Sunday 8 April 2012

A Christian Post for Easter

 For about two years of my life I was what is known technically as an “Anglican contemplative religious” in layman’s language a monk. Monks come in different flavours and I guess if you were looking for a job description for a contemplative it would be “praying the world along” the working day contained a lot of meditation.

Due to a misunderstanding I was attached to an academic order and they even tried to teach me New Testament Greek, thankfully I have forgotten the written part of this, languages are not my strong point and this one even has a different alphabet.
 Some of the sounds remain though particularly when they don’t need much in the way of translation, St Paul, who obviously was a Greek when trying to explain what it was all about, the “it” being the mystery of the gospels made a series of sounds in Greek not unlike “Christos Iasus in humen”. Which I suppose boils down to, there is now, because of this, an everlasting sense where god appears in or though other human beings.

On this Easter Day, if you bumped into someone who appears to have recently been beaten about a bit, has suffered a certain amount of mental bruising, type of thing, this can be taken as a sort of indicator that you may have had some sort of religious experience, without being aware of it at the time. There is also a sense here that if you were aware of it at the time then it wouldn’t have happened.

I would imagine that most of us have heard bits of the post crucifixion new testament where the accounts of the risen Christ seem to be along the lines of this sort of thing, and I guess that something Christianity has done, even for non Christians, is to give or amplify, this chance that not all religious encounters need to have that old testament sense of a finger pointing out of the cloud.

7 comments:

  1. "On this Easter Day, if you bumped into someone who appears to have recently been beaten about a bit, has suffered a certain amount of mental bruising"

    He would probably be a DSS claimant

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    1. That seems to be the way of the thing Ken.

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    2. No chance of you being the good samaritan then Ken? or is it only the beaten and DSS claiments your against, are old women and children exempt.

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  2. Thank you for sharing these thoughts, just when I needed remnding.
    Col

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  3. Nice sentiments, Michael, and quite refreshing when elsewhere the current anti-Christ is threatening all around the other blogs with the dire consequences of opposing him. Not bothered personally because I have my crucifix, holy water and garlic at the ready.

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    1. Anon, I believe in helping those who help themselves. I do not believe that giving people too much support is a good thing. Like the example of the UK giving grant aid to India although Indai said they did not want it, in my book that is a condescending attitude.

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  4. Sorry I don’t think I can have expressed myself very well here, this wasn’t about doing good to people, which for the most part they don’t like very much. Nor was it about finding the antichrist in other people, which isn’t how I think this works.

    If you didn’t get a glimpse of the risen lord over Easter, you could try a prayer of complaint, but I would recommend you run over your Easter encounters in your mind first. It is always embarrassing to do this and then realise you missed the point.

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Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.