For the Joy of the Journey

Death & Dying (8) -Dying Well

George October 29, 2023 Death & Dying 0 Comments

Confronting finitude

A status report on my Dying Well Plan. You can read my previous post HERE.

People who want to die well must be willing to confront their finitude. We do not have to accept death, invite it, or wish for it. But we must be prepared to say, “Yes, I am human and therefore mortal. One day I will die.” We cannot both cling to the indefinite extension of life and effectively prepare for death.
The Lost Art of Dying

Since committing to develop a Dying Well Plan, it has become clear any such plan is a contingency plan. Planning for death is a crap shoot. Death is enevitable, time and circumstances are TBD. However, there are reasonable probabilities for my remaining time, and few factors in my control; with that in mind I maintain my commitment.

—“People who want to die well must be willing to confront their finitude.” — is a basic tenet embraced in the process of developing a Dying Well Plan. Living out that conviction exposes inherent cultural resistance. Someone who reminds you “…you are going to die” is probably not who you look forward to having a conversation with. Discretion and discernment remain a challenge.

Willingness to confront my finitude has focused my attention. I see and contemplate things related to my mortality previously ignored or unnoticed; funerals and sermons, obituaries and articles, podcasts, et al, flood my consciousness. I attribute that change to paying attention. Reminders of our finitude are ubiquitous.

For me, confronting finitude includes reading secular, theological and spiritual resources.I am currently enrolled in a Life Long Learning Class entitled “End of Life and Human Flourishing”. Field work includes frequent walks through Wilmore cemetery. There are spiritual implications “…beliefs about God and an afterlife, if we have them, are often abstractions. If we don’t accept the reality of death, we don’t need these beliefs to be anything other than mental assents.” ¹

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.
Tim Keller

Confronting finitude reveals the substance of our faith. Keller discovered: I had to look not only at my professed beliefs but also at my actual understanding of God. Had it been shaped by my culture? Had I been slipping unconsciously into the supposition that God lived for me rather than I for him, that life should go well for me, that I knew better than God does how things should go?

Unlike Keller, I have not received news of pancreatic cancer, but the truth is I am dying, and you as well. That realization is producing an opportunity for healthy self-examination. Arthur Brooks observed; “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.”

Looking to be more fully alive!

…people die. All of us. We live on an edge, and people tumble off all the time. For that reason, the truth of the faith does not disappear. It is never irrelevant. Indeed, in the light of the truth of our existence, Christ’s Pascha, his death and resurrection, is the only truly relevant thing. Only if Christ has trampled down death by death can we face the naked truth of our existence with hope.
Fr Stephen Freeman

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

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Tim Keller

So Much To Think About

George October 21, 2023 Notes Anthology 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

So Much To Think About

George October 11, 2023 Notes Anthology 3 Comments

I’m responsible for what I say, not for what you understand.

What we’re thinking

In January, the Pew Research Center released a startling report describing parents’ priorities for their children. An extraordinary 88 percent said that financial independence was extremely or very important. The same percentage placed the same priority on their kids having careers they enjoy. In contrast, only 21 percent said it was extremely or very important for their children to get married. A mere 20 percent said it was extremely or very important for their kids to have children.

Hope

Hope is not primarily for the future. It’s for now! Hope is a way of seeing time and understanding the present. It’s a way of tasting and receiving the moment. It gives us the capacity to enter into the future in a new way. In that sense, we can call hope true realism, because hope takes seriously all the many possibilities that fill the moment. Hope sees all the alternatives; it recognizes and creates an alternative consciousness. That’s the hope of the prophet.

The person who can see the moment fully is never hopeless. Hopelessness is an experience whereby a person’s sight is set in one direction: “The only way I’ll be happy is if such and such happens.” When we can imagine only one way to be happy, we don’t recognize the fullness and possibilities of the moment. We collapse if our one way is taken away from us. That’s the power of the prophets—to recognize that there is always another way for the promise to be fulfilled, another way for Divine Love to reach us.

Richard Rohr

PPP Loans

Lakewood Church in Houston, pastored by televangelist Joel Osteen, recently announced that it will pay back a $4.43 million dollar PPP loan. A church spokesman said the loan will be paid back with interest over 60 months.

More than 8,800 religious groups have asked for their loans to be forgiven — as the program was designed to allow, and a relatively common practice for all PPP borrowers. The status of another approximately 4,500 remaining loans has not yet been reported to the SBA by local banks.

All told, 11,823,594 PPP loans were approved, for a total of $799.8 billion.

Is it possible?

Is it possible to be HORRIFIED and PISSED OFF (yes that is the right word) over the terrorism of Hamas on Saturday and not succumb to the same barbarism? Is it possible to see that Palestinians are my brothers as much as Jews in Israel? Is it possible? Is it possible to grasp that the State of Israel, in the name of security, has in fact perpetuated crimes against the Palestinians? Is it possible to condemn what Hamas has done and recognize that the reality of how Palestinians live on a daily basis? Is it possible to recognize that more Palestinians are my brothers and sisters in Jesus than Jews in Israel? Is it possible to think rather than just react emotionally? Does Truth, Justice, Love and Shalom play any role in how we look at the State of Israel (and the Palestinians too)?

For a Christian it should not only be possible but a way of life. Hate begets hate. Violence will not stop the cycle of violence. Grace will. Love will.

I do not expect that non-believers in King Jesus will hold to my views nor why I hold them. What I do expect is that my own views, and the reasons I hold them, will express my allegiance to biblical theology and the kingdom of God. The Greatest Commands of Love God and Love my Neighbor do not change when bad things happen. Jesus made this abundantly clear in the Sermon on the Mount, “But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5.44).
https://stonedcampbelldisciple.com/2023/10/10/i-stand-with-israel-what-do-you-mean-a-plea-for-truth-justice-love-and-shalom/

Bobby Valentine

God is not a puppeteer

God is not a puppeteer but he is an amazing stage director. Puppets have no will of their own. Their movements are never left to chance. Actors, on the other hand, must learn a script. They must be trained in the art form. They can take cues or reject them. An actor can heed the director’s command or do something completely different. The best actors become so immersed in the script and trained in the mind of the director they can improvise in the moment to effect an outcome never seen before but only imagined in the heart of the director.

Some think of the sovereignty of God as though God were a divine puppeteer. There is no effect God does not cause; no outcome he did not predestine. People, like puppets, have no free will. Some of the smartest theologians in the room believe this. I do not claim to be among them in intelligence or in belief. I think of the sovereignty of God as though God were a divine stage director. There are infinite effects from manifold causes; thousands of possible outcomes not predetermined neither unforeseen. He has complete control over every aspect of the production, but he chooses to work with actors who have a mind and will of their own. He expects the cast to know the script(ure) by heart and to intuit his mind from hours and hours of practice through the gift of the Spirit. God’s chief desire is willful obedience inspired by holy love yet his will cannot be thwarted even by total insurrection and the most heinous rebellion.

The amazing thing about God as sovereign stage director is he is directing billions of different stages all at once as though they were in one great theater. No matter what forgotten lines or errant improvisations or outright deviations from the script, one thing is for certain—the outcome:

The kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever. (Rev. 11:15)

J D Walt

Health and Wholeness

Health and wholeness cannot be found in an endless pursuit of pleasure and in the avoidance of pain. Because all of this is true, great care must be taken in the therapeutic work of the Church. We do not pursue pain for the sake of pain. Kindness, gentleness, empathy – co-suffering – are all required in the fearful work of a soul’s journey through the Cross. But there remains no path to wholeness that is not a path through the Cross.

Fr Stephen Freeman

Good works

Work then is not the result of the fall but is “an integral part of God’s original intent for humanity. God creates humans to do good works, and doing good works is therefore part of what it means to be a human in right relationship with God. Work, in other words, is originally a form of worship.”

The Doctrine of Good Works: Reclaiming a Neglected Protestant Teaching

Platitudes

Whenever we face unfathomable things, human beings crave simplicity: something to soothe our psyches and make us feel we’ve dealt with it appropriately and completely. We want a simple platitude that can exempt us from really steeping into the complicated, terrifying, bloody pit of humanity’s capacity for inhumanity, and to admit just how outside of our depths we are.

John Pavlovitz

American Christianity in Crisis

Well, it was the result of having multiple pastors tell me essentially the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount parenthetically in their preaching – turn the other cheek – to have someone come up after and to say, where did you get those liberal talking points? And what was alarming to me is that in most of these scenarios, when the pastor would say, I’m literally quoting Jesus Christ, the response would not be, I apologize. The response would be, yes, but that doesn’t work anymore. That’s weak. And when we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we’re in a crisis.

Russell Moore

Kindness

Niceness serves me. Niceness makes people like me. But kindness? Kindness is sacrifice for the service of others.

Sarah Jane Souther

View from the Front Porch

In the midst of life, we “practice the presence of God” by listening and speaking to him in every circumstance. Spiritual formation happens through a life of contemplation. In the midst of our daily activities, we ponder and meditate on God’s words and works. We talk to him in prayer. We listen, we question, we complain. We give thanks, make requests, and express our doubts. We study, analyze, and consider how to apply his teachings. We walk or sit silently with him and enjoy his presence. For a believer the veil between this world and the “heavenly places” is thin and there is constant interaction between the two realms.

https://imonk.blog/2013/05/26/another-look-spiritual-formation-what-is-it/

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

So Much To Think About

George October 4, 2023 Notes Anthology 0 Comments

Being young is beautiful, but being old is comfortable and relaxed…one must wait until evening to see how splendid the day has been.
Mark Twain

Ghetto spirit

There is nothing whatever of the ghetto spirit in the Rule of St. Benedict.

That is the wonderful thing about the Rule and the saint. The freshness, the liberty, the spontaneity, the broadness, the sanity and the healthiness of early Benedictine life.

But closed in on itself, interpreting interpretations of interpretations, the monastery becomes a ghetto. Reforms that concentrate too excessively on a return to strictness do not in fact break the spell. They tend to increase the danger of spiritual suffocation.

On the other hand, fresh air is not the air of the world. Just to break out of the ghetto and walk down the boulevard is no solution. The world has its own stink, too—perfume and corruption.

The fresh air we need is the air of the Holy Spirit “breathing where He pleases,” which means that the windows must be open and we must expect Him to come from any direction. The error is to lock the windows and doors in order to keep the Holy Spirit within our house. The very action of locking doors and windows is fatal.

Thomas Merton

Enjoy your weekend

My great-grandparents, like many Jews of their generation, worked in the clothing factories of New York City. They were probably required to work every day except Sunday, which was the standard at the time. Jewish workers were sometimes warned that if they didn’t show up on Saturday, they wouldn’t have a job on Monday.

In 1907, another Jewish immigrant of that generation, Henry Feuerstein, saved up enough money to buy a knitting mill in Malden, Mass.

Feuerstein, who was an observant Jew, decided to do something new. He shuttered his factory on Saturdays as well as Sundays, so both Jewish and Christian workers could observe their Sabbath days. It appears to be the earliest documented instance of an American factory giving its workers what is now the standard weekend.

The idea spread slowly. In 1922, there were still only about 70 factories in the country that offered a five-day workweek, according to a survey by a Princeton economist. Most of them were textile firms in New York with heavily Jewish labor forces. By then, however, workers in other industries, including coal miners and autoworkers, were also demanding a five-day week. The eventual success of that effort is commemorated by a popular bumper sticker: “The Labor Movement: The Folks Who Brought You The Weekend.”

Feuerstein’s role is largely forgotten, but it shouldn’t be.

The union movement is now starting to push for a four-day week. The autoworkers picketing factories across America aren’t just demanding higher pay from the Big Three automakers. They want a full paycheck for a four-day, 32-hour week.

It’s a great idea. As I wrote in a piece making the case that a four-day week should become the new standard, “Americans spend too much time on the job. A shorter workweek would be better for our health, better for our families and better for our employers, who would reap the benefits of a more motivated and better-rested work force.”

Happy Monday. Wouldn’t it be nice if today were the third day of the weekend?

Read the essay here.

Good works

Good works are a command of God; they are the duty of the grateful; they need to be present for sanctification; they flow out of justification and regeneration; they witness to and demonstration justification/redemption; they witness to the believer of her and his redemption; they edify others, and they witness to nonbelievers about the gospel; ultimately, they glorify God.

Scot McKnight https://scotmcknight.substack.com/p/evangelicalism-has-a-systemic-problem

Beauty

what draws us to the good is that it is also eternal beauty. God himself is beauty, that is, and in the end, for Christians, we are joined to him in seeking the beautiful as he has taught us to recognize it in Christ, and in therefore seeking in every circumstance, however unanticipated, to express that beauty always anew, in ever more novel variations on that original “theme”—that unique and irresistibly attractive manner

David Bentley Hart

Artful living

the moral life is like learning to play an instrument, creative artistry is built upon a foundation of technical skill. Consequently, our early lessons are going to be rote and rudimentary. But the goal with advancing skill is the ability to perform creatively and beautifully in ways that surpass mere technical proficiency. All this is a part of what the Greeks meant by arete, the word we translate as virtue. For the Greeks, arete has an aesthetic aspect. Virtuous living is “artful” living.

Richard Beck

Salvation

Salvation is much more than a heavenly reward or the deliverance from hell. Rather, salvation is the transformation of the whole person and their ultimate transfiguration into the image of Christ. Salvation is becoming eternally and truly what we were created to be – the very image of God.

Fr Stephen Freeman

Good and Bad

Merton claims that the devil doesn’t always turn people conspicuously sinister, sometimes he just turns us blindingly righteous, which frankly is more effective and also more dangerous.

It’s a sneaky, twisted little business this whole battle between good and evil thing. Because the fact is, atrocities are more often perpetuated by those who are dazzlingly certain of their cause’s righteousness than by like, Bond villains who just love evil and want to see it spread. Maybe we are all at much higher risk of harming ourselves and other people when we are certain we are acting out of our virtues than we ever are when we are for sure acting out our vices. I mean, you know how the police station has a vice squad? I’m like, where’s the virtue squad?

Don’t mistake me, I’m not being an abject relativist here – I do believe that pure good and pure evil exist, I just don’t believe that humans are as good at knowing the difference as we think we are.

What I am trying to say is that if I want to stand on the side of righteousness, if I want to stand against evil maybe the best way to do that is to remain sufficiently suspicious of my virtues.

Nadia Boltz-Weber

Violence

Violence, as expressed most often with weapons, is an idol that makes us god. It derives from fear and a desire to protect power and what we deem ours and our privilege. Violence dehumanizes others. America as empire joins a long history of nations becoming self-idols.

Scot McKnight

Apology

View from the Front Porch

I was deeply gratified when a friend and neighbor asked to sit on our front porch to study. I had no imagination for what a sacred place our front porch would become when we moved to Wilmore sixteen years ago. It is truly a “thin” place.

iMonk

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

Love Your Enemies

George September 30, 2023 Faith Challenges 0 Comments

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
Matthew 5:43-48 NIV

This post was prompted by responses to Brent Leatherwood’s tweet below.

Below is a small sample of responses to Leatherwood’s gracious comment. The depth of vitriol was stunning many, if not most, coming from his own SBC cohort.

As I read through more of the comments I was increasingly incensed and saddened by the hatred and obliviousness toward Jesus’ teaching to love our enemies. Amidst those emotions, prompted by the Spirit of God, I experienced conviction; revealing how much my heart embraces, if not hatred, distain for my enemies. It is a low bar to love those who love me. I found myself in the company of the of Leatherwood’s critics. It didn’t take much introspection to hear the echo of my own words and thoughts about my “Feinsteins”.

God have mercy on me.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY