For the Joy of the Journey

A National Failure

The United States has lost more than one million people to overdoses since 2000 — more than the number of Americans lost in all wars in the past 150 years put together, including both World Wars. Yet neither Democrats nor Republicans have tackled the problem with the seriousness or nuance it deserves.

When nearly 3,000 Americans died in the Sept. 11 attacks, we reorganized the federal government and spent trillions of dollars in an (often misguided) effort to make us safer. Yet an even larger number die every week from drugs and alcohol, and we can’t even be bothered to provide effective treatment to most of those in need. This is a staggering national failure.

Nicholas Kristof

Religions

Religions devised for a social purpose [he wrote, more than seventy years ago], like Roman emperor-worship or modern attempts to ‘sell Christianity as a means of saving civilisation’, do not come to much. The little knots of Friends who turn their backs on the ‘World’ are those who really transform it.’

C S Lewis

Dissonance

…in Ohiyesa’s words, ‘Christianity and modern civilisation are opposed and irreconcilable.’ In his 1986 book The Civilisation of Christianity, Catholic priest and theologian John L. McKenzie put the same point even more sharply. ‘There is a deadly and irreconcilable opposition between Western civilisation and Christianity,’ he wrote, ‘and one of them must destroy the other.’ If that’s true, then wielding the Christian faith as a weapon to defend this thing called ‘Western civilisation’ is a lost battle from the start. Our culture may have been nominally Christian five hundred years ago, but for a long time now it has been the culture of the Enlightenment, of modernity, of the Machine, of Mammon. It valorises not God but the world.

Paul Kingsworth

Jesus is the Center

Jesus Is the Center Some have described what’s happening in deconstruction as a kind of “centered-set” thinking. Time and time again, we’ve found that deconstructors want to get back to Jesus and want to base everything they believe on Jesus. They often describe a sensation of discovering the Bible all over again when they begin to read the Gospels once again. They describe a shift to thinking more like Jesus, acting more like Jesus, and letting Jesus’ vision for the kingdom reshape their life. He becomes the center of their life.

Centered-set thinking contrasts more directly with bounded-set thinking. A bounded set emphasizes boundaries. It defines who is “in” and who is “out.” It spells out in detail what an acceptable person must believe and how such persons should behave. Only those who are inside the boundaries can belong to the group. Uniformity characterizes the group, and the uniformity is conservative in the sense that it is neither flexible nor open to change. Either you’re in or you’re out, and if you’re in, you’re all in.

The common problem with bounded sets is determining how to define the boundaries. A bounded-set person could risk losing Jesus in their efforts to build walls at the borders of their faith. Deconstructors would say those who think this way have lost Jesus because they focus excessively on who is in and who is out, and especially on keeping the wrong people out.

Tommy Preson Phillips

Zero Sum Love

The problem comes when we think of love as like a kind of cake. There are only so many slices of cake and you have to be careful who you give them out to because sooner or later they will run out. In this way of thinking, love is a limited commodity where you have to be sparing who you love, because there isn’t enough to go round.

Yet divine love is a bit more like fire. When you take a light from a candle and light another candle with it, the first candle is not diminished, but continues to burn brightly. Fire can be passed on from one place to another and spread widely because it’s not finite in the way that a cake is.

Gtaham Tomli

Generalities

We live in a culture of statistics – and they hide a lot. They obscure us in the reduction of our lives to generalities. None of us is a percent. None of us is an aggregate. Each of us is a priceless treasure of whom God is mindful. You cannot count the hairs on the heads of humanity in general. But the hairs on the head of each of us is numbered . Sparrows do not fall to the ground in general. It is the single sparrow that God notes, and infinitely notes each sparrow, fallen and otherwise. This is the wonder of it all.

Fr Stephen Freeman

 A capella  Singing

Nadia Bolz – Webber

It is an extraordinary thing to be raised in community. And I didn’t realize during my childhood how unusual it is in America these days to really have such a tight knit community. So we saw the same people several times a week. And they would come to our house for devotionals, and we’d share meals, and we went to church, you know, Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night.

And then there was stuff in between, and so just regularly seeing the same people and having them in our lives, just that alone is pretty remarkable. And of course the singing was, um, absolutely extraordinary. 

It was my first language, truly, singing a cappella, four part harmony. I probably could do that before I could speak.

And it completely ruined me for all, for all other church music. I have never, never felt moved by an organ or a band, anything, but unadorned human singing. It has never, moved me in a way I think it does other people. But I always feel bullied by the organ, if I’m honest. Like, I’m a theologian in residence at a couple of big churches, like an Episcopal cathedral and a big Presbyterian church, and they have beautiful organs and magnificent music programs.

And I mean, as music, it’s nice, but I’ve never experienced it as worshipful in the way I have just acapella singing.

Certainty 

“In the course of a long life in the service of our Mother the Church, let me tell you that there is one sin I have come to fear above all others. Certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance.” 

Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), Conclave

Stupid 

Italian historian Carlo Cipolla once put it, “The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.”

If somebody comes up to you and says, “I think I’m going to take a hike in a lightning storm with a copper antenna on my head,” stupidity replies, “That sounds like a really great idea!” Stupidity is the tendency to take actions that hurt you and the people around you.

German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it: “This is virtually a sociological-psychological law. The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.”

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

Today is special. Ann’s birthday.
I am so thankful for her. Wonderful wife, mother, mother-in-law, grandmother, great grandmother, sister and much more.

I love you.

ARCHIE update

Thursday 2-6-25

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

Why do men relish control so much? There are a number of ways to answer this question, but certainly the sense of having agency in the world, of being able to have an impact on our surroundings, of being able to see that we make a difference in the world—all of these can help explain why we like and want control.

Perhaps the above explains my ill-advised attempt to create a Billy Bob Thornton persona … Unfortunately Ann doesn’t think much of Billy Bob Thornton.

Self Control 

Self-control is a Fruit of the Spirit, which means that we depend upon God’s grace to receive it, but we can’t be passive. Self-control is a discipline, too. It is a muscle we exercise or we don’t. We each have an obligation to mortify our flesh and resist sinful temptation in all forms. Given the powerful currents of our society, we must be intentional about practicing self-denial. Chastity is a virtue, even (especially?) in marriage. A beautiful marriage does not mean you will have all your sexual desires fulfilled. You won’t. You will have to practice self-control. Over and over again.

https://newsletter.oalannoble.com/p/self-control-and-scandals

Contemplation 

Contemplation waits for the moments, creates the moments, where all can be a silent prayer. It refuses the very distinction between action and stillness. Contemplation is essentially nondual consciousness that overcomes the gaps between me and God, outer and inner, either and or, me and you.  

The reason why the true contemplative-in-action is still somewhat rare is that most of us, even and most especially in religion, are experts in dualistic thinking. And then we try to use this limited thinking tool for prayer, problems, and relationships. It cannot get us very far. The irony of ego “consciousness” is that it always excludes and eliminates the unconscious—which means it is actually not conscious at all! Ego insists on knowing and being certain; it refuses all unknowing. Most people who think they are fully conscious (read, “smart”) have a leaden manhole cover over their unconscious. It gives them control but seldom compassion or wisdom.  

Richard Rohr

Celebrity

there is a mania loose in our society where so many people are pursuing celebrity rather than artistry. In other words, they want to be famous for doing nothing. Reality TV and social media have encouraged people to strive, not for greatness, but for recognition. They will even settle for notoriety, engaging in the most cruel, inhumane, and self-degrading behavior just to have people recognize them on the street. It doesn’t matter why they recognize them, only that they do.

There’s a difference between fame and accomplishment, between celebrity and artistry. For me, fame, celebrity, and recognition should be something earned through passion, hard work, practice, and commitment. I have no beef with reality shows or social media millionaires who unbox stuff—they can be very entertaining—but those people should never be equated with those who actually produce something worthwhile. 

The reason we are so quick to bestow celebrity onto so many people who do so little is that it keeps the hope alive in all people that anyone can become famous just by doing outrageous stuff that goes viral and gets clicks and followers. Everyone can’t write a Bob Dylan song or paint a Matisse or write a Maya Angelou poem—but they can rant about conspiracies or eat disgusting things. All with the sad subtext of: Please notice me! 

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Theological Differences

…the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) wanted to add the song “In Christ Alone” to their hymnal Glory to God. They asked the authors of the hymn if they could change the original lyric “Till on that cross as Jesus died / the wrath of God was satisfied” to “Till on that cross as Jesus died / the love of God was magnified.”

…we can see why evangelical and progressive Christians experience mutual incomprehension when they encounter each other. They come from very different theological worlds.

Ricard Beck

Bad Data and its Consequences.

One consequence of looking at the wrong data to understand the shape of a problem is that data always hints at the solution. 

For example, during the Vietnam War, U.S. military leaders measured “success” in the conflict using the same metric they used in World Wars I and II: body count—the number of enemy combatants killed. The assumption was that higher body counts equated to progress toward victory.

But the Vietnam War wasn’t a war of attrition. It was a war for public opinion. As a result, strategies were developed to maximize body counts, often at the expense of what truly mattered: winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese and beyond. Villages were bombed, civilians were displaced, and atrocities like the My Lai Massacre occurred. In the end, the focus on this narrow, incomplete metric contributed to widespread disillusionment, both domestically and abroad, and the eventual failure of U.S. efforts in Vietnam.

When Christian thought leaders look at the data available to them to understand the problems facing Christianity and to uncover solutions, they make a similar mistake. Here is the data set most leaders are using to make decisions:

67% of the U.S. population self-identifies as Christian, which equates to around 224 million people. This is down from 95% of Americans who identified as Christian in the 1950’s.

Source: GovInfo – Percentage of Christians in the U.S.

However, there is a catastrophic problem with this data.

Surveys that rely on self-reported faith and church attendance are notoriously unreliable as indicators of actual religious engagement. Recent studies have demonstrated that conventional surveys significantly overestimate both church attendance and religious adherence due to respondent bias.

Based on my own experience, when people find out I’m Catholic, due to knowing only Catholics in name only, they often expect me to fit this stereotype.

I consistently disappoint.

The idea behind this data is that church attendance and self-reported affiliation are considered the primary indicators of faithfulness. Thus, if you can win on these two metrics, you win the war. In other words, they think that Christianity is in a war of attrition with modernity. When someone gets baptized or says the salvation prayer, they think, “We got another one! Move them across the ledger!” This is precisely the wrong way to think about religious adherence, and its byproduct is a tremendous amount of time, effort, and energy wasted.

That’s because we misunderstand the war we’re fighting. We are not in a battle of attrition with modernity where individuals move across the “self-identification line” and are “on our team now.” Instead, We’re fighting a war of FORMATION with the modern culture. Each side forms its adherent’s behavior in this war to reflect its deeply held beliefs.

Admittedly, this is an oversimplification. However, to draw a clear contrast between Christianity and prevailing cultural trends, it helps to examine how belief systems manifest in measurable life outcomes. Two competing worldviews are at play here, each shaping behavior and priorities in radically different ways.

ARCHIE update

Wonderful news. He is making progress. Gabby is permitted to hold him. He has gained weight. Prayers continue. Still a long road ahead. Wait for him to wake up on the video.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY