Homelessness

I notice I'm getting a couple of referrals from the "There are Real Things" blog to which I contribute. I should note, to wanderers, that I this blog here is more scattershot and less intended to be of much interest to anyone but myself; a sort of notepad in html. I don't put anything too personal up here, but coherent, tightly-written posts that make sense and don't ramble and digress outrageously are not a priority. I mean, I hope y'all like it, but...

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I'm still browsing through the Ochlophobist blog, which will be going belly-up in 19 days. Part of me wants to look up some one-click service for archiving the entirety of it, but I know that if I did that, I'd probably never read most of it.

One finds on The Sarabite a poet who has had to look at each of his habitations in life from a distance even while living in the midst of them. When you have spent most of your life feeling as if you are in exile from the very place you find yourself, then you are among those of us for whom Hebrews 13:14 is a cause of great hope.

"For we have not here an abiding city, but we seek after the city which is to come."

Pseudo-Iamblichus' post reminded me of a line from an old Rich Mullins song, hearkening back to my Evangelicalish days:

"And if your home is just another place where you're a stranger
And far away is just somewhere you've never been
I hope that you'll remember, I was your friend"

Perhaps we feel as if we are in exile in and from the places we find ourselves because all of this world is passing, yet at the same time, the kingdom which is to come has come in Jesus Christ, and is coming in Jesus Christ, here, to the very place we find ourselves in exile. And so we wait, and try to keep our lamps lit.

The post he links to says:

For Sartre, most of us live in "bad faith", i.e. we think we are something that we are really not. The self in Sartre's tome is a constantly roving ghost trying to catch its own shadow. Consciousness is always consciousness of something, and if you are conscious of that thing, you are NOT it. Thus, when a person says, "I am a waiter," for Sartre, this person is in a sense lying since he is looking outside of himself and saying: "I am that", when he really isn't. For Sartre, the self is a negation, a constant negation, and this is the ground for the absurdity of human life, but it is also the ground for freedom. Man, as Sartre says, may be a futile passion (since he wants to become God, ens causa sui), but this makes man free to choose his actions in an absurd universe.