Archive | June, 2011

The world is full of praise

by on June 20, 2011

A word on praise and prayer from Moltmann’s The Source of Life:

The world is full of praise, for God is in this world. God is not far off, in the Beyond, but is himself the life in the world. Israel expresses this by saying that God’s Spirit, God’s Wisdom and God’s presence fill everything created in such a way that all things live from God and have their existence and continuance in God…So nothing is so far from God that it does not hold God ‘within itself’, as Aquinas said, and God is so cose to all things that, together with human beings, in him ‘they live and move and have their being’ (Acts 17.28).

It is only for modern men and women that the world has become dumb, for it has now come to be seen merely as material for research and technology. The modern world for its part has led to what Rachel Carson called ‘the silent spring’, and has turned the song of praise of living creation into the stillness of the dead and ravaged world. But the world is not mute. All creatures speak, even if human beings can no longer hear them. All creatures are aflame with the present glory of the Lord, and reflect his glory in a thousand different mirrors, but ‘we are blind, we have no eyes’ said Calvin, as did Francis of Assisi.

People who thank God every morning for the new day in their lives, people who praise God through their delight in existence and glorify him through their love for life, are not doing something singular. They are only doing what all creatures do, universally and unceasingly, each in its own way. With the lives they live these people are joining with cosmic resonance of God’s goodness and beauty. To pray like this means to wake up out of the mute world of modernity and turn back to the cosmic solidarity of all created being.

 

I love this description of prayer as waking up to the presence of God in the world, and how that inevitably leads us to a feeling of solidarity with all of creation, beloved as we all are by God our Creator.  For so many people prayer is duty, obligation, even punishment for past wrongs, while it is meant to be an act which awakens your heart to God in all fullness.

I also appreciate Moltmann’s criticism of our often haughty approach to the world, treating it as some sort of pet project on which we’re calling the shots. We have made the world dumb because we so desperately want to feel smart.  But there is wisdom in our return to a cooperative understanding of life, where we work in and with creation (and our fellow human beings), joining the “cosmic resonance of God’s goodness and beauty.”  To pray, to live in the life of God’s Spirit, is to be awakened to this fullness and humbled by the ways we’ve attempted to silence it.

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Pentecost as Movement Metaphor

by on June 13, 2011

1997-2020 Copyright Lebanon sacred art

Happy Moltmann Monday!  Happy Pentecost!  (Could there be a better duet?!)  In honor of my favorite Christian holiday, today’s excerpt comes from The Spirit of Life p. 278ff:

The early Christian experience of Pentecost is presented with metaphors about the rushing of a great wind, and a flaming fire…I am calling these metaphors movement metaphors because they express the feeling of being seized and possessed by something overwhelmingly powerful, and the beginning of a new movement in ourselves. They describe a movement that sweeps people off their feet, which possesses and excites not only the conscious levels but the unconscious depths too, and sets the men and women affected themselves on the move towards unsuspected new things. Deeply moved, we ourselves move, and go out of ourselves. The primal image is the Pentecost story, which tells how the experience of the Spirit turns a crowd of Jesus’ intimidated disciples into free witnesses to Jesus Christ, apostles of the gospel who carry the tidings ‘to the ends of the earth’ (Acts 1:8). I am relating the movement metaphors of tempest and fire to the experience of the life-affirming, life-giving love of God–that is, to the presence of the Holy Spirit.

Last night at Journey I was trying to briefly summarize (again) why I love Pentecost so very, very much.  I should have just read this paragraph, because as usual, Moltmann says exactly what I want to say, exactly how I feel it to be true in the depths of my being, but far better than I ever could.

Pentecost is my kind of holiday because it’s a day that not only allows but practically requires you to respond in celebration,  affirming how and where you and all of creation are wildly and passionately ALIVE.  An event as powerful as Pentecost beckons us to respond, and to respond with GUSTO:  ALL CAPS GUSTO.  Moltmann’s words capture this spirit of gusto and celebration and response perfectly. The rushing wind, the tongues of fire, these are metaphors that MOVE us.  These were actions that moved the disciples from inside their locked room into the public streets of Jerusalem.  Here they were, staring at the wall waiting for the next bout of instructions, when all of a sudden, Pentecost happens, and before they know it it’s noisy and chaotic and unifying and beautiful.  In those moments, they become the church. They become sent people, people who have been deeply moved and who now only can respond by moving out, seized as they are by this zest for life, this passionate fire.  What does it mean to live by the Spirit?  It means to feel that life-affirming, life-giving love of God like an overwhelmingly powerful wind in your gut, moving you to something unexpected and new.

 

Image note:  ”Descent of the Holy Spirit” by Joseph Matar, a Lebanese poet/artist.  OBVIOUSLY, this combination required me to purchase one.

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Symmetry in Creation

by on June 6, 2011

I’m on a quantum physics kick these days, so here’s an apt Moltmann Monday quote about creation, particles, and the fundamental unity of nature from The Way of Jesus Christ (p. 288):

If all things are created by God, then a transcendent unity precedes their diversity and their historicity. It is not a matter of many worlds belonging to many gods or powers. This is the one creation of the one God. If all things are created by the one God through his Wisdom/Logos and are held together in that, then underlying their diversity in space and time is an immanent unity in which they exist all together. Their unity does not come into being in a subsequent process, emerging from their relationships and the warp and weft into which they are bound. All things have their genesis in a fundamental underlying unity, which is called God’s Wisdom, Spirit or Word…If God withdraws this foundation, all things disintegrate and become a nothingness. If God lends it fresh force, their forms are renewed (Ps. 104.29f). The Jewish and Christian doctrines about Wisdom or the Logos as mediator in creation are in direct contradiction to the atomism of Democritus. The beginning was not the particles. The beginning was the symmetry, the concord. “The elementary particles embody the symmetries. They are its simplest representations, but they are merely a result of the symmetries. Jewish and Christian doctrines of creation have therefore always maintained the idea of ‘the unity of nature.’

 

Creation begun, founded, grounded in symmetry and concord. I like that.

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Zombies- One Last Time

by on June 2, 2011

 

My last article about our zombie series, entitled “Just In Time for the End of the World”  is up at Patheos.  In it I talk about cardio, exit strategies, and Twinkies.  Go check it out if you’re interested.

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