* "At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. (OL's Note: Satan's playground/opportunity) This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us. It its so to speak his name written on us, as our poverty, as our indigence, and our dependence, as our sonship. It is like a pure diamond , blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions or points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely…The gate of heaven is everywhere."

Thomas Merton

Post Edited (One Love) : 6/9/2009 5:47:32 AM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (Tom) : 6/9/2009 12:21:50 PM (GMT-5)

It's not a Buddhist page at all.  It's just talking spirituality.  Seriously.  So you don't even have to worry about the eschatology problem, necessarily. Oh, well...

Post Edited (One Love) : 6/9/2009 12:40:37 PM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (One Love) : 6/9/2009 1:05:41 PM (GMT-5)

Images, right?

Post Edited (Tom) : 6/9/2009 2:14:19 PM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (Tom) : 6/9/2009 2:32:00 PM (GMT-5)

Asher: Tom, I wanna have your baby.

Jeff: That's hilarious! I've got to use that one at work.

Post Edited (Tom) : 6/11/2009 2:31:32 AM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (Tom) : 6/10/2009 12:55:40 AM (GMT-5)

I just spent a good hour working on a way I thought D and I would find some new agreement on this stuff. Lost it all.

Crap.

I lost the creative moment, so it’s gone forever. Arghghgh!

What I can remember of it was something like this:

We’ve got the pieces of the puzzle on the table basically—D’s inward moment of self-denial and grounding in God, and my outward moment of creative expression. D can have all that he wants in the inward moment, all the stuff he’s been arguing for: self-denial, death to all our false selves, embracing our nothingness, only God being able to tell us ‘who’ we are, union with God, spirit-Spirit double-inverted loop-de-loop bipolar asymmetry, all of it. And I can have what concerns me: the enduring freedom of the creature to self-determine (libertarianly) the shape/form of creative expression, creatures as ‘creators’, as artists, the inter-personal nature of our relation to God maintained all the way through from grounding to expression.

It depends on how each of us understands the other’s ‘moment’ as definitive of human personhood. If D wants to say that human personal becoming is a kind of self-contained event that begins and ends in the inward moment, and that the outward moment where we live and engage the created order is where this already completed identity goes on display, then we’ll continue to have problems. For me, ‘personal becoming’ can’t be begun and completed in the inward moment. Creative expression ‘participates’ in defining ‘personal becoming’.

I think D will flat out reject this. And maybe that’s just our disagreement. So be it. But from my point of view, the two moments comprise a kind of bipolar ‘movement’ (like the ‘bipolar’? Yeah!) involving ‘grounding’ and ‘creative expression’. To say ‘personhood’ entirely takes place in the inward moment is like saying someone who never paints (or draws, or sculpts, or whatever) can be called an artist. But personhood is a creative achievement in my book. The inward moment with all the stuff D has so faithfully hammered on is true—nothing in the created realm can tell us who we are. But that doesn’t mean becoming persons in Christ doesn’t require a created realm to complete our ‘personal becoming’. This is a sensitive difference between us.

It’s like this. When I say “nothing in creation can tell us who we are” I mean “neither the canvass nor the medium can tell someone who they are [as an artist].” No. YOU tell the canvass you’re an artist. But you’re not an artist until you do that ‘telling’. Art IS the telling (via medium and canvass). The artist can’t BE an artist without canvass or medium even if neither canvass nor medium can tell the artist who she is. There's even asymmetry here between the two ‘moments’—inward and outward—that together constitute our becoming an artist. You have go IN to find out who and what’s there. Then you go OUT to creative expression. But you’re not an artist until you paint, until you compose the world. But you can't GET the composition FROM THE WORLD.

Similarly, to be a ‘person’ is to be a ‘logikos’, a meaning-maker, an artist. Hence, there’s no ‘personhood’ without creative expression. Nada. Not even for God. This is why creaturely self-determination is a non-negotiable for me. If the divine will determines what all creaturely movements are to be and then mediates this to us via the grounding relation where we deny ‘self’ and embrace God, then God has not “created creators who create,” he’s just “created” period, and he’s the only artist in town.

I’m concerned that the inward moment doesn’t get understood as a bottomless pit (eh, bad wording, let’s try…) or an infinite moment where we can be all we were created to be (which has to be ‘persons’) without the world. I say, no, an artist requires a canvass. In the inward moment what we discover and embrace is the truth that we are God’s canvass, God’s artwork, yes. That has to be accepted. All hopes of independently creating our own meaning have to be destroyed--and that can be excruciatingly painful. We are GOD'S artwork. And that means that only the artist can tell us what we MEAN (i.e., WHO we are). But that’s only half the story, for what God has also created ‘creators who create’. God's artwork is arTISTS. And isn't THAT the real significant story here?

Tom

Post Edited (Tom) : 6/11/2009 7:57:56 AM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (One Love) : 6/11/2009 1:05:30 PM (GMT-5)

We've talked about this before...

Posted By : One Love - 12/5/2008 1:42 PM

Layman's terms. As we look "inside ourselves" for that which is most unique, unrepeatable, and particular about us...we will find the universal (Divine Hypostasis) that indwells each particularity as "universal". Loder. Knight's Move. 104. Gotta quote. "Logically, the universal is not truly universal if it does not embrace particularity per se. This logical paradox, which appears in science as the problem of singularity, is resolvable at the human level only through faith and the tranformative power of the God-Man [Christ-the-Logos].  In faith, one is freed from conceptual and cultural illusions of universality (universal laws of nature, ethics, society, etc) in order to enter fully into God's creation through the particularity of one's own existence. The surprise is that precisely through the full appropriation of one's own particularity, universality comes to light everywhere in all creation." Wait a second.  That sounds familiar...oh, yeah... Alexei V. Nesteruk Light from the East: Theology, Science, and the Eastern Orthodox Tradition Page 28 "Detachment from Nature and the Love of Nature" ---------------------------------------- Though fascinated by the natural world and appreciating its great beauty, the Fathers clearly understood that if the mind were to be distracted by the puzzles of nature and to consider them as ends in themselves, then the knowledge of nature would itself become an obstacle in trying to know God. Thus a tension was created between the appreciation of nature and the danger of being trapped by its investigation. On the one hand, the natural world is accepted and affirmed, while, on the other, it is renounced as having no meaning without its spiritual ground. The necessity to rise above nature in order to find God was always experienced as the difficulty of being detached from a natural world that at the same time was highly appreciated. In the contemplation of the logoi of creation (Maximus), the Greek Fathers found an ingenious way of resolving this tension, freeing themselves from the demands of nature, on the one hand, while enjoying nature, on the other. They never experienced any fear of nature, which was the creation of a God "who loves mankind." Their detachment from the material world provided a paradoxical freedom to treat this world in a way that never subverted their spiritual vision of reality, that is, their faith. The secret of the Greek Fathers' freedom to enjoy nature was their detachment from it. Their spiritual vision of nature freed them to love and appreciate nature without condemning its created origin and without fearing its demands, for the natural world, like all of creation, is good because everything done by God through his Word (Logos) is good.

Post Edited (One Love) : 6/11/2009 1:18:02 PM (GMT-5)