AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA
Upon occasion, in human affairs, it becomes necessary to remind the functionaries that they are not proprietors. This observation has reference to that Euro-American mélange of colossal dummies who self-identify as the foreign policy establishment (FPE) and intelligence community (IC).
Bonhoeffer and others, including I, sought for decades to articulate what we saw The Church — as contrasted with the churches, a distinction not unanimously accepted — becoming morphologically, which is to say, as embodied, concretized — to use Tillich’s word — by Herself in this breathing world.
Tillich’s last lecture dealt with what he foresaw and called The Religion of the Concrete Spirit.
Embodying and concretizing in this context mean dwelling in and inspiring to procreative acts personalities draped in flesh and blood conducting their daily affairs.
Three themes or characteristics struck many if not most of us who felt called to be visionaries serving The Church, so to speak:
1- The Church is heading towards privacy,
3- The Church is heading towards commonality, and
2- The Church is heading towards procreativity.
The great and greatly visible works of devotion and artistry The Church’s fecund genius previously cultivated and threw forth into embodiment — buildings, music, organizations, literature, fine arts, social orders, education and geo-political systems, etc. of the last five to ten centuries — were visibly losing vivacity.
The thoughts of some ran to resuscitation. They failed. The thoughts of some ran to condemnation. They were irrelevant. The thoughts of some ran to ministration. They lost confidence. The thoughts of some ran to abandonment. They collected money, sex, and station and such prestige as this fickle world deigns to bestow. Each of these responses to the churches’ sitz im leben opposed the Resolve of The Church Who created the same.
In contrast to a few mocked, denounced, and/or abandoned Christian visionaries wanting to serve Christ and The Church inside their ranks, most of three or four generations, at least, of self-consciously Christian clergy sought self-promotion as against The Church’s Resolve to reconfigure the churches — that is to say, The Church’s finite embodiments — towards privacy, commonality, and procreativity.
Most so-called Christian clergy did not want to look at the most real reality: what The Church Herself had underway right in front of them, right at home, what She was actually doing. They fought the boss, defied the orders, felt they knew more and better than the boss does, and hoped they could get around the boss without serious consequence.
This was really stupid. Resuscitation, condemnation, ministration, and abandonment are stupid responses to The Church’s reformulating her morphology. And that is what She is doing. Clergy and other stewards of the churches have to go along or go aside, and that is what most are doing . . . the latter, reconstituting parish churches as fronts for sex-obsessed psycho-babble in pursuance of Socialist political activity, in the vain hope that Socialists themselves will tolerate and accommodate their unusual articulations and reprehensible (so Socialists accuse) histories.
Christian morphology is returning to its taxological root, which is an hybrid anchorite/family monasticism. That is the observation towards which Bonhoeffer, Tillich, and other diligent seekers of Divine Resolve have been trending these many decades as they contemplated, ruminated upon, and addressed the question:
Wither the concrete consequences of Resolve by The Church to embody Her Vividity globe-wise in conditions produced by communications abundance?
The answer is: Hybrid Anchorite/Family Monasticism.
Once Krishna pretended to suffer from an unbearable headache. With warm clothes wound around His head and red eyes, He rolled restlessly in bed. Queens Rukmini and Satyabhama tried many remedies that proved ineffective. Along with Narada, when they consulted Lord Krishna, He directed to bring the dust of the feet of a true devotee! In a trice, Narada manifested himself in the presence of some celebrated devotees, but they were too humble to offer dust of their feet to be used for their Lord as a drug! Narada returned disappointed. Krishna asked, “Did you ask Gopis?” Narada hurried with disbelief! When the Gopis heard this, without a second thought, they shook the dust off their feet and filled his hands! Even before Narada reached Dwaraka, Krishna’s headache had disappeared! The Lord enacted this five-day drama to teach that self-condemnation is also egoism and when ego goes, you feel neither superior nor inferior, and a devotee must obey the Lord’s command without demur.
Sathya Sai Baba – Divine Discourse, July 07, 1963.
Βασιλεία του Θεού