Happiness (Quotes)

Check out this page for some quotes on happiness. Here are a couple of examples:

"Joy is not a constant condition. Most people manage a settled cheerfulness, but this, no matter how admirable, has nothing to do with joy, which flashes suddenly on our darkness. Like the light in an El Greco painting, joy does not merely illuminate the landscape. It transforms it." Sr Wendy Beckett

"If what most people take for granted were really true?if all you needed to be happy was to grab everything and see everything and investigate every experience and then talk about it, I should have been a very happy person, a spiritual millionaire, from the cradle even until now?What a strange thing! In filling myself, I had emptied myself. In grasping things, I had lost everything. In devouring pleasures and joys, I had found distress and anguish and fear." Thomas Merton

How To Hold Onto It (By Michael Leunig)

Life, the planet, yourself, family and friends, body and soul, food, ... anything important really.

Not Just a Favoured Few...

A guest post from the Revd Ron Keynes. (Pentecost 23, Year B: Ruth 3:1-5; 4:3-17; Mark 12:38-44)

There is often a fairly strong reason why Christians are often charged with being ‘against the world’ and somewhat troglodytic. I have mentioned elsewhere something of the struggle even with my children, as they tend to belong to a later generation, not quite up to X. However, there has been some rethink by younger people as the World Financial Crisis has done its job in bringing some factors back to balance, and Global Warming perhaps adding to the rethink.

If there is one aspect of life that tends to be reflected in almost all cultures and countries, it is the determination of the powerful ones to advertise both their power and wealth and demanding all the best that the country has to give. Even some religious people fall victim (or demand the position) and become very much a part of the problem. As the Gospel reminds us, in Jesus’ day the practice was rampant. Today’s world tends to have it in terms of salaries and perks of CEOs, where the matter is totally beyond reality.

Contrast that, if you will, with the story of Ruth and Naomi, a beautiful and moving tale of tragedy and ill fortune, made remarkably more touching by the commitment of daughter-in-law (of a different race!) to a mother of her late husband. There is a story of quite lovely proportion, of self-giving quite beyond the norm. It was a most moving moment when, at our youngest daughter’s wedding, this passage was chosen as one of the readings. ‘There was hardly a dry eye in the house.’

I wonder whether the rich and powerful ever stop to ponder what is important in life, and what is marginal. I have to say that my experience of ‘pretty people’ is that such a title is a misnomer of the first order, and selfishness and refusal of ordinary human responses is obligatory. On the other hand, ordinary little people seem to have a far more balanced perception of what is important and what is not. And are not the basics of life really quite simple and uncomplicated? Or am I fooling myself?

The reason that Christians tend to be so against today’s life-style of self-aggrandizement is that it leaves almost every other person right out of the equation. Bugger you Jack, I am all right. And it does not need to be the ‘high and holy ones’ who have such a blind stare. Do you not meet, constantly, even little people who demand their priority with great rudeness and pomposity?

Life’s reality does have a habit of blowing down our proud houses of cards every now and again. And it all comes back to the business of what is true and just, for those capacities have a habit of returning from the dead. It is not all that long ago that the film ‘Greed’ was greeted with yells of delight. And it did not take long for the outcome of that pattern to blow up in everyone’s faces.

Life is for everyone, not just a favoured few. Faith is for everyone too, though there seem to be rather fewer takers, for some reason. Peace and even prosperity is far more likely to ensue when the gentler path is chosen by all. And there can be little fight against that!

Idolatry Instead of Faithful Discipleship

Kyle Strobel, over at Theology Forum has an excellent post on being a healthy church movement. His criticism below should not be directed at evangelicalism exclusively. See here for the full post.

"I have been thinking, as of late, about the various strategies in evangelicalism to navigate the marketplace of ideas. It seems to me that the typical evangelical strategy to “win” (sorry, I don’t mean this to be polemical (yet) but I can’t think of another word which is accurate), is simply to create something of a boys club. In other words, we surround ourselves with people who both agree with every word that comes our of our mouth and who won’t actually attack our views in any significant way. This is enough, in itself, to be idolatry, but it rarely stops there. The next step is to start a movement. A movement, in these terms, is nothing more than simply organizing leadership and adopting worldly strategies for kingdom building. Once teaching, leadership and dogma can be disseminated, there is a twofold turn outwards: First, a turn outwards to evangelize – not Christ as much as the movement itself - and, second, a turn outwards to attack anyone who thinks differently. The latter turn stems from the inherent fundamentalism in evangelicalism which equates difference with danger."

Getting Rid of the Dead Wood

I can't help thinking that the Pope's latest stab at church union by allowing dissident Anglicans to recognise his authority and cross the Tiber will, in reality, get rid of some of our dead wood. I know I shouldn't, but ...

Here is a very funny video (linked from Inhabitatio Dei) from a satirical US Show. It's very funny, and the points he makes are good. Like, how much sense it makes for the Pope to welcome into the Roman Church those who have trouble with their current authority structures. Someone is going to be in for a shock, either the ex-Anglicans (most likely) or the Pope (he'll just get annoyed and boot 'em out). Stay with the video even when the goosey Episcopalian priest comes on. The interviewer keeps on making the point.

And also from the same blog I picked up this comment by Hans Kung on Benedict's latest strategy for church union. Hans is not amused.

Friends of God

At a recent chapel cycle at St John's I made three points about friendship.

First, I used a picture (side) to remind us that Jesus was actually betrayed by a close friend. The pain Jesus must have felt by this betrayal is easily overlooked from our position of hindsight. The pain of betrayal by a friend is because we give something of ourselves to our friends. So I asked the question: how you going respecting that piece your friends have given you?

Second, I pointed out that Jesus was known as a friend of those everyone else hated (sinners and tax collectors). The usual practice is to befriend those similar to us or we like, or who might benefit us. Not Jesus. I spelt the implication out in chapel.

Third, to be a friend of Jesus is to be a friend of God. and remember, friends give something of themselves to those they befriend. So when God becomes our friend through Christ, God gives something of Godself to us. (Doctrinally, this is the same as saying that in the Incarnation and the giving of the Spirit God communicates Godself to us.)

See here for a great sandart video about friendship.

I Am the Resurrection and the Life (John 11)

The story of the raising of Lazarus (John 11) reveals the the humanity of Jesus in a narrative form that is of a piece with the deepest theology of the Gospel of John. (E.g. John 1:1-5, 14) Here we see a vulnerable, human Jesus, full of love, and therefore overcome by grief at the death of his friend Lazarus. This is the same Jesus who, in, for example, the Farewell Discourses of Chapters 13-17, will reveal (admittedly in more structured prose) the heart of God. But even so, John 11 can't be matched for the sheer vulnerable humanity of Jesus.

Lazarus is the friend of Jesus. (11:11; also 11:36) We will wait until 15:14-15 before we hear Jesus call his disciples friends. There is something special in the relationship between Lazarus and Jesus. Yet, Lazarus is strangely absent in the Gospels. We meet Mary and Martha in Luke, but not Lazarus. And in John Mary and Martha speak to Jesus, but Lazarus, the friend of Jesus, says nothing. He is resuscitated, and in John 12 the chief priests decide that Lazarus must die as well as Jesus. (John 12:9-11; see 11:45-57) Jean Vanier says that Lazarus seems to be a "nobody" in comparison to the rest of the characters in the story. Like the disabled people Vanier has lived with in L'Arche. In John 11 Lazarus is sick. The Greek word is asthenes, and Jean Vanier says that this can mean not just sick, but disabled. This supposition on the part of Vanier would explain why Mary and Martha are still at home with Lazarus, and why Lazarus, the friend of Jesus, seems absent in the text. He was, as Vanier says, a "nobody".

People wonder why Jesus did not leave immediately to heal Lazarus when he discovered that he was sick. (11:6) The flow of the text gives the answer. The death of Lazarus will allow Jesus to work another "sign" (John 2:11; 4:54), signaling who Jesus is ("I am ..." John 11:25-26) , and the overcoming of death that awaits those loved by Jesus. (As is all Christology, this story is about soteriology, not just speaking of the status of Jesus.)

Jesus arrives and after some dialogue with Mary and Martha is directed to the tomb of Lazarus. Here we see the raw and intense emotion of Jesus, shuddering and disturbed in his own grief at the death of his friend, and deeply moved by the grief of those weeping for Lazarus. (11:33-35, 38) Jesus wept. He does not avoid his grief; resurrection does not make human emotion and the loss of death empty. Jesus here touches the horror of death, and its sheer deadliness, feeling and expressing the anguish and pain we feel when stung by death and its forces. Vanier says

"Here he (Jesus) weeps in front of death; he touches the horror of death, the void created in hearts when someone who is loved dies... This is the only place in the gospel where Jesus reveals his deep, human emotions. when he met the Samaritan women (sic) he was tired, but here something is broken in him." (Jean Vanier, Drawn Into the Mystery of Jesus Through the Gospel of John, p.199)

But more than this, Jesus here confronts his own mortality. (Yes, mortality, the point of the picture above, with a dead Jesus, gangrene spreading in his tomb.) He is human, and he will die. The blackness of death awaits him, and the horror of death encompassing a loved one awaits the mother and friends of Jesus. Christian hope in the resurrection of Jesus is not an avoidance of death. I will die, you will die, those we love will die. There is no immortal 'bit' in us that avoids death. There is only hope in the God of Jesus who brings resurrection. Indeed, without entering the full horror of death and the cross there is no resurrection. This is not one more example of the spiritual principle of death and rebirth. This is the brokenness, failure, and absolute end that is the prerequisite for grace, the tomb of resurrection.

A Joke

A Catholic priest, an Anglican priest and a Baptist minister sat next to each other in a plane. After take off, the steward came to them and asked if they wanted a drink. The Catholic said, Whiskey"; the Anglican said "Scotch and soda, please." The steward asked the Baptist, who said(rather self-righteously), "I'd commit adultery before I'd have a drink." The Anglican thought for a moment, turned to the steward, and said, "Can I change my order?"

Stats on Child Sexual Abuse

Following a link on Ruth Gledhill's blog I came across a page of statistics with one statistic I don't think I have seen before. The statistics are for the UK, and look at her original post if you would like to follow up some other links, particularly from the three major insurers of US Protestant Churches and claims for sexual abuse. Anyway, on the link mentioned above, the last entry says:

Very few children (less than 1%) experienced abuse by professionals in a position of trust, for example a teacher, religious leader or care/social worker.

(Here is the link.)

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost

To Choose is To Renounce

To live we must choose a life, a commitment. We must move from a series of disconnected experiences to a way of life with all its hopes and disappointments. That choice can come to us in a variety of ways: an inner voice, aptitudes, skills, gifts; or what brings us joy or where we find our creativity most exposed.

But this is a path less travelled, for it is our path. But to choose this path is to renounce other possible paths. Perhaps this is one reason why the psychological age of youth with its exploration of possibilities stretches well beyond chronological youth now. There are so many alternatives that might be taken up, which to choose? To choose one might close down others, so choosing one is postponed. But, funnily enough, life itself is postponed. As Jesus said, to choose life will always bring some death with it.

The Two Great Elephants in the Room

... behind and beneath the smooth wheels of the socially constructed world are two abiding facts: unreconciled pain and unexhausted compassion, the history of men and women and the history of God with us. (Rowan Williams)

Lines Composed Above Tintern Abbey

That blessed mood,
In which the burden of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened--that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,-
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul;
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

William Wordsworth

Remembering and Forgetting

And yet, longing not to be chained to a traumatic past is not wrong. What is mistaken, however, is the idea that fixation on the traumatic past would somehow guarantee being set free from it. A collective past, like that of an individual, is traumatic when it is not allowed to be remembered, and is just as much so if it has to be remembered. In other words, fixation on the past is merely the flipside of repression. Detraumatisation is the process of becoming able to both remember and forget; it is leaving the past in the past, in a way that embraces remembrance as well as forgetting. (Bernhard Schlink, Guilt About the Past, p. 36.)

The Goal of Self-Denial

Once there was an ascetic who struggled his whole life to reach perfection. He distributed all his goods to the poor, withdrew into the desert, and prayed to God night and day. Finally the day came when he died. He ascended to heaven and knocked on the gates. 'Who is there?' came a voice from within. 'It's me!' Answered the ascetic. 'There isn't room for two here,' said the voice. 'Go away!' The ascetic went back down to earth and began his struggle all over again: poverty, fasting, uninterrupted prayer, weeping. His appointed hour came a second time, and he died. Once more he knocked at the gates of heaven. 'Who's there?' came the same voice. 'Me!' 'There isn't room for two here. Go away!'

The ascetic plummeted down to earth and resumed his struggle to attain salvation even more ferociously than before. When he was an old man, a centenarian, he died and knocked once again on the gates of heaven. 'Who's there?' came the voice. 'Thou, Lord, Thou!' And straightway the gates of heaven opened, and he entered

.

I think this is from Nikos Kazantzakis, God's Pauper, but I am not sure. When I reread it some day I will find out!

God Cares For Each Of Us

The Christian gospel declares that people are of inestimable value because they are the children of God, the concern of God’s love, created for an eternal destiny; not just people in general, but individual men, women and children, each with a name, each having priceless worth. This was made startingly plain by Jesus when he told his disciples ‘the very hairs of your head are all numbered’: an extravagant piece of imagery to drive home what he was saying. When we take his words seriously, we begin to realize how far-reaching their significance is. If they are true, if that is how things really are, if God does care for every single man, woman and child in the teeming millions that inhabit the globe, not to speak of the countless generations of the past and those as yet unborn, we cannot dismiss anyone as of no consequence; nor are we entitled to suppose that some are more important than others or that any should be sacrificed to serve some interest which takes precedence over their inherent worth. The consequences of accepting this basic presupposition are shattering, calling in question not only the way in which we commonly behave towards many of our fellow human beings, but the international, military, political, economic and social policies which have been and still are considered reasonable by those who are responsible for them.

Paul Rowntree

We Are Incomplete

Most of the time we act as though we are complete. But we are not. From birth we need others, and none of us knows everything, in fact none of us knows what we need to know. There are gaps, holes within us. There is a God shaped hole that, if left unacknowledged, we will try to fill. But instead of filling it with God we will have to fill it with that which cannot fill: 'stuff', relationships, or whatever. Idols in other words. The God hole in us can only be filled with that which is greater than us, transcendent; the finite will collapse under the strain when shoved in the hole. No wonder we have to shove more and more 'stuff' in.

If you wonder what a humanity that fills the God hole would be like, then study the Gospels. Jesus is not confused about what goes where in his life. In him the finite (his humanity) can carry the infinite, but only because it is open and empty. The great paradox: when we are empty we can carry the infinite, when full, well, all we carry is the finite as though it could function and satisfy like the infinite. Idolatry is the result.

To Fulfil Our Promise, That is All

I don't want to be anything special, I only want to try to be true to that in me which seeks to fulfil its promise. (Etty Hillesum)

Jesus the Exorcist and Healer

When it comes to the healings and exorcisms of Jesus it is easy to get caught up in discussions about the miraculous on the one hand, and questions about the reality of the demonic on the other. While important, those discussions need to be broadened a little. Brad, my co-minister here at Holy Innocents used to work with children with multiple disabilities. In that work he would use every channel available to communicate with the children. He remarked in a recent sermon that he could see some similarity between his work with these children and the story of the healing of the deaf man with a speech impediment in Mk 7:31-37. Those schooled in the debates about the reality of healings and the question of magic miss the very basic ways that Jesus is communicating with the man in the story. Jesus touches the man's ears and tongue, and looks up to heaven and sighs. The man would recognise what Jesus was indicating and doing. The question of what happened in the healing does not disappear, but we need not see the touching and the saliva as some kind of magic, or even just as a prophetic acting out. Jesus might have also been communicating with the man, telling him what he, Jesus, was about to do.

The same holds true with the exorcisms of Jesus. The Gospel stories explicitly weave social and political realities into the exorcisms. Two examples, both in the Gospel of Mark, come readily to mind. The first is Mk 1:21-28 where the exorcism is clearly linked to the contrast between the teaching and authority of Jesus with the teaching and authority of the scribes. And then there is the story of the Gerasene demoniac. (Mk 5:1-20) I can't remember where I read it, but apparently there is some evidence to suggest that in antiquity demon possession increased during times of foreign occupation. Demon possession, while a spiritual reality in the text, is not divorced from the political realities of the people within the text. And just in case we doubt it, the name of the demon is legion, the basic unit of the Roman army.

No One is an Island (Part 2)

Most people have heard the famous line, “No man is an island”. You might have even heard a little more of the meditation it comes from:

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

The above comes from John Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVII, and “For whom the bell tolls” was picked up by Hemingway. It is a meditation upon our interconnection as human beings and as baptized Christians. And I think it is a way of understanding the whole of the Christian faith; a sort of lens to understand what we believe and what we are being drawn into. Some doctrine and biblical passages to reflect on through the lens of 'No One is an Island'.

• Doctrine of God (Trinity) God is not alone (Jn 1:1)

• Jesus Lives, dies, raised for God and others (Jn 5:19-24;11:45-53)

• Eucharist “We who are many …” (1Cor 10:14-22)

• Baptism into Christ, Jesus’ brothers and sisters (Rom 6:1-11; 8:15-17)

• Humanity Gen 1:27

• Ethics Matt 5:21-48; Rom 12:9-21

• Church Mk 3:13-19; Ephes 4:17 – 5:2

• Evangelism Acts 2

• Healing Mk 5:21-43

• God, Jesus, Spirit, love 1Jn 4:7-21

And as in all Christian doctrine, all the above lead into each other and back again.

To view Meditation XVII see here, or a podcast of it being read, or the whole of the Devotions, or my sermon on 'No One is an Island' and a link to a really cool video here.