"Remember you must live!"
As much as past spiritual journeys evolved around the maxim “Remember you must die” (Muriel Spark), the present challenge of becoming an inclusive community calls for a response informed by the motto “Remember you must live” (Ali Smith). The latter saying promotes a pilgrimage which does not take us beyond this world but deeper into this world for the sake of the whole of creation. In his Letters and Papers from Prison Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian and martyr, confesses:
“I discovered later, and I’m still discovering right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. One must completely abandon any attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, or a converted sinner, or a churchperson (a so-called priestly type!), a righteous person or an unrighteous one, a sick person or a healthy one. By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world – watching with Christ in Gethsemane.”
It is along those lines that various theologians have argued that Christ did not come to make us divine but to help us understand what it means to become fully human and to be faithful to this earth.
Robert Steiner
