We will be convening here at the ZigZag café, Suisse, on Thursdays for conversation and dialogue. I invite you to stop by every Thursday for the question of the day. Your thoughts and participation are most welcome. Pull up a stool, avec un café, un thé, ou un chocolat chaud, et un croissant, and join in here on Thursday at the ZZ café.
For today:
If we receive grace from God, why is this gift so infrequently passed on to others?
4 comments:
Because we don't care (for others and about the grace we received...)?
Maybe also because of our false understanding about justice (seems to equal to equality in our minds, since we are selfish...)?
Lukas
Lukas,
Thanks. Yes, it seems that justice is so much easier to pass on to the other and therefore grace pales into insignificance. Shouldn't be this way because grace is not to merely be received, but true grace is that which is also given.
"If we receive grace from God, why is this gift so infrequently passed on to others?" I tend to agree with Lukas, as far as I am concerned, that it is because of my own selfishness and self-righteous misunderstanding about justice that I miss the point you just made that "true grace is that which is also given." The givenness of the gift --this is a real challenge for us in a mass-consumerist, exchange world, as we tend to miss what is really at stake in the gift being freely given to us. I confess that I am amazed at this whole talk about the gift and God's grace: this is something I cannot comprehend, like Kierkegaard and Derrida said, it is beyond my understanding.
Shabbath Shalom!
Nita,
Thanks. Seems like God's grace in the freely given is connected with a givenness that is always already there. Perhaps, the inability to comprehend is due to a surplus of meaning, but a surplus of meaning already means something understandable otherwise there would be no surplus.
I agree that the whole discussion of gift and grace, especially in continental philosophy, is amazing.
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