Mark 4:33

With many such parables Jesus used to speak to the people of his message, as far as they were able to receive it;


we practice parables
for we never know
how many it will take
to hear another
one we need
for our own health


The most prevalent error made in an attempt to teach is in saying just that one more thing than the teacher understands.

This shows up in the archetype of a professor with yellowed notes carrying along what once was a helpful insight as though it were all that ever will be worth knowing. It is revealed no less in an avant-garde early adaption of any whiff of an advertiser’s, “New! Improved!”

Both betray a movement of advance, consolidate, advance. Living off a past advance or an anticipated neo-anything (ego, both) leaves no room for the space needed to retreat to deep wilderness to arrive at a new shore such as D.H. Lawrence parablized in his “New Heaven and New Earth”:

IT was the flank of my wife
I touched with my hand, I clutched with my hand
rising, new-awakened from the tomb!
It was the flank of my wife
whom I married years ago
at whose side I have lain for over a thousand nights
and all that previous while, she was I, she was I;
I touched her, it was I who touched and I who was touched.

Yet rising from the tomb, from the black oblivion
stretching out my hand, my hand flung like a drowned man’s hand on a rock,
I touched her flank and knew I was carried by the current in death
over to the new world, and was climbing out on the shore,
risen, not to the old world, the old, changeless I, the old life,
wakened not to the old knowledge
but to a new earth, a new I, a new knowledge, a new world of time.
Ah no, I cannot tell you what it is, the new world
I cannot tell you the mad, astounded rapture of its discovery.
I shall be mad with delight before I have done,
and whosoever comes after will find me in the new world
a madman in rapture.

A radical rhetoric simplifies, telling the same story over and over again in such a way that facet after facet sparks imagination: G*D and I are beloved Partners—now what will I do with that?