For the Joy of the Journey

For the New Year, 1981
by Denise Levertov

I have a small grain of hope–
one small crystal that gleams
clear colours out of transparency.
I need more.
I break off a fragment
to send to you
Please take
this grain of a grain of hope
so that mine won’t shrink.
Please share your fragment
so that yours will grow.
Only so, by division,
will hope increase,
like a clump of irises, which will cease to flower
unless you distribute
the clustered roots, unlikely source–
clumsy and earth-covered–
of grace. 

Fake News
Fake news is hardly anything new. Back in the 18th and 19th century, people would anonymously publish newspapers and pamphlets spreading horrible rumors about their political opponents. In the 1790s, one newspaper, secretly financed by Thomas Jefferson, wrote slanderous op-eds claiming that George Washington was going to declare himself king of the new republic. During the Civil War, southern newspapers claimed that Abraham Lincoln was not only going to abolish slavery, but force whites and blacks to intermarry. 
Mark Manson        

We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present our our means, and the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.
Pascal’s Pensées

Biblical Worldview
The findings were published in the report Perceptions about Biblical Worldview and Its Application.
Now around two-thirds of Americans identify as Christians, and the study found that 51% of American adults claim to have a Biblical worldview.  But then those supposed Bible believers were asked specific questions.
The study found that a minority of those Christians who thought they did have a Biblical worldview actually held to teachings the researchers considered to be benchmarks of a Biblical worldview.  Only 9% got all of the answers right.  From the study:
[Only] 26% believe the personal accumulation of money and other forms of wealth have been entrusted to them by God to manage for His purposes
[Only] 29% believe that the best indicator of success in life is consistent obedience to God
[Only] 33% believe that human beings are born with a sinful nature and can only be saved from the consequences of sin by Jesus Christ
[Only] 47% believe that when they die they will go to Heaven only because they have confessed their sins and have accepted Jesus Christ as their savior
[Only] 48% believe that it is very important for their religious faith to influence every dimension of life
[Only] 49% say that their most likely source of moral guidance in any given situation would be the Bible
[A whopping] 49% accept reincarnation as a possibility after they die.

Cognitive distortions
Cognitive distortions are exaggerated patterns of thought that are out of line with reality. All people engage in cognitive distortions to some degree, but if you engage in too many, too often, you may become anxious, depressed, or both. Not coincidentally, learning to avoid cognitive distortions is also a good way to learn critical thinking.

1. MIND READING: You assume that you know what people think without having sufficient evidence of their thoughts. “He thinksI’m a loser.”
2. FORTUNE- TELLING: You predict the future negatively: Things will get worse, or there is danger ahead. “I’ll fail that exam,” or “I won’t get the job.”
3. CATASTROPHIZING: You believe that what has happened or will happen will be so awful and unbearable that you won’t be able to stand it. “It would be terrible if I failed.”
4. LABELING: You assign global negative traits to yourself and others.“I’m undesirable,” or “He’s a rotten person.”
5. DISCOUNTING POSITIVES: You claim that the positive things you or others do are trivial. “That’s what wives are supposed to do— so it doesn’t count when she’s nice to me,” or “Those successes were easy, so they don’t matter.”
6. NEGATIVE FILTERING: You focus almost exclusively on the negatives and seldom notice the positives. “Look at all of the people who don’t like me.”
7. OVERGENERALIZING: You perceive a global pattern of negatives on the basis of a single incident. “This generally happens to me. I seem to fail at a lot of things.”
8. DICHOTOMOUS THINKING: You view events or people in all?or ? ?nothing terms. “I get rejected by everyone,” or “It was a complete waste of time.”
9. SHOULDS: You interpret events in terms of how things should be, rather than simply focusing on what is. “I should do well. If I don’t, then I’m a failure.”
10. PERSONALIZING: You attribute a disproportionate amount of the blame to yourself for negative events, and you fail to see that certain events are also caused by others. “The marriage ended because I failed.” 
11. BLAMING: You focus on the other person as the source of your negative feelings, and you refuse to take responsibility for changing yourself. “She’s to blame for the way I feel now,” or “My parents caused all my problems.”
12. UNFAIR COMPARISONS: You interpret events in terms of standards that are unrealistic— for example, you focus primarily on others who do better than you and find yourself inferior in the comparison. “She’s more successful than I am,” or “Others did better than Idid on the test.”
13. REGRET ORIENTATION: You focus on the idea that you could have done better in the past, rather than on what you can do better now.“I could have had a better job if I had tried,” or “I shouldn’t have said that.”
14. WHAT IF?: You keep asking a series of questions about “what if”something happens, and you fail to be satisfied with any of the answers. “Yeah, but what if I get anxious?” or “What if I can’t catch my breath?”
15. EMOTIONAL REASONING: You let your feelings guide your interpretation of reality. “I feel depressed; therefore, my marriage is not working out.”
16. INABILITY TO DISCONFIRM: You reject any evidence or arguments that might contradict your negative thoughts. For example, when you have the thought “I’m unlovable,” you reject as irrelevant any evidence that people like you. Consequently, your thought cannot be refuted. “That’s not the real issue. There are deeper problems.There are other factors.”
17. JUDGMENT FOCUS: You view yourself, others, and events in terms of evaluations as good– bad or superior– inferior, rather than simply describing, accepting, or understanding. You are continually measuring yourself and others according to arbitrary standards, and finding that you and others fall short. You are focused on the judgments of others as well as your own judgments of yourself. “I didn’t perform well in college,” or “If I take up tennis, I won’t do well,” or“Look how successful she is. I’m not successful.”

The antidote to cognitive distortions is practiced disputation, which means examining and engaging with competing ideas in order to correct distortions and arrive at a nearer approximation to the truth.

Fly or Honeybee
Some people tell me that they are scandalized because they see many things wrong in the Church. I tell them that if you ask a fly, “Are there any flowers in this area?” it will say, “I don’t know about flowers, but over there in that heap of rubbish you can find all the filth you want.” And it will go on to list all the unclean things it has been to.
Now, if you ask a honeybee, “Have you seen any unclean things in this area?” it will reply, “Unclean things? No, I have not seen any; the place here is full of the most fragrant flowers.” And it will go on to name all the flowers of the garden or the meadow.
You see, the fly only knows where the unclean things are, while the honeybee knows where the beautiful iris or hyacinth is.
Fr Stephen Freeman

View from the Front Porch
This past weekend Ann and I traveled to Alabama to attend a small reunion with several of my high school classmates . It was good to get reacquainted and share memories. I am thinking a lot about how our origins were so similar but our perspectives and understandings so different, not so much in a bad way, but different. It was an opportunity to reflect on who I am and how I got here. It made realize how life changing my decision to leave Florence, Alabama and travel to Texas to attend college really was. I discovered this song some years ago and it came back to me as I thought about the reunion. Listen HERE.

Still on the Journey

Failing to tell the truth, and failing to face the truth, is ultimately more harmful than the opposite.
Rod Dreher

Calvin and vaccines
Sixteenth-century Reformer John Calvin taught this creational theology with particular verve. “Wherever you cast your eyes,” he wrote in Institutes, “there is no spot in the universe wherein you cannot discern at least some sparks of God’s glory.” What many today call the “natural world” was, for Calvin, a “dazzling theater” of God’s glory. He lamented that “scarcely one man in a hundred is a true spectator of it!”
Calvin insisted that through medicine God “provides us with the capacity to attend to our illnesses.” Indeed, he exclaims, “whoever does not take account of the means [medicine] which God has ordained does not have confidence in God but is puffed up with false pride and temerity.”

Telling a story
But you can’t convincingly tell a story until you’ve made it your own. Until we allow the story of Jesus to shape our own, to make us more and more into his likeness, we just sound like Pharisees, bleating about religious freedom, insisting on our rights, and demanding the world conform to our esoteric form of holiness. And that’s what people like my Uber driver see. They might be neutral about Jesus, but their views about the church are anything but impartial. Indeed, the reputation of church has never been lower.
Michael Frost

center of the cosmos
…why not put human being at the center of the cosmos? The universe might be vast, but it is cold and empty. Yet here, in the midst of that vast icy silence, exists a hot, burning flame. You are a candle in the darkness. Incandescent. More mysterious and remarkable than anything reveled by astrophysics. 
Richard Beck

“Pursuing one goal to the utter exclusion of all others is not to make a choice but to run from it. It’s not leadership; it’s abdication.”
Mitch Daniels

Electric Christians
Among the “new” things of that era [19th century] were new religious ideas. An interesting group of those ideas fall under the heading of the powers of the mind. It was the great century of electricity and it seems only inevitable that such a force would become a power image for spiritual energy. Already in the late 1700’s, there arose “electrotherapists.” One such physician, T. Gale of upstate New York, who used electricity for the cure of mental and physical diseases, described it as the “soul of the universe.”

For Gale, his fellow electrotherapists, and their numerous patients, electricity was a material current of divine love; matter and spirit, nature and grace, were different aspects of a single reality. God, for Gale, was the “spiritual sun” whose love was “spiritual nutrition”; electricity was that spiritual substance in material form, “participation of the same element as the natural sun diffused through all the natural world.” There was, in Gale’s view, “no animation in the natural world” except by the heat of the “ethereal fire.” Echoing [Jonathan] Edwards, Gale believed that the discovery of electricity and its divine healing properties augured a worldwide Christian millennium. (McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon, p. 136)

I often think that in our contemporary times we are tempted to become “electric Christians.” We “send out thoughts and prayers” as though they were radio signals. We gather as many people who will agree to join us in prayer as though its power and effectiveness were somehow increased if more people “generate” it. It is a powerful image, and our thoughts in that direction are not intentionally wrong. But prayer and matters of the Spirit are not electrical forces (nor even like electrical forces). The Holy Spirit is quite silent for the most part (Jn. 16:13). Nevertheless, the Spirit is a person – not a force to be used. It is not for us to create such false images in an effort to explain what cannot be known.
Fr Stephen Freeman

Fundamentalist
A fundamentalist … is absolutely certain that his system of thought gives him access to unvarnished truth, and therefore doesn’t waste time examining contrary evidence or engaging in dialogue with nonbelievers. The fundamentalist is unshakable in his belief that his viewpoint is perfectly clear and so cannot be misinterpreted. He reasons down from initial premises to what he takes to be unchallengeable conclusions.
Persuasion Community

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
Victor Frankel

View from the Front Porch
The world looks different when you view it through grief.
RIP
Jordon Ezell

Still on the Journey