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Challenges to the Self and Identity

November 25, 2011

After Jesus’ enlightening moment he felt the need, or more accurately the Spirit prompted/drove/compelled Jesus, to go into a time of reflection. Jesus went into the eremos, the desert. The desert has a rich history in the biblical tradition as well as in our last two thousand years of church history. The desert/wilderness for Israel was her place of testing and identity formation. And it is quite clear theologically that Jesus, as a representative for Israel is undergoing a personal identity formation moment as he heads to the desert. A sort of culmination in his person of all Israel wanted to be but couldn’t be. Of course whether he knew he was doing that as the climax of Israelite history IN him and his life is what we have said is totally unknown.

The question that Jesus is apparently wrestling with is whether or not he will live from the deepest sense of calling he has been given, something that as of this is moment at least he realizes is special and maybe historic.

If you and I think we are special, if we are given high accolades, if are given high praise, we are faced with how much of that will “go to our heads” so to speak. That same is true of criticism we receive. How much of this “storying” will land within us and be restoried over and over again; one of the stories potentially leading to egocentricity the other toward a personal self deprecating outlook. I wonder if in the midst of Jesus’ experience at his baptism he isn’t facing something like this.

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Letting Go of Life at the Speed of Blur

November 20, 2011

For those of you at Mosaeik over the weekend I promised poetry that syncs with my message. Here you go

The Way It Is

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change.
But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about
what you are pursuing.
You have to explain
about the thread.
But it is hard for
others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.

Tragedies happen;
people get hurt
or die; and you suffer
and get old.
Nothing you do can
stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever
let go of the thread.

~ William Stafford ~

And an astronomer said, Speak to us of Time?
And he answered:
You would measure time the measureless and the immeasurable.
You would adjust your conduct and even direct the course of your spirit according to hours and seasons.
Of time you would make a stream upon whose bank you would sit and watch its flowing.
Yet the timeless in you is aware of life’s timelessness,
And knows that yesterday is but to-day’s memory and to-morrow is to-day’s dream.
And that that which sings and contemplates in you is still dwelling within the bounds of that first moment which scattered the stars into space.
Is not time even as love is, undivided and paceless?
But if in your thought you must measure time into seasons,
let each season encircle all the other seasons,
And let to-day embrace the past with remembrance
and the future with longing.

Kalhil Gibran

Made in Eden

Never ending like the sun in the sky
Ever lasting is the love in your eye
O I wonder how you made it all for me
What you’ve given it’s hard to receive for free

So I want to thank you for my life

I was made from the dust of the ground
You placed me inside your garden of love
I could walk around with you by my side
This is my reason to live
I was made in Eden

The wind it blew and brought with it the rain
You taught me to build a bout and shelter from the pain
This is your promise the world cannot deny
It is untouchable like a rainbow in the sky

So I want to thank you for my life

I was made from the dust of the ground
You placed me inside your garden of love
I could walk around with you by my side
This is my reason to live
I was made in Eden

There is nothing else that can make me feel this way
There is nothing else that can give me all this life
So I will stay, yes I will stay

I was made from the dust of the ground
You placed me inside your garden of love
I could walk around with you by my side

This is my reason to live
I was made in Eden

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Enlightenment and Ego…Jesus

November 15, 2011

What comes next after Jesus comes to cousin JB for a ceremonial washing is really quite remarkable. This four hundred plus year wait is over. The long awaited new world was dawning. And Israel as a nation is waking/mindchanging/repenting, and to show it they are washing off the accumulations of sleepiness, wrongdoing, forgetfulness and lack of faith it would ever come. They are coming up out of the water, clean, ready and “alive.”

As soon as Jesus was baptized as he came up out of the water heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and lighting on him. 17 And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.” (matthew 3)

The italics are mine. Jesus saw this. Did anyone else? Certainly no one else is listed in the text as seeing anything. Luke’s gospel remains silent also as to whether anyone else saw this, and as we have said in the past an argument from silence is simply that…silence.

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Ceremonial Washings to Identify that A Bigger Mind is Important

November 8, 2011

You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness… what you will discover will be wonderful. What you will discover is yourself

Alan Alda

Jesus underwent what appears to be a normal development as a kid. Grew physically, grew in wisdom, grew in favor with God, and grew in grace and favor with the rest of humanity. Those are statements all made of the youth/young man transitional space Jesus; in the Jewish world of Jesus’ context, bar-mitzvah time.

What we do not know about is the interior world of Jesus’ thought or even what the stories were that swirled around him growing up. What was the public story about Mary’s pregnancy? What did the families narrate about the unique circumstances in which they were found? And if they told Jesus this story what exactly did they tell him and when? “Uh Jesus you might hear some crazy rumors at school or on the playground but don’t worry…THEY ARE TRUE… mommy did have a vision, and you were conceived by the Holy Spirit, and it is a miracle and really honest we aren’t looney.” Can you imagine from Mary and Joseph’s position how excruciating this had to be? These are some of the unknowns for which we simply have no details.

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Beginners Mind On What We Think Jesus Knew About Himself

November 1, 2011

As we set out to consider the teachings of Jesus in an integrated spiritual method, we are entering territory that is both familiar and unfamiliar. Perhaps more than any other spiritual teacher, Jesus requires a real beginners mind. A willingness to unlearn what one already presumably knows and start with a completely clean slate.

Cynthia Bourgeault – Mary Magdalene

Can we read about Jesus, and his life and teachings, in ways that surprise and arrest us again? Novelty is unnecessary but fresh eyes and seeing are. Tired, pedestrian and worn out ways of reading are common when we don’t check our assumption at the door instead of our brain. What am I suggesting?

There is a kind of assumption floating around lots of church circles that Jesus was soooo divine that “surely” he knew from the womb he was special, God’s son, destined for death by crucifixion only to be resurrected! Pretty picture, nice idea, neatly packaged theology, but purely speculation. Purely. Actually from birth to 12 years we have only one story of the life of Jesus. The particular story is actually a very important one for showing Jesus on a very very human development curve.

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Five Options Forward in Our “Spliced-Together” Worlds

October 28, 2011

From our last post…

The collapse of long-term thinking, planning and acting, and the disappearance or weakening of social structures in which thinking, planning and acting could be inscribed for a long time to come, leads to a splicing of both political history and individual lives into a series of short-term projects and episodes which are in principle infinite, and do not combine into the kinds of sequences to which concepts like ‘development,’ ‘maturation,’ ‘career,’ or ‘progress’ could be meaningfully applied. A life so fragmented stimulates ‘lateral’ rather than ‘vertical’ orientations.

Zygmut Bauman Liquid Modernity

Five Questions to Move Us Forward

1. How honest will we be?

My sense is that while we all feel the crunch of time constraints, it is much harder to be really honest about how badly those time compressions impact us. Do we really want to get off the speeding bullet train that has left the station or do we actually like the adrenalin rush it provides? At some point in time we have to have some honest moments.

2. How dense a life do you want to have?

How much do you really want to cram into a 24 hour day? That is a question to which there is no right or wrong answer but it is crucial to answer nonetheless. Do you love a packed full day 7 days a week where everything is an appetizer but you never get a meal? Are you the kind of person for whom down time is a sign of laziness and busyness a badge of honor? If so your choice of life-density is something funding a certain identity you really value.

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Merry-Go-Round

October 20, 2011

“Speed is the form of ecstasy the technical revolution has bestowed on man; that wild state of simultaneous freedom and imprisonment that is the culmination of millennia of evolution in human societies, technologies and habits of mind.

Czech novelist Milan Kundera

Speed in life has changed the very texture of our existence. Don’t know what I mean? Have you never texted someone and sat there 10 minutes later absolutely miffed they hadn’t yet responded? Or sent an email that 3 days later hadn’t been replied to and thought to yourself “what is with them, what is taking so darn long, should I have sent it snail mail or what?”

Yes technology has given us speed as the ecstasy of our time. And we are as guilty of propagating it as we are sick of being subject to it. But are we subject to it? Are we simply helpless victims unable to do anything about the ever faster merry-go-round we are on? Or are we doomed to merely getting sick to our stomach, dizzy in orientation, and once off realizing we have in actuality gone nowhere?

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The Past No Longer Holds, But Neither Does the Future

October 17, 2011

‘There is a contraction of the present. The past “no longer holds” or is no longer relevant to us.
The future “does not hold yet.” The present then is “the time span for which the horizon of experience and expectation coincide”’ Harmut Rosa- High Speed Society

Eccl. 5:18 “After looking at the way things are on this earth, here’s what I’ve decided is the best way to live: Take care of yourself, have a good time, and make the most of whatever job you have for as long as God gives you life. And that’s about it. That’s the human lot. 19 Yes, we should make the most of what God gives, both the bounty and the capacity to enjoy it, accepting what’s given and delighting in the work. It’s God’s gift! 20 God deals out joy in the present, the now. It’s useless to brood over how long we might live”
Solomon’s latest publication that would be possibly titled “Enjoy Now!” But was formerly released under the title Ecclesiastes

It seems to me Rosa, current social acceleration guru, and Solomon, Mr. Ancient Wealth Man of the Millennium, are in the same camp.

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Wheel Spin – All the Activity With None of the Direction

October 11, 2011

The acceleration of technological innovation has been outstripped by the increase in the quantity of activity necessary to navigate it. The example of facebook from last post is only one example we could give. The truth is the metabolic rate of life seems to have increased. Unfortunately though that increase in metabolism hasn’t thinned things out but actually contributed to what I call “life density.”

Everything is packed so tight and experiences so closely spliced together it is hard to genuinely experience anything. Life seems denser, fuller, more diffracted but fuller here does not mean richer. By defintion this density we are speaking of isn’t a fuller deeper richer experience of the same few thing that used to be on our calendar 5 years ago or 15 years ago. This is a density of quantity. It is this quantity overload that leads us into dizzying velocity and a sped up metabolism with which we have to do life…a life at the speed of blur.

It has been said by one social demographer that the quintessential metaphor of the late modern age is the motorcycle. Jump on and ride into the sunset with no boundaries and get away from it all. The motorcycle symbolized freedom. But if the modern world sees a motorcycle our postmodern world is riding something quite different if you can call it riding. We have gotten off the motorcycle and gotten on the treadmill. Moving rather quickly, sweating like a dog in the process and all the while going no where at all. It keeps our metabolism up, but in an artificial way because we are moving toward nothing very quickly.

Or is a better metaphor the wheel spin. You know the car gets stuck in some loose gravel and the wheel starts to spin. And so you hit the accelerator harder. But what happens? Gravel spins out from underneath the tire. Faster wheel spin, less and less traction. Pretty soon no contact with anything solid. And if the engine is revved continually the lack of traction and continual spinning with blow the engine. Feel like you are wheel spinning and about to blow?

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Skimming Till Numb

October 6, 2011

Did you ever do that quintessential kid thing one day at the lake; stand in chest deep water and while holding your arm out parallel to the water spin around and let your hand bounce and skim the surface? The faster and harder you did it the more your hand slowly numbed and the dizzier you got?

I wonder if this isn’t a bit of a picture of human life in the 21st century. Moving quickly, skimming the surface, slowly numbing all the while getting more dizzy.

Communication is quicker…10 to the second power quicker. Post office-email.

Travel is quicker …. 10 to the seventh power quicker. Horse, car, jet plane.

But just those two things alone should have freed up so much more time for us to do things we really want right? Wrong-O tiny one. Wrong-O!

A micro change in technology enables something to be done faster or more efficiently. And this has an obvious benefit BUT ONLY so long as the macro environment in which the change took place remains unaffected.

So for example let’s take facebook. Post pictures so your family can see them or your close friends, shoot an inbox message to a friend or sibling and life is easier and you have saved time. BUT BUT BUT while you are doing that 4 friend requests come in from people you haven’t seen in 14 years – 17 years respectively. You have to see their pictures. And of course when you do it is one of those Holy S@&* has she ever gained weight moments, or the “my gosh has he aged, sheesh where did his hair go, or man she really picked up some wrinkles” moments. The next thing you know you are browsing their family photos and holiday pictures and 30 minutes later or 2 hours later your time saving facebook connection is a really pain in the you know what. Time saved is exponentially time lost now.

In other words the cumulative effect of such micro changes is to re-configure that macro environment, ushering in new expectations and these change the velocities and metabolism of our lives.

We are taking in more data, we are more broadly connecting, the density of life increases, but are we REALLY connecting or just skimming till we are numb?

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