Category: Notes Anthology

Enchantment

… enchantment is “seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them.” Enchantment isn’t “escaping” the “real world” into a “fantasy world.” Enchantment is seeing a better world and then returning with a prophetic rebuke. Reconciling oneself to the “real world”–refusing to visit the land of Faërie–is tantamount to the prisoner refusing to escape his cell.

To borrow the phrase of Walter Brueggemann, enchantment is a “prophetic imagination.” Faërie is the vision of the New Heavens and the New Earth, the world set free from the consequences of the Fall.

Richard Beck

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Closeness

…we long for closeness that is deeper than getting everything right all the time. “Getting it right” never meets our deep need to relax into the arms of a loved one. because the real way we keep closeness is not by performing but by expressing our needs and receiving a caring response” We all need someone who races toward us and embraces us before we even have the chance to explain ourselves.
Attachment to God

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Right Answers
If we’ve dealt with suffering we see in the world by coming up with cause-and-effect systems of theology, then we will cling to those systems to avoid the more difficult questions, for instance, we may think those experiencing heartbreaking poverty are simply experiencing the consequences of their actions. When we believe everyone’s quality of life is the result only of their own choices, it’s easier to turn a blind eye to suffering.
We’ve quelled our anxiety by having all the right answers, so we have to hold a rigid way of approaching the world and our faith. The moment our “right answers” come under scrutiny, our anxiety rises-and then often anger comes. Maybe you’ve been a part of a religious community like this, where asking questions is experienced as a threat, evoking fear and anxiety followed by anger and suppression.
Attachment to God

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Theology that prevents lament:
In a sermon, [Billy]Graham said the gospel is like this: a father asked his son to fetch some wood from the shed for their stove. The son, whose nose was in a book, didn’t respond. The father then became enraged, giving an ultimatum that his son could either obey or leave the house, The son chose the latter, slamming the door on his way out. A fortnight later, the son returned, pleading to be forgiven. The father “softened for a moment. Then he grew stern and, pointing to the woodshed, said, ‘Son, that same stick is in the woodshed. Get it, bring it in, put it on the fire, and you can come in.’
This is drastically different from the father who decides to gift his estate, even when the son is impudent. In Jesus’s story be father never asks the son to leave.
Attachment to God

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Yearning
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

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The Everyday Person
It was a long time before it occurred to me that the whole system might just have been designed for men — the kind who had their meals cooked for them and their children quietly removed from their company so that they could pursue their lofty spiritual goals. I thought back to my training and remembered our teacher telling us how he’d left his wife and children to go to India to study with the Maharishi. He learned a lot about himself there, he said. He sat alone in a cave for months and wrestled with hisoul. It was hard, but ultimately worth it. He could never have made such breakthroughs without giving meditation is full commitment. Next to me, a woman raised her hand.
“How did your wife manage?” she asked. “Well, I’m sure it was tough for her,” he said. “Buthe knew it was important to me.’
I’m ashamed now that I didn’t see it: the patriarchal way that we frame spiritual development, the way that men get enlightenment and women get to look after them as they do so, all the while getting mocked for the compromised practices they create in the scraps of time that remain.
I appreciate the value of the monastic tradition, and I understand that some insights can come only from true solitude but I also see very clearly how it prizes masculine knowledge over feminine, diminishing the wisdom of those of us who by necessity are anchored to the everyday.
Enchantment

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Fire
We have not understood this earth’s full potency until we have recognised fire. Too often, we have allowed ourselves to believe that we can live whole lives in the absence of suffering. We are told that uniform happiness is the only desirable experience. But this in itself is a disenchantment. Fire brings us back into contact with the cycle of life, with the limits of our control, and with the full spectrum of human feeling. It teaches us hard lessons and burns through our fragile illusions. Without it, we are living only a surface existence, a shallow terrain. We must assimilate fire to become whole again.
Enchantment

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Play
play is absolute. play is the complete absorption in something that doesn’t matter to the external world, but which matters completely to you. It’s an immersion in your own interests that becomes a feeling in itself, a potent emotion, play is a disappearance into a space of our choosing, invisible to those outside the game, It is the pursuit of pure flow, a sandbox mind in which we can test new thoughts, new selves. It’s a form of symbolic a way to transpose one reality onto another and living, a way to transpose mine it for meaning, play is a form of enchantment.
Enchantment

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Community life
“…community life – care for one another-is built on friction, on sticky and inefficient relationships. Community is also under assault because we’ve outsourced care. As Peter Block and John McKnight argue in their book, The Abundant Community, a lot of the roles that used to be done in community have migrated to the marketplace or the state. Mental well-being is now job of the therapist. Physical health is now the Job of the hospital. Education is the job of the school system.
The problem with systems, Block and McKnight argue, is that everything has to be standardized. Everything has to follow rules. “The purpose of management is to create a world that is repeatable, “they write. But people are never the same.
When there is a loss of care, a neighborhood becomes fragile and so do the people in it. The people are still there but the fluid of trust in which they were suspended has been drained away. If things go bad they have fewer people to turn to. They yearn for a sense of belonging.
Care has been replaced by distance and distrust.
The Second Mountain

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Ethic of Jesus

“…the scriptures are essentially a manual for suckers. The teachings of Jesus have ‘gotten us nothing.” – DJT, Jr

…the ethic of Jesus has gotten in the way of successfully prosecuting the culture wars against the left. If the ethic of Jesus encourages sensibilities that might cause people in politics to act a little less brutally, a bit more civilly, with a touch more grace? Then it needs to go. Decency is for suckers.

• unreligious cruelty toward immigrants, 
• selfish refusal to vaccinate to protect the most vulnerable 
• veneration of a vulgar, misogynistic cult leader. 

If you wonder how so many “people of faith” can behave in such ways, understand that their “faith” has become hostile to traditional religious values such as kindness, empathy, self-restraint, grace, honesty and humility.

Peter Wehner

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Wisdom

Maybe what we lack isn’t love but wisdom. It became clear to me that I should pray above all else for wisdom.

We all want to love, but as a rule we don’t know how to love rightly. How should we love so that life will really come from it? I believe that what we all need is wisdom. I’m very disappointed that we in the Church have passed on so little wisdom. Often the only thing we’ve taught people is to think that they’re right—or that they’re wrong. We’ve either mandated things or forbidden them. But we haven’t helped people to enter upon the narrow and dangerous path of true wisdom. On wisdom’s path we take the risk of making mistakes. On this path we take the risk of being wrong. That’s how wisdom is gained.

Richard Rohr

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Social media

Krista Boan: We hear from families that technology is the No. 1 battleground in their homes. Qustodio, a leader in online safety, recently released its annual report and found that 70 percent of parents assert that screens and technology are now a distraction from family time and device use causes weekly or daily arguments in nearly 50 percent of households. A big new study from Cambridge University, in which researchers looked at 84,000 people of all ages, found that social media use was strongly associated with worse mental health during certain sensitive life periods, including for girls ages 11 to 13. Compared with their counterparts in the 2000s, today’s teens are less likely to go out with their friends, get their driver’s licenses or play youth sports.

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Purity

Our purity systems, even those established with the best of intentions, do not make us holy. They only create insiders and outsiders. They are mechanisms for delivering our drug of choice: self-righteousness, as juice from the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil runs down our chins. And these purity systems affect far more than our relationship to sex and booze: they show up in political ideology, in the way people shame each other on social media, in the way we obsess about “eating clean.” Purity most often leads to pride or to despair, not holiness. Because holiness is about union with, and purity is about separation from….  

Nadia Bolz-Weber

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Finding truth

“The process by which we find truth is maybe the most important thing. It takes work to locate, and often as soon as we think we have grasp it comma it slips away. Truth is not a script. It is not a cheat sheet for life. Truth does not come from picking a set of answers and then arranging all the questions so that they line up correctly. Truth starts with questions, it requires an openness – to other points of view and experiences, to being wrong, to changing one’s mind. A commitment to truth involves A passionate embrace of critical thinking.”

Jon Ward 

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Presented without comment

Abraham Twerski:

The bearded Twerski goes to the airport in his Hasidic garb — the hat, the long coat, the buttoned white shirt. Another Jew, this one modernly dressed, is annoyed by Twerski and unloads on him: “What’s wrong with you? Must you insist on parading around in that medieval get-up as if it were Purim? Don’t you realize how ridiculous you look? You bring nothing but scorn and embarrassment upon us Jews!”

After letting the angry man continue for a while, Twerski says, “I fail to understand what thee art saying. You do realize that I’m Amish, don’t you?”

The modern Jew’s anger quickly turns to embarrassment. “Oh, I beg your pardon,” he says apologetically. “I didn’t realize that you were Amish. You look so much like those Hasidic fellows. You should know that I have nothing but respect for you and your people — keeping to your ways without bowing to society’s wills and whims.”

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Belonging 

Most Americans report significant feelings of non-belonging. As the report notes, “64 percent of Americans reported non-belonging in the workplace, 68 percent in the nation and 74 percent in their local community.” Even worse, “nearly 20 percent of Americans failed to report an active sense of belonging in any of the life settings,” 
Belonging Barometer

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Tithing

The study released last week by Lifeway Research, a firm affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, found that 77% of Protestant churchgoers in the U.S. affirm that “tithing is a biblical command that still applies today.” Only 10% rejected this belief and another 13% were unsure.

Yet, the study found that only 12% of Methodist churchgoers tithe; 17% of Restorationist/Church of Christ churchgoers tithe; and 19% of Lutheran churchgoers tithe. Lutherans were also most likely to reject the notion of tithing, with 59% saying they don’t embrace the teaching. 

 Evangelical beliefs in tithing have declined by 6% since 2017, according to the online survey—and also varied by age. Only 66% of respondents aged 18 to 34 affirmed that tithing is currently applicable, the lowest of any demographic group.

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Faith

Faith is not something we are trying to do well or to somehow get right. It is rather an immersive participation in the very life of God—on earth as it is in heaven. To be full of faith is to be infused by the life of God in such a way that crucifies our old sin-sick life and reveals our resurrected life in Jesus Christ, filled by the Holy Spirit, to live the glorious life human beings were originally intended to live. All along, from the very first day to the present day, from first to last, we were intended to live by faith.

J D Walt

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STILL ON THE JOURNEY

Remembering

God never called us to Make Yesterday Great Again. But he does call us to remember. 

The word “remember” is used in Scripture more than 150 times. When the Bible speaks about remembering, the kind of memory to which it most frequently refers is akin to muscle memory. When you jump on a bike after not riding for years, and your mind and body instantly recall how to balance and pedal as if you’d just done so yesterday, you’re tapping into the way in which we are invited to remember.

The active, present, and all-encompassing nature of remembering in the Bible is captured in the core realities that God remembers his covenant with his people and God expects his people to remember and do what God has commanded. Remembering is a function of a relationship. When we remember Jesus through wine and bread shared together at the table, we are invited to experience it as though we are sitting with him at the final meal he shared with his friends. The Bible doesn’t invite us to recall a set of data points about Jesus when we come to the communion table but to participate with him who is Immanuel, God with us here and now. 

https://www.fathommag.com/stories/noxious-nostalgia

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Briar patch?

In the most famous Uncle Remus story—one that appears in countless versions in cultures around the world, including one from the Apache involving their trickster hero, Coyote—the malicious Br’er Fox makes a doll out of tar (the “tar baby”) and places it in Br’er Rabbit’s path. Br’er Rabbit becomes offended when the creature doesn’t respond to his friendly greeting and lashes out at it, only to find himself stuck to it—and the more he struggles the more firmly stuck he becomes. Then, entangled and exhausted, he is at Br’er Fox’s mercy. And this is when he makes one final plea to his tormentor: Do anything to me, he says, but don’t throw me in that briar patch. Anything but that. Naturally, Br’er Fox, mean creature that he is and nemesis to the rabbit, tosses him right into the briar patch—which is just what enables the victim to detach himself from the tar baby. So Br’er Rabbit taunts Br’er Fox: This might be a place of pain to other animals, but I was born and bred in the briar patch!

An affirmative disposition toward all obstacles—this is the blues idiom in a phrase. Resistance and affliction as the necessary engines of creativity.

Here is where Cosmos Murray comes to our aid. What it contributes is the idea of “an affirmative disposition towards all obstacles,” specifically because obstacles are occasions for improvisation—occasions for living with style, making artful living from the unpromising materials of pain. You can think yourself mistreated, think yourself the object of scorn, and become “the lamenting, protesting, perpetually pissed-off rebel”—the course taken by so many white Christians online—or you can strive to cultivate a “resilience that is geared to spontaneous exploration, experimentation, inventiveness, and perpetual readjustment.” If you take the latter course, then the world can become your briar patch too: Every way that you are thwarted, every obstacle that prevents you continuing in your old familiar habits, can become an occasion for “spontaneous exploration,” for doing old things in a new way—for, in short, living by faith rather than by your own sense of entitled comfort. And if you do that, then even in dark days you have a pretty fair chance of letting the good times roll.
https://comment.org/the-blues-idiom-at-church/

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Sunbelt Nation

The Brookings Institution demographer William Frey has noted that in 1920, the Northeast and the Midwest accounted for 60 percent of America’s population. A century later, the Sunbelt accounts for 62 percent of the nation’s population. These days we are mostly a Sunbelt nation.

David Brooks

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Evangelical Moderates

“the evangelical moderate” and the moderate was not an activist on the racial divide. Here are his words to sum up the moderate: “although earlier fundamentalists might have been more explicitly and unashamedly open with their racism, the evangelical moderate remained content to denounce only the most overt and blatant kinds of racial prejudice, to equivocate on the inevitability or necessity of segregation, to vehemently oppose “forced integration,” and to ignore, critique, or explicitly condemn the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement and its leaders.” There was no room “for systemic analyses or governmental interventions.”

Isaac B. Sharp -The Other Evangelicals

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Baby Names

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Rule of Life

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time…it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.
Annie Dillard

As Dillard says, how we spend our days will be, in the end, how we spend our lives. Intentionality, practiced through a rule of life, defends from chaos and whim, creating a net that catches our days and a lifeboat on which we find ourselves, decades later, still living. 

If you’re wondering about what a rule of life might look like, beyond fixed hour prayer practices, you might check out The Common Rule or Crafting a Rule of Life.

Richard Beck

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The Life of J D Green

“Why was I born black? It would have been better had I not been born at all. Only yesterday, my mother was sold to go to, not one of us knows where, and I am left alone, and I have no hope of seeing her again. At this moment a raven alighted on a tree over my head, and I cried, ‘Oh, Raven! if I had wings like you. I would soon find my mother and be happy again.’ Before parting she [i.e. Mother] advised me to be a good boy and she would pray for me, and I must pray for her, and hoped we might meet again in heaven, and I at once commenced to pray, to the best of my knowledge, ‘Our Father art in heaven, be Thy name, kingdom come. – Amen.’ But, at this time, words of my master obtruded into my mind that God did not care for black folks, as he did not make them, but the devil did. Then I though of the old saying amongst us, as stated by our master, that, when God was making man, He made white man out of the best clay, as potters make china, and the devil was watching, and he immediately took some black mud and made a black man, and called him a N****R.” [I have partially omitted the last offensive term].

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Dying Young

How long a person can expect to live is one of the most fundamentally revealing facts about a country, and here, in the richest country in the world, the answer is not just bleak but increasingly so. Americans are now dying younger on average than they used to, breaking from all global and historical patterns of predictable improvement. They are dying younger than in any peer countries, even accounting for the larger impact of the pandemic here. They are dying younger than in China, Cuba, the Czech Republic or Lebanon.

You may think this problem is a matter of 70-year-olds who won’t live to see 80 or perhaps about the so-called deaths of despair among white middle-aged men. These were the predominant explanations five years ago, after the country’s longevity statistics first flatlined and then took a turn for the worse — alone among wealthy nations in the modern history of the world.

But increasingly the American mortality anomaly, which is still growing, is explained not by the middle-aged or elderly but by the deaths of children and teenagers. One in 25 American 5-year-olds now won’t live to see 40, a death rate about four times as high as in other wealthy nations. And although the spike in death rates among the young has been dramatic since the beginning of the pandemic, little of the impact is from Covid-19. Over three pandemic years, Covid-19 was responsible for just 2 percent of American pediatric and juvenile deaths.

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STILL ON THE JOURNEY