Sunday, January 02, 2022

Discernment resolution

Found these fellows in a shady part of Rose Canyon Open Space Park, on the way to dinner with friends, seemingly in convivial discussion. 
My day had begun with a church service at Holy Apostles - by zoom of course - in which a priest slily and a little irreverently rendered the famous three-legged stool of Scripture, tradition and reason/ experience in a more dynamic way as a "tricycle of discernment." This fit with the Gospel reading, Christian Scriptures' only story of Jesus as a child, sometimes called the Finding in the Temple, where Mary and Joseph, five days after losing track of him, find their twelve-year-old insouciantly ensconced with the elders of the Temple: not teaching (let alone disputing, as often rendered in Christian tradition from more antisemitic times) but listening, discussing. Our priest suggested this was Jesus - whom we believe to have been fully human, after all, as well as divine - doing the work of discernment, moving his tricyle. But her main point was that even Jesus knew that discernment is sometimes best done in company with others. Our dinner with friends was confirmation of that! I'll take this to heart this year.