New Beginnings (Reflections on a New School Year

New Beginnings

The end is never the end, but always in the economy of a God who created us and loves us, the end is a new beginning.  This morning there was actually a touch of fall in the air.  Not a full blown crispness, just a touch.  But that touch was enough to remind me that summer is drawing to a close, that as of today almost all of our children are back in school, from pre-K to college and everything in between.  And, for those of us in the South, we can tell you exactly how many days, hours and minutes it is until our favorite high school or college team hits the gridiron for the first time. 

I have seen so much excitement among the children and teenagers I work with as a priest.  I have seen pictures of the first day of high school taken by the students and their parents, alone and with their best friends.  I have seen pictures of college freshmen, pledging their sorority or fraternity, or joining the college band for the first time.  I have seen pictures of teachers ready for another year of challenge, heartache and joy.  Even though most of us are not going back to school, either to study or to teach, I believe we can share the joy and the excitement of those who are.  If we get too close to them, we too might just be infected with the enthusiasm that will change our lives and maybe even change the world.

I believe that none of us are ever too old to learn and that the day we stop learning is the day we begin to die.  We can learn about life from our friends and on our jobs and in our community involvement.  We can learn about love and joy from the religious community of which we are a part.  I do not use the term religious institution because at our best, we are in fact involved in communities rather than institutions.  We can also learn about awe and wonder, not just from these religious communities, but from the beauty and power of the creation itself. 

Jesus taught that “unless we become like a little child, we will never enter the kingdom of God.  I believe that at least part of what Jesus meant by this is that unless we as adults recapture the joy and wonder of creation and the excitement of finding all things new, that we will miss the excitement of the presence of God in the world and in our lives, even when it is right under our noses.

The writer of the apocalyptic book of Revelation in the Bible, written to give hope to the Christians during the Roman persecutions at the end of the first century AD, assures us that (Jesus) “is making all things new. . . .I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.  To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life.  Those who conquer will inherit these things, and I will be their God and they will be my children (Revelation 21:5-7). Think of this wonderful promise every time a school bus slows you down, or when you send your children or grandchildren out the door for the beginning of each new day.  And as we approach each new day of our own lives, I pray that we remember Jesus’ admonition to the adults of his time and take his words as our own words to live by: “Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.  Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.  And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them (Mark 10:14b-16).

Blessings to you, in the name of the One who makes all things new.

Ben Alford

The Rev. Ben Alford is a retired Episcopal Priest living in Elmore County. He may be reached at benajr@aol.com

Perplexity: the Season of Spiritual Surviving

Some Reflections on Part III of

Naked Spirituality by Brian McLaren

Perplexity: the Season of Spiritual Surviving

Some reflections on doubts, fears,  and questions which affect many of us on our faith journeys.  Brian McLaren gives us a starting point for what I hope will be an ongoing conversation about these important aspects of faith.

McLaren suggests that in this season (of perplexity), “what matters most to us—more than being right, more than being effective—is being honest, authentic, even brutally so. . . .Life itself is no longer the simple war or the complex game it used to be for us.  On our bad days it’s a joke, on our good days it’s a quest and on most days it’s a bit of both.”(p. 142)

            “We’ve grown beyond being dependent infants who look to their leaders for everything, and beyond being somewhat independent children who boast. ‘I can do it myself!’. . . . We will probably come to doubt (our faith) now and may even abandon it for awhile.  At the very least we will need to add a margin for mystery and unbolt some of the structural elements of our faith that have been until now tightly fitted together.  Our faith becomes less the nest and more the quest at this stage, and mention of God evokes feelings of ambivalence.  It’s a great season for honesty and for digging deeper, but not so great for commitment, energy or enthusiasm.”(p. 142)

The longer we live with our faith and study the scriptures the more likely it is for us to ask questions of others, of our faith organizations and of ourselves.  We want to live with our beliefs or lack of beliefs as they are developing and evolving.  We question others, we question scripture and we question ourselves and what we once believed.  At this point in my faith journey, I want to be honest with others, and mostly with myself, about who I am and what I believe and why this is important to how I live.  For me this was and still is an important part of my life’s journey.  It is not always easy, it never gives simple answers, but when I have experienced faith, it is an exciting and life giving faith.  It is during these times in our lives that McLaren believes we begin to ask the questions of God: When did you leave, where are you, are you coming back, when? (p. 149)

            “Hold your when or how long or where before God.  Make space for your disappointment, frustration, and unfulfillment to come out of hiding and present themselves in the light.  Don’t rush (through these times of) spiritual dryness.  The spirit wants to join you. . . .” (p. 155)

            McLaren entitles Chapter 18: “NO: The Void Expands.”  He heads the chapter with a quote from William Temple, former Archbishop of Canterbury, “If you have a false idea of God, the more religious you are, the worse it is for you—it were better for you to be an atheist.” (p. 157)

            This time of doubt and questioning and ‘wandering in the wilderness,’ can be very difficult for those of us who have had a strong faith in God and want more than anything else to maintain or reclaim that faith.  The struggle is to find a way to believe what we want to believe and still be honest with ourselves.  This can often be a time of “the dark night of the soul,” spoken about by St. John of the Cross.  We know what we had, we know what we want, but we do not know how to get it.  “Perhaps by raging against the failed image of God, it will fall, and behind it the true God will appear, the true God to whom Meister Eckhart prayed, ‘save me from god.’” (p.158)

            “This is why doubters, atheists, and skeptics have an important place in the community of faith.  The acid of their critique flows—even though they may not realize it—from their sadness that a truer, brighter, bigger better God isn’t showing up, but only a second rate imposter god.  And their no is a dual rejection.  First, it is a refusal to accept the second-rate imposter god’s presence, and second, it is a refusal to accept the true and living God’s absence.” (p. 159)

            “. . . .We have kept these questions at bay for months, years, even decades. 

·         Why wouldn’t God have chosen to aid a needy person without my intercession

·         How could God create a world where lovers are separated, little girls raped, mothers send sons off to war to be killed or kill sons of other mothers

·         Where we have to nurse children with severe diseases or parents through years of mental illness or dementia” (p. 159)

When my belief in God was unshakeable, I had a difficult time understanding how a person could doubt or be a skeptic, much less be an atheist.  Now that I have traveled through more than one of my own “dark nights of the soul,” I understand completely.  Several years ago I attended a conference led by Fr. Andrew Greeley.  He was asked “why, with as much proof as there is for God, some people just do not believe.”  Acknowledging the existence of proof for God’s existence, Greeley then said, “the reason some do not believe is that there is just as much proof that that there is no God as there is that God exists.”  I found this extremely helpful for me at the point I was in on my spiritual journey.

“You can’t have faith without doubt.  Give up the business of suppressing doubt.  Doubt and faith are two sides of the same thing.  Faith will grow out of doubt, the real doubt.  We don’t pray right because we evade doubt.”(Thomas Merton)(p. 163)

Our doubts are very real and a very important part of our journey.  Trying to pretend like they do not exist and then acting as if they do not does not change how we feel or how we believe.  I have known ordained ministers who have doubts but do not express them because they believe the colleagues do not doubt.  Interestingly, some of those some colleges have the same doubts but do not dare express them for the same reasons.  Better to be open and honest with yourself and others than to pretend for each other.  It is important that we not condemn each other for our doubts and beliefs, because none of us is able to walk in the other’s shoes.  We are called to be companions on the journey, not judges of “right belief.”

            “I often feel that the deep middle of Job has been betrayed by the addition of a shallow preface and dishonest epilogue.”. . . .Human beings have a right to question the divine, but they cannot expect answers—and that even without answers, faith in God endures (p. 163). . . .Learn to live without answers.”(p. 165) . . . . The voice of the Lord comes not with answers, but with a tornado of questions.”(p. 167)

            Job is the quintessential parable about “why bad things happen to good people.”  It attempts to explain that good life can fall apart for anyone and that the strength of the faith or the orthodoxy of their belief does not affect this.  Job’s friends are stuck in the old way of seeing life and try to bring him back to their reality.  Job knew what kind of life he has led and intends to take it directly to God.  He is allowed to do so and questions God and God answers his questions with questions:  “who are you to question God?  where were you when I made the great leviathan?

            Too many Christians have been afraid to question God or doubt God.  We have been told that God will solve all of our problems and answer all of our questions and when that does not happen, then the first thought most of us have is that something is wrong with us.  If we do not have this thought, than many of us have friends or even preachers  like Job’s friends who are more than happy to let us know that, in fact, something is wrong with us.  Our faith is not simple with easy answers for every occasion.  Our faith is dynamic and evolving and exciting and life giving.  This means we have to live with ambiguity and doubts and fears, but these are the very things that open us up to the mystery and mystical life in relationship with creation, with other human beings, and if we are fortunate, with God.  As Jimmy Buffett says in one of his newer songs, “life is not over, it’s just simply complicated.”  And hopefully this discussion is not over either.  I invite you to become followers and to continue this discussion on this blog.

The Journey continues,

Ben

Life is still worth living, it’s just simply complicated

Life is still worth living, it’s just simply complicated

I don’t know if you have been watching the news the past few weeks, or engaging in religious discussions with friends, or looking at the politics of our state or nation, or simply trying to figure out the meaning of life.  I want to share some reflections on these things.  But first, to put things in perspective, a quote from “philosopher and theologian, Jimmy Buffett, “Life is complicated with its if's and ands and buts’. . . . life is still worth living, it’s just simply complicated.”

The issues our nation and state have been struggling with are important but complicated and well meaning people can and do have different opinions on them.  The issues we look at in our religious life can also be complicated and again, well meaning people can have different opinions on them.  I have had several conversations lately both in person and online, many with people with whom I disagree.  The good news is that instead of screaming party slogans at each other, we have gone back and re-read the 14^th, 17^th and 18^th amendments of the U.S. Constitution to see what is really said.  We have gone back and looked at the number of times the debt ceiling has been increased in the past thirty years and how this was done in the past.  What has resulted is that we have learned from each other and from the documents of our nation and from our history.  As I write on Monday, it appears that our Nation’s leaders may well reach a compromise on the debt ceiling and the deficit that will be beneficial to our nation.  “Life is still worth living, it’s just simply complicated.”

In our great state of Alabama there has been a great deal of discussion about the issue of Immigration.  Our State Legislature passed a law during the most recent session that brought both cheers and tears from citizens of our state.  Some of my friends in the legislature voted for the law and other friends in the legislature voted against it.  And both groups are still my friends.  What this has done for me is led me to participate in prayer vigils and walks for peace and justice for all, citizens and immigrants, documented and undocumented, and to read and re-read the new law as I seek to form my opinion about it.  “Life is still worth living, it’s just simply complicated.”  How wonderful that we live in a country where we can disagree, learn from one another and work hard for our beliefs.

Last but certainly not least, because I believe that our politics grow out of our faith, I have carried on an informative conversation with several friends on Facebook about our Christian faith.  About how we worship, how we understand the Bible and God.  We have used our best human words and our best understanding of scripture and not surprisingly, they were not sufficient.  On the whole, this conversation was civil, and when some tempers began to rise, cooler heads took over and calmed the rest of us down.  As you might expect, we did not all agree, but we seemed to be headed toward the acceptance of the “first and great commandment that Jesus took from his Jewish faith and passed on to all of us who follow him:  “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and soul and strength and love your neighbor as yourself.”  Come to think of it, if we all follow this teaching of Jesus, it just might help us deal with the politics of our lives as well!   “Life is complicated with its ifs and ands and buts’. . . . life is still worth living, it’s just simply complicated.”

Blessings and Peace,

Ben Alford

  

Spokesmen For God, by Edith Hamilton

Some Final Reflections on

Spokesmen For God, by Edith Hamilton

1936, The Norton Library

In this thoughtful and progressive book, Hamilton looks out how the 8^th through 6^th Century Hebrew Prophets changed the understanding of God for both Jews and Christians.  In her penultimate chapter, 12, she seeks to summarize not all that the prophets thought, but only what they thought which has value for us today.  Hamilton believes that these prophets were the first to see that love and compassion must belong to the divine.

As we read these prophets, we see that they make no distinction between religion and politics.  This seems to be because they did not think about fitting people for heaven, but about fitting people to make the world a better place in which to live.(p. 234)  “Politics then, was everyone’s religious duty, as was economics.  Problems of poverty and wealth are keenly analyzed in their writings.  Neither did they seem to have much interest in theology:  “they never enunciated a creed or stated a dogma or essayed a definition of anything they believed.  The only test of a person’s religion to which they gave a thought was the way that person acted.”(p. 235)

“Intellectually the prophets’ world is not our world, but that fact does not touch their value to us.  Spiritually they are our teachers.”(p.236). . . . “Uncertainty is the prerequisite to gaining knowledge and frequently the result as well.  Great knowledge does not mean greater certainty. Oftenest the very reverse is true.  We are certain in proportion aw we do not know.”(236)  Even though we have more scientific knowledge than they did in their day, we can learn much from them about the ways we are to relate to God and to God’s people.  “Truths of the spirit are always true and these great teachers of the Hebrew Bible understood them as no others have, and in their works we find ourselves.

Hamilton, believes that the “prophets knew they were spokesmen for God, that they knew that they were nothing before God’s unutterable excellency and glory and yet each one felt that he had come close to God.  “They never entertained the idea of religion as an end in itself, comforting, satisfying aspiration toward inward purity and personal perfection.  And they never said, Believe this and you shall live.  Both of these ways also coud so easily be made substitutes.  Religions way \was different and not easy: Do this and you shall live.  Upon God’s true worshipers rested the tremendous responsibility of making God’s will a reality up on earth.”(p. 238)

What made the prophets different from any others who had spoken for God was that they “saw a world where no man was wronged by another, where the strong shared with the weak, where no individual was sacrificed for an end, where each individual was prepared to sacrifice himself for the end of making what God wished become a realized good.”(p.239)

I close this post by reflecting on what our world would look like today if the Prophets, Amos, Hosea, Micah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Isaiah and Second Isaiah had succeeded in communicating to us God’s Vision for our world.  How would the debt ceiling and debt reduction talks in our country have developed differently than they have?  What would our congress and state legislatures have done differently in dealing with the Immigration issue in our country?  Would the issue have been solved already?   Would we have a Nationwide Health Care Plan that made healthcare available and affordable for all of our citizens?  These and other questions are worth asking ourselves and I believe we have the right to ask these questions of our governmental leaders and expect them to give us answers and to do something about them.  As the prophets believed, I too believe that belief, theology and religion are really about politics, economics and people.

I invite your thoughts on these questions and challenge all of us to seek to live the way of the prophets. 

Ben Alford

Some Brief Reflections on Naked Spirituality

Some Brief Reflections on Naked Spirituality

By Brian D. McLaren

Harper One, 2011

Brian McLaren continues to be a champion of those who have lost their faith, been hurt by their faith, struggle to keep or regain their faith or have reached a point in their lives where faith simply has no meaning for them anymore.  In Naked Spirituality, McLaren begins with the story of Francis of Assisi striping naked in church, in broad daylight, in front of his angry father, as well as in front of the local Bishop.  Francis said to them, “you can have your clothes back, I shall go naked to meet my naked Lord.”

This is a book about meeting our Lord and His Spirit at a time in our history when, for many reasons, this is not always a simple thing to do.  I share with you some of McLaren’s thoughts from the Preface, Introduction and Chapter 1 to give you a sense of how important I believe this book to be.

From the Preface

“This is a book about getting naked—not physically, but spiritually.  It is about stripping away the symbols and status of public religion….and it’s about attending to the well-being of the soul clothed only in naked human skin.”(p. vii)

“At their best, religious and spiritual communities help us discover this pure and naked spiritual encounter.  At their worst, they simply make us more ashamed, pressuring us to cover up more.”(p. viii)

Some reasons a person may want to read this book:

From the Introduction

“You may have come to a point where the word “God” is problematic for you.  You are so dreadfully sick and tired of hearing God’s name overused and abused that you’d rather not add to the commotion.”(p.2)

“You may be spiritually disappointed and wounded; you may feel God has abandoned you, turned on you, left you, and you do not know where to go next.”(p. 2)

You may be, perhaps without admitting it even to yourself, one of the increasing numbers of theologians, pastors, priests, and lifelong Christians who have practically become atheists because of long-standing disillusionment, unanswered questions, and unresolved pain.”(p.2)

“Doctrinal Correctness, institutional participation, and religious conformity won’t suffice anymore.  You need a life centered on simple, doable, durable practices that will help you begin and sustain a naked encounter with the holy mystery and pure loving presence that people commonly call God.”(p.3)

From Chapter 1

“What Many people experience in religious communities on a popular level seems closer to the opposite of love.  Religion as they experience it promotes conflict and selfishness rather than generosity and otherliness.  It teaches them to prioritize their own personal salvation and religiosity over the well being of others.  It reaches practices and beliefs that make some fear, dehumanize, and judge others.”(p. 15)

“A spiritual life is a Spirit life, a life in the Spirit, and Jesus’ life and work come into proper focus when we realize his goal was not to start a new religion—and certainly not to create a new religion that would seek to compete with or persecute his own religion, Judaism!  No, his goal was to fill with Spirit-wine the empty stone jars of religion—his own religion and any other religion.”(18)

When people say, I am not religious, but spiritual, many of them, I think, see what Jesus saw, that the Spirit’s realm of activity can’t be limited to the sphere of religion in general, much less to any particular religion.  The Spirit of God is the fine wine of justice, joy, and peace; the uncontained wind of creativity, comfort, and liberation; the living water of holiness, beauty, and love.  Whenever people encounter justice, joy, peace, creativity, comfort, liberation, holiness, beauty, love and any other good thing, they are in some way encountering the Spirit, or at least the signature or aftermath of the Spirit.  The spirit, then, is bigger than any particular religion, or religion in general.  Nobody has a monopoly on Spirit,

Get that straight and a thousand other things begin to fall into place.  We can put ourselves into the sandals of that woman drawing water from that well, or Nicodemus hearing the wind in the trees, or the disciples tasting that wine drawn from these ceremonial stone jars.  We might just dare to believe that we too can experience the water, the wind, and the wine.”(pp 18-19)

This is an important book for the emerging church of today and if you see yourself in any of McLaren’s descriptions, then I recommend that you jump in to this book with anticipation and hope.

Ben Alford

“How Awesome Is This Place”

“How Awesome Is This Place”

Jacob left Beer-sheba and went toward Haran. He came to a certain place and stayed there for the night. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down. He dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. And the LORD stood beside him and said, "I am the LORD, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring; and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring. . . .." Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, "Surely the LORD is in this place--and I did not know it! . . . How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven." (Genesis 28:10-19a)

As I read this passage over and over last week in preparation for my sermon on Sunday, I was again reminded that all ground is Holy Ground, all places are awesome and every place we find ourselves has the potential to be “the house of God, The gate of Heaven,”  and every experience an opportunity to know God.  I share two of these places and experiences with you.

Last Saturday, July 16, Lay leaders and clergy of the Episcopal Diocese of Alabama gathered at The Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham to worship and to elect a new Diocesan Bishop to succeed our Current Bishop, Henry Parsley.  Our first act was to celebrate the Holy Eucharist, or Holy Communion.  The beautiful Cathedral with red hangings and vestments of the clergy and candles on the altar truly allowed us to experience the presence of the Holy Spirit.  That power of God was so strong that you could feel it and touch it and taste it.  This simple but powerful worship experience confirmed for all of us that “surely the Lord is in this place, it is none other than the House of God.” 

In the powerful presence of God’s Holy Spirit, we then went on to elect our current Bishop Suffragan to become the Eleventh Bishop of Alabama.  A life changing experience of the Presence of God in the lives of all who participated.

The second place and experience I want to share with you is the trip to Zion National Park in Southern Utah which I made with my son, Seth, earlier last week.  The beauty and grandeur of this place named by the Mormons after the Holy mount of God in Israel is overpowering, especially when shared with loved ones.  There is even a court of the patriarchs with peaks named after the same Abraham, Isaac and Jacob referred to in the scripture with which I opened this column.  Seth and I hiked a trial that took us a thousand feet above the floor of the canyon and saw the beauty and felt the power of God’s marvelous creation.  “Surly the Lord is in this place, how awesome is this place, it is none other than the house of God, the gate of Heaven.

My prayer for all of us is that we go through life, always open and expectant of entering the presence of God, even when we least expect it.

Faithfully,

Ben Alford

Fabulous, Friendly, Fun Filled, Freedom Filled Fourth

Fabulous, Friendly, Fun Filled, Freedom Filled Fourth

What a great weekend.  We live in a wonderful country in a wonderful world and God has given us many gifts.  This weekend we celebrated our nation’s independence from England by spending time with friends, new and old, by eating hamburgers and hotdogs and lots of other stuff.  If we were lucky we found some water in a lake or pool or ocean to get into to play and cool off.  Some of us watched the Fourth of July Concert from Washington D.C., some went into town to visit and dance and watch the fireworks and some watched the fireworks on Lake Jordan. 

Our nation was established on the premise that “all men (people) are created equal and that we are endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”  Our founders set the bar pretty high, and we have not always lived up to these noble standards that we have set for ourselves.  When the declaration of Independence was written, men meant men, and only white men at that.  Since that time we have recognized that this document includes women as well as men, and people of color as well as those who looked like the founders of our nation.  This kind of progress takes time, but as we change and adjust, the United States and the world become better places to live.

We have also become a nation where we recognize the founder’s intent to have a separation between “Church and State.”  One of the greatest gifts our founders gave us is the gift to worship God as we choose, or not to worship at all.  Whatever our religion or lack thereof, we are all Americans, dedicated to welcoming “you’re tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to be free,” to quote the inscription on the Statue of Liberty that welcomed many of our ancestors to this country.  We are one of the most diverse nations in the world, religiously, ethnically and politically and the fact that we get along as well as we do is nothing less than a miracle and a gift from God.

On this very special day in our country, my prayer is that we look at the gifts God and the natural resources of this land have given us.  That we give thanks for these gifts, reflect on how we have used them wisely, as well as how we have squandered them, that we look at the ways over our history that we have “treated others as we would have others treat us, and at the ways we have not treated others as they have treated us.  This day of celebration and reflection is an opportunity for us to rejoice in the good we have done and to humble ourselves before God and ask forgiveness for the hurts we have caused others in this nation.

Living in a country of over 300,000,000 people is not easy and there are often difficult decisions to make.  Sometimes we make the right decision and sometimes we don’t.  Independence Day every year gives all of us the opportunity to celebrate, make amends and seek strength and guidance from God to be better next year than we were this past year.

Thanks be to God who gives us memory, reason and skill to serve our fellow human beings in God’s name.  As Jesus said, “the first and greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and strength.  The second is like unto it; love your neighbor as yourself.”

Blessings and Peace,

Ben Alford