72 Rules

+Rowan Williams said in his talk on Benedictine spirituality.

The holy person is not simply the one who keeps the commandments with which the catalogue of tools (referring to the 72 tools in chapter 4 of the Rule) for good works begins, but he who struggles to live without deceit, their inner life manifest to guides and spiritual parents, who makes peace by addressing the roots of conflict in him or herself, and, under the direction of a skilled superior, attempts to contribute their distinctive gifts in such a way as to sustain a healthy 'circulation' in the community.

Judgement of Work done

The quote below from Thomas Merton below goes well with another from Dan at PoserorProphet where he quotes a letter he received from the theologian Moltmann to the effect, "I do not judge my self" (referring to his own work)

"It is useless to try to make peace with ourselves by being pleased with
everything we have done. In order to settle down in the quiet of our own being
we must learn to be detached from the results of our own activity. We must
withdraw ourselves, to some extent, from the effects that are beyond our control
and be content with the good will and the work that are the quiet expression of
our inner life. We must be content to live without watching ourselves live, to
work without expecting any immediate reward, to love without an instantaneous
satisfaction, and to exist without any special recognition. "
Source: No Man Is an Island

(thanks to inward/outward for the quote)

Sanctification or the price of aging

(thank you John Camp. Read the whole quote here)

Gerhard Forde on Sanctification:
from "Christian Spirituality"--(pp. 31-32)

.. Well, maybe it seems as though I sin less, but that may only be because
I'm getting tired! It's just too hard to keep indulging the lusts of youth. Is
that sanctification? I wouldn't think so! One should not, I expect, mistake
encroaching senility for sanctification! "But can it be, perhaps, that it is
precisely the unconditional gift of grace that helps me to see and admit all
that? I hope so. The grace of God should lead us to see the truth about
ourselves, and to gain a certain lucidity, a certain humor, a certain
down-to-earthness."

I can really understand this, especially since August 2006 when suddenly I had an M.I.

Ellul on the future

Halden has a great quote from Jacques Ellul about how when a revolutionary judges today's situation, it is done with a truth -- a truth that is obviously only in the mind and is potentially possible in the future.

This means that the future truth is invading into the present trying to dominate it by judging itand make us believe that the future truth is more important than the present.

This is a subject that I've read many things about from Dr. Myers and others on the web but I could not understand.

How many gaps do I have in my knowledge

There Are 1 Gaps in Your Knowledge

Where you have gaps in your knowledge: Art Where you don't have gaps in your knowledge: Philosophy Religion Economics Literature History Science

Do You Have Gaps in Your Knowledge

So there you know my weakness

How much will you give to save yourself and how much to save your neighbour

Andrew Leonard of "How the world Works" says that the amount of money given in aid by the whole world is paltry compared to how much the US government is are willing to lend GM to buy the almost worthless Chrysler.

At the same time is the whole system collapsed he says that even worse things would happen to the poor. Still given a problem to the economy we spend huge sums of otherwise unobtainable money.

Can I do this on my own. How much should be my financial safety net? Is that even the right question. ... (I wish I could say see my upcoming post in which I will provide a neat insight and solve this painful issue.)

Strength in Weakness

I finally grasped a central principle of holy folly: strength in weakness. God’s power flows into and then gushes out of human vulnerability. It’s the principle of engaging our brokenness, running into it rather than fleeing it our denying it, but then finding true strength–God’s strength–smack in the middle of our brokenness.

Holy Fools: Following Jesus with Reckless Abandon by Matthew Woodley

(H.T. to PoserorProphet )

Immanent Frame - what is it?

1. "...Charles Taylor describes our modern 'secular age' as one existing in an Immanent Frame. That is, over the last 500 years we have moved from an 'enchanted' age, with its gods, demons, spirits, and magic, to our modern, scientific 'disenchanted' age. A two-dimensinal plane of existence with a horizontal human dimension and a transcendent vertical dimension has now been reduced to the flat, horizontal line. The only minds, meanings, concerns, goals, purposes, and values are human ones. Beyond us, there is nothing."

2. "... Charles Taylor discusses the "malaise of modernity." That is, with the collapse of the transcendent, spiritual dimension secular persons face various challenges that our forbears did not face in bygone "enchanted" eras. Taylor notes that in the secular age, due to the flatness of the Immanent Frame, where no meaning is to be found outside of human strivings, we find meaning fragile. That is, if there is nothing deeper or above us, spiritually speaking, we struggle to find our projects of lasting value, meaning, and significance. We live and die and are forgotten. This realization continually threatens our psychological equilibrium in the secular age. Existential crises are common and ubiquitous. In the Immanent Frame we are constantly asking, "What's the point?" Work, work, work to get the gold watch? Is that the goal of human life? If there is nothing transcendent and lasting beyond me and beyond death then why not collect toys and distract myself with entertainments? These nagging questions are symptoms of the malaise of modernity. Meaning is hard to secure and protect in the secular age "

3. William James in his book The Varieties of Religious Experience:

"What keeps religion going is something else than abstract definitions and systems of logically concatenated adjectives, and something different from faculties of theology and their professors. All these [abstract] things are after-effects, secondary accretions upon a mass of concrete religious experiences."

"These direct experiences of a wider spiritual life...form the primary mass of religious experience on which all hearsay religion rests, and which furnishes that notion of an ever-present God, out of which systematic theology thereupon proceeds to make capital in its own unreal pedantic way." "The mother sea and fountian-head of all religion lies in the mystical experiences of the individual, taking the word mystical in a very wide sense. All theologies, and all ecclesiasticisms are secondary growths superimposed."


(h.t. to Experimental Theology the whole article is based on a theology of Calvin and Hobbes)

Why history is a lot more interesting than I thought

I read something new at Faith and Theology here . Since Dr. Myers and Archbishop Rowan Williams and the famous historian Quentin Skinner all say this, there probably is something true in it. What they say is that we should not judge history from today's perspective. Like separating bran from wheat. This is because doing so would mean that we claim to have the ultimate clarity in knowing things - which certainly isn't true. So what we can gain from history is to try and see how it was that people at that time could hold something we absolutely hate or absolutely take for granted as true today.

Only by sympathetically getting into the "epistemic rationality" of that day can we learn from history.

Judge ye not

from the wise Dr. Ben Myers here (talking about a method of learning from the thoughts of great men of the past ):

.. If we learn from the past by distinguishing the timeless “perennial core” from the nonessential (i.e. flawed) elements, then we’re acting as though our own commitments are the final arbiter of history — we’re assuming that history has found its goal in us. And one of the unfortunate side-effects of this approach is that we’re no longer in a position to be critiqued by history. ...

The thing I can't understand is the side effect thing. May be what we choose to understand as the perennial elements are not correct and thus open us to critique ?

Vengeance is not yours

from Exclusion and Embrace, Miroslav Volf

“My thesis that the practice of nonviolence requires a belief in divine vengeance will be unpopular with many Christians, especially theologian in the West. To the person who is inclined to dismiss it, I suggest imagining that you are delivering a lecture in a war zone (which is where a paper that underlies this chapter was originally delivered). Among your listeners are people whose cities and villages have been first plundered, then burned and leveled to the ground, whose daughters and sisters have been raped, whose fathers and brothers have had their throats slit. The topic of the lecture: a Christian attitude toward violence. The thesis: we should not retaliate since God is perfect noncoercive love. Soon you would discover that it takes the quiet of a suburban home for the birth of the thesis that human nonviolence corresponds to God’s refusal to judge. In a scorched land, soaked in the blood of the innocent, it will invariably die. And as one watches it die, one will do well to reflect about many other pleasant captivities of the liberal mind. (p. 304)"

Quoted from here. My feeling is that our word vengeance has a history that is human so we picture it one way. The very presence of God is trembling and fear for those who believe (Moses?) so how much more painful for those who cannot or will not believe.

Why God is not Top Gun

Here we have Halden on why God is not like us only much much bigger :

The only god we could ever “act directly on behalf of” is precisely that, “a god,” an inhabitant of the universe, a “top person” who legitimated our activities. The God of the Christian confession is not a top-person, a mere existent whom we could claim to represent directly. Rather God is the reason there is anything at all, the source of all being, and as such lies beyond our ability to directly mediate or claim. McCabe notes that most atheists think of the question of God as though religious people “claim to have discovered what the answer is, that there is some grand architect of the universe who designed it, ..... that there is a Top Person in the universe who issues arbitrary decrees for the rest of the persons and enforces them because he is the most powerful being around. Now if denying this claim makes you an atheist, then I and Thomas Aquinas and a whole Christian tradition are atheist too” (God Matters, 7). Only if God is some sort of existent, a “top person” who issues arbitrary decrees could we conceptualize God as the justification for acts of violence. And this is not the God of the Christian faith.

Yippy Yae! Halden and McCabe.