Sean, what I write here is not intended to contradict your experience but more to ask, having the same experience myself, what the next step is.
Some things I read in your wonderful writing:
There is a wonderful world to travel.
Threats--even nuclear ones--can recede.
Days can be wonderful.
There is such a thing as apple strudel.
People make friends.
You (Sean) can be generous and buy people dinner.
People donate food and staff breadlines.
I think your heartbreak is well-founded and based in "Love your neighbor as yourself."
But when the lawyer asked Jesus about eternal life, Jesus asked him to repeat the Law.
The lawyer answered: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself."
Jesus said: "Do this and you shall live."
There are many of us who remember to love our neighbors. But I wonder what it means for us and the world if we also learn to do it while loving the pattern of existence?
Believe me, I understand where you are coming from.
And only the other night, I was in the bathtub convinced that everything was futile and fucked, even--maybe especially--my life. Even Jesus, on the Cross, asked "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?"
But I can't help wondering--and this is absolutely not science, not logos but mythos--if things are transformed by how we view them.
If it is so, then loving God with all your body, soul, heart and strength becomes an obligation to transform that upon which we gaze--by our gaze. If our infinitely loving gaze transforms things, then loving the pattern existence actually becomes "loving your neighbor as yourself."
People say that you need to view things with heartbreak, fear and anger in order to be motivated to change it. But actually both science and religion shows that it is when we are in awe and gratitude that we are most likely to help and be generous.
What if it is not the world that stops us from seeing God in plain sight, but our own minds? And what if making the effort to change our minds in order to see God in plain sight changed things?
It would be hard. Because seeing God and holding heartbreak at the same time may mean God isn't as we hoped. Like, I'd rather believe God isn't there than believe God co-exists and even creates the heartbreaking situations.
And, still, then, can we love God with all our body, all our heart, all our soul and all our strength?
Thank you for this very profound response. I guess my main intention with this post was to show that sudden flashes of truth can be as heartbreaking as they can be exhilarating, depending on what is being revealed.
But your thoughts on what to do about that heartbreak are fascinating. To observe with love, to stumble from my naivete into an embrace of the world as it is, feels much more like a holy call than to recoil. I personally don't believe that God creates suffering, only that God uses suffering and suffers with us, but I'm no theologian.
No shortage of heartbreak, is there?
Powerful and haunting.
Wonderful.
Well said, Sean.
Thank you, Barbara.
Sean, what I write here is not intended to contradict your experience but more to ask, having the same experience myself, what the next step is.
Some things I read in your wonderful writing:
There is a wonderful world to travel.
Threats--even nuclear ones--can recede.
Days can be wonderful.
There is such a thing as apple strudel.
People make friends.
You (Sean) can be generous and buy people dinner.
People donate food and staff breadlines.
I think your heartbreak is well-founded and based in "Love your neighbor as yourself."
But when the lawyer asked Jesus about eternal life, Jesus asked him to repeat the Law.
The lawyer answered: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself."
Jesus said: "Do this and you shall live."
There are many of us who remember to love our neighbors. But I wonder what it means for us and the world if we also learn to do it while loving the pattern of existence?
Believe me, I understand where you are coming from.
And only the other night, I was in the bathtub convinced that everything was futile and fucked, even--maybe especially--my life. Even Jesus, on the Cross, asked "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?"
But I can't help wondering--and this is absolutely not science, not logos but mythos--if things are transformed by how we view them.
If it is so, then loving God with all your body, soul, heart and strength becomes an obligation to transform that upon which we gaze--by our gaze. If our infinitely loving gaze transforms things, then loving the pattern existence actually becomes "loving your neighbor as yourself."
People say that you need to view things with heartbreak, fear and anger in order to be motivated to change it. But actually both science and religion shows that it is when we are in awe and gratitude that we are most likely to help and be generous.
What if it is not the world that stops us from seeing God in plain sight, but our own minds? And what if making the effort to change our minds in order to see God in plain sight changed things?
It would be hard. Because seeing God and holding heartbreak at the same time may mean God isn't as we hoped. Like, I'd rather believe God isn't there than believe God co-exists and even creates the heartbreaking situations.
And, still, then, can we love God with all our body, all our heart, all our soul and all our strength?
Thank you for this very profound response. I guess my main intention with this post was to show that sudden flashes of truth can be as heartbreaking as they can be exhilarating, depending on what is being revealed.
But your thoughts on what to do about that heartbreak are fascinating. To observe with love, to stumble from my naivete into an embrace of the world as it is, feels much more like a holy call than to recoil. I personally don't believe that God creates suffering, only that God uses suffering and suffers with us, but I'm no theologian.
So fun to discuss. But how can anything exist if God did not create it or create at least the seed from which it grew? #HonestQuestion
I don't know. I don't know how any of it works.