Christian Nonduality

Christian Nonduality
http://twitter.com/johnssylvest
Bird Photos by David Joseph Sylvest

Montmarte, Colorado Springs & the Kingdom

And so one could suggest that the Kingdom looks more like Montmarte than Colorado Springs!
from Jamie Smith's Desiring the Kingdom

 Some redacted conversations (my contributions only):

If we want people to laugh, we don't order them to laugh, we tell them a joke. Laughing's more so a participatory reality & much less so propositional. It's the same w/teaching religion, where more is caught than taught. Solidarity... is not a reality we need to pursue or establish; it's one we need to recognize. When we awaken to our solidarity, compassion, like laughter, will ensue. What awakened you?

Even when we draw such distinctions as between the propositional & participatory, the descriptive/normative & the interpretive/evaluative, the cosmological & axiological, the cognitive & affective AND even if we rightly recognize that one aspect enjoys a certain PRIMACY, being more foundational or fundamental, we do NOT want to introduce a false dichotomy, which suggests that any one aspect is AUTONOMOUS from the others b/c, instead, they are integrally-related. There has been some tendency 1) in evangelical & Arminian traditions to overemphasize the evidential (evidence that demands a verdict) 2) in reformed & Calvinist traditions - the presuppositional (belief as philosophically basic) 3) in fideist, Lutheran & neoevangelical traditions - the existential (faith as experience) and 4) in Catholic, both Roman & Anglican, the rational (logical argument). In all of these traditions, a more holistic approach is EMERGING.

All that said, once we recognize the primacy of the social imaginary (hometown know-how) over doctrinal propositions (map-reading), as an anthropological datum, it then behooves us to come to grips w/the fact that the para-liturgical realities & liminoid experiences of mall & marketplace & stadiums, where the wrong values are often caught, will not be re-formed thru propositional-instructional teaching or catechesis, alone, but must also (even primarily) be gifted thru participatory liturgy & liminal experiences. That's why I intentionally employed the qualifiers "more so" and "less so" in order to convey the "necessary but not sufficient" dynamic; we do not want to claim that any given aspect is "enough." This is, in large measure, what a nondual approach is all about. There ARE some either/or realities, just not as many as some would imagine.

What you describe sounds like what my tradition calls mystagogia, whereby symbols effect what they signify, bring into reality precisely what they bring to body, soul & spirit via a pedagogy of right desire. The liturgical celebration engages our social imaginary thru which we understand our world as we sing and pray and dance and engage our rituals & practices. From this understanding, via noncognitive dispositions (values & desires) acquired thru participation, there FOLLOWS an attempt at theoretical articulation of cognitive beliefs in propositional doctrine. Doctrine should not be superimposed (added as the dominant feature) such that liturgy expresses it; it is quite the other way around!

In the same way that hymns, psalms, doxologies, letters & worship practices (breaking of the bread) preceded the NT canon, as well as articulated doctrines & a Xtn worldview, ecclesiologically (via a vis the church), worship precedes & births & forms an individual's beliefs & worldview as practices precede ideas. Transformation is a full body-blow and DOES include theological abstractions or scientia, eventually, but, first and foremost, we are Homo sapiens, so sapienta, or wisdom or practical knowledge, is how we encounter life's deepest mysteries and engage our most ultimate concerns. Orthopathically, thru Worship, and orthopraxically, thru Walk, we became an orthocommunio, a We, and expressed it all orthodoxically, thru Word.
Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Cultural Liturgies) by Jamie Smith affirms the primacy of our affective, desiring, loving self. It recognizes that an axiological vision of the whole operates, even if subconsciously and implicitly, in the quasi-liturgies of mall and marketplace and urges a conscious-competence on us all in our rituals, practices and liturgies.

See review.

Christian Nonduality
http://twitter.com/johnssylvest
Bird Photos by David Joseph Sylvest