Category: Notes Anthology

 Experience is something you don’t get until just after you need it. _{^{Steven Wright}}

religion cannot be restricted to beliefs.

To reduce religion to “belief” betrays a distinctively Christian and perhaps even Protestant myopia in conceiving religion. Christians have always defined themselves as “Believers” and internally policed the boundaries of belief far more than other religions where the emphasis was on orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy. But religion more broadly defined is the totality of a life lived before God, something embodied, a way of life, rhythms and rituals, habits of holiness, calendar and community. In many religions it not conceivable let alone possible to compartmentalize religious beliefs away from the daily expressions of religious life.

Michael Bird

Success

I think we have to be very careful using the word “success” when discussing being Jesus’s apprentices. It is easy to perceive following Jesus as a project similar to getting in shape, fixing up our house, or obtaining a certification. We can incorrectly think of it as a process, that if we apply ourselves properly and learn the right principles and actions, we will act like him and thus be successful spouses, parents, friends, employees, leaders, etc. And while success in those areas may be a byproduct, that is not the primary goal of following Jesus. Being Jesus’ apprentice is not a program to make us successful in our lives and careers. It is learning from him how to naturally BE like him, so that like him we can be the embodied presence of God in love, faith, hope, joy and peace for the sake of others.

Jason Zahariades 

Perception of the heart

There is a perception, a “seeing” that is beside the seeing of the mind. This is the perception of the heart. The tendency of our mind (thoughts and feelings) is to fragment everything. We see details. We are overwhelmed with details. We experience the world as a cacophony of the senses. Repelled by one and attracted by another, we stumble through life like a drunken man, pushed and pulled by the things around us. This is a description of the passionate life. With increased purity of the heart, however, there comes the increased ability to perceive the whole. To see one thing, not only as itself but in its relations as well, is the beginning of knowing the logos of something. Were we to perceive everything in such a manner, we would perceive the truth of all things. For nothing is as it is in itself, but only as it is in relation (including most especially its relation to God).

Either life is nothing more than the chemistry of his brain, and thus no more significant than the digital programming of a computer model, or there is something unquantifiable, something “ineffable, incomprehensible, invisible, beyond understanding,” etc. within our experience and just beyond the edge of our knowing. [Our] choice lies between the fragmented mastery of the chemical equation and union with the Joy that extends beyond.

Fr Stephen Freeman

Idolatry

Idolatry may also seem far removed from modern life, conjuring images of ancient peoples bowing to golden statues. But we should understand that those who bowed before images did so because they believed they could persuade or manipulate the gods to give them what they longed for — fertility, rain, abundant harvests, victory, happiness, security and safety. We may use different means today, but modern people are driven by the same motivations. We also seek, in our own ways, to control our world and to wrest from it what we need and desire.

The idea of idolatry is not, necessarily, having false gods that we can name — or sculpt, for that matter. Instead, it is a term for disordered love. It describes a devotion to even good things that is excessive or obsessive. It conveys to us that well-meaning people who desire worthy things can seek them in ways that harm themselves and others, that we can be driven by longings that we may not know, understand or be able to articulate but that determine the shape of our lives and our society. The 16th-century Protestant theologian John Calvin famously said that “the human heart is a perpetual idol factory.” We are constantly devoting ourselves to what will make us feel secure and safe, things that promise to provide what we most desire and need. Idolatry, Calvin thought, is a subconscious motivator. Our idols are the deepest loves and urges driving us under the hood of our conscious minds, our default mode of being.

Understanding our hearts as idol factories invites us to the difficult work of honesty and humility. It tells us that people do harm, sometimes without knowing it or without meaning to, which means that weprobablydo as well. It tells us that we are not driven by pure rationality or unfettered love to the degree we suppose we are. And this humility allows for compassion and charity to others, even our enemies. It tells us that they are not uniquely evil. They are driven by disordered passions and loves just like us.

Trish Harrison Warren NYT

Old men

“Every old man complains,” so said Samuel Johnson, “of the growing depravity of the world, of the petulance and insolence of the rising generation.” 

Unintentional injury 

The CDC tracks hospital admissions for unintentional injuries. You fell off a ladder, you fell on a bike. The people that get injured the most, traditionally, are teenage boys. They have very high rates of injury, and then as men get older, the rates go down. That’s the way it used to be.

But what happens beginning in the early 2000s is the boys’ rate begins going down and down, especially after they move on to smartphones around 2012. Boys are no longer going to hospitals for broken arms. It’s a very rare thing now. Now you might think that’s good, but boys are now getting injured at the same rate as 50-year-old men, teenage boys who you think are out taking risks, same hospitalization rates as 50-year-old men, and lower hospitalization rates than teenage girls had 15 years ago. Because boys are not doing anything where they could get hurt. They come home after school, they put on their headphones, they play video games with their friends. Now it’s great fun, but it’s missing most, it’s missing many of the active ingredients of play. It’s missing actual fear, actual thrill. And so I don’t think that, I don’t think our kids are getting the risk exposure that they need to be able to manage risks for the rest of their lives. By the time they come to us in college, they seem to think that reading Shakespeare could be dangerous for them.

All else equal, I would rather there were fewer broken arms. But if the cost of having fewer broken arms is a doubling of the suicide rate, I think from almost all of recorded history, at least as far back as I can see data, young people were much more likely to be killed by someone else than by themselves. But beginning in this period, I think it’s around 2012, the suicide rate for the first time exceeds the murder rate. So kids are still getting hurt and killed, but it’s by themselves now. And I think that’s really, really sad.

Jonathan Haidt 

View from the Front Porch

Beliefs

Listening to a podcast recently, I was introduced to an interesting idea about beliefs. I do not recall the podcast but I have continued pondering the idea for several weeks and thought it worth sharing. My apologies to the authors but here is the gist of what I heard: Many Christians conceptualize their belief as a foundation, as a result, when a fault line appears the entire structure is threatened. The authors suggested that a better way to think about belief is as a net, interconnected strands creating a network that is sustained even when strands are weakened or destroyed. 

The idea resonates with me. Early development of my beliefs was about building a foundation consisting of inviolable conclusions, the purpose being to establish an unassailable foundation that provided assurance of salvation and a roadmap for life. 

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

Each of us’ righteousness seemed like a lightbulb. Some shine like 100 watt others like a 15 Watt bulb.  what we must remember is that in the bright sunshine of God‘s righteousness neither  the 15 watt or the 100 watt bulbs are discernible.

Beauty

…we perceive beauty because it is real and true, and discover in it, a gateway into the mystery of the universe, that which lies beneath and within. 

FR Stephen Freeman

Idols

The prophets warned that the making of idols—those objects or ideas or affiliations that replace for us what should be ultimate—are destructive. At this moment, though, the idols don’t seem to be killing us. They seem to be helping us succeed. In reality, though, they are doing worse than killing us—they are deadening us.

Idols are useful. They draw people together. They give a person a sense of meaning, a cause for which to live and die. Nothing can mobilize a nationalistic sense of identity better than the chant “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!” (Acts 19:28). Their usefulness, though, is the very reason the Bible says they are useless.

Idols have two fatal flaws: They are self-created and they are dead. The man who “falls in love” with his chatbot can have all the glandular sensations of what seems like a love affair. Ultimately, though, he has to know that what he “loves” is himself—what the algorithms repeat back to him is what he put there in the first place. Idols, the Bible warns, are dead. And what’s worse, the Bible warns, “Those who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them” (Ps. 115:8).

At the end of the path to idols, you end up enclosed in your own self, but a part of you knows that what’s controlling you is a construction of your making. You end up, moreover, dead—numb to the very source of your life and being. And then, seeking to answer the deadness, you construct some other idol to give a rush of what feels like life.

Russell Moore

Nazism 

Nazism was seductive precisely because it promised an immediate fix to parliamentary gridlock, an end to economic chaos, and a refusal to bow to the crushing indemnities and humiliating conditions imposed upon Germany by the western powers after the First World War. For many Germans, the Nazi party was an alternative and perhaps even the answer to the trauma, divisions, and poverty after the First World War.

Nazism was not an alien political doctrine that appeared out of nowhere. Nazism succeeded because it embodied what people either believed or wanted to believe. Nazism was an incredibly eclectic worldview, combining Darwinian science, pseudo-sciences like eugenics, incorporating some aspects of Lutheranism, elements of the philosophy of Nietzsche, the music of Wagner, Nordic mythology, anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, numerology, idealized masculinity, nationalism, militarism, anti-communism, and belief in the magical power of ancient artefacts – it had something for everyone!

Nazism appeared to be scientific, spiritual, progressive, and effective, the new type of civilization the world needed. As a philosophy, Nazism was internally consistent to the point that it appeared self-evident to many people, which is precisely why it attracted supporters from all over Europe.

This is why many political philosophers and political theologians have spent so much time studying Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, because we want to understand how a totalitarian movement “works,” how does it seduces and succeeds? How can people participate in a sadist regime where it’s main mode of discourse is terror? We like to think that the Nazi leaders were either monsters or mad. But that probably says more about our sense of horror at the Nazis but does not really explain them.

But let’s be honest, it’s hard to understand the evil of the Nazis, we cannot imagine the rationality for it. But to prevent it one must understand it, which means we must engage in the unpleasant task of trying to get inside the head of the Nazis, into their mentality, look upon their brutality and banality, even if such a gaze burns our eyes.

Michael Bird

Theology

Theology’s mother tongue is prayer and confession, the language of the liturgy, but these aren’t genres so much as modes that transform disparate genres into vehicles of divine discourse. Like Jacob’s Ladder, the traffic runs both ways.

Brad East 

Belief

It is dishonest to cling to a belief which the facts will not support, but it is equally dishonest to withhold your assent from a belief if the evidence at your disposal is overwhelmingly in its favour.

G. B. Caird 

Experts

It is a curious fact that in this age of specialization we are prepared to trust the word of the expert in almost every other sphere, but in religion it is tacitly assumed that the person in the street knows best.

If we were consistent, we should pay at least as much respect to the saint in religion as we do to the genius in any other field of knowledge or experience.

If you want to be sure about Christianity, you must try it and see.

Yet only those who have sincerely tried to live the Christian life are qualified to pass judgment on the Christian faith.

G. B.  Caird 

Pandemic 

March 11, 2020

Four years ago today, society began to shut down.

Shortly after noon Eastern on March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared Covid — or “the coronavirus,” then the more popular term — to be a global pandemic. Stocks plummeted in the afternoon. In the span of a single hour that night, President Donald Trump delivered an Oval Office address about Covid, Tom Hanks posted on Instagram that he had the virus and the N.B.A. announced it had canceled the rest of its season.

It was a Wednesday, and thousands of schools would shut by the end of the week. Workplaces closed, too. People washed their hands frequently and touched elbows instead of shaking hands (although the C.D.C. continued to discourage widespread mask wearing for several more weeks).
The worst pandemic in a century had begun.
Today, on the unofficial fourth anniversary, I’ll update you on where things stand.
The true toll
Covid’s confirmed death toll — more than seven million people worldwide — is horrific on its own, and the true toll is much worse. The Economist magazine keeps a running estimate of excess deaths, defined as the number of deaths above what was expected from pre-Covid trends. The global total is approaching 30 million.

This number includes both confirmed Covid deaths and undiagnosed ones, which have been common in poorer countries. It includes deaths caused by pandemic disruptions, such as missed doctor appointments that might have prevented other diseases. The isolation of the pandemic also caused a surge of social ills in the U.S., including increases in deaths from alcohol, drugs, vehicle crashes and murders.

Key to wisdom

One of the keys to wisdom is that we must recognize our own biases, our own addictive preoccupations, and those things to which, for some reason, we refuse to pay attention. Until we see these patterns (which is early-stage contemplation), we will never be able to see what we do not see. Without such critical awareness of the small self, there is little chance that any individual will produce truly great knowing or enduring wisdom.

Richard Rohr

View from the Front Porch

Discipleship

The word discipleship and the word discipline are the same word, which has always fascinated me. Once you have made the choice to say, “Yes, I want to follow Jesus,” the question is, “What disciplines will help me remain faithful to that choice?” If we want to be disciples of Jesus, we have to live a disciplined life.

BY discipline, | do not mean control. If I know the discipline of psychology or of economics, | have a certain control over a body of knowledge. If I discipline my children, I want to have a little control over them.

But in the spiritual life, the word discipline means “the effort to create some space in which God can act.” Discipline means to prevent everything in your life from being filled up. Discipline means that somewhere you’re not occupied, and certainly not preoccupied. In the spiritual life, discipline means to create that space in which something can happen that you hadn’t planned or counted on.

Discipline means to prevent everything in your life from being filled up.

Henry Nouwen

Our front porch is — that space in which something can happen that you hadn’t planned or counted on.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY