[Oe List ...] 3/10/2022, Progressing Spirit: Rev. Fran Pratt: Anchoring Peace; Spong revisited

[Ellie Stock]

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Anchoring Peace
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|  Essay by Rev. Fran Pratt
March 10, 2022

I write this to you, my Progressive Christian siblings, on a Monday morning during the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I had written an entirely different article to submit, but I find myself following a different direction. Together, we are feeling such dismay over this newest war, and finding ourselves provoked to worry, fear, anxiety; aware of the very real threat of global consequences. We pray for an end to the conflict, the safety of the Ukrainian people, and peace on the European continent. Hopefully by the time this article is published we will have a better idea of how things will progress, and outcomes will be favorable.

But. Regardless of what happens, if we are to be of any influence and help to the world, we Progressive Christians must be and become people of deep peace and profound prayer. We must situate ourselves so firmly in the Spirit that we are unshakably peaceful - spiritual powerhouse rooted in the solid ground of God. This begins in our inner terrain, with our practice, our discipline, and our identity.

We have had two years of pandemic in which to practice peace amidst chaos the likes of which most of us have never experienced. If we have not begun a spiritual practice of cultivating inner peace and anchoring it into the world, it’s not too late to begin. Now is the moment to begin again. We are the ones responsible for our inner resources, our connectedness to the Center, our awareness of our True Self, which is, as Saint Paul writes, “hidden with Christ in God".

I want to call our collective attention to the words of Christ as recorded in John 20. Recall the story: Christ has been crucified and entombed. Mary Magdalene approaches the tomb and discovers it is empty, followed by Peter who then goes away with some other disciples. Mary remains, weeping. There Mary is the first to whom Christ reveals himself. That evening the disciples have locked themselves into a room, terrified of the Temple authorities. After all, their teacher has just been brutally and publicly murdered by the state. They are justifiably afraid for their lives as people who were known to follow the now-disgraced Jesus.

Suddenly, despite their security precautions, Jesus appears in their midst! And then he does/says three baffling and profound things:
    
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His first words to them in the midst of their terror and caution are “Peace be with you.” He says this twice! (John 20:19-21)
 
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He breathes on them! And with the breath he conveys God’s spirit upon them with the words, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” (John 20:22)
 
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He shares with them the spiritual power of forgiveness! “If you forgive anyone’s sins, they are forgiven. If you retain anyone’s sins, they are retained.” (John 20:23)
 
 For me, this is one of the most powerful moments in all of the gospels, alongside the Beatitudes in its importance. Jesus is teaching us how to live here, how to navigate the most stressful of times, how to be God-reflections inside of earth’s chaos. Here Jesus wakes the disciples, and us, up to the power we hold and can wield in the world if we discipline ourselves to do it.

With every breath, we remember the Spirit of God within us, our inherent divinity and access to the Center of Peace. We are commissioned by Christ to speak and be peace in the world, anchoring the Peace of Christ wherever we are. And we are empowered with the ultimate de-escalation tactic, the weapon to end all weapons, the antidote to every offense, the medicine for every world ailment: forgiveness.

Forgiveness doesn’t mean we immediately try to change people or circumstances, although that is often the result when forgiveness is applied. Nor does it mean we’re apathetic and do nothing. It means we accept people and circumstances as they are and love them anyway. It means we stop resisting what’s happening and instead face it head on, speaking peace to it, ceasing to resent it for being what it is, deflating our urge to punish it. We do all this even as we take reasonable measures to prevent harm, retribution, and violence.

Forgiveness is Love’s most powerful tool, but it takes considerable strength to wield. It’s only accessible to us once we’ve come past our ego to tap into a deeper power, the power of Spirit. And, poignantly for us today, forgiveness is the only path to following Christ’s mandate to love our enemies.

If we are Christ-followers (or any kind of spiritual people at all), this is what we are: Peace-speakers. Holy Spirit emissaries. Forgiveness experts.

But these skills don’t always come easily - at least not until we are fully in the flow of Divine Love. Most of us have layers of trauma to muddle through, bad thought habits, ego hangups, and fear for these temporal bodies of ours. So we have to practice going deep within, past the body into the soul, into the center where God dwells, taking our nets with us so that we can drag the peace, spiritual fortitude and expansive forgiveness we so desperately need up to the surface. We have to practice peace. We have to train ourselves to become peaceful. We have to constantly place reminders before ourselves of who we are and what our work is in this world.

So, even when the world is burning, we too are burning as beacons of peace, constantly refueling our inner flame by way of our connection to Spirit. Even when rush and tumult are knocking at our doors, we are inside creating spaces of clarity and calm trust. Even when chaos, greed and division are launching bombs and rhetoric, passing unjust laws, and targeting our vulnerable siblings; we are sowing seeds of peace. We are coming behind sweeping up the detritus of war and composting it for our gardens. Because we forgive everything for happening, we encourage it to transform from death to life.

No one can do it for you. No one can make you peaceful. You’ll have to embrace Christ’s words yourself and turn them into action, into daily practice. No pastor or guru or external authority can turn off your inner TV. It’s all on you.

The good news is the peace, spiritual power, and forgiveness resources are there for you. For us all. To turn inward, breathe in, and take hold of. So, if you haven’t already, let today be the day you sit yourself down in some quiet place and breathe in the Holy Spirit. Let now be when you dedicate yourself to learning contemplative prayer, or meditation, or Visio Divina, or mantra, or some other practice that carries you inward to the truth of yourself. Let this moment be the beginning of the end of your resentments. Start now so that you are well-resourced and well-practiced at anchoring peace into whatever ground you’re occupying. (If you need a place to start, I offer my Litany For An Anxious Moment as a jumping-in point.)

This war, this climate emergency, this pandemic, this personal crisis, this health scare - whatever it is, it is the Contemplative’s time to shine with brilliant inner light. Teilhard de Chardin reminded us that we are spiritual beings having a human experience, and that means that this whole thing is our training ground for being who we truly are. So, back to the words of Christ we go. Back to spiritual practice. Back to cultivating inner peace so that it has a chance to reverberate throughout the world by way of our thoughts, words, actions, and influence. This whole life is our prayer, if we let it be.

With love, peace, and blessings,

~ Rev. Fran Pratt

Read online here

About the Author
Rev. Fran Pratt is a pastor, writer, musician, and mystic. Making meaningful and beautiful liturgy to be spoken, practiced, and sung, is at the heart of her creative drive. Fran authored a book of congregational litanies, and regularly creates and shares modern liturgy on her website and Patreon. Her prayers are prayed in churches of various sizes and traditions across the globe. She writes, speaks, and consults on melding ancient and new liturgical streams in faith and worship. Fran is Pastor of Worship and Liturgy at Peace of Christ Church in Round Rock, Texas.  |

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Question & Answer

 

Q: By James

John Shelby Spong wrote about a “non theistic” view of God. How do you understand this view and can those who have lived with a view of a personal God find satisfaction in such an approach? Do most progressives come to the non theistic view? 


A: By Dr. Carl Krieg
 
Thank you James for your question, which has been, and today still is, also my question.

Being brought up as a young child, there was always the assumption in my family that God was a loving, caring God, with whom you could speak and relate to in a personal way. This theistic assumption carried right on into my time at Union Theological Seminary in NYC, where we were always referring to God doing this and doing that, not only in biblical times, but in today’s world as well. We all realized, as do you and I now, that God was not up in the sky, far, far away, but there was no answer as to where s/he was. Tillich talked about God as the Ground of Being, or Being-Itself. In a short essay, Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality, he laid the groundwork [no pun intended] for one type of what is called panentheism, the idea that God somehow inheres in the universe, but is different from it. I struggled with Tillich, and was never quite convinced that he succeeded in his attempt to bring Person and Being together. 

There are other ways to think about God. Deism, for example, views God as a creator who did his magic and left for another universe to take a nap. Never sure what such a God was good for. Pantheism asserts that everything is God. But, then, what’s the difference? And so we come back to panentheism, which appears in different contexts. Some believe that God is the consciousness of the universe, manifest of late in human consciousness. This allows for God to be everywhere, but nowhere in particular. Energy is another panentheistic candidate, since energy is everywhere. But… a loving energy field? Sounds like a stretch. A candidate of late has come from string theory, a modern understanding of reality that posits tiny “strings” of vibrating energy that are the building blocks of everything. The mathematics involved require at a minimum that there be 11 dimensions, 7 more than the 3 we are accustomed to dealing with, plus time. The idea is that God could be hiding in one of these dimensions, everywhere, unseen, but very active. 

How God is both person and loving, as well as Being, I have concluded, is a mystery beyond comprehension. Theology needs to make more room for mystery, just as science does, all the time. Why is there a universe? It’s a mystery. How is particle entanglement possible? Mystery. What was before the Big Bang? On and on. The heart of the Christian faith is also a mystery: that in some manner beyond comprehension, Jesus, crucified, dead, and buried, was - not resuscitated, an old body brought back to life - but resurrected, living again but in a new way that was and is totally incomprehensible. So, in one sense, the essence of theism lives on. We may no longer assert a divine providence wherein a supernatural being controls events or performs miracles or sends punishment for evil deeds. But we do have a God with whom we can relate, who is loving, who surrounds and upholds us, who is a God both personal and cosmic. A mystery, but no less true for being that mystery.

~ Dr. Carl Krieg

Read and share online here

About the Author
Dr. Carl Krieg received his BA from Dartmouth College, MDiv from Union Theological Seminary in NYC and PhD from the University of Chicago Divinity School. He is the author of What to Believe? the Questions of Christian Faith and The Void and the Vision. As professor and pastor, Dr. Krieg has taught innumerable classes and led many discussion groups. He lives with his wife Margaret in Norwich, VT.
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited


"Think Different - Accept Uncertainty"
Part IV: Expanding the Bankruptcy of Theism

Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
February 16, 2012
Before proceeding with this series, I want to return to my theme of last week and examine the concept of theism more closely.  In so doing, I run the risk of repetition, but so crucial is this idea in the development of this series that I am willing to do that in order to make sure that the ground has been laid for a deeper and more significant examination of why the predominant theistic definition of God is mortally wounded and how we must find a way to transcend its limits, while holding open the possibility that the God beyond theism can still be perceived as real.

It was a German theologian named Paul Tillich who first opened for me the possibility that God was not a being, supernatural in power, dwelling somewhere beyond the sky and ready to come to us with intervening miraculous power.  To say it differently, Tillich was the thinker who first made me realize that “theism” was no longer a definition of God with which I could live.  That insight was expanded by reading a book entitled Night, by Elie Wiesel.  Wiesel, a teenage Jewish boy, sent by the Nazi regime to the death camps of Adolf Hitler, was parted from his mother at the prison entrance, when Elie and his father were sent in one direction, while his mother and all other women were sent in another.  He would never see her again.  Somehow Wiesel was destined to survive that horror.  Shortly before that war’s conclusion, he watched his father die. Even the presence of the light at the end of the tunnel was not enough to overcome what his father’s body had suffered.  Elie Wiesel was thus the sole survivor in his family, but that survival left him a changed man.  For Wiesel hope had died, faith in God had died and meaning was in tatters.  In the sacred scriptures of his people he had read the story of Moses and the Exodus.  His Bible asserted that in the past God had come to the aid of God’s people.  God had pounded the Egyptians with multiple plagues until they agreed to set the Jewish people free from their bondage.  God had aided their escape, these scriptures proclaimed, by splitting the waters of the Red Sea, so that the Jews could pass through on dry land while the Egyptians all drowned.  In the wilderness God had fed these people with bread from heaven, and had brought water for them out of the rock at Meribah.  This was a God who saw, who intervened with supernatural power, a God who cared.  That was, however, not the Holocaust experience so Wiesel asked: “Where was this God now? Had God abandoned God’s people?  Was it possible that God had died?  Was his God nothing but a figment of his imagination?”  His spiritual crisis was real.

In Wiesel’s mind the equation was simple.  If God was real and had the power to intervene to stop the Holocaust, but had declined to do so, then God was both responsible and morally culpable. Such a God would be a malevolent demon, not an object of worship.  If God did not have the power to intervene then God must be impotent.  Having a malevolent God or an impotent God is worse than having no God at all.  That was the dilemma that the concept of a theistic deity raised for Wiesel and indeed for everyone else.  That is why the human mind has over the centuries felt compelled to justify the ways of God to human minds.  The traditional idea of an intervening God equipped with supernatural power collided head on with the idea of God’s goodness.  You could not have both.  The claims we made for God paled before the enormity of the evil inflicted on the Jews by the Nazis.  The inevitable conclusions were clear.  Either there was no God or the definition we had of God was woefully inadequate.  Wiesel was plunged into the dark night of the soul, and so were many citizens of the Western World.

The theistic understanding of God had been badly weakened earlier by the expansion of human knowledge.  By the time of the Nazi horror in the first half of the twentieth century, we were well past the writings of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo, 16th and 17th century figures, who had in effect rendered homeless the theistic God.  The idea that the skies were empty and the universe was infinite was the conclusion toward which these early astronomers were headed.  The suggestion that there was an all-seeing deity who kept us as the apple of the divine eye or a deity who numbered the hairs of our heads, or even a God “unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hid” became quite problematic. The Christian Church tried to fight back against this heavenly emptiness by putting Galileo on trial and convicting him of heresy.  Because of his age and infirmity, however and perhaps also aided by the fact that he had a daughter who was a nun, he was not burned at the stake.  Instead he agreed to recant publicly and never again to publish any thoughts contrary to the church’s faith.  He was sentenced to live under house arrest for the balance of his days.  The church in that era, so drunk with its own power, believed that if someone disagreed with the church’s version of the truth they had to be wrong.  That had been the working principle behind the Inquisition. New ideas, they had to learn, cannot be repressed simply because they are inconvenient to established truth.  In 1991 the Vatican officially announced that they now believed that Galileo was correct.  This was decades past the beginning of space travel.  Galileo was right indeed and the theistic understanding of God that Galileo challenged began its slow but inevitable decline.

It did not get better for the theistic deity with the work of Isaac Newton in the latter half of the 17thy century.  It appeared to Newton and his followers that the universe operated with immutable, natural laws.  A capricious deity could not set these laws aside to answer prayers, to send rain, to turn the direction of a hurricane, to stop an earthquake, to cure a sickness, to end a war, or even to counter human atrocities. The religious voices, fettered to a theistic past, found their explanations sounding more like comic relief than serious conviction.  All of the things we once assumed to be the actions of the theistic deity were now explained without appeal to that deity at all.  Increasingly the world had no need for the theistic God hypothesis.  The theistic God had thus become virtually unemployed.  The theistic deity was given a pink slip and retired.

Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed this God to be dead as long ago as the 19th century.  In the1960’s the “God is Dead” theologians, a group of leading Christian academics, added their voices to the despairing state of theological understanding. We are today increasingly living in a post-Christian world and more and more people become convinced almost daily that they can no longer sing the theistic God’s song in the 21st century that all of us now inhabit.  If people can not accept this exploding knowledge that has served to call all theistic presuppositions into question, they become defensive and hide behind the irrational and easily dismissed authority claims like being the possessors of either an infallible Pope or an inerrant Bible.  If people do embrace the world of new knowledge, they find no room in their lives for the theistic God ideas of the past. They are today leaving the unthinking religious institutions in droves, abandoning the faith of their fathers and mothers to the dustbins of history.

It was into that world that Paul Tillich began to seek a new definition of God.  Perhaps God is not a being.  Perhaps we have created the theistic God in our image, not the other way around.  Perhaps we can discover a transcendent dimension in life by looking at being itself.  Perhaps it is life that is holy, flowing as it does through every living creature, as it has journeyed from single cells, which first defined life about 3.8 billion years ago, to the self-conscious complexity that human beings now illustrate.  Among these self-conscious ones there has always been a yearning to transcend all limits, to engage the meaning of life, to probe the potential of love and to seek oneness with something that is beyond our grasp.  Is this ‘God’ not still present hiding behind the theistic categories that are now dying? Can we not let theism die without destroying the human yearning for the divine?  It is only the death of theism not the death of God that fuels our current religious despair. 

Suppose, however, that we look again and see that there is something beyond our separateness that calls us into oneness, that there is something beyond our self-consciousness that invites us into a universal consciousness, and that there is something beyond our limits that encourages us to step beyond all human limitations. Can we not then begin to define this God non-theistically?  Instead of searching for God as a being who dwells beyond the sky, Tillich suggested that we turn inward and search for the God who is the Ground of being, the Source of life and the Source of love.  Is my life then part of the life that is God?  Is my love a manifestation of a love that emanates from God?  Is my being related to and grounded in the being of God? Is our mystical yearning a delusion or a pointer toward a new reality?

A new door is surely opening for our exploration.  We tremble at the door.  If we dare to walk through it, we must leave behind almost all of the religious symbols by which we have been nurtured in the past.  We will, we fear, become “secular humanists.”  If on the other hand, we refuse to walk through that door, we must spend our time defending our dying religious past with increasing hysteria.  We become fundamentalists, traditionalists or pre-Vatican II Catholics.

If the only alternative to theism is atheism, that will be the result.  I propose something quite different.  My expectations are that we will find a new understanding of what it means to be human and in that process discover a mystical oneness that can and will relate us to that which is eternal.  It is that goal which beckons me to begin this journey that will inevitably take us out of the immaturity of our religious past and into the wonder of our religious future.

In that journey inevitably creeds will change, old institutional forms will die and new ones will be born, and all present liturgies will be transformed, but the eternal search for God will go on.  That is the challenge facing Christianity today.  I am willing to begin the journey now.  I hope I am not alone.

~  John Shelby Spong
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