Sunday Dialogue CII

Journer: Do you think we need a new Reformation?

Nez: My student* said, “reformation is a permanent movement.”

Journer: But why not a new set of 95 theses on a symbolic church door somewhere, like in Vatican City?

Nez: Reforming spirit is hammering on every door of creation every day.

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* H. Richard Niebuhr, “Reformation: Continuing Imperative,” Christian Century 77 (1960): 250, via Lonnie Kliever

image: "The Power of Spirit: and Its Relationship to the World of All Living Things," by Tadashi Hayakawa http://tinyurl.com/45pgqs

Emerging Paradigm

There is a way of seeing Christianity that makes persuasive and compelling sense of life in the broadest sense – a way of seeing reality and our lives in relationship to what is real.... [This] “emerging paradigm” has been developing for over a hundred years. ~Marcus Borg, The Heart of Christianity, pp. xi-xii

Borg and a host of others have been on a mission to present the heart of reality, from their faith perspective, in our worldview so that we can respond with our full being, including our intellect. ~jpc

We no longer have any excuses. Namaste.

image: Jenny Holzer http://tinyurl.com/45a2pq

Beyond the Symbols

Joseph [Campbell] taught me to see beyond the symbols to the riches they represent. Those who cannot see beyond the symbols, he remarked, are “like diners going into a restaurant and eating the menu,” rather than the meal it describes. ~Diane K. Osbon, introduction to Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion, p. 9

My mentor threw the Bible on the chapel floor to make his point: that book is a symbol, not the feast. ~jpc

We cherish the symbols, but, ever so much more, the truth they point to. Namaste.

image: "Eating the Menu," by Richard Cody www.flickr.com/photos/rcody/159769674/

Strong as Its Spirit

[This dug up Torah from a grave at Auschwitz] is a very concrete, tactile ... remembrance – of what people, some of whom [Nazis] did it in the name of Christ, did to people who were Jewish.... [This restored holy book] enables us to be prepared to prevent that from happening again.... The Nazis really thought they had wiped Jews off the face of the earth, and Judaism. Here we are taking the ultimate symbol of hope and of Judaism and rededicating it.... And we’ll take it to Auschwitz. You can’t beat that. ~a Lutheran Pastor and Jewish Rabbi speaking in “From Auschwitz, a Torah as Strong as Its Spirit,” by James Barron, nytimes.com, 4/30/08

Symbols for a new future, born out of evil from the past, raise consciousness. ~jpc

Let us never forget. We rededicate ourselves to living and let live. Namaste.

image: Running with the Sefer Torah http://tinyurl.com/4qlcls

Me Is We

One can accurately speak of the “autonomy” of an individual only by incorporating a sense of the dynamic web of relationships that are constitutive for that being at a given moment. ~Charlene Spretnak http://www.realitysandwich.com/next_buddha_will_be_a_collective (meaty), via Bill Salmon

The “Lone Cowboy sense of autonomy” is out, according to Spretnak. We are a “dynamic web of relationships.” We are our relationships. “Me” is “We.” ~jpc

“We” is not only the emerging trend but is eternal reality. Namaste.

image http://tinyurl.com/5xsr6e

At Least One Adult

If a child is to keep alive his [sic] inborn sense of wonder..., he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement, and mystery of the world we live in.... [I]t is not half so important to know as to feel. If facts are the seed that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow. ~Rachel Carson, A Sense of Wonder, pp. 55-6

What child/children am I keeping alive? Namaste.

image: "Good Father" photo by Rarindra Prakarsa (Jakarta) http://tinyurl.com/46ad69

Presence of God

When young people today are appalled upon learning the young women and children are being “traffick-ed” in modern sexual and economic slavery, or that death has become a social disease in this world because of grotesquely unequal access to health care and life-saving drugs, or that their favorite shoes and outfits were made in oppressive sweatshops, or that the equivalent of the Asian tsunami death toll happens in Africa every month, or that class and race and gender still determine one’s share of life even in America – when they learn of these things and are appalled, it shows that God is still alive in them. ~Jim Wallis, The Great Awakening, p. 60, via Karen Bueno

The strange presence of God often appears when we cry over the injustice in our world. ~jpc

Injustice is always calling. Namaste.

image: "The Agony of Gaia" billboard, Frankfort, by Jeff Chapman-Crane (photographed by James Archambeault) http://tinyurl.com/3j2zsa (look closely)