Our Instinct to Survive and Our Need to Control At last week’s recovery church meeting we discussed a quote from Francis Weller about the shadow times, the periods when we feel afraid and vulnerable, when it seems we have fallen down into the depths. We don’t like those times, of course, yet Weller reminds us that “down is holy ground.” [1] During those moments of struggle, when our assumptions and our defenses are shattered, we have the opportunity to become free. This is a good thing. So why do we try so hard to avoid pain? Are we so desperate to feel safe? Most of us are. After all, we…
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Lament and Creating Justice
A Year for Lamentation What a year this has been. In January, the Hong Kong protests were news. That same month, bushfires in Australia killed millions of animals. Later, the House impeached President Trump, and the Senate acquitted him. In Yemen, a civil war broke out. Then the pandemic hit, George Floyd was killed, and the Black Lives Matter demonstrations erupted. Hurricanes and fires destroyed wilderness and devastated communities. Kobe Bryant died, as did John Prine, John Lewis, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and others. We are reeling. Lament is a totally appropriate response. The term “lament” may bring up images of professional mourners wailing and carrying on as they stumble along…
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Sacrifice, Scapegoating, and Love
Restoring Harmony through Human Sacrifice With the start of the harvest, and before the rains began to fall, the ancient Aztecs ended their celebration of Ochpaniztli with a human sacrifice. The name “Ochpanaiztli” means “sweeping the way,” which may have been, as a Wikipedia article suggests, a reference to the winds that swept across the valley as winter drew near. [1] The holiday was celebrated to honor the goddess Tlazolteotl. A complex deity, she demanded sexual purity while, at the same time, inciting people to adultery and prostitution, both considered immoral to the Aztecs. Indeed, they would punish offenders by beating them to death or crushing their skull. To avoid…
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Truth and Our America
The Question of Truth Does such a thing as truth exist? If so, how do we define it? Is it relative, dependent on culture or worldview, making one truth as good as another? Can truth guide how we live and work and respond to the chaos overwhelming the United States today? The topic is huge. To explore it in depth would take a book. But there are some simple ideas we can look at. For instance, Michael Glanzberg, in his Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article, notes that philosophers have devised many ways of understanding how we know truth from falsehood. One way is to use the correspondence theory of truth.…
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Prayer Is Not Nothing
Nothing Left But Prayer This week at the recovery church meeting, we will talk about prayer. The timing seems right. As the United States reels from the effects of the pandemic, from forest fires and hurricanes, from a relentless cultural divide, and now, the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg from cancer, it seems as if all we have left to do is pray. It’s not just world events that leave us seeking comfort in ritual and supplication. When turbulence gets so bad it threatens the plane in which we ride, for instance, or medical interventions fail and we find ourselves perched at the edge of the afterlife, we can feel…
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Is There a Sentient God?
When the World Is Burning As I write this, forest fires in California, Oregon, and Washington are destroying vegetation and property, displacing families, and killing animals and people. Although this is just one more hit in an ongoing attack by a warming world, just one more season of worsts, these fires have sent hundreds of thousands of people from their homes. In areas that aren’t burning, smoke hangs like a thick and acrid fog, making our eyes sting, leaving grit in our mouths. Many people are suffering. When the world is burning, we flee, or we fight. In the face of immediate danger, we’re unlikely to wonder if the god…
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Faith, Hope, and Charity
The Greatest of These First Corinthians 13 contains Paul’s famous treatise on agape, which in most modern translations of the Bible is rendered as “love.” If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. .…
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From Suffering to Love
Seeking Relief from Suffering “Why shouldn’t people suffer?” one of our members asked during a sharing circle. “Maybe that’s why they’re good people.” The question of why suffering exists often comes up as we explore together what it means to be human, ponder how we can better serve the common good, and consider how to help our hearts grow in empathy. Suffering can help us develop kindness and compassion, but that doesn’t mean we like it. If God is real, and if She has anything to do with love, we wonder how She can allow her creatures to experience so much pain? It may be, as our group member suggested,…
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Free Will in a Quantum Universe
Seeking to Know Why As a hospital chaplain, I see a lot of suffering. Illness, financial insecurity, disability, betrayal, loneliness, and loss are common. Some patients wonder why God has afflicted them so. Even those who understand that we can’t divine a reason for suffering will still search for one. It is part of being human, this desire to know why. One patient told me, “I know ‘why’ isn’t a helpful question. I know there’s no answer. But sometimes I wonder if I did something wrong. Am I being punished? If so, maybe I can make it right. Maybe I can mend my ways, and then God will cure me.”…
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Removing Blocks to Love
We Are Love At the Universalist Recovery Church meetings, we talk a lot about love. Not long ago, we concluded that our essential nature is love. That’s not a unique idea. Many religious traditions endorse that belief, especially those comfortable with mysticism. Sufism, which is the mystical branch of Islam, is all about love. Called “lovers of God,” Sufis often speak about the blissful union between us and the divine, one that is better than the most intimate oneness between a lover and her beloved. [1] Before we were born, no separation existed between us and God. With birth, we lose the memory of that oneness. For the Sufi, our…