Living on the Border of the Holy. L. William Countryman

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СКАЧАТЬ that broke through the experiences of everyday routine, and on closer inspection (for experience is also ‘reason’ and interpretation) that seemed to be ‘news,’ news in which we nevertheless recognize the deepest of ourselves. Here the new at the same time seemed to be the ‘old familiar’ which had not yet been expressed. . . .” Edward Schillebeeckx, Church: The Human Story of God, trans. John Bowden (New York: Crossroad, 1990) 22.

      21. “. . . the Christian perception of the meaning of the offer of revelation comes about in a creative giving of meaning: in a new production of meaning or a re-reading of the Bible and the tradition of faith within constantly new situations of every kind.” Schillebeeckx, Church, 44.

      22. “Countless times nature has drawn me into itself. ... It has reminded me over and over of the wonder and beauty of life and creation, as well as its power and fragility. . . . My sense of the Holy has always been rooted deeply in my relationship with the earth. Many, and perhaps most, of my early experiences of God—and many of my later ones as well—have mingled inextricably with the earth, with nature, with the holy ground of creation.” Blomquist, “Barefoot Basics,” 8–9.

      23. “If ever humankind lived near the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and not near the tree of life, it is today. That is what Kierkegaard meant when he said that we know so much, have so much information, but have forgotten what it means to exist. It would be better to know less and to imagine more.” Harper, On Presence, 106.

      24. “. . . the mysteries of God are the ways of God in getting through to us, in opening our eyes to face reality, in bringing us to faith, and hope, and love. . . . We can neither claim nor master these mysteries. They can only claim and master us.” Morse, Not Every Spirit, 43.

      25. It may be that such perfection is not to be desired. The sculptor Stephen De Staebler has pointed out the value of our incompleteness: “It helps bridge the gulf when the other person or the image in the art is less complete. . . . We are who we are not so much because of what we have or are endowed with but because of what we are not endowed with.” Quoted by Doug Adams, “De Staebler Winged Figure Installed at G.T.U. Library,” Arts 6/3 (Summer 1994): 4. This is, in a sense, the negative statement of Paul’s doctrine of gifts; we are defined not only by the gifts we receive from the SPIRIT, but by those we do not receive directly and must therefore depend on our neighbor for.

      26. There is a significant irony in the Gospel of Mark that alludes to this reality. Jesus tells the disciples, “To you the mystery of GOD’S kingdom is given, but for those people outside, all things turn out to be in riddles” (Mark 4:11). Yet from this point onward in Mark’s Gospel, the disciples never really get anything right, and the moments of true insight all come to outsiders.

      27. “Although there are many experiences of meaning in human life, nevertheless it is above all experiences of meaninglessness, of injustice and of innocent suffering that have a revelatory significance par excellence. . . . The authority of experiences therefore culminates in human stories of suffering.” Schillebeeckx, Church, 28.

      28. Kenneth Leech, Soul Friends: The Practice of Christian Spirituality (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1977); Henri Nouwen, The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972).

      29. “To experience oneself as a human being is to feel life moving through one and claiming one as a part of it. It is like the moment of insight into a new idea or an aspect of truth. What initially is grasped by the mind and held there for meaning begins slowly or suddenly to hold the mind as if the mind itself is being thought by a vaster and greater Mind. It is like the thing that happens when you are trying to explain something to a child and you finally succeed in doing so. Then the child says, ‘I see.’ In that moment you are no longer there in fact. The barrier that stood between the child’s comprehension of the idea and the idea itself has been removed. There is a flowing together, as if the child and the idea were alone in all the universe!” Howard Thurman, The Luminous Darkness: A Personal Interpretation of the Anatomy of Segregation and the Ground of Hope (New York: Harper & Row, 1965) 98.

      30. On the extraordinary depth of priesthood that AIDS has often elicited from those whom it effects, directly or through their loved ones, see Richard P. Hardy, Knowing the God of Compassion: Spirituality and Persons Living with AIDS (Ottawa: Novalis, 1993).

      31. Traherne, Centuries 3.1–5; Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” The priesthood of children is often difficult for adults to accept. Robert Coles tells us of his own irritation when Anna Freud said to him, “Let the children help you with their ideas on the subject”: “At the time, I was rather put off—I thought she was telling me that close attention to boys and girls as they talked about religious issues would bring me closer to the way my own thinking, some of it childish, made use of religious interests. But years later, as I looked back . . ., I realized that she meant precisely what she said; she had in mind no condescension or accusation of psychopathology.” The Spiritual Life of Children (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990) xvi.

      32. “If. . . the terror, the loss and the fear of the unknown abyss is too much, we will retreat from the edge. . . . Our fear and our terror will set like wet cement and we will become increasingly rigid. We then move from being quarrelsome, annoying, and irritating toward becoming theological and religious bullies. . . . [T]he rigidity is not primarily motivated by the desire to control other people; rather, it is primarily motivated by the desire to control God. ...” Michael Dwinell, Fire Bearer: Evoking a Priestly Humanity (Liguori, Mo.: Triumph Books, 1993) 162–63.

      33. This lust can infect communities and institutions as well as individuals. “It is only because we are so accustomed to this—taking churches for granted, even when we reject them—that we do not see how odd they really are: how curious it is that men do not set up exclusive and mutually hostile clubs full of rules and regulations to enjoy the light of the sun in particular times and fashions, but do persistently set up such exclusive clubs full of rules and regulations, so to enjoy the free Spirit of God.” Underhill, The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today, 116.

      34. Simone Weil, Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: Putnam, 1951) 54.

      35. “. . . all of the demonic claims against human life have a common denominator. Typically, each and every stratagem of the principalities seeks the death of the specific faculties of rational and moral comprehension which distinguish human beings from all other creatures. Whatever form or appearance it takes, demonic aggression always aims at the immobilization or surrender or destruction of the mind and at the neutralization or abandonment or demoralization of the conscience. In the Fall, the purpose and effort of every principality is the dehumanization of human life, categorically.” William Stringfellow, “Resisting Babel: Preserving Sanity and Conscience” (excerpt from An Ethic for Christians and Other Aliens in a Strange Land [1973]), The Witness 78/9 (September 1995): 16.

      36. Some advocates of slavery argued that it was GOD’S providence for the conversion and gradual perfection of Africans. I have, for example, a rebuttal to such arguments by Cornelius H. Edgar, The Curse of Canaan Rightly Interpreted, and Kindred Topics (New York: Baker & Godwin, 1862) 33–40. For a good survey of Christian polemics about slavery and their use of scripture, see Willard M. Swartley, Slavery, Sabbath, War, and Women: Case Issues in Biblical Interpretation (Scottsdale, Pa., and Waterloo, Ont.: Herald Press, 1983) 31–64. Peter J. Gomes identifies the “culturist” element in the use of scripture texts to support slavery and other forms of racism in The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart (New York: William Morrow, 1996) 46–51, 85–101. The same basic points hold true for the use of scripture to justify the European-American conquest of the North American continent.

      37. The “names,” of course, СКАЧАТЬ