For the Joy of the Journey

Jesus is not a consolation prize when things do not go our way in life. He is the King.
Matt Redmond

Paradox
What do the empirical data actually have to say on one of the greatest paradoxes of our time, which is: If a major point of yoga is quieting the ego and reducing focus on self, why are there so many yoga pose pictures on Instagram?

Certitude
I want to point out that there are two different kinds of certitude: mouthy and mystical.
Just for the sake of alliteration and cleverness, I call the first one “mouthy certitude.” Mouthy certitude is filled with bravado, overstatement, quick, dogmatic conclusions, and a rush to judgment. People like this are always trying to convince others. They need to get us on their side and tend to talk a lot in the process. Underneath the “mouthiness” is a lot of anxiety about being right. Mouthy certitude, I think, often gives itself away, frankly, by being rude and even unkind because it’s so convinced it has the whole truth.
We have to balance mouthy certitude with “mystical certitude.” Mystical certitude is utterly authoritative, but it’s humble. It isn’t unkind. It doesn’t need to push its agenda. It doesn’t need to compel anyone to join a club, a political party, or even a religion. It’s a calm, collected presence, which Jesus seems to possess entirely. As Jesuit Greg Boyle writes, “There is no place in the gospel where Jesus is defensive. In fact, he says, ‘Do not worry what your defense will be’ [Luke 12:11]. Jesus had no interest in winning the argument, only in making the argument.”
Richard Rohr

Lecturing
Lecturing never works. Think about it, the only time we use the word “lecture” in a positive sense is when we voluntarily go to one, which we have probably paid for. That tells us that sometimes we need to wait for the ones we love to come to us for help and guidance and entrust them to God in the meantime.
Matt Redmond

Baseball box score
“Every player in every game is subjected to a cold and ceaseless accounting; no ball is thrown and no base is gained without an instant responding judgment—ball or strike, hit or error, yea or nay—and an ensuing statistic. This encompassing neatness permits the baseball fan, aided by experience and memory, to extract from a box score the same joy, the same hallucinatory reality, that prickles the scalp of a musician when he glances at a page of his score of Don Giovanni and actually hears bassos and sopranos, woodwinds and violins.”
Roger Angell

Moral Seriousness
What do I mean by moral seriousness? I don’t mean guilt and shame. I don’t mean sin and Judgment Day. I simply mean that being a good person was a front burner priority in my childhood home. Moral integrity and virtue were talked about, they were goals. Goodness mattered to my parents, and they wanted it to matter to me. And as a parent myself I put being a good person on the front burner for my two sons. Telling the truth and being honest mattered. It was a priority. Keeping promises mattered. Being patient, kind, and generous mattered. Sticking up for those being picked on at school mattered. Including those who were excluded mattered. Sharing mattered. Eschewing materialism mattered. Resisting stereotypes and racism mattered. And above all, love mattered.
Richard Beck

Is God a fool?
In its excellence, the world did not know Christ. We not only dispise fools but seek incessantly to portray our enemies as fools (“those idiots!”). However:
“God resists the proud but gives more grace to the humble.”
I many times suspect that God stands before us as a “mute fool,” giving no answer to our accusations and recriminations apart from the silence of his corpse on the Cross. One of the desert fathers once said, “If I cannot edify you by my silence, then I certainly cannot edify you by my words.”
In our world, perhaps only a fool could speak the truth. But, then, it would mean that only fools could understand him.
Fr Stephen Freeman

“We cannot make Him visible to us, but we can make ourselves visible to Him. So we open our thoughts to Him — feeble our tongues, but sensitive our hearts. We see more than we can say. The trees stand like guards of the Everlasting; the flowers like signposts of His goodness — only we have failed to be testimonies to His presence, tokens of His trust. How could we have lived in the shadow of greatness and defied it.” 
Abraham Hershel – I Asked for Wonder

Every Opportunity
Be wise in the way you act toward outsiders; make the most of every opportunity. Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone. Colossians 4:5–6
Make the most of every opportunity. (v. 5b)
What is the opportunity? I used to think the opportunity was to try and work in some way to share the gospel message with them, which in retrospect looks more like trying to get people enlisted on my multilevel marketing discipleship pyramid scheme.
I think of the sharing the gospel differently now. It’s more about the mystery than the messaging. As we have discussed, the message of the gospel is the mystery of Christ, and the mystery of Christ is Christ in us. To the extent I am attuned to “Christ in me,” I can be present to the person sitting across from me. To the extent I can be present to that person, Christ will presence himself with us and the mystery will become manifest. As I become genuinely interested in another person, Jesus manifests his interest in him or her.
The opportunities are everywhere. The overwhelming majority of people in the world, outsiders or not, are not listened to. No one leans into them and listens with genuine interest. This is what supernatural love looks like in ordinary clothes.
JD Walt

View from the Front Porch
The morning is fitting: gloomy, rainy. My heart is heavy with grief and anger. I am thankful I can speak freely to the ONE who knows and cares, but comfort is AWOL.
My words are complaint, the bitter howl of unbelief in any benevolent God in this moment, a distrust in the love-beat of the Father’s heart. (Ann Voskamp)

“My health may fail, and my spirit may grow weak, but God remains the strength of my heart; he is mine forever.”
??Psalms? ?73:26? ?NLT??

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

Mystics
The mystic is not somebody who says, “Look what I’ve experienced. Look what I’ve achieved.” The mystic is the one who says, “Look what love has done to me.”. . .  There’s nothing left, but the being of love itself giving itself away as . . . the concreteness of who you simply are.—James Finley, Following the Mystics through the Narrow Gate

Lying
Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator. (vv. 9–10 NRSV)
Unfortunately, so many people live so much of their lives unaware of these things. Lying to one another does not mean telling untruths to each other; rather, it means projecting an image of yourself to other people that simply is not true. Most people do not intend to do this. They can’t help it. One’s outward image is a direct projection of his or her inward sense of identity and when this identity is built on things that are not true (i.e., anything other than the image of God), that individual’s outward image lies about who he or she most deeply is.
JD Walt

Prayer of Elderly
. . Sometimes I say to myself a little prayer in my advancing years, “God, help me to be the kind of old person young people want old people to be. Help me not just to talk like this, but help me to walk around like this and answer the phone like this and talk to my grandchildren like this.” We’re all trying to do our best here to walk the walk. 
James Finley with Kirsten Oates, “Dialogue 1: The Ascent of Mount Carmel,

Reading the Gospels 
At every step Jesus seemed to confuse his listeners. I’ve been reading the gospels a lot over the past year. A few chapters at a time. And Jesus is constantly confounding the expectations of everyone. Except those who are desperate for his healing. They expect him to heal them. But those who want him to overthrow Rome seem consistently disappointed and thrown off kilter. Of course, it was never his mission to overthrow Rome. At least not with armies and swords. The American church has never learned this lesson.
. I want you to imagine that Jesus is with you right now. Think about it. Imagine what that would feel like. Would you now think, feel, and talk about “the news” of the day the same way if he was sitting with you now.
Here’s the thing…He is.
So many of us, who identify as Christians are looking for life in the wrong place. We are looking for life in politics, work, money, sex, substances, power, body image, reputation, (kid’s) sports, and even doctrine. And it is making us sad and angry and full of anxiety. But life is only found in one place, the person of Jesus.
Matt Redmond

Being Moral
Morality is a very low bar, and if that’s what we are aiming for, our lives will hover back and forth just above and below this threshold. Virtue is simply good morals on steroids. Love, on the other hand, is the holy presence of Jesus Christ filling human beings together to the measure of all the fullness of God. This is the secret long hidden and now revealed. It’s not about aspiring to better behavior but becoming abandoned to Jesus.
And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity. (v. 14)
J D Walt

Healthy religion is always humble about its own holiness and knowledge. It knows that it does not know. The true biblical notion of faith, which balances knowing with not knowing, is rather rare today, especially among many religious folks who think faith is being certain all the time—when the truth is the exact opposite. Anybody who really knows also knows that they don’t know at all.
Richard Rohr

what might a more healthy relationship with the state look like?
One answer comes from “A Letter to Diognetus,” a piece of early Christian apologetics from the second century. In the letter, the author describes how Christians relate to the nation states in which they dwell:

Christians are indistinguishable from other men either by nationality, language or customs. They do not inhabit separate cities of their own, or speak a strange dialect, or follow some outlandish way of life. Their teaching is not based upon reveries inspired by the curiosity of men. Unlike some other people, they champion no purely human doctrine. With regard to dress, food and manner of life in general, they follow the customs of whatever city they happen to be living in, whether it is Greek or foreign.And yet there is something extraordinary about their lives. They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labor under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country.
Richard Beck

The Storyteller
Sometimes the storyteller’s impact is minimal. He [Elie Wiesel]tells the story of a rabbi who before Passover sought to persuade his people to be generous for the poor. When he got home his wife said, “Nu, how was it?” “Did you accomplish anything?” He said, “Only half.” Thus, “I did not succeed in convincing the rich to give, but I managed to convince the poor to receive.” Quite a story there. Scot McKnight

View from the front porch
In a Jewish legend Solomon “knew the songs of birds and could interpret them.” A later Hasidic master was asked by a student how that could be, and he said, “When you know what your own soul is singing, you will also understand the songs of the bird.” Are those birds – ach, the warblers above all – singing something inherent, too, to who we are?
Although, I’ve always appreciated birds, in recent weeks my interest has increased. I discovered an amazing bird app which identifies bird calls. Of course the next step is bird feeders… two at the end of the porch. I am still awaiting my first feeder… 18 hours and counting. I suspect I have a lot to learn about bird feeders.
Furthermore, I apparently I do not understand what my own soul is singing… working on it.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

Spiritual Person
The mark of a spiritual person, in the tradition of Jesus, is not in some kind of super-spirituality but the holiness of his or her humanity. Jesus did not become a human being so that we could become something other than or more than human beings. He became a human being so that we could embody the holiness of humanity.
The hallmark of real Christianity is not elevation but descent. It is not revealed through people who venture higher up, aspiring for more spiritual experiences, but those who journey downward, ever increasing their experience of loving and serving others.
J D Walt

Words You Should Never Say to Your Pastor
The full sentence could say, “People are saying that you don’t visit enough.” Another example is: “People are saying that our student ministry is not doing well.” Or one more example is: “People are saying that you don’t have good office hours.”
The sentence might specify a group while maintaining anonymity for the individuals: “Some elders are not happy with you,” or, “A lot of the staff are unhappy.”
You get the point. It could be phrased a number of ways, but the meaning is still similar. “People” is never defined. The true complainer is never identified. It is one of the most frustrating and demoralizing sentences pastors and staff will hear. Here are some reasons for the frustration:
The complainer lacks the courage to speak for himself or herself. So he or she hides behind the deceitful veil of “people are saying.” Leaders in churches know that when complainers lack courage to speak for themselves, or when they have to hide behind anonymous complainers, they are trouble in the making.
The leader has no recourse or action to take. These complainers never identify the source or sources. So the pastor or staff person cannot follow up and speak directly to the dissidents. He or she is left with a complaint that cannot be resolved due to anonymity.
The leader immediately questions the motive of the complainer. The moment the ministry leader hears those words, “People are saying,” he or she doubts the credibility and the heart of the complainer. The approach is cowardly; it thus is always seen through the lens of doubt and frustration.
This approach is a double frustration for the ministry leader. First, he or she has heard yet another criticism. Most ministry leaders have to deal with criticisms too often. Second, the ambiguity of the complaint and the source of the complaint can leave a leader wondering if the problem is really bigger than reality. He or she can waste a lot of emotional energy on something that really may not be such a big deal.
Indirect criticisms can be the most painful criticisms. Most ministry leaders deal better with someone who is direct and precise in his or her concerns. But indirect criticisms such as “People are saying…” or “I love you pastor, but…” hurt more because cowardly actions and duplicitous behavior are added to the criticism itself.
https://churchleaders.com/outreach-missions/outreach-missions-articles/266017-the-one-sentence-pastors-hate-to-hear.html?fbclid=IwAR1au7_1wJFFAeqSrBQaDWPMQg_nNxxJ3SpRddrqji0cS8M1OL5L012WUOI

Suffering and Evil
Suffering and evil exert a force that either pushes us away from God or pulls us toward Him. But if personal suffering gives sufficient evidence that God doesn’t exist, then surely I shouldn’t wait until I suffer to conclude He’s a myth. If my suffering would one day justify denying God, then I should deny Him now in light of other people’s suffering.
Believing that God exists is not the same as trusting the God who exists. A nominal Christian often discovers in suffering that his faith has been in his church, family, career, or social network, but not Christ. As he faces evil and suffering, he may find his beliefs shaken or even destroyed. But genuine faith—trusting God even when we don’t understand—will be made stronger and purer.
If your faith is based on lack of affliction, it’s on the brink of extinction and is only a frightening diagnosis or a shattering phone call away from collapse. Token faith will not survive suffering. Nor should it.
https://www.epm.org/blog/2022/May/4/honest-faith?fbclid=IwAR0m-syB1GSiL2ns9nhi7_XsV8ay4PEiRB–WDVxPSfHjO1qYsJR8KT22jA

Progress
“In 1942,” Marian Tupy, who runs the invaluable HumanProgress.org, wrote a few years ago, “some 68 percent of white Americans surveyed thought that blacks and whites should go to separate schools. By 1995, only 4 percent held that view. In 1958, 45 percent of white Americans would ‘maybe’ or ‘definitely’ move if a black family moved in next door. By 1997, that fell to 2 percent.” In surveys asking whether you would be opposed to a neighbor of a different race moving next door, America doesn’t come out as the least racist country in the world, but we do far better than many countries. We beat Germany and France (3.7 percent), Spain (12), Italy (11.7), Mexico (11.4), Russia (14.7), China (18), Turkey (41.21!), and even Finland (6.8).
Jonah Goldberg

Spending More Time With God
A few years ago a female student wanted to visit with me about some difficulties she was having, mainly with her family life. As is my practice, we walked around campus as we talked.  
After talking for some time about her family situation we turned to other areas of her life. When she reached spiritual matters we had the following exchange:“I need to spend more time working on my relationship with God.”
I responded, “Why would you want to do that?”
Startled she says, “What do you mean?”
“Well, why would you want to spend any time at all on working on your relationship with God?”
“Isn’t that what I’m supposed to do?
“Let me answer by asking you a question. Can you think of anyone, right now, to whom you need to apologize? Anyone you’ve wronged?”
She thinks and answers, “Yes.”
“Well, why don’t you give them a call today and ask for their forgiveness. That might be a better use of your time than working on your relationship with God.”
Richard Beck

Going backwards
The Taliban’s Ministry for the Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue issued a decree over the weekend mandating women in Afghanistan wear either a burqa or abaya that covers their body from head to toe. The rule—which comes with escalating punishments if violated, culminating in a woman’s “male guardian” being jailed—is a return to a similar Taliban policy from the 1990s

What We Need Most
What we need most
in order to make progress
is to be silent
before this great God
with our appetite
and with our tongue,
for the language
he best hears
is silent love. 
—John of the Cross, Sayings of Light and Love

View from the front porch
Thinking about being 80 years old.
This week I will celebrate my 80th birthday. It difficult to grasp that reality, except when I attempt arduous tasks.
I came across this quote recently:

People want to stay alive as long as possible and for as much of the time as possible in good physical condition. And it is equally natural for them to want to know that one day they will be freed from the necessity of work. … [But] it is generally assumed—probably even by the aged themselves—that the trouble lies here: in the humiliation, the sense of futility, that result from being shunted aside. Psychologists tell us that one of the main disabilities suffered in the life of retirement is a loss of self-esteem.” Midge Decter

For many, those troubles are real in their life of retirement. I am deeply grateful for family and friends that have made and continue to make my life an exception.
Still on the Journey