SojoStore - Christian peace and justice resources

SojoStore - Christian peace and justice resources

Code of Civil Conduct

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

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

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

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

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Maslow's Seeking the Higher Potentialities

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

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.