A Passage from Rilke

Just some words from Ranier Maria Rilke's The Divine Hours: The Book of Poverty and Death, (III, 31) that spoke to me. Perhaps instead of the word "cities" one could substitue another term - consumerism, commercialism, or perhaps some other "ism." You decide...

The cities only care for what is theirs
and uproot all that's in their path.
They crush the creatures like hollow sticks
and burn up nations like kindling.

Their people serve the culture of the day,
losing all balance and moderation,
calling their aimlessness progress,
driving recklessly where they once drove slow,
and with all that metal and glass
making such a racket.

It's as if they were under a spell:
they can no longer be themselves.
Money keeps growing, takes all their strength,
and empties them like a scouring wind,
while they wait for wine and poisonous passions
to spur them to fruitless occupations.

On Cognitive Limit and the Ground of the Divine

I was recently reading a work on the metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead by Thomas E. Hosinski (Stubborn Fact and Creative Advance). In the conclusion of the fourth chapter, Hosinski comments that Whitehead’s system is "an attempt to give basis for human particulars in the minutiae of the universe." My immediate gut response was to question why this was necessary? I guess I am not persuaded that we must have or find some rule or law in the depths of the cosmos to give legitimacy to what happens or occurs phenomenologically on the human level.

What is the source or basis for the need to find objective grounding for that which exhibits itself in humanity? Certainly there are the issues of being able to make objective claims about the universe, but why cannot the basis be simply in the fact that we exist? Why cannot our humanity, the fact that these things occur in us - product and part of the universe - give us enough "right" to assert claims, realizing that we do so as a particular, unique species and creation of the cosmos?

This, I believe, is part of the issue - recognizing our limit as humanity. Does this go back to the issue of epistemic distance and limit and the recognition of the other? Is this not a liberalizing tendency that perhaps points to the heart of a new interpretation of the gospel? I have no problem with objective claims as long as there is a distinction made in the type of objectivity that can be found. That is there are local, speciated objective interpretation and valuations and there are universal, meta objective interpretations and valuations. Objective claims then can be made about the world but only as local speciated objective claims. That is, we can only speak objectively when we, at the same time, realize the limit of this objectivity. Trying to find an ultimate basis within the universe for human values, etc. seems to say that these human particularities have no value nor worth unless they possess such deep rooted beginnings or sources such as in the "minutiae of the universe," or at the lowest levels. This, of course, is contrary to the idea of emergence and emergent properties.

As with all thoughts and ideas, I wonder how do I relate this back to the way of the Christ? I believe that it is at this limit, this cognitive and epistemic distance and limit , the area where we realize our inability to be all things - the limit of self, of understanding outside of self, where the possibility for a re-interpretation of what Christ is may be possible.

It is in our sounding out the depths and limits of our selves that we see return to us our acknowledgement of our finitude. And in the image that forms from this we can recognize the significance of “both/and.” It is this, what is seemingly a paradox, what can only be described as mystery, that is the ground from which the divine comes towards us. In recognizing our limit we also gain sight to that which we are. Our limits show us our interdependence, our createdness, and our possibility for further creative venture within and without our selves. “Through creativity, with creativity, and in creativity, unified by Spirit…” to paraphrase the doxology of the memorial acclamation. We find God coming not from us, but at the same time in us, from this limit of knowing that provides self knowledge.

We are reliant upon this; even if we do not at all times consciously recognize this fact. And it is when we build up our lives and systems upon the lie and error that knowledge, and therefore control, can be or is complete and within ourselves that we see the welling up of the demonic. The demonic in life is the illusion of control and omniscience manifesting itself in our actions and outlooks.

The Parable of the Invisible Gardener

As promised Greg, here is the text I offered for consideration the other night. It is by Antony Flew from the book New Essays in Philosophical Theology.

“Let us begin with a parable. It is a parable developed from a tale told by John Wisdom in his haunting and revelatory article ‘Gods’. Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing the jungle. In the clearing were growing many flowers and many weeds. One explorer says, ‘Some gardener must tend this plot’. The other disagrees, ‘There is no gardener’. So they pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. ‘ But perhaps he is an invisible gardener.’ So they set up a barbed-wire fence . They electrify it. They patrol with bloodhounds. (For they remember how H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man could be both smelt and touched though he could not be seen.) But no shrieks ever suggest that some intruder has received a shock. No movements of the wire ever betray an invisible climber. The bloodhounds never give cry. Yet still the Believer is not convinced. ‘ But there is a gardener, invisible, intangible, insensible to electric shocks, a gardener who has no scent and makes no sound, a gardener who comes secretly to look after the garden which he loves.’ At last the Sceptic despairs, ‘But what remains of your original assertion? Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?’…A fine brash hypothesis may thus be killed by inches, the death by a thousand qualifications.”

A poem by Lee Carroll Pieper

I ran across this poem a while back...hope you enjoy!

Many are called
but most are frozen
in corporate or
collective cold,
these are the stalled
who choose not to be chosen
except to be bought and sold.

Unititled Reflection

Creativity begets Life,

and Life begets Hope,

and Hope begets Faith,

and Faith recognizes this Mystery,

and this Mystery begets God.

Where Faith Begins and Ends

Part of my thesis is devoted to the thought of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a twentieth century Jesuit priest, geopaleontologist, and theologian who wrote prolifically on the subject of evolution and Christianity. While the main thrust of his writing is aimed at creating a synthesis from orthodox Catholicism and evolutionary theory, other portions turn toward mysticism. My favorite passages come from the latter. I can’t help but wonder how his thought may have differed if he did not have the mental obligation to such a strict understanding of Catholicism?

Here is a passage from his 1934 essay, “How I Believe:"

"If, as the result of some interior revolution, I were to lose in succession my faith in Christ, my faith in a personal God, and my faith in spirit, I feel that I should continue to believe invincibly in the world. The world (its value, its infallibility and its goodness) – that, when all is said and done, is the first, the last, and the only thing in which I believe. It is by this faith that I live. And it is to this faith, I feel, that at the moment of death, rising above all doubts, I shall surrender myself."