It was very busy 2000 years ago in the little town of Bethlehem, lots of human traffic to meet the censure call of Caesar Augustus. So full of people till the inn was without room.
So crowded and busy that the arrival of the Saviour was unnoticed.
It is just as crowded and busy today.
Friday, December 25, 2009
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Silent Night, Holy Night...Why is the night so silent?
Silent Night, Holy Night...
Why was the night silent? At the birth of a Saviour, of God.
The only announcement was that of the angels to the shepherds.
The only clue was that of the leading of the star to the wisemen.
And Joseph and Mary.
Some spreading of word by the shepherds.
Jerusalem was disturbed but not too stirred (except sometime later with the death warrant).
And then another 30 years of almost non-existence.
Silent Night, Holy Night...
Can I be silent?
Nowadays we celebrate the day with much more sound and sight.
Should we one day observe a silent night and cause the world to wonder.
Because He will come again like a thief in the silence of the night but that night will not be as silent as the first.
Why was the night silent? At the birth of a Saviour, of God.
The only announcement was that of the angels to the shepherds.
The only clue was that of the leading of the star to the wisemen.
And Joseph and Mary.
Some spreading of word by the shepherds.
Jerusalem was disturbed but not too stirred (except sometime later with the death warrant).
And then another 30 years of almost non-existence.
Silent Night, Holy Night...
Can I be silent?
Nowadays we celebrate the day with much more sound and sight.
Should we one day observe a silent night and cause the world to wonder.
Because He will come again like a thief in the silence of the night but that night will not be as silent as the first.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
What is TIME anyway?
Exdous 12: 1 The LORD said to Moses and Aaron in Egypt, 2 "This month is to be for you the first month, the first month of your year.
Ecclesiastes 3:11 He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.
Time is the medium in which we live. It is the psychological, mental and emotional air we breathe; and, like air, it is transmuted within us and becomes us. There is inner time -- our personal sense of the rhythms of time, experienced differently by each of us; and there is imposed time - the regimented time by which society organizes itself, the time of schedules and deadlines, time structured largely by work and commerce. These two times, inner and imposed, rarely jibe anymore, and the painful tension between them is one of the core psychological realities of our era.
In the beginning was the railroad -- the beginning, that is, of today’s experience of time. In the 1880s, railroad interests (in that era, America’s most potent business power) pressured the federal government to divide the country into time zones. Before this, 3:00 p.m. in San Francisco did not correspond to any particular time in New York, much less England and China. In fact, 3:00 p.m. in any city was only roughly coordinated even within the city limits. There was no place to call for a central reference point -- there weren’t any telephones to call with.
Coordination was largely a matter of bells and whistles. The factory whistle would blow, the town-hall clock would chime, and, if they felt like it, people would set their house clocks and pocket watches accordingly. Absolute precision wasn’t expected, nor, for most endeavors, was it needed; 20 minutes either way was, in most instances, no big deal.
Hours are artificial constructs; moments are not. The measurement of what we can an “hour” has taken on enormous importance since we began to measure our work, and our value, by the hour -- a practice barely a century old. People who are paid $4 an hour are not valued, and do not value themselves, as highly as people who are paid $20 an hour; people paid $20 an hour are treated differently, and often treat themselves
differently, than people paid $100 an hour. Today, our moments are lost in hours. And, since our moments are everything, unless they can be retrieved, all is lost.
Feeling that time is a force imposed from without to which they must conform, people use much of their energy to avoid that force, usually passively, and without interacting with one another, populating their inner lives with images again imposed, or at least supplied, from without. The soul or self or whatever you choose to call it – that intrinsic quality that makes each person unique and that is what (under whatever label) a
healer must connect with and appeal to – is confined in a time-cage and obscured by a cloud of habitual, if not outright addictive, fantasy figures.
In spite of (or because of) our advances, we have been stripped down to first causes: what marks our time. And we have to remind ourselves that time isn’t money. Time is life itself.
Full article can be found at THE AGE OF INTERRUPTION by Michael Ventura, Psychotherapy Networker January/February 1995
Ecclesiastes 3:11 He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.
Time is the medium in which we live. It is the psychological, mental and emotional air we breathe; and, like air, it is transmuted within us and becomes us. There is inner time -- our personal sense of the rhythms of time, experienced differently by each of us; and there is imposed time - the regimented time by which society organizes itself, the time of schedules and deadlines, time structured largely by work and commerce. These two times, inner and imposed, rarely jibe anymore, and the painful tension between them is one of the core psychological realities of our era.
In the beginning was the railroad -- the beginning, that is, of today’s experience of time. In the 1880s, railroad interests (in that era, America’s most potent business power) pressured the federal government to divide the country into time zones. Before this, 3:00 p.m. in San Francisco did not correspond to any particular time in New York, much less England and China. In fact, 3:00 p.m. in any city was only roughly coordinated even within the city limits. There was no place to call for a central reference point -- there weren’t any telephones to call with.
Coordination was largely a matter of bells and whistles. The factory whistle would blow, the town-hall clock would chime, and, if they felt like it, people would set their house clocks and pocket watches accordingly. Absolute precision wasn’t expected, nor, for most endeavors, was it needed; 20 minutes either way was, in most instances, no big deal.
Hours are artificial constructs; moments are not. The measurement of what we can an “hour” has taken on enormous importance since we began to measure our work, and our value, by the hour -- a practice barely a century old. People who are paid $4 an hour are not valued, and do not value themselves, as highly as people who are paid $20 an hour; people paid $20 an hour are treated differently, and often treat themselves
differently, than people paid $100 an hour. Today, our moments are lost in hours. And, since our moments are everything, unless they can be retrieved, all is lost.
Feeling that time is a force imposed from without to which they must conform, people use much of their energy to avoid that force, usually passively, and without interacting with one another, populating their inner lives with images again imposed, or at least supplied, from without. The soul or self or whatever you choose to call it – that intrinsic quality that makes each person unique and that is what (under whatever label) a
healer must connect with and appeal to – is confined in a time-cage and obscured by a cloud of habitual, if not outright addictive, fantasy figures.
In spite of (or because of) our advances, we have been stripped down to first causes: what marks our time. And we have to remind ourselves that time isn’t money. Time is life itself.
Full article can be found at THE AGE OF INTERRUPTION by Michael Ventura, Psychotherapy Networker January/February 1995
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