Our Hope, within us and around us,
Today, may our lives give to and reflect your holiness.
Oh Creation, through us and through the world let your glory show.
Let us be open to the ways of mystery and creativity.
May we be blessed today with your spirit,
And given as much grace as we are willing to give to others.
Help us to act rightly and with reverence towards life in all of our doings,
And may we find our day filled with peace and safety.
Let it be so.
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Further Reflections on the Nature of Prayer in a Non-Theistic Scheme
Again these are better described as snippets rather than well formulated ideas but here they are for better or for worse.
Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming and he answered, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is within you.”
- Luke 17.20-21
If we reject the “I-Thou” relationship between God, persons, and the world, then we must accept that, for whatever prayer is to be, whatever it is to accomplish, it must occur within the realm of creation alone, and more specifically within humanity. There is no supernatural Thou or realm towards which to direct prayer. This does not deny that there may be some such thing as spirit. Rather, spirit, or whatever it might be, remains mired in this world, in earthiness and in matter. It is at home in the universe, to borrow a phrase from Stuart Kauffman, just as are we humans and everything else that exists.
The active force of prayer – what it may or may not bring about – exists in this realm alone as there is no other. This gives us an insight towards the nature of prayer. It is this worldly – bringing about some thing or things within this world.
So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!
- 2 Corinthians 5:17
One issue to overcome is the notion that there is a great disparity between the end result of a person’s life of faith and their current state. Indeed this is not helped by the language of the New Testament, rife as it is with verses expounding on the new creation, etc. I do not with to say that there is error in this plethora of “newness,” yet I do feel that it is misunderstood or at least that this idea of the new creation must also be re-interpreted just as prayer should be.
The issue begins from a misconception of the nature of humanity. Due to the doctrine of original sin (along with others), so embedded within all of Christian thought, the new creation is seen to be something that overcomes a moral defect. The Christian life becomes then merely a challenge for the Christian to do good, to sin no more. While there is nothing wrong with this attempt, the focus upon sin as the impediment between God and humanity limits the potential for the creative transformation with the Christian. This new creature is limited to a being that merely attempts harder and harder to refrain from sin, becoming a moral athlete.
Importantly these sins are of a personal nature and this struggle to overcome personal shortcomings spirals downward leaving the Christian a sad depressed individual forever gazing upon their sins, constantly failing.
We forget that the new creation is still a creation. In following the Christ we do not lose our humanity. Rather our humanity is made aware of the potential for creative growth to explore afresh what it means to be human. Christ is not for us to become non-human but rather to become more human, to embrace those qualities that define us as such. Too often these aspirations are viewed as folly, being impossible or something that is to come in the future, implemented by God at the end of time. This is the worst possible interpretation available today. What is required of Christ today is a way for us to become through our humanity a new creature...a new human, but still so very human.
Pray without ceasing.
- 1 Thessalonians 5.17
It is in embracing this humanity that we look now at prayer. Prayer is a way of living. Due to the “I-Thou” misunderstanding of God, the format for prayer is often only conceivable as communication rather than action. One cannot pray to something as there is nothing to pray to. That is, it is commonly understood that prayer is simply a communication between the divine and the individual or group. So if we remove God from the equation we are left, if we continue only with prayer as conversation, a one-sided conversation. Clearly then, if we are to retain prayer as an important action of faith, we must redefine prayer.
What is it we want from prayer? What do we hope to get out of it? Can we delineate prayer from other things? I think we can because prayer, whatever our final definition may be, it seems to be different from other actions. But, if we are to take the injunction of 1 Thessalonians seriously, this separation could be a problem. Our faith should be something that is indistinguishable from the rest of our life. Our life should be our faith and our faith should be our life. How far then can we claim prayer to be an intentional act?
Unconscious/ Habitual Prayer and Intentional Prayer
I would like to say that prayer is an action. This is obvious I suppose, but I think that it is important to stress that prayer is something that one does. It is said that we are to pray without ceasing. Yet if prayer is an action, it seems an impossible task to be constantly engaged in an intentional act.
The life of faith is a series of assents to various propositions resulting in a commitment to a particular orientation of one’s life. Faith is not a separate thing to be distinguished from the person, bur rather is the entire constitution of the person. I have initially distinguished between two different manifestations of prayer, that of unconscious or habitual prayer and that of intentional prayer. Unconscious or habitual prayer could be equated to breathing. It is an action that occurs without any pre-conscious decision to engage in that act. And it is in this way that we can pray without ceasing. The essence of this prayer is awareness of existence through the paradigm of the Christ, the new creation. It is unconscious or habitual because as it is indistinguishable from our personal existence - it is who we are and how we see the world.
It is when we become focused and immediately aware of this orientation of our existence through the paradigm of the Christ - the new creation - that we can engage in intentional prayer. Personal prayer then is precisely these moment of intense, intentional, (or accidental) awareness of the new creation. Liturgical or group prayer could be understood as an opening up – a listening to and participation in- a communal conversation. In this act, the group is listening to and speaking to the shared communal beliefs, concerns, and orientation. In both personal and liturgical/ group prayer, the communicative act occurs through the orientation of the person/ group toward the Christ.
The paradigm of the new creation, of the Christ, is marked by empathy with life, appreciation of one’s position within it, forgiveness of others, and openness to the immense possibilities of creativity that exist within us and through us. When we are thus open to this way of seeing the world, when our thought or action become shaped by these, we are engaged in prayer as our entire being is at that time given definition and form by Christ. And it is through this that our creativity, the creative movement that is God, is able to be directed via the paradigm of Christ.
Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming and he answered, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed; nor will they say ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is within you.”
- Luke 17.20-21
If we reject the “I-Thou” relationship between God, persons, and the world, then we must accept that, for whatever prayer is to be, whatever it is to accomplish, it must occur within the realm of creation alone, and more specifically within humanity. There is no supernatural Thou or realm towards which to direct prayer. This does not deny that there may be some such thing as spirit. Rather, spirit, or whatever it might be, remains mired in this world, in earthiness and in matter. It is at home in the universe, to borrow a phrase from Stuart Kauffman, just as are we humans and everything else that exists.
The active force of prayer – what it may or may not bring about – exists in this realm alone as there is no other. This gives us an insight towards the nature of prayer. It is this worldly – bringing about some thing or things within this world.
So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!
- 2 Corinthians 5:17
One issue to overcome is the notion that there is a great disparity between the end result of a person’s life of faith and their current state. Indeed this is not helped by the language of the New Testament, rife as it is with verses expounding on the new creation, etc. I do not with to say that there is error in this plethora of “newness,” yet I do feel that it is misunderstood or at least that this idea of the new creation must also be re-interpreted just as prayer should be.
The issue begins from a misconception of the nature of humanity. Due to the doctrine of original sin (along with others), so embedded within all of Christian thought, the new creation is seen to be something that overcomes a moral defect. The Christian life becomes then merely a challenge for the Christian to do good, to sin no more. While there is nothing wrong with this attempt, the focus upon sin as the impediment between God and humanity limits the potential for the creative transformation with the Christian. This new creature is limited to a being that merely attempts harder and harder to refrain from sin, becoming a moral athlete.
Importantly these sins are of a personal nature and this struggle to overcome personal shortcomings spirals downward leaving the Christian a sad depressed individual forever gazing upon their sins, constantly failing.
We forget that the new creation is still a creation. In following the Christ we do not lose our humanity. Rather our humanity is made aware of the potential for creative growth to explore afresh what it means to be human. Christ is not for us to become non-human but rather to become more human, to embrace those qualities that define us as such. Too often these aspirations are viewed as folly, being impossible or something that is to come in the future, implemented by God at the end of time. This is the worst possible interpretation available today. What is required of Christ today is a way for us to become through our humanity a new creature...a new human, but still so very human.
Pray without ceasing.
- 1 Thessalonians 5.17
It is in embracing this humanity that we look now at prayer. Prayer is a way of living. Due to the “I-Thou” misunderstanding of God, the format for prayer is often only conceivable as communication rather than action. One cannot pray to something as there is nothing to pray to. That is, it is commonly understood that prayer is simply a communication between the divine and the individual or group. So if we remove God from the equation we are left, if we continue only with prayer as conversation, a one-sided conversation. Clearly then, if we are to retain prayer as an important action of faith, we must redefine prayer.
What is it we want from prayer? What do we hope to get out of it? Can we delineate prayer from other things? I think we can because prayer, whatever our final definition may be, it seems to be different from other actions. But, if we are to take the injunction of 1 Thessalonians seriously, this separation could be a problem. Our faith should be something that is indistinguishable from the rest of our life. Our life should be our faith and our faith should be our life. How far then can we claim prayer to be an intentional act?
Unconscious/ Habitual Prayer and Intentional Prayer
I would like to say that prayer is an action. This is obvious I suppose, but I think that it is important to stress that prayer is something that one does. It is said that we are to pray without ceasing. Yet if prayer is an action, it seems an impossible task to be constantly engaged in an intentional act.
The life of faith is a series of assents to various propositions resulting in a commitment to a particular orientation of one’s life. Faith is not a separate thing to be distinguished from the person, bur rather is the entire constitution of the person. I have initially distinguished between two different manifestations of prayer, that of unconscious or habitual prayer and that of intentional prayer. Unconscious or habitual prayer could be equated to breathing. It is an action that occurs without any pre-conscious decision to engage in that act. And it is in this way that we can pray without ceasing. The essence of this prayer is awareness of existence through the paradigm of the Christ, the new creation. It is unconscious or habitual because as it is indistinguishable from our personal existence - it is who we are and how we see the world.
It is when we become focused and immediately aware of this orientation of our existence through the paradigm of the Christ - the new creation - that we can engage in intentional prayer. Personal prayer then is precisely these moment of intense, intentional, (or accidental) awareness of the new creation. Liturgical or group prayer could be understood as an opening up – a listening to and participation in- a communal conversation. In this act, the group is listening to and speaking to the shared communal beliefs, concerns, and orientation. In both personal and liturgical/ group prayer, the communicative act occurs through the orientation of the person/ group toward the Christ.
The paradigm of the new creation, of the Christ, is marked by empathy with life, appreciation of one’s position within it, forgiveness of others, and openness to the immense possibilities of creativity that exist within us and through us. When we are thus open to this way of seeing the world, when our thought or action become shaped by these, we are engaged in prayer as our entire being is at that time given definition and form by Christ. And it is through this that our creativity, the creative movement that is God, is able to be directed via the paradigm of Christ.
Is Heaven Necessary?
(A quick caveat here…these thoughts are less organized and developed than I had hoped. Nevertheless I felt it would be good to get them out into their own realm of existence to grow or ferment for some time. Perhaps then I can come back to them to see how if and how they have grown or withered. There may be some repetition in the ideas so I apologize for any confusion that may cause to the reader.)
My father died this weekend from cancer that had spread from one of his kidneys to his liver and pancreas. In the end it was his body’s inability to remove toxins from his systems that took his life. When I last say him, his skin was jaundiced and had almost a greasy texture – the skin excreting poisons as his body’s last attempt to remedy itself. It was pure life struggling to continue on living at that point – assignments being given to organs and systems not appropriate for the given task.
I am not looking forward to his funeral. Even at the time of his death family members and friends were talking about how he had “gone home” or “gone on to a better place.” And I am almost certain that the sermon to be given at his funeral will include some sort of attempt to save the unsaved with a salvation message.
As we picked out a casket and went over other funeral arrangements the thought was reinforced in me at how all of these motions and preparations are for the living and not the dead.
I am thinking about all the ideas surrounding salvation and heaven and the afterlife. How comforting an idea it is that, whatever might occur to us while we are living, we can rest on some concept of heaven or a subjective afterlife.
As Christians we profess that there is some sort of afterlife or resurrection of the dead and the focal point of this belief is the resurrection of Christ. The comforting hope of an afterlife is all that we have and I should like to stress that it is exactly that – a hope. Nowadays though with so much of my personal theology up for grabs as it were there is not resting for me on the promise of an afterlife or resurrection. And so I see the promises and statements of faith regarding these as being there as hope for the living- hope to help us deal with the frightening thought of non-existence.
My theological struggles center around trying to find or develop a faith that I can claim as my own and that fits with my person including my worries, fears, hopes and earnest desire to live a proper life. And this struggle has ended up with a massing tearing away at those beliefs embedded within me from childhood.
I have remained intellectually quiet on the prospects of an afterlife for one because there have been so many other pressing issues to consider first. Nevertheless, the ramifications of some of my leanings in other areas have silently affected my beliefs regarding what happens after death.
The belief in an afterlife as some sort of reward or for any other purposes is (and others might be in agreement with this) a coping strategy for the existential fear of the prospect of not existing. More precisely, it is for the fear of not subjectively existing. We wish to know that our subjective consciousness will not end in death, that we will, in some form, retain our psychical sense of self beyond our death.
I cannot in good conscience make any faith statement about this issue as fact, but rather only as hope. Unfortunately, in ways often unspoken, this hope for an afterlife underpins the various Christian denominations in existence today. For them the security of the afterlife is obtained through practices and creeds and prayers.
This is a great stumbling block for our faith while at the same time it is the locus of our faith. Would it have been better if the Church arouse out of the ashes not of the Easter experience but something else instead? Yet I know and feel deep down that the notion of life rising out of destruction – of the hope placed in such possibility is central to our faith. Perhaps it is simply because it makes a shift from being a thing hoped for to a belief which gives a certainty to it that it does not deserve?
If heaven remains only a hope, then perhaps the focus could, as it should, be returned to this life and this world. When the object, the central premise of a faith is that of an afterlife then the faith, in my view, becomes useless. A faith, as an orientation of ones life, as the way ones life becomes constituted, should be focused on this world and this world alone.
As I more and more work towards building a personal faith that is focused and based in this world and as my view of God becomes that of an impersonal deity, I wonder how that central purpose of heaven – the promise of better things to come- fits in. Indeed the issue that it addresses – existential fear of non-existence – does not disappear. Therefore some answer regarding what happens when one dies must be reached.
What I want to say next may hot make that much sense. There is room for spirit, I believe, in any newer theology that emerges from explorations into a non-personal, non-agential concept of God and the world. However, the discovery of that spirit – rather than coming from some outer realms, the separate world of the old theistic God – will come from diving deep into existence, into the stuff of the universe. Spirit will emerge out of matter. And this will be extremely hard and it will in some way require the cataclysmic destruction of our current outlook on our relationship as a species to nature and the world. In order for spirit to arise we will need to demolish the mental separation that exists in our perception of ourselves as separate from the cosmos. Perhaps it is not unexpected that heaven is described as a city – as a human construction.
I feel, although I cannot hope to prove, that spirit will be found within, deep down entrenched in ourselves , our bodies, our matter, our earthiness. And I do not necessarily think that we can retain a view of a heaven that is the abode of spirit only. The other route is to find that a heaven is not necessary. It would require an antidote to the existential fear of non-existence for that is an issue that will never go away. Thus the persistence even today in the vision of heaven and afterlife as commonly understood.
Can we find a hope- a comfort- that does not require a heaven?
My father died this weekend from cancer that had spread from one of his kidneys to his liver and pancreas. In the end it was his body’s inability to remove toxins from his systems that took his life. When I last say him, his skin was jaundiced and had almost a greasy texture – the skin excreting poisons as his body’s last attempt to remedy itself. It was pure life struggling to continue on living at that point – assignments being given to organs and systems not appropriate for the given task.
I am not looking forward to his funeral. Even at the time of his death family members and friends were talking about how he had “gone home” or “gone on to a better place.” And I am almost certain that the sermon to be given at his funeral will include some sort of attempt to save the unsaved with a salvation message.
As we picked out a casket and went over other funeral arrangements the thought was reinforced in me at how all of these motions and preparations are for the living and not the dead.
I am thinking about all the ideas surrounding salvation and heaven and the afterlife. How comforting an idea it is that, whatever might occur to us while we are living, we can rest on some concept of heaven or a subjective afterlife.
As Christians we profess that there is some sort of afterlife or resurrection of the dead and the focal point of this belief is the resurrection of Christ. The comforting hope of an afterlife is all that we have and I should like to stress that it is exactly that – a hope. Nowadays though with so much of my personal theology up for grabs as it were there is not resting for me on the promise of an afterlife or resurrection. And so I see the promises and statements of faith regarding these as being there as hope for the living- hope to help us deal with the frightening thought of non-existence.
My theological struggles center around trying to find or develop a faith that I can claim as my own and that fits with my person including my worries, fears, hopes and earnest desire to live a proper life. And this struggle has ended up with a massing tearing away at those beliefs embedded within me from childhood.
I have remained intellectually quiet on the prospects of an afterlife for one because there have been so many other pressing issues to consider first. Nevertheless, the ramifications of some of my leanings in other areas have silently affected my beliefs regarding what happens after death.
The belief in an afterlife as some sort of reward or for any other purposes is (and others might be in agreement with this) a coping strategy for the existential fear of the prospect of not existing. More precisely, it is for the fear of not subjectively existing. We wish to know that our subjective consciousness will not end in death, that we will, in some form, retain our psychical sense of self beyond our death.
I cannot in good conscience make any faith statement about this issue as fact, but rather only as hope. Unfortunately, in ways often unspoken, this hope for an afterlife underpins the various Christian denominations in existence today. For them the security of the afterlife is obtained through practices and creeds and prayers.
This is a great stumbling block for our faith while at the same time it is the locus of our faith. Would it have been better if the Church arouse out of the ashes not of the Easter experience but something else instead? Yet I know and feel deep down that the notion of life rising out of destruction – of the hope placed in such possibility is central to our faith. Perhaps it is simply because it makes a shift from being a thing hoped for to a belief which gives a certainty to it that it does not deserve?
If heaven remains only a hope, then perhaps the focus could, as it should, be returned to this life and this world. When the object, the central premise of a faith is that of an afterlife then the faith, in my view, becomes useless. A faith, as an orientation of ones life, as the way ones life becomes constituted, should be focused on this world and this world alone.
As I more and more work towards building a personal faith that is focused and based in this world and as my view of God becomes that of an impersonal deity, I wonder how that central purpose of heaven – the promise of better things to come- fits in. Indeed the issue that it addresses – existential fear of non-existence – does not disappear. Therefore some answer regarding what happens when one dies must be reached.
What I want to say next may hot make that much sense. There is room for spirit, I believe, in any newer theology that emerges from explorations into a non-personal, non-agential concept of God and the world. However, the discovery of that spirit – rather than coming from some outer realms, the separate world of the old theistic God – will come from diving deep into existence, into the stuff of the universe. Spirit will emerge out of matter. And this will be extremely hard and it will in some way require the cataclysmic destruction of our current outlook on our relationship as a species to nature and the world. In order for spirit to arise we will need to demolish the mental separation that exists in our perception of ourselves as separate from the cosmos. Perhaps it is not unexpected that heaven is described as a city – as a human construction.
I feel, although I cannot hope to prove, that spirit will be found within, deep down entrenched in ourselves , our bodies, our matter, our earthiness. And I do not necessarily think that we can retain a view of a heaven that is the abode of spirit only. The other route is to find that a heaven is not necessary. It would require an antidote to the existential fear of non-existence for that is an issue that will never go away. Thus the persistence even today in the vision of heaven and afterlife as commonly understood.
Can we find a hope- a comfort- that does not require a heaven?
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
On the memory of friend who has died
Lately I've been taking note of how much effect my wife's pregnancy has had on me. I've gained a lot of weight myself, going up two waist sizes in the past few months. My sleeping habits have also changed and my dreams have become very strange.
Several years ago Tom, my best friend from high school, died in a car accident. It was unexpected as deaths go, the most personal encounter with it that I have had. I had never experienced a friend dying before. It hit me in its own way and to be honest I am still dealing with it, carrying the memory of my good friend and the knowledge that he no longer exists.
I didn't cry at his funeral. I couldn't cry. I even tried to make myself cry, thinking that it was appropriate and necessary, and in the attempt I ran through my mind every sad thought possible. No tears came though.
I mention all of this because the only time I see Tom now is in my dreams. He'll pop up in them every now and then and he has been making appearances more frequently now than ever. I think it is because my wife and I are getting closer and closer to the birth of our first child and there is that knowledge in the back of my mind that he will never share in that experience.
Tom was the most self-assured person I have ever known. To a lot of people that trait came off as a cockiness yet it was an endearing cockiness. While he had his own inner demons, as we all do, he possessed a strength that rubbed off onto others.
I miss him greatly.
We hadn't seen each other in a few years before he died. That's a hard thing...to never have that final goodbye, to wonder if the dead can ever know the impact that they had upon us, if they ever knew the love we felt for them. There are so many wishes left behind, never able to be fulfilled. And it is strange...our lives had parted since our last get together as I am sure is so common a thing. Not a parting out of hate or argument, but just the separation that comes with time, with people going about their different paths, having so many different experiences that they grow away from each other. It is the lack of shared experiences and it causes persons to move away from each other like flotsam being carried apart on tiny ripples and waves in a vast sea.
I dreamed about Tom again last night. I dreamt that I could go back in time and see him again, to try and prevent his death or to at least say goodbye. The dream hit me hard, harder than other have lately. Afterwards, I thought of how silly our lives are. How the important things and the scary things are really not that important or scary at all. I thought of how we are as children and about how my own child will soon enough experience going to school for the first time, make her own friends and enemies, and how those things will become so ultimate in importance for her.
I don't like Jesus very much in this story from St. John's gospel. Lazarus dies because Jesus doesn't come soon enough to heal him. True, a few verses later he raises Lazarus from the dead, but I can't help but focus more on the emotional impact that his death had upon his sisters and other followers of Jesus. What sticks out most is the recorded interaction between Mary and Jesus. One can sense the anger she feels towards Jesus for not coming sooner. I think about that and I hope that the cries of Mary cut Jesus hard. I hope he felt guilty. The words of Martha and Jesus in this chapter remind me of a very traditional Christian response to illness, calamity, and death. This tragic thing has happened according to the greater will and glory of God. This thing has occurred for a reason and purpose known only to God. We cannot understand why it has happened but we must trust in God that there is some justifiable reason and purpose behind it all. I hate this response. I hate the blind trust of the sheep led to the slaughter.
I slip off to Tom's grave every now and then. I go because I am drawn to it by feelings I don't quite understand. When I arrive and stand in front of his tombstone I don't know exactly what to say or think and I fumble around trying to find something that feels appropriate. I'm not sure there is anything appropriate. The stones of the dead, mute and cold, are only there for us the living.
This is the puzzle of life and death.
Several years ago Tom, my best friend from high school, died in a car accident. It was unexpected as deaths go, the most personal encounter with it that I have had. I had never experienced a friend dying before. It hit me in its own way and to be honest I am still dealing with it, carrying the memory of my good friend and the knowledge that he no longer exists.
I didn't cry at his funeral. I couldn't cry. I even tried to make myself cry, thinking that it was appropriate and necessary, and in the attempt I ran through my mind every sad thought possible. No tears came though.
I mention all of this because the only time I see Tom now is in my dreams. He'll pop up in them every now and then and he has been making appearances more frequently now than ever. I think it is because my wife and I are getting closer and closer to the birth of our first child and there is that knowledge in the back of my mind that he will never share in that experience.
Tom was the most self-assured person I have ever known. To a lot of people that trait came off as a cockiness yet it was an endearing cockiness. While he had his own inner demons, as we all do, he possessed a strength that rubbed off onto others.
I miss him greatly.
We hadn't seen each other in a few years before he died. That's a hard thing...to never have that final goodbye, to wonder if the dead can ever know the impact that they had upon us, if they ever knew the love we felt for them. There are so many wishes left behind, never able to be fulfilled. And it is strange...our lives had parted since our last get together as I am sure is so common a thing. Not a parting out of hate or argument, but just the separation that comes with time, with people going about their different paths, having so many different experiences that they grow away from each other. It is the lack of shared experiences and it causes persons to move away from each other like flotsam being carried apart on tiny ripples and waves in a vast sea.
I dreamed about Tom again last night. I dreamt that I could go back in time and see him again, to try and prevent his death or to at least say goodbye. The dream hit me hard, harder than other have lately. Afterwards, I thought of how silly our lives are. How the important things and the scary things are really not that important or scary at all. I thought of how we are as children and about how my own child will soon enough experience going to school for the first time, make her own friends and enemies, and how those things will become so ultimate in importance for her.
John 11:1-6, 17-23,28b-37
Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair; her brother Lazarus was ill. So the sisters sent a message to Jesus, "Lord, he whom you love is ill." But when Jesus heard it, he said, "This illness does not lead to death; rather it is for God's glory, so that the son of God may be glorified through it." Accordingly, though Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, after having heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was. When Jesus arrived (in Bethany), he found that Lazarus was dead and had already been in the tomb four days. When Martha
heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, while Mary stayed at home. Martha said to Jesus, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give to you whatever you ask of him." Jesus said to her, "Your brother will rise again." Martha went back and called her sister Mary, and told her privately, "The Teacher is here and is calling for you." And when she heard it, she got up quickly and went to him. The people who were with her in the house, consoling her, saw Mary get up quickly and went to him. They followed her because they thought that she was going to Lazarus' tomb to weep there. When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." When Jesus saw her weeping, and the people who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, "Where have you laid him?" They said to him, "Lord, come and see." Jesus began to weep. So the people said, "See how he loved him!" But some of them said, "Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?"
I don't like Jesus very much in this story from St. John's gospel. Lazarus dies because Jesus doesn't come soon enough to heal him. True, a few verses later he raises Lazarus from the dead, but I can't help but focus more on the emotional impact that his death had upon his sisters and other followers of Jesus. What sticks out most is the recorded interaction between Mary and Jesus. One can sense the anger she feels towards Jesus for not coming sooner. I think about that and I hope that the cries of Mary cut Jesus hard. I hope he felt guilty. The words of Martha and Jesus in this chapter remind me of a very traditional Christian response to illness, calamity, and death. This tragic thing has happened according to the greater will and glory of God. This thing has occurred for a reason and purpose known only to God. We cannot understand why it has happened but we must trust in God that there is some justifiable reason and purpose behind it all. I hate this response. I hate the blind trust of the sheep led to the slaughter.
I slip off to Tom's grave every now and then. I go because I am drawn to it by feelings I don't quite understand. When I arrive and stand in front of his tombstone I don't know exactly what to say or think and I fumble around trying to find something that feels appropriate. I'm not sure there is anything appropriate. The stones of the dead, mute and cold, are only there for us the living.
This is the puzzle of life and death.
By the rivers of Babylon-
there we sat down and there we wept
when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there
we hung our harps.
Psalm 137:1-2
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
On the Limits of Christianity and Prayer
I had lunch this week with a friend from seminary during which we commiserated over the usual suspects that trouble our personal theologies. I left our meeting that day feeling re-invigorated enough to struggle with them some more. Here are some of the results, although they are incomplete in that I feel I will need to return to them again and again.
I am struck by the centrality, the necessity of St. Paul’s words. If we do not have this belief, then everything is in vain, of no purpose, pointless. If there is no resurrection, then we are all just wasting our time. Was it easier for St. Paul to believe in miracles than it is for us today? Was there less cynicism? Was there still room enough in the minds of people for the miraculous to occur?
I cannot change that today there appears to be no room for miracles. I take it for certain that the violation of the laws of nature by any deity is impossible. Instead, these days I find my miracles in things visible. And this, I think, is neither good nor bad. It is simply where we are. Some Christians find themselves still waging war against this loss of the supernatural God. I wish them luck, and I pity them for theirs is a faith that is under assault on all sides. As for me, I am tired of trying to rescue this God. I am tired of performing mental acrobatics to try and find some escape clause, some loophole, and some syllogism to keep this God on continued life support. I have decided to pull the plug.
Is there a resurrection of the dead? I have no idea.
Does this mean there is no afterlife? I have no idea.
Perhaps there is hope, and I will allow for that. I will allow that God, the great whatever in the sky, the mysterious force driving the universe, has thus far provided enough evidence of the miraculous in and through the cosmos and nature to provide room for hope. And, yes, it is a scary place to find oneself. And yes, sometimes, I can find comfort in plain old hope…sometimes.
Yet I am still at odds with St. Paul’s declaration. I have heard the explanations of the historical context surrounding the passage. Still, I can’t help feel that what St. Paul is writing is not simply a response to a problem in Corinth. I have to permit that this is precisely what the saint says it is…a central tenet of the faith, without which there is no faith. And that is something that no historical critique of the passage can erase.
What follows from verse 2b to verse 4 is St. Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer. Another version is given to us by St. Matthew in chapter 6:9b-13 in his community’s gospel. There is no version given by St. John’s gospel and some scholars offer that a proto version of the prayer can be found in the gospel of St. Mark, 11:24-25. I will not attempt to expound at all on the differences between the versions as other persons with far greater academic pedigrees have done so on many other occasions and with better insight than I can offer. Instead, what I am proposing here is something completely different, going back to the question given in St. Luke’s account – “teach us to pray.” I hope to speak as honestly as I can in this little exercise.
Prayer is something that I struggle with, mainly because I find myself not knowing how to pray. While God is still a mystery to me (and always will be), at this point in my life I find myself trying to think of God in non-personal, non-agential, and non-theistic ways. Thus prayer, at least the concepts and traditions of prayer that I have grown up with, has been blasted to pieces and rendered utterly useless in this new spiritual country in which I roam.
Before I go any further, let me offer a little bit of a negative credo concerning God.
- I do not believe God is a separate being who exists somewhere “out there” beyond time and space.
- I do not believe that God hears our prayers of supplication and requests and then grants or denies them, depending on God’s will.
- I do not believe we can persuade God to do certain things through prayer.
- I do not believe that God can or does intervene in our affairs. God is not a cosmic superman, stepping in to deliver us from harm or evil.
- I am not certain that God can act as an agent in any way, moving or leading the universe towards any certain goal. It may be that God can do this, but I am unwilling to place any bets upon it, at least if in doing so one is required to allow that God has a prior vision of what the universe will or should look like and then, as an agent, works towards the fulfillment of this prior aim. The crux here is prior aim or goal. If I allow this, then I fear that I slip too easily back into the rut of viewing God as a person, going about, working toward a vision, just as you or I would go about working toward a goal or plan. When I consider the world and the cosmos, I am amazed at the struggle towards life, and towards complexity. At the same time, however, I wish to preserve the freedom of the cosmos and all its inhabitants and matter in its quest towards this complexity.
Is this complexification, expressed freely within and by the cosmos, precisely the cosmos’ response to a God that lures it towards something unexpected? Perhaps, but again, I am afraid of even granting this much to God as it again points toward a greater goal or aim of God. Gordon Kaufman has suggested that it is only the creative serendipitous movement of the universe that can be termed rightly as “God.” While I agree with Kaufman on this, still I am driven further from any traditional understanding by the work of persons such as Stuart Kauffman of the Santa Fe Institute who suggest that this ability to move towards complexity and life is an essential feature of the universe, existent from the moment of creation.
If this is so, then where does one draw a line of distinction between God and the world? Thus I find myself becoming more and more a pantheist rather than a panentheist, unless I remain firm in the idea that no one individual can claim to be the ultimate expression of God. God, rather, can only be glimpsed (and I would like to stress that this is a peripheral glimpse, remaining always out of focus) in the entirety of the creative serendipitous movement of the cosmos. Is this enough to base a God/world distinction upon? Perhaps it is.
But let me get back to the original question: How are we to pray? Here is my offering. Several years ago, I ran across a Buddhist blessing to be used before meals. I and others have since adopted it, feeling that if prayer is to be an intentional, conscious act of opening oneself up to understanding and living within the world in a spiritual manner, then any prayer must become an expression of this orientation. Likewise, for me a prayer must avoid becoming a laundry list of requests, pleading for God to do what God is incapable of doing. Prayer is to be in part a remembrance, calling to mind to needs of others in such a way that those needs become our needs. In our prayer we must become the other so that we share in their pain, suffering, joy, and pleasure. So, after all these caveats, here is the prayer that I try to use, adjusting it when necessary (as I mentioned, it is a blessing for use before meals) to reflect the situation at hand. When you pray, say:
I have been thinking about this verse lately, precisely because I find myself doubting the “resurrection of the dead,” whatever that may ultimately mean. Those last words symbolize my disposition. And that is the last thread I hang onto…the uncertainty of what resurrection of the dead may ultimately mean. But how does one base a faith upon pure uncertainty? Oh, how so many of my past tenets of faith have become vestigial organs now. And I don’t mean it to sound as if I am glorying in that, either. I mourn for them…I am to some extent lost without them.1 Corinthians 15:12-14; 19
Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from
the dead, how can some of you say there is no
resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain…If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.
I am struck by the centrality, the necessity of St. Paul’s words. If we do not have this belief, then everything is in vain, of no purpose, pointless. If there is no resurrection, then we are all just wasting our time. Was it easier for St. Paul to believe in miracles than it is for us today? Was there less cynicism? Was there still room enough in the minds of people for the miraculous to occur?
I cannot change that today there appears to be no room for miracles. I take it for certain that the violation of the laws of nature by any deity is impossible. Instead, these days I find my miracles in things visible. And this, I think, is neither good nor bad. It is simply where we are. Some Christians find themselves still waging war against this loss of the supernatural God. I wish them luck, and I pity them for theirs is a faith that is under assault on all sides. As for me, I am tired of trying to rescue this God. I am tired of performing mental acrobatics to try and find some escape clause, some loophole, and some syllogism to keep this God on continued life support. I have decided to pull the plug.
Is there a resurrection of the dead? I have no idea.
Does this mean there is no afterlife? I have no idea.
Perhaps there is hope, and I will allow for that. I will allow that God, the great whatever in the sky, the mysterious force driving the universe, has thus far provided enough evidence of the miraculous in and through the cosmos and nature to provide room for hope. And, yes, it is a scary place to find oneself. And yes, sometimes, I can find comfort in plain old hope…sometimes.
Yet I am still at odds with St. Paul’s declaration. I have heard the explanations of the historical context surrounding the passage. Still, I can’t help feel that what St. Paul is writing is not simply a response to a problem in Corinth. I have to permit that this is precisely what the saint says it is…a central tenet of the faith, without which there is no faith. And that is something that no historical critique of the passage can erase.
Luke 11:1-2a
(Jesus) was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John (the Baptist) taught his disciples.” He said to them, “When you pray, say…”
What follows from verse 2b to verse 4 is St. Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer. Another version is given to us by St. Matthew in chapter 6:9b-13 in his community’s gospel. There is no version given by St. John’s gospel and some scholars offer that a proto version of the prayer can be found in the gospel of St. Mark, 11:24-25. I will not attempt to expound at all on the differences between the versions as other persons with far greater academic pedigrees have done so on many other occasions and with better insight than I can offer. Instead, what I am proposing here is something completely different, going back to the question given in St. Luke’s account – “teach us to pray.” I hope to speak as honestly as I can in this little exercise.
Prayer is something that I struggle with, mainly because I find myself not knowing how to pray. While God is still a mystery to me (and always will be), at this point in my life I find myself trying to think of God in non-personal, non-agential, and non-theistic ways. Thus prayer, at least the concepts and traditions of prayer that I have grown up with, has been blasted to pieces and rendered utterly useless in this new spiritual country in which I roam.
Before I go any further, let me offer a little bit of a negative credo concerning God.
- I do not believe God is a separate being who exists somewhere “out there” beyond time and space.
- I do not believe that God hears our prayers of supplication and requests and then grants or denies them, depending on God’s will.
- I do not believe we can persuade God to do certain things through prayer.
- I do not believe that God can or does intervene in our affairs. God is not a cosmic superman, stepping in to deliver us from harm or evil.
- I am not certain that God can act as an agent in any way, moving or leading the universe towards any certain goal. It may be that God can do this, but I am unwilling to place any bets upon it, at least if in doing so one is required to allow that God has a prior vision of what the universe will or should look like and then, as an agent, works towards the fulfillment of this prior aim. The crux here is prior aim or goal. If I allow this, then I fear that I slip too easily back into the rut of viewing God as a person, going about, working toward a vision, just as you or I would go about working toward a goal or plan. When I consider the world and the cosmos, I am amazed at the struggle towards life, and towards complexity. At the same time, however, I wish to preserve the freedom of the cosmos and all its inhabitants and matter in its quest towards this complexity.
Is this complexification, expressed freely within and by the cosmos, precisely the cosmos’ response to a God that lures it towards something unexpected? Perhaps, but again, I am afraid of even granting this much to God as it again points toward a greater goal or aim of God. Gordon Kaufman has suggested that it is only the creative serendipitous movement of the universe that can be termed rightly as “God.” While I agree with Kaufman on this, still I am driven further from any traditional understanding by the work of persons such as Stuart Kauffman of the Santa Fe Institute who suggest that this ability to move towards complexity and life is an essential feature of the universe, existent from the moment of creation.
If this is so, then where does one draw a line of distinction between God and the world? Thus I find myself becoming more and more a pantheist rather than a panentheist, unless I remain firm in the idea that no one individual can claim to be the ultimate expression of God. God, rather, can only be glimpsed (and I would like to stress that this is a peripheral glimpse, remaining always out of focus) in the entirety of the creative serendipitous movement of the cosmos. Is this enough to base a God/world distinction upon? Perhaps it is.
But let me get back to the original question: How are we to pray? Here is my offering. Several years ago, I ran across a Buddhist blessing to be used before meals. I and others have since adopted it, feeling that if prayer is to be an intentional, conscious act of opening oneself up to understanding and living within the world in a spiritual manner, then any prayer must become an expression of this orientation. Likewise, for me a prayer must avoid becoming a laundry list of requests, pleading for God to do what God is incapable of doing. Prayer is to be in part a remembrance, calling to mind to needs of others in such a way that those needs become our needs. In our prayer we must become the other so that we share in their pain, suffering, joy, and pleasure. So, after all these caveats, here is the prayer that I try to use, adjusting it when necessary (as I mentioned, it is a blessing for use before meals) to reflect the situation at hand. When you pray, say:
“This food is the gift of the whole universe,What I appreciate about this simple blessing is that it avoids pleading with a God that I believe cannot hear. Rather, it serves to focus one's attention on the present moment, realizing both that nothing should be taken for granted, and that one should, as much as possible, become completely empathetic toward the complex web of actions, misfortunes, struggles, and successes that comprise the universe.
the earth, the sky, and much hard work.
May I live in a way that makes me worthy to receive it.
Many beings will struggle for food today.
May they all have enough to eat.”
Monday, December 31, 2007
Excerpts
Nothing much here...just some excerpts from Sophie's World by Jostein Gaardner that I turn to now and then for reassurance. Enjoy!
"A lot of people experience the world with the same incredulity as when amagician suddenly pulls a rabbit out of a hat which has just been shown to them empty.In the case of the rabbit, we know the magician has tricked us. What we would like to know is just how he did it. But when it comes to the world it's somewhat different. We know that the world is not all sleight of hand and deception because here we are in it, we are part of it. Actually, we are the white rabbit being pulled out of the hat. The only difference between us and the white rabbit is that the rabbit does not realize it is taking part in a magic trick. Unlike us. We feel we are partof something mysterious and we would like to know how it all works...As far as the white rabbit is concerned, it might be better to compare it with the whole universe. We who live here are microscopic insects existing deep down in the rabbit's fur. But philosophers are always trying to climb up the fine hairs of the fur in order to stare right into the magician's eyes.
"The only thing we require to be good philosophers is the faculty of wonder...The world itself becomes a habit in no time at all. It seems as if in the process of growing up we lose the ability to wonder about the world. And in doing so, we lose something central...for somewhere inside ourselves, something tells us that life is a huge mystery. This is something we once experienced, long before we learned to think the thought...For various reasons most people get so caught up in everyday affairs that their astonishment at the world gets pushed into the background. All mortals are born at the very tip of the rabbit's fine hairs, where they are in a position to wonder at the impossibility of the trick. But as they grow older they work themselves ever deeper into the fur. And there they stay. They become so comfortable they never risk crawling back up the fragile hairs again. Only philosophers embark on this perilous expedition to the outermost reaches of language and existence. Some of them fall off, but others cling on desperately and yell at the people nestling deep in the snug softness..."
"A lot of people experience the world with the same incredulity as when amagician suddenly pulls a rabbit out of a hat which has just been shown to them empty.In the case of the rabbit, we know the magician has tricked us. What we would like to know is just how he did it. But when it comes to the world it's somewhat different. We know that the world is not all sleight of hand and deception because here we are in it, we are part of it. Actually, we are the white rabbit being pulled out of the hat. The only difference between us and the white rabbit is that the rabbit does not realize it is taking part in a magic trick. Unlike us. We feel we are partof something mysterious and we would like to know how it all works...As far as the white rabbit is concerned, it might be better to compare it with the whole universe. We who live here are microscopic insects existing deep down in the rabbit's fur. But philosophers are always trying to climb up the fine hairs of the fur in order to stare right into the magician's eyes.
"The only thing we require to be good philosophers is the faculty of wonder...The world itself becomes a habit in no time at all. It seems as if in the process of growing up we lose the ability to wonder about the world. And in doing so, we lose something central...for somewhere inside ourselves, something tells us that life is a huge mystery. This is something we once experienced, long before we learned to think the thought...For various reasons most people get so caught up in everyday affairs that their astonishment at the world gets pushed into the background. All mortals are born at the very tip of the rabbit's fine hairs, where they are in a position to wonder at the impossibility of the trick. But as they grow older they work themselves ever deeper into the fur. And there they stay. They become so comfortable they never risk crawling back up the fragile hairs again. Only philosophers embark on this perilous expedition to the outermost reaches of language and existence. Some of them fall off, but others cling on desperately and yell at the people nestling deep in the snug softness..."
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
“Das Ding an sich” and personal thoughts
No real epiphanies here, just some thoughts to capture before they disappear. A confession if you will…
Often I think that one of my struggles is not to come up with some new amazing never-before-thought-of idea, but rather to see things in a new light. The most insightful moments of learning for me are those in which something, an idea, set of facts, etc, that has been before my eyes and mind for a very long time are suddenly “seen” anew; I become aware of a pattern, having always existed, but now seen clearly and with a precision that was lacking before. Something starts to make sense in a way that it didn’t before, regardless of how often I had scanned over, read, or played around with it in my mind. A pre-existent truth finds its way home with a stickiness that it didn’t have before.
Thus wise, I have been pondering certain dispositions of mine, personal feelings and intuitions. The saying of Kant’s, “Das Ding an sich,” kept returning to me; “The thing in itself,” as it is known only to itself and to no other observer. I wonder how that applies to my personal feelings and sensitivities.
So often, I become convinced of the reality of my perceptions of other things and people. That is, I am convinced that my perception of them is actually how they are in themselves. I am convinced that there is no discrepancy between my thoughts and the reality of the other thing. It occurred to me that so often, this is the breeding ground for the un-pleasantries in life. Hurt, pain, anger, sadness, and all other sorts of ill-feelings that are all based on my believing my understanding to be the reality of the situation. How often does this misconception, this wholesale buying of personal interpretations lead directly to sorrow and personal torment? How often does it shape my subsequent actions for the worse?
There is something else here, something pleading to be dug up, to be examined but I don’t as yet know exactly what it is or how to excavate it. Some way of seeing the same old things with a new vision that has slipped away for the present. Maybe it is simply an inner longing to see the old things in a new way, a request for a new vision? I don’t know. Does anyone really understand that, the internal struggle for dealing with the same old trials in a new way? It is a longing to escape for a moment the inner thoughts and voices that seem to struggle against each other, realizing that I have heard all these same thoughts before, played around with them in the same old ways, and have grown tired of their endless banter, their same tired conclusions producing the same tired actions and results.
Often I think that one of my struggles is not to come up with some new amazing never-before-thought-of idea, but rather to see things in a new light. The most insightful moments of learning for me are those in which something, an idea, set of facts, etc, that has been before my eyes and mind for a very long time are suddenly “seen” anew; I become aware of a pattern, having always existed, but now seen clearly and with a precision that was lacking before. Something starts to make sense in a way that it didn’t before, regardless of how often I had scanned over, read, or played around with it in my mind. A pre-existent truth finds its way home with a stickiness that it didn’t have before.
Thus wise, I have been pondering certain dispositions of mine, personal feelings and intuitions. The saying of Kant’s, “Das Ding an sich,” kept returning to me; “The thing in itself,” as it is known only to itself and to no other observer. I wonder how that applies to my personal feelings and sensitivities.
So often, I become convinced of the reality of my perceptions of other things and people. That is, I am convinced that my perception of them is actually how they are in themselves. I am convinced that there is no discrepancy between my thoughts and the reality of the other thing. It occurred to me that so often, this is the breeding ground for the un-pleasantries in life. Hurt, pain, anger, sadness, and all other sorts of ill-feelings that are all based on my believing my understanding to be the reality of the situation. How often does this misconception, this wholesale buying of personal interpretations lead directly to sorrow and personal torment? How often does it shape my subsequent actions for the worse?
There is something else here, something pleading to be dug up, to be examined but I don’t as yet know exactly what it is or how to excavate it. Some way of seeing the same old things with a new vision that has slipped away for the present. Maybe it is simply an inner longing to see the old things in a new way, a request for a new vision? I don’t know. Does anyone really understand that, the internal struggle for dealing with the same old trials in a new way? It is a longing to escape for a moment the inner thoughts and voices that seem to struggle against each other, realizing that I have heard all these same thoughts before, played around with them in the same old ways, and have grown tired of their endless banter, their same tired conclusions producing the same tired actions and results.
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