Terry Chapman's - Sabbath Journey

Kenosis as beginning part 2

This from Samir Selmonovic's newly published and excellent book, It's Really All About God:

"The Place Where We Are Right"
by "one of the greatest Israeli poets, Yehuda Anchai"

From the place where we are right
flowers will never 
grow.

The place where we are right
is hard and trampled
like a yard.

But doubts and loves
dig up the world
like a mole, a plow.

And a whisper will be heard in the place
where the ruined
house once stood."

A place where we are right is seldom a thin place.  Giving up being right about God, about life, about ourselves, is a process of emptying.  When emptied of our need to be in charge of all the answers, we open ourselves tot he stories of people we have always thought we knew. And as we listen and speak, we find our differing and difficult stories woven together, whole and beautiful, for the whole universe to see.

Here again is a beautiful description of the beginning of the journey of transformation.  The place of assumed "rightness" is really a state of being unconscious, and of apathy.  It is downloading, being plugged into a steady stream of information that confirms your point of view. (Reminds of the Matrix). It is indeed a THICK place where real reality cannot penetrate and the real self is perpetually diminished. It is to be dead to the creative life of the Spirit.

I know letting go is really scary but not as terrifying as the alternative!  Again LET US REMEMBER THAT "OUR LIVES ARE HIDDEN WITH CHRIST IN GOD."   So, with the preacher in Hebrews, "Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.  Is not the "throne of Grace" that time and space where God breaks into our lives?  It is that thin place toward which the spiritual journey leads.  Knowing the destination we can let go of our epistemological arrogance with boldness and with confidence knowing that in so doing we grow closer to the transforming mystery of God. 

I touched on this in yesterday's sermon on Mark 9:30-37, Rethinking Greatness.  The disciples were stuck, paralyzed by fear, and unable to ask Jesus for help in understanding his teaching.  I wonder if U2's song that contains the lyrics "stuck in the moment and con't get out of it" describes this place of downloading.

Moltmannian Musings - The Crucified God

p. 16  Only by self-emptying in encounter with what is alien, unknown and different does man (sic) achieve selfhood... But this includes the 'ceaseless prayer for the spirit of persistence" That is trust in the hidden and guaranteed identity with Christ in God (Col. 3:3)  makes possible the self-abandonment, the road into nonidentity and unidentifiability, which neither clings to ancient forms of identity, nor anxiously reaches out for the forms of identity of those one is fighting in common.

...

Solidarity with others in meaningful actions loses it creative character if one no longer wishes to be anything different from the others.  ... Only someone who finds the courage to be different from others can ultimately exist for 'others', for otherwise he exists only with those who are like him.

This self-emptying lies at the threshold of the spiritual journey.  It is the often painful realization (like a sharp shard pressing against one's heart) that there is more to reality than one's own small story.  There is more that "wants" to happen that is new and brings one in closer proximity to the "other" who has been previously shut out by old assumptions, systems, and calcified historical experience.  It can be described as coming to terms with "inconsumation" bringing to the surface a need to cry out and mourn one's incompleteness.  it can be experienced simultaneously as both desolation and consolation, as opportunity and frustration.  But it is always the first step!  It is a restlessness that is necessary to move from the place of "downloading" to the next step on the journey (According to "U") of opening one's mind to let the new in.  The resistance is of course, the VoJ - Voice of Judgment, which as Moltmann rightly points out requires courage to suspend or let go of what one has been clinging to.

For the Christian the source of this courage is, again as Moltmann points out, found in the trust that "You have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God." (Col. 3:3)  Without this assurance I imagine that courage for what lies ahead would be hard to sustain.