Pagan Origins of the Christian Faith (Phil. Daily Inquirer)

[handsoff241]

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also, it would be nice if you backed up your statements with something factual, and not ignore key people in history to the point of sounding as if the subjective remarks you have made were actually substantial

Was it(child's post) not?

[The_Child]

your "overrated" statements are subjective.. without martin luther's contradictions, there would have been no one courageous enough to initially test that authority. he did not only divide the church, but he also changed it.. and like i said earlier, the church did not acknowledge martin luther for the "changes" it undertook. changes like the abolishment of indulgences, the focus on ceremony to the focus on scriptures, more stringent behavior on the part of the priests...

anyway, i am not glorifying martin luther for what he has done.. i'm merely putting him in place of what his functions were in history.

also, it would be nice if you backed up your statements with something factual, and not ignore key people in history to the point of sounding as if the subjective remarks you have made were actually substantial..

"were actually substantial" well at least you had the impression that it is substantial, no? i'd also like to say the same way to your post but honesty prevents me to do so.


historical judgement are always subjective, so when i say Luther is overrated it is my subjective point of view, as the same way as commentators would say that Erasmus is "prince of renaissance humanism" if you misconstrue that as a historical fact then that is your issue, not mine. either you agree with me or not, im not asserting a fact. it think that is very clear in terms of dealing with historical events.


what do you mean recognize? as in to bestow a medal of excellence? or canonization? or what? Reformation was already being aired during the time, Erasmus and More were advocating for reformation, only that it was Luther who pinned down his 95 thesis on the church door. So far as recognition is concerned, history books already recognized Luther as one of the important persons for the reformation.

but what do you mean the Church needs to recognized Luther? has she not given recognition to Luther already or do you want the Church to canonize him?

[The_Child]

Yes it is this practice of ONENESS realizing that "No Religion is Higher Than Truth (GOD)."

The smallest creaturely image that ever forms in you is as great as God is great. Why? Because it comes between you and the whole of God. As soon as the image comes in, God and all His Divinity have to give way. But as the image goes out, God goes in.

- Meister Eckhart

The Transcendent Unity of Religions

The traditionalist or perennialist perspective began to be enunciated in the 1920s by the French philosopher René Guénon and, in the 1930s, by Frithjof Schuon himself. The Harvard orientalist Ananda Coomaraswamy and the Swiss art historian Titus Burckhardt also became prominent advocates of this point of view. Fundamentally, this doctrine is the Sanatana Dharma – the eternal religion – of Hindu Neo-Vedantins. It was supposedly formulated in ancient Greece, in particular, by Plato and later Neoplatonists, and in Christendom by Meister Eckhart (in the West) and Gregory Palamas (in the East). Every religion has, besides its literal meaning, an esoteric dimension, which is essential, primordial and universal. This intellectual universality is one of the hallmarks of Schuon's works, and it gives rise to fascinating insights into not only the various spiritual traditions, but also history, science and art.
The dominant theme or principle of Schuon's writings was foreshadowed in his early encounter with a Black marabout who had accompanied some members of his Senegalese village to Switzerland in order to demonstrate their culture. When the young Schuon talked with him, the venerable old man drew a circle with radii on the ground and explained: God is in the center, all paths lead to Him.[3]


Frithjof Schuon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

again, people TALK about the ineffable God. (contradiction no?)

dili naman na uso ang "center" karong mga panahona, there is no longer a center, 'there is an event, a rupture in the history of structure" there is no center.

[regnauld]

again, people TALK about the ineffable God. (contradiction no?)

dili naman na uso ang "center" karong mga panahona, there is no longer a center, 'there is an event, a rupture in the history of structure" there is no center.

"Center and Circumference"

I would like to begin with a quote from the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. In The Second Coming,
he says:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,
and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
(The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats)

We are a circumference people, with little access to our natural Center. We live on the boundaries of our own lives, "in the widening gyre," as he puts it, confusing edges with essence, too quickly claiming the superficial as if it were substance. As Yeats predicted, things have fallen apart, "the center cannot hold."


If the circumferences of our lives were evil, they would be easier to moralize about. But boundaries and edges are not bad as much as they are passing, accidental, sometimes illusory, too often needy of defense and decoration. Our skin is not bad; it's just not our soul. But "skin" might also be the only beginning point available to a modern people. But, we remain on the circumference of our soul for so long it seems like life. Not many people are telling us there is anything more. And maybe the confusion lies even deeper. We have always looked for the soul inside the body. Perhaps, maybe just a different way of thinking, our bodies are merely a part of a much larger Soul. I think that is exactly what the great Wisdom Tradition has always been saying.


Let's presume there was an earlier age when people had easy and natural access to their soul. I am not sure if this age ever existed, any more than the Garden of Eden, where all was naked and in harmony; but if it did, it consisted of people who were either loved very well at their Center or who suffered very much on their surface -- probably both. The rest of us have to rediscover and return to the Garden by an arduous route.


This movement back to Paradise is the blood, guts, and history of the whole Bible. It is both an awakening and a quieting, a passion for and a surrendering to, a caring and a not caring. It is both Center and circumference, and I am not in charge of either one. But I have to begin somewhere. For most of us the beginning point is on the edges of our lives. Yet the teachers tell us not to stay there! The movement beyond the edges to the center is called conversion, integration, or holiness. Often it feels more and more like a Divine trick -- especially if you try to resolve it in your head. So let's go somewhere else.


Less than a block from my house in downtown Albuquerque, there is a sidewalk where the homeless often sit against the wall to catch the morning sun. A few days ago, I saw new graffiti chalked clearly on the pavement. It touched me so profoundly that I immediately went home and wrote it in my journal. It said, "I watch how foolishly man guards his nothing, thereby keeping us out. Truly God is hated here." I can only guess at what kind of person wrote such wisdom, but I heard a paraphrase of Jesus in my mind: "The people of the sidewalk might well be at the Center, and the people in their houses might well be on the circumference." (Luke 13:30, Mark 10:31, Matthew 19:30, 20:16)

Now I can probably assume that this street person is not formally educated in theology, or trained in contemplative spirituality. Yet from the edges, this person has clearly understood all that I am trying to say. Did she go through some great healing? Did he pay for psychotherapy? How does this person so clearly recognize the false nature of our self-image and yet the clear sense of being included and excluded from life? This street person has both edges and essence and seems to also know exactly who God is! You don't resolve the question in your head. The body is probably a better beginning point. Remember, the body is in the soul. Living in this material world, with a physical body, and in a culture of affluence which usually only rewards the outer self, it is both more difficult to know our spiritual self and all the more necessary. Our skin-encapsulated egos are the only self that most of us know and therefore for many people their only beginning place. But they are not the only or even the best place.


This is how our contemporary culture seems to look at it: 1) Our culture no longer really values the inner journey, if it would be honest. 2) In fact, we actively avoid and fear it. 3) In most cases we no longer even have the tools to go inward because, 4) we are enamored and entrapped in the outer self in the private edges of our private lives. In such a culture, "the center cannot hold," at least for long.


How do you find what is supposedly already there? Why isn't it obvious? How do you awaken your spiritual Center? By thinking about it? By praying and meditating? By more silence and solitude? Yes, perhaps, but mostly by living -- and living consciously. The edges, when they are suffered and enjoyed and felt and listened to, lead us back to the Center where God is obvious.

The street person feels cold and rejection and has to go to a deeper place for warmth. The hero pushes against his own self-interested edges and finds that they don't matter. The alcoholic woman recognizes how she has hurt her family and breaks through to a compassion beyond her. In each case, the edges, the circumference, suffer, inform, partially self-destruct, and all are found to be unnecessary and even part of the problem. That which feels like pain, also lets it go, and the Center stands revealed and sufficient! We do not find our own Center; we do not find God; it finds us.


The body is in a much larger soul. It is both the place of contact and the place of surrender. I don't think that we think ourselves into a new way of living. We live ourselves into a new way of thinking. The journeys around the circumference lead us back to the radical and absolute life at the Center. Then, by what is certainly a vicious circle and a virtuous circle, the Center calls all the journeys at the circumference back into question! The ruthless ambition of the businessman can lead him to the very failure and emptiness that is the point of his final conversion. Is the ambition therefore good or evil? Do we really have to sin to know salvation? Call me a "sin mystic," or a Lutheran -- Luther said sin boldly -- but that is exactly what I see happening in my real and honest pastoral experience.


That does not mean that we should set out to intentionally sin. We only see the pattern after the fact. Julian of Norwich, the English mystic, put it perfectly, "Commonly, first we fall and later we see it -- and both are the mercy of God." Wow! How did we ever lose that kind of wisdom? It got hidden away in that least celebrated but absolutely central Easter Vigil Service, when the deacon sings to the Church about a "felix culpa," the happy fault which precedes and necessitates the eternal Christ. Like all great mysteries of faith, it is hidden except to those who keep vigil and listen.


The overwhelming problem today is that people are creating and letting go of boundaries who have no hint of their own psychological or theological Center. Those who create their own boundaries often end up with hardened and defended edges, without permeability for others to move in or out.


They may become either racists afraid of the "not-me" or co-dependents manipulating the world to meet their love and security needs. Those who too easily let go of boundaries will seek their soul forever outside themselves: She will make me happy. I need him for my sense of self. This church is who I am.


Those who have firmed up their own edges too quickly without finding their essential Center will be the enemies of ecumenism, the enemies of forgiveness, the enemies of vulnerability, and peace-making between nations and classes. Those who let go of their edges too easily often pride themselves on their openness and tolerance. But even here there is both virtue and vice. The tolerance of the believer, rooted in God, is certainly the voice of wisdom; but the too quick tolerance of the skeptic, cheap liberalism, is largely meaningless, usually no more than a need to be liked or a need to be popular. The first is the authentic lover, the faith-based prophet, the grounded agent of change; the second is a "born yesterday" believer, the faddish New Ager. Unfortunately, the second is much more common on the American scene today, even in churches and social justice circles. We have our work to do.


The greatest gift of centered and surrendered people is that they know themselves as part of a much larger history, of a larger symbolic universe. In that sense, centered people are profoundly conservative, knowing that they only stand on the shoulders of their ancestors and will be another shoulder for the generation to come. Yet they are paradoxically open and reformist, because they have no private agendas and self-interest to protect. People who have learned to live from their Center where God reigns know which boundaries are worth maintaining and which can be surrendered. Both reflect an obedience. If you want a litmus test for truly centered people, that's it: they are always free to obey a voice outside themselves.


Probably the most obvious indication of non-centered ec-centric people is that they are a pain to live with! Every ego-boundary must be defended, negotiated, glorified: My reputation, my nation,
my job, my religion, and even my ball team are really all I have to tell myself that I am somebody. No wonder wisdom, understanding and community have come upon hard times!


Toward the end of his career Carl Jung said that he was not aware of a single one of his patients in the second half of their lives whose problem could not have been solved by contact with what he called, "The Numinous," the one we would call God. (Letters, Vol. I, 1973, p.377) An extraordinary statement from a man who considered himself alienated from institutional religion! Yet thirty years later we find ourselves condemned to live in a world where "the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity." The Center has not held. Most of the gods we have met in our narcissistic age have been no more than projected and magnified images of ourselves. The Catholic god too often looks Roman, the charismatic god looks sweet, the liberal god looks undemanding and the American god looks tribal and pathetic.

We wait for the Word of the Lord. We wait for the season of the Word of the Lord. The falcon must hear the falconer.


Biography
Fr. Richard Rohr, O.F.M., founded the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a center that trains lay people for the outreach ministries of the church. He's in great demand as a speaker at retreats and conferences around the world, and is heard by thousands through his widely distributed audio and video tapes. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

Richard Rohr - Center and Circumference

[The_Child]

what do you want me to do with Richard Rohr? i dont know him since i'm not interested in spiritual retreats et al.

[regnauld]

what do you want me to do with Richard Rohr? i dont know him since i'm not interested in spiritual retreats et al.

Have you read his article? I am only sharing about Center and Circumference and nothing else.

[bluedes]

"were actually substantial" well at least you had the impression that it is substantial, no? i'd also like to say the same way to your post but honesty prevents me to do so.

sarcastic....
gi-atay na lng kulang.. lolz kaau..

historical judgement are always subjective, so when i say Luther is overrated it is my subjective point of view, as the same way as commentators would say that Erasmus is "prince of renaissance humanism" if you misconstrue that as a historical fact then that is your issue, not mine. either you agree with me or not, im not asserting a fact. it think that is very clear in terms of dealing with historical events.


what do you mean recognize? as in to bestow a medal of excellence? or canonization? or what? Reformation was already being aired during the time, Erasmus and More were advocating for reformation, only that it was Luther who pinned down his 95 thesis on the church door. So far as recognition is concerned, history books already recognized Luther as one of the important persons for the reformation.

but what do you mean the Church needs to recognized Luther? has she not given recognition to Luther already or do you want the Church to canonize him?

ambot nimo parts.. naglibog ko nimo.. bale2x man imong stand oist..

first, ingon ka overrated si Martin Luther, karon, ingon ka na gi-recognize na siya sa Church..
the fact na gisagulan nimo ug subjective description, murag ikaw ra nilabag sa imong "rules" of history..

wa jud ko nag-overrate ni luther or unsa pa diha.. ako ra gi-state unsa iyang nabuhat in history.. kay natumong man jud na naa xa sa anang panahon ug lugar.. kanang uban diha na imong gimention, pa-itoy2x pa man japon na sila sa Church..

parehas ra na ni Copernicus ug Kepler gud.. pa-itoy2x ra to sila.. pero si Galileo ra jud ang pinaka-isug nilang tanan.. maski naniguwang na.. pero maski-unsa-on ka isug, kung tiuyan na gani ug death threats.. aww.. mabayot lng gihapon.. kay di lalim na sunogon ka oi.. bitaw, peace to all these dead men in the past..

there are two ways to reform an organization.. when a new ruler ascends the old one and implements a new system, but he still has to deal with the cohorts of the old system..
the other is when someone from the outside is stubborn enough to go against it, thereby effecting an act so impressive and dramatic (its all in the appearances you know) that will usher in a new wave of change in the culture within and without.

martin luther stands on the latter...

[The_Child]

no i have not.

[regnauld]

Most of the gods we have met in our narcissistic age have been no more than projected and magnified images of ourselves. The Catholic god too often looks Roman, the charismatic god looks sweet, the liberal god looks undemanding and the American god looks tribal and pathetic. - Fr. Richard Rohr, O.F.M.

[regnauld]

Sadly, but we ALL practice "paganism". A manner which we took from our great great forefathers.

Yes and there is nothing wrong with Paganism because everyting is a manifestation of the Divine!