Spiritual readings "Greetings from Whittier Presbyterian Church"
February, 2002
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Pop music lyrics on technology |
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Sept. 11 reflections link |
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What clothing says about us |
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A prayer for parents |
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Humans' unique view of the universe |
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Fascination with the universe |
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Christ ends myths |
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11th Century Latin prayer to the trinity |
I recently purchased a compact disc by an English/Indian artist named Nitin Sawhney. He is in the pop/techno genre and this CD, released in 2001, is entitled “Prophesy.” Here are the liner notes to the CD, that capture the essence I think of his message.
“Technology is a drug.
We can’t get enough of it.
We feed it to our kids and watch them grow on a forced diet of desensitization. Switch on the TV and someone will tell you 50,000 people died in India. Two seconds later you’re watching a comedy. Technology can do that. It gives us simulated realities that make us oblivious to the real world. Heroin does the same thing. So do most class A drugs. Basically, we are all addicts – addicted to the comfort and convenience that technology provides – addicted to the notion that progress is directly related to the size of your computer screen. Of course it is. We must be right. We come from the developed world. We’re already developed. Sure. Then again, wealthy kids in America shoot each other. Poor kids in Soweto can‘t stop smiling.
So who’s developed?
I met an Aborigine in Arnhemland, Australia – his nephews showed me symbols where I saw trees and rainbows through smoked glass. They could see fish through clouded water. I couldn’t even see my own reflection. I must have forgotten how.
When I look in front of me, I see two paths – spiritual or material. Two worlds – developed or developing. You decide which is which. We’re still in the wake of millennium paranoia – earthquakes, floods, end of world scenarios, cult suicides, viral diseases that eat into our computer realities. This is our developed world.
Then, as Nelson Mandela says ‘We are free to b e free.’
I guess we make our own prophecies”
The liner notes of pop CDs are not often places where spiritual insight comes from, but that is the case here. I’m as much a technology junkie as probably many of you are(after all, is not our connection via email?!), but these words are a reminder that we are to keep our priorities straight. In this email group, our focus is spirituality, not technology, and I think Sawhney’s words are a good reminder to us of those priorities.
Grace & peace
Geoff
You may recall that after Sept. 11, 2001, I posted many responses to the terrorist attack on our church’s web page. I have found another site that has many responses, with some very powerful and appropriate words. It is http://www.sermonmall.com/WTC/index.html
Let me suggest your perusal of that site today for a short while and see what you can find that might inspire you. Nearly five months later, reading some of this material can deepen our perspective on life and its transience. Let me know what you like there!
Much of the hosting site, the Sermon Mall part, is members only, but so far everything I’ve looked at on the site I have listed above is free.
Grace & peace
Geoff
“Clothes make the man(person)” is a proverb that I recall from somewhere in my past. I began wearing a clergy collar nearly 10 years ago and it changed me. How do clothes effect us? Stephanie Paulsell has an article in the January 16-23, 2002 issue of Christian Century magazine that talks about the importance of clothing in our spiritual lives. She is coming out with a book this year, “Honoring the Body: Meditations on a Christian Practice” from Jossey-Bass publishers. Here are some excerpts from her fine article in the Christian Century.
Paul reminds us in Galatians 3:27-29 that when we are baptized, we are clothed in our true identity as children of God.
Those clothed in the garments of Christ are called to clothe others. (See Matthew 25:31-46)
Clothing can yield up a surprising amount of information; ask any teenager. In my high school, brand names, style of clothes and certain color combinations distinguished preppies from potheads from jocks.
Some express their deepest commitments through the refusal of adornment. The Old Order Amish wear their commitment to simplicity on their bodies in their plain clothes, unadorned even by buttons. Others, like medieval abbess Hildegard of Bingen, who often adorned her nuns in jewels that she believed reflected interior spiritual gifts, invest every button with meaning. Those in mourning often wear black, allowing their clothes to speak their grief to the world. My friend Kay, who is losing her mother to cancer, believes that b lack also signifies, Watch out. I’ve lost my beloved and I am angry. Don’t mess with me. In the bible, grief and repentance are sometimes articulated in clothes of sackcloth and a head smeared with dirt and ashes and sometimes in clothes that are ripped and torn….. (Gen 37:29). We wear our clothes as extensions of our bodies and as signs of what is happening invisibly inside of us.
Finally, in reference to Mathew 6:25-33, she asks some pointed questions
Are your habits of adornment a burden or a pleasure, a source of anxiety or d=confidence? Do your clothes free you to be yourself, or do they constrain you by forcing you into an identity that, however fashionable, you would not have chosen? Did the production of your adornments constrain the freedom of another?
This last question is in reference to the sweatshop labor that is often employed in the manufacture of clothing, a spiritual dimension of clothing that we have only realized on a popular level in the last few decades. All of Paulsell’s questions and points lift us to the spiritual level of reflection upon our clothing.
May you find the spiritual elements in your daily living, through your cothing and all else that you use day by day.
Grace & peace
Geoff
In The Oxford Book of Prayer (Oxford University Press, 1985, George Appleton, ed.) I have found a wealth of prayers which, when read meditatively, bring fresh breaths of the Spirit to one’s soul. (See http://www.whitpresby.org/august_2000_emails.htm for help in this kind of meditative reading). Here are two prayers from that collection, representing perhaps two ends of the intellectual spectrum of prayer.
Lord,
Keep my parents in your love.
Lord,
Bless them and keep them.
Lord,
Please let me have money and strength
And keep my parents for many more years
So that I can take care of them
(Prayer of a young Ghanaian Christian)
In the life which wells up in me and in the matter which sustains me, I find much more than Your gifts. It is You Yourself whom I find, You who makes me participate in Your being, You who moulds me. Truly in the ruling and in the first disciplining of my living strength, in the continually beneficent play of secondary causes, I touch, as near as possible, the two faces of your creative action, and I encounter, and kiss, Your two marvelous hands—the one which holds us so firmly that it is merged, in us, with the sources of life, and the other whose embrace is so wide that, at its slightest pressure, all the springs of the universe respond harmoniously together. (Teilhard de Chardin, SJ, 1881-1955)
May your prayer soar to the heights of human imagination, yet keep your feet on the ground. That makes for a great image of being ‘stretched,’ doesn’t it?!
Grace & peace,
Geoff
Have you ever looked up into the sky on a clear night and been filled with wonder at the beauty and majesty of the star-filled sky? There is a sense of wonder and humility that comes from such an experience. In his book “The Universe is a Green Dragon” Brian Swimme talks about the universe in personal terms, adding a deeply spiritual sense to the wonder and humility we experience. He adds the insights that astrophysics has achieved in the last generation or two to expand that wonder, connecting us to the beginning of creation, the “Big Bang.”
“Our ancestry stretches back through the life forms and into the stars, back to the beginnings of the primeval fireball. This universe is a single multiform energetic unfolding of matter, mind, intelligence, and life. And all of this is new. None of the great figures of human history were aware of this. Not Plato, no Aristotle, or the Hebrew Prophets, or Confucius, or Thomas Aquinas, or Leibniz or Newton, or any other world-maker. We are the first generation to live with an empirical view of the origin of the universe. We are the first humans to look into the night sky and see the birth of stars, the birth of galaxies, the birth of the cosmos as a whole. Our future as a species will be forged within this new story of the world.”
As we enter the season of Lent we are given a great opportunity for self-reflection. How we fit into the universe can be one way to reflect upon our life and what God has called us to. May your Lenten season be rich in insight and may you find a sense of wonder around the edges of your life.
Grace & peace
Geoff
Friday’s email quoted from Brian Swimme’s book “The Universe Is a Green Dragon” which Swimme dedicated to the cultural historian Thomas Berry. Here’s a quote from Berry’s book “The Great Work.” Berry’s words are just the kind of thing that Swimme resonates with. On pages 19-20 Berry says:
“In accord with indigenous modes of thinking throughout the world we might give a certain emphasis to the need to understand the universe primarily as celebration. While the universe celebrates itself in every mode of being, the human might be identified as that being in whom the universe celebrates itself and its numinous origins in a special mode of conscious self-awareness.
We might think of a viable future for the planet less as the result of some scientific insight or as dependent on some socioeconomic arrangement than as participation in a symphony or as renewed presence to some numinous presence manifested in the wonderworld about us.
I continue to be fascinated with that image that we are the universe’s “special mode of conscious self-awareness.” I’m reminded of the words of Psalm 8, from which we get the phrase “we are the crown of creation.”
May you find a deeper sense of wonder, love and grace this day.
Grace & peace
Geoff
Gil Bailie begins each chapter of his wonderful book, “Violence Unveiled” with some excerpts of the writings of others. He opens one with this quote from Max Picard’s book, “The World of Silence,” Regnery Gateway, 1988.
“Christ came so directly from silence into the world …that the whole world between silence and language—the world of mythology—was exploded and bereft of its value and significance. The characters in the world of myth now become demons stealing language from man and using it to cast demonic spells. Until the birth of Christ, they were the leaders of men, but now they become the misleaders, the seducers, of men.”
Picard hints at part of what it means to be a new creation in Christ. From what or whom do we take our leadership? Is Christ in the center of our lives or is he just one of several voices we hear from as we confront our life?
May Christ be the center of your life, and may you have the perspective on the rest of your life that God gives in Christ.
Grace & peace,
Geoff
Here is a Latin prayer from the 11th Century, taken from the “Oxford Book of Prayer” Oxford University Press, 1985, ed. George Appleton. I was particularly attracted to the three qualities that are attributed to God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Praise and glory be to the omnipotence of the eternal Father, who in his providence created the world out of nothing. Praise and glory be to the wisdom of his only-begotten Son, Who redeemed the world with his blood. Praise and glory be to the loving kindness of the Holy Spirit, who enlightened the world in faith. Praise and glory be to the holy and undivided Trinity, who formed us without our deserving it in their image. We give praise and glory to you, most blessed Trinity, for the blessing of our creation, by which you granted us bodies and souls, you adorned us with your image and likeness, and added us to your Christian flock, making us sound and whole in our senses and in our members, above all the creatures who are beneath the heavens, and gave us your holy angels as our guides and ministers. For all this be pleased that we may praise you, world without end.
May you find such praise and love of God in your heart this day and all the days to come.
Grace & peace,
Geoff
