A Recap of the Session:
In our end of year session we did a broad review of some of the topics we covered this year. I began claiming a positive understanding of Religion. A deeply human impulse in response to awe and wonder and the reality of our mortal existence. Religions are constructions to that response. I reiterated that the God of supernatural theism never was. We need to reimagine what we mean when we say and do things in the name of God. I briefly reviewed “Weak Theology” a wonderfully provocative description of Christian theology based on the work of Jack Caputo. Along with weak theology the admission of a Hermeneutics. “It is interpretation all the way down.” I touched on Theopoetics a language style that serves our need to express our experience of God, awe, wonder. The propositional language of dogma and doctrine doesn’t come close. Two other items I closed with: The Impossible and the Possible. The coming of what we don’t see. And haven’t a clue. And the stuff of possibility. As Jack says Event (Grace, God, we know not what) harbors the impossible. We are the ones who make the impossible possible if there is possibility at all. The impossible is our Hope.
I underscored in our last session the two most important theological and faith journey influences in my adult life: Marcus Borg and Jack Caputo. Marcus for 40 years. Jack since 2015. From Marc I have learned and continue to learn how to see and discern the heart of Christianity. Marcus’ s trustworthy scholarship, insight and intuition continues to help me see the Christian tradition, the Biblical stories and Jesus himself with new eyes. His work has deepened my own heart’s understanding and deepened my devotion. Jack has given me new language, nuanced language. He has freed me from categorial assumptions. And shifted my attention to a horizon I did not see coming. Jack has deepened my devotion. Marcus and Jack share understanding and intuitions. Marcus is a Biblical Scholar, an historian, and theologian. Jack a philosopher and theologian. They were both stirred by the stars in the night sky from early on. They have different training. Reference different language. The both responded to a Summons. A Call. From something we know not. Something that did not let them go. And will not.
I think all of us who have found our way to Second Saturday are responding to a summons or call. Heard at a level below the head. We all seem restless. In a good way. Insisting there is something to listen to, wonder about, act upon in hopes of a better world, a better future. Not just in our time but for generations whom we long will experience the wonders of life on this planet as we have. With Marcus and Jack I believe that deep in the structure of things is goodness. This is not a moral category for me. There are possibilities. Always possibilities. We are capable of goodness, kindness, compassion. Love. And we are forever seeking justice. So our hearts are forever restless.
Jack Caputo will return next year for three sessions as our guest. I will announce those dates in advance. I highly recommend you take up and read one of Jack’s books this summer. Maybe the one on Religion. Or on Truth. Or the Weakness of God. Or Hope against Hope. They will sound familiar. I can’t say Jack is a beach read. But his work is important, challenging, inviting. Reading Jack also makes me laugh out loud. He is funny Clever. Delightful. I wonder if I might ask Jack permission to work on The Humor of Jack Caputo. As I see it. But context is everything. So, maybe not.
And always read Marcus Borg. Marcus Borg changed the conversation about Christianity. Redirected it toward a future. That redirection is the trajectory we continue to follow.
Second Saturday Chat Transcript
Below please find the selections that were discussed and shown during this session.
Grace by Judith Wright
Living is dailiness, a simple bread
that’s worth the eating. But I have known a wine,
a drunkenness that can’t be spoken or sung
without betraying it. Far past Yours or Mine,
even past Ours, it has nothing at all to say;
it slants a sudden laser through common day.
It seems to have nothing to do with things at all,
requires another element or dimension.
Not contemplation brings it; it merely happens,
past expectation and beyond intention;
takes over the depth of flesh, the inward eye,
is there, then vanishes. Does not live or die,
because it occurs beyond the here and now,
positives, negatives, what we hope and are.
Not even being in love, or making love,
brings it. It plunges a sword from a dark star.
Maybe there was once a word for it. Call it grace.
I have seen it, once or twice, through a human face.
From Marcus’s The Heart of Christianity
(Condensed version on articulating the heart of Christianity)
The task of Christian theology is to interpret a “given,” a received tradition, in a present cultural context. It has always been so.
The “given” cannot simply be conformed to the present; it must be allowed its own voice, must from time to time be reformulated to speak to a changed cultural context.
Discerning the heart of Christianity thus involves us in an “unending conversation,” a metaphor of Kenneth Burke, an American intellectual whose life spanned most of the twentieth century.
Being Christian, though, involves not just “talk,” but the transformation of our lives. Discerning the heart of Christianity involves us in an unending conversation, and the ongoing construction of what it means to be Christian and living from that.
These (conversations) are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses;
And the rest is prayer, observance, discipline,
Thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood,
Is Incarnation.
~ from “The Dry Salvages” by T.S. Eliot
From Isaiah 40
Comfort my people….
In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord,
Make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
Every valley shall be lifted up,
And every mountain and hill made low;
The uneven ground shall become level
And the rough places plain.
Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
And all people shall see it together,
For the mouth of the Lord has spoken it.
I Corinthians 13:11
When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.
Life is short, and we do not have much time to gladden the hearts of those who travel the way with us. O’ be swift to love. Make haste to be kind.
Henri Amiel, 1868
Below please find the poem “Natural Theology” ready by Jackie Yerby during this session.
Natural Theology
Kelly Cherry
You read it in the blue wind,
the blue water, the rock spill,
the blue hill
rising like a phoenix from ash. Some mind
makes itself known through the markings of light
on air; where earth rolls, right
comes after, our planet’s bright spoor… If you look, you’ll find
truth etched on the tree trunk,
the shark’s tooth, a shell, a hunk
of room and soil. Study from beginning to end.
Alpha and omega—these are the cirrus alphabet,
the Gnostics’ cloudy “so—and yet.”
If a tree falls in a forest, a scared hind
leaps, hearing branches break;
you crawl under the log and shake
honey out of a hollow, eggs from a nest, ants from the end
of a stick; resting, you read God’s name on the back of a bass
in a blue pool; God grows everywhere, like grass.