Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘And ‘I have a hunch that it is possible to experience the world as a gift received, a call answered, without signing up to the theological package. I’ve begun to think of this as a stance – or an inställning, as we say in Swedish, because this means something like “stance towards”, but it is also the word for the “tuning” of a radio. To be in the world is always already to have a stance, or a gait, a way of holding yourself and moving through the world, and this is shaped to some extent by the assumptions of your place and time, but not wholly determined by them. You can inhabit the world as though it were the result of meaningless chance, or inescapable cause and effect, or you can inhabit it as a realm of gratuity, as something more like a gift received. And any of these ways of inhabiting the world is a leap, rather than something obvious and provable…

What I’m reaching towards saying is that the stance in which the world is encountered as a gift is not uniquely a leap of faith, in contrast with some default perspective, but that whatever stance we take, it involves a leap beyond what can be proven. To inhabit the world as made by laws without being able to explain who did the legislating is not obviously more reasonable than to inhabit it as a gift without being able to explain who did the giving.’ (from the Writing Home Substack)