10. “Attention to the ordinary tends to be in conflict with contemporary experience with its emphasis on the dramatic, the violent, and the shocking. . . . The sacred character of the ordinary things of life is prominent in [Barbara] Pym’s novels. It will continue to be so in contemporary life within and outside the church because the ordinary permeates all human experience. No human life is devoid of the ordinary, and any attempt to dispense with it is a move in the direction of meaninglessness and non-being.” Belinda Bede, “A ‘kinder, gentler’ Anglican Church: The Novels of Barbara Pym,” Anglican Theological Review 75 (1993):395–96.
11. “Ironically, or perhaps very appropriately, it is a harder side of nature that often grounds me. Nature is not only beautiful and bountiful; at times it is devastatingly destructive, and at others, exquisitely indifferent. We can’t blackmail nature. We can’t wheedle or cajole it into perpetuating illusions we hold about ourselves. . . . Nature’s indifference leaves us quietly to face our own truth, while in constancy it stands at our side. Its very indifference creates an environment at once unrelenting and gracious.” Jean M. Blomquist, “Barefoot Basics: Yearning and Learning to Stand on Holy Ground,” Weaving 8/5 (September/October 1992): 11.
12. “[The] completeness of emphasis on first-hand solitary seeking, [the] one-by-one achievement of Eternity, has not in fact proved truly fruitful in the past. Where it seems to be fruitful, the solitude is illusory. Each great regenerator and revealer of Reality, each God-intoxicated soul achieving transcendence, owes something to its predecessors and contemporaries. All great spiritual achievement, like all great artistic achievement, however spontaneous it may seem to be, however much the fruit of a personal love and vision, is firmly rooted in the racial past. It fulfills rather than destroys. . . .” Evelyn Underhill, The Life of the Spirit and the Life of Today (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986) 118–19.
13. This is the insight expressed in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. “If God were alone, there would be solitude and concentration in unity and oneness. If God were two, a duality, Father and Son only, there would be separation (one being distinct from the other) and exclusions (one not being the other). But God is three, a Trinity, and being three avoids solitude, overcomes separation and surpasses exclusion. . . . Through being an open reality, this triune God also includes other differences; so the created universe enters into communion with the divine.” Leonardo Boff, Trinity and Society, trans. Paul Burns (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1988) 3.
14. “Ultimate Reality confronts us in such a way that we are addressed. By being addressed we encounter One who is other to ourselves, but the otherness disclosed in this manner is one of communion and not separation.” Christopher Morse, Not Every Spirit: A Dogmatics of Christian Disbelief (Valley Forge, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1994) 91.
15. The border country connects the “surface” or ordinary reality with its deeper roots. We will imagine it best if we think of the border not as dividing “natural” from “supernatural” or “this world” from “the world to come” or even “creation” from “God,” but rather as connecting the “everyday” with the “transcendent.” The “transcendent” may as easily be “within” the everyday as beyond or under or over or next to or otherwise “outside” it.
16. “Our ministry [in the AIDS pandemic] is a theology of redemptive and sacrificial acts, expressing through deed—and through loss—what the Gospel proclaims in words. What we do, what we experience, and what we liberate others to do animates the new Law: We love God. And we love our neighbor. We are purified by our experience, and everything else is secondary. Our experience seems sometimes to be devoid of beauty, but it is never devoid of truth.” Warren W. Buckingham III, opening plenary address for National Episcopal AIDS Coalition “Hope and Healing” Conference, Santa Monica, Calif., February 3, 1994.
17. “[Charles Williams’s] ‘doctrine of substituted love’ requires each of us to carry the burdens of others. . . . This may fly in the face of our very modern insistence—and pride—that we should do everything ourselves. To try to do everything ourselves, however, is to fly in the face of the laws of the universe, and it results in what Kierkegaard called ‘sickness unto death.’ [Gabriel] Marcel and Williams were convinced that only exchange or substitution can be a realistic antidote to despair. But first, ‘you must be content to be helped,’ and that is sometimes harder than to carry someone else’s fear. And yet it can be done.” Harper, On Presence, 44.
18. Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses, trans. Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson (New York: Paulist Press, 1978) 12–13. Cf. Rowan Williams, Christian Spirituality: A Theological History from the New Testament to Luther and St. John of the Cross (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1979) 62–67.
19. “Perhaps [Gabriel] Marcel’s single most important insight, more important than his distinction between problem and mystery, or his sense of being as presence and presence as mystery, is his insistence that what truly makes a person human is his or her capacity for being open to others.” Harper, On Presence, 43.
20. “Already in everyday human speech we sometimes hear someone say, ‘That was a revelation for me.’ ... By that we mean that something surprising took place, something that broke through the experiences of everyday routine, and on closer inspection (for experience is also ‘reason’ and interpretation) that seemed to be ‘news,’ news in which we nevertheless recognize the deepest of ourselves. Here the new at the same time seemed to be the ‘old familiar’ which had not yet been expressed. . . .” Edward Schillebeeckx, Church: The Human Story of God, trans. John Bowden (New York: Crossroad, 1990) 22.
21. “. . . the Christian perception of the meaning of the offer of revelation comes about in a creative giving of meaning: in a new production of meaning or a re-reading of the Bible and the tradition of faith within constantly new situations of every kind.” Schillebeeckx, Church, 44.
22. “Countless times nature has drawn me into itself. ... It has reminded me over and over of the wonder and beauty of life and creation, as well as its power and fragility. . . . My sense of the Holy has always been rooted deeply in my relationship with the earth. Many, and perhaps most, of my early experiences of God—and many of my later ones as well—have mingled inextricably with the earth, with nature, with the holy ground of creation.” Blomquist, “Barefoot Basics,” 8–9.
23. “If ever humankind lived near the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and not near the tree of life, it is today. That is what Kierkegaard meant when he said that we know so much, have so much information, but have forgotten what it means to exist. It would be better to know less and to imagine more.” Harper, On Presence, 106.
24. “. . . the mysteries of God are the ways of God in getting through to us, in opening our eyes to face reality, in bringing us to faith, and hope, and love. . . . We can neither claim nor master these mysteries. They can only claim and master us.” Morse, Not Every Spirit, 43.
25. It may be that such perfection is not to be desired. The sculptor Stephen De Staebler has pointed out the value of our incompleteness: “It helps bridge the gulf when the other person or the image in the art is less complete. . . . We are who we are not so much because of what we have or are endowed with but because of what we are not endowed with.” Quoted by Doug Adams, “De Staebler Winged Figure Installed at G.T.U. Library,” Arts 6/3 (Summer 1994): 4. This is, in a sense, the negative statement of Paul’s doctrine of gifts; we are defined not only by the gifts we receive from the SPIRIT, but by those we do not receive directly and must therefore depend on our neighbor for.
26. There is a significant irony in the Gospel of Mark that alludes to this reality. Jesus tells the disciples, “To you the mystery of GOD’S kingdom is given, but for those people outside, all things turn out to be in riddles” (Mark 4:11). Yet from this point onward in Mark’s Gospel, the disciples never really get anything right, and the moments of true insight all come to outsiders.
27. “Although there are many experiences of meaning in human life, nevertheless it is above all experiences of meaninglessness, of injustice and of innocent suffering that have a revelatory significance par