NUDGINGS: a journey into the unknown

“We Christians say glibly that we are "saved by the death and resurrection of Jesus" but seem to understand this as some kind of heavenly transaction on his part, instead of an earthly transformation … We need to deeply trust and allow both our own dyings and our own certain resurrections, just as Jesus did! This is the full pattern of transformation.” Richard Rohr     I have a ‘Resurrection Story’ for this morning … well sort of! A computer had refused to turn on and so it was taken to the computer doctor. After a number of days the message was received that the computer had died and please come and pick up the ‘body’ for burial. However once it was safely home again, the owner decided that the computer could be resurrected with the help of running the ‘restore’ disc and some loving care. Now I would like to be able to say this story had a happy ending, but alas the next day found the owner in a store buying a new hard drive to replace the one that had die...

I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth. - Genesis 9:11 If you were in church on the first Sunday of Lent this year, you probably heard this read from the lectern and maybe even preached on. This covenant between God and God’s people was so important to the writers of the Old Testament that there are actually two stories of the flood both intertwined in Genesis 9.   Martin Luther King Jr. took this story and updated it to his time, the 1960s, a time of racial unrest in America. “ It is no longer a choice, my friends, between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence” He saw that the threat of violence had become overwhelming. If anyone tried to meet violence with more violence, they would in all likelihood be killed. And so the choice for violence would lead to nonexistence while the choice of nonviolence had a greater cha...

‘You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope. ’   -Thomas Merton We all know those people who say that they either can’t watch the TV news at night because they won’t be able to sleep or that they have given up following world events all together. Both these statements imply that if the hearers don’t agree then they, the hearers, are obviously not grasping the seriousness of the events or/and are lacking in empathy and compassion. Otherwise they too would be unable to watch. Yes, there are huge problems on the evening news. Yes, no one person can cure even one of them. Yes, it is imperative that we feel disgust and dismay at what we see. No, we can’t hide our heads in the sand and hope it will all go away. Because it won’t!! Perhaps we can’t do anything to stop the bloodsh...

There are many nuggets of wisdom in the writings of Dr. Seuss but perhaps none seem more obvious, but yet are more difficult to put into practise, than this one. After all, we spend our lives, once the innocence of childhood has passed, trying to be someone else. We try to be smarter, prettier, thinner, more interesting, kinder, …you name it, than anyone else. In that trying to be someone we are not, we lose sight of that person who we really are. That person who is so unique that there is no one like them in the whole world! A person who has insights and talents that are crying to be let out - and we keep them locked away because they aren’t good enough, because someone might laugh, because we might be seen as bragging, because we might be seen as wrong! And yet that person, with all those faults and strengths is who we are. It is how we are made to be! Teresa of Ávila actually said the same thing in the 1500s, she just put it a little differently… “ Christ has ...

’ Faith is as powerful a force as science...but far more dangerous’ - I was struck by the above comment as I was reading ‘Voyager’, one of the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon. It was slide so innocuously into the text, that you could very easily let your eyes slide right over it. I had done exactly that and had to reread what I had just read in order to see it REALLY said what I thought it had! Claire who had travelled in time   from the 1960s in Boston to a homestead in North Carolina just prior to the American Revolution, was commenting on the variety of faiths she found there and the dissension caused between them: Anglicans, Catholics, Puritans and Dissenters. It was a time of strong religious beliefs and loyalties, a time when what you believed was more important than life itself and when belonging to the wrong Protestant sect was almost as bad as being a papist in the early colonies. She was, of course, comparing this faith in her own mind with the power of scienc...

The fact is "in the beginning" is no more precise than "once upon a time".  Nancy Ellen Abrams Over the last number of years I have become more and more firmly convinced that our concept of God is a human construct. It is the result of people over the ages from many different culture’s trying to explain their spiritual experiences with only the words and understanding   that were currently at their disposal to help them. The last few months I have found myself deleting unread most of the computer mailings that come from progressive Christianity sites as being uninteresting or not speaking to me. They no longer talk about my concept of God. Instead they talk about a concept that while it was once more less mine, is no longer. I realize that this is a sign of change. Not change within the blogs which I am sure are still sending out the same type of material but rather of a change within myself.  I can no longer read articles that talk about God as a be...

‘By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.’ Genesis 3:19 Most scholars agree that the texts found in Genesis began to be written down sometime in the 10th century BCE and were based on oral and written traditions. It is this verse that is referenced in the Book of Alternative Services during the Ash Wednesday service, ‘Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return’. A few years ago now we attended an Ash Wednesday Service where the words had morphed to ‘Remember that you are stardust and to stardust you shall return’ moving into the cosmology of the 21st century, connecting our bodies with the whole universe. These express the beliefs of a different world view. They both call us to remember that life on this earth is impermanent and fleeting. They call us to pause and to ponder our lives. Which one resonates with you doesn’t matter. What does matter is that...