SOFiA Newsletter 175 December 2024
 
 
Exploring Values, Meaning and SpiritualityImage of dover beach
 
Limestone cliffs like those at Dover, scene of the poem “Dover Beach”

Thoughts on Christmas
 
The image (left) juxtaposes the contemporary pre-Christmas commercial bustle with the original scene of Joseph and Mary on a donkey, heading for Bethlehem.    More…
Larksong book cover
Larksong – Cecily Sheehy’s song collection
 
Larksong contains 100 songs by the Dominican sister Cecily Sheehy.  

In her own Introduction, Cecily tells of her attendance at Matthew Fox’s Creation-Centred Spirituality programme in California.  More...
On Death, Part 3

    1. From Epicurus we can learn not to worry about the state of being dead, no matter how much evangelical preachers may warn us of the dangers of hell. In death we no longer exist, so even the wish ‘may he rest in peace’ cannot apply to the state of the dead person. The most we can say is that it could mean ‘may we be in peace and not troubled by the memory of this dead person.’
    2. From Irwin Yalom, we can learn about the tension between our biological nature and our reflective, intellectual selves. Animals react instinctively to any threat, but we humans know that a lion could be hiding behind any bush and that eventually we must all die. This makes our mortality much more of an issue for us than for other animals, due to our cognitive abilities.
    3. From Paul Tillich, we can learn about the role that anxiety plays. Just to exist, we must affirm a ‘courage to be’ against the anxiety of fate and death. The courage to be is a broad-based way of understanding what Christians have traditionally understood faith to be.
    4. From Lloyd Geering, we can learn that resurrection is not an invention of the Christians, a one-off miracle that just happened. Rather, the ‘idiom of resurrection’ is something with a long history, going back way before the existence of the people of Israel, and undergoing change and evolution during its history. We don’t share that resurrection perspective, which makes understanding Easter particularly difficult for would-be modern Christians.
    5. From Eugen Drewermann, we can learn to regard resurrection as something humanity-wide rather than as specifically Judeochristian. Ancient cultures looked to nature for evidence that countered the obvious reality of death and found it for example in the moon that reappears after three days. Ancient Egypt in particular had a rich and varied symbolism that was close to nature; many of their gods had animal faces and a human body. We can counter the widespread abstraction in most modern theology for example by meditatively identifying with the sun as it sets in the West and makes an underground journey before emerging anew at the beginning of the next day.
From him we can also learn that we don’t have to choose between resurrection and immortality, as long as we don’t try to turn them into philosophical theories or dogmatic beliefs. Both are there in Egyptian symbolism; the rising of the sun after ‘dying’ in the evening and the ascension of the golden Ba-soul.  More...
  Printable Version button             - * -  About SOFiA - * -
 
 

Search

 

Quick links

 
About us    Join us   Conference   Newsletter   Contact   Resources