Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Sometimes too early

This morning while it was still dark the call of the gym rang loudly in my little mind. Yes time to get over there and sweat. It was a difficult shaving at 5:17 am but nothing like a fresh face to look at while getting your heart rate up to 156. Things were looking great when you make all 3 of the stoplights, whistling through on the greens. And so it begins -- another vigourous and healthy physical hour. But wait something is seriously wrong. The, well lets call her older women who you haven't seen in a few months, is at the different stations and the total weights she is pushing look to be quite a bit. Doesn't matter. I'll be over there in a few minutes and will crank it up -- wrong! I have to crank the weight total down. Humiliating. And from there it went downhill. About mid morning I felt awful. Just overdid it, again. Sometimes it is just too early.

Maybe I should take up smoking outside Irish bars like the guy in the picture. Not to worry there is always tomorrow, or the day after......

Monday, October 09, 2006

Turtles



The turtle face. A Mexican handicraft from Loreto made from a coconut shell. This little image sometimes speaks volumes on our lifestyles. Make sure the shell is secure and then retract. Whatever the pain, I am inside so leave me alone.

I found a book "Prayer and Modern Man" by Jacques Ellul which I had bought 30 years ago and had not read. He speaks of prayer in the following passages.

Commenting on why people do not pray - "We are concerned with ourselves, with the actual situation of contemporary man, in our technical, technicalized society, with the situation of the person who does not want to pray because nothing invites him to do so, for whom everything is a deterrent from it."

When speaking of Durer's Praying hands picture - "They express the cessation of activity, the composure of heart which goes with a morning of promise or an evening of work completed."

Speaking of prayer as some suggest "a telephone to heaven" - "Thus the device itself gives me assurance because a means is at hand and I can do something."

These are very powerful statements that speak to the culture we live in today. These were written before the advent of the personal computer. It is apparent that Ellul saw what technology, now maybe viewed in it's infancy, was and would become to the human condition. He says that everything is a deterrent from prayer. That our lives speak bluntly to that which we lack. That cessation of activity...when is that experienced these days? And doesn't a personal computer need an inscription stating that "it gives me assurance because a means is at hand and I can do something". Prophetic words to a silent and unlistening world.