Even Life and Death in Itself is a Rhythm

And even life and death in itself is a rhythm. When we're actually alive in this body, there's a energy to it and doing. And then some point in the future, we die. That energy pauses for a moment and then it finds another form. I'm not saying we can become reincarnated. But the energy finds another form. The energy goes somewhere into the soil or into another life form in some way. 

And so, when we really stay intimate with that rhythm of life, that pulsing on off on off, in out in out. I don't want it to sound too spiritual or too Zenny but we we are one with the rhythm of life, one with the universe, with the essence of the universe, when we're in touch with that breathing.

Breathing - the rhythm of life

February 24, 2024 by Geoff Dawson, Ordinary Mind School of Sydney

The Order of the Books of the New Testament

"Most scholars believe that either 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, or James was the first New Testament document written, all of which speak to events chronologically later than the Gospels. This is largely due to the fact that the Gospels are not media reports or live tweets about Jesus: they are literary biographies, composed by followers of Jesus to tell the story of Jesus as the first generation of Christians got older."

The New Testament In Order

Jacob Prahlow, April 14, 2021 Conciliar Post

The Second Vatican Council stimulated arguments over “true and false tradition” (Yves Congar).

More than a decade before Vatican II the French Dominican Yves Congar wrote a book with the title True and False Reform in the Church. The work was considered controversial in its day, but has, I think, been vindicated as thoroughly orthodox.

True and False Reform

Avery Cardinal Dulles, August 2003

First Things

The Institute on Religion and Public Life, publisher of First Things, was founded in 1989 by Richard John Neuhaus, a Lutheran pastor who later became a Catholic priest. The Institute’s mission is to advance a religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society.

Bishop Eusebius, Father of Church History

Eusebius's account is the only surviving historical record of the Church during its crucial first 300 years.

Bishop Eusebius, a learned scholar who lived most of his life in Caesarea in Palestine, broke new ground in writing the History and provided a model for all later ecclesiastical historians. In tracing the history of the Church from the time of Christ to the Great Persecution at the beginning of the fourth century, and ending with the conversion of the Emperor Constantine, his aim was to show the purity and continuity of the doctrinal tradition of Christianity and its struggle against persecutors and heretics.

The History of the Church: From Christ to Constantine

Eusebius

Description from Good Reads

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Known as the “Father of Church History,” Eusebius was bishop of Caesarea in Palestine and the leading Christian scholar of his day. His Ecclesiastical History is an irreplaceable chronicle of Christianity’s early development, from its origin in Judaism, through two and a half centuries of illegality and occasional persecution, to a new era of tolerance and favor under the Emperor Constantine. In this book, Michael J. Hollerich recovers the reception of this text across time. As he shows, Eusebius adapted classical historical writing for a new “nation,” the Christians, with a distinctive theo-political vision.

Eusebius’s text left its mark on Christian historical writing from late antiquity to the early modern period—across linguistic, cultural, political, and religious boundaries—until its encounter with modern historicism and postmodernism. Making Christian History demonstrates Eusebius’s vast influence throughout history, not simply in shaping Christian culture but also when falling under scrutiny as that culture has been reevaluated, reformed, and resisted over the past 1,700 years.

Making Christian History

Eusebius of Caesarea and His Readers

by Michael Hollerich, June 2021

About this book, University of California Press

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I decided to try that approach“ [reception history”] to measure the impact of Eusebius’ book on church history, a subject that he could legitimately claim to have invented.

For too long, the Constantinian panegyrics dominated how moderns read him.

I wanted to look at how Ecclesiastical History survived and influenced later ages and religious cultures, as well as what that tells us about how Christians (and also non-Christians) understood themselves and their past. To borrow a usage from German scholar Dorothea Weltecke, a student of the universal history of Michael the Syrian, I wanted to see works of history as themselves historical events, a methodological turn in the study of ancient historiography in general.

Reflections on Making Christian History

By Michael Hollerich, May 27, 2022

The Most Wonderful Moment of Your Life

The Buddha said: “You have to make the present moment the most wonderful moment of your life.” And this is possible, because if you are able to go home to the present moment, to the here and now, and become fully alive, fully present, you can touch all the wonders of life within and around yourself.

Everything belonging to you is a wonder: your eyes, your ears, your nose, your body, your mind. But if you are not mindful, you don’t touch them deeply, you don’t know that they are wonders until you die and you begin to regret that you have not lived at all.

That is why our true home must be sought in the here and now. It can be touched in the here and now.   

Inviting the Bell

By Thich Nhat Hanh

November 21, 2021

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I'm processing being diagnosed with prostate cancer with a Gleason score of 7. I feel calm because I have been thinking about death since I got the biopsy that the doctor told me I needed. Well this brings the reality much closer, I have been thinking about it because Buddhists think about death. Everyone is going to die. Somehow we don't want to talk about that but Buddhist prepare by saying it out loud. Many people live life fuller when they have been diagnosed with a terminal illness. I'm not at that point but I feel like at the age of 71 Buddhism has been moving me in that direction.

In these past 2 weeks as I anticipated the news after my biopsy, I realized it will be much harder for my spouse and daughter than for me.

Thomas Martin died in Bangkok after giving a lecture. At the end of his talk he said "We will have question tonight. Now I am going to disappear."