Essentials Blue – Week 2

The Holy Spirit…hmmmm.  Yes, for some reason is seems like a very controversial topic to discuss.  Do we believe in the Holy Spirit?  What is the role of the Spirit?  And yet, N.T. Weight, in only his way,  simplifies it as “one of the characteristic signs of the Spirit’s work is precisely that sense of the intimate presence of God” (p. 137).  I can say with confidence, that I know this intimate presence of God, but it seems so weird to tell other people about this.  It’s odd and I often feel uncomfortable talking about this, even with other Christians, be it a similar or different worldview.  The “Spirit plays the same role in our pilgrimage from Passover to the Promise Land,” for it is through the Spirit that we are able to know the Son, and it is because of the Son and Spirit that we are able to petition God.  However, this offends our post-Enlightenment Western sensibilities, it stands in opposition to Pantheism and Taoism. Opposition is okay, but again it comes to truth and belief, it comes to faith that a Spirit exists and has broken in and through the natural work, that the Kingdom of God has broken into earth.  Christianity is weird.  I am okay with it being weird for me.  And I have faith and knowledge that God can and is telling the meta-narrative through our feeble lives.  But how do the poor and abandoned folks I work with daily, tangibly know the Holy Spirit?  I want friends to know the Holy Spirit, but I’m not sure how to tell them, or how to exemplify.  

Ya, I’m too tired to hash this out.  Its too big of a topic to blog on.  Its paper material.  Its prayer.  Its conversation and encouragement with other like minded folks.

Essentials Blue – Week 1

Thirsty for Spirituality.  I think this is our culture today, we are a thirsty and incredibly lost.  When I speak in terms of “we,” I am referring to the Western world at large.  Wright refers to spirituality…”it has been axiomatic in North America that religion and spirituality should stay in their proper place – in other words, well away from the rest of real life.”  As a lover of philosophy and political science, I can’t help but wonder what spirituality would really look like today if it had not been separated, Church and State.  Yes, crusades and genocide have all happened in the name of religion…I guess its the broken relationship and justice that I long to see reconciled, a reconciliation between man/man and man/God and man/creation.  I know I am an idealist, I know Church and State could never function how I picture it perfectly functioning in my mind.  Here is an idealism; what if  ”heaven on earth” encompassed Church and State being one, where we were all taught the truthful narrative of the Gospel, which we all then embodied in our relationship, in justice on the earth, in our beauty and in our quest for spirituality.  I guess what I am trying to communicate is that this is the goal I want to live towards.  I myself want to live towards this complete wholeness, reconciliation, and yet I know that this will not come in totality whilst in a broken world, I know this will come once I stand before my Creator.  I am an idealist when it comes to governance, politics, church and state.  

Blah, Blah, Blah.  There is so much to say.  The four chapters provoked many thoughts.  I guess my resonation with one of the echoes really is a the filter in how I see and interact with the world.  The term worldview, which refers to my framework of ideas and beliefs through which I interpret the world and interact with it, seems to constantly change and shift with the changes in society.  This is something I’m grappling with.  Does the Biblical narrative bend and change, although it holds on to the Foundation of its truths.  I guess that is relativism, something I tend to but don’t want to buy into.  I loved Wrights tangents on “Spirituality and Truth” and the “Glorious Complexity of Life.”  What is true?  And how do we really know?  I had a “yes” moment when he described the complexities of the world and how the cosmos functions, and how the human body is so complex, the beauty of childbirth the growth that takes place in the womb, and all the crazy things that happen in the world to provide us with food, and energy and all that!  Thus, “we should expect the world and our relation to it to be at least as complex as we are.  If there is a God, we should expect such a being to be at least as complex!”  

That’s it for now…