1. EMERGENCE (PARAPATEO) IN THE INDIVIDUAL
Rev. Errol Lloyd Narain
I minister in an urban church that sits almost next door to a large taxi hub. Taxis fill the parking
lot of the hub and even spill out into the street. Most of the taxi drivers are from Nigeria. I have
always wanted to connect with the people in this taxi hub. Each day I drive by the place, a wish
or a prayer would be consciously on my mind.
I was visited one day by a gentleman who talked to me in earnest about his call to a ministry
amongst his colleagues in this taxi hub. He wanted to start something that he at this point was
unsure of, especially the details. He had already connected with 20 Nigerian Christian drivers
who had expressed their need for a support group of prayer, worship and learning. He worked
out that the church being so close by, would be the most convenient place to meet regularly.
As we talked, I learned that he had studied at two famous Evangelical institutions- Moody in
the city of Chicago and Wheaton in the suburbs. He never showed off his fundamentalist
discipleship or the spirited Pentecostal church he attended. He let it slightly slip that he had
grown from and somewhat away from his nursery beginnings.
What fascinated me was not the beginnings of what I recognized as weaning from a third phase
psychology of faith to a fourth phase questioning stage, but the general spiritual state of the
man. In this moment of his life he recognized a mystery present, filling him with new
understandings and a compassion for the welfare of others. Immediately prior to this, for him,
there was the void, the result of a loss of things he held dear for so long. This void was a
vacuum, a nothing. Now this void was being filled with things old and new.
Greek tragedy often features a device known as the parapateo, the moment in which the hero
realizes everything he thought to be true was not, and is therefore forced to reassess the nature
of his entire experience, both leading up to and transcending that crucial point. This I believe
was the experience of this man who talked to me about his successful life, a conversation during
which at times he would clasp his head with his hands when ( in my understanding) he
experienced the moments of mystery, a mysterious presence from within and without.
In The Nature of Things, written nearly fifty years before the birth of Christ, Lucretius points out
that in speaking of solidity, it is ultimately power that fills the space between representation
and what he calls 'the void'. As he explains, "nothing can be crushed or broken or split apart unless it
contains void; it cannot absorb moisture, admit the seeping cold or piercing fire by which things joined
together are undone. But all the more of void a thing contains, the more it gives way under attack, of
things like these upon its structure"

2. Nothing or void precedes something. For something to be there must be nothing. Something is
created out of nothing. Therefore nothing is something and something is nothing.
This attack of the void, upon the structure of nothingness is the emergence of the new. This
newness is a reinvention, a reimagination of the social individual for the new world.
Jesus the mystic knew the void. He, having much, emptied himself, assuming a lowly status. He
preached a sacrificial discipleship, not that the whole world should be poor, but that the whole
world may experience at the same moment the void- [no] thing and something. That immanent
something Jesus chose not to name but only describe as father.
This [no] thing for Jesus was power for transformation. He practiced a freedom from the prisons
of materialism and consumerism. He demonstrated a new way of being human in the world. He
lived in solidarity with those who were the least in the world but first in the kingdom.