WORLD ONE: ALIEN TO GNOSTIC
This is the journey from Separation to Reunion. People longing to find their way home. They yearn for harmony and inclusiveness. The cycles of life – birth, death, and rebirth – are central. World One people are always looking for a new way of seeing, and are often contemplative. God is Eternal Now, present in the cosmos. Christ is the Revealer of God.
Conundrum: Mystery waiting to be recognized and trusted
Sin: Mistrust/faithlessness Gospel Truth: The eyes of the heart indeed need opening |
Resolution: New awareness/"seeing"
Christology: Christ is the revealer who lifts the veil/opens the eyes Gospel Celebration: Sacred moments are rifts/holes through which we glimpse eternity |
Scripture: All words of the Bible point to the Word behind creation
God: Not a Being per se, but imaged as woven into the fabric of creation Salvation: A new way of seeing/a change in perspective |
Conundrum
As we stand before the sheer vastness of the cosmos, there emerges a feeling of being an alien. Separated from the whole we are weighed with a sense of alienation and abandonment. We are solitary figures in the face of an over-whelming and silent cosmos. Life is a fundamental mystery: everything that is, could just as well not have been, or have been radically different. We are nameless, directionless, homeless with “reality” simply the name for the incidental point where we happen to be.
Doubt has a particular "freeing" role in the life of World One citizens. The Lutheran thinker, Ted Peters writes: "Doubt is pressed into the service of faith as a tool for discovering and dispensing with idols, for unmasking and disempowering those images of God that make God only one more component of the mundane world…. (C)ritical faith is courageous faith because it seeks radical obedience to the first commandment by incorporating doubt and leaping into the realm of the unkown and unknowable."
Doubt has a particular "freeing" role in the life of World One citizens. The Lutheran thinker, Ted Peters writes: "Doubt is pressed into the service of faith as a tool for discovering and dispensing with idols, for unmasking and disempowering those images of God that make God only one more component of the mundane world…. (C)ritical faith is courageous faith because it seeks radical obedience to the first commandment by incorporating doubt and leaping into the realm of the unkown and unknowable."
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From Romeo and Juliet, notice the play on the issue of exile as worse than death, for Verona/Juliet is life and outside of this sphere Romeo is lost.
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First notice the imagery - a bit of Eden and expulsion. Then pay attention to the yearning of seeking and finding.
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Resolution
Resolution comes as the ability to see the “reality beyond reality”: the invisible beyond the visible, the spiritual beyond the material. Such seeing is always partial and comes as quick glimpses or special moments which hint of “other.” Such moments are rifts in the curtains, or holes in the mystery. It is through this kind of seeing that things become new. Such moments provide a foretaste which bathes the infinitely meaningless with the unfathomably awe-filled.
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You will want to notice how the search now turns back on itself. In this scene from the musical Hello Dolly the lead character returns (after being lost) to her favorite restaurant.
There is intimacy to the place she has just found again:
Very telling for World One, is the image of a "leap of faith":
Note the confession of searching and finding:
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In this short scene from A Knight's Tale we encounter the joy of finding. Telling for World One orphans is the father's questions, "Has he followed his feet? Has he found his way home at last?" Just as telling is that only the wayfarer can answer these questions.
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Spiritual Quest
Tearing the veil opens up a different dimension of reality. Through this experience we gain a perspective for contrasting views of the All/God. Also, in this experience we begin to understand that our search for God takes place within God’s search for us. Adpating an ingisht from Meorld Wetphas, for World One citizens the search is for the God who evokes prayer, and sacrifice, and awe, and music, and dance, and not necessarily to clarify all mystery.
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I love this piece for both it's eloquent expression of World One themes and the act of a collaborative art work seeking expression, vision, and the "truth" of the composition. The path of World One persons is exploring, wandering, experimenting, studying, trying new things/ideas/god-concepts while not always knowing the final design
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A simple representation of the yearning of World One's spiritual quest:
"I lost the way and I cannot see / find me Lord, lift the veil / Shine your face on me. Remove the veil that my eyes may see / Remove the veil that hides you from me / Remove the veil that my eyes may see / Your beauty and your glory, my Lord." |
In World One failure to venture out into discovery can result in us becoming solitary figures, forever drifting through the cosmos all alone in our little boat of life. "In the search for meaning," writes the Roman Catholic theologian Francis Schussler Fiorenza, "we experience ourselves as radically finite yet with unlimited questions. We experience reality as an incomprehensible mystery, but at the same time, we hope there is a fulfillment of the highest possibility of human existence. We hope that ultimately reality is meaningful. Though finite and limited, we have the hope for an absolute fulness of meaning. We hope and trust that the absolute mystery of our being is a Thou who is absolutely trustworthy."