Posts Tagged ‘God’

Allowing the Work to Gather Us

Sunday, January 1st, 2012

Writing here on the first day of 2012, I am thinking of the blessing in allowing the work to gather us.  Maybe our corporate New Year’s Resolution?

Much of life is the pivot toward gathering around the Work, written eloquently of here by Richard Rohr:

The Christian life is a matter of becoming who we already are, and allthat we truly are! Can you imagine that? Is the seed already within you—of all that God wants you to be? Do you already know at some level who you authentically are? Are you willing to pay the price? Even the mistrust of others? Could that be what we mean by having a unique “soul”? Most saints thus described the path as much more unlearningthan learning. There are so many illusions and lies that we must all unlearn. And one of the last illusions to die is that we are that different or that separate, and finally we are all one and amazingly the same. Differentiation seems to precede union and communion, for some strange reason.

As he notes, it is the True Self in God coming alive.  And there is a cost.  Are we willing to pay the price?  In a culture that worships the private, the individual, and the inviolate sanctity of personal thoughts and opinions – which are very good, to a point – the price is obvious.  We may in the end be called to give up those vary things that got to that point, to the “pivot.”  ”Unlearning” carries a cost.

As the New Church theologian Emanuel Swedenborg put it, our task then is straightforward in this great “unlearning.”

Abstain from evil, and do what is good, and believe in the Lord with your whole heart and your whole soul, and the Lord will love you and give you love for what you do and faith in what you believe. Then you will do what is good because of love, and you will believe because you have faith, which is confidence.  And if you persevere like this a reciprocal partnership [with God and others] will develop and become permanent.  That is salvation itself and eternal life.   

To get our selves out of the way, we need to allow the Work to gather us.  What is the Work?  It is the work of compassion, love, service, sharing, teaching, reaching, stretching.  If you put that all into one word it would be “church”, not in an institution of orthodoxy but as a living, breathing universal BEING.

So for 2012, lets allow the work to gather us!

 

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We Do Care

Friday, November 19th, 2010

We do care.  People tend to have a deeply seeded sense of love and compassion.  Deep within, all of us – ALL of us -  lies a divine spark, a God given piece that remains with us through all eternity.  That piece reflects God – a God that, “… has compassion on everybody, loves everyone, and wishes to make everyone eternally happy.” (Heavenly Secrets, # 904).

Aligning our lives with that love is where challenges arise.  Likewise, when we do it, it is where life most breaks open.  I most enjoyed a TED talk by Jessica Jackley as she spoke about her journey from the Sunday School lessons of taking care of the poor to something far deeper – organized steps to do that in a way that aligned love and money.  She definitely lives that “spark”!

What she learned in the process of organizing her non-profit, Kiva, is that we do care and we do love.  Fear keeps many of us from always living into that care and love – fear of failure, fear of doing it wrong, fear of being taken advantage of.  What moves us through that fear are stories.

Stories – a point so true.  We thrive on stories.  As Rachel Naomi Remen noted in an NPR interview – at times we need them more than food.  Watching God settle into peoples’ souls, including mine, is known by story.  There is no other experience of it, no other communication of it.  And those stories move us beyond fear.  The fact is there are mechanics of growing a church, a church focused on service.  There are budgets, perspectives that at times challenge, projections not met, personality clashes – aka “the mess” that is life.  And there are the stories.  Stories upon story that speaks to the need to reach out, to connect, to find meaning.  The best of those are the ones that pull us in and then push us out.

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Is Life About Salvation or the Finding the Will of God?

Wednesday, November 17th, 2010

This question is key to the Christian life and the answer greatly informs the Christian New Church Perspective.

For many, the core of Christianity is individual salvation.  There are clear biblical teachings focused on that every message.  But those concepts need seasoned by a broader perspective.  Imagine that the salvation of the individual comprises the whole of the spiritual experience?  If the spiritual life, as it were, narrows in that direction, how does that shape our interactions with ourselves, with others, and with God?  The shape arguably would fall then along the lines of a “credit” and “debit” game.  In the myopic, self seeking introspection endemic to this approach we come to worship ourselves.  How can you become a tool for my salvation?  How can I earn enough “points” for God to love me?    God then functions merely as the accountant.  He joins others in becoming a bit player in our larger, self authored drama.

One of the scariest – and I say this knowing it will unsettle some – is how in this model we can practice a form of idolatry in which we hold “doctrine”, in and of itself, as “God.”  We then worship words and not God. The New Church is clarion clear – doctrine is a means to the end, not the end in itself.  And yet, we often slide this direction.  I certainly have at times in my life made the doctrine, the ideas as it were, the entire point.  Doctrine is not the point.  It is what doctrine points to that is the point.

Doctrine remains instructive, along with our own experience, in discovering the will of God.  Bonhoeffer’s words capture this well. “The will of God  is not a system of rules established from the outset.  And for this reason a person must forever re-examine what the will of God may be.  The will of God may lie deeply concealed beneath a great number of possibilities.”  That “digging” for God’s will is critical and makes legitimate self critique – i.e. repentance – come alive, moving it beyond merely accounting to discovery.

In that space, Jesus arrives.  He embodies the incarnate model of God’s will.  The Christian message then becomes able to move through the world, through, through our lives with the power that is its own – a power detached from the faith-alone salvation goal.    The message is not “come and be saved” but a message of this is the will of God, that “you love one another as I have loved you.”  This is where as well, the goal of Divine Providence rests – the goal of wholeness, “that what has been broken apart should become whole.”  Divine Providence, page 55.

Salvation as wholeness in settling our lives into the will of God

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Losing A Thought, Gaining Your Soul

Monday, September 27th, 2010

I was listening to a priest today who made a fascinating point.  He talked of what occurred when the idea that we are separated from God dies.  When that thought goes, so does our separation from God.

Emanuel Swedenborg wrote of attention to the spiritual being attention to what was real.  God is omnipresent – is everywhere.  As the Bible so beautifully words it – Where can I can go Lord that you are not?

I think many have those moments in which the thought of being separated from God disappears.  We are in the moment and that moment, at times, is pure heaven.

That is the essential unity of creation.  We move away from dualism, from separation, to unity, to the oneness spoken of by Jesus in the Gospel of John.

The priest went to talk of moments near death, moments when the brain “stops”, the chatter “stops”, when the thought we are separate from God “stops.”  What decision is left but to fall into the loving arms of God.  As one dear friend said on his deathbed, “It is all so perfect.”

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Self Image or Self and Image

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

I spent this week working with teenagers at a local summer camp.

Stories (and sermons) divide into three part – context, conflict, resolution. These young adults broke into groups and discussed what they saw as the essential conflict of adolescence. Restated, if adolescence was a “story”, what would the conflict be?

Interesting responses. The key appears to be self image. I love that phrase. It is the problem and the solution all in one.

The challenge is when we hold self image as one thing. The solution is breaking self and image, noticing that the two are actually different.

Richard Rohr’s words ring true – “God does not love us if we change, as we almost all think; but God loves us so that we can change.” This is the very nature of God’s unconditional love. From that place we can divide self from image in a healthy way, learning to spend a lot more time looking out the window at others vs. gazing in the mirror at ourselves.

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