Bed ridden and dying last November, Landon Saunders was asked “ Do you have any fear knowing your death is immanent?
In reply, he said “ If I am honest I am a little afraid of the dying process, but I wouldn’t mind missing the next election.”
Deconstructors
What we are seeing in the deconstructors at the heart of our study is not that they left the faith or left the church altogether, but that they left that church to find Jesus move clearly in another place, or church. What they did was not deconstruct the faith. They are shedding beliefs that have “barnacled” themselves to evangelicalism in a way that makes them central and necessary. The deconstructors went through pain, turmoil, and the realization that they might lose friends and their stabilizing community in order to maintain their integrity about what it means to follow Jesus. There are too many for whom “deconstruction” means shedding elements of cultural evangelicalism. Let’s listen to them.
Scot McKnight
https://scotmcknight.substack.com/p/what-are-they-deconstructing
Divided
David Zahl cites in his 2019 book Seculosity, fewer than 10 percent of American parents in the 1950s would have objected to their child marrying someone from another political party. In 2010, that number surged to nearly 40 percent. Today, entire church congregations are turning over, resorting themselves according to shared political ideals.
Remembering your reading
If we can’t remember the things we’ve read and watched and even loved, do they still “count”?
What does it mean for a book, a show, an experience to “count,” anyway? Do you need to be able to recall the plot in detail? Should you be able to describe scenes or bits of dialogue, larger themes, cultural relevance? Or is it enough to just remember enjoying a book, or to be able to conjure a feeling it inspired? I was mulling these questions when I came across this essay by James Collinsfrom 2010. In it, he describes books that he loved about which he remembers nothing: “All I associate with them is an atmosphere and a stray image or two, like memories of trips I took as a child.”
Collins suspected, as I do, that the books he can’t remember must have had an effect on his brain anyway, that the experience of reading and engaging with the texts must have changed him in some deeper way, leaving “a kind of mental radiation — that continues to affect me even if I can’t detect it.” I want to believe that my immersion in the fascinating characters and rich plot of “Creation Lake” by Rachel Kushner are performing some kind of alchemy in my brain even if — and it seems unthinkable, halfway through the book — I am likely to forget it all.
Maryanne Wolf, a neuroscientist, confirmed for Collins that inability to recall a book’s details shouldn’t be taken as evidence that we didn’t assimilate it in some way. “We can’t retrieve the specifics, but to adapt a phrase of William James’s, there is a wraith of memory,” she told him. “The information you get from a book is stored in networks. We have an extraordinary capacity for storage, and much more is there than you realize. It is in some way working on you even though you aren’t thinking about it.”
Melissa Kirsch NYT
17th-century genius Thomas Browne: “Let age, not envy, draw wrinkles on thy cheeks.”
Envy
Envy is the dominant destructive emotion in most people. It’s a tricky emotion in that it can be both healing and lethal. A small dose can motivate a person to excel, but a large dose can lead a person to hop on an endless treadmill of chasing what they can never catch. It’s an addiction that only increasing amounts can satisfy and even then the satisfaction is fleeting and the hunger returns.
Kareem Abdul Jabbar
College Education
no college education is complete unless it trains students to ask the right questions about the relationship between their empirically based studies of the world around them and larger transcendent principles – including principles about God, the meaning of virtue, and the basis for objective truth.
If students don’t ask these questions, they’ll likely graduate from college with some excellent skills, but without the framework that equips them for a meaningful life. But if they do ask these questions, they will not only have the tools to see the connections between everything that they have learned but they will also gain the ability to apply that knowledge for something more meaningful than merely a personally enjoyable or financially lucrative career.
https://theraisedhand.substack.com/p/looking-beyond-career-skills-what
Using what we have
We often tell Jesus what we would do if we had a million dollars, but most don’t have a million dollars. Most of us do have a twenty in our pocket. Perhaps Jesus is interested in what we’ll do with the twenty we do have rather than the millions we don’t.
Mike Glenn
Given the choice of this moment or eternity,
every holy moment
let me choose in this moment what is eternal.
Given the choice of this easy pleasure,
or the harder road of the cross,
give me grace to choose to follow you,
knowing that there is nowhere
apart from your presence
where I might find the peace I long for,
no lasting satisfaction
apart from your reclamation of my heart.
Living as a Mystic
You don’t have to enter a monastery to be a mystic. You don’t have to renounce chocolate or forsake pop culture. It is not necessary to take formal vows and beat yourself up when you inevitably fail to uphold them. These are static notions of what it means to be committed to the life of the soul, and they probably have almost nothing to do with the warm and spicy sprawl of your days. To be a mystic in our times is not about renunciation; it is about intention.
Living as a mystic means orienting the whole of yourself toward the sacred. It’s a matter of purposely looking through the lens of love. Contemporary wise woman Anne Lamott says (quoting Father Ed, the priest who helped Bill Wilson start up Alcoholics Anonymous) that “sometimes Heaven is just a new pair of glasses.” [1] You know what it looks like when you wipe a lens clean of smears and dust. And you also know how it feels to bump into the furniture when your vision is fuzzy. When you say yes to cultivating a mystical gaze, the ordinary world becomes more luminous, imbued with flashes of beauty and moments of meaning. The universe responds to your willingness to behold the holy by revealing almost everything as holy. A plate of rice and beans, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, your new baby, the latest political scoundrel, the scary diagnosis, the restless nights.
You can start right here, in the middle of your messy life. Your beautiful, imperfect, perfect life. There is no other time, and the exact place you find yourself is the best place to enter. Despite what they might have taught you at Bible Camp or in yoga class, you are probably not on your way to some immaculate state in which you will eventually be calm and kindly enough to be worthy of a direct encounter with the divine. Set your intention to uncover the jewels buried in the heart of what already is. Choose to see the face of God in the face of the bus driver and the moody teenager, in peeling a tangerine or feeding the cat. Decide. Mean it. Open your heart, and then do everything you can to keep it open. Light every candle in the room….
Mirabai Starr via CAC.org
We are STUPID!
Prov. 12: 15 Stupid people always think they are right. Wise people listen to advice. (GNT)
Wise people are really aware of how often they are wrong. Even when they are right they feel a sense of wrong.
Stupid people always think they are right. They never have to justify their actions. They never have to justify their choices because they think they’re right. If you are always right you’re not always right, you’re always stupid.
By choosing to listen you begin to attack the stupidity in your life. Wise people listen to counsel. You never get so wise that you do not need advise.
Stupid people think that wise people don’t need advise. And that’s why they are stupid. Wise people need less advice and want it more. Wise people need less advice and seek it more. Stupid people need more advice and seek it less.
Here’s how to know where you fall on the spectrum of stupid or wise. If you are asking people for counsel and input in your life you are wise. If you are looking for people that agree with you, you are being stupid. Ironically, stupid people always pretend they are getting advice.
Erwin McManus
Being a Christian
To be a Christian in the proper sense, to worship God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is to acknowledge that our life does not have its source in ourselves, but in God. Living by this, moment by moment, is what it means to have a true and authentic existence – to be truly human.
Fr Stephen Freeman
Reverberation from the Echo Chamber
…an unfortunate and largely unintended consequence of the rise of social
media is that instead of being better informed and exposed to ever-broadening viewpoints, research shows that Americans today are more polarized and draw from shrinking pools of news.
R. Sunstein
Over the past decade or more, government and society in general has become more polarized. People’s ability (willingness) to communicate with those who do not share views/beliefs has become endanger. There is general agreement echo chambers are a significant factor contributing to the state our society.
Technology has unleashed the malevolent potential of echo chambers in ways never imagined.
Echo chambers are ubiquitous. Social media, news outlets, blog feeds, churches, families, neighborhoods, communities. If there is a context where differences exists, a “safe room” (echo chamber) will emerge and like-minded people will seek refuge.
Echo chambers are personally relevant. Recognizing I was residing in a self imposed political/social echo chamber, I made a decision to dampen the echoes and open myself to different sources.
Those efforts met with mixed success. The likelihood of trading one echo chamber for another is real. The decision became a catalyst for more serious thought and investigation into the character and nature of echo chambers. The Echo Chambers essay is an
attempt to share questions, ideas and issues encountered related to echo chambers.
Echo Chambers – an impetus for evil.
The poor in spirit do not commit evil. Evil is not committed by people who feel uncertain about their righteousness, who question their own motives, who
worry about betraying themselves.
The evil in this world is committed by the spiritual fat cats, by the Pharisees of our own day, the self-righteous who think they are without sin in because they are unwilling to suffer the discomfort of significant self-examination.
The major threats to our survival no longer stem from nature without but from our own human nature within. It is our carelessness, our hostilities, our selfishness and pride and willful ignorance that endanger the world.
Unless we can now tame and transmute the potential for evil in the human soul, we shall be lost. How can we do this unless we are willing to look at our own evil ?
M. Scott Peck – People of the Lie
[“Reverberation from the Echo Chamber” ; excerpts from an essay entitled “Echo Chambers” written in 2018. You can read the complete essay HERE.]
STILL ON THE JOURNEY