“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
Reminded that autumn is officially (meteorologically) here, today is a repost of thoughts from several years ago, even truer today.
I have discovered life in autumn to be more akin to entering the wardrobe of The Lion, The witch and the Wardrobe, than a protected and cozy cocoon. Autumn is a strange and wondrous place of mystery, questions, doubts, adventure and endless possibilities.
Living in autumn is a challenge.Exhilaration and frustration constant companions. Each day is like a sunset at the end of a cloudy day, when the sun breaks through revealing unexpected and startling beauty. The desire to grasp and absorb infinite nuances of color and contrast before darkness invades is overwhelming.
Despite its brevity, sunset transforms my angst and makes impending darkness inconsequential. Assurance of a new day, another sunset, restrains despair. I hold no regrets for my life, but I can say with confidence, I have never felt more alive than now.
Hard to believe I once had a phone attached to a wall, and when it rang, I picked it up without knowing who was calling.
THREE THINGS FOR YOU TO ASK YOURSELF
Have you been approaching your relationships transactionally? (i.e., “I’ll do this for you but only if you do this for me.”)
Have you been approaching your work transactionally? (i.e., “I’ll do this just so I’ll get money/status/prestige.”)
Have you been dealing with your family transactionally? (i.e., “I sacrificed for you so now you have to do this thing for me in return.”)
If so, how’s that going for ya?
Mark Manson
Get married, be happy
The common operating assumption seems to be that professional life is at the core of life and that marriage would be something nice to add on top sometime down the road. According to an analysis of recent survey data by the University of Virginia professor Brad Wilcox, 75 percent of adults ages 18 to 40 said that making a good living was crucial to fulfillment in life while only 32 percent thought that marriage was crucial to fulfillment. In a Pew Research Center survey, 88 percent of parents said it was “extremely or very” important for their kids to be financially independent, while only 21 percent said it was “extremely or very” important for their kids to marry.
There are mountains of evidence to show that intimate relationships, not career, are at the core of life, and those intimate relationships will have a downstream effect on everything else you do.
…the University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman published a study in which he found that marriage was “the most important differentiator” between happy and unhappy people. Married people are 30 points happier than the unmarried. Income contributes to happiness, too, but not as much.
David Brooks
God as person
God expresses nothing less than God-ly feelings. David Lamb has recently written about seven of God’s emotions: yes, hatred and wrath, along with jealousy, sorrow, joy, compassion, and love. Each of these terms could be given various translations, but what needs to be seen is that God is not distant, emotion-less, unfeeling, calculating. God is a person, God has relations, God responds to us as we respond to God. That’s step one. Step two is this: We are made in God’s image. If Christ is the perfect image of God, and if Jesus is filled with empathies and compassions and tears and joys and love, then we too are emotional, feeling-shaped images of God.
The quest for power reveals more about character and sin than any measure I know. Nothing comes closer to wanting to be God than a yearning for control, to be in charge, and to eliminate anything and anyone that gets in your way. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, as a famous line goes, and the more powerful a person becomes, or even desire to become, the less that person’s morality looks like Christ. Power distorts perception, especially self-perception, and it corrupts one’s following of Jesus. Even those opposing those questing for power can be seduced into the power trap. Narcissists cannot avoid competing for power, and neither can they avoid retaliating against those who check their power. They can’t stop themselves because their aim is power.
Justice
…the word for “justice” in the Bible is the same word as “righteousness.” This overlap shows that the central concern of biblical justice was not “getting what you deserve”; rather, it was making right what was done wrong, restoring what had been destroyed, healing the wounds of an offensive act. It was about bringing balance and wholeness back to the community, which is why you often see scales as an icon for justice.
Shane Claiborne
Sinners saved by grace
…it is common to think that Christians are merely sinners saved by grace – depraved worms ever deserving of the deity’s dumpster of destruction – who are graciously granted a share in eternal life, that should not be our conclusion. Instead, we should think of ourselves as saints who sometimes sin.[2] What defines us is not who were once were apart from Jesus, but who we are being conformed to the image of the Son (Rom 8:29) and who we shall be revealed to be as the glorious children of God (Rom 8:19). That is because we are no longer who we once were, nor will we ever be that person again. That old self is dead, crucified, buried, and raised into a new person.
True, sin might nip at my heals, try draw me back to a life I left behind, but sin is no longer our true master, and sin is no longer the source of our true identity. Holiness is not simply about trying harder; yes, it takes effort, but it is more than that. It is about faith in God’s holy power, a power that makes the unclean clean, turns the profane into something sacred, calls and consecrates us into a Christ-shaped way of being human. Holiness happens when I draw myself nearer to a Holy God and God’s Spirit is drawn into my very fabric of my being. It is in communion with God that we are consecrated and committed to a holy pattern of existence that is set apart from the ways of this world.
Michael Bird
God’s presence
At the center of the prophets’ ministry is their awareness of the transcendent God who is above all things and yet within all things. God’s presence cuts across all boundaries of space and time, and there is never any place or event from which God is absent.
Richard Rohr
Why is America so mean?
David Brooks
I was recently talking with a restaurant owner who said that he has to eject a customer from his restaurant for rude or cruel behavior once a week—something that never used to happen. A head nurse at a hospital told me that many on her staff are leaving the profession because patients have become so abusive. At the far extreme of meanness, hate crimes rose in 2020 to their highest level in 12 years. Murder rates have been surging, at least until recently. Same with gun sales. Social trust is plummeting. In 2000, two-thirds of American households gave to charity; in 2018, fewer than half did. The words that define our age reek of menace: conspiracy, polarization, mass shootings, trauma, safe spaces.
The most important story about why Americans have become sad and alienated and rude, I believe, is also the simplest: We inhabit a society in which people are no longer trained in how to treat others with kindness and consideration. Our society has become one in which people feel licensed to give their selfishness free rein. The story I’m going to tell is about morals. In a healthy society, a web of institutions—families, schools, religious groups, community organizations, and workplaces—helps form people into kind and responsible citizens, the sort of people who show up for one another. We live in a society that’s terrible at moral formation.
View from the Front Porch
Good Neighbor?
I am a good neighbor. I love my neighbors.
Not so much, I do good things for my neighbors, but do I truly love them?
… how American life works in the 21st century. Contemporary America simply isn’t set up to promote mutuality, care, or common life. Rather, it is designed to maximize individual accomplishment as defined by professional and financial success. Such a system leaves precious little time or energy for forms of community that don’t contribute to one’s own professional life or, as one ages, the professional prospects of one’s children. Workism reigns in America, and because of it, community in America, religious community included, is a math problem that doesn’t add up.
Spiritual Transformation
The future is always the same as the present. That’s why we have to change the present.
We have to begin within and allow ourselves to be transformed. Then the future can be different than the present. Otherwise, we have no evidence that we’re going to do anything different tomorrow, next week, or next year.
Authentic spirituality is always on the first level about us—as individuals. It always is. We want it to be about our partners, our coworkers, or our pastors. We want to use spirituality to change other people, but true spirituality always changes us.
Richard Rohr
Aging World
By 2050, people age 65 and older will make up nearly 40 percent of the population in some parts of East Asia and Europe. That’s almost twice the share of older adults in Florida, America’s retirement capital. Extraordinary numbers of retirees will be dependent on a shrinking number of working-age people to support them.
In all of recorded history, no country has ever been as old as these nations are expected to get.
As a result, experts predict, things many wealthier countries take for granted — like pensions, retirement ages and strict immigration policies — will need overhauls to be sustainable. And today’s wealthier countries will almost inevitably make up a smaller share of global G.D.P., economists say.
…the aging of the world is a triumph of development. People are living longer, healthier lives and having fewer children as they get richer.
The opportunity for many poorer countries is enormous. When birth rates fall, countries can reap a “demographic dividend,” when a growing share of workers and few dependents fuel economic growth. Adults with smaller families have more free time for education and investing in their children. More women tend to enter the work force, compounding the economic boost.
Front porch contemplation
The real gift of contemplative practice is to be happy and content, even while we are just sitting on the porch, looking at a rock; or when we are doing the “nothingness” of prayer or benevolently gazing at anything in its ordinariness; or when we can see, accept, and say that every single act of creation is “just this” and thus allow it to work its wonder on us.
So go learn, enjoy, and rest in inner contentment and positivity—a full reservoir of fresh water, both before success and after failure. Then we have the treasure that no one can take from us or give to us. We will be ready to be captured by many moments of awe—and we will be capable of the surrender that brings both foundational union and joy.
Richard Rohr
Awe
Abraham Joshua Heschel has argued, faith is an experience of “radical amazement.” Heschel observes:
Awe enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple; to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal.
There is a mystical core at the heart of the religious life, a radical amazement, that catalyzes and sustains righteous moral action in the world.
If you’re looking for God, let wonder and awe be your guide.
Richard Beck
Looking back
In 2020 Dr. Scott Atlas, argued that the virus was not dangerous to an overwhelming majority of Americans. Both he and Dr. Bhattacharya said the Covid death rate for everyone under 70 was very low. Dr. Atlas claimed that children had “virtually zero” risk of death. Neither man responded to requests for comment.
As of this summer, more than 345,000 Americans under 70 have died of the virus, and more than 3.5 million have been hospitalized with Covid. The disease has killed nearly 2,300 children and adolescents, and nearly 200,000 have been hospitalized.
Nostalgia
C. S. Lewis noted that the one prayer that God almost never grants is “encore.” Lewis wrote that our nostalgia for the “golden moments in the past” can be nourishing and sustaining, as long as we see them for what they are—memories, not blueprints. “Properly bedded down in a past which we do not miserably try to conjure back, they will send up exquisite growths,”
Evangelicalism at its best
The insight of evangelical Christianity, at its best, is that any pilgrimage cannot start with a road map of certainty but must begin with the cry of faith that says, like the noble disciple Thomas wrongly labeled as a doubter, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” (John 14:5).
Nostalgia—especially of the sort wielded by demagogues and authoritarians—cannot protect religious faith, because it uses religion as a tool for worldly ends, leaving a spiritual void. The Christian Church still needs an organic movement of people reminding the rest of us that there’s hope for personal transformation, for the kind of crisis that leads to grace.
Russell Moore
Saved by faith
When we proclaim, as Christians, that we are “saved by faith,” we all too easily mistake this for a proclamation about what we “think.” The simple fact is that, from day to day, what we “think” about God might waver, some days bordering or even lapsing into unbelief. The same can be said of a marriage. We love our spouse, though there might well be days that we wish we weren’t married. Faith (and love) are not words that indicate perfection or the lack of failure. “Faith,” in the Biblical sense, is
perhaps better translated as “faithfulness.” Much the same can be said of love within a marriage. In both cases, it matters that we do not quit.
We cannot predict the future. The classical Western wedding vows acknowledge, “for better or worse, for richer for poorer, , in sickness and in health…” That is an honest take on life. The same is true of our life in Christ.
Modernity has nurtured the myth of progress. Whether we’re thinking of technology, our emotional well-being, or the spiritual life, we presume that general improvement is a sign of normalcy and that all things are doing well. This is odd, given the fact that aging inherently carries with it the gradual decline of health. Life is not a technological feat. It is unpredictable and surrounded by dangers – nothing about this has changed over the course of human history.
The hand of God is often “secret,” unseen both by us and by those who oppose us. The mystery of the Cross is easily the most prominent example of God’s secret hand. St. Paul said that the demonic powers had no idea that the Cross would accomplish their defeat. (1Cor. 2:7-8)
That same hand is at work in the life of every believer. Though we stumble, He remains faithful. We cling to Christ.
There is a Eucharistic promise that seems important here:
He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him. (Jn. 6:56)
Abide with Him. His secret hand will bear us up.
Fr Stephen Freeman
View from the front porch
There is the new view of our front porch. Our daughter Melissa and her husband Byron graciously gifted us with a makeover. The craftsman style columns give a much improved appearance. They worked diligently for two days. The difficult part for me was watching while they worked. But, alas that seems to be the case more and more these days. Actually it is not that bad, just takes some getting used to.
