for lent

So this past lent season I gave up morality. What a ride. More to come…

How (Not) to speak of Pete Rollins

We spent the week with Pete Rollins, author of “How (Not) To Speak of God“, and a founder of ikon. What can I say except it was fun. Pete is a great guy and if you ever get the chance to hang out with him, do it. I say it is even better than reading his  book.

I thought that was a metaphore

A friend sent me this and I just couldn’t resist sharing.

Church Beer!

I don’t know why I haven’t posted on this before, but our church, or rather one of the communities that I am a part of, is brewing it’s own beer. Yep, it’s true, in the ancient tradition of Christianity, mostly monks, and Martin Luther, who, at one point in his life was a monk, we are brewing beer as a community. This generally gets a lot of responses when we tell people, especially since a lot of us come out of an evangelical background. And the word travels fast. In fact, I was at a conference recently and was approached by a Welsh guy, one of the speakers, and his first question was “You’re from Arizona right? You’re the guy with the church that brews beer?” -And he flashed a big smile. We became friends quickly and planned a pilgrimage to Ireland.

Okay, so some questions on this:

Why? Lots of reasons. We can talk about those in the comments section if you’d like. For the most part it is to create something as a community. And to offer a great product to others.

What? Well right now we are experimenting with various brews, learning the process and trying to settle on an initial recipe that we like.

What’s it called? We’re not sure yet. We are still thinking of names, do you have any ideas for us?

Will it be made available to the public? We hope so, eventually. We would like to offer it as gift, as hospitality, to the world. And we would love for a portion of the proceeds to go into our works of Social Justice.

An interesting link: This is what I got when I googled church beer.

These sites are especially interesting: www.churchbrew.com, www.beerchurch.com, www.thechurchofbeer.com

Cheers!

update on the hole-ie bible

Of Course I am referring to the Western Bible, which apparently has sold quite a few copies in the short time that it has been out.  This is the bible that has literally cut out the harder parts of scripture, things like really loving your neighbor, living in simplicity, seeking true justice, without prejudice, for all people. So why, why would they do that? Because it’s funny! And perhaps it is the slap in the face a lot of us need.

see also this post…for more on this.  Oh and the bible is only avainalble in Dutch, so far.

the soul friend/ Celtic Spirituality

I have been reading Anam Cara by John O’ Donohue these days. Actually I have been taking a class on Celtic Spirituality this semester and this book was a great surprise of a reading assignment. The class has actually been a good journey. If you ever find yourself at the University of Arizona wondering about Celtic Spirituality, I suggest Dr. Peter Foley’s class.

So, I just wanted to share a few quotes from the book Anam Cara with you. These are in no particular order, I hope they enrich you as they have me.

“To be holy is to be natural, to befriend the worlds that come together in you.”

“Friendship is a creative and subversive force. It claims that intimacy is the secret law of life and universe.”

“Behind the facade of image and distraction, each person is an artist in this primal and inescapable sense. Each one of us is doomed and privileged to be an inner artist who carries and shapes a unique world.”

“Love is our deepest nature, and consciously or unconsciously, each of us searches for love. We often choose such false ways to satisfy this deep hunger. An excessive concentration on work, achievements, or spiritual quest can actually lead us away from the presence of love. “

” The blade of nothingness cuts deeply. Others want to love, to give themselves, but they have no energy. They carry around in their hearts the corpses of past relationships and are addicted to hurt as confirmation of identity.”

“Real friendship or love is not manufactured or achieved by an act of will or intention. Friendship is always an act of recognition.”

“You can never be fully visually present to yourself…Your Anam Cara [Gaelic for Soul Friend] is the truest mirror to reflect your soul.”

“The Celts had an intuitive spirituality informed by mindful and reverant attention to landscape.”

“One of the tasks of true friendship is to listen compassionately and creatively to the hidden silence.”

if it don’t fit- CUT IT OUT!

Someone actually did it. They took the steps and cut all the ish out of the Bible that they didn’t want in there. And in the best interest of capitalism it is available to the public. Introducing the Western Bible, released by the Western Bible Foundation in the Netherlands.

I found this on Pete Rollins blog. As you can imagine this “translation” is causing quite a stir. I thought it is just funny that someone has actually done it. I mean how many preachers have joked saying something like. “Well if you don’t like that part of the bible just cut it out. ” And someone, in this case the Western Bible Foundation in the Netherlands, said “okay, good idea”.

So what did they cut out? They cut out difficult parts surrounding economic justice, possessions and money, ha of course. Their reasoning is along the lines of well, no one actually takes those things seriously, so let’s just take them out. And you know, when it comes to the church in the west, I would have to say they’re right. We don’t take those things seriously, if we did, it would certainly stand out. I know that a lot of people who call themselves Christian are going to be really upset by this bible. The fact is though, many of them have been cutting out those same passages with their lives. Cutting paper is one thing, cutting people is another. Before we judge let us judge our selves and ask if this is only a manifestation of the gospel we have been proclaiming with our lives for years.

Please read Pete’s post here.

peace.

Emergent conversation- a family matter

It is for the famous Smith family of the Calvary Chapel movement. A Friend recently sent me this LA times article. It is well worth a read. I think it paints a good picture of the chasms that need be crossed on both sides of the conversation as well as a solution, or rather an approach, that of love, love like we would have for a family member.

enjoy.

Update, New poems and some emerging/ent thoughts

Update, New poems and some emrging/ent thoughts

 

Wow, so much had been going on lately that I am really deprived of knowing where to start. So for starters, I am enrolled once again in an institute of higher education pursuing a degree in creative writing. As you can tell I need all the help I can get. This, in large part is the reason for the undue neglect to this blog.

 

I am also focused on a new gig, professionally. I was informed that the religious institution of which I have served on the global outreach team for the past six years is allowing me support, to work with a group of friends in the transition/ emergence of another faith community. For those readers who know me well, know what a privilege and relief this is. Not that my previous gig was bad, but it was pulling me into a black hole other than that magnificence to which I am otherwise gravitating toward. This all came about, in large part because of a miracle wrought by my friend Dave Fleming, but of course.

 

I am still overseeing the Living Room and that is as exciting as it ever was. Especially now that we have some momentum on a community development project that has been a heartfelt passion of ours for some time.

 

I have just posted a new poem and thought you ought to be the first to know, you can find it here.

 

 

Now some thoughts:

I was talking with a friend recently who is in the employ of a religious establishment of the rather contemporary evangelical sort. We have been dialoguing for some time, practicing the art of dipping our toes into the emergent conversation. That’s a mouthful right there I know. Regardless, my friend recently asked me to lunch for conversation, after having recently read a book that as Doctor Phil might say, dropped a hornet in his hanky. The book shook a lot of paradigms for my friend but was only really an entry point into the conversation.

 

I figured we were on safe ground so I started in with ideas, a thousand colorful what ifs. After about an hour my friend looking particularly bewilder, looked at me and said something like whoa, you are pulling bricks out left and right. He was of course referring to the building blocks of evangelical Christianity, of which many are made from the mud of a modern worldview rather than the heritage of faith Christianity owes itself to. I apologized, backed up and offered some comfort in the form of easy illustration.

 

I realized in that moment that I better take a dose of my own medicine. I have always said that it is impossible to get someone to leap from one side of the Grand Canyon to the other in a single bound. No, if we are to get to the other side without dying, or in this case shipwrecking our faith, we need to take the slow steady journey down (deconstruction) one side and up (emergence) the other. So a word to my emergent friends out there, lets help people take the slow and sometimes painful journey, often holding their hand and not push people off cliffs.

 

Good night and have fun….

GOD RID ME OF GOD

Pete Rollins posted a bit of an article on his blog back in April titled God Rid me of God. If you haven’t yet read it, it is in my opinion worth a read. The bit is a very honest, and integral musing on what it means to pursue a genuine faith. You can read the post here.

My favorite line from the article goes like this… “Some mystics would even say that to presume to speak of God at all is heresy. Forget using words to describe God, use them instead to describe your yearning for God.” 

ah, enjoy.

Brian McLaren at Mars Hill Bible Church

Yes folk, it’s a little like having the Christmas and Thanksgiving holidays all at once! I am of course referring Brian McLaren speaking at Mars Hill Bible Church recently. Just as Christmas and Thanksgiving are my two favorite holidays, when it comes to spirituality, Christianity and the emerging church, Brian and Mars Hill are up at the top for me.

Brian suggests that the picture on the box doesn’t match the puzzle pieces we have. That is when it comes to the predominant christian worldview (the picture on the box), versus what we actually discover in sacred scripture (the puzzle pieces). You can download the talk from the mars hill website here.

aREA 215

Hey check out the Area 215 Blog, were blogging again, at long last. It’s about time guys!

Worn out by the hype

It is so easy to say that what really matters is that we are. That is to say, that we are human, we are created, we are children, we are a reflection of God’s beauty and that is enough. It is quite another thing to really be satisfied in knowing that I am of great value intrinsically because God made me and that I need not do or say anything profound to be worthwhile.

I confess that sometimes I get so caught up in, and worn out by the hype of the poop (er I mean pop, er do I), culture that inevitably finds ways of creeping into Christendom. Perhaps you could say that it doesn’t have to creep in because most of the time we bring it in with us. I forget that by just existing, I am joining with every other created thing declaring the beauty, and majestic creativity of God. Sometimes I feel like I am wasting God’s time, and yours by not doing or saying anything extraordinary.

In these moments I begin to gage my worth by what I have accomplished, what my ministry has accomplished, what we have given voice to. And usually, for me it’s never enough and I waste a couple days on a good inner sulk fest. That is kinda where I have been lately. Then today a friend of mine, a fellow laborer in the urban landscape, sent me an email connected to a devotion written by Shane Claiborne. It was just the kick in the ear I needed to refocus. So I would like to share it with you all. You can download it here. And if you haven’t read Shane’s Book “The Irresistible Revolution” yet, hope on, it’s a good ride.

Presentation matters?

Okay so you have seen this image before, a picture is worth a thousand words, they say. So as I said this image has helped me to think through things for a couple years now. From time to time I will repost this image and just babble my thoughts, no guarantee on whether or not they will be coherent. Join me in the thinking, what say you?

Does presentation matter?

What if I were to prepare for you your favorite food? I even made it so well that it made you want to immediately go fight your mom. Why would you go fight your mom? Because she never made it so good. Anyway, that’s not the point, the point is that it’s your favorite food, and it’s well made, and I am offering it to you. Only thing is, I present it to you in a dirty, old toilet bowl. You still want it? Hopefully you said no.

Don’t they say that you can never undue a bad first impression or something like that. Say you meet me for the first time and I am dirty and incoherent because I have been out in the Arizona sun, working in my yard. So my brain has literally been fried. What might you think of me? You may think that I am a crazy person, you may be right. Now, if you just happened upon me in my yard .the context of my condition), it may make sense to you. You will now understand my condition and probably give me the benefit of the doubt. But say I went to your house immediately after working myself into an insane frenzy. It would be stupid of me, to show up in this condition, knowing that I am about to meet you for the first time.

So what the point? Perhaps we can at times be genuine in our excitement for God, for God’s love, justice and peace, that we present our excitement in ways that make us seem crazy. Perhaps we in our ignorance and lack of being evangelized (being a student of life and culture) inadvertently present or offer good things in bad ways. And when we do this, the good, becomes bad. Like the food, once I put it in a dirty toilet bowl, it’s no longer good. What a waste.

We can all be guilty of doing this. For the fundamentalist peoples out there, it’s done through aggression and salesmanship, which in many cases makes good news very bad. (And granted there are places where what is being offered is not actually good news, or food or whatever, but it is actually something other, that’s not the point.) For my emergent/emerging/POMO & socialist friends sometimes our cynicism and reaction*ism to what we see as wrong, makes our good message, bad.

I know personally, that I want to move beyond cynicism, to let it push me to hope and move me to compassion. I want to present something beautiful, to put on display a life that accurately represents who I say I am. I don’t want to take something beautiful and make a monstrosity out of it.

Orthodoxy is Heretical

{Disclaimer the image contained in this post may be disturbing, it is intended to be…}

First of all I need to say, mostly for my own benefit that this post, and all posts for that matter, are more dynamic than static. In essence I am thinking aloud and inviting you (whoever you may be) to join me in thinking things through…

I made this image a couple of years ago, I am not claiming to be a designer of any merit for such a claim would only be lunacy, obviously. I made it to help me think through my thoughts on God. Or more aptly what we often make God into. There is a quote out there (I forget by whom) that goes something like this, "God rid me of God." I think at the heart of this quote, as with the title of this post and the image to the left, is that often our thoughts on God, are the very things that keep us from God.

A friend of mine recently introduced me to some thoughts shared by an Irishman by the name of Peter Rollins, who is a part of a community in Ireland called Ikon. I liked him instantly because for one he is Irish, and he likes Guinness, as all godly people do. Anyway the idea is simple, and profound, as most simple things are. It is that orthodoxy is heretical, which I think was the original title of Peter’s book  How not to Speak of God". The idea is, that when we say this is how we ought to think about God, or that this is who God is (definitively), we have at that moment made God not God, and have in a sense created our own image of God. Remember it is always important to be aware that we are made in God's image and not the other way around, although we are very fond of doing the later.

I think this is at the heart of that ol' commandment of Ancient Jewish Scripture: "You shall have no other gods before Me. You shall not make to yourselves any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in the heavens above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth."

I have always thought of this commandment as applying to not worshipping other gods and it does. Only until recently have I thought that this commandment could apply to people trying to express God definitively within the framework of their own understanding. That is to say that the moment we say, look here at this statue, this is what God is like, we have made another god. When we try to nail God down and define God, God stops being God. Perhaps that is why God issues this commandment, maybe it’s a way of saying I am beyond anything you can think of, and the moment you limit me to any created thing, at that moment you have made for yourselves a god that is not me.

So then how are we to think of God. I think a part of the secret can be found in the relationship God had with ancient Israel. They were not a people who carried a message to the world; they were the message to the world. They were chosen, not just for the sake of choseness and the eventual establishment of a country club, and drinks with little umbrellas in them, but rather they were chosen as a way of example and invitation. Namely that they would exemplify to the whole world what a relationship with God is like and in this way reveal what God is like, and in this way issue an invitation. They showed people what God is like through their relationship to God, as people who embodied His way (not that they always did this, but neither do we, so let's not play with rocks) rather than showing people what God is like with statues and empire, it was done in a relationship.

Relationship is not static it is dynamic. I remember one of the first road trips I ever took with my wife. I took her to the beach, (500 miles away) for her birthday. I think we had been married about a year. Though we had been married a year, I remember thinking as we drove, "whoa, who is this person sitting next to me, how well do I really know her?" I realized that getting to know someone is an ongoing process, and that that it is what relationship is. It doesn't work that you get to know someone, say by reading a book about them, and then you go into a relationship. No, relationship helps you discover who a person is, and as we all know, it is an ongoing thing. Even after five years of marriage I can't say that I know my wife completely (although I do know her in a biblical sense) I am still getting to know her. I am learning more about who she is and consequently who I am, and who we are. We are in relationship.

So perhaps that is how it goes with God, that as we change, as our thinking grows, as we relate, we know God more. This never ends, so perhaps saying what God is like, or who He is definitively, is as ridiculous as the image above. No doctrine, no ritual, no image can fully express God; they are all, when they claim to do so completely, heresy.

Now, I think that Jesus is the fullest representation of who God is and what God is like. And this itself says something. Jesus is a person. A person can only be known relationally. It's been 2000 years and it seems that we are still trying to understand and getting to know Jesus. Shouldn't that tells us something?

Maybe it is that what is often rejected about God, or Jesus is not actually God or Jesus, perhaps it is the monstrous image that we have made God or Jesus into.

Something to think about…