For the Joy of the Journey

A Few Thoughts

George January 28, 2025 Notes Anthology 0 Comments

When Christianity is assumed to be an “answer” that
makes the world intelligible, it reflects an
accommodated church committed to assuring
Christians that the way things are is the way things
have to be.
Stanley Hauerwas

Their Stuff/My stuff

it’s easy to see our partner’s crap, all the ways they drive us crazy. It’s much more difficult for me to look at my own stuff, my own reactivity, and my own childhood experiences which wired me to react in certain ways in given dynamics.

It’s hard, she says, “for me to study my own reactivity.” In the midst of being annoyed with one we love, it’s hard to ask ourselves, “What was it about me?”

Dr. Alexandra Solomon via NSE notebook

When a person believes that he or she possesses eternal truth, there’s a temptation to believe that he or she is entitled to rule.

David French

“When you worship power, compassion and mercy will look like sins.”

Benjamin Cremer, a Wesleyan pastor

Doing it right

We don’t come to God by doing it right. Please believe me on this. We come to God by doing it wrong. Any guide of souls knows this to be true. If we come to God by being perfect, no one is going to come to God. This absolutely levels the playing field. Our failures open our hearts of stone and move our rigid mind space toward understanding and patience. It’s in doing it wrong, making mistakes, being rejected, and experiencing pain that we are led to total reliance upon God. I wish it weren’t true, but all I know at this point in my journey is that?God has let me do just about everything wrong, so I could fully experience how God can do everything so utterly right.

Richard Rohr

Shalom.

Of course it means peace.
But shalom is a word that overflows the boundaries of its own letters and irrigates other words.
Wellbeing. Harmony. Justice. Fruitfulness. Righteousness. Welcome. Union. And yes, Peace.
For all who, today as every day, long for shalom, in our heart, community, and world, this is a good prayer:

“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you believe in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”

Jim Gordon

Jesus’ tool box

..one of the best tools in the toolbox of Jesus. Tell ‘em a story, a riddle, invite curiosity and imagination, and let’s see what becomes of a world like that. If Jesus wanted to be crystal clear, he would have written a book of philosophy, like Aristotle. Instead, he told stories.

Scot McKnight

Gentle Parenting

In neglecting the dark corners of a child’s soul, gentle parenting does children a disservice. For the fact is that most children know that they’re sometimes bad, and that they sometimes do things out of malice, spite, and greed. Gentle parents are right: shame and guilt are negative feelings which may cause “trauma” for the child, as for the adult. No kidding. But the job of the parent is not to prevent any potential “trauma”, it is to love the child even when they are bad, and to punish them, and most importantly to forgive them. A child can’t understand the lightness of forgiveness without understanding first that one needs it. (I often wonder if the parents also want to avoid the “trauma” of guilt and shame, and so never acknowledge their own reasons for doing the things we do, such as becoming parenting “philosophy” consumers out of vanity, pride, or sloth. We may one day have good reason to ask forgiveness from our kids.)

https://unherd.com/2024/12/the-cruelty-of-gentle-parenting/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

ARCHIE UPDATE

Momma Gabby:
1 month (and some days) of Archie ? it’s been a big month for our tiny warrior! He graduated to a lesser vent which lets Kyle and I hold him and he is up to 2lbs and 8oz now! Please pray for continued growth, his care team, and for Kyle and I as we navigate this season of life. All Glory and Praise to our Father for this precious blessing!

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

THE CHURCH – Losing the Battle for Attention (part 1)

George January 23, 2025 THE CHURCH 0 Comments

In January 2024 I contended the church is winning the battle for attention; a success which is taking the church in a wrong direction. If you have not read that post, you can find it HERE.
This post, intended as a follow up, has been a draft for many months. Primarily and ironically it languished because, sadly, the previous post did not garner much attention.
Prompted by a recent article [You’re Being Alienated From Your Own Attention : Every single aspect of human life is being reoriented around the pursuit of attention. By Chris Hayes] I went back and re-read my post in light of Hayes’ article. IMHO that post was pretty darn good.

Before you can persuade, you must capture attention: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears!” Before you inform, insult, or seduce, you must make sure that your voice doesn’t end up in the muted background static that is 99.9 percent of speech directed our way. Public discourse is now a war of all against all for attention. Commerce is a war for attention. Social life is a war for attention. Parenting is a war for attention. And we are all feeling battle weary. ¹

Some possible reasons why it didn’t get more attention…

The title “The Church and the Battle for Attention” wasn’t very seductive. Perhaps something like : ” The Battle of Armageddon Rages” or “Satan Invades the Church” would have gotten attention.
The post was more than 244 characters and had links to other articles requiring additional investment of time and attention. In a society where less than half of young Americans read a book nearly every day and ‘70% say they use Facebook daily (including 45% who do so several times a day), a significant increase from the 63% who visited daily in August 2013.’ it should be no surprise a longer post about the church and attention is a snoozer.
Related to above, decreased attention span. The average adult internet user’s attention span is 8.25 seconds, influenced by the increasing distractions on the internet, social media, and the environment. ²
The subject requires thoughtful reflection and analysis, questioning assumptions and beliefs, and seeking out new information and perspectives. In other words, effort. Competition for your attention is fierce.
We resist coercion…If someone puts a gun to your head and tells you to dig a ditch, you know you are being coerced. If someone fires a gun in the air, your attention will instantly shift to the sound even before you can fully grasp what’s happening. ³

If you have gotten this far, thank you. I hope I’ve gotten your attention enough you will read the first post and the Chris Hayes article. Preparation for: THE CHURCH- Losing the Battle for Attention (part 2).

Questions to be addressed :
Why is it important that churches lose the battle for attention?
How can churches abandon the battle for attention and be successful ?

STIIL ON THE JOURNEY

1
Chris Hayes
2
Attention span, the length of time a person can concentrate on a single task, activity, or stimulus, is a crucial aspect of cognitive functioning. It influences how we learn, work, and interact with our surroundings. This article sheds light on the average human attention span statistics and facts, illustrating how attention varies among individuals and changes over time.https://www.sambarecovery.com/rehab-blog/average-human-attention-span-statistics
3
Chris Hayes

A Few Thoughts

George January 22, 2025 Notes Anthology 0 Comments

Experience is something you don’t get until just after you need it.

Loving Enemies

Our enemies always carry our own shadow side, the things we don’t like about ourselves. We will never face our own shadow until we embrace those who threaten us (as Francis of Assisi embraced the leper in his conversion experience). The people who turn us off usually do so because they carry our own faults in some form.?

Richard Rohr

Chiasms

Chiasms are a kind of mirror-image parallelism, using repetition to trace an idea. They litter the Old Testament and the New; once you start seeing them, you can’t stop.

A modern example of a short chiasm would be If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Jesus makes a pithy chiastic statement in Mark 2:27: “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”

If we focus just on our abilities and responsibilities, we see only gains in the first half of the chiasm of life and only parallel losses in the second. In a culture that values youth and vigor, we risk losing sight of what we learn over the years: wisdom. The wisdom of aging means that even as our bodies increasingly fail us, our internal lives grow richer and steadier. Bodies decline, but people develop.

Parenting

Christopher Lasch: “The school, the helping professions, and the peer group have taken over most of the family’s functions, and many parents have cooperated with this invasion of the family in the hope of presenting themselves to their children strictly as older friends and companions.”

Parents have bought into the illusion that if they do not direct and guide their children, then their children will make free individual choices — and then, if things go wrong, at least they won’t be able to blame Mom and Dad.

Awe- inspiring

Something must have come over me, says Kohei Ohmori, reflecting on the 280 hours or roughly 5 months spent drawing a hyper realistic composition of a metallic bolt and nut using just pencils.

Salt

Salt doesn’t exist to preserve itself; it exists to preserve what is not itself…. Salt is meant to enhance, not dominate. Christian saltiness heals; it doesn’t wound. It purifies; it doesn’t desiccate. It softens; it doesn’t destroy….

One of the great tragedies of historic Christianity has been its failure to understand this distinction. Salt fails when it dominates. Instead of eliciting goodness, it destroys the rich potential all around it. Salt poured out without discretion leaves a burnt, bitter sensation in its wake. It ruins what it tries to enhance. It repels.

Debbie Thomas

Reading

According to the neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, so-called deep reading—sustained immersion in a text—stimulates a number of valuable mental habits, including critical thinking and self-reflection, in ways that skimming or reading in short bursts does not.

Tucker Carlson

“If running for office can encourage you to imagine millions of supporters [who don’t exist], hosting a show can entirely separate you from reality,” he observed. “If you’re not careful, you can permanently lose all critical distance from yourself. One morning you wake up, and you’re living in your own irony-free world.”

The Danger

“The danger,” the Jewish mystic Simone Weil wrote, “is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry.”

NICU UPDATE

Archie Scott Gabehart

Now 2 lbs.–

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

A Few Thoughts

George January 17, 2025 Notes Anthology 0 Comments

Why do men relish control so much? There are a number of ways to answer this question, but certainly the sense of having agency in the world, of being able to have an impact on our surroundings, of being able to see that we make a difference in the world—all of these can help explain why we like and want control.

Perhaps the above explains my ill-advised attempt to create a Billy Bob Thornton persona … Unfortunately Ann doesn’t think much of Billy Bob Thornton.

Self Control

Self-control is a Fruit of the Spirit, which means that we depend upon God’s grace to receive it, but we can’t be passive. Self-control is a discipline, too. It is a muscle we exercise or we don’t. We each have an obligation to mortify our flesh and resist sinful temptation in all forms. Given the powerful currents of our society, we must be intentional about practicing self-denial. Chastity is a virtue, even (especially?) in marriage. A beautiful marriage does not mean you will have all your sexual desires fulfilled. You won’t. You will have to practice self-control. Over and over again.

https://newsletter.oalannoble.com/p/self-control-and-scandals

Contemplation

Contemplation waits for the moments, creates the moments, where all can be a silent prayer. It refuses the very distinction between action and stillness. Contemplation is essentially nondual consciousness that overcomes the gaps between me and God, outer and inner, either and or, me and you.

The reason why the true contemplative-in-action is still somewhat rare is that most of us, even and most especially in religion, are experts in dualistic thinking. And then we try to use this limited thinking tool for prayer, problems, and relationships. It cannot get us very far. The irony of ego “consciousness” is that it always excludes and eliminates the unconscious—which means it is actually not conscious at all! Ego insists on knowing and being certain; it refuses all unknowing. Most people who think they are fully conscious (read, “smart”) have a leaden manhole cover over their unconscious. It gives them control but seldom compassion or wisdom.

Richard Rohr

Celebrity

there is a mania loose in our society where so many people are pursuing celebrity rather than artistry. In other words, they want to be famous for doing nothing. Reality TV and social media have encouraged people to strive, not for greatness, but for recognition. They will even settle for notoriety, engaging in the most cruel, inhumane, and self-degrading behavior just to have people recognize them on the street. It doesn’t matter why they recognize them, only that they do.

There’s a difference between fame and accomplishment, between celebrity and artistry. For me, fame, celebrity, and recognition should be something earned through passion, hard work, practice, and commitment. I have no beef with reality shows or social media millionaires who unbox stuff—they can be very entertaining—but those people should never be equated with those who actually produce something worthwhile.

The reason we are so quick to bestow celebrity onto so many people who do so little is that it keeps the hope alive in all people that anyone can become famous just by doing outrageous stuff that goes viral and gets clicks and followers. Everyone can’t write a Bob Dylan song or paint a Matisse or write a Maya Angelou poem—but they can rant about conspiracies or eat disgusting things. All with the sad subtext of: Please notice me!

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Theological Differences

…the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) wanted to add the song “In Christ Alone” to their hymnal Glory to God. They asked the authors of the hymn if they could change the original lyric “Till on that cross as Jesus died / the wrath of God was satisfied” to “Till on that cross as Jesus died / the love of God was magnified.”

…we can see why evangelical and progressive Christians experience mutual incomprehension when they encounter each other. They come from very different theological worlds.

Ricard Beck

Bad Data and its Consequences.

One consequence of looking at the wrong data to understand the shape of a problem is that data always hints at the solution.

For example, during the Vietnam War, U.S. military leaders measured “success” in the conflict using the same metric they used in World Wars I and II: body count—the number of enemy combatants killed. The assumption was that higher body counts equated to progress toward victory.

But the Vietnam War wasn’t a war of attrition. It was a war for public opinion. As a result, strategies were developed to maximize body counts, often at the expense of what truly mattered: winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese and beyond. Villages were bombed, civilians were displaced, and atrocities like the My Lai Massacre occurred. In the end, the focus on this narrow, incomplete metric contributed to widespread disillusionment, both domestically and abroad, and the eventual failure of U.S. efforts in Vietnam.

When Christian thought leaders look at the data available to them to understand the problems facing Christianity and to uncover solutions, they make a similar mistake. Here is the data set most leaders are using to make decisions:

67% of the U.S. population self-identifies as Christian, which equates to around 224 million people. This is down from 95% of Americans who identified as Christian in the 1950’s.

Source: GovInfo – Percentage of Christians in the U.S.

However, there is a catastrophic problem with this data.

Surveys that rely on self-reported faith and church attendance are notoriously unreliable as indicators of actual religious engagement. Recent studies have demonstrated that conventional surveys significantly overestimate both church attendance and religious adherence due to respondent bias.

Based on my own experience, when people find out I’m Catholic, due to knowing only Catholics in name only, they often expect me to fit this stereotype.

I consistently disappoint.

The idea behind this data is that church attendance and self-reported affiliation are considered the primary indicators of faithfulness. Thus, if you can win on these two metrics, you win the war. In other words, they think that Christianity is in a war of attrition with modernity. When someone gets baptized or says the salvation prayer, they think, “We got another one! Move them across the ledger!” This is precisely the wrong way to think about religious adherence, and its byproduct is a tremendous amount of time, effort, and energy wasted.

That’s because we misunderstand the war we’re fighting. We are not in a battle of attrition with modernity where individuals move across the “self-identification line” and are “on our team now.” Instead, We’re fighting a war of FORMATION with the modern culture. Each side forms its adherent’s behavior in this war to reflect its deeply held beliefs.

Admittedly, this is an oversimplification. However, to draw a clear contrast between Christianity and prevailing cultural trends, it helps to examine how belief systems manifest in measurable life outcomes. Two competing worldviews are at play here, each shaping behavior and priorities in radically different ways.

ARCHIE update

Wonderful news. He is making progress. Gabby is permitted to hold him. He has gained weight. Prayers continue. Still a long road ahead. Wait for him to wake up on the video.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

Dying Well…between now and dead…

George January 16, 2025 Dying Well 1 Comment

…the analytic mind bypasses a broad set of moral, spiritual, and philosophical questions about what it means to be a human, and merely dissects and corrects. However, what if we began with questions about what it means to die well?
_{Kevin Brown}

A question DR. Laura¹ often asks her callers , “..what do you want your life to look like between now and dead?”

Answers to the question define for a responder what it means to die well. Consider a few responses to “How do you want to live the final 10 years of your life? from Quora:

…do whatever I damn well please.

…travel the whole world and meet new aquaintances

…try to be helpful and/or make someone’s day a bit better

…walk in nature every day for at least 2 hours.
live in a beautiful village that has a fresh market two to three times a week.
In the afternoon — around the hour of apero — I’ll have a drink and a cigarette.
read, write and listen to music — A LOT.
be very very slim — like I am now.
do tai chi and stretching exercises in the morning sun.
have a fireplace.
host people on my property — whether it be friends or travellers.

…About the same way I’ve been doing it.
I’m poor, so there is no travel, no vacations, no bucket list for me. I’d keep living my life, day to day, minute by minute. I’d spend time with my sister.

…I am very happy with the way my life is going, I don’t have anything on any “bucket list” to accomplish. I’m retired, living in a paid for home, have adequate retirement income, and I am debt free. 10 more years of what I am doing now would be enough to keep me happy.

…Attend Shows the impersonation of Elvis, Enjoy a beautiful sunset on the beach, accompanied by a Cold Beer, Brass wind music, Good seafood and the Mother of My Sons and Daugther. Thanking God for so many blessings received throughout my life.

…remaining life I want to live for other people who needs any sort of help, by free teaching, looking after who are patients, needy and poor people. To solve the problems by my life experience. Also all types of charity work. My aim is some one should get benefited from my soul.

“NOW” between now and death is the the occasion of an “existential slap”² that awakens us to our mortality.

I propose that “existential slap” initiates “second half” ³ life.

Life’s second half is characterized by:
… a time to discover the meaning of life
… a time to let go of the ego and find a deeper sense of self
…a time to live in the present moment without tension or judgment
…a time to find a deeper purpose for life
…a time to find a more spacious, vibrant sense of self ¹

Dying well is a second half endeavor. Our concern is not so much to have what you love anymore, but to love what you have—right now.

We are a “first-half-of-life culture,” largely concerned about surviving successfully. : establishing an identity, a home, relationships, friends, community, security, and building a proper platform for our only life.

You cannot walk the second journey with first journey tools. You need a whole new tool kit.
Understanding and applying those tools is the task of dying well.

Dying well is meeting death fully human.

Life is learning to die in order to be born again. The creature participates in using their death to become a human being. To be clear, this isn’t a stoical acceptance of death as the cessation and end of life, a materialistic, nihilistic vision of “dying well.” We are describing death as birth-pangs, as moving toward mystical union with God. Again, death is being used as a tool. The soul is perfected and purified as it moves through this world of contingency, full of suffering and tribulation. The soul experiences this life as a birthing, as labor pains in a process of sanctification.
We die to arrive as human beings.
_{Richard Beck}

Answers to “..what do you want your life to look like between now and dead?” reveal how we intend to use of our dying. Do we double down on a materialistic, nihilistic vision like most of the Quora responses?; or, do we seek to be more fully human, moving toward mystical union with God?

Take time to ponder your answers.
I have chosen to pursue the latter — but questions remain…

What are tools for second journey?
What does it mean to be fully human ?
Is seeking to be more fully human, moving toward mystical union with God consistent with prevailing concepts of discipleship? If so, how? If not, Why?

STIIL ON THE JOURNEY.

Richard Rohr ↩︎

1
…one of the most popular talk show hosts in radio history, Dr. Laura Schlessinger offers no-nonsense advice infused with a strong sense of ethics, accountability, and personal responsibility; she’s been doing it successfully for more than 30 years, reaching millions of listeners weekly.
2
“existential slap” —that moment when a [dying] person first comprehends, on a gut level, that death is close. For many, the realization comes suddenly: “The usual habit of allowing thoughts of death to remain in the background is now impossible,” . “Death can no longer be denied.”¹
3
According to Father Richard Rohr, the second half of life is a time to discover the meaning of life and to live in the present moment. It’s a time to let go of the ego and to find a deeper sense of self.