Eating Turkey

The Thanksgiving holidays are in the rear view mirror and only a few turkey scraps remain. Since Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, I always enjoy fixing turkey and making dressing (cornbread dressing mind you!). I guess what I enjoy the most is simply not doing anything more constructive than preparing one meal. Although it is a big meal, once it is done, the work, such as it is, is over.

To enjoy simply being present with some family or friends, is a rich gift. Maybe we should do it more often!

Poem du jour

Takk for alt

She was not quite ninety-seven
when she died.
One who waited at her side
heard her say it:
"Takk for alt" "Thank you for everything."
It was her home-going word to God.

Like a good guest
she addressed her Host.
She spoke as one well-taught,
well-taught by life,
by memory and expectation!

To be gift-conscious is to be wise;
to know whom to thank is grace indeed.
to know the gift and love the Giver,
to have learned life's dearest lesson,
is to be rich toward God.

--Gerhard E. Frost


May your Thanksgiving holiday provide time for you to practice the discipline of gratitude! --cer

The Church and A Word For Today

Long time, no post. Staying focused on the discipline of writing comes and goes for me. Ironically, my personal journaling has been much more consistent in the past two weeks. . . . .

Catching up on some reading on a rainy day. Brian McLaren is featured in the current Christianity Today along with some discussion of the emergent church movement--or dialogue. I think that McLaren has a lot to offer; especially if, we do what he says and not try to slavishly imitate some particular way of doing church.

Church is not something you do; church is something we (Christ-believers) are. That single conviction begins to turn things is some interesting ways. For example, back to McLaren. McLaren, reflecting the work of Lesslie Newbigin, says, “Election is not about who gets to go to heaven; election is about who God chooses to be part ofhis crisis-response team to bring healing to the world.”

McLaren and the emerging church has a lot in common with another group--The Gospel and Our Culture Network (www.gocn.org). With every passing day, North American culture becomes less inclined toward gospel; its time to think deeply about what it means to do church.

Hospitality

Northlake is gearing up for some study on the Christian practice of hospitality. Vic McCracken has got several of reading a great book by Christine Pohl called Making Room. Published by Eerdmans, Pohl's work is readable and convincing. I haven't finished it yet. But here are some quotes:

"Strangers, in the strict sense, are those who are disconnected from basic relationships that give persons a secrue place in the world. The most vulnerable strangers are detarched from family, community, church, work, and polity."

"Although we often think of hospitality as a tame and pleasant practice, Christian hospitality has always had a subversive, countercultural dimension. 'Hospitality is resistance,' as one person from the Catholic Worker observed. Especially when the larger society disregards or dishonors certain persons, small acts of respect and welcome are potent far beyond themselves. They point to a different system of valuing and an alternative model of relationships."

Much more in Pohl's book. From what I can see thus far, Pohl is challenging the church to reclaim this ancient and biblical practice and in so doing, respond in a "subversive" way to the social and moral issues that prevail in our culture

More from the Economist:Video Game Violence

In the study mentioned in yesterday's blog more interesting things emerge. Functional brain-imaging challenges another aspect of American culture. I think that I will simply quote the article without comment:

"Dr. Mathiak enlisted 13 gamers who played video games for, on average, 20 hours a week. While the gamers stalked and shot the enemy from the relative discomfort of a scanner's interior, the reserachers recorded events in their brains.

As a player approached a violent encounter, part his brain called the anterior cingulate cortex became active. This area is associated with aggression in less fictional scenarios, and also with the subsequent suppression of more positive emotions, such as empathy. Dr Mathiak noted that the responses in his gamers were thus strikingly similar to the neural correlates of real aggression. As he puts it, 'Contrary to what the industry says, it appears to be more than just a game.'"

Renewing the Mind

This just in from 30 October issue of the Economist (thanks to Joe Page).

A series of studies offers some striking insights into the importance of how we train and shape our minds to help us make good choices.

Students in one particular study were place in a brain scanner and then offered the choice of receiving a gift certificate worth 5-40 dollars or the option of receiving one worth 1% to 40% more in one to two weeks.

"When a participant chose the earlier reward, there was an increase in the activity of his limbic system. This is a region of the brain that is involved in emotion. In contrast, when the choice was to delay gratification in exchange for a bigger reward, brain activity was concentrated in the 'thinking' regions, such as the prefrontal cortex. The inconsistency therefore seems to be the result of different sorts of calculation happening in the two cases."

Instant gratification seems to be rooted in the emotional makeup of the human; delayed gratification finds its resource in the the thinking regions of the mind. Having the same mind as Jesus takes on new meaning here!

Congregational Monasticism

According to Diana Bass in her recent book, The Practicing Congregation: Imagining a New Old Church, a rising form of self-understanding for a growing group of churches is to appropriate the concepts of monasticism as a way of self-understanding. She doesn't mean that people are now living celebate lives and selling their homes. Rather, she is suggesting that the practice of spiritual disciplines move beyond some new trend or another quarter in the adult education program.

Although she admits that there is something of a trend going on she states: "I believe that all these things express a deeper hunger for meaningful Christian faith. It is possible to offer trendy programming in spirituality, as if the congregation were a kind of religious shopping mall or boutique. Not all practices can form pilgrim congregations. When congregations pay attention to Christianity and its constituent practices as a way of life, only then are they acting as open monastic communities."

Why is that important? It is important in that if the church is to help persons move from pagan, secular lives to lives that are connected to God, then thinking deeply about how we do that is important. Monastic communities take seriously spiritual life and engagement with Christian practice that nurtures the development of Christian people. Could Christian offer the necessary resources to sustains a whole way of life?

Blogging Away

Blogging as spiritual practice gets some play in an article by Rob Moll. (See link below) Frankly I think he is on to something--particularly as it pertains to creating a free place for conversation and engagement unfettered by church structure or authority.

Frankly, there is a lot of bloggers out here. Moll states: "A Perseus survey estimated that by the end of 2004 there would be 10 million blogs. A report from Pew suggests that somewhere between 2 and 7 percent of Internet users blog, which puts the number between 2.5 to 8.9 million. The blogs4God.com search engine lists over 1,100 Christian bloggers, but that is hardly definitive; blogs4God only lists those who register their blog. I would estimate it in the hundreds of thousands because the majority of bloggers who discuss religion would not label themselves as "spiritual bloggers.""

Can written dialogue on a computer screen be an avenue for spirituality and faith? Or, if that is a no-brainer, I wonder how the process of blogging engages persons in a spiritual quest?

Maybe it is the simple discipline of blogging. Again Moll writes: "Blogging is like spiritual journaling in that it is a discipline. About two-thirds of the roughly 10 million blogs are abandoned after two months. It is hard to write every day. It is also like journaling in that it attempts to connect with God through writing."

"The most significant difference is that blogs expect an audience. Bloggers learn quickly that their blogs are public and that the public has an opinion. People like Gordon MacDonald have used journaling as a way to order their private world. Blogs augment our intellect but also record our spiritual journey."

I know that writng something several days a week makes me focus and keeps me alive to what is going on around me. For me, it is not enough to simply see God in our world. I too easily experience a moment and then it slips away. Writing invites me in and calls me to explore the experience, probing for God's hand in the everyday vagaries of life.

Gotta go; coffee's on.



http://www.christianitytoday.com/le/2004/004/4.13.html

Traffic

I'm spending a couple of days in Nashville. One thing is for certain; after a couple of months of living in Atlanta, Nashville traffic is no big deal!

Of course, perception, context, and personal experience flavor points of view. I wonder what i would think about traffic if I had spent my whole life in say, Costa Rica or Tibet?

That being said, I wonder what people might say of church folk who didn't grow up around church folk?