Apologizes to those who have been following my blog and wondered why there haven’t been any postings for the last month or so.  Well I have just posted 7 reflections which cover those weeks – plenty of reading. 

Blessings

Christopher Page

Still Thinking – The Film: The Way

The film The Way, currently screening in Melbourne is worth seeing.  It is the story of a man walking the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, also known in English as The Way of St James. The Camino – the road or the way - traditionally starts in St Jean Pied de Port in France and finishes in Santiago de Compostela, a distance of 780km traveling through Northern Spain.  For centuries it has been a spiritual and religious pilgrimage walked by pilgrims as an act of devotion and personal reflection.

I won’t give away too much of the story of the film but suffice to say that it is the journey of father who longs to be reconnected to his son.  Travelling The Way becomes for him like many pilgrimages, a metaphor for life itself.  As this man walks the road and covers many kilometres each day, he begins to find not only his son, but himself.  And this happens through conversations with the companions he meets on the road; through the many ordinary experiences of daily life that somehow point the extraordinariness of life and the unrelenting beauty, wonder and splendour of the landscape he passes through.  And slowly all this and the passing of each day does its work on his inner world.

During my “pilgrimage” to Jerusalem in 2007 the first words I wrote in my journal was a quote from the English writer G.K. Chesterton, “The traveller sees what he sees. The tourist sees only what he has come to see.”  As I set out on my own journey of discovery I wanted to see what was before and not just impose my preconceived ideas of what I should see or more importantly, what I had planned to see, on the travel experience.  So the three hour trip in the shuttle bus (the sherut) from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which could have been done in half an hour became and adventure rather than an inconvenience.  I spoke at length with Israelis, Germans and Americans about why they had come to the Holy Land and each responded with their own personal story.  In the film the experience of a stolen backpack takes the “pilgrims” on a rich and satisfying journey. 

Early in the film the son of the man we are following on The Camino says to his father, “You don’t choose a life, you live a life.”  And our capacity to let go of the life we think we should live and embrace life as it is lived is the key to life in all its fullness.  I am sure I have quoted the Irish philosopher and poet John O’Donohue when he wrote, “I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.  Those words have become like a mantra for me because I see in them the challenge to surrender the false and egoist desires of life and embrace life that is. 

Thomas Merton the Catholic Monk had a very clear sense that we live either through the true self or the false self.  He wrote:

Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self.  This is the person that I want myself to be, but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him.

I find that helpful because if life is about anything it is about letting go of illusions and living into reality.  On The Camino the father through his own personal journal began to see who he was, what he valued and only then could he recover the relationship with his son.  He found the “isness” of life.  He found that truth in both in his travel companions and the landscape he travelled through, but most importantly he found his true self.  The self that is known only in God.

Christopher

Still Thinking -Confluence: Where the rivers flow together

Big Tent Christianity is a movement in the USA that is bringing together voices from various places within the Christian tradition.  Last year in Phoenix, Arizona those from, “Progressive and Emergent; Denominational and Non-denominational; Large and Small Faith Communities; Describable and Indescribable,” gathered for a three day conference with the objective, “to bring people together from across the country to proclaim what unites us as followers of Jesus in this modern world.”

It may not mean that much for those of us in Australia, but the ability to get Marcus Borg Carol Howard Merritt, Brian McLaren, Richard Rohr, Philip Clayton, Spencer Burke and several other theologians and pastors together to share what unites them rather than what divides them is remarkable.  Much of the history of Christian faith has been schismatic.  Often when we disagree we separate; if our opinions collide we leave; when I am offended by your beliefs, I walk away.  The notion that evangelicals, traditionalist, liberals and progressive can not only be in the same room, but listen to, and show respect for, those who hold different views is surely a sign of the presence of God’s Spirit.

In geography there is a term called “confluence.”  It is the meeting of two or more bodies of water and usually refers to the point where streams flow together, merging into a single stream.  In history we can often observe a confluence of ideas.  When the time and place is right and there is an openness to sharing formative experiences with one another, we can see the creation of a confluence - a flowing together  - where a new revitalized stream of life is created.  But it only happens when there is a genuine respect and even a curiosity about the other.  If one believes that their group is the sole possessor of truth, than confluence is not possible.

I think that one aspect of confluences that troubles some is that when the rivers flow together a lot of mud is stirred up. The merging of two streams of thought or two or three traditions is never without turbulence and often produces a good deal of murkiness.  The purists are fearful that the best in their tradition will be lost, or at least diluted in merging with the values and principles of others.  But what is often not seen is that life itself is a continuous confluence.  It is in fact what gives us life, from the mingling of sperm and egg, to the meeting of true friends and the coming together of two people in marriage, all are confluences in the best sense of the word.

What keeps faith alive is not a dogged commitment to following the only true way, but an active and creative dialogue with both friends and strangers who travel the religious path with us. What keeps our Christian life alive is our willingness to open our hearts and minds to the insights we gain in our conversations, our readings and those times when we intuit that someone different from us, has offered us a new understanding of and old idea.

It was the poet John O’Donohue who wrote, “I would love to live like a river flows carried by the surprise of its own unfolding,” an image that speaks of a living faith that is neither stagnate nor dull, but vibrant and vital always open to the change that comes when I encounter other life streams.

Christopher

Still Thinking- Anzac Day

 I am the first male in my family for four generations who has not gone to war.  My great-grandfather was in the British army in South Africa.  He fought in the Boer War and I have his service medals listing the battles in which he fought.  My grandfather enlisted in 1941 at the age of 39 to fight in World War II.  He spent eighteen months in Bougainville.  As a child I asked him what it was like to be in the war in New Guinea.  All I remember him sayings was that it was very boring and that he didn’t have dry pair of socks for eighteen months.  His brothers had all at some point in their lives been in the army.

My father joined the Navy in 1950 and served in the Korean War on the Tribal Class Destroyer HMAS Arunta.  For two years he was stationed in Japan and I was four years old when he returned to live permanently in Australia.  During that time my mother, sister and I lived with my father’s parents.  My father had been away for so long that I called my grandfather Dad and continued calling him Dad until his death.  My father’s brother was also in the navy for several years.

The closest I came to enlistment was in 1972 when I was twenty years of age and there was National Conscription to support the Vietnam War. I recall the day the lottery of birthdays was announced on the radio.  I was working as a cadet land survey in Queensland and I listened as the birth dates of those where called up were read out.  They began in January and picking the dates from a lottery machine moved toward my birthday, April 10.  As it got closer I could feel myself holding my breath.  I was pretty sure I didn’t want to fight in Vietnam.  It wasn’t that I was so politically aware of the situation, I suspect for me it was more personal.  I had no desire to subject myself to the military way of life.  I had had a brief time in my school’s Army Cadet Corp and that was disastrous.  The lottery passed my birthday and I breathed a sigh of relief

.

Since then I have reflected on my understanding as a Christian minister on war. I am not a pacifist; I do believe there is a time for resisting violence with violence.  However, I suspect that violence is used far too often when wisdom demands diplomacy and peaceful strategies.  It is also imperative that we take seriously Jesus’ command to” love your enemy.” I think he means by that to love them before you get to the stage of violence.  If we loved our enemies around the world now, maybe we would not have to go to war later.  And of course at the most practical level war cause irreparable damage on human and non-human levels.  That’s why we say, “Lest we Forget.”  The reason I remember and celebrate Anzac Day is so that I will not forget the cost of war. It is a way to respect those who have died and support those who have lost loved ones and to imagine a world without violence.

Christopher

Still Thinking Abundance

Much of Jesus’ teaching encouraged his listeners to live life with a sense of abundance.  While later Christianity has tended to restrict and limit this teaching to what a person could or could not do, the Gospel’s give a strong message that the ministry of Jesus was about removing the restrictions and opening the lives of his followers to the abundance and fullness that one could encounter in this world.  It is probably no surprise that one of my favourite verse in the Bible is the passage in John’s gospel Chapter 10, verse 10, where Jesus’ says to his disciples, “a thief comes to steal, kill and destroy; I have come that you may have life and may have it in all its fullness.”

There are many thieves in this world that would destroy abundant/full living today.  This includes rule based religions; immoral and unethical living; fear of failure; the unwillingness to take risks and even a distorted view of ourselves and others.  But I want to focus on just one thief of abundant living and that is the thief of attachment.   For us in middle Australia this is always a difficult subject.  We have so much and yet we seldom feel as if we have enough.  It is also difficult because our economic society is based on consumerism. If we stop consuming then the retail industry suffers and we all suffer (economically at least.)

But constant consumerism and the need for continual growth is not the same as living a life of abundance. While there are real human needs that must be meet, housing, food, education, transport among others, there are true limits to how the things we consume contribute to an abundant life.

Few have been more articulate on this subject than the director of the Australia Institute, Clive Hamilton.  In two of his books, Growth Fetish and Affluenza, Hamilton takes Australian society to task for its financial and consumerist obsessions.  He suggests that Westfield shopping centres are more the “quintessential icons of modern Australia,” than the Sydney Opera House and Uluru.  He argues that two thirds of we Australians can’t afford what they buy and then once we have bought it, we become the third biggest generator of landfill per capita in the world. I heard someone complained recently about having to purchase a digital TV because the analogue signal will soon be switched off.  They purchased the television and took the old one to the tip and there at the tip they saw a mountain of discarded analogue TVs.

I don’t raise this because I am a non-consumer, that is not even possible, but because at its heart consumerism is a spiritual and theological approach to life.  Buying stuff and having more and more things can be a way of dealing with the hunger in us for what is called “the More”  and the more is the desire to live with abundance.  But a grain of wisdom and a pinch of maturity shows us that the things, the stuff we have, seldom feeds the need in human beings to satisfy their desire for “the More.”  Spiritual hunger can only be satisfied spiritually.  That means we apply spiritual principles to our lives such as; less is more; or to have something - one must let go of it; to find oneself - one must lose oneself; and abundance is discovered in who we are, not in than what we have.

And of course no stronger words can be said than what Jesus said, “I have come that you might have life and have it abundantly.”

Christopher

Still Thinking – Atheism

“The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science … We have to devote a significant proportion of our time and resources to defending it from deliberate attack from organized ignorance …" Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion. 

"The number of churchgoers in Australia is about 9% and dwindling, the diversity of spiritual belief is flourishing and atheism is going off like a frog in a sock." Catherine Deveny The Age, Melbourne February 18, 2009.

The Atheists are coming!  In fact, they are already here.  Last Friday the Global Atheist Convention 2012 began in Melbourne with keynote speakers Richard Dawkins, Peter Singer, Catherine Deveny, AC Grayling and Geoffrey Robinson just to name a few.  These are probably household names to those who have rejected religion and are seeking some sense of community among the “disbelievers.” Atheism has a long and colourful history.  It is a philosophical approach to life that is born in the rejection of religious faith and religious belief.  Atheists are the more militant wing of the Agnostic movement – those who don’t know or don’t care for discussion about God and belief.  Atheists are willing to engage the enemy – we religionists and the new Atheist take no prisoners.

I think Atheists are both right and wrong.  First, why they are wrong. Richard Dawkins in his book The God Delusion spends most of his argument attacking all religious people regardless of their theological persuasions.  Fundamentalist and social reformers are all in the same basket.  If one is motivated by a religious impulse beyond one’s self, then that is to be condemned.  Sorry, but that doesn’t make sense.  Religion, like any human activity can be healthy or unhealthy.  Beliefs can be destructive or creative.  People can kill each other in the name of their God or they can bring the hope and healing through their love of God and all people. In the quest for absolutism many atheists walk the same pathway as religious fundamentalists.  They take a straw figure of what the religious person should be like and then blow it over.  Human beings are far more complex than these easy caricatures.

But the atheists also have it right.  Atheists often accuse religious people of having an “invisible or imaginary friend,” and that God is just an illusion or delusion to make life easier.  This can be true.  It has taken us sometime to unshackle ourselves from images of God that are at best unhelpful and at worst, dangerous.  Marcus Borg in his book Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, tells the story of a young student who says to him, “I don’t believe in God!”  To which Marcus replies, “Tell me the God you don’t believe in and I probably don’t believe in him either!”  The atheists have helped us see that it is not just believing in God that counts, but rather it is the God we believe it that really counts.

While religion is constructed from our human experience it is also a response to the very source of life itself.  We know that not everything in this magnificent universe is constructed in the mind of human beings.  It is equally possible that we are constructed in the mind of God within the universe and that God, like the human mind is much bigger that we originally thought.

Christopher

Still Thinking – Easter Love

Recent scholarship has shown us that there was a great diversity among the Christian gatherings and communities after the death of Jesus.  The central debate among those communities was between Jewish and non-Jewish (Hellenistic) beliefs and practices.  These were expressed through a diversity of rituals, symbols and practices in those first Christian communities. The writings of Paul to the churches were often a response to the question, “how should we follow Jesus in our gatherings,” rather than just specific questions about belief.  Some have argued that the early church was more concerned with orthopraxy - right action, than it was with orthodoxy – right belief. And of course this was motivated by the view that Jesus had initiated a movement of radical inclusive love not just a system of belief.  The following quote for Wikipedia is helpful:

Christians proclaimed a God of love who enjoined them to share a higher love with one another. Some interpreted the Old Testament as revealing primarily a God of justice, whereas the New Testament, particularly the letters of Paul and the Gospel of John, revealed a more loving God. Parallels are found in Pharisaic and Rabbinic Judaism. Paul of Tarsus is represented in Acts 17:22-33 as equating the Unknown God of the Greeks as revealed in the Christian God. Early Christian communities welcomed everyone, including slaves and women, who were generally shunned in Greco-Roman culture…

Oh dear, where did we go wrong? Perhaps it was in our (the early Christian Community’s) embracing of Empire.  It is difficult to find anywhere, where the church and the state have come together, that the church has been able to maintained its commitment to radical love.  When the Christian church no longer wants to be the salt, but instead become the salt shaker, it tends to lose it unique savour.  Maybe this evolution from Christian community to state sanctioned church is built into the very message of the early church.  The more successful we are at making disciples, the greater the desire to make the whole society in which we live, Christian.  And so the community that practices this form of radical inclusive love must bow the knee to what our society or nation tells us.  Therefore the enemies of the state become the enemies of our Christian faith.  We can no longer love our enemies because the state to which be give allegiances forbids it.

However, the most subversive Christian communities have always been willing to love and include whoever they choose.  While love is a belief of the Christian faith, it only finds true expression in action.  It is said of the infant Christian community by those outside, “Oh how they love each other.”  While that was in the first century, the same was also said of the Methodist/Wesleyan communities that gathered around the Wesley brothers in the late 18^th and early 19th century.  It seems that these gatherings of people lived, as the early church did, in a time of exceptional grace. And such times encourage a spirit of welcome and hospitality.

Do we live in such a time today? Is there a movement of open and welcoming hospitality in our age, in the 21^st century?  As we unshackle ourselves from the oppressive aspects of our society and culture and practice what we preach, will we experience a time of exceptional grace? When we stop trying to be like other Christian churches and communities and become authentically ourselves drawing from the well of inclusive love, will that shape and reshape us into the kind of community where our words and actions are in harmony?  I believe so. That’s Easter love!

Christopher