email: whitpresby@mindspring.com
Spiritual readings "Greetings from Whittier Presbyterian Church"
September 2000 Emails
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What is spirituality? |
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Music & spirituality |
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Music & spirituality pt. 2 |
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Stockholder responsibility |
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Spiritual practices |
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The capital sins |
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Stockholder responsibility |
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Perfectionism |
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Dostoyevsky |
Among the books I began reading on vacation was one called “Holy Longing” by Ronald Rolheiser, a Canadian Catholic priest. As the title suggests, he is talking about this yearning in us that we call spirituality. Here is an excerpt from the opening chapter, where he answers the question “What Is Spirituality?”
“We see this……spirit in all things. Everything is driven outward. Rocks, plants, insects, and animals are just as erotic, and as relentlessly driven, as are human beings. There is, at some level, a stunning similarity between a bamboo plant pushing blindly upward through the pavement, a baby feeding, a young adolescent restlessly driven by hormones, the tangible restlessness of a singles’ bar, and Mother Teresa kneeling consciously in prayer before her God. Desire is working in each case, sometimes blindly and sometimes consciously. St. Paul would say that, in each instance, the Holy Spirit is trying to pray through something or somebody. The law of gravity and the pull of emotional obsession is not so different.”
May this open picture, this expanded definition if spirituality, be an encouragement to you in your own holy longing.
Grace & peace to you all,
Geoff
As some of you know, music is a great love for me. One of the things I do on vacation is get a bunch of new compact discs and go to some free concerts, at the Santa Monica Pier or the California Plaza, downtown L.A. Music plays a large role in the lives of all of us. Some of us get more obsessed with it than others. I have always regretted not pursuing musical education further than I did. I wished I played some instrument with some proficiency. As it is, I join the church choir occasionally, help lead the singing in our contemporary service and sing in the shower.
Jeremy Begbie is on the faculty at the University of Cambridge in England and he has taken up the theological implications of music as part of his life’s work. In relating music to the sense of history and the issue of where history might be going, he has this to say.
“Music is capable of “sounding forth” a temporality in which the past of a musical occurrence does not retreat into an ever-receding “beyond,” but is carried by its constant future orientation, borne along by its waves of tension and resolution. Musical events do not fall backwards into vacuity: They are new in the sense of being always new. Similarly, the future of a musical event is not the future of the bleak unknown, but the future whose charge, so to speak, is experienced in the “now” as it bears its past. As musical occurrences anticipate their future they carry their past; as their future is unfolded, their past – and ours – is enfolded. This is the dynamic into which we are invited and caught up by music.
Our lives are often movements of tension and resolution too, and God calls us into the dynamic of what God is doing in the world and the future to which God is leading us all. May you hear God’s call as music in your life.
Grace & peace to you all,
Geoff
The last email had a quote from Jeremy Begbie about the order and progression of musical compositions. He also talks quite a bit about the importance of improvisation in the music of nearly all cultures. Whenever I think of improvisation, I think of Jazz first, but note that improvisation has played a large part in Rock and Roll too, particularly with one of my favorite groups, the Grateful Dead. Begbie borrows this definition of improvisation: “the simultaneous conception and production of sound in performance,…” Later he says “Life in the Spirit, therefore, involves a combination of faithfulness and particularizing what is received in the present in anticipation of the future. This is the dynamic of musical improvisation.”
As I reflected on this sense of playing variations on a theme, I thought about how each of us are variations on the theme of being created in God’s image. God lays down the chords, gives us the beat, and we are able to make marvelous harmonies with those other human variations that we come in contact. We have the Bible that gives us the score for the composition, then we make our own improvisations on it in how we live our lives.
What kind of music do you make in your life? Can you improvise on what God has given you? May you find your beat and chords, then find those with whom you can harmonize until that day comes when we will join the choirs of angels singing God’s praises. By the way, how much improvisation do you think there is in heaven??
Grace & peace to you all.
Geoff
Jesus speaks about money more than anything else except the Kingdom of God. I think preachers has said that every year around this time. Yet we still struggle with the implications, the “How,” of that fact. Wealth has always been a difficult issue for most Christians, mainly because most of us don’t have it! There is a strong attraction in us for the Deadly Sins of Envy, Greed and Pride to work together in our unconscious to make us do ugly, unchristian, even stupid, things.
One area of difficulty that is becoming more popular(in terms of the growing number of people that it effects) is that of stockholder behavior or stockholder activism. How many of you own stocks? If you have any kind of retirement or pension program, you are a stockholder. How does your faith effect your being a stockholder? Various groups of Christians (Maryknoll brothers & sisters in the Roman Catholic communion come to mind) are working at impacting the world of higher finance with their kind of Christian values.
The Washington Post magazine(which I receive weekly, thanks to a member of Covenant Presbyterian Church in Long Beach, where I used to be on the staff) had a very interesting article on Sept. 4 on what seems to be a growing movement that has to do with Stockholder responsibility. The article covers seven leaders in this movement called ‘shareholder activism.’ Here’s a couple of annotated quotes:
From Robert A.G. Monks(www.ragm.com): “The goal of corporate governance is to get the energy of corporations aligned with the interests of society.” Seems to me the key word here is ‘interests,’ which from a Christian perspective might be worded “good.” Read the statement with that rewording to see what I mean.
From Carl Icahn: “The movement toward corporate governance is a little bit like the Magna Carta. Everybody talks about it and it sounded good, but it never really accomplished very much. It never freed the common shareholder.” With all due respect to Mr. Icahn, his business sense may be better than his sense of history. My understanding is that the Magna Carta, seen in it historical perspective, was a major step toward representative democracy as it began the movement to hold kings accountable to at least someone else in the earthly realm. Indeed, I learned that the US Constitution and Bill of Rights could be traced back, perhaps directly, to the Magna Carta.
Are YOU a stockholder? How does your faith impact that?
As we approach the Fall concerns of harvest and stewardship, may we continually seek to know how God would have us live out our Christian faith.
Grace & peace to you all.
Geoff
Luke 6:46 has Jesus saying “why do you call me ‘Lord Lord’ and not do what I tell you?” Jesus seems angry or frustrated with his disciples as he says this. James 1:22 says “Be doers of the word, not merely hearers who deceive themselves.”
I ran across something in Craig Dykstra’s book, “Growing in the Life of Faith” that brought these scriptures to mind. In relation to the growing need for what is rather generically called spirituality, Dykstra says:
“Perhaps the calls we are hearing for “more spirituality” are, in large part, cries for help in developing anew disciplined PRACTICES of faith. Perhaps we should regard the burgeoning self-help books, pamphlets, articles and courses we see all around us as contemporary substitutes for the manuals ….(used in) devotional instruction produced in many cultures during nearly two thousand years of Christian history.”
These practices that are talked about are such things as prayer, Bible study, fasting, spiritual direction, service, hospitality, simplicity, keeping Sabbath, etc. there is really quite a long list of historical Christian practices. Not all of them suit everyone, nor can anyone do too many of them and still live a “real” life. But there are some that are right for each person and part of our response to God’s call to us is to find the right practices for us.
What do you do to practice your faith? Or are you deceiving yourself? You are responsible only to God with those answers, but a life including some kind of Christian practice will be a deeper, more loving, and ultimately more satisfying life.
Grace and peace to you all.
Geoff
A few years ago I preached a series of sermons on the Seven Deadly Sins, Pride, Greed, Envy, Lust, Sloth, Anger and Gluttony. I sought to bring the wisdom of the Church through the ages into the modern way of living. People greatly appreciated those sermon, both in Whittier and Long Beach. In his book “Intimacy with God” Thomas Keating makes reference to those seven sins, using the term capital sins.’ He says they are the results of what he terms “the emotional programs for happiness.” I call this the worldly forces that work inside us, that are instilled in us as we grow. Recall one of the founding principles of our nation is the pursuit of happiness. Keating’s definition of these Emotional Programs for Happiness is “the growth of the instinctual needs of security/survival, affection/esteem, and power/control, into centers of motivation around which our thoughts, feelings, and behavior gravitate.”
Tying this in with the capital( or Seven Deadly) sins he says (I’m slightly paraphrasing)
"without the experience of resting in God, all the capital sins can flourish without one actually being aware of the fact. One may think one is doing great things for God…but the seven capital sins, the results of the emotional programs for happiness in the unconscious, are there in concrete form and, unless confronted, will lead to burn-out or pharisaism, the occupational hazards of religious people.
Burn-out or pharisaism (legalistic judgmentalism by my definition). Which are you most prone to? How do you guard against it? Resting in God is the Keating/Centering Prayer antidote, but any kind of prayer life is a start. Or some of the other practices of the spiritual life that I mentioned last week. We need help in our lives, especially our lives as disciples of Jesus Christ. May you find that help wherever you can and find the rest that God gives in your life.
Grace & peace,
Geoff
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about stockholder responsibility after reading an article in the Washington Post magazine. Many of us are invested in the stock market, either directly and our faith says as much about that as any other financial matter in our lives. In checking some of the websites I found I could email one of the authors cited in the Post article so I did. I wrote to Robert A. G. Monks, complimenting his on what the Post article said about him and asking his opinion of faith-based stockholder actions. To my surprise he indicated how important the leadership of religious organizations has been. I only wish the Post article had said something about that.
Monks also indicated that he is finishing a book relating modern investment responsibility to the parable of the talents (see Matthew 25:14-30). I, for one, will be looking for the book.
My correspondence with Monks became a ray of hope for me, that the spirit of God is at work in places in the world where I do not often expect such. Where do you find evidences of hope and moral and ethical growth in the world?
Grace & peace,
Geoff
I’ve been a faithful reader of the Christian Century magazine since seminary, nearly 25 years now. In the September 13-20 issue there was a short article on perfection by Carol Zaleski, a religion professor at Smith College in Massachusetts. Perfection is a difficult term for us moderns, and we are never quite sure how to respond to such Bible texts as Matthew 5:48 and Romans 12:2. She indicates that our culture experiences a certain confusion about perfection. She says:
“Either we mistake it for an inhuman perfectionism or we empty it of meaning by proclaiming everything perfect.”
She talks about the rules for living that have been a by product of the search for Christian perfection. Monasteries are formed around rules, and many is the foundation of a religion based on a rule for living. These rules have to do much more with daily living than with sacred ritual. Zalesky goes on to say:
“…a rule for perfection …has everything to do with ordinary domestic routine and nothing to do with Martha Stewart-like flawlessness; everything to do with grace and nothing to do with merit or exalted spiritual feelings.”
Most of all I liked her definition of the distinctively Christian understanding of perfection:
“…maturity, wholeness and obedience in a life consecrated to the law of love revealed by Christ.
“May you seek THAT kind of perfection, both in yourself and in those around you.
Grace & peace
Geoff
Looking for a topic for this email I thumbed through Thomas Merton’s “Contemplative Prayer,” published in 1969, a year after Merton’s death. Though written for monks, Merton acknowledges that it would be of interest to all Christian, since we are all to be people of prayer. In talking about the spiritual renewal our world needs he borrowed from one of the great Russian novelists.
“Dostoievski, in ‘The Brothers Karamazov,’ shows the eternal conflict…..in Christianity. The conflict between the rigid, authoritarian, self-righteous, ascetic Therapont, who delivers himself from the world by sheer effort, and then feels qualified to call down curses upon it; and the Staretz, Zossima, the kind, compassionate man of prayer who identifies himself with the sinful and suffering world in order to call down God’s blessing upon it.”
Merton goes on to add: “…in the present era…we are more and more concerned with the Zossima type.”
I think it goes without saying that there is great need in our world for kindness, compassion and prayer, no less now that over 30 years ago when Merton wrote this. There is that proverbial expression “the more things change, the more they remain the same.” Indeed it could be argued that there is more need for compassion and kindness now than 30 years ago.
Where do you find kindness and compassion in your life now? Where do you give kindness and compassion in your life? May the Spirit of God enable you both to find and to give these gifts of compassion and kindness.
Grace & peace to you all,
Geoff
