Tag Archive: belief
… an image of God as a Tane Mahuta tree – too large to take in, too large to take with us. We can carry smaller symbols carved out of wood that are portable, small enough to manage. When we whittle, what gets cut away? We need to be self-aware to the fact that any part of God that is small enough to understand, small enough to carry around, can only be some small, symbolic part of something much bigger. We forget. We imagine in the carved icon we can fit our hands around that we can understand all of who God is. We can never understand all of who God is. We need to live knowing this. We need to express our Christianity knowing this. Anytime we imagine something is certain, something is known, God moves and invites us to come along… invites us to look with new eyes, in some new light – invites us to see. The commitment to being a disciple of God is the commitment to move and to see again.
Talitha Fraser
THE SPIRITUAL PROBLEM (diagnosed for the Western church)
- Christian confession has rendered Christ as static figure
- Christ’s principal business is judgement
- Christ has become a law of life, instead of being a way of life
- Christ is portrayed as single, individual existent – static and absolute in space and time/ permanent and fixed
- The mystery of God has been locked into an externalised, single individual human person
- This individual, Jesus of Nazareth, has been rendered as the single individual superhero
- This reduces the rest of humankind as mere spectators to the divine drama
- The consequent doctrines of Original Sin and the Fall, have induced the Christian fixation on rescue religion and the need to be saved
- Which has created the radical and complete separation between God and creation
4 things:
- Expansiveness, large heart
- Decision to be faithful to the church despite harm – repeatedly blocked him from sharing philosophical writing
- Church is about transformation not legalism
- Vision is experiential – trusting his own experience
Mystical theology – full acknowledgement of revelation and full acknowledgement of personal experience across all sensory perceiving. Goal to be immersed in God like a drop in an ocean… guiding preoccupation with listening, personal experience of divine love… liberates!
Teilhard was a French palaeontologist and a Jesuit priest > stretcher-bearer “writings in time of war” Gave his spiritual works to a lay woman who published them! Teilhard was deeply distressed by the one sidedness of both science and religion, and by the unnecessary and tragic consequences of their bifurcation. .. devoted equal commitment to internal and external facts. His writing has had a profound effect on 20th century thinking across many disciplines: science, history, international development. Critiques: didn’t engage with other faiths, didn’t go ‘far enough’ into consciousness.
Genesis is an ongoing state of becoming > what is Christs role then? Christ is the driving loving energy of cosmogenesis. Teilhard: looking for Christ the evolver. Not King and Master outsider/adjudicator but Christ who fills and moves all things.
“By means of all created things, without exception,
the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us.
We imagine it as distant and inaccessible,
when in fact we live stepped in its burning layers.”
Evolution is the process if suffering > creation is groaning > has casualties. At cosmos and individual level (stars explode and new ones are born).
“Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves,
the tides and gravity,
we shall harness for God the energies of love,
and then, for a second time in the history of the world,
man will have discovered fire.”
‘to bear the sins of the guilty world’ means precisely, translated and transposed into terms of cosmogenesis, ‘to bear the weight of a world in a state of evolution. (Christianity and Evolution, p218-219)
The recognition that ‘God cannot create except evolutively’ provides a radical solution… to the problem of evil (which is a direct ‘effect’ of evolution), and at the same time explains the manifest and mysterious association of matter and spirit. (Christianity and Evolution, p179)
Christ must no longer be constitutionally restricted in his operation to a mere ‘redemption’ of our planet. (Christianity and Evolution, p241)
If a Christ is to be completely acceptable as an object of worship, he must be presented as the saviour of the idea and reality of evolution. (Christianity and Evolution, p78)
I can only be saved by becoming one with the universe. (The Heart of Matter, p78)
Development of consciousness – choice and decision-making > ethics
Something is wiped out and something else comes? Way we are broken open that are impelling is to grow. Earthquake – want to hold onto everything, for it to stay the same (building), cosmos says “No”, need to re-build, change, evolve. Progression vs. regression – want to lock it down to earlier ‘known’ state. Christianity wants to find a culprit, aggression and blame with preaching love that does not make sense to people outside the church. Not merely – sin will be made clean but an invitation to participate in the ascent of creation.
Have to experience something that will actually change us.
We are star dust.
Hubble Heritage Team/NASA/ES
“Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability –
and that it may take a very long time.
And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually – let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own goodwill)
will make of you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.”
[Hand out both bread and wine so that they are in our hands]
Yesterday I was in my car and had a little Christmas tantrum “I HATE Christmas!” thumped the steering wheel… “I can’t wait for it to be over…”
Every day I feel like I’m running from thing to thing and doing them all badly, traffic’s terrible – don’t get me started on Highpoint and there’s so many social things to do, I’m barely overlapping with my housemates… I’m stressed out. Yesterday in my car I asked myself the question, “Where is God in this?” How can I engage with the deeper meaning of Christmas when I get swept up in the commercialness and busyness of it?
I’m going to read a poem by Peter Rollins called “In the name…” in an attempt to answer that – invite you to hold the elements and reflect on where you yourself are at at this point of the season… and where God is in the mix. Some of the language may be a bit confronting but it captures some of the missed feelings I have around this time of year and I trust that while we won’t identify with all of it, we will all identify with some of it.
The Lord be with you… and also with you.
In the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
In the name of goodness and love and broken community.
In the name of meaning and feeling and I hope you don’t screw me…
In the name of darkness and light and ungraspable twilight
In the name of meal times and sharing and caring by firelight
In the name of action and peace and human redemption
In the name of eating, and drinking and table confession
In the name of sadness, regret, and holy obsession, the holy name of anger, the spirit of aggression…
In the name of forgive and forget and I hope I get over this…
In the name of the Father, and Son and the Holy Spirit
In the name of beauty and beaten and broken down daily.
In the name of seeing our creeds and believing in maybe, we gather here, a table of strangers, and speak of our hopeland and talk of our danger…
to make sense of our thinking to authenticate lives to humanise feeling and stop telling lies.
In the name of philosophy, theology and who gives a damn?
In the name of employment and study and finding new family.
In the name of our passion, our loving and indecent obsessions
In the name of prayer and of worship and of demon possession.
In the name of solitude, and quiet and holy reflection.
In the name of the lost, and the lonely and the withered direction
In the name of efficiency, stupidity and the wholly ineffectual
In the name of the straight, the queer, transgender and bisexual
In the name of boot clogs, and boob jobs and erectile dysfunction. Schizophrenia, hysteria and obsessive compulsion.
In the name of Mary and Jesus and the mostly silent Joseph.
In the name of speaking to ourselves, saying this is more than I can cope with…
In the name of touch up and break up, and break down and weeping
In the name of therapy, and prozac and full-hearted breathing.
In the name of sadness and madness and years since I’ve smiled.
In the name of the unknown, alien and the holy in exile
In the name of goodness and kindness and intentionality.
In the name of harbor and shelter and family.
(like telling an exciting secret…)
Christ is coming!
Christ is coming!
Christ is coming!
The Lord be with you… and also with you.
Let’s eat and drink.
This week, the second of advent, we light the candle of peace. We light it knowing full well that peace is elusive, and in some parts of the world almost completely absent – but God is never absent from us. God is always preparing something new. And even where there is war and discord, whether between countries, within families or within our own hearts, God is present, leading us to new possibilities. Loving God, in this time of preparation and planning, we thank you for the hope and peace you unfailingly offer us. Show us the creative power of hope. The us the peace that comes from justice. Prepare our hearts to be transformed by You – that we might walk in Your light. Amen.
God is in the garden with the grubs and shrubs
God is in the laundry with the taps and tubs
God is in the kitchen with the pots and pans
God is in the bathroom where we wash our hands
God is in the bedroom with the lamp and bed
God is in the backyard with the bikes and shed
God is in you – and also in me
Whatever you look like, wherever you’re from
God lives within us and God’s kingdom comes
Talitha Fraser
Wonder and devastation
A magic that alters
The landscape forever
To never be the same again
Wisdom of the snow globe:
- Sometimes everything is all up in the air but eventually they settle down
- Some things change, some stay the same
- Things changing, and settling, changing and settling will happen again and again. You can rely on the rhythm but not rely on them always staying the same or always changing but the rhythm.
- Wild vs. domesticated, good to have both (not just a house or snow in a bubble but both – dynamic)
- Can’t see during the flurry but you can when they settle down, therefore wait. It’ll be ok.
I walked beside the sea today
the sea, the sea
Seeing out but looking in today
looking in, looking in
Doubt, fear, responsibility I exhaled today
I exhaled, I exhaled
I picked up a broken yet beautiful shell today
broken yet… broken yet…
and held it to my ear to listen today
to listen, to listen
and today, today I heard You
Talitha Fraser
There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression in unique.
And if you block it, it will never exists through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is: nor how valuable it is: nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.
You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate YOU.
Keep the channel open…
No artist is pleased…
There is no satisfaction whatever at any time.
There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.
~ Martha Graham
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