For the Joy of the Journey

So Much To Think About

George February 13, 2024 Notes Anthology 0 Comments

Dostoevsky said, “The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he’s in prison.”

We know the sound of two hands clapping. But what is the sound of one hand clapping?
A Zen K?an

The sound of two hands clapping is the sound of a person being elevated into a joyful state by art because they are reminded of their connection to all other people facing the same struggles. The sound of one hand clapping is the silence of suppressed joy and appreciation. It is the person who feels delight in another person but is unable to express that out of fear of embarrassment or some other repressed reason. The one hand is raised in desire to participate, now thwarted by a lack of courage. This reluctance to express one’s feelings to another human being is isolating—it is the deafening, unbearable sound of silence.

Kareem Abdul- Jabbar

Technology and Religion

If the misuses and abuses of technology depend upon how people engineer, design, envision, imagine, and market culture, then simply introducing new technological tools will not lead to the realization of Christians’ deepest fears. Rather, those fears are only realized when Christians, themselves, are complicit participants in affecting the cultural life produced by the misuse and abuse of new technologies. Religious communities have long critiqued how new technologies fail to meet people’s expectations of their material and spiritual well-being. By taking those critiques seriously, perhaps there could be a more holistic, human solution to address the cultural issues behind the fears inaugurated by technological change.

Good for Connecticut:

Connecticut will cancel roughly $650 million in medical debt for an estimated 250,000 residents this year, Gov. Ned Lamont announced Friday, saying it is the first state to provide this type of relief.

The effort will liberate many residents from “the cloud” over their heads and give them more freedom to buy a home, start a business or continue with their education, Lamont told CNN. That will help them strengthen their financial standing in a state with a large wealth gap.

“It’s a debt that you had no control over,” Lamont told CNN. “It’s not like you overspent. You get hit by a health care calamity.”

Residents whose medical debt equals 5% or more of their annual income or whose household income is up to 400% of the federal poverty line, or about $125,000 in 2024, are eligible.

Those who qualify do not need to apply – they will receive letters in the mail saying their debt has been eliminated as soon as this summer. More than 1 in 10 Connecticut residents have medical debt in collections.
via Scot McKnight

Knowledge

True knowledge changes us. “If only I had known,” can also mean, “If only I had been a different person.” Knowledge, in this biblical sense, is much deeper than the collecting and management of facts. In biblical terms, we know by participation or communion. When Christ says of his detractors that they do not know God, he dismisses their mastery of the facts (“And these things they will do to you because they have not known the Father nor Me.” John 16:3) Those who accused Christ and urged the Romans to crucify Him, not only knew the facts of the Jewish faith – they were experts.

Fr Stephen Freeman

God’s fire

Real fire is destructive; throw yourself into a fire and you will be destroyed.
God’s fire is destructive too because it can swiftly eliminate all self-illusions, grandiose ideas, ego-inflation, and self-centeredness. Throw yourself into the spiritual fire of divine love and everything you grasp for yourself will be destroyed until there is nothing left but the pure truth of yourself.

Scientist and theologian Ilia Delio

The beauty of rising every morning…

…we all arise from bed each day with some pain—the pain of lost loved ones, the pain of lost dreams, the pain of aging out of relevance. Yet, we endure that daily pain because it is the worthwhile cost of the daily joys and delights we experience in loving, in dreaming, and in growing older among family and friends.

Kareem Abdul Jabbar

View from the Lanai

Precarity

Precarity means something that can be given and taken away, and for such a long time I thought that precarity must inherently be a bad thing or at least not a very Christian thing to feel that way when I know I felt delicate and I thought well surely I just have to get back to that place before where I felt durable. And then I read a wonderful comparison of the work of Dorothy Day, catholic reformer, and compared with Reinhold Niebuhr, the amazing Protestant, theologian, and both of their account of the word precarity. Dorothy Day used it to describe the state in which we live as people of faith aware in the world, and yet delicate, and Reinhold Niebuhr described precarity as a way of describing the delicacy of our world, but hoping that we just need to plow through with faithfulness and reasonable good conscience and I was like no, I think I’m on the Dorothy side.
I think that when we’re really honest most of the things that we build our lives are things that can come apart in any moment, and once we know that, and can maybe live inside that with a little more honesty, we might begin to start to say different spiritual things than we did before .
Kate Bowler (interview with Russell Moore)

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

The Presence of God (4)

George February 9, 2024 The Presence of God 0 Comments

Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea,
even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.
Psalm 139

One of the most fundamental principles of the Christian vision of reality is that God is present everywhere, filling all things. This underlies the essential Christian task of becoming consciously aware of that Presence and bringing that awareness into every aspect of our life.
Fr Stephen Freeman

God is everywhere and in everything, and we cannot be without Him. It’s simply impossible.
Thomas Merton

“The presence of God changes you.”
unidentified

…the Christian mystical tradition teaches us, life with God is more about knowing than believing. The mystics didn’t believe in God; they encountered God.
Beck, Richard. Hunting Magic Eels (pp. 11-12).

Reflecting on the comments above, reminded me of the consternation I felt engaging in study of practicing the presence of God.
Grasping that God is present everywhere all the time is unpalatable to a child of the Enlightenment like me. Raised on reductionism ¹ and rationality² ; God present everywhere all the time is, at best, incomprehensible; at worst, nonsense.
Richard Beck describes that condition: “… operating as if God doesn’t exist. We don’t expect to bump into God around the watercooler or doing the dishes. We might believe in God, but we don’t expect to encounter God.
We think we’re living in a two-story universe. In this two-story universe, the cosmos is a house with two floors. As Freeman describes it, “We live here on earth, the first floor, where things are simply things and everything operates according to normal, natural laws, while God lives in heaven, upstairs, and is largely removed from the story in which we live. To effect anything here, God must interrupt the laws of nature and perform a miracle.” For us to see or hear from God, God has to come downstairs to visit us. But most of the time, it’s just us alone on the first floor. God is absent, upstairs and minding his own business.
When we live our lives in the two-story world, we practice what Freeman calls “Christian atheism.” Since God is “upstairs,” God is “not here.” God isn’t close; God is elsewhere, far away and distant. And not just physically distant, mentally distant as well. God is at the back our minds, an afterthought, if we think of God at all.” ³

I want to minimize Beck’s description as hyperbole; but continuing to grapple with the presence of God and engaging in self-examination, reveals my daily life too often abides in a two-story universe. I’m not prepared to be labeled a Christian Atheist, but upon further consideration, perhaps I am closer to a Disenchanted Christian. ⁴

Until now, my spiritual journey has been determined mostly by reasoning and thinking.
Embracing a reality that God is present everywhere all the time — God’s presence, constant communion with Him—must define the journey.
What that means will be the subject of future posts.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

1
a philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents.
2
“uncertain but sensible” arguments based on probability, expectation, personal experience …
3
Beck, Richard, Hunting Magic Eels (pg104)
4
..disenchanted Christians attack miracle stories with a battery of questions. Every miracle story is fiercely interrogated as a “more rational” explanation is sought. Perhaps that chance encounter or the money in the mail wasn’t God but a mere coincidence. Perhaps the doctors, rather than God, healed that person. We’ve all asked these sorts of questions and expressed these doubts when faced with stories we find too incredible or too neat and tidy to believe. Some of us, especially those of us who have been thoroughly disenchanted by the modern, scientific world, just can’t stop raising these questions.
Beck, Richard. Hunting Magic Eels (p. 191).

A Word or Two

George February 5, 2024 A Word or Two 0 Comments

Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is about 2,000 words. If you have the time it takes about 6.5 minutes to read. And then it takes about a life time to fully digest. Taken together, these words turn this world on its head. If you don’t believe that, read them. And if you want your world to really change, live them.

‘The world’ as the Bible describes it, is life organized without reference to God. And that world, that life, is ready to eat you up and spit you out … or use you up and discard you like a Styrofoam coffee cup. It is a ‘world’ has no moral conscience beyond convenience, no compassionate center of gravity beyond expedience, no redemptive compass beyond utility. Why? Because it’s life organized without reference to God.

So it is no surprise that given this kind of cultural ethos, Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount calls us to cultural atheism: to not believe in the gods of this culture … to stop believing that they will somehow, ultimately bring us happiness or fulfillment or satisfaction…the small ‘g’ gods like politics or money, status or wealth, appearance or celebrity. Could that be wrong? Ask a broken heart. Ask a lost relationship that is never coming back. Ask loneliness or rejection or betrayal. The small ‘g’ gods have no answers for these. Instead, Jesus calls us to a new life in His Km where the dynamics of everyday life are as distinct and different from those of this world as a Caribbean cruise is from floating on a log down the Ohio River.

2,000 words. 6.5 minutes. Do we have the time? Maybe we need to make the time.

READ NOW

So Much To Think About

George February 1, 2024 Notes Anthology 0 Comments

If you don’t learn to laugh at trouble, you won’t have anything to laugh at when you’re old.
Mark Twain

The Sky is Falling

pessimism [is] a membership badge—the ultimate sign that you are on the side of the good. If your analysis is not apocalyptic, you’re naive, lacking in moral urgency, complicit with the status quo.

In 1964, 45 percent of Americans said that most people can be trusted, according to a survey by American National Election Studies. That survey no longer asks this question, but a University of Chicago survey asked the exact same question to Americans in 2022 and found that number is now 25 percent. Seventy-three percent of adults under 30 believe that, most of the time, people just look out for themselves, according to a 2019 Pew Research Center survey. Seventy-one percent say that most people “would try to take advantage of you if they got a chance.”

apoplectic rigidity becomes the default mode of seeing things. This damages the ability to perceive reality accurately. One of the great mysteries of this political moment is why everyone feels so terrible about the economy when in fact it’s in good shape. GDP is growing, inflation is plummeting, income inequality seems to be dropping, real wages are rising, unemployment is low, the stock market is reaching new peaks. And yet many people are convinced that the economy is rotten. These are not just Republicans unwilling to admit that things are going well under a Democratic president. The real divide is generational. In a recent New York Times/Sienna College poll, 62 percent of people over 65 who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 report that the economy is “excellent” or “good”—but of Biden supporters ages 18 to 29, only 11 percent say the economy is excellent or good, while 89 percent say it is “poor” or “only fair.”

Is this because the economy is particularly bad for young people? That’s not what the data reveal. As Twenge has pointed out, the median Millennial household earns considerably more, adjusted for inflation, than median households of the Silent Generation, the Boomers, and Generation X earned at the comparable moment in their lives; they earn $9,000 more a year than Gen X households, and $10,000 more than Boomer households did at the same age. Household incomes for young adults are at historic highs, while homeownership rates for young adults are comparable to previous generations’. All of which suggests that difference in the generational experiences is not economic; it’s psychological.

Excerpts from David Brooks’ Atlantic Article

Humility

Humility involves the following:

Possessing an accurate assessment of yourself
A willingness to acknowledge your mistakes and limitations
An openness to the viewpoints and ideas of others
An ability to keep your accomplishments in perspective
Low self-focus
Appreciating the value other people

http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2024/01/a-peaceable-faith-part-6-cultural.html

Holiness

Buechner says that holiness is not a human quality like virtue is. “If there is such a thing at all, holiness is Godness and as such is not something people do but something God does in them…It is something God seems especially apt to do in people who are not virtuous at all, at least not to start with.”

If we are pursuing holiness by pursuing virtue itself, we are going to pursue the virtues as we see them. Yet it’s not only our behavior that is amiss, but also our seeing. And we miss the realness of virtue. “If you’re too virtuous, the chances are you think you are a saint already under your own steam, and therefore the real thing can never happen to you.” Holiness is all around us, but we have trouble seeing it. We cannot make holiness real. Holiness helps us to see the realness. In me. In you. In my oat cake with mascarpone cheese and the snow that I am crunching my feet on outside this week.

https://aimeebyrd.substack.com/p/nothing-is-harder-to-make-real?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1879090&post_id=140945822&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=g50id&utm_medium=email

ART

The best of the arts induce humility. In our normal shopping mall life, the consumer is king. The crucial question is, do I like this or not? But we approach great art in a posture of humility and reverence. What does this have to teach me? What was this other human being truly seeking?

David Brooks

Aging

In Rainer Maria Rilke’s novel “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,” the protagonist notices that as he ages, he’s able to perceive life on a deeper level: “I am learning to see. I don’t know why it is, but everything penetrates more deeply into me and does not stop at the place where until now it always used to finish.”

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

The Presence of God (3)

George January 29, 2024 The Presence of God 0 Comments

The practice of the Presence of God is the most holy, the most all-encompassing, and the most necessary practice of the spiritual life. It trains the soul to find its joy in His Divine Companionship. Bro Lawrence

Having read the book some years earlier, plus considerable experience teaching and leading, I volunteered to lead a men’s group in a study of The practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence. I developed a syllabus for the study complete with goals, expectations and topics for discussion. Diving into reading and study my confidence was immediately shaken.

You have searched me, Lord, and you know me.
You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar.
You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways.
Before a word is on my tongue you, Lord, know it completely.
You hem me in behind and before, and you lay your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.
Psalm 139

There is no sweeter and delightful life than that of continual communion with God. Only those who experience this and practice it can comprehend it. Yet I do not advise you to undertake this practice from that motive. We should not seek pleasure in this exercise. Instead let us do it out of love and because God desires it.
Bro Lawrence

The spiritual life begins when one wakes up to the presence of God and experiences this reality for oneself. The omnipresence of God is more than a theological doctrine; it is experiential reality. The spiritual life begins in earnest when one wakes up.
This type of awakening is the heart of Christianity. It moves us from the realm of beliefs and ideas, emotions and rituals, into the Presence of God.
Marshall Davis

Mystery is not something you can’t know. Mystery is endless knowability. Living inside such endless knowability is finally a comfort, a foundation of ultimate support, security, unrestricted love, and eternal care. For all of us, it takes much of our life to get there; it is what we surely mean by “growing” in faith.
Richard Rohr

Grappling with —”knowledge too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain” — misconceptions about practicing the presence of God were unmasked.

First, assuming practicing presence of God to be an educational issue. Unfortunately, for a long time, I assumed diligent study and improved techniques would produce spiritual growth. Most of my efforts at spiritual formation have been overly, even excessively, education-based. In recent years that assumption was challenged and refuted but its resilience was apparent in preparing for the study. Ironically, serious inquiry into the practice of the presence of God revealed a another way of knowing; not discarding education/study but ‘ …an awakening of the heart. moving us from the realm of beliefs and ideas, emotions and rituals, into the Presence of God.”¹ — a game changer.
“He surrendered himself to an attitude of faithful devotion and insight rather than reasoning and thinking“. ²

A second misconception — the Practice of the Presence of God is self improvement.
American Christianity is a therapeutic culture, we approach faith as therapy. The trouble with this therapeutic milieu is that it is ego-centric and reduces the cross of Christ [the presence of God] to a feel-good, psychotherapeutic intervention (Jesus Loves Me!, 1 Cross + 3 Nails = 4 Given, and the Jesus’s footprints in the sand parable).³
That misconception was implicit in the goal of our study: Become better disciples of Jesus. Certainly, being in the presence of God produces better disciples, but “The change or transformation that God desires is not found in our improvement. Rather, it is our union with Him and our transformation into His image and likeness. Christ has not come to improve us, but to remake us from the inside out. ⁴ The presence of God produces humility and repentance, prerequisites to God’s transforming work.

Encountering the practice of the presence of God has proven to be a significant spiritual milestone. I am still seeking to understand the depth and breath of its mystery. Hopefully, you will join me in pursuit of the presence of God.
More to come.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

1
Marshall Davis
2
Bro Lawrence
3
Richard Beckhttp://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2008/08/therapeutic-culture-of-american.html
4
Fr Stephen Freeman