Rev. Erudite Redneck, B.S., B.S., M.A., M.Div.

Ecclesiastes 12 would be my point: learn to love God when young and life is golden; it's a lot harder to start when one has lived a while. Resentments build up.

Conversely, even resentments represent relationship - and admitting them can represent a healthy, mature and committed one.

Think Denys the Carthusian, St. John of the Cross.
 

I'm with you. I learned about resentments in Al-Anon years ago, gettin' over a relationship with a crackhead. I try to nip it in the bud when possible.

My finer point here was that I didn't mean to be glib, or whatever, on the other thread, as you seemed to have interpreted. Redneck sacrament? Come on.

And, yes, it is just a blog! I have just so much time for critical thinking/writing, and frankly work and seminary has just abput tapped that well dry. Sorry!
 

"For whoever is joined with all the living, there is hope; surely a live dog is better than a dead lion"

I like this one.
 

Yes, LBJ! The live dog is the only available salvation. The dead lion is romantic myth or fetish. And modern western Christianity, in response to biblical criticism, created many dead lions (even as literal lion in C.S. Lewis and a figurative one in liberal political visions) and the living dog has been almost completely lost.

Christ as a living dog. Perfect meditation icon. Loyal but not really a killer.

America seems to call out for a killer God these days.
 

"America seems to call out for a killer God these days."

These days? Or most of our history? Seems to me we've preferred a god that was quite willing to rid us of pesky Others who interfered with our Divinely wrought plans. We have yet, I think, to realize that the God of abundant life really has no truck with that kind of thing.

Spiritual schizophrenia, or simple socio-psychological projection, or perhaps a refusal to admit our own weakness as a people. Don't know for sure. And, yes, such praying does continue, and I really don't know what to feel about it other than shame.
 

C. S. Lewis as dead lion - nice touch! I think I would add all sorts of other corpses to that particular leonine pile.

Struggling out from under it because the live dog is, Lassie-like, calling us to the well where Timmy is trapped, might also serve, if one follows the metaphor . . .?
 

Such is the source of Cynocephalic Icons.
 

Well, maybe the figure of dog as "not a killer" is not quite on target.

www.nytimes.com/2010/04/26/sports/26greyhounds.html?hpw
 

I cannot believe I have never heard of this!
 

I can't believe you never heard of this either. This is big sport down in Tillman and Jackson counties. Old man Hickey had a box with his three coyote dogs in the back of his pickup truck and would drive along the section lines and when he spotted a coyote he tripped a leaver that dropped the door of the box and the dogs were off and running. Now those dogs weren't greyhounds but they were long legged, fast and mean. They were mostly some kind of hounds alright, the sounds of the chase were the big payoff for Hickey. Unlike rifle hunters, there weren't nothing left of the coyote to hang on the fence when the hounds got through with them.

Two things though, if the dogs in the NYT article went up against seven coyotes that means they are "packing up" which is a shift in their behavior. Coyotes are solo hunters and highly territorial that prey on smaller animals. They only pack up when the smaller prey are scarce. Then they can take down almost anything in Oklahoma out in the fields and hills that they care to.

Secondly Teddy Roosevelt did hunt coyotes out of Snyder, Oklahoma in 1906 with two guys named Frank and Ralph Abernathy from Frederick, Oklahoma. Frank used dogs to scare up coyotes but then he chased them on horse back. When he caught up with them he leaned down and grabbed them by hand and killed them. Teddy just shot them however.

Historical footnote for you. Teddy came by train on the Frisco R.R. and stayed at the Harvey House R.R. Hotel in the Station at Snyder during the hunt. When the successor Burlington Northern RR tore the station/hotel down in the 1980s three people were there to protest its destruction.

Say, this should have been in the new Encyclopedia of Oklahoma.
 

Correction:

It was Frank and Jack Abernathy,
Ralph was Jack's grandson. I think Jack was a U.S, Marshal as well.
 

Funny. I knew about "Barehanded" Abernathy and Rooooosevelt.
 

While I was checking up on Jack I was reminded of his two son's who at age 9 and 5 rode their horses from Oklahoma to Santa Fe, N.M. and back by themselves. "Those Abernathy Boys" were famous young horsemen also riding to NYC on horses in 1912 (?) buying a newfangled automobile and driving it back to OKC alone.