What would help free you to be run by the Chef’s delight in you?
A restaurant customer’s pleasure in a meal completes the Chef’s delight. The Chef and the customer are yoked together in a holonic relationship. The restaurant is a holon, which is a whole that’s composed of distinct entities. For example, a molecule contains atoms; a corporation has departments; a diocese consists of parishes; the chef’s restaurant serves diners; God’s creation includes human creatures.
We never can lose our existence in God Who incorporates our lives within God’s Divine life, but we can act as if that relationship were not present or never existed. When there is no awareness of a holonic relationship with God, then the social other’s denial of God drives our lives. And yet, even as the social other’s claims deny God, we still acknowledge our holonic relationship with God in worship and, at times, we proclaim that relationship intentionally, spontaneously or perhaps just serendipitously.
I think of the cross as a symbol of the holonic relationship between God and humanity. We reach out to our brothers and sisters in the cross’s two arms. The vertical trunk signifies God’s indwelling presence. We are free to respond to God’s indwelling presence allowing God to inform our lives. And yet, to reconcile our holonic relationship with God who wants to illuminate our daily routines remains the challenge of living and loving. Jesus, the Forgiving Victim, in His human existence, both revealed and met this problem of life and love.
What I learn here at Forgiving Victim helps me to balance the quotidian with the invisible indwelling immediacy of God’s presence. Forgiving Victim helps me understand the notion of God’s inaccessible all-powerfulness, which James describes as the weak presence of God’s great power. Forgiving Victim provides the knowledge to navigate the holonic relationship between God and humanity, between God and me. And so to relax into God’s ever loving arms.
I rewrote the last paragraph in the comments I posted last week to reflect more clearly my understanding of the relationship of one’s life with the Forgiving Victim, the Other-other:
But, now comes the Forgiving Victim, one day – every day, to ‘warm our palates,’ to illuminate the Other-other’s life that is life, to clean away the social other dust that continually settles into daily life. As children, we felt Christ’s cleaning hand, but as adults, that feeling faded. Nevertheless, Jesus remained, wiping away the dust of the decades to reveal God’s constant message of creative love, which God wrote at birth on the hearts of each and every one of us.