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:
Someone recently said, “nothing is the way it’s supposed to be.” What are your thoughts on this?
Living spirituality, deeply anchored in and tightly tethered to love, challenges us to break down the personal, cultural, and religious barriers that produce a lack of love. This will never be accomplished by mechanical formulas or fleshly mandates that attempt to be ends in and of themselves, since this dismantling is indeed first and foremost a spiritual enterprise without limit or condition. Charting the course of love will be a costly, but joyful enterprise. There will be pain and rejection, but also wonder and acceptance, as being loved by God opens up true possibilities for loving God, self, and other. Surely, we should recognize and embrace this magnificent trajectory, as we attempt to follow in the footsteps of the Crucified and Risen One, and seek to be an expression of divine love in a world that is so deficient of it.
When it comes to the discernment of diversion from the gospel, we require a fine balance between trust and suspicion; trusting trust and suspicion and being suspicious of trust and suspicion, in relationship to the referents for both. Cunning rhetoric and lofty speech are powerful players that can divert believers’ attention from sincere devotion to Christ. To receive someone’s words is therefore a continual challenge; a task and a joy. We want to be listening carefully, as there are multitudes of ways in which people portray the gospel; health, wealth, and consumerism being just three of a diversity of bogus representations that are set in place as substitutes for the real thing. Let’s face it, in our day and age, gospel can mean just about anything people want it to, unless it is diligently described and its sense and referent tracked by careful research and study of the biblical text.
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:
“God is good.” Do you think this affirmation needs to be nuanced, somehow modified, or changed all together?
The plight of much of the Western church is that it has been highly influenced by its political, economic, and social context. Instead of always following culture, Christians need to take the lead and find biblical, creative, and spiritual ways to bring the truth and love of the gospel into culture. Redeeming our political, economic, and social relations is a crucial, even urgent task that requires our serious attention and our devoted time and energy. As far as I see, this can begin on a local scale and grow out from there. Change is possible – the status quo is death – we can make an effort to bring our communities and churches life, as we seek to apply God’s redeeming love, biblical truths, and a renewed worldview.
Sunrises and sunsets are filled with beauty. When we perceive the reds, blues, and oranges, we’re struck to the core and feelings of awe and wonder majestically flow through us. At the same time, these natural world phenomena are connected to the mechanism of the earth turning round the sun. Such pictures of reality are composed of these two dimensions and much, much more. Sometimes we will want to have a greater focus on one aspect and at different times, the other, but if we attempt to live off mechanism or feelings alone, we will surely die. Intriguingly, in this sense, the complexity and integration of reality promotes life and having it more fully. In something of a mysterious way, we’re tethered to reality, yet reality is tethered to us.
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 you think the embrace and implementation of faith, hope, and love are risks that make us free?
There are three prevailing worldviews that tend to dominate the glocal context today. First, matter matters. This is the notion that all there is―is matter. Scientific hubris is attempting to capture what is, but in its reductionism and anti-theism is doomed to fail. Life is more important than matter. Second, money matters. Consumer strategies and corporate values teach us that all that’s real is―money. When money becomes a god in church, politics, economics, and society, everything is sacrificed on the altar of death and redemption is left lying in the ashes of the meltdown. People are more important than money. Third, power matters. Cutting down and shredding responsibility or anything else that stands in the way means that all that counts is―power. Explicit claims and acts of terror oppress and de-dignify an ethical imperative that is trampled by images, bullets, words, and bombs. Love and justice are more important than power.
Such a lamentable concoction of worldviews is devastating, even catastrophic. Might I say - apocalyptic; borrowing a metaphor so often used to describe the fallout of what’s happening to this planet and its people at this particular moment. As, truth, love, and justice decline, partially due to the woeful state of so many churches who fall into one of the trinity of current views mentioned above, we are left to weep with the Creator and Savior. But tears should promote action to re-establish the viability of the Christian worldview and its capacity to proclaim a refiguration of the present world and then through an eventual face to face encounter with the Infinite and the Crucified and Risen One, lead to streams of never ending life.
Betrayal and rejection in the face of love is an awful thing. My wager is that, if and when this horrific experience happens to us, it is also in tears, one of the unenviable ways we are closest to God.
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:
Some have said, the reader’s response it not to the meaning, it is the meaning. What’s your view?
Early Genesis makes room for cocreativity. God endows the natural world with the capacity to be part of a creative process that is a massive enterprise, which far surpasses what we can fathom or imagine. It appears that God releases nature to be distinct from God, while God nevertheless remains sovereign over its creationality processes and its ultimate destiny. This picture of God and nature can be partially filled in from both sides; the biblical and natural world informers paint in a startling diversity of colors more luminescent, mysterious, and creative than any eye has seen.
Looking for contact with God can sometimes seem to be an arduous task. Often we expect something direct – a clear pathway opening up between God and us, like the wrestling Jacob, the law receiving Moses, or the barren Sarah, yet are disappointed when this does not usually take place. Perhaps, our vision would improve if we begin to reflect on the indirect ways in which God, through nature, the trustworthy other, and Scripture, can likely create conduits that contribute to bridging the distance that we may be experiencing. Being attuned to the manifestation of God through these configurations opens us up to new ways of seeing and perceiving the multifarious touching points between us and the great and mysterious I Am.
