Living in the Present Moment

This concept always sounded odd to me. Maybe it works for a Monk that had no cares or obligations but could it somehow help me in my quest for transformation?

I read a book a couple of months ago called “Stumbling on Happiness” by Harvard Psychology professor Daniel Gilbert. In that book he explains how our happiness depends in large part on our ability to accurately remember our past and accurately imagine our future. Unhappy people are ones that let memories and/or projected anxiety run their lives. At the heart of that notion is the idea that events, past or present, rarely cause much pain when they happen, but when we let our minds dwell on future things like schedules, obligations, promises, debts, and expected confrontations, then we end up creating weeks or months of stress for something that may only be 1 day of difficulty. The hype is usually much worse than the reality.

A similar phenomenon occurs when we set unrealistic expectations about positive things which we are looking forward to. How many times have you ruined a decent movie because you set such high expectations for it and when it turned out to be “good” instead of “great”, you ended up letting that failure to meet expectations feel like a complete bust rather than appreciating the good movie. We have to realize that we don’t have the ability to correctly imagine the future. Our skills of imagination are often better at dreaming up the impossible rather than correctly projecting an accurate picture of future events. How many people are lured into making decisions like getting a new job, car or house because they have over estimated and incorrectly projected the value it will create in their life. Eventually they feel regret when what the really got was more debt and none of the old problems disappear. I think this phenomenon is the very heart of many problems in our culture of consumerism. Madison Avenue has become very skilled at preying on this flaw in our mental capacity.

It seems that we also have an unrealistic memory of past events and the farther removed we are from the events the more unrealistic our memory becomes. Ever heard your grandfather describe the “good ole days”? Do you think they were really that good? Have you ever eaten what you thought was the “best meal of your life” only to return 2 weeks later to the same restaurant to realize that your memory of the meal was much better than the actual food?

We need to learn how to imagine more accurately but we also need to dwell in the present and feel more content with the blessings that are right in front of us. Meditation is a real key to solving this flaw in our mind. The most basic Buddhist mantra used for meditation goes something like this:

Breathing in – “I am calm”
Breathing out – “I smile”
Breathing in – “I dwell in the present moment”
Breathing out – “It is a good moment”

That seems very simple, but I’m finding that even a few minutes of mediation like this during my busy day can completely change my outlook on life. Being in touch with the present is important in the life of a follower of Jesus. For too long Christianity has been fixated on what may or may not happen in the next life or in "the end times" and forgotten to participate in the kingdom of God which Jesus tells us is "at hand".

The Luminous Web (Essays on Science and Religion)

This book by Barbara Brown Taylor really surprised me. Most people are either left brain types or right brain types. Early in our process of education we split off those people that are geared for logical thinking and those that are more geared to write the great American novel.

Taylor is such a great master of words that I was surprised to see her tackle the likes of evolutionary biology, Einstein’s theories of general and special relativity, quantum physics, and chaos theory. I’ve always been fascinated by science, but most books on the subjects suffer from a horrible case of underdeveloped right brain functionality. I was very impressed with this short book that finds a wonderful balance of logic and poetry. She hits the high points of these major scientific areas without boring the reader to tears.

Religion has often been forced into the role of competition with science but that shouldn’t be the case. The two are really built on the same concept of searching for truth. If we attempt to turn the Bible or any set of religious teachings into our science textbook then we will have ruined our ability to think rationally. If we attempt to use science as our religious inspiration then we will end up completely uninspired.

“Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.” – Albert Einstein

From the beginning of time man has always used God as the explanation for the unexplainable. Floods, earthquakes, fires, famine, and even a victory or defeat in battle became the acts of God that punished or rewarded our behavior. As those things became more explainable we relinquished God to be the smaller and smaller “gaps” in our understanding. A major emphasis of the book is revealing how the scientific discoveries in the last several centuries have influenced our religious endeavors. What we learned about the universe during this time period is that there seemed to be a number of very dependable laws of nature that made up a structured machine-like universe. The idea of mystery seemed to be vanishing and our image of God evolved (pardon the pun) into the master machinist pushing the right buttons to keep everything from falling apart. Religion feared these laws because each one seemed to threaten the image of God that man had created. To combat those threats religion attempted to create it’s own set of laws/doctrines to protect its identity. Science keeps stumbling onto a new paradigm shift that sends religion back to the drawing board.

The truth is that religion is always shaped by the physics of the day and the theology of the faith we all grew up with was built on the absolute mindedness of 19th and 20th century science. Modern physics is all about absolute laws of nature. Einstein’s theories of relativity had little to do with being relative and everything to do with an absolute formula for the energy in mass. Even the more recent Chaos theory has more to do with the limits of randomness rather than the mystery of the unknown.

Einstein spent the last part of his life trying to disprove quantum physics, which is an attempt to explain why sub-atomic particles seem to completely ignore all the laws of nature that we have grown attached too. He said, “God doesn’t roll dice” in an attempt to again create another formula that explains what still seems to be unexplainable. He died unsuccessful at finding the formula for the strange relationship of particles that seemed to be affected or somehow externally connected. He called this phenomenon “spooky action at a distance”.

Quantum physics may end up explaining exactly how God operates the machine from a distance, or it may explain how God is not in control at all. Instead, I like the idea that maybe every particle in the universe is actually a part of God interacting together the way a heart interacts with blood or the way plants interact with sunlight. Maybe everything that we can see with the strongest telescope is just a simple cell or at most an organ in the mystery we call God.

“Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes and heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion, its message becomes meaningless.” - Rabbi Abraham Heschel (Jewish Theologian 1907 –1972)

Leaving Church

I recently discovered a couple of books by Barbara Brown Taylor. She has the rare ability to describe the journey of faith in the way Hemingway described a fishing trip. The first of her books that I read was titled “Leaving Church” and it described her experiences as a priest and how she left a busy life in a big city parrish to move to rural north Georgia and then left that role to become a professor of world religion at a small college.

My favorite part of the book was a description of how she struggled at times with being uncomfortable in the clothes she wore. She describes her first clumsy but humbling experience with her priestly collar then later she describes how uncomfortable it was to ware something that made her look more like a woman again.

“I didn’t not know how to stand in the dress or where to put my hands. I could not think of anything to say that went with the dress. All of the things I was used to talking about went with the serious clothes in my closet, while this dazzling outfit called for something that Billie Holiday might say, or Dorothy parker at least. When I saw people I knew from church, I saw my own discomfort mirrored in their faces. Seeing their priest in a blue sequined dress at a New Year’s Eve party was like running into their dentist in a Speedo at the beach. They could hardly look at me.”

As I have recently come to understand, studying world religions has a way of changing your perspective about faith. Unlike today, early Christianity was all about searching for identity and finding faith on the edges of established and accepted traditions.

“The emperor Constantine knew that a faith with no center would never anchor his crumbling empire. So he called all the bishops together, fed them lunch, and asked them to say something definitive about the nature of God in Christ… When the bishops had finished crafting a central confession of Christian faith, those who did not choose this option became known as heretics.”

Many people have called Barbara Brown Taylor a heretic for questioning some fundamental values of the traditional church but as she so eloquently states:

“While the center may be the place where the stories of the faith are preserved, the edge is the place where the best of them happened.”

If I have learned anything in the last 4 years as I have delved deeper into studying the Bible and rediscovering my own religion, it is that the Bible has been misread and misused. Like Barbara, I spent the early part of my life making the Bible an idol but never bothered to understand it. The mistake I made with the Bible was equivalent to marrying a beautiful woman and loving her based only on her surface appearance without ever asking where she was born, who her parents were, and what she dreamed about the future. Barbara has this to say about her love of the Bible…

“I do not pretend to read the Bible any more objectively than those who wrote it for me. To read it literally strikes me as a terrible refusal of their literary gifts. I will keep the Bible, which remains the Word of God for me, but always the Word as heard by generations of human beings as flawed as I.

…I hope never to put the book ahead of the people whom the book calls me to love and serve. I will keep the Bible as a field guide, which was never intended to be a substitute for the field.”

I have many things in common with Barbara Brown Taylor and spending time living in rural north Georgia is only one of them.

Peacefulness

This morning I woke up before daylight. I’m not sure why that happened but I felt perfectly refreshed so I decided to do the unthinkable. I got out of bed at 6am on a Saturday morning! I made a cup of coffee and sat outside on the deck for a little extra reading and meditation. I really love the view of our little slice of nature. Our deck sits about 20 feet up in the trees and in the summer the leaves hide any hint of the fact that we are located in the suburbs. The sounds of nature filled the air as I took a few hours to read in the cool of the morning. Of course anyone from Augusta, GA realizes that cool is a relative word and it is a short-lived condition in July.

After a couple of hours and deep in a state of bliss as I was about to finish a very entertaining book, my wife joined me. My wife and I are so very different. She too enjoys soaking in nature, but for her being still and quiet for more than 5 minutes is torture. For her, nothing is really enjoyed until it has been spoken. The glorious event of a squirrel scampering through the trees isn’t really an event until she speaks to it. “Good morning Mr. Squirrel. Isn’t it a beautiful day?” The majesty of the sound of nature is not really majestic to her until she can verbally declare it to another person. “Isn’t it peaceful out here?” she announced as she began to rattle off her scheduled plans for the day.

Normally I might have been a little irritated that she had disrupted my state of bliss but something occurred to me this morning that caused me to remain silent and listen to her. As I listened to the sounds of birds in the background I wondered if any of the birds were annoyed by the sounds of other birds. Could the sounds of birds and insects that seemed so calming to me actually drive other creatures away? Maybe my perception of pleasant sounds vs. annoying sounds was a bit off.

My wife went inside for a minute (remember she can’t sit still for more than 5 minutes) and returned with a bowl cereal. This time when she returned I let the sounds she made crunching cornflakes beside me blend with the birds and squirrels. I realized that my wife was another majestic creature that God had placed in my life and her sounds were as pleasant and soothing as any bird. In fact, when she went back inside again 5 minutes later the soundscape of my backyard seemed a bit empty. It wasn’t long before I began to hear the sounds from inside the house as she cleaned the kitchen. I smiled knowing that the sounds of pots, pans, and cabinet doors were not that different than those of a squirrel scratching bark and shaking leaves. These are all sounds that let me know that God is there and he has given me all the things I need to be happy if I will just take the time to listen.

I guess that sounds are relative just like temperature and I guess that the peacefulness of a sound has more to do with the person listening. Today I realized that peacefulness is not something you create with the right combination of temperature, silence, and space, but it is a state of being that you can choose to have anytime and anywhere.

The Meaning of Prayer

In Buddhism, practicing the teaching of the Buddha is the highest form of prayer. The Buddha said, “If someone is standing on one shore and wants to go to the other shore, he has to either use a boat or swim across. He cannot jus pray, ‘Oh, other shore, please come over here for me to step across!’” To a Buddhist, praying without practicing is not a real prayer. - Thich Nhat Hanh

I think the thing that has captured my attention about Buddhist philosophy is that unlike Christianity it is a faith of action and sacrifice rather than a faith of belief and self-preservation. The theology of traditional Christianity is plagued by its lack of action. As a Christian I spent most of my life thinking that the best thing I could do is try and persuade God to solve the problems of the world by praying the right way or the right amount of times. The combination of this view of God as sovereign and all-powerful along with its eschatological views about the inevitable literal destruction of the world and miraculous salvation of a select few has created a mass of people unmotivated to take action. That was not always the case. Paul’s writings in the New Testament are filled with ideas of cultivating the type of character traits that Jesus encouraged and building the community that Jesus called the kingdom of God.

When it comes to fixing our own problems and meeting our own needs we seem to have no trouble taking action. We work hard to feed our own families and even mock people that can’t. We take to the polls to vote for candidates that will help us prosper and protect our own interests and lifestyle. But when it comes to caring for the starving children of the world or protecting the lives of people outside of our own borders, we feel the best thing we can do is offer up a few prayers. We use our theology as an excuse to avoid responsibility. When we convince ourselves that God is in complete control and is responsible for everything then we no longer need to be responsible. Like Pilate, we wash our hands of thier blood and leave it up to God, but we forget that God has clearly placed the responsibility in our hands. The message of Jesus is that we are not subject to the violent judgement of an angry God, but that he has given us the means to build a new community of justice and peace here on earth and we must make it a reality for men and women of all social standing.

Can we really call our prayers for peace sincere if we turn around and vote for candidates that make war and the preparation for war a priority? How can we sincerely pray for people in poverty when the majority of our charitable contributions are going to churches that then spend it on our own entertainment and our own spiritual health? How can we sincerely pray for the orphans of the world and not open our homes to them? How can we pray for the families of the world and not support legislation and govenrment budgets that help families survive.

I now see prayer as a starting point of self-motivation rather than and ending point of responsibility. Prayer should be a statement of our intent not a plea for God’s intervention. Our prayers will not suddenly wake God up from a slumber, convince him to change his course of action, or bring something to his attention that he had until now overlooked. However, our prayers can be a time of correction of our own priorities. Prayer cannot motivate God but it can be powerful motivation and redirection for us. I hear that message in Jesus instruction for how to pray. The Lord’s prayer is an example of how to use prayer to be a statement of commitment to sacrifice and motivation through a submission to God’s will.

Lately I have a deep conviction and regret that I’ve not actually let my faith lead my public actions. I have to confess that I’ve not been living a sincere life in the spirit of Christ. It is interesting that it took a couple of Buddhist monks to teach me the importance of becoming the body of Christ and not just admiring and worshipping the person of Christ.

When I pray "God let your will be done" I am not suggesting that God take my advice and begin doing things his way. I'm making a statement that I will begin doing God's will.

Searching for...Fred?

What exactly is love? It has been said that God is love but I’m not sure our culture knows what love really is. It seems to me that we use the word love most often to represent desire or a sense of craving something or someone. I say “I love chocolate” or “I loved that movie last night” or even “I love my wife” only because those things satisfy me and bring me joy. I think that most of those cases and even in the case of love for people we really mean that we desire or crave them and we in some way are benefited by having them around and/or in our presence. There isn't anything wrong with that, but is it really a good goal? Maybe the problem with marriages today is that people are trying to “crave” each other but if you think about it, craving someone is the most selfish thing a person could do. I don’t think that when Jesus said to love your neighbor he meant to value his friendship because he will loan you a power tool from time to time. Did Jesus mean that we should find joy in our neighbors or that we should bring them joy?

What if the idea of love that Jesus had was something different than “desire” and his understanding of love just doesn’t translate to our language and worldview? What if there was actually some other emotional experience or a higher level of consciousness and sensitivity that he had in mind and we missed the point because we don’t have the right words in our vocabulary? What if we haphazardly translated the most important word in all of his teaching with the same word we use to describe how we feel about a candy bar or a pretty girl?

I think that my concept of faith in the past had been as a way to change my priorities so that I would start to desire the right things instead of desiring the wrong things. That sounds like a good idea, but it is fundamentally flawed because it is still centered around desire and as soon as desire is quenched then the compassion and love will fade. On the other hand if we are showing compassion only because we are trying to please and obey God then that also is wrong motivation. These efforts will be seen as fake rather than truely based on compassion for the ones we serve. The real goal of faith is to completely change our understanding of love so that we no longer desire anything or anyone but have compassion for everyone regardless of the benefit to us or our "desire" to please God. I think that is what Paul means by dying to our “self”. This is how Buddhists describe correct motivation for seeking transformation. It must be done for the benefit of others not for ourselves.

Since our language of love is so mixed with the concepts of desire and craving, maybe we need a new word to translate what Jesus meant. Just for kicks, lets say the word for this new super emotion and state of consciousness and sensitivity is called “fred” (pick your own creative word if you don’t like mine!). So I could say to someone “I fred you” and by that I would mean that I have compassion for you, I completely sympathize with your needs, I seek to bring you joy and fulfillment, and I want to support you and nourish you regardless of the benefit to me and regardless of the effects of the rewards I might receive from God. Relationships based on "fred" will last long after desire fades.

Maybe fred is all we need?

An Inconvenient Truth…

http://www.climatecrisis.net/

This movie should be a much-needed wake up call if we don’t all hit the snooze button and roll over.

A little over 4 years ago I read a book that urged me to answer the following question…

“Like most Christians, you have probably accepted Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior, but have you ever accepted Jesus as your political Lord and Savior?”

That one question started me down a process of self-analysis and reevaluation of my social and political views. I always felt that politics in general was corrupt so I might as well vote for the guy that will bother me the least and charge me the lowest amount of tax for the horrible job they did. I thought that faith was private and should not factor into my political views. That was bad logic and poor stewardship of the freedom and responsibility that God gave me. I have long since repented and been “politically saved”. I realized that if the message of Jesus didn’t affect my views about public policy and political allegiance then I was being selfish and missing the point. The politics of Jesus is something that urges us to look beyond political alliances that benefit ourselves and instead have compassion and understanding for the whole world regardless of the inconveniences they cause for us now.

I really don’t care much for Al Gore, but I’ve been waiting for a couple of months to see this movie he created. My wife and I saw it last night and it turned out to be very good despite his really weak presentation skills. I wish they had paid a professional actor to narrate the movie.

Why do so many Christians ignore this message? Too many conservative Christians interpret the message of the Bible to be about how the world will be literally destroyed instead of understanding that the Bible from Genesis to the Gospels to Revelation is telling us how to avoid the destruction of the world. God doesn’t want the world to be destroyed and he is not harboring a horrible plan to end it and rebuilt it. Visions and prophecies of the end of the world are warnings of possible outcomes given our current behaviors not predictions of an inevitable outcome.

I was a little disappointed that the movie didn’t go into more details about the current administrations complete disregard for the environment. President Bush’s appointments of oil industry personnel into very important positions of influence over the governments environmental and energy regulation agencies have been hard to tolerate. I don’t understand how Christians have been so brainwashed about politics.

http://www.net.org/reports/appointments.vtml

http://www.moles.org/ProjectUnderground/drillbits/6_05/vs.html