Oct 5th, 2016 by Kwong Yee
information is not necessarily transformation
- “Overexplanation separates us from astonishment” — Eugene Ionesco
- “The world can pigeonhole any idea,” he said. They are easily discounted and “dodged”
- When God appeared on the scene, it was not felt to be good news by most people; it was bad news. The sense was, “Who has to die now? Who’s going to be punished now? What is the price I will have to pay for this?”
- In most ancient religions, God was felt to be ‘controllable’ through human sacrifice, found on all continents
- “God is not only stranger than we think but stranger than we can think.” God is not bad news but, in fact, overwhelmingly comforting and good news.
- But the genius of the biblical revelation is that it doesn’t just give us the conclusions; it gives us (1) the process of getting there, and (2) the inner and outer authority to trust that process
- This is what you cannot discern if you have no inner experience of how God works in your own life!
- two alternating mediocrities in the interpretation of Scripture
- hackneyed moralisms and pieties of those who have never studied the historical and authropological setting in which it was first set (the conservative temptation)
- the narrow historical, critical interpretation of those who have no had any real God experience (the progressive temptation). It’s the usually “enlightened” formulas of those who have no inner experience to awaken the reality of the spiritual world
- God always and forever comes as one who is totally hidden and yet perfectly revealed in the same moment or event
- The Bible moves us from sacred place or sacred action or mental belief systems to time itself as sacred time
- It is time itself, and patience with it, which reveals the patterns of grace
- incorporation of negative and self-critical thinking
- Our temptation now and always is not to trust in God but to trust in our faith tradition of trusting in God
- It is amazing how religion has turned this biblical idea of faith around to mean its exact opposite: into a tradition of certain knowing, presumed predictability and complete assurance about whom God likes and whom God does not like. I guess we think we have God in our pocket
- the cosmic egg
- in many parts of the world where people have no time, or even no vocabulary, for their private or personal story. Their only identity is the identity of the group. This, of course, becomes scary because such groups are highly malleable and very subject to fear and violence from supposed threats to their group
- The New Age temptation, and the sophisticated liberal temptation, is to live only in the first dome of meaning, in the realm of my private experience
- More conservative, traditional people tend to get ost in the second dome of meaning: group loyalty, group identity
- There is no specifically Catholic way to feed the hungry or to steward the earth. Love is love, even if the motivation might be different
- If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it
Posted in Books
