Leaderboard

nice script on the water and fire baptism sirguessalot tried so hard for so many years with books and books running out of my ears, like cleaning the outside of the pitcher, while inside is a fuse waiting to be lit, tried it my way then I started listening anyways, always cool to converse with everyone here, open hearts

It may also be that the competence of John's baptism strongly involved the seemingly "magic" and "cultic" but actually quite pragmatic medicinal impacts of hygiene, where the competence of Christ's fire was more akin to the kind of medicine that heals when there is no cure, which involves washing in the inner flames of realities like grief, guilt, humiliation and most specifically, shame, and the depth and degrees of our capacities to touch, hold and handle any of this is what keeps us from both eden and paradise. In this light (NOT counting the dead), one might even say that there are currently maybe billions of living souls on Earth drowning tormented in such an inner lake of fire right now. Meanwhile, there are also maybe millions alive walking in the very same fire. Which is perhaps also why "fire" seems to have long been a living metaphor in the contexts of end-of-life care-giving and companionship (in what other field is the harvest so plentious and the laborers so few?), and is firmly rooted in a "healing the healer" approach, or medicine for the "wounded healer." Communities of the devoted to supporting each other in doing their inner work so they cause even less harm. Essential baseline mode of care for anyone wanting to heal (or lead or teach) anyone else. This deeper history of hospitals, nursing and medicine runs through the Gospels. Quite revolutionary in times of mass avoidance and fixers run amuck.

Indeed. It may be, as I suspect, that the grand tour of the Apocalypse is not merely about future events, but rather a illumination of ongoing Processes, including the processes, patterns and stages of inner life, which includes of course how these inner conditions and changes impact the outer world. The book seems more like a user manual than mere list of predictions, although clearer discernment of inner processes and their impacts on the outer world does also lend to seeing clearer trajectories in outer events, increasing our capacity to predict things. These are not one-time events, but rather patterns that repeat as the conditions support them, which is perhaps why folks for millenia who try to apply the symbols and archetypes to specific literal one-time events are constantly mostly wrong. Also, the history of Catholicism is quite full of rich diversity. Often ignored or misunderstood by protestant leaning beliefs are the contemplative and monastic orders and disciplines, such as Franciscan, Cistercian, Benedictine, etc.. These include folks who do not always fit the standard current mainstream Catholic codes in belief or practice about Purgatory or anything else. Purgatory and the Apocalypse also reminds me of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bardo_Thodol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bardo "In some schools of Buddhism, bardo (Classical Tibetan: བར་དོ་ Wylie: bar do) or antarābhava (Sanskrit, Chinese and Japanese: 中有, romanized in Chinese as zhōng yǒu and in Japanese as chū'u)[1] is an intermediate, transitional, or liminal state between death and rebirth. The concept arose soon after Gautama Buddha's death, with a number of earlier Buddhist schools accepting the existence of such an intermediate state, while other schools rejected it. The concept of antarābhava, an intervening state between death and rebirth, was brought into Buddhism from the Vedic-Upanishadic (later Hindu) philosophical tradition.[2][3] Later Buddhism expanded the bardo concept to six or more states of consciousness covering every stage of life and death.[4] In Tibetan Buddhism, bardo is the central theme of the Bardo Thodol (literally Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State), the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a text intended to both guide the recently deceased person through the death bardo to gain a better rebirth and also to help their loved ones with the grieving process.[5]" Wondering about life after death is like the unborn wondering about life after birth. We come out screaming bloody murder because it feels like dying, yet the scope and variety of life after birth is many many magnitudes more than life in the womb (like seed versus tree), and that great cloud of ancestral witnesses are like the nurses, midwives and relatives in the waiting room. And, while the personal ego may not survive death, it may be that other forms of life after death are overwhelmingly MORE (in both scope and variety) than what we are experiencing now. And, as with birth, where there is no guarantee a newborn lives to see its first birthday, or with sprouting seeds, where there is no guarantee it flowers, the newly dead are not immediately done with their growth. The potential of life without end is simply that. Thus, notions like Purgatory and the Bardo.

Seems to me all religions are filled with words that all other religions don't know/care about, but most old religious traditions do include near-equivalents to Purgatory as both a state of being and an actual location associated with the dead. Naraka, Diyu, Tir Na Nog, etc.. As with the ecosystems of Catholicity, each is a living and unique response and expression of human encounters with the many fields and layers of life beyond life. And as with Catholicism, most are old enough to have long been hollowed out and filled with surface ideas and applications nearly utterly divorced from these kinds of roots, providing poor examples of the original ancestral wisdom, leaving us mostly naked, lost and afraid in our mortality, grief and shame. In this, we have mostly replaced living practices and direct experience for mere explanations of distant things. Yet, it seems within each religion there are folks in touch with those deeper strands. fwiw

You and me (and many others who have survived to become "seniors") both. we[b] boast in the hope of the glory of God. 3 Not only so, but we[c] also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; 4 perseverance, character; and character, hope. 5 And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us. From Romans 5, NIV.