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

Still Thinking – Soul

Over the last few years I have been involved in a “Circle of Trust” which is a contemplative group developed by Quaker writer and scholar Parker Palmer.  Those who have read Parker’s writings will know that there is a great deal of emphasis on what he calls the soul.  The word soul has been used in many different ways throughout history.  Stretching back to Plato and Aristotle philosophers and theologians have attempted to understand and explain what the soul is.  In Parker’s writings the soul is the heart; the true self; the inner life; the centre of our being.  But most of all it is a metaphor that names a way of being and a way of life. It is not an object that you can find or discover by searching rather it is something we experience in times of struggle or in solitude. It is the real you.

May Sarton in one of her poems expresses it this way:

Now I become myself. It has

Taken many years and places

I have been dissolved and shaken

Worn other people’s faces.

That becoming myself has something to do with the soul and our soul is the gift God gives to us.  It is in fact me or my life.  Throughout the centuries theologians have suggested that the Imago Dei, the Image of God which in Genesis is the imprint of God on humankind, maybe marred, suppressed, distorted or neglected but it can never be obliterated. The centre, the inner life, the soul, the God-self in us is permanent, resilient and tenacious. 

Parker in his book A Hidden Wholeness says that the soul is like a wild animal and I want to add to that that this wild animal he calls soul is the mark of God in our lives, the Imago Dei. We often interpret wild animal to mean vicious or frightening, but look at how Parker uses this metaphor:

Like a wild animal, the soul is tough, resilient...and knows how to survive in hard places. I have learned these qualities during my bouts of depression.  In that deadly darkness, the faculties I had always relied on collapsed...But from time, to time deep in the thickets of my inner wilderness, I could sense the presence of something that knew how to stay alive...

For me that is the Image of God imprinted on my life.  It is where I find courage to match fear; hope to match despair; wonder to match busyness; and peace to match confusion.  It is the centre of my being, and while I may image it as a strong wild animal, like all wild things that are undomesticated, it is shy and will only appear when it is safe.  My soul, the centre of my being survives by being aware of the dangers around me and seeks solace in safe communities where I can both be myself and grow toward wholeness.  May TUC be such a place where the soul in each of us is nurtured, nourished and cherished.

Christopher

Still Thinking – The Atonement

There can be in our journey to Easter quite an emphasis on suffering.  Because the resurrection of Jesus is preceded by his violent death, many have argued that even in the new life the Christian is called to accept that both healing and suffering are woven together into their lives.

Throughout Christian history there has been many theories put forward in an attempt to explain and promote the relationship between Jesus’ death and its relationship to the Christian.  Most theories of what has been called the “atonement” are shaped by the world view of their proponents.  Many of the authors in the New Testament and the Hebrew Scriptures rely on a “blood sacrifice” view of atonement and reconciliation. 

Most hold the view that a price must be paid in blood, the blood of a perfect and innocent sacrifice, to a Holy God who is distant and often vengeful.  Many passages in the Bible are drawn from this world view.  However, that world view does not exist in our culture and time.  It is in fact both repulsive and abhorrent.

There are other views in the Bible about how the death of Jesus is understood and related to the present experience of Christ among us. It was in the twelfth century that the controversial theologian Peter Abelard began to argue that the death of Jesus was not about blood sacrifice, it was in fact, about love. This came to be named the "moral theory of atonement."

It the twelfth century, the common view of the atonement was that Jesus’ death paid a debt, either to God or to the Devil, that humans could not pay ourselves, but Abelard approached the matter from a more subjective angle. He explained that Jesus’ life and death were such radical demonstrations of the love of God that we are moved to love God in response, and God then forgives us on the basis of that love. He wrote

Our redemption through the suffering of Christ is that deeper love within us which not only frees us from slavery to sin but also secures for us the true liberty of the children of God, in order that we might do all things out of love rather than out of fear - love for him who has shown us such grace that no greater can be found.

This view of the atonement became popular during the Enlightenment, a time of intense scepticism towards anything transcendent or supernatural.

It was Peter Abelard who also made significant contributions to Christian thought in the areas of ethics and sin. He controversially taught that humans are not born with original guilt, as no person can be guilty for the sin of another.  He argued that there is no guilt until we have agreed with or acted upon our “sinful” inclination. Whether an act is good or evil depends entirely on one's intention.  And finally, Abelard insisted that no person can absolve another person of sin, so the function of confession can only be to instruct the sinner in the proper penance not to absolve the person from their sin.

While much of Abelard’s language and this theological constructs are foreign to the twenty-first century, he did give a fresh approach to the stale theology of the scholastics and their dogged ascent to time worn doctrines.  As we move toward Easter our hearts are fixed on the love of God demonstrated in the life and the death of Jesus; a God of love who is seen in the capacity to receive the violence of our world and not retaliate with violence.

Christopher 

Still Thinking – Death and Dying

I never thought much about my own death when I was a young person even through at the age of 13 I was in the house when my mother died.  While I had an awareness of what death was I was too much immersed in life to dwell on it.  I recall a real feeling of irritation as a teenager when a travelling evangelist came to Upper Mt Gravatt Baptist Church and at the conclusion of his sermon told us, “As you leave the church tonight and walk out into the street you could be hit by a bus and killed.  So if you don’t accept Jesus as your Lord and Saviour tonight you will spend the rest of eternity in hell!” As a “God intoxicated” sixteen year old whose mother had died when she was 32 years old, I truly felt that I knew more about life and death than this itinerant preacher did.

While my mother’s death left an indelible mark on my life the only time thoughts of my own death would pass through my mind as a young person was when I was engaged in something dangerous - like diving off the rocks into the surf at Currumbin beach and then the fear was more about being injured than actually drowning. However, life and aging does change our reflections on death and dying. 

At the ripe old age of 59 I do think more about my own death today than I did ten or fifteen years ago.  But, and I suspect this is true of most in the second half of life, my concern is not so much with death, that final terminus, but with the “process” of dying.  What can be worrying is the manner in which I will die.  I don’t lie awake at night fearful that one day I will die, neither do I want to live forever, but I know that dying often - not always - takes some time.  Perhaps it’s the fear of the loss of control when doctors or my wife or adult children make decisions for me; or the loss of dignity when forced to wear those hospital gowns designed to display ones rear end to the world. I don’t think I fear the pain or the discomfort and while I don’t want to be euthanized, I do want to have the right to both pain medication and the final say about the end of my life.

I am aware that such a discussion is much easier in the theoretical or hypothetical than it is when faced with the sting of death and the cloak of dying but the Christian faith has taught us that death is a part of life and that those who face their own death can then live more fully.  During my time in the desert on the men’s initiation retreat with Richard Rohr I spent a day by myself on the top of hill contemplating my death.  We all had a simple sentence we were to contemplate for 8 hours.  That sentence was, “You are going to die!” What began in the morning as a trite recitation of the sentence, ended after a day’s work with tears, longings and a love for living.  “Death,” someone said, “is too important to leave to the end of life.” 

This morning we will consider the story of Jesus drawing his disciples into the paradoxical truth that “only those who lose their lives for the sake of gospel will save their lives,” I hope that in this story we can still see the flowering of hope and life.

Christopher

Still Thinking – Jesus through the Centuries

John Churcher in his recent book Setting Jesus Free suggests that the

“Jesus of Nazareth was the breaker of barriers that separate and the final barrier to be broken was that between life and death.”

It goes without saying that Jesus still remains one of the most important figures in western civilization even as our society becomes more and more secular and materialist.  For those of us in the Christian church Jesus is far more than an influential figure his life, message, and teaching, is what shapes and forms us every day. But that only occurs when Jesus is “set free.”

The slow movement of history has a way of placing a kind of veneer over the facts and events it is carrying.  We know that the Christian Church has passed through several “reformations” and each time a different and sometimes a new view of Jesus has emerged.  Jaroslav Pelikan in his book Jesus Through the Centuries chronicles the various names and cultural identities given to Jesus through the last two millennia.  Would you believe that in English society in the nineteenth century it was common to refer to Jesus as the “perfect gentleman”? That does not sound like a barrier breaker does it?.  More common of course are the Biblical names that are attributed to Jesus of Nazareth. 

From the second century onward there was more and more emphasis placed on the divine names for Jesus as against the “earthly” names.  For example we know that the early church place a lot of importance on Jesus being a Rabbi/teacher.  In the story of the empty tomb Mary addresses Jesus as Rabbi.  By the third and fourth centuries AD Jesus is referred to as God. For some this was blasphemy for others it was the natural progression for a leader to be deified by his followers. It was left to the various Church councils to come up with some way to reconcile not only the many designations given to Jesus but to state what is the nature of this person who grew up in Palestine and was now seated at the right hand of God in heaven.  So in 451AD the Council of Chalcedon established what is called the doctrine of Hypostatic Union which states

…following the holy Fathers, all with one consent, teach people to confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in Godhead and also perfect in manhood; truly God and truly man, of a rational soul and body; consubstantial with the Father according to the Godhead, and consubstantial with us according to the Manhood;

It is probably not the language we would use today, but in its time it was a very successful marriage between Christian theology and Greek philosophy.  It stood until the nineteenth century when the inherent logical error that placed all of the godhead in one human being became apparent and so the formula began to collapse.

In the 21st century it seems that the most powerful way we can image the presence and nature of Jesus is in the human.  The Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonheoffer called Jesus “the man for others.”  And more recently the predominant way in which the designation, “Son of Man” is translated is as “the Human One.” That may sound strange to our ears because it is not as familiar as other names for Jesus, but it does resonate with our time and culture.

Someone once said, “…the more we worship Jesus the less we seem to follow him.”  The further we push Jesus away from being like us, the less we identify with his call to show love, justice, compassion and hopefulness.

Christopher

Still Thinking  - Choosing Freedom

I was 16 years of age when I first responded in a Baptist church to an invitation to follow Jesus.  It took a lot in me to overcome my embarrassment at claiming my private conviction in such a public way.  Some would say that that is the point.  There are no secret followers of Jesus, so overcoming one’s natural shyness catapults a person to a new and higher level of religious commitment.

After this first time, it got easier to come forward in response to the preacher’s call.  In fact, I made quite a habit of “walking the sawdust trail” as the Southern Baptists have called it.  Partly, as a deeply religious young person, I was always seeking a kind of religious perfection.  I knew that I was not as faithful as I could be; I knew that I had been sinful and failed to meet God’s standards.  But really, preaching about sin to adolescents is like shooting fish in a barrel, you know you will always hit a good number of them.

As I reflected on those experiences some forty years ago, I realize that they probably kept me in the church, but sadly truncated my experience of life and of God, Jesus and the Spirit.  It took some years to experience what the apostle Paul called in Romans 8:21, “the glorious liberty of the children of God.”  That experience came with the realization that it was not so much that I need to be “saved,” but rather what I craved was to be liberated; to be set free from that which bound and limited me in my spiritual and daily life.  And one of those things I needed liberation from, as I discovered later, was religion.  Now that may sound strange coming from a minister, but if we recognize that Jesus never established a religion and was in fact critical of binding oneself to rules, codes and religious practices, then freedom from religion is the goal of the good news that Jesus preached.

Don’t get me wrong I love the church.  I love the rich and diverse history that covers the last two thousand years.  And I am very aware that we need an institution that gives shape to the Body of Christ. However, if the church is a formal, boundary setting, belief testing institution, then we all know it is off track.  But if it is the living, breathing spirit of Jesus, alive in the world, then we are on track. 

Religious educators tell us that young people need strong, challenging and decisive institutions that give them boundaries and yet freedoms within those boundaries.  Young people want to be part of a movement, but they also want to know what the ground rules are.  As they mature they crave that strange paradox of wanting to belong and yet desiring unlimited freedom.  We know that young people, particularly young males are risk-takers and this can cause them and others a lot of heart ache.  But it really can’t be any other way and the church needs to provide for both aspects of youthful maturation.  While what we call “conversion” is an important experience for young people it should be associated with claiming the good news of life lived fully through Jesus and not the limited moralist, sin based view that many of us passed through in our teenage years.

Christopher

Still Thinking – This is your Brain of Prayer

Dr Andrew Newberg has worked for many years developing a field of research called Neurotheology. This field of enquiry takes seriously contemporary studies on the human brain and the history of Christian and religious theology, particularly the mystical approach and tries to understand why human beings as so predisposed to ideas and experiences of “God”.

Attempting to bring a coherent approach to this discipline, Newberg produced a book in 2001 titled, Why God Won’t go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief and more recently in 2009, How God Changes your Brain.   Both are fascinating reads, albeit a bit technical at times.  Simply put over a period of years, Newberg studied the brains of people in the act of meditation, prayer and visualizing religious experiences.  Using an Electroencephalography, (EEG) machine, he gathered data on the changes in particular areas of the brain when the subjects engaged in “spiritual” activities. He found that the parts of the brain that “lit up” during these experiments were associated with the limbic system.  

The limbic system is the part of the brain that contains the amygdala, hypothalamus, and hippocampus and limbic cortex. It is found on top of the brainstem. This system as a whole is responsible for our feelings of love, fear, anger, jealousy, embarrassment, pride and elation and the emotions needed to ensure survival including sexual pleasure and memory. The cerebral cortex lies above these structures. That’s the technical part, what is important is that this area is the oldest structure in the brain and it is the location of our religious and spiritual feelings.

When a person prayers or meditations the limbic system in the brain is activated and with sustained practice the individual can have two competing experiences, either a depth sense of calm and peace or a strong sense of union or oneness with God.  Newberg is quick to remind his audience that he is measuring only the human physiological response to an encounter or experience of the “holy”. This neither proves nor disproves the existence of God in the same way that he can measure a person’s response to eating a sandwich which neither proves nor disproves the existence of the sandwich.  But what it does do, perhaps for the first time, is to show that humans are predisposed to religious and spiritual experiences, beliefs and rituals and that our brains are in fact “designed” by evolution to be open to the holy, sacred and divine.

Dick Gross picked this up in the weekly article in the National Times some months ago. Gross, an atheist refers to the recent publication of the Oxford University project, Explaining Religion. He says:

Belief in the supernatural seems to have evolved to rule humanities heart and inhabit our breast… Rituals, conscience, notions of justice may have been introduced to the species through supernatural belief systems.  Thus faith might be an ever present part of the psychological landscape…

Of course this adds little to the life of the believer and in fact many, even in the Christian tradition, have moved beyond the craving for an interventionist/supernatural being of the type the atheists are fond of debunking.  The interest for me lies more in the ways in which Christian and religious practices can be bring about a meaningful life and encounter with what we call God.  It does seem that it is important that we should pay attention to several insights gain through studying the human brain.  They are:

1.        We all need rituals that connect us with our world and the “ground of our being.”  The practices that we do together, communion, worship, prayer, singing and general attendance at church gatherings do find a receptive place in our minds, “hearts” and lives.

2.        We should think about our faith.  Most studies suggest that religious thought and experience is not static, but rather evolving.  Our cognitive process and our emotional limbic system work together to produce healthy religion.

3.        The quest of the human mind and the processes of the brain developed over millions of years is progressing toward what theologians call the mystical rather than just rule based religiously which is more often the product of religious institutions and not of religious experience.  

~      Christopher