It is undoubtedly the case that we must understand religious language as "metaphors of a reality beyond our comprehension." It’s just that God’s transcendence, and the revelation by which He has allowed us to comprehend its actuality, also necessitate absolute truth claims about literal and quite robust realities.
For in Christ, analogy and that which is literally real are finally united. In Christ, the God of faith, the God of myth and the God of the philosophers become one with the concrete everyday all around us.
When the God who in the parables of the Old Testament walks around in the cool of the day of paradise so actually stands here before us one night in Gethsemane, metaphors and literal truth claims ultimately become one and the same.
But God is very much impossible to own, to capture. To comprehend. The essence of God is inconceivable to any created consciousness, and the transcendence of God is absolute. It is a miracle that we are even able to affirm God's existence through faith and reason, and it is an unfathomable mystery that He came to us as a little child, born of a virgin.
This is nonetheless true.
But He does not force us to welcome Him. He let His singular act of salvation depend on the free choice of a lowly teenage maiden. Of the Holy Virgin Mother.
And in the very same way, we must seek to find. We must ask to receive.
We have to knock for the door to open. As St. Ephrem the Syrian wrote as early as the fourth century, God could very well have made us obey Him in His own good pleasure, but out of grace and unimaginable love, He paid a price we can never understand so that we of our own free will will could affirm the ineffable hope that He has called us to. So that God may also be born in us, in our faith, in our will and in our reason, that through His supernatural presence we may in some inconceivable way partake in the inner life of the Holy Trinity.
So that each of us could stand with St. Peter to face the question all of us must answer in the secret chiaroscura of our own hearts:
"Who do you say that I AM?"
…
“Do something pretty while you can
Don't be a fool
Reading the gospel to yourself is fine
Do something pretty while you can
Don't be afraid
Skating a pirouette on ice is cool
On a bus stop in the town
’We rule the school’
Written for everyone to see and read”
/Belle & Sebastian
…
From Hiroyuki Hamada’s Facebook:
“Merry Christmas my friends. John Steppling sent us this quote this morning and I feel I must share it with you all. These words came from George L. Jackson shortly before he was murdered in California's San Quentin Prison.
‘Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.’
George L. Jackson
Like Fred Hampton said ‘you can kill the revolutionary but you can’t kill the Revolution.’
Much love,
Hiroyuki.”
La Vierge au lys, Bouguereau, 1899
The new religion is science, and it's as made up as the old religions.
I understand the truth of religion, a meaning of life and love, but all of the major religions forgot that because they became absorbed into the political and economic system....
Who knows what the original Christians believed before the empire adopted it?
Alphabet vs the goddess lecture:
https://youtu.be/2QQuD62RxrU