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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

Category: Notes Anthology

So Much To Think About

George 0 Comments

Eventually you will reach a point when you stop lying about your age and start bragging about it.
YEP!

Church Attendance

More than half of Americans (56%) say they seldom or never attend religious services, according to new data from Gallup. Less than a third (30%) say they attend on a weekly or almost weekly basis.

Gallup found that almost all of the so-called Nones (95%) say they seldom or never attend services. More than half of Jews, Buddhists, Hindus and Orthodox Christians say they rarely attend as well.

Among religious Americans, Latter-Day Saints (67%) are most likely to say they attend weekly or almost weekly, followed by Protestants (44%), Muslims (38%) and Catholics (33%).

Critical Thinker

Good education forms a person into a critical thinker. That doesn’t mean a chronic skeptic! A critical thinker is someone who knows how to examine an idea by its history, context and coherence—coherence with other, more grounded ideas and inner coherence as logical consistency. A critical thinker learns to step back from ideas put before him or her and ask questions, even the right questions. A critical thinker is slow to embrace any idea until it is examined. And examining an idea requires a certain “distance” from it.

Roger Olson

The Small Gesture

Social media has turned many people into thirsty faux celebrities needing a grand gesture to publicize their identities. Engagements need to be choreographed, filmed, and put on YouTube. We’re not really cleaning debris from a beach for the sake of the environment but for a photo opportunity for Instagram. Yet, there are thousands of people who quietly, without acknowledgment, spend a day off, or even an hour off, doing something necessary for others. The small, intimate gesture is as valuable to the community as the big, grand gesture, for both are about improving humanity. As poet John Donne said, we are all “a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” Any act that lifts one of us, lifts us all.

Kareem Abdul Jabbar

Everyday mystics

Mystics are people who have a personal religious experience or an encounter with God. This description has freed me and many others from thinking that God appears to people only after years of prayer and living an ascetic, isolated life. Thurman believed anyone can be a mystic if they are open to the experience. He opened a door to a world where mystics move freely among us and live ordinary lives. Mystics are the ones who can hear the water flowing beneath the street. They know how to quiet the surface noise enough to hear the meaning of all things coursing below daily life.

Everyday mystics are people who commune with the presence of God, receive guidance through prophetic visions, voices, and dreams, and commit themselves to living for God rather than solely for themselves. Their vision for life is larger and more expansive, knowing that they are alive for a reason, a purpose that will benefit human spirits they may never meet…. Thurman lived out an identity grounded in mysticism, as he regularly felt oneness with God and on occasion experienced visions. He also believed that mystical moments should stir people toward love, community, and social action.

Lerita Coleman Brown on Howard Thurman

WWJD

What would Jesus do? My answer to that question, day by day, presupposes a loving trust in Jesus, the urgent and creative  experience of God’s love shed abroad in my heart, a desire to abide in the One who abides in me, and a deepening of understanding, compassion and commitment in the face of all those other people who move in and out of my life. 

Jim Gordon

Reason for Evangelism

“I share my faith in Christ with others not because I believe God will eternally torment them if they don’t accept Christ, but because I believe that in Jesus God came to us, to show us the way, the truth, and the life. I believe from him we have the clearest picture of who God is, and who God calls us to be. I tell others about Christ because my faith in him has changed my life for the better, because in him I find God’s love. I am passionate about sharing the good news of Jesus Christ with others because in it we find the purpose for which we were made, God’s answer to the deepest longings of our hearts, the road map for how we are meant to live, hope in the face of despair, and God’s love, mercy, and grace incarnated in him.”

Adam Hamilton

You might be a Christian Nationalist if you think:

  1. The federal government should advocate Christian values
  2. The federal government should allow prayer in public schools
  3. The federal government should allow the display of religious symbols in public spaces
  4. The federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation
  5. The federal government should enforce strict separation of church and state
  6. The success of the United States is part of God’s plan.

Forgiveness

a definition of forgiveness. Forgiveness occurs when:

A. an act violating a moral norm breaks trust, disturbs or destroys a relationship, and produces moral outrage (resentment, anger, hatred, vindictiveness, righteous indignation),

B. is addressed at the level of morality, damage, and responsibility,

C. but, with full awareness of the gravity of the moral offense, an increased understanding of the personhood of the wrongdoer, and contrary to a retributive sense of justice, and on the basis of one’s own personal beliefs,

D. a victim chooses to release (suddenly or progressively) the moral outrage in various ways (emotionally, cognitively, behaviorally), depending on the victim’s conditions (repentance, repair, restitution, retribution) and goals (psychological health, social justice, reconciliation).

Scot McKnight,

https://scotmcknight.substack.com/p/forgiveness-and-the-moral-order

Dealing with people

…in dealing with facts you can be sure before you commit yourself, but in dealing with persons you must commit yourself before you can be sure.

In daily life we trust people for three reasons: because they claim our confidence, because their claims are supported by the testimony of others, and because we can test them for ourselves by our own experience.

G.B. Caird

Facebook

…studies have consistently shown that the more time people spend on Facebook the worse their mental health becomes; Facebooking is also correlated with increased sedentariness, a diminishment of meaningful face-to-face relationships, and a decline in real world social activities.” She closes the door on the essay with this damning word about Facebook:

…neither a record-setting five-billion-dollar penalty for privacy violations nor the latest antitrust efforts have managed to check one of the world’s most dangerous monopolies. Billions of people remain, instead, in the tight fisted, mechanical grip of its soul-saving mission.

Jill Lepore’s The Deadline

The Mission 

Once the mission takes over all that matters is the mission. Ethics, morality, doing the right things – they fall into the ditch of claims we make that are important but only when we need them.

Scot McKnight on mission statements:

First, they need to be organic to the community, not a top-down imposition followed up by a passionate claim that God’s at work because this is our mission, and it’s God’s. Let the people speak. Let their voices rise to the surface. Listen to them.

Second, claiming something to be the mission, and plastering it on the church’s publications, does not make it the mission. The mission is God’s, it is centered in Jesus, and most mission statements don’t say enough about either. Or they are too simplistic to guide sufficiently.

Third, to discern the mission of a church community requires excavation of what the people in the church are actually doing. Not what they want to do. Not what they’d like to do. Not what they know the Bible says they are to do. But what they actually do. We might be surprised.

Fourth, I’m no fan of building vision statements and branding on the basis of the mission statement. It gets kitchy. Too clever. It’s not owned by the people. It looks cool because the cool kids are all building mission statements.

Fifth, having said that, I believe a church’s decision, over months and months, to examine the Bible and to articulate the Bible’s complexities about mission, can be a redemptive process. As long as it keeps the problems in view. I have heard over the years a number of leaders say that the process of working on a mission statement was helpful for the church to find its way. That’s all to the good.

View from the Front Porch

Spring’s appearance has been reluctant at best. The front porch is ready, cushions out and ready for conversations. On one recent warm day, I had the first conversation of this year. One of the best parts of front porch conversations is you never know who might show up or what the conversations might be about. If the first conversation is any indication, this will be an interesting year. The subject was circumcision. No worry it was an appropriate and healthy conversation, but I would never anticipated that beginning. Excited for what is come.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

So Much To Think About

George 0 Comments

Each of us’ righteousness seemed like a lightbulb. Some shine like 100 watt others like a 15 Watt bulb.  what we must remember is that in the bright sunshine of God‘s righteousness neither  the 15 watt or the 100 watt bulbs are discernible.

Beauty

…we perceive beauty because it is real and true, and discover in it, a gateway into the mystery of the universe, that which lies beneath and within. 

FR Stephen Freeman

Idols

The prophets warned that the making of idols—those objects or ideas or affiliations that replace for us what should be ultimate—are destructive. At this moment, though, the idols don’t seem to be killing us. They seem to be helping us succeed. In reality, though, they are doing worse than killing us—they are deadening us.

Idols are useful. They draw people together. They give a person a sense of meaning, a cause for which to live and die. Nothing can mobilize a nationalistic sense of identity better than the chant “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!” (Acts 19:28). Their usefulness, though, is the very reason the Bible says they are useless.

Idols have two fatal flaws: They are self-created and they are dead. The man who “falls in love” with his chatbot can have all the glandular sensations of what seems like a love affair. Ultimately, though, he has to know that what he “loves” is himself—what the algorithms repeat back to him is what he put there in the first place. Idols, the Bible warns, are dead. And what’s worse, the Bible warns, “Those who make them become like them; so do all who trust in them” (Ps. 115:8).

At the end of the path to idols, you end up enclosed in your own self, but a part of you knows that what’s controlling you is a construction of your making. You end up, moreover, dead—numb to the very source of your life and being. And then, seeking to answer the deadness, you construct some other idol to give a rush of what feels like life.

Russell Moore

Nazism 

Nazism was seductive precisely because it promised an immediate fix to parliamentary gridlock, an end to economic chaos, and a refusal to bow to the crushing indemnities and humiliating conditions imposed upon Germany by the western powers after the First World War. For many Germans, the Nazi party was an alternative and perhaps even the answer to the trauma, divisions, and poverty after the First World War.

Nazism was not an alien political doctrine that appeared out of nowhere. Nazism succeeded because it embodied what people either believed or wanted to believe. Nazism was an incredibly eclectic worldview, combining Darwinian science, pseudo-sciences like eugenics, incorporating some aspects of Lutheranism, elements of the philosophy of Nietzsche, the music of Wagner, Nordic mythology, anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, numerology, idealized masculinity, nationalism, militarism, anti-communism, and belief in the magical power of ancient artefacts – it had something for everyone!

Nazism appeared to be scientific, spiritual, progressive, and effective, the new type of civilization the world needed. As a philosophy, Nazism was internally consistent to the point that it appeared self-evident to many people, which is precisely why it attracted supporters from all over Europe.

This is why many political philosophers and political theologians have spent so much time studying Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, because we want to understand how a totalitarian movement “works,” how does it seduces and succeeds? How can people participate in a sadist regime where it’s main mode of discourse is terror? We like to think that the Nazi leaders were either monsters or mad. But that probably says more about our sense of horror at the Nazis but does not really explain them.

But let’s be honest, it’s hard to understand the evil of the Nazis, we cannot imagine the rationality for it. But to prevent it one must understand it, which means we must engage in the unpleasant task of trying to get inside the head of the Nazis, into their mentality, look upon their brutality and banality, even if such a gaze burns our eyes.

Michael Bird

Theology

Theology’s mother tongue is prayer and confession, the language of the liturgy, but these aren’t genres so much as modes that transform disparate genres into vehicles of divine discourse. Like Jacob’s Ladder, the traffic runs both ways.

Brad East 

Belief

It is dishonest to cling to a belief which the facts will not support, but it is equally dishonest to withhold your assent from a belief if the evidence at your disposal is overwhelmingly in its favour.

G. B. Caird 

Experts

It is a curious fact that in this age of specialization we are prepared to trust the word of the expert in almost every other sphere, but in religion it is tacitly assumed that the person in the street knows best.

If we were consistent, we should pay at least as much respect to the saint in religion as we do to the genius in any other field of knowledge or experience.

If you want to be sure about Christianity, you must try it and see.

Yet only those who have sincerely tried to live the Christian life are qualified to pass judgment on the Christian faith.

G. B.  Caird 

Pandemic 

March 11, 2020

Four years ago today, society began to shut down.

Shortly after noon Eastern on March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared Covid — or “the coronavirus,” then the more popular term — to be a global pandemic. Stocks plummeted in the afternoon. In the span of a single hour that night, President Donald Trump delivered an Oval Office address about Covid, Tom Hanks posted on Instagram that he had the virus and the N.B.A. announced it had canceled the rest of its season.

It was a Wednesday, and thousands of schools would shut by the end of the week. Workplaces closed, too. People washed their hands frequently and touched elbows instead of shaking hands (although the C.D.C. continued to discourage widespread mask wearing for several more weeks).
The worst pandemic in a century had begun.
Today, on the unofficial fourth anniversary, I’ll update you on where things stand.
The true toll
Covid’s confirmed death toll — more than seven million people worldwide — is horrific on its own, and the true toll is much worse. The Economist magazine keeps a running estimate of excess deaths, defined as the number of deaths above what was expected from pre-Covid trends. The global total is approaching 30 million.

This number includes both confirmed Covid deaths and undiagnosed ones, which have been common in poorer countries. It includes deaths caused by pandemic disruptions, such as missed doctor appointments that might have prevented other diseases. The isolation of the pandemic also caused a surge of social ills in the U.S., including increases in deaths from alcohol, drugs, vehicle crashes and murders.

Key to wisdom

One of the keys to wisdom is that we must recognize our own biases, our own addictive preoccupations, and those things to which, for some reason, we refuse to pay attention. Until we see these patterns (which is early-stage contemplation), we will never be able to see what we do not see. Without such critical awareness of the small self, there is little chance that any individual will produce truly great knowing or enduring wisdom.

Richard Rohr

View from the Front Porch

Discipleship

The word discipleship and the word discipline are the same word, which has always fascinated me. Once you have made the choice to say, “Yes, I want to follow Jesus,” the question is, “What disciplines will help me remain faithful to that choice?” If we want to be disciples of Jesus, we have to live a disciplined life.

BY discipline, | do not mean control. If I know the discipline of psychology or of economics, | have a certain control over a body of knowledge. If I discipline my children, I want to have a little control over them.

But in the spiritual life, the word discipline means “the effort to create some space in which God can act.” Discipline means to prevent everything in your life from being filled up. Discipline means that somewhere you’re not occupied, and certainly not preoccupied. In the spiritual life, discipline means to create that space in which something can happen that you hadn’t planned or counted on.

Discipline means to prevent everything in your life from being filled up.

Henry Nouwen

Our front porch is — that space in which something can happen that you hadn’t planned or counted on.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

So Much To Think About

George 1 Comment

Most of us think we are our thinking, yet almost all thinking is compulsive, repetitive, and habitual. Rohr

Sunday Morning 

Answer me quickly, Lord; my spirit fails 
Do not hide your face from me 
or I will be like those who go down to the pit. 
Let the morning bring me word of your unfailing love, 
for I have put my trust in you. 
Show me the way I should go, 
for to you I entrust my life. 
Rescue me from my enemies, Lord, 
for I hide myself in you. 
Teach me to do your will, 
for you are my God; 
may your good Spirit lead me on level ground.
Psalm 143:7-10 NIV

Mental assent

Mental assent means intellectually accepting the Word of God as true – admiring it and agreeing with it-but not allowing it to have an impact on you, so that it doesn’t do any good in your life. In essence, mental assent agrees with God but does not believe in God.


Cherokee Parable

A grandfather is talking with his grandson. The grandfather says, “In life, there are two wolves inside of us which are always at battle. One is a good wolf which represents things like kindness, bravery, and love. The other is a bad wolf which represents things like greed, hatred, and fear.”
The grandson stops and thinks about it for a second then he looks up at his grandfather and says, “Grandfather, which one wins?”
The grandfather replies, “The one you feed.”

Kareem Abdul Jabbar

Lying

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.

Frankfurt

Immigrants

“Our nation is a nation of immigrants. More than any other country, our strength comes from our own immigrant heritage and our capacity to welcome those from other lands.”

Ronald Regan

Lament

Opening ourselves to God when we’re in need says that we trust God and want God to accompany us, support us, and befriend us in every way.

We trust those we love most with our deepest fears, doubts, emptiness, and disillusionment. So we love God when we share those vulnerable aspects of our lives with God. Just as a little child in the middle of a temper tantrum can shout “I hate you, Mommy!” only because he knows his outburst will not end their relationship, we can express to God our deep doubts, anger, or frustrations only because we possess an even deeper trust in God’s love…. The fact that we share this pain with God rather than withhold it turns out to be an expression of love. 

Brian McLaren 

Eros

Modern usage has corrupted the meaning of “erotic” to only mean sexual desire – but it is a profound word, without substitute in the language of the Church.

By eros we mean the love that makes us forget ourselves entirely and run towards the other without any regard for ourselves. Allan Bloom described eros as “love’s mad self-forgetting.” (from Road to Emmaus, Vol. XV, No. 2, Spring, 2014). 

Personal Impressions

…personal impressions are highly selective. I can only see the world out of my own eyes, but my view is bounded and limited by my experiences. My view is only the smallest of slices of what is going on in the world. 

Richard Beck

Back from Florida

We returned from our annual 3 month snowbird retreat to Venice Florida on March 2. This year’s stay was exceptional in a couple of ways. The weather was most unusual as compared to previous visits. Temperatures over all were cooler, more wind and rain. It was not constant, so the warmer days were appreciated. Beach time was limited but Ann managed to get an appropriate tan. Any disappointment with the weather was resolved by looking at the weather in Wilmore.

Beyond the weather, we had wonderful visits, interactions, conversations and meals with friends and neighbors. The greatest attraction for us is community. We were able to experience community similar to our neighborhood in Wilmore. Without that we probably would not continue to spend 1/4 of our year in Florida.

We are committed to return next December…

STILL ON THE JOURNEY