When you start out on something that seems promising but outside your comfort zone, you can easily lose momentum, chicken out. You hear the countering voices. What was I thinking? I am making too much of this. I’ve been feeling this about my little Traychon project, about the young man who was shot behind our house, which I wrote about just two days ago. Nevertheless, I have persisted in following my impulses or perhaps the Spirit. Continue reading
Law of Three
Traychon
So this happened a week ago Sunday night, at around 10 pm as we were watching a movie at home: a pop-pop-pop that might have been gunshots or firecrackers. Fifteen minutes later I looked out a kitchen window and saw police cars, lights flashing, crime-scene tape, cops with flashlights behind our long backyard, in the street and in a parking lot that belongs to a business at the back edge of our property. Definitely, it had been shots.
Law of Three on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial
I’ve been wondering how to apply the Law of Three in the larger social arena. A series of events this past week showed why it is so much easier to keep it on the very personal level and leave it at that, though I am not really satisfied to do so.
I was one of the thousands (millions?) who weighed in on social media about the kerfuffle on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, the confrontation between the Catholic white boys and the Native American elder. I missed the initial video and the elder’s comments after the incident but saw these in numerous reposts, and because many people were commenting by then, I did not. But when the longer video appeared, along with the (condescendingly smirking or uncomfortably smiling, depending on your viewpoint) white boy’s explanation of his side of the events, I thought it worth drawing attention to the fact that the situation might have been more complicated than it looked at first. Continue reading
Waltzing the Law of Three
I am just back from a 3-day Wisdom School on the Law of Three and I am seeing triangles everywhere.
Law of Three, in the Wisdom tradition of Christianity, is the theory that the most basic, most pervasive dynamic of life is a triangular dance among three kinds of forces: FIRST FORCE– affirming (positive, active); SECOND FORCE—denying (negative, passive); and THIRD FORCE—reconciling (neutralizing, transforming, catalyzing … etc.). The first two forces may end up in opposition but Third Force is present (though hidden) in the stalemate, and when it comes into play, change happens. Something new arises. Still, all three forces are necessary for that to happen.
This waltz is how things evolve on every level, from the subatomic to the universal. It is in the very nature of God (think Trinity as process more than persons). It operates at the level of the individual human psyche and in our interactions with each other. Continue reading
the practical mystic 