Christmas Icons

Sister Wendy Beckett on Icons and their potency at Christmas

Cosplay: dressing-up in a Virtual World

(BBC news: Tech Know Cosplay).  


Talk about living out the narrative!  This is what Jean Baudrillard and Elaine Graham call 'hyper-reality': Virtual worlds inspiring people to presents themselves in ways that transcend their real selves and become something different, a ‘hyper-real’ or post-human self.  


Human life is enriched by taking up, or immersing ourselves within, the existential spaces - whether real or virtual - which we inhabit, or the narratives we read and experience.  Cosplay, an assimilation of virtual reality into our humanity, promises offers meaning and pleasure and fun.  


Are there spaces and narratives that offer an assimilation, for want of a better word, of theological realities into humanity that are enriching, meaningful, pleasurable and life-giving without the need to go beyond reality or what it means to be human?

Modern Monasticism

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11724007

'Christo-aesthetic'

'In him [Christ] crucified and forsaken [though these are in fact different level elements that eminate in harmony from within the form of Christ alongside the promises of the New Age and resurrection (cf. von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. 1, pp 199-204.] radiates the glory of the Trinity and within a 'Christo-aesthetic' measure all wordly being can be read anew.' (Fr. Brendan Leahy in Bede MacGregor O.P. and Thomas Norris (Ed.), The Beauty of Christ: An Introduction to the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar, p 53. Comments in square brackets mine.)

Drink Offering

Life in Christ is not about the 'here' of inner musings, but the 'there' of social existing. It is made complete in a movement of ekstasis or even kenosis; a journey away from ourselves towards the other. I must abandon the project that is 'self-realization' or 'self-discovery' and see myself poured out onto the pavement for the sake of the other; the droplets of my life refreshing the thirsty.

An ode to A2

Farewell, sweet home; place of rest, place of prayer, place of light.


I will remember with great fondness the moments of divine help within these walls as Jacob upon awaking from sleep on his journey and say:


'Surely [God] is in this place - and I did not know it!' (Genesis 28.16).

Call to Personhood

Alistair I. McFadyen, The Call to Personhood

Loads of great stuff on the development, ‘sedimentation’ of personhood as a process of communication with the other extrapolated from Barthian and Moltmannian theology of the Trinity. Slightly confused way of understanding the role of the Holy Spirit. A very structural approach. Posits lots of ideals about undistorted forms of communication and human being. Argues that personhood is an embodied phenomenon. Does not entirely accommodate the concept of human uniqueness. You have to read 179 pages until he explains how people with learning difficulties might operate within his schema, and even then it doesn’t quite cut it. He writes,

The indwelling of Christ and the possibilities of participating in a relation conformed to and mediated by him [this needs explanation in itself] are not constrained by mental capacities. Where the level of communicative competence is too low for another to explicate his or her understanding, or to make the grounds for his or her resistance plain, one has to ‘stand in for the other’. This means attempting to reconstruct an understanding from an imaginary, empathetic ‘indwelling’ of the other’s identity and social location.

Although,

Formal reciprocity yields an understanding, admittedly only approximate and vague, of the universal and reciprocal interests or rights of the person. (McFadyen, p 179)

McFadyen might argue that this is not uncommon in other exchanges, but the degree of standing in for the other when relating to someone with an impairment is inevitably more intense. I have witnessed a Day Service Officer working with a gentlemen with learning difficulties for over 20 years and still misjudging a particular response to a call for communication.