VERSE
Cotter, James Finn
Gregory lqazianzen said that those who attempted to pry into the mystery of God would go mad, and Basil said that anyone who claimed to know God was depraved. No serious theologian or mystic of...
...23 December 1977:818...
...Butter-and-eggs, loosestrife, black-eyed susan bands salute the sun's reviewing stand...
...This is a pathetic example of what happeus when traditional wisdom is lost, and traded away for "going to where the people really are" (to use a current catchphrase in religious education...
...Not quite to prove the point, but nearly, let me offer an example of human self-definition worked up by someone less profoundly informed than Hans KUng (who, working from a tradition which has accepted the belief in deification, correctly identifies many of our false gods...
...It is true, as Hans KUng says, that this doctrine has a meaning if it can speak to us of what it means to become truly human...
...The reason that we cannot at present know what God is is that we are in the idol-making business: even God becomes an idol...
...The symbols which surround the story of Christmas are upsetting ones: a pregnant virgin gives birth to a child in a barn, and the child is the world's salvation...
...If modern man does not understand a statement like "God became man so that man might become God" this iS only because no one understands iL It can be lived only by emptying ourselves of all our notions of God and man...
...Because I own all of me I can become intimately acquainted with me...
...To ask for intelligibility is, I think, a mistake...
...I am me, and I am OK...
...Where they really are is in some kind of shopping center, being victimized, more than anything else, by a society which sees ever3ahing as controllable, potentially understandable, with happiness and fulfillment a goal and a right, rather than an occasional, fortuitous thing--a world with no unpredictable or uncontrollable limits...
...In Sell-Esteem (Celestial Arts Press) Virginia Safir writes, "I am me...
...Catnip and hawkweed corps, battalions of bouncing" bet, present stalks, attention, eyes right: Beat the buttercup, whistle the vetch, follow the bellflower, forward march...
...I own everything about me---my body, my feelings, my mouth, my voice . . . . I own all my triumphs and successes, all my failures and mistakes...
...God at work in us may seem to be absolute emptiness (as God was to Abraham, Job and Jesus in Gethsemane...
...The radical belief expressed at Christmas is that the source of everything sent his o~m.life into flesh because of love, and shares that life with us...
...In all the world there is no one else exactly like me...
...A doctrine of Incarnation which does not go aN far as the Fathers did in asserting our own divine humanity can become idolatrous: Jesus becomes another remote god, and not the God who emptied himself to share humanity...
...but it is this emptiness at Work in us which can uncover the divine humanity, and it is this which defines the truly human, rather than anything we can arrive at on our own...
...and all of them stand in the way of God, the life of Christ, and true Christianity...
...Everything that comes out of me is authentically mine because I alone choose it...
...It is better to begin with our unknowing, spending what might b e a confusing and dark time in the presence of someone presently unknowable, in order to find out what we are called to be...
...The story of the Incarnation, and the ancient belief in deification, might show us that it b not enough to aim at being human...
...No serious theologian or mystic of any age has been unaware of the absence or darkness of God, though in our time of Hiroshima, the Holocaust, and universal boredom it is no longer the theoretical preserve of theologians, but an omnipresent reality...
...We cherish the image of God, the notion of what it means to be Christian, a picture of the church...
...I would suggest, though, that it is not enough to use words like "humane" or "humanization" withot reference to deification...
...By so doing I can love me and be friendly with me in all my parts . . . . Whatever I think and feel at a given moment in time is authentically me...
...If later some parts of how I looked, sounded, thought and felt turn out to be unfitting, I can discard that which is unfitting, keep the rest, and invent something new . . . . I own me, and therefore I can engineer me...
...Gilt and brass glow in long green rows: goldenrod, goat's beard, cinquefoil and primrose...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 JAMBS FINN COTTER ALONG KINftS EIGiiWAY Ranks of chicory, troops of tiger-lily stride at roadside this Fourth of July...
...Armies of yarrow, diasy, rhododendron parade to the wind's fife and drum...
Vol. 104 • December 1977 • No. 26
