Metacentricities

I’m doing a bit of a first (not really, it just feels that way,) giving a short (5 minute) meditation for a service tomorrow morning at my church. I thought it would be fun to share.

Some Questions You Might Ask — Mary Oliver

Is the soul solid, like iron?
Or is it tender and breakable, like
the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl?
Who has it, and who doesn’t?
I keep looking around me.
The face of the moose is as sad
as the face of Jesus.
The swan opens her white wings slowly,
In the fall, the black bear carries leaves into the darkness.
One question leads to another.
Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg?
Like the eye of a hummingbird?
Does it have one lung, like the snake and the scallop?
Why should I have it, and not the anteater
who loves her children?
Why should I have it, and not the camel?
Come to think of it, what about the maple trees?
What about the blue iris?
What about all the little stones, sitting alone in the moonlight?
What about roses, and lemons, and their shining leaves?
What about the grass?

Meditation

The radical creation theologian Matthew Fox says, "As the ocean is in the fish and the fish are in the ocean, so God is in everything and everything is in God." For those of you that are theology geeks, this is called panentheism, the idea that God is in everything, immanent within all of creation.

I heard an amazing story on the radio a couple of weeks ago, about salmon in the Northwest. Like most people, I know the standard salmon story. They are born in small streams, then they swim down into the ocean, spend some years in the ocean growing, then, finally when they are ready to breed, they head back up to the same stream they were born in, to spawn, then die. What I didn’t know, is that the ecosystem of the forests of the Northwest depend upon the salmon. Of course, the bears and the eagles, and other predators depend on the salmon. But there is more. If you were to measure the carbon and nitrogen in trees in Northwest forests, a large percentage is from the ocean. It comes from the predators of the salmon disposing of the carcasses in the forest, which then decompose, and get incorporated into the soil, and that nourishes the trees.

Native Americans of the region understood their dependency on salmon quite deeply. Here is a short poem said by women of the tribe Kwakiutl. It is called…

Prayer to the Sockeye Salmon

Welcome, o Supernatural One, o Swimmer
who returns every year in this world
that we may live rightly, that we may be well.
I offer you, Swimmer, my hearts deep gratitude.

I ask that you will come again
that next year we will meet in this life,
that you will see that nothing evil should befall me.
O Supernatural one, o Swimmer,
now I will do to you what you came here for me to do.

We sing here “I see the love of God in you, the light of God is shining through …” Seeing God in everything calls us to see the love of God in each and every dog, cat, leaf, stone, shell, flower, grain of sand, snake, mosquito, fish, maple tree, and kudzu root. Wouldn’t we think differently, and act differently if we thought that God was not only in each of us, but in each thing we came across and ate, too? And that, in having God, they have souls?

As we know, we live in a precarious moment. Every step we take, and every decision we make, can have implications for the future health of our planet, and every being on it. This is a moment to pay attention. To see every flower, every leaf, every stone, every lady bug, the seagulls at the beach, the spider crawling up your living room wall, the fish in your tank, the trees in your backyard, the cat crossing your lawn, the grass in your lawn, the ant in your kitchen, the dog who sleeps at the end of your bed, the chicken in your pot, the leaves of spinach in your salad, the worms in your compost, and give thanks to the God that is in them, and the God, that by the miraculous process of evolution, put us all in this place, and in this time, so that we may depend upon one other.

I don’t have a whole lot of time these days, but I thought I’d share with you the best I’ve seen in TreeHugger this week:

• I know you’ve heard about Peak Oil. How about Peak Copper?
• The blog Evanco.com, the Evangelical Ecologist, is having a Green Blog Carnival
• Lester Brown’s new book Plan B 2.0 is available for free on the net. Looks like a good read.
• Find out where you should get your food from, with the 100 Mile Diet.
• In the newest kind of airline idiocy, they are actually trying to introduce standing room only seats in economy class. Flying cheaply and comfortably has been an oxymoron for a while now, but this is ridiculous. I know that shoving more people into a plane is theoretically more ecologically advantageous, but …

technorati tags: environment

I’m sure you have noticed that I’m blogging less often this past couple of weeks. Well, I am up to my neck (eyeballs?) in schoolwork, have varied life happenings, and, generally, I simply have less time to blog. So I’ll be blogging a lot less over the next month. Summer is coming, though, and I am very much looking forward to a summer off, some travel across the country, and time to relax, and integrate all of the intense happenings over the past 18 months.

I also have been thinking a lot about what my blogs are for. I posted a while back, some thoughts about the uses of blogging.

I’m thinking now, about three principle reasons to blog:

• Keeping friends, family, acquaintances and interested parties up to speed on my life
• Continue interactions and conversations in the progressive religious blogosphere
• A space to think and talk about topics of interest to me. This, I think, has some separate sub-reasons:
• Develop and express political and social ideas (my prophetic voice)
• Develop and express intra- and interpersonal concepts
• Express spiritual experiences, and develop and express theological concepts

But I want to be more clear, more intentional in my blogging. I’ll let you know where this thinking leads.

technorati tags: school, blogs

According to a patent filing, Phillips (an electronics company) has invented a method, using existing technology, to stop you from either changing the channel, or fast forwarding through a recording, during a commercial. Yes, you heard me right. I imagine it might also prevent you from using the mute button.

So now, no only is there nothing of any substance or use on television, they expect to force you to watch commercials (or, of course, you can pay to get that ‘feature’ removed.)  But, actually, I won’t notice, since I don’t watch TV.

What I find fascinating is that as network television gets fewer and fewer people watching it, since more people watch cable, watch TV shows on DVD, or from iTunes, or downloading, or they just spend more time surfing the web, they are inventing things that are more likely to drive people away from TV. Does that make any sense? 

technorati tags: television, advertisement

I was among the crowd, and they were jostling me around. I tried to stay close to the edge of the road, so I’d see him coming. My friends, all women, were standing around me, and we were holding each other for support. "Did you get to talk with him last week?" one asked me. I hadn’t. I’d missed him entirely because I was off running an errand, buying a new goat. I now regretted how I let something so trivial get in the way of something so important.

"Here he comes!" someone shouted. I saw a phalanx of centurions, with their shiny armor and pikes, marching in step. There seemed to be many others in the moving group, so it was hard to see him. But he was there. He looked so small, inside that circle of centurions. So fragile, weak. Not like I’d seen him last, a few months ago. He was strong, and was doing a pretty good job of facing down my older brother the Pharisee. He now looked so tired, so weary, so broken.

Behind him, there was a tall man carrying the cross - struggling to keep up. Every once in a while a centurion would crack his whip, so that the poor man would push himself forward. There were some in the crowd that were spitting at Jesus, mocking him, taunting him. My friends and I pushed forward, wanting to provide him with comfort, with some level of support. He’d been so good, and so understanding with us over the year that we’d followed him. He looked up, looked in my eyes, and I knew, at that very moment, that everything would be OK.

(Some of you may not know what the Stations of the Cross are. Wikipedia has a nice entry, which is a good introduction to this depiction of the last hours of Jesus’ life, and the liturgical significance of it. Station 8 is called "He meets the women of Jerusalem." and is a reference to Luke 23:27-31 which depicts Jesus speaking to some women who are wailing and weeping for him.)

Other Via Crucis Posts today: (7) His second fall Annie, Jonathon, Jason, PmPilgrim   (8) He meets the women of Jerusalem Dry Bones Dance, Jonathon, Jason

Tomorrow (9) His third fall Ron,  Jonathon, PmPilgrim    (10) He is stripped of His garments Ron, Mark, Jonathon, Church Geek

The Washington Post today has a story, which they title "Most Seniors Enrolled Say Drug Benefit Saves Money." In the first paragraph, they say:

Millions of senior citizens have not signed up for and do not know much about Medicare’s new prescription drug benefit, but among those who have enrolled, three-quarters said the paperwork was easy to complete and nearly two-thirds said the program saved them money, the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll shows.

OK, so the ones that managed to sign up (over half haven’t) thought the paperwork was easy and most of them saved money. This poll means absolutely nothing. Perhaps many seniors didn’t sign up because they realized after number crunching that they wouldn’t save any money. Some might not have signed up because, for them, the paperwork was too hard. No where in this article do they suggest that the millions that didn’t sign up might be different than those that did.

An article in the New England Journal of Medicine begs to differ with the sentiment of the Washington Post. A salient quote:

Despite its youth, the Medicare drug benefit is already chronically ill. But with extensive rehabilitation, it could go on for years, albeit with impaired functional capacity. Debate continues over whether its early spasticity was caused by inept management of its birth or a genetic disorder present at its creation. Proponents of the first explanation suggest that Medicare and its private insurers were not ready for the millions of applicants and hundreds of millions of prescriptions that poured in early in January, in a flood that they were ill prepared to handle. The layer of insurance companies inserted into the process in the name of efficiency exacerbated the confusion. An administration and Congress guided by Ronald Reagan’s principle that "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem" put his vision into practice in a chillingly convincing way.

I’m happy to report that my old home state of Massachusetts has started a different ball rolling, by passing new legislation which virtually guarantees everyone health insurance coverage. Yay!!

technorati tags: medicare, healthcare, polls, massachusetts

Yesterday, Palm Sunday, was the beginning of Holy Week. This is, basically, the first time I’ve observed Holy Week in any sense of the word. When I was a kid, growing up, and when I was a fundamentalist I remember Palm Sunday, and Easter, but nothing else registered. And from what I could tell, it was Christmas that was the most important holiday of the year. Then, of course, I ignored the whole thing except for noticing the chocolate eggs and chicks arrive at the store. Then, as a Unitarian Universalist, basically, the whole thing never really registered except that we had really nice balloons and a cool flower ritual on Easter Sunday.

This year, since I kinda sorta observed Lent (that’s another whole long story I’ll write about sometime,) Holy Week has made quite the imprint in my life. During this week in our morning Lectio Divina practice, we’re doing the sections of Mark’s gospel relating to the last week. I’m going to a Holy Thursday service (which will have foot washing and communion, how cool is that?) a high church Good Friday service at Grace Cathedral in SF,  and then stuff on Sunday.

I’m doing all of this on purpose, really. See, this is the deal. I can’t and won’t take the whole "Jesus died for our sins" thing at anything even remotely close to face value. I could spend a lifetime unpacking those 5 words. Every single one of those words are at least five questions, not an answer. And, truth be told, I don’t think that for me, there really is only one answer to any one of those questions.  And what’s turning out to be true for me, is that it is practice, which, in this case means both my daily contemplative practice, and worship a couple of times a week, that helps me look at those questions, connects me with the most direct (for me) avenue to ask and explore those questions: God. I guess that’s why I’m a mystic. And, this sounds hauntingly familiar. It was practice that connected me with any understanding of Buddhism I managed to come away with. This seems to mean that for me, spiritual practice is the core of my spiritual life.

I’m turning into a Christian that is, in the greater scheme of things, somewhat unusual. I said, not so long ago, that I thought that Protestants spent too much time on faith, and not enough time on practice.  Most Christians that are observant in terms of spiritual practice are pretty conservative theologically. Most Christians who are progressive or radical in their theology are not especially observant (like most mainline Protestants, for example.) I imagine there are Christians who are not observant, but theologically conservative. But the quadrant I find myself on the far end of, is the quadrant of those that are observant, that is, do a lot of spiritual practice, but are theologically progressive or radical. And that is a really interesting place to sit. I know that I have company. There are folks here at PSR who are in a similar place. (And, actually, a lot of Episcopals sit here, too.) And I wonder, given the new interest in things like Taizé services (a contemplative ecumenical service,) Lectio Divina, Centering Prayer and Christian meditation, that perhaps more people are beginning to populate this quadrant.

Anyway, one more note about Holy Week. I’ll be blogging as part of the Via Crucis (Stations of the Cross) grid blog project.  I’ll be blogging on Wednesday on station 8, "He meets the women of Jerusalem."

technorati tags: religion, easter, lent, christianity, viacrucis

Ages ago in  "blog time" (that’s about a month) Beth wrote a blog entry, called "Blogging as Professional Development." Not too long later, when I was talking with Cindy about my upcoming work next year as an intern at Fairfax Community Church, and expressing the (at this point, mild) stress of thinking about writing sermons, she said I had no excuse - I had lots of sermon material already at hand.

This lead me to think about what blogging means to my professional career (which, at this point is simply my career as a seminarian) and what it means to be a blogging professional. In her post, Beth talks about reflection, and how blogging allows for the expression of what comes from reflection about experiences, or new learning. 

There are an increasing number of religious leaders who blog, although most are relatively young. But it’s interesting to watch what they write, and how, and why. And it will be interesting to watch whether or not, and how, my blogging changes as I move forward on this path. And it will also be interesting to see how we all, as blogging religious professionals, interact with each other in this medium.

technorati tags: blogging, professional, religion

With impeccable timing, National Geographic has published the text, and a lot of information on a recovered codex, which contains something called "The Gospel of Judas." It’s considered the biggest find in ancient Christian related text since the Nag Hammadi Library, discovered in 1948, and popularized by Elaine Pagels and others, containing the Gospel of Thomas. Apparently, this text was written around the same time as the Gospels of Matthew, Luke and John, and provides a different view of the relationship of Judas to Jesus. The text is Coptic, which is the same language as the Nag Hammadi Library. Coptic is an acient Egyptian language. A lot of texts have been preserved from Egypt, because of its very dry climate.

It’s worth having a look at the National Geographic site, it gives you a good idea of the context, the fragments of codex themselves, and what kind of work is involved in recovering old text like this. 

I haven’t delved much into the whole issue of this Gospel, and I haven’t read much of it yet. In general, I’m pretty interested in exploring the wide range of non-canonical texts that exist. For one, it shows the incredible range of theology in the early church. I’m hoping at some point I’ll find a class on this stuff.

I think for me, one of the most interesting questions (of course this all is predicated on the notion that there was someone called Judas that betrayed Jesus) is that if, according to core Christian doctrine, Jesus had to die, then in what way really was Judas a traitor? And in what way did he have free will? I’m sure there are many theologians who’ve grappled with this, and I just haven’t read them yet, but I’ve found that whole thing to be really interesting - Judas is the infamous betrayer, yet the betrayal was, according to doctrine, necessary. That’s pretty fascinating stuff.

technorati tags: bible, christianity, jesus, judas

Those of you who are Apple fanatics like me have already heard the news. Those of you who are just garden variety Apple users should know about this. And the Windows users should perk up your ears. Those of you that run Linux, well, go get some coffee, maybe.

This is one of the biggest earthquakes in the Apple world that I can remember (and I’ve been an Apple user since 1978, although I’d say I’ve only actively followed the doings of apple since the mid 80s,) up there with, in recent memory, Apple clones, OS X, the switch to Intel chips. What happened was that Apple released new software, called Boot Camp, that allows you to run Windows and Mac OS X on the same machine (not at the same time, but I’m sure that’s not too far down the pike.) And it will be an integral part of the new release of OS X, called Leopard (10.5 - won’t they running out of cat names soon? And when is OS XI due?)

There are all sorts of theories flying about this. Is it a way for Apple to finally make inroads in the business market? Is it a way to recover from the losses in educational market share? I think it’s a bit of both of these, but mostly, I think it’s about consumers. Consumers have always been the most important market for Apple, and it’s been their main focus (that link is a really good article that argues that MS is in the bind it’s in with Vista because of Apple.) The main reason why there isn’t a Macintosh in every home is that Jane Q. Public is running Windows at work, is used to Windows, and needs to log in to the corporate network/read a document/run an application/what have you. So JQP buys a Dell, or a Toshiba, so that she doesn’t have to think about whether or not she can work at home. But now, with Boot Camp, JQP gets to have her cake, and eat it too. And there is another big one. Imagine thousands (millions?) of desktops and laptops with OS X and Windows installed. Users switch back and forth. It’s my bet that OS X will just shine in that kind of comparison, especially with the continued, ongoing security issues dogging Windows and IE.

No question, there are vendors right now preparing to sell you Intel Macs with both OS X and Windows on them. In the beginning, this will not at all diminish Windows sales (in fact, I imagine there might be a small uptick) but the long term prospects for Windows are chilling, especially if they come out with a new release of Windows that is very late, and far from spectacular, which Vista looks like it will be. It will be fun to watch.

What’s your take? 

technorati tags: apple, macintosh, windows, osx