-
Posts
-
-
4.4 The portal and the embassy
James is using a series of images to demonstrate that Church life involves undergoing a huge shift in perspective. Sometimes travel to a foreign country can give us an entirely new perspective on our culture. And sometimes having a foreign guest in our house can allow us to see ourselves through their eyes.
Receiving a new story
Share ways in which you have noticed the content, questions or insights from the previous Module showing up in your lives.
Paradigm shift
Answer the following questions:
- If you immigrated to your country as an adult, please describe what seemed strange about the customs you encountered when you first arrived.
- Have you ever had a guest from another country stay in your home? What things that were part of your daily life did they find difficult to understand?
- Have you ever discovered a new perspective on your life while travelling?
Food for thought
- In what ways are you imprisoned by a fear of death?
- How does the unheard voice of a shamefully executed criminal free you from that fear?
- James says: “It turns out that the portal that has opened up has never had any intention of taking any of us ‘elsewhere’. It turns out that the only ‘elsewhere’ is here.
- What is the “elsewhere” being referred to?
- Could the prayer Jesus taught us, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in heaven,” be a prayer for the opening of the portal?
- If so, how does that change our pattern of desires towards “here”?
- Could the prayer Jesus taught us, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in heaven,” be a prayer for the opening of the portal?
- What is the “elsewhere” being referred to?
Wrap-up question
What parts of life in “prison” do you find comforting? In what ways might your longing for the stability of the familiar prevent you from experiencing the new reality that is opening up?
-
4.4 In the Discussion Forum of this unit, share ways in which you have noticed the content, questions or insights from the previous session showing up in your lives
“What is baptism?” Discussion around this topic absorbed about half of last Sunday’s book study in the hour between the eight and ten o’clock services at our small Episcopal parish. This fall we’re studying: ‘Born of Water, Born of Spirit: Supporting the Ministry of the Baptized in Small Congregations,’ by Sheryl A. Kujawa-Holbrook and Fredrica Harris-Thompsett. http://amzn.to/2eFvkR1
Most of our group of seven thought of baptism as an event, something that happens to an infant, not an ongoing life experience akin to the shift from being formed primarily by the social other to being reborn into the leading of the Other other.
A lifelong process where at times the Spirit may drag us ‘through a bush backward,’ as James has written. Or, on other occasions, the Spirit may flood our senses with the beauty of the world ‘Just Now,’ or with a sense of our bond to those we are encountering ‘Just Now.’ For me, both experiences testify to the Spirit’s baptizing presence – yesterday, today and tomorrow.
It’s hard to share ideas like those in the above paragraphs in a fifty-minute book study. I tried not to be pedantic by using the image of a drop of black ink infusing a glass of clear water. The ink drop falls into the water. Initially, the dark ink contrasts sharply with its clear surroundings. Soon, however, the ink spreads throughout the glass transferring its tincture into all of the water.
The sacrament of baptism corresponds to the drop of ink hitting the water in the glass, which represents a person’s life. It takes a lifetime for the ink to permeate the whole glass – to suffuse all of the life’s experience. The analogy agrees with the Other other’s atoning movement toward humanity in the ardent desire of infusing all of our personal choices and all of our life’s comportment.
-
That is a wonderful description of baptism Rich. It is rather like James’s thinking on baptism expressed in different words as “Like a portal from another universe, ……….What’s odd is that the portal that has opened up looks remarkably like a dead criminal, executed under shameful circumstances. It seems more like a failure than a rich act of communication. At first the portal feels like an invasion, and then like a “prison break?in”. Slowly we become aware that a prison with a hole in it is no longer a prison. Some may prefer the stability of inside, but the fact is that the entire system has been altered. What used to be a closed system which didn’t even know it was closed, turns out instead to be a satellite reality dependent on a huge and massively healthy “outside” whose existence had not previously been suspected.”
-
-
Have you ever discovered a new perspective on your life while traveling?
Traveling has always been instructive for me. Dependable shortcuts making daily life easier are gone. What typically are easy tasks at home can become new and sometimes painful jobs on the road. I find that mundane travel difficulties can present fertile environments for innovation. For example, four of us, two couples, took a month-long driving trip in France in 1986 where quickly we had to learn a system for dividing up common costs. When similar occasions arise today, I still use the system we developed so long ago in our gite (house) in Villandry, France.
One of us on that trip, Michele, was born and raised in Angouleme before she emigrated to the U.S. around 1948. Michele interpreted both language and customs for the rest of our group, and we had a lot to learn! For example, early in the trip, we stayed in Tours. One evening, when I tried to shew a dog out of a restaurant, Michele very quickly corrected me, not the dog! French people welcome dogs in their restaurants. Since I love dogs, this French custom was a very pleasant surprise indeed.
-
Yes, travel so often is “walking a mile in another’s shoes”. We come to realise that our point of view or way of seeing things is not necessarily correct, and is perhaps actually really limited. James tells us how rewarding it can be …. ” using a series of images to demonstrate that Church life involves undergoing a huge shift in perspective. Sometimes travel to a foreign country can give us an entirely new perspective on our culture. And sometimes having a foreign guest in our house can allow us to see ourselves through their eyes.”
-
-
How does [the Our Father] change our pattern of desires towards “here?”
The just past Thanksgiving holiday preempted my Forgiving Victim study habits. Almost forty members of our extended family gathered for two days in late November at our Iowa country acreage. I ‘worked my tail off,’ as best a late-in-the-decade sexagenarian can work his tail off. Thanks to what I am learning here at Forgiving Victim, this year I willingly accepted the role of servant to all. And, I had a wonderful, if exhausting, time. 2016 was our forty-first Thanksgiving here, but the first when, with no resentment, I genuinely wanted to extend our hospitality, not generally, but to each person individually. As a result of that changed approach, I think of Thanksgiving 2016 as an answer to the question above. Thanksgiving 2016 was a “change of the pattern of desires towards ‘here’“ that will remain with me motivating and informing my attitudes and actions.
-
Well, Rich, it is absolutely delightful to hear of someone who us genuinely ‘walking the walk’. James, when referring to our patterns of desire and the ‘Our Father’, has the following to say…”As we read the Our Father, imagine yourself as highly malleable, being stretched between two force?fields, two patterns of desire. The Our Father is inducting you into a pattern of desire which will enable you to inhabit the “being stretched” which is how the desire of the Other other brings us into being.” It seems to me that in being ‘servant to all’ at your Thanksgiving festivities your desires were truly in the “here”.
-
What parts of life in “prison” do you find comforting? In what ways might your longing for the stability of the familiar prevent you from experiencing the new reality that is opening up?
I think the discussion question’s “longing for the stability of the familiar” highlights a significant aspect of the faith journey. God reveals God’s self to humanity, which exposes our prisons of self. Only within the context of God’s revelation can we recognize the false security of the familiar.
We don’t seek tightly restricted lives; it’s just that much of the time God seems absent and the danger of getting bound up in the self, “longing for the stability of the familiar,” becomes ever more present. God appears close and intimate at times, but then come long seasons when God seems far off and distant. It’s then that we feel alone, perhaps abandoned by God, or imprisoned by the social other in the confines of too small selves.
Unbinding our lives from the false balance of the familiar requires the gift of faith to observe thoughts, actions, and expectations, to re-orient to changing circumstances. Understanding life as a process where we observe, orient, decide, and act reframes longing for stability into taking the time to reconnoiter, to reestablish the equilibrium necessary to birth the gift of an ever more faithful self.
The ability to observe, orient, decide and act develops through persistent prayer. Exercising that ability ripens life with understanding and opportunity, as we relax through prayer into the love of God.
-
Rich, here we are looking at what James describes as “a final similarity between the half way house and Church: both are structured spaces in which people move beyond being free from something to being free for something. In the case of Church, being free from being run by death and its fear to being free for new forms of togetherness and enjoyment. The Good News is a communication that we needn’t be in prison thus making us aware that what we regarded as normal was more like ‘being in prison’ “. Thus, as you say, we are able to “relax through prayer into the love of God”.
-
-
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.