This post, affirming “the fuller gift of who we are” is what I consider to be a deeply important theological principle: that in finding out the truths about “gift of who we are”, we are on that road of the “therapy of desire”. We are in a miraculous community which is re-froming; reshaping our very being, healing it of the scars and disfigurements it has endured in its addiction to culture and its folllowing after inappropriate desires and assumptions about life.
As we are guided … to face what has not yet been healed in our lives, all the residual damage of our years of cultural addiction, and as we are given help in working with these damaged parts of ourselves, we can begin to express the fuller gift of who we are.
Freed to love and serve and dream new dreams, our true selves emerge and we find a fuller belonging to the local community and the world community, These are the foundational life skills of the Christian faith and what it means to go deeper.
To find this “fuller belonging” is not a path to be taken lightly, or to be expected that it will be easy. When we are “freed to love and dream new dreams”, we are on a path of radical reshaping. The Alternative Seminary is an intensive, in-depth and disciplined attention to the fullness of life, and a calling for us to explore together where the world’s “shaping of desires” needs challenge, and then to incorporate these “alternative ways of being” into our life together.