Loving may not require self-understanding

Dave Brown, "a workplace chaplain to firefighters, ambulance staff and brewery workers" and a Church minister in Dunedin, New Zealand writes about the ordinariness and the mystery of the Kingdom of Heaven in his blog post, "Mustard seeds and statistics". He includes his enjoyment of the book, The New Believers: Re-imagining God (2003) by Rachael Kohn:

"In a chapter entitled "Re-souling Psychology" she is writing about Thomas Moore, a former Catholic monk turned psychotherapist. She writes: "Thomas Moore is urging his students and readers in a direction that is dynamic — he is saying there is a deep knowing in the doing, in  the loving and in the living. Self-understanding in a clinical sense is not a necessary condition for unconditional love — the chief expression of the soul — and may even stand in the way of it."  That is what I find. There is a deep knowing in the loving and living of the way of Jesus that is just so hard to communicate ... it is found in the doing."

Brown may want to read Moore's own Writing in the Sand: Jesus and the Soul of the Gospels (2009) in which he too stresses the ordinary and the mysterious in the Kingdom.

In his previous post, Sunday blog", Brown describes the way of Jesus and includes, "One man said once that many Christians 'Have just enough religion to make them miserable — not enough to make them happy.' Now it may sound judgmental, but often I suspect this is true, even for people who have been in Church for years. I think many are immune to the real Jesus, because they have a domesticated-easy-to-handle-church-focused Jesus. I think too that when we have not given ourselves to his servant lifestyle, Jesus is just a vague belief in a metaphysical saviour, and not a dynamic-life-changing-life-enhancing-mentor and 'presence'.  He comes alive for us when we risk all, and I would suggest most church goers have not risked much."