Brian’s Reflection: Thursday, October 13, 11

Every day people are straying away
from the church and going back to God.

Lenny Bruce, comedian; he was born
on this date, 1925 (and died at age 40)

OK. Let this be said. I can only say so much in my short Reflections ….. and I’m usually exaggerating to make a point ….. and yes there are lot of people in lots of churches, temples, mosques, etc trying their best to be holy and do good. Some are better than others ….. and the definition of “good” and of “holy” are for better or for worse in the eye of the beholder.

That said: I’m with Lenny. Many (my brain wants to say most) religious organizations, and especially their polities and their leadership structures, definitely could use a re-think. Yes, I would say that about my own Episcopal Church too. To refuse a man ordination as a bishop because he practiced Buddhist yoga and held positive views about other religious theologies, or to defrock a priest because he wanted to have dialogue with Muslims in church - what utter rubbish! Well I remember a former Roman Catholic who became a member of an Episcopal church I was serving. I asked him why he switched. He said, “Fifteen years of anti-abortion and anti-Gays ….. what kind of spiritual life is that!” He joined the two Jews who worshipped with us, who were more interested in God than “church”.

One thing I can say about my years of parish ministry, which had a lot of faults: everyone in those congregations knew without a doubt how magnificent is the Love of God and how spectacularly they were loved. And I would say that if there was ever any strong motivation to repentance or goodness or justice or healing, it flowed from that knowledge.

The God of Compassion, Love, Justice, Kindness, Mercy comes first. “Church” second. And I would say that the first “work” of any “church” is to make sure that the “church” is made in the image of God and not the other way around.

Brian+

Brian’s Reflection: Wednesday, October 12, 2011

But in the next world I shan't be
doing music, with all the striving
and disappointments.
I shall be being it.


Ralph Vaughan Williams, composer,
musician; he was born on this date, 1872

I was “raised” in the Anglo-Catholic (and, I would like to think, central Anglican) theological understanding that the essence of being a priest is not in what one DOES, but in what on IS. Well do I remember my ordination to the priesthood in 1973, and particularly the words as the bishop laid on hands and prayed, “Make him a priest”. I definitely had the sense that I was becoming something I hadn’t been before. A “new creation”. And it was definitely connected with Jesus, the “great High Priest”. (We won’t at this point get into all the complicated ramifications of this!)

What is true of the “making of a priest” is also true of every one of us.

My comprehension is that “this World” and the “next World” are the same thing, in the context of having been baptized into the Kingdom Life. All artificial barriers dissolve. (All. Think about it.) Which means that here in “this Life” we are called not to DO but to BE. To be what?

To be fully Human. To be “as Christ”. To be “divine”. To be “eternal”. To be “free of the power of sin and death”. Oh, there may be some sense that it is not possible to be “perfected “ in this mortal life. After all, this is just one of an infinite number of stages in the great Mystery of Being!

I would like simply to suggest (notice that I do NOT split infinitives!) that we all concentrate on BEING, not DOING. Just BE Love. Just BE Compassion. Just BE Justice. Just BE Kindness. Just BE Joy. Just BE Simplicity.

To me, this is how we will best understand what Jesus meant when He said, “My yoke is easy, and my burden light”.

Brian+

Brian’s Reflection: Tuesday, October 11, 2011

On the question of relating to our fellowman - our neighbor's
spiritual need transcends every commandment. Everything else
we do is a means to an end. But love is an end already,
since God is love.

Edith Stein. A Jewish woman, she converted to Roman
Catholicism, and became a Carmelite nun. She was killed
at Auschwitz. On this date, 1998, she was canonized as a
saint in the Roman Catholic Church.


Authentic “saints” always transcend boundaries. In modern times, the Carmelites, at the powerful pressure of Pope John Paul II, were allowed to build a convent near Auschwitz. Jews worldwide objected ….. and in my view rightly so. It was clearly a political move on the part of the Roman Catholic Church, designed to use a Jewish convert for propaganda. Shame. If the Roman Catholic Church were being faithful to Edith Stein, they would have understood her words that our “neighbour’s spiritual needs transcends every commandment”, and recognized that it was contrary to Love to deflect the World’s attention from the horror of the Holocaust for the Jews. And I say this as a Gay man and a Christian, many of whose Gay sisters and brothers suffered at the hands of the Nazis.

Jesus said, “Love one another”. Because to experience God is to know that God is Love. And Love is never restricted by partisan religious politics. Love can have no conditions. Love erases Self, and all of Self’s petty self-interests.

This is what the Christian Church needs today: the renunciation of partisan dogma and self-preservation in order to be faithful to the self-renunciation of Jesus. Jesus did not die for the “salvation of Christians”; He died for the gathering of all people, through the power of Love, into the Community of Compassion and into the one family of Love.

“Our neighbour’s spiritual need transcends every commandment”. Do you think that if we followed this path, the Christian or any other religious community would decrease?

No. We would envelope the World in Love.

Brian+

Brian’s Reflection: Monday, October 10, 2011

… when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who
was not wearing a wedding robe, and he said to him, `Friend, how did
you get in here without a wedding robe?' And he was speechless. Then
the king said to the attendants, `Bind him hand and foot, and throw him
into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.'
For many are called, but few are chosen."

The Gospel called “Matthew”, chap 22 (read for Sunday, October 9, 11, RCL)


[ The whole text, for your pondering, is found here: http://www.lectionarypage.net/YearA_RCL/Pentecost/AProp23_RCL.html ]


First: do Jews or Muslims (of whatever stripe) have a lectionary that is followed for worship? Are there websites where they can be found? I’d appreciate knowing..

So: a Kingdom Parable. The central dynamic of the Gospel is to call human beings into the “Kingdom of God”. What is It? Simple: It is the community that Lives Divine Love. Most sensible Christians believe that all human beings are called into the “Kingdom”, and that the Christian Church is called to be a living symbol of this truth.

People often get sidetracked by the passage I’ve quoted. Misunderstood, it sounds very unfair. One must understand this “man without the wedding garment” in the context of the story, which powerfully speaks of the nature of the Kingdom of Love, of its inclusivity, of its importance for the well-being of the human community.

Many things can keep us out of the Kingdom Community. Excuses abound, as the parable relates. The man without the wedding garment is each of us. I once read that at fancy weddings in ancient Middle Eastern times, everyone invited was given a wedding garment. This man reminds us that each human being has been given a garment and invited into the Feast. In other words, to be a loving, compassionate, kind, just human being is of the essence of being human/divine. The “violence” of the man’s being cast out is to remind us that the greatest “sin” is to deny our essence and our destiny ….. to refuse the wedding garment.

Home for us all is in the community of Divine Compassion.

The parable says to us all: Come Home.

Brian+

Brian’s Reflection: Friday, October 7, 2011

Insurrection is an art, and like
all arts has its own laws.

Lev Davidovich Bronshtein; he was born
on this date, 1879, in Yanovka, Ukraine.


My whole being tells me that it is time for a religio-theological insurrection. On a world-wide basis.

The word “insurrection” was not used in English until the 15th C. It derives from the Latin verb “insurgere”, meaning something like “to gush up from within”. And from Within is where this must surge.

To put it another way: it is time for the shift to begin of which Nicholas Wade writes - a shift from the age of Homo Sapiens to the age of Homo Universalis. It is time for the human race to start thinking and acting from a different centre if we are to survive as an evolutionary experiment and not just peter out as yet another failed evolutionary branch. The path we are on right now seems on every level to be leading to that failed end. However, being an optimist, I express my hope that the human race could, if it chooses, manage to prolong our “experiment”. My problem is, I have this absurd hope that the Inner Light within us can lead this change ….. but my mind knows that the Inner Light has so often been enslaved by what we call “organized religion”, by the religious equivalent of the Corporation, an entity warped by self-interest, greed, and the enslavement to Power.

An example of how the movement of Divine Compassion and Justice can be thwarted? Today is the 80th birthday of (in my opinion) one of the greatest men to understand and live the Gospel: Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The Dalai Llama was invited by him to come to South Africa to share in the event. The South African government did not grant His Holiness a visa. They said that it had nothing to do with pressure from the Chinese government ….. which any intelligent person will know is a patent lie. Mammon rules in our World.

It is time for the emerging Homo Universalis - and especially those who partake in organized religion - either to reform or to do away with all the religious corporations which have perverted the spiritual core of what it is to be Human or to be made in the image of the God of Love.

It is time for us to develop the Art of Religious Insurrection: to move from fragmentation to Unity, to honour the paths by which human beings have sought to understand Compassion, and to learn what it means to give of ourselves that we might all live in Holiness and Peace.

[ Who was Lev Davidovich Bronshtein? Leon Trotsky. ]

Brian+

Brian’s Reflection: Thursday, October 6, 2011

When you’re blind to your own nature, the Buddha is an ordinary being.
When you’re aware of your own nature, an ordinary being is the Buddha.

Huineng


At this moment in time - and God knows things change! - I firmly believe that there is no “ultimate truth” which says what is true about human nature. Every group of people who thinks about it eventually comes up with their own “truth”, and this becomes enshrined in their culture, religion, literature, philosophy, etc. I do not believe that there is “one way”, and that every one else is wrong. For example, “traditional Jews” believe that they are God’s “Chosen People”. (Reconstructionist Jews do not believe this, nor do they believe that God “gave them” the land now called Israel.) And it seems by their pronouncements that the Roman Catholic Church believes it is the only “true religion” by which one can be in a “saving” relationship with God. And it seems that Muslims believe that their Muhammad is the last “prophet” through whom God will speak. In my view, such views are the work of Evil in the human heart, causing endless bloodshed, hate, prejudice, division, and all manner of wickedness in the life of the human community.

These days, I am deeply intrigued by the question of our identity and our nature as human beings. There are endless propositions about this. My choice - a choice which I believe every human being is responsible for making - is expressed by Huineng, and I believe by Jesus: What we call “God” is the source of all Life ….. and all Life is a manifestation of God. I do not believe that “God” is entirely “the Other”, entirely different from all else that Exists. I choose to believe that Jesus prayed for oneness with God because there is no other truth, no other path by which we know who we essentially are. God is God, we are human ….. and we are One.

If I do not know that I am One with God, and that every human being and all other creatures are therefore part of me, I will be tempted to treat other humans with dishonour. The result can only be the misery we are experiencing in the World these days. But if I know that I am One with God and with all other things, I will honour all Existence as Divine ….. and Peace and Compassion will define us.

Personally, I know that I am One with God, that You are I. What I seek day by day is the integrity to act on this truth.

Brian+

Brian’s Reflection: Wednesday, October 5, 2011

As long as you're green, you're growing.
As soon as you're ripe, you start to rot.

Ray Kroc, founder of McDonalds;

he was born on this date, 1902


Hmmm. Ray Kroc became one of the richest men in the world because he gave people, as he said himself, what they loved. From my personal point of view, he have the world a lethal killer. I rarely ever ate anything from McDonalds, and I have never eaten anything from McDonalds since the day I discovered over 20 years ago that a kid was thrown off his high school wrestling team for drug taking ….. only to discover that it came from the steroids that he ate everyday in McDonalds’ beef. I probably wouldn’t be quoting Ray Kroc, if it weren’t for the fact that his wife, in her will, left millions to NPR in order to make it more independent of political money.

The quote is a little questionable and confusing in terms of its usefulness. The whole point of a plant is to ripen and then to provide full rich nourishment! Yes, if you don’t use it then, at the ripened point, it loses its value. So what has this image to say about being fully human?

To me, it speaks to the wisdom of knowing when to be planted, to die, and then to produce a rich harvest. Yes: that deep wisdom Jesus spoke of. The skill and art of living on that elegant balanced point between vigourous “greenness”, of growth, and of ripeness before rot begins to set in. This, I think, is the art of Love. We must always be growing in Love - and when at any point our Love ripens, we must be willing to “die”, to give it away so that it can nourish and sustain. And out of every giving away, new Love will sprout and grow.

Life is about always being “green”, about ripening, about never allowing the ripe fruit of Love to rot unused. I don’t want to push the metaphor too far - but the cross, in the Christian story, is of a rich fully developed Love poured out at the fullest moment in order to give Life to the World.

In a life of Love, artfully lived, there is freshness and ripeness. Nothing is left to rot.

Brian+