[Dialogue] From The Week: Hearing the voice of God

[Del Morril]

I really appreciated this Jann.  One of the best experiences a few years ago
was visiting the church Eileen and George have been active in, in which the
people are from all walks of life and all types of theological backgrounds,
and using an amazing variety of vocabulary to describe their experiences.
The common denominators were joy within themselves, acceptance of one
another and their great diversity, and a care for their community.  I'm sure
there were other "denominators", but these were the most evident to a
one-time visitor and observer.  Wouldn't it be nice to "view" this, and
participate in it, in most any gathering.

 

Frankly, I was rather surprised at the quick, dogmatic responses and
judgment elicited by this latest writing from The Week (which is a great
mag, if you haven't ever read it). Granted, it wasn't a ton of
correspondence, but it came to me as quite "old-fashioned". Responses that
seem to come before getting more information or even asking a simple
question or two before making such judgments, seem, to me, to be as
close-minded as the same persons probably accuse those of more conservative
religious views.  What happened to the days when we felt strongly that you
should not critique a writer until you have read through thoroughly and
tried to be in their shoes as that writer?  I guess some of us have
forgotten this. I've been learning in these past years to at least attempt
to listen for what a person is trying to say to me, rather than getting
blocked by the words used or the philosophy out of which one speaks.  Is
there a new perspective?  Is there a different slant being taken on an old
perspective? Is there an attempt to help the reader understand where someone
else is coming from, or why they have chosen the route they have taken? etc.
etc.???  Personally, I rather appreciate trying to understand just why
someone might think the way they do or act they way they act.  Maybe it's
just that I'm so much older than when I thought I knew everything!

Del

 

 

 

  _____  

From: dialogue-bounces at lists.wedgeblade.net
[mailto:dialogue-bounces at lists.wedgeblade.net] On Behalf Of LAURELCG at aol.com
Sent: Sunday, August 19, 2012 5:31 PM
To: dialogue at lists.wedgeblade.net; Oe at wedgeblade.net
Subject: Re: [Dialogue] From The Week: Hearing the voice of God

 

Thank you, Jim. What a rich report. I'd like to respond with a witness, or
sorts.

 

After Fred died (1/31/08), I decided to simplify my life by going to church
with my mother. It was not easy to return to the fundamentalist Church of
Christ that I grew up in, but it was easier than trying to juggle dropping
her off, going to the Presbyterian church where I was a member, than picking
her up.

 

I loved the a cappella singing of gospel hymns, participating in communion
weekly and the very sweet people in the congregation. I couldn't stand the
theology, but was able to tune out the sermon and either meditate or read
scripture during that time. I was listed as a visitor in the bulletin every
week for at least 3 years.

 

After Mother died in March, a friend and fellow D.Min. from University of
Creation Spirituality, came for Mother's memorial service, which was on a
Sunday afternoon. Mia, my friend, and I went to worship that morning at the
church of Christ. (We were borrowing chairs for the service at Mother's
apartment building later.) I was a little apprehensive. Mia grew up in a
wealthy Episcopalian family in Philadelphia, had never been to a
fundamentalist church. This would be very strange for her. 

 

After worship, she turned to me, her face glowing and said, "The energy here
was so sweet that I had a major breakthrough on an issue I've been
struggling with internally."

 

That wouldn't have happened if she'd pre-judged it all a "crock" because it
wasn't post-modern theology. Open your heart just a little, Wes. Go to your
own experience of deep spirituality, not some chart from 40 years ago, if
you want to understand why the Vineyard Christian Fellowship and other
congregations like it are bursting at the seams.

 

My two cents:)

 

Grace and peace,

Jann McGuire

 

In a message dated 8/19/2012 7:59:49 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time,
jfwiegel at yahoo.com writes:

Seems quite intriguing.  Has anyone read this book?

Hearing the voice of God 

When an anthropologist studied how evangelicals pray, says Jill Wolfson, she
came to a surprising realization. 

On a Sunday evening in Palo Alto, Calif., around 50 members of the Vineyard
Christian Fellowship of the Peninsula gathered in a rented room above a
popular coffee shop. Before the occasion got under way, the conversation was
a friendly and exuberant mix of the mundane and the heady: the gorgeous
weather, Christian writer C.S. Lewis, the lusciousness of the strawberries
set out as a snack, someone's car trouble, the problem of demons. Lead
pastor Alex Van Riesen, a tall, informal, open-faced man, got everyone
settled and quiet. 

"For those of you who haven't been to our church, this is the way it is,"
Van Riesen began cheerfully. "Everyone hangs outside eating, drinking
coffee, and talking. Then, when you hear the voice of God, you come inside."


There was a burst of laughter: an evangelical joke for an evangelical
Christian audience. Van Riesen then segued to the main event. "Have people
been asking you about the book?" he asked the group. "I've been getting lots
of email about it." 

The book in question, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American
Evangelical Relationship With God, is about the people in this very room. On
the makeshift stage next to Van Riesen sat its author, Tanya Luhrmann, who
spent two years studying this Vineyard church and another two years at a
Vineyard church in Chicago. She knows these believers well. 

Luhrmann attended Sunday church where members danced, swayed, cried, and
raised their hands as a sign of surrender to God. She attended weekly home
prayer groups whose members reported hearing God communicate to them
directly. She hung out, participated, took notes, recorded interviews, and
"tried to understand as an outsider how an insider to this evangelical world
was able to experience God as real and personal and intimate." Members told
her about having coffee with God, seeing angel wings, and getting God's
advice on everything from job choice to what shampoo to buy. 

After being introduced jokingly by Van Riesen as Professor Luhrmann to
people who have known her for so long as Tanya, she told the group her book
does not weigh in on the actual existence of God. Rather, her research
focuses on "theory of mind," how we conceptualize our minds and those of
others. In this case, she investigated how the practice of prayer can train
a person to hear what they determine to be God's voice. 

"I do think that if God does speak to someone, God speaks through the human
mind," she explained. "As an anthropologist, I feel I can say something
about the social, cultural, and psychological features of what that person
is experiencing. I came into this project wanting to understand the
question: How are rational, sensible, educated people able to sustain faith
in an invisible being in an environment of skepticism?" 

Luhrmann's provocative theory is that the church teaches those who pray to
use their minds differently than they do in everyday life. They begin by
holding conversations with God in their heads, modeled on the kind of chummy
conversations they'd have with their best friends. As they talk to Him, tell
Him about their problems, and imagine His wise counsel and loving response,
they are training their thoughts, much as people use weights to train their
muscles. The church encourages them to tune in to sounds, images, and
feelings that are louder or more intense or more unfamiliar or more
powerful-and to interpret these internal cues as the external voice of God. 

"I came in with a set of stereotypes of evangelicals-the kind that you'd
expect from someone in the academy," she said. "I came out with more respect
for the religious process...how private and precious the experience of God
can be for people." 

She read from her book's final chapter: "I have said that I do not presume
to know ultimate reality. But it is also true that through the process of
this journey, in my own way, I have come to know God." 

Luhrmann's work has roots deep in her intellectual and emotional past. She
describes herself as an anthropologist with one foot in psychology. She
could easily add that her other foot is in theology and both hands have a
firm grasp on philosophy. 

Her upbringing was that of a "spiritual mutt." In the book's preface and
acknowledgments, she writes that she has been thinking about God ever since
her maternal grandfather, a Baptist minister, "walked across the park with
me when I was 6 and tried to explain who he thought God was." His
daughter-Luhrmann's mother-took her children to the more free-form Unitarian
church. Luhrmann's paternal grandfather was a Christian Scientist whose
son-Luhrmann's father-became a medical doctor, a psychiatrist. The eldest of
three children, Tanya was raised in a suburban New Jersey neighborhood,
where she helped Orthodox Jewish neighbors as a shabbas goy, a gentile who
assists with activities that are restricted on the Sabbath, such as turning
on light switches. "I came from this background where I knew smart, good
people whom I loved, but who came down on very different positions on the
existence of God-not only on the yes-no dimension, but on who God was." 

As a Harvard freshman, she had thoughts about Immanuel Kant that, in many
ways, set the course of her career. She decided that the philosopher was
"cheating" when he "explained away" the irrational. "I've always been
intrigued by myths and stories and the way people construct their world.
People live in the narrative, and that is more important than their logical
sensibility in many ways. So I switched from philosophy to folklore....I was
just so curious about people and about the way they come to hold their
beliefs-even in the face of evidence to the contrary." 

An academic mentor encouraged her to pursue graduate studies at the
University of Chicago, but a chance encounter with a volume in the Harvard
bookstore sent her in a different direction. "It was a book that told you
how to be a witch," she recalls with a laugh. "I was amazed by this. You can
learn that?" 

She headed to Cambridge University for graduate studies, from whence she
could go "hang out in London with all these pagans and magicians-for the
most part educated and middle-class people-and plunge into this really batty
dissertation on modern witches." 

The goal was not to rule on the validity of magic. Luhrmann was more
interested in the magical process, in what happened in the minds of the
practitioners. "I was really taken by my observation that something does
happen. I didn't quite know how to think about it, but they experienced
something directly." 

Luhrmann did "what anthropologists do" and participated in their world by
joining their groups, reading their books, and performing rituals. For 30
minutes a day for nine months, she practiced seeing with her mind's eye,
following instructions such as: Build up in imagination a journey from your
physical plane home to your ideal room. 

What startled her was that her witchcraft self-training worked. Her internal
awareness seemed to shift; her senses felt more alive and alert. She had her
own supernatural experience: One night, after she'd done some pleasurable
and immersive reading about the early Celts, six druids appeared outside her
window and just as suddenly vanished. "Had they been there in the flesh? I
thought not," she writes in When God Talks Back, but the vivid, singular
experience led her to wonder "for many years if something about the practice
associated with magic made these supernatural experiences more common. When
I encountered the same spiritual techniques in experiential evangelical
Christianity, I was determined to find out." 

In 2007, to better understand if and how spiritual practice impacts the
mind, Luhrmann randomly divided Christian volunteers into groups: One
listened on iPods for 30 minutes a day to lectures on the Gospels, while
another participated in a more interactive, imagination-rich way, similar to
the prayer style of Vineyard members. Their recordings invited them to see,
hear, and touch God in the mind's eye, to carry on a dialogue with Jesus. 

"I found that after a month of prayer practice, people reported more vivid
mental imagery than those who listened to the lectures," she says. "They
used mental imagery more readily and had somewhat better perceptual
attention, and they reported more unusual sensory experience. In short, they
attended to their inner experience more seriously, and that altered how real
that experience became for them." 

The night before Luhrmann appeared at the Vineyard congregation, she read
and answered questions at a Bay Area bookstore. She traced the modern
history of the evangelical movement from its hippie, Jesus-freak roots of
the 1960s to its current, mostly conservative, mostly middle-class state.
She talked about the people whose stories give the book its narrative pull,
people whose faith proved more complex than she had imagined. 

This was an entirely different crowd. A couple of atheists ranted about how
people who talk to God must be nuts. Another person in the audience, a
little more measured, wanted Luhrmann to address the impact that
conservative evangelicals are having on the country's political landscape. 

It is not a small impact. Of the many baby boomers who once stopped going to
churches, half have returned to religious practices, but not to the
mainstream services of their childhood. They have flocked to churches
similar to the Vineyard. A recent study found that nearly 40 percent of
Americans said that the main reason they practice religion was "to forge a
personal relationship with God." Some call this movement the country's
fourth Great Awakening-a reference to other eras in American history in
which religious fervor shaped the national agenda. 

While Luhrmann intentionally avoided politics in the book, it comes up in
interviews and reviews, as readers and critics wonder if the author "ever
engaged her subjects in a lively conversation about gay marriage or
evolution." Her answer is that conservative evangelicals and secular
liberals are at such odds politically because they think about life very
differently. If political progressives really want to stop scratching their
heads over why evangelicals get so upset about same-sex marriage and
health-care reform, they need to understand how evangelicals think about
God. 

"Secular liberals want to create the social conditions that allow everyday
people, behaving the way ordinary people behave, to have fewer bad
outcomes," she says. "When evangelicals vote, they think more immediately
about what kind of person they are trying to become-what humans could and
should be, rather than who they are. From this perspective, the problem with
government is that it steps in when people fall short." 

Hanging out with believers-whom she found "smarter and more varied than many
liberals realize"-has given her some insight that could double as political
advice. "If Democrats want to reach more evangelical voters, they should use
a political language that evangelicals can hear. They should talk about the
kind of people we are aiming to be and about the transformational journey
that any choice will take us on." 

Reprinted with permission from Stanford magazine, published by Stanford
Alumni Association, Stanford University. 



- Sent from The Week iPad edition - 
All You Need To Know About Everything That Matters 
Download the app and try The Week for free:
http://iTunes.com/apps/theweekmagazineus 


Jim Wiegel
Jfwiegel at yahoo.com

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