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12/09/2021, Progressing Spirit: Toni Anne Reynolds: Sankofa; Spong revisited
by Ellie Stock 09 Dec '21

09 Dec '21

| | | | View this email in your browser | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Essay by Toni Anne Reynolds December 9, 2021 | | | | | | Sankofa | | | | The United Nations, in partnership with the West African country of Ghana, marked 2019 as “The Year of Return”. It was a year to honor the 400-year stint of resilience of the people of the African Diaspora. 400 years since the first stolen Africans arrived in the Americas as part of the system of chattel slavery. During the Year of Return, thousands of people of the African Diaspora visited countries in West Africa as a way of honoring the lineage of strength. Ghana was host to most of these events and many of the festivities were advertised with the symbol of “Sankofa” (displayed in both images above). It has become a popular symbol and term throughout the United States as African American communities work to connect with the past to envision and build the future. The Sankofa symbol itself is inspired by an Akan proverb: “sƐ wo werƐ fi na wo sankƆfa a yenkyi”. This can be translated to “if you forget and you go back to take what you forgot, it is not a crime/taboo.” Typically, one might find the meaning of Sankofa explained as “to retrieve” or “to return and get it”. In either short or long form, the essence remains: visiting the past is a way to invest in and protect the future. Generally, Sankofa is invoked to encourage an entire generation, or the whole of a community, to embody the meaning. As was the case with "The Year of Return" events. The idea was, and continues to be, that knowing one’s lineage, culture, and history can ensure a lively future. The building of which will be strong and able to endure for many generations. There are several depictions of this wisdom symbol. One form looks like a heart with spirals incorporated on the top and bottom. Another common form of Sankofa is of a bird facing backward with a seed in its mouth, while it’s body and feet face forward. Internet searches will tell you this bird is mythical, but I have heard elders speak about this creature as one that truly exists in Nature, or did at one point in time. This bird is known for meticulously collecting food and strategically hiding it in its surroundings. Then, during times of scarcity, the bird returns to its hidden troves of nutrition - it will “go back and get it” so that death does not come to visit. To embrace the meaning of this symbol is to accept the invitation to behave with the same priorities of this bird. Regardless of ancestral lineage, ethnic and cultural makeup, each of us is responsible for protecting treasures so that they can be of benefit to coming generations. This value seems to be activated in today’s reality. At the beginning of 2019, The Year of Return, an estimated 26 million people used an at home genetics test to trace their ancestry. This staggering desire to trace roots lead to many people finding long lost family, discerning details about their familial origin stories, and connecting to cultures they once felt removed from. There’s no way of knowing what the driving motivation was for all 26 million people. However, anytime a trend takes off in society, it does seem to point to a stable truth. In this case, I offer that the widespread interest in exploring personal lineage is reflective of our collective call to “retrieve” what has been forgotten, as a way to supply future generations with much needed virtues. Virtues such as community, endurance, wise compassion, resilient creativity, ingenuity. Even on the level of so-called individual life, it can be the case that visiting the past reveals hidden gems that enrich the present and inform the way a person creates their future. I recently had such an experience in my “individual” life. I was participating in a Saturday Service facilitated by the beloved Rabbi Brian when he led a gratitude exercise. He asked everyone to open their text messages or email inboxes and scroll down several times so that we were deep in our inbox, and therefore likely to select someone who hadn’t heard from us in a long while. Without much analyzing, we picked a person and wrote them a simple message of thanks. “I’m glad you’re in my life.” “Thank you for being such a positive presence to those around you,” messages of this sentiment. The person I selected without thought was a college professor. She last messaged me in February of this year. Now, in October, I texted her to say, “thank you for being part of my journey.” What followed turned into a month’s long catch-up session. We have connected via video calls, emails, and are collaborating on a project that I left in 2011 before I graduated from college. The process of being in touch with her has enlivened corners of my life that I didn’t realize were becoming dull. Interests that fell to the wayside have been pulled back onto my path. A few other dearly held relationships that faded with time are coming back into focus as well. It has been a joyous few months feeling these closet lights turn back on. I had forgotten so much, so many people, so many inspirations. The biggest blessing in all of it is that the plan I had crafted for 2022 has been heavily edited by this surprising spark turned flame. Now my immediate future is made brighter after picking up the seeds I left hidden in my past, and in my reaching back I am reviving things that will be of great service to my community. It’s not lost on me that Rabbi asked us to “go back” in our inboxes to find a gem of a person. Or, that the conversation with that gem of a person resulted in even more reflecting and revisiting of the past. All of this, and the aspects that remain unshared, are part of the Sankofa experience. I wonder what ways you are you able to do something similar this week? It is not always easy to go back or to remember. I presume that acts of service, like this exercise in retrieving forgotten jewels, are meant to happen in community. Even if the community is a bit abstract, consisting of descendants and people you may never meet. You do belong to more than just yourself, and so does our legacy. In whatever way you are able to embody Sankofa this week, I hope you will do so with great expectancy. May your fetching be joyful, and your return to the present be met with great hopes for the future to come. There is a great deal of architecture to be constructed on the foundation of our past. Here’s to building something beautiful. Together.~ Toni Anne Reynolds Read online here About the Author Minister Toni Anne Reynolds is committed to singing flesh onto the bones of the Christian tradition by incorporating recently found texts of the ancient world into liturgy, sermons, and poetry. Toni’s Christianity forms a holy trinity with the psychological medicine of Tibetan Buddhism and the eternal Life found in Yoruba traditions. Balanced in an eclectic faith and focused in theology, Toni’s ministry offers a unique perspective on life, theology, and spirituality. | | | | | | | | Question & Answer Q: By Roy As a progressive Christian, how should one read and understand the story about Lazarus and the rich man? A: By Rev. Jim Burklo Dear Roy, In the old Vulgate edition of the Bible, the rich man in Jesus’ parable in Luke 16: 19-31 is called “Dives”. Lazarus begs for crumbs from Dives’ table. At death, Dives is sent to Hades (the Greek version of hell) and Lazarus is directly delivered into the bosom of Abraham. Here is Martin Luther King’s interpretation of the story: “Dives is the white man who refuses to cross the gulf of segregation and lift his Negro brother to the position of first-class citizenship, because he thinks segregation is a part of the fixed structure of the universe. Dives is the Indian Brahman who refuses to bridge the gulf between himself and his brother, because he feels that the gulf which is set forth by the caste system is a final principle of the universe. Dives is the American capitalist who never seeks to bridge the economic gulf between himself and the laborer, because he feels that it is natural for some to live in inordinate luxury while others live in abject poverty. Dives’ sin was not that he was cruel to Lazarus, but that he refused to bridge the gap of misfortune that existed between them. Dives’ sin was not his wealth; his wealth was his opportunity. His sin was his refusal to use his wealth to bridge the gulf between the extremes of superfluous, inordinate wealth and abject, deadening poverty.” I don’t think I can improve on MLK’s commentary. His words ring as true today as they did in 1955 when he delivered them in a sermon. Jesus’ parable was old when he uttered it. A similar story circulated in ancient Egypt. The prophetic tradition has always exhorted the rich to attend and respond to the plight of the poor. Progressive Christians might be taken aback by the vivid imagery of hell (its Greek version, called Hades) in this passage. But note that the modern evangelical formula for hell-avoidance is missing! In this parable, you don’t have to “accept Jesus as your personal Lord and savior”. All that’s necessary to get to the bosom of Abraham is to follow the law of Moses and the guidance of the prophets. And there’s no mention of “heaven”. Genesis 25 tells us that “Abraham breathed his last and died in a good old age, an old man and full of years, and was gathered to his people.” The people of early Israel did not believe in an afterlife: being “gathered to his people” meant being buried with them. Lazarus’ reward for following the law and the prophets was to die in peace and be gathered to Abraham and the rest of his people. The cultural context of this parable makes it clear that it is not to be taken literally as a description of life after death. But progressive Christians ought to take it seriously. Those of us with the resources to help those who lack them must pay attention and respond meaningfully to their needs – not just with traditional charity, but with a commitment to structural social and economic change.~ Rev. Jim Burklo Read and share online here About the Author Rev. Jim Burklo is the Senior Associate Dean of Religious and Spiritual Life at the University of Southern California. An ordained pastor in the United Church of Christ, he is the author of seven published books on progressive Christianity, his latest book is Tenderly Calling: An Invitation to the Way of Jesus (St Johann Press, 2021). His weekly blog, “Musings”, has a global readership. He serves on the board of ProgressiveChristiansUniting.org and is an honorary advisor and frequent content contributor for ProgressiveChristianity.org. | | | | | | | | 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 us on Facebook! | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | As a non-profit ProgressiveChristianity.org/Progressing Spirit rely heavily on the good will of our donors to help us continue to bring individuals and churches the messages of progressive Christians, Weekly Newsletters, along with the many other resources we provide. For years, the majority of our fundraising came at the end of the year. Looking at various ways to create a more reasonable amount of cash flow we decided rather than having a BIG ask at the end of each year, our more frequent asks give folks a chance to contribute when their funds are more flexible. We think that's a win for everyone. We also want to highlight the opportunity to become a sustaining supporter. If you are looking for the best way to help us continue to provide progressive Christian resources, become a sustaining supporter by choosing Recurring Donation. Help keep ProgressiveChristianity.org online and going strong - click here to donate today! * Another way to support us is to leave a bequest in your Will and/or Trust designating us a beneficiary. | | | | | | | | Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited Troy Davis and the Debate over Capital Punishment Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong September 29, 2011Wednesday, September 21, 2011 was a consciousness-raising day in the United States. It is always a conscious-raising occasion when a high profile public execution is about to take place. The people of this country favor the death penalty for murder, the polls tell us, by about a 64 per cent majority, but there is a deep ambivalence even among those who say they approve. The support for the death penalty was 80 per cent as recently as 1994. It has declined because of publicity in cases where DNA evidence established innocence for some who were condemned and waiting on death row. The idea of executing an innocent person is deeply troubling. Death is so final. Mistakes cannot be rectified or restitution accomplished. On that particular September Wednesday two people were executed in the United States. Only one of them, however, received national attention. His name was Troy Davis, an African American man living in Georgia. The other was a white man named Lawrence Brewer, who was convicted along with two other men of tying a black man named James Byrd by his legs to their pick-up truck and dragging him along an unpaved gravel road in Jasper, Texas, until he was not only dead, but dismembered. The crime for which Troy Davis was put to death took place in 1989. According to the testimony at the trial the details were these: Police officer Mark MacPhail was off duty, but working a second job as a security guard. A homeless man called for help when he was being assaulted by a group of people including Troy Davis. Officer MacPhail came to his aid and was shot in the face and heart, presumably by Mr. Davis, who was at that time 20 years old. Officer MacPhail died immediately, leaving a widow and two small children to struggle through life without a husband or father. Mr. Davis was subsequently arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to die. He has been on death row for 22 years, spending that time exhausting the appeals process. His execution date had been set four times. On three previous occasions during 2007 and in 2008 Mr. Davis came near the moment of his execution, but received a stay, first from the State of Georgia Clemency Board and later from the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court, having granted the stay, however, voted not to hear the case. The fourth date set for his lethal injection was the final one. It was after the appeals process had exhausted the possibilities for clemency that the case catapulted into national prominence as a number of anti-death penalty groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, People of Faith Against the Death Penalty, Amnesty International and the NAACP took up the cause. A majority of the witnesses who had testified against Mr. Davis at the trial publicly wavered and sought to withdraw their testimony, which they now said was coerced. Of course this case had racial overtones. Given Georgia’s racial history that is probably inevitable. When the final appeal to the Georgia State Clemency Board was turned down just before the execution, rumor had it that the vote of this five person board was three to two in favor of denying clemency and proceeding with the execution. That vote has not been confirmed, but it was noted that this board was made up of three white Americans and two black Americans, so the rumor, coupled with unverified assumptions, fueled the charges that racism was operative. Mr. Davis was said to have declined a final meal and to have been in “good spirits.” He was aware of the world-wide publicity that his case had attracted. Among those who appealed for clemency on his behalf were former President Jimmy Carter, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Pope Benedict XVI, fifty-one members of congress, people from the world of entertainment and even William S. Sessions, a former Federal Bureau of Investigation head and a strong supporter of capital punishment. There is a kind of fascination present in the American public that accompanies the process of execution. People want to know the details, to hear of the last words, to be informed of the behavior of the condemned person. For those who witness an execution there is always an audience to address. A public execution is an emotional experience for many, though after the deed is done people quickly forget all but the most notorious of the victims. Attending this execution were Officer MacPhail’s widow and her two now-grown children. This execution for them seemed finally to have closed a door on their pain and grief, allowing them to move on. The murder had obviously left deep scars on each of them and all three had clearly undergone real suffering. Mrs. MacPhail characterized her family, quite appropriately it seems, as “victims.” Also in attendance at this execution were members of Troy Davis’ family. This experience had also defined their lives as they watched one they loved spend 22 of his 42 years of life incarcerated. They made no comments, leaving us to wonder at their grief and the specter of the broken dreams and lost hopes that parents always seem to have for their children. There is a deep heaviness that accompanies a wasted life. The two families were kept apart. They made no attempt to see each other. No one needed that additional emotional load. When Troy Davis was pronounced dead at 11.08 p.m. that Wednesday night, those outside the Jackson, Georgia, jail demonstrating in support of Mr. Davis dispersed. Some were weeping, others were angry, all felt defeated. There were undoubtedly others across this land who rejoiced, who claimed that justice had been done, the laws upheld and proper punishment administered. There is always that division in the American body politic. The debate on the death penalty in America is an ongoing one. The Supreme Court temporarily suspended it in 1972 as “cruel and unusual punishment” and therefore for a time unconstitutional. They then reinstated it in 1976. Since that time 1269 people have been put to death. A particularly horrendous public crime always brings loud calls for capital punishment. Some of the people who support the death penalty surely want revenge. That is as basic and as ancient in human nature as “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” Vengeful, hard justice seems to satisfy this emotion in some people. Others who support the death penalty believe that this punishment is a deterrent to further crime. Deterrence is also the major argument used by politicians who favor it, but all of the studies I have read fail to demonstrate that deterrence works. Nations that have the death penalty have no less murder and in most cases actually have a higher murder rate than those who do not. Psychologically the death penalty has always seemed strange to me. The argument that “because killing is so terrible a thing to do, we will punish those who kill by killing them,” does not make logical sense to me. I do understand the need for finality, for closing the door on a devastating episode that has been like a draining sore. I do understand the need for a government to protect its citizens from those who have demonstrated that they are not capable of living in society without doing violence to another. Both of these needs, however, I believe can be met with sentences of life imprisonment without parole. People argue the economics of this, suggesting that life time care for convicted murderers is an expense taxpayers ought not to be asked to bear. The facts, however, do not bear even this out. The endless appeals process in capital cases is far more expensive to the taxpayer than life-time incarceration for the convicted one. Others argue that our parole system ultimately sets free those with life time sentences. That does happen in some cases, but that can be fixed by a legislative body passing a law to make parole in these cases impossible. This argument is thus an excuse, not a reason. Deep down I know that I do not favor capital punishment under any circumstances. My reasons are convincing, at least to me. First, the wrong person can be and has been executed on more than one occasion. Second, there does appear to be economic and racial disparity in those who are sentenced to die. Very few wealthy people, who can afford top criminal lawyers, need fear this outcome. Poor people with court-appointed attorneys do. Far more blacks than whites face the threat of execution. That gives me pause since racism runs so deep in this nation that it inevitably distorts objectivity. Third, both the fields of sociology and psychology have taught us that life is not only deeply connected, but radically interdependent. None of us is an island complete in himself or herself. All of us have been shaped and formed by our human experiences. Is stealing wrong? Yes, of course, stealing is wrong, but so is an economic system that grinds some people so deeply into poverty that they steal in order to survive or to provide bread so that their children do not starve, as was the case with Victor Hugo’s character Jean Valjean in Les Miserables. Is murder wrong? Of course murder is wrong, but who created the murderer? No one is self-made. Abused children do become abusive adults. I do not intend to say that the individual can be relieved of any ultimate responsibility for his or her behavior, but I do want to say that individualism is not as individualistic as once we imagined. We are a deeply interrelated species and any of us can be warped, twisted and even destroyed by another. Given these facts I do not believe that the judgment of society can ever fall with appropriateness solely on the shoulders of the one who commits the crime or pulls the trigger. Finally, I am not able to square capital punishment with my faith as a Christian. I do not believe that capital punishment is or can ultimately ever be a moral option, nor do I think war today is or can ever be a moral option. I am also prepared to argue that if we had a vigorous and competent system of sex education in our public schools and if we made birth control universally available, I would regard abortion, save in the rarest of circumstances in which the mother’s life or health was at risk, as no longer a moral option. We live, however, in a compromised society. Executions strike me as the result of failed domestic policy. Wars strike me as the result of failed foreign policy. Most abortions strike me as the dreadful result of a compromise between rampant sexual ignorance and the inappropriate repression that rises from contrived and unhealthy sexual fears. I, furthermore, do not think that revenge and violence are the qualities of a civilized people. I do not think that state killing demonstrates an advanced civilization. I still hear the words of Jesus commanding us to love our enemies. Troy Davis, may you rest in peace.~ John Shelby Spong | | | | Announcements Tonight join the Justice Revival team and special guest speaker Lisa Sharon Harper for an inspirational evening of worship, music, and community to honor Human Rights Day and commemorate the Advent season. 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2 1

Global Buzz for Decenber
by ICA International 06 Dec '21

06 Dec '21

Enjoy catching up with what is happening in ICAs across the globe.... And please click the link below for the latest issue of the Global Buzz Global Buzz Report: December 2021 or copy and paste this URL into your browser's address bar http://globalbuzz.icai-archives.org/7dayreport-21/2021-12-01.php 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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Holiday gift giving
by Robertson Work 04 Dec '21

04 Dec '21

[cid:6d4f403f-5dd8-4267-a95f-bd70c402d2f2] Dear friends and colleagues, Health and happiness to you! This Christmas, one of my books may be a good gift for a family member, a friend, or yourself. I wrote and published them to honor and learn from the past, to provide hope for a better future for all, and to invite us each to give our care in the present moment to create that hoped-for future. You can choose from a visionary manifesto, poems, essays, speeches, or autobiography. They are available in paperback and e-book on all online sites and from your local bookshop. Prices are low and my royalty is even lower - twenty-four cents for my autobiography! They have been reviewed and endorsed by thirty-five ICA colleagues. Here is one link for the five books: https://www.amazon.com/Robertson-Work/e/B075612GBF With warm holiday good wishes! Rob ............................................. Author page for my books: https://www.amazon.com/Robertson-Work/e/B075612GBF Blogsite: https://compassionatecivilization.blogspot.com/ Website: https://www.robertsonwork.com/

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A December 11 Global ICA Gathering - some changes - see below
by Sunny Walker 02 Dec '21

02 Dec '21

[image: dreamstime_l_15822655.jpg] The Global Schedule Team is inviting ICA Colleagues & friends - from around the world *Standing together as Community* *TO HONOR AND REFLECT ON* *THE HIGHLIGHTS, STRUGGLES, GRIEF AND JOYS OF 2021* *AND ANTICIPATE 2022* *Who:* People interested in Community, Organization and Personal Transformation Love for the Planet Earth And Any Other Areas of Caring *What*: A *sharing of stories and yarns* from 2021 In the world - your work - your personal life And looking forward to 2022 *Where*: On Zoom - <https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82510448495?pwd=UmpHMFlSVlN3T0FhamhpNFM2QVhrdz09>Join Zoom Meeting <https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82510448495?pwd=UmpHMFlSVlN3T0FhamhpNFM2QVhrdz09> 10 minutes ahead of time, please. *When:* Choose the time below that suits you best and register. *DECEMBER 11* (Happening twice) ● 12:00 Noon Togo Time - *REGISTER HERE <https://www.eventbrite.com/e/global-ica-community-year-end-celebration-tick…>* ● 3:00 PM Chicago Time - <http://www.eventbrite.com/e/global-ica-community-year-end-celebration-ticke…>*REGISTER HERE* <http://www.eventbrite.com/e/global-ica-community-year-end-celebration-ticke…> and / or *A FREE EVENT* To see Global Schedule events: https://icaglobalarchives.org/social-research-center-events *Sunny Walker on behalf of the host teams* *She/her/hers* *On **Arapaho, Cheyenne, Núu-agha-tʉvʉ-pʉ̱ (Ute), and Očeti Šakówiŋ (Sioux) tribal land*

1 0

Common Earth Program
by Jo Nelson 02 Dec '21

02 Dec '21

I’m not sure if this has been shared on this list. https://www.commonearth.com/our-program This is an extraordinary program to intensify our ability to make a difference in climate change (and more). The core question is "How can we move to the emerging caring society that puts carbon in its place." David Patterson put this together collaboratively with other colleagues. Duncan has been part of the team. I have signed up for it for January through March. Take care, Jo -- Jo Nelson, CPF Emeritus, CTF <jnelson(a)ica-associates.ca> Certified Professional Facilitator and ICA Certified ToP™ Facilitator ICA Associates, Inc. 401 Richmond Street West, Suite #405, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5V 3A8 Ph. 1 416-691-2316, x2230 Toll-free 1 877-691-1422 Fax 1 416-691-2491 Website http://ica-associates.ca Cellphone 647 233 6910 [IAF Certified Professional Facilitator Emeritus] “You do not belong to you. You belong to the universe. The significance of you will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume you are fulfilling your significance if you apply yourself to converting all your experience to the highest advantage of others.” R. Buckminster Fuller

1 0

List management reminders
by Timothy Wegner 02 Dec '21

02 Dec '21

I try to bother the lists members about list mechanics as little as possible. Lately I have seen more than the usual number of requests for help, so here are some words of advice. 1. If you are not always receiving list messages, they may be going to spam. The best way to avoid this is to create two contacts for the lists, with the emails, respectively, as follows: oe(a)lists.wedgeblade.net dialogue(a)lists.wedgeblade.net 2. If you are having trouble posting, make sure that the return address in emails you send is the same as the email you used to subscribe to the lists. You can fix this yourself by changing your list email, but I can easily fix this if you let me know via a private email to me. Tim Wegner

1 0

ICA Global Community Gathering coming soon
by Timothy Wegner 02 Dec '21

02 Dec '21

Sunny Walker asked me to post this link about an upcoming meeting: https://docs.google.com/document/d/17PHdl8S-odiv_6Jg4Nf0Et5OLGibq9dpiZjqHVc… Tim Wegner

1 0

12/02/2021, Progressing Spirit: Rev. Jim Burklo: Christianity: The Plain English Version; Spong revisited
by Ellie Stock 02 Dec '21

02 Dec '21

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screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv4368909422 #yiv4368909422templateBody .yiv4368909422mcnTextContent, #yiv4368909422 #yiv4368909422templateBody .yiv4368909422mcnTextContent p{font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv4368909422 #yiv4368909422templateFooter .yiv4368909422mcnTextContent, #yiv4368909422 #yiv4368909422templateFooter .yiv4368909422mcnTextContent p{font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;}} | | | | View this email in your browser | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Christianity: The Plain English Version | | | | | | | | | | Essay by Rev. Jim Burklo December 2, 2021In Luke 9:58, Jesus said: “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” That was Simone Weil: an "insider" by virtue of her deep practice of Christian contemplation, but an "outsider" with no place that felt right to lay her head inside the Christian fold. She lived for only 34 years, through the upheavals of World War II and the tumult that preceded it. She was a Jewish by heritage, a philosophy prodigy at the Sorbonne and a radical leftist who then found herself attracted powerfully by Catholic Christianity. Though she never was baptized, her writings, most of which only came into print after her death, distinguish her as an important theologian of Christianity. What some writers would say in two pages she would strip down to a crystal-clear sentence in plain prose, so dense that it needs to be soaked in water overnight before it can be consumed. Even then, the reader needs to go over it again and again to let it metabolize in the mind and soul. Here I offer but a subset of the many, many passages I highlighted in my copy of a collection of her essays called “Gravity and Grace”. They amount to a P.E.V. – a Plain English Version of Christianity (translated from the French) - with my commentary added: The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering, but a supernatural use for it. Christianity (Catholic and Protestant) speaks too much about holy things. Simone Weil’s work was to clear the fog of doctrine and jargon and go to the heart of the Christian message, in word and deed. To be proud is to forget that one is God…. The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be an object of contemplation. A case of contradictories which are true. God exists. God does not. “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” There we have the real proof that Christianity is something divine. “In the desert of the East..” We have to be in a desert. For he whom we love is absent. Simone Weil saw clearly that Christianity is rooted in paradoxes which are intrinsic to the human condition. Living selfishly seems like it would lead to happiness, but it leads to frustration. Living selflessly sounds like the opposite of fulfillment but is really the only way to get there. We would like to believe in a benevolent, all-powerful God - but it is only by forsaking any such conception or description of God that we can enter into the divine presence which takes the form of an absence. But this divine void is at the same time filled with the whole universe. We want to be seen, but in order for us to see, our egos must disappear. Sitting with these contradictions, accepting their reality, was the heart of faith for Simone Weil. Catholic communion. God did not only make himself flesh for us once, every day he makes himself matter in order to give himself to man and to be consumed by him. Reciprocally, by fatigue, affliction, and death, man is made matter and is consumed by God. How can we refuse this reciprocity? The Eucharist should not then be an object of belief for the part of me which apprehends facts. That is where Protestantism is true. But this presence of Christ in the Host is not a symbol, for a symbol is the combination of an abstraction and an image, it is something which human intelligence can represent to itself, it is not supernatural. There the Catholics are right… For Simone Weil, the eucharist was both a sign and that to which the sign referred, a sign of a reciprocal relationship between human beings and Ultimate Reality, and the essence of the relationship itself. She offered a corrective both for Protestants, who in the Reformation began to view the eucharist as merely symbolic, and for Catholics, who see it as the literal body and blood of Christ. I believe it is central to the progressive Christian project to re-embody our faith through the sacrament of communion: to experience directly the real presence of the divine in the bread and in the wine. To make it a body-trip again, and not just a theological head-trip. For Weil, the dialectic in the relationship of humanity with God was demonstrated directly in the mass. Yet she never took the bread and wine herself. We might call her relationship to the eucharist something like Catholic "adoration of the blessed sacrament", in which the consecrated host, enclosed in a "tabernacle" box on the church altar, is contemplated visually and spiritually by the faithful between masses. In another essay, she wrote: The beautiful is that which we desire without wishing to eat it. We desire that it should be... Eternal beatitude is a state where to look is to eat. The cross transfixed Simone Weil’s attention: Adam and Eve sought for divinity in vital energy. A tree, fruit. But it is prepared for us on dead wood, geometrically squared, where a corpse is hanging. We must look for the secret of our kinship with God in our mortality. God gives himself to men either as powerful or as perfect – it is for them to choose. The cross as a balance and as a lever. A going down, the condition of rising up. Heaven coming down to earth raises earth to heaven. A lever. We lower when we want to lift. …the intersection of the world and that which is not the world. The cross is this intersection. The point of contact between a circle and a straight line (a tangent). This is the presence of the higher order in the lower under the form of what is infinitely minute. Christ is the point of tangency between humanity and God. Simone Weil's brother was a prodigy in geometry, which shaped her perception of the cross. It was for her a geometry of paradox: a lever bringing heaven to earth and earth to heaven. The intersection of the divine and the earthly. Like progressive Christians today, her focus was not substitutionary sacrifice - Jesus dying for our sins - but rather the cross as the sign and reality of the human and divine experience of suffering. Her interpretation of the cross resonates with that of Carl Jung in his "Answer to Job", a mythical, depth-psychological depiction of the gospel story of the crucifixion as God's restitution for the suffering he inflicted unjustly on Job. "Suffering: superiority of man over God. The Incarnation was necessary so that this superiority should not be scandalous," she wrote. There is no way around suffering. There is only the way through it, beginning with attending to it, as it is. Our consent is necessary in order that he may perceive his own creation through us. God who is no other thing than love has not created anything other than love. I can easily imagine that he loves that perspective of creation which can only be seen from the point where I am. We must try to love without imagining. To love the appearance in its nakedness without interpretation. What we love then is truly God. Like progressive Christians today, Simone Weil knew God as love. Not just as warm, fuzzy, romantic, or familial love. Rather as agape love, which embraces all beings and things - and all experiences, including suffering. Communion with the divine was, for her, manifested in attention: Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer. By attending to reality, we attend our way to God. Attention = prayer = love = God. And how to live out that love in our lives? Simone Weil's spirituality flowed seamlessly into a mysticism of ethics: We should do only those righteous actions which we cannot stop ourselves from doing, which we are unable not to do, but, through well-directed attention, we should always keep on increasing the number of those which we are unable not to do. Her aim was to be so suffused in God that she would have no choice about what actions to take or refrain from taking. This sentence from "Gravity and Grace" might be considered Simone Weil's personal manifesto: I must move toward an abiding conception of the divine mercy, a conception which does not change whatever event destiny may send upon me, and which can be communicated to no matter what human being. She rendered the Christian religion down to its bones, expressing its universal truths in ways "which can be communicated to no matter what human being". And that is the mission of progressive Christianity today: to express and to live out the P.E.V. - the Plain English Version of the faith. ~ Rev. Jim Burklo Read online here About the Author Rev. Jim Burklo is the Senior Associate Dean of Religious and Spiritual Life at the University of Southern California. An ordained pastor in the United Church of Christ, he is the author of seven published books on progressive Christianity, his latest book is Tenderly Calling: An Invitation to the Way of Jesus (St Johann Press, 2021). His weekly blog, “Musings”, has a global readership. He serves on the board of ProgressiveChristiansUniting.org and is an honorary advisor and frequent content contributor for ProgressiveChristianity.org. | | | | | | | | Question & Answer Q: By Cheryl Do progressives believe in the resurrection? Sometimes, without hope in my sins being forgiven, I don't think I could have emotionally coped. A: By Rev. Irene Monroe Dear Cheryl,Jesus’s physical resurrection from his crucifixion is a narrative framed within both Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature as both metaphoric and mystic. I preach about Jesus’s resurrection as a way to examine social injustices confronting marginal and disenfranchised people. For me, social injustices are a sin. For example, it would be an egregious omission to gloss over the unrelenting violence that took place during Jesus’s time, especially in light of the ongoing violence in today’s society toward people of color, women, Jews, Muslims, and LGBTQ+ people, to name a few. However, the deification of violence as part of a resurrection narrative spun as redemptive suffering has deleterious implications that are not-so-benignly played out today from the playground to the courtroom. In other words, in conservative Christianity, the cross as the locus of God’s atonement for human sin raises a myriad of questions for those of us on the margins of society. As an instrument for execution by Roman officials during Jesus's time, the cross's symbolic nature and its symbolic value can both be seen as the valorization of suffering and abuse, especially in the lives of the oppressed. For those of us on the margins, a Christology mounted on the belief that "Jesus died on the cross for our sins," instead of "Jesus died on the cross because of our sins," not only deifies Jesus as the suffering servant, but it also ritualizes suffering as redemptive. While suffering points to the need for redemption, suffering in and of itself is not redemptive, and it does not always correlate to one's sinfulness. For example, the belief that undeserved suffering is endured by faith, and that it has a morally educative component makes the powerful insensitive to the suffering of others. Also it forces the less powerful to be complacent to their suffering - therefore, maintaining the status quo. When suffering is understood as an ongoing cycle of abuse that goes on unexamined and unaccounted for, we can then begin to see its manifestation in systems of racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, and other "isms" in our everyday lives. With a new understanding about suffering and how it victimizes the innocent and aborts the Christian mission of inclusiveness, Jesus’s death at Calvary and his resurrection invite a different hermeneutic than its classically held one. Many Christians do not realize that with the classical view of the cross held by many conservatives as the exaltation of Jesus as male, Jesus as white, and Jesus as heterosexual, this view disinvites solidarity among diverse groups of people who do suffer.~ Rev. Irene Monroe Read and share online here About the Author The Reverend Monroe does a weekly Monday segment, “All Revved Up!” on NPR's WGBH (89.7 FM). She is a weekly Friday commentator on New England Channel NEWS. Monroe is the Boston voice for Detour’s African American Heritage Trail, Guided Walking Tour of Beacon Hill: Boston’s Black Women Abolitionists. A Huffington Post blogger and a syndicated religion columnist; her columns appear the Boston LGBTQ newspaper Baywindows, Cambridge Chronicle, and the Boston Globe. Monroe states that her “columns are an interdisciplinary approach drawing on critical race theory, African American, queer and religious studies. As a religion columnist I try to inform the public of the role religion plays in discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people.” Her papers are at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College’s research library on the history of women in America. Click here to visit her website. | | | | | | | | Please continue to send us your feedback… we are listening. We aim to give voice to many different perspectives that are relevant and inspiring along this spiritually progressing path. We are not here to tell you what to believe or how to act. We are here to support your journey, to share and learn together.Thank you for being a part of this community - join us on Facebook! | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | As a non-profit ProgressiveChristianity.org/Progressing Spirit rely heavily on the good will of our donors to help us continue to bring individuals and churches the messages of progressive Christians, Weekly Newsletters, along with the many other resources we provide. For years, the majority of our fundraising came at the end of the year. Looking at various ways to create a more reasonable amount of cash flow we decided rather than having a BIG ask at the end of each year, our more frequent asks give folks a chance to contribute when their funds are more flexible. We think that's a win for everyone. We also want to highlight the opportunity to become a sustaining supporter. If you are looking for the best way to help us continue to provide progressive Christian resources, become a sustaining supporter by choosing Recurring Donation. Help keep ProgressiveChristianity.org online and going strong - click here to donate today! * Another way to support us is to leave a bequest in your Will and/or Trust designating us a beneficiary. | | | | | | | | Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited The Lecture Tour of Germany, Part III: Marburg Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong August 11, 2011Our task and the agenda for the third day of our lecture tour of Germany was to go to the city of Marburg where the University of Marburg is located. This was a particularly exciting opportunity for me because Rudolf Bultmann, the man I regard as the greatest New Testament scholar of the 21st century, had spent the bulk of his professional career teaching at the University of Marburg. It was Bultmann who gave to the New Testament world the word “demythologize” which frightened traditional biblical literalists when it was first uttered, since they understood the word “myth” to mean something like a fairy tale and began to accuse Bultmann of saying that the Bible was a book of fairy tales. Nothing could have been farther from Bultmann’s intention. What Bultmann was saying was that every generation inevitably translates its “God” experience in terms of the world view operative at the time. We can do no other. If we assume, for example, that the earth is the center of a three-tiered universe and define God as a being, external to our world, the location of God above the sky then becomes the context of our religious mythology. When we have never heard of germs or viruses, coronary occlusions or cerebral accidents, tumors or leukemia, then we will almost of necessity understand sickness as the “punishment of the external deity, who lives above the sky.” When we know nothing of the shift of tectonic plates beneath the surface of the earth or what happens to low pressure systems moving across warm ocean waters in the northern hemisphere summer, then we will explain earthquakes and hurricanes as the angry response of our external deity. When we know nothing about either mental illnesses or epilepsy, then we explain those phenomena in terms of demon possession. Our “mythology” thus shapes our explanations. When the New Testament was written in the first century those “mythological” understandings were all but universal. If you and I are going to understand that New Testament, then we must “demythologize” it, that is, we must remove the experience from the “mythology” of the first century and recast it in terms of the “mythology” of our time. That was Bultmann’s incredible insight and, for those who had never conceived of any way to read the Bible except literally, he was an enormous challenge. The theological seminary where I did the graduate work leading to my ordination in 1955 had not yet heard of Rudolf Bultmann. Denominational schools are not generally on the academic cutting edge. This institution was still rooted in the post World War I reaction led by Karl Barth to the theological liberalism of the 19th century that did not account for the evil experienced in that world conflict. Barth’s movement became known as “neo-orthodoxy.” Because of this, I did not meet the gigantic figure of Rudolf Bultmann until much later in my career. My seminary did, however, train me in the ground-breaking theological thinking of another German named Paul Tillich, while leaving me with a very dated understanding of the scriptures. The pre-Bultmannian options were to remain a biblical fundamentalist and hope to be clever enough about it to escape notice or to reject all things fundamentalist, while having a vapid and empty liberalism to offer instead. To illustrate those options, I could either believe that Jesus literally multiplied five leaves and two fish into a sufficient volume of food to feed “5,000 men” plus women and children with supplies left over to fill twelve baskets or I could dismiss the miraculous altogether and assume that the lad mentioned in that story, who had offered his lunch of five loaves and two fish, had so shamed the others that they brought out their hidden food supplies to share until there was ample food for all. The former meant that I could still pretend I lived in a pre-Newtonian world in which miracle and magic still abounded, while the latter would be so ordinary as to cause one to wonder why the story was ever recorded. I could either believe that Jesus defied the laws of nature and walked literally “on the water” as the fundamentalists insist or I could observe that the Greek preposition we have translated as “on” can also mean “along the side of” and that this apparently miraculous story really meant that Jesus walked alongside the water, which again is so ordinary that it would not have been noticed. Bultmann provided me and a whole generation of students with a totally new approach and he thus helped me combine biblical scholarship with Tillich’s 20th century theology. My own vocation of trying to recast the Christian faith in the language of the 21st century required both of these perspectives. To repeat a note from the first of my columns on this German lecture tour, it was my friend and mentor, the English bishop, John A. T. Robinson, who first put together for me the biblical scholarship of Bultmann, the theology of Tillich and the courage and vision of Bonhoeffer, Germans all, to form the point of view that I came to represent. He did this in his 1963 book entitled Honest to God. As a perpetual student, I had just this past year devoured Bultmann’s powerful and massive commentary on the Fourth Gospel. For our generation Bultmann has completely recast the biblical debate. Pre-Bultmanian people simply do not understand the post-Bultmanian agenda. So the idea that I would lecture in Marburg, where Bultmann had taught for more than 20 years was a personal thrill for me. To make this Marburg visit even more special, I discovered that Tillich had also begun his career as a teaching assistant at the University of Marburg. This meant that in this citadel of learning I could express my appreciation for these two gigantic professors. Bultmann had died on July 30, 1956. Tillich, who had escaped the Nazi regime to come to America, had a spectacular career at Union Seminary in New York City and Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, died in 1963. To me, however, both have been esteemed colleagues of a lifetime. The subject of the lecture in Marburg was how to develop a non-theistic understanding of God. I am no longer able to make sense out of the traditional theistic definition of God as “a Being,” who exists somewhere external to this world, who is a supernatural power and who can come to our aid in time of need or in answer to our prayers. I am therefore not a “theist” and the English language suggests the only alternative to being a theist is to be an atheist. I am not an atheist either. Indeed I have an overwhelming sense of the wonder and mystery of God, but few if any words with which to convey that conviction. In this lecture I sought to root a non-theistic understanding of God in the universal expression of separation that I believe accompanied the birth of self-consciousness. To be self-conscious is to view life from a center inside the self instead of seeing oneself as an undifferentiated part of nature. Self-consciousness is the experience in which time is known as the medium in which we live; it is thus also the source of the chronic anxiety that grips all human life and in which we are forced to view ourselves as mortals, who are destined to die. No other living creature has to manage this much reality. It is self-consciousness that creates the great divide between human beings and the world of nature, including the merely conscious but not self-conscious parts of nature. Out of the anxiety, or as the Germans would say, out of the angst of self-consciousness we create religious systems designed to please the external deity as a part of our search to find security. Religion is motivated to win divine approval so that God will do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. Thus religion, I now believe, represents a necessary stage in the childhood of our humanity, but one which we must inevitably outgrow when we finally stop playing parent-child games with God. The next step in human development will come, I believe, when we dare to step into human maturity and begin to experience God as the life force, empowering us to live fully, the love force freeing us to love wastefully and the being of God – what Tillich called the Ground of Being – giving us the courage to be all that we can be. It is in terms of this understanding of the God experience that I now understand and seek to communicate the Christ story. I see Jesus not as the divine visitor, but as one who lived fully, who loved wastefully and who dared to be all that he could be and in this process opened us to who God is. Jesus broke the boundaries that still keep us in childlike fear and dependency. The Jesus I now see does not rescue me from a fall that never happened, even mythologically, but he is the one who calls me and empowers me to enter a new dimension of what it means to be human. This God experience in Jesus invites me to step beyond tribe, gender, prejudice and even religion to be part of a universal consciousness. One can only develop the bare outline of this approach in a single public lecture or indeed in a single column, but what I hoped to do in Marburg was to plant the seeds of a radical new theological reformation in the land of Luther, where the Reformation of the 16th century first gained its footing. The German phase of this trip was now over and I headed to Scotland to engage in Glasgow the established Church of Scotland, which is a deeply conservative Presbyterianism. To that story I will turn next week.~ John Shelby Spong | | | | | | | | Announcements Advent and the Birth of the Word within us In this special Online Advent workshop on December 11th, by School of Contemplative Life, we’ll reflect on the birth of God’s Word as the birth of loving-awareness within us. Read On... | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

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Passing of Forrest Craver
by Terry Bergdall 27 Nov '21

27 Nov '21

See below the post below at the request of Joshua Craver: Hi Everyone, Forrest Craver, passed away on November 18th due to Covid complications with his sons, Andrew and Joshua, at his side. He was a founding member of the ICA Detroit house, later served in DC, Ivy City, and Brussels nexus. He also Attended Ivy City, Inyan Wakagapi, Tairgwaith and Ijede consults. The below link has a more detailed summary of his life. https://www.gettysburgtimes.com/obituaries/article_5612798e-720d-5137-ae3b-… <https://www.gettysburgtimes.com/obituaries/article_5612798e-720d-5137-ae3b-…> Josh Craver

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11/25/2021, Progressing Spirit, Rev Irene Monroe: Celebrating Thanksgiving’s 400th anniversary of revisionist history; Spong revisited
by Ellie Stock 25 Nov '21

25 Nov '21

| | | | View this email in your browser | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Celebrating Thanksgiving’s 400th anniversary of revisionist history | | | | | | | | | | Essay by Rev. Irene Monroe November 25, 2021 “We forget everything. What we remember is not what actually happened, not history, but merely that hackneyed dotted line they have chosen to drive into our memories by incessant hammering.” ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956 “Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another.” Ephesians 4:25, ESV Before this year’s national celebration of Thanksgiving, the town of Plymouth, Massachusetts, just 43 miles southwest from Cambridge, where I reside, celebrated its 400th Thanksgiving anniversary. The nationally televised extravaganza venerated the arrival of European Pilgrims to America in 1620. Packaged in the promotion was the story of these early Pilgrims’ heroic voyage on the Mayflower, and the beginning of American democracy that Quincy native President John Quincy Adams depicted as “the earliest example of civil government established by the act of the people to be governed.” Also, the event promoted the one-year celebration after they arrived in 1621, symbolized as a Thanksgiving depicting a cooperative and cordial relationship between the Pilgrims and Native Americans. This Thanksgiving’s 400th anniversary arrives amid a continued COVID pandemic that has ravaged marginalized communities of color as the county reckons with its past by re-examining its roots of persistent inequities. For example, this year, Massachusetts celebrated Indigenous Peoples Day in lieu of Columbus Day. In 2020, the NFL team formerly called the “Washington Redskins” is now the Washington Football Team. And in this supposedly more “woke” moment, television images of whites doing “war whoops” and “tomahawk chops” coming across our screen are now frowned upon. That said, what would celebrating Thanksgiving’s 400th anniversary with the town of Plymouth be a reckoning? Historically, for Native Americans, Thanksgiving is not a cause of celebration but rather a National Day of Mourning. Why would Native Americans celebrate the people who tried to destroy us?” Since 1970, Native Americans have gathered at noon on Coles Hill in Plymouth to commemorate a National Day of Mourning on this revered U.S. holiday. And for the Wampanoag nation of New England, whose name means “people of the dawn,” this national holiday is a reminder of the real significance of the first Thanksgiving in 1621 as a symbol of persecution of Native Americans and their long history of bloodshed with European settlers. Oddly, the first group of settlers was refugees, a group America closes her doors to now. The Pilgrims were seeking a better life. However, the Pilgrims, who sought refuge here in America from religious persecution in their homeland, were correct in their dogged pursuit of religious liberty. Regrettably, the Pilgrims’ fervor for religious freedom was devoid of an ethic of accountability, and their actions did not set up the conditions requisite for moral liability and legal justice. Instead, the actions of the Pilgrims brought about the genocide of a people, a historical amnesia of the event, and an annual national celebration of Thanksgiving of their arrival. In other words, their actual practice of religious liberty came at the expense of the humanity and the civil rights of Native Americans. In 1990, President George H.W. Bush designated November as “National American Indian Heritage Month” to celebrate the history, art, and traditions of Native American people. However, in this nation’s reckoning moment, celebrating the arrival of the Pilgrims hints at its continued revisionist history. And it must cease! As we get into the holiday spirit, let us remember the whole story of the arrival of the Pilgrims. “It is a day of remembrance and spiritual connection as well as a protest of the racism and oppression which Native Americans continue to experience,” reads the text of the plaque on Coles Hill that overlooks Plymouth Rock, the mythic symbol of where the Pilgrims first landed. The United American Indians of New England (UAINE), a Native-led organization of Native people, supports Indigenous struggles in New England and throughout the Americas. Also, UAE supports the struggles of communities of color, LGBTQ+ communities, and, yes, all refugees because it understands the interconnections of struggles. “Most pilgrims would have died during the harsh winter had it not been for the open arms of the Native Americans,” Taylor Bell wrote in “The Hypocrisy Of Refusing Refugees at Thanksgiving.” The misrepresentations about what was served at the first Thanksgiving in Plymouth in 1621 needs to be corrected, too. For example, there is no evidence that turkey was offered, and pie could not have been served because there was no flour or butter available for the crust in those days. Also, the Mayflower arrived in Plymouth Harbor in 1620, after first stopping in Provincetown, now known as an LGBTQ+ vacation hot spot. As we get into the holiday spirit, let us remember the whole story of the arrival of the Pilgrims and other European settlers to the New World. When Malcolm X said, “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock. The rock was landed on us,” in March 1964 in a speech at the Audubon Ballroom in NYC, he identifies Plymouth Rock, not as the stepping stone of America’s preordained manifest destiny. Instead, the symbolism of the rock is a direct consequence of the continued struggle Native Americans confront today, as well as black, brown, and other oppressed people in this country. Memory is a form of resistance. It’s transgressive against glorified lies, like the prevailing narrative of Lost Clause Myth, revering Confederate soldiers as America’s true patriots in the Civil War. Also, memory is subversive in its enduring power to disrupt historical amnesia and a canonical past unwillingness to confront itself, like January 6th depicted, by some, as American patriots defending freedom instead of an insurrection. On a trip home to New York City in May 2004, I went to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture to view the UNESCO Slave Route Project, “Lest We Forget: The Triumph Over Slavery. ” The exhibit marked the United Nations General Assembly’s resolution proclaiming 2004 “The International Year to Commemorate the Struggle Against Slavery and Its Abolition.” In highlighting that African Americans should not be shamed by slavery, but instead defiantly proud of our collective memory of it, I read the opening billboard to the exhibit that stated the following: “By institutionalizing memory, resisting the onset of oblivion, recalling the memory of tragedy that for long years remained hidden or unrecognized, and by assigning it its proper place in the human conscience, we respond to our duty to remember.” In the spirit of our connected struggles for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, this Thanksgiving, we should not solely focus on the story of Plymouth Rock. Instead, as Americans, we should focus on creating this nation as a solid rock that rests on a multicultural and democratic foundation. And in so doing, it helps us remember and respect the struggles that not only this nation’s Pilgrim foremothers and forefathers endured, it also enables us to recognize and respect the present-day struggle refugees and other marginalized groups face, especially our Native American brothers' and sisters' ongoing struggle every day, particularly on Thanksgiving Day. ~ Rev. Irene Monroe Read online here About the Author The Reverend Monroe does a weekly Monday segment, “All Revved Up!” on NPR's WGBH (89.7 FM). She is a weekly Friday commentator on New England Channel NEWS. Monroe is the Boston voice for Detour’s African American Heritage Trail, Guided Walking Tour of Beacon Hill: Boston’s Black Women Abolitionists. A Huffington Post blogger and a syndicated religion columnist; her columns appear the Boston LGBTQ newspaper Baywindows, Cambridge Chronicle, and the Boston Globe. Monroe states that her “columns are an interdisciplinary approach drawing on critical race theory, African American, queer and religious studies. As a religion columnist I try to inform the public of the role religion plays in discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people.” Her papers are at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College’s research library on the history of women in America. Click here to visit her website. | | | | | | | | Question & Answer Q: By Russ What do we mean by the word “faith?” People, who would dismiss us as anti-intellectual, ridicule faith with the presumption that it means believing in things that are hard to believe in or believing in things that are contrary to known facts. I know this is not what we Christians mean by that word (outside the evangelical fringe), but I don’t have good words to explain it. Can you help? A: By Bishop John Shelby Spong Dear Russ, I can try. Faith in its original biblical meaning had more to do with trust than it does with believing. This trust was not in the conviction that all would be well, but that whatever tomorrow brings, God would be present in it. That is why the author of the epistle to the Hebrews could write that it was “by faith that Abraham left Ur of the Chaldees” to form a new nation in a new place. It was “by faith” that Moses left the known of Egypt for the unknown of the wilderness. Later in Christian history “faith” was connected with believing certain propositional statements. That was when the creeds began to be called expressions of “the Faith.” Actually, this was little more that idolatry. Creeds represent the human and ecclesiastical assertion that the mystery and wonder of God can actually be captured in something that human beings have created. That is in creeds, doctrines or dogmas. This practice is also the source of the development of religious imperialism, which ultimately gave birth to the Inquisition, to religious persecution, to religious wars and many other evils. Creeds are at best pointers to the mystery of God. They are not and should never have been allowed to become strait jackets that we were required to put on in order to pretend that we have captured the truth of God. The first creed of the church was only three words. It was an affirmation that “Jesus is Messiah” rather than a set of beliefs. To call Jesus “messiah” was to claim that in the life of Jesus the transcendent power of the divine has been met and engaged. I think this is still the best creed the church has ever formulated. In a word (or two), I define faith as “having the courage to be.” ~ Bishop John Shelby Spong (December 8, 2011) Read and share online here | | | | | | | | 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 us on Facebook! | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | As a non-profit ProgressiveChristianity.org/Progressing Spirit rely heavily on the good will of our donors to help us continue to bring individuals and churches the messages of progressive Christians, Weekly Newsletters, along with the many other resources we provide. For years, the majority of our fundraising came at the end of the year. 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Help keep ProgressiveChristianity.org online and going strong - click here to donate today! * Another way to support us is to leave a bequest in your Will and/or Trust designating us a beneficiary. | | | | | | | | Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited The Lecture Tour of Germany Part II: Gottingen Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong August 4, 2011 My lecture tour of Germany was joined from the very beginning by a unique Frenchman named Raymond Rakower, who accepted Gerhard Klein’s invitation to come to Germany and to accompany us. Gerhard Klein has been the translator into German for four of my books. Ray Rakower was his French counterpart, who has translated two of my books into French. Both were remarkable men and able scholars. Since I introduced Gerhard last week, let me now briefly introduce Ray this week. Ray, fluent in German, French and English, came out of a Jewish family. His grandfather had been the Chief Rabbi at the synagogue in Krakow, Poland. Both his father and his brother were killed in a Nazi death camp, while Ray and his mother managed to escape into Switzerland. In his adult life he had a very successful career in the oil and gas business that took him all over the world. He added a unique dimension to our German experience, especially when we went to places where anti-Semitism had victimized millions. Three venues hosted my visit. I described Grebenstein last week. Because it was Gerhard’s home it was the fitting place to start. He is a highly-respected citizen of that community and his friends came from all walks of German life. The other two venues were university towns, Gottingen and Marburg, both of which have theological schools and theological faculties on their campuses. This week I will focus on the Gottingen visit for it had many rich and provocative moments. Next week, I will examine Marburg. One of the things that made the visit to Gottingen University so unique was that on its theological faculty was a man named Gerd Ludemann, a brilliant New Testament scholar. Gerd is described far and wide as a biblical and theological radical, and today no longer identifies himself as living inside the Christian tradition. I have known and liked Gerd for several years as we have spent time together as members of the Jesus Seminar. In that fraternity of scripture scholars, Gerd found support for his insights, his findings and his journey, but what he enjoyed there was certainly not what he experienced from the hierarchy of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Germany, who saw in him a destroyer of what they held sacred. These hierarchical figures regarded him first as a “disturber of Israel,” a bit later as an unacceptable provocateur and finally, as one whom they judged to be no longer worthy or qualified to teach students preparing for ordination in their Lutheran tradition. In time the conflict between Gerd and the leaders of the German Lutheran Church reached a crescendo and the Lutheran Church in Germany cancelled its recognition of Gerd as an acceptable Lutheran teacher and withdrew his “certification.” They ordered that his university title be changed to indicate that he was no longer recognized by the Lutheran Church. Those preparing for ordination from this time on were to be given no credit for taking his courses. His students immediately dried up, but the university’s commitment to academic freedom meant that he maintained his tenured position on the faculty. It was a strange compromise. He became a professor with no students. What Gerd had done to bring about this judgment was to suggest in his writing that the vast majority of the words attributed to Jesus in the New Testament were not spoken by him at all, a conclusion that is commonplace in the Jesus Seminar. Gerd, however, had gone further to assert that since these words, attributed to Jesus, were not in fact spoken by him, then the superstructure of ecclesiastical creeds, doctrines and dogmas based on these unauthentic words could not be said to present a defensible body of data originating with Jesus. While many in the church recognize this problem, there are few who, like Gerd, draw the conclusions that are apparent and appropriate. If his challenge to ecclesiastical authority had come in the 14th century, Gerd Ludemann would very probably have been burned at the stake. In the 21st century, he was simply marginalized and dispossessed. So Gerd dedicated the remaining years of his Gottingen career to study, to public lectures and to writing. He was, however, the one who was eager to have me invited to this university. When we arrived, Professor Ludemann was waiting outside the university building to greet our party, which he did warmly and generously. We talked as we renewed our friendship. His time at Gottingen was coming to an end as he was preparing to retire at the end of June. In his office, his books had already been removed and packed. He had recently signed a three-year contract to teach at the Divinity School of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. There he would join Professor Amy-Jill Levine to form an unusually competent duo of biblical scholars. Vanderbilt must not think that controversy in biblical studies is a liability. The format for the Gottingen visit was that I was introduced to deliver the lecture of the day, Gerhard Klein served as the translator, and afterward Gerd Ludemann and I were to engage in a dialogue/debate over the content of my presentation, moderated by a third person. When that was complete, a general question period was entered in which the audience would have an opportunity to ask either of us a question. My topic was the relationship of the thinking of Charles Darwin to the traditional way Christians have told the Christ story. The contrast was striking. Darwin had rooted human life in the struggle for survival, which is a mark of all living things. Christians have, however, interpreted this survival drive and its inevitable manifestation of self-centeredness as the mark of our “sinfulness.” They understood this mythologically as “The Fall” and this, they have asserted, left human lives victimized by “original sin.” On the basis of this analysis of the source of human evil, traditional Christianity has postulated Jesus as the divine rescue operation mounted by the external deity. Against this backdrop Christians have traditionally told the story of the Cross as the place where the price of the fall was paid and where the power of original sin was broken. This has resulted, I believe, in a theology rooted in victimization with Jesus being seen as the first victim. Catholic Christians refer to their liturgy as the “sacrifice of the mass” and suggest that the mass serves liturgically to make the death of Jesus ever available to overcome the “sin” that is present in us all. Protestant Christians, working in this same theology of victimization, have developed the mantra “Jesus died for our sins” that permeates our prayers, our hymns and our scriptures and which is primarily a guilt message of blame. It is this understanding of human evil that is rendered absurd if Darwin is correct. Since Darwin asserts that there was no original perfection, there could have been no “original sin.” If there was no “fall” then to speak of Jesus as the one who rescued us from that fall becomes nonsensical, as does salvation being understood as a restoration to a status we have never possessed. So in conclusion, I recast the Jesus story as empowering us to become fully human. “Atonement” theology has been, I believe, the prime distorter of the Jesus story. When the lecture was completed, Gerd challenged me from the perspective of his belief that the Jesus story is not history at all, but a later mythological development. I defended the position that the Jesus story in fact is rooted in the history of a particular life in which people believed they had encountered what they understood God to be and that it is not that life, but the way life itself has been interpreted that is the problem. It is quite obvious to me that much mythology has been wrapped around the memory of Jesus, but the substance and outline of this historical life can still be identified. That life was seen by his followers as a doorway into God. The issues between us were clear and the questions from the audience were lively. It was a good and exciting afternoon. When it was over, Gerd bade us farewell and both of us looked forward to continuing the dialogue when he will be in the United States over the next three years. I can respect Gerd Ludemann and be challenged by him without agreeing with him. It would never occur to me to try to silence him, but only to engage him, to listen to him and to learn from him. If his insights force me to change the way I look at Jesus then so be it. My interest is not in the way either I or the Christian Church has traditionally understood the Christ experience, my interest is in what the reality of that experience is. Of course, the mythology of the ages has been wrapped around Jesus, but the question I seek to answer is not whether this mythology is true, but what was there about the life of Jesus that caused people to think it was appropriate to wrap mythological patterns around him. Of course, the virgin birth, the bodily resuscitation and the cosmic ascension are ancient myths, but I want to know what the experience was that elicited those myths and caused them to be attached to Jesus? Can we, apart from that mythological content, retell the Christ story in the accents of our day? The basic issue that divides me from Gerd Ludemann is that I believe we can and therefore that story still has integrity for me. Gerd believes that this is no longer possible and that one should not even try. I too am convinced that the structures of traditional Christianity are dying. I do not want to rescue dying structures. I do believe, however, that Christianity is bigger than the structures in which it has been carried for 2000 years and that we still have the ability to sing the Lord’s song in the real world of the 21st century, if we can but separate the Christ experience from the explanations of the past. I am no more interested than Gerd in trying to defend the concept of God from the erosion of modern thinking, nor am I interested in protecting traditional creeds. My interest is in discovering the authenticity of the Christ experience and then being able to enter it as a citizen of the 21st century. I am interested in learning how to relate that experience to out increasingly non-religious world. That is what my lecture at the university in Gottingen was all about and I believe that goal justified the approach I took. We drove back to Grebenstein that night weary, but happy. The next day we were headed to Marburg and another adventure. ~ John Shelby Spong | | | | | | | | Announcements Advent Retreat and Ecourses from Spirituality & Practice One Online Retreat and Nine Ecourses for Advent starting on November 26th through the 12 days of Christmas. READ ON ... | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

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