Hi,
I haven't been doing much blogging because ever since I got back from France I have been awash with admin and everything else to do with the arrival of the new students. However, today I just had to respond to a blog I read on AKMA's page about Angels...here is my response...
AKMA said:
(This is partly why angels don’t, can’t have a sense of humor; the perfection of their existence in truth makes “incongruity” an empty category for them.)
Umm...what is truth? I take it humour then comes from the sense of lack, a break in the perfection of reason, a rupture in order which the comic can tease into laughter. But there is too much modernisation of angels here. Are angels a recreation of the modernist ideal or are they antediluvian monstra, the bene adonai? And if they are the sons of God (i.e. in character, in form, in source) does this mean that God too cannot have a sense of humour because he is divine - the perfection of His existence makes incongruity an empty category.
But God does have a sense of humour (witness the Bible in both Testaments, Jesus', John 9 and American politics), and our sense of humour could be seen as a sign of our Godlikeness. So, if anges are bene adonai, then they too must have a sense of humour. What does it mean not to have a sense of humour. Have you seen the film Equilibrium (over here on satellite TV at the moment) where the future Tetragrammaton government makes people take emotion suppressent medication - it removes all feeling from humanity in order to eradicate war and violence. It don't work. It is godless - the Tetragrammaton (!) destroys humanity and humanity rises up to destroy the Tetragrammaton instead. Interestng post-liberal death of God stuff in the background..but I wonder whether this says something else about humourless angels. God forbid!
Talking of Sky - I watched the Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood the other day while doing the ironing. Personally I found it a bit insulting. For people who have gone through hell in childhood because of their parents disorders (don't we all to some extent? My poor kids!), it's just not good enough to say "look at it from their perspective - they couldn't help it". It wasn't her mother's fault that she belted them until they bled - she was under a lot pressure - would you do any better? No, of course we wouldn't. But this simply heaps the guilt upon the child - it was my fault she was under pressure - rather than be the perpetrator the mother becomes the victim while the real victim, the child, becomes the perpetrator. By the end of the film mother and daughter are united again and the daughter joins her in the Priestesshood - she too has become complicit in the act of brutality, she has realised that she is little different from her mother, does this mean that she absolves her mother's brutality or is she preparing for her own role in brutalising a child? What a load of rubbish. Child brutality is always awful and can never ever ever be explained away. It is not justified by any pressure or stress which a parent is going through. It is never justified by anything. It happens and I do not deny that. I don't want to demonise parents who fall into the trap of (verbally) letting rip at their kids...I am as guilty as anybody...perhaps more so...but nor do I want to brutalise kids by giving the apologetic that it is stress that does it. I do it. It's something I have to deal with.
Theologically it is all part of the fallenness of our world but do I then want to blame God for letting us fall, or Eve for eating the apple, or Adam for being such a prat or what? Nope. I want to deal with it myself. I want to be filled with the Holy spirit and with his fruit - that is the only way I can be a better parent, the only way I can deal with my past - my own childhood experiences, to bring myself to God and find wholeness in him...and where better.
Pete
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