Curious Christian

This is a question I posed earlier today on the Pagan and Christian Moot on Facebook:

I know I am not the only one here who has noticed the parallels between the four living creatures of Revelation 4 and the watchtowers of Wiccan ritual. Phil Johnson first drew my attention to this in conversations on the tarot and I’ve been fascinated by it ever since. Could this be a conversation starter for different perspectives on sacred space?

I ask this because I have long been bothered by the phrase “interfaith conversation”. It’s because of the Western association of “faith” and “doctrine”. I can’t help noticing that many interfaith conversations end up focussed on doctrinal issues, on what different people from different paths “believe”. Leaving what they “feel” and “do” under explored.
Yet I feel ritual and experience are just as important to explore here as doctrine and interpretation.

Well, here is what my sons and I did and experienced the weekend before last. They asked me if we could do home church. The kids program is in recess for the school holidays so I said, sure. I chose Acts 2 as a focus and used that to explore what it means to be a church, what it means to gather in the name of God. As part of this we broke
bread together and offered our lives to God. And what looms large in the lives of my kids? Video games! So in setting up the table I invited them to surround the bread and the cup, which represent the living Messiah, with elemental Skylanders. Four of them in fact.

The kids were excited and enthusiastic about this. In the process we reflected on how, for us, Christ is the centre of the cosmos, not us and our everyday concerns. How living as Christians is the ongoing experience of entrusting our lives to God through him.

So, you’ll no doubt notice some muddiness here. Was this distinctively Christian?

But maybe, before rushing to analysis, open yourself to the other parts of yourself. Give your imagination, your intuition, your experience of liminal spaces some place in this conversation as well.