Month: July 2020

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General Personal

Aging Thoughts: Palmer

I first encountered the work of the Quaker educator and social activist Parker Palmer in 1998 when I joined some colleagues at Murray State to discuss his book The Courage to Teach (1997). Our college of Humanities had just instituted a program of “Teaching Circles” whereby faculty members from different departments could apply to receive several hundred dollars to buy books or lunch and get together to discuss a topic that crossed disciplinary lines.

Later in 2016, I joined another group of academic friends to discuss his treatise The Healing of Democracy (2011). We were reading that book while watching the election of the first American president who took as his aim the weakening instead of the healing of that democracy.

Palmer is a man of spiritual depth who believes that we can only become whole by opening our heart—what he calls “breaking open our heart”—to others. He is also a poet, a devotee of the late Thomas Merton, holder of a Ph.D in Sociology, and founder of the Center for Courage and Renewal, a leadership and training institute for teachers and other professionals: It’s mission is “to create a more just, compassionate and healthy world by nurturing personal and professional integrity and the courage to act on it.”

It was this year, 2020, that I became aware of his little collection of essays and poems entitled On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity, and Getting Old (2018). This is not a systematic look at the stages of retirement or old age, but rather a series of psychological and spiritual reflections on aging.

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General Personal

Aging Thoughts: Introduction

(The word “Aging” in this title does not mean that these thoughts are necessarily about aging. Rather, these particular posts are comments that occur to me as I have time to reflect on life, not thoughts about aging, but thoughts that have, I hope, like good wine, aged appropriately.)

First, I want to make clear that I am not a “boomer.” I am among the small number of Americans which demographers barely squeeze into the category of “Silent Generation,” which ends in 1945.  Born in 1943, I am a tail-ender to that generation just as my wife Deanna, born in 1946, is a pioneer boomer.  We are both, as the as the astrologers say, on the cusp.

Our parents were shaped by the Great Depression, bequeathing to us a certain sense of scarcity (in my family anyway, where “money didn’t grow on trees”) while we were simultaneously growing up in what was to become the most prosperous period in American history, never experienced before or since.

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Religion/Spirituality

Light and Dark: Good and Evil

Recently I read the following quotation in a book of daily spiritual readings: “The activity of God is like light touching darkness. It does not do anything whatsoever to darkness; it does not heal it, correct it, change it or remove it. It just reveals that there is none.”

This comment by Joel S. Goldsmith, an early twentieth-century spiritual teacher, initially struck me as interesting, even an exciting insight. After all, if creation, including humans, is good and not “fallen” (my current theological position), then it might be true that evil is an illusion created by us to explain “the bad things that happen to good people.”

But then my cerebral skepticism kicked in and my enthusiasm for this potential new insight began to fade. If darkness doesn’t exist, why does “the activity of God” need to “touch” it? And why are we so preoccupied with bad things if they don’t really exist?

It reminds me of a rhyme that my mother recited when I was young.  It went something like this: “I saw him sitting on the stair, the little man who wasn’t there.  He wasn’t there again today. Gee, I wish he’d go away.”

Of course, as a “progressive” or incarnational Christian, I do believe that God exists in everything and everything exists (somehow) in God, that is, contains some divinity. [See my post entitled “Imagining a New Way to be Christian”].  

Richard Rohr, my favorite practical mystic and spiritual teacher, along with many mystical thinkers before him, sees the unity of creation as the ultimate reality. He deplores our dualistic, “either-or” way of looking at things, a western way of thought useful in science and engineering, but detrimental (and judgmental) when applied to things of the spirit.)

Rohr and others would see the activity of God expressed through us humans as that which transforms the darkness (or evil or sin) of all kinds into Light. We are most likely to see and have the ability to effect such a transformation only after we have experienced either great joy or great suffering. Only those experiences, Rohr would say, allow to let go of the ego forces that too often leads us into the darkness. 

Rohr might even say that Joel Goldsmith is not exactly wrong; his view of this process is just incomplete.

And this reminds me of another rhyme on this subject (author unknown) that goes like this: “In the black, there is some white. In the wrong, there is some right. In the dark there is some light, In the blind there is some sight.”

How’s that for a glimpse of unity?

Categories
General

Loren Eiseley and Blaise Pascal visit the Sierra Club

I have a habit, shared by many others, of reading something “light” (or at least short) to help me get to sleep after I go to bed. I even have a light clipped to my headboard to shine on my book or magazine.

To this end, I recently picked up an old (1985) paperback edited by James Moffett entitled Points of Departure: An Anthology of Nonfiction. It contains over fifty short pieces, ranging from personal letters and newspaper columns to travelogues, short bits of history, and personal essays (the last under the chapter heading “Cogitation.”) As an old cogitator from way back, I picked an essay in this section by the great science writer Loren Eiseley entitled “The Hidden Teacher.”

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Religion/Spirituality

Trusting God and Ourselves: A Sermon

Scriptures:     Luke 17:20-21          2 Peter 1:4              John 14:12

COVID-19 has challenged Americans more than most of us have ever been challenged before.  We have been hurt financially, psychologically, and spiritually.  Whether we have contracted the corona virus or not, our lives have been dramatically changed.

Many of us have not been able to see our extended families, or socialize with friends, or attend church or engage in our normal forms of recreation or work.  This has caused many more than usual to feel depressed, and this feeling is often expressed as anger, and a need to find someone or something to blame, something not hard to do in our society, which was polarized politically before the disease struck.

We are simply overwhelmed by our inability to feel certain about anything in the future, even life itself.

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Categories
Personal Politics

Daughters in Decisionville, Coronaland

We have two daughters, born fifteen months apart. They each live away from their parents and each other, although we all live in Kentucky.  They love each other and their parents (most of the time), and both are entering their mature years (fifty-somethings). They have very nice families.

I have counseled both of them to begin thinking seriously about preparing financially for retirement now, especially given the current disarray in the old USA. And like good daughters everywhere, they always pay close attention to advice from their father (wink, wink, nudge).

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Personal Religion/Spirituality

“Light of the World?”

When I was still young in the 1950s, there was an interesting show on our black and white TV sponsored by a Catholic religious order, the Paulist Fathers. While I don’t remember much about the show, I was captivated by and internalized the song with which they ended the program.

With a picture of a candle burning, a strong voice sang the following words: “If everyone lit just one little candle, what a bright world this would be.”  Every once in a while, that one-line melody pops into my head. 

This morning was one of those times. In a quiet house on a rainy Sunday morning, I was reading a short piece on “The Light of Humankind” by one Rocco Errico in the current issue of my Science of Mind magazine.  Scholar Errico has two degrees (Th.D and Ph.D) and is founder and president of the Noohra Foundation in Smyrna, Georgia.

Noohra is the Aramaic word for “light,” one of Dr. Errico’s favorite languages. He tells me that in the northern Galilean dialect that Jesus spoke, the words of Jesus in Matthew 5:14—“you are the light of the world,”—came out as “Aton enon noohreh dalma.

He (Rocco) explained that “Jesus was telling his disciples and the people that they were the carriers of the light of God on Earth.”  He then noted that the Aramaic for “world” was alma and that alma had other meaning as well. It could refer to “age, life-time, eternity, everlasting.”

As it happens, noohra also has other meanings. It can mean “sight, brilliance, brightness, enlightenment.” What a nice but challenging way to look at ourselves.   It does, however, remind me of a line of Charlie Brown’s in the Peanuts cartoon strip: “There is no heavier burden than a great potential.”

Is it possible for us to enter into and live up to the truth that we are indeed God’s messenger’s on earth? Can we identify and somehow grasp in our heads and our hearts that we do have access to the mind and heart of Jesus and that, as Brian Clardy said in yesterday’s First Presbyterian sermon on Facebook, Jesus is only telling us what the Father (Abba) has told him to say?’

All I can say is that I struggle with this—and I hope that you will struggle with it as well.

                                                                                 7-13-20

Categories
Politics Religion/Spirituality

Religion and Politics: Substance not Slogans

It is an old adage that religion and politics shouldn’t mix and must be avoided in conversations, especially in churches and at family gatherings.

Clearly, we humans can be very emotional about our religious and political views. I remember being startled when two people stormed out of our church when our pastor criticized Donald Trump by name for contradicting a preacher who spoke of loving our neighbor at a national prayer breakfast. 

I also know of one family gathering where, following a political “discussion,” between two persons of markedly different views, one of them left in an angry huff and dented the new car of a family member on the way out of the driveway.  

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Religion/Spirituality

Eternal Life Now?

The follow words come from a sermon preached at the First Presbyterian Church in Hinton, West Virginia. My friend Ann Wells, who lives in both Hinton and Murray, KY (though not at the same time) shared this with me.  It suggests a way for us to live incarnationally.

“Eternal life can be experienced, here and now. In the Gospel of Luke 17: 20-21, there is a conversation between the Pharisees and Jesus. The Pharisees ask Jesus, ‘when the kingdom of God would come.’ Jesus replied, ‘The Kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, nor will people say, ‘Here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ because the kingdom of God is within you.’ . . . The word ‘kingdom; in Greek is ‘basileia’ and it means rule, reign, or dominion. When we believe in Jesus as our Savior and Lord, God’s rule and God’s reign starts in us. And if we are under God’s reign, we can experience eternal life, here and now. We are not able to fully experience eternal life in our earthly lives because our sinful nature remains in us and is constantly blocking us from having an intimate fellowship with God. But we can still enjoy and experience eternal life on earth when we haves a personal relationship with God because we are united with Christ through faith and Christ lives in us.”

To this I would only add that “personal relationship” is only evident to ourselves and to others when we live incarnationally (draw upon the divinity within us) to reach out to and love others—all others, without exception—even those we don’t like.