Peace/Spirituality

Aletheia and Myth

Posted on by stephen t berg / 0 Comment

Finally, beloved, whatever is true…and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.(St. Paul)

Have you ever had the experience of looking at a total stranger and for what ever reason, without there being any outward signs of difficulty or distress in the person, your heart goes out to him. Maybe it was a look, a mannerism, an almost imperceptible moment of awkwardness. Whatever it was, you experienced a connection with him just beneath consciousness.

And perhaps with it, a memory flooded back about the first time you discovered there were other people in the world besides you. And they were real. Real as you. They had hopes and fears and desires and appetites…just like you. And you really hadn’t noticed how concrete that was before and you were almost overwhelmed by it all. And it made you wonder; and it changed the way you thought about yourself and about your place in the world.

Whatever you do, hang on to those signs of humanity. Trust the truth in them. They are real and ultimately the difference between a full-life and a life of sleep-walking, a compassionate life and a preoccupied life. It’s so easy–as a matter of fact it’s our default position–to live within the myth that our desires are uniquely ours.

Aletheia is the Greek word for truth. It comes from the root letho, which is the verb “to forget”. The prefix a is the negative. So the literal meaning of the Greek word for truth, aletheia, is “to stop forgetting”. Aletheia is the etymological opposite of myth. Something to remember.

Tags: , , ,

Uncategorized

The Patriotic Spirit

Posted on by stephen t berg / 0 Comment

A few days ago I posted a mulling on patriotism. (It is the season.) Well, it’s turned into something like an article. If I get it published I’ll post it here with it’s slightly revised beginning. If not I may publish it here angway. That, my friends, is the beauty of blogging. It concludes as follows:

The “patriotic spirit”, which so easily becomes an idol, keeps us tied-up in escalating cycles of retaliation. It’s this “patriotic spirit” that can become the worst form of nationalism-witnessed today in the rise of new-nationalism.

During the early 1990’s, Michael Ignatieff saw this new-nationalism first hand as he traveled from Serbia to Northern Ireland and elsewhere. As chronicled in his book, “Blood and Belonging”, he exposes the deep connection between violence and belonging. Ignatieff reports, “I have been to places where belonging is so strong, so intense, that I now recoil from it in fear.” There was a reason why the good Dr. Johnson said that patriotism was the last refuge of scoundrels.

That is not to say a Christian should not have a love for her country, or take part in its political process. But her love will not be for “blood and soil”. It will be a simple love of place and relationships; and her love will not stop at a border. As well, her political involvement will be a provisional involvement. It may look more like a respectful child who sits quietly with the grown-ups after dinner, but who can’t wait to get back to playing outdoors.

It’s this kind of “play” that is at work within Jesus’ notion of the kingdom. We get the impression that Jesus loved his land, his people, but he was no patriot. His allegiance was to a “kingdom that was not of this world” (John 18), meaning, he was profoundly indifferent to our ways of founding and keeping alive nation-states through violence. He was not promoting any kind of escapist formula as though there was a disconnect between this world and the kingdom. He was instead actively inviting us to shed our categories of us and them, categories that are inherent in patriotism.

Now all of this leaves any Christian in agreement open to the charge of supreme naiveté. However from the perspective of Jesus, this naiveté is a kind imaginative innocence that takes no prisoners and exacts no revenge and is willing to stand in front of tanks so as to open up the possibility of human evolution.

The “way of patriotism” has no understanding of this possibility, and so sees it, as Nietzsche saw it, as ultimate weakness and folly. But the supposed sophistication of state-craft through patriotic-nationalism, because it is founded on the mechanism of expulsion, because its unity is at the expense of a violent exclusion of some other group or nation, is doomed to the same tired results. We’ve tried this, in all its variations. What too many of us Christians haven’t begun to try is Jesus’ way of creative naiveté.

Tags: , , ,

Christianity/Spirituality

A Living Mystery

Posted on by stephen t berg / 0 Comment

“To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda or even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery: it means to live in such a way that one’s life would not make sense if God did not exist.” Emmanuel Cardinal Suhard

I came across this quote by Suhard while reading some church history. Suhard was someone I hadn’t heard of before but his quote stood out and rang true. I needed to share it.

Some may think his thought is on the esoteric side. I would disagree. Perhaps instead, our definition of mystery is impoverished. Mystery is not something we just haven’t figured out yet. It is instead a compelling force that speaks of transcendent beauty and possibility and promise.

“A living mystery”, is something we too seldom encounter these days. St. Paul refers to the “mystery of Christ” or the “mystery of the gospel” over twenty times in his letters. I would think that living in such a way that recalls the “mystery of Christ” is exactly our calling.

As far as I can tell Cardinal Suhard tried to practice his preaching. As the Archbishop of Paris during the German occupation, he protested against the deportation of the Jews. He also protested against the deportation of young workers to Germany for forced labor and when this failed, he organized a program of clandestine chaplains to go to Germany with these youth.

Of course the way a Christian comes to reflect the “mystery of the gospel” will spring out of her own unique mystery, engaged as it is, with the “mystery of Christ”.

Tags: , ,

Christianity

Sparrows and Counting Hair

Posted on by stephen t berg / 0 Comment

Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. And even the hairs of your head are all counted. (Matthew 10)

Yesterday morning I met David. He was in a parking lot, sitting on one of those car-width long, six-inch high, concrete wheel-blocks that are at the front of all the parking stalls. His block was in a handicapped stall.

He looked tired and sad, not like that’s new for guys on the street. I expected him to ask me for money. He didn’t, and I realized that he wasn’t asking anyone for money; only looking up at passers-by from time to time. It was his way, I guessed. I walked past him, but then stopped, and asked him how he was.

Things, of course, had been better. We talked for a while, maybe fifteen minutes. He was clear-eyed, well-spoken, had been clean for a “time”. When we parted we exchanged names and I wished him success as he was a newcomer to Edmonton. Then he smiled at me and I took it as sincere and natural. Perhaps my estimation of that is too optimistic, but I sensed that I made him feel, at least to a degree, that he mattered.

I read in a Madeleine L’Engle book that the reason astrology was so popular–and still is in some corners–is that your day of birth, even the hour and minute of the day you were born, matters. By inference of course, you matter.

I don’t think there is anything so empty as feeling that you do not matter. I’m repeating a thousand other counselors, pastors, writers, in stating the obvious, but we all want, no, need, to matter. It occurs to me that the obvious needs restating…perhaps so that it stays “obvious”. Because this is something that in practice, in giving and receiving, too quickly slips us by.

David needed somebody to talk to. He did not need instruction, or counsel, or a “cheery” good-morning, the kind I’ve given often enough as a way to dismiss my-supposedly-busy-self from contact. There will be a time for counsel and direction but just then, David simply needed to hear a human voice. That’s my take anyway.

And about the verse? Jesus’ words about “sparrows and numbering hairs” only makes sense when we are able to connect them to some experience of having-mattered-to-someone.

Tags: ,