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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

The Presence of God (4)

George 0 Comments

Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? 
If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. 
If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, 
even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.
Psalm 139

One of the most fundamental principles of the Christian vision of reality is that God is present everywhere, filling all things. This underlies the essential Christian task of becoming consciously aware of that Presence and bringing that awareness into every aspect of our life.

Fr Stephen Freeman

God is everywhere and in everything, and we cannot be without Him. It’s simply impossible.

Thomas Merton

“The presence of God changes you.”

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…the Christian mystical tradition teaches us, life with God is more about knowing than believing. The mystics didn’t believe in God; they encountered God.

Beck, Richard. Hunting Magic Eels (pp. 11-12).

Reflecting on the comments above, reminded me of the consternation I felt engaging in study of practicing the presence of God.
Grasping that God is present everywhere all the time is unpalatable to a child of the Enlightenment like me. Raised on reductionism 1a philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents. and rationality2 “uncertain but sensible” arguments based on probability, expectation, personal experience … ; God present everywhere all the time is, at best, incomprehensible; at worst, nonsense.
Richard Beck describes that condition: “… operating as if God doesn’t exist. We don’t expect to bump into God around the watercooler or doing the dishes. We might believe in God, but we don’t expect to encounter God.
We think we’re living in a two-story universe. In this two-story universe, the cosmos is a house with two floors. As Freeman describes it, “We live here on earth, the first floor, where things are simply things and everything operates according to normal, natural laws, while God lives in heaven, upstairs, and is largely removed from the story in which we live. To effect anything here, God must interrupt the laws of nature and perform a miracle.” For us to see or hear from God, God has to come downstairs to visit us. But most of the time, it’s just us alone on the first floor. God is absent, upstairs and minding his own business.
When we live our lives in the two-story world, we practice what Freeman calls “Christian atheism.” Since God is “upstairs,” God is “not here.” God isn’t close; God is elsewhere, far away and distant. And not just physically distant, mentally distant as well. God is at the back our minds, an afterthought, if we think of God at all.” 3 Beck, Richard, Hunting Magic Eels (pg104)

I want to minimize Beck’s description as hyperbole; but continuing to grapple with the presence of God and engaging in self-examination, reveals my daily life too often abides in a two-story universe. I’m not prepared to be labeled a Christian Atheist, but upon further consideration, perhaps I am closer to a Disenchanted Christian. 4..disenchanted Christians attack miracle stories with a battery of questions. Every miracle story is fiercely interrogated as a “more rational” explanation is sought. Perhaps that chance encounter or the money in the mail wasn’t God but a mere coincidence. Perhaps the doctors, rather than God, healed that person. We’ve all asked these sorts of questions and expressed these doubts when faced with stories we find too incredible or too neat and tidy to believe. Some of us, especially those of us who have been thoroughly disenchanted by the modern, scientific world, just can’t stop raising these questions.
Beck, Richard. Hunting Magic Eels (p. 191).

Until now, my spiritual journey has been determined mostly by reasoning and thinking.
Embracing a reality that God is present everywhere all the time — God’s presence, constant communion with Him—must define the journey.
What that means will be the subject of future posts.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY


  • 1
    a philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents.
  • 2
    “uncertain but sensible” arguments based on probability, expectation, personal experience …
  • 3
    Beck, Richard, Hunting Magic Eels (pg104)
  • 4
    ..disenchanted Christians attack miracle stories with a battery of questions. Every miracle story is fiercely interrogated as a “more rational” explanation is sought. Perhaps that chance encounter or the money in the mail wasn’t God but a mere coincidence. Perhaps the doctors, rather than God, healed that person. We’ve all asked these sorts of questions and expressed these doubts when faced with stories we find too incredible or too neat and tidy to believe. Some of us, especially those of us who have been thoroughly disenchanted by the modern, scientific world, just can’t stop raising these questions.
    Beck, Richard. Hunting Magic Eels (p. 191).

A Word or Two

George 0 Comments

Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is about 2,000 words. If you have the time it takes about 6.5 minutes to read. And then it takes about a life time to fully digest. Taken together, these words turn this world on its head. If you don’t believe that, read them. And if you want your world to really change, live them.

‘The world’ as the Bible describes it, is life organized without reference to God. And that world, that life, is ready to eat you up and spit you out … or use you up and discard you like a Styrofoam coffee cup. It is a ‘world’ has no moral conscience beyond convenience, no compassionate center of gravity beyond expedience, no redemptive compass beyond utility.  Why? Because it’s life organized without reference to God.

So it is no surprise that given this kind of cultural ethos, Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount calls us to cultural atheism: to not believe in the gods of this culture … to stop believing that they will somehow, ultimately bring us happiness or fulfillment or satisfaction…the small ‘g’ gods like politics or money, status or wealth, appearance or celebrity. Could that be wrong? Ask a broken heart. Ask a lost relationship that is never coming back. Ask loneliness or rejection or betrayal. The small ‘g’ gods have no answers for these. Instead, Jesus calls us to a new life in His Km where the dynamics of everyday life are as distinct and different from those of this world as a Caribbean cruise is from floating on a log down the Ohio River.

2,000 words. 6.5 minutes. Do we have the time? Maybe we need to make the time.

READ NOW

So Much To Think About

George 0 Comments

If you don’t learn to laugh at trouble, you won’t have anything to laugh at when you’re old.
Mark Twain

The Sky is Falling

pessimism [is] a membership badge—the ultimate sign that you are on the side of the good. If your analysis is not apocalyptic, you’re naive, lacking in moral urgency, complicit with the status quo.

In 1964, 45 percent of Americans said that most people can be trusted, according to a survey by American National Election Studies. That survey no longer asks this question, but a University of Chicago survey asked the exact same question to Americans in 2022 and found that number is now 25 percent. Seventy-three percent of adults under 30 believe that, most of the time, people just look out for themselves, according to a 2019 Pew Research Center survey. Seventy-one percent say that most people “would try to take advantage of you if they got a chance.”

apoplectic rigidity becomes the default mode of seeing things. This damages the ability to perceive reality accurately. One of the great mysteries of this political moment is why everyone feels so terrible about the economy when in fact it’s in good shape. GDP is growing, inflation is plummeting, income inequality seems to be dropping, real wages are rising, unemployment is low, the stock market is reaching new peaks. And yet many people are convinced that the economy is rotten. These are not just Republicans unwilling to admit that things are going well under a Democratic president. The real divide is generational. In a recent New York Times/Sienna College poll, 62 percent of people over 65 who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 report that the economy is “excellent” or “good”—but of Biden supporters ages 18 to 29, only 11 percent say the economy is excellent or good, while 89 percent say it is “poor” or “only fair.”

Is this because the economy is particularly bad for young people? That’s not what the data reveal. As Twenge has pointed out, the median Millennial household earns considerably more, adjusted for inflation, than median households of the Silent Generation, the Boomers, and Generation X earned at the comparable moment in their lives; they earn $9,000 more a year than Gen X households, and $10,000 more than Boomer households did at the same age. Household incomes for young adults are at historic highs, while homeownership rates for young adults are comparable to previous generations’. All of which suggests that difference in the generational experiences is not economic; it’s psychological.

Excerpts from David Brooks’ Atlantic Article

Humility

Humility involves the following:

  • Possessing an accurate assessment of yourself
  • A willingness to acknowledge your mistakes and limitations
  • An openness to the viewpoints and ideas of others
  • An ability to keep your accomplishments in perspective
  • Low self-focus
  • Appreciating the value other people

http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2024/01/a-peaceable-faith-part-6-cultural.html 

Holiness

Buechner says that holiness is not a human quality like virtue is. “If there is such a thing at all, holiness is Godness and as such is not something people do but something God does in them…It is something God seems especially apt to do in people who are not virtuous at all, at least not to start with.”

If we are pursuing holiness by pursuing virtue itself, we are going to pursue the virtues as we see them. Yet it’s not only our behavior that is amiss, but also our seeing. And we miss the realness of virtue. “If you’re too virtuous, the chances are you think you are a saint already under your own steam, and therefore the real thing can never happen to you.” Holiness is all around us, but we have trouble seeing it. We cannot make holiness real. Holiness helps us to see the realness. In me. In you. In my oat cake with mascarpone cheese and the snow that I am crunching my feet on outside this week.

https://aimeebyrd.substack.com/p/nothing-is-harder-to-make-real?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1879090&post_id=140945822&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=g50id&utm_medium=email

ART

The best of the arts induce humility. In our normal shopping mall life, the consumer is king. The crucial question is, do I like this or not? But we approach great art in a posture of humility and reverence. What does this have to teach me? What was this other human being truly seeking?

David Brooks

Aging

In Rainer Maria Rilke’s novel “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,” the protagonist notices that as he ages, he’s able to perceive life on a deeper level: “I am learning to see. I don’t know why it is, but everything penetrates more deeply into me and does not stop at the place where until now it always used to finish.”

STILL ON THE JOURNEY