Poems, Meditations, and Worship Material: July 2005 Archives

Love alone diminishes not
but shines with its own light,
makes an end to discord
softens the fires of hate
restores the peace of the world,
brings together the sundered,
redresses wrongs and injures none.
Nor can that endure which has not
its foundations upon love.

Treaty of Union at Horodlo, Poland, 1413

A defensive alliance against the Teutonic Knights of the Poles (Christians) and Lithuanians (Old Religion.)  Words might be used for opening, closing, candle lighting, wedding, and even a funeral.  The treaty writing warriors had no idea what latter generations might make of their work.

Native Americans have a pan-en-theistic orientation to the divine, a perspective shared by many contemporary religious liberals, both Christian and non Christian.  I think of Marcus Borg, and I think of George Tinker.  Different approaches to God in whom we live and move and have our being, both sharing the understanding of the divine as immanent and transcendent, and incarnate in all creatures of this creative cosmos.  This orientation is not some new theological idea, dreamed up by desperate theologians in the face of the crisis of theological theism, or the objections of materialism.  We have here a prayer that witnesses a panentheist orientation from eleven century China.