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:
What is hope like?
I recently talked to someone struggling with very low self esteem. Question: Who are you? Answer: I don’t know. It turns out that she was measuring her worth by all kinds of false standards. She vainly tried to measure up, but continually failed. This caused unusually high levels of stress, anxiety, and eventually depression. Then, I asked her what connection her view of herself had with belief in God and she confessed that she hadn’t thought about this. The importance of a God connection and its ability to shed light on her life had been masked by self deception, which is enticingly subtle, yet radically perverse. Being a believer in God and his offer of redemption in Christ are crucial for the whole of life generally, and in particular, for self identity. Don’t forget to connect with God to start to answer the question: Who are you? if you hope to find true standards of love, acceptance, and self worth.
Breaking through the complex web of lies and distortions is a monumental task that may take someone years to accomplish. Surely, after many failed attempts to save one’s self, it becomes all too painfully clear that we mess up our own and the lives of others in the charade. But it may take time, so much time, to begin to admit and accept this truth. Somehow the false is a power structure that cycles and recycles through us again and again, leaving us debilitatingly safe, yet deceived. Self-deception is one of the major defeater’s that covers and closes us into a shroud of secrecy. Uncovering and openness, however, become the way ahead for a new depiction of being and doing, which are ultimately rooted in the reality that what we so desperately need is a redemption that comes to us as an invitation from the Sacred One.
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:
My assumption is that desire seems to get a bad rap in many Christian circles. Why?
Desire is a pre-given part of who I am. Its expression can be constructive or destructive, but this does not explain its existence. I am not in control of desire, but merely its outcome, as it’s already there before I am conscious of it. If this is the case, it’s one more nail in the coffin of the prominent, but wayward proposal of a self-authenticating self, which attempts to be the founder of itself and the final foundation of meaning and knowledge. A more accurate hermeneutics of self is one that takes into account the truth that I am a mediator of that which precedes me; that which is given, and that my accountability is connected to what I do with this, not that I make it be in the first place. For example: to desire is not a choice, but what to desire is. This portrayal of selfhood should make room for the transcendent and in doing so therefore, ultimately open up a very real signpost to God.
The patron saints of reductionism and polarization in contemporary Christian thought frequently dominate disputes over language, philosophy, theology, and interpretation. Let’s move in a different direction. We want to be part of communities that establish a space for dialogue, mediate one-sided extremes, and offer a hermeneutic of relation and distinction rooted in love, which depicts a new vision for engaging with these contested issues. It’s time to be challenging and insightful, opening up possibilities that invoke a perceptive wisdom going beyond modernist and postmodernist perspectives, affirming the tension-filled and organic character of Christian truth.
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:
Has the created world always been both a safe and a dangerous place?
A poetics – being, doing, and making true stories plays a significant role in understanding life. Taking disparate and unconnected events and dynamically shaping them into a mysterious whole is tied to a plot that we are already submersed in, yet not enslaved to. Stories break the status quo and help articulate who we are, what we are to do, and why we are here. They embody possible worlds and on the trajectory of our creative imitation impulse, we are involved in the emplotment of scenarios that function more as breathing pictures, than mirrors or windows. Swept up into a dialogue with God, Scripture, self, and other ought to lead us in the direction that the stories of creation, grace, justice, hope, and redemption are the centrality of poetics. In this narrative recounting, love surpasses knowledge and living is a work of art that is portrayed on the canvas of imagination and projected out into the world.
Wisdom emerges in our lives slowly and sometimes painfully. It invites reflection, question, and struggle. It covers everything from advice on how to take care of daily tasks, to the absurdity of them all. For true wisdom relates to living spirituality as it deals with facing life in all its ups and downs. God graciously meets us through living, as we shape the contours of every day routines and choices, so that we might learn to wisely follow the path to life and goodness. The fear (awe, reverence) of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. This saying targets a two-dimensional reality: wisdom as internal; focused on the individual who be’s and do’s, and as external; situated in a variety of social contexts in the world. Life is to be filled with the gift of the wisdom of God, which applies to the whole of human activity, as we forge ahead on the journey towards our destiny.
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:
Do we have any right to demand how someone should love us?
In many Christian circles, making something of ourselves is seen to be unspiritual. As it goes, “if you just do what God tells you to do and remove yourself from any responsibility, then you’re on the heavenly road to the highest form of what a spiritual person looks like.” One of the major problems with such a configuration is that most of the time people spend enormous amounts of energy searching for what they’re supposed to do and how to get rid of themselves, which is easier said than done. Doing and not being is the mantra that controls this picture. But going round and round in circles, not knowing where we’re headed, will not develop a living spirituality. Being in community with God, however, is always to precede doing and making. God has offered us plenty of portraits of who to be, what to do, and how to make something out of ourselves from what has been given and when we act on these he is clapping his hands and saying, “well be’d, done, and made.”
Relational break ups and downs destroy both the strong and the weak. Devastating losses accumulate over the years and attempt to numb us and rip us apart. Left in bitterness and despair, we weep over what once was and what could have been, but now is not. This being driven to tears though, slices through to the core, and can open a space for hope. Yet, such a hope passes through a sharp knife that cuts the throat of the lamb, spilling blood everywhere over everyone, presenting us with the problematic of a choice.
