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Re: [Oe List ...] Sharing news about Heidi Holmes
by John C 06 Jan '18

06 Jan '18

“Heidi, we are thinking of you and praying for your profound journey. Journey on!” (Thanks, Jeanette, Mary and Stuart. The circle builds.) ~John and Lynda Cock From: OE <oe-bounces(a)lists.wedgeblade.net> on behalf of mary hampton via OE <oe(a)lists.wedgeblade.net> Reply-To: Order Ecumenical Community <oe(a)lists.wedgeblade.net> Date: Saturday, January 6, 2018 at 2:39 PM To: Order Ecumenical Community <oe(a)lists.wedgeblade.net> Cc: mary hampton <mhampton(a)att.net> Subject: Re: [Oe List ...] Sharing news about Heidi Holmes Heidi we are thinking of you and praying for you. Remembering June 4, 1972! Mary and Stuart Sent from Mail<https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=550986> for Windows 10 From: Jeanette Stanfield via OE<mailto:oe@lists.wedgeblade.net> Sent: Wednesday, January 3, 2018 8:16 PM To: Order Ecumenical Community<mailto:oe@lists.wedgeblade.net> Cc: Jeanette Stanfield<mailto:jstanfield@ica-associates.ca> Subject: [Oe List ...] Sharing news about Heidi Holmes Dear Colleagues, Heidi and her family have asked me to share this with you. Some of you may have heard that in mid-October Heidi Holmes was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer with significant brain involvement. She and the family thought she had picked up a very bad flu or had picked up Lyme’s disease. She was sleeping a lot and lost many cognitive skills. An MRI revealed the real reason for the symptoms. She had a series of 5 whole-brain radiation treatments and has, until recently, been taking an estrogen blocker drug. The side effects of that drug were such that she has opted to discontinue it and have a better quality of life. Since the treatments Heidi’s cognitive skills have improved. She gets around and engages in small group conversations. Her daughter Rachel has moved in with her and along with many friends is providing care and companionship. The best way to communicate with Heidi is through Rachel whose email is sherluck(a)hotmail.com<mailto:sherluck@hotmail.com> Grace and peace, Jeanette Stanfield

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Re; Happy New year 2018
by A.M. Noel 06 Jan '18

06 Jan '18

Dear Colleages, Lucky to greet the 2018. We had a house fire due to gas leak. All of us made it safe including the cat. Praise be to God. A.M. Noel 206-321-6274

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Sharing news about Heidi Holmes
by Jeanette Stanfield 06 Jan '18

06 Jan '18

Dear Colleagues, Heidi and her family have asked me to share this with you. Some of you may have heard that in mid-October Heidi Holmes was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer with significant brain involvement. She and the family thought she had picked up a very bad flu or had picked up Lyme’s disease. She was sleeping a lot and lost many cognitive skills. An MRI revealed the real reason for the symptoms. She had a series of 5 whole-brain radiation treatments and has, until recently, been taking an estrogen blocker drug. The side effects of that drug were such that she has opted to discontinue it and have a better quality of life. Since the treatments Heidi’s cognitive skills have improved. She gets around and engages in small group conversations. Her daughter Rachel has moved in with her and along with many friends is providing care and companionship. The best way to communicate with Heidi is through Rachel whose email is sherluck(a)hotmail.com Grace and peace, Jeanette Stanfield

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1/04/18, Spong: New book: Unbelievable - Part I; Spong revisited.
by Ellie Stock 06 Jan '18

06 Jan '18

HOMEPAGE MY PROFILE ESSAY ARCHIVE MESSAGE BOARDS CALENDAR Unbelievable - Part I Bishop John Shelby Spong The book has elements about it that have bordered on the miraculous. I was not sure I would ever be able to complete it. I had written about ninety per cent of this volume before I had a stroke in September of 2016. The stroke immobilized my right side. It was not clear that I would recover. I could not lift my right hand, nor walk without a walker, dragging my right leg. These symptoms, however, began to fade in about six weeks and all my limbs have returned to functioning, a bit weaker, but functioning nonetheless. My tread mill was a valuable aid. I had used it daily for many years, but now it became important in my rehabilitation. My rule was to use the track for one hour a day. Once I did twelve minute miles or five miles an hour. Today in that hour I do three and one quarter miles, not a jogger’s pace, but steady as strength has flowed back into my body. One symptom, however, has remained resistant to my efforts at recovery. I cannot make my right hand write legibly enough that I can read it. I could use the computer, but that is not natural to me. I never learned to type and hunting and pecking takes so much time. People suggested that I get a program where I talk into my computer and it converts the words to print. I tried that, but perhaps I was undone by my southern accent. Every time I spoke the word “career” the computer would write “Korea!” There was still the final ten per cent of the book to be done: a chapter on why I believe in life after death, the final chapter of the book on universalism as the mark of a non-tribal Christianity, and the Epilogue on my “mantra” – the “what I do believe!” chapter. Each of these was frankly significant to the book’s argument. They had to be right. I finally dictated them to my wife and she typed them. Then I could proceed to the editing. I wanted this final book to be more than a mediocre work. It had to be clear and understandable. I tried to develop a crucial distinction between the Christ experience and the Christ explanation. The experience is real and timeless; the explanation is in the language of its day and is thereby time-warped and time-bound. The explanation must be surrendered, but the experience does not have to go with it. The Incarnation, the virgin birth, resuscitation as the meaning of resurrection and the concept of the Holy Trinity – all are explanations that will never last. People hear the experience of Christ being challenged when it is only the explanation that is at stake. I wanted to make sure that people could understand that explanations have to die, but the experience remains eternal. Human religion is always bound by time. Most people do not recognize what makes a book excellent and memorable. So let me tell you what occurs. There are four primary steps of editing, which we have developed. First my own turn and Christine’s – it is a joint task. I would read the manuscript and produce the editing cuts and send them to Christine. She would go over them, incorporating the changes with which she agreed and doing a thorough punctuation check. Her rule is that if you have to read a sentence twice, it needs to be changed. She was raised on English grammar and is a minimalist on commas. We always make a request not to be bound by the style sheet provided by Harper. They agreed. Then in round two the book goes to two professionals – the manuscript manager, Lisa Zuniga, and the copy editor, Kathy Reigstad. I have never met these two ladies, but they have worked on my last four books and I admire them greatly. They live in different parts of the Pacific Northwest. They both always come back with suggestions of what it would take to make the work better. Sometimes a word I have chosen is just not right and a new one has to be found. Sometimes dates need to be added to produce the correct context of my subject. Sometimes I depend on my memory and have been proved dead wrong. One quote that I was sure was from Mahatma Gandhi turned out to be from G. K. Chesterton. In any event after this second editorial phase the manuscript comes back to me. I am invited to accept or reject each of their changes. This is hard work, but I am well served by the team of Zuniga and Reigstad. The third editing then takes place. Overwhelmingly I accept the work of these two geniuses. Occasionally I will rewrite a passage to make my point clear. Finally they have noted passages that are somewhat repetitious. I read the marked places in the manuscript. I pull these repetitions out of the text, place them side by side and choose where it is best to make this point. This task completed, I return the book to Lisa and she incorporates all of the changes into the manuscript. The book begins to shine. The last editorial opportunity comes when the manuscript comes back from Lisa to me for a final read. All the changes that have been made are incorporated. The book is supposed to be almost complete. Changes are costly at this point, but one reads it again. We find little things. One row of type was not perfectly lined up. One repetition still glared forth on the final read and had to be struck with my editor’s pen. We argue over arcane uses of punctuation. Then comes the moment when the book is put into a UPS envelope and sent on its final journey never to be seen again until it arrives finished at my door about six weeks later. I recognize sadly that this will be the last book of my career. When it went out on its final journey, there was a personal sense of completion and just a little bit of depression. I will not know this experience ever again. Christine and I celebrated by going out to lunch. Life has been a grand adventure. The book title is always a critical issue for the author. I want the title to reflect the content of the book. HarperCollins, however, has a different agenda. They want the title to leap off the shelves at the bookstores and challenge the potential readers. My working title was Charting a New Reformation. That was descriptive, if not exciting. The book went to the publisher under that name. It did not appeal to my editor, Michael (Mickey) Maudlin. Few of my other titles have passed his test in the past. Over the years, however, I have come to trust him. He communicated back with another idea – a one word title, Unbelievable. My daughters thought it was fantastic. If Christianity in its present form has become unbelievable, it is better to be honest and say so. This title would work for me if we could add a subtitle that would give a hint of the book’s content. My final proposal was to add the words Why Neither Ancient Creeds nor the Reformation Can Produce a Living Faith Today. That satisfied everyone and the title was set in early June of 2017. In late August while I was reading the New York Sunday Times I spotted a feature story on Katy Tur, a reporter for NBC News. She had been given the unique assignment to follow Donald Trump in his pursuit of the presidency. At the time that the assignment was made it was of minor importance. Donald Trump was not at that time considered a strong candidate, but time has a way of changing perceptions and Trump won the election. Katy’s career was clearly “struck by lightning.” The article then stated that Katy was writing a book on the Trump campaign that would be released in September. Her title was Unbelievable and it was being published under the imprint of William Morris, which just happens to be a HarperCollins label. I was floored. I wrote to my editor and asked what that title would do to my title. I found it hard to believe the two parts of HarperCollins could have two books published within five months of each other, using the same title and not know about it. I learned that one part of Harper located in San Francisco did not communicate with the part of Harper located in New York. We went immediately into a search for a new title. Why Christianity Has Become Unbelievable was offered. That did not satisfy me. I do not believe that Christianity itself has become unbelievable, but that the form in which Christianity has been communicated has become so. That title was, therefore, misleading. We ruled out other titles like Not Believable. That sounded negative. Mickey then urged us to wait. We did not have to rush to a decision. We had lots of time. Katy’s book came out in September with a large media campaign. It was reviewed by the New York Times Book Review. It was third on the Times non-fiction best seller list that week and remained in that position for a second week. Then it fell to sixth for two more weeks before it disappeared from that list. The interest of the country had moved toward the Trump administration and away from the campaign. Mickey then decided not to change the title of my book at all. He argued that between September and January is an eternity in the book business and felt that the two books are about very different subjects so that there is little chance of them being confused. So the decision was made to stick with the original title. I do not know Katy Tur, but I do admire her. I wish her well and I was honored to have this footnote of similarity connect her book with mine for just a moment. It is now the time to introduce my book to the reading public. I will talk about its content next week. I see it as the crowning achievement of my writing career. ~ John Shelby Spong An Endorsement From The United Kingdom If you choose just one book of John Shelby Spong’s then choose Unbelievable. This final book is not only a summation of his life’s teaching, but a contemporary catechism that addresses the real questions and profound hesitations that contemporary women and men really do have about Christianity. Put another way, it provides in one volume the basis for a new reformation for all those who have left the church in despair or who will never darken its doors because of the intellectual non-sense and constricted life that are perceived to be required by its followers. Here is something different that asks us not to check our brains at the door, but to think deeply, “to live fully, to love wastefully and to be all that we can be.” Peter Francis, Warden The Gladstone Library The United Kingdom Read the essay online here. Question & Answer Ginny from Reno, Nevada asks: Question: Why is it so important to you to view the Gospels as "midrash" rather than as history? Answer: Rev. Mark Sandlin Dear Ginny, It's not so much that it is important to anyone personally to view the Gospels as midrash as much as it is that careful scholarship rather strongly suggests that viewing the synoptic Gospels as such puts us much closer not only to their original intent, but also closer to how they would have been received by Jewish ears of the day. The reality is that it is very difficult to read the Gospels as history through modern eyes. Having just passed through the Christmas season, let's take the stories of the first Christmas as an example. The first thing to notice is that I said the “stories,” plural. We have two very different stories of the first Christmas. If it were history you'd expect them to match more closely. Not necessarily perfectly match, but you'd expect them to have more in common. Also, for such remarkable stories it is even more remarkable that the earliest writing in the New Testament either found the birth of Jesus to be somewhat unremarkable (Paul) or didn't even bother to mention it at all (Mark). Add to all of that the reality that historical documents do not support several of the events mentioned in the stories (such as the census and King Herod killing the male babies in the area), it becomes increasingly difficult to see the events recorded as actual history. That can seem somewhat devastating to those of us who grew up being told that the stories were real and shouldn't be questioned, but if we read it as midrash, we are very likely to find it packed with meaning every bit as important as it would be were it meant to be recorded history. Much like letting go of the story of Santa being real does not make the lesson of the joy of giving to others any less important. For example, the virgin birth tells us that Jesus had a very special connection to the Divine. Let's face it, biologically it really does take two to tango and in that day and age they believed the entirety of a human being was held in the man's seed and women nourished and grew those seeds. A birth without a man involved? Both then and now, it would have been seen and should be seen as an impossibility. So, you dig for the deeper understanding and meaning. Ultimately, midrash is a way of making a truth more timeless. It takes the present (in this case the historic Jesus) and houses it in the concepts and symbols of yesterday (the OT) in order to preserve the mean of the faith story for future generations. As Spong suggests in “Resurrection: Myth or Reality,” using midrash to relate Jesus to Hebrew traditions speaks to him being on a timeless, holy journey. The idea here is not simply to record the history of Jesus, but as Spong says, to “canonize” him on a more mythic level. Ultimately, the Gospel writers were Jewish and, not surprisingly, used Jewish techniques to communicate their stories. The Gospels they wrote were mostly written for Jewish people who were very familiar with midrash and could recognize it and understand its purpose. As the Christian movement grew and included more and more folks outside of the Jewish tradition, it began to lose its connection and understanding of those Jewish techniques. For some people, re-embracing midrash as a way to understand the Gospels can seem like it undercuts their importance, but quite the opposite is actually true. Midrash elevates the stories and places them in the realms of the holy. It packages them in stories that are so magical and unbelievable that it invites the reader to explore more deeply the hiding meaning, all the while, recognizing that they are stories of the extraordinary. In the end, reading the Gospels this way should bring us closer to the way they were originally understood and in doing so should bring us closer to the way Jesus was understood in those days. For me, that is a remarkable gift that excites me, challenges me, and inspires me. ~ Rev. Mark Sandlin Read and share online here About the Author Mark Sandlin is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA) from the South. He currently serves at Presbyterian Church of the Covenant. He is a co-founder of The Christian Left. His blog, has been named as one of the “Top Ten Christian Blogs.” Mark received The Associated Church Press' Award of Excellence in 2012. His work has been published on "The Huffington Post," "Sojourners," "Time," "Church World Services," and even the "Richard Dawkins Foundation." He's been featured on PBS's "Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly" and NPR's "The Story with Dick Gordon.” Follow Mark on Facebook and Twitter @marksandlin __________________________________________________ Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited Weeping Over the Grave of God Part II of a series about the Tsunami In a 20th century drama entitled, "Conversation at Midnight," playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay had her character Ricardo speak these words: "Man has never been the same since God died. He has taken it very hard...He gets along pretty well, as long as it's daylight...but it's no use. The moment it begins to get dark, as soon as it is night, he goes out and howls over the grave of God." Those words have been very poignant for me through the years, rising every time I experience the tragic dimensions of life that in the past were cushioned by the traditional understanding of God. The earthquake in the Indian Ocean, which spawned the Tsunami waves killing more than 150,000 people, was the latest occasion for calling to mind these words. Had such a tragedy struck our world 500-600 years ago, two things would have been quite different. First, the probability is that most of the people of the Western world would never have known about it. The world was so vast in that period of history. Oceans and language were great barriers. Communication systems were quite primitive. This Tsunami would have made its way only into the remembered history of the affected areas, entering the folklore of the people and producing perhaps another story like the one about Noah. In the 21st century, however, the press covered this enormous disaster relentlessly. Pictures of its horror invaded our homes via television. The story journeyed with us through our car radios. It dominated the front pages of newspapers across this planet. There was no escape from the searing reality of the carnage, the cries of the victims or those newly bereaved. No one could avoid staring at the mass graves or trying to embrace what it means to lose so many lives so suddenly. People's emotions were numbed. This was not an attack by a foreign enemy to which people could release the frenzy of their pent up anger. It was the work of an impersonal force tearing up the earth miles beneath the ocean floor and unleashing waves of such height, power and fury that they destroyed everything in their path. Elderly people died. Babies died, sick and crippled people died, mothers died, fathers died. Rich vacationers died, poor peasants died. It had no rhyme, no reason and it lent itself to no rational process of thinking. The second thing that was different was that in the past this tragedy would have been understood in the context of a religious worldview. Theories would abound as to what its meaning was and why God was so displeased that this divine punishment was hurled at the world. That was the way that Europe understood the Bubonic Plague in the 14th century and the way the storm that sank the Spanish armada in 1588 was interpreted. In the Tsunami coverage this religious dimension was totally missing at first, a clear indication that the religious worldview of the past no longer exists. Instead we were given geological lessons about the collision of tectonic plates. No one assumed that the victims were being punished. No one offered a rational explanation implying any purpose. Only after the passage of several days did the religious spokespersons begin to present their explanations on television and radio talk shows, but these voices were singularly lacking in both profundity and credibility. Larry King, interviewing not clergy but former Presidents Bush and Clinton, kept pressing both of them to say what this tragedy had done to their faith. President George W. H. Bush in response referred to the time he had lost a daughter and it "did cause me to wonder why...an innocent child." President Clinton referred to the unfairness of life at all times and urged Larry King to have on his program representative theologians from the religions practiced by most of the victims, Hindu, Moslem, Buddhist and Christian, to have them discuss how their faith helped them to understand this disaster. This tragedy simply did not lend itself to their pious but threadbare explanations. This was simply nature acting with the fury for which nature is well known. Perhaps the last gasp of that traditional, pre-modern religious thinking occurred after the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, when Jerry Falwell, appearing on Pat Robertson's 700 Club, offered the opinion that God had removed the shield of divine protection from America because its leaders had begun to tolerate "feminists, abortionists, homosexuals and the American Civil Liberties Union." The nation gasped at this level of religious arrogance and the current Bush administration distanced itself from these remarks, saying it did not want to be associated with that kind of response. Yet, years ago that was the typical and almost universal explanation. It is the common explanation that one encounters in the writing of the biblical prophets. What has happened in the intervening years to change public perceptions? I think it is fair to say that God, understood as an external, supernatural, miracle-working deity has died. The death of this God was not sudden. The realization of this divine demise has slowly trickled down over the centuries from the intellectuals to the masses. The death of this God has spawned two seemingly opposite responses in our day. One is the development of a radically secular society. The other is in the hysterical rise of fundamentalist, evangelical religion that represents a denial that the death of God has occurred. How did this death of God occur? It began in the 16th century with Copernicus and his later disciples Kepler and Galileo, who forced us to see that the earth was not the center of the universe and that God did not live just beyond the sky, engaged in the tasks of watching, planning, intervening, keeping record books, punishing and rewarding. This insight posed a mighty challenge to the God we met in the pages of scripture. This God was quite capable of splitting the Red Sea to liberate the Chosen People and of dictating the Ten Commandments to Moses. As the understanding of the universe expanded, we no longer knew where God was and more importantly who God was. The universe seemed very large and we began to feel very lonely. Then Isaac Newton explained how the laws of nature operated in this universe, leaving little room for miracle and magic. Next Charles Darwin challenged our assumption that human life was just a little lower than the angels, suggesting instead that it was just a little higher than the apes. Finally, Albert Einstein took away all certainty, replacing it with relativity. With each new insight, the traditional concept of God faded into the shadows. The next step in the desacralization of our world came when we could no longer explain evil with our appeals to this supernatural deity. Life seemed more and more governed by chance and less and less by purpose. Analyzing who survived the attack on the World Trade Center, we discovered that it was the chance factor of whether they worked on the upper floors or the lower floors, not whether they were deserving or not. Passengers on the doomed 9/11 airliners prayed fervently but no divine hand reached down to give them aid. They were the chance victims who booked passage on the wrong plane. Then came the earthquake and the Tsunami. It erupted beneath the sea. It killed religious people and non-religious people. It killed Christians, Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists. No God stopped it. When people thought about it they concluded that no God could stop it, which posed a provocative theological issue in such a way that it was inescapable. If God has the power to intervene and does not, then surely God is malevolent. If God does not have the power then God is impotent. Either way the traditional God explanation fails. What we had long suspected intellectually we began to embrace emotionally. There is no supernatural divine power that stands at our side to be our protector. Thus the traditional religious worldview died and people began to cope with what it means to be citizens of a lonely and seemingly empty universe. As the days pass and the world begins to return to its normal routines, voices will surely try to respirate artificially the old world view in order to make sense of this disaster, in an effort to preserve the remaining shreds of divinity to which we cling so tenaciously. Their words, however, will inevitably sound empty and hollow because they will be spoken out of a religious context that is no longer believable and is no longer ours. Does this mean that there is no God? That is a common conclusion of those who today inhabit the 'secular city,' but I don't think so. I am convinced, however, that it does mean that the primary way we have thought about God for almost 10,000 years is dying or is dead. Since most people do not or cannot separate God from our traditional definition of God, it feels to many like there is no God or that God has died. God and the human definition of God are, however, not identical. Perhaps God can be met and experienced in ways beyond the theistic definitions of the past. Perhaps it is still possible to encounter transcendence, otherness, holiness or timelessness without locating these realities in an external supernatural, miracle-working, invasive deity? That is where their inner quest has led many people in the modern world today. I stand with them. This means, I believe, that we stand on the edge of the most profound spiritual revolution in human history. It is dawning with rending power in the human psyche. We will, however, never be able to encounter this reality until we allow the traditional God concept from the days of our childlike humanity to die. For many that is a fearful transition to be avoided by all means including denial, but for me and for others it represents a new chapter in human history for which we yearn with deep anticipation. I will seek to open a door into that scary place next week. ~ John Shelby Spong Originally published January 12, 2005 Announcements Why Christianity Is No Longer Believable – And How We Can Change That Pre-order John Shelby Spong’s final book, "Unbelievable" Five hundred years after Martin Luther and his Ninety-Five Theses ushered in the Reformation, bestselling author and controversial bishop and teacher John Shelby Spong delivers twelve forward-thinking theses to spark a new reformation to reinvigorate Christianity and ensure its future. (Book goes on sale February 13, 2018)

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Re: [Oe List ...] A Child Is Born on the 11th Day of Christmas
by Del Morrill 05 Jan '18

05 Jan '18

Congrats to the grandparents; afterall, it wouldn’t have happened at all without you! Del Happiness is not the absence of problems but the ability to deal with them. From: OE [mailto:oe-bounces@lists.wedgeblade.net] On Behalf Of Isobel Bishop via OE Sent: Friday, January 5, 2018 12:30 PM To: Order Ecumenical Community <oe(a)lists.wedgeblade.net> Cc: Isobel Bishop <isobeljimbish(a)optusnet.com.au> Subject: Re: [Oe List ...] A Child Is Born on the 11th Day of Christmas Thankyou Ellie. Very beautiful In peace and love, Isobel Bishop Sent from my iPhone On 6 Jan 2018, at 4:50 am, Ellie Stock via OE <oe(a)lists.wedgeblade.net <mailto:oe@lists.wedgeblade.net> > wrote: Dear Friends, On the 11th day of Christmas, 3:26 a.m....A Child Is First Born! To Son-in-law and daughter: Jose Luis and Chenoa Stock Claure Leandro Aiden Claure (Lion of man, mission of fire) in St. Louis, MO Mother, father and son doing well...grandparents still recovering... A Reflection below... Ellie and Carleton :) elliestock(a)aol.com <mailto:elliestock@aol.com> EYES, ONLY HOURS OLD Eyes, only hours olds, innocently laser-beamed life's disease and death's marrow-- healing births' paradox and revealing its wholeness to a pondering heart as a rooting mouth, also hours old, hungered beyond the miracle of a mothering breast. ejhs _______________________________________________ OE mailing list OE(a)lists.wedgeblade.net <mailto:OE@lists.wedgeblade.net> http://lists.wedgeblade.net/listinfo.cgi/oe-wedgeblade.net

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Seasons Greetings
by Gail West 31 Dec '17

31 Dec '17

*from Gail and Dick West Dec 25, 2017* *We are profoundly grateful for 201* *7* * being a year of ~~~* * Gratitude for amazingly good health* * Being happily engaged in service and exploration* * Awe and wonder of the times in which we live* * Being profoundly addressed and affirmed by the way life is* *Being blessed by our friends and* * * *community* in Taiwan and beyond ~~~~~ *Best wishes to you all as we enter another wonder-filled and challenging year!* *[image: Inline image 2]*

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12/28/17, Fox/Spong: Naomi Klein & Scott Russell Sanders: Birds of a Feather, Two North American Prophets In Search of Wisdom and Right Action; Spong revisited
by Ellie Stock 28 Dec '17

28 Dec '17

HOMEPAGE MY PROFILE ESSAY ARCHIVE MESSAGE BOARDS CALENDAR Naomi Klein & Scott Russell Sanders: Birds of a Feather, Two North American Prophets In Search of Wisdom and Right Action Rev. Matthew Fox In dark times like ours one takes delight in those who are still committed to a search for truth and are still busy hunting gathering for what matters. We are blessed still with such figures in our midst and I want to celebrate two in this essay. One, a citizen of Toronto and of Canada, Naomi Klein, described herself by phone one day to me as “Jewish, Feminist and Atheist.” She is a profound author, social activist and filmmaker. The other, Scott Russell Sanders, celebrates his small town existence in Methodist rooted rural Ohio and on this planet and in this universe in a number of wonderful books. The former’s two recent books, Capitalism vs. The Climate and No Is Not Enough, are as on target to our troubled times as any I know; and Sanders book Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World, complements Klein’s in a profoundly mystical way. Both agree that stories lie at the heart of things, yes stories and “myths.” Both ask the question: “What stories are we telling? What stories are we listening to? What stories do we reject? Which stories do we get energized by?” In answering these questions we are revealing who we are, what we strive to be, where we are aspiring to go, and what values we cherish. Naomi Klein on Stories Listen to Naomi Klein on stories. “A great deal of the work of deep social change involves having debates during which new stories can be told to replace the ones that have failed us. Because if we are to have any hope of making the kind of civilizational leap required of this fateful decade, we will need to start believing, once again, that humanity is not hopelessly selfish and greedy—the image senselessly sold to us by everything from reality shows to neoclassical economics.”(1) Yes, and let me add religion’s stories of “original sin” (stories the historical Jesus, like any Jew, never heard about) and also the stories from patriarchy that reinforce what Adrienne Rich dares to name as a “fatalistic self-hatred.”(2) Klein invokes stories again when speaking of Donald Trump who in her eyes “is not a rupture at all, but rather the culmination—the logical end point—of a great many dangerous stories our culture had been telling for a very long time. That greed is good. That the market rules. That money is what matters in life. That white men are better than the rest. That the natural world is there for us to pillage. That the vulnerable deserve their fate and the one percent deserve their golden towers. That anything public or commonly held is sinister and not worth protecting. That we are surrounded by danger and should only look after our own. That there is no alternative to any of this.”(3) Klein sees these stories as “part of the very air we breathe” and therefore she sees Trump as “the logical expression of a culture that grants indecent levels of impunity to the ultra rich, that is consumed with winner-take-all completion, and that is grounded in dominance-based logic at every level.”(4) Stories, I would add, that hold up the reptilian brain (winner take all) as primary. In Klein’s view, it is these “stories that ineluctably produced” Trump. “The values that have been sold to us through reality TV, get-rich quick books, billionaire saviors, philanthrocapitalists. The same values that have been playing out in destroyed safety nets, exploding prison numbers, normalized rape culture [now being exposed in some very high places in government and the media and etc.] democracy-destroying trade deals, rising seas and privatized disaster response, and in a world of Green Zones and Red Zones.”(5) Sanders on Stories Sanders takes to task many “modern” thinkers who believe we have outgrown stories—or ought to have done so.(6) Among such crusaders he cites E. M. Forster who declares disapprovingly that “the story is primitive, it reaches back to the origins of literature, before reading was discovered, and it appeals to what is primitive in us.” Sanders sees a similar “sigh” regarding story “from the likes of Henry James, Gustav Flaubert, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, and Samuel Beckett. Their sighing proclaims them to be civilized, modern, free from illusion; they have left the cave to dwell outside, where stories shrivel in the harsh light of reason.” (151f) Sanders makes an important connection between a belief in story and a belief in the sacred, citing approvingly that the Apache word for myth means literally “to tell the holiness.” The Sacred is so big it requires story and not just facts. Holiness is of the same ilk. He comments: “By telling the holy, sacred stories ground a people or an individual, not merely in a landscape, but in the power that creates and preserves the land.” (154) It is special that Sanders dares to invoke an old word, holiness. Rabbi Heschel observes that “holiness is the most precious word in religion.”(7) And Frederick Turner believes that there lies in our times “an unsatisfied and inexplicable yearning, which can now identify as a thirst for things like glory, sanctity, conscience, and heroism, which were forbidden to us by the doctrines of existentialism.” In place of stories about holiness, we have substituted drugs (and other addictions I would add): “As the doctrines of materialism triumphed first among intellectuals, then among the population at large, so did the use of opium, cocaine, mescalin, and cannabis.” But drugs cannot accomplish transcendence for us for they “destroy the tension and the hunger and thus the process of transformation.”(8) Sanders challenges Mircea Eliade who argues in Cosmos and History “that myth, ritual, taboo, every grasping for a transcendent reality, merely expresses our desire to abolish time, to resist change, to escape mortality.” Sanders accuses Eliade of teaching that “only by detaching ourselves from nature, weaning ourselves form sacred stories, and accepting the terror of history as the sole reality, can we become fully human.” (152) Sanders prefers other voices such as the Aborigines of Australia, Barry Lopez, Thich Nhat Hanh, Thomas Merton, Rene Dubos, Loren Eisley. “In their various accents, these voices declare that a spiritual landscape does indeed flicker and flame within the physical one.” (153f) He proposes Why these stories are found all around the world, in ancient times and our own. “I believe that this doctrine is widespread because it is true, or at least it is as close to the truth as we have en able to come. Sacred stories arise from our intuition that beneath the flow of creation there is order, within change there is permanence, within time there is eternity.” (154) The battle that Sanders recognizing as raging in modern literature and anthropology also rages in approaches to Sacred Scriptures of many traditions. It does not satisfy the human heart or mind to be told that only 15% of the words ascribed to Jesus in the Gospels were his words. The other 85% of words may contain a lot of wisdom and truth as well. The modern quest for what Snider calls “equations, formulas, numbers” is useful at times; but it is not the final word. Has science rendered myth obsolete? Says Sanders: “I very much doubt that we can live by statements, and I am certain we cannot live by statistics. Not even scientists can bear a steady diet of numbers….The data themselves only make sense, only add up to knowledge, when they are embodied in narrative…” He sees himself as inviting science back to the full human enterprise, one that is larded with stories and from the stories, values. “In claiming that science is a patchwork of stories, I am not saying it is untrue; on the contrary, I am saying that scientists, like the rest of us, have no way of snaring truth, no way of carrying it around, no way of storing it, except in stories.” (157) As for dismissing stories as “primitive,” Sanders cites Buddhist poet Gary Snyder that the word “primitive” comes from “primus” or first as in ‘original mind’, original human society, original way of being. Sacred places, and the stories we tell about them, put us back in touch with what is original, to ourselves and in creation.” (156) Klein and Sanders are both urging us, that if we want to change culture, we must choose to change stories. If we want a world that runs on values, we must choose appropriate stories and reject inappropriate ones. Sanders cites approvingly the observation of Flannery O’Connor that “in the long run, a people is known, not by its statements or its statistics, but by the stories it tells.” (166) What stories are we telling? What do we choose to tell? And choose to discard? From our answer to these questions, it seems to me, arises new movements and new dreams and new civilizations. ~ Rev. Matthew Fox Read the essay online here. About the Author Matthew Fox holds a doctorate in spirituality from the Institut Catholique de Paris and has authored 32 books on spirituality and contemporary culture that have been translated into 60 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. Among his books are Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the FleshTransforming Evil in Soul and Society, The Pope’s War: Why Ratzinger’s Secret Crusade Has Imperiled the Church and How It Can Be Saved and Confessions: The Making of a Postdenominational Priest A new school, adopting the pedagogy Fox created and practiced for over 35 years, is opening in Boulder, Colorado this September. Called the Fox Institute for Creation Spirituality it is being run by graduates of his doctoral program and will offer MA, D Min and Doctor of Spirituality degrees. With young leaders he is launching a new spiritual (not religious) “order” called the Order of the Sacred Earth (OSE) that is welcoming to people of all faith traditions and none and whose ‘glue’ is a common vow: “I promise to be the best lover of Mother Earth and the best defender of Mother Earth that I can be.” ____________________ (1) Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate (NY: Simon & Schuster, 2014, 461. (2) Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (NY: W. W. Norton & Co., 1976), 215. (3) Naomi Klein, NO is Not Enough (Chicago, Il., Haymarket Books, 2017), 257f. (4) Ibid., 258. (5) Ibid., 258f. (6) Scott Russell Sanders, Staying Put: Making a HOME in a Restless World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 151. Other references are all to this book. (7) See my discussion on the Thirst for Holiness in a Post-Modern time in my autobiography, Matthew Fox, Confessions: The Making of a Post-Denominational Priest (Berkeley: North Atlantic Press, 2016), 304-316. (8) Cited in Ibid., 304f. Question & Answer John from Tucson, asks: Question: First let me tell you I am an atheist. Prior to this I was raised in the Roman Catholic tradition and was a member in good standing for approximately the first thirty years of my life at which time I left. The journey I am on has led me in many directions and I have been comfortable lately with where I find myself. That is until I read a column from Bishop Spong. What brings this uncomfortable feeling is the sentence that reads, "As optimism has died, human beings increasingly turned either to fundamentalist religion or to secular materialism in the constant search for meaning." Because I value his understanding of the human condition, I took the latter part of the above sentence as an indictment. I know that my search for meaning has often turned to secular materialism. I must tell you this disturbs me. I'm not sure where to go with this. I cannot return to religion, as it holds nothing for me. Yet I do not want to continue to define myself by what I buy and own. Any insights? Answer: By Rev. Roger Wolsey Dear John, I respect where you’re at. Though I am a Christian, as a progressive Christian, we likely share much in common. If it weren’t for progressive Christianity, I’d likely be an atheist too. You were raised in a Christian denomination so I won’t overdo providing “the Christian” answer to your question – though it can be as simple as “You are a beloved child of God”. That something was stirred in you, however, upon reading those words of Bishop Spong is not surprising. His insights tend to be enigmatic and come at things from a non-conventional way that ruffles the feathers of believers and non-believers alike. It’s been said that a preacher's/journalist's job is to “comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable.” The good bishop has done his job. You are feeling some discomfort. Good. Now, what to do with it…   As a progressive Christian, I have no need for you to think as I do or to return to being a Christian – even as a progressive Christian. I feel that you are just fine as you are and I believe that Spirit feels the same. I will say that the way you frame things may be a bit limiting. You seem to suggest that it’s either continue to follow the vapid path of secular humanism – or – “return to religion.” I would suggest that there are other options for how you identify and define yourself.    First, there are some practices/modalities that can help people self-identify. These include the Enneagram defense type and the Myers-Briggs personality type surveys/indicators. Highly helpful in understanding our spiritual tendencies. There is also much merit in exploring our “Love Languages” (how we tend to feel and express love), as well as Attachment Theory (massively helpful in understanding our relationship tendencies). I also invite people to write on 10 slips of paper – 10 things that define them. In my case it might be Trumpeter, Writer, Music Lover, Father, Pastor, Lover, Dancer, Liberal, Bald, Runner, Christian, United Methodist, Middle Class, Mystic, Male, White, etc. I then have people rank them in order of most importance, and then take the least important one, look at it, ponder how that is part of them, consider how that is part of their life, then crumple it up and drop it to the floor – imagining that no longer being part of who they are. And then repeat this process with each of the 6 least important slips of paper. Then, after feeling the weight of all of this, pick up all of the slips and re-order them in response to that exercise - with permission to write something else on a new slip of paper, replacing it for something else.  This helps cut to the chase and really get at what’s most essential in our lives.   I will also remind us one can be spiritual without being religious. A person alone on an island can have a very rich spiritual life and have a strong sense of meaning, connection, and purpose. That said, I am both spiritual and religious. Humans are social creatures and we thrive best in community. Here’s a link to something I wrote explaining why I’m “both/and” instead of either/or.    I sense that something happened to you after those “first 30 years of your life” – some trauma, some wounding, that led you to be estranged from your Church. I’m sorry about whatever that was that you experienced. Whatever it was – either an overt action or a felt sense of lacking, it wasn’t the Church being at its best, it was an outlier, an exception, not the religion operating at peak performance. There are numerous religions and numerous kinds and varieties of each religion. Just because one congregation/priest/pastor in one denomination or religion got it wrong, doesn’t mean it’s all wrong. There is a place for religion, good religion, in the world. There’s a place for you in the world too. The world needs both you and religion at your best – and both you and religion can help bring that about.   John, it feels true to me that you are still curious about Christianity and “a Jesus way” to connect to the Divine. You read the Bishop Spong newsletter and you are reaching out to this forum for insight. You wouldn’t be doing those things if you were fully allergic to this Way. It seems to me that Spirit is actively at work in your life in many ways and that you are awakening and blooming in some new and exciting ways.    I wish you well on your journey of discovering and re-claiming who you really are.    P.S., If you’d like to converse further and go deeper, please feel free to send me a private message. You can reach me through the Wesley Foundation at CU Boulder. ~ Rev. Roger Wolsey Read and share online here About the Author Rev. Roger Wolsey is an ordained United Methodist pastor who directs the Wesley Foundation at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and is author of Kissing Fish: christianity for people who don’t like christianity; The Kissing Fish Facebook page; Roger’s Blog on Patheos “The Holy Kiss” ________________________________________________ Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited The Theological Message in the Destructive Tsunami The earthquake near Sumatra and the resulting tidal wave that have wreaked devastation in many nations on two separate continents was the final major event in the tumultuous year of 2004. The people of the world watched in stunned disbelief as television footage showed us mountains of bodies, some 30 percent of them children, and massive destruction of property caused by gigantic waves that swept over the land far beyond the beaches. Imagine the psychological impact of this event on such nations as Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India and Pakistan. To put this trauma into perspective recall the numbing pain inflicted on the psyche of America on 9/11 when this nation of almost 300,000,000 people lost about 3,000 lives in a terrorist attack. The healing of these wounds is still unfinished. Yet a single town in Indonesia or Sri Lanka lost ten times that many in this Tsunami. The estimate of lives lost has climbed quickly each day until it has now reached a staggering total beyond 150,000. I doubt the exact number of deaths will be known for some time, but surely most of those now listed as missing will ultimately come to rest in the deaths column. This event, like all natural disasters, forces upon the people of the world a new and scary consciousness. Once the trauma has passed that new consciousness will frame new, ultimate and very human questions that will be unavoidable. This planet, our scientists tell us, is some four and a half billion years old. In its life span it has often not been a safe place for any living thing. During its first billion or so years, no life existed on this planet. Instead a constant barrage of meteorites and other particles of an exploding universe relentlessly pounded the earth's surface. Nature's raw violence was visible in the liquefied rock boiling near the center of the earth. As recently as 200 million years ago, the landmass on this planet formed a single continent. What is now North and South America nestled into Europe and Africa. Australia was the underbelly of India and Antarctica was the southern edge of this single landmass. Over a vast span of time violent earthquakes miles beneath the sea have broken up that landmass into the continents that we identify today. Those calamitous events, however, occurred before there was an inhabitant who could knowingly record or be victimized by them. No sense of tragedy was associated with the force of nature until some 50,000 to 100,000 years ago when our earliest, self-conscious ancestors finally emerged through the evolutionary process. Only then were there living beings whose minds enabled them to embrace time as a connected flowing whole. They could remember the past and anticipate the future, which meant that the uniquely human dimension of chronic anxiety entered the life of this world. Expanded knowledge enables us to know that yesterday's violence might well return again tomorrow. The natural forces of storm, hurricane and earthquake were so intense that these creatures trembled in fear before their power and sought to placate whoever or whatever was in control of these forces that appeared to victimize them. Human survival required that we become aware of nature's power without being immobilized by it. Had we not been able to make that adjustment the evolutionary step that brought us self-consciousness would have been aborted and life would have devolved back to the beasts of the field existing in a world of unknowing. Finding a way to deal with this trauma was the catalyst that caused primitive religion to be born. Our vulnerable ancestors survived by envisioning a powerful supernatural being, who was big enough to control the forces of nature and who was our ally. That was when human beings assumed that those devastating forces of nature were either expressions of this God's power or events that occurred at the divine bidding. So, a contract with God, sometimes called a covenant, was formed. Human beings were compelled by their need for security to discern and obey the divine will and to please this supernatural being with respectful liturgies. That is why every human religious system has developed codes of conduct that are said to have been dictated by God. That is also why every human religious system has produced traditions of worship that must be adhered to in the minutest detail. Natural disasters were inevitably understood as to be expressions of divine wrath. Primitive religious leaders devoted their efforts to determining exactly what human beings had done to provoke the divine anger. A consensus would be formed around some conclusions and a reformation would be instituted designed to express both penitence and new resolve to please God in the future. Fortunately, for these human interpreters, natural disasters were widely scattered in time so that the illusion could be preserved, that the adopted changes were successful and God was pleased to be their protector once again. Our religious traditions still reflect this mindset. God, according to the Bible, controlled the rain, wind, lightning, thunder and all natural disasters, using them to punish sin and to reward righteousness. The psalmists reminded their readers that God set the boundaries for the oceans and rivers. The waters escaped those boundaries only at God's instigation. Even as our ancestors in faith died in the great disasters of history, their deaths had meaning since God had a divine purpose in each tragedy. It was a comforting thought. Our forebears used the structures of their supernatural religion to keep their debilitating fears in check. This idea no longer works for modern people, which means that when tragedy strikes, our peculiar destiny is to wrestle with the new issue of potential meaninglessness. Nothing reveals this modern dilemma more clearly than the way this current tragedy has been interpreted by the public media. God has not been mentioned once as a causative factor of the Tsunami. This means that far more than we recognize consciously, God understood as the supernatural, controlling presence, is no longer a working hypothesis in our increasingly secular world. Richard Norton Smith on PBS did refer to "the almost biblical proportions" of this disaster. He did not tell us to what he was referring by his use of the word "biblical" but I suspect his reference was either to the flood story at the time of Noah or to the destruction that shall accompany the end of the world that the Bible has projected into the future. Instead of God being discussed as a factor in this disaster the media introduced us to geological explanations. Earthquakes are caused by the collisions of tectonic plates far below the sea. We learned that this particular tragedy occurred when the displacement initiated by the thrusting of the Indian plate beneath the Burma plate created waves so powerful that they devastated nearby nations and sent 30-foot surges to pound the east coast of Africa half a globe away. We were informed that there is today an active fault line under the Canary Islands off West Africa that has the potential to erupt, sending half a trillion tons of rock into the Atlantic Ocean that could create tidal waves capable of pounding America's shores with water heights larger than the skyscrapers of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington and Miami. Only human beings are equipped to live with the knowledge of their own potential destruction. The sheep will not worry about this pending tragedy. The cows will continue to chew their cuds and the rabbits will keep on breeding. To be human is to embrace our frightening world and to know that we cannot make it secure. Our assertion that God is in charge is little more than another attempt to keep the delusion of our security in tact. One cannot appeal to the idea of a supernatural deity who controls our destinies in the face of the raw and indiscriminate power of the Tsunami that hurls bodies into a watery grave without rhyme or reason. The modern conclusion is that there is no sky God directing the affairs of nature. So desperate is our anxiety, so deep is our need to believe that such a protector is there that we say astonishingly naïve things about this God. We talk as if we have actually captured the will of God, through an 'infallible Pope or an inerrant Bible.' We know, however, that these relics from the childhood of our humanity do not hold water, that they are nothing but pathetic coping devices to shield us from the terror of being aware that we are at the mercy of forces over which we know that we have no control. This event, happening west of Sumatra - miles beneath the oceans, makes it very clear that no angry God decided to victimize the world. There is only impersonal, natural power, oblivious to human concerns. This natural disaster reminds us that the military might of a single nation, even one with vast nuclear capacity, is like fools' gold when it comes to protecting the world from nature's fury. It also confronts us with the frightening necessity of abandoning the supernatural God of yesterday, who allowed bad things to happen only if we deserved them. Suddenly all of our attempts to build security are revealed as little more than superstitions. All we can finally depend on in this world is our own fragile humanity and human life is inextricably bound together in a common destiny. The theological challenge that rises inevitably in this crisis is the awareness that we alone are our neighbor's keeper. Can human life survive without the security of a divine protector? Or will that realization prove to be our Achilles' heel as we turn out to be like the dinosaurs that bloomed for but a moment in cosmic time and then disappeared when they could not adapt to a new environment? The only alternative to this bleak picture is that this tragedy will drive us into a new consciousness that will produce a radically different way to view both God and our own humanity. Those are the issues posed as Mother Nature sends us reeling into the year 2005. I will seek to address these issues in my column next week. ~ John Shelby Spong Originally published January 5, 2004 Announcements Next Week's Newsletter: Bishop John Shelby Spong introduces his greatly anticipated, final book to the reading public: Unbelievable: Why Neither Ancient Creeds Nor the Reformation Can Produce a Living Faith Today. Click here to pre-order (book goes on sale February 13, 2018) Any questions or concerns, please contact us at support(a)progressivechristianity.orm or 253-507-8678. Copyright © 2017 ProgressiveChristianity.org, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you have a membership at johnshelbyspong.com. Our mailing address is: ProgressiveChristianity.org 4810 Pt. Fosdick Dr. NW #80 Gig Harbor, WA 98335 Add us to your address book If you are a paying subscriber, you may login and cancel your account. This email was sent to elliestock(a)aol.com why did I get this? unsubscribe from this list update subscription preferences ProgressiveChristianity.org · 4810 Pt. Fosdick Dr. NW · #80 · Gig Harbor, WA 98335 · USA

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Global Buzz reminder
by ICA International 28 Dec '17

28 Dec '17

Reminder for entries This reminder is for the Global Buzz that will be published January 5th. 2018 (Please send your entries at least a day or more ahead) Please send all your entries by regular e-mail to: inform(a)ica-international.org with your entry as an attatchment. Send details of news items, training programmes, your peer to peer connections with other ICAs, any concerns you may have and of any events that are coming up at your location. Your report can be long or short, but remember that all other ICAs would really like to know about the things that matter where you are, and what you are doing as an ICA. Peter, for ICAI Communications Pour les entrées de rappel Ce rappel est à la Global Buzz qui sera publié le 5 Janvier 2018 (Veuillez envoyer vos entrées au moins une journée à l'avance) Veuillez envoyer toutes vos entrées maintenant par courriel ordinaire à : inform(a)ica-international.org avec votre entrée comme un attatchment. Envoyer les détails des articles de nouvelles, des programmes de formation, vos connexions peer to peer avec d'autres CIAS, de toute préoccupation que vous pourriez avoir et de tous les événements qui sont à venir à votre emplacement. Votre rapport peut être longue ou courte, mais rappelez-vous que toutes les autres CIAS aimerait vraiment savoir à propos de choses qui importe où vous êtes et ce que vous faites comme une ICA. Recordatorio de las entradas Este aviso es para el Global Buzz que se publicarán 5 Enero 2018 (Favor de enviar sus entradas al menos con un día de antelación) Por favor envíe todos sus entradas ahora por correo electrónico a: inform(a)ica-international.org con su entrada como un archivo adjunto. Enviar detalles de noticias, programas de capacitación, el peer to peer las conexiones con otros convenios o acuerdos internacionales, las preocupaciones que usted pueda tener y de los eventos que se aproximan en su ubicación. El informe puede ser a corto o largo, pero hay que recordar que todos los demás convenios quisiera saber realmente sobre lo que realmente importa, y lo que están haciendo una ICA.

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11/21/17, Wolsey/Spong: Wakey Poem Sermon; Spong revisited
by Ellie Stock 21 Dec '17

21 Dec '17

HOMEPAGE MY PROFILE ESSAY ARCHIVE MESSAGE BOARDS CALENDAR Wakey Poem Sermon Rev. Roger Wolsey “P” is for Poetry   To better help people understand the difference between liberal Christianity and progressive Christianity, I’ve referred to what I call the “The 11 Ps of Progressive Christianity“:  * Postmodern * Passionate * Poetic * Prophetic/Political * Prayerful * Practical/Practice/Praxis/orthoPraxy * Paradoxical * Pro-LGBTQI * Peaceful/Pacifist * Panentheistic * Pluralistic. It is the third of those three that I intend to convey at this time. Over the years I’ve put forth the following assertions:   “..Christians rightfully honor and celebrate Jesus as a unique and fully incarnate (poetically speaking) manifestation (poetically speaking) of God. We are devoted to him, we cherish him, we revere him, we are endeared to him. But we pray to the God Jesus prayed to, not to Jesus. Being a Christian is putting our trust and reliance (having faith) in the way, teachings, and example of Jesus (that was informed and inspired by the Hebrew prophets before him) and to live with holy boldness as we seek loving and just right relations with ourselves, our neighbors (near and far), all of Creation, and with God.” Nov. 2, 2013 “People today know that theology is poetry – and that it provides meaning – not facts.” – May 14, 2015   “The trinity is a beloved Christian poem of who God is to us. But poems don’t literally define things. Like all art, and theology, they point to what is beyond them.” – May 21, 2015 Fr. Richard Rohr wrote: “All language about God is necessarily symbolic and figurative. ..The Bible uses metaphors for God, such as rock and shepherd. Jesus describes himself metaphorically as the bread of life and the light of the world. The Spirit is portrayed as breath and wind. God is not literally a rock or an actual shepherd on a hillside somewhere, yet we need these images to “imagine” the unsayable Mystery.” – January 11, 2017 And I put it even more simply as “The Bible is poetry. All theology is. The sooner people realize that, the fewer arguments and the less conflict we will have.” Dec. 6, 2017 Granted, a case could be made that this last remark is a bit overstated, but I let it be clear that cases supporting it can readily be put forth as well. Bottom line: progressive Christians are called to error on the side of multi-valent interpretations understandings instead of on the side of legalistic and exclusivistic ones.   I’m going to share a “spoken-Word” slam poetry sermonette that I preached about this time last year. It is as true now as it was then – frankly, even more so. You may notice the other “10 Ps” infused within. Wakey-Wakey!  “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way…” What in the dickens did he know? What did he know? He knew what time it was. That tale of twin towns was the time right before the French revolution and all that led up to it… Do we know what time it is? I said do we know what time it is? Some of us thought we did. We thought it’s the time of the dawning of the idyllic age of Aquarius. We imagined we’re entering a utopian new age of “higher consciousness” We dreamed it’s the era of ever-integrating, spiritually elitist spiral dynamics where people deemed “green” are “more evolved” than those deemed orange, blue, red… and so on! ,,,, Ain’t nobody got time for that! And we fantasized a rise of “Indigo Children” – a new generation of super sensitive more fully evolved humanity present among us! Yeah right. The past 8 weeks [12 months] have shown us who we really are and what time it really is. On the left and on the right – we’re a bunch of freaked-out Henny Penny Chicken Little’s running around with our heads cut off hollering, “The sky is falling!, Abandon ship! It’s the end! Let’s move to Canada!” All 9 Enneagram types have regressed to our respective stress and fear states — and brother — that ain’t good. ‘Cause if we’re stressing and act out of fear we manifest the monsters that we loathe and despise. Our demons become self-realizing prophesies and none of us look like the beautiful souls we really are. Instead, of intentional deep thinking about what time it really is, we react pell-mell! — Pell-Mell: “In disorderly confusion; rushed with reckless haste. “The contents of the sacks were thrown pell-mell to the ground” Like a hyper-reactive human pinball game with deadly consequence… Pell-mell — we react to the xenophobic rhetoric and scapegoating of Jews and allow them to be sent off to be gassed Pell-mell – we attack a naval fleet in Hawaii Pell-mell – we drop atomic bombs on cities in Japan Pell-mell — we create the modern state of Israel Pell-mell – we commandeer Palestinian lands and bulldoze Palestinian homes Pell-mell – we wage war on Israel with volleys of rocks and rockets. Pell-mell – we fly planes into buildings in New York killing 2,977. Pell-mell — we invade Iraq without just cause resulting in 251,000 deaths Pell-mell — we create ISIS to fill the vacuum of leadership that invasion caused Pell-mell — we react assuming the worst about black citizens who might be criminal suspects, shooting first and asking questions later. Pell-mell — we ambush innocent cops as vigilante justice for what other cops in other states did to black citizens saying, “if black lives don’t matter, then neither do blue!” Pell-mell – we rally for white supremacy without white robes and hoods in Charlottesville, and pell-mell – we ironically don we now our black masked apparel seeking to punch Nazis and Nazi sympathizers in the face   Pell-mell – we shoot hundreds of country music fans in Vegas, and Pell-mell – we buy AR-15s in record numbers and stocks in bump-stocks skyrocket like never before!] Pell-mell – we elect a human-aggravated blowhard who pledges to unleash more coal-burned global warming gasses into the sky Pell-mell – we fricken frack turtle island and threaten our aquifers with oil, gas, and fracking fluids containing chemicals they still won’t name. Pell-mell – we focus all of our energy to prevent one pipeline from being constructed … as an Indian-headed token wooden Burning Man nickel so that we can absolve ourselves from not saying a damn thing about the other pipelines that are being planned and constructed during the time we’ve been virtually standing with Standing Rock with our armchair activism – and as a palliative pill that helps us sleep at night after taking our sweet time to provide clean water to the people of Flint! The lead sinkered sacrifice of a population of mostly black fellow citizens – mitakuye oyasin (mitakia wahsan) “all our relations”- – on our watch! On our watch… on our watch… tic toc tic toc ….zzzzz …But it’s not time to sleep people. It’s time to wake-up! It’s time to get woke! Getting woke means gaining perspective – historically and spiritually. It’s time to get historical perspective – seeing that at 240 years, we’re but a teenager within the global family of nations. It’s time to wake up to see that our collective torrid twitter tantrum is an adolescent rebellion. Teens do dumb stuff. They push limits, test boundaries, and act impulsively – with brains that aren’t fully developed. Their frontal lobes haven’t thickened to put a needed check to their hormonal outbursts and eruptions. The global community looks on with dismay – but they aren’t freaking out. They raise their eyes and roll them. They’ve seen it all before. Over the centuries, they’ve seen imperial young bucks flex their muscles, thump their chests, and strut around like cocky red bulls in a china shop with impetuous arrogant swagger saying that they’re Number One & that God Bless Whateverica has a special hard-on for them. The world wise web knows that we learn and grow through the dynamic process of * thesis * antithesis * synthesis. Thesis – learning the cultural norms, values, and conventions that are presented Antithesis – rejecting those norms, values, and conventions Synthesis – reinterpreting norms, values, and conventions in new ways, with needed adjustments, on our own terms in our own ways that make sense today. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. And are we ever in the midst of antithesis. We, changed our clocks back for Daylights Savings Time and then we pell-mell voted to set progress back 50 years or more! And it’s time to get spiritual perspective – seeing that we don’t have to view chaos as unwelcome or to be avoided. Seeing that chaos is an essential part of real authentic life. We don’t need to numb and distract ourselves with television or drugs of choice to take the constant edges off — instead we can own and shred the edge! we can learn to be with it we can grow toward being a less anxious presence we can learn to calmly tread water amidst the chaotic floods we can learn to relax, float, and breathe though we’re surrounded by the dangerous derelict debris of political, economic, and environmental train-wrecks we can learn to see that “this too shall pass” we can embrace Sojourner’s truth that “Hope is believing in spite of the evidence — and watching the evidence change.” I’ve seen things of great value lost – We don’t know what we have until it’s gone … get found again – and then transform into something entirely different and unexpected. “No one saw that coming!” Can I have a witness? We can learn to see that we can help hope’s evidence change by applying the theory of Spiritual Relativity You know it right! E = ??? … E= MC2! E – the Energy to do what it takes to move us into action toward health and transformation M – the MASS of US! The collective all of us. Combined we have mass – critical mass. The people together shall not be defeated! C – the constant. What’s the constant? C is L. The constant is Love — and squaring it is redundant – just a poetic flourish. And we have enough of it to inspire and move us from freaked … to fine. and C is also G — God. God is love. And there’s no fear in love. And nothing can separate us from the love of God. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow—not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love. No power in the sky above or in the earth below— (Romans 8:38-9) Nor a trumped-up bragadocious oligarchical ginger white-bred Corinthian leather wrapped, faux-wood veneered alt right administration! Love is what defines us we were born in love we live in love we die in love and rest assured love is where we’ll find ourselves whatever may happen after that! We weren’t given a spirit of fear or timidity but of power and love (2 Tim 1:7) Sometimes love is tough. And when you’re trying to raise a teenager- it’s time for tough love and logic. Our self-parenting love calls us to set boundaries and provide a container where we remind ourselves that there is such a thing as facts and facts matter There is such a thing as lying and telling the truth matters There is such a thing as nepotism, good ‘ol boy cronyism, and Richy Rich oligarchy and plutocracy – and they’re to be resisted! There is such a thing as Civil Rights There is such a thing as the rule of law There is such a thing as science There is such a thing as global warming There is such a thing as good stewardship of Creation There is such a thing as grace There is such a thing as God And when we aren’t perfect in love, when we do fear, when we forget about perspective, energy, hope and love, may we take turns reminding each other of who and Whose we are. We have the time. The time is now. Like Jesus’ mother Mary, let us ponder these things in our hearts and may we know when it’s time to become great with child and know when it’s time to give birth to who we really are — and grow past our adolescence into the full maturity of God’s people – God’s grown-ass men and women. Amen. ~ Rev. Roger Wolsey Originally preached Dec. 4, 2016 at Wesley Chapel, Boulder, CO [Updated Dec. 11, 2017] Read the essay online here. About the Author Rev. Roger Wolsey is an ordained United Methodist pastor who directs the Wesley Foundation at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and is author of Kissing Fish: christianity for people who don’t like christianity; The Kissing Fish Facebook page; Roger’s Blog on Patheos “The Holy Kiss” Question & Answer A Reader from the Internet, asks: Question: What does the Advent season call us to do in troubled times? Answer: By Rev. Irene Monroe Dear Reader, A Trump presidency is what I can best depict as a “disastrous opportunity,” because it encourages an intersectional dialogue as well as activism against potential erosion if not dismantling of decades-long civil rights gains. Americans on the margins have the most to lose in a country pivoting away from their full protections and participation in a multicultural democracy. However, while I am nervous I am also reminded of the 1960’s. During the U.S. civil rights movement of the 1960's, "the voice of one crying out in the wilderness" was the clarion call for justice. The voice that was heard articulated the trials and tribulations of black suffering under an unyielding reign of white supremacy in the United States. One voice in the movement was occasionally heard more loudly than others: the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who represented African Americans' collective voices crying out in the wilderness of America's racism. In the inimitable rhetorical style of the African-American jeremiad tradition, King's voice crying out in the wilderness of American racism is most remembered from his "I Have a Dream" speech. Like John the Baptist, who prepared the way for Jesus' public ministry in this gospel, the force and the momentum of the Civil Rights movement prepared the way for King's ministry. And like the way that John the Baptist's public preaching is most remembered and revered in this gospel where he quotes the prophet Isaiah, King, too, quoted the same words of the prophet Isaiah. Standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, speaking to a crowd of over 200,000, he said, "I have a dream that one day . . . 'every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plains, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.'" King saw America "in the wilderness" in that time when life was divided along a color line into distinctly black-and-white terms. And the wilderness experience of the 1960's for us Americans was due to racism. As a geophysical reality, the wilderness was the U.S. South. And the South represented a place unsuited for human habitation. It was a place of danger, inhospitality, marauding Ku Klux Klansmen, and ongoing chaos. During the time of King's address, the Southern states had long systematized a peculiar brand of justice with its "separate but equal" laws that allowed for separate drinking fountains, restrooms, restaurants, hotels, etc. The South was a place where the entire country could watch African Americans being subdued by blazing-water hoses or being charged by aggressive German shepherds on national television. But at night, when no one was watching, the Ku Klux Klan rode through black neighborhoods to burn their property and/or them, brandishing fire and terror as symbols of white supremacy. However, racism did not just situate itself unabashedly in the South, it also colored life in the North, albeit differently and less visibly. And although segregationist practices directly violated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, the federal government exerted little to no effort to enforce these amendments -- in either North or South. The wilderness, therefore, functions as multiple sites, and it can heal us as a people -- both the oppressed and the oppressor. The wilderness should not be seen as a permanent place in which one resides or into which one falls and gets stuck, but rather as a place of transition and growth, where radical transformation can take place. It should be used as an interpretative lens to look at reality from an involved, committed stance in light of a faith that does justice. The wilderness is where you see the face of the damned, the dispossessed, the disinherited, and the disrespected, and know that is your starting place. And for those in the wilderness, it is a space where liberation begins. The wilderness gives you the agency to effect change on your own behalf. It offers an oppositional gaze from which you can honestly critique the oppressive structures in society that keep us separated from who and what we are as the body of Christ. Advent invites us to journey into the wilderness. It does not invite us into the wilderness to put us on a road without signposts or a road map; instead, Advent invites us to journey into the wilderness as a shared experience of struggle, discovery, enlightenment, community, and liberation. It is only in a shared wilderness experience that the "voice of one crying out in the wilderness" becomes many and is heard. The Silence Breakers are the TIME person for 2017. It started with one voice that is now many and a worldwide #Me Too movement speaking out against sexual harassment and assault. ~ Rev. Irene Monroe Read and share online here About the Author The Reverend Monroe is an ordained minister. She does a weekly Monday segment, “All Revved Up!” on WGBH (89.7 FM), a Boston member station of National Public Radio (NPR), that is now a podcast, and a weekly Friday commentator on New England Channel NEWS (NECN). Monroe is the Boston voice for Detour’s African American Heritage Trail, Guided Walking Tour of Beacon Hill: Boston’s Black Women Abolitionists (Boston) - Detour Monroe’s a Huffington Post blogger and a syndicated religion columnist. Her columns appear in cities across the country and in the U.K, Ireland, Canada. Monroe writes a column in the Boston home LGBTQ newspaper Baywindows, Cambridge Chronicle, and Opinion pieces for the Boston Globe. Monroe stated that her "columns are an interdisciplinary approach drawing on critical race theory, African American, queer and religious studies. As an religion columnist I try to inform the public of the role religion plays in discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people. Because homophobia is both a hatred of the “other ” and it’s usually acted upon ‘in the name of religion,” by reporting religion in the news I aim to highlight how religious intolerance and fundamentalism not only shatters the goal of American democracy, but also aids in perpetuating other forms of oppression such as racism, sexism, classism and anti-Semitism.” Her papers are at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College's research library on the history of women in America. Click here to visit her website. _________________________________________________ Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited The Meaning of the Christmas Myths It is a beautiful time of the year. The celebration is in full swing. The symbols, some sacred, some quite secular, mingle in the market place: Bethlehem and the North Pole, the Angel Gabriel and Rudolf, the Heavenly Host and Santa's reindeer, crèche scenes and Christmas trees. It is also a season in which light hurls back the darkness of the winter solstice. Christmas captures our imaginations as few things ever do. Unfortunately the religious minds of our generation believe that these traditions can be protected from erosion only if they are literalized. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The deepest meaning of this season can never really be understood until literal claims have been laid aside. Jesus' birth was not something that occurred on a silent and holy night in the little town of Bethlehem. No star announced his birth and no angels sang of peace on earth. These mythical details rather embody a beautiful and eternal human dream that we enter symbolically year after year. Let me briefly analyze the data. Bethlehem as the birthplace of Jesus was a late developing part of the Jesus story that did not appear until the writing of the Gospel of Matthew in the 9th decade of the Christian era, when people began to claim that since Jesus was the anticipated messiah, he had to be the heir to the 'throne of David.' That idea carried with it the assumption that this future leader had to be born in the "City of David." The early Christians found scriptural authority for this claim in the prophet Micah, an 8th century BCE figure, who had written " But you O Bethlehem, who are little to be among the clans of Judah, but from you shall come forth from me one who is to be the ruler of Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days." Matthew had the scribes of Herod quote this text to the Wise Men as he directed them to Bethlehem. So important to Matthew was Jesus' royal lineage that he opened his gospel with a long genealogy, that we call the 'who begat whom' chapter, to document this claim. So Matthew tells his readers that Mary and Joseph actually lived permanently in a house in Bethlehem. It was such a specific house that a star could stop and shine directly on it to guide the wise men to their destination. It was a house that Matthew says they had to abandon when informed in a dream that their child was at risk from King Herod, who like the Pharaoh of old, was destroying Jewish male babies in an attempt to wipe out the promised deliverer. It was a house to which this family could return from Egypt when they heard that Herod had died. It was a house they abandoned once again when they learned that Herod's brother, who was equally dangerous, was now on the throne. This time they fled to Galilee and that, Matthew implies, is how Jesus just happened to grow up in Nazareth and why he became known as a Galilean and a Nazarene. Matthew's myth of Jesus' birth presents him as a new Moses, so that as God once led the chosen people out of Egypt, so God could now lead the chosen messiah out of Egypt. This narrative so clearly serves Matthew's apologetic purpose that it cannot be confused with history. The overwhelming probability is that Jesus was born in Nazareth, which is the clear assumption in Mark, the earliest gospel. Matthew, who had Mark before him when he wrote, is the one who altered the tradition. Luke, writing near the end of the 9th decade or perhaps even early in the 10th decade (88-93 CE), treated the developing Bethlehem tradition quite differently. Like Mark, Luke is quite clear that Mary and Joseph lived in Nazareth. However, he too must address the growing idea that Jesus, as messiah, is the heir to the Royal line of David. So Luke seeks to temper his story of Jesus' Nazareth origins (which were becoming too humble a place of birth for so great a person) to accommodate the Bethlehem tradition. His literary device for doing this was a census that he dates by saying it was ordered by Caesar Augustus when Quirinius was governor of Syria. This census, by which "all the world was to be enrolled," required, according to Luke, that every male person must return to his ancestral home to be registered. This meant, said Luke, that Joseph had to go to Bethlehem, a 94-mile journey from Nazareth, for he was of the house of David. So Joseph just happened to be in Bethlehem when his wife delivered her first-born child. Through this accident of history, Luke argues, the scriptures were fulfilled in Jesus. It was a very ingenious solution indeed since it enabled Luke to combine Jesus' obvious Nazareth origins with the fantasies building around Jesus, proclaiming him the Messiah born in the city of David. The most preliminary study will reveal, however, that the story is not history. Luke and Matthew, for example, both say that Herod was king at the time of the birth of Jesus. Since secular records reveal that Herod died in 4 BCE, this means that Jesus had to be born before this date. Luke then says that the enrollment, ordered by Caesar, came when Quirinius was governor of Syria. Secular records, however, reveal that Quirinius became governor of Syria in 6-7 CE, by which time Jesus would have been at least 10-11 years old. History begins to wobble visibly. Luke's theory required that this worldwide enrollment had to occur in the male person's ancestral home. This was the strangest literary wrinkle of all and would have required a massive dislocating migration. David, who had 300 wives, died about the year 960 BCE. Luke was asserting that all of the descendents of King David, whose number some 960 years later must have been legion, not only had to know this ancestral detail about themselves but they also had to make their way back to Bethlehem. This was a time in which human longevity made three generations a century normative, so we are talking about 27-30 generations of keeping family lines alive. To my knowledge no one, in that time when there were no birth or death certificates, to say nothing of marriage licenses, was that deeply into ancestor worship. It is also of interest that the genealogies of Jesus in both Matthew and Luke do not agree in almost any detail, including which of King David's sons constituted the royal line: it was Solomon says Matthew, Nathan says Luke. No one knows who Nathan is but if a man had as many wives as David, certainly one of his sons might have been called Nathan, or anything else for that matter. These genealogies also disagree on who Jesus' grandfather was: Jacob, says Matthew, Heli, says Luke. A final note that makes Luke's story clearly not history is that on this journey to Bethlehem Joseph was said to have taken his wife, who was "great with child." Why? To be enrolled? Women were not counted in a census, or registered for tax purposes. Women also did not normally travel. Given the mode of transportation available in that day, walking or riding a donkey, what man in his right mind would take an eight months plus pregnant woman on a 94 mile walk or donkey ride, that would normally take seven to ten days and in a world with no restaurants or hotels? One woman biblical scholar, on reading this observed, "Only a man who had never had a baby could have written such a story." No, the Bethlehem birthplace of Jesus is not history. It is part of the later developing mythology that gathered around the origins of Jesus. A person as significant as Jesus was believed to be when these later gospels were written could not have had an ordinary birth; so Matthew and Luke, 50 to 60 years after the crucifixion, freed their imaginations and created these miraculous tales that form our Christmas stories. Once the mythical content of the Bethlehem birthplace is established, all the other details of these birth narratives fall as literal history. Ancient astrologers did not follow a star announcing the birth of a Jewish king, especially one that no one recognized as a king until well after his death. Recall that Matthew says later that this king was also a carpenter's son. Nor do angels sing to hillside shepherds, propelling them on a similar journey to search for a baby. Luke gives the shepherds only two clues. The baby would be wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. We do both the Bible and human scholarship a grave disservice when we try to literalize and make history out of these interpretative myths, created by the second or third generation of those who were the disciples of this Jesus. No reputable biblical scholar in the world today, Catholic or Protestant, treats these narratives of Matthew and Luke as history. It is time the church said that publicly. Why do we then keep these stories and repeat them every year if they are not factually true? That is usually the question of an adult who has had his or her fairy tale religion shaken. The answer is simple. Truth is so much bigger than literalism. The meaning of Santa Claus, who receives his greatest joy by giving gifts to children, is not dependent on there being a literal fat elf dressed in red who lives in a place to which we can never go. Some human experiences are so large, so real, so life changing and so defining that the words used to describe those moments must break open the imagination if they are to capture this kind of truth. That is what myth does. That is what the biblical stories of Jesus' birth are all about. There was something present in this Jesus, they said, that opened human lives to new dimensions of reality. Human beings could never have produced what we have experienced in Jesus. In him, they exclaimed, we believe that we have met eternity breaking into time, transcendence entering the mundane, the divine in the life of the human. If that is our experience with the adult Jesus, then his birth must have been marked with heavenly signs that drew people to him. That is what these stories are trying to say. Our task is not to master the details or to pretend that myths are history. It is rather to enter the experience that caused the myths surrounding his birth to be born, to be transformed by that life and to become a new creation through that experience. If that occurs, these early Christians were saying, we too will see the star of Bethlehem, hear angels sing, and like the wise men and shepherds of old, begin our journey toward the mystery and wonder of God. Bethlehem, the symbolic town where God and human life come together, is finally our human destiny. That is the meaning of Christmas. ~John Shelby Spong Originally published December 22, 2004 Announcements Why Christianity Is No Longer Believable – And How We Can Change That Pre-order John Shelby Spong’s final book, "Unbelievable" Five hundred years after Martin Luther and his Ninety-Five Theses ushered in the Reformation, bestselling author and controversial bishop and teacher John Shelby Spong delivers twelve forward-thinking theses to spark a new reformation to reinvigorate Christianity and ensure its future. ................

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Greetings of this blessed season
by Jann McGuire 21 Dec '17

21 Dec '17

Elements of Jann’s year, December 17, 2017 Earth: Upon completing 80 years, I suppose one must expect physical challenges. A cardiac ultrasound in August revealed that my atrial valve will need to be replaced. It didn’t seem to be a problem until I developed atrial fibrillation in October. Taking a blood thinner for th e condition has been a see-saw process. Started with 10 mg coumadin daily -- too thin; down to 1 mg -- too thick. Every blood check is a surprise. On Nov. 16, I had a cardioversion shock treatment to get back to regular rhythm. Worked well. On Dec. 6, I had a cardiac angiogram which revealed I’m not at high risk. I’ll go to Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute for a consultation the day after Christmas and hopefully to schedule surgery. Water: The emotional aspect of my life had its ups and downs. High points were: * An over-the-top birthday bash hosted by my sons: threedays at beautiful Lake Nacimiento. I hope all of you who came and/or sent cards and gifts know how deeply touched and appreciative I feel, still basking in the glow. *My 22nd annual retreat with the beloved wild wise women circle near Seattle in July. They staged a delightful “Dangerous Old Woman” event to start me on my 81 st year. I stayed with Sharon Fisher’s gracious family a few extra days to see the awesome Chinese terra cotta warriors. *Three days in September in a luxurious lodge near Mineral King, with Scott’s and Barry’s families, including Johnna, who now blesses Scott’s and our family’s life. She and her family hosted us for Thanksgiving, a beautiful feast. Low points were: *The death in June of Kristin Knutson, Joan’s daughter, born the same year as my daughter Suzanne. We wise women celebrated Kristin’s life with stories and bubbles. *The illness and death of my dear friend, teacher and spiritual mentor, Bob Goings. I sorrowfully wrote his obituary and was able to share in enabling the celebration of his life. This loss helped me to grieve previous losses in a more profound way. Air :The mental aspect of the year was enhanced by joining a local book club , motivating more reading, and and a politically progressive women’s huddle, with study of current events to resist the extreme right wing agenda. I’m reading Sisters in Law at the moment. Clarissa Pinkola Estes” book, The Dangerous Old Woman was my favorite. Have enjoyed studying with Lynne McTaggart online. Fire: Sage-hood is essentially spiritual . Throughout this year, I’ve increased in my awareness of how deeply each creature is loved by the Divine Giver of Life. Silence, stillness and meditation have nurtured me. *We who gather at my house each moon share our joys, sorrows and cares. *Recently the wise women connect energetically in a scattered circle each night around 9:00. We light candles from Port Townsend to Seattle, to Macomb, IL to Phoenix to Los Angeles to Lindsay to Eugene, OR.. The circle prays for physical, emotional, mental and spiritual healing for ourselves and the world. May we all be blessed to love each present moment of our precious lives.. Thank you for being part of mine. With love and prayers and the hope for PEACE ON EARTH,

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