This project to find a way Toward a Personal Theology is even harder than I had supposed it would be. Because I am not a professional theologian, I'm not thinking and writing for publication or even for teaching but simply for my own need to understand more clearly why the church, and the people who constitute the church, so often seem to me either to  misunderstand the clear teachings of the Gospel or are willfully ignoring and even working against the teachings of the Gospel. The most blatant example of such ignorance or misunderstanding is the resistance by many church people to the Gospel's imperative  to respond to the needs of the poor.  Equally strange, considering the Gospel's stress on the centrality of love as the greatest good, is the resistance by many church people to the idea that same gender people may love each other and commit to each other in the same ways that heterosexual people are encouraged to do. This project is obviously going to take longer than I had imagined it would be.  I will continue to add paragraphs from the project as they are developed.  In between the days when project paragraphs are ready, I'll post pictures and comments about whatever... "The Way I See It."

Titian and Caravaggio painted their versions of Ecce Homo...

This is my friend Clyde Yoshida's holiday gingerbread man.

ECCE HOMO,  BEHOLD THE MAN

Whether one believes man was created in God’s image or that God was created in man’s image, a good place to begin asking questions about God is with man.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer preferred to use the word person.  In his groundbreaking Sanctorum Communio (Communion of Saints) which was written as a dissertation in 1927, then first published in 1930, and published posthumously in German first in 1960 and then in English in 1963, Bonhoeffer explains why we must begin with the concept of the person in the search for  God.  He says "the person is identified with self-knowing and a self-active mind, involving truth and reality.  The person has command of his own ethical value, possesses the dignity of being able to be ethical, and—so far as he is a person—having to be ethical.” 

The Bonhoeffer book that most people, including pastors, know is The Cost of Discipleship in which he seems reconciled to the probability of his own imminent death by the gestapo. He explains what it means to remain faithful to message of the Gospel of Jesus in times when governments are hostile to it and determined to eliminate Christians who decline to abandon their faith.  That book was published in 1937.  Two weeks before U.S. soldiers liberated the camp where he was imprisoned by the Nazis,  Bonhoeffer was hanged at dawn on April 9, 1945. On that morning he was stripped naked and led to the gallows.  In Berlin his brother was executed on April 22, and his brother-in-law was executed on April 23.

Before his death Bonhoeffer suggested in his Letters and Papers from Prison that a time might come when Christianity will become religionless.  He speculated that human beings may evolve to a point when they will no longer need a metaphysical God “up there.” He doesn’t suggest how he thinks the Christian establishment, the Sanctorum Communio of his earlier dissertation will shake off its 2000 metaphysical years or exactly what the Christian life might look like without the church, but his emphasis clearly is on reverence for “the person” as a demonstration of reverence for God. The message is clear:  If you want to find God, you will find God in people not in a metaphysical place out there somewhere in the Cosmos... and unless you know how to look, not even in church.  Ecce Homo!

Mime this afternoon in Balboa Park

Homeless man at University Avenue.  I took the photograph in 2008.  

He is white, but today I pulled out that old picture and photoshopped the image of him colorless, lost in a world of color.  

I can report that I still see him occasionally near the same area, 

and he seems less lost. 

On the day in 2008 when I took the picture

he declined to talk with me.  These days we exchange greetings.

Another homeless friend with whom I shared coffee a few times several years ago

at my favorite coffee shop in Mission Valley. He said I could call him Butterfly.

This picture, too, is from those days.  He disappeared from Mission Valley.

One day I realized I hadn't seen him for several weeks and felt a sense of loss.

I wonder what happened to him.  He was clearly bright.

Homeless man asleep midday on Fifth Avenue...

2009

This is a picture I took this past Christmas Week.  The man, clearly not homeless, 

was reading in a loud voice from the Bible.  

I asked if I could take his picture.  

He didn't stop reading but shook his head yes.