“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
It is clear, 80%+ of my life is in the rearviewmirror. With the possible exception of apologies and repentance, it is what it is, but it is not done. In our final years (second half), according to Richard Rohr, our spiritual awareness moves from adherence to a belief system to a humble inner knowing. Life in all its ups and downs becomes the great spiritual teacher. The unsatisfactoriness of human existence creates in us a kind of spiritual homesickness. In the crucible of inner awareness and decay we can live well. I am finding that to be my experience.
The following quotes give insight into the dynamic of living well – dying well:
By “coming to terms with life” I mean: the reality of death has become a definite part of my life; my life has, so to speak, been extended by death, by my looking death in the eye and accepting it, by accepting destruction as part of life and no longer wasting my energies on fear of death or the refusal to acknowledge its inevitability. It sounds paradoxical: by excluding death from our life we cannot live a full life, and by admitting death into our life we enlarge and enrich [life].
An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941–1943
The awareness of death tends to make life’s trivialities seem…trivial. “Cancer cures psychoneuroses,” one of Irvin Yalom’s therapy patients told him. “What a pity I had to wait till now, till my body was riddled with cancer, to learn how to live.”
Lazear Ascher writes in her memoir Ghosting. At the end, their life together was stripped down to the essentials. “There were many times when we felt blessed. It was as though certain death had granted us an extra life.”
When Bob got really sick, Barbara brought him home from the hospital so his final days would be more humane. She showered him with love and attention. “Dying was intimate, and I drew close,” Ascher writes. “We were single-minded, welded together in the process of this long leave-taking.”
How to Know a Person – David Brooks
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.
According to ars morendi temptations emerge as death nears — lack of faith, despair , impatience , spiritualpride , avarice . Death circumstances then wer an ever present reality, often coming prematurely Today’s death circumstances are much different; death is rigorously avoided. Extended life expectancy, prolonged dying experiences facilitated by medical and technological advances, extend the dying process. To die well, requires understanding of and resolutions to the temptations.
Despite diligent efforts to avoid death, fear of death is a subconscious reality. Lack of faith, despair, impatience, spiritual pride, and avarice, are witness to the fear of death. Tim Keller’s reflection on receiving news of terminal cancer illustrates the point.
One of the first things I learned was that religious faith does not automatically provide solace in times of crisis. A belief in God and an afterlife does not become spontaneously comforting and existentially strengthening. Despite my rational, conscious acknowledgment that I would die someday, the shattering reality of a fatal diagnosis provoked a remarkably strong psychological denial of mortality. Instead of acting on Dylan Thomas’s advice to “rage, rage against the dying of the light,” I found myself thinking, What? No! I can’t die. That happens to others, but not to me. When I said these outrageous words out loud, I realized that this delusion had been the actual operating principle of my heart.
If we don’t accept the reality of death, we don’t need these beliefs to be anything other than mental assents. A feigned battle in a play or a movie requires only stage props. But as death, the last enemy, became real to my heart, I realized that my beliefs would have to become just as real to my heart, or I wouldn’t be able to get through the day. Theoretical ideas about God’s love and the future resurrection had to become life-gripping truths, or be discarded as useless.
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
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.
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.”
…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.
All Saints’ Day was established as an opportunity to honor all the saints, known and unknown.
All Saints’ Day has a rather different focus in the Reformed tradition. While we may give thanks for the lives of particular luminaries of ages past, the emphasis is on the ongoing sanctification of the whole people of God. Rather than putting saints on pedestals as holy people set apart in glory, we give glory to God for the ordinary, holy lives of the believers in this and every age. This is an appropriate time to give thanks to members of the community of faith who have died in the past year. We also pray that we may be counted among the company of the faithful in God’s
All Saints Day, All Souls Day, liturgy, Christian Calendar and numerous other terms familiar in church history were not a part of my spiritual heritage. Engaging death and dying has produced an appreciation for them, particularly as related to confronting our finitude. Death avoidance is revealed when All Saints Day is not acknowledged. I had the opportunity to watch a video of an All Saints Day service and found it to be meaningful and helpful in understanding a different perspective. You can watch the entire video below.
Here are some excerpts from Nadia Bolz-Weber’s sermon “Death After Life”
DEATH AFTER LIFE
…my two favorite days in the liturgical year are Ash Wednesday and All Saints …the former being the day you are reminded that if you are not in your grave, you are one day closer to it, and the latter being the day when we speak the names of those who have died and offer thanks for their lives.
I’m so grateful that the Christian calendar has days set aside to just call a thing what it is; days where we confront the truth of our mortality. And I love that we have the gall to do it right smack in the middle of our death-denying culture, a culture where we are so often offered the message that we can live forever with the right combination of yoga, injections and elective surgery. But while the false promises of immortality through self-improvement might sell product, they do nothing for us in any real way other than to make us feel like we can avoid the most inevitable thing in the world:
That you will die.
And I will die.And so will every human being ever born.
I’m so sorry to be the one to say it, but there are no exceptions, I’m afraid.
We who gather today and speak the names of those who have died this year will one day be the ones whose names are spoken on a Feast of All Saints in a year to come.
It stings a bit, does it not? Like, how dare I say this.
But the truth about our mortality is only offensive if it’s heard as an insult and not a promise.
I mean, to my ego immortality sounds great, but to every other part of me it sounds exhausting. And kinda boring, honestly.
Because it is the fact that we do not live forever that makes life so precious.
And Rare.
…none of us has been promised another day. We have this day only. But we have been promised the impossible – that death is not the final word. I am reminded of that line from a famous Auden poem – Nothing that is possible can save us, We who must die demand a miracle.
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
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.
Book recommendation: I am currently reading and finding it to be personally relevant. Quotes below give a taste of Brooks’ thoughtful insights.
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.
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.
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.
