K-M Musings

2011-11-16T07:14:00.000-08:00

This Sunday we will wrestle with the paradox of Christ - the non-violent One, killed by the hand of earthly powers- declared King by Paul and in the text of Matthew's Gospel in the Great Commission. How can Christ be both victim and ruler?

Occupy All Street?

2011-11-10T19:03:00.000-08:00

The Only Cure by Helen Caldicott

2011-10-05T07:31:00.001-07:00

The only cure is love.
I just walked around my garden. It is a sunny, fall day and white fleecy clouds are scudding across a clear, blue sky. The air is fresh and clear with no taint of chemical smells, and the mountains in the distance are ringed by shining silver clouds. Earlier I picked a pan full of ripe cherry guavas to make jam, and the house is filling with the delicate aroma of simmering guavas. Figs are ripening on the trees and developing that gorgeous deep, red glow at the apex of the fruit. Huge, orange-colored lemons hang from the citrus trees, and lettuce, beet-roots, and cabbage are growing in the vegetable garden....
It is clear to me that unless we connect directly with the Earth, we will not have the faintest clue why we should save it.
Source: If You Love This Planet

The Kenyon Review — The International Journal of Literature, Culture and the Arts

2011-10-01T14:54:00.000-07:00

David just published poetry at Kenyon Review Online
The Kenyon Review — The International Journal of Literature, Culture and the Arts

Faith Distribution by State

2011-09-01T11:42:00.000-07:00

Check this out to see what percentage each faith community has in each of the US states. Thanks to Harold Guess for this.

Bible Study to Begin in September

2011-08-17T18:38:00.000-07:00

Beginning on September 13 we will be having a new Bible study at University Christian Church in Austin Texas. The Tuesday noon studies (brown bag lunch) will run for six weeks with the schedule of the topic and the related Scripture passage below. This blog will be the place where we converse about the topic and where I suggest some readings before the Tuesday sessions. All are invited to join us at 2007 University Ave., Austin, TX. Feel free to telephone 512-477-6104 with your reservation for space. All are invited to chime in on the topics here at this blog regardless of whether or not you are able to make the Tuesday meetings.

Sept 13 Begrudging Generosity Matt. 20:1-16
Sept 20 Question Authority Matt. 21:23-32
Sept 27 Respect My Authority Matt. 21:33-46
Oct 4 Open Invitation Matt. 22:1-14
Oct 11 Caesar's Things Matt. 22:14-22
Oct 18 Language Limits Matt. 22:34-46

Tech tools tackle Biblical scholarship - USATODAY.com

2011-07-02T13:08:00.000-07:00

Fascinating software development that as corroborated some painstaking Biblical scholarship and will open promising avenues for future study.

Tech tools tackle Biblical scholarship - USATODAY.com

Dr. Kevorkian’s Victims - NYTimes.com

2011-06-08T07:41:00.000-07:00

An interesting question....

a right to suicide?

Thought-provoking.

Dr. Kevorkian’s Victims - NYTimes.com

Traveling with Jihad

2011-03-10T06:58:00.000-08:00

Above is Traveling with Jihad on the common roots of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Fine.

The Aggregators are Coming

2010-10-30T20:31:00.000-07:00

The Aggregators are Coming

Joanna Macy links to an ecologically-centered vision for our future

2010-07-17T16:19:00.001-07:00

http://www.joannamacy.net/allexternallinks.html

Poems I Love

2010-07-17T15:54:00.000-07:00

Poems I Love

Excellent Rilke poems!

unbearbeitet

2010-07-17T15:48:00.000-07:00

This looks a lot like an insect I spotted Jan. 15th on a flower potted in our backyard. Yes, it was this iridescent! Anyone know what it is?

Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life

2010-07-17T05:15:00.000-07:00

Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life

'Green' church moves heaven, earth closer - USATODAY.com

2010-07-17T05:12:00.000-07:00

'Green' church moves heaven, earth closer - USATODAY.com

SojoStore - Christian peace and justice resources

2010-07-17T05:09:00.000-07:00

SojoStore - Christian peace and justice resources

Code of Civil Conduct

2010-02-16T12:59:00.000-08:00

There's poster outside my office door that reads, "A modest proposal for peace: Let the Christians of the world agree that they will not kill each other." It is a strangely unsettling challenge to the way things are.

Likewise, the Comment Code of Conduct follows blogs at Soujourners' website to remind would be commenters that especially in Christian circles civil communication is key:

"I will express myself with civility, courtesy, and respect for every member of the Sojourners online community, especially toward those with whom I disagree—even if I feel disrespected by them. (Romans 12:17-21)

I will express my disagreements with other community members' ideas without insulting, mocking, or slandering them personally. (Matthew 5:22)

I will not exaggerate others' beliefs nor make unfounded prejudicial assumptions based on labels, categories, or stereotypes. I will always extend the benefit of the doubt. (Ephesians 4:29)"

Rediscovering Tillich

2010-01-29T14:46:00.000-08:00

In getting ready for this coming Sunday's sermon on the first Corinthians chapter 13, I've had an opportunity to dig back into Paul Tillich's book Love, Power and Justice. I first ran across this book more than three decades ago when I was in seminary. I had already been moved by a great appreciation of Tillich's Systematic Theology, but was transfixed in a very special way by this small book on the ontology of love, power, and justice.

It has been with great delight that I have been rereading this; remembering some long-ago learnings; understanding for the first time passages that did not make sense those decades ago; and being able to understand the realities the book points towards in new ways since I am a very different person in this reading.

The Disappearing Woman

2010-01-29T14:22:00.000-08:00

I had the oddest experience today. Early afternoon I had gone to the Wells Fargo bank to deposit some checks. When I walked out the front door of the bank and looked towards where our car was parked -- only about 30 feet-- I had the impression of someone walking past the driver side door of the car and peering in. It wasn't unsettling or odd. I glanced to the left just to make sure that I wasn't going to walk into anything or anyone and when I look back slightly to the right at the car, the apparition was gone. At first I couldn't believe there was no one there. I even walked around the car to assure myself that someone wasn't hiding around it because I was so convinced that I had seen someone beside the car. There were no other vehicles or possible hiding places nearby, so clearly no one had actually been there. I have no explanation for what actually happened, but it surely was strange!

Putting the Earth in perspective

2009-08-11T13:14:00.001-07:00

The following video does put some things in proper perspective!
Putting the Earth in perspective

Shared via AddThis

Maslow's Seeking the Higher Potentialities

2009-08-01T17:53:00.000-07:00

There is so much overlap between the work of some transpersonal psychology researchers and our Christian work as practical theologians, that I find the following short summary a wonderful goad.............. CK-M

Here below are excerpts from Maslow's landmark 1969 article, “Theory Z” (re-printed in Maslow's basic text on Transpersonal Psychology, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, NY: Viking, 1972):

Abraham Maslow:… I have recently found it more and more useful to differentiate between two kinds (or better, degrees) of self-actualizing people, those who were clearly healthy, but with little or no experiences of transcendence, and those in whom transcendent experiencing was important and even central…. I find not only self-actualizing people who transcend, but also nonhealthy people, non-self-actualizers who have important transcendent experiences. …

[Transcenders] may be said to be much more often aware of the realm of Being (B-realm and B-cognition), to be living at the level of Being… to have unitive consciousness and “plateau experience” (Asrani [serene and contemplative B-cognitions rather than climactic ones]) … and to have or to have had peak experience (mystic, sacral, ecstatic) with illuminations or insights or cognitions which changed their view of the world and of themselves, perhaps occasionally, perhaps as a usual thing. It may fairly be said of the “merely-healthy” self-actualizers that, in an overall way, they fulfill the expectations of [Douglas] McGregor’s Theory Y [which holds, beyond industrialized society’s idea of Theory X that people are inherently lazy, that people actually do want to work, contributte and achieve]. But of the individuals who have transcended self-actualization we must say that they have not only fulfilled but also transcended or surpassed Theory Y. They live at a level which I shall here call Theory Z.

1. For transcenders, peak experiences and plateau experiences become the most important things in their lives….

2. They speak more easily, normally, naturally, and unconsciously the language of Being (B-language), the language of poets, of mystics, of seers, of profoundly religious men….

3. They perceive unitively or sacrally (i.e., the sacred within the secular), or they see the sacredness in all things at the same time that they also see them at the practical, everyday D-level….

4. They are much more consciously and deliberately metamotivated. That is, the values of Being…, e.g., perfection, truth, beauty, goodness, unity, dichotomy-transcendence, B-amusement, etc. are their main or most important motivations.

5. They seem somehow to recognize each other, and to come to almost instant intimacy and mutual understanding even upon first meeting….

6. They are more responsive to beauty. This may turn out to be rather a tendency to beautify all things… or to have aesthetic responses more easily than other people do….

7. They are more holistic about the world than are the “healthy” or practical self-actualizers… and such concepts as the “national interest” or “the religion of my fathers” or “different grades of people or of IQ” either cease to exist or are easily transcended….

8. [There is] a strengthening of the self-actualizer’s natural tendency to synergy—intrapsychic, interpersonal, intraculturally and internationally…. It is a transcendence of competitiveness, of zero-sum of win-lose gamesmanship.

9. Of course there is more and easier transcendence of the ego, the Self, the identity.

10. Not only are such people lovable as are all of the most self-actualizing people, but they are also more awe-inspiring, more “unearthly,” more godlike, more “saintly”…, more easily revered….

11. … The transcenders are far more apt to be innovators, discoverers of the new, than are the healthy self-actualizers… Transcendent experiences and illuminations bring clearer vision of the B-Values, of the ideal, …of what ought to be, what actually could be, … and therefore of what might be brought to pass.

12. I have a vague impression that the transcenders are less “happy” than the healthy ones. They can be more ecstatic, more rapturous, and experience greater heights of “happiness” (a too weak word) than the happy and healthy ones. But I sometimes get the impression that they are as prone and maybe more prone to a kind of cosmic sadness or B-sadness over the stupidity of people, their self-defeat, their blindness, their cruelty to each other, their shortsightedness… Perhaps this is a price these people have to pay for their direct seeing of the beauty of the world, of the saintly possibilities in human nature, of the non-necessity of so much of human evil, of the seemingly obvious necessities for a good world…. Any transcender could sit down and in five minutes write a recipe for peace, brotherhood, and happiness, a recipe absolutely within the bounds of practicality, absolutely attainable. And yet he sees all this not being done… No wonder he is sad or angry or impatient at the same time that he is also “optimistic” in the long run.

13. The deep conflicts over the “elitism” that is inherent in any doctrine of self-actualization—they are after all superior people whenever comparisons are made—is more easily solved—or at least managed—by the transcenders than by the merely healthy self-actualizers. This is made possible because they … can sacralize everybody so much more easily. This sacredness of every person and even of every living thing, even of nonliving things … is so easily and directly perceived in its reality by every transcender that he can hardly forget it for a moment.

14. My strong impression is that transcenders show more strongly a positive correlation—rather than the more usual inverse one—between increasing knowledge and increasing mystery and awe…. For peak-experiencers and transcenders in particular, as well as for self-actualizers in general, mystery is attractive and challenging rather than frightening. … I affirm … that at the highest levels of development of humanness, knowledge is positively, rather than negatively, correlated with a sense of mystery, awe, humility, ultimate ignorance, reverence, and a sense of oblation [surrender to the Divine].

15. Transcenders, I think, should be less afraid of “nuts” and “kooks” than are other self-actualizers, and thus are more likely to be good selectors of creators (who sometimes look nutty or kooky). … To value a William Blake type takes, in principle, a greater experience with transcendence and therefore a greater valuation of it…. A transcender should also be more able to screen out the nuts and kooks who are not creative, which I suppose includes most of them.

16. …Transcenders should be more “reconciled with evil” in the sense of understanding its occasional inevitability and necessity in the larger holistic sense, i.e., “from above,” in a godlike or Olympian sense. Since this implies a better understanding of it, it should generate both a greater compassion with it and a less ambivalent and a more unyielding fight against it….

17. … Transcenders … are more apt to regard themselves as carriers of talent, instruments of the transpersonal, temporary custodians so to speak of a greater intelligence or skill or leadership or efficiency. This means a certain peculiar kind of objectivity or detachment toward themselves that to nontranscenders might sound like arrogance, grandiosity or even paranoia…. Transcendence brings with it the “transpersonal” loss of ego.

18. Transcenders are in principle (I have no data) more apt to be profoundly “religious” or “spiritual” in either the theistic or nontheistic sense. Peak experiences and other transcendent experiences are in effect also to be seen as “religious or spiritual” experiences….

19. … Transcenders, I suspect, find it easier to transcend the ego, the self, the identity, to go beyond self-actualization. … Perhaps we could say that the description of the healthy ones is more exhausted by describing them primarily as strong identities, people who know who they are, where they are going, what they want, what they are good for, in a word, as strong Selves… And this of course does not sufficiently describe the transcenders. They are certainly this; but they are also more than this.

20. I would suppose… that transcenders, because of their easier perception of the B-realm, would have more end experiences (of suchness) than their more practical brothers do, more of the fascinations that we see in children who get hypnotized by the colors in a puddle, or by the raindrops dripping down a windowpane, or by the smoothness of skin, or the movements of a caterpillar.

21. In theory, transcenders should be somewhat more Taoistic, and the merely healthy somewhat more pragmatic. B-cognition makes everything look more miraculous, more perfect, just as it should be. It therefore breeds less impulse to do anything to the object that is fine just as it is, less needing improvement, or intruding upon. …

22. … “Postambivalen[ce].” …Total wholehearted and unconflicted love, acceptance, … rather than the more usual mixture of love and hate that passes for “love” or friendship or sexuality or authority or power, etc.

23. [Transcenders are interested in a “cause beyond their own skin,” and are better able to “fuse work and play,” “they love their work,” and are more interested in “kinds of pay other than money pay”; “higher forms of pay and metapay steadily increase in importance.”] Mystics and transcenders have throughout history seemed spontaneously to prefer simplicity and to avoid luxury, privilege, honors, and possessions. …

24. I cannot resist expressing what is only a vague hunch; namely, the possibility that my transcenders seem to me somewhat more apt to be Sheldonian ectomorphs [lean, nerve-tissue dominated body-types] while my less-often-transcending self-actualizers seem more often to be mesomorphic [muscular body-types] (… it is in principle easily testable).

[Maslow concludes:] I have found approximately as many transcenders among businessmen, industrialists, managers, educators, political people as I have among the professionally “religious,” the poets, intellectuals, musicians, and others who are supposed to be transcenders and are officially labeled so…. Any minister will talk transcendence even if he hasn’t got the slightest inkling of what it feels like. And most industrialists will carefully conceal their idealism, their metamotivations, and their transcendent experiences under a mask of “toughness,” “realism,” “selfishness”… Their more real metamotivations are often not repressed but only suppressed, and I have sometimes found it quite easy to break through the protective surface by very direct confrontations and questions.

Meeting with Icons

2009-06-22T19:51:00.001-07:00

Today I arrived in San Antonio for the first of two days at the International Conference of Renovare', a spiritual renewal organization that I have followed and appreciated for 15 years now. The chief impact of the day was the chance to see in person two of the icons of this very ecumencial spiritual growth movement, Richard Foster and Dallas Willard.

I've read a considerable amount by both of these authors and have always been impressed by how they connect so well with liberal, conservative, and the wide spectrum between. It was fascinating at the end of the day to compare my expectations of what these leaders would be like with what they actually seemed like up close and personal.

Let me be a bit confessional here. Sometimes I've teased my wife, Becca, for her desire to brave any obstactle to have an in person encounter with someone she admires: policitian, musican, theologian, or writer. She's made considerable sacrifices to have those opportunities happen. Most of those times I've chided her saying that those in-person encounters don't match to the recorded varieties, whether we are talking about recorded music, written theology, or a DVR up close interview with her beloved Obama.

I'll eat a little crow today. This has been a day of revealing. Being in the presence of Willard and Foster has changed my understanding of who they are. In both cases the new version of the writers is more human, less plastic, less perfect, and somewhat less saleable to the wide spectrum of Chrisitianity.

That said, now that they are human again, I'm interested to revisit their writings and see what new light comes shining through these now new-to-me writers.

UCC Goals for 2009

2009-03-22T14:11:00.001-07:00

Go to the address below for Pastor Kutz-Marks' goals for UCC in 2009

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dfwdfhbb_91qqpnvc2

Personal Economics and Spirituality Workshop

2009-03-13T15:53:00.000-07:00

Last night the endowment for creative ministries program committee hosted a gathering Dr. Steven Tomlinson at the green pastures restaurant here in Austin. While we sure dinner together a group of 24 people led by Dr. Tomlinson reflected on the current economic troubles the world is facing and then asked questions about how those stresses and opportunities appeared to those present. The room included many members of University Christian church as well as representatives from the Congregational Church in Austin, University Baptist Church, the University Avenue Church of Christ, Central Christian Church. Dr. Tomlinson had us focus and on three basic questions:
- How bad could it get?
- What does faith have to do with it?
- What is the best thing that could happen?

The conversation was fascinating and took many turms. People present seemed engaged and challenged by new ways of looking at the matters at hand. Of note, Bert Crowson from University Avenue Church of Christ reflected on an acronym for hope: Holding Onto the Perspective of Eternity. Later in the session he gave another potent quote, “where there is heart room, there is house room.: This was a quotation that his mother offered to say that there would be space in their home for those who need it because they based their family on compassion.

It was a fascinating evening and a wonderful beginning as we make preparations for the April 26 workshop at University Christian church that Dr. Tomlinson will be leading. For those interested in hearing more about the matter, please go to the following web address www.ucc-austin.org.

Vladimirskaya

2008-12-10T19:12:00.001-08:00

Vladimirskaya
Originally uploaded by jimforest

I ran across this enchanting icon related to the Magnificat sermon work underway. In reading through the photographer's story of the icon, I discovered that he was a resident of Tantur, the Jerusalem study center that I stayed in in 2004! His story....

An extract from Praying with Icons

.... A small hope that Nancy and I brought with us was that we might find a hand-painted icon in Jerusalem, and we did. On our very first day in the Old City, in the window of a dingy shop near the Jaffa Gate, a small icon of Mary and the Christ Child caught our eye. It was a hundred dollars, the Palestinian owner told us -- not much for an icon, but at the time it seemed more than we could afford. We hesitated, and not only because of our meager financial resources. Other shops in Jerusalem were full of icons, though even our untrained eyes could see that most of them were hastily painted mass-production jobs that had been "aged" in ovens. We decided not to hurry, yet week after week we looked with gratitude at that one haunting icon whenever we passed the shop -- until one day it was gone, and then we grieved.

A week later I went into the shop and asked the owner if he might have anything similar. "Similar! I have the very icon. No one wanted it so I took it out of the window." He quickly found it. Asking him to keep it for me, I gave him a ten dollar bill and the next day returned with the rest. I wrapped the icon in a freshly washed diaper (Anne was still a baby) and took it back to Tantur.

Graced by that small icon, our apartment became a different place. I remember carefully unwrapping it and Nancy lighting a candle. What better way to receive an icon than to pray? That was clear. But what prayers? We recited the Te Deum from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. We read Mary's Magnificat. Just a few days before we had bought a Jewish prayer book and easily found several suitable prayers addressed to the Creator of the Universe. We recited the text of the Litany of Peace [endnote: The text in including at the end of the Daily Prayer section at the end of this book.] used in the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. We sang a Protestant hymn Nancy knew from her childhood, growing up in the Dutch Reformed Church. Never was there a more hodge-podge service, such an awkward, Marx Brothers beginning; but whatever the moment lacked in elegance was more than made up for in gratitude.

Later we showed the icon to a Roman Catholic priest who admired the Orthodox Church and was well-versed in icons. It was Russian, he told us, and had the name "the Vladimir Mother of God" because the prototype had for many years been in the Russian city of Vladimir. He guessed ours was 300 years old, possibly more. "Tens of thousands of Russian pilgrims came to Jerusalem in the nineteenth century, many of them walking most of the way," he said. "Probably one of them brought this along and it never found its way back to Russia." He told us it was worth far more than we had paid for it and could only have come to us as a gift of the Mother of God.

Whether he was right about the age of the icon, its provenance or its material worth to collectors, I have no idea. It doesn't matter. What he was certainly right about was that it was Mary's gift to us.

Praying with Icons web page:
incommunion.org/forest-flier/books/praying-with-icons/

Uploaded by jimforest on 12 Aug 05, 7.13AM PST.