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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

Before you speak of peace, you must first have it in your heart.?
—St. Francis of Assisi? 

Being  Interruptible 

“It is a strange fact,” writes Bonhoeffer, “that Christians and even ministers frequently consider their work so important and urgent that they will allow nothing to disturb them. They think they are doing God a service in this, but actually they are disdaining God’s ‘crooked yet straight path.’” 

This is us

We all must admit that our secret inner attitudes are often cruel, attacking, judgmental, and harsh. The ego seems to find its energy precisely by having something to oppose, fix, or change. When the mind can judge something to be inferior, we feel superior. We must recognize our constant tendency toward negating reality, resisting it, opposing it, and attacking it on the level of our mind. This is the universal addiction.

Richard Rohr

the Cross

“the resurrection does not eradicate the crucifixion.” The Christians chose the most hideous of symbols to identify who they were. They chose a cross, not a stone that had been rolled away. “There was only one reason to carry a cross in the Roman Empire: to certify Rome’s absolute power and any resisters abject weakness.” No wonder the Greeks and Romans saw the Christians as a weak people with a weak Messiah.

The Gospels are not ashamed to show Jesus’s ‘weak’ side; they do not mythologize him into some airbrushed superhero or fantasize a utopian version of his kingdom. The Gospels render the highest, most honest honor to God and Jesus, merited by their solidarity with a struggling people, not a perfunctory or begrudging honor like that coerced by narcissistic Caesars and other strongmen.

Scot McKnight

Sexism

“Sexism is a misuse of power in which men hold power over women and use that power for themselves while diminishing and restricting women’s God-given power.” 

Heather Mathews

…the kingdom that is coming in fullness. A kingdom that is “a new, reconciled humanity where there are no more barriers based on ethnic, socioeconomic, or gender distinctions.” I genuinely, and with tears in my eyes, long for this day. The New Testament shows us how Jesus came to create a new humanity, one devoid of lines drawn around race, gender and economic status. A church where slaves could function as elders, women could teach and shepherd, and the poor are sought out for their perspective on the kingdom.

Matthew’s work reminds us that a theology of antisexism is a theology that truly believes men and women are created equal. Jesus was not sexist. He did not accuse women of seeking power, in fact his harshest words were for the men who used their power to restrict others in the kingdom.

Karen Fletcher Smith

The Professor said to write what you know
Lookin’ backwards
Might be the only way to move forward

–       Taylor Swift

Present in Liturgy 

We are not an audience in the Liturgy. We are not gathering information in order to make a decision. We are in the Liturgy to live, breathe, and give thanks, in the presence of God. 

The struggle for a Christian in the modern world is to renounce the life of the audience. Within the audience we experience a deep estrangement from God. We are always “watching” from somewhere else, always engaging the false self with its criteria of judging, weighing, deciding. The world becomes a beauty contest but never a wedding. Modernity creates false distinctions. We are anxious that if we are not “part of the show,” then we are somehow being excluded. “Where are the women?” a visitor asked, commenting on the group within the altar. Ironically, they were spread throughout the Church, participants in the marriage of heaven and earth that is the Divine Liturgy. “Watching” one of their gender “perform” would make none of them more present, only somehow satisfied in the judgment of the audience that some abstract sense of inclusion had been satisfied.

Father Stephen Freeman

Forgiveness

Among the most powerful of human experiences is to give or to receive forgiveness. I am told that two-thirds of the teaching of Jesus is directly or indirectly about this mystery of forgiveness: God’s breaking of God’s own rules. That’s not surprising, because forgiveness is probably the only human action that reveals three goodnesses simultaneously! When we forgive, we choose the goodness of others over their faults, we experience God’s goodness flowing through ourselves, and we also experience our own goodness in a way that surprises us. That is an awesome coming together of power, both human and divine.   

Richard Rohr

Parallels

(Praise And worship)

Back in February, the music historian Ted Gioia wrote an essay on the state of American culture. He argued that many creative people want to create art (work that puts demands on people), but all the commercial pressures push them to create entertainment (which gives audiences what they want). As a result, for the past many years, entertainment (superhero movies) has been swallowing up art (literary novels and serious dramas).

Wanting to die

My grandfather, in his 90s, often told me he didn’t want to continue living. He once looked me in the eye and told me that my weekend visits were wonderful but didn’t outweigh the pain he suffered all week. He also felt guilty about the burden he put on his own family. With no legal options, he finally chose to undergo an elective surgery because a surgeon cautioned it was quite risky. The surgery was successful, and my grandfather woke up furious. When he got a serious infection a few weeks later he pumped his fist, and died soon after.

View from the Front Porch

[adapted from a post in2020]

 “the sky is falling” is currently the weapon of choice. If you are unfamiliar with the story of Chicken Little, you can read it HERE.

The pressing question for me is, how should I respond to “the sky is falling”? Chicken Little is helpful.

  • When encountering an unexplained and/or unanticipated threat (acorn), resist knee-jerk assumptions. Gather facts necessary to determine the magnitude of danger.
  • Seek reliable counsel for confirmation and appropriate action.
  • Only when confident of the reality and magnitude of threat, and, having clarity necessary for a response, should you alert others. 
  • When fearful We are most vulnerable to seduction we would never consider otherwise. 
  • Resist the temptation think the worst.

The moral of the story is not to be a “Chicken” but to have courage. 

A very early example containing the basic motif and many of the elements of the ” chicken little tale” is some 25 centuries old and appears in the Buddhist scriptures.  the Buddha, upon hearing about some particular religious practices, comments that there is no special merit in them, but rather that they are “like the noise the hare heard.” He then tells the story of a hare disturbed by a falling fruit who believes that the earth is coming to an end. The hare starts a stampede among the other animals until a lion halts them, investigates the cause of the panic and restores calm. The fable teaches the necessity for deductive reasoning and subsequent investigation.

Wikipedia

We need a lion.

So Much To Think About

George 0 Comments

I intend to live forever … So far, so good.

Scarcity 

Brene’ Brown describing the impact of scarcity upon our lives:

We get scarcity because we live it…Scarcity is the “never enough” problem…Scarcity thrives in a culture where everyone is hyperaware of lack. Everything from safety and love to money and resources feels restricted or lacking. We spend inordinate amounts of time calculating how much we have, want, and don’t have, and how much everyone else has, needs, and wants.

Brown goes on to share this assessment from Lynne Twist: 

For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is “I didn’t get enough sleep.” The next one is “I don’t have enough time.” Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it. We spend most of the hours and the days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying about what we don’t have enough of…Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we’re already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something. And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds are racing with a litany of what we didn’t get, or didn’t get done, that day. We go to sleep burdened by those thoughts and wake up to that reverie of lack…This internal condition of scarcity, this mind-set of scarcity, lives at the very heart of our jealousies, our greed, our prejudice, and our arguments with life.

Brueggermann and Grace

Walter once told me that he is disliked by progressives because he still believes in the old formula, that it is by grace alone that we are saved. And then he confided in me, “Conrad, I have to work to stay in that place of grace.”

And I love that old truth. Work to stay in the place of grace. For without the work there is but cheap grace. But without the grace, the work matters not. And is ultimately, expensive work.

The Nature of Focus

Focus is fundamentally different from mere attention. Attention can be fleeting, easily shifting from one thing to another, often beyond our conscious control. It’s our reaction to the constant barrage of sensory inputs we face each day. In contrast, focus is the sustained, intentional direction of our mental faculties toward a specific goal or object. It involves narrowing our field of vision, both literally and figuratively, which deepens our engagement with what we are focusing on.

Hyperfocus, often described as the intense concentration seen in individuals with ADHD, illustrates the power of focus. During hyperfocus, distractions fade, and the person becomes deeply engrossed in their task. However, this state can also lead to neglecting other important aspects of life. The challenge is to harness the benefits of such focus while maintaining balance.

Brad Vaughn 

Penny wise?

A conservative estimate holds that there are 240 billion pennies lying around the United States — about 724 ($7.24) for every man, woman and child there residing, and enough to hand two pennies to every bewildered human born since the dawn of man. (To distribute them all, in fact, we’d have to double back to the beginning and give our first six billion ancestors a third American penny.) These are but a fraction of the several hundreds of billions of pennies issued since 1793, most of which have suffered a mysterious fate sometimes described in government records, with a hint of supernaturality generally undesirable in bookkeeping, as “disappearance.” As far as anyone knows, the American cent is the most produced coin in the history of civilization, its portrait of Lincoln the most reproduced piece of art on Earth. Although pennies are almost never used for their ostensible purpose (to make purchases), right now one out of every two circulating coins minted in the United States has a face value of 1 cent. A majority of the ones that have not yet disappeared are, according to a 2022 report, “sitting in consumers’ coin jars in their homes.”

It’s crucial that they remain there. Five years ago, Mint officials conceded that if even a modest portion of these dormant pennies were suddenly to return to circulation, the resulting flow-back would be “logistically unmanageable.” There would be so unbelievably many pennies that there most likely would not be enough room to contain them inside government vaults. Moving them from place to place would be time-consuming, cumbersome and costly. (Just $100 worth of pennies weighs a touch over 55 pounds.) With each new penny minted, this problem becomes slightly more of a problem.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/01/magazine/worthless-pennies-united-states-economy.html?unlocked_article_code=1.HU4.9zWx.OIYO7dNndhkq&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

0.99

Retail legend claims that the “odd cents” pricing strategy (a Parisian trick imported by Rowland H. Macy to his New York City dry-goods store) proliferated after the cash register’s invention in 1879, as a tactic to prevent sales clerks from stealing. If a customer paid $3 for a $3 item, the logic went, a cashier could stealthily pocket the bills; if the price was $2.99, the customer would be owed a coin; to open the register, the cashier would need to key in the sale, thus creating, within the register’s hidden recesses, an incorruptible record of the transaction. That consumers tend to associate these prices with better deals (incorrectly, according to studies) was an added benefit.

Clarity of Scripture

Pop Protestantism believes in the clarity of Scripture in the sense of its perfect perspicuity. That is to say, that Scripture is clear enough that a Christian does not need a Pope or professor to tell them what to believe about the Bible. The plain sense of Scripture, combined with the illuminating power of the Holy Spirit, is sufficient itself to lead believers into truth. Which means I don’t take Bible study tips from an Italian guy in a pointy white hat wreaking of garlic let alone from a liberal “religion” professor at Penn State wearing a Che Guevera T-Shirt. Plus, if you combine the clarity of Scripture with a thing called soul competency where each soul is competent enough to interpret the Bible for himself and herself, then, you really can say that Bible interpretation requires only two things: Me and my ESV.

Except that such a view is neither truly Protestant nor a healthy approach to biblical interpretation.

If you look at the Protestant confessions, whether the Westminster Confession or the London Baptist Confession, the clarity of Scripture only applies to the things necessary for salvation. So yeah, reading the Gospel of Mark and Epistle to the Romans, you can figure out “What must I do to be saved?” without doing a Master of Divinity. But after that, all bets are off, not everything is clear, some stuff is disputed and debatable, and some things are downright baffling!

Wayne Grudem is correct that Scripture’s clarity does not deny the difficulty of some passages and the need for effort in interpretation. He writes:

I understand the clarity (perspicuity) of Scripture as follows: Scripture affirms that it is able to be understood but (1) not all at once, (2) not without effort, (3) not without ordinary means, (4) not without the reader’s willingness to obey it, (5) not without the help of the Holy Spirit, (6) not without human misunderstanding, and (7) never completely.

Which means with some assistance and some effort, one can attain knowledge of God through Holy Scripture. As Thomas Cranmer, the Anglican Reformer, put it,

This Word, whosoever is diligent to read and in his heart to print that [which] he readeth, the great affection to the transitory things of this world shall be minished in him, and the great desire of heavenly things that be therein promised of God, shall increase in him. (A Fruitful Exhortation to the Reading and Knowledge of Holy Scripture)

And yet, precisely because Scripture is complex we need translators, historians and teachers to explain to us things like: women “will be saved from childbirth”; Who were the Nephilim or Pharisees? What is the kingdom of God? To help us wrestle with tensions like divine sovereignty and human responsibility or justification by faith and judgment according to works. This stuff is not self-evident and cannot be figured out after a 15-minute search on Wikipedia.

Michael Bird 

Free Ride

Ana Ley, who covers mass transit, wrote a story this week focused on buses that quantified the problem in New York City with a jarring statistic: On nearly half of all bus rides in the city, people now skip paying the fare. As a result, about one million riders ignore the bus system’s most basic rule every weekday.

His faith was not a seamless garment but a ragged garment but a ragged garment with the seams showing. the tears showing. a garment that he clutched about him like a man in a storms 

Fredrick Bruechner on James Muilenburg

Antimaterialist 

an “antimaterialist,” that you believe reality is more than what science can investigate or reveal. An antimaterialist believes that truth is greater than facts, that reality includes more than the empirical.

Richard Beck

Weddings

Hassan Ahmed, 23, is charging his guests $450 for a ticket to his wedding next year in Houston, where he lives. Mr. Ahmed said he hadn’t heard back from many of his 125 wedding guests. But he has already spent over $100,000 on the wedding, including deposits for the venue, the D.J. and the photographer. In a video on TikTok, he said he was confused by the response, noting that many of his guests had spent more money on Beyoncé or Chris Brown tickets.

View from the Front Porch

As a result of participation in a recent class at church, I have been thinking about slippery slopes. The class focused on the interaction of Christians with the world on difficult subjects, i.e. LGBTQ+.
Leaders provided helpful information, stimulating hard but healthy conversations among participants. Varied viewpoints produced some anxiety. Rebuttals to ideas that conflicted with conventional thinking were often conciliatory but concluded with a warning that embracing them would be a slippery slope; implying danger and severe consequences and closing further discussion.

Slippery slope is an ideograph:

[a tool of persuasion, ideographs avoid arduous and often painful work of intimate, meaningful communication. Perfectly suited to a culture characterized by ambiguity, relativity and utility, they have metastasized into most arenas of communication, religious, business, personal, et al; rhetorical critics use chevrons or angle brackets (<>) to mark off ideographs.]

In personal communication, ideographs can impede conversation. For example, injecting “unbiblical” or “unchristian” can shut down a conversation that otherwise has potential for understanding and deepening relationship. Christ followers, called to love neighbor can ill-afford the use of ideographs.

Use of ideographs may indicate an anxious attachment to God.

“…those with anxious attachments to God have greater anxiety about abandonment, greater fears of being rejected by God. Consequently, these believers fear doing anything that might risk God’s disapproval. These fears interfere with faith development as any questioning or change in one’s beliefs risks making a “mistake.” A “better safe than sorry” dynamic comes to regulate how these anxiously-attached believers hold their beliefs and read the Bible.
Richard Beck

Slippery slopes are a reality and require deep and meaningful conversations. Christians best equipped to navigate slippery slopes are those securely attached to God.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

So Much To Think About

George 0 Comments

Sitting on the front porch this morning, I sneezed loudly.

From our neighbor’s open window across the street, I was pleasantly surprised to hear an unequivocal “BLESS YOU”.

Welcome to community!

You should never say bad things about the dead, only good things. Joan Crawford is dead. Good.
— Bette Davis

A Faithful Life

A faithful life is not like a grocery list-something to get through as efficiently possible. A faithful life isn’t simply reciting the right ideas about God. A faithful life is an invitation to contemplate God, to linger in the presence of God, to be with God, not just to do for God. 

Peterson translates Psalm 27: this way:
I’m asking GOD for one thing, 
only one thing: 
To live with him in his house 
my whole life long. 
I’ll contemplate his beauty I’ll study at his feet. 
(THE MESSAGE) _ 

Open & Unafraid – W David O Taylor

“Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak whispers the o’er fraught heart and bids it break.”

“Macbeth”: Shakespeare 

Empty Ritual

Some adults, having lost their true humanity, even use phrases such as “empty ritual.” Like many other enemies of tradition, they eradicate all the truly human pursuits in the name of “higher” rational activities, invented only in the last few hundred years.

Those who utter phrases such as “empty ritual” (something I’ve heard all my life) forget that it is God who first gave ritual to the people of Israel. This primary story about the faith runs counter to modern intuitions. For we presume that real things and true things are in the mind. It is thought and sentiment that we consider to hold the lofty place of the holy. But it is ritual that is given this place in the Scriptures.

In the later chapters of Exodus, we are told of Moses’ 40 days on the mountain in the presence of the Lord. During that time he is shown “the pattern” of all the furnishings of the Tabernacle. He is given the “pattern” of worship as well – the ritual of Israel. Christian understanding from the New Testament forward has always seen these patterns as a foreshadowing of Christ and His Pascha. The gospel was hidden in the patterns given to Moses.

Fr Stephen Freeman

Wealthy people

…this is why I think Jesus says that it is difficult for the wealthy to enter the kingdom of God. Not because wealth is inherently contaminating. Or that wealthy people are morally corrupt. The issue, it seems to me, is how wealth insulates you from your neediness, your vulnerabilities, dependencies, and brokenness. Separated from your neediness your days can be blissfully passed in delightful spaces and lovely experiences. Wealth cocoons you, and eventually entombs you. 

Thus the exhortation from Psalm 62: “If wealth increases, don’t set your heart on it.”

Richard Beck

Who is my neighbor?

The question “Who is my neighbour?”, is answered by Jesus’ question “Who proved to be neighbour to the person in need?” And the lawyer’s answer, drawn like a deep rooted tooth reluctant to emerge, “Well, I suppose, the one who showed him mercy.”

Mercy is thoughtful and costly neighbourliness. Mercy is the tilt of the heart towards those whose lives can be made better by our kindness and generosity. Mercy is compassionate practical caring about what is happening to folk who are struggling.

Emotional empathy and practical kindness, feeling and action, embodied kindness, the love of God enacted and demonstrated as a way of life; each a constituent part of mercy. We love because God first loved us; God’s love poured is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. God’s love to us is sufficient motive and our love for the neighbour is the energy source of mercy. “Anyone who does not love his brother or sister [or neighbour] whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen.”

Jim Gordon

Truly Human

While it is true that “God became man so that man could become God,” it is equally true that God became man so that man could become man – truly human. To be truly human we must sing and dance, create art and tell stories. We engage in commerce and build cities. All that is human life and existence is a gift from God and has a God-given purpose and direction.

Fr Stephen Freeman

Human Worth

…a recent survey which showed that under 30s in Canada think poor and homeless people should be allowed to seek euthanasia if their lives are miserable enough that they want to do so. Alas, human autonomy and expendability has replaced the “imago dei” as the basis for determining human worth.

Michael Bird

View from the Front Porch

PERSPECTIVE

This morning Alexa signaled a notification. I asked what the notification was..
“CNN reports 40,00o killed in Gaza”

I was stunned. All sorts of scenarios ran through my mind. Nuclear attack? Refugee camp bombed? Middle east war spreading? It was disconcerting, to say the least.

Following up, I found the full CNN report, “40,000 killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023.”

Read that, I was flooded with relief. Thank goodness it was not 40,000 killed yesterday but a total for the war.

I’m pondering — perspective
Relieved to learn 40,00o have been killed ?

“You will always define events in a manner which will validate your agreement with reality.” – Steve Maraboli

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

So Much To Think About

George 0 Comments

Your house, containing everything you own, catches fire. After saving your loved ones and pets, you have time to safely make a final dash to save any one item. What would it be? 

August 6, 1945

Not many Americans have Aug. 6 circled on their calendars, but it’s a day that the Japanese can’t forget. 

The bombs killed an estimated 200,000 men, women and children and maimed countless more. In Hiroshima 50,000 of the city’s 76,000 buildings were completely destroyed. In Nagasaki nearly all homes within a mile and a half of the blast were wiped out. In both cities the bombs wrecked hospitals and schools. Urban infrastructure collapsed.

“Everything was burned. People were walking around with their clothes burned off, their hair singed and standing on end. Their faces were swollen, so much so that you couldn’t tell who was who. Their lips were swollen too, too swollen to speak. Their skin would fall right off and hang off their hands at the fingernails, like an inside-out glove, all black from the mud and ash. It was almost like they had black seaweed hanging from their hands.

But I was thankful that some of my classmates were alive, that they were able to make their way back.

Swarms of flies came and laid eggs in the burns, which would hatch, and the larvae would start squirming inside the skin. They couldn’t stand the pain. They’d cry and plead, ‘Get these maggots out of my skin.’

The maggots would feast on the blood and pus and get so plump and squirm. I didn’t dare use my bare hands, so I brought my chopsticks and picked them out one by one. But they kept hatching inside the skin. I spent hours picking those maggots out of my classmates.”

Chieko Kiriake (5 years old 1945)

Social Media

Supposedly, being on social media is free. But you know that’s not true. It costs you time—hours of it, in fact, each and every day. It costs you attention. It costs you the anxiety it induces. It costs you the ability to do or think about anything else when nothing exactly is demanding your focus at the moment. It costs you the ability to read for more than a few minutes at a time. It costs you the ability to write without strangers’ replies bouncing like pinballs around your head. It costs you the freedom to be ignorant and therefore free of the latest scandal, controversy, fad, meme, or figure of speech that everyone knew last week but no one will remember next week.

Brad East

Motherly images of God

“under the shelter of your wings”

A recurring maternal image of God’s care in Scripture is that of a mother bird sheltering her chicks under her wings. Jesus uses this imagery in the gospel of Luke when he weeps over Jerusalem: 

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her. How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!”

…it’s important, for me at least, to stop and savor these motherly, maternal images of God’s love and affection. A mother’s heart is a profound and powerful window to look through when contemplating the love of God. There is no fiercer love on earth, and something divine shines through that fierceness. And it is good for your soul to know that you are loved like that.

Richard Beck

Your story is worth listening to. 

Peter Levine said that “trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.” Empathetic witnessing means holding your story/experience without rushing to fix, solve, minimize, bypass, or shame you. Consider who might be an empathetic witness to your story (this can include a therapist).

Kat Wilkins

Pondering

Can I believe in something I can’t understand?

God’s Will

For generations, the providence of God, as mysterious and perplexing as it was, created capacities for emotional resignation, humility, and patience. And I wonder if the reason our politics has become so emotionally reactive is due to the fact that we’ve lost some of this perspective, that God moves in mysterious ways. To be sure, we need to practice Lincoln’s humility when reading history. We need to stand quietly before the inscrutability of God rather than pridefully proclaiming what is or is not “God’s will” in any given historical event. Our posture is patience and trust rather than redpilling ourselves into conspiracy theories. 

I trust that God is at work in history, even in the disasters. How, I don’t know. To what purpose, I cannot say. Maybe God is rejecting America, and if so God has his reasons. We are not Israel after all. The hope of the world never depended upon us. But like Lincoln, I really don’t know what is going on. So I act with what light has been given me and wait in humility, patience, and trust. And this trust gives me just enough emotional distance from today’s news and future election results that I experience a peace that seems increasingly rare. 

Richard Beck

Luxury Beliefs

Luxury beliefs are ideas professed by people who would be much less likely to hold them if they were not insulated from, and had therefore failed seriously to consider, their negative effects.

…there is a special class of bad ideas and policies that proliferate in good part because those who hold them, being insulated from their effects, have never seriously thought about the consequences that would ensue from their implementation. The reason why the concept of luxury beliefs has resonated so widely is that it gives a name to people who treat as a parlor game questions that potentially have very serious consequences—just not for themselves. In other words, these beliefs are a luxury not because they are costly to acquire or serve predominantly to accrue social status but rather because those who hold them have the luxury to adopt them without being exposed to their real-life consequences.

 Yascha Monk

Consumer Driven

The consumer-driven religious life has resulted in Churches that major in personal fulfillment with little attention to doctrine and sacrament. It is a new form of Christianity, one that differs from its own Protestant ancestry as much as its ancestry differed from the Catholic. And though it has its largest representation within Protestant or non-denominational Churches, both Catholic and Orthodox communities are not immune to its power and its thought. Orthodox Christians are sometimes as guilty of “shopping” for their parish (or jurisdiction) as any mega-Church seeker.

Fr Stephen Freeman

Every Human
“Every human being is a human being. Every human being is fearful—fearful of being discovered as less than they want to come across.”

John Huffman, Sr

Defending the Accused

“He’s just intense.”
“You are overreacting.”
“You’re being paranoid.”
“You need to forgive him.”
“Just turn the other cheek.”
“You are being too sensitive.”
“You must be reading into things.”
“You need to think the best of him.”
“Are you sure he meant it that way?”
“You need to look at your own self first.”
“Did you do something to provoke him?”
“You’re blowing things out of proportion.”
“No one’s perfect. You shouldn’t expect him to be.”
“He treats you that way because he cares about you.”
“I can’t believe you’re telling me this. Stop gossiping.”
“We’re all sinners, so you should be gracious with him.”
“I’m sure he didn’t realize how his actions made you feel.”
“You are trying to ruin this family/organization/church/group.”
“You took something really small and made a huge deal out of it.”
“Well, you must have done something to cause him to treat you that way.”
“You’re probably stressed out right now; don’t let it cloud your judgment.”

If you’ve experienced any of these types of responses, I’m so sorry. It is disorienting and painful to be treated this way. And the commonality in these responses is that they, at best, minimize your concerns and at worst, attack you for raising them.

Scot McKnight

Will Rogers had it right: “One must wait until evening to see how splendid the day has been.” 
Right now, it’s pretty splendid.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

So Much To Think About

George 3 Comments

“Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind.”
Mary Schmich

Two Worlds

There are always two worlds. The world as it operates is power; the world as it should be is love. The secret of kingdom life is how we can live in both—simultaneously. The world as it is will always be built on power, ego, and success. Yet we also must keep our eyes intently on the world as it should be—what Jesus calls the reign of God. 

Richard Rohr

Forgetting God

The Russian writer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, when asked about the terrible evils of the Soviet Gulag, and other nightmarish manifestations of modernity, offered a very simple explanation of all that had befallen our world: “We forgot God.” I would add to that the observation that every time we remember God, we allow ourselves to step into the truth of our existence. The secular delusion disappears.

Fr Stephen Freeman

Miracle

After lecturing learnedly on miracles, a great theologian was asked to give a specific example of one. “There is only one miracle,” he answered. “It is life.” 

Have you wept at anything during the past year? 
Has Your heart beat faster at the sight of young beauty? 
Have you thought seriously about the fact that someday You are going to die ? 
More often than not do You really listen when people are speaking to you instead of just waiting for your turn to speak?
Is there anybody You know in whose place, if one of you had to suffer great pain, You would volunteer yourself? 
If your answer to all or most of these questions is No, the chances are that You’re dead. 

Fredrick Buechner

Readers

Earlier this week, a new Reading Agency survey, The State of the Nation’s Adult Reading, reported that half of U.K. adults do not regularly read and 15% have never read regularly for pleasure, while 35% used to read but have stopped. Attention is an issue overall, with 28% of U.K. adults saying they have difficulty focusing on reading for more than a few minutes.
Comparing this data with a study conducted in 2015, the Reading Agency’s research found that these figures mark not just a notable decrease in the number of U.K. adults reading regularly, but also a stark increase in the number of non-readers. With only 50% of the nation now saying they read regularly, down from 58% in 2015, the decline has gathered momentum in recent years, with 15% of the nation now saying they do not currently read for pleasure and have never done so regularly. That’s a rise of 88% since 2015, when just 8% of U.K. adults were non-readers.” 
The research also indicates a potential for this trend to continue growing, with younger adults being less likely to read than all other age groups. One-quarter of young people across the U.K. (aged 16-24) say they’ve never been regular readers, while an additional 44% already identify as “lapsed readers.” 
https://www.shelf-awareness.com/issue.html?issue=4776#m64565

Sports (Olympics)

Sports, like other art forms, are potential channels of transcendence. It’s why we watch and admire athletes. It’s why athletes sometimes can’t tell you why they made some choice on the field or what they were thinking in the moment. They were so in the flow, so self-forgetful, so present to teammate and circumstance that they lost themselves. The beauty that results, for them and for us, is marvelous. Our breath catches in our throat. David Foster Wallace called watching Roger Federer “a religious experience.” In a sense, he wasn’t wrong.

Brad East

Momento Mori –
These lyrics hit a lot harder at 60 [82] than they did at 16…..

And you run and you run
to catch up with the sun 
but it’s sinking…
Racing around 
to come up behind you again.
The Sun is the same,
in a relative way,
but you’re older…
Shorter of breath 
and one day closer to death.

—Pink Floyd

Clocks

“Sometimes it really upsets me—
the way the clock’s hands keep moving,
even when I’m just sitting here
not doing anything at all,
not even thinking about anything 
except, right now, about that clock
and how it can’t keep its hands still.
Even in the dark I picture it, and all
its brother and sister clocks and watches,
even sundials, all those compulsive timepieces
whose only purpose seems to be
to hurry me out of this world.”

– Linda Pastan

Consciousness 

Consciousness is not the seeing but that which sees me seeing. It is not the knower but that which knows that I am knowing. It is not the observer but that which underlies and observes me observing.We must step back from our compulsiveness, and our attachment to ourselves, to be truly conscious. 
… take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.  
Wisely, [this step] does not emphasize a moral inventory, which becomes too self-absorbed and self-critical, but speaks instead of a “personal inventory.” In other words, just watch yourself objectively, calmly, and compassionately. When we’re able to do this from a new viewing platform and perspective as a grounded child of God, “The Spirit will help us in our weakness” (Romans 8:26). From this most positive and dignified position, we canlet go of, and even easily admit, our wrongs. 

Richard Rohr

Holiness

Someone taught me long ago that there’s a difference between “gifted” and “godly.” Ideally you need both, but godly is always better than gifted and a jerk.

  • Holiness is both gift and demand. Something we are given and something we prosecute.
  • Holiness is not moralizing, not separatism, nor self-deprecation.
  • Holiness is the attempt to be consumed by God and to reflect Jesus to others.
  • Christian leaders are held to a higher standard in terms of language, financial dealings, relational integrity, and scrutiny. One must be beyond reapproach.
  • In effect, your walk must match your talk. You can’t have a private life without recourse to holiness.
  • Now, importantly, holiness is not perfection or sinlessness. 
  • Holiness always means dealing with the flaws in your character, mistakes of judgment, and seeking reconciliation when you are in the wrong.
    In fact, learning how to faithfully resolve your own mistakes rather than deny them or cover them up is a mark of holiness.

    Michael Bird

Truly Human

While it is true that “God became man so that man could become God,” it is equally true that God became man so that man could become man – truly human. To be truly human we must sing and dance, create art and tell stories. We engage in commerce and build cities. All that is human life and existence is a gift from God and has a God-given purpose and direction.

Fr Stephen Freeman

View from the Front Porch

Thank God it’s Monday

Thank God it’s Monday. OK, so I am retired and it is easy for me to say since I don’t have to go to work. But, I must tell you I adopted that prayer long before I retired. At some point, I realized that “”Thank God it’s Friday”” reflected an attitude toward work and the week and to life that I did not share. Of course weekends have their special opportunities but it is during the week that life is lived and experienced at its best and worst. Living for Friday betrays a more general attitude about our life that says we believe the best of life is somewhere ahead of us. We are pulled through life by a carrot on the end of the stick. It is an “”I can’t wait until…”” philosophy. I can’t wait until… school’s out for summer … I get my driver’s license … I get married, have a family … start my career … retire … get to heaven (die?). I have come to realize how much that I was missing by wishing for the future rather than experiencing the present. That probably accounts for some of my lack of memory that I have written about. I attribute some of the “”I can’t wait until…”” philosophy, at least for Christians, to a truncated view of salvation. If we only view salvation as going to heaven when we die, our view of life will be skewed. Somewhere along the line I began to understand that salvation is not just about “”pie in the sky””, it is present and real. We enjoy the reality of salvation here and now. Salvation is living under the reign of God here on earth as well as in eternity. That has profound implications for how I live and especially I how I view Monday.
posted 2006

STILL ON THE JOURNEY