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wesleyhill · 4 years

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The God of the Transfiguration

A homily on Mark 9:2-9, preached at Trinity Cathedral, Pittsburgh, on the last Sunday after the the Epiphany 2021

This week, starting on Wednesday (“Ash Wednesday”), we will be entering the liturgical season of Lent.

How do you think about Lent?

Many of us may understand it as a season to try to break free from some bad habits — you know, by giving up sweets or gossip or “doomscrolling.” Or we may think of it more in the mundane terms of the regular rhythms of the seasons. Lent, after all, gets its name from the lengthening of the days that will lead us out of dark winter and into lighter spring. Maybe you think of Lent as a time to start planning a landscaping project or cleaning out a forbidding closet.

But, if we’re Christians, we shouldn’t think of Lent as being primarily about self-improvement or warmer weather. Instead, Lent is a time for us to try, with concerted intentionality, to “keep company” with Jesus as He moves toward His death in Jerusalem. (That’s the best way I know to think about what the Prayer Book means when it calls us to observe a “holy Lent”: we’re meant to try to watch and pray and “be with” Jesus during His journey towards the end — the goal — of His life.)

Lent lasts for forty days, which correspond to the forty days that Jesus spent in the wilderness being tested after His baptism. Many Christians find it helpful during Lent to slowly read through the Gospels and ponder each of their scenes slowly and think about how they speak to us today. Our goal during Lent is to walk along with, watch with, observe, and accompany Jesus, to try to relive His earthly life with Him, to put ourselves in the shoes of those who were closest to Him, to see what they saw and hear what they heard, to get as close to the life Jesus lived with us and for us as we can.

So here we are on the last Sunday before Lent begins, and the folks who decided on our Bible readings for today knew exactly what they were doing. We heard just a few moments ago the story of Jesus’s transfiguration from the Gospel according to St. Mark. If you read the entire Gospel of Mark, you’ll see that shortly following that episode, Jesus sits on a donkey and rides into Jerusalem as the King, the anointed One, of Israel. So it’s especially appropriate that we would read about His transfiguration just before we enter the season when we recall His journey to Jerusalem and His suffering and death, which is what Lent and Holy Week are all about.

The story of Jesus’s transfiguration is a strange and mysterious one. Jesus takes His three closest followers, Peter, James, and John, with Him up a mountain, and there, on the mountaintop, His appearance is completely changed. Mark tells us that “His clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them.” And two of the greatest figures from the Old Testament — Moses who led God’s people Israel out of their slavery in Egypt and gave the people God’s law and Elijah who spoke the word of God to God’s people and who was taken up to be with God in a supernatural fiery chariot — appear with Jesus and talk with Him (as St. Luke’s Gospel tells us) about His impending death in Jerusalem, His redeeming work that He is about to accomplish for the world. This is a miraculous epiphany, a tearing back of the curtain of ordinary life to show us a glimpse of a reality that would be otherwise hidden.

After Peter makes a bumbling attempt to domesticate the whole scene, a cloud appears and envelops these figures on the mountain top and then “from the cloud there came a voice, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!’” God the Father declares that this man Jesus is His Son, the One whom He loves and whom He has sent into the world. And He exhorts Jesus’ disciples to heed His words, to pay attention to Jesus and believe what He says and do what He enjoins.

It is a dramatic, wondrous, awe-inspiring scene. And what it shows, at its heart, is the radiant deity of Jesus — His equality with God the Father, the fact that Jesus, “true God from true God,” as the Creed says, lives a life that uniquely discloses the nearness and tenderness, the purposes and judgment of God. We see that especially in St. Luke’s version of the story, where we read that Jesus’s “face shone like the sun.” The sun shines from its own white-hot light. The moon merely reflects the sun’s light, shining with borrowed radiance. But the sun emits light from itself. And that, says Luke, is how Jesus shone on the mount of transfiguration: His face and clothing flashes like lightning not simply because someone else is lending Him brightness but because He is radiant in and of Himself. He is the LORD of Israel in human flesh, the eternal God clothed with our own humanity but, in this moment, no less glorious despite His state of humiliation. The human life He lives displays and communicates the depths of the life of God Himself.

Now, after this episode, if you were to keep reading in the Gospel of Mark — and I encourage you to consider making Mark part of your daily reading and meditation during this Lent — you would find that, almost immediately, Jesus predicts His suffering and death and resurrection: “The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.” Maybe if we heard those words in another context, we wouldn’t find them all that remarkable. After all, we know the story of Holy Week, the story of Jesus’s shameful execution, the story of the Passion. But let’s ponder this morning the fact that Jesus’s prediction of His death comes right after one of the clearest, most brilliant stories that shows that Jesus is divine — that He is one with the LORD of Israel. What does that mean for our understanding of Jesus and our relationship to Him?

What the transfiguration shows us is that Jesus is one with the Creator, He is the source of all life and light — He is not other than, not external to, the one and only God who is the wellspring of all that we know as nature and history and experience.

And what comes afterwards — what we are about to pay special attention to during Lent — shows us that this very One, this Jesus, who is true God, undergoes and bears up under and endures to the end all the extremity of our human condition. He, the radiant, resplendent One, suffers unjust imprisonment, unfair interrogation, false accusations, and brutal, shameful execution. He endures the most emasculating, horrifying punishment the might of empire could devise. And He does this as God. It is the One who shines with a light purer and stronger than the light of the sun who will give up and give away His life for our sake in a few short weeks.

As we move toward Good Friday, friends, when we will keep watch with Jesus as He is condemned and fastened to a cross and hoisted into the air for mockery and derision and death (and, at the same time, as St. John tells us, for exaltation and coronation), we are reminded today, at the outset of our long Lenten journey, that the One who will undergo all this suffering and loss and humiliation on our behalf is none other than God Himself, who is “Light from Light,” the shining, holy One of Israel.

The One whose suffering and death we will shortly commemorate is not a mere human being, not just a man, not simply a creature. Rather, the One whom we will watch with and weep with as He is condemned and executed in Jerusalem is God. It is God who will yield His life for us on Good Friday. It is the Creator and Redeemer of Israel, the true Lord of the whole world, who will give up His very own flesh for the life of the world — for you and for me.

Let this shining vision of Jesus’s glory that we heard read today be a measure to us of just how far God will go to make us His own forever.

To God be the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.

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pxterparkour · 7 years

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a brief history of you (closed): for @spidcrgwens

( tw: death / implied violence ) ( i mean it's gwen stacy what do you expect )

Dear Gwen,

I’m not sure you even asked, but I feel like you deserve to know about her. The other Gwen. My Gwen. So, here it is, the whole thing, start to finish. Just a heads up, it might get a bit long, or a bit soppy, and you are under no obligation to read it all or put up with me. I just thought you should have the truth, the whole truth. (And nothing but the truth.) All jokes aside, she’s a bit of a touchy subject, so here’s hoping I can get this all down.

We met in high school. I was a nerd. Like, really a nerd. Tripping over my own feet, unable to string together coherent sentences, you know the drill. I’m assuming you had your own Peter, and he probably wasn’t a football star or anything (I mean if he was, good for him, I’m impressed!), so you probably have a good idea of what I’m talking about. We had chemistry together--the class, not the other kind. That came later. I was too shy to talk to her, so I’d just kind of stare, and laugh a bit too loudly, and try to be helpful during labs.

I might have taken some pictures of her, from a distance, before I really knew her. In retrospect, it was probably a little creepy. God, she was cute. She always wore these little headbands and sweaters, sort of looked like every teenage boy’s librarian fantasy. (That’s a thing, right? Is that weird? That’s definitely not just me.) She had a habit of biting her nails when she thought--only her thumbs. You’d look over at her during class, during a particularly boring lecture, and there she’d be, taking notes with one hand, absentmindedly toying with her left thumbnail. That’s how you knew she was working on something genius.

MJ was her friend first. Everyone was friends with MJ, but I doubt I need to tell you that. She’s the best. Anyway, we were running in the same circles, sitting at the same lunch tables, asking each other for notes on the homework, that kind of thing. We started talking, eventually, really talking, arguing about books and movies and Schrodinger’s cat and renewable energy cars. I think MJ regretted picking scientists as her best friends. I still blushed every time Gwen talked, but it was less, a little. Maybe. I hope.

And then I got bit. It was a class trip to Oscorp, I got lost (I’m an idiot), ended up with a hitchhiking arachnid, who was probably just as unhappy to be there as I was to find him. So then I stopped needing my glasses, and learned to stand up a little bit straighter. That’s when I started doing the whole Spider-Man thing. Petty stuff, really. I was full of shit and trying to make a quick buck to buy a car. I wanted to impress her. I was still an idiot. An idiot with superpowers, but still an idiot.

I asked her out. We got coffee. She wore a blue dress and I paid for her latte, and we walked through Central Park and made jokes about being Typical Angsty Teenagers, quoting the Catcher in the Rye at each other and thinking we were the coolest people in the world. We never did decide where the ducks go.

We had fun. We saw movies, went to bad restaurants, played video games in my basement (for the record, she sucked at Assassin’s Creed, but was surprisingly good at Tomb Raider). We talked about traveling after high school: England, Spain, Belize, Thailand. Anywhere and everywhere. It took embarrassingly long for us to become Official, but, by the summer after junior year, Gwen Stacy was officially my girlfriend.

Then, that August, my uncle Ben died. I don’t really want to get into the details right now, but it was rough. There was a break-in, I could have stopped it, and I didn’t, and it was my fault. I’d been some variant of Spider-Man since that May, so you could say I was still getting my sea legs, but I should have known better. I was a mess, Gwen and MJ were there for me. I don’t know that I would have gotten through it all without them. It was a bad time, and something I’d rather not relive right now, if that’s okay. This letter is hard enough to write as it is.

I could tell you about the time we went to Coney Island in the dead of winter, and she kicked off her boots and pulled me into the water. We were both sick for weeks. I could tell you about the way her face crinkled up when she laughed, or how she’d tuck her hair behind her ears when she was mad with you. I could tell you about how she hated root beer and always ordered pistachio ice cream. Little things, Gwen things. I don’t know how many of these things you two have in common, at the end of the day. Her dad was a police chief, and she had kickass taste in music. She was not a drummer.

She was brilliant, though, and figured me out pretty much immediately. Like, late September of senior year, after I’d finally gotten out of bed and back into school and started really trying the whole hero thing. She noticed I was always a bit bruised, would show up to dates late or too fast or from entirely the wrong direction. There was no hiding from her. I think we were getting pizza when she told me she knew. I tried to deflect, but she was adamant, and she was right. So we finished our slices, and I showed her the suit, the web shooters, the whole shebang. Mind you, this was pre-Stark Tech, so it really wasn’t that much to see. I don’t think she was as impressed as I’d expected--something along the lines of, yeah, I already knew, dumbass.

On the flip side, it meant I had a hell of a good time promposing that spring. We’re talking PROM? written in webs, me swinging onto her fire escape to kiss her. It was flashy as all get out, but she said yes, so. I did something right.

She was our valedictorian. Headed to Oxford, of all places, brilliant as she was. She gave the speech at our graduation, and I hate that I don’t remember what she said. I was too distracted by her in that stupid blue cap and gown, thinking that somehow I had conned this incredible person into maybe liking me. Were we soulmates or madly in love? I don’t know. I thought so at the time, but I was seventeen, and, honestly, what do seventeen year olds know? (Nothing. They know nothing.)

It all went to shit a few weeks after graduation. You know, that hazy time between college and high school, when you feel so old and indestructible and so small and broken all at once. Everything and nothing. In-between time. Gwen and I spent a lot of time together; MJ’s mom was sick, she’d had to go back to Pittsburgh, but I’ll let her fill you in on all that. And then there was this guy, he called himself the Green Goblin, it was a whole big complicated to-do honestly not worth telling. He was bad, it was a mess.

But he took Gwen. He was showing off, probably. Wanted to lure me out to a big macho standoff. I still don’t know how he got her, and I don’t want to know. I don’t want to picture her screaming, ripped from her bed in the middle of the night by a really unfortunate looking green man. I don’t know if she cried.

It was an off day for me to start, which isn’t an excuse, just a fact. I’d been up all night watching Game of Thrones and freaking out about housing assignments for next year--I was due to start Columbia, and really didn’t know how to hide a superhero alter ego from a roommate. So I didn’t bring my A Game to the George Washington Bridge, and I paid for it.

He threw her. Right off the bridge, down, down, down into the Hudson. There’s a good chance we were on the Jersey side, too, to add insult to injury. I panicked, I threw a web out to catch her just before she hit the river. I thought I was so clever, I was making jokes about it as I pulled her up. Not only am I the most dashing hero on two legs....

At first, I thought it was the impact, but, looking back, it was whiplash. She would have died either way, but it was my rope that caught her. I snapped her neck. And it’s my fault. The monster got away, too. I lost her, and I lost him. Talk about a shitty day.

So, this is getting stupidly long, and my hand is cramping up, so I’m going to stop here. I guess, if you have any questions or anything, I’m here to talk? To summarize, I dated Gwen Stacy. I think I loved Gwen Stacy. I killed Gwen Stacy. It sucked.

Just, thought you should know. If I start staring at you weird, that’s why.

Best, Peter.

#( para )#( p. self )#( p.3 )#rebuildtask3 #spidcrgwens #( i am a masochist and i still hate all of you )

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djmophatt · 8 years

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#Repost @stampedncertified4 ・・・ White people never cease to amaze me with the BS that come out their mouth... smh... . Many people believe that the opportunity to receive a quality #education is a human right fit for all regardless of their race, creed, or socioeconomic status. However, there are private and public figures in the #American power structure who do not agree with that notion. In fact, a senator in the #US state of Pennsylvania believes that black students, in particular, are better fits for vocational schools than they are for #college or #university attendance. This #Republican state senator’s name is John Eichelberger (pictured). Eichelberger is also the chairman of the Senate Education Committee of Pennsylvania. Very recently, Eichelberger was a speaker at a town hall meeting when a very controversial statement came out of his mouth. An opinion-editorial about this hot-button issue, which was republished this past Tuesday (March 7th) by the Pittsburgh Courier partially reads as follows: “[Sen. John Eichelberger] is being rightly criticized for saying minority students from “inner-city” public schools would do better in vocational careers than in college. [Eichelberger] said during a town hall that minority students are being pushed toward college and are dropping out. He says they’d succeed in a less-intensive track.” (The Pittsburgh Courier) #Democratic Sen. Vincent Hughes of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania has called for Eichelberger to step down from his position as chairman of Pennsylvania’s Senate Education Committee. “[I am] repulsed by [Eichelberger’s] statement,” Hughes said in a media interview. “Let’s be clear, this issue about the stereotyping of Black and Brown children needing less-intensive tracks to succeed has been around for generations, maybe even centuries,” #unitedstates #america #murica #merica #usa #government #governmentcorruption #landofthefree

#usa #governmentcorruption #republican #unitedstates #merica #landofthefree #democratic #government #repost #university #us #america #college #education #murica #american

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passportrend · 5 years

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The attack materialized throughout a non-secular celebration within a rabbi's house The stabbing at a rabbi's house in big apple state was "domestic terrorism", state governor saint Cuomo says. Hatred supported race, color ANd creed was an "American cancer spreading within the body politic", the governor told a press conference. He needed a terrorism law within the state to prosecute such crimes. At least 5 folks were injured within the attack in Monsey, north of the town of the recent royal house. The wrongdoer was later inactive in New York's Harlem space. Witnesses aforesaid the wrongdoer burst into the house, that was hosting a Hannukah celebration, force out an outsized knife and started assaultive folks. The Story Behind Of This Word Dude Hillary Clinton Responds To President Donald Trump Pewdiepie Has Announced That He Left Youtubing Till Next Year Guests reportedly threw tables and chairs at the person, UN agency then tried to enter a place of worship not far away before fleeing in an exceeding automobile. However his vehicle registration was passed to police and vehicle plate scanners picked up the automobile because it entered NY town, wherever he was detained. Police have named him as Grafton Thomas, 37, of timberland Lake, New York. Grafton Thomas is in police custody He has been charged with 5 counts of tried murder and one count of a felony, the Associated Press reports. What did Governor Cuomo say? He delineates the attack as "very disturbing" however aforesaid it had been not associate degree isolated incident, adding that hostility supported race, faith and immigration standing was spreading across the country. "It is an act of terrorism. These area unit folks that shall produce mass damage, mass violence, and generate concern supported race, color, creed. that's the definition of coercion," he said. "Just as a result of they do not return from another country doesn't suggest they're not terrorists. they must be prosecuted as domestic terrorists." "We don't seem to be planning to let this poison unfold. nobody else will defeat this county, however, this country will defeat itself," he added. The attack came every day once NY police same officers were stepping up patrols in heavily mortal districts following a spate of anti-Semitic threats and attacks. Two of the victims were still within the hospital, police same. What happened? A man brandishing a matchet attacked a Hanukkah celebration at the rabbi's property in Monsey - a locality with an outsized population of ultra-Orthodox Jews. The incident happened at concerning 22:00 on Sabbatum (03:00 UT1 Sunday). "The house had several dozens of individuals in there," Yossi Gestetner, a co-founder of OJPAC for the Hudson vale region, told the big apple Times. He aforementioned the assaulter had his face partly lined by a shawl throughout the attack and also the rabbi's son was one among those he wounded, Mr. Gestetner aforementioned. Aron Kohn, 65, was within the rabbi's home at the time. He told the paper: "I was praying for my life. He started offensive folks promptly as shortly as he came within the door. we tend to did not have time to react the least bit." Mr. Kohn aforementioned that the assaulter then tried to enter a temple next to the house, however, folks within had secured the door. The rabbi's house was hosting a Hanukkah celebration Local police aforementioned the aggressor - World Health Organization has not nonetheless been known - would face 5 charges of tried murder and one in all felony. What other reaction has there been? President Trump has not nonetheless associate degreed true|gone through|had|undergone|passed through|saw|felt|suffered} the stabbing however his female offspring Ivanka - WHO regenerate to Judaism - tweeted that it absolutely was an "act of pure evil". The vicious attack of a rabbi in Monsey, NY last night was an act of pure evil. As we pray for the victims, may the candles of Chanukah burn bright through this darkness. — Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) December 29, 2019 In Israel, President Reuven Rivlin expressed his "shock and outrage" at the attack. "The rise of anti-Semitism isn't simply a soul downside, and definitely not simply the State of Israel's downside," he aforementioned during a statement. "We should work along to confront this evil, that is raising its head once more and maybe a real threat around the world." Steve Gold from the soul Federation in Rockland County aforementioned the North American country had to fail the soul community. "My oldsters were Holocaust survivors and my father created American state promise to try and do what I will to create certain it ne'er happens once more. nowadays I will say I failing my father. The North American country has to fail my oldsters and every one Holocaust survivors. This cannot continue," he said. Police in NY are guarding synagogues following a spate of hate crimes The attack follows a series of anti-Semitic threats and attacks in and around big apple town. On weekday civil authority Bill Diamond State Blasio proclaimed further police patrols in 3 areas of the borough. We are closely monitoring the reports of multiple people stabbed at a synagogue in Monsey, NY (Rockland County) pic.twitter.com/cHoQnbneKO — NYPDCounterterrorism (@NYPDCT) December 29, 2019 Responding to the attack in Monsey, Mr. First State Blasio aforesaid he couldn't "overstate the concern individuals square measure feeling right now". "We won't permit this to become the new traditional. We'll use each tool we've to prevent these attacks once and for all," he said. I am deeply disturbed by the situation unfolding in Monsey, New York tonight. There is zero tolerance for acts of hate of any kind and we will continue to monitor this horrific situation. I stand with the Jewish community tonight and every night. — NY AG James (@NewYorkStateAG) December 29, 2019 The person vacation of Hannukah marks the success of Judah Maccabee over the Syrian Greeks within the Second Century before Christ and also the recapture of the capital of Israel. Are anti-Semitic attacks on the rise in the US? On a weekday the big apple town police's hate crimes unit same it had been investigation eight anti-Semitic incidents reported since thirteen Gregorian calendar month. They enclosed a threat by a person United Nations agency walked into associate Orthodox human community organization's headquarters in Brooklyn and vulnerable to shoot somebody. In another incident, a 30-year-old lady reportedly maltreated 3 girls within the face. New York local department commissioner Dermot Shea has the same hate crimes in the big apple town area unit up twenty-second this year. "You see a Hakenkreuz being drawn, you see a brick being thrown through a window, you see a lady walking down the road together with her youngsters and having her wig ripped off," he said. Earlier this month officers in New Jersey same a gun attack that killed a detective and 3 folks in an exceedingly human food market was being investigated as "potential acts of domestic terror, fuelled each by racism and anti-law social control beliefs". In Apr a gunman killed a feminine rabbi and wounded 3 folks at a house of worship in the city. That attack came precisely six months once the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in America history, once a gunman killed eleven worshippers at the Tree of Life house of worship in Pittsburgh. Collect From - BBC News

http://passportrend.blogspot.com/2019/12/american-governor-monsey-stabbing.html

#News #trump #america #usa #movies #politics

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emlydunstan · 5 years

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Radical Sobriety: Getting (and Staying) Clean and Sober as Subversive Activity

Sometime in the autumn of 1798, a middle-aged chief of the Seneca tribe led a hunting party from their home near the Finger Lakes of upstate New York through the verdant woods of western Pennsylvania, bringing a cache of venison and buckskin to a small settlement at the forks of the Ohio River called Pittsburgh, where they traded their goods for a barrel of whiskey. Historian of religion Peter Manseau writes in his One Nation, Under Gods: A New History that afterwards the “hunters had lashed their canoes together into a single barge and managed to make their way upriver as the liquor continued to flow,” as they made their way home to the Iroquois settlement of Jenuchshadego. Manseau records from primary sources that the returning party terrified the villagers, that they would “yell and sing like demented people,” and that “they are beastlike.”The Code of Handsome Lake: An Early Recovery MovementThe Sachem Cornplanter, Handsome Lake’s half-brother, had seen the Seneca decimated by alcoholism, and so he banned liquor within the confederation. Handsome Lake fell into the withdrawal symptoms of delirium tremens, though as Manseau writes “it was believed that he was [also] suffering from a spiritual malady.” Expecting death to take him, Cornplanter let Quaker missionaries tend to his dying brother, until one day “some strong power” took command of Handsome Lake, and he awoke seemingly cured of his affliction. The chief told his people that while convalescing, he had a mystical vision of three angels who imparted to him the creed of a new faith that was to be known as the Code of Handsome Lake, or the Longhouse Religion. Central to Handsome Lake’s prophecy was a belief that liquor was a narcotic whose specific purpose was the anesthetizing of humans, of reducing them to bestial impulse so as to make them easier to control. For Handsome Lake, both drinking and sobriety had profound political implications, with Manseau explaining that the chief’s temperance “became the conduit for the promise of a broader redemption.”There is no narrative of sobriety which I do not find inspiring; there is no story of recovery which is not useful to me. As different as Handsome Lake and I may be, there is an important experience which we share. Because though he is an 18th century Indian chief there is some combination of brain chemistry which makes us similarly powerless before barrels of proffered whiskey. We’re both conversant with his older contemporary the English lexicographer Dr. Johnson’s observation that “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” But there is something important and distinct in Handsome Lake’s example which I think is worth reflecting on: his faith wasn’t just one of personal redemption, but also of an understanding that there are radical implications in recovery, that abstinence can be subversive, that sobriety can be counter-cultural.Trying to Make It as a Drunk BohemianEasy to think when we’re actively using that there’s a cracked romance in being an alcoholic: all those drained shots and pint glasses, living our best imitation of the 19th century French poet Charles Baudelaire’s commandment that “You have to be always drunk.” I probably never needed much justification to getting blackout drunk – I liked it. But sometimes rationalization was a helpful salve when I woke up the dozenth time in a month shaking, hungover, going through my text messages to see whom I offended. The disease’s conclusions may be universal, and our symptoms are largely the same. But there’s always some variation. Mine was of the pseudo-bohemian, aspiring Romantic kind; dog-eared pages of Charles Bukowski and Jack Kerouac initiating me into a society of the ecstatic, of those who “burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles.” More fun to think of myself as among “the ones who are mad to live” rather than as the one who pissed his pants.To clarify, I don’t blame any of those writers, some of whom I still enjoy, for my affliction. I even still have a beloved copy of Baudelaire’s Flowers of Hell. No, what I mean to suggest is that whatever the reasons why I drank, through it all I had some sort of warped sense that the damage I was doing to mind, body, and spirit served some supremely radical role, that I was a renegade against the strictures of regulated, uptight, square society. Part of me still feels that buzzed euphoric recall of dangerous nostalgia. And I didn’t quit because I rejected that gin-flavored narrative so much as that I realized in a moment of clarity that seems to have miraculously stuck (so far) that if I didn’t put down the bottle, absolutely nothing good would come of it. But what I’ve also realized, as I approach the midpoint of my third year of sobriety, is that there is something just as subversive in rejecting alcohol as in embracing it.The Radical Potential of Narrative to Treat AddictionIn his excellent book Drunks: The Story of Alcoholism and the Birth of Recovery, Christopher M. Finan credits Handsome Lake with founding the first real fellowship that could be said to treat the disease with the radical potential of narrative. Handsome Lake is the first in a line of visionaries, from the six reformed drunkards who founded the 19th century Washingtonian Movement to Bill W. and Dr. Bob of Alcoholics Anonymous, who crafted what was fundamentally a counter-cultural ideology which rejected alcoholism, but also the servility which came with it. Finan writes that for the Seneca of Handsome Lake’s era, the “euphoria of intoxication brought temporary relief from the pain of dispossession and death.” Same as it ever was, because addiction’s particular form of mental slavery pretends to treat both profane concerns, such as making us ignorant of our own dispossession, as well as more transcendent fears, like how we can almost believe that we’re immortal for the price of a pint or 20. We prayed for art when we were drunk, but as Lewis Lapham writes, “Alcohol’s job is to replace creation with an illusion that is barren.”What these fellowships have always promised isn’t denunciatory scolding, but rather a rejection of a narcotic which helps to keep people in physical and spiritual bondage. Alcoholism has medical, economic, and social implications, none of which actually serve any kind of bohemian or utopian yearning, but deceive the sufferer into believing that they do. Meanwhile, the addict’s world constricts into a smaller and smaller circumference. Odd to consider that temperance as a reform movement was often grouped alongside abolitionism and suffragism, since we so often see it as fundamentally anti-freedom. And prohibitionist and neo-prohibitionist arguments have been social and moral disasters, maybe especially for the individual suffering with addiction. But the grouping of temperance (as distinct from Prohibition) with those radical political movements is not strange, for the personal rejection of intoxication has a certain radicalism to it as well, a turning away from an exploitive thing-of-this-world. That is before we consider how addiction has been used to target marginalized communities, how it can be a function of poverty and class, and how the criminal justice system and the media treat different sufferers in different ways. As Finan writes, the struggle to get sober, and the ways in which alcoholics have been able to help other alcoholics get and stay that way, deserves to be understood as one of the “great liberation movements” of American history.The Myth of the Bar Stool RevolutionaryWhen I sat on a bar stool feeling the electric thrum, or when I passed out on my apartment floor, or on a city street, I may have imagined that there was something subversive about my antisocial behavior, but in sobriety I’ve developed a more jaundiced view of how my own particular predispositions were exploited in a way that was anything but counter-cultural. I had my radical political poses, my underlined copies of bohemian poets and political theorists, and I could talk a big game about being “anti-capitalist,” but I had no compunction about shoveling out thousands of dollars over the years to pad the bank accounts of liquor and beer companies, apparently seeing no irony in paying for the very poison that was killing me. Once I recall formulating a bar-stool argument that the local tavern was one of the last democratic institutions in the United States, and I think there is still some merit to that, but I’ve found far-more radical potential in how groups like the Longhouse Religion, the Washingtonians, and AA are organized.Not much is actually anarchistic about active addiction other than the chaos that characterizes your life, but the non-hierarchical, egalitarian, horizontal organization of 12-step fellowships makes them one of the few successful, genuinely counter-cultural movements in American life. Author Michael Tolkin describes AA as having a “cunning structure; no due, no tithes, no president, protected from permanent officer and the development of cults by a rotating leadership for each separate group, no other requirement for membership than the declaration of fellowship in a shared condition.” What they offer is something in genuine opposition to the gods of this world, the market system that will profit off suffering while promising you paradise, what Tolkin describes as “spiritual slavery to the internal compulsion engine.”To turn down a drink, that which is pushed through advertisement and neighbor alike, that edifying, enjoyable, relaxing nectar, is to reject the status quo in a way which courts its own type of infamy. The only drug you’ll kick where you’re viewed afterwards as being a bit suspicious. “Can’t you have just one?” As with Handsome Lake’s realization that liquor wasn’t just physically killing him, but holding him in a sort of bondage, so recovery has radical implications that go far beyond health and self-care.Recovery as a Liberation MovementThe fundamental brilliance of such fellowships is the sharing of a common affliction and the communal support of those who’ve been where you have. This is the same brilliance of all great faiths. Where the endless addictions of capitalism build you up only to tear you down (for profit of course), the process of recovery is one where you must first be torn down to be built up. Religion at its best is a process of ego diminishment, an understanding that you are one of many, and that ultimately you are something infinitely more precious than a mere consumer — you are a human. When Finan talks about recovery as a liberation movement, he means the way in which there isn’t just a physical freedom promised in sobriety, but a mental, emotional, and spiritual one as well. No longer chained to the endless cycle of believing that one more drink will promise something immaculate in “just fifteen more minutes” which never comes.Apart from the political, I think that the most radical potential of recovery is something a bit more personal, something that is an issue of transcendence itself. It's all well and good to claim that addiction is a good metaphor for those things which oppress us in life, but addiction is also literally addiction. Followers of mystical paths have always advocated behaviors which others specifically can’t, won’t, or don’t do, from celibacy to fasting. Sobriety is in its own way such a radical, unexpected, unconventional behavior, as author Peter Bebergal has written: “Sobriety is its own kind of altered state of consciousness.” In Too Much to Dream: A Psychedelic American Boyhood, Bebergal writes about how in early recovery “A cup of coffee in the basement of a church… tastes like the nectar of the gods. A roast beef sandwich is like… something from Eden,” and the most profoundly true of observations: “Sleeping for the first time sober and waking up clean is a mystery of boundless grace.”“Mystery” and “grace” are religious terms, and indeed 12-step recovery often gets libeled as a type of religious mysticism. I would only take offense to that were I against religious mysticisms. But Bebergal is right, the first time you go to bed sober and wake up clean does feel like a mystery, because it’s so antithetical to who you have been, and it does feel like grace because for once you have a sort of freedom you’ve never known before. It’s a staking out of agency, of personal sovereignty, and it’s a declaration of independence. “Freedom” is simply another word for grace, and there is never anything more powerful, radical, or subversive than freedom. Bebergal writes that “Removing the pall of daily addiction is like flash powder going off in your face,” as it was for Bill W., as it was for Handsome Lake, as it was for me, and as it possibly can be for you.In addiction there is that pursuit of freedom, the lie that one more drink will get you closer to the comfort and safety of a home you’ve never known. The radicalism of sobriety is that it actually gets you there.

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alexdmorgan30 · 5 years

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Radical Sobriety: Getting (and Staying) Clean and Sober as Subversive Activity

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pitz182 · 5 years

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Radical Sobriety: Getting (and Staying) Clean and Sober as Subversive Activity

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republicstandard · 6 years

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Rebutting Civic Nationalism

While conservatives of yore sought to combat the very real and very significant threat of communism, they failed to notice two things: one, that its practitioners had also colonized their own countries, and two, who, exactly, was behind the introduction of these spores of communism. While the West ultimately triumphed over the USSR, it may be the ghosts of Lenin and company have the last laugh. In many ways, life in the West is worse than it was in the Eastern Bloc. Such a comparison may seem laughable—we have plenty of stuff after all—but advance just one unpopular opinion about race, sex, and the like and watch what happens to your gainful employment, your placid home life, and your ability to even cash a check. The totalitarianism is more sinister precisely because it is more covert and because it is more invasive. Don’t like it? Build your own platform.

Whilst Baby Boomers were sold a bill of goods regarding “the content of our character,” Generation X was treated to the cognitive dissonance of merit-based race-blindness and the notice-but-disregard quirks of post-racialism; in an interesting twist, culturally, for a brief period in the 1990s, they actually almost got the formula right, but continued mass immigration and the ascendance of anti-Western ideologies continued to rush headlong toward the Barack Obama boiling point, where, quoting from Mark Point’s brilliant essay at American Thinker, “Racism on the Rise”:

Millennials were taught from childhood that the highest moral good was serving the self-esteem of non-Whites… According to the implicit demands of the experiment, Whites and by extension what could be perceived as “White culture” was selected for strategic downsizing… It’s unsurprising that when Whites were encouraged to jettison the exigencies of tradition in favor of debasing themselves, that we ended up with an entire class of people now lost in the wilderness without past or future. Over the past thirty years, conservatives were busy building an entire culture around anti-socialism while the Left was busy pushing its cultural trojan horse to unleash a whole different kind of plague.

Though there is essentially no difference between the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama in effect, the clear division is in the former’s final exhaustion of Ronald Reagan’s “moral majority” and the latter’s at-times antagonistic relationship toward Israel. Let’s be clear about something, though: they essentially served the same master as two sides of the same coin.

There are not two Americas. There is one America—ours—and the Tower of Babel-esque post-liberalist hellscape of the future that looks like the Golden Triangle in the remnants of Pittsburgh in George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead. Nevertheless, too many Americans have deluded themselves into thinking that voluntarily abasing themselves and their culture will somehow lead to unity, especially as they themselves accept the mantle of cultural and racial whipping-posts. This can only lead to contempt from the other races, for though Francis Fukuyama and his ilk decided that the fall of the USSR meant “the end of history,” it was only Western liberals who bought into such a premise fully. Unfortunately, though, conservatives, so fixated on defeating the Reds, had missed the deep rot setting in their own culture while they vicariously fought Ivan Drago. They’re now fighting ghosts. Returning to Point:

Indeed, it's nice that wrangler-wearing boomers have had their war paint ready to conserve their nest egg from the perennial specter of Soviet-style economics. Railing against socialized medicine and magazine limits is not without its merit, but for the sake of their grandchildren maybe they’d like to also counter the forces that seek to degrade Whites and for the first time in 2,000 years, permanently disconnect culture associated with them. Is it not obvious that every group on the planet both within and outside the West is encouraged to embrace the legacy of their ancestors except for Whites?... Don’t expect the Japanese or Chinese to do anything but look in amazement and take notes as Ford F150 ten-gallon hat types indignantly yell “out of my cold dead hands!” meanwhile their granddaughter is likely to spend the same twilight years in a very dangerous world because her grandfather was too worried about his bumpstock or the return of Fidel Castro to take a stand against the toppling of his ancestors and the deracination of his heirs. If conservatives were half as serious about combatting anti-White racism as they are about their guns, the wall would have been built 30 years ago and Mr. “It’s in our DNA” Obama would have never been elected to anything but a tribal warlord.

90% of Blacks, 80% of Jews, 77% of Asians, and 69% of Hispanics voted Democrat in the 2018 mid-term elections; these overwhelming percentages voted for the present radical, anti-White iteration of the Democrat Party. Using CNN’s exit polling data, 79% of the respondents who answered that electing more racial and ethnic minorities was “very important” were Democrats. 87% of respondents who felt that Whites were favored in society today were Democrats as opposed to 69% of the Republicans who felt that no group is favored. This is depressing on two fronts: one, a whole lot of Republicans, mostly Whites, either have their heads in the sand or are so deeply marinated in post-“Civil Rights” propaganda that they refused to see the reality playing itself out before them, and two, that most Democrats are just as delusional in feeling that Whites, with all of the venom and anti-White policies directed at them, are somehow a privileged group.

“All cultures are created equal except your own,” we are told, except yours. And while this is true, it is framed in the opposite. Europeans and the European Diaspora are responsible for 97% of all human achievement and innovations, notions of human rights and democracy (which are now being weaponized against us), and the eradication of many diseases as well as the minimization of the effects of famine. As election after election has proven, non-Whites do not, and will not, ever, in any appreciable numbers value the same things that we do. They do not vote Republican (and let’s be honest, it’s not like all Republicans are worth voting for), but rather hew toward the “liberal” Democrats—“liberal” in this instance meaning genocidal totalitarians who literally threaten to use nuclear weapons against their own people who refuse to turn their guns over to the federal government. This is not hyperbole: they want you dead. Eradicated. Erased. Point asks:

So where have three decades of feverish placation and encouraging our sons and daughters to take a backseat landed us? Statue toppling, knock out games, self-self-segregated graduations, implicit this, privilege that, people being fired for thought-crimes, higher taxes on struggling families to subsidized race-based transfers, racialized comic book warriors, real historical heroes defaced with graffiti, suppressed speech, our national anthem undermined, and an endless torrent of millions of new immigrants adding more complexity to a difficult situation… Your daughter’s daffy feminism, the lionization of increasingly bizarre sexual anomalies, the undying dream of economic collectivism and Christophobia are all skirmishes that need managing but America is becoming dangerously anti-White at a time when with the world’s only White-majority societies are becoming White-minority.

Americans (to quote Revilo P. Oliver, “When I use that word, I mean Americans, descendants, and heirs of the creators of the Western world; I do not mean all featherless bipeds that, ‘regardless of race, color, or creed,’ happen to be on our soil at the present time”) and their Western kin must decide what kind of nation—if one at all—they want moving forward.

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