It’s an easy read, the story of a college professor Kate, her senior colleague Martin, and a student Erin. About to get tenure, Kate is invited to apply for a one year professorship at a seminary; if she accepts, however, she’ll have to reapply for her position and may not get it. She and Martin had a brief affair years ago, which ended abruptly. Erin is part of a conservative Bible study cell, pressuring her to drop Kate’s liberal class.

Author Borg uses the characters’ class lectures, sermons and meditations to put forth his progressive views, namely that since the Enlightenment Christianity has changed. The Enlightenment in the 17th century saw the rise of science, in particular Newtonian physics, and called into question such things as the miracles and the creation accounts. Borg offers an alternative vision which sees the miracle stories as symbolic.

He emphasizes the point that something may not be factual, but nevertheless true; he quotes Thomas Mann, who said, “Myth is the way things never were, but always are.” For those who find the word “myth” scary because it often is used in the sense that something is false or made up, rather than real or true—I define “myth” as language about truth which cannot be put into words.

Kate gives a lecture in which she references a study of the word “believe” over time. Before the 1600s “believe” almost always had a person as a direct object; after, it often had a statement as direct object. Believing moved from meaning “committed to” to meaning “agreeing with, giving assent to.”

We see the difference in the idioms “believe that” and “believe in.”

• I believe that Hitler lived.
• I believe in Jesus Christ.

Borg points out an old form of the word was something like “belove.” That still survives, by the way, in the word “beloved.” It involves a whole lot more than accepting a set of factual statements about Jesus.

Habakkuk’s “the righteous will live by faith [believing]” doesn’t mean “agreeing with” doctrinal statements.

Borg moves on to words for faith, three of them.

1. Assensus, intellectual agreement.
2. Fidelitas, faithfulness.
3. Fiducia, trust.

The latter mean living in faithful relationship and risking your life on.

Genuine Christianity requires the second and third. But since the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on science, and the Reformation, on doctrine, the first meaning “agree with” has become ascendant.

Real faith means living in God-confidence, not anxiety and fear.

I find Borg’s thought exciting. I accept the possibility of the miracles being factually as well as symbolically true more than he does. But it’s unimportant because he clearly has a living relationship with God.

What bugs me about the book is its New Age-y themes. Although Christ appears in the book, there are a crystal shop, omens, Melchizedek, and the mysterious Urim and Thummim as well.

Many people may be blest by the book, but I have a feeling of dys-ease about stuff like this, born of Isaiah’s prohibition of the occult (8.19-20).

Today’s Christians have yet to decide where the boundaries are about the occult. Yeah, that includes Harry Potter—all volumes of which I’ve read and admire.

If you compare Narnia to Potter, however, you notice the difference between books drenched in the Bible and the Holy Spirit (Lewis) and books which commend virtue but do not provide a foundation for it (Rowling). The culture has lost much of its Christian light.

I don’t like closed-minded critics, and hope not to be one.

This issue belongs among those like food offered to idols (1 Cor. 8). Some say such things as witches have no life, hence are harmless; while, for others, witchcraft is a grave danger to life in Christ.

Coelho’s book was a good read, a fast read. I especially liked the prologue to the 10th anniversary edition. My dream has been to write and publish, which I’ve done only a little. Perhaps Coelho will encourage me not to let go of that dream yet.

The Pilgrimage, same author, is an autobiographical/fictional account of the author’s pilgrimage along El Camino de Santiago de Compestelo (Way of St. James in northern Spain), which he describes as a life-changing event. Would it answer some of my questions?

Your insights are welcome.

•  Jewish Study Bible, Job.
• Edgar Rice Burroughs. Tarzan, Return of Tarzan, Son of Tarzan. I needed some light reading. Burroughs appeals to the basic pleasures: physical prowess, wealth, danger. But it’s disappointing to find racism and sexism at its rankest in his portrayal of Africans and women.
• The Iliad. I decided, if I wanted to read adventure, I might as well start with the best. I have a series of CDs from the Teaching Company (www.Teach12.com), a great source of knowledge, to help me get the most from the book. It’s challenging, lots of Greek names, lots of spear thrusts through the nipples, and armor clatterng upon people.

I watched streaming video: Perry Mason (cbs.com) and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. What a powerful film! Anyone who works in mental health needs to wrestle with these issues of how our mental health system often simply restrains and reduces people to DSM-IV diagnoses. And, the bars now are interior, so much of the time, with psychotropic meds controlling, changing personality. I’m grateful for the dedication of my docs, but at the same time I know more than one who is like Nurse Wratchett. As for ECT (electro-shock treatments)—they are helpful to a few, abusive to others.

At the moment I’ve not been able to meditate. After a couple of peaceful sessions, I’ve found myself so full of thoughts and restlessness, that after 20 minutes or so on two successive nights I quit. I’m pissed about it. I thought I could manage the basc moves. I guess it’s back to GO, don’t collect $200.

 King is right when he concluded that the U.S. is often on the wrong side of history. Our Declaration of Independence is the first cry for freedom, and peoples throughout the world are inspired by it.

 But America has multiple personality disorder. We love freedom, but we also love the wealth produced by business. And business isn’t democratic. Workers typically do not have free speech. Corporations call on the American military to exercise its might on behalf of their holdings throughout the world. Often we are directly blocking the path of people demonstrating for freedom and for subsistence rather than destitution.

 I love my country. I honor our soldiers for their courage, loyalty and skill. But sometimes I wonder if politicians and business leaders, in private suites of privilege, take advantage of the bravery and commitment of our troops, if in fact we aren’t defending profit rather than freedom.

I’ve been reading spirituality and social issues steadily for months, and decided I need to go a different direction for my next project: Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago.

As a high school student I loved all things Russian. I studied the Russian language for three years, but all that is lost now. I enjoyed, however, seeing things from a different perspective.

Pasternak is a master of creating the artistic scene, especially the striking or elegant metaphor. He also deftly builds character with subtle brush strokes. You really can’t catch him at it, until you’ve read the book more than once.

I also love the book because it’s a gift in 1966 from my beloved sister Patrick. Thanks be to God, she’s survived heart surgery this year and is going strong as ever at age 68!

I’m reading Francis of Assisi by Leonardo Boff. It’s a heady book. But I’m finding it worth the wade. for example:

How, beyond the mysticism of gentle and compassionate identification with the poor and the Crucified, did they make sense of their want?  No one lives by mysticism alone. Life has demands that cannot be opposed permanently. How did they humanize this objective dehumanization that is poverty? It is precisely within the context of poverty that Francis places the problem of fraternity.  Each one’s  poverty implies for others a challenge, in order, to their care, gentleness, and the creation of an atmosphere of openness and security, denied by radical poverty. For Francis, having has been toppled from its pretension of granting security and humanization to persons. Only care for one another truly humanizes life…. Care is the way of being human.

Leonardo Boff, Francis of Assisi: a Model for Human Liberation. (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2006), p. 66.

I can’t describe what happened to me as I read these words. Of course!! I thought. This is it!!

My African brothers and sisters know this principle, because they live it. “Nobody’s poor here, unless they’re alone,” they said. Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement also knew it.

Jesus did exactly this: he invested in people, flesh and blood, fallible people, like Peter and Mary Magdalene.  If they failed, he failed.  If they succeeded, he succeeded.

I don’t know the specifics for me yet.  But I do know the principle: our ultimate security lies, not in bank accounts or IRAs, but in caring for one another, as God cares for us.

Your Father knows what you need before you ask him.

Matt 6:8 (NRSV)

Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you.

1 Peter 5:7 (NRSV)

Flush with the success of earlier efforts, I added a protein booster whey powder, a couple eggs, and two tablespoons of oil.

After 25 minutes in the oven, the knife came out clean.

We cut the cake the next day to store it. It consisted of an outside ring, inside ring and center.

The outside was perfect, a dream of a cake.

The inside was still semi-liquid, doughy.

The center was empty.

T. S. Eliot:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Wow! What an image of spiritual life!

It is critical for our spiritual lives to be real, nourishing, whole.

Not cream puffs without cream.

And, when you’re starving, a good hearty piece of bread is better than a pastry.

I’m reading Dom Helder Camara in the Orbis Books series Modern Spiritual Masters. I was intrigued that I never heard of him before, yet the blurb identified him as a major player in Vatican II and an archbishop (?) who implemented changes to move the Brazilian and Latin American church toward ideals of Poverty and Service.

He embodied the bishop Victor Hugo described in the opening pages of Les Miserables. Fluent in French,  he must have known that book well. The Brazilian dictatorship of the 1960s silenced him in the country, but could not outside.

Conservative, fervent anti-Communist pope John Paul II dismantled most of his accomplishments. His writings are largely in Portuguese and housed in Recife, I believe. Orbis is doing world Christianity a great service in bringing the riches of his thought to light.

I confess I  got a flyer offering them at half off. I purchased:

• Dom Helder Camara
• Pedro Arrupe
• Thomas Merton
• Evelyn Underhill
• Simone Weil
• Writings on Contemplation and Compassion, ed. Robert Ellsburg.

Easily a year’s worth of reading and reflection.  I was introduced to the series by the volume on Dorothee Sölle, the German theologian. That led me to read her magnum opus The Silent Cry, which I’ve written about.

Reading is a way out of despair for me. It helps me in these increasingly dark days. Advent is around the corner, my heart cries out for light, light, light!

Quoting Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls (1993):

“At the [Cuban] National Library in 1969 Lezama [Lima] gave a reading of perhaps one of the most extraordinary essays of Cuban literature under the title ‘Confluences.’ It reaffirmed the creative force, the love of language, the struggle for an integrated image against all  those who opposed it. A sense of beauty is always dangerous and antagonistic to any dictatorship because it implies a realm extending beyond the limits that a dictatorship can impose on human beings. Beauty is a territory that escapes the control of the political police. Being independent and outside of their domain, beauty is so irritating to dictators that they attempt to destroy it whichever way they can. Under a dictatorship, beauty is always a dissident force, because a dictatorship is itself unaesthetic, grotesque, to a dictator and his agents, the attempt to create beauty is an escapist or reactionary act.” p. 87

Arenas is not somebody conservative Christians typically read. He was a promiscuous gay activist in communist Cuba. His writings caught the acclaim of an international audience, and of Castro’s State Security, which hounded Arenas and imprisoned him in El Morro, a notorious lockup for murderers and the like.

Arenas was brutalized. Even after he escaped Cuba by slipping into Key West in the Mariel exodus in 1980, Castro’s agents sought to destroy him.

One night a mysterious blast, like a gunshot, shattered a glass of water in his apartment. Unfortunately, because he was debilitated due to AIDS, poverty, and the struggle to publish as an ostracized Cuban expatriate, he took this shattered glass as an omen, a metaphor of his life. The protective aura he had enjoyed from childhood abandoned him. He died.

He ended a letter published posthumously:  “I do not want to convey to you a message of defeat but of continued struggle and of hope. Cuba will be free. I already am.” (p. 317)

Yet, I find some lessons from his memoir:

• Faith and a living relationship with God make a difference. As tyranny hammered Arenas, he could have benefited from experiencing the unconditional love of God [not the stereotypical right-wing deity, however].
• His commitment to Beauty, truth expressed through literature, and his refusal to use his gift to glorify the state, have transcendent value. Quakers speak about “that of God in everyone.” Arenas’s commitment to writing were “that of God” in him.
• His experience of America as “a country without a soul,” a country tyrannized by “the power of money” is a legitimate warning. I know another America, where people’s love of God and one another is the primary power. But I believe Arenas’ experience is also true. I can’t read the Hebrew prophets, who condemn the rich for caring not at all about the poor, without recognizing parallels in the US today.

Other voices have sounded the warning, too. Aleksandr Solzehnitsyn addressed Harvard; he spoke about how human potential must be balanced by belief in a Supreme Being who gives value to human life and responsibility to human freedom. I also compare Maria von Trapp in Sound of Music with Sally Bowles in Cabaret, two figures iconic of America–but which will we ultimately choose to become?

Not the kind of book you’d expect a preacher to be reading. Lots of rowdy sex.

Besides that, what I like in this book is the longing evident from early days in Arenas’s life, a longing for something missing in the Communist paradise he grew up in.

Maybe food. As a boy he often ate dirt to fill his stomach.

His writing brought him to the attention of the literary community in Cuba. Despite the many parasites who sold out to State Security, there were others who gathered in small groups to read their work.

In one meeting the poet read his original poems, then burned the only copy in a hibachi to the gasps of the crowd. In Cuba it’s criminal to write except in connivance with the State.

Arenas’ friends smuggled his work out of Cuba, and it was published in France, winning acclaim.

He writes that tyranny hates the Beauty of a poem which cannot be enslaved to its purposes.

He would have liked Ephesians 2.10, “We are God’s works of art…” [lit. poema] NJB.

In my heart is a longing that Arenas somewhere, somehow met the God, who might be known by other names—such as Beauty, Medicine, Truth, Justice, Love. Transcendent names.

I don’t know. I’m just really clear that the system I grew up with, in which people were either saved or lost (no other possibilities), doesn’t cover all the people I know.

There are those souls who long for a better God than all the gods they know, souls who serve their better God even though they have no proof their God exists, souls who put many “saved” folks to shame.

C.S. Lewis wrote of one such soul in The Last Battle. Emeth [Hebrew word meaning faithful] was an enemy soldier who loved the pagan bird god Tash fiercely, risked his life to catch a glimpse of Tash, only to learn in Aslan’s country that he had worshiped the great Lion all his life.

Lewis explained, you can’t offer true worship to a false god; nor can you give false worship to the true God. By whatever name they call God true worshipers serve the true God; false worshipers, false gods.

O true God of mercy, love and grace, you have other sheep, belonging to other folds. May you bring them home in peace at the last. Amen

 Note: high pain today, so I can’t write a lot.

Loss of pastoral care and counseling centers and training programs

I first encountered Gerald May through his book Will and Spirit: A Contemplative Psychology, (1982). At the time I was a full-time resident at the Virginia Institute of Pastoral Care (VIPCare), one of pastoral care and counseling’s premier institutions. We didn’t know then, but only one resident would come after me. Economics would slowly squeeze the educational program, until today it is a faint shadow of what it was.

Although almost nobody noticed, we lost one of the most valuable assets in the field, and not only at VIPCare. Across the nation pastoral counseling centers themselves are going out of business, and training and certification has been handed off to the university and the state.

Pastoral counseling uniquely focuses on the personhood of the counselor and her spiritual and professional formation. Secular training programs, modeled on the university, train the intellect and barely nod at the person, whose own largely unexamined unconscious and spirit will drive her counseling practice.

Active and passive praying

Anyway. Back to G. May and his writing. Gerald May’s The Dark Night of the Soul is deceptively simple. (G. May, of course, is distinct from Rollo May, also an outstanding psychologist and author.)

He gives an overview of the lives and writings of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, 16th century religious geniuses. John also is Spain’s national poet.

I’ve never had much success reading either of these people.

May defines “meditation” as primarily all the exercises and forms of prayer that we do, whereas “contemplation” is God’s sheer gift. All we can do with regard to the latter is “to welcome it with open arms.” These definitions vary with different writers. The definitions I’m more familiar with are:

• meditation, the first stage of praying, active, characterized by use of methods, images, thought.
• contemplation, a usually more “advanced” stage of praying, passive (receptive, welcoming with open arms), open, imageless, thoughtless.

I”m sorry to use the word “advanced” because it brings in all kinds of unwanted associations. But I can’t think of a better term.

May says prayer is active and passive. The two intermingle. You go back and forth from beginning to “advanced” phases. (There is no such thing as “advanced”; in prayer we’re all beginners.)

I like the image of God and soul as dance partners. (The “soul” is the deepest part of yourself, where you are most truly you, where God also is.) In active praying the human partner’s movement is more in view; in passive, God’s movement is. But both are interactive in both.

The human activity in the “passive” phase, however, is being receptive, welcoming with open arms. This is what Buddhists and others call “mindfulness,” a relaxed state of loving attentiveness to all that is.

(continued)

 Your feedback will be especially valuable to me. I hope you find these explorations of use in your daily walk with God.