January 2019 - OE - lists.wedgeblade.net

1/3/19, Progressing Spirit: Matthew Fox: Some Resources for Hope in a Time of Doomsday Messaging; Spong revisited
by Ellie Stock 03 Jan '19

03 Jan '19

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!important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv3818028251 #yiv3818028251templateBody .yiv3818028251mcnTextContent, #yiv3818028251 #yiv3818028251templateBody .yiv3818028251mcnTextContent p{ font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv3818028251 #yiv3818028251templateFooter .yiv3818028251mcnTextContent, #yiv3818028251 #yiv3818028251templateFooter .yiv3818028251mcnTextContent p{ font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;} } We are not bereft of resources to inspire and instruct our work of hope in a time of eco-darkness. | | | | View this email in your browser | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Some Resources for Hope in a Time of Doomsday Messaging Column by Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox January 3, 2019As we enter a new year amidst the dire warnings from the United Nations and even Trump’s own administration about the peril humans and the rest of the Earth are in due to climate change, it seems fitting to ask: Where are there some resources for hope? Without hope people die. Without hope people do crazy things—like tell one another that we are all doomed and that all we need do is eat, drink and be merry while of course we grab our piece of the disappearing pie. Thomas Aquinas had a warning about doomsday messaging however when he said that the “worst thing a human can do is to teach despair.” He also warned us that despair is the “most dangerous” of all sins—not the worst—that is injustice; but the most dangerous because when a person (or society) is in despair they do not care about themselves much less any one else. (Didn’t Jesus say something about loving your neighbor as yourself?)And who is our neighbor? Is it just the two-legged ones? Or is it also the soil and the trees, the plants and the animals, the birds and fishes and oceans and rivers and birds and air and wind that both feed us and delight us. The UN study gives us twelve years in which to change our ways profoundly. After that climate change will continue pretty much unabated. In its essence the Earth crisis carries a spiritual crisis. It is all quite apocalyptic. As Ted Richards has reminded us in his important book on The Great Re-imagining: Spirituality in an Age of Apocalypse, the Greek word for Apocalypse also means Revelation. Which raises the issue: What Revelation is staring us in the face as we wrestle with the survival of the planet as we know it in this apocalyptic time?To me the answer is obvious: The Revelation of How Holy all things are; how holy existence is; how holy our planet is. As Thomas Merton put it, “everything that is is holy.” Or as Meister Eckhart put it: “Isness is God.” Or as Thomas Berry put it: “It has been said, ‘We will not save what we do not love.’ It is also true that we will neither love nor save what we do not experience as sacred…. Eventually only our sense of the sacred will save us.”[1] Will we discover this revelation before it is too late?It is this recovery of the sense of the sacred that we must ignite in ourselves and all our institutions from education to religion, economics, politics, media, agriculture, art, architecture. We do not have a choice. There alone is our “salvation,” our healing, our conversion or metanoia or evolutionary leap into the future of what it means to be human (and has always meant). Lakota teacher Buck Ghosthorse said to me one day: “Do you want to know how sacred water is? Go without it for three days.” Will we learn how sacred the earth was only after we have despoiled and desecrated it? Or might we ignite a fire of wakefulness and awareness and of hope before Earth as we know it is ruined? The profound changes in weather patterns that express themselves in droughts, record fires, unprecedented forceful hurricanes and flooding, the rising of sea levels, the migration of people and other species from unprecedented heat are unmasking our denial (thus revelation, to remove the veil).Eco philosopher David Orr defines hope this way: “Hope is a verb with the sleeves rolled up.” Yes! Hope is proportionate to the work—both inner and outer—that we are willing to undertake in the name of a healthy Earth. Roll up our sleeves and go to work—but from a deep, inner place, not from panic or duty or fear. Consider these resources for work both inner and outer.In Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in without Going Crazy Buddhist activist Joanna Macy and physician Chris Johnstone lay out a practical guide to keeping hope alive without shrinking from the “widespread anxiety” that is abroad in our time. Active Hope is a practice—something we do rather than have—they tell us and it does not require optimism. It requires choosing. “Active Hope is about becoming active participants in bring about what we hope for” they remind us (p.3) Their workshops on Hope begin with practices of Gratitude because “Gratitude enhances our resilience, strengthening us to face disturbing information.” (p. 43) Gratitude is the Via Positiva.Writer Scott Russell Sanders, confronted by his seventeen year old son that he lacked hope, responded by entering on a two year retreat in pursuit of Hope. The result was an excellent book, Hunting for Hope: A Father’s Journeys. In it he tells us what he has learned. “I still hanker for the original world, the one that makes us rather than the one we make. I hunger for contact with the shaping power that cures the comet’s path and fills the owl’s throat with son and fashions every flake of snow and carpets the hills with green. It is a prodigal, awful, magnificent power, forever casting new forms into existence then tearing them apart and starting over.” (138)His hope comes from relating to the cosmos and one night stood out for him in particular. “I climbed out of the car with a greeting on my lips, but the sky hushed me. From the black bowl of space countless fiery lights shown down, each one a sun or a swirl of suns, the whole brilliant host of them enough to strike me dumb.” We humans have a longing with us he says that no matter what work we human do and no matter how clever they are, “they will never satisfy this hunger. Only direct experience of Creation will do.” It is faith “in our capacity for decent and loving work, in the healing energy of wildness, in the holiness of Creation” that will yield hope. “That the universe exists at all, that it obeys laws. That those laws have brought forth …life, and out of life consciousness, and out of consciousness these words, this breath, is a chain of wonders. I dangle from that chain and hold on tight.” (39f)Both Macy and Sanders are appealing to Creation Spirituality, the “holiness of Creation,” in Sanders’ words and Macy outlines a four-fold path to hope that is almost identical to the four paths of Creation Spirituality. Creation Spirituality is hopeful not because it is optimistic but because it begins with something bigger than ourselves: Creation. Buddhist poet Gary Snyder defines the Sacred this way: The sacred “helps take us out of our little selves into the whole mountain-and-river mandala universe.” (The Practice of the Wild, 16) For Snyder the sacred and the wild overlap and for Thomas Berry the wild forms the “wellspring of creativity” that we share with all other beings in the universe. Further teachings of Creation Spirituality that build up our muscles of hope are the following:Original Blessing. Isn’t it important to see the Goodness of creation and existence as our starting point? The goodness of the 13.8 billion years that brought our Earth and sun and moon forward as well as ourselves? And also the goodness of ourselves as Original Blessings as well? Doesn’t an original sin ideology, whether found in religion or in consumer capitalism, stifle hope and feed pessimism and self hatred? And in doing so elevate patriarchy which is, as Adrienne Rich taught us, busy teaching us “fatalistic self-hatred”?The Cosmic Christ. Instead of wallowing in psychological and anthropocentric narcissism, shouldn’t we be searching for what Sanders and Snyder speak of: The big picture, the universe, the whole. A post-modern physics begins with the whole, physicist David Bohm teaches. So does a post-modern religion. Christianity flies on two wings—the historical Jesus and the Cosmic Christ. The latter is so rarely taught or evoked—which is why Bishop Marc Andrus and myself teamed up with two artists to share a new and post-modern spiritual practice called the Stations of the Cosmic Christ, which is available as a book and as 16 icons to put on one’s church or retreat walls and a card deck for meditations. The Cosmic Christ theology is found in the earliest Christian sources, namely Paul and the Gospel of Thomas–as well as in the later Gospel stories. All the great Liturgical feasts in the Christian memory from Christmas to Jesus’ Baptism, transfiguration, crucifixion, Resurrection, Ascension and Pentecost are set in a cosmic context. The Cosmic story of Christ has been hijacked by ecclesial narcissism.The New Cosmology. Creation Stories have always kept tribes together and there is hope in a common creation story being taught by science around the world today that invites us all into the task of co-creating a livable future.The Order of the Sacred Earth. Why not a community and a movement of lovers of the earth (mystics) and defenders of it (prophets or warriors) who comes from all the world spiritual traditions and none and take a vow to love the earth and defend it? That is what the Order of the Sacred Earth is all about. (see Order of the Sacred Earth)Creation Centered Mystics. If the creation spiritual tradition is indeed that of the historical Jesus (and it is because he derives from the wisdom tradition of Israel) and if it is the first author of the Hebrew Bible (the J source which it is), then surely there will be many creation -centered mystics in our lineage. And there are. Jesus and Paul but surely Hildegard of Bingen, Francis of Assisi, Thomas Aquinas, Mechtild of Magdeburg, Meister Eckhart, Julian of Norwich, Nicolas of Cusa and many artists, poets, musicians, film makers and others in our own times, Thomas Merton included. If Jung is correct when he tells us that “only the mystics bring what is creative to religion itself,” then we ought to be renewing religion out of a deep awareness of this creation-centered mystical tradition.All these elements of creation spirituality nurture and feed hope. I can think of no finer preparation for a hopeful warrior than to feast on the writings of Meister Eckhart who marries psyche and cosmos, the world and the soul, spirit and matter like no one else and who is recognized by students of religions the world over as a champion of truth and justice.[2]Creativity. Otto Rank observes that “pessimism comes with the repression of creativity.” Yes, creativity brings hope (science shows that a creative state awakens endorphins in our brain that make us happy). So art as meditation brings hope and the energy to act that goes with it. Psychologist Claudio Naranjo rightly called extrovert meditation or art as meditation “the way of the prophets.”Speaking of creativity and energy to act, consider, Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming. This book edited by Paul Hawken inspires hope by offering 100 substantive solutions from scientists and others committed to healing the planet. The book breaks down solutions into the following categories: Energy; Food; Women and Girls; Building and Cities; Land Use; Transport; Materials; Coming Attractions. Within the latter category is a shout out for Pope Francis’ encyclical on “Care For Our Common Home,” Laudato Si. This too is a resource that should be studied and shared.So we can see that we are not bereft of resources to inspire and instruct our work of hope in a time of eco-darkness.~ Matthew Fox Click here to read online and to share your thoughts.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 71 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. 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. Recent books include The Lotus & The Rose: Conversations on Tibetan Buddhism and Mystical Christianity with Lama Tsomo; Naming the Unnameable: 89 Wonderful and Useful Names for God…Including the God Without a Name; new paperback version of Stations of the Cosmic Christ with Bishop Marc Andrus. A Special Eckhart@Erfurt workshop in June, 2019.*******************************[1] Forward to Kathleen Deignan, ed., When the Trees Say Nothing: Thomas Merton Writings on Nature(Notre Dame, In., Sorin Books, 2003), 18f.[2] I put Eckhart in the room with Rabbi Heschel, Thich Naht Hanh, Avicenna, Rumi and Hafiz, Black Elk, Hindu Coomeraswamy, etc. in my Meister Eckhart: Mystic-Warrior For Our Times, New World Library, 2015. | | | | | | | | | | Join our FB community today! Spread the word, share with friends. Thanks! | | | | | | | | Question & Answer Q: By Matt I desire to continue my spiritual journey by walking the Christ path as it is and has been the path of my life. I believe God to be the source of life, love, and ground of being. I don’t believe God is a personal being as Christianity and the Bible often defines or illustrates. That said, is Progressive Christianity, as the community defines it, Pantheistic or Panentheistic? If God is not personal, what rationale do we, as progressive followers of Christ, have to believe God greater and beyond our universe (Panentheism) rather than just being our universe (Pantheism)? Does continuing to walk the Christ path mean that I must onto notion/faith that God is something greater than everything? I’m considering attending a United Universalist Church, the closest thing to Progressive Christianity I can find in my area. I hesitate because I don’t want to lose my focus on the Christ path as it has been so fruitful in my life. A: By Joran Slane Oppelt Dear Matt,The difference between pantheism (“all is God”) and panentheism (“all is in God, and God is in all things”) is a subtle shift — a micro adjustment — along a spectrum that includes mythic, traditional, modern, pluralistic, mystical and unitive beliefs. This spectrum (as seen in Spiral Dynamics, Fowler’s Stages of Faith, etc.) is an evolutionary model that applies to all world religions. In my opinion, every Christian expression at pluralistic and beyond (and even some modernists) can safely be referred to as a “progressive” Christianity. But that tiny shift along the religious spectrum can result in cataclysmic changes for the individual and their worldview. Because Christianity emerged relatively recently in history, when discussing panentheism we must also make a distinction between concepts like a living, monotheistic and Abrahamic God and a pre-Christian, animistic Creator (Spirit) whose body is the living universe. We need both history and mythology to tackle the big questions. I can hear your frustration with the lack of clarity on the topic as well as seeking a church home in your area. I know that lonely feeling. I understand the personal importance of wanting to clearly align yourself with the cosmological view of an organization. It’s how we share language, values, ideas and experience within a community of practice. It determines how we show up and serve others. It’s how we belong. But, I have a hunch that this question (the nature of God) will be a personal one -- and one that is wrestled with until we pass into the next world. To clarify what Progressive Christianity “believes” or where they stand on doctrine might be tough. The “Progressive Christianity” movement is a sprawling tangle of roots and branches that includes the emerging, contemplative, integral and evangelical. Some churches are more progressive than Christian (some more Christian than progressive). The 8 Points of Progressive Christianity (as listed at ProgressiveChristianity.org) state that Christ teaches us about the “sacredness, oneness and Unity of all life.” They say nothing at all about God. And, for me, this is the heart of the matter. Mystical religious experience — a personal relationship with the Divine — is the path of Christ. Walking the Christ path doesn’t require you to believe anything about God or the universe, it simply requires that you love God with all your heart. God doesn’t need to be a “personal Being” in order for me to have a personal relationship with God. This is where the mystics (Eckhart, Hildegard, Teresa, Merton, et. al.) got it right. We can appreciate their poetry about crystal castles and babbling streams and the “innermost” and the holy journey “Christward” as a description of that love. As Ilia Delio describes, “God is a name that points to an unfathomable mystery of unquenchable love and inestimable goodness. There’s no human mind that could get itself wrapped around the infinite or eternal love that God is.” In Psalm 139 -- a poem about this exact everywhereness of God (“Where can I escape from thy spirit?”) -- we may know that God is in all things (lightness, darkness) but only after showing up there ourselves. I may enjoy playing catch with this ball (“the nature of God”) in slow motion with you via the internet, but the Spirit of this question truly comes to life when it is becomes midrash, conversation, interpretation -- when it is argued and debated with others following the way and walking alongside you on the path. Which brings me to UU. I assume when you say that you’re considering attending a “United Universalist” church in your area, you mean “Unitarian Universalism.” I have two thoughts: 1) You should not hesitate to seek community at any church you want. Attend a different church each week, if you like. It doesn’t mean you need to become a member or join a committee or change your religious affiliation. 2) Unitarian Universalism has a rich history of being an open, welcoming, tolerant and loving church with a commitment to social justice and community. Every UU community I’ve been to has been a place where Christians, Buddhists and atheists alike can gather, sing, celebrate, serve and grow together. What UU typically does not offer (and, of course there are exceptions) are communities of practice for those following the very personal path of the mystic or the contemplative. Sadly, it’s all too rare in the Christian churches as well. UUs are progressive and liberal and would wholeheartedly welcome the deism/theism or pantheism/panentheism debate, but if your focus is to keep Christ at the heart of all things, then I feel like you might be better served in a Christian (not an interfaith) community. It’s worth having a candid conversation with your local UU minister to see if there’s a home for you there. Wherever you land, they will be lucky to have your gifts of focus, insight and curiosity. I will pray for your continued discernment as you navigate the Way. Looking forward,~ Joran Slane Oppelt Click here to read and share onlineAbout the Author Joran Slane Oppelt is an international speaker, author, interfaith minister, life coach and award-winning producer and singer/songwriter. He is the owner of the Metta Center of St. Petersburg and founder of Integral Church – an interfaith and interspiritual organization in Tampa Bay committed to “transformative practice, community service and religious literacy.” Joran is the author of Sentences, The Mountain and the Snow and co-author of Order of the Sacred Earth (with Matthew Fox), Integral Church: A Handbook for New Spiritual Communities and Transform Your Life: Expert Advice, Practical Tools, and Personal Stories. He serves as President of Interfaith Tampa Bay and has spoken around the world about spirituality and the innovation of religion.He has presented at South by Southwest in Austin, TX; Building the New World Conference in Radford, VA; Parliament of the World’s Religions in Salt Lake City; Embrace Festival in Portland, OR and Integral European Conference in Siófok, Hungary. | | | | | | | | Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited Dallas, Texas: A New Vision Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong on October 11, 2006 Dallas, Texas, has never been one of my favorite cities. Its image was firmly set for me during the course of a single month in 1963, when two events occurred that rocked this country. First, the American Ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai E. Stevenson Jr., was booed, abused and spat upon by a Dallas crowd while making a speech on the United Nations.Recent harsh, right-wing editorials in its newspapers were considered responsible for inciting this mentality among Dallas citizens. Within a month in this same city, that anger struck again as President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Dallas became for me a city of hostility. A decade later that negative image was enhanced when I was gathering material to write the biography of my personal mentor and hero, John Elbridge Hines, who had been Bishop of Texas prior to his election a Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church (1964-1973). As his official biographer I had the privilege of reading all of the correspondence sent to him and the press notices that referred to him. The amount of vituperative rhetoric that he received from Dallas citizens, and the stridently negative coverage of him in the Dallas Morning News confirmed my less than positive feelings about that city.Later in my days as a bishop, the leadership of the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas, especially its one-time Suffragan Bishop Robert Terwilliger, kept the Dallas negativity at full strength. Terwilliger was a consistently hostile voice in our church as we sought to wrestle with the issues of a changing world. He adamantly opposed the ordination of women to the priesthood and directed constant and emotional energy against every liberalizing move the church made in the seventies and eighties to bring justice and acceptance to gay and lesbian people. None of these experiences served to counter my poor image of Dallas.Yet I could recall things long stored in my memory bank about Dallas that were positive. When I was a child I was a Washington Senators baseball fan. The Washington organization was the parent team of the Charlotte Hornets who played in my hometown and to this team my childhood devotion was intense. Charlotte Hornet players who made it to the big leagues, like Early Wynn, Al Evans, Jake Early, Jim Bloodworth and Bobby Estalella, were my ultimate heroes. Most did not stay with the Senators, but were traded or sold by this chronically bad team to pay its bills. Finally poor crowds forced this team out of Washington, first to Minneapolis-St. Paul to become the Minnesota Twins, and after a second Washington team also failed, it was moved to Dallas to become the Texas Rangers. I then transferred my affection to the Rangers and pulled for this Dallas/Fort Worth team until I moved to Newark in 1976 and fell in love with the Yankees of Reggie Jackson, Thurman Munson and Catfish Hunter. However, for that brief time Dallas gained credibility and warmth inside my not always objective psyche and served to temper my heretofore negative image.Over the years these positive feelings began to grow as I accepted a number of invitations to speak in this city. I lectured at Southern Methodist University where an “adopted” son of mine named Chace Brinegar was a student, and then at the Perkins Theological Seminary where the great theologian Schubert Ogden was a respected and admired member of the faculty. I led a clergy conference for the Methodists of the Dallas-Fort Worth area. I even engaged in a printed debate in the Dallas Morning News with the current Episcopal Bishop of Dallas, James Stanton, that I enjoyed, but I don’t think he did. On three different occasions, I spoke at the very unique Dallas Cathedral of Hope. On three other occasions, I gave a series of lectures at the Unity Church of Dallas. All of these were wonderful experiences and I began to develop a circle of friends in that city who forced me to recognize that the monolithic negative definition of any place is always inappropriate. Every city, indeed every place, has within it both good and evil, things for which to be proud and things for which to be ashamed.I go into this personal history as a preamble to a recent experience in which Christine and I spent five wonderful days in Dallas, that were as meaningful as any time as I have ever known. We arrived on a Friday and that evening and on Saturday night, we both attended, along with some 400 people, two performances of the play “A Pebble in My Shoe,” written and directed by Los Angeles playwright Colin Cox. This play is based on my autobiography, Here I Stand: My Struggle for a Christianity of Integrity, Love and Equality. It has been floating around the country at various venues since it opened in Los Angeles in late 2005. Dallas was the second Texas city, after Austin, where it has been performed. Both nights the audience was wonderfully responsive to this drama about the Church’s struggle with racism, sexism and homophobia.On Sunday I spoke twice at the Cathedral of Hope to a combined audience of some 1,300 people. Founded in 1973 as a worship community for homosexual people, this church has had as its senior pastor for the past nineteen years, the Rev. Michael Piazza, a gay Methodist minister of enormous talent. During his tenure the Cathedral of Hope emerged as one of that city’s largest congregations with an online ministry that reaches 10,000 people a week. The multiple Sunday worship services are augmented by a spectacular choir of some 40 – 50 voices and a marvelous full orchestra under the direction of Cynthia Brown. Once they had a choral group calling itself “The Positive Singers,” because all of its singers were HIV positive.The new leader of this church is the Rev. Dr. Jo Hudson, who has a graduate degree in Theology from Perkins and a PhD from Texas A. & M. She was an ordained Methodist minister who was outed as a lesbian and dismissed from her congregation. She found her ministry in this incredible place where, along with Michael, she is universally loved and admired and where her incredible talents are on full display. The Cathedral of Hope was originally affiliated with the Metropolitan Community Church, a denomination created by the Rev. Dr. Troy Perry specifically for the rejected homosexual members of all churches that today has over 300,000 members around the world. The Cathedral of Hope is at this moment negotiating to enter the Christian Protestant mainstream by affiliating with the United Church of Christ. This transition is symbolic of the transition going on in America as homophobia dies and gay and lesbian people enter the life of full citizenship in both our nation and our churches. Michael Piazza told me some years ago that at the height of the AIDS epidemic, he was conducting as many as 20 to 25 funerals a month, almost all of them for young males less than 40 years of age. I have thought many times of how grateful I am to this church for giving its love and pastoral care to so many who found the welcome of Christ lacking in the churches in which they were raised.As the service unfolded in that church on that Sunday morning, tears came to my eyes as I watched worshipers come up as couples or as family groups to receive communion. The acceptance accorded to so many who have endured so much rejection was present in the joy and love on the faces of these gay and lesbian people. Couples held hands, sometimes a gay son or lesbian daughter would come to receive the sacrament accompanied both by their partners and their parents. This was a church in which they could finally be openly together.That afternoon, my wife and I accepted their invitation to ride in the back of a Lincoln Town Car convertible as part of the Dallas Gay Pride Parade. On that ride we received the love, cheers and applause of the thousands who lined the streets along the parade route. We were announced at the various stops along the way as the Episcopal bishop who had fought for the full acceptance of homosexual people in the life of the church. The crowd waved, shouted and called us by our names. It rained constantly during the parade on that open convertible, but neither the rain nor a group of Bible-wielding counter demonstrators could dim the joy of that day for us. The counter-demonstrators, with voices screaming and faces contorted by anger promised us the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. I am always amazed at how the Bible, that portrays my Lord embracing the outcasts, touching the lepers, welcoming the Samaritans, not judging the woman taken in the act of adultery, and inviting “all of ye,” not “some of ye,” to “come unto me,” can, in the hands of a few distorted people be turned into a book of hatred, violence and judgment.The Dallas visit ended with a lecture delivered to a large audience of people at the Unity Church of Dallas on Monday evening. The Unity Movement is a branch of Christianity to which I have in recent years become deeply attracted, as it quite self-consciously seeks to redefine the Christian faith outside the categories of sin, guilt, rescue and control.Its theology begins in Matthew Fox’s concept of “Original Blessing” rather than with the traditional concept of “Original Sin.” It sees and encourages personal growth and the call to full humanity. It proclaims a Christianity built on love and inclusion. It affirms each person as he or she is and then seeks to provide both the community and the resources to help that person grow into being all that he or she can be. Unity sees Christianity as a religion of acceptance not judgment, of expanding life not controlling behavior. The Unity movement contains much of what I believe will mark the Christian Church of the future.Christine and I flew home on Tuesday with the smiles of those who have been in the presence of the Holy. We also came away with warm new feelings about the city of Dallas. Is it possible that the Kingdom of God might be dawning in Texas? God does move in mysterious ways, doesn’t she?~ John Shelby Spong | | | | | | | | 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! | | | | | | | | Announcements | | | Events and Updates Catalysts for Change Online: January 7 - 27, 2019 In your day, you’ve probably made a lot of resolutions — large and lofty goals covering all aspects of your life — and then watched them fall to the wayside one by one. Recovery programs say that it takes three weeks to break a habit or start a new practice. So here is a 21-day journey on the path of change. Each day you will receive an email with a short reading from a spiritual teacher and a spiritual practice to do, to help you firm up your resolve and make small steps for change. Click here for more information/registration. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

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From Gene Marshall, thanks to David
by James Wiegel 02 Jan '19

02 Jan '19

Seems clear and concise https://mailchi.mp/e7f72505871d/welcome-to-citizens-call-2228533?e=fff404a3… Jim Wiegel 401 North Beverly Way, Tolleson, Arizona 85353 Tel. 011-623-936-8671 or 011-623-363-3277 jfwiegel(a)yahoo.com www.partnersinparticipation.com When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. "But that is not what great ships are built for." Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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Celebrating our Diversity - Enhancing our Commonality
by David Yost 01 Jan '19

01 Jan '19

[image: New Year Message 2019.png] -- Grace & Peace David Yost 720-365-6698[image: F] <#> "What life means to us is determined not so much by what life brings to us as by the attitude we bring to life; not so much by what happens to us as our reaction to what happens". Lewis Dunning

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