No church is exclusively right on target…

So then, am I a liberal, a universalist or someone who just thinks there is nothing to be right about?

If my thinking fitted well within the liberal camps, I would be trying to tone down religious features that don’t ring true to how things are today. If I were a universalist, I would be advocating a prejudiced exclusion of uncommon features from the world religions so that what is left appears to fit together. If I figured that there is no complete picture of reality, I would promote this stance only because there is no target to hit.

Each stance is a remake of the same struggles I see within my own favored “denomination”. It, also, fits well with what I knew growing up as a Baptist, and later training as a pastor in the Christian Church. My move over to the politely liturgical Episcopal Church exposed me to just another fashion of what I’d seen in the prior two. My last move into the Eastern Orthodox surfaced another ancient and dynamic struggle. Being engaged in an old liturgical worship I’ve caught wind of the melody underlying all the other shared struggles.

Yes, there are strict and serious differences among these groups. Each, in viable ways, disagree with one another, but our disagreements are seated in conceptions built within a questionable bias. Of necessity, all of the arguments are shaped from within a shared belief that our points of reference are sufficient.

Mounting my way of seeing self and God on how “I and my favored group” think of reality portrays my trust as seated on me and that group rather than on God. Yet, I also question my reliance on that supposedly individual point of view. Confusing, isn’t it. My, I hope child-like and not childish, effort is to use but not trust in my view of things. At the same time, I do try to repeatedly lay my use of those things before that One. Choosing to try and learn to not trust in us is deeply conflicted but what I’m struggling to take on.

a comment on, “Is sport a religion?”

Nigel Barber via a blog in Psychology Today wrote about “The psychology and social impact of spectators,” published in 2001. It was delightful reading about someone else spouting off on a seeming commonality between our sports world and religion. Like sports, people do use times of worship as a vehicle to take a ride with friends.

We do entertain ourselves and not just with sports. I do not think of seeking pleasure in worship as bad. My preference of the repetitive fashions in Eastern Orthodox worship strikes common cords in my personality.

Nigel exclusively framed, along with Daniel Wann, et. al. the whole issue as if religion were just a more complexed social activity. I agree with them, but only to a degree. My disagreement might be offensive, though, to many friends within Christianity. For me, what Nigel Barber pointed at in “Is sport a religion?” is the effect of our fitting God to self, rather than the other way around.

Jesus statement, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Ye seek me, not because ye saw the miracles, but because ye did eat of the loaves, and were filled.” (Jn 6:26) is as common today. In ways I see myself as part of the crowd Jesus pushed away. Again, I don’t see desiring worship that fits best to me as wrong. I see the problem resting in our exclusively fashioning worship for comforts sake. I am afraid that our seeking what harmonizes well with self too deeply is also an insidious effort to keep God at a distance.

A complaint as common as fights between couples is boredom. When the couple avoid conflict so that only a few common cords are struck between them, they effectively hold themselves hostage. I am concerned that this is an unspoken function in all denominations of Christianity.

Guilt by Association

PhysOrg today put out a brief article called, “Gene function discovery: Guilt by association“. One little chuck of the whole thing struck home. Sue Rhee at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Plant Biology made a powerful comment. Her saying, “We call it guilt by association. Based on over 50 million scientific observations,…” powerfully links to the picture I hold close to my heart.

None of us can see the whole picture.  Too few us own the inductive applications we make of the fragments of deductive truth. Any time that I read an owning of our shards of truth my heart is reinforced in hoping. Hope that even a few of us continue catching onto the incompleteness of the human ability to see the whole picture.

Grappling with Reality

Like all the rest of us, I want to believe that we can and eventually will know the fullness of reality. I desire to really know things! So what if that proves or disproves my belief in the Risen Christ?

My stance, I know, contradicts in one direction and is seen as conflictual in the other. My faith in Christ, I know, has no deductive proof. The chance that there is something out there which is god, as my best friends, who are Evangelical Atheists, say is too small to be even taken in faith. Yet, I see both sides deeply conflicted with their own positions.

I see my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ as deeply conflicted as I see my friends who see the religious as grossly repressive. My view rests on a simple issue. How are any of us to go about assuredly distinguishing between inductive and deductive established stances?

Almost to a person, my fellow believers in the crucified Christ, will nearly yell that they have no conflict with Him in whom each trusts. If that were true, why then do they argue among themselves about whose faith is properly structured?

I may, very well, get a perplexed look from my equally faith structured friends who call themselves atheists. On what does each of them rest their point? It is built on a deeply inductive stance that as we come to finally see the whole of reality such will demonstrate that the ideas of religion will be excluded.

On what does their position rest? First, it rests on a shared belief that the spiritual is incongruent with reality. Of itself such a stance rests a belief that there can be no relationship between the two. I take the stance that the lack of relationship between the two rests on the incompleteness of our current knowledge base.

Second, which rides on the first point, in time people will see the fullness of reality. It is this point of which I am deeply critical. How am I to deductively know that the human is truly capable of taking in the whole of reality? Taking the stance that reality is congruent does not serve as proof that we will finally see the whole thing. What isn’t addressed is whether the human both within what we are evolving into and have yet to accomplish is capable of absorbing the whole.

Such is an inductive stance. I’m yet unaware of any means for deductively establishing any of these positions. Do we know that what we have yet to discover will fit within the framings we’ve accomplished so far? Do we know that humanity is truly capable of grasping the whole of what is real?

Conflicts

I figure that, to a person, we’ve all known conflicts and we’ve been there repeatedly. Few of us, though, were raised watching family and friends accommodate to conflicts. Learning to not just think in the ‘either or’ fashion I was raised in was a godsend from the deans of a little bible college. However, I have to say that my graduate school of social work, from the opposite direction, did not teach well how to accommodate to life. Like most conservatives, those professors and my peers sought in as full a fashion as conservatives to make everyone over in their own images.

Later, I caught sight of the same problem from another direction. My “interpretations” of a client’s behaviors, repeatedly, got me hit between the eyes by a few of my peers. Discovering my own ‘projections of commonality’ onto the client wasn’t comfortable then and still isn’t. Exclusively using what I was taught to see, in graduate school in the client/patient is a common stumbling block. As I progressed, I caught sight of older issues being faultily used to interpret the client and increasingly myself.

It isn’t that the old Freudian all the way to our heavily working the biological foundations of behaviors are totally wrong. By not drawing together a whole picture, including what I personally don’t agree with, I was not accommodating to reality. Accommodation doesn’t mean that I give in to the other, but that I am willing to rework, myself. Any reworking of what I do, doesn’t force me to accept that other person’s efforts to remake me in their image. No! My reworking of myself after catching sight of me in the other person is for me.

For a while, this budding realization did much more than disquiet me. Sight of my failing to keep hold of self, knowing at the same time that not all of what I was holding on to was right generated so much emotional strife. During a few years of ebbing distress a necessary transition was simultaneously waxing. That transition drew out conflicts I had not anticipated. None of what I had learned at home, in college or grad school proved a bedrock on which I could build my new edifice.

Only by discovering a few people, themselves engaged in the same, was I able to actually begin delving into myself. I recommend, out of my experience, that we all begin with our children to teach them to both accept what we tell them while learning to think for themselves. Those two points are not in conflict, unless we, exclusively, take one position or the other. As a dad, I’ve learned to not absolutely trust in how I do things and so to not force them on my kids, and now, especially on adult children.

Teaching a child to positively question you with our positively living out a critique and acceptance of their way can set the stage. We must teach them to both walk with the crowd, sometimes, and to walk against the crowd at other times. Unless people are readily able to do this, they are living out the same mistake made from opposite directions.

Prayer

Said to fix things, such prayers are basic refusals to accept the answer.

Too many of the prayers brought up as part of my clients therapy sessions rested on “Why won’t God take care of me?” Such questions were nested in a simple expectation. If God cared for me then He’d do things as I think. About the same number of clients with similar complaints linked those to their denominations.

Needing to working with the person in both directly taking on their problem(s) and to learn a reason for things just not happening, for me, proved a seriously deep challenge. Like most of the rest of the protestant christian world, I was raised expecting a one-on-one relationship between what I knew as good and what God was going to accomplish in my life. Too often, that stance generated a jeremiad from my clients and me.

My years of hearing such encouraged my shifting attention. Was the problem God’s not answering prayers or that the answers didn’t fit, in the least, to my expectations?

It was from this reframing that I began an adventure. Prayer began becoming a release from my expectations. Across those years, I’ve learned to release myself from more than my own hopes. Critical to the point is that the ‘release’ I’m thinking of is not abandonment of my conjectures of God’s expectations. I have to use what I have in hand. Like a child, I have to use what is in hand for play. Unless I play with what I have I can’t learn. By playing out what I saw mom and dad doing I learned. Prayer, in this fashion, became part of child-like play.

Step-by-step God has taken me from maybe six months to 7 or 8 months of age across the past 20 or so years of such prayer. I know that doesn’t sound like much advancement, but realize that I treat the likes of the Apostles Paul or John as no more than 3 years of age.

Across these years, I’ve been encouraged to be humble in my prayers. No longer expecting that my prayer life will work out as expected has, kind of, forced me into an unfolding of humility.  Here lies the deepest challenge to a walk with the Risen Christ. Becoming willing to let Him refashion me rather than trusting in my own, let alone your grasp of things has penetrated deeply.

Comments on “Amazon losing “Flying Rivers,” Ability to Curb Warming”

As I’ve said before, I don’t think that current images of Global Warming fit to expectations. Most of us either argue for or against ‘it.’ Some are doubtfully pointing out faults in both directions. Those doubts rest on the too obvious power struggles among groups within and among the whole picture.

In Amazon Losing “Flying Rivers,” Ability to Curb Warming from National Geographic, I caught in its’ first paragraph an unspoken cyclical conflict. Common to National Geographic’ this well formed article does not address the full cycle. It is true that within the Amazon basin we are seeing ‘nature’ adjusting to what farming and energy industries are causing. Why, though, don’t we see the full picture of what has energized their reshaping of those human activities?

From my point of view, adding in the dual forces of nearly 7 billion people and our current tendency to live in dense clusters better fills out that cycle. By living in this fashion we cannot feed ourselves. We, also, insist on a life style that requires vast amounts of energy. For the moment, our entire struggle is to hide from ourselves the real criminal. Until humanity, on the whole, accepts that there is no escaping from our having gone past the boundary of how many can be here and that we cannot ‘compensate’ to that boundary by striving to keep a lifestyle, we are all guilty.

“Everybody lies differently”

No, I didn’t say this, it is the title I pulled from Psychology Today. Like I said on my Facebook page, make this a self-critique while reading this article. Greater benefits come from knowing yourself, than by just learning to better read the other person. So few of us, honestly, recognize those fabrications we made even in the course of short comments. It was to fraud the other, but to better frame self.

I don’t see that type of common behavior as “wrong” but rather the groundwork we look for in that other person. Which of us doesn’t listen for common threads in that other person’s conversation? We all listen for those fabrications meant to support the point.

As you critique yourself, in this area of life, do so without intending to stop lying. Work at catching sight of your own fabrications and so your vulnerability to what you hope for with the other.

I could kick myself . . .

. . . for forgetting what masochism means!

Government

For years, I’ve felt uncomfortable with our supposed fashionings of this nation out of mixed versions of Christianity. Those nations of rather dominant Anglican, Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox versions make me feel awkward but not like my own country. Voicing such discomfort makes, at least, a few aghast. Having been raised a Baptist, trained as a pastor in the Christian Church/Churches of Christ, who later moved in with the Episcopalians and now is a reader in the Eastern Orthodox  you’d think that I’d never think this, but I did even then.

From early on, I have stood with the prophet Samuel on this issue. His resisting the people’s call for a king resonates well with my discomfort over a Christian nation. Those uncomfortable with my point might comeback with, “If ‘we’ don’t strive to Christianize the United States we will fall. If we fall then we will not be able to effectively evangelize the world!” My response will be, “Why do you link our political and economic dominance with effective evangelization?”

Is that framing only because winning people to Jesus is wanted? Comfortably, I say, No! Our history is replete with grievous effects of the formal Church calling the shots. We need to let go of this. In response, I’m certain that one of the first comebacks will be, “Then you don’t want to help people find Jesus! You just want to go into hiding.” My answer is, “No, I want us to stop making converts over in our own image.  I want us to stop cushioning ourselves with vast numbers of converts from the consequences of our feeble fashions of following the Risen Christ.”

I fear that the vast majority of Christians, on all sides, are like those who left Jesus when he wouldn’t feed them, heal them, or cast the Roman’s from them (Jn 6). How far down will the population of the Church fall as this country loses favor? Or suppose that the tithe ceases being a desired tax cushion.

As the Church, within this country, has receded from housing close to the majority or at least the most vocal of voters its’ power has fallen back. Rather than watching adults, who were acculturated in Christian fashions, leave we are seeing our children do that. I feel that they are living out why the masses abandoned Jesus’ following his refusal to fill empty stomachs. I then hold us, their parents, responsible because we have lived out, before them, why they shouldn’t be following Him.