good questions
Roy who did the communion input today at our blended congregation led with two thought provoking questions:
- What is more scary or challenging to us – war or love?
- Do we as humans really want to be in a fully realised relationship with God and all that this would mean?
They made me think so much I can’t tell you much of anything else that he said.
June 6th, 2005 at 2:23 pm
I’m sorry Phil, they seem a bit fatuous to me.
The horror and inhumanity of war far supercedes any minor personality flaw whereby a person may find love threatening. To even equate them is to fail to acknowledge to true horror of psychological and physical abuse that occurs during a war.
The anwser to the second question, I would have thought, was an unqualified “No!” given that it would eliminate the concept of faith which is a fundamental tenent of the Christian religion. The whole point of the Christian “faith” is that it is not fully realised and that it contains an essentially abstract component that full realisation would destroy.
June 6th, 2005 at 2:42 pm
Well, it would have been a short reflection for you then Chris
June 6th, 2005 at 3:10 pm
Quite short, Yes.
June 6th, 2005 at 10:54 pm
Pity as sometimes the process of the question is as important and revealing as the answer to the question
June 7th, 2005 at 2:47 pm
I have found love to be challening and scary - perhaps because war has not been on my front door everyday and my family is not consumed by the violence which seems to pervade so effortlessly the lives of others. And yet, by its very nature, love demands great sacrifices of us; being vulnerable, open to the other, “if we have not love, we have nothing” which really puts the cat among the pigeons if we are to be true to our calling to be a people of love.
War is scary because it threatens my physical environment, as I understand it, and perhaps it is something that is thrust on me from the outside. I react to violence, I create war to defend my ‘country’; Love I find, is challenging because it threatens my physical, spiritual and mental environment because it is I who needs to take the first step and ‘I’ might be rejected by others when I ‘love’.
As for the second question, I would say ‘Yes’ only because I believe that is when we are in a fully realised relationship with God that we are grow more deeply in love with ourselves, God and the neighbour. Without a fully realised relationship perhaps to ‘love the other’ whoever that might be, seems out of context if not seen as part of the potential for a fully realised relationship. I hope for this, yet live within the wonder of it never truly coming to fulfilment. Just some opening thoughts . . .