Tag: Random thoughts

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Education, passivity and God’s plan for humanity

I was rather interested in Michel de Verteuil’s comment (in: Let All the Peoples Praise Him: Lectio Divina and the Psalms) that

because of the insights of great educators like Paulo Freire, we are conscious that the education system encourages passivity; it frustrates God’s plan for humanity.

I can certainly relate to our education system encouraging passivity, which seems true in so many ways. I’ve thought before that I ought to read Paulo Freire myself sometime. De Verteuil’s comment has just reinforced that.

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The body was even scarier

Interesting thoughts by Margaret Atwood on ‘dirty words’:

The bad ones in French are the religious ones, the worst ones in any language were what they were most afraid of and in English it was the body, that was even scarier than God.

From Surfacing.

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Re-membering and the ongoing work of making creation whole

Some sobering and insightful thoughts about the Eucharist from Sara Miles’s inspiring book Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion:

The entire contradictory package of Christianity was present in the Eucharist. A sign of unconditional acceptance and forgiveness, it was doled out and rationed to insiders; a sign of unity, it divided people; a sign of the most common and ordinary human reality, it was rarefied and theorized nearly to death. And yet that meal remained, through all the centuries, more powerful than any attempts to manage it. … The feast showed us how to re-member what had been dis-membered by human attempts to separate and divide, judge and cast out, select or punish. At that Table, sharing food, we were brought into the ongoing work of making creation whole.

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Lion Isaiahists and Wolf Isaiahists battling over the Peaceable Kingdom

The Lion Isaiahists and the Wolf Isaiahists both preached on street corners, battling when they met: they were at odds over whether it was the lion or the wolf that would lie down with the lamb once the Peaceable Kingdom had arrived.

This little satirical gem from Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood puts it finger rather squarely on one of the problems Christianity tends to suffer from.

There’s much insight in the following thought, too:

… religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God.

.

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The barbarians have already been governing us for quite some time

Alasdair MacIntyreWhat matters … is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages, which are already upon us. The barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theology

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A source of life and service

In her poem ‘The Lord’s Prayer from Guatemala’ (1979), also published in Threatened with Resurrection/Amenazado de resurrección, Julia Esquivel envisages that:

churches abandon their structures of power and domination
and become instead a source of life and service
for all humankind.

…

For yours is the kingdom
belonging to no usurper,
yours is the power
belonging to no structure or organization,
and yours is the glory,
for you are the only God and Father
forever and ever, AMEN.