Monthly Archives: June 2015

Daily Riches: Death and the Temptation to Despair (Dan Clendenin and Atul Gawande)

Posted on by under Death Daily, Desolation's Gift, Detachment and Attachment, Embracing Losses and Limits, Suffering and Grace

“Atul Gawande has written a best seller about about dying well: Being Mortal; Medicine and What Matters in the End. Gawande argues that instead of acknowledging ‘the natural order of things,’ we’ve been seduced by ‘the prevailing fantasy that we are ageless.’ Instead of acknowledging the limits of medical treatments, we’ve turned mortality into an almost purely ‘medical experience,’ which in turn has led to denial, dishonesty, arrogance, and, for the elderly and the dying, horrible social isolation. This reduction of mortality to medicine, says Gawande, harms instead of heals. Acknowledging your mortality is a tremendous gift. It reorders your desires. It narrows your focus and gives you a new perspective that’s rooted in reality instead of futile medical fantasies. Medical interventions are only justified, says Gawande, ‘if they serve the larger aims of a person’s life. When we forget that, the suffering we inflict can be barbaric. When we remember it the good we do can be breathtaking.’ … Various writers describe this experience in similar ways. The Benedictine nun Joan Chittister calls it a ‘spirituality of struggle.’ The Orthodox theologian John Chryssavgis calls it a ‘spirituality of imperfection.’ The Presbyterian pastor Don MacCullough has written about the ‘consolations of imperfections.’ …Luther famously reminded us that God’s ultimate act of redemption and revelation was through suffering on a cross. A ‘theology of the cross’ affirms that we often experience God’s power in our human weakness. …Paul is a realist, not a sentimentalist. And his realism is liberating and refreshing. He begins and ends his reflections on ‘wasting away in the body’ with the identical words: ‘we do not lose heart’ (2 Cor 4:1, 16). That counsel of encouragement is necessary because the temptation to despair is real. In the end, Paul is an optimist: ‘Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.’ Daniel Clendenin

“we are being renewed day by day”
2 Corinthians 4:1

 Moving From the Head to the Heart

  • Are you in denial about your approaching death?
  • Are you letting losses in your life now prepare you for the Great Final Loss?
  • Is your faith a “spirituality of imperfection” in which you discover “consolation?”

For More: Being Mortal by Atul Gawande

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These “Daily Riches” are for your encouragement as you seek after God and he seeks after you. I hope you’ll follow and share my blog. My goal is to share something of unique value with you daily in 400 words or less. I appreciate your interest!  –  Bill (Psalm 90:14)

 

Daily Riches: Aging and Life In the Body (Dan Clendenin and Sherwin Nuland)

Posted on by under Death Daily, Desolation's Gift, Detachment and Attachment, Embracing Losses and Limits, Emotions and Spirituality, Suffering and Grace

“Last week I read The Art of Aging: A Doctor’s Prescription for Well-Being by Sherwin Nuland, a Clinical Professor of Surgery at the Yale School of Medicine. There’s a very thin line, observes Nuland, between denial and despair, between pretending nothing has changed and doing nothing at all. And a big difference between living long and living well. Beyond the standard advice about diet, exercise, genetics, intellectual stimulation, and social connections, Nuland explores the intangibles of our attitudes, dispositions, and religious faith. It’s not just about eating granola, he says. Cultivating equanimity over entitlement, contentment over complaining, or determination over discouragement, are only three examples of the attitudes we can choose about aging. Aging brings both gains and losses. Cultivating the wisdom to separate fact and fantasy is huge, as is learning to live with uncertainty and adversity. One of the biggest lessons of aging, says Nuland, is that ‘choice exists for each of us.’ Aging is not a disease, it’s a natural condition of every life. And if it’s handled wisely, there really is more sugar at the bottom of the cup. …In 2 Corinthians 4 and 5, Paul mentions the ‘body’ seven times. He uses unflattering metaphors to describe the body – it’s like a flimsy tent, a clay jar, a ‘nakedness’ when we are exposed as ‘unclothed.’ Life ‘in the body,’ says Paul, is a time of ‘troubles’ when we are ‘away from the Lord.’ Paul is brutally realistic about life ‘in the body.’ He yanks us out of fantasy and into reality, from denial into candor. He would move us from despair to wisdom in order to live well today. But make no mistake, for Paul, life ‘in the body’ is hard. Growing old isn’t for sissies. While ‘in the body,’ we are ‘hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.'” Dan Clendenin

“We always carry around in our body
the death of Jesus.”
2 Corinthians 4:10

 Moving From the Head to the Heart

  • As you age, how are you doing when it comes to “equanimity over entitlement, contentment over complaining, … determination over discouragement?”
  • …when it comes to learning to live with limits? … “with uncertainty and adversity?”
  • Are you discovering “sugar at the bottom of the cup?”

Abba, help me age like a fine wine.

For More: The Art of Aging by Sherwin Nuland

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These “Daily Riches” are for your encouragement as you seek after God and he seeks after you. I hope you’ll follow and share my blog. My goal is to share something of unique value with you daily in 400 words or less. I appreciate your interest!  –  Bill (Psalm 90:14)

“I practice daily what I believe; everything else is religious talk.”

Daily Riches: A Great Leap Backward, Then and Now (Ron Dunn)

Posted on by under Awareness, Humility, Learning Your Proper Place
“Why do we love what is rare and despise what is all around us?” Ron Dunn
.

“Mao was a man in control of his world, but not, at least in the beginning, of the sparrows. He viewed sparrows as one of the four ‘great’ pests of his regime (along with rats, mosquitoes and flies).  …At the moment at which Mao decided to kill the sparrows, there were hundreds of millions of them in China (some estimates run as high as several billion), but there were also hundreds of millions of people. Mao commanded people all over the country to come out of their houses to bang pots and make the sparrows fly, which, in March of 1958, they did. The sparrows flew until exhausted, then they died, mid-air, and fell to the ground, their bodies still warm with exertion. Sparrows were also caught in nets, poisoned and killed, adults and eggs alike, anyway they could be. By some estimates, a billion birds were killed. These were the dead birds of the great leap forward, the dead birds out of which prosperity would rise. Of course moral stories are complex, and ecological stories are too. When the sparrows were killed, crop production increased … at least initially. But with time, something else happened. Pests of rice and other staple foods erupted in densities never seen before. The crops were mowed down and, partly as a consequence of starvation due to crop failure, 35 million Chinese people died. The great leap forward leapt backward, which is when a few scientists in China began to notice a paper published by a Chinese ornithologist before the sparrows were killed. The ornithologist had found that while adult tree sparrows mostly eat grains, their babies … tend to be fed insects. In killing the sparrows, Mao and the Chinese had saved the crops from the sparrows, but appear to have left them to the insects.” Ron Dunn

“Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies?
Yet not one of them is forgotten by God.”
Luke 12:6

 Moving From the Head to the Heart

  • Have you learned to “despise what is common?”
  • What would it mean that “not one of them [the sparrows] are forgotten by God?”
  • Do you believe God had entrusted a sacred responsibility to us to care for his planet?

Abba, help me to value all the creatures you have made and that share this planet with me.

For More: “The Story of the Most Common Bird in the World” by Ron Dunn

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These “Daily Riches” are for your encouragement as you seek God and he seeks you. I hope you’ll follow and share my blog. My goal is to share something of unique value with you daily in 400 words or less. I appreciate your interest!  –  Bill (Psalm 90:14)

 

Daily Riches: Wonder at the Wonder of Our Universe (Annie Dillard)

Posted on by under awe and wonder, Contemplation, Mindfulness, Mystery, The Sacrament of the Present Moment

“Along with intricacy, there is another aspect of the creation that has impressed me in the course of my wanderings.  Look again at the horsehair worm, a yard long and thin as a thread, whipping through the duck pond, or tangled with others of its kind in a slithering Gordian knot. Look at an overwintering ball of buzzing bees, or a turtle under ice breathing through its pumping cloaca. Look at the fruit of the Osage orange tree, big as a grapefruit, green, convoluted as any human brain. Or look at a rotifer’s translucent gut: something orange and powerful is surging up and down like a piston, and something small and round is spinning in place like a flywheel. Look, in short, at practically anything – the coot’s feet, the mantis’s face, a banana, the human ear – and see that not only did the creator create everything, but that he is apt to create anything. He’ll stop at nothing. There is no one standing with a blue pencil to say, ‘Now that one, there, is absolutely ridiculous, and I won’t have it.’ …The world is full of creatures that for some reason seem stranger to us than others, and libraries are full of books describing them – hagfish, platypuses, lizardlike pangolins four feet long with bright green, lapped scares like umbrella-tree leaves on a bush hut roof, butterflies emerging from anthills, spiderlings wafting through the air clutching tiny silken balloons, horseshoe crabs…the creator creates…he creates everything and anything. …Of all known forms of life, only about ten percent are still living today. All other forms – fantastic plants, ordinary plants, living animals with unimaginably various wings, tails, teeth, brains – are utterly and forever gone. That is a great many forms that have been created. Multiplying ten times the number of living forms today yields a profusion that is quite beyond what I consider thinkable. … The creator goes off on one wild, specific tangent after another, or millions simultaneously, with an exuberance that would seem to be unwarranted, and with an abandoned energy sprung from an unfathomable font. …the creator loves pizzazz.” Annie Dillard

“The heavens declare the glory of God….” Psalm 19:1

 Moving From Head to Heart

  • Did this quote make you smile? worship? give thanks?
  • Are you in awe of the wonder all around you?
  • When is the last time you really experienced nature for yourself?

Abba, thank you for your beautiful voice in the creation.

For More: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

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These “Daily Riches” are for your encouragement as you seek God and he seeks you. I hope you’ll follow and share my blog. My goal is to share something of unique value with you daily in 400 words or less. – Bill (Psalm 90:14)

 

Daily Riches: Religion and Established Privilege (Thomas Merton)

Posted on by under Contemplation and Activism, Contemplative Prayer, dissent and resistance, Nationalism and Patriotism, Social Justice, truth and illusion

“Of course, it is true that religion on a superficial level, religion that is untrue to itself and to God, easily comes to serve as the ‘opium of the people.’ And this takes place whenever religion and prayer invoke the name of God for reasons and ends that have nothing to do with him. When religion becomes a mere artificial facade to justify a social or economic system – when religion hands over its rites and language completely to the political propagandists, and when prayer becomes the vehicle for a purely secular ideological program, then religion does tend to become an opiate. It deadens the spirit enough to permit the substitution of a superficial fiction and mythology for this truth of life. And this brings about the alienation of the believer, so that his religious zeal becomes political fanaticism. His faith in God, while preserving its traditional formulas, becomes in fact faith in his own nation, class or race. His ethic ceases to be the law of God and of love, and becomes the law that might-makes-right: established privilege justifies everything. God is the status quo.” Thomas Merton

“Do not conform to the pattern of this world,
but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is –
his good, pleasing and perfect will. “
Romans 12:1, 2

 Moving From the Head to the Heart

  • Does your religious experience “deaden the spirit” rather than invigorating it? Does it squelch individuality and produce conformity? Does it discourage imagination and curiosity?
  • Does it tend to prop up some unjust “social [or] economic system? Does it support the “status quo” as a way that is out of step with the Bible’s insistence upon justice?
  • Has your faith in God become “in fact faith in your own nation, class or race?”
  • Has your religious ethic somehow become something other than the “law …of love?”
  • Are you comfortable with your answers to these questions? If not, what can change?

Abba, help me to speak to the status quo instead of being shaped by it. Strengthen me to question established, unjust privilege and work to undo it. Work in me your earth-changing “law of love.”

For More: Contemplative Prayer by Thomas Merton

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These “Daily Riches” are for your encouragement as you seek after God and he seeks after you. I hope you’ll follow and share my blog. My goal is to share something of unique value with you daily in 400 words or less. I appreciate your interest!  –  Bill (Psalm 90:14)

“I practice daily what I believe; everything else is religious talk.”

Daily Riches: Silence –The Void Where God Is (Irvin Boudreaux)

Posted on by under "Being" with Jesus, Asceticism, Silence, Solitude, Spiritual Disciplines, Stillness

“Abba John the Dwarf was very fervent. Now someone who came to see him praised his work, and he remained silent, for he was weaving a rope. One again the visitor began to speak and once again he kept silence. The third time he said to the visitor, ‘Since you came here, you have driven away God from me.’

“We have been taught for centuries that silence is a very vital avenue to a close relationship to our Creator. Today we exist in a world of clutter, noise and interruptions. The men and women who went to the desert felt very much the same about their world. Their journey was to escape those distractions to have a deeper and closer relationship with God. People who don’t observe silence have a difficult time understanding and respecting those who do. This saying deals with that issue. Abba John the Dwarf was focused in his work and prayer…. The well-meaning visitor seemingly wanted to engage the monk through his compliment. He apparently had no sense that the way to truly engage the Abba was to join in his work and silence. In that apparent void was the presence of God. The continual ‘noise’ drove God away. Through our conversation, our constant chatter, we crowd out the presence of God. Our challenge is simple. We must give God space in our lives.” Irvin Boudreaux

“God is our refuge and strength,
an ever-present help in trouble.”
Psalm 46:1

 Moving From Head to Heart

  • Abba John seems testy, his visitor, clueless. Nevertheless, the intended lesson is clear: respect silence. Do you have a difficult time “understanding and respecting” someone who has sought out silence? If so, what does that say about you?
  • It’s easy for us to lose our sense of the “ever-present” God. Are there well-intentioned people in your life who “drive God away” from you? Do you have a plan to protect your times of silence no matter what it takes, so this doesn’t happen often?
  • How can you practice silence in a way that allows for interruptions that may be from God?

Lord help me learn this lesson from the desert. Silence my lips and let me feel your presence. In my silence you fill the void instead of me filling my life so full that it crowds you out. (Boudreaux)

For More: The Sayings of the Desert Fathers by Benedicta Ward and Metropolitan Anthony

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These “Daily Riches” are for your encouragement as you seek after God and he seeks after you. I hope you’ll follow and share my blog. My goal is to share something of unique value with you daily in 400 words or less. I appreciate your interest!  –  Bill (Psalm 90:14)

“I practice daily what I believe; everything else is religious talk.”


Daily Riches: The Pinnacle of God’s Creation (Gregory Boyd, Jonathan Edwards, Augustine)

Posted on by under "Being" with Jesus, awe and wonder, Being the Beloved, Emotions and Spirituality, Loving Union with God, The Love of God, thirsting and longing for God, Wholeness and Brokenness

“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” Augustine

“As the New Testament and the church tradition teach, the life of God is nothing other than the perfect love that eternally unites the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and this Triune God spoke creation into being with the ultimate goal of inviting humans to share in this life. …[Jonathan] Edwards painted a portrait of the Trinity in which the love and joy of the three divine persons was so full and intense, it simply could not be contained. God’s fullness thus yearned to be expressed and replicated by sharing it with others. So this fullness overflowed, as it were, as God brought forth a creation that mirrored his triune beauty. And the pinnacle of this creation is created beings whose yearning for God mirrors, in a small way, his yearning for them. But whereas God’s yearning comes out of his fullness, our yearning comes out of emptiness. It’s a beautiful arrangement. The God of overflowing love longs to pour his love into others, so he creates beings that long for his love to be poured into them. But in my opinion … it wasn’t God’s original intention for us to ever go a moment with this longing unsatisfied. Living without the fullness of God’s love is a reality we have brought on ourselves through our rebellion, and it’s completely unnatural to us. And try as we may to run from it or numb it, the pain of our unnatural emptiness is acute and incurable. The profundity of our emptiness is the negative reflection of the profundity of the fullness of the One we long for.” Gregory Boyd

“And may you have the power to understand …
how wide, how long, how high, and how deep [God’s] love is.”
Ephesians 3:18

 Moving From the Head to the Heart

  • Imagine a God whose eternal essence consists of “perfect love that eternally unites the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” Now imagine that God choosing to love you and make God’s “home” in you. What feelings arise?
  • Have you ever thought of your deep-seated yearning for intimacy with God as mirroring God’s deep-seated yearning for intimacy with you?
  • Have you ever thought of the profundity of your existential “emptiness” as the “negative reflection of the profundity of the fullness” God wants for you?

Abba, make your home in me.

For More: Benefit of the Doubt by Gregory Boyd

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These “Daily Riches” are for your encouragement as you seek after God and he seeks after you. I hope you’ll follow and share my blog. My goal is to share something of unique value with you daily in 400 words or less. I appreciate your interest!  –  Bill (Psalm 90:14)