Still holding on to line from yesterday's quote I'll push on here to more on what Alison calls 'a constant reeducation of desire.'
Our knowledge of each other is projective and in its mode already distorted. Only in the degree to which we allow our own distortion to be corrected will we be able to know the other with limpidity. In case it is not clear already that this reciprocal involvement in turning each other into stumbling blocks, which is at the heart of Jesus' moral teaching, has, at its roots, an understanding of desire, a few verses later Jesus' further teaching on prayer makes exactly this point. In Matthew 7:1-7 prayer is shown to be a learning to desire without stumbling blocks in imitation of the Father who is without stumbling blocks. We must not let our desire remain at the stage whereby we think that we will not get what we want but must learn to believer in one who gives gratuitously what we really want. Prayer is a constant reeducation of desire out of a mode of stumbling blocks and into a mode of desiring and receiving gratuitously. And this is then directly referred back to our human relationality (7:12): we must treat others in the same way, learning how to substitute a gratuitous reciprocity for a reciprocity formed by the skandalon.
Once again I get caught up in simple phrases that capture me. On prayer he writes, 'prayer is shown to be a learning to desire without stumbling blocks in imitation of the Father who is without stumbling blocks.' We all know it is not easy to be patient - to wait and trust that God will provide life. Maybe that is because we often do not want mere life. We want life our way - under our conditions - with you being a part of the world as we want the world to be. Whoa, can you hear the sound of people stumbling all over the place. In prayer we let go of those knock down, trip up, push over, desires that have a way of taking us farther and farther away from the life within God's Reign because they really only give us what we desire and not what God has imaged for us. Our God offers us the life of God's peaceable Reign - no strings - all life available without conditions. We are invited to enter it - so is our neighbor - so is our enemy. That is a bit crazy. That is unbelievably gracious.
Connection: Thank God we are handed God's reigning life without all of the game-playing we so readily like to enter. It is as the game-playing and the desire drops that we are given a new lens through which we can see how God's Reign really does unfold among us.
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