This website takes its name from the coffee shop where I like to spend my day off.
But the way everlasting.... is more than caffeine, and I still remember reading the entire New Testament for the first time whilst recovering on a train.
That was a mental spiritual lightening of burdens - because Jesus seemed to really leap off the page and to be right there in the carriage with me.
What is reality anyway? I mean what is this "nothingness" before birth, and after death, and behind our frantic efforts and our deliberate ignorance of the here-and-now? Before birth and after death may not be a thing, but is it really nothingness, an absence? Or is it more like presence?
To be sure, there is a lot of storytelling in Christianity.
And there is no real theology without experience.
Also, there is no Real experience without the stilling of the human mind.
Now there's a claim or three - so because it sounds mysterious, I am going to let Monsignor Dr Lorenzo Albacete sum up the spirit of this website for you. He does it so very well here:
"The results of science should be measurable, and that is fine, but that cannot apply to ALL of our experiences of life. When you say 'I', what does that 'I' stand for? There is one I that can be explained in terms of brain functions, but there are other experiences for which the brain function explanation is inadequate.
Darwinism is true, within its scope, but if it is the only question you are asking, then you are depriving yourself of a human experience. In Darwinism, beautiful stuff is discovered for sure, but the price is to exclude certain things from the enquiry. As long as we are aware of the exclusion, that is fine, but when you take life and treat it the same way - by ignoring what has been excluded from the enquiry, that is a tragic narrowing.
Creationism or any 'ism as an ideology that accounts for all human experiences and as a proposal for organising your life in all its dimensions, I cannot accept.
There are two types of understanding - comprehension and certainty. It is the teaching of the church that the doctrines and the dogmas are signposts, not the reality. But striking with reality always launches you. As you react to the circumstances that determine where you are, you fall back. You may crash or run out of energy, but I would say the religious impulse, the desire for the infinite, is the impulse making science possible. I will not say anything unless I have verified it. Does it make sense? I have to decide every day whether I believe what I believe. I believe Jesus to be the saviour of humanity, but, I am assuming this is all somehow originating in the Reality which I call the mystery. Mystery is what unites us.
This great MYSTERY which unites us, which you can call GOD, the CREATOR, or the GREAT LIZARD, whatever you want to call it, this is the Reality which educates us.
God has to purify our idea of God, but there is another direction, which is opposite to this direction. It is the direction towards selfishness and pride, lived out in my relations with people and with nature. Even the name of God is used in this direction. In the name of God, the more I know of God, the more intolerant I become.
And what does God reveal? He reveals himself. But when you reveal yourself, you have to work with what is there.
And as a Christian, and this is what makes me a Christian, I come to believe that the concretisation of all of this, at one point in time, and the manifestation of this Mystery, not just the manifestation of any other teacher of the Mystery, as authentic as they may all be, BUT OF THE MYSTERY ITSELF, is the person of Jesus of Nazareth.
And this is what I hold, but it does not close me. I do not say that those who do not accept Jesus are damned or excluded, of course not, because the purpose of Jesus is precisely to move us to the next stage, which is all embracing. And so I read the Bible in its context and I will tell St Paul: “OK I say Yes to anything, but what do you mean by: You must believe in the Son of God.”?
I embrace that which accounts for the experience of my heart, but do it in a reasonable way. The Church cannot get away with saying: "This is it and shut up." It has to invite you to verify it.
In order to find out what the words: 'Jesus is the son of God' mean, I have to explore, to ask, to question.
A Buddhist or an atheist may get to heaven faster than I do. Even St Thomas Aquinas would say a person has to follow his (OR HER) conscience. Be honest to your heart. It is the heart that is important. This is very important. And a truth that inspires you to do violence is not truth.
Love's very particularisation broadens it. As a follower of Christ and believing he and only he is the centre of the universe, I do not find this particularity in any way conflicting with my desire to be open to every manifestation of humanity. If I come with any threat, or suggestion of powerfully imposing this or its consequences, I am against that. The purpose of Christ is universal. I just rejoice and follow what I have discovered. I offer it to the people. If they accept it, fine, but if they do not, they are not my enemies.
I would like all to believe in Christ, but what salvation comes can come without someone knowing it, because what it requires is not moral achievement but purity of heart. I do not love humanity because I love Christ. I love Christ because I love humanity.
In spite of its horrors, and all its negative challenges, I turn to Christ because Christ makes sense of all this, so I say yes. It corresponds to the desires of my heart. If it didn't, I would be out of my mind to continue with it, that is crazy, like a self-hatred.
So in the country we have people who are non-believers, Buddhists, Jews, whatever, but I say be faithful to your atheism, see where it leads you. I have total confidence that it will lead to the Mystery, because we are structured that way.
We do have to talk about these things - but we are not made to talk about them all the time. And in the end, you have to go to the movies.”
There, that sums up the ethos of this website. If you wish, you can find a much fuller filmed and transcribed version of the above interview here.
But silence is good too, the stillness of God.
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