Yardsticks to measure your past life, now, or to sketch what is next

THINKING ABOUT WHAT COUNTS

 There are many ways to shape your life, leaving aside the factors outside of your control like nature (what you are born with) and nurture (how the events and people around you affect things). For example, you can identify some things about influential people in your life or ones you hear about in books, news media and entertainment, or figures from the Bible. Either consciously or in ways you are less aware of, these personalities offer a model or sometimes a pathway to lead you toward the person you become and continue to come to be.

The thirst for meaningfulness (in God's eyes, in peer's eyes, in your own eyes) can be expressed by achievements that are visible or may be intangible and not readily visible to others; kindnesses done for other living things along the road of life, for instance. Dreams or aspirations of one's own or inspired by others may include meaningfulness as the fruit of the efforts as well as costs for that undertaking.

Another major form that people may use to measure success, or its lack, is worldly acumen and rewards produced: the more stuff (or less tangibly, the more experiences) gathered equates the the more achievement. Worldly measures might include consumer victories: satisfaction from bargaining for a good price, avoiding costly monetary liability, freedom from debts, and so on. Or the trophies might fit the bumper sticker, "The person who dies with the most stuff wins."

Doubtless there are many other ways to estimate one's own value among the living, but from the Rabbi Jesus example, perhaps relationships and lives touched by one's efforts - either adding net positive things to those lives, or by lessening the negative parts of those others' lives - are the best yardstick for knowing your measure.

Analytically, the motivators of meaningfulness, material shrewdness, or building relationships of depth and breadth can be discussed independent of each other, but going about one's day or lifetime these all work together, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. And yet, even if it is artificial to separate these from each other, doing so helps to make clear which mindset leads the others at any moment: is your decision based on maximizing utility (homo economicus) and pressing the levers of political economy, or is the main organizing principle for why you are driving your life in a particular direction mainly about meaningfulness, something that resonates as the main point which positions all else in secondary or dependent roles. Or maybe the lens through which you see the world and view your own self, as well, is concerned with quality of relationships, the ways that one person helps another to bridge difficulties, grow into a bigger person, do the right thing, and pay forward or pay back blessings they have known. Of course this same discussion of individual lives can also be broadly projected on the various zeitgeist of a certain generation or century; or indeed upon a whole culture, language, or society - what is primary and what is regarded as secondary in lifetime worth?

No matter which current flows strongest in your life at a given stage, the others will be also be present because even the holiest aspirations and intentionality takes place in a world of gravity, calories, hungers and thirsts. So material circumstances cannot simply be dispensed with. Nor can the deep-rooted desire to express and recognize meaningful words and deeds. As for living and loving relationships, there must necessarily be good days and bad days; not forever frozen and unchanging in tone and texture.

Having a yardstick, or at least being aware of the one you most often turn to, is an important step in assessing, estimating, comparing and discussing earlier situations and also for planning the future use of time and energies that give shape to the life that you now live and the one that you want to live in days to come.

Christians for risk: in love, in faith, in relationships

leaping fish heads up the ladder, unknowing what follows this next step - 49503 Z.I.P. code

The the right of center this freeze-frame taken from fall equinox at the Grand Rapids, Michigan fish ladder shows a coho salmon heading upstream during the annual spawning season. It makes a good illustration of the "theme music" for Christianity: risk, pressing beyond what is familiar and possibly free of conflict or uncertainties. The quotation about the duty of newspapers has also been adopted by leaders of church communities, as well, "To comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable" (attributed to Finley Peter Dunne, 1902). But what does it mean to own this shaky side of Jesus-following?

strangers and friends sometimes swap places - but Jesus was friend to all

Faith is one of the pillars for spiritual growth, along with Hope and Love (charity; karitas). What all these have in common is the opportunity, or perhaps requirement, to step beyond the things that one is certain about, to take chances in being disappointed, injured, or worse. Stated inversely, without some risk to yourself and your beliefs can the faith, or hope, or love be true and authentic. By extension of the life told of the rabbi from Nazareth, if his divinity was a secret super-power and nothing was ever risked in the Temptation by Satan, or in the many public ministries, then can we truly say he was one of us mortals? Loving truly involves the risk of being hurt. Exercising faith truly involves the risk of being hurt or confused or daunted. Hoping truly involves the risk of your heart being broken. In this same spirit of chancing failure (in human eyes; not God's eyes, since forever and all ways you are loved), there is a delicate touch required when growing spiritually: not gripping too hard on the parts of The Way that you know best, but being willing to let go or let slip those things that first seemed to be absolute, tidy, streamlined verities. For as soon as you congratulated yourself for having things figured out, comprehending the wholeness of a teaching or commandment, that is the time that you have boxed yourself in. Understanding something infinite is too big for one person's experience to encompass. So the best way to develop spiritually is to seize upon bigger and better comprehension, but all the while remain vigilant and seeking after more and better ways to engage with Creation and the Creator.

Spiritual but not religious

Pew surveys of the society and its changes use the term "spiritual but not religious" to mean that the person considers him or herself to be not affiliated in an organized, established body of believers and yet does remain receptive and maybe responsive to something bigger than human powers; something worthy of respect and seeking after (worth-ship or worship); and accepts some point of reference to remind her or himself of humbleness and human dignity.

There are clergy, ordained or lay, who also make a distinction between Christianity and Church-ianity (or Church-inanity). That is to say, overzealous of rituals can redirect one's attention and love from the Spirit of the Law to the Letter of the Law, similar to the imagery in the Bible to describe "white-washed tombs" that are righteously bright and bold on the surface, but which contain only death on the inside. In other words, organized religions of any civilization can blur the lines between the form but lose sight of the intention and heart of the teachings and the way of living that the particular body of belief and believers aim to embody day in and day out.

The illustration attached here comes from translate.google.com when typing 'spirit' on the English side and calling up the Hebrew words that cover each sense of the word. Clearly, there are many different words in Hebrew, and thus many distinctions or facets of meaning to mark with differing word roots and pools of meaning. This example of the many sides of 'spirit' suggests something about the "spiritual but not religious" phenomenon. Even before that expression came to be, perhaps there have always been people unwilling to commit to the forms of organized religion available in their society. Observers have said that it is the most skeptical people who take longest to come to a decision about their relationship to religious practices that come down the generations. Very often these are the people who turn out to be the strongest advocates for that religion if/when they do come around to it. By contrast, those who are born into the body of belief may take everything in like Mother's Milk, without giving the matter a lot of thought and who are satisfied with the sense of belonging and habit that comes from unexamined acceptance; without scrutiny.

Before the phrase "spiritual but not religious" was coined, those people would keep one ear open to the institutional religion and the other ear open to other sources of guidance, truth, and respect. They could see value and meaning and truth in much of what they heard in both of their ears, but would not grant exclusive truth value to one source or to the other. This makes sense from a logical or rational way of seeing things: how could Ultimate Truth be contained or comprehended by one exclusive set of words and ideas, one religion over another? Yet in order to speak the language of spiritual things, a fixed set of vocabulary and ideas has to be engaged with: it matters less the particular religious language that you adopt and gain fluency in than the fact that you do engage with some specific body of belief and not remain idle in limbo, paralyzed from making a commitment by the abundance of choices and possible truths.

As the long set of Hebrew nouns for 'spirit' suggests, there are many aspects of the spiritual world and spiritual maturation and development that connect with this topic. Being open, hearkening, and seeking after truths in the span of a single lifetime is a fundamental part of building a life of meaning and humanity. For many people there is advantage in clinging to an elaborated and established form of religious tradition or community of faithful people. But for many others there is self-criticism (I am not worthy enough or righteous enough), lack of trust (unable to rest in the truths), anxiety about committing to a single path and foreclosing other ways, or a distaste for the sense of exclusivism that draws boundaries between self and others. And so the category of self-identifying as "spiritual but not religious" continues to grow, while the organized, institutional religious shrink to a smaller but more committed core of purposeful followers of their own faith community's ways. The delicate balance remains a living thing: between grasping confidently and firmly one exclusive way to worship and grow, on the one hand, and yet loosen that grip to allow other things to come to hand, on the other hand. Put another way, it is important to speak confidently and in full trust in what is righteous, but at the same time to remain humble and openhearted, ready to listen and to care. In other words to go forward, one has to know the truths of all ages, and also not know things with any finality; to be certain but also uncertain. Definite but not foreclosing other views.

"...in life, in death, O Lord - Abide With Me"

Those much loved words of comfort and supplication from Abide with Me have risen to life at many memorial services and funerals since the 1847 lyrics of a man dying from tuberculosis met the melody of the composer in 1861, around the time of the U.S. Civil War.

How do wires connected to dead Sitka spruce relate to the hymn, "Abide with Me"?

Daily we walk the city streets where overhead lines bring telephone, electrical power, cable TV, and Internet to individual households. But only today did the illustration of the role of dearly departed friends and family come into sharp focus.

The strong upright tree trunk standing here long after its life has ended is something like a person loved by others who now lives no more. And yet the many relationships, memories, and other connections that touch on that person continue to live on. In other words, even the dead continue play a part in the lives of those left behind, much as this long-gone tree continues to connect the surrounding homes and businesses with services and survival: you don't have to be eternally present to exert a presence and provide meaning to others.

God is Love; but Love is God, too?

The rhetorical masters of ancient Greece listed all the persuasive moves and structures in a person's speaking. One of these is called Antimetabole, the flip-floping of word order to come up with a sometimes refreshing or sometimes startling inversion: God is Love; Love is God. (ὁ θεὸς ἀγάπη ἐστίν)

The passage in 1 John 4:19 is what the Tuesday Men's Bible Study read and riffed on today. Instead of quoting the familiar KJV or NIV, though, here is BibleGateway.com where many versions of the text can be displayed side by side, or simply looked up individually. Looking at the HWP, Hawai'ian Pigin, currently only published for the New Testament gives an unfamiliar voice to these familiar words about "love is..." The spelling is phonetic (e.g. brudda =brother) and there are a few Polynesian words that might not be known to most English readers (e.g. ohana =community/family). But by sounding out (speaking aloud) the text, the passage will bring to mind John's words. Even though HWP will be inconvenient, requiring slow pace and careful sounding-out the words, there is a directness, raw and earthy embrace of the heart of the meaning that is worth the effort (click the image for full-size view):

1 Johns 4:19 from https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Numba+1+From+John+4&version=HWP

Love has so many senses in English. In the Greek of the New Testament there are the four distinct words (philial =brotherly love, eros =marital love, agape =community love or charitable, storge= family love). But in our consumer 2019 there is love of country, NASCAR, wood smoke, pristine snowfall, as well. Like so many other instances of physical experience in the material world, any given element or relationship structure can be perverted to misuse or abuse the thing, too. So there will be cases of false love; something that might resemble love at first blush, but --like the concept of Truthiness (seems like Truth, but in the end not so)-- these manifestations turn out to be mistaken, lacking the essential life that makes the love true in the "God is Love" sense of sincere, abiding, firm, and so on.

So with that caution about being vigilant to discern love from love-ish imposters, there is some merit is taking "God is Love" and turning it around to say that "Love is God," that is, in the small ways and big ways that one's day is peppered with situations the exhibit and express love between people at play, at work, fully immersed in creative effort or in a casual moment of joy or reflection; in all these glimpses of Love, there, too, is God. God is present when Love is present. Where there is Love, so, too, there is God. Looking at the world at hand today and the worlds seen in mass media far away or from times long ago, suddenly all the instances of love stand for God's place, side by side in those blessed times. Turning the argument upside down by acrobatic logical gymnastics and saying, "where there is no love, there is no God" ignores the idea of ever-present God, in good times and bad; in sickness and in health, in prosperity and in poverty.

In the end, despite the shortcomings of playing around with rhetoric and logical, linear verbiage, this "God is Love; Love is God" exercise does stimulate a fresh vision: that every time a feeling of affection, esteem, and connection arises, it can be a reminder of God's own basis for relating to the creatures of the Earth, whether the two-legged kind, or the many, many other kinds. Since most people grow accustomed to a certain manner of thinking, and routines of response, by flip-flopping the "God is Love" phrase there comes a chance to re-think, re-view, and re-embrace that foundational way of being in the world. Similarly, the unfamiliarity of a Bible translation like HWP can spur a person to re-think, re-view, and re-embrace one's relationship to The Word.

Heartology - the study of the (human) heart

intersecting moment

Many times the place where one's awareness resides is an intersection of heart (feeling or non-verbal awareness and responsiveness) and mind (verbal, sometimes logical or rational and rationalizing) and spirit/soul (something outside of narrow Ego prerogatives). Even though the words are spelled differently and stem from different etymological roots, they sometimes seem to touch a a shared something. Different languages can split analytical hairs and break apart experiences or feelings into named components, but the raw sensation or (re)cognition of something may be a single, monolithic thing, rather than fragmented component facets.

The time of the primitive or early eklesia of Jesus followers involved Greek speakers and Aramaic or Hebrew speakers, among many others. But the traditions of Greek thinkers tended to split things analytically, fracturing and producing insights and knowledge; sometimes also wisdom from that base of knowledge. In modern Japanese the word 'kokoro' combines heart/mind; emotional responses as well as presence of mind. Today in English there is a conceptual split in mind-body, as well as mind-heart. But in the time before these distinctions a person was a unitary presence; all these components were taken as inseparable.

Since so much of a person's spiritual growth is rooted in one's heart, it would seem to be fruitful to develop a science of the heart, or heartology; maybe some characteristics would come from creatures other than human, for that matter, too. A beginning point for any field of knowledge is vocabulary or nomenclature. Free-association for words containing 'heart' or whose meaning is adjacent or implied of heart includes these.

heartful . heartless . encourage . dishearten . hearty . heartful. heartening . heart-breaking . down-hearted  hard-hearted . cold-hearted . warm-hearted - big hearted - black hearted . discourage .  care . careful . uncaring . careless . cordial . haven't got the heart to . sacred heart . precious heart . heart of gold

These words will carry several common threads. One of the common strands is that the person is fully open and present to the other's condition; responsive to the joy or sorrow of the other, somehow joining in or mirroring/echoing that condition. Sometimes there are mixed feelings of misgiving, but hope; trepidation but fortitude, love and hate, respect but dislike, and so on. By looking more deeply at the pool of closely-related, as well as more indirectly-related terms it is possible to collect examples of situation when these are expressed, in addition to digging into the word roots for clues to the ground from which the words have grown across the centuries. Taken all together, the context of usage and of history, the broadest picture emerges of what a soft heart and a hard heart consists of, and of the importance of breaking and healing a heart; of self and others.

When you pray.... just think how it would be if...

After a few decades the weekly Men's Bible Study still opens and closes with shared prayer, whether 2 or 3 show up or a full table of 9 or 10 are present. Thinking about the range of topics that some of the men voiced during the preamble, "well, what should we pray about today," and reflecting on the words spoken in the course of bowed heads for the praying itself, there seemed to be a recurring intention or purpose that emerged sometimes. Underneath the petitions, praise, and thanks on matters of healing/health for bodies and for spirits, including specific persons and specific struggles, there was an overarching or underlying urgency that God please draw each person closer in stronger relationship and sweeter harmony; that hard hearts remain soft and open to being touched by events in one's own life, as well as in responding with feeling to the events in others lives, whether personally or professionally known or ones farther away whom we do not know closely.

In sum, the bottom line for all of these prayers and all of these decades might be a request to seek God's Will and do his bidding; to listen with care to the direction for one's decisions; to rely on one's heart when looking across the world and when weighing decisions that affect self or one's neighbor. In short, the prayers keep coming back to God is Love; we aspire to be more like God/Jesus and thus overflow in expressing (agape) love of others; and in achieving this posture and outlook in our engagement of the places we find ourselves, thereby to grow deeper connection and stronger feeling with God's Will.

Suppose for a moment that these recurring, ultimate intentions are carried out; that more and more people successfully navigate their lives and relationships by leading with their hearts, not greed, fear, (self) loathing, or some other strong force. How would household life differ; congregational aspirations change; wider community habits and responses to crisis or stress by altered; indeed, how would state and (inter)national decisions proceed differently to different purposes/outcomes to the way things run now with reference to GNP, quarterly profits for shareholders, and externalized costs that a company leaves for future generations to clean up.

Being foreign to this World - book of 1 Peter

screenshot from BibleGateway.com

Lots of wondering points came up in the weekly Bible reading of 1 Peter’s 2nd chapter. The list of bad behavior springing from who you are deep down reads like the reverse of “fruits of the spirit” that grow from seeking God’s Way. The NIV lists these terrible things as …” rid yourselves of all malice and all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander of every kind.” And the Hawai’ian Pidgin verse gives …”No do no bad kine stuffs. No bulai nobody. No say one ting an do anodda. No get jealous. No talk stink notting.” Still another voice (E. Peterson’s The Message), …”Make a clean sweep of malice and pretense, envy and hurtful talk..” here is the link to those comparative verses at BibleGateway dotcom.

Since Peter’s letter is addressing house-churches far from Jerusalem with mixed congregations of Jews and Gentiles, perhaps some of those attending were in the habit of sorting their peers into who is more holy or righteous or closer to God than the others; for example, would it not be natural to project onto the Jews a bit more affinity to the legacies of Rabbi Jesus? How is this human habit addressed in the followers of The Way?

In languages spoken and written today, often there is a distinction between spoken and written version of the language, since the voice, face, and context all contribute to conversational interchange, but only punctuation marks and word order can speak on the written page. So the many iterations of Bible verses and also the letters circulated to early churches would have been the stiff style of written, not spoken teachings, right? And when the Greek source texts later went into Latin or all the vernacular languages, then this formal style was conserved, right? But to have lived in the presence and preaching, teaching, healing and blessing of Jesus or his nearest contemporaries and companions would have been all in the spoken voice; not the thundering cadences of KJV, for instance - beauteous though it was frames in the early 1600s. How ever could one go about reconstituting the conversational style of the teachings, parables, etc?