[Oe List ...] 1/13//2022, Progressing Spirit: Kevin G. Thew Forrester: Liturgy: Corporate Practice of Presence; Spong revisited

Thu Jan 13 07:59:14 PST 2022

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Liturgy: Corporate Practice of Presence
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|  Essay by Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D
January 13, 2022When Christians gather for liturgy; when we assemble for saying prayers, singing songs, hearing sermons; when we come together for Eucharist, it is simply assumed that we are engaging in worship. The last stanza of “An Affirmation of Faith” in the beautifully written A New Zealand Prayer Book, states: “You are our God. We worship you.” The mostly unquestioned and dominant vision of liturgy for millennia is that we gather to worship God, with kindred expressions in both Judaism and Islam. I sketch below a different, non-dual vision, reflective of the human experience of Reality in which every person is a human of Being.

Presence and Jesus
In this vision I am not speaking about presence as the presence of a god. Holy Mystery is not a reality that comes and goes. We are appreciating God as Presence. Presence is not a quality of a being but Being itself as the beating heart of existence. Theism is much too small. Being can in no way be circumscribed. Presence is a way of speaking about how Being, or Holy Mystery, is the Reality, the essence, of you, of me, and of every creature. All that exists only exists insofar as Being is its true nature, its essence.

What the story of Jesus’ baptism points to is the beginning of his realization, in biblical poetry, that his Abba is his very heart. As he meditates, shares meals, teaches, dances, converses, grieves, his realization deepens. His egoic will is being transformed into “thy will,” which means his egoic wants are becoming transfigured into the soul’s spontaneous flow of living as Holy Mystery. Day-by-day, as his own defensiveness and egoic hungers diminish (what we call kenosis), Jesus is realizing his true nature is nothing other than Being. Presence is his being. This presence is not an abstract concept, or a theological position, but a palpably direct experience of being an authentic human being whose essence is boundless love.

Softness, receptivity, non-judgment, sweetness, kindness, clarity, authentic strength, wisdom:  these are some of the qualities of love, of Being, that Jesus comes to know directly and invites his community to realize as well. Jesus’ life, his path – and the liturgy of a gathered community – is about the personal realization of the presence of Being as the truth of our nature. In this realization of presence is begun the basic healing of the human heart and the unfolding of the soul. We begin the move from guarded egos to spontaneous souls. We not only fall in love with Reality, but we also realize that our own Reality is love. Love – the practice of being with the truth of the given moment – is the path.

A Vision
What might liturgy be for a Christianity become aware that Holy Mystery, or Being, is the Reality that is always already our true nature? When God language is no longer about some separate particular entity, but utterances of persons become aware that they are humans of Being.

Anxiety about winning a god’s salvific favor has ceased to hold relevance. What matters to the human heart is the soul’s unfolding realization: her being is simply Being manifesting uniquely here and now in this beautiful fragile form. This Reality holds equally true for all creatures, great and small, sentient and insentient.

Within this vision, Jesus, like Siddhartha, is a wisdom teacher because he has personally realized this truth as his own true nature and the true nature of Reality itself. In biblical language, he experiences his Abba as his heart. Jesus’ response is of one who has fallen in love, like a child with her mother, discovering that love itself is the fabric of life regardless of circumstances.

Just as the realized Siddhartha takes on a new name – Buddha – so too does Jesus acquire a new identity in his personal realization – Christ. Both new identities, in this vision, bespeak human beings become fully aware of their own true nature, fully alive, fully human. With each – Siddhartha the Buddha and Jesus the Christ – there is the awareness that their personal realization requires tending, nurturing, struggle, practice, part of which is individual, part of which is essentially corporate.

Human realization requires the support and presence of others in our lives rooted in a similar experience and thus committed to a similar vision. And so, Siddhartha the Buddha calls together and forms his sangha, and Jesus the Christ invites his disciples into a beloved community.  The call is an invitation to experience the same realization as the teacher. Practice – both individual and corporate – will be the path and means of realization.

Liturgy, Practice, Presence
Within this vision, the “work of the people,” or liturgy, is the soul’s practice of becoming the truth of what and who we truly are. I am using the ancient word “soul” as shorthand for describing how each creature is Being present in a particular place and time. The ego, or personality, is the soul “contracted” by defenses and desires to secure the love it needs to exist; the spontaneity and freedom that is Being is blocked and mostly unconscious. The awakening of the soul is the person learning to live spontaneously as presence, their true nature.

In liturgy, we gather to discover and deepen our awareness that there is no gap between us and Holy Mystery. Drawing upon Julian of Norwich we could say that grace and peace are always in in us, because they are us, but we do not always act from that love and peace. We become lost in our blindness to our own truth. We come to liturgy battered and bruised by our own inner critics, attachments, identities, societal prejudices – by the effects of human blindness. Liturgy is where we practice together and directly experience in our practice that in truth, we are love incarnate longing to live as such. In and through our practice we are gradually being born into the freedom that is our true nature.

We gather to hear stories, sing songs, receive teachings, and be fed. Each of these, in this vision, has become a spiritual practice of presence. Liturgy – as a whole – is here re-grounded in a receptive listening flowing from the practice of meditation. Too much of corporate liturgy is busy “doing” rather than relaxed “being,” more reflective of cultural anxiety than spiritual awareness. Each authentic spiritual practice within liturgy flows from emptiness into embodiment such that it sparks curiosity, reignites the fire of soulful longing, and supports us in the gradual realization of our own Christhood. The path of Jesus is the soul’s gradual awakening to the truth that she is fully alive and thriving, become a living Christ.

I envision liturgy that ceases to be the worship of a deity. It becomes our corporate spiritual practice of realizing that to be an authentic human being is to be nothing other than the unique presence of Holy Mystery here and now. Liturgy is the consistent corporate practice of together becoming the Reality of our true nature. ~ Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D
Read online here

About the Author
Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D. is an Episcopal priest, a student of the Diamond Approach for over a decade, as well as a certified teacher of the Enneagram in the Narrative Tradition. He is the founder of the Healing Arts Center of  in Marquette, Michigan, and the author of five books, including I Have Called You Friends, Holding Beauty in My Soul’s Arms, and My Heart is a Raging Volcano of Love for You and Beyond my Wants, Beyond my Fears: The Soul’s Journey into the Heartland. Visit Kevin’s Blog: Essential Living: For The Soul’s Journey.
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Question & Answer

Q: By John

Is the Bible the final authority in Christian faith?

A: By Rev. Dr. Robin Meyers
 Dear John, For Protestants, the unspoken assumption is that yes, the Bible is the final authority in Christian Faith.  I grew up in a church tradition that took the Bible so seriously that we liked to say, Where the Bible speaks, we speak.  Where the Bible is silent, we are silent. Unfortunately, not everything that the Bible speaks about even matters anymore, nor do we consider its assumed premises to be equally moral. 

Take slavery for starters, or the second-class personhood of women.  Both are “biblical.”  Likewise with the idea that we should not speak about things the Bible doesn’t speak about—a kind of theology from silence.  That leaves out of lot of things we all believe in now, even things we cherish.  Electricity for starters, and the true manna of the church, the potluck casserole!  So, it really depends on what you mean when you use the word “authority.”  If that means infallible answers to any questions we might ask, then the Bible falls short.  But if that means the collection of stories which comprise our formative and normative Story—which, though bound by time and culture still rings true in its essence so long as it is continually reinterpreted— then yes, the Bible is “authoritative” (as opposed to the final authority). 

But we should not be looking for a Paper Pope, as the Protestant approach to scripture is often described.  Rather, we should remember that what is truly normative for our faith and life is love, and where love shines through the ages in scripture, we should celebrate it and be guided by it.  But where the Bible warps the concept of love, or even distorts it, then we should fearlessly object.  The Bible should be a signpost, not a hitching post, and we should take seriously all the other sources of truth, beauty, and wisdom in the world.  Not every sermon needs to come from the Bible, nor does every word of the Bible deserve to be preached on.  But whenever we use scripture to give authority to our preaching and teaching, our approach should always be guided by four principles:  It should be biblical responsible, intellectually honest, emotionally satisfying, and social significant.  As the United Church of Christ likes to say, “Never place a period where God has placed a comma.  God is still speaking.”   ~ Rev. Dr. Robin Meyers

Read and share online here

About the Author
Rev. Dr. Robin R. Meyers is retired senior minister of Mayflower Congregational UCC Church, Oklahoma City, Distinguished Professor of Social Justice Emeritus in the Philosophy Department at Oklahoma City University, where he still teaches.  He is 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.”  More information is at RobinMeyers.com  |

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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited

Facing the Political Realities of Institutional Church Life in the Launch of Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World

Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
November 10, 2011On November 8, 2011, my publisher, Harper-Collins, released my newest book under the title Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World.  The date of a book’s release is always a significant day in the life of an author, not unlike, I can at least imagine, the way a mother must feel when she gives birth to a baby.  This book has been a growing part of me for the last three years, but during that time I could still change it, redefine concepts, rearrange parts, clarify places of confusion, improve a sentence here and there and even re-check a fact or a text.  I still controlled this “baby’s” development.  The publication date, however, signals that those days are over and separation between the parent-creator and the independent offspring has begun.  The book now begins its own life.  People will relate to it in a variety of ways.  Some will find things in it that I did not know were there and did not even intend to be there.  The book will receive a variety of responses, many of which will say more about the responders than they do about it.  If past books are a guide, there will be expressions of appreciation from those who feel that it frees them from some of the restrictive and destructive ideas of their religious past, while others will express hostility since they will experience it as attacking their religious security.

The first questions I will face in its launch will be about my motivation in writing it.  Did I intend to upset the religious sensitivities of my critics?  Is it simply an expression of my hubris that I place myself in opposition to traditional ideas that people assume, falsely I believe, have always marked the Christian faith?  No matter how well prepared I am after years of experience as an author, it still amazes me to read the words of some reviewers and critics, who do not know me personally at all, but who will still ascribe motives of their own creation to my work.  I am reminded once again that I should never underestimate the level of biblical ignorance that marks the lives of so many people, including some who actually head up fundamentalist theological seminaries and who presume to speak for God on television and radio. So before that tide begins to come in, I thought I would introduce this book personally to my readers and recall something of its birth and growth. People might be interested in this first hand bit of background that will put this book into the context that I, as its author, have envisioned for it.

I have always had a dual career.  My calling has been to the life of a priest and my church elected me to act out that calling in the role of a bishop.  For 21 of my 45 year career I worked as a priest in cities like Durham and Tarboro, NC, and Lynchburg and Richmond, VA, and for 24 years I served as a bishop in the exciting and dynamic Diocese of Newark, which contains the suburbs of New York City west of the Hudson River in the seven northernmost counties of New Jersey.  I found my priesthood the most deeply satisfying and personally fulfilling years of my career; while my years as a bishop were the most challenging and stretching.

In both phases of that ministry, however, my life was marked with a hunger for knowledge and a deep thirst to understand and to communicate the symbols of my faith story in the language and concepts of my time in history.  Early in my career, I expanded my ministry to a teaching role at such conference centers as Kanuga in Western North Carolina and then the Chautauqua Institute in Western New York.  I spent summer vacations in places like the University of the South in Sewanee, TN, in graduate classes.  I decided later in both Lynchburg and Richmond that my particular vocation was to introduce the people in my congregation to the world of biblical scholarship.  I discovered that this knowledge when shared was generally welcomed and was received as my giving these people “permission to think” about God, the Bible and religion in ways that they somehow felt had been denied to them in the past.

When I was elected bishop, I determined that I would be a teaching bishop, available to challenge and be challenged by the people I served.  I deliberately went public in books and in lectures to open people to the theological debates of our generation.  I wanted to give the clergy who worked with me the freedom to venture beyond the boundaries behind which so often both they and their congregations hid in a kind of false safety.  To keep up with the scholarship in the field that is necessary to do this task, I did special study units at such eminent theological centers in this nation as Union Theological Seminary in New York City, Yale Divinity School in New Haven, Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge and ultimately included stints in the UK in such roles as “Scholar in Residence” in both Magdalen College and Christ Church at Oxford. I was elected Quatercentenary Scholar at Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 1992. I also read voraciously, primarily concentrating on the area of the study of scripture.  Later in my career I was elected “a fellow” in the Jesus Seminar and in 2000 was named the William Belden Noble lecturer at Harvard University. I was invited to teach at Harvard Divinity School, at both the Graduate Theological Union and the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, CA and at the Theological School of Drew University in Madison, NJ.   With one foot in the academic world and one in the institutional church, I became aware of the enormous gap that exists between the two, about which I have spoken in this column just recently.  Things that are essentially commonplace and even “old news” in the academy appear to be controversial and to create enormous tension in the congregations as well as becoming a source of great negativity and suspicion at “denominational headquarters.”

In the academy to treat the Bible literally is regarded as absurd.  In the churches, however, many people know of no other way to read scripture and their clergy actually collude in this ignorance.  Do we really think that our people still believe that a star can travel through the sky so slowly that wise men can keep up with it?  Can they still believe that God dictated the Ten Commandments when they discover three different and mutually contradictory versions of these Commandments in the Bible?  Do they think that God simply did not get them right the first time? In the church in many places Darwin and evolution are still opposed in the name of “preserving the faith.”  In academic circles evolution is the basis of biology and is assumed in the modern practice of medicine. Even when we get our flu shots we learn that the flu strains evolve from year to year to adapt to the vaccines of yesterday. In the light of what we know today about genetics and reproduction, can people still believe in the Virgin Birth as biology?  In the light of what we know about what happens to a human body within minutes after it dies, can people still think of the resurrection as the resuscitation of a deceased body after three days?  In the light of what we know about astrophysics and the size of our universe, can people still treat the story of the ascension of Jesus to return to God as a literal event?  God has not lived above the sky in the educated Western world since the days of Galileo.

Beyond these conceptual problems if people actually studied the Bible they would be well aware that these treasured books disagree with each other on very essential matters like who constituted Jesus’ twelve disciples and even on the basic details of the Easter story.  There is hardly a detail in the Easter story found in one gospel that is not contradicted in another. Church leaders, who surely must be aware of these realities, seem eager not to allow it to be shared.  Indeed, they tend to suppress this knowledge.  Perhaps this is why there is something like a conspiracy of silence going on in our churches that prevents the knowledge available in the academy from filtering through the pulpit to engage the lives of the people in the pews.  Institutional leaders, including many clergy, seem to fear that truth and scholarship might disturb the faithful and cause the institutions to decline and their revenues to drop.

These leaders, perhaps fearful of controversy, need to realize that the people who are still in our churches do not live in a vacuum and that the number of people who find little or no meaning in the way Christianity is presented is increasing.  Church leaders counter these realities with the assertion that the fundamentalist churches are growing and they offer this as a rationale for not doing the hard work of Christian scholarship.  There is a statistical germ of truth in that assertion, but who among us thinks that ignorance will finally prevail or that cultivating an ecclesiastical fortress mentality that is resistant to new knowledge will finally succeed?  Fundamentalism, in both its Catholic and its Protestant forms, is in fact increasingly ghettoized in our society today and the modern world is becoming increasingly non-religious.

I still believe that Christianity can engage the modern mind in significant dialogue if we dare to take the biblical and theological knowledge that is currently available seriously.  I believe that we ought not to seek to dodge, but to address the questions that impinge upon us daily from the world of knowledge.  I have seen this engagement bear fruit when it has been practiced.  I believe it can happen world-wide.

To be a resource in this effort is why I wrote Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World.  I want to make the knowledge available in the world of Christian scholarship equally available to the people in the pews and in a language they can understand.

The seminary I attended had these words as its motto. “Seek the truth, come whence it may, cost what it will.”  That has also been the motto of my ordained career and this book is published as a part of that same conviction.  Truth and God can never be in conflict.  If they are, either what we call truth is wrong or how we define God is wrong.  I want us to be able to look at both possibilities.~  John Shelby Spong  |

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