May 20, 2013 · 10:49 am

Every Bush is Burning

Discerning Authentic Spiritual Experience

burning_bush_smallIn Exodus 3, Moses was having an average day: tending the flock, hanging out in the desert. But then, the text notes, “he led the flock to the far side of the desert.” And there he has the profound and epic experience of meeting God in a bush. We spent some time on this passage in a recent gathering of Roots DC, the faith community I’m a part of here in DC.  In the text, Moses is told to take off his sandals, for “the place where you are standing is holy ground.”

This led to some discussion: what made that ground special? What was the significance of taking off his shoes? At what point in this experience did Moses realize that it was more than just an oddity of nature, that God was meeting him there?

This led to further ponderings on divine encounters or spiritual experiences in general: what are they like? How do you know when (or if) you are having one? When to believe someone else’s account of such an experience?

I recently came across some helpful guidelines by Gerald May, whose work I’ve come across since I’ve begun working at the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation, a center for developing contemplative spiritual practice and leadership. May practiced medicine and psychiatry for twenty-five years before becoming a senior fellow in contemplative theology and psychology at Shalem.

May notes that when someone speaks of having an encounter with the Divine, we wonder: Is this “real” or is it an illusion contrived by ego?

In having this discussion, he reminds us that the line between reality and illusion can be very close: “Because our minds continually create images of reality through our senses and conditioning, it would be true to say that all experience is at least somewhat psychologically contrived.”

In other words, all of our experiences in life have a psychological component, whether it be chatting around the coffeepot at work, checking the mail, or a profound spiritual encounter.

He outlines eight qualities that can be useful in judging whether a spiritual experience is authentic, while noting “our experiences cannot be based on content alone”, but “must be integrated in the larger picture of life: in context, in community, and over time.”

I found these eight points very helpful, so here they are:

  1. Meaningful Integration. Authentic spiritual experiences do not exist as isolated “highs.” They occur within the context of real life and are integrated in a way that is meaningful for both individual and community. Authentic experiences may contain a perfect end-in-itself quality, but they still have meaning and impact on life.
  2. Bearing Good Fruit. Authentic spiritual experiences lead to good effects for individual and community. Classically, this includes deepened faith, hope, trust, compassion, creativity, and love. Authentic experiences do not lead to privatism or destructiveness.
  3. Decreased Self-Preoccupation. Authentic experiences lead people to feel more identified with and open to the rest of humanity and the world. Experiences that lead to feelings of being more special or better than other people, or to self-absorption, are probably not authentic.
  4. Self Knowledge. Authentic experiences lead to a greater understanding of oneself. Signs of repression, denial, or shutting out of self-awareness indicate a lack of authenticity.
  5. Humility. Authentic experiences lead to a particular kind of humility, one that painfully recognizes more of one’s human inadequacy, yet at the same time increasingly realizes one’s won preciousness and worth as a child of God. It is a humility that is combined with dignity. This is in contrast to experiences that lead either to arrogance or devaluing of oneself.
  6. Openness to Differences. By deepening trust in the power and goodness of God, authentic experiences lead to less defensiveness about one’s own faith and increased respect for and openness to dialogue with people of differing faiths [or perspectives]. Authentic experiences may lead to a desire to share the truth, but they do not result in defensive or aggressive clinging to one’s own understanding.
  7. Open-endedness. Authentic spiritual experiences contain a quality of further invitation: deepened yearning, inspired energy, continued growth and healing. In contrast, experiences that communicate a sense of “having arrived” are cause for suspicion.
  8. Ordinariness. Although authentic experiences may initially be accompanied by celebration and enthusiasm or by fear and trepidation, their integration brings a quality of wondrous appreciation of the ordinary; life is holy, and the miraculous presence of God’s grace flows through all of it. Experiences that lead to a strong separation of the holy from the mundane must be questioned.

Gerald May closes with this thought: “If there is one basic factor that distinguishes authentic from inauthentic experience, it can be found in a paraphrase of John of the Cross: In the end, all of us—and all of our experiences—must be judged on the basis of one thing, and that is love.” (Gerald May’s guidelines quoted in Holy Meeting Ground: 20 Years of Shalem)

Sometimes we long for such a deep, powerful  experience as Moses had with the bush in the desert. We wonder why God hasn’t met us in such a powerful way. Yet perhaps such an experience is nearer to us than we think.

John Philip Newell is a poet, scholar, and teacher of the Celtic tradition from Scotland. He recently visited the DC region for the two day Gerald May Seminar held by the Shalem Institute, an annual event which seeks to carry on the legacy of May’s life and teaching. He spoke on the connection between earth awareness and contemplative practice, noting that there is a profound and deep connection between matter and spirit that perhaps we’ve forgotten. He puts it this way, in his recent book A New Harmony: The Spirit, The Earth, and The Human Soul:

In the story of Moses and the burning bush, in which the Living Presence is revealed in the words “I am who I am” or “I will be what I will be,” Moses is told to take off his shoes, for the ground on which he is standing is holy. He is told to uncover the soles of his feet, a place of deep knowing in the human form. Think of walking barefoot in the grass. Think of placing our bare feet into the coolness of a refreshing stream. When we do so, we see in a new way. Doors of perception are opened in us. Rabbi Nahum, in teaching on this passage from Torah, likes to say that the important aspect of this story is not that the bush is burning, but that Moses notices. For every bush is burning. Every bush is aflame with the Living Presence. The “fiery power,” as Hildegard puts it, is hidden in everything that has being.

An encounter with the divine may be nearer than you think. The title of Newell’s chapter from which I quoted? Every Bush is Burning. The question is: have you paused to notice? Have you made space in your busy life? Maybe it’s time to go for a walk. And don’t forget: leave the shoes at home.

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May 13, 2013 · 6:20 pm

Tomorrow’s Theology. Today’s Task.

A recent article in The Banner, the online and print magazine of the Christian Reformed Church, began with the following:

I suspect that a thousand years from now Christians will look back at the 21st century and say, “How could Christians have let themselves think that?” They’d have in mind our theology—some of the doctrines that are so precious to us and that we consider to be the backbone of Christianity.

Some saw this as provocative. Some as overstating the case. Others as unthinkable.

My thought was, “People are already saying this now.”

EvolutionGodThe article more or less centers around the issue of evolution, which, at least in one form or another, has attained a near consensus status among scientists as being part of the process of the development of life on earth, including all animal life. Animal life includes people, which is in many ways where the rub is.

Are we, as C.S. Lewis puts it in the Chronicles of Narnia, the “sons of Adam and daughters of Eve”?

Scientists argue that it is not genetically possible for present DNA diversity to have issued from a single pair of ancestors in recent history.

So the writer of the provocative article in the Banner rightly notes that we must begin to assess certain readings and/or doctrines which seem to rely upon a view of the world which may not, in the end, be accurate.

Yet some would say, can’t we just read the Bible literally?  Well, no. At least not accurately (with regard to science. Or literature).

As Pete Enns put it in a Biologos article:

The biblical depiction of human origins, if taken literally, presents Adam as the very first human being ever created. He was not the product of an evolutionary process, but a special creation of God a few thousand years before Jesus—roughly speaking, about 6000 years ago. Every single human being that has ever lived can trace his/her genetic history to that one person.

This is a problem because it is at odds with everything else we know about the past from the natural sciences and cultural remains.

There are human cultural remains dating well over 100,000 years ago. One recent example is 130,000-year-old stone tools found on Crete. (Their presence on an island presumes seafaring ability at that time.) Ritual/religious structures are known to have existed as far back as 40,000-70,000 years ago. Recently, a temple complex was found in Turkey dating to about 11,500 years ago—7,000 years before the Pyramids.

In addition to cultural artifacts, there is also the scientific data from the various natural sciences that support a very old earth (4.5 billion years old) and the evolutionary development of life on it—things most readers of this Web site hardly need me to point out. Most recently, the genetic evidence for common descent has, in the view of most everyone trained in the field, lent great support to the antiquity of humanity and sharing a common ancestry with primates.

So reading the Bible literally is problematic for scientific and historic reasons. And there is another reason:

There is a third line of evidence that is a problem for a literal reading of the Adam story. Archaeological evidence gathered over the last 150 years or so has helped us understand the religions of the ancient Near East during and long before the Old Testament period. As is well known, Genesis 1 and the Adam story bear unmistakable resemblances to the stories of other peoples—none of which we would ever think of taking as historical depictions of origins.

Bingo.

And many people realize this, and have realized it for some time.

But apparently not certain readers of the Banner.

Objections ranged from: “Asking a whole lot of big complex questions without any attempt to answer it is not helpful” to “This article should have never made print” to “This article implicitly affirmed a lot of heretical propositions” and finally, “Is it possible to overture Synod to remove and replace the editor of the Banner for behavior so damaging to the well being of the churches?”

There were many more reactions, some of which were very thoughtful, others of which were more of the above (and worse!).

Was it a perfect article? I suppose not. But neither was it terrible. It opens the door to further dialogue, and that’s what we need. It is OK to ask a lot of big questions. And not only OK, imperative. Asking questions is an important, crucial step in learning anything.

Whenever you are no longer allowed to ask questions, you can safely assume you’re no longer in a good place.

We should be asking questions, and not just about tomorrow’s theology a thousand years from now, but about what we might, by grappling with Scripture, science, and the best of human understanding, believe today about ourselves, our world, and God.

Many are already doing it, and we should join them.

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A few recommended resources:
Looking for the Missing Link – a documentary by my friend Leo Hagedorn
The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn’t Say About Human Origins – Pete Enns. One of the best works I have read regarding how we are to read Adam through the biblical lens, both as understood in Genesis, by Israelites and Jews, and by Paul and Jesus.
Evolving in Monkey Town: How a Girl Who Knew All The Answers Learned to Ask The Questions – Rachel Held Evans
Network for Science, Technology, and Faith – the Episcopal Church

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April 23, 2013 · 2:38 pm

The Pistol-Packing Pastor

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The LA Times had a story recently about a pastor who carries heat: “He shows others how to put their trust in God and take their security into their own hands.”

From the story:

BEAUMONT, Texas — Two years ago on Super Bowl Sunday, Pentecostal preacher James McAbee was getting into his car after services when he heard a commotion. He saw two men break a window and enter a church hall that was being renovated.

McAbee called 911. The dispatcher said it would take officers at least 11 minutes to respond.

He lingered outside for a moment, frustrated.

“I could hear them snapping the lumber and carrying the sheet rock,” McAbee said.

The pastor drew a .380 pistol he wore in an ankle holster and burst into the hall — only to find two adolescents.

McAbee, who’d had a troubled youth, saw himself in the pair. He lowered his gun to offer some fatherly advice, but the older one, a 17-year-old with two outstanding drug warrants, rushed the pastor with the pointy end of a broken 2-by-4.

“I got my gun back out in time,” McAbee said. “He froze in his tracks. I said, ‘Son, you better not move or I’ll put one right in your watermelon!’”

The pastor held them until police arrived.

Some laud this pastor as exemplary, and he’s become known as Triple-P: “Pistol-Packing Pastor.” He began teaching gun classes shortly after he earned his nickname, and cites Scripture that he says justifies the classes: Psalm 144:1, “The Lord has trained me for battle”; and Luke 22:36, in which Jesus instructs the disciples to arm themselves.

I actually posted Luke 22:38 earlier today on Facebook:

So they said, “Lord, look! Here are two swords.”
He answered them, “Enough of that!”

Typical translations will have Jesus reply: “That is enough,” but I like this version. It’s as if Jesus is dismissing such talk. Yet in either case, Jesus is noting that his disciples are not to be about aggression and violence. Two swords would be laughed at in the face of even the smallest contingent of Roman or Herodian soldiers. He would face their worst, and was not about to respond in kind.

RELATED: Christianity, Gun Violence, and the Nihilism of Mike Huckabee

But back to our pistol-packing pastor:
He was expecting more than 100 people to attend his latest class, mandated by the state for concealed handgun licenses. The class costs $50, and in recent months, McAbee’s business has tripled and he’s trained more than 1,000 people.

What do you think? Is he doing a good thing? Is it possible to teach someone to trust in God and take security matters into their own hands? My own sense is that the need to carry the gun points to the opposite of trust in God. “Sure, I’ll trust you, God, up until the point I actually need to trust you. At that point, I’ll take care of things myself, thank you.”

There’s more to the story:

Guns were a normal part of McAbee’s life. He was raised in the small town of Clover, S.C., where his grandfather took him hunting. His mother worked in law enforcement and carried a gun.

One day at the range, his mother accidentally shot and partially paralyzed herself. McAbee was 9.

He grew up caring for his mother, and the stress took a toll. As a teenager he started using drugs and stealing to feed his habit.

When he was 18, McAbee was caught breaking into an elderly neighbor’s house. He was convicted of burglary, aggravated assault and battery, and served 21/2 years in a maximum-security prison.

There, McAbee felt called to preach.

This is a fascinating story. This guy spends over twenty years in prison because his mother shot herself with her own gun, yet he’s still enamored with them. Amazing. In prison he finds God. You’d think perhaps he would turn over a new leaf in regard to guns. The story continues (you’re not even going to believe this part):

In 2008, his mother again wounded herself with her own gun. Weakened by the shooting, she died later that year.

Seriously? She does this twice?! And she worked in law enforcement. You’d think this would be it for McAbee and guns. There’s no way he can look at one and say, “Hey, this is a good thing, more people ought to have these…” Except he does.

McAbee’s attitude about guns was unchanged: “Don’t blame the tool.”

Don’t blame the tool. Indeed.

MacAbee was hired three years ago at his present church, which is in a low-income neighborhood where gun crimes and celebratory gunfire is not uncommon. The day after Obama was re-elected, he bought an AR-15 assault rifle for nearly $1,000. He noted: “If the thugs are going to have one, I’m going to have one too.” If he insists on referring to people in his neighborhood as thugs, people who need the kind of help and life his church can offer, he might as well be armed. And apparently he is.

On occasion, the article notes, McAbee wears two guns to church — the .40 on his hip and the .380 in the ankle holster. His wife also carries a concealed gun. Neither has a safety on the guns they carry, and they like to keep a bullet chambered.

“People think I’m a gun nut and gun crazy, but I’m not. I don’t want to hurt anybody. I believe the Bible teaches peace. But that doesn’t mean I should let them hurt me,” he said.

That’s like saying: “I believe the Bible teaches peace. But I don’t actually believe in trying it for myself.”

Imagine if Jesus had said, “My way is peace, and how dare you lay a finger on me, Pilate! I’m locked and loaded, baby!”

I invite you to read the rest of the story and draw your own conclusions.There’s been obviously tons of talk about guns of late, beginning with the Newtown tragedy and recent attempts at gun legislation. There are differing perspectives as to what the second amendment should mean today (or even meant originally).

Personally, I am amazed that someone who spent most of his adult life in prison and lost his own mother due to guns would have such a perspective. My own sense is that a ‘pistol-packing pastor’ is an oxymoron, and such an example doesn’t teach people anything about trusting in God, or about the way of Christ.

But I could be wrong about that.

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April 19, 2013 · 9:19 am

Boston Reaction: Had It With Humanity?

Mourners attend candlelight vigil for Martin Richard at Garvey Park, near Richard's home in the Dorchester section of Boston, on Tuesday, April 16, 2013. Martin is the 8-year-old boy killed in the Boston Marathon bombing. (AP Photo/The New York Times, Josh Haner)

Mourners attend candlelight vigil for Martin Richard at Garvey Park, near Richard’s home in the Dorchester section of Boston, on Tuesday, April 16, 2013. Martin is the 8-year-old boy killed in the Boston Marathon bombing. (AP Photo/The New York Times, Josh Haner)

This piece was originally posted Friday, April 19 in the Huffington Post.

The reactions to Monday’s explosions at the Boston Marathon are well documented and many.

President Obama acknowledged in the aftermath that we knew little about the explosions at the Boston Marathon, but pledged “we will find out who did this and we will hold them accountable.”

Obama maintained that Boston is a “tough and resilient town,” and that “the American people will be with them every single step of the way.”

The stories of the victims and the brave acts of heroism should be paramount here, but inevitably we ask: Who did this? Why did they do this? Why does anyone want to do something like this?

RELATED — BOMB SUSPECT DEAD, MANHUNT FOR SECOND

One particular reaction that many people resonated with was making the rounds on Facebook. It was from comedian Patton Oswalt:

Boston. Fucking horrible.

I remember, when 9/11 went down, my reaction was, “Well, I’ve had it with humanity.”

But I was wrong. I don’t know what’s going to be revealed to be behind all of this mayhem. One human insect or a poisonous mass of broken sociopaths.

But here’s what I DO know. If it’s one person or a HUNDRED people, that number is not even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population on this planet. You watch the videos of the carnage and there are people running TOWARDS the destruction to help out. (Thanks FAKE Gallery founder and owner Paul Kozlowski for pointing this out to me). This is a giant planet and we’re lucky to live on it but there are prices and penalties incurred for the daily miracle of existence. One of them is, every once in awhile, the wiring of a tiny sliver of the species gets snarled and they’re pointed towards darkness.

But the vast majority stands against that darkness and, like white blood cells attacking a virus, they dilute and weaken and eventually wash away the evil doers and, more importantly, the damage they wreak. This is beyond religion or creed or nation. We would not be here if humanity were inherently evil. We’d have eaten ourselves alive long ago.

So when you spot violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, “The good outnumber you, and we always will.”

What do you think? Is humanity on the whole wired toward goodness? Is this an intentional, divinely-infused goodness, or a product of evolutionary development, or perhaps both?

We discussed this very thing at Pub Theology DC on Tuesday night, the following day after the events in Boston.

Read the rest of this article at the Huffington Post!

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April 16, 2013 · 4:28 pm

What can we reason but from what we know?

An excerpt from An Essay On Man by Alexander Pope, 1734:

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queensferrylampost220300Say first, of God above or Man below
What can we reason but from what we know?
Of man what see we but his station here,
From which to reason, or to which refer?
Thro’ worlds unnumber’d tho’ the God be known,
‘Tis ours to trace him only in our own.
He who thro’ vast immensity can pierce,
See worlds on worlds compose one universe,
Observe how system into system runs,
What other planets circle other suns,
What varied being peoples every star,
May tell why Heav’n has made us as we are:
But of this frame, the bearings and the ties,
The strong connexions, nice dependencies,
Gradations just, has thy pervading soul
Look’d thro’; or can a part contains the whole?

Is the great chain that draws all to agree,
And drawn supports, upheld by God or thee?

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On its publication in 1734, An Essay on Man met with great admiration throughout Europe. Voltaire called it “the most beautiful, the most useful, the most sublime didactic poem ever written in any language.” In 1756, Rousseau wrote to Voltaire admiring the poem and saying that it “softens my ills and brings me patience.” Kant was fond of the poem and would recite long passages of the poem to his students. Voltaire later satirized some of Pope’s themes in Candide.

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April 4, 2013 · 3:11 pm

The Cross and the God of the Gaps

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Guest post by Dr. Paul Knitter, Paul Tillich Professor of Theology, World Religions and Culture at Union Theological Seminary, New York City. (Posted with permission of Union in Dialogue and Paul F. Knitter – Original post here)

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[Recently, on a] Good Friday, I experienced the confluence of two theological streams – one philosophical and the other devotional. I started with the philosophical on the bus to the United Nations this morning, on my way to participate in “The Way of the Cross, the Way of Peace” which would trace its way down 42nd Street and end up in Times Square.  I was reading a piece by John Caputo in the recent issue of Tikkun whose featured topic was “God and the 21st Century.”

Caputo, ever the devoted theologian of postmodernity, described eloquently and engagingly, as he always does, the only God he (and I) can believe in – a God who is thoroughly, intimately, and dangerously part of the ongoing and always messy process of life:  “God is not a warranty for a well-run world, but the name of a promise, an unkept promise, where every promise is also a risk, a flicker of hope on a suffering planet.”  This promise can be kept only if we work with it. The divine “promiser” and the finite “promise-ees” are in this together.

And on this basis, we have an entirely different take on the much ridiculed “God of the gaps” – the God we resort to in order to fill in the holes or gaps of our knowledge or inadequacies, only to find that science keeps filling in the blanks and pushing out God.  The way Caputo puts it can well serve as a zinger for all our “new atheists”: “God does not bring closure but a gap. A God of the gaps is not the gap God fills, but the gap God opens.”

God is that power, that presence, or that something that keeps opening, surprisingly, new gaps, new questions, new possibilities.

Caputo’s philosophical proddings were stirring in my mind as we started the “First Station” of the Way of the Cross in Dag Hammarskjold Plaza near the UN.  I was waiting for the usual prayer, traditional to Roman Catholic Good Friday liturgies and used in the “Way of the Cross, Way of Justice” that I used to attend in Cincinnati: “We adore thee, O Christ, and we praise thee, because by thy holy cross, thou hast redeemed the world.”  Instead, this is what we read and prayed from the printed program: “We adore you, O  Christ, and we praise you. BY THE POWER OF YOUR HOLY CROSS, HELP US TO CHANGE THE WORLD.”

The difference between those two formulations is the difference between two very different soteriologies – or ways of understanding how Jesus’ death on the cross saves us.  In the first, the cross redeems us by changing God – that is by satisfying God’s demand for reparation or atonement for humanity’s sin.  In the second, the cross redeems us by enabling US to change the world.

The cross doesn’t pay off God.  Rather, what we see and learn from the cross changes our hearts so that we can change the world.

And here is where I reconnected with Caputo’s understanding of the God who opens gaps. The cross and the death of Jesus represent the primary gap or new possibility that Christianity offers the world: on the cross, we see a man who was filled with the Spirit of God and who challenged the powers that be (mainly the Roman Empire) to the point that they decided he had to be “disappeared” and executed.

But rather than respond to the violent hatred of his executioners with hatred, he responded with non-violent love.  He forgave them.

That’s the new gap – the new possibility opened up for humanity:  in order to save or really change this messed up world of hatred, injustice, and greed, we have to confront the powers that have caused this mess.  But when they respond and come after us, we can’t hate them; we have to confront them with the power of love and non-violence.

It may cost us our lives.  But if we die like this – if we confront evil but do not hate the evil-doers even though they kill us – we can change the world.

This gap, this possibility, this way of living cannot be proven to bring the birth or resurrection of a new world.  But given the example of Jesus – as well as so many others like Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, Archbishop Romer, the Dalai Lama – we can bet our lives on it.

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paulknitterSince his ground-breaking 1985 book, No Other Name?, Paul Knitter has been exploring how the religious communities of the world can cooperate in promoting human and ecological well-being. His latest publication is Without Buddha I Could Not Be A Christian (Oneworld Publications, 2009).

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March 29, 2013 · 6:05 pm

Atheist: “I Still Believe in Good Friday”

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Guest post by Chris Lubbers, Adjunct Professor of Philosophy, Muskegon Community College

Reflections on Good Friday

I remember being puzzled as a child in church—one of many times—about why the day on which Jesus was crucified was called “Good Friday.” What was good about that? It seemed pretty awful.

I was told that what was good was that Jesus died for our sins, thus saving us from the punishment of death. But everyone still sins, and everyone still dies.

Later I was told that saving us from death was a metaphor for saving us from the eternal torment known as hell, which was not a metaphor. Some people still went to hell, though, because they didn’t believe in Jesus. Whatever that meant.

Have you ever tried to just believe something that you didn’t already believe? Good luck.

Eventually, I was told that it didn’t really matter what we did. God chose from before the creation who would go to heaven and who would go to hell. Problem solved?

Studying Biblical scholarship, church history, theology, ethics and philosophy of religion offered me the opportunity to learn far more subtle, complex, nuanced and technical answers to these simple questions I had raised. But I found them all lacking.

So, why am I writing about Good Friday, when I don’t believe in Easter?

Because, even though I don’t think there are any such things as gods or places like heaven and hell, I still believe in Good Friday. I believe that Jesus was crucified by a powerful and corrupt empire, with the help of the religious leadership, whose authority Jesus questioned on a regular basis, sometimes violently.

Little has changed in two thousand years. Those in power still seek to destroy those who question their authority.

Every once in a while, though, someone comes along and reminds us that some things are worth dying for. They inspire us to do what is right and let the shameful injustice of those in power reveal itself to everyone.

I think today of all those girls, boys, women and men who have suffered and died for our sins.

Do we have enough courage not to avert our eyes?

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