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