The longing for validation and the fear of invalidation often creates a powerful dynamic that risks surpassing human norms. That is, these two emotions can be considered a part of being human and therefore appropriate, yet when they operate in such a way that they dominate our lives, we have been deceived into being selfish and short circuiting our spirituality. Duped into false ways of relating to get what we want from the other does them violence and is ultimately unloving. These oppressive and dominating power mechanisms need to be confronted by a power that is greater than they, notably Christ and the agency of the Holy Spirit, which will lead to transformation and fresh ways of relating that re-connect us to our spirituality.
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Monday, May 28, 2012
Reflection for the Week - May 28
Christians are taught to find themselves or to find God. This is an inadequate way of teaching what is true. In actuality, we have a deep need to find both God and ourselves. Questions about who I am and why I am should not and cannot be ignored, yet in order to discover answers to these important matters, we can only go so far without also asking who God is. Being attentive to finding both God and ourselves reaches a meeting point— a symbiotic configuration that has the capacity to and is a catalyst for recognizing that each has its dynamically appropriate place. God is first and we are second.
Friday, May 25, 2012
Friday Poetry - May 25
Long time have human ignorance and guilt
Detained us, on what spectacles of woe
Compelled to look, and inwardly oppressed
With sorrow, disappointment, vexing thoughts,
Confusion of the judgement, zeal decayed,
And lastly, utter loss of hope itself
And things to hope for! Not with these began
Our song, and not with these our song must end
Theirs is the language of the heavens, the power,
The thought, the image, and the silent joy
Words are but under-agents in their souls;
When they are grasping with their greatest strength,
They do not breathe among them: this I speak
In gratitude to God, Who feeds our hearts
For his own service; knoweth us, loveth us,
When we are unregarded by the world.
These salient words by Wordsworth in The Prelude, 1850, Book 12, invite us to explore beginnings and ends and all that’s in-between.
Thursday, May 24, 2012
The ZigZag Café - May 24
We will be convening here at the ZigZag café, Suisse, on Thursdays for conversation and dialogue. I invite you to stop by every Thursday for the question of the day. Your thoughts and participation are most welcome. Pull up a stool, avec un café, un thé, ou un chocolat chaud, et un croissant, and join in here on Thursday at the ZZ café.
For today:
What is heaven ?
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Spiritual Rhythms of Life for Today - May 23
Who am I? I am a human being who exists in time and story. I am a creature. I love and am loved. I am knower and known. I am limited. I am finite. I am sinful. I am not self-sufficient. I am not ultimate authority. I do not have the capacity to exclusively self-determine what actions I am free to do, nor what actions I am constrained from doing. I am a human being. I need Divine sources and referents to give wisdom as to how to be and be with others. Being human is subjectively objective – both I and outside of I have a role in telling me who I am, but they don’t have the same degree of say so. Being human is to practice a hermeneutics of trust and suspicion across the whole of life, including my own I am. It simply won’t do to trust I and be suspicious of everyone and everything else. I cannot bear the weight without pretending and cheating. But who will see; who will invite me to a genuine integrity? Questioning my own perspectives of what I trust and what I suspect in light of a greater calling is an essential part of being human and it begins to respond to who I really am.
Monday, May 21, 2012
Reflection for the Week - May 21
Quitting church is reaching epidemic proportions. Caught in the vice between those who exchange the gospel for a social code and those who market it as a consumer product, streams of people are flowing out of churches. From what I can tell many of them long for God, love, truth, credibility, justice, and redemption, but are disappointed with what the church is offering. Bagels and coffee, and promises of health and wealth are limited and breaking down. Thus, today’s pseudo–gospel is having less and less traction and for this we should rejoice. Yet, the fallout is serious, in that the legitimate questions people are asking are not being addressed, nor are these folk being provided with a place to dwell, which has more to do with living spirituality, than merely finding a geographical home. Rich and diverse gospel centered communities are essential to renew and redo the faith in what appears to be the demise of what has been known as church for all too long.
Friday, May 18, 2012
Friday Poetry - May 18
Imagination! lifting up itself
Before the eye and progress of my Song
Like an unfather’d vapour; here that Power,
In all the might of its endowments, came
Athwart me; I was lost in a cloud,
Halted, without a struggle to break through.
And now recovering, to my Soul I say
I recognize thy glory; in such strength
Of usurpation, in such visitings
Of awful promise, when the light of sense
Goes out in flashes that have shewn to us
The invisible world, doth Greatness make abode,
There harbours whether we be young or old.
Wordsworth’s salient words are striking and worth pondering more than once. From The Prelude, 1805, Book VI (525-537)
Thursday, May 17, 2012
The ZigZag Café - May 17
We will be convening here at the ZigZag café, Suisse, on Thursdays for conversation and dialogue. I invite you to stop by every Thursday for the question of the day. Your thoughts and participation are most welcome. Pull up a stool, avec un café, un thé, ou un chocolat chaud, et un croissant, and join in here on Thursday at the ZZ café.
For today:
How do you hear from God?
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
Spiritual Rhythms of Life for Today - May 16
When it is understood that Jesus Christ is the gateway to living spirituality, there are new and momentous opportunities that open up for us. We are given community with the Infinite-personal God by tasting living water, and experiencing a new birth of the Spirit through faith in the Crucified and Risen One. When we accept the invitation to walk through the gateway, our world explodes because we confess that it’s no longer centered on ourselves. And it is then that we start to find our place in living spirituality and to discover the true meaning of life in all its richness and mystery. This is something like moving from darkness to light, being released from a cage, or coming out of an illusion to reality.
Monday, May 14, 2012
Reflection for the Week - May 14
Living spiritually is enhanced and enriched through the Psalms and their frequent affirmations of and appeals to God’s covenant loyalty. Many of these writings, however, may shock us with their realism. In the midst of our sometimes automatic pilot spirituality, where everything is supposedly bright and happy, some of the Psalms remind us that community with God and the path to life are far from straight forward. There is and will be brokenness, mystery, dark times, judgment, desperate searching, and much more. Though these circumstances frequently lead to illumination and new understanding, arriving there means going through—not taking a detour around—facets of spirituality that may not fit our desired schemes, notions, and expectations of God. The path may become difficult and the destination may seem far away, but God is faithful to lead us forward. The Psalms are a richly textured slice of life with God, and they offer us revelatory insights into humanness and living spirituality. From my Living Spirituality: Illuminating the Path.
Saturday, May 12, 2012
Friday, May 11, 2012
Friday Poetry - May 11
Resembles Life what once was held of Light,
Too ample in itself for human sight?
An absolute Self--an element ungrounded--
All, that we see, all colours of all shade
By encroach of darkness made?--
Is very life by consciousness unbounded?
And all the thoughts, pains, joys of mortal breath,
A war-embrace of wrestling Life and Death?
I like these words from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s What is Life? around 1805. Rather than secondary, ornamental, or aesthetic renderings of writing; metaphor, symbol, and story may be first order forms of discourse that need to be taken seriously as we seek to understand God, ourselves, and the world. Poetry, for example, may be a fuller expression of truth than mathematical formulations and imagination may prove a reliable guide to discovering the real over the unreal.
Thursday, May 10, 2012
The ZigZag Café
The ZigZag Café
We will be convening here at the ZigZag café, Suisse, on Thursdays for conversation and dialogue. I invite you to stop by every Thursday for the question of the day. Your thoughts and participation are most welcome. Pull up a stool, avec un café, un thé, ou un chocolat chaud, et un croissant, and join in here on Thursday at the ZZ café.
For today:
Some say all that’s important is to do what Jesus did. Would you agree or disagree and why?
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
Spiritual Rhythms of Life for Today - May 9
Living in a post-trust culture means that cynicism and apathy reign. So many people are infected with an overdose of suspicion, which amounts to being caught up in the cycle of the same. Suspicion produces suspicion, which produces more suspicion. While it is true that it is sometimes appropriate to be suspicious, it is even more important to realize that trust is always primary. That is, God has created humans in such a way that they can’t escape trust - even if it's trusting our suspicions. Problem is that we trust and are suspicious of the wrong things and this is where we need direction. A dialogue of trust and suspicion will be instructive, yet it is insufficient to produce sustainable insight as to which is which. Therefore, if we want to break out of the cycle of unknowing who and what to trust and where and why to be suspicious, I suggest that we turn to God as the Divine One who can enter into the dialogue and provide a helpful illumination that will lead to discernment and a new possibility of beginning to live the dialogue in a more redemptively accurate and appropriate manner.
Monday, May 7, 2012
Reflection for the Week - May 7
God has given us precious creational and salvific rhythms to live by. Order and beauty shape and frame the world, while the death and resurrection of Christ extends reality and brings it into an entirely new dimension. These rhythms shake, rattle, and roll us off our seats and in so doing invite us to take part in the groove. Imagine dancing to God’s rhythms and learning to keep time with his beat. Join in the Divine concert. Get the rhythms, get the rhythms, get the rhythms and gooo! Get the rhythms, get the rhythms, get the rhythms and gooooo!
Friday, May 4, 2012
Friday Poetry - May 4
Thus I fared,
Dragging all passions, notions, shapes of faith,
Like culprits to the bar, suspiciously
Calling the mind to establish in plain day
Her titles and her honours, now believing,
Now disbelieving, endlessly perplex’d
With impulse, motive, light and wrong, the ground
Of moral obligation, what the rule
And what the sanction, till, demanding proof,
And seeing in everything, I lost
All feeling of conviction….
I like these words from William Wordsworth’s The Prelude 1805 Book X (889-99) where he expresses the detrimental effects of rationalism.
Thursday, May 3, 2012
The ZigZag Café - May 3
We will be convening here at the ZigZag café, Suisse, on Thursdays for conversation and dialogue. I invite you to stop by every Thursday for the question of the day. Your thoughts and participation are most welcome. Pull up a stool, avec un café, un thé, ou un chocolat chaud, et un croissant, and join in here on Thursday at the ZZ café.
For today:
Should our experiences in the world have any bearing on our belief in God?
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
Spiritual Rhythms of Life for Today - May 2
We are a question to ourselves that we don’t have a complete answer for. While God graciously gives us a sufficient picture, it nevertheless lacks a pristine focus and a crystal clear resolution. This means that we have ample room for exploring contours and adjusting angles, as we grow in our faith. Seeking God’s illumination to better understand the mystery that we are gradually leads us to a carefully configured dynamic of confidence and humility that can be lived with each other and out into the world. In being and becoming testifying agents of the Supreme One - tethered to life in Christ, we are creatively and imaginatively given an ever expanding image that certifies, in spite of not seeing precisely who we are or will be, the deep experience of the mercy and love of God.
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