Good Words

Ξ August 28th, 2009 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Life |

Patience

Ξ August 27th, 2009 | → 1 Comments | ∇ Life |

Meditation is not a way of making your mind quiet. It is a way of entering into the quiet that is already there – buried under the 50,000 thoughts the average person thinks every day." – Deepak Chopra

Thank you Deepak, by way of Louis Charles

I am learning patience (and so far, I’m not doing too well). On 8/8, my wife’s birthday, I was injured in a home accident. I was mowing my rather large yard. While driving my lawn tractor, trying to mow as close as possible to the base of a mesquite tree, I wasn’t paying attention to the large low-hanging limb. I ran up under it compressing my upper body down into the seat folding me almost double. I heard a loud "CRACK". Immediately, I felt great pain in my cervical area, my right arm, and right leg. Somehow I made it back to the house. By then, my arm and leg had gone numb. My wife wanted to get me to the ER, but I convinced her I would be alright. Feeling began to return to my leg and arm within two hours. It being a Saturday, and her birthday, I convinced her I would go to our doctor on Monday. To make a long story short, I compressed the disk at C5-C6, strained/sprained the upper cervical area, irritated the nerves in the area. I have been off work for almost three weeks. I am working on PATIENCE. Never have been one to sit and do nothing. It is really hard. Hope to get back to work after the Orthopedist sees me on Friday week. Learn patience Grasshopper.

Lee Strobel Speaks

Ξ August 19th, 2009 | → 3 Comments | ∇ Life |

Lee Strobel is quoted as saying, "Many people consider it arrogant, narrow-minded and bigoted for Christians to contend that the only path to God must go through Jesus of Nazareth. In a day of religious pluralism and tolerance, this exclusivity claim is politically incorrect, a verbal slap in the face of other belief systems."

To which I answer, "Yes Lee. Yes they do………"

I Am a Believer in Exile

Ξ August 13th, 2009 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Life |

Ever since I began my journey over five years ago, I have been trying to discover who I really am, what label if any, fits me. I don’t like labels but they seem to be a accepted part of life which helps us to put things into categories. That’s how we humans are. We like to categorize things, put them in their proper place. For when we can label them and put them into a category, we feel we better understand who or what they are.

I have tried several times to describe who I am, where I’m going, each time thinking I had done a fair job. At times I believed I should only describe myself after the commencement of my journey, for I am not the person I was before it began. At other times I thought I should try to find out who I have been in reality all along the road of my life. What I have found is that I keep changing! At first, I thought this cannot be a good thing. I have to find what I’m looking for, then, when I do, take a well-deserved rest. I’ve discovered that I will probably be searching until the end of this existence. That’s fine with me. I’m good with that. It’s been a wonderful journey so far and I wouldn’t change a thing. So, I took a different tack on "who I really am" and decided to try to explain why I went on this journey and what I have become as a result of the journey.

I am a believer in exile. Claiming to be a believer in exile brings up certain questions. What do you mean by exile? What compelled me into exile? Is this a transitional state on my way to God?

1. Exile is not a voluntary state. It is forced upon one by things or circumstances beyond one’s control. A person just does not leave a denomination (faith) where he spent 59 years of his life voluntarily. He must be forced by circumstances.

2. This exile is a forced dislocation from which I will never be able to return.

3. If this exile was not voluntary, what was it that forced me there? It was a rather sudden revelation that my beliefs, my faith simply wasn’t working for me. They had lost their meaning, their power in my life. This forced me to look for answers as to why this had happened. My journey had begun.

I will always be a believer. I believe there is a God. I believe there was a man called Jesus. I think that is about all that I believe that conforms to traditional Christianity. To me, God is not the theistic, anthropomorphic, monarchial, personal deity beyond the sky, who keeps an account book on each and every one of us, so that at a later date he can judge us as to whether we belong in Heaven or Hell. It goes much deeper than that, but that’s a start. To me, Jesus was a man whose life so completely revealed the transcendent reality that I call God, that people often referred to him as "God’s son or God’s only son". I believe that Jesus was a God-presence, a powerful experience of the presence of the Ground of Being undergirding all of us at the very depths of life. The presence of God was so real in him that when I look at his life I can say that I see God in Jesus. This is only a taste, however, of the whole picture..

At present, as should be obvious, there is no place for this exile in traditional Christianity. I have defined myself theologically as a believer who lives in exile. I will continue to be an exile until traditional Christianity either does one of two things: dies a slow death as more and more followers become exiles, or makes the changes, drops the things that don’t work anymore and moves into the Post-Christian Period where followers can find real meaning to the God and the Jesus story once again, meaning that makes sense in this 21st century world in which we live. 

The revelation that I am an exile came to me while reading John S. Spong’s, "Why Christianity Must Change or Die". I am very grateful to Bishop Spong for opening my eyes and giving a label or name to what I am. In this journey I have been many things. "Believer in Exile" is a label I can live with.

*This is the third in a series of posts I have done on the exiled believer. Here are links to all of them:

Are You An Exile?

As an Exile…What to Do with Jesus

As An Exile…What to do with Jesus

Ξ August 11th, 2009 | → 2 Comments | ∇ Life |

In an earlier post "Are You An Exile?", I talked about a new vision of God that is needed for those of us "in exile".  So what do we exiles do with Jesus? What becomes of him in the new vision? That is a very important question for anyone calling themselves an exile.

In the being of Jesus we see a revelation of the"Ground of Being" (that was spoken of in the earlier post). In his life we see a revelation of the Source of Life. In his love we see a revelation of the Source of Love.These were the aspects of his life, his human presence, that made his life so awesome and so compelling that people were driven to speak about him in terms of the theistic images of antiquity. In those terms, we hear acclaimations of "Son of God", "the incarnate one", "2nd person of the Trinity".That was the only way that the Jewish Christians of the 1st century, who wrote the Bible and the later Christians of the 4th & 5th centuries who wrote the creeds could make sense out of their experience, given the frame of reference set for them by their presuppositions and their worldview. *

God is real for me, not external,  not supernatural,  not anthropomorphical, or theistic. God is rather a presence in the very depths of my life, giving me the capacity to live, to love and to be. Jesus, in his life, was our example of the alive one, the loving one, the one who had the courage to "be" himself. He was and is the life where God had been seen, and can still be seen in a human form under our own human limits. The cross shows us what one who is in touch with or at one with the source of life can be. One can give life away if he totally possesses it. It was the being of Jesus, the full humanity of Jesus, that ultimately revealed the meaning of God. It is the being of each of us, our full humanity, that will also finally connect us to the meaning of God.

Being a follower of Jesus does not require me to make literalized creedal affirmations about him or about the theistic God who supposedly invaded our world and lived among us in the person of Jesus. Neither does being a follower require that I literally believe all things spoken about him in the New Testament. It only requires me to be impowered by him to do as he did, imitating the presence of God in him by: living fully, loving wastefully, and having the courage to be all that God created me to be. It doesn’t mean that I have to turn away from life, to shun life, to make contact with the holy, because the holy is within me. It does mean that my contact with God is shown by the degree to which I can give my life, my love, and my being away to others.

I cannot truly follow (serve) this God or this Christos except by seeking to build a world in which all barriers to full humanity for every person are removed.

So is this Jesus a divine Christos? Is this a sufficient portrait of the meaning of Jesus and his life to establish continuity with the historic tradition of Christianity? For me, I believe it is. You will have to determine for yourself if this portrait is sufficient for you personally. It is not for me to say. For me, however, this portrait is the way for an exile to make it through beyond the death of theism. It is a vision, a starting place for one who feels that traditional Christianity and theism no longer holds a place of importance for him.

"I am the way, the truth, and the life" ~ John 14:6.  Perhaps Jesus could be, for you, the way into the heart of God, the Ground of Being.

*quoted from "Why Christianity Must Change or Die", by John S. Spong

~ many ideas were also from this book  

Human Judgments

Ξ August 5th, 2009 | → 1 Comments | ∇ Life |

"The tendency to turn human judgments into divine commands makes religion one of the most dangerous forces in the world."

~Georgia Harkness

A Note on Religion

Ξ August 3rd, 2009 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Life |

"Every religion is the product of the conceptual mind attempting to describe the MYSTERY."

~Ram Dass