sustain:if:able kiwi

God at feast, a further re-imagining of God and creativity

Following on from the image of God as musician, here’s one about God at feast – What does this quote say about God? What does it say about being human?

“All the senses are involved in a good feast. We taste, touch, smell, see, hear. Salvation as health is here vividly physical. Anything that heals and enhances savouring the world through our senses may feed into a salvation that culminates in feasting ….

As millions starve, ought anyone to be feasting? Ought there not to be a long detour of working to feed anyone, postponing the feasting till that has been achieved? Or should we keep alive the hope of food for all by working for justice, and, if we have food, simultaneously celebrating the goodness of God? Can we even sustain work of compassion and justice in the right spirit if we are not also having some celebratory foretaste of the Kingdom of God? …

That combination of sharing and celebrating is, perhaps, the most radical of all the implications of the teaching of practice of Jesus. Feeding the hungry is not a matter of the well-fed offering handouts and getting on with their private feasting: the vision is of everyone around the same table, face to face. Even to imagine sitting like that gently but inexorably exposes injustice, exploitation, sexism, hard-heartedness, and the multiple ways of rejecting the other …

To envisage the ultimate feasting is to imagine an endless overflow of communication between those who love and enjoy each other. It embraces body language, facial expressions, the ways we eat, drink, toast, dance and sing; and accompanying every course, encounter and artistic performance are conversations taken up into celebration.”

David Ford; in Theological Aesthetics: A Reader which has over 126 such readings, original texts from diverse places in history and location, on the theme of creativity and God.