For the Joy of the Journey

A Few Thoughts

George December 27, 2024 Notes Anthology 0 Comments

“Robin Givhan examined former President Jimmy Carter’s approach to his remaining days: “Hospice care is not a matter of giving up. It’s a decision to shift our efforts from shoring up a body on the verge of the end to providing solace to a soul that’s on the cusp of forever.””

Sweatpants

“David Mack explained the endurance of sweatpants beyond their pandemic-lockdown, Zoom-meeting ubiquity: “We are now demanding from our pants attributes we are also seeking in others and in ourselves. We want them to be forgiving and reassuring. We want them to nurture us. We want them to say: ‘I was there, too. I experienced it. I came out on the other side more carefree and less rigid. And I learned about the importance of ventilation in the process.””

Social Media

Last week, a cable news pundit struggled to understand the new media landscape. So he sought advice from his teenage son.

He asked the youngster to name the most influential people in the world today.
Can you guess the names he picked?
Here’s what happened:
I’m thinking to myself he’s going to say Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Jay-Z.
He says Kai Cenat, Adin Ross, Jynxzi, and Sketch. I don’t know who he is talking about.
I said ‘What platforms are you on?’
He said ‘I’m on Twitch, Kick, and Rumble.’
I said ‘That sounds like you need to go to the hospital.
What are these platforms? I’m telling you guys, the mainstream has become fringe, and the fringe has become mainstream….
There are people out there that are getting 14 million streams. And we are on cable news getting one or two million.
This is the new reality. The future of media has arrived—but people above a certain age won’t even recognize the names.
Check out the list below of the most watched streamers in the US and Canada.

Jynxzi? Zackrawrr? Summit1g?

A few days ago, I’d have told you these are passwords, not people.

“You can’t earn God’s love with good behavior and lofty thoughts, because he’s already given it to you as the lavish gift that you don’t deserve. “I prayed for wonders instead of happiness, Lord,” Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, “and you gave them to me.””

Wonder and Awe

Wonder and awe are the emotions we feel when we are in the presence of a vast something just beyond the rim of our understanding.

David Brooks

Sacred Moments

Every day we pass by sacred moments. Each of these moments is the pearl of great price. Our days are filled with fields of hidden treasure. And yet, we hurry past, lost within ourselves. Trapped in nostalgia or regret about yesterday. Fretful or planning for tomorrow. We’re never present to the moment and, therefore, miss the sacred encounter.

Richard Beck

Archie Scott Gabehart

Speaking of sacred moments, Archie’s arrival has filled the days around Christmas with sacred moments. Anxious and precious is each moment as Kyle and Gabby love on him in the NICU. He is a fighter.

‘m not close enough to God to be angry. God is not close enough to me for me to be angry.
Christian Wimans

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

A Few Thoughts

George December 21, 2024 Notes Anthology 0 Comments

Christian Wiman

I made a new acquaintance this past week. We were introduced via a No Small Endeavor podcast. I expect we will become good friends. Consider these citations from the interview. You might decide to become his friend also.

…when you’re facing death, there’s not much left to lose, and that opens up possibilities for intimacy, letting go of our masks or letting go of our pretense or whatever it might be.
Richard Wilbur has a poem where he looks at a stream, describes it through seven stanzas beautifully, and then he says,
‘joy’s trick is to supply dry lips with what can cool and slake, leaving them dumbstruck also with an ache nothing can satisfy.’
I’ve been to so many different churches and always something happens that, that I just disagree with so profoundly or often there’s a mismatch between the urgency with which I feel in my own interior communion with, and wrestling with God, and the banality of the spaces in which this is supposedly being expressed.
And so, I’m often bored out of my skull at church, you know, and if I’m not bored, I’m often I just disagree so profoundly with what’s being said. And I also feel that most churches don’t allow for a space for how wild God could be, you know? I mean, Annie Dillard has that famous paragraph about saying that people should be wearing crash helmets in church, and, you know, lashing themselves to the pews.
I’m not close enough to God to be angry. God is not close enough to me for me to be angry.
‘Reading Pascal in Quarantine’
I love only those who seek with lamentation.
I love only those whose lives events some timeless entire.
To weep is to see.
To be is to bow.
I love only those who know a whole new naivete.
His book “My Bright Abyss“” is on my reading list.

David Brooks

I also had a conversation with my friend David Brooks this week. Well, actually I read his latest NYT article “The Shock of Faith: It’s Nothing Like I Thought It Would Be” . I really did feel like we had a conversation. Here are some excerpts to whet your appetite. Maybe David could be your friend also.

When I was an agnostic, I thought faith was primarily about belief. Being religious was about having a settled conviction that God existed and knowing that the stories in the Bible were true. I looked for books and arguments that would convince me that God was either real or not real.
When faith finally tiptoed into my life it didn’t come through information or persuasion but, at least at first, through numinous experiences. These are the scattered moments of awe and wonder that wash over most of us unexpectedly from time to time. Looking back over the decades, I remember rare transcendent moments at the foot of a mountain in New England at dawn, at Chartres Cathedral in France, looking at images of the distant universe or of a baby in the womb. In those moments, you have a sense that you are in the presence of something overwhelming, mysterious. Time is suspended or at least blurs. One is enveloped by an enormous bliss.
At least for me, these experiences didn’t answer questions or settle anything; on the contrary, they opened up vaster mysteries. They revealed wider dimensions of existence than I had ever imagined and aroused a desire to be opened up still further. Wonder and awe are the emotions we feel when we are in the presence of a vast something just beyond the rim of our understanding.
In his book “My Bright Abyss,” the poet Christian Wiman writes, “Religion is not made of these moments; religion is the means of making these moments part of your life rather than merely radical intrusions so foreign and perhaps even fearsome that you can’t even acknowledge their existence afterward.”
It hit me with the force of joy. Happiness is what we experience as we celebrate the achievements of the self — winning a prize. Joy is what we feel when we are encompassed by a presence that transcends the self. We create happiness but are seized by joy — in my case by the sensation that I had just been overwhelmed by a set of values of intoxicating spiritual beauty. Psychologists have a name for my state on that mountaintop: moral elevation. I wanted to laugh, run about, hug somebody. I was too inhibited to do any of that, of course, but I did find some happy music to listen to during my smiling walk down the mountain.
I’ve had to keep reminding myself that faith is more like falling in love than it is like finding the answer to a complicated question. Given my overly intellectual nature, I’ve had to get my brain to take a step back. I’ve had to accept the fact that when you assent to faith, you’re assenting to putting your heart at the center of your life. The best moments are giddily romantic — when you are astounded at the great blessing of God’s love and overcome by the desire to do the things that will delight him. It’s a reminder that we’re rarely changed by learning information, but we are acquiring new loves.
When religion is seen as belief, the believer lives on a continuum between belief and doubt. But when religion is seen as a longing, the believer lives on the continuum between intensity and apathy. That’s the continuum I live on these days. I’ve gone whole months when God may or may not have been walking beside me, but I can’t bring myself to care. Other desires, chiefly the desire for achievement and prowess, crowd out the higher desire for contact with the divine.

OK I admit there are more than a few thoughts today, but it is important to share conversations you’ve had with good friends.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

A Few Thoughts

George December 12, 2024 Notes Anthology 1 Comment

…love cannot be defended by analytical arguments; love has its own internal logic….
Ilia Delio

If our interpretation of the Bible does not lead us to love others, including our enemies, then we are not reading it aright. If it does, we are.

The Word Fulfilled: Reading the Bible with Jesus

Thomas Merton wrote, “A man knows when he has found his vocation when he stops thinking about how to live and begins to live.”

God’s Grace

First, God’s grace is superabundant and magnificent and overflowing; second, God’s acts in grace toward us are prior to anything we say or do; third, God always acts in grace; fourth, God’s grace is effective in what it is designed to do; fifth, God’s grace is distributed without consideration of our worth or merit; and, sixth, God’s grace can be non-reciprocal, which means God can show grace even when we refuse to respond. Of course, grace is also inherently reciprocal, that is, God gives and we become agents of giving ourselves

Scot McKnight

Biden’s Pardon

I wish Biden hadn’t pardoned his son, yet I’m secretly glad he did. If he hadn’t, I would have praised him and admired his stance, but also felt sad. I have to live with that nagging and gnawing duality within me, like most of us. That doesn’t mean I won’t support doing one’s duty, even when it has a cost. Even if it saddens me. Hegel understood the torturous anxiety that comes with choosing between two rights. So do we all.

Kareem Adul-Jabbar

Jesus for Everyone

If we do not see the face of the divine in the face of everyone else–even if we don’t believe in a God who looks like us–we should nevertheless be able to see the human face, the face we share, in everyone else. If we cannot, we are lost. … we may never get to ‘love of enemy.’ I’m not there yet, and love of enemy is not on my bucket list. But human decency, that’s attainable. The Bible helps us get there; the Jesus tradition helps us focus.

Amy-Jill Levine

God’s essence

God’s essence is beyond human conception. To peer into God’s very being is to look into an impenetrable darkness. Following Thomas [Aquinas], we can use negations to narrow in on God, sort of like approaching the event horizon of a black hole. Our knowledge is a boundary encircling a mystery rather than the grasping of something definite.

Richard Beck

View from the Lanai (Dance Floor)

View from the lanai is different this year. Hurricane Milton destroyed our screened-in lanai. We now have a very nice dance floor. Although we miss the lanai, the dance floor has been an interesting experience. Sunny for most of the morning and shaded in the afternoon, it is very comfortable. Because it is open, people seem much more inclined to come and sit with us. Weather has been beautiful for the most part. Cool mornings and warm afternoons.

The Church – A community of discernment

George December 9, 2024 THE CHURCH 1 Comment

Reading DISCERNMENT by Henri Nouwen, a providential discovery in Kindle Unlimited, the section Discernment in Community was the catalyst for this post.

Looking through the lens of discernment provides opportunity for a soul-searching examination of today’s church as a community of discernment.

What follows are excerpts from Discernment in Community:

We ask that you may be filled with the knowledge of God’s will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding so that you may lead lives worthy of the Lord. —Colossians 1:9–10 NRSV

Discernment is a spiritual understanding and an experiential knowledge of how God is active in daily life that is acquired through disciplined spiritual practice. Discernment is faithful living and listening to God’s love and direction so that we can fulfill our individual calling and shared mission.

The purpose of discernment is to know God’s will, that is, to find, accept, and affirm the unique way in which God’s love is manifest in our life.

While discernment begins in solitude, individual seekers of God always come together in community, for the Spirit gathers all believers into one body for accountability and mutual support. A person honestly seeking to know God’s will and way will choose to be in community.

Living together in community:

WE proclaim that love is stronger than fear, that joy is deeper than sorrow, that unity is more real than division, and that life is stronger than death.

WE are invited to make regular choices that radically contradict the powers and principalities of our world.

Living in community offers concrete ways to make choices that support discernment—deep listening for the way and will of God.

The choices we face often are quite specific and require thoughtful conversation around basic questions that confront our individual and collective motives and agendas:

Are we squandering our time or seizing time as a constant opportunity to discover more about ourselves, our neighbors, and our God?
Are we structuring our days to be distracted and entertained, or to let our hearts grow more mature and strong?
Are we responding to our inner fears and pains by ignoring them, or do we choose to face them and live into and through our fears and pains with the help of others who accompany us?
Are we talking or praying, worrying or giving thanks, looking at images that arouse or those that bring joy, dwelling with our anger or with the one who can bring peace?

These decisions are difficult because we live in a world that thinks we are wasting our time, that there are more exciting ways to use our talents, that there is more money to be made, more prestige, education, and success to be had, more respect and honor to gain, if we would just step away from our spiritual idealism and be realistic in our choices like everyone else.

What are we choosing?

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

Dying Well 6.0 … sanctification

George November 22, 2024 Death & Dying 0 Comments

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

The previous post focused on the welfare of those we leave behind. Today’s post will address implications of “for our sanctification”.

SANCTIFICATION

Sanctification defined as — “the ongoing pursuit of conforming our lives to the example of Jesus” was my simplistic understanding of sanctification for most of my spiritual journey. Synonyms for sanctification would have been discipleship or holy living. Early on, sanctification was a mysterious theological word that belonged in high churches, which being apostate, meant it was most likely heretical. Because the Bible said “…you were washed, you were sanctified…” Sanctification remained part of my fundamentalist lexicon. In the past several decades my understanding has deepened but is still incomplete.
In my spiritual heritage, our vision of salvation tipped toward justification, i.e. we were justified by our faith[ful] obedience. So much so that, salvation was wholly identified with our understanding of justification. Sanctification was achieved through discipleship/ holy living. ¹

Commencing with an existential slap ² “dying begins” begins with acceptance of our mortality.

“…is there a way to face [our mortality] without debilitating fear?
… there is, but it requires both intellectual and emotional engagement: head and heart work. And so I set out to reexamine my convictions and to strengthen my faith, so that it might prove more than a match for death.”
Tim Keller : “Growing My Faith in the Face of Death”

Putting our dying to use begins with reexamining convictions and strengthening faith.

In my definition of dying well, the phrase “for our sanctification” sounds good and makes it quotable, but how dying can be put to use for our sanctification depends on one’s understanding of sanctification. For example, my simplistic understanding, i.e. discipleship, holy living, puts responsibility for my sanctification on me and requires doubling down on good works — “making ever effort” . Essentially, putting dying to use would mean working harder to be like Jesus.

However, if one’s understanding of sanctification proceeds from:
“Nothing can happen, not justification or sanctification, without Christ. Whatever we experience, by way of grace or holiness, is the work of Christ in us.”
putting dying to use has a different appearance. Sanctification is experienced as union with Christ.
“more and more embracing grace — deeper participation in the life of God — More joy —More love —More peace — we step “more and more” into the abundant life—

Putting dying to use requires maintaining tension between faith and works. Karl Barth compares it to riding a bike: you have to keep the two pedals moving to maintain forward momentum. You pedal back and forth: Justification. Sanctification. Justification. Sanctification. Justification. Sanctification. Should you ever stop pedaling, you’ll fall over.

We will experience failure and setbacks. When we do, we fall back upon grace, a grace that we will receive “again and again” in our lives. A grace made available by the “once for all” sacrifice of Christ. Which is, ultimately, our only hope. Seen this way, justification supports sanctification. Grace sets a hard floor, a safety net if you will.
Security. Our failure will not cause us to fall into a pit.

According to Treatise on the Art of Dying Well, there are five temptations faced by the dying : disbelief, despair, impatience, pride and avarice.Those temptations are not confined to our final moments. They are inherent with our fallenness but they intensify with the realization ” we are going to die”; producing the opportune time for Satan to kill and destroy. To die well those temptations must be resisted. Failure to do so gives rise to sin.

A revised definition of Dying Well:
“Dying well is putting our dying to use for the welfare of those we leave behind and resisting temptations of disbelief, despair, impatience, pride and avarice that come when death becomes a reality.”

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

1
Full disclosure, many of my comments are adapted [stolen] from Richard Beck’s posts on the subject of sanctification.
2
that moment when a [dying] person first comprehends, on a gut level, that death is close. For many, the realization comes suddenly: “The usual habit of allowing thoughts of death to remain in the background is now impossible,” . “Death can no longer be denied.”Nessa Coyle, a nurse and palliative-care pioneer