There is a silence that communicates more than any word; there are words that say nothing. These are not words but merely noises; words without sense, making sound but with no effect, are just noise...but there is no silence that has no meaning. That which has no meaning is mute, not silent."
~Michele Federico Sciacca
{quote and image from Onehouse}"Seeking God through philosophical or theological arguments has a certain ring of inauthenticity to it, or at least suggests an artificial distancing. It's been wisely said that "demonstrations" of God never convince the unconvinced and do little to strengthen the faith of those already convinced. Philosophy and theology help us clarify our ideas about our relationship to the Divine. But the experience, the encounter, the moment in which one recognizes that all one's experiences are bounded and made possible by the continuous self-giving of God, comes first. God demonstrates. We respond.
Instead of engaging in interminable squabbles about whether God "exists," we'd be better off opening ourselves to grace-moments in our lives that point beyond themselves to Something greater than themselves. As Rahner says--and I agree--the Christian must be a mystic, or cease being anything at all. Silence, deep listening, receptivity, openness: these precede worded creeds, and they certainly precede theology and philosophy. Or at least they ought."
(from the now erased blog "Subversive Christianity")
Our reflection tonight was hindered by the fact that I forget the material on Rahner and Tillich that we were going to do the reflection on.
So we went to the "Wide-Angle Lens" Method, seeking place of "ultimate concern" -- which was a bit too wide angle lens for even the wide-angle lens. However. We ended up with a Unitarian Universalist kind of list --
Freedom
Authenticity
Examination
Empathy/Presence -- or ; In resonance with others
A sense of Risk
A sense of Space or spaciousness
Concern with Being over and above Doing
***
Taking this list of Ultimate Concerns into The society quadrant led to interesting divergent opinions about the group verses the individual, which was a bit off topic, but we went with it.It seemed that the mores of many groups are contrary to the articles of concern. However this led us into a discussion of stereotypes, and the common stereotypes abroad about our current culture and it's concerns. We value efficiency, productivity, doing vs being. The culture seems to define the inner aspect of us in more of a clinical, psychological manner -- almost the inner being defined as depression.
In contrasting with Tradition, we couldn't agree on a tradition source. Do our images of God come from places cultures and peoples like or unlike us? Can the cultural and traditional attitudes towards the individual vs the group be harmonized?
We will visit some texts and examples next week. We really did run out of time.
We did a collect, which is a sort of wandering in the desert collect, but then, that's us.
Collect;
God you are
Truth
Unique
Incomplete
AbsentWe pray for a full moon
Light and clarity
So that we may
make all well and Love more fully.Amen.
"Peter
Kingsley's teaching is a journey back to the source – not only of
Western civilization but, more importantly, to the source within you.
To understand him is to be transformed" Eckhart Tolle
WHEN:
Saturday, February 9th. Check in between 1:15-1:45 pm. Talk will begin
promptly at 2:00pm to 4:00pm. People not checked in by 1:45 will not
be admitted.
WHERE: St. Patrick's Episcopal Church, 4755 North Peachtree Road, Dunwoody, GA 30338
COST: $40.00 (limited scholarships are available for those with expressed financial need)
For more information or to register, please contact Donna Talipsky at 770-455-6523 x226 or donna.talipsky@stpat.net.
Ultimate Concern.
So many theological discussions now remind me of the Russian argument when they first launched a man into space, and the astronaut said that they had been up in space and "hadn't seen any God up there." Who took that seriously? They were looking for an old bearded man in the sky? What?
And here we are in the 21st century, with silly "is there a God, an old bearded man in the sky" conversation to sell tabloid newspapers.
***
This is from a blog called "A Seeking Spirit"...
**
"When I was a young woman and beginning my journey into religious studies I came upon the Bishop of Woolrich’s writings because they were so controversial at the time and, as a result, his little, thin book Honest to God was brought to my attention.
His writing made so much sense to me and to my peers. My professors at the time, even though they were of a conservative bent, understood well the quality of his work and encouraged serious consideration of his book and that of others who similarly forge new appreciation and clarity within our Faith.
In God’s time a half century is but a pebble. For me, Robinson’s words are as helpful now as they were then and I know that, while I can appreciate the anthropomorphic imaging of God by understanding its roots in its developing monotheism Judaic tradition, I continue to find that he, along with theologians such as Tillich and Bonhoeffer, speaks to my heart and subjective condition.
Now years later, theologians have reviewed his book and pointed out that many in the church in his day did not want to take a serious effort to even understand what they purported to believe, let alone deal with the discrepancy between those beliefs and religious conventions, versus the way the church’s members lead their daily lives. But as society became more jostled by modernity, this discrepancy has become a concern, and continues as a constant focus of contemporary criticism as well as cause for self-examination by those who are faithful. (Read, for example, The Purpose-Driven Life).
Theologian Rowan Williams critiqued Robinson’s work for its lack of theological depth and not adequately taking into account trinitarian doctrine, thereby reducing the contemporary theological view of God to that of an “inactive, crude and vague supraworldly agent.” My own conclusion is that as simplistic and perhaps naive as Robinson’s book may have appeared to contemporary theologians, it was prophetically foretelling the Lambeth storm that is waging now on Rowan’s doorstep."
The following from John A T Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich, ‘Honest To God’ (SCM, London: 1963)
"For in place of a God who is literally or physically ‘up there’ we have accepted, as part of our mental furniture, a God who is spiritually or metaphysically ‘out there’. (p. 13) But suppose such a super-Being ‘out there’ is really only a sophisticated version of the Old Man in the sky? Suppose belief in God does not, indeed cannot, mean being persuaded of the ‘existence’ of some entity, even a supreme entity, even a superior entity, which might or might not be there, like life on Mars? (p. 17)
God, [Paul] Tillich was saying, is not a projection ‘out there’, an Other beyond the skies, of whose existence we have to convince ourselves, but the Ground of our very Being. (p. 22) Rudolph Bultmann …in ‘New Testament and Mythology’ … when he spoke of the ‘mythological element in the New Testament he was really referring to all the language which seeks to characterise the Gospel history as more than bare history like any other history. … the mythological language of pre-existence, incarnation, ascent and descent, miraculous intervention, cosmic catastrophe, and so on … make sense only in a now completely antiquated world view. … the entire conception of a supernatural order which invades and ‘perforates’ this one must be abandoned. But if so, what do we mean by God …. and what becomes of Christianity? (p. 24)
God is, by definition, ultimate reality. And one cannot argue whether ultimate reality really exists. One can only ask what ultimate reality is like … Thus, the fundamental theological question is not in establishing the ‘existence’ of God as a separate entity but in pressing through in ultimate concern to what Tillich calls ‘the ground of our being’…(p. 29)In Tillich’s words: The phrase deus sive natura, used by people like Scotus Eriggena and Spinoza, does not say that God is identical with nature but that he is identical with the natura naturans, the creative nature, the creative ground of all natural objects. (p. 31)
God is not ‘out there’. He is in Bonhoeffer’s words ‘ the “beyond” in the midst of our life’, a depth of reality reached ‘ not on the borders of life but at its centre’, not by any flight of the alone to the alone, but, in Kierkegaard’s fine phrase, by ‘ a deeper immersion in existence’. For the word ‘God’ denotes the ultimate depth of all our being, the creative ground and meaning of all our existence. …Tillich warns us that to make the necessary transposition, ‘you must forget everything traditional that you have learned about God, perhaps even that word itself.’ (p. 47)
Belief in God is the trust, the well nigh incredible trust, that to give ourselves to the uttermost in love is not to be confounded but to be ‘accepted’, that Love is the ground of our being, to which we ultimately ‘come home’. … And the specifically Christian view of the world is asserting that the final definition of this reality, from which ‘nothing can separate us’, since it is the very ground of our being, is ‘the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord’. (p. 49) … Bonhoeffer insists … ‘The transcendent is not infinitely remote but close at hand.’ (p.53)
The question of God is the question whether this depth of being is a reality or an illusion, not whether a Being exists beyond the bright, blue sky, or anywhere else. Belief in God is a matter of ‘what you take seriously without any reservation’, of what for you is ultimate reality. (p. 55) The New Testament says that Jesus was the Word of God, it says that God was in Christ, it says that Jesus is the Son of God; but it does not say that Jesus was God, simply like that. (p. 70)
Bonhoeffer .. [wrote] … To be a Christian does not mean to be religious in a particular way, to cultivate some particular form of asceticism (as a sinner, penitent or a saint), but to be a man. It is not some religious act which makes a Christian what he is, but participation in the suffering of God in the life of the world.’ (pp. 82-83)
…(we remember it was) asked by the crowds of Jesus when he began his public ministry: ‘What is this new teaching?’ And so it has always been … Paul was dismissed as a setter forth of strange gods, Socrates was condemned as an ‘atheist’. Every new religious truth comes as a destroyer of some other god, as an attack upon that which men hold most sacred…For the Christian gospel is in perpetual conflict with the images of God set up in the minds of men, even Christian men, as they seek in each generation to encompass his meaning…. But as soon as (these images of God)…become a substitute for God, as soon as they become God, so that what is not embodied in the image is excluded or denied, then we have a new idolatry and once more the word of judgment has to fall.
… the beginning is to try to be honest - and to go on from there. (p. 141)"
Paradox
The Way of Ways
Twist and get whole.
Bend and get straight.
Be empty and get filled.
Be worn and get renewed.
Have little: get much.
Have much: get baffled.
***
Sometimes, it seems as though there is no justice, that the "wicked prosper" , that power and money have the final word and the last laugh. And yet, and yet.... The Tao tells us to wait and to watch. That things aren't really as they seem.
When we look at Mary's 'Magnificat' and Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, and Sermon on the Plain, when we hear what the Buddha said and continues to say, the consensus seem to be to wait and to watch and to stay with the truth and that this truth will, indeed set us free.
Appearances are always deceptive. There is always another level of reality that is acting in a given situation. We simply have to become quiet enough, still enough to become acquainted with it. This is the intuitive, the receptive, that part of us that is always watching.
There is a part of every human being that is gnosis, that Knows.
****
The most persistent advice of John Eudes in his spiritual direction is to explore the wounds, to pay attention to the feelings, which are often embarrassing and shameful, and follow them to their roots. He keeps telling me not to push away disturbing daydreams or hostile meanderings of the mind but to allow them to exist and explore them with care. Do not panic, do not start running but take a careful look.
It is interesting to mention here Diadochus of Photice's views on the discernment of spirits. He says that we have to keep the surface calm so that we can see deep into the soul. "When the sea is calm, the eyes of the fishermen can penetrate to the point where he can distinguish different movements in the depth of the water, so that hardly any of the creatures who move through the pathways of the sea escape him, but when the sea is agitated by the wind, she hides in her dark restlessness what she shows in the smile of a clear day.
What is the importance of this? Diadochus say that with a clear mind we will be able to distinguish the good from the bad suggestions so that the good ones can be treasured and the bad ones dispelled.
That indeed is the value of being able to follow the movements of the soul. When we do not panic and create waves, we will be able to "think them through" to the end. When the end proves to be a dead end , a blind alley, then we can be free to search for a new way without the false suspicion that the old way might be the better one. When we keep a diagnostic eye on our soul, then we can become familiar with the different, often complex stirrings of our inner life and travel with confidence on the paths that lead to the light."
--Henri Nouwen
The Genesee Diary
****
"Without a doubt, time is an accident," Maimonides said, "one of the created accidents, such as blackness and whiteness."
"God is -- for the most part -- out of the physical loop of the fallen world he created, let us say. Or God is the loop, or pervades the loop, or the loop runs in God like a hole in his side he never fingers. Certainly God is not a member of the loop like the rest of us, passing the water bucket to splash the fire, kicking the bucket, passing the buck. (I cannot prove that with the other hand he wipes and stirs our souls from time to time, or that he spins like a fireball through our skulls, and knocks open our eyes so we see flaming skies and fall to the ground and say, "Abba! Father!")
NOW * A man who struggles long to pray and study Torah will be able to discover the sparks of divine light in all of creation, in each solitary bush and grain and woman and man. And when he cleaves strenuously to God for many years, he will be able to release the sparks, to unwrap and life these particular shreds of holiness, and return them to God. this is the human task: to direct and channel the sparks' return. This task is tikkun, restoration.
Your is a holy work on earth right now, they say, whatever that work is, if you tie your love and desire to God. You do not deny or flee the world, but redeem it, all of it -- just as it is.
Buber on Hasidism: "We are sent into the world of contradiction; when we soar away from it into spheres where it appears fathomable to us, then we evade our task." Buber explains the thinking of the Baal Shem Tov. Some thinkers argue that Buber, professing to clarify the Baal Shem Tov, voiced his own thoughts.
Annie Dillard
For the Time Being
***
"Vietnamese legend calls the earth the realm of desire."
**
"Lou hoped scandalously to live her own life. A subnormal calling, since civilization means cities and cities mean social norms. Ahe wanted only to hear herself think. She admired Diogenes who shaved half his head to he would stay home to think. How else might she hear any original note, any stray subject-and-verb in the head, however faint, should one come?
She pushed the tiller hard over, came about, and set a slashing course upwind. The one-room ever-sparer dune shack was her chief dwelling from which only hurricane or frost exiled her. Over decades, she had reclaimed what she had forfeited of her own mind, if any. She took pains to keep outside the world's acceleration. An Athens marketplace amazed Diogenes with "How many things there are in the world of which Diogenes hath no need!" Lou had long since cut out fashion and all radio but the Red Sox. In the past few years she had let go her ties to people she did not like, to ironing, to dining out in town, and to buying things not necessary and that themselves needed care. She ignored whatever did not interest her. With those blows she opened her days like a pinata. A hundred freedoms fell on her. She hitched free years to her lifespan like a kite tail. Everyone envied her the time she had, not noticing that they had equal time."
Annie Dillard
The Maytrees**
Henri Nouwen, Annie Dillard, Jacob Needleman and Pema Chodron are interesting to read at the same time.
Claiming back time, aimless time, carving out sheets of time. Open space to open out more space, so that something can empty out and some new thing can arrive.
Snow and freezing rain predicted this a.m.
Pray that the power doesn't go out.
Peter sent this to me.
I must say, it made me laugh, and that's
really valuable.
It proposes to clean your computer screen from
the inside, when you click the link.
Internet jokes.
Now, don't send me any internet jokes.
If your computer screen is dirty, try this - http://www.linein.org/media/screenclean.swf
Five things observe with care;
To whom you speak, of whom you speak,
And how, and when, and where.”
—N.E. Norris
“Listen. That is what you can do. You can listen.” The L.I.D.S. acronym that forms the title of our newsletter is his mnemonic for this idea: “listening is doing something.” His deepest point, and our point here, is not only that listening is doing something, you will never do anything more important than listening. Its importance, in fact, is vastly underrepresented, overlooked in the search for everything else we ought to be “doing.” From listening will follow all other types of important action.
There is, of course, an art to listening. And those who listen well have learned the secret to a deeper spirituality. What separates the true religion from the false is a matter of listening. There is infinite wisdom in the maxim: “Be still and know that I am God.”
Only encounter with God puts to rest the troublesome questions. And the only way to encounter God is to listen: to be still and listen in our hearts, and, in time and with enough listening, we will come to know that he is God—and we will come to know what it means to say that he is God. What God does as portrayed in writings both ancient and modern will then be seen through an entirely different perspective: from the inside out, as it were.
The wise one seems foolish to the man who does not listen. The man who does not listen is filled with many things, most namely an inflated sense of his own importance. But as the Eastern sages well know, water only flows into the empty spaces. Listening, then, “creates a space” for encounter, for it is in the emptiness that God may be found by us. That is the lesson I take from Job. An apparently capricious deity turns an indifferent ear on his suffering servant, offering only non-answers to Job’s questions: “Were you there when I laid the foundations of the earth?” Perhaps the picture we have is of a taciturn God, an outmoded immortal in need of a New Testament upgrade. Or perhaps instead we have a piece of wisdom literature reflecting on the merits of emptiness: only the one emptied can be filled, and part of being empty is being able to let go of everything else, including the need for answers. In this life you will suffer. And suppose that I answer all of your questions? Will you then be filled?
I would argue that answers never fill, they only create more questions: we can see the wisdom in L.I.D.S., certainly. The same that holds true of encounter with God, also holds true of encounter with others. If we rarely listen, we will rarely encounter. And by “listen,” I mean listen, and by “encounter,” I mean encounter, I do not mean merely hearing and interacting, for we hear and interact with many people a day without ever being touched.
(From Le Penseur Reflechit)
******
Tonight's Theological Reflection was taken from the book; The Art Of Theological Reflection, by Patricia O'Connell Killen and John DeBeer.
1) Share with the group an experience of the transcendent in your life, a time during which you experienced God's touch or an intensity of a reality that transcends our ordinary, taken-for-granted world.
2) Narrate the situation briefly. Identify the key feeling it contains and an image that captures it.
3) Going back to each image, answer in turn the following questions for reflection:
* What does the image reveal about how god is at work in the world?
* What counts as God's work in thw world in this image?
* What does the image reveal about how god actually related to people?
* Why is this important?
4) Go over in the group the range of answers -- the contradictions and the commonalities.
5) Define a position of your own about how god works in the world. are you willing to defend this statement? If so, why? If not, why not?
6) What will you take away to your search for God in your daily life from this reflection?
******
Each person shared in turn an incident that they could narrate illustrating the transcendent. Some chose things that happened long ago, some chose things that happened today.
We went around and shared , then commented and began to link similar feelings and themes in the different stories.
The stories had common threads which were;
Expansion
Foreverness
A shift of some sort
Making a connection with someone or something
The incidents seemed to call up something in us that is natural, or innate.
The stories have a feeling of love suffusing them.
Ineffable
Deepened reality
We took the discussion into how God might be seen to be at work in the world. Some discussion ensured. Peter felt that his incident was less connection, more a kind of disconnection with everyday reality. Anna P. felt that we were not so much seeing God at work in the world as human beings (are human beings not the hands and hearts of God?).
We talked about the sense of the Buddhist "Ground of Being" -- Anne D. noted the similarity to Paul Tillich's "Ultimate Concern." Somehow, each of our incidents had put us into communication or into relationship with this mysterious ground -- what the painting is painted on, if you will. Or , the overarching view of the entire play, not simply ones' own part to be played. How do we see and feel what lies beyond or beneath this Ground, this place of Beingness itself?
We talked about the spiritual friend or healer or teacher holding space for the group -- holding space for healing or communication or learning to take place. How silence, prayer, presence allows this to happen.. Is this God or is this us?
What do you do? What does God do? There seems to be some sort of invitation to the open space within us, that there is a sense that it isn't us, our doing, our mental tricks or manipulations. It's as if letting go of that, either out of dire necessity or out of Grace is a part of the transcendent incident.
We noted that in each incident , there was an aspect of loving or being loved. In one of the stories, Anne D. talked about holding a child. We drew a metaphor (with Rosa's help) of "The God of the Child"...... Was it God who comforted us, was it something of God in the Child? Was it "the God of the Child" which might be some combination of both God and the Child responding to us? Doesn't God come into existence from our need for God to manifest something?
****
Our Collect at the end (one of our wordiest yet) is:
God , You Are
Spacious
The Ground of our being
Beyond meaning -- innate.
We pray that we live these experiences
That we see you again
That we feel your presence in our encounters
Feel resonance in our connections
So that we may
Act rather than react
Follow the bouncing ball to Heaven
Recognize each other and ourselves
and see through the illusions
and Be Godly.
Amen
******
Fragment from “Variation and Reflection of a theme by Rilke”
by Denise Levertov
Within the pulse of flesh,
in the dust of being, where we trudge,
Turning our hungry gaze
this way and that,
The wings of the morning
brush through our blood
As cloud - shadows brush the land.
What we desire travels with us.
We must breathe time
As fishes breathe
water.
God’s flight circles us.
*****
Holiness comes wrapped in the ordinary. There are burning bushes all around you. Every tree is full of angels. Hidden beauty is waiting in every crumb. Life wants to lead you from crumbs to angels, but this can happen only if you are willing to unwrap the ordinary by staying with it long enough to harvest its treasure.
- Macrina Wiederkehr, O.S.B, "A Tree Full of Angels"
****
From Jacob Needleman's "Time and the Soul"
"Once again, let us go slowly, The soul speaks to man in rare and great moments of our lives, and this communication of the soul ( which is the same as the Over-Soul of the world) Emerson calls revelation. Such communications, says Emerson, "are always attended by the emotion of the sublime. For this communication is an influx of the Divine mind into our own mind." The depth and duration of this experience vary, depending, as Emerson tells us, upon the state of the individual. But, he says, whatever the depth or degree of this contact with the Self (or soul), it is intrinsically incomprehensible to the ordinary time-driven mind -- except when it actually is taking place. In these moments when the contact is actually taking place, the mind submits. The mind becomes quiet. It accepts. It obeys. But it does not understand -- in the way it always tries to understand. In such moments one sees that what the mind is reaching for cannot be attained by the mind, but only by its submission to another force. In this submission, which takes place instantly and gently in the moment of contact, time is overcome."
***
"The nature of these revelations is the same," he says. "They do not answer the questions which the understanding asks. The soul answers never by words, but by the thing itself that is inquired after."
The answer to the question of time, the soul's answer to the question of time, is not anything in words or ideas. time is incomprehensible to the mind that asks about it, our mind. the soul's answer to the problem of time is the experience of timeless being. there is no other answer."
***
" What, then specifically of time and the future? Emerson now begins by telling us, "Revelation is the disclosure of the soul." And then he warns us against the obsessive desire to predict the future, trying to prepare in an anxiousway for something that transcends not just our present date and time of existence but our present state of consciousness. The unknowability of the future is like the wing of a great being that is the Self in all its unknownness.
"The popular notion of revelation is that it is a telling of fortunes .... {The} understanding seeks to find answers to sensual questions, and undertakes to tell from God how long men shall exist, what their hand shall do, and who shall be their company, adding names, and dates, and places. But we must pick no locks. We must check this low curiosity. An answer in words is delusive; it is really no answer to the questions you ask. Do not require a description of the countries towards which you sail. The description does not describe them to you, and tomorrow you arrive there, and know them by inhabiting them."
Do not imagine, says Emerson, that the great masters of wisdom offer to answer questions about the future in the way these questions are usually asked. What Emerson now writes should perhaps be committed to memory by every man or woman driven by anxious worry concerning his or her future well-being:
"These questions which we lust to ask about the future are a confession of sin. God has no answer for them. No answer in words can reply to a question of things. It is not in an arbitrary "decree of God," but in the nature of man, that a veil shuts down on the facts of tomorrow; for the soul will not have us read any other cipher than that of cause and effect. By this veil , which curtains events, it instructs the children of men to live in to-day."
He continues:
"The only mode of obtaining an answer to these questions of the senses is to forgo all low curiosity, and, accepting the tide of being which floats us into the secret of nature, work and live, and all unawares the advancing soul has built and forge for itself a new condition, and the question and the answer are one."
***
Here's Needleman:
THE FEAR OF THE FUTURE AND THE HABIT OF WORRYING
The strange story of Kirzai may be taken as a message to us from the ancient wisdom about the normal relationship to our own individual future. The young Kirzai sacrifices his immediate gain to help a man whom he does not consciously recognize, but who in face is himself grown old. "The desert will repay you," say the old Kirzai after drinking the water given to him by his younger self and then mounting his camel. It is all he can say and all he needs to say.
The desert will repay you: it is these words and their many-layered meaning that we can bring to the second aspect of our contemporary pathology of time -- the habit of worrying. Find a man or woman who is too busy and you are certain to find an individual who always worries. Yes, as we shall see, from the most ancient times wisdom has been trying to teach mankind that the future obeys laws that are far different than we can imagine. When we worry, we are assuming we know what is likely to happen in the future and our emotions are employing thought in order to deal in imagination with this presumed future before it happens.
***
If we observe ourselves when we are worrying, we may see that what we feel is strongly akin to the profound sense of loneliness that afflicts so many of us in our modern culture. When I worry, I feel cut off from my life -- and this sense of being cut off from life is practically a definition of loneliness. It is quite different when we are confronting genuine dangers and genuine possibilities -- that is, possibilities that reflect reality and the real world. Fear of genuine, possible danger, from either nature or people is never a waste of time or energy. On the contrary, such fear engages us in the world of real forces, a world in which we may be defeated but never isolated. "Fear" and "sorrow" are words reflecting man's painful but meaningful encounter with the real world; anxiety and nervousness reflect our capture by a meaningless imaginary reality invented by the mind in service to the revolving automatisms of emotional reaction. In the state of worrying, there is no such thing as thinking in the fully human sense. In this state, thought, which is meant to inform us about the real world, becomes instead a puppet of the emotional reactions.
At this point the ancient wisdom advises us to develop in ourselves an instrument for real thinking and vision, the instrument of the mind, for which man was created. The future simply cannot be seen with the egoistic or anxious mind. We are on earth to do things that only human beings can do, but none of them can be done until we are able to think as a grown-up man or woman thinks. Worrying is not thinking.
****
There is a remarkable passage about man's relationship to the future in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. It occurs in his most famous essay, "The Over-Soul." In this early work, first published when he was thirty-seven years old, Emerson announces the great, underlying theme that forms the basis of everything he was to write in his long, prodigiously productive life. The idea of the Over-Soul is that the universe, the greatness of nature, is everywhere penetrated by an invisible, conscious Selfhood upon which it, nature, depends. The greatness of nature is this Selfhood in its manifestation. The uniqueness of man is that he is given the possibility and the duty consciously to attend to this Selfhood, this soul, within himself, and to sense throughout his life that this soul is himself. "Man," writes Emerson, "is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence." Then, speaking of man's relationship to time, he goes on:
"The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, and the only prophet of that which must be, is that great nature in which we rest, as the earth lies is the soft arms of the atmosphere; that Unity, that Over-Soul, within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all other ..... We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence .......to which every part and particle is related; the eternal ONE....
***
And now, speaking specifically of man's relationship to the future, Emerson offers an extraordinary vision of what is means that the future is unknown to us -- what this obvious fact means and what this intrinsic unknowability of the future calls on us to search for within ourselves. In what Emerson writes, we shall see the astonishing idea that the future is unknown in the same sense that the Self is unknown! To remember is the same mystery as to foretell! What we are to be is the same thing as that which we have always been -- in our depths.
(More tomorrow , following Needleman's idea of the prophetic and our relationship to the future)
******
From Thomas Merton's "A Book of Hours"
"What Merton learned, he taught -- that the epiphany of God in time can come to us at any moment, anywhere, whether we are praying or not. It can come at work, on the road, in any situation, because it is a deep and secret movement of the divine spirit within our own, the felt sense of God's own self-discovery in us. The life of contemplation prepares us for such intervals of divine encounter, creating a new experience of time: "le temps vierge" -- one's own time felt at once as abundant fullness and profound emptiness. Like the enigmatic "point vierge," its temporal analog is a point of "nowhereness in the middle of movement, a point of nothingness in the midst of being." It is an incomparable point of contact with mystery by which we pass through the center of our own nothingness and enter into infinite reality to awaken as our true self.
Le temps vierge is the time of openness to all that is just as it is. It is healing time when some great and secret mercy works miracle in our woundedness, and so it is compassionate time. In this space of liberty, free of the demands of the world and the ego, all possibilities are allowed to surface and new choices become manifest in a moment of pure potential. This is the different wisdom Merton harvested from the seeds of contemplation nurtured in the soil of the present moment, the near frontier of eternity. In his moments of real presence he came to see what is our to see as well in the temps vierge of quiet praise:
in emptiness.
The silence of the spheres in the music of
a wedding feast.
The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena
of life,
the more we analyze them out into strange finalities
and complex purposes of our own,
the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity and
despair.
But it does not matter much,
because no despair or ours can alter the
reality of things,
or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always
there.
Indeed we are in the midst of it,
and it is in the midst of us,
for it beats in our very blood, whether we
want it to or not.
Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget
ourselves on purpose,
cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the
general dance.
--Thomas Merton
"The following excerpts are from a promotional brochure designed by the EfM group at St. Bartholomew’s Church, NY, NY. The brochure describes EfM
for newcomers and provides enrollment information for those who want to join.
“Education for Ministry, affectionately known as EfM, is a four-year ecumenical program designed to prepare you for lay ministry within the diverse contexts of contemporary life...
The curriculum is centered on theological reflection, which is the artful spiritual discipline of putting our life experiences into conversation with the living God of our faith. It is a practical skill that will provide a way for you to experience greater meaning in your day-to-day life... Seminar groups work under the leadership of mentors.
Mentors are not ‘teachers’ in the traditional sense (who are expected to impart information about the Christian tradition); the role of the ‘teacher’ is built into the program materials. The mentor in EfM provides structure for the group and enables them to study, engage and pray together. Most importantly, the mentor encourages the hearts of participants.”
*****
Have you ever considered doing a Theological Reflection on your EfM experience? Whether you are currently active in the program, or have been away for some time, you might be surprised by what you discover. Try using the following method.
1. Name what you have experienced as God’s forming activity in your personal life through EfM, and what you have noticed happening within the program as a whole.
2. Create a narrative metaphor for the way your group sees EfM and use the metaphor to connect to ideas, images and stories from Tradition and Culture sources. Have a conversation about what you understand and see happening, especially with reference to human nature, the whole of creation, and how God is understood. What do you believe about EfM?
3. Identify two or three new things seen or understood from the conversation.
4. Discuss the implications for yourself, the EfM program, the Church and the world in which we live.
5. In silence, listen to what the Spirit is saying to the Church, then compose a collect based on your reflection."
***
In our meeting tonight, our conversation was about our group life -- We reflected on our perceptions of the process and how to communicate it to one another. What do we have in common, if we are not all Christian? Comer observed that "We are all human," and our common humanity gives us common cause and common ground for sharing and reflecting. Anne reminded us of "The tribal mind afflicts us all," from our ancestral heritage, and our plight as human beings demands that we transcend and transform our tribal-mind limitations and locate and illuminate that which we have in common. That the tribalism of religion and nation can too often be used as weapons to divide and separate us. We seek the antidote to that. That we share also the human ancestry of casting out, or finding scapegoats and false sacrifices to further wound and separate people.
Among the metaphors that showed up for discussion was the metaphor coming from the movie "The Gods Must Be Crazy", where Aboriginal tribesmen see a coke bottle fall from the sky, and a member of the tribe sets out to try to find out what's it means.
Asking the question, "What's going on?" is itself a metaphor for a state of mind that is seeking to open to something further than what it already knows.
We spoke , again using story and image, of "a river wearing down the sharp edges of the stones that live in it," (Peter) - a reflecting pool, where what you see when you look is an impression of oneself, a game of "Clue" with God as Mrs. Marple,(Peter again) questioning the participants as to what might be happening between a group of people at a dinner party.
Metaphors for our process might be knights of the round table, people going on a pilgrimage or a quest, disciples, or adventurers.
Our coming together occasions a) fights b) disagreements c)persuasion e)examination f)witness g) all the rest.
(This list BTW is not exhaustive, but more of an outline, to give the flavor of)
We came to the question of how God is understood or might be understood. This part of the discussion observed that the process of discussion is untidy. There isn't (necessarily) a consensis within the group. We become frustrated, emotions and events arise from our own cultural or family background that might make our present activity seem to be a negative event.
For example, we might be operating either knowingly or unknowingly from a model that says everyone has to agree. Or, for example , we might disagree with someone and think that they are "in a box" while not seeing that we are in a box as well. That perhaps this process entails traveling on our quest from "box to box" and being patient with the seeming limitation of that. That this sort of transitional state is never really finished or over. In constant flux and change we are never really "locked in" but molten, fluid, flowing. As we encounter one another, we may encounter our own sense of being overwhelmed by the pace of change (others' our own and/or cultural change) and wish to withdraw to the grounds of greater certainty.
But that all of the above are part of how God is understood, or how God is with us. God is also present in how we come to understand our own priorities. Noticing, being attentive to and aware of that helps to see the help that might be available to us, help that we'll miss if we aren't aware and looking.
Somewhere in here, is the freedom to let God be God and enjoy that, however that might appear to us. (Carolyn)
Our collect that emerged says:
GOD you are ineffable
Beyond boxes --
You're doing a good job.
You are generosity itself.
We pray that, like knights in rusty armor
We find the strength to go on our quest
So that we may
Open our hearts bravely before each other.
So say we all.
AMEN
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