Loving, Disjointed Stepping Stones

Traditional religious thinking sees modernity as an error, with modernity’s (and postmodernity’s) error being the rejection of one’s place in what is an ancient and inscrutable social order that is set down by divine imposition and policed in various forms by societies along the way. Their corrective to this situation is to disinfect modernity by purging it in whatever means it can of its modern, polluted errors, both intellectually and in terms of its behaviour.

But there has always been more at stake for people who are sensitive to the genuine interaction of God in the world than in conforming to roles...where there is no separation between the spiritual and the physical.

Certainly there is more at stake than claiming human dignity or calculating the rights of conscience in and of themselves, which is the over worn core of liberal thought itself beginning as early as the nineteenth century. And it is of course very predictable that the next step, i.e. postmoderism, would be to run off and try to totally disconnect oneself from society itself, which would only be possible if one were to actually be able to do so. But this is of course a myth, made possible only by the social superstructure already in place.

Contemplative experience, rooted in the thread of individuals over millennia, has been nothing more than loving, disjointed stepping stones spread sometimes far and sometimes narrow across a river. These can be adequately described in neither traditional nor modernist terms. And in reality there is no need to do so. What purpose would that serve? And yet churches of all stripes either accept contemplative experience or reject it based upon these inane standards of traditional and modern and postmodern. Contemplatives, on the other hand, are called to be generous to all of the people who are so-convinced that they need to conform to one or the other of these identities. Why? Simply for the sake of what it means to simply and truly be open to the presence of Christ in the world, no more, but no less.