Contemplative Essays
[2024]

"Chi Rho"
Book of Kells (Irish, ca. 800 ce.)
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A sermon about brewing, theology and the Living Water, and what all three have to say to the church.
In today's busy and hurried culture, it is almost impossible to think or function apart from the constraints of time. For most of us time has become an unbearable task master controlling us far more that we wish to admit.
"Salvation" is not about afterlife, it is about making the Mystery called "God," real through our healing actions of living justly and delivering mercy with humility. It is about being the PURE LOVE that is God.
Why not create a brand new Christian theology that speaks to our modern day culture? Let’s come up a brand-new way of thinking about Christianity and life. To do so, perhaps we need to rethink "Incarnation."
We all know of the story of St. Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland, but do we know about St. Patrick, the Peacemaker?
WIn some mystical way the “nuirt” includes the divine, but in someway more than the traditional divine image concept. Panentheism, I think doesn’t far enough, because we still separating God and things. Yet, it is not pantheism in that the divine doesn’t become the thing.
A Faith Statement: I identify as a liberal Christian Universalist who embraces Celtic Christianity and Christian Universalism as a model of how I ought to live as a follower of the Jesus Way.
Building a Larger Table is about seeing the Face of God in the Ordinary is about building a spiritual community that has a Table large enough to accommodate everyone, no exclusions, large enough to accommodate the ordinary, both animate and inanimate.
Where we look for the Side Street God Determines the God We find. But, Who? What? is the Side Street God?
The primordial myth of Creation, common to all peoples, tells of a mighty melody – the very breath of God – that sang Creation into existence. To the Celts of old she was known as the The Oran Mór,1 “The Great Melody.”
Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, canceled, made nothing? Are you willing to be made nothing? Dipped into oblivion? If not you will never really change. -D. H. Lawrence. That's what living in the Borderlands is all about.
Celtic Christianity can be summed up in two words: death and resurrection. They are the same experience from two perspectives. Both build upon the constant Celtic theme: “redemption through pilgrimage."
In the 13th c. a startling discovery was made – at least to those who study things Irish – appended to an 11th c. Latin codex of Brehon Law was a Gaelic poetic catechism of sorts, a Christianized version of even a much older Druidic catechism.