salmos - Tumblr blog

[salmos]

where do I find God? why doesn't he appear in burning bushes anymore?

other things burn, now

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Linda Gregg from All of it Singing: New and Selected Poems

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i am sympathetic to the idea or original sin, but am more inclined to the more eastern theological understanding of first sin.

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pure and undefiled religion before God the Father is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself unstained from the world.

james 1:27

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hashem fingers ten phrases into stone, passes them to moses. moses hurls these against sinai, shattering them. hashem then tells moses new phrases, similar but not the same. you shall be foreign, you shall not make votives, you shall keep festivals, you shall give to me the first of each womb entrance, you shall not appear to me empty-handed, you shall not hand me leaven yet you shall hand me ripe fruit, and, finally, you shall not boil a kid in the mother's milk. these are written on the stones that are placed in the ark, that chest, that body of hashem kept in a tent, fed brown bread and oil, through exodus. these phrases—the yahwist, ritual decalogue of exod 34:11–27—need to be held. festival, votive, womb, empty, milk, ripe, foreign

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I was redirected to you, I do enjoy your posts so I’m wondering what you insight might be.

How could I approach God after wrestling him for years. He doesn’t sit *right* with me. Maybe it’s because of the people who used him for ill intent against me, maybe it’s because I question every action; I tend to ask why

keep wrestling him—he can take it and he asks for it. prophets refuse their call, émigrés in exodus store their manna, exiles of assyria, of babylon, turn to marduk or el. hashem resists being palatable. he resists foreclosing the anger it takes to grab him by his inner thigh. he hears your question, calls it sacred, calls it cruel, and begins to answer it anyway

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i am wondering why it seems that the ten commandments are the only exceptions where god in the bible can communicate to us something that is very clear and to the point, whereas other narrative in the rest of the bible are always have to be interpreted- they’re usually in the form of revelations, obscure narrative and dialogues, complicated or sometimes just beyond comprehension

revelation from the biblical god has an ethics of the imaginary. the bodies receiving revelation, the relationship with the prophet, the author of the biblical pericope, the context of the word—these all matter. antedating revelation matters too—hashem will mimic the behavior of other good ancient near eastern gods who demand, as he will, extispicy, oracles, bone-drawing and arrow-shooting, visions.

the first time the decalogue is written, god uses his own finger. then he has those shattered and has moses write a second copy. when it is straightforward it is because it borrows from other legal codes. when it is obscure it is because it breaks itself across the hebrew lexicon. revelation is sometimes effortless and sometimes isn't. sometimes it's just god or his prophets lying (signs can't be trusted any more than those bodies closest to god can). hashem and his signs privilege a register that is ruined by its own disclosure

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Theophanes the Greek, Transfiguration of Jesus, 1408

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sadly i think that liberation theology in general doesn’t get the traction it deserves both in (predominantly white) secular and religious circles because people, even the “good” christians who value social justice, are more interested in liberating themselves than they are in liberating other people. at some point christianity stopped being about communion and started being about how we can free ourselves from something: sin, guilt, shame, fundamentalism, etc. in actuality christianity is and has always been about other people, but nobody seems keen on acknowledging that in any way that matters. 

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everything fades away but the love of god!!!!!!!

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hi Sam. what do you understand by "God"? who is He? what is He? how is He?

he is a becoming, a co-emergence; plurality, rhythm and pulse. he is the language i attach to him—the language my grandma attached to him. and he is the exit-wound of that language. he is the body of the man i love, his inner thigh and his ashes. he is the order of the father and the matrix, anatomical and non-anatomical, semiotic and not, tissue and text. he is a god in a tent, in some desert in the ancient near east. he is ethical relationship. and he is, most of all, a hole in the real—all excess, all rot, all honey. a co-affecting hole, one made as we cut into one another

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Christ Gathering Up His Tunic. José de Mora & Diego de Mora. Spanish c. 1700

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“God sends nobody to Hell; only a wicked ignorance can suggest that He would do to us the very thing He died to save us from. But He has so made us that what in the end we choose, that in the end we shall have. If we enter the state called Hell, it is because we have willed to do so.”

Dorothy L. Sayers, “My Belief about Heaven and Hell,” The Sunday Times, January 6, 1957, 8.

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“The creator of the heavens obeys a carpenter; the God of eternal glory listens to a poor virgin. Has anyone ever witnessed anything comparable to this? Let the philosopher no longer disdain from listening to the common laborer; the wise, to the simple; the educated, to the illiterate; a child of a prince, to a peasant.”

— St. Anthony of Padua

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Dorothee Sölle, "Mysticism, Liberation, and the Names of God: A Feminist Reflection"

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Joel 2:25 (RSV)

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Yahweh seems to enact restorative justice &retributive justice why !?!?!?!

hashem is a good ancient near eastern god. he's conjugating steles with his own lex talionis. he's whispering in hushed tones to hammurabi's code. he's attaching apodosis to protasis. he's spilling out of leviticus. the hebrew bible is written in exile. before it knows anything else, it knows how much it matters for a god to promise repayment