Hosea 11:1-11
Proper 13 (18) - Year C
This is a good passage on which to use Spiral Dynamics. Print this chart:
http://www.kon.org/hswp/archive/images/mcgregor3/Wilberian%20integral%20approach0002.jpg
Now ask about parental expectations. “The more I called to them, the more they went from me.” We see this all about us, parents yelling at their kids to, “Come here!” This kind of distanced power just doesn’t work. It is far more efficient, kind, and teaching to go to the young one and walk with them to where you were. It saves getting angry and allows them to learn why it is that they were called and they need to check out a next call. Just a couple of times and there is a new relationships developing.
Going after someone with wrath in your voice seldom would attract that someone to you. In fact a whistle or some other identifiable and easy to make sound cuts through all the yelling.
Eventually, when those now being chastised reach a certain amount of experience they may well look back and acknowledge they could have reached this point in their life much sooner than they did. Hopefully they will learn about the folly of expecting someone without their perspective to grasp it in a moment and will walk with them to a new insight rather than demanding they “understand” right now.
There is much religion and G*D could learn from a basic understanding of life-stages. It would also help a congregation understand a different way of interacting with one another, as their fellow parishioners bring together all the stages at one time. How might we love where folks are and walk with them that they might take another step and at at the same time love our stage and movement toward a next?
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2013/07/hosea-111-11.html
Hosea 11:1-11 or Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14; 2:18-23
Being so sure . . . a vanity.
Knowing nothing . . . a vanity.
Thrusting away . . . a vanity.
Expecting return . . . a vanity.Truly, everything . . . a vanity.
So? Get what you can while you can? Give it all away as soon as you can? Focus on our differences as a way of dividing people? Focus on our differences as a way of building a commonwealth?
Again, (having just seen again the film parable, "Pleasantville") we are left with the question, "Do you know what's going to happen next?" The litany response is, "No, I don't."
Now we can get somewhere. The freedom to change, and know it, is the beginning of wisdom.
The issue of passionless repetition may be more basic than a particular fundamentalism that would keep things unchanging. This may be more important to our work with one another than any other hermeneutical technique of interpreting scripture. There are more active ways to constrain the present by the past than there are stars. There are more subtle ways of constraining the future by the present than grains of sand.
We again meet the boundary of enough and shy away. Have mercy!
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2004/august2004.html
Hosea 11:1-11 or Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14; 2:18-23
What a vanity, this tough-pretending G*D. Old Ephraim has been busy with the business of living in human form - unhappy business. We hate our toil; G*D hates our toil. Finally there is despair from humans and despair from G*D - the more we are called the more we went in the opposite direction. Thus, despair in all directions.
A solution to this unhappy business is not despair squared, but a recognition that, despairing or not, we and G*D won't give up. Those old hounds of heaven have been unleashed. Fierce despair/anger won't be unleashed. When the hounds arrive, great licking of faces will occur. Forgiveness as slobber -- compassion, warm and tender -- will find us at home again.
- - -
caught between
vanity and vanity
hearken back
at distance
once loved
given up for lost
and threatened
nothing left
still loved
compassion shines through
no more wrath
welcome home
what sense this
wavering wind of uncertainty
trembling bird
new future
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2007_07_01_archive.html
The more I called, the more they ran -- this seems to be every parent's/prophet's experience at some point along the journey.
Many of us have been on both sides of that divide. Some of us still prefer one side over the other and operate out of that preference. There are inveterate callers and knee-jerk runners-away.
I've been led with "cords of human kindness" and experienced some of them as shackles. Our "spiritual care" for one another can be pretty heavy, laying all manner of expectation and reservation of acceptance upon us. Greg Brown's song Driftless has a line about this:
Have I done enough, Father,
can I rest now?
Have I learned enough, Mother,
can we talk now?
Yet, thankfully, the impulse to keep everyone a thankful third-grader who would never respond like that older teen, can keep us going long enough to move past a need to control things like setting a fiery sword at Eden's gate. With blessings aplenty we don't give up on folks. With high hopes we just can't bring ourselves to separate from one another, no matter how disappointed we have been.
In our family, my dearly beloved often has been heard to exclaim, "I don't know how we are going to get through this (whatever was having its day or season), but I'm going to keep loving you." Simple words; profound words.
May you be returned to your "home" (which may be different than where you thought it was or who else is there) in such a way that you can move on into the next stage of your life and your relationship with other family members, near and far.