John of the Cross

"We must silence the lowly human senses that lead us to false conclusions about God and keep us blind to His constant work and movement all around us.
Coming to a place of inner stillness we can perceive the first true-dawning light of the spirit."

Dark night of the Soul Bk 1. Ch 6.

Birth of Christianity by John Crossan

the God of Justice.

In "Birth of Christianity" on page 182
"And how does one know that God is just? Because God stood against the Egyptian Empire to save some doomed slaves. God does not simply prefer Jews to Egyptians. God does not simply prefer slaves to masters. The only true God prefers justice to injustice, righteousness to unrighteousness, and is therefore God the liberator."


Jesus asks the disciples, at one point in some of the gospels, to go out two by two (animals into the ark?) without money or spare clothes to the villages and to stay (in one house only) wherever they are welcomed and to eat whatever they are given and to heal the sick. It's just crossed my mind that they are NOT asked to "preach the good news" but only to heal the sick.
The way the author of B of C puts it is a revelation.

"Jesus' primary focus was on peasants dispossessed by Roman commercialisation and Herodian urbanisation in the late '20's. The itinerants as the just-recently-dispossessed destitute and the householders as the possibly-soon-to-be-possessed poor are brought together into a new family, a companionship of empowerment that is the kingdom of God. It does not break families apart but regroups those families torn apart already (or soon to be torn apart across the generations.)

Also, on page 321,
"Whenever, in the New Testament, you read the term "poor" in English, it is "destitute" in Greek."
It's a fundamental difference. 

Again, on page 282,
"a God who opposed systemic evil not because it was systemic but because it was evil."
Suddenly, the"Kingdom of God" makes sense!

Star men

A quote from "Star Men", a BBC programme about British astronomers who went out to USA as a part of the Brain Drain in the 60s and did some amazing work over the next 40 years.
50 years on they go back with a film crew.
One of them says, "Death is a part of life. It's an inevitable part of life. It's THE way that new things get going and you don't get cluttered by all this memory of what's gone on in the past."

during illness

thinking of St Bernard.
passionate Christianity.
it sometimes seems sentimental to me.
but passionate love always does to those who do not share it.

your imminence. 

the gulf between us is all our perception.
like a man blindfolded by mischievous friends and taken up imagined steps to what he perceives as a high place. asked to jump from the high place he is filled with terror. When forced, or pushed, he discovers that the fall is just inches. he is laughing then but the terror was real. 


daily life draws us away, back into fear, doubt and separation.  we cannot remember you. we are in your presence or we are not. this is how we perceive.

the reality of your imminence does not make you imminent to us.
seeking, we find.
not seeking, we don't find.

oh one more thing.
spiritual life, musical life. artistic life. emotional life. all tributaries of one river.
except the analogy is wrong because a river flows downhill.

a tree would be a better analogy. trunk and branches.






 

significance

how you give us significance.
how love engenders significance.
the significance of all living things.
and how this significance is given by the love of parents for their offspring
animals and humans alike.
being given significance engenders purpose and hope.

diversity.
every creature and every human is different.
right from the start our differences make us unique.
it is this diversity which gives us significance.
diversity is then another aspect of love.

diversity is not sufficiently understood as a central and perhaps essential aspect of the church.
yes Paul talks about hands and feet and other bits making up The Body but is therefore assuming that there be just one Body to make up. (I have probably mentioned this before.):
But why should diversity be the opposite of unity?
the Christian faith now takes many forms and this is always considered to be an aberration; that really we should be one big happy family but . . . .
just as it is natural (inevitable) for man to have different languages . . . .
(although this too is coloured with regret through the Babel story: a punishment for overreaching ourselves. (an aside: does the word babble stem from the Babel story I wonder?)
 . . . wasn't it inevitable that, once people are reading the scriptures for themselves, (reformation stuff) groups are going to form different ideas and different emphases thus creating diversity?
Many countries have their own churches, and I have always railed against this myself because I loathe Nationalism so much but I think I have gone too far in this. Isn't gentle nationalism really simply a bid for a local unity? a recognition, then, of the Significance of the nation? A way for its peoples to understand that the nation is both unique and loved through it's uniqueness?
Rahner considers the Christian faith to be the correct faith - this is still the Catholic view I suppose - though at least he recognises that there can be salvation outside the church.  I don't think he goes nearly far enough with this though.
I won't dig deeper here but I will just again mention (a) the severe limitations of language; the impossibility of getting anywhere near the actual truth with mere words - although this does not of course mean that language is not essential. Language acts as signposts towards the truth without which we could not even begin to travel but it can only take us so far. 
Just as there should be diversity in the church - as an aspect of uniqueness and recognition of significance - so there is bound to be diversity in faiths because each place starts from a different point. We are all subject to the tiny accidents of history which change everything about us: the way we think, talk, act, understand, view the world, and each other, where we think we come from and where we think we are going . . . . . but all the faiths have so much in common too! Of course!  because you are at work in all of them!

No two souls follow precisely the same path, and God never repeats himself in his creatures.