History is Real: our Past is Real

So. I guess I would say that where Abrahamic religion strikes me as uniquely valuable

Is that it conceives of the person and the religious polity as in time in a different way, an open-ended way.

The end-state of a person is NOT ACTUALLY KNOWN, nor knowable

Covenants of communities are broken and repaired

(I am speaking of course of Abrahamic religion as it can be, not as it usually is)

I broke with Buddhism for two reasons: one, that it took the end-state for known and static. It will be like a moment of illumination and plenitude, except for ever and ever, it will be an ecstatic death. And two, that a person’s quiddity was simply a mask and an illusion. Those were my two reasons. Neither of those two things can be quite right. We labor in ignorance. We are seeds of something we can’t understand, but are reaching toward. We will arrive in places whose existence we could not have guessed. But we will arrive as selves which also we could not have guessed, but which are threaded on an unbreakable thread to who we are right now, individual and indelible. Change is real. History is real. Our past is real.

Are we immortal? I don’t know. In some sense, maybe. But just as certainly, we have to really die. Those three days, Good Friday to Easter, are not optional, not notional. The resurrection wasn’t theater. Jesus was stone dead.

April

Dear Prudence, sings a man who left before me
won’t you come out to play?

Fitting Lego bits together, left in a cryptic lay
by a little girl whose intensity puts us all to shame;

April takes stained awnings in its jaws
and puppy-shakes the house until it rattles in its frame.

You thought maybe an simple life would rise before you:
it won’t: we’re only here

to change the guard. We have no use
for captains who can’t steer,

or gold braid, or teachers’ pets: dear Prudence,
won’t you come out to play?