Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write off the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Sunday, February 1, 2015

Langston Hughes - I Dream a World





An alternative orthodoxy is never stingy with grace or inclusion
because it has surrendered to a God who is infinitely
magnanimous and creative in the ways of love and mercy.

- Richard Rohr


Jesus' Kingdom ethic is here and now.
Love, peace, goodwill are not contested virtues.
The hardest part is enacting what is known
with what we do personally,
as communities, as governments,
institutions, and organizations.
We're talking Spirit-power run
on the fuel of Jesus' atonement -
the life blood of any Kingdom ethic.

- R.E. Slater
February 2, 2015


Langston Hughes 113th Birthday
"I Dream a World"



I dream a world where man
No other man will scorn,
Where love will bless the earth
And peace its paths adorn,
I dream a world where all
Will know sweet freedom's way,
Where greed no longer saps the soul
Nor avarice blights our day.
A world I dream where black or white,
Whatever race you be,
Will share the bounties of the earth
And every man is free,
Where wretchedness will hang its head
And joy, like a pearl,
Attends the needs of all mankind
Of such I dream, my world.

- Langston Hughes


Of Giving of One's Self through Dance




'How Generous Are You Willing To Be?' A Dance Teaching Story
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jesua/how-generous-are-you-will_b_6441146.html

by Jesua, healer, mentor, writer, mother
January 12, 2015


When I was 20 years old, a junior at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, I made an incredibly brave choice. I decided to dedicate one third of my college curriculum to the studying of modern dance.

Prior to that point I had been studying psychology, philosophy, writing and religion, as well as the visual arts. But the summer after my sophomore year I had a near-death experience, spanning several months, suddenly finding myself bizarrely ill, drastically losing weight, finally, after collapsing in fever, discovering a huge tumor the size of a cantaloupe swelling rapidly with blood inside my spleen. And so, after maneuvering and surviving three surgeries, having negotiated with angels and revisited all my life contracts, I was, needless to say, irrevocably transformed.

After taking a semester off for healing, I returned to college in January for my junior year and somehow knew that if I was going to successfully remain free of disease, I would need to fully and completely incarnate. I would need to actually inhabit this body I was living in, not just drag it around, loosely tethered to my spirit. And so, I decided, with huge trepidation and terror, to dance.

It was an especially courageous choice not only because I had never danced before, but because I still actively lived with mostly invisible neurological "damage" from my waist down, as the bi-product of childhood meningitis, had worn leg braces as a child, and did not have access to "normal" mind-leg control.

I had healed to the extent that hardly anyone (besides my mother, maybe) would notice I still slightly dragged my left foot. But in a dance class, requiring complex coordination and balance, my physical limitations would be horribly exposed.

And so they were, and so it was: immensely, painfully humbling. How many times did we, the students, line up, one by one, to dance across the floor? And how many times, come my turn, did I trip and fall, and then feel the others turn away aghast, in excruciating embarrassment on my behalf? Plenty of times, I'll tell you.

There were days I simply couldn't face the challenge, and pretended I was sick. There were days I sat on the sidelines, fuming with grief and envy that I couldn't move with the grace and fluidity and ease of neurological connection my classmates could seemingly take for granted.

And yet slowly, slowly, I learned to dance. Neurological pathways literally opened, healed and came to life in my lower body. Muscles developed. I cultivated my mid-line, learned to celebrate gravity, learned to enjoy the power and thrust and pleasure of movement. My spirit dove all the way down into my pelvis, my legs, my feet. My life-force came IN.

There were moments I actually tasted physical ecstasy for the first time, true surrender to life. There were moments I discovered, firsthand, what it was to be danced.

Then, one day, in the middle of morning warm-ups, moving through a simple routine to the comforting familiarity of the live piano player's warm-up melody, suddenly my dance teacher waved to the piano player to stop playing. The room was silent and all the students stopped dancing.

A tiny woman with a huge voice and presence, our teacher approached me slowly in her petite, graceful, chiseled body, with hungry, angry ferocity shining in her eyes like a panther about to pounce.

Then, in front of the entire class, she yelled at me, scolding me, with so much intense love and conviction and passion I have perhaps never recovered since.

She said: "Look at you, shame on you! Holding these long, beautiful limbs so close, so tight to your sides? Look at you!?"

Then she got in my face: "How generous are you willing to be? How generous are you willing to be with your whole life? Will you share yourself with us? With the world? Do you dare? Or are you just going to hold yourself tightly in, hold these long arms and legs all to yourself?

"Are you just going to be stingy? Just keep yourself to yourself for the rest of your life? In case you fall? In case you fail? In case you make a fool of yourself? In case we see how imperfect you are?

"OR: are you going to choose to just be generous anyway? To just take up as much space as you actually take up? To be as big, as graceful, as long, as gorgeous, as enormous as you actually are?"

She stopped, out of breath from her spontaneous explosion, and stood there, staring up at me, tears of wisdom's fierce love glistening in her eyes. Stunned tears came to my eyes as well, and I met her gaze, with what must have been the light of humbled gratitude.

If I had known how to bow then, I would have bowed. I would have fallen to my knees and kissed her feet. But instead I just stood there, meeting her gaze, shaking, knowing I had been given a tremendous teaching, a true gift.


That was one of those life-changing moments: in my dance, in my heart, in my life. Bless her heart, such a true teacher, a true life-midwife. She awakened in me something that was sleeping still; in fear, in laziness, in reluctance to actually embodying my imperfect body, in resistance to taking up as much space in this lifetime as I was here to take up.

Her words come back for me now, 20 years later, as I continuously summon the courage for leaps and bounds and surrender of a different nature. Her words are a soothing balm, an affirmation, a blessing: "How generous are you willing to be? Will you share yourself? Do you dare? Or are you just going to be stingy? In case you fall? In case you fail? How generous are you willing to be with your whole life?"

True generosity can look as many ways as there are individual moments to live. It is not necessarily a grand or public gesture of exposure. It could be as simple as your own hand tenderly touching your own face. It could be a deep breath. It could be the generosity of forgiveness, or self-forgiveness. It could be a smile. Or the simple word "yes." We always know, deep inside, what the choice of generosity could look like for us, in any given moment. Generosity of presence, of honesty, of kindness, of trust, of love, of truth.

Just imagine her fierce eyes of immense love, my friend, glaring at you like a hungry predator, saying: "How generous? How generous?" and just feel how it inspires you to open your heart, spread your wings, and live and love and dance and be danced with what remains of this fleeting life.

I dare you. I meet you here in this generosity. With all my being, I meet you.