To be able to love one another, we must pray much, for prayer gives a clean heart and a clean heart can see God in our neighbor. If we now have no peace, it is because we have forgotten how to see God in one another.
[Humans became human] by breaking into the daylight of language—whether by good fortune or bad fortune, whether by pure chance, the spark jumping the gap because the gap was narrow enough, or by the touch of God, it is not for me to say here.
"The Tamil language is very precise,"
the Tamil poet said.
"There are seven different words
between the English words, 'bud' and 'flower.'"
One would have to live in attentive quiet,
live with the plant,
marveling at each subtle change
to create such a language.
Love creates such a language.
The term Gaia has caught on among those seeking a new ecological spirituality as a religious vision. Gaia is seen as a personified being, an immanent divinity. Some see the Jewish and Christian male monotheistic God as a hostile concept that rationalizes alienation from and neglect of the earth...I agree with much of this critique, yet I believe that merely replacing a male transcendent deity with an immanent female one is an insufficient answer...
~ from Rosemary Radford Ruether in GAIA AND GOD: AN ECOFEMINIST THEOLOGY OF EARTH HEALING
The language we use reflects and in turn shapes the way we construct our experience of the world. (Plaskow acknowledges that)...all of these images of God are humanly crafted metaphors, but our metaphors emerge out of specific cultural and political context. When these contexts change, the old metaphors must change with them.
~ from "The Feminist Critique of God Language" by Dr. Neil Gillman, reprinted from THE WAY INTO ENCOUNTERING GOD IN JUDAISM, discussing Judith Plaskow's book STANDING AGAIN AT SINAI
It is all too easy and too simple to disdain as "superstition" everything one cannot understand, but the ancients themselves knew very well what they meant when they used symbolic language...the Spirit can always come back to breathe fresh life into the symbols and rites and give them back their lost meaning and the fullness of their original virtue.
