- Dialogue - lists.wedgeblade.net

12/12/19, Progressing Spirit: Lauren Van Ham: Imagine That!; Spong revisited
by Ellie Stock 12 Dec '19

12 Dec '19

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!important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv0924999122 #yiv0924999122templateBody .yiv0924999122mcnTextContent, #yiv0924999122 #yiv0924999122templateBody .yiv0924999122mcnTextContent p{ font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv0924999122 #yiv0924999122templateFooter .yiv0924999122mcnTextContent, #yiv0924999122 #yiv0924999122templateFooter .yiv0924999122mcnTextContent p{ font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;} } What sort of change do you imagine when you hear the words, “everyone,” and, “everything”? | | | | View this email in your browser | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Imagine That! | | | | | | | | | | Essay by Rev. Lauren Van Ham, MA December 12, 2019Last Spring, Greta Thunberg’s statement to the European Parliament included the phrase, “Everyone and everything needs to change.” It’s become a mantra for me: Everyone, Everything, Me, Changing. What sort of change do you imagine when you hear the words, “everyone,” and, “everything”? To me, it sounds large. Downright Biblical. And, here is my real question: are we even able to imagine it? Probably not. Maybe some of us, for a moment? Maybe in glimpses? At long last, there is starting to be some real recognition of what we humans have done to ourselves and the living system in which we’re intricately woven. Along with this recognition comes an assortment of responses, emotions, and agendas. Scientists, social entrepreneurs and activists are meeting the faces of those who had believed things, “weren’t so bad,” that a solution was being worked out “behind the scenes.” More and more of us now see and understand that humans surviving the climate crisis is not a guarantee, and very much up to us. This level of urgency and importance can create a froth of nervous activity, panic, hunkering down… But there is another possibility. And the season we’re in carries instructions! Since Summer, I have found relief in the writings of Jem Bendell, a professor of leadership from the UK, who is teaching from the awareness that societal collapse, related to climate chaos, is already happening. He calls our task at hand, “Deep Adaptation.” With others from the climate policy community, Bendell releases all previous ideas of, “sustainability,” and instead explores what kind of adaptation is possible. Different aspects of Deep Adaptation, are described using four “Rs.” Resiliency considers first how to reduce harm and not make matters worse by cutting emissions, adhering to international drawdown measures, and such. Relinquishment, describes measures for protecting ourselves in the ways we can by withdrawing from global coastlines and not building in fire zones, for example, as well as decommissioning vulnerable industrial facilities. These steps are hugely important, but it’s the next two Rs of Deep Adaptation that really get me. In Restoration, Bendell pointedly asks how we might live and die lovingly because of the necessary changes. In what ways will we act to lovingly care for what we’ve destroyed or eroded? How will we practice restoration, in Jem’s words, “not because it will work, but because we have a faith or sense that it is the right way to be alive?” For any of us who walk a spiritual path, for those who claim a practice of meaning-making, moving with Spirit, or living by Faith, this is what we endeavor to do…isn’t it??? In fact, as brilliant beings and co-creators in this interdependent web of life, isn’t that what we believe we are called to do? We’ve gotten lost. Even in our efforts to affect change in some places, we’ve fallen prey in others to the seductive din of Business as Usual. It’s really hard not to, AND I believe Advent and the Solstice season remind us of who we really are and of what we are truly capable! This season is the dreamtime. When Matthew and Luke set out to tell the birth story of Jesus, their assignment was great. They needed to shake people from what had become Business as Usual; to lift us from out of its loud, limited and fear-based thinking. Does any of this sound familiar? With enough unexpected and surprising nudges to look and listen for Spirit elsewhere, Luke and Matthew intended to help people return to a deeper truth, to more direct encounters with right ways to be alive. To do this, Matthew and Luke left historical accounts to others. They used cosmological and shamanic examples to tap something deeper in us, something filled with Creation and Divinity. Repeatedly, angels appear to Joseph, Zechariah, Mary and the shepherds. Nearly every time the Angels begin with, “Do not be afraid” and then continue to deliver a clear message that speaks to the Deeper Knowing inside each of the listeners.[i] The Christmas story, again and again, asks each of us to call into question the ways we have become comfortable in the scarcity and predictability of Business as Usual. Dreams, angels, bright star nights and animals awaken us with wild and Creation-infused imagery to embody our more liberated selves who can care and respond more creatively. This is good medicine for us right now. It is high time we find our way back to the cosmological perspectives and spiritual practices that will take us from our old ways of seeing while also offering the steady reassurance of, “Do not be afraid.” It is only from this space that we can imagine something different. The fourth R in Deep Adaptation is Reconciliation. Here, Bendell references anthropologist and psychologist Jonathan Lear’s work to better understand the Crow Nation of North America. In a summary of Lear’s book, Radical Hope, Scott Duimstra of Library Journal writes, “Lear examines the cultural collapse of…the Crow Nation. Lear begins by examining the importance of bravery, courage, and honor within the tribe’s culture and how these values were tested when the Crow were forced to abandon their warrior lifestyle and move onto a reservation. Their chief, Plenty Coups, inspired the Crow to use what Lear describes as ‘imaginative excellence’ by trying to imagine what ethical values would be needed in their new lifestyle. Plenty Coups did this with a combination of such traditional sources as dream interpretation and past ethical values, which gave the Crow an opportunity to overcome their despair and lead a meaningful life.” Plenty Coups understood Deep Adaptation. So much was lost. Reorientation was needed multiple times in order to find meaning in the meaningless, to find willingness in the face of death and irreparable losses. Imaginative excellence, indeed! Plenty Coups, like the Gospel writers, called hard upon our other ways of knowing – dreams, rituals, signs and symbols found in the wisdom of Creation and Spirit. Part of our paralysis right now is our fear of death. It’s so real. It’s also always been true. Should the fear we harbor around our own death stymie us in our efforts to find adaptive practices for all other life to flourish in the ways it can? Of course not. As people of faith it is our job to imagine what can be; to move from fear and limitation into creativity and care, ingenuity and trust, synchronicity and reciprocity within the living system that envelopes us. Dr. Cornel West calls on our imaginative excellence when he reminds us, “To be a Christian is to live dangerously, honestly, freely — to step in the name of love as if you may land on nothing, yet to keep on stepping because the something that sustains you no empire can give you and no empire can take away.” The instructions of this season are fantastic preparation for the year ahead and the climate emergency timeline we must heed. Counter to ALL the ways Business as Usual has usurped this season, making much of it a self-serving disaster, we are invited to choose otherwise. Can we – will we - give ourselves the space, the permission, the courage to excellently imagine the change ahead? Each one of us is being asked to suspend everything we think we know, so that we might restore our relationship with ourselves, Creation and one another. By embracing the 4 Rs, our actions can bring about healthy soil, water and air. Our future can include thriving networks of humans who are supporting one another locally while generously, peacefully sharing best practices globally. A world that honors balance and flow with all living species and discovers its innate and divine abundance…Imagine that!~ Rev. Lauren Van Ham, MA Read online here[i] If you are interested in learning more about the Christmas story’s origins and the intentional choices made by Gospel writers to free us from Business as Usual, I highly recommend The Liberating Birth of Jesus: A Birth Story Able to Reverse Our Planet’s Perils by Lee Van Ham (OneEarth Publishing, San Diego, CA. 2019) In the interest of transparency, the author is my Dad.About the Author Rev. Lauren Van Ham, MA was born and raised beneath the big sky of the Midwest, she holds degrees from Carnegie Mellon University, Naropa University and The Chaplaincy Institute. Following her ordination in 1999, Lauren served as an interfaith chaplain in both healthcare (adolescent psychiatry and palliative care), and corporate settings (organizational development and employee wellness). Lauren’s passion for spirituality, art and Earth's teachings have supported her specialization in eco-ministry, grief & loss, and sacred activism. Her essay, "Way of the Eco-Chaplain," appears in the collection, Ways of the Spirit: Voices of Women; and her work with Green Sangha is featured in Renewal, a documentary celebrating the efforts of religious environmental activists from diverse faith traditions across America. Her ideas can be heard on Vennly, an app that shares perspectives from spiritual and community leaders across different backgrounds and traditions. Currently, Lauren tends her private spiritual direction and eco-chaplaincy consulting practice; and serves as guest faculty for several schools in the San Francisco Bay Area. | | | | | | | | Question & Answer Q: By Glenda So, I have come to a point in my life where I no longer have a belief in a higher power. I was raised Southern Baptist and radiated to Methodist as an adult. After reading several of Dr. Spong’s books and essays I feel that what I had come to suspect is now true. Now I am lost, its as if there is not a Santa Claus. No being to look after me or my loved ones and perhaps no afterlife either. It’s not as if I am crushed but is it weird that I am still seeking “something”? What now? On the other hand, there is relief that there is not a God that only favors some, all the contradicting rhetoric in the Bible now doesn’t have to make sense to me. Please help. A: By Kaitlin Curtice Dear Glenda,I believe the person asking this question has come to a really important place in life, one that many people who grew up in fundamental religious spaces perhaps don’t get to. What happens when everything falls to the side and we are left with a sort of black hole where religion once was? I came to this in my late 20s and have been struggling with it ever since, while others come to this existential sort of crisis later in life. For example, I have found it quite comforting that the universe is far expanded outside the walls of the Baptist churches I grew up in. Instead of a patriarchal, white God who controls everything and blesses only those he deems worthy, I am enveloped by Mystery that I cannot comprehend. That gives me room to breathe a little, to ask big questions, to wonder. The advice I would give to the person asking this question is to let grief lead, at least for a little while. We must go through the process of letting go of the childhood “container,” as Richard Rohr calls it, to see what might be on the other side. Maybe on the other side it’s just more questions, but at least we know we aren’t alone. Ask what it means to be human, and that, if there isn’t an afterlife or a divine presence, what does it mean to still be a loving, kind human anyway, who honors others, human and non-human alike? We may not know what’s ahead of us, and perhaps we cannot make sense of the past, either. What we have is this exact moment, and we can be present to it. We can marvel at the way the leaves change colors and fall, or the way ice glistens in the sunlight. We can become childlike again, without having to succumb to our childhood religious prisons. That, at least, is something. Allowing ourselves to grieve a religion that was ours for so long will give us room to ask what’s next, and to not shame ourselves, whatever the answer may be. If we become atheists, humanists, just generally spiritual, or followers of another religion, we do it because our humanness leads us there, and there is no shame in that. If there is a God/Divine Being/Great Mystery, I’d like to think they’d be okay with our grief, lack of clarity, and wobbly legs as we find our way through this life. The best part is, we aren’t alone in the search, because if we are human, we are made for questions, for life, for seeking, for being, and for that beloved childlikeness that claims us along the way, every day. ~ Kaitlin Curtice Read and share online here About the Author Kaitlin Curtice is a Native American Christian author and speaker. As an enrolled member of the Potawatomi Citizen Band and someone who has grown up in the Christian faith, Kaitlin writes on the intersection of Indigenous spirituality, faith in everyday life, and the church. Her first book, Glory Happening: Finding the Divine in Everyday Places, was published with Paraclete Press in 2017. It is a series of fifty essays and prayers focusing on finding the sacred in everyday life. Kaitlin is currently working on her second book with Brazos Press, set to come out in 2020. It has been named by Publisher’s Weekly as a Religion and Spirituality book to watch for. Kaitlin has contributed to OnBeing, Religion News Service, USA Today and Sojourners, among others, and she was interviewed for the New Yorker on colonization within Christian missions. In 2018 she was featured in a documentary with CBS called “Race, Religion and Resistance,” speaking on the dangers of colonized Christianity. Kaitlin travels around the country speaking on faith and justice within the church as it relates to Indigenous peoples. She has been a featured speaker at Why Christian, Evolving Faith, Wild Goose Festival, The Festival of Faith and Writing, and more. | | | | | | | | 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 Origins of the Bible, Part X: The Rise of the Prophetic Movement: Nathan – Prophecy's Father Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong August 15, 2008The prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures are not religious versions of Drew Pearson or Jeane Dixon. They do not predict future events. Prophets are those who are in touch with values, truth, perhaps we could call it God, and who thus see the issues of life more deeply than other people see them. Perhaps they are the ones who, by standing on the shoulders of others, can perceive future trends and speak to them before others see them developing. We have known artists to whom prescience has been attributed. A well-known Spanish painter, for example, painted a scene several years before the Spanish Civil War that portrayed his country torn apart in a violent struggle. The Bible might well have called him prophetic. He saw what there was to be seen, but not everyone was able to see it. The power of the prophets was also derived not from the established structures of the social order, but from the prophet's vision. They were always outside the lives of either political or ecclesiastical authority. As such, they were what King Ahab called the prophet Elijah, "Troublers of Israel". The established priesthood always resented the prophets for they were not ordained or trained. They were free spirits who somehow spoke with an authority that established figures wished they possessed. The ability to speak to authority in a way that demanded the authority's attention was the signal mark of the prophetic spirit. None of this, however, answers the question of just why it was that the role of the prophet was able to rise in Israel to such heights that the religion of Israel was said to rest with equal weight on the law (the Torah) and the prophets. It all began, I believe, in a charismatic confrontation between Israel's most powerful king and a man armed only with a sense of God's righteousness. That story is told in the Second Book of Samuel and it remains powerful today. King David lived in the biggest and tallest house in the city of Jerusalem, which meant that when he was out on his roof top he could look at the rooftops of all of Jerusalem's citizens. One afternoon when he was doing just that, he spied a beautiful woman taking a bath in what she assumed was the privacy of her own roof top. The king was smitten with her charms and at once sent a messenger to her with an invitation to visit the palace to have a tryst with her king. The woman came. Perhaps in the power equations of that world she had no choice, perhaps she wanted to come, the text doesn't tell us and so we will never know. The two of them, nonetheless, became lovers at least for this brief time. When the lovemaking was over, the woman, whose name was Bathsheba, returned to her home. I suspect this was neither the first nor the last such affair that King David had had and so he did not think much about it once the rendezvous had ended. So it was that that weeks passed and memories faded until they were newly called to mind by a message arriving at the palace directed to the king's eyes alone. The message read: "King David, I need for you to know that I am expecting your child." It was signed, Bathsheba. When David read it, he responded in a typically male, evasive way. "You are a married woman", he said. That is the first time that we learn from the biblical source that this tryst was an adulterous relationship that the king had had with a married woman. "Why do you assume that I am the father of this baby?" To which Bathsheba responded immediately, "I am indeed a married woman, but my husband Uriah is a soldier in the king's army. He has been fighting the king's wars under Joab, the king's military leader and thus he has not been home for months. There is no doubt, O King, that you are this baby's father." Still unwilling to accept responsibility, the king decided on an alternative course of action. It was plan B. He would grant Uriah a furlough so that Uriah could then come home, enjoy the privilege of his wife's bed and then, in this pre-DNA testing world, they could say this baby came early. It would not be the first time that tactic had been employed. So this permission for leave was conveyed by a royal messenger to the field and a very surprised Uriah found himself being granted an unprecedented furlough. What King David did not anticipate, however, was that Uriah had the make-up of the "original boy scout". He was a soldier first, drunk with the camaraderie of warfare. "It would not be fair or appropriate for me to enjoy the comforts of my home and my wife while my buddies are bleeding and dying on the battlefield from which I have somehow been removed. Therefore, in solidarity with them", he concluded, "I will not enter my home on this leave." Very ostentatiously Uriah set up a pup tent on the walk beside his home and spent his entire leave there. On viewing this, David, feeling trapped, said: "What a turkey" and began to develop Plan C. Once again a sealed royal order was conveyed to Joab, the commanding officer, this time by the hand of Uriah himself. In this letter David commanded Joab to organize his army into a flying wedge and hurl it at the gates of his enemy's capital city. Uriah was to be placed at the front tip of the flying wedge, where his death was all but inevitable. It was done. Uriah was struck down and killed. Joab then notified the king that his problem was now solved. King David sent for Bathsheba and she became a member, perhaps the dominant member, of his harem. Finally, King David felt that his problem was solved. This outrageous kingly behavior, however, did not escape the notice of a highly respected holy man whose name was Nathan. He decided that he must confront the king about the king's action. The reputation of Nathan was such that the king, unsuspecting of what was to come, granted him the audience that he requested. It must have been a strange confrontation. Here was King David in his royal chambers surrounded by all the wealth, power and opulence of royalty. Standing before him was Nathan, armed only with a sense of righteousness that is contained in what he believed was the moral law of God and the universe. When the two of them were alone Nathan said to the king that an episode of gross injustice in the king's realm had occurred and that Nathan felt compelled to bring it to the king's attention. The king encouraged Nathan to speak on. Nathan did so in terms of a parable. A certain poor man, he told the king, had a single ewe lamb that was treated as a pet in his family. This lamb was fed from the family's table, slept in the family's home and shared in the family's love. Another man who lived nearby, Nathan continued, was very wealthy and owned great flocks of sheep. One day this rich man had a distinguished visitor that he was required by the mores of his culture to honor by entertaining him at a banquet. Instead of taking a lamb from his own flocks, however, he went to the house of his poor neighbor, took his only ewe lamb, slaughtered, dressed and roasted it and set it before his guest. The rich man and his guest dined sumptuously while the poor man and his family were grief stricken. Nathan let the pathos hang as he finished his story. David, upon hearing this tale, was filled with anger and declared: "The man who has done this thing must surely die". Then in one of the Bible's most dramatic moments, Nathan fixed his eyes on the king and said: "Thou art the man!" The king, thought to be all powerful, had been called to answer for his deeds. No one is above the law of God, he learned. That was a lesson rare in the ancient world, indeed it was a message unique to the people of Israel. David might have been divinely chosen to be king, as the biblical story suggests, but the King of Israel still lived under the authority of the law of God and must answer for his behavior. David, to his great credit, did not banish Nathan from his presence, but heard the voice of God through the words of Nathan and publicly repented. He sought to do acts of restitution. When the child of this adulterous liaison died shortly after his birth, David and the biblical writers interpreted this death as divine punishment. Perhaps in a further act of trying to make things right, David lifted Bathsheba out of his harem and into the public role as his queen. Their second child was born a while later. His name was Solomon and he was to be the successor to David's throne and to solidify the royal line of David that was destined to last, at least the Southern Kingdom, for over 400 years until it was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586BC (BCE). For Nathan's act of courage to be included in the Jewish Scriptures meant that this episode had entered the annals of Jewish memory. By becoming part of the sacred text of the Jewish people, it was destined to be read in worship settings over the centuries and in time to become identified as a mark of Judaism. In retrospect, Nathan was called a prophet and because of that the prophet's role in Jewish life was established. It was the duty of the prophets to speak for God in the citadels of power, to claim for God's law a place of absolute influence and to assert that there is no one in the land who was not subject to the law of God. Monarchy was not absolute in Israel from that moment on. Nathan originated the prophetic role in Israel. He established Israel as the one nation where no one's power would be above the power of the law. This was the reality that made the Jewish nation different from all the other nations of the ancient world. Certainly it was this nation alone that was destined to produce the prophetic tradition that would become so strong that it was not "the law and the Temple" but "the law and the prophets", that would characterize this people. We will look at a number of the prophetic voices as this series on the origins of the Bible continues.~ John Shelby Spong | | | | | | | | Announcements Join the Global Silent Minute December 21, 2019 At 9.00pm London GMT on the Solstice, December 21, 2019, let us ring a bell to prepare to enter into one minute of silence in communion with the Forces of Light, as we generate a reservoir of united global thought that will inspire cooperative endeavours to create a better world for all. READ ON ... | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

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Heidi Holmes
by jstanfieldica 11 Dec '19

11 Dec '19

Dear Colleagues,Heidi Holmes died at 3:05pm today in a hospice where she has been for the last few weeks. Rachel and Duncan were by her bed.We celebrate her completed life.Peace,Jeanette StanfieldFor the familySent from my Bell Samsung device over Canada's largest network.

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Celebration of Heidi
by Jeanette Stanfield 09 Dec '19

09 Dec '19

Hi, I am attaching invitation to celebration of Heidi Holmes life in hopes that you will see photo of Heidi that was included in invitation. Jeanette Stanfield

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Prayers & Healing for Shirley Henschen
by Timothy Wegner 08 Dec '19

08 Dec '19

Patricia sent the following out to the WSR (Women's Spirit Retreat) mailing list and asked me to forward to OE and Dialogue: ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Patricia Henschen <phenschen(a)verizon.net> Date: Wed, Dec 4, 2019, 8:55 PM Subject: Prayers & Healing for Shirley Henschen Dear Women of the WSR: As some of you know, our mom, Shirley Henschen, has been undergoing treatment for cancer since January of 2018. Last week, she began her third regimen of chemo. This coming Saturday is her birthday. The Henschen family invites you to participate in a time of prayer and healing for her, to increase her strength & resiliency and the efficacy of the chemo. So that as many people can participate as easily possible, I suggest setting aside a few minutes at noon in your time zone to send healing thoughts and prayers to Shirley. If you are a healer (Healing Touch, Reiki, etc.), please use your gifts to uplift Shirley and restore her well-being to the greatest extent possible. If noon is not a feasible time, please select whatever time is available to you. Shirley was one of the founders of the WSR South, and when she and my dad moved to Arizona in 1996, she continued the tradition of semi-annual retreats for amazing women by founding the WSR West. Kindly share this with the prayer warriors and healers you know in your network. I know without a shadow of a doubt that all of the love and positive intentions of so many good people will help her immeasurably. Those of you who know Shirley know that she is the epitome of goodness and kindness; she has helped many, and she really needs our help now. God bless you all. Blessings and peace, Patricia Henschen

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Global Buzz for December
by ICA International 07 Dec '19

07 Dec '19

Enjoy catching up with what is happening in ICAs across the globe.... Global Buzz Report: December 2019 Click above or copy and paste this URL into your browser's address bar http://globalbuzz.icai-archives.org/7dayreport-19/2019-12-01.php And: read the latest ICAI Winds & Waves Magazine brought to you now on Medium.com See here: https://medium.com/winds-and-waves ICAI Communications

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12/0519, Progressing Spirit: Kaitlin Curtis:The Power of Liminal Spaces In Changing Times; Spong revisited
by Ellie Stock 05 Dec '19

05 Dec '19

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!important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv9463160548 #yiv9463160548templateBody .yiv9463160548mcnTextContent, #yiv9463160548 #yiv9463160548templateBody .yiv9463160548mcnTextContent p{ font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv9463160548 #yiv9463160548templateFooter .yiv9463160548mcnTextContent, #yiv9463160548 #yiv9463160548templateFooter .yiv9463160548mcnTextContent p{ font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;} } We are all, always, changing, and accepting that truth is the beginning of everything. | | | | View this email in your browser | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The Power of Liminal Spaces In Changing Times | | | | | | | | | | Essay by Kaitlin Curtice December 5, 2019I was thinking recently about how much I loved getting my hair cut growing up. If I became bored with something in my life, I chose a new style. If I felt like I needed to express myself in a new way, I decided to get bangs, or chop all my hair off, or try something completely new. My hair was a part of me that could shift and change as I shifted and changed. My hair, in a way, was the space where I asked questions and took chances, when I couldn’t do that in other realms of my life. I grew up in the conservative southern Baptist tradition, in a conservative town, where, even at the public school, there were rules based on Christian principles. Girls couldn’t wear tank tops with straps less than two inches , or shorts and skirts above the knee, so the evangelical purity movement was alive and well in all realms of life. Even though I followed all the rules, I expressed myself through my fashion sense, through my hair, and through the music I listened to and wrote. I pushed the boundary only as far as I felt comfortable without crossing a line, and I found that creativity was an outlet, a safe space for me to be exactly who I am as a beloved person. I’m not southern Baptist anymore, and would loosely call myself a Christian. And today, while I still have an eclectic style and love of music, I’ve found that the power of words and identity are also ways of expression, especially coming out of a religion that does not greatly value either one when they belong to women. I write as an act of resistance. I identify myself as a Potawatomi woman within the church as an act of resistance. This means that I live in a lot of gray areas. Many of us who grew up in fundamental spaces were taught to live in dualities: black and white, in and out, saved and unsaved. In those spaces, there isn’t liminality. There aren’t many safe spaces to ask really hard questions, to show anger toward injustice, or even to grieve when we need to grieve. We are taught to brush it off, smile, move on, trust God, and believe. But the cost of those dualities is our identities. The cost is the identity of a gender non-binary or trans person who can’t fully, safely live into who they are. The cost is a sense of self-love for a mixed-ethnicity or bi-racial person who is made to feel ashamed of who they are. The cost is young girls and women expressing themselves only within the boundaries of patriarchal relationships and marriages. The cost is disabled people being told they don’t belong and they aren’t enough. Can we create spaces that are not built by those dualities, but built in the liminal spaces, where we gather to ask questions, to lean into difficult conversations with grace and truth-telling? I’ve been thinking lately about Bob Dylan’s song The Times, They Are A-Changin’. Written in the 1960s, this song was an anthem during a hard time in America. It pointed to injustice and called all people into the work of doing what is right, of not being silent, of using whatever gifts they had to create change and foster wholeness. This particular line speaks to me: Come writers and critics Who prophesize with your pen And keep your eyes wide The chance won’t come again As a writer who often criticizes the church and the false and harmful narratives America has told for generations, I live in a space that is difficult to inhabit sometimes. But I know I am not alone, and I stand alongside others who are asking hard questions. I am standing in a lineage of people, in Dylan’s generation and before, who are pointing to change that is coming, whether we are ready for it or not. When we do not know where to go from here, we can look to our children. Another line in Dylan’s song says this: Come mothers and fathers Throughout the land And don’t criticize What you can’t understand Your sons and your daughters Are beyond your command Your old road is rapidly agin’ I am a mother of two children, and so much of my own religious deconstruction has happened because they challenge me daily to ask hard questions about the God I grew up with and the God I now know and the God that I will learn about tomorrow. Because our children are the future, we ask hard questions now for them and because of them, and we allow them to ask their own questions. We listen to their wisdom and learn from their passionate way of loving the world. This is where so much of the American white church has fallen short. This is why there are studies, books and conferences about why the younger generations aren’t interested in worship and are abandoning the faith of their parents and grandparents. My generation, millennials, are considered lazy and anti-religion because we are naming our own trauma and working to dismantle institutions that have traumatized us. If we are trapped in a religion or spirituality that doesn’t allow us to ask questions, those questions either die (and our souls die along with them) or we begin to break out of those toxic boxes. Sometimes we leave religion altogether, and sometimes we stay, always pushing for things to change, for equity, for justice. We do it for the sake of our own wellness. We do it for the sake of future generations. And what waits on the other side, in the liminality, is more questions, more unknowing, more mystery. For many, it’s scary there. We try to force answers. We hate the process. But the young ones lead us. Their dreams carry us forward. Their persistence and passion create a path where we didn’t see one before. We are all, always, changing, and accepting that truth is the beginning of everything. Today, while I’m not getting haircuts to express who I am on a regular basis, I am using words to guide me, to lead me, to push those boundaries and show me what the next step might be. For now, that is enough. For now, I know that no matter what changes are coming, I am not alone in this work.~ Kaitlin Curtice Read online here About the Author Kaitlin Curtice is a Native American Christian author and speaker. As an enrolled member of the Potawatomi Citizen Band and someone who has grown up in the Christian faith, Kaitlin writes on the intersection of Indigenous spirituality, faith in everyday life, and the church. Her first book, Glory Happening: Finding the Divine in Everyday Places, was published with Paraclete Press in 2017. It is a series of fifty essays and prayers focusing on finding the sacred in everyday life. Kaitlin is currently working on her second book with Brazos Press, set to come out in 2020. It has been named by Publisher’s Weekly as a Religion and Spirituality book to watch for. Kaitlin has contributed to OnBeing, Religion News Service, USA Today and Sojourners, among others, and she was interviewed for the New Yorker on colonization within Christian missions. In 2018 she was featured in a documentary with CBS called “Race, Religion and Resistance,” speaking on the dangers of colonized Christianity. Kaitlin travels around the country speaking on faith and justice within the church as it relates to Indigenous peoples. She has been a featured speaker at Why Christian, Evolving Faith, Wild Goose Festival, The Festival of Faith and Writing, and more. | | | | | | | | Question & Answer Q: By John Would you comment from your Christian perspective on the Buddhist assertion that we have no separate self or separate existence because we cannot understand who we are without understanding who we aren't, and our separate existence is known only because of everything we are? Is the sense of self an illusion? A: By Brian McLaren Dear John,First, I should say that although I have studied some dimensions of Buddhism, I am not deeply enough conversant with Buddhist understandings of self to offer a cogent counterpoint of Christian and Buddhist views. I wrote a book on Christian identity in a multi-faith world (Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road?), and as I explain there, I tend to agree with John Cobb, who says that different religions are "incommensurable." In other words, different religions are not saying different things about the same thing, or the same thing about the same thing. Rather, having developed in different contexts, they're different research projects, so to speak, saying different things about different things. They each have their own unique backstory and are addressing problems and challenges unique to their own contexts. That doesn't mean they have nothing to say to one another, but it does suggest that it is best to try to approach each religion as its own language or its own world, and to try to enter it and understand it from the inside, rather than thinking that one can understand one religion fully when operating within the mind and assumptions of another religion. Having said that, I do recall a story told about the Buddha that relates directly to your question. I found the story here (https://tricycle.org/magazine/there-no-self/) When Vacchagotta the wanderer asked him point-blank whether or not there is a self, the Buddha remained silent, which means that the question has no helpful answer. As he later explained to Ananda, to respond either yes or no to this question would be to side with opposite extremes of wrong view (Samyutta Nikaya 44.10). Some have argued that the Buddha didn’t answer with “no” because Vacchagotta wouldn’t have understood the answer. But there’s another passage where the Buddha advises all the monks to avoid getting involved in questions such as “What am I?” “Do I exist?” “Do I not exist?” because they lead to answers like “I have a self” and “I have no self,” both of which are a “thicket of views, a writhing of views, a contortion of views” that get in the way of awakening (Majjhima Nikaya 2). I take the Buddha's guidance to heart. Rather than speculate about whether a separate self exists, I would say that if a self exists, in a truly Christian understanding, it cannot be separate. That's because every person, along with every other creature and reality, lives within the love and attention and presence of God. In God and in God's love, each thing is connected to all other things. This, I think, is what Paul is pointing to in Romans 14:7 where he says no person lives to himself or herself alone, and no person dies to himself or herself alone. This, I think, comes close to the concept of inter-being that many Buddhist teachers explain. The self-ness of a sentient being doesn't require it to be separate. The selfness of one can inter-be with the selfness of another. This is what love, communion, and unity are about. Howard Thurman spoke of this when he said: Now if I hear the sound of the genuine in me, and if you hear the sound of the genuine in you, it is possible for me to go down in me and come up in you. So that when I look at myself through your eyes having made that pilgrimage, I see in me what you see in me and the wall that separates and divides will disappear and we will become one because the sound of the genuine makes the same music. Here, I think, the Christian teaching of the Trinity also can be helpful. I don't bring in the Trinity as an exclusive and coercive dogma, but as a healing teaching in the Christian tradition that suggests that in the One-ness of God, there is harmonious otherness. There is a Fatherness, we might say, that includes but doesn't absorb and eradicate Son-ness, and a Son-ness that includes but doesn't absorb or eradicate Spiritness, and so on. The threeness of the Trinity is diversity-in-unity or unity-in-diversity. In other words, in God, there is not oneness that opposes otherness, nor is there otherness that violates one-ness. Rather, in God there is infinite one-anotherness. Dynamic relational harmony is what God is, or as John puts it, "God is love" (1 John 4:7-8). In this sense, Paul can quote (Acts 17:28) an ancient poet, "In God we live and move and have our being." Our self can exist within God, without separation, and yet without a hostile takeover or absorption. In short then, we might say that in a Christian framework (I say "a" rather than "the," because there are many viewpoints in Christian communities), the separate self is an illusion, or better put, a delusion. We often promote this delusion because it gives us permission to be selfish, arrogant, bigoted, egotistical, even narcissistic. The Christian self is a relational self, a self that seeks to love one's neighbor as oneself, because God loves both myself and my neighbor's self without discrimination. When this insight goes beyond a notion that one sees and actually becomes the way one sees, that, I believe, is at the heart of the Christian mystical experience. There is no separation, no condemnation, no male or female, slave or free, Jew or Greek, no clean or unclean, but God becomes all in all. God is all because I see all in love, and God is in all, because the love and presence of God fill without obliterating. We might say the fullness of God doesn't replace, but rather fulfills the self. The self, whatever it is, is a bush that burns with the fire of God but is not consumed.Thank you for your question.~ Brian McLaren Read and share online here About the Author Brian D. McLaren is an author, speaker, activist, and public theologian. A former college English teacher and pastor, he is a passionate advocate for “a new kind of Christianity” – just, generous, and working with people of all faiths for the common good. He is an Auburn Senior Fellow and a leader in the Convergence Network, through which he is developing an innovative training/mentoring program for pastors, church planters, and lay leaders called Convergence Leadership Project. He works closely with the Center for Progressive Renewal/Convergence, the Wild Goose Festival and the Fair Food Program‘s Faith Working Group. His most recent joint project is an illustrated children’s book (for all ages) called Cory and the Seventh Story. Other recent books include: The Great Spiritual Migration, We Make the Road by Walking, and Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road? (Christian Identity in a Multi-Faith World). Brian has been active in networking and mentoring church planters and pastors since the mid 1980’s, and has assisted in the development of several new churches. He is a popular conference speaker and a frequent guest lecturer for denominational and ecumenical leadership gatherings – across the US and Canada, Latin America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. He has written for or contributed interviews to many periodicals, including Leadership, Sojourners, Tikkun, Worship Leader, and Conversations. A frequent guest on television, radio, and news media programs, he has appeared on All Things Considered, Larry King Live, Nightline, On Being, and Religion and Ethics Newsweekly. His work has also been covered in Time, New York Times, Christianity Today, Christian Century, the Washington Post, Huffington Post, CNN.com, and many other print and online media. Brian is married to Grace, and they have four adult children and five grandchildren. His personal interests include wildlife and ecology, fly fishing and kayaking, music and songwriting, and literature. | | | | | | | | 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 Origin of the Bible, Part IX: The Judges - Transition Between the Law and the Prophets Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong August 7, 2008When one initiates a series of columns on the origins of the Bible and how it came to be written, there are inevitably times when there are transitions. They are not the most exciting part of the story, but they are essential if one is going to hear the story in its entirety. We come to such a transition part of the story in this column. Let me set the stage. Thus far we have examined the development of the Torah, the name by which the Jews refer to the first five books of the Bible. Though they are popularly known as "The Book of Moses", today scholars are universal in denying the Mosaic authorship of these books for three reasons that, upon examination, seem quite obvious. Firstly, Moses had been dead some 300 years before the first verse of the Torah was written, making it, shall we say, somewhat impossible for him to be its author. Secondly, the Torah contains an account (Deuteronomy 34) of Moses' death and burial, a rather remarkable thing for an author to be able to write. Thirdly, an analysis of the Torah reveals it to be the combination of at least four separate strands of material written over a period of some 500 years from 950BC (BCE) to 450BC, but reflecting events in Israel's earlier history. Recent scholarship has finally and completely dismissed one of the prevailing fantasies marking biblical literalism. In this week's column, we transition beyond the Torah and toward the prophets. Jewish tradition was built on the "twin towers" of the law and the prophets. Moses was the Jewish face of the law and his name became a synonym for the law. The prophets, however, were not identified with a person in the same way, even though Elijah has been designated, I think inaccurately, as the father of the prophetic movement. Elijah lived in the 9th Century BC, a time in which the Jewish people were divided into competing nations, the Northern Kingdom, with its capital in Samaria and Judah with its capital in Jerusalem. Elijah was identified with the Northern Kingdom. The Torah (Genesis-Deuteronomy) covers Jewish history from the moment of creation to the time when Israel was poised on the edge of what they called "The Promised Land". The Exodus and the Conquest of Canaan are located in the 1250-1200BC period. The prophetic movement appears in the reign of King David, but its golden age does not arrive until the 8th Century BC. So there is a considerable gap of time between the Torah and the prophets. During this gap the solitary Jewish nation divided through a civil war into two separate nations. The Northern Kingdom lasted until 721BC, when it was destroyed by the Assyrians and the nation called Judah lasted until 586, when it was destroyed and its people exiled to the land of the Babylonians. These constitute the stories related in the biblical books from Judges to II Kings, which now come into our focus. These books probably do not give us much real history. They are rather filled with folk tales, hero stories and national propaganda, but they do provide information into the character of Judaism. We look first at the books of Joshua and Judges. It is still a much debated question as to whether Joshua was a historic person. Historians wonder whether the conquest of the land of Canaan was done in a single military conflict resulting in a Jewish victory, as the Bible suggests, or whether that conquest occurred over hundreds of years as marauding Semitic bands settled in this land and only later did their stories merge into a consistent Jewish history. What we do have in the biblical story is that Joshua was the successor to Moses and that he was of the tribe of Ephraim, which made him a member of one of the two Joseph tribes that would someday constitute the bulk of the Northern Kingdom. Many Moses stories appear to have been wrapped around Joshua. Certainly the splitting of the Jordan River so that the people of Israel could walk across it on dry land on their way to conquer Jericho is a Red Sea story being retold. The conquest of Canaan by Joshua is portrayed in the Bible as being total, but later history shows Jews and Canaanites living side by side and even intermarrying long after Joshua, which would seem to indicate that Joshua enjoyed something less than total victory. The Book of Joshua actually only relates three major military campaigns: The Battle of Jericho, which is told in great detail; the battle against the kings of the South and the battle against the kings of the North, both of which have scant details. If you read the word kings here as if they were more like mayors of various villages, you would have a truer picture of these battles. After these three campaigns the Bible suggests that the people settled down into loosely-knit confederations under the leadership of local judges. The period of the Judges in Jewish history produced folk tales, hero stories and myths that are quite distinct even in the Bible. People tend not to be familiar with these stories, except for the narrative about the strong man, Samson and of his dramatic undoing at the hands of his lover, Delilah. As delightful as the story of Samson is, it is only one of many that we find in the Book of Judges. There is also the account of Jael, who finds the number one enemy of her people, a Canaanite general named Sisera, delivered miraculously into her hands. After giving him a glass of milk laced with sufficient drugs to render him unconscious, she proceeds to nail his head to the floor with a mallet and a tent peg. It is a rather gory story! There is also the story of Jephthah and his rash vow to sacrifice anyone who comes out to greet him on his return from a military victory. The innocent one who gets trapped in this vow turns out to be his own daughter. Then there was the story of Ehud, the left-handed judge, who managed to drive his sword so deeply into the stomach of Eglon, the hugely fat king of Moab, that his hand actually disappeared in the king's flesh. Perhaps the most repellent story in the Bible is the narrative in the Book of Judges about a man who travels with his concubine to Jerusalem where, to save himself from abuse, he offers his concubine to the men of the city for gang rape. When they have done their worst to her, they threw her unconscious body on the porch of the home where this man was staying. He then proceeds to carve this woman into twelve pieces, sending part of her to each of the twelve tribes of Israel to call them to arms (Judges 19). The stories found in the Book of Judges are not necessarily the passages one reads in church and then says, "This is the word of the Lord!" This period in Jewish history when local judges were the real rulers might best be understood as analogous to that period of American history when the people of this nation lived under the articles of confederation as a loose union of states with little or no national power. Having just endured the life of submissive colonies ruled by a foreign power, these early Americans were not eager to cede local authority to anyone. The Israelites also had searing memories of their oppression at the hands of the Egyptians and so, having found freedom, they were also not eager to be submissive to a distant authority again. That is a natural reaction, but it is hardly ever a permanent solution. The American Colonies would never have maintained their independent life had they not become a unified nation. The tribes of Israel would never have maintained their independent life had they not become a nation. The new union in both nations was, we recall, quite fragile and was tested by secession. It was 80 years after the kingship of David was established that the ten Northern tribes seceded from the nation ruled by the tribe of Judah. It was 73 years after the United States established the central government, under the presidency of George Washington that secession from this union occurred that ultimately involved eleven states. The process of nation building seems to go through certain inevitable stages. The period of the Judges came to an end under the leadership of the final judge, whose name was Samuel. He is clearly the pivotal figure in this period of Israel's history between being a people in the wilderness and having an established nation. As seems to be the case with every pivotal figure in Jewish history, Samuel becomes a model for Jewish messianic thinking. Certainly the Jesus story shows the influence of Samuel. Samuel had something of a miraculous birth. His mother, Hannah, had been unable to have children until, as the story says, God intervened to answer her prayers. When Samuel was born Hannah was said to have sung a song that is quite similar to the Song of Mary that we call the Magnificat. When Luke tells the story of Jesus going up to the Temple at the age of twelve, there are many similarities with Hannah taking Samuel to the shrine where Eli the priest lived. Samuel is also the pivotal figure in the establishment of the monarchy. At first he was said to have resisted the pressure to have a king, warning the people that kings can be tyrants and yet he anoints Saul to be the first king of the unified Jewish nation. When Saul proved to be a poor choice, Samuel sought out and anointed a shepherd boy named David, the son of Jesse, to be the second king and it was David who established the lasting monarchy. It was also during the reign of King David that a lone man, armed with nothing except a sense of his belief in the immutable moral law of God, challenged King David publicly for what he believed was the king's immoral behavior. By this act this man established the prophetic principle, which was rare indeed among the ancient nations, that even the king must live under and be judged by the law of God. Ultimately this principle would make Israel a very different nation from all of the rest. To this man's story and its role in the rise of the prophetic movement we will turn when this series continues.~ John Shelby Spong | | | | | | | | Announcements Advent and Holiday E-Courses from Spirituality & Practice A collection of holiday opportunities for spiritual retreat. Looking for a spiritual retreat to tide you over in quiet contemplation during the holy days leading up to Hanukkah, Winter Solstice, Christmas, Kwanzaa, New Year’s Day, and Epiphany? Here are many choices — some Christian and inclusive, others multifaith — from which you can find a perfect match for your needs. READ ON ... | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

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11/28/19, Progressing Spirit: Brian McLaren: Why do we use Christ as a synonym for Jesus?; Spong revisited
by Ellie Stock 28 Nov '19

28 Nov '19

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!important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv1903795420 #yiv1903795420templateBody .yiv1903795420mcnTextContent, #yiv1903795420 #yiv1903795420templateBody .yiv1903795420mcnTextContent p{ font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv1903795420 #yiv1903795420templateFooter .yiv1903795420mcnTextContent, #yiv1903795420 #yiv1903795420templateFooter .yiv1903795420mcnTextContent p{ font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;} } I’ve been pondering this question too … for decades! | | | | View this email in your browser | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Why do we use Christ as a synonym for Jesus? | | | | | | | | | | Essay by Brian McLaren November 28, 2019 This week's essay is in response to a question we received from Janet: I wonder who “Christ” is. I know when people use the term, they are referring to Jesus. But Christ didn’t walk on water, Jesus did. So why does Christianity so often use the word Christ for Jesus; I find it confusing and incorrect. Some say there is a “Christ event;” so what is/was that event? Is that when Jesus became the Christ? “Christ” is the equivalent of Messiah, “anointed one.” Saul was a messiah; so was David as well as others. So why do we use Christ as a synonym for Jesus–or are they not one and the same? Janet - thanks so much for this question. I’ve been pondering this question too … for decades! As you may know, Fr. Richard Rohr recently wrote a book on the subject, called the Universal Christ, and the former Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, recently wrote a book called Christ, The Heart of Creation. So if you’re wondering about the meaning of Christ, you are not alone! Let’s start by saying the obvious: Christ isn’t Jesus’s last name. It’s a title, like doctor, reverend, president, or governor. It’s the Greek translation for the Hebrew word for Messiah, and both words mean “smeared,” as in smeared or anointed with oil. In ancient times, scented oils were smeared on people being honored, named, or recognized for a special role, much like placing an Olympic medal on an athlete, or giving an important person the keys to a city, or putting a crown on a prom queen. In passages like Isaiah 61, this oil of anointing was associated with the Spirit of God. In the Jewish tradition, a powerful spiritual, theological, and political movement developed around the idea of the Messiah. For centuries, the Jewish people were oppressed and occupied by one foreign power after another, and they dreamed of a mighty liberator or freedom fighter who would unite them, rally them, and lead them into war to overthrow their oppressors so they would be free at last. Various would-be-messiahs arose and staged uprisings, but one after another were crushed. For some, the dream of a messiah died, but for many, with each defeat, the hope would become even more fervent. You can think of it this way: there were kings over Israel who were puppets or accomplices of Caesar in Rome. They were not liberating kings. They were oppressive, corrupt, complicit kings. Someday, the people dreamed, God will send us a new leader who will be both a spiritual leader and a powerful political and military leader; he will be anointed as our liberating king. Some years ago, I participated in a new translation/paraphrase of the New Testament called The Voice. I was assigned the books of Luke and Acts, and my assignment was to try to render the Greek and older English texts into contemporary terms that would make the meaning as clear as possible to people today. I struggled with how to translate the word Christ, and with this background in mind, I decided to use the term Liberating King. Today, I might simply render it Liberator instead. Many of Jesus' contemporaries dared to believe that he might be their liberator, their long-awaited Christ. Yet he refused to fulfill their expectations. They wanted him to unite and revive the people spiritually so they would go to war against their Roman oppressors. But Jesus wouldn’t comply, because he wanted to liberate people, not simply from violent oppression, but also from violence itself. “My kingdom is not of this world,” he once said. “If it were of this world, my disciples would fight.” So he dared to proclaim an alternative kingdom that would be planted nonviolently, like seeds in the middle of the existing one. He was flipping the script on what it meant to be “smeared” or anointed as the Messiah. Paul, when he was still called Saul, preferred the violent Messiah, and in fact he used violence to suppress the fledgling Jesus movement. Eventually, when he had a spiritual experience that convinced him that Jesus was in fact the Messiah or the Christ, it turned his life around. One of his favorite terms came to be “in Christ.” Just as “in the kingdom of God” is one of the key phrases in understanding Jesus, “in Christ” is one of the key phrases in understanding Paul. Think of it like this: in Jesus, Paul encountered the Christ, the Messianic or Liberating Spirit, moving in the world of his day. But the life of Jesus radically redefined his understanding of what Messiah or Christ meant. The way of the Christ was not a way of violence (as he once thought), but the way of nonviolent love. By repenting (having a paradigm shift, rethinking everything, having his whole world turned upside down), he came to see himself as part of this new liberation movement. Now, he was “in Christ,” in the Messiah, in the Spirit, a citizen, an ambassador, and an agent of God’s kingdom, a member of the body of people in whom the liberating work of Jesus continued, now in many human bodies instead of just one. Paul traveled around the Mediterranean world inviting people to join him “in Christ,” as part of the Spirit’s movement for justice, peace, and joy (see Romans 14:17). Paul’s vision, as I understand it, was that the world would be transformed as more and more of us offered our “bodies as living sacrifices,” meaning opening our lives so that the Christ, the Messianic Spirit, the Spirit of liberation and love, could fill us, transform us, and empower us to do what the Christ manifested in Jesus: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, and self control. In-Christ people would be messianic people, people being healed and liberated so they could be sent out to heal and liberate the world through love. The in-Christ people would learn to live a new way of life with a new code and a new vision and a new identity (which is what a kingdom is). Jesus was filled with the Spirit, and anointed (smeared, marked as messianic) to preach good news to the poor, bind up the brokenhearted, proclaim liberation to captives and freedom for prisoners. When we join that movement of love and liberation, when we enter “in Christ” (in the messianic movement), we become participants in the ongoing embodiment of Jesus, which is why we can be called “little Christs” (the literal meaning of Christians). Sadly, this meaning of Christ and Christian has been largely lost. Now, to be a Christian means little more than to belong to an institution or assent to a list of beliefs. (Some so-called Progressive Christians still understand Christian identity as a matter of beliefs. They just uphold different beliefs than their conservative counterparts. They’ve changed their beliefs, but not their fundamental understanding of Christian faith as a way of life rather than a system of beliefs.) This helps explain why the behavior of so many, if not most Christians, is so far from messianic. Nobody ever actually explained the real good news to them, the real good news that the Spirit of love and liberation is at work in the world, and if we will rethink everything — our values, priorities, purpose, even our politics — we can join the liberation movement! When we “get” the original understanding, I think we quickly discover that the messianic Spirit, the Spirit of love and liberation, doesn’t care about labels. As Jesus said (in John 3 and 4), the Spirit blows and flows where it will, and is happy to work with any willing people, whatever their label. If all this is true, then a number of other insights follow. For example, if “the Christ” means the presence of the Spirit of love and liberation, and if this is another name for God, then we would expect, as Richard Rohr says, to be able to see Christ “in every thing” through the universe, and as Rowan Williams says, we would expect to see Christ “at the heart of creation.” And if the Spirit of Christ, the Messianic Spirit, the Spirit of love and liberation is not the wholly owned subsidiary of one person or one culture or religion (as the story of Pentecost surely indicates), then we should expect to see the Christ showing up everywhere … even in us, and even in our neighbor! In that light, just as Moses didn’t want to hoard his spiritual power and role, but said, “I wish that all the Lord’s people were prophets” (Numbers 11:29), we can see why Jesus didn’t want to hoard the title “Christ.” Jesus was happy to share it and spread it far and wide. Just as he said "I am the light of the world," he also said, "You are the light of the world." As my friend Doug Pagitt explores in his excellent new book, Outdoing Jesus (Eerdman’s, 2019), Jesus wanted his disciples to be like their teacher, and to even do greater things than he did. He wanted us all to be filled with the messianic Spirit. He wanted us all to be embodiments or incarnations of the Spirit of love and liberation. As he was in the world messianically — for its nonviolent liberation, so he sends us. So your question, Janet, isn’t just a theoretical one. It’s one that invites us all into the movement of love and liberation in our world today. Imagine what that could mean for the planet, for the poor, for peace, and even for politics … if more and more of us join God’s ongoing movement to liberate the world from all that steals, kills, and destroys, and to fill it instead with justice, joy, and peace! ~ Brian McLaren Read online here About the Author Brian D. McLaren is an author, speaker, activist, and public theologian. A former college English teacher and pastor, he is a passionate advocate for “a new kind of Christianity” – just, generous, and working with people of all faiths for the common good. He is an Auburn Senior Fellow and a member of the faculty of the Center for Action and Contemplation. He works closely with Vote Common Good, the Center for Progressive Renewal/Convergence, the Wild Goose Festival, and the Fair Food Program‘s Faith Working Group. His most recent projects include The Galapagos Islands: A Spiritual Journey and an illustrated children’s book (for all ages) called Cory and the Seventh Story. Other recent books include: The Great Spiritual Migration, We Make the Road by Walking, and Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road? (Christian Identity in a Multi-Faith World). Brian has been active in networking and mentoring church planters and pastors since the mid 1980’s, and has assisted in the development of several new churches. He is a popular conference speaker and a frequent guest lecturer for denominational and ecumenical leadership gatherings around the world. He has written for or contributed interviews to many periodicals, including Leadership, Sojourners, Tikkun, Worship Leader, and Conversations. A frequent guest on television, radio, and news media programs, he has appeared on All Things Considered, Larry King Live, Nightline, On Being, and Religion and Ethics Newsweekly. His work has also been covered in Time, New York Times, Christianity Today, Christian Century, the Washington Post, Huffington Post, CNN.com, and many other print and online media. Brian is married to Grace, and they have four adult children and five grandchildren. His personal interests include wildlife and ecology, fly fishing and kayaking, music and songwriting, and literature. | | | | | | | | Question & Answer Q: By Ed I fundamentally agree with your theology (Progressing Spirit) but need a clarification. I once considered myself an atheist (after FINALLY abandoning a strict Southern Baptist brainwashing). However I now consider myself an ‘a-theist’ vs an ‘atheist’. This to me means I have abandoned the Biblical personal God. However, I cannot pull away from ‘Universal Mystery’; especially when I see a real merger of that Mystery with modern Quantum Mechanical concepts. Just wondering if you too have ‘a hole in your soul’. A: By Rev. Brandan Robertson Dear Ed, Thank you so much for sharing a bit of your spiritual journey with us. I want you to know that your spiritual journey is very common. I bet that many, if not most readers of Progressing Spirit, feel the same way that you do. During the season when I was leaving the evangelical Christianity of my youth, I too jumped to an atheist position. This was primarily a result of my belief that the Church, or its leaders, had access to or represented God; and if their God was supposed to be the real one, there was no way I could believe in him. But as my journey continued, as I have studied science, anthropology, and learned about the evolution of human consciousness - I became utterly convinced that there was a Divine Life that animates and is at work in the Universe. I never feel this more acutely than when I stare into a star-filled night sky and contemplate the reality that we are here, on this ball of dirt, floating in an expansive cosmos. This seems to be the most ridiculous and unlikely reality - and yet, here we are. And as I stare into the sky, contemplating the mystery that is existence, I can’t help but think that such beauty was created for a purpose. That there is some sort of design behind this all. That some consciousness, somewhere has carefully crafted the Reality that we experience. I think science is overwhelmingly beginning to point in this direction, and the indigenous spiritual traditions of our ancestors have, in many ways, always pointed our gaze away from ourselves into the expansiveness of the Universe, and invited us to wonder at the majesty of it all. In those transcendent moments, I feel that “hole in my soul” fill up for just a moment. And then I return to my rational, modernistic thinking and have all sorts of questions about the validity of religious claims, and I become skeptical of theism altogether once again. This rhythm of profound awe and deep skepticism is, I think, part of the spiritual rhythm of progressive people of faith. Rather than fearing or judging it, I think we are better served to accept it as a gift, to be honest about our experiences, and to continue walking this journey with others who are traversing similar terrain. I hope you can find that where you live, and I hope that you know that this community here on Progressing Spirit is on this same journey of skepticism and awe with you! ~ Rev. Brandan Robertson Read and share online here About the Author Rev. Brandan Robertson is a noted spiritual thought-leader, contemplative activist, and commentator, working at the intersections of spirituality, sexuality, and social renewal and the author of Nomad: A Spirituality For Travelling Light and writes regularly for Patheos, Beliefnet, and The Huffington Post. He has published countless articles in respected outlets such as TIME, NBC, The Washington Post, Religion News Service, and Dallas Morning News. As sought out commentator of faith, culture, and public life, he is a regular contributor to national media outlets and has been interviewed by outlets such as MSNBC, NPR, SiriusXM, TIME Magazine, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Associated Press. | | | | | | | | 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 Origin of the Bible, Part VIII: The Priestly Revision of the Jewish Sacred Story (B) Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong June 18, 2008 While the first wave of Jews entered the Babylonian Exile around the year 596, a second wave came in 586 after a rebellion was put down by the Babylonians and all of the identifiable descendants of King David were executed. Both groups of captive people carried with them their sacred story, which at that time consisted of the merger of the Yahwist strand from the dominant land of Judah, the Elohist strand produced by the breakaway Northern Kingdom and the book of Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic revisions of the entire text carried out probably by Jeremiah and the Deuteronomic writers with the encouragement of King Josiah. When they left their Babylonian captivity, which they did in waves from 50 to 150 years later, that text had been completely rewritten and greatly expanded by a group of priestly writers, one of whom appears to have been the prophet Ezekiel. Now the Jewish sacred story reflected two things: the Jewish struggle for survival, which they had accomplished by making isolation from their captors a primary religious requirement, and a new understanding of their ultimate mission in this world, which was to return someday to their sacred soil, rebuild their capital city of Jerusalem and restore their ordered life of worship centered, as it had previously been, in the Temple. It was the stated mission of the priestly writers to create such a deep sense of what it meant to be Jews that their identity would never again be compromised individually or corporately. This could only be done by asserting that their sacred scriptures were in fact the absolute law of God, that these scriptures expressed the will of God for them and that their obedience to the Torah must be total and complete. So the priestly writers edited the sacred text of the Jews to illustrate that the story of their ancestors included the mandates of Sabbath observance, kosher dietary laws and the absolute requirement that all of the males of the tribe be circumcised. They also wrote into the Torah rules that were to govern every aspect of their common life. Representing a monumental revision, the priestly writers set about to accomplish this literary task, and accomplish it they did. The opening segment of the Torah was rewritten to reflect God’s command at the beginning of the world that all Jews must obey the Sabbath. This was a new creation story, actually modeled on a Babylonian story of God creating the world in a specific number of days. It suggested that creation was accomplished in six days so that God could obey the Sabbath by resting from the divine labors on that day, thus setting the pattern for all Jews to follow. This creation narrative moved from the idea of the spirit of God brooding over the chaos of darkness to bring forth life to the story of how light was separated from darkness on the first day. On the second day a firmament to be called “heaven” was made to separate the waters above the earth, from whence the rains came, from the waters below that presumably at that time covered the entire planet. On the third day the waters of the earth were gathered into one place and called the seas, and thus separated from the dry land which was to be called the earth. This enabled the dry land to bring forth grass, herbs, fruit trees and vegetables to be used for food as soon as living things arrived. On the fourth day God created the sun to light the day and the moon to light the night, dividing day from night and creating both seasons and years. God was also said to have made the stars on that day. On the fifth day the fish of the sea and the birds of the air were created and ordered to fill the sea and the air. On the sixth day God made the beasts of the fields and “everything that creeps in the earth.” Finally, on that same day as the last divine act, God made the man and the woman, together, instantaneously, both in the image of God. These human parents were also ordered to be fruitful, to multiply and to fill the earth. The work of creation was now finished and God pronounced it to be complete and good. So on the seventh day God inaugurated the Sabbath of rest, blessed it and hallowed it; enjoining its observance upon the subsequent generations of the Jewish people as their sacred duty. This whole creation story was the product of the priestly school in the Babylonian Exile and was designed, not to inform people about what happened at the dawn of creation, but in order to make observance of the Sabbath the original and defining mark of Judaism. It was the opening salvo of the priestly writers’ campaign to reshape the sacred story of the Jews in order to aid their goal of tribal survival as a distinct group of people living in and through a critical experience. Once that purpose in the creation story is understood, then the other priestly editorial changes can be noted and understood. In the story about God providing manna to the hungry Jews in the wilderness on their original trek from slavery in Egypt to what they believed was their Promised Land, the priestly writers inserted new details to reinforce the Sabbath. The manna from heaven was said now to have fallen only on six days of the week so that neither God in sending, nor the people in gathering up this heavenly gift had to work on the Sabbath. When the priestly writers came to the story of the Ten Commandments being given by God at Mt. Sinai, they added their creation story motif to the Sabbath Day Commandment as commentary. The earlier reason for the Sabbath (see Deuteronomy 5) was that the Jews were to remember from their days of slavery in Egypt that even slaves are entitled to a day of rest. It had nothing to do with a creation story since that story had not yet been written. Now, however, that was the reason the Commandments gave for a strict observance of the Sabbath. The priestly writers then sought in their revision to locate each of the distinctive marks of Judaism in the earlier narratives in order to attribute them all to Moses. So the kosher dietary laws were written into the Book of Leviticus as the commands of God through Moses. Circumcision was placed into the stories of both Abraham and Moses as something mandated by God. The elaborate rites of Jewish worship were spelled out in detail and adapted to their exile status, so that they could be observed even in captivity. Synagogues, as local teaching centers, were established to compensate for the loss of the Temple. Even the story of Noah was adapted so that Noah would have on board sufficient animals to carry out all of the required ritual sacrifices without jeopardizing the future of any species of which there was supposedly only a single pair that made it into the ark. The revision process of the sacred story went on for perhaps as long as 200 years. It was thus not the product of a single author or even of a single generation, but it accomplished its stated purpose. It stamped an identity on the Jewish people that became indelible. The Torah or Sacred Scriptures of the Jews was now the Jahwist-Elohist-Deuteronomic-Priestly version. The text had more than doubled in size. Great chunks of new material had been added, mostly to govern worship and behavior. Priestly additions included almost all of the Book of Exodus after the story of Sinai (Exodus 20), all of the Book of Leviticus and significant parts of Numbers, as well as editorial revisions of the entire text. It may not have come into its finished form until as late as the fourth century BCE. There is a narrative in the Book of Nehemiah (Chapter 8) in which a group of the Jewish people, having returned from the Exile and having rebuilt the Temple in Jerusalem, were gathered “before the Water Gate.” There upon orders from the Governor, Nehemiah, Ezra the priest had brought to him “The book of the law of Moses” and he proceeded to read it to them in its entirety. This reading occurred, we are told, on the first day of the seventh month of the Jewish year. That was the day on which the New Year or Rosh Hashanah was to be celebrated and the people covenanted to be bound by this law. What Ezra read on that day was in all probability pretty much the substance of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. Two results of this new text of the law of God through Moses would soon affect the pattern of Jewish history. First, the passion to keep separate from Gentile infiltration in order to survive as a recognized people in exile got interpreted, when they returned to their homeland, to be a passion for ethnic purity. Genealogies were kept so that people could demonstrate their blood lines and prove their unpolluted Jewish heritage. This led to purges of those husbands, wives and children who were not demonstrably full blooded Jews, as well as to the judgment, found in New Testament times, that Gentiles were by definition unclean and thus to be avoided. It also led to the violent prejudice against those who came to be called Samaritans. These were the descendents of the people who had been brought in to resettle the land after the Jews had been exiled to Babylon, who had intermarried with those few Jews who had been left behind. Not only was their Jewishness compromised, but their religion was also corrupted by foreign and thus pagan elements. This meant that prejudices went deep and were justified by appeals to the “word of God” found in the Law of Moses. In time this prejudice against both the unclean Gentiles and the heretical Samaritans would reach such high levels of intensity that it produced protest books like Jonah and Ruth that somehow managed to remain in the Jewish Scriptures. Jonah expressed God’s concern for Gentiles and Ruth suggested that even King David would not have passed the racial purity test. The other result was the elevation of the Torah into the status of being the “Holy of Holies” in the Jewish Scriptures and this led to the synagogue practice of requiring the Torah to be read in its entirety on the Sabbaths of a single year in the stricter observing congregations and over three years in those less strict. The essence of Judaism was said to be the “law and the prophets.” The Torah was the law. We will turn to the prophets when this series continues. ~ John Shelby Spong | | | | | | | | Announcements Climate Conversations: Dialogue in a Virtual Global Space Sometimes the most valuable conversations come about informally – a coffee break at a conference, a chance meeting on the street, an introduction at a community gathering, or a friendly greeting in a new setting. Global Conversations are an opportunity for informal dialogue in a virtual global space. READ ON ... | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

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Celebrating the Completed Life of Shirley St. John.
by Lynda C 26 Nov '19

26 Nov '19

With fond memories of the journeys shared with the St. John family and celebrating a life of service and care. Another saint goes marching in! Lynda C. http://Outline.com/…/article_c4165f0e-0ca6-11ea-b80b-1b5929…<http://outline.com/www.hoosiertimes.com/herald_times_online/obituaries/shir…> <http://outline.com/www.hoosiertimes.com/herald_times_online/obituaries/shir…> HOOSIERTIMES.COM Shirley St. John, 88<https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Foutline.com%2Fwww.hoosiertimes.…> Shirley St. John, 88 50John <https://www.facebook.com/ufi/reaction/profile/browser/?ft_ent_identifier=Zm…>

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11/21/19, Progressing Spirit: Brandan Roberts: How Progressive Christianity Can Save the World; Spong revisited
by Ellie Stock 21 Nov '19

21 Nov '19

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!important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv0148869655 #yiv0148869655templateBody .yiv0148869655mcnTextContent, #yiv0148869655 #yiv0148869655templateBody .yiv0148869655mcnTextContent p{ font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv0148869655 #yiv0148869655templateFooter .yiv0148869655mcnTextContent, #yiv0148869655 #yiv0148869655templateFooter .yiv0148869655mcnTextContent p{ font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;} } Christianity is inherently political. | | | | View this email in your browser | | | | | | | | | | | | | | How Progressive Christianity Can Save the World | | | | | | | | | | Essay by Rev. Brandan Robertson November 21, 2019Christianity is inherently political. The faithful path taught and demonstrated by Jesus of Nazareth was arguably just as much a political vision for the future of the Jewish people as much as it was a path to spiritual salvation. After all, the long-expected Messiah of the Hebrew Bible was always seen as a political savior, one who would establish justice and righteousness between the affairs of humans once and for all. One who would cause wars and divisions to cease and would liberate those who had been caught in cycles of oppression. One who would replace every other king and emperor’s failed political systems with a divinely orchestrated government that would lead to the flourishing of the nations. This is the messianic tradition to which those of us who follow Jesus are laying claim. The declaration “Jesus is Lord” is a declaration of political as well as spiritual allegiance to the one whom we believe is the rightful ruler of humanity. While we know that this is true, progressive Christians have on a large scale been very resistant to engage in any way that seemed overtly political. We look to the Religious Right and see what is the very worst of Christian political engagement- powerful, privileged men finding ways to leverage their influence as faith leaders to cozy up to political powers and gain even more influence. We see a brand of Christianity that has sold its soul out to the agenda of a political party and its leaders, christening anything and everything that the party stands for as the Christian path. This corruption of Christianity for political ends has caused many progressive people of faith to pause and think twice before engaging as Christians in any political action. While this hesitance is clearly not unfounded, it has caused progressive Christians to forfeit a great deal of moral ground in our country over the past fifty years. We have refused to use our Christian values to cast a vision for the future of our country and the world that could inspire hope and ignite a deep political revolution that could change the hearts of millions of people. We have separated our spiritual beliefs from our political engagement, and what has emerged is a shallow, undesirable version of both. What is a political revolution for justice and equity if there is not a compelling, ancient spiritual grounding to argue for such a future? What is a faith that dreams for the reign of God to be manifest on earth as it is in heaven if there is no practical call to political action to make that vision a reality? What made Jesus such a compelling spiritual and social revolutionary was that he engaged both the political and the religious realms of his society without reservation. He spoke clearly about his political positions and his opinions about the political rulers of his day. He connected his spiritual and moral teachings to practical, political realities. When he told parables, such as “The Good Samaritan”, he was offering overt political commentary that was infused with spiritual wisdom. He understood that there was truly no difference between the political and the spiritual- both are dealing with the actions, desires, and possible futures of humans. The message that he taught in the Temple courts was relevant not just to the pious religious elites, but to the most irreligious passerby, because it cast a vision for a future that was for the common good of everyone, not just rewards for the faithful. One of the reasons I believe that progressive Christian denominations and organization have been facing such hurdles as we’ve moved into a new millennium is because we have allowed our faith to separate from our politics. We’ve overly bought into the extreme atheistic and humanistic positions that religion and politics have no business intermingling- which is not, by the way, what the idea of the separation of Church and State is about at all. And when our spiritual messages were removed from meaningful calls to engagement in the political affairs of our towns, cities, states, and nations, our version of Christian faith really did become irrelevant for a vast majority of people. Progressive Christianity became more about crafting theologies that could adapt to post-modern realities rather than about tangible transformation of lives, neighborhoods, and societies. And a Gospel without tangible transformation is not a Gospel worth believing… so people leave. As we stand in the midst of one of the most critical moments of human history, where the political future of the United States, and indeed the world, is in such great flux, and where the very survival of humankind over the next fifty years is a complete wild card, I believe that progressive people of faith have just the message that can bring hope and salvation to our world. We have a Gospel that takes into account the real challenges that humanity is facing, that offers real values and real solutions rooted in ancient narratives that have proven truthful for centuries. We have some of the greatest tools for organizing- namely communities of like-minded people who are waiting to take faith-rooted action for the common good, if only they were granted the permission to or had tangible examples of faithful political engagement. As we approach a new decade, it is going to be essential that progressive Christians begin to engage politically once again. It is essential that our pastors are not afraid to use our pulpits and our positions within our local communities to speak unambiguous truth to the public and to the powers that be. To name evil and injustice when we see it, while also naming potential solutions that are rooted in the wells of wisdom available to us from our faith traditions. It is essential that our local church gatherings transition from being museums of organized religion to community centers that utilize our religion for organizing as an expression of our devotion to Christ and to our neighbor. In this next era, progressive Christians must not be afraid to speak publicly, to engage elected officials, to create networks and organizations that unashamedly promote progressive values from a faith-based perspective. When we cast aside the weights of fear and complacency that have weighed us down and begin to once again have a sense of mission for why we exist as people and communities of faith, I believe we will regain our relevancy in culture and actually begin to shape the world in a meaningful way. The Gospel that we’ve been entrusted with will become compelling once again, because it will actually bring about the transformation and salvation that people are craving for so deeply. Progressive faith will become less about trying to convince people to join a sinking ship of institutionalized religion, and truly about joining a movement that is actually changing lives and the world. The actually has influence and power to make a difference. When I think about this kind of Christianity, I feel my heart leap. To be a part of a community that is actually at work to save the world through living out the Gospel of Jesus is why I first gave my heart to Christ so many years ago. And it turns out that this is the very kind of Christianity that, when reclaimed from the right, might just make me stick around the Church for years to come.~ Rev. Brandan Robertson Read online here About the Author Rev. Brandan Robertson is a noted spiritual thought-leader, contemplative activist, and commentator, working at the intersections of spirituality, sexuality, and social renewal and the author of Nomad: A Spirituality For Travelling Light and writes regularly for Patheos, Beliefnet, and The Huffington Post. He has published countless articles in respected outlets such as TIME, NBC, The Washington Post, Religion News Service, and Dallas Morning News. As sought out commentator of faith, culture, and public life, he is a regular contributor to national media outlets and has been interviewed by outlets such as MSNBC, NPR, SiriusXM, TIME Magazine, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and The Associated Press. | | | | | | | | Question & Answer Q: By Roy I’ve read so many books I had to stop because my head hurts. My reading has included the Bible twice from start to finish, Borg, Spong, K. Armstrong, Fox, Miles, Vosper, Felton/Murphy, Rollins, Aslan etc. I am not a scholar but was and am fascinated (Borg’s word) and driven to understand religion and my own spiritual desire. Anyway, I’m not there but have this overarching question before I continue my search.. what is God? If the traditional theistic notion has been debunked is there one Progressive view? We all use the same word and reference to something sacred but are all of your contributors and authors sharing the same meaning? If so what is it? Are we talking about a Buddhist mental thing or some other force in the world? A: By Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D. Dear Roy,Let me begin by saying that there is no “one Progressive view.” Indeed, one of the great gifts of a postmodern milieu is the freedom from a supposedly singular ahistorical perspective that dominates and devalues all others. That said, I believe there are common dimensions to a Progressive view: there is the inclusion of human experience both personally (phenomenology, psychodynamics) and communally (cultural studies), with all the incredible diversity that it necessarily embraces; there is also the integration of the complexity of various systems in and through which life unfolds. For myself, the existential longing within the Progressive view and what motivates my endless curiosity is the desire to know what is true about our experiences of Reality. Each author you cite has their own perspective and contribution to make to human spiritual inquiry. Freed from doctrinal blinders, what I find common to many, if not most of them, is the realization that Being is the Ground of what is Really Real. Being is not a mental category but the true nature of all that is. How that is so, well that is our amazing question. In many ways, Heidegger was correct – all roads of inquiry of what makes life possible lead to the exploration of Being. You speak of being “driven to understand religion and [your] own spiritual desire.” That is your starting place, that is your path. In your desire is your longing to realize your oneness with Being and that longing is your light, and it eschews ready-made answers. For me, no other question stirs the courageous human soul as the search for the true meaning of Being in our life. This is because “soul” is simply a word to describe Being manifesting as you, me, and every other phenomenon we encounter. The mystery is even deeper, because we can come to realize that we are Being. To come to know the true nature of ourself is to come to know Being. One of the gifts of Buddhism is that it always refers us back to the exploration of our own experience, our own sense of fascination, our own desire to understand. It wisely invites us to trust that to search for God is to explore Being, which means to be endlessly curious about your own soul’s journey.~ Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D. Read and share online here About the Author Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D. is an Episcopal priest, a student of the Diamond Approach for over a decade, as well as a certified teacher of the Enneagram in the Narrative Tradition. He is the founder of the Healing Arts Center of St. Paul’s Church in Marquette, Michigan, and the author of five books, including I Have Called You Friends, Holding Beauty in My Soul’s Arms, and My Heart is a Raging Volcano of Love for You and Beyond my Wants, Beyond my Fears: The Soul’s Journey into the Heartland. Visit Kevin’s Blog: Essential Living: For The Soul’s Journey. | | | | | | | | 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 Origin of the Bible, Part VII: The Final Strand of the Torah, The Priestly Document (A) Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong June 12, 2008 Time after time we discover that it was the external events of human history that more than anything else shaped the content of those writings that would someday be called the Holy Scriptures. That should not surprise us since all books have human authors who live in a context of both time and place. Only those who ascribe a supernatural source to these ancient texts find this insight disturbing. There is, however, no rational argument in the world that would assert a divine origin for either the Bible or the Koran. We have already traced this interplay in the first three stages of the development of the Torah. This week we come to the fourth and final stage. The earliest document in the Bible was a 10th century BCE product of the dominant tribe of Judah, which focused on the power symbols of that part of the Jewish world: the city of Jerusalem, the royal house of David, the Temple and the high priest. It was written probably during the reign of King Solomon, but its ultimate hero was King David. We call it the “J” version for it referred to God by the name JHWH. The next strand of the Torah was a 9th century product of the Northern Kingdom, written after its successful revolution, which separated it from Judah, creating a second Hebrew state. The Northern Kingdom, which called itself Israel, was, not surprisingly, far more democratic in nature. Power was vested in the people, allowing them to choose and to dismiss their rulers. This version called god Elohim and was known as the “E” document. It also made Joseph, the favorite son of the patriarch Jacob, the hero of its story, not King David, as the “J” document had done. In 721 B.C. this Northern Kingdom was overrun and destroyed by the Assyrians, their people becoming in the process the “ten lost tribes of Israel.” The conquering Assyrians resettled the citizens of that defeated nation in foreign lands, where they disappeared into the DNA of the Middle East. A survivor of this crushing war, however, did escape to Jerusalem with a copy of the “E” document. In time this material was woven into the “J” document and the Jewish story was now the “JE” version, which remained for a century the scriptures of the Jews. In 621 BCE a “new book of Moses” was “discovered” hidden in the walls of the Temple during a period of Temple repairs. It was called Deuteronomy from “deutero,” second, and “nomas,” law. Under its influence a massive reform of Temple worship was carried out. We suspect that the prophet Jeremiah was a part of this reforming group that wrote, planted and discovered the book. When Deuteronomy was woven into the JE version, the Deuteronomic writers also edited the entire corpus, placing their stamp onto Israel’s history. This JED account was the Jewish sacred scriptures for only a brief time before Judah’s worst calamity unfolded. This tragedy began in 609 B.C.E. when Pharaoh Necho of Egypt sent troops to attack his enemy, the Assyrians, on the plains of Megiddo. King Josiah of Judah, the hero of the Deuteronomic reforms and an ally of the Assyrians, intercepted the invading Egyptians. In the ensuing battle, King Josiah, probably the most popular king of the Jews since David, was slain. Despair and fear now set in among the Jews. Assyria was declining and the Babylonians, led by their warrior king, Nebuchadnezzar, proceeded to defeat its army, destroy Nineveh its capital, and to replace it as the dominant power in that region of the world. In the early years of the sixth century BCE, Nebuchadnezzar consolidated his power sufficiently to begin a war of conquest. Sweeping out of the North, he conquered everything in sight before arriving at the walls of Jerusalem to begin a siege in 598. Jerusalem was eminently defendable, located as it was high on a fortress-like hill and possessing an internal water supply. It had not been conquered by a foreign army in the last 400 years. The Jewish strategy before marauding armies was to retreat into “Fortress Jerusalem,” where they always kept sufficient food supplies to wait out a siege. Normally, the enemy would grow weary and a negotiated settlement would be reached, leaving Judah free but poor. Jerusalem had thus developed an aura of invincibility, causing the Jews to assert that as the earthly dwelling place of God, God would not allow it to be either conquered or destroyed. The Babylonians, however, proved to be more persistent than any previous enemy and the siege lasted for two full years, by which time both the food and the weapons of war were exhausted. Even rocks and spears once hurled were not retrievable. Finally, the walls were breached and the Babylonian army poured in, destroying everything before them. Even God’s house, the Temple, was leveled. The Babylonians rounded up the captive people and prepared them for deportation to Babylon. Only the elderly and the physically impaired would remain. The period of Jewish history known as the Babylonian Captivity was about to begin. A puppet ruler named Zedekiah, of the house of David but loyal to Judah’s new master, was placed on the throne. All others were forced to march into resettlement in Babylon. This experience would remain the darkest moment in Jewish history until it was superseded by the Holocaust in the 20th century. These Jewish exiles left everything they knew. They would never again see the sacred soil of Judah. They were removed from their Temple with its sacred feasts and fasts, which had served to give a sense of order and purpose to their lives. They even assumed that to be removed from the Temple was to be removed from God. According to one of the psalms (137), the conquered Jews were taunted by their captors. The words of this psalm are plaintive: “By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, when we remembered thee O Zion. As for our harps we hanged them upon the trees that are therein. For they that led us away captive required of us then a song and melody in our heaviness: Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” They were destined to live as slaves or as a perpetual underclass in a land where the name of their God was never to be spoken in public. They did not believe that God could even hear their prayers in this foreign place. Their spiritual crisis was even deeper than this. In this primitive time the defeat of a nation was understood to be a defeat for their God. This meant that their God had been demonstrated to be impotent in the face of the gods of Babylon. Their God had in effect been destroyed. If they were to continue to be believers, they would have to be, to use a phrase I would coin some 2600 years later, “believers in exile.” They were now separated from everything that under girded their understanding of God. It was a crisis of dire proportions in which their God would either perish or grow. There were no other alternatives. Most ancient peoples did not survive such an ordeal. This norm had in fact been the fate of the people of the Northern Kingdom. In only two or three generations they had completely lost their identity and were soon absorbed into the general population, becoming what we now call the “ten lost tribes of Israel.” The only hope a conquered people had for survival lay in their ability to remain separate and distinct from their neighbors, thus making it impossible for amalgamation to occur. The Jews now lived with the ultimate hope that someday, in some unknown future their descendants, if still cohesive and recognized as Jews, might just have the opportunity to return to their homeland and rebuild their nation and Jerusalem. This hope became their dream and the ultimate value for which they lived while in captivity. Included among those who were taken into exile was the man we know as Ezekiel, along with a number of other priests. Almost inevitably they became the new leaders of the exiled people, moving at once to build and to install into the consciousness of these conquered people the virtues of remaining separate from the Babylonians and to guarantee that their descendants would cling to the dream and the tribal duty of returning someday to their homeland. In the service of that dream these priestly leaders identified three essential marks of Judaism that they set out to stamp so deeply on the psyches of their people that they would serve to keep them separate from the others in Babylon. First, they reintroduced the Sabbath, making it the sign of their national identity. These Jews became known as those strange people who refused to work on the seventh day. This custom disrupted work crews to which they had been assigned as laborers, causing frustration and anger to grow among the Babylonians, but it also served to identify the Jews as “different,” perhaps weird, thus aiding the Jewish desire to remain separate. Second, these priestly leaders urged upon their people the adoption of kosher dietary laws, mandating that the food that the captive people ate had to be prepared in kosher kitchens. This meant, effectively, that all social discourse with those who were not Jews was cut off. Since Jews could not eat with non-Jews, this meant that there was little chance that close relationships could ever grow, since most human relationships develop in the act of eating together. Third, these priestly leaders revived the practice of circumcision as the distinguishing mark of Judaism, literally cutting that mark into the bodies of every Jewish male at the time of puberty. This made it impossible for a Jewish male to hide his Judaism from the world, which also served to make intermarriage difficult. The plan worked. The Jews became a people separate from all others. All of these practices were seen to be religious mandates. Ezekiel and his priestly leaders then decided that the sacred story of the Jewish people had to be revised to include these mandates as part of Jewish life and practice from the very beginning of their nation’s history. They now undertook a major editorial revision of what had been the Yahwist-Elohist-Deuteronomic story of the Jewish people. This fourth strand of material was to be called the priestly or the “P” document and to its content I will turn next week.~ John Shelby Spong | | | | | | | | Announcements Aquinas @ Orvieto with Matthew Fox Deepen your own spiritual journey as mystic and prophet A 5-Day Retreat, July 5-10, 2020 in Orvieto, Italy with Matthew Fox, Claudia Picardi, Meschi Chavez, and Gianluigi Guglielmetti and Rupert Sheldrake. Study the spiritual teachings of one of the greatest minds of Western civilization–Thomas Aquinas– with a preeminent scholar of Christian spirituality, Matthew Fox, in the amazing Italian town of Orvieto, famous for its views and art, where Aquinas himself taught and preached. Orvieto is located two hours from where Aquinas was born in Roccasecca, and where he died at Fossanova Abbey. And 90 minutes from Rome or Assisi! READ ON... | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

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Winds & Waves magazine reminder
by ICA International 19 Nov '19

19 Nov '19

Any problem reading this message please click or paste this URL in your browser's address bar http://windswaves.icai-archives.org/new-ww/ en français en español November 2019 This is a reminder for entries to our new Winds and Waves Magazine We are delighted to invite you to share your stories here via this link medium.com/winds-and-waves We also welcome videos that show the work you are doing. And we would be delighted if you would share stories from Winds and Waves on your own social media networks. For information about how to work with Winds and Waves on Medium: Please see attachment here Please be sure to send this invitation on to your ICA members and friends, colleagues, partners, family, so they too can participate. You can get further information by contacting us at icawindandwaves(a)gmail.com Best wishes, Robyn, Dharma, Roma, Rosemary, Isabel, Peter, for W&W team Published by The Institute of Cultural Affairs International, 401 Richmond Street, West, Toronto, ON. M5V 3A8, Canada All rights reserved. For more information or to unsubscribe, email: inform(a)ica-international.org

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