Rev. Dr. Thomas Shepherd's Theo-Blog

Remarks upon Receiving the 2011 Charles Fillmore Award

2011-06-14T23:29:00.000-07:00

My notes say, “Be sure to thank Unity Worldwide Ministries, your family, your co-workers and students at Unity Institute, the people who read your books and columns… etc. Unity is a vast pool of spiritual wisdom and love. A lot of great people have received this award in the past; so make humble noises.”

I want to thank my students—past and present—who are here tonight. How many members of the "Order of the Tiger are here?" (Loud cheering) They’ll explain to you what that means later.

I also want to thank the members of my twice-monthly congregation at Unity of the Lakes, Warsaw, Missouri. And I promised Toni Lapp I would urge everybody to subscribe to Unity Magazine.

If you have read my column in Unity Magazine, you know I make it very clear that I do not speak FOR the Unity Movement. But tonight, I’m going to lean out this window of opportunity you have opened for me, and speak TO the Unity Movement…for a few minutes. For better or for worse, you have given this year’s Charles Fillmore award to a theologian, and I want to speak to you about the value of doing theology in everyday life.

Theology is critical reflection about spiritual ideas, especially those which originate within a community of faith. We are Unity. We believe in the One Power/One Presence, and that gives us common ground. But if we think that means there will be uniformity of thought, we have not learned the lessons of history. What religious or spiritual movement has ever been able to define itself so adequately that everyone says, “Yes! That’s who we are and what we believe!” and the next generation, and the next, and the next—all agreed?

Even when our best thinkers write their books, all they can give us is a snapshot, a comprehensive expression of the ideas current in their time. We learned about human equality from Martin Luther King, Jr., even though Jesus and the Apostle Paul proclaimed the fundamental oneness of all people two thousand years ago. “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

We learned about women’s right and gay rights from folks who challenged our thinking. When we reflect on what all that means for a person of faith, we are doing theology.

The historical record shows that Unity’s co-founders reveled in theological dialogue about their spiritual goals. We actually have the Fillmores on record engaging in theological discourse in the early stages of their developing thought, even before they were married. When Charles Fillmore courted Myrtle Page late in the nineteenth century, they carried on a zesty cross-country correspondence. Today they would have exchanged e-mail and text messages. Across the miles their letters traveled, and sometimes they sparred about religious ideas.

One letter to Charles, dated September 1, 1882, contains the following eyebrow-raised retort from the future Mrs. Fillmore. Myrtle writes to Charles:

"You question my orthodoxy? Well, if I were called upon to write out my creed it would be rather a strange mixture. I am decidedly eclectic in my theology—is it not my right to be? Over all is a grand idea of God, but full of love and mercy."

I like that. “…decidedly eclectic in my theology…” Meaning she reserved the right to pick and choose those ideas which worked for her. I wonder if Charles ever questioned her orthodoxy again?

We have a glimpse of the way Charles Fillmore did theology when teaching a class. In The Story of Unity James Dillet Freeman says:

Often in his classes, a student would be answering a question and Mr. Fillmore would ask, “Where did you get that idea?”
The student would reply, “I read that in such-and-such a Unity book, Mr. Fillmore.”
“Are you sure?”
“Certainly, Mr. Fillmore, that is right out of page so and so.”
“You know,” he would say, “that is not exactly right,” and then he would go on to explain the point in a way that clarified it.”

Freeman continues:

“Often in his classes, he would interrupt his students, when they were quoting him, with the question, “But what do YOU think about it?”

James Dillet Freeman summarized Charles Fillmore’s teaching style with these words:

“The main aim of his teaching was to get his students to think Truth through for themselves. He knew that only out of free discussion would students arrive at an understanding of Truth that was in their own language.”

Mr. Fillmore stood firmly in the tradition of progressive thinkers who understood the need for ongoing theological dialogue. The great 20th century liberal minister, Harry Emerson Fosdick, challenged mainstream Christianity to continually re-think its deepest beliefs. Fodsick wrote:

"The fact that astronomies change while the stars abide is a true analogy of every realm of human life and thought, religion not least of all. No existent theology can be a final formulation of spiritual truth."

Astronomies change, the stars abide. Biologies change, but evolution presses onward. Religious ideas change, and God—One Presence, One Power—expresses through us, and in us, and as us, in eternal truths which are eternally re-thought. That is what theology is all about. It give you the tools to re-think the great questions…and the little ones, too.

I challenge you tonight with the same words I address to my students at Unity Institute: Follow the example of the Fillmores. Be “decidedly eclectic” in your theology. Describe before you prescribe. Think critically and honestly. Turn every idea upside down to see if there is an expiration date stamped on the bottom. Learn the joy of disagreeing agreeably.

Do not seek uniformity; it is not possible.

Do not attempt to find THE Unity answer to every question, but find A Unity answer that works for you. Be "decidedly eclectic" in your theology. It is your right to be.

Express your credo with complete freedom of thought, centered in the One Presence, One Power. And remember, there are many, many ways to understand what that magnificent idea means.

We are not a set of doctrines; we are a movement.

We are not a teaching; we are a way of life.

We are not limited to our Christian heritage; yet we are under no obligation to abandon the Christian heritage just because some of the noisy friends of Jesus have decided they get to define what it means to be a Christian. Do not let the conservatives define the faith for you.

Unity is Practical Christianity, which is the term Charles Fillmore used for his work all the days of his life. I like to say we are culturally Christian, spiritually unlimited.

So, be not afraid.

Trust your gifts.

Pray any way that works for you. No one has been appointed the prayer police. Talk to God or as God or from God—whatever works is true for you.

And “the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.”

Thank you for this great honor you have given me tonight. I pray to be worthy. Amen. Shalom. Maranatha. Allah u’ Akbar. Namaste.

Turkey Worship & the Church in/of the Future

2011-06-03T10:06:00.000-07:00

Why did people build the first towns? Seems like an easy question: they found places where economic factors made it possible to produce and store more food, safely raise their children, and carry on the shared, diversified responsibilities of village life. As these rural communities grew, walls were needed to protect small towns from human mauraders and wild beasts, especially in the night. Gods and magical spirits were invoked to guarantee fertility, enhance the harvest, and protect these proto-cities from natural and man-made calamities. The ancients believed the balance between heaven and earth must be maintained by human action to demonstrate fidelity with the divine forces. So, altars of sacrifice blossomed, and religious semi-professionals (shamans) became priests and priestesses. This led to the construction of permanent shrines and temples for this purpose.

Next question?

This is a rough outline of what most archaeologists and anthropologists have believed about the sequence of civilization. The movement toward urbanization was driven by economics and security, i.e., the need to share resources for the common good. Humans abandoned hunting and gathering after they learned how to plant and harvest grain. They settled down near a source of water because fields cannot travel with nomads. These small settlements grew into villages and towns, which required common defense and a division of labor. More complex art and pottery flourished as people had time to spare for the finer pursuits. Religious institutions and the structures to house them--shrines and temples--came later in support of the spiritual and ritualistic needs of an established community.

If you have taken a course in the history of civilization you are probably nodding... Yeah, yeah. And your point is?

Warning: Fasten your cultural seatbelts. All of the above is most likely wrong. Not just wrong, but backwards-wrong.

Gobekli Tepe: World's First Temple?

German-born archeologist Klaus Schmidt has discovered a vast and artistically delightful temple complex in southeastern Turkey near the Syrian border which, according to a growing number of scholars, is older than the pyramids. No, that doesn't say it stongly enough. The complex is seven thousand years older than the Great Pyramid and six thousand years senior to Stonehenge. The ruins are so ancient they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture.

Schmidt has discovered over fifty sites buried safely beneath the soil of Turkey, where they were built about 11,500 years ago. What's more amazing is the nature of the ruins. There is no water source, no trash heaps, none of the telltale signs of human habitation. The sites were not lived in; they were ceremonial centers--temples. That means human raised temple buildings first, then they figured out how to service these religious complexes by domesticaing grain, raising herd animals, and constructing groups of family dwellings in the area.

Schmidt's thesis is that people must have been gathering at ceremonial sites for ages before they decided to formalize the place of worship with stone structures. The temple came first.

The need to worship drove people to find stable food sources and create permanent settlements. Writing in Newsweek, Patrick Symmes observes:

"Religion now appears so early in civilized life—earlier than civilized life, if Schmidt is correct—that some think it may be less a product of culture than a cause of it, less a revelation than a genetic inheritance. The archeologist Jacques Cauvin once posited that 'the beginning of the gods was the beginning of agriculture,' and Göbekli may prove his case." [1]

Lyceum 2012: The Church in/of the Future

It is worth noting, when considering the Lyceum 2012 theme above, that people have been predicting the downfall of organized religion since writing was invented. But the temples at Gobekli Tepe predate writing by thousands of years. There appears to be something hardwired into humanity which requires us to give thanks, to offer gifts to the divine--first fruits of the field and flocks, devotions of our minds and hands, acts of service in support of something immeasurably greater than ourselves. It was not simply the whimpering of frightened people in a thunderstorm when our ancestors cried unto their gods for deliverance; it was faith that a moral order exists in the cosmos, and that something like justice must eventually prevail. Klaus Schmidt is under no illusions that humanity has gotten religion right through time, but he does seem to believe in the evolution of collective consciousness when he asserts that new ways demand new practices. The people who managed the Gobekli Tepe complex decided to bury the site with dirt, which makes it one of the best preserved Neolithic sites. "When you have new gods," Schmidt says, "you have to get rid of the old ones." [2]

It sounds like theological reflection is at least as old as civilization itself...
______________________________________________________________

[1] http://www.newsweek.com/2010/02/18/history-in-the-remaking.html
[2] Ibid.

God and the Quantum Clematis

2011-05-13T09:58:00.000-07:00

These pretty blue blossoms are the result of Carol-Jean's dilligent work outside the Shepherd Estates on Trailwood Street in Lee's Summit.

I looked at them and displayed my vast store of botanical knowledge by asking, "Honey, what's this?"

"They're Clematis," she told me.

I said, "Nice flower."

"Vine," she said.

"Yes, divine."

"No, Clematis is a vine."

"Hmmm...still looks like a flower to me."

"Theologians," she muttered.

I began pondering the nature of Clematis as she returned to gardening. It has been a fertile Spring, for flowering vines and great student discussions at Unity Institute.

During my Unity Institute course HTS 552 Metaphysical Theology II, students divide into small teams to lead their classmates in a theological analysis of the seven basic books written by Unity co-founder Charles Fillmore. Each team gets two class periods (five total hours) to present the essence of the Fillmorean book assigned to them, a daunting task when you consider that whole courses could be taught on each book. And this is professional theological education, not a church discussion group on Thursday evenings, so the methodologies employed must reach graduate level standards.

I have taught this course for several years, and the pattern has been remarkably similar. The students have great reverence for Mr. Fillmore's accomplishments, but they often wrestle with his methods and conclusions like Jacob and the angel. That willingness to explore and critically analyze marks the boundary line one must cross to become a true professional in any field.

I repeatedly urge them to let Mr. Fillmore be who he was, without feeling the need to prove their loyalty by rescuing, rehabilitating, or repairing his ideas if he goes somewhere they cannot venture. Charles Fillmore was a 19th century man who lived in a Newtonian universe, a spiritual teacher-healer whose practice was located deep inside a conservative Christian world. I often find myself agreeing with him when he says what works but disagreeing when he tries to explain how it works. He is extraordinarily consistent throughout his writing, from the early years to the end of his life. He unwaveringly taught certain ideas--like regeneration and the dangers of sensuality--which are problematic for many people today. Despite this steadiness throughout a long life, he actively encouraged his own students to find answers which worked for them.

"Do not dogmatize in creed, or statement of Being, as a governing rule of thought and action for those who join your organization. These things are limitations, and they often prevent free development because of foolish insistence on consistency. The creed that you write today may not fit the viewpoint of tomorrow." [Twelve Powers, pp. 111-112]

I think one of the greatest examples of his spiritual genius shows itself in the inconsistent way Mr. Fillmore addresses the nature of God.

During the course of student led seminars this year, a new emphasis emerged. Students became engrossed in the historical-theological question about whether Mr. Fillmore taught that God is personal,--i.e., a Supreme Being to Whom one can and should pray--or impersonal, understood as Divine Law or Principle. (Hint: If an easy answer comes to mind, you probably haven't spent a lot of time studying the problem.)

Sometimes, Charles Fillmore speaks of God as impersonal, almost a like a Platonic philosopher discussing concepts like truth, beauty, or goodness:

"When we pray in spiritual understanding, this highest realm of man's mind contacts universal, impersonal Mind; the very mind of God is joined to the mind of man. God answers our prayers in ideas, thoughts, words; these are translated into the outer realms, in time and condition." [Christian Healing, p. 78]

Other times, he begins to sound like a mystical Catholic, like Meister Eckhart:

"Prayer is the opening of communication between the mind of man and the mind of God. Prayer is the exercise of faith in the presence and power of the unseen God. Supplication, faith, meditation,silence, concentration, are mental attitudes that enter into and form part of prayer. When one understands the spiritual character of God and adjusts himself mentally to the omnipresent God-Mind, he has begun to pray aright." [Atom-Smashing Power of Mind, pp. 11-12.]

Here he describes God as both impersonal and personal, capable of creative action (personal) yet functioning uniformly (impersonal):

"God is Mind, and man made in the image and likeness of God is Mind, because there is but one Mind, and that the Mind of God...This one and only Mind of God that we study is the only creator. It is that which originates all that is permanent; hence it is the source of all reality." [ASPM, 93.]

And again:

"Being is not only impersonal Principle as far as its inherent and undeviating laws are concerned, but also personal as far as its relation to each of us is concerned. We as individuals do actually become a focus of universal Spirit." [Revealing Word, p. 22]

One last quote:

"Our Bible plainly teaches that God implanted in man His perfect image and likeness, with executive ability to carry out all the creative plans of the Great Architect... God is free to do as He wills, and He has implanted that same freedom in man."

In the midst of their spirited discussion, I asked the class whether they heard Charles Fillmore describing God as an impersonal Principle or personal Supreme Being. Some said impersonal, some personal. Some said both. Both? How could God be both personal and impersonal? And then it hit me--quantum physics explains both the nature of the Clematis and the Fillmorean view of God.

Quantum theory holds that the observer literally shapes that which is observed. For example, if scientists try to determine whether light is a wave or a particle, the answer will depend on which phenomenon they study. Look at light as a wave, and it's a wave. Look at light as a particle, and--lo!--it's a particle. Except it can't be both; they are mutually exclusive. Yet it is.

When I look at the blue plants outside my house, what they are is determined by what I'm looking for. The Clematis climbs on my wife's white metal trellis, and therefore it is a vine. But it has big, star-shaped blooms, and that makes it a flower. (I know; it's actually a flowering vine, but I can only do the equation one way at a time. I'm Pennsylvania Dutch.)

The observer shapes what he/she sees. When I look at God as One Presence/One Power, the Principle of Being-Itself, then God is impersonal. Fillmore quotes an excerpt from Robert Browning: "What I call God...fools call Nature."

But when I stand under the night sky and look into the Cosmos and feel the Presence of Infinite Love, when I am in need of what Jewish theologian Martin Buber called the I-Thou relationship between myself and God, when my God-within reaches out and speaks to the rest of the Divine Mystery--then I recognize God as not merely personal or impersonal but transpersonal. More than impersonal and personal combined. I look at the flowering Clematis vine and celebrate the Creator-God and the Principles of Nature which produced this blue blessing by my front door.

War on Terrorism is Not a Sporting Event

2011-05-03T12:53:00.000-07:00

All right, ten years later we finally got Osama bin Laden. The US intelligent assets who pinpointed him and the valiant troops who surgically removed him the deserve heartfelt thanks of peace loving people around the world. Osama bin Laden hijacked a radicalized Islamic theology to further his political and social agenda, even while killing lots of Muslims who stood in the way of his self-righteous rampage. Did he deserve a proper trial before a jury before suffering the ultimate penalty? Probably so. But this was contact with the enemy in war, not a police raid. Although kicking down the door at a meth lab is potentially as dangerous as warfare, the safety tolerances allowable in actual combat are far narrower than possible in law enforcement situations. In the midst of a firefight with the bodyguard forces of the number one terrorist in the world, the Navy Seals can be forgiven for failing to properly Mirandize him.

I recall the surprising words of don Miguel Ruiz, Toltec master and bestselling author, who back in 2001 spoke to a group of Unity ministers in California soon after the attacks of 9-11. He asked what we thought of the tragedy. Many ministers' opinions were filled with words of forgiveness and peace. After listening to our views on the situation, don Miguel Ruiz startled the room when he said in his thickly accented voice, "If a mad dog comes at you, you have to do what you have to do. It isn't personal."

So, I say--just for myself, not for any institution or religious perspective--this was a good thing our soldiers did.

However, I was disappointed in the jubilant reaction from some of my countrymen. Cheering and chanting, "USA! USA!" trivializes the tragic necessity of deadly force and makes wartime killing a gold medal event in the fantasy Olympics. I have been shot at in war, and it is definitely not a sporting event. Soldiers need to pump themselves up sometimes, but that's before combat. Afterward, there is gratitude for survival, grief for losses and injuries, and usually a reflective, weary silence. I never heard soldiers fresh from battle cheering the events of the day. More likely, it was a quiet, "Thank God that's over and I'm alive..."

Killing a "bad guy" in war is not like Dorothy dropping a house on the green lady with the ruby slippers. Yet, I felt like the immediate reaction of too many Americans was something like the Munchkins singing, "Ding, Dong, the Witch is dead." As Dorothy finds out, there are other witches out there. Some of them equally wicked, some positively angelic. The death of any person detracts from humanity. And the Unity minister in me has to constantly remind the ex-soldier in me that even someone who so richly deserved a bullet in the head as Osama bin Laden--yes, even that murderous perverter of the great faith of Islam--had within him the image and likeness of God.

The only way you'll ever eliminate all the bad guys in this world is for everyone to agree that killing and violence is not the answer. Transform an enemy into a friend, and you "kill" an enemy and gain a friend. However, as I look out at the world in which we live, it is clear that realization is later in the program. I will affirm peace on earth and the long-term goal of a world without violence, even while giving thanks for the brave ones who stormed that compound and ended the violent life of Osama bin Laden.

Thanks, Kate & William

2011-05-01T16:44:00.001-07:00

May I engage my hyperbole thrusters and declare, on behalf of a weary, beleaguered humanity: We needed that royal wedding.

The April 11 cover of Newsweek magazine said it with words I wouldn't have chosen, being a Unity minister, but I couldn't help cheering at the sentiment: "In a world gone to hell--thank God, a wedding."

What drove millions of Americans to rise in the dark before dawn or set their TV's to record this event? Why did an estimated 2 billion people worldwide--people from all faiths, representing over 1/4 Earth's population--watch some kind of coverage of this church ritual in England? Not everyone was happy with the unprecedented attention given to a couple's nuptials in "a world gone to hell."

Hari Sreenivasan writes on the PBS website: "According to the World Health Organization about 2.6 billion people lack an improved latrine, and 1.1 billion have no access to clean drinking water...Someday perhaps as many people will pay as much attention to them as to a guest list, a wedding, a carriage, a kiss." [1]

I concur with Mr. Sreenvisan's sense of urgency about the needs of an overpopulated, under-fed world. However, while working to make conditions better, all people need to take every opportunity to celebrate the good of this life. Rites and festivals of season, harvest, fertility and new growth are so deeply woven into the structure of human life that we clergy are sometimes shocked when absent parishioners--folks we haven't seen on any regular basis, or perhaps complete strangers--show up at those moments for a blessing at key events like baptisms, wedding and funerals. Even non-observant, empty-church Europe needs its cathedrals for rites of passage.

So, two billion souls witnessed the full spectacle of a high church, Anglican wedding, complete with King James language and angelic choirs. It was like sneaking into Mecca during the Hajj, or celebrating Diwali with Hindus in India. Rites of passage give even the ultra-self-sufficient among us an excuse to remember the heritage: We come from people who gathered around the fire and danced the hunt; people who sang prayer before they spoke it; people who hadn't the sophistication to know what they were doing, but it didn't matter because doing always precedes and transcends explaining.

And, yes. We need fairy tales to promise a brighter possibility for the future. Just because people sometimes fail to meet their own highest expectations does not make the effort less noble, less divine.

So, I saith unto thee--Hooray for Kate and William. They remind us that young people are standing in the wings, ready to take up the management of whatever world we deliver to them. I, for one, hope it comes with clean drinking water and better latrines for all God's children, and fairy tale weddings, too.

[1] http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2011/04/2-billion-royal-wedding-viewers-really.html

Christ the Lord is Risen Today

2011-04-23T18:17:00.000-07:00

A man was walking on the beach on Easter Sunday, deep in prayer. Then God spoke to him saying that because it was Easter, and he had always been faithful, one miracle would be granted to him. “Great!” The man said, “I want a bridge to Hawaii, so I can drive there whenever I want.”

God said, “Too materialistic, too difficult, and it would take too many natural resources. Think of something else.”

The man thought for a time, then said, “All right, Lord. For my miracle, I want to be able to understand my wife, know her feelings and read her mind. I want to know what she wants without her telling me. And I want to know what’s going on whenever she gives me the silent treatment then insists that nothing is wrong.”

The Lord was silent for a moment, then replied, “You want two lanes or four lanes on that bridge?”[1]

Easter is the day that Christians around the world celebrate the miracle of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. I want reflect with you about this Easter is the concept of miracles in the New testament, and how it relates to the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Some miracles are easy to understand, like coincidences which bring positive results. Who hasn’t had that experience? You need an answer to prayer, and it appears from a source you never imagined. Unity people call that Divine Order, also grace. Sometimes healing occurs when medical science says it can’t happen. Sometimes people forgive and forget. Sometimes old wounds are finally healed. Miracles are unexpected events which cause a surge in faith.

The New Testament has three Greek words which can be translated as miracle: terata, dynameis, and semeia. Each word conveys a different sense of the miraculous.

The word terata literally means “wonders” and suggests feelings of amazement caused by the event. Terata is the word used to describe the amazement of the crowds when Jesus spoke his wisdom, or the amazing conversion of Saul the persecutor into Paul the great Apostle to the gentiles. It doesn’t require a supernatural event. Just something astonishing which shows the presence and power of God.

Do you remember the lyrics from the Rogers and Hammerstein musical Flower Drum Song? ..

A hundred million miracles are happ’ning ev’ry day,
And those who say they don’t agree
Are those who do not hear or see.
A hundred million miracles are happ’ning ev’ry day. ..

In ev’ry single minute so much is going on,
Along the Yangtse Kiang or the Tiber or the Don.
A hundred million miracles! ..

A swallow in Tasmania is sitting on her eggs,
And suddenly those eggs have wings and eyes and beaks and legs!
A hundred million miracles! ..

A little girl in Chungking, just thirty inches tall,
Decides that she will try to walk and nearly doesn’t fall!
A hundred million miracles!

Are happening every day.[2]

That is the sense of terata—everyday events which, when properly noticed, show the miraculous nature of life.

The second Greek word, dynameis, means power. You can hear it in the word itself—dynameis, sounds like the English word dynamo. This is the classical understanding of a miracle as a mighty act of divine power. Jesus calms the sea. Jesus curses the fig tree, which withers. Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. By choosing a form of the word dynameis, the author of the passage wants you to know that “no natural power could bring it to pass in any manner or form whatsoever, as e.g., the raising to life of the widow’s son (Luke 7), or the cure of the man born blind (John 9).”[3]

Modern scholars are skeptical of the historical basis for events which present dynameis. It all began with Ralph Waldo Emerson. In July of 1838 Emerson, who was a Unitarian minister, was asked to speak to the student body at Harvard Divinity School. He arose that warm summer night and delivered a devastating blow to orthodox religion by challenging the idea that Christianity is built on miracles. Here is Emerson describing the message of Jesus:

He spoke of miracles; for he felt that man’s life was a miracle, and all that man doth, and he knew that this daily miracle shines, as the character ascends.  But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster.  It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.[4]

That has been the one of the critiques of thinking people since the early years of Christianity. Does the faith of Jesus rest upon a series of super-natural events, or, to borrow Emerson’s poetic phrase, is it, “one with the blowing clover and the falling rain”?

The New Testament authors struggled with this question, too. Listen to Matthew’s description:

⁴¹In the same way the chief priests also, along with the scribes and elders, were mocking him, saying, ⁴²’He saved others; he cannot save himself. He is the King of Israel; let him come down from the cross now, and we will believe in him. ⁴³He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he wants to; for he said, “I am God’s Son.” ’ ⁴⁴The bandits who were crucified with him also taunted him in the same way.

Most commentators today are more comfortable with miracle as terata, meaning wonder, than as the suspension of natural laws by dynameis, or power, which requires the action of a super-natural God. There is something about the suspension of the natural order which smacks of magic. Even though we laughed at the story about the man who wanted a bridge to Hawaii, God is not a genie granting wishes. Metaphysical Christianity does not attempt to get God to do anything which the divine power would not ordinarily do. We attempt to open ourselves to the good which God is continually showering upon us.

The final Greek word used for miracle is semeia, which means sign. Not sign like “Do Not Enter” or “Yield Right of Way”, the word semeia as sign is “an appeal to intelligence, and expresses the purpose or final cause of the miracle.”[5] However, far too often the demand for a sign from God leaned toward a requirement for a miraculous event. The Apostle Paul complained:

Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

Miracle, as understood by the word semeia, points to a meaning beyond itself. Not just raw power or astonishment, the miracle says, “This is what God is like.” It is less like magic and more like metaphysics.

Now we come to the empty tomb and Easter. And all three words come into play. Surely there is great astonishment, there is the revelation of great power, and the sign of God’s handiwork. But what happened? I think we can link three possibilities to the three Greek words.

o Terata – It was an experience of wonderment.

§ Visionary experiences of resurrection

§ Encountering Jesus in dreams, meditation, prayer, and personal encounters.

o Dynameis - It was an experience of divine power.

§ Physical Resurrection—perhaps so.

§ Angelic testimonies…who knows for sure?

o Semeia - It was an experience of signs from God.

§ Spiritual/psychological resurrection

§ Disciples gathered their strength and courage and saw in the events of the crucifixion the presence and power of God despite appearances to the contrary.

§ The community rose from the dead; they knew Jesus was eternally alive in their hearts.

Actual historical truth? We’ll never know. But we do know that the small band of powerless disciples went forth with utter fearlessness, and within four centuries they had conquered the Roman world. Mark’s gospel records it simply, and the old ending to the oldest gospel leaves everything up in the air.

When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus’ body. Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb and they asked each other, “Who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb?” But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed. “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.’ “ Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.

Mark 16:1-8 (NRSV)

If a miracle is an unexpected event which causes a surge in faith, whatever happened that first Easter certainly qualifies. Perhaps even Emerson would agree. “I can find my biography,” he wrote, “in every fable that I read.”[6]

[1] Paraphrased and adapted from “The Lighter Side of Talking with God” at http://halife.com/laughs/church.html.

[2] “A Hundred Million Miracles” excerpted from Flower Drum Song by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, http://www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/flowerdrumsong/ahundredmillionmiracles.htm (accessed 04-22-11).

[3] Catholic Encyclopedia online, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10338a.htm (accessed 04-22-11).

[4] Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Divinity School Address,” July 15, 1838, http://www.historytools.org/sources/Emerson-Divinity.pdf (accessed 04-23-11).

[5] Catholic Encyclopedia online.

[6] Ralph Waldo Emerson http://www.famousquotesandauthors.com/authors/ralph_waldo_emerson_quotes.html

A Metaphysical Christian Statement of Faith

2010-12-13T12:52:00.000-08:00

I believe in God,

One Presence and One Power,

Who speaks to me

..........personally, as a still, small voice within,

..........transpersonally, as the power of Omnipotent Goodness, and

..........historically, through teachers and prophets of all faiths

Wherever consciousness arises in God’s vast Cosmos. .

I believe in Jesus the Christ,

understood and reinterpreted through time as

the man of Nazareth, the Wayshower,

who calls people to serve all God’s children with compassion,

And in Christ Jesus, the crucified and risen Lord,

who demonstrates that all life is eternal

and points to the imago Dei in every sentient being.

I believe in the Holy Spirit,

the God-energy which empowers the Cosmos to be,

inspires creativity and understanding,

and leads people by holy wisdom

to discover the many paths to Divine Truth.

I believe in the equality of all God’s children,

in the rich diversity of their physical and spiritual expressions.

I believe in the unity of purpose

which gathers a community of people

to experience the power of affirmative prayer and

share the challenges and celebrations along life's path;

I believe in the communion of soul growth

by which all will one day participate,

And the eternal possibility for Oneness with God

through an endless, innovative union of joy and love.

Blessings and peace, divine order and refreshing inspiration, healing power and prosperity, wholeness of life and love eternal will accompany us now and forevermore, through the power of the Christ within. Amen.

_________ .

Written by - Thomas Shepherd, D.Min.

Disclaimer: I am opposed to formal statements of faith published by religious organizations. This is a personal view, not meant to be a final declaration; more psalm than creed. First draft 2006, re-written 2007, updated and posted 12-13-10, re-edited 12-14-10...You get this is a work in progress? Suggestions and corrections invited. Dialogue invited. (If you use it in your work, please cite the source--it will give you somebody else to blame.)

English Summer #9 (Final) - London to Fayetteville to Home

2010-11-07T17:27:00.000-08:00

I was fortunate to have one final great experience in ministry before departing the United Kingdom.

Carol-Jean and I traveled by a combination of car, train and subway (the Tube) from Maidenhead to Balham, where we spoke at the Rev. Dr. Patience Kudiabor's warm and cozy church, Unity South London.

After a great potluck dinner CJ & I raced by subway and taxi to make the last train northeast out of London. We had already prepositioned our baggage via rental car at the Guest House of the RAF/USAF Mildenhall Air Base, but the trip back to the base by train took several hours and involved expensive taxis at both ends.

Then we learned that the space available flight which we expected for the next morning (Monday) was actually scheduled for Tuesday. I don't know if Monday being labor Day had anything to do with it, but we had a day of foot-travel around the smallish base and to the nearby Bird-in-Hand Pub for meals.

Tuesday Morning we were required to be at the Terminal--baggage in hand--by 4 AM. (You did not read that wrong. 04:00 hours. O-dark-thirty, as we used to call it when I was active duty.)

We were told the flight to McConnell AFB Kansas was full. Sorry. There would be four other flights, but none to the Midwest, unless you count Fargo, North Dakota, and there weren't any seats on that one, either. So, we opted for Plan C--Carolina. There was a flight leaving shortly for Pope AFB, Fayetteville, NC. They had room. Instead of leaving us an easy day trip from McConnell (Wichita to KCMO), this hop would deposit us 896 miles from Unity Village. We took it anyway. (See picture for CJ's reaction to my strategic planning.)

OK...now I have good news and bad news. The good news is this plane was a lot more comfortable and less crowded. The bad news is that we had to rent a one-way-drop-off car and drive home. We crunched the numbers and found that the combination of taxi fares and add-on charges for same-day airfares made it less expensive to drive. Besides, it gave me two more days of vacation and a chance to decompress from a whirlwind tour.

Driving through the Great Smoky Mountains, I kept thinking that, like Dorothy, I'd left Kansas and gone over the rainbow to a magical land full of strange and wondrous sights, warm and friendly people, and no wicked witches. Now, just like the story, I am even more convinced that there's no place like home...
[Last photo from Online Source.]

English Summer 2010 #8 - Bard and Bailey

2010-11-01T10:10:00.000-07:00

Carol-Jean and I still wanted to explore nearby Windsor Castle (see picture, round tower), so we dedicated a full day to the enterprise. Needless to say, by the time we got going it was afternoon, but thankfully Windsor was less than an hour's drive from Maidenhead where we were staying. I don't have any inside pictures of Windsor; photography within the buildings is prohibited. These external shots are nevertheless some of the best I took on the trip, IMHO. Windsor is an active residence, the Queen's primary abode, and you don't get to visit when she's at home.

The previous time we were at Windsor (2008) she was in residence and we only got to look inside the compound through an iron gate. Fortunately, this time Elizabeth II and the royal family had gone to Scotland for the summer, which apparently is their custom. Windsore Castle has several baileys, inner courtyards. Inside the stone walls we discovered the England of old--art treasures and suits of armor. There was even a huge room with swords and polearms literally papering the walls to a height a vaulted ceiling.

In regard to the art, there were three--count them--three Rembrandts side-by side in a room where every wall surface was covered with priceless paintings. I kept seeing images that I remembered from history books, to include the portraits of rulers like Queen Victoria and King Henry VIII. Kings and Queens, living and immortalized--No wonder they had soldiers patrolling the grounds!

We had one more mandatory stop-spot on our English summer 2010. As a writer, I wanted to make a pilgrimage to the town where a youthful William Shakespeare courted a well-to-do Anne Hathaway, Stratford-Upon-Avon. (See full picture of Anne Hathaway's house, top of the blog.)

This would be our last full day of unrestricted sightseeing. We drove to Stratford-Upon-Avon with a more-or-less minimum of loss time, due to map-reading goofs and endless games of "Which Exit Do We Take?" at the ubiquitous, dreaded, left-side-driving, clockwise-flowing roundabouts.

Parking at a pay lot and boarding an on-and-off tour bus, we managed to see most of the main Shakespeare-related sites, narrated by a great, pre-recorded, plug-in system in every bus. Anne Hathaway's cottage is a mandatory stop. (Heck, how many of you had to BUILD a model of the thatched-roof country farmhouse in high school? Show of hands,please? Ah-huh. Thought so. Me, too. In 9th grade, I think. At least I recall working on something in class.)

You probably didn't include this view (inside window), because it was taken surreptitiously from inside the second floor of Anne's house. They said no pictures inside, but this actually looks OUTSIDE. (No flash, just available light, so it did no damage. And I didn't get caught.) I remember wondering if Wild Bill made it up here alone with Anne some Saturday afternoon when Mr. Hathaway was in town marketing his produce. Maybe this part hadn't been built yet.

In those days, families slept together in the one room with a fireplace. CJ and I had visited this well-preserved historical bulding twice before, and not surprisingly it had not changed much.

The drooping, thatched roof and time-worn wooden rafters are still there, still evoking the real presence of a flesh-and-blood mortal who gave the world such treasures of the pen and stage. Here an 18-year-old Will Shakespeare walked across open fields to court 26-year-old Anne. His mental scent lingers in the flowers and vegetables of the garden surrounding the house of Anne's father and mother and many siblings.

Shakespeare didn't need to travel to exotic locales to study with great masters--although those who feel the call to seek guides and gurus are equally wise for their endeavors. However, the small-town youth who became the greatest author in English history found inspiration in the winds of May and the stories taught at ordinary schooling, even though formal education was far from ordinary unless, like Will, your parents had "the chinks" (coin).

When we boarded the tour bus to continue our circuit of Stratford it was late afternoon. I wanted to visit the Bard's grave, but he is buried inside Holy Trinity Church in the town, along the banks of the Avon. We retrived our rental car and followed tourist maps, but by the time we arrived the old stone parish had closed for the day. I was intensely disappointed at first, then we found the church property included a lovely park by the river.
I sat on a bench in the shadows of old trees and communed with Shakespeare's presence. (Leave it to a Unity minister to find a way to transcend four hundred years of history and a thirty-minute tardy arrival.) I closed my eyes and did a self-directed guided meditation, imagining Brother Will on the other end of the bench. We had a nice talk, and he suggested a few plot lines for my new sci-fi novel. He's a Trekkie, by the way.

Then it was back into the rental car and navigate the traffic circles and country lanes back to our apartment atop Silent Unity-UK's building at Maidenhead.

As I write this I am sitting at the kitchen table of our Maidenhead flat. (See picture. If you've been following my wife's blog, you might recognize this as a view from within CJ's Window. ) This will be our last night here... Sunday I speak a London South, and Monday we attempt a Space-Available return flight on military aircraft. Not necessarily a done deal, but we feel so good about this summer that we are open and receptive to whatever comes our way. Carol-Jean and I are filled with the joy for this time in England, but we are ready to come home...

English Summer 2010 #7 - Lake Country to London Eye

2010-10-18T10:12:00.001-07:00

We had completed our major teaching tasks and now we had another week of playtime. Carol-Jean and I drove south from Hadrian's Wall through the Lake District, which is a favorite vacation spot for Brits. Later that day we stopped for tea in a seaside town.

The next day we caught the train at Huddersfield and rode through the countryside toward London, where we changed trains for Maidenhead. Altogether a satisfying few days, with plenty of good memories to stack upon the others. We spent the next day near "home" and visited the shops of Maidenhead. (See picture of CJ, below.)

I'm probably going to hell for taking this..well...I don't believe in hell...but the picture was too good to miss. I had to ask my unsuspecting wife to adjust left and right a few times to block the word "uni" in the sign for this Maidenhead "CJ's Uni-sex" hair salon.

Hmmmmm....Why has my special pillow and teddy bear suddenly appeared on the living room sofa?

We found the Prime Meridian at Greenwich. In the picture, I am standing with left foot in the Eastern hemisphere, right in the Western. Climbing the hill behind and below almost killed me...well, not literally, but with a little cardiac dysfunction it was an oxygen-depleting assault on Mt. Everest. They told me Tom Thorpe loved this place, and I figured if he could haul it up here, so could I. Then, gasping for air, I get to the top and find the taxi stands...OK, Brother Thorpe. You got me that time.

It wasn't such a bad day actually. In this picture we're having Mexican food in Greenwich. We caught the boat back to London, and when we returned there was one major sightseeing attarction we decided to experience.

The London Eye.

You've probably seen pictures of the huge ferris wheel by the Thames. It moved so slowly that passengers literally stepped aboard as each enclosed gondola car swept across the entry deck. The view from the top was extraordinary (see picture). Although the trip was enjoyable and, with unexplained, frequent stops and goes, lasted over 30 minutes, it probably wasn't worth the 18 pounds sterling per ticket (about $30 each). Still, it was something to experience, one of those "Now-I-can-say-I've-done-it" moments.

We had only a few days left before I spoke in Unity London South at the Sunday services September 5, so we decided to visit two places that anchor the heritage of the Mother country--Stratford on Avon and Windsor Castle.

English Summer 2010 #6 - From the York Minster and Shambles to Herriot's House to Hadrian's Wall

2010-09-18T20:20:00.000-07:00

We drove north from Huddersfield in a hired car--that's Brit-speak for a rental. About an hour later we reached the ancient city of York. If Manhattan, Kansas is the "Little Apple" and Manhattan, NY, is the "Big Apple" then this walled town must be the old apple tree. We wandered down the Shambles, a cobbled footpath between a row of shops and tea rooms, some of which were built before Columbus sailed. (Note the irregularly shaped stones in the street behind Carol-Jean.)

The interior of the York Minster is vast. The photo shows only one wing of the complex. A "minster" is a church that was considered a missionary post at one time, which includes even London's Westminster Abbey as a Christian outpost in Roman times. If some of my students are considering the option of pioneering a new church, I guess they could call it a minster... which is not too far removed from the common Unity practice of calling all centers of spiritual service a "ministry".

After dodging raindrops at York we headed northwest to the small town of Thirsk, made famous by its best-known citizen, the veterinary surgeon J. Alfred Wight, best know by his pen name, James Herriot.

Nice doggie...

<-- --->

Upon entering the surgery, I was fortunate to be able to say hello to Mrs. Pumphrey –whom all Herriot fans will instantly identify as the owner of an obese Pekingese named Tricki Woo. Apparently, she stopped by and refused to leave until Uncle Herriot himself attended to her pampered darling.

This was one of my favorite stops. CJ and I are great fans of James Herriot, who practiced veterinary medicine in the vicinity of Thirsk and other Yorkshire towns until he retired. We sat in a cafe eating scones, then walked the streets he traveled not many years ago before going to the building which served as the model for "Skeldale House" in Herriot's books. We were actually able to book a B&B across the street, so for one night the Herriots were our neighbors so to speak, a few decades removed.

In the evening we ate at the Darrowby Inn (see picture), a nod to fantasy by the tourism-savy locals, who recognized the benefit of identifying their village with Herriot's conflation of several Yorkshire locales into the fictionalized town of Darrowby. The food was basic pub fare, wholesome and tasty and bad for you, but the highlight to the evening came when I began casually chatting with a few older gentlemen sipping beer at the next table. They knew Alf Wight the vet, and you could tell they were respectful of this man who had so much money yet continued to work in the profession he loved. "Aye, that man were a gentleman," one of them said gravely.

During our tour of the Herriot House that afternoon we had seen a clip when Alf Wight was interviewed on American network TV at the height of his popularity. At that moment several of his books were on the New York Times Bestsellers List, and his BBC/PBS TV series was wildly popular. The interviewer asked what Alf would do now that he had all this money and noteriety. He said there wasn't time to do anything special, because he was a veterinarian, and that was a 24/7 job. It was the life he loved, and he never gave a thought to abandoning it just because he had wealth and fame.

I thought--what an fantastic prospertity lesson! Here was a guy who already had everything he wanted, so he was already prosperous. It isn't about quantity of stuff, or the amount of money in the bank, or how many admiring fans you have. Happiness and prosperity are about balance, about quality, not quantity. What fool would abandon a perfect life for mere money?

The next morning we visited the Thirsk church where Alf Wight and family worshipped and were treated to an impromptu pipe organ concert as the musician practiced for Sunday. Then we drove north to Hadrian's Wall (see pictures, below).

Carol-Jean and I have always wanted to see this 70-mile-long attempt to keep the Scots from conquereing Roman British towns. It was a masterful achievement in its day, built by soldiers and not by slaves or abducted locals. The guidebook says there were "Romans" stationed along the wall that came from every part of the Empire--Germans, Spaniards, even a detatchment of Arabs from the marshlands of the Euphrates valley. I stood on the wall at one point, near the ruins of a Roman fort, and said a silent prayer for the soldiers on both sides of this line who faced the terrorism of their day.

The Scots saw the Romans as foreign devils; the Romans saw the Scots as barbarians at the gate. Good thing we don't think like that any more, now that we're spiralized and civilized.

We've got minsters of consciousness to build, my brothers and sisters...

More later, from Windsor Castle.

English Summer 2010 #5 - Bouncing at Birmingham

2010-09-06T09:46:00.000-07:00

Saturday, August 21. After teaching several crash courses at the Maidenhead Silent Unity-UK headquarters, Carol-Jean and I headed north to classes scheduled for Birmingham and Huddersfield. Jane Goug, the metaphysical Methodist who helps guide Silent Unity-UK through its daily activities, drove me to Birmingham today. Jane's actual title is "Director of Administration and Director/Editor of Daily Word UK," and she is one of the nicest people I've ever met. CJ rode in another car with Margaret Kennedy, whose cats sometimes drive with her and therefore made that vehicle a sneeze-and-wheeze machine for me. (Sorry, cat-lovers--I like kitties, but they give me an asthma attack.) Margaret has attended all the classes I've been teaching at Maidenhead, and now she is heading to Birmingham and then on to her home town of Huddersfield, where I will complete this northern leg of my teaching journey tomorrow (Sunday Aug 22). CJ and I plan to take some time off and just sightsee after that.

The Birmingham Unity group was lively. I lectured on Connie Fillmore's concept of five Unity principles, took lots of excellent questions, and basically stirred up the troops a little. The Unity group meets in a Swedenbourgian church building. This picture is during break time. There were over 20 people attending the day-long session.

.

Hey, Unity of the Lakes!
You need to install one of these--I've hit my head on your rafters too often! (See picture.)

.

CJ & Margaret Kennedy, one of the guiding lights of the Huddersfield Unity community.

A lovely elderly Methodist lady named Jean graciously provided room and board during our stay in Huddersfield. This is the rear of her home, which she opened to us because of her friendship with members of the Unity group.

We traveled to Huddersfield in two cars also, but Jane had to return to her home in London and so another pillar of the Huddersfield Unity community, Winifred Hirst, arranged with another Methodist friend (another Margaret...stay with me) to drive me in a catless conveyance. So, Winifred, the Other Margaret, and I spent a couple of hours chatting and following Margaret Kennedy's tail lights up the Motorway from B'ham to Huddersfield. CJ rode with Margaret again.

Now here's the problem...

I had tossed my C-PAP machine and case in the back of Jane's trunk (the boot, in Brit-speak). CJ didn't know it was back there, and she had loaded our single travel bag into the back seat of Jane's car. Jane had to leave for London during the lunch break, and when they transferred the travel bag to Margaret's car they missed my blue C-PAP case. Jane drove away with it to the South of England. I can get along without the breathing support, but the problem is that all my medications were tucked in the pocket of the bag. Blood pressure, etc. The really scary thing is that I only had one dose of the beta blocker I take to control my heart rate. The last time I went off that medicine was about 12 years ago, and I ended up in an emergency room with a pulse rate over 170. It was 8 PM at night. Jane was five hours away, and everybody was exhausted after a long day.

I've got to admit, it was a little scary. CJ told me everything would be OK. I said it was too much to ask anyone to travel that far after a lengthy day on the road. She said to relax, that worst case she would drive with Margaret and meet Jane halfway to London, if necessary.

OK...suddenly I'm feeling like the Hebrew children lost in the wilderness. "Moses, Moses--why did you bring us out here to die? We had it better in Egypt!" Forget that they just saw the sea part and walked across on dry land. (Stay with me, here--I know it didn't happen historically...but it's a great metaphor.)

Then I look up and see Noah's rainbow, literally, in the sky. See picture. (OK, that's a seriously mixed metaphor, but I am not in charge of the Cosmos at this stage of my development.)

And I knew everything would be all right...

We contacted Britain's National Health Service (NHS) by telephone. A nurse called back within the hour, took notes, and promised a doctor would call. I thought, "Right...on Saturday night?" Within half an hour, a nice physician who sounded East Asian called and said he would fax a prescription for a week's medication to a "chemist" (pharmacy) nearby. He gave me a complete refill of all my missing prescriptions--I will not bore you with the list, but it was extensive--and took my word for it that I had misplaced them in good faith. Within another hour I had journeyed to the appointed druggist and received my refills.

"How much will that be?" I asked, shamelessly hoping for a senior discount.

"You're a senior? There's no charge."

I blinked. "No charge."

"Yes."

"Wowzers...thanks."

I collected my bag of prescriptions and went back to the nice Methodist lady's house, where CJ waited to remind me she'd told me so.

Poliical aside: Let those who say abusive things about countries with "socialized medicine" ask themselves how I might have fared in similar circumstances in a US city on a Saturday night. I would have been required to go to a hospital, wait endlessly, and pay enormous charges. It made me wonder why my native country has been so far behind the rest of the civilized world on the basic human right to have medical care.

The meeting next day in Huddersfield went very well. Small but lively group. Then we went back to the rainbow house and arranged a rental car for tomorrow. We would journey further North--onward to York Minster, to James Herriot country, and to Hadrian's Wall.

The fun work was almost over; the non-work fun was about to begin.

English Summer 2010 #4 - Slumming at Oxford

2010-08-20T14:03:00.000-07:00

Look at that incredible doorway! I was wandering around with my straw hat in hand, sheepishly refusing to put the thing on my head amid the hallowed halls of learning, when we entered the courtyard of the Oxford Divinity College. This august institution has turned out students for the ministry since the early 1400s. Suddenly, the dated inscription on Unity Institute's official seal, proudly claiming New Thought antiquity due to our establishment in 1931, made be glad we call it New Thought.

Not that there is anything necessaily wrong with old thought. I suspect that more than one of our Friends in High Places has graced that courtyard on the way to class and to a life of delightfully heretical mischief-making which followed. (Divinity School interior, right.)

The pulpit of the Church of St. Mary the Virgin (left). This sanctuary is also known as "The University Church," and the pulpit overlooks the spot where Protestant church leaders like Bishop Thomas Cranmer were tried, convicted, and led forth to burn at the stake. And our students think Unity's L&O committee can be tough!

That was a baaaaaad third interview.

As I sat there in the space where people trained for the ministry over 600 years ago, it occurred to me that times and ideas change but the acts of service to which we committ ourselves continue in unbroken line. Some of these men--for they were, sadly, all men in those days--went forth to change the world. But far more of them graduated and took posts as ordinary teachers, pastors, and parish priests. They visited the sick during the great plagues. The collected food and clothing for the poor. They made the rounds of the villages and comforted widows and the elderly. And, yes, they said mass and preached doctrines which we will doubtless find outmoded today.

Yet the energy of ministry--to do good in the Name of God--unites us through the centures with these long-gone, unknown, friends in middle places. I sit on a time-worn bench and think about an average student who learned his Latin and chanted his prayers in this space half a milllenium before I was born. Across time and space, I say a quiet thank you...

English Summer 2010 #3 - Teaching & Sightseeing

2010-08-13T12:36:00.000-07:00

NOTE: Check out Carol-Jean's great blog at CJWindow

I've been working fairly hard over here--just completed two days of a four-day, 20-hour class called Bible Overview. This came after presenting Hibrew Bible Interpretation and an introduction to my book Good Questions. Carol-Jean volunteered to answer phones for Silent Unity UK while I was teaching. Fortunately, we were able to work in some nice sightseeing time as well.

Carol-Jean and I have made two treks to London on the train from Maidenhead, about 45 minutes for the express or closer to an hour when riding the local. Our first outing was a pilgrimage to the center of the English-speaking world, Big Ben. After posing for the required photo (see left), we scooted across the street to Westminster Abbey to pay our respects to Queen Elizabeth. Not the one who lives at Windsor, but the one who commissioned Shakespeare to write plays in the 17th century.

The Abbey is a vast cavern of a place with famous dead people tucked away everywhere you look. Actually, you have to look down to find the best ones. Before I knew it, I was standing on the marble slab under which Charles Darwin is buried.

A few steps away is Sir Isacc Newton. They have poets and writers, too--Chaucer (the original), Kipling, Dickens, etc. Well, it's their language, so I guess they're entitled to hoarde the great literary figures.

After touching the stone monument under which lies Elizabeth I, Carol-Jean made our way across town via "the Tube" to the last stop on our Anglo-Saxton Haj, the British Museum. When we visited two years ago the Library was under repair so we couldn't sit in the same space where Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had worked. Now, in 2010, we whole-heartedly expected to enter this sanctum of radicals and high achievers. Alas...the work progresses yet. The nice man at the desk told Carol-Jean there would be two more years of renuvations. (See picture, above, which I did not take. Downloaded from the Museum website. URL below.)

The next day we repeated this process but aimed for different cultural Kaabahs. We managed to see (not necessarily tour or experience in depth--just see)the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace, St. Paul's Cathedral, London Bridge,
the Tower of London, the "London Eye" ferris wheel, the recreated Globe Theatre of Shakespeare, and the church where the founder of my native state, William Penn, was married.

We stopped at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese Pub where Dickens wrote for great lunch.

And we saw a familiar word in a surprising context.

More to follow....

Cheers!
___________________________________________________________________________

www.britishmuseum.org/the_museum/history_and_the_building/reading_room.aspx

English Summer 2010 #2 - B4CJ

2010-08-10T01:48:00.000-07:00

Tuesday AM - Aug 3. I arrived today and was able to struggle to a taxi and rendezvous with Kimerie Mapletoft at a local breakfast spot. As a civilian she couldn't drive onto RAF Mildenhall, so we met at the Running Chef in Barton Mills and I had my first English breakfast. Of course there were two Running Chefs within sight of each other, but the cabbie picked the right one.

After breakfast we start for Maidenhead by car. Quickly I remember, from previous visits to Britian, what a chore it is getting used to sitting on the left without driving. I'm always reaching for the steering wheel, which I now realize is as much a balancing hand-hold as it is part of the car's guidance system. We chatter away about Unity and England and Missouri as the English countryside flies past. Driving on the left is contrary to programming for Americans, but it's amazing how rapidly you adapt. Well, it helps to have good conversation and not being the driver, too.

I am pleased that the third floor flat at the Silent Unity-UK building is as nice as I remembered it. Well, it's technically the "Second Floor" because the British call the walk-in first story of a building the "Ground Floor" and start numbers at the second level. That of course does nothing to elminate the extra set of twisting narrow steps to climb to reach my second floor abode. Some of the Unity folks graciously help carry my cumbersome travel bags up the steps to the Silent Unity loft apartmemt.

It is now early afternoon. Since I've been awake for nearly two days and unable to sleep on the cargo plane, I decide to push toward evening before calling it a day. So, I set up my laptop, hook into the Unity hotspot wify, and spend a few hours working on the online course I'm teaching this summer, HTS 665 Emerson and the Transcendentalists. I also answer e-mails, some of which come from Unity Village offices and seem like the authors don't know I am off campus, six time zones to the east. Then I look at my PowerPoint lessons for the two-day seminar on Interpreting the Hebrew Scriptures which I'll be teaching all day Saturday-Sunday.

Yep...that's a minister's vacation.

Okay. Enough work. I close the computer and saunter down the lane to the great cultural center which Britain has given the civilised (UK spelling) world: the local pub. On the way, I get confused about what seemed like simple instructions. Probably due to fatigue (although my students might disagree). A gentleman emerges from a house and gets into his car, and I ask directions. He very kindly insists on giving me a ride the rest of the way and so I climb into the driver's side to ride the last few blocks.

It is 8 pm local time. As I write this, I'm sitting in a pub called the Pond, about a half mile from my Unity-UK home. Sipping a chilled lager, watching a soccer game--excuse me...a football match, while waiting for my beef roll-up sandwich and chips (fries). Haven't slept since Sunday night, so I am getting a little woozy, and I am certain the food and good British brew will accelerate the process. Suddenly I wonder if this is all a dream and I'm still on the damned plane.

Ah...cold beer and hot food. Do not wake me!

This will be my last entry BCJ--before Carol-Jean arrives. She's flying in Thursday. Kimerie and I will pick her up at London's Gatwick Airport. (Picture below.)

Getting There is Only Half the Fun

2010-08-04T05:10:00.000-07:00

(Photos taken as this happened, except for jet on runway.)

Free, "Space Available" air travel is one of the few remaining perks for retired US military personnel and their spouses. However, as the British say, it is a dodgy business. In 1999, Carol-Jean and I got to Europe with no problems, even though we were a foursome with our two dependent teenagers (Emily and Lindsey). When we tried to get home a few weeks later...no spaces available. We ended the trip flying one way on a commercial jet, significant out-of-pocket expenses when multiplied by four travelers.

This time it was just CJ and me, ambling into the smallish MAC Passenger Terminal at McConnell AF Base outside Wichita, Kansas. But even with a smaller Shepherd Party, the chances of being seated looked pretty grim. The place was crowded with active duty service members and their families, all of whom rightly have priority over a retiree and his wife. As the roster took shape, a miracle occurred--CJ and I were the last two names called. We checked our big bags and took our carry on luggage into the standby lounge. I called Bill, my thirty-something son, and asked him to call our Unity-UK friends to alert them that we were inside the gate and enroute. Our USA cell phones had not the range to reach England, so Bill "rang them up" on the land line.

Kimerie Mapletoft--a candidate for Unity sainthood in my book--was planning to pick us up the next morning, and it is quite a long drive from Silent Unity-UK HQ at Maidenhead (west of London) to RAF Mildenhall (northeast of London). We sat back and waited to board the aircraft.

Then a tense-looking nineteen-year-old in uniform came into the standby lounge and hurried straight for CJ and me. With great apologies he said there were, in fact, not enough spaces for everyone on the aircraft. They could take 20 Space-A passengers; Carol-Jean & I were number 20 & 21 on the list. There was no seat for both of us. As a dependent spouse of a retiree, CJ couldn't fly unaccompanied, i.e., without the retired military member. So our choices were to send me alone on the AF jet or both of us could withdraw from the roster and try again...in a week, when the next flight was scheduled.

I asked for twenty minutes to decide, plus access to the Internet. The young airman graciously took us to his computer and got me online, but the verdict from his supervisor was to tell them what we're doing in ten minutes. CJ and I talked it over quickly. Since there are classes for me to teach later this week, we decided I had to fly today. I agreed, but only with the stipulation that we find her a commercial seat so she could join me quickly as possible. We have been planning this trip for months. She rearranged her work schedule to accompany me to England for the month. It wouldn't be any fun without her... (Well, okay. It wouldn't be AS MUCH fun without her.)

In a few minutes Internet surfing I found the lowest airfare available on short notice--still a cold shower compared with the warm glow of free passage--and we booked her to England arriving on Thursday. The advantage was she could fly from Kansas City in a reasonably comfortable commercial jet. The complications were all logistical (e.g., our car won't be waiting for us in Wichita when we hop back home). It also dented our vacation budget, but we agreed it was the best alternative to her not going at all--unthinkable to me. We retrieved her big bag, kissed good-by, and CJ drove alone back to Lee's Summit.

But the drama wasn't over yet. I'm sitting in the Air Force blue shuttle bus with the rest of the Space-A passengers who made the cut, when that same tense nineteen year old boarded the vehicle, clipboard in hand, to make another announcement.

The passenger list was still one too many. They had only 19 seats for Space-A's, not 20. I was dead last on the list, so mine was the non-seat he was announcing. I reminded him that I'd just bought a non-refundable one-way ticket to Great Britain for my wife, who was heading up the Kansas Turnpike as we spoke. He said it was the aircraft commander's call, and the officers were firm on 19 not 20. He said wait a minute and rushed away.

My stomach sank, and I felt a chill of fear. Then I remembered this thing I'd studied sometime in my shadowy youth...what was it called..? Unity. Yes. That's it, I think. I remembered the symbol of Unity for a long time was the winged globe. That means we can fly anywhere, do anything, overcome any apparent obstacle. And I also remembered that God is the Source of my supply. Everybody and everything else works for the Lord (Lord = Law = principles) of the heavens and the earths (One Presence/One Power).

So, I became calm and quiet. I closed my eyes and realized that all was in Divine Order, that no matter what happened opportunities for good and growth would present themselves to everyone involved. When I began this treatment my panic level was at the cold-chills-through-the-gut stage. Now I was all right. Everything in Divine Order, regardless of the consequences. I bless, release, and accept all the good which is flowing my way. I let go of my need to manipulate or control the outcome. (Some who know me might doubt that, but I really did it this time!) I felt at peace.

A few minutes later a smiling member of the crew (tan colored flight suit, indicating desert duty station) boarded the bus and asked if anyone had gone back to the terminal when they had said there were not enough seats. When he was assured we were all aboard, he said, "Good. We re-arranged the seating and there's room enough for all 20."

I just smiled and whispered, "Thank you, God."

I am now sitting inside the plane and it's crowded but the crew found enough room for us. (See pictures.) It's a loadmaster's call, and they have responsibility for the security of the cargo and safety of the passengers.

Now I'm at 40,000 feet over Canada, unable to sleep and stiff in all places due to the hammock-style bench seating. But it doesn't matter. All is in Divine Order, and we'll be together in England shortly.

I'll be blogging as we go. You're coming along, right?

Prepping to Jump the Pond for Unity-UK

2010-07-22T13:25:00.000-07:00

Here we go again....

The above picture was taken in May 2008 during our last jaunt to England. Now, Carol-Jean and I are frantically trying to get everything done on this side of the Atlantic so we can journey to the British Isles for the whole month of August. I'll be teaching and speaking all over the place. Pub lunches. Old churches. What fun.

I am especially looking forward to re-visiting the many cultural venues which are uniquely available in Merry Ole England. (Example, left.)

The British Unity folks are gracious hosts; we are eager to asee them again. We'll be staying at the Silent Unity-UK headquarters, a three-storie brick building with a comfortable quest apartment on the topmost floor.

Look closely and you'll note the Unity wings on the sign.

However...the air travel arrangements are...uh..shall we say, Spartan?

As a retired US Army officer, I get to fly Space-Available on military aircraft.

Carol-Jean can fly with me, also free. Sometimes, we have flown on Military Airlift Command passenger jets, but usually its likely to be a cargo jet (see picture). We sit in sleeping bags on canvas benches, back to the bulkhead, and shiver in the badly heated cargo bay. Oh, and it's not insulated against noise, either. Major earplugs required.

But, hey, I told CJ I'd show her the world, and I keep my promises. (Sometime, I'll tell you about the FC-130 propeller plane we flew from Athens to Crete...)

Anyway, it's only 13 hours from Wichita to London. And you get a box lunch.

More later.

PS: CJ is threatening to start her own blog to tell the rest of the story.

Nine Flavors For Better Living

2010-06-24T21:55:00.000-07:00

Reading: Galatians 5:19-26

What I want to do this summer is slow down a little…take some time to think about the Church of Jesus Christ in all its myriad forms, and its people, all of whom have access to the Fruit of the Spirit as divine power within them.

Why does the church exist?

We do fun things together, but so do the people at a country club, or the cheaper version of a country club, the tailgate party. We perform acts of service for the good of our community, but so do the Lions and the Rotarians. We help people with their problems, but so do psychologists and social workers and life coaches. We provide a safe environment for people to gather and discuss important issues, but so do the PTA and the League of Women Voters. We want to make the world a better place, but so do the Democrats and Republicans and Greenies.

So...why does the church exist?

Gal 5:25: “If we live by the Spirit, let’s be guided by the Spirit.” I hold that the Church has one excuse for opening its doors, and one excuse only—to offer the Jesus Christ message to people who hunger for a spiritual dimension to life. We are blessed to be a blessing. We are called to practice practical Christianity, to look beyond the physical dimensions of life and see the world meta-physically. To respond as people of faith to the call of Almighty God.

When we respond to the call, what happens?
Well, among other things, we become…a little more mellow? The Apostle Paul—who nobody could accuse of being a mellow guy—laid out some elements of character which believers in Christ Jesus begins to show in their lives. He called them “Fruit of the Spirit” and differentiated them from the “Gifts of the Spirit” which he listed in his First Letter to the Corinthians.

Gifts of the Spirit
The “gifts” are very specific, and Paul goes out of his way to insist that not everybody has the gift of teaching, or prophesy, and so forth. However, the “Fruit if the Spirit” should be growing in everybody’s spiritual orchard. So, this week I’d like to take a moment and reflect with you on the nine “fruit” listed by Paul. And I’d also ask your indulgence as I try to match each of these spiritual fruit with an edible fruit available at your local supermarket. Maybe the next time you munch on an apple or peach you might contemplate the spiritual quality which corresponds, however arbitrarily, with the natural snack you are enjoying.

NINE FLAVORS FOR BETTER LIVING
Ask yourself what comes to mind when contemplating each “flavor” below. Here are some of my thoughts, and it is admittedly a work-in-process.

Love: Binding force of Cosmos
Fruit: Apples

The Greek word here is the familiar agapé, often thought to mean selfless love. Paul described agapé at length in his famous “Hymn to Love” found at I Corinthians 13. It is worth noting that the kind of love Paul advocates has nothing to do with feelings, unlike modern understandings of the word. In fact, Paul is almost Buddhist in his doctrine of love. Not a feeling but a way of relating to others.

Although I am a zealous advocate for feelings of love and falling in love, I am beginning to adopt this larger, Pauline-Buddhist model of love as compassion rather than simply passion. Our lives should out-picture love, but that doesn’t mean we must feel lovey-dovey/pitter-pat for all God’s fuzzy creatures, or we’re not using the gift of love.

I think Charles Fillmore nailed it when he said, “Love is the power that joins and binds in divine harmony the universe and everything in it.” [1]

To me, the apple represents the wholeness and holiness of the Cosmos. It is the traditional gift given to teachers. It is also the most heart-warming of fruits, properly baked into a pie and sprinkled with cinnamon, its aroma almost begs you to eat and share it with others.

So, nibble an apple, or a slice of apple pie, and contemplate your world with compassion for all.

Joy: Celebrating life
Fruit: Strawberries

Interestingly, the Greek word chara which is translated usually joy in this passage, has the same root as the word for grace. It is also the same root which forms the word charis-mata, gifts of the spirit. So, by this “fruit of the spirit” (which was supposedly available to all) Paul provides a link to the special “gifts of the spirit” concept. Strawberries are like that. Both available to everybody and yet specially designed by God for me.

Something mystical happens when you pop a ripe strawberry in your mouth. A cool breeze of refreshment wafts over your face as little barbs of sweetness jab at your tongue. It is pure joy, and only the stern can respond inaudibly. Next time you devour a strawberry—they are never simply eaten, you know—meditate on the gift of joy and all those who have given it to you.

Joy is one of those forces which, when properly channeled, can power your life.

Peace: Inclusion and acceptance
Fruit: Peaches

Peace is not just the absence of war, nor is a life dedicated to peace immune to conflict. But a life centered in peace finds its strength from inclusion and acceptance rather than exclusion and rejection. Edwin Markham (1852-1940), who was a frequent quest at Unity Village, wrote a poem which summarizes the path of peace by inclusion and acceptance.

Outwitted by Edwin Markham

He drew a circle to shut me out.
Heretic, rebel; a thing to flout.
But love and I had the wit to win.
We drew a circle that took him in.

When biting into the soft and exquisite flesh of a peach, think of those words…The circle of the peach skin takes in all the sweetness and nectar, not to exclude but to hold together.

Peach is for peace.

Patience: Trust God despite appearances
Fruit: Kiwi

The King James Version rendered the Greek word makrothumia as long-suffering, but the word patience conveys a better sense of its meaning. Sometimes things are not what they seem. The harsh event today can become the moment of deliverance tomorrow. If you need an example, I give you the kiwi fruit. Tough and brown and bitter on the outside, soft and green and sweet within. To those who exercise patience, the goodness inside the tough wrapper may yet be revealed.

When cutting into your next kiwi, think patience and trust God.

Kindness: Living the Golden Rule
Fruit: Oranges

I am absolutely convinced the universal spiritual principle allowing healthy interactions with others is an application of the Golden Rule in some variation. All versions really say the same thing in two variations, either positive (“Do this…”) or negative (“Don’t do that…”). The message is simple: Be nice, because you want others to be nice to you.

Kindness is so much more intelligent than its opposite, cruelty. When expressing cruelty, you generate hate and an energy for vengeance. But kindness usually returns to you in the same vein, or at the very least keeps things from exploding back in your face.

Oranges always seemed like a kind fruit to me. When I was a child, my Christmas stocking always had an orange in it, along with the mandatory candy canes and other confectionaries. My grandmother explained that during the Depression of the 1920s and 30s, people in our family were so poor they couldn’t afford candy or other luxuries, even at Christmas. But they always managed to buy a few oranges for the stockings, a special treat for those who lived in northern climates, especially during winter. To this day, I put an orange in the stocking of everybody in my home each Christmas, and I remind my kids—now all grown—that our family has come through challenging time in the past and will do so in the future, and this little ball of orange-gold, represents kindness from the heart and a belief that life goes onward to its highest good.

Put an orange in your stockings this Christmas, and pass the kindness along.

Generosity: Prosperity principles
Fruit: Watermelon

One of the most basic principles of prosperity is that release and circulating is better than hoarding, because we get back what we put out. That’s why watermelon is a prosperity fruit to me. It is meant to be shared. Not just shared, but shared generously, because it’s usually too big for one person to eat it all before it spoils.

Share a watermelon and multiply your prosperity!

Faithfulness: Perseverance
Fruit: Grapes

The word here is pistis, which elsewhere is translated faith, but has a wider meaning which the NRSV faithfulness catches. An Old Testament story from the Book of Numbers links the quality of faith with grapes. (No, really!) Moses sends a team of scouts (spies in most translations) to check out the Promised Land. They come back with tall tales of a land flowing with milk and honey, and they bring back a bunch of grapes so huge they had to cut a pole to carry them. All is lovely and fertile, except there are “giants” in the land, the spies report, so if Moses leads the Israelites in they will be slaughtered. This is even acknowledged as an exaggeration by the text. The point is, they lacked faith in their own power to face the giants ahead, so they opted for more long years in the wilderness.

The next time you eat a grape, think about the delicious gifts which God is continually trying to give you, and rather than fleeing the make-believe giants of your fears, go forward to claim your promised land of goodness.

Gentleness: Be a “safe house” for others.
Fruit: Banana

Sometimes translated humility, the Greek word prautes can also be rendered courtesy, modesty, considerateness, and meekness, although this last term is meant in the archaic sense of mildness rather than the modern word which has overtones of naiveté and weakness. A person who demonstrates this particular fruit of the Spirit is someone who can be trusted, for he or she lives by the ancient dictum of the medical profession, “Do no harm.” This person’s sphere of influence is a kind of safe-house into which all may enter and be received with courtesy and humble acceptance. There is a child-like innocence to this gift.

Perhaps that’s why bananas come to mind as the appropriate symbolic fruit. As anyone who has raised a child since the middle of the 20th century knows, squashed bananas are fed to babies in great quantity. We are evolutionarily large primates, related to other two-legged banana-nibblers by massive DNA similarities. Once full grown, our hirsute cousins are probably not a good example of prautes, but the babies of most warm-blooded species seem to radiate gentleness. Baby mammals—humans included—express some degree of courtesy to others of their species, at least until they grow a little older and rivalries take over. Maybe that’s why Jesus told us to become as a little child in order to access the Kingdom of Heavenly possibilities.

Let bananas with their smile-like shape forever suggest the gift of gentleness and acceptance for all.

Self-Control: Moderation and balanced life
Fruit: Plums

The New Interpreter’s Bible, one of the references I’ve been consulting as I dribble out these thoughts, notes that the Greek word used here—egkrateia, or self-control—is found nowhere else in Paul. This is probably because he wanted to find a strong closing word, one that would contrast with the strong closing word in his list of offensive behavior which immediately precedes the passage on fruit of the Spirit:

“Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.” (Galatians 5:19-21, NRSV)

Paul ends the no-no list with a tirade against “drunkenness, carousing, and the like…” There was a time in my life when I would have argued with him on the worthiness in a night spent with a little bacchanalian revelry, but I’m sixty now, so the party has to end before Jay Leno’s monologue. Note, however, how Paul’s list of spiritual fruit closes with the opposite: Instead of riotous living, the gift of the Spirit is self-control.

Many of you know I am a retired US Army chaplain. I can recall one night when I was visiting the barracks of one of my units in Germany. It was late, and I was talking with the CQ (charge of quarters, the NCO who stood watch at night and acted as the official representative of the commander). A soldier literally crawled in the door, too drunk to stand up. The NCO grunted and called for a few other GI’s to drag the totally snookered young troop to a special drunk tank bed they had in a room on the first floor near the CQ desk.

It was like a hospital ICU without any equipment. Actually, it wasn’t like an ICU at all, except that the soldier got monitored during the night. We had had a young man die in the barracks of alcohol poisoning a few weeks earlier, and the commander wisely initiated this policy to save lives. He also leaned on the young men to control their drinking, but young people have their own agendas. He also command-referred (that means marched them off, like it or not) his people to drug and alcohol rehab when episodes like this occurred, so I knew this GI had some meetings in his near future.

I remember looking down at him as he lay there on the floor and saying—perhaps unkindly although I thought not at the time—“Had enough fun for tonight?”

How someone could go out and hurt themselves like this and call it fun was beyond me. But my friends in recovery are all shaking their heads now and saying, “Oh, yeah, Tom. Trust me. Some alcoholics do it.”

The name of the game, to me, is to find a moderate center, living a balanced life. That takes many skills, not the least of which is self-control. The good news is that self-control is one of the fruit of the Spirit, which means it lies within us if we learn how to manifest its power. To do this often requires us to plumb the depths. (Sorry…) So, now you know why I picked plums for the fruit of Self-Control.

I believe the Church exists to provide a place where people can grow spiritually, where we can learn about God and life and eternity, and where we can pass along our highest values and grandest hopes for a better tomorrow.

Anyway, these stray thoughts are meant to stir your mind a little. The church should be in the stirring business. Let me know if the ideas helped. And feel free to used the Nine Flavors in your writing and teaching—just give me a footnote and my ego will smile like a monkey with a bushel of bananas.

NINE FLAVORS FOR BETTER LIVING

Love – Binding force of Cosmos – Apple
Joy – Celebrating life – Strawberries
Peace – Inclusion and acceptance - Peach
Patience – Trust God despite appearances - Kiwi
Kindness – Golden Rule - Orange
Generosity – Prosperity principles - Watermelon
Faithfulness – perseverance - grapes
Gentleness - be a “safe house” - banana
Self-Control – Moderation and balanced life – plums

Galatians 5:22-25
The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, 2gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit.
______________________________________________________________________________

[1] Charles Fillmore, Christian Healing (Unity Books), p. 120.

New Book Due out this Summer

2010-06-02T14:39:00.000-07:00

Unity House will be releasing my newest book late this summer. The work is entitled And He Walks with Me: Jesus 2.1 - Interactive Edition. It's a study in Christology written for ministers, students/teachers of religion, and interested laypeople. Prelimary responses have been pretty good. We have positive comments from Bart Ehrman and John Shelby Spong, and two of my illustrious Unity Institute colleages--the Rev.'s Tom Thorpe and E.J. Niles--like it, too!

Anyway, I thought it was appropriate to share my delight that the final editing process is done by offering a short excerpt from the book for your perusal.

And He Walks with Me: Jesus 2.1 - Interactive Edition

Why add to the towering pile of books about Jesus of Nazareth? One might reasonably argue that too much has already been written about him. What possible good can another volume of Jesus-talk do in today’s postmodern, post-911, post-Christian world? Surely, all the great ideas about the man from Galilee have already fought their way into print. What fair wind of change could another discourse on Christology—by yet another self-appointed theologian—add to the hurricane of words blowing through Christendom for the past 2,000 years? People have continued to eat, drink, marry and give in marriage, and they have muddled through quite nicely without the current volume to guide them. Isn’t it obvious that, while making their lives and raising their families, people have successfully managed to make and re-make Jesus Christ based on the needs of each successive era?

Yet, it is just that observation—the successive re-making of Jesus, vertically through history and horizontally through contemporary cultures—which distinguishes this book from other works of Christology. And He Walks With Me: Jesus 2.1 – Interactive Edition differs takes seriously the creative process by which people have shaped their Jesuses. In fact, I will argue that creative interaction with inherited images and ideas about Jesus constitutes a healthy, positive course of intellectual and spiritual growth, an essential component in any understanding of Jesus Christ and the faith bearing his name.

There is nothing particularly innovative about the observation that thought-pictures of Jesus have been repainted through time. Authors like Albert Schweitzer and Jaroslav Pelikan have detailed the history of Christological metamorphosis. Schweitzer said the process was unavoidable; Christology must be progressive.

Each successive epoch found its own thoughts in Jesus, which was, indeed, the only way in which it could make him live…one created him in accordance with one’s own character.

Rather than lament the lack of a clear-cut, authentic, historical Jesus from whom to receive perfect guidance, this volume celebrates the ongoing process of Jesus-building, choosing instead to see the culturally influenced images of the Christ as an attempt to get a better look at the imago Dei, the image of God inscribed within each individual. The central point this book attempts to make is that the flexibility of a progressive Christology allows each new generation to discover more about their true nature by discovering themselves in Jesus the Christ.

Furthermore, the discussion proceeds from a postmodern premise, i.e., not only are there multiple paths to the same truth, there are also multiple truths accessible along a dizzying diversity of paths. Not just the blind men and a lone elephant; other creatures, great and small, stand unidentified in the fuzzy dawn of a new, quantum universe. Reputable scientists now suspect that human thought has the power to shape reality in a way that probably would have scared Sir Isaac Newton out of his powdered wig.

Taking the multiplicity of truth as a given, the long history of Christological interpretation and re-interpretation becomes much easier to understand. Harry Emerson Fosdick, one of the great preachers of the 20th century, advocated openness to new thoughts as a survival tactic for any religious system. He wrote:

"If the day ever comes when men care so little for the basic Christian experiences and revelations of truth that they cease trying to rethink them in more adequate terms, see them in the light of freshly acquired knowledge, and interpret them anew for new days, then Christianity will be finished."

To be fair to Fosdick’s vision, he was a modernist, not a postmodernist, in that he believed there was only one truth and the goal was to refine one’s thinking to grow ever closer to this singular view of reality. He also lived in a time before women rightly raised awareness about the need for inclusive language when speaking of humanity at large. Postmodernists, as mentioned above, postulate an amazing array of “truths” which individuals can comprehend, none of which may be singularly correct for all persons at all times. It is precisely this kind of open-ended discussion which can inform the search for new understandings of Jesus Christ for today and into the future.

Humanity has consistently and creatively re-created the son of Joseph and Mary to meet the needs of each new age. Most recent books written about the changing images of Jesus through time have attempted to recover the original person buried under all the modifications. Some have felt the historical Jesus enjoys special authority, or at the very least a unique and authoritative voice. Consequently, the closer we come to what he actually said and did, the closer we moved to The Truth. This book sets off in a different direction.

Acknowledging that people re-make Jesus in each generation, I will argue, as Schweitzer did, that without a progressive Christology the richness of the Jesus-event will be frozen in time, trivialized and ultimately lost. As Schweitzer also noted, it is probably impossible to reconstruct the historical Jesus from the documentary evidence, the best of which comes from biased sources who were not themselves eyewitnesses.

Now you have a thumbnail sketch of the book’s central thesis, but this work is less a systematic argument than a collection of ideas. Essentially, the current work is a series of essays to introduce a new application of an old, old story--a Jesus Christ upgraded for the 21st century. In the following chapters you will participate in the celebration of a Jesus for now, taking for granted that all Jesuses for the future and all historical Jesuses from the past are, and should be, products of different needs.

Unity Is a Way of Life--Not a Set of Doctrines

2010-04-24T21:58:00.000-07:00

Church history is replete with recurring patterns. The schism declared heretical today breaks off, forms a new sect, grows into a denomination, and settles into the mainstream. Yesterday's rebels are today's staid old conservatives. We in the Unity movement could take a lesson from our fellow progressives of the Unitarian-Universalist Accociation in this regard. In Challenge of a Liberal Faith UU minister George N. Marshall writes:

"Faith will grow and change with new experiences. Hence it will have the capacity to always be adequate. When William Ellery Channing, the aged man who in his youth had been the flaming leader of the Unitarian revolt from Calvinism, met an old colleague, he noted a new danger that the younger men in the pulpit were 'making an orthodoxy of the liberalism of our youth.' Already Dr. Channing had passed beyond the position of his youth, and he recognized that once liberalism became static and systematized, it, too, would become an orthodoxy, like all other religions." (p.14)

Unity co-founder Charles Fillmore put it this way:

"The absolute freedom of the individual must be maintained at all hazards. God is the one principle; we are all as free to use God as we are free to use the principles of mathematics or of music. The principle never interferes, but if it is to be rightly applied we must develop understanding. Freedom leads to many errors, but, since it is a part of Being, man must learn to use it properly...Any system that suppresses the will is radically wrong." (Christian Healing, 112-113.)

What then shall we say to answer those who want Unity to lay down a complex baseline of beliefs which all good, card-carrying Unity people should affirm to be "in integrity" with "our teachings"?

First of all, Unity has never been a set of teachings. It is first and foremost a movement, a way of life. The excitement about new ideas and the open possibilty that we might discover something fresh and spiritually invigorating is one of the reasons Unity churches appeal to people across a broad spectrum. We are refugees and immigrants and multi-generational Unity people, united by love of God and passionate for diversity, open-minded, open-hearted, unafraid of new thoughts, come what may.

We emerged from Protestant Christianity, energized by the 19th century Christian healing movements and Emersonian Transcendentalism, yet in many ways Unity is as Hindu as it is Western. Can we envision Unity as a Christian denomination in which to be non-Christian is perfectly acceptable? Shall we seize the definitional tools from the hands of the fundamentalists and embrace a vision of the Christian faith which, to paraphrase Catholic theologian Hans Kueng, finds common ground by looking to Jesus for a decisive vision of what it means to be human and divine?

Secondly, any attempt to establish a set of doctrines which define what "Unity teaches" is doomed to failure because we are a congregational polity; there is no means to enforce doctrinal purity. That means every church membership defines what it is about. Every board of directors and minister can set their own agendas and declare their theological views. I have often made the somewhat facetious, yet technically correct, observation that a board of trustees at a local church has the power to declare its minister the Fourth Person of the Trinity. All a national church organization can do is withdraw its stamp of approval and demand the congregation cease calling itself by the denominational brand name. However, the history of all denominations shows that the more successul a local church is the less likely they will pay any attention to directions from central authority.

Thirdly, I am growing increasingly impatient with language about "our teachings" and resultant the coercive tone I am hearing from well-meaning lovers of Unity. If we concentrate on what Unity teaches, as well we could, that will begin a descent into the doctrinal wars which have marked and marred the history of most religious movements among human societies, especially in the Christian-Jewish-Islamic world. Jesus scandalized his contemporaries precisely because he refused to declare anyone outside the community of God. Advocates who want to "define Unity" and "clarify our teachings" so we can have "continuity" will deny they are moving to exclude anyone, but realize this: When you define precisely what Unity is, you also define what Unity is not. Any definition which specifies content is a formula for doctrinal warfare that invariably leads to dissent and schism. Just look at human history.

How then shall we define ourselves, if not by a catechism of beliefs? I propose we take seriously one of the oldest rubrics of the Christian church--albeit much ignored to the impoverishment of many--which has been called the "Dictum of the Fathers" (forgive the gender specifics of another age):

"In essentials unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.”

What are the "essentials" The fewer items to make the list, the less likely we are to shake people off the welcome wagon. I propose the following six ideas could provide a baseline for a bona fide Unity theology:

1) One Presence/One Power. (However understood.)
2) Indwelling divinity/Christ within. (You define the terms).
3) Celebrate diversity and community.
4) Trust your gifts; use them for the good of humanity.
5) Live in harmony with the Cosmos.
6) Pray and meditate any way that works for you.

Connie Fillmore's five principles are a good model, too. And you will note that in her system and in the list above the emphasis is on a combination of consciousness and action.

Unity is a wide meadow encompassing lots of possibilities, but most people will find a fence out there somewhere. As I approach my fence and look over into the adjoining meadows, I see ideas and practices which may be fascinating but are nevertheless not "Unity" to me. Doubtless you do likewise. The interesting point is that our fences don't have to stretch along the same boundary lines. Theological discussion is often about where the fenceline belongs, and the result of those ongoing exchanges will continually re-shape the meadow for each of us.

Ex Libris

2010-03-08T16:51:00.001-08:00

Thoughts about the Power of Reading
by – Thomas Shepherd, D.Min.

Books are more than paper and printer’s ink, even more than keystrokes on a computer monitor.

Books carry you at the speed of light to the far edges of human thought.

Open a book and you are diving for pearls in the azure Pacific; open another and you’re bouncing through New York traffic in a Yellow Cab.

Books give you sounds and scents of lands far away…

Through the magic of books, you hear the long-dead voices of Socrates, St. Augustine, Shakespeare and Shelly. You climb into their minds and see the world through their eyes.

Books entertain, teach and arouse us.

It was a book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, that acquainted the world with the horrors of slavery. So powerful was her influence that, upon meeting the author for the first time, Abraham Lincoln said, "So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!"

Books challenge and inform us. When you read, there is no corner of the Universe too remote for your mind to reach. Stretch yourself… listen to the wisdom of the ages… match wits with the great thinkers of humanity… laugh with the clowns and cry with the victims and cheer for the heroes. But read, read, read—all your life. Read, and nothing will be closed you. Open a book, and the world falls into your hands.

Four Kinds of Love

2010-02-06T12:52:00.000-08:00

"This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you."[1]

Despite the ongoing obsession of Western civilization with love, humanity needs to face the fact that this modern, Information Age culture knows very little about this most powerful motivator in daily life. This is true even though we are inundated with love-talk, in-utero to eulogy. Consider that most Americans know more about professional sports than they do about love, even though some theologians believe love is the very force which holds the Cosmos together.

The Bible, of course, brims with words about love. God so loved the world...the disciple whom Jesus loved…love bears all things…who can separate us from the love of God? And not just in the Second Testament. My unscientific, quick check of a modern English translation counted over 120 references to “love” in the Book of Psalms alone. Not just the Bible, but literature in general is full of words about love. Though Shakespeare’s heroines were played by pre-pubescent boys in stodgy Elizabethan England, the Bard still manages to splash love across the pages of his scripts like a drunken sailor spilling wine. I suspect most people have given litle thought to whether Shakespeare's sonnets were written for boyfriends or girlfriends; they’re beautiful love poetry, and they work for all flavors.

Almost all popular music is written about love. Most of people are hard pressed to name a few popular tunes that are NOT love songs. A generation ago the Beatles proclaimed, “All you need is love…” Ra-ta-ta-ta-ta. Love was all they needed to make millions. With their careers established, the Beatles branched out into pure storytelling ballads like “Eleanor Rigby” and creative excursions like the “Yellow Submarine,” “Abbey Road,” and “Sergeant Pepper” albums. Beatle-mania began with “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You”, and The Fab-Four continued to produce quality love music until they disbanded. One of their last, best offerings before the group broke up was “The Long and Winding Road,” a hauntingly beautiful love song.

Movies must have a love interest to maximize their appeal at the box office. Sometimes, romance is the story. The plot of one of the biggest movies of all time was, essentially, “The Love Boat hits an iceberg.” Today, the same producer/director has scored another spectacular hit with a sci-fi thriller that could be summarized: "Blue lovers fight for environmental freedom." (Titanic was so-so, but I absolutely loved Avatar.)

Even though Hollywood has refined the art of cinema romance, movies almost always neglect the deeper aspects of love. For lovers who stroll the silver screen, love equals sexual attraction, usually expressed through intense, semi-nude love-making scenes. Fun to watch, perhaps, but not a good model of what constitutes love. Certainly, passion plays an important part in many relationships, but it is in no wise the singular or even the most important element.

Besides, not all “relationships” are sexual. We have children, extended families, friends, neighbors, work associates, social and business acquaintances, church and community members—none of whom share sexual intimacy with us, even though we may love them dearly.

Some Quick Thoughts

So, if people spend so much time, money, and energy on love, why do we get it wrong so often? Here are a few quick thoughts on popular misconceptions about love:

1) Sensuality. Much of what passes for love is sensual attraction and sexuality. In case you suspect I am advocating celibacy, let me hasten to say there is nothing wrong with sexual passion in romantic relationships. Few marriages last these days without the partners being lovers too, but love involves much more than passion.

2) In Love with Love. Much of what passes for love is mere glamour. At the entry level of a romantic relationship we are infatuated by the physical attractiveness of the other person. New love is a kind of madness, but infatuation is not love, and the rapture of a new relationship wears off eventually. Courtship ends, then what?

3) Enabling/Dependencies. Much of what passes for love is neurotic dependency. Some kinds of relationships are based on feelings of inadequacy. A song lyric made famous by Barbara Streisand goes:

With one person, one very special person
A feeling deep in your soul
Says you were half,
Now you're whole. [2]

Yet, what happens when two half-people find each other? The heart math doesn’t add up to two whole people. If we are in relationships simply because we perceive we lack something which is provided by the other, we have not understood the message of Jesus Christ about the divine qualities within every human being. Only two whole people can truly love one another from their fullness; half-people are locked in enabling dependencies which limit the depth of their potential for intimacy and fulfillment.

4) Fear of Loneliness. Much of what passes for love is fear of loneliness. This is perfectly understandable, considering the alienation with their everyday world in which many people live today. Until my generation, everyone pretty much knew their neighbors. My upbringing was like that; we lived in a row house in Reading, Pennsylvania in the 1950’s. My folks literally knocked on the wall to signal the neighbor lady to meet them in the yard for conversation. We never had dinner at each other’s homes, but we knew the people on both sides, across the street, and down the block by name. We also had blood relatives within an easy drive, city buses to travel to shopping areas downtown, and safe streets to walk day or night. Today in some communities, people feel imprisoned in their own homes.

Although the place where I live now has relatively little violent crime, I’m an example of this neo-local isolation, too. I live far from family members, and I don’t know my neighbors beyond a nod of recognition as they power-walk past on the tree-shaded street of our subdivision. In this isolated lifestyle, many people cling fiercely to their mates and expect the other person to fulfill all the functions which were previously provided by family, neighbors, and a supportive, friendly community. No wonder some relationships fail to meet the needs of the partners.

5) Ego, jealousy and selfishness. Much of what passes for love is unbridled possessiveness. Occasionally, especially when I was a chaplain in the US Army working with young married couples, I have counseled young wives whose husbands got angry and abusive when other men merely noticed them. One man had jealous fits when the OB-GYN doctor performed a routine examination on his wife; another soldier took his wife’s car keys when he went to work in the morning for fear she would sneak out during the day to meet some fantasized paramour. Because the military community is a cross-section of middle class life, I suspect the problem of possessiveness is far more widespread than just the ranks of junior enlisted men in the US Army. When young couples came to me for pre-marriage counseling, they often said their plans had accelerated when the soldier-fiancé received overseas reassignment orders. Some of these young people actually confessed that they wanted to get married now because they were afraid a separation would end their relationship.

Love, in its highest expression, is not possessive but liberating.

6) Convenience. Much of what passes for love is convenience, routine, and economic comfort. Most of us know people who acknowledge they are in unsatisfying, loveless unions, yet their situations persist year-after-year because the partners would rather stay in their rut than risk changing their partners or improving the relationship.

So, What Is Love?

The obvious conclusion from these short summaries is that love isn’t as easy as Hollywood pretends, but another point, seldom considered, is that love comes in more than one variety. The answer to “What is love?” depends on the context. We don’t love our children the same way we love our country. We certainly don’t love friends and neighbors the same way we love husbands and wives, unless we’re behaving like characters in a tawdry novel. What about that obnoxious so-and-so at work? How about friends and family who have been cruel? How can we “love” people who are prejudiced against us, or members of a group which stands against everything we cherish?

When Jesus said, “Love your enemies,” how far did he intend for that command to stretch? Some would say infinitely. Would Jesus insist that Jewish Holocaust survivors, or freed slaves after the American Civil War, were ethically required to love their persecutors? The question is not as clear as a first glimpse might suggest. Contemplating monstrous evil, like the holocaust or African slavery, can push thinking persons into a dark room. One can metaphysically understand “evil” as the absence of good, as it surely is, but studying the history of human inhumanity makes love of one’s enemies a difficult goal to contemplate.

In this essay, I will attempt to re-discover the underlying principles of Jesus about love by looking at four biblical-era words. It is a topic that clearly requires a separate book, perhaps several volumes. I shall attempt to do justice to the Christian understanding of love through brevity, trusting that others will follow to plumb its depths.

Four Kinds of Love

British Medieval literature scholar C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) wrote extensively on religion, and even when not specifically writing about his beliefs a heavy measure of conservative Christian thought underscored Lewis’s work. Some rather traditional themes about redemption and salvation dance through his science fiction novels and his well-known fantasy series, Chronicles of Narnia. Lewis is so deft at weaving theme and plot that most readers are unaware of the deeply pious sentiments which motivated Lewis to create a talking lion who dies to save the helpless from the powers of evil. Lewis’s stories work at several levels—the Narnia Chronicles are, after all, children’s books—and this ability to communicate deep ideas in layers of meaning is a tribute to his skill as an author.

One of Lewis’s nonfiction works is a thin volume entitled The Four Loves. In this little book Lewis divides love into four categories: affection, friendship, eros (passion), and charity (self-giving). Lewis offers good insights into both the complexities of human love and provides a revised vision of the traditional view of Divine Love, yet I have always believed a complete reinterpretation of the word, based on the four biblical-era terms, would convey a more complete understanding of the vexing, beautiful, alluring power of love.

Some of the conclusions I reach will be very close to Lewis’s views on love, other times not so. For example, he does not elect to discuss hesed, dutiful love, and prefers to establish a separate category for affection. Furthermore, I have assiduously attempted to avoid merely re-writing his book in an essay format. The notes from which this discussion proceeds come from preparation I did for a sermon series over twenty years ago, well before I had read C.S. Lewis’ book. The similarity of my procedure—even the sequence which puts friendship, eros, and agapé in that order—suggests I probably gleaned some “original” ideas from long-forgotten seminary lectures I attended in the 1970s, whose sources reach to Lewis’s 1960 work. Let this chapter be a new statement, then, on the four kinds of love, and let the reader compare my work with Lewis to see how they differ and where they coincide.[3]

Four Words

Although the four words I will discuss are implicit in the teachings of Jesus, the Second Testament only puts one of them explicitly on his lips, and that connection is dubious. The problem is that Jesus likely spoke Aramaic, but the Christian Scriptures were written in Koine Greek, the common language of Hellenistic civilization. Yet, there is some possibility that Jesus was a lot more cosmopolitan than he is ordinarily pictured. For a long time, scholars believed Jesus was from a sleepy backwater town in northern Palestine, but recent archaeological evidence suggests that the Roman city Sepphoris was within easy walking distance. Conceivably, Joseph of Nazareth took his son along to practice their carpentry trade in the bustling, expanding Roman town. Sepphoris boasted a Roman theater and an impressive array of tile mosaics, some now coming back into the light as archaeologists delicately sweep the ruins with fine hair brushes.

Because of the practical need to do business in affluent, Roman Sepphoris, Jesus may have spoken conversational Greek, maybe even a little Latin. The Greek words we’ll discuss in this chapter (philia, eros, agapé) might have been well-known to him, because the concepts behind them certainly play major roles in his stories and teachings.

More likely, Jesus knew the Hebrew word (hesed). Everyone familiar with the gospels knows that Jesus read aloud in the synagogue, and scholars have noted that, as a full adult Jew, he would have gone through the typical Hebrew education for his day. By the 1st century, Hebrew was a dead language which had to be studied so Jewish children could read the Bible, much like European youth for centuries studied Ancient Greek and Latin to read Homer and Virgil in their original tongues. The adaptive Jewish community had produced Greek and Aramaic translations of the “Old Testament” for study and discussion, much like we translate the whole Bible into English versions today. We begin with the Hebrew word.

1. HESED – Love is Steadfast and Loyal

In the Hebrew Bible, a common word for love is hesed, often translated “steadfast love.” Well-known passages come to mind:

Praise the Lord!
O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good;
for his steadfast love endures forever![4]

Hesed is the kind of devotion that soldiers owe to their commanders, the respect children feel for their parents, and the allegiance citizens pay their country. It is grounded in duty, the whole-hearted faithfulness to someone, or some cause, which deserves our loyalty. Now there's a new concept: Loyalty. Are you old enough to remember loyalty? Elbert Hubbard put it this way:

"If you work for a man, for heaven's sake work him: speak well of him and stand by the institution he represents. Remember, an ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleverness. If you must growl, condemn, and eternally find fault, why not resign your position? And when you are on the outside damn to your hearts content, but as long as you are part of the institution, do not condemn it; if you do the first high wind that comes along will blow you away and you will never know why."[5]

Can you recall when working for someone meant working for someone? Nowadays, feeling a sense of ownership and pride in the business which employs you marks the employee as somewhat naive. Water cooler talk is seldom about how to make the company better, and discussions of the boss too often deteriorate into “ain't it awful” games, orgies of complaint with itemizations of managerial faults and abuses.

This is especially true about the workplace which should generate the polar opposite reaction in workers, the local church. Most clergy can relate horror stories about disloyal, back-biting, conspiratorial Board members, who seem to relish their role as tormentor of the Minister. Seldom to one's face, of course. Clergy have told me they could deal with honest opposition, provided the aggravated member came to them directly and expressed concerns in the open. Unfortunately, many people despise confrontations, so they follow the line of least resistance and air their grievances in private with other church members.

This practice of triangulation, which is sometimes called enlisting support, may temporarily ventilate a person’s frustrations, but it also begins to undermine group cohesion and works against loyalty to the minister, which clergy must have to effectively lead a congregation. Consequently, when looking for a church assignment after a hiatus of several years, I told all the committees who interviewed me that, if I became their minister, I would never speak ill of them behind their backs and asked them to do likewise. In actual job situations of churches I have served, my positive-speaking system usually broke down over time. People have diffucilty living without complaints. Myself included. But I continue to hope that cooperation and dialogue will triumph in human relations. If I were starting out as a minister today, there would be continuous, ongoing classes offered in Rev. Will Bowen's "complaint free" system.

The natural tendency toward nay-saying becomes deadly when coupled with disloyalty, and the combination has frustrated many a good ministry from developing a loving, open community under the vigorous leadership of a clergyperson who mutually trusts and is trusted by the people.

How about patriotism?

Communities create their own compelling reasons for individual behavior. One of my seminary professors remarked that when he studied in Europe, quite a few years ago, he sent his son to German public school. It was raining the first day of class, so the lad wore a typical American school kid’s yellow raincoat. Kids are kids all over the globe, so he was bitterly ridiculed for the cultural faux pas, and for not having a proper European backpack book-bag. Of course the American parents rushed out, bought the book-bag pack, and their son went smiling off the class the next day with no further incidents. Time passed quickly and the professor completed his studies and moved his young family back stateside. When the boy showed up at school with the European back pack and no raincoat…well, you can guess the reaction from his American school mates. A new yellow raincoat solved the problem.

Who told the children to ostracize their chums for non-compliance with the dress code? No one, of course. There was no nefarious plot behind their corporate behavior; that is just an example of how cultural dynamics operate. I often experienced a different twists on this group-think phenomenon in my ten-year career as a teacher.

From the early 90’s until the turn of the 21st century when I returned to full time ministry, I took an unofficial sabbatical from church leadership and taught in the Georgia public schools. Working with the young people was a great experience; when I taught middle school and sponsored the Drama Club I spent so much time with sixth, seventh and eighth graders that my wife once grumbled, “All your friends are under fifteen.” Then I moved to high school, and I discovered a different world. Those students had formulated and consolidated their values, and they were somewhat impervious to teacher suggestions.

Although my senior high school students displayed lots of admirable traits, there were a few areas where the generation gap (I was then in my early 50’s) created problems for me. Patriotism—or the lack of it—for example. Disturbingly, most of my 11th grade homeroom students flatly refused to say the "Pledge of Allegiance" each morning. When I asked them why, I got mumbles instead of answers. Not that they had any political or ethical objections to the pledge, of course. Their silence was social, not an act of protest. In what was probably an excessive use of teacher-power, I detained a band of 11th graders after the bell and refused to let them go to first period class until they told me why they would not say the pledge. One young man finally blurted, “Because I don’t have to!” Nobody else said the pledge, and he didn't want to stand out. Bottom line on why this group of high school students wouldn't pledge allegiance to the flag?

It just wasn't cool.

In fairness to the kids, this was in the late 1990’s, before 9-11 re-awakened American patriotism. The lesson this teacher learned that morning is still valid. Culture often determines values, and when it comes to religious values, those ideas must be examined in the light generated during an interactive dialogue between embedded theology and the biblical-theological Jesus.

What would Jesus do about war, and how much would he have advocated patriotism? His recorded remarks, if they are historical, suggest a degree of loyalty to the social order as long as it does not compel individuals to violate their higher calling as children of a loving God.

That definitely would not be cool.

Remember Loyalty?

Eastern mystics have long understood the need for loyalty—to spiritual leaders like gurus, sages, and teachers, but also to representatives of social order. In the closing decades of the 20th century, some Westerners laughed at TV images of the Japanese soldiers who stayed in hiding on remote Pacific islands until decades after WWII had ended, but no one laughed in Japan. Asians understand loyalty. If you've read James Clavel's novel Shogun, you know that the Samurai code of honor, Bushido, rested squarely on the principle of Hesed. Samurai would promptly take their own lives if ordered by their liege lord. Dishonor required defeated armies to commit seppuku, or hara-kiri (literally, "belly cutting"), a form of ritualized suicide. This demonstrated their fidelity to Bushido, which in the mythology of Shinto guaranteed their re-birth as Samurai.

Modern Japanese workers seldom kill themselves when their corporations are swallowed up by hostile mergers, but bosses nevertheless expect fierce loyalty of employees, who can usually count on working for the same company for life.

Where the principle of Hesed is applied, relationships firm up. Dependable love reshapes the dynamics of collegiality, co-working, partnership, friendship, marriage and family. An argument could be made that today, especially in the realm of romantic love, a little stubborn loyalty wouldn't be a bad thing.

2. Philia - Love Is Friendly

Loyalty alone is not enough to form a high theology of love. So, let's add the next element, a Greek term found in the Second Testament, PHILIA, which can be translated "friendship." Before the feminist revolution, we called it "brotherly love."

The term philia is found only once in the Second Testament at James 4:4, and even there it appears to have in an uncomplimentary context. ("Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God?") The word itself simply means "friendship" or "brotherly love." Philadelphia was named after it. The “city of brotherly love” was founded by Quakers.

What Does Friendship / Brotherly Love Imply?

• Equality. Friendships are mutual relationships.
• Trust. Friends are loyal and faithful.
• Free choice. We don't choose family, but we choose friends.
• Enjoyment. Friends are people we like to have around.
• Reciprocity. Friends will do things for us, and we for them.

Doubtless this war-plagued world could use a lot more philia. Friends get along by learning that anybody can have a bad day, even the people we like best. Some kinds of behavior steps so far out there that even a friend must call it wrong.

This was surely the case when four white Los Angeles policemen beat up Rodney King, an African-American taxicab driver who was allegedly high on drugs at the time of his arrest. When the brutal beating was caught on videotape and played repeatedly on all news networks, many people who saw the video—myself included—thought it showed a disgraceful abuse of police powers. A predominantly white jury nevertheless acquitted the policemen. In the aftermath of the acquittal, racially motivated riots broke out across the country. The worst violence occurred in Los Angeles itself, with fifty-five deaths, 2,383 injuries, over 7,000 fire responses, and more than 3,100 businesses vandalized by angry mobs. Total damage in the Los Angeles riots amounted to over $1 billion.

In the midst of this ferocity, a plainly bewildered Rodney King came to the microphone and asked the nation, perhaps the world, a profound question: “People, I just want to say, you know, can't we all just get along?"[6]

His question was motivated by a spirit not unlike philia, a simple desire to coexist in a friendly world, regardless of the momentary evils which might spring from the combination of human free will and spiritual immaturity. Although it was plainly wrong for those policemen to beat and abuse Rodney King, an offense compounded by their acquittal by an all-white jury, the rioting in the aftermath of the verdict only expanded the tragedy and further alienated black and white communities. Rodney King’s plaintive question lingers to this day as one of the few good legacies in this sorry affair: “Can't we all just get along?"

The spirit of philia is still needed in this world.

3. EROS - Love is appreciation.

The word eros not specifically found in the Second Testament, although it is implied in several places. Usually it is thought of as sexual love; we get the word "erotic" from eros. However, the meaning goes much deeper. Eros does denote sexual desire, passionate aspiration, and sensual longing, but it also can mean the upward longing for the eternal and the divine.

Generally, eros refers to the attraction felt for some beautiful or desirous object, idea, or event. Although the word is not found in the Bible, but its influence is everywhere. For example, the Song of Solomon, which is clearly meant as a hymn to erotic love.

Hebrew consciousness struggled mightily with its erotic side. Documents found among the Dead Sea Scrolls refer to a fine levied for public nakedness. Biblical rules included prohibitions against sex during menstrual period, against men & women wearing each other's clothing, against any kind of public nakedness--including exposure of the middle of the body, against all forms of lesbianism and homosexuality, against a woman intervening in a quarrel between her husband and another man by seizing the opponents sexual organs, and against worshipping through the cult of temple prostitutes. It is interesting to note that prostitution for money itself is never explicitly outlawed. All the condemnations are leveled at so-called “sacred prostitutes” of the various non-Hebrew temples. Of course, all forms of adultery were punishable by death.

What was the definition of adultery? It was a sexual act committed between a married woman and someone who was not her husband. Note that a married man having sex with a single woman was not considered an adulterer; that was fornication, a lesser sin. Jesus leveled the playing field somewhat when he told the crowds that even thinking about it is tantamount to doing it, so don’t act so high-and-mighty.

Eros also referred to appreciation of beauty. To gaze at a magnificent statue was eros; to be carried away by a glorious sunset on the sea was eros. Anything which brought delight through the senses could be understood as eros.

How do the Jesuses of scripture view this type of love? Surprisingly, biblical pictures rather unanimously show us a man who enjoyed life and exhibited a love of good things. He took pleasure in the perfumed oil a woman massaged into his feet; he enjoyed partying, making good wine at marriage feast at Cana. He went to dinner parties, drank wine, consorted with females, and generally had a good time whenever he could. In fact, Jesus was apparently known for partying so much that his detractors called him a “glutton and a drunkard…” [7] One might infer his attitude toward eros was that passion for life is good; life’s good pleasures are to be embraced, not shunned. Aesthetics are important, because beauty is a gift of God. Sensuality-sexuality is the entry-level of romantic relationships.

It is not difficult to imagine Jesus encouraging his followers to enjoy the world and its beauty, because not to do so is sinful.

Was Jesus Married?

Recent theories have floated around about Jesus and Mary Magdalene having an intimate relationship; I have heard my good friend Bishop John Shelby Spong speculate that perhaps Magdalene was his wife. This interesting, albeit irrelevant, question will probably never be answered, but a sexually active Jesus is nothing to fear unless there is something inherently dirty about sex itself. The by-products of human sexuality are ritually unclean in Hebrew thought—to include semen, menstrual flow, etc.—sex itself is a mitzvah, a blessing, which is not only allowed but encouraged on the Sabbath. In fact, nothing in the Jewish Law or the life and teachings of Rabbi Yeshua suggests anything like an abhorrence for normal pleasures. If Jesus was the Messiah, he was unquestionably an erotic Savior in the full sense of the words.

4. AGAPÉ - Love is compassion—selfless, altruistic and counterintuitive.

This is the word favored by NT writers when they speak of Love. It actually means 'selfless love,' the kind that puts the other person first. Perhaps the most powerful biblical example of agapé is the story told by Luke which has come to be called the Parable of the Good Samaritan. I discuss this parable at length in the next essay, but suffice it to say that the Samaritan had no motivation for personal gain in his actions of merciful kindness to the wounded traveler. The unconscious man wasn’t even able to say “Thank you” to this unknown benefactor.

The Samaritan, who was a member of a despised ethnic minority, exceeded all reasonable expectations, not only treating the victim’s wounds but carrying him to an inn, paying for his room and board, and offering more compensation if the money he provided ran out before the victim recovered. That is agapé. It goes the second, third and fourth mile, not for personal reward but simply because it is the loving thing to do.

The “Good Samaritan” story calls for humanity to see that other humans have the right to exist and be regarded with dignity. Apparently, the 1st century church believed the heart of the gospel was this understanding of selfless love. Agapé is more than a moral suggestion; John’s gospel uses this verb in the “new commandment” which Jesus gives his followers(John 13:34-35):

"I give you a new commandment, that you love (agapate) one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."[8]

Remember the Robbers?

It is important to recognize that agapé as demanded by the biblical Jesus—i.e., all people have the right to unqualified acceptance and positive esteem—seems to run afoul of the natural order. In nature there are no rights, only powers. It is a giant leap forward when a species of omnivores, like homo sapiens, accords rights of existence to its own members and begins to hesitate before attacking, killing and eating the stray who has wandered among them. An ocean of blood separates “Live and let live” from the more primordial question “What’s in it for me?” Tolerance of diversity is the moral equivalent of coming down from the trees and walking upright. And, in the social evolution of our race, the movement from coolly tolerating outsiders to embracing the stranger in an act of altruism constitutes a leap from the forest floor to the stars.

Although it may seem counterintuitive for a species member to seek the health and well-being of his rivals, these altruistic values are essential building blocks for all complex societies. Just as the Lakota needed to trust that the hunter sleeping in the next lodge would not steal his horses and kill him in the night, so do nation-states need to know the default behavior of their economic and political adversaries in other lands is not opportunistic aggression but peaceful, commercial competition.

This tolerance is based on mutual need, but Jesus and other great teachers of humanity have long called for humanity to move beyond tolerance to a place where respect yields to mutual admiration and trust. The human race has its challenges—some of us have not yet come down from the trees, or given up tribal warfare. The good Samaritan is the model to emulate, but there are still robbers on the road who have not learned this lesson yet. If 9-11 taught the world anything it was this lesson. Peaceful, kindly humans must continue to help the victims out of the ditch, but someone has to deal with the robbers or the victimization will continue.

One could argue a variety of ways to make the metaphorical highways of life safe from robbers—retribution to reconciliation—but the point here is that nothing in the teaching of Jesus requires denial of the problem or capitulation to helpless suffering. Tough love can still be an expression of agapé. If you doubt this, meditatively visit the Jerusalem Temple and ask moneychangers.

Applications of Agapé

Agapé applies to all kinds of relationships, friend-to-friend, person-to-acceptable co-worker, even person to obnoxious jerk. In her book Seeing Children, Seeing God, St.Pul School of Theology's Professor Pamela Couture says that caring actions which must be independent of the response of the person served. “True generosity continues even when others do not respond as we would like; otherwise, our kind actions were bait, rather than generosity.”[9] This sounds very much like Charles Fillmore:

"Let us give as God gives, unreservedly, and with no thought of return, making no mental demands for recompense on those who have received from us. A gift with reservations is not a gift; it is a bribe.[10]

Even if a truly “Christian” response to enmity from those served requires forbearance, the interactive quality of the event is still paid into the sum of the experience for Pastoral Theology, or we would not be having this discussion. Perhaps, in certain circumstances, a thankless rebuff is more conducive to spiritual growth than a hug-and-a-kiss, although the latter certainly feels better.

Love Prescription: What is Needed in Relationships?

1) Less Eros and more Agape. It’s not that eros is bad, it’s that the sensual-attractive side of relationships has been overplayed. This is so self-evident in Western society that the case need not be explicitly stated; everyone old enough to operate a TV remote knows our culture wallows in sensual-sexual imagery.

2) Less Hollywood and more Jerusalem. Perhaps this idea is contained in the first point, above. Glamour is alluring; action-adventure stories where evil is destroyed in the last moments of the movie give us a sense of satisfaction. Yet, the world is infinitely more complex than two teams of super-attractive athletes squaring off in a battle between good and evil. Who were to good guys and bad guys in the biblical stories? Were the Romans evil, or the Jews? One could understand the Second Testament setting as a struggle between imperial, enslaving Rome and freedom-loving Israel; yet the same story can be cast as a battle between urbane, progressive Hellenistic civilization and fanatical religious terrorists, with Jewish zealots playing the role of Al Qaeda in the 1st century. Certainly there have been times when one side represents monstrous “evil” such as the Nazi’s, but most conflicts have been less black-and-white. Rodney King’s hard question should be set in the stained glass windows of every church in the world: “Can’t we all just get along?”

3) Less emphasis on attractiveness and more on compatibility. This is especially true for romantic relationships, but it probably applies equally to all forms of human interaction. Pretty people have both an advantage and disadvantage in our culture. The advantage is obvious; physically attractive people are simply treated better in almost every circumstance. This has been shown in study after study. A stunningly attractive woman once confessed to me, as her minister, that she didn’t know what people actually thought about her, because they always related to her physical beauty and not her ideas, character, or even personality.

4) A good measure of Philia. Mutuality and reciprocity; each side gives more than 50 percent. The best kind of relationships share and allow for the occasional episode of temporary insanity in others.

6) Resolve conflicts without Winning or Losing. Quarrels between intimates or strangers can best be resolved by looking for solutions rather than identifying villains. Agapé represents the hope for better human relationships, that each participant wishes good will for all and is willing to strive selflessly to achieve healing of the nations.
___________________________

Notes:

[1] John 15:12.

[2] "People,” lyrics by Bob Merril. Online source: http://www.seeklyrics.com/lyrics/Barbra-Streisand/People-From-Broadway-Musical.html. Accessed 01-24-08.

[3] C.S. Lewis, The Four Kinds of Love (NY: Harcourt Brace, 1991).

[4] Psalm 106:1.

[5] Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915), quoted at “Quoteland.com” website. Source: http://forum.quoteland.com/1/OpenTopic?a=tpc&s=586192041&f=099191541&m=6531055101 (accessed 01-19-08).

[6] Rodney King Home Page; http://lsnhs.leesummit.k12.mo.us/dtwp/spring07/historical/hour5/historical_bradr/index.htm (accessed 05-15-07).

[7] Matthew 11:19.

[8] John 13:34-35.

[9] Pamela D. Couture, Seeing Children, Seeing God, (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2005), 57.
[10] Charles R. Fillmore, Dynamics for Living (Unity Village, MO: Unity Books, 1967), 208.

Authorized Comments

2010-01-30T11:29:00.001-08:00

Friends of Theo-Blog: Recently I had to open this form as its creator and delete some vulgar promo's posted by so-called "adult" sites, who have somehow gotten my URL and decided to use the comment section to advertise their wares. Consequently, I have installed a filtering process whereby I will review all comments before they are posted. Please do not hesitate to lambaste me for doctrinal error in the future, but if you're advocating Mistress Mella's House of Pain, take your whips and free trial memberships elsewhere.

But leave the handcuffs.

DrTom

Circles of Sin

2010-01-27T12:09:00.000-08:00

I know, I know. You hate that word. For good reasons. All your life, people have insisted you need a Savior, because you're a sinner. You know in your heart that all this "worthless sinner" business is a crock of....yes, of course, you know that. And yet, if you're anything at all like me, there have been times when you have said or done things that you immediately wanted to take back. (I have often found myself wishing that life had something equivalent to MS Word's UNDO key.)

So that brings up a hard question: How does one recover from grevious mistakes? Better question: How do I feel okay about myself after I've said or done something unworthy, nay, verily, reprehensible? It doesn't happen very often in my life, thank God. But when it does, I'm the most miserable of God's children.

Oh, sure, I can tell myself, "You are accepted by God the way you are. Sin is self inflicted nonsense. Sin is error belief. Sin is missing the mark...attempting to negate a divine idea...You should not feel bad. This is a learning experience."

And just as surely as I know that all that "worthless sinner...need a Savior" stuff is not satisfying, some of the above New Thought responses are equally nugatory when I am gripped by the aftermath of a hurtful or selfish choice I have made.

Just as their are circles of faith, circles of belief, circles of love--there seem to be "circles of sin". If I am inside a circle of love or faith or belief, I want to expand it, stay inside its embrace. However, when trapped inside a circle of sin the first item on my agenda is breakout.

The Breakout Formula. I look at what I've done. I affirm that I'm better than this. I accept full responsibility for the mistake, which sometimes calls for me to acknowledge that I knew it was wrong but I did it anyway. I bless, release and forgive myself for making this non-productive choice. I remind myself that it isn't about what's evil and good, it's about what works and doesn't work.

Sometimes, I will give myself an assignment: Center on a spiritual word, playing it like a mantra in my mind. Or do something nice for someone and not tell anyone about it. (Is that penance? I've never been a Catholic, but there's something comforting in actually DOING something to make ammends.)

And then I will repeat the process as often as necessary, whenever the feelings of guilt resurface. Bless, release, forgive. Make ammends as necessary.

Sure, sure. There are people out there who are shaking their heards and murmuring, "I knew he wasn't really Unity..." But why not raid the pantry of Western spirituality as well as Eastern thought? I find no comfort in denying what I am actually feeling--i.e., guilt--rather than dealing with the challenge of missing the mark by picking up my arrow and shooting again, and again, until it hits the target, and I break out of the circle called sin.

That's a mixed metaphor, but I can live with it.

New Thoughts as a New Decade Begins

2009-12-31T12:26:00.000-08:00

What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.

Romeo & Juliet, Act II, Scene 2.

Forty-five years ago, when I was a young US Army soldier stationed in what we then called West Germany, I met an Arab Christian couple from Lebanon who had a new baby. They graciously invited me to their apartment where we shared an evening of food and conversation. During our delightful time together, I noticed the mother and father frequently bending over their infant son and repeating the same word: “Allah, Allah, Allah.”

The father explained, “We want his first word to be the Name of God.”

They were Marionite Christians, teaching their baby the same Arabic word for God as the followers of Islam use in prayer: Allah.

Westerners sometimes translate the great creedal statement of the Islamic world with the words, “There is no God but Allah,” as if our Muslim friends were praying to some alien deity. But the Arabic expression really means, “There is no God but God.” The same Divine Power celebrated in Lebanese Christian liturgies is addressed five times a day by 1.5 billion Muslims around the world.

It started me thinking…how many more things do people of different faiths have in common? Certainly, there are differences among the world religions. Not surprisingly, civilizations separated by geographical, cultural and linguistic barriers have solved their spiritual equations differently. Diverse spiritual traditions have inspired rich cultural heritages—beliefs, practices, and theological nuances; characteristic music, dance, and art—which make each faith distinct from all others.

Yet, all the religions of humanity seem to offer a sense of wonder, reverence for life, ethical teaching, some form of the Golden Rule, and an abiding sense of life’s okay-ness because, despite all appearances to the contrary, God has everything under control. Beyond these rudimentary similarities, much healthy diversity is readily apparent.

As I reflected on my Lebanese Christian friends in Germany and their Muslim countrymen back home, it occurred to me that all parents want similar good for their children. Happiness, wholeness, a sense of purpose, and a faith which sets them free to be the best person they can possibly be. Whatever combination of phonemes we select to identify the mystical presence and power of the Divine outpicturing in our lives—even if we find it difficult to use God-language at all—one could argue that the goal of a prosperous, healthy, joyful existence is the baseline hope of all sentient beings and the common religion of humanity.

Last spring I visited Sri Lanka and traveled in the company of Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims. The intense compassion for humanity and desire to leave our children a better world was indistinguishable among the faith groups I met. Perhaps this speaks to an even deeper common ground than ideas or culture or ritual.

Perhaps the universal yearning for meaning and wholeness indicates we have a self-correcting program running within humanity, and tendencies toward violence and selfishness must give way as we learn more about our brothers and sisters across the street and across the world.

Join me and ponder these thoughts about the underlying oneness of humankind in the decade now begun...

2009-12-24T20:48:00.000-08:00

December 24, 2009

Undelivered/ Snowed Out Christmas Eve Message 2009 Unity of the Lakes

Sermon: “Angels we have heard, kings we have seen…”

Texts: Luke 2:1-19, Matthew 2:1-12 (See below for full NRSV texts)

How many of you believe in angels? Oh, don’t worry, This isn’t Peter Pan. An angel won’t drop dead if you state your disbelief in them. So…seriously….how many people believe there are supernatural beings, which we call angels, who interact in some way with God and humanity? Let’s see a show of hands…

As many of you know, I have a show on Unity-FM, our internet radio network. It’s called “Let’s Talk About It.” I invite guest panelists from all sorts of religious backgrounds. I have had a Catholic nun and a Baha’i and a Sikh. Last week, I invited the angel people…. [ ]

Angels are everywhere this time of the year. Christmas carols echo with their choruses; cards and packages display their images; sacred scripture of Judaism, Christianity and Islam testify to their reality. But are there really, really such things as angels? No humbug intended, but have you ever seen one? Why is it that some otherwise rational people, who would never affirm the existence of demons, have no problem believing in angels? My distinguished panel took a close look at angelology to get a “New Angles on the Angels” on Let's Talk about It. The program was broadcast Friday the 18th of December, but it repeats several times this month, and you can find all my shows archived at the Unity-FM website.

Sooo…..what’s all this annual seasonal brouhaha about angels? In the Bible, God is often seen as distant, like a king on his throne. Not always. There are images of God as the loving father, too. But the king-on-the-throne business seems to get more play. A king doesn’t leave his palace to dabble in the daily affairs of ordinary men and women. He sends messengers to do that, and that is precisely what the word which is usually translated “angel” means in Hebrew. The word is mal’akh, and although the Old Testament book of Malachi is really the book of the messenger. The great Medieval Jewish theologian Moses Maimonides defined angels as “totally disembodied minds…which emanate from God and are the intermediaries between God and all the bodies [objects] here in this world.” Only two angels are given specific names in the Hebrew Bible—Michael and Gabriel—and only in book of Daniel.

Early Christians at first simply appropriated Jewish ideas about angels as messengers. Then the Christian view of angels changed from the angel as a messenger of God to a manifestation of God himself. As time went by, other names were assigned to individual angelic messengers like Raphael, Uriel and Sataniel. Actually, Sataniel—from whom we get the name Satan—started as a good guy, God’s inspector general in Hebrew thought. Check out the books of Job and Zechariah. Sataniel only became “the devil” after several Christian revisions of the storyline, borrowed heavily from Persian, Greek and Roman religion.

By the fifth century, angels had morphed into their traditional characteristics in theology and art—angelic wings and a softer, more feminine look; sometimes in Greek-style armor, more usually in gently flowing robes. A hierarchy of angels and archangels was also created by medieval theologians with too much free time.

So, what about the angels we have heard on high? Messengers, of course, directly drawn from Hebrew mythology. They appear to announce the birth of…well, listen to their own words, faithfully recorded by Luke, who was not an eyewitness:

In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them,

“Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.”

“Do not be afraid…”

Right. Just ignore this army of supernatural beings floating here in the sky overhead and the heavenly light radiating from us to the illuminate the countryside…I wonder how you and I would respond to that? If we were out under the winter sky somewhere in the country and a great light shined upon you and a loud voice spoke from above—well, I’d assume it was a UFO and I’d run for cover. Unless they seemed nice, then I’d come out of hiding to ask for a ride on their starship.

There is a deep significance in this scene. Look at the audience the angels chose to address. The birth of the messiah is announced as “news of great joy for all the people” and the listeners are ordinary working folks, not the wealthy, the educated elite, or the politically or spiritually powerful. This is a significant statement from the pen of Luke. Jesus was not born for the privileged few; he came for “all the people.” Even the angels are jazzed about the possibilities:

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!”

But there is another first Christmas story in the Bible that shows the message of Jesus is not just a way to comfort for the powerless. If Luke’s nativity scene shows the importance of Jesus to the common people, Matthew’s story of the first Noel reaches into the center of earthly power.

Wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.”

When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him; and calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born.

Notice how the scene shifts? No longer are we looking at peasants on the hillsides, shivering in the cold night. No longer is the messiah announced as “good news and great joy for all the people…” of the world. Now we stand in the court of the king, listening to wealthy, powerful men of a distant land who have come looking for a messiah who is the newborn King of the Jews. King Herod calls his “chief priests and scribes” together in the war room of the palace; the governmental and religious leadership meets in emergency session to determine how to respond to the crisis.

The visitors were not really described by as kings in Matthew’s gospel. The word used is magi, which corresponds with Zoroastrian priest. Zoroaster (also, Zarathustra) was a Persian prophet who lived in the 6th century B.C.E. His followers today, who live mostly in India, are called Parsis because of their Persian connection. Zoroaster taught monotheism to his followers and gave the world the concept of a power of evil, an adversary to God who struggled against the good. He also spoke of heavenly signs that would accompany the beginning of a new spiritual era to come. It makes sense that the wise men would come from the East, seeking an earthly manifestation of these prophecies when the signs were right in the heavens. None of this has any known historical basis, but it makes a great story.

What we have in the magi and their visit to Herod is the confrontation of worldly power by the incarnation of Jesus in Bethlehem. If Jesus is the promised one, what does that say to rulers and politicians? If Jesus brings a message of peace and hope, where does the power reside—in God, or wise men, or inspired utterance? Does the authority to declare what is truth and falsehood necessarily come from established power, a fact taken for granted in times of absolute rulers?

Jesus born for the poor people; Jesus born for the wealthy, the powerful, and the highly educated. Does this not suggest that God speaks to all levels of human society in a manner commensurate with the listener’s ability to comprehend? Does this not further suggest that all social and political and economic strata need the message of hope and love which the birth of the Christ child conveys?

This Christmas when looking to the sky, or listening to the news media, remember…remember…remember…Jesus was born for the poor shepherds on a cold winter’s night that was so deep…and also for King of Orient, and Occident, and the democratically elected regimes of today. His birth proclaims hope: there are higher standards than expedience. His birth proclaims Divine Order: despite appearances to the contrary, God is working in through and as the people of every nation and race and religion, to bring world peace and good will. This Christmas is a good time to allow yourself the luxury of optimism, to believe all is well, to expect the best, to believe with your whole heart that humanity is destined to solve its petty squabbles and move forward as one united species to explore the Cosmos.

Look to the heavens…listen for the angels….watch for the star…

_________________________________________________________________

Matthew's Nativity

1 In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, 2 asking, "Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage." 3 When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him; 4 and calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born. 5 They told him, "In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it has been written by the prophet: 6 "And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel.' " 7 Then Herod secretly called for the wise men and learned from them the exact time when the star had appeared. 8 Then he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, "Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage." 9 When they had heard the king, they set out; and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising, until it stopped over the place where the child was. 10 When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. 11 On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. 12 And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.

Luke's Nativity

1 In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. 2 This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. 3 All went to their own towns to be registered. 4 Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David. 5 He went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child. 6 While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. 7 And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn. 8 In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. 9 Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. 10 But the angel said to them, "Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: 11 to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. 12 This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger." 13 And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, 14 "Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!" 15 When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, "Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us." 16 So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger. 17 When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child; 18 and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them. 19 But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. 20 The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.

Joining the Advent Conspiracy

2009-12-15T14:14:00.000-08:00

"The story of (Jesus) Christ's birth is a story of promise, hope, and a revolutionary love. So, what happened? What was once a time to celebrate the birth of a savior has somehow turned into a season of stress, traffic jams, and shopping lists. And when it's all over, many of us are left with presents to return, looming debt that will take months to pay off, and this empty feeling of missed purpose. Is this what we really want out of Christmas? What if Christmas became a world-changing event again? Welcome to Advent Conspiracy."

(above excerpt from http://www.adventconspiracy.org )

Great Idea--"The Advent Conspiracy"

I have just learned about a new "movement" among Christian churches this holiday season. It's called "The Advent Conspiracy," and seems to cut across deominational and theological lines. Although it is worded in traditional language, I am convinced many Unity folks and other Metaphysical Christians will find its proposal intriguing.

There are four basic principles which motivate the revolution called for by the Advent Conspiracy (and they really aren't all that revolutionary or conspiratorial):

Worship Fully
Spend Less
Give More
Love All

1. This year, move forward to a renewed celebration of God-with-us, which is what the birth of the Christ is all about.

2. Dial back on the expensive presents. Of course, give nice gifts--make some, buy some, recycle some. But cut back on the compulsive need to outspend last year's trappings. (Even Jesus only got gold, myrrh and frankincense once.)

3. Give some of the savings to people and organizations who really need it. With 10% of the nation unemployed and charitable giving spiraling downward, it isn't hard to find somplace to circulate the good by giving from a center of generosity and love. Prosperity begins by letting go, which does not require maxing out the credit cards.

4. Love your family and friends by paying attention, the greatest gift of all. Send the people you love a personally written note telling them why they're special to you. It will take longer than a shopping spree at Wal-Mart if you actually write to everybody. They will treasure your note--or the memory of it--long after the sweater you were going to purchase is faded and threadbare.

So, there it is. Commercialism is not a bad thing, but every good thing can be abused by over-use. This Christmas, why not join the Advent Conspiracy and de-criminalize modest gift-giving, set up a revolutionary council of note-writers, and share the good with those who need a little more Christmas cheer. Individuals, charitable organizations, churches--you find the place you are called to support. This is NOT a tithe, but it is pure prosperity principle in practice.

Here's a thought: You can give a flock of ducks to a needy family across the globe for $20.00 through the Heifer Project. Here's the URL, below, or you can just go to www.heifer.org and paddle obver to the ducks page.

http://www.heifer.org/site/c.edJRKQNiFiG/b.2667667/?msource=kw205&gclid=CKrhr4nC2Z4CFRQhDQodew0qdw

And find a house of worship to celebrate the light of this holiday season with a community of faith. Join the Advent Conspiracy, and we can change the world.

How to Live Confidently Until You Die (Maybe Longer)

2009-11-30T12:56:00.000-08:00

‘Tis but a day we sojourn here below,
And all the gain we get is grief and woe,
Then, leaving our life's riddles all unsolved,
And burdened with regrets, we have to go.

The Rubaiyat by Omak Khayyam (c. 1120 C.E.)

Darkness Approaches

How does an aging Boomer find a lifestyle which is both meaningful and enjoyable in the final phase of life? Both Omar Khayyam and the unknown preacher of Ecclesiastes complained about the futility of a life that ends too soon and accomplishes too little. The preacher called life vanity of vanities. “All things are wearisome; more than one can express.”[1]

Why did anyone go to the trouble of hand-copying and preserving such ancient downers? Perhaps cathartic negativity appeals to the human mind because our species has endured wars and rumors of wars throughout history. We Boomers are a fairly cynical generation, the people who snickered as Queen chanted, “Another one bites the dust!” Yet we never felt the lyrics applied to us personally, never suspected the dust-biting was coming our way.

Oh, certainly, everybody knew we were mortal, that nothing was certain but death and taxes. Then the Reagan revolution told us that taxes were optional, and science began to find ways to prolong life…so who knows? We jogged. We watched our weight and took multi-vitamins. We gained weight and fought smoking addiction, not to mention lingering drug relapses here and there. AIDS terrified everyone for a decade or so, then medicine removed the inexorable death sentence from HIV-related illness, and we relaxed into fantasies about immortality once more, even while people continued to die.

But death is coming. It took some people of our generation who should still be here. Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Ricky Nelson, Karen Carpenter, John Lennon, John Denver, Jim Henson, Steve Erwin, my half-brother, Darryl John Carter, the list goes on. Statisticians estimate we’ll all be gone by the 2060s.

My own existential awareness of death looming distant occurred in one of the most youth-centered locales imaginable. I was teaching eighth grade at Spirit Creek Middle School in Hephzibah, Georgia, a few miles southwest of the azalea-splashed city of Augusta, known for the Masters’ golf tournament. Students had gone to Unified Arts and Physical Education, leaving our hallway empty and giving us teacher-time to prepare lessons or play catch-up on the ten million other tasks required in public schools. I remember thinking about the strange silence of that wing of the building. Suddenly, I flashed on the idea that, just as UA/PE happens every day with clockwork regularity, so will I follow my ancestors into the approaching shadows of death. It was an organic realization, not an abstract concept. It wasn’t about death as a subject to be considered; it was about death as an unavoidable event which I must one day experience. Not, “All people are mortal and will one day die,” but rather, “You are mortal; you are going to die. The big dirt nap approaches. Everything will go black, and that will be it. Lights out. Sayonara. Another one bites the dust. You. Die. Gone. Blackness.”

It scared the bejesus out of me. I rushed into the hallway, desperate to see someone alive, wishing my irascible middle schoolers would return from UA/PE, so that some of their immortality would rub off. Of course, it did. Activity spun me away from the brink, and the only panic attack of my life passed into legend. Telling you about it helps, too. Community is a healing experience.

These thoughts are not designed to bum you out, just to make it clear that we are all in this together. Life’s end approaches, and the only question facing us is how shall we live while approaching the still-distant but unavoidable dark wall of death? We may live beyond it. Most great religions insist we do. But we cannot avoid passing through its dark gate.

We’ll begin then with a short list of thoughts about living with confidence and joy until you enter the final darkness which leads to…more light? (More about that later. But relax. I told you this book doesn’t peddle a religious philosophy.) So, before we plunge into the ten paths to wisdom from East and West, here are ten starter ideas from a former middle school teacher.

Ten Starters for the Last Phase of (Mortal) Life

1. Get ready. Make eschatological preparations, then savor every day. You have promises to keep, even after you’re dead. Do the legal stuff, take care of your survivors as best you can, then forget it forever.

2. Get back to school. Go learn stuff, no matter how old you are. Nothing stimulates the brain like learning. Even if it’s online, or offered at your house of worship, or requires home tutoring.

3. Get romantic. I misspoke, above. Something does stimulate the brain like learning. Stay as sexually active as you and the pharmacist can achieve. Keep love alive.

4. Get complaint-free. Find solutions, not villains. Try to live complaint free. Practice positive affirmations. Don’t try to prove you’re right and they’re wrong. There are very few people on this planet who are able to stop in the middle of an argument and say, with sincerity, “You know, I get it now. I am wrong and you are right.” No matter how “right” you may be in some abstract sense, that ain’t gonna happen, dude. Don’t try to find out whose at fault. The blame game is like playing catch with a nuclear hand grenade. No matter where it lands, all players get zapped when it goes off. Give people enough emotional space to turn around, to cross over to your side. Appeal to their humanitarian tendencies. Most people will work with you if approached with a request for help. An old Army sergeant once said to me, “Ask, and ye shall receive. Demand, and you can go fuck yourself.”

5. Get political. Party organizations love people like us. We generally have more discretionary income, more free time to volunteer, and are better educated about the issues than the younger generations.

6. Get theological. Study the great thinkers of your religious tradition and compare them with writers from other faiths or denominations. Knowledge is connectional, and critical analysis of comparative ideas about God, life, and eternity is always appropriate. The objective here is to clarify and explore, not to prove who’s right. Earlier in life, our generation excelled at letting people “do their own thing,” but we lost some of that flexibility in the last decades of the twentieth century. Perhaps this is a good time to pick up Sartre and Heinlein and Jonathan Livingston Seagull once more.

7. Get spiritual. Spirituality is a belief system in action. Pray & meditate; return to church or find a new one. You’re looking at the doorway to eternity, so you might as well see what others have said about the journey. Do something from your religious tradition. (If you’ve never dabbled in spirituality, or haven’t recently, you might be surprised how cool some of them are today!) Try working my Eight Scenes in a Peaceful Life exercise, or do variation on the vision quest.

8. Get comfortable. Work as long as you want, but be prepared to phase down later. Do less as needed. You get to say when “later” occurs. You might never fully retire, and that would be okay, too, if you’re enjoying the work. Or you might hang it up at sixty-two. The choice is yours, based on personal preferences, economic considerations and health issues. Learn to relax without guilt. No matter whether you’re working full time, part-time, or fully retired, playing isn’t sinful, indolent, or unproductive—it’s a vital, brain-saving activity. Enjoy simpler pleasures. Go fish. And playing cards helps, too. Watch sporting events, live and on TV. See good movies, read good books. Cultivate a love for art, music, gardening—anything that takes you out of the humdrum to a higher place.

9. Get creative. Find meaningful creative activities. Write that book, or your memoirs. Get online, or expand your online life.

10. Get them together. It takes a community. Gather with your extended family for meals regularly. Celebrate everything possible, especially holidays. Also, learn to let others do for you. Especially your children.

“Give Peace a Chance…”

Our generation, which produced unsung military heroes and a grassroots anti-war movement, will leave behind a paradoxical legacy of service and rebellion, competence and corruption. Richard M. Nixon was far from an ideal leader, but his rush to infamy began with a rather thoughtful speech at the 1968 Republican Convention. As he accepted the nomination for president, Nixon reached across generations and told Americans to stop shouting and start listening to each other. Most of the television audience had no clue that Nixon would be listening via illegal wiretaps, but the point is well taken regardless of how poorly he followed his own advice.

As I cross the line into senior citizenry status, the last thing I want in the last third of my life is to go around nursing grudges or feeling superiority. I don’t have to agree with people or approve of the choice they make in order to treat everyone with dignity and compassion. Confident living begins with a commitment to center oneself in a life of compassion, because all people are worthy of respect. It is joyful way to live in the last phase of life.

So, if you are ready after sampling some preliminary ideas, let’s get busy learning how to relax, let go, and keep active in the golden years to come. The long autumn of life stretches ahead of us like a color-splashed forest path, extending as far as the mind’s eye can see. Take the hand of someone you love, and let’s all go there together.

______________________________________________________

[1] Ecclesiastes 1:2, 8. If you ever want to get seriously depressed, read the first chapter carefully. Had the author been a member of my generation, somebody would have taken him aside and said, “You’re bumming me out, man…”

Giving Thanks for Atheists and Conservatives

2009-11-25T13:48:00.000-08:00

[The excerpt following comes from my input in an e-mail exchange among friends at Unity Village.]

Atheism is a challenge that comes from a direction in which many Unity people are not facing. We tend to stare down Christian conservatism, but to be attacked from the left is a shocker.

Most atheists I've known are anti-YHWH, the god of the Hebrew Bible, and have never given serious consideration to rejecting Thor, Siva, or Allah. Ironically, even in their rejection of the primitive doctrine of God found in some parts of the biblical canon, atheists (and to some extent agnostics) pay indirect homage to the anthropomorphic model by setting it up as the norm. This is like saying, "I want to deny the existence of God--lead me to the Bible, and I'll take Him on!"

Nor have most atheists rejected the concept of value. There are ideas, practices, and relationships to which humans--even atheistic ones--assign value. If there is no divine thread weaving everything together at some supersensible level, what gives anything intrinsic value? Are not the drunk in the gutter and Mother Theresa equally pointless? In what case is love better than apathy, if there is no connectedness above my narrow needs? The fact is, some principles seem to be universals--love, order, imagination, faith, etc....One could mention all the 12 powers, plus a few unmentioned by Mr. Fillmore, like peace and steadfastness. (Aside: Ned Kelly tells me the power of Strength has this quality. He may be right, but I read Strength more as having the resources to do something, whereas Steadfastness speaks of tenacity.)

In any event, the fact that universal values seem to be discernible has sometimes been called the moral argument for the existence of God. Immanuel Kant took this position, among others.
According to Dostoyevsky, "If there is no God, then everything is permissible." The fact that humans instinctively know that NOT everything is permissible, suggests that some transcendent Source of value exists. [1]

One might further argue, as a metaphysical aside, that the above is also a decent argument to see that transcendent Source as the true God. Isn't it possible to see God as the ongoing Process by which the Cosmos outpictures and from (and in) which we continue to emerge? Substance is God energy, said Mr. Fillmore. God energy arises from Principle, which outpictures as the creative force at work in and as the Cosmos. That is not far from a full-blown process theology.

Anyway, I think the real issue about atheism goes to the frustration that thinking/feeling people have experienced when confronted by conservative Christianity. Most atheists I have know are simply fed up with delusional theologies that try to make people think like we did before the scientific age. The Young Earth Theory; refusal of scientific evidence on everything from nuclear wastes to despoiling the environment to climate change; insistence that homosexuality is a choice rather than a biologically determined orientation; rejection of women's full equality; intellectual incompetence by refuting historical-critical studies of the Bible....the list goes on. No wonder, if the conservatives have defined their form of Christianity as THE CHRISTIAN FAITH, that thinking men and women are saying, "Forget it. I'm spiritual, not religious."

There have been days when I have heard radio preachers hammering away about what Jesus wants and how you can get saved by following Jesus (actually, their narrowly defined version of Jesus)--well, sometimes I have fantasized about chucking the Bible out the window and joining the Hindus. (After all, I like Vishnu and Ganesh and love curry with rice.)

But then, graciously, the historian arises within me, and I remember... Jesus had the same problems with the conservatives of his time. And Mohammed fled Mecca to Medina to save his neck from the conservatives (albeit pagans) in his day. And Baha'i prophet Baha'u'llah was imprisoned 40 years by Islamic leaders.

The man of Nazareth himself lamented that a prophet is never honored close to home. Jay Wells more recently has summarized the unavoidable problem for all of us who venture into the center of the discussion about Ultimate Concerns:

“Jesus faced opposition. In every crowd, someone questioned his motives and sought to discredit him. If it happened to him, it will happen to you.” [2]

So, I take a deep breath and, from deep within my Pennsylvania Dutch/ German Reformed/ Unitarian-Universalist/ Eternally Unity soul, say to my conservative Christian brothers and sisters: "You do not have the authority to speak for Jesus Christ, and you certainly don't speak for me."

And to atheists and agnostics, "Keep stirring the kettle. It makes a better soup."

The atheists keep me honest; the fundamentalists keep me sharp. So, this holiday season, I give thanks to the Irreligious Left and Hyper-Religious Right. They seem to be part of that pesky thing called Divine Order in my life...

Unity and the Sacraments

2009-11-06T11:05:00.000-08:00

[The following discussion continues comments made in e-mails at Unity Institute and opens the floor for comments and critical analysis.]

My definition of a sacrament is any event (or place) during which the presence of God becomes more readily discernible (Glimpses of Truth). This is a broadening of Martin Luther's basic idea that God's real presence can be discovered in the communion elements, even though there is no more "God" in the bread and cup than anyplace else. It's the conscious awareness of the omnipresent God which rendered some activity a "sacrament"--which by the way is a Latinized translation of the original Greek word mysterion, i.e., mystery, or sacred awareness beyond rational thought.

Since Bishop John Shelby Spong hails from a "high church" tradition (Anglicanism = Episcopalianism in the USA), the sacraments are much more important for him than they would be for, say, someone like Martin Luther King, Jr., whose background was the "low church" tradition of the American Baptist Church. Catholics, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Anglicans and others of the "high church" traditions consider the sacraments to be the central act of worship; without holy communion there is no worship in those churches. Unity represents a "low church" tradition in that we have never held the sacraments to be so central, except for one..."The Silence" might arguably be considered our central sacrament, as Ray Nelson remarked in class yesterday.

Anyway, we cannot simply dismiss our of hand the ideas about discerning the presence of God through prayer, ritual, and tradition, and since so many Unity people emerge from (or still participate in) "high church" traditions, it seems to be a good discussion to have. Manmade rituals are attempts to perceive the divine; the discussion might fruitfully consider what works, and what doesn't, for people in the 21st century.

Your thoughts?

Book Launch!

2009-10-27T14:26:00.000-07:00

GOOD QUESTIONS:

Answering Letters from the Edge of Doubt

by Rev Thomas Shepherd, D.Min.

I look too fat in the picture, but who cares? Hoo-ray! My new book is out...well, it's supposed to be out by Thursday, October 29. There's a link to a facebook page below that gives information about the book. On to the particulars...
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Book launch events will begin with an autography party and short readings, 4:30-6:00 pm, on Monday, November 2, at the Unity Village Bookstore, 1901 NW Blue Parkway, Unity Village, MO. Light refreshments will be served. .
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This is the first new non-fiction book for me in almost a decade. The work is based on 15 years of Q&A columns in Unity Magazine. Because it's a letter-by-letter format, Good Questions makes good bedtime reading. In fact, it's ideal for any time you have just a few minutes to read. (My wife predicts it will quickly become the #1 published work found in Unity & New Thought bathrooms across the English-speaking world. Some folks would say that's where it rightly belongs...but let's not go there.)
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Foreword
by Rosemary Fillmore Rhea

I'm especially honored that Rosemary Fillmore Rhea, grandaughter to Unity co-founder Charles Fillmore, wrote an embarrassingly complimentary foreword to the book. Her grandfather was the first Unity columnist to write a Q&A column, followed by Dr. Marcus Bach and finally me. Rosemary knew all three of us, and she is gracious enough to speak kindly about my efforts in following the footsteps of those distinguished predecessors.
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Sunday, November 8 - Unity Village Chapel Services
I will be speaking at the Unity traditional service held at the Silent Unity Chapel, Sunday, November 8. My topic will be "Good Questions" (surprise!) and there will be a book signing immediately following the service.

Will I see you at the book launch events?

Here's the facebook link: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=189584842844

Limitations on the Ethics of Nonviolence

2009-10-16T12:01:00.000-07:00

A common response among some New Thought leaders to people who raise ethical issues with political overtones is to quote or paraphrase the words of Gary Simmons in his book The ‘I’ of the Storm: "There is no one and nothing against you."[1] The “no one and nothing is against you” premise seems to flow from a belief that God is all there is, therefore actions to oppose perceived evil in the world are unnecessary and counter-productive. An action or idea is neither good nor bad; it is what it is.[2] While understanding the positions taken by others is necessary to any kind of productive dialogue, the claim that all ethical propositions are created equal is a trapdoor into antinomianism.[3]

History is benchmarked by the tombstones of evil practices: African slavery in the New World, genocide against the indigenous peoples of North and South America by European immigrants, Nazism, Stalinism, Jim Crow laws and segregation in the USA. All of these were hotly debated and people stood passionately on both sides of the issues. Today we can understand only with difficulty how any moral person could argue in favor of slavery, which testifies to the triumph of truth over error belief. Slavery had to be defeated, which meant some people who passionately stood for slavery also had to be defeated because they were wrong. Not necessarily killed, abused or imprisoned—but clearly defeated.

Both Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. understood that existential evil must be opposed, not accommodated. Whether there is any actual metaphysical force of evil in the cosmos is clearly irrelevant when slave owners are hunting runaways with bloodhounds or their spiritual descendants are unleashing police dogs on peaceful civil rights protesters to obstruct integration. While the non-violent protests of Indians for freedom from British rule and civil rights marchers against racial injustice in the USA and South Africa were successful, some ethicists believe there are times when evil (error-belief) becomes so powerful, dominant and ruthless that the only appropriate response is violent resistance. Marches ended segregation; it took a bloody Civil War to end slavery.

Some would argue that circumstances change the kind of response which is appropriate. Gandhi and King were essentially using the power of public opinion against a governmental system which saw itself as lawful and just. When Americans saw the water hoses and police dogs unleashed against children and peaceful adult demonstrators, the backlash of shame did much to sweep aside decades of prejudicial public policies. However, peaceful protestors marching against a totalitarian regime which has no such moral scruples to embarrass might be considered pointless, as Chinese pro-democracy demonstrators discovered in their 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. Estimates of eight hundred deaths and countless arrests point to the power of repressive, amoral regimes. Whether China will come to democracy by evolution or revolution—if freedom comes at all—has yet to be determined. Examples of this phenomenon of violent oppression are sadly too common.

During World War II, German theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer made the long journey from pacifism to tyrannicide. He wrote to friends:

“If we claim to be Christians, there is no room for expediency. Hitler is the anti-Christ. Therefore we must go on with our work and eliminate him." [4]

The assassination plot failed; Bonhoeffer he was hanged by special order of Heinrich Himmler. For Dietrich Bonhoeffer, it was The Cost of Discipleship.

The problem with armed resistance to ethical and moral ideas is that as soon as one raises a weapon to overthrow some perceived evil system, the pattern for future revolution has been reinforced. The scandal that Americans would carry weapons to presidential events, reinforced by a national insanity about gun rights that makes the USA the most heavily armed population on earth, threatens the future with endless cycles of insurrection. Democracy only works if the system of representative government is supported by the vast majority when one’s favorites are out of power.

This is a complicated maze of issues involving war and peace, individual rights, pacifism, nonviolence, just war theory, self-defense, the right of revolution, opposition to flagrant tyranny, and the very nature of life as a drama of metaphysical unfoldment. Questions abound:

If the Christ was in Hitler, was it still “right” to plot his death?

How many millions of people would have been spared untold misery if a lone gunman had taken out the arch-tyrant?

How can we prevent that model of extreme response to an extreme circumstance from becoming the wish-fulfillment fantasy of everyone who opposes the powers that be?

What are the limits of peaceful protest, spiritual action, resistance to injustice?

If God really has everything under control, why bother to do anything?

Shall we meditate and await the Second Coming, or world peace by gradual warming of the hearts of humanity, or the supernova coming in five billion years which will end the world? Even so come, Lord Jesus.

The questions are not friendly. The answers are not painless. There are people and things against us. God is inside all of these.

Sometimes, I wish life were simpler, but it is what it is…

_________________________________________

[1] Gary Simons, The ‘I’ of the Storm, quoted at http://www.itstime.com/feb2003.htm (accessed 10-16-09).
[2] “It is what it is.” Another ubiquitous saying in New Thought circles, apparently this cliché goes back at least to the late 1940’s. http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2008/01/it-is-what-it-is-or-is-it.html (accesed 10-16-09).
[3] Antinominanism - The belief that ethical values are entirely person-centered; nothing counts except one’s feelings in any given circumstance.
[4] Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Paul Johnson A History of Christianity (NY: Atheneum, 1980), p. 494.

2009-09-13T23:00:00.000-07:00

My grandfather, William Henry Quell (1911-1974), was a Socialist. You can tell from his picture (left) that he obviously had sinister designs on the fabric of American society at large. He and my grandmother, Esther Marie Quell, raised me. He is the only father figure I've ever known, and I gotta tell you....he wasn't very good at being a Dad. He was working all the time! He worked nights, and then he drove school buses during the day. He came home between morning and afternoon bus runs to catch some sleep, but he was always walking out the door with his lunchpail and I wanted a Dad to play catch with me. He didn't even talk that much. I thought he was....well...stupid.
..
Only after he had been dead a decade did I realize that English wasn't his first language; he was urban Pennsylvania Dutch. Not an Amish black hat riding a carriage with a whip in hand and five hundred acres of planted corn, Pop Quell was a mechanic's helper at the Reading, PA, Bus Company. He never even made mechanic. He was a seventh-grade dropout, a man who struggled to read the evening newspaper and repeated himself frequently when he thought he had said something witty.
..

Pop Quell wasn't stupid, rather he was in the purest sense of the word ignorant, meaning he wasn't well-educated in an academic setting and therefore had limited resourcs to understand things like American history, politics, literature, art, or philosophy. It wasn't his fault, and it certainly wasn't due to laziness. William Henry Quell left school at twelve years old to go to work, not just because the family needed extra income, but because that is what working class boys did in the factory towns during the 1920's.
..
And he was definitely a Socialist. Well, to be accurate, he had voted Socialist whenever a major Socialist candidate was running for local office. In 1927 Reading elected Mayor J. Henry Stump, who served several terms as the city's only Socialist mayor. When I was a boy in the 1950's, people still spoke fondly of "Stumpy" and his pipe-smoking, common-man politics.
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Pop Quell didn't have a clue what socialism meant. I know this because we spoke about it on occasion. He simply said, "The Socialists always did more for the working man." That was his political philosophy in a sentence. He didn't care what labels people wore; he wanted to know what they would do for "the working man." Working women will identify with this philosophy, too.
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My grandfather was a bread-and-butter Socialist; he didn't know and didn't care what political philosophy motivated people. He wanted a living wage, and Social Security, and un employment insurance, and a chance to work hard and retire with dignity.
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I was moving back to Reading in June of 1974, having dropped out of seminary in Denver in the hope of finding a teaching job in my home town. While I was driving across country, my grandfather died of a heart attack on my 28th birthday, June 10, 1974. He was just shy of 63, and had not survived to collect social security.
..
He had a union job and good benefits. But I wonder what might have happened if his nation had adopted universal health care as a fundamental right for all. Would our excellent family physician, Dr. Martin Luther Spangler, D.O., have been more inclined to order tests that may have discovered the blockage that eventually cause his heart attack? Who knows.
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Pop was a nominal Socialist for all the right reasons. Not for political philosophy or some vaugue idea of a workers' paradise. He wanted bread-and-butter benefits for the working man...and woman.
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Somewhere between Marxist Communism (which does NOT work) and laissez-faire capitalism (which also does not work), there must be a responsible, sober, econonically plausible middle ground that will allow the greatest nation in the world to provide health care and social services to its working people.

My grandfather worked two jobs--cleaning city buses by night and driving school buses by day--and I never had a chance to tell him thank you. I realized recently that the reason he was working so hard was to put me through high school, a level that must have seemed like college to him. Now I have a doctorate, and America does not have universal health care. Our provided-for generation needs to step up and do something for the Pop Quells out there who are holding down multiple jobs to raise grandchildren and wondering why the politicans don't do more for the working man and woman.

"To Boldly Go There...Carefully"

2009-07-14T20:09:00.000-07:00

The Lyceum at Unity Village, MO
Sep 30 - Oct 3, 2009

Lyceum 2009 theme - ..
..
“Science and Religion: An Evolving Dialogue”

“Before language, before ritual, before self-consciousness itself, our hominid ancestors probably looked to the night sky with wonder. We did not come down from the trees to sit on the ground. Perhaps we came down to find a meadow and get a better look at the stars.”

. ...................................................................................................TW Shepherd
_______________________________________________

Abstract of my upcoming Lyceum 2009 Lecture

“To Boldly Go There…Carefully: Theological Ethics after First Contact with Extra-terrestrial Civilizations”

A paper to be delivered at Lyceum 2009 by Thomas William Shepherd, D.Min.

My Lyceum lecture this year will discuss the new Copernican revolution which is coming after the religions and secular philosophies of humanity begin to realize how incredibly small and relatively insignificant the human race appears when viewed against the backdrop of deep space exploration. Specifically, humanity may have to reinvent its most cherished myths when our descendents encounter races from what is probably an ancient, complex, multi-species galactic civilization. This is not the fluff of science fiction but the hard science of astronomers, futurists and other serious theoreticians. The very likely existence of a myriad of intelligent lifeforms in our galaxy alone has been addressed seriously by scientists—to include chemists, physicists and, yes, exiobiologists— and popularized by the late Dr. Carl Sagan in his Cosmos series on PBS.

However easily those of us who have grown up with Star Trek and Star Wars may embrace the concept of a multi-species Cosmos, the potential discovery of intelligent non-human life raises serious challenges which have not yet been fully addressed by the religions of humanity, especially traditional Christianity.

The paper will begin by identifying three currently unfounded assumptions which shape and inform the topic to be presented:

1) Life exists on a multitude of worlds in billions of galaxies, to include our galaxy.
2) Some of those life forms are intelligent.
3) Some day humans will learn how to travel the vast distances between Earth and other biologically friendly planets in a reasonably short span of time.

From this starting point within a post-modern circle of faith, the paper will proceed to a brief overview of the intellectual history of the discussion about the implications of extraterrestrial life, which has been ongoing for at least twenty-five centuries, then proceed to consider how the “new” view of Cosmos affects central Christian doctrines such as the Trinity.

Finally, my paper will look at the ethics of First Contact and attempt to sketch the outlines of an environmental-ecological theology of deep space exploration which allows human development while avoiding the pitfalls of unchecked, conquistador-style exploitation by applying a modified version of science fiction visionary Gene Roddenberry’s “Prime Directive” to all human-alien interactions.

The paper will conclude with an assessment of both the need and longing for exploration of the Cosmos: “When searching for the deepest meanings of existence, humanity appears hard-wired to look toward space.”

This is Iran's Selma

2009-06-24T10:09:00.000-07:00

Today, June 24, 2009, the Iranian regime has shown its utter contempt for democratic values and the free speech rights of their people. There was a time that a nation run by religious hooligans and corrupt politicans could have simply shut down the media and done whatever it wanted without fear of the brutality seeping outside the country, but the Iranian tyrants have miscalculated the free flow of information in the twenty-first century. In a live CNN report via cell phone by a young woman in Tehran, the world learned that black clad Iranian security police waded into the crowd of peaceful demonstrators and beat, clubbed and shot them. There are reports of people being shoved off bridges and security police "chopping people like meat" with axes, blood everywhere.

What immediately comes to mind is the Civil Rights movement in the USA and the "Bloody Sunday" incident at Selma, Alabama, on March 7, 1965. Non-violent demonstrators planned to march from Selma to the State Capitol at Montgomery. They made it only as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where the Dallas County Sheriff 's Department and Alabama Stae Troopers awaited them on horseback and in military formations. "In the presence of the news media, the lawmen attacked the peaceful deomonstrators with billy clubs, tear gas, and bull whips. Brutal televised images of the attack, which presented people with horrifying images of marchers left bloodied and severely injured, roused support for the U.S. civil rights movement." One woman, Amelia Boynton, was beaten and gassed almost to death in full light of the national news agencies.[1]

The horrific images shocked the nation and deeply embarrassed the people of the South. It was the beginning of the end to officially sanctioned segregation of public facilities and a great step forward toward America truly becoming one nation, under God.

Whereas the majority of Southern whites watched in horror at this violation of their Christian values, members of radical groups such as the KKK saw the protestors as agents of the devil, deserving what they got. It is important to note that the KKK considers itself a Christian organization, hence the burning cross as their symbol. Martin Luther King, Jr., was a Christian minister, but his take on the faith of Jesus was infinitely distant from the hatemongering racicism that brought violence to the demonstrators on Bloody Sunday.

Iran is another case. The lunatics are in charge of the asylum; those who profess to be the leaders of Islam are standing behind the hand of state power in its suppression of the rights of free people. Peaceful protest is met with brutality, and that violence is seen as the will of God. Shame on the religious leaders who pervert Islam into a religion of hate and fear. You are the KKK in a turban, and you have no more right to speak for Islam than the Imperial Wizard of the Klan can speak for Jesus Christ.

Fortunately, everyone in Tehran seems to have a cell phone with a camera, and the world knows what is going on in the streets. Everywhere from the Russian arctic to Tierra Del Fuego in Argentina, people are hunched over computer screens reading translated versions of the news about the beastiality of the Iranian regime. Pictures have been released to the world. This is their Selma. God is Great, indeed.
________________________

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selma_to_Montgomery_marches
(accessed 06-24-09)

Walking with Iran, Celebrating the Tiger Gods

2009-06-23T08:43:00.000-07:00

President Barack Obama has begun to turn the ship of state from its collision course with the Islamic world. Only a wise student of history with self-confident moral courage could do what the President is attempting to do. He has ended an era of confrontation and posturing and begun the process of educating America about its new leadership role in a post-modern world.

What many Americans and Iranians share in common is ignorance about socio-cultural factors that drive us. Metaphysical nuances aside, everyone is born in a world he or she did not create. The culture we have is the culture we learned as infants. For breakfast today, you probably did not sit in a lotus position eating rice and coriander sauce with your fingers. If you've been following my Sri Lankan Journal (blogs below), you may recall that's the way they greet the morning. If a child is born in Idaho, she is statistically unlikely to be raised a Hindu. Move the birth site to Mumbai, and the numbers reverse themselves. All the evil-doers in the American slave era were conveniently born in the Old South, while my Civil War era Yankee ancestors stood for God, country, and freedom. Moving to Georgia, I got a much different picture of the War of Northern Aggression. It was a hopeless but noble stuggle for independence against a powerful, tyrannical central government that wanted to control and tax the good people of Dixie until our way of life was gone with the wind...

We need to grow up and realize that there are no tiger gods where there are no tigers. Christianity is not the one true faith; neither is Islam. The American way of life, which was good enough for Superman, may not work for people from other lands. The point is, people must be able to choose how they want to organize their societies, and we cannot go around the globe trying to make everyone into suburbanized white Protestants. There are some common causes about which humanity seems unified: Children should be safe and educated; women and men should experience some degree of equality (although the jury is stuill out on what that means); humans should not own, kill or mistreat other humans; public policy must not be motivated by hatred toward any group; and the best way to solve problem is through dialogue and reconciliation, not force of arms.

When did we we adopt this John Wayne foreign policy that characterized the Bush Administration? Was it all about 9-11? Hardly. The advice we Baby Boomers got from the moguls of popular culture was, “Don’t get mad, get even.” Two decades of theatergoers cheered the five-part Death Wish movies (1974-94), when an avenging Charles Bronson killed a series of bad men for the best of reasons. Perhaps we inherited this trait from the movie stars our parents had adored, heroes who met the bad guys in the street at high noon and gunned them down.

John Wayne, whose action-movie career spanned generations, was one of my boyhood favorites, too. Although he had an appealing personality both in film and real life, the Duke’s onscreen characters displayed a consistently violent behavioral repertoire, offering neither empathy for human frailties nor reconciliation with one’s enemies.

A goodly number of young radicals in our generation adopted the modus operandi of the crusading hero by deciding that bringing down the system would transform the world. Beyond ordinary drop-out, get-high hippies, we produced the Black Panther Party, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Weather Underground Organization, and the Youth International Party (Yippies). These and other groups advocated everything from forming anti-establishment communal refuges to a total revolution and seizing the reins of government. There was a lot of shouting at the meetings, mostly directed against the Vietnam War in general and the Johnson administration in particular. Since a fair number of the anti-war disturbances occurred on University campuses, there was also a significant amount of railing against the educational establishment. Some of the furor escalated because the Establishment—our parents of the WWII generation—responded with slap-down disciplinary measures when their Boomer children protested against the icons of the elder generation, i.e., down with the schools, the military, the government, and conventional morality.

In the 1970 protest comedy Getting Straight, Elliot Gould plays a Vietnam veteran who returns to college for his master’s degree and gets swept up into the culture of chaos developing on American campuses. Near the end of the film, Gould’s character meets with campus administrators during a student riot. They observe a young man rampaging through the halls, breaking things. Gould accuses the faculty “adults” of transforming this student from a peaceful kid, who previously only wanted to get laid, into a raving lunatic who now wants to kill.

It is an overstatement, of course, and inappropriately dismisses the responsibility of the rioters for their behavior, but Gould’s veteran has a point. When people feel they have no recourse to achieve worthwhile goals by peaceful ends, they will often resort to violence, sometimes violence which is haphazard and heartbreaking. That is why the sex-driven young man in Getting Straight became a violent protestor. That is also why the 9-11 terrorists flew their planes into buildings full of people whom they did not know, praying "God is Great!" before they died.

It is long past due that an American leader should understand the complex forces which motivate godly people to do ungodly deeds. It is not simply about good and evil; that was the chief error in the thinking of the previous administration. In American history, good people owned slaves, who were good people themselves; good people fire-bombed the cities of Germany and dropped two nukes on Japan; good people protested the Vietnam War, while other good people marched off to fight it, obeying their country's call. All people are basically good, but in the long and bloody history of the world circumstances have often impelled us to do ungodly things for the highest reasons.

Someone has to blow the whistle and say, "Enough!" It's time for humanity to grow up. I am encouraged that America has finally elected someone who understands the nuances of the real world. It's long overdue that a grown-up should lead us, even a young one. Hold your breath; the ship is turning, slowly but steadily, away from the rocks of ethnocentrism to a new consciosuness of the connectional nature of human life in the post-modern world. I pray he succeds, for the good of all humanity.

Sri Lankan Journal - Entry #10 - Final Pages

2009-06-13T22:27:00.001-07:00

(With gratitude that you are still reading this Theo-Blog and apologies for the three month hiatus since Entry #9...I'll try to be more attentive now that my doctoral program is complete. To start at the beginning of this Sri Lankan Journal, scroll down to Entry #1.)

"Morning has broken..." .
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After the book launch, Bhante and I rode back through the dark but still bustling city. He asked the driver to stop and allow me time to run into a Chinese restaurant for take-out. Bhante does not eat dinner; apparently Buddhist monks eat only breakfast and lunch.

The restaurant could have been in Lee's Summit, Missouri. It sported the same el cheapo red lanterns with dangling red tassels and Wal-Mart watercolors of rugged mountains overlooking a river dotted with crescent shaped boats. I thought, Well, why not? Everything is made in China these days..

I expected takeout to come in the typical waxed-cardboard goldfish box with wire handle, but it arrived in a shoebox lined with thin plastic wrap.

Bhante dropped me at my apartment(picture, below left) outside the Buddhist Peace Center and I climb the flight of stairs to my buggy borrowed domain. I slipped under the mosquito net to eat my dinner, while infiltrating insects did likewise. Tomorrow I will get a fresh bottle of repellant and spend more hours on the beach.

This is a new kind of spiritual retreat. I begin every day sitting up in bed under the mosquito netting. I stretch, yawn, scratch a little, then sing "Morning Has Broken" and read the Daily Word. God and I are in constant dialogue in my head. Uh, sure. I know it's dualistic--God is inside, not out there. Ya-da, ya-da... Sue me. I am happily talking to God, who must be both "out there" and "in here" or the whole thing is a fraud. Besides, I need someone who speaks English. More later. .

FRIDAY 02-27-09

OK, I bailed on the adjunct-ashram-sans-window-screens and moved to the Mount Royal Hotel for the last three days here. It is located at the beach near the restaurant I've been attending with some regularity. Mt. Royal isn't classy--think of an aging Holiday Inn somewhere in Florida--but it's air conditioned, clean, and quite comfortable (see picture). The hotel is big, weather-beaten, and fairly inexpensive ($55 US for B&B). It wasn't the Sri Lankan humidity or heat that drove me from the free rent apartment overlooking Bhante's hide-away meditation center. I can get by nicely with electric fans and cold beer. It was--you guessed it--the mosquitos. Since visiting Sri Lanka I have become aware that a vast number of humans are exposed to the bites of blood-sucking insects every night of their lives. Many residences here have no window screens, yet they have lattice work and air vents permanently open to the occasional gust of cool air and the regular influx of mosquitos. Fortunately, some of the locals seem to be immune; Bhante gets bitten now that he's a non-resident most of the year, but the ladies who serve his meals out of doors under an open pavillion (see picture, right) seldom get bites, or so they told me.

I am at my beachfront bistro now, watching a red-orange sunset over the Indian Ocean (picture, above). Sea breezes blow pleasantly from the direction of the setting sun. Young Sri Lankans are playing in the shallows near the shore, bobbing on the same plastic surfboards you could see on any beach in the USA. Behind me, landward, a train roars past not fifty feet from this table. The rush of metal on rails vibrates the warm, packed sand beneath my bare feet. To add to the surreal quality of this early evening by the Indian Ocean, my beacfront bistro just flicked on its string of colored lights overhead and switched on the music. Late disco tune, don't recognize the group. I keep an eye peeled for John Travolta to dance past in a white suit.

Back at the ashram, Bhante is attending a Buddhist flower-offering ceremony. I was invited, but just could not bear three more hours in the twilight with the mosquitos. Instead, I opted for a brief, self-directed meditation exercise on my balcony overlooking the moon-washed Indian Ocean, then retreated indoors for air conditioning, BBC news, and a cold bottle of Lion Lager. What a planet.

SATURDAY 02-28-09
I am flying home tonight. This has been an amazing week. If you had asked me to list the places I wanted to visit before I die, Sri Lanka would not have made the cut. But I am infinitely glad to have come here, to meet these gentle people who drive like a cross between Mother Theresa and a kamikaze pilot, who meditate and work on inner peace while fighting a civil war against insurrectionists, and who honor spiritual traditions East and West. I meant it when I said that Christians have a lot to learn from our Buddhist brothers and sisters, and I chief among the students. To me, their committement to compasion and inner peace sounds like Jesus on a good day. May we one day come together with all people as children of the One Presence/One Power, and recognize our Unity regardless of the belief system by which the several tribes of humanity have clothed the Christ-Buddha within.

Morning Has Broken, indeed.

Sri Lankan Journal - Entry 9

2009-03-23T08:22:00.001-07:00

(To start at the beginning, scroll down to Entry #1.)

I am at the book launching event. (Picture, right, taken as I write.) Today we mark the publication of Bhante's two books--Lessons of the Lotus and Poems of Awakening--in three new editions representing the official languages of Sri Lanka: English, Sinhala, and Tamil. (Today's program is conducted in entirely English--thank you, God.)

How do I describe the scene in a way you will be here with me and believe what is happening? The program is taking place on the second floor of a large public auditorium complex in downtown Colombo. Bhante's people have gathered in ascending, semi-circular rows like UN delegates. The first two rows are clergy. There are Buddhist monks in robes of safron, yellow-orange, dull red, russet, yellow, and another color I call, for lack of another term, spicy brown mustard (picture, right). The colors, I am told, represent various schools of Buddhist thought, followers of this or that teacher, roughly comparable to monastic orders in Roman Catholicism. There are also Hindu priests and Muslims and a Christian or two, plus a lot of non-clergy--men in long-sleeved white shirts or short-sleeved sports shirts, women Sri Lankan native in saris and western clothes. This is a large gathering, and I am honored to be Bhante's special guest from America.

I sit at the head table on the platform beside the man of the hour, the Venerable Yatirawana Wimala Thero. I am confused. Is that Bhante's actual name--Yatirawana Wimala? The monk to my right confirms it, explaining Thero means elder, and Bhante is a term like Father or Reverend in the Christian West. All Sri Lankan monks are Bhante's. What a shock! I always thought "Bhante" was the first name of my friend. Well, title or not, he's still Bhante Wimala to me. After all, it's how he introduces himself. I think he uses his title as a first name in the West because Bhante rolls off the American tongue a lot easier than Yatirawana. .

The monk (to my right in the first picture, above) has an interesting life story. His full designation in the printed program is the Venerable Olande Ananda Nayka Thero. If I spoke Sinhala I might have noticed his name, Olande, is a form of Hollander, which means a person from the Netherlands. He is a Westerner whose spiritual journey followed several paths that eventually led him to Sri Lanka, where he become a Buddhist monk. Olande Ananda is fluent in the local langauge and speaks perfect English. When he led the meditation, I thought for a moment I was in a Unity church. He told me with a sly smile that they promoted him to "Nayaka Thero" on the program, which means "chief elder" even though he's just a plain ol' Thero.

There was a deligtful opening ceremony with Sri Lanka girls doing a traditional dance, followed by the head table and other major delegates getting up to light candles. (See right and below.)

When the program speakers begin, I am surprised to learn than not only am here to introduce Bhante but my position is listed as "Chair" of the session and guest of honor at this august gathering. TV cameras point at us, photographers snap their flashes. And the whole thing is being simultaneously translated in Sinhala and Tamil. Yikes! This is a media event, and I'm the main guest of honor. .

Why didn't I lose twenty pounds before coming here??.

Now it's my turn to speak. I look out across a sea of faces--Buddhist monks, Hindu priests, Muslim leaders, plus an assembled representation of the Sri Lankan intelligentsia, people with PhD' s and MD's and LLD's--and I think, "Okay, Reverend Smartass, what do you preach to this crowd?!" ..

Suddenly, I feel like Dorothy's little man behind the curtain, and I want to click my heels and say, "There's no place like home..."

But my task saves me. I am here to introduce my friend and co-worker in spiritual awareness. I begin speaking....

."We gather here today to celebrate the publication of two important books in Sinhalese, Tamil and English. But we really didn't assemble in this lovely place just to attend a book launching. We gather in Sri Lanka's capital city to honor the work of a citizen of the world, the Venerable Bhante Wimala. It is because of this gentle, intelligent, compassionate man that I flew halfway around the globe--that many of us traveled great distances. We come from cities and villages across the earth where Bhante Wimala has walked and taught..." .

I tell them Bhante is like pure gold, that's why his presence is valued in any culture or country. Recalling his visit to Unity Institute, I describe how Bhante spoke on compassion and gave my students a new definition for selfless love that they continued to discuss for months. I tell them how he showed us the wisdom of peace without glossing over the need for justice amid the danger and sufferings of the contemporary world. Then I say something that generates a few faint smiles on the supremely unperterbed faces in the first two rows:

"I only know one Buddhist monk personally, but if all Buddhists are like Bhante Wimala then I think we Christians have a lot to learn from you."

I sit, but there is no applause. Did I bomb? But wait a minute--there has been no applause yet, not even for the teenage girl dancers or the flute soloist. There will be none this afternoon. Bhante Olande tells me silent appreciation is typical and considered a show of respect and decorum. .

Bhante rises to speak; I take notes. He speaks for about thirty minutes on "Inner Peace and Outer Peace." His lesson/sermon could have been delivered from the pulpit of any Unity church in the world. Inner peace is how you feel toward yourself; outer peace is how you feel toward others. Bhante says every thought has power. Positive thoughts bring comfort; when you feel kindness and compassion those feelings are beneficial to the person experiencing them, the body aqnd mind are in fulfillment. However, negative thoughts bring discomfort. When you are angry or fearful, look at your mind and body--it will be tense, anxious, and stressful. "It hurts top be angry," he says. "It ghurts to hate people. It even hurts to dislike people." Having a good reason to be angry or hateful doesn't exempt you from the consequences of it. Holding onto negative emotions causes you to suffer. Outer peace will be established only when people release the need to hate or even dislike others. "Peace in the world will come when people realize the nature of their own suffering and free the mind from negative thoughts."

He finishes speaking, and I resist the temptation to jump up and shout, "Amen!"

Bhante is presented with the first copies of his new translation editions, and he turns to make presentations to all his major guests. The paparazzi swoop in to snap wildly, TV cameras roll. And I'm the first major guest!

After much more of the above, plus "Sacred Flute Music" and brief speeches by dignataries from several major groups, the assembly concludes with the singing of the Sri Lankan National Anthem. An interesting cultural phenomenon took place. The monks kept their seats, but everyone else in the audience rose. Those of us at the head table also stood for the anthem, except for the monk from Holland. Olande Ananda told me later that he had followed the lead of the clergy in the audience, then he noticed Bhante Wimala was standing. Bhante himself said he got up reflexively with the head table, like people do in America, then realized he was the only cleric (besides me) who was standing. "But then, I couldn't sit down," he said. That would have been awkward.

There was a lot of milling around with photographers and newspeople interviewing this cleric or that, and everyone wanted to get on camera with Bhante. I'm certain he was on the Evening News. After the official picture-taking, I asked for a few shots of the colorful costumes and weaseled my way into photo-op's with a few high-placed Buddhist clergy. At least they were venerated quite highly by the others. And some of the lovely saris on camera, too. (See below.)

This was a day...and now I am seriously hungry. And Bhante doesn't eat dinner!

(More later, including a stop for Chinese take-out.)

Sri Lankan Journal - Entry #8

2009-03-18T16:30:00.000-07:00

(Note: Scroll down for earlier entries.)
Today is Tuesday, 24 February 2009, and I opted for the car trip to the city of Kandy in the hills about four hours from Colombo. This area is Bhante Wimala's birthplace, a vast sweep of mountain valleys robed in the many shades of green you find in the tropics. Coconut palms spread their green fingers everywhere, and beside them I saw towering trees which resemble species which in the USA are kept as itty-bitty houseplants, like Joseph's Coat (below). I had one on my office window at Unity Institute, but it died in the Missouri winter.
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I saw monkeys along the roadway, fighting over some trash. Not a very common site--monks, yes. Not monkeys. As we passed the lake in Kandy I couldn't resist snapping the silhouette of a monk by the water (below).

Sometimes they walk in two's, or line up in single file processions with adults guiding elementary school age boys to or from the local monks' training school. The boys wear the same red or orange robes and sport the same shaved heads. (Are they monkettes?)

I also saw kids marching to public schools, uniformly in white, often moving in protective columns with their classmates. The air is thick with curry and jasmine and diesel exhaust. There are billboards written in Sinhala script, curly-Q letters in a row, like someone spilled a box of Cherrios' across the page.

The smiling people in the streets are dark brown, some very dark, Asian dark chocolates. The smiling people on the billboards--obviously Sri Lankans or Indians--are uniformly lighter, like CNN reporters.

Women in bright saris flow past our car, dark jewels wrapped in gossamer red, yellow, tangerine, spring green.

We arrive at the hotel (left) and I step backward in time to a colonial world like British India. Bell hops in white and "Yes, sir!" and too many servants, suggesting low salaries for eager natives. Decadent, air conditioned, exploitation. God help me, I loved it. I slept, ate, watched CNN and BBC World News. NO mosquitos. Yes, central air. And more of that delightful Sri Lankan brew, Lion Lager. By dinner that night I discover that I am a colonist at heart. The locals smile and pocket my money. Who's exploiting whom? I haven't a clue.

As a group the Sri Lankans are the kindest, most polite people I have yet encountered. And the friendliness comes without a fee or a hint of resentment. In plenty of places I have visited, you get the superficial smile that has to do with the dollars you're about to spend. I never had that feeling while in Sri Lanka. These people are just....nice. I left my notebook with all these notes and my passport in a shuttle car. The driver circled back to the hotel and brought my prescious, rubber-band-wrapped package directly to the desk, where I was checking in. And he steadfastly refused a "thank-you" tip. What a nice bunch of people! Again, I think Buddhism has a lot to do with it. Funny how I had to travel to the other side of the earth to find a nation of people who live by the "do-unto-others" principles of Jesus Christ.

My feet are badly swollen, at least twice their normal size. My sneakers are loose and baggy, thank heavens, and I loosen the laces even more. Bhante had said it happens to him whenever he flies long distances like this. I prop my feet up and spend a glorious, mosquito-free evening with air conditioning and cold drinks and English TV. There's a sermon somewhere in this one-day excusion, but I'll figure that out later.

Sri Lankan Journal - Entry #7

2009-03-18T07:20:00.000-07:00

Riding in a three-wheeled, motorized Sri Lankan taxi is an adventure. You get the strong impression that these sturdy little omnipresent carriages are the evolutinary offshoot of the Asian rikisha. Let me tell you a few examples of life in the wild streets of Colombo.

The vehicle has open sides, a canvas top and a rear bench seat. The passenger space offers just enough room for two adults (or one portly American packing a bag of souvenirs), although the rather diminuitive locals tend to make the smallish seat stretch to family size in some mystical way. The drivers are uniformly well-tempered but opportunistic, always trying to charge the ignorant tourist twice the going rate paid by Sri Lankan natives. I was politely told by my hosts that the "bargain fare," which I had vigorously negotiated from a smiling young man who spoke no English (see picture, above), was nothing short of total surrender to economic terrorism.

The vehicle itself is basically a motorcycle with a three-wheel frame straddled by a metal-and-canvas carriage. The driver literally has no steering wheel but operates with handlebars (see picture, left). Some of them start with pull-cords like lawn mowers.

.Driving in the wildly pulsating traffic flow is an activity which requires almost a hive mind--like a friendlier version of Star Trek's Borg--among motorists and cyclists. The rules seem to be, "Honk once to say you're cutting in, two or three times to warn people not to do the same to you, and yeild if they get in their front tires ahead of yours." I am convinced that my wife, Carol-Jean, who winces when red lights flash on a vehicle 100 yards ahead, would be unable to travel more than a block or two before leaping from the taxi in mortal terror. Even Bhante, who teaches meditation and faced the aftermath of the Tsunami, says that when he returns here after a long absence he must use all his Buddhist-monk skills to stay cool in the fray. "I just have to keep out of it, let the driver handle the traffic."

For all the frantic activity, there are actually very few accidents and even fewer injuries, partly because the stop-and-go traffic flow seldom allows vehicles to get up enough speed for serious crashes. But I think Buddhism plays an important role in the non-lethal traffic mêlée, too. Unlike in America and Europe, drivers here work together to avoid crashes. Consequently, a taxi driver is perfectly confident that the truck down the street, slicing across traffic lanes with reckless impunity, will be out of the way when his beep-beeping three-wheeler shoots by. Still, there are moments I'll never forget, like the time my taxi did a hard right turn across four lanes of traffic to execute a U-turn at rush hour. I looked out the open side door; we were perpendicular to the street with busses, small trucks, and Toyotas flying right into us. Of course, all four lanes did their toot-toot and yeilded politely. If this had been Manhattan or Paris, CJ would be planting flowers over me today...

Then there was the time my cabbie bummed 100 Sri Lankan Rupees (about 69 cents) to buy gas. He had to push the three-wheeler up to the pump. (I thought about getting out to walk, but I was paying for the ride.) Later, when we stopped at one of those ubiquitous police checkpoints, a polite guy in uniform with a loaded automatic weapon slung over his arm gestured for my driver to move forward. The driver had shut off the engine, so he got out and rolled us forward to the designated spot to save gas. I remember thinking how my cheapskate, Pennsylvania Dutch grandmother would have totally approved his frugality.

.Another driver ran out of gas while shuttling me back from the beach. He pulled over, hopped out, and fished a 2-liter plastic bottle from under his seat. He disappeared around back, then returned with it half-empty. The taxi coughed to life, and I said, "You know, guy, you're basically driving a motor vehicle with a Molotov cocktail between your legs?" He smiled and nodded, not understanding a word, and plunged back into the buzzing boulevard. I wanted to point out that a half-empty bottle of gasoline is even more dangerous due to the fumes in the empty space, but that would have been an equally futile English babbling to a Sinhala -speaking cabbie.

They seem to adjust their flying chariots instinctively, like Chewbacca doing maintenance on the Millenium Falcon. And after about a week of riding in these ground-level starships, I finally get it. The drivers in Sri Lanka have had 2,500 years of Buddhism. They operate from a fundamentally polite, do-no-harm ethos which is not shared in the West. Even the best American drivers carry a sense of democratic justice to the highways: All people are obligated to respect the civil and property rights of others, to include the right of way. The Sri Lankans seem to operate under a different social contract: Why cause a crash, when it's all about your ego? The drivers here are simultaneously aggressive and defensive. They hurl themselves into traffic flows that scare the bejesus out of me, yet everyone knows the objective is to get there as quickly as safety will allow. So, if the guy gets his front wheel(s) ahead of you, you give way. Beep-beep, just as a reminder, but let him in. I have been a passenger in vehicles which pass uphill on a wide, blind curve. Two lane roads become four-lane as traffic shifts to avoid certain death.

I remarked to an Indian friend of Bhante's, with whom I was sharing a ride in a hotel van, "The locals here seem to think lines painted on the road are merely suggestions." He said that India was worse, that there literally are no side mirrors on Indian vehicles because they've all been whacked off by close encounters in the street. And he agreed the difference here was kindness on the part of the drivers. I have never seen aggressive kindness before, but here is is, alive and well in the roadways of Sri Lanka.

These reflections are jotted as I'm headed to Kandy, in the mountains about 4 hours from here, with Bhante's Indian friends. My friend the monk has sent me up here to get behind an air conditioned, mosquito-proof barrier for at least one night. More later from that location. Bhante's look launch is tomorrow, so I'll be coming back quickly...

Sri Lankan Journal - Entry #6

2009-03-10T09:04:00.000-07:00

The pina colada was awful, but the tuna steak was excellent. Char-grilled and basted in a rich oinion sauce and served with crisp french fries and a small dish of teriyaki dipping sauce. I heeded the guidebook warnings about Third World eating and avoided the fresh greens garnishing the plate. Even if raw veggies themselves are okay, food preparers often wash salad makings in the local, contaminated water. Everybody here drinks cold H2O in two-liter bottles (see picture, previous blog). I also discovered the joys of a local beer called Lion Lager. Had one cold bottle late in the afternoon, then on the way home I stopped at a grocery store to stock up on cheese, bread, and a few liters of the Lion. Now this is getting to be my kind of spiritual retreat...

Spent the evening reading Deepak Chopra's book Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment. It's an historical novel and quite entertaining, but I'm thinking the Buddhists would likely be a little scandalized at the way young Siddartha is portrayed. Some good information mixed with historical fiction, nevertheless. I did not know Buddha's father had been such a warrior king, and that his goal for his son was to be ruler of the known world. How odd, the way one's aspirations for beloved children may come true in a manner wholly unpredictable to the parents. Good read.

I also spent a little time playing video games on my laptop, which adapts quite well to the 220 volt current here. Strange how playing a game I enjoyed back home gives me a feeling of comfort in this interesting yet profoundly diffferent land. For a quick instant my mind flashes on the irony--finding comfort by shooting cyber bad guys with a Buddhist peace center down the block.

Pushba and Karona came by to show me how to hook up the anti-mosquito incense dispenser. It seemed to help a little; I had fewer bug bites next morning. I ate a late breakfast at 7:30 AM local--God knows what time my body thinks it is. Bhante says I can stay in the Colombo area or go inland to Kandy, the second largest Sri Lankan city, located four hours away in the mountains. He emphasizes that the Tanmil Tigers have their stronghold far from that city, so the trip will be perfectly safe. He suggests I take another day to walk the beach and meditate first. He also recommends I buy some sunscreen, politely not mentioning my beet-red face from yesterday's exposure to the tropical sun.

I paused a little while to meditate in the lovely gardens of the Vishva, then ventured forth on foot to purchase a hat and sunscreen, after which I'll head to the beach. Deepak and Buddha are my companions. Tuna steak lunch awaits me. Three-wheel taxi rides will get me there. Little did I know what a wild street experience that would be...

More later.

Sri Lankan Journal - Entry #5

2009-03-09T11:28:00.000-07:00

[To begin reading from the first entry, scroll down.]

Table by the sea at La Voile Blanche, my favorite local hangout. .

If you look closely, at the bottom of the photo (left) you'll see the notebook from which these journal entries are being transcribed.

.The picture below is the Mount Lavinia Hotel.

.Bhante's driver, Sadath, took me to the fancy and expensive Mount Lavinia Hotel, originally built for the governor in the old days of British colonial rule. I checked it out and discovered it was sprawling, western, pricey, and crowded with European tourists. They charged money to access the beach, and you get a free day pass if you buy the Sunday brunch. It was Sunday, but I wasn't hungry yet. So, I found the lounge and ordered coffee from a bartender in white, then reclined in air conditioned comfort to sip strong java and the ocean below (see picture, above). After about an hour of Western decadence, I decided this was way too far the other direction, so I conned the bellhop into snagging a local three-wheel taxi and we putt-putted away toward the real beach where the locals hang out.

.The beach below and to the north of the fortress resort was full of locals--dark bodies playing in the gentle surf. I walked abouty 45 minutes past fishing boats and lingering tsunami damage. I took off my sandals and went ankle-deep wading along the crest of the incoming tide, then came back to a beachfront bar and grill called La Voile Blanche (pictured above). I am writing this now from the table in the picture while sipping on a pina colada (it's past noon!) and watching the locals play in the surf. Lunch later, probably a tuna steak with onion sauce and french fries. I wonder if I'll get a K-F-S or eat by hand? More later...

Sri Lanka Journal - Entry #4

2009-03-08T12:26:00.000-07:00

[Note: To begin this series with Entry #1, scroll down.]
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I looked around the small room and decided I could do this, so I unfurled the mosquito net and started unpacking my belongings. Various members of the Vishva staff shuffled in and out, bringing me a floor fan and a plug-in mosquito repellant device (I kid you not). Then Bhante appeared and announced that they arranged a bigger place for me. They saw I was a misfit for the smallish bed and room, although I was willing to be a trooper in Buddha's army and stay the course. Bhante reported that the Director of Vishva Niketan whom I had just met--a lovely lady with salt-and-pepper hair and a warm smile--graciously offered a second floor apartment in a gated courtyard building just outside the center. (See photo.)

Also without screens or a/c, but lots more room. I dutifully sprayed mosquito repellant on my extremities and crawled under the net, tucking it down under the matress on all sides. The mosquitoes however were not impressed by these defensive tactics and had a good night of munching on my ankles, wrists, and arms. They seem to prefer limbs, like I was a Christian appetizer before going out on the town for a Buddhist main course. I actually rested very well bug bites notwithstanding, probably because of the tube of anti-itch cream I kept inside the netting tent. And that was my Saturday, which because of the weird science of time zone travel (and spending 28+ hours in the air) actually began at Thursday morning 02-19, half a world away, when I left KCMO for the first leg of my journey.

Sunday, February 22, was my first full day in Sri Lanka. Bhante invited me to breakfast with him. He eats breakfast and lunch but not supper, which apparently is typical for monks. Sometimes he will take a little soup in the evening. Also, according to Sri Lankan Buddhist tradition, monks eat first while others wait, sometimes watching like adoring fans. It's actually quite polite, a sign of respect for the office of clergy, but I don't think our congregations would go for it. In fact, some ministers make sure their people eat first before they sit to join them at church functions, although I've never gone hungry at a Unity potluck. Bhante actually broke tradition and ate with me, even though I was perfectly willing to abide by their customs.

Not surprisingly, breakfast was nothing like American style eating. Well, there was bread and butter. The main foods were two kinds of rice spaghetti with spicy lentil chili poured over it. Very tasty. Also garbanzo beans and sliced fruit. Bhante ate Sri Lankan style with his fingers; I asked for a spoon. Seating at meals is quite different, too. Think of an open-sided pavilion—like the kind you’d find covering a picnic area at a public park in the US—only there are no tables. Along the half-wall sides is a concrete bench about a yard deep. You perch on the bench and eat with the food beside you. (See picture, above.) I achieved my customary ½ lotus, which delighted the staff. I actually stayed in that Asian pretzel configuration for a good five minutes before dangling my feet (bare, or course).

We ate and chatted. Bhante introduced the two servers, delightful women. Their names are Pushba (on left in picture, her name means flower) and Karona (right, meaning compassion). Pushba and Karona were laypeople, not Buddhist nuns. They were ordinary, early middle aged women with extraordinary smiles, and everything they did overflowed with friendliness. That is ordinary here, too. I remember thinking, “If the Sri Lankans I’ve met so far are typical, this has got to be the kindest, most gracious nation on earth.” And I would leave the country ten days later with that belief still in place. I met Buddhist and Christian Sri Lankans. I saw Muslim women in the marketplace with their distinctive head scarves--only they were colorful here, reds and yellows and bright green head coverings, not just the black veils of Arab Islam. And I also saw Indian Hindus and mainland Chinese and Japanese, Koreans, and European expatriots--it reminded me of California.

California...That reminded me: What I really needed was a spiritual lift. So, with Bhante's prompting, I left the Retreat Center for the day and headed for the beach.

More to follow...

Sri Lanka Journal - Entry #3

2009-03-07T16:27:00.000-08:00

[Note: To begin this series with Entry #1, scroll down.]

It is Saturday and the plane is 30 minutes from landing at Colombo. This flight began like the other marathon--several minutes of seat-shuffling--but this aircraft has more leg room and so I get a better night's rest.

And now I am here. Bhante (see photo) met me outside the terminal, which is clean, air conditioned, and 1st world. His driver (see photo) Sadath was orbiting the terminal and came quickly when Bhante summoned him by cell phone.

Colombo, the Sri Lankan capital city, is Asian-metro with a touch of Mexico-style poverty. Lots of open-front workshops with sparks from men grinding metals and sidewalk sales nooks stuffed with small items, soft drinks and lotions and packets of dry noodles, like a Sri Lankan version of a convenience store. The streets teemed with motor bikes and Toyotas, plus swarms of 3-wheeled cars that seemed to constitute the local taxi corps.

We made a few business stops as Bhante organized his event for next Wednesday, February 25. One stop was the HQ of the Sri Lankan National Lottery Board, where I met Ashok Witharana, whose title is "Additional General Manager." (See photo.) The AGM is a big supporter of Bhante and it was obvious from the deference he showed that my friend the monk was indeed, as his official title indicates, "venerable." The Lottery Board is housed in a concrete edifice that looks like an old government building anywhere in the world, except it sits with its back to the beach and the blue-green Indian Ocean. I got my first glimpse of this new ocean (for me) out of the windows of Ashok's second-floor office. He exchanged a few pleasantries with Bhante, then a young Sri Lankan girl and her family shuffled in to meet the Venerable guest. (Bhante, of course, not me.) They were Buddhists, so one-by-one they snuck in a full bow to the floor to touch Bhante's sandals, a gesture of ultimate respect.

The little girl was about eight or nine, dark eyed and keely intelligent. She had just earned a Lottery Board scholarship to help her family pay for expenses as she continued her education in private school. Her speciality, I learned, was English, and she brightened when I spoke directly to her in my American accent and thanked her for studying my native language.

.After another winding trek through Colombo's maddening traffic, we arrived at the Vishva Niketan Center (see photo), which is a smaller, Sri Lankan version of California's Asilomar. Lovely tropical grounds, scents of incense and curry in the distance, and no air conditioning or screens on the windows. You get a mosquito net and a fan.

More later...

Sri Lanka Journal - Entry #2

2009-03-07T15:16:00.000-08:00

[Note: To begin this series with Entry #1, scroll down.]

The flight from LAX to London Heathrow was a little like taking your honeymoon in hell: the company was nice, but the accomodations were excruciating. Nature and my healthy appetite have conspired to give me the kind of body that is expressly not built for extended airline travel: very long legs and a wide waist. When the nice flight attendant tried to provide alternative seating for me, it was a choice between mismatches. I could sit in an exit aisle, which offered extra leg room but had rigid arm rests—the kind that can’t fold-up—which did not allow my wide hips to exploit the roomy advantage of a vacant seat beside me. Or, I could opt for a row with tuck-away arm rests but cramped leg room; if the passenger ahead tried to recline, I could tuck my feet under the seat and have his headrest in my lap, or just sit straight up and prevent the other seat from reclining, my knees tight against the seat in front.

Thanks to the incredible kindness and patience of the Virgin Atlantic crew (and a light load of passengers), I literally went back and forth among four different locations before settling on the lesser of multiple evils.

The overnight flight was basically sleepless, and now I'm sitting in a pub at London's Heathrow Airport, nibbling a sandwich and chips (french fries). While eating, I watch BBC television. And now there is “breaking news” flashing CNN-style across the bottom of the screen: The Tamil Tigers, a Sri Lankan terrorist militia, have staged an air attack on the capital city, Colombo. At least 38 people have been wounded. The airport is closed. Power is off in the city. I look down at my boarding pass, and it reads London - Colombo. This just keeps getting better and better…

I did some quick online research at an Internet kiosk and learned that the Tamil Tigers are a terrorist organization, and the attack was an amateur-hour operation with a couple of light airplanes. Then I called my wife, Carol-Jean, in Kansas City to reassure her that I wasn't flying into a combat zone. She listened quietly and then told me about the sudden death of a Unity Institute student, Jim Pearce. He had come through cancer surgery with flying colors. Everything looked clear and bright. Then he died. I was shocked. And suddenly my complaints about discomfort and potential dangers on this trip seemed petty and petulant. I asked CJ to convey my deep sense of loss at Jim's memorial service. I realize again how good it is to have a partner like her.

I am on the Sri Lankan Airlines flight now, half-listening as the pre-takeoff video tells me how to unbuckle a seat belt and where the life vests are stowed. I'm a theologian, but have no cosmic answer about Jim's death. Life happens. Then it ends. We respond with faith. He was a really good guy. Would that people will say likewise when our time comes.

More later.

Sri Lanka Journal - Entry #1

2009-03-07T14:12:00.000-08:00

[The following posts were written as they happened.]
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I must be crazy. At sixty-two years old, I’m on my way to the other side of the earth, to a third world country with an active civil war, and all that “Prayer for Protection” stuff notwithstanding, I’m a little frightened. Not so much because of the physical danger--my rational mind knows the safety level of this trip is roughly comparable to spending the week in a major US city--but because I will be off balance over there, living with locals in a culture I do not yet understand. True confession time: I am a European-American, through and through. Sure, I love to study world cultures and have a special warm spot for Buddhism, but I am not harboring any illusions about being comfortable in all parts of the world. It is one thing to have an intellectual and spiritual affinity for people of other lands, but to actually spend time there at the native level--eating all kinds of foods, living under all kinds of conditions—raises multi-culturalism to a whole other order of magnitude.

Actually, I'm not a total stranger to the far side of the world. Three of my six children were born in Germany; I lived in Korea for 15 months and in Vietnam for a year. But when I have gone overseas in the past it was as a soldier, moving within a military subculture which kept me safe inside an American bubble and took care of my daily needs. All I had to do was relax, do my job, and "the system" took care of me.

Now, I travel alone, and I don't even have control over the itinerary. I am a leaf on the wind. At my age, that is not a comforting image. So, yes. I am a little frightened tonight as I await the boarding call for the flight to London and thence to Sri Lanka.

Today’s Daily Word was written for me: .

“My prayers reach out, near and far, to bless my loved ones. I look at the first glimmer of the moon in the evening sky and know that it is the same celestial object that shines in the evening sky above my loved ones. And I may be thinking particularly of one who is a world away, saying good morning to the rising sun as I am saying good evening to the setting sun. Still, I know in my heart that we are in one world and one in Spirit. Wherever we are, the Christ in me greets the Christ in my loved ones. We share a spiritual connection that neither space nor time can interfere with. I imagine my prayers taking wing, reaching out to bless those I love.I pray, affirming always that we are aware of our oneness in Spirit, and that each one is safe and healthy, happy and fulfilled.” ..............................................(Daily Word, 02-19-09) .

Wow. More later. Probably with red wine over the Canadian arctic.