Hello, Central, Give Me Heaven

 Sarah and Maybelle Carter Singing "Hello, Central, Give Me Heaven."

We wrote a post on Mr. Bannon a couple of days ago   (http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-grey-mech-cometh.html) based on an article in The Huffington Post titled  Steve Bannon's obsession with a dark theory of history should be worrisome

We only wish to point out the perils of prophecy and believing that one may know the future with certainty.

Point 1.
That is why we have elections, like the most recent one. If outcomes were deterministic, elections are mere window-dressing.


Point 2
We cannot talk with God.
Oh, we know we always pray and say we are talking to God, but we also say that God is "ineffable", meaning we can't talk about God, for he is so beyond our understanding.

However, when we say we cannot talk about something, we also imply that we cannot talk to that something, for if we could talk to God, then we could grasp at least those human linguistics phenomena which God must use, and then we could have some understanding of divinity in an intimate form.

Now if you say that God is not ineffable and the argument above is nonsense, fine. But that also means that God can be talked about like the Super Bowl and mustard on pretzels.
A lot of us do just that.

I do not talk to God. When I do that old-timey prayer thing, I am talking to myself and my Icon or Image of God, but I have not in any sense used a holy telephone and said, "Hello, Central, give me heaven."
Prayer now is different.

The realization that one cannot talk to God is devastating and unsettling.
It is a vast opening within our existence.
That is why if we really understand the inability to talk to God, we should have something ready as a lifeline... else we are left in a sea of despair ("despair" since we have lived our entire lives thinking we can palaver with God, and that removal of that underpinning shatters the structure of the ego).


What happens after this realization is surprising and the topic of some later article.


Now, we see Mr. Bannon thinking he can speak to God, or he can channel History, or practice some other arcane science.
Mr. Bannon, like so many of us, has drained the world of the color of God, and left us with black-and-white. Like Marx, he has kicked God off the throne and has enthroned an ideology. Nothing is in the hands of God - for we cannot speak to God, so it may as well be as if God does not exist!!!! - and the world is derelict of divinity... the world is populated by the walking dead, who do not yet know they are dead.
Others of us have enthroned our own nation, making American Exceptionalism our golden calf, or have dreamed up Imperiums based upon ourselves and allies and canons of the past which we hardly half understand.... all to try and fill back in the blanks we have left in our worlding.

After draining away the colors of the world, many people try to "colorize" what is left with their theories of the future.

The roads to the future are too many and the progress too uncertain to be able to predict.
Mr. Bannon is merely seeing patterns in falling sands and anticipating the edges of chaos.

As a child I saw facial patterns in the wood of the furniture and doors of my parents' house. After having discerned the pattern, I saw the same faces every day in the grain and knots.
That did not make those patterns real faces.

There is no short, sweet, and easy road to prophecy. Ask Cassandra. Ask the prophet in his own hometown.


*****

As I recall the words:

"Hello, Central, give me heaven,
for my mother's there;
you will find her with Saint Peter
on the Golden Stair..."

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