Why Sexuality Matters

My Dialogue with Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body: An assertion on why purity is important.

Just recently I’ve been thinking a lot about sexuality, purity and wholeness. In recent dialouges with with fellow students, professors friends and colleagues it has come to my attention that while I have a basic idea of what I believe about sexuality and the body, I’ve not spent much time developing or writing on it much, and this was surprising to me considering how sacred my theology of the body has become. So today i wanted to spend some time in thought about my person, your person and why sexuality matters.

So, first of all, what is the body? Here i’m gonna lay out an assertion of the human person according to what I believe the scriptures are telling us and several interrelated theories on being. From there we’ll talk about being and practical theology and finally conclude with the importance of sexuality to human identity, and ultimately why sexuality matters.

For a long time I’ve been disturbed by the question of what happens at marriage that inherently changes something, how is it that before a ring almost everything is off limits and then by a simple token everything is ok? What difference can a ritual make in ontologically shifting something from one place to another? Is marriage really that important in uniting two persons into one flesh, or is it a formality with pretty metaphors?

So, to answer my own question about marriage and the ontology of such a union, it is my belief that what has happened is in our conception of being when we lost the idea of being in communion we took a shift from the idea of communion as a necessary element of being. To be a person is to be a being-in-relationship, and therefore to necessitate a constant dialogue between an internal and external self-hood.

Sartre shows us in his Being and Nothingness that in reality man is never being in itself as for example a rock is. A rock simply is, but we as people lack being-in-itself because being-in-itself lacks consciousness. We are being for itself and thus lack definite being and are forced to create our being out of nothingness. And as foray into dimension theory and the propositions of time purported by H.G. Wells, if anything lacks duration it cannot be said to exist. Humans therefore are not and cannot be static being or inherently and diametrically dualistic beings, for change affects people in time and therefore their being is dynamic in that when viewed in 4 dimensions height, length, depth, and duration being is never in itself, but in relation to time, space, objects and other objects of being to discern and develop our own being.

This dynamic selfhood is the consciousness that we have of ourselves being aware of things outside ourselves and our idea of the perceptions with which we interact with the world. This, not even this is static since our perceptions change, ideas develop, and over time this self matures, corrupts, decays, grows, evolves, becomes more self aware, less self aware, directed, misdirected and always interactive. The self as relates to other objects in both time and space, in memory, and perception outside the internal perception of what we believe to be ourselves. Sartre helps us do away away with Kant’s dualism of noumena and phenomena, showing us that there is no ungraspable appearance behind things but rather only things in themselves as they appear.

 

The external self constitutes the internal self because that self is projected onto the external world and receives its selfhood back from the dialogue between the projection and reception of meaning. The internal self is not an objective reality but exists as interpreted through our perception of self that emerges through interaction with those things that we have relationality with in the world outside our physical bodies. In Sartre’s idea the for-itself of being makes of the world a blank canvas onto which it projects its being, and in marriage, to get back to the topic at hand, there is a mutual imprint of being which allows both giving and reception of being through mutual imprintedness.

Hopefully I have done some justice to what I believe Sartre is saying.

Marriage is the mystery by which human being becomes truly alive, it is sacramental, holy, and relational. The thing that changes is not the world, but our perception of self, from the myself which we are so involved in in our day to the ourself which is become myself. Therefore as we search for being in the world, the world reaches us through the eyes of another such that as we explore out for ourselves, the meaning of ourselves is presented to us in another. The other becomes the I and vice versa such that the other person is a mirror of ourselves as we explore identity through the perceptions and reflections brought out in the living interlocution of being. So that when we are called to love one another, as we do in marriage, we find our self consciousness should be caught up in neighbor consciousness. The I and Thou becomes the We that is You and the You that is the mirror of myself. 

So how does all this preliminary dialogue take us back to the matter of sexuality?

Let’s begin with an assertion by the brilliant and moving theology of the body by Pope John Paul II:

 

It seems that the second narrative of creation has assigned to man “from the beginning” the function of the one who, above all, receives the gift (cf. especially Gn 2:23). “From the beginning” the woman is entrusted to his eyes, to his consciousness, to his sensitivity, to his heart. On the other hand, he must, in a way, ensure the same process of the exchange of the gift, the mutual interpenetration of giving and receiving as a gift. Precisely through its reciprocity, it creates a real communion of persons.

 

Giving and receiving is perichoretic, it is interpenetrational and dynamic between the two persons of the union making it sacred. The being of two persons becomes completely mysterious in that they become not absorbed in one another, nor annihilated in the other, but having substance in the other each person is a mirror to which the other looks for that penetrating substantiality. The giving is within both parties and the reception is within both parties. The man in the garden received the woman and looked upon her, being given over to him not in the sense of her reduction to object but in the sense of his embrace of her, his reception of her is in itself a giving. In her being received she is also receiving.

 

The man is enriched not only through her, who gives him her own person and femininity, but also through the gift of himself. The man’s giving of himself, in response to that of the woman, enriches himself. It manifests the specific essence of his masculinity which, through the reality of the body and of sex, reaches the deep recesses of the “possession of self.”…At the same time he is received as a gift by the woman, in the revelation of the interior spiritual essence of his masculinity, together with the whole truth of his body and sex. Accepted in this way, he is enriched through this acceptance and welcoming of the gift of his own masculinity. Subsequently, this acceptance, in which the man finds himself again through the sincere gift of himself, becomes in him the source of a new and deeper enrichment of the woman. The exchange is mutual. In it the reciprocal effects of the sincere gift and of the finding oneself again are revealed and grow.

 

It is in giving oneself to the other that the other becomes the mirror through which the self truly develops. The union of marriage sanctifies ontologically what already occurs naturally, and in their giving to each other, they are enriched. Marriage is an invitation to love one’s neighbor, to care for one another and to stand for one another.

So, in short what’s all this talk mean to me? I’ll tell you.

This body is sacred, it is baptized into the already resurrected body of Christ, my person is intimately connected with Christ, through the eucharist, and through the Spirit of life which animated Christ back to life and raised him from the dead. This body has been marked and sealed as a sacrament of the eschaton. Therefore when considering the integrity of the body, it is necessary that I should consider my person an extension of the literal body of Christ which is sacred.

Therefore as a sacramental entity this body and the bodies of my fellow humans are sacred, bearing in them the image of God, the image of Christ. Unity before marriage is not about merely disregarding a tradition, it is a violation of the spirit which animates us all, who is within us and gives us life. It is a violation of being reflecting onto another and being reflected on in such a way that the mirror formed in mutual union is never expunged and the connection is formed, because it has to do not strictly with an unimportant ritual but with the notion and condition of being itself is adultery an inadequate resolution.

To quote liberally someone, I believe it was C.S. Lewis, who said that the person who lusts does not love too much it is that the person loves too little to truly love at all.

In short, those are my thoughts for today. I hope that someone wanted to hear that. I know I’m not done with this topic, but thanks for tuning in.

Also, I realize i didn’t follow my basic outline at the start, sorry for those of you who expected better. whatever.

eli

Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out: Relationality in Cultural Context

Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out: A Case Study of Colin Gunton’s Theory of Relationality

“Like every great religion of the past we seek to find the divinity within and to express this revelation in a life of glorification and the worship of God. These ancient goals we define in the metaphor of the present — turn on, tune in, drop out.”

The Divinity within, a concept that permeates our contemporary culture’s idea of religion. This is clearly an example of what the great evangelical theologian Colin Gunton critiqued in his book The One, The Three and The Many: God Creation and the Culture of Modernity. However, what about the rest of the first statement? There’s clear religious language: revelation leads to a life of the glorification of god. Simple enough right? Surely there is need to express the revelation found in nature, found within our own minds, right? Surely a religion can be founded on the self, the divinity within, self sustenance.

In Leary’s Autobiography Flashbacks, He is quoted saying:

Turn on’ meant go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Become sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers that engage them. Drugs were one way to accomplish this end. ‘Tune in’ meant interact harmoniously with the world around you – externalize, materialize, express your new internal perspectives. Drop out suggested an elective, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments. ‘Drop Out’ meant self-reliance, a discovery of one’s singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change. Unhappily my explanations of this sequence of personal development were often misinterpreted to mean ‘Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity

A discovery of one’s singularity?

 

Let us not forget the relations with which we are gifted in order to develop.

Untitled II

Do you believe me? I asked one night, as we drifted through the night air, heavy laden with the tears of our saints. It took a moment to register that feeling, a soft twitch, a quirk in your smile. Weary and tired we approached the old theatre, tried and beaten down by the vagaries of reality. But within, within was really where the treasure was.

You’ve always known how to look within.

So, we descended the steps, hearing our echoes carry across the proscenium, listening to the whispers around us. Covered in rain, I lit up a cigarette and sat beneath the heavy curtains, drawing lines across your skin in whispers of broken revelry. You never join me here anymore.

Your lipstick carried the chorus of a thousand souls that night, breathing out the softest hues of murder and lullabies. Stroking your rain laden hair with my cold fingers, I felt you near me, felt you shiver inside your skin. You looked at me, caught in those eyes I emptied myself to the stars, and told you your dreams.

You told me I was your everything, now just a reflection. That night under the blood red curtains, I sang you a song from another world, that old song, from another life, when we were both cats. In that moment your eyes lit up and looked beyond our theatre, fell into revelry, and absorbed the ecstasy of our commingled voices as you joined me in our endless requiem.

Covered with each other upon the faded stage, upon that scratched wood, worn with love and age and ending memories we found each other, we found a song. I always knew you would find yourself. I was a saint. I was yours that night, and I asked if you believed me. You fell into that endless gaze and rose from my lap to dance before the eagerly awaiting audience of chairs and moths in the flames. You twirled about like that little girl, smiling out in open fields.

You told me to believe in you. You told me that everything was in its place. You asked me to love you like an endless dream, to enter you, an inseparable reflection. You were my voice, and I was your eyes. Justice, used to pass between us like ceaselessly flowing water, freely given. We used to watch the day go by from the roof, waiting for our chance to join the sun in her home under the earth. The moon we knew was our guardian, and the twilight, our sweet abode.

Weary and tired, you fell to your knees and cried out, a panic swept over your face, undying torture, a shriek of terror locked on your face. Suddenly, you no longer cared for beauty. Your knees locked in that bitter position of weeping agony, feeling the breaking of a thousand hearts, hearing the cries of a dying child, you were endlessly above me. I fell to my knees, welcoming the terror, feeling that horror that is our existence I joined you. Weeping hearts and breaking bridges, burning lives all around, and nothing for solace save the sound of our own tears.

You asked me to believe. I stopped hearing the sound of running water.

Dogma and the Imagination: Architecture

What is faith? Faith is that by which we are called to live out in awareness of something at times beyond immediate perception.

We live in a beautiful world, a world of wonder and amazement, you can feel it in the waves. It echoes in the wind, passes through the mountain peaks and into the valleys, fills the earth with life and green fields endless beauty on every side. We live in a world of color and inspiration, a world of music and sound and light, and warmth. We live in a world full of God’s glory. We can feel it at times, looking at the sunset, listening to the world around us at peace and rest. We find ourselves being in it, captured by it, alive through it, and reacting to it.

We live in a world full of chaos and greed. Full of vicious cycles of violence, where reason out strips beauty or ethics, where efficiency is king. We live in a world full of money, and slavery. Bloodshed is on every hand and the taste of blood on every lip. All are responsible. Nature is a competition and war zone for survival. Predators hunt prey daily and all nature itself knows is violence, terror. Politics rage around our heads as nations fling themselves at other nations and the threat of nuclear war shows us how much our own state of mind is fallen in the world today. We live in a world where people kill people for pocket change, where disaster lurks around the corner, and chaos is on our breath. We have bullet shaped teeth a penchant for violence, oppression in our every step, our institutions enslave us, we enslave others, and no one is free. We are a fallen world. Our planet decays under our cities, our strip mines destroy landscapes and our landfills hide our disasters.

The world is hideous. The world is beautiful.

Both of the above statements are true.

So what do we do about it? What are you and I supposed to do about a world that’s out of whack and thirsty for violence? It takes a move beyond the cursory glance into the news to do something about it. We live in a society where everything needs a microwaved, ready packed, do-it-yourself-in-seconds, prepackaged answer. But you cannot do that with life’s big issues. It takes moving out beyond the 30second attention span and into a meaningful reflection on what it means to be in the world.

So, what is the answer to our problem? I believe it is The Creative Imagination.

Art has the ability to bring with it presence, to create presence between the observer and the object being viewed. I think we can all agree that when we find a truly beautiful piece of art, we move beyond our everyday into something peaceful, serene, soothing, and tranquil. This does not mean all art is this way, but at the same time we can find those works that inspire us with their great beauty. Now, art is not just a frivolous and empty experience that makes us feel good about ourselves for a few moments. I believe that art is an integral part of humanity, and subsequently of Christianity. Why? Because through art, we experience the presence of something beyond ourselves, it takes us to a reality outside ourselves where we can admire our world with the beauty that it has. Furthermore, as a creation of beauty it glorifies the Creator God, who is the Triune Lord that we confess.

It would seem to me that art is going to play a central role in God’s reconciliation of all things. Because art is a means by which we can create beauty, observe the world, and celebrate what we see. This is not the only type of art though, nor does it need to be. While it is beautiful to paint a natural setting, there are other beauties, shapes, and forms, colors, shadows. Art can also show us darkness, the horrors of things past, nightmares from the minds of others, sadism, and death. But this is not the way art has been done before. Where modernity would seek to tell us to move along and be functional, rational and effiecient about the world, we must say ‘No.’ Where modernity would tell us that art is purely political, purely forms or minimalism, we cannot agree.

Art teaches us to stop, to breathe, to appreciate. It inspires us to see the world through different eyes, through another mind, through another perspective, through another heart. Art is not an aside to the Christian gospel, nor does it stem from scant and scattered verses about the arts in the Bible, rather it is integral to God’s plan to set things to rights within the created order. Art is the creation of repose, maybe secondarily, but how many of you have ever painted or taken a picture and found a rest and peace in that moment? The arts inspire us, bless us and heal us, they are a reminder of a world beyond modernity, beyond efficiency and offices.

Not just art alone though, because art can be done by anyone with talent. What it takes is Creative Imagination, inspired by the Creator.

The imagination is not a frivolous empty place where imaginary things hide in our closets and scare our children, the imagination is an active participant in the nature of human being. The imagination is an integral locus of what it means to be human. The imagination needs freedom to express itself and create beauty in our lives, without it we lose a pillar of our existence. The modernist pursuit of function actually served to our detriment, because the buildings of the era, like the thought of the era homogenize and reduce, alienate and divide. This is not supposed to be, created spaces should cultivate relationships and human interaction rather than divide people and separate them. The Creative Imagination can create these spaces.

For an assertion on the nature of Imagination, I briefly turn to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose work and reflection on the imagination serve a great good in society, and whose voice and contemplation point to something higher than himself. For Coleridge, the Imagination mediates between a world of real objects and a real presence, an “I am,” if you will. But the imagination does not create reality, it creates poetry. It creates a willed experience of the real. It is consciously willed creative control of the potentials within something that characterizes and signifies what the imagination is to Coleridge. It is a conscious mediation between the real world and something other, through the exercise of creative control that allows the mind to create something new and beautiful between the real world and the mind perceiving it.

As Christians, we should call for architecture that speaks meaning, and as Christians in architecture, spaces need to be functional but should also capture relationality between people and the space, should inspire imagination and create a place of reflection and interaction. We need to exercise willed creative control of a space in order to properly imagine all that space could be. Art is not divorced from life but is part of it, creating the environments we live in, and the places we have our interactions. If In Him we live and move and have our being, should not the spaces where that living moving and being reflect the glorious splendor of the creator and inspire something within us?

Have you ever considered what the architecture of our age says about us? We have no open spaces, we have symmetrical monstrosities that make us feel crowded in and insignificant. Our architecture worships our intellect and the feats of humanity’s vertical achievement, but reduce horizontal space to a trivial necessity in order to go higher and higher. I’m not an architect, not a philosopher of architecture, but we cannot let industry create our world, so that there is “a coca-cola advertisement in every village” [1] and a megalithic apartment complex every three blocks. This is not they things should be, buildings have voices, and symmetrical anonymous, identical, faceless buildings impose conformity and oppression. An age that promised enlightened thinking has stripped us of our freedom, an age that sought to create the ultimate humans has alienated their individuality, and stripped them of their power.

Have you as an architect or building design engineer considered that function is important but buildings can be used to point to something greater? To God Himself? Not as an empty sort of homogenization of architecture into cathedrals or religious buildings everywhere, but each space as its own voice and way of expressing the glory of God. Each space should be cultivated to the full extent of what it can be in itself, not as a universal style of distinction, but within each space a maximization of space, utility and relationality creates the Christian vision of what architecture means to us. Colin Gunton claims that one of the chief failures of modernity is the lack of reconciliation between universality and particularity. What this means for architecture is simple, either our buildings all look the same or they are disjointed and fragmented spaces juxtaposed over each other in a struggle for supremacy. What culture, what architecture needs is unified diversity.

Postmodernism is attempting to restore to particularity those things which belong to it, such as individual significance and importance, however, we cannot allow postmodernity to flatten our sense of space, place and being so that all things are equally valid. When all things are equally leveled out, they are all equally reduced into identical categories, none can be more beautiful, more special, or even individual anymore, and thus they all become boring. It’s like school uniforms, even in the uniformity of everything, it’s the people with the accessories that stand out.

Art and its mediation of presence to us through a created reality draws out the beauty within our own imaginations and inspires us to do something more with ourselves than merely be functional. Functionality is death if it is all that we do. We cannot possibly attempt to have any meaning beyond our bank statements and credit history if we do not actively engage in something beyond functionality. What is the purpose of life?

Certainly it is not to edify and construct institutions at the expense of our identity, to be functional at the expense of ourselves. It is something above and beyond that, and mediating between the horrors of the world and what can be done requires imagination. It requires the creation of beauty in the world, yes in art galleries and on sidewalks and in the streets, on the highways, and byways, in the villages and towns, among the lower classes as well as the socially privileged. The horrors and evil in the world requires us to actively engage the world with imagination, to take control of the situation and create beauty where there was none. Not in the sense of buildings alone, or paintings and inanimate objects, rather the imagination should be used in every aspect of life, actively engaging the world and discovering ways to beautify and cultivate a richer experience from things for the individual as well as the community.
At the core of the imagination is not an arbitrary idea, nor an idealism that is fragile, for Christians the core of the imagination should be the dogmas that inspire us, for the sake of active engagement in the world while not being of the world. The Christian Imagination, that creative force of the will that resides within us and inspires us should look to God’s affirmations of what it means to be in the world for guidance. Christ came to redeem, restore and reconcile all things to himself. He will someday reconcile and redeem all things, and it has already begun in his disciples, the Church, this is a core dogma of our faith. What this means for our artistic merit is that we are called to reconcile all things to God actively, by the Holy Spirit and the active imagination we can participate in. Not that this should reduce art to paintings of Jesus and the disciples, or make everything about looking religious, but really, it’s a celebration not just of spiritual things but the entire creation. Everything has the potential to be beautiful, or redeemed into beauty.

Recently reading an article by N.T. Wright, he mentioned a sculpture of the tree of life, made entirely out of decommissioned weapons.[2]

The world is good, and was created to be so. In acknowledging this we don’t need a specific apologetic for aesthetics, other than ‘for the glory of God.’ We can celebrate the goodness we already see within the world. We have the right to glorify God who created the beauty we do see. We have an imagination that can envision the way things should be, and point us to that reality.

The horrors of the world are real, but in the midst of them we can find peace in the One who is already Lord, and who will continue to bring reconciliation to all things by His Spirit. Christianity is calling…and is asking us to imagine what the world, redeemed and filled with God’s love looks like, and to do our part in making that happen, to create beauty that reflects the glory of God in what we do, the space we live in, the places and ways we exist.

Practically, we can say this: At the center of all the ugliness in the world is a sacrifice that calls us to change the way we think about things. There is for us a man on a cross, who shows us where God has entered into our pain, our suffering our emotional state, and said “enough.” There is a man who has entered into the heart of where the world feels pain, and he is calling us to go there too.

Imagination is not about feeling peppy, but rather is an active engagement in thinking creatively about reconciliation. The Christian Imagination calls us to enter into that same place where the world feels pain, and actively imagine what the love of God looks like there and to set about the task of expressing and ushering in that love, be it in architecture, music, art, sculpture, painting, reflection, philosophy, theology, conversation, ecology, and everything else.

The Anointing and The Other: Reflections and Confessions on Solidarity

Lately, I’ve just been exhausted. Tired beyond belief, the semester is almost over, but i feel as if I’ve come out with more scars and bruises than ever before. It’s almost over, but at what cost? I know that God is faithful, and that we need to have faith in his goodness. But it’s a little bit of a catch 22 that the things you need to be faithful are the very things challenged by the problems you face day to day. The things you need to be strong are the very things made difficult by the problems you face.

Time and again, we are strapped to some irreconcilable grief or evil that afflicts us, and we are sometimes ignored, told to have faith, stop sinning, press through, or just keep on keeping on. These remarks are empty, and filled with vanity, the vanity of self righteousness. What about compassion, what abut binding up the broken hearted? I feel that too many times I have fallen short in realizing that the Spirit of the Lord comes upon me to bind up the broken hearted, to preach liberty to the captives, to preach good news to the poor, and declare the good and acceptable year of The LORD and the day of the vengeance of our God.

The Spirit of The LORD is upon us so that like Jesus we may care for others. When I go through hard times, how often have i sought God’s counsel through his Spirit to come upon me and draw me into serving others and binding up their hearts and in the process my own? I sometimes forget that the Spirit of God comes upon me to help me help myself through helping others.

I have often heard about how the anointing is for personal benefit, which by all means is true. How can anyone who has felt the blessedness of actual grace conveyed either through the Eucharist or in prayer deny the self development and personal benefit of actual grace? However, such grace is not meant to be used only for self, but through self, in relation to others. Grace should inspire me to be aware of theirs and to bind up broken hearts, to reach out to heal, to stand with others and comfort them by the grace that is within my life. The grace conveyed from myself to the other, that is where we connect with each other and relate to each other in Christ by the Spirit.

I confess that I have fallen short in proclaiming liberty to the captives in my own life. I have fallen short and allowed myself to become a captive as well. I have failed to be the voice of liberation and comfort to those who need solidarity and guidance, I have failed to love those near me in the ways they need it most, and failed at being the strong one. I have not lived up to expectations and have not strengthened myself in The LORD, nor have I looked to the presence of God for my guidance and support. I have not led people out of captivity, but have entered into captivity with them and at times found myself trapped in the very darkness that i was trying to bring the light of Christ to.

I have not preached good news to the poor, or at least not often enough. I often find myself isolated, contaminated by my own busy mind and packed schedules. My calendar is often overloaded with time to spare and at the same time packed to the brim with things to do. I have often found myself too preoccupied to live out the solidarity that I preach, too focused on my grades and my classes, or just myself to remember the poor. Sometimes, I myself am one of the poor, forgotten and untouched, isolated and alone, but this should not be impeding me from reaching out to others. The problem is that it is the very issues of life that tend to isolate me from others, I keep myself aloof in order to solve something on my own because there are days I have no one I can trust.

I need to remember the good news myself, keep it in my mind when I am poor, that there is a God in Heaven Who has done the unthinkable. While I was estranged and in pure enmity towards Him, a self declared enemy of God, He chose to adopt me into His family. The good news is that this family will reign over all the earth through the firstborn of many brethren, through the God Man who has been appointed to steer the world towards the recapitulation that God has ordained to be His will from the beginning. The good news is that Jesus Christ is already The LORD of this world, and that His kingdom is spreading through the work of his followers, those being conformed to his image and spreading the light of his image throughout the world by resembling him. The good news is that time is being redeemed by the work of God in time, and that all things are being reconciled to God by Christ and the Spirit.

The good and acceptable year of The LORD is now, it is when we choose to do right in the eyes of God. It is when we are the ones who bring the light of Christ into the darkness in the world. Martin Luther King once said that the good and acceptable year of the Lord is when [people] decide to do right. It is when we decide to bless others, to love our enemies, when we bind up the broken-hearted. These all foreshadow the final acceptable time wherein all things will be reconciled to the triune God in blessed assurance of continued purpose in being created by a loving Creator.

Our Father in Heaven has called us to be His agents, and by His Spirit to have compassion, by His Spirit, to give peace, by the same Holy Spirit to deal justly and establish righteousness. We are fallible and will never simply progress towards this goal in time without God. Creation necessarily depends on its Creator.

Any progress that is to be had will be in individuals dedicating themselves to causes and committed to those causes, forming deep bonds of unity with people and the world around them to accomplish those goals which the Kingdom of God has called us to. More important than anything else is to remember that the Holy Spirit, teaches us to bless others, and to help them, by bringing light into their darkness, but it’s not a quick fix process. I need to remind myself to look to God for strength for the long haul, this is not an easy bake oven or a microwavable situation. I need to inspire those around me, through real commitment to them, not shadows of real compassion.

This is the vengeance of our God, peace that burns chaos, love that dissolves alienation and marginalization, justice that overcomes failure and defeat injustice and scandal, righteousness that reestablishes order, and sets about the restoration of everything.

Echoes, Memory and Individualism In Focus

Echoes, echoes are an amalgam of voices, they enshroud us, surround us, and draw us into themselves. Echoes invite us to enter into another realm, into some faraway and distant place that is simultaneously closer to us than we ourselves. Echoes are expressed in the genetics that we carry, they are memories of everyone who has contributed to our identity. Echoes are expressed in the stories we carry in memory, they beckon us beyond self awareness into a reflection of our composite nature. We are individual, but our individuality is not detached from the places we come from, the genes that make us, and the stories we carry in our hearts. Echoes when they happen in real time, are a manifestation of memory, an awareness of the ‘us’ that is inside every ‘me.’

Echoes are an awareness of memory, a remembering of everything that makes up our being. We are composite systems of relations, our relations are unified into a single consciousness, but we are nevertheless a system of relations. Another way of saying this is that, we have emerged out of something, never, ex nihilo. To believe otherwise is to displace community and heritage for a self created meaning that stands over against the truth of what identity really is. We are not conscious in the universe alone as floating arbitrary beings that define ourselves and refine ourselves by ourselves. We have come from somewhere, and that somewhere is in our skins, in our hair, in our eyes, in our smiles, in our memories and pasts, in our futures, in the things we hope for, and the disappointments we share among one another. We have ideas that were not born in a vacuum, but are the product of observation, genetics, inclination and intuition. Our individual consciousness depends on the interactions we have between ourselves and others, between the past and the present, between our bodies and the world around it, between imagination and reason, between language and the divine, between the spoken, and the ineffable.

Whispers in the essence of who we are make up some of the quirks and choices that we make and being aware of those whispers is how we will find our true individual consciousness. Individual consciousness is a composite dialogue between several varying awarenesses that indwell our entire “selves,” wholistically. To be aware of the past is to look to those things which contribute to an awareness of place, an awareness of where it is we come from, an anchor from which we set out in search of bringing new things back to where we came from. But it is also necessary to be conscious of the present, by realizing the present as a means of self expression and as an opportunity to give and receive freedom amid others. The present calls us to an awareness of the reality and particularity of ourselves, in which we live aware of the past but allow it to act as a voice amid the consciousness of our whole, not the determined end of it. Individual Consciousness necessarily depends on the awareness of the past as a guide to which we are anchored, and an intimacy with the present through which we acknowledge the need to become a self through choices we make and our reactions to the relations that we encounter.

In relation to the lives of others, our consciousness and being depend on being aware of others as relationally in need of interaction as we are. In the church there are times of solitude, contemplations, meditations, solaces and individual yearnings after God, but in the larger context of life our being depends on our relations to others. Our being depends on our being able to connect with others and be their liberators.

Our freedom in self-awareness is not a call to detachment but instead provides us the opportunity to interact with others in mutual relations that ask us to identify between one another using our getting to know others as a means of coming to know ourselves, as well as with one one another working together to find mutual identity amidst each other, and finally to identify ourselves as individuals indwelling one another, realizing that as Christians, we are dwelling within one another as one body, not to say that we are all the same, or share a hive mentality, but that in our individual expressions there is a single spirit that unites us.

That same Spirit which is The Spirit of Christ, seeks to bestow upon us unity as well as diversity, so that being happens in relation to others but individually as well as we discern what we are and what we are not in relation to other things. For a short analogy, being would occur as we dialogue with our relations, we learn what we are, as if by looking within another we see the contrasts and comparisons between ourselves and the others. So that when we look we are given a picture of those things which we are or wish to become as well as those things which are not part of our being and thus show us the boundaries of that which we would call our self.

God has united us by one spirit and that same spirit calls us to remember the echoes, the communal memory of those who have gone before us, those who live on in our bodies through our genes, those whose stories we carry in our hearts, whose lives shape parts of the direction of our own.

Our own individual memory serves us as well. Not just the echoes. Echoes, are in fact only a mere part of the memory we seek for ourselves. Memory grounds us in our identity, remembering is something beautiful. Memory is our grounding as beings, it is in memory that we have an awareness of who we wish to be through seeing who we have been. Memory in the context of a single being has an infinite value which can be associated with it, in that it is the only intangible thing which has a real presence outside of God. Memories can haunt, comfort, speak, even echo, or resonate.

In memory we find an obligation, the need to recall, to respect, that which has been and to look forward with an awareness of that past. We have an obligation to commemoration, by this I mean we have a duty to remember as a community, as a communion, to co-remember, but also to call forth that past into our present through an awareness of it. By this I simply mean, we as individuals must remember the nature of our relations in searching for being, and as communities, we must remember to listen to the voices that echo within us, to the other memory, the voices of a thousand ancestors past, and remember the places we have been through them, the evils we have faced as well as the victories we have had, the gravities of despair, as well as the heights of triumph.

Memory helps shape individual consciousness, and develop us into communal awareness. There is a necessary tension between relation and alienation, individualism tends to make the individual being of such importance that anything other, including friends and family are seen as infringements upon the freedom of the one. But in seeking freedom for oneself, one must also realize that without balance, anything that is other will necessarily be subordinate to our one.

Nietzsche was right to describe the will to power, without a conception of things that are other as having value for their relations to us, and without a value for any relations between self and things that are other, one necessarily creates a system where only the self matters. Where only aesthetic nihilism can flourish. Individualism with the goal of asserting a pure individual self will always suppress the role of anything that is other, so that in the end that assertion ends in power struggle after power struggle, failure or success alone.

In terms of God, individualism can strip us of God because it takes from us an awareness of the echoes, of the memories, of the many, the others in our lives, the communities we participate in, as well as our ability to relate to anything outside ourselves. This can become dangerous when we lose our ability to find a God that is wholly other yet relatable, in our striving to relate to ourselves and fit God in that picture, we can misrepresent and even destroy a working positive image of God before us. We can skew the voice of God and interpret it through radical subjectivity so that there is no God, in the end only interpretation based on the assertion of self over anything else. Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were right to say that was a possible outcome of modernity, only one of two things can happen in the face of a society that is modern.

Either we become part of the crowd and join untruth, part of the herd that makes us passive and disinterested, or we become power striving totalitarians, out of a necessity to meet the ideals of pure self subsistence.

So what do we do with all this? In short, we need a dual awareness of ourselves as united, many relations, with a single consciousness, as individuals. Furthermore we must remember the power with which we can recall those who have gone before, and those who are presently with us. We must be aware of our individuality in terms of relations, and how we are all interconnected, and made up of interconnections.

Memory/Echoes, Awareness, Existence, these three are one, and find one consciousness in those who unite them into one being. These are parts of consciousness, again not an end all say all, just an idea.

We are the relations we dwell in. Our being takes place in between the objects of self and other. The self, still remains fully self, the other still remains fully other, but there is meaning in the middle, and that meaning, that interaction is what makes our being a being at all, the dialogue between relations.

We are the relations we care for, and cultivate. Our being will be shown in the spaces between ourselves and others, the life of the spirit is found in our selves, but is most evident in the spaces between ourselves and others. Why else would they have an inherently social nature, one has never needed to be patient without some outside force requiring it. The spirit can guide us, giving us an awareness of the space between ourselves and others, showing us ourselves in the relations we have. Those relations are our mirror.

We are the relations we dwell in. Our being, both as individuals and communities will expose itself most strongly in our relations to the other, to memory, to echoes, to breathing in memories, and breathing out wisdom.

Breathe in, absorb your past, Open your eyes, and flooded with the light of awareness, become that which you are called to become.