Musings

The Tumbleweeds

(a story I tell our grandkids....)

 

“That’s how I roll!”

...hollered Tangler Tumbleweed said as she caught a breeze, bounced off a rock, spun over a mesquite tree, and left Don Coyote in the dust.

“Catch you next time!” Don howled.

“Catch me if you can!” Tangler yelled back as her voice faded in the distance.

She was in a rush to get home to her family.  They had found a nice campsite among some big boulders, sheltering them from the wind.  “My favorite!" she exclaimed with glee as she picked up the scent of dinner cooking on the fire.  Wrangler Tumbleweed, her brother, had four roasted locusts in his tendrils already.  “Hey!” said Tangler.  “Wait till we say grace!” 

“That’s right,” said Mrs. Tumbleweed, their mother.  Mr. Tumbleweed was spreading the cloth on the flat rock that served as their dinner table.  “Put your locusts on the plate first,” he told Wrangler. 

“Thanks for locusts,” said Tangler.  “Thanks for wind,” said Wrangler.  “Thanks for Wrangler,” said Mrs. Tumbleweed.  “Thanks for Tangler,” said Mr. Tumbleweed.  And their tendrils tangled as they reached for the locusts and crunched them in their prickly mouths. 

“Tomorrow we go north,” said Mrs. Tumbleweed.  “The wind forecast says we’ll get 30 miles an hour.” 

“But that’s only if we stick together,” Mr. Tumbleweed declared.  “No taking off on your own, you two!  Remember, Tangler, when you took off on your own and ended up getting stuck in a barbed wire fence?  Ay, yi, yi.  We had to wait a few days for the wind to blow the other direction so we could go back and pull you out!”

“Yeah, I remember,” said Tangler.  “Sure was boring being stuck there for so long.  A plastic bag blew in my face and I couldn't get it off.”

“Yes, and remember, Wrangler, when you went tumbling on your own and got stuck in a cholla cactus?”

“Yeah, that hurt,” said Wrangler. "I'm still picking spines out of my tendrils."

“The family that tumbles together doesn’t grumble together,” said Mr. Tumbleweed.  “So remember, in the morning, before the wind starts blowing, we are going to get ready to go north.”

The next morning, Tangler and Wrangler woke up early and played their favorite game, Tumbleweed, on their phones.  Their tendrils poked quickly all over their screens as they avoided obstacles and leaped and bounced and flew and spun for more and more points.  "56!" yelled Wrangler.  "89!" yelled Tangler.

"Okay you kids.  Enough gaming.  Time for the real thing," said Mrs. Tumbleweed. 

As they packed up their belongings tightly and folded them into the middle of their balls of tendrils, Mr. Tumbleweed spoke.

"Your mom and I have decided that today, Tangler is going to drive."

"What??!!" howled Wrangler.  "She's still too young!" 

"We've been watching her," said Mrs. Tumbleweed.  "She's got great reflexes and is really good at catching the wind.  It's time!"

Tangler's tendrils spread to reveal a smile as wide as all of Texas.

The family bunched and hunched and scrunched until they were one big ball of scratchy, curvy tendrils.  Tangler directed them onto a high spot on top of a flat rock, and waited for the morning wind. 

Don Coyote warily approached.  "That is one big tumbleweed!" he exclaimed.  "Woah, wait a minute!  Is that Tangler in there?"

"Yes!" Mr. Tumbleweed replied.  "She's driving today!  For the first time."

Don Coyote raised his snout to the sky and howled and yipped in celebration.  "Yit-yit-yit wahoooo!" 

"I still don't think she's ready," grumbled Wrangler.

"Oh don't you worry, boy," drawled Don Coyote.  "That sister of yours is ready.  You should have seen her yesterday.  I never saw a tumbleweed dance so fast around a mesquite tree in all my days.  She's ball lighting, that girl!"

They could hear it coming, whistling through the brush.  Don's ears stood straight and his snout poked into the wind.  "Here she comes!  Yaaaaa-yit-yit- yahoooooh!"

"See you when the wind blows south, Don!" hollered Tangler.  The Tumbleweeds rolled slowly at first.  Then they lifted off and rolled in the air, then lightly touched the ground and bounced back up.  Tangler steered them around creosote bushes, bounced them over dry-washes, bounded them around and over hoodoos and rockpiles, picking up speed.

"Wooo-hooo!" yelled Wrangler as the family flew over a little canyon, catching a sudden updraft that blew them to the other side....

 

 

JIM BURKLO
Website: MINDFULCHRISTIANITY.ORG   Weblog: MUSINGS    Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
See the GUIDE to my articles and books
Sr Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California

 

Did God Want Trump to Be... Anything?

 

Did God want me to be a pastor?  Is that why I am one?

 

"I think God calls all of us to fill different roles at different times and I think that he wanted Donald Trump to become president, and that's why he's there," said Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the president's press secretary, this past Wednesday.

 

Let's set aside for now the outrageous proposition that God would choose a cruel, unrepentant habitual liar and philanderer to be the president of any country.  Not even the people of this country wanted him to be president: he lost the popular vote by 2,850,000 ballots.  Instead, let us begin by considering whether God "calls" any of us to do or be anything at all.

 

There is a deeply rooted belief in most branches of Christianity, including the progressive one from which I dangle, that some people get "called" to ministry by God.  This never made sense to me, even though I had experiences along my path to ministry that surely could fit the usual descriptions of such a "call".  I had mystical moments in my childhood.  Religion always mattered to me.  I got goosebumps in calculus class at the university when the professor described the concept of the limit, in which the function gets arbitrarily close to the curve - it reminded me of getting arbitrarily close to God in mystical prayer.  That was the moment when I decided to go to seminary.  Did God call me to ministry that day?  Or did I have an encounter with God, which then got me excited about studying theology, which then led to considering church ministry?  My attraction to God certainly had something to do with my attraction to ministry.  But a person can be just as attracted to God without feeling any urge to clerge. 

 

I take full responsibility for my career choice.  I am far too in awe of God to claim that divine intervention or preference had anything to do with it.  I think this "call to ministry" business is hubris, contrary to the religion founded by that humble man, Jesus. 

 

So having laid the whole idea of being "called by God" to rest, we can also put the words of Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the amateur theologian in the White House, to bed as well.  No, God did not ordain Donald Trump to be the president of the United States.  Indeed, had he been more God-conscious, more attracted to Divine Love, Trump might well have made very different career choices.  He might have realized that he was temperamentally and intellectually unsuited for political office of any kind, and instead put his efforts into philanthropy with the vast ill-gotten gains he inherited from his father - hopefully hiring people with more qualifications than his own to distribute it properly.

 

If God is Love, God does not "call" us to this or that line of employment, but rather attracts us to make highest and best use of whatever skills and proclivities we have been given, for the benefit of other beings.  God does not call me like a boss offering me a job.  God is not a headhunter, placing people in positions based on "his" mysterious preferences.  God is the sacred compassionate relationship that happens in almost any profession when one person is truly of service to another. 

 

As a college student earning my way through school, I worked for two years as a nursing assistant in a convalescent hospital.  I was paid minimum wage for some of the most significant employment I've ever had in my life, helping elderly people through the last days of their lives and attending to them at death.  Nobody ever told me I was "called" to that occupation.  But surely it was as sacred a form of work as any I've done since. 

 

Hmmm.  Could two years of placing bedpans under patients in a nursing home do Donald Trump's soul some good?  I doubt Sarah Huckabee Sanders would ask that question...

 

 

 

 

JIM BURKLO
Website: MINDFULCHRISTIANITY.ORG   Weblog: MUSINGS    Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
See the GUIDE to my articles and books
Sr Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California

Taste and See

 

Imagine that you memorize a book of recipes.  You quote passages from the recipes, with breathless enthusiasm, to other people - whether they care to listen or not.  You follow each recipe to the letter.  You chop and mix and bake and cook according to the instructions.  You show off the finished product, proclaiming its absolute superiority to all others.

 

But you never bother to eat the food.

 

Some kinds of Christianity are like that.  All directions, but no dinner.  Because if you actually ate the food, you might or might not like it.  There are recipes that, if faithfully followed, will produce bland, boring, unpleasant, and even nasty dishes.  Because rigidly orthodox religion worships the recipes, actually eating the results might lead to questioning them. 

 

That's why conservative Christian preachers warn against trusting your emotions when interpreting the faith.  Your subjective experiences are like taste-buds.  A bitter orthodox teaching should be obeyed on authority, and not be subject to evaluation by your God-given sensorium.  Oh no no no, don't follow your gut.  Don't follow your nose or your tongue before you even get to your gut.  Follow those megachurch pastors and big-pulpit clerics who declaim with stentorian gravitas, ordering you to consume the recipe, but not the food.

 

But I say, try out the recipes in the Bible.  Play with the ingredients in our tradition.  It's not about believing the recipes.   It's about tasting and seeing.  Don't memorize the faith and gush about how perfect it is.  Practice it.  Don't just talk about God.  Experience God in mystical contemplation.  If the results are great, consider repeating the exercise.  If you follow a religious recipe and get perfectly prepared lutefisk, which tastes like the residue left in a sink trap after a Drano treatment, consider shelving that one and trying another.  If you get okay results with a Christian recipe, but get a bright idea for improving on it, or even radically altering it, go for it.  Be playful and free-spirited.  A dash of this, a dash of that.  Don't be a slave to the details.  Experiment with the recipes of the great mystics and contemplatives of the Church over the past 2,000 years.  Poke your finger in the batter and lick it.  If it works for you, make it part of your repertoire.  Come up with your own recipes!  There's always room for innovation in the Christian kitchen.

 

My wife, Roberta, is a gifted baker.  Her signature product is Roberta's Cheesecake (pictured).  The best in the world.  Yes, there's a recipe.  But not just anybody can follow it the way she does. What brands of cream cheese and sour cream do you use?  Are they even available in your part of the country?  How does your oven heat up and cool down?  Electric?  Gas? Convection?  What pan do you use?  What size?  How thick or thin is it?  How hard do you tamp down the graham cracker crumble crust?  Exactly how much should the crust be caramelized, and just how can you tell when you have it right?  Roberta follows a recipe, but it is subject to interpretation.  Just like the Bible and the whole Christian tradition is subject to infinite variations of interpretation, each resulting in potentially significant different consequences. 

 

The recipes in Leviticus are colon-cleansers.  If you like sweet and sour, go with the ones in the Psalms.  For savory, there is the Song of Solomon.  The recipes in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount are gourmet: devilishly hard to follow, but the results are divine.  With notable exceptions, Saint Paul's aren't good for much besides weight loss. How will you know for yourself unless you get busy cooking - and eating?  The whole Christian tradition - scriptures, songs, art, liturgies, prayer practices, social witness - is a big pantry full of amazing ingredients to employ in creative cookery.  Let's get busy!

 

"O taste and see that the Lord is good..." Psalm 34: 8.  Don't take the word of some talking head for the answer.  (Not even mine.)  Cook, taste, and then see.  The proof of Christianity is in the pudding (and the cheesecake)! 

 

JIM BURKLO

 

Website: MINDFULCHRISTIANITY.ORG   Weblog: MUSINGS    Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
See the GUIDE to my articles and books
Sr Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California

 

 

 

 

St. Mary Oliver

LA Women's March, 1-19-19

 

 

When it's over, I want to say: all my life

I was a bride married to amazement.

I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

 

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.

Tell about it.

 

To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.

 

-- Mary Oliver

 

The function of sainthood is to facilitate our relationship with the divine.  And this was the supreme achievement of Mary Oliver as a poet.

 

As Saturn's rings are stardust concentrated by the planet's gravity, so Mary Oliver's halo was formed by her focused attraction to nature and to the human condition.  Her words drew us into her orbit.  Her poems were deep, layered, reduced to essentials.  They were heretical in the view of literary critics who could not accept that really good poetry could be so easily accessible to a popular audience.  But she was in excellent company.  Many of the mystics of Christianity and other world religions have been subjected to the same kind of accusation.

 

Not a formally religious person, she nonetheless grounded her life and work in a natural spirituality that resonated with the contemplative traditions of the world's faiths.  Her poetry had a scriptural quality, expressing universal truth in enduring language widely repeated.  Her poems are profound but simple prayers, invocations, homilies, and benedictions, read aloud at sacred moments in people's lives.  Now, after her passing, we recognize the virtual sainthood she achieved among us long ago.

 

To be canonized in the Catholic church, one must be associated with one or more miracles.  Mary Oliver passed this test.  As a child, she was awestruck by what she saw in the woods by her house in Ohio.  Mary Oliver paid attention.  Open, curious, wonder-filled, slack-jawed attention.  The kind of attention that is love.    Through careful observation of everyday phenomena in nature, the door to the miraculous was opened to her, and through her poetry, to us.  She was "married to amazement", and her readers were transubstantiated into her bridesmaids and groomsmen whose job is to stand and watch with love.

 

Some might object to giving Mary Oliver sainthood so soon after her death.  But if we're doing the work that she called us to do, then time will fall away and we will enter into eternity in this life, rapt with awe.  Mary Oliver's poems invite us into the experience of timelessness.  So in this eternal now, what would be gained by waiting to honor her saintliness?

 

By acclamation, by overwhelming consensus, let us canonize Mary Oliver.  With every reading of her poetry, we brighten her halo, and let it illuminate more of the world around us.

 

 

 

JIM BURKLO
Website: MINDFULCHRISTIANITY.ORG   Weblog: MUSINGS    Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
See the GUIDE to my articles and books
Sr Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California

Perfecting Love

Painting by Bardia Soltani, USC undergraduate art student

 

A few weeks ago, I flew up to Portland from Los Angeles and found myself sitting next to a woman, about 45 years old, who was on her way to her first face-to-face date with a man she met online.  She needed to talk because she was nervous about the impending encounter.  I asked her questions and offered encouragement, for which she seemed very grateful.  She was a fundamentalist Christian who had never married.  "My biggest test of faith was when I was in the Peace Corps in Nepal and fell in love with a wonderful man who was a Hindu.  We were getting close to a commitment but I did not want to be "unequally yoked" to an non-Christian.  I was afraid of God so I backed away from him.  It was so hard," she confessed.  I just listened, but felt so sad for her.  Her fear-based religion shattered the love of her life.  And that fear even now dragged behind her like a useless anchor.

“God is love.”  The Bible tells us so.  Taking this short line from the first letter of John seriously results in a long list of significant consequences.  These three words are our marching orders as Christians.  They sum up the meaning and purpose of human existence.  They open a window into a more compassionate, mindful, and progressive form of the Christian faith.

If God is love, then God is something we do, rather than somebody or something we try to believe in.  If God is love, then God is a relationship, and not a Guy in the Sky or some other kind of supernatural entity.  If God is love, God is nothing to fear.  If God is love, when we really love someone - even of another religion, or of no religion at all - God is in that relationship, blessing it.  So these three words wipe away all the theological debates about science and common sense versus religion.  These three words sweep away the problem of evil, the perennial conundrum of how an all-powerful God could love people while allowing horrible things to happen to them.  If God is love, then God is not in charge of the universe.  Love is extremely powerful, but it is not directive.  Love does not force anybody to do anything, nor to force anything to do anything to anybody.  If God is love, then God is omni-attractive, not omni-potent. 

If God is love, then prayer is not about asking God for favors.  If God is love, then prayer becomes the contemplative experience of divine love.  It is the practice of love through compassionate attention to all that is.  And this is the purpose of human life.  Through billions of years of cosmic unfolding and evolution, we frail creatures have come into being for the purpose of reflecting attentive awe and wonder back at the universe.  We’re here to let our jaws drop in amazement at each other’s existence, and to be wonderstruck with loving attention toward all that exists.  When we are in this state of awe, we are doing God.  We are practicing God.  We are communing with God. 

“Perfect love casts out fear.”  If we take this line from the first letter of John seriously, it leads us to an enlightened personal and communal morality.  Border walls will not cast out fear.  A nuclear arms race will not cast out fear.  Radically restricting immigration will not cast out fear.  Keeping a gun in the house will not cast out fear.  Rubbing our hands all the time with sanitizer will not cast out fear.  What will cast out fear?  Knowing our neighbors and showing them kindness.  Welcoming strangers.  Directing open, warm curiosity toward other people and toward all beings and things, even those that at first glance may seem disturbing.  Practicing God – that is, practicing Love – attracts us to kindness and distracts us from fear.  And by practicing Love, we will make the world a lot less scary.  Because so much of what is scary in this world is the result of people trying to deal with their fears in ways that are scarier than the stuff they were scared of in the first place. 

Like the guy I know who has a big locked cabinet in his basement, full of guns.  Why does he have guns?  To protect his family from intruders, he says.  But the main reason an intruder would want to intrude would be to steal his guns, which are by far the most fungible assets in his house.  He thinks he needs guns in order to protect his guns.  Our current president wants to build and store lots more nuclear weapons in order to keep America a safe place to build and store nuclear weapons.  And he said he will build a border wall to protect Americans from brown immigrants who are only scary because he said they are scary and his supporters believed him and now they demand that he build a wall.  He has trapped himself in a feedback loop of fear.  But if we loved the folks south of the border, we’d do what we can to make their lives better so that they wouldn’t want to cross the border in the first place.  We'd show compassion to the millions of undocumented immigrants who have been living in the shadows for decades.  And we’d show compassion to those with legitimate need for asylum.  Perfect love would cast out our irrational fears and at the same time make the world happier and safer. 

Here in LA, this city full of Catholics, I've never seen anyone cross themselves when crossing a street.  But I sat next to a guy on my flight home from Portland to LA who crossed himself at takeoff and landing.  I just looked at him with all the love I could muster and hoped that it might help cast out his fear.   But then, maybe making the sign of the cross was enough to get him from fear into divine love!  Most of the stuff we’re afraid of is statistically trivial.  Being a pedestrian in Los Angeles is vastly more dangerous than air travel. 

“God is love” – it's old news that stayed good news.  But it might be frustrating news for folks who were hoping for a God who is more like Batman, vanquishing evil with superpowers.  Or for a God like Elijah’s, who rained down fire from heaven to show who was boss.  Or for a God like the one who drowned the Egyptian army when it was pursuing the people of Israel through the Red Sea.  Or the God of Aimee Semple McPherson, the megachurch evangelist in 1930’s LA who told folks to put their hands on the radio to receive miraculous healing.  Love is very powerful, to be sure, but a lot of us have been disappointed by it.  You love somebody and they don’t love you back.  Or you think somebody loves you but it turns out they really don’t.   Or you want to love somebody but their difficult behavior makes it hard to know how to love them.  And the list goes on.  Love is more than a word on a Hallmark card.  It takes time and trouble and discipline.  I teach mindfulness practice at USC, and I tell my students that mindfulness and love are the same thing.  Warm, caring, curious, open, non-judgmental attention.  I tell them that mindfulness practice is not rocket science.  It’s simple.  But it is very challenging.  It’s easy to learn what it is.  But it’s hard to actually do it consistently.  God is the love that you practice, the love that you do and share. 

If God is love, then the church is a school of love.  If God is love, then the church doesn’t need to get bogged down with theological mumbo jumbo.   The message is simple.  The practice is hard, so we should be helping each other figure out how to love best, under many different and often very difficult circumstances. 

I went to the Sunday Assembly in Hollywood a few times.  It’s a sort of church for atheists here in Hollywood.  One part of their Sunday meeting is called “Doing Our Best”, and I think our progressive churches should copy it.  They pick out one of their members to tell about how they did their best in a challenging situation.  The stories they tell are prosaic.  They sometimes don’t have happy endings, and often the stories end without a clear resolution.  But such is life, eh?  And such is love.  It’s not all flowers and balloons, cuddles and giggles.  The “Doing Our Best” stories are inspiring exactly because they aren’t heroic or extraordinary.  They lift up the deep significance of how we respond to everyday life. 

 “God is love.”  It sounds sweet, but it has serious consequences.  So we gather together in our churches, supporting each other in doing the best we can to move our community and our world away from fear and toward compassion....

 

 

JIM BURKLO
Website: MINDFULCHRISTIANITY.ORG   Weblog: MUSINGS    Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
See the GUIDE to my articles and books
Sr Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California

The Church Confesses

 

churchconfession  by Jim Burklo

 

"I am the church, and this is my confession.  My last confession was 500 years ago.  I have oppressed women and kept them out of leadership positions.  I have oppressed gay and lesbian people.  I have judged people pointlessly for having normal sexual urges and relationships, treating sex like a disease instead of lifting it up as a precious gift from God.  I have failed to see the absurd irony of being the church of Jesus, a humble servant, while pridefully claiming that my religion is the only true faith.  I have twisted the Bible to claim that it endorses slavery, wars, greed, and cruelty.  I have resisted social and scientific progress by claiming to interpret the Bible literally, when it was never intended to be read that way.  I am sorry for these sins and for all the sins of my past life.  I commit myself to turning from the errors of my ways.  I will follow Jesus’ way of unconditional love.  I will joyfully and creatively practice my Christian tradition without claiming that it is the only way to God.  I will praise and worship God as Love, instead of as a capricious, supernatural “guy in the sky”.  I affirm the sexuality of LGBTQ people, and will celebrate their marriages.  I will honor women as equals to men in church and society.  I will work with people of other faiths, or of no faith at all, to protect the planet, promote peace and social justice, and create a heaven of kindness on earth.  More about my commitment to change at ProgressiveChristianity.org and ProgressiveChristiansUniting.org.   Amen."

 

Make your own Church Confession!  Get a model of a church.  And get an  EZSound Box with 10 inch extension play button.  Record the words above into it.  Put sound box inside or near the model of the church, with the button out front.  Use at events, coffee hour, or make your own video as a playful way to spread the message of our progressive Christian movement.

 

 

JIM BURKLO
Website: MINDFULCHRISTIANITY.ORG   Weblog: MUSINGS    Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
See the GUIDE to my articles and books
Sr Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California

The Shape of Christmas

"The Pink Moment", Ojai, CA, 12/1/18

 

The Shape of Christmas

By Jim Burklo    12-3-18  

(See my many other Advent/Christmas poems here. Use freely with attribution.)

 

My mind is a maze with the turns of the journey

The wise men wandered while aimed at the star

Their ears had the form of the wings of the angels

Attuned to the music they sang from afar

 

The shape of my spite looks a lot like King Herod’s

The innkeeper’s answer describes my disdain

My fear is the terror first felt by the shepherds

The birth-pangs of Mary give voice to my pain

 

My soul is a hole in the shape of a manger

A silence that begs for a baby’s soft cry

A darkness that yearns for a child’s wide-eyed wonder

On seeing that blaze in the evening sky….

 

 

JIM BURKLO
Website: MINDFULCHRISTIANITY.ORG   Weblog: MUSINGS    Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
See the GUIDE to my articles and books
Sr Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California

Hope in the Ashes

 

The sharp tang of ash made my nostrils flare as I walked on the powdery dirt of the trail in the mountains above Malibu.  Apocalypse came to more than one California paradise in recent weeks.  Blackened branches of scrubby sumac reached vainly into the air.  Green blankets of chaparral were reduced to grey dust.  Oaks on steep slopes were scorched, sycamores in the arroyos were singed.  96,949 acres of stunning wilderness went up in smoke, obliterating the plant and animal life along many of the trails most loved by Angelenos, including myself.

 

I was not supposed to be hiking on the Backbone Trail.  Only later did I learn that the whole National Recreation Area was closed.  When I got to the trailhead, there were no signs to that effect, so up the steep path I climbed.  Some of the vegetation on the trail was intact, some was stained red with fire retardant dropped from planes, and some was blackened.  As I hiked higher, I could see that the Castro trail on the ridge was burned over.  Same with the trail to the site where the M.A.S.H. shows were filmed.  Same with the trails in upper Las Virgenes Canyon and on Simi Mountain.

 

When I was in high school in Santa Cruz, CA, our biology teacher, Ed Borovatz, taught us about the "greenhouse effect" - an early term for what we now call "human-caused climate change" resulting from CO2 emissions.  Through Ed's intervention, I was appointed, at the age of 16, to the Student Council on Pollution and the Environment.  It was an advisory group set up by the Nixon administration to monitor and co-opt student environmental activists.  I was by far the youngest student on the Council.  Most of the others were leftist graduate students.  We traveled on federal vouchers, meeting with government officials.  The grad students were wise to Nixon's machinations.  They arranged for us to visit universities on each of our trips and radicalize students into the ecology movement, at government expense! 

 

On one of our trips, we had a private meeting with the Secretary of the Interior, Wally Hickel, an affable fellow who had served as the governor of Alaska.  It violated my innocent assumptions that, for a big shot, he was so short in stature.  I asked him a question based on my new-found knowledge about CO2 in the atmosphere.  "Mr. Hickel, shouldn't the government tax gasoline at a very high rate, in order to reduce consumption and lower emissions?"

 

Wally Hickel looked me right in the eye and said "Young man, you're absolutely right.  That is exactly what should happen.  But it is politically impossible."  I was upset at the answer, but had to respect the forthright manner in which he delivered it.

 

The year: 1970.

 

Forty-eight years later, the current Secretary of the Interior is on a mission, head-bent and hell-bound, to pump more oil and blast more coal out of the ground.  The President maintains his denial of the reality of human-caused global warming even as he tours the devastation left by the worst fires in California history.  This week in Paris, where the French government fully recognizes the climate threat, people are storming the streets to protest a gasoline tax increase imposed to mitigate the effects of CO2 emissions. 

 

Gazing at mile after mile of denuded peaks and scorched hills, I felt despondent that half a century later, Wally Hickel's answer could still be true. 

 

"Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience."  (St. Paul in Romans 8: 24-25)  From the Backbone Trail, hope definitely was not seen.  What hope remains within me for rectifying our collective damage to the planet lies buried by thick layers of ash.  Yet like the seeds of California chaparral plants that lie dormant until cracked open by wildfire, germinating to green the mountains once again, I must wait with patience for hope to spring up.

 

My hike was preceded by weekends spent knocking on doors in northern Los Angeles County for Katie Hill, a young Democrat.  Gazing at the massive turnout of other volunteers on the last day of canvassing, my eyes filled with tears, sensing that the impossible might be possible after all.  She - and we - eked out a victory.  But that was just the beginning.  There are so many more doors to knock, and so little time. 

 

So may holy hope rise out of the ashes, grow big, and move us to action.....

 

JIM BURKLO
Website: MINDFULCHRISTIANITY.ORG   Weblog: MUSINGS    Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
See the GUIDE to my articles and books
Sr Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Natural Spirituality

 

THE NEW SCIENCE OF NATURAL SPIRITUALITY

Lisa Miller, professor at Columbia University, is a leading researcher into the new scientific field of “natural spirituality”, which she describes in her 2015 book, “The Spiritual Child”.  There are now separate neurophysiological metrics for the human relationship with the transcendent, a realm that until recently was folded into psychology and sociology.  Miller has popularized awareness of spirituality as a distinct developmental process, to be taken as seriously by parents and scientists as physical and psychological growth. 

Miller calls for parents, regardless of their religious or non-religious orientations, to nurture actively the natural spiritual inclinations of their children.  The awe and wonder of children deserve the awe and wonder of adults.  An observant Jew, she is very “religion-friendly”, but she assumes that the non-religious can be just as helpful in their kids’ spiritual growth as those who follow formal faiths. 

This new science opens the prospect that public education may someday include active nurture of students’ spirituality, but in a pedagogical form that makes no mention of traditional religions.  The new field of developmental natural spirituality may result in a secular replacement for the functions of religion.  My boss and I started a big program called Mindful.USC.  The classes we offer have no religious content.  But mindfulness is certainly the content of a lot of religion.  So here we are, the Office of Religious Life, replacing religion with a secular substitute!  A kind of Stevia for the soul?  And yet I find that our program has inspired many students to take greater interest in the contemplative traditions of Christianity.  Mindfulness is now liberated from religion.  But it also has the potential to liberate religion from the confines of dogma.

Meanwhile, other research is revealing the neural pathways and brain processes of healing.  Research demonstrates that the “placebo effect” works even when the subjects of the research are told that the medication they are taking is indeed a placebo.  Believing that the pill is real medicine, even when it is not, is not required.  It appears that the “active ingredient” of the placebo effect is going to the doctor, getting attentive care, getting a prescription, and taking the pill.  “This is the specific effect of the ritual of medicine,” says a researcher, Ted Kaptchuk, at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School in Boston.   It is fair to extrapolate from his findings that there can be a similar positive effect from the rituals of religion. 

Further research is beginning to reveal the chains of neurochemical events in the brain associated with the positive placebo response.  It is deeply ironic that this might lead to the development of drugs that could mimic the effect of placebos!  Apparently, people differ in their positive responses to the rituals of medicine.  This suggests that certain genotypes might derive more or less benefit from the gestures of caring offered by doctors and nurses.  This finding could lead to the tailoring of medical caring rituals to the genomes of particular patients.

"Entheogens" are chemicals that reveal God.  Important research was done on the benefits of hallucinogens in the 50’s and 60’s.  Then came the Electric Koolaid Acid Test and the images of young people turned into zombies by drugs in the late 60’s.  The reputation of these drugs was badly damaged.  But now there is a resurgence of interest in them.  New research is underway into their potential for treating addictions and depression.  And there is a resurgence of excitement in the mysticism-inducing effects of these drugs. 

Imagine that you come to church for the first time, and when you get in the door you are given a quick prick on your finger for a blood test.  Depending on your genotype as revealed in the test, you’ll be sent to a specific part of the church, where a worship service will be conducted in a manner most beneficial for you.  When you take communion in that worship service, the bread comes in a cellophane wrapper and the wine comes in a little zip-top container.  These have been dosed with neurotransmitter drugs specifically designed for your genetic makeup.  While the choir sings music most appropriate for your spiritual genotype, you eat the wafer and drink the shot of wine, and in a few minutes you have entered the sublime realm of the divine. 

This scenario was the substance of a story I wrote about 35 years ago:  “The First Theochemical Church”.  The protagonist was a woman declared a heretic because she refused to take communion laced with designer entheogenetic drugs.  She was shunned for trying to experience God directly without the intervention of pharmacology. 

Which is what we've been doing all along!  Science is just now confirming what we've always known:  our religion, when practiced wisely and deeply, is good for us.  At least some of our spiritual practices actually, objectively benefit our natural spirituality as well as enhance our mental and physical health. 

 

We progressive Christians are humble about our version of the faith.  (Which is why so few people know that we exist!)  We don’t think our way is the only way, nor even that our way is better than all other ways. But it might be time to re-think our humility.  In our progressive congregations, the communion ritual of stepping forward to dip a piece of bread into a cup of wine, and then eating it, may be health-inducing.   We don’t think of the bread and wine as the active ingredients: we don’t take “transubstantiation” literally.  But the neural pathways activated by the ritual of communion with bread and wine may well make a palpable difference in enhancing our natural spirituality and mental and physical well-being.   

Brain science is beginning to explain or at least describe and confirm our spiritual experiences.  We’re at a point where we can isolate the neural pathways that correspond with mystical religious awakenings.  Atheists may conclude that this is proof of that God is nothing more than a human construct built around our genetic propensity to create meaning out of our experiences.  The discovery of a discrete developmental process of the unfolding of universal natural spirituality might suggest that religion is optional, unnecessary, and perhaps even a hindrance to this process.  We may be able, finally, to explain religion away as a product of our innate spirituality.  But why do we have this propensity?  Who or what etched it into the very structure of our brains?  If we’re hard-wired for transcendence, doesn’t that suggest that the experience of union with Ultimate Reality is hard-wired into the cosmos?  Holy awe appears to be a feature of our human nature.  So what does that say about the nature of Nature as a whole?  Through us and other sentient beings within it, is Nature in awe of itself? 

Progressive Christians are perfectly positioned to embrace and employ these new scientific findings.  We made peace with science long ago.  The more we learn from the new science of natural spirituality, the better we'll be able to refine our spiritual tradition so it can be more effective in serving souls. 

 

JIM BURKLO
Website: MINDFULCHRISTIANITY.ORG   Weblog: MUSINGS    Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
See the GUIDE to my articles and books
Sr Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California

Microdosing on Christianity

It's been a thing for a while in Silicon Valley.  Computer engineers, seeking a creative edge, take small doses of hallucinogens on a regular basis. They claim it enhances their problem-solving capacities without impairing their ability to function.  (Having lived in that part of the world for over two decades, I can attest that while IQ's are high in Silicon Valley, EQ's - emotional intelligence quotients - are often not up to par.  Folks in that business already get away with odd behavior, so who notices or cares if they microdose on the job?)

 

Hearing about this phenomenon got me to thinking.  What else could people microdose, to good effect?  Then it dawned on me that Christianity might well be a candidate.

 

I'm into a strong dose of Christianity every day.  Works for me!  But people are different.  Some folks can't deal with full-strength Christianity - not even the progressive kind.  So they forget the whole thing.  But some of them might find that microdosing on the faith could do them good, and serve those whose lives they touch.  I don't believe anyone goes to hell for failing to accept all or any of the Christian tradition.  But I am enthusiastic about welcoming into it those who have any level of interest.

 

So in this spirit, here I offer some perfectly legal microdoses of Christian spiritual practice:

 

1.)  Mystical contemplative prayer.  For twenty minutes, daily or at least weekly, pray like Jesus did in the desert before he started his ministry.   Go to a quiet place – a metaphorical desert, if not a physical one - and get into a physical position in which your body will be comfortable but you'll be unlikely to fall asleep.  (The “lotus position”, seated with legs crossed and tailbone slightly elevated on a little pillow, is just one way to achieve this balance.)  Close your eyes, and in silence, observe whatever arises to take your attention.  The object of your observation can be anything at all.  A thought.  An idea. A sensation – something your body feels, something you hear.  A memory.  A scheme for the future.  It can be an urge – a desire – a sense of needing or wanting to do something.  Just watch the urge.  Let it be.  Watch all that arises and passes, observing with non-judgmental, caring attention.  Be a quiet presence, like a friend who stays close in silence with a loving attitude toward you.  As you enter into deeper and deeper present awareness of your physical and mental experiences, ask yourself:  who is doing the watching?  Who is paying loving, non-judgmental attention to your experiences?  The answer of the mystical teachers of the church is that God is doing the watching within and through you.  Awakening to the presence of God within you is the moment of your spiritual union with the divine.

 

2.)  Adore the sacrament.  This is an adaptation of a very old Catholic spiritual practice of contemplative prayer in front of a "tabernacle" box containing the wafer of bread for communion, blessed by the priest as the "body of Christ".  Take a cracker or a loaf of bread or a piece of bread.  Place it on a table or mantel or other surface where you can comfortably gaze at it.  Look at the bread for ten minutes.  The ritual of communion, or eucharist, has many meanings in Christianity.  What are its meanings for you?  A simple one to consider is that by mindfully observing and appreciating everyday things like bread and wine, we enter into spiritual communion with the universe.  We can experience the whole by fully embracing the particular.  The bread becomes a window through which we are able to see and experience the Ultimate Reality.  Look at the bread, admire it, consider its origins in fields of wheat tended by farmers, in the hands of bakers and shop-keepers.  Love the bread with your deep attention.  Then, slowly and with reverence, step forward and take it and eat it, savoring the experience.

 

3.)  Listen to the Christ.  At least once a day, as you are listening to another person talk, imagine that the person is the Christ.  The name "Christ" has layers of meaning and significance in Christianity, but you don't need to know them all.  Just go with one of those meanings, such as this:  the Christ appears in our encounters with other people where unconditional love is shared.  When you are with another person, and you are paying deep attention to them, and releasing judgment toward them, and/or they are doing the same toward you, then that person becomes the Christ.  First imagine that the person is the Christ, and then "love your way" into that reality through deep listening - which is one of the highest forms of service we can offer each other.

 

4.)  Choose your focus in worship.  When you are in a church for worship or another occasion, and feel some trepidation about it, just choose one thing as your focus.  Maybe you can't handle a full dose of the Lord's Prayer, for example - so just pick out a word or phrase from it that speaks to you, and meditate on it.  Pick out some feature of the worship space and focus your attention on it.  Let an image or a snippet of a hymn or a phrase from the sermon become the "mustard seed" for your contemplative prayer.  Christianity should be a gift, not a burden.  So reverently receive the gift from the church that most speaks to and for you, and leave the rest alone for the time being. 

 

5.)  Turn acts of service into sacred offerings.  Our ability to give is itself a gift.  Our ability to serve others comes from a Source beyond ourselves.  So when we do any act of kindness for others in our jobs, our homes, or our communities, we can dedicate it in silent prayer:  "I serve in the name of the Christ."  It's a way of acknowledging that true service is "selfless", given while releasing any expectation of reward, as Jesus taught us in his Sermon on the Mount.

 

You don't have to identify as a Christian to microdose on Christianity.  But if taking it a small step at a time begins to work for you, don't be surprised if you start taking more!

 

 

 

JIM BURKLO
Website: MINDFULCHRISTIANITY.ORG   Weblog: MUSINGS    Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
See the GUIDE to my articles and books
Sr Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California