This morning’s homily went all right, I think; at a certain point people get used to one’s preaching and it becomes harder to calibrate the extent to which they’re responding to this particular sermon as opposed to the extent to which they’re responding to the aggregate of all one’s past sermons.I wasn’t rendered uncomfortable while preaching it, though I’m certain there’s room for clarifying or refining what I will post here (below the fold), so this one probably hits the broad ‘average’ range for my homiletics.
Oooo. The apothecary God! I love this image.
Eschatology is one of those I could never really seem to wrap my head around. On the one hand as you say death decay is all around us and on the other hand, it is exactly that dynamic which liberate us. I feel a complex relationship between my personal death and my own view of what happens after that, and the larger communal death, and what happens after that. The second seems to be more abstract and is the place where our deepest hopes for the future lie the former is the one that complicates matters because it’s the place we most directly feel personal suffering.
I’m curious if you’ve ever thought about Jesus and Paul’s teaching here in relation to the four noble truths and the noble eightfold path liberation that the Buddha taught. It strikes me that there are parts of the perennial tradition that help me personally, and others I talk to, engage with Christian eschatology with curiosity and a practical sense of living the many polarities that you name.
Sorry for the typos. I voice typed this and didn’t check it before sending.
Oh, Chris, so honoured that you’re thinking along with me. Thank you for your imagino-contempla-deliberati-provocations!
One of my great concerns involves respect for particularity, for the gritty details that make us ourselves/different from one another. As such, I try to concentrate on my Xn theological stuff and not dip into someone else’s spiritual well for a(n exotic) taste of the water that flows to nourish them. At the same time, I have read some, studied a little, and am married to someone who earned her first degree in comparative religion. On that basis, I feel as though I have back-up among fellow travellers when I reason that I’m just not equipped to say a lot about The End. I probably won’t be around for The Big Ending, if there is one, because (a) the raw odds are against that happening during any person’s lifetime and (b) I don’t understand how anybody could know anything about a condition so radically, utterly different from anything that constitutes human life today.
And this side of The Big One, so much suffering, arising from so much desire! This is a theme manifest not only in the gospels and Paul, but also and especially my cherished James. That it runs in seeming parallel to truths acknowledged by a teacher (and the teachers who followed him) whom I respect deeply, even at a distance, encourages me to think that there might be something to it. I will no more try to coopt their teaching as a buttress for my own than I’d imagine they would want to coopt my stuff to inculcate their spiritual teaching. But that doesn’t mean we can’t nod respectfully when we’re in nodding range, wink, smile, maybe bow a little, and go about our meditations comforted that someone without a stake in Proving Something sensed a distant kinship.
As to personal and communal death, I just have no expectations. I want not to be burdened by feelings that one day God might let me down, or that my stipulations or expectations or rationalisations are somehow binding on a Love so vast that it would not but share, even at the cost of its ‘own’ being, because love not shared isn’t yet love. So in answer to your question, I already know that nothing lies in wait for me (in the sense that, if I can’t conceptualise or touch or even begin to guess at it, I shouldn’t bother trying to name it something). I trust (imperfectly, but I work at it), and I am reassured and consoled that I neither can be nor will be disappointed. And for my community, I try to speak and live in ways that may chip open that possibility for us, that maybe we (together) can practise letting-go enough that at some ‘time’ not chosen on our terms, we can let go of everything. Maybe we have shed all our tears; maybe joy so fills us that we don’t need to laugh, that channeling joy into laughter would be a step away from where we should be: at perfect ease, agog, filled with what in us needs filling but overall, in the end, emptied of what we have tried so hard to carry. To step back toward more familiar, sensible, concrete terms, I think that would be heavenly.
(No need to worry about voice-pos, friend.)