For the Joy of the Journey

Christian Wiman

I made a new acquaintance this past week. We were introduced via a No Small Endeavor podcast. I expect we will become good friends. Consider these citations from the interview. You might decide to become his friend also.

• …when you’re facing death, there’s not much left to lose, and that opens up possibilities for intimacy, letting go of our masks or letting go of our pretense or whatever it might be. 
• Richard Wilbur has a poem where he looks at a stream, describes it through seven stanzas beautifully, and then he says, 
  ‘joy’s trick is to supply dry lips with what can cool and slake, leaving them dumbstruck also with an ache nothing can satisfy.’
• I’ve been to so many different churches and always something happens that, that I just disagree with so profoundly or often there’s a mismatch between the urgency with which I feel in my own interior communion with, and wrestling with God, and the banality of the spaces in which this is supposedly being expressed.
  And so, I’m often bored out of my skull at church, you know, and if I’m not bored, I’m often I just disagree so profoundly with what’s being said. And I also feel that most churches don’t allow for a space for how wild God could be, you know? I mean, Annie Dillard has that famous paragraph about saying that people should be wearing crash helmets in church, and, you know, lashing themselves to the pews.
• I’m not close enough to God to be angry. God is not close enough to me for me to be angry. 
• ‘Reading Pascal in Quarantine’
  I love only those who seek with lamentation.
  I love only those whose lives events some timeless entire.
  To weep is to see.
  To be is to bow.
  I love only those who know a whole new naivete.
• His book “My Bright Abyss“” is on my reading list.

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David Brooks

I also had a conversation with my friend David Brooks this week. Well, actually I read his latest NYT article “The Shock of Faith: It’s Nothing Like I Thought It Would Be” . I really did feel like we had a conversation. Here are some excerpts to whet your appetite. Maybe David could be your friend also.

• When I was an agnostic, I thought faith was primarily about belief. Being religious was about having a settled conviction that God existed and knowing that the stories in the Bible were true. I looked for books and arguments that would convince me that God was either real or not real.
• When faith finally tiptoed into my life it didn’t come through information or persuasion but, at least at first, through numinous experiences. These are the scattered moments of awe and wonder that wash over most of us unexpectedly from time to time. Looking back over the decades, I remember rare transcendent moments at the foot of a mountain in New England at dawn, at Chartres Cathedral in France, looking at images of the distant universe or of a baby in the womb. In those moments, you have a sense that you are in the presence of something overwhelming, mysterious. Time is suspended or at least blurs. One is enveloped by an enormous bliss.
• At least for me, these experiences didn’t answer questions or settle anything; on the contrary, they opened up vaster mysteries. They revealed wider dimensions of existence than I had ever imagined and aroused a desire to be opened up still further. Wonder and awe are the emotions we feel when we are in the presence of a vast something just beyond the rim of our understanding.
  In his book “My Bright Abyss,” the poet Christian Wiman writes, “Religion is not made of these moments; religion is the means of making these moments part of your life rather than merely radical intrusions so foreign and perhaps even fearsome that you can’t even acknowledge their existence afterward.”
• It hit me with the force of joy. Happiness is what we experience as we celebrate the achievements of the self — winning a prize. Joy is what we feel when we are encompassed by a presence that transcends the self. We create happiness but are seized by joy — in my case by the sensation that I had just been overwhelmed by a set of values of intoxicating spiritual beauty. Psychologists have a name for my state on that mountaintop: moral elevation. I wanted to laugh, run about, hug somebody. I was too inhibited to do any of that, of course, but I did find some happy music to listen to during my smiling walk down the mountain.
• I’ve had to keep reminding myself that faith is more like falling in love than it is like finding the answer to a complicated question. Given my overly intellectual nature, I’ve had to get my brain to take a step back. I’ve had to accept the fact that when you assent to faith, you’re assenting to putting your heart at the center of your life. The best moments are giddily romantic — when you are astounded at the great blessing of God’s love and overcome by the desire to do the things that will delight him. It’s a reminder that we’re rarely changed by learning information, but we are acquiring new loves.
• When religion is seen as belief, the believer lives on a continuum between belief and doubt. But when religion is seen as a longing, the believer lives on the continuum between intensity and apathy. That’s the continuum I live on these days. I’ve gone whole months when God may or may not have been walking beside me, but I can’t bring myself to care. Other desires, chiefly the desire for achievement and prowess, crowd out the higher desire for contact with the divine.

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OK I admit there are more than a few thoughts today, but it is important to share conversations you’ve had with good friends.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

…it is very hard to expect change from people who benefit from the system as it is. Change requires us to listen to voices outside of what has become our norm.”
Danielle Strickland

If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
Rene Descartes

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Do yourself a favor

Once we stop expecting, needing, or demanding that something or someone be perfect, we’re much happier. We’re doing ourselves and the world a favor. It’s not easy to do apart from the life and grace of God flowing through us. That’s why, for me, the notion of God as Trinity, the flow of relationship between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is so important. Without that daily flow, we get trapped in the negatives. We all do. We all will, unless we tap into the love of God flowing through us.  

Richard Rohr

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Men

·  Men are 50% more likely than women to struggle with alcohol and substance abuse.

·  “Men died of overdose at 2-3 times greater a rate than women.”

·  “Men outnumber women… about 2 to 1 among people with gambling addictions.”

·  Married men are almost twice as likely to cheat on their wives than vice versa.

·  The male suicide rate is approximately 4 times higher than the female rate.

·  Men commit 69% of violent crimes.

·  Men comprised 98% of active shooters in 2022-2023.

·  Men comprise 90% of the prison population (1,653,600 men, 174,000 women; not a typo).

·  Almost 400,000 men in the prison population are Protestant.

·  An appalling number of male pastors and ministry leaders, including 700+ SBC pastors, have sexually abused girls and women, then attempted to cover up the abuse.

It’s important to note that the above behaviors and statistics do not apply to all men! But they nevertheless provide compelling evidence that an enormous number of men engage in emotionally driven behaviors that ironically fit the Merriam-Webster definitions for irrational, illogical, and dare I say… hysterical. Yet the false belief that all women are irrational, illogical, and hysterical endures, due to its underlying premise: that women are allegedly inferior to men.

https://scotmcknight.substack.com/p/confronting-systemic-cultural-sexism

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Reading Scripture

Imagine that every time you receive the Holy Eucharist, your mind is filled with thoughts of the chemistry of bread and wine. Indeed, the thoughts become so dominant that the presence of Christ is largely forgotten. In particular, the relationship of heart to sacrament is disrupted. If, in such circumstances, someone began to absent themselves from communion, it would not be surprising.

The reading of Scripture in the life of the Church is quite properly compared to the reception of communion – for the Scriptures are best described as sacramental in nature.

If the whole time you read, the question is, “Did this happen? Did it happen like this?” etc. there is no engaging of the Scripture as Scripture. The distance between reader and text could hardly be greater.

Fr Stephen Freeman

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A dose of reality

I have had an X (formerly know as Twitter) account for several years. I do not recall ever posting to it, but regularly scrolled through to get a feel for what was going in the Twitter world. I did not find it to be particularly beneficial. in my opinion, since Elon Musk bought Twitter , the cesspool seem to descend into an even darker realm.
Discovering Bluesky, a new social media platform that presents itself as an better alternative to X, I deleted my X account and signed up for Bluesky — @grezell.bsky.social . I have no anticipation of posting on a regular basis but I am interested in seeing how it contrasts to X and follow some relevant users.

To introduce myself, I decided post a link to one of my recent posts. I usually only share my posts with subscribers to my blog, a small number of faithful readers I know and who seem to appreciate what I write. Needless to say, my post on Bluesky did not go viral, but I did one comment :

“What an absolute heaped and steaming pile of shit. The authors need to reevaluate their conscience as do anyone who agrees with this utter nonsense.”

It is hard to describe the impact that comment. It was a dose of reality on several counts:

1. Clearly my subscribers are an echo chamber. I do not get a lot of comments but they are, almost without exception, positive. My posts are generally unchallenged. As a result, agreeable comments have produced an inflated and unhealthy self-perception about my writing. Don’t get me wrong, I love positive comments. They are wonderful and a positive reason for echo chambers. The shocking negative comment I received was a reminder of the necessity of dissenting voices for a healthy echo chamber and ego.
2. The comment disabused me of any idea that there is any “safe/sane” social media platform. Living in an echo chamber creates a false notion that everyone is basically a good person. Reality is, there are mean spirited people who live for an opportunity to express their dissatisfaction in hateful and or destructive ways. Social media is a petrie dish for evil. There are positive aspects to social media but the likelihood of getting a serious infection is dangerously high and requires careful precautions.
3. Receiving that comment exposed my spiritual vulnerability. Despite my “love your enemy” conviction, my first reaction was anger and resentment followed by an impulse to retaliate — a “Nathan/David” moment. Her comment was a needed wake-up call.
4. I would have preferred some thoughtful, cogent criticism but I must say,”steaming pile of shit” and “utter nonsense” got my attention. I have re-read the post several times and continue to reassess my thoughts and conclusions. Some times you beed a slap in the face. OUCH! I struggle between dismissing the comment out of hand and deleting the post. Those are false choices. I need to reassess and, revise my post if needed
5. I have not decided to post any more on Bluesky or whether I will even keep my account. Withdrawing from social media most likely would mean seeking comfortable confines of an echo chamber. Not a bad idea. It is a lot easier to love my enemy from there and feel really good about myself and my writing.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY