[Craic] Thoughts for the Day - Borg - Nouwen - Gallagher

[Greg Gillis]

Wonderful stuff David, love it!

Greg


On Sat, Feb 27, 2021 at 3:15 PM Tedd via craic <craic at lists.integralshift.ca>
wrote:

> David thank you for the reflections and link to Hedges...good reading!
> DD
>
> On Feb 27, 2021 11:23, David Walsh via craic <craic at lists.integralshift.ca>
> wrote:
>
> A few quotes for reflection
>
> David
>
> “The Bible is one massive protest against the ancient domination system,
> which makes it a very political document. And we need to remember that
> Jesus didn't simply die, he was executed by the domination system that
> ruled his world. He was executed because he had become a radical critic of
> the way that world was put together and he was beginning to attract a
> following. To be very blunt, it's difficult for me to imagine how anybody
> who has seen what the Bible and Jesus are about could vote for policies
> that actually maintain or increase the wealth of those at the top in our
> day.
> For Christians, a major task is consciousness raising within our own
> congregations about the Bible. Not only about what it is, but also about
> the idea that God is passionate about our liberation from oppressive
> systems.
> Part of the scandal of American Christianity is that statistically the
> U.S. is the most Christian country in the world and yet, as a country we
> have the greatest income inequality in the world. And as a country we are
> uncritically committed, not simply to being the most powerful nation in the
> world militarily but to being as militarily powerful as the rest of the
> world combined.”
>
> *Marcus Borg*
> ___________________________________________________________________
> “I plead guilty to a life-long passion, even an obsession with making
> sense of faith, especially for those for whom it makes little or no sense.
> This concern had a definite moment of birth when I was 21 and spent a full
> year outside the then very Catholic Ireland at the University of Caen in
> the north of France. For the first time in my life I encountered widespread
> agnosticism among my French companions, most of them baptized Catholics.
> And a first simple insight got born then, one that was strengthened in
> later years as a Jesuit, working always in different university contexts. *I
> became convinced that most blockages to faith were not on the level of
> truth but on the level of spiritual freedom.* This was later confirmed
> when I did some more specialist work on Newman and discovered his special
> stress on people’s disposition. A second insight, born from a year in Latin
> America, was that our western lifestyle and culture have immense and often
> hidden power over our spiritual freedom or lack of it. A third dimension
> entered when I began to understand that human imagination is a key cultural
> battleground where faith is either starved or nourished. So these three
> topics – freedom, culture, imagination – came to be natural concerns for
> me, and in this spirit I tried to explore some of the so-called frontier
> areas of fundamental theology.”
> Jesuit theologian *Fr Michael Paul Gallagher*
>
> *LUKE 17:20,21 (NIV)  **Jesus replied, "The kingdom of God does not come
> with careful observation, nor will people say, 'Here it is,' or 'There it
> is,' because the kingdom of God is within you."*
> *The True Voice of Love** …** Henri Nouwen*
> Fear is the great enemy of intimacy. Fear makes us run away from each
> other or cling to each other, but does not create true intimacy. When Jesus
> was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane, the disciples were overcome by
> fear and they all “deserted him and ran away” (Matthew 26:56). . . . Fear
> makes us move away from each other to a “safe” distance, or move toward
> each other to a “safe” closeness, but fear does not create the space where
> true intimacy can exist. .
> To those who are tortured by inner or outer fear, and who desperately look
> for the house of love where they can find the intimacy their hearts desire,
> Jesus says: “You have a home . . . I am your home . . . claim me as your
> home . . . you will find it to be the intimate place where I have found my
> home . . . it is right where you are . . . in your innermost being . . . in
> your heart.” The more attentive we are to such words the more we realize
> that we do not have to go far to find what we are searching for. The
> tragedy is that we do not trust our innermost self as an intimate place but
> anxiously wander around hoping to find it where we are not. We try to find
> that intimate place in knowledge, competence, notoriety, success, friends,
> sensations, pleasure, dreams, or artificially induced states of
> consciousness. Thus we become strangers to ourselves, people who have an
> address but are never home and hence cannot be addressed by the true voice
> of love.
>
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