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.

stepping stones

blankest prayer yesterday -
confused, ugly, messy,
meaningless;
yuck.

today I see again (but how?) what yesterday I had again forgotten
that it was a surprising stepping stone
over the choppy waters - dark and cold -

where is the next? - you say -

and, looking back, (it's alright)
I see some of those stepping stones:
beautiful!
stretching away into the history of me.

don't forget: the blanker the better!
because these are the ones that really count.
only heaven knows why. 

are you really leading me away from understanding anything?

by the way: those piano pieces I can hardly play.
tonight I know you love them.
thank you for that.
with all my heart.
thank you.

good friday 2020

Testing a hypothesis today . . . .
I was thinking about the nature of hope.
first, a question:
what does a dog, or a lion, or a seal, or a chimpanzee, or any animal hope for?
Because they have no language they cannot verbalise their hope or the nature of it but, because life and hope are so intertwined, their hope IS their life and life itself their hope.

Perhaps, then, it is the way in which we hope that makes us different from the other animals.

This traditional thing about man "having a soul".
No. To a modern man this means nothing.

What we have is language.
and it is our ability to speak, hear and think in words that changes everything.

Our verbal thinking is our greatest gift but also our heaviest burden.

It is true that, as young children, we live without much needing to hope. The present is enough for us and this makes us close to the animals; although we learn to hope for Christmas and birthdays and holidays soon enough.
Adults teach us this.
As we grow and learn to think verbally our sense of the present is tempered by things we  hope for.  Initially, hopes are perhaps short-term: building a snowman, visiting a waterpark, a visit to McDonalds, a sleepover, and, yes, a birthday party, or Christmas presents, a visit from a much-loved granny. Gradually we come to see that hope of nice things to come gets us through the darker days when the present is less a place we want to stay.
As hope becomes intertwined with the very fount of our lives, we begin to live around much longer-term hopes: getting good grades in our exams, saving enough money for a new camera, getting a better physique, developing footballing skills, learning to play a musical instrument. . . . we set goals and some of us are prepared to work hard for these.
At school we are taught to sacrifice the present for the future.

But this is a precarious business.
Many things can prevent and damage this process. Setting our hopes too high; over-estimating our abilities; never coming close enough to reaching a longed-for goal can result in repeated disappointment and shattered hopes. But, equally, setting sights too low can lead to boredom and apparent failure too. Low self-esteem can lead to even lower self-esteem. Traumatic events, unstable situations at home, bullying, teasing or inadequate support from parents, teachers or peers can make realistic and approachable goals hard to visualise, verbalise and realise.
In extreme cases, where this process has gone seriously awry somewhere along the way, to function at all on a planet that goes on revolving however hopeless things seem, we may may feel forced to revert to the child's perspective - an animal's perspective even - trying to live entirely in the moment.  We have a drink, take a drug, eat, have sex; not so much to numb the pain but more to fill the void created by our lack of a clear hope, or a failure of a sense of being able to achieve a clear hope.
Children or animals can never fall into this deadly cycle because hope, for them, is instinctive; easy as breathing and sleeping.  
Putting it another way, of course, I can see that people who experience constant love and support from parents and friends through their childhood are much more able to withstand disappointment and shattered hopes and see things in perspective. 
Hope and love are clearly intertwined in the fabric of our being.

My point is that religious symbolism is fundamentally a way of expressing linguistically, those things that are, for animals and small children, completely instinctive. It is the means by which we can steer our way back to a realistic perspective. 
To put it another way, faith is a search for that instinctual hope that we lose as a result of language. When we put our hope in a deity - of any sort perhaps- although it may seem to an atheist that we are thereby hoping for nothing at all - it can nevertheless get us up in the morning and sometimes even joyfully. And yet faith - despite it being a search for something instinctive; a search to live more in the way that children and animals do i.e. in the present moment - can only be "known" through language.
So there is the paradox: language gradually takes us out of the present into the future or the past or both, and faith, expressed through language, can steer us back towards the present.
Religion then is the means by which man seeks to stay in touch with the most essential instinct: to life.

Descartes writes "Je pense, donc je suis." It is simply not enough if there is no hope. For  Descartes himself, of course, it was his very search for meaning that gave him the hope he needed to get him out of bed that day.

 

Brexit

Today, Great Britain officially leaves the European Union. Keep our seat warm for us guys because we´ll be back. It might be a while though. Sadly most likely not in my lifetime.

how thin the thread

Foolishly, lazily, I took a week off.
You will not mind, I said to myself.
Everyone needs a break now and then.
And now . . . . I find I have to start all over again:
the thinnest thread almost - but not quite -
broken.
twisted and feeble
Now, knowing almost nothing,
I am a beginner again. 

Time after time . . . .  

but, don't forget,
the thread is purest gold still.
Source of life;
more valuable than life itself.