Maybe it's because I'm a Gemini, or schizophrenic, who knows... but I'm often thinking about God on both sides of the fence : I hold two worldviews, one in each hand (secular & religious). That is, I imagine how a non-believer might respond to this series of Jesus Thoughts.
I can see very clearly how the series might come across as a bunch of airy noodling; disconnected from the hard concrete facts of both physical & social reality. Deracinated from the objective forces (physical, historical, political, economic, etc.) impinging on the planet, & all the anxiety, pain & suffering they can bring - the horrors, actually - as well as, on the far other hand, all the fizzy pleasures & joys of life, the gusto of animal spirits. I'm writing like some old stuffy preacher, pontificating & sermonizing, using hoary symbols for social realities long gone, long ago worn out.
Understandable, that attitude. A no-brainer.
Yet the fact is, I'm a poet. I operate with a part of the brain Coleridge (was it Coleridge?) called the "synthetic imagination". I'm with William Blake (I attended Blake High School, in fact). I put together the cosmos as I see it & feel it. Moreover, I believe in inspiration (some scientists do too, believe it or not). I think of the physical brain as more like a radio receiver or cosmic archive than as the ultimate originator of meaning. The human mind is the receptacle, the womb of a new world : but we didn't design it ourselves ; we encompass & comprehend the design. This is how we work with God.
Third thing : I'm 6o years old (hard for me to believe). Some of the things which obsessed, worried & excited me 30, 40 years ago, no longer really interest me - or I see them differently now. What joggles the political or poetical blogospheres seems pretty ephemeral & boring most of the time.
What gets my synapses flashing, the spark-waves moving, is one thing now : the Ratio, the Logos. In a universe of analogy & metaphor, there is one central analogy which, as I see it, binds Dante's scattered leaves of the cosmos in one volume. Man = Imago Dei. The persons we see & encounter & know & love stand as measurable reflections of the immeasurable Personhood, the enfolding consciousness which sieves through all experience. As Mandelstam put it, the free artist is playing a game of "hide & seek with the Father" : we are meant to plunge deeper & deeper toward that hearth, that maternal-paternal spousal-bridal central hearth at the very core of both planet & universe : the breath of Spirit hovering with seraphic wings over & around Time & Space.
This "kingdom" is near at hand : it is coming with the "birth-pangs" of the earth : it is within you, it is amidst us. This is what Jesus keeps saying : proving with his person & his presence, right through death to everlasting life.
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