Easter: Anointing by Resurrection

God would prove Jesus’ anointing not by vindication, but by resurrection.

-- Russell Moore, The Evangelical Temptation to Prove Ourselves

Jesus rarely confronted political power, because he knew that's not where real power is.

This Easter, we are hiking in the Havasupai region in Arizona.  While many Easters, for me, have been in the context of a church building, this one is a whole different kind of church…the cathedral of outdoors. In this church, it dawns afresh on me that real power is in what God has created — among other things, the Earth.  

If God has resurrection power, then all that is built into the created world, including all of its beauty, can certainly overcome what we do to it (in spite of how damaging that can be — we can certainly ruin things for a long time).  

I’m grateful today that resurrection power is just another marvel-form of Creator power.

One of the foundational reasons for our sense of isolation and unhappiness is that we have lost our contact with nature. 

Acknowledging the intrinsic value, beauty, and even soul of creation, elements, plants, and animals is a major paradigm shift for most Western Christians. In fact, many in the past often dismissed such thinking as animism or paganism. We limited God’s love and salvation to our own human species and then in this theology of scarcity, we did not even have enough love left to cover all of humanity! To be honest, God ended up looking quite stingy and inept—hardly “victorious,” as our Easter hymns claim.

Easter is the feast of hope. This is the feast that says God will have the last word and that God’s final judgment is resurrection. God will turn all that we maim and destroy and hurt and punish into life and beauty.

-- Richard Rohr

What About (Holy) Saturday?

What if it’s Saturday and you don’t yet know about Easter Sunday?

Easter is about hope, but first…

3 Observations & A Question

The only way to know how to do something really well is to do it a lot.

Strength is something you discover, sometimes by intent, but more often by circumstance.

You rarely can take someone somewhere you’ve never been.

Why is partisanship so often dehumanizing?

Prior 3 Observations & A Question….

Property Taxes & '24 Measles Outbreak

FASTCOMPANY

It’s not even the end of March yet, but measles cases in the United States have already surpassed the total number of measles cases in the country during all of 2023, according to new data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). 

Measles is a virus that affects the respiratory system. It is highly contagious and can kill those infected with it, especially children. 

The CDC says that even in otherwise healthy children, measles will cause serious complications in one out of about every 1,000 cases. Those complications include permanent brain damage. Additionally, those who contract measles can suffer neurological conditions including the deterioration of behavioral and intellectual capabilities a full 7 to 10 years after they’ve had the virus.

IS THERE A VACCINE FOR MEASLES?

Yes, and there has been since 1963 when the first measles vaccine was licensed for public use. The CDC estimates that since the year 2000, the measles vaccine has prevented 57 million deaths worldwide.  Continue here....

-- Michael Grothaus

Holy (Good) Friday: Dying In Order To See

The psychologists and the theologians, the poets and the mystics, assure us that impasse can be the condition for creative growth and transformation … IF the ego does not demand understanding in the name of control and predictability….  

It is only in the process of bringing the impasse to prayer, to the perspective of the God who loves us, that our society will be freed, healed, changed, brought to paradoxical new visions, and freed for nonviolent, selfless, liberating action, freed, therefore, for community on this planet earth. Death is involved here, a dying in order to see how to be and to act on behalf of God in the world.

-- Constance FitzGerald

On this otherwise awful day, Jesus showed us how to see....

We All Have Ability

We all have ability.  The difference is how we use it.

-- Stevie Wonder

The Last Repair Shop

In the spirit with which I ended last week's post, I'm starting this week's with this wonderful human (and musical) story:

I've been thinking about what we do and why do we do it.

Why we do what?, you ask.  You know, what we do.  Even if too much of what we do is more mindless than we'd like to admit, there still is a reason.

Ask yourself, what do I want to do?  It's a pretty simple, straight-forward question.  However, it doesn't take too long to confront the next question, why?

Why do I want to do that (whatever it is)?

I suspect the answer is nearly always connected in the end to another word that starts with 'w'.  Who?  Because of who I want to be.

Let's play it out a little more practically.  

As I lay in bed in the morning, I am aware of a question.  Do I really want to get out of bed this morning and work out or just stay right where I am?  I can lay there and think about it, but at some point, I have to decide whether I'm going to or not.  Typically, I end up getting closer to the answer by asking myself, do I want to work-out?  And, the answer to that question is engaged by another one.  Why? 

Why do I want to work out?  I want to get up and work out because...I want something.  I realize that I want the benefit of doing something more than the comfort of not doing it.  Like everyone else, some days I don't seem to care about all that.  But, after a while in life, I have recognized that I really do (care).  So, I get up and work out (most days anyway). 

Before it's all said-and-done, though, I invariably get tossed towards at even deeper question.  What is the benefit I want anyway?  In this case, I feel better when I work out, it is good for me, and I want to be healthy.  Why do I want to be healthy?  Well, I remind myself, I don't want to be sickly, always without energy, unable to do very much, etc. ...in essence, unable to be very much.   So, now I'm really into the third 'w', who. In essence, I'm really saying who I want to be is motivating why I do what I do.

I choose what I want to do because the benefit of doing so puts me in a better position to be who I want to be.

This, sometimes, can take a while to figure out.  But, it tends to happen over the course of one's life in one context or another.  And, as we are more aware of who we really are, a whole new kind of energy kicks in.  It propels us forward and frees us to be more and more of it.  

Generally, and beautifully, this ends up taking the shape of what we offer the world, the gift we give to it.  And, once this dance really gets going, my giving of it often turns into a kind of receiving as it engages the same mechanism in others.  In a fully flourishing state of things, it is quite a sight to behold — everyone giving and receiving, receiving and giving in return.

Like music, it becomes both the substance and the mechanism.   I think this is why I was so drawn to the documentary above.  The beauty and the power, of and for the people involved, are nearly magical in depth and scope.

I want to be like that.  I want to live like that.  I want to give like that.

LT: Effort

 Effort is what drives success, not talent.

-- Bruce Kasanoff

What's Good For Yourself

I’m wondering…why does it seem like like it is way more challenging to do what’s good for yourself, than it is not to?

Or, put it this way, why do so many things that are good for you seem to require attention and effort, while so many things that are bad for you don’t?

Maybe there is more to attention and effort than we realize — like gateways to better and richer reality.

The Bible Doesn't End With...

The Bible doesn't end with souls ascending to a disembodied heaven.  It ends with a fully embodied heaven descending to Earth.

The resurrection is the good news that God in Christ is committed to the renewal, reconciliation & resurrection of all things — and so should the Church be.

-- Rich Villodas

3 Observations & A Question

We really need to get more serious about eliminating single-use products.

Like many things in life, government is often about making adjustments for common good.

Love is a long-term thing and, therefore, requires a kind of faith.

How are you taking ownership of your mental health these days?

Prior 3 Observations & A Question….

Americans' Satisfaction With Personal Life & The State of Our Union

GALLUP - Front Page

The Dispatch

In our nation’s 246-year history, there has never been an individual who was a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump. 

-- Dick Cheney (the father of former Wyoming Republican representative Liz Cheney), released a video opposing Trump’s presidential run

Donald Trump can’t run from the facts. He can do all the name-calling he wants, but the truth is he is a con man who has been directly part of the problem we have seen over the past 40 years — where working class people have gone backward and billionaires like Donald Trump reap all the benefits….  

-- Shawn Fain, statement to CBS News

...apparently, it doesn't matter what side of the isle you're on — it all points to the same thing.

The ‘age of selfishness’ is making us sick, single, and miserable.

We are living in an age of selfishness. Many of us noticed an increase in selfish behavior during the early days of the pandemic. At the time, we may have written it off as a flash in the pan that would subside. But it hasn’t. From rudeness in grocery stores to doors closing in your face rather than being held open by a stranger, behavior at a macro level seems to have fundamentally changed. Even airline pilots are going viral for reminding passengers not to be “selfish and rude.”

Why is it that people seem to act so selfish these days? Self-centeredness has been studied for centuries by philosophers, psychologists, and everyday observers of human behavior, with times of crisis known to predispose us to increased selfish actions. And we’ve experienced a period of “permacrisis” in recent years.

Yet research shows we are wired for altruistic behavior and get significant gains from it. There is a healthy tension between selfishness and prosocial behavior (i.e. having a tendency toward generous behavior) that is crucial to understanding today’s social interactions, and conflict in general.  

Indeed, people are hardwired for both self-interest and altruism. While a fight-or-flight innate response promotes looking out for oneself in life-saving circumstances, our success as humans depends on our evolved capacity to cooperate with others. This means that there are natural constraints and limits to selfish behavior.  Continue here....

-- Talia Varley

Anxiety

Anxiety does not empty tomorrow of its troubles, but it empties it of its strength.

-- George Seaton Bowes

Tell The Truth

The historian Howard Zinn wrote, “The most revolutionary act one can engage in is […] to tell the truth.” Indeed! I think the revolutionary part of truth is that it can free us and those around us to live with greater certainty about what is real, even when it hurts, because we are no longer shackled to the energy lying requires of us. Lying demands the continuation of the lie and the amplification of the lie to keep the truth hidden.… Telling the truth creates ripples of authenticity that change the world.… 

-- Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis

Just think about how drained so many feel right now.  Could it be because of the pervasive environment of lies we are living in?  

At times, these days, don't you just want to stand up and scream, "God damn it, just tell the truth for once!"?  

Lying is sucking life out of everything.

We were taught from our earliest days not to lie.  Kids test the theory, but they know it’s bad (and most adults reinforce that).  Life can’t function well when it doesn't rest on truth. 

So, when adults do it (especially systematically), it throws the whole balance of things off...way off.

Think about the destabilization of institutions that were founded on the premise of trust — trust in their various forms of truth. Some criticism of them has been well-founded; abuse of trust has occurred.  But, just because there is some falsehood, doesn't mean there is no truth.  

The prolific rise of misinformation, however, has taken things to a whole new level.  It now feels strategic, calculated, political.  Besides its insidiousness, it’s shameful.  Without too much difficulty, we can observe some of the drivers involved when misinformation has been used before.  A favored technique of dictators (and wannabees), it is more highly effective than we would like to admit.

I still believe that truth prevails (at least in the end).  But, the refrain that nothing is true has gained a lot of traction in our social arenas.  And, this sets us up; ripe-for-the-picking for an unanticipated transference of trust...to anyone who appears strong enough to handle the problems we can't otherwise solve (a well-documented strategy, by the way —  see Hitler, Stalin, Kim Jong-un to name a few of the more recent ones.  Vladimir Putin has been staging his current strong-man role using destabilizing misinformation in Russia for decades).  

It appears that part of human authenticity is pre-disposed to trust.  We want to trust.  In fact, we need to.  So, it's pretty obvious that the object of our trust becomes a rather significant piece of this puzzle.

While the truth can sometimes have a hard edge, it serves us on our trek to true freedom because we are no longer tethered to what isn't true.  Perhaps if we were to once again reject lying long enough, we could get back to the work of aligning ourselves with and maintaining what is true — becoming re-energized by what is actually real.

I'm hoping 'Tell The Truth' kicks off a series that focuses on what and why good is a better focus than the bottomless pit we otherwise tend to so repeatedly get sucked down into.  If we can't effectively argue for what is bad about bad, perhaps we need to resurrect voices about what is good.  These days, couldn't we use a different standard for discussion anyway?

LT: Who They Lift Up

Instagram: sharonsaysso

The mark of a great leader is who they lift up, not who they put down.

-- Sharon McMahon

Affections

Ever noticed…that our affections either sustain us or tear us down?

Busyness

Busyness is the enemy of spirituality. It is essentially laziness. It is doing the easy thing instead of the hard thing. It is filling our time with our own actions instead of paying attention to God’s actions. It is taking charge.

-- Eugene Peterson

Wages & Crime

Vox

The nation has had a record drop in homicides and other categories of violent crime. The only crime that has risen in 2023 is vehicle theft. 

-- Heather Cox Richardson

Sometimes (?!?) it's helpful to get a little truth back into the picture....

3 Observations & A Question

Pick some ways that you don't want to be half-hearted.

There is what you think you’re seeing, and then there is what you actually saw.

Culturally, we seem to really like to use the term 'weaponize' these days...such a great way to start helpful conversation.

What question have you asked recently that wasn't just a ploy for an answer about which you've already concluded?

Prior 3 Observations & A Question….

On the Lighter Side: G.O.P.

On the Lighter Side:

Robert Reich

Best Way

The best way to lift one's self up is to help someone else.

-- Booker T. Washington

I’m Waiting…

I’m waiting today for something to capture my imagination to write about.  Lots of seedling ideas, but nothing particular is compelling enough of my imagination-energy today…yet.  

It's often a flow thing, sometimes catalyzed by being outdoors.

So, rather than force things, I’m waiting...perhaps for the benefits of my evening walk.

I'm, apparently, not the only one who benefits from this approach, so I'll let one do the talking today:

Depression, Tech Fatigue, and What I Found in the Mountains of Utah

...so, I ordered a t-shirt.

To Join You

Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.

-- Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Inspiring

I've noticed...that I wish I was more naturally inspiring.

Spiritual Wildness Protection Program

The desert is the spiritual wildness protection program, open to anyone willing to leave the pavement and be emptied right out, making room for God knows what is coming next.

-- Barbara Brown Taylor

3 Observations & A Question

Good is not simply the absence of bad.

Sometimes I catch myself acting like (thinking) I'm not loved.

Part of living with understanding of what another person is working with is believing that they are doing so.

How can you really be available to others, if you're not available to yourself?

Prior 3 Observations & A Question….

US Government: Dissatisfaction

GALLUP - Front Page

Let's Try Again

‘Poem for the week’ — “Let's Try Again”:

God, I come to you as I am.

It is all I have, really.
And the next one I’m conscious of
will be the same.
I can feel the way I move,
moment to moment,
without the comfort of “solutions.”

It seems wild to me now how I imagined
any once-and-for-all cure for this,
or a master plan to ensure things
will work out.
But, truth be told, that’s always been
my secret hope.

So, Lord, let’s try again.
I’m begging for a new plan.
I want a plan that is an “unplan.”
I must keep moving and planning,
trying and changing,
knitting my days together even as
they unravel.
So can we do this together?

Remind me to pray: come Lord
and quiet the worry.
I step, and you steady me.
I give, and you keep my hands open.
I act, and you fortify me with courage
to try and try and try again.

This life is uncertain, Lord,
but your love is not.
You tell the story of my life
regardless of how little I know
about how it ends, except to say,
you were there since the beginning
and you appear on every page.

-- Kate Bowler

Obsessed With This Moment

Pretend you’re more obsessed with this this moment and a little bit less with the way it ends.

-- Buddy Wakefield

Baking Bread

I've recently taken up something that could soon become a verifiable hobby — baking bread.  Still quite the novice; but, when you start watching videos of things you like to do, it's a good bad-sign that you're getting hooked.

My sons-in-law are doing it, too.  Even some co-workers are finding it something easy to both talk about...and taste together.  Which makes me wonder what all is happening here.  

Maybe there's something about it that is off-setting something else that we're all feeling in one way or another as a society.  Does baking bread feel like we're getting back to something?  Or, that we're (like some premonition) preparing for something we don't know that is coming?

When I was recently asked about this, I tapped a few things into a quick TXT by way of response.  Something about bread feels kind of primal — like you're participating in something that has been a kind of sustenance for millennia.  As if by joining something that has always been done and, thereby, connecting to it somehow.  Something feels cathartic about it.  

And, of course, there are the other elements of it — something to learn (even master), fairly easy to do, but a process that you have to, in some ways, respect.  Bread-making leans towards cooperating with you, if you cooperate with it.  It's better than the chemical versions from the store (that don't mold for weeks — is it really bread?).  And, there seems to be something a little spiritual about it (more on that later).  

Oh, yeah, and the most obvious thing is that homemade bread often tastes SO good it seems to even sooth something in our spirit.

...speaking of which, do you suppose it was accidental that Jesus referenced bread the way he did? In one of his more famous prayers, there is something both sustaining and daily about the moments that bread seems to address — not unlike the kind of dependency that we need to have with God.

It is interesting then to also note that one of Jesus' temptations involved bread.  Not to mention his claim that he is the 'bread of life'.

Whatever it's all about, I'm into it right now....

Share & Take Responsibility

Good leaders share the credit when things go well and take responsibility when things go badly.

-- Simon Sinek

Get Out of Bed

I’m wondering…about why I feel like getting out of bed some days and not others.  What is it that makes me feel like it when I do (and not when I don't)? 

Usually, when I do feel like it, it’s because there is a sense of a place for me to be.  One where I don’t primarily feel the full weight of responsibility for that place; but, I can contribute to it responsibly — where something meaningful is going on (that includes me).

I feel a sense of “there's something going on there...”that I want to be a part of.

…which led me to wonder about how I can go about my day in a way that fosters that feeling for others.

The Unitive Way

Order by itself normally wants to eliminate any disorder and diversity. Disorder by itself closes us off from any primal union, meaning, and eventually even sanity in both people and systems. Reorder, or transformation of people and systems, happens when order and disorder are understood to work together.

I see this pattern in the Bible: (1) We start with group thinking; (2) we gradually move toward individuation through experiences of chosenness, failure, and grace; (3) then there is a breakthrough to unitive consciousness by the few who are led and walk fully through those first two stages. Consider Moses, David, many prophets, Job, Mary, Mary Magdalene, Paul, and Jesus himself. We could also describe it as (1) Simple Consciousness (Order), (2) Complex Consciousness (Disorder), and (3) Non-Dual Consciousness, or “the unitive way” (Reorder).

The unitive way—or what I am calling Reorder—is utterly mysterious and unknown to people in the first Order stage, and still rather scary and threatening to people in the second Disorder stage. If we are not trained in a trust of mystery and some degree of tolerance for ambiguity and suffering, we will not proceed very far on the spiritual journey. In fact, we will often run back to Order when the going gets rough in Disorder.

Thus the biblical tradition, and Jesus in particular, praises faith more than love. Why? Because faith is that patience with mystery that allows us to negotiate the stages. As Gerald May (1940–2005) pointed out in The Dark Night of the Soul, it allows God to lead us through darkness—where God knows and we don’t. This is the only way to come to love! Love is the true goal, but faith is the process of getting there, and hope is the willingness to live without resolution or closure. They are indeed “the three things that last” (1 Corinthians 13:13).

Having faith doesn’t have to do with being perfect. It has to do with staying in relationship, “hanging in there,” holding on to union as tightly as God holds on to us. It’s not a matter of being correct but of being connected.

I once wrote in my journal while on retreat:

How good of you, God, to make truth a relationship instead of an idea. Now there is room between you and me for growth, for conversation, for exception, for the infinite understandings created by intimacy, for the possibility to give back and to give something to you—as if I could give anything back to you. You offer the possibility to undo, to please, to apologize, to change, to surrender. There’s room for stages and for suffering, for mutual passion and mutual pity. There’s room for mutual everything.

That’s the genius of the biblical tradition. Jesus offers himself as “way, truth, and life” (John 14:6), and suddenly it has all become the sharing of our person instead of any fighting over ideas.

-- Richard Rohr

Alexei Navalny

Letters from an American

4 Observations (from Others)

The ability to live well is the ability to live without so many certainties.

-- Stanley Hauerwas

The sacred task at hand is to let yourself be reclaimed by something deeper than the immediacy of struggle and pain. This something need not be identified or fixated upon, but surrendered to.

-- Pixie Lighthorse

Sometimes in the stillness of the quiet, if we listen, / We can hear the whisper in the heart / Giving strength to weakness, courage to fear, hope to despair.

-- Howard Thurman, Meditations of the Heart

Letting go gives us freedom, and freedom is the only condition for happiness. If, in our heart, we still cling to anything—anger, anxiety, or possessions—we cannot be free.

-- Thich Nhat Hanh

Prior 4 Observations (from Others).

People are living longer lives—but not healthier ones.

People are living longer lives, but not healthier ones—and there are four main reasons why.

In 1950, the average American life span was 65 years. Today, it’s more like 77.5 years—an almost 13-year gain.

But that doesn’t mean people are enjoying those bonus years. Only 85% of the average American’s life span is spent in good health, according to a June report from global financial services firm Deloitte. That means the average American can expect to spend nearly 12 years in poor health—making the gain in life span almost a wash.  Continue here....

-- Erin Prater