We will continue to base the devotions on “God for a Secular Culture” by Jurgen Moltmann.
This week we will look at how we apply a principle like ‘unity in division and division in unity’ to the knowing of other people, other things, and the Wholly Other God.
If the unlike know themselves, then interest in the difference of the other must be greater than the interest in its likeness. In the others I do not look at what is like me, but at what is different in them, and try to understand it. I can only understand it by changing myself, and adjusting myself to the other. In my perception of others, I subject myself to the pains and joys of my own alteration, not in order to adapt myself to the other, but in order to enter into it. There is no true understanding of the other without this empathy.
Is this beginning to show some signs of what I would call self-sacrifice? I let go of myself – how I would want the world to be…how I would order life…who is a part of my world - in order to enter into the world of the other. I don’t give up who I am. Rather, I let go of all the ‘stuff’ that usually keeps me from having some kind of quality exchange with the ‘other.’ When that happens, there is space for dialogue, change, alteration, or simply…conversation…conversation that I may not have entered previously. I find the gospel is a collection of stories in which our God enters into that which is ‘other’…completely other...in that God enters into what is creaturely…when God is the Creator of our creaturely selves. How do we some times hear it in church: the one without sin became sin…for us?
Connection: Yes, to know the other may take stretching ourselves. And yet, in that stretching, both the other person and I change and, I would suggest, grow.
Help us to step out onto the pathway that leads to that which is not known to us, O God, so that we may begin to see the sheer beauty and grandeur of your creation and be daily amazed at your creativity. Amen
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