When i look at me, do i see you Gomar?

"I wonder what the homecoming of the human spirit will look like? Will it be like, as Father O’Donohue describes:

‘As stillness in stone to silence is wed

As a river flows in ideal sequence

As the moon absolves the dark of distance

As the breath of light awakens colour

As spring rain softens the earth with surprise

As the ocean dreams to the joy of the dance

As clay anchors a tree in light and wind

As twilight fills night with bright horizons

May beauty await you at home beyond.'

I’ve been trying to get my head round the Almighty...I live journeying this circle...went to church last night...the only conclusion my thoughts have given me is that the more I know the less I understand.

Life, with all its concurrent struggles and painful beauty, has brought me to the point where all the things I thought I knew I am now having to learn again. In the long run (and the long run is all there is), when everything is said and done, James was right; by their fruit shall we know the truthful ones.

Shaped by the practice of church culture it just may be that I (and I don’t think I’m alone) have limited the context of the road to God. What do I mean by that? I mean that we have made God way too small. Mystery is something sadly lacking in Western Christian spirituality, sure there are pockets of it, but they are pockets at best. Put bluntly the church’s response to Modernity put pay to that. We became the finest example of a culture preoccupied with answers rather than one who would embrace questions and mystery, and I would propose this is one of the major reasons as to why many people in the post-modern, post-Christian West struggle to connect with our Institution, and so consequently God.

Where do I invest my love, passion and energy?
I may go, but I don't live in the margins – the edge – partly due to the fear of what I will find, or is it because I am so conditioned that these are not the kind of landscapes that good Christian folk should be traversing.

So often we are not looking...and because of that we become convinced that it is wrong to look. Unfortunately this is rather indicative of the lack of any mysterious, creative, imaginative, incarnate and relational connection that may possibly exist with those perceived to be outside.

In reality we fail so often to authentically allow God’s presence in many a marginalised person’s world. Examples of this are littered in the Scriptures. I will vindicate my statement with the example of Peter. I was reading in the car before church, I started in Acts 10. His reluctance to partake of specific foods was consistent with the Jewish tradition of holiness. This grew from a separatist approach to piety – that which divided, in church speak, the clean from the unclean. Here was a man who has followed the Christ in a way beyond even my imagination – but who didn’t realise the implications of the message of this same Christ until he met Cornelius.

I want to always be rediscovering the mystery of what it means to be a friend of tax collectors, prostitutes, and drunkards. This will be messy and will not happen without a certain degree of theological tension. True holiness, real passion for humanity should not keep us from the margins of mystery – rather it should drive us into them - saturated in the faith of the one we follow. For within the margins we find God very much alive in places many of us would say He doesn’t belong.

‘some may think this is blasphemy, but I believe it to be true. God lies here beside you in the gutter, while grace, like a mother, holds you.’

I love these words of Stocki."