 Jared Witt | May 28, 2020 
 Jared Witt | May 21, 2020  To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
If that’s true, then what do you suppose everything looks like to a preacher with only one sermon about forgiveness? Forgiveness is definitely a part of what Jesus was about. And any transformation of this world almost definitely requires it. BUT it also requires more than forgiveness. Jesus didn’t say, “I’ve come to bring forgiveness.” He said that he’s come “to bring good news to the poor…release to the captives…sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of debt forgiveness.” That last one has the word “forgiveness” in it, yes, but don’t be confused. It refers to forgiveness of the accumulated debt and sharecropping deals worked out by those landholders who had been bailed out by shark lenders during bad growing seasons, using their land, their family’s entire means of survival, as collateral. In other words, Jesus is proclaiming the year that the rich forgive the poor so that they don’t get buried by desperate financial moves, NOT the year that God forgives people for swearing in front of their grandmothers and for masturbating.  Jared Witt | May 6, 2020  Sometimes my mind reaches an impasse in its efforts to understand itself. I wheel around and around the same problem like I’m in a Parisian roundabout, and the issue that I’m having is the median. It never occurs to me to just take the next boulevard exit off to the side and get on with my life. And whenever a particular street sign catches my eye and alerts me to that option, I’m utterly dumbfounded that I’d probably missed it countless times before.
George Ivanovich Gurdjieff is unlikely to be a household name for most. But if you’ve studied the Enneagram at all, it may ring a bell. He reclaimed and codified many of the concepts of the Enneagram, though that was more or less a side hustle next to his greater body of work. The eccentric Armenian left home at a young age on the hunch that it is in fact possible for humans to achieve a higher state of consciousness and improve their “state of being.” For him, this meant everything from high forms of meditative enlightenment to simply not yelling at the dog because you’ve had a hard day at work. In fact, he would develop a way of speaking about the latter as being no less a transcendent topic and every bit a part of the conscious spiritual life as, say, sitting legs folded, palms up on a mountain top. |
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