[Oe List ...] Salmon: Reflection on Hearing the voice of God

[Rod Rippel]

Thanks Jim and Bill.  It sounds like the old Positive Thinking of Norman 
Peale (circa. WW II)
Rod Rippel

-----Original Message----- 
From: William Salmon
Sent: Sunday, August 19, 2012 12:33 PM
To: Order Ecumenical Community
Subject: [Oe List ...] Salmon: Reflection on Hearing the voice of God

Jim and others--
    On prayer, eh?
    From a perspective of Postmodern theologians, the treatment of this
topic is a crock. It is another attempt, among billions of evangelical
pseudo-scientific attempts, to explain the theological. It can't be done. So
much for the death throes of the Modern Worldview.
    The best answer ever (so far) is located in the chart of the 144's;
Prayer is "THE DOING." It is experienced as: "The Burden," The Passion,"
"The Intervention," and "The Expenditure." When we live The Awakened Life"
we discover we ARE PRAYER that is demonstrated in the DOING.
    The existential question is, what kind of prayer are we?
    Ah, well. Pissing into the winds of the past only gets our pants wet.
Everything lies in the future where the Good News is experienced: ALL IS
GOOD, the PRESENT is a gift, the PAST is fogiven/forgotten, and the FUTURE
IS OPEN. This, my friends, is prayer.
    Later!
    Bill
PS: Geez. I wonder if this isn't hearing the voice of God? Well, I'll be
damned. wes
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "James Wiegel" <jfwiegel at yahoo.com>
To: "Colleague Dialogue" <dialogue at lists.wedgeblade.net>; "Order Ecumenical
Community" <oe at lists.wedgeblade.net>
Sent: Sunday, August 19, 2012 10:02 AM
Subject: [Oe List ...] From The Week: Hearing the voice of God


> 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
>
> “One cannot live in the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s 
> morning; for what was great in the morning will be of little importance in 
> the evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become 
> a lie.” – Carl Jung
>
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