The spiritual life, the downward path, and the values wisdom brings

Thomas Merton once wrote: “People may spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.”

It's also true that most of us spend our time climbing the wrong direction; one friend recently told me, "I climbed to the top of the pinnacle only to sit down and realized how much it hurt."

Every spiritual tradition, at its heart, offers a downward pathway into the temple of the soul.  If we cooperate with the life-journey, we may well learn the values of true wisdom: 

depth rather than acquiring

awareness rather than ambition

wisdom rather than being right

humility not arrogance

gentleness not force

love not security

growth not comfort

relinquishment instead of clinging

A different, but wholly transforming way of being in the world.

And frankly, these are values not often learned until we travel the second half of life--a downward journey into limitation, physical decline, suffering, and eventually the final letting go, death.

Feeling passionate but alone? Here's a way to contribute to the common good

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Circles of Strength are small, intentional gatherings of people drawn together by a desire to co-create the kind of world we wish to live in.  We gather around two essential goals: 1. we identify our desires to improve our world, and 2. together, we grow our sense of strength so we can make a difference.

Around us, millions of Americans are rising up to meet the environmental, social, and political challenges of the 21st century.  

Rather than feeling disempowered or disillusioned, people like us want to do something useful to transcend barriers, overcome hostilities, and create programs, products, movements and opportunities that contribute to the common good in our neighborhoods, cities, nation, and around the planet.  

Circles of Strength are small gatherings of 3 or more people (no more than 5).  They are intentional in that they meet at least every other week for at least an hour to check in with each other around a series of questions like:

• What am I feeling passionate about? And why?
• What is a problem or injustice I cannot allow to remain unchallenged?
• What would I like to do about it?
• What gifts do I have to address it?
• What gets in the way or holds me back?
• What progress have I made since we last met?
• What do I need to take the next step?

Circles don’t need a trained leader, but they do need a common commitment from each other to listen more than give advice, and to help others find their passion.  Through meeting together and talking about our desires for a better world, we help foster accountability, hope, and follow-through. (And when we fail or repeatedly bang into walls, we help each other find new direction.)   

Find a few other people, create a circle, and begin to change your world.

In Praise of Sauntering: How to Experience Holiness

I grew up hiking and fly-fishing, backpacking and picnicking in the Colorado Rockies.  My father is a scientist who’s spent his life in a love affair with these valleys, streams, and peaks—the granite and pine, trout and Columbine that populate this magnificent part of the Earth.  When he and I stand in the same valley we experience it very differently.  He sees the subtle moraine laid down eons ago by some vast, retreating glacier.  He feels the mighty forces that belched this rock from Earth’s belly billions of years ago.  He imagines the achingly long, painful processes that twisted and tilted this ancient rock into the peaks we now traverse.  He can tell me exactly why a certain conifer grows on this side of the valley and not on the other, why schist appears here and not there, what we might expect when we cross over yonder pass between those two ten thousand foot spires.

Dad will correct you if you call what we’re doing “hiking”.  And because of the way he loves this land, he’s got good reason to.  We’re walking, he says—or better, “sauntering” . . . not hiking.  To support his argument, he’ll paraphrase Thoreau and shout something like this over his shoulder as you follow him along the trail:

I’ve only met one or two persons in my life who understand the art of Walking—people who had a genius for sauntering.  Sauntering’s a word that comes from what folks used to call those fools who roved around the European countryside in the Middle Ages asking charity, pretending they were going a la Sainte Terre, that is, “to the Holy Land.” 

The village kids would laugh and point at these crack pots saying, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer!” 

A Saunterer.  A Holy-Lander. 

Know this, my son, there are those who never know the ground beneath their feet as holy; they’re mere idlers and vagabonds, not true saunterers.  What we’re doing now, if you’re aware of the ground beneath your feet, is what true sauntering is all about.*

Sauntering’s what my father aims to do.  When he does, and I’m with him, I can see it in his eyes—that misty-eyed gaze of those who, after a long journey, finally glimpse the Holy City rising before them in the distance.  He is a Sainte-Terrer.  These mountains, trees, and rivers, lazy fawns and ambling bear are his Holy Land.  And each high mountain stream, teeming with brook trout, is Jerusalem to him.

But there are many who never go to the Holy Land in their walks.  They hike.  It’s not that they intend to miss the mystery that is this Holy Land.  They know there’s more here than meets the eye; they just don’t know how to see it.  They’ve got no real training in sauntering, in holiness.  They are “idlers and vagabonds” across these mountains, when they intuitively long to be Sainte Terrers, Holy-Landers whose love gives them eyes to see all that’s beyond first- and even second-glance.

I think it was these walks with my father that made me hunger for holiness before I ever knew what it was.  I realize now that his love of the divine in every blessed thing upon this sacred Earth and the way he encountered them taught me my first rudimentary practices for pursuing the Holy and finding It. 

*Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, Nature and Walking, Boston: Beacon Press, 1991, p. 71.

Our Place in this Sacred Universe: Bringing Christianity Up-To-Date

We are living in a time of immense challenge on every front—socially, politically, ecologically, and spiritually. In the midst of all this, the writings of Thomas Berry (a Catholic scholar of religion and cosmology) have kept me grounded.  In his books, often very influential among those engaged in the current ecological conversation, he says that we need a new story to reorient and ground ourselves to meet these challenges. Religions, and Christianity in particular, have been slow to catch up to modern understandings of science, and the origins and future of the universe.  Our theologies, liturgies, pastoral work, and ethics are still grounded in outdated understandings of the life of the universe as well as human social organizations. Science and religion must come together to foster a way of life on this planet so that all things may flourish.  If religions fail to reform themselves and remain instead connected to conservative and often fundamentalist views, the future of the planet is bleak.  Religion can be a potent force for change, but it can keep us stuck in the status quo.

In his book, The Sacred Universe, Berry writes that we must aim at “overcoming our human and religious alienation from the larger, more comprehensive sacred community of the natural world.”  “Our challenge is to move from a purely human-oriented or personal-salvation focus in our religious concerns to one that embraces the universe in all its forms.  This will require an immense shift in orientation.”  John Philip Newell also pointed us in this direction, and his talks among us this last winter were a compelling call, complementing our Lenten reading in Pope Francis’ recent book.  Together, they urged us to explore a distinctively Christian way to care for the earth, our common home.    

This fall, I will offer a fall sermon series that invites us further into the kind of dialog we need in order to care more robustly for the earth, as stewards of and participants in the evolving life of the universe.  I’ll do so by exploring these themes through the life of John Muir (1838-1914), the Scottish-born, American naturalist whose writings and advocacy led to the preservation of Yosemite and other national parks, and, through his founding of the Sierra Club, helped ignite the modern environmental movement.  

Muir was raised a Presbyterian, and while he rejected the cold and rigid doctrinal formulations of his inherited Calvinism, his Christian faith nourished all his encounters with nature and supported his advocacy on behalf of the earth.  

Here’s a look at the series I’m calling, “John Muir: What We Can Learn from California’s Neglected Saint”:

October 9, 2016: “The Home of God is Among Us”
October 16: “Consider the Lilies”
October 23: “When I Look at the Heavens”

These three sermons will include a meditation on biblical texts, stories from Muir’s life, excepts from his spiritual writings, and implications for Christian faith and practice.  Throughout the series we will explore how our religious vision—joined with the best of our tradition and current understandings of cosmology—can provide us with a more holistic view of life on this plant and how we can each participate in its healing and flourishing, and, therefore, in our own. 

I hope you’ll join in the important work before us, shaping a Christian view not only of that little bit of the cosmos we call the Earth, but also of the entire universe.  Here are some suggested resources that might help you in your reflection:

Thomas Berry: Selected Writings on the Earth Community, edited by Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim.  Berry, a Catholic theologian (or what he called a “geologian”) taught history of religions at Fordham University, and is in many ways a mentor for many religious leaders today who are working on the encounter between science and religion, and especially our ethic as humans in relation to the environment.

Journey of the Universe, by Brian Thomas Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker.  A remarkable, beautiful, and timely prose “poem” that explores, from a scientific point of view the origins and nature of this vast expanding universe.  Not written from a religious point of view, the book bears the inspiration of a classic spiritual text—it’s a hymn to the splendor of the cosmos.

Journey of the Universe: An Epic Story of Cosmic, Earth, and Human Transformation.  This Emmy award winning documentary, adapts the book by Swimme and Tucker (above and by the same title).  A 57 minute video.

John Muir: Spiritual Writings, edited by Tim Flinders.  Muir was a Scottish-born, Presbyterian naturalist whose writings and advocacy contributed to the preservation of Yosemite and other national parks.  He also founded the Sierra Club. This collection of journal entries, letters, and excerpts from other writings, reveal his deeply spiritual sentiments and how they inspired his activism on behalf of the natural world.

The Coming of the Cosmic Christ by Matthew Fox.  A thick yet helpful exploration of Christology from a creation-centered perspective. Fox re-digs the wells of historic Christianity to help us rediscover sources of theological reflection and spirituality that can help us at this point of the Earth’s great need.  

Christ of the Celts: The Healing of Creation, by John Philip Newell.  Newell, of course, is influential among us at DCC.  This handy little book offers us a vision for Christ who is not shackled by the doctrines of original sin and substitutionary atonement which are antagonistic to a faith perspective that honors the Earth as sacred. 

Worship and the New Cosmology, by Catherine Vincie.  Professor of sacramental and liturgical theology at Aquinas Institute of Theology in St. Louis, Dr. Vincie gives a short and concise summary of much of the current thinking in scientific circles about the nature of the universe and then applies those insights to the ways we express Christian faith through our worship.  You will notice a number of things we have been doing for awhile in our worship services, but this book may help us with further reforms that carry our worship life further beyond outdated understandings of the cosmos and our place in it so that we can more fully participative in the gifts of the natural world.