Dear Eugene

Dear Eugene, How fragile we are.  How we need to consider this.  How do we consider this? Today I was reading again Rowan Williams' " The Wound of Knowledge ," and here he speaks about a Christianity that I suspect is foreign to most churchgoers, and I suspect not only in the West: "The final control and measure and irritant in Christian speech remains the cross: the execution of Jesus of Nazareth. Christianity is born out of struggle because it is born from men and women faced with the paradox of God’s purpose made flesh in a dead and condemned man. Without the cross there would be no New Testament. . . . What is at issue is that the first Christians were painfully aware that God’s chosen one and God’s chosen people had come into open and tragic conflict: that God seemed to be set against God. If God is to be seen at work here, he is indeed a strange God, a hidden God, who does not uncover his will in a straight line of development, but fully enters into...

Dear Eugene, This morning I was contemplating on what Rowan Williams said here: "So we come back, by a longish detour, to the point to which Mark's narrative brought us: the contemplative enterprise of being where we are and refusing the lure of a fantasized future more compliant to our will, more satisfying in the image of ourselves that it permits. Living in the truth, in the sense in which John's Gospel gives it, involves the same sober attention to what is there—to the body, the chair, the floor, the voice we hear, the face we see—with all the unsatisfactoriness that this brings. Yet this is what it means to live in that kingdom where Jesus rules, the kingdom that has no frontiers to be defended. Our immersion in the present moment which is God's delivers the world to us—and that world is not the perfect and fully achieved thing we might imagine, but the divided and difficult world we actually inhabit. Only, by the grace of this living in the truth, we are ...