Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Certainty is confidence in the way you approach reality

I don't know the method most bloggers use to determine what to post about, but my method is one that, while I believe it allows people to read each post discretely, is best read in continuity. In other words, there are different threads that, woven together, make Καθολικός διάκονος. Recently I posted a couple things about faith and certainty. Last Saturday I drew attention to a bit from an article by Santiago Ramos on the significance of the music of Kurt Cobain. Ramos wrote: "even for those who have been given the gift of faith in their lives—those for whom the God-shaped hole has been filled up to the brim—the drama of life does not end. Faith merely makes you look at the drama in a different way."

Then yesterday, citing Origen, I averred that our faith in Christ is made firm through suffering.


Today I want pass along without commentary something by John Waters that, at least for me, synthesizes my two previous posts that bear on the the matter of faith and reality. Writing about CL's annual event The Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples, held in Rimini, Italy, which this year dealt with the theme
And existence becomes an immense certainty," Waters observes: "We can speak words, write them, hear them, look at them, sometime for many years, and yet not know what they signify, what their possibilities are. Such a word, we have to concede in the wake of the 32nd edition of the Rimini Meeting, is "certainty".

We went there certain of what certainty was: to know something absolutely, to be without doubt, to have examined the matter fully. We came away with a different definition: certainty as being to do with the confidence with which we approach things, the steadiness of the step upon the path, the resoluteness with which we apply a method of pursuing the truth, being certain, always, that there is something great to discover (underlining emphasis mine)
Reality, that is, the daily circumstances of your life, is the way Christ, who is the greatest discovery of all, draws you to Himself.

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