Ch 2, p8
Richard Rohr
What Goes Unsaid
In each mind, even the most candid,
there are forests, where needled haze overshadows
the slippery duff and patches of snow long-frozen,
or else where mangroves, proliferant, vine-entwisted,
loom over warm mud that slowly bubbles.
In these forests there live certain events, shards
of memory, scraps of once-heard lore, intimations
once familiar – some painful, shameful, some
drably or laughably inconsequent, others
thoughts that the thinker
could never hold fast and begin to tell.
And some – a few – that are noble, tender,
and so complete in themselves, they had
no need of saying.
There they dwell,
no sky above them, resting
like dragonflies on the dense air, or nested
on inaccessible twigs.
It is right that there are these secrets
(even the weightless ones have perhaps
some part to play in the inconceivable whole)
and these forests; privacies
and the deep terrain to receive them.
Right that they rise at times to our ken,
and are acknowledged.
and other excerpts…
Primal speech
If there’s an Ur-language still among us…
then it’s the exclamation,
universal whatever the sound, the triumphant,
wondering, infant utterance, ‘This! This!’,
showing and proffering the thing, anything,
the affirmation even before the naming.
Primary Wonder
…once more the quiet mystery
is present to me, the thong’s clamor
recedes: the mystery
that there is anything, anything at all,
let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,
rather than void: and that, O Lord,
Creator, Hallowed One, You still,
hour by hour sustain it.
The Servant Girl at Emmaus
…Those who had brought this stranger home to their table
don’t recognise yet with whom they sit.
But she in the kitchen, absently touching the wine jug she’s to take in,
a young Black servant intently listening,
swings round and sees
the light around him
and is sure.
God our creator, provider, and carer,
You are the best and fairest;
We are committed to searching out and living the way that you want us to.
Help us not to worry about the future,
and to share what we have with others.
Forgive us when we destroy life
and teach us to create life instead.
Give us courage to choose to
forgive those who hurt us.
Be with us in our time of need
and help us not to give up.
Our safety and life is in you.
Amen
Starting to read this together at Sunday Group – here are some teasers from the intro…
xvii When Christianity loses its material/physical/earthly interests, it has very little to say about how God actually loves the world into wholeness.
xxii Substance addictions like alcohol and drugs are merely the most visible form of addiction, but actually we are all addicted to our own habitual way of doing anything, our own defenses, and most especially, our patterned way of thinking, or how we process our reality. The very fact we have to say this shows how much we are blinded inside of it. By definition you can never see or handle what you are addicted to. It is always hidden and disguised as something else. As Jesus did with the demons of gerasa, someone must say, “What is your name?”(Luke 8:30). The problem must be correctly named before the demon can be exorcised. You cannot heal what you do not first acknowledge.
xxiv
This counterintuitive wisdom will forever be resisted as true, denied and avoided, until it is forced upon us – by some reality over which we are powerless – and if we are honest, we are all powerless in the presence of full Reality.
You can buy Breathing Under Water by Richard Rohr (or any of his other titles) from the Centre for Action and Contemplation website.
excerpt from Estranged Relatives – Mediation and Nonviolent Direct Action (A Conversation between Ched Myers and Elaine Enns)
I’m puddling my way through the Bartimaeus Institute Restorative Justice online course – and am struck anew by what it means to have teaching that holds the bible in one hand and the newspaper in another, historical contextual interpretation and current relevance… Ched and Elaine re-frame the above tool in such terms as peace keeping, peace making, peace building and peace waging.
This is good theological meat and you should eat some. Lots of free access articles and webinars on their website too…
What follows are some excerpts from an Anne Elvey article I picked up at the Creation Symposium (full article available here) interesting reading for anyone thinking about the ways our disconnection to the earth is mirrored in our disconnection from our own bodies
In being transcended through certain forms of western discourse and practice, bodies and earth have been critically endangered. In the context of this endangerment, an ecological feminist politics and ethics seeks to affirm the materiality of bodies and earth.
OOO
The language we use in addressing the question of the relationship between culture and nature is critical, because discourse is one of the key processes through which we construct the agency or non-agency of the other and create structures that allow or disallow that agency.
OOO
As with all experience, sexual experience is vast, not only in its possibilities but in the resonance of even the simplest sensation. Desire, longing, pleasure, passion, orgasm, move the body into states of being which defy all definitions, not only those of gender or sexuality but of the boundaried way European culture perceives existence… Apart from any bond or relationship between lovers, in sexual experience an erotic connection to existence is kindled.
(Katherine Hayles, 1995:60)
OOO
I take up the now fairly commonplace notion of earth as a community of interconnected constituents. This community includes humans, other animals, plants, rocks, soil, water, air, trees, rivers, oceans, forests, hairy-nosed wombats, viruses, kangaroo apples, hermit crabs, amoeba and so on, connected by way of a complex sociality marked by plurality, particularity, diversity, interdependence and sometimes violence, oppression and indifference to the other. What if this earth, however we might know earth, is understood as a material given that precedes and resists but also underpins and gives space to our cultural constructions of it? This space is given not as a hole to be filled but in the manner of hospitality or to borrow a term from Jean-Luc Nancy (2000) of ‘being toward’. What if this understanding of the earth is giving precedence in our thinking about the questions of ‘sex and gender’? What if the questions of ‘sex and gender’ are considered within the context of the materiality of human beings as constituted within the wider materiality of a plural and diverse earth community?
OOO
The experience of the lived body offers a particular example of the agency of experience. In pregnancy and childbirth as well as in illness, the lived body challenges my ‘illusions of control’ (Diprose 1994:103). During an illness, for example, my bodily experience is foregrounded in such a way that the interplay between nature and culture in the processes of my lived embodiment cannot be reduced to a simplistic notion of the cultural construction of bodies or nature… feels nevertheless as though the virus is in some sense constructing or deconstructing me.
OOO
She describes two forms of cultural impact on bodies and landscapes: first, the productive transformation of bodies and landscapes through cultural practices such as depilation and agriculture, for example, and second, the reproduction of bodies and landscape in discourse. (Kate Soper, 1995:137)
OOO
Instead she locates this agency not in the individual organism alone; rather it is an ‘agency in relation’, emerging ‘out of the engagement of the organism with its surroundings’. In this context, sexed bodies are continually being shaped and re-shaped both internally and externally through processes which are ‘partly material and partly social/experiential’, and these processes are inseparable. (Lynda Birke 2000:152)
OOO
Contemplation is a practice of attentiveness to the other, which begins with a movement of unknowing and through a practice of openness is followed by a movement of partial and provisional ‘knowing’
The symposium ran 26-28 May 2016 – these are some notes from a few session of the 26th.
Revd Dr Stephen Ames
This ‘problem’ of natural evil e.g. tsunamis, earthquakes, genetic disorders – how do we include this in liturgy and felt experience of God. What appears to be divine inaction, in the face of evil.
God gave things causal power.
Good in themselves, able to bring out good in others.
Creation creates creation.
Creation came from God’s pure thought.
Can’t evaluate that. Have to go and investigate it 
using senses and rationality (without prejudice).
Maximises co-creation
“Better” type of creation (than inert or mechanical)
What purpose in mind of Creation?
“…since the carrying out of government is for the sake of bringing the governed to their perfection, that form of government will be better which communicates a higher perfection to the governed” (Aquinas, ST 1a, article 6, 6th point)
Scientific, moral and ethical problems.
Testimony of Jesus re God e.g. Prodigal Son.
reckless and loving vs. reckless and cruel. Giving all things created power and “dominion” (freedom to use it). Limit, overcome, transform – Jesus submits to violence (human dominion) and suffers with it… not a contradiction of what God has created “good”.
Dr Jan Morgan and Dr Graeme Garrett
Friedrich, Caspar David (1774 – 1840), Deutscher Maler der Romantik; “Der Mönch am Meer”; Foto: Jörg P. Anders;
Is God more real in the monastery or untamed waterlands?
The city provides for my wants and needs (without my thinking about it) lights, food, fuel… everything comes out of creation. Church has also sheltered me from Creation. How can I responsibly connect with the world as God’s creation?
John Lewis Cretier – French Catholic theologian, call and response. Life filled with invitations. Traces back to God calling into “being”, calls come from all the beings that share the world with us – Visible Voice.
Augustine’s Confessions…
Burning bush speaks to Moses, whirlwind speaks to Job, Paul on the road to Damascus – light.
Suggestions for prayer practice can be found on the Carmelite Library blog.
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