Music

'Poem for the week' -- "Music":

There is music, deep and solemn
   Floating through the vaulted arch
When, in many an angry column,
   Clouds take up their stormy march:
O’er the ocean billows, heaping
    Mountains on the sloping sands,
There are ever wildly sweeping
     Shapeless and invisible hands.

Echoes full of truth and feeling
   From the olden bards sublime,
Are, like spirits, brightly stealing
   Through the broken walls of time.
The universe, that glorious palace,
    Thrills and trembles as they float,
Like the little blossom’s chalice
     With the humming of the mote.

On the air, as birds in meadows—
   Sweet embodiments of song—
Leave their bright fantastic shadows
    Trailing goldenly along.
Till, aside our armor laying,
    We like prisoners depart,
In the soul is music playing
     To the beating of the heart.

-- Alice Cary

More Than An Evolution

More than an evolution of ideologies, real growth leads towards love.

Ground Level

I like ideas.  I love ideas that work on the ground-level.

Cynicism

Cynicism is lazy.

-- Rob Bell

Aren't Always

Ever noticed...good guys aren’t always good...and, bad guys aren’t always bad?

In spite of how obvious this is, a little acknowledgement of it would probably go a long way these days.

The goal isn't, in fact, simply to win.  It is to do good, to be good to all involved—the good and the bad...because none of us are fully either.

Jesus Came to Proclaim Good News to the Poor. But Now They’re Leaving Church.

It’s well-established that the gap between the middle class and those who earn the highest incomes in the United States has grown wider over time, spurring partisan responses over how or whether to address income inequality.

But there’s a facet of this issue that should be particularly worrisome to Christians: Many of the poorest Americans are abandoning church en masse. By stepping away from church communities, the people who are most financially strapped also end up losing out on social networks and social capital—which can make their economic situation and outlook even worse.

To test the relationship between religion and socioeconomic status, I took four income brackets (adjusted for inflation over the time) from the General Social Survey (GSS) and calculated the share that said they never attended religious services. The change over the last 46 years was stunning.  Continue here....

-- Ryan Burge

Snow's Shush

Snow throws on us a blanket of silence, saying, "It's time to be quiet".

God Walks Slowly

God walks “slowly” because he is love. If he is not love, he would have gone much faster. Love has its own speed. It is an inner speed. It is a spiritual speed—a different kind of speed from the technological speed to which we are accustomed.

-- Kosuke Koyama, Three Mile an Hour God


If the devil can’t make you sin, he’ll make you busy.

-- Corrie ten Boom


Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day, you must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.

-- Dallas Willard

Receptivity

Art begins with receptivity.

-- Mirabai Starr

Is our receptivity inhibited by all our hurry?

Does it take an artist to point this out?

More or Less

Life is not a race—the goal is not to beat other people, get there first, and take more of whatever you can.

In the end, it is rarely about more; not to mention faster. If anything, it is about less.

Longer

The tail of hate is incredibly long, but that of love is even longer.

Choices

Related to yesterday's post:

Our choices reveal our intentions.

-- Simon Sinek

MLK Day: Silence Of Our Friends

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

-- Martin Luther King, Jr.


Life's most persistent and urgent question is, 'What are you doing for others?'

​-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Worshiping My Own Ability

Instagram: sarcasticlutheran

I need a God who is bigger and more nimble and mysterious than what I could understand and contrive.  Otherwise it can feels like I am worshiping nothing more than my own ability to understand the divine.

-- Nadia Bolz-Weber

Your Brain Works Against You When You Argue With Your Significant Other

First comes love, then comes marriage (or some modern equivalent), then comes the inevitable really stupid fight you keep having over who threw whom under the carriage last time you went over to that person’s place for that thing. Spats with your significant other—there are infinite varieties—are unavoidable. But they don’t have to be so bruising or so frequent, according to Stan Tatkin, therapist, researcher and author of the new book We Do: Saying Yes to a Relationship of Depth, True Connection and Enduring Love.

Tatkin studies couples by filming them during a fight and then doing video microanalysis (a slow-motion, frame-by-frame examination of the footage) to see what’s really going on. Through this analysis, he has found that the human brain has a set of characteristics that can make fights with our loved ones worse...:

• You’re relying too much on your memory
• You’re expecting perception to be objective
• You’re overestimating how well you’re communicating
• You’re not looking at each other
• You’re seeking compromise but not collaboration

...continue here.

-- Belinda Luscombe

In Praise of Friendship

From Michiana Chronicles:

"Much of life is really about revision, re-imagining."

"Friendship is a revelation."

"No matter how bad things get, if you have a friend, you can keep going."  Continue here....

-- Joe Chaney

Fear and Insecurity

Instagram: bobgoff

Fear and insecurity will always try to talk us into settling for lesser things.

-- Bob Goff

My Dilemma

When I encounter a truly helpful thing (reading, music, art, nature, relationship) that I am drawn to—the nature of its descriptiveness of or resonance with something about life—I want to do something with it.  I don't to just hold it for myself; I want to, somehow, share it.

My sharing of choice often is to write about it.  And, then I can feel a dilemma.  The dilemma I feel, often from such encounters, is that what I would share (related to what excites me about them) has in some way already been shared (described, written, etc.).  The question that pokes at me is, what value would there be in my simply re-telling of it?

This stops something in me, on a fairly regular basis.  And, it shouldn’t.  I am missing something here, in the logic of my dilemma.  It is like I am believing something about what is necessary (needed) that actually isn’t true.  But, let's be honest, I don’t know precisely what that is.

It has been observed that authentic growth, for a person (like me) with the ego-structure of an Enneagram 9, is the ability to not try to protect others from our opinions (which is really just a form of self-protection).  As I've mentioned before, this is why it is easier for me just to keep my opinions to myself.

Perhaps, this is related to the reaction I observe from others to opinionated people—how much they resent (often even hate) them.  But, this dynamic is partly why I enjoy that thing so much in the first place—when something true is being described or presented, even if in an opinionated way.


Part of the answer to my dilemma is the recognition that, while there is ‘nothing new under the sun’, there are SO many things that people are not aware of—that have been historically forgotten or even unknown.

It is only in the telling (and re-telling) that anything true can be experienced or known—for the first time or the hundredth time by anyone.  It's not so much the novelty of something that matters, it's the truth of something that matters. We can speak our truth; more specifically, our encounter with it. What is true needs to be told and it can only be told as a result of our encounter with it.  

This should be part of my answer to, or the pathway through, my dilemma.

Care, Respect, and Delight

Love means care of, respect for, and delight in our own selves and bodies.

-- Anne Lamott

What Would My Life Be Like?

I'm wondering...what my life would be like today were it not for those I share life with.  How would I be different without them?  What would I lack?  What would I be insensitive to?  What of life would I not know?

I am so thankful for their influence; their effect, on me.  I'm grateful for what they call me to by who they are and how they live life, for the gaps in my life they fill, for the way I am shaped by their love...even more, for just who they are.

I am more whole because of others and (hopefully) they are more whole because of me; when this is true, the world has a better chance of recovering its wholeness.

Thinking Thoughts

We cannot know God only by thinking thoughts. Unfortunately, for much of Christianity, faith largely became believing statements to be true or false (intellectual assent) instead of giving people concrete practices so they could themselves know how to open up (faith), hold on (hope), and allow an infilling from another source (love). Contemplation opens our heads, hearts, and bodies to God’s living presence.

-- Richard Rohr

Insider Language

A few years ago, a friend, who was a successful insurance agent, invited me to attend a high-end luncheon. The hotel ballroom was filled with a few hundred insurance agents from around the region. After lunch was served, a prominent leader in the insurance industry spoke, joking about “claimants,” “negligence,” and “aggregate limits of indemnity.” While the other agents laughed, nodding in agreement with the speaker’s comments, I fidgeted in my seat. I appreciated my friend’s invitation and ticket to the lunch, but I left feeling unintelligent and confused.

Every group, if it’s together long enough, develops insider language. The luncheon I attended used insider language targeted to their specific industry. They didn’t use it to be exclusionary; they employed it for the sake of identity, clarity, and efficiency. But I realized—in maybe the clearest manner in my life—what happens in the hearts and minds of visitors and spiritual sojourners when we use insider language in a local church.  Continue here....

-- J. R. Briggs

We don’t call portraits people

But in fact, just about everything is a portrait.

It’s our temporary understanding of the world as it is, not an actual experience of it.

We see things through our filters, match them to our expectations and live out our story of what we expect and why. We build a narrative around every interaction we have, and that narrative is rarely as accurate as we’d like to admit.

It gets easier to work our way through a situation if we preface our retelling with, “the way I experienced what she said…”

-- Seth Godin, We don’t call portraits people

Wonders and Realities

The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the Universe about us, the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race. Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side-by-side with a lust for destruction.

-- Rachel Carson

...how many more people would click on the title of this post, if it was 'Lust for Destruction'?

Say More

Some people say too much; others don't say enough.

A lot of the time, both are motivated by some type of ego protection.

I have an aversion to saying too much.  So, it is easier for me to believe it is better to not say something.

As I grow, however, I sense I need to err more on the side of saying too much, rather than not enough (it is likely that err will be involved either way).  I suspect I would have more regret over what I didn't say, than what I did say (especially, knowing my tendencies above).

It is true; each time I have done this, it has cost me something.  But, at the same time, it is also true that what I have discovered by doing so has, perhaps, been even more valuable than what I have lost.

Someone else once said something about this type of  saving / losing proposition about life....

Note to self—it is time for me to say more.

Pretend Do Not Exist

It is hard for us to heal wounds that we pretend do not exist.

-- Hillary McBride

Honesty and Hope

I've noticed...that the range represented in the last two days' posts is a reflection of the range that seems to naturally operate within me—the range between honesty (poison) and hope (restoration).  Sometimes those feel like polar opposites—that they are even at war with one another (...at the very least, incompatible).  But most of the time, that isn't how it feels to me.

Hope, for me, is muted when dishonesty exists.  We must be more honest about the state of things.  If we can't, hope has less meaning.

On the other hand, real honesty is not the end either.  In fact, it is only a means to an end.  Without an end, honesty is, well, just honesty—endearing to some; overwhelming to others.  I am naturally a hopeful person.  I believe in something bigger; I watch for it.  I am motivated by it.

From my perspective, hope is the antidote to honesty.  And, honesty makes hope real.

The more honest we are, the more hopeful we can actually be.  And, the more hopeful we can be, the more we can afford to be honest.  These two 'Hs' reflect the range of my spectrum.

God Is Restoring All Things

There was a time in the 1980s and 90s, when the response to the hypocrisies in the church was to start new, creative expressions of church—what many came to call “the emerging church movement.” My community in Philly, The Simple Way, was one of the fruits of that era. . . .

Many new movements have been born amid the remnants of the past. Fresh life can come from the compost of Christendom. I think we are poised for another great awakening. . . .

God is restoring all things. Institutions like the church are broken, just like people, and they too are being healed and redeemed. My friend Chris Haw put it this way. It’s the difference between being in a canoe and a rowboat. In a canoe, you look forward as you row, but in a rowboat, you look back as you move forward. Our way forward is behind us. . . .

Rather than throw out the traditions, I want to know and study them, find the treasures and spit out the bones.

The church needs discontentment. It is a gift to the Reign of God, but we have to use our discontentment to engage rather than to disengage. We need to be a part of repairing what’s broken rather than jumping ship. One of the pastors in my neighborhood said, “I like to think about the church like Noah’s Ark. That old boat must have stunk bad inside, but if you tried to get out, you’d drown.”

Just as we critique the worst of the church, we should also celebrate her at her best. We need to mine the fields of church history and find the treasures, the gems. We need to celebrate the best that each tradition can bring—I want the fire of the Pentecostals, the love of Scripture of the Lutherans, the political imagination of the Anabaptists, the roots of the Orthodox, the mystery of the Catholics, and the zeal of the Evangelicals.

One of the most promising things that has come out of the emerging church has been folks looking back and reclaiming the best of their traditions, seeing that it is not an either/or but a both/and—God is doing something ancient and something new. Phyllis Tickle [1934–2015] called it “hyphenated denominations”—Presby-mergence, Bapti-mergence, Luther-mergence—because what they are doing is renewing and building on what was.

-- Shane Claiborne

Religion Poisons Everything

A commenter going enigmatically by “notme” once responded to my rundown of a controversy over Scripture classes in schools:

"What has religion got to offer but War, Intolerance/hatred (of other religions and minority groups), and poverty? religion should not only be banned from classrooms but from the whole planet"

I faithfully reproduce the comment as is, grammatical warts and all, keyed in, I imagine, in the first flush of a righteous indignation.

They’re common accusations, straight out of the New Atheist playbook. Religious belief is irrational, snarling, psychologically and socially stunting. In the enduring formulation of Christopher Hitchens in God Is Not Great (2007): “Religion poisons everything.”

Christians have, after all, tortured heretics, burned witches, hoarded wealth, propped up slavery, rubber-stamped colonialism, expelled or massacred entire Jewish communities, silenced women, persecuted gay people, and moved known child molesters from parish to parish. These are not accusations; they are history.


And not only history. You don’t have to look far—probably not much farther than the murky corners of our own hearts—to see the same old ugliness cropping up today: the self-righteousness, the love of respectability and comfort, the inertia and cowardice, the militant certitude, the blindness to inconvenient truths, the fear of difference, the fear of losing power, the fear of change or challenge.

But underneath the cynicism, the absolutism, sometimes the smugness, I wonder if what I’m really hearing is...continue here.

-- Natasha Moore

But, the good news is, there is still what Miroslav Volf calls a 'thick' kind of religion.  Read the article (from the 'continue here' link above).

The Year

'Poem for the week' -- "The Year":

What can be said in New-Year rhymes,
That’s not been said a thousand times?

The new years come, the old years go,
We know we dream, we dream we know.

We rise up laughing with the light,
We lie down weeping with the night.

We hug the world until it stings,
We curse it then and sigh for wings.

We live, we love, we woo, we wed,
We wreathe our brides, we sheet our dead.

We laugh, we weep, we hope, we fear,
And that’s the burden of the year.

-- Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Restoring Wholeness

Generally, the first half of life is devoted to the cultural process—gaining one’s skills, raising a family, disciplining one’s self in a hundred different ways; the second half of life is devoted to restoring the wholeness (making holy) of life.

-- Robert A. Johnson

Vision & Dependence

As another year recedes and new one dawns, I feel mindful of a couple of things—things that, on the surface, even seem a bit divergent.

One, despite my attempts to suppress the notion, I have some awareness that there is an emerging level of anxiety within me.  I feel this mostly at the sub-conscious level; perhaps, because this is something I don't typically want to feel.  Partly as a result of 2019, I have a growing sense of more unknown ahead of me, at a variety of levels and on a number of fronts.  Several of these involve territory where I don't have direct personal experience.  Anxiety may be too strong a descriptor, but I do have a sense of more new things on the way....

Two, I also have a sense of hopeful anticipation—not unlike that which can come from a big trip somewhere I haven't traveled before.  But, I also know what these kinds of experiences often produce.  Even if they can be somewhat unnerving, at this point in my life, I am so grateful for what they bring to me.  Or, where they bring me to.

I feel more aware of this spiritually, but also physically.  And, I sense a new season emotionally.

All of this will likely necessitate kinds of practice that I am not used to; kinds that I will need to depend on to do this in a healthy way.  I'm curious what getting used to these new ways of being will look like.

Because of this dialectic, I am excited about the opportunities a new year will afford.  I am praying that God will surprise me with a kind of vision that I have not yet been able to imagine and a level of dependence I have not known before.  Above all else, whatever comes, I hope to continue to become more aware, more open, and more present to all that is around me and that somehow this will translate to something meaningful and helpful to others.

This thought keeps running through my spirit:

Goodness just cannot be stopped.  

Which pieces of all of this fit together in 2020?  We'll see!