Feeling Mostly Like Winnie-the-Pooh

Great Theologians: Winnie-the-Pooh
http://peterrollins.net/?p=2600

by Peter Rollins
posted 24/3/11

“Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it”

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We all experience life like Winnie-the-Pooh at times. We all have been touched by the feeling that we are upside down and traveling this path of ours all wrong. When this feeling creeps up on us it is deeply disconcerting. And so we try to avoid it. We fill our lives with distractions… we gather people around us who tell us everything is fine… we affirm our view of the world all the more vigorously (reading books, watching programs, reading papers etc. that solidify our view of the world and thus help to inoculate us from the experience of Winnie-the-Pooh).

Most of us flee from the idea that perhaps it is not the rest of the world who are wrong… but us.

However there are a few who allow this feeling to speak to them, a few who are brave enough to let this experience interrogate them, to break them, rather than attempting to domesticate it, tame it or repress it. These few open themselves up to a deeply disconcerting experience of feeling forsaken by all that has grounded them, all that has sustained them, all that has nurtured them.

This crucifixion experience is deeply painful, but just perhaps it can help to humanize us and open us up a whole new type of community. A community where we acknowledge our weakness, brokenness and frailty, a community in which we gather, not around the idea that we are right, strong, pure and good. But rather around our wounded flesh. Finding purity, beauty and truth, not in the renunciation of our weakness, but in the very midst of it.