An Introduction to A White Colt's Tale

An Introduction to A White Colt's Tale

​A Theological Introduction

​Our family is a family of readers. Our love for reading began at a young age with stories told from the Bible. In our home and at church, we were taught and encouraged to engage our imaginations through Children’s Bible stories. We first learned of God’s love and the diversity of creation through storytelling. We learned to see these stories as a way of renewal, redemption, reconciliation, forgiveness, salvation, spiritual insight and formation. They became for us a way of living, a way of being and transformation.
 
As an ageless and sacramental story, A White Colt’s Tale, offers children and adults a hopeful message. One which is about the power of love to heal and transform the world through our friendships with one another, and the mystery and grace of God. The story of Jesus and Manuelo’s friendship, is our story too. Their story acts as an invocation of the Holy Spirit; however, you may see the Spirit at work in your own life and friendships. It honors all the   relationships and friendships that move through our lives.
 
Theologian Paul F. Knitter, who was the Paul Tillich Professor of Theology, World Religions and Culture at Union Theological Seminary, NYC, tells us that understanding God through relationships is critical. And that the source and power of our relationships and friendships are driven by the presence of the Holy Spirit. 
 
“What Christians have seen in Jesus of Nazareth is a God who creates and is present to the world through relationships, the same kind of relationships that we say exist in the very nature of God: relationships of knowing, of giving, of loving that bring forth ever more life and existence. Behind and within all the different images and symbols Christians may use for God – Creator, Father, Redeemer, Word, Spirit – the most fundamental, the deepest truth Christians can speak of God is that God is the source and power of relationships. 
 
That sounds abstract. But it’s not. It’s the most basic, and the simplest, thing we can say about ourselves and about God: we exist through relationships of knowing and loving and giving because that’s how God exists.
 
To experience and believe in a Trinitarian God is to experience and believe in a God who is not, as Tillich would say, the Ground of Being, but the Ground of InterBeing.  God is the activity of giving and receiving, of knowing and loving, of losing and finding, of dying and living that embraces and infuses all of us, all of creation.” 1
 
The story of Manuelo and Jesus is timeless. Their devotion to one another helps us to see something beyond ourselves actively at work within the world. In the Christian vocabulary that I learned to love as a child, the power of the “Holy Spirit” calls us into a relationship with one another. These are the interconnections and celestial quantum entanglements at play in our relationships across all creation. God as a Verb. God is InterBeing. God is an intimate part of our Being or InterBeing.
 
In Paul Knitter’s thought — “God is the field – of InterBeing – within which, as we read in the New Testament, “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). — Or, from the divine perspective, there is “one God above all things, through all things, and in all things” (Eph. 4:6).” 2
 
Here we may encounter the greater — Mysteries & Graces of God — dwelling and resting within all humanity. They flow in and with and through us and arise from our relationships with one another. We do not need to name them by the words of any solitary faith. Here we may celebrate the love and compassion that flows through all human faiths, unveiled and revealed in our sacred stories and scriptures. For there is a season and a time to everything under heaven.
 
Ecclesiastes 3 (KJV)
 
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
 
 
1 John 4:16 (NRSV)

So we have known and believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.
 
1 Corinthians 13 (NRSV)

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood.
 

1. Knitter, Paul F. – Without Buddha I Could not be a Christian(p. 19). Oneworld Publications. Kindle Edition.
2. Knitter, Paul F. – Without Buddha I Could not be a Christian(p. 20). Oneworld Publications. Kindle Edition.

The concept of InterBeing referenced by Paul Knitter, comes from — The Heart of Understanding: Commentaries on the Prajnaparamita Heart Sutra – by Thich Nhat Hanh, where he covers Buddhist ideas on Śūnyatā – Emptiness –  InterBeing – Dependent Arising or Origination.  

As a theologian, Paul Knitter, sees a similar parallel at play in these verses from the book of Acts and Ephesians.


Acts 17:28-29 (NRSV)

For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’

Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals.


Ephesians 4:4-6 (NRSV)

There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.

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In the Anglican Communion — Christian tradition, sacraments are seen as “outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace.”

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The Sacraments — The Episcopal Church
Book of Common Prayer — An Outline of the Faith (Page 845)
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• The sacraments are outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace, given by Christ as sure and certain means by which we receive that grace.
• Grace is God's favor toward us, unearned and undeserved; by grace God forgives our sins, enlightens our minds, stirs our hearts, and strengthens our wills.
• The two great sacraments given by Christ to his Church are Holy Baptism and the Holy Eucharist.

Whenever we engage in an interfaith dialogue one of the first things we must do is to learn and appreciate the vocabulary of that faith. When you consider all our words and images about God, the Divine, or the Presence of a Greater Mystery, such images are "formed by the art and imaginations of mortals."  

These images arise from our interactions and relationships within creation itself, going back to the beginning of humankind. Human beings are seekers, we seek to understand the greatest mysteries of creation through the pursuit of faith, traditions, spiritual formation and practice (praxis), scripture, liturgy, literature, poetry, truth, reason, knowledge, and science.  Scientific studies have shown that wellness, healing, and positive medical outcomes are intimately entangled with our spiritual life, wholeness and holiness are complimentary. 
 

Many Blessings,
​Ron Starbuck 
Publisher/CEO Saint Julian Press

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The Book of Common Prayer — An Outline of the Faith

We, who are many and diverse, come together in Christ through worship and common prayer. The prayer book contains the Episcopal Church liturgies, prayers, theological documents, and much more. It is the literature of a faith found in prayer, poetry, liturgy, rite, sacrament, and holy scripture.

​The Way of Love — Spiritual Practice

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