Ratzinger has been elected the Bishop of Rome. This is the one person I dreaded becoming Pope.
I feel like putting on a black armband.
I see the cars go by,
and they’re all painted black.
I see a door ahead,
I want to paint it black
Author: Jon
The Unitarian Jihad Arrives!
My Unitarian Jihad Name ? is: The Sword of Warm Humanitarianism.
New: Religious Video Humor
Well, it turns out that the most popular page on this site isn’t my blog, nor the introduction to Christian mysticism, nor the Theosis page. Nope, it’s not even the Matrix review. It’s the Bad Music Videos page, with about 2300 visits so far this month!
In keeping with that great(?) tradition, I now present the Religious Video Humor page. Enjoy!
Writing the Unwritable
Susie Miller at Sojourn Ministries has an interesting post which brought back memories for me: why i write G-d…. Coincidentally perhaps, my friend Trev sent me something he’d written, also using “G-d” throughout. During most of my undergraduate years, I was part of a Messianic Jewish congregation in El Paso, which observed the Jewish reverence for the divine name by writing it with a hyphen, G-d.
That reverence is why the Old Testament is filled with the phrase (usually in small caps) “the Lord” instead of the ancient divine name, Yahweh. Most translations follow that tradition, which causes many verses to lose their original meaning. Compare “the Lord is God,” with “Yahweh is God,” which implies that Yahweh is God, and Baal, Moloch, Ashtoreth, et. al. are not.
Susan writes:
Thus i write G-d, like the Hebrews do: to allow there to be Mystery within the very name i use for The Incomprehensible Eternal One….to acknowledge the limits of our rudimentary language and its awkward inability to really name anything, beyond the accepted semiotic usage of the day and time…
On the mystical path, all words and pronouns seem woefully inadequate, and writing “G-d” calls attention to the fact. I might do that myself, except that I hate hyphens as no other mark of punctuation! Jacques Derrida would probably write “God” to show that we’re just borrowing a word for Something beyond all concepts.
A strictly impersonal metaphor, such as the Tao, could be “It”. . . but even capitalized, “It” seems too impersonal. The Sanskrit word Tat (That) seems much better, since “that” can be personal or impersonal. Early Buddhists spoke of Suchness, and called the Buddha “the one who has come from Suchness.” Some Christian mystics used similar words. Meister Eckhart called God “Isness”–emphasizing “him” as the Ground of Being, and Hildegard of Bingen called God hæcceitas, This-ness.
Eastern Orthodox icons of Christ have the Greek words Hō On (The Being) written on the halo’s cross (left), which is the Greek translation of “I am that I am,” the divine name in Exodus 3. Eckhart Tolle also uses the word Being as a substitute for God.
Pronouns are a special problem. The default divine pronoun is masculine and personal, in view of the very common (and often misleading) personal, masculine metaphor of God. Using “divine” sometimes gets around the need for possessive pronouns, but it seems rather weak. I like the definite quality of This, That, and Such, although they’re probably too strange for prime-time, and should be used sparingly.
For God so loved the world, that Such gave This only-begotten Son…
I usually fall back to the “defaults” for convenience. Any thoughts out there?
This This-ing
pen scratching paper, making pretty marks
marks stand for sounds,
sounds stand for thoughts,
thoughts stand for the jokes,
the jokes we call our selves.
pen scratching pager, making pretty marks
why?
the question shows corruption;
the innocent can’t ask why,
there is only wow.
don’t ask why i write.
don’t ask what it means.
i needed meaning when i was lost.
now that i know that i don’t know
what meaning can i need?
no one writes–there is only writing.
no one questions–there is only asking.
there are no nouns, only verbs
no i, no we, no you, no other.
only this,
doing this, now, thusly.
be god, be this, be natural.
god, you, i
appearing and fading
here and there
as needed, as needed.
when a universe is needed
let there be light
and light there is.
nothing is done,
no one does.
there is only this thising.
© jon zuck, april 12, 2005, norfolk
Doubting and Faith
Today, I received an email from a reader in the Netherlands troubled by doubts. For me, I only began to believe after a time of doubting. I got the doubting out of the way in my youth, but I had to be an agnostic for long months before I became a believer.
Yet faith changes continue. My conception of God has changed from being “personal” (God has the attributes of a person) to being mostly impersonal (God is something far beyond personhood). I keep going back to the phrase “the Ground of Being,” used by Christian mystics for centuries, from The Book of Privy Counseling, to Fr. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. *The Ground of Being* means that Beingness, Existence itself–with all that it contains–space, time, the Universe–springs from something that is so incredible it’s beyond the concepts of being or existence. Yet existence comes from it like the grass from the ground.
A friend of mine was shaken by a spiritual experience he had, because God didn’t seem to be there. Of course not. In these glimpses where the Matrix is dissolved, God can’t be seen because there is no separation. In One, there is no “you” and “God;” there is just One.
Yet, in the manifested world, It is personal, because It manifests persons, and all that is. Everything we use to describe this Ground of Being falls short. It is mystery. Nothing stops us from trying to explain and describe It, but we can only describe Its energies and actions, as we can only see the wind by the movement of the clouds and dust.
Children sense this intuitively:
What created the Universe?
The Big Bang.
What made the Big Bang bang?
Who made the world, Mommy?
God did, Honey.
Who made God?
So we use words: God, Tao, Brahman, the Unconditioned, Emptiness, and on and on, though all words and names are insufficient. The Mystery pervades everything. Explanations are only invitations to engage the Mystery at a deeper level. Why do living things grow? Because their cells divide. Why do cells divide? Because of DNA. How does DNA make cells divide? Silence.
I ended my email response to him with this:
My teacher once said “the Universe is a mystery. If you could explain it, there wouldn’t be a mystery anymore.” . . .
Move the consideration from being a question in your head to a wonder in your heart. Love the mystery, devote yourself to IT, not as a question or problem, but as your life. Because, well, it is your life, and all life. Everything comes from the mystery, and there is nothing which isn’t full of the mystery. The mystery will sustain you as nothing else can. It’s the only thing there is!
Farewell, John Paul
I haven’t read the book, but I’ve heard that in his novel Angels and Demons, Dan Brown (author of The Da Vinci Code) imagined the world largely ignoring the passing of the Pope. He was wrong. Very wrong. In fact, he couldn’t have been more wrong.
Millions—no one knows exactly how many—flocked to Rome to say farewell this week. Mourners included not only Catholics of every nation, but thousands of Protestants, Jews, Buddhists, and Muslims. The heads of state of Iran, the United States, Israel, and Syria sat close together, and the latter two shook hands and renewed their commitment to peacefully resolve their differences.
Why have so many people been affected, including hundreds of millions of non-Catholics and non-Christians? Because he spoke to our most pressing needs—freedom, peace, and holiness. Yes, many of us felt he was not speaking to other important needs, but seldom has mankind ever been graced by a more fierce and dedicated champion of freedom, peace, and holiness, and none greater in the age when nuclear annihilation threatened to destroy the world, and materialism to destroy the soul.
Peggy Noonan has written a most illuminating account of how the Pope’s visit to Poland in 1979 precipated the collapse of the entire Iron Curtain. Read “We Want God“.
Blessed are the peacemakers. They shall be called the children of God.
Come as a Child
Akilesh has a wonderful post at Graceful Presence about how awakening is a restoration of the original mind of the child. I hightly recommend it.
Jesus said so many years to go to just come as a child. We can’t accept it. We think it means have childlike faith in the Biblical narratives or the Nicene Creed. It just means to see the divine magic of reality.
Trev Diesel recently posted his thought, “How strange that we should be here at all.” The wonder doesn’t lie in explanations, even the explanation that God loves us so much that he made the Universe. The wonder is just this. And the other wonder is that we don’t see it.
A little resurrection
It’s been a great Lent and Easter for me. Besides my ongoing study with my teacher, Kitabu Roshi, I’ve celebrated the presence of God in a Native American prayer lodge, in my parish, at Catholic Campus Ministries, and among new friends at Symphonic.
This is also an anniversary for me, at least by the church calendar. Ten years ago, on Holy Saturday, I joined the Catholic Church. A couple of hours before the Vigil Mass began, I broke my fast at Long John Silver’s in Kent, and had my picture taken outside with Harley, a tame mountain lion. (Kent is the kind of cool place that just happens to have mountain lions hanging around fast-food restaurants sometimes!) A frimmin’ mark for this transition in my life. (I’m having problems with my scanner. Hopefully, I’ll be able to include the picture soon.)
I thought I had been through faith changes before (and I had!), but I had no idea what lay ahead for me. When you open yourself to wanting to discover all God has for you, prepare to be changed. *A lot.* I didn’t know that I would discover a Christian teaching called “theosis” that would change my life, I didn’t know that I would try for a time to become a priest, I never dreamed that I would be studying Zen with an enlightened master, nor how difficult some of the path ahead would be.
At the Easter Vigil Mass last night, I felt something wonderful break in me. My ever-present “inner theologian” shut up. Suddenly, all the differences in concepts in all of the traditions became irrelevant. The only thing that mattered is the simply the divine presence of the One. I felt not only reconciled to my church, but also with the Evangelicalism of my youth. It’s a little resurrection.
What am I? I don’t know. All I know is God is alive here and everywhere, and I want to awaken to that fully and become one with that fully.
The Greatest Lesson (pt. 3)
After nearly two full days had elaspsed since his death, it looked like the end. There would be no kingdom of God. There were nice ideas, there had been healings, but the religion had killed the Teacher, and the Empire had squashed the Kingdom. His friends huddled in fear behind closed doors, wondering if they too, were going to be nailed to crosses.
It was the first day of the Jewish week, and early in the morning before the workday began, some of the women who followed him went to his tomb to pay respects by anointing his body.
What they found was that the Teacher had been **vindicated** in an extraordinary miracle. He was alive again. The final lesson would not be forgotten:
>Love is stronger than death. Love is stronger than hate. Love is courageous, and will even sacrifice itself for the benefit of others. Love is the power of God.
Forty days later, the Teacher would be **greatly exalted.** He would be enabled to share his spirit with all who asked. This “second coming” would be greater than the first, for it allows an intimacy that was impossible when Jesus was in the body.
>He [Jesus] has given us all the things that we need for life and for true devotion, bringing us to know God himself… through them you will be able to share the divine nature (II Peter 1:3-4a).
Christ is risen. Hallelujah! May we live out his Good News.