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“You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart — your stories, visions, memories, visions and songs. Your truth, your version of things, your own voice. That is really all you have to offer us. And that’s also why you were born.”
Anne Lamott

“You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart — your stories, visions, memories, visions and songs. Your truth, your version of things, your own voice. That is really all you have to offer us. And that’s also why you were born.”
Anne Lamott

So Much To Think About

George 0 Comments

Before you speak of peace, you must first have it in your heart.?
—St. Francis of Assisi? 

Being  Interruptible 

“It is a strange fact,” writes Bonhoeffer, “that Christians and even ministers frequently consider their work so important and urgent that they will allow nothing to disturb them. They think they are doing God a service in this, but actually they are disdaining God’s ‘crooked yet straight path.’” 

This is us

We all must admit that our secret inner attitudes are often cruel, attacking, judgmental, and harsh. The ego seems to find its energy precisely by having something to oppose, fix, or change. When the mind can judge something to be inferior, we feel superior. We must recognize our constant tendency toward negating reality, resisting it, opposing it, and attacking it on the level of our mind. This is the universal addiction.

Richard Rohr

the Cross

“the resurrection does not eradicate the crucifixion.” The Christians chose the most hideous of symbols to identify who they were. They chose a cross, not a stone that had been rolled away. “There was only one reason to carry a cross in the Roman Empire: to certify Rome’s absolute power and any resisters abject weakness.” No wonder the Greeks and Romans saw the Christians as a weak people with a weak Messiah.

The Gospels are not ashamed to show Jesus’s ‘weak’ side; they do not mythologize him into some airbrushed superhero or fantasize a utopian version of his kingdom. The Gospels render the highest, most honest honor to God and Jesus, merited by their solidarity with a struggling people, not a perfunctory or begrudging honor like that coerced by narcissistic Caesars and other strongmen.

Scot McKnight

Sexism

“Sexism is a misuse of power in which men hold power over women and use that power for themselves while diminishing and restricting women’s God-given power.” 

Heather Mathews

…the kingdom that is coming in fullness. A kingdom that is “a new, reconciled humanity where there are no more barriers based on ethnic, socioeconomic, or gender distinctions.” I genuinely, and with tears in my eyes, long for this day. The New Testament shows us how Jesus came to create a new humanity, one devoid of lines drawn around race, gender and economic status. A church where slaves could function as elders, women could teach and shepherd, and the poor are sought out for their perspective on the kingdom.

Matthew’s work reminds us that a theology of antisexism is a theology that truly believes men and women are created equal. Jesus was not sexist. He did not accuse women of seeking power, in fact his harshest words were for the men who used their power to restrict others in the kingdom.

Karen Fletcher Smith

The Professor said to write what you know
Lookin’ backwards
Might be the only way to move forward

–       Taylor Swift

Present in Liturgy 

We are not an audience in the Liturgy. We are not gathering information in order to make a decision. We are in the Liturgy to live, breathe, and give thanks, in the presence of God. 

The struggle for a Christian in the modern world is to renounce the life of the audience. Within the audience we experience a deep estrangement from God. We are always “watching” from somewhere else, always engaging the false self with its criteria of judging, weighing, deciding. The world becomes a beauty contest but never a wedding. Modernity creates false distinctions. We are anxious that if we are not “part of the show,” then we are somehow being excluded. “Where are the women?” a visitor asked, commenting on the group within the altar. Ironically, they were spread throughout the Church, participants in the marriage of heaven and earth that is the Divine Liturgy. “Watching” one of their gender “perform” would make none of them more present, only somehow satisfied in the judgment of the audience that some abstract sense of inclusion had been satisfied.

Father Stephen Freeman

Forgiveness

Among the most powerful of human experiences is to give or to receive forgiveness. I am told that two-thirds of the teaching of Jesus is directly or indirectly about this mystery of forgiveness: God’s breaking of God’s own rules. That’s not surprising, because forgiveness is probably the only human action that reveals three goodnesses simultaneously! When we forgive, we choose the goodness of others over their faults, we experience God’s goodness flowing through ourselves, and we also experience our own goodness in a way that surprises us. That is an awesome coming together of power, both human and divine.   

Richard Rohr

Parallels

(Praise And worship)

Back in February, the music historian Ted Gioia wrote an essay on the state of American culture. He argued that many creative people want to create art (work that puts demands on people), but all the commercial pressures push them to create entertainment (which gives audiences what they want). As a result, for the past many years, entertainment (superhero movies) has been swallowing up art (literary novels and serious dramas).

Wanting to die

My grandfather, in his 90s, often told me he didn’t want to continue living. He once looked me in the eye and told me that my weekend visits were wonderful but didn’t outweigh the pain he suffered all week. He also felt guilty about the burden he put on his own family. With no legal options, he finally chose to undergo an elective surgery because a surgeon cautioned it was quite risky. The surgery was successful, and my grandfather woke up furious. When he got a serious infection a few weeks later he pumped his fist, and died soon after.

View from the Front Porch

[adapted from a post in2020]

 “the sky is falling” is currently the weapon of choice. If you are unfamiliar with the story of Chicken Little, you can read it HERE.

The pressing question for me is, how should I respond to “the sky is falling”? Chicken Little is helpful.

  • When encountering an unexplained and/or unanticipated threat (acorn), resist knee-jerk assumptions. Gather facts necessary to determine the magnitude of danger.
  • Seek reliable counsel for confirmation and appropriate action.
  • Only when confident of the reality and magnitude of threat, and, having clarity necessary for a response, should you alert others. 
  • When fearful We are most vulnerable to seduction we would never consider otherwise. 
  • Resist the temptation think the worst.

The moral of the story is not to be a “Chicken” but to have courage. 

A very early example containing the basic motif and many of the elements of the ” chicken little tale” is some 25 centuries old and appears in the Buddhist scriptures.  the Buddha, upon hearing about some particular religious practices, comments that there is no special merit in them, but rather that they are “like the noise the hare heard.” He then tells the story of a hare disturbed by a falling fruit who believes that the earth is coming to an end. The hare starts a stampede among the other animals until a lion halts them, investigates the cause of the panic and restores calm. The fable teaches the necessity for deductive reasoning and subsequent investigation.

Wikipedia

We need a lion.

A Word or Two

Steve Elliott 0 Comments

Once upon a time …

(…with gratitude to Frederick Buechner who put these thoughts in my head)

Once upon a time, or so the fable goes, there was an orphaned, motherless lion cub who was adopted by goats and brought up by them to speak their language, eat their food, and in general, to believe that he was goat himself. 

Then one day, the king of the lions happened by and all the goats scattered in fear leaving the young lion … that thought it was a goat … all alone, to confront the king of beasts. He was afraid, of course and yet somehow, strangely  not afraid.

The great lion king asked the young one what he meant by the foolish masquerade of being a goat, but all the young one could do was bleat nervously as any goat would and tried to ignore the question by nibbling at the grass. 

So the lion king picked up the young beast by the scruff of the neck and took him to a pond nearby where he was forced to look at their two reflections side by side in the pool and draw his own conclusions. The poor goat could only bleat in confusion.

Finally, the lion king took him to the carcass of a recent kill and offered him his first taste of raw meat. At first, the young lion was repulsed by the idea and recoiled at the unfamiliar taste of it. 

But then, as he ate more and more of it, and began to feel it warming something deep within him, it began to dawn on him. Lashing his tail and digging his claws into the earth, the young lion finally raised his head high and the landscape trembled at the sound of his first, mighty roar.

This old fable illustrates a very basic point about life: that as human beings, we usually live life in this world at less than what we were created to be. We are supposed to be lions, but we usually live as goats. 

The goat in this fable is really not a goat at all, of course, he is really a young lion. But he doesn’t know that. And as long as he believes he is a goat, in one sense, he really is a goat. Or at the very least, he is really not a lion. 

To cast it then in terms of the humanity that is ours and the spirituality that is available to us in Jesus Christ, we were created in the image of God, a spiritual image, but something has gone desperately wrong. Like a young lion cub, orphaned, left to live among goats, we have been orphaned by our sin to live far below what we were meant to be. 

What all this means is that we have wrenched ourselves out of the kind of spiritual relationship we were intended to have with God and with each other. Like Adam, we have all lost paradise … lost our birthright as lions … lost our full spiritual capacity for life. We have been orphaned by sin.

And yet … and yet… we all carry something of the original intentions of paradise around inside of us like a haunting memory … like a deep longing for what we have lost or a strong yearning for what we dream could one day be.

In the language of our fable, if the lion who thought he was a goat, could really be a goat, he wouldn’t have this problem. He’d just go on being a goat. But there is still enough lion left in him, as there is left in all of us, to make us discontented with being a goat. 

So we may run with the other goats, ignore the larger question of identity and meaning, nibble at the grass and hope that the Lion of Judah will just leave us to bleat along with the rest. But real meaning in life seems to forever elude us, and life as a goat never seems to satisfy us … there is always some something we cannot name, dangling out there, twisting the in the wind of our soul, just beyond our reach. We may bleat well enough, but deep down  …there is a gnawing suspicion that we were really made to roar.

SVE

So Much To Think About

George 0 Comments

I intend to live forever … So far, so good.

Scarcity 

Brene’ Brown describing the impact of scarcity upon our lives:

We get scarcity because we live it…Scarcity is the “never enough” problem…Scarcity thrives in a culture where everyone is hyperaware of lack. Everything from safety and love to money and resources feels restricted or lacking. We spend inordinate amounts of time calculating how much we have, want, and don’t have, and how much everyone else has, needs, and wants.

Brown goes on to share this assessment from Lynne Twist: 

For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is “I didn’t get enough sleep.” The next one is “I don’t have enough time.” Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it. We spend most of the hours and the days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying about what we don’t have enough of…Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we’re already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something. And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds are racing with a litany of what we didn’t get, or didn’t get done, that day. We go to sleep burdened by those thoughts and wake up to that reverie of lack…This internal condition of scarcity, this mind-set of scarcity, lives at the very heart of our jealousies, our greed, our prejudice, and our arguments with life.

Brueggermann and Grace

Walter once told me that he is disliked by progressives because he still believes in the old formula, that it is by grace alone that we are saved. And then he confided in me, “Conrad, I have to work to stay in that place of grace.”

And I love that old truth. Work to stay in the place of grace. For without the work there is but cheap grace. But without the grace, the work matters not. And is ultimately, expensive work.

The Nature of Focus

Focus is fundamentally different from mere attention. Attention can be fleeting, easily shifting from one thing to another, often beyond our conscious control. It’s our reaction to the constant barrage of sensory inputs we face each day. In contrast, focus is the sustained, intentional direction of our mental faculties toward a specific goal or object. It involves narrowing our field of vision, both literally and figuratively, which deepens our engagement with what we are focusing on.

Hyperfocus, often described as the intense concentration seen in individuals with ADHD, illustrates the power of focus. During hyperfocus, distractions fade, and the person becomes deeply engrossed in their task. However, this state can also lead to neglecting other important aspects of life. The challenge is to harness the benefits of such focus while maintaining balance.

Brad Vaughn 

Penny wise?

A conservative estimate holds that there are 240 billion pennies lying around the United States — about 724 ($7.24) for every man, woman and child there residing, and enough to hand two pennies to every bewildered human born since the dawn of man. (To distribute them all, in fact, we’d have to double back to the beginning and give our first six billion ancestors a third American penny.) These are but a fraction of the several hundreds of billions of pennies issued since 1793, most of which have suffered a mysterious fate sometimes described in government records, with a hint of supernaturality generally undesirable in bookkeeping, as “disappearance.” As far as anyone knows, the American cent is the most produced coin in the history of civilization, its portrait of Lincoln the most reproduced piece of art on Earth. Although pennies are almost never used for their ostensible purpose (to make purchases), right now one out of every two circulating coins minted in the United States has a face value of 1 cent. A majority of the ones that have not yet disappeared are, according to a 2022 report, “sitting in consumers’ coin jars in their homes.”

It’s crucial that they remain there. Five years ago, Mint officials conceded that if even a modest portion of these dormant pennies were suddenly to return to circulation, the resulting flow-back would be “logistically unmanageable.” There would be so unbelievably many pennies that there most likely would not be enough room to contain them inside government vaults. Moving them from place to place would be time-consuming, cumbersome and costly. (Just $100 worth of pennies weighs a touch over 55 pounds.) With each new penny minted, this problem becomes slightly more of a problem.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/01/magazine/worthless-pennies-united-states-economy.html?unlocked_article_code=1.HU4.9zWx.OIYO7dNndhkq&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

0.99

Retail legend claims that the “odd cents” pricing strategy (a Parisian trick imported by Rowland H. Macy to his New York City dry-goods store) proliferated after the cash register’s invention in 1879, as a tactic to prevent sales clerks from stealing. If a customer paid $3 for a $3 item, the logic went, a cashier could stealthily pocket the bills; if the price was $2.99, the customer would be owed a coin; to open the register, the cashier would need to key in the sale, thus creating, within the register’s hidden recesses, an incorruptible record of the transaction. That consumers tend to associate these prices with better deals (incorrectly, according to studies) was an added benefit.

Clarity of Scripture

Pop Protestantism believes in the clarity of Scripture in the sense of its perfect perspicuity. That is to say, that Scripture is clear enough that a Christian does not need a Pope or professor to tell them what to believe about the Bible. The plain sense of Scripture, combined with the illuminating power of the Holy Spirit, is sufficient itself to lead believers into truth. Which means I don’t take Bible study tips from an Italian guy in a pointy white hat wreaking of garlic let alone from a liberal “religion” professor at Penn State wearing a Che Guevera T-Shirt. Plus, if you combine the clarity of Scripture with a thing called soul competency where each soul is competent enough to interpret the Bible for himself and herself, then, you really can say that Bible interpretation requires only two things: Me and my ESV.

Except that such a view is neither truly Protestant nor a healthy approach to biblical interpretation.

If you look at the Protestant confessions, whether the Westminster Confession or the London Baptist Confession, the clarity of Scripture only applies to the things necessary for salvation. So yeah, reading the Gospel of Mark and Epistle to the Romans, you can figure out “What must I do to be saved?” without doing a Master of Divinity. But after that, all bets are off, not everything is clear, some stuff is disputed and debatable, and some things are downright baffling!

Wayne Grudem is correct that Scripture’s clarity does not deny the difficulty of some passages and the need for effort in interpretation. He writes:

I understand the clarity (perspicuity) of Scripture as follows: Scripture affirms that it is able to be understood but (1) not all at once, (2) not without effort, (3) not without ordinary means, (4) not without the reader’s willingness to obey it, (5) not without the help of the Holy Spirit, (6) not without human misunderstanding, and (7) never completely.

Which means with some assistance and some effort, one can attain knowledge of God through Holy Scripture. As Thomas Cranmer, the Anglican Reformer, put it,

This Word, whosoever is diligent to read and in his heart to print that [which] he readeth, the great affection to the transitory things of this world shall be minished in him, and the great desire of heavenly things that be therein promised of God, shall increase in him. (A Fruitful Exhortation to the Reading and Knowledge of Holy Scripture)

And yet, precisely because Scripture is complex we need translators, historians and teachers to explain to us things like: women “will be saved from childbirth”; Who were the Nephilim or Pharisees? What is the kingdom of God? To help us wrestle with tensions like divine sovereignty and human responsibility or justification by faith and judgment according to works. This stuff is not self-evident and cannot be figured out after a 15-minute search on Wikipedia.

Michael Bird 

Free Ride

Ana Ley, who covers mass transit, wrote a story this week focused on buses that quantified the problem in New York City with a jarring statistic: On nearly half of all bus rides in the city, people now skip paying the fare. As a result, about one million riders ignore the bus system’s most basic rule every weekday.

His faith was not a seamless garment but a ragged garment but a ragged garment with the seams showing. the tears showing. a garment that he clutched about him like a man in a storms 

Fredrick Bruechner on James Muilenburg

Antimaterialist 

an “antimaterialist,” that you believe reality is more than what science can investigate or reveal. An antimaterialist believes that truth is greater than facts, that reality includes more than the empirical.

Richard Beck

Weddings

Hassan Ahmed, 23, is charging his guests $450 for a ticket to his wedding next year in Houston, where he lives. Mr. Ahmed said he hadn’t heard back from many of his 125 wedding guests. But he has already spent over $100,000 on the wedding, including deposits for the venue, the D.J. and the photographer. In a video on TikTok, he said he was confused by the response, noting that many of his guests had spent more money on Beyoncé or Chris Brown tickets.

View from the Front Porch

As a result of participation in a recent class at church, I have been thinking about slippery slopes. The class focused on the interaction of Christians with the world on difficult subjects, i.e. LGBTQ+.
Leaders provided helpful information, stimulating hard but healthy conversations among participants. Varied viewpoints produced some anxiety. Rebuttals to ideas that conflicted with conventional thinking were often conciliatory but concluded with a warning that embracing them would be a slippery slope; implying danger and severe consequences and closing further discussion.

Slippery slope is an ideograph:

[a tool of persuasion, ideographs avoid arduous and often painful work of intimate, meaningful communication. Perfectly suited to a culture characterized by ambiguity, relativity and utility, they have metastasized into most arenas of communication, religious, business, personal, et al; rhetorical critics use chevrons or angle brackets (<>) to mark off ideographs.]

In personal communication, ideographs can impede conversation. For example, injecting “unbiblical” or “unchristian” can shut down a conversation that otherwise has potential for understanding and deepening relationship. Christ followers, called to love neighbor can ill-afford the use of ideographs.

Use of ideographs may indicate an anxious attachment to God.

“…those with anxious attachments to God have greater anxiety about abandonment, greater fears of being rejected by God. Consequently, these believers fear doing anything that might risk God’s disapproval. These fears interfere with faith development as any questioning or change in one’s beliefs risks making a “mistake.” A “better safe than sorry” dynamic comes to regulate how these anxiously-attached believers hold their beliefs and read the Bible.
Richard Beck

Slippery slopes are a reality and require deep and meaningful conversations. Christians best equipped to navigate slippery slopes are those securely attached to God.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

A Word or Two

Steve Elliott 0 Comments

THE UNREHEARSED LIFE

If you asked me to play a tune on the piano, I am sure I could not even squeak out “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.” If you asked me to paddle you across a lake, I am pretty sure that a few strokes into the trip we would be swimming. However, it you asked me to pray for you or help you talk through a life-sized problem you are facing, there is a chance, albeit a small one, that I might be able to help. 

You see, we practice our spiritual disciplines so we can live what I have come to call an unrehearsed life. We practice them so when the moment comes and our best spiritual self is needed to respond, we don’t have to do a Google search to find out what to do. We respond out of all that God has formed us to be over the years of relating to Him: through our disciplines.

Years of practice at the piano make it possible for you, later on, to quietly, effortlessly, play something that soothes your soul. Years spent paddling a canoe make it possible for you to easily glide out onto a lake and be in the kind of peaceful, soulful environment that enables you to fully think something through. 

God does not reward us on a spiritual point system for how often we pray or fast or study His word. There is no ‘big box store points reward card’ for how well we play the piano or how well we paddle the canoe or for how often or eloquent we pray. He rewards us with Himself for the time spent in our spiritual disciplines, tuning our heart to His. 

Like the Sabbath is made for us and not us for the Sabbath, that is when we discover that our disciplines serve us: they familiarize us with who God really is so we can readily find Him, even in the dark. We move from knowledge of Him to knowing Him … from some measure of doubt to some measure of certainty … from reading it on-line to living it in real time. We discover, much to our amazement really, that we have moved into the unrehearsed life. And there is no telling what God might invite you to join Him in, in life’s myriad of daily unrehearsable moments .

SVE

08/13/24

Dying Well 3.0 – End of Life

George 0 Comments

When I hear “end of life”, I think of the circumstances around the moment we die.
In the context of planning to die well “end of life”encompasses – days, weeks, perhaps months /years — preceding our death — a liminal space in which we have the opportunity to prepare for death. Commencing with an existential slap “End of life” begins with acceptance of our mortality, the sooner the better.
“existential slap” —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.”1Nessa Coyle, a nurse and palliative-care pioneer,wrote
My “existential slap” occurred there years ago.


All of us project ahead a trajectory of our life. That is, we anticipate a certain life span within which we arrange our activities and plan our lives. And then abruptly we may be confronted with a crisis … Whether by illness or accident, our potential trajectory is suddenly changed.”

The task of dying well:

“You have to live with awareness of dying, and at the same time balance it against staying engaged in life,” he says. “It’s being able to hold that duality—which we call double awareness—that we think is a fundamental task.”2Gary Rodin, a palliative-care specialist

Despite plans to assure intentions for our final days are fulfilled, there can/will be circumstances beyond our control. Death may come without warning, rendering plans moot. Any dying well plan is a contingency.
The best result for a dying well plan comes in circumstances were control is possible and decisions are made in accordance with expressed desires.

In a perfect world, our final days —end of life — would be laced with “…years of conversation about the need to prepare well for death – medically, communally, and spiritually.”
Because of our cultural aversion to death, engaging in meaningful conversations with family and loved ones may be the most challenging part of dying well.

Goals for Dying Well

Tim Keller’s article: “Growing My Faith in the Face of Death” should be required reading for every Christian.
In the excerpt below Keller conveys two goals of dying well. [my emphasis]

When the certainty of your mortality and death finally breaks through, is there a way to face it without debilitating fear? Is there a way to spend the time you have left growing into greater grace, love, and wisdom? I believe 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.

It is important to be prepared for death, very important; . . but if we start thinking about it only when we are terminally ill, our reflections will not give us the support we need.

-HENRI Nouwen’

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

  • 1
    Nessa Coyle, a nurse and palliative-care pioneer,wrote
  • 2
    Gary Rodin, a palliative-care specialist