So why is \u201cthisness\u201d so good and important? Duns Scotus mirrors Jesus as the Good Shepherd leaving the ninety-nine sheep and going after the one (Luke 15:4\u20136). The universal incarnation of Christ always shows itself in the specific, the concrete, the particular; it refuses to let life be a mere abstraction. No one says this better than Christian Wiman: \u201cIf nature abhors a vacuum, Christ abhors a vagueness. If God is love, Christ is love for this one person, this one place, this one time-bound and time-ravaged self.\u201d [1]<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The doctrine of haecceity <\/em>says that we come to universal meaning deeply and rightly through the concrete, the specific, and the ordinary, and not the other way around. The principle here is \u201cgo deep in any one place and we will meet all places.\u201d When we start with big universal ideas, at the level of concepts and -isms, we too often stay there\u2014 arguing about theories, forever making more distinctions. At that level, the mind is totally in charge. It\u2019s easier to love humanity then, but not any individual people. We defend principles of justice but can\u2019t muster the courage to live fully just lives ourselves. Only those who live like Francis and Clare do that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Francis lived such \u201cthisness\u201d simply by looking at things and loving things in themselves and for themselves. I think this is what it means to love God. When we love things in themselves, we are looking out at the world with God\u2019s eyes. When we look out from these eyes, we see that it\u2019s not about us! And I promise, when we begin seeing the world this way, everything starts to give us joy. Simple things start to make us happy, and Reality begins to offer us inherent joy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So why is \u201cthisness\u201d so good and important? Duns Scotus mirrors Jesus as the Good Shepherd leaving the ninety-nine sheep and going after the one (Luke 15:4\u20136). The universal incarnation of Christ always shows itself in the specific, the concrete, the particular; it refuses to let life be a mere abstraction. No one says this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mindbootcamp.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mindbootcamp.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mindbootcamp.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mindbootcamp.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mindbootcamp.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=295"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mindbootcamp.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":296,"href":"https:\/\/mindbootcamp.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295\/revisions\/296"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mindbootcamp.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mindbootcamp.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mindbootcamp.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}