For the Joy of the Journey

So Much To Think About

George February 17, 2022 Notes Anthology 0 Comments

PIGEON FORDGE, Tennessee —
Leave it to Dolly Parton to deliver the good news of the day.
The legendary singer’s theme park, Dollywood, will begin paying full college tuition for all employees who choose to go.
The company will also cover miscellaneous fees and textbooks.
The education perk is available to employees starting on their very first day of work and will be available to all seasonal, part-time, and full-time employees. This tuition coverage starts on Feb. 24.
Dollywood has a reputation for caring for employees.
Along with the new tuition benefit, employees receive access to the Dollywood Family Healthcare Center and are provided free meals for every working shift.
There are also apprentice and leadership training programs offered through the company.
The park also pays a portion of childcare costs for employees who need childcare while they work.

Pain of grief
Unlike people who tried to soothe my pain, part of the comfort God offered me was to never flinch or look away. God saw my pain and knew not to try to make me feel better, but to sit with me in the endless ache. God knows the only thing that can slightly lessen the pain of death is for it to be seen and known. So Jesus wept. And God does not forget, even for an instant, the stories of every single person who is gone.
Hannah Mitchell

RULES FOR LIFE
“vacuum of meaning.” But what Peterson is really concerned about is our “vacuum of morality.” Peterson is a moralist. And you see this most clearly in his popular book 12 Rules for Life. The 12 Rules:
Stand up straight with your shoulders straight.
Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping
Befriend people who want the best for you
Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not the useless person you are today
Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them
Set your house in order before you criticise the world
Pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient
Tell the truth. Or at least don’t lie
Assume the person you are listening to knows something you don’t
Be precise in your speech
Do not bother children while they are skateboarding
Pet a cat when you encounter one in the street

Vacuum of Morality
Peterson is correct, the modern world is a moral vacuum. Moral norms, much widely accepted, have evaporated. People no longer go to church and families are complete trainwrecks. Young people are lost and aimless. And into that void Peterson says, “Tell the truth” and “Stand up straight.” And millions of people listen on YouTube. Advice, in the modern world, is rain in the desert.
Can the church take a hint here? Let me say something quite pointed. There are a lot of pastors with MDiv, DMin, or PhD degrees who sneer at topical, advice-giving preaching. These pastors prefer expository preaching, teaching from “the text.” And when they preach “the text” they explain a lot about the Bible and speak in vague generalities about joining the mission of God. The sermon is for everyone and therefore no one. And the young people sit the pews bored, looking at their phones.
Here’s the truth. Those pastors who preach advice-giving, practical, topical sermons? People follow them. People listen to them. People go to their churches. And the appeal here is the same appeal as Jordan Peterson’s. These pastors are giving concrete moral guidance in a world aching for concrete moral guidance.
Am I saying that pastors need to give up textual, expository preaching to become more topical and practical? No. What I’m saying is this: Stop sneering at the advice givers and pay attention. Do better. Be a more incisive cultural anthropologist. The modern world is a moral vacuum and people are craving concrete, specific and particular advice. You might, for impeccable reasons that got you an A+ in seminary, decide that your sermon just isn’t the place to give advice. Fair enough. But don’t wrinkle your nose at Jordan Peterson when young people stop listening to you and start listening to him. You can speak into the vacuum. So say something.
Richard Beck

Compassion
One way to nurture compassion is to be honest about the adversity in our own lives. Reckoning with our own hardship and suffering better prepares us to express empathy for others who know adversity. Empathic solidarity with others having a hard time in life can lead us to be more generous, kind, and supportive toward them.
Peter W Marty

Image inspiration: Sometimes we don’t have the energy to climb the stairs or jump off the dock. Wherever we are in this moment: in community, in solitude, in joy, in sorrow, with motivation or with great exhaustion… God meets us here.
via Richard Rohr

Self deception
Perhaps the most broken part of our broken human nature is just how hopelessly self-deceived we are. How else can we account for the levels of sheer chaos in this world? Self deception compounds like inflationary interest until it creates a debt that cannot possibly be repaid. Perhaps the greatest collective self-deception is that there is some kind of collective solution like communism or socialism or even capitalism. There is only a personal solution. We don’t want this to be true, but unfortunately it is, and we can live out our entire lives trapped within our broken selves in an empty way of life. The craziest thing about self-deception is you have no idea of it when you are self-deceived. And it’s in this kind of enslaved condition where we are most apt to isolate ourselves from other people.
JD Walt

Obedience
The Greek term for obedience, hupakoe (pronounced, hoop-ak-o-ay) means in the most literal sense (hypo) “under” and (akouo) “hear”; to hear while sitting under. You recognize the term “acoustics” as coming from this Greek root. Obedience is all about hearing. So to obey the truth means to sit under the sound of truth “to hear while sitting under.
Obedience does not mean compliant submission to an authoritarian leader. It means a deep kind of submissive listening to the authority of the Truth—which is the Word of God and the God of the Word. Before obedience ever takes a step, it sits down. Before the first hint of activity it is surrendered attention.
JD Walt

Beyond
Think of the visible spectrum—all the light we can see—with red on one end and violet on the other. Just past the ends, invisible, there is infrared and ultraviolet. Maybe “ultranatural” is a better word than supernatural to describe this liminal space where we step outside what we know and see and realize there is something else, something beautiful and mysterious.
Mark Geil

View from the Lanai

I recently came across this list of extravagances of Billionaires

$238 million on a New York penthouse like hedge fund manager Ken Griffin
vacation at his own private island in Belize like Bill Gates; or
throw $10 million birthday parties featuring camels and acrobats like investor Stephen Schwarzman; or
$70,000 a year on hair care like Donald Trump; or
buy a preserved 14-foot shark for an estimated $8 million like Steven Cohen;
or spend more than $1 billion on art like media mogul David Geffen; or
budget $23 million for personal security like Facebook did for Mark Zuckerberg. Or
own spaceships like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos; or
a 600-foot flying airship like Sergey Brin; or
a decommissioned Soviet fighter jet like Larry Ellison; or
a $215 million yacht with a helipad and a pool like Steve Wynn; or
a private train with three staterooms like John Paul DeJoria; or
a $5 million luxury car collection like Kylie Jenner.

I am confident that not one of them can find more joy and meaning in their extravagance than I experience with friends and family.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

The Myth of a Safe Place

George February 15, 2022 THE CHURCH 0 Comments

Myth of a Safe Place

“Do not trust in these deceptive words: ‘This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.’” Jeremiah 7:4 ESV

I do not know anyone who is unconcerned about children’s safety. Safety is paramount in our society. What differs today from past decades is pervasive distrust. In the parenting phase of our life (60-80’s) there were places we trusted as safe places for our children — family, church, neighborhood, school — cautious, sometimes suspicious, our default was trust. Social and cultural changes in the intervening decades, shifted parental default, for good reasons, to distrust. Each default has negative consequences. Negative results of naive trust are obvious. Distrust, though less obvious, has negative consequences of a different nature. What both have in common is the misconception that there are safe places for children. Safe places are a myth. Wide spread evidence clearly establishes occurrences of sexual abuse in places thought to be safe. A reality that can produce unhealthy paranoia and paralysis.
Of course, no organization would declare itself unsafe, but it is disingenuous to portray themselves as safe. Establishing policies and procedures to assure safety; all necessary t0 protect organizations in a litigious society, ultimately fail to achieve a 100% safe place.

Thinking about commercial airlines may be helpful. Flying is a risky business. I’ve never flown and not thought about the possibility of crashing, but I fly without fear. Airline procedures inherently communicate the possibility of crashing, pre-flight instructions — fasten seat belts — in case of emergency… et al. You can even buy life insurance at the gate. Passengers converse about the possibly of crashing. As far as I can tell, no major airline proclaims to be safe (except for COVID 19). No matter how low the probability, there is no question of their concern and awareness of the possibility of crashing. Measures to make flights safe are obvious. Risk is a part of normal conversations, as a result, passengers and employees are aware and vigilant.
Airlines are diligent about safety policy and procedures but do not claim, or imply, no risk. Transparency prompts responsibility which gives passengers confidence in their safety. Risk can never be eliminated but can be minimized.

Sadly, human organizations… communities, neighborhoods, churches, families… cannot eliminate sexual abuse.

Taking cues from commercial airlines, following are suggestions on how churches can become safer communities.

Educate leadership, staff and congregants on the prevalence of sexual abuse and its impact on individuals and society.
Create a community ethos defined by concern for safety — offering reliability, honesty, and credibility.
Eliminate all pretense of being a safe place.
Understanding their limitations, develop and implement appropriate prevention policies and procedures.
Cultivate and reward communication that encourages consistent and healthy dialogue about sexual abuse.
When prevention fails, respond with transparency.
Always make compassion for victims the first priority.

In the course of thinking about the myth of a safe place and developing a framework for safer communities, there were numerous contributors of ideas and thoughts worthy of sharing for further consideration developing and maintaining safer communities.

The bigger the church, the less transparency when things go wrong. And the greater the harm done.
Matt Redmond

Language has power. How we speak to each other is the medium through which a more positive future is created or denied. As we engage in conversation the questions we ask and the speaking that they evoke constitute powerful action. The questions we ask will either maintain the status quo or bring an alternative future into the room. The Answer to How Is Yes – Peter Block

More than anything else, being able to feel safe with other people defines mental health; safe connections are fundamental to meaningful and satisfying lives. Being validated by feeling heard and seen is a precondition for feeling safe…

There is ultimately a (steep) pastoral cost to be paid for being a community that serves individuals and communities only in the aftermath of their wounding. The question that many victims of trauma ask the church is not “where are you now?” but instead ask “why didn’t someone protect me or prevent this from happening to me?”.

…ecclesial communities can pivot from being primarily the field hospital [reactive] towards becoming an exponentially impactful agent for the transformation of its own life and the larger society in which it is located.
While moral injury is not a clinical diagnosis it is recognized in the clinical literature that there is a concrete need of something akin to forgiveness and remission of the things that to the individual are wrong or sinful.
…by centering the traumatized and the vulnerable in our communities we are able to better identify with the God who meets us in our woundedness still bearing his wounds, and can come alongside those most susceptible to injury as defenders and interrupters that push back the darkness.
Theology of Prevention – Michael Hanegan

Assigning individual blame gives to the public an illusion of safety and preventability, whilst isolating an already often guilt-ridden traumatized individual.

The Christian community’s own response can socially exacerbate trauma, where, “religious and spiritual beliefs change from a possible source of healing to another weapon in an overwhelming onslaught
A true theology of compassion must embrace a theology and practice of lament, both for the traumatized individual and community.

…friendship may be refused in the malaise of an individual’s trauma, it is better the offer be present than absent. Even from a distance it can be comforting to realize that a special community is orientating its practices because it acknowledges your pain; that fact alone can be immensely winsome for post-traumatic social re-integration.

Pastoral sensitivity to the needs of traumatized congregants will give apt direction to a form of worship which duly acknowledges the weight of burden that, some will feel, defies being translated into speech. Such sensitivity may avoid the pressure that most Evangelical forms of worship, requiring audible/cognitive participation for the worshipper to feel a co-participant, can create. This can be due either to incessant singing of praise choruses or a demanding cognitive focus on verbal preaching.
“Trauma, Compassion, and Community” – Roger P Abbott

It is apparent to me that the challenge of building safer communities encompasses more than policies and procedures and will necessitate re-thinking fundamental assumptions. Churches will be faced with a need to examine assumptions about every aspect of their faith. Which, in part, explains the continued epidemic of sexual abuse in faith communities.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

So Much To Think About

George February 11, 2022 Notes Anthology 2 Comments

a Better Place
Modernity’s mantra, “make the world a better place,” is invoked repeatedly in one guise or another. Every invocation promises that with money and power, we could really make a difference. The myth (or lie) that this perpetuates is that the only thing standing between us and a better world is lack of resources. The truth is that, at the present time in our modern age, there is no lack of resources, no lack of wealth. The abundance of the world is overflowing. People are hungry and starve, etc., for lack of goodness. It has been observed by some that every famine in our modern time has had politics as its primary cause. We are not the victims of nature – but of one another. (unknown)

Free Speech
No right was deemed by the fathers of the Government more sacred than the right of speech. It was in their eyes, as in the eyes of all thoughtful men, the great moral renovator of society and government. Daniel Webster called it a homebred right, a fireside privilege. Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. They know its power. Thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers, founded in injustice and wrong, are sure to tremble, if men are allowed to reason of righteousness, temperance, and of a judgment to come in their presence.
‘Fredrick Douglass

I value free speech, not so much because I’m right and you need to hear from me, but rather because I’m very often wrong and need to hear from you. Free speech rests upon a foundation of human fallibility.
David French

three possibilities in any given argument:
1. You are wrong, in which case freedom of speech is essential to allow people to correct you.
2. You are partially correct, in which case you need free speech and contrary viewpoints to help you get a more precise understanding of what the truth really is.
3. You are 100% correct, in which unlikely event you still need people to argue with you, to try to contradict you, and to try to prove you wrong. Why? Because if you never have to defend your points of view, there is a very good chance you don’t really understand them, and that you hold them the same way you would hold a prejudice or superstition. It’s only through arguing with contrary viewpoints that you come to understand why what you believe is true.
Greg Lukianoff

Evil is corporately agreed upon as good before individuals ever dare to do it. We all cooperate in absurd systems. When we humbly and honestly recognize this, we learn much more readily how to join hands with one another. We’re trained to compare and compete; that’s the nature of capitalism. The gospel undercuts that by saying, first of all, that we are one; and secondly, that each of us is a unique individual. Holding our oneness and individuality together reveals the Christian mystery: “You are all Christ’s Body, and individually, you are parts of it” (1 Cor. 12:27).
Richard Rohr

Without Comment
Get well cards for Terminally Ill

ubuntu
The concept comes from the Zulu phrase Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, which literally means that a person is a person through other people. Another translation is, “I am who I am because we are who we are.”. . . With this in mind, who I will be is deeply related to who you are. In other words, we are each impacted by the circumstances that impact those around us. What hurts you hurts me. What heals you heals me. What causes you joy causes me to rejoice, and what makes you sad also causes me to weep.
By channeling the ancient wisdom of ubuntu, we can engineer a badly needed love revolution to rise up out of the ashes of our current reality. . . . The empathy that grows from listening to others, from connecting with our neighbors, and from loving our neighbors as we love ourselves can define the courses of action we take.

Searching
…as belief in God fades in the modern world we increasingly turn inward to discover a ground of being, value, and meaning within ourselves. We no longer look “up” but “in.” Through subterranean self-exploration, as spelunkers of the soul, we wander through the mineshafts of our psyche seeking our “true,” “real,” and “authentic” selves. And having discovered this “true self,” like digging up a diamond in a coal mine, we set it as our North Star, seeking to stay loyal and true to ourselves.
And if that fails, if we return to the surface empty handed, we turn outwards toward each other, co-dependently hoping that the meaning of your life can be borrowed as my own.
Richard Beck

Social media
…social media, it is a circus tent full of funhouse mirrors where distorted, twisted images stare back at other distorted, twisted images. Every screen is a portal into a vast, churning sea of human insecurity, confusion, and anxiety. So where are we to turn? Wherever we look, inside ourselves or outward toward each other, every mirror I find is either broken or distorted. I’m never able to get a clean look at myself or a clear look at you.
…we need a relationship that is fundamental and foundational, a mirror that is steady and clear. Something transcendently solid where we can find constant, unconditional rest. Something possessing an eternal, oceanic calm beyond the stormy churn of human need and the anxious raining of my own mind. God, dear readers, is this grounding, fundamental relationship. God is how we escape the quicksand of neurosis and the needy, inconstant web of human brokenness.
Richard Beck

Fantasy and fiction, at their best, are not good because they are created by someone. They are good because they make it possible to see more clearly what God has created – something that is neither fantasy nor fiction. Such is our life. Gifts. Joy. Wonder. Fr Stephen Freeman

View from the Lanai
A very special week. Ann celebrated her 80th birthday. She is an amazing person and I am thankful that she is a part of my life.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

So Much To Think About

George February 3, 2022 Notes Anthology 0 Comments

Christians
Christians are not a special, better class of person. We’re normal people, but we’re normal people to whom God has delivered a high moral call. The Sermon on the Mount, for example, is one of the most profoundly challenging declarations of moral purpose ever uttered. Thank God for His remarkable grace, because I fail to achieve that standard every day. But the call still remains.
David French

Inspiration
Inspiration is not about some disembodied ethereal voice dictating words or notes to a catatonic host. It’s a collaborative process, a holy give-and-take, a partnership between Creator and creator. . . . God is still breathing. The Bible is both inspired and inspiring. Our job is to ready the sails and gather the embers, to discuss and debate, and like the biblical character Jacob, to wrestle with the mystery until God gives us a blessing.
Rachel Held Evans

The Other Epidemic
Something has been replicating in the American mind. It is not microbial. It cannot be detected by nasal swab. To treat an affliction, you must first identify it. But you can’t slide a whole country into an MRI machine
“There’s no diagnosis for this,” Fauci says. “I don’t know what is going on.”

Relationship
We could say that the original blueprint for everything that exists is relationship. John’s word for that was Logos (John 1:1). In other words, the first blueprint for reality was relationality. It is all of one piece. How we relate to God reveals how we eventually relate to everything else. And how we relate to the world is how we are actively relating to God, whether we know it or not (1 John 4:20). How we do anything is how we do everything!
Richard Rohr

The rate of U.S. traffic deaths is now lower than it was in 1921, back when less than 10% of the population had cars.

CHRISTIANS
“There are two kinds of Christians: list makers and storytellers.” And “List makers will talk about doctrines you must believe or commandments you must keep.” And “Storytellers … will say: ‘Let me tell you about my grandmother ….’ That’s when I lean in, because I find the art of Christian living far more compelling that a theological argument. It didn’t used to be that way, though. When I was a young man, I relished” the list making approach. “But these days, I’d rather hear about an embodied faith – a story that must be imagined to be believed.”
Rodney Reeves in his new book, Spirituality according to John. Scot McKnight

The Bible
If we want the Bible to be a constitution, it isn’t enough. It isn’t at all. Nor is it enough as a road map for successful living, as a set of blueprints for building a life, institution, or nation, or as an “owner’s manual” . . . . But as the portable library of an ongoing conversation about and with the living God, and as an entrée into that conversation so that we actually encounter and experience the living God—for that the Bible is more than enough. . . .
Richard Rohr

Journey with Jesus
Jesus’ call to “Come and follow me” doesn’t only occur at the beginning of our journey with him. I think we hear it again and again as we begin new phases of our life with him. In those moments, we have a choice either to stay where we are, content with what the journey has produced in us or to answer the call again. We begin something new again, accepting new risks and challenges.
Jason Zahariades

Fan or follower
They’d gathered outside the giant football stadium as early as 3 a.m. but didn’t seem to mind the cold. The frigid and faithful few had waited 18 months for this, what was a few more hours?
At promptly 8:59 a.m. Wednesday, the doors to the team store at FedEx Field swung open and some two dozen fans, most dressed in a custom burgundy and gold outfits, rushed inside to check out the new merchandise.
“Let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s go!” yelled one, as he weaved through racks of T-shirts.
Washington’s NFL team unveiled its new name — the Commanders

View from the Lanai

Sometimes the desire to be lost again, as long ago, comes over me like a vapor. With growth into adulthood, responsibilities claimed me, so many heavy coats. I didn’t choose them, I don’t fault them, but it took time to reject them. Now in the spring I kneel, I put my face into the packets of violets, the dampness, the freshness, the sense of ever-ness. Something is wrong, I know it, if I don’t keep my attention on eternity. May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe, tiny but useful. May I stay forever in the stream. May I look down upon the windflower and the bull thistle and the coreopsis with the greatest respect.
Mary Oliver

Still on thr Journey

So Much To Think About

George January 28, 2022 Notes Anthology 1 Comment

T G I F

HolocaustMemorial Day
“The degree to which one is sensitive to other people’s suffering, to other men’s humanity, is the index of one’s own humanity.”
“True love for man is clandestine love for God.”
“There is an evil which most of us condone and are even guilty of: indifference to evil. We remain neutral, impartial, and not easily moved by the wrongs done to other people…The prophets’ great contribution to humanity was the discovery of the evil of indifference.”
Rabbi Abraham Herschel

Digital Guilt
the “spiral of expectations.” When communication technology makes a new thing (like responding on the go) possible, doing that thing can be a way for people to signal how dedicated they are as workers or family members—and, crucially, not doing that thing can suggest that they aren’t dedicated enough. Now when people feel they haven’t responded sufficiently quickly, they think they owe their correspondent an apology.
…with the mass adoption of email and smartphones, is that the “acceptable” window of response time has gotten much smaller. Someone could conceivably apologize for their delay when responding in the afternoon to an email sent that morning.
Scot McKnight

REMINDER WHEN FILING YOUR TAX RETURN
The Internal Revenue Service’s Publication 17, available on the agency’s website, contains a section on stolen property that may leave readers scratching their heads.
“If you steal property, you must report its fair market value in your income in the year you steal it unless you return it to its rightful owner in the same year,” the guideline states.

If you sit and stare at a flowing creek for long, perhaps playing about its shallows with sticks and such it is possible to see how utterly connected the many currents and flows are with one another. An action in one spot can yield a reaction downstream, though the one downstream may know very little of what happened before. We individuals who inhabit this point in the stream of time fancy our decisions as though they were independent of so much that went before.
Fr Stephen Freeman

Thinking…
[There] are those who prefer certainty to truth, those in church who put the purity of dogma ahead of the integrity of love. And what a distortion of the gospel it is to have limited sympathies and unlimited certainties, when the very reverse, to have limited certainties but unlimited sympathies, is not only more tolerant but far more Christian. For “who has known the mind of God?” [Romans 11:34] And didn’t Paul also insist that if we fail in love we fail in all other things?
William Sloane Coffin

Cyber Shelters ?
More than 75 years after the invention of nuclear weapons, only nine countries appear to have a usable one. But dozens of countries already have cyberweapons. “Everybody seems to want them,” Mark told me, “and this gives enormous power to the countries who sell them and can use them for diplomatic advantage.”

Something to remember when filling your vehicle.
The unemployment rate is at 3.9 percent, lower than its been at any point since 1970 save April 2000 and mid-2018 through March 2020. Year-over-year wage growth is near its highest level since the metric began being tracked in the mid-2000s. Yesterday, we learned that real GDP grew at a 5.7 percent clip in 2021, its fastest rate since 1984. After a global pandemic led most countries around the world to more or less shut down commerce for several months, the U.S. economy is all of … 1 percent smallerthan it likely otherwise would have been.

View from the Lanai

The Road Not Taken – Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Still on the Journey