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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

 Lettin’ the cat outta the bag is a whole lot easier than puttin’ it back in.

Sharing beliefs

I have had to stand before crowds for years and describe what I thought I believed, and then I often had to ask myself, “Do I really believe that myself?” And in my attempt to communicate it, I usually found that I’d only scratched the surface of understanding. In sharing, in giving it away, you really own it for yourself and appreciate more fully its value, beyond what you ever imagined.

Richard Rohr – Dancing Standing Still

Misinformed

Combine vast choice with algorithmic sorting, and we now possess a remarkable ability to become arguably the most comprehensively, voluntarily and cooperatively misinformed generation of people ever to walk the earth.

David French

Oil Production

American oil fields are gushing again, helping to drive down fuel prices but also threatening to undercut efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Only three years after U.S. oil production collapsed during the pandemic, energy companies are cranking out a record 13.2 million barrels a day, more than Russia or Saudi Arabia. The flow of oil has grown by roughly 800,000 barrels a day since early 2022, and analysts expect the industry to add another 500,000 barrels a day next year.

Selfies

There is a deep connection between God and the self within Christian understanding. Obviously, they are not the same thing, but we do not know one without the other. It is possible to say that we only know God to the extent that we know ourselves and that we only know ourselves to the extent that we know God.

To know yourself is an inner activity, made particularly difficult in an outer-directed culture. Though we live in the age of the “selfie,” we are, nonetheless, an age that is distracted from the true knowledge of the self. The “selfie” has nothing to do with self-knowledge and everything to do with an objectification of the self – how I would like myself to look if I were someone else. What the selfie never shows is how we truly perceive ourselves.

Fr Stephen Freeman

Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year for 2023 is authentic—

authentic saw a substantial increase in 2023, driven by stories and conversations about AI, celebrity culture, identity, and social media.

Incarnation

Jesus, in the song you wrote
The words are sticking in my throat…
Peace on earth
Hear it every Christmas time
But hope and history won’t rhyme

– U2, “Peace on earth”

Sometimes I wonder what the Incarnation changed. 

In the Incarnation, God is saying… 

Life on earth matters. People matter. Pain matters. When I made all I made in the way I made it, I knew what I was doing. I understood the cost of free will, which I know may seem hard to believe. So I’ll take on your frame. I’ll experience all you feel and more. I’ll show you how to live at peace in a troubled world, how to be an unhurried and healing presence. I’ll come in the flesh to be an example to you. Then I’ll come in the Spirit to be life in you. My rescue will be fast. Your adoption will be quick as a hammer’s swing. My rescue will be slow. Millenia will pass before the fullness of the Kingdom comes. My slowness is not cruelty or lack of care. On the contrary: I’m birthing a people of everlasting joy. That takes time.

Brian Morykon

For a New Baby

Kind Father

Thank you for your gracious gift of Miles.

God, please give Miles all that is required for a good way of life and for a good way of living.
Please let Miles  bring joy and pride to Gabriel and Kyle and all their families. We will give all that is needed to this child. And do our best to guard and protect Miles for his lifetime.

Amen

Adapted  – Author Unknown

Lord willing

To say “Lord willing” isn’t to say that God is a puppet master picking and choosing who has a safe trip home or an accident. To say “Lord willing” is, rather, an admission of our frailty, dependency, and mortality. As it says in James, we are but a vapor. Saying “Lord willing” brings my finitude into view, that my time in not in my hands. To say “Lord willing” is a memento mori. 

I think old timers said “Lord willing” a lot because they lived in agrarian cultures, where they had little control over the elements that affected their crops. Their fate was not in their hands. They had no power to make it rain. Saying “Lord willing” put them in a proper frame of mind. Farmers had to be humble. 

But as we move further and further away from those times and places, we grow more prideful, thinking that we can control our own fates. I don’t think we bristle at “Lord willing” because of theological concerns about providence. I think we chaff at “Lord willing” because we don’t like to admit our lives are not in our hands. I think we avoid “Lord willing” because we’ve lost the humility of our ancestors. Our technology has insulated us from our neediness and dependencies. They prayed for rain, we turn on our sprinkler system. They sat on front porches fanning themselves through hot summers, we turn on our air conditioner units. 

They said “Lord willing” their entire lives. We never say it at all. And between us, who sees life more truthfully?

Richard Beck

Eucharist

… from the earliest times, the offering of Christ’s Body and Blood has been known as the Eucharist. It is the Thanksgiving. Were this not so, the Church would have named this most central act of its life something else: the Lord’s Supper or Holy Communion. These are later titles given in an effort to distinguish Protestant worship from Catholic. The word Eucharist is returning to common usage, however. It will be truly significant when the Eucharist (thanksgiving) returns to Christians as a way of life.

Fr Stephen Freeman

View from the Lanai

Writing today and for the next three months from Florida.

A significant part of my activity while here is reading and wiring. I just finished and highly recommend :

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

So Much To Think About

George 0 Comments

  My tolerance for idiots is extremely low these days. I used to have some immunity built up, but obviously, there’s a new strain out there.

We become what we see

pornographic gaze vs sacramental gaze 

This vision is “sacramental” as we come to behold invisible, spiritual truths shining though material reality. Proper Christian vision participates in a “sacramental ontology,” where we see a world “charged with the grandeur of God.” The sacramental gaze creates a sacred encounter. To see with the eyes of the heart incarnates a relation of love. 

The pornographic gaze is greedy, consumptive, and objectifying. The pornographic gaze is iconoclastic perception, a form of perceptual violence, as it rips the sacred from the material. In the thought of Martin Buber, the pornographic gaze creates an objectifying and deadening I-It relation with the world.  By contrast, the sacramental gaze beholds an I-Thou relation, a meeting with a holy other. 

to “make a covenant with my eyes” is, rather, learning to envision the world correctly, rejecting an I-It relation for an I-Thou relation, as we gaze at each other. In rejecting the pornographic gaze in favor of the sacramental gaze, we come to see the world with the eyes of our heart.

I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people, Ephesians 1:18

http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2022/08/a-covenant-with-my-eyes-part-3-seeing.html

The Presence of God

Adapted from Walter Brueggemann’s description of Freedom, 

Living Toward a Vision page 41 

There is something hidden and mysterious about the Presence of God. It is like manna in that it is always a gift given, and never a product controlled and understood. Like manna, it is not something that cam be stored up and taken for granted, because then it turns sour and we don’t have it anymore. It states the heart of our faith and our greatest temptation.  : Yet at the same time those who do not care for, nurture, and celebrate God’s Presence when it is given are likely not to enjoy it very long. 

Avoiding Death

When we avoid thoughts of death, we unconsciously assume that tomorrow will look a lot like today, so we can do tomorrow what we could do today. But when we focus on death, that increases the stakes at play in the present, and clarifies what we should do with our time.

If you insist on ignoring your own demise, you are likely to make decisions that cause you to sleepwalk through life. You may not be dead yet, but you’re not fully alive either.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/05/death-memento-mori-happiness/674158/

Is pluralism a Christian ethic ?

Pluralists seek to replace the demonizing, demeaning and dividing ethos with one that encourages respect, relationships and cooperation. Pluralists believe that people’s identities are complex and shifting, that most human beings shouldn’t be divided into good/evil categories, that we become wise as we enter into many different points of view. Patel says that universities shouldn’t be battlefields but potluck dinners, where all guests bring their own cuisines to the common table.

David Brooks

Prayer is the work

…the battle is fought in prayer. We don’t pray for the battle. Prayer is the battle. Prayer is the place where justification and sanctification happen., An old preacher told me once that he really began to understand “justification” when he was working construction one summer.  As he would place a stud in the wall of the home they were building, either he or his partner would have to step off and hold up a plum line to make sure the stud was straight. One day, he said, he finally understood this was what the Spirit was doing to him in prayer. The Spirit would hold up the plum line of Christ against his life and then hammer him straight in the places he didn’t line up with Jesus. 

When we leave our prayers, we should be totally aligned with what God is doing in us and through us. You can’t do that in a few minutes a day. That takes a while.

Mike Glenn

Love your enemies

…brain scans show how powerfully social identity can shape our emotional response to situations. …

For example, if someone sees a comrade in pain — a fellow member of one’s group — the brain will react with empathy. “My brain would simulate the suffering of the other person by reactivating how I feel when I am feeling bad,” Klimecki explains.

But, instead, if it is an adversary experiencing pain, not only is the same empathetic region of the brain not as active, she says, “we also sometimes see more activation related to schadenfreude or malicious joy.”

Olga Klimecki, a neurology researcher, via Scot Mknight

the biggest threat to faith

“clean hands and a pure heart” Ps 24

…the biggest threat to faith in the modern world is what I call “the mystical-to-moral shift.” We believe that goodness is the goal of faith, rather than seeking God. This moralization and politicization of faith, given how politics is increasingly becoming an arena of moral identity and performance, instrumentalizes God and the life of faith. God becomes a tool to become good, faith an instrument for a political agenda, church a technique for moral self-improvement. 

Phrased differently, God is perceived as means and goodness as the end. We believe in God, go to church, pray, read our Bibles, follow the Golden Rule all in order to become a good person, increasingly a politically inflected vision of a good person.

This instrumentalizing of faith undermines faith because, as we all know, you can be good without God. And you don’t need to believe in God to vote well. There are many non-religious ways to become a good person or subscribe to the proper politics. And if you don’t need God, faith or church to be good, well, what’s the point? If you can get to the end by other means, God, as a moral or political tool, can be left behind. 

Richard Beck

Islamification of the faith

Islamification of the faith. I have written before of the influence of Islam on the notion of Sola Scriptura. Christianity, viewed as essentially an act of submission to God through Christ, is not Christianity. It is a Christianized Islam. It’s useful. It need have none of the problems concomitant with a genuine historical Church. It is quite portable and can be kept entirely private, offering no disturbance to the structures and agreements of the secular world. Individual Christians are never a problem for the world. It’s only when two or three of them gather together that they become dangerous.

Fr Stephen Freeman

Faith

“faith.” We often assume that the Greek word pistis means something thin, as in “belief.” To have “faith” is to “believe.”

But pistis (faith) means something much more than “belief.” Pistis is better translated as fidelity, faithfulness, loyalty, and allegiance. To have faith means to keep faith — to hold fast, to endure, to remain, to stay, to never falter or betray. Faith is an inseverable bond. An unbreakable promise. An unshakable commitment. An unwavering loyalty. Faith is courage, endurance, and steely resolve. Faith is the blood of the martyrs.

Another way to think about this, especially faith-as-allegiance, is that, in the Biblical imagination, there is no space for free moral agency. Every space has a Power or a Lord. The only option before you, therefore, is to whom you will swear allegiance. As Bob Dylan sang, “You’ve gotta serve somebody.”

This is why the opposite of faith isn’t “unbelief” but idolatry — betraying your love, breaking your promise, serving another lord. And again, the issue of idolatry isn’t here a mental game, a game of “believing” in this or that. Idolatry, says the theologian William Cavanaugh, is less about your metaphysical or ontological beliefs than a lifestyle that betrays your fundamental allegiances:  

Richard Beck

Only in kentucky

…state law allows for secret recordings as long as one party is aware of it …

Compassionate Heart
– definition: A person who is standing in snow with the temperature at 12 degrees who feels compassion for those who are in Florida standing in the rain with the temperature at 35 degrees. 

Tradition

Our humanity is a tradition. I can only learn what it is to be a human being from another human being, someone who has successfully fulfilled that reality. Animals are no different. Birds do not suddenly fly – their flight is traditioned to them. Human beings learn to walk in a traditioned manner as well. Your computer or your phone will not teach you how to be a human being.

Fr Stephen Freeman 

Seduction of Crowds

the seduction of crowds is a hunger for transcendence. Getting swept up in a group can be ecstatic, temporarily filling the hole in your soul. But such transcendence is temporary, addictive, and prone to corruption. Belonging to the group becomes more important than the reason the group was created in the first place. 

Jonah Goldberg

View from the front porch

Happy Thanksgiving

Gratitude

Anne Lamott writes of the exponential flow of gratitude in our lives:

Saying and meaning “Thanks” leads to a crazy thought: What more can I give? We take the action first, by giving—and then the insight follows, that this fills us. Sin is not the adult bookstore on the corner. It is the hard heart, the lack of generosity, and all the isms, racism and sexism and so forth. But is there a crack where a ribbon of light might get in, might sneak past all the roadblocks and piles of stones, mental and emotional and cultural?…

How can something so simple be so profound, letting others go first, in traffic or in line at Starbucks, and even if no one cares or notices? Because for the most part, people won’t care—they’re late, they haven’t heard back from their new boyfriend, or they’re fixated on the stock market. And they won’t notice that you let them go ahead of you.

They take it as their due.

But you’ll know. And it can change your whole day, which could be a way to change your whole life. There really is only today, although luckily that is also the eternal now. And maybe one person in the car in the lane next to you or in line at the bank or at your kid’s baseball game will notice your casual generosity and will be touched, lifted, encouraged—in other words, slightly changed for the better—and later will let someone else go first. And this will be quantum.

The movement of grace toward gratitude brings us from the package of self-obsessed madness to a spiritual awakening. Gratitude is peace.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

So Much To Think About

George 1 Comment

Meg Greenfield once observed, Washington isn’t filled with the wild kids who stuck the cat in the dryer; it’s filled with the kind of kids who tattled on the kids who stuck the cat in the dryer.

Belief

A belief cannot be either proved or disproved. If you wish to believe that invisible flower spirits are causing your string beans to grow, there is no point in my trying to dissuade you, because these entities are invisible and immaterial. Something proposed as a truth can, however, be put to the test. In recent years, people have confused beliefs with truths. From this confusion have come ideologies and dogmas—the characteristic of a dogma being that it’s proposed as an absolute truth and cannot be disputed, and if you try disputing it, you’ll be burned as a heretic.

Margaret Atwood

NCAA Investigations

“Handing the N.C.A.A. an investigation is like throwing a Frisbee to an elderly dog. Maybe you get something back. Maybe the dog lies down and chews a big stick.” (Paul Shikany, the Bronx)

“Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”

-Bryan Stevenson

What if YOU’RE the asshole?


Maybe you are just like me and everyone else: part asshole, part angel. And you too have done and said things for which you are not proud, that you wish you could take back.

But maybe it’s time to Marie Kondo your resentments against yourself. You gotta take out the trash.  Pretending it doesn’t smell only works for so long. Walk it to the curb, burn some incense, and move the f**k on.

You are a thousand times more than just the subtotal of your mistakes.

I hope that you have practiced enough self-honesty and compassion, accountability and forgiveness to tell a story about who you are that is bigger and more beautiful than the most shitty moment. I hope you can speak of your past self with compassion.

Nadia Bolz- Weber

Epistemic humility

“Name five things you got wrong”

in terms of honesty with oneself as well as the capacity to persuade others, there’s no substitute for principled and explicit fallibilism (the notion that knowledge might turn out to be false).

Brad East

ARE – Adverse Religious Experience

five adverse religious experiences (AREs) that often lead to trauma.

1.    Fear of hell or eternal conscious torment

2.    purity, virginity, and abstinence culture

3.    altar calls, healings, and scary sermons

4.    spanking and corporal punishment can lead persons into religiously abusive situations and toward spiritually abusive leaders

5.    patriarchy and oppression.

https://scotmcknight.substack.com/p/religious-abuse-and-ares
via Scot McKnight 

Everyone knows

a man killed 18 people and injured 13 others in Lewiston, Maine.

The killer was an Army reservist, and the military had determined that he should not have access to a weapon or ammunition. An Army colleague had alerted the local police, who contacted the family but did little else. His ex-wife knew: Their divorce decree stated that he had to keep all of his guns locked up. He was at least denied the purchase of a suppressor from a local gun shop based on his answer to a question on his background check. Kevin writes: “If anything is clear from the events preceding the bloodbath in Maine—in which everybody from the military to the police to friends and family and mental health authorities had good reason to intervene and the legal means to do so…

Dispatch Weeky

Feelings

 Feelings are real—people do have them, I have observed—and they can certainly be plausible explanations for all kinds of behavior. But they are not excuses or justifications. If they were, men who murder their wives because they’re feeling cranky that day would never get convicted.

Margaret Atwood

DANG

…the longer many couples are married, the less accurate they are at reading each other. They lock in some early version of who their spouse is, and over the years, as the other person changes, that version stays fixed—and they know less and less about what’s actually going on in the other’s heart and mind.

William  Ickles 

Prophetic Friends

Prophecy is seeing and articulating reality from God’s perspective. Walter Brueggemann writes that prophecy “voices” God among humans. In Scripture, prophets recite the character of God as evidenced by his words and deeds, assess what’s going on for good or ill among God’s people, and reveal God’s purposes now and into eternity. Prophetic speech is often very bold.

Prophetic friends are there to see and reflect the quality of our character, and they expand our capacity for virtue. They share a vision of God leading us into a new calling and uniquely empower us to step into it. Prophetic friends show us “a world other than the visible, palpable world,” in Brueggemann’s words, which is the very root of hope. Prophetic friends keep us spiritually alive and kicking.

https://www.plough.com/en/topics/life/relationships/friends-mirrors-prophets

View from the front porch

Book recommendation:
I am currently reading and finding it to be personally relevant. Quotes below give a taste of Brooks’ thoughtful insights.

https://www.amazon.com/How-Know-Person-Seeing-Others/dp/059323006X

Who are you

…who you are becoming in corrosive times. Are you becoming more humane or less? Are you a person who obsesses over how unfairly you are treated, or are you a person who is primarily concerned by how you see and treat others? “Virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is,” Iris Murdoch wrote.

WHAT TO DO IN HARD TIMES

The most practical thing you can do, even in hard times, is to lead with curiosity, lead with respect, work hard to understand the people you might be taught to detest.

That means seeing people with generous eyes, offering trust to others before they trust you. That means adopting a certain posture toward the world. If you look at others with the eyes of fear and judgment, you will find flaws and menace; but if you look out with a respectful attitude, you’ll often find imperfect people enmeshed in uncertainty, doing the best they can.

David Brooks

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

So Much To Think About

George 0 Comments

First you forget names, then you forget faces. Then you forget to pull up your zipper.  It’s even worse when you forget to pull it down.

Aging

…my great friend Father Terry Richey said, it’s not about trying harder; it’s about resisting less. This is right up aging’s alley. Some days are sweet, some are just too long.

Anne Lamott

SOME THINGS FOR YOU TO THINK ABOUT

Sometimes being hard on someone is the most helpful thing you can do for them. Sometimes being nice to someone is the most unhelpful thing you can do for them.

Nice is not always the same as good.

Choosing to be nice is strength. Feeling compelled to always be nice is weakness.

Choosing when to be disagreeable, when required, is strength. Always being disagreeable is weakness.

Mark Manson

Learning to see and love what is

…many people think religion has to do with ideas and concepts and formulas from books. That’s how clergy and theologians were trained for years. We went away, not into a world of nature and silence and primal relationships, but into a world of books. Well, that’s not biblical spirituality, and that’s not where religion begins. It begins in observing “what is.” Paul says, “Ever since the creation of the world, the invisible essence of God and God’s everlasting power have been clearly seen by the mind’s understanding of created things” (Romans 1:20). We know God through the things that God has made. The first foundation of any true religious seeing is, quite simply, learning how to see and love what is. Contemplation is meeting reality in its most simple and direct form unjudged, unexplained, and uncontrolled!

Richard Rohr

Magic

The magic we find is rarely the magic we expect, yet it exists more often than not, given our openness to its presence. Be there.

Eric Alan

Women in ministry

In Christian ministry, how do men and women partner in ministry, as co-pastors or part of a team, without falling into several traps.

By traps, I mean things like:

(a) Treating women as honorary men;
(b) Making token appointments of women to positions of junior leadership;
(c) Assuming that men need a warning sign, “May break into patriarchy at any moment,”
(d) Thinking that some gifts come in pink or blue; and
(e) Failing to recognize that gifts are exercised not despite gender but precisely through it, that is, as men and women who serve the churches.
(f) Putting women on a different pay scale.

Michael Bird

Christian

Too few Christians add value to the precious title of “Christian.” We take the Name, and by our choices, make the Name mean nothing. 

Someone who bears the name has come to terms with their own brokenness and failures. A Christian is someone who recognizes they can’t fix what is broken within them nor repair the damage they’ve done in others. A Christ follower has realized that Jesus and Jesus alone understands the best way to live life and He alone, has the power, grace, mercy and love needed to make something new out of our wreckage. 

Mike Glenn

The place of truth at funerals

But here’s the problem with blocking out the flaws of the person who died: Choosing to remember only the good provides a false sense of reality. Remembering the good only allows us to remember and think about the person in pieces. It doesn’t allow space for us to think about the person as a whole.”
https://experiencecamps.org/blog/why-we-need-to-remember-the-flaws-along-with-the-good-those-who-die#:~:text=Here%27s%20what%20she%20had%20to,and%20joyful%20experiences%20with%20them.

Competence

Competence is how good you are when there is something to gain. Character is how good you are when there is nothing to gain.

People will reward you for competence. But people will only love you for your character.

It’s hard enough to be competent. It’s even harder to have character. Do you believe you’re someone of character? Are you able to do the right thing or do something well when no one is looking or when there is nothing to gain?

Mark Manson

Decline of Religiosity

There is no doubt that the percentage of American adults who said they had no religion nearly doubled between 2007 and the early 2020s. What is the reason for this?

I think that the answer is that the people who are leaving Christianity are doing so primarily because they no longer find Christianity morally credible. They don’t think they need religion in order to be moral people, and they don’t think that the moral fabric of the country depends on a set of values sustained by religious faith. This is a new phenomenon, because for most of the nation’s history, large numbers of Americans did believe that the country’s moral values were inextricably tied to religion, just as George Washington suggested in his Farewell Address. But when people’s faith in the moral authority of Christianity disappears, they leave the church.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2023/10/american-secularization-hasnt-followed-the-script-that-secularization-theory-would-predict/

Fulfillment of Prophecy 

this must be said, whether from the pulpit or not: every precise fulfillment of some Bible verse (understood as) prophetic prediction so far has been shown not to be a fulfillment. Put more bluntly, the predictors have all been wrong about every prediction so far. They need to stop. We need to stop. Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Gorbachev, Putin, et al. – none were THE antichrist. None. WWI, WWII, the Six Day War, the oil crisis, you name it, each has been ramped up with apocalyptic expectations and every last one – name them all – has been wrongly connected to the end of history. The approach is entirely wrong.

Scot McKnight

Divine Providence

I have come to think that the doctrine of divine providence is more readily seen by the old than by the young. For the old, most of life is “in the rear-view mirror,” while, for the young, it rushes towards the windshield at ever-increasing speeds. In hindsight, the hand of God seems clear, and, mostly, unmistakable. It is a mysterious working, particularly when I see good come out of seeming evil.

Fr Stephen Freeman

View from the Front Porch

One of my current writing projects is a Faith Memoir. An anthology of blog posts and other writings over the past several decades that focuses is on my faith journey, sharing significant experiences, understandings and beliefs that have shaped my faith. it is intended to serve as an ethical will, a document that passes ethical values from one generation to the next. You can read about Ethical Wills HERE
Here is one entry:

The Journey

There is a temptation to think of one’s spiritual journey as individual. I do not believe that is true. I am one part of the pilgrimage of all of God’s people. We each have our own unique encounters, experiences, trials and detours but we do not travel alone. We must not, cannot proceed alone. We need the strength, companionship, encouragement, wisdom and experience of fellow sojourners. The journey is perilous and we may need to be rescued or to rescue. The journey brings us joyful experiences and beautiful vistas to which we enthusiastically direct our fellow travelers. Of course we could make better progress without the burden of others but its not just about the destination. It’s also about the experience of the journey. Too often our perspective is like the impatient child: “Are we there yet?”. We pay little attention to the wonderful experiences, opportunities for relationship and love and the beauty and wonder of the scenes passing the window. We are only concerned about the destination.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

So Much To Think About

George 0 Comments

There are three kinds of men: The ones that learn by reading. The few who learn by observation.    
The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence and find out for themselves.

Overwhelmed…

It seems to me (and I may be wrong) that while in the Garden of Gethsemane, that Jesus was at least momentarily overwhelmed by what the Father would require of Him soon thereafter… overwhelmed to the point of asking if there were any other way to accomplish the will and work of God. How much more will fallen creatures like ourselves be overwhelmed by what life throws at us? Prayer…it seems to me…is asking God if there is any other way than the one that we see…and neither the emotions, nor the questions are sinful…

Phoenix Preacher

Name calling

…calling someone a ‘snowflake’ or an ‘alt-right troll’. It is a means to dismiss their ideas, without engaging in any meaningful way.

Calling someone a heretic or name often kills that conversation of discernment before it begins. We should seek to learn to listen, exhort, and challenge in ways that grant our conversation partners dignity and worth. Is this more work and less glamorous than name-calling? It certainly is. Does it lead to better unity and conceptions of the truth? I sure hope so.

Adam Renberg 

Love and Power

Both love and power are necessary building blocks of God’s peaceful realm on earth. Love utterly redefines the nature of power. Power without love is mere brutality (even in the church), and love without power is only the sentimentality of individual lives disconnected from the Whole. The gospel in its fullness holds love and power together, creating new hope and healing for the world. 

Richard Rohr

Path to knowledge of God

A path for the knowledge of God. 

This is something regardless of your age, young or old, this is the path—Pay attention to your questions— On this path you become far more aware of what you don’t know.  Knowing what your questions are, you become far more aware of the things you don’t know.

It is then, the things you think you know, and things that are merely information fade away. They weren’t my questions .

adapted from Fr Stephen Freeman

Hope

Hope is not imaginary or illusory. It is that sonar by which the body of Christ holds together and finds its way. If we, as living members of the body of Christ, can surrender our hearts … and listen for that sonar with all we are worth, it will again guide us, both individually and corporately, to the future for which we are intended. And the body of Christ will live, and thrive, and hold us tenderly in belonging.

Cynthia Bourgealt 

God’s Existence

…make a distinction between God’s existence and God’s essence. People often miss this hugely important point. True, we might make an argument for God’s existence, but that is a very thin claim. That God exists we might get our head around, but What God is and How God is, well, about such matters we have no clue. 

…the name “God” functions as a cipher, a word that points toward a mystery. We name the Source and Origin of the cosmos “God,” but we really have no idea what we’re talking about, what the word “God” actually names or means. 

The human mind follows its innate metaphysical curiosity to the edge of the cosmos. And at that edge our minds stare into the Beyond. We know that the universe cannot be its own explanation. Why does it exist? How does it exist? We don’t really know, but the word “God” points toward that Mystery.

Source unidentified

THREE THINGS FOR YOU TO THINK ABOUT

Haters occur in proportion to admiration. Doing anything notable will generate both positive and negative reactions of similar intensity.

It’s impossible to be a life-changing presence to some people without simultaneously being a complete joke to others.

The best response to hate is to simply improve yourself so much that the hater’s criticisms become self-evidently false and empty. The best revenge is to be so undeniably good that there’s no need to ever respond.

Mark Manson

Restorer

If you remove the yoke from among you, the accusing finger, and malicious speech;
If you lavish your food on the hungry and satisfy the afflicted;
Then your light shall rise in the darkness, and your gloom shall become like midday…. 
“Repairer of the breach,” they shall call you, 
“Restorer of ruined dwellings.” —Isaiah 58:9–10, 12

Richard Rohr

When I’m wrong

Even with the desire to be both biblical and rational in my thinking, there will be times when I’m wrong about the conclusions I come to…I do not fear or avoid this reality…I invite it as I’ll be wiser for the correction…

Phoenix Preacher

View from the Front Porch

TREES IN WINTER
Anne Lamott

..the moment I walk in and smell those old people again, and find them parked in the hallways like so many cars abandoned by the side of the road, I start begging God not to let me end up like this. But God is not a short-order cook, and these people were once my age. I bet they used to beg God not to let them end up as they have.

…I struggled to find meaning in their bleak existence. What finally helped was an image from a medieval monk, Brother Lawrence, who saw all of us as trees in winter, with little to give, stripped of leaves and color and growth, whom God loves unconditionally anyway. My priest friend Margaret, who works with the aged and who shared this image with me, wanted me to see that even though these old people are no longer useful in any traditional meaning of the word, they are there to be loved unconditionally, like trees in the winter.

Dying people can teach us this most directly. Often the attributes that define them drop away—the hair, the shape, the skills, the cleverness. And then it turns out that the packaging is not who that person has really been all along. Without the package, another sort of beauty shines through.

STIIL ON THE JOURNEY