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the best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.
Is this being too smart for Jesus?
What has made this sharpening difficult is that all the information (not wisdom) since the beginning of time has become exponentially available in the last generation. We are always expecting the final and truthful answer to show itself. This explosion of data makes us think that wisdom is still out in front of us.
It is hard for most to tell the difference between data and information and between both of these and wisdom.
Ordinary people discover this wisdom by living!
Probably the single most traditional wisdom issue is, of course, the immense teaching capacity of human suffering, and especially unjust suffering.
isn’t this—sooner or later—at the heart of everybody’s spiritual problem: what we do with our pain?
Job and Jesus: We want to be part of the conversation of our suffering.
Our knowledge of God is participatory. God refuses to be intellectually “thought,” and is only known in the passion and pain of it all, when the issues become soul-sized and worthy of us.
Three containers if meaning
The great This Is Us dome is summed up in that common phrase, “For God and Country.”
Tribal gods flourish in second-dome people.
Many people never move beyond this early stage because it provides so much identity and comfort—even though it lacks breadth, depth, and compassion.
really works very well, but the trouble is that it feels so godly that much, if not most, religion is a belonging system more than a search for intimacy with God.Jesus was not into tribal religion, groupthink, and loyalty tests. Much of the institutional church is into them, however, and always has been. It works too well to call it into question. It holds us together and that feels like salvation, even if it is a very deteriorated form.
Biblical religion, at its best, honors and combines all three levels: personal journey as raw material, communal identity as school and training ground, and true transcendence as the integration and gathering place for all the parts together. We call it holiness, which is the ultimate form of wholeness.
True transcendence frees us from the tyranny of I Am and the idolatry of We Are. But, if all three are taken seriously, as the Bible does very well, we have a full life—fully human and fully divine.
Both progressive thinking and traditional thinking can be a way to avoid the great surrender to God.
the act of faith will still feel like dying
IN ORDER TO RECONSTRUCT, WE NEED TO BE OPEN TO SOMETHING MORE than cerebral, rational knowing. We need to move toward a more spacious, contemplative knowing. We need to move beyond the dualistic, seesawing mind that makes quick judgments, beyond the self and its own self-interest, beyond win/lose and either/or worldviews. This is actually conversion in its most basic sense, but it is also the way to enormous wisdom and the vision of God. Only the whole self is ever ready for the whole God.
cut off’
The lens that we most associate with knowing is intellectual knowing. It’s the result of education, and formal education in particular. It has to do with science, reason, logic, and what we call intelligence.
The second way of knowing is volitional knowing. That’s the kind of knowing that comes from making choices, commitments, and decisions, then sticking with them, and experiencing them at different stages.
It is the experiential knowing that comes from staying in the trenches over a period of choices, disillusionments, and re-choosings.
Great emotions are especially powerful teachers.
They have the capacity to blind us, but also the power to open us up and bring us to profound conversion, humility, and honesty.
We need to know, feel, own, and find appropriate expression for our negative as well as our positive emotions.
Bodily or sensory knowing comes through the senses, by touching, moving, smelling, seeing, hearing, breathing, tasting—and especially at a deep or unconscious level. Becoming aware of our senses in a centered way allows us to awaken, to listen, to connect. It allows us to know reality more deeply, on our body’s terms instead of only on our brain’s terms.
Many teachers of contemplative prayer find that breathing exercises are the surest way for some people to know God in their bodies. It is no surprise that Jesus touched most people he healed.
Tradition tells us that one of the Syrian fathers said that we do not know God until we have wept.
Imaginal knowing is the only way that the unconscious can move into consciousness. It happens through fantasy, through dreams, through symbols, where all is “thrown together” (sym-ballein in Greek).
It happens through pictures, events, and well-told stories.
It happens through poetry, where well-chosen words create an image that, in turn, creates a new awar...
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Words are simply too brittle, narrow, and culturally limited to ever be a broad or solid basis for unity.
Jesus told stories to help people re-imagine their lives and their relationship with the universe. Once
Maybe all true knowing is re-membering, putting the members and memories together in a new and now significant story.
Ouch!
Aesthetic knowing is often either so pretty or so ugly that we tend to stop there.
Usually aesthetic knowing is only an entranceway,
Aesthetics can be a way of knowing, but it can also be an avoidance of knowing.
An epiphany is a parting of the veil, a life-changing manifestation of meaning, the eureka of awareness of self and the Other.
Epiphany happens in unusual settings, usually non-religious settings, which is often a needed sign that we didn’t cause it ourselves by devotion or morality.
Let us be present to the now. It’s all we have and it’s where God will always speak to us.
Incarnational Christianity
"God out there" thinking
The three images to be awakened and transformed are our image of self, our image of God, and our image of the world.
our worldview answers several foundational questions.
The first question is: “What should be?” or “What’s the grand and final vision?”
The second has to do with the state of things: “Why are things messed up?” or “Why do we suffer?” or “Why are things not the way they should be?”
The third question that our worldview answers is: “How do we get from what’s broken to what should be?” or “How do we live to make things right?” or, quite simply, “What does it mean to be a good human being?”
The Buddhist worldview
Marxist worldview
