present people

here is a short excerpt from a longer piece of work that i am writing

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mother teresa famously said that she could see the face of christ reflected in those that she served. she lived in a world where a person may be alive one moment and dead in the next breath. in being present with that person, engaging with who they are, right at that moment (because there may not be another moment), she experienced christ, mediated through that person, unique to that person at that moment.

when someone is suffering, the temptation is to disengage from who that person is at that present moment: to pine for the past moment or to hasten to a future moment, when the person is different, better or simply more like us again. it is tempting to think that our desire is rooted in that person’s best interests – we wish them to be healed, to be happy. all these might come from noble motivations; however they might also be simply a guise in order to avoid the person. to be with someone, to be truly, fully present with them is to know them in their brokenness, even when this is uncomfortable for us. we do this, not so that we can ‘fix’ them, to view them as a project to be completed, or assimilated into normality, but just to be with them, at that present moment. it is the difference between perceiving them as a problem, or as a mystery to be caught up in. if we are caught up in pursuing a future goal for that person, one where they are essentially a different person than the one that we are presented with, then we miss the point, we miss the person.

if we find our own personhood in relation to other persons, then this tendency is detrimental to us as individual persons and as persons in community. for we, ourselves, are present persons: we do not live in the past, nor in the future, we only have our being in the present moment. therefore, to refuse to encounter other persons in their present moment, even when that moment includes suffering, is to remove our own person from the present moment. we end up trying to live in a moment that does not exist, a quasi-utopia. both the person who is excluded from ‘normal’ society because of their suffering, and that society itself, suffer for that exclusion.

phases my brain goes through when writing an essay

i don't know anything, have i actually read anything about this at all, i can't remember anything, oh no i'm writing crap, this doesn't make sense, why on earth did i think i could do this

oh, actually that's okay

people are drawing cartoons of me now......

thanks adrian!

adrian has written a riposte to my mission-shaped church article on fulcrum - he is also a cartoonist, in fact i think that a few other fulcrum team have been at the end of his brush, fab.

of course i disagree with him in his discussion about the place of the trinity in the mission dialogue, but to be honest, i don't think this is anything remarkable, adrian being liberal in his theology and me being, well not.

the christian tradition understands God as revealing something of himself to us and so what we say about him as trinity is not simply guesswork, nor just our own projections from what we see of God as human beings, but rather is understood to have been graciously revealed to us by the God who chooses to move towards the other for the flourishing of that other; mission.

of course we do view God from our own perspective, that is true, and from this perspective we try to use language which gives some explanation to what it is that we see. but mostly we have to admit that our language is a ragged equation with the reality we are trying to describe - even augustine struggled with the 'persons' analogy, and in the end says something like 'well we had to use some word, so persons had to do - better that than use nothing'.

but that is not the same as saying that we are only doing that. we believe that God reveals himself as One who is for the world, for his creation, active and present within it, holding it together, and who ultimately reveals himself in the person of Christ. of course, as adrian says, the trinity also tells us something of what it means to be defined by relationship, but this is not 'yet another metaphor' attached to the trinity; it is better to say that we can say that 'God is mission' rather than 'God does mission' because the ontological place of mission in the trinity is an expression of the ontological principle of relationship.

but anyway, enough high falutin' talk, i'm enjoying my cartoon adrian :-)

articles

i've just published two pieces of work on fulcrum, one is a book review of 'the shack', huge news in the states and fast becoming so over here, and the other is an essay which hopefully continues the conversations on mission shaped church.