Here’s a little more meditation of my z-theory. I realize this offends some who would prefer that I stay within the narrow parameters of a specific doctrine, but I am pressed to attempt to articulate that which I’ve seen. Even some of my friends say I’ve lost it and need a sabbatical. I won’t deny that. I might be wrong. At least half wrong. But, as we all know, there are risks involved in straying from the herd. I want to discover as much as I can before I get caught.
There is the Pre-Revealed. This is the One that is not known, cannot be known, and will not be known. This is total and unprovable mystery. Evidence might be gathered, but this Mystery will not be captured. When we speak of this One, surely we don’t mean what we say. The word is not the thing. Neither is the thought. This is the Unnameable. I am interested in communing with this One, the Beautiful Beyond. But I am not only prevented by my brain’s unwillingness and inability to think beyond its own self-securing agenda, but I am obstructed by the Beautiful Beyond’s refusal to be had. This is the upper arm of the z.
There is the Revealed. This is the gracious desire to commune with all things. This is the incarnation. This is the condescension. This is the transmission. This is the revelation. This is the coming down. That is from the top end. From the bottom end, it is the understanding, the receiving, the accepting, the willingness to commune with the Beautiful Beyond, the Absolute, the All-in-All. This is the going up. This is the slanting arm of the z. It slants down backward because it is retroactive, indicating that this has always been the intention and the action of the Absolute. It slant up forward because we enter the fullness of time.
There is the Post-Revealed. This is the bottom arm of the z. It is like a dam broke and a river torrent was released, the force of which has forged a deep gorge through which the river courses. We are in the gorge. We are downriver from the moment of the Revealed. We are past the historic impact. We live in the fullness of this, and still somehow this is an Eternal Source that precedes us. All bathe in this Mystery that is somehow fully within us, that we are fully within, but which still has Being beyond us. This is the Beautiful Beyond that is now not an invisible separated entity, but observable, experienced and known in the love between all beings.
I hope this is helpful to someone.
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Oh come on, FiF.
You know that nobody keeps the law perfectly.
Nobody even comes close. In fact, when we are born, the game is over.
Gonna take my wife to breakfast (today is her birthday and she took off from work).
So me, the last of the big spenders, will get her a few pancakes.
Talk to you later, FiF.
you forgot to sign…
SIN…cerely yours, Steve
FiF,
You are the BEST!!
Ciao!
SIN…cerely,
da jerk
I think you’re wrong Steve. Or at least that’s it’s possible to reconcile those verses without cherrypicking.
I know other, more educated people, have probly said and done it. But I have to do it myself, so it might take awhile.
I will answer you Fif, one day I’ll send you a big long email. But not yet, I’m busy reconciling the gospels right now
Oh and my pastor and friends helped me reconcile James and Romans, but I doubt I could remember enough to expain it clearly. I think I already tried.
Steve: ‘he considers all of that doggie- stuff in comparison’
‘doggie-stuff’??? What does that mean? Did you mean ‘dodgy stuff’? Or are we back to the ‘get along little doggies’?
Tiggy,
I think the word St. Paul uses is ’scabalone’ (or something like that) and it means dog poop.
Cool – St. Paul has just gone up in my estimation. I tend to agree with you, Steve, on the whole. I’m sure we all contradict ourselves in what we say and write, especially over a long period of time and in different situations and in relation to different audiences, but the main thrust is that struggling to meet some perfect standard is ultimately destructive.
So ‘Scabalone’ to that. I wonder if there’s a word for seagull poo. I got bombed the other day whilst sunbathing on my balcony. I’m convinced they do it on purpose.
Semety…what is yr motive in pursuing reconciliation between writers/verses?. If the NT reveals something less than homogenity, shldn’t we accept that?
sorry, that shld be homogeneity…I used to be a good sptheller
Tiggy…I think they call it sea-doo
We’re nowhere near the sea – these are urban gulls and we’re overrun with them. Actually, in Canadian terms we ARE near the sea. We’re about half an hour’s drive from the Bristol Channel which is kind of on the coast, but I’ve lived half an hour from the sea in two other places and never been surrounded by gulls. I suppose the difference is the river. Urban gulls are becoming a major problem here.
I wish there was a map on here and people could mark where they are. I find that really interesting. You could also have a world map with a zoom. I live in the South West of England, in the city of Bath which is a ‘World Heritage Site’ near Bristol and Wales. Wales is another country where some people speak Welsh. We’re also not far from Stone Henge.
Tiggy…if you click my name you’ll see that I’m quite fond of seagulls…I live on The Bay of Fundy…near David…
Why ‘World Heritage”…what’s so special?
Well I like them when they just fly past singly, but when they go crazy it’s like Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’.
Not all Fundies in Fundy then.
Bath is all Georgian buildings – over 300 yrs old. I live in one as do most people in the city centre. Bath was an ancient place of healing because of the hot springs and it’s famous for its baths built by the Romans. It was also a sacred site for them. In the eighteenth century it was a very popular spa town where people came not only to ‘take the waters’, but to enjoy a busy social season of parties and meeting new people. It features in Jane Austen novels as a place people from London go to to find a rich husband. I continue that search!
Strangely, since moving here four months ago I’ve experienced an amazing amount of healing. I’ve met a lot of people, both religious and non-religious, who feel like me that they were called here in some strange way. Someone in one of the churches here had a ‘prophecy’ that on the seven hills around Bath there are seven angels protecting the city. I’m currently writing a song about it.
hey tiggy: no FAIR!!! you write songs????? you’ve gotta put one up that we can hear. come on now!! where can we hear you??????
Tiggy…what brought you to Bath?
other than the mystery…if there is another?
I will when I’ve recorded them and that’s in the pipeline. My idea was to sell them, but unfortunately to do that you have to record them and I need a few singing lessons – not to mention a few gin and tonics!
That’s been part of my healing – a constant flow of songs. It just happens and I’m like, ‘Oh no, not another one!’ Of course I have to work on the lyrics for a while after the initial bits come into my head along with the music. I’m surprised I can remember all the tunes.
The other healing has been me developing more of a passion for justice issues, a love and appreciation of women, a realising that I’m not the bad person my parents always said I was, not being lonely any more because I have a social life now and good friends around me who understand me and share my interests and values. In the next few weeks a very relationship I had many years ago with someone very special to me will be healed. There have been amazing coincidences since I moved here and it’s all truly weird, but lovely.
sounds like yr got yr ‘mojo’ workin’….
God brought me to Bath – and I’m not the sort of person who would normally say something like that! I was at my computer one day, typing away, not thinking about places to move to or even thinking of moving, when the thought came into my head, ‘I’d like to move somewhere like Bristol or Bath.’ Bristol was too big, I felt, and quickly dismissed the idea of that. Started looking at possibly going to a university in Bath but no idea which course to do as I already have a degree and was just looking for a secure environment with ready made social life. Idea put on hold.
Christmas Day, weird sudden blow-up wi th my parents just because I went on Ebay for 2 mins!!!! Still don’t understand that one. That week, they gave me a legal sort of letter evicting me. I didn’t even not get on with them. My sister and her husband thought my parents had gone mad. Decided to move to Bath because I didn’t like where I was living anyway. Arrived one month later, traumatised and was put on beta-blockers for stress. That went away after 2 or 3 weeks. Then the healing began and a lifetime of depression has lifted. There are far more coincidences and things but those would take too long to relate. I knew hardly anything about Bath but it has turned out to be the perfect place for me in many different ways.
Wow…just when I began to doubt serendipity…a story like yrs shows up on my computer…life is like that…especially at Christmas
The funny thing is, my best friend has been going on about ‘Cosmic Ordering’ for the last six months or so. She went to meetings on it and was quite sure it would work. I told her it was bollocks because it is. I don’t know what she cosmically ordered, but she’s still in deep shit, even deeper, whereas my life has changed totally. Not meaning to gloat, but she’s always full of whacky theories that do my head in.
I thought ‘Mojo’ meant sex drive?? It does in Austen Powers films. Yes, I feel passionate all the time in the widest sense of the word. It’s the power of Eros that Christians need to reclaim – the Divine Erotic.
By reconcile I mean, see for myself that they don’t contradict? They can all have different perspectives but still be talking about the same thing. I’m not pursuing homogeneity, I’m pursuing God. And there is a God or isn’t, and he’s not a God of discord. I am seeking to find what God says about Himself.
They don’t have to be the same or think the same to reconcile. But if there’s a lot of internal contradictions, it destroys the Bible’s validity and reliability.
So I won’t pick and choose. God is merciful and just and loving and wrathful. And they reconcile with each other. God is three-in-one, and it reconciles. But that doesn’t mean it’s homogenous.
“Hear O Israel. The Lord our God, The Lord is One. You shall love the Lord with all your heart, all your mind, and all your strength.”
Tiggy…I guess it does,but apparently the metaphor is not misplaced
….do you read Thomas Moore/James Hillman-archetypal psychology?
Semety…good luck with that…but remember,it’s only a raft…it doesn’t have to be perfect to help you get to where you want to go…it shld be a means and not an end
No it doesn’t have to be perfect. It is a means to and end – Jesus is THE end.
And without that end, I have nothing. “If Jesus didn’t rise again, we are most to be pitied”
I thot God was the end.
What metaphor Fatima?
…got yr ‘mojo’ workin’?
How is that a metaphor? Doesn’t ‘mojo’ mean libido?
I guess so,but I thot metaphorically,,,,the original meaning refers to a magic charm in Hoodoo
Really? I always assumed it was a Scottish slang word! LOL
that too. Jesus is God, we get to the father through him. Without him, we have no cover.
As in insurance cover? I’m not sure what the sentence ‘Jesus is God’ means. By God most people mean God the Father and Jesus isn’t God the Father. Even if he says, ‘I and the Father are one, that doesn’t mean they are the same – he said we would be one with the Father too. I think of Jesus as the eldest son, with us as his younger siblings.
Do we pray THROUGH Jesus or TO him? Or is that just an Anglican sort of question?