[Dialogue] 4/06/2023, Progressing Spirit: Rev Matt Syrdal: Conversation Therapy; Spong revisited

Ellie Stock elliestock at aol.com
Thu Apr 6 06:45:43 PDT 2023 

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!important;padding-bottom:9px !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv7560758419 .yiv7560758419mcnTextContent, #yiv7560758419 .yiv7560758419mcnBoxedTextContentColumn{padding-right:18px !important;padding-left:18px !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv7560758419 .yiv7560758419mcnImageCardLeftImageContent, #yiv7560758419 .yiv7560758419mcnImageCardRightImageContent{padding-right:18px !important;padding-bottom:0 !important;padding-left:18px !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv7560758419 .yiv7560758419mcpreview-image-uploader{display:none !important;width:100% !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv7560758419 h1{font-size:22px !important;line-height:125% !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv7560758419 h2{font-size:20px !important;line-height:125% !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv7560758419 h3{font-size:18px !important;line-height:125% !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv7560758419 h4{font-size:16px !important;line-height:150% !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv7560758419 .yiv7560758419mcnBoxedTextContentContainer .yiv7560758419mcnTextContent, #yiv7560758419 .yiv7560758419mcnBoxedTextContentContainer .yiv7560758419mcnTextContent p{font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv7560758419 #yiv7560758419templatePreheader{display:block !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv7560758419 #yiv7560758419templatePreheader .yiv7560758419mcnTextContent, #yiv7560758419 #yiv7560758419templatePreheader .yiv7560758419mcnTextContent p{font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv7560758419 #yiv7560758419templateHeader .yiv7560758419mcnTextContent, #yiv7560758419 #yiv7560758419templateHeader .yiv7560758419mcnTextContent p{font-size:16px !important;line-height:150% !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv7560758419 #yiv7560758419templateBody .yiv7560758419mcnTextContent, #yiv7560758419 #yiv7560758419templateBody .yiv7560758419mcnTextContent p{font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv7560758419 #yiv7560758419templateFooter .yiv7560758419mcnTextContent, #yiv7560758419 #yiv7560758419templateFooter .yiv7560758419mcnTextContent p{font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;}} By Rev. Matt Syrdal  
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Conversation Therapy
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|  Essay by Rev. Matt Syrdal
April 6, 2023

I have been thinking about the nature of language recently and its relationship to both consciousness and culture. This season of Lent, one of the things I decided to fast from was listening to public radio. My “experiment,” if I can call it that, has been what happens when I am selective and intentional about what I choose to listen to? Call it curiosity. I wanted to know, does language matter? More importantly, does our understanding of what language really is matter?The origins of our alphabet and the written word can be traced back to the birth of oral language rooted in the phenomenological ground of the nature and consciousness. Even our contemporary word “text,” which has been lifted from the page and digitized by the screen, comes from the Latin textus, meaning “texture” in the old sense of the weave patterned into cloth. In this sense, even the land is a “text” in the sense of textured sounds, scents, beings and intelligences—worlds interweaving worlds.Our written language itself is comprised of glyphs, primordial visual symbols of animals and landforms from oral Earth-based cultures. David Abram in The Spell of the Sensuous writes persuasively of the phenomenological origins of language (including the written word) co-arising within the context of human relationship to the land over the span of millennia. Arising in a polymorphic conversation of textures and senses, sounds and movements, animals, landforms, shapes that took on the forms of human vocalic sounds, and eventually abstract glyphs that adorned rocks and cave walls.The basic idea is that all phenomena, all sensations and experiences, all consciousness — whether human or more than human — all language, culture, and religion, co-arise in conversation with the whole, not from one individual part. The Whole is the great unseen weave, the context, the texture… the text.It has been said that words make worlds. And if this is true, that what we say and how we say it matters. If this is true, language is sacred. For in its origins language would be the Self-expression, not just of the human species—but of the world itself.John’s prologue to his mystical gospel opens with “In the beginning was the Word.” Not only do words make worlds, then, but the World makes words. “In the beginning was the Speaking,” is closer to the original Latin translation of Logos, that was Sermo before it was replaced for theological and political reasons by Verbum, which came to dominate Christian theology according to a fascinating journal article from Vigiliae Christianae in 1977 titled, “Sermo: Reopening the Conversation on Translating Jn 1,1” by Marjorie O’ Rourke. It is worth the read. She opens with, “In the beginning was the conversation, not the word.”Conversation. The ancestry of this word comes through the Latin, weaving up through the Old French meaning, “living among,” also “familiarity,” and “intimacy.” In other words “conversation” communicates a deep sense of kin-ship, of likeness but difference. If you wanted to break it down into con or com which means “together” and versare, which means “to turn,” you start to grasp an intentional “turning together,” a weaving together into or toward something greater.It seems to me that we are on the cusp of a massive tectonic revolution in worldview in the Western world — what American physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn called a “paradigm shift.” We see an interdisciplinary paradigm shift happening across diverse fields of science from biology to cosmology and philosophy, from psychology to theology. A new understanding of intelligence and communication is becoming evidenced at all levels of existence, from the microcosm to the macrocosm. Like trees in the forest communicating in their own language through roots and mycelial networks like the nervous system of the human body, we are beginning to develop a systems understanding of identity, and an ecological view of “selfhood”. What I believe is happening in Western culture today is a shift from a “conversion worldview” to a “conversational worldview”. Let me try to explain.“Conversion” is a four-letter word in some circles and rightly so. Funny, it is only two letters removed from a “conversation.” Apparently two little letters can make all the difference. Conversio originally means “turned about.” It comes from epistrepho in the gospels, “to turn” as of a person turning under their own volition and agency back toward God. In the healthy meaning of the word conversion, God, the great Mystery, is the Reality at the center of life that we turn towards. We all need a true conversion of the heart and life in this sense. In English the term became specialized and binary in its religious usage with the sense of the “turning of sinners to God.” Interestingly, in the field of advertising and marketing today the word conversion refers to an online advertising performance metric representing a visitor performing whatever the intended result of an ad is defined to be. If I as a company can get you to buy what I am selling, that is called a conversion.When we make the self the center, our particular beliefs, our western worldview, our church or doctrine, conversion becomes about shaping others into our own image. It is toxic when it becomes homogeneous and inauthentic. We have inherited this “conversion therapy” model through centuries of colonization, forced education of indigenous communities, violence and suppression. But nature’s model, a living ecosystem for example, knows no hierarchy, it knows no ranking—it is not homogenous. It only knows what is ultimately good for the thriving of the whole under constantly changing conditions.A conversion worldview simply sees that the “other” is wrong, maladaptive, or different and needs to be fixed. A conversation worldview by contrast understands that there is a third something, a mystery to be explored together of which we are an integral part. A conversion worldview cannot escape the binary prison of its own dualistic presuppositions: there are only two parties, two warring sides, bad guys and good guys, black and white, right and wrong, good and evil, us and them. A conversational worldview is dynamic and open, a developmental process of evolutionary unfolding and species interdependence.Conversion therapy is the hallmark of a corporatized, commodified world in which human beings are seen as individual units that need to be changed, controlled, broken down into specialized “markets” based on socio-economic ranking and purchasing habits. For thousands of years humans have been progressively stripped from the living tissue of an animate and mysterious cosmos, from hunters and gatherers in tune with the speech of the land, to agriculturalists needing to domesticate the wild world with the written word for survival, to producers that can spin a story and weave an appetite for more stuff, to… consumers.Perhaps the natural world provides the best blueprint for human development, mature spirituality and healthy culture. Uprooted from nature, conservatives and liberals alike continue to war with each other seeking to convert allies to their cause, reinforcing the split between humanity and the animate world. And we are all largely unconscious of the myths which we collectively draw upon to feed our insatiable desires. The same distorted myths and unconscious ideologies that gave birth to religious fundamentalisms of all kinds is the operative, unseen force behind Empire, colonialism, and the culture wars today.Poet David Whyte speaks in the vein of the bards, Earth-based Celts and Hebrew prophets, psalmists, shamans, saints and mystics about the “conversational” nature of reality. The conversational is what emerges “in the frontier between where your boundaries end and ‘the Other’ begins… you enter into a conversation with the world.”Perhaps it is time to learn to let go of the modern fantasy that there is a vantage point “out there” from which to address the prevailing dilemmas and crises facing these times in which we live. A conversational view of reality includes the senses and embodied experience, language and shared story in community, it includes the emotions and intuitions, dreams and the deep imagination, each thread woven through the ecosystem itself, “braided” together into one continuous fabric of meaning, communication, and life—one whole.I remember lazy Saturdays as a young boy exploring the woods behind my home with awe, reverence, and untamed curiosity. I believe young children intuitively experience the world this way, and we too can re-member the world in this way. Like trees in a forest, a whole underground communication system of roots and entangled mycelia, there is a deep and ancient intelligence—an ecological resilience—that a conversational worldview can offer us today. Paul’s theology of the body, reinforces a non-hierarchical kin-ship resilience like the author of Ecclesiastes 4, “a cord of three strands is not easily broken.” Like a Celtic wedding knot, we humans are to be wed to the divine and to Earth in order to become whole. Then, only then, can we truly turn together toward the repair of the world.~ Rev. Matt Syrdal
Read online here

About the Author
Matthew Syrdal, M.Div., is a pastor in the Denver area, a visionary, founder of Church of Lost Walls, and co-founder of Seminary of the Wild. Matt has begun a new venture called Mythic Christ, a mystery school and podcast for awakening mythic imagination and ritual embodiment. Matt speaks at conferences and guides immersive nature-based experiences around the country and his mentoring and coaching practice as a certified Wild Mind nature-based human development guide through the Animas Valley Institute. His work weaves in myth, archetype, dreams, deep imagery, and ceremony in nature as a way for people to enter into conversation with the storied world of which they are a part. Matt’s passion is guiding others in discovering “treasure hidden in the field” of their deepest lives, cultivating deep wholeness and re-enchantment of the natural world to apprentice fully and dangerously to the kingdom of god.  |

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Question & Answer

 
Q: By Roy

About the miracles in the Gospels
The miracles in the Gospels, where Jesus healed people who were sick, can they be taken literally or if not can they be interpreted and understood as ways of been kind towards those who are ill?

A: By Rev. Dr. Robin Meyers
 Dear Roy,Your question has been asked countless times by people who struggle with the relationship between what is true and what really happened. 

In the time of Jesus, illness was thought to be caused by either the sin of the person who was ill or by demon possession.  Nobody knew anything about pathogens, or about cancer, or about mental illness in those days.  So, if you were going to cure someone, they needed to believe that you had the power to exorcize the demons that were causing their illness, or to restore their mental health by pronouncing you worthy and loved by God. 

So, if the healing stories are about the power of restoring wholeness and worthiness then they can be taken literally.  If they are about miraculous physical changes, then some might not take those stories literally.  Even so, we know the power of prayer and the psychosomatic dimension of healing.  Not believing that a blind person could suddenly see, or that a paralyzed person could suddenly jump up and walk is not the same thing as discounting the power of someone like Jesus to restore health in other ways to human being who had lost all hope.  He would always say, “Your faith has made you well.”  That is, wholeness is not just outwardly physical, but is also inwardly spiritual.  There is more than one way to be healed, and the miraculous is not to be confused with the magical.  In the end, we may not be made perfect, but love can make us whole.   ~ Rev. Dr. Robin Meyers
Read and share online here

About the Author
Rev. Dr. Robin Meyers is pastor of First Congregational Church UCC, Norman, Oklahoma, and retired senior minister of Mayflower Congregational UCC church, Oklahoma City.  He is currently a Professor of Public Speaking and Distinguished Professor of Social Justice Emeritus in the Philosophy Department at Oklahoma City University.  He is a fellow of the Westar Institute and the author of eight books on religion and American culture, the most recent of which is, Saving God from Religion:  A Minister’s Search for Faith in a Skeptical Age.  A feature-length documentary chronicles his work on behalf of Progressive Christianity in Oklahoma (americanhereticsthefilm.com) and more information is at RobinMeyers.com  |

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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited


Part X Matthew: The Story of the Magi and Their Gifts

Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
December 25, 2013The wise men from Matthew’s birth story have been deeply attached to our Christmas celebration, stretching all the way back to the time that Matthew introduced them in the middle years of the ninth decade of the Common Era. They are instantly recognized mounted on their camels and appearing in our Christmas cards, our decorated store windows, advertisements and our Christmas pageants. In our developing mythology they have even been given names: Casper, Melchior and Balthazar.These magi have even been interpreted as universal symbols representing the various races in the human family: Caucasians, Africans and Asians. Carols have been written about them, the words of which we know by heart. Many of us have played the role of one of the wise men in a pageant and we sang his verse of the familiar hymn. So deeply are these characters embedded in the life of our culture that few of us are aware that outside of Matthew’s gospel, they are never mentioned anywhere else in the entire New Testament. Only in Matthew’s birth narrative do the wise men have any existence. Furthermore, when we go to that single biblical source where Matthew introduces them, we discover, sometimes to our amazement, that nowhere in that text is there any mention of the fact that the wise men were three in number and nowhere in Matthew’s story does it say that camels were their means of transportation. Both the number three and the camels appear to have been placed into the tradition by human imagination!That should be enough data to cause us to look more critically at this familiar biblical story and to ask whether there is anything other than mythology operating in Matthew’s tale of the magi. If we conclude that the magi are mythological characters and not people who ever lived in history, then we need to ask: “What do they mean?” Those are the issues that I want to examine in this column as our series on Matthew’s gospel continues.First, we need to be aware that cosmic signs accompanying a human birth are always both interpretive and mythological. The stars in the heavens are physical bodies that operate according to the laws of nature. To treat the stars as if they can reveal events in human history or even discern the tides of the future is nothing more than uninformed superstition. Yet, it has long been a human passion as the popularity of astrology shows, but interpreting human history by studying the stars in little more than nonsense.Second, the assumption that the birth of Jesus was or could have been announced by a special star requires the definition of stars as lanterns hung in the sky by the deity who lived just beyond the sky. People in biblical times had no concept of space or of the vast distances in the universe. Copernicus would not be born for another 1600 years. In the mind of a first century human being the idea that a star could appear to announce an earthly event was as simple as imagining that the God, who was thought to live above the sky, could simply hang out a new lantern in the heavenly abode to announce whatever God wished to announce.Third, but in a similar manner, the idea that a star could travel across the sky so slowly that wise men could keep up with it, was as simple to understand as imagining that God, or one of God’s angels, could pull that star across the floor of heaven, which would be the roof of the world, to whatever destination God wished. Once we human beings learned what stars really are and the nature of the distances in space, the literalized reading of the story of the wise men is no longer intellectually credible. Given these advances in knowledge it is easy to see why first Copernicus and later Galileo were so threatening to the way people believed in the 17th century.A fourth problem becomes evident when we embrace the distances that separate the stars from the earth and understand that light travels at the approximate rate of 186,000 miles per second. This means that the light of the star that we see from our vantage point on this planet earth was actually emitted at a time in the distant past and it is only now reaching the point where we can see it. So, if God had wanted to announce the birth of Jesus with a star emitting light for us to see, God would have had to create that star millions of years before the birth of Jesus for its light to reach our eyes in the year 4 BCE, which is our best guess as to the time of Jesus’ birth. For these reasons treating this narrative literally is not an option for our generation, which in turn causes us to wonder if that was what the original author of this story actually had in mind. I suspect that the man we call Matthew would have been both surprised and chagrined to discover how later generations would literalize his story.Significant internal evidence from the first gospel reveals that Matthew was a Jewish scribe, the head of a synagogue and one deeply familiar with the Jewish scriptures. The books the Jews call “The Latter Prophets,” (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the Book of the Twelve, the books from Hosea to Malachi), were regularly read in rotation along with the Torah in the synagogue on every Sabbath of the year. After the crucifixion and before the time the followers of Jesus were expelled from the synagogue, local disciples of Jesus would then relate those readings to the life of Jesus. That is what synagogue preaching was all about. The story of the star in the east, the journey of the wise men and even the gifts that they brought were all born, I would suggest, in a sermon delivered by a follower of Jesus based on a text from a reading in Isaiah. Turn with me now to Isaiah 60 and watch the symbols in Matthew’s story of the wise men parade slowly before our eyes.The Isaiah 60 text says “Kings shall come to the brightness of God’s rising.” It was easy to transform “the brightness of God’s rising” into a star in the east. The East was the direction of mystery and fear for the Jewish people. To their west was the known Mediterranean Sea. Danger tended to come from the unknown East. Matthew’s text describes the wise men as magi or astrologers, not as kings. It was, I now believe, the originating text of Isaiah that turned them in our imagination into kings, enabling us to sing “We Three Kings” without fear of contradiction.This text from Isaiah says that these kings will come on camels. That is the place where camels entered the wise men story, since they are not found in Matthew. We begin to recognize that even in our current understanding it was the Isaiah text that created the story. Next, guess what these kings in Isaiah 60 brought to the “brightness of God’s rising?” It was gold and frankincense. Does that not sound slightly familiar? Those, however, who are committed to a literal reading of the Bible, immediately raise the question: “Where is the myrrh?” Getting only two out of three correct in regard to the gifts brought by the wise men, they argue, is not conclusive. Ah, but if one really knows how the Jews would read Isaiah, the myrrh is present in this text, although not overtly. Isaiah says that these kings will come from Sheba. Sheba was a land near current day Yemen, from which, according to the book of Kings, another royal figure, “The Queen of Sheba,” came to pay homage to another king of the Jews. Here we learn that she brought to King Solomon truckloads of spices. This is the source from which the myrrh entered Matthew’s story. Myrrh was the best known spice in the Middle East. It was derived from a sweet smelling resin of a small native tree. The Jews used myrrh first as a deodorant and then it became identified with death. This came about because the Jews did not embalm their dead; they simply wrapped the body in a cloth sheet or shroud into which they placed large amounts of myrrh, since its sweet smell drowned out the odors of death and decay. Now we have all of the elements that Matthew put together to create this segment of his birth narrative. Kings on camels come to the “brightness of God’s rising,” bringing gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh. The wise men were never meant to be understood as figures of history, they were rather dramatic characters born in Matthew’s familiarity with the Jewish scriptures.Over the years, those gifts of the magi were further defined once again as symbols, primarily by Christian preaching. Gold became a gift appropriate for a king and was used to define Jesus’ kingship. Frankincense became a gift offered to a deity and thus pointed to Jesus’ divinity. Myrrh became the symbol of death and presaged the crucifixion by which Matthew would assert that the ultimate meaning of Jesus was fully revealed, since it would be through Jesus’ death that the message of his life would most clearly be seen.Matthew knew what he was doing. He was a student of the Jewish scriptures. He understood the Jewish use of Midrash, by which the stories of the past were wrapped around people and events in the present to discern the workings of the Divine. The Jewish congregation for which Matthew’s gospel was written would also have understood the way he built his story. It was only when the Christian Church had left its Jewish roots and become a Gentile movement that literalism crept into the biblical text. Gentiles simply did not know or understand the Jewish scriptures and how a Jewish author would have used them to tell the Christ story. Gentile ignorance is the ultimate reason that Christians began to think that the gospels were history. Biblical fundamentalism is the direct result of a Gentile misunderstanding of Jewish scripture.One other symbolic theme lay behind Matthew’s story of the wise men. They were strangers from the east, which means that they were Gentiles, not Jews. The star signified that the birth of Jesus had cosmic significance. Its rays did not stop at the boundaries of the Jewish nation. They were seen all over the world and their symbolic purpose was to draw the whole world into the worship of this Jesus, who was God’s revelation to Jew and Gentile alike. Matthew used the birth narrative to draw the Gentiles into the story of Jesus. With that established, Matthew is ready to tell the story of Jesus. We will follow it as this series unfolds.~  John Shelby Spong  |

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