12/27/2002 04:39:00 PM
the responses to this post have been very interesting.
most have been positive. honestly, i was surprised anyone read the damn thing. i must be the king of run on sentences. give me a dash, semi-colon and the occasional comma splice and i am a happy man. most reaction has centered around these bits regurgitated here in Cliffs Notes fashion for you wise souls who will not subject yourselves to the grammatical perversion of the long-winded original:
...i am all for the eclectic, but not the carnival eclecticism of domesticated ancient spiritual practice packaged for easy dissemination amidst a population averse to anything requiring more than a 15 minute commitment.
...our communities have a dire need to simply live in faith, hope and love as the normal people that we are. the extraordinary is always seeded in the ordinary. the impossible germinates in the banality of the sacred mundane. the hard work of spiritual community is not walking a labyrinth, fasting from animal products for a month or confessing an ancient creed periodically. the actualization of community is in the boring, soiled exchange of large quantities of normal living.
...there was no originary unity of the Christian experience save in love for the one God and love of one's neighbor. beyond this the Christian tradition--even before it was Christian--was inherently diverse.
...those happy souls so excited to find our unity in the Celtic and the catholic, the orthodox and the apostolic need to begin to ask the more difficult questions that pop up when one does not stop the historical archeology of identity with Reformation Europe, Constantinian Rome or the Apostolic reconstruction after the Jerusalem community's cataclysmic demise.... i don't want to hear another thing about the need to return to a more adequately Apostolic, classical or Triune faith... though i realize that for many the ancient in "ancient-future" is defined by the winners, for me, the ancient is the mass of illiterate peasants who held tightly to the thin hope of a Kingdom they could enact even in the midst of total political and religious domination. in large measure it was this viral kingdom of the powerless that was sacrificed for the violent kingdom of the empowered in the centuries following the execution of Yesh'uah and the historically unfolding definition of triumphant Christianity.
...rediscover Jerusalem i say! and with her the altogether foreign (for us Hellenized orthodox types) experience of the various Yeshu'ah following, Kingdom living, Judahist communities that filled her ancient streets. the various flavors of Nicea that pass as a divided church today would have us not dip into the forgotten world of the pre-Christian Jesus community, but we must.