Thursday, April 28, 2011

English Subtitles, Endnotes, Footnotes, Drafts All is Vanity

Life had become inundated with footnotes, endnotes and drafts. Our Church life is overrun with subtitles and parenthesis and brackets. Every thought and declaration a revision of some prior edition. Each seeking to outdo, out clarify, out pray.

Countless hours are spent in a fatal attempt to legitimize editions by demonizing sages, customs  and discrediting the original (the gold standard). These keepers of the way who maintain the path paved the way with crimson blood of the martyrs are to be embraced not banished or slandered for being loyal to sacred traditions and canons. If the copy or translation contained the essentials of the original endless notations would be unnecessary. It is essential to make the concerted effort to bring the wisdom to believers though education not negation.

Bring the Traditions and the Bible in the vernacular of the people certainly as one would to babes but then broaden and deepen understanding by including the original reference. Distancing personal revelation from the keepers of the faith is precarious if not suicidal.  This is the problem with harvesting our clerics from first generation converts who are vested in remaining authentically 'whatever they were before'. I fail to understand why clerics would not see it as their obligation to their vows to learn the language of the Church and to encourage their flock to learn what they can. They choose rather to insert themselves into artificial arguments of morality and ethics the lesser issues of man. Focus rather on healing and illumination. It is a prideful ethnocentrism if you will permit the broad usage of the term to cling to their traditions of linguistic affections and secularism.

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