Church Life , Politics. Loving protesters can take their stand, not against anyone as an enemy, but with and for love for one another, not raising threatening fists or pointing accusing fingers, but simply standing with open arms and hearts full of love. March 17, General , Global , Practical Justice.
Many of us were shocked to discover that farm workers in Florida were being trafficked Onward Christian Peacemakers! March 11, Church Life , Theology. Dear Dr. Moore, I don't believe we have ever had the opportunity to meet, but I hope we will meet someday and have the opportunity to get better acquainted in person. Relational and respectful? Like God, like believer, we might say.
Our image of God, our image of ourselves, and our processes of individual and cultural development move together as in a dance. It sounds like 'Christ and him crucified' is not for you. At least not yet. You have to find a way to disarm your faith as a potential instrument of hate and convert it into an instrument of love.
Otherwise, your neighbors around this seminary will tolerate you the way they might tolerate a chemical plant that could at any moment blow up and kill them all. You can try to hybridize them and compromise them for centuries, but like oil and water they eventually separate and prove incompatible.
They refuse to alloy. They produce irreconcilable narratives and create different worlds. Hostility is a symptom of the disease, not part of the cure. Rather, we must judge and deconstruct those conventional definitions in light of Jesus and his example.
Similarly, believing an alternative and transforming framing story may turn out to be the most radical thing any of us can ever do. Instead, it tries to teach you how to think.
It stretches your thinking; it challenges you to think bigger and harder than you ever have. Epiphany would train us to keep our eyes open for expressions of compassion in our daily lives. Lent would be an honest self-examination of our maturity in love and a renewal of our commitment to grow in it. Instead of giving up chocolate or coffee for Lent, we would stop criticizing or gossiping about or interrupting others.
Maundy Thursday would refocus us on the great and new commandment; Good Friday would present the suffering of crucifixion as the suffering of love; Holy Saturday would allow us to lament and grieve the lack of love in our lives and world; and Easter would celebrate the revolutionary power of death-defying love. In fact, Christians have only demonstrated that there is something profoundly wrong with the cosmology and worldview behind more than five centuries of carnage—carnage that has yet to even slow down.
Christians have so much negative history and dogma to overcome within their own tradition, I do not believe the religion is even salvageable. The world is deep in the throes of an ecological crisis based in Western economies of hyper-exploitation. By a Someone bigger than the sky that expanded above me. It was as if the whole sky were an eye, and all space were a heart, and I was being targeted as a focal point for attention and love.
Friday I was also one of the relatively rare few who also had it patterned into me that prayer was listening to God. Not even listening for messages, exactly. Brian shares how fly fishing connects him with the force and source of Life.
Nor do I fish simply to catch and release. No, I fish for this sense of connection—to know the fish by feeling its power, its resistance, its strength, its aliveness. But for many of us, God is more elusive, and at best, we hope God is there, here, in here, but we can claim no rational certainty.
You can place yourself in a suitable location, prepare yourself, reach out your line, and—wait. And hope. And wait. And hope some more. And wait some more. We invite you to watch this video where Barbara talks about her love of fishing as a practice of contemplation, connection, and community.
John Buchan Thomas Nelson and Sons: , He writes:. I grew up in a religious home. A full-dose, hard-core, shaken-together-and-my-cup-runneth-over, conservative, Bible-believing, Evangelical, fundamentalist Christian home. Holidays and Sundays were just the spiritual appetizers. For the main course, there was also church every Sunday night. And there was a Wednesday night prayer meeting too.
Some neighborhood buddies. The retreat leader sent us off on Saturday afternoon for an hour of silence during which we were supposed to pray. I climbed a tree—being a back-to-nature guy—only to discover that my perch was along an ant superhighway and that mosquitoes also liked the shade of that particular tree. But eventually, between swatting and scratching, I actually prayed. In spite of my sincerity, absolutely nothing happened. I walked several paces away from my friends and lay back in the grass, fingers interlocked behind my head, looking up, feeling strangely quiet and at peace.
Something began to happen. I had this feeling of being seen. Young science geek that I was, I pictured myself lying on a little hill on a little continent on a little planet in a little solar system on the rim of a modest galaxy in a sea of billions of galaxies, and I felt that the great big Creator of the whole shebang was somehow noticing little, tiny me.
And the oddest thing happened as this realization sank in. I began to laugh. Profound laughter surged from within me. It was more like an overflowing laughter, as if all that space I had been feeling opening up inside me was gradually filling up with pure happiness, and once it reached the rim, it spilled over in incandescent joy.
At this moment! I can feel it! Story from Our Community: I begin each day with the joy of these reflections. Full of wisdom and insight, new ways of looking and longing, I share them with friends, family, and grandchildren. I love Fr. Everything is sacred. When grounded in an experience of Love, doubt does not represent a step backwards, but is a necessary condition for any movement forward.
Before doubt, I thought that faith was a matter of correct beliefs. They taught me this not to be cruel but because they themselves had been taught the same thing, and they were working hard, sometimes desperately, to be faithful to the rules as they understood them.
I tried to do the same, and I would still be doing so today if not for doubt. But more was going on, so much more. Looking back, I now see that underneath arguments about what I believed to be true factually , something deeper and truer was happening actually.
For example, whether or not the creation story happened factually as described in Genesis, I was committing myself to live in the world as if it actually were a precious, beautiful, meaningful creation, and as if I were too. What mattered most was not that I believed the stories in a factual sense, but that I believed in the meaning they carried so I could act upon that meaning and embody it in my life, to let that meaning breathe in me, animate me, fill me.
Whether I considered the stories factually accurate was never the point; what actually mattered all along was whether I lived a life pregnant with the meaning those stories contained. To my surprise, when I was given permission to doubt the factuality of my beliefs, I discovered their actual life-giving purpose. Doubt need not be the death of faith.
It can be, instead, the birth of a new kind of faith, a faith beyond beliefs, a faith that expresses itself in love, a deepening and expanding faith that can save your life and save the world. Martins: , , , Story from Our Community: These have been extremely challenging times and, though difficult and often dangerous, inside each of them lay opportunity. I can enmesh myself in ego my own and of others , yet I do my best to awaken to Christ consciousness. Everything is for the sake of spiritual evolution.
Making New Friends Thursday, April 15, In this passage, he encourages us to build relationships outside our comfortable social and religious groups. Christian mission begins with friendship—not utilitarian friendship, the religious version of network marketing—but genuine friendship, friendship that translates love for neighbors in general into knowing, appreciating, liking, and enjoying this or that neighbor in particular.
Many new friends have come into my life. Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, New Agers, and others—including lots of atheists and agnostics, too. Like a lot of churches, our little congregation held a prayer service.
While praying, I felt a voice speaking, as it were, in my chest: Your Muslim neighbors are in danger of reprisals. You must try to protect them. The next morning, I wrote and made copies of a letter extending, belatedly, friendship toward Muslim communities in my area, and offering solidarity and help if simmering anti-Muslim sentiments should be translated into action. I drove to the three mosques nearby—I had never visited them before—and tried to deliver my letter in person.
I then handed him my letter, which he opened and read as I stood there awkwardly. I remember the imam, a man short in stature, slowly looking down at the letter in the bright September sun, then up into my face, then down, then up, and each time he looked up, his eyes were more moist. Suddenly, he threw his arms around me—a perfect stranger. I still remember the feeling of his head pressed against my chest, squeezing me as if I were his long-lost brother.
My host welcomed me not with hostility or even suspicion, but with the open heart of a friend. Invite them into companionship over a cup of tea or coffee. Ask them questions. Display unexpected interest in them, their traditions, their beliefs, and their stories. Learn why they left what they left, why they stay where they stay, why they love what they love.
Enter their world, and welcome them into your world, without judgment. If they reciprocate, welcome their reciprocation; if not, welcome their nonreciprocation.
Experience conviviality. Join the conspiracy of plotting for the common good together. Story from Our Community: These meditations enrich our lives with different ways of seeing, so important in the narrow tradition I grew up in.
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