Thursday and Another Short Night

Missy and I had gone to bed at 9:00PM as usual and I slept fitfully for most of the night...off and on asleep...awake at 11:30PM and again at 2:00AM. I finally just got up at 4:00AM. I had taken melatonin but it didn't work all that well.

Today is a free day. Nothing much is going on. Tomorrow at noon, Karan, Gretchen and I will have lunch. Judy invited herself to the lunch too. Saturday I will bake my cake for next Tuesday and see if Bob will take them to Independence on Tuesday to the First Christian Church. I will ask him to put my cake in his freezer until Tuesday.

Sunday, we have a basket dinner too and afterward we will pack our Samaritan Christmas Child boxes.  I will need to get a roast at Country Mart for Sunday's basket dinner. I will fix it in my slow cooker with onions and potatoes.

I don't have a plan for today. So, I will go feed Missy and myself and get myself ready for the day.

More later...

I finished my book this afternoon. It was very interesting and the author is Phyllis Tickle and the book is called "The Great Emergence".

She explains in this book that every 500 years, religion makes some drastic changes and she tells about those changes. The last 500 year change was around 1517 and was called "The Great Reformation" when Martin Luther nailed his theses to the church door.

In 1054 the next 500 year change was called "The Great Schism" and that was when Christianity divided into the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches.

500 years prior to that was around 540 when Pope Gregory the Great called the Council of Chalcedon to decide, among other things, if Mary was to be called The Mother of God and the Monastics were born and the church ruled from monasteries and nunneries and at that time the Dark Ages were born.
That move saved the Christian Church

The next 500 year span back was when Christianity was born.

So she says the church is enter another 500 year period and the new emerging church is beginning to be born.

But not only Christianity was affected by these cycles of change but all the world's religions were also affected by these 500 year cycles. When a Christian speaker talks to a Jewish audience about 500 year cycles, almost always some good rabbi will point out that much the same sort of scheme appertains to Judaism.  Of late  an Islamic scholar or two has begun to argue that the same kind of cycling can be discerned in that faith's history.

It was not until 1948 that a name was assigned to those centuries of tumultuous transition.A German scholar, Karl Jaspers applied the name "the Axial Age" to it and the name stuck until 2006. In 2006, Karen Armstrong. a scholar of great distinction gave it the title "The Great Transformation." Her term seems to have stuck.

Anyhow, it has been a very interesting book.   

More later...

Missy and I laid down on the sofa about 5:00PM and watched the news and later some more of the Amazon Prime TV until 9:00PM when we went on to bed.