For the Joy of the Journey

So Much To Think About

George May 8, 2024 Uncategorized 0 Comments

I’m responsible for what I say, not for what you understand.

Lord Willing

…people often get triggered when the phrase “Lord willing” gets offered up as a petition. For example, we make travel plans and then append “Lord willing.” We say, “We’ll see you tomorrow. Lord willing.” As I’ve shared, a lot of ex-evangelical types get triggered by such expressions. The complaint is that if God “wills” for us to make the trip safely does that imply that God “wills” for others to die in car accidents? Is God providentially picking and choosing who dies in a car crash today?

In response to these complaints I’ve shared how “Lord willing” isn’t a theological argument about predestination but is, rather, a simple expression of humility. My life is not ultimately in my hands. I cannot control the future. I do not know what today holds for me. Expressions such as “Lord willing” bring my finitude into view, and keep me grounded in the moment I possess here and now. “Lord willing” isn’t a theological argument, it’s good mental and spiritual hygiene.

Richard Beck

Contemplation

A phrase I used a lot back when I first started teaching contemplation was the idea associated with Albert Einstein that no problem can be solved by the same consciousness that created it. It is so brilliant! It makes the case for contemplation almost better than anything.?

I don’t believe I’m overstating it when I say that only the contemplative mind can help bring forward the new consciousness needed to awaken a more loving, just, and sustainable world. We need a practice that touches our unconscious conditioning where all our wounds and defense mechanisms lie. That’s the only way we can be changed at any significant or lasting level.

Because we’ve got to be honest — the dualistic, calculating, and judging mind is almost exclusively the way most of us Western people think. This gives us false superiority, false security, and false righteousness. Is it any wonder why our culture, politics, and religion are in the state that they are in??

Nevertheless, I still have hope. I always will. More and more people are discovering contemplation as a way of being, reconciling, and bridge-building guided by their inner experience of God. We’re not throwing out our rational mind, but rather we’re adding nondual, contemplative consciousness. When we have both, we’re able to see more deeply, wisely, and justly.?This creates humble people, loving people, and patient people.

Richard Rohr

Senior Citizens

The number of senior citizens is growing rapidly; individuals aged 65 and older increased from 39.6 million in 2009 to 54.1 million in 2019 (a 36% increase) and is projected to reach 94.7 million by 2060. This has come about as a result of advances in modern medicine and improved living conditions.

…over the last few years, reports not only in the U.S., but from around the world, have brought to light a major new pandemic that may reach deeply into the fabric and soul of our society: The usual respect and care of our aging population is decaying into a growing incidence of neglect and abuse. Increasing reports of horrific events that affect our aging population detailing prolonged suffering and premature death are now commonplace.

Aging is already abusive enough, both physically and mentally. We lose control of our bodies, our minds start to fade in and out, and when we’re walking at a pace our bodies can manage, we’re treated like inconvenient speed bumps slowing down youthful traffic. We’re stereotyped as angry, impatient, technologically challenged, and sexless. Pretty much every TV show and movie shows the thought of seniors enjoying sex makes non-seniors cringe. Our only revenge is knowing that someday if they’re lucky, youth will have to endure the same demeaning attitudes.

The Growing Epidemic of Elderly Abuse

Scientific method

The scientific method is not foolproof. Mistakes can be made. That’s why scientists don’t accept studies until they can be consistently replicated. But the key is to base opinions on evidence, not desire. When a person holds an opinion and rejects all evidence that disputes it and can’t find legitimate proof to support it, that is not someone who should be a political leader. Or even a voter.

Kareem Abdul Jabbar

For Benedictine monk Augustin Belisle, simplicity provides a necessary self-emptying so we can dwell more fully in the presence of God.

To live simply, simply to listen, to be simple in our response to persons and events, to speak with simplicity, to simplify our surroundings—simplicity helps to clear our vision. It dissipates the cloudiness which tends to fog our daily responses to God’s Word. Simplicity helps clear the confusion which can easily bombard us from so many directions…. It corrects the myopia we experience when we hold on to the possessive drive. This shortsighted obsession … adds to the burdens of others around us.… Simplicity works against our proclivities toward obsession—with self, guilt, weakness, and things. If we are not obsessed, we can be possessed by the sacred. If we know the emptiness which yearns to be filled—if we recognize the potential spiritual energy which lies within the heart—then we can feel at home with this emptiness. Our souls will be vibrated by it. To live the present in the presence of God is our aim.

don’t let the old man in.

Remember, the Old Man or Old Woman starts knocking around 50, encouraging you to be less patient, more sedentary, and more belligerent about your opinions being right. You start sentences with, “Kids today are too…” You can’t get rid of him—he’s camped out in your yard. But you can at least keep him out of your house.

There’s a lyric in Toby Keith’s song that makes me laugh: “Ask yourself how old you would be/If you didn’t know the day you were born.” Nice sentiment, but I would know my age without a calendar because my prostate would tell me. My joints would tell me. My wobbly memory would tell me. But that’s all part of the adventure, facing down the slings and arrows of aging and still finding joy in getting out of bed because you have things to look forward to. Keep the Old Man out, but don’t lock yourself in.

Kareem Abdul Jabbar

Fake Quote

In 2016, I discovered that this famous quote could not be found in any of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s works:

Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.

It is a popular quote and many people still attribute it to Bonhoeffer but there it can’t be found in any of his writings nor is there a record of it in his sermons or speeches.

Warren Throckmorton

Small church

A church must be small to be effective…because a real church is comprised of people who have met Jesus and in meeting Him have come to know who they really are…and have chosen to stop pretending they’re something else. In a small church we can see Jesus working in others and it gives us hope that we can be real and safe at the same time…

Phoenix Preacher

Infinitely Valuable

One Rabbi of the 19th Century said, “woe to the person who is unaware of their shortcomings, because they will not know what to work on. But even greater woe to a person who is unaware of their virtues, because they don’t even know what they have to work with.”

So, Held’s orientation for spiritual formation looks like this: “by virtue of the fact that we are created in the image of God, we are infinitely valuable, and we are loved. We do not need to earn our worth, and we do not need to earn God’s love. The spiritual life is a response to the fact that God loves us and we matter.”

Scot McKnight

View from the Front Porch

It is graduation season for the Crockett family. Ann and I are traveling this week to Tennessee and Mississippi and back to Lexington to attend graduations.

Grayson graduated with a Bachelors degree from Lipscomb University on 5/4. Meredith graduates with a her JD Law Degree from Ole Miss on 5/9. Jerod graduates with an MD from UK on 5/11. (Blake graduated from UK last year)

May concludes with grandson Tyler Gabehart’s marriage to Olivia Smith on 5/18.
We are proud grandparents.

So Much To Think About

George April 22, 2024 Notes Anthology 0 Comments

If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something. Stephen Wright

Be You

God wanted me to be me and only me. He wants you to be you and only you. God never repeats Himself in creation. No two snowflakes are alike. No two people are alike either. We shouldn’t be surprised that He only made one of each of us. Be you. It’s one of the most Godly things you can do.

Mike Glenn

Awe

The feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends one’s current understanding of the world.

Dacher Keltner

The Pursuit of Bigness

“The pursuit of bigness is a relentless monster that demands to be fed but will never be satisfied. It consumes everything and everyone in its path.” Numbers can toss shade on weak teachings, cheap grace, relentless ego-making. “Wanting to reach people for Jesus and wanting bigger attendance are not the same thing.”

“The pursuit of bigness in the church is morally, theologically, and emotionally damaging.” Yes, growth. “We should prepare for growth. We should be ready for growth period but we should not pursue growth.” He lays down another strong claim: “It is not possible to pursue Jesus and to be obsessed with bigness at the same time without one of them becoming diminished in the process.”

Karl Vaters – De-Sizing the Church: How Church Growth Became a Science, Then an Obsession, and What’s Next

What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.
Pericles (495-429 BCE)

“You’ll stop worrying what people think about you when you realize how seldom they do.”
– David Foster Wallace

Conversations from the heart

Our own conversations, both when speaking and listening, do well to be grounded in the heart.

Here are some tools to use to remain in the heart:

Use fewer words – be silent if possible. (Eccles. 3:3)
Only speak the truth, though it is not necessary to be unkind. (Eph. 4:15)
Resist the effort to defend yourself. (Matt. 10:19)
It is not important to be right. (Proverbs 26:21)
Do not argue. Your effect on someone else’s ego will come to nothing. (Hos. 4:4)
Tell your anxieties that everything will be ok. (Phil. 4:6)
Don’t be in a hurry to speak. Let someone else finish their thought. (Proverbs 29:20).
Breathe.

Fr Stephen Freeman

A Prophecy

Four decades ago, Neil Postman prophesied an apocalypse of moral idiocy in the age of mass media. “When a population becomes distracted by trivia,” he wrote, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, “when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people becomes an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”

The Atlantic

Reading Fiction

Professional golfer John Daly, who rarely does or says anything intelligent, accidentally stumbled from a fairway onto a stage of reporters and commented ever so accurately that he didn’t like fiction because, “after all, none of it is true”. Depending, I guess, on what you mean by “true”, but the floppy-haired, droopy-faced golfer was onto something. At least at the time I thought he was. Why, I have asked myself for nearly 30 years of serious reading, why read those who play pretend when I can read those who tell the truth? Fiction, to quote the words of one who did write a bit of fiction (Frank O’Connor), “covers every reality with a sort of syrup of legend.”

Scot McKnight

View from the Front Porch

The Friendly Church

Is your church friendly?
If a first-time visitor commented they did not find your church to be very friendly, what would be the response ?
How would you reconcile the visitor’s experience with a conclusion your church is friendly ? Easy enough…
She was probably not very approachable.. She may have left immediately after services before anyone had a chance to engage her… She didn’t speak to anyone… et al. More significantly she was a stranger.

It only takes a cursory observation of the foyer to see how friendly a church is. People are everywhere, warmly greeting and talking with one another. A closer look reveals that friendliness is mostly directed to people we know. Yes we are friendly. That sort of interaction is what we have in mind when we declare that we are friendly. One author would describe the foyer scene as “The Territory of Our Kindness”

The Territory of Our Kindness

The walls we have to tear down to make room for each other are rarely physical. The walls that separate us are mostly psychological. Feelings are what exclude people from our friendship and dinner table: ignoring versus noticing, suspicion versus trust, exclusion versus embrace.

To describe how our affections carve up the world into friends versus strangers, the ethicist Peter Singer uses an idea he calls “the moral circle.” A moral circle is created by a simple two-step process. First, we identify our tribe. We make a distinction between friends and strangers. We locate our family, friends, peeps, and BFFs. Everyone in this group is inside my moral circle. Everyone else is a stranger. So that’s step one: make a distinction between friend and stranger, between insider and outsider. The second step is this: extend kindness toward those on the inside of your moral circle. Consider the roots of the word kindness—kin and kind. Kindness is the feeling I extend toward my kin (my tribe, my people, my friends), toward those who are the same kind of people as me. Our affections are for sameness—like attracted to like, as Aristotle noticed millennia ago. We’re drawn toward the similar and the familiar. We care and look out for “our kind.” There is goodness in this dynamic—our love for family and friends, our loyalty to our tribe and “our people”—but there is also much darkness. The moral circle highlights our natural tendency to restrict our kindness to the few rather than to the many, limiting our ability to see or notice the stranger, let alone welcome him or her. Because the walls that separate us begin with our emotions, only a few people are admitted into the circle of our affections, the circumference of our care.
http://fortresspress.com/product/stranger-god-meeting-jesus-disguise\

Perhaps the better question is: “Are we hospitable?” Being friendly is not the same as being hospitable.

… hospitality — welcoming God in strangers and seeing Jesus in disguise — begins by widening the circle of our affections , the circumference of our care , the arena of our compassion , and the territory of our kindness.
We make room for each other because God made room for us . “ Welcome one another , ” Paul says in Romans 15 : 7 ( NRSV ) , “ as Christ has welcomed you . ”
Hospitality is expanding the moral circle to make room in our hearts for each other .
Beck, Richard. Stranger God: Meeting Jesus in Disguise (p. 9). Fortress Press.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

The Presence of God (8) – Leaving aTwo Storey Life

George April 17, 2024 The Presence of God 0 Comments

… a “two-storey universe.” In short, this is a description of how many modern Christians see the world. There is the first floor – the natural world which operates according to naturalist, “secular” rules, and the second floor – the world of God, heaven, hell, angels, etc. The spiritual crisis of much of modern man is the inherent disconnect in these two worlds.
How to believe in a God who is “everywhere present and filling all things” is a very different way of life than to believe in a God who is “out there.”¹

This post concludes, but does not exhaust, implications of abandoning a Two Storey life. In addition to “moving from abstraction to the realm of living“ “and “being more about knowing than believing“; today’s post focuses on Christian Atheism. at You can read the previous post HERE.

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.” ²

Having confessed to mostly living in a Two Storey life; Beck’s assertion that I have been practicing Christian Atheism is a shocking declaration worthy of some serious scrutiny. What follows is a synopsis of Christian Atheism from Fr Stephen Freeman’s essay “Christianity in a Two Storey Universe”

CHRISTIAN ATHEISM

How can one be both an atheist and a Christian?
In the history of religious thought, one of the closest versions to what I am describing as a “two-storey” world-view, is that espoused by classical Deism.
[In] an almost pure, two-storey worldview. God, “the Deity,” had created the universe in the beginning, setting it in motion. He had done so in such a way that the world could be described as directed by His Providence, but not in any sense interfered with after its creation.
The creator had accomplished His work: it was up to us to conform ourselves to His purposes and morality – which were pretty indistinguishable from natural law. If you read the writings of the period it’s much more common to read Providence where a Christian might put God. Many modern evangelicals mistakenly read such statements as Christian.

…other than having some notion of an original Creator, Deists were practical atheists. The God Who created had completed His work. Ethics were as much a matter of scientific discovery as any other principle of physics. They believed in something they called “God” or “Providence” but only in a very divorced sense. It would be hard to distinguish their thought from that of an atheist except that they clung to an idea of God at least as the initiator of all things.
…“practical atheism,” meaning by it, that although a person may espouse a belief in God, it is quite possible for that belief to be so removed from everyday life, that God’s non-existence would make little difference.

…“practical atheists.” Though they had great, even absolutist, faith in the Holy Scriptures, they had no relationship with a God who is living and active and directly involved in their world. Had their notion of a God died, and left somebody else in charge of His heaven, it would not have made much difference so long as the rules did not change.
The more the secular world is exalted as secular, that is, having an existence somehow independent of God, the more we will live as practical atheists
Christianity that has purged the Church of the sacraments, and of the sacramental, have only ideas which can be substituted – the result being the eradication of God from the world in all ways other than theoretical.
…much of modern Christianity functions on this ideological level rather than the level of the God-Who-is among-us, much of Christianity functions in a mode of practical atheism. The more ideological the faith, the more likely its proponents are to expouse what amounts to a practical atheism.

The more truly sacramental becomes the Christian life, the more thoroughly grounded it is in the God-Who-is-among- us. Such a God is indeed, “everywhere present and filling all things.” Our options are between such a God – as proclaimed in the New Testament – or a God who need be no God at all for He is removed from us anyway.

There is a dialog that may take place between Christians and atheists. But there is, prior to that, an even more important dialog to be had, and that is with the practical atheism of Christians who have exiled God from the world around us. Such practical atheism is a severe distortion of the Christian faith and an extremely poor substitute for the real thing.

Richard John Neuhaus has written frequently of returning the Church to the public square. I think the problem is far deeper. In many cases we have to speak about returning God to the Church. In cases where practical atheism is the faith of a goup of “believers,” their presence in the public square makes no difference. Who cares?

God cannot be exiled from our world no matter how men try. He has come among us, and not at our invitation. “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). He is already in the Public Square as the Crucified God who is reconciling the world to Himself, whether we like it or not. The opposite of practical atheism is to do the only thing the Christianity of the first- storey can do: keep His commandments and fall down and worship – for God is with us.

although a person may espouse a belief in God, it is quite possible for that belief to be so removed from everyday life, that God’s non-existence would make little difference.

Next: Christianity in the One Storey life

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

1
Fr Stephen Freemanhttps://fatherstephen.wordpress.com/2009/04/29/unbelief-and-the-two-storey-universe/
2
Beck, Richard, Hunting Magic Eels (pg104)