Our Relatedness To The "Other" - Ilia Delio

Finding God In The World: Interview with Diana Butler Bass - Patheos

Nothing short of a spiritual revolution is afoot. This revolution is happening not within the walls of the church, but outside of them, in nature, in neighborhoods, in the home, and in the global commons.

The environmental language and the language of the web from technology has conspired to create a new spiritual language for us and it’s been very powerful to me.

Nothing short of a spiritual revolution is afoot. This revolution is happening not within the walls of the church, but outside of them, in nature, in neighborhoods, in the home, and in the global commons.

Where is God? "Right here," Butler Bass says, in the dirt, in the water, in the air we breathe, and in the face of our neighbors. And this makes a world of difference in how we live as people of faith.

This spiritual revolution is really about a shift or a transformation. It really isn’t about institutions or the church. It’s about the way in which we understand and experience God. And yet our churches and institutions are still locating God in the very same place they did 500 years ago, in a far away heavenly realm.

Lots of people are now looking immediately around themselves, and saying, look at this! God is in my garden! Who knew God cared about tomatoes? Or, God is in the air I breathe, or in the face of my neighbor. The direction in which we are looking for God has really shifted.

God is with us here, in the web of life — not beyond it — and we live here, and the rest of nature is here, this whole amazing system of the world, and this planet we inhabit, its all interrelated.

This is a God who is interested in how we live now. It is so challenging to me. It’s a realization that is turning not only my spiritual life, but also my ethical and moral choices, inside out and I’m personally on a path of re-imagining my entire understanding of what it means for me to be a Christian person.

The full article is available here

Integral Joy: God Is Everywhere - Carl McColman in Shalom Institute

God is everywhere: in the celestial regions as well as the underworld, and of course everywhere in between. Perhaps this is why we can say with confidence, all are related: because everything is knit together in the silent presence of God.

A phrase from the Lakota language, mitakuye oyasin, means “all are related” or “all my relations.” It’s a way of seeing: of recognizing that we exist not as some sort of isolated cells over and against our environment or are communities, but that our existence, our very lives, are indeed integrally bound up together with all other beings, with the world and the cosmos. We are all related. We are all connected.

This in turn reminds me of Julian of Norwich, who wrote “the fullness of joy is to behold God in all.” So not only are we connected to all, but that if we learn how to see, we can behold God in all to which we are connected. In scripture we read, “If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there” (Psalm 139:8).

What all this means, of course, is that silent prayer or contemplative practice cannot be divorced from the rest of life. Spirituality is not something apart from everything else we do; it is knit into the fabric of our undivided lives, the same way that breathing is. In silence we pay attention to our breath, and then for the rest of the day we continue to breath, whether we attend to it or not.

In contemplation we rest in God’s presence, whether we feel or consciously experience it or not. Likewise, throughout the day we rest in the Divine, regardless of how attentive we may be to this fact. But the invitation is more than just cognitively acknowledging the Divine, but rather to enter into the fullness of joy. Learning to see God means learning to find joy.

Now, in truth, much of life may seem anything but joyful. We suffer, we hurt one another, we encounter disease or abuse and death. Where’s the joy in all that?

I don’t believe God calls us to rejoice in suffering itself, but rather to rejoice in God even in the midst of suffering.

The full article is available here

Heaven Is Not "Up There" Somewhere - Chuck Queen in Patheos

Heaven is up, down, and all around. Heaven is where God is, and God is the very Spirit in whom “we live, move and have our being.”

Dallas Willard’s book, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God (HarperOne, 1998) prompted me to rethink my views about salvation, the kingdom of God (which was the central theme in Jesus’ preaching and teaching), discipleship and the spiritual life, the meaning of Jesus’ death on the cross, and the reality of heaven.

While I don’t agree with everything Willard teaches—such as his view that the Bible is inerrant, for instance—he helped me to realize that heaven is not just up there somewhere, but is, rather, right here and now.

He writes:

The Old Testament experience of God is one of the direct presence of God’s person, knowledge, and power to those who trust and serve him. Nothing – no human being or institution, no time, no space, no spiritual being, no event – stands between God and those who trust him. The “heavens” [he noted that heaven in the Greek is usually plural] are always there with you no matter what, and the “first heaven,” in biblical terms, is precisely the atmosphere or air that surrounds your body. (p. 67)

Such words from Willard came to me as living water when I was in a dry, parched land. At the time I desperately needed to know that God was that close. That the world is immersed in the Divine and the Divine pervades the world came to me as very, very good news.

Heaven is up, down, and all around. Heaven is where God is, and God is the very Spirit in whom “we live, move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28). Heaven is now as well as later. It is where we experience conscious union with God and all of God’s creation.

In Falling Upward the progressive Franciscan priest and mystic Richard Rohr expresses the symbolic meaning of heaven this way:

Heaven is the state of union both here and later. As now, so will it be then. No one is in heaven unless he or she wants to be, and all are in heaven as soon as they live in union. Everyone is in heaven when he or she has plenty of room for communion and no need for exclusion. The more room you have to include, the bigger heaven will be.

It’s when and where we recognize that we all belong, that we are all connected.
The full article is available here

Living Into God's Story - by Eugene Peterson

Story doesn't just tell us something and leave it there; story invites our participation. A good storyteller gathers us into the story.

The Bible is basically and overall a narrative, an immense, sprawling, capacious narrative. Stories hold pride of place in revealing God and God's way to us. It follows that storytellers in our Christian community carry a major responsibility for keeping us alert to these stories and the way they work.

There is a reason for the appropriateness of story as a major means of bringing us God's Word. Story doesn't just tell us something and leave it there; story invites our participation. A good storyteller gathers us into the story.

Of course, not all stories are good; some lack honesty. There are sentimentalizing stories that seduce us into escaping form life; there are propagandistic stories that attempt to enlist us in a cause or bully us into stereotyping responses; there are trivializing stories that represent life as merely cute or diverting.

The Bible's honest stories respect our freedom; they don't manipulate us, don't force us, don't distract us from life. They show us a spacious world in which God creates and saves and blesses. They invite us in an participants in something larger than our sin-defined needs, in something truer than our culture-stunted ambitions.

We don't live our lives by information. We live them in relationships in the context of a community of men and women - each person an intricate bundle of experience and motive and desire, and of personal God, who cannot be reduced to formula or definition, who has designs on us for justice and salvation.

When we lose touch with our lives, our souls - our moral and spiritual, our God-personal lives - story is the best way of getting us back in touch again.

Maybe it is because Scripture comes to us so authoritatively, "God's Word," that we think all we can do is submit and obey. Submission and obedience are part of it, but first we have to listen. And listening requires hearing the way it is said (form) as well as what is said (content). Stories suffer misinterpretation when we don't submit to them simply as stories.

Spiritual theology, using Scripture as text, does not so much present us with a moral code and tell us, "Live up to this," nor does it set out a system of doctrine and say, "Think like this." The biblical way is to tell a story and invite us, "Live into this - this is what it looks like to be human in this God-made and God-ruled world; this is what is involved in becoming and maturing as a human being."

The full article is available here

Have We Gotten Heaven All Wrong? John Murowski in Religion News Service

"What the majority conventional view of heaven is, is very different from what we find in these biblical testimonies,” said Christopher Morse of Union Theological Seminary in New York. “The end times are not the end of the world — they are the beginning of the real world — in biblical understanding.”

Scholars on the right and left increasingly say that comforting belief in an afterlife has no basis in the Bible and would have sounded bizarre to Jesus and his early followers. Like modern curators patiently restoring an ancient fresco, scholars have plumbed the New Testament’s Jewish roots to challenge the pervasive cultural belief in an otherworldly paradise.

The most recent expert to add his voice to this chorus is the prolific Christian apologist N.T. Wright, a former Anglican bishop who now teaches about early Christianity and New Testament at Scotland’s University of St. Andrews.   Wright’s insistence that Christianity has got it all wrong seems to mark a turning point for the serious rethinking of heaven. He’s not just another academic iconoclast bent on debunking Christian myths.

"What the majority conventional view of heaven is, is very different from what we find in these biblical testimonies,” said Christopher Morse of Union Theological Seminary in New York. “The end times are not the end of the world — they are the beginning of the real world — in biblical understanding.”

In classic Judaism and first-century Christianity, believers expected this world would be transformed into God’s Kingdom — a restored Eden where redeemed creation would be liberated from death, illness, sin and other corruptions.

The sect of first-century Jews who believed Jesus was Messiah also believed he inaugurated the Kingdom of God and were convinced the world would be transformed in their own lifetimes, Wright said. This inauguration, however, was far from complete and required the active participation of God’s people practicing social justice, nonviolence and forgiveness to become fulfilled.  Doing God’s Kingdom work has come to be known in Judaism as “tikkun olam,” or “repairing the world.”

Many clues to an early Christian understanding of the Kingdom of heaven are preserved in the New Testament, most notably the phrase “your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” from the Lord’s Prayer.  The two dimensions intersect and overlap so that the divine bleeds over into this world.

“Our picture, which we get from Dante and Michelangelo, particularly of a heaven and a hell, and perhaps of a purgatory as well, simply isn’t consonant with what we find in the New Testament,” N.T. Wright said. “A lot of these images of hellfire and damnation are actually pagan images which the Middle Ages picks up again and kind of wallows in. Heaven isn't a Platonic, timeless eternity, which is what we were all taught."

The full article is available here