Theopoetics. Phillip Michael Garner

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      Blindness

      A visionless soul cannot imagine beyond the status quo. It is to this condition that Jesus applied the word blindness. The healing of this blindness results in the witness of an uncompromising life; in a person who lives the vision of an alternate reality; this is Jesus› reality, it is born of God. For this reason Christianity is more than dogma, more than reason, more than words, it is a way of living.

      It is not a better argument that changes the world; it is a better life, a life marked by a power that can only be termed Spirit. A better argument is not effective because words are like spirit; they are invisible to the blind. This truth would prompt Jesus to make statements like, “Come and see” and “Follow me”.

      When the gospel is understood in all the fullness of its message and meaning it makes sense of reality. For this reason, communal movements toward the utopian, the ideal, the reign of God can embody a better argument for how humanity is to live, and how the world will be governed. However those arguments press against the power of normalized structures established by culture and the state.

      The loss of order is a fear that holds each individual back from embracing their power as creators of reality.

      People are in need of order, yet they should fear ordering the world offered by mandates of institutional or legal power because regulations stagnate, they limit damage but do not exemplify Spirit. Of course Jesus, through his life, taught his followers to tolerate the powers of government and taxation so that they could embody a greater power; the reign of God in humanity.

      Those people who acquire the most also fear the most. It is not God who they fear, but suffering. They ignore the poor and suffering because without faith, suffering is meaningless and personal or national security becomes their god. To ignore the suffering of the poor is to live unethically and defy the voice of morality that comes from God. The attempt to provide meaning through acquisition, through self-empowerment, is to avoid experiencing the meaningless of a life without faith. Such an effort is self-deification and ignores the connectedness of each person with one another and with creation. It is the birthplace of desire and it is natural to human beings. Only when we become spirit and open our eyes to reality can we overcome desire.

      This misguided effort to become meaningful is impotent because of mortality, bringing the eternal into the temporal through acts of love is to bring God into the world and such echoes into eternity. Human beings cannot escape suffering, they either harden their hearts to it, or recognize that suffering has meaning because God is watching, because God cares about how we live in relation to one another. Ultimately we do not possess life in ourselves; life is a gift from God.

      Blindness is healed when eyes are opened. Love is the healing salve that mediates healing to the fearful; everyone is afraid and everyone wants to be loved. Love is irrational, love is self-sacrificing, love is not selfish and offers mercy to all. The love of God flows through a life, a person, whose belief in the goodness of God is supported by a conviction that opens the heart of the blind who long to see.

      Face to Face

      Standing in Heaven

      He needed me

      When I found him he was crushed by the weight of reality

      His irreducible love, his indomitable hope, had led him to the precipice of the lost

      He invited me to come

      He had passed through death’s portal and never relinquished the burden he carried

      “Follow me” I heard him say

      I chose to come and see

      My questions were outweighed by his call, by his way of living

      A power gripped my soul and held me captive to a dream

      I’m standing in heaven

      I chose to continually remain waiting letting others pass ahead

      There was one who stood with me

      I beheld him face to face

      For we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face For now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love

      First Cor 13:12-13

      Facing God

      To stand face to face with another is the defining encounter for knowing, for experiencing the spiritual dynamics of relationship. Face to face there is the potential for intimacy, when eyes speak and the intricate movements of the face communicate, when words are defined by inflections in the voice, and body language incorporates the entire person. Face to face is the call to embrace the person of the other who bears the image of God.

      Beholding another face to face is a place of equality; if it is not then the encounter is not face to face. Without equality the dynamics of the encounter are disrupted by powers that separate one from another. Vulnerability is the essential openness for insuring a truly face to face experience with another. In the man Jesus we can see God face to face, it is in the Lord Jesus Christ that we see God join the creation to experience living as a human being. His continuing existence as a human being is where the one who is uniquely Son of God lifts us to learn how to find the invisible, ineffable, God in the human family.

      Through the use of poetry, Paul the apostle expressed belief in a time of human and divine encounter when the vulnerability of humanity before the Lord is matched with the vulnerability of God. God’s vulnerability is an irreducible love, a love that enters the depths of creaturely difference to lift us up from the earth (ground) to become children of God.

      Humanity’s perception of the voice of God will have moved from prohibition to ‘God our Father’.

      There is no exchange or loss of power, rather there is the knowing of God as the divine lover, the relational redeeming creator who makes inviolable promises to his creatures; the surety of life resident in the source of life, the one God. This knowing eradicates the creature’s desire for surpassing the limits of knowing, a limit placed upon us as like, but other than, God.

      This moment is the kiss of marriage, the intimacy of humanity incorporated into the Spirit of God. In Christ, humanity learns to live and not reach for fruit beyond the limits of the creature’s existence, an existence defined by the wisdom of God. The inward voice of human intellect seeking to explore regions beyond the structures of reality will turn from the prohibited tree and see innumerable trees in the garden of life, each rich with the fruit of life.

      Beholding the Lord, the lowly man, the exalted Christ, the patience of eternity calling us ever forward into life, is not a single moment but a constant reality, a spiritual revelation as we are held in the being (Spirit) of God. Hiding and absence are words no longer descriptive of the divine-human relationship. We will know the Lord; all of us, and hierarchical structures of relationship will fade into harmonious creativity.

      In Jesus Christ the Lord, part СКАЧАТЬ