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#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_thr... | | | | | | | | 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 ... | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |