"...what if Christ does not fill the empty cup we bring to him but rather smashes it to pieces, bringing freedom, not from our darkness and dissatisfaction, but freedom from our felt need to escape them?" PR
The more I long to embrace a Creator that is far removed from the far away God I once embraced, the more books like this one entice me into a space of understanding a Creator that embraces more than needs to be coddled.
Original Sin can be understood very simply as the sense of loss that all humans experience in the process of coming to self-awareness, while Idolatry refers to any object that we imagine can fill this inner void. To put it another way, we mistakenly feel that we have lost something central to our humanity (Original Sin) and then postulate some object we believe will restore what we have lost, something we believe will bring wholeness and fulfillment to our lives (the Idol). In this way the two terms are intimately interwoven, for without Original Sin there would be no Idolatry. Without the formation of the gap at the moment of self-awareness, we would not be provoked into imagining something that could fill it. Original Sin thus opens up the possibility of Idolatry. PR
I don't get close to anyone I worship. That was true with my sister and even more true with God. The more I worshipped God, the farther away that God got from me. I wonder if that is the attraction to the Jesus story. Maybe at heart, we don't want a God we can worship and remain as slaves to, we want a Creator that can embody us in our pain and humanity. What if it is not just a want, what if it could be a reality.
Jesus is presented to us as being at one with the source of all that is. Here we glimpse the idea that God is not that which lies ahead of us as a distant being we must attempt to reconcile with, but must be approached as the depth or ground that we can come into contact with once we are freed from the Idolatry that holds us captive. We must approach God as that reality we encounter indirectly through a deep and committed love of the world itself. PR
Love makes sense as the standard, if we can only understand the totality of Love.
When someone is in love he cannot help but experience the world as meaningful, even if he doesn’t believe it is. While the one who does not love cannot help but experience the world as meaningless even if he believes that the world is meaningful. Love then infuses the world with meaning regardless of what one believes about it. By revealing God as love, the Christian tradition rejects the idea that God is a meaningful being in favor of the idea that God is that which lights up our world, rendering it meaningful to us. This means that unlike the Idol, which seems meaningful until grasped, the moment we lay down the idea of God as meaningful and find the world infused with meaning, we bear witness to the meaningfulness of the divine. PR
I don't like to use "God" as the descriptor of that which gave me breath... because that name, that word still holds baggage for me in the communities I dwell in. That name is still the idol of religion. That which dwells far away.
I realize I am restricted by language and culture. Trying to break free of those shackles may be an exercise in futility. I spend a lot of time trying to make my words mean something and sometimes it only invites conflict. I don't like conflict. So my other option is to let others just believe I agree with them, thus pretending to be someone I am not and also deceiving those I love. Is that how I am to best navigate this life?
While the Idol is a fiction that we experience as existing, we may say that the God of Christ is a reality that we experience as not existing.
Instead, this God is present as the source that calls everything into existence. The word “exist” literally means “to stand out.”
The main characteristic of something that exists is that we are able to treat it as an object of some sort. We are able to hold it, contemplate it, smell it, touch it, or hear it. The God hinted at in Christianity is that which calls everything into existence, all the while defying objectification. PR
God does not exist. Love does not exist. But everything is brought into existence by God, by Love... now that is meat worth chewing on. "God" ceases to be an idol, and is that which sustains my breath and is that Flow that moves in, around and through me.
Thank you Peter Rollins for yet another rocket read. I find myself a little closer to embracing something that doesn't exist, and yet all that is in me and around me exists because of that something. That is a something or someone worth embracing.
A life in which the source of all is no longer approached as some being whom we ought to love, but as a mystery we participate in through the very act of love itself. PR