When I first began my work in Christian religious renewal, the people with whom I was working were mostly nominal Christians who were interested in knowing answers to questions like: What do we mean by the word “God” What does it mean to say, “God loves us? What does it mean to call Jesus, the “Christ”? What are we pointing to with by being filled with Holy Spirit? How do we distinguish the true church from its many temporal manifestations and from its massive perversions? And what role does social justice play in a renewed Christian life? That was what I faced and learned to deal with in the nineteen sixties.
Today, in this second decade of the 21st century, many people have no interest, positively or negatively, in these old Christian symbols. If there is some relevant meaning in these old symbols, they don’t care. They even fear that finding some relevant meaning in this confused heritage will justify carrying on with the oppressive forms of Christianity that they have known and now wish to thoroughly avoid. Some of these folk have given up on religion of any sort. Why have a religious practice at all? What good is it? Who needs It? Some of these folk have given up on Christianity, but have moved on to a Buddhist practice or an Islamic practice or a Pagan practice or some other religious practice that they much prefer. Or perhaps some fresh, new therapeutic community or scientific discipline seems to help them well enough to not need a religion.
This new situation for Christian witnessing means at least these three things:
(1) Our presentation of Christianity has to be thoroughgoing in its separation from the old oppressive forms that people rightly dismiss and perhaps hate and fear.
(2) And we need to admit that our renewed Christianity is a finite practice alongside other finite practices of religion, none of which have dropped down from Eternity, but all of which have been created by limited human beings.
(3) At the same time, we need a contemporary vision of Eternity as a profound human experience that all good religions came into being, and stills come into being, to assist us to access. This experience of profound humanness needs to be at the heart of our interreligious dialogues and acts of interreligious cooperation. This experience of profound humanness also needs to be the foundation in Truth that guides us in discerning good religion from bad. All this means walking a sort of razor’s edge between falling back into oppressive dogma on the one hand and on the other hand falling forward into a thoroughgoing relativism that holds that any religious perspective or practice as just as good as any other, leaving us with no serious sense of religious validity.
In this Realistic Living Pointers I want to share some helpful insight that pertain to this third quality of a relevant Christian witness. I will start with this poem:
The temporal has a past and a future,
but no present.
The present is only a passing away,
a goodbye to an impermanence.
The present is only a coming to be,
a hello to what is coming into being
and will hence be going away.
In the present of temporality
there is no resting place,
no “IS,” no “Here I am.”
It is all coming and going.
It is all hello and goodbye.
And there is no space at all
between hello and goodbye.
We can image a space like today,
or this hour, or this year,
but these are merely imaginings of our mind,
not experiences of our body, gut, and awareness.
In our real, every-moment experience
of the temporal realm,
it is never Now!
Inescapable Eternality
Eternality is to be found in that infinitesimal nothingness of the present instant. Strange as it seems to our temporal-based minds, we can jump into that present instant and dwell there. Buddhist mediation is exactly that. As we concentrate our consciousness on the incoming and outgoing breath, we are able to notice consciousness itself sitting in its lasting “place” observing all sounds, all feelings, all thoughts, everything. Christian contemplation is also a jump into the lastingness of that Eternal Now. As we recall the past and anticipate the future, notice others and notice our own self, we are also able to notice consciousness itself, sitting in its lasting “place” observing all things. Each of the major world religions manifests awareness of this strange human capacity for being in the Now as some sort of resting place, as a place to BE between the ever-impending future and the ever-gobbling past.
The term “Eternal Now” found a place in the writings of Paul Tillich. Under that title, Tillich published a whole book of sermons on Biblical passages. Let us further explore in our own awareness what this strange paradoxical term “Eternal Now” can mean for us. This Now has no past and no future; it just IS. So stable is this IS that humans have been reluctant to believe that our IS will ever become IS NOT. Humans have projected a reincarnation of this IS, or a resurrection of our body and its IS in a next eon of time, or the continuance of this IS in a Spirit realm of heavenly bliss, or perhaps everlasting despair. That our IS will become NOT with the death of our body is altogether likely; nevertheless, these ancient projections of an “after-death-IS” witness to the Now experience in our current lives of an Eternality to which we are inescapably related.
For the rest of the essay from which the above excerpt it taken, click:
http://www.realisticliving.org/UR3/3TimeEternity.pdf
And for a ten-session course on Christians, Who Are We?
with course overview, ten essays, ten lesson plans for teaching those ten essays,
plus an eleventh essay for further reading, click: