spirituality

I want to share my article with you. This is about the link between Mind and Social / Environmental-Issues. The article is directly related to Spirituality. The fast-paced, consumerist lifestyle of Industrial Society is causing exponential rise in psychological problems besides destroying the environment. All issues are interlinked.

Today the New-age version of Jesus is very popular within society in general. Why is this? During the 19th century there was a cure for hooping cough which said you cut off the hair of the person with the cough and fed it to a dog found in a church graveyard. There is still a power accoisated with the church but it was wraped in supperstion. Why is this? During the dark ages people would buy supposed bits of the cross, apostles bones ect. Why is this?

My thought is this: we have lost the mystery of our faith over the generations. We are so badly want answers that we have neglected truth. We so want to understand what type of road we are walking on (what its made of, how long it is, ect) that we have forgoten the destination. There are just to many neatly packaged thoughts in these times. Examples inclued:

My maxim has long been that "All truth is God’s truth" and I’ve attempted to live in such a way to demonstrate that belief. I was responding to a friend’s blog the other day when I suddenly stopped and questioned one of my core beliefs. I asked:

Surely our ability to deal with the truth we have (what we do with knowledge) is more important than what knowledge we have?

Now that I phrase it like that, I wonder how it fits into the creation stories. What do people in the community think? Is knowledge (such as ‘’the knowledge of good and evil’‘) sinful in itself or does it take willfull action based on that to become sinful?

How can we account for the widespread violence (physical, emotional, and spiritual) over the past 2,000 years among the followers of Jesus—the greatest proponent of non-violence that the world has ever known?

I think it has to do with evolution. We are still evolving! And progress is not always linear—two steps forward, one step back.

The "worldly" behavior that the New Testament discourages (particularly violence) can be observed in chimps, gorillas, and other primates.

If we saw ourselves as apes with a frontal lobe with faulty wiring, maybe we would be more humble, make better choices, and have more inner peace and outer peace.

How can the truth set us free if we don’t know what it is? See what you know about evolution—test your EV-Q (Evolution Quotient) at www.desertspirituality.com (under latest quiz).

Having finished the first, I am working my way though the second of NT Wright’s Christian Origins series and find it an exhilirating, mind and spirit expanding process. I had been hoping to find some padding in the text,which I could skip, but no luck so far (I’m at page 300, only 360 to go).

The controlling story is of course Israel’s exile and exodus and the way in which Jesus recapitulates that in final and definitive form.

I wonder whether the story of Israel is a fruitful template for the individual Christian’s spiritual journey? I could see how my own life could be interpreted as disobedience, exile (into the pain of idolatry of many sorts over many years), the call from God to travel back into his kingdom and then working through that in response to the story of Jesus.

A Story to Set the Stage

The life streams of Bill, Albert and Derek have once again converged on this dreary Monday evening. The three leaders have gathered to connect and share their experiences of God’s presence and activity over the previous week. After a round of lighthearted jabs at Albert (Al, for short) over the results of the U.S. presidential election, Derek suddenly shifts the mood to a more serious note. He is visibly troubled. He takes the initiative and shares that earlier in the week he has had a serious run-in with his boss over the re-assigning of a colleague to a different departmental team (on the grounds that the colleague is “ill-suited to the challenge at hand”). Derek is still reeling from what he perceives as a hasty, slap-in-the-face decision handed down to one of their team’s most respected participants.

Having grown up as a Christian and having been on a quest to “be spiritual” and draw close to God for some 30+ years, I find myself still struggling with how to get there. New forms of spirituality are evolving every day as our world tries to figure out how to get to God.

I was very enthusiastic and driven to let God be the Lord of my life as a young man. I remember reading two books by Jerry Bridges that had a profound impact on me, The Practice of Godliness and The Pursuit of Holiness. I was also involved with The Navigators in my early adult years and they had a significant influence on my spiritual growth. My spirituality was built around the disciplines, a life that could admittedly have become legalistic and mainly focused on what I can do to become spiritual. The topic of holiness is something that has started bouncing around my head once again. Working in a more grace/freedom oriented culture these days, I struggle to figure out holiness in this context. And, as I attempt to engage an emerging postmodern culture, I wrestle with the question of how does holiness fit in? What might it look like today? How does one pursue holiness in a world where every part of holiness is being assaulted?

Evangelical responses to the paradigm shift we are currently experiencing in the western world have focused for the most part on the deconstructionist tendencies of postmodernism. Led by philosophers such as Foucault and Derrida postmodern thinkers have challenged reigning paradigms for the past forty years, demonstrating the inconsistencies and difficulties in many of our most basic assumptions. In evangelical circles deconstruction also played it’s role: we ‘deconstructed church’ and ‘deconstructed faith.’ Critics have noted the negative or reactionary tone in the conversation, and this has caused no small amount of frustration: evangelical writers on the subject (many of whom seem to band together under the name Emergent) have articulated what is it they dislike about the old paradigms and why, but have struggled to articulate what they would like to replace it with.

Keven Macnish

What, therefore, have we to do with questions of philosophy? He to whom the Eternal Word speaks is free from theorizing. Far from this Word are all things and of Him all things speak – the Beginning Who also speaks to us. Without this Word no man understands or judges aright. He to whom it becomes everything, who traces all things to it and who sees all things in it, may ease his heart and remain at peace with God.

Oh God, You Who are the truth, make me one with you in love everlasting. I am often wearied by the many things I hear and read, but in You is all that I long for. Let the learned be silent before You; You alone speak to me.

The more recollected a man is, and the more simple of heart he becomes, the easier he understands sublime things, for he receives the light of knowledge from above. The pure, simple and steadfast spirit is not distracted by many labours, for he does them all for the honour of God. And since he enjoys inner peace he seeks no selfish end in anything. What, indeed, gives more trouble and affliction than uncontrolled desires of the heart?

Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ

This paper does not seek to answer the question, what does spirituality look like in an urban post-modern environment. To be honest, I have considered this for a long time and don’t have the first idea as to how to answer that question, and that is partly why I am here this weekend, to learn from you. Nor is it a tightly-argued philosophical tract – I have written too many of those over the last couple of years and felt like a break. What this paper does seek to address is one potential aspect of assessing how to determine the answer to the question.

On 29 September, 2004, the British Labour Party received a jolt. Bono (Paul Hewson) of U2 fame called upon the party to credibly bear the “weight of expectation,” and do something historic with the Prime Minister’s Africa Commission.[1] He urged them to replace verbal wrangling with money, lots of money, in response to the 6,500 Africans who are dying every day of treatable and preventable diseases. He called it not a cause, but an emergency. It was unnerving because it challenged a spirituality that “makes a fool of our idea of justice, mocks our pieties, doubts our concern and questions our commitment.” It is not about charity, he said, but justice.