Spiritual readings "Greetings from Whittier Presbyterian Church"
March, 2002
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E.F. Schumacher, Theology & Economics |
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Mathews & Prayer & Healing |
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David Tracy on resurgence of spirituality |
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Foster on Spirituality and money |
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Coburn on Spiritual reading |
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Prevallet on control |
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Prevalett on handling control |
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Bailie on the significance of the cross |
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Bailie: discomfort with biblical violence |
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Bailie: cross turns darkness to light |
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Bailie: the miracles of Jesus’ feeding |
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Bailie: executions & ritual sacrifice |
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Bailie: scapegoating violence |
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Bailie: significance of the cross |
E.F. Schumacher wrote a ground-breaking book published first in 1973 called “Small Is Beautiful” wherein he talks about a shift in thinking about economics from the macro to the micro. He is influenced by Gandhi’s thinking about a viable economic system for India. He also calls into account the metaphysical (read spiritual) underpinnings of any economic theory or system. Here is a selection from “Small Is Beautiful” that points to that kind of spiritual rootedness that economic thinking needs.
“The problem(of a grounding ideology) is not new. Leo Tolstoy referred to it when he wrote: “I sit on a man’s back, choking him, and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by any means possible, except getting off his back.” So this it he first question I suggest we have to face. Can we establish an ideology, or whatever you like to call it, which insists that the educated have taken upon themselves an obligation and have not simply acquired a “passport to privilege”? This ideology is of course well supported by all the higher teachings of mankind. As a Christian, I may be permitted to quote from St. Luke(12:48): “Much will be expected of the man to whom much has been given. More will be asked of him because he was entrusted with more.” It is, you might well say, an elementary matter of justice.”
In a day and society like our where we are inundated with economic news, we do well every now and then to go back to the foundations of how we are to behave towards each other. One of my favorite economic “events” is the Grameen Bank and Family of Organizations. See here http://www.grameen-info.org/
May your spirituality be firmly grounded in this world while you seek the world of the spirit.
Grace & peace
Geoff
Someone gave me a book a while back by Dale A. Matthews, M.D. entitled “The Faith Factor: Proof of the Healing Power of Prayer” Penguin Books, 1999. He wrote this book to answer one simple question, “How can the faith factor help you?”(the reader). Matthews had a minister grandfather and a physician father. Here is what he says about his motivation to become a physician.
“With this dual heritage, it is not surprising that, as a young man, I struggled over the choice between medicine and ministry. I chose medicine because I believed it would be a more practical way to live out my grandfather’s motto (to help people.) today, however, as the gap between medicine and religion begins to narrow, the choice I made between medicine and ministry no longer seems so absolute. Fortunately for me, it is an auspicious era in which to be a doctor committed to understanding and invoking the spiritual dimensions of medicine. I can practice medicine as a form of ministry and serve people in need through medicine, hope, and prayer.”
Matthews goes on throughout the book to document the way that prayer really has been proven to be effective in the healing process than can be achieved with just the practice of medicine as it is taught in the USA today.
Where do you go for healing? Is the medical industry the only place you go? Don’t forget the faith factor and the power of prayer, worship and community that you can have around you in a church.
May you and your loved ones find the healing you need in this world.
Grace & peace,
Geoff
That there has been a resurgence in spirituality in the last decade or so should not come as news to most of you reading these emails. Indeed, these emails are one manifestation of that interest in spirituality. David Tracy is a theologian at the University of Chicago and, in an interview in the Feb. 13-20, 2002 issue of Christian Century magazine, has this to say about the resurgence of interest in spirituality.
“If there is one thing religions all agree on, it’s that the ego is the problem, not the solution. I agree with Nietzche: our souls are too small. The turn to religion among many distinguished figures—and apparently in the population as a whole—is a very ambiguous sign. It can either be a turn to the self or a turn to the other. In terms of the work of the spirit among genuine Christian groups, I would point to the fact that when you go into the really terrible neighborhoods, you’ll find Christians serving there. And they’ve always been there. The hope for our culture as a whole—and not only the Christian church—is a recovery of that kind of spirituality.”
If you are honest with yourself, which way does your spirituality turn you, inward or outward? Tracy adds the distinction that we turn not only outward, but outward towards those with the greatest need. So it is not only outward to those around us, but outward to those who present the greatest need. See Matthew 25:31-46, among many other gospel texts.
May you find the grace and strength to turn towards those in need.
Grace & peace,
Geoff
How does our spirituality effect our money? That’s a rich question, pun intended. In his book “Freedom of Simplicity”, Harper & Row Publishers, 1981, Richard J. Foster lays down some Christian fundamentals for a theology of wealth.
If we are serious about teaching Christian simplicity, we will have to address the prevalent theology of wealth. This theology takes many forms, but its point is always the same: God will bless us materially beyond our wildest dreams. This teaching does contain an important truth—God does indeed want to bless his children. The real issue, however, is the purpose for which God blesses us. God’s blessing is not for personal aggrandizement, but to benefit and bless all the peoples of the earth. To understand the distinction makes all the difference in the world. The theology of wealth says, “I give so that I can get.” Christian simplicity says: “I get so that I can give.” The difference is profound.”
Profound indeed. How do you apply your faith, your Christian(or whatever) practice to your wallet. I recall the little proverb I have used in several sermons, “If you want a measure of your faith, take a look at your checkbook.”
How do you measure your faith? How do you decide to spend your money? Serious questions for this Lenten season, or any season for that matter.
Grace & peace
Geoff
See below for Gil Bailie information
John B. Coburn wrote a book called “Prayer and Personal Religion”, Westminster Press, 1958 (Now out of print I believe) that was my first entry into a serious devotional life. Among the aids to a life of devotion he says this about what I call spiritual reading.
“Men and women who have known and loved God in their day have left accounts of their experiences to help us to know and love (God) in our day. One of the great aids to progress in prayer, therefore, is the reading and inwardly digesting of the experiences of those who have walked with God. Although the forms of expression may differ from generation to generation, the knowledge and the love are the same, offered to God by (people) of every age.
(He then goes on to list his all-time favorites in this genre, starting with the bible and including the “Confessions of St. Augustine,” “The Practice of the Presence of God” by Brother Lawrence, “An Introduction to the Devout Life” by Francis de Sales and “On the Love of God” by St. Bernard.)
One final word should be said about spiritual reading: READ SLOWLY. The material can be taken into your soul only as you “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest” it. This means little bites at a time, not entire meals. This is why spiritual reading makes such good bedtime reading. Only a few pages at a time are enough. But taken regularly over the years they make possible a great increase in grace and strengthening of the inner life of the Spirit.”
Several of you have asked where I get the time to do all the reading that seems to be reflected in these emails. Part of the answer is the devotional reading I have done as a consequence of reading Coburn’s book over 25 years ago. It is not the quantity of reading that is devotional it is the quality.
I commend this kind of discipline to you. May your Lenten season continue to offer you the opportunity to reflect and deepen your spiritual life.
Grace & peace, Geoff
Gil Bailie, author of the wonderful book, “Violence Unveiled,” quoted several times in these emails, has embarked on a speaking tour. For those of you in the Midwest and East, go to http://www.florilegia.org/Gil_Schedule.htm for the schedule and see if you can attend one of his lectures.
I have been reading an old copy of the spiritual journal, “Weavings” put out by The Upper Room press. See here for more: http://www.upperroom.org/weavings/
In the March/April 1997 edition, Elaine M. Prevallet, S.L. has an article entitled “Borne in Courage and Love: Reflections on Letting Go.” Suitable for Lenten reflection, she points out one of the more powerful idols in our lives.
“Power, particularly perceived as domination or control, is, I believe, our cultural idol. It is for us a cultural pathology, an obsession, manifested in a variety of symptoms. I think of all the emphasis at the national level that our country should be number one as a world power, with force always in the background in case that status is threatened. I think of the exploitation we perpetrate in order to keep the standard of living (for some) that ensures that power will be maintained. I observe how fearful and resentful we are of losing control of our lives in suffering and sickness, and how we regard dying as the final enemy to be delayed or held at bay by any means possible for as long as possible. I think of how that will to power is fed by greed: how we have been, from earliest childhood, carefully taught about the importance of acquiring, getting, competing, and winning. I think of how addicted we are to consuming, and how we unquestioningly connect ‘better’ with more and bigger, and ‘new’ with progress. We are kept enthralled by the illusion that we are, can be, or should be in control of our lives. The idol requires that we devote our time and energy, our hearts and souls, to keeping this illusion alive. And we do.”
We will hear more from her on Friday. As we go through Lent, we are to be shedding ourselves of attachment to idols and drawing closer to God in Christ. The cross leaves little room for idols, and the fierce love of God shown in the cross can burn up idols in a flash, if they are exposed to that love. What are the idols in your life? Dare you expose them to the consuming, yet freeing, love of God? Some questions for your Lenten reflection.
Grace & peace
Geoff
Following last Tuesday’s reading about control, here is another piece from the same article. From the March/April 1997 edition of “Weavings” put out by The Upper Room press(http://www.upperroom.org/weavings/). Elaine M. Prevallet, S.L. continues her article entitled “Borne in courage and Love: Reflections on Letting Go.” With these words.
“The idol of control holds out to us the hope that suffering and death can be eliminated. If we just get smart enough, we will gain control of pain and even of death. That false hope, in turn, has the effect of setting suffering up as an enemy to be avoided at all costs. We can choose never to suffer!
That choice comes at a price, however. Part of what our idolizing of control does is to diminish and attenuate our capacity to love. It happens, I think, something like this. As we assume an attitude of refusal toward suffering, we not only raise the control quotient, be we lose something very deep in our humane nature. We lose touch with the appreciation of our capacity to yield. The cross reminds us that the movement of love, being essentially the interplay of freedoms, is the opposite of control. Love itself is precisely a yielding, a oozing that opens a space in which we can receive the beloved—or receive reality as it is. When we lose our ability to yield, we also lose touch with our capacity to love and thereby to deepen the reaches of our humanity.
As we move towards Holy Week and the prominence of the cross, these words about suffering and letting go become an application of the cross into our very lives. May you find that cross in your life and be strengthened by it.
Grace & peace
Geoff
One of the most profound books I’ve read in a while is Gil Bailie’s “Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads” Crossroad books, New York, 1995. It is a prolonged exploration into the way the story of the crucifixion (the focus of our Holy Week meditations) unveils the violence at the heart of much human religious behavior. Bailie’s thesis, based on the anthropological work of Rene Girard, is that the crucifixion of Jesus is God at work unveiling that violence at the heart of human behavior and mythologized in much religious behavior. Christ puts an end to that, and did so 2000 years ago. Yet human behavior is slow to learn, slow to change and we are still growing into that realization. Here is one of the ways Bailie puts it:
“While the historical record of institutional Christianity is hardly the sordid affair its modern detractors seem to think, it is reason enough to enter the dialogue with others in a spirit of humility. In the dialogue itself, there is much that Christianity stands to learn from others, but there is one thing that it will have both to learn better itself and to convey more coherently to the world, and that is the staggering historical and anthropological significance of the Cross.”
It is the learning ourselves that is the most important. This Holy Week, 2002, can we take the events of the world around us and our own lives, hold them up against the cross, and perhaps hear anew the deep message of God for us? May you labor at that task throughout this week.
Grace & peace
Geoff
March 26, 2002, Monday of Holy Week
We continue our Holy Week meditations in Gil Bailie’s book “Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads” Crossroad books, New York, 1995.
“…the Bible (is) the original chronicle of humanity’s struggle to extricate itself from primitive religion and blood sacrifice and to renounce its dependence on the structures of sacred violence…..
The texts often provoke a moral shudder in the reader for the same reason that the history of institutional Christianity often provokes a moral shudder in Christians. In each case, the text’s justifying mythology is inept and its moral self-disclosures are vivid.”
I interpret this in such a way as to say that if we are uncomfortable with the violence in the Bible, we are supposed to be! That is part of what Bailie is trying to say that goes against much of what we have either been taught or assumed about the Bible. It makes for interesting reflection during the week before Jesus is crucified.
Grace & peace,
Geoff
March 27, 2002, Wednesday of Holy Week
We continue our Holy Week meditations in Gil Bailie’s book “Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads” Crossroad books, New York, 1995.
“The prologue to John’s Gospel says something apropos of the Bible as a whole when it says that “the light shines in the darkness.” This does no simply mean that the light has managed to successfully fend off the darkness. Rather, it means that the crucifixion has actually turned the world’s darkness into an agent of revelation. “The light shines IN the darkness.” Once we understand this, it is clear how misplaced are the efforts to apply the tar brush and the gold leaf to biblical texts. These texts impugn themselves and redeem themselves so much more powerfully than do their detractors and defenders that the task of being one of the other is always a little comic.
God’s ability to turn darkness into an agent of revelation is a powerful insight and can become like a compass for us as we weather the difficulties in our life. We can ask ourselves “What is God doing to/for/with me in this current crisis? What light can God bring out of this darkness?”
As the Disciples approached the death of Jesus, they might have asked the same questions. We have the advantage of knowing the whole story.
May your Holy Week be a blessing, light out of darkness.
Grace & peace
Geoff
March 28, 2002, Thursday of Holy Week
We continue our Holy Week meditations in Gil Bailie’s book “Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads” Crossroad books, New York, 1995.
Maundy Thursday is a day devoted to either foot washing or communion or both. We will be doing both in our evening service, in combination with the Nueva Vida Congregation and the congregation of St. Nareg Armenian Church. Here are some words from Bailie on communion. In reference to the miracle of the loaves and fishes, he says:
“…Jesus preached of a God of love and forgiveness and then invited those who heard his message to sit down together and live for a moment in the “kingdom” about which he was preaching. Changing the human heart and liberating those trapped in religious superstition is simply a greater miracle than pulling loaves and dried fish out of a basket. The feeding of the multitude was a REAL miracle. The miracle was a new kind of community, one generated by prayer and inclusion, a “new generation.” Transitory as it may have been, it remains a model for a new community, one on which all human culture will one day have to be based. The social bond that gave the community that Jesus inspired its coherence had one conspicuous feature: the breaking down of religious prejudice.”
Our world is ripe with tensions between religions and often manipulated by politicians and the media. The burden we have to discern what is true, what is respectful and what is the loving/Christ-like thing to do as we face other faiths and other perspectives on our faith. A suitable challenge for any week, let alone Holy Week!
Grace & peace
Geoff
March 29, 2002, Friday of Holy Week
We continue our Holy Week meditations in Gil Bailie’s book “Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads” Crossroad books, New York, 1995.
Good Friday recalls the execution of the man from Nazareth who became Lord and Savior. One of the chapters in Bailie’s book, entitled “Shaken Witnesses,” deals with the issue of public executions. His premise is that all executions are a form of sacrificial violence. Here is a slightly edited excerpt.
“For a culture to choose only the certifiably guilty as victims of its sacrificial spectacles is undoubtedly a moral improvement, but it is an innovation that will only temporarily be able to override the empathy for victims aroused by the gospel.
….The system for …(punishing wrongdoers) …may be clumsy and cruel, or it may be scrupulous and attentive to the humanity of even the most heinous criminals. In all cultures that have fallen under the gospel influence, the tendency toward the latter is unmistakable. And yet, vestiges of ritual sacrifice survive in even the most ideal criminal justice systems. How morally problematic future generations will find these vestiges and how they might seek to eliminate them remains to be seen. Reversals in any historical development can be expected, but, in the long-term, I haven’t the slightest doubt that the exposure and renunciation of sacrificial violence will continue. In which case, to the extent that societies under gospel influence exploit their criminal proceedings for the purpose of venting their resentments, indulging their lust for vengeance, and basking in the glow of unearned moral rectitude, they will sooner or later have the devil to pay.”
As we contemplate the execution of Jesus on this day, may we thank God for the “gospel influence” that Bailie talks about above.
Grace & peace
Geoff
March 30, 2002, Saturday of Holy Week
There will be no Email on Tuesday, April 2, as Geoff will be in Mexico with the Easter Mission Project.
We continue our Holy Week meditations in Gil Bailie’s book “Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads” Crossroad Books, New York, 1995.
The Lent and Easter season can be seen as a journey. When we return from a journey, we see things differently, at least for a while. If we can plumb the depths of the cross as Bailie suggests we will go through a process that will enable us, in the words of the title of one of the chapters in “Violence Unveiled,” “To Know the Place for the First Time.”
“To arrive at where we started and to see it without either the mythological veil or the historical screen that vindicates its violence is to stand stupefied before the spectacle of scapegoating violence. To return to where we started and to know the place for the first time is to stand before a scene structurally indistinguishable from the crucifixion. To know the place for the first time is to stand at the foot of the Cross. If one can do so without entangling oneself in what Girard calls the ‘Lilliputian threads of piety and antipiety,’ then one can see ‘things hidden since the foundation of the world’ (Matthew 13:35). To catch a glimpse of such things is to realize both how dependent we are on culture for our sanity and civility, and how suffused culture is with delusion, myth, and religious superstition.”
These are hard and deep words for us to ponder on the day between the crucifixion and resurrection. May we ponder deeply and not let the joy of Easter totally wipe out the deep questions that are asked of us during Holy Week.
(The Girard referred to in the paragraph above is Rene Girard, an anthropologist whose work is the basis and inspiration for Bailie’s book. Girard wrote the forward to “Violence Unveiled.”)
Grace & peace
Geoff
There will be no Email on Tuesday, April 2, as Geoff will be in Mexico with the Easter Mission Project.
One final word, an Easter word, from Gil Bailie’s book “Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads” Crossroad Books, New York, 1995.
“The empty tomb was essential for understanding the resurrection, not because it announced the resurrection, but because it deprived those who were later to experience the resurrection of a cathartic religious ritual that might have substituted for it. The discovery of the empty tomb meant that Jesus’ corpse and its resting place could not be made into a shrine and become the locus for a new religious cult. Had Jesus’ tomb not been empty, the explosive force that scattered the gospel revelation out beyond the culture-world in which it originated and broadcast it to the corners of the earthy might have been offset by the gravitation pull of a central shrine. Had the tomb not been empty, what Paul feared might have happened. The Cross might have slowly moved to the margins of Christian awareness and the Christian message. Christianity might have become what some have recently declared it to be: a philosophical affair presided over by a Jeffersonian Jesus full of wise and occasionally ironic sayings.
I pray that these excerpts from Bailie’s book will have deepened your Holy Week and that, like the cross working a leavening effect on culture, the cross will be ever more a leaven to your faith.
A most blessed and joyous Easter to you all.
Grace & peace
Geoff
There will be no Email on Tuesday, April 2, as Geoff will be in Mexico with the Easter Mission Project.
