- Dialogue - lists.wedgeblade.net

Completed Life of David Zahrt
by Ellie Stock 02 Jul '20

02 Jul '20

Dear Friends, We were sad to learn of David's death, although we knew his health had been failing. When we think of David Zahrt, four initial memories come to mind. First: We first met and worked with David and Lin in 1970 after Summer 70 when they came to Rochester to open and be priors of the religious house which ended up being a few blocks from where we lived in the Maplewood Neighborhood. David and Lin provided excellent leadership for the congregations involved in the Local Church Experiment n which we were involved. He was serious, single-minded, faithful, persistent and deliberate in his dedication to and carrying out the mission of the House. His attention was fully present with whomever he engaged in conversation and focused on what was possible. Second: David was a man of many gifts and talents. Post-Order, he and Lin returned to Iowa to his Loess Hills family homestead (filled with wonderful family antiques--including a player piano) which, with blood, sweat and tears, they rejuvenated and hosted with great hospitality as a Bed and Breakfast where we stayed during a trip to Ft. Mandan. David worked with the community on conservation efforts, and I believe (Jo or Lin correct me if this is incorrect) eventually turned part or all of this homestead into conservation land. Third: David's weeks' long bicycle trek with the 2015 cross country Climate March was incredible, overcoming obstacle after obstacle to meet the big demonstration in NYC and then on to Washington, DC the final destination. He was one of the oldest, if not the oldest, trekker in the group. We followed his daily blog and were amazed by his persistence, endurance, and determination to complete the trip, no matter what. Fourth: Even when his body was failing, he still kept up with list serve posts and wanted to make sure he received the Spong and later Progressive Spirituality and other articles, continuing his life-long journey of learning. As friends and colleagues, we give thanks for and celebrate David's unique and completed life and send our prayers to Lin, Heidi, and Jo and all his family. May his legacy of living into possibility continue through those whose life he touched. Grace and peace ~ Carleton and Ellie Stockcarletonstock(a)aol.com elliestock(a)aol.com

4 3

7/02/20, Progressing Spirit; Fran Pratt: Even in 2020, Gratitude is my Religion; Spong revisited
by Ellie Stock 02 Jul '20

02 Jul '20

Even in 2020, Gratitude is my Religion#yiv4578070957 p{margin:10px 0;padding:0;}#yiv4578070957 table{border-collapse:collapse;}#yiv4578070957 h1, #yiv4578070957 h2, #yiv4578070957 h3, #yiv4578070957 h4, #yiv4578070957 h5, #yiv4578070957 h6{display:block;margin:0;padding:0;}#yiv4578070957 img, #yiv4578070957 a img{border:0;height:auto;outline:none;text-decoration:none;}#yiv4578070957 body, #yiv4578070957 #yiv4578070957bodyTable, #yiv4578070957 #yiv4578070957bodyCell{min-height:100%;margin:0;padding:0;width:100%;}#yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957mcnPreviewText{display:none !important;}#yiv4578070957 #yiv4578070957outlook a{padding:0;}#yiv4578070957 img{}#yiv4578070957 table{}#yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957ReadMsgBody{width:100%;}#yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957ExternalClass{width:100%;}#yiv4578070957 p, #yiv4578070957 a, #yiv4578070957 li, #yiv4578070957 td, #yiv4578070957 blockquote{}#yiv4578070957 a .filtered99999 , #yiv4578070957 a .filtered99999 {color:inherit;cursor:default;text-decoration:none;}#yiv4578070957 p, #yiv4578070957 a, #yiv4578070957 li, #yiv4578070957 td, #yiv4578070957 body, #yiv4578070957 table, #yiv4578070957 blockquote{}#yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957ExternalClass, #yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957ExternalClass p, #yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957ExternalClass td, #yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957ExternalClass div, #yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957ExternalClass span, #yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957ExternalClass font{line-height:100%;}#yiv4578070957 a .filtered99999 {color:inherit !important;text-decoration:none !important;font-size:inherit !important;font-family:inherit !important;font-weight:inherit !important;line-height:inherit !important;}#yiv4578070957 #yiv4578070957bodyCell{padding:10px;}#yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957templateContainer{max-width:600px !important;border:5px solid #363232;}#yiv4578070957 a.yiv4578070957mcnButton{display:block;}#yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957mcnImage, #yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957mcnRetinaImage{vertical-align:bottom;}#yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957mcnTextContent{}#yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957mcnTextContent img{height:auto !important;}#yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957mcnDividerBlock{table-layout:fixed !important;}#yiv4578070957 body, #yiv4578070957 #yiv4578070957bodyTable{}#yiv4578070957 #yiv4578070957bodyCell{border-top:0;}#yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957templateContainer{border:5px solid #363232;}#yiv4578070957 h1{color:#202020;font-family:Helvetica;font-size:26px;font-style:normal;font-weight:bold;line-height:125%;letter-spacing:normal;text-align:left;}#yiv4578070957 h2{color:#202020;font-family:Helvetica;font-size:22px;font-style:normal;font-weight:bold;line-height:125%;letter-spacing:normal;text-align:left;}#yiv4578070957 h3{color:#202020;font-family:Helvetica;font-size:20px;font-style:normal;font-weight:bold;line-height:125%;letter-spacing:normal;text-align:left;}#yiv4578070957 h4{color:#202020;font-family:Helvetica;font-size:18px;font-style:normal;font-weight:bold;line-height:125%;letter-spacing:normal;text-align:left;}#yiv4578070957 #yiv4578070957templatePreheader{background-color:#FAFAFA;background-image:none;background-repeat:no-repeat;background-position:center;background-size:cover;border-top:0;border-bottom:0;padding-top:9px;padding-bottom:9px;}#yiv4578070957 #yiv4578070957templatePreheader .yiv4578070957mcnTextContent, #yiv4578070957 #yiv4578070957templatePreheader .yiv4578070957mcnTextContent p{color:#656565;font-family:Helvetica;font-size:12px;line-height:150%;text-align:left;}#yiv4578070957 #yiv4578070957templatePreheader .yiv4578070957mcnTextContent a, #yiv4578070957 #yiv4578070957templatePreheader .yiv4578070957mcnTextContent p a{color:#656565;font-weight:normal;text-decoration:underline;}#yiv4578070957 #yiv4578070957templateHeader{background-color:#FFFFFF;background-image:none;background-repeat:no-repeat;background-position:center;background-size:cover;border-top:0;border-bottom:0;padding-top:9px;padding-bottom:0;}#yiv4578070957 #yiv4578070957templateHeader .yiv4578070957mcnTextContent, #yiv4578070957 #yiv4578070957templateHeader .yiv4578070957mcnTextContent p{color:#202020;font-family:Helvetica;font-size:16px;line-height:150%;text-align:left;}#yiv4578070957 #yiv4578070957templateHeader .yiv4578070957mcnTextContent a, #yiv4578070957 #yiv4578070957templateHeader .yiv4578070957mcnTextContent p a{color:#007C89;font-weight:normal;text-decoration:underline;}#yiv4578070957 #yiv4578070957templateBody{background-color:#FFFFFF;background-image:none;background-repeat:no-repeat;background-position:center;background-size:cover;border-top:0;border-bottom:2px solid #EAEAEA;padding-top:0;padding-bottom:9px;}#yiv4578070957 #yiv4578070957templateBody .yiv4578070957mcnTextContent, #yiv4578070957 #yiv4578070957templateBody .yiv4578070957mcnTextContent p{color:#202020;font-family:Helvetica;font-size:16px;line-height:150%;text-align:left;}#yiv4578070957 #yiv4578070957templateBody .yiv4578070957mcnTextContent a, #yiv4578070957 #yiv4578070957templateBody .yiv4578070957mcnTextContent p a{color:#007C89;font-weight:normal;text-decoration:underline;}#yiv4578070957 #yiv4578070957templateFooter{background-color:#FAFAFA;background-image:none;background-repeat:no-repeat;background-position:center;background-size:cover;border-top:0;border-bottom:0;padding-top:9px;padding-bottom:9px;}#yiv4578070957 #yiv4578070957templateFooter .yiv4578070957mcnTextContent, #yiv4578070957 #yiv4578070957templateFooter .yiv4578070957mcnTextContent p{color:#656565;font-family:Helvetica;font-size:12px;line-height:150%;text-align:center;}#yiv4578070957 #yiv4578070957templateFooter .yiv4578070957mcnTextContent a, #yiv4578070957 #yiv4578070957templateFooter .yiv4578070957mcnTextContent p a{color:#656565;font-weight:normal;text-decoration:underline;}@media only screen and (min-width:768px){#yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957templateContainer{width:600px !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv4578070957 body, #yiv4578070957 table, #yiv4578070957 td, #yiv4578070957 p, #yiv4578070957 a, #yiv4578070957 li, #yiv4578070957 blockquote{}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv4578070957 body{width:100% !important;min-width:100% !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv4578070957 #yiv4578070957bodyCell{padding-top:10px !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957mcnRetinaImage{max-width:100% !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957mcnImage{width:100% !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957mcnCartContainer, #yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957mcnCaptionTopContent, #yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957mcnRecContentContainer, #yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957mcnCaptionBottomContent, #yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957mcnTextContentContainer, #yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957mcnBoxedTextContentContainer, #yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957mcnImageGroupContentContainer, #yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957mcnCaptionLeftTextContentContainer, #yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957mcnCaptionRightTextContentContainer, #yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957mcnCaptionLeftImageContentContainer, #yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957mcnCaptionRightImageContentContainer, #yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957mcnImageCardLeftTextContentContainer, #yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957mcnImageCardRightTextContentContainer, #yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957mcnImageCardLeftImageContentContainer, #yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957mcnImageCardRightImageContentContainer{max-width:100% !important;width:100% !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957mcnBoxedTextContentContainer{min-width:100% !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957mcnImageGroupContent{padding:9px !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957mcnCaptionLeftContentOuter .yiv4578070957mcnTextContent, #yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957mcnCaptionRightContentOuter .yiv4578070957mcnTextContent{padding-top:9px !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957mcnImageCardTopImageContent, #yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957mcnCaptionBottomContent:last-child .yiv4578070957mcnCaptionBottomImageContent, #yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957mcnCaptionBlockInner .yiv4578070957mcnCaptionTopContent:last-child .yiv4578070957mcnTextContent{padding-top:18px !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957mcnImageCardBottomImageContent{padding-bottom:9px !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957mcnImageGroupBlockInner{padding-top:0 !important;padding-bottom:0 !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957mcnImageGroupBlockOuter{padding-top:9px !important;padding-bottom:9px !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957mcnTextContent, #yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957mcnBoxedTextContentColumn{padding-right:18px !important;padding-left:18px !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957mcnImageCardLeftImageContent, #yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957mcnImageCardRightImageContent{padding-right:18px !important;padding-bottom:0 !important;padding-left:18px !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957mcpreview-image-uploader{display:none !important;width:100% !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv4578070957 h1{font-size:22px !important;line-height:125% !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv4578070957 h2{font-size:20px !important;line-height:125% !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv4578070957 h3{font-size:18px !important;line-height:125% !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv4578070957 h4{font-size:16px !important;line-height:150% !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957mcnBoxedTextContentContainer .yiv4578070957mcnTextContent, #yiv4578070957 .yiv4578070957mcnBoxedTextContentContainer .yiv4578070957mcnTextContent p{font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv4578070957 #yiv4578070957templatePreheader{display:block !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv4578070957 #yiv4578070957templatePreheader .yiv4578070957mcnTextContent, #yiv4578070957 #yiv4578070957templatePreheader .yiv4578070957mcnTextContent p{font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv4578070957 #yiv4578070957templateHeader .yiv4578070957mcnTextContent, #yiv4578070957 #yiv4578070957templateHeader .yiv4578070957mcnTextContent p{font-size:16px !important;line-height:150% !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv4578070957 #yiv4578070957templateBody .yiv4578070957mcnTextContent, #yiv4578070957 #yiv4578070957templateBody .yiv4578070957mcnTextContent p{font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;}}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){#yiv4578070957 #yiv4578070957templateFooter .yiv4578070957mcnTextContent, #yiv4578070957 #yiv4578070957templateFooter .yiv4578070957mcnTextContent p{font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;}} | | | | View this email in your browser | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Even in 2020, Gratitude is my Religion | | | | | | | | | | Essay by Rev. Fran Pratt July 2, 20202020 is proving to be a year of Apocalypse. A great unveiling of the reality of things. We are seeing things as they are, our illusions dissipated. The alarms that Black, Indigenous, and People of Color have been raising for over half a century, that we are not a post-racial society, that injustice is still normal, that inequality is still prevalent, that Black and Brown bodies are targeted, that systems of policing and incarceration are menaces to their communities - and so many more - are finally being heard by some. Their white siblings are waking up to these realities. I see many of my white siblings struggling to accept this reality, or refusing to outright. Because white people have lived in such cognitive dissonance for so long, being unwilling to recognize, much less lend their effort to, these systemic problems; many find themselves reeling from their awakening. We are also collectively reeling from the pandemic and its ongoing society, political, cultural, and economic effects. Communities of Color are affected more severely on all fronts. People are suffering, stir-crazy, angry, politically divided, and confused about how best to confront the challenges before us all; and experiencing all this with little leadership or guidance from top officials. We are muddling through; doing, I hope, our best to apply ourselves to the problems at hand with empathy and solidarity.It seems to me that, now, in the fourth month of the pandemic, we need to reach down deep for spiritual, emotional, and contemplative resources. The best one I know is gratitude. I have often said to my congregation, followers, and friends: Gratitude is Spirituality 101. Learn to practice gratitude so that we can pay attention to the world. We do this not to spiritually bypass; in fact, I believe, the practice of gratitude helps us to guard against spiritual bypassing, holding us accountable to reality and inviting us to sift through circumstances as they are so that we might accept them, love them, and find the lessons and opportunities for participation inside them. Gratitude is at once the most difficult of practices, and the most simple. Most people laugh a little when I mention it. They brush it off as simplistic and naive. “You must be looking through rose-colored glasses, Fran. You must be naturally optimistic…” I am not. I’m naturally bent toward cynicism and melancholy. In fact, I know that it can take a colossal effort of will to bring myself out of an energy of discouragement and hopelessness and into an energy of appreciation. It can take monumental strength. The effort is worth it. We practice gratitude so that we can engage with the stark reality of the world from a vantage point of Love. So, even in 2020, Gratitude is my Religion. I advocate for spiritual people to practice gratitude as a spiritual discipline, as a holy resistance, and as a compassionate engagement with and acceptance of the Now, the present moment, as it is, without excuses or equivocations. Spiritual Practice The spiritual practice of gratitude is not an empty-headed “good vibes only” stance. No. It is a daily challenge to courageously forge into the Now in search of the Divine. It is a daily call to curiosity. What could I possibly find to appreciate or offer thanks for in this midst of what, on any given day, might be a terrible reality? I’m not advocating for wide-eyed optimism. I’m advocating that we intentionally practice a deep, spiritual, grounded faith that begins in the most lowly place: gratitude for our existence, and the land we live on. As our Indigenous siblings teach us, we begin: “We are all thankful to our Mother, the Earth, for she gives us all that we need for life” (1). And as our Christian sacred texts teach us, we begin: “I thank and praise you, God of my ancestors…” (Daniel 2:23). Because of this I regularly advocate that people who want to deepen their spirituality begin with gratitude. I encourage folks to write morning gratitude lists, similar to the gratitude journals spoken of by teachers of many stripes, from Oprah to Julian of Norwich (and many others). This point of pen on paper can be a powerful transformative force in our lives; we begin from a posture of thankfulness for blessing - whatever blessing we can scrounge up amidst whatever life situations we experience. Our connection to Divine Love and self-knowledge can start here, and it is a long-term pathway to spiritual growth and maturity. It was Julian who said, “Gratitude is a true understanding of who we really are.” And when we learn the truth of ourselves in relation to the Divine and recognize the Divine Within, we become more spiritually awake. Holy Resistance We touch the “Greening Force... enfolded in the weaving of Divine mysteries” (2), of which mystics like Hildegard of Bingen so eloquently write, by way of our attention and gratitude practice. This baseline gratitude then blossoms and branches out to foster other virtues in us: empathy, compassion, right action, holy rage toward injustice, and joy. In the words of WWII martyr and nazi-resistor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Gratitude changes the pangs of memory into a tranquil joy.” Grateful people have more access to joy. And the feeling of joy is a sacred resistance of evil and of the forces of the world that would have us inattentive and morose, unresistant to their agendas. As the author and activist Adrienne Maree Brown writes, “Feeling good is not frivolous, it is freedom.” (3) Fostering within ourselves a deep gratitude that leads to joy is a sacred liberating lifeforce. By our attention to the Divine, and our humble posture of gratitude at receiving, we resist empire. We resist colonizing forces that hierarchize and find inner freedom. We resist the sirens of Capitalism insisting that we must acquire and hoard. Because gratitude practice draws our attention to the abundance around us, it leads us away from a scarcity mindset. Instead of focusing on what we lack, we foster contentment that frees us to enjoy what we have. In this we also resist our own human temptation to feel entitled. We resist whiteness’ cultural imperative to own - to control, appropriate, amass. Instead of ownership, we are free to practice appreciation, and to hold every gift we encounter with an open handed lightness. Instead of a compulsion to get and keep, gratitude invites us to behold. Compassionate Engagement Gratitude practice teaches us and develops our strength in compassionate engagement; in loving the world as it is, in accepting reality and being willing to wade into it with clarity of mind, in search of the Divine movement inside it. When we can come at the world from a perspective of appreciation we allow ourselves the opportunity to love the world in the midst of its chaos. This trains our brains, digging synaptic pathways of gratitude that we can cultivate on easier days, and can rely upon in more difficult ones. Gratitude prepares our neural pathways in ways that make us more resilient, less easily traumatized, more easily bent but not broken, and more strategically present (5). Grateful people are better able to enter into seemingly hopeless situations, bringing help, practical solutions and clear thought. In the words of Nelson Mandela, “The time is always ripe to do right.” And we are better able to see the ripeness of the time because we have learned to pay attention and practice thankfulness. In this way we increase our ability to be responsive to a circumstance, rather than reactive. I believe that grateful people change the world by means of their gratitude, and by the virtuous action gratitude gives way to over time; they see the world from Love’s perspective, and thus can love it into wholeness. We echo the words and example of Christ In giving thanks and practicing thanksgiving, we follow the example and words of Christ as recorded in the Gospels: … “He took the cup, and when he had given thanks…” (Luke 22) … “Father, I thank you that you have heard me…” (John 11) … “I thank you,... Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children…” (Matthew 11) … “[Jesus] took the seven loaves and the fish, and He gave thanks, broke them, and kept on giving them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds…” (Matthew 15) We know that prayer and contemplation were foundational to Christ’s life and work on the earth; and I believe it's safe to say that the intentional practice of gratitude was, and is, an essential fuel of his initiating and living out the Commonwealth of God here. Gratitude is a pathway into Christ-consciousness. This simple, humble practice that grounds us in the knowledge that everything we have, we have received. Every work or movement toward justice that we participate in was begun before us. Every breath we take, molecule we drink, morsel we eat is supplied by the Divine. When gratitude fuels us we are able to see and appreciate the world, to love it, and to work for its good in this moment of desperate need.~ Rev. Fran Pratt Read online here About the Author Rev. Fran Pratt is a pastor, writer, musician, and mystic. Making meaningful and beautiful liturgy to be spoken, practiced, and sung, is at the heart of her creative drive. Fran authored a book of congregational litanies, and regularly creates and shares modern liturgy on her website and Patreon. Her prayers are prayed in churches of various sizes and traditions across the globe. She writes, speaks, and consults on melding ancient and new liturgical streams in faith and worship. Fran is Pastor of Worship and Liturgy at Peace of Christ Church in Round Rock, Texas.___________________1. https://www.firstpeople.us/html/A-Haudenosaunee-Thanksgiving-Prayer.html2. —Hildegard von Bingen, Causae et Curae3. Adrienne Maree Brown, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good4. https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_gratitude_can_help_you_th… | | | | | | | | Question & Answer Q: By Gerwyn In looking at how the Jews see the Adam and Eve story – that it was a story of taking responsibility and moving out of innocence etc. How does this reconcile however with Paul ( a Jew) in Romans Ch5 where he appears to take on a more traditional even literal approach with Adam and Sin entering in , The Fall etc. ? A: By Carl Krieg Dear Gerwyn,Your question is whether Paul was a literalist, and to answer that it helps to unpack the various dimensions involved. First, we can ask what the author of the Yahwist narrative in Genesis had in mind. Did that person intend that the story be taken literally, and if not, what does it mean? Second, what did Paul have in mind when he used this story? What was he trying to show? And thirdly, are we obligated to agree with the Yahwist and/or Paul as we seek to understand who we are and who God is? Let’s start with the last question. The focal point of the Christian life is Jesus of Nazareth, who he was, what he taught, what he did, and how we today walk in that path. What the Yahwist thought millennia ago may be helpful in that enterprise and what Paul thought also may be helpful. Whether or not Paul was a literalist is set within the context of whether we are literalists, and if not, can we disagree with Paul, whatever he says? Put otherwise, is the Bible the absolutely inerrant and authoritative word of God? Historically, we should note that this concept of biblical inerrancy initially arose after the Reformation in the period known as Protestant Orthodoxy, and was a factor in the Thirty Years war, in which about 8 million died. I’m not sure what Paul had in mind in Romans chapter 5. In fact, I have always found much of Romans confusing. But the larger question is whether or not Paul, whatever he had in mind, could have been misguided or wrong. Although fundamentalists would howl and scream, any open-minded Christian today has to be open to that possibility. Lots of liberal church members feel as though they have to “struggle” with the meaning of many biblical verses that seem to support anachronistic perspectives. Personally, I have given up on struggling to reconcile certain biblical verses with Jesus-discipleship, and simply assume that different people at different times dealt with different issues from a different perspective. Just because someone or some group along the trajectory of church history placed those writings in “the book”, does not give them absolute authority. Just because the First Letter of Timothy prescribes that wives should be subject to their husbands does not require that we should accept that as God’s will. The same holds true for Paul. Just because his letters were so important in the development of the early church that they eventually assumed the authority of scripture, does not require us to accept his views as God’s will. Whether he was a literalist is not as important as whether we are literalists. Given that, it is nonetheless informative and helpful to try to understand what in fact Paul had in mind. I personally find it extremely improbable that Paul actually believed that the human race started with two people named Adam and Eve. Certainly he does believe, however, that human beings easily give in to a distortion of their humanity and that Jesus came to show us what it means to be truly human. Adam and Eve are symbolic of the problem, and set the stage for Jesus. That’s the second question. This brings us to the first: what was the Yahwist describing in that story about Eden? For a full analysis I refer you to my book, The Void and the Vision, and also an article in progressivechristianity.org entitled Eve, Adam, and Self-Transformation. The idea is simple. That which is forbidden is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, a phrase that means the equivalent of top to bottom, left to right, in other words, everything. The pair are warned not to act as though they know everything and to assume that their view of the world coincides with what the world really is. But that, of course, is exactly what they do. They eat the fruit. They represent everyone. As we go through life, we each develop our own little “world”, inescapably and universally, and that parochial, egocentric perspective distorts our appreciation of and understanding of the real world and interferes with our ability to love our neighbor. In heart and conscience we all at some level are aware of this distortion, and by who he was and said and did Jesus casts God’s light into that self created world.~ Carl Krieg Read and share online here About the Author Dr. Carl Krieg received his BA from Dartmouth College, MDiv from Union Theological Seminary in NYC, and PhD from the University of Chicago Divinity School. He is the author of What to Believe? the Questions of Christian Faith, and The Void and the Vision. As professor and pastor, Dr. Krieg has taught innumerable classes and led many discussion groups. He lives with his wife, Margaret, in Norwich, VT. | | | | | | | | 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 Study of Life, Part 6: Rethinking Basic Christian Concepts in the Light of Charles Darwin Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong September 3, 2009As I retraced Charles Darwin’s steps through the Galapagos Islands, I contemplated anew his impact on traditional Christian thinking. I had been working intensively on Darwin for about three years in preparation for my book on eternal life. Darwin, more than anyone else, had shaken the foundations of belief in eternal life by defining human beings as animals with more highly developed brains, removing any sense of immortality from them. By the time we arrived in the Galapagos the time for any rewrites on this book was over. My manuscript was at my publisher, HarperCollins. The next time I will see this book will be in its published form. This book had been for me a grueling task since it drove me almost against my will to come to a new understanding of my faith. I discovered first that I could no longer make a case for life after death until I had journeyed to a place that was, as my subtitle suggests, “beyond religion, beyond theism and beyond heaven and hell.” That was a direct result of my deep engagement with Darwin’s thought. It is fair to say, however, that in the writing of this book I also became aware that Darwin’s thought had also helped me to arrive at a new vision of what I believe will be the future of Christianity. Through this column I seek to share that process with my readers. My struggle began with the recognition that the primary titles that we Christians have given to Jesus all carry with them a particular definition of what it means to be human. To call Jesus “savior” implies that human life needs to be saved from something. The same is true about the titles “rescuer,” “redeemer” and “reconciler.” This negative definition of humanity is why the traditional telling of the Jesus story focuses on Jesus’ suffering, which was the price that Jesus had to pay for our salvation. The traditional Protestant mantra, “Jesus died for my sins,” and the Catholic definition of the Eucharist as “the sacrifice of the Mass,” both reinforce the assumption of human depravity that is a major theme filling Christian theology and history. These distorting images began in a mythology that assumed that human life was a special creation, made in the image of God, and suggesting that human life originally shared in the perfection of God’s finished creation. Falling from that status into what came to be called “original sin,” however, quickly became the major focus of Christian theology. Starting with Paul, it has been the “fall” and its resulting distortion of God’s creation that has been the bedrock of the way we have told the Jesus story. It was our sinful status that mandated God’s divine rescue operation “for us and for our salvation.” The heart of Christian theology, including such core doctrines as the Incarnation, the divinity of Christ, the Atonement and even the concept of God as a Holy Trinity, were all attempts to spell out the Jesus story in terms of this definition of what it means to be sinful. Human beings were those creatures who in an act of disobedience had destroyed the beauty of God’s original creation and had plunged the whole world into sin. Charles Darwin’s understanding of human origins ran directly counter to these assumptions. If Darwin was correct then this whole theological system, which featured the account of Jesus’ sacrificial death to save us from our sins, was doomed to become inoperative. If human life, as Darwin suggested and as modern science keeps verifying, is the product of millions of years of evolutionary history, then none of these theological formulas remain valid. Without an original, perfect and complete creation, there could never have been a fall from perfection, not even metaphorically. Original sin has thus got to go. Without that fall from perfection there was no need for God’s rescue and no reason for Jesus to come to our aid. The idea of God as the punishing parent organizes religious life on the basis of the childlike and primitive motifs of reward and punishment. The cross understood as the place where Jesus paid our debt to this vengeful God becomes not just nonsensical, but it also serves to twist human life with guilt in order to make this system of thought believable. That is why Christian worship seems to require the constant denigration of human life. Christian liturgies constantly beg God “to have mercy.” Our hymns sing of God’s amazing grace, but the only reason God’s grace is amazing is that it “saved a wretch like me.” This theology assumes that God is an external being, living somewhere above the sky, whose chief occupations are two: first to keep the record books up to date on our behavior, thus serving as the basis on which we will be judged; and second to be ready to come to our aid in miraculous ways either to establish the divine order or in answer to our prayers. Darwin was only one part of the explosion of knowledge that rendered these ideas not only irrelevant, but unbelievable. Copernicus and Galileo had destroyed God’s dwelling place above the sky by introducing us to the vastness of space, suddenly but not coincidentally rendering this God homeless. Then Isaac Newton discovered the mathematically precise and immutable laws by which the universe is governed, leaving little room in it for either miracle or magic, which rendered the miracle-working deity unemployed. One well-known English theologian, when he finally embraced these realities in the early 1980’s, abandoned his Christian faith, pronouncing himself “a non-aggressive atheist.” When asked why he was no longer a believer, he replied quite simply “because God no longer had any work to do.” It was Darwin, however, who applied the coup de grâce both to religion and to the belief in life after death, at least as traditional Christianity had proclaimed these things. To Darwin human beings were merely a work in progress. Far from being created perfect we had evolved into our present form like every other creature by “natural selection” over more than three billion years. Salvation built on the three premises of a perfect creation, a fall into sin and a rescue from above that was achieved on the cross became an exercise in fantasyland. Indeed the story of the sacrificial death of Jesus by crucifixion began to look bizarre. This theology made God appear to be a deity who required a blood offering and a human sacrifice in order to forgive. Jesus began to look like a perpetual victim, perhaps even a masochistic person who willingly endured, even welcomed, suffering and death on the cross. Human beings looked like guilt-ridden creatures whose sinfulness made the death of Jesus necessary. Finally, Christianity became a religion of guilt, which was encouraged liturgically. There was nothing about this scenario that could be called good news or “gospel,” yet it persisted for centuries. These distortions in the Jesus message began to wobble under the impact of Galileo and Newton, but it was Darwin who made it clear that the Christian world could no longer go on pretending that nothing had changed. The foundations on which the Christian message had been erected had collapsed. When I embraced what this meant existentially I came to the conclusion that if Christianity was to have a future, then I must find a new point of entry and a new way to hear and to believe the Jesus story. That was the challenge I had to meet before I could ever address the possibility of life after death. I began that reconstruction task in my book Jesus for the Non-Religious and now I had to complete this task by spelling out a new way to view eternal life. I was delighted to discover that the greatest of the New Testament scholars in the 20th century, Rudolf Bultmann, regularly spoke of Jesus not as the “savior,” but as the “revealer.” That shift was not subtle. Bultmann was suggesting the Jesus “revealed” a new dimension of what it means to be human and in the process opened a new window into what it is to experience the presence of God. Suddenly I had found a whole new way to look at what divinity is in human life. Underneath the focus on sacrifice revealed in the gospels I began to view Jesus as one who was so deeply and fully human that whatever it is that we experience God to be could be seen in him and experienced through him. A new way to view the cross next began to come into view. The cross was not a sacrifice to placate an angry God, but a living portrait of a human life that was no longer controlled by the innate drive to survive. Here was a life free to give itself away, a life with no need to build itself up at another’s expense. This was a new dimension of what it means to be human, what it means to live fully, to love wastefully and to be all that life was meant to be. When I got beneath the level of later explanation, which dominates the gospel narratives, and began to ask what was the Jesus experience that compelled his followers to stretch the words available to them to an infinite degree to enable those words to be big enough to capture their Jesus experience, I heard them saying we have met and encountered in the life of this Jesus everything that we mean by the word “God.” It was that word “inflation” that gives us virgin births, wandering stars, miracles, parables, physical resuscitations and ascensions into heaven. They were trying to say that in his humanity, which seemed to break all human barriers, they had found a doorway into the meaning of transcendence, the reality of God. The way into divinity became for me the pathway of becoming fully human. It was to affirm that we are still evolving into we know not what. Jesus was a new dimension of life for which we may all be headed. So I had to begin my quest for life after death by going into the depths of the mystery of life itself. Just as we now know that life evolved out of lifeless matter, that consciousness emerged out of life and finally that self-conscious life has emerged out of mere consciousness, so perhaps the day is now arriving when we will experience the possibility of entering a universal consciousness that is beginning to emerge out of self-consciousness. We are thus part of the oneness of life, bound together by a common DNA and that oneness makes us part of God. It also suggests that we are linked to eternity since God is found at the depth of the human. These words can only scratch the surface of the thought I try to develop in my book on eternal life, but they do presage the path I walk. Charles Darwin, who for me made a new Christianity necessary, turns out to offer the clue to that new direction. This vision now stands before me. I invite you to join me in entering it. ~ John Shelby Spong | | | | | | | | Announcements Revelations of 12 Master Artists How do an artist’s paintings speak to our perceptions of self, beauty, vision, and meaning? Roger Housden offers a 12-session course starting July 6th on self-revelation through the works of 12 different artists. READ ON ... | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

1 0

Picture of David Zahrt and the Iron Man
by Timothy Wegner 02 Jul '20

02 Jul '20

Back in 2014 Terry Berdall added a picture of a group participating in the Global March for Climate Action, Sept 6, 2014 in front of the Iron Man to https://wiki.wedgeblade.net/. <https://wiki.wedgeblade.net/> David and Lin are in the picture on the left. The picture is fairly large, but you might have to scroll down to see it. The wiki website was built by Gordon Harper, Len Hockley, and myself. I provided mainly technical and software support. Even though the site is dormant these days (although it's still entirely possible to add more content) I have kept it going through several rehosts and software upgrades because I am obsessive about such things. I found it heartwarming to look at this picture and remember David and some of the other folks in the picture. Tim

3 2

John Giancola
by Karen Snyder 01 Jul '20

01 Jul '20

Jim Troxel asked me to post this remembrance of John’s life: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.” Henry David Thoreau. It was the early part of 1966 on the campus of Oklahoma State University located in Stillwater that I, as a naive sophomore, first encountered John Giancola, a senior philosophy major. John was active in the Methodist Wesley Foundation, led by our campus ministers Carl Caskey and Vance Engleman, which served as the hotbed of student awakenment and activism in which I and a lot of other students were caught up. We recruited students and faculty to attend the weekend religious seminars of the Ecumenical Institute (EI) and organized caravans to make the road trip up to EI in Chicago’s Inner City at least twice a quarter. We labeled ourselves the FATAGS, the Friday Afternoon Tea and Glee Society, and eventually helped lead some 5000 students and faculty to protest the school administration’s reduction of our first amendment rights. We hammered out a bi-weekly off-campus student newspaper called The Drummer paying homage to Thoreau.* While Ron Stevens served as its editor, two of our intellectual leaders were Rob Work and John Giancola. While Rob was quieter and laid back, John was more spirited and outgoing. Indeed, John was the life of our parties. The most bizarre parties we held in the small auditorium of the Foundation were a re-enactment of The Sound of Music movie that came out the year before. I have no recollection as to how or why we got into this as our cabaret. We’d dole out the parts and invariably John lobbied for and was always cast as the Mother Abbess whose rendition of “Climb Every Mountain” was the highpoint of the evening. John’s casting was perhaps a hint of his future inclinations. It was John’s spirit and energy, though, that I remember the most. He was the center of whatever discussion or activity we were caught up in at the moment. His enthusiasm engaged all around him and none of us ever expected that whatever windmill we’d be going after that we wouldn’t conquer the giants. His smile played the tune of the pied piper and it was hard not to follow him whatever road he took. John had the gruff appearance of Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof. His compassion for subjects, causes and the people around him was infectious. John and Rob graduated in the spring of 1966 and both found their way to Chicago eventually to join the staff of the EI, which modeled itself as a “lay ecumenical religious family order.” Vance Engleman and Judy Sparks Montgomery would take the plunge as well and other Wesley Foundation folks would join up in Chicago, myself included. But, alas, the structures of EI were too confining for John. He marched to a different drummer. So he moved to New York to find his bliss. I have not seen him since he left OSU. But, obviously, he had a big impact on my life. My tribute to John is that he played the role in my life of the Avatar. He served as an embodiment of the essence of a superhuman being in an earthly form. He was, in other words, bigger than life. He transcended the particulars of the moment to enable us to see the larger picture of what we were about. He led us to new awarenesses that we couldn’t see for ourselves. And, for an unformed adolescent who was caught up in the whirlwind of the ‘60s, he had a profound influence on my life direction. John died recently due to complications arising from the COVID virus. Thank you, John, for being you. Jim Troxel

2 1

Last Chapter- John Epps Appreciation
by Richard Alton 29 Jun '20

29 Jun '20

I've tried to just list what might be called "contributions" by time and place instead of describing experiences. Hope this is what you want. John *John Epps Contributions to the Order Ecumenical, Ecumenical Institute, and the Institute of Cultural Affairs - *as requested by Dick Alton and team John Epps: Born June 30, 1939, Charleston, South Carolina Education: The Citadel, BA Perkins School of Theology, BD, PhD – Systematic Theology Married: Ann Epps, August 3, 1964 Joined OE and EI, January 1972 1972-79 – Chicago Ecumenical Institute, Nexus · Taught numerous RS-1 and Parish Leadership Courses · Prior of Research Centrum that produced quarterly Ecclesiola manuals · Member of first full-time Panchayat · Co-authored the OE Polity Document · Assisted in organizing the Oklahoma Town Meeting 100 campaign · Member of team for three “Kitchen Sink” Summer Programs in Chicago · Member LENS strategic planning development team and three global treks to pilot the course 1979-82 – Kuala Lumpur Regional Nexus · Prior Operations Centrum · Consulted, trained, and travelled to Projects throughout SEPAC 1982-85 – Denver/Rocky Mountain Region ICA Co-director · Co-led regional organizing team for Colorado Exposition of Rural Development · Formed IERD regional steering committee including Lieutenant Governor · Assisted in identifying numerous project candidates for IERD India conference · Co-taught numerous accredited ICA Imaginal Education Courses and other ICA courses · Presentation of ICA community development projects to Denver Rotary 1985-2016 – Kuala Lumpur Region · Marketed and Co-facilitated multiple strategic planning projects with financial, insurance, technology, direct selling, international non-profits (Save the Children Norway, UK Volunteers, etc.), and petroleum industries · Trained public courses in Malaysia in ToP Facilitation Methods, Strategic Planning, Imaginal Education, Meeting Design, Facilitation from the Inside Out · Founding member of the International Association of Facilitators (IAF), internationally, and co-organizer of IAF events in Malaysia · Member organizing committee of twelve IAF Asia Facilitator Conferences · Co-developed and led “Methods Modules” for business and community leaders prior to offering full ToP courses · Organizing editor of two volumes of Joseph Wesley Matthews talks · Co-developed and led Customer Service Workshops with multiple companies · Participant and co-presenter at numerous ToP Network Conferences in the USA · Co-led multiple ToP facilitator training sessions for government officials in Singapore both through the Singapore Civil Service College and as requested by various government agencies such as the Subordinate Court Judges, the Internal Revenue Service, community police, and the Ministry of Home Affairs 2016-2020 – ToP Network, USA · Attended ToP annual gatherings · Member of ToP Curriculum team for several years · Assisted in editing new TFM Participant Manual -- Richard H. T. Alton One Earth Film Fest ( OEFF) Green Community Connections Interfaith Green Network T: 773.344.7172 richard.alton(a)gmail.com **Save the Date! One Earth Film Festival 2021, March * http:www.oneearthfilmfestival.org Make Plain the Vision, Habakkuh 2:2 Won't you be my neighbor?

4 3

6/25/20, Progressing Spirit: Carl Krieg: Biblical Billionaires and the Taming of Jesus, Spong revisited
by Ellie Stock 25 Jun '20

25 Jun '20

#yiv4946856623 p{ margin:10px 0;padding:0;} #yiv4946856623 table{ border-collapse:collapse;} #yiv4946856623 h1, #yiv4946856623 h2, #yiv4946856623 h3, #yiv4946856623 h4, #yiv4946856623 h5, #yiv4946856623 h6{ display:block;margin:0;padding:0;} #yiv4946856623 img, #yiv4946856623 a img{ border:0;height:auto;outline:none;text-decoration:none;} #yiv4946856623 body, #yiv4946856623 #yiv4946856623bodyTable, #yiv4946856623 #yiv4946856623bodyCell{ min-height:100%;margin:0;padding:0;width:100%;} #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623mcnPreviewText{ display:none !important;} #yiv4946856623 #yiv4946856623outlook a{ padding:0;} #yiv4946856623 img{ } #yiv4946856623 table{ } #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623ReadMsgBody{ width:100%;} #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623ExternalClass{ width:100%;} #yiv4946856623 p, #yiv4946856623 a, #yiv4946856623 li, #yiv4946856623 td, #yiv4946856623 blockquote{ } #yiv4946856623 a .filtered99999 , #yiv4946856623 a .filtered99999 { color:inherit;cursor:default;text-decoration:none;} #yiv4946856623 p, #yiv4946856623 a, #yiv4946856623 li, #yiv4946856623 td, #yiv4946856623 body, #yiv4946856623 table, #yiv4946856623 blockquote{ } #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623ExternalClass, #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623ExternalClass p, #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623ExternalClass td, #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623ExternalClass div, #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623ExternalClass span, #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623ExternalClass font{ line-height:100%;} #yiv4946856623 a .filtered99999 { color:inherit !important;text-decoration:none !important;font-size:inherit !important;font-family:inherit !important;font-weight:inherit !important;line-height:inherit !important;} #yiv4946856623 #yiv4946856623bodyCell{ padding:10px;} #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623templateContainer{ max-width:600px !important;border:5px solid #363232;} #yiv4946856623 a.yiv4946856623mcnButton{ display:block;} #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623mcnImage, #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623mcnRetinaImage{ vertical-align:bottom;} #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623mcnTextContent{ } #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623mcnTextContent img{ height:auto !important;} #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623mcnDividerBlock{ !important;} #yiv4946856623 body, #yiv4946856623 #yiv4946856623bodyTable{ } #yiv4946856623 #yiv4946856623bodyCell{ border-top:0;} #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623templateContainer{ border:5px solid #363232;} #yiv4946856623 h1{ color:#202020;font-family:Helvetica;font-size:26px;font-style:normal;font-weight:bold;line-height:125%;letter-spacing:normal;text-align:left;} #yiv4946856623 h2{ color:#202020;font-family:Helvetica;font-size:22px;font-style:normal;font-weight:bold;line-height:125%;letter-spacing:normal;text-align:left;} #yiv4946856623 h3{ color:#202020;font-family:Helvetica;font-size:20px;font-style:normal;font-weight:bold;line-height:125%;letter-spacing:normal;text-align:left;} #yiv4946856623 h4{ color:#202020;font-family:Helvetica;font-size:18px;font-style:normal;font-weight:bold;line-height:125%;letter-spacing:normal;text-align:left;} #yiv4946856623 #yiv4946856623templatePreheader{ background-color:#FAFAFA;background-image:none;background-repeat:no-repeat;background-position:center;background-size:cover;border-top:0;border-bottom:0;padding-top:9px;padding-bottom:9px;} #yiv4946856623 #yiv4946856623templatePreheader .yiv4946856623mcnTextContent, #yiv4946856623 #yiv4946856623templatePreheader .yiv4946856623mcnTextContent p{ color:#656565;font-family:Helvetica;font-size:12px;line-height:150%;text-align:left;} #yiv4946856623 #yiv4946856623templatePreheader .yiv4946856623mcnTextContent a, #yiv4946856623 #yiv4946856623templatePreheader .yiv4946856623mcnTextContent p a{ color:#656565;font-weight:normal;text-decoration:underline;} #yiv4946856623 #yiv4946856623templateHeader{ background-color:#FFFFFF;background-image:none;background-repeat:no-repeat;background-position:center;background-size:cover;border-top:0;border-bottom:0;padding-top:9px;padding-bottom:0;} #yiv4946856623 #yiv4946856623templateHeader .yiv4946856623mcnTextContent, #yiv4946856623 #yiv4946856623templateHeader .yiv4946856623mcnTextContent p{ color:#202020;font-family:Helvetica;font-size:16px;line-height:150%;text-align:left;} #yiv4946856623 #yiv4946856623templateHeader .yiv4946856623mcnTextContent a, #yiv4946856623 #yiv4946856623templateHeader .yiv4946856623mcnTextContent p a{ color:#007C89;font-weight:normal;text-decoration:underline;} #yiv4946856623 #yiv4946856623templateBody{ background-color:#FFFFFF;background-image:none;background-repeat:no-repeat;background-position:center;background-size:cover;border-top:0;border-bottom:2px solid #EAEAEA;padding-top:0;padding-bottom:9px;} #yiv4946856623 #yiv4946856623templateBody .yiv4946856623mcnTextContent, #yiv4946856623 #yiv4946856623templateBody .yiv4946856623mcnTextContent p{ color:#202020;font-family:Helvetica;font-size:16px;line-height:150%;text-align:left;} #yiv4946856623 #yiv4946856623templateBody .yiv4946856623mcnTextContent a, #yiv4946856623 #yiv4946856623templateBody .yiv4946856623mcnTextContent p a{ color:#007C89;font-weight:normal;text-decoration:underline;} #yiv4946856623 #yiv4946856623templateFooter{ background-color:#FAFAFA;background-image:none;background-repeat:no-repeat;background-position:center;background-size:cover;border-top:0;border-bottom:0;padding-top:9px;padding-bottom:9px;} #yiv4946856623 #yiv4946856623templateFooter .yiv4946856623mcnTextContent, #yiv4946856623 #yiv4946856623templateFooter .yiv4946856623mcnTextContent p{ color:#656565;font-family:Helvetica;font-size:12px;line-height:150%;text-align:center;} #yiv4946856623 #yiv4946856623templateFooter .yiv4946856623mcnTextContent a, #yiv4946856623 #yiv4946856623templateFooter .yiv4946856623mcnTextContent p a{ color:#656565;font-weight:normal;text-decoration:underline;} @media only screen and (min-width:768px){ #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623templateContainer{ width:600px !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv4946856623 body, #yiv4946856623 table, #yiv4946856623 td, #yiv4946856623 p, #yiv4946856623 a, #yiv4946856623 li, #yiv4946856623 blockquote{ } }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv4946856623 body{ width:100% !important;min-width:100% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv4946856623 #yiv4946856623bodyCell{ padding-top:10px !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623mcnRetinaImage{ max-width:100% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623mcnImage{ width:100% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623mcnCartContainer, #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623mcnCaptionTopContent, #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623mcnRecContentContainer, #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623mcnCaptionBottomContent, #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623mcnTextContentContainer, #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623mcnBoxedTextContentContainer, #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623mcnImageGroupContentContainer, #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623mcnCaptionLeftTextContentContainer, #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623mcnCaptionRightTextContentContainer, #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623mcnCaptionLeftImageContentContainer, #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623mcnCaptionRightImageContentContainer, #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623mcnImageCardLeftTextContentContainer, #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623mcnImageCardRightTextContentContainer, #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623mcnImageCardLeftImageContentContainer, #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623mcnImageCardRightImageContentContainer{ max-width:100% !important;width:100% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623mcnBoxedTextContentContainer{ min-width:100% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623mcnImageGroupContent{ padding:9px !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623mcnCaptionLeftContentOuter .yiv4946856623mcnTextContent, #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623mcnCaptionRightContentOuter .yiv4946856623mcnTextContent{ padding-top:9px !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623mcnImageCardTopImageContent, #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623mcnCaptionBottomContent:last-child .yiv4946856623mcnCaptionBottomImageContent, #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623mcnCaptionBlockInner .yiv4946856623mcnCaptionTopContent:last-child .yiv4946856623mcnTextContent{ padding-top:18px !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623mcnImageCardBottomImageContent{ padding-bottom:9px !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623mcnImageGroupBlockInner{ padding-top:0 !important;padding-bottom:0 !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623mcnImageGroupBlockOuter{ padding-top:9px !important;padding-bottom:9px !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623mcnTextContent, #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623mcnBoxedTextContentColumn{ padding-right:18px !important;padding-left:18px !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623mcnImageCardLeftImageContent, #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623mcnImageCardRightImageContent{ padding-right:18px !important;padding-bottom:0 !important;padding-left:18px !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623mcpreview-image-uploader{ display:none !important;width:100% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv4946856623 h1{ font-size:22px !important;line-height:125% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv4946856623 h2{ font-size:20px !important;line-height:125% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv4946856623 h3{ font-size:18px !important;line-height:125% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv4946856623 h4{ font-size:16px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623mcnBoxedTextContentContainer .yiv4946856623mcnTextContent, #yiv4946856623 .yiv4946856623mcnBoxedTextContentContainer .yiv4946856623mcnTextContent p{ font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv4946856623 #yiv4946856623templatePreheader{ display:block !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv4946856623 #yiv4946856623templatePreheader .yiv4946856623mcnTextContent, #yiv4946856623 #yiv4946856623templatePreheader .yiv4946856623mcnTextContent p{ font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv4946856623 #yiv4946856623templateHeader .yiv4946856623mcnTextContent, #yiv4946856623 #yiv4946856623templateHeader .yiv4946856623mcnTextContent p{ font-size:16px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv4946856623 #yiv4946856623templateBody .yiv4946856623mcnTextContent, #yiv4946856623 #yiv4946856623templateBody .yiv4946856623mcnTextContent p{ font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv4946856623 #yiv4946856623templateFooter .yiv4946856623mcnTextContent, #yiv4946856623 #yiv4946856623templateFooter .yiv4946856623mcnTextContent p{ font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;} } | | | | View this email in your browser | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Biblical Billionaires and the Taming of Jesus | | | | | | | | | | Essay by Dr. Carl Krieg June 25, 2020 My initial intent in writing this column was to look at how the early church lost the message of Jesus, but the recent protests, climate change, and the pandemic seemed more urgent, demanding immediate attention. Then I realized that lurking behind all of them was the dark but pervasive shadow of society’s rich and powerful, those who expand and protect their interests at any cost. Racial discrimination today is a continuation of the slavery that formed the foundation of our economy. With respect to climate change, the case certainly can be made that a half century ago fossil fuel industries were well aware of the danger of global warming but chose for profit’s sake to dig and drill anyway. It would be difficult to argue that greedy humans created the coronavirus, but the rich and powerful certainly are taking advantage of the crisis. While comforting the public with the lie that all was well, US senators with insider information were dumping stocks that would tumble with the pandemic and investing in stocks that would rise. When congress created a fund to enable the economy to survive, giant banks received a huge subsidy and are using that money to buy up fracking companies going bankrupt because of the virus. Three massive tragedies, all inter-related because of the power of wealth. What has always been less obvious, however, is the impact of the rich and powerful on the development of the early church.The time of Jesus was a time when these people were utilizing all means at their disposal to become even more rich and more powerful. The government was in on it. Business was in on it. The religious establishment was in on it. The poor were crushed. Into this scene at about age 28, came Jesus from a small village called Nazareth in the province of Galilee. He and his disciples lived and taught a life that denounced the oppression that dominated society, offering instead the vision of a community based on caring and sharing. But it didn’t last. The timeline is instructive. From a historical point of view, the religious community described in the New Testament developed in four stages. The first was that created by Jesus himself. We often think of this community as limited to twelve male apostles, but there were women as well. We have the names of six, mention of “the others”, and we are told that they supported and provided for Jesus and his followers. The whole group was based in Capernaum from whence they traveled into the Galilean countryside. We must, therefore, imagine about 25 men and women who were gathered by Jesus and who lived together. The fullness of humanity incarnate in Jesus and the power and mystique of his person and his teaching impacted them as nothing they had ever experienced before. Through him they had found a new life together, and they wanted to share this good news with others. And then he was crucified. Initially, so the story goes, they were terrified, denying that they ever knew the man, lest they too be implicated in the crime of sedition against the Roman Empire. After that initial bout of terror a new experience enveloped them, and so begins the second stage of the communal development. They remembered Jesus and all he had done and said, and came to believe that he was present again in their midst in a new form, the form of spirit. As historians of the 21st century we can say with certainty that the disciples believed that the holy spirit of Jesus infused their community, reinstating the fullness and joy they had experienced in their life together before he was killed, and again inspiring them to share with others what they now experienced. They shared, they grew in number, and so begins stage three in their development. Let us assume that Jesus was crucified in the year 30 ce, and that Paul was converted to this new faith in 35. When Paul writes his first letter in 45, we discover that there are already in existence many small congregations that have emerged and, further, that there are groups within these churches that don’t agree with one another. A lot has happened since the crucifixion. The church has grown, and controversy has arisen about many matters. Who was Jesus? What did he do for us? How do we know? Who were there as eyewitnesses? Are men and women equal? Do we have to free our slaves? Must I share my property with the less fortunate? How are we to relate Jew and Gentile? Paul had much to say on these matters, partially but forcefully summed up in his words to the church in Galatia: “In Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile, male nor female, slave nor free.” Unfortunately, his word did not carry the day, and so we enter stage four, epitomized in the first letter of Timothy, found in the New Testament and written toward the end of the first century. Here we are bluntly warned, among other matters, that women are subject to men, that we must be subject to the governing authorities, slaves must obey their masters, and priests and bishops rule the church. This attitude is also found in other New Testament writing dating from this period. The first question that comes to mind is: why? why did the history unfold as it did? How did we get from a ragtag group of happy, fulfilled and excited men and women, to an institution that turned its back on every change Jesus tried to initiate, basically reverting to the existing patriarchy/patronage system that pervaded the culture? A simple answer suggests itself. What Jesus both incarnated and taught was an alternative to the system that benefited the rich and powerful, be they in government, business or religion. And, to put it bluntly, they did not like that. The crucifixion is proof. They had to get rid of him, but that didn’t succeed as they hoped, inasmuch as the movement spread. The ultimate takeover of the movement by conservative forces, however, did succeed, although it took a long time. Questions arise. Was there an intentional plot by them to take over the church? Did the influences that changed the church arise from within the church itself? Or was it the inertia of society that squashed the revolutionary impetus? Whatever the answer to these questions, the fact remains that by the end of the first century, Jesus and the disciples had lost and culture had won. As a consequence, much of what we accept as basic Christian understanding did not originate with Jesus and the disciples, but rather with the interests of the rich and powerful. Women be quiet and submit to your husbands. Slaves obey your masters. Everyone be subject to the governing authorities. The priests rule the church. That much is basic to the established order of oppression. But there is more. Less obvious but equally destructive was a total shift in the meaning of Jesus’ life, death and new life. The disciples found in Jesus a model of the person they too could become, and he was a person who preached justice and equality, love and kindness toward one another. To the authorities such people are suspect, and that, no doubt, is why Pilate had him crucified. But as time went on, the perceived role of Jesus shifted away from the revolutionary to the sacrificial. His death became a propitiation of an angry god, a socially much less dangerous role. Jesus, the one who had wanted to create a just and loving society, a kingdom of God on earth, became the one who had died for your sins, a role much more amenable to the existing culture. Sacrificial lambs do not threaten class and wealth stratification. Prophets do. The same analysis holds for the resurrection of Jesus. The disciples fully believed that the revolutionary who had gathered them into a microcosm of the kingdom was now alive in their midst as spirit. Really alive, inspiring them to continue growing the kingdom. To them, the resurrection demonstrated that the power of evil evident in the crucifixion, the power of Rome, had been overcome by the power of God. Love ruled the universe, not death and destruction. Such conviction was dangerous for the existing order, challenging, as it did, the authenticity of violence as the norm of human life together. The solution for the established order was to transform the resurrection as revolutionary into the resurrection as resuscitation, and by accepting and promulgating this maneuver, the church lost its prophetic vitality and became the promoter of accepted and acceptable cultural norms. The empty tomb may have started as a pointer to the victory over cosmic evil, but it soon became identified as the thing itself. As a result of these changes in the supposed role of Jesus, the meaning of his life, death and resurrection was shifted from the present to the future. Instead of the One who gave his life in the struggle to transform society, he became the one who would judge every individual at some future, undetermined time. God in the moment became God at the end of time, a god much more palatable to the existing order. As a consequence, faith, which at first meant participation in the Way of the kingdom, a way of social justice and equality, now degenerated into acceptance of certain doctrines of belief, chief among them being that Jesus had died for your sins. Such faith posed little threat to the establishment. The takeover was complete, encapsulated as it was in the holy writ of the Christian scripture, now defined and interpreted by the bishops and priests. I am neither a biblical scholar nor a historian of the first century, but I am greatly disturbed that the message of Jesus was transmogrified into a bastion of reactionary ideology and that that ideology has become identified today with the gospel of Jesus. The hidden influence of the rich and powerful is more pervasive than we’d like to believe. ~ Carl Krieg Read online here About the Author Dr. Carl Krieg received his BA from Dartmouth College, MDiv from Union Theological Seminary in NYC, and PhD from the University of Chicago Divinity School. He is the author of What to Believe? the Questions of Christian Faith, and The Void and the Vision. As professor and pastor, Dr. Krieg has taught innumerable classes and led many discussion groups. He lives with his wife, Margaret, in Norwich, VT. | | | | | | | | Question & Answer Q: By A Reader The only religion I was exposed to as a child was Pentecostal. I never subscribed to it, tried several denominations, never felt any connection. The hell and damnation thing is so deeply rooted in me that it makes me afraid to speak my real mind about God. The older I have gotten, I am 64, the more alone and abandoned I feel. Is there a God? If there is, how can I worship authentically? What books can I read to help me resolve this spiritual crisis in my heart? I desperately want a connection to a higher power and I would love to share that in a group of people but I just cannot abide the Christian faith. I respect it but I cannot go, sit, and pretend that I believe it all. It’s just too hypocritical. Can you offer guidance? A: By Jennifer Berit Dear Reader, This is a very exciting moment in your life. It is never too late to begin or to continue on your unique authentic spiritual path. I am not surprised to hear of your skepticism with the Christian faith because our traditional religions have long subscribed to a paradigm that is no longer relevant to our times - a paradigm that used religion to make sense of mysteries of the universe we could not explain, a paradigm that told us to focus not on this earthly reality and our present life but instead to always look toward transcendence and live our life according to what will get us into a mythical heaven. To step away from a dogma or faith tradition that does not resonate with you is one of the bravest and most important things you can do. I could recommend hundreds of books that might spark a new spirituality within you - anything by Bishop John Shelby Spong, Matthew Fox, Joanna Macy, Yeye Luisah Teish, Bill Plotkin, Robin Wall Kimmerer, poetry by Maya Angelou, David Whyte, Mary Oliver, Walt Whitman, and the list goes on and on. But what I recommend before reading any books or following any teachers is to find yourself, in nature. Develop a practice of finding a spot where you can connect with nature - a creek, a tree, a house plant, and meditate. I trust that eventually you will find God in every wild creature this planet has to offer, from the littlest ant to the highest mountain. The limitless divine energy that imbues our sacred Earth, our only home, is one that we can always trust. ~ Jennifer Berit Read and share online here About the Author Jennifer Berit is the co-author of Order of the Sacred Earth: An Intergenerational Vision of Love and Action and works in book publishing as a private consultant for authors assisting with manuscript editing and book publicity. She is also the co-director of Wild Awakenings, an adult Rites of Passage organization dedicated to fostering the thriving of Earth, life, and humanity. Jennifer was on the Board of Trustees at the Unity in Marin Spiritual Community for three years, serving as the Board President for 18 months. Also at Unity in Marin, Jennifer was a guest speaker for Sunday mornings, she led Rites of Passage groups for teenagers, and founded a young adult interfaith group committed to conscious connection, community service, and social activism. She is a passionate hiker, reader, writer, and public speaker. | | | | | | | | 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 Study of Life, Part 5: Galapagos II - My Search for the Meaning of Life as I Walked in Darwin's Footsteps Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong August 27, 2009 In the preparation required to write my new book on eternal life, I soon discovered that this subject raised all of the contemporary theological issues that threaten to destroy Christianity as we have known it. It was clear that I would have to turn the traditional religious approach around. I had to read the modern critics for whom the religious concepts of the past make no sense. I also had to come to a new understanding of what life itself means. Life after death cannot possibly be contemplated until one understands the wondrous and even mysterious dimensions of life before death. That study resulted in two immediate insights. First, I discovered the drive to survive deep in every specimen of life from the rainforests to human beings. Second, I found all life to be deeply interrelated and even linked through DNA. Armed with this information I now faced the fact that the work of Charles Darwin had rendered the basic tenets of traditional religion so suspect that if I were to speak of life after death with any credibility I would have to find a new starting place, perhaps outside of or beyond religion itself. I could no longer employ any concept of God that had reigned in religious circles since the birth of religion. Since most people’s idea of God is that of an external supernatural being ruling over the world, they would inevitably see the path I would be walking as a move into atheism, something about 180 degrees different from what I was in fact trying to communicate. I would also have to dismiss any concept of life after death based on the behavior controls of eternal reward and punishment, and that is the primary content of most religious ideas of life after death. As I embraced these conclusions, I also understood just why Darwinism and traditional religion were such mortal enemies. If Darwin was right, religion in general, and Christianity in particular, was wrong on almost every level. In this column I want to look briefly at the content of that struggle. To move beyond it I must understand it. The first flash point in the conflict between Darwin and Christianity was centered on the authority of scripture. Evolution did not jibe in any detail with the biblical story of creation. The timeline in the Bible was quite different from the timeline that Darwin was utilizing. This was so even though Darwin was not yet aware of the actual age of the Earth at 4.7 billion years or the age of life at 3.8 billion years. Second, the Bible attributed the varieties of species to the divine initiative; Darwin to natural selection. Third, the Bible saw human life as a special creation, not related to anything else, while Darwin saw it as evolving out of other forms of life. The scripture part of the debate was not as strong in intellectual Christian circles as the traditionalists thought, because a critical study of the Bible had been initiated inside the Church, primarily in Germany, some 50 years prior to Darwin’ writings. In 1835, David Friedrich Strauss had published his monumental work, Leben Jesu, which had been translated into English in 1846 under the title The Life of Jesus Critically Examined by George Eliot, the author of Silas Marner and the pen name of Mary Ann Evans. For traditional Christians, Strauss’ work was a deeply disturbing book, since it revealed not only the contradictions in the gospel tradition but the very human way in which the gospels had been written. It was clear to Strauss and his colleagues that no angel had guided Matthew’s hand in writing his gospel, as the popular art of the day portrayed. Matthew had rather copied about 90% of Mark into his text. In the process he had added to, deleted from and even changed some of Mark’s ideas. In the non-academic ranks, however, the Bible-based condemnation of Darwin had much longer to run, even after someone suggested that each day in the Genesis creation story “might have been a billion years.” By 1910, a group of Presbyterian divines centered around Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey decided to mount a counterattack against Darwin in the name of defending “traditional Bible-based Christianity.” A series of pamphlets, about 500,000 per printing, were published on a regular basis over a five-year period and distributed to Christian leaders around the world. The pamphlets, financed by the Union Oil Company of California (UNOCAL) in the first known instance of an alliance between the oil industry and right-wing religion, were called “The Fundamentals” and through them, the words “fundamentalist” and “fundamentalism” entered our vocabulary. As a direct result of these pamphlets, all of America’s mainline churches began to show a split between their fundamentalist members and those who came to be called “modernists.” While the pamphlets polarized the churches, they did little to push back the Darwinian tide. The next public battlefield between Darwin and traditional religion took place in the unlikely spot of Clayton, Tennessee, in the year 1925, when a young science teacher named John Scopes was recruited by the American Civil Liberties Union to challenge openly a state law in Tennessee forbidding the teaching of anything in the public schools of Tennessee that was contrary to “the word of God found in the Holy Scriptures.” That trial captured the attention of the nation since it was covered by every major newspaper in America, to say nothing of the fledgling and still somewhat static-filled radio industry. John Scopes was found guilty and fined $100. The fine was never paid. The effect of the trial, however, was once again to bring the insights of Charles Darwin into the awareness of the general public in a massive way. It also served to begin the split in this nation on social issues that was destined to pit the urban Northeast and West coast of America against the heartland of the South and the Midwest, the precursor of the blue states versus the red states of the George W. Bush era. Truth, however, is never really stopped because it is threatening or inconvenient to a previous way of thinking. Next, from embattled religious leaders came the “Creation Science Movement,” reaching its high-water mark in 1970 when it bought pressure on Washington’s Smithsonian Institution to close an exhibition on “The Dynamics of Evolution.” Failing that, they wanted a countering exhibition on creation science to be presented so that “truth could be balanced.” That too failed, and ultimately the Supreme Court dismissed creation science as unconstitutional under the separation of church and state provision of the constitution. Still not willing to accept defeat, critics of evolution repackaged creation science under the new banner of “Intelligent Design,” only to have that ploy also dismissed by the courts. Darwinism was clearly here to stay. With the literal Bible no longer at the heart of the conflict, it slowly began to dawn on the wider Christian consciousness that a much deeper threat to traditional religion had now been loosed upon them. If Darwin was correct then the basic Christian myth had made assumptions that were no longer true. There was no “perfect creation” from which human life could fall into original sin. If there had been no fall, there was no need for a divine rescue operation carried out by Jesus on the cross. Salvation could no longer mean being restored to a status that human life had never possessed. Instead of being “fallen sinners” we were incomplete human beings. We did not need to be redeemed, we needed to be called and empowered to become more deeply and fully human. Pioneering Christian theologians began to wrestle with these ideas, but whenever these ideas achieved public notice the status quo ecclesiastical authorities attacked them vigorously. In the early years of the 20th century thinkers like Alfred North Whitehead sought to redefine God more as “a process than as a being.” A Roman Catholic priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, became the first religious figure to seek to reconcile God and evolution in his book The Phenomenon of Man. The Vatican responded by indexing his works. Reformed theologian Paul Tillich, writing in the 1940’s and 1950’s, built on these ideas by suggesting that there was a “God beyond the Gods of men and women” and he began to refer to God not as “a being” but as “the Ground of Being.” Next came the “God is Dead” theologians in the 1960’s as the supernatural, theistic concept of God became less and less believable. They were followed by the work of two Anglican bishops, John A. T. Robinson in Great Britain and James A. Pike in America. For their efforts both were marginalized and finally squeezed out by their respective churches. The external, supernatural and invasive God, however, was seen to be in inevitable collapse. We live today in the midst of this transition. Those who cannot see the problem and who seem to think that all one has to do is to recite the old formulas loudly and they will be believable have become the fundamentalists. They come in both a Catholic and a Protestant form. Those who do see the problem are now convinced that religion is dying or has already died. They become the secularists who get on with the task of living creatively in a godless world. Most of them have been drawn from the “main line” churches, which are all in a statistical freefall. Darwin removed God from the day-to-day workings of our world. He redefined human life biologically as one species of the animal kingdom, finite creatures destined for a fate no different from the sheep of New Zealand or the iguanas of the Galapagos. If that proved to be an accurate definition then traditional religion with its theistic concept of God could not survive. No artificial respiration will resuscitate a concept that is not in touch with established knowledge. Either we have reached the end of religion as a human enterprise or we have to find a new way to approach both human life and whatever we mean by transcendence. A record-keeping theistic deity, who metes out reward and punishment in order to control behavior, is simply no longer viable. This is not an insignificant crisis. No, I am not prepared to reject Christianity, but I am prepared to rethink its meaning in a radical way, so radical that traditional Christians may feel that all that they once believed was holy is now being taken away from them. To analyze the possibilities for a new Christianity designed to live without apology in this new world will be my task in the column next week. ~ John Shelby Spong | | | | | | | | Announcements Wild Christ, Wild Earth, Wild Self: Weekend Intensive Mirabai Starr joins Seminary of the Wild guides on June 25th in an online webinar. This weekend online intensive includes the webinar and a nature-based introduction to Seminary of the Wild. The week is primarily experiential, with daily invitations to solo wanders wherever you reside. This journey will rewild your mind and body and allow you to move more deeply into your heart as you listen for the voice of the Holy speaking your name. READ ON ... | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

1 0

Fwd: Marge Philbrook Memorial Celebration
by Timothy Wegner 24 Jun '20

24 Jun '20

---------- Forwarded message --------- From: <lephilbrook(a)gmail.com> Date: Wed, Jun 24, 2020 at 11:13 AM Subject: Marge Philbrook Memorial Celebration To: <tim(a)tswegner.net> [image: A person in a blue shirt Description automatically generated]Marge’s Mantra Song (tune: Children’s Marching Song) … I’m the greatest, can’t you see. I’m the only one like me. I want to be the great one I am. I’m the only one who can. Dear friends and loved ones, You were invited to participate in Marge Philbrook’s Memorial on June 10th. It was a wonderful celebration. Marge was an unrepeatable mystery. In our invitation we let you know we would have a video you could see later, so below is a link for you to view Marge’s celebration. https://youtu.be/TTWQUS6qgGk At times like these, we seem more closely linked to our friends, colleagues and family. If you feel a need to connect with us further, our emails are listed. Grace and Peace, Roy and Gene Philbrook, lephilbrook(a)gmai.com Deana and Kenneth Henry, kdhenry(a)gmail.com Paula Philbrook, paula.philbrook(a)gmail.com Larry and Evelyn Philbrook, larry(a)icatw.com

1 0

Lift Every Voice
by Timothy Wegner 23 Jun '20

23 Jun '20

If you are ready for some very positive but intense emotion, check this out. It is a large group of African American opera singers singing "Lift Every Voice and Sing". If you can, listen on a device that has decent sound. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jufE7HuY5nI Tim

2 3

6/18/20, Progressing Spirit, Gretta Vosper: Playing for Love in the Time of COVID; Spong revisited
by Ellie Stock 18 Jun '20

18 Jun '20

#yiv6215329518 p{ margin:10px 0;padding:0;} #yiv6215329518 table{ border-collapse:collapse;} #yiv6215329518 h1, #yiv6215329518 h2, #yiv6215329518 h3, #yiv6215329518 h4, #yiv6215329518 h5, #yiv6215329518 h6{ display:block;margin:0;padding:0;} #yiv6215329518 img, #yiv6215329518 a img{ border:0;height:auto;outline:none;text-decoration:none;} #yiv6215329518 body, #yiv6215329518 #yiv6215329518bodyTable, #yiv6215329518 #yiv6215329518bodyCell{ min-height:100%;margin:0;padding:0;width:100%;} #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518mcnPreviewText{ display:none !important;} #yiv6215329518 #yiv6215329518outlook a{ padding:0;} #yiv6215329518 img{ } #yiv6215329518 table{ } #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518ReadMsgBody{ width:100%;} #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518ExternalClass{ width:100%;} #yiv6215329518 p, #yiv6215329518 a, #yiv6215329518 li, #yiv6215329518 td, #yiv6215329518 blockquote{ } #yiv6215329518 a .filtered99999 , #yiv6215329518 a .filtered99999 { color:inherit;cursor:default;text-decoration:none;} #yiv6215329518 p, #yiv6215329518 a, #yiv6215329518 li, #yiv6215329518 td, #yiv6215329518 body, #yiv6215329518 table, #yiv6215329518 blockquote{ } #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518ExternalClass, #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518ExternalClass p, #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518ExternalClass td, #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518ExternalClass div, #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518ExternalClass span, #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518ExternalClass font{ line-height:100%;} #yiv6215329518 a .filtered99999 { color:inherit !important;text-decoration:none !important;font-size:inherit !important;font-family:inherit !important;font-weight:inherit !important;line-height:inherit !important;} #yiv6215329518 #yiv6215329518bodyCell{ padding:10px;} #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518templateContainer{ max-width:600px !important;border:5px solid #363232;} #yiv6215329518 a.yiv6215329518mcnButton{ display:block;} #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518mcnImage, #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518mcnRetinaImage{ vertical-align:bottom;} #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518mcnTextContent{ } #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518mcnTextContent img{ height:auto !important;} #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518mcnDividerBlock{ !important;} #yiv6215329518 body, #yiv6215329518 #yiv6215329518bodyTable{ } #yiv6215329518 #yiv6215329518bodyCell{ border-top:0;} #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518templateContainer{ border:5px solid #363232;} #yiv6215329518 h1{ color:#202020;font-family:Helvetica;font-size:26px;font-style:normal;font-weight:bold;line-height:125%;letter-spacing:normal;text-align:left;} #yiv6215329518 h2{ color:#202020;font-family:Helvetica;font-size:22px;font-style:normal;font-weight:bold;line-height:125%;letter-spacing:normal;text-align:left;} #yiv6215329518 h3{ color:#202020;font-family:Helvetica;font-size:20px;font-style:normal;font-weight:bold;line-height:125%;letter-spacing:normal;text-align:left;} #yiv6215329518 h4{ color:#202020;font-family:Helvetica;font-size:18px;font-style:normal;font-weight:bold;line-height:125%;letter-spacing:normal;text-align:left;} #yiv6215329518 #yiv6215329518templatePreheader{ background-color:#FAFAFA;background-image:none;background-repeat:no-repeat;background-position:center;background-size:cover;border-top:0;border-bottom:0;padding-top:9px;padding-bottom:9px;} #yiv6215329518 #yiv6215329518templatePreheader .yiv6215329518mcnTextContent, #yiv6215329518 #yiv6215329518templatePreheader .yiv6215329518mcnTextContent p{ color:#656565;font-family:Helvetica;font-size:12px;line-height:150%;text-align:left;} #yiv6215329518 #yiv6215329518templatePreheader .yiv6215329518mcnTextContent a, #yiv6215329518 #yiv6215329518templatePreheader .yiv6215329518mcnTextContent p a{ color:#656565;font-weight:normal;text-decoration:underline;} #yiv6215329518 #yiv6215329518templateHeader{ background-color:#FFFFFF;background-image:none;background-repeat:no-repeat;background-position:center;background-size:cover;border-top:0;border-bottom:0;padding-top:9px;padding-bottom:0;} #yiv6215329518 #yiv6215329518templateHeader .yiv6215329518mcnTextContent, #yiv6215329518 #yiv6215329518templateHeader .yiv6215329518mcnTextContent p{ color:#202020;font-family:Helvetica;font-size:16px;line-height:150%;text-align:left;} #yiv6215329518 #yiv6215329518templateHeader .yiv6215329518mcnTextContent a, #yiv6215329518 #yiv6215329518templateHeader .yiv6215329518mcnTextContent p a{ color:#007C89;font-weight:normal;text-decoration:underline;} #yiv6215329518 #yiv6215329518templateBody{ background-color:#FFFFFF;background-image:none;background-repeat:no-repeat;background-position:center;background-size:cover;border-top:0;border-bottom:2px solid #EAEAEA;padding-top:0;padding-bottom:9px;} #yiv6215329518 #yiv6215329518templateBody .yiv6215329518mcnTextContent, #yiv6215329518 #yiv6215329518templateBody .yiv6215329518mcnTextContent p{ color:#202020;font-family:Helvetica;font-size:16px;line-height:150%;text-align:left;} #yiv6215329518 #yiv6215329518templateBody .yiv6215329518mcnTextContent a, #yiv6215329518 #yiv6215329518templateBody .yiv6215329518mcnTextContent p a{ color:#007C89;font-weight:normal;text-decoration:underline;} #yiv6215329518 #yiv6215329518templateFooter{ background-color:#FAFAFA;background-image:none;background-repeat:no-repeat;background-position:center;background-size:cover;border-top:0;border-bottom:0;padding-top:9px;padding-bottom:9px;} #yiv6215329518 #yiv6215329518templateFooter .yiv6215329518mcnTextContent, #yiv6215329518 #yiv6215329518templateFooter .yiv6215329518mcnTextContent p{ color:#656565;font-family:Helvetica;font-size:12px;line-height:150%;text-align:center;} #yiv6215329518 #yiv6215329518templateFooter .yiv6215329518mcnTextContent a, #yiv6215329518 #yiv6215329518templateFooter .yiv6215329518mcnTextContent p a{ color:#656565;font-weight:normal;text-decoration:underline;} @media only screen and (min-width:768px){ #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518templateContainer{ width:600px !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv6215329518 body, #yiv6215329518 table, #yiv6215329518 td, #yiv6215329518 p, #yiv6215329518 a, #yiv6215329518 li, #yiv6215329518 blockquote{ } }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv6215329518 body{ width:100% !important;min-width:100% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv6215329518 #yiv6215329518bodyCell{ padding-top:10px !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518mcnRetinaImage{ max-width:100% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518mcnImage{ width:100% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518mcnCartContainer, #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518mcnCaptionTopContent, #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518mcnRecContentContainer, #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518mcnCaptionBottomContent, #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518mcnTextContentContainer, #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518mcnBoxedTextContentContainer, #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518mcnImageGroupContentContainer, #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518mcnCaptionLeftTextContentContainer, #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518mcnCaptionRightTextContentContainer, #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518mcnCaptionLeftImageContentContainer, #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518mcnCaptionRightImageContentContainer, #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518mcnImageCardLeftTextContentContainer, #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518mcnImageCardRightTextContentContainer, #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518mcnImageCardLeftImageContentContainer, #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518mcnImageCardRightImageContentContainer{ max-width:100% !important;width:100% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518mcnBoxedTextContentContainer{ min-width:100% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518mcnImageGroupContent{ padding:9px !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518mcnCaptionLeftContentOuter .yiv6215329518mcnTextContent, #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518mcnCaptionRightContentOuter .yiv6215329518mcnTextContent{ padding-top:9px !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518mcnImageCardTopImageContent, #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518mcnCaptionBottomContent:last-child .yiv6215329518mcnCaptionBottomImageContent, #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518mcnCaptionBlockInner .yiv6215329518mcnCaptionTopContent:last-child .yiv6215329518mcnTextContent{ padding-top:18px !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518mcnImageCardBottomImageContent{ padding-bottom:9px !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518mcnImageGroupBlockInner{ padding-top:0 !important;padding-bottom:0 !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518mcnImageGroupBlockOuter{ padding-top:9px !important;padding-bottom:9px !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518mcnTextContent, #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518mcnBoxedTextContentColumn{ padding-right:18px !important;padding-left:18px !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518mcnImageCardLeftImageContent, #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518mcnImageCardRightImageContent{ padding-right:18px !important;padding-bottom:0 !important;padding-left:18px !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518mcpreview-image-uploader{ display:none !important;width:100% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv6215329518 h1{ font-size:22px !important;line-height:125% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv6215329518 h2{ font-size:20px !important;line-height:125% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv6215329518 h3{ font-size:18px !important;line-height:125% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv6215329518 h4{ font-size:16px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518mcnBoxedTextContentContainer .yiv6215329518mcnTextContent, #yiv6215329518 .yiv6215329518mcnBoxedTextContentContainer .yiv6215329518mcnTextContent p{ font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv6215329518 #yiv6215329518templatePreheader{ display:block !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv6215329518 #yiv6215329518templatePreheader .yiv6215329518mcnTextContent, #yiv6215329518 #yiv6215329518templatePreheader .yiv6215329518mcnTextContent p{ font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv6215329518 #yiv6215329518templateHeader .yiv6215329518mcnTextContent, #yiv6215329518 #yiv6215329518templateHeader .yiv6215329518mcnTextContent p{ font-size:16px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv6215329518 #yiv6215329518templateBody .yiv6215329518mcnTextContent, #yiv6215329518 #yiv6215329518templateBody .yiv6215329518mcnTextContent p{ font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv6215329518 #yiv6215329518templateFooter .yiv6215329518mcnTextContent, #yiv6215329518 #yiv6215329518templateFooter .yiv6215329518mcnTextContent p{ font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;} } | | | | View this email in your browser | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Playing for Love in the Time of COVID | | | | | | | | | | Essay by Rev. Gretta Vosper June 18, 2020 Looks like what drives me crazy Don't have no effect on you-- But I'm gonna keep on at it Till it drives you crazy, too. Langston Hughes The world has shifted on its axis since my last article appeared in Progressing Spirit. As I write, the number of COVID-19 deaths has passed 400,000, a number that shrinks from the reality experienced around the globe. As countries attempt to reopen their economies, anti-racism protests are sweeping the globe. Immune to neither challenge, we in Canada are little more than a quiet simmer when compared to the legitimate rage being expressed across America and around the world. Who couldn’t call this one? It would be lying if we said we didn’t see this coming. Maybe the clash of two tragic realities and the exponential impact they had on one another. Maybe that was a surprise. But what created those independent realities was something we’ve been watching approach in slo-mo for a long, long time. The only question was when one or the other was finally going to erupt. The only defence against a pre-existing knowledge of the approach of these matched threats is ignorance and how many of us could really claim that? The virus Let’s begin with the virus. There has been a lot of loud yelling and much finger pointing at China as the source of the virus, as though just being angry at the right people will make everything somehow better. In particular, those who often consider themselves above laying blame on “a people”, are quick to name “wet markets” like the ones in Wuhan province as the origin of the problem. That finger-pointing gets us nowhere as these very markets are often the best way for people to get local, fresh produce and meats and are among the lowest sources of microbial infections outside of Europe, the Americas, and the wealthier countries of the Pacific Rim.[1] The problem isn’t the wet markets; it’s the origins of the food that sometimes shows up in them. We cannot claim ignorance about the link between humanity’s[2] incessant destruction of Earth’s natural world and the emergence of novel viruses for which the human body has no immunity. In the 1970s, the Ebola virus emerged in South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is believed that the impact of deforestation on populations, both human and animal, has led the two toward one another at an escalating pace and with devastating results. As humans are forced to venture further and further into the wild for food, their interaction with and consumption of animals previously unencountered provides viral opportunities. As animals lose habitat, particularly bats which can carry many viruses without themselves being infected, they move into areas where humans are establishing new agricultural industries. The pairing of the two can be disastrous.[3] Black Lives Matter Now let’s look at the images coming to us through news outlets the world over: the rising up of defiance against white privilege, not only its abuses, but its very existence. Regarding the oppression of Blacks, Indigenous people, and People of Colour (BIPOC), well, we white folk can’t plead ignorance there, either. We have seen, over and over again, the imposition of brutal force upon the black bodies of Americans and other populations. We’ve watched videos depicting the seemingly approved police practice of shooting first, as if anyone could answer the questions later. In February of last year, aspiring rapper, Willie McCoy, was permanently silenced for no other reason than being found sleeping in his car in the parking lot of a Taco Bell; police shot him 55 times in 3.5 seconds. Read that again. Commentators have suggested that anti-racism protests have swollen in size and vehemence because of the sense of release and purpose felt by people kept too long idle and in isolation due to the pandemic. That may, indeed, be true. But it isn’t the whole truth. It intimates that without COVID-19 setting the stage, there might have been another wave of indignation, a few marches, some judgments and condemnation expressed by Black leaders, and then the return to business as usual with an underlying sense of something isn’t quite right. After all, the return to normal seems to be what we do when it comes to killing Black men and boys. All of us, American or otherwise, who have watched graphic videos like the ones that captured the cold-blooded “I can’t breathe” murders of Eric Garner and George Floyd, walk our streets and go about our lives in varying states of post-traumatic stress disorder[4]. Our brains cannot process the depth of indifference, hatred, and horror even as we who are white begin the work of exploring our own complicity, the reality of our own investment in white supremacy.[5] The suggestion that the protests are as significant as they are is because of the injection of COVID-restlessness discounts the real fuel behind the Black Lives Matter protests. It misses, or perhaps intentionally downgrades, the anger fueled by the arrogance of the voice magnified by its presidential role. It misses the value of insurgency that marked the making of that country and that has found its place and power again. It misses the tsunami of fury felt by those who have lived in fear or watched it rain down the faces of their black neighbours, friends, and family members. The painting of BLACK LIVES MATTER on 16th Street in Washington was a decided nod to the voices of dissent. The renaming of the square “Black Lives Matter Plaza” was a moment of triumph. The announcement of the dismantling of the Minneapolis Police Force is a recognition that it is time to wash the blood of Black people from the streets for all time, streets that, we hope, will never be the same again. Those protesting at the Black Lives Matter gatherings have no interest in a return to normal. Those protesting around the world at the impudence of white privilege are drawing their line in the sand. What side of that line can we be on? What parts of democracy do our faith communities really support? These are the questions we need to ask and address in community and with our people. Let the questions come. Sit with them. Feel their impudence. Be uncomfortable. Find where you really stand and stand there. Singing on Zoom West Hill has been meeting, as have many congregations, by Zoom and not just for Board meetings. Our Sunday Gatherings have been on Zoom as well. Having already established a robust participatory Sunday morning service, Zoom provides us the ability to have the back-and-forth that we so often enjoy when we are together in one room. True, we are still ironing out the challenges, but the first one we realized was that we could not sing together. Live music without the benefit of experienced performers and technicians is gawdawful on Zoom. [6] But singing is a significant part of our gatherings. My partner, Scott Kearns, has written most of the music that inspires our Sunday mornings. It’s been written for communities who choose values over religious beliefs in a decidedly contemporary tone (Scott’s a former evangelical and brings his musical roots with him). When we sing the music of traditional hymnody, new words have been written to the same purpose: uplifting our values and reminding one another and ourselves how it is we want to live. When we realized we couldn’t sing together, we refused to give up the use of music in our Gatherings; it is just too important. So we turned to the only source of music we thought could offer the same experience even if it didn’t involve singing along: YouTube. The greater part of my service preparation these days is watching YouTube videos and determining if they are inspirational enough for our gatherings. Or clean enough; though I forgot to prepare the congregation for the F-bomb on one of the first Sundays we used music videos, I’ve warned them since. There are no holds barred in this important work. A Curated List Here are some of those songs. The first many find a focus in the earth and our relationship with it. Then, on May 31st, we fall into the abyss of racial injustice; we’re still falling. The themes grow out of the events of the day but are also linked to lectionary passages (for the following year). All the songs were chosen because they speak to the very real realities of these issues that currently face us: environmental devastation and its connection to our current pandemic situation, and the pain of recognizing white privilege, its power and its shame. We must find the courage to work with one another to dismantle it. May these songs find a place in your broken heart and invite you to the healing work we must undertake together. Click here for Song List. Read online here ~ Rev. Gretta Vosper About the Author The Rev. Gretta Vosper is a United Church of Canada minister who is an atheist. Her best-selling books include With or Without God: Why The Way We Live is More Important Than What We Believe, and Amen: What Prayer Can Mean in a World Beyond Belief. She has also published three books of poetry and prayers. Visit her website here. [1] For more information, check out this article and the references contained within it. ” China Is Reopening Its Wet Markets. That's Good”, by David Fickling, Bloomberg,[2] I use this word, “humanity”, and I feel the slight lift of relief. Initially, the sentence read “our incessant destruction of Earth’s natural world”. But that just feels so much more damning. So I edited it to a more remote perspective, to give you a little breathing space. If you’re reading this footnote, however, you’ve been exposed to the ruse and the bald truth. And now, like me, you might feel more responsibly to doing something about it.[3] For further reading, check out the following Forbes article and the references contained within it. “How Deforestation Drives the Emergence of Novel Coronaviruses”, by Jeff McMahon, Forbes, March 21, 2020. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2020/03/21/how-deforestation-is-dr…, Accessed June 8, 2020.[4] My friend and visionary speaker, Carrah Quigley, articulated this for me. You can visit her and read about her own shooting story at https://www.carrahquigley.com. Carrah will be speaking at West Hill via Zoom on Sunday, July 12. You can join us here at 10:30 EDT: https://zoom.us/j/370030792[5] I know. You think that is harsh. If you do and you are white, please pick up a copy of Layla Saad’s Me and White Supremacy and work through your blind spots and the horrors of realizing how deeply invested you are in the racist realities of our world. Saad’s book is short and provides 28 days of reflections, each with questions meant to prompt critical (in every sense of that word) self-reflection and understanding. If you can’t bear the thought of reading that, start with White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo.[6] Always learning, we are about to explore live music again using the setting corrections we found on Music Repo's YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoXM5wcpVNU. | | | | | | | | Question & Answer Q: By A Reader As a scholar of Thomas Aquinas can you help me understand his teleological argument for his belief in the existence of God? A: By Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox Dear Reader, First, too much can be made of the term “proofs for the existence of God” by Thomas Aquinas. As scholar Mary T. Clark advises, he “never claimed that the five ways for trying to prove God’s existence … were his ‘proofs.’” They are found in his summa theologica right after he talks of how God’s existence is not self-evident to us. He seems more to be addressing pagan philosophers in his remarks; and, in his eminently ecumenical way, offers guideposts on where to look into science for overlaps between believers and non believers around God talk. (110f)* Your question alerts me to a point British biologist Rupert Sheldrake made to me a number of years ago. “The future of biology is Aristotle… because the future of biology is teleology.” Here are Aquinas’s words on the subject of the teleological argument which, he says, “is taken from the ordered tendencies of nature. A direction of actions to an end is detected in all bodies following natural laws even when they are without awareness, for their action scarcely ever varies and nearly always succeeds; this indicates that they do tend toward a goal, not merely succeeding by accident. Anything, however, without awareness tends to a goal only under the guidance of someone who is aware and knows; the arrow, for instance, needs an archer. Everything in nature, consequently, is guided in its goal by someone with knowledge, and this one we call ‘God.’” (124) Placing this within a postmodern scientific worldview, we might ask: Is evolution entirely random? Each species and individual within a species seems to have its goal (or purpose or aim): To Live. To survive. This goal or aspiration we might call the divine imperative since “God is life, per se life.” (Aquinas) Aquinas’s argument takes on a fuller context within his and Aristotle’s teachings about the Four Causes which they name as Efficient; Material; Formal; Final (or goal or end). What is the Final Cause? It “signifies the aim, that for the sake of which something is… The question, why?’ expects a cause.” (120) Aquinas says, “Every agent acts for an end. Otherwise, only by chance would definite results come from an agent’s action.” (128) And “the aim is called the cause of causes, since it causes the causality of all the causes.” (172) He offers the example of when we exercise to stay healthy, health is our final cause. I think it is useful also to consider the Four Causes in light of the Four Paths of Creation Spirituality. My major work on Aquinas, Sheer Joy: Conversations with Thomas Aquinas on Creation Spirituality, is centered around the Four Paths; and, in the course of my interviewing him, it becomes overwhelmingly clear that Aquinas is steeped in all of them--the Via Positiva, Via Negativa, Via Creativa and Via Transformativa (as is his disciple, Eckhart). Is it just coincidence that the Four Causes and Four Paths are developed so richly by both Aquinas and Eckhart? Is the final cause akin to the Via Transformativa, namely, Compassion and Justice, Celebration and Healing? Interestingly, both Aquinas and Eckhart call God Compassion and also Justice (“compassion means justice” Eckhart adds). It would follow that where justice and compassion are, God is. Is that a teleological argument for God also? ~ Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox Read and share online here About the Author Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox holds a doctorate in spirituality from the Institut Catholique de Paris and has authored 35 books on spirituality and contemporary culture that have been translated into 74 languages. Fox has devoted 45 years to developing and teaching the tradition of Creation Spirituality and in doing so has reinvented forms of education and worship (called The Cosmic Mass). His work is inclusive of today’s science and world spiritual traditions and has awakened millions to the much neglected earth-based mystical tradition of the West. He has helped to rediscover Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart, Thomas Aquinas. Among his books are Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul and Society; A Way To God: Thomas Merton's Creation Spirituality Journey; Meister Eckhart: A Mystic-Warrior For Our Times; Hildegard of Bingen: A Saint for Our Times; Confessions: The Making of a Postdenominational Priest; Stations of the Cosmic Christ; Order of the Sacred Earth; and Naming the Unnameable: 89 Wonderful and Useful Name for God...Including the Unnameable God. To encourage a passionate response to the news of climate change advancing so rapidly, Fox started Daily Meditations with Matthew Fox - See Welcome from Matthew Fox. *Citations are from Mary T. Clark, ed., An Aquinas Reader: Selections from the Writings of Thomas Aquinas (NY: Doubleday Image, 1972). Pages within the text refer to that book and all citations are from Aquinas except the first. | | | | | | | | Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited The Study of Life, Part 4: Tracing the Story of Charles Darwin in the Galapagos Islands Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong August 29, 2020 Still pursuing the meaning of life as the necessary prerequisite for raising the question of what might lie beyond life, we left the Amazon Rainforest and made our way by air from Quito through Ecuador’s major port and biggest city, Guayaquil, to the sole airport in the Galapagos on the island named Baltra. This is the principal gateway into this mysterious area, which has been called everything from “the closest thing to hell on earth” to the “Garden of Eden.” These islands are a series of land masses, created by volcanic eruptions in what is called the “hot spot” of the Galapagos. The oldest island in this chain is 6.5 million years old, while the youngest is no more than 300,000 years old. These islands drift to the east as if on a slow-moving conveyor belt at the rate of about three inches a year. Given their ages, that can constitute significant distances. The oldest island, for example, has drifted 378 miles from its place of birth, while the youngest has moved only 21 miles. So the further east-southeast the islands of this chain are, the older they are. The effects of their volcanic birth are everywhere, with black ash and rolls of spewing lava, now hardened but quite visible. Each island’s vegetation reflects its age. The earliest form of vegetation is normally the volcanic cactus. That is followed by more sustainable vegetation as hundreds of thousands of years pass. The animate life native here is limited to sea birds and various reptiles, the best known of which are the giant tortoises and the iguanas. Mammals, which are by nature late developing, are indigenous to this land only in the form of sea lions and bats. The Galapagos’ sea lions have been traced to the sea lions of California, while bats have amazingly long navigational abilities and can come from almost anywhere. The scarcity of fresh water makes other forms of mammalian life all but impossible. These islands were first discovered by fishermen in the 16th century and were later used by pirates, lying in wait for galleons loaded with Inca gold and other prizes of the new world. The pirates introduced other forms of life here, such as goats, so that they would have a fresh supply of meat waiting for them on future voyages. Remarkably, these goats proved to be sufficiently hardy to survive on the slight moisture they found in plants and the occasional rainfall, while at the same time they demonstrated one of Darwin’s principles by adapting their bodies to the ability to drink brackish salt water that was available in great supply. A stop here in 1835 by the HMS Beagle, captained by Robert Fitzroy and having on board serving as the “naturalist” a young man in his mid-twenties named Charles Robert Darwin, brought change not just to the Galapagos, but to the face of human history. The voyage of the Beagle lasted five years, from 1831 to1836, but the only time spent in the Galapagos was between September 5 and October 7 of the year 1835. Of that five-week time span Darwin actually spent only 19 days on land. In that limited time, however, Darwin visited every island on which he could get ashore and immediately became aware of their relatively recent origins and even of the gaps of time between each island, small by geological standards but significant in terms of the development of life forms. Everywhere he went, he collected specimens for his study. The differences among the same species of the finch provided Darwin with what was to be an invaluable clue that would underlie his theory, namely that various forms of life were not immutable, but were in fact always changing. Indeed these changes could be so total, he found, that given the necessary time, new species could actually develop. Just as the various islands of the Galapagos chain floated eastward over time, so the life forms on each island were distinct as they adapted to the different environment and resources available on each island. Darwin thus broke two “established” conclusions present in the religious world view of his day. One was that the age of this planet Earth was far older than the 6000 or so years postulated by Irish Bishop James Ussher who, from his biblical sources dated the birth of this Earth in 4004 BCE. The second was the idea firmly stated in the creation story that God created each species “after its kind” and that there was therefore no changing or evolving after the creation. Darwin himself did not yet embrace the real dimensions of time in the Earth’s history, which we now count at 4.7 billion years. If he had, his work would have been much easier. Nor did he embrace the possibility, now well established, that our separated continents were once a contiguous land mass. This would have explained, for example, both the similarities and the differences in vegetative and animal life in Africa and South America. Yet even without these two dimensions of knowledge that were to come much later, his thesis was remarkably accurate. What, he wondered, brought about the observable changes in the various forms of life from island to island? It was in answer to that question that Darwin’s real contribution came. His answer to that question would also prove to be most controversial in religious circles, for it shattered the primary concept by which human beings conceived of God. For Darwin, biological change was accomplished by natural selection. There was no place in his thinking for a divine intelligence directing the process. The clue for this truth for Darwin was seen in the wide variety in the shape of the beaks of the finches from island to island. Since the food supply was different on each island because of its age, the finches that survived in each location had to have beaks that were well adapted to the local food supply. Over multiple generations the finches with the fittest beaks for the environment in which they lived were naturally selected for survival. That same principle is still observable today among the sea lions of the Galapagos. The dominant male of the sea lion colony patrols a limited stretch of the beach, preventing other male challengers to his kingdom, and thus he impregnates all of the female sea lions in that area. Regularly, the dominant sea lion fights off male challengers to maintain his position until finally a stronger one than he prevails and takes over. In this way, the strongest characteristics are continually bred into the offspring. Natural selection works to foster survival adaptations. When Darwin left the Galapagos after this short visit, he discovered that his record-keeping was quite happenstance. Only later, by use of the notes kept by Captain Fitzroy, was Darwin able to organize each of his specimens by the island and the date on which it was obtained. Only then, when the differences on each island became visible to him, did the theory of evolution begin to take shape, since it alone made sense of the now apparent data. Natural selection emerged as the key to the theory. Darwin himself was shocked by his own conclusions. It was such a revolutionary way to view life from anything supposed before. He sat on this knowledge, seeking to be certain, while constantly testing his thesis from 1836 to 1859. When he finally published his findings, he was quite aware of the challenge his ideas would bring. This had been made clear to him from two primary sources. First, there was the vigorous opposition to his conclusions on biblical grounds that came from Captain Robert Fitzroy. Second, his wife, a devoted member of the Anglican Church, made him aware of her fears. With the negativity destined to be so high, he wanted to be sure that he stood on solid ground before he put his conclusions into irrevocable print. Twenty-four years after the voyage of the Beagle and under pressure from another scientist named Alfred Russel Wallace, who was working in the same area and who might have become the one with whom evolution was identified if he had published first, Darwin finally released his book to the public in 1859 just 150 years ago and in the 50th year of his life. When this book hit the streets of London, it sold out on the first day of publication. The world would never be the same. Within a few weeks Darwin’s theory was the subject of the historic debate between Thomas Huxley, representing Darwin, and the voice of the threatened religious establishment, Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford. This debate took place before the members of the British scientific world at the Museum of Natural History in Oxford. Though Wilberforce was, by popular acclaim, the winner of this debate, history has not treated the good bishop kindly. He is viewed today more as a buffoon than as a serious critic. When Wilberforce tried ridicule by asking Huxley whether it was on his mother’s or father’s side that he had descended from apes, he had stooped to the oldest trick that losers regularly employ in a debate: “If you can’t deal with the message, attack the messenger.” The chief result of this debate was that press coverage guaranteed that Darwin’s ideas quickly entered the public’s awareness and began that inevitable process of seeping into universal consciousness. Today the discovery of DNA and the subsequent recognition of the interrelatedness of all living things has fairly well clinched the argument in Darwin’s favor. There is universal acceptance of his theory in intellectual circles. Medical science is organized on the basis of evolution. The study of genetics assumes it. The fields of biochemistry and biophysics have it as their prerequisite. Evolution has in fact won the day. Religious opposition is now little more than a minor skirmish fought on the battlefield along the major retreat routes of religious thinking. Darwin had signaled the fact that religion would have to change dramatically, perhaps even die, before human beings would understand the very meaning of life. This last possibility finally became clear to me in the writing of my new book. I discovered that I had to walk beyond religion in order to discover the meaning of life here or the hope of life hereafter. Before I could find a doorway into an understanding of life after death, I had to find my way into what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “Religionless Christianity.” I will seek to reveal the process this book took in next week’s column. ~ John Shelby Spong | | | | | | | | Announcements The Mass Poor People’s Assembly and Moral March on Washington The Mass Poor People’s Assembly & Moral March on Washington is going digital! We will gather from all 50 U.S. states and territories, and from across the world on June 20th. This 2-hour program will be broadcast on Saturday, June 20th at 10:00am EST and 6:00pm EST and again on Sunday, June 21st at 6:00pm EST. READ ON ... | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

1 0

John Patterson's kind recommendation
by Robertson Work 14 Jun '20

14 Jun '20

John Patterson, in the closing session of the recent ICA Social Research Center sojourn, spoke about reading my autobiography, Serving People & Planet: In Mystery, Love, and Gratitude. He said that he couldn't put it down, had a wonderful time reading it, appreciated the depth of experience born out of my association with ICA, followed my many UN missions setting up programs, and found it stunning, as part of our common effort of being the ICA. Deep gratitude to you, John, for your kind and generous recommendation. If you would like to read it, you can find it on Amazon, Lulu, Barnes & Noble, BookDepository, and many other sites. The Amazon URL is: https://www.amazon.com/Serving-People-Planet-Mystery-Gratitude/dp/1684716160<https://www.amazon.com/Serving-People-Planet-Mystery-Gratitude/dp/168471616…> Compassionate Civilization Collaborative (C3) ................................................................................................ New book (2020): Serving People & Planet: In Mystery, Love, and Gratitude https://www.amazon.com/dp/1684716160<https://www.amazon.com/Serving-People-Planet-Mystery-Gratitude/dp/1684716160> Previous book (2017): A Compassionate Civilization: The Urgency of Sustainable Development and Mindful Activism https://www.amazon.com/dp/1546972617 Blog: https://compassionatecivilization.blogspot.com/<https://compassionatecivilization.blogspot.com/><https://compassionatecivilization.blogspot.com/> LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertsonwork/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/compassionatecivilization/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/movementofmovementsMOM/

2 2