Quote for the Day: "The Church, Like Any Other Network of Human Relationships, Must Live in the Spaces in Between"

At Hepzibah, Alan McCornick suggests that in his refocussing of the Catholic conversation, Pope Francis "is inviting all within the church, gays, women, priests sanctioned for their work as Liberation Theologists, to the table." And then Alan says,

This will be possible, of course, only when the focus is not on the rules, not on the status quo, but on the dialogue.  What has to matter is the on-going nature of human relationships, the exchange of views.  The church, like any other network of human relationships, must live in the spaces in between.  In the language of progressive Christians, one has to stop putting a period where God has put a comma, and God has to be experienced not as a noun (truth, authority, censure), but as a verb.

As Alan explains earlier in this posting, the phrase "The world lies in between people" is from Hannah Arendt, who notes that "[t]he world and the people who inhabit it are not the same." Alan takes these observations to mean that the world  "moves forward in everyday human interaction." 

And I think Alan is very insightful and correct to apply these concepts to Francis's recent interview, with its insistence that "God is in history, in the processes," that "God has revealed himself as history, not as a compendium of abstract truths," and that "God is in every person’s life" and we encounter God only when we can and must try to seek God in every human life."

The graphic: Sami Kallio's "In Between Chair," of which I find photos at a number of blog sites, including the Little Things site.