[Dialogue] [Oe List ...] 7/11/19, Progressing Spirit: Brandan Robertson: All The World A Thin Place; Spong revisited

[James Wiegel]

Thanks Ellie. We are listening to Braiding Sweetgrass. Recommended by Nancy Lanphear.  Same themes, more poetic

With respect, 
Jim Wiegel

> On Jul 11, 2019, at 9:58 AM, Ellie Stock via OE <oe at lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote:
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> All The World A Thin Place: 
> An Urgent Call for Eco-Theology
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> Essay by Rev. Brandan Robertson
> July 11, 2019
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> The Celtic tradition has a concept called “thin spaces”, geographical locations where the veil between heaven and earth, the world we live in and the realm of the Divine, seems to be remarkably thin. I suspect that all of us have experienced such a place at least once in our lives- maybe it was a place of pilgrimage that we journeyed to over a great distance, longing to lay our eyes on this sacred place. Perhaps we wandered into a thin place without realizing it and we were mesmerized by the power and beauty we found pulsating around us. Whatever the case, when we arrive in a thin space we, like Moses, feel like we must take off our shoes and stand in awe at the glory of the place.
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> Also, within the Celtic tradition, and most other indigenous spiritual traditions, is a belief that has become known as panentheism, the idea that the Divine impregnates every molecule of the Universe. Every person, every plant, every buzzing bee, and every drop of water is a channel through which the Divine is manifesting its Presence. There is nowhere we can go where our Creator is not. As the Jewish Psalmist wrote, “If I ascend to heavens you are there, if I descend to the depths you are there, if I rise on the wings of the dawn, even there you will find me.” At the heart of every major religious tradition there is a call to humility and wonder at the ordinary world that we live in, because there is a recognition of the Divine in and through all things.
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> These two concepts, thin spaces and panentheism, which were once so essential to the spiritual understanding of humanity, all but disappeared during the modern era. Those who managed to hold on to religious faith seemed to revert to a mythic belief system that saw the Divine as a personified deity outside of this world, looking down on us with judgement, and occasionally interjecting the affairs of the world at his whim.  This image of God caused us to begin to long for an escape from this present world, and a desire to go to whatever physical world that God resided on. It allowed us to begin to see our world as less than sacred, and we developed a posture of consumerism towards the created world- this world was given to us to consume, to use, to dominate, and to decimate, because we would one day be leaving it behind.
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>  Since the emergence of this theistic notion of God, our planet has been assaulted and nearly destroyed, largely by ideologies that have at their core the idea that our life is intended for another world, or that we will have a second chance somewhere else. God isn’t around, but is far away, and is calling us to leave this earth to be in his presence. So, we have exploited and pillaged our planet, we have innovated and found ways to make ourselves more powerful, elevating humanity to a God-like status, able to control, manipulate, and transform the elements for our own hedonistic desires. We desired full dominion over every aspect of planet earth, and by tapping in to our own divine potential, we have done quite well at establishing such dominion.
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> The problem is the world that we are dominating, exploiting, and pillaging, as Fr. Richard Rohr often says, is the first incarnation of the Divine. Though we have placed blinders over our collective eyes, refusing to acknowledge the Divine presence in every centimeter of the created world, we none the less have been abusing and murdering God. This, of course, is not a new concept. At the heart of the Christian story is the narrative of God appearing in the form of a human being, who is grotesquely murdered at the hands of humanity who believed they knew how to see and be in the world better than the one who created it. And because God has granted us will over our lives and world, God will allow humanity to choose whatever path we desire. If we desire to crucify our Creator, the Creator will tragically allow us that choice. 
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> Since the Industrial Era we have indeed chosen to crucify our Creator. But in doing so, we are crucifying our own ability to survive. There is no life apart from the Source of Life. Every nail that we have pressed into the fragile skin of our Creator, through our unsustainable, human-centered industrial endeavors, has likewise been a nail pressed into our own collective body. Every time we have chosen to dominate and control the planet, rather than living in mutuality with it, we have been tightening the noose around our own neck, threatening to cut off our own ability to live, move, and have our being.
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> We’ve been dashing towards the line of death with each passing century, ignoring the warnings that our Creator has been giving us through the Book of Nature. And now we’ve finally reached the threshold where we have the option to resist the consequences of our own actions. aWe can begin the long, costly process of repentance to bring healing to the world, or we can step across the finish line, ensuring our own destruction and the destruction of the world as we have known it. The situation is really, truly that dire.
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> Astonishingly, we seem to be choosing death. The warning flares continued to be shot into the air, but instead of heeding them and making changes for our survival, we are sitting in our skyscrapers watching them as if they are fireworks, toasting to our own destruction. The most powerful and destructive nations in the world continue to choose their own pleasure and self-interest, rather than scaling back the practices and commodities they enjoy, thus saving the world. Most of us continue to walk through our days living as if destruction is just a far-off fantasy that could never actually come upon us. If there was ever a time for anxiety and panic among the masses, this is it.  The Creation is breathing its last breath, it’s crying out from the cross of our own making, asking us, “Why have you forsaken me?” And we, like the centurions of old, are turning our heads and covering our ears.
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> Many people will read this and desire to jump to the hope of resurrection. We want to grab onto an optimistic perspective that humanity will eventually wake up, or that God will somehow step in and reverse our course. But that isn’t the way the world works. I do believe that our planet will eventually heal itself and return to its full health and glory, but I believe that may very well come after humanity has become extinct. Humans have only been on the planet for a brief moment- the earth existed for billions of years before we appeared on the scene. And millions of species of living organisms have come and gone over the history of our planet. We must not allow our humanistic ideology blind us to the fact that we are but one more organism that can easily come and go in the history of this beautiful blue planet.
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> God will be resurrected. The planet will heal. Our choice to kill and destroy the incarnation of God will only harm ourselves. Our Creator will overcome. Life will continue. But it may well continue without human involvement. That seems to be the trajectory that we are heading.
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> How can we change course? How can we ensure our survival? I believe we must first start by returning to the wisdom of our ancestors who lived in worshipful relationship to the Created World. We must begin to acknowledge the presence of the Divine in every leaf, every ant, and every person. We must begin to live in loving, sacrificial relationship with God in Creation, allowing the world to sustain us as we seek to sustain it. We need to return to a synergistic relationship to God, giving back to the Divine Life as much as we receive. We need to begin to see all the world as a thin place, realizing that the realm of the Divine isn’t somewhere off in the cosmos, but is here on the ball of dirt and glory.  
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> The subconscious spiritual beliefs of any and every culture are an indicator of the likely actions that such a people will take. In our consumeristic, capitalistic Western culture, our subconscious beliefs tell us that we are the center and pinnacle of Creation, that our innovative capacities will continue to enable us to survive regardless of circumstances. But in the words of Jesus, these beliefs lead us down the wide road to destruction and many are walking upon it. The narrow road that leads to life calls us to challenge these subconscious beliefs, challenge the systems that we have created that pillage and exploit Creation, and be willing to point our innovative capacities towards devolving technologically and returning to simpler, more natural ways of being in the world.
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> But again- in order for any significant change to occur, our beliefs must be changed. And it is one of the primary roles of institutions of religion to call society out of its position of complacency and into a posture of true repentance- that is, metanoia, the expanding of our minds. We must call humanity out of mythic consciousness that sees God as some Being out in the cosmos who will at last step in and save the day, and into an integrated view of Reality that sees God in our midst, around us, through us, and as us. We must, with urgency, call our communities to tear off our blinders and take a hard look at the destruction that is looming over our species, and then act in accordance to our spiritual traditions to enter into a right relationship with the Divine once again.
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>  “The End is Near” was once a catchphrase of right-wing fundamentalist preachers. Today, it must become a rallying cry for all who care about the future of humanity and the future of our planet. The end is in fact near, but we still have the opportunity to reverse our course. The end is in fact near, but a new beginning is still within the realm of possibility for humanity. One of the primary keys towards changing course and saving our world is going to come when we once again begin to locate the Divine in the midst of all that is, seen and unseen. Salvation will come when we embrace the wisdom of our Celtic spiritual forerunners who saw all the world as a thin place, who located heaven in the midst of here and now, and who saw this world and everything in it as pierced through with the Divine.
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> May all people of faith heed these warnings, turn from our arrogance, and open our souls and lives towards a renewed kind of relationship with the Divine, in and through this sacred ball of blue and green.
> ~ Rev. Brandan Robertson
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> Read online here
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> About the Author
> Rev. Brandan Robertson is a noted spiritual thought-leader, contemplative activist, and commentator, working at the intersections of spirituality, sexuality, and social renewal and the author of Nomad: A Spirituality For Travelling Light and writes regularly for Patheos, Beliefnet, and The Huffington Post. He has published countless articles in respected outlets such as TIME, NBC, The Washington Post, Religion News Service, and Dallas Morning News. As sought out commentator of faith, culture, and public life, he is a regular contributor to national media outlets and has been interviewed by outlets such as MSNBC, NPR, SiriusXM, TIME Magazine, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Associated Press.
> Question & Answer
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> Q: By A Reader
> Is God a Palestinian/Brazilian/Chilean/Russian/Khazak/…woman too?
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> A: By Christena Cleveland
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> This question was posed in immediate response to my assertion that God is a black woman.
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> Before we scurry on to other metaphors for the Divine, it is important to recognize how our theological imaginations have been poisoned and impeded by anti-blackness. Because we associate the Divine with whiteness and “light”, it is difficult for us to embrace God in black skin, especially God in black female skin. Black women, who exist near the bottom of the racial-gender hierarchy, are saddled with both the “foolishness/weakness of women” and “dirtiness of black people” prejudices. In fact, Malcolm X famously said, “The most disrespected person in America is the black woman.” As a result, black women are perceived as wholly unholy; unfit to represent God much less be God.
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> God as a black woman violates our expectations. Due to our conditioning, we expect God to be white and male. Social psychology research on expectations teaches us that when we encounter someone who violates our expectations, we feel threatened. In one study[1], participants interacted with a White or Latinx partner who described their family background as either high or low in socioeconomic status (SES). The researchers’ theorized that people are conditioned to expect white people to come from high SES backgrounds and Latinx people to come from low SES backgrounds. They predicted that when participants interacted with someone who violated those expectations, they would feel threatened and experience higher cardiovascular reactivity. Indeed, their hypothesis was correct. Participants who were paired with a relatively wealthy Latinx partner or a relatively poor White partner showed much higher levels of threat and cardiovascular reactivity than those who were paired with partners who met their expectations. 
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> This social psychology insight is key to helping us dismantle the anti-black misogyny that infects our theological imaginations. For all of us who have been conditioned by anti-blackness and misogyny, the invitation is to linger with– rather than rid ourselves of- the discomfort, threat, and cardiovascular reactivity that God as a black woman might pose. 
> ~ Christena Cleveland
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> Read and share online here
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> About the Author
> Christena Cleveland Ph.D. is a social psychologist, public theologian, author, and activist. She is the founder and director of the recently-launched Center for Justice + Renewal, a non-profit dedicated to helping justice advocates sharpen their understanding of the social realities that maintain injustice while also stimulating the soul’s enormous capacity to resist and transform those realities. Committed to leading both in scholarly settings and in the public square, Christena writes regularly, speaks widely, and consults with organizations.
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> Dr. Cleveland holds a Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of California Santa Barbara as well as an honorary doctorate from the Virginia Theological Seminary. She integrates psychology, theology, and art to stimulate our spiritual imaginations. An award-winning researcher and author, Christena has held faculty positions at several institutions of higher education — most recently at Duke University’s Divinity School, where she led a research team investigating self-compassion as a buffer to racial stress. She is currently working on her third book which examines the relationship among race, gender, and cultural perceptions of the Divine. Dr. Cleveland is based in North Carolina where she lives with her spouse, Jim.
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> [1] Mendes, WB; Blascovich, J; Hunter SB; Lickel, B & Jost, JT (2007). Threatened by the unexpected: physiological responses during social interactions with expectancy-violating partners. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92, 698-716.
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> Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
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> The Fifth Fundamental: The Second Coming
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> Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
> October 31, 2007
> The last of the Five Fundamentals claimed by American Protestant Traditionalists as the irreducible essence of Christianity has to do with the second coming of Jesus. To modern ears it is the most bizarre of the five and is based, I believe, on a misunderstanding of the Christ experience that was later literalized. However, that misunderstanding has found a place in the gospels themselves, and so the distortion echoes through the ages. This fifth fundamental stated that Christians are required to believe that Jesus will return to the earth in a bodily form on the last day for two purposes. He will come, first to inaugurate the Kingdom of God and second to carry out the final judgment. This ancient concept involved pictorial images of Jesus coming physically out of the sky, which made sense only in a pre-Copernican world. It forces contemporary believers to affirm the literalness of a place called heaven, where great and eternal rewards are handed out and of a place called hell where great and eternal punishment must be endured. It also implies that the “Day of Judgment” has to be regarded as an event that will occur inside history at the end of time. For most modern people all of these concepts fall somewhere in between gobbledygook and complete non-sense. That is at least part of the reason why there is in our time a rush into secularism and why our modern world produces popular books espousing atheism. Yet, the fact remains that even in this generation those who predict the specific date for the second coming of Jesus still get media attention – though maybe only the kind of attention that one gives to the theater of the absurd. Occasionally, some person will actually claim that they are in fact the Jesus who will come again. The last one of these to gain major attention in the media was from Texas – enough said. Devotees of the second coming quote the Bible literally to justify their convictions. Perhaps we ought to start by looking at these biblical ideas.
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> Apocalypticism, or concern with the end of the world, is indeed a note found first in the Hebrew Scriptures and later in Paul and the gospels. Apocalypticism appears to enter this tradition as a sign of the decline of hope among the Jewish people that their vindication would ever occur inside history. That despair was born after the Assyrians conquered the Northern Kingdom of Israel in 721 B.C.E. That defeat for the Jews dispersed the citizens of the Northern Kingdom into the DNA pools of the Middle East, never to be isolated, identified or heard of again. These people are referred to today as The Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.” The Assyrians also reduced the last remaining Jewish state called Judah to vassal status and inaugurated a policy of collecting tribute, which left the Jews in poverty and allowed hopelessness to become their daily bread.
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> It was out of that hopelessness that the Jews began both to dream of God’s restoration and to envision exactly what would occur at the end of history when the Kingdom of God would be established. Apocalypticism also fed the messianic dreams of the Jews, for one aspect of the messiah who would come, was that he would reestablish the Jewish nation, restore the Jewish throne and usher in the Kingdom of God at the end of time.
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> These hopes grew in direct proportion to the rise of Jewish despair. After vassalage to the Assyrians, the Kingdom of Judah was defeated and destroyed by the new power of the Middle East, the Babylonians. This time Judah tried to hold out against this foe, fighting a brilliant defensive battle for two years before the walls around Jerusalem were breached and the victorious Babylonians poured in. The city was laid to waste, the Temple destroyed and all the able bodied citizens were deported to exile in Babylon never to see their holy land again. Some two generations later, the Persians overran the Babylonians and let the captive people finally return to their homeland, where they discovered that the nation of Judah was little more than a rock pile and that Jerusalem was so crippled that it would never again inspire grand dreams. In that climate apocalyptic thinking thrived. Someday messiah will come, they said, and draw history to a close. Messiah will usher in the Kingdom of God, judge the people of the world and begin the time after time and beyond history when God’s will is done “on earth as in heaven.”
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> It was not long, however, before the Persians were overrun by the Macedonians and the Jews became again a conquered province now in the empire of Alexander the Great. Upon Alexander’s death, the Jewish state became a pawn between the Syrians and the Egyptians until Rome’s might once again united that part of the world under Roman domination. So when the Jews looked at history they saw it only as an arena of their constant victimization. In response they created apocalyptic fantasies that anticipated the end of the world. In that alone they found both comfort and hope. The promised one, they said, would descend out of the sky at the end of time and usher in the new age of peace under the dominance of these oppressed people.
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> Many definitions floated around the idea of messiah in Jewish circles. He would be the Son of David, and thus the heir to David’s throne. He would be the new Moses and the new Elijah, the Son of Man and even the Son of God. Much of the gospel material in the New Testament was designed, not to describe things Jesus actually said and did, but to attach various images to him in order to demonstrate his claim to be the messiah. They believed that when messiah came he would be recognized because the signs of the kingdom would be the marks of his life: the blind would see, the deaf hear, the lame walk and the mute sing. When Jesus was identified by his disciples as the messiah all of these images were attached to his memory. When Matthew attributed to him the parable of the Judgment in which the sheep and the goats were separated and dispatched, one to eternal life, the other to outer darkness, messianic thinking was clearly operative.
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> Messiah would come out of the sky because that is where God lived. The “City of God” would descend out of heaven; living water would flow from above when the Kingdom dawned. All of these images assumed a three-tiered universe with heaven, the abode of God, just above the sky. Christianity’s incarnational language reflected that mentality. Jesus was the human form of God above, entering human history through a miraculous virgin birth. His life was filled with Godlike acts and people said that he was destined to return to the God above the sky through the miracle of a cosmic ascension. Those were the interpretive symbols used to tell the Christ story.
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> Interestingly enough, however, these traditional story lines do not appear to be original to Christianity. The Virgin birth, for example, did not enter the Christian tradition until the 9th decade. Paul who wrote between 50-64 had clearly never heard of it. Neither had Mark, the first gospel, written in the early years of the 8th decade. The story of Jesus’ ascension, as something separate from the resurrection, is a 10th decade addition to the Christian story and try as we may, we find no evidence of miracles being associated with Jesus until the 8th decade. Something occurred, an experience that cannot be described, causing the disciples to identify Jesus with that promised messiah and immediately these “end of the world” images were wrapped around him, It quickly became obvious, however, that neither the life nor the death of Jesus had established the Kingdom of God. So echoes in the teaching of Jesus appeared suggesting that he would come again to complete the messianic task before “this generation has passed away.” He was called the “first fruits of the Kingdom of God.” A crisis developed in the church at Thessalonica when Jesus did not return immediately and Paul had to address this anxiety in his first Epistle to the Thessalonians. Two thousand years have now passed and the Kingdom has not yet dawned. Increasingly most people just assume that this was a misunderstanding that got incorporated into Jesus. In Luke’s gospel and in his second volume that we call the book of Acts, it begins to look like the hope for the second coming has already been replaced by the idea that the church has the universal mission to convert the world. Some have suggested that the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost was really the second coming and that the church, presumably born in that Pentecost experience, was now the “Body of Christ.”
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> That idea transforms the second coming symbol somewhat. Others have said that Christ’s second coming is in the lives of his faithful disciples, our commitment to live the Christ life. These explanations may be helpful to some but they are not to me. Neither are they to those almost to be pitied people, who fail to live now because they spend their lives getting ready to welcome Jesus in his second coming. All of the apocalyptic language, out of which talk of a second coming of Jesus arises, is mythological language expressing hope that is not bound by the pain of this world. It was never meant to be literalized. The classical fundamentalists, who wrote the Five Fundamentals of Christianity, are thus not the true interpreters of the Christ story but the ones, who by literalizing the interpretive myths have actually falsified the Christ experience so totally that 21st century people find it increasingly difficult to call themselves Christian.
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> So our analysis of the Five Fundamentals of Christianity is now complete. Every single one of them is intellectually bankrupt in the light of modern knowledge. The Bible is not the inerrant word of God. The Virgin Birth has nothing to do with biology. The idea of substitutionary atonement is a barbaric idea that makes God an ogre, Jesus a victim and you and me the guilt-ridden causes of Jesus’ death. The resurrection of Jesus is not a physical, bodily resuscitation. The second coming is nothing more than a mythological way to express the human yearning for fulfillment. It has nothing to do with an event that might occur in time. So what is Christianity all about if none of these “fundamentals” are literally true? That will be my topic next week.
> ~  John Shelby Spong
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