A Few Notes

            Conscience.  On Saturday Paco and I watched “Minority Report” (2002). It focuses on John Anderton’s crisis when the precogs reveal that he is going to kill a man he has never met. When the moment arrives, the precog Agatha says that knowledge of the future doesn’t mean the future is inevitable. “You can choose,” she tells him insistently. She is speaking to his conscience, his consciousness of himself as a moral being.

            Religious experience.  Yesterday I read a few pages in The Significance of Religious Experience, by Howard Wettstein. It led me to reconsider Clive Marsh’s seven-theme, which is really a seven-doctrine, methodology. What would it be like in my study of religion and theology if I started with issues on which I would stake my existence, rather than with a schedule of teachings? Abraham Joshua Heschel calls this situational, as opposed to conceptual, thinking (God In Search of Man, 5).

            Beauty and Holiness.  Ever since the day thirteen years ago when I read Ps. 27:4—“This is what I seek … to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord”—I have wanted to sink into the experience of these words. But how? Robert K. Johnston quotes Gerardus van der Leeuw, who speaks of an analogy between art and religion. “The paths of beauty and holiness approach each other, growing distant, until finally … they can no longer be held apart” (in Johnston, 73).

            Creation.  Last year I plunged into gardening, with the dream of turning my yard into an English garden. There would be a dense shrub border around the perimeter, small trees and many flowers. The response of the earth is a continual marvel to me: “If you plant it, it will grow.” I wish I could find the verses in the Bible which speak of God’s delight in Wisdom at play on the earth, because that’s what it feels like.

            Story.  I also read an essay called “Religion Without God,” by Ronald Dworkin. Dworkin looks directly at an issue that Johnston and Marsh approach obliquely: it isn’t necessary to believe in God to live an ethical life. His argument made sense until I came to the sentence: “There is no direct bridge from any story about the creation, or … [etc.] … to the enduring value of friendship and family, or … [etc.]." No bridge, I thought, except the human need for story.

            Church, temple, synagogue, mosque.  Not the building but the awareness, found in indigenous religions too, of being a member of a community that stands in awe of ultimate reality. The ground-hugging foundation of tradition is part of this. I belong to the Judeo-Christian tradition. The first words of the Gospel reading yesterday, on Pentecost Sunday, hearkened back to the first words of Genesis, in which the Spirit of God hovers over the waters.

            Sabbath.  Some theologians have “called attention to the need for a restructuring of theology in which praxis would … be the very foundation of theologizing” (The New Dictionary of Theology, 784). Keeping the Sabbath holy is the practice of setting aside creative activity—making things happen in the world—in order to pay homage to God the Creator. We can extend this to a practice of Sabbath-time, remembering, “Great sacrifices were offered on that day, and there was rejoicing over the great feast of the Lord in which they shared” (Neh 12:43), and “Rejoice in the Lord always” (Phil. 4:4).

.