LITMIR.BIZ

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yourself more closely to the moral axis of the universe? Does it help you see reality more clearly? Does it put in your mind the presence and compassion of the others around you? If it is yours, then it is true, believable, valid.

      Q. Is it all relative? no absolutes?

      A. Misstated question! For you it is absolute, if it works, if it’s yours, if it aligns you. For you it may be Christianity, for someone else Islam, or Judaism or Buddhism.

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      Feast of St. Luke the Evangelist—October 18, 2010

      Patron Day, with a full house, thirty in the choir, a brass quintet accompanying the organ for the festivities and the rededication of the building after all the work. But earlier this morning I considered that, given all the craziness, greed, power-mongering, senselessness, amorality and madness rampant throughout the world, I could easily conclude that man is nothing more than an evolved mammilian, no soul, no more immortality than the fish in the ocean from which we probably evolved, even though we might have a touch more self-awareness or self-consciousness, albeit we have no clear evidence; it may be that some other creatures may have some degree of self-awareness as well. The evidence Robert Wright sees which suggests there is a moral axis to the universe is so sketchy and vague to my eyes, so unreliable and inconclusive that I have to stretch my credulity in order to concur. And when that is stacked against the horrors and amorality in this world that seem unchecked in any way—given the amorality of even our own leaders (their only ethical yardstick is to get re-elected). Then I wonder if there is any moral force for good to be reckoned with. Or are we as a species morally adrift completely, unanchored, wafted by any breeze, any whim?

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      Susan suggests that Freud thought the first stage of development is the naive, unknowledgeable innocence before the child begins to differentiate. Could then the mystic be doing naught more than remembering his intra-uterine experience, which most of us cannot recall?

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      Pentecost XXII—October 24, 2010

      At the Grounds for Discussion Coffee Hour Stephen started to share his learnings from the courses he took on sabbatical. He titles his presentation “The Once and Future Church” and intends to lead the conversation into the issues of how we should be reshaping St. Luke’s to move into the future. But I am in a different discussion. I’m not concerned with how we should reshape the church. I’m asking the much more basic questions for which I suspect there are no answers. And I have no notion what the responses should, or even could be. What could the church be, what should the church become, what ought to be the mission/task of the church today and tomorrow?

      I think that saving the world for Christ, and selling Jesus to every human being have become stupid missions. We need to radically rethink just what Jesus wanted us to be about, and what we think we ought to be about, religiously and morally. Convincing everyone that Jesus is the way, the only way has become dysfunctional, counterproductive, dangerously divisive and antagonizing. It’s not merely repackaging the product that’s needed. It’s rethinking what we’re trying to accomplish. Jesus is no longer the product we’re selling. It’s whatever Jesus and Buddha and Mohamed and Moses were all about, what they hold in common, what is the root of all religious thought and action.

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      Pentecost XXIV—November 7, 2010

      I think it has become time for me to start writing, but how to start? Maybe with the linchpins I have in hand today (I seem to be swinging ape-like, from one set of linchpins to another, towards something, or just indiscriminately?).

      (1) I am reading about mystics. They seem to be among the great innovators, re-directors of the church, of the faith, in other religions as well. But I wrestle with “What are they?” Rare persons who really can be in touch with god, the divine, the Absolute? Or merely special persons able to do . . . . What? In deep contemplation to put things together, develop insights, experience? Or re-experience prenatal comfort/memories? What are these mystics? They seem to provide some common ground across religious boundaries.

      (2) Robert Wright makes deep sense to me, debunking the Scriptures, talking about cultural evolution, sensing a moral compass built into the universe. But where do you go with that?

      (3) I see/hear/experience the Dalai Lama, a person with a truly remarkable comfortableness, humility, an informed naivete, some very profoundness, but in this world extremely improbable/impractical insights. He truly makes (Tibetan) Buddhism sensible, more sensible than the Christian gospels. It all makes the Hebrew YHWH seem quite childish. Yet the Dalai Lama is silent about God, as though God makes no difference (which may be correct). Buddhism is a system about living not a metaphysic about pre-universe. Attractive, but not my circle of standing stones. Our Scriptures are a Rorschach; ergo tradition must move to the center, replacing the Scriptures, traditions about the hows of interpreting Scriptures, i.e., what and how to project without violating (whatever).

      (4) I become more and more convinced that Christianity is just one expression of what lies beyond, one expression among many equally valid expressions. But what does lie beyond?

      (5) Sin is an outmoded, unuseful, misleading notion. Buddhism’s interdependency and intertwinedness is a much more functional model, but does it sufficiently cope with the evil in the world? Really need to work on that.

      (6) All religion, all religious ideation/language is purely metaphorical. Yes, but how to more adequately conceptualize what lies beyond the metaphor? And so I need to completely rethink what our religious language and ideation means in this twenty-first-century world/universe. And especially re-think whatever the mystics are trying to convey to us.

      (7) The main business of the church is to stay in business. The truly religious/spiritual/ spiritually enervating things happen outside the church, at the fringes of the church, and never can be at the center. When the main, dominating mission of the church is to stay in business, to survive into the next millennium, then any mission emerging out of spiritual insight must take place outside the church or it will simply be overwhelmed, swallowed up by the survival efforts of church.

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      I’ve spent my life’s work theologizing, and I simply can’t turn it off. I can stop priesting and sermonizing but not theologizing.

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      Advent I—November 28, 2010

      So, as I wrote John Kauffman, the Christian metaphor has gone dry and dusty for me. I can bemoan and grieve that, or I can move out into the wilderness. It seems useless, non-productive and pretty stupid to waste my energies screaming about inconsistencies, inaccuracies, misdirections and such. Instead, the real and productive challenge is to look through the storied metaphor as a lens that may help see beyond the physical, and learn to search out what lies beyond. I know the God is not in the story. But what clues does the story give me to what is beyond? And to see beyond the God, to see what is it about?

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      Epiphany VI—February 13, 2011

      Another take on this morning’s gospel reading, Matthew 5:21-37 (from the Sermon on the mount). I need to begin with a footnote: the Buddha lived and taught some half-millennium before Jesus. There is only the vaguest, unlikeliest possibility that some of his teaching may have reached Jesus’ ears. It is only a slightly less vague possibility that, both being mystics, they taught similar things. And further, it is similarly the distinct possibility, nay, probability that Jesus’ followers wildly misunderstood some of his teachings, and in particular this set of teachings. End of footnote.

      Matthew the Hebrew, preaching to an orthodox Jewish community, presents these teachings like a reformist Pharisee, as intensifying the take on Torah and the concurrently developing oral midrash. He fills the law up thereby making it so much more stringent, so much more as to make it impossible to keep. That take I think quite misunderstands Jesus’ intent. I think it quite perverts his intent and misdirects our attention. I think what Jesus is trying to teach is not a more stringent law which we are doomed to fail, but rather a wholly different understanding

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