obliquity

hopeful amphibian: stop thinking about yourself - be oblique Hopeful Amphibian draws our attention to a new term 'obliquity' [which he credits to Ann Morisy]. It was great to be given a term for a concept I have been trying to explain for years. Ever since my last church when we decided that we would update our mission statement [or whatever we called it]. The old statement had "Fellowship' in it; ie we were aiming to build fellowship a part of the church's mission. What's wrong with that? You might well ask; my problem with it was, I now know, obliquity. It seemed to me that you can't aim to build/create fellowship: it happens as a result of other things in this case usually doing things together. Perhaps I was being a bit picky but I felt and feel that there really are certain good things that arrive as unintended [and unintendable] consequences of doing the right things. #In this case I propsed coining a phrse 'One anothering' since, I argued, it was as we set about the task of doing all those good things that involved 'one another' or 'each other' in the NT that fellowship came about.

A further illustration is of a person I once knew who was desperate to make friends but their desperation was so great that they actually only managed to smother people and cause them to back off after an initial acquaintance. Maggi Dawn, in a usefull little reflection, applies the principle to happiness.

I would say that ther is a gospel principle behind obliquity: those who seek their lives will lose them and those that lose their lives ... will find them. It seems to me that Jesus is saying that there is obliquity in our pursuit of Life. It will always elude our grasp, paradoxically we pursue it by not pursuing it. I've just been reading about Zen and there's something interestingly 'zen' about obliquity too.

Perhaps it might be that we need to think of certain [obliquitous] things as emergent; they can only arise out of the whole-hearted pursuit of other things and only as those other things are fuly functioning and running smoothly enough can whatever-it-is emerge from the processes.

Obliquity -could be the first word made current by blogging? [Except 'blogging', of course ... that's kind of oblique too]

obliquity