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 escapism?
In addition to Freud’s atheism, there are many others, including Nietzsche, Barthes, and Foucault, who argue that God is a contradiction to life, for the death of the Author, and that the strategic alignments of power interests are out to control knowledge, relationships, and truth. While these thinkers have some salient insights, their wayward conclusions have contributed to the cultural construction and propagation of a cynical, pessimistic, and decentered self. Yet, in the face of such views, the counter-cultural and always avant-garde perspective of Christian promise and hope defies this manufactured status quo. Destroying idols and listening to symbols is one of the keys that unlock living spirituality and possibilities for engaging the God of love and truth. When this takes place we are no longer trapped within a network of self – other power plays that exploit us, but we are embraced by a Divine love without measure, where freedom leads to redemption and transformation. Being loved in this manner supplies us with a new self and an identity that goes far beyond any of our own making.
Like razor wire slashing through flesh, many Christians and churches leave people spiritually lacerated. There seems to be no limits to the piercing levels of impoverishment, as Christianity slides towards dehumanization, theological irrelevance, and cultural isolation. Hidden comfortable idolatry vilifies integrity and credibility, and outright indifference to truth and reality shreds hearts and minds. When fine sounding soothing rhetoric and clever speech take charge, God’s place of radical dispute and testimony has been tarnished and stained. Reversal, with God’s help, has to start by dismantling the razor wire. Generating humanness, mercy, compassion, redemption, and love will be vital and significant steps towards severing that which kills, and bringing healing to the deep wounds that cut people off from life.
Epitaph
Long ago love had been lost,
Won over so easily
By the ever changing winds of fortune
Swept away by spending more than any cost
Rocky shores prevented ships from docking
To bring cherished cargo,
New resources to those starving in safe
White buildings with blinking crosses
Navigating sovereign thickets,
Never’d, till it didn’t matter anymore
Truth blocked and sealed the doors and windows
Spellbound hiding in warping blindness
Blood dripped from dead dogs eyes,
Follow me, I’ll lead you heavenward
What ever your dreams conceive in clean
White buildings with blinking crosses
Sterile laws beckon
To those seeking cleansing here,
Baptized in shame and guilt pervading
Loosen the dam and let freedom flow
Streaming from a death neglected,
Buried under hearts of stone
Soliciting alms while
Prostitutes, vagrants, strangers assailing,
A losing trick to keep from finding escape
Suffocating inside the walls of fated
White buildings with blinking crosses
Grace untold, the secret kept
To those forgetting where it
Blossoms from created
Earthen hollowed trees and
Spacious fields of vine and branch
Pierced illusions never fading,
Oh deathly sacramental longings betrayed
On the register of time exploding
White buildings with blinking crosses
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:
How, if at all, might an experience of Divine love vary from, or feel different than, human love?
Unfortunately, Christians tend to embrace a vicious cycle of self-introspection that revolves around in a continual cadence of navel gazing, where they get lost in the circle of the same. Not that introspection is all bad, but when it’s all that there is, it becomes highly dubious. The end result of this is being a self-centered self. Living spirituality, by contrast, leaves plenty of room for self examination, but it would promote another self: a redeemed self. This self exists in contact with and in dependence on the Other and others, the biblical text, and the world, which allows for the possibility of going far beyond the narrow enclosure of its self.
To follow after Jesus is to first deny oneself. Self denial then is a denying of a particular self – a self centered self, a self sufficient self, a messiah making self, a selfish self: = a false self. This does not mean to become nothing, but it means to put one’s counterfeit self interests aside, especially with regard to messianic ideology, and to embrace the Other, namely God and then the things of God. Bogus imaginary constructs and unrealistic hopes can often turn us into our own messiah makers. Messiah making is a risky and dangerous enterprise and something that we can all tend to do in one way or the other. Better to discover and explore the steps of the Crucified and Risen One, which has the explosive potential of leading us in the direction of being true selves.
Coleridge is thought provoking.
What is Life?
Resembles Life what once was held of Light,
Too ample in itself for human sight?
An absolute Self—an element ungrounded-
All, that we see, all colours of all shade
By encroach of darkness made?-
Is very life by consciousness unbounded?
And all the thoughts, pains, joys of mortal breath,
A war-embrace of wrestling Life and Death?
Written around 1805.
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 stance should Christians take to culture (let’s say: human creation of meaning)?
We want to be loved and accepted, but we quickly find out that these realities are not for sale – or to be envisioned as consumer products. The economy of gift (grace of giving without receiving back) over that of exchange (if you give to me, I’ll give to you), will open up horizons that provide us with a vision of the Invisible One. He engaged and shattered the requirements of “like for like” through the donation of the Crucified and Risen One, so that we might be gifted with a trustworthy love and acceptance without limits.
From my forthcoming book: Living Imagination. J-P. Sartre’s Nausea captures and exposes crucial issues concerning the real and the empty seduction of the unreal. Antoine, the book’s narrator, is left with a severe and devastating case of nausea – and nausea – and more nausea. Life is like that, but in his eyes at least it’s real. This bleak and haunting novel should cause us to reflect seriously on reality, the status of image, the notion of the real and unreal, and who we are in relation to both. The radical division, in Sartre’s view, between the real as perception and the unreal as imagination forces imagination to become more and more isolated and wholly beyond the real. As Antoine, who was left with the choice between living or telling, so also Sartre leaves us with the choice between real or imaginary nothing. According to Sartre, to enter into the imaginary is to de-realize oneself, while to enter the real is to realize oneself. Yet, we may question whether human experience, one of Sartre’s major interests, is ever so pristinely distinct, without at some point also being related. Perhaps, a more adequate view would be to see imagination and perception as related and distinct, with neither having, nor offering exclusive claims to the real, which is dependent on far more than what we imagine or perceive.
I like these thoughts from Wordsworth.
In such communion, not from terror free,
While yet a child, and long before his time,
Had he perceived the presence and the power
Of greatness; and deep feelings had impressed
So vividly great objects that they lay
Upon his mind like substances, whose presence
Perplexed the bodily sense. He had received
A precious gift; for, as he grew in years, 140
With these impressions would he still compare
All his remembrances, thoughts, shapes, and forms;
And, being still unsatisfied with aught
Of dimmer character, he thence attained
An active power to fasten images
Upon his brain; and on their pictured lines
Intensely brooded, even till they acquired
The liveliness of dreams. Nor did he fail,
While yet a child, with a child's eagerness
Incessantly to turn his ear and eye 150
On all things which the moving seasons brought
To feed such appetite--nor this alone
Appeased his yearning:--in the after-day
Of boyhood, many an hour in caves forlorn,
And 'mid the hollow depths of naked crags
He sate, and even in their fixed lineaments,
Or from the power of a peculiar eye,
Or by creative feeling overborne,
Or by predominance of thought oppressed,
Even in their fixed and steady lineaments 160
He traced an ebbing and a flowing mind,
Expression ever varying!
The Excursion - The Wanderer - Book first - around 1814
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 a Christian can have non-Christian friends?
We are damaged agents - like leaves fluttering in the winds of time. Pain, anger, and tragedy may beset us and it is helpful, through not always satisfactory, to know that we’re in the good company of Sarah, Job, Jeremiah, Mary, and Jesus. Their plight and its expression may be preserved for us for a reason. That is, we too may clamor for forms of speech that will give voice to our cry in the wilderness, as we long to be heard, responded to, released, and redeemed.
Eyes burning and seared by the present views and circumstances of life blurs a passion for the possible of a different future, yet God has promised to renew the world and we must trust and act on his ability to do so. Learning to perceive the imprint of the future on the present is no easy task. We sometimes stray from the visionary and realistic, blindly immersed in the apparent unchanging status quo that only recycles everything into the same. Imaginary orientations rooted in God’s manifestations of hope, by contrast, open up and broaden our horizons toward change, and help us to look and see again.
