[163.1] THE TRICKY ART OF DISPOSSESSION

From Nicholas Lash's Three Ways of Believing in One God, SCM 1992/2002 (which I'm re-reading at the moment)...

"All prayer, all worship, all life lived in the discipline of discipleship, is, at heart and centre, dispossessive. We need continual and exacting schooling because, at every level of behaviour, language and imagination - from politics to private life, from business to religion - we seek some safety, some security through ownership and power. And yet, however much we kick against the pricks, we do not own the words we say, the things we do, ourselves, our friends, our circumstances (and, when we try to do so, there are always forces outside our control which mock all such Promethean ambition). In liturgy and attentive contemplation, praise and prayer, we may learn to give back our language and our understanding, and ourselves; [to] learn patience, the surrender of security, sometimes in darkness not unlike Gethsemane."

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