In the Northern hemisphere, we are in the season of Fall and harvest. It is also the time when a number of cultures and traditions encourage communion with our benevolent ancestors, saints, and spiritual teachers.
One of the “ultimate questions” humans like to pose is this: Why are we here?
This might seem to be a particularly appropriate question to ask in a time of the coronavirus plague when so much is becoming uprooted, when so many are afraid and suffering and dying.
For us faith leaders the problem is much deeper than simply ‘green-washing’ Christianity. Our habits of inattention and self-survival stand trial. The “cultural self” has become really good at shutting off the valve to feeling, that organ of perception connecting our own hearts with the heartbeat of a living World.
“New personality types are created during social and spiritual crises of religious, political, or economic origin.” ~Otto Rank
One hundred years ago, as the world was shaking …
Many people, if they hear the name Thomas Aquinas at all, may not feel that he has anything to say to today’s “progressive” religious and post-religious movement. They would be wrong; dead wrong.
As an indigenous Messiah, Jesus was one who listened deeply to the song of Creation, to the living dialogue that is in the beginning, the heartbeat of the universe itself. In this sense, Jesus was the mythteller of the community he was forming around his own ministry of power, healing, and renewal.
Last Spring, Greta Thunberg’s statement to the European Parliament included the phrase, “Everyone and everything needs to change.” It’s become a mantra for me: Everyone, Everything, Me, Changing.
Everything that God called forth comes from the Water, everything we know in our world today was created except for the Water, it was already here. Even among scientists there is continued debate about where Water came from, how it got here. No matter the angle, Water’s presence in our reality is a precious, life-giving mystery.
It is a sad thing to close the doors of a church. Hard as it is for the congregation’s members, however, the event has a far deeper, though often unseen and uncalculated, impact on the health of the community in which that congregation was practicing its increasingly irrelevant faith. As churches age and weaken, their focus necessarily turns toward survival and away from the world outside their doors.
For most Christians, the question is, “Can you strip Jesus of his supernatural powers and still achieve salvation through Christ?” If we take the Godhead out of Jesus, what are we left with? Is there some other element that we enter into or move through by knowing him?