Calling, in the religious sense of the word
"As a minister I am quite unnecessary to anyone else's salvation. Surely it is one of the universe's little jokes that I must be a minister in order to make them see this."
- Alice Walker's The Temple of My Familiar
Although my personal version of this sentiment probably wouldn't use the word salvation, preferring perhaps a word more similar to enlightenment in the Buddhist sense of the term or self-actualization in Maslow's language, but it would be a mere quibble. Salvation, in the Christian sense, already means the same thing as these other terms. Mythologists might disagree, might try to make an argument about literal salvation as it relates to an afterlife or the development of some specially privileged relationship with God. But I think that Jesus would be quite happy to equate the salvation that he spoke of with these other terms, being quite content that each term (and the many others that remain unmentioned) is a bona fide attempt to attach a word, a human concept, to an aspiration of all humanity that is divine. (This language usage accepts that human=animal and divine=highest_form_of_sentience paradigm that is standard in English language and thought, a construct with which I will surely take issue in some future post.)
... ahhh, my mind and sentences have wandered afar from their original intent, but these caveats are, perhaps, valuable enough not to be victims of the 'select_all_delete' action, so... lets start again
"As a minister I am quite unnecessary to anyone else's salvation. Surely it is one of the universe's little jokes that I must be a minister in order to make them see this."
- Alice Walker's The Temple of My Familiar
- Alice Walker's The Temple of My Familiar
Although my personal version of this sentiment probably wouldn't use the word salvation, preferring perhaps a word more similar to enlightenment in the Buddhist sense of the term or self-actualization in Maslow's language, but it would be a mere quibble. Salvation, in the Christian sense, already means the same thing as these other terms. Mythologists might disagree, might try to make an argument about literal salvation as it relates to an afterlife or the development of some specially privileged relationship with God. But I think that Jesus would be quite happy to equate the salvation that he spoke of with these other terms, being quite content that each term (and the many others that remain unmentioned) is a bona fide attempt to attach a word, a human concept, to an aspiration of all humanity that is divine. (This language usage accepts that human=animal and divine=highest_form_of_sentience paradigm that is standard in English language and thought, a construct with which I will surely take issue in some future post.)
... ahhh, my mind and sentences have wandered afar from their original intent, but these caveats are, perhaps, valuable enough not to be victims of the 'select_all_delete' action, so... lets start again
"As a minister I am quite unnecessary to anyone else's salvation. Surely it is one of the universe's little jokes that I must be a minister in order to make them see this."
- Alice Walker's The Temple of My Familiar
I don't think that I've ever read a passage prior to this that so accurately summed up the nature and internal tension in my own calling. I feel called to witness to the world that we hold the intellectual, moral, emotional, and technological keys required to create a human paradise here and now in this world... the same basic calling that I hear when I read Jesus, or Mohamed, or Buddha, or Gandhi, or Martin Luther King Jr. ... but I am not necessary, the world just needs someone to light the path. personally, I'd prefer if it was someone else.
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