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aiming to research and develop with others
- a sacramental spirituality that unites God, humanity and creation
- the presentation of the Christian spiritual and sacramental tradition in a way that
can inspire the 'ordinary believer'
- an understanding of science that nourishes rather than undermines human values
- the building of bridges between the Christian and Buddhist traditions, to the enrichment
of both.
based on the following convictions
- Analogy : matter is meaningful. We have evolved within
a world rich with analogies for understanding ourselves and God. The 'dust'
is 'holy'.
- Emergence : meaning is material. An authentic humanity requires
us to see our minds and our cultures as emerging seamlessly from the material world,
which we ignore at our psychological and ecological peril. 'Holiness'
has to be rooted in the 'dust' - the energy of chaos that Phillip Pullman
describes in his great trilogy.
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Innocence :
our enjoyment of this richly meaningful world is hindered by the obsessive
clinging whereby we define our egos by competitive possession of things. Buddhist
call this tanha, and one modern theory calls it 'mimetic desire'.
Christ and Buddha both teach us a way we can be freed from this into a childlike
innocence and receptive love.
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Faith :
We cannot achieve freedom from the ego by the ego's effort; we need to open
ourselves to a freedom that has been freely given from beyond us, through what Christians
call the resurrection.
- Struggle : The powers that pin us down in obsessive clinging are
corporate, and the struggle for innocence needs to be corporate as well as solitary,
and not naive but wily. Seeds of the required wisdom are spread across the
faith traditions.
These aims and convictions, lie behind the title of the site, 'Holy Dust'.
My life has committed me at different stages to Buddhism and Christianity, and y
current work tries to
reconcile both perspectives.
So this website has an academic and a personal aspect. But it also has a business
aim: to help a freelance spiritual writer and theologian eke out a living!
Click here for more.
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