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:
In what ways does God speak to you?
When our faith in God configuration is rigid and brittle, we’re going to be in for problems. As new ideas surface and gain traction, particularly with respect to the natural world informer, an inflexible paradigm will produce fear rather than engagement. Unbending formulations of God, self, other, and world are unsustainable. They will be credibly forced to make a hasty retreat in due honesty, as protecting and deferring play the role of a meta-narrative – a totalizing story that explains everything – which suddenly or gradually collapses and is shown up to be what it always was: an illusion. Christians don’t want to embrace illusions, but a real world that makes sense, on the levels that we can understand it. There are inevitably going to be modifications and revisions that become necessary for living an integrated faith configuration with clout, which offers the capacity to freely explore the reaches of the known and unknown that open possibilities for contact with the Infinite One. Thus, a flexible, more elastic perspective is pertinent for us to adopt, since it’s truer in allowing for variations based on fresh data, albeit within degrees, of what a legitimate faith in God looks like.
A report on the Swiss news last night mentioned that the EPFL – the world renown polytechnic in Lausanne, has received, I believe, a billion Euro for “the brain project” – mapping the brain, etc. will have implications for theism and Christianity, which are going to be fascinating. Stay tuned!
Sometimes we sense a loss of contact with God. We grope around in darkness longing for light and wander through the desert thirsting for a cup of water. When this happens we need to cling to God and his promises, to the truth that we are not on our own, and to the reality that we have a destiny of being transformed into the image of Christ.
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 that non-belief is a human possibility, or do we always believe in something or someone?
Dismantling naïveté can be a painful, yet rewarding process if it results in a more careful and critical formulation of beliefs. But this process is often short circuited. A shattered naïveté usually results in recognizing that one’s beliefs did not merit the trust that one invested in them. We can call this a growing awareness of the need to be critical of our beliefs, let’s say, a move into the mode of criticism. This is a necessary and good thing. Problem is that there is a tendency to stop here, since suspicion now seems so much more reliable than trust (though in reality, it really isn’t because trust is a center of gravity at the core of being human and thus we are obliged to trust our suspicions). When the critical mode, valid as it is, persists as a monologue, the end of the story can tend to become criticism itself, and this in turn can emerge into skepticism or relativism. It is imperative, therefore, that we find ways to credibly move through the critical mode, not back to a rightly left behind naïveté, but towards a critical trust and sustainable beliefs. When this takes place, we are able to be re-engaged in a life mode – a life setting dialogue that calls us to explore fresh options that transcend the toxicity of false endings and their emergent illusions.
God, I’m giving you a chance to show up and be accounted for. I have not been the most careful in dealing with my financial responsibilities, so I would like you to provide a way for me to pay my bills. There is also the small matter of a new job, and not just any job, but direct me to the right job for me. Furthermore, my accommodation is no longer satisfactory, and I would like you to lead me into finding a place that’s more suitable for me. If you don’t take care of my needs now and give me something to go on, then you must not love me or be personally involved in my life.
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:
A Christian recently told me, “I want to move from being self-indulgent to being selfless.” What do you make of such a desire?
Cross Country Skiing -10C in the Alps. Dents in the distance.
Control issues, manipulation, and insecurity will inevitably be relationally destructive to self and other, whereas the dynamic trio of faith, hope, and love connected to the Revealing One brings about a dislocation from the familiar modes we tend to live in, and a reconstitution of deep relational chaos and desolation. When we are disrupted, this results in shock therapy that can lead us in the direction of taking the risk of seeing anew, beyond the confines of a visible field of perception. As the economy of gift (grace) over that of exchange (if you give to me, I’ll give to you) comes into focus, it will open up horizons for an encounter with the Divine, which in turn will transform the relationality of selves and others.
Mirrors reflect too clearly and thereby falsify who we are. Perhaps, a better indicator of identity would be a prism, which has the capacity to create something new out of something old. In a sense, this metaphor may be a theologically fitting one for what God is doing for us. Self re-imaging and re-shaping will never have much to do with a physical appearance, as they desperately require a reliable representative who is able to transform the seen into the real.
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 faith?
Indictments of the supposed guardians of orthodoxy proliferate throughout the Scriptures. Prophets are continually speaking God’s word to a faithless people who set aside his commands for their own benefit. Jesus is even more to the point with his sarcastic irony towards the religious elite of his day concerning the pretense of washing hands to be clean. Pseudo-orthodoxy called for ceremonial washing before eating. Jesus says this is an absurd charade because it leaves the heart uncleansed. Those today that wave the banner of “we’re orthodox and you’re not,” need to seriously consider where their hearts are, rather than inspecting the hands of everyone else.
Barriers to belief in God may plague us throughout our lives. Forgone solutions and conclusions will only increase our difficulties, instead of resolving them. After all, our access to the possible world of Eden is beyond reach and we are hampered by a real world inability to get outside of ourselves in order to have an ultimate vantage point that will put all the pieces in place. Since this is true, we are likely to experience times of struggle and questioning, which occur on different levels, but choosing an alternative of automatic pilot spirituality where everything makes sense is merely a foil for non-sense. There is no such thing. Thus, as we ramble through our days, sometimes villains or sometimes disciples, we don’t want to give in to the pressures of unbelief, as powerful as they may appear to be, for the roadblocks on the path can turn into signposts that point in the direction that belief in God is warranted and sensible in the midst of this wild, wonderful, and broken world.
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 in the world is real?
The fierce debate about Christian living in the face of Empire is well known. My brief response to the question goes something like this. While there are various sources to explore, I am thinking along the lines of the prophets (Isa; Jer; Ezk; Dan) and 1 Peter, where there seems to be a working out of the types of Empire living that are appropriate for us. That is, in these texts, we encounter, in a deft and wise manner, the coming to terms with Empire. This includes some accommodation and some resistance. Finding our way along will be arduous, and the where and when we resist or accommodate not always precisely clear, yet while it won’t be perfect, we should be a standing for God’s truth and love, as we seek to follow in the footsteps of Christ. Being aliens is no easy task and it will require a living hope for redemption and transformation, no matter how oppressive or inviting Empire may appear to be.
