It's possible to look so hard that substance coalesces into pure being

I've slackened in my blog responses not so much because I have too little to say, as as I have too much to say: so many things are going through my mind - art shows, paintings, drawings, Merleau-Ponty, the lectionary texts for this Sunday and last Sunday, Eberhard Jungel on justification by faith, Barth talking about Christ the servant as lord, Keck's Roman's commentary, our cats health, house buying, being a good husband, being a good friend, and many more articles recondite and mundane: all these things run through my mind, inviting me to grasp hold of them, each in turn, only to elude my real grasp. As I said before, the past eludes us and the future has no shape in space, such that we only grasp the present.
Merleau Ponty says that we are so caught in time, embodying time, that we "secrete time" we "create time" and live in a present against a future, empty, hollow; our past, conditioned by interpretation and habits, never is a present. We ask, "what am I looking at" never fully in possession of ourselves - hence our existence is penultimate. We are embodied, though and our embodied existence is a "work of art." We are thrown into things between the horizons of our past and future limits.We live by looking, by focusing - not allowing our focus to slip off into unconsciousness- we must describe what we see. At least that's as far as I've read now, and I can't say that I've absorbed everything. But I continue in hope: I am immersed in Ponty's book. I find that I've been immersed like this in only a few books: the New Testament, Barth's Church dogmatics, Calvin's Institutes, Becker's Denial of Death, Bakhtin's Rabelais and his world, Whitman's Leaves of Grass. There are many similarities between Whitman and Ponty - this keen emphasis on observation and the sense of embodiment, open to multifarious points.

A long day

And the best part of the day was walking around the golf course: I walk, Jami runs and meets me, and then we walk on together. What a wonderful Sunday: we went to 1st Presbyterian here in Durham and heard a wonderful sermon from Joe Harvard: God is an extravagant disperser of seed - everything so Whitmanesque lately, but no wonder that God's abundance is without calculation, that it goes everywhere, without measure. We live in a world where many people don't believe that: wanting to believe that the necessities of life are scarce. I say, only because we make them scarce through our anxieties and fear, when we act out of self preservation. We seem culturally wired to disbelieve Jesus' message of abundance and forgiveness, instead believing it is better to hold grudges and squirrel away all we have. For this we go to war, we build fences, we engage in security theatre and polarizing rhetoric. An objective view, a nuanced view - these are drowned out, brushed aside.
Has it ever been otherwise?
Today, after church we went to see Hellboy II. What a great film. There's the sense in this film that humanity never learns its lesson. We found ourselves drawn to Hellboy and his elven protagonist. If demon spawn and elf-brood and goblin can get along, why can't we? Why can't we care about the planet we live on? This trend in super villains, where they've got a good point, is an improvement over the black/white, good/evil dichotomy that's prevailed for so long.
And then, after the movie, for some reason I thought the reception for the vice-moderator was today (it's next Saturday) and we drove from the theatre in Morrisville into Raleigh, only to find an empty parking lot and the doors to the church closed. I would like to blame the weight watchers diet: that it leaves me insufficiently fueled to run my complex brain; but I would have made this mistake on a full stomach - and last night, I did make this mistake on a full stomach - or moderately full.
After we returned home, we went for that walk around the golf course, in the woods, among the trees, on a wide graveled path. All around me nature was green and bright. I am amazed at how beautiful the world is, even close at hand: how water trickling in a culvert among rocks can be transcendent. Whitman and Merleau Ponty ring in my ears: I'm in my body and in the world, moving through time, and I exist in this place, facing this horizon.
Tuesday I will be received into presbytery. And this moment and that moment are tied together. I will stand before my colleagues in ministry knowing and not knowing, forgetting and remembering.
When the long day is over I put my tired legs under the covers and cherish the presence of my wife. Together we laugh. Hearty Rabelaisian laughs.