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10/31/2024

I find my heart beats a little faster with hope when I read these words on "solidarity." Another word for one I use often which is "inclusion."

Read on. This from Fr. R. Rohr's daily devotional thought. Today's written by Brian Maclaren.

Feel your heart, as you read:

"There may be a way to draw the best resources we can from all our traditions, not to cure us of being human, but to help us become humane, because in the end, we humans are all connected, woven, as Dr. King said, in an inescapable web of mutuality. [1] …. If we are to avoid self- destruction, it will require solidarity across all our traditions.…

"If you choose solidarity, instead of pulling away from those you once suspected, avoided, vilified, or rejected, you see them as neighbors. You smile. You talk. You try to collaborate for the common good in whatever ways you can. When you disagree, as you must, you do so boldly but also graciously, not burning bridges, not breaking solidarity. They may be your opponents for the moment, but you don’t write them off as enemies.

"When you embrace solidarity, you embrace humanity, including Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, humanist, and atheist humanity, and including the humanity of those Christians whose behavior consistently prompts you to ask if you can stand staying Christian for even one more second.

"If you choose solidarity … in the way modeled by Jesus, then you don’t have to stop being Christian. In fact, you may have just become a better Christian than you’ve ever been…. You may have some old friends reject you, and you may struggle to keep accepting them anyway. You may have to find new teachers and mentors who can walk with you toward Christianity’s deeper, wider heart…. If you dare to follow that summons deeper into the darkness of unknowing, eventually you will come into a new place, a good place, a place not of elite religiosity but of shared humanity.

"You will look around and feel that all are welcome here. They have come from different places, but by the same path, the path of love. Muslims have come in their caravan of love. Jews have pursued the Torah of solidarity. Buddhists have followed the noble truth of compassion. Sikhs have learned to see no stranger, and Hindus have descended into essential oneness. Atheists and agnostics have discovered in humanism a path into our common humanity….

"When you find that this option of solidarity is open to you, this option of going to the deepest and most genuine core of your Christian tradition and there finding a love that connects you to everyone and everything, everywhere … you don’t need to go anywhere else. Of course, you can if you want to. But here is a way of staying Christian that connects you to others in a quest for solidarity rather than separating you from them in a quest for innocence, dominance, or supremacy. This feels to me like the way of Christ. This feels like the way of life."

Wow. See what I mean?

In his book Do I Stay Christian?, Brian McLaren highlights solidarity as a universal value supporting of our common life:  There may be a way to draw

10/05/2024

It’s been one year (well, in 10 more minutes to be exact), since our dear mother departed.

Hard to believe.

Pam and I were talking last night at dinner about Thanksgiving (that, too, is here again already) and our plans for this year. I was conscious of the fact that my first thought was, “I need to call Mimi and find out if she wants to join us here for Thanksgiving as she has done so many times before."

Wow. I miss her.

I think one of God’s greatest gifts to us is the daily awareness that each moment that passes has nothing to do with the clock and everything to do with my consciousness…my presence in the only moment that matters - this moment.

I’m learning, when I live in this moment, not some other moment, I am able “to see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower…to hold infinity in the palm of my hand and eternity in an hour” (William Blake, Auguries of Innocence).

09/11/2024

To all my FB friends. Yes, I've been hacked. If you get a Friend Request from me, delete it. My apologies for any inconvenience. Be well.

08/21/2024

In today's CAC.org devotional thought, there is this statement I find most profound...

"There is something in every one of you that waits, listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself and if you cannot hear it, you will never find whatever it is for which you are searching.… You are the only you that has ever lived; your idiom is the only idiom of its kind in all the existences and if you cannot hear the sound of the genuine in you, you will all of your life, spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls…." (cac.org).

WOW!

08/16/2024

Today's Devotional Reminder: "Instead of talking about merging with God or union with God," writes Fr. R. Rohr, "Julian of Norwich coined the term oneing. Oneing is a reflection of what already is...we already are one with God; we always have been and we ever shall be. This life is nothing if not a reawakening to that reality of our oneness, oneing with God" (from cac.org).

This life is nothing if not a reawakening to the reality of our oneness with God.

In my understanding today, as well as in my own experience, this is the meaning of "salvation." I was raised to believe I am separated from God because I inherited through no choice of my own a nature that is so repulsive and sinful, God sent His Son to die because blood had to be shed on my behalf in order for God to forgive and accept me.

I no longer see the Divine/human relationship in such ugly, demoralizing ways. Not to speak of the fact that it is a gross misunderstanding of the New Testament message, especially as we see it in the example of Jesus.

For me, today, I am experiencing God as part of myself, what the mystic Julian referred by the self-coined word "onening." I am onening with God.

So are you.

You may not be aware that you are or this notion that you are separated from God may be hard to overcome, especially if an inadequate theology has been engrained in you as it was for me from well-meaning but sadly misguided people in your experience.

What has helped me is the continual reminder spoken first by Jesus in John 17:3ff, the famous "prayer of Jesus" for his followers. Jesus says, "Now this is eternal life: that they know you...and be one as we are one" (17:3, 11).

Knowing this, not just in your head but in your heart, changes everything. Knowing this is foundational to create an "abundant life" as Jesus called it.

"I have come that they might have life and live life to the fullest" (John 10:10).

05/12/2024

04/05/2024

Father Richard describes how it’s possible to experience resurrection before we die:

"We don’t need to wait for death to experience resurrection. We can begin resurrection today by living connected to God. Resurrection happens every time we love someone even though they were not very loving to us. At that moment we have been brought to new life. Every time we decide to trust and begin again, even after repeated failures, at that moment we’ve been resurrected. Every time we refuse to become negative, cynical, hopeless, we have experienced the Risen Christ. We don’t have to wait for it later. Resurrection is always possible now.

"The resurrection is not Jesus’ private miracle; it’s the new shape of reality. It’s the new shape of the world. It’s filled with grace. It’s filled with possibility. It’s filled with newness.

"The resurrection is not a miracle story to prove the divinity of Christ, something that makes him the winner. It’s a storyline that allows us all to be winners. ALL! No exceptions! There’s no eternal death for anybody: ALL are invited to draw upon this infinite Source, this infinite Mystery, this infinite Love, this infinite Possibility. Spiritually speaking, we live in a world of abundance, of infinity. But most of us walk around as if it were not true, operating in a world of scarcity where there’s never enough. There’s not enough for me, there’s not enough for you, there’s not enough for everybody.

"And so we hoard it—Spirit, Love, Life—to ourselves. We hoard grace, we hoard mercy. We don’t allow ourselves to be conduits through which it pours into the world. Truly, the only way we can hold onto grace, mercy, love, joy—any spiritual gift—is to give them away consciously and intentionally. Once we stop acting as a conduit, we lose them ourselves. That’s why there are so many sad, bitter, and angry people. Disconnected from God, we choose death. We ourselves contribute to negativity, cynicism, anger, and even to the oppression of other races and religions. In that state, it’s always other people who are wrong."

12/10/2023

What is all this talk I hear in some Christian circles about the "Second Coming of Jesus," the Battle of Armageddon, the Rapture, Judgment, and the End of the World?

What is this thought and feeling among many Christians that the world is spinning out of control (which, admittedly, it feels at times it is), that what's happening in Israel and Palestine is all some kind of prophecy fulfillment, and that the return of Christ and the end of the world is that which we should look for to - honestly, escape the mess our faith has failed to change?

I love the perspective of Fr. Richard Rohr who in his morning devotional from the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, NM, who wrote the following: (Check it out...)
https://cac.org/daily-meditations/universal-restoration-2023-12-10/

09/30/2023

“Great Mystery unscrews the tight lids of the jars of certainty that you hold, too tightly, too fiercely. You realize, sometimes even trembling, that something greater than yourself is meeting you” - Theologian Randy Woodley

You can that again.

And again.

06/13/2023

Richard Rohr believes that nature has been revealing God long before the Bible and Church came to be:   Nature itself is the primary Bible. The

04/11/2023

Louisville, let us pray.