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 from 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

Wednesday, November 12, 2025

After the Rupture: Choosing to Heal, Essay II, Part C


by re slater & chapgpt


AFTER THE RUPTURE:
CHOOSING TO HEAL

Toward a Metanoiaic Grammar of Processual Becoming
[ A Post-Lacanian Analysis ]

ESSAY II, PART C

by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT-5


We are beings shaped by language
yet never finished in the process.
Selves which are continuously shaped
by new grammars of presence,
beauty, and worth.

- re slater & chatgpt



V. Ethics as Relational Emergence

Ethics, after the rupture, is no longer a code. It becomes a necessary response pattern.

We do not inherit morality from fixed systems of right and wrong. We learn it in motion - through relational experiences, through processual encounters, through personal responses. Each moment becomes a field of emergence where novelty appears.

Whitehead calls this the creative advance into novelty - referring to a philosophical universe which is forever learning how to live with itself, or, as in the case of humanity as an evolving species, one that is continually learning how to live with itself.

To live ethically, then, is to join this creativity consciouslyto notice what new possibilities emerge from our interactions, and to align ourselves with those that increase beauty, intensity, and harmony.

This is a processual ethics - not commandment, but communion;
not law, but listening;
not purity, but participation.

It asks:

  • Does this act contribute to the world’s capacity for more beauty, truth, or love?
  • Does it increase the field of relatedness, or constrict it?

When we begin to answer this not from ideology but from relational awareness,
ethics becomes a living art form - a choreography of becoming within and without.



by re slater & chapgpt

VI. Societal Healing: Escaping the Liturgies of Fear (A MAGA Case)

A society, like a psyche, organizes around its wounds.

MAGA culture in America is not merely a political movement;
it is a theological neurosis - a collective defense mechanism against loss of self, ambiguity of meaning, and disrupting change that it is experiencing.

It clings to mythic certainty because it cannot yet imagine belonging without domination.
It confuses the stability of truth with the comfort of control.
Its liturgy is grievance.
Its creed is nostalgia.
Its altar is the idol of certainty - that somewhere in the past, we were once "whole."

But wholeness cannot be found by returning to a mythic past.
It must be re-created through new and expansive relational experiences.

The healing of such a culture will not come through argument,
but through the slow reconstruction of relational imagination.

This means re-teaching the grammar of community:

  • that freedom is not isolating one's self but participation,

  • that truth is not a weapon but a shared, evolving discussion,

  • that faith is not allegiance to an idea but fidelity to love.

To rupture this culture’s enclosure is not to mock it,
but to speak a language that invites it forward -
to meet its fear with depth, not dismissal.

Only when new (and positive) words and new relational experiences appear - words of belonging, of co-creation, of shared future - can a closed culture of defensive myth give way to an evolving and generative story of beauty, wholeness, and love.

This is how metaphysics meets-with-and-intwines with politics.
It is not the battle of ideologies but the re-patterning of imagination.



by re slater & chapgpt

VII. Aesthetic Intelligence: Beauty as the Measure of Healing

When the moral world collapses, beauty and love must become the new teachers.

Not beauty as decoration or escape,
but beauty as the felt sense of coherence-in-motion -
the rhythm of reality finding harmony after dissonance.

Aesthetic intelligence is the intuition that knows when something feels alive.
It is what Whitehead called the lure of feeling toward order and intensity.

This form of intelligence moves us beyond analysis into attunement.
It teaches us how to sense the world’s becoming:
how to let form follow compassion,
how to see justice as a pattern of art,
how to heal through composition rather than control.

In this way, beauty becomes the ethical grammar of process itself -
the mark of righting relation between re-engaging entities.

To cultivate aesthetic intelligence is to learn how to live beautifully with difference,
to build communities not through ideology but through lively resonance.

When politics becomes ugly,
beauty is resistance.
When theology becomes cruel,
beauty is revelation.



by re slater & chapgpt

VIII. Metanoiaic Grammar as Daily Practice

The final movement of healing is not theoretical. It happens in language -
in the words we choose,
the pauses we allow,
the tone with which we greet each other.
Every sentence becomes an event of possibility.

Metanoiaic grammar is the daily practice of speaking from the wound as wonder, beauty, and love.

It asks:
  • Can we speak truth without domination?
  • Can we confess failure without despair?
  • Can we love without erasing difference?
To practice this grammar is to live as a poet of process:
  • to let our speech carry presence rather than position,
  • grace rather than certainty,
  • movement rather than mastery.

In time, the world reorganizes itself around such exemplary speech.
Neighborhoods begin to breathe differently.
Churches soften.
Families reopen.
Nations relearn how to speak across the fractures they had created.

This is how language heals.


Conclusion: Toward a World That Speaks Again

We are beings of speech and silence, shaped by wounds that are never completely healed in our  struggle to become more whole.

To heal after the rupture is not to close it, but to live through it beautifully. To make of the broken world around us a grammar of tenderness, beauty, and love.

When we speak from within our wounds - gently, truthfully, creatively - we do not restore what was lost; we "midwife" what might be bourne out of our wounds.

The task is not to return to disruptive coherence, but to re-discover a generative communion.

And so we re-learn how to move forward - not in conquest, not in certainty, but in the faith that a broken, fearing, hateful world can be healed from its delusions, harming actions, and wasteful actions; re-weaving a patched cloth into the promised beauty as only love can make.


by re slater & chapgpt


Midwives of the Wound
by R.E. Slater & ChatGPT

We are beings of speech and silence,
shaped by wounds which never close,
each scar a syllable,
each gash an unformed word,
in the unfinished sentence of our becoming.

To heal is not to wrap the break,
but to live through it beautifully -
to let the fracture speak,
to make from a broken world
a new grammar of consciousness.

When we speak from within our wounds -
gently, truthfully, creatively -
we cannot restore what was lost,
but can midwife what might be born,
into fracture worlds needing healing.

Not disruption - but communion.
not harming control - but caring speech;
moving forward one stitch at a time,
brought together by a new grammar of hope,
patching the torn cloths of creation,
with the only thread that can hold all -
love.


R.E. Slater & ChatGPT
November 12, 2025

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications
all rights reserved



The Power of Our Words
Thus spake Adam -

In the hurry of the day,

In the brevity of life,
At the dawn of creation,
Before the Tree of Life,

“Giveth to me the power of your words…”


      To bind or create

      Make dead or alive
      Burden or uplift
      Withhold or provoke
      Bury or resurrect
      Expire or inspire
      Imprison or release
      Prevent or excite
      Dissuade or arouse
      Divide or multiply

      To add or subtract

      Fortify or offend
      Declare or hide
      Begin or end
      Wake or sleep
      Enrich or impoverish
      Transpire or cease
      Help or hurt
      Heal or harm
      Transform or change

Spake the Voice of the Almighty -


Like the oceans of turbulent seas,

Like the storm its thunderous deeps,
On birdsong as gentle as the breeze,
As love ever bent in tender kiss,

“Bless now the power of My words…”



R.E. Slater
October 31, 2011

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications
all rights reserved


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COMPLETION OF PROCESSUAL FREEWILL AGENCY
& HEALING FROM THE EFFECTS OF SIN AND LACK