Heart of Matter: “Christianity is a Non-Dual Religion”
“Writing from an intercultural perspective, Raimon Panikkar’s view was that Christianity is essentially a non-dual religion. What has distorted this awareness has been the attempt to process Jesus’s experience through a rigid Western interpretation of Abrahamic monotheism that sees creator and creature as separated by an unbridgeable abyss. But Jesus himself neither taught nor experienced this.”
Ilia Delio, The Not-Yet God, Carl Jung, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the Relational Whole
+
“Desde una perspectiva intercultural, Raimon Panikkar pensaba que el cristianismo es esencialmente una religión no dual. Lo que ha distorsionado esta conciencia ha sido el intento de procesar la experiencia de Jesús a través de una rígida interpretación occidental del monoteísmo abrahámico, que ve al creador y a la criatura como separados por un abismo insalvable. Pero Jesús mismo ni enseñó ni experimentó esto.”
Ilia Delio, The Not-Yet God, Carl Jung, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the Relational Whole
What is being asked?
What is being moved?
View print-friendly version
4 Comments
Leave a Comment
Related Posts
Heart of Matter: “The Divine Entanglement”
“While panentheism is a helpful concept, the language of pantheism and panentheism is based on concepts of ‘being’ and ‘nature’ that can lead to misguided images of distinct beings in…
It seems to me that our unfortunate embracing of ‘duality’ was/is rationalized from Genesis. Could it be that the real meaning of the ‘tree of knowledge of good and evil’ is just that: a warning against the duality of either or, all or nothing, good or bad. Would we really know compassion and empathy, love without the ‘tree of knowledge of good and evil’?
I know fragility, suffering, pain and even joy – because.…
I know lust, because it is somewhere rooted within me.
I ‘know’ the pain of Jesus. Without my little bit I could not begin to fathom His,
the why…for me.
As that ‘person’ I ‘know’ the capacity to inflict pain, to violate integrity. It is why I want it gone.. I ‘see’ the pain, sadness, despair, of the violated. It is why I want to heal.
Without the ‘tree of knowledge of good and evil’, would I ‘know”, want, need, see – the good, protect the vulnerable, give succour to the needy, pained, to comfort the violated, protect and shield, welcome the excluded and diminished and seek, to do, find, love?
If…I did not ‘know’ in some way the absence of love, would I know to seek, to find, to give? There is no choice without knowing, without its other.
Jesus is the ‘new Adam’ because he is, wanted us to finally learn, that lesson. He plumbed its depths and chose…taught us that.
But we forgot? Or did we hide it behind, under the ‘tree’ and tell us otherwise?
The ‘dawn, the afternoon the dusk, before the night of Christianity’ is, yes, that paradox: the “Word” – Christ our Redeeming God.
This “afternoon” is to have the faith to learn, teach, be the sons and daughters of the ‘tree’ because we know, not because we are sin; create the sacred place…be that church and in the world. Because we are, because we know, because it is within us to choose.
The “New Testament” is that lesson hidden in plain sight within the story of the ‘tree’.
I’m being asked to be open to the Mystery of Life. Letting go of that which divides and hitching up to the next adventure together.
The concept of Christian non-dualism, or (could we use a positive term like “intimate mystery” or “mysterious intimacy”?) communality?
is thrilling. How to manifest this idea or talk about it to those who do not share our faith in it? Maybe better to show first and tell later, if asked. As the Acts of the Apostles has a non-Chistian say, “See how they love one another!”
2 rules: Love God, Love neighbor