I am on a steady diet of God so I am not feeling any pangs of hunger.  I would like more grace and righteousness.  I am not anxious for the lack of either at present.

There is hunger in my congregation for God.  Some difference of opinion as to what that means.  Some see God as grandfatherly and happy with minimal effort.  Others see God as taskmaster and unhappy that we aren't going door to door.  There is a uniformity in that both views expect worship to cater to them in some way.

Does our hunger show to visitors?  If only it did.  Our congregation has not moved from primarily spectator to performer as of yet.

Why not?  Old habits die hard right?  And the two perspectives made known to me do not dovetail easily together so there is a tension present in the congregation.  While anything I do to support each perspective cements them anything I do which conflicts serves only to increase the demand.  

Unless perspectives change nothing else will.

Grace and peace to you.

John

How hungry am I, really, for God? Is my congregation truly hungry for God? If so, how does that hunger show to a visitor? If not, why not?

Hunger's a powerful, peculiar motivator. Hunger is a complicated motivator.

And in many religions, feast and fast establish a sense of bonding with god and with one another.

Hunger is a sign of physical distress: you are running low of life-sustaining nutriments. When that feeling kicks in, we typically get remarkably undiscerning.

We’ll eat just about anything, even each other, in preference to eating nothing. And most of us, when we do eat, prefer to eat what’s familiar rather than what’s nutritious and/or healthy.

What’s sweet and fatty has universal head-start appeal.

Stress seems to push people to eat more than is good for them.

Junk food has an enormous market. According to the Global Industry Guide, the worldwide fast food market grew 6.8 per cent in 2011 to reach a value of more than $250,000 billion.

Are there spiritual disorders as there are eating disorders? Do we have junk religion the way we have junk food? Do we consume religion without thinking about our health?

I think it’s best to avoid becoming overly hungry for god so that I keep a bit of perspective on my faith life. That means feeding my spirit regularly and discerningly. It means a bit of "head" stuff — reading and study — as wel;l as "engagement".

Great guidelines for good eating: chose food for its for freshness, flavor, local sourcing and variety; don’t become a slave to habit; prepare food with care and creativity… make it “special”, make it interesting, care about it, enjoy it … and share it.

I’d suggest the same tips pretty much apply to spirituality. Spiritual good habits promote spiritual good health. 

In one of my wife’s appointments, we organized a “pilgrimage”: an intentional journey on foot from one of the churches in the two-point charge to the other. I wrote a short, four-part, episodic medieval-style playlet (I’ll send you a script if you want one) that was performed at stops along the way, accompanied by prayer and a hymn. We each had a pilgrim staff and a scallop shell, and we walked together. One participant led a donkey.

It was certainly a spiritually energizing event for many but it was done just the once, preparations for it having been made through a winter study programme. Afterwards, though, there was a feeling of having “been there, done that” and the hope of its becoming an annual event faded. That was appropriate, I think. A pilgrimage is not something to be repeated over and over; it's an exploration.

We lived in Scotland for eight years and took that opportunity to piligrimage to Iona, Lindisfarne, Whithorn, Cairnpapple, St Andrew’s and the Border Abbeys in Scotland. We also have made deliberate visits ot other holy places including the Vatican, the Serpent Mounds in Ontario, and the crypt of an early abbot, Epiphanius in the 5th century monastery of San Vincenzo al Volturno, where a friend and scholar who’s spend years studying and writing about the site, Franco Valente, gave us a detailed explanation of the frescos that depict the theology of the day.

And we have been to Santiago di Compostela, but without walking the Camino. The constant arrival of weary walkers gives the small city a remarkable character, and the cathedral entrance was piled high with backpacks.

To that, I guess I could add a list of sites that we‘ve visited less intentionally but with the same sorts of questions in mind as many others sharing our footsteps. And we have made technically secular pilgrimages. I have done a lot of travelling in Europe to write about bagpiping traditions (of which there’s probably about 200 across the greater region). This put me wholly in the hands of hospitable musicians and their families and gave me a wonderful appreciation of how incredibly interesting and kind people can be. And I still carry in my heart the teachings of Maori elders I received in my youth.

For me (for us) life itself is a search for meaning and god-experience, with the real revelations arising more from the journey and our companions, than from the destination. It has taken me from New Zealand to Scotland and Canada as a resident and as a citizen (I have three passports) and my work took me across a great part of Europe.

I have visited the famous Bachkovo Monastery in Bulgaria and Orthodox chapels and churches in Greece. I’ve seen amazing cathedrals in Spain, Germany, Italy, England and France… I’ve seen old Celtic sites like Southend, Dunadd and Kilmartin in Scotland, and Armagh in Northern Ireland. I have been to the grandiose Papal Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi and the reconstructed Abbey of Montecassino.

What these sites have filled me with has been, not insights into god, but insights into human nature and human expressions of an enormous desire to influence god. In some ways, they oppose god by defining and attempting to confine god. St Francis' chapel, the little broken church he began to restore at the start of his call then abandoned when he realised the "church" he was called to were the people, the poor and marginalised, is now INSIDE a basilica and a central feature… very ironic. Some amzing churches were built to glorify princelings and robber barons who had them built to sanctify their family crypts. At their finest, they express the sublime heights of the human creative impulse.

And, yes, we have done the labyrinth thing too… a solitary reflection that leads to god within, as opposed to the pilgrimage thing which bumps us into god in others. (No, there;s noo 'made' local labyrinth… plenty of natural ones though.)

To me, the lesson lies in the frame of mind within which any journey is taken.

Every place opens to god-ness, every journey can be in the footsteps of god, every place offers insight into the magnificence of god. Everywhere, beauty and abundance can be seen, affirming god’s love. Every day that I’ve been able to, I’ve been visiting a bend in the nearby river; I listen to its song and hear the voices of angels. The purpose of those visits is partly to walk the dog but the real “why” is to help me sustain a focus in my own life and companionship with the “holy”.  It’s for refreshment. It’s to keep the channels of my engagement open. It’s not about visiting “god” or leaving “god” there where I go home again. Going there helps me to “grounds” myself: physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. And it’s my “happy time”.

The path to god is simple: it’s engagement.

I have not participated in a formal pilgrimage.  I have never considered walking every day paths a pilgrimage.  If the definition of pilgrimage is to widen to that point I would never not be on a pilgrimage of one kind or another.

I have walked a labyrinth several times.  There is at least one labyrinth in my area.  Wlaking Labyrinths is not a part of my spiritual practice.

Grace and peace to you.

John

Day 24 - Tuesday: Listening 

I can listen to those with whom my paths will cross today.

Listening is the language of love in my life in that while listening I am giving my self to the one I listen to.  Every moment I spend listening is a moment I cannot spend doing anything else.  It becomes a gift of grace.

Grace and peace to you.

John

It’s March break and our daughter and three grandchildren, 6 months, 2 and 12 are with us. So they’re the ones getting listened to this week!

Listening can be just about hearing… but more importantly I think it’s about “being with” and that’s a very much deeper commitment. It demands response. As "being with" it's like "stone soup", each involved person's presence adding to the flavour, nuritional value and satisfaction of the soup.

In this sense, I’m with about as many people as I can be and still have space to share with my wife… which is necessary to sustain our attentiveness to others. There’s no “listening” without a functioning “listener” and the state and the character of the “listener” are critical.

I knew an extremely clever listener some years ago who used her listening skills to her extreme advantage… and to the extreme disadvantage of those to whom she’d  listened.

And there are times to NOT listen: gossip’s a cowardly, pernicious form of betrayal. Trustworthiness is a critical issue and the call to listen is also a call to trustworthiness. Faith is a “trust zone”: confidentiality is a necessary discipline. In a society that’s given over so thoroughly to marketing, misinformation and spin, trust takes a bit of a hiding. “Community” is its victim.

In my view, trust’s essential to any exploration of faith and sacred love. Then listening can happen… as engagement. Engagement is agape… the unconditional love with which god surrounds us, the same love Jesus calls us to make the centre pf our lives in community.

“Good” listening is “good” loving. And “being with” is the breath of this: the breath of love, the breath of god. It’s the essence of god’s presence with us, in us. It’s ours to inhale… it’s everywhere.

Fear’s the obstacle… fear in the listener, fear in the one listened to.

In what ways has the ecological crisis of our time awakened you to new spiritual awareness, a deeper appreciation of the sacredness of creation? How can your day-to-day behavior reflect this appreciation?

In 1965-69, I was a student at Auckland University, New Zealand.

It was a time of political ferment in New Zealand. A Maori cultural revival was under way and calls were starting for land claims justice. Because of New Zealand's sporting (rugby) links with South Africa, an anti-Apartheid movement was strong. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was a mainstream movement, a tremendous number of New Zealanders having recently petitioned the government to take the lead in establishing the Southern Hemisphere as a nuclear-free zone. But France had just turned a couple of atolls in colonial French Polynesia —  Mururoa and Fangataufa — into nuclear test sites. The first detonations were in 1960.

There was a strong environmental awareness in New Zealand: the Forest and Bird Protection Society, launched in the 1920s in response to native species extinctions and the destruction of native forests, was a respectable middle class pressure group and political  lobby. Environmental awareness goes back a century in New Zealand.

All of these issues tended to merge a kind of environmental, anti-colonial movement, into which opposition to the Vietnam War smoothly fitted. As a young student, I was involved in protest action of one sort or another almost every day.

And, after university, I moved in circles that welcomed and gave all the help and hospitality we could to people like David Moodie and his crew on the Fri, who went to protest the French tests, and the Vega, and we formed protest flotillas of yachts and launches to block visits by nuclear armed or powered ships into New Zealand ports — especially Auckland Harbour.

We were thrilled in 1973 when our Prime Minister, Norman Kirk, sent two Royal New Zealand Navy ships into the French nuclear test area’s exclusion zone to protest France’s snubbing of the International Court of Justice’s order to end their testing.

So, in July 1985, the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour and murder of Fernando Pereira was a personally felt outrage. The "ecological issues" are not simply about recycling and living more simply, they are about politics and violence and national policy.

The degradiation of Mururoa and the sickness inflicted on so many French Polnesians made it clear… then theattack on the Rainbow Warrior was a close-to-home demonstration of deadly thug-mindedness — on Mitterand’s part in this case — that puts political and economic greed ahead of environmental and cultural justice issues. It was state terrorism. Behind all the political attempts to muster plausibility for the cause of “resource” exploitation, greed shapes weapons of ruthlessness. The exploiters will not simply wake up one day, see the error in their ways, apologise, fix the damage and start living on moderate incomes. The violence done to native peoples in Canada in the name of "resources development" is of the same ugly cut. Also utterly odious is the gagging of government scientists on these issues. In a democracy they are "our" scientists and we need to hear their voices.

As a Christian, I feel called to simply get on with doing what I can to fan hope that the World will survive and be whole again… "Environment" is us… we're inseparable and, along with living “green”, that includes denouncing greed and wanton destruction. It’s a spiritual call, a social call, a political call. I also believe it’s a Christian call.

“The Environment” is a resurrection issue.

That's how envionmental awareness has affected my spitirtuality. It helped to sharpen my discernment.

It hasn't.

I believer that creation is God's third testament.

I do not believe that creation has been consecrated, devoted or dedicated to a deity.

I do not believe that creation is entitled to veneration simply by its association to a Creator.

I do not believe that creation is separate from the secular.

I do not believe that creation has been reverently dedicated to some purpose or person or object.

I'm iffy on the reverence and whther it is something that creation is due.

I do not believe that a notion of 'sacred' is necessary to treat creation as a gift and to steward that gift with wisdom befitting a love for the giver of the gift.

My day to day behaviour doesn't reflect an understanding of creation as sacred.  I suspect that there are many ways that I could steward the gift better than I currently am.

I also suspect that all of us have room for improvement in that regard and holding creation to be sacred is not much of an actual step forward in good stewardship.  Though if it works for some that isn't a negative thing.

Grace and peace to you.

John

Recall a time you encountered death. What memories come? How did experiencing this death change you understanding of life? What changed within you? What would you like to change now?

21 July 2006: I was in Canada. My father was in a care home in New Zealand. Two weeks previously, I had been back to spend his 95th birthday with him, a memopable thime that included the launch of his third book, an excerpt from the wartime segment of his autobiography:

The phone rang. It was the nursing supervisor at the care home. “Your dad’s going,” she said. “He wanted to call you and say thanks for coming for his birthday. Here he is…”

So we talked a few slow sentences then, after a bit, he just breathed, weakly. And I talked. I talked about journeys, about journeys when I was a kid, about journeys we’d done together and journeys we'd done separately and I thanked him for the restlessness and wanderlust he’d given me, and for the values he’d given me. I reached into my depths and kept my end up as his breathing slowed and became gentller and gentler… until I could hear nothing and my cousin, who’d arrived at the care home since the call began, took the phone to say dad had died.

That was when I broke.

But it was an amazing liberation to have been able to do that. It was beautiful. It was a closure. Nothing was left unsaid. And the liberation assuaged the breaking and grief.

What changed in me? What would I like to change?  Nothing really. He gave me his dying breath. I got affirmation that day for the path I’ve walked and continue to walk, for my practical and financial ineptitude and “mistakes”, for my spirituality and my way of be-ing.

My respect and admiration of my father, and of my mother who’d died in 1992, were confirmed. My mother gave me trust in the mystery and some of her passionate curiosity. My dad instilled most of my lived values… including my willingness to enter into life as fully as I can and to accept each moment as gift no matter what it holds, and my combativeness… even my inclination to rant.

To live as he did and die as he did deepened my awareness of the infinitely wonder-filled experience life is, if we allow it to be.

Have you ever heard god speaking to you? Why might someone not hear god speak? What can block us from hearing god?

Have I heard "god"… yes, I believe so.

But the word “god” gets in the way for a lot of people… for myself for many years, and for most of my friends. For starters, what does it mean?

God is a blabbermouth: god is everywhere, rabbiting on about love and trust, generosity and humbling mystery, and abundance and opening to the full experience of life, banging away about forgiving and valuing what is good and just and true… and beautiful; tirelessly dancing and singing for us and cramming our imaginations. God is ceaselessly vocal and makes endlessly ineffable music for each of us to hear. God is an explosion. So, of course… we want to talk about all of that. We NEED to talk about all that.

But what do we say? Everything we can say about “god” is wrong. Even the Bible is wrong because the words do what words are supposed to do: ring-fence meanings, and there’s no way to ring-fence god.  If any of it makes “sense”, it’s a misprint. God’s “truth” penetrates “sense” and leaves all the words as empty as peanut husks. The words find their meaning in us; the best we can do is use that meaning in its time and place as a ladder, to help us become the meaning we're seeking.

The “god thing” is rejected because most of us know that life is fragile and finite, and that’s because we know only one life (our own) intimately enough to draw some conclusions about it. On the other hand, most of us have some inkling that life is sort of boundless. But, as slaves to reason and "good sense", most of us have been taught that paradoxes are unsupportable.

So what is irresolvable, what leaks through every word we put in the way, is frightening to us. We are prompted to withdraw our trust; we have learned to withhold trust from the quack and the liar. And that's well-advised.

But, at the same time, we let quacks and liars shape and define our societies… then we'll ask, “if god’s so good, why does ‘he’ allow such bad things to exist?” That’s crazy thinking even by the standards of the quackery running our society. Do we ask in the same breath, “if we are so good, why to WE allow such bad things to exist?”

The difference is power? God in omnipotent, so we can blame god for everything we don't like? Oh really? Science tell us that the choices we make have consquences.

If we are weak, it’s because we will it.

If god is weak, isn't it because we will it? We shut god out of our being; we look away. We impair our wholeness to avoid responding to god. "Selective deafness," I think it's called.

So why might I not hear god sometimes, even if I’m trying to hear?

Maybe it’s because what I’m trying to hear is not what god is, but rather what I want god to be?

Language fences things in. That’s why it’s useful. That’s what we need language to do. We don’t have the mind-power, the conceptual reach, the spiritual capacity to fence god in… but how earnestly we try! We worship, we assail “him” with supplicatory prayers? Why? Why “him”? I more usually experience “god” as “her”, but most often it’s as “beyond-but-here”. God has no location, god is location… but not just location. God “is”.

Try telling people to listen to what “is”? That doesn’t get it across either.

In my own case, curiosity and first-hand experience opened me to god (to the extent that I’m open).

Why do some not hear? What blocks us from hearing?

Maybe WE say too much about “god”, too much of it “sense”? Maybe we need to trust god to reveal herself in her own way sometimes?

The memories fluctuate depending upon the death remembered.  Since I have been ordained death is something I deal with on a regular basis and there have been no close family die in that time so I don't know how my professional involvement in death will impact upon my personal experience of death.

As far as changing my understanding of life goes I have had the lesson driven home repeatedly that life is fleeting and subject to change at a moments notice. 

What has changed within me?  Not much.  I still perceive death as enemy to life.  I have not bought into the circle of life perspective.  I am ambivalent to death as mercy perspective, in those instances where ongoing life is painful I can see how an end to pain appears merciful.  I don't see, for example the cat finally killing the mouse as merciful when part of the play has be torturing the mouse to death.  When the cruel game ends it ends not because the cruel gamer has become less cruel it comes when the victim has no strength to resist.

What would I like to change now?  I'd like to be able to get my hands on death and have it be the mouse to my cat.  I'd love to torment death and give it a taste of its own medicine.  Let it know fear and hopelessness, let it experience pain and agony of spirit.  Then I'd like to ask it if that felt merciful.

Grace and peace to you.

John

I have.  It was my first notion that I was called to ministry and it was terrifying.  There were days when I wished someone would come forward to admit that it was a hoax.  There have been days since that I have wished someone would come forward to admite that it was a hoax.  Those days are fewer and far between.

Well, most people don't know how to shut up and listen.  If you don't listen you shouldn't be surprised that you don't hear.

Since that event I have never heard God speak in precisely the same way (and I'm not complaining about that).  God is more of a hushed whisper than nearby voice.  A hint, like a distant voice on the wind or a fading echo.  There is enough to grab my attention and then as I focus on the sound there is rarely detailed information to act upon just an impression of a way to turn  And that impression is difficult to wrestle with.

What blocks us?  I suspect we are more prone to blocking ourselves.  We expect God to be predictable and operate within our framework of what is acceptable and God feels no obligation to dance to our tune, God invites us to dance to the tune God plays.  We are not attuned to the frequencies God moves upon and we fail to receive all of the information we could use.

As we mature we may become more attenuated and more adept at listening there will still be distractions that get in the way of our hearing.  There was a verse in a song by Randy Stonehill (You're loved tonight) that always stopped me short:

It's the fear of silence

That puts us to shame

It's like we know in our souls

If we shut off the music

The wind would be crying his name.

I have always done well with silence.  Or so I thought.  What I really did was find something quite natural that the hustle and bustle of life drowned out and focus on that.  Is that a red-winged blackbird I hear?  Or a cicada?  I was stretching the range of my hearing but always listening for the readily obvious instead of shutting that out to try and hear what roared beneath it.

Grace and peace to you.

John

John, you talk as if Death is a thing 

Hi crazyheart,

And?

Birth and Death are happenings, I think, not things. But I have been known to be wrong.

Happenings are also things.

It rains.  Is rain a thing and not a happening or a happening and not a thing?

"Things:" aren't universally understood the way we tend to. Some languages treat every identifiable part of experience as "things" (on the basis that experience of them makes them enduring); other languages talk about  everything as verbs — actions — because all we experience used to be some thing other and is in the process of becoming something other again. That table, that once was tree and minerals in the earth will return t the earth… everything is a narrative partly told. Each attempt to describe experience is as "true" as the other… English tries to sort out the differences: false analysis. 

I suspect that like most I am only law-abiding when it is convenient.  Speed Limits?  Those are for times when I am not running late.  Parking restrictions?  That is when I'm able to get my business done in 15min or so.  I might need longer, what is it to you?

I come to the altar with my gift but I haven't yet forgiven my brother.  I'll get around to it.

I'm eating the bread and drinking the wine all the while I have forgotten to consider the body.  A crumb and sip of judgement aren't much of a threat.

Now, when I'm caught I don't make excuses.  I certainly don't direct any animosity to the officers who have caught me, they are doing their job which is to catch people like me who break the law.

Yes, maybe somewhere a bank robber is getting an extra minute headstart.  Whose fault is that?  Not the officer who stopped me.  It is me, who by my criminal behaviour forces the officer to stop me.

I don't play the game like show up in court and hope to get let off because the officer who pulled me over is off somewhere possibly catching a bank robber.

Most of the time I am aware that I have crossed the line between legal and illegal I justify it by saying I'm careful.  When I am not paying attention the line is crossed easily and I may only be accidentally criminal while breaking the same law I routinely break intentionally.

I come from a broken home.  That isn't a free pass for me to drive as I wish or park as I want.  I have been a victim of injustice.  That doesn't give me the opportunity by righting the scales as a doer of injustice.

I live in a society with rules and when I break them no matter how minor the rule appears or insignificant the infraction is I am still in the wrong and I have earned whatever consequences are given to me because of that infraction.

Now because I am always courteous and polite with the officers I have found that they will add small mercies to the experience.  They knock off a little speed or make a decision to cite me on a lesser charge.  I'll get a fine but no points.  Clearly those graces are wasted by the fact that I continue to cross the lines clearly posted.

Grace and peace to you.

John

"Are you really a law-abiding citizen?"

Well no. I have jay walked, received parking tickets, speeded over the limit, etc.....

At the same time I would purposely jay walk(run) to save a life, park illegaly in order to shorten the distance for the disabled and speed to rush a pregant or bleeding person to get to the hospital on time.

Jesus saying, "let those without sin cast the first stone" may mean that we should not be judgemental but perhaps it could also mean that justified circumstances can eradicate a sin . How else could we elevate the morality of any people if we become blind through legalism?

In the story above, does the writer not also judge the staff member?

Are you really a law-abiding citizen?

I “get” the whole drift of today’s study and I agree with it.

But, for me at any rate, the question we’re invited to ponder doesn’t engage with the issue. My answer has to be “as far as I know”. I certainly don’t intentionally set out to break the law of the land, but I don’t hold it absolute either. I haven’t NEEDED to break the law, not as I understand the law. I follow the road code because there's a need for consensus  there, in much the same way that unlegislated courtesy smoothes one's way through the day in any social setting. I don't speed because I know that speed increases the severity of injuries and likelihood of death if I drive into someone.

But  I have to say, I’ve never been that concerned about laws… I just try to life decently and, so far as I know, I have yet  to attract the attention of the police.  I have only just found out, though, that it’s apparently illegal to eat ice-cream on Bank Street in Ottawa on a Sunday.

In a democracy, there are opportunities to improve on the laws we have and that imposes on us all a responsibility to be interested in and speak out about the sort of society we want. The law, I would hope, is in harmony with this.

Personally, and on the basis of what I’ve seen of it, I would like to see restorative justice become Canada’s preferred approach to dealing with “wrongdoing” because it’s a way to repair damage in ways that benefit us all.

It’s too easy to leave the damage to heal itself and toss the “guilty” person into a costly limbo where there’s no opportunity for that person to play his or her part in fixing what’s been broken. The “guilty” person needs to be healed by being a part of the healing. Re-socialising that person to an artificially sustained subculture that’s removed from society is not going to heal that person.

But restorative justice needs community involvement and maybe we’re all too busy doing other things to consider shouldering responsibility for the ambiguities inherent in our own “innocence”.