Faith Forward

At some point, we have to learn to forgive God. My guess is that most of us don’t want anything to do with forgiving God, either because we rather like the grudges we hold against the Almighty or because we cringe at the idea of God needing forgiveness. But to truly live in relationship to God we have to be capable of forgiving God, of looking at the world God created and ourselves within it, and say to God, “I will love you in spite of this mess, and I forgive you even if it turns out you meant it to be this way all along.”

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So what does this world look like without ‘theology’? What it means is that competition and apologetics are near non-existent in their current forms. That we don’t have to be right. That beyond our theories lies humanity at its best.

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We are in danger of losing everything: the threat is that we will be reduced to abstract subjects devoid of all substantial content, dispossessed of our symbolic substance, our genetic base heavily manipulated, vegetating in an unlivable environment. – Zizek Atheist philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek is talking of the inherent problems with capitalism [...]

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When young teenagers are driven to kill themselves, the bullies are not the only one’s at fault, we are too. And when they kill themselves, they are killing a piece of humanity. When we allow the death of innocent teenagers to take place, we support the very perversion we say we’re against. We perpetuate the reverse perversion of the Big Other. We can’t idylly sit by and talk about loving our neighbour any longer.

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To help us better understand what has happened to prayer, I think we have to listen in to a psychoanalyst by the name of Jacques Lacan. When a child is in its predominant learning stage it looks to the mother as the sole nurturer of its reality. The role of the mother cannot be underscored here. The child believes that the mother is pulled away by outside desires, because this is an unknown element, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan refers to this imaginary object as the Phallus. Which itself is an imaginary object.

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I think where we are now in terms of asking very hard questions and participating in such liberating events like Big Tent Christianity, is the part of this much needed psychotic break happening within the Church. We are beginning to break away from the vulgar act of exclusion and are participating in a new way of loving our neighbour. We are participating in a divine act when we love the other.

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Pakistan is still reeling from the destruction of the floods. I have personal friends who are struggling through and offering their presence to these families. I think that’s the key, not offering them answers; answers can be destructive. Peace isn’t finding an answer to your problem, its knowing that you’re not alone.

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For Lacan, public law such as “No Photos” or “Do not go on the grass” implicitly attracts the subject of that law to commit the very thing it prohibits (exactly in the way that if we tell the child not to eat the freshly baked cakes, we are simultaneously pointing out the method with which [...]

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Dogma imprisons us within freedom. It gives us the caged experience of liberty. It drives us to think when we are bound we are free. The illusions that dogma perpetuate empowers us with the sense of being in control of our own destiny, as if we have a choice to follow the Creator. But the fatal flaw of dogma is that the illusions aren’t real. They lie to us. They betray us by being faithful to themselves.

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At one point on his journey, Jesus comments on the static state of the homeless population. He says to his listeners that the homeless will always be here with us. In another place he equates a compassionate act to those in need, as the same as if we had enacted compassion directly on to Him. Essentially, the homeless population are Jesus in the flesh. They are messengers of the Rabbi from Nazareth.

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