Two years ago I did not know about the reputations I would have. They knew me by my number #946---020. That was jail, this is Boston College. They know me here as #3454**18, my electronic ID used on a swipe card to purchase through "the cloud". When someone says to me "Merry Christmas!" they access a part of me that deeply believes in God, even if an account of it at that moment could not surface.
The reputation of Christmas never changes the identity, the meaning of Christ's incarnation. I think we obtain a special understanding of it as Catholic beings in "the cloud" of Church. We recognize the mysterious by identifying our unique hope with faith. There is a danger is keeping a hope that conforms only to what is private and in reach. The conscience is the place from which our hope 'springs eternal' but how often do we go there in true examination? Are we in touch with the hope of our deepest dreams?
In A Midsummer Night's Dream Shakespeare makes Bottom say "I will Peter Quince to write a ballet of this dream. It shall be called 'Bottom's Dream' because it hath no bottom"(IV.i.214-216). Our true hope is uniquely found in communion of faith. Christ is the profound bottom we cannot fully hope to understand, but thankfully he comes to us.
“Hope without faith would be blind. It would not know who it
was trusting or what it was hoping for. Yet faith without hope would be closed
in on itself. It would tend to imagine the future looking like a mere repetition or copy of the present.”—Anthony
Kelly, Eschatology and Hope, 17
(emphasis added)
^
We cannot forget who we are.
The choice before us
is
remembering the momentum our personal history has
so that we draw up the inertial force of Christ
with us
who is our integral
hope.
We are not “mere repetition” or copies of our self, for one moment 768**18 erupts and up from within it emerges --our potential—another moment—and so on
as the ground beneath our feet continues to be firm.
Christendom remains fashioned imperial,
imposing and stoic;
as such Dogma is;
to many she seems the barren Sarah without child.
But this physique has a tenderness hidden to us-with-feint-hearts;
we swoon into its arms;
this romance with centrifugal reality bears us with unfeeling;
inward though,
how it hangs over the molten, real, deep down weight of things.
Historical reality is romantic:
Our potential resists us but it cannot escape,
and so on. We pursue the inevitable confrontation.
Modes of thought arrive (!) cataclysms of
‘it does this’
and then the ‘to me’
attaches,
‘it does this to me’ arrives
redolent in reflective ‘ordering’,
but we cannot forget who we are.
Explication begins here, delving his Santa Claus bag for gifts.
He lets us correspond in history.
To dwell on the cumbersome bonds
that issue
our arrest
and captivate our being,
for this,
fundamental theology.
To know that faith may intelligibly correspond
in love and history,
for this,
fundamental theology.
Our integral hope means that the categories give way;
this
is how fruitful conflict happens;
birth by birth.
We can forget
that division of moments and separations do,
finally,
amount from longings we share deep down.
If again the seam of reality parts way
‘rise’ thusly:
what for!
How dare!
Forget not such disturbances.
Allow despondence in momento mori
when a record raises up a ghost.
This way
and inside this way,
the moment of next
our hope is:
realizing us.
Champion boxers are made in the separation of one athlete over another, by degrees, between punches, out of the reserves of tendril fibers built in jump rope and footwork sessions; Political careers from tripping doorsteps, smiles, handshakes; Gross Domestic Products from bills of sale by arms dealers, supernovas from gravitational collapse.
A man told by doctors he would never walk again needed his back re-aligned, a possibility unforseen because it existed out of the realm of what they knew.
Possibility is revealed like a flower. What is that inner floret which unfolds in bloom last in our potential, ever opening us up into God within. We yield our imagination so that the present happens to be a fulfillment of what it was we were hoping for, so that we could get to a possible future still awaiting us.
The choice before us
is
remembering the momentum our personal history has
so that we draw up the inertial force of Christ
with us
who is our integral
hope.
We are not “mere repetition” or copies of our self, for one moment 768**18 erupts and up from within it emerges --our potential—another moment—and so on
as the ground beneath our feet continues to be firm.
Christendom remains fashioned imperial,
imposing and stoic;
as such Dogma is;
to many she seems the barren Sarah without child.
But this physique has a tenderness hidden to us-with-feint-hearts;
we swoon into its arms;
this romance with centrifugal reality bears us with unfeeling;
inward though,
how it hangs over the molten, real, deep down weight of things.
Historical reality is romantic:
Our potential resists us but it cannot escape,
and so on. We pursue the inevitable confrontation.
Modes of thought arrive (!) cataclysms of
‘it does this’
and then the ‘to me’
attaches,
‘it does this to me’ arrives
redolent in reflective ‘ordering’,
but we cannot forget who we are.
Explication begins here, delving his Santa Claus bag for gifts.
He lets us correspond in history.
To dwell on the cumbersome bonds
that issue
our arrest
and captivate our being,
for this,
fundamental theology.
To know that faith may intelligibly correspond
in love and history,
for this,
fundamental theology.
Our integral hope means that the categories give way;
this
is how fruitful conflict happens;
birth by birth.
We can forget
that division of moments and separations do,
finally,
amount from longings we share deep down.
If again the seam of reality parts way
‘rise’ thusly:
what for!
How dare!
Forget not such disturbances.
Allow despondence in momento mori
when a record raises up a ghost.
This way
and inside this way,
the moment of next
our hope is:
realizing us.
Champion boxers are made in the separation of one athlete over another, by degrees, between punches, out of the reserves of tendril fibers built in jump rope and footwork sessions; Political careers from tripping doorsteps, smiles, handshakes; Gross Domestic Products from bills of sale by arms dealers, supernovas from gravitational collapse.
A man told by doctors he would never walk again needed his back re-aligned, a possibility unforseen because it existed out of the realm of what they knew.
Possibility is revealed like a flower. What is that inner floret which unfolds in bloom last in our potential, ever opening us up into God within. We yield our imagination so that the present happens to be a fulfillment of what it was we were hoping for, so that we could get to a possible future still awaiting us.
“Fundamental theology seeks to explicate the faith in a
manner corresponding to the present historical modes of human understanding. It
does this, not in order to submit itself to the ruling modes of thought, but in
order to enter into a fruitful conflict with these modes of thought.”—Johann Baptist
Metz, Theology of the World, 82
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