March 2020 - OE - lists.wedgeblade.net

Face Masks
by Richard and Maria Maguire 25 Mar '20

25 Mar '20

Hi It seems that people have attempted to share on face mask making via an attachment which seem not to work on this list. Here is one of many sites which have detailed directions for making them. They also say such things are a last resort, but in a time when official masks aren't available, or should be reserved for professional carers, they are useful for one's self and society. https://sarahmaker.com/how-to-sew-a-surgical-face-mask-for-hospitals-free-p… Best wishes Richard

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Resending: pleated face mask pattern without green background
by Ellie Stock 25 Mar '20

25 Mar '20

Hi Folks, Sarah asked if the pleated face mask pattern could be sent without the green background. David Dunn was able to remove the background, so here it is attached. Ellie :)elliestock@aol.com Hi Ellie. Hope this helps. Anyone who owns Adobe Acrobat (not the free Adobe Reader) can remove the background. I’ll do the same with other handouts if no one has Acrobat. David — "Mystery, possibility, and the power to choose” Deacon David DunnChurch of the Holy Family Cell: 720-314-5991Email: dmdunn1(a)gmail.com

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Another pattern for a DIY Face mask
by Ellie Stock 24 Mar '20

24 Mar '20

A second pattern for face masks from a friend: https://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-Cloth-Face-Mask/ Use mask 1 pattern with filter pocket. This pattern is what a pulmonologist from Barnes Jewish Hospital (St Louis) sent to me.If any of your email friends are quilters, they will have lots of 100% cotton on hand. Ellie:)elliestock@aol.com | | Virus-free. www.avast.com |

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Here is the pattern for sewing face masks
by Ellie Stock 23 Mar '20

23 Mar '20

Hi Folks, Forwarding this pattern for sewing face masks from our daughter Chenoa, a PC(USA) Mission Co-Worker in Peru ( now sequestered at home during Peru's mandatory, military enforced lockdown). This might be of interesnt to some of you sewers or someone you know who sews. Hope you all are staying well in the midst of this pandemic. Grapes, and peas, Ellie :)elliestock@aol.com -----Original Message----- From: Chenoa Stock <chenoa.stock(a)gmail.com> To: Ellie Stock <elliestock(a)aol.com>; Evajworks <evajworks(a)aol.com>; Lingan S Randolph <marilee79(a)juno.com>; mhadams <mhadams(a)centurytel.net>; Ahren Stock <astoc(a)hawken.edu>; Charity McDonald <charityrmcdonald(a)gmail.com> Sent: Mon, Mar 23, 2020 01:54 PM Subject: Fwd: Here is the pattern for the face mask Do you all know anybody who sews? A church member passed the attached pattern for fwce masks on to me... Chenoa Stock PC (USA) Mission Co-Worker for PERUSAPeru https://www.presbyterianmission.org/ministries/missionconnections/chenoa-st…

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Update on Pat Balm
by Dharmalingam Vinasithamby 23 Mar '20

23 Mar '20

Dear Colleagues, Patricia Balm completed her life yesterday morning, March 21st. Pat, who was in her 90s, had been in poor health and slipped into a coma a couple of days ago. Her son Kevin messaged me to say that most of her family had gathered to be with her in her last days. I got to know Pat, and her late husband Mally, when we set up the Hyderabad House in the 1970s. Their home in the Gunfoundry neighbourhood was a meeting venue for the metro cadre. They moved to Maliwada when we set up the Human Development Project there. Pat impressed me with her can-do spirit and her stories about bringing up a large family through difficult times. She, like Mally, relished putting their minds to solving problem, both in their family ventures and in the ICA projects. They, along with their sons Desmond and Kevin, were instrumental to a lot of our work in India as well as around the world. The family eventually migrated to Perth, Australia. The photo of Pat that I’ve posted here is about 10 years old. If you want to send messages of condolences to her family, please message Kevin at balmkevin(a)gmail.com. Regards, Dharmalingam

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Maliwada Visit
by John Ballard 23 Mar '20

23 Mar '20

Words cannot express. Words cannot express how we felt when we recently visited a village in Maharashtra, India named Maliwada. Jack, and I along with our adult son, Peter, were visiting India for the first time. We were guests of Sushil, Vinod and Kamela Parekh. Back in the 90s, our family sponsored, Sangeeta, Sushil and Sarah Parekh's daughter, while she was attending college in New Jersey. Some of you may remember way back in the late 70s when Sarah and Sangeeta were living in Kemper for a few years. Sarah brought Sangeeta from India to Chicago to attend a school that would teach the little 3-year-old to speak aloud in English. Sangeeta was born profoundly deaf. At that time, we became friends. Then in 1994 Sangeeta began her college studies in the US. We had not seen Sangeeta since she returned to India in 1996. It was a lovely reunion with her and her family and also with her uncle and aunt, Vinod and Kamala and other dear friends along the way. We visited Mumbai, Pune, Aurangabad and Nashik. While we were visiting with Vinod and Kamala, they took us to visit Maliwada. What an experience. The residents were dressed for a holiday. We were greeted in the Indian way with welcoming ceremonies, marigold leis, shawls, and the men with Gandhi hats. There was an extraordinary gathering at the Grand Panchayat Hall, when elders spoke and testified to the amazing development that had happened in their village. Pundlik Dhangare began by recounting the journey of using the methods to create their dream for Maliwada. He sang the songs of the village. I had been crying before but his testimony (in Marathi) was so gratifying, one couldn't help but experience the emotions of this large group filling the hall. Other speakers included Shankar Davtkar, Dondiram Jagdhane and Ram Udavanti. Shankar spoke in English! Everyone was so excited to see Vinod and Kamala, who were greeted in such a loving and grateful way. We found ourselves being witnesses to the accomplishments of the villagers over the last 45 years. We visited several homes, walking under the Maliwada gateway arch on the paved road. Not shacks, not small dwellings. No, these were large two or three story concrete homes with indoor toilets, ant-proof kitchens and rooftop gardens. The residents were so proud of the lovely dwellings. We visited with three different families. We also visited the sawmill, which makes wooden packaging for a local business. The hardworking men showed us how the wood makes its transformation from tree to thin planks, ideal for the job. There is a new petrol station in town! Since a new highway is being planned to come nearby Maliwada, this provides another opportunity for business. The women and children looked good, healthy, and happy with bright eyes. We loved talking with them. Some may remember Rukmani Dhangare. She is vibrant and loved showing off their new home. First, hosting us in their old small house, showing us pictures of the old days at the beginning of the project and showing us their notebooks full of planning and methods and then taking us to the rooftop garden of the new house next door with its grand view of the fort. People gave us flowers, fruits, shawls, and great warmth and love. It is something we will never forget. We of course, were witnessing the gratitude of a place and people who for 40 + years have implemented their plans, together. They could never have done it without the amazing sacrifice, care and human resources so many of you brought to that little dusty spot below the ancient fort. We wanted to let you know that what you gave in those difficult early times has transformed a people and their community. We met a son who is a college-educated engineer. "India is a wonderful place, Maliwada is my home" sang Pundlik. And so it is. Louise Ballard Picture taken in front of the Grand Panchayat Hall

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Re: [Oe List ...] Update on Pat Balm Celebrating Pat's completed life
by rjhutchinson48＠gmail.com 22 Mar '20

22 Mar '20

Dear all, Thanks Dharma and Isobel for sharing this news and your reflections on a great colleague. We have been following Pat’s journey over many years. Mally and Pat were an integral part of our family! It was wonderful that most of the family could be by Pat’ side this week, to celebrate the last days of her life together. We wanted to share just a few memories we have of Pat and Mally – 46 years ago until the recent years. • Working together in Gunfoundry and the Hyderabad cadre in the 70’s, when we were in the Hyderabad House • The long conversations John had in particular, with Mally ranging over many topics • The local training programs and celebrating House Church together • Cleaning the latrines and building the Gunfoundry community garden • Pat making exquisite tiny baby clothes for our newly adopted Hyderabadi baby. Kiran (at 1 month) • Mally and Pat being present at the multi-faith naming ceremony for Kiran in Hyderabad • Years later in Sydney, Mally’s head and characteristic grin, popping over the back gate of the Rockdale manse to attend John’s surprise birthday party!) • Visits with other members of the Balm and the extended Gunfoundry family in more recent years. • A number of visits with Pat and the family in Perth over the last 30 years. Our thoughts and love to the Balms and our wonderful global family, John and Robyn, Kiran and Glen Hutchinson Sydney From: OE <oe-bounces(a)lists.wedgeblade.net> On Behalf Of isobeljimbish--- via OE Sent: Sunday, 22 March 2020 2:03 PM To: Order Ecumenical Community <oe(a)lists.wedgeblade.net> Cc: isobeljimbish(a)optusnet.com.au Subject: Re: [Oe List ...] Update on Pat Balm Thank you for this news sad though it is,Dharma. I remember Mally and Pat very well. . Kindness sending over to you. Isobel and Jim Bishop Sent from my iPhone On 22 Mar 2020, at 1:14 pm, Dharmalingam Vinasithamby via OE <oe(a)lists.wedgeblade.net <mailto:oe@lists.wedgeblade.net> > wrote: Dear Colleagues, Patricia Balm completed her life yesterday morning, March 21st. Pat, who was in her 90s, had been in poor health and slipped into a coma a couple of days ago. Her son Kevin messaged me to say that most of her family had gathered to be with her in her last days. I got to know Pat, and her late husband Mally, when we set up the Hyderabad House in the 1970s. Their home in the Gunfoundry neighbourhood was a meeting venue for the metro cadre. They moved to Maliwada when we set up the Human Development Project there. Pat impressed me with her can-do spirit and her stories about bringing up a large family through difficult times. She, like Mally, relished putting their minds to solving problem, both in their family ventures and in the ICA projects. They, along with their sons Desmond and Kevin, were instrumental to a lot of our work in India as well as around the world. The family eventually migrated to Perth, Australia. The photo of Pat that I’ve posted here is about 10 years old. If you want to send messages of condolences to her family, please message Kevin at balmkevin(a)gmail.com <mailto:balmkevin@gmail.com> . Regards, Dharmalingam <Pat Balm IMG_0097.jpg> _______________________________________________ OE mailing list OE(a)lists.wedgeblade.net <mailto:OE@lists.wedgeblade.net> http://lists.wedgeblade.net/listinfo.cgi/oe-wedgeblade.net -- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus

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Patricia Balm - in declining health
by Dharmalingam Vinasithamby 20 Mar '20

20 Mar '20

Dear colleagues, Patricia Balm, one of the pillars at the Maliwada Human Development Project along with her late husband Mally Balm, is in declining health. Her son Kevin Balm messaged me to say that she slipped into a coma this morning with her organs shutting down. Pat, who is in her 90s, moved to Perth with her family many years ago. Kevin says her 11 surviving children, their spouses and almost all of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren are with her as they care for her, make practical arrangements and celebrate her life. If you want to send condolences, please message him at balmkevin(a)gmail.com Dharmalingam

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3/19/20, Progressing Spirit: Toni Anne Reynolds: Faith and Fate; Spong revisited
by Ellie Stock 19 Mar '20

19 Mar '20

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.yiv8500205981mcnTextContent, #yiv8500205981 #yiv8500205981templateHeader .yiv8500205981mcnTextContent p{ font-size:16px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv8500205981 #yiv8500205981templateBody .yiv8500205981mcnTextContent, #yiv8500205981 #yiv8500205981templateBody .yiv8500205981mcnTextContent p{ font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv8500205981 #yiv8500205981templateFooter .yiv8500205981mcnTextContent, #yiv8500205981 #yiv8500205981templateFooter .yiv8500205981mcnTextContent p{ font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;} } | | | | View this email in your browser | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Faith and Fate | | | | | | | | | | Essay by Toni Anne Reynolds March 19, 2020 The below offering was inspired by a conversation with my favorite Rabbi Brian Zachary Mayer and the late, great Peter Tosh. Thanks for inviting the Selah, Rabbi. Rest in Power, Peter. ..............___________________________________________ After a half hour catch up session, Rabbi fills the natural pause in the conversation,“So, what do you think about fate these days?”. I hear “faith” so I proceed accordingly. I have a habit of talking fast, and that’s what I was doing before Rabbi blessed me with a Selah. A request to pause. It was then that he informed me that he said “FATE, not faith. But faith works too!” How poetic. As my mind moved faster than my mouth, I realized that my sense of faith is in close relationship with fate. These days I’m thinking of faith more differently than I ever have. Not by way of any theological shift. But a shift in personal power, or truth perhaps. I used to think that faith had much more to do with the belief in a force somewhere out there. Over the rainbow. Up in the clouds. On the edge of the Universe. Even in a volcanic place beneath my feet held a power far beyond me. There were certainly entities that had the power to create and destroy. To make life, take life, and dangle life in front of me as a perfectly motivating carrot that I may never reach. Both God and “anti”-God (the Devil or Satan) felt wobbly, like frienemies (friends+enemies=frienemies) just older and much, much smarter than me. If I wasn’t careful, disaster could strike at any moment because of a negative thought or a simply human moment wherein the fear of God failed to motivate me in the way of righteousness. Or, I could be experiencing a streak of luck and find that it was really the work of the Devil tricking me, or so I was told. All of it was so confusing. I don’t think I ever had the details fully etched out in my spiritual imagination, but the silhouettes of person-like beings were there. Profoundly there, in the depths of my mind and at the root of my worries, prayers, actions, etc. Truthfully, I was as afraid of God as I was of the Devil. Yet, I would say the prayers I was taught “I am in you, you are in me, and we are in God.” Or, the completely worn out John 3:16. I would move from affirming God’s love for me to being sick with worry that he would find a reason to drown me like he did the people of Noah’s day, and was predicted to do in the end days yet to arrive. These fears seeped to the base of my mind. My dreams became intense, and I started working with a Jungian analyst to better understand the language that was being spoken to me. I need this symbolic view because something about this belief set felt... not quite “right”. If my body was a temple because God lived there, then why would it be a temple full of so much fear? Selah. “Love is what first made my heart to beat”, Peter Tosh said some years before he was murdered. This quote has taken up residence in my mind since I heard it 5 years ago. It made me think about the first heartbeat of a human being, how electricity suddenly causes a human, submerged in water, to hold a rhythm in their own body. I was once on course to be a doctor, so I get the science of it enough to know it can be explained in at least one way. But that way falls short in a profound way for me. “Love is what first made my heart to beat.” My heart. Something made it beat once years and years ago. Right now, I trust that the Something was inclined to a type of love that will take the rest of my life to fully understand. A Something that trusts me enough with its electric pulse to live a life in the flesh. And this quote from the late, great Tosh feels like a lightning bolt itself. It feels like each time I say it, I can aim it at a particular doubt and the truth of this phrase will transform the doubt. After many a lightning strike I have found that the faith I need has been living in my chest all this time. With help from the holy, and persistently truthful dreams, and an incredible Jungian analyst, I’ve spent the last two years reimaging the Force I have faith in. It has meant that before I look to the stars for a faceless God, I turn inward to see if there’s something I can learn about the rhythm that’s held in my chest. As a result of this new and improving practice, my sense of fate has changed, too. If I move with the truth that Love is literally living in my chest, trusting me with such a strong power, can’t I operate with some confidence? Can I trust myself the way this force has trusted me? Maybe this first heartbeat was really an invitation to co-create something. To participate in fate because I have faith in this spark that’s keeping me alive. I said all this to Rabbi, in some form. Except probably less coherent because of the speed talking thing. Again, he asked me to slow down. Selah. Such a great Rabbi move. Selah. Then, I found myself sharing another currently loved quote from the analyst that’s been helping me fish through my un/subconscious mind. Some months ago, after working through some heavy symbols, he said to me “Toni, do you know the difference between fate and destiny?” I was a little annoyed that I didn’t have some answer saved in my pocket so I admitted to him that I didn’t know the difference. He continued with this gem, “Fate is the cards you’re dealt and destiny is how you play them.” Selah. I wanted to weep when he told me this. So, I did. The perfect paradox. From zero control to freedom. Freedom to choose. Freedom to fold. Freedom to cheat. Freedom to see a way forward and win. Freedom of choice. Before I knew I was an “I”, Love found me. You, too. Selah. My faith was so outwardly turned that part of me felt wholly incapable of directing this life of mine. Sure, I’ve done some cool things and have my name on some cool hardware and pieces of paper. But all of those things were done while I was following some North star, hoping that I didn’t mix up my cardinal directions. Following a Light without, and having a pretty great go of it. But, what about the Light within? What about this Love that gave my heart its first beat? I wish I could convey the way that question makes me feel! Your fate was, and is, the same as mine- to receive Love. I know this with certainty because your heart is beating while you read this. The first and foremost faith I need(ed) to maintain is in the Love that first sparked my heart to beat. As long as that Spark is still playing its rhythm in my body, my faith ought to begin with an inward turn in order to face that reality. The truth that my fate was to receive such a profoundly mysterious love. That is my fate. This is the basis of healthy faith. From there, movement outward can be stabilized. From center, my own heart can be the grounding force as I continue to travel the road and search for greater inner-standings. Your fate was to receive Love. Something out there trusts you to use it well. What destiny will you make with this precious hand you’ve been dealt? Selah. ~ Toni Anne Reynolds Read online here About the Author Minister Toni Anne Reynolds is committed to singing flesh onto the bones of the Christian tradition by incorporating recently found texts of the ancient world into liturgy, sermons, and poetry. Toni’s Christianity forms a holy trinity with the psychological medicine of Tibetan Buddhism and the eternal Life found in Yoruba traditions. Balanced in an eclectic faith and focused in theology, Toni’s ministry offers a unique perspective on life, theology, and spirituality. | | | | | | | | Question & Answer Q: By Bryan Hi, I am An Episcopalian now, I was Roman Catholic up to about four years ago, I’m 62. I would consider myself a progressive christian, but I’m wondering is it necessary to go attend Sunday services? I sometimes wonder if I’m doing it out of guilt or that God will show me favor or listen better. Yours thoughts please and any reading on said topic would be much appreciated. A: By Rev. Amanda Hambrick Ashcraft Dear Bryan, I think “necessary” might be the wrong word here. Necessary says to me obligatory, and my faith doesn’t tell me I’m obligated to attend Sunday services…. especially considering how organized Christianity is largely colonized and thrives within a white supremacist patriarchal system. I often ask the question instead - what does God desire? God desires being in relationship with her, so that we can best know and bring about her kin-dom on Earth as it is in heaven. So then we ask, how does one know God’s desires? We learn God’s desires through the practices of our everydays. In waking our children up for school, in commuting to work, in seeing a stranger across from us on the Subway, in the clouds, in our meditative practices, in our study of Biblical texts, in our prayers. Additionally, we know God in community, and therefore attending SOMETHING with other God seeking and believing people enhances and equips our faith and our relationship with God. This could be a book study, a dinner group, a service activity, or worship. All of these things, then, become rehearsing the reign of God, which is important to our faith. Finally, I do not believe that God shows favor or “listens better” based on our Sunday service attendance; but rather, we become more like God in our intentional relational practices to seek and see and commune with the Divine. ~ Rev. Amanda Hambrick Ashcraft Read and share online here About the Author Rev. Amanda Hambrick Ashcraft is an activist, organizer, Baptist minister, and mother of five-year-old twins Zane and Levi and four-year-old Skyler. She is the Executive Minister for Justice and Movement Building at Middle Collegiate Church and the founder of Raising Imagination, a platform that examines social change at the intersections of faith, parenting and politics. Her activism has been featured on CNN, MSNBC, Yahoo, the Wall Street Journal, Refinery29, and Bust and she is a regular writer and inaugural board member of The Resistance Prays. She and her family live in the East Village of Manhattan and fight the patriarchy and examine their racism and spirituality together, one cheerio at a time. | | | | | | | | 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 Origins of the Bible, Part XXIII: Job, the Icon of New Consciousness Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong March 26, 2009 Three books of the Bible, Jonah, Job and Ruth, are known as "protest literature". We treated Jonah in the section of this study on the prophets. We turn now to Job and Ruth. To those outside the traditional religious circles, the Book of Job is probably the best known book in the Bible. It raises the deepest human question and deals with the most ancient of human fears. It examines the issue of meaning through the lens of human suffering and the absence of fairness and justice. As such, the Book of Job has a counterpart in every religious tradition of the world. The great 20th Century psychiatrist Carl Jung used this book as the basis of his probing the dimensions of human life in what I want to believe is his most profound work, The Answer to Job. Solving the question of why there is evil and suffering has been part of the human inquiry forever. It should surprise no one that these themes find a place in the Bible. The original story of Job seems to date from about 1000-800 BC (BCE) and versions of it can be found among many nations, leading us to suspect that this is a universal human narrative. The biblical version of this story, however, did not get written until the 500s. We can date it fairly accurately, since it reflects elements of Persian religion that came into Jewish awareness during and after the exile of the 6th Century BC. The Book of Job, for example, introduces the figure of Satan into the biblical story, but in this book Satan is not yet an evil figure or even a fallen angel. That would develop later. In Job Satan is simply a part of the heavenly court who acts on God's command. The prologue to this book sets the stage for the drama. God and Satan are discussing the faithfulness of God's servant Job. Satan suggests that Job's faithfulness is only because he has been blessed with riches and a large family. "Why should he not be faithful?" Satan asks, "since the system of reward and punishment works for him?" Would he still be faithful, Satan wonders, if his faithfulness was not so abundantly rewarded? God defends Job's faithfulness as sincere, but resolves to determine whether God or Satan is correct. God authorizes Satan to test Job for a season. Satan would remove the rewards of the good life from Job in order to determine whether his faithfulness would continue. This is when tragedy sweeps down on Job. His wealth is destroyed, his wives and children are killed and his health is taken from him. Job then tries to reconcile the established wisdom that God rewards faithfulness and punishes evil with his experience. Job is a righteous man. There is no debate about that since even God has certified his goodness in the introduction. Job, however, has now been brought low by these calamities. If calamities result from an evil life, he wonders, how can the righteous Job goodness explain his misfortunes? The stage is set for the entrance of Job's comforters. Three of Job's friends, Eliphaz, Zophar and Bildad, hear of Job's tragedies and come to console him. The conversation between Job and his friends goes on for some thirty chapters. Supporting their conclusions, Job's friends have the common wisdom of that age, made up of undoubted "truths". God, as a just deity, rewards righteousness and punishes evil. For God to punish a righteous man would not only be inconceivable, but blasphemous. Job's friends buttress their argument by quoting scripture, since the Bible was filled with this traditional interpretation of God. Every defeat that the people of Israel had ever endured was seen by them as God's punishment for their disobedience. The message of the prophets was clear. The Jewish people had been punished with boils when King David conducted a census that displeased God. Moses had been punished with death because he had put God to the test in the wilderness of a place called Meribah. God had rewarded the people of Israel with the Exodus and the miracle at the Red Sea for the faithful endurance of their sufferings under the oppression of the Egyptians. This idea that if one obeyed the law and worshiped God properly one could count on blessings from heaven was a central tenet in popular Jewish religion. If one did not, the vengeance of God was said to be sure and swift. Deep down this firmly held belief delivered the Jewish people from the threat of meaninglessness. There was purpose, not chaos, in life. This purpose was best revealed in that human behavior controlled the response of God. Human goodness put God on one's side with rewards. Human faithlessness and evil brought God's wrath and divine retribution. Job's friends were confident in the rightness of their convictions. When they confronted Job's calamities, there was, therefore, only one possible explanation. Job must be guilty of some unseen evil, so they came to help him come to grips with his sinfulness, to beg for forgiveness and to seek the mercy of God. They felt compelled to get Job to see the evil of his ways, believing that to be the only way to bring an end to his tragedy. Theological correctness was thus confronted by human experience and, as so often is the case, it simply did not fit. Job stood alone against this common theological wisdom. He knew he was not deserving of these calamities. He could not deny the experience of his own character. He knew himself to be upright and honest, one who not only obeyed the law faithfully, but who also paid proper homage to the God of his ancestors. Yet he also knew that he had witnessed the loss of all that he valued - his family, his fortune and his health. In the most dramatic moment in the story, Job is portrayed as sitting on top of a garbage heap, scratching the infected sores of his body with a piece of broken pottery, alone with his inner integrity. None of his calamities made rational sense unless he was deserving of this treatment. The pressure from his friends was to face and to admit these things, to judge himself as evil and thus to make his suffering make sense. The meaning of life itself was thus at stake in this debate. Only by the admission of his evil could he keep at bay the deep and perennial human fear that maybe there was not a God who was in control. If there is no God then perhaps life was chaotic, ruled only by chance, fate or luck, possessing no purpose, no meaning and no redemptive qualities. If that turned out to be the case then the human alternative was only to hope for the chance of blessing, since one could not earn it, or to endure endless suffering if that was to be his fate, with no further court of appeal. If the common theological wisdom did not operate then Job had to decide either that God was not just or that there was no God. This was the unspoken fear that Job's tormentors were resisting and like all theological fundamentalists, that was why they pressed their case with such single-minded fervor. Job, on the other hand, was willing to run this enormous risk because the common theological wisdom simply did not interpret properly his experience. With the unprecedented courage of one seeking a new human breakthrough, he stood against the conclusions of his friends, forcing on them a new alternative. The Book of Job ends not with a negotiated settlement of this dispute, but with a new vision of God who spoke out of the whirlwind to challenge the inadequacy of every human attempt to state how God works and to discredit every human effort to define the holy. The voice of God reminded Job that the human mind cannot embrace the reality of God. "Where were you when the foundations of the word were laid?" The ways of the divine are not the ways of the human. That is always the fatally wrong theological assumption. Religion at its core is based on the arrogance of believing that human beings can not only discern the ways of God, but they can also act in such a way as to control the actions of God. The human sense of fairness is read into the understanding of God. The human attempt to control human behaviour reinforces the common theological wisdom that expresses itself in a reward and punishment mentality. Heaven and hell are nothing more than the assertion that the mind of God, as we human beings have created it, is still operating to reward or punish us after our deaths. Religion almost inevitably creates God in the image of the human being and then tries to force reality into that frame of reference. That is why there is no religious system that is eternal. That is why when human experience can no longer be interpreted adequately inside the traditional religious framework, the framework itself begins to die. The death of a religious system is never easy. The fear engendered by the loss of religion, or even what we think of as the death of God, engulfs human life in a sea of potential meaninglessness. Such a death always produces emotional denial or fundamentalist fervor; a killing hostility directed toward that which or those who have shattered our religious delusions. It also, however, always produces emancipation from the evils of religion that many people welcome. It is the evils of religion that force us either into a new religious oppression or the building of a new secular city. The struggle to find a new alternative, however, also stretches our consciousness into new dimensions of what it means to be human and that is where hope is born. Job resisted the theological conclusions of his day. Job refused to let his experience be interpreted by the categories of the past. He held on until the birth of a new consciousness engulfed him. Job is thus an icon through which we can see the meaning of a profound religious paradigm shift. Today we are experiencing exactly that sort of paradigm shift. Our experience has rendered the religious answers of yesterday to be inoperative. The defenders of the inadequate answers of the past are anxious. The critics of those answers feel a new freedom. The God of yesterday dies as we struggle to view the birth of the God of tomorrow. Job is thus an eternal symbol of that eternal human struggle. ~ John Shelby Spong | | | | | | | | Announcements Tips and Tricks for Running Video Services/Classes Rabbi Brian has been teaching and running online services for 7+ years and has offered a free webinar for clergy folk looking for help on tips and tricks for streaming classes and services. He will be paying special attention on “how to do hybrid live and virtual at the same time.” Friday, March 27, 2020 at 9am PST / 12pm EST https://zoom.us/j/678409961 Free for ProgressiveChristianity.org friends and clergy. READ ON ... | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |

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Fwd: Fw: Cat video
by A.M. Noel 18 Mar '20

18 Mar '20

A.M. Noel ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Matthews, Reggie (F) <Reggie.Matthews(a)marriott.com> Date: Wed, Mar 18, 2020 at 8:05 AM Subject: Fw: Cat video To: anthony.marianoel(a)gmail.com <anthony.marianoel(a)gmail.com> *Reggie Matthews* *Director of Sales* reggie.matthews(a)marriott.com <https://owa.marriott.com/owa/redir.aspx?C=0WqL_VKPWujWvU1ziBFT_I2DAqpwwPztb…> t 972.550.7796 f 972.550.8562 *TOWNEPLACE SUITES BY MARRIOTT DALLAS LAS COLINAS* 900 West Walnut Hill Lane • Irving, TX 75038 USA TownePlaceSuites.com <https://owa.marriott.com/owa/redir.aspx?C=bddbYF8XHOxK6nmzIij9XAKJGbmbvygIX…> ------------------------------ *From:* Fred Sheehan <flyjet(a)aol.com> *Sent:* Tuesday, March 17, 2020 8:59 AM *To:* Matthews, Reggie (F) <Reggie.Matthews(a)marriott.com> *Subject:* Cat video Fred Sheehan Sent from my iPhone

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