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Stealing Fire

11/7/2015

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PictureFrom this site: http://squigglywalkers.deviantart.com/art/Tlingit-Raven-Wallpaper-290090439

I've been thinking of stealing fire, the risk in changing things-as-they-are, and the ethically ambiguous act this demands of us.  The myths tell us: you have to trick the gods, eat the forbidden fruit to know good from evil. Steal the means to illuminate.  The truth shall set you free?  Not such a moral tale.  

Stealing fire. Many versions of the raven as a trickster who steals from another bird, a gull.   Here is the Haida narrative.  Prometheus also steals fire from Zeus to deliver to humans and he suffers the terrible punishment, chained to a rock where a eagle tears out his liver every day. Every day it regenerates so he can suffer the pain again. 

Is stealing fire a human plagiarism of the divine, a form of intellectual theft? 

I've been thinking about the moral courage and crazy vision of activists and  militant peacemakers.  Mystic, shamman, prophet, magical Marxist, revolutionary spirituality, it has many names. 

Been drinking at the trough of David Tracy in the last months. Check this site.  He talks of "limit situations"  in which we are drawn to express our religious experience. But these limit situations don't ask permission.  They take us across the abyss, to the edges of other limits.  You steal fire, you singe  feathers.

A quick act to steal, but a long time to learn how to use the fire.

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    Kathryn (Kerry) Poethig 

    I teach Global Studies in California, study feminism, religion and peacemaking in SEAsia,  I've taken on this Invisible Aid project and decided to blog it as I go.  This work sits in the intersection of political, metaphysical and personal imaginal worlds.

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