Meaning and Authenticity

When I was 8 or 9 years old, one of my little neighborhood friends was Charla. I remember one day at Charla's house, she and I were sitting on the floor by her bed. I don't remember exactly what we were doing -- maybe we were playing with dolls or some kind of game or something. I remember suddenly thinking something like: " Wait a minute. How do I know that what I mean by this doll is what Charla means? I'm seeing this doll and it's real to me, but how do I know whether the same thing is really real to Charla? I'm locked inside my body, and I can't look out and see the world from her eyes. " I didn't think about that experience again for 30 years--not until I took a philosophy class in seminary, and we read about epistemology. Whew! Suddenly that memory hit me like a ton of bricks! How do we know things? How do we know any thing? Modernist thinking would say that we can know what really exists -- the table is real. Scientifically I can tell you wh...

Many times I've heard people say something like this regardig discerning their calling to ministry: Oh, I didn't want to do it, but God kept at me. God was pulling me along, but I didn’t want to go, I really didn’t, but God just kept bugging me and wouldn't let me alone. I think we need to be very careful about this kind of thinking. God is found in our resistence, too. Yes, we must learn to trust God, but we must learn to trust ourselves, too. Discernment is not really about making a decision or solving a problem. Discernment is living a life that moves toward authenticity. It's all about learning to love ourselves~the true self, that is. It's a process of developing self awareness such that we can finally see how our deepest desire is also God's desire for us. God's will for us does not differ from our own deepest desire. And I believe that our deepest desires always come down to Love. Most every advance in discernment carries with it a cost, the cross of...

Resurrecting Footpaths has this quote from Chesterton that I had forgotten: The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening,“Do it again” to the moon. It may be that he has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, our Father is younger than we. This quote is part of a great post. Took a look ! I often sit on a chair and put little M on my knees and play "Pony." Giddyup pony, go t...

I recently subscribed to the journal Images: Art, Faith, Mystery, and my first copy arrived yesterday. I'm reading the article "Unapologetic Visibility," and it has this paragraph: We cannot afford to jettison the imagination because it is the sensitive spot into which God's image stamps itself. It is a place that needs to be filled, like the blank walls of a Florentine chapel, a space that opens to God by being filled with images--frescoes with likenesses of the body, the means by which one person opens up to another .... The imagination, like the skin, is sensitive, and like the mind it cannot endure a vacuum. Whether you like it or not, billboards and screens are ready to pounce upon the imagination. Its sensibility requires us to cover it actively, even if we do it weakly and diffidently. I wonder how the imagination has been effected by television and movies. Is the 21st century imagination the same as imaginaton in the 19th century? How do I actively "cove...

I am introducing Companions in Christ: The Way of Grace to my new congregation. Nine folks signed up for this small group, and the introductory meeting last Sunday gave me confidence that it will be an enriching group for all. If you've done this study, you may remember the first chapter. It contains Walter Brueggemann's intriguing description of grace as: God's transforming disposition towards the whole world. Then the text says: Divine grace is expressed as a creative will for dynamic life and goodness, full of ongoing possibilities for transformation and renewal. God bestows on human beings the risky gift of freedom of divine love, a risk extended for the sake of transformation, for greater wholeness, for fullness of life. ... Jesus calls his disciples who will shortly misunderstand as much as they understand. Why? For the hope of transformation. Advocacy is risked by Jesus for a woman who has been caught dead-to-right in sin. Why? For the potential of transforma...

Lovely Passionate Feminist is home sick today. We drove up to Small City to the North and brought her home with us yesterday so that she could start to heal and feel better in her comfortable bed here at home. It's some kind of stomach flu, or food-poisoning (but the docs at the university's clinic said she was contagious--can food poisoning be contagious?) Anyway, she's feeling very puny and our hearts are surrounding her with love. In other news ... I'm still living life in warp-speed. Oh, so much to get done! But I decided to listen to my friends who have been nudging me to attend this year's Five-Day Academy for Spiritual Formation in our area. This is the retreat that I led last year--well, not really. I was suppose to lead it, but went home sick on the 2nd day with pneumonia. Anyway, this year I'm just going to attend it, be there for five days with no responsibilities at all, enjoying some of my dearest friends, engaging lectures, and an absolutel...

Temporality has always interested me. What does it mean that "I," a self, am part of the present moment? I learned from my short practice of Zen the importance of the present moment. What else is there but the present moment? But then I go to graduate school and begin to understand how the past and the future are just as real, and part of the present. Even eternity is part of the present, in a way. I'm reminded of something I wrote previously, that when time and eternity intersect, the present moment gathers the self into a whole that exists fully in this fragmented world. Thus a space is opened for a “yes” to the transcendent call to freely choose ourselves in our “eternal validity,” as Kierkegaard would put it, that is, to risk everything and in faith and true freedom live out who we are given to be. God calls to us from eternity, reaching into time, calls us to be the people we are meant to me. The "extra-temporality" of our existence--we exist in both time ...

The next step in my faith story came in seminary when I confronted my difficulty with the divinity of Jesus. I took an elective course in Christology, with Dr. G, an extraordinary teacher of theology and philosophy. He was one of those teachers who was willing to stay with the subject until he sensed the students understood it. Invited questions. Asked us whether we understood. He was educated at Yale, and I think was quite a bit more conservative theologically than I, yet hearing my struggle he was the one who recommended that I read John Cobb's Christ in a Pluralistic Age for the Christology class. As I was thinking about this, I realized that I could remember practically NO details of how Cobb convinced me of Jesus' divinity--so typical of me. My memory has never been good, and at 51 it's getting scary bad. So I searched my files this morning and found my paper, written in the Fall of 1995. I'm going to retype several of the relevant paragraphs of this paper here. I ...

A quote I've found meaningful: "Our commitments to healing and liberation require risk because the love and trust required to love fearlessly open us to injury. To remain open and to receive the world's gifts requires us to maintain a capacity for vulnerability, and the tragedies and limits of human life can weaken our trust so that we move from love toward fear and withdrawal. Our vulnerability means we are not completely immune to forces of evil...To commit ourselves to the work of God's love and justice means taking enormous risks in order to keep healing and liberation alive in the world. We must be aware that the forces of oppression, hate, and violence are strong and canny...organized to resist relinquishing their power...We require COURAGE--strength of heart--to challenge evil, even as we remain suspicious of our most self-righteous polemics and defensive postures. Courage enables us to cherish our anger at injustice at the same time we are attuned to the opp...

John Cobb is one of my favorite theologians. It was through his book, Christ in a Pluralistic Age, that I resolved my inner dilemma regarding the divinity of Jesus. With that dilemma removed, I was, of course, able to both think of myself as a Christian with more integrity and to come to love Jesus with a passion that transformed me. Cobb is a process theologian, but his writings aren't limited to systematic theology. My brother, Daring Quiet Writer, has read Cobb's work regarding Buddhist-Christian dialogue. And in my Ph.D. program I ran across Cobb's book on pastoral counseling and pastoral theology. This is a quote from that book: "Growth is never the simple addition of something new to what is already present. If it were, it would not be resisted so strongly. Instead, to add the new is to change the old.... [The old] must receive, quite literally, a new form. Because we identify ourselves with what-is, with what we have achieved, with what we already are, th...

Kievas tagged me for the "Five Things I Dig About Jesus" meme. 1. The Christ--Principle of Creative Transformation (John Cobb). 2. Loved women and children and the dispossessed. 3. Courage. 4. New Life from and through Death. 5. Mirror for how humanity can and should be. If you haven't already been, consider yourself tagged!

Linda's blog very often has posts that are truly art . In these posts her writing has that quality to it that takes me right into the moment, right into the room (or the jogging path) with her, and I feel the pathos or the life or the grief or the joy. More than that, the beauty of her writing--the structure, the words chosen, and that mysterious 'something more' that true art requires--is so deeply creative that it leads me to the Creator. I remember one post about a woman colleague of hers who was so close to trusting, on the very brink of the kind of vulnerability that transforms, and yet ultimately backed away from it. I was in tears. Oh dear God, please help this woman cross over into LIFE, I thought. One of Linda's most recent posts is about life--Life all around her, all around us, have we but the eyes to wake up and see. I hope you'll read it. Read it, and give yourself permission to be where she was when her words came forth. I think you'll be inspired...

I've always loved this from St. Irenaeus: "The glory of God is a human being fully alive." (Of course, I've changed the original and ridiculous male language.) When we are fully alive we reflect the glory of God. Imagine that! In my pastoral counseling practice, I often hear women complain of depression or anger. Everyone is different, but in one way or another when she moves toward living more fully--whatever that may look like for her--the depression or anger dissolve. Sadly, Christian theology contributes to the suppression, the half-deadness, of women--and men, too. Catholic theology, interestingly however, has this to say about "humility": Humility has 3 elements: 1. Awareness of, and responsiveness to, God’s glory. We fall on our knees in loving adoration! 2. Confrontation of our own person with the Infinite Person. We become aware of our sin and weakness. 3. Awareness of God’s calling us by name. Whether we feel “worthy” is not the point....

One of my big projects at church has been to put together a monthly concert series. My church is downtown, so we've designed the series such that downtown workers can take their noon lunchbreak, walk on over to the church, hear about 20 minutes of beautiful music, go downstairs for a free meal, and be back to their offices by 1:00. It's been a big success--well, relatively speaking. We have quite a few "regulars," people working in these huge companies who tell me how much it means to them to have a place like this to come to once in a while. Today was especially fun for me. First, I woke up with some energy--first time in over two weeks. Second, my dear friends C. and R. came-- always SO great to see them! We even got to catch up a little during lunch. And third, I just had a sense of how much I like people and enjoy being a minister, providing a welcoming space for people to be. I have 'learned' the sense of hospitality that I want to provide for people by e...

"In each and every negative, life-diminishing situation in life, without fail—each situation of pain, injustice, terror, grief, abandonment, rejection, etc.—God is there. And in God’s presence is an invitation toward transformation of that fear and hurt into that which is good. This way of transformation is always available. The opportunity to accept God’s invitation toward wisdom, love, freedom, truth, compassion, joy, beauty, kindness, and justice never fails. " I wrote that a few years ago, and I have never been the same since. Wish I could remember it more quickly at times, though! I've been sick all week and instead of opening myself to the possibility of God's creative transformation for some kind of good in the midst of it, I've let guilt get in the way. That little voice (my father's) that nags: Your employer won't like this....you must EARN what you're paid ! Buttressed no doubt by that old John Houseman ad for SmithBarney, remember?: " T...