[Oe List ...] 12/12/19, Progressing Spirit: Lauren Van Ham: Imagine That!; Spong revisited
Ellie Stock
elliestock at aol.com
Thu Dec 12 07:41:12 PST 2019
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!important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv0924999122 #yiv0924999122templateBody .yiv0924999122mcnTextContent, #yiv0924999122 #yiv0924999122templateBody .yiv0924999122mcnTextContent p{ font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv0924999122 #yiv0924999122templateFooter .yiv0924999122mcnTextContent, #yiv0924999122 #yiv0924999122templateFooter .yiv0924999122mcnTextContent p{ font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;} } What sort of change do you imagine when you hear the words, “everyone,” and, “everything”?
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Imagine That!
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| Essay by Rev. Lauren Van Ham, MA
December 12, 2019Last Spring, Greta Thunberg’s statement to the European Parliament included the phrase, “Everyone and everything needs to change.” It’s become a mantra for me: Everyone, Everything, Me, Changing.
What sort of change do you imagine when you hear the words, “everyone,” and, “everything”? To me, it sounds large. Downright Biblical. And, here is my real question: are we even able to imagine it? Probably not. Maybe some of us, for a moment? Maybe in glimpses?
At long last, there is starting to be some real recognition of what we humans have done to ourselves and the living system in which we’re intricately woven. Along with this recognition comes an assortment of responses, emotions, and agendas. Scientists, social entrepreneurs and activists are meeting the faces of those who had believed things, “weren’t so bad,” that a solution was being worked out “behind the scenes.” More and more of us now see and understand that humans surviving the climate crisis is not a guarantee, and very much up to us. This level of urgency and importance can create a froth of nervous activity, panic, hunkering down…
But there is another possibility. And the season we’re in carries instructions!
Since Summer, I have found relief in the writings of Jem Bendell, a professor of leadership from the UK, who is teaching from the awareness that societal collapse, related to climate chaos, is already happening. He calls our task at hand, “Deep Adaptation.” With others from the climate policy community, Bendell releases all previous ideas of, “sustainability,” and instead explores what kind of adaptation is possible. Different aspects of Deep Adaptation, are described using four “Rs.” Resiliency considers first how to reduce harm and not make matters worse by cutting emissions, adhering to international drawdown measures, and such. Relinquishment, describes measures for protecting ourselves in the ways we can by withdrawing from global coastlines and not building in fire zones, for example, as well as decommissioning vulnerable industrial facilities. These steps are hugely important, but it’s the next two Rs of Deep Adaptation that really get me.
In Restoration, Bendell pointedly asks how we might live and die lovingly because of the necessary changes. In what ways will we act to lovingly care for what we’ve destroyed or eroded? How will we practice restoration, in Jem’s words, “not because it will work, but because we have a faith or sense that it is the right way to be alive?”
For any of us who walk a spiritual path, for those who claim a practice of meaning-making, moving with Spirit, or living by Faith, this is what we endeavor to do…isn’t it??? In fact, as brilliant beings and co-creators in this interdependent web of life, isn’t that what we believe we are called to do?
We’ve gotten lost. Even in our efforts to affect change in some places, we’ve fallen prey in others to the seductive din of Business as Usual. It’s really hard not to, AND I believe Advent and the Solstice season remind us of who we really are and of what we are truly capable! This season is the dreamtime. When Matthew and Luke set out to tell the birth story of Jesus, their assignment was great. They needed to shake people from what had become Business as Usual; to lift us from out of its loud, limited and fear-based thinking. Does any of this sound familiar?
With enough unexpected and surprising nudges to look and listen for Spirit elsewhere, Luke and Matthew intended to help people return to a deeper truth, to more direct encounters with right ways to be alive. To do this, Matthew and Luke left historical accounts to others. They used cosmological and shamanic examples to tap something deeper in us, something filled with Creation and Divinity.
Repeatedly, angels appear to Joseph, Zechariah, Mary and the shepherds. Nearly every time the Angels begin with, “Do not be afraid” and then continue to deliver a clear message that speaks to the Deeper Knowing inside each of the listeners.[i]
The Christmas story, again and again, asks each of us to call into question the ways we have become comfortable in the scarcity and predictability of Business as Usual. Dreams, angels, bright star nights and animals awaken us with wild and Creation-infused imagery to embody our more liberated selves who can care and respond more creatively. This is good medicine for us right now. It is high time we find our way back to the cosmological perspectives and spiritual practices that will take us from our old ways of seeing while also offering the steady reassurance of, “Do not be afraid.” It is only from this space that we can imagine something different.
The fourth R in Deep Adaptation is Reconciliation. Here, Bendell references anthropologist and psychologist Jonathan Lear’s work to better understand the Crow Nation of North America. In a summary of Lear’s book, Radical Hope, Scott Duimstra of Library Journal writes,
“Lear examines the cultural collapse of…the Crow Nation. Lear begins by examining the importance of bravery, courage, and honor within the tribe’s culture and how these values were tested when the Crow were forced to abandon their warrior lifestyle and move onto a reservation. Their chief, Plenty Coups, inspired the Crow to use what Lear describes as ‘imaginative excellence’ by trying to imagine what ethical values would be needed in their new lifestyle. Plenty Coups did this with a combination of such traditional sources as dream interpretation and past ethical values, which gave the Crow an opportunity to overcome their despair and lead a meaningful life.”
Plenty Coups understood Deep Adaptation. So much was lost. Reorientation was needed multiple times in order to find meaning in the meaningless, to find willingness in the face of death and irreparable losses. Imaginative excellence, indeed! Plenty Coups, like the Gospel writers, called hard upon our other ways of knowing – dreams, rituals, signs and symbols found in the wisdom of Creation and Spirit. Part of our paralysis right now is our fear of death. It’s so real. It’s also always been true. Should the fear we harbor around our own death stymie us in our efforts to find adaptive practices for all other life to flourish in the ways it can? Of course not.
As people of faith it is our job to imagine what can be; to move from fear and limitation into creativity and care, ingenuity and trust, synchronicity and reciprocity within the living system that envelopes us. Dr. Cornel West calls on our imaginative excellence when he reminds us, “To be a Christian is to live dangerously, honestly, freely — to step in the name of love as if you may land on nothing, yet to keep on stepping because the something that sustains you no empire can give you and no empire can take away.”
The instructions of this season are fantastic preparation for the year ahead and the climate emergency timeline we must heed. Counter to ALL the ways Business as Usual has usurped this season, making much of it a self-serving disaster, we are invited to choose otherwise. Can we – will we - give ourselves the space, the permission, the courage to excellently imagine the change ahead? Each one of us is being asked to suspend everything we think we know, so that we might restore our relationship with ourselves, Creation and one another. By embracing the 4 Rs, our actions can bring about healthy soil, water and air. Our future can include thriving networks of humans who are supporting one another locally while generously, peacefully sharing best practices globally. A world that honors balance and flow with all living species and discovers its innate and divine abundance…Imagine that!~ Rev. Lauren Van Ham, MA
Read online here[i] If you are interested in learning more about the Christmas story’s origins and the intentional choices made by Gospel writers to free us from Business as Usual, I highly recommend The Liberating Birth of Jesus: A Birth Story Able to Reverse Our Planet’s Perils by Lee Van Ham (OneEarth Publishing, San Diego, CA. 2019) In the interest of transparency, the author is my Dad.About the Author
Rev. Lauren Van Ham, MA was born and raised beneath the big sky of the Midwest, she holds degrees from Carnegie Mellon University, Naropa University and The Chaplaincy Institute. Following her ordination in 1999, Lauren served as an interfaith chaplain in both healthcare (adolescent psychiatry and palliative care), and corporate settings (organizational development and employee wellness). Lauren’s passion for spirituality, art and Earth's teachings have supported her specialization in eco-ministry, grief & loss, and sacred activism. Her essay, "Way of the Eco-Chaplain," appears in the collection, Ways of the Spirit: Voices of Women; and her work with Green Sangha is featured in Renewal, a documentary celebrating the efforts of religious environmental activists from diverse faith traditions across America. Her ideas can be heard on Vennly, an app that shares perspectives from spiritual and community leaders across different backgrounds and traditions. Currently, Lauren tends her private spiritual direction and eco-chaplaincy consulting practice; and serves as guest faculty for several schools in the San Francisco Bay Area. |
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Question & Answer
Q: By Glenda
So, I have come to a point in my life where I no longer have a belief in a higher power. I was raised Southern Baptist and radiated to Methodist as an adult. After reading several of Dr. Spong’s books and essays I feel that what I had come to suspect is now true. Now I am lost, its as if there is not a Santa Claus. No being to look after me or my loved ones and perhaps no afterlife either. It’s not as if I am crushed but is it weird that I am still seeking “something”? What now? On the other hand, there is relief that there is not a God that only favors some, all the contradicting rhetoric in the Bible now doesn’t have to make sense to me. Please help.
A: By Kaitlin Curtice Dear Glenda,I believe the person asking this question has come to a really important place in life, one that many people who grew up in fundamental religious spaces perhaps don’t get to. What happens when everything falls to the side and we are left with a sort of black hole where religion once was? I came to this in my late 20s and have been struggling with it ever since, while others come to this existential sort of crisis later in life.
For example, I have found it quite comforting that the universe is far expanded outside the walls of the Baptist churches I grew up in. Instead of a patriarchal, white God who controls everything and blesses only those he deems worthy, I am enveloped by Mystery that I cannot comprehend. That gives me room to breathe a little, to ask big questions, to wonder.
The advice I would give to the person asking this question is to let grief lead, at least for a little while. We must go through the process of letting go of the childhood “container,” as Richard Rohr calls it, to see what might be on the other side. Maybe on the other side it’s just more questions, but at least we know we aren’t alone. Ask what it means to be human, and that, if there isn’t an afterlife or a divine presence, what does it mean to still be a loving, kind human anyway, who honors others, human and non-human alike? We may not know what’s ahead of us, and perhaps we cannot make sense of the past, either. What we have is this exact moment, and we can be present to it. We can marvel at the way the leaves change colors and fall, or the way ice glistens in the sunlight.
We can become childlike again, without having to succumb to our childhood religious prisons. That, at least, is something. Allowing ourselves to grieve a religion that was ours for so long will give us room to ask what’s next, and to not shame ourselves, whatever the answer may be. If we become atheists, humanists, just generally spiritual, or followers of another religion, we do it because our humanness leads us there, and there is no shame in that. If there is a God/Divine Being/Great Mystery, I’d like to think they’d be okay with our grief, lack of clarity, and wobbly legs as we find our way through this life. The best part is, we aren’t alone in the search, because if we are human, we are made for questions, for life, for seeking, for being, and for that beloved childlikeness that claims us along the way, every day.
~ Kaitlin Curtice
Read and share online here
About the Author
Kaitlin Curtice is a Native American Christian author and speaker. As an enrolled member of the Potawatomi Citizen Band and someone who has grown up in the Christian faith, Kaitlin writes on the intersection of Indigenous spirituality, faith in everyday life, and the church.
Her first book, Glory Happening: Finding the Divine in Everyday Places, was published with Paraclete Press in 2017. It is a series of fifty essays and prayers focusing on finding the sacred in everyday life. Kaitlin is currently working on her second book with Brazos Press, set to come out in 2020. It has been named by Publisher’s Weekly as a Religion and Spirituality book to watch for.
Kaitlin has contributed to OnBeing, Religion News Service, USA Today and Sojourners, among others, and she was interviewed for the New Yorker on colonization within Christian missions. In 2018 she was featured in a documentary with CBS called “Race, Religion and Resistance,” speaking on the dangers of colonized Christianity.
Kaitlin travels around the country speaking on faith and justice within the church as it relates to Indigenous peoples. She has been a featured speaker at Why Christian, Evolving Faith, Wild Goose Festival, The Festival of Faith and Writing, and more. |
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
Origins of the Bible, Part X: The Rise of the Prophetic Movement: Nathan – Prophecy's Father
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
August 15, 2008The prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures are not religious versions of Drew Pearson or Jeane Dixon. They do not predict future events. Prophets are those who are in touch with values, truth, perhaps we could call it God, and who thus see the issues of life more deeply than other people see them. Perhaps they are the ones who, by standing on the shoulders of others, can perceive future trends and speak to them before others see them developing.
We have known artists to whom prescience has been attributed. A well-known Spanish painter, for example, painted a scene several years before the Spanish Civil War that portrayed his country torn apart in a violent struggle. The Bible might well have called him prophetic. He saw what there was to be seen, but not everyone was able to see it. The power of the prophets was also derived not from the established structures of the social order, but from the prophet's vision. They were always outside the lives of either political or ecclesiastical authority. As such, they were what King Ahab called the prophet Elijah, "Troublers of Israel". The established priesthood always resented the prophets for they were not ordained or trained. They were free spirits who somehow spoke with an authority that established figures wished they possessed. The ability to speak to authority in a way that demanded the authority's attention was the signal mark of the prophetic spirit. None of this, however, answers the question of just why it was that the role of the prophet was able to rise in Israel to such heights that the religion of Israel was said to rest with equal weight on the law (the Torah) and the prophets. It all began, I believe, in a charismatic confrontation between Israel's most powerful king and a man armed only with a sense of God's righteousness. That story is told in the Second Book of Samuel and it remains powerful today.
King David lived in the biggest and tallest house in the city of Jerusalem, which meant that when he was out on his roof top he could look at the rooftops of all of Jerusalem's citizens. One afternoon when he was doing just that, he spied a beautiful woman taking a bath in what she assumed was the privacy of her own roof top. The king was smitten with her charms and at once sent a messenger to her with an invitation to visit the palace to have a tryst with her king. The woman came. Perhaps in the power equations of that world she had no choice, perhaps she wanted to come, the text doesn't tell us and so we will never know. The two of them, nonetheless, became lovers at least for this brief time. When the lovemaking was over, the woman, whose name was Bathsheba, returned to her home. I suspect this was neither the first nor the last such affair that King David had had and so he did not think much about it once the rendezvous had ended. So it was that that weeks passed and memories faded until they were newly called to mind by a message arriving at the palace directed to the king's eyes alone. The message read: "King David, I need for you to know that I am expecting your child." It was signed, Bathsheba.
When David read it, he responded in a typically male, evasive way. "You are a married woman", he said. That is the first time that we learn from the biblical source that this tryst was an adulterous relationship that the king had had with a married woman. "Why do you assume that I am the father of this baby?" To which Bathsheba responded immediately, "I am indeed a married woman, but my husband Uriah is a soldier in the king's army. He has been fighting the king's wars under Joab, the king's military leader and thus he has not been home for months. There is no doubt, O King, that you are this baby's father." Still unwilling to accept responsibility, the king decided on an alternative course of action. It was plan B. He would grant Uriah a furlough so that Uriah could then come home, enjoy the privilege of his wife's bed and then, in this pre-DNA testing world, they could say this baby came early. It would not be the first time that tactic had been employed. So this permission for leave was conveyed by a royal messenger to the field and a very surprised Uriah found himself being granted an unprecedented furlough. What King David did not anticipate, however, was that Uriah had the make-up of the "original boy scout". He was a soldier first, drunk with the camaraderie of warfare. "It would not be fair or appropriate for me to enjoy the comforts of my home and my wife while my buddies are bleeding and dying on the battlefield from which I have somehow been removed. Therefore, in solidarity with them", he concluded, "I will not enter my home on this leave." Very ostentatiously Uriah set up a pup tent on the walk beside his home and spent his entire leave there. On viewing this, David, feeling trapped, said: "What a turkey" and began to develop Plan C. Once again a sealed royal order was conveyed to Joab, the commanding officer, this time by the hand of Uriah himself. In this letter David commanded Joab to organize his army into a flying wedge and hurl it at the gates of his enemy's capital city. Uriah was to be placed at the front tip of the flying wedge, where his death was all but inevitable. It was done. Uriah was struck down and killed. Joab then notified the king that his problem was now solved. King David sent for Bathsheba and she became a member, perhaps the dominant member, of his harem. Finally, King David felt that his problem was solved.
This outrageous kingly behavior, however, did not escape the notice of a highly respected holy man whose name was Nathan. He decided that he must confront the king about the king's action. The reputation of Nathan was such that the king, unsuspecting of what was to come, granted him the audience that he requested. It must have been a strange confrontation. Here was King David in his royal chambers surrounded by all the wealth, power and opulence of royalty. Standing before him was Nathan, armed only with a sense of righteousness that is contained in what he believed was the moral law of God and the universe. When the two of them were alone Nathan said to the king that an episode of gross injustice in the king's realm had occurred and that Nathan felt compelled to bring it to the king's attention. The king encouraged Nathan to speak on. Nathan did so in terms of a parable.
A certain poor man, he told the king, had a single ewe lamb that was treated as a pet in his family. This lamb was fed from the family's table, slept in the family's home and shared in the family's love. Another man who lived nearby, Nathan continued, was very wealthy and owned great flocks of sheep. One day this rich man had a distinguished visitor that he was required by the mores of his culture to honor by entertaining him at a banquet. Instead of taking a lamb from his own flocks, however, he went to the house of his poor neighbor, took his only ewe lamb, slaughtered, dressed and roasted it and set it before his guest. The rich man and his guest dined sumptuously while the poor man and his family were grief stricken. Nathan let the pathos hang as he finished his story. David, upon hearing this tale, was filled with anger and declared: "The man who has done this thing must surely die".
Then in one of the Bible's most dramatic moments, Nathan fixed his eyes on the king and said: "Thou art the man!" The king, thought to be all powerful, had been called to answer for his deeds. No one is above the law of God, he learned. That was a lesson rare in the ancient world, indeed it was a message unique to the people of Israel. David might have been divinely chosen to be king, as the biblical story suggests, but the King of Israel still lived under the authority of the law of God and must answer for his behavior. David, to his great credit, did not banish Nathan from his presence, but heard the voice of God through the words of Nathan and publicly repented. He sought to do acts of restitution. When the child of this adulterous liaison died shortly after his birth, David and the biblical writers interpreted this death as divine punishment. Perhaps in a further act of trying to make things right, David lifted Bathsheba out of his harem and into the public role as his queen. Their second child was born a while later. His name was Solomon and he was to be the successor to David's throne and to solidify the royal line of David that was destined to last, at least the Southern Kingdom, for over 400 years until it was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586BC (BCE).
For Nathan's act of courage to be included in the Jewish Scriptures meant that this episode had entered the annals of Jewish memory. By becoming part of the sacred text of the Jewish people, it was destined to be read in worship settings over the centuries and in time to become identified as a mark of Judaism. In retrospect, Nathan was called a prophet and because of that the prophet's role in Jewish life was established. It was the duty of the prophets to speak for God in the citadels of power, to claim for God's law a place of absolute influence and to assert that there is no one in the land who was not subject to the law of God. Monarchy was not absolute in Israel from that moment on.
Nathan originated the prophetic role in Israel. He established Israel as the one nation where no one's power would be above the power of the law. This was the reality that made the Jewish nation different from all the other nations of the ancient world. Certainly it was this nation alone that was destined to produce the prophetic tradition that would become so strong that it was not "the law and the Temple" but "the law and the prophets", that would characterize this people. We will look at a number of the prophetic voices as this series on the origins of the Bible continues.~ John Shelby Spong |
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