January 1, 2008 @ 9:53 pm | Category: spirituality/religion, existential questions
To start the new year fresh we need the gift of forgetting. We all know that it’s hard to go on if you keep reliving the past. The admonishment to forget contradicts every thing else we are told. We are reminded to remember where we came from, to remember those fallen in battle, and to remember the holocaust. We set aside special days just to remember. You have heard it a million times. Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Middle-aged people worry that they are forgetting too much, too soon, and seek memory enhancing solutions. Even God instructed Israel to remember their deliverance from Egypt through a ritual feast. Jesus instructed his disciples to remember him perpetually in the holy meal. There is no doubt that remembering and memory play an important role in our lives.
This New Year’s morning I woke up to discouraging global news, which reminded me that most of the world’s troubles are due to our inability to forgive, much less forget. Regional conflicts are plagued by decades, if not centuries, of wrongs done and relived. Recognizing the importance of memory, we need to understand the value of forgetting. Imagine if you remembered every pain and sorrow you have ever experienced. You would be overwhelmed with grief. Thank God for the gift of forgetting. However, God has gone further. God has promised, not only to forgive our sins, failures, and foibles, but to forget them. That also means he is willing to forgive those who have wronged us. The promise of the future is that God will wipe away the tears and finally make all things new. The world’s pain, mourning, and sorrow cast into the sea of forgetfulness forever. Only then will we have a truly fresh beginning with our selves and with each other.
To read more about healing memories and forgetting, check out Miroslav Volf’s The End of Memory:Remembering Rightly in a Violent World.
Add Comment
August 26, 2007 @ 8:26 pm | Category: spirituality/religion, existential questions
Read the cover story in this week’s Time Magazine about Mother Teresa’s crisis of faith. A dark night of the soul that lasted 50 years. The article is based on a new book, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light (Doubleday), consisting primarily of correspondence between Teresa and her confessors and superiors over a period of 66 years. According to Time:
“The letters, many of them preserved against her wishes (she had requested that they be destroyed but was overruled by her church), reveal that for the last nearly half-century of her life she felt no presence of God whatsoever — or, as the book’s compiler and editor, the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk, writes, “neither in her heart or in the eucharist.”
The story provides plenty of fodder for reflection on the meaning of Christian happiness. The questions are endless. What is Christian joy? How do our feelings feed or hamper our faith? Can doubt ever be a strength? How narrow (and painful) is the door into the Kingdom of Heaven that Jesus talked about? For a society use to the gospel of prosperity, where material success and emotional fulfillment are considered signs of grace, these questions are worth wrestling with.
1 Comment
August 7, 2007 @ 10:15 pm | Category: spirituality/religion, art
Read this article in the Arion journal by the always provocative cultural critic Camille Paglia. It’s long, but worth it. I think she does a good job of showing the interdependent and mutual relationship of art and religion. In order for art and religion to flourish in a free society, conservatives and liberals will have to rethink how they view both.
1 Comment
June 11, 2007 @ 8:52 pm | Category: body, spirituality/religion, global issues
Here is a story from the BBC about young girls in India who are sold into temple prostitution. This ancient practice remains alive and should prompt us to dismiss any contemporary claim that the ancient goddess cults are good for women or girls. Historically, sacred sex, sacred virgin, and fertility rituals are code words for sacred exploitation.
2 Comments
May 15, 2007 @ 7:54 am | Category: spirituality/religion
Salon.com has an interview with developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert, whose science tells him that God is a figment of our imagination. After reading it, I was left to wonder how Wolpert is so sure of his own existence and that he is not just another grand illusion.
Add Comment
April 25, 2007 @ 7:41 pm | Category: spirituality/religion, Pot Luck
I don’t know about you, but I feel we are living in a topsy-turvy world straight out of a Tom Pynchon novel (like his latest Against the Day, which is indecipherable). In religion, politics, business, and the arts it feels like we are living with twentieth century values, programs, and leaders in a twenty-first century world. The difference in politics comes down to the basic goodness of those who espouse any particular view. Work needs re-engineering because it has become home to many and while for some home is too much work. Former ideas about life cycles, family patterns, and the meaning of a career no longer hold up. It’s too early for us to make sense of where we are or how to navigate the world; a world where up is down, time seems to go backwards, and multiple ideas compete for dominance. Our leaders were trained for the cold war, big business, mass religion, and the triumph of the CD. The world is different from even five years ago with only fragments of the former remaining. Human nature is basically the same. Is the world flat, smaller, bigger, or just upside down? Is the crowd wise or mad? I think this accounts for so much of the dissonance many of us are feeling.
During this time, attentive observation, lots of silence, and the cultivation of rootedness will do us good. We don’t need more facts, information or analysis. Experts can’t help us now. The people we need are sages–wisdom people who can see in the shadows and help us navigate in the turbulence. Be forewarned you will not likely find them on a stage, or making the media rounds. A sage may be closer to you than you realize. In your workplace, neighborhood, or church. Otherwise, you may need to be one of the sages the world needs to heal its dissonance. In the end, the wisdom borne by sages who follow Jesus, the Wisdom of God, will trump knowledge and right a topsy-turvy world.
Add Comment
April 23, 2007 @ 7:30 pm | Category: spirituality/religion, work
Here is a post at Salon.com about a new study showing that one year out of college women earn less than comparable men. It gets worse as we move along. The study was published by The American Association of University Women. Besides structural gender discrimination, women do seem to accept less and put up with more. Why? Maybe, it’s because we don’t think we are worth it. I have heard this more than once from women. This wouldn’t be so completely disastrous if it wasn’t for the fact that our self-doubt affects our spiritual lives. Maybe, we feel that we aren’t even worth much to God. In doing so we are in danger of heaping lies on the love of God and condemning ourselves to tentative lives. Overcoming the plague of self-doubt is one of the many battles we must wage in order to become wise people and one that I explore in my new book Chasing Sophia: Reclaiming the Lost Wisdom of Jesus.
Add Comment
April 7, 2007 @ 11:15 am | Category: spirituality/religion, theology/church
The Entombment by Caravaggio, 1602
I can’t remember the first time I saw a baptism, I am sure it was a full body dunk of an adult convert to Christianity. I distinctively remember the first foot washing I witnessed at a pentecostal camp meeting. Since then both adult baptisms and foot washings are a rare thing. What has remained more frequent is the holy meal. Even this seems to be threatened with extinction due to neglect. If it wasn’t for those high church people, God bless them, it would gone by now, lost to efficiency and televised church services.
To me the loss of these practices is an indication that the fundamental understanding of the Christian faith as an embodied religion is disappearing, at least in the US. The Christian faith has always held that the body matters. Even after allowing for its lapses into gnosticism. The body matters enough for God to take on flesh, die, and defeat the great enemy of humanity, death, in a resurrection. No matter what pop culture will tell us about a “good death” the Christian faith says that the only good death is death defeated. Ask the billions of unsophisticated people in the world what they fear most for themselves, and their loved ones, and they will tell you death. Death from hunger, disease, and human brutality. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is good news for them and for us. It means that our bodies matter and that we can hope to live eternally not as disembodied spirits in some ethereal plane but in the wonder of humanity - our bodies. That is why for two thousands years Christians have proclaimed, He is risen!
2 Comments
March 20, 2007 @ 11:03 am | Category: spirituality/religion, Pop Culture
It seems that every few years the same banal, arrogant, and cheap spirituality gets recycled again. This time with no one other than Oprah championing The Secret. Read this excellent article in Salon. What is the secret? You create your own reality. Whatever you want you can have. Whatever you have, that you don’t want, is your fault. Money, power, romance, are all waiting for you. Tell that to millions of starving children, victims of human slavery, and the people of Darfur. It’s spitting in the face of millions, even us whose only problem, on any given day, is finding a parking spot.
The real secret, and it’s not even a secret, Jesus already told us. It’s difficult for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God. Better to lose the world than lose your own soul. Take up your cross and follow me. Lose your life in order to gain it. Of course this all doesn’t sell well in consumer self-centered culture, but it’s the path to contentment. The alternative is to end up terrified and alone with all our stuff facing the Master of our lives. No one will be able to save us, not even Oprah.
Add Comment
February 1, 2007 @ 10:02 pm | Category: community, spirituality/religion, family/relationships
Tonight as I talked with a friend at one of those life crossroads we all eventually encounter it became evident that for her and for all of us we either commit to something or we die a slow unsatisfying death. Our wiring seems to drive us to commitments. No matter how loose and fancy free want to play it in the end our happiness demands that we commit to a work, a relationship or a community. Our desire to give ourselves to something outside ourselves creates a crisis in a culture that views commitments and duty with suspicion. A commitment is risking change and we can’t control who we will become or where a commitment will take us. It’s a leap into the great unknown. Nevertheless, the power of a commitment can serve as ballast in the turbulence of life. It’s true, as Jesus taught, we have to lose our life in order to find it. It’s the only way to truly live.
Add Comment
