I came across a quote I wrote many years ago in a notebook I found again this week; 'we are not to give passive assent to a fact in a creed, but to participate in the life of the resurrected Jesus.' Ouch! The challenge rings true in my heart; so much of what we take for the faith in the west is a passive acknowledgement of a credal statement, rather than a vital demonstration of what the faith is about.
I'm as guilty as the rest. And it's difficult to work my way back through all the processes of western thought and its twists and turns, to where belief and lived experience were so intertwined that the gap was negligible; probably a mythical place, I acknowledge, but maybe there was a state, way back when, where apprehension of the resurrection led, sans complications, to a life imbued with that resurrection force.
But I pray that in spite of all the cultural accretions, the intellect, the doubts, the anxieties, which I have put between myself and The Life, somehow I may live it. And that it may be recognised in some small way as having the stamp of God in it.
Is that how it is with you-?
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