For the Joy of the Journey

So Much To Think About

George October 14, 2024 Notes Anthology 0 Comments

“Someone who thinks the world is always cheating him is right. He is missing that wonderful feeling of trust in someone or something.” – Eric Hoffer

metaphysical belonging,

— a sense that your life fits into a broader scheme of meaning and eternal values.

If you lack metaphysical belonging, you have to rely on social belonging for all your belonging needs, which requires you to see your glorious self reflected in the attentions and affirmations of others. This leads to the fragile narcissism that Lasch saw coming back in 1979: “The narcissist depends on others to validate his self-esteem. He cannot live without an admiring audience. His apparent freedom from family ties and institutional constraints does not free him to stand alone or to glory in his individuality. On the contrary, it contributes to his insecurity.”

David Brooks

Discover Joy

God, who is forever pouring out God’s whole being from all eternity, wants you to flourish. God wants you to be filled with joy and excitement and ever longing to be able to find what is so beautiful in God’s creation: the compassion of so many, the caring, the sharing. And God says, Please, my child, help me. Help me to spread love and laughter and joy and compassion. And you know what, my child? As you do this—hey, presto—you discover joy. Joy, which you had not sought, comes as the gift, as almost the reward for this non-self-regarding caring for others.

Dalai Lama

Cosmic Dance

When we are alone on a starlit night; when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children; when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet Bash? we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash—at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the “newness,” the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.

Thomas Merton

Memory

We honor pain through memory and we know that people die twice—the second time when no one on earth still speaks their name.

In Judaism God is called Zochair kol Hanishkachot—the one who remembers all things forgotten.

Hebrew has a word that applies only to bereaved parents, shakul. Can one conceive of a history so studded with such loss that there needs to be a designated word?

For the Jewish people amnesia is not an option. Jewish memory is both a tribute and a harbinger. It is what we owe to God, and to those who suffered and those who died. The dead should not be forgotten in the press of the everyday. The poignancy of loss cannot be fully calmed by the blanket of passing time.

David Wolpe

Heartbreak

Heartbreak is about crushed expectations. The problem is that we’ve made romance into such a fantasy that anything short of a Hallmark movie feels like failure. We’ve created generation after generation more in love with this idealized love than with the person. The inability to distinguish this is what causes so much pain.

Why don’t we have high school classes about romantic relationships? We could separate the fantasy from the reality to forewarn our children so they can better handle the flood of hormones and peer pressure. Instead, we give them useless clichés like, “When it’s love, you’ll just know.” While that may be true, most people “just know” many times—and are wrong.

Kareem Abdul Jabbar

Modern World

The modern world is a culture of “fatherless children” (sometimes quite literally). The past (and thus the place and source of our origins) is always seen as something to be overcome. The notion of “progress” includes a forgetting of the past and the reduction of its power in our lives. We seek to self-create and self-define our lives as though we had no source outside of ourselves.

Fr Stephen Freeman

Cultural Christianity

When we insert religion inside of culture, culture wins every time. Most of us are Americans or our nationalities first, and then maybe, once in a while, we are Christians. That’s just obvious—it’s our cultures that form us. We want to believe, we keep pretending we believe, but we really don’t.

Richard Rohr

Scripture

The purpose of Scripture is to not to get a passing grade in Religion 101, rather, the purpose of Scripture is to bring people to believe in Jesus, to come to Jesus, to grasp hold of Jesus, to rest in the one whose yoke is easy and whose burden is light (Matthew 11:30)

Michael Bird

The Irony of Infamy

By the time Rose’s 24 -year career came to an end in 1986 he had become MLB’s all-time leader in hits, games played, at bats, singles, and outs. He was Rookie of the Year, won three World Series championships, three batting titles, two Golden Glove Awards, and one Most Valuable Player Award. He also made 17 All-Star appearances at an unequaled five different positions: first base, second base, third base, left field and right field.

…eighteen months after Rose was banned from baseball and the same year Rose would have been first eligible for the Hall of Fame, its directors voted to exclude individuals on baseball’s permanently ineligible list. This new rule prevented Rose from ever being admitted to the Hall of Fame.

“What, are they waiting for me to die?” Rose repeatedly would say of his chances of getting into the Hall of Fame. “Wouldn’t that be horrible if I died next week and then next year they reinstated me?”

Well, he’s dead, but the controversy continues.
If, some day, he is inducted to the HOF, will he be remembered for baseball or betting?

Reverberation from the Echo Chamber

The Importance of Being Wrong

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 .
Far from being a sign of intellectual inferiority , the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition . Far from being a moral flaw , it is inextricable from some of our most humane and honorable qualities : empathy , optimism , imagination , conviction , and courage . And far from being a mark of indifference or intolerance , wrongness is a vital part of how we learn and change . Thanks to error , we can revise our understanding of ourselves and amend our ideas about the world .
... it is ultimately wrongness , not rightness , that can teach us who we are .
_{Schulz, Kathryn. Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error}

The above quotes capture the paradox each of us find ourselves in as we strive for meaningful and authentic lives. An unrelenting pursuit of rightness is pitted against our incontrovertible fallibility. 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.

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.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

Dying Well – Fear of Death (2)

George October 14, 2024 Death & Dying 0 Comments

FOREWORD

Writing this post has been a work in progress. I continually encounter helpful and/or challenging thoughts and ideas about dying well. Reading Richard Beck’s post this morning provided especially valuable insights into aging — dying well. Struggling to articulate my interest in death and dying and defining the what and why of dying well; this excerpt from Beck’s post was an Aha! :
“Maximus the Confessor… described how we put our dying to use for our sanctification. Put my dying to use.”
Pilfering Beck’s insight, my working definition of dying well is:

Dying well is putting our dying to use for our sanctification and the welfare of those we leave behind.

God, you have taught me from my youth,
and I still proclaim your wondrous works.
Even while I am old and gray,
God, do not abandon me,
while I proclaim your power
to another generation,
your strength to all who are to come.
Psalm 71

The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.
Carl Jung, Swiss psychiatrist (1875-1961)

…perhaps the most important, factor in dying well is acknowledging our fear of death and it’s spiritual, mental, emotional and psychological manifestations in our lives.
_{https://www.georgeezell.com/2024/09/__trashed-2/}

No matter what the issue may be, looking to Jesus first for answers is always good advice. Fear of death is no exception. At first glimpse, that doesn’t seem logical — Jesus, Messiah, son of God fears death?
The doctrine of incarnation’s reality and mystery has been muted by disenchantment of faith in the West. If not opposed, we are reluctant to accept that Jesus “had to be made like them, fully human in every way“… or “because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.” ¹
Jesus’ struggle with the reality of his approaching death is recorded in Matthew, Mark and Luke.
Note the various translations of Jesus’ words to Peter, James and John. Each of them, capturing a fearful anticipation of death . They reveal a profound revelation of the full humanity of Jesus.

“I am deeply grieved, even to death; remain here, and stay awake with me.” NRSV
“My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.” NIV
“I am so sad that I feel as if I am dying. Stay here and keep awake with me.” CEV
“My soul is crushed with grief to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.” NLT
“My soul is very sorrowful, even to death; remain here, and watch with me.” ESV
“My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death: tarry ye here, and watch with me.” KJV
“This sorrow is crushing my life out. Stay here and keep vigil with me.” MSG
“The sorrow in my heart is so great that it almost crushes me. Stay here and keep watch with me.” GNT “
My soul is very sorrowful, even to death; remain here, and watch with me.” RSV
“My soul is deeply grieved, so that I am almost dying of sorrow. Stay here and stay awake and keep watch with Me.” AMP

““Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” Matthew 26:41 NIV
‘He took Peter, James and John along with him, and he began to be deeply distressed and troubled.” Mark 14:33 NIV
“An angel from heaven appeared to him and strengthened him. And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground.” Luke 22:43-44 NIV

Jesus did not yield to temptation from fear of death. However, his temptation is an apologia for Beck’s contention — “Death is the cause of sin. More properly, the fear of death produces most of the sin in our lives. “

The Garden of Gethsemane was “an opportune time” —_{“When the devil had finished all this tempting, he left him until an opportune time.” Luke 4:13 NIV} — The mystery and reality of the incarnate Son of God is on display. Jesus understood his, and his disciples, vulnerability to the fear of death. Peter, James and John’s falling asleep, is equivalent to today’s pervasive denial of death.
Psychologically, Jesus’ humanity is revealed in his anxiety. Beck defines two types of anxiety produced when facing death, demonstrated by both Jesus and ourselves.

Basic anxiety: the anxiety of biological survival, the anxiety of our fight-or-flight response, the anxiety associated with vigilantly monitoring threats in our physical environment. Basic anxiety is connected to the survival instincts we have as biodegradable animals in a world of real or potential scarcity … in the face of survival threats, our self-interest intensifies; if the situation becomes dire, violence breaks out.

Neurotic anxiety: is characterized by worries, fears, and apprehensions associated with our self-concept, much of which is driven by how we compare ourselves to those in our social world. Feelings of insecurity, low self-esteem, obsessions, perfectionism, ambitiousness, envy, narcissism, jealousy, rivalry, competitiveness, self-consciousness, guilt, and shame are all examples of neurotic anxiety, and they all relate to how we evaluate ourselves in our own eyes and the eyes of others.

…we are enslaved to the fear of death because the basis of our identities—all the ways we define ourselves and make meaning with our lives—is revealed to be an illusion, a lie, an obfuscation, a neurotic defense mechanism involved in death repression. Death saturates every aspect of our personhood.

… psychological and social avoidance is driven by an underlying neurotic anxiety. And where there is fear and anxiety, there is opportunity to be manipulated and tempted. In an attempt to manage or reduce our anxiety, we are driven to embrace distractions, entertainments, and comforts. The illusion of a deathless society can only be maintained by a vast industry of such distractions and entertainments.²

Jesus’ admonition to his disciples,“Watch and pray so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak”, gets posted on the refrigerator door, but when considered in the context of the the specter of death in the Garden of Gethsemane and it has more profound implications; begging the Apostle Paul’s question, “Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?”
Paul’s answer: “Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!

The person who does not fear death is outside the tyranny of the devil…When the devil finds such a soul he can accomplish in it none of his works.
John Chrysostom

Hopefully this post has stimulate deeper consideration of slavery to the fear of death and its function in producing sin in our lives. The next post will examine Jesus’ response in the Garden as he was tempted as we are and what his experience can teach us about how we are delivered from this body subject to death.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

1
Hebrews 2
2
The Slavery of Death- Richard Beck

So Much To Think About

George October 5, 2024 Notes Anthology 0 Comments

Bed ridden and dying last November, Landon Saunders was asked “ Do you have any fear knowing your death is immanent?
In reply, he said “ If I am honest I am a little afraid of the dying process, but I wouldn’t mind missing the next election.”

Deconstructors

What we are seeing in the deconstructors at the heart of our study is not that they left the faith or left the church altogether, but that they left that church to find Jesus move clearly in another place, or church. What they did was not deconstruct the faith. They are shedding beliefs that have “barnacled” themselves to evangelicalism in a way that makes them central and necessary. The deconstructors went through pain, turmoil, and the realization that they might lose friends and their stabilizing community in order to maintain their integrity about what it means to follow Jesus. There are too many for whom “deconstruction” means shedding elements of cultural evangelicalism. Let’s listen to them.

Scot McKnight

https://scotmcknight.substack.com/p/what-are-they-deconstructing

Divided

David Zahl cites in his 2019 book Seculosity, fewer than 10 percent of American parents in the 1950s would have objected to their child marrying someone from another political party. In 2010, that number surged to nearly 40 percent. Today, entire church congregations are turning over, resorting themselves according to shared political ideals.

Remembering your reading

If we can’t remember the things we’ve read and watched and even loved, do they still “count”?

What does it mean for a book, a show, an experience to “count,” anyway? Do you need to be able to recall the plot in detail? Should you be able to describe scenes or bits of dialogue, larger themes, cultural relevance? Or is it enough to just remember enjoying a book, or to be able to conjure a feeling it inspired? I was mulling these questions when I came across this essay by James Collinsfrom 2010. In it, he describes books that he loved about which he remembers nothing: “All I associate with them is an atmosphere and a stray image or two, like memories of trips I took as a child.”

Collins suspected, as I do, that the books he can’t remember must have had an effect on his brain anyway, that the experience of reading and engaging with the texts must have changed him in some deeper way, leaving “a kind of mental radiation — that continues to affect me even if I can’t detect it.” I want to believe that my immersion in the fascinating characters and rich plot of “Creation Lake” by Rachel Kushner are performing some kind of alchemy in my brain even if — and it seems unthinkable, halfway through the book — I am likely to forget it all.

Maryanne Wolf, a neuroscientist, confirmed for Collins that inability to recall a book’s details shouldn’t be taken as evidence that we didn’t assimilate it in some way. “We can’t retrieve the specifics, but to adapt a phrase of William James’s, there is a wraith of memory,” she told him. “The information you get from a book is stored in networks. We have an extraordinary capacity for storage, and much more is there than you realize. It is in some way working on you even though you aren’t thinking about it.”

Melissa Kirsch NYT

17th-century genius Thomas Browne: “Let age, not envy, draw wrinkles on thy cheeks.”

Envy

Envy is the dominant destructive emotion in most people. It’s a tricky emotion in that it can be both healing and lethal. A small dose can motivate a person to excel, but a large dose can lead a person to hop on an endless treadmill of chasing what they can never catch. It’s an addiction that only increasing amounts can satisfy and even then the satisfaction is fleeting and the hunger returns.

Kareem Abdul Jabbar

College Education

no college education is complete unless it trains students to ask the right questions about the relationship between their empirically based studies of the world around them and larger transcendent principles – including principles about God, the meaning of virtue, and the basis for objective truth.

If students don’t ask these questions, they’ll likely graduate from college with some excellent skills, but without the framework that equips them for a meaningful life. But if they do ask these questions, they will not only have the tools to see the connections between everything that they have learned but they will also gain the ability to apply that knowledge for something more meaningful than merely a personally enjoyable or financially lucrative career.

https://theraisedhand.substack.com/p/looking-beyond-career-skills-what

Using what we have

We often tell Jesus what we would do if we had a million dollars, but most don’t have a million dollars. Most of us do have a twenty in our pocket. Perhaps Jesus is interested in what we’ll do with the twenty we do have rather than the millions we don’t.

Mike Glenn

Given the choice of this moment or eternity,
let me choose in this moment what is eternal.
Given the choice of this easy pleasure,
or the harder road of the cross,
give me grace to choose to follow you,
knowing that there is nowhere
apart from your presence
where I might find the peace I long for,
no lasting satisfaction
apart from your reclamation of my heart.
every holy moment

Living as a Mystic

You don’t have to enter a monastery to be a mystic. You don’t have to renounce chocolate or forsake pop culture. It is not necessary to take formal vows and beat yourself up when you inevitably fail to uphold them. These are static notions of what it means to be committed to the life of the soul, and they probably have almost nothing to do with the warm and spicy sprawl of your days. To be a mystic in our times is not about renunciation; it is about intention.

Living as a mystic means orienting the whole of yourself toward the sacred. It’s a matter of purposely looking through the lens of love. Contemporary wise woman Anne Lamott says (quoting Father Ed, the priest who helped Bill Wilson start up Alcoholics Anonymous) that “sometimes Heaven is just a new pair of glasses.” [1] You know what it looks like when you wipe a lens clean of smears and dust. And you also know how it feels to bump into the furniture when your vision is fuzzy. When you say yes to cultivating a mystical gaze, the ordinary world becomes more luminous, imbued with flashes of beauty and moments of meaning. The universe responds to your willingness to behold the holy by revealing almost everything as holy. A plate of rice and beans, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, your new baby, the latest political scoundrel, the scary diagnosis, the restless nights.

You can start right here, in the middle of your messy life. Your beautiful, imperfect, perfect life. There is no other time, and the exact place you find yourself is the best place to enter. Despite what they might have taught you at Bible Camp or in yoga class, you are probably not on your way to some immaculate state in which you will eventually be calm and kindly enough to be worthy of a direct encounter with the divine. Set your intention to uncover the jewels buried in the heart of what already is. Choose to see the face of God in the face of the bus driver and the moody teenager, in peeling a tangerine or feeding the cat. Decide. Mean it. Open your heart, and then do everything you can to keep it open. Light every candle in the room….

Mirabai Starr via CAC.org

We are STUPID!

Prov. 12: 15 Stupid people always think they are right. Wise people listen to advice. (GNT)

Wise people are really aware of how often they are wrong. Even when they are right they feel a sense of wrong.

Stupid people always think they are right. They never have to justify their actions. They never have to justify their choices because they think they’re right. If you are always right you’re not always right, you’re always stupid.

By choosing to listen you begin to attack the stupidity in your life. Wise people listen to counsel. You never get so wise that you do not need advise.

Stupid people think that wise people don’t need advise. And that’s why they are stupid. Wise people need less advice and want it more. Wise people need less advice and seek it more. Stupid people need more advice and seek it less.

Here’s how to know where you fall on the spectrum of stupid or wise. If you are asking people for counsel and input in your life you are wise. If you are looking for people that agree with you, you are being stupid. Ironically, stupid people always pretend they are getting advice.
Erwin McManus

Being a Christian

To be a Christian in the proper sense, to worship God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is to acknowledge that our life does not have its source in ourselves, but in God. Living by this, moment by moment, is what it means to have a true and authentic existence – to be truly human.

Fr Stephen Freeman

Reverberation from the Echo Chamber

…an unfortunate and largely unintended consequence of the rise of social
media is that instead of being better informed and exposed to ever-broadening viewpoints, research shows that Americans today are more polarized and draw from shrinking pools of news.
R. Sunstein

Over the past decade or more, government and society in general has become more polarized. People’s ability (willingness) to communicate with those who do not share views/beliefs has become endanger. There is general agreement echo chambers are a significant factor contributing to the state our society.
Technology has unleashed the malevolent potential of echo chambers in ways never imagined.
Echo chambers are ubiquitous. Social media, news outlets, blog feeds, churches, families, neighborhoods, communities. If there is a context where differences exists, a “safe room” (echo chamber) will emerge and like-minded people will seek refuge.
Echo chambers are personally relevant. Recognizing I was residing in a self imposed political/social echo chamber, I made a decision to dampen the echoes and open myself to different sources.
Those efforts met with mixed success. The likelihood of trading one echo chamber for another is real. The decision became a catalyst for more serious thought and investigation into the character and nature of echo chambers. The Echo Chambers essay is an
attempt to share questions, ideas and issues encountered related to echo chambers.

Echo Chambers – an impetus for evil.

The poor in spirit do not commit evil. Evil is not committed by people who feel uncertain about their righteousness, who question their own motives, who
worry about betraying themselves.
The evil in this world is committed by the spiritual fat cats, by the Pharisees of our own day, the self-righteous who think they are without sin in because they are unwilling to suffer the discomfort of significant self-examination.
The major threats to our survival no longer stem from nature without but from our own human nature within. It is our carelessness, our hostilities, our selfishness and pride and willful ignorance that endanger the world.
Unless we can now tame and transmute the potential for evil in the human soul, we shall be lost. How can we do this unless we are willing to look at our own evil ?
M. Scott Peck – People of the Lie

[“Reverberation from the Echo Chamber” ; excerpts from an essay entitled “Echo Chambers” written in 2018. You can read the complete essay HERE.]

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

So Much To Think About

George September 28, 2024 Notes Anthology 0 Comments

Self sufficiency

…the saying in the Sesotho language is: Motho ke Motho ka Batho. A person is only human in relation to other humans.

…as a Christian the idea of self sufficiency is close to anathema. How else do we live the Christian life except in the context of the faith community as we engage the world around us?

Keith Regehr

role of God in mental health

I don’t think you can grow tomatoes by praying for them to appear out of thin air. There is this thing called gardening that God gave us to grow and cultivate tomatoes. In a similar way, God gave us technologies that promote mental health and well-being and it would be foolish not to use these when needed. And yet, I also think it’s a mistake to ignore the role faith and spirituality plays in psychological well-being. As I describe in The Shape of Joy (due out in about two weeks), one of the best kept secrets of psychology is that faith and spirituality have been repeatedly shown to be predictive of health and happiness. God is good for you.

This isn’t to say we should approach God in a therapeutic, utilitarian manner. I know a lot of pastors and theologians who worry about reducing God to “the therapeutic.” I tend to respond to this concern with Augustine: Our hearts are restless until they rest in God. If God is our Creator and the ground of our being then it stands to reason that we’ll thrive when we make contact with and abide in that ground. Mental health improves when psychology makes contact with ontology. Living in the real matters.

Richard Beck http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2024/09/psalm-69.html

Ethics

Ethics are formed. We are not born able to naturally make ethical decisions for the good of others. Have you ever seen a group of toddlers play? “Mine!” and “No!” are phrases that characterize the toddler years. Nor do we coincidentally happen upon becoming a virtuous person. The process by which ethics, and therefore character, is the academic study that spiritual formation engages in.

Kelly Edminson

Contemplation

Parker Palmer writes, “The function of contemplation in all its forms is to penetrate illusion and help us to touch reality.”

Contemplation is any way we can find to help us penetrate illusion and touch reality—and reality will always be bigger than us. It will always leave us a bit uncomfortable, a bit off center stage. If we’re still on center stage, it isn’t Reality.

Richard Rohr

Famine

Timmo Gaasbeek, a disaster expert who has modeled the crisis for a research institute in the Netherlands, told me that he foresees 13 million people starving to death in Sudan by October 2025, with a margin of error of two million. Such a toll would make this one of the worst famines in world history and the worst since the great Chinese famine of 65 years ago. By way of contrast, the famous Ukraine famine of the 1930s killed perhaps four million people, although estimates vary.

Nicholas Kristof NYT

A convenient rationale for euthanasia:

“The patient is mercifully put out of our misery.”
G Ezell

Remembering your reading

If we can’t remember the things we’ve read and watched and even loved, do they still “count”?

What does it mean for a book, a show, an experience to “count,” anyway? Do you need to be able to recall the plot in detail? Should you be able to describe scenes or bits of dialogue, larger themes, cultural relevance? Or is it enough to just remember enjoying a book, or to be able to conjure a feeling it inspired? I was mulling these questions when I came across this essay by James Collins from 2010. In it, he describes books that he loved about which he remembers nothing: “All I associate with them is an atmosphere and a stray image or two, like memories of trips I took as a child.”

Melissa kirsch NYT

Envy

Kareem Abdul Jabbar

A Good Story

Let this be said: evangelicalism loves a good conversion or spiritual life story. Let this be added quickly: but only so long as the story confirms the boundary lines.

Scot McKnight

Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

Today’s post introduces what is planned to be a regular feature in SMTTA. “Reverberation from the Echo Chamber”. I will share excerpts from an essay entitled “Echo Chambers” written in 2018. You can read the complete essay HERE.

“Reverberation from the Echo Chamber”

Who are we?

My hope is readers will gain an awareness of echo chambers. More importantly, readers will better understand personal implications of residing in an echo chamber.
This is not about Republican or Democrat, et al. It is not about giving up what we believe to be right. It is not about proving the other side wrong.
It is ultimately irrelevant whether we are right or wrong about our cause.
Continual, unfiltered reinforcement of our rightness, will, ironically, result
in unhealthy outcomes that can result in destructive consequences.
It is revealing to read comments on controversial subjects that appear in social media. There is no limit as to how despicable comments can be. Living constantly in an echo chamber can transform us in ways that are inexplicable. The “safety” of an echo chamber is a darkness that shields us from face to face interaction and allows us to escape responsibility and grants permission for words and conduct that we would never consider otherwise.

Consider two comments posted recently on Linkedin I believe illustrate the point:

Bull@#$% comments from trolls or morons are completely useless and waist of my time to read. I am not neatral in what i am.I stand without doubt a hardcore constitutional republican ,a Master automotive technician, and above all
a christian. So call me what you want i am confident in my beliefs, ideas and religion.What the naysayers have to say has ZERO EFFECT ON ME and makes no difference to anyone but the one calling names.

… we should all support each other…men ,women and others.we are all gods children.lets stop dividing ourselves into categories.men ,women, black ,white straight ,gay.lets just be one people with the same mission.being good citizens of our wonderful country.I agree that women should not put down other women nor should any group denounce other groups just to self promote or to attack others you dont agree with.Lets debate and find common ground and work together for the greater good for all.

The first comment was, obviously, in response to a subject a commenter did not agree with.
The second comment came in response to an idea a commenter agreed with.

The most revealing thing about these two comments is that the author of both was the same person.
I wonder which one he would say most represents who he is??

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

Dying Well 4.0 – the fear of death

George September 24, 2024 Death & Dying 0 Comments

Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.
Hebrews 2.14-15

With the exception of a few conclusions/comments, very little of this is post original to me. No surprise to regular readers, Richard Beck is my primary resource. His book “The Slavery of Death” has been formative in my engagement with the subject of death and dying. I highly recommend his blog “Experimental Theology” for current posts and as a great resource.

An important, perhaps the most important, factor in dying well is acknowledging our fear of death and it’s spiritual, mental, emotional and psychological manifestations in our lives.

The central contention of this book is that death, not sin, is the primary predicament of the human condition. Death is the cause of sin. More properly, the fear of death produces most of the sin in our lives.
Beck, Richard. The Slavery of Death (p. 3)

The following quote from The Slavery of Death summarizes Beck’s contention:

Through the power of death and the devil, sin that reigns in men gives rise to fear and anxiety and to the general instinct of self-preservation or survival. Thus, Satan manipulates man’s fear and his desire for self-satisfaction, raising up sin in him. . . . Because of death, man must first attend to the necessities of life in order to stay alive. In this struggle, self-interests are unavoidable. Thus, man is unable to live in accordance with his original destiny of unselfish love. This state of subjection under the reign of death is the root of man’s weakness in which he becomes entangled in sin at the urging of the demons and by his own consent. Resting in the hands of the devil, the power of the fear of death is the root from which self-aggrandizement, egotism, hatred, envy, and other similar passions spring up. In addition to the fact that man “subjects himself to anything in order to avoid dying,” he constantly fears that his life is without meaning. Thus, he strives to demonstrate to himself and to others that it has worth. . . Fear and anxiety render man an individual.
This passage is a concise summary of the entire argument to this point. As mortal creatures the selfish pursuit of survival and self-preservation becomes our highest good, and these survival fears lead us into all sorts of sinful practices. Almost every unwholesome pursuit of humanity—from hedonism to self-aggrandizement to acquisitiveness to rivalry to violence—can be traced back to these basic survival fears.

Beck’s assertions regarding the relationship between the power of death, devil and sin challenged my assumptions about Genesis chapter 3, original sin, salvation and a variety of other related subjects and passages. For that reason, it is a impossible task to do Beck’s case justice in this post.
I will say, after reading The Slavery of Death, I have embraced his belief — “that death, not sin, is the primary predicament of the human condition. Death is the cause of sin. More properly, the fear of death produces most of the sin in our lives.”
My purpose is not to convince readers but hopefully stimulate curiosity, investigation and reading of “The Slavery of Death”.
Implications of the fear of death being the source of sin in our lives are profound. They not only effect our capability to die well, almost every aspect of our relationship with Christ is affected; from praxis and discipleship to spiritual formation and more. I cannot say you will be convinced, but I will say you will profit from the experience.

To conclude this post I will share a couple of observations that nudged toward my conclusion:

>Christian resistance to accepting death..

A recent Harvard study found that patients with high levels of support from their religious communities are more likely to choose aggressive life support and to die in intensive-care units. They were also less likely to enroll in hospice.
THe lost Art of Dying – L .S. Dugdale

Although religious communities are not defined, it is reasonable to assume a significant population oof the study to be Christian or hold some belief in life after death. My limited, anecdotal, experience supports the study’s conclusion. Why would people who believe in heaven fight vigorously using all possible means to avoid their enviable death? I believe the answer, at least in part, is a fear of death. The most honest testimony I have read describing the terror of death for a Christian was written by Pastor and Theologian Timothy Keller. You read his essay HERE.

>Evidence from ars moriendi

According to Tractatus artis bene moriendi, or “Treatise on the Art of Dying Well, there are five temptations faced by the dying. Of his eleven woodcut prints, five depicted those temptations, and another five pictured their resolutions. This meant that the illustration of disbelief was paired with an image of encouragement in faith, despair was coupled with an illustration of comfort through hope, impatience with a print encouraging patience, pride with humility, and avarice with “letting go” of the earthly.
Those temptations are eerily familiar in the protracted dying experiences in our modern context.
Interestingly, temptation of disbelief, despair, impatience and avarice are continually present in the Christian’s life, when we yield to them we lead to sin.
Connecting the dots of between ars moriendi and temptations of everyday Christian experience, was a significant nudge toward Beck’s position.

Changing the way we die takes work. What sort of work? …dying well requires the recovery of a sense of finitude and the embrace of community —both central features of the original ars moriendi.
L. S. Dugdale

I plan additional posts filtered through the lens of “death is the cause of sin”.