Spirituality for All the Wrong Reasons

Eugene Peterson, author of The Message and professor emeritus at Regent College, was interviewed on Christian spirituality recently. I found this article to be an excellent basis for discussion on the topic. Click on the address below and read the article, then make any comments if you'd like:

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/003/26.42.html



I do not know if there is anything more that I could add to what he has to say about spirituality and how it has been twisted in churches today. From beginning to end, I agreed with what he said. It reminded me of a quote that I read a while back:

"We must remember that our experience of union with God, our feeling of His presence, is altogether accidental and secondary. It is only a side effect of His actual presence in our souls, and gives no sure indication of that presence in any case. For God Himself is above all apprehensions and ideas and sensations, however spiritual, that can ever be experienced by the spirit of man in this life..." --Thomas Merton

welcome

welcome to all who are visiting this "blog" for the first time. i've never done one of these before, so when it asked me to come up with a "title name" for the blog, i was confused at first. after i figured out what it was talking about, i was confounded as to what to name my blog. it just so happens that i was reading an article by Miroslav Volf, and the idea came from there. instead of trying to explain what he said, i thought i'd give you an excerpt that will explain why i named the blog "embrace".

The title of the article is "From Exclusion to Embrace: Reflections on Reconciliation":

"The will to embrace another person is unconditional. The starting point must be the primacy of the will to embrace. Since the God of Christian belief is the God of unconditional love and the God who died for the ungodly, the will to embrace the other, even the evil other, is a fundamental Christian obligation. The will to give ourselves to others and “welcome” them, the will to readjust our identities to make space for them, is prior to any judgment about others, except that of identifying them in their humanity. The will to embrace precedes any “truth” about others and any construction of their “justice.” This will is absolutely indiscriminate and strictly immutable; it transcends the moral mapping of the social world into “good’ and “evil.”

so there it is...

again, thanks for visiting...and feel free to comment on anything i write. i thoroughly enjoy discussion on any topic.

ryan boettcher