This forum was established not only to inform, but to evoke reflection on and reverence for those items wherein we find and celebrate our capacities to become whole, our faculties of hope, trust, love.
A number of articles herein posted were originally published earlier in other fora. These were, for the most part, written for specific audiences. As such, they reflect the ambits of those audiences, speaking boldly to them afforded curule in chancel or academy, conforming to the terms of the confession of faith for them accustomed to a place in pew, and striving to remove the veils of religious terminology for them disposed to flee at sight of steeple or cross. As this forum has progressed, my recitatives have become more generalized, and, therefore, reflective more of my mind’s workings than of the minds I am addressing.
These articles are given as neither exhaustive nor comprehensive analyses. They are sketches. Some have noted that this generalization has emanated a tendency to compress a goodly amount of considerations into a small space. I admit I prefer the pavonine flourish of a trumpet to the sustained subliminality of a flute. In my defense, flute invites to reverie, the trumpet heralds attention. I have been advised to constrain my sesquipedalianism, to “dumb down” my work. My work is, however, the creation of a forum for reflective and reverent considerations, both of which and their honing require exercise. Exercise requires some expenditure, some exertion, some sweat. A gymnasium, be it for body, mind or soul, is not a social lounge wherein one may sit and lolly. I have found in my studies that I do not always understand what is being said, but I plow through as best I can, gathering what I can, and if I deem the field worthy of further gleaning, I plow through a second time, or more. Occasionally I find I have misunderstood something, occasionally I discover a trove before unnoticed, but with each treading more and more of the field accrues to me, becomes a part of me, in the linguistically impoverished but accurate depiction of current usage, ultimately “I get it”.
There was a time when I taught, and it was mandatory, at least according to my standards, that I knew the text under consideration sufficiently well to reference it and the applicable critiques of it chapter and verse. On occasion I espy one or another of those venerable texts upon my shelves and am bemusedly aware I would be hard pressed to deliver a five hundred word synopsis. Those texts, however, like so many others, are not point items of my consciousness, but a part of me, things “inwardly digested” and assimilated into the fabric of who I am.
Thus, my work is my work, yet in that work I am the coryphaeus, and my esteemed choir holds the like of Aquinas, Luther, Brunner, Barth, Hooker, Tillich, Whitehead, Schleiermacher, Schillebeeckx, Kierkegaard, the Moltmanns, and a hundred others sounding their notes in the auditorium of my head. My work is also the work of a Christian, and while I try at times to speak without wearing the linguistic semblance of sacred vesture, I cannot speak without being who I am, without being in-formed by both faith and prayer. Nevertheless, my reader ought to note that when I approach a topic from the perspective of faith I speak in the language of faith, the ideography and terminology of Christian spirituality and theology, and when I approach that same topic from the perspective of the world, I speak in the quotidian secular, in the ideas and koine of occidental philosophy and Jungian psychology. I hold there to be no contradiction in my analyses resultant of moving from one language to the other. Whether I speak from the divine vantage or that of the self, the vision, the truth, is one and the same, merely the vocabulary changes.