St.Arbucks @ THE WAY: April 2009

St.Arbucks @ THE WAY: April 2009

In Silence let us worship the incomprehensible

THE TRUTH WILL NOT SECURE YOU TIGHT

“The truth shall set you free”, says Jesus Christ to his disciples in John’s gospel. Truth is precious in every discipline, and truth is a revelation not just to human beings, but also through them. Awareness of the way our own personal filters will colour the truth is called Critical Realism. This can encourage sceptical questions but retain unselfconscious humility.

Thanks to a cold virus I recently watched Carl Sagan’s utterly exhilarating TV documentary ‘Cosmos’, about the evolution of this amazing universe. If you have 13 hours to spare, it’s highly recommended. It ends with these words: “It is as if there were a God who said to us: I set before you two ways, you can use your technology to destroy you, or to carry you to the stars, it is up to you.”

Observation of the universe implies it is expanding outwards. The current consensus is that 15 billion years ago it could fit through the eye of a needle. In many cultures, asking how it began has led people to say a God created it out of nothing.

“But if we wish to pursue this question courageously,” says Carl Sagan, “we must ask the next question. Where did God come from? If we decide this is unanswerable, why not save a step and conclude that the origin of the universe is unanswerable? If we say that God always existed, why not save a step and conclude that the universe always existed? Cosmology brings us face to face with the deepest mysteries.”

God is not logically necessary, and the question of beginnings is not crucial, but truth shall set you free. Truth doesn’t evade thinking the uncomfortable, but it does respect the Mystery.

“The role of the creator,” says Anglican physicist Rev Dr John Polkinghorne “is not to light the blue touch paper of the Big Bang and start it all going, but to hold the world in Being. God is as much the creator of the world today as God was 15 billion years ago.”

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"In the person whose mind is sound, there is no need for letters" - St Anthony of Egypt
“I think that there is a real question as to what Transcendence is and what its place is in the experience of all of us. The voice that spoke from the burning bush said ‘I am that I am’. It reminded us of this very peculiar word which all of us use – the word ‘I’, which doesn’t identify any material object in the world in which we are situated, nor does it identify any object out of that world. Just what does it mean? What is it, to look into somebody’s eyes and see the other eye that’s looking out at you? It is an experience of Transcendence in itself. It is the raw material from which all religious faith is constructed. It is part of the metaphysical obscurity and unintelligibility of our predicament. We are all faced with this experience every day, and religion makes sense of it for many people. Even for those who don’t have religion, that experience is still there.” - Professor Roger Scruton.
"Should we concentrate on the present moment since it is out of the present moment that the future [and therefore any 'climax of history'] evolves? Could we say that Christianity [and apocalyptic literature] is concerned with the invasion of eternity into historical time? Is the prophetic tradition, that is, seers, visionaries, dreamers, God-inspired prophets, bringing eternity into historical time?" - Theo Harman
"I suppose the word "after" in the expression life after death implies a durational time concept. Perhaps for this reason it is inappropriate since life beyond death is non-durational eternity." - Theo Harman
"IS JESUS not understood by Christians primarily as a saviour who redeemed us through the atoning sacrifice of his life on the cross.... [Yes God does redeem the world to himself in Jesus] ....but numerous Christian theologians nowadays reject the medieval idea that Jesus' death constitutes our salvation. [this is because] The theological construct that God would require the bloody sacrifice of Jesus so as to be able to forgive our sins is as bizarre as it is repulsive. Our salvation is rooted in nothing else but the grace of God - in God's universal salvific will - which is not constituted in but represented through Jesus' life and death." - - Perry Schmidt Leukel, Professor of Systematic Theology, University of Glasgow
"The resurrection is here to stay" - Lenny Kravitz
"What we need is a form of life which is completely pointless ... rather than serve some utilitarian purpose or earnest metaphysical end, it is a delight in itself. It needs no justification beyond its own existence. In this sense, the meaning of life is interestingly close to meaninglessness. [Of course, there must be meaning, but it is less like discovering planned pre-arranged pre-packaged meaning than it is like embodying & co-operating with the beauty of creating meaning] Religious believers who find this version of the meaning of life a little too laid back for comfort should remind themselves that God, too, is his own end, ground, origin, reason, and self-delight, and that only by living this way can human beings be said to share in his life. Believers themselves sometimes speak as though a key difference between themselves and non-believers is that for them, the meaning and purpose of life lie outside it. But this is not quite true even for believers. For classical theology, God transcends the world, but figures as a depth within it. As Wittgenstein remarks somewhere : if there is such a thing as eternal life, it must be here and now. It is the present moment which is an image of eternity, not a succession of such moments." - from The Meaning of Life, by Terry Eagleton
" The idea that God is an object outside of oneself to which one relates through prayer is totally unscriptural. It is heresy, and should well be forgotten. It is an idea which is the result of a cultural conditioning originating in the world of philosophy and especially Descartes. The worldview that affirms the subject-object dichotomy has produced the fruit of modern technology, but it has also cramped the intuitive faculties of the Western mind and left education totally bereft of its spiritual dimension." - Fr Thomas Keating
"Jesus is Love" - Lionel Richie
"A bird grows up in three stages, from womb to egg,then to the nest where it sings; and once it is fully grown it flies in the air, opening its wings in the symbol of the Cross". - Ephrem the Syrian
"He does not delay but repays in their own person those who reject him" Deut 7, 10.
"God does not require our acknowledgment, either to be God or do us good. No matter how thick our ignorance, how perverse our resistance, God is always greater. Indeed, it is hard to escape God, thank God." - Denise Carmody
"My book .. is the nature of created things, and as often as I have a mind to read the words of God, it is at my hand." - St. Anthony the Great (251 - 356)
"There was a time when evil was not, and there will be a time when it will not be; but there was no time when virtue was not, nor will there be time when it will not be." - Evagrius
"Thirst for Jesus, so that he may inebriate you with his love" - St Isaac
"Christ judges by knowing our hearts, not by questioning our deeds." - Ambrose
"With God, two I's cannot find room. You say 'I' and he says 'I'. Either you die before him, or let him die before you." - Rumi
"With the advance of cloning techniques, the idea that the conception of a human child is impossible and unbelievable without the participation of a man's semen may start to look a trifle old fashioned." - Gillian Crow
"For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the inter-related structure of all reality" - Martin Luther King [www.stanford.edu/group/King/about_king/warandpeace/wpquotes.htm]
"WHEN GOD SET OUT TO EMBRACE THE ENEMY, THE RESULT IS THE CROSS" - Miroslav Volf ...............................
"Any chain of thought loses all rational credentials as soon as it can be seen to be wholly the result of irrational [natural] causes." - C.S Lewis
"Idealistic spirituality, from the Platonists to the modern Germans to some important Buddhist schools does us the favour of showing how God must be the Light of our light, but it is not specifically Christian. What is specifically Christian, the sine qua non of an orthodox confession, is that the Word of God took flesh and dwelt among us, the man Jesus became for us human beings and our salvation the abode of God, as much as any creature can be ... Mary gave God the wherewithal to enter space and time, become like us human beings in all things save sin, make the flesh we know intimately the primary presence of absolute holiness, deathless, sanctity." - Denise Carmody
"In this tranquility the understanding sees itself raised up in a new and strange way, above all natural understanding, to the Divine light, much as one who, after a long sleep, opens his eyes to the light he was not expecting." - St John of the Cross
"Dogmatic absolutism encourages the abuse of power because it denies the necessary openness for internal criticism and reform which a living faith requires. In this sense I do not regard the desire for uniformity as a positive virtue. If we are to avoid the absolutising of our truth claims whilst striving for a vibrant religion and morality, we need to rediscover the original Protestant emphasis on faith as living without security, of living without evidence and proof in the love of God. Soren Kierkegaard has beautifully described such a faith as swimming above forty thousand fathoms of the sea of life. In this sense, the need for religious authority to legitimise our beliefs and actions can be viewed as a lack of faith in ourselves and in God." Julie Hopkins
"Until people realize that everything less than God can trouble them - they have not taken the first steps outside the nursery" - Denise Carmody
"Speech is an organ of this present world. Silence is the mystery of the world to come." - St Isaac of Syria
"The reconstruction of a Christology which can be interpreted as good news for alienated religious believers is in my opinion best served by avoiding metaphysical categories and atonement theories. Rather the gospel is an invitation to join a pilgrimage of unknowing into the living heart of God. If our spirituality is deep enough to embrace all aspects of life, whether personal, social, natural or cosmic then the theological controversies surrounding the nature of Christ can respectfully be circumvented. Our focus becomes the God who reveals Gods-self as incarnate in different persons and history, who shares the suffering of the world and who is finally the creative power which continually transforms death into new life. These aspects of the nature and processes of God with us are for Christians revealed in the simple story of the life, mission, death, and resurrection of their teacher, Jesus of Nazareth. If we read the gospels with some sense of historical perspective we can study these aspects for ourselves. We can learn to reflect, question, pray and act in the Spirit of the One God. It may well be that women [and men!!!] studying the Gospels together are not actually interested in the debate concerning the nature of the relationship between the humanity and divinity of Christ within the Trinity. I suspect they wish to search for a different way of knowing beyond the binary oppositional categories of humanity versus divinity, the world versus eternity, the secular versus the sacred, the body versus the soul and the individual versus society." Julie Hopkins
"Be at peace, then thousands around you will find salvation" - St Seraphim
"Once rationality deserts religious faith, it becomes a menace even to its own adherents." - Michael Morton
"There is a peverse form of contemporary violence to which the idealist fighting for peace by non-violent methods most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes work for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful." - Thomas Merton
"The principal thing is to stand with the mind in the heart before God, and to strive towards him with longing." - Theophan the recluse
"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle." - Philo of Alexandria
"This is the right way of being intitiated into the mysteries of love, to begin with examples of beauty in this world and use them as steps to ascend continually to absolute beauty as one's final aim... This above all others is the region where a truly human life should be spent, in the contemplation of absolute beauty... One who contemplates absolute beauty and is in constant union with it... will be able to bring forth not mere reflected images of goodness but true goodness, because one will be in contact not with a reflection but with the truth." - Plato, the Symposium
"Death is the consummation of timelessness which underlies our existence in time." - Theo Harman
'For us faithful physicists, the separation between past present and future has only the meaning of illusion, though a persistent one' - Albert Einstein
"The Universe contains Limit aplenty, an equal measure of Unlimit, and also a potent Cause which brings order and arrangement to years, seasons, and months-it well deserves the names 'Wisdom' and 'Mind'... what we are saying is of some considerable significance ... it is in full accord with the declaration of those who long ago prolaimed that Mind is ever the ruler of all." - Plato, the Philebus.
"In the Christian tradition I find a pathological obsession with security, an obsession that impels the denial of difference (thus concern with heresy and essences), an obsession that leads to a blinding Christian triumphalism." - Sharon Welsch
"Repressive political power correctly understands that principles of peace and non-violence are radical and dangerous to regimes based on violence and exploitation." - Hozan Alan Senauke
"A crisis is not an abandonment by God but an avenue for God's intervention." - Donla Goergen
'...abandon all sensation and all intellectual activities, all that is sensed and intelligible, all non-beings and all beings, thus you will unknowingly be elevated, as far as possible... to the Unity of that beyond being and knowledge' - Denys the Areopagite
"The fact that somehow I manage to get through a day .... [as a feminist theologian ] with some self confidence, integrity, hope and vision intact is my resurrection. I rise up and am renewed in the presence of God in spite of everything." - Julie Hopkins
"A presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thought; a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean and the living air, and the blue sky, and the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that implels all thinking things, all objects of all thought, and rolls through all things." - William Wordsworth
"An elder was teaching his grandchildren about life. He said to them, 'A terrible fight between two wolves is going on inside me. One wolf represents fear, anger, envy, greed, arrogance, self-pity, resentment, lies, and ego. The other wolf stands for joy, peace, serenity, humility, kindness, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. This same fight is going on inside you, and inside every other person too. The children thought about it and then one asked her grandfather. 'Which wolf will win?' The old man replied,'The one I feed'." - Anon