Menu Close

“You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart — your stories, visions, memories, visions and songs. Your truth, your version of things, your own voice. That is really all you have to offer us. And that’s also why you were born.”
Anne Lamott

“You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart — your stories, visions, memories, visions and songs. Your truth, your version of things, your own voice. That is really all you have to offer us. And that’s also why you were born.”
Anne Lamott

Category: Notes Anthology

So Much To Think About

George 0 Comments

Being young is beautiful, but being old is comfortable and relaxed…one must wait until evening to see how splendid the day has been.
Mark Twain

Ghetto spirit

There is nothing whatever of the ghetto spirit in the Rule of St. Benedict. 

That is the wonderful thing about the Rule and the saint. The freshness, the liberty, the spontaneity, the broadness, the sanity and the healthiness of early Benedictine life. 

But closed in on itself, interpreting interpretations of interpretations, the monastery becomes a ghetto. Reforms that concentrate too excessively on a return to strictness do not in fact break the spell. They tend to increase the danger of spiritual suffocation. 

On the other hand, fresh air is not the air of the world. Just to break out of the ghetto and walk down the boulevard is no solution. The world has its own stink, too—perfume and corruption. 

The fresh air we need is the air of the Holy Spirit “breathing where He pleases,” which means that the windows must be open and we must expect Him to come from any direction. The error is to lock the windows and doors in order to keep the Holy Spirit within our house. The very action of locking doors and windows is fatal.

Thomas Merton

Enjoy your weekend

My great-grandparents, like many Jews of their generation, worked in the clothing factories of New York City. They were probably required to work every day except Sunday, which was the standard at the time. Jewish workers were sometimes warned that if they didn’t show up on Saturday, they wouldn’t have a job on Monday.

In 1907, another Jewish immigrant of that generation, Henry Feuerstein, saved up enough money to buy a knitting mill in Malden, Mass.

Feuerstein, who was an observant Jew, decided to do something new. He shuttered his factory on Saturdays as well as Sundays, so both Jewish and Christian workers could observe their Sabbath days. It appears to be the earliest documented instance of an American factory giving its workers what is now the standard weekend.

The idea spread slowly. In 1922, there were still only about 70 factories in the country that offered a five-day workweek, according to a survey by a Princeton economist. Most of them were textile firms in New York with heavily Jewish labor forces. By then, however, workers in other industries, including coal miners and autoworkers, were also demanding a five-day week. The eventual success of that effort is commemorated by a popular bumper sticker: “The Labor Movement: The Folks Who Brought You The Weekend.”

Feuerstein’s role is largely forgotten, but it shouldn’t be.

The union movement is now starting to push for a four-day week. The autoworkers picketing factories across America aren’t just demanding higher pay from the Big Three automakers. They want a full paycheck for a four-day, 32-hour week.

It’s a great idea. As I wrote in a piece making the case that a four-day week should become the new standard, “Americans spend too much time on the job. A shorter workweek would be better for our health, better for our families and better for our employers, who would reap the benefits of a more motivated and better-rested work force.”

Happy Monday. Wouldn’t it be nice if today were the third day of the weekend?

Read the essay here.

Good works

Good works are a command of God; they are the duty of the grateful; they need to be present for sanctification; they flow out of justification and regeneration; they witness to and demonstration justification/redemption; they witness to the believer of her and his redemption; they edify others, and they witness to nonbelievers about the gospel; ultimately, they glorify God.

Scot McKnight  https://scotmcknight.substack.com/p/evangelicalism-has-a-systemic-problem

Beauty

what draws us to the good is that it is also eternal beauty. God himself is beauty, that is, and in the end, for Christians, we are joined to him in seeking the beautiful as he has taught us to recognize it in Christ, and in therefore seeking in every circumstance, however unanticipated, to express that beauty always anew, in ever more novel variations on that original “theme”—that unique and irresistibly attractive manner

David Bentley Hart 

Artful living

the moral life is like learning to play an instrument, creative artistry is built upon a foundation of technical skill. Consequently, our early lessons are going to be rote and rudimentary. But the goal with advancing skill is the ability to perform creatively and beautifully in ways that surpass mere technical proficiency.  All this is a part of what the Greeks meant by arete, the word we translate as virtue. For the Greeks, arete has an aesthetic aspect. Virtuous living is “artful” living.   

Richard Beck

Salvation

Salvation is much more than a heavenly reward or the deliverance from hell. Rather, salvation is the transformation of the whole person and their ultimate transfiguration into the image of Christ. Salvation is becoming eternally and truly what we were created to be – the very image of God.

Fr Stephen Freeman

Good and Bad

Merton claims that the devil doesn’t always turn people conspicuously sinister, sometimes he just turns us blindingly righteous, which frankly is more effective and also more dangerous.

It’s a sneaky, twisted little business this whole battle between good and evil thing. Because the fact is, atrocities are more often perpetuated by those who are dazzlingly certain of their cause’s righteousness than by like, Bond villains who just love evil and want to see it spread. Maybe we are all at much higher risk of harming ourselves and other people when we are certain we are acting out of our virtues than we ever are when we are for sure acting out our vices. I mean, you know how the police station has a vice squad?   I’m like, where’s the virtue squad?

Don’t mistake me, I’m not being an abject relativist here – I do believe that pure good and pure evil exist, I just don’t believe that humans are as good at knowing the difference as we think we are.

What I am trying to say is that if I want to stand on the side of righteousness, if I want to stand against evil maybe the best way to do that is to remain sufficiently suspicious of my virtues.

Nadia Boltz-Weber

Violence

Violence, as expressed most often with weapons, is an idol that makes us god. It derives from fear and a desire to protect power and what we deem ours and our privilege. Violence dehumanizes others. America as empire joins a long history of nations becoming self-idols.

Scot McKnight

Apology

View from the Front Porch

I was deeply gratified when a friend and neighbor asked to sit on our front porch to study. I had no imagination for what a sacred place our front porch would become when we moved to Wilmore sixteen years ago. It is truly a “thin” place.

In the midst of life, we “practice the presence of God” by listening and speaking to him in every circumstance. Spiritual formation happens through a life of contemplation. In the midst of our daily activities, we ponder and meditate on God’s words and works. We talk to him in prayer. We listen, we question, we complain. We give thanks, make requests, and express our doubts. We study, analyze, and consider how to apply his teachings. We walk or sit silently with him and enjoy his presence. For a believer the veil between this world and the “heavenly places” is thin and there is constant interaction between the two realms.

iMonk

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

So Much To Think About

George 1 Comment

Why is there a ‘D’ in fridge, but not in refrigerator? 

Nobody is wrong 100% of the time. Always look for the nugget of truth in those you disagree with.Nobody is right 100% of the time. Always look for the faults and mistakes in those you agree with.
Mark Manson

one of my favorite Billy Connolly gags: “Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you’re a mile away — and you’ve got their shoes.”

Scot McKnight

Relevance

As we’ve all come to see, the hunger for continued relevance is the corroding lust that devours the very old.

David Brooks

Colorado football

In The Washington Post, Rick Reilly, a native of Boulder, Colo., and a graduate of the University of Colorado, exulted in the early-season promise of its football team, the Buffaloes, by noting their awful past. “A couple of years ago, a buddy said he left two Buffs tickets on his desk at work and somebody broke in overnight and left two more,” he wrote, going on to note that Colorado lost to Minnesota by 42 points in 2022. “Most schools could start the faculty against Minnesota and not lose by 42 points.” Part of the problem, he suggested, is how inhospitably monoracial Boulder, where the university is, can feel to Black players: “We are whiter than Tucker Carlson eating a Wonder Bread mayonnaise sandwich at Cracker Barrel.”

Kindness

For years I’ve kept posted on the back of my office door a journal entry from one of my students. The student wrote:


I once encountered a woman in Walgreen’s who I swear changed my life.  I was there buying some film for my 35mm and maybe some lip gloss, just normal Walgreen’s stuff;  she was working at the cosmetic counter.  When I gave her my things, she looked at them and said, ‘I think I have a coupon for both of those,’ reached under the counter, and pulled up this lunch bag full of coupons in little baggies.  I asked her why she has so many coupons and what she was doing with them (out of curiosity) and she said she cuts them out of coupon books and keeps them under her counter to give people she checks out.  ‘Times are hard,’ was her only explanation, ‘and all we can do in this world is help each other.’


What the basic postures of kindness do, it seems to me, are to situate ourselves along with the grain of the universe: life teaches us that all is gift, all is grace. None of us are self-sufficient. None of us are “self-made men” or “self-made women.” Indeed, times are always, in some way or the other, hard. Such is life. To practice kindness is to acknowledge all these realities, and is a sweet salve, easing life’s daily challenges and hardships

Lee Camp

Listening

Listening well is not simply hearing the words being said, it’s also feeling the emotions being felt. People usually don’t want solutions as much as they just want to be understood.

Mark Manson

Loneliness 

Loneliness crushes the soul, but researchers are finding it does far more damage than that. It is linked to strokes, heart disease, dementia, inflammation and suicide; it breaks the heart literally as well as figuratively.

Loneliness is as deadly as smoking 15 cigarettes a day and more lethal than consuming six alcoholic drinks a day, according to the surgeon general of the United States, Dr. Vivek Murthy. Loneliness is more dangerous for health than obesity, he says — and, alas, we have been growing more lonely. A majority of Americans now report experiencing loneliness, based on a widely used scale that asks questions such as whether people lack companionship or feel left out.

Nick  Kristof

The wrongness of being right

Truth matters. I want to be clear that I believe that. But knowing truth, and being wise about when kindness and mercy matter more than correcting theological error or ignorance, is an important skill to hone. Because I want to be right. I want to fix you so much it’s literally painful at times. I’m a sick, sick puppy who’s not near as smart as he thinks he is. But I’m learning that the need to be right on every little thing—even when it comes from noble intentions—obliterates my ability to speak the ultimate Truth. 

Chad West

Modernity

According to Charles Taylor, the modern “secular age” lives in the “immanent frame,” a disenchanted culture that has lost touch with transcendent sources of meaning. We’ve lost the metaphysical framework that tells us who we are and where we are going.

The modern person is abandoned, therefore, to their choices, radically free to make decisions and chart a direction in life but without a map or any compelling reason to navigate in a particular direction. There is no “point” to anything, just you and your choices. Any meaning or telos for your life is the one you choose for yourself. There is no grand narrative or plotline you’re being caught up in. Life is, rather, a Choose-Your-Own adventure novel.

Richard Beck

Individualized Christians

For Christians this individualized concept of the self undermines many of the primary realities of the faith. The Church cannot be rightly understood as a voluntary association. We are Baptized “into the Body of Christ.” The modern concept of the individual runs deeply contrary to Scriptural teaching on the nature of the Christian life. The sacraments, whose foundations rest within a world in which true communion and participation are possible, become more and more foreign to the individualized Christian experience. The sacraments are either deeply minimized (even to the point of extinction) or re-interpreted in voluntaristic terms. It is this re-interpretation of the sacraments that undergirds the modern notion of “open communion,” or “Eucharistic hospitality.” The exclusion of persons from the Cup of Christ is seen as an insult, a denial of their self-defined Christian identification. I have been told, “Who are you to say that I should not be allowed to come to communion?” However, “Individual communion” is an oxymoron.

Fr Stephen Freeman

View from the Front Porch

Echo chamber

A whole lot of us go through life assuming that we are basically right , basically all the time , about basically everything : about our political and intellectual convictions , our religious and moral beliefs , our assessment of other people , our memories , our grasp of facts . As absurd as it sounds when we stop to think about it , our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to omniscient .

Schulz, Kathryn. Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error

The unrelenting pursuit of rightness pitted against our incontrovertible fallibility is a paradox each of us find ourselves in as we strive for meaningful and authentic lives. Amazingly, left to our own devices, rightness will almost always win out.
Our desire for rightness leads us to echo chambers where our “rightness” is amplified and error is filtered out. Like a butterfly from a cocoon, we emerge in the beauty of our rightness, confirmed in our infallibility.

The cost of rightness can be high.
The avoidance of controversial issues or alternative solutions creates a loss of individual creativity, uniqueness and independent thinking. Rightness binds and blinds us. An “illusion of invulnerability” (an inflated certainty of our rightness) can prevail. Stereotyping of, and dehumanizing actions toward, dissenting persons can develop. As true believers we can produce fantasies that don’t match reality. Interpersonal communication outside our echo chamber is stifled. Immersion in the comfortable confines of an echo chamber may result in significant losses, not the least of which, can be family and community relationships.Echo chambers reinforce our natural tendency to restrict our relationships rather than expand our social interactions.
Residing within an echo chamber strips our lives of serendipity and wonder. We trade off the opportunity to engage the endless diversity of the world around us.
https://www.georgeezell.com/2021/02/the-importance-of-being-wrong/

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

So Much To Think About

George 1 Comment

There is no such thing as a grouchy old person. The truth is that once you get old, you stop being polite and start being honest.

Aging America

America may still think of itself as a young nation, but as a society, it is growing old. Thanks to falling birthrates, longer life expectancy and the graying of the baby boomer cohort, our society is being transformed. This is a demographic change that will affect every part of society. Already, in about half the country, there are more people dying than being born, even as more Americans are living into their 80s, 90s and beyond. In 2020 the share of people 65 or older reached 17 percent, according to the Census Bureau. By 2034, there will be more Americans past retirement age than there are children.
NYT

Departure – Why I left the Church

Most Christians don’t want their thinking challenged. They come to church to reinforce what they’ve believed their entire lives. From their perspective, the job of the pastor is not to push them to grow, but to reassure them that they are already on the right track. Any learning should support the party line and comfort them that their investment of resources in the church will result in a payoff somewhere down the line, particularly once they reach the afterlife.
Alexander Lang

https://www.restorativefaith.org/post/departure-why-i-left-the-church?fbclid=IwAR29GufA13Oa7x1xqb7KHbiGkg4JGut-_SjPuJqVxxMFG10Vtzv9jC_VVrw

–

Communion

…sacraments, then, are not discrete actions of the Church designed to enhance our spiritual experience: they are revelations of the way of life. For in every case, the sacraments are the life of communion, whether Ordination or Eucharist, Baptism, Chrismation, Matrimony, etc. It is for this reason that we can observe that “the whole creation is a sacrament.
Communion is not a quality or an activity of life – it is the very essence of life – it’s sine qua non. 

Fr Stephen Freeman

The questions have changed

Sam Allberry commented to Russell  Moore regarding how questions people ask have changed in the past several decades. Referring to Jesus’ encounter with the a demon possessed man. “Thirty years ago, upon hearing Jesus had sent demons into a herd of pigs, people would ask, ‘Do you believe demons exist?’. Today the question would be ‘How could Jesus do that to those pigs?’

Religious History

My reading of American religious history is that religion always functions best from the margins of society and not in the councils of power. Once you identify the faith with a particular candidate or party or with the quest for political influence, ultimately it is the faith that suffers.

Randy Balmer

Curiosity

Curiosity cures: anxiety, ignorance, selfishness, extremism.

Curiosity creates: empathy, compassion, knowledge, growth.

Curiosity prevents: arrogance, judgment, stagnation.

Practice curiosity.

Mark Manson

Horizons

“The hard thing to do when you get old is to keep your horizons open,” the theologian and civil-rights hero Howard Thurman once wrote. “The first part of your life everything is in front of you, all your potential and promise. But over the years, you make decisions; you carve yourself into a given shape. Then the challenge is to keep discovering the green growing edge.”

Seeing

O my heavenly Mother, open Your eye in my soul, so that I may see what is what–so that I may see who is dwelling in my soul and what sort of fruits are growing in her.

Without Your eye I wander hopelessly through my soul like a wayfarer in the night, in the night’s indistinguishable gloom. And the wayfarer in the night falls and picks himself up, and what he encounters along the way he calls “events.”

You are the only event of my life, O lamp of my soul. When a child scurries to the arms of his mother, events do not exist for him. When a bride races to meet her bridegroom, she does not see the flowers in the meadow, nor does she hear the rumbling of the storm, nor does she smell the fragrance of the cypresses or sense the mood of the wild animals–she sees only the face of her bridegroom; she hears only the music from his lips; she smells only his soul. When love goes to meet love, no events befall it. Time and space make way for love.
https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/glory2godforallthings/2023/08/24/love-has-no-history-2/

True or false

One must not be too quickly preoccupied with professing definitively what is true and what is false. Not that true and false do not matter. But if at every instant one wants to grasp the whole and perfect truth of a situation, particularly a concrete and limited situation in history or in politics, one only deceives and blinds himself. Such judgments are only rarely and fleetingly possible, and sometimes, when we think we see what is most significant, it has very little meaning at all.

Thomas Merton

View from the Front Porch

Labor Day brings the start of a new semester at Asbury Theological Seminary. I look forward to new people making their way to seminary along our street. There is opportunity to engage in conversation, perhaps friendships will be formed. Sacred experiences, Jesus is often revealed in unexpected ways through an earnest disciple.
If I had to describe my encounters in one word, it would be: communion.