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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

I believe our lives are a journey. A healthy life is characterized by growth and change. Each day holds the prospect of adventure and discovery. Life is not defined by seeking a safe place and hunkering down insulated and protected from the world around us.

Change continues to be important in my life. As I grow older, change is less attractive and more difficult. I struggle daily to resist the inclination to hunker down. In that regard, one small change I have decided to make relates to “So Much To Think About” posts. You may have noticed I deviated from Friday posting. This and future posts will come randomly. reflecting the rhythm of my reading and daily life. Content will be less, but, hopefully interesting and worthy of your attention. I would appreciate your feedback.

The Church as a moral witness
Generally, we expect the church to be a moral witness. That is, we expect Christians should be “better” than non-Christians. And when Christians are not any better than most people, we despair and chuck the whole business. Our metric of success is wholly moral.
But let me simply observe, as a regular church goer, that the people gathered on a typical Sunday morning are just normal people. Church people have the same sorts of problems as everyone else. And they are sinners just like everyone else.
We know this about ourselves, that we are sinners, yet we keep getting disappointed. What should be expected–our moral failures–keeps surprising us. Over and over. Why? I think it’s our stubborn moral framing of the church, that church people should be “better.” 
But if we’re not any better than other folks what then is church all about?
The church, to borrow that line from the Catholics, is “a sacrament of salvation.” Yet I mean this differently than extra Ecclesiam nulla salus. What I mean by “a sacrament of salvation” is that the gathered church makes salvation visible. 
The gathered church isn’t a moral witness–How could it be?–but a sacramental witness. We gather to make visible the salvation of God in our midst. This is how a depraved, broken, and lost people can gather together on a Sunday and be called “the church.” These gathered sinners simply point to the reality of grace. Our moral portfolio is abysmal, but in our worship, prayers, liturgies, and testimonies we make visible the love of God, in our lives and in the midst of the world. “Grace exists,” our presence declares. And we make this declaration not only for ourselves, but for the world as well. 
If this is so, “the church” simply is this sacramental witness. Which means “the church” doesn’t point to the moral performance of human beings. Rather, the “the church” is a gathered group of sinners who come together to point toward the grace of God. We sinners gather to bear witness to grace, and it’s toward grace where we must direct our gaze.
Richard Beck
http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2022/10/despairing-for-church-part-5-sacrament.html

Sympathy vs Compassion
I believe the problem today can be summed up simply: people mistake sympathy for compassion.
Sympathy is feeling bad for someone and wishing they didn’t feel so bad.

Sympathy is noble on the surface (“people should suffer less!”) but can often end up being subtly self-serving (“people should suffer less because I don’t want to feel bad for them anymore.”)

Compassion is similar to sympathy but different in an important way.
Like sympathy, compassion begins with feeling bad for someone. But instead of simply wanting the person’s suffering to go away, compassion involves someone who is willing to suffer alongside that person so that they may overcome their challenges.

Sympathy is sending flowers and a card to a friend when a parent dies. Compassion is driving to their house and holding them as they cry.

Sympathy is letting a screaming child have that toy they want so they’ll stop screaming. Compassion is letting them cry because you know they will be better off once they understand that they can’t always get what they want.

Sympathy is changing your profile picture on social media for whatever the new cause du jour is. Compassion is actually giving time or money to victims, listening to their stories, helping them rebuild their lives.

Sympathy is a good thing. We need it in the world. But it’s also easy. It’s short-term and short-sighted. It’s an, “Aw, I feel bad for him.” Sympathy is focused on the feeling rather than the person. “I hope they feel better.”

Compassion is about the person. “I don’t just hope they feel better, I hope they become better.” Therefore, compassion is more involved. It takes more effort—both mental and emotional.

Sympathy is trying to remove as much strain and struggle as possible. Compassion is trying to help a person move through a manageable amount of struggle so they can grow into a better person.

I believe that as a culture we’re over-optimized for sympathy and under-optimized for compassion. This is probably largely social media’s fault, but not entirely.

Sympathy is easy to communicate online. It’s also easy to see sympathy communicated between others. Compassion is like sarcasm, it is not communicated well online. It’s also harder to recognize between others.
We’re probably also over-optimized for sympathy because it’s easier to measure and study. It’s relatively easy to measure how good/bad a person feels. It’s incredibly difficult to measure whether someone has grown or not.
Mark Manson

Wendy Wasserstein wrote in her book “Sloth,” “When you achieve true slothdom, you have no desire for the world to change. … Better to fall into line than to question the going ethos.”

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

So Much To Think About

George 0 Comments

Thinking About God
Did you ever have one of those days where the whole idea of God was just too much to think about? As if trying to “get a handle” on God was like trying to kiss the moon? If the mystics are right (and usually they are because they see things much differently than we do) then you were probably closer that day to God than any other day in your life. How is this possible, you ask? How can God be close to you (or you to God) when God seems so far away or not at all? . . . This is my answer to you: God is a mystery of humble love. It is a mystery that you cannot reason or try to figure out. You must simply live in the mystery. 
Richard Rohr

ultracrepidarian
A story is told of an artist named Apelles who was commissioned to paint Alexander the Great. A shoemaker, after observing that the number of laces on the sandals was incorrect, then proceeded to offer more suggestions, none of which evidently he knew much about. So a term has been created, an “ultracrepidarian,” who evokes a Latin line “shoemaker, nothing beyond the shoe.”
Social media, let’s be honest with ourselves, makes us all ultracrepidarians at times. We can give our opinions about anything and everything. And we can write about anything and everything. And if we know one thing (shoes) does not mean we don’t know politics even if we transfer our confidence from one to the other.
“Outrage often looks and sounds like strength but it is in reality weakness shrounded in aggression.”
“Gentleness is true strength.”
“Gentleness isn’t possible until our pride gives way to humility.”
Scot McKnight

Mystics
Mystics know and enjoy the connected core of reality that is hidden to those who do not desire it or search for it. All mystics know is that they are inside of an immense and wonderful secret, which seems to be hidden from or denied by (but not denied to!) most of the rest of us. Mystics look out from different eyes that see the grace in all things and the deep connection between all things. 
Richard Rohr

Fewer?
“Enter through the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the road broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who go through it. How narrow is the gate and difficult the road that leads to life, and few find it.”

Disappointments are due to our expectations not being met. So perhaps our despair over “the church” might be due to having too high of expectations for what passes as Christian. Perhaps we’ve been assuming that Christianity is widespread and common when, in fact, it is precious and rare. Perhaps we should hear the words “Christian” and “church” with a lot more skepticism. If Jesus is correct, there are only a few Christians in the world. And if that’s true, maybe the train wreck that is “the church” isn’t a disappointment but something quite expected.
Richard Beck
(This citation is from a series Beck is writing entitled “Despairing for the Church”. Check it out . HERE.)

Older adults today…
Until the early 1960s, young people acted older than their actual age. Now, older adults pretend to be younger than their actual age, which is perhaps one of the reasons why boomers are so easy to mock. In a recent article, Abigail Shrier quoted a physician and psychologist who had told her that“Fifty years ago, boys wanted to be men. But today, many American men want to be boys.”
An article in the Wall Street Journal reports:
Aging baby boomers are … struggling with a bunch of issues … One of the most vexing issues they face is deciding what they want to be called by their grandchildren, lest it make them sound—and feel—old … Ms. Wilkofsky has decided to be called Glamma, as in glamorous grandmother, a name suggested by one of her girlfriends. Her husband, Steven, a 58-year-old doctor, said he didn’t want a typical grandfatherly name, either, because “I still feel like I am 25.” So he chose to go by “Papa Doc.”

And this is from an article on the same topic from the New York Times:
However mightily my peers may pine for grandchildren and adore them when they arrive, some don’t want to acknowledge being old enough to be dubbed Grandpop or Granny. Such names conjure up gray hair and orthopedic shoes, along with a status our society may honor in the abstract but few boomers actually welcome.

The author and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist has said:
In the old days young people went to university to learn from people who were perhaps three times their age and had read an enormous amount. But nowadays they go in order to tell those older people what they should be thinking and what they should be saying.

Other cultures figured out that older people are generally wiser. The more days you live, the more things you know. When you’re young you have beauty and when you’re old you have wisdom. Only this dumb country wants to posit wisdom and beauty in youth. Bill Maher

https://www.persuasion.community/p/adults-today-care-too-much-what-young?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=61579&post_id=76445652&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email

View from the front porch…

The Problem with Nouthetic (or “Biblical”) Counseling

..what’s the difference between counseling and therapy?
(from Scot McKnight)
Counseling is about working on issues in more of the short-term, whereas therapy focuses on the long-term addressing of deeper issues (and mental health disorders) that may be affecting the client.

Still, regardless of whether we call it counseling or therapy, there is another term that needs to have light shed upon it: nouthetic counseling. This is sometimes referred to as biblical counseling. As the title of this post suggests, I believe there is a problem with this kind of counseling.

http://www.georgeezell.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/The-Problem-with-Nouthetic-or-Biblical-Counseling-The-Prodigal-Thought.pdf

Scot delves into a subject that has become more relevant for churches as post-pandemic as issues of mental health continue to emerge. I recommend reading the entire thought provoking article. Lots to think about.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

So Much To Think About

George 1 Comment

Growing Churches
We mostly get it backward today. Our primary question is: How do we grow the church? The real question is: How does the Holy Spirit grow people? As a consequence, we have nearly mastered the art of growing churches that don’t grow people. We get people busy in all manner of Christian activity, but when it comes to measuring the maturity of people, we have no metrics. And, as they say, we manage what we measure.
What if, instead of asking how we get people to come to church or how we get people to come back or how we get people involved or assimilated or tithing or in a home group or in Sunday school or going on a mission trip or what we want people to know . . . what if we asked much deeper questions, the kinds of questions Jesus might ask? Who do we want people to become? How would we know if we became it? What are the markers of mature faith? Who in our midst shows forth the qualities of perfect love in their lives?
J D Walt

Evangelicals 
2015 NPR story demonstrated just how much. It turns out that the “true” percentage of Americans who are evangelicals ranges from 35 percent if identity is based only on self-identification, to 25 percent if identity is based on denominational affiliation, to a mere 6 percent if identity is based on agreement with a series of core evangelical beliefs.
David French

Shame
 In confession, the energy of shame becomes energy against the passions. As for a definition of shame, I would say it is the lack of courage to see ourselves as God sees us. (from The Enlargement of the Heart). Fr Stephen Freeman

GOSPEL
While the gospel is a message, it cannot be confined to messages. While the gospel is the truth, it cannot be captured by a series of propositional truths. Before the gospel is anything else, the gospel is God. Gospel means “good news,” and the good news is God. The good news is not that God loves us. It is that God is love. The good news is not that Jesus saves. It is that Jesus is himself salvation.
We think we truly comprehend God and the gospel because we have some comprehension of what God has done for us. This is good, as far as it goes, but it does not go anywhere near far enough. When our understanding of the gospel is limited to what God has done for us, our understanding of sharing the gospel will be limited to telling others what God has done for them.
To be sure, the gospel is the message of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ, but in a far greater sense, the gospel is who Jesus Christ is to us and in us and through us for the world.
The gospel is not a body of knowledge about who God is and what God has done. It is actually knowing God. Jesus prayed, “Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (John 17:3).
J D Walt

An idea which comes from reading Factuals: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World–and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling. Learning that things are better in this world than we think they are is a much needed but generally resisted message because of deeply held misconceptions.

How did the number of deaths per year from natural disasters change over the last hundred years?
?A: More than doubled ?
B: Remained about the same??
C: Decreased to less than half

This number includes all fatalities from floods, earthquakes, storms, droughts, wildfires, and extreme temperatures, and also deaths during the mass displacement of people and pandemics after such events.
The number of deaths from acts of nature has dropped far below half. It is now just 25 percent of what it was 100 years ago. The human population increased by 5 billion people over the same period, so the drop in deaths per capita is even more amazing. It has fallen to just 6 percent of what it was 100 years ago.

If I love and care for you only if you agree with me, I don’t love you at all…you’re simply a mirror I can use to worship myself… Phoenix Preacher

Piety
I think piety–a fiercely held and courageous moral integrity that does no harm and takes personal responsibility for making the world a better place in light of sacred values and commitments–is one of the greatest things in the world. I wish we all would become more pious. Richard Beck

Obscurity – a new spiritual discipline:
“Obscurity may very well be the spiritual discipline the American church needs to practice the most in the coming century.”
And these lines speak up and speak out:
“In order to go up, we have to go low.”
“None of us need another fan.”
“None of this is new,” she observes.
She’s right because she’s right.
Katelyn Beaty https://amzn.to/3bBiINi (Scot McKnight)

Healing
I have noted through the years, that some people (including some priests) are convinced that a soul can only be saved with disciplinary slaps and corrections from time to time. If there are such corrections needed in a human life, then it is likely only God who has the wisdom to know when and how such correction should take place. My experience as a priest and confessor is that I simply need to be consistent in sharing God’s love and be patient with what might be a process of healing that takes years.  Fr Stephen Freeman

View from the front porch
The front porch and our house have a new look. The red front door is now green and we have new siding on the house. Shutters painted. Getting cooler, porch time is waning.

Getting older:
Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Aging: Awaken as You Grow Older

Opening deeply to the truth of our own aging is wise. Opening deeply to the truth of our own impermanence is wise. Although such opening may not come easily at first—we all know how the ego tends to resist vulnerability—it is important to do so if we wish to mindfully use the time remaining to us. . . .
To live a life of an elder is to ripen into being that is more than simply elderly, more than just old. It involves ripening into clear-eyed acceptance of the way things actually exist. That ripening involves, for each of us, many difficult reckonings in the multifaceted, multidimensional understanding that everything that can be lost will be lost. . . .
Grey hair and shagginess notwithstanding, many of us still cling childishly to so much that is unreal and inessential. Many of us still cling to reputation, to imagined security, to unexamined habits of attitude and behavior, and to self-image. We have deep aversion to having all of our cherished illusions stripped away by life-in-form’s seeming indifference.
We all have reservoirs of fear, some large and some small and subtle, around entering this new terrain of unknown and mystery: our last years. What will aging to do me? To my body? To my mind? . . . Will I matter to anyone? Will I be a burden? How will I die?
We do not know. We have no clue what these years will hold for us. We have no clue what will happen tomorrow. The “moment that changed everything” usually arrives unannounced.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY