A Community of Souls...exploring the mystery of being human
O God, Wrest from me the Word
secret-ed within me
and set it on my tongue
that I might invoke a fire
that burns down all the names of God.
From the Mystery of God Service
On This Day…
Christian Nativity of Mary, daughter of Sts. Anne and Joachim
Nativity of Mary, Spain, 17th century.
Orthodox Christian Nativity of the Theotokos
St. Matthew, Apostle, evangelist, martyr
I believe that many of the Eastern Fathers would have been amazed at Augustine's City of God—at the very conception of heaven as civic bliss. For the Eastern Fathers and Mother saw heaven as blinding light, or a dark corner where man can rest, or as a face, or a throne, or a quiet flame upon which to meditate. God is one because He is multitudinous.
Teri Martin
On This Day…
Edith Sitwell born in 1897 in Yorkshire, England: writer and surreal poet, died 1964
Works: The Queen and the Hive, English Eccentrics, English Women
Quotes: “Good taste is the worst vice ever invented.” “I have often wished I had time to cultivate modesty, but I am too busy thinking about myself.” “A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits.”
In our Christuman creed, we call God “ours”—and ineffable.
Let us not forget the ineffability, thus falling into attempts to dissect,
to peer through lenses at minute shreds thought to be clutched in our probing tweezers.
It does not matter how God comes to us. Only that He does.
Donna Leicthling
There have been those theologies that have emphasized the “apophatic—what can't be said about God—and those that have chosen the “cataphatic”—“what can be said” about God. A problem with the cataphatic was pointed out long ago by an Eastern Church mystic, Pseudo-Dionysius who said that the more one moves from speaking about Revelation and tries to speak directly about the Revealed, "the more language falters, and when it has passed up and beyond the ascent, it will turn silent completely, since it will finally be at one with him who is indescribable."
Even before the days of the Christian Church, East or West, the Greek Pre-Socratic philosophers wrestled with the apophatic vs. cataphatic nature of God. They tried to hash out to logical limits the philosophical implications of "God is" as well as, "God is not". They were trying, just as Aquinas did much later, to find the proper and adequate proportions between material and immaterial things. To the pre-Socratic philosopher, Heraclitus, the term logos meant both discourse and contents, both the truth about things and the principles on which they function, both the Revelation and the Revealed. He said, "God is day, night; winter, summer; war, peace; satiety, hunger" and added that "he changes as fire does when mixed with things sacrificed and is called by the name appropriate to the taste of each."
Whenever we try to say what God is, we face, just as did the Greek puzzler, Zeno, a paradox of infinite divisibility. We find ourselves scrambling to cram an infinite number of words into one finite moment in an all too vain attempt to fill in the space between.
Teri Martin
On This Day…
Mother Teresa of Calcutta: 20C nun, missionary and founder of the Missionaries of Charity who serve the poorest of people
Quotes: “Let us always meet each other with a smile, for the smile is the beginning of love.” “Spread love everywhere you go. Let no one ever come to you without leaving happier.” “Love begins at home, and it is not how much we do, but how much love we put into that action.”
Without the worship, even the most sacred, the god himself, loses sacrality and returns to that which is ordinary. The god denied the food of communion, the living sacrifice, eventually starves to death. The burning globe to which people used to point as it passed overhead and exclaim, "Oh! That's Varuna making his daily trip through the sky, bringing light and warmth to the earth!" becomes a reference in a science book as a "body of gases about which the earth and other planets revolve and which furnishes light, heat and energy for the solar system." Another case of deus otios, the god who, rather than starve to death, takes an early retirement and moves to the Western Slope.
Teri Martin
On This Day…
Mary Renault born Sept 4, 1905 in Forest Gate, England: historic novelist, died 1983
Works: Last of the Wine, Persian Boy, The King Must Die
Quotes: “Go with your fate, but not beyond. Beyond leads to dark places.” “Money buys many things…the best of which is freedom.” “It is bitter to lose a friend to evil before one loses him to death.”