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“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

Not surprising, but disappointing, I received only one response (pictured on the left)to my challenge to suggest signs you would place along your life’s road to remind you of things you know but forget. If you have not read the previous post click HERE. The challenge remains open.

Intolerance
Instead of offering rigorous and compelling arguments in defense of what we understand to be true, some simply take up the other side of the rope in a tug-of-war game of intolerance, making each side no different from the other side.
….some things are clearly and simply wrong. It takes wisdom to discern what should be tolerated and what should not. It also takes wisdom to know when to speak up and when to wait. It takes wisdom to understand when institutions are set up to perpetuate wrong rather than prevent it, to recognize when corruption is a feature, not a bug.
Karen Swallow Prior

Wisdom
The moral logic of creation becomes visible to us in the life of Jesus. Jesus is wisdom incarnate, wisdom in the flesh. To live wisely, to follow the grain of the universe, is to imitate Jesus. This changes how we might think about questions of “right versus wrong.” Is it “wrong” to build a house out of marshmallows? Well, not exactly. But it is foolish. The same goes for how you build your life. As Jesus says at the end of the Sermon on the Mount:
“Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock.” (Matthew 7:24-27)

Life is full of storms. You might be in a storm right now. Look at the choices you are making. Are you building wisely? Because you will get to where you are going.
Richard Beck

The truth will set you free, …
but first it might break your heart. We need broken-hearted people overflowing with empathy if we want to heal this country.
[Jesus talks about] peacemakers [not] peacekeepers. [Peacekeepers avoid conflict while peacemakers enter into the conflict to make peace.]
Kristen Powers

Doing Good
“We need to make the kind of society where it is easier for people to be good,” said Peter Maurin (1877–1949). [1] That is our difficulty today. We are surrounded by good, well-meaning folks who are swept along in a stream of shallow options. Not only is the good made increasingly difficult to do, it is even difficult to recognize. It seems that affluence takes away the clear awareness of what is life and what is death. I don’t think the rich are any more or less sinful than the poor; they just have many more ways to call their sin virtue. There is a definite deadening of the awareness of true good and true evil.
Richard Rohr

Prayer Life
There is a tendency, I think, to conceive of our prayer life as an effort that somehow gains us something. Like so much in our lives, we imagine prayer to belong to the realm of cause and effect. “If I do this…then this will be the result.” There is no causation in the spiritual life, at least not in any manner we can imagine. God alone is the Cause, and He “causelessly” causes – we can never truly observe His causation: it remains out-of-sight. Self-emptying is an embracing and acknowledging of the complete futility of our efforts. We cannot cause anything in our spiritual life. We cannot add a “single cubit” to our span of life; we cannot make our hair white or dark. God is the cause of our existence and is alone the source of eternal life and blessing.
Fr Stephen Freeman

Lying 
…the Fathers write about three things that are somewhat interchangeable: Goodness, Beauty, Truth.
This sense of the connection between the words we speak and the goodness, beauty and truth of the world find a connection in the simple injunction: “Do not lie.” We generally think of lying as being sinful because it has the potential to cause harm. And we thus describe certain lies as “harmless.” But there is a deeper problem with lying: it attempts to create what does not exist, or, rather, to uncreate what does. It becomes the enemy of Goodness, Beauty and Truth. We should take to heart the fact that our adversary is named the “father of lies” (Jn. 8:44).
Fr Stephen Freeman

We.. must not try to make our own imprint of God by projecting onto him conclusions about what he is like deduced from our own life experiences, conceptions, and expectations.
Greg Boyd

Resistance and Opposition
We must know the difference between resistance and opposition. Resistance to our proposal or plan of attack is most often a good thing. It helps to test, clarify, sharpen, and strengthen a plan. The sign of a mature leader is their ability to welcome resistance from others and receive influence. Opposition is a different matter. Opponents don’t usually want to test, clarify, sharpen, or strengthen. They want to advance their own course and often for their own ends. Resistance should be welcomed. Opposition must be confronted. Knowing the difference is the secret sauce of wise leadership. 
J D Walt

View from the lanai
Same sunrise. Perspective is shaped from point of view.

Still on the Journey

So Much to Think About

George 1 Comment

Progress ?
On October 22, 2020, the United States was averaging, per The New York Times, about 62,000 new COVID-19 cases, 45,700 hospitalizations, and 800 new COVID-19 deaths per day in what was the early stages of the country’s third wave that would go on to kill hundreds of thousands of people. One year later, all three of those figures are worse: 76,500, 57,700, and 1,500 as of Wednesday, respectively. 

What’s wrong with America? bottled water!
Susan McWilliams’ observation that 2006 marked a terrible turn in American civic life. That was the year when Americans started drinking bottled water more than beer. “Why is this important?” she asked. “It’s important because beer is a socially oriented beverage, and bottled water is a privately oriented one.” Beer commercials have happy fun people doing stuff together. Bottled water commercials, meanwhile, “tend to include lone individuals climbing things and running around by themselves, usually on a beach at sunrise—even though they are not being chased.”
Jonah Goldberg

Surrender
In A Return to Love, Marianne Williamson says, “Until your knees finally hit the floor, you’re just playing at life, and on some level you’re scared because you know you’re just playing. The moment of surrender is not when life is over. It’s when it begins.” [1] It is entirely cliché, but this was exactly my experience. The moment I finally let my knees hit the floor was when I finally stopped playing at life, and every bit of good that’s come to me since then stems from this reversal of opinion on surrender.
Surrender is the strongest, most subversive thing you can do in this world. It takes strength to admit you are weak, bravery to show you are vulnerable, courage to ask for help. It’s also not a one-time gig; you don’t just do it once and move on. It’s a way of existing, a balancing act. For me, it looks like this: I pick up the baton and I run as far as I can, and I hand it over when I’m out of breath. Or actually maybe it’s like: I’m running with the baton, but the Universe is holding on to the other half of it, and we have an agreement that I’ll figure out the parts I can and hand over the parts I can’t.
Holly Whitaker via Richard Rohr

How to see
At its best, Western Christianity is dynamic and outflowing. But the downside is that this entrepreneurial instinct may have caused it to be subsumed by culture instead of transforming culture at any deep level. In our arrogance and ignorance, we also totally trampled on the cultures we entered. We became a formal and efficient religion that felt that its job was to tell people what to see instead ofhow to see.
Richard Rohr

I can do nothing
I can recall years ago that in my very first confession as an Orthodox Christian, the priest told me to pray: “Apart from You, I can do nothing.” I did, but I misunderstood it for many years. My twist was quite subtle. When I prayed this I meant, “I can’t do anything without your help.” This is somehow not the same as “I can do nothing.” The first kept directing my attention to the “anything” I could do if God helped me. However, my attention needed to be on the “nothing.” It is our emptiness and failure that bring us face-to-face with our shame, and in that moment, face-to-face with the God who alone can truly cover our shame and comfort us.
Fr Stephen Freeman

Elderly
Earlier today, a friend posted on Facebook about an experience he’d just had on the Upper West Side of Manhattan: “I heard a guy who looked to be in his 20s say that it’s not a big deal cause the elderly are gonna die anyway. Then he and his friend laughed … Maybe I’m lucky that I had awesome grandparents and maybe this guy didn’t but what is wrong with people???”

What does it say about our society that people think of the elderly so dismissively—and moreover, that they feel no shame about expressing such thoughts publicly? I find myself wondering whether this colossal moral failure is exacerbated by the most troubled parts of our cultural and economic life. When people are measured and valued by their economic productivity, it is easy to treat people whose most economically productive days have passed as, well, worthless.

From a religious perspective, if there is one thing we ought to teach our children, it is that our worth as human beings does not depend on or derive from what we do or accomplish or produce; we are, each of us, infinitely valuable just because we are created in the image of God. We mattered before we were old enough to be economically productive, and we will go on mattering even after we cease to be economically productive.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/respect-old/607864/

Friendship precedes fellowship
…friendship precedes fellowship. Yes, they want fellowship but they have big doubts sitting in a nice chair on Sunday in silence (or some singing or saying words from the liturgy) can legitimately be called fellowship. And if it doesn’t start with friendship it can never be fellowship.
Scot McKnight

Kate Durie 1950-2021
Kate’s Christian faith was never based on already found answers. Her mind was too sharp, her mood more interrogative than declarative. She had grown beyond the various iterations of Christian faith too ready to settle for certainty, and too impatient of mystery, too worried about not knowing. In the theological sense Kate loved mystery, and refused steadfastly to reduce God to manageable proportions or propositions. She trusted the humanity of Jesus, his tears and his anger, his compassion and patience, the sheer gratuitous fun of turning water into the best ever wine. She could entrust herself to the Lord of all faith, whose strong hands were skilled at the plane and the lathe – Christ, the master carpenter, using those tools that shape and form us towards Christlikeness.
Jim Gordon

The problem with our lives is that we cannot solve them. We can only live them. 
Kate Bowler

View from the front porch
Fall is waning and temperatures are falling. We are preparing to flee to Florida for three months. Next time I write it will be a view from the lanai. For whatever reason, blogging has been a challenge since my stay in the hospital. My recovery is going well but writing is lagging behind. It is not clear why that is. I suspect it is related to the trauma I experienced and will improve with time.
Happy Thanksgiving.

So Much to Think About

George 0 Comments

Collapse of transcendence 
With the collapse of the transcendent we no longer struggle with guilt, how God views our actions. We’ve turned inward to take up “the vague and unending project of having to become one’s fullest self.” But this turning inward has come with its own pricetag. We’ve exchanged guilt for the weariness of the self. 
Richard Beck

Falling in love with God
What a long way it is between knowing God and loving him! Pascal 

Nothing is more practical than finding God, than falling in Love in a quite absolute, final way. What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you do with your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, whom you know, what breaks your heart, and what amazes you with joy and gratitude. Fall in Love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.
 
Fr Pedro Arrupe  via Richard Beck

Idols
When biblical/theological truth becomes tainted and compromised by ideological frameworks and pragmatic alliances it leads invariably to idolatry. An idol is anything or anyone we put our hope in other than or in addition to Jesus Christ. Idols are lifeless things that promise flourishing life and when we put our hope in a lifeless thing in pursuit of flourishing life we become lifeless. It’s why the telltale sign of idolatry is hard-heartedness. There is only one response to hard-heartedness—confession and repentance. Tragically, the person with a hard heart is all too often the last one to know. 
J D Walt

Gift of presence
…part of what I’ve been so grateful is when people seem to have a real awareness of is the gift of presence. It’s when they’ve learned to put down some of that anxiety over not being able to solve other people’s pain, if not their own, and they learn to leave a little breathing room for ambiguity, for not knowing, for not always knowing the right words or that fix, and then also remembering that in that space, it’s not just that they’re the gift of community, which is so precious, and also the gift of presence because I love presents when I’m suffering, please give me presents. It’s so great.
Kate Bowler

Being Human
There is no cure to being human. Finitude is going to be part of this deal, but man do I understand prosperity gospel that says they just want to be able to look back through the details of their life and be able to draw that straight line between “and then things worked out because I have a God who loves me.” I no longer live in a world in which God’s reasons are immediately discernable to me. I just don’t.
Kate Bowler

Bureaucracy
Administrative system governing any large institution
In modern usage, modern bureaucracy has been defined as comprising four features:
hierarchy (clearly defined spheres of competence and divisions of labor)
continuity (a structure where administrators have a full-time salary and advance within the structure)
impersonality (prescribed rules and operating rules rather than arbitrary actions)
expertise (officials are chosen according to merit, have been trained, and hold access to knowledge)
Wikipedia

“Bureaucracies are automated systems made up of people who must choose each and every day whether their job will require any of their humanity.”
— No Cure for Being Human: (And Other Truths I Need to Hear) by Kate Bowler

SIN
This is how sin deceives us. We mistakenly focus on sin at the level of our behaviors when they are merely the symptoms of the sickness. Sin, in its deepest essence, is the condition of an unbelieving heart and an unbelieving or untrusting heart inevitably becomes a hardened heart. And a hardened heart is the most dangerous place on earth. 
J D Walt

View from the Front Porch
Some perspectives have changed since emergency surgery and extended hospitalization. I am grateful for the many prayers on my behalf. They were a very present comfort. I heard, and it was reported, prayers for full,100% recovery… a return to a normal life … not unlike my own prayers. As I reflected on my experience and those petitions, I realized how much they reveal a deep resistance to embracing mortality. To believe I could or will get back to normal (whatever that was) denies the reality that my body has been changed and return is not possible. The perils of my health and continued aging cannot be denied. To live in an illusion that I can return to some previous health nirvana via prayer, miracle or bootstrap regimen would deny reality, by definition, insanity. As a Christ follower, my hope in not that my life will restored, but that I will live life in its present reality. So questions I am pondering in the shadow of mortality is, how then shall I live? Is it different from how I lived before? If so, in what way? What prayers should be offered ?
So much to think about.

So Much to Think About

George 13 Comments

Perhaps you noticed I have not written any blog posts recently. Without any warning the evening of July 29 I experienced excruciating pain in my chest and abdomen. A 911 call and subsequent trip to the emergency room was the beginning of a perilous journey that included a real possibly of not surviving, miraculous surgical intervention, multiple days in ICU on a ventilator. After ups and downs of recovery, discharge and re-admission, six days in rehab, I returned home on August 28, to continue my recovery.

What I am thinking about at this time is gratitude. Gratitude for God’s providential care. Except for inexplicable circumstances, I would not be alive. I am grateful for the enumerable prayers that were offered and answered. Ann’s constant presence and care sustained me. Though memories are scant, I was aware of the presence and voices of family encouraging and assisting.

This experience has given me much to think about, but I struggle to write. Hopefully, as recovery continues my motivation and thinking will improve. I’m not sure what what normal will be for me as I recover, but there is much to be grateful for.

Still on the journey.

So Much to Think About

George 0 Comments

philosopher Jean-François Revel argued: The fact is that we do not use our minds to seek out the truth or to establish particular facts with absolute certainty. Above all and in the great majority—if not in the totality—of cases, we use our intellectual faculties to protect convictions, interests, and interpretations that are especially dear to us.

What we know
Let’s start with a few facts that are clear:

Vaccinated people are nearly guaranteed not to be hospitalized or killed by Covid.

Among children under 12, who remain ineligible for the vaccine, serious forms of Covid are also extremely rare. Children face bigger risks when they ride in a car.

The Delta variant does not appear to change either of those facts.

Millions of unvaccinated American adults are vulnerable to hospitalization or death from Covid

Søren Kierkegaard said that life must be lived forward but can only be understood backward.

Doubt
Christian Wiman wrote in his book My Bright Abyss, “Doubt is painful…but its pain is active rather than passive, purifying rather than stultifying. Far beneath it, no matter how severe its drought, how thoroughly your skepticism seems to have salted the ground of your soul, faith, durable faith, is steadily taking root.”
Andrea Lucado

Incarnation
Because of the Incarnation, we see signs of God himself in the most human expressions of art and literature. Jesus became a man. The creator irrevocably, for all time, bound himself to his creation. The best human stories beckon us like a fire on a cold day. As we linger, warming feet and hands and face in its glow, we recognize Christ at the burning center. 
Heather Morton

Thy Kingdom come
It is incredible dishonesty in the human heart to pray daily that this kingdom should come, that God’s will be done on earth as in heaven, and at the same time to deny that Jesus wants this kingdom to be put into practice on earth. Whoever asks for the rulership of God to come down on earth must believe in it and be wholeheartedly resolved to carry it out. Those who emphasize that the Sermon on the Mount is impractical and weaken its moral obligations should remember the concluding words, “Not all who say ‘Lord’ to me shall reach the kingdom of heaven, but only those who do the will of my Father in heaven” [Matthew 7:21]
Eberhard Arnold, Salt and Light: Living the Sermon on the Mount,

Gospel
As Walter Brueggemann says, “The gospel is a truth widely held, but a truth greatly reduced. It is a truth that has been flattened, trivialized, and rendered inane. Partly, the gospel is simply an old habit among us, neither valued nor questioned. But more than that, our technical way of thinking reduces mystery to problem, transforms assurance into certitude, quality into quantity, and so takes the categories of biblical faith and represents them in manageable shapes.”
We try to take a truth that’s as big as an ox and turn it into a bouillon cube. We want to talk before we listen; argue before we converse; assume before we know; reject before we honor.
Michael Frost

Death
Death means little if it is not impetus to change ourselves while we are alive and thereby the future when we are gone.
Steve Leder – The Beauty of What Remains

Transcendence
God’s transcendence has to be so radical so that God can come close to the creature while not becoming the creature.
Unknown

…just because one side of a coin is wrong, that doesn’t mean the other side is right.
Jonah Goldberg

Knowing God
I have often used the example of riding a bicycle as an image of knowing God. There’s no difficulty learning how to ride if you don’t mind falling off for a while. But no matter how many years you have ridden, you cannot describe for someone else how you know what you know. But you know it. I also suspect that if you thought too much about riding a bicycle while you were riding it, you could mess up and wreck.
Fr. Thomas Hopko famously said, “You cannot know God – but you have to know Him to know that.” He clearly knew what he was talking about.
Fr Stephen Freeman

Gratitude 
Gratitude is a social emotion, the response we feel when we’ve been given a gift. And where there is a gift, there is a gift-giver. …, you can’t feel grateful for life and creation and be an atheist, not emotionally. Being awed at the cosmic odds is different from saying “Thank you.”
Richard Beck

View From the Front Porch
You can learn a lot about people watching traffic go by. Some drive by furiously, seemingly self-absorbed, without regard for speed limits, or anyone else. Others are unhurried and wave. Some are faithfully punctual, I know it is 6:36am when her red car passes. For many, the condition of their vehicles are metaphors for their lives — noisy, needing repair, with an uncertain future. Recently a stranger stopped and came up for conversation, we enjoyed each other’s company for a few minutes and he was gone. Occasionally, someone will stop and ask for assistance, directions or perhaps money.
Seldom am I asked for advice. Oh well. ?

FRONT PORCH PLAYLIST

Still on the Journey