Out of You and Me

Leave a Comment / By Paul Hughes / July 2, 2016

An important decision

Zig Ziglar …
Wendell Berry …
or James Lee Burke?

The book one brings to morning coffee out is not unlike the t-shirt options one has later that evening

SpongeBob …
Arsenal F.C. …
or Feel the Bern?

Managing our reputations, as the LinkedInFluencers say. Wouldn’t wanna cross those guys.

It’s usually about trying to say something unique, trying to be something unique.

Of course we can’t avoid being unique but we don’t think we are, so we keep trying.

There’s another way. It’s harder but — by which I mean and thus — it’s well worth it. More precisely there are two ‘nother ways

Say something
Say nothing

Or rather

Say something different
Say nothing, which is different

An easy something different can be to ask the other a question. It must be honest and sincere. Prolly we’ll have to work at it.

To say nothing, which is different — that second option — means we can talk but only to comment on what the other says, not ourselves.

This isn’t about being coy or combative, shy or manipulative. It’s the studied studying of the other.

Why the other?

Because they are.

Rainer Maria Rilke said it was a marvel (or German to that effect) two people ever truly communicated, that one ever knew anything, or cd know anything, about the other. And he’s talking about people in love — people who want to know the other.

In any event … a marvel.

A wonder.

And that’s the key.

Knowing the other — making the other another — turning someone in your mind and heart from utterly alien to one who … isn’t … who is still an other into another — to one we come truly to want to know about … to know truly about … to know about truly … is a marvel, accomplished by wonder.

Treat it — and them — as one.

Leave a Comment Cancel Reply

Recent

Can We Tawk?

Comedienne Joan Rivers’ catchphrase was, ‘Can we talk?’ with all that that entails — its rhetorical nature, the Jewish thing, an implication that at least one of the parties will be better off for having done so … Like God. T’other day a priest spoke of ontological remembrance, the immediate and ongoing memory of past-present-future

Hide and See

Something lost, Dallas Willard said once, might yet be very valuable. One’s car keys for instance. He was speaking somewhat in the context of salvation, if I recall … the general point was calling something lost doesn’t mean it’s not wanted — quite the opposite. Yet it remains … until finding its way out or being found

Greater Love Blah Blah Blah

Do we doubt locals thanked them for their service? I’m not equating the two. They were wrong; glad we crushed them. Only noting it’s likely they thought as much about such things as we do, which is to say not much. German citizens who believed their leaders, loved their country, watched their sons get on

Dark Eyed Life

According to @CitizenScreen, doing yeoman’s* work daily on Twitter* relative to the Golden Age of film, today is the birth date of Mabel Normand, Hedy Lamarr, and Dorothy Dandridge — Normand: New York, 1892 Lamarr: Vienna, 1914 Dandridge: Cleveland, 1922 — which makes for coupla at least interesting, if not compelling or fascinating at the

Random

Faith in the Shadowlands

Casting Crowns made me cry. It was the song “Somewhere in the Middle” — sometimes called “Caught in the Middle” on the Internet. I misheard one of the lines too — the phrase is “deepwater faith, in the shallow end.” It was also a little disconcerting to learn that it was written for teenagers. We

In The Heart of the Drunkard

And away he went, to drink the value of his cross … I have been listening to Fyodor Dostoevski’s The Idiot on the iPhone, from Audible.com. It’s incredible. I just know I’ll have to read it as soon as I’m done with the audio. [I do irk myself somewhat on having become such a fan

Everyman’s Death

It’s legit unseemly. Our being ‘gutted’ and whatnot by the deaths of people we don’t know. Still, there is John Donne and there is continuity and there is in the end … us. Well, there ought to be but we usually skip not to the end — that bell tollling for we. + Also unseemly

Functionally Illiterate Christian

Every few years I realize how wrong I’ve been. People who know me are faster on that, and even temporary acquaintances pick up the signals pretty quick, and I do the same for them. All this has happened before, and it will all happen again, the line goes. But this time it happened in …

Related

Never Get Out Of The Boat

So you’re on this boat. You’re near enough to land if you want some of that, but you don’t exactly want to leave the old life. The old life in this case is not the bad old days B.C. Those are way gone. In fact, they mayn’t even be optional for you anymore. Sorry. That’s

Not a Eulogy

(A Eucatastrophe) * Love the words, my friends. Pay attention to the words, I say. Christians don’t die One reason we know this is Jesus said it. In John’s account he told Michael: “You shall never taste or see death” (Indeed, as the Psalmist says, “taste and see that the Lord is good.”) Another reason

Pieta

I don’t think next year will be so different from this year. Which after all was not so different from the one before. But I think you can be different from last year and I can. Which after all may be true for you as it was also for me.

Do Piece — Community (Barth)

They crucified him with the criminals. Do you know what this implies? Don’t be too surprised if I tell you that this was the first Christian fellowship, the first certain, indissoluble, and indestructible Christian community. Christian community is manifest wherever there is a group of people close to Jesus who are with him in such a