Sunday, July 12th, we will host our final discussion of Church of the Wild. You can find the full details here. Every week, I have been updating this article with a few quotes from the chapter read that week. This article includes chapters 6-9, which we will discuss at our discussion groups. If you are interested, you can find the Discussion Guide for chapters 1 - 5 here.
Your Invitation to Join the Conversation
Anyone is welcome to join the online discussion. You can respond in the comment section, based on the readings, or in response to my personal reflections and quotes. Please keep your comments to 500 words or fewer. Please be respectful and kind to those who share.
Don’t feel limited to the reflection questions posted below. They are simply prompts to help you get started. You can share in whatever order or format you like.
1. What stood out to you from the chapter or my reflections?
2. How do you feel about what you read?
3. What did you find most challenging?
4. What questions would you like to discuss with others who are reading the book?
I will pull insights and questions from everyone’s reflections and use them to draft our discussion guide for our group gatherings.
My Personal Reflections
Chapter 6: In the Beginning Was the Logos
Below are the quotes that stood out to me from this chapter:
The idea of a divine indwelling at the center of the whole universe, with every unique part in conversation with the others, has many names. What Thich Nhat Hanh names the web of interbeing is aligned with what Robin Wall Kimmerer calls sacred reciprocity. David Whyte calls it the conversational nature of reality, and quantum scientist David Bohm uses the term implicate order. Martin Luther King Jr. called it an inescapable network of mutuality, which he said was “tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” The ancient ancestors of Christianity called it logos.
Logos is about the divine relationship between all things. The system of their connection: conversation.
Christ as radical solidarity, as primal and ongoing relationship, as how life works. Christ as the Conversation between everyone and everything.
Christ as that sacred Conversation that brings all things into being and links all things together.
And I offer another relevant metaphor for our time, yet rooted in a forgotten tradition: Christ as Conversation. Christ as Conversation says to me that the oak tree and that deer in the meadow are not God. And I’m not God. But we both carry the Christ, the Logos, the Tao, the spark of divine love within us. And the conversation between us: that is the manifestation of the sacred, moving forward the evolving kin-dom of grace. The wild Christ.
This chapter felt more theological. The general concept of all things containing a spark of the divine has been a continual refrain. This chapter places Christ as the conversation that connects it all.