Category: Notes Anthology

GOOD NEWS

Loneliness
…mass loneliness is a perversity. If a bunch of people are lonely, why don’t they just hang out together? Maybe it’s because people approach potential social encounters with unrealistically anxious and negative expectations. Maybe if we understood this, we could alter our behavior.
My general view is that the fate of America will be importantly determined by how we treat each other in the smallest acts of daily life. That means being a genius at the close at hand: greeting a stranger, detecting the anxiety in somebody’s voice and asking what’s wrong, knowing how to talk across difference. More lives are diminished by the slow and frigid death of social closedness than by the short and glowing risk of social openness.
David Brooks
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/25/opinion/social-life-talk-strangers.html?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20220826&instance_id=70280&nl=the-morning&regi_id=98699252&segment_id=102419&te=1&user_id=979ff7ea8eb24fcd7abe710b579081f5

Celeberity
…we need to shift from a culture formed by “success” to a culture formed by “character.” The word success has too often transformed churches and organizations and institutions and seminaries from formation locations into launching pads for entrepreneurial types who want to use the church’s platform to build their brand. Maybe everyone of these types needs to spend two months a year in a church in rural America and do what the majority of pastors are actually doing.
Scot McKnight

Gospel
The gospel proclaims the presence and power of God in our lives through the indwelling gift of the Holy Spirit. The actual spiritual union we experience with God in the Holy Spirit goes well beyond a declaration that God loves you. Again, love is an affection, a feeling. And while feelings are important, something more is available to us in the Holy Spirit. Through the Holy Spirit God is with us and empowers us. Presence and power. These gifts are available to all who believe the Good News.
To be sure, Christians display a lot of diversity about what sort of “power” we have access to through the Spirit. But for this post, we can keep it simple and stick to what all Christians believe, that the Holy Spirit gives us a strength to carry the burdens of our lives that we would not otherwise possess on our own. The gospel is more than a message of God’s affection. The gospel is the offer to share in God’s very own life.
Richard Beck
http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2022/08/the-gospel-minus-x-equals-part-7.html

Contempt (https://amzn.https://amzn.to/3PN7ioB )
We are dwelling in an age of contempt.
Contempt for others forms a death-dealing cancer in our culture, in our churches, and in our society – but also in ourselves, the ones contempting others (if that’s a verb).
We dwell today in a world of hot hate and cool hate, and surely more in the cool hate than in the hot hate. Hot hate turns into road rage and sudden outbursts; cool hate seethes and foams and goes indirect and passive. It turns into snark and sarcasm and verbal putdowns.
Kim cites John Gottman’s four horsemen of negative interaction – criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. He thinks contempt is the deepest problem. It creates a world of the superior and the inferior, a world of us vs. them. Contempt kills. Others and ourselves.
What Kim knows is that this contempt has invaded the church in “motive attribution asymmetry” (we know we love others but others hate us). So we misunderstand and misattribute. Motive attribution asymmetry is made worse by “online disinhibition effect,” words Orwell would despise, but we can get by the stodgy words to the truth: when we get online it’s much easier to express hatred and contempt and to attribute motive to those we don’t even know.
God has always had a very hard time giving away God: No one wants seems to want this gift. We’d rather have religion, and laws, and commandments, and obligations, and duties. I’m sure many of us attend church out of duty, but gathering with the Body of Christ is supposed to be a wedding feast. Do you know how many times in the four Gospels eternal life is described as a banquet, a feast, a party, a wedding, the marriage feast of the Lamb? There are fifteen different, direct allusions to eternal life being a great, big party. 
Richard Rohr

“It is not your business to succeed (no one can be sure of that) but to do right: when you have done so the rest lies with God,” C S Lewis

View From the front porch
A bit of poetry:

From where does my praise come?

…from the bounty of my circumstances?

…from the strength of my health?

…from freedom and liberty?

…from my goodness and rightness?

Hallelujah!

So dear God, keep from me

…poverty

…sickness

…imprisonment

…failure and sinfulness

If not, where then would my praise come from?

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

On Tuesday, Sugar, the Crockett’s 17 year old pet (our grand dog)was euthanized. Surrounded by family, she was mercifully relieved of her painful daily reality. As that reality vanished, another appeared, love for Sugar and memories that will assuage pain and grief in the days and years ahead.

My understanding of God has changed over the course of my life, one result of that change is how I view animals, pets, dogs and cats in particular. Thankful for a Creator who knows when a sparrow falls.

O Love, that will not let me go…
Living Wittily / by Jim Gordon / August 13, 2022 at 04:03AM
Yesterday in the supermarket, a dad with two children and a trolley.One child started to scream and shout in distress. It sounded like a tantrum – but only if we lack imagination, compassion and some understanding. The second child didn’t seem too bothered. Dad spoke firmly and took and held the hand of the distressed child, who refused to be calmed or comforted, and continued to be very upset. Dad held on to his hand. Then Dad stood in the queue with his trolley, speaking calmly to the child, ignoring the responses of some others around him, and eventually the lad settled and walked with his family out the doors.Sensory overload, heat exhaustion, familiar and safe routines interrupted, just too much to process by one highly sensitive mind – any combination of these or other causes. And a dad whose behaviour over the ten minutes or so of his son’s distress, was gentle, calm, firm and there, just there, the reassuring, patient presence that wouldn’t turn away, or let go.What that costs, day and daily, in the loving and caring for a child who feels and sees the world differently? Who knows.  But in those ten minutes we watched a lived out parable of the love of God in the love of a father holding firmly the hand of his child.

A Prayer for the Irritated
I bring to you Lord, my momentary irritation, 
that you might reveal the buried seed of it—not 
in the words or actions of another person, but
in the withered and hypocritical expectations 
of my own small heart. Uproot from this
impoverished soil all arrogance and insecurity that 
would prompt me to dismiss or distain others, 
judging them with a less generous measure that
I reckon when judging myself. 
Prune away the tangled growth
of my own unjustified irritations, Jesus,
and graft to my heart instead your humility, 
your compassion, 
your patience, 
your kindness, 
That I might bear good fruit in keeping 
with your grace.
Amen.
Thérèse of Lisieux

Power of Dissent
In a famous 1951 experiment, the psychologist Solomon Asch showed how easily humans can be manipulated by social pressure to conform. If everyone else in the room affirms even the most blatant falsehood, we will very often affirm it ourselves, even denying the clear evidence of our own eyes.
But a variation of the Asch experiment gives hope. If only one other person in the room—a single reality ally—tells the truth, the pressure to conform drops sharply and we become much more willing to buck the lie. That is why authoritarian regimes work so furiously to stifle opposition voices, even seemingly weak ones. It is what the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was getting at when he said, “The simple act of an ordinary brave man is not to participate in lies, not to support false actions! His rule: Let that [lie] come into the world, let it even reign supreme—only not through me.”
https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-reality-ally-347 utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Suffering
Suffering, of course, can lead us in either of two directions: (1) it can make us very bitter and cause us to shut down, or (2) it can make us wise, compassionate, and utterly open, because our hearts have been softened, or perhaps because we feel as though we have nothing more to lose. Suffering often takes us to the very edge of our inner resources where we “fall into the hands of the living God” (Hebrews 10:31), even when we aren’t sure we believe in God! We must all pray for the grace of this second path of softening and opening. My opinion is that this is the very meaning of the phrase “deliver us from evil” in the Our Father (Lord’s Prayer). In this statement, we aren’t asking to avoid suffering. It is as if we are praying, “When big trials come, God, hold on to me, and don’t let me turn bitter or blaming”—which is an evil that leads to so many other evils. 
Richard Rohr

Adolescence
“I have no qualifications for speaking about adolescence with anything like authority except in one respect. I am sixty four years old. I have fathered children. I have written books. I have letters after my name and an ecclesiastical title before it. But to call me an adult or grown up is an oversimplification at best and a downright misnomer at worst. I am not a past participle but a present participle, even a dangling participle. I am not a having-grown up one but a growing-up on, a groping up one, not even sure much of the time just where my  growing and groping are taking me or where they are supposed to be taking me. I am a verbal adjective in search of a noun to latch onto, a grower ins earch of  a self to grow into…I speak about adolescence with authority because in many ways I am still in the throes of it. This is my only qualification for addressing myself to the subject here. I am a hybrid, an adult adolescent to whom neither term alone does full justice…” (The Clown in the Belfry, 84-5) Fredrick Beuchner

A political columnist one wrote this:
Whenever A and B are in opposition to one another, anyone who attacks or criticizes A is accused of aiding and abetting B. And it is often true, objectively and on a short-term analysis, that he is making things easier for B. Therefore, say the supporters of A, shut up and don’t criticize: or at least criticize “constructively,” which in practice always means favourably. And from this it is only a short step to arguing that the suppression and distortion of known facts is the highest duty of a journalist.
Scot McKnight

 “we are not saved by information.”
Matters of prayer, of pride, of shame, of love, of forgiveness, of generosity, and suffering, are much closer to that place where we live. The rest of the world (and theology) are true, but, like Quantum Mechanics, it’s not always what we need. It is said that Orthodox Christianity is a “way of life.” This is true, and means that it cannot really be read. It can be sung. It can be prayed. Mostly, it can be stumbled around in so that we learn what it means for it to be the way.
Fr Stephen Freeman

View from the front porch
My enchanted life...

Consider the following:

• When I get up each morning a steaming cup of coffee appears at my side.
• Mysteriously, our bed is made up every morning, with the sheets perfectly tucked and pillows flawlessly arranged.
• I never run out of toothpaste.
• I never run out of toilet paper.
• Dirty clothes magically disappear, only to reappear neatly folded (underware) or hung in their proper place.
• Dust and debris disappear without explanation.
• Each day I find the window blinds raised.
• The refrigerator and cupboard never seem to be wanting.
• The cats are fed without fail. 
• My prescriptions get refilled without prompting.
• Our vehicles are never left unlocked.
• Misplaced articles magically appear in their proper place.
• Unnecessary lights inexplicably turn off.
• Family/friends birthday cards appear for my signature.
• Somehow, meals appear most days at 5:00pm.
• I never run out of cheerios.
• Fingerprints on the storm door always temporary.
• Our bed always has the proper amount of cover.
• My distilled water never runs out.
• Best of all, bruises, cuts, wounded feelings and unspoken needs are always treated with just the right medicine.

Indeed my life is enchanted. And to that I say: 
THANK YOU- Ann Watson Ezell

STILL ON THE JOURNEY