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Look at the birds

Look at the birds. They don’t plant or harvest or store food in barns, for your heavenly Father feeds them. And aren’t you far more valuable to him than they are?

Look at the lilies of the field and how they grow. They don’t work or make their clothing, yet Solomon in all his glory was not dressed as beautifully as they are. And if God cares so wonderfully for wildflowers that are here today and thrown into the fire tomorrow, he will certainly care for you.

Jesus in the “sermon on the mount”, Matthew 6

In Jesus’ sermon on the mount, there’s a beautiful passage about anxiety and worry, where he encourages us: do not worry about tomorrow, each day has enough worry of its own. Even though in Australia we’re probably safer and more likely to have food and shelter than most other times or places in history… anxiety is high. Many suffer from it. It is crippling.

Jesus calls us to “look at the birds” and “look at the lilies of the field”. In the past I’ve often read this as a rhetorical device: help our brains see the logic, nature doesn’t worry and God takes care of it, God will take care of us, so lighten up.

But I’ve been learning a lot about worry. In my own counselling, and in sessions with psychologists where I learn how to support my kids. So much of anxiety is bodily, yes it is running through your mind, but it’s not just in the mind. And when your body is in a fight or flight or freeze state, the idea of “helping our brains see the logic” really falls flat.

The advice I’m reading my kids is about breath work and visualisation. (from Diane Alber’s “A little spot of emotion” series):


I’ve been holding a lot of my own worry and anxiety over the future lately, and have been drawn back into reading and reflecting on these few thoughts Jesus shared. To comfort me, to guide me.

And instead of seeing “look at the birds… look at the lilies” as a piece of rhetoric, something to think about… I’m seeing it as guidance, something to do.

Go outside, and find the birds. Find the native flowers that just grow all on their own. And look at them. Long enough for my breath to slow down. Look at them long enough to meditate on them. That they are there, and cared for. Long enough that my heart rate slows down. Long enough to remember that maybe I too am cared for.


“That is why I tell you not to worry about everyday life—whether you have enough food and drink, or enough clothes to wear. Isn’t life more than food, and your body more than clothing? Look at the birds. They don’t plant or harvest or store food in barns, for your heavenly Father feeds them. And aren’t you far more valuable to him than they are? Can all your worries add a single moment to your life?
“And why worry about your clothing? Look at the lilies of the field and how they grow. They don’t work or make their clothing, yet Solomon in all his glory was not dressed as beautifully as they are. And if God cares so wonderfully for wildflowers that are here today and thrown into the fire tomorrow, he will certainly care for you. Why do you have so little faith?
“So don’t worry about these things, saying, ‘What will we eat? What will we drink? What will we wear?’ These things dominate the thoughts of unbelievers, but your heavenly Father already knows all your needs. Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need.
“So don’t worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring its own worries. Today’s trouble is enough for today.

Jesus in the “sermon on the mount”, Matthew 6
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Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg on finding a spiritual community even you feel like they’re not your people

First, a reminder that even if the rabbi of a synagogue is preaching stuff that does not align with your political beliefs–that does not necessarily mean that every single person in that community is similarly aligned. There may be other folks who are much more kindred spirits than you might think at first blush — and it might take a second or two to find them, but that does not mean that they are not there or impossible to find. Synagogues are often comprised of communities within communities, and it may be possible for you to find yours. How? Well, first you have to start showing up to things where you might be able to meet people. Is there a social justice or social action committee doing stuff? Are there other subgroups within the synagogue that feel like they might be more likely to have folks on your wavelength? Is there a younger folks group — even if they call it “Young Professionals“ or some such thing, you may find some true kindred spirits there — you never know. I say this from experience, as someone who showed up to a Conservative synagogue in my early 20s, as the youngest (by about 15 years) and queerest (by far) person I could see for miles. With some patience and digging, eventually I connected with an amazing intergenerational group of people (some of whom knew each other before, some not), some of whom I am still in touch with today, many many many years later. 

Second of all, even though it is lovely and comfortable to go to community that has been built, don’t discount your own power to build community. You can (eg) host Shabbat dinner for a motley group of people–some of whom may be Jews, some of whom may not be, some of whom may be familiar with Jewish practice, some of whom may not at all. ‏ Make it potluck, or do a simple pot of soup and salad and frittata. Or make a vat of chili get some chips and guac you’ve got dinner. Get some wine or juice and challah– bam! Get this going as a monthly thing and see if you can get enough of a community together to get some text study or prayer action before or after dinner (davening first, study after). Etc. Do a lunch! Make it a picnic when the weather improves! Host holiday things! Get creative! Start slow, build.

Rabbi Danya Ruttenburg – You asked I answered

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Vesuvius Challenge

This is fascinating. A library was buried in Herculaneum when Vesuvius erupted, and there were 800 or more scrolls buried in ash that crumble when you try to unwrap them.

A mix of advanced CT scans, machine learning and incredible research activity is digitally unwrapping them and finding what’s inside. 

They’ve got a first sample of text from the first scroll, and it’s a previously unknown text, looks like Epicurean philosophy.

Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll!

I also love the reflection on how they structured the competition to maximise progress and collaboration rather than information hoarding.

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Jürgen Moltmann on revenge, peace, justice and the disarming child

It certainly sounds more realistic for people in darkness to dream of God’s day of vengeance, finding satisfaction in the hope that at the Last Judgement all the godless enemies who oppress us here will be cast into hellfire. But what kind of blessedness is it that luxuriates in revenge and needs the groans of the damned as background to its own joy? For to us a child is born, not an embittered old man. God in a child, not as a hangman.

He will establish “peace on earth,” we are told, and he will “uphold peace with justice and with righteousness.” But how can peace go together with justice? What we are familiar with is generally peace base on injustice, and justice based on conflict. The life of justice is struggle. Among us, peace and justice are divided by the struggle for power. The so-called “law of the strongest” destroys justice and right. The weakness of the peacemakers makes peace fragile. It is only in the zeal of love that what power has separated can be put together again: in a just peace and in the right to peace.

This love does not mean accepting breaches of justice “for the sake of peace,” as we say. But it does not mean, either, breaking someone else’s peace for the sake of our own rights. Peace and righteousness will only kiss and be one when the new person is born, and God the Lord, who has created all things, arrives at his just rights in his creation. When God is God in the world, then no one will want to be anyone else’s Lord and God anymore…

But is this really possible here and now, or is it just a dream?

Jürgen Moltmann in The Power of Powerlessness. I read it in “Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas”. Emphasis mine.
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The wise men and Christmas gifts

I’ve got an uneasy relationship with Christmas and gifts. I’m not great at gift giving in general. And I don’t feel much on the receiving end – it’s clearly not my love language! The forced-ness of gift giving at Christmas, combined with the overwhelming commercial advertising and expectation, combined with remembering something else that’s supposed to be remembered in that season, combined with thinking about our level of consumption and it’s impact on the environment… I’d personally prefer to opt out of the whole thing but that feels too grinch-like so we continue quietly.

So this reading from “The Gospel in Solentiname” hit home. Ernesto Cardenal the priest apparently “does not believe in sermons” and so facilitated small group discussions to help his people understand the stories. The perspectives they share are from such a different world to my own – they were among the poor in Nicaragua at the height of the cold war.

And the comment from Olivia astounded me with its clarity:

When they saw the star again
They were filled with joy.
They went into the house;
they saw the child with Mary his mother,
and they knelt down and worshipped him.
Then they opened their boxes
And gave him presents of gold, incense and myrrh.

Tomás: “They come and open their presents – some perfumes and a few things of gold. It doesn’t seem as if he got big presents. Because those foreigners that could have brought him a big sack of gold, a whole bunch of coins, or maybe bills, they didn’t bring these things. What they brought to him were little things… That’s the way we ought to go, poor, humble, the way we are. At least that’s what I think”.

Olivia: “It’s on account of these gifts from the wise men that the rich have the custom of giving presents at Christmas. But they give them to each other”.

The Gospel in Solentiname. I read it in “Watch for the light, readings for Advent and Christmas”.

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Knowledge and movement (the wise men and the scribes)

A very simple observation from Søren Kierkegaard on the difference between knowledge and action (commenting on the story of the Wise Men consulting the scribes in Jerusalem for the location of the Messiah):

Although the scribes could explain where the Messiah should be born, they remained quite unperturbed in Jerusalem. They did not accompany the Wise Men to seek him. Similarly, we may know the whole of Christianity, yet make no movement. The power that moves heaven and earth leaves us completely unmoved.

What a difference! The three kings had only a rumour to go by. But it moved them to make that long journey. The scribes were much better informed, much better versed…

Who had the more truth? The three kings who followed a rumour, or the scribes who remained sitting with all their knowledge?

Søren Kierkegaard (from Meditations from Kierkegaard, edited and translated by T.H. Croxall. I read it in “Watch for the Light”)
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The community Ruth found

At our church this month we’ve been going through the book of Ruth. The series has been good, with the first three messages bringing the story to life, with all of its hard to understand customs, offensive levels of patriarchy, and yet endearing characters. (The recordings are on YouTube: message 1 and message 2 by Steve, and message 3 by my sister Clare.) I’ve also been reading it – it’s only four short chapters and takes me about 20 minutes – it’s worth reading yourself!

One thing that’s standing out to me is the lack of “supernatural” in the story. There’s a famine but no miracles of food falling from the sky or loaves of bread being multiplied, or prophets making it rain or anything like that. There’s death but no coming back to life. There’s infertility but no miracle babies.

What there is, is a story of two women (Ruth and her mother-in-law Naomi) choosing to return to Naomi’s home country, her people, her God and way of life.

They were destitute in Moab and running away from famine – for Naomi it is running to her home country, and for Ruth, it is following Naomi to a place she’d never been, where she’d settle in as a foreigner and immigrant.

When they get to Bethlehem, the story narrows in to focus on what they find in that community when they get back. And what they find is a community that’s going about the rhythms of agricultural life – it was harvest when they arrived – but with a few twists that showed they were God’s chosen people who were trying to live according to the laws Moses had given them.

In particular, the harvesters were comfortable making space for Ruth to harvest in their fields (“gleaning”), not attempting to maximise their commercial returns but leaving some leftovers for the poor. This was based off this verse in the law:

When you harvest the crops of your land, do not harvest the grain along the edges of your fields, and do not pick up what the harvesters drop. It is the same with your grape crop—do not strip every last bunch of grapes from the vines, and do not pick up the grapes that fall to the ground. Leave them for the poor and the foreigners living among you. I am the LORD your God.

Leviticus 19:9-10

And Boaz, the wealthy land-owner and love interest in Ruth’s story, goes a step further. Not just following the law as stated – which as Steve pointed out in one of the linked messages – is open to a stingy interpretation. But Boaz leant into the spirit of it, to care for the poor and the stranger:

Let her gather grain right among the sheaves without stopping her. And pull out some heads of barley from the bundles and drop them on purpose for her. Let her pick them up, and don’t give her a hard time!

Boaz in Ruth 2

He was also well aware of his both his rights and his responsibilities for caring for his female relatives in a patriarchal society, and again seemed intent to not just do what was required, but to meet the spirit of the law and do what is right.

And that is one of the miracles in this story, I think. Nothing supernatural, but a community of people actually living with the intent to love each other, and love the strangers living amongst them, as God had asked them to do. And taking a big hearted generous approach to that.

And it makes me wonder, what miracles might be possible if our communities choose to live this way: genuinely trying to embrace God’s heart of love and wholeheartedly embracing that as our guide for how to live. What would we do differently? And what would it mean to the people who wander into our midst, perhaps as destitute as the heroines in this story?

If Ruth and Naomi returned as a poor widow and her foreign daughter-in-law, and found a self-seeking community that didn’t leave any leftovers in their field, and didn’t feel any responsibility of care for their extended family… then this story would have been very different. It would have been depressing, unsurprising, probably not worth writing down.

But instead they found a community committed to living the way God had taught them, and that community made generous space for Ruth and Naomi. And nothing supernatural happened – and nothing supernatural was needed! – because there was a miracle of love, abundance, redemption and hope… entirely because the people choose to live God’s love and make it their way of life.

I want to see that story play out in my church, over and over.

(One of the other miracles in the story of Ruth is the beautiful connection between Ruth and Naomi, and their boldness in taking initiative as powerless women in a patriarchal society… but that’s another post. And covered in the messages I linked above!)

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Blogging as an “ideas garden”

Mark Carrigan has a post “How blogging is different from tweeting“. I particularly loved his description of blogging as an “ideas garden”:

It occurred to me recently that I feel extremely differently about ‘outputs’ via Twitter than blogs. I first came across the notion of the ‘ideas garden’ via Doug Belshaw and it suggests a blog can be seen as a place where you help ideas take root and grow.

This contrasts with the inherently performative feel of Twitter where the focus on immediate feedback means that individual item becoming a focal point for your reflection. In other words I care about the reaction a tweet gets because it is self-standing and immediately public whereas a blog post is an element of a large whole. It is a contribution to growing my ideas garden, for my own later use and whatever enjoyment others find in it, rather than something I have expectations of receiving a reaction for.

The blog itself then comes to feel like something more than the sum of its parts: a cumulative production over 13 years and 5000+ posts which captures my intellectual development in a way more granular and authentic than anything I could manage by myself. Over time I see old posts I’d forgotten about resurfacing as people stumble across them and this long tail heightens my sense of the emergent whole. It’s become an ideas forest which people wander into from different directions, finding trails which I had long since forgotten about and inviting me to explore a now overgrown area to see if I should begin tending to it once more.

https://markcarrigan.net/2023/05/22/how-blogging-is-different-from-tweeting/

Other people I’ve seen do this really well:

I’m inspired to try do a bit more of my thinking publicly, particularly about my work in the software industry (both cutting code and leading people).

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Our great desire

  1. In many times and in many ways, God speaks
  2. We may drift away
  3. It was only right
  4. Where you’ll find God
  5. “Stay soft”: Sabbath rest
  6. The difference between right and wrong
  7. An anchor for the soul
  8. Our great desire

Our great desire is that you will keep on loving others as long as life lasts, in order to make certain that what you hope for will come true. Then you will not become spiritually dull and indifferent.

Hebrews 6:11

I love this verse.

There’s a whole section in the chapter before where the writer is admonishing the readers for being spiritually dull and struggling to understand the concepts they’re being taught:

There is much more we would like to say about this, but it is difficult to explain, especially since you are spiritually dull and don’t seem to listen. You have been believers so long now that you ought to be teaching others. Instead, you need someone to teach you again the basic things about God’s word. You are like babies who need milk and cannot eat solid food. For someone who lives on milk is still an infant and doesn’t know how to do what is right. Solid food is for those who are mature, who through training have the skill to recognize the difference between right and wrong.

So let us stop going over the basic teachings about Christ again and again. Let us go on instead and become mature in our understanding.

Hebrews 5:11 – 6:1

Often I would hear or read that admonishment and feel this challenge – am I spiritually dull too? Am I incapable of listening and understanding? What can I do to make sure I’m growing in maturity?

And here the answer is simple: keep on loving others, as long as life lasts.

Not study or exploring mysteries or following rituals or solitude or pilgrimage.

Loving other people is the great pilgrimage, the path to deep and lasting maturity.

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An anchor for the soul

  1. In many times and in many ways, God speaks
  2. We may drift away
  3. It was only right
  4. Where you’ll find God
  5. “Stay soft”: Sabbath rest
  6. The difference between right and wrong
  7. An anchor for the soul
  8. Our great desire

Therefore, we who have fled to him for refuge can have great confidence as we hold to the hope that lies before us. This hope is a strong and trustworthy anchor for our souls.

Hebrews 6

These words and metaphors have been ones I’ve found myself clinging to and meditating on through what has been a pretty rough ride in my life this year.

Fleeing to God for refuge. A hope that gives us confidence. An anchor to hold us steady.

These images have helped give my soul a sense of stability when life has felt incredibly unstable.

But I’d usually imagine the anchor holding us in place in the storm. Then I listened to Krista Tippett (host of On Being) interview Kate Bowler (host of Everything Happens). Kate was diagnosed with terminal cancer as a young mother at 35. Somehow, she’s still here, and so her take on “Hope” carries extra weight.

Tippett: What at this point is your working definition of hope?

Bowler: I think before I would’ve said it was something like certainty. I might have looked from a doctrinal perspective and been like, “Well, Krista, thank you for asking, I actually have six things about God I’d love to tell you.” Because depending on your story of faith, it’s a long timescale — that it’s the consummation of the earth and the great triumph of good over evil, et cetera, et cetera. But I think hope now feels like God and love is like an anchor that’s dropped way in the future. And I’m just, along with everyone else, being slowly pulled toward it. And that feeling won’t always feel like the details of my life have somehow clicked into place and that I get to feel the fullness of my life. But that, ultimately, that this is a good story. It’s just not only mine.

From an interview with Krista Tippett and Kate Bowler on the On Being podcast

Not an anchor holding us in place, but “an anchor that’s dropped way in the future. And I’m just, along with everyone else, being slowly pulled toward it.”

That’s hope.

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The difference between right and wrong

  1. In many times and in many ways, God speaks
  2. We may drift away
  3. It was only right
  4. Where you’ll find God
  5. “Stay soft”: Sabbath rest
  6. The difference between right and wrong
  7. An anchor for the soul
  8. Our great desire

You have been believers so long now that you ought to be teaching others. Instead, you need someone to teach you again the basic things about God’s word. You are like babies who need milk and cannot eat solid food. For someone who lives on milk is still an infant and doesn’t know how to do what is right. Solid food is for those who are mature, who through training have the skill to recognize the difference between right and wrong.

Hebrews 5 (emphasis mine, of course. Does biblical greek even have italics?)

There’s a black-and-whiteness that many or most people bring to morality. Some things are clearly good, some things are clearly bad. Often something that’s clearly good for one person is clearly bad for another. Sometimes there’s an internal compass, “it just felt right, and I trust that“. Often there’s some external source of truth that defines what’s good or what’s not for a person. I’ve seen cheesy christian souvenirs that say “the bible said it, I believe it, that settles it”.

Like it’s that easy. 🤷‍♂️

I appreciate the writer of Hebrews reminding us that knowing the difference between right and wrong is a skill, and a sign of maturity. It’s not all easy and straight forward, it requires training.

It’s interesting thinking about the ethical dilemmas the early church stressed about – divorce and remarriage, eating food sacrificed to idols, sharing meals with different ethnic / religious groups.

In the book of Mark there’s a story where Jesus is teaching on divorce and remarriage:

Whoever divorces his wife and marries someone else commits adultery against her. And if a woman divorces her husband and marries someone else, she commits adultery.

Mark 10

Then in a similar story in Matthew’s book, either Jesus said something different or Matthew included or added an extra detail:

And I tell you this, whoever divorces his wife and marries someone else commits adultery—unless his wife has been unfaithful

Matthew 19

We started with a clear-cut, black and white moral statement. And now there’s an exception. Then Paul, addressing a specific circumstance in a specific church, adds another, for when the other person doesn’t follow the same Christian way of life, and doesn’t see marriage the same way and they walk away:

(But if the husband or wife who isn’t a believer insists on leaving, let them go. In such cases the believing husband or wife is no longer bound to the other, for God has called you to live in peace.)

1 Corinthians 7

I feel like more nuance might have come out if you asked either Jesus or Paul about situations like domestic abuse…

They’re trying to make a point: marriage is important! It’s sacred! We should value it way more than the surrounding culture! But there also needs to be maturity to be able to recognise the difference between right and wrong, simple rules interpreted simply don’t always cut it.

Endless equivocating and avoiding moral absolutes, and taking an “anything goes” approach also feels like a trap. The wisdom here is not “recognise there is no difference between right and wrong”. That’s not what was said.

Instead, it’s recognising there is a difference, and that with training and skill and maturity, that for a given situation you can know the difference, find what is right, and you can choose to do what is right, to live righteously.

That’s hard work. But it’s a sign of maturity. Let’s train in it.

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Barbara Brown Taylor and “This Hunger for Holiness”

“On Being with Krista Tippett” has long been my favourite podcasts, and this interview with Barbara Brown Taylor is a new favourite episode. In their conversation they follow Taylor’s life and some of her teaching, exploring the wandering and wilderness of a life of faith, the idea of the body, ecology and the incarnation being crucial to spiritual life, and what “the death of God” and “the death of the church” look like in a world where churches are emptying but “spiritual but not religious” or “none” just don’t do justice to the new thing that people are seeking and experiencing.

I think it is so true that people are talking about loss of faith, loss of God, and I think it’s loss of church. I really think it’s church that’s suffering now. And it was suffering long before COVID put it in isolation. But I think a lot of people during that couple of years, I’ve talked to them, who discovered either how eager they were to get back or that they weren’t going back. So I do think this is about church. And I didn’t understand Altizer this way, and his colleagues. He wasn’t the only guy. He just got famous for saying, “God is dead.”

But I remember not too long ago looking back into that theology again, and realized that at least some of those people were talking about God emptying God’s self into the world. That’s a familiar thing for people who’ve been initiated into Christian language, that Jesus poured himself into the world, emptied himself into the world. So I am intrigued by the idea of what it means for the church to be emptying now. And I am still naïve enough to believe…

… I trust the Holy Spirit, Krista. That’s where I’m still real religious, is I still trust that wind that blows things around, and you don’t know where it came from and you don’t know where it goes, but it’s going to blow. And it’s blowing all the time.

Barbara Brown Taylor, in interview with “On Being with Krista Tippett”
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“Stay soft”: Sabbath rest

  1. In many times and in many ways, God speaks
  2. We may drift away
  3. It was only right
  4. Where you’ll find God
  5. “Stay soft”: Sabbath rest
  6. The difference between right and wrong
  7. An anchor for the soul
  8. Our great desire

“Today, if you hear his voice,
do not harden your hearts
as you did in the rebellion,
during the time of testing in the wilderness,
where your ancestors tested and tried me,
though for forty years they saw what I did.
That is why I was angry with that generation;
I said, ‘Their hearts are always going astray,
and they have not known my ways.’
So I declared on oath in my anger,
‘They shall never enter my rest.’ ”

Hebrews 3

There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God; for anyone who enters God’s rest also rests from their works, just as God did from his. Let us, therefore, make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one will perish by following their example of disobedience.

Hebrews 4

When I was a teenager I got a birthday card. There were messages in the card from a few different staff and leaders at my church, but one of the messages was only two words, and they’re the only two words I still remember from it.

Stay soft. -Ads

Adam – a friend and a church leader I looked up to – would often talk about the importance of keeping your heart soft, responsive to God, not being hard-hearted. When he picked those two words to write to me, I took them to heart, and it’s been a formative posture for me, a big part of shaping who I am now.

And that’s the message coming out from this passage in Hebrews too: stay soft.

The couple of verses I’ve quoted are part of the passage I remembered that originally drew me back into reading the bible earlier this year. Our family life has been a real struggle, and we have been exhausted and depleted, and the promise of a sabbath rest, some kind of deep, fulfilling rest, and a call to enter that rest, sprung out of my memory and, like a siren song – so appealing and so urgent – its words drew me back into this passage, and back into the bible.

Do not harden your hearts.

Stay soft.

Not like in the rebellion, the time of testing in the wilderness.

The psalm being quoted actually includes the names “Meribah” and “Massah”, which suggests its probably referring to the two stories where the Israelites have run out of water in the dessert and are wishing they were back in the Egypt, the land of their slavery, because at least there was water there. In both stories Moses strikes a rock with his staff, and miraculously, water comes out – enough for the whole community.1 While much of the commentary on this story is about if Moses did something wrong, Numbers 20:13 puts the focus on the people not trusting God:

This place was known as the waters of Meribah (which means “arguing”) because there the people of Israel argued with the LORD.

Numbers 20:13 (emphasis mine)

And that’s what both the psalm and the book of Hebrews seem to focus on too: the community of Israel didn’t trust God to look after them and give them water.

Despite all the miracles they’d seen so far – “for forty years they saw what I did” – they didn’t trust they’d be provided for. They’d rather go back to slavery because they knew there was an agreement there – they’d do work and they’d get water and food.

All the miracles and provision that came during their time in the desert had not helped them internalise that God would provide for them, and so they kept trying to make other plans. “They have not known my ways, their hearts are always going astray”.

They shall never enter my rest.

Brutal.2

But in Hebrews, the author tries to remind us that they think we’ve still got a better offer open: “Dear friends, even though we are talking this way, we really don’t believe it applies to you.” (Hebrews 6:10).

There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God… Let us, therefore, make every effort to enter that rest…

The point being made in Hebrews is about an eternal Sabbath, a permanent rest, full of joy and liveliness and deep delight, that lasts forever – not just the weekly rhythm and the seventh day. But as I’ve been dwelling on this passage in Hebrews, and this rallying cry to “stay soft”, I realised that a weekly Sabbath practice can be a part of keeping a soft heart.

Here’s how I see it:

  • God was doing work among their people, and they saw it.
  • But they did not know God’s ways – they never took it in, never seeing it or beginning to understand who God is and how God works, never internalising it, never learning to live in a way that trusted God’s working.
  • So they argued with God, and made other plans.
  • And so they never entered the promised land, or the promised rest.

So, we don’t want to harden our hearts. We want to stay soft. What can we actually do?

When I was in my early twenties I ran a fortnightly small group meeting for young adults in my church, and there was about 30 of us, and to facilitate some kind of conversation that attuned us to what God was doing, I would ask everyone to break up into groups of two or three, and ask a question to each other: where did you notice God this week?

There’s a similar question I ask myself in an end-of-day “Examen” reflective exercise I do, at least when I’m not so tired I fall asleep instantly:

Where have I felt true joy today?
What has troubled me today?
What has challenged me today?
Where and when did I pause today?
Have I noticed God’s presence in any of this?

The Examen: A Daily Prayer

This kind of reflection requires you to pause.

To rest from your works.

To stop.

To cease.

And when you do, your heart rate shifts. Your thoughts shift. You stop problem solving and stop rushing and stop striving and … notice things. Notice the things that brought you joy. The smile from a kid, or the sunshine through the window. You notice the things that were really hard. The words spoken that pierce your heart and cause your stomach to churn. You notice where God’s presence was in it all.

You see, when you’re so focused on what you have to do, it’s easy to miss what others are also doing, easy to miss what’s going on around you, or what’s already happened. This is why gratitude is such an important practice. But more than just the gratitude, there’s the stopping. The ceasing.

When we cease our work, we have the opportunity to see what God is doing, and to know God’s ways, and to stay soft.

In Marva Dawn’s classic book on Sabbath3, she talks about what the Sabbath is for:

  • Its Ceasing deepens our repentance for the many ways that we fail to trust God and try to create our own future. 
  • Its Resting strengthens our faith in the totality of his grace. 
  • Its Embracing invites us to take the truths of our faith and apply them practically in our values and lifestyles. 
  • Its Feasting heightens our sense of eschatological hope — the Joy of our present experience of God’s love and its foretaste of the Joy to come. 
Marva J Dawn, an excerpt from “Keeping the Sabbath Wholly”

Ceasing from “the many ways we fail to trust God and try to create our own future”.

We’re so damn busy trying to create our own future, that we don’t even notice the future God is creating right around us. We have not known his ways.

Ceasing on the Sabbath is an antidote to that, a weekly chance to stay soft, to notice God, and to know God’s ways, and to live in trust. And from there we can move to experience the resting and embracing and feasting too.

And as we practice Sabbath each week, it is indeed practice for that greater rest that is talked about in Hebrews 4.

So I’d encourage you, make every effort to enter that rest. Practice for it by practicing the Sabbath.

One day a week, cease your work.

Notice instead where God is working.

Learn to trust God’s ways.

Stay soft.

Footnotes
  1. The “water from the rock” stories are super interesting. In the Numbers 20 version, Moses is supposed to speak to the rock but instead hits it twice, the miracle happens and water comes out, but for some reason, God is pissed. God says Moses will die in the desert and not see the promised land. But no one is quite sure why God is so angry. This article has a whole gamut of theories from Rabbis who are trying to make sense of it. One particular theory from the 15th century made me laugh:

    “Moses and Aaron’s sin was not particularly terrible; they merely made a mistake. However, G‑d did not want them entering the Land for other reasons. Moses, because he sent the spies, and Aaron because of his involvement, albeit unwilling, with the sin of the Golden Calf. G‑d wanted to protect Moses and Aarons’ honour, so He pretended that the rock was the reason for their punishment, to cover up the true reason.”

    Once you start going down this rabbit hole you notice the death of Miriam at the start of the story, and that leads you to Miriam’s Well and then you start learning about how Miriam was probably a much more important leader than is recognised, and the texts we have tried to diminish her role. Patriarchy 🙄

    Also the Numbers 20 story sounds like it happened at Kadesh, right on the border of the promised land, the same place where the Israelites were when 40 years earlier they had spies come back and tell them about the promised land, and they didn’t trust God would make it theirs. In both this story and the water-from-the-rock story, God was trying to give them something good but they didn’t trust it, and wanted to go back to Egypt where they worked for the things they need.
  2. I’ve written before about how my beliefs around hell and eternal punishment are not what most Christians might expect, and I’ve probably had a few years of having a fairly “universalist” worldview, seeing God in all different places, and so trying not to think about the reality that some people live lives in a way that is not just “a different experience of God” but is actually separate from God and that there’s a pain and despair in that. I still don’t think the dividing line of those who experience God and live in line with God is the same as what religion you put on your census form. But this experience of reading Hebrews in depth for the past few months has actually forced me to open up to that: God’s promise of entering his rest still stands, so we ought to tremble with fear that some of you might fail to experience it. (Hebrews 4:1)
  3. One day I was looking at my parents bookshelf and I picked up “Keeping the Sabbath Wholly” by Marva J Dawn. I’m glad I did. Sabbath wasn’t a concept that was well taught in my childhood churches, and so this book was my starting point. Even read the dedication:

This book is dedicated to all the people who need the Sabbath

the busiest, who need to work from a cohesive, unfragmented self;

social activists, who need a cycle of worship and action;

those who chase after fulfillment and need to understand their deepest yearnings and to hear the silence;

those who have lost their ability to play because of the materialism and technologization of our society, who need beauty and gaiety and delight;

those who have lost their passion and need to get in touch with feelings;

those who are alone and need emotional nourishment;

those who live in community and need solitude;

those who cannot find their life’s priorities and need a new perspective;

those who think the future is dictated by the present, who need hope and visions of the future to change the present order;

those who long for deeper family life and want to nurture certain values;

the poor and the oppressed, who need to mourn and dance in the prison camp;

the rich and the oppressors, who need to learn nonviolence, stewardship, and God’s purposes in the world;

those who suffer, who need to learn how suffering can be redemptive;

professional theologians, who need to bring the heart back into theology;

those who don’t know how religion fits into the modern world, who need a relationship with God;

those who are disgusted with dry, empty, formalistic worship and want to love and adore God;

those who want to be God’s instruments, enabled and empowered by the Spirit to be world changers and Sabbath healers.

From “Keeping the Sabbath Wholly – Ceasing, Resting, Embracing, Fasting” by Marva J. Dawn.
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Where you’ll find God

  1. In many times and in many ways, God speaks
  2. We may drift away
  3. It was only right
  4. Where you’ll find God
  5. “Stay soft”: Sabbath rest
  6. The difference between right and wrong
  7. An anchor for the soul
  8. Our great desire

Christ, as the Son, is in charge of God’s entire house. And we are God’s house, if we keep our courage and remain confident in our hope in Christ.

Hebrews 3

When I hear a phrase like “God’s house” the image that comes to my mind is usually a giant building. Perhaps one of the cathedrals of Europe, perhaps a more modern auditorium setting, or perhaps an imagined palatial setting that’s giant and magnificent and heavenly. But in my mind, it’s usually a building.

But here the writer reminds us very clearly that we are God’s house. It’s not a building, it’s people.

It’s also not a single person – it’s plural. They don’t say “and I am God’s house” or “and we are God’s houses”. All of us, together, are where God chooses to live.

And so if you want to find God, your best bet is to look where other humans are gathered.

And that’s what the word church actually means – the gathering, the assembly of people. The building isn’t where God is found. We, the people, are where God is found.

For where two or three gather together as my followers, I am there among them.”

Jesus in Matthew 18

You are coming to Christ, who is the living cornerstone of God’s temple. He was rejected by people, but he was chosen by God for great honor. And you are living stones that God is building into his spiritual temple. What’s more, you are his holy priests.

Peter in 1 Peter 2

Don’t you realize that all of you together are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God lives in you? God will destroy anyone who destroys this temple. For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple.

Paul in 1 Corinthians 3

“Then these righteous ones will reply, ‘Lord, when did we ever see you hungry and feed you? Or thirsty and give you something to drink? Or a stranger and show you hospitality? Or naked and give you clothing? When did we ever see you sick or in prison and visit you?’

“And the King will say, ‘I tell you the truth, when you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you were doing it to me!’

Jesus in Matthew 25
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It was only right

  1. In many times and in many ways, God speaks
  2. We may drift away
  3. It was only right
  4. Where you’ll find God
  5. “Stay soft”: Sabbath rest
  6. The difference between right and wrong
  7. An anchor for the soul
  8. Our great desire

God, for whom and through whom everything was made, chose to bring many children into glory. And it was only right that he should make Jesus, through his suffering, a perfect leader, fit to bring them into their salvation.

Hebrews 2:10

Everything we see and hear and touch, all of the universe, all of creation, was made. This is one of the starting beliefs of Christianity: that there is a creator. A person behind it all, a person who had a reason to create. It’s not just matter. It’s not just energy. It’s not just existence.

The universe is personal.

“Through whom” is about the craftsmanship. That God is involved in the making of every water-drop, every flower, every person, every galaxy. To quote a church song from my teenage years: “is everything I know marked with my maker’s fingerprints?

“For whom” is about the intent and the reason. God wanted this universe, and God wanted us in it. That’s our chosen starting point for the big life question: “why are we here?” We’re here because God wanted us, so God created us.

And the intent here is to bring many children – that’s us – into glory. It’s hard to even imagine what this is supposed to mean. The word “glory” here is the same Greek word “doxa” that is used again and again when Jesus talks about “returning in glory“, when Paul is “blinded by the intense light“, when Jesus talks about not needing the approval of the religious leaders, or when he gives examples about the seat of honour at special occasions. Whatever it means, God intends to make us stand out, make something bright and radiant, something honoured, something glorious, out of our lives.

It’s an incredible starting point, that imbues all of life with meaning and purpose and worth and hope.

But we all know life doesn’t actually look like that.

It’s far more messed up.

You know that. I know that.

These grand theological statements just don’t match the experience of our lives. Yes of course there’s joy and radiance… at times. But there’s just as much drudgery, or cruelty, or outright suffering. We feel heartbreak over separation, heartbreak over death, and we live in fear of both of these. We feel shame. We feel loneliness. We know life has suffering, and we know the suffering.

And with that, the writer of this letter to the Hebrews brings us back to Jesus. They promise Jesus is the leader who brings us into salvation, leading from this life to the promised life – from the suffering to the glory.

And while you know and I know that life doesn’t look like the promise being laid out, the writer knows it too, acknowledging that “we have not yet seen” the promise.

They know there is suffering, and they drive home this point: Jesus knew suffering too.

He didn’t just know about suffering. It’s not even that he knows about our suffering and sees us. It’s that he suffered.

Like we do. More, even.

So, when I originally thought I’d write a post on these verses, I imagined narrowing in on the idea that it’s through suffering you become a perfect leader. And there’s truth in that… but the more I meditate on this part of the letter to the Hebrews, the more I realise that’s not the truth the writer is trying to get across.

You see, I think Christianity is more about following than about leading. So the thing I’m finding myself focusing on is not me and my leadership… it’s Jesus and his leadership. Because I’m planning to follow him.

And while his path started in a place of honour and privilege – the son of God! – he then became human, deliberately made his home and found his community among those who lived in suffering. Not as a visitor, not as a rescuer, but as one of us. He embraced that, even to death, and through that was lifted back up to the kind of glorious life we talked about. And that is pretty much the story told in our earliest hymn and creed.

If that’s his path, and we’re following him through it, then it’s something worth meditating on.

What we do see is Jesus… because he suffered death for us, he is now “crowned with glory and honor.” Yes, by God’s grace, Jesus tasted death for everyone.

Because God’s children are human beings—made of flesh and blood—the Son also became flesh and blood. For only as a human being could he die, and only by dying could he break the power of the devil, who had the power of death.

Therefore, it was necessary for him to be made in every respect like us, his brothers and sisters, so that he could be our merciful and faithful High Priest before God.

Since he himself has gone through suffering and testing, he is able to help us when we are being tested.

Hebrews 2 (excerpts)
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Dead Stars by Ada Limón

I was listening to an interview with Krista Tippett and Ada Limón, and it was a beautiful, fun, hilarious interview. When she read the poem “Dead Stars” near the end of the interview I was brought to tears.

Here’s the interview.

And here’s the poem:

Out here, there’s a bowing even the trees are doing.
Winter’s icy hand at the back of all of us.
Black bark, slick yellow leaves, a kind of stillness that feels
so mute it’s almost in another year.

I am a hearth of spiders these days: a nest of trying.

We point out the stars that make Orion as we take out
the trash, the rolling containers a song of suburban thunder.

It’s almost romantic as we adjust the waxy blue
recycling bin until you say, Man, we should really learn
some new constellations.

And it’s true. We keep forgetting about Antlia, Centaurus,
Draco, Lacerta, Hydra, Lyra, Lynx.

But mostly we’re forgetting we’re dead stars too, my mouth is full
of dust and I wish to reclaim the rising —

to lean in the spotlight of streetlight with you, toward
what’s larger within us, toward how we were born.

Look, we are not unspectacular things.
We’ve come this far, survived this much. What

would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?

What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh and said, No.
No, to the rising tides.

Stood for the many mute mouths of the sea, of the land?

What would happen if we used our bodies to bargain

for the safety of others, for earth,
if we declared a clean night, if we stopped being terrified,

if we launched our demands into the sky, made ourselves so big
people could point to us with the arrows they make in their minds,

rolling their trash bins out, after all of this is over?

The lines that cut through me: “Look, we are not unspectacular things We’ve come this far, survived this much. What would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?”

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We may drift away

  1. In many times and in many ways, God speaks
  2. We may drift away
  3. It was only right
  4. Where you’ll find God
  5. “Stay soft”: Sabbath rest
  6. The difference between right and wrong
  7. An anchor for the soul
  8. Our great desire

So we must listen very carefully to the truth we have heard, or we may drift away from it… what makes us think we can escape if we ignore this great salvation that was first announced by the Lord Jesus himself and then delivered to us by those who heard him speak?

Hebrews 2:1

Last week I wrote about how it had been years since I’d read the bible in any meaningful way. And here in the book of Hebrews it said something that aligned with that experience – if you don’t pay careful attention, you tend to drift.

It’s kind of a relief to read this, honestly. Most of the Christian New Testament parts of the bible were written by people with powerful first hand experiences of Jesus: Peter and John and Matthew were all walking with Jesus everyday for three years before his death. Even Paul who wrote most of the letters in the New Testament talked about his life altering experience as a physical encounter with a resurrected Jesus. I imagine that kind of exposure to a person is indelible, it leaves a permanent mark, its hard to drift away from.

But that’s not what most of us get. We might experience the invisible God, and have spiritual encounters of various kinds, but we don’t see or hear or touch or smell Jesus like they did. Not in a physical, tangible way. If Jesus is the image of the invisible God, we don’t get to see him. We just hear about his life from others. And the experiences we do have first-hand tend to be more intangible.

So it’s refreshing to here someone who wrote an important part of the bible, this letter to the Hebrews, say they’re in the same boat as us. They didn’t give us their name, so we don’t know who exactly it is. (Scholars like to guess. An audio-bible I used to listen to had the voice for Hebrews played by a cast of men and women to demonstrate the ambiguity. I liked the idea that it might have been a woman, because we know several women had important leadership roles in the early church but we’ve mostly been kept from hearing their voices.)

Whoever it was, they say they’re in the same boat as us. They didn’t know Jesus directly, they heard about him from someone else. They’re a second-generation follower. And they say it’s easy to drift and forget.

For me personally, some stuff didn’t drift: a sense of worth, value and dignity, of being made in the image of God. That was deeply internalised. My values as well have been deeply shaped by my faith earlier in life, and those mostly held steady even without continued focus. So what has drifted?

I think its the focus on the “great salvation” they talk about. There’s a big picture, a meta-narrative, an arc of history that ties together the story of Jesus and the stories of us.

When a person keeps this big picture in their field of view, it can yield a big change in the way they lead their lives. Being part of something bigger is incredibly motivating for most of us – and can call us into living courageously, selflessly, resiliently.

And I think that’s the bit that has drifted: without a focus on the big story, the routines and the challenges of my life have become all encompassing. I’m not suggesting I should have been going and serving the poor or preaching in churches instead… keeping my focus on my young family and loving them, providing for them, that should have been the focus anyway. But I wonder if I’d kept a connection to the larger story, if it would help strengthen the moments of joy, help bring meaning to the moments of suffering, and help me see beyond my own troubles to offer compassion to others around me who have their own challenges going on too.

I want to live my life with that big picture in view.

“We must listen very carefully to the truth we have heard, or we may drift away”.

Now, there’s a thousand different ways to understand what “great salvation” means, and I think each person’s experience of it, and the way they describe it, would be different. There’s a deep shared truth in there somewhere, and then the just-as-real truth of each person’s experience of it. And of course for me its complicated, because I don’t feel comfortable with some of the simpler narratives of sin and salvation and heaven and hell.

But there is something speaking there, something true, and if I want my life to follow that path in my life, and not drift away, and I should listen carefully, actively, asking questions and seeking to understand.

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In many times and in many ways, God speaks

  1. In many times and in many ways, God speaks
  2. We may drift away
  3. It was only right
  4. Where you’ll find God
  5. “Stay soft”: Sabbath rest
  6. The difference between right and wrong
  7. An anchor for the soul
  8. Our great desire

Long ago God spoke many times and in many ways to our ancestors through the prophets. And now in these final days, he has spoken to us through his Son.

Hebrews 1:1

I was catching up with friends from my church recently and one of them talked about how they’d been struggling to read the bible in any valuable way lately, and I struggled to relate – not because I have a vibrant relationship with reading the scriptures myself, but because it’s been so long since I have that, unlike my friend, I didn’t feel its absence in my life.

Years of daily reading as a teenager and young adult, and years of deep study in preparing to lead a small group or write a blog post or preach a sermon, have meant that the christian scriptures have been deeply embedded in how I think. But as the habit of daily reading dwindled, and the need to prepare for small groups or sermons dissipated, I haven’t found myself opening the book often, and when I did, I was often coming to it with a transactional mindset: looking to find something specific, as if the bible’s main purpose was to be a “proof text” to help me feel better about a position I hold or a life decision I’m making.

My friend mentioned they had been finding something else valuable – a book of readings and prayers for everyday life called “Every Moment Holy“. The bible isn’t the only way to hear God speaking. I know that to be true for me: in the years where bible reading hasn’t been a habit, I’ve still felt God speaking through time in nature, through times of reflection and introspection, through podcasts, through music and art, through friends and family and small children.

In all those I felt a sense that “God spoke”. Not an out-loud voice that moves through the air waves and into my ears. Not even an inner voice with a running dialogue in my head. But a sense that God, the hidden animating force of the universe, the person woven into every moment and every molecule, was somehow imparting and transmitting to me a sense of love, of peace, of strength to live a certain way, of clarity. God does speak in many times and in many ways, and we should attune our ears to hear it in all these ways, not just when we have a bible open.

But, having said all that…

I’ve recently been drawn back into the bible.

It started because our family life has been exhausting, and I’ve been feeling depleted. And a phrase I knew from the bible was ringing around in my head: “enter my rest”. I remembered there’s this whole bit in the book of Hebrews where it talks about entering God’s rest, a “Sabbath” rest, and some people enter it, and some don’t, and we should try to be those who do. I couldn’t shake it from my head, so I wanted to read it. (I had to ask Anna where our bible even was.)

And so I picked up the bible, and have been reading Hebrews, and have been drawn into it. All the ways I described “God speaking” and sending me love and peace and strength and clarity – I found again as every day or two I picked up the bible and kept reading.

And it didn’t feel transactional, like I was coming to check some facts or prove a point. It was different, like I was coming to it open to what it might say to me, what it might do to me.

My Dad also has a blog, and earlier this year he posted something which resonates with what I’m experiencing:

In the age of the printed book and of the internet, modern writings whether blogs or learned tomes are ephemeral, read, perhaps noted, and then discarded. They have no particular authority and different readers ascribe different value to them.

Religious reading, on the other hand, is different for the texts are treated with reverence as an ‘infinite resource,’ as a treasure house of wisdom, etc. As such, the words are read and re-read over and over and in time, tend to be committed to memory. “And as a reader memorizes a text, he becomes textualized; that is, he embodies the work that he has committed to memory”:

“‘A memorized work (like a lover, a friend, a spouse, a child) has entered into the fabric of its possessor’s intellectual and emotional life in a way that makes deep claims upon that life, claims that can only be ignored with effort and deliberation.’ … A memorized text has a peculiarly character-forming effect on the memorizer. The text becomes part of his character; he lives in it and lives it out.” (Wenham, Psalms as Torah, 53, citing Paul J. Griffiths, Religious Reading, 46-47).

On Reading and Memorising Scripture by Michael O’Neil (my Dad!)

And that’s been my experience. Reading and letting it change me, and form me. Chewing on the sentences and the phrases in my mind like you chew on gum, slowly letting its flavour out. Treating it as an infinite resource, and approaching it with reverence, and openness to its character-forming effects.

Some of it engaged me on my usual intellectual-theological level. Some of it felt like a lifeline of support and promises to hold me fast with the life challenges I’ve had going on. Some of it inspired me to carry a different attitude in my approach to life. Some of it was personal, and some of it I want to share. I’ve written down about 14 or so things that stood out that I think would be interesting reflections to share on this blog. So: I’m going to do that, starting with this: God speaks at many times, and in many ways.

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Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg on the scriptures in Leviticus used to justify homophobia

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg has been one of my favourite religious teachers for a few years now. Recently she’s written up two posts exploring what she calls “clobber” texts: verses in the Bible (Hebrew Bible in this case) that are used to clobber the LGBTQ community and justify homophobia / transphobia.

Links to the two articles:

Her analysis is useful (and entertaining) and I imagine I’ll be coming back to these if I ever find myself in a discussion with someone trying to justify homophobia based on the Bible.

Beyond her unpacking of these verses and ways to interpret them, two things stood out to me. First: the role of scripture teachers in a world where religious fundamentalism is taking hold again. She lives in the USA where fundamentalist Christians are gaining significant political power and shaping laws to force their worldview onto others. The reality in Australia’s politics is different, but you see the same religious fundamentalism play out in power structures at the level of families and schools and communities.

Because in the days when drag bans are getting passed and gun bans aren’t, knowing your text inside and out matters.

We have to fight against the encroaching theocracy in many ways at once. One of those ways includes disemboweling bad readings of sacred texts—especially the bad readings that are used to harm people—at every available opportunity.

The other thing that stood out was her willingness to criticise the patriarchal and homophobic ideology when that’s what is in the text. Growing up evangelical, I had been taught “all scripture is God breathed”, and when something in there was completely out of step with our contemporary values, we either tried to change our values to match, or tried to reinterpret the text in some way that downplayed the parts we disagreed with. The Rabbi on the other hand isn’t afraid to question and criticise the scripture itself and the major rabbinic commentary through history – acknowledging it as tainted by human prejudices – even while somehow approaching it with care, treating it as sacred, and allowing it to speak.

As much as I love to hold up the more optimistic texts in my corpus, it’s still a very patriarchal tradition and we have plenty with which to reckon.

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Imagine believing in the resurrection

It’s a bit of a “clickbait” title, and if you heard someone say it you’d probably imagine them being incredulous, dripping with cynicism: “imagine believing in that! I can’t even imagine how your brain gets to a point where you think a corpse coming back to life and walking out of a tomb isn’t ridiculous…” At some points of my life I’ve been convinced it’s true, and some points not, and well, eh 🤷‍♂️ That’s not what I’m thinking about today.

Instead, imagine, actually think about what it would be like, when someone believes and internalizes the idea that Jesus came back to life, never to die again. That there’s a life beyond this one, overlapping with this one, that means death is not the end. That those who mean the world to us who passed away we will see again, laugh with, eat with, embrace again. That this life isn’t the final life and so the end of this story isn’t the end of the story. Imagine that resurrection means there’s a chance for justice and restoration and hope even when this life has only been injustice, neglect and despair.

What would be different if someone really believed that? If you really believed that?

Imagining in this way isn’t an exercise in futility. One of the books that most impacted me is “The Prophetic Imagination” by Walter Brueggemann, which drove home the point that if you can’t picture a different future, if you can’t imagine it, then you can’t find the energy to start moving toward it. “Without vision the people perish”; but when you can imagine something new, an alternative future with new possibilities opens up.

So what alternate future is unlocked if people really believe in the resurrection?

As a start, the despair of losing someone to death is gone. The death of a loved one is always going to be painful, and life after will hold a sense of loneliness and loss, but “death has lost its sting”. When you believe they’ll live again, and you’ll see them again, and when you do it will be different, a life without the same suffering… then even though it’s hard, there’s an anchor of hope, both hope for you and hope for them.

Then there’s your own fear of death. You might still fear the fate of those left behind – even Jesus on the day of his death was asking his friend to care for his mum. But your own fear of death wouldn’t be the same. Instead of fearing the unknown, or fearing nothingness, if you believe wholeheartedly that after death comes life, and life without the same suffering… then there’s no fear in that. Instead hope, maybe even longing. That side of death looks “better by far”.

And if you don’t fear death, then you’re harder to control. Think of how much evil in the world is sustained because those in power can threaten to kill anyone who tries to stop them. If you don’t fear death, and even more, if you don’t fear missing out on your dreams for this life – because you trust your life will continue and be made new and right after death – then you’re free from that fear and intimidation, and you can act according to your conscience and your sense of justice. If a whole community believes that, it would be impossible to subdue them without eliminating them. They would have so much courage in the face of injustice and persecution… and courage can be very contagious.

And imagine you believe not just that there’s life after death, but you also believe the full good news message: that all will be set right. That those who weep now will laugh, those who are hungry now will be filled, those who have lived in poverty now will inherit the kingdom… all of a sudden you would see so much more dignity in the lowly parts of life. Any suffering, any wrongdoing, any injustice… you could filter it through your understanding of an eternity set right, and all those unbearably hard things would seem “light and momentary”. You could find hope to endure all of life’s hardships, and probably do so with joy.

And because your perspective has shifted and you know those who are suffering are destined for better things… you would feel compelled to bring that future forward, and work hard to help them today, not waiting for the final act to set things right.

(This is not unlike the stories I’ve heard of the first few centuries of the Christian church…)

So, ignoring the question of if it’s true… can you see the impact on the world if you were to believe the resurrection, living like it is true, and embodying resurrection as a driving force in your life?

So, this morning on Easter Sunday, when I stand with hundreds of other people and sing “Hallelujah, death has lost its grip on me” – I am encouraged. There is a way of life that stands in defiance of fear of death. The resurrection story frees us to imagine an alternative future, and pulls us forward into a new life, a resurrection life. And that life offers not just a bright hope for tomorrow, but strength and courage and clarity for today. And this morning as the voices of my church sang out and claimed this resurrection to be real, not just as history but present life and power, it helps me believe too.

Categories
Faith Personal

Pendulums and Paradox

I’ve been back at church and this week a line from one of the songs got my brain thinking:

You will always be holy, holy forever

From the song “Holy Forever

Holy. It’s a word used all the time, especially in church, especially in church songs. The meaning is something like “apartness, holiness, sacredness, separateness” or “revered, set apart for God”1.

Singing about and meditating on God as “holy” is a reminder of how separate God is from us. There is something about God entirely different, foreign and “other” than what we experience as humans, and sometimes its good to remind ourselves that God is set apart, and take on a posture of reverence.

God is holy.
God is set apart.
God is separate from us.

But if there’s a scale from “separate” to “united”, or perhaps from “sacred” to “everyday”… then God is at the other end of the scale too. God is close, the name “Emmanual” that we have on Christmas cards means “God with us”. Yes, God is separate and different to us, but we’re also united with God. Paul uses the phrase “in Christ” over a hundred times, more than any other phrase in his writings2. We can hardly be separate if we are in God.

The same phrase is often translated “united with Christ”. There’s a deep sense that our goal is not separation but unity. 2 Peter 1:4 even talks about us being given promises through which we can “participate in the divine nature”3.

God is holy.
God is separate from us.
God is also united with us.
God is close.

So when I hear a song celebrating the separate, the sacred, the holy nature of God – have we got it wrong? Are we revering separateness when in fact God is close? Is it time for the pendulum to swing the other way – for us to celebrate the nearness and the unity of God?

A pendulum, swinging from one extreme to another like our interest rate cycles or political climates… perhaps eventually finding a stable middle ground… is that the way we should be thinking about God?

Instead of a swinging pendulum, let’s think about it as a paradox.

Something where both ends of the scale are true. Instead of insisting only one side is correct, or instead of feeling we’ve gone too far one way and pulling hard toward the center again… what does it look like to embrace things, and explore how far we can stretch both ends?

But even the metaphor of stretching out something elastic in two directions still implies it will come back to a single middle point. This is a classic example of dualistic thinking – that there’s a clear true and false, and so if we are stretched in two competing directions, it will one day resolve to a single point.

But paradoxes aren’t like that – we could explore both ends of this scale and discover new and transforming ways of thinking about God and knowing God – on both ends of the spectrum.

Instead of a pendulum that swings between two points, or an elastic material that stretches but snaps back to center, we could think of paradox as a national park to explore. We start at our camp site. We don’t know if its in the exact centre of the park… it doesn’t really matter. We can set off walking in any direction, and explore what we find. Be amazed at what we find. Maybe we’ll come back to our original camp site, or maybe we’ll find a new place to camp – or many new places.

The paradox is not here to be answered or resolved. Its here to be explored. To be lived in. To be wandered and to bring wonder.

God is separate and holy. God is near, and united with us. Yes, to both. Let’s explore that.

You’ll do yourself no favours if you pick a side and try hold it, or if you reflexively always swing back to a middle point that doesn’t challenge your thinking too much.

There’s a bunch of paradoxes that are part of Christian faith and life. Jesus as fully human and Jesus as fully God. Fear God and have no fear. Free will and an all knowing God. Doing good to “let you light shine” and doing good in secret.

When faced with these, instead of trying to resolve the contradiction, or trying to find the middle ground, maybe try exploring. Paradox is an invitation to curiosity, to wonder, to humility, and to God changing how we think and how we live.

These are the irreducible mysteries that no systematic theology can logically explain, and it’s best that we imitate Moses when confronted with paradox. When he stood before the bush that burned and was not consumed, he did two things: drew closer for a better look, then removed his shoes.

Jen Pollock Michel
Footnotes
  1. I got these definitions of “Holy” from the website Blue Letter Bible, which has some free tools to look up the original language for a verse and see where else those words are used and get some of the feeling of their meaning. Here’s the link for Holy in the Hebrew bible (“קֹדֶשׁ” / qodesh) and in the greek parts of the bible (“ἅγιος” / hagios). I think I’d enjoy learning to read these languages properly one day.
  2. I first came across the importance of this phrase “en Christo” / “in Christ” in Richard Rohr’s book “The Universal Christ”. The same idea is adapted and shared as a meditation here: https://cac.org/daily-meditations/in-christ-2019-02-27/
  3. In The Orthodox Way, Kallistos Ware talks about the eastern orthodox idea of there being the “essence” and the “energy” of God, and we’re destined to join in the energy but will remain separate from the essence… which is an interesting way to think about it. But in line with this post, I wonder if there’s value to be found in not trying to resolve this contradiction but embrace both ends as true.
Categories
Justice and Politics Personal

Derrimut

Content Warning: Jan 26th. This post talks about 26th Jan, European invasion/settlement, systematic oppression, racial abuse, and is generally pretty heavy. But the person we’re talking about was an incredibly strong resilient leader who I find really inspiring.

2023 Note: I wrote this originally in January 2017, but am only recently found the draft, and have tidied it up to publish now in 2023. 6 years later I still find this story gut wrenching, challenging and inspiring. I no longer live on the lands of the Kulin nations. Now I’m on Noongar land, and I pay my respects to their leaders, past, present and those emerging.


January 26th goes by different names in Australia. “Australia Day”, “Invasion Day”, “Survival Day”. On the 26th I saw people posting respects on social media to the traditional custodians of the land, the Aboriginal people who have been here for over 50,000 years.

I wanted to do the same, but realised I know very little of the people who lived here in Melbourne before 1835. So I set out to learn.

I live in Williamstown, one of the oldest suburbs in Melbourne, and one of the first places Europeans tried to settle back in the 1830s.

Before their boats landed, there was already a nation here – the Kulin Nation. A collection of 5 tribes, who had lived in the land for 31,000 years. One of the tribes was the Boonwurrung people, and the clan that hugged the coast from the Werribee River, through to Port Melbourne, Albert Park and St Kilda was called the Yalukit Willam.

This blog post is me sharing what I’ve learned about the Yalukit Willam, and one of their leaders. I pay respect to these people, the traditional custodians of the land I live in, and their leaders past, present and emerging.

Ancient History

During the last ice age, there was no Port Phillip Bay, the water level was low enough you could walk right across, you could even walk right to Tasmania. After the ice age ended, the water rose to a point higher than it is today, the bay filled, and the area I now live in was completely underwater. It wasn’t until 5,000 years ago that the water level receded, and that was about when the Yalukit Willam people moved in.

(Fun fact, that gives weight to their ancient stories: The geological record lines up with their oral history, as a people they preserved a memory of the last ice age, and as a culture they remembered a time when they could walk across the bay. Even crazier, the Yalukit Willam borders line up closely with the high-water level following the last ice age – they moved in as soon as the water line receded and the land was available to walk on).

Introducing Derrimut

At the time of European Arrival in the area, one of the leaders – an “arweet” – of the Yalukit Willam people, was called Derrimut.

He’s a complicated and sometimes controversial figure… I’ll mention why in a minute, but for me though, in reading his story I’m filled with incredible respect at his strength, and sadness at how much he suffered.

An old painting / portrait of Derrimut. He's a serious looking aboriginal man with a great beard.
Portrait of Derrimut by Benjamin Duterau, painted in 1837 during a visit to Hobart. Found on Wikipedia, public domain.

One of his first experiences with European forces was before any of them had attempted to settle down in the Melbourne area. It was a band of seal hunters, who came on to the shore and kidnapped several of the local women and took them as slaves. One of the women was Derrimut’s wife, Nandergoroke, another his sister in law, and one the wife of his nephew. When I think about the family close to me… I can’t even begin to imagine the pain.

Even with such a painful personal history to carry, he continued to lead his people with honour and courage. When a small group of Europeans landed and tried to settle, rather than responding in hostility and violence, he remembered the law of his people.

Tanderrum Hospitality: Freedom of the Bush

“This land will always be protected by the creator, Bunjil, who travels as an eagle, and by Waarn (Waa) who protects the waterways and travels as a crow. Bunjil taught the Boon Wurrung to always welcome guests, but he always required the Boon Wurrung to ask all visitors to make two promises: to obey the laws of Bunjil and not to harm the children of the land of Bunjil.

Ms Carolyn Briggs, a Boon Wurrung Elder, http://www.yarrahealing.catholic.edu.au/stories-voices/index.cfm?loadref=87

One of the customs of the Kulin people was to grant access to strangers and wanderers who came to their land, to welcome them and offer protection.

In June 1835, John Batman came with the intention to set up a village in what is now Melbourne. (Hilariously, if Wikipedia is to be believed, he wanted to call it Batmania). He met with the locals, and sought to organise a treaty with them, offering to pay them annually with a range of goods.

It seems likely this was misinterpreted by the Yalukit Willam leaders to mean Batman was participating in a Tanderrum ceremony, asking for temporary access and protection as a visitor, and offering gifts in return. The access rights

gave visitors who had no familial ties to the country the opportunity to seek formal permission from clan-heads for temporary access. The safety of all approved visitors was guaranteed.

As wikipedia notes, it was “a diplomatic rite involving the landholder’s hospitality and a ritual exchange of gifts, sometimes referred to as Freedom of the Bush.”

For Derrimut, he was a local leader, and a good man, and it was now his responsibility to care not only for his clan, but for the visitors that had arrived on his shore. (It makes me think about how poorly we treat those who come to our land, seeking our protection, in this day and age.)

Saving the settlement

So when word spread in October that year that a tribe from the North was intending to come and wipe out the new settlement, Derrimut raced to warn the European colonists, so they had time to arm themselves and fend off the attack.

This is where some of the controversy in his legacy comes in – in giving warning to the colonists, the colonists were able to arm themselves, and presumably kill/hurt/harm the people who were coming for them.

To me this feels like an ethically wrought and morally messy decision. It’s not straightforward and calling him a “hero” or a “traitor” for his actions in this moment skips over just how human this moment is – facing no good options and needing to decide what you will do. It’s not as simple as “picking sides”, especially once you count his own moral framework.

When I read the accounts, I suspect Derrimut saw it as his duty to protect them while they were on his land, and he did that by warning them of the oncoming attack, knowing what the consequences would be.

Values mismatch

Everything I’ve read about Derrimut shows me that he was exceptionally strong. Not in an angry, violent way that attacks and lashes out, but in a persistent, courageous, peaceful and moral way. He lived out his beliefs and tried to protect his people and co-operate with the European arrivals.

The Yalukit Willam had a culture that celebrated peace.

The culture he was dealing with though, the European settlement, did not recognise the same principals. The governor refused to recognise Batman’s treaty, and stuck to the arrogant belief that the land was empty when they found it, and therefore belonged to the Queen.

These people, coming to Derrimut’s land, in ever increasing numbers, were not temporary visitors, but invaders.

Fear and cruelty

As European settlers arrived and set out farms, they would fence off areas and claim them as their own. The land the Yalukit Willam people had walked on and hunted on and played on and celebrated over, for 5000 years, was now not in their control – and they were now told they were not welcome.

As the settlers expanded, they new arrivals viewed the Yalukit Willam suspiciously and fearfully. Land management rituals like burning out the undergrowth (without which Victoria’s horrendous bushfires will occur) were how the people kept the land flourishing, safe and sustainable, but Europeans believed the fires were meant to burn their farms and their families, and so responded with violent force.

The Boon Wurrung were known as a very peaceful people and if actually hostile, they would hardly have been deterred by one ‘old sailor’! This was likely a Yalukit Willam party engaged in their regular burning back of the lands during cooler weather necessary to stimulate pasture for kangaroo, reduce undergrowth and promote fire-tolerant food plants. Settlers however strongly discouraged ‘fire-stick farming’ as they were unfamiliar with the role of fire in regenerating Australian flora. This change in land management may have contributed to the Black Thursday disaster in 1851 when a quarter of Victoria burned.

Yalukit Willam: The River People of Port Phillip. By Meyer Eidelson. Page 25

These fears meant that as the farmers kept expanding their borders, they kept pushing the Yalukit Willam people further and further away. They were not subtle about this, they were brutal. I’ll quote a few paragraphs from “The Yalakit Willam: the First People of Hobson’s Bay”:

In June 1846, on government orders, Thomas [a government officer charged with “protecting” the Aboriginal people] removed the valuables from the willums (bark huts) of the Boon Wurrung camp then wrecked and burnt them. He ordered 51 residents to disperse. Thomas lamented that he had to order them to move every time a European objected. ‘Poor fellows, they are now compelled to shift almost at the will and paprice of the whites’. Their hardship was intensified because there was no bark left in the district and they were now compelled to build ‘mud huts’.

The Boon Wurrung and Woi Wurrung increasingly had trouble obtaining food in the vicinity of Melbourne, and they were suffering from introduced diseases. Europeans objected when Aboriginal people entered fenced paddocks to hunt, and, consequently, they were forced to subsist by begging and cutting firewood for the intruders.

The breaking up of camps continued unabated in the latter part of the 1840s. In January 1849, at one Boon Wurrung camp, Thomas was asked ‘where were they to go, why not give them a station’.

The Yalukit-Willam: The First People of Hobson’s Bay. Page 12

(Side note: the disparity between Thomas’s compassionate thoughts and cruel actions is why I think civil disobedience is vital for a just society. If you think something is wrong – don’t do it! Even if it is your job! Even if it puts you on the wrong side of the government and law-enforcement!).

It’s hard to comprehend just how unjust this is.

These people had successfully cared for the land sustainably for 5,000 years. Their first contact with Europeans involved family members being kidnapped. They still did the honourable thing and protected the first white immigrants, working with them cooperatively and peacefully. But the arriving settlers stole their possessions, and burned their homes, because they were prejudiced and afraid, assuming that land management practices were attacks. They banned them from hunting and from their traditional land management practices, and forced them into subsistence, reduced them to begging.

The Yalukit Willam people asked Thomas for a station, a section of land they could care for and continue to live on as they had always done, but free from European encroachment. Benbow, one of Derrimut’s fellow clan leaders, and even an employee of the government, tried to meet with Governor LaTrobe to make the request. LaTrobe left him waiting outside all day and refused to see him.

In March 1849, Benbow resolved to see Superintendent La Trobe to ask for a country for the Boon Wurrung… Benbow stood outside all day but was not admitted.

The Yalukit-Willam: The First People of Hobson’s Bay. Page 12

Resignation, persecution and tragedy

The last time I saw him was nearly opposite the Bank of Victoria, he stopped me and said, “You give me a shilling, Mr Hull.”

“No”, I said, “I will not give you a shilling, I will go and give you some bread”, and he held his hand out to me and said

“me plenty sulky you long time ago, you plenty sulky me, no sulky now, Derrimut soon die”, and then he pointed with a plaintive manner, which they can affect, to the Bank of Victoria, he said “You see, Mr Hull, Bank of Victoria, all of this mine, all along here Derrimut’s once, no matter now, me soon tumble down and die very soon now”.

The Yalukit-Willam: The First People of Hobson’s Bay. Page 13

Forced into subsistence, being told he’s not welcome on his land, Derrimut soon began to lose hope. The people he had welcomed onto his land, the people he had protected and co-operated with, had taken everything from him, and treated him cruelly.

(You can even feel the racism dripping in the sentence: “I won’t give you money, I’ll buy you a meal” – I’ve said that too! It makes me question how I respond to people on the streets who approach me for help. Did they think Derrimut was not capable of using money wisely? He was a capable and smart leader).

In July 1863, the very last of their land was sold to white settlers; they were now not allowed to live anywhere on the land that had once been their nation for 5,000 years.

They were moved on to a reserve at Coranderrk, North-East of Melbourne. On the day they had to leave, Thomas, the government officer enforcing the rule, wrote:

Poor Derrimut cried & so did Mr Man who hung his head on the breast of Derrimut like Esau and Jacob, I was forced at length to separate them.

Yalukit Willam: The River People of Port Phillip. By Meyer Eidelson. Page 69

Their connection to the land was more than just sentimentality and familiarity. I believe there is a spiritual element to it, and when Derrimut was forced off his land, despair set in. He died the following year.

Derrimut became very disillusioned and died at the Melbourne Benevolent Asylum at the age of about 54 years in 1864. In his honour, over his body, interred in the Melbourne General Cemetery according to European rather than Aboriginal rites, a tombstone was erected.

Wikipedia

The tragedy continued after Derrimut’s story ended. His clan, resourceful as they were and with their knowledge of the land, used the station at Coranderrk to farm and run a successful business. They were so successful that they started winning awards, and then the oppression started once more, with neighbouring European farmers believing it was not the people and their farming practices that resulted in the high quality produce, but merely that the land was more valuable. Because of this they started moving the Yalukit Willam people off the reserve, and caused the business to collapse.

Coranderrk Station ran successfully for many years as an Aboriginal enterprise, selling wheat, hops and crafts on the burgeoning Melbourne market. Produce from the farm won first prize at the Melbourne International Exhibition in 1881; and other awards in previous years, such as 1872.

By 1874, the Aboriginal Protection Board (APB) was looking for ways to undermine Coranderrk by moving people away due to their successful farming practices. Neighbouring farmers also wanted the mission closed as the land was now deemed ‘too valuable’ for Aboriginal people to occupy.

Wikipedia

The level of abuse and repression they suffered is hard to swallow. I’ve often felt a sense of shame at our national history, but seeing these details of specific incidents, the cruelty of it, it hurts to know that it was my culture inflicting this on good, innocent people.

My reflection

Most mornings I ride my bike along this land, around Hobson’s Bay and through Point Gellibrand, along the river and bay and wetlands where Derrimut once lived freely.

There is a beauty here that is breathtaking. It is also life giving. There is a spirituality to this place. I can only imagine how strong that sense is for the people of a culture that have lived here and sustained the land, and been sustained by it, for thousands of years.

That same respect for land also gave him a respect for other people, even foreigners from a culture he did not understand, and as I read his story I am so inspired by his kindness and decision to honour his commitment to hospitality and protection of visitors, even when it put him in opposition to some of his own people – he stood up for the visitors in his care.

And yet he was crushed by a cruel invading culture, and that is the culture I’m part of. It brought me to tears realising how horribly we treated such a good man, and all his people.. And to think of the generations of pain caused to countless Yalukit Willam people who lost their connection to the land and have been repressed for over a century. And people of nations all over this continent…

It gives me so much more respect for Indigenous people across Australia who are still here, still fighting to be heard, fighting to have their culture recognised, fighting for a positive future for themselves and for their children. The cruelty they have suffered is so significant, to continue on shows such courage.

Learning this history has also been a big reality check for my own privilege, helping me see the systematic racism still at play, and start thinking about what my role has been in it, and what my role needs to be in reversing it.

Your own learning

If you want to learn more, I recommend you look up the history from your local council. Most local governments in Australia will publish some history of the first inhabitants on their website. Take a look, learn about the leaders, past and present, who are the traditional custodians of the land you now live in.

Here are the articles I read in writing this post:

Yalukit Willam: The River People of of Port Phillip by local historian Meyer Eidelson

The First People of Hobsons Bay

You have all this place, no good have children …” Derrimut: traitor, saviour, or a man of his people?

What to do?

2023 Update

This list from Pat Allan feels like a good start:

• donate to https://dhadjowa.com.au
• contribute to https://paytherent.net.au
• show up to your local Invasion Day rally or similar events
• subscribe to Amy McQuire’s newsletter: https://amymcquire.substack.com
• read Chelsea Watego’s book Another Day in the Colony

I’d add to that… with an upcoming referendum on giving an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, have a think about who you know, who you’ve got a trusting relationship with, and who will or might vote against it. And have a heartfelt conversation with that person, try to change their mind.

Categories
Faith Personal

Christmas 2022

For the third year now, I’ve been following Advent readings from the book “Watch for the Light“. One of the readings was this poem by Jane Kenyon, it’s titled “Mosiac of the Nativity: Serbia, Winter, 1993”:

On the domed ceiling God
is thinking:
I made them my joy,
and everything else I created
I made to bless them.
But see what they do!
I know their hearts
and arguments:

“We’re descended from
Cain. Evil is nothing new,
so what does it matter now
if we shell the infirmary,
and the well where the fearful
and rash alike must
come for water?”

God thinks Mary into being.
Suspended at the apogee
of the golden dome,
she curls in a brown pod,
and inside her the mind
of Christ, cloaked in blood,
lodges and begins to grow.
Jane Kenyon, “Mosaic of the Nativity: Serbia, Winter, 1993” from Collected Poems. Copyright © 2005 by the Estate of Jane Kenyon.

This poem hit me hard this year. Particularly with the invasion of Ukraine this year, the second verse of the poem reminded me of the bombing of the Mauripol theater that women and children were sheltering in, one of many atrocities that we’ve seen.

The scale of human suffering, so much of it that we inflict on each other, is unbearable. And what does God do with all that?

“God thinks Mary into being… and inside her the mind of Christ, cloaked in blood, lodges and begins to grow.”

Is a baby really going to be enough? Enough to get humanity off an evil course and back on track? What possible difference could a baby make? It reminds me of this line from the song “Seasons”:

You’re the God of greatness
Even in a manger
For all I know of seasons
Is that you take your time
You could have saved us in a second
Instead you sent a child

Lyrics from “Seasons”. Words and Music by Chris Davenport, Benjamin Hastings & Ben Tan. Published by Hillsong.

This contrast perhaps says something about God, and about the gift humanity wanted vs the gift humanity needed: power vs vulnerability, force vs weakness, hard logic vs trust, quick results vs patience.

Considering our need, the gift most of us would ask for would be the forceful intervention. And yet at Christmas we Christians reflect on the fact that’s not the gift God choose to give us. Instead, God sent a child.

In what areas are you praying for God’s forceful intervention, and instead God is doing something small and fragile, slow and vulnerable?

Where are you using your own power and influence to force a quick solution, when perhaps there’s a less expected approach God is initiating?

Advent is about making space for God to come.

And its quite likely that the way God comes among us now will be in a gentler, slower, easier to ignore, less obvious, more vulnerable form than we want.

The work of advent isn’t for us to take the initiative and plan how God will come, but to make space, to wait, and to commit to that way.

To respond as Mary did, “May it be to me as you have said”.

Merry Christmas.

Categories
Faith Personal

“What about those who never got a chance to hear?”

One of the awful recurring conversations of my teenage and early adults years as a young Christian usually began with a question like “what about all the people who never heard of Jesus because of where and when they lived?”

The reason that I find this an awful conversation, in retrospect, is because a bunch of the assumptions behind it. For example: God is the only meaning in life, so if you don’t have God, your life is meaningless. Worse still, hell is a thing, and that’s the awful default choice for where you go if you’re not connected to God. And you get connected with God when someone tells you about Jesus and you respond in a certain way. So what if you live in one of the many, many times or places where no such opportunity arises? That hardly seems fair!

Here we were, as young Christians, responding to our own spiritual experiences of love that meant the whole world to us, and that pushed us to want to love all people, and yet the belief system surrounding those beautiful experiences was one that assumed a whole bunch of people would suffer intensely and unendingly for something they had no control over.

Now, the conversations weren’t that awful, because for the most part, we were trying to find ways to morph the beliefs back into something more loving, that more closely matched our experiences of love.

I remember clinging to the story of a guy’s near death (or actual death?) experience which apparently involved a supernatural deathbed opportunity to connect with God despite being an atheist until that point. Maybe everyone gets a chance and no-one goes to hell unfairly after all!? Eventually we’d start hearing rumours that maybe the “hell” story isn’t as clear cut as we thought, and when Rob Bell wrote “Love Wins” a bunch of people felt relieved to hear someone articulately argue that we don’t have to believe in the punishment thing. (Disclaimer: I haven’t actually read the book, and many people said he’s a heretic for it, but I love Rob Bell. Any “heresy” he’s pushing I’m likely to agree with him on!)

But even aside from the question of hell, do we really think God is completely absent from humans, except through some of the organised religions?

Back then I studied the bible a lot, and over time some verses that aren’t commonly talked about in evangelical circles started standing out to me, like this little aside from Paul in Romans 2:

Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them.

Romans 2:14-15 (NIV)

So there’s the most prolific writer of the early church, Paul, acknowledging that sometimes God is interacting with people who’ve never had any conscious interaction with the visible religions that are officially representing God. God just gets in and connects with them anyway, and doesn’t wait for the religion to make its way across the world first.

Eventually, I found myself paying attention to Paul’s sermon to the people of Athens, recorded in Acts 17. After a few years away from church, and when I was not even sure if I’d call myself Christian, this sermon felt really compelling to me:

The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’

Acts 17:24-28

For any century you could be born in, for any country you inhabit, “Got is not very far from any of us”. And God’s whole motivation in placing us here on this world… that we would seek God, perhaps reach out for, and find God. God desired relationship, and thats been available – “not far from” – all people in all nations at any point in history.

And this rings true for me: the same God I’ve known, I’ve seen showing up in other parts of the world which hadn’t had exposure to the same Christianity I had.

I remember learning about the Boon Wurrung people in the Kulin Nations, what is now called Melbourne. Their creator taught them to always welcome guests and care for them as for their own, and that duty of hospitality is a key part of Derrimut’s story in protecting early European arrivals. That teaching might sound familiar to people who’ve read Leviticus: “When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself“. There’s so many examples like this. The golden rule wasn’t unique to Jesus.

A few years ago I discovered Karen Armstrong’s book “The Case For God”, which does a beautiful job depicting how cultures across the world have tried to reach out to “the unknown God”, and showing common threads of mystic encounter and a deep ethic of compassion emerging from all different parts of the world.

She’s gone on to start the Charter For Compassion, and perhaps that’s a fitting place to end this post. The love that me and my friends felt so strongly, that made us want to question any belief system that sent innocent people to suffer, that love was the real deal. And that same love is emerging all over the world, in all sorts of communities, religious or not. Making sure your religion – both the spiritual experiences and the belief system – drive you towards love and compassion is absolutely crucial.

We therefore call upon all men and women to restore compassion to the centre of morality and religion ~ to return to the ancient principle that any interpretation of scripture that breeds violence, hatred or disdain is illegitimate ~ to ensure that youth are given accurate and respectful information about other traditions, religions and cultures ~ to encourage a positive appreciation of cultural and religious diversity ~ to cultivate an informed empathy with the suffering of all human beings—even those regarded as enemies.

Charter for Compassion

Edit: 15 Dec 2022: I’ve since discovered the name for this topic: The Fate Of The Unlearned. There’s even a wikipedia page, which explores the same passage in Romans 2. The page lists a range of viewpoints from Christianity and Islam, and my upbringing probably sat on the “harsher” side – many traditions do have theologies that are more inclusive for those who outside the formal religion. Even with that though, I think there’s a lot of the behaviour I described us also doing: trying to find justifications to drag their beliefs back to the reality of the love they’ve experienced… but the starting point for the beliefs is often still out of line with the experience of infinite love. I think our theology can be better than that, we can have belief systems that are more reflective of our experience of infinite love. We should strive for that.

Categories
Faith Personal

Following over believing

I’ve started participating in a local church again lately, after a few years away.

In that time away my beliefs have continued to evolve (there’s never really been a period in my life where they haven’t), and now I find myself standing in a gathering of people signing songs whose lyrics often make me cringe, and bring on a sense of cognitive dissonance for me – there’s parts of this I do believe are true, parts of this I want to believe are true (but probably don’t, if I’m honest) and parts that I think are downright unhealthy, regardless of their truth.

So what am I doing here?

Well, I want community. And being part of a regular weekly gathering is a way of building friendships that I know works, and that I’m comfortable with. Even if there’s a little dissonance.

I also want a spiritual practice – I’ve never stopped believing in God (if you’ll let me define “believing” and “God” on my own terms at least!) and have wanted to maintain a connection with the spiritual reality that permeates everything. And while I’ve experienced this same connection in music festivals and yoga classes, something I’ve appreciated about the church I grew up in is the absolute insistence that this divine spiritual reality isn’t an impersonal energy, but is a person, and is a person who can be known, and a person who wants to be known. I want that.

But probably the biggest thing is that for all my questions about the meaning of Jesus’ life, I still find his example and his teaching incredibly compelling, and to this day haven’t found anything else that I’d want to have as a foundation for building my own life on, a story to orient myself towards, a starting point for choosing the way I want to live.

I guess that’s what I think of as discipleship. Following the way of the teacher. Regardless of what I intellectually reason to be truth, I can still listen to teachings, learning from the example, and choose to live that way.

This morning at the church gathering, there was a song I felt no awkwardness singing, so I sang it loud:

I have decided to follow Jesus
No turning back
No turning back

A hymn by Sadhu Sundar Singh
Categories
Culture First Engineering Front End Development Personal

Li Juen Chang

3 weeks ago I heard the incredibly sad news that my friend Li had passed away. I was his manager for a few years at Culture Amp, and to remember him, I want to share a few stories of conversations we had during out time working together that I think speak to the quality of his character.

Talented, but humble

Li was a remarkable front end engineer. He was quietly productive, building high quality user interfaces faster that almost anyone else around. It wasn’t uncommon to hear feedback that he’d finished building out an entire interface on his own while a whole team of back end engineers were still working on making the data available for it. Eventually people started to notice, and Kevin Yank, our Director of Front End Engineering, asked: how do you do it? Is there some secret the rest of us could learn too?

His answer still makes me laugh. “I’ve got my code editor set up really well.”

To this day I don’t know if he was just trying to deflect the compliment, or if he really thought that was his secret advantage. Tool sharpening is definitely a thing in our industry – we like to quote the proverb “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”

Li’s editor setup was simple, it wasn’t something he wasted time tweaking over and over, but it was effective. When I watched him work he spent his time thinking about the problem at hand, not trying to remember where a file was saved or trying to remember what a keyboard shortcut was.

Remembering it, I love the humility of his response – he didn’t boast, he wasn’t proud. He knew he was good at what he did, and was happy to share the things he found helpful.

Learning, to share

I remember a point where Culture Amp had just acquired a smaller company, and we were looking for some senior engineers to transfer in and join the team we’d just acquired to help them integrate their product into ours.

At first Li was interested in exploring the opportunity, but then backed out when he realized the move would be permanent, not a secondment from his current team.

We had some conversations to explore the opportunity, and he surprised me with his biggest motivation not being the desire for a lead role, or a high visibility project, or the desire to work with a team based in the US, but instead the chance for mutual learning. He wanted to work with an established team, see what he could learn from them, see what he could teach them, and bring that back to his existing team and work, sharing what he had learned. Which explained why he was interested if it was a secondment, but not permanent.

Throughout our time working together I was always impressed at his willingness to learn, be curious, do deep dives into a problem, and then to bring what he’d learned and share it back to the team around him so we would all benefit.

Contentment

I remember wanting to understand some of Li’s long term career aspirations, and I asked a question I learned from Kim Scott’s book Radical Candor: “At the peak of your career, what sort of work do you want to be doing?”

Most people have a few different answers to this, sometimes its a job title (“director of X”) or a specific role (“I want to be focused in Application Security”) or an ambition outside the industry entirely (“I want to run a small business, maybe a food truck”) or a personal goal (“financial independence, then volunteering”).

It was hard to get a picture from Li of a specific goal he was working towards, and the reason I eventually learned, is that he was content. He really liked the kind of work he did, and found it meaningful. He really liked the people he worked with. “I’m actually really happy in my current role” was something he’d say if I kept asking.

Contentment is rare. Especially in the high-growth software industry. When I think about Li’s good-hearted approach to work and life and his ability to actually enjoy the place he’s at, without longing for more, I think of this quote from the bible:

godliness with contentment is great gain.

Li found contentment, and I admire him for it.


There was a whole lot more about Li I never got to know that well – perhaps because of the manager/employee relationship dynamics, perhaps because we worked from different cities, we didn’t share much of our personal worlds with each other. There was a little bit – I’d hear about an upcoming dance congress he was excited about. Or how a lunch we shared reminded him of Sunday lunches after church with his family when he was growing up. Or about the ups and downs of buying, owning, renting out, and selling an apartment. I had no idea he could speak Spanish. I wish I’d had more time with him, and asked more questions, and shared more of myself too. But even without that, I’m grateful for having crossed paths, worked with, learned and laughed together.

I’ll miss you friend.

Categories
Faith Personal

Great love and great suffering

There are only two major paths by which the human soul comes to God: the path of great love, and the one of great suffering. Both finally come down to great suffering—because if we love anything greatly, we will eventually suffer for it.

When we’re young, God hides this from us. We think it won’t have to be true for us. But to love anything in depth and over the long term, we eventually must suffer.

Richard Rohr – Life Coming to a Focus Daily Meditation

I’ve often remembered this thought from Richard Rohr – said in different times and different ways, but basically: the path to transformation is either great love, or great suffering.

I used to hear it and struggle to imagine the great suffering. My life has usually been pretty comfortable.

But he’s right, if you open up enough to experience love, then you’re opening yourself up to suffering too.

Parenting has been that journey for me.

A greater love than I knew was there. More pressure than I knew I’d face. More resilience than I could have imagined I’d had, and more than I thought I’d need. More awareness of my own fragility. More delight too.

Our family is definitely still in the pressure cooker. Its hard to say what the lessons learned will be, what the transformation might look like from the other side. For now, it’s hard to get through, and not much sense of hope for change.

Remembering this thought from Richard Rohr gives a glimpse of purpose to the love and suffering of parenting. Maybe this is one of the paths to God.

Categories
Personal Reflecting

Examen 2020

At the change of the year I want to engage in some reflection. A reflective exercise I’ve began using in 2020 is a daily prayer called “The Examen”. I believe it’s a Jesuit practice, and I’m following this format shared by Xavier University. I’ve mildly adapted it here to make the language about the year not the day.

The Examen: A Daily Prayer

St. Ignatius Loyola’s Examen is an opportunity for peaceful daily reflective prayer. It invites us to find the movement of God in all the people and events of our day. The Examen is simply a set of introspective prompts for you to follow or adapt to your own character and spirit.

Begin with a pause and a slow, deep breath or two; become aware that you are in the presence of the Holy.

From “The Examen: A Daily Prayer” via Xavier University

Thanksgiving

What am I especially grateful for in the past year…

The gift of another year…

The love and support I have received…

The courage I have mustered…

An event that took place this year…

From “The Examen: A Daily Prayer” via Xavier University

The biggest news of the year came in the final month. On December 4th in the early hours of the morning, Hugo was born. We’d been holding our hopes for a healthy baby and a healthy mum – and both came to be. We’re now a family of four, and I’m so grateful.

Christmas Day 2020. I’m 33, Anna is 30, Louis is 2 and Hugo is 3 weeks old.

One of the other things we’ve been hoping and praying for through 2020 was about making the most of our time with Louis at this young age and while before his brother arrived. He learned so much about the world, and we learned so much from him, and my love grew more than I knew my heart was capable of.

2020 for most of the planet was defined by the COVID19 pandemic. I lived in Western Australia, one of the safest places on earth this year. Safe in a pandemic, locked down in a big home with Anna’s parents who we love. Grateful to have spent this year safe, and for the proximity to family, and for the support we gave each other.

I’m also grateful to be writing this from a beautiful house that’s now our family home. After living in 9 houses over 5 years we were keen to settle. We tried to sell our little unit and buy a family home, but the finances just couldn’t work. We’ve found a rental though that is perfect for our family and our stage of life.

This year we also found a spiritual community where we felt most authentically ourselves since our small Melbourne church closed down. A small group of friends (we know each other mostly from Riverview) started gathering, at first on Zoom, and then face-to-face once it was safe, and sharing our journeys, and finding ways to hone our spiritual practices together. We used the resources at https://practicingtheway.org/ to lead us in growing in two practices in particular: Silence and Solitude, and Sabbath. I also made some small progress in finding words and courage to share where I’m currently at with friends and family whose journey and beliefs now look pretty different to mine.

The first practice our Sunday group worked through was “Silence and Solitude”. I’d highly recommend this series (if you’re up for the church teaching style and the assumed Christian background anyway)

I was grateful for the courage Anna had in writing this post and releasing this song. This has been a big part of our story that we’ve carried privately for a long time. Sharing it took courage.

This song took 3 years from writing to release. And the story behind it spans an entire life.

I felt like this year I had courage at work and have grown as a leader, taking on new teams and harder tasks and speaking up when it’s not been comfortable. The support I’ve had from my co-workers, and my managers in particular, has helped me grow so much.

There’s other places I started to show courage, but wish I had better follow through. After the devastating Australian bush-fire season I reached out to local politicians to discuss an idea for community volunteering in the face of climate change, but dropped the ball when COVID19 took over the world. Similarly I was exploring doing a DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) talk at tech meet-ups, exploring how privilege has shaped my own journey, to help other people recognise their privilege and work to share it. This also dropped off the radar during COVID19 lock-down. I also made efforts to help people affected by Culture Amp’s layoffs. Not sure if it really helped anyone. And lately I’ve been volunteering to help a small group build a site for collecting stories about those with disabilities and their experience of being Locked Out during lock downs. Hopefully I have better follow through there!

Finally, I’m grateful for this book: “Watch for the Light“. These readings for Advent have been a beautiful way to connect with my faith, and has helped me move beyond what I struggle with intellectually, and into the experience and the politics and the hope of the Christmas season. I’ll be rereading this again next year I suspect.

Book cover: Watch for the Light | Readings for Advent and Christmas.

Petition

I am about to review my year; I ask for the light to know God and to know myself as God sees me.

From “The Examen: A Daily Prayer” via Xavier University

Review

Where have I felt true joy this year?

What has troubled me this year?

What has challenged me this year?

Where and when did I pause this year?

Have I noticed God’s presence in any of this?

From “The Examen: A Daily Prayer” via Xavier University

Where did I feel true joy?

Most days this year when I tried to reflect on where I felt true joy, the first thing that popped into my head was Louis. The wonder of seeing a small person grow and learn and experience things and imagine.

Louis loves the playground swing. And he loves his picture books, including some which talk about space. He recently started closing his eyes on the swing and imagining his extraterrestrial journey.

Also, in November we celebrated 10 years since Anna and I met. Reflecting on a decade together has been sweet.

One moment of happy tears I’ll remember: receiving news that some of my favourite friends were moving to Perth. We’ve missed them, and haven’t built friendships quite the same back here yet. So glad to have them near again.

Where was I troubled and challenged?

On that note, something that has troubled me this year is noticing how I don’t actively invest in many friendships beyond those people I see regularly by necessity (family, workmates). In particular there was one friendship that has atrophied over the years and at the end of this year, it was heart-wrenching to realise just how dead the relationship now was. I felt awful – for my own sake, and for realising the pain I’d caused by not returning the friendship offered. One of my resolutions out of this is to get counselling and do the “inner work” that is part of repentance. (Shout out to Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg for helping make this clear to me).

Another thing that has troubled me is the work culture at my work. Our company is called Culture Amp, and the thing which attracted me to the company was the mission to be successful by being a company that puts people and culture first – being a great place to work. I’ve been there three years and most of that has been great, this year has been hard though. As well as the lay-offs, there has been an unrelenting period of change, and it’s been hard. I’ve seen plenty of decisions I disagree with, and seen people I like a lot negatively impacted by them. I’m still hopeful we can get back to being a place we’re proud to work but it has been a hard year.

I was also troubled by the amount of time I was glued to my phone. With a constant stream of worldwide drama: bush fires and impeachment and a pandemic and elections – and the addictive nature of an infinitely scrolling social media feed – I spent way too much time staring at my phone (after being on my laptop 8hrs a day for work). Most weeks I’d have an average daily screen-time use of between 1-2hrs. I am troubled that it’s so addictive I do this even while hanging out with my kids. And I’m troubled by the opportunity cost – I don’t have time for friendships, for writing, for reading, for richer things, because of this.

I read this reading from Thomas Merton on December 31st 2020 in “Watch for the light”, and it felt like a perfect description of my addiction to the new news in this eventful year.

Nor are the tidings of great joy announced in the crowded inn. In the massed crowd there are always new tidings of joy and disaster. Where each new announcement is the greatest of announcements, where every day’s disaster is beyond compare, every day’s danger demands the ultimate sacrifice, all news and all judgement is reduced to zero. News becomes merely a new noise in the mind, briefly replacing the noise that went before it and yielding to the noise that comes after it, so that eventually everything blends into the same monotonous and meaningless rumor. News? There is so much news that there is no room left for the true tidings, the “Good News,” the great joy.

Thomas Merton. From Raids on the Unspeakable, 1966.

One way of bringing together all of these challenges: I live a comfortable life in an uncomfortable world. I benefit from a mix of luck and hard work and systematic privilege. And I’ve become more aware of that privilege this year. And seeing the sharp contrast between my comfort and a world in pain can be… challenging. Am I doing enough to change things? Am I there for those who need me? Am I even there for those I consider friends? Is my busyness (from work) and mind cluttered-ness (from screen time) numbing my willingness to see, and to act? Is this just part of the early-parenting stage of life? How might I get less comfortable? How might I do less sympathising and more compassion, more help? Can I love “the storm drenched“? These thoughts have been building into a challenge to myself.

Where did I pause?

I’m glad to have explicitly worked on some spiritual practices that led me to pause. The few minutes of savasana at the end of yoga, a nightly “examen” to pause and reflect, setting aside Sunday as a Sabbath day of ceasing and rest and worship, and this book of readings through Advent. None of them I followed perfectly or consistently, but between them, I did learn to pause. For longer breaks, I only took one small holiday this year, but it was a good one for pausing: in a cabin on the edge of a Karri Forest in Margaret River.

A view of the sun rising over a hill lined with tall Karri trees.
This was looking at the window one morning during our holiday stay in Margaret River.

Where did I find God in all of this?

I’ve found God in little ways, new ways, this year. As my image of God becomes less “in heaven above” and more “over all and through all and in all” I’m adjusting where I expect to find God. Less often in a religious service or book. More often in people. Or in nature. Or in silence. A new little life. The night sky. Someone willing to give up their health and freedom-of-movement to be a COVID-19 chaplain. The support from family in a time of need. Nursing a newborn in the middle of the night. And then sometimes still in the services and books from before.

Most days that I prayed the Examen, I found the Spirit of God somewhere in the day. It was usually subtle.

Response

In light of my review, what is my response to the God of my life?

From “The Examen: A Daily Prayer” via Xavier University

I’m going to leave this out, keep it private.

A Look Ahead

As I look ahead, what comes to mind?

With what spirit do I want to enter the coming year?

From “The Examen: A Daily Prayer” via Xavier University

The big thing in my mind is 2021 will be us parenting a newborn and a two year old – we’re not sure how we’ll balance it! As well as that I’ve got some challenges and opportunities at work (some predictable, some not), I’ve got friendships I want to strengthen, I want to keep seeking spiritual community, and I want to get some counselling to work through some of my challenges mentioned above. There’s a lot to do.

But in all of that, the spirit I want to carry, is one of having space. Creating space, and expectation, waiting to find the moments where the Spirit of God might interrupt my days. To notice the places where grace appears. Or to be willing to look on the places where inequality and injustice still dominates. Leaving capacity in my days and in my task list to look beyond my own concerns and to see the need of others, and rather than looking away, finding ways to partner with the Spirit of God to bring grace into the world. To live the kind of life that brings both justice and peace.

It’s hard to do that when rushing between zoom calls and filling spare moments with social media feeds. I want space to notice where God is at work and where grace is forming, and I want space and energy to join in and be part of it. Be that in my family, in my work, in my friendships, or the wider world.

Categories
Faith Personal Reading & Inspiration

Reading Notes: “Christianity After Religion” by Diana Butler Bass

(Still some TODOs in here, but I’m posting anyway and hope to get back to them) I first came across Diana Butler Bass on her Twitter account. I can’t remember how I came across her, but I’ve appreciated her voice, her tweet-thread-sermons, her perspective on current affairs and more. So when a family member gave me a book voucher to a local Christian bookstore that didn’t seem likely to stock much I was interested in, I was stoked to see they could order in one of her books. And that’s how I ended up reading “Christianity After Religion”. When it arrived and I read the praise on the cover from Richard Rohr and Rob Bell, I hoped I was in for something good.

The main point

Since the 1960s the USA (and other western nations) have seen a massive change in how they’d describe their religious/faith life. A common line has been “I’m spiritual, not religious” and rather than being a thoughtless throwaway line, this actually captures a big part of what this shift is about. Rather than viewing it purely as a move toward secularism, DBB argues this is an awakening – in the spirit of America’s past great awakenings. This is faith evolving, not faith disappearing. By changing the way kinds of questions we ask when we approach a life of faith, and by changing the order in which we ask them, we can participate in this new awakening – an exciting evolution in what it means to be Christian, or even what it means to be human – and some would argue, an exciting movement of God.

Overview

The “spiritual vs religious” dichotomy isn’t describing two opposites, rather it’s a lense to understand how our people’s experience of their faith is changing. We can broadly break experience of religion of spiritual life into three categories:
  • Belief – how we understand the world and it’s meaning
  • Behaviour – how we choose to live, and the habits which make up our life
  • Belonging – the sense of community and shared purpose
For each of these categories, DBB looks at how Christianity (and American Protestantism in particular) has approached this category, and the questions it has deemed most important to ask. These are the “religious” questions. She then offers alternative “spiritual” questions: ways of revisiting the same category with a different approach, focused on lived experience.

Belief

Often when we think of “belief” in the context of religion we think of doctrine. Belief in a god. Belief in the Christian bible as an authoritative text about God. Belief in the resurrection, or the virgin birth, or the 7-day creation. Some things are easy to believe in – we’re pretty sure a person called Jesus of Nazareth existed – but many are increasingly hard to take literally. TODO: copy the questions asked This chapter concluded with some amazing examples of Christian communities writing their own creeds. Creeds were written by communities at points in time – a point DBB made in this twitter thread that I found memorable. After reading this section of the book, I journal led and wrote out, for the first time in a long time, not a description of what I no longer believed, but a description of what I still believe.

Behaviour

When we think of “behaviour” in the context of religion, we often think of moral guidelines. Don’t murder, don’t steal, don’t drink, don’t look at porn, don’t charge interest on loans… Do look after the needy, do love your neighbour, do attend a religious service etc. Beyond this though, a lively faith usually consists of habits, or spiritual practices, that make up the day-to-day of our life. When the purpose of such habits isn’t understood, they lose meaning, they become meaningless rituals. But when learned carefully, many habits and practices have a transformative impact on your life. DBB uses floristry as an analogy. Her family were florists for generations, and she learned the craft by sitting in the workshop with her dad, gradually gaining the skills herself. This kind of gradual exposure, where an experienced practitioner shows you, guides you, and gives you increasingly challenging work until you are fully competent – is similar to many spiritual practices. Another thing we can learn from this analogy, is that people are less like to simply do what their parents did. Where successive generations in her family had all been florists, she has chosen a different career, because these days, you have options. When it comes to our spiritual habits and practices and rituals… this is even more true. TODO: copy the questions asked

Belonging

For a long time, belonging meant having an identity tightly linked to the religious community you are part of (and probably grew up in). “I am baptist” or “I am catholic” or “I’m part of Riverview Church”. There was an assumed stasis in this model: you’ve always been one of us, you are one of us, you will always be one of us. You’ve always been here, you are here, you will always be here. But most stories of faith are journey stories: Abraham leaving the land he grew up in, Moses leaving Egypt, the fishermen leaving their nets to follow Jesus. We need to craft a different identity that respects this journeying nature of faith. And a way of belonging that allows growth, change, pilgrimage and exile, and still offers community, acceptance and love. A traditional approach to identity asks “who am I?”, and Christianity has encourage you to ask “who am I in God?” One of my favourite moments in this section was reframing the question: “who is God in me?” Where and how does God act in the world through my life? How can people I interact with experience God through my actions? TODO: copy the questions asked

Reversal

After examining these three categories and asking how we can revisit them through a “spiritual” lense, DBB did my favourite thing in the book: she suggested we reverse the order we tackle these questions in the faith journey. Rather than beginning with “belief” (you must believe in the trinity, and creation, and the resurrection, and the virgin birth, and whatever other doctrine is hard to literally believe), then progressing to behaviour (follow these moral guidelines and adopt these habits) and then being able to experience belonging, DBB suggests we approach it the other way. Begin with belonging: unconditional acceptance, loving community. From there learn the way of life: the habits and the choices that shape your faith (behaviour). And from here, you will begin to find your beliefs changing. You might find you believe in the resurrection after all: but it is coming from having experienced yourself countless ways where life overturns death. By reversing the order we no longer have as our starting point adherence to a religious doctrine. Rather, we have as our starting point an experience of love and community, and the entire faith journey now takes that approach. And when people say “I’m spiritual, not religious” – this is part of the distinction. The starting place is experience, and the whole journey is lived experience.

Awakening

The book ended on a real message of hope. DBB looks back at the three great awakenings of the past, and in the debate about if there was/is a fourth great awakening, she joins the group who sees the social and religious change beginning in the 1960s constitutes a new great awakening. People began exploring new ways of experiencing faith, experiencing God, and this came out of, and fed back into, massive cultural changes. She describes her college campus in the late 1970s having multiple thriving communities and chapters of people taking their faith and discipleship seriously, resulting in a bold vision for what could be in the world. It certainly felt like a religious awakening. Something new and bold and exciting was happening, and it felt like God was very active in it. But then she returned to the campus in the 1980s, this time as faculty, and the life was gone, the diversity was gone, the experimentation and bold visions for change were gone. Replacing it where some standard Christian groups pushing a standard political/conservative agenda. DBB paints the growing political power of the “religious right”, the “moral majority”, Ronald Reagan and co, as a pushback against the awakening – and describes how similar pushbacks have happened in past awakenings. This time however, something that began in the 1960s is continuing over half a century later… the pushback was significant, and so the change is drawn out. In describing past push-backs, she seems to describe the rise of Donald Trump. (The book was written while Obama was still president, but the rise of tea party conservatism was evident). It’s interesting to frame the success of conservative evangelicalism – in political power, in megachurch attendance, in mindshare – not as the awakening, but as the pushback on the real awakening. Though it uses the language of revival, and the metaphors and service structures of past awakenings, this is actually by now the old thing, and the comfortable thing, and the thing some are trying to protect from change. But as she describes this tension between the “old lights” and the “new lights”, she describes the new light in ways that I completely identify with: for all of the struggle I’ve had with the church and structure and faith I’ve grown up in, she describes exactly the bits that I’m still holding onto, the values I hold most dear, and the hope and vision I have for what a renewed world might look like. In reading this, I suddenly felt less like I (and those like me) are stepping away from our faith, and more like the steps we’re taking are part of a journey of renewal. It does feel like upheaval and uncertainty, but it’s not an abandoning of faith, it’s faith finding a new form to match the world we now live in. And the world we now live in is globally connected, and past modes of tribalism over religious dogma no longer make sense when we can see the other tribes, and see that they too are human, and we can see that despite our differences the fruit is good, and so we’re learning that our religion isn’t the only way to meet God, our tree isn’t the only tree that produces good fruit – we can learn from each other, and perhaps we can discover that God has been showing up to all people in all cultures and religions. And perhaps this acknowledgement that God can show up to anyone in any culture or religion should have been more obvious to us from the beginning:
“The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’

Acts 17
And so every religion worldwide seems to have up-shoots of renewal at the moment. We’re seeing up close people who we’d used to consider “other”, and discovering they’re not so different. And there’s a tribalistic pushback, but in many ways, this renewal is underway and somewhat unstoppable. Any way of faith which defines at the outset that only some experiences are “valid” and “true” is brushing up against our lived reality that we’re finding God in all aspects of life, on many different and intersecting paths. And this is where we can join in. By joining (or forming) communities. By embracing spiritual practices that lead us to experience God, to love others, and to grow in maturity, and by allowing our beliefs to be formed by the experience of God among us – we can be part of this renewal. It won’t be the last time humanity’s relationship with the divine God needs to adapt and evolve. It’s not the last awakening. It’s not necessarily the greatest awakening. But it’s our generation’s awakening, and our chance to be part of it.
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Faith Personal

“You are welcome here”

“God, you are welcome here”

It’s a line often sung in churches, and often prayed. But for people who believe in an omnipresent God – present everywhere at once – what does it mean? What’s the point in welcoming someone who is already here?

Well, there’s a difference between being present, and being welcomed. It’s an attitude thing. Are you acknowledging the person who has come, or ignoring them? Are you engaging with a defensive attitude, a judging attitude, a cautious attitude, an open attitude? Open to them being who they are, which might be different to what you hoped. Open to their thoughts, which might be different to your thoughts. Open hearted to ways their story might change you… that’s vulnerability. And the hospitality of welcome does require vulnerability. You might just come out of the encounter different.

So when you pause in a worship service to “welcome” God, it’s not about letting Holy Spirit in… that’s already happened. It’s about preparing the state of your inner world so that you’re actually open to genuine connection, even if it pushes you and changes you.

“You are welcome here”
“Whoever welcomes you welcomes me”
“Whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me”

And perhaps, we can’t welcome God unless we also welcome all God’s children. You soften your heart towards the Spirit when you soften your heart towards the people near you.

Welcome them, even if they’re not who you hoped, even if they think completely differently to you, even if it means making yourself vulnerable to connection and to change.

And don’t claim to welcome God if you’re not willing to welcome fellow humans.