Digital evil
My 6-year-old boy died in January. We lost him after a household accident, one likely brought on by a rare cerebral-swelling condition. Paramedics got his heart beating, but it was too late to save his brain. I could hold his hand, look at the small birthmark on it, comb his hair, and call out for him, but if he could hear me or feel me, he gave no sign. He had been a child in perpetual motion, but now we couldn’t get him to wiggle a finger.
My grief is profound, ragged, desperate. I cannot imagine how anything could feel worse.
But vaccine opponents on the internet, who somehow assumed that a COVID shot was responsible for my son’s death, thought my family’s pain was funny. “Lol. Yay for the jab. Right? Right?” wrote one person on Twitter. “Your decision to vaccinate your son resulted in his death,” wrote another. “This is all on YOU.” “Murder in the first.”
Enchantment
There has been a yearning in me that I’m only just beginning to to understand: a craving for transcendent experience, for depth, for meaning – making. : It’s not just that the world needs to change-l need to change, too. I need to soften, to let go of my tight empirical boundaries, to find a greater fluidity in my being. I’m seeking what the poet John Keats called negative capability, that intuitive mode of thought that allows us to reside in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason. The subtle magic of the world offers comfort, but I don’t know how to receive it.
Enchantment – Katherine May Pg 8
Church as family
As I’ve studied the theme of church as family in Paul’s epistles I’m unconvinced that the biblical model can work with more than 100 people at a time…and that might be stretching it…maybe we should redefine success in ministry…
Phoenix Preacher
Powerlessness
Admitting we are powerless over people, places and things, and that our lives have become unmanageable, can be one of the most difficult, yet one of the most freeing, admissions of our lives. It is usually beyond our comprehension that admitting powerlessness and unmanageability will help us find peace. For many, if not most of us, this admission implies we have given up or we are defeated. However, this is exactly what the First Step is asking us to do: admit defeat. But, we are only admitting defeat in relation to our way of doing things.
…what happens on the other side on our admission of defeat:
Admitting our powerlessness frees us to allow the One who is Power to become active in our lives. We become more open to new ways of doing things as we allow God to love us and teach us how to give and receive love. We also begin to accept people and situations as they are. As we realize we aren’t in control, but God is in control, we are more able to detach from people and situations that are unhealthy for us, and accept these the way they are. This doesn’t mean we quit caring. We care, but we don’t allow the situation to determine our thoughts, actions and feelings. We will discover, as our detachment and acceptance deepens, that we have more emotional energy to spend on ourselves and the activities we would like to do.
Catherine Chapman
Love the sinner hate the sin
…Evangelicals don’t approve of gay sexual relations. This is expected given their views that this activity is sinful. But what about the “love the sinner, hate the sin” dynamic? And let’s remember the finding from above: Evangelicals report being the most accepting of people (compared to other religious groups), even when those people are doing things they disagree with. So, do Evangelicals separate their feelings about gay behavior from their feelings about gay persons? The results from another “feeling thermometer”: Of all the religious groups Evangelicals score the lowest with the most negative feelings toward gays as people.
Richard Beck
We learn by doing it wrong
Any talk of growth, achievement, climbing, improving, and progress highly appeals to the ego. But the only way we stay on the path with any authenticity is to constantly experience our incapacity to do it, our failure at doing it. That’s what makes us, to use my language, fall upward. Otherwise, we’re really not climbing; we’re just thinking we’re climbing by saying to ourselves, “Look, I’m better today. Look, I’m holier than I was last week. Look, my prayer is improving.” That really doesn’t teach us anything or lead us anywhere new.
In contrast, it is recognizing, “Richard, you don’t know how to love at all” that keeps me on the path of love. Constant failure at loving is ironically and paradoxically what keeps us learning how to love. When we think we’re there, there’s nothing to learn.
Richard Rohr
Seeing- Stopping
The practice of Seeing…is simply a posture of social mindfulness. The practice of Seeing is paying attention to–seeing, really seeing–the person right in front of you.
Older translations of the Bible use the word “Behold” a lot. “Beholding” is deeper than mere “looking.” You can look, but not behold. The practice of Seeing is a practice of beholding others. Consider the failure of the Rich Man in the parable with the poor man Lazarus. Lazarus sits at the Rich Man’s gate begging, sores covering his body which the dogs came and licked. Though sitting at his very door, the Rich Man never sees Lazarus, never beholds him. Most of our failures to welcome others begin and end with these failures of beholding. Practices of Seeing try to bring people into view.
The practice Stopping is a variant of of the practice of Seeing. We often don’t see people because of the pace of our lives, our hurry and preoccupations. We have agendas and stuff to get done. Consequently, we tend to blow right past people. The practice of Stopping is a practice of slowing and becoming interruptible.
Richard Beck
http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2023/03/practicing-jesus-part-7-practices-of.html
Global Christianity
In his book “The Unexpected Christian Century,” Scott Sunquist notes that in 1900, about 80 percent of the world’s Christian population lived in the Western world and about 20 percent in the majority world. By 2000, only 37 percent lived in the Western world, and nearly two-thirds lived in the majority world. Sub-Saharan Africa had the most striking growth of Christianity, growing from around 9 percent Christian at the beginning of the 20th century to almost 45 percent at the end of it. There are around 685 million Christians in Africa now.
“Christianity at the beginning of the 21st century,” said George, “is the most global and most diverse and the most dispersed faith.
Statistics vary but even conservative estimates guess there were around 98 million evangelical Christians globally in 1970. Now, there are over 342 million.
The future of American Christianity is neither white evangelicalism nor white progressivism. The future of American Christianity is probably not one where white concerns and voices dominate the conversation. The future of American Christianity now appears to be a multiethnic community that is largely led by immigrants or the children of immigrants. And that reality ought to change our present conversations about religion in America.
Tish Harrison Warren NYT
A Prayer for When God Seems Absent
Oh God, comfortable would we be if You gave us formulas and answered prayers and realized hope. But You call us beyond comfort.
But God, life upends us. We face divorce or miscarriages, financial struggles or job insecurity, and the people we love are tossed about by disease or loneliness or homelessness or addiction.
We are afraid. We don’t have adequate answers. And sometimes we can’t find You.
Or, we can’t find the person we hoped You would be.
May we learn to trust that You aren’t asleep on the job. That You haven’t forgotten us. That You are as near to us as our very breath. Give us the courage to press on. To suffer with hope that You have overcome the world.
May again and again we be awed by Your presence. That even when we feel like we’ve hit rock bottom, may we recognize we have fallen into Your arms because there is no place so deep or so dark or so scary that Your presence cannot reach.
In the name of the One who can still the seas with mere words, amen.
Kate Bowler Jessica Richie
Worshipping Satan
When I make myself and my pleasure my highest value, my highest vision of the good life, then I am worshipping the devil.
I’m convinced the worship of the devil is not so obvious; it is evidenced in a heart that has made its outward priorities an inward map of their motivations, motivations clearly pointed back at one’s own care above others. I’m a big fan of self-care. But it’s not the goal; rather, it is a means to wholeness and fruitfulness for the sake of renewing our call to sonship and daughterhood in the world.
Dan Wilt
TheLost Art of Dying
I recently read The Lost Art of Dying
by L S Dugdale MD.
It seems dying should be a relevant subject, at least for elderly people, though everyone is going to die… so… However, I find it that it is seldom a topic of conversation for me and my peers, much less anyone else.
Reading The Lost Art of Dying has got me thinking more about dying (in a good way). One concept the author writes about is the idea of dying well. I want to die well, but it requires understanding and conversation, before I die – duh!.
Richard Beck comments: In the affluent West, where our culture is characterized by a “denial of death”–a culture where we like to pretend, due to modern medicine and our technological wizardry that we are immune to death–
I recommend the book and plan write about it on my blog in coming weeks. I would be glad for you to join the conversation.
STILL ON THE JOURNEY