Welcome to ASBO Jesus
Enjoy your stay and have your say! Cheers, Jon
Blogroll
- BigDaddyWhale
- birchmultimedia
- celtic difference
- changing worship
- dennis coburn
- frontier youth trust
- growing enthusiasm
- holy famoley
- iain cotton, sculptor
- jonny baker
- let them eat cake
- mark roques
- mindwriter
- naked pastor
- proost.co.uk
- Rainforest SOS
- reality bites
- sanctuary
- si smith
- sophia network
- stepping stones nigeria
Archives
- April 2013
- March 2013
- February 2013
- January 2013
- July 2012
- June 2012
- May 2012
- April 2012
- March 2012
- February 2012
- January 2012
- December 2011
- November 2011
- October 2011
- September 2011
- August 2011
- July 2011
- June 2011
- May 2011
- April 2011
- March 2011
- February 2011
- January 2011
- December 2010
- November 2010
- October 2010
- September 2010
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- February 2007
- January 2007
I wanna be first! Looks with that color like the boat ran aground in the rolling farmland out where I live. ;-D
Sometimes an identity crisis can be a good thing – look, ask, seek, examine, and find out if what you have become is viable, and congruent, or not.
Sort things out and become better focused and more confident in yourself.
Never mind, at least it’s got fluoride in it. Or is it a French cross-channel ferry?
I like the idea of churches being ‘lanterns in the darkness’. Like Bath Abbey being ‘The Lantern of the West.’
Ha, just beat me! You weren’t really first because you’re several hours behind us – so you’ll never be first, mwahahahah!
i agree forrest. can be very positive.
i love bath abbey at night, in the beautiful limelight, whatever the weather, it looks amazing.
I don’t think cathedrals have the same identity crisis because they’ve been around so long and they’re so damn big – they know they’re for everybody and really important.
6. I find it far different experience to visit a Cathedral that’s now geared for the tourist trade versus one that is actually in use. The later really makes history come alive.
What got me at Ely were the modern stained glass windows paid for and dedicated by predominantly Jewish supermarkets! Quite nice in a way, like the old trade guilds used to buy them – but rather blatant advertising.
As individuals we all go through identity crisis’ from time to time and I doubt it is any different for a church. It’s what you do with it that counts. Like Forrest says, making it something positive and floating around and being useless.
sorry, ‘not floating around…’.
Watchout for identity theft then!
Identity: I am invitation and contribution to those around me
and I am a part of a church family/community
that invites any and all to follow Jesus and contributes to that following
I know how I go about my identity… working with colleagues and students, meeting fellow villagers in my life around the place, discussing possibilities with them, sailing with friends, sharing meals, conversations, worries and hopes with others in my local church family, praying …
I’m not so sure, however, that the ‘church’ is as clear about how it goes about inviting and contributing … it certainly is not sure about my contribution.
I like this epigram Caroline Too:identity most fully actualised/realised through relationship…. very perichoretic
Which makes your closing comment even more poignant
[Sorry, hit 'send' prematurely on 12]
makes me feel seasick!
Nouwen wonderfully explains the depth of one’s identity through the parable of the prodigal son in one of his books.
“perichoretic”?
I hate it when you people make me have to go look up words and learn something new.
found this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perichoresis
and this
http://www.theopedia.com/Perichoresis
Tiggy – a lot of cathedrals are just parish churches that have been redesignated.
you’re going to have to help me here Pat (#13), had to go and look up perichoretic… but couldn’t find it in my shorter oxford dictionary
but you’re so right, who I am is all creating in relating…
so I guess that means that you lot (ASBOers) are part of who I am and who I’m becoming…
pretty scary eh
(but even worse for you lot, cos I’m….
Pat – “perichoretic”
How very un western….
Caroline Too – Not just me then? Wikipedia helped me out.
Every time I hear the word perichoresis I have to look it up. My vicar said “trancept” on Thursday. I had to ask what that meant too.
My brain feels fluffy!
Perichoresis – weren’t there a few cases of that in the isolation ward at hospital?
Totally off topic, well, I don’t know, does involve identity crises and boats: pulled out balsa wood boat hull started last year, not sure if it will be large yacht, fast passenger ferry, or small cruise ship, in what scale, one scale, or another.
“I’m so confused, I don’t know who I am!”
But, then, it doesn’t _have_ to know which it is yet.
That time will come.
But it is not now.
There’s more “foundational” work to be done before it is time to have to know.
Hey Jon, on the boat theme here’s some cartoon fodder:
http://www.marinebuzz.com/2009/07/26/india-launches-first-indigenous-nuclear-powered-submarine-arihant/#more-3950
“India launched her first indigenous nuclear powered submarine Arihant on July 26. … ‘Arihant’ means ‘Destroyer of Enemies’.
…the nuclear powered ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) …”
Here’s a link to a great sermon by Bishop Margot Kässmann about how she wouldn’t want to live in a world without Cathedrals
http://tinyurl.com/mb2fb8
Don’t worry it is in English!
“I would not like to live in a world without cathedrals. I need their beauty and their grandeur. I need them to contrast with the mundaneity of the world.”
Well Robb, those are some ‘big f**k-off’ parishes churches then!
And some really ordinary sized parish churches.
A lot of diocese didn’t exist until recently!
Just looked up wakefield cathedral on google images. Apparantly you are only allowed to use a wide angle lens to shoot it so that it looks massive. Hay ho.
Not everywhere is in Durham, York or London.
I didn’t even know Wakefield HAD a cathedral. Is it Anglican? Many of the smaller and newer cathedrals are Catholic, like the new one in Brentwood which is architecturally ghastly and inside looks like the lighting department at BHS.
I know St. Albans, Ely, Salisbury and Bath Abbey a well as a lot of huge continental ones.
What is the difference between an Abbey and a Cathedral? Is it that an Abbey hasn’t got a teashop?
Forrest,Caroline Too & Robb @ 17, 19 & 21:I reckon perichoresis (mutual indwelling and constitution) and kenosis (self-limitation) are probably the two ideas that have helped me most in recent times in my grapplings with ‘understanding’(!)God, creation, selfhood,relationality and salvation and my place in all of that!
They’re wonderfully rich and challenging themes. Colin Gunton, Jurgen Moltmann, John Zizioulas and Catherine La Cugna are some good but rather’heavyweight ‘theological’ reads. Ian Mobsby touches on both ideas in The Becoming of G-d although, to be honest, I found aspects of this book rather disappoining. The book I’d really recommend for getting a feel for kenosis(although I can’t remember off the top of my head whether it specifically mentions the term) is WH Vanstone’s wonderful Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense
Another good read if you want to explore some of the possible implicationsis of kenotic theology is a collection of essays by scientists and theologians inspired by the writings of Vanstone: The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis – which is not anywhere near as intimidating as it sounds
Well I for one am very pleased to learn the word ‘perichoresis’. Do we have a breakdown of the literal meaning of the word? Love a new word, especially when it relates to a concept I like.
Not too sure about kenosis, which I have heard of. Can you explain that a bit more please. I like to be very expansive rather than limiting myself.
Thanks Pat!
Sometimes I feel out of place here as I haven’t done all that much theological reading, and therefore haven’t heard of any of these authors, and don’t often talk about religion on either of my 2 blogs.
You don’t SEEM out of place at all Forrest. I’m really glad you’re here.
golly I love this place for conversations…
this is a place where you can come up with a crazily obscure word…
get teased about it a bit
get some help from people who take the time to go and look it up
get some further ideas from the originator of said obscure word
nobody runs you down for being to clever by half
then we have other conversations where we head off topic and have fun
or get radical
or give each other space to be a bit snotty
or wear the chips on our shoulders a bit too loudly
thank you guys, I’m so glad I ‘know’ you all
Forrest @31 – Don’t feel bad – I should know them as it’s my day job (well, sort of!):lol: Vanstone is well worth reading I think.
Tiggy @ 30 – I have no pretensions to being a greek scholar of any sort at all (i.e I know none
)so I afaid I can’t give you a learned and detailed etymological breakdown of perichorein – but as far as i understand it the prefix (peri)would equate with something like ‘at all points’; and the root terms (‘chora’ ‘choreo’)would relate to the ideas of ‘space’ and ‘proceed’ – hence ‘making room for one another about oneself’ or, more stongly, ‘mutual interpenetration at all points’. So it’s the idea that the fullest expression of personhood (in the Trinity and, by extension, in human persons) comes in relationship – receiving from and giving one’s self to an Other.
Self-limitation of the kenotic sort is one of those wonderful paradoxes which seem to make up the language of God:The ultimate expression of autonomy, of selfhood, is to choose to voluntarily place restrictions on oneself so as to allow other goods to come into being. The obvious example is Christ – as stated in the great hymn in Phil 2:7 – where the greek κενόω (‘he made himself nothing’)means to empty oneself. The Incarnation required some form of voluntary self-limitation on the part of the second Person of the Trinity – although what form precisely that took has, inevitably, been the subject of much theological debate!
There is also an argument that creation requires kenosis on the part of God – at least initially (i.e God restricts himself in order to make a space for the material world to exist without being overwhelmed by and subsumed back into Godself). Some would go further and say that freedom in the world (both for the physical world to devlope over time, and in human day-to-day existence)requires ongoing self-limitation by God – so maybe no omniscience/omnipotence within the created realm.
Caroline Too @ 33: Here’s to good conversations, and to ASBO-shaped expressions of perichoresis and kenosis
Thanks
That’s what I wanted. Though to say ‘mutual interpenetration at all points’ to someone like me is asking for trouble. Actually, it made me think of the Enneagram – are you familiar with that? I was also thinking of the Enneagram in connection with kenosis where one gives up or limits the aspects of the ‘false’ or compulsive self in order to reveal one’s true Essence.
It’s kind of a shame that the Trinity is all male as one can feel a bit excluded. If I try imagining it as female then I feel much more involved. I know some people see the Spirit as she, but most don’t.
Tiggy: I think (hope) I’m right in saying that the Hebrew word for spirit- ruach- is a feminine noun and of course there is female imagery of God/spirit as in Hosea 13 where God is a bear robbed of her cubs, the mother hen gathering her chicks in Matthew and Luke and one of my favourites:
‘As a mother comforts her child,
so will I comfort you’
(Isaiah 66:13)
I believe God encompasses and transcends gender and is both male and female, mother and father. After all, it’s man and woman in the image of God
Yeah that’s all very well, but wha’s the Trinity – three guys dancing around in homoerotic unity. If it doesn’t matter so much and God really does transcend gender then why don’t we have images of three women as the Trinity?
For Tiggy
And Theseoldshades beat me to the hebrew stuff….
Tiggy, I agree that visual examples of a ‘female’ Trinity don’t spring to mind – on a quick google image search I only found this version of Rublev’s famous icon from a community of contemplative sisters in Ireland – but that’s a failure of understanding and imagination on our part over the last 2000 years I guess! I agree with Theseoldshades that God is neither male nor female – and that there is plenty of feminine imagery in the Bible but sadly, the masculine, (often war-like) ones have been favoured at the expense of these
Robb:I think this wiki account is rather weak on the seperate identity of the Spirit as a fully individuated Person with her own otherness and identity – but I think that might take us into even more abstruse and technical theological discussion
Well…I seem to have done something to the text beyond simply inserting a link – but I’ve no idea what or how
Thanks, not seen that one before, though it would have been much better as art (rather than icon) if it had been done as a modern version with three women in modern dress and sans wings and not all looking the same. That’s what I would do if I were an artist. I have the original of that icon – well not the original obviously or I’d be rich.
But it wouldn’t have made the same statement. The challenge wouldn’t have been the same.
I think it would have made a better statement. I prefer the original. They don’t seem real to me.
It does kind of defeat the purpose. Icons are painted androgenously so that you see the saint, or in rublevs case, the trinity as neither male nor female. I personally think that rublev’s trinity look very female anyway.
Most saints in icons have beards! How is that androgynous? I like icons for their colours and the evocativeness of the Byzantine style, but I prefer less staid art.
icons are a language, they are also liturgical if you will. their original purpose, to illustrate the lives of those they show and thus point towards god. i don’t think first and foremost they are art in the classical sense. there is method and reason behind everything from the egg tempura to the red which underlies the gold leaf. i say ‘not art’, when what i really mean is they are more akin to illustration, but unlike illustration the artists ‘style’ is not supposed to be of primary concern (although it does sometimes creep through). the icon tradition to this day seems to stay very true to it’s roots. i wouldn’t call it ‘staid’, anymore than asbo style is staid. (there are two icons, both famous… one of st herman and the other of arch bishop oscar romero which include helicopters!) it simply works and has for centuries. in fact i think i’m gonna put an icon corner in my work room.
For some reason I am once again reminded of mitchell and webb….. anywho.
In the iconographic tradition an icon is seen as a window into heaven. It is to speak of the sacred in a way that words cannot easily convey.
In the icon in question, the three clearly beardless androgenous figures have an open space inviting you to join in with the dance of the trinity.
I did contemplate photoshopping some beards into the icon for you but thought that would be hugely offensive and I wouldn’t want to do that.
On closer inspection I suspect that the figure on the left’s androgeny may even extend to a 1982 Speilburg classic…
Just been around the house and checked all of the icons and other religious imagery. The only beard I can find is on Buddy Christ. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t any in the world, just that the statistical sample I have available doesn’t offer many beards.
I’m sure most of my icons have beards. When did the Greeks stop having beards then? They always maintained them in contrast to the Romans and a beard is compulsory in the Orthodox Church.
The Rublov Trinity ones don’t have beards because they’re angels. And as we all know from reading Philip Pullman, angels are gay.
I prefer Dogma’s version. Angels are smooth like action man
I don’t know who some of the icons I have are. They tend to be gifts when people go to foreign parts.
As with all people who are engaging with the emerging church, the only icon I have bought is Rublev’s trinity
As well as beards the Orthodox get the best hats!
And yes, lots of icons get beards. But they also tend to be expressionless and androgenous shapes with beards applied on the outside. A bit like the ASBO cartoons. You can’t really gender specify a circle
Me and my mates at university set up an Eastern Orthodox prayer group where we said The Jesus Prayer and had icons. It was wonderful and lasted for five years and we were a very close group. It was held at our house in the spare room which we called The Prayer Room. However, when our Muslim landlord, Arafat, came to visit we’d take down the big Rubelov icon and put up a picture of the Queen so as not to offend him.
I think the church knows it’s supposed to get into a state of flux, in order to go where the spirit leads.
it’s just that it’s a tricky manoeuvre – following the new direction, when the previous one was to be ‘bound by reason’, since we now are finding holes in the ‘idol of reason’.
Yes, the church is finally realising that we’re post-Enlightenment. But the Goddess of Reason was never going to remain on her pedestal for long – the overemphasis was making us less than whole.
thanks for the image, Tiggy, ‘the goddess of reason’. (stuff the sterio types, reason is a woman – don’t mess)
and have just got a copy of “How (Not) to Speak of God” by Peter Rollins, it’s looking like a great read
Well after the French Revolution Reason was portrayed as a goddess along with Liberty. I suppose it was preferable to portraying them as men because the revolutionaries and French ‘philosophs’ were against both religion and kings. I don’t think there is particularly any other reason to align women with reason, except for sometimes being the voice of reason when competing ideologies want to fight it out.
My friend just recently recommended Peter Rollins book to me after reading a review of it on Amazon. Praps I’ll get it too then we can talk about it.
Pingback: Identity Crisis « Fires, Clouds, and Wanderings
Excellent – Very telling. I can use it for light relief in something I am writing.
I in no way knew that sometimes straightforward matters such as this can also turn fascinating.