GraceStreet- a company of exiles

Trinity and equality

Timothy Radcliffe, author of the very good, Archbishops of Canterbury’s Lent Book 2009 – Why Go to Church? The Drama of the Eucharist speaks powerfully about the Trinity.

How the Christian doctrine of the Trinity might guide a response to social problems today and how might Jesus' last conversation at supper with his disciples inspire constructive sexual ethics? Timothy Radcliffe is an Oxford-based Dominican friar and former Master General of the Order. In a recent lecture in Brisbane, to mark the 150^th year of the Catholic Church in Queensland (more info here), he explored how Christianity can thrive in the 21st century and how Christians can be authentic in Western society - avoiding both the ghetto and assimilation.

Here’s an excerpt:

 

“…So what has the doctrine of the Trinity got to do with the 21st century? What's it got to do with kids who are unemployed looking for jobs, what's it got to do with young married couples struggling to make sense of their lives? What's it got to do with dialogue with Muslims, what's it got to do with us as we face the crises of our age? I would say absolutely everything. Here you have a love which is utterly free of domination, a love which is completely unpatriarchical, unmanipulative, which gives entirely to the other, the Father sharing all that he is with the Son, even His divinity, and that's the mystery of love which we spend our whole life engaging with. The moment when a teenager falls in love for the first time, maybe has a crush on his or her gym teacher, they're beginning to explore the nature of the Trinity. They don't realise it probably. Or young parents struggling to understand how to bring up kids into equality and mature, adult, free love - they can teach us about the nature of the Trinity. A God who is merely isolated, all by itself in some remote stratosphere could never love us…” you can listen to the MP3 at www.abc.net.au/encounter/stories.

Thoughts on a late summer morning

“When the forms of an old culture are dying, the new culture is created by a few people who are not afraid to be insecure.”
- Rudolf Bahro

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it will take grace to let others here be different to our expectations of them
so we pray for grace

it will take courage for each of us to live beyond the story we know of ourselves
so we pray for courage

it will take wisdom to believe we don’t have all the answers
so we pray for wisdom

it will take hope to believe our future is not yet determined
so we pray for hope

in the story of god all expectations are defied
all things are made possible
the whole world is made new

it will take faith to live as though this can be our story
and so we pray for faith. -Cheryl Lawrie

" But the Helper, the Holy Spirit,
whom the Father will send in My name,
He will teach you all things,
and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you.
Peace I leave with you, My peace I give to you;
not as the world gives do I give to you. "