.comment-link {margin-left:.6em;} <$BlogRSDURL$>

Monday, December 11, 2017

Black sheep And prodigals Dave Tomlinson  

In the context of Damascus Road experience-“I am more inclined to wards the experience of former poet laureate, Andrew  motion, Who said I’ve seen the light. And it flickers on and off like a badly wired lamp. He goes on to say that this is probably experience of millions of people who inhabit what he calls the ambivalent middleground in religion. Xi 

There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in bracket (Leonard Cohen) 37

All the great religious traditions acknowledge that God is a mystery beyond human comprehension; it has its own subtle methods for subverting black and white outcomes about who or what God is. In Judaism the name of God quite literally cannot be uttered since it only consists of Hebrew vowels. If you try to speak the word, (rather wonderfully) just makes the sound of breath. - rabbi Lawrence Kushner insists that it is no coincidence that the holiest name in the world, the name of the creator, is the sound of your own breathing. 38

To Dishley, Western Christianity has been preoccupied with understanding God through conceptual and rational terms-through beliefs, doctrines and Crete. These are undoubtedly significant. Yet purely rational, verbalise faith is a miserably impoverished one.49

Sophie Sabbage The cancer: how to let cancer heal your life

Astrophysicist carl Sagan calculated that if Jesus had literally flown off into the sky, even at the speed of light 180 6400 mi./s he still wouldn’t have made it out of the Galaxy! Actually he would still have 93,000 years go, Even to get that far. It is silly point, I know, and Sagen had his tongue firmly pushed into his cheek, but it was meant to demonstrate how ridiculous he thought a little belief in the ascension was. 178

Apparently, in the original Aramaic Jesus‘s followers used, there is no word for salvation. Salvation was understood as a bestowal of life; to be saved was  to be made alive, or to be fully alive. For the earliest Christians, therefore, Jesus was not the Saviour (as we have come to think of that) but then life giver.

Throughout the gospels, Jesus never speaks of receiving salvation; he called people to follow him, to be part of his way and therefore come alive. In more contemporary language, Jesus liberated ( saved) people from enslavement to ego, the drug of self importance, and invited them to discover the path of vulnerability, love, generosity and service. The cross speaks of this more than anything else; the abandonment of ego, winning by losing, love given without measure. Indeed, the whole Jesus event  imagines a guard separated from self asserting power, a God whose only existence is love. This is the path Jesus invited his followers to enter, the path of salvation. 

The path begins with repentance, a word now Wronglet enmeshed in associations of guilt and shame. But the Greek word metanoia actually means change of mind, a new mindset. To repent is to open up to a new consciousness: about ourselves, about other people, about the world-about God.Yes, this will include turning away from taxes and thought patterns that are selfish or damaging and driven by ego alone, a century, to repent is to come alive; to discover a new wholeness; to begin to involve spiritually yes, this will include turning away from practices and thought patterns that are selfish or damaging and driven by ego alone, but essentially, to repent is to come alive; to discover a new wholeness; to begin to evolve spiritually; to be saved. 151

#
Comments: Post a Comment


This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?