Waving or Drowning?

Nothing New Under the Sun

Over on the Slacktivist Fred Clark has posted this excerpt from John Chrysostom’s 21st homily on 1 Corinthians, no doubt in response to a certain someone's recent tweet. For my part, it's both educational and condemning to see what it used to mean to be a Christian, in the first few centuries after Jesus.

The Saint was not one to pull any punches:

It is foolishness and a public madness to fill the cupboards with clothing and allow men who are created in God’s image and likeness to stand naked and trembling with cold, so that they can hardly hold themselves upright.

Yes, you say, he is cheating and he is only pretending to be weak and trembling. What! Do you not fear that lightning from Heaven will fall on you for this word? Indeed, forgive me, but I almost burst from anger.

Only see, you are large and fat, you hold drinking parties until late at night, and sleep in a warm, soft bed. And do you not think of how you must give an account of your misuse of the gifts of God?

… On the other hand, you question very closely the poor and the miserable, who are scarcely better off in this respect than the dead: and you do not fear the dreadful and the terrible judgment seat of Christ. If the beggar lies, he lies from necessity, because your hardheartedness and merciless inhumanity force him to such cheating. … If we would give our alms gladly and willingly, the poor would never have fallen to such depths.

… But for him, who prays and calls on God, and beseeches you humbly and modestly, to him you will vouchsafe neither an answer or a glance, but at the most, you will give him a reproach and say: “Why does such a one have to live and breathe and see the light of the sun?” And while God says to you “Give alms and I will give thee the Kingdom of Heaven,” you hear it not.

… Indeed, for your charioteers in the circus, you are ready to sacrifice your own children, and for your actors you would deliver up your own soul, but for the hungering Christ, the smallest piece of money is too large for you to give. And if you do sacrifice a penny for once, it is as if you were giving away your whole property. Truly, I am ashamed when I see rich people riding about on horses decorated with gold and with servants clad in gold coming along behind them. They have silver beds and multitudes of other luxuries. But, if they have to give something to a poor man, suddenly they themselves are the poorest of the poor!

Creative World Festival Redux

As a follow-up to my earlier post, here's a the latest promo video for the Creative World Festival:

 

Creative World July promo from Creative World Festival on Vimeo.

 

I mentioned I was looking forward to catching Shad. As a bonus here's an earlier video highlighting him:

 

CreativeWorld: Meet Shad. from Creative World Festival on Vimeo.

Should be good.

Either Way, A Call

Russell Brand, in a painfully honest and beautiful tribute to Amy Winehouse, hits on the lunacy of the current tendency to criminalize the victim.

Now Amy Winehouse is dead, like many others whose unnecessary deaths have been retrospectively romanticised, at 27 years old. Whether this tragedy was preventable or not is now irrelevant. It is not preventable today. We have lost a beautiful and talented woman to this disease. Not all addicts have Amy’s incredible talent. Or Kurt’s or Jimi’s or Janis’s, some people just get the affliction. All we can do is adapt the way we view this condition, not as a crime or a romantic affectation but as a disease that will kill. We need to review the way society treats addicts, not as criminals but as sick people in need of care. We need to look at the way our government funds rehabilitation. It is cheaper to rehabilitate an addict than to send them to prison, so criminalisation doesn’t even make economic sense. Not all of us know someone with the incredible talent that Amy had but we all know drunks and junkies and they all need help and the help is out there. All they have to do is pick up the phone and make the call. Or not. Either way, there will be a phone call.

Preach it, brother. Read the whole thing here.

Creative World Festival

I'm pretty excited about the upcoming Creative World Festival. Here are the details:

The first annual Creative World {an arts and justice festival} will be held August 12-14, 2011 in Mission, British Columbia, Canada. We are followers of Jesus, passionate about creativity and social justice, and excited to provide a space for folks from all walks of life to come together and be inspired.

Shane Claiborne, Cheryl Bear, Ched Myers, Bob Ekblad and Elaine Enns will be there, along with a host of others. Personally I'm looking forward to seeing Shad perform too. Yours truly will be holding a workshop--hopefully more of a conversation--with a working title of Justice For All: Letting Go of the System With Love.

I'm looking forward to this, and hope to meet some of you there. The website is here, the Twitter feed here.

Good Times on The Grind

Last week, after an absence of about 5 years, I managed to get back to The Grouse Grind. In fact, I did it three times. (And no, that's not me in the photo.) To call it Nature's Stairmaster just doesn't do it justice. I hate it. And I love it. 

You always see and hear funny things on The Grind. I've seen people in heels (she passed me), and I once saw a guy with a baby carriage (I passed him.) Just this past Sunday I passed a gentleman who must have been in his 80's. But I was puffing and wheezing like an octogenarian, and he was whistling. He was whistling. I could hear the guy for the next 10 minutes. 

The all-time greatest line I've ever heard is still intact though. This must have been 6 years ago. An older gentleman who was in incredible shape passed me while talking with a much younger woman. 

"Yeah," He said, "I used to be able to do this in the low 40's," Referring to his time. "Of course," He added, "I was in my early 60's at the time." (For the record, my all-time best time is 49 minutes.) Son of a gun.

On Sunday while climbing I must have heard 10 different languages. I love this city.

Love, Hell, Consciousness, and the (Current) Impossibility of 'Church Unity' (UPDATED X3)

I was saddened but not surprised to read Mickey Maudlin's column this morning. Mickey is Senior V.P./Executive Editor over at HarperOne, and did the editing on Rob Bell's book, Love Wins.

Come to think of it, Mickey is sad too.

And so, as someone who has spent his entire adult life in the evangelical portion of the church, I cannot help but be sad at the reaction to the book by many conservative Christians. The Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution against Rob and the book. Bestselling author Francis Chan and Christianity Today’s Mark Galli have authored two of the six books opposing Rob. Leading evangelicals like Albert Mohler, David Platt, and John Piper have condemned him. Christian critics routinely use words like “unbiblical,” “heretical,” and worse to describe Rob. Most Christian bookstores refuse to carry the book. My heart goes out to Rob for having to endure this onslaught (which, in my view, he has weathered surprisingly well, thank God).

But why such hostility? Why would leaders attack as a threat and an enemy someone who shares their views of Scripture, Jesus, and the Trinity? What prevented leaders from saying, “Thanks, Rob, interesting views, but here is where we disagree”? When did “believing the right things” become equated with determining who is “saved” so that, as some have claimed, affirming Rob’s teachings might jeopardize one’s eternal destiny? (If salvation is dependent on having the right Protestant theology, how could the apostles be saved?) What exactly is so threatening about Rob’s expansive vision of God’s love and grace?

I've written here before about my growing interest in the evolution of consciousness, particularly as it relates to our faith.

As individuals, but also as a species, we are meant to evolve, to grow, to transform. And as we do, our ability and capacity to 'understand' more of God should grow. To state the obvious--that God never changes--is a moot point. Even if I spend the rest of my life increasing my capacity to know more of God, I will never grasp more than a tiny fraction. So suffice to say that who I think 'God is' should constantly be changing. 

This is why I'm generally not a fan of anything that comes with the prefix 'neo' attached. We are to be moving forward, not backward in our faith. As it stands, the only Neo I really want to know is a guy who dresses in black after waking up one day in a tub of pink goo.

If you read Ken Wilber, or Don Beck, or any of the other leading thinkers in the area of consciousness, you'll quickly run into the issue of 'levels'. To grossly oversimplify, as people we move from one level of consciousness to another, higher level. Generally we don't move until the current level becomes unworkable for us. Why would we? Who wants to change something that is working just fine. Often it is some kind of crisis that brings us to the point of growth.

As with any movement, there will be those who are ahead of the curve. But as more and more feel the need to grow, to think differently, it becomes obvious that something is happening to us as a people, as humanity. This is always a tumultuous time. Just as there are those who are leading the charge, there are also those resisting, and attempting to stamp out change.

This is where it gets interesting for people of faith.

If your spirituality is based on "believing the right things", there is going to be trouble.

If you believe there is a concrete list of "right things" to know, and if you happen to believe that you, in fact, know these things, then the very idea of growing, thinking differently, of evolving, is by definition heresy. If we want to sound religious we call these right beliefs orthodoxy, and we declare ourselves its protector, and the keeper of the faith, as if somehow God needed a bodyguard.

Which brings us back to Rob Bell and Love Wins.

In my view Rob is trying to take the conversation about Christian faith to the next level. I actually think he's been doing it for quite a while. Those who have been ready and eager to hear it have listened, and those who haven't have just tuned him out and moved on.

Perfect, right? Well yes, until Rob dared tackle a cornerstone issue like hell. Then (forgive me) all hell broke loose.

And this is exactly what we should expect to happen at one of these transformation points; where someone wants to help take us where others don't want to go.

Finally, this brings us to the oft-touted idea of church unity. It's been a popular subject, since Jesus himself prayed that we would "be one", just as he and the Father were one. That's a tall order. Then again, Jesus had the benefit of knowing the plan. We will get there. There will come a day when God's will is done on earth, as it is in heaven. But not yet. We have more evolving to do, and that's OK. That's the plan, apparently.

The bad news is that things will get worse before they get better.

Just yesterday I had a spiritual conversation with an old friend, and I shared with him my growing discontent with the label 'Christian'. So you're a Christian. That really doesn't tell me anything about your faith. Are you a "torture is OK against bad people" kind of Christian, or a "Jesus was a pacifist" kind? A "God hates homosexuals" kind, or a "God loves everyone" kind? And now we can add a believer in "eternal conscious torment" or in "Rob Bell's idea of hell" to the list.

At this level of consciousness there will never be any meaningful "church unity." At the level of doctrine, dogma and right belief, as some attempt to stretch us past this place, the church will fragment further.

And sad as that is, it's also OK. Its the only way we will move forward in our view of God, and our understanding of what it means to be God's People.

UPDATE: Fred Clark picks up on this theme and draws a connection with his own latest Tribulation Force discussion.

UPDATE: KesterB's poem Stones seems like a good fit here.

UPDATE: My buddy Matt Beimers references this post and touches on our love/hate relationship. Seriously, Matt articulates exactly why I do this stuff.

Paradox and the Contemplative Mind

More profound insights from Richard Rohr this morning...

Great religion is full of paradoxes. A paradox is something that appears to be contradictory, but if seen from another angle or with a different mind, is not a contradiction at all but a deep truth. We Catholics love paradoxes: Jesus is fully human and yet fully divine. Mary is a virgin and yet mother. The Eucharist is bread and Jesus at the same time. God is three and one at the same time. [Mike's inserts: The first shall be last and the last shall be first. In order to save your life you must lose it. The list goes on.] These are logical contradictions and cannot be processed with a dualistic mind. To deal with spirituality, you need different software, which I call contemplation or nondual consciousness. Paul simply called it understanding spiritual things spiritually (1 Corinthians 2:6-16).

Once we stopped teaching the contemplative mind, we set up the Western world for rationalism and secularism. We lost our unique access point, our "new mind" and alternative consciousness. We told Christians to keep believing these doctrines, which we always paradoxes, but we no longer gave them the proper software with which to understand them. Is it any surprise that atheism emerged primarily in the Christian West?

Richard Rohr, On the Threshold of Transformation

Hot Stove Thinking

I know I keep beating the drum for The Work of the People, and particularly Alter Magazine, but I ain't going to stop until you're all dialed in. And then I probably won't stop anyway.

Here's one of several brief conversations between Brian McLaren and David Wilcox filmed recently at the Wild Goose Festival. What a privilege to listen in. I can't help but be transported back to a bus on dusty Palestinian roads last year, and listening in on similar conversations between these two, and many other amazing friends.

And I miss that laugh. Enjoy

(Click the image above for the video)

 

Others clips from the Airstream Musings series can be found here, and here, and here, and there might be one or two others I've missed...

 

The Brink is the Threshold

Old Fools

Many of us grow more rigid and opinionated as we age. We're supposed to move from the dualistic thinking of ten-year old boys to the nondual mind of wise mentors. We're supposed to move from either/or to both/and thinking as we grow up. This is why, all things being equal, elders should be better at patience, forgiveness, mercy and compassion than teenagers.

But if we remain self-assured, self-righteous, self-seeking, dualistic thinkers, and left-brained at that, we cannot become bridge builders or agents of reconciliation--not even in our own families or neighborhoods.

Presently, our religious leaders seem uninterested in true interfaith dialogue. Our politicians seem capable not of seeking the common good but only of working with win/lose models. Those at the helm of the financial sector live on extravagant bonuses, while much of the world goes hungry. Instead of moving away from dualistic thinking, the people who could have become mentors have instead used the system to become even more entrenched and dualistic!

The result: we have moved backward, and our society has grown even more infantile.

Richard Rohr, On the Threshold of Transformation 

I love this thought from Father Richard.

He's taught me about nondual thinking, and expanded my views on paradox. Applying both of those concepts to the reality he describes above, I'd say that even as we grow more infantile, we are maturing. We will not make the leap from the current level of consciousness we occupy until it becomes unworkable. Usually that involves a crisis of some sort. (This thinking applies both to us as individuals and to humanity as a whole.)

We want to grow, we want to evolve, we want to transform. So badly we can taste it. We're ready to move, and yet many of us resist change, and so we regress in order to avoid it. The elastic band stretches, and... here comes the crisis that will ultimately advance us.

Does this make any sense? These are exciting days.