what can we learn from the latest climate “scandal”?
December 30, 2009
If you are a climatologist or even a lukewarm environmentalist, you may have heard the echoes of a storm out of Europe a few weeks ago. An online entrepreneur hacked into the University of East Anglia’s prestigious Climate Research Unit. The result? Apparently climatologists and scientific researchers have been revealed for either the height of arrogance or the stupidity of short-sightedness. As the Washington Post reported:
“They appear to exaggerate their public certainty on disputed issues, shade the presentation of information for political effect, tamper with the peer-review process, resist reasonable requests for supporting data and urge the destruction of e-mails to avoid embarrassment. Other scientists in these e-mail chains resist these abuses. But the dominant voices are ideological. The attitude seems to be: Insiders can question, if they don’t go too far. Outsiders who threaten the movement are “idiots.” This attitude is demonstrated not only by private e-mails but also by the public reaction of prominent scientists to those e-mails. They show “scientists at work.” They are “pretty innocuous.” They are “understandable and mostly excusable.” “We are all humans; and humans come with dogma as standard equipment.” This “kind of language and kidding goes on verbally all the time.” Criticism is based merely on “ignorance” and critics have “more screws loose than the Space Shuttle Challenger.” It is the scientific equivalent of discounting Watergate as a “second-rate burglary.”
All of this back-and-forth in the scientific community should probably be an aside for followers of Jesus, because whether one side gains an up on the other in the media, one of the first and primary commissions given to all humans in Genesis is to care for and steward the resources of the earth: that means the environment, the animals and all of the creatures/creations. Yet surely this gives the nay-sayers of global warming and climate change adversaries ammunition for attacks against the scientific evidence of climate change. But even moreso: if this eventually gets into the “public consciousness” it can affect the priority of environmental policy, because Senators and Congressmen - not to mention the President - will feel the scrutiny and pressure of pursuing and spending public resources on something suspect in the eyes of the public that elects them. In fact, it casts such a long shadow on the endeavour of climatologists seeking to understand global warming [since the advent of reliable records in the 1800s, the overall trend goes in one direction: warmer. All 10 of the hottest years on record have come since 1997.] they might find their huge government grants shrinking because of the political fallout. What has happened? Their credibility is in crisis.
What can the Church learn? I’d like to suggest three things we can learn from this “scandal”:
- Integrity matters. It’s as simple as that. Surely - as Ecclesiastes proclaims - there is season for everything – a time to be provocative and a time to be understated - but integrity is never out of season. And if you are pimping your message and if your ideological dogma outweighs the spirituality of the Way, Truth and Life to such an extent that you are willing to sacrifice integrity to garner support or short-circuit community discernment because its “messy” and inefficient or sacrifice the struggle with doubt for shallow certitude…you just might end up sacrificing the most important things that you need in the long haul.
- Discernment matters. Delving deeper into the truth beyond 24-hour-news-cycle media headlines and scandals must take place in the community of Jesus. We have to look deeper and ask the Spirit to empower us beyond of prejudices and to guide us into all truth, in every aspect of truth, including climate change and global warming.
- Grace matters. The truth is we are all fallible and messy people, particularly when we are in community. Mess happens in church, mess happens in community, mess happens in the scientific community. Yet the weight of the glory of the people of God is that we can reach, endure and see beyond the mess via the grace of Christ Jesus so that the Spirit can guide us all into the truth.
lectio: luke 3:7-18
December 11, 2009
So he began saying to the crowds who were going out to be baptized by him, “You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? ”Therefore bear fruits in keeping with repentance, and do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham for our father,’ for I say to you that from these stones God is able to raise up children to Abraham. ”Indeed the axe is already laid at the root of the trees; so every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” And the crowds were questioning him, saying, “Then what shall we do?” And he would answer and say to them, “The man who has two tunics is to share with him who has none; and he who has food is to do likewise.” And some tax collectors also came to be baptized, and they said to him, “Teacher, what shall we do?” And he said to them, “Collect no more than what you have been ordered to.” Some soldiers were questioning him, saying, “And what about us, what shall we do?” And he said to them, “Do not take money from anyone by force, or accuse anyone falsely, and be content with your wages.” Now while the people were in a state of expectation and all were wondering in their hearts about John, as to whether he was the Christ, John answered and said to them all, “As for me, I baptize you with water; but One is coming who is mightier than I, and I am not fit to untie the thong of His sandals; He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. ”His winnowing fork is in His hand to thoroughly clear His threshing floor, and to gather the wheat into His barn; but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.” So with many other exhortations he preached the gospel to the people.
luke 3:7-18
verses 10-14 - so often i ask: what do i do, Lord? what i am supposed to do is very practical, not super-hyped, just plain and simple. share food and clothes with those who have none. be honest. don’t oppress. be content. this is what repentance looks like. so often, simplicity is the answer to my own complexity.
verse 15 - echoing the request of abraham joshua heschel: “i asked for wonder!”; i need more expectation and wonder and awe in my life…which probably means i need to become more childlike again and again…
verse 17 – in prayer and ministry, i overuse the imagery of the Holy Spirit coming as a dove…with gentleness and grace and loving adoption. i need more of the fire of the Holy Spirit…burn away the chaff in me O God!
++O Father, make us into children of abraham, make us children of faithfulness. O Lord Jesus, may we abide in you in such simplicity and trust that we bear the fruit of our abiding. O Spirit, come…come and baptize us with fire that we may spread it upon the earth. Amen.++
lectio: luke 3:1-6
December 4, 2009
Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip was tetrarch of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias was tetrarch of Abilene, in the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John, the son of Zacharias, in the wilderness. And he came into all the district around the Jordan, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins; as it is written in the book of the words of Isaiah the prophet:
”THE VOICE OF ONE CRYING IN THE WILDERNESS,
’MAKE READY THE WAY OF THE LORD,
MAKE HIS PATHS STRAIGHT.
’EVERY RAVINE WILL BE FILLED,
AND EVERY MOUNTAIN AND HILL WILL BE BROUGHT LOW;
THE CROOKED WILL BECOME STRAIGHT,
AND THE ROUGH ROADS SMOOTH;
AND ALL FLESH WILL SEE THE SALVATION OF GOD.’”
Luke 3:1-6
verses 1 and 2 - as one trained in the craft of history, i appreciate the context-setting that luke does here, giving us the international, national and local context of those who wield power; and yet in the midst of all these ‘power people’, the word of God comes to john in the wilderness…not in the palaces and temples of power, but the wilderness. the wilderness has often seemed like a dry wasteland and the absence of God to me. but i testify that it has been in the wilderness seasons of my life - when i was athirst and my soul dried up - that is when God has given me his word, like a sudden rainshower…utterly refreshing and life to one in the wilderness; this also reminds me that it is into the wilderness that God – in the exodus – led the former slaves of Egypt to make of them a covenant people, ready to embody His Way…
verse 3 - stunning: ‘preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins;’ it strikes me today that i often rush through these words, assuming so much, because i have heard sermon-after-sermon about them. but today as i re-read them over and over, what strikes me is that john isn’t preaching a repentance [greek: metanoia/"change you mind"] about your sins, but it says change your mind about “the forgiveness of sins”. these people knew they were sinners; they lived in a culture seeped in the teaching of torah and if that wasn’t enough, the pharisees are there to provoke them. but what john offers is a word about forgiveness…and this strikes me as a good word for myself as well: how often am i trying to convince people about the sin in their lives that they all ready know about? i need to begin speaking much more of forgiveness, and practicing it. the significance of forgiveness can be lost on me sometimes, but if preaching forgiveness gets john in trouble with the temple authorities, then it should probably get me in trouble as well; and it reminds me of the situation of the apostle paul: if we are not being accused by the pharisees and temple authorities of our day of having too much grace (like paul was in romans 6) then we probably are not really practicing the radical way of forgiveness and grace; but, like paul, in taking the radical way of Jesus, we will likely need to explain ourselves, because it is not cheap grace nor easy forgiveness, but it is scandalous!
verses 4-6 - again, reflecting what had happened in verse 2, a voice proclaiming - crying out - in the wilderness; the echo of the word of God spoken in dry, lonely places is heard round the world. there will be no obstacle to God coming to redeem and deliver His people…chills run up my spine as i read: “and all flesh will see the salvation of God.” even so, come Lord Jesus.
++Lord Jesus, help us to embrace the way of forgiveness. Help us change our minds concerning the forgiveness of sins, and see that we cannot do it, it is only in You that we may find the deep grace of a delivering God. Let us see Your salvation, O God Most High! Amen.++
lectio: luke 21:25-26
November 27, 2009
Luke 21:25-26 (Today’s New International Version)
25 “There will be signs in the sun, moon and stars. On the earth, nations will be in anguish and perplexity at the roaring and tossing of the sea. 26 People will faint from terror, apprehensive of what is coming on the world, for the heavenly bodies will be shaken.
The advent readings begin with a slap across the face, a cold splash of water, a shrill alarm.
Wake up! Change - deep change - is afoot!
The practice of lectio divina asks that we listen to the text and pay attention to the word, phrase, perhaps concept which jumps out and catches our attention on first hearing it.
My breath is caught by ‘anxiety’, and more from ‘apprehensive’. I read this passage on the eve of a job interview after three months of unemployment and dozens of closed doors. To say that I’m fighting apprehension and anxiety would be a dramatic understatement; mostly I’m trying not to drown in them.
I read again, once or twice. I know that the context of this passage is Jesus predicting the destruction of Jerusalem, but I hear it in my own context, my time, my situation, and the arrival of Advent.
Jesus’ words are immediate, harsh. This is no new-agey, kumbaya Jesus; this is Jesus the prophet.
No answers are given, no three-steps-to-peace. Jesus wakes me up, makes me sit up straight, pay attention, and listen.
Listen!
time is of the essence (2)
March 22, 2009
“Smoke, nothing but smoke. [That's what the Quester says.] There’s nothing to anything - it’s all smoke. What’s there to show for a lifetime of work, a lifetime of working your fingers to the bone?”
Ecclesiastes 1:2-3 (The Message)
[If you missed part 1, check it out here)
we have been thinking about time, both our relationship to it and use of it. let's begin today with a slightly different but related question and then come back to our conversation about time.
what is life really about?
a few years ago – while i was chatting with friends during one of our breaks in class at the baltimore hebrew university – when my friend aaron gave me an etrog
[aside: an etrog is an oval-shaped citrus fruit given out during the jewish festival of sukkot (also known to us as the feast of tabernacles) which is one of the autumnal feasts.]
this led to one of those great conversations that i took a lot away from…certainly about sukkot, but in fact it changed my perspective about life. sukkot is said to be the most joyous of jewish festivals, in which the people of God are supposed to purposely include (‘gather-in’) the gentiles to dwell and celebrate with them (ok…tell me that’s not prophetic Kingdom of God stuff!).
my friends at baltimore hebrew also pointed out that when they celebrate the festival of sukkot, it is tradition to read through qohelet, which is hebrew for ecclesiastes. i wondered at this, because at that point my experience with ecclesiastes was that it seemed very depressing…’life is vanity’ and all that jazz.
many contemporary readers of qohelet are left with a depressing/despairing impression of the overall message rather than something uplifting; it also seemed atodds with the joyous nature of the festival of sukkot. yet, the very theme of ecclesiastes is joy from their perspective. ecclesiastes reminds us of the real nature of joy, which is the same as that of sukkot: dwelling together in the presence of YHWH.
thus, apart from Jesus, His Heavenly Father and the Holy Spirit, we might be persuaded that our material possessions, our positions in life, work, pleasure, power…are more important than relationship with each other and with Him; yet too often our life shows those other pursuits are exactly our priorities.
we make ourselves more available to our jobs, careers and possessions than we do to our wives, husbands, children, parents, friends and other persons, even our precious Lord Jesus. we need to change our perspective and our priorities. we need to learn the lesson of qoholet that my friends now remind me of every year: we need to make time for the joy of fellowship in our shared lives…we need to dwell in joy.
commit the insight of qohelet/ecclesiastes to remembrance: The value in living is living!
strip away the illusions! the way of life in which the world trains us in effect say that meaning can be found in power, money, fame, pleasure or industry. ecclesiastes says: celebrate life by living; as i follow Jesus, i say it this way: embrace Jesus and His abundant-living Way; seek the Invisible God while much of the rest of the world prefers to rest in the security of their nip-tuck looks or precarious stock options or big house or whatever makes them feel secure.
which brings us back to time. if life is about living, then how do we redeem time?
sacred scripture speaks of “redeeming the time”…but we may ask: what does that even mean? perhaps there are some disciplines we can put into practice in order to detox from the cultural experience of the worship of time and efficiency and the merchants of time management that have fully commodified time for us (so much so that the language we engage and conceptualize time is as a commodity: we “spend” time, we “lose” time, we can “manage” time, etc.)
what i want to say is that in redeeming time, we free time and free ourselves…take this off the altar of our lives…and one way that i have found helpful is to relational-ize your time and your time management.
now there are many quite useful tools - action plans, activity logs, critical success matrices, etc. - that your garden-variety time management books give you (with the understanding that almost all emerge from a paradigm of the culture of business and ‘busyness’. they are achievement-based, results-oriented; which is what is needed in the business world, yet while useful, perhaps we need some discernment in applying them to our own lives. Remember the subtlety of Jesus: while the public saw Jesus busy all the time, the disciples saw that he arose early or late at night and went of for some un-busy time with His Father.)
thus, while useful for what they are, these tools place the emphasis away from people and toward personal gain, power, check-off lists and inanimate results.
i want to suggest a different way that eventually can make these other tools redemptive (that may sound arrogant, but the word-nerd in me cannot think of a better way to put it); the key emerges from a more ancient relational pattern of being: boundary markers
stones marked the boundaries of land allotted to people in the ancient near east, and specifically in our hebrew scriptures. instead of a hard-and-fast fences or a wall, the boundary marker was there to provoke awareness of where you were…they spoke of something…they witnessed to something…they were part of a discipline of remembrance (serving in some way like the ‘Lord’s Table’; ‘do this in remembrance of me’). Can we imagine an alotted ‘field’ as our life? And then perhaps we can also imagine the ’seasonal crop’ as time that we are harvesting and putting to use in God’s Kingdom? i wonder if it would be helpful to change the typical paradigm of boundaries as ‘fences’ and move on to ‘boundary markers’…take down the razor-wire fences and let people and God into our lives.
boundary markers are signs that make us aware of something…thinking of it this way may help challenge us to raise our awareness, our sense, of time as we practice other principles of time management. for instance, when God gave the hebrews financial management instructions (see Leviticus 19), the paradigm that He seeks to train His people toward is His paradigm of the Kingdom of God…His reign; thus, in terms of Kingdom-economics, one of the instructions was to not reap your whole field, but leave margins as benevolence for the poor and the stranger and the outcast; i wonder if we cannot apply this principle of ‘leaving margins’ in our own ‘time management’, thus intentionally creating marginal space and time for reflection in our daily rhythms, for openness to the marginalized and the stranger and the outcast? Take a moent to linger here and imagine what that might look like in your our ‘field’, your own life.
sacred scripture also gives us a warning at this point. i think the biblical caution regarding people moving the boundary markers of others might be illustrative here as well…people can enter our lives and may move our boundary markers, if we are not careful and discerning, they can take time away from us in an unhealthy way…again, the call is to deeper our awareness. also recall the biblical instructions on gleaning/harvesting your field: do not glean to the margins. therein lies wisdom: save some cushion at the edges of your life;
in the previous post, we spoke of reflection begetting awareness, awareness begetting discernment, and discernment being crucial to preserving the essence of something good. Well, in training ourselves toward reflection, boundary markers can be essential in our discipline of remembrance, provoking us toward reflection, awareness and discernment.
ok, so what would these boundary markers look like?
i’ll answer that question, but you may want to sit down for this one, because the biggest tool, the best boundary markers are totally counter-intuitive to the typical time management tools of our day. i would like to call us to a more ancient paradigm: people as boundary markers…that’s right, people
…lose the inanimate watch/time-piece; place yourself in the situation of ‘not knowing’ what exact time it is; perchance, in this vulnerable position, you just might have to raise your awareness to know what time it is…although you may have to catch the time on a public clock or actually engage someone and meekly ask: pardon me, but do you have the time?
i personally witness that although it may take the disciplines of attention and remembrance, this has made me more aware of time rather than less…i have not owned nor wore a watch since high school (and even then, although i owned one i never wore it)…and yet i don’t miss meetings, am not chronically late, nor does insecurity overwhelm me because i do not know what time it is.
can i get a witness? by placing myself in the vulnerable position of not knowing what time it is, i have found that this supposed weakness has turned out to be such a rich source of strength…(although in the day-and-age of blackberries and cell phones the ‘actual time’ is not far from any of us, in case of an immediate crisis or emergency, etc.)…but the point is to place us in an environment where we are in a place of humble need for other people to make us aware of time…we need to ask for the time (when was the last time someone refused you when you asked: ‘what time is it?’)
[experiment: have you noticed that when you don't know something, you unconsciously raise your awareness of it? for instance, if you are used to having a watch, and forget to wear it, you can become more aware of time, because you don't know what time it is. try this experiment that i have done in the past: try to feel what the passage of time "feels" life. get in a quiet place by yourself and take a time piece with you for reference. sit and seek to spend 5 minutes in silence and solitude...just being...and try to check the time after you think 5 minutes have passed. this practice will raise your awareness of time in an experiential, experimental way. stop and try it right now. how did it go? how close are you to getting it right? what did 5 good mnutes feel like to you? begin training yourself in this awareness and see what the fruit of it might be]
now, i realize, this might be really hard for some people; this is really counter to how the culture is training us, because you might have to put your rugged individualism aside and get off the self-reliant, independent bandwagon, yet doing this reminds me of 2 corinthians 6, when that erstwhile apostle paul says: we own nothing, and yet we have everything.
further, can we see that this reflects the relational aspect of the Trinity? remember what we said about the value of living? relationships are of the essence of our lives; when we ‘relational-ize’ our time and time management, we join our awareness of time to the very essence of our lives…both ourselves within and ourselves in relation to others.
in ‘relational-izing’ your time management, you just might find that:
• you’re more aware of time because you don’t have easy access to find out precisely what time it is;
• humility creates in you the desire to listen to and really hear others, not just talk at them;
• people are quite nice and really friendly and happy to give you the time;
• you might make new friends and neighbors;
• time – hopefully like the truth - is free;
time is of the essence (1)
January 21, 2009
This post is written by my good friend Steven Hamilton, our first guest blogger. I met Steven several years ago when we (Vineyard Central) hosted a gathering called Mayhem — yeah, we were enthralled with Fight Club — at which Brian McLaren spoke. But I really got to know Steven over the course of the first 6 months of 2008. He was one of 21 participants in our School of Spiritual Direction.
There are so many things about him that I came to love. First of all, he’s one of the most active people I know: a husband, father of 3 young children, a full-time government employee in D.C. (The National Archives), and a pastor with the Central Maryland Vineyard. He also happens to be a powerful voice against modern-day slavery, building awareness of the issue, serving on task forces, and working toward the passage of state and national legislation. [You can find him in the video called Love Justice. (Look for the cool guy with the shaved head.)] I wish I had half his energy. Second, he’s got a healthy sense of humor. It’s nice to be with people who know how to laugh. But what I love most is that in spite of his active, demanding life, he’s deeply reflective. Let me amend that. I think that his commitment to living reflectively has led to his rich, active life.
It’s easy to be busy. But it takes hard work, great courage and careful discernment to be busy in the right ways, especially in our day. I think Steven shows us the right was to be “busy.”
You can find him posting regularly at his blogsite Verve and Verse.
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“There is an appointed time for everything. And there is a time for every event under heaven” — so says the wise Qohelet in what we call Ecclesiastes 3.
i’m not sure how the wise one of ecclesiastes was raised, but my mother was an efficiency expert for a large corporation, so i was raised in what was possibly the most efficient household on the planet. there were, of course, very good and bad things about this, but one of the best is that time management was ingrained in me to the extent that it became second-nature … i didn’t just think about efficiency; i lived efficiently.
as i reflect on this second skin of mine, i realize that, in effect, my mother modeled the awareness of time, and i was trained into it. she created a rhythm of life, and i lived in that rhythm. undergirding this rhythm was was her finely-tuned awareness of time. there are hard-and-fast tools to use to better manage the precious time we are given in this age, but i would say awareness is the essence of superior time management … ah, but i’m getting a little ahead of myself.
… let’s start with the rhythm of life:
in the book Timeshifting, stephan rechtschaffen insightfully shares what he calls the process of entrainment: we have a tendency to align our personal rhythms with those of our environment.
“… [We are] embedded in a world and a culture with fast-talking, fast-driving, fast-fooding people and advertisements that drive us — shaping our lives for us — and we are susceptible to get caught up in it in an undiscerning way.”
it’s easy to lose touch with the simple awareness of time and plunge into the frenzied charge of lemmings rushing for the cliff-edge and tragedy. i’ve found myself doing this on almost a daily basis in commuting to work in the washington, dc area. i get on the highway, and fairly soon i’m zoning out and going the ‘speed-of-traffic’, which in my area of the world, is much more than the posted speed limit. in fact, just the other day, i found myself going 85 mph without trying or thinking about it.
so we surge and then crash, surge and crash in a repetitive, destructive cycle of living that conforms to the powerful tides around us. we are quite literally trained toward them. So our “entrainment tendency” creates a vicious slave-master relationship that limits our perspective to such an extent that we no longer believe we actually have time to stop, discern, reflect and consider whether our lives are mistrained
as i mentioned before, my mother was a corporate efficiency expert and she brought her job home with her. what her job typically entailed was shadowing people and then suggesting ways for them to be more efficient, either time-saving steps, re-ordering processes, or altogether new structures and rhythms of work. because of her influence i became — and this is amusing to me now — the most efficient room-cleaner on my street. i would clean my room, then go to a friend’s home to ask them to play, and if they had to clean their room before they could come out and play, i would jump in, organize the activity and presto-chango, lickety-split, the job was done and we were out and free.
yet, while my mother gave me an awareness of time and the gift of efficiency, i also see clearly that she sometimes went too far and sacrificed quality on the altar of efficiency.
and this now brings me to pot pie.
i love pot pie, and there are certain elements of pot pie that can be sacrificed to save time without losing ‘pot-pie-ness’, yet others are non-negotiable and require you to take your time. they require you to be “inefficient.” for instance the flaky crust and the cream sauce are non-negotiable. and while you can get frozen chicken and frozen vegetables to make the cooking process more efficient, you all but kill a pot pie if you use them. the last time my mother made pot pie for me, she sacrificed — for the sake of efficiency — all the stuff that makes pot pie, well … pot pie. Instead we got some two-bit knock-off that barely gets by under the name of ‘pot-pie casserole.’
it was awful.
reflection begets awareness. awareness begets discernment. and discernment is crucial to preserving the essence of something good. it keeps us from sacrificing quality on the altar of efficiency.
but is it possible to turn the values of our culture around to our advantage? eugene peterson seems to think so (and i agree!). in his book The Contemplative Pastor, peterson makes the point that the organizational calendar for keeping appointments has become sacrosanct in our culture. if you say you have a ‘previously scheduled appointment’, no one questions it. they won’t even think of treading over that holy ground and asking, “who are you meeting and why?” so peterson cleverly advises us to use the planning calendar as a tool for becoming unbusy, for pulling out of the fast lane and scheduling time for reflection and contemplation. you break out of time so you can come back into time correctly.
Jesus had a different understanding of time. it was grounded in how he understood his work and what he thought about life. his perspective on time was often at odds with the understanding of those around him. their urgencies were almost never his. he clashed with prevailing notions then and clashes now with 21st century American notions of time. a clear example of this occurs in the the gospel of john, where it says Jesus lingered where he was and delayed for a while before going to help the deathly ill Lazarus, “the one that He loved”. All his disciples thought he should have acted with a greater sense of urgency.
Jesus invites us into a fuller awareness of time, one that allows God to be expressed in us and us to be expressed fully in this world. To acquire it will take the discipline of “unbusying” ourselves so that we have time to reflect. a sustainable faith embraces and creates space and time for what matters most: distinguishing the ‘important’ from the merely ‘urgent’. given this …
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how can we begin to steward our lives and “redeem the time”?
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how can we mature and raise our awareness of something that to us is quite like water to fish?
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how can we become wise with the time given us without sacrificing quality on the altar of efficiency?
I hope you reflect on these questions and join me for a concluding post on the essence of time. your comments are welcome!
Essential Disciplines for Our Time 3
December 19, 2008
Reflection … an antidote to hurry
Look at how the lilies grow (Matthew 6:28)
If you’re going to enjoy a painting you’ve got to set aside time. You must not expect that you can take a fleeting glance and reach a conclusion, any more than you can just look at a book’s dust cover …. When I’m filming, in between times when they’re setting up for the next work of art, I’ve got to sit somewhere and often I’ve been I’ve been parked in front of something that I would not have looked at twice. But forced to sit and contemplate it, I begin to warm up to it and it opens up to me …. It might never be something that we would choose as our first love, but it can speak to us. It’s that giving time, looking at art peacefully, that matters. Crowded, noisy museums are not conducive to this kind of looking. I forget who it was who said that the necessity for appreciating art is a chair — which I always have, you see, because I go round in a wheelchair. So I really look. (Sister Wendy Becket, nun and art critic, from an interview in Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion)
Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. (Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now)
Consider the following statements of Jesus taken from Matthew’s narrative of his life:
Look at how the birds don’t plant or harvest… (Matt. 6:26)
Look at how the lilies grow… (6:28)
The kingdom of heaven is like a farmer who planted seed… (13:24)
The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed (13:31)
The kingdom of heaven is like yeast (13:33)
The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure that someone discovers hidden in a field… (13:44)
The kingdom of heaven is like a pearl merchant on the lookout for choice pearls… (13:45)
The kingdom of heaven is like a fishing net… (13:47)
The kingdom of heaven is like a person who brings both new and old from the storehouse (13:52)
The kingdom of heaven is like the owner of an estate… (20:1)
This generation is like a group of children playing a game in the public square… (Matt. 11:16)
Jesus, like all those around him, saw birds every day. He saw flowers, watched fishermen haul in nets, heard of people winning the lottery, knew of people who owned lots of property. But he had cultivated the practice of doing something that few people then (as now) almost never make room for: he considered the significance of what he experienced as it related to the work of God. Everybody saw birds and flowers, but Jesus saw how they reflected God’s provision. Every household was familiar with yeast and its qualities, but Jesus saw how it reflected the hidden, subversive and viral nature of God’s kingdom.
He regularly took the “brute facts” of his day and mined them for their divine significance. And in each case he paid attention to one feature of what he saw. We like to believe that we can notice many things at once (and we may even take a certain degree of pride in our ability to multi-task), but it’s a frustrating and inefficient way to go through life:
Despite our subjective feelings to the contrary, actually our brain can work on only one thing at a time. Rather than allowing us to efficiently do two things at the same time, multitasking actually results in inefficient shifts in our attention. In short, the brain is designed to work most efficiently when it works on a single task and for sustained rather than intermittent and alternating periods of time…. But despite neuroscientific evidence to the contrary, we are being made to feel that we must multitask in order to keep our head above the rising flood of daily demands. In essence, the brain has certain limits that we must accept. (Richard Restak, M.D., The New Brain)
Think of time as soil, attention as water, and quiet as sun. Allowing ourselves these three, we’ll naturally grow. Like Jesus (and many others who have lived wisely and courageously), we’ll notice what’s in front of us and be able to relate it to God’s work in this world.
But we’ll only notice if we slow way down and shut way up. Rituals like Sabbath-keeping (or creating mini-sabbaths throughout each day) give us that opportunity. So do reading and lingering over Scripture. We let our imagination “image” the scenes and then think about the significance of those scenes. (My friend Larry Bourgeois refers to this and other “slow-downs” as spiritual loitering.) But even staring at a painting, watching kids play, admiring a tree for several minutes or thinking about the food in front of you are invitations to reflect.
Essential Disciplines for Our Time 2
December 17, 2008
Single-Mindedness … an antidote to schizophrenia
Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. (James 4:1-8, NIV)
Jesus doesn’t’ mince words about what’s required to follow him. It is to “lose our lives.” For those who follow him there’s a clear expectation that we’ll follow his agenda. (Matthew 7:21) And when James blasts out the encouragement: “purify your hearts, you double-minded,” he’s reiterating the kind of attention and focus that undergird the Christian life. A “double-minded” person suffers from a type of schizophrenia, a rupture of the person. There’s a bi-polar quality to life, exhibitied by conflicting allegiances and multiple masters.
As Christians, however, we’re to turn our hearts fully toward God’s will in order to become single-minded. This is what’s meant by the call to “purify” ourselves. This may be the single most important base for discipleship. Jesus asks, “Are you in or out? Coming with me or staying behind. Make your choice and be aware of what the choice entails.”
Modern life, however, does anything but encourage single-mindedness. The multiplicity of distractions available to us in our time is nothing short of astonishing. If we are going to follow Jesus faithfully in this whacked out modern life, we have to find a way not just to turn down the volume, rise above all the nonsense and keep our eyes fixed on Christ.
There are two spiritual disciplines that seem especially appropriate for our day. They inoculate us against distraction and hurry. They’ve always been useful and a part of the lives of mature Christians, but because of the ethos of our culture, maybe we need to give them more attention than usual. The first of these is recollection., the subject of this post. The second, the subject of tomorrow’s post — if tomorrow should come — is reflection.
Recollection … an antidote to distraction
Be still and know that I am God. (Psalm 46:10)
I wonder what Aldous Huxley would say if he were alive now in the 21st century. It seems almost quaint when he talks about the radio — this was written over 60 years ago — but if you understand it as “aural bombardment” in general, then there’s a takeaway for us:
The twentieth century is, among other things, that Age of Noise. Physical noise, mental noise and noise of desire — we hold history’s record for all of them. And no wonder; for all the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence. That most popular and influential of all recent inventions, the radio [what would he say today!] is nothing but a conduit through which pre-fabricated din can flow…. And this din goes far deeper, of course, than the eardrums. It penetrates the mind, filling it with a babel of distractions — news items, mutually irrelevant bits of information, blasts of corybantic or sentimental music, continually repeated doses of drama that bring no catharsis, but merely create a craving for daily or even hourly emotional enemas. And where…the broadcasting stations support themselves by selling time to advertisers, the noise is carried from the ears…to the ego’s central core of wish and desire…. All advertising has but one purpose — to prevent the will from ever achieving silence…. The condition of an expanding and technologically progressive system of mass production is universal craving. Advertising is the organized effort to extend and intensify craving. (Aldous Huxley)
The Practice of Jesus
Read Mark 1:35, Mark 6:31 and Matthew 14:10-13 and it will become clear that Jesus took time for recollection, which literally means “collecting again” or “bringing to mind again.” Think of the imagery behind the word recollection. You have the picture of someone picking up pieces that have become scattered and putting them all in one place. This is what we do in recollection. We take the scattered elements of our selves and our days and put them back into a whole piece. We remind ourselves that we belong to the Lord, that he loves us, that one thing matters, that we’re here to receive and dole out love.
Recollection is the precursor for reflection. We first have to gather the scattered elements of our selves and life before we can think about them. It’s like doing archeology. You’re digging around and come across a bunch of pottery shards embedded in dirt. You carefully extricate them, clean them, and put them together on a table. Then you carefully examine them and figure out what goes together. Eventually you might get a pot. But there’s no examination until there’s some sort of collection. Re-collection starts when we stop. Re-collection sets the stage for reflection, but the two dance together. If we practice recollection at regular intervals through the day, we train ourselves to return to God. Those stopovers on our daily journey might revolve around fixed-hour prayer. They might involve two or three scheduled breaks in our day just to sit still, be quiet, and pray silently. Journaling might also help us. What you do specifically is almost inconsequential in comparison to simply doing something. The truly important thing is to act courageously and wisely by carving out moments to step off the path, silence the noise and listen for a moment with God to your life.
Essential Disciplines for Our Time 1
December 16, 2008
Purity of heart is to will one thing. (Søren Kierkegaard)
[Your heavenly Father] will give you all you need from day to day if you live for him and make the Kingdom of God your primary concern. (Matthew 6:33, NLT)
… a doubtful mind is as unsettled as a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind. People like that should not expect to receive anything from the Lord. They can’t make up their minds. They waver back and forth in everything they do. (James 1:6-8, NLT)
Don’t make room for the world, for your unbridled passions, or your laziness. Words aren’t enough to claim the kingdom of God. It takes strength and courage and violence. You must violently resist the tides of the world. Violently give up all that holds you back from God. Violently turn your will over to God to do his will alone. (François Fenelon)
Single-mindedness, recollection, silence and reflection are foundational for developing a mature, durable spiritual life. There is, in fact, no mature conversation with God and no deep understanding of his created order that occurs without them. They form the backdrop, context and the ground for our discipleship. In their absence we can only expect an abstract babbling about God, a kind of virtual experience of the divine based on the acquisition of religious information rather than direct experience of the Holy One. Without them we have the semblance of power, but certainly not the real deal. In short, we can’t afford to lose them.
But in fact we are losing them. Of course there has never been a crowd stampeding to God or rushing headlong to the practices that help us draw close to him. The majority has always been content to travel effortlessly along a broad and comfortable highway leading to an equally broad gate. Jesus was quick to point this out. (Matt. 7:13) But there will always be holdouts, people who want the less traveled and bumpier road despite the difficulties involved. We, like our ancestors, can still find that narrow road today. But whereas in the past the effort to find and walk it well took all our efforts, today it seems to take more than all. We look in our travel bag for the items of single-mindedness, recollection, silence and reflection only to find that the supply is low, that someone raided it in the middle of the night and left us in short supply. Welcome to modern life.