Salvation: New Perspectives

SALVATION


...the countless days, months and years I have spent studying my craft, developing and honing my skills...the untold lonely hours of persistence and drudgery....so the believer as aspirant must constantly struggle to discover how best to dramatize the tenets of faith in daily action. -John S. Hatcher,The Arc of Ascent: The Purpose of Physical Reality II, George Ronald, Oxford, 1994, p.32.


Salvation, now there’s a word
that has bedeviled history, theology,
people, religions and me at least
since we struggled out of animism
between 7000 BC and 2000 BC,
if not long before neolithic times.

Salvation is more of a process
than an event, a constant monitoring
of one’s condition, a persistent
evaluation of one’s performance
and an expanding expression
of our understanding in daily life.

Salvation requires a social context;
a theoretical spirituality must be
practiced in a social milieux;
indeed salvation applies to the
whole society as much as it does
to the individual in it.

Salvation involves our detachment
from our personal trip and our
involvement in the social institutions
which are the more inclusive expressions
of our own identity: this verity underpins
the oneness of humankind.

Salvation is an expression of the
desire to belong and to be appreciated
by the group, of the intertwined nature
of self-interest and collective interest;
for salvation is a social reality; personal
transformation involves social transformation.

Salvation, then, is about passionate intensity,
chaos, perplexity and consternation,
about being overwhelmed by longing
and unable to attain one’s desire,
about bewilderment, action and a
whirlwind of wonderment and exhaustion.

Salvation is about a sense of selflessness
that is acheived by individual action in
a divine plan and universal structure,
a perception of ourselves within a
collectivity of meaning, a catching
of a fragrance from an eternal garden.

Salvation is an entering and reentering
the world of shadows and its ephemeral
visions, an uplifting of the human condition,
an experience of the world of creation as an
emotionally charged vision and mystic journey
in this deathbed childbed age.

Ron Price
7 January 1996