“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
“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”.
UAW launches historic strike against Big Three automakers Some 2,600 nonstriking General Motors and Ford workers in Kansas and Michigan face temporary unemployment due to fallout from striking plants
The Washington Post Sept 15, 2023
United Auto Workers are on strike against the BIG 3 US Automotive companies, certainly news worthy but it is an interesting contrast to the long history of UAW strikes against US automotive companies. Here is an NYT article that chronicles that history. My interest comes from a career with Ford Motor Company, which began as an hourly UAW represented employee and later included several years as management in labor relations. I still have my honorable withdrawal card from the UAW when I became a salaried employee; assurance that I could return to my hourly job should I fail.
My first strike experience was as a production foreman in 1967: ..the United Auto Workers (UAW) union called a company-wide strike on Sept. 6, 1967, when the current UAW-Ford contract expired, which temporarily put a halt to auto/truck production nationwide. 150,000-160,000 Ford workers represented by the UAW went on strike, which continued until Oct 22, 1967. It was said that Ford lost more than 600,00 vehicles in all divisions due to the strike. Ironically, for salaried production employees, those 46 days were a respite from the constant rigors of production. Unlike striking union workers , we continued to get paid while performing mostly busy work. Any utilization of salaried employees to perform union worker’s tasks became an issue impeding any settlement agreement. US automotive companies have had a long standing adversarial relationship with the UAW. Strikes provide a public stage to demonstrate latent anger and dissatisfaction, violence was no stranger.
Salaried employees, supporting of the company were placed in the uncomfortable position of discreetly cheering for the union’s success, particularly in regard to wages and benefits. Whatever the union achieved typically became the benchmark for increases in salary and benefits of salaried employees. We were as anxious to hear details of settlement agreements as were union employees.
The current strike is a departure from the union UAW’s usual strategy of pattern bargaining. In pattern bargaining, the union would target one big 3 auto company to strike. Whatever agreements made with the target company became the pattern for settlement with the other two companies. This produced some historic agreements and created considerable difficulties for big 3 automotive companies, Ford Motor Company, General Motors Corporation and Chrysler Corporation.
Union membership in the US has declined significantly.
The current strike is certainly newsworthy but it falls far short of historic proportions . The headline focuses on 2,600 idled non-striking employees and does not mention 26,000+ striking employees walking picket lines.
This post intends to illustrate the character of many news reports today; headlines providing convenient facts without relevant context in order to shape public opinion. As is usually the case, there is a lot more to the story. Always look behind the headlines.
Why is there a ‘D’ in fridge, but not in refrigerator?
Nobody is wrong 100% of the time. Always look for the nugget of truth in those you disagree with.Nobody is right 100% of the time. Always look for the faults and mistakes in those you agree with. Mark Manson
one of my favorite Billy Connolly gags: “Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you’re a mile away — and you’ve got their shoes.”
Scot McKnight
Relevance
As we’ve all come to see, the hunger for continued relevance is the corroding lust that devours the very old.
David Brooks
Colorado football
In The Washington Post, Rick Reilly, a native of Boulder, Colo., and a graduate of the University of Colorado, exulted in the early-season promise of its football team, the Buffaloes, by noting their awful past. “A couple of years ago, a buddy said he left two Buffs tickets on his desk at work and somebody broke in overnight and left two more,” he wrote, going on to note that Colorado lost to Minnesota by 42 points in 2022. “Most schools could start the faculty against Minnesota and not lose by 42 points.” Part of the problem, he suggested, is how inhospitably monoracial Boulder, where the university is, can feel to Black players: “We are whiter than Tucker Carlson eating a Wonder Bread mayonnaise sandwich at Cracker Barrel.”
Kindness
For years I’ve kept posted on the back of my office door a journal entry from one of my students. The student wrote:
I once encountered a woman in Walgreen’s who I swear changed my life. I was there buying some film for my 35mm and maybe some lip gloss, just normal Walgreen’s stuff; she was working at the cosmetic counter. When I gave her my things, she looked at them and said, ‘I think I have a coupon for both of those,’ reached under the counter, and pulled up this lunch bag full of coupons in little baggies. I asked her why she has so many coupons and what she was doing with them (out of curiosity) and she said she cuts them out of coupon books and keeps them under her counter to give people she checks out. ‘Times are hard,’ was her only explanation, ‘and all we can do in this world is help each other.’
What the basic postures of kindness do, it seems to me, are to situate ourselves along with the grain of the universe: life teaches us that all is gift, all is grace. None of us are self-sufficient. None of us are “self-made men” or “self-made women.” Indeed, times are always, in some way or the other, hard. Such is life. To practice kindness is to acknowledge all these realities, and is a sweet salve, easing life’s daily challenges and hardships
Lee Camp
Listening
Listening well is not simply hearing the words being said, it’s also feeling the emotions being felt. People usually don’t want solutions as much as they just want to be understood.
Mark Manson
Loneliness
Loneliness crushes the soul, but researchers are finding it does far more damage than that. It is linked to strokes, heart disease, dementia, inflammation and suicide; it breaks the heart literally as well as figuratively.
Loneliness is as deadly as smoking 15 cigarettes a day and more lethal than consuming six alcoholic drinks a day, according to the surgeon general of the United States, Dr. Vivek Murthy. Loneliness is more dangerous for health than obesity, he says — and, alas, we have been growing more lonely. A majority of Americans now report experiencing loneliness, based on a widely used scale that asks questions such as whether people lack companionship or feel left out.
Nick Kristof
The wrongness of being right
Truth matters. I want to be clear that I believe that. But knowing truth, and being wise about when kindness and mercy matter more than correcting theological error or ignorance, is an important skill to hone. Because I want to be right. I want to fix you so much it’s literally painful at times. I’m a sick, sick puppy who’s not near as smart as he thinks he is. But I’m learning that the need to be right on every little thing—even when it comes from noble intentions—obliterates my ability to speak the ultimate Truth.
Chad West
Modernity
According to Charles Taylor, the modern “secular age” lives in the “immanent frame,” a disenchanted culture that has lost touch with transcendent sources of meaning. We’ve lost the metaphysical framework that tells us who we are and where we are going.
The modern person is abandoned, therefore, to their choices, radically free to make decisions and chart a direction in life but without a map or any compelling reason to navigate in a particular direction. There is no “point” to anything, just you and your choices. Any meaning or telos for your life is the one you choose for yourself. There is no grand narrative or plotline you’re being caught up in. Life is, rather, a Choose-Your-Own adventure novel.
Richard Beck
Individualized Christians
For Christians this individualized concept of the self undermines many of the primary realities of the faith. The Church cannot be rightly understood as a voluntary association. We are Baptized “into the Body of Christ.” The modern concept of the individual runs deeply contrary to Scriptural teaching on the nature of the Christian life. The sacraments, whose foundations rest within a world in which true communion and participation are possible, become more and more foreign to the individualized Christian experience. The sacraments are either deeply minimized (even to the point of extinction) or re-interpreted in voluntaristic terms. It is this re-interpretation of the sacraments that undergirds the modern notion of “open communion,” or “Eucharistic hospitality.” The exclusion of persons from the Cup of Christ is seen as an insult, a denial of their self-defined Christian identification. I have been told, “Who are you to say that I should not be allowed to come to communion?” However, “Individual communion” is an oxymoron.
Fr Stephen Freeman
View from the Front Porch
Echo chamber
A whole lot of us go through life assuming that we are basically right , basically all the time , about basically everything : about our political and intellectual convictions , our religious and moral beliefs , our assessment of other people , our memories , our grasp of facts . As absurd as it sounds when we stop to think about it , our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to omniscient .
Schulz, Kathryn. Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error
The unrelenting pursuit of rightness pitted against our incontrovertible fallibility is a paradox each of us find ourselves in as we strive for meaningful and authentic lives. Amazingly, left to our own devices, rightness will almost always win out. Our desire for rightness leads us to echo chambers where our “rightness” is amplified and error is filtered out. Like a butterfly from a cocoon, we emerge in the beauty of our rightness, confirmed in our infallibility.
The cost of rightness can be high. The avoidance of controversial issues or alternative solutions creates a loss of individual creativity, uniqueness and independent thinking. Rightness binds and blinds us. An “illusion of invulnerability” (an inflated certainty of our rightness) can prevail. Stereotyping of, and dehumanizing actions toward, dissenting persons can develop. As true believers we can produce fantasies that don’t match reality. Interpersonal communication outside our echo chamber is stifled. Immersion in the comfortable confines of an echo chamber may result in significant losses, not the least of which, can be family and community relationships.Echo chambers reinforce our natural tendency to restrict our relationships rather than expand our social interactions. Residing within an echo chamber strips our lives of serendipity and wonder. We trade off the opportunity to engage the endless diversity of the world around us. https://www.georgeezell.com/2021/02/the-importance-of-being-wrong/
There is no such thing as a grouchy old person. The truth is that once you get old, you stop being polite and start being honest.
Aging America
America may still think of itself as a young nation, but as a society, it is growing old. Thanks to falling birthrates, longer life expectancy and the graying of the baby boomer cohort, our society is being transformed. This is a demographic change that will affect every part of society. Already, in about half the country, there are more people dying than being born, even as more Americans are living into their 80s, 90s and beyond. In 2020 the share of people 65 or older reached 17 percent, according to the Census Bureau. By 2034, there will be more Americans past retirement age than there are children. NYT
Departure – Why I left the Church
Most Christians don’t want their thinking challenged. They come to church to reinforce what they’ve believed their entire lives. From their perspective, the job of the pastor is not to push them to grow, but to reassure them that they are already on the right track. Any learning should support the party line and comfort them that their investment of resources in the church will result in a payoff somewhere down the line, particularly once they reach the afterlife. Alexander Lang
…sacraments, then, are not discrete actions of the Church designed to enhance our spiritual experience: they are revelations of the way of life. For in every case, the sacraments are the life of communion, whether Ordination or Eucharist, Baptism, Chrismation, Matrimony, etc. It is for this reason that we can observe that “the whole creation is a sacrament. Communion is not a quality or an activity of life – it is the very essence of life – it’s sine qua non.
Fr Stephen Freeman
The questions have changed
Sam Allberry commented to Russell Moore regarding how questions people ask have changed in the past several decades. Referring to Jesus’ encounter with the a demon possessed man. “Thirty years ago, upon hearing Jesus had sent demons into a herd of pigs, people would ask, ‘Do you believe demons exist?’. Today the question would be ‘How could Jesus do that to those pigs?’
Religious History
My reading of American religious history is that religion always functions best from the margins of society and not in the councils of power. Once you identify the faith with a particular candidate or party or with the quest for political influence, ultimately it is the faith that suffers.
“The hard thing to do when you get old is to keep your horizons open,” the theologian and civil-rights hero Howard Thurman once wrote. “The first part of your life everything is in front of you, all your potential and promise. But over the years, you make decisions; you carve yourself into a given shape. Then the challenge is to keep discovering the green growing edge.”
Seeing
O my heavenly Mother, open Your eye in my soul, so that I may see what is what–so that I may see who is dwelling in my soul and what sort of fruits are growing in her.
Without Your eye I wander hopelessly through my soul like a wayfarer in the night, in the night’s indistinguishable gloom. And the wayfarer in the night falls and picks himself up, and what he encounters along the way he calls “events.”
You are the only event of my life, O lamp of my soul. When a child scurries to the arms of his mother, events do not exist for him. When a bride races to meet her bridegroom, she does not see the flowers in the meadow, nor does she hear the rumbling of the storm, nor does she smell the fragrance of the cypresses or sense the mood of the wild animals–she sees only the face of her bridegroom; she hears only the music from his lips; she smells only his soul. When love goes to meet love, no events befall it. Time and space make way for love. https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/glory2godforallthings/2023/08/24/love-has-no-history-2/
True or false
One must not be too quickly preoccupied with professing definitively what is true and what is false. Not that true and false do not matter. But if at every instant one wants to grasp the whole and perfect truth of a situation, particularly a concrete and limited situation in history or in politics, one only deceives and blinds himself. Such judgments are only rarely and fleetingly possible, and sometimes, when we think we see what is most significant, it has very little meaning at all.
Thomas Merton
View from the Front Porch
Labor Day brings the start of a new semester at Asbury Theological Seminary. I look forward to new people making their way to seminary along our street. There is opportunity to engage in conversation, perhaps friendships will be formed. Sacred experiences, Jesus is often revealed in unexpected ways through an earnest disciple. If I had to describe my encounters in one word, it would be: communion.
Reminded that autumn is officially (meteorologically) here, today is a repost of thoughts from several years ago, even truer today.
I have discovered life in autumn to be more akin to entering the wardrobe of The Lion, The witch and the Wardrobe, than a protected and cozy cocoon. Autumn is a strange and wondrous place of mystery, questions, doubts, adventure and endless possibilities.
Living in autumn is a challenge.Exhilaration and frustration constant companions. Each day is like a sunset at the end of a cloudy day, when the sun breaks through revealing unexpected and startling beauty. The desire to grasp and absorb infinite nuances of color and contrast before darkness invades is overwhelming.
Despite its brevity, sunset transforms my angst and makes impending darkness inconsequential. Assurance of a new day, another sunset, restrains despair. I hold no regrets for my life, but I can say with confidence, I have never felt more alive than now.
