in line for execution
watching others strapped in, terrified
one by one bodies keeling over
bodies falling over lifeless.
Being led to the chair
being strapped down in dread.
I am much more courageous
than I feared I would be.
Seeing the crowd gathered,
I face my death with grim resolve
surprisingly calm
feeling the jolt
feeling the pain
as it increases
burning my flesh
and my awareness passing beyond…
I remembered this during my Intro to Christian Ethics class today. We were learning about the mystical body of Christ. This is a teaching of Paul’s, the key text being Colossians 1:17, “God is before all things, and in God all things are held together.”
Is the mystical body of Christ only a metaphor, as in all these separate individuals making up the body of the Church; or is Paul really speaking of an ontological understanding of being, as in a relational concept of being? Western understanding is that being is the sum total of all things, but this is problematic. Life is more than what we can see, touch, and quantify empirically. The mystical body is therefore not about things.
Edmund Husserl states that “consciousness is always consciousness of something.” Subject and object are always given together, but being includes both in relationship.
Subject & Object in Relation = Being
Conceiving of God as a thing is idolatry, reifying, ‘thingifying’. But God is not a thing. Paul’s mystical body is relational: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. God is closer to no-thingness than to somethingness. As someone once put it: all we ever get to see of God is his backside as God passes by—every time we try to focus on God, God disappears.
Every thing is contrasted by the dread of our own death, the potential of our own nothingness. There is no “I am” apart from “I am not.”
This understanding makes clear some baffling statements of Jesus: “Where two or more are gathered in my name, there I am among them.” He doesn’t say, “where one is, there I am,” because he is in the relationship between them. “In as much as you have done to/for the lowest ones, so have you done to me.” It’s relational:
This understanding leads to the realization that Christ’s resurrection was not of the physical body, but of the relational body of being. This realization is most easily seen in love, especially erotic love where one merges with one’s lover and goes outside one’s limited bodily experience.
Some concrete illustrations of this understanding:
Friends function as mirrors to the self.
In fetal development the mind doesn’t develop without interaction with the human community.
Ecology is the queen of science. Modern physics understands relationships at the macro and micro level to be a symbiosis of subject and object.
The relationship is more important than the objects in relation. Basic reality is:
God, Ourselves, and Our Neighbors are all Related
We always have problems whenever we try to collapse this triangle.
Thus, the end of my poem is
I wake up.
Opportunities Falling Into My Lap
A couple weeks ago I interviewed for an interfaith internship working with labor unions for worker justice, called Seminary Summer. It’s a joint project of the National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice and the AFL-CIO. It’s a ten week paid internship including one week of training in Chicago. I felt the phone interview went well, and found out just the other day that I have been approved for the program by both organizations. There are still two major hurdles before this is a done deal. On their end, they are working to find a supervisor and placement for me in the Columbus area. Currently the closest they have is in Cleveland or Cincinnati. On my end, since this will be a full-time, flexible hours job, I’d have to quit my part-time tech-support work. I won’t qualify for a leave of absence so there’s no assurance I’d have my job back at the end of the summer. That said, the coordinator of the program called earlier this week to say she’d be in Columbus next Tuesday and maybe I’d like to meet her in person. I told her that would be great, but that I could do her one better: Tuesday is Consortium Day, the day when students, faculty, and staff from all three Central Ohio seminaries get together, and this year Methesco is hosting it. I’ve announced her visit to Trinity Lutheran Seminary and the Pontifical College Josephinum. She’ll be available after the Consortium Day events to speak about this program to other students and staff. We would like to start up a permanent NICWJ group here.
My son’s dedication is Sunday, and we’re excited making preparations for that. The UU minister who’s doing the ceremony has been very helpful in my own preparation for ministry, and she and I have spoken in the past about the possibilities for me doing a congregational internship in her church. I am scheduled to have lunch with her on Monday to discuss funding options. Meanwhile, the school’s Field Education office sent a flyer out yesterday saying they have several grants available for new and creative ministry positions. The $4K amount (for a full school year) is tiny, but it’s a start, and I’m sure she and I can put our heads together to make it fit into something bigger. I’m hoping to be able to start some kind of ministry position soon…
A fellow UU student friend was marveling at how ministry opportunities just fall into your lap. (I sure didn’t share that sentiment my first year and a half at seminary.) She had expressed this after I told her about the Seminary Summer interview. She wasn’t aware of the other bees in my bonnet, but it’s too soon to share much about the third one. I’m very excited about all three of these opportunities. It does seem that they have just been falling into my lap. I’m hoping and praying that I can finally say goodbye to SARCOM and be more fully on the path to ministry.
The List Keeps Getting Longer
While I’ve been busy doing other things, not posting anything to this blog, spammers have been busy posting rude and/or obscene comments to it. I don’t know if they would stop if I posted more often, but they sure are annoying, especially when one spammer posts nearly a dozen comments in one day. If you’re interested in marketing drugs or adult-only web sites, go somewhere else. I have a zero-tolerance policy for offensive comments. Once you post anything not remotely related to my own post, you’re henceforth banned from ever posting comments again. Likewise with email. Any sender that gets marked as ‘junk’ mail will never be seen in my inbox again. The lists of banned IP addresses (prohibited from posting comments to this blog,) and blocked email addresses keep getting longer and longer. I’ve got better things to do with my time.