Picking up Philosophical Crumbs

 

Let us call him a saviour, because he liberates the learner from his bondage, saves him from himself; a deliverer, because he delivers from bondage one who has bound himself, and no one is so terribly bound, and no bondage so impossible to escape, as that in which the individual places himself!

- Philosophical Crumbs, Søren Kierkegaard

I believe as a Christian I am called to follow in the more difficult way; the path that may not be the most popular. The more challenging it becomes the more I realize it is what Jesus taught when his footsteps clapped the sandy desert. It transcends thought and experience. He did not promise it would be easy to follow Him. But He is the Light and He is the Way. He promises to lead us. If we look deeply enough (we tend not to, as remaining at the shallow end seems more safe) we will develop the capacity to link into aesthetic and ethical insights whilst working through the challenges of being a Christian.

Kierkegaard was a genius, and his writings showcase his immense, deeply complex insights he pondered over as he intertwined Christian and Socratic intuitions and institutions. He had the talent of writing about it in a poetic, philosophical way. I feel muddled often as I read his words, as if my brain is running hard to keep up with his thoughts, but I always grasp something at the end of the section (crumbs?) which I ponder over for weeks/months/years to come.

Christians have to unlearn those accumulated interpretations that make Christianity all-too familiar, a matter of simple socialization from the cradle to the grave. Christianity has to be made strange. (from the introduction).

How eagerly I dip my toes into philosophy with Kierkegaard as my guide. He sets up the road into the strange land, and I read page after page like one entering a garden lush and overwhelming one cannot take it all in at once, picking up his crumbs along the way. His linking of the Socratic thinking with Christianity reminds me to look deeply into all things to find God's fingerprints. And in this passage I am moved by the simplicity of the paradoxical image he provokes of sitting with God in a posture of peace and conversation with each of us.

And the situation of the understanding, how precarious it is, poised at every moment at the edge of misunderstanding as the anxieties of guilt threaten the peace of love; how terrifying, because it is less terrifying to fall prostrate while the mountains tremble at the voice of the god, than to sit with him as with an equal, and yet it is precisely the god's desire to sit this way. (Philosophical Crumbs)