Body-soul dualism is foreign to the Jewish world-view,foreign to the Old Testament, the Hebrew scriptures. To be qunitessentially Jewish was and is to have a voracious appetite for life in all its material and physical reality......Yet from its earliest days, two strands of spirituality have existed side by side in Christianity...The one that has predominated in the Western Church is based on a vision of the human spirit rising above the natural, physical or material world in order to commune with God in the 'spiritual' realm....The scond...strongly rejects the idea that we must escapethe world in order to commune with God....In this...the presence of the divine is celebrated within the physical and material realm....The expectation is to encounter God within both the world of nature, and the world of human culture and experience. St Francis offers a paradigmatic expression of this strand...when, as he was about to die, in that most intimate moment of communion with God, he kept reciting his elegant 'Canticle to the Sun', that placed him in solidarity with the birds, the insects, the sun and the moon, and indeed the whole world of nature. Dave Tomlinson in Re-Enchanting Christianity , Canterbury Press, 2008, p89-90
This extract expanding on the talk of the same title sparked one of the trains of of thought that I've been mulling over since my recent visit to Greenbelt. I'd not noticed the 'feline/canine' connections til just now. However, it wasn't the only thing I heard there that - to my mind anyway - tied into both core aspects of Franciscan spirituality and has planted a tiny seed of thought regarding the synthesis of several strands of my own, which currently loom quite large in my vocational musings. Not that they don't figure in the journey of every Christian at some point or other, regardless of their leanings. It's not rocket science, as they say - or simplicity, as Francis would doubtless tell you. Yet it offers a clue as to how to move on, and I, for one, will be following the reflections as to how to reconcile, to balance, these two strands of homelessness and belonging with real interest.
Who'd have thunk it?!
