Blog Archives

Skinny Dipping Anyone?

7/29/2015

Skinny Dipping Anyone?

Dear old and new friends,

Leaders who abound today in state, church and local communities, either elected or appointed, are usually mangers or administrators. A true leader is the one who bravely does first whatever is desired or needs to be done, and then others follow him or her. When we were young we were attracted to that daring person among us who as he took his clothes off asked, “Anyone for skinny dipping?” We who were imprisoned by our fears, social morals, church laws, parental judgment or personal embarrassment were inspired by the brave one among us who had jumped in naked…and we followed him.

In your youth I’m sure you can recall such persons who because of their daring freedom were looked upon by others as a leader. The principal of this kind of liberation is awareness of the limits of what is possible, then the courage to venture a little way beyond them into what seemed impossible! The impossible can be any number of things; for example, doing something completely contrary to accepted custom. Richard Blechynden, an Englishman, had the tea concession at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. On a very hot July day not a single fairgoer was interested in a cup of hot tea. In Blechynden’s despair to save his business, as an Englishman, he did the impossible…he began selling iced tea! In these hot summer days, the next time you drink iced tea toast its inventor Richard Blechynden, and be inspired to do something impossible.

To do the unachievable requires an open mind. Is your mind opened or closed?

There was a debate in the House of Commons of the British Parliament in 1854 concerning a proposal for the government to fund an office for the collection and distribution of weather data. A British Royal Navy captain, Robert FitzRoy, had been urging Parliament to establish such an office for what he called “forecasting” the weather. An enthusiastic member of the House of Commons proposed such an office saying it could mean someday that they could know 24 hours in advance the weather for London! At that statement such loud, raucous and sustained laughter broke out they had to recess the proceedings.

Be forewarned, since to promote the impossible can make you the target for ridicule and mocking, and therefore you must have a bulletproof heart as well as an open one.

What do you think?

Possible (P)…Impossible (I)…Don’t Know (DK)

Two persons of the same sex can be happily married for life. – (P) or (I) or (DK)

Protestants and Catholics could worship together in the same parish. – (P) or (I) or (DK)

God loves atheists and agnostics as much as devout believers. – (P) or (I) or (DK)

I could have a gay or transsexual person as my best friend. – (P) or (I) or (DK)

After a long life I have the right to choose when and how I want to die. – (P) or (I) or (DK)

I should live my life viewing death as a comma, not a period. – (P) or (I) or (DK)

Undemocratic Love

7/22/2015

Undemocratic Love

Dear old and new friends,

We live in a time of religious confusion and uncertainty when after several thousand years institutional religion is dying. As membership in the major religious churches is rapidly shrinking many are confused if their religious feelings are still valid. Their question is answered by Carl Jung, the great Swiss psychiatrist of our time, who affirmed that the human spirit is “by nature religious.”

If that is true he formulated our wonderment when he said, “Christians often ask why God does not speak to them, as he is believed to have done in former days.” Jung could have responded that today our daily lives are so noisily filled with continuous music, news or entertainment we couldn’t hear God if he shouted at us. Or Jung could have said, “The ears of those of former times were empty except for the living sounds of nature, so they heard God speaking to their non-scientific ears communicating in code by ear-piercing thunder, mystifying inexplicable diseases and an abundant harvest.

Instead wise Carl Jung answered that question with a story! He said whenever he hears that God no longer speaks as in olden times he is reminded of the story of a rabbi who was asked the same question. The rabbi replied, “Nowadays there is no longer anybody who can bow low enough!” And we could answer, “Nowadays there is no longer anybody who bows (period).”

Bowing is an ancient human gesture so it has numerous meanings; it is used both as a greeting and a sign of assenting to a request. It can indicate respect or recognition of another’s rank…and added to a bow before royalty was touching one knee to the floor as in genuflecting. In the rabbi’s story the bowing was an act of worship, and the deeper the head and shoulders were bowed down the more profound the veneration.

All symbolic actions like bowing or genuflecting can easily become hollow and empty of authentic reverence, which is a real temptation for us who had a revolution to be liberated from all that bowing and scraping before nobility. Powerfully imbedded in our American spirit is social equality and classlessness that even influences us religiously. Is our Religious Americanism the reason for half-hearted, hasty if not sloppy gestures of religious reverence? As has been said, “One can tell the depth of a man’s faith by the way he makes the sign of the cross!” If so, then wouldn’t a casual glance at our public worship reveal a rather shallow depth of faith?

So let us consider adopting bowing as a daily sign of reverence. With a slight nod of your head greet with respect all those who serve you in whatever capacity. With a bow acknowledge the Invisible Presence in a beautiful flower or the song of a bird. Employ the same awesomely profound bow you’d make to a storm-damaged black-snaking high voltage cable to your next Divine visitation in the escape from a fatal accident, the innocence in the face of small child or being touched by affectionate bottomless love.

Faith and Doubting

7/15/2015

Faith and Doubting

Dear old and new friends,

The four stories of Nazareth’s Teacher-Rabbi are called the Gospels, from the old English Godspell meaning “Good News.” But honestly wouldn’t we say that some of his teachings are definitely not good news? Perhaps they are good for angels, but for us ordinary humans some of them are just too difficult to keep in our modern society, so we don’t observe them. If you obey “You shall love your enemies” or “Offer no resistance to one who is evil,” you can’t support waging war for even a just cause in defense of your homeland.

He also said about our little domestic wars, “If you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your transgressions.” And the early church’s rule in Ephesians 4:26, “Do not let the sun set on your anger,” challenges many family disputes that continue to last for days or longer. As for forgiving, granting pardon to someone who has betrayed your love and trust may be the hardest. If you are interested in more of his difficult teachings on how to live read Matthew 5: verses 21-48.

Yet the Gospels also have many beautiful teachings, and people have among them their favorite(s)…pause to recall yours. My personal choice of the superlative good news is Matthew 28:17! Only six words long, it is the account of the eleven disciples on the Galilean mountain of the ascension where Jesus had told them to go, and when saw him, “They worshipped him, but they doubted!” What amazingly powerful six words, especially the last three, “but they doubted!” They are the most healing and encouraging of all the good news since hasn’t each of us at some time both worshipped and doubted?

For doubt, Matthew uses the Greek word “Distazo” that carries the idea of standing in two places at the same time or of having two minds simultaneously. One mind states firmly a belief you were taught in childhood, while your other mind skeptically questions whether it is really true today? Typically we resolve the conflict by smothering one voice, and like the disciples, we worship but we doubt. Concerning faith and doubt, there’s an old geriatric joke that’s rich in truth: “It takes more faith to believe that the tissue paper communion wafer is bread, than it is to believe it is the Body of Christ!”

When grey clouds of doubt overshadow your religious experiences, don’t worry you’re losing your faith. To resolve doubting or questioning issues of your faith requires patience. It is similar to loving another, which in the earliest stages of love can be accompanied by doubts that question its validity. Like God, love is invisible; so it’s impossible to be weighed or measured. We are naturally skeptical if we are loveable as our examples of those who are come from Hollywood and the fashion world’s high standards of beauty. So it is natural to wonder, question the genuineness of another’s affection for us. However, I assure you that after 30 or 40 years of experiencing being loved in all circumstances, and in devotedly loving the other, you can have undaunted assurance that you are loved.

What Was It?

7/9/2015

What Was It?

Dear old and new friends,

All of us regardless of our age has walked into a room, stopped, and asked, “What was it that I came into the room for?” This small forgetfulness isn’t a sign of early Alzheimer’s, only proof of good brain housekeeping. The act of passing through a doorway into another room to get something can cause our short term memory to go blank.(1) A vacant brain is unusual and uncomfortable since our brain is typically busy with many thoughts, often back to back like rush hour traffic. As busy people with busy minds we typically accept and adjust to this commonly shared affliction of a blank mind.

However, if we desire we can triumph over this affliction using the following practice. The next time you are about to go into another room for this or that, invoke the assistance of the ancient Roman god of the gate of heaven, Janus. He had two faces, one looking backwards and the other facing forward! Along with being the god of heaven’s gate he was the protector guardian of all front and back doorways, and so his name was given to our doorway first month of the calendar, January.

Shocking, invoking a pagan god! Well, I searched through the long list of Christian patron saints beginning with the letter A. There I found Saint Aya, who in the seventh century as a wealthy Belgian widow who bequeathed all her wealth to a convent. Her heirs contested her will in court, and in the trial Aya spoke in defense of her will in a loud, hollow voice from her tomb. Case dismissed! St. Aya is a patroness of lawyers.

Near the end of the list of saints in the Z’s, I found Saint Zita, a thirteenth century domestic servant of the wealthy Fatinelli family. She would be swept up in ecstasy doing her housework and was mystically generous in feeding beggars at the Fatinelli’s front door. Today Saint Zita is the patroness invoked in the search for lost household keys. In searching from A to Z, I didn’t find a single Christian patron or patroness saint for your front or back door, so we’ll invoke saintly Janus.

He can be an excellent patron for making decisions. Janus reminds us to look backwards at our commitments, projects and duties before looking forward and accepting yet another one. Saintly Janus also can insure us that it isn’t rude, sinful, and not a rebuff or a minor act of violence when to a request we wisely say, “No.”

(1) Research now shows that our brain’s short term memory can only hold a limited amount of information. This requires the brain to constantly move short term memories into various compartments until we need them again or erase them. While this organizing is useful, it can cause problems in our minds whenever we cross over an event boundary like a doorway. To pass through a doorway from one room to another signals our brain to file away our current thought. Without this ongoing self-organizing, when there is something we really need to remember, our brain like our telephone recorder will say, “Sorry, but your memory box is full.”

When Is a Gimme Not a Gimmick?

7/1/2015

When Is a Gimme Not a Gimmick?

Dear old and new friends,

No one wants to be a sucker. That’s why we usually give a stone face and ears to the street beggar asking us for money since we don’t want to be hoodwinked by his scam. Ah, panhandlers and beggars today come to our door almost endlessly by telephone solicitations, mail promotions showing color photos of suffering children, charity pleas from churches and religious groups, and run-and-donate marathons for various diseases. Each of them saying, “Gimme some of your money for….”

A gimmick is slang for any device use to cheat or deceive. It’s not only the sad-faced panhandler in old rumpled clothing with his gimmick who can deceive you; four major cancer charities were recently exposed by federal authorities for stealing millions of dollars from donors! Only a tiny trickle of that money went to cancer research, the vast majority going to extravagant salaries, large bonuses and lavish lifestyles of the scammers.

Who can you trust? Just because the begging is by a church, TV preacher, religious charity, educational or arts foundation, your money can likely not be used as you were led to believe. Each of us lives in a winner or loser society. So we never want to be a loser in card games or charity. The giving of alms to the poor is a major requirement of faithful Muslims and an essential part of a good spirituality since it was encouraged by the Master. So how do we avoid being “taken in”?

Remember those movies where the hero is going down a narrow street in some Arabian city and beggars sitting along the street cry out, “For the love of Allah, alms.” There’s the secret! The money is given as a love gift to God; so regardless how clever the gimmick you never can be a loser or sucker when you give to the Risen Christ in the poor petitioner. Your money to build or remodel your church is given not to your church or some charitable institution, but to God. Then if your church closes down you haven’t wasted your money to help build or remodel it. The same is equally true of the “gimme” street beggar; even if he isn’t actually broke, hungry or homeless your gift to him really isn’t to him but to the Divine Beloved. A frequently repeated complaint is, “Religion is all about money.” Yes, that’s true…it is about how to give it away!

If you are a non-believer or non-affiliated with a religion (56 million), according to a recent Pew Research Center in America poll you now belong to the second largest group (in numbers) behind evangelicals, and I will share a secret with you: By giving ever more lavishly you are inwardly changed. So the next time anyone pleads “Gimme,” be foolishly generous, and your life will be greatly enhanced.

Tallulah Bankhead, a famous movie actress of the 1930’s and 40’s, was renowned for her flamboyant lifestyle. One day she dropped a $50 dollar bill (back then that was a lot of money) into the jingling tambourine held out to her by a man in the Salvation Army. Tallulah waved away his expressions of gratitude saying, “Don’t bother to thank me. I know what a perfectly ghastly season it’s been for you Spanish dancers”!

Skinny Dipping Anyone?

Skinny Dipping Anyone?

Undemocratic Love

Undemocratic Love

Faith and Doubting

Faith and Doubting

What Was It?

What Was It?

When Is a Gimme Not a Gimmick?

When Is a Gimme Not a Gimmick?

Edward Hays

The Haystack

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