“You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart — your stories, visions, memories, visions and songs. Your truth, your version of things, your own voice. That is really all you have to offer us. And that’s also why you were born.”
Anne Lamott
“You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart — your stories, visions, memories, visions and songs. Your truth, your version of things, your own voice. That is really all you have to offer us. And that’s also why you were born.”
Anne Lamott
Unlearning I’m learning to be grateful for unlearning. What misery it would be if we had to retain what we learn as certainty for our lifetimes! Unlearning is a part of learning. And this gives us freedom and humility, then, to explore who you are, Lord, and your world with your people. Isn’t repentance also a form of unlearning? Dallas Willard paraphrases Jesus’ words in Matthew 4:17 like this: “‘Rethink your life in light of the fact that the kingdom of heaven is now open to all.’”[1] Because repentance is just that. It is a rethinking, seeing what’s real, turning towards it, shedding the counterfeit, and walking through the door. There’s an unlearning involved. Aimee Byrd
Scott Erickson on Instagram: “It’s painful to outgrow the form you’ve called your home for such a long time. We all go through some form of this. Hometown. Perspective. Even religious practice. And religious practice is hard because all religious practice is about identity and where we feel like we belong. So when you feel the claustrophobia and the tightness… it’s overwhelming to think you don’t fit anymore and you need to change in some way. But the wonder and the gift of transformation is this: Awakening to the truth that your shell was never your home… The ocean is.
Satisfaction and human flourishing …satisfaction is central in how many contemporaries think of human flourishing. Satisfaction is a form of experience, and experiences are generally deemed to be matters of individual preference. Everyone is the best judge of her own experience of satisfaction. To examine whether a particular experience fits into a larger account of the world is already to risk relativizing its value as an experience. Miroslav Volk
Better a Liar than a Bullshitter? It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may pertain to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose. (pp. 55-56) On Bullshit
The Importance of Sharing Wisdom …one important feature of sharing wisdom: it is more like playing a musical piece for a friend than treating her to a meal. When I serve a meal to a friend, what she eats I no longer have; in contrast, when I play music for her, she receives something that, in a sense, I continue to possess. When I share wisdom, I don’t part with what I give; to the contrary, I may come to possess it in a deeper way. Miroslav Volk – A Public Faith- How Followers of Christ Should Serve the Common Good
Aging John Perry, the main character in the novel “Old Man’s War”, describes the aging process in a direct and little bit coarse way, which only a senior citizen can get away with: “The problem with aging is not that it’s one damn thing after another—it’s every damn thing, all at once, all the time.”
View from the Lanai Asbury Revival Social media, local and national news has been saturated with reports , pictures, video, articles, including a Tucker Carlson segment on Fox News regarding the revival that broke out on February 8th and continues today. An extraordinary event; revival is a work of God through the Holy Spirit; and defies rational explanation.
I am thankful that thousands of people are having an encounter that will echo in their hearts and minds for the rest of their lives. Undeniably personal and profound, the ultimate impact of those experiences remains to be seen. Without question, lives are being changed. That’s what happens when we meet God.
Did I get it Right? We ask, “Did I get it right?” which phrases the question with the emphasis on ourselves. Webecome the center of our attention – which misses the point. That point is better stated as, “Am I walking in the Light?” In this, the focus is on Christ who is the Light. If I fail, then I fail within the light. The point is not my failure (for, if I walk in the Light, then the blood of Jesus cleanses me from all sin) but the Light. Christ is everything. Fr Stephen Freeman
Power of Evil over Good Decades ago, Archbishop Desmond Tutu was asked whether evil is more powerful than good. His reply can help shape the terms of our challenge in this moment: “Evil is not more powerful than good,” Tutu replied, “but it is better organized!”
Beauty A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing. Keats
Simplicity Just as all higher mathematics depends on learning basic arithmetic, and just as all more sophisticated music depends on mastering the basics of tempo, melody, and harmony, the spiritual life depends on learning well the essential lessons of this first season, Simplicity. If these lessons aren’t learned well, practitioners will struggle in later seasons. But if in due time this season doesn’t give way to the next, the spiritual life can grow stagnant and even toxic. Nearly all of us in this dynamic season of Simplicity tend to share a number of characteristics. We see the world in simple dualist terms: we are the good guys who follow the good authority figures and we have the right answers; they are the bad guys who consciously or unconsciously fight on the wrong side of the cosmic struggle between good and evil. We feel a deep sense of identity and belonging in our in-group…. This simple, dualist faith gives us great confidence.
This confidence, of course, has a danger, as the old Bob Dylan classic “With God on Our Side” makes clear: “You don’t count the dead when God’s on your side.” Brian McClaren
Artificial Intelligence This is what many of us notice about art or prose generated by A.I. It’s often bland and vague. It’s missing a humanistic core. It’s missing an individual person’s passion, pain, longings and a life of deeply felt personal experiences. It does not spring from a person’s imagination, bursts of insight, anxiety and joy that underlie any profound work of human creativity. [for example] Empathy. Machine thinking is great for understanding the behavioral patterns across populations. It is not great for understanding the unique individual right in front of you. If you want to be able to do this, good humanities classes are really useful. By studying literature, drama, biography and history, you learn about what goes on in the minds of other people. If you can understand another person’s perspective, you have a more valuable skill than the skill possessed by some machine vacuuming up vast masses of data about no one in particular. David Brooks
View from the Lanai It may not be a light at the end of the tunnel but hopefully it is is reason for some optimism.
Senate Prayer Breakfast Once a week, a bipartisan group of two dozen of us get together, pray together, sing together, and most importantly, listen to each other at something called the Senate Prayer Breakfast.
I am encouraged. When I first heard about it, my first reaction was skepticism, revealing prejudices deeper than my confidence in prayer. Introspection is a good thing.
Just as all higher mathematics depends on learning basic arithmetic, and just as all more sophisticated music depends on mastering the basics of tempo, melody, and harmony, the spiritual life depends on learning well the essential lessons of this first season, Simplicity. If these lessons aren’t learned well, practitioners will struggle in later seasons. But if in due time this season doesn’t give way to the next, the spiritual life can grow stagnant and even toxic. Nearly all of us in this dynamic season of Simplicity tend to share a number of characteristics. We see the world in simple dualist terms: we are the good guys who follow the good authority figures and we have the right answers; they are the bad guys who consciously or unconsciously fight on the wrong side of the cosmic struggle between good and evil. We feel a deep sense of identity and belonging in our in-group…. This simple, dualist faith gives us great confidence.
This confidence, of course, has a danger, as the old Bob Dylan classic “With God on Our Side” makes clear: “You don’t count the dead when God’s on your side.”
Brian McClaren
DEDICATED FAN
John Adams, Guardians drummer, provided the soundtrack to Cleveland baseball for nearly 50 years.
Adams died Monday morning at the age of 71. He had dealt with numerous health complications in recent years.
His drumbeat was the heartbeat of every Cleveland baseball season for the past half-century, year after year, through miserable slogs during chilly evenings on the lakefront to those magical moments that only October can deliver. That ballpark memory you clutch onto dearly? Adams’ steady beat was its soundtrack.
Hockey legend Bobby Hull died Monday…he was a Hall of Famer on the ice and (at times) a hall of shamer off it…we aren’t supposed to celebrate the gifts he gave us because of the latter…I don’t accept this way of thinking…it encapsulates us all in our worst moments without recognizing any good…it’s a nasty way to live…and die…
We should acknowledge the dark sides of those we admire…it prevents idolatry. Acknowledging only the dark side leads to nothing but shame and a false sense of holiness…
The time to give a full overview of someones life is not an hour after they died…
Phoenix Preacher
Four movements in the faith journey
There are four major movements in the overall journey. They are :
moving from forgiveness to acceptance,
from taking in to giving away,
from fear to inner peace,
and from responsibility to simple response.
They generally follow naturally as faith and trust deepen, as we can relinquish that which we cling to and release ourselves into God’s arms.
The Critical Journey
Absence of God “Once the creator was removed from the creation, divinity became only a remote abstraction, a social weapon in the hands of the religious institutions.”
Wendell Berry
RISK
The French poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1919)
“Come to the edge” he said.
“No” I said, “I’m afraid.”
“Come to the edge,” he said.
“No” I said, “I can’t. I will fall.”
“Come to the edge,” he said.
So I came. And He pushed me
And I flew.
via Steve Elliott
Spiritual Mentorship David Brooks in his book “Second Mountain” describes how he was mentored in his faith journey: Anne [Snyder] answered each question as best she could. She never led me – She never intervened or tried to direct the process. She hung back. If I asked her a question she would answer it, but she would never get out in front of me. She demonstrated faith by letting God be in charge. And this is a crucial lesson for anybody in the middle of any sort of intellectual or spiritual journey: Don’t try to lead or influence. Let them be led by that which is summoning them.
View from the Lanai
So I am thinking about this woodpecker that shows up on the street lamp and bangs away on the aluminum cover. What ever is he thinking? Then I think maybe I’m a lot like him sometimes. Just making noise? So much to think about!
Meeting God We all meet God in our own way. There are moments of recognition that, brief as they are, touch those deepest longings we find it hard to name. In the encounter with God it is seldom clear whether we meet God, or God meets us, and in any case, to make such a distinction risks missing the mystery that challenges all such certainties. Jim Gordon
Knowing Who We Are People who know who they are find it the easiest to know who they aren’t. Whenever we do anything stupid, cruel, evil, or destructive to ourselves or others, we are, at that moment, unconscious, and unconscious of our identity. If we were fully conscious, we would never do it. Loving people are always highly conscious people. Richard Rohr – Breathing Under Water
Dreich In Scotland ‘dreich’ is the word we reserve for days that are dull, damp, cold and relentlessly demotivating! Jim Gordon In a sense, one can hardly put anything into words: only the simplest colours have names, and hardly any of the smells. The simple physical pains and (still more) the pleasures can’t be expressed in language. I labour the point lest the devil should. hereafter try to make you believe that what was wordless was therefore vague and nebulous. But in reality it is just the clearest, the most concrete, and most indubitable realities which escape language: not because they are vague but because language is … Poetry I take to be the continual effort to bring language back to the actual. C S Lewis
Truth telling The historian Howard Zinn wrote, “The most revolutionary act one can engage in is […] to tell the truth.” Indeed! I think the revolutionary part of truth is that it can free us and those around us to live with greater certainty about what is real, even when it hurts, because we are no longer shackled to the energy lying requires of us. Lying demands the continuation of the lie and the amplification of the lie to keep the truth hidden.… Telling the truth creates ripples of authenticity that change the world.… I believe truth is revolutionary; it’s part of the work of fierce love. Truth makes a personal, spiritual, ethical, and moral demand upon us. It wants to be said, known, told. It hurts and it’s inconvenient, but it’s essential to our well-being. It cleanses our spiritual palate and restores our souls. Truth is a drink of water to a parched traveler. It lubricates relationships. It liberates us from bondage. It builds trust and connections. It’s the beginning of authentic living and joy. Truth eludes us at times, and we have to pursue it. Truth invites us to be honest about who we are, about our flawed-but-beautiful, broken-but-healing selves. Truth leads to reconciliation and peace; without truth, there is no peace. In the light of truth, we are able to honor our journey and love ourselves. Truth-telling is a spiritual discipline that requires practice. We must not lie to others and, as Fyodor Dostoevsky suggested, we mustn’t lie to ourselves. Being honest with ourselves about ourselves is to love ourselves unconditionally, to love ourselves fiercely. Richard Rohr -Truth-telling can be a very difficult journey on the way to freedom. —Jacqui Lewis, Fierce Love
You might be a fundamentalist if: you have an intolerance for disagreement, are constantly line-drawing, endlessly hunting for heretics. Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Proverbs 18:2
Dissent …words from the Supreme Court in Barnette: Ultimate futility of such attempts to compel coherence is the lesson of every such effort from the Roman drive to stamp out Christianity as a disturber of its pagan unity, the Inquisition, as a means to religious and dynastic unity, the Siberian exiles as a means to Russian unity, down to the fast failing efforts of our present totalitarian enemies. Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard. David French
Best Ideas Learned in 2022 The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question, but to post the wrong answer, because people are more interested in criticizing others than helping them.
Evil can be guarded against. Stupidity cannot. And the world’s few evil people have little power without the help of the world’s many stupid people. As a result, stupidity is a far greater threat than evil.
“For every PhD, there is an equal and opposite PhD.” In courtroom trials and political debates, anyone can find a subject-matter expert who supports their view, because having a PhD doesn’t make someone right, it often just makes them more skilled at being wrong.
View from the Lanai Reading “The Second Mountain” Brooks reflects on the mentorship that led him to faith in God.
Pg 239 Anne [Snyder] answered each question as best she could. She never led me – She never intervened or tried to direct the process. She hung back. If I asked her a question she would answer it, but she would never get out in front of me. She demonstrated faith by letting God be in charge. And this is a crucial lesson for anybody in the middle of any sort of intellectual or spiritual journey: Don’t try to lead or influence. Let them be led by that which is summoning them.
Sault Ste. Marie, MI — Stop resorting to imprecise, trite, and meaningless words and terms of seeming convenience! You’re taking the lazy way out and only confusing matters by over-relying on inexact, stale, and inane communication!
Language monitors across the country and around the world decried the decrepitude and futility of basic methods to impart information in their mock-serious entries for Lake Superior State University’s annual tongue-in-cheek Banished Words List. LSSU announces the results of the yearly compendium on Dec. 31 to start the New Year on the right foot, er, tongue.
The vast majority of the 1,500-plus nominations of words and terms for banishment for misuse, overuse, and uselessness for 2023 reveled and wallowed in the erosion of fundamental expression.
Ranked No. 1 as the best of the worst: GOAT, acronym for Greatest of All Time. The many nominators didn’t have to be physicists or grammarians to determine the literal impossibility and technical vagueness of this wannabe superlative. Yet it’s bestowed on everyone from Olympic gold medalists to Jeopardy! champions, as one muckraker playfully deplored. Meanwhile, other naysayers remarked on social media posts that brandish a photo of, for instance, multiple cricket players or soccer stars with a caption about several GOATs in one frame.
“Words and terms matter. Or at least they should. Especially those that stem from the casual or causal. That’s what nominators near and far noticed, and our contest judges from the LSSU School of Arts and Letters agreed,” said Peter Szatmary, executive director of marketing and communications at Lake State.
Here are the 10 words and terms that have been banished for 2023:
GOAT
Inflection point
Quiet quitting
Gaslighting
Moving forward
Amazing
Does that make sense?
Irregardless
Absolutely
It is what it is
My nomination would be blessed: . What would be yours?
Cathexis
Coined by Freud, the word “cathexis” comes from the psychodynamic tradition in psychology. A cathexis is an unhealthy concentration of mental energy on a person, idea or object. The word “fixation” is a related concept, as we become “fixated,” to an unhealthy degree, where there is a concentration of mental energy and investment. Along with “fixation,” “obsession” is another word that points to a cathexis.
You can think of a cathexis as a “hot spot” in the psyche, a “gravity well” that creates a mental orbit, even a kind of “black hole” that sucks up available energy. And that’s a key notion in psychodynamic thinking, how our mental energy is a finite resource. Our various cathexes, fixations and obsessions hurt us because they suck up mental energy, leaving us less energy to allocate, devote and invest in other areas of our lives. Like the pull of a large gravitational mass in space, a strong cathexis warps and distorts the psyche causing it to become twisted and imbalanced.
Psychic energy is a precious and limited resource, and every bit of energy sucked up by the cathexis [of politics] is energy that could be devoted to your family, your friendships, your church, your creativity, your spiritual formation, and your works of mercy in the local community. Richard Beck
CHATgpt Encouraging news—A college student created an app that can tell whether CHATgpt AI wrote an essay. Ironically it is AI that counters the threat of Chatgpt.
Prophets The prophets’ vocation is to cry out—to God, to the air, to any open heart; they cry out on behalf of God and on behalf of the poor because no one is listening except God. They cry out for those no one heeds, except maybe in passing in lip service.… The prophets often see us as nearsighted, meaning we can only see what is immediately under our noses, connected to our own lives. We have lost sight of the vision of hope, of the future that God intends, while we have been concentrating with total self-absorption on our own immediate desires. We are like drivers lost in a fog of our own obsessions, unable to see the road clearly. And so we need the prophets, the far-seeing ones, the dreamers in broad daylight, the long-distance high beams that show us glimpses of where we are going and what the outcome of our choices and lifestyles will be. One way to define a prophet is a person who sees so clearly what is happening in the present moment that he or she can tell us what is going to happen if we don’t change immediately and radically. Megan McKenna
Transformation
We can never engineer or guide our own transformation or conversion. If we try, it will be a self-centered and well-controlled version of conversion, with most of our preferences and addictions still fully in place, but now well-disguised. Any attempts at self-conversion would be like an active alcoholic trying to determine their own rules for sobriety. God has to radically change the central reference point of our lives. We do not even know where to look for another reference point because, up to now, it has all been about “me”! Too much “me” can never find “you”—or anything beyond itself.
Breathing Under Water – Richard Rohr
Academic Freedom
… if academic freedom really only means as much freedom as your most sensitive students can stand, an irresponsible position that puts the university, the classroom, and the careers of scholars in the hands of students who are inexperienced in the subject matter, new to academic life, and, often, still in the throes of adolescence.
Nearly a generation ago, the social theorist Christopher Lasch argued that acknowledgment of the darkness is precisely what is missing.
“Having no awareness of evil, the once-born type of religious experience cannot stand up to adversity,” Lasch wrote. “It offers sustenance only so long as it does not encounter ‘poisonous humiliations.’”
In other words, as Jesus shows us in John 9, the problem lies not with the blind person crying out for sight but with those who won’t acknowledge their blindness: “If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains” (v. 41).
For those who really pay attention—to the world, to the church, and to themselves—the portrayal of only the “good things” doesn’t do much to reassure or build trust. People for whom religion is just a vehicle for consolation and flourishing might be totally oblivious to this, but their kind of religion offers nothing for those who wonder whether anyone can see what’s killing them.
A word that doesn’t speak to that isn’t proclamation but propaganda. Propaganda might work for public relations, but it doesn’t come with the authority to drive out the darkness.
Yes, these are cynical times. The way institutions have misused power can make some people wonder whether every institution is that way. This cynicism isn’t accurate, but it’s also not crazy, given what we’ve seen.
Arguments about the facts of institutions and persons are not only legitimate but necessary. Making the case that an accused murderer wasn’t at the scene of the crime is different from saying, “Talking about murder here hurts tourism, so if you talk about it, you are being disloyal to our city.”
Russell Moore
Know what you’re talking about
…is very difficult to have serious conversations about serious things if we don’t have accurate labels for the things we’re talking about. As George Orwell observed, language “becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”
Saint
A saint is not so much a man who realizes that he possesses virtues and sanctity as one who is overwhelmed by the sanctity of God. God is holiness. And therefore things are holy in proportion as they share Who He is. All creatures are holy in so far as they share in His being, but we are called to be holy in a far superior way—by somehow sharing His transcendence and rising above the level of everything that is not God.
Thomas Merton
VIEW from the lanai
Our nation continues to be embroiled in societal conflict; an un-civil war that threatens our future as a democracy. Unlike The culture war, initiated by the Christian right in 1970’s against secularism, atheism and moral decline; today’s war is a bewildering paradox in which the opposing camps are waging War on Reality. Each, believing they are championing the building of a just society, fabricate their own reality; a moral compromise Rod Dreher correctly characterizes as suicidal.
A lie is an attempt to reject reality as it is and to put something else in its place. A lie seeks to murder the truth. Fr StephenFreeman
