… to practise the full teaching of the Church as enshrined in the Book of Common Prayer
It is a question of understanding my own destiny, of seeing what the Deity really wants me to do; the thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die. … I still accept an imperative of knowledge, and that through it one can also influence people, but then it must be taken up alive in me, and this is what I now see as the main point.
1 August 1835
Is there a difference between “Jesus died for sin” and “Jesus died for my sin”?
Have you ever thought that all of this is a cosmic joke? It’s a mistake, and the joke is on me. That feeling that I am completely out of place, out of time, out of sync with the world around me. There is an inside joke called “life”, of which I am simply not part.
I have felt that more in the last couple of months, and I censor myself to fit in, making myself small to fit into other people’s views of me. I have not spoken up and allowed my silence to be consent. It is a learned stress response. It is a way to escape and internalise everything until the balloon is full and “pops” with much noise. And I want to run, perhaps to see if people will miss me.
When is “enough” enough? Where do you draw the line? I fool myself into thinking that I am open-minded, yet even I have my limit. But where is that invisible line? I think I am on the threshold. I feel like I am drowning. Or being fed a diet of air. Why do I hide my thoughts and ideas for “peace”? Is that life with other people?
Being alone is great. Refreshing. Upbuilding. Perhaps the context has to change?
One of my favourite Kierkegaard quotes is from Sickness Unto Death:
The formula that describes the state of the self when despair is completely rooted out is this: in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it.
So, I pray for what I fear most: having my “self” transparent in Jesus.
Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.
1 Corinthians 8:1
“Truth? What is that?” Pilate asked Jesus, The Truth (John 14:6). There is a lot of talk about facts and truth. Perhaps, there should be?! Yet, some of this talk comes from a “scientific worldview” that has simply been baptised.
So, the above verse came to mind. And, to be a Kierkegaard fanboy, there is a difference between something being “true” (whatever that may mean) and something being “upbuilding”.
Maybe I spend too much time alone. I do not understand the idea of “truth moving people to action.” Simply knowing the truth does not make my life any different. And there are a plethora of words that are used as synonyms.
It is an ugly ditch – history and knowledge.
So, anyway …
Duty becomes duty by being referred to God, but in the duty itself I do not enter into relation to God. For instance, it is a duty to love one’s neighbor. It is a duty by its being referred to God, but in the duty I do not enter into a relation to God but to the neighbor I love.
Kierkegaard: Fear and Trembling
Jesus calls me to love my neighbour, but that love of neighbour is not my relationship with Jesus. It is my relationship with my neighbour. If I love my neighbour (who, like me, is a sinner in need of Jesus) only because Jesus says so, what does that say about my understanding of my neighbour? Anyway …
In Hegelian philosophy the outer (the externalization) is higher than the inner.
Kierkegaard: Fear and Trembling (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy), 60.
The difference remains, however, and is between being, or at least striving to be, what one admires—and being personally detached. Let us now completely forget this danger connected with confessing Christ and think rather of the danger of actuality that is inescapably bound up with being Christian. Does not Christian teaching about ethics and obligation, Christianity’s requirement to die to the world, to surrender the earthly, its requirement of self-denial, does this not contain enough requirements—if they were to be obeyed—to produce the danger of actuality that makes manifest the difference between an admirer and an imitator, makes it manifest precisely in this way, that the imitator has his life in these dangers and the admirer personally remains detached although they both are nevertheless united in acknowledging in words the truth of Christianity? Thus the difference still remains. The admirer will make no sacrifices, renounce nothing, give up nothing earthly, will not transform his life, will not be what is admired, will not let his life express it—but in words, phrases, assurances he is inexhaustible about how highly he prizes Christianity.
Practice in Christianity
So, then, what truly can be said to draw to itself must be something in itself or something that is in itself. So it is when truth draws to itself, for truth is in itself, is in and for itself—and Christ is the truth. It must be the higher that draws the lower to itself—just as when Christ, the infinitely highest one, true God and true man, from on high will draw all to himself. But the human being of whom this discourse speaks is in himself a self. Therefore Christ also first and foremost wants to help every human being to become a self, requires this of him [XII 150] first and foremost, requires that he, by repenting, become a self, in order then to draw him to himself. He wants to draw the human being to himself, but in order truly to draw him to himself he wants to draw him only as a free being to himself, that is, through a choice.
Practice in Christianity
231. There also exists a constant tension between ideas and realities. Realities simply are, whereas ideas are worked out. There has to be continuous dialogue between the two, lest ideas become detached from realities. It is dangerous to dwell in the realm of words alone, of images and rhetoric. So a third principle comes into play: realities are greater than ideas. This calls for rejecting the various means of masking reality: angelic forms of purity, dictatorships of relativism, empty rhetoric, objectives more ideal than real, brands of ahistorical fundamentalism, ethical systems bereft of kindness, intellectual discourse bereft of wisdom.
Pope Francis
Kierkegaard would (maybe?!) say that the single individual is more important than the abstraction. When it is flipped over, you have leveling. One step further would be to suggest that ideals (abstractions) can create reality – “if we can measure it, we can create it”.
So Francis is just a closet Kierkegaardian!
One of the earliest pieces has this to say about reading:
It is, namely, the transubstantiation of experience; it is an unshakable certainty in oneself won from all experience, whether this has oriented itself only in all worldly relationships (a purely human standpoint, Stoicism, for example), by which means it keeps itself from contact with a deeper experience — or whether in its heavenward direction (the religious) it has found therein the centre as much for its heavenly as its earthly existence, has won the true Christian conviction “that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor the present, nor the future, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Kierkegaard
Reading is much more than information but an experience that changes me. It is not something to do while I am bored but a choice for change.
Anyway …
God is present in the moment of choice, not in order to watch but in order to be chosen. Therefore, each person must choose. Terrible is the battle, in a person’s innermost being, between God and the world. The crowning risk involved lies in the possession of choice.
Kierkegaard
