Archive for the 'God' Category

what does the sun do? shine

Jim September 24th, 2008

so, let’s say you come to this point on the journey when you realize that ‘you’ are not the sum total of your physical biology or the sum total of what happens in your mind. come to think of it, you realize, your mind seems to be perpetually preoccupied with things like comparing yourself to others, acquiring something you don’t have, doing something important that others will take note of, being accepted and loved by others, proving your superiority over others, what people think of you, and an endless amount of other things that just seem to breed discontent, fear, worry, and all kinds of crappy stuff.

so you realize there is more to you than what you see in the mirror and all the craziness that goes on in your head.

perhaps you’ve been told you were created as a reflection or image of God, or as a Christian you know that the Christ life flows within you, or maybe you have realized there is something more to you that springs forth from your deep feelings or a certain intuitive knowing inside you. in any event, more and more you are identifying with that divine reflection or Christ life or deep feeling or intuitive knowing within you. more and more you are understanding these to be the real you.

it dawns on you that this ‘you’ can’t be improved, made better, enlightened, or enhanced. does the image of God need imporvement? is the Christ life within you in need of progress? do those deep feelings or that intuitve knowing need educated? you realize, this ‘you’ is all that it is in every moment, and never in need of you doing anything. it’s like the sun. the sun is the sun always. it doesn’t strive to be the sun. it doesn’t need help to be the sun. it doesn’t follow a program to be a better sun. it never fears being less of a sun. it isn’t bogged down in an endless number of options about how to be or how not to be the sun. it’s just the sun…always. it has no options…it just is.

what would life be like if we quit feeding and acting upon all that stuff in our mind, and instead just allowed ourselves to be a reflection or expression of God, be the Christ life, be those deep feelings or intuitive understanding?

so what i’m asking is, what would a life of simply being these entail? what if we stopped orienting our lives around all the head stuff, and oriented all of life around being that real you?

(photo by zoo gal)

does “Jesus” do more harm then good?

Jim August 14th, 2008

does “Jesus” do more harm then good? let me explain. for two decades (through college, seminary, professional Christian ministry) i was immersed not in Disneyland, but in Jesus-land. for me, it was eat, drink, sleep Jesus – Jesus-this, Jesus-that; i had the Jesus t-shirt and wore it proudly. and yet despite all the Jesus-hoopla, for most of those years i was not at peace or free, and experienced very little love, life, joy, contentment, and fulfillment. theoretically, according to my theology, Jesus was supposed to have repaired and enabled me to know God. and yet truthfully speaking, there was very little God-reality behind all the religious jargon i used to explain it. i did church, crammed the Bible into my brain, lived a moral life, and shouted Jesus from the roof-tops but was seriously lacking in the spiritual life department.

when i finally asked myself “how’s that working for you?” and the answer was a resounding “it’s not!!” it all collapsed to the ground. since Jesus was the poster-child of the “Christianity” i created, i grew indifferent toward Jesus. notice that in my original question i put “Jesus” in quotes as i did also when referring to my “Christianity.” in other words, that “Jesus” and “Christianity” were of my creation, and my sense now is that Jesus would have condoned neither.

so, i went through Jesus-fatigue, which meant that even hearing the name of Jesus got my insides churning. if i was in a conversation and the person started down the path of Jesus-talk, i wanted to run. this lead to a sort of Jesus-detox, a season of cleaning out my previous assumptions about Jesus and all the other stuff i managed to pin on him. after a long Jesus blackout period, i experienced a healing of sorts in that i came to understand Jesus as someone who wasn’t responsible for my bondage but an advocate for my freedom. for the first time in my life i could plainly see the spiritual truth of Jesus in the gospels, which in all my previous years i didn’t have the eyes to see. among other things, Jesus encouraged me down the path of questions like: what is truth? and where is truth?

in some respects, i guess you could say “i came back to Jesus,” that is until i realized Jesus was saying i needed to let him go and get on with the truth he bore witness to for myself. what i mean is, i have always been prone to make a religion out of Jesus of Nazareth the man. i began noticing in the gospels that Jesus’ disciples were also prone to this, and Jesus continuously confronted them on it. so many times Jesus essentially said, “unless i go, you won’t get it.” in other words, it’s not the expression of the truth we want to become enamored with but the truth itself. Jesus said i came to “bear witness to the truth.” and yet what i did was build a religion around the “witness” (Jesus) but failed to grab a hold of the truth he witnessed to.

in terms of Jesus, i guess you could describe my journey like this:

I. Jim has a Jesus of Nazareth religion but it doesn’t lead to freedom.

II. Jim loses his Jesus religion, and doesn’t want to have anything to do with Jesus.
III. Jim discovers his “Jesus” wasn’t real, and sees another Jesus who as an advocate to true peace and freedom.

IV. Jim realizes the need to relate to Jesus differently, which is not returning to another Jesus religion, but moving forward with the truth Jesus gave witness to or sharing in the same spiritual reality Jesus of Nazareth lived.

i’m not saying this is the way it needs or should be for anyone else. this is just how it has evolved for me.

(photo by zoo gal)

giving it all up

Jim July 23rd, 2008

Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.”

Most people feel they are more or less doing the right thing if they are following tradition. The logic is if a lot of people do and believe the same thing over a long period of time it must be right. What if Jesus’ parable about the kingdom of heaven is about giving up all our present ideas and notions about God? In other words, the treasure the man found was a spiritual reality beyond anything he had even imagined. But this reality couldn’t be forced into his current beliefs and understandings about God. The joy of what he found motivated the man to let go of all his previous notions in order to continue on with the treasure he had found. I imagine this would be difficult for the man because people find their identity and security in their fixed notions about God. But evidently not; it wasn’t all that hard for the man because of the joy he experienced in holding the treasure.

(photo by zoo gal)

my year of putting away the Bible

Jim July 18th, 2008

A.J. Jacobs wrote The Year of Living Biblically. Here’s a video of A.J. talking about why he wrote the book, and what he learned from his one-year experiment. I enjoyed what A.J. had to say, and I appreciate that he genuinely and earnestly set out to live the Bible literally, and reflected deeply about the implications of it all for his own life.

in the video, A.J. shares some of his conclusions as the result of his one-year experience, one of which is that the Bible should not be taken literally, and certainly cannot be lived literally.

in Wide Open Spaces i devote a chapter to sharing how my perspective on the Bible and why i attach significance to the Bible has changed over the course of my spiritual evolution. as a part of my religious detox, i could no longer read the Bible and had to put it away, which i did for almost a year. at the time, i was not capable of reading the Bible beyond all my religious conditioning, which had put me in a spiritual prison filled with all kinds of suffering. here’s an excerpt,

Over the years the Bible and I have had a tumultuous relationship. After graduating seminary, I gladly accepted my role as the Bible expert people deferred to when a definitive answer or explanation about God was needed. Through several years of professional ministry, I disciplined myself to rise early each morning to read the Bible. I also spent many more hours each week studying it in preparation for Sunday and Wednesday sermons. The Bible was my road map, my compass, my foundation, my Michael Jordan when the game was on the line with :08 left. No one articulated a higher view of Scripture as the “inspired, infallible, and inerrant Word of God.”

However, as life and ministry rolled on, I reached a point where I became increasingly weary and numb to the Bible. Most of the time I read the Bible to learn things about God and for gleaning principles for godly living. There were occasional times when I experienced God speaking directly to me through Scripture, but I was trained to approach the Bible in a way and with a process that made it difficult to experience an intimate connection with God. When I read a verse of Scripture, my first task was to determine its original meaning. This might involve the use of various Bible study tools to unpack the contextual, historical, and cultural aspects of the passage. Once I had a firm grasp on its meaning, the challenge was to establish its equivalent meaning for the present day and circumstances. Eventually, this was all supposed to aid the discovery of some insight about God or how to live a holy life. Yet God seemed to become more impersonal with each and every step.

As a pastor, I began having ambivalent feelings toward the Bible, but I suppressed those feelings because of my obligation to study and teach it. Despite this, even after leaving professional ministry, I maintained a regular time of personal Bible study. Quite honestly it was simply one of many items on my daily to-do list, but there was very little joy or meaningful connection with God in it. My negative feelings toward the Bible intensified as my discovery of God apart from religion continued. After all, it seemed like the Bible was at the center of my Christian religion, a religion that had left me empty, exhausted, and disillusioned.

During my process of shedding religion I put away my Bible for a season, and it’s one of the best things I’ve done for my relationship with God. I quit reading it. I tuned out preachers and others quoting or referring to it. Of course, I had enough horse sense not to broadcast my taking a break from reading the Bible, but it’s not something you can hide from everyone . . . such as my wife, who was more than a little concerned.

though my view of the Bible has changed, it holds more significance for me now than it has at any other time in my life but for different reasons. i don’t see the Bible as a “landing strip” on which to arrive at “correct theology,” but a “launching pad” for knowing and experiencing the many spiritual vistas of eternal truth. you can make a strong case that all suffering is ultimately rooted in issues of identity and separation. i’m amazed at the many different ways the Bible gets at these two issues, including showing what happens when people drag God into the middle of their confusion of identity and separation.

(photo by zoo gal)

My God can Whup Your God! (Wide Open Spaces excerpt)

Jim July 13th, 2008

These last few years, God has supplied a few jolts of his own to rouse me from my religious slumber. One of those jolts was Connie’s July 13 blog post, only nineteen words long. Connie is one of my MySpace friends, and from time to time I read her blog. July 13 was one of those times. I clicked on her blog and read this:

I Hate You.
You Hate Me.
We Hate Them.
They Hate Us.
What does it take to change this?

These words planted a seed within me that has continued to germinate. Religion teaches that God is synonymous with a specific belief system. Each system claims to have “right” beliefs about God, which are passionately held by its adherents—so much so that hate, bitter resentment, bloodshed, and even war can result from disagreement about God. A brief overview of world history shows that bad things happen when religious belief systems clash. This is what Connie was feeling. She had experienced religious hate in her own world, was fed up, and voiced it in nineteen sobering words.

But what if God isn’t a belief system? What if God is bigger than self, bigger than family, bigger than tribe, bigger than nation, and even bigger than any set of doctrines we try to wrap around him? Whereas religion sometimes brings out the worst in people, could the vision of a bigger God cause us to place higher value on expanding our circles of care and compassion and working toward a more peaceful world?

One of the most freeing discoveries these past few years in my relationship with God (and it’s still sinking in) is that God is not a belief system or a fixed set of theological propositions. On the one hand, it seems patently obvious that a list of claims about God can’t actually be God himself. There isn’t a lockbox at the center of the universe containing a divine computer program with doctrinal code. Hopefully we’ve all realized that The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is fiction and that the number forty-two doesn’t answer anything of ultimate significance. And yet for many years, my Christianity was basically a well-worked-out and defined set of propositions and practices in the name of God. I said Jesus Christ was my Savior, but in reality I treated my belief system as if it were my savior. It was my belief in the right suppositions about Christ that made me eternally saved.

When the basis for being a Christian is your specific set of beliefs about God, the most important thing is being right. If someone comes around with contrary ideas, the logical conclusion is . . . well, their ideas must be wrong. It doesn’t take an MIT grad to figure out two people with divergent views of God can’t both be right. Therein lies all religious conflict; there must be winners and losers. It’s a zero-sum game. The “win-win” mentality just doesn’t fly.

For many years, my sense of well-being, comfort, safety, security, identity, and superiority in the world was based largely on being right about God. I was eager to take on theological debates. After I received my masters of divinity degree, I was confident I was “right” about God. When threatened, my response was akin to the little boy yelling, “My daddy can whup your daddy!” I was happy to be counted among the few, the proud, the saved who could emphatically say, “My God can whup your God! My belief system wins over your belief system. My book is better than your book. I win, you lose. I’ll pray for you.”

Wide Open Spaces: Beyond Paint-by-Number Christianity
Thomas Nelson Publishers

(photo by garyturner)

one woman’s story (being present with others in their pain)

Jim June 26th, 2008

i subscribe to Speaking of Faith, hosted by Krista Tippett. the latest edition is, “Presence in the Wild,” the story of Kate Braestrup, who is a chaplain for search-and-rescue missions with the Maine Game Warden Service. she is a “Unitarian Universalistic minister” who is called in when children disappear in the woods or when snowmobilers disappear under the ice. i really enjoyed the interview. to listen, go to this page and click “Listen Now.” whatever your theology and how it may differ from Kate’s theology, i think you will find her story and experiences worth the time.

(photo by zoo gal)

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