24 quotes
The 'I', the 'self' of the child of God, is born in the midst of the ruins of repented idolatry.
Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay (2001)
All human paternity comes internally structured by fratricide and, as paternity, is incapable of truth, because it will always be protecting itself against the 'other'.
Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay (2001)
Sin is resistance, in the name of God, to the creative work of God which seeks to include us all.
Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay (2001)
Sin ceases to be a defect which excludes, and comes to be participation in the mechanism of exclusion.
Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay (2001)
God has not the slightest difficulty in bringing to a fullness of creation the person who is in some way incomplete and recognises this. The problem is with those who think that they are complete, and that creation is, at least in their case, finished.
Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay (2001)
There is no wicked and numinous paternal 'they'. There are only brothers and sisters like ourselves: fragile receivers and mete-ers out of ambivalent and often fratricidal fraternity.
Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay (2001)
Now, here is Jesus' point: he is not only the culmination of the project, but the project itself, God made brother, offering us to become siblings, but vulnerable to fratricide.
Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay (2001)
In the face of those who have no voice, we must, above all, avoid being strong with the weak (cf. 1 Cor. 10:23-30).
Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay (2001)
The only places in the gospels where the paternal voice of God appears independently of Jesus is precisely to indicate that it is to Jesus that we must listen, and that in him God is glorified.
Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay (2001)
In one case as in the other, the question which gives away the sacrificial mentality underlying group belonging is the same: are you for us, or are you one of them? It is the question which reveals the impossibility of a cracking of heart, and thus the impossibility of Eucharist.
Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay (2001)
All of Paul's preaching, all of his theology, is characterised by the process of the collapse of a certain sacred structure, and by the slow discovery of the perspective given by a new focus on Yahweh, the Pauline equivalent of Elijah's still, small voice.
Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay (2001)
There is nothing harder than to be told that what we hold sacred is an idol. (64).
Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay (2001)
The problem is that this 'being identified with the victim' can come to be used as an arm with which to club others. The victims become the group of the 'righteous just' in order to exclude the poor Pharisees, who are never in short supply as the butts of easy mockery.
Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay (2001)
Being good can never do without the effort to learn, step by step, and in real circumstances of life, how to separate religious and moral words from an expelling mechanism, one which demands human sacrifice, so as to make of them words of mercy which absolve, which loose, which allow creation to be brought to completion.
Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay (2001)
But as we become stronger, more capable of words, happier in our discovery that God does indeed love us, then might it not be important that we learn to withhold the excessive tribute of our resentment from something which doesn't really exist?
Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay (2001)
In a world where nobody understood the viewpoint of the victim, we would all be right to side with the victim. But we live in a world where almost nobody 'comes out' as a Pharisee or a hypocrite, and it seems to me that the way to moral learning proceeds in that direction.
Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay (2001)
Elijah, when he entered into rivalry with the prophets of Baal became one of them, because God is not to be found in such circuses, nor in the murders which go along with them. At the end of his undeceiving, Elijah is more Yahwist, more atheist, less of a shaman, less of a sacrificer, because God is not like the gods, not even so as to show himself superior to them.
Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay (2001)
... [I]t is our being bad brothers and sisters that leads us to be bad fathers and mothers, not our having bad fathers and mothers that has made us bad brothers and sisters.
Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay (2001)
The moment I realised that I was dealing with a mechanism whose participants were its prisoners, at that moment I was able to take distance from what had happened, and forgiveness started to become possible.
Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay (2001)
For catholicity doesn't mean a unity of perspective from which we start, but the discovery and construction of a real and surprising fraternity which begins with overcoming the tendency to forge from our own perspective a sacred which excludes.
Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments Catholic and Gay (2001)