- Dialogue - lists.wedgeblade.net

NSV and Spring Archives
by Robertson Work 03 Apr '20

03 Apr '20

Dear Lynda, Karen, Cheryl, Jan, and others, I look forward to our dialogue concerning the whole system redesign of human society on Earth! Glad we are "staying home" and will meet online. Blessings, health, and happiness, Rob Compassionate Civilization Collaborative (C3) ................................................................................................ New book (2020): Serving People & Planet: In Mystery, Love, and Gratitude https://www.amazon.com/dp/1684716160<https://www.amazon.com/Serving-People-Planet-Mystery-Gratitude/dp/1684716160> Previous book (2017): A Compassionate Civilization: The Urgency of Sustainable Development and Mindful Activism https://www.amazon.com/dp/1546972617 Blog: https://compassionatecivilization.blogspot.com/<https://compassionatecivilization.blogspot.com/><https://compassionatecivilization.blogspot.com/> LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertsonwork/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/compassionatecivilization/ ________________________________ From: OE <oe-bounces(a)lists.wedgeblade.net> on behalf of Cheryl via OE <oe(a)lists.wedgeblade.net> Sent: Friday, April 3, 2020 6:09 PM To: oe-request(a)lists.wedgeblade.net <oe-request(a)lists.wedgeblade.net>; oe(a)lists.wedgeblade.net <oe(a)lists.wedgeblade.net> Cc: Cheryl <kartes(a)aol.com> Subject: Re: [Oe List ...] OE Digest, Vol 97, Issue 5 Re: Final Meaning Witness I think it would be a fabulous gift to the world for OE/ICA folks to "reimagining the economic, political and cultural processes for the future" as Karen suggested. I agree with Judy Lindblad's comment and quote "As Governor Cuomo called out this week "this is a transformative experience, it is never going to be the same." There is going to be a new normal. These are the times and ... it would be a big task worth doing. Judy" Here is something I can contribute: https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/extinction-and-the-revolution-of-love/ Charles Eisensein's thinking always causes me to think deeper - maybe it will help trigger a reaction and a response in the reimagination process. I am always grateful for the deep thinking and profound work of all of you who came long before me in the SPT thinking (I'm not much younger, but was busy doing other things). Your experimentation and reflections have provided ripples of impact in the world already. Thanks, Cheryl Kartes ToP Network Mpls, MN -----Original Message----- To: oe(a)lists.wedgeblade.net Sent: Fri, Apr 3, 2020 12:41 pm Subject: OE Digest, Vol 97, Issue 5 Today's Topics: 1. Re: Final Meaning witness (Karen Snyder) 2. Re: Final Meaning witness (Judy Lindblad) 3. Re: [Dialogue] Final Meaning witness (McCabe, Diann A) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message: 1 Date: Fri, 3 Apr 2020 10:45:21 -0500 From: Karen Snyder <karen.snyder10(a)gmail.com<mailto:karen.snyder10@gmail.com>> Subject: Re: [Oe List ...] Final Meaning witness The 1971 New Social Vehicle work was amazing. 77 proposals were written to imagine a new society. As I read proposal 2 on Final Meanings (below), I struggled with the language and decided to transpose it. While doing that, I found myself dreaming of the possibility of taking all 77 proposals and writing them for the next decade (I did not get to this step). Reading an article by Paul Mason (?The coronavirus crisis shows we need an entirely new economic system?) he calls for us to imagine it and make it happen. Rewriting the social process proposals could be a part of reimagining the economic, political and cultural processes for the future. Any takers? > On Apr 2, 2020, at 1:10 PM, James Wiegel via OE <oe(a)lists.wedgeblade.net<mailto:oe@lists.wedgeblade.net>> wrote: > > Thanks, Richard. Dipping into the Social Change collection of the ICA Social Research Center, see attached Proposal 2: Communal Wisdom: Final Meanings. -- the one referred to by Louise. > Here it is in google: Proposal 2 Final Meanings.pdf <https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rbhiXE3wqlZXXmL-i_-93uBriVycBpIL/view?usp=…<https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdrive.goo…>> > > Proposal 2 Final Meanings.pdf > <https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rbhiXE3wqlZXXmL-i_-93uBriVycBpIL/view?usp=…<https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdrive.goo…>> > Jim Wiegel <http://partnersinparticipation.com/?page_id=123<https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fpartnersin…>> > ?That which consumes me is not man, nor the earth, nor the heavens, but the flame which consumes man, earth, and sky." Nikos Kazantzakis > > 401 North Beverly Way,Tolleson, Arizona 85353 > 623-363-3277 > jfwiegel(a)yahoo.com<mailto:jfwiegel@yahoo.com> <mailto:marilyn.oyler@gmail.com<mailto:marilyn.oyler@gmail.com>> > www.partnersinparticipation.com <http://www.partnersinparticipation.com/<https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.partne…>> > Message: 2 Date: Fri, 3 Apr 2020 12:43:35 -0400 From: Judy Lindblad <nj.lindblad(a)gmail.com<mailto:nj.lindblad@gmail.com>> Subject: Re: [Oe List ...] Final Meaning witness Blessings be upon you Karen! Perhaps these times of shifted context and reduced usual activity might afford time to consider what it would take to rethink and update. As Governor Cuomo called out this week "this is a transformative experience, it is never going to be the same." There is going to be a new normal. These are the times and ... it would be a big task worth doing. Judy Message: 3 Date: Fri, 3 Apr 2020 17:41:16 +0000 From: "McCabe, Diann A" <dm14(a)txstate.edu<mailto:dm14@txstate.edu>> We joined the order in late 1973 so much of what Louise writes about was unknown to us. Good to be reminded of the work that went on in those days of experimentation. Thank you for sharing.--Diann McCabe, SIP in San Marcos, TX ________________________________ From: Dialogue <dialogue-bounces(a)lists.wedgeblade.net<mailto:dialogue-bounces@lists.wedgeblade.net>> on behalf of Richard Alton via Dialogue <dialogue(a)lists.wedgeblade.net<mailto:dialogue@lists.wedgeblade.net>> Sent: Thursday, April 2, 2020 9:53 AM Subject: [Dialogue] Final Meaning witness I just found this piece going through my files: I was Louise Singleton and her late husband John's Local Church prior and later worked a decade with her on the ICA USA's African ICAs HIV/AIDS work. A little long for a witness but what happens to one who spends a month working on final meanings on the Southside of Chicago. Amazing what we asked of people! Dick THE GROUND SHIFTS UNDER MY FEET SOUTH HOUSE ON BLUE ISLAND AVENUE, CHICAGO I am not sure what I expected when John and I and three others from Montview Presbyterian Church drove to Chicago to attend the Summer Research Assembly at the Ecumenical Institute (EI). It was July, 1971; John and I left four children eleven to three in the care of the Denver Religious House at 1741 Gaylord Street, a big old house that was the home and office of those who worked for the Ecumenical Institute in Denver. John, Paul Hamilton and Don Elliott planned to return to Denver after a short time, but Freda, Don?s wife, and I intended to stay four weeks. I had never been to Chicago and my children would spend those four weeks in a Religious House. I knew essentially nothing about this organization or what I would be doing. What could I have been thinking? The Kent State Massacre had shocked the world on May 4, 1970. The New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers in mid-June, 1971. Protests against the Viet Nam War were strident. I had missed the up-endedness of the 60?s ? the rebellion against authority, free-form lifestyle, rejection of materialism, and discontented individualism. I had four children in the 60?s and to say that I was busy, distracted, and disconnected from the larger world is to understate the coziness of my cocoon. I ran into Betty Friedan and the Feminine Mystique in 1968 when I was pregnant with Will. I got a glimpse of how my wife and mother role had been meticulously nurtured into me in my Southern upbringing. Yes, I had gone to Boston to business school and happily worked for Polaroid for three years, but still I had no idea that I would want a career, work of my own in the world. I did not feel much responsibility for the world beyond my family and close community. John and I had encountered the Ecumenical Institute at a weekend seminar called RS-1 ? Religious Studies I. Its intention was to confront unexamined religious literalism with an intellectual and experiential grounding that had powerful ramifications for how you lived your life. The course focused on four major symbols of the Christian faith ? God, Christ, Holy Spirit, and Church. It used writings of four 20th century theologians, Rudolph Bultman, Paul Tillich, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and R. Richard Niebuhr to blow open these well worn church concepts and the words that name them, and ground them in ordinary human experience. It sought to demythologize them and re-symbolize them again. To me, who had grown up in the unquestioned and unquestioning environment of the southern Presbyterian Church, this was radical and exciting stuff. The calling was to live an intentional life of service ? not to some reduced god, but to the whole world. This was not a Jesus Loves You, Y?all Come kind of th eology; it was insistent demand. Stop worrying about yourself and your soul. Get out there and bring new life to the world. Live your life. I had no idea what a month in Chicago would bring; I was clear there was an interesting world beyond my kitchen sink, and my unexamined life role. We arrived in Chicago at the Ecumenical Institute offices located in an old seminary on West Congress Parkway in the middle of a poor black, angry, rioting community. We were instructed not go on the street ? not because we might come to harm, but because there might be an incident which would damage EI?s work in 5th City, a community the Institute was working with to offer paths to change and a sense of hope where very little existed. The first shock was that those of us from Denver were split up and assigned to three different locations. A thousand people were expected to attend, so other buildings were co-opted. John and I were sent to a four story wooden building, an abandoned hotel with rooms around a central shaft on Blue Island Parkway. I have no idea where in Chicago it is because I only left the building to go to assemblies of the whole body once a week and I never walked outside the building. John was assigned to a men?s dorm and I was assigned to a women?s dorm on the 4th floor built around the four-story atrium. The building looked like a firetrap. My room containing bunk beds for six, opened on a hall at the top of this open shaft. I was out on the falling-off-the-wall back porch in tears because there was no way that a responsible mother of four would put herself in such danger. And I was beginning to understand about assignment: it equaled obedience. Charles Moore came along and asked what the problem was. I let him have it ? the danger, the negligence, etc, etc. He listened quietly and said wait. In a few minutes he was back with a new room assignment. John and I were assigned together to a small room off the porch on the second floor above the kitchen. I learned later it was his and Pat?s room. Living in a room with five other women would not have been easy, but I might have been less lonely than returning every evening to this small room off the second floor porch, above the kitchen and facing the tenements behind. John stayed for a week and returned to Denver. I knew no one ? no one to help make sense of the strange, continuously objectionable expectations in which the rules of engagement were different than any I had ever encountered. The Ecumenical Institute was a family secular order of people who had decided to live a life of radical service. Those who decided to join the Order Ecumenical lived by the ancient monastic vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Poverty meant receiving a stipend equal to the poverty level wherever one worked. In India, that could be $10 a month. Some people worked outside and their income supported those who staffed the work of the Institute. Chastity had to do with the Kierkegaardian idea of willing one thing. Your life was about the immediate work and intention of the larger group. Obedience was about accepting assignment. These three disciplines ? seriously observed ? came to me continuously as a shock and an affront. And yet, all these extremely bright, we ll-organized, compelling people had agreed to live like this. And seemed to think it the most important thing they had every done. And the most important thing I might do. The task for the month was to create the New Social Vehicle. EI expected nothing less than to participate in transforming the world. Huge white banners hanging across the front of the assembly hall read, All the past belongs to all the people. All the wisdom belongs to all the people. All the goods belong to all the people. All the decisions belong to all the people. I wondered if this would show up in my FBI file although it seemed unlikely I had an FBI file. It had not been so long since the days of the McCarthy Hearings; I could believe association with this organization might be hazardous. I also felt an underlying implication that my usual role of wife and mother was inadequate: I needed to commit myself to renewing the local church and helping to re-create the institutions of society to care for all. The day began with Daily Office at 6 am. Wake up call was someone with a gong outside the door shouting Praise the Lord Christ is Risen, to which we were to respond, He is risen indeed as we rolled joyfully out of bed. I was assigned to a working group of about thirty people, which would be home base for the four weeks. We met morning and afternoon, breakfast, lunch and dinner. The Research Assembly of a thousand people gathered staff from all over the country and a few from overseas, plus volunteers and new recruits like us. The purpose of the summer?s research was to figure out what was needed to transform civil society and create the practical programs that those under assignment would implement in the coming year to help bring that about. During the working year those under assignment would apply the thinking and programmatic actions wherever they were assigned, and come back the next summer for another assembly to assess what worked and create the organization?s work for the fol lowing year. It was a kind of practical research. It was an astounding operation, better seen from a bird?s eye view than from a hard chair in a working group in the steamy summer heat of Chicago. My bottom developed blisters. The task for that summer assembly was to define the dynamics that occur in any society. It would be used as a tool for understanding and analyzing what the tyrannizing and collapsing social forces were in current realities that need to be corrected. When economic, political, and cultural dynamics are in balance, the New Social Vehicle could emerge. Staff had read 1000 edge books over the last year, trying to discern what was happening in communities in the chaotic time of the ?60?s and beginning of the ?70?s. [page3image3330531104] Typical of ICA methodology, the task for the third of the assembly meeting at South House was to define the Cultural Commonality in The Social Process triangles. The other two locations would describe Economic and Political Commonalities. Those in south House were asked to figure out what concretely was meant and went on in Communal Wisdom, Communal Styles and Communal Symbols? My working group was assigned Final Meanings under Communal Wisdom. This task required a great deal of brainstorming, discussion, and corporate writing. It is difficult to explain and define the very medium in which you live and operate. As someone said, does a fish know what water is? Corporate writing was a new experience. Three or four people work together to write, getting their wisdom on paper in a process of suggestion and negotiation which can be both long and infuriatingly difficult, particularly if you are defining something called Final Meanings. The day?s work was sent to Room E where leadership decided what the next step would be the following day. This was an evolving process. I was totally disconnected from home, seeming to forget my children for days at a time; I was trying to survive and to contribute; my days were contained as if on an unknown island. There were no computers, cell phones, newspapers or even telephones for general use. Someone reported the news of the day at breakfast. There was a quiet time after lunch when I took my journal and incense to an assigned place and thought deep thoughts. Singing and Psalm conversations were intended to keep spirits up and intention focused on the task. There were regular reporting dynamics with a weekly assembly of the entire gathering and some planned activities or ?discontinuity.? Singing by the whole body when they gathered 1000 strong in assembly was without accompaniment ? and earthmoving. The primary songs I remember were the hymns For I Know Whom I have Believed, Amazing Grace, The Lord of the Dance, and Why O Lord, Hast Thou Quite Forsaken Me, Those Who Wait on the Lord, and secular songs like Blue Skies and I Don?t Know Why I Love You Like I Do. People wrote visionary words to popular tunes such as On a Clear Day and the Sound of Silence. The nuts and bolts of the assembly were directed by staff and carried out by participants as assigned ? to the kitchen, cleaning, print shop, and typing. John worked in the boiler room in the grungy basement. To load coal into the boiler, it was necessary to load it into a wheelbarrow and push the wheelbarrow up a six- inch plank to reach the boiler. One night on breakfast prep, I broke 300 eggs to prepare scrambled eggs. I was instructed to break them two at a time ? one in each hand; breakfast prep was just beginning. Showers and toilet facilities were barely adequate and tended to verge on collapse. Documents were printed at the print shop and then collated by laying out stacks of each page in order and the entire body of people passed by in a line assembling their document ? usually while singing. I anticipated that Bill Hudson, who had left the Order and was a minister at Montview Church, would arrive for the second two weeks. He had gotten me into this, and maybe he could help me understand why it was important for me to be there. I was in a school gymnasium as part of a typing crew on Friday night when the phone rang. I heard the person who answered say that it was too bad that someone had died. I found out that Bill had had a heart attack and died the day before. He would not be coming to Chicago, to South House. Bill had left the Order; people did not leave the Order. No one knew at that point how the Order should deal with an ex-Order member who died, so his death was mostly ignored: he had left the Order; he had refused to live his life. I am not overly given to tears, but I think that summer I cried about every day. I still do not know why I did not go home. I expect a few people thought up a good reason why they were required to be someplace else. My prior (as in the head of a monastery), the leader of my working group was that same Charles Moore who rescued us from the back porch. It is hard to describe Charles. Like many other people in the Order, he was a preacher who decided that this was a far more interesting and significant thing to do with his life than working in the desert of the local parish. He lived in the depth of the spirit ? close to the Dark Night of the Soul. And he could make you believe you belonged there too. I could not imagine telling him this work was not important and I would not be part of it. That?s what a prior is: they keep you pointed in the direction you choose for your life, willing one thing and being obedient. I had chosen to be there. When Summer ?71 ended, Paul Hamilton?s son Cap, and I drove home from Chicago to Denver. We talked all night, and by the time w e drove in I-70 out of Limon into the Denver morning, I understood a lot more about what had happened to me. I could think about it and not just respond emotionally. I would not just go home, pick up my abandoned children, and return to life as usual. I understood that I had now assumed Care for the World ? a burden that would never leave me. I did not join the Order, although I often thought about it. I had a husband with little interest and four children. And I am not sure I could have been sufficiently obedient, willing-one-thing, and detached from this world?s goods to have been a satisfactory member of the Order. Research and working in local communities was also changing the organization. At the 1972 Summer Research Assembly, they emerged from the dark night of the soul and waltzed. I couldn?t believe the reports of what a fine time people had. The decision was also made to make the Turn to the World. The assessment was made that major change in our time would not happen through the local church, but through secular society. Soon after, the Ecumenical Institute became the Institute of Cultural Affairs, because major change in the world would come from change in the cultural dimension of society. Human Development Projects were born and established on every continent in every time zone where local people learned skills to ?develop? their community ? human devopment. As ICA worked in communities with every religion, the intent was not to convert people but to find the [page5image3331086800] ICA Meeting, Chicago transparent life-giving word in their religion. I particularly appreciated the EI/ICA intention to create and define frameworks to use in thinking about things. My favorite is Knowing/Doing/Being. Although I wrote many history exams on the economic, political, and cultural backgrounds of an issue, how those interacted with each other were not as clear until I worked with the Social Process Triangles. The Global Grid gives a new way to imagine the world. And of course, there is Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience. Over the years, I volunteered in many activities, beckoned by the opportunity to work with unusually committed people who could see past the immediacy of the moment to the possibility of actually changing the world to one in which people ? particularly the poorest of the poor--took hold of what they wanted for their future and worked to make that happen. The work opened my life to the world. John and I were part of a ?cadre? at Montview Church, one of four churches in the Denver/Boulder area involved in the Local Church Experiment to renew our churches. We were instrumental in hiring Ken Barley who with Zoe had just left the Order, to replace Bill Hudson. He took the leadership role in changing Montview from a senior ministry model to a corporate ministry organization. In 1976, I assisted with town meetings in the nation-wide Town Meeting Project. It was a massive project--at least one was organized in every county across the country--as a way to raise the consciousness of residents to the possibility of new life in their community. In 1978, I visited development projects in India, Malaysia. and Indonesia while we were on sabbatical in Oxford, glimpsing first hand for the first time the enormity, richness, and need of the world. I helped organize local development projects in Colorado to attend the Global Exhibition of Development Projects in Bombay in 1984, and spent ab out four weeks there, helping to set up the conference, leading a group on a field trip to northern India, and traveling for a week after the conference ended. The Order: Ecumenical went out of existence in 1986 and the Institute of Cultural Affairs (ICA) became a professional non-profit organization working with organizations and communities in the US and abroad. They developed, taught, and used facilitation and planning methods called the Technology of Participation or TOPTM. I joined the ICA Board in 1995, became president in 1998, and coordinator of the 2000 ICA International Conference held in Denver at Denver University, attended by 650 people, one-third of whom came from outside the US. Forty years ago, the Kemper Insurance Company sold their office building to ICA for $1.00. An eight-story building at North Sheridan Road and Lawrence Avenue, it is located in Uptown, north of Chicago downtown, between the commuter rail and Lake Michigan. Uptown is a low-income area with very diverse population. The Kemper Building became ICA: USA headquarters and a center for Uptown community services. There are ICA offices on the sixth floor, a conference center on the 7th floor and a community and guest rooms on the 8th floor. The rest of the building is leased to community service organizations including a health clinic, Chicago Social Services and various immigrant and other support services. On [page6image3331648272] Sunday music from African congregation services fill the 2nd floor. Particularly during the years I was on the Board, I was there frequently, staying in a guest room with the bathroom down the hall, eating meals in the dining room on the 6th floor and listening to the traffic and sirens that filled the night. I would fly into O?Hare, take the train to Jefferson and catch the Lawrence Avenue bus that stopped right on the corner of Sheridan. It was about a half hour ride through neighborhood after neighborhood, each a different nationality with its own ethnic flavor. That eye-opening ride was preparation for entering that building and the work that goes on there. For many ICA people, it is a place to return to, to see colleagues, work on project, maintain the archives, and touch base. It was a home I shared with many others. Over the last few years it is being turned into a green building modeling energy conservation and sustainability. In 2012 ICA participated in and was an organizing leader in Chicago?s Accelerate 77, which stands for Accelerating Green Initiatives in Chicago's 77 Community Areas. The building also has a new name: GreenRise Building Uptown. At the ICA International Conference in Denver in 2000, called the Millennium Connection, there was concern about the threat of HIV/AIDS to development in Africa. African staff were overwhelmed by their experience of HIV. People were dying and AIDS was decimating communities. At that time, the HIV rate in Zimbabwe was 26% and 16.2% in Zambia. Every family had at least one person sick and dying. In 2001, I joined several colleagues to develop and implement the African HIV/AIDS Prevention Initiative. That work called on everything I had learned in public health and years of ICA and life experience. I had the opportunity to work with committed colleagues in the US, Canada, and the UK, but most importantly I worked in Africa with African staff and on the ground with rural villagers. I experienced the great pleasure of working with colleagues in a common and significant enterprise. What had often seemed like living my life in parallel universes finally came together. In the previous thirty years, I had many friends and colleagues in Denver who knew of and worked with ICA. Denver had had a Religious House with ICA staff and many in Montview Church were active or aware of ICA. But most people in my day-to-day life were not involved. I often felt ICA was too strange to be understood by my ?normal? establishment friends and family. If you hadn?t been there, how would it make sense? ICA always claimed that it was not dis-establishment but trans-establishment ? between the no longer and the not yet. I felt my experience was far outside that of most people, hard to explain, and hard for friends and family to grasp. The ICA African HIV/AIDS Prevention Initiative was something everyone could understand and support. Without funding of Denver friends, Montview Church, and the sponsorship of funds from several Denver and Boulder Rotary Clubs, we would have had a difficult time launching the Initiative in eight countries in Africa. Working in eight countries was possible only because [page7image3332124816] of the network of self-governing country ICA?s with local staff trained to lead Human Development Projects since the early 70?s. They were local community revolutionaries in their countries. Assisting those staff to address HIV prevention and management, as an integral part of their development work was our goal. This would become my work for the next decade and beyond. ICA as an organization is working as a professional non-profit organization in an establishment world and it is not easy. It has not yet learned to be a reliable beneficiary of funding organizations. The commitment of those from the next generation is needed to continue vigorous work as those involved since the ?70?s retire and die. It is difficult to inspire young people to take up poverty, chastity and obedience ? but I know from experience that that is what will be required to move to the New Social Vehicle, which seems less attainable and more essential with every newspaper report. 2012 was the 50th anniversary of this organization. Using the social process triangles, it is clear that the economic process is the tyrannizing force with the political as ally. The cultural dimension is collapsed, divided into sides, each unwilling to even talk about common values ? those final meanings. The Occupy Movement had a glimpse of this, but did not know how to build that new social vehicle. It is the task for the next twenty years to figure out how to live in community that has changed radically at every level?local, national and global--since 1971, but still seeks the same human benefits. I am one of the people who want to make that happen. The blessings upon my life by my work, my colleagues, and association with this remarkable organization ? this global home ? have been beyond measure. Written as part of a memoir, Between Earth and Sky, self-published in 2015 ICA Global Citizen ?1987 -- Richard H. T. Alton One Earth Film Fest ( OEFF) Green Community Connections Interfaith Green Network T: 773.344.7172 richard.alton(a)gmail.com<mailto:richard.alton@gmail.com><mailto:richard.alton@gmail.com<mailto:richard.alton@gmail.com>> *Save the Date! One Earth Film Festival 2021, March http:www.oneearthfilmfestival.org<https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.oneear…<https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.oneear…>> Make Plain the Vision, Habakkuh 2:2 Won't you be my neighbor? End of OE Digest, Vol 97, Issue 5 *********************************

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4/02/20: Progressing Spirit: Jacqueline J. Lewis: A Grown-Up God for Times Like TheseSpong revisited
by Ellie Stock 02 Apr '20

02 Apr '20

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.yiv8081868463mcnTextContent, #yiv8081868463 #yiv8081868463templateHeader .yiv8081868463mcnTextContent p{ font-size:16px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv8081868463 #yiv8081868463templateBody .yiv8081868463mcnTextContent, #yiv8081868463 #yiv8081868463templateBody .yiv8081868463mcnTextContent p{ font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv8081868463 #yiv8081868463templateFooter .yiv8081868463mcnTextContent, #yiv8081868463 #yiv8081868463templateFooter .yiv8081868463mcnTextContent p{ font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;} } | | | | View this email in your browser | | | | | | | | | | | | | | A Grown-Up God for Times Like These | | | | | | | | | | Essay by The Rev. Jacqueline J. Lewis, PhD April 2, 2020 I had just graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary and was serving a church in Trenton, a new church development called Imani Community Church. We were Presbyterians, hoping to grow a new kind of ministry — multiracial, intergenerational, children and elders co-leading, open and affirming, in an old building, in a dying city. It was rough. The industry that lead to the slogan, “Trenton takes; the world makes” had long dried up; business now meant government, drug-trade, policing the same, and houses of worship offering hope. We banded together across faiths against the perils of poverty, crime and, occasionally, deadly policing. Our allies were unlikely: Catholics, United Methodists, Baptists, Jews, The Nation of Islam and a splinter group, The Five Percenters. We did not agree on names for God, on how many times to pray, on how genders relate, on how to worship. We did agree that Trenton was our home and we needed to protect our home; we agreed that we were family. Before that time, I had an intellectual appreciation for other faiths. In my childhood church our junior choir sang, Millions of stars placed in the sky by one God; millions of men lift of their eyes to one God…. walk with me brother there were no strangers after his work was done, for your God and my God are One. My parents never criticized Muslims or Jews; they were our sisters and brothers — all progeny of Abraham and Sarah. When I was a teenager, I had the understanding that Jesus himself was a Jew and was deeply confused about how anti-Semitism could be in the heart of any Christian. And in seminary, I studied the core principles of many faiths. But it was in the working side-by-side with colleagues across faiths that my personal faith became universalist. I was a Christian; I am a Christian. But it became clear to me that God speaks more than one language. Because God wants to be known, I came to believe, by any means necessary, God speaks to the hearts of humans in the ways they can hear, inviting us to come close to be seen, known and loved. When I left Trenton to go to graduate school to study psychology and religion, my interfaith family came to celebrate me and our shared work. They came to send off an African American Christian woman. They embraced me as their sister, some breaking cultural boundaries to do so. It was at Drew University in the psychology and religion program that I began to think more deeply about how humans come to faith, how faith sustains us, how the “God story” is one narrative that shapes our personalities. I am sure some in my discipline move in the world with certainty that God is an illusion, created (per Freud) to manage our anxieties about life and death. For me, I strongly believe in the existence of God. AND because God is a mystery, theologians, ethicists, psychologists, sociologists and every day folk have spent lifetimes trying to understand God. Who is God? What does God require of us? What is the relationship between God and the nature of goodness and evil? Does God cause natural disasters; why doesn’t God stop natural disasters? We wrestle with those questions as soon as the concept of God enters our awareness. One of my favorite psychologists of religion, Ana-Maria Rizzuto wrote, “No child arrives at the 'house of God' without his pet God under his arm.” (Birth of the Living God: A Psychoanalytic Study). She means that each of us has a God representation. Rizutto argues that there are parts of our God representation that are made up of what we have experienced. I agree and would say further that those experiences are often imbedded in stories. Stories shape our psychological development — stories about gender, birth order, sexuality, race, and, yes, about God/religion/faith. We learn stories about God (theology) from other people who ask the same questions as we do. Our church school teachers, pastors, imams, rabbis — are all wrestling with the mystery. They wrestle using personal experience, research and study. They wrestle while reading the “wrestling” of others — commentaries, midrash, even other sermons. They wrestle using scripture and other holy texts, which, although inspired, represent the theological wrestling of the writer! The authors of those texts have stories, experiences, and circumstances that make them wonder, “Where is God in this? How am I to understand this in light of what I think about God?” Because the authors are different, because the circumstances are different, what they say about the “unchanging God” varies. In fact, most scholars believe there are four different theological voices in the Hebrew scriptures as they show up in the Christian bible. And, when we read the four gospels telling the story of Jesus, we get four different nuanced narratives as well. It can feel that God is changing, but actually I think it is different than that. The way I think about this is that we project different things onto God at different times. Sometimes we want and need to think of God as a kind and benevolent being, who will forgive all things and bless us, no matter what. Sometimes we want to think of God as a powerful, angry force who is fully in charge of the universe and who will, if we ask, smite the people we call enemies. I think we often “create” the God we need for the moment. Father Richard Rohr writes, Controlling people try to control people, and they do the same with God—but loving anything always means a certain giving up of control. You tend to create a God who is just like you—whereas it was supposed to be the other way around. ― Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For and Believe The longer I live, the clearer it becomes to me that God doesn’t change; we do. We change individually, developmentally; the human species also evolves. Our understanding of the mystery of God changes as we mature, as we have new experiences. We speak, sing, write, read texts, and preach about our changing understanding of the mysterious, ineffable God. What we say, think and write is only a representation of the indescribable. Our pronouns for God might change (I now love “she” and “they”). Our metaphors for God might change, mine has become more intimate. Rather than “rock” or “shelter,” I think more often of God as “partner” or “bosom to rest in.” Just like God shows up in holy texts, God shows up on television, in film and in art as a representations as well. When describing God in The Color Purple, Alice Walker put these words in the mouth of a wild and wise woman, Shug Avery: Here's the thing, say Shug. The thing I believe. God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And sometimes it just manifest itself even if you not looking, or don't know what you are looking for. Trouble do it for most folks, I think. Sorrow, lord. Feeling like sh&t. It? I ask. Yeah, It. God ain't a he or a she, but a It. But what do it look like? I ask. Don't look like nothing, she say. It ain't a picture show. It ain't something you can look at apart from anything else, including yourself. I believe God is everything, say Shug. Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you've found it. The older I get, the longer I live, I, too, think God is everywhere, in everything, all around us. Inside all the people, in our new grandson and his two-year old sister. In the doctors and nurses working, right now, to heal people of viruses, and of broken legs. The therapists and clergy working to heal people of broken hearts and broken hope. In the rocks, rivers and trees; in the rise and fall of an ocean, in the rise and fall of our breathing bodies. God shows up in our lives, as part of our lives. And when I need a short-cut to describe the mystery, the Holy Other that is both outside of us and inside of us, I go to a little book in the Christian New Testament, 1 John 16: God is Love, and those who abide in Love abide in God, and God abides in them. All who love live in God, and God lives in them. That is so comforting to me. It opens my heart up, makes me less judgmental, and more curious. I believe God is Love. There have to be many paths to Love. Love. Period. Love is a grown-up God for a grown-up life. A grown-up God for times like these. ~ The Rev. Jacqueline J. Lewis, PhD Read online here About the Author Rev. Jacqueline J. Lewis, PhD is the Senior Minister of Middle Collegiate Church in New York City. She is a nationally acclaimed activist, author, public theologian, and organizer of an anti-racist multicultural movement of love and justice. She has been featured in The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and on The Today Show, CBS, and MSNBC. She write The Power of Stories: A Guide for Leading Multiracial and Multicultural Communities, and also wrote a book with her husband John called The Pentecost Paradigm: Ten Strategies for Becoming a Multiracial Congregation | | | | | | | | Question & Answer Q: By A Reader Why is it so difficult to apologize? Why do some apologies heal while others fail - and even offend? A: By Rev. Irene Monroe Dear Reader, One of the most healing and humble exchanges between two people is an apology. Saying, “I’m sorry!” can restore feelings of safety, dignity, and respect. Because it is a sign of strength, the words can even repair relationships, especially when based on the concept of restorative justice. However, not all apologies are the same or have any meaning behind them. For example, Hollywood film mogul, Harvey Weinstein, was recently convicted of sexually harassing, assaulting, and raping dozens of women. Weinstein’s public and scripted mea culpa stated the following: “I so respect all women and regret what happened.” Weinstein’s apology is the classic conditional non-apology. It means the following: If you are hurt, I am sorry. Or, stated another way: I am sorry only if you are hurt. In my hometown, members of the Cambridge School Committee, along with many students of Cambridge Rindge and Latin School - past and present - their parents, and the wider Cambridge community have been embroiled over School Committee member's use of the n-word. Many have requested her resignation as a beginning step toward restorative justice. On the surface, an apology should have extinguished the imbroglio. However, sometimes an apology inflames rather than informs, and mends the situation toward healing. The School Committee member’s apology was experienced by many as insensitive and tone-deaf, at best, and, as racist, at worst. Her apology exacerbated fraught racial tensions; thus, creating another missed opportunity toward restorative justice. Also, given the uneven power dynamics and racial hierarchy between the School Committee member and the students, she, as an educator, missed another teaching moment to model what to do when an apology is needed. Apologizing doesn’t always mean that you’re wrong, but instead, you value a relationship with the injured party more than trying to prove a point or delving into the minutia that inevitably compounds the chaos, confusion, miscommunication, and hurt feels. Restorative justice creates relational strategies to remedy racial disparities, institutional and implicit biases, and hurt feelings when it can build from an effective apology. However, ineffective apologies make restorative justice impossible because they intentionally change the topic, minimize the blame, and most egregiously wait too long to be sincere or sufficient. We all have experienced these types of ineffective apologies when someone does the following: apologize to be polite; apologize to appease; apologize on demand; apologize from guilt, and apologize without apologizing. These apologies fail to recognize an offense, the aggrieved parties, and to lay a foundation toward reconciliation. ~ Rev. Irene Monroe Read and share online here About the Author The Reverend Monroe does a weekly Monday segment, “All Revved Up!” on NPR's WGBH (89.7 FM). She is a weekly Friday commentator on New England Channel NEWS. Monroe is the Boston voice for Detour’s African American Heritage Trail, Guided Walking Tour of Beacon Hill: Boston’s Black Women Abolitionists. A Huffington Post blogger and a syndicated religion columnist; her columns appear the Boston LGBTQ newspaper Baywindows, Cambridge Chronicle, and the Boston Globe. Monroe stated that her “columns are an interdisciplinary approach drawing on critical race theory, African American, queer and religious studies. As a religion columnist I try to inform the public of the role religion plays in discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people. Because homophobia is both a hatred of the “other” and it’s usually acted upon ‘in the name of religion,” by reporting religion in the news I aim to highlight how religious intolerance and fundamentalism not only shatters the goal of American democracy, but also aids in perpetuating other forms of oppression such as racism, sexism, classism and anti-Semitism.” Her papers are at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College’s research library on the history of women in America. Click here to visit her website. | | | | | | | | Please continue to send us your feedback… we are listening. We aim to give voice to many different perspectives that are relevant and inspiring along this spiritually progressing path. We are not here to tell you what to believe or how to act. We are here to support your journey, to share and learn together.Thank you for being a part of this community! | | | | | | Join our FB community today! Spread the word, share with friends. Thanks! | | | | | | | | Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited The Church and the Flu Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong February 8, 2006 Dear Friends, This week I introduce you to the first guest columnist of this year 2006. Each year I try to identify four unique voices of those who labor in the same area of life that I find myself working. They are people who either have thought about things in a new way or even those who have thought about new things. I take great pleasure in making these voices better known. Today I present to you a piece that in my knowledge no one else has addressed. It was authored by one of the most gifted clergy in this generation. The Rev. Dr. Phillip Cato may be the most intellectually stimulating priest from my own church that I have ever known. Raised, as I was, in Charlotte, North Carolina, he did his undergraduate work at Duke University, got his Master's in Divinity degree from the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts and then after some time serving congregations mostly in North Carolina, he pursued and received his PhD degree from Emory University in Atlanta. His field of study was "The Intellectual History of the Western World." That broad and all-inclusive subject has always intrigued me just as Phillip's mind has done. In addition to serving churches Dr. Cato also had a career as a chaplain in the United States Naval Reserve I had the pleasure of being Dr. Cato's bishop for a number of years and his incisive intellect made a profound difference to me and to our diocese. He is now retired, but in his retirement he is active in both the congregations and the intellectual life of the Diocese of Washington, D.C. Most people in this church of ours would not think about the subjects Phillip addresses but, typical of his career, Phillip has never been left at the starting gate. He is generally far ahead of most of us. Several weeks ago, the New York Times reported the one-day drop of over 25% in the price of Pilgrim Pride Corporation Class B stock that is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The story accompanying this slide revealed that this Company, located in Texas, is the second largest poultry business in America, topped only by Tyson's Foods of Arkansas. The collapse of the stock price in Pilgrim Pride Corp. was attributed to softness in the sale of chicken in the European market, causing Pilgrim Pride to lower its guidance for the next quarter. The drop in demand was attributed to the public's move away from chicken in the light of the Avian or "bird flu" scare. On January 11, a CNBC program talked about the need for American business to prepare for the possibility of a "bird flu" pandemic. No one I know of in the Christian Church has begun to address the state of preparation inside our churches for such an eventuality. Then along came Phillip Cato and, typical of his whole career, he was on top of this neglected issue. I welcome your responses pro and con, to this article, as I do with all of our guest columnists. I hope you will have suggestions about how the churches can operate if public gatherings are forbidden in an epidemic, or if receiving communion becomes too dangerous as a way of passing on the infection. If the volume justifies it I will print a sampling of your letters in a future column. I will also pass on all letters you write on this subject to Dr. Cato. The Church and the Flu Americans seem not to be much aware that we are facing a catastrophe of apocalyptic proportions and are woefully unprepared to deal with it. The October 8th New York Times carries a chilling account of our nation's present unpreparedness to deal with an expected pandemic of avian flu. Gardner Harris provides a very detailed preview of the Bush administration's 381 page Pandemic Influenza Strategic Plan to deal with what he characterizes as "what could become the worst disaster in the nation's history." The numbers cited by the government's plan, prepared "for internal Health and Human Services use only," are that more than 1.9 million Americans would die and an additional 8.5 million would require hospitalization costing in excess of $450 billion. The quarantines that are planned would, at best, only serve as a delaying tactic. Our recent national experience with the hurricane disasters in the Gulf States gives us no reason to be confident that our government has the capacity to deal with such a pandemic with any degree of efficiency or efficacy. The recent photo opportunity of the President with the chief executive officers of the major pharmaceutical companies does little to still what should be real fears about the consequences of this expected outbreak. Simply hoping that this virus will not evolve into one that has a human-to- human transmission capability is a dangerous expression of naivet ~ John Shelby Spong | | | | | | | | Announcements In this Special Edition of their Weekly Recap Newsletter, ProgressiveChristianity.org is highlighting Resources, Sermons, Online Tools and Courses to help all of us during this time of crisis. Click here to read the full newsletter. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

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Easter Sunrise Service Liturgy
by Ellie Stock 01 Apr '20

01 Apr '20

Dear Family, As we move, in the Christian tradition, from Lent into Holy Week, which the whole world is now experiencing in the midst of the detachment, suffering and death caused by the coronavirus pandemic crisis, we have the benefit of also looking toward what we now experience as Easter, the possibility of new life and transformation which the early followers of Jesus could not have anticipated, following the crucifixion. These last weeks, like many of you, we have been worshipping at home via live-streaming services. For many years, I have coordinated the outdoor Easter Sunrise Service on the west bank of the January-Wabash Lake, sponsored by the Ferguson Ministries Alliance. This year the service will not be held. Wherever we have lived, the Easter Sunrise Service (when it has been held outdoors, as this one is) has always been my favorite, but this year, with everything else changing, so has the way we will do this service. The service has always been informal--no robes, microphones, hymnbooks--just gathered together (standing or sitting in portable chairs) in a sort of semi circle, facing the lake, the fountain, the sunrise, and enjoying the sights and sounds of spring's creation, including the flyover or swimming geese with their bellowing honks. The service was held there rain or shine or snow, cold or warm with umbrellas or hats and gloves or no coats at all. Always a joy-filled occasion. Coffee and donuts followed. Then folks went home or off to their various congregations, breakfasts and Easter egg hunts. Attached is a copy of the liturgy for this year. Feel free to use it at home and share with others--best to be outside. As the words on the final blessing say: May the ChristWord, Event, Spirit, and Love--which cannot be bound by cross or tomb,social-distanced, self-isolated,sheltered-in-place,sequestered or quarantined--dwell within you andunite your heart withall humanity and all creation in renewed consciousness, care, courage,creativity, and compassion. Be well, stay safe, stay calm, and stay connected as we take all necessary precautions and remain physically-distanced and sheltered-in-place but Together in Spirit. Grace and peace,Easter blessings and love ~Ellie Stock :)elliestock@aol.com

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Memorial for John Gibson
by Lynda C 31 Mar '20

31 Mar '20

Dear Colleagues, Several folks have inquired about John’s obituary. I have had a message from Ruth Gibson Clark to share with you that the Memorial Service for her father, John Gibson, is tentatively set for June 6, 2020. The family will release the obituary as the memorial date is confirmed. Ruth’s contact is 5756 Carvel Ave, Indianapolis, IN 46220. E-mail: RuthandDave2004(a)gmail.com<mailto:RuthandDave2004@gmail.com>. With care, Lynda Cock.

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3/26/20, Progressing Spirit: Irene Monroe: COVID-19 And The World Community; Spong revisited
by Ellie Stock 26 Mar '20

26 Mar '20

| | | | View this email in your browser | | | | | | | | | | | | | | COVID-19 And The World Community | | | | | | | | | | Essay by Rev. Irene Monroe March 26, 2020In a responsible response to the corona virus outbreak, also known as COVID-19, church and worship services across the globe are canceled. Traditional Bible study has gone online. Sermons are watched on Zoom, and old videos of singing church choirs have popped up in my inbox. Our global engagement with one another right now is social distancing while staying connected, revealing our acts of spiritual communion. This pandemic doesn’t call for pandemonium, petty divisions, political wrangling, or panic buying. We are all in this together! Our collective concern should be about saving lives and not the momentary upending of our lifestyles. This global crisis highlights how we are bound in shared humanity. And as such, we are to take seriously medical historian and epidemic expert Howard Markel's advice: “Coronavirus is a socially transmitted disease, and we all have a social contract to stop it. What binds us is a microbe – but it also has the power to separate us. We’re a very small community, whether we acknowledge it or not, and this proves it. The time to act like a community is now.” The act of an inclusive community is a difficult concept and lived reality to actualize. Markel’s words that we should act like a community are heartfelt, particularly in this time of polarization that we witness on local, national, and international levels. This “us versus them” mentality” infects places like even our churches that by their very essence and ethos means community. For example, on March 15, I was invited to be the guest preacher at a United Methodist Church. However, I didn’t preach because of the COVID-19 warning to remain out of congregate settings, avoid mass gatherings, and maintain distance (approximately 6 feet or 2 meters). For months the senior pastor and I had been finalizing plans for me to come out to preach and celebrate with the church its upcoming 15th anniversary as a Reconciling Congregation in March. UMC Reconciling Congregations welcome people of all gender expressions and sexual orientations. In his letter inviting me he wrote the following: “Given the proximity of this year’s observance to the next UMC General Conference vote re: LGBTQ legislation in May 2020, it is important to us to invite a preacher who will encourage us during a tumultuous time in our relationship with our global connection and, to be honest, in our congregation’s own internal connections.” Just minutes after our phone call ended, my smartphone flashed the Associated Press headline: “Methodists propose split in gay marriage, clergy impasse.” I let out a long sigh of despair, thinking, why are we LGBTQ+people of faith loving a church that doesn’t love us. On March 15, I looked forward to delivering a homily about healing our “isms.” LGBTQ inclusion in the policy and practices of UMC has been a long contentious and exhausting battle- both nationally and globally. The proposed schism to be voted on in May at General Conference in Minneapolis would divide the nation’s third-largest denomination worldwide. While the current UMC will allow LGBTQ marriages and clergy, the impending split will create a new “traditionalist Methodist” denomination, allowing outright discrimination and denunciation of LGBTQ people in the name of God. “The best means to resolve our differences, allowing each part of the Church to remain true to its theological understanding, while recognizing the dignity, equality, integrity, and respect of every person,” the proposal, “PROTOCOL OF RECONCILIATION & GRACE THROUGH SEPARATION” stated. In the sermon I didn’t preach, I wanted to convey that it is not enough just to look outside ourselves to see the places where society is broken. It is not enough to talk about institutions, churches, and workplaces that fracture and separate people based on race, religion, gender, and sexual orientation, and not see these prejudices and bigoted acts in ourselves. We cannot heal the world if we have not healed ourselves. So perhaps the most significant task, and the most challenging work we must do first- is to heal ourselves. And this work must be done in relationship with our justice work out in the world. In Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” he was struggling to change a nation. King was disheartened to receive criticism from clergy he considered to be his colleagues and on the battlefield toward justice with him. However, King understood the interconnectedness of human life and the intersectionality of oppressions. His worldview of a global community resounds in these words: “In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be... This is the inter-related structure of reality.” Let us be united in this struggle together to not only heal ourselves of our indifference toward one another but to also heal a world fighting to save its life. We have never been where we are today as a nation, from natural disasters to terrorist attacks, hate crimes and unmentionable acts of violence, to now a health pandemic. In honoring the sanctity of all human life, let’s care for ourselves and each other.~ Rev. Irene Monroe Read online here About the Author The Reverend Monroe does a weekly Monday segment, “All Revved Up!” on NPR's WGBH (89.7 FM). She is a weekly Friday commentator on New England Channel NEWS. Monroe is the Boston voice for Detour’s African American Heritage Trail, Guided Walking Tour of Beacon Hill: Boston’s Black Women Abolitionists. A Huffington Post blogger and a syndicated religion columnist; her columns appear the Boston LGBTQ newspaper Baywindows, Cambridge Chronicle, and the Boston Globe. Monroe stated that her “columns are an interdisciplinary approach drawing on critical race theory, African American, queer and religious studies. As a religion columnist I try to inform the public of the role religion plays in discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people. Because homophobia is both a hatred of the “other” and it’s usually acted upon ‘in the name of religion,” by reporting religion in the news I aim to highlight how religious intolerance and fundamentalism not only shatters the goal of American democracy, but also aids in perpetuating other forms of oppression such as racism, sexism, classism and anti-Semitism.” Her papers are at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College’s research library on the history of women in America. Click here to visit her website. | | | | | | | | Question & Answer Q: By A Reader It has been suggested that over ten religions have a version of the Golden Rule. For Christians it is the core of faith and transcends tradition, ritual and doctrine. In military conflict one strategy is to divide the opposing force to conquer it bit by bit. Is it possible that evil is using that strategy to keep the Golden Rule faiths separated? A: By Rev. Aurelia Dávila Pratt Dear Reader,I grew up in a context where interfaith work was considered radical and borderline dangerous. Yet, it is this exact realization of the Golden Rule’s existence in such a wide variety of faith traditions that compelled me to interfaith work in my community. I have created, participated in and written about interfaith work for several years. The one truth I continue to come back to again and again is we are more alike than we are different. But, could evil be using a divide and conquer strategy on us? In many regards this could be proven true. Daily, we watch an endless stream of information and news cycles revealing a general lack of compassion for the other. A divisive spirit surely runs rampant through our society as we watch politicians and those in power manipulate our differences for their own benefit. Yet, it is precisely because of the Golden Rule that I don’t lose hope. The Golden Rule is a universal reminder that we are more alike than we are different. It is true that we often utilize parts of our human nature similarly, including things like fear, suspicion, or anger. However, the same is true for what matters most: our ability to love, extend empathy, practice compassion and peacemaking. These are the kinds of things that hold divine power. They are proof of the Spirit of God living within each of us. The Golden Rule helps us to understand this truth because it helps us find the inherent goodness of each person and therefore, recognize the divine in all people. So, to answer your question: Evil may try to divide and conquer us all it wants, but it won’t be able to use the Golden Rule to do it. As long as there are faithful people in every tradition speaking the truth of its message (and I believe there are!), there will always be faithful people following these wisdom teachings in their daily lives. When we not only believe, but also practice the message of the Golden Rule, we can and will overpower any force that would attempt to keep us disconnected from the humanity of one another. Interfaith work is the healing work needed to bridge our various golden rule messages together. It is the perfect antidote to the division threatening to keep us from common understanding. You can read more about my thoughts on the Golden Rule and its relationship to interfaith work here.~ Rev. Aurelia Dávila Pratt Read and share online here About the Author Aurelia Dávila Pratt is the Lead Pastor at Peace of Christ Church and is a licensed Master of Social Work. Her sermons and writings steer the listener toward contemplation while also boldly tackling social issues of the day. She prioritizes the work of Peace, believing it to be both a vertical and horizontal process that is disruptive and uncomfortable, but mystically healing. As a pastor, she promotes safe and creative space for all to participate in this work. | | | | | | | | Please continue to send us your feedback… we are listening. We aim to give voice to many different perspectives that are relevant and inspiring along this spiritually progressing path. We are not here to tell you what to believe or how to act. We are here to support your journey, to share and learn together.Thank you for being a part of this community! | | | | | | Join our FB community today! Spread the word, share with friends. Thanks! | | | | | | | | Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited The Origins of the Bible, Part XXIV: The Book of Ruth Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong April 2, 2020 There are three books in the Hebrew Bible that are designated as “protest literature;” that is, they are all representative of a literary device used by an anonymous author to make a point, human or political, in a particular moment of history. The three books are Jonah, Job and Ruth. None of these books ever pretended to be literal history; the three main characters are not real people who ever lived. They are literary characters created by their respective authors to allow the drama to unfold and as such to carry a specific narrative purpose. Only one who is completely ignorant of biblical history would ever suggest that these three works were ever written to be read as literal history or as the “inerrant word of God.” We have already looked at Jonah and Job in this “Origins of the Bible” series. Jonah is located, incorrectly I believe, in what the Jews call the “Book of the Twelve” and the Christians tend to call “The Minor Prophets.” In our consideration of Jonah we noted that, whereas modern people might signal the fictional nature of a story by beginning it with the words “Once upon a time,” the Hebrews used gross exaggeration to make the same point. So we read in Jonah of a great fish in whose belly the prophet can live for three days and three nights. In Job the exaggeration takes the form of a rich man whose righteousness was tested by God by having his life wrecked by a series of calamities that his moral character did not deserve in order to see how he will react. Those things signal the fact that these narratives are not history, but fictional stories with a powerful purpose. Today we turn to the last of the protest books, the book of Ruth. This small, four-chapter-long story is hidden away in the Bible between the books of Judges and First Samuel. It was written in the post-exilic period of Jewish history, probably near the time of Ezra and Nehemiah, somewhere between 425 and 360 BCE. It received its present position in the Bible prior to the establishment of the house of David and the royal line of Davidic kings because it purports to tell the story of King David’s great-grandmother. That was, indeed, the whole point of the book, but to note that here is to get ahead of my story. Let me set the stage. During the time of Ezra and Nehemiah, the Jewish nation went through a period of intense xenophobia, which grew out of an enormous fear that is always the mother of dislocating prejudices. The Jewish people had had to face the possibility of their own annihilation. First, they had been defeated in battle by the Babylonians in 596 BCE. Their supposedly impenetrable walls around Jerusalem, which had not been breached by an enemy for more than 400 years, had given way to the army of Nebuchadnezzar. Their holy city had been laid waste. The Temple built by Solomon around 935 BCE and believed to be the earthly house of their God Yahweh had been leveled. These traumatized Jewish people, who believed themselves to have been chosen by God and thereby promised the land they occupied, and who were also convinced that their holy homeland was not only the center of the earth but the place where heaven and earth touched, now found themselves unceremoniously marched away into a Babylonian captivity far from their sacred soil. They had thus been ripped away from everything they believed to be holy. They even wondered if they would ever again sing the Lord’s song, since it could not, they believed, be sung in a foreign land. When some of them were finally allowed to return from exile some two generations later, around the year 538 BCE, these newly freed descendents interpreted their restoration to mean that finally God would vindicate them and proceed to establish the long-anticipated kingdom of God back on Jewish soil. Surely the end of their captivity was the sign that the kingdom was near and that God was back in charge. That, however, was not what happened. A second return around 490 BCE under Zerubbabel also did not give rise to the expected kingdom. A third return under Nehemiah about the year 450 BCE met a similar fate, as did a fourth under Ezra between 400-350 BCE. With each disappointment the hopelessness of their dreams seemed to be given new confirmation, so they raised haunting questions. Why was God not protecting them? Why would God allow the chosen people to be so badly treated with defeat and exile, and then to experience a return made up only of the bitterness of being small, defenseless and continually abused? It was a strange way for God to act, unless God was angry. So they sought to determine what they had done to infuriate their God and to bring about their fate. By the time of Ezra they became convinced that they finally understood the reason for their suffering: They had ceased to be a racially pure people. Some Jews had married non-Jews, who had polluted their pure blood and had even corrupted their true faith. This, they thought, must have angered their God and they came to believe that nothing would change until the Jewish nation purified itself. A new national strategy was thus adopted. All foreign elements were to be purged. Xenophobia set in. Husbands or wives married to non-Jews were to be banished from the land, along with any half-breed children that had issued from these unholy unions. The new Judah was to be for Jews only. This was the context in which an unknown author wrote his protest that we today call the book of Ruth. Listen to this story now from this perspective. A Jewish man named Elimelech and his Jewish wife, Naomi, took their two sons, Mahlon and Chilion, and moved to the land of Moab. Perhaps it was a time of a downturn in the Jewish economy and work was hard to find in Judah. While dwelling in this foreign land, however, Elimelech died and the care of his widow Naomi was left in the hands of their sons. These sons, living far from Judah, then proceeded to take Moabite wives for themselves, one of whom was named Orpah and the other Ruth. Then tragedy struck again, and Mahlon and Chilion died. In that patriarchal society this left a vulnerable and economically non-viable family made up of three single women. Naomi decided that her only choice was to return to Judah, and so she urged her two daughters-in-law to return to their fathers’ families. It was a sign of disgrace for them to do so, but an older, widowed mother-in-law without sons had no way to care for these now single younger women. One of them, Orpah, agreed to do so, but the other, Ruth, declined and, in a piece of writing that has been quoted as a mark of fidelity through the ages, said to Naomi: “Entreat me not to leave you………where you will go, I will go. Where you lodge, I will lodge. Your people will be my people and your God my God and where you die, I will die and there will I be buried.” The two of them thus returned to Judah without a male protector. It was a hazardous life in a patriarchal world. Determined to survive, they settled near the fields of a man named Boaz, who was a distant kinsman of Naomi’s deceased husband. Jewish law required that the poor be allowed to glean in the fields of the rich for enough grain to keep them alive, and so each day Ruth brought enough from Boaz’ fields to make bread to keep the two of them alive. In the process, Ruth, this foreign woman, won the admiration of her Jewish neighbors, including Boaz, who ordered her to be protected while alone in the fields and to be given access to water. Naomi, knowing that Boaz was kin to Elimelech, was also aware of the Jewish law requiring the male nearest of kin to a deceased husband to take the widow of his departed kinsman into his care as part of his harem, so she devised a plan to confront Boaz with his responsibility for herself and for Ruth. The plan involved seduction. At the end of the harvest there would be a celebration at which wine would flow freely. Naomi instructed Ruth to bathe, anoint herself with perfume, put on her best dress and go to the party. Ruth was instructed to see that Boaz’ heart was made merry with much wine. When well drunk, Boaz lay down on the floor and went to sleep. Ruth gave him a pillow and covered him with a blanket. Then she crawled under the blanket with him. When Boaz awoke the next morning, he found this woman at his side. He had no idea what he had done. “Who are you?” he asked. “I am Ruth,” she responded. “Spread your skirt over me for you are next of kin.” What she was saying was, “Marry me!” Boaz demurred, admitting his kinship but saying there was a nearer kinsman than he who must be given first refusal on this new wife. When this man declined, Boaz did the honorable thing and he and Ruth were married. They had a son, whose name was Obed. He in turn had a son named Jesse and Jesse had a son named David. That is where the book of Ruth ends. Ruth was a Moabite. She was David’s great-grandmother. David, the hero of the super-patriotic Jews who were at that moment purging from the land all people whose bloodlines were compromised, was himself part Moabite! David would have qualified for purging. That is why the protest book of Ruth was written. It was designed to confront the reigning xenophobia and to reveal its inherent weakness. As the fear subsided, the xenophobia also faded. It always does. The call of God to human beings is always a call to wholeness. No one is whole when, acting out of fear, he or she seeks to diminish the worth and the dignity of one who is judged to be somehow impure or inferior by reason of some ontological difference: those whose skin color is of a different hue, whose religion is thought to be deviant and thus not true, or whose sexual orientation is not that of the majority. Ruth is a book written to protest all of the limits that human prejudice forever tries to place on the love of God. How wonderful that such a book was included in the sacred scriptures of both the Jews and the Christians. The book of Ruth provides us with a biblical mirror into which we can stare at our own prejudices and then be led to free ourselves of them. That is why the Bible is called “Holy.”~ John Shelby Spong | | | | | | | | Announcements Practical Wisdom from Six Legendary Yogis Since 1893, a stately parade of swamis, gurus, and yoga masters have journeyed from India to grace the shores of the United States. They have irrevocably changed the spiritual landscape. Regardless of our own path or tradition, we’ve all been influenced by them to one degree or another, often in ways we’re not even aware of. Now, in this e-course, we turn to six legendary teachers to dramatically enhance our spiritual growth.With the help of audio and video recordings, the course dives deeply into the fascinating lives and groundbreaking teachings of six masterful teachers:* Swami Vivekananda * Paramahansa Yogananda * Maharishi Mahesh Yogi * A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami (aka Srila Prabhupada) * Swami Satchidananda * Swami Muktananda Click here for more information/registration. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Copyright © 2020 ProgressiveChristianity.org, All rights reserved. Our mailing address is: 4810 Pt. Fosdick Dr. #80, Gig Harbor, WA 98335 253-507-8678 - contact(a)progressivechristianity.org You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list. | | | |

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Resending: pleated face mask pattern without green background
by Ellie Stock 24 Mar '20

24 Mar '20

Hi Folks, Sarah asked if the pleated face mask pattern could be sent without the green background. David Dunn was able to remove the background, so here it is attached. Ellie :)elliestock@aol.com Hi Ellie. Hope this helps. Anyone who owns Adobe Acrobat (not the free Adobe Reader) can remove the background. I’ll do the same with other handouts if no one has Acrobat. David — "Mystery, possibility, and the power to choose” Deacon David DunnChurch of the Holy Family Cell: 720-314-5991Email: dmdunn1(a)gmail.com

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Another pattern for a DIY Face mask
by Ellie Stock 24 Mar '20

24 Mar '20

A second pattern for face masks from a friend: https://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-Cloth-Face-Mask/ Use mask 1 pattern with filter pocket. This pattern is what a pulmonologist from Barnes Jewish Hospital (St Louis) sent to me.If any of your email friends are quilters, they will have lots of 100% cotton on hand. Ellie:)elliestock@aol.com | | Virus-free. www.avast.com |

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Here is the pattern for sewing face masks
by Ellie Stock 23 Mar '20

23 Mar '20

Hi Folks, Forwarding this pattern for sewing face masks from our daughter Chenoa, a PC(USA) Mission Co-Worker in Peru ( now sequestered at home during Peru's mandatory, military enforced lockdown). This might be of interesnt to some of you sewers or someone you know who sews. Hope you all are staying well in the midst of this pandemic. Grapes, and peas, Ellie :)elliestock@aol.com -----Original Message----- From: Chenoa Stock <chenoa.stock(a)gmail.com> To: Ellie Stock <elliestock(a)aol.com>; Evajworks <evajworks(a)aol.com>; Lingan S Randolph <marilee79(a)juno.com>; mhadams <mhadams(a)centurytel.net>; Ahren Stock <astoc(a)hawken.edu>; Charity McDonald <charityrmcdonald(a)gmail.com> Sent: Mon, Mar 23, 2020 01:54 PM Subject: Fwd: Here is the pattern for the face mask Do you all know anybody who sews? A church member passed the attached pattern for fwce masks on to me... Chenoa Stock PC (USA) Mission Co-Worker for PERUSAPeru https://www.presbyterianmission.org/ministries/missionconnections/chenoa-st…

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3/19/20, Progressing Spirit: Toni Anne Reynolds: Faith and Fate; Spong revisited
by Ellie Stock 19 Mar '20

19 Mar '20

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Thanks for inviting the Selah, Rabbi. Rest in Power, Peter. ..............___________________________________________ After a half hour catch up session, Rabbi fills the natural pause in the conversation,“So, what do you think about fate these days?”. I hear “faith” so I proceed accordingly. I have a habit of talking fast, and that’s what I was doing before Rabbi blessed me with a Selah. A request to pause. It was then that he informed me that he said “FATE, not faith. But faith works too!” How poetic. As my mind moved faster than my mouth, I realized that my sense of faith is in close relationship with fate. These days I’m thinking of faith more differently than I ever have. Not by way of any theological shift. But a shift in personal power, or truth perhaps. I used to think that faith had much more to do with the belief in a force somewhere out there. Over the rainbow. Up in the clouds. On the edge of the Universe. Even in a volcanic place beneath my feet held a power far beyond me. There were certainly entities that had the power to create and destroy. To make life, take life, and dangle life in front of me as a perfectly motivating carrot that I may never reach. Both God and “anti”-God (the Devil or Satan) felt wobbly, like frienemies (friends+enemies=frienemies) just older and much, much smarter than me. If I wasn’t careful, disaster could strike at any moment because of a negative thought or a simply human moment wherein the fear of God failed to motivate me in the way of righteousness. Or, I could be experiencing a streak of luck and find that it was really the work of the Devil tricking me, or so I was told. All of it was so confusing. I don’t think I ever had the details fully etched out in my spiritual imagination, but the silhouettes of person-like beings were there. Profoundly there, in the depths of my mind and at the root of my worries, prayers, actions, etc. Truthfully, I was as afraid of God as I was of the Devil. Yet, I would say the prayers I was taught “I am in you, you are in me, and we are in God.” Or, the completely worn out John 3:16. I would move from affirming God’s love for me to being sick with worry that he would find a reason to drown me like he did the people of Noah’s day, and was predicted to do in the end days yet to arrive. These fears seeped to the base of my mind. My dreams became intense, and I started working with a Jungian analyst to better understand the language that was being spoken to me. I need this symbolic view because something about this belief set felt... not quite “right”. If my body was a temple because God lived there, then why would it be a temple full of so much fear? Selah. “Love is what first made my heart to beat”, Peter Tosh said some years before he was murdered. This quote has taken up residence in my mind since I heard it 5 years ago. It made me think about the first heartbeat of a human being, how electricity suddenly causes a human, submerged in water, to hold a rhythm in their own body. I was once on course to be a doctor, so I get the science of it enough to know it can be explained in at least one way. But that way falls short in a profound way for me. “Love is what first made my heart to beat.” My heart. Something made it beat once years and years ago. Right now, I trust that the Something was inclined to a type of love that will take the rest of my life to fully understand. A Something that trusts me enough with its electric pulse to live a life in the flesh. And this quote from the late, great Tosh feels like a lightning bolt itself. It feels like each time I say it, I can aim it at a particular doubt and the truth of this phrase will transform the doubt. After many a lightning strike I have found that the faith I need has been living in my chest all this time. With help from the holy, and persistently truthful dreams, and an incredible Jungian analyst, I’ve spent the last two years reimaging the Force I have faith in. It has meant that before I look to the stars for a faceless God, I turn inward to see if there’s something I can learn about the rhythm that’s held in my chest. As a result of this new and improving practice, my sense of fate has changed, too. If I move with the truth that Love is literally living in my chest, trusting me with such a strong power, can’t I operate with some confidence? Can I trust myself the way this force has trusted me? Maybe this first heartbeat was really an invitation to co-create something. To participate in fate because I have faith in this spark that’s keeping me alive. I said all this to Rabbi, in some form. Except probably less coherent because of the speed talking thing. Again, he asked me to slow down. Selah. Such a great Rabbi move. Selah. Then, I found myself sharing another currently loved quote from the analyst that’s been helping me fish through my un/subconscious mind. Some months ago, after working through some heavy symbols, he said to me “Toni, do you know the difference between fate and destiny?” I was a little annoyed that I didn’t have some answer saved in my pocket so I admitted to him that I didn’t know the difference. He continued with this gem, “Fate is the cards you’re dealt and destiny is how you play them.” Selah. I wanted to weep when he told me this. So, I did. The perfect paradox. From zero control to freedom. Freedom to choose. Freedom to fold. Freedom to cheat. Freedom to see a way forward and win. Freedom of choice. Before I knew I was an “I”, Love found me. You, too. Selah. My faith was so outwardly turned that part of me felt wholly incapable of directing this life of mine. Sure, I’ve done some cool things and have my name on some cool hardware and pieces of paper. But all of those things were done while I was following some North star, hoping that I didn’t mix up my cardinal directions. Following a Light without, and having a pretty great go of it. But, what about the Light within? What about this Love that gave my heart its first beat? I wish I could convey the way that question makes me feel! Your fate was, and is, the same as mine- to receive Love. I know this with certainty because your heart is beating while you read this. The first and foremost faith I need(ed) to maintain is in the Love that first sparked my heart to beat. As long as that Spark is still playing its rhythm in my body, my faith ought to begin with an inward turn in order to face that reality. The truth that my fate was to receive such a profoundly mysterious love. That is my fate. This is the basis of healthy faith. From there, movement outward can be stabilized. From center, my own heart can be the grounding force as I continue to travel the road and search for greater inner-standings. Your fate was to receive Love. Something out there trusts you to use it well. What destiny will you make with this precious hand you’ve been dealt? Selah. ~ Toni Anne Reynolds Read online here About the Author Minister Toni Anne Reynolds is committed to singing flesh onto the bones of the Christian tradition by incorporating recently found texts of the ancient world into liturgy, sermons, and poetry. Toni’s Christianity forms a holy trinity with the psychological medicine of Tibetan Buddhism and the eternal Life found in Yoruba traditions. Balanced in an eclectic faith and focused in theology, Toni’s ministry offers a unique perspective on life, theology, and spirituality. | | | | | | | | Question & Answer Q: By Bryan Hi, I am An Episcopalian now, I was Roman Catholic up to about four years ago, I’m 62. I would consider myself a progressive christian, but I’m wondering is it necessary to go attend Sunday services? I sometimes wonder if I’m doing it out of guilt or that God will show me favor or listen better. Yours thoughts please and any reading on said topic would be much appreciated. A: By Rev. Amanda Hambrick Ashcraft Dear Bryan, I think “necessary” might be the wrong word here. Necessary says to me obligatory, and my faith doesn’t tell me I’m obligated to attend Sunday services…. especially considering how organized Christianity is largely colonized and thrives within a white supremacist patriarchal system. I often ask the question instead - what does God desire? God desires being in relationship with her, so that we can best know and bring about her kin-dom on Earth as it is in heaven. So then we ask, how does one know God’s desires? We learn God’s desires through the practices of our everydays. In waking our children up for school, in commuting to work, in seeing a stranger across from us on the Subway, in the clouds, in our meditative practices, in our study of Biblical texts, in our prayers. Additionally, we know God in community, and therefore attending SOMETHING with other God seeking and believing people enhances and equips our faith and our relationship with God. This could be a book study, a dinner group, a service activity, or worship. All of these things, then, become rehearsing the reign of God, which is important to our faith. Finally, I do not believe that God shows favor or “listens better” based on our Sunday service attendance; but rather, we become more like God in our intentional relational practices to seek and see and commune with the Divine. ~ Rev. Amanda Hambrick Ashcraft Read and share online here About the Author Rev. Amanda Hambrick Ashcraft is an activist, organizer, Baptist minister, and mother of five-year-old twins Zane and Levi and four-year-old Skyler. She is the Executive Minister for Justice and Movement Building at Middle Collegiate Church and the founder of Raising Imagination, a platform that examines social change at the intersections of faith, parenting and politics. Her activism has been featured on CNN, MSNBC, Yahoo, the Wall Street Journal, Refinery29, and Bust and she is a regular writer and inaugural board member of The Resistance Prays. She and her family live in the East Village of Manhattan and fight the patriarchy and examine their racism and spirituality together, one cheerio at a time. | | | | | | | | Please continue to send us your feedback… we are listening. We aim to give voice to many different perspectives that are relevant and inspiring along this spiritually progressing path. We are not here to tell you what to believe or how to act. We are here to support your journey, to share and learn together.Thank you for being a part of this community! | | | | | | Join our FB community today! Spread the word, share with friends. Thanks! | | | | | | | | Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited The Origins of the Bible, Part XXIII: Job, the Icon of New Consciousness Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong March 26, 2009 Three books of the Bible, Jonah, Job and Ruth, are known as "protest literature". We treated Jonah in the section of this study on the prophets. We turn now to Job and Ruth. To those outside the traditional religious circles, the Book of Job is probably the best known book in the Bible. It raises the deepest human question and deals with the most ancient of human fears. It examines the issue of meaning through the lens of human suffering and the absence of fairness and justice. As such, the Book of Job has a counterpart in every religious tradition of the world. The great 20th Century psychiatrist Carl Jung used this book as the basis of his probing the dimensions of human life in what I want to believe is his most profound work, The Answer to Job. Solving the question of why there is evil and suffering has been part of the human inquiry forever. It should surprise no one that these themes find a place in the Bible. The original story of Job seems to date from about 1000-800 BC (BCE) and versions of it can be found among many nations, leading us to suspect that this is a universal human narrative. The biblical version of this story, however, did not get written until the 500s. We can date it fairly accurately, since it reflects elements of Persian religion that came into Jewish awareness during and after the exile of the 6th Century BC. The Book of Job, for example, introduces the figure of Satan into the biblical story, but in this book Satan is not yet an evil figure or even a fallen angel. That would develop later. In Job Satan is simply a part of the heavenly court who acts on God's command. The prologue to this book sets the stage for the drama. God and Satan are discussing the faithfulness of God's servant Job. Satan suggests that Job's faithfulness is only because he has been blessed with riches and a large family. "Why should he not be faithful?" Satan asks, "since the system of reward and punishment works for him?" Would he still be faithful, Satan wonders, if his faithfulness was not so abundantly rewarded? God defends Job's faithfulness as sincere, but resolves to determine whether God or Satan is correct. God authorizes Satan to test Job for a season. Satan would remove the rewards of the good life from Job in order to determine whether his faithfulness would continue. This is when tragedy sweeps down on Job. His wealth is destroyed, his wives and children are killed and his health is taken from him. Job then tries to reconcile the established wisdom that God rewards faithfulness and punishes evil with his experience. Job is a righteous man. There is no debate about that since even God has certified his goodness in the introduction. Job, however, has now been brought low by these calamities. If calamities result from an evil life, he wonders, how can the righteous Job goodness explain his misfortunes? The stage is set for the entrance of Job's comforters. Three of Job's friends, Eliphaz, Zophar and Bildad, hear of Job's tragedies and come to console him. The conversation between Job and his friends goes on for some thirty chapters. Supporting their conclusions, Job's friends have the common wisdom of that age, made up of undoubted "truths". God, as a just deity, rewards righteousness and punishes evil. For God to punish a righteous man would not only be inconceivable, but blasphemous. Job's friends buttress their argument by quoting scripture, since the Bible was filled with this traditional interpretation of God. Every defeat that the people of Israel had ever endured was seen by them as God's punishment for their disobedience. The message of the prophets was clear. The Jewish people had been punished with boils when King David conducted a census that displeased God. Moses had been punished with death because he had put God to the test in the wilderness of a place called Meribah. God had rewarded the people of Israel with the Exodus and the miracle at the Red Sea for the faithful endurance of their sufferings under the oppression of the Egyptians. This idea that if one obeyed the law and worshiped God properly one could count on blessings from heaven was a central tenet in popular Jewish religion. If one did not, the vengeance of God was said to be sure and swift. Deep down this firmly held belief delivered the Jewish people from the threat of meaninglessness. There was purpose, not chaos, in life. This purpose was best revealed in that human behavior controlled the response of God. Human goodness put God on one's side with rewards. Human faithlessness and evil brought God's wrath and divine retribution. Job's friends were confident in the rightness of their convictions. When they confronted Job's calamities, there was, therefore, only one possible explanation. Job must be guilty of some unseen evil, so they came to help him come to grips with his sinfulness, to beg for forgiveness and to seek the mercy of God. They felt compelled to get Job to see the evil of his ways, believing that to be the only way to bring an end to his tragedy. Theological correctness was thus confronted by human experience and, as so often is the case, it simply did not fit. Job stood alone against this common theological wisdom. He knew he was not deserving of these calamities. He could not deny the experience of his own character. He knew himself to be upright and honest, one who not only obeyed the law faithfully, but who also paid proper homage to the God of his ancestors. Yet he also knew that he had witnessed the loss of all that he valued - his family, his fortune and his health. In the most dramatic moment in the story, Job is portrayed as sitting on top of a garbage heap, scratching the infected sores of his body with a piece of broken pottery, alone with his inner integrity. None of his calamities made rational sense unless he was deserving of this treatment. The pressure from his friends was to face and to admit these things, to judge himself as evil and thus to make his suffering make sense. The meaning of life itself was thus at stake in this debate. Only by the admission of his evil could he keep at bay the deep and perennial human fear that maybe there was not a God who was in control. If there is no God then perhaps life was chaotic, ruled only by chance, fate or luck, possessing no purpose, no meaning and no redemptive qualities. If that turned out to be the case then the human alternative was only to hope for the chance of blessing, since one could not earn it, or to endure endless suffering if that was to be his fate, with no further court of appeal. If the common theological wisdom did not operate then Job had to decide either that God was not just or that there was no God. This was the unspoken fear that Job's tormentors were resisting and like all theological fundamentalists, that was why they pressed their case with such single-minded fervor. Job, on the other hand, was willing to run this enormous risk because the common theological wisdom simply did not interpret properly his experience. With the unprecedented courage of one seeking a new human breakthrough, he stood against the conclusions of his friends, forcing on them a new alternative. The Book of Job ends not with a negotiated settlement of this dispute, but with a new vision of God who spoke out of the whirlwind to challenge the inadequacy of every human attempt to state how God works and to discredit every human effort to define the holy. The voice of God reminded Job that the human mind cannot embrace the reality of God. "Where were you when the foundations of the word were laid?" The ways of the divine are not the ways of the human. That is always the fatally wrong theological assumption. Religion at its core is based on the arrogance of believing that human beings can not only discern the ways of God, but they can also act in such a way as to control the actions of God. The human sense of fairness is read into the understanding of God. The human attempt to control human behaviour reinforces the common theological wisdom that expresses itself in a reward and punishment mentality. Heaven and hell are nothing more than the assertion that the mind of God, as we human beings have created it, is still operating to reward or punish us after our deaths. Religion almost inevitably creates God in the image of the human being and then tries to force reality into that frame of reference. That is why there is no religious system that is eternal. That is why when human experience can no longer be interpreted adequately inside the traditional religious framework, the framework itself begins to die. The death of a religious system is never easy. The fear engendered by the loss of religion, or even what we think of as the death of God, engulfs human life in a sea of potential meaninglessness. Such a death always produces emotional denial or fundamentalist fervor; a killing hostility directed toward that which or those who have shattered our religious delusions. It also, however, always produces emancipation from the evils of religion that many people welcome. It is the evils of religion that force us either into a new religious oppression or the building of a new secular city. The struggle to find a new alternative, however, also stretches our consciousness into new dimensions of what it means to be human and that is where hope is born. Job resisted the theological conclusions of his day. Job refused to let his experience be interpreted by the categories of the past. He held on until the birth of a new consciousness engulfed him. Job is thus an icon through which we can see the meaning of a profound religious paradigm shift. Today we are experiencing exactly that sort of paradigm shift. Our experience has rendered the religious answers of yesterday to be inoperative. The defenders of the inadequate answers of the past are anxious. The critics of those answers feel a new freedom. The God of yesterday dies as we struggle to view the birth of the God of tomorrow. Job is thus an eternal symbol of that eternal human struggle. ~ John Shelby Spong | | | | | | | | Announcements Tips and Tricks for Running Video Services/Classes Rabbi Brian has been teaching and running online services for 7+ years and has offered a free webinar for clergy folk looking for help on tips and tricks for streaming classes and services. He will be paying special attention on “how to do hybrid live and virtual at the same time.” Friday, March 27, 2020 at 9am PST / 12pm EST https://zoom.us/j/678409961 Free for ProgressiveChristianity.org friends and clergy. READ ON ... | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

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St Patrick's Day Eve Greetings
by Ellie Stock 16 Mar '20

16 Mar '20

Dear Friends, Greetings on this Eve of St. Patrick's Day. I hope you are staying well in the midst of this coronavirus pandemic crisis, and taking all the precautions needed to prevent the spread of the disease as well as sustaining your own health and the health of your families, friends and the wider community. A Celtic creation prayer . . . Deep peace of theRunning waves to you.Deep peace of the Flowing air to you.Deep peace of the Quiet earth to you.Deep peace of theShining stars to you.Deep peace of theSon of peace to you. There have been many inspiring and encouraging words and acts of compassion shared online and through other media. Continue to share them as we continue to support one another in new patterns of physical self-distancing and isolation. We remain connected in spirit and solidarity through these kind gifts of communication, prayer, and lighting of candles for each other and for the world, especially for health care workers and those who are on the front lines of battling the coronavirus. I was struck by the video of the Italian Airforce Tri Color (Frecce Tricoloi) accompanied by Pavarotti's aria from Turondot's "Nessun Dorma" (we will win)--the famous formation becoming a symbol of hope for Italy and the rest of the world as we work together to contain and stop the coronavirus. Below is the link with some background info. Scroll down to the video link (sorry it's in the midst of a tweet...). The Story Behind The Frecce Tricolori Video That Has ... theaviationist.com/2020/03/16/the-story-behind-the-frecce-tricoloris-video.… scene of the Italian Air Force display team performing their trademark final maneuver has gone viral, so much so President of the United States used it for a message of encouragement to Italy. … I continue to reflect that this present mobilization will not compare to the mobilization and society/life style changes needed to combat the complexifying issues and global crises related to climate change and global warming. Perhaps this is a much need warning and dress rehearsal. May we continue to enter these next days, weeks, months--not being overcome by fear and panic-- but instead with an abundance of consciousness, care, creativity, courage, and compassion. I leave you with a familiar prayer of St. Patrick... Grace and peace,blessing and love ~ Ellie :)elliestock@aol.com

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