Category: Notes Anthology

Serendipity was scarce in 2023 . Prognostications for 2024 are not promising.

In 2003, a NASA Investigation Board blamed the disintegration of the space shuttle Columbia in part on PowerPoint.

Useless

Oscar Wilde:

A work of art is useless as a flower is useless. A flower blossoms for its own joy. We gain a moment of joy by looking at it. That is all that is to be said about our relations to flowers. Of course man may sell the flower, and so make it useful to him, but this has nothing to do with the flower. It is not part of its essence. It is accidental. It is a misuse. All this is I fear very obscure. But the subject is a long one.

Sacramental Life

The sacramental life of the Church is not an aspect of the Church’s life – it is a manifestation of the whole life of the Church. It is, indeed, the very character and nature of the Church’s life. The Church does not have sacraments – the Church is a sacrament. We do not eat sacraments or just participate in the sacraments – we are sacraments. The sacraments reveal the true character of our life in Christ. 

Fr Stephen Freeman

God is at work here

How many times have you thought or said this. I’ve said it too. “God must be at work here.” And what you and I are observing is something successful, something cool, something remarkable, something miraculous, something astounding. Which trains our eyes, ears, and senses to see God in the extraordinary and successful. More importantly, which trains us not to see God at work elsewhere.

What is so remarkable about Paul is that he states over and over, especially in 2 Corinthians, that he sees God most at work in his life when he is vulnerable and suffering and in pain and weak. This is the real Paul being real about the real Christian life. For him the Christian life is not about glory and success and money and prestige and honor. He does not look for the work of God in the forum of Rome or at the bema in Corinth or at the Acropolis in Athens or in well-known celebrities turning to Jesus (which is good, so too is the conversion of someone few know). He looks for the work of God in the ordinary person following the way of Jesus.

The Corinthians “Expected to see God at work in places of physical strength, material success, social achievement, human flourishing, lasting smiles and rhetorical brilliance.” But not Paul. Not the way of. Not cruciformity or Christoformitiy. In… “physical weakness, emotional brokenness and social humility” the apostle Paul “proudly witnesses to God at work in enduring and hopeful ways.
https://scotmcknight.substack.com/p/look-elsewhere

Bull-headedness

If people refuse to change, what my mother used to call “bull-headedness,” the world will only get worse. We have to learn how to dialogue, how to forgive, and how to trust, and how to give people the benefit of the doubt. In the United States, our country has become very cynical about truth and love. We hear politicians take oaths to be fair and just leaders and we all know it doesn’t mean anything. We expect everybody to be for the truth of their group and their “kingdoms.” But Jesus tells us to change our minds and accept the kingdom of God, which is what’s good for the whole.

Richard Rohr

Grief, Lament and Spiritual Bypassing

“Spiritual bypassing is a tool used to sidestep complicated emotions, psychological issues, and unfinished developmental tasks.”

“Many HCR’s (High Control Religions) instill in their followers of fear that if they grieve for too long, even after a loved one has died, their emotions will take over. Instead, HCR’s offer platitudes to get people to look on the bright side so that others around them can avoid feeling their own discomfort with grief and loss. Focus is instead placed on seeing what people can learn through the experience or what God might be teaching them. Rather than dealing with difficult emotions or painful experiences, many are taught to instead look for how God can use the situation to bring glory to his name.”

Spiritual bypassing also explains the inability, or perhaps even the unwillingness, genuinely to enter into a period of lament and sitting in it, rather than finding release points, positive possibilities, and hope. The Book of Lamentations Simply does not take us to where many in the spiritual bypassing mode want to go.

 The Book of Lamentations, then, “is both survivors’ literature and survival literature.” The story we tell about the past and the story that gives meaning to the present and hope for the future. “Trauma makes one mute and numb, and recovery is not feasible without the victim finding his/her/their voice and naming his/her/their suffering.” Lament in the book of lamentations avoids mentioning God while inveighing against God. “They do not wait for Yhwh to speak; rather, they expect him to listen.”

It is a fundamental mistake then to minimize lament and grief. Healing does not occur by spinning a narrative of victory, of triumph, and of hope. Healing occurs by facing reality and in the reality learning the language of healing and hope. It is too easy to call it lament, and then abort the lament by turning to stages of progress and development.

https://www.amazon.com/When-Religion-Hurts-You-High-Control/dp/1587435888

The Roman Catholic Blessing of Same-Sex Couples

The reality is that the statement is far more limited.  A few points will make this clear:

1. The document clearly retains the church’s position that Christian marriage is between a man and a woman.
2. Any blessing given to a same-sex couple cannot be given in a formal “liturgical” setting, which would mirror the kind of ceremony we associate with Christian marriage.
3. Any blessing given to a same-sex couple is not intended to extend moral legitimacy to same-sex unions.

The blessing the document envisions is what is known as a “spontaneous” blessing.  It may not be fully appreciated by many Protestants, but it is very common for Roman Catholic priests (identifiable by their clerical collar) who may be found in malls, airports, places of pilgrimage etc. to be approached by someone asking for their blessing.  The document now allows priests to bless same-sex couples in these “spontaneous” non-liturgical situations.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/04/vatican-says-blessing-of-same-sex-couples-is-not-blasphemous

Advent

It is a season of wonder. Wonder is an interesting thing. Scot Erickson says that wonder is “the moment when all of our narratives and stories about life disappear in the rapturous experience of actually being here.” He says that wonder is “being present with the glorious now.”

A moment of Wonder is the moment when you are speechless, overwhelmed, and caught up in a mystery. In a moment of wonder, you momentarily develop a singular focus, and everything else stops.

I want you to bring to mind the last time you experienced wonder. Don’t you long for a life of wonder and mystery and surprise and joy?

Kelly Edmiston

Taxes

The poorest quintile of Americans pays more than twice the rate of state taxes as the top 1 percent does, and about half again what the top 10 percent pays.

Single Parenting

According to the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, 60 years ago just 20 percent of children born to parents with a high-school education or less lived in a single-parent household; now that figure is nearly 70 percent. Among college-educated households, by contrast, the single-parent rate remains less than 10 percent. Since the 1970s, the divorce rate has declined significantly among college-educated couples, while it has risen dramatically among couples with only a high-school education—even as marriage itself has become less common. The rate of single parenting is in turn the single most significant predictor of social immobility across counties, according to a study led by the Stanford economist Raj Chetty.

Digital Books

Three in ten Americans read digital books. Whether they’re accessing online textbooks or checking out the latest bestselling e-book from the public library, the majority of these readers are subject to both the greed of Big Publishing and the priorities of Big Tech. In fact, Amazon’s Kindle held 72% of the e-reader market in 2022. And if there’s one thing we know about Big Tech companies like Amazon, their real product isn’t the book. It’s the user data.

Major publishers are giving Big Tech free rein to watch what you read and where, including books on sensitive topics, like if you check out a book on self care after an abortion. Worse, tech and publishing corporations are gobbling up data beyond your reading habits—today, there are no federal laws to stop them from surveilling people who read digital books across the entire internet.

Reader surveillance is a deeply intersectional threat, according to a congressional letter issued last week from a coalition of groups whose interests span civil rights, anti-surveillance, anti-book ban, racial justice, reproductive justice, LGBTQ+, immigrant, and antimonopoly. Our letter calls on federal lawmakers to investigate the harms of tech and publishing corporations’ powerful hold over digital book access. 

This investigation is an essential first step to revive the right to read without fear of having your interests used against you. Because unfortunately, that right is on life support when it comes to digital books. 

Ironically, I keep hoping someone will read what I am reading.

View from the Lanai

Our stay in Florida has been very good. The weather has been unusual but I’m confident no one wants to hear complaints.

A special part of our experience is the community, neighbors and friends we’ve grown to know and love. Even the anonymous person who left a Christmas treat on our door.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

My mind is like an internet browser. At least 18 open tabs, 3 of them are frozen, and I have no clue where the music is coming from. 

Are you thinking like a golfer?

Bad shot? We tell ourselves it has to be the balls or the clubs, which is why we’ll purchase a dozen balls for $50 despite knowing we’re likely to lose at least two or three a round because we’re not as good as we think we are, or we’ll spend thousands on irons because we believe they will make our shots travel longer and straighter without the required practice time. Poor drive? Has to be the driver, which is why we’ll spend hundreds to replace the one we purchased the year before.

Jim Trotter

Self-preservation

When you prioritize self-preservation above all else, it pleases no one. If you try so hard to split the middle, you’ll have diluted any sign of genuine conviction or commitment.

Shadi Hamid

Divination 

Jesus often uses the metaphor of a wedding to describe what God is doing—preparing and drawing us toward deeper intimacy, belonging, and union. The Eastern Fathers of the Church affirmed this belief; they called it the process of “divinization” (theosis). They saw it as the whole point of the incarnation and the very meaning of salvation. The much more practical and rational church in the West seldom used the word divinization. It was just too daring for us, despite the rather direct teachings from Peter (1 Peter 1:4–5; 2 Peter 1:4) and Jesus in John’s Gospel: “I pray not only for them, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, so that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us, that the world may believe that you sent me” (John 17:20–21).

Richard Rohr

Calendar

The calendar in the Hebrew Bible, the calendar Jesus lived by, told a Story. In fact the calendar preaches. It proclaims(ed) the mighty acts of grace by Yahweh. It is a God filled, grace saturated story of life under God. So we read about the festivals Sabbath, Passover, Tabernacles, Weeks, Purim and Hanukkah.  The festivals tell the Story of God:

– God creates the world [Sabbath],
– God delivered by grace Israel [Sabbath and Passover],
– God walks with Israel in the wilderness [Tabernacles],
– God provides food and gives torah [Weeks/Pentecost],
– God protects from annihilation [Purim],
– God redeems his temple [Hanukkah].

Bobby Valentine

Where are 85 + year old people living?

…roughly half of the 5.9 million Americans age 85 and older are living with family, including spouses and adult children, while more than 40 percent live alone, including in independent living or assisted-living facilities. A quarter live in multigenerational households, with people of two or more generations under the same roof, and about 8 percent live in nursing homes or memory care facilities.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2023/where-do-americans-live-after-85-look-inside-homes-11-seniors/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most

Christmas

Christmas isn’t about coming to Bethlehem and to find Jesus. Christmas is about a God who came to Bethlehem to find us. Christmas celebrates the outrageous gospel message that God has come into our world. This God we have been looking for has come to our world looking for us.  Christ, in our world, looking for us. Christmas is about a God who pursues His children. 

So, if God won’t stay where we put Him, do we have any idea where He might be?

You don’t know? We’ve been singing it for weeks now.

“And His name shall be called Emmanuel, which means, “God with us.”

Christmas isn’t about where Jesus was, but where He is. Immanuel. God with us. Merry Christmas. 

Mike Glenn

Ifs

There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause: – through infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless faith, adolescence’s doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally.

—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

Technology

Technology is, by nature, mono-dimensional. It functions to advance efficiency and productivity. It optimizes. That is its reason for existence. When considering innovation, we implicitly ask, “Can technology do this better?” Increasingly, the answer is “yes.”

Kevin Brown

Awe

Awe is more than an emotion; it is a way of understanding, insight into a meaning greater than ourselves. The beginning of awe is wonder, and the beginning of wisdom is awe.

Awe is an intuition for the dignity of all things, a realization that things not only are what they are but also stand, however remotely, for something supreme. Awe is a sense for the … mystery beyond all things. It enables us … to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple; to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal. What we cannot comprehend by analysis, we become aware of in awe. 

Faith is not belief, an assent to a proposition; faith is attachment to transcendence, to the meaning beyond the mystery. 

Knowledge is fostered by curiosity; wisdom is fostered by awe. Awe precedes faith; it is the root of faith. We must be guided by awe to be worthy of faith.

Theologian Bruce Epperly

Concert as Worship

Can attending a Beyoncé concert be a religious experience? To that, his answer is a resounding yes — or perhaps a loud amen. It’s certainly true that the modern concert, which gathers like-minded acolytes in an enclosed physical space to, quite often, experience something close to spiritual rapture, has no more obvious analogue than a church service.

We might sometimes forget that “sanctuary” has at least two meanings in a religious context: a sacred, consecrated place, and also a place of safety and refuge. The conversation around this year’s big concert tours has largely focused on the difficulty of accessing them — the expensive admission, the elusive tickets. But as Dyson reminds us, once we make it to them, concerts can provide rare spaces that allow us to feel truly welcome as we are, and part of a community much larger than ourselves . NYT

Sharing beliefs

I have had to stand before crowds for years and describe what I thought I believed, and then I often had to ask myself, “Do I really believe that myself?” And in my attempt to communicate it, I usually found that I’d only scratched the surface of understanding. In sharing, in giving it away, you really own it for yourself and appreciate more fully its value, beyond what you ever imagined.

Richard Rohr

View from the lanai

Waiting

At the start of the spiritual journey waiting on God is experienced as frustrating and alienating. God seems uncaring, passive, and delaying. There are severe temptations here. Waiting can sour into disillusionment and disillusionment can curdle into unbelief. 

But as you spiritually mature, waiting is transformed into deep soul work. You come to realize you’ve spent most of your time waiting on some good outcome to transpire. Waiting on God to “do something.” You slowly come to see that you’ve never really been waiting for God. You’ve been waiting for some favor or blessing, but not for God himself. 

I’ve waited for this or that, but I haven’t waited for you. 

Richard Beck

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

  My tolerance for idiots is extremely low these days. I used to have some immunity built up, but obviously, there’s a new strain out there.

We become what we see

pornographic gaze vs sacramental gaze 

This vision is “sacramental” as we come to behold invisible, spiritual truths shining though material reality. Proper Christian vision participates in a “sacramental ontology,” where we see a world “charged with the grandeur of God.” The sacramental gaze creates a sacred encounter. To see with the eyes of the heart incarnates a relation of love. 

The pornographic gaze is greedy, consumptive, and objectifying. The pornographic gaze is iconoclastic perception, a form of perceptual violence, as it rips the sacred from the material. In the thought of Martin Buber, the pornographic gaze creates an objectifying and deadening I-It relation with the world.  By contrast, the sacramental gaze beholds an I-Thou relation, a meeting with a holy other. 

to “make a covenant with my eyes” is, rather, learning to envision the world correctly, rejecting an I-It relation for an I-Thou relation, as we gaze at each other. In rejecting the pornographic gaze in favor of the sacramental gaze, we come to see the world with the eyes of our heart.

I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people, Ephesians 1:18

http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2022/08/a-covenant-with-my-eyes-part-3-seeing.html

The Presence of God

Adapted from Walter Brueggemann’s description of Freedom, 

Living Toward a Vision page 41 

There is something hidden and mysterious about the Presence of God. It is like manna in that it is always a gift given, and never a product controlled and understood. Like manna, it is not something that cam be stored up and taken for granted, because then it turns sour and we don’t have it anymore. It states the heart of our faith and our greatest temptation.  : Yet at the same time those who do not care for, nurture, and celebrate God’s Presence when it is given are likely not to enjoy it very long. 

Avoiding Death

When we avoid thoughts of death, we unconsciously assume that tomorrow will look a lot like today, so we can do tomorrow what we could do today. But when we focus on death, that increases the stakes at play in the present, and clarifies what we should do with our time.

If you insist on ignoring your own demise, you are likely to make decisions that cause you to sleepwalk through life. You may not be dead yet, but you’re not fully alive either.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/05/death-memento-mori-happiness/674158/

Is pluralism a Christian ethic ?

Pluralists seek to replace the demonizing, demeaning and dividing ethos with one that encourages respect, relationships and cooperation. Pluralists believe that people’s identities are complex and shifting, that most human beings shouldn’t be divided into good/evil categories, that we become wise as we enter into many different points of view. Patel says that universities shouldn’t be battlefields but potluck dinners, where all guests bring their own cuisines to the common table.

David Brooks

Prayer is the work

…the battle is fought in prayer. We don’t pray for the battle. Prayer is the battle. Prayer is the place where justification and sanctification happen., An old preacher told me once that he really began to understand “justification” when he was working construction one summer.  As he would place a stud in the wall of the home they were building, either he or his partner would have to step off and hold up a plum line to make sure the stud was straight. One day, he said, he finally understood this was what the Spirit was doing to him in prayer. The Spirit would hold up the plum line of Christ against his life and then hammer him straight in the places he didn’t line up with Jesus. 

When we leave our prayers, we should be totally aligned with what God is doing in us and through us. You can’t do that in a few minutes a day. That takes a while.

Mike Glenn

Love your enemies

…brain scans show how powerfully social identity can shape our emotional response to situations. …

For example, if someone sees a comrade in pain — a fellow member of one’s group — the brain will react with empathy. “My brain would simulate the suffering of the other person by reactivating how I feel when I am feeling bad,” Klimecki explains.

But, instead, if it is an adversary experiencing pain, not only is the same empathetic region of the brain not as active, she says, “we also sometimes see more activation related to schadenfreude or malicious joy.”

Olga Klimecki, a neurology researcher, via Scot Mknight

the biggest threat to faith

“clean hands and a pure heart” Ps 24

…the biggest threat to faith in the modern world is what I call “the mystical-to-moral shift.” We believe that goodness is the goal of faith, rather than seeking God. This moralization and politicization of faith, given how politics is increasingly becoming an arena of moral identity and performance, instrumentalizes God and the life of faith. God becomes a tool to become good, faith an instrument for a political agenda, church a technique for moral self-improvement. 

Phrased differently, God is perceived as means and goodness as the end. We believe in God, go to church, pray, read our Bibles, follow the Golden Rule all in order to become a good person, increasingly a politically inflected vision of a good person.

This instrumentalizing of faith undermines faith because, as we all know, you can be good without God. And you don’t need to believe in God to vote well. There are many non-religious ways to become a good person or subscribe to the proper politics. And if you don’t need God, faith or church to be good, well, what’s the point? If you can get to the end by other means, God, as a moral or political tool, can be left behind. 

Richard Beck

Islamification of the faith

Islamification of the faith. I have written before of the influence of Islam on the notion of Sola Scriptura. Christianity, viewed as essentially an act of submission to God through Christ, is not Christianity. It is a Christianized Islam. It’s useful. It need have none of the problems concomitant with a genuine historical Church. It is quite portable and can be kept entirely private, offering no disturbance to the structures and agreements of the secular world. Individual Christians are never a problem for the world. It’s only when two or three of them gather together that they become dangerous.

Fr Stephen Freeman

Faith

“faith.” We often assume that the Greek word pistis means something thin, as in “belief.” To have “faith” is to “believe.”

But pistis (faith) means something much more than “belief.” Pistis is better translated as fidelity, faithfulness, loyalty, and allegiance. To have faith means to keep faith — to hold fast, to endure, to remain, to stay, to never falter or betray. Faith is an inseverable bond. An unbreakable promise. An unshakable commitment. An unwavering loyalty. Faith is courage, endurance, and steely resolve. Faith is the blood of the martyrs.

Another way to think about this, especially faith-as-allegiance, is that, in the Biblical imagination, there is no space for free moral agency. Every space has a Power or a Lord. The only option before you, therefore, is to whom you will swear allegiance. As Bob Dylan sang, “You’ve gotta serve somebody.”

This is why the opposite of faith isn’t “unbelief” but idolatry — betraying your love, breaking your promise, serving another lord. And again, the issue of idolatry isn’t here a mental game, a game of “believing” in this or that. Idolatry, says the theologian William Cavanaugh, is less about your metaphysical or ontological beliefs than a lifestyle that betrays your fundamental allegiances:  

Richard Beck

Only in kentucky

…state law allows for secret recordings as long as one party is aware of it …

Compassionate Heart
– definition: A person who is standing in snow with the temperature at 12 degrees who feels compassion for those who are in Florida standing in the rain with the temperature at 35 degrees. 

Tradition

Our humanity is a tradition. I can only learn what it is to be a human being from another human being, someone who has successfully fulfilled that reality. Animals are no different. Birds do not suddenly fly – their flight is traditioned to them. Human beings learn to walk in a traditioned manner as well. Your computer or your phone will not teach you how to be a human being.

Fr Stephen Freeman 

Seduction of Crowds

the seduction of crowds is a hunger for transcendence. Getting swept up in a group can be ecstatic, temporarily filling the hole in your soul. But such transcendence is temporary, addictive, and prone to corruption. Belonging to the group becomes more important than the reason the group was created in the first place. 

Jonah Goldberg

View from the front porch

Happy Thanksgiving

Gratitude

Anne Lamott writes of the exponential flow of gratitude in our lives:

Saying and meaning “Thanks” leads to a crazy thought: What more can I give? We take the action first, by giving—and then the insight follows, that this fills us. Sin is not the adult bookstore on the corner. It is the hard heart, the lack of generosity, and all the isms, racism and sexism and so forth. But is there a crack where a ribbon of light might get in, might sneak past all the roadblocks and piles of stones, mental and emotional and cultural?…

How can something so simple be so profound, letting others go first, in traffic or in line at Starbucks, and even if no one cares or notices? Because for the most part, people won’t care—they’re late, they haven’t heard back from their new boyfriend, or they’re fixated on the stock market. And they won’t notice that you let them go ahead of you.

They take it as their due.

But you’ll know. And it can change your whole day, which could be a way to change your whole life. There really is only today, although luckily that is also the eternal now. And maybe one person in the car in the lane next to you or in line at the bank or at your kid’s baseball game will notice your casual generosity and will be touched, lifted, encouraged—in other words, slightly changed for the better—and later will let someone else go first. And this will be quantum.

The movement of grace toward gratitude brings us from the package of self-obsessed madness to a spiritual awakening. Gratitude is peace.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY