Musings

By Heart: Scripture Treasures for Children

Certain passages from sacred texts can live in your heart and nourish you from within for a lifetime, giving your soul a voice in times of joy and of crisis. You can make it a family affair! Pick out passages to memorize together, reciting them at mealtime or bedtime.  This is a list of special biblical treasures that are well worth committing to memory. I most recommend using the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible.

Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament):

Ten Commandments: Exodus 20:1-4,7-8,12-17

The Aaronic Benediction: Numbers 6:24-26

Ruth's Promise: Ruth 1:16-17

Elihu's Speech: Job 37:14-24

Psalms: 8, 23, 46:1-2a, 10, 92:1, 95:1-2, 100 or 100:1-2, 118:24, 121 or 121:2

Proverbs: Proverbs ch. 8

Prophecy: Isaiah 2:2-4, 11:1-3a, 11:6-9, 40:1-11,27-31, 61:1-2, Amos 5:21-24, Micah 6:8

 

New Testament:

Beatitudes of Jesus: Matthew 5:3-10

Jesus - Light: Matthew 5:16

Jesus - Love Enemies: Matthew 5:43-48

Lord's Prayer: Matthew 6:9-13

Jesus- Do Not Be Anxious: Matthew 7:25-34

Jesus - Asking: Matthew 7:7-12

Jesus - With You Always: Matthew 28:20

Jesus - Children: Mark 10:13-16

Jesus - Communion: Mark 14:22-25

Magnificat: Luke 1:46-55

Simeon's Blessing: Luke 2:29-32

Jesus - Golden Rule: Luke 6:27-31

Jesus - Law of Love: Luke 10:27

Jesus - Parables of Mustard and Leaven: Luke13:18-21

The Word: John 1:1-5

For God So Loved the World: John 3:16

Jesus - Love One Another: John 13:34-35

Jesus - Lay Down His Life: John 15:12-13

Hope: Romans 8:18-28

Hold Fast to the Good: Romans 12:9-12

God of Hope: Romans 15:13

The Body of Christ: 1 Corinthians 12

The Love Chapter: 1 Corinthians 13

Be Kind: Ephesians 4:25-32

Armor of God: Ephesians 6:10-17

Put on Compassion: Colossians 3:12-17

Doers of the Word: James 1:19-25

God Is Love: 1 John 4:7-12

He First Loved Us: 1 John 4:19-21

River of Life: Revelation 22:1-5

God Can't

If God is love, then suffering and evil aren’t God’s fault.  Love attracts but doesn’t force, doesn’t compel.  If God is love, then God is omnipresent, but is neither omnipotent nor omniscient.  Because, if God is love, we have choices – and that makes our behavior unpredictable.  We might follow the light of divine love and do right, or we might ignore it and do wrong.

Thomas Jay Oord, professor at the new online Northwind Theological Seminary, expands on this view of the divine in “GOD CAN’T:  How to Believe in God and Love After Tragedy, Abuse, and Other Evils” (SacraSage, 2019).  He is steeped in process theology, having received his PhD from Claremont School of Theology.  In this book, Tom Oord makes the essentials of process thought accessible to lay readers who wrestle with the failure of evangelical theology to make sense of theodicy, otherwise known as the problem of evil: how can a loving God allow terrible suffering to exist?    

Oord used to teach at a Nazarene seminary in Idaho, so he is fluent in “evangelicalese”, as is evident in his writing.  His book provides a sturdy footbridge for evangelicals to make the crossing, step by careful step, into progressive Christian theology.  The title of the book may be jarring to a conservative Christian, but if she or he screws up the fortitude to open it, whether out of curiosity or out of desperation, inside will appear reassurance that the God who can’t prevent evil is still the God of the Christian faith.  Even the layout of the book is redolent of evangelical culture: there are cursive inserts in the text with “teasers” about that section’s content, and there are study questions at the end of each chapter. 

Tom Oord gets it that the problem of evil is the tipping point for a lot of people in their relationship with Christianity.  Most pastors blow bad theological sunshine at good church members when bad things happen to them.  And lots of folks head for the exits as a result.  Oord systematically debunks each of the common religious nostrums used to sweep away the problem of evil, and the defunct concepts of God that go with them.  Along the way he paints a fresh picture of the divine.  God works alongside us toward the good.  God joins us in making the best out of bad situations.  God feels our pain and stands with us in doing our best to alleviate it.  God needs us to work God’s will of love in the world.  There are things God can’t do, but not because God chose not to do them.  While God is limitless, God’s nature – and the nature of Nature itself – allow for all entities in the universe to make choices that cannot be predicted, and that may result in tragic consequences.  Oord’s portrait of God reflects closely the concept of the divine in Whiteheadian process theology, without burdening the reader with its arcana.

Tom Oord has walked where he invites his readers to follow:  “God was once the source of my greatest fears… I considered myself a sinner in the hands of an angry God… I no longer fear God.  It took a while for me to arrive where I am today… The key to overcoming my fear was realizing God always loves me.  God’s perfect love cast out my fear of God!” 

This is a very useful book – one I’d recommend to an evangelical Christian struggling with the inherent absurdities of that interpretation of the faith.  My only critique of it is that he uses the language of God as a supernatural personality without the content that goes with it.  So the reader might well be left with a God who is a hollow shell of what the reader used to think of as the divine.  While Oord explicitly disavows the "clockwork God" of deism – standing at a remove from the world and letting it run - that might be the kind of God that the reader is left with.  The cure for traditional supernatural theism is contemplative practice rooted in monastic Christianity, leading us into the palpable experience of the God who is love.

Dream Campfires

Gather friends and start a Dream Campfire! 

Nighttime dreams are portals into the realms of the unconscious mind. Paying attention to them brings us to a higher level of consciousness, and can give profound guidance for our lives.  This suggested group format is based on the work of psychotherapist Jeremy Taylor .  This approach understands that the elements of dreams do not have fixed, universal meanings or significance.  One element that appears in multiple people's dreams can have as many meanings as there are people who have experienced it.

A group of up to eight people, meeting for a few hours weekly over a period of several weeks, can make profound discoveries about their inner lives together in a Dream Campfire.

Participants are asked to keep a dream journal and to maintain confidentiality about what is shared in the group.  Circle around a virtual campfire on a smart phone or computer screen - a video of a campfire that can serve as the background for your conversation. 

The first person shares a dream.  Then participants can ask questions of the dreamer.  The questions should be honest – open-ended, not round-about ways of giving opinions or making judgments.  Then allow 3 min of silent mindful meditation on the dream.  Then, going clockwise around the campfire circle, each person answers:  “If it were my dream, this is the significance it would have for me….” Again, after each person speaks, all the others can ask that person questions.

When circle is complete, then the dreamer can share their discoveries from the responses of the others to their dream. 

And then the next dreamer shares a dream, following the same process... until all have participated.

Clearness Committees

 

Ever feel bewildered in the face of a tough choice or confusing personal situation?  You are in great company.  And having some of that great company can make your decision-making process a lot easier. 

That’s what Clearness Committees are all about.  You write down the problem you’re facing – as succinctly as you can.  (You may be unclear about how to describe the situation that is before you – but do the best you can.)  You invite a group of people whom you respect to gather together as a temporary Clearness Committee.  You text/email them your problem ahead of time.  You ask them if they are willing to follow these guidelines.  

Those who agree gather and sit in a circle for between 1.5 and 2 hours with you around a phone or laptop computer with this campfire video playing.  They choose one of them to be the “clerk” and take simple notes, which the “clerk” emails to you afterward.  They start asking you questions.  Only questions.  Honest questions for which they do not yet know your answers.  Questions that invite your reflection.  Questions that aren’t “leading” – questions that are not round-about ways of giving advice or opinions.  Questions that invite answers that will lead to yet more questions that will invite answers that lead to yet more questions. 

There are times of silence, when only the virtual campfire is crackling.  Times for reflection, for letting questions and answers sink in deeper.  When you are ready, 15 or so minutes before the agreed-upon ending time, you ask your committee members to “mirror” what they heard and saw in your responses to their questions.  Again: no opinions, no advice – just feedback about what they noticed in you as the campfire burned. 

Then you shake hands with each of them and depart in soulful silence.  What happens at the Clearness Committee campfire stays at the campfire – complete confidentiality.

The Ladder of Souls

"We are climbing Jacob's ladder... every round goes higher, higher..."

These words from the old gospel song reflect the biblical myth of Jacob dreaming of a stairway into heaven, with angels going up and down.  A 12th c French Catholic Christian monk, Guigo II, picked up on this image in describing the spiritual life as climbing a ladder.  The steps were lectio, meditatio, oratio, and contemplatio – reading, meditation, prayer, and contemplation.  Other Christian mystics expressed the soul's journey with similar metaphors.  St John of the Cross drew an image of the spiritual ascent of a metaphorical Mount Carmel, climbing by the "via negativa": one step at a time marked "not this - not this - not this", dropping away all that is not God in order to get to God.  "To arrive at being all, desire to be nothing."

To this rich Christian lore of the ladder, I add my own interpretation:

Awe is the first rung of the ladder of souls.  Our attention is captivated by that which is beyond our comprehension. 

The second rung is to learn and practice spiritual disciplines that nurture awe, and gain a language for it through religion, art, music, and literature.

The third rung is to release judgments, opinions, categorizations, and definitions of that which induces awe in our souls.  What we learned on the second rung prepared us for this step, but now we must let it all go so that we can take the next.

The fourth rung on the ladder of souls is ahhhh....  where we are fully immersed and absorbed into divine love.

We climb up the ladder into union with this Ultimate Reality.

We climb down the ladder to serve people and the planet - and to invite others to climb the ladder with us.

Dr Paul Laughlin, former head of the religion department at Otterbein College in Ohio, once noted that perhaps it is no accident that virtually all the major figures in world religions have names including the sound of "ahhhh":  Yahweh - Yeshua - (Jesus, in Hebrew) - Buddha - Krishna - Rama - Brahman - Atman - Allah - Muhammad - Wakan Tanka (Lakota name for the divine) - to name a few.  The experience of awe is the universal phenomenology of religion.  But of course one need not be religious to know it.  I've written recently about the emerging research illuminating the neural correlates of the sense of transcendence.  We now have robust scientific evidence suggesting that nurturing awe and wonder in young people results in measurably improved life-outcomes.  Awe is our birthright, and attending to it and encouraging it makes us more fully human.  And more fully divine.

My dad, Don Burklo, had nothing to do with religion until he married my mom.  Going to church was part of her package.  He never complained about it, and was very active in supporting the church.  But he perfected the art of sleeping while sitting upright in a pew.  (My goal as a pastor was to keep him awake whenever he was in a congregation where I preached.)  Once I asked him about his theology.  "Well," he said, rubbing his jaw, "you'll have to ask me that question outdoors on a starry night."  That is still his theology, at the age of 93.  I'm grateful to my mom, Barbara Burklo, for introducing me to the Christian tradition - though it required me to go to seminary in order to recover from the version of it that I received!  From my dad, I received powerful nurture for my natural spirituality of awe.  He encouraged us to be in wonderment of nature, but most of all he imparted us with his wonderment at us.  Every night he'd come into our bedrooms and, not saying a word, just stare at us for a while... pure love that we'll never forget.

Ideally, these two aspects of spiritual education would be fully integrated.  We would carefully observe and encourage the natural spirituality of our children, and help them make the connection between their experience of awe and ahhhh and the myths and rituals of our faith traditions - giving them a rich language to express their innate relationship with the transcendent.

"Every round goes higher, higher..."  I invite you to climb the ladder with me!

Awexercise

 

"Yep, I still can't believe this whole thing is real! If it's one galaxy after another, after another, how can there be any end to it? An example of "forever"?"

These are the words of Don Burklo, my dad, responding to my recent "musing" in which I wrote about how his sense of awe nurtured my own.  He's 93 years young with wonderment at the night sky when he looks out the window.

His great-grandson, Jacob, 22 months old, lifted up a stone from the ground during a family Halloween party this past weekend, and showed it to me.  "Cool rock!" he said with a beaming smile.

These are examples of awexercise.  Pronounced "ahhh-kser-size".  A word I invented for a soul workout, with no heavy lifting required.  All you gotta do is answer this question:  what blows you away today?

It could be anything.  I am a rockhound, having amassed a collection of specimens over my lifetime.  I'm delighted that Jake and I appear to share this fascination.  But the rock that Jacob was examining, a chunk of the decomposed granite that litters the neighborhood, was unremarkable to me.  I know that rock very well, or so I thought at the time. 

But to Jake, that rock was astounding.  

With the hindsight of a few days, I begin to share his perspective.  Just because I know a name for that rock doesn't mean I know much more about it than my toddler grandson does.  I've been pondering how little I know about that rock ever since he handed it to me.  Why is some granite hard and dark, and others are crumbly and brown like this one?  What was going on underground that generated its form?  What chemistry resulted in its color?  The questions go on and on.  My ignorance of the answers goes on and on and on.  Now, finally, I'm in awe of that rock.

When it comes to awexercise, Jake is in great shape.  I aim to catch up with him, even if I'm usually a few days behind.

Let's get some awexercise right now.  You're reading this "musing" someplace.  Turn away from the screen and find any object and hold it up and stare at it.  What don't you know about it?  What else don't you know about it?  Make a mental list of the things about it that boggle your mind, until you are slack-jawed with wonderment. 

Awexercise is the discipline of deep attention - getting past the words, categories, and judgments we make about the people and things around us so that we can begin to see them for who or what they are, on their own terms, apart from our own.  Deep, kind, non-judgmental attention is the same thing as love.  And unconditional love is God. 

Awexercise is a pathway into communion with Ultimate Reality.  And the fitness center where we can practice it is all around us - wherever we are, and whomever we're with....

For the Love of Jesus

 

I loved Jesus for the first time when I was sixteen years old, and heard someone read aloud this passage from his Sermon on the Mount:  "Love your enemies..."  A person who could love his enemies was supremely worth loving himself.

And my love for him has endured ever since... both despite and because of my changes of theological perspective. 

I was one of the "Jesus People" of the late 1960's in Santa Cruz, California.  Long-haired young people with faraway looks in their eyes, drawn to Jesus as a fellow counter-cultural character.  At first, we more or less fit in with the peace and love crowd.  But then, the true colors of the Jesus People's leadership began to show through.  They weren't about peace and love at all.  They were about dogma and power and control.  "God at the beach" slowly morphed into fundamentalism in suburbia.  Not my scene.

Still full of love for Jesus, I felt homeless as a Christian until I drifted into seminary.  There I found another way to love and follow him.  I discovered the contemplative spirituality of the faith - practices modeled by Jesus himself.  Practices that are the foundation of a way of life of compassion and commitment to making peace and justice real in the world.

I've written here a number of times about the serious consequences for politics - and for the survival of democracy - that result from progressives' failure to display the US flag and other symbols of patriotism.  I get why so many folks squirm when they see me waving the red, white, and blue.  I was waving it at a pro-choice rally recently and somebody said "I thought you were with the other people until I saw your sign under your flag!"  The flag has been "occupied" by people who are striving against the very values it ought to represent.  The solution is not for progressives to recoil from the flag.  The solution is for progressives to "occupy" it back.  And with gusto!  It's our flag, representing our values and aspirations.  It does not represent the dark eras of our history: it represents our commitment to righting our nation's wrongs through the exercise of democracy.  We abandon this symbol at everyone's peril.

Something similar is at play among progressive Christians.  A lot of us are afraid to be too "Jesus-ey" for fear of being identified with the folks who have "occupied" his identity, making him the figurehead for a hyper-conservative social and political agenda.  Some of us have lost focus on Jesus entirely as a consequence. 

But, for the love of Jesus and his church, we must let him "occupy" our hearts once again.  Because the person of Jesus is the magic of Christianity.  Each world religion has its gift to offer humanity.  Christianity's is the embodiment of divine love in Jesus of Nazareth. 

To give the gift of Jesus to the world again, in the context of faith freshly interpreted for our time, I wrote "Tenderly Calling: An Invitation to the Way of Jesus", my latest book.  It aims to share the spirituality of Jesus, not religious beliefs about him.  Writing this book brought me full-circle, back to that moment as a teenager when my heart burst open with love from him and for him. 

I invite you to dare to do the same.  Go ahead and open your heart to this human being who lived so long ago, and whose love for others - even those who ended up killing him - can move us to compassion and service today.