Prodigal Kiwi(s) Blog

Enough Light for the Next Step

“Often we want to be able to see into the future. We say, "How will next year be for me? Where will I be five or ten years from now?" There are no answers to these questions. Mostly we have just enough light to see the next step: what we have to do in the coming hour or the following day. The art of living is to enjoy what we can see and not complain about what remains in the dark. When we are able to take the next step with the trust that we will have enough light for the step that follows, we can walk through life with joy and be surprised at how far we go. Let's rejoice in the little light we carry and not ask for the great beam that would take all shadows away.” 

Henri Nouwen

 

Solitude, Shallows and Education

I came across an interesting little article on the importance of “solitude” within the education sector. For me, to a point, it parallels some thinking and reflection that Nicholas Carr has developed around what he calls “the shallows” (see his The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains). Are there parallels with our experiences of church-belonging…? Are churches / discipleship education dealing with different issues, for example, rather than “activity” the challenge is more around passivity…? 

Here’s an excerpt from the article which is an interview with Diana Senechal, a New York Public school educator and author of the very recently published Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture 

“…Solitude is not about being in a hut out in the woods or being out in the desert or living without other people around. I define solitude as a certain apartness that we always have, whether we’re among others or not. It is something that can be practiced — maybe to think just on one’s own, even when in a meeting or in a group and so forth — but that also has been nurtured by time alone. So there’s an ongoing solitude that’s always there, and there’s also a shaped or practiced solitude, which requires both time alone with things, to be thinking about things and working on things, and time among others when you nonetheless think independently…

… I’m not a psychologist, but in the classroom and in many discussions on education, what I see is an emphasis on keeping the students busy from start to finish. Not letting a moment creep in where they don’t have something specific to do, something concrete where they are actually producing something. So if you keep them busy, busy, busy, and doing something at every moment, then supposedly they’re engaged. And when supervisors walk into classrooms and look and see the students writing and turning and talking, their conclusion is “Oh! What an engaged class!” The problem with that is then students don’t learn how to handle moments of doubt, or moments of silence, or moments where they have to struggle with a problem and they can’t produce something right on the spot. So, the students themselves come to expect to be put to work at every moment. If you want to give them something more difficult, you have to expect a little uncertainty. You have to expect a little bit of silence, a little bit of an awkward pause where they don’t know exactly what to do right away. What happens in this focus on visible engagement, we lose something that may go deeper, where students may have a chance to wrestle with something that’s a little bit above his or her head and where the answer is not immediately apparent…”

Intimacy

Intimacy is allowing oneself to love and be loved, to know and be known fully. Its about not hiding from ones significant 'other(s)', nor from oneself. 

Life is a profound movement from self-indulgence and self-absorption into the rich and deeply humanizing adventure of love: learning to love and receive love. There is no end to this learning and receiving.  

 

“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well…” – Vaclav Havel

I was struck by the following as I read a reflection on Vaclav Havel (1936-2011) written by Paul Wilson and published in the New York Review of Books, 9^th February 2012. Here it is. Highlights are mine. 

“…a week in which the Czech newsstands were flooded with special commemorative editions of magazines and newspapers devoted to Havel’s passing, there was scarcely an aspect of his life and ideas that was not mulled over and parsed for deeper meaning, or recalled in pictures. The most iconic of those pictures—a shot of Havel with his back to the camera, walking toward the ocean—was turned into a poster and widely displayed around Prague, along with a quotation expressing one of Havel’s most deeply held beliefs: “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” 

A ringing statement, but it was not quite in focus. What Havel meant by “something”—as his other formulations of the same belief make clear—was action. All his life, Havel lived by the belief that if you wanted something to happen, you had to do something to make it happen, and damn the consequences, including arrest and prison, and possibly even death. Speaking about the early days of the post-Stalin thaw, he once said: “The more we did, the more we were able to do, and the more we were able to do, the more we did.” It is a fine summary of his attitude, and, in a sense, his legacy. Havel was continually pushing the boundaries of the possible, and in doing so, he was able to create space for others to follow…” 

… What put him in a league of his own is the corollary: you act not to achieve a certain outcome; you act because it is the right thing to do. That is what he meant by “living in truth,” a notion he explores in some depth in his most radical and enduring work: The Power of the Powerless. 

Like many great Czechs before him, Havel insisted on the importance of truth, but with a difference. “Truth and love,” he was fond of saying, “must prevail over lies and hatred.” He was often ridiculed for what seemed like a Hallmark sentiment (“Why love?” people asked), but he defended the slogan by referring to one of his greatest insights: truth, by itself, is a malleable concept that depends for its truthfulness on who utters it, to whom it is said, and under what circumstances. As a playwright, Havel turned this insight into a dramatic device: in most of his plays, the main characters constantly lie to one another and to themselves, using words that, in other circumstances, would be perfectly truthful. Truth by itself is not enough: it needs a guarantor, someone to stand behind it. It must be uttered with no thought for gain, that is, in Havel’s words, with a love that seeks nothing for itself and everything for others… 

…Havel was a deeply spiritual man who expressed his spirituality, if that is the right word, almost entirely through his actions in the world… 

… Havel’s generosity toward Sudeten Germans points to one of his finest, and most radical, qualities: his capacity for forgiveness…“and Havel knew that the only way to break out of [the] …cycle of hatred and vengeance was to forgive those who have wronged us. If,” he added, “they ask to be forgiven”…” 

You can read the full New York Review of Books piece, here. 

Thanks for Jason Goroncy for bringing it to my attention. 

Incarnation.

“…Most of us need a good infusion of understanding of the rich significance of Jesus’ humanness. He did not become flesh and blood simply so that he could die. He became a man so that he could show us what it means to be fully and truly human…” 

J. R. Daniel Kirk, from here. Referencing an article by Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen on Jesus in the Jan. 2012 issue of Christianity Today. 

 

Andrew Perriman: “The curse of patriarchy and the hope of new creation”: and a Corollary on Marriage

Another thoughtful and thought-provoking post from Andrew Perriman – further reflection emerging out of his reflection on the themes of chapter 6 (“Women in the Story of God”) of JR. Daniel Kirk’s book Jesus Have I Loved, But Paul? A Narrative [Storied] Approach to the Problem of Pauline Christianity. I posted on his initial review here. 

Here’s an excerpt from his latest reflection: 

Referencing Genesis 3, he writes: 

“…The words for “desire” and “rule over” are the same in both texts. The parallelism strongly suggests, on the one hand, that the “desire” of the woman for the man is not to be understood positively—in the postlapsarian world the woman and man are at odds with each other in much the same way that sin and Cain are at odds with each other…” 

Which, I guess makes life-giving, genuine, deepening, and life-long marriages all the more special; and all the more the result of a life-time of grace-full acts of love, care, affirmation, valuing, encouragement etc which counter and subvert the power of sin and death; the inherent brokenness and conflict that lies within the hearts of each one of us and at the heart of each relationship, not least marriage. Surely then, these marriages are reflections and signs of “New Creation”, so St. Paul can liken the marriage relationship to the relationship between Christ and the Church. Signs are for seeing, but the sad reality is that so few of us see that our marriages are the signs they are, we don’t frame or understand them theologically and so we give up and the ‘sign’ is defaced and New Creation is rolled back. Far from being condemnatory, relationally naive, or from casting stones I feel deeply saddened by and grieve for the increasing loss of this hope-full sign.   

The Church is surely write to encourage prayer for couples and for those marriages it blesses in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I’m again grateful for the work of Harville Hendrix (on this blog here, here. Plus here for why marriage is a poor choice in a narcissistic consumer culture) and his deep commitment to healing, saving, and re-enlivening marriages. 

And, reflecting on “Signs of New Creation”, Andrew writes: 

“…The church is a sign in the present of the future renewal of creation, and it will be a much more effective sign of a coming world in which it is no longer necessary for the man to rule over the woman if it acts that reality out and does not merely pay lip service to it. Jesus did not only proclaim the coming restoration of the people of God, he enacted it concretely through exorcisms, healings, the rehabilitation of sinners, and carefully staged prophetic performances such as the entry into Jerusalem and the action in the temple. 

There are, naturally, limits. The extent to which new creation may be anticipated in the life of the church is necessarily circumscribed because sin still crouches at the door, creation still waits to be “set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Rom. 8:21). But what I like about the eschatological argument is that it allows us both to acknowledge the social problematic and to give a compelling theological reason to bring a new egalitarian reality into existence…” 

For Andrew’s complete post, go here. 

Evangelical Catholicism…?

Today an excerpt from a piece written by George Weigel in which he reflects on the state of the Catholic Church, and does that in the light of the John-Paul II – Pope Benedict XVI influence. He talks of a new “Evangelical Catholicism”. 

Here’s an excerpt: 

“…Evangelical Catholicism takes its ecclesiology, its idea of the Church, from Lumen Gentium, Vatican II's Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, as interpreted by John Paul II's 1991 encyclical Redemptoris Missio.

In this ecclesiology, the Church does not so much have a mission (as if "mission" were one among a dozen other things the Church does); the Church is a mission. Everything the Church does, the Church does to propose Jesus Christ as the answer to the question that is every human life. Everything the Church does, the Church does in order to offer friendship with Jesus Christ as the true means of satisfying the deepest longings of the human heart.

Evangelical Catholicism takes John Paul II's injunction in the 2001 apostolic letter Novo Millennio
Ineunte to heart: it sets sail from the stagnant shallows of institutional maintenance into the deep waters of post-modernity, preaching the Paschal Mystery as the central truth of the human condition, while building communities of integrity, decency, solidarity and compassion - Eucharistic communities of supernatural charity capable of nurturing genuine human flourishing.

Evangelical Catholicism is thus both culture-forming and counter-cultural. It is culture-forming, in that it takes the formation, nurturance, and maturation of a distinctive culture - the Church - with utmost seriousness. And it does not look to the ambient public culture for suggestions as to how this distinctive ecclesial culture, this distinctive mode of life called "Christian," is to be structured and lived…”

You can read his full article here.

The Beauty of Aging

I came across the following statement earlier in the week: 

“Some people no matter how old they get never lose their beauty – they merely move it from their faces to their hearts…”

Martin Buxbaum

 

J.R. Daniel Kirk, Andrew Perriman, and the “backward-moving force of the future”

And so, as the Blog Tour for J.R. Daniel Kirk’s new book Jesus I Have Loved, But Paul? A Narrative Approach to the Problem of Pauline Christianity pulls into the Andrew Perriman way-station, before continuing its journey. Andrew reflects on Chapter Six “Women in the Story of God”. 

Andrew opens with some comment around a theme, which he has championed, not least in his wonderful book The Future of the People of God: Reading Romans Before and After Western Christendom. He subtitles this section, and I had to laugh: “Freshly Squeezed Narrative without the Apocalyptic Bits”. His brief reflection lightly circles around a question he puts to Kirk: “why in a book that makes so much of the narrative structure of our belief system is there no reference to the apocalyptic extension of the story into the future of the people of God?” He continues, “…what about Jesus’ future—[his] “coming” to deliver his persecuted followers from their enemies, to judge Israel and the nations (Jim West observes that Kirk plays down the judgment theme in the Gospels [I think we all (mistakenly) do for a whole range of 21-century and socio-cultural reasons – Paul], and to be confessed as Lord by the nations? It seems to me that a narrative that jumps from Easter to the final renewal of creation is not much of a narrative any more…” In a sense this is an aside to the task of reviewing chapter six, but I think Andrew is correct to raise it as often as he does. One answer, by the way, to the question he puts to Kirk above, is that Andrew has already written the book, demonstrating how in St. Paul’s letter to the church(s) in Rome, the apocalyptic extends into the future of the people of God! 

“I think”, Andrew writes “that it raises an important question about the adequacy of the model as it is being developed here. Are there not risks involved in constructing a narrative ethic based on only half the story? Can we in principle assume that an apocalyptic ethic will look the same as a post-apocalyptic ethic?” He continues: “…Kirk makes much of the fact that the future impinges on the present—he speaks aptly of the “backward-moving force of the future”… But this argument is put forward at the expense of the political story…” 

Here are some excerpts from his reflection that address chapter six. You will find his full here. 

“…The “equality” of male and female is grounded in Christ… 

… The purpose of the church is actively to realize its future “new creation” identity in the here and now. Kirk writes: “I believe that the calling before us is to prayerfully discern what it might mean to grasp the future that God has in store for creation and draw it into the present”… 

… I [Andrew] found myself wondering, as I read this chapter, whether we should not simply call Christian patriarchy—the prolongation of the rule of the man over the woman—a sin, a dark shadow cast on the bright image of humanity made new… 

… Kirk nicely suggests that the anonymity and modesty of the “commendable women” in the Gospels in many ways illustrate more effectively than the obtuseness and self-importance of the male disciples the extraordinary inversion of the leadership paradigm that we find in Jesus’ practice and teaching. It is part of the ambiguity of the matter in scripture that the “full potential latent in these early inclusions of women in the Jesus story is not fully realized in the ministry of Jesus”, but they function “as cracks in the glass ceiling” of the social hierarchies that make women subordinate to and dependent upon men… 

… In the last section of the chapter Kirk sets out to explore “what it might mean to integrate women into the cruciform narrative of our Christian communities”. The big picture of the Christian story—it doesn’t hurt to keep restating this—is that “God has bound himself to humanity, through the nation of Israel, for the purpose of bringing the world from the failure of old creation into the glory of new creation”. Where this narrative diverges from Judaism is in the fact that “the means God chooses is a crucified Messiah whose kingdom-inaugurating activity was one of upending the economy of the world”. A.K.M. Adam has noted a certain tension between the emphasis on the cruciform shape of the kingdom story and the “imperishable vindication” of resurrection and new creation. There is something to this, but I think Kirk would respond that the way of renewal always takes us through the cross and the radical overturning of all that is worldly—including hierarchy…” 

Read Andrew’s full ‘review’ / reflection here. You might also find this post and this one, both written by Andrew, of value. 

James Alison and Belden Lane

ABC’s Encounter program recently featured James Alison. 

“Priest and theologian James Alison believes that there are bright glimmers of hope to be found in the Catholic Church's wrestling with issues around homosexuality. He reflects on his own experience as a gay Catholic, on the givenness of sexual orientation, and on what he calls "the shape of God's affection".” 

It’s an interesting interview, one you can hear now. My wondering as I listened to it is reflected in this quote from a Belden Lane, from a chapter in Lane’s The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality (still one of my favourite theological books!), which I’d read prior to listening to Alison. 

“…I’m increasingly uncomfortable with current images of God found in books and workshops that mix popular psychology with a theology whole devoted to self-realization. They seem to reverse the first question of the [Westminster] catechism I studied as a child, declaring that the chief end of God is to glorify men and women, and to enjoy them forever.” I really don’t want a God who is solicitous of my every need, fawning for my attention, eager for nothing in the world so much as the fulfillment of my self-potential. Once of the scourges of our age is that all our deities are house-broken and eminently companionable. Far from demanding anything, they ask only how they can more meaningfully enhance the lives of those they serve…” (p.53).

This quote on Len Hjalmarson's blog also underlines for me some of what Lane is suggesting:

"...Benedictine prayer is based almost totally in the Psalms and in the Scriptures.. Benedictine prayer is not centered in the needs and wants and insights of the person who is praying. It is anchored in the needs and wants and insights of [God] ..." Joan Chittister. Len's full post, here. 

You can listen to, or download, the James Alison interview here. 

Walter Brueggemann - Some More Thoughts …

I’ve now listened a few more times to the Walter Brueggemann interview I recently featured here. 

To encourage you to listen – if of course you haven’t already – here’s some more excerpts. It might be useful to reflect on them, and indeed your own life through the lenses he provides when in his interactions with the Psalms he talks about the cycle of: orientation, disorientation, and re-orientation (or “new orientation”). 

Brueggemann: … The prophets characteristically revolve around judgment and hope, I'll do two passages, one of each of them. The judgment passage that I'll read is in Jeremiah 4. It goes like this: "I looked" — and you don't know who I is — "I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void; and to the heavens, and they had no light. I looked on the mountains, and lo, they were quaking, and all the hills moved to and fro. I looked, and lo, there was no one at all, and all the birds of the air had fled. I looked, and lo, the fruitful land was a desert, and all its cities were laid waste before the anger, before His fierce anger." 

… Well, you get the "I looked," "I looked," "I looked," and what that text really is Creation in reversal, so you go from heaven and earth to mountains, to birds, to humans, and he's describing it all being taken away at one time. When I hear that kind of poetry, I get chill bumps because it seems to me so contemporary that I think that's how very many people are now experiencing the world. It is as though the ordered world is being taken away from us and it's just so powerfully exquisite. 

…the world we have trusted in is vanishing before our eyes and the world that is coming at us feels like a threat to us and we can't quite see the shape of it… 

BRUEGGEMANN: … our consumer culture wants somehow to narcoticize us so that we just settle in on things. I think Kafka maybe said that a poet or a novelist is like a pick ax that attacks the way we've got things arranged, and I think these poems are like pick axes that are not welcome among us, but we're going to miss out on the reality of our life if we are narcoticized both about the loss and about the newness… 

…"Our consumer culture is organized against history. There is a depreciation of memory and a ridicule of hope, which means everything must be held in the now, either an urgent now or an eternal now"… 

… That's what's extraordinary about the poetry, that it's so elusive that it refuses to be reduced to a formula… 

… We have neglected the lament pieces; we are ill-equipped for the loss that we are facing in our society. So we keep pretending and denying that that's not happening to us… 

… The truth of our life [is that] that our lives are arenas for all kinds of disruptions because it doesn't work out the way we planned [or hoped]… 

… I've recently been thinking more and more that it's so astonishing that the Old Testament prophets hardly ever discuss an issue. They don't discuss abortion, Panama Canal or anything like that. And I think what they're doing is they're going underneath the issues that preoccupy people to the more foundational assumptions that can only be got at in elusive language. Very much the institutional church has been preoccupied with issues… 

… I think if the prophets of the Old Testament really were uncredentialed people without pedigrees, then we ought not to expect people to arise primarily in the institutional church… 

… I've asked myself why in the church does the question of gays and lesbians have such adrenaline. And I've decided for myself that that means most of what we're arguing about with gays and lesbians has nothing to do with gays and lesbians. It is rather that the world is not the way we thought it was going to be. I think what has happened is that we've taken all of our anxiety about the old world disappearing and we've dumped it all on that issue. So I have concluded that it's almost futile to have the theological argument about gays and lesbians anymore because that's not what the argument's about. It is an amorphous anxiety that we are in freefall as a society, and I think we kind of are in freefall as a society, but I don't think it has anything to do with gays and lesbians particularly… 

… Brueggemann (On “Mercy”): You may know that the Hebrew word for — Phyllis Trible has taught us that the Hebrew word for mercy is the word for womb with different vowel points. So mercy, she's suggested, is womb-like mother love. And it is the capacity of a mother to totally give one's self over to the need and reality and identity of the child. And mutatis mutandis then, mercy is the capacity to give one's self away for the sake of the neighborhood. 

Now none of us do that completely, but it makes a difference if the quality of social transactions have to do with the willingness to give one's self away for the sake of the other rather than the need to always be drawing all of the resources to myself for my own well-being. So it is this kind of generous connectedness to others and then I think our task is to see how that translates into policy. I think that a community or a society finally cannot live without the quality of mercy. The problem for us is what will initiate that? What will break the pattern of self-preoccupation enough to notice that the others are out there and that we are attached to them? 

…Tippett: It would be the same, right. You know what? It takes me back to a conversation I had with a clinical psychologist who's studying forgiveness and revenge and how forgiveness is made more possible… [when] we become able to care in larger — wider and wider circles – when we see other's well-being as linked to our own… 

Brueggemann … What the church does with its creeds and its doctrinal tradition, it flattens out all the images and metaphors to make it fit into a nice little formulation and then it's deathly. So we have to communicate to people, if you want a God that is healthier than that, you're going to have to take time to sit with these images and relish them and let them become a part of your prayer life and your vocabulary and your conceptual frame. 

Otherwise, you're just going to be left with these dead formulations, which, again, are why poetry is so important because the poetry just keeps opening and opening and opening so more metaphors gives more access to God and one can work one metaphor awhile, but you can't treat that as though that's the last word. You got to move and have another and another… 

… What a metaphor or image does is to invite you to keep walking around it and looking at it another way and noticing something else. It's a gift that keeps on giving… 

…BRUEGGEMANN (ON READING & RE-READING THE BIBLICAL TXT): I don't want to construct the whole theology out of [a] phrase, but that's enough for that day and I'll find — I'll be given another phrase another day like that. So that's kind of how my mind works. It doesn't yield a doctrinal package; it just yields a bunch of fragments that are not easily fit together. But the reason that works for me is that I am aware that I as a person without entity, I am essentially a collection of fragments that do not fit very well together, so that's OK…

Keep Going!

In her first post of 2012, friend, fellow wayfarer, and wonderful author Maggi Dawn offers some encouragement to those who’re battling with the circumstances of their lives: 

“…I share with many the ongoing journey of life marked by daily, deliberate, repeated forgiveness. The only way to survive the awful inhumanities that people visit upon each other is to learn to let go: to make our peace with the circumstances that halved or quartered our health or security; to cut adrift those who assassinated our marriages, our careers, or our self-esteem; to live day by day in the knowledge that life consists in celebrating what is, and ceasing to regret what never will be…” 

Read the full post here.

An Alternative Reality ... Embodied and Enacted

While not directed related to yesterday’s post (Hans Boersma interview) there are links that could be developed if you overlaid it with a recent Nijay Gupta post who offers some very useful reflections under the heading: “Creed, Worldview, and Counter-Reality” 

“…God doesn’t care for you to invest in a belief that doesn’t change you.

Put another way, if a core Christian belief doesn’t affect who you are and how you live, it has not served its purpose. God is not in the business of checking beliefs off of some kind of divine list so that people can go to heaven. In order to make good sense of the centrality of Christian creeds, we must be able to connect it to worldview. Worldview is, obviously, how we look at all of reality. It is the lens through which we view ourselves, the people around us; it shapes our values, our view of time and space, our appreciation of art and beauty, who we become friends with, what job we choose, how we spend money and strength; worldview dictates what we think is right and wrong. If we have failed to teach young Christians about worldview, we have basically failed them altogether!” 

You can read the rest of his post here.

For more on “world views” I’d recommend as introductory texts Tom Sine’s books. More academic? Try Brian Walsh (and Richard Middleton) or Michael Goheen (and Craig Bartholomew). In terms of embodying and enacting a counter-reality, I’d recommend works by William Stringfellow.

Living without a “Gap” Between Heaven and Earth

One of the more interesting books I glanced through in 2011 (and now need to read in 2012) is Regent College’s Hans Boersma’s Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry. It hasn’t been reviewed overly positively on Amazon, but a number of people (e.g. James K A Smith) have included it in their lists of “top” theological reads of 2011. 

In August 2011 Christianbook.com posted a written interview with Boersma in which he talked about Heavenly Participation. It’s fascinating and evocative on many places, and indeed is likely to motivate a number of us (it did me) to get the book of the shelf and read it. Beyond that, the interview offers a number of fascinating perspectives to take with us into the New Year as it unfolds. 

Here are some excerpts from the opening section of the interview: 

“…Prior to modernity, there was no chasm, no huge gap, between heaven and earth in people’s basic mindset. Heavenly realities impinged on life here on earth, while things here below participated in the truth, goodness, and beauty of heaven itself. The gap between creator and creature, between heaven and earth, between nature and grace—or however we want to put this exactly—has made it easy for us to live as if God did not exist… 

… The notion that this-worldly realities are autonomous from God and fully at our disposal is perhaps the most defining characteristic of modernity. By contrast, if you look at this-worldly realities as sacraments that participate in heavenly realities, then you’re going to approach everything around you with a great deal more reverence—because then you realize that behind the creaturely objects that you see, there’s something more, something deeper. In other words, you recognize a divine mystery that lies veiled behind creaturely appearances. The contrast, then, between the pre-modern and the modern mindset is a contrast between reverence and control, between mystery and explanation, between sacrament and idol. The modern rejection of creation’s sacramental participation in the eternal Word of God removes all sense of mystery from the created order. This utilitarian attitude has obvious consequences for the economy, for the environment, for human sexuality—indeed, for every area of human life…” 

You’ll find the complete interview here.   

The Lack of “Contemplative Psychotherapy” is the Source of Most Human Misery, Lostness, Suffering, and Unhappiness …?

The following is a mix of direct quote and paraphrasing of some statements I was listening to recently by Fr. Thomas Keating OCSO: 

The Contemplative tradition is concerned with God’s love for us, and of dwelling in and being transformed by that love… Part of “The Divine Therapy” (cf. Thomas Keating) is going to be concerned with awakening in us what it means to be the image of God, that “image” being the indelible presence of God, Christ-in-us. We don’t lack the “image” but we lack the “likeness”; it’s the likeness that is missing and this absence is what we experience as feeling “incomplete”. We also experience it as human brokenness, frailty, and that which dehumanizes us and makes us less than God’s loving, healing, and transformative intentions for us. 

So a big part of “Divine Therapy addresses the human-condition head-on by trying … little-by-little to create an atmosphere of trust, acceptance and humility so that we’re willing to allow ourselves to be drawn from unconsciousness to consciousness; willing to allow the repressed and the emotional woundedness of a lifetime to be healed by God. “The contemplative tradition is a very well-thought-out course of psychotherapy and as such its not just limited to a ‘method of prayer’”, but is in actual fact a “way of life”; an orientating and a bending of oneself toward grace, life, and love. 

Ironically this is the heart of the Christian life. It’s just not experienced this way by most people because the contemplative dimension of the gospel is largely neglected or unknown. 

There needs to be a personal assimilation by practice of the grace being given by God… It is the lack of deep relationship with God, with our own deepest selves, and the lack of “Divine Therapy, or “contemplative psychotherapy” is the source of most human misery, lostness, suffering, and unhappiness. 

It’s a big claim isn’t it, but the more I learn and experience, the more I’m inclined to side with 80+ year old Keating. The contemplative touches the essential, deepest, and sadly most neglected dimensions of our humanity. Contemplation is not about a retreat from life; its about the place from which we launch ourselves into life in all its richness: contemplation + action.