It is always true that our access of our Response-Ability is capable of much improvement—that is, much expansion in our ability to respond. Nevertheless, until we are dead, there is always some degree of Response Ability in play.

Simply paying closer attention to our shit is an improvement in Response-Ability. Yes, it is true that the personality patterns we constructed for our lives by age five, are still doing its original survival patterns. But we can now as adults pay closer attention to our personality’s actions. We also have a degree of power to moderate that old tool for our survival. Our personality is a friend as well as an enemy. Our personality got us here. We did survive. Our personality still has some survival potentials. But times have changed since age five. Our personality is ill adapted for many, if not most, of our contemporary challenges. And fortunately, we still have some ability to respond beyond the boundaries of our very own personality.

Perhaps we need to use whatever modicum of Response-Ability we still have to find a good therapist who can assist us to realize more of our Response-Ability. Or perhaps we just need a religious practice, or a better religious practice. Perhaps simply setting aside 20 minutes a day for some sort of solitary practice is a response of which we are still capable.

Expanding Response-Ability is a description of spirit sanctification. Each of us are indeed a very profound essence of Response-Ability that we are not realizing at this time. Our freedom, to use another word, is being restricted by many of our patterns of unrealism. To know those patterns and to unravel them is part of accessing that primal Response-Ability and putting such “primal holiness” into play.

Shit does not just happen in our lives. We are always there with an ability to respond that is potentially boundless. Reality is on the side of Response-Ability. Let Jesus be our illustration. We are all potentially able of laying down our lives for our friends, indeed making even our enemies a type of friends whom we benefit with our responses to them and everyone. But we need to be “saved” from ourselves in order to access our deep essence of being Response-Able beings.

The word “saved” has been deeply polluted with images of escape from our real down-to-Earth challenges. Some of us may even have dreamed of voyaging to another planet. More likely, we have dreamed of a trans-cosmic realm of heavenly somewhere that we pretend to hope for to escape this vale of tears.

So a “salvation” that happens here and now in the midst of our real-Earth living can seem strange to our escape-addicted mentality. We are prone to believe that in this world shit happens, but in some next world no shit happens. And in such a set up of supposed happenings, Response-Ability has nothing to do with either of these two imagined realms.

So what does a down-to-Earth Christian salvation look like? It has these three elements:
(1) owning up to our reigning bondage-producing state of living, (2) noticing the cosmic forgiveness for our particular shit, and (3) choosing the then present fresh start in Response-Ability that is released by by accepting this forgiveness.

Perhaps you remember the story in the New Testament (Luke 19:1-10) about a tax collector named Zacchaeus. He was a short man and a rich man who had become rich as a Jewish tax collector for the Roman government. The way that that tax system worked was that the collector collected what the Roman government requested, plus a bit more for his own personal support. Such a system was open to serious corruption, and all the collectors who got rich were indeed corrupt. This short, rich Jew had been robbing his fellow Jews for some time. He was perhaps shunned for being so short and hated for being so corrupt. His whole life was clearly a public and personal mess. But he was still religious enough to be curious about this holy man who was entering his village. Since he was too short to see over the crowds, he climbed up a sycamore tree to see this man.

Jesus saw him up there, intuited his state of life, and called out for all the crowd to hear, “Come down Zacchaeus I am having lunch at your house.” So Zacchaeus climbs down, and before running off to prepare lunch comes to this holy man who had expressed such a attitude of forgiveness for him and exclaimed for all to hear, “Look sir, I will give half of my property to the poor. And if I have swindled anybody, I will pay him back four times as much.” Jesus then explained to the crowd, including you and me, that “Salvation had come to this house today.”

The post Response-Able first appeared on Realistic Living.

(1) Scientific History: What do we know about when and where a text was written, who wrote it, and what probable meanings were being given to the specific words used by this time-bound story teller?

(2) Literary Analysis: Was this a poem, a teaching, a fictional story, a historical legend, a theological myth, etc.?

(3) Metaphorical Translation: Interpreting any transcendent, two-layer, story-talk with our contemporary, existential, one-layer, transparency language.

(4) “Word-of-God” Suggestions: What might this passage be saying to us today about the living of our authentic lives and about the power of these Christian symbols for our own depth living?

Here is an illustration of Bible-based theologizing for a next Christianity. Following is a text from Luke 9:28-36 (J. B. Phillips translation) and my commentary on this story of the transfiguration of Jesus:

About eight days after these sayings [about the son of man coming in his glory], Jesus took Peter and James and John and went off with them to the hillside to pray. And then, while he was praying, the whole appearance of his face changed and his clothes became white and dazzling. And two men were talking with Jesus. They were Moses and Elijah—revealed in heavenly splendor, and their talk was about the way he must take and the end he must fulfill in Jerusalem. But Peter and his companions had been overcome by sleep, and it was as they struggled into wakefulness that they saw the glory of Jesus and the two men standing with him. Just as they were parting from him, Peter said to Jesus,

“Master, it is wonderful for us to be here! Let us put up three shelters—one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”

But he did not know what he was saying. While he was speaking a cloud overshadowed them and awe swept over them as it enveloped them. A voice came out of the cloud saying,

“This is my Son, my chosen! Listen to him!”

And while the voice was speaking, they found there was no one there at all but Jesus. The disciples were reduced to silence, and in those days never breathed a word to anyone of what they had seen.

Here is my take on interpreting this story: First of all, it is helpful for us to know some historical facts, like the highly probable fact that this story was written years after the crucifixion. The whole story is fiction—not a word of it is actual history except for the names of the people. “They never breathed a word to anyone of what they had seen” is an admission of the story teller who first told this story that he or she is making up this story. Seeing Jesus in his glory (as the Christ) did not happen until the “resurrection experience” happened. Indeed, seeing this glory of Jesus by the disciples, or by us, is the resurrection.

So, this story is about the meaning of resurrection, told and read by resurrected persons after the horror of the crucifixion became for them a doorway into the deeps of life. The teller of this story knows that “there was no one there at all but Jesus.” That dynamic applies to us today: until we participate in the resurrection experience, there is no one there at all but Jesus.

The bulk of this story is told in a type of dream imagery. The dazzle of Jesus garments is something seen only by transformed people who see the dazzle of Jesus along with the dazzle of Moses (author of the law) and the dazzle of Elijah ( grandfather of the prophets). We can translate the meaning of this dazzle for our mindsets as an experience of awe—a dread and fascination moment that is mysterious, that requires courage, and in the end redirects our lives.

I reject the sort of literalism that implies that a tape recorder would have picked up that voice from a cloud. I view this cloud as a symbol used to indicate the “heavenly source” of the message. And “heaven” is also a symbol for what we today might call, “the realm of Mystery that can penetrates any ordinary moment.”

And what does this dream-world “voice” say? It says, “Pay attention to Jesus, for this human being is revealing the nature of the Mysterious EVERY-THING-NESS/NO-THING-NESS that Moses and Elijah were also dazzled by, and that awake people today might meet in every moment of their lives.”

“The disciples were reduced to silence.” In other words, these still-learning disciples had no words for what they, in this story, were experiencing. They were, in this story, experiencing a preview of the resurrection, that rebirth on the other side of having all their illusions crucified in an event that so shattered the foundations of their lives that they never got over it. Only when this shaking of the foundations is complete, does the dazzle noted in the story appear. Only when all our illusions are exposed for what they are— when we have died to all our egoistic projections upon Reality, does the dazzle of Reality appear to us.

Peter cries out, “Let us build some altars [some religious formations] at this place.” In this story, Peter did not know what he was saying, but he did know that he was experiencing Final Things, appropriate for marking this place with some sort of humanly invented religious something.

In this story, all the above happens to these three disciples as “they were struggling into wakefulness.” We can identify with this phrase, for this story is what it is like for any of us to struggle into wakefulness, concerning our true being and our encircling Reality.

I have shown how we can translate a bit of New Testament text from first century poetry into contemporary language that might enable 21st Century humans to notice the “Awe-level” or “Primal-truth-level” that this story contains for our lives today. The final step (step four) is examining what it might mean to “Hear the Word of God” in this passage of Christian scripture.

So, what might we have heard at this deep level? In reflecting more carefully on this passage, we may have realized that we may have been walking with Jesus to hillsides and villages, so to speak, but it will take his death to wake us up to being the body of Christ who sees Jesus as the Christ, as the Truth, the Life, and the Way to live our lives. This story may also be telling us something about the human experience of “the resurrection from the dead”—the transformation from our deadly, despair-destined deludedness to our essential being in the body of the resurrected Jesus. If we do indeed feel some shallow deluded approach to living our lives, we are hearing the Word of God. If we do indeed see more clearly what authentic living might be for us, we are hearing the Word of God.

For more on death and resurrection as the core of the New Testament witness, I recommend the following portion of my commentary on the Gospel of Mark:

http://www.realisticliving.org/PDF/MarkCrossResurrection.pdf

The post New Testament Living first appeared on Realistic Living.

Too often overlooked is Niebuhr’s insight that the word “God” in biblical writings does not point to “a being,” but to “a devotion”—that the word “theism” or “God” is a devotional word, like the word “sweetheart.”  Niebuhr holds that the Hebraic Scriptures and the New Testament, as well as Augustine, Luther, and thousands of others use the word “God” to mean a devotion to a source of meaning for our lives.   Luther was very explicit about this: “Whatever your heart clings to . . . and relies upon, that is properly termed your God.”

So, if we view the syllable “theo” in the word “theology” to mean a devotion rather than a being, then “theology” might be termed “devotionology.”  “Monotheism” becomes “mono-devotionality.  “Polytheism” becomes “poly-devotionality.  And “henotheism” becomes “heno-devotionality.”

According to Niebuhr, monotheism, polytheism, and henotheism are three different devotional attitudes toward the whole of life.  I will describe these devotional attitudes beginning with poly-devotionality.

Both Augustine and Mohammed conducted a severe critique of the poly-devotionality that dominated their surrounding cultures.  Gods like Venus and Mars are about devotions to real realms of life—in this case love and war.  It is understandable that both of these devotions can exist in a single life, along with many other devotions: family, work, nation, race, sex, gender, virtue, personality, etc.  Niebuhr points out that each of these many temporal devotions can make an ultimate claim upon our lives.  And when they do, we experience our lives being torn apart among these many claims.  Perhaps we have experience this tension between our family and our work, or between other meaning-givers of our lives.   Niebuhr calls this “the war of the gods.”

Niebuhr also points out that each temporal god-devotion is doomed to disappoint us.  Each of these temporal “gods” (devotions) will disappoint us because each is temporal.  None of these “gods” can endure as an ultimate devotion.  Our family can die or abandon us.  Our work can end or bore us.  Our nation can embarrass us.  Our strong body can become old and fragile.  Any one of these god-devotions can cease to be a devotion that renders our life meaningful to us.  Niebuhr calls this “the twilight of the gods.”

Niebuhr’s radical mono-devotionality resolves these poly-devotionality short-comings.  A fully radical devotion to the ONE INCLUSIVE REALITY relativizes all the many devotions.  It provides a context of devotion within which these sub-level devotions can have a place, a place that is not ultimate, but a relative place rendered so by that ONE devotion to the Final Source and Final Terminator of all the temporal gods and god-devotions.

Heno-devotionality is an attempt to resolve the poly-devotionality short-comings, but it does so in an incomplete manner.  The “heno” idea points to a cultural pantheon like a nation or peoplehood  that holds the many devotions in some socially prescribed order.  Nativism or nationalism is a form of heno-devotionality, rather than a mono-devotionality, for it does not include a devotion to every other nation, as well as to our own nation.  Similarly, a devotion to life, the life of all animate beings, is a heno-devotionality rather than the mono-devotionality, for it does not include a devotion to the inanimate as well as to the animate, to the processes of dying as well to the processes of living.  As the Sufi poet Rumi said, “ Life and death are two wings on the same bird.”

These reflections allow us to see the fully radical nature of mono-devotionality.  Mono-devotionality turns out to be a complete form of realistic living.  To quote a phrase from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, this faith means a lived life in which “the good and the real come together.”  If something is real, it is good.  If something is going to be viewed as good, then it must be real.  “Evil” from this perspective becomes all those humanly invented value-universes of delusion, escape, and substitution for what is real.  Radical monotheism (mono-devotionality) is a radical realism of the most thoroughgoing sort.

This means that the findings of the scientific approach to truth are good to whatever extent they are real.  For example, if the evolution of life on Earth is real, it is good.  If the climate crisis is real, it is good—facing this crisis demands our full attention and our full responsibility toward ending our dependence upon greenhouse-gas-producing energy sources.  We can have vigorous debates about our various interpretations of the facts and their meaning, but making up our own facts to support our greed-based biases is selling ourselves to the dark-side.

Similarly, the findings of our contemplative inquiries into the essence of our own human consciousness is a valid approach to truth, and if such findings are true, they are good, requiring our ethical obedience and loyalty.  For example, if we find that bigotry, racism, nationalism, sexism, and other oppressive views are not in accord with our reality-based humanity, then those attitudes are a “fall” from a true mono-devotionality.  This fall does not change the essence of our true humanity, but it sets up a split in the self that we can call “despair.”  This fall is a fall into abject hopelessness, because in the final outcome, the real always wins over the fabricated.  If our devotionality is attached to the fabricated, then we are trapped in the losing side of the real drama of life.

It is not an accident that the mono-devotionality religions, at their best, have espoused and lived a thoroughgoing devotion to the Real, as well as to an unconditional love for our real selves and our real neighbors.

For more on this topic check out this longer essay:

http://www.realisticliving.org/UR4/10RadicalMonotheism.pdf

The post Mono-devotionality first appeared on Realistic Living.

Reality is my shepherd, so I lack nothing.
This shepherd provides green pastures,
and leads me to peaceful drinking water.
This Ground-of-all-being persistently renews life within me,
and guides me step-by-step on the path of righteous realism.
Even when I walk through a valley dark as death,
I fear nothing, for the Great Shepherd is leading me.

Dear God, my shepherd, when Your staff pushes me
or Your crook holds me back,
I see these actions as my comfort.
Indeed, Oh Final Mystery, You spread a picnic for me,
even in the presence of my enemies.
My head is anointed in Your oil of honor.
My cup of aliveness runs over.

So I say to all of you here listening:
Goodness and love unfailing will attend me,
all the days of my life,
and I shall abide happily within this Enduring Wholeness
my whole life long.

I am convinced that the above understanding of this Psalm is the understanding meant by whoever it was that wrote this Psalm.   Though the original vocabulary was different for this ancient poet of realistic living, I believe that his or her deep awareness about realistic living was the same as the one I am attempting to express.

Jesus was surely familiar with this Psalm.  Indeed, I believe that Jesus added nothing to this Psalm except a full devotion to living it.  Jesus was nothing more than a good Jew in the terms meant by this Psalm.  Such a happily devoted trust of Reality is the basic attitude that could unite Jews and Christians and both Jews and Christians with Muslims.

I mean this seriously; Jesus was nothing more than a good Jew, where “good Jew” means living Psalm 23.  Let me spell out how I think Jesus lived this Psalm.  When his disciples became anxious about how they were going to be fed, Jesus referred them to the sparrows.  “God feeds them,” he pointed out.  “You can buy a dozen sparrows for a quarter.  Don’t you think God values you that much?”

The Sadducees of Jesus’ culture were well-to-do religious leaders who had colluded fully with the Roman Empire in order to maintain their status, wealth, and positions.  Jesus viewed them as dead, unlike Abraham Isaac and Jacob who were still alive.

The Zealots of his time sought to protect the integrity of Judaism with military action.  Jesus rebuked this attitude.  He saw that “God” had invested the Roman Empire with an overwhelming power that could not be defeated at that time.  Here is his mode of rebuke of the Zealot attitude:  “If a Roman soldier ask you to carry his pack for a mile (which he is lawfully permitted to do) carry it, and offer to carry it a second mile.  If he slaps your face, offer him a second cheek.  This is how you stand up to Roman power.  This is what realistic living looks like.”

Jesus also rebuked those Pharisees who sought to exalt themselves over the masses through a detailed obedience to the Jewish rulebooks, in order to be rewarded by Reality in this life and in the final audit of time.  He saw that they were honoring minute rules while ignoring the weightier meanings of the law—the full demands for realism, love, and justice.  He likened them to straining gnats out of their soup, while swallowing camels.

Jesus was drawn to the John-the-Baptist movement of his time.  John saw that the core issue toward being realistic in that sick culture was acts of repentance.  Come to the river and have water pour on your head as a public symbol of your departure from unrealistic foolishness and for a renewal of your dedication to realism.  Jesus joined those who did this.

All these acts of Jesus illustrate what living Psalm 23 looks like.  And the Jesus story about Psalm-23 living had an even deeper meaning.  When John got his head chopped off, Jesus, so the story goes, was led by the spirit into the desert for a 40-day fast.  After being temped by the key unrealistic options faced by a powerfully awake person, Jesus began his own movement, knowing full well that the outcome that was met by John would be met by him as well.

The end of the Jesus story spelled out, for those who remembered it and lived it, a seemingly strange paradox.  Living the Psalm 23 means dying to all unrealism in spite of the fact that such living is costly.  Those who are dedicated to unrealism are not going to tolerate such living.  Nevertheless, this is where the beautiful life is to be found.  Such living is the resurrection from all death, despair, and daily foolishness.  Living that complete trust in Reality and in lived realism (expressed in Psalm 23) is the best-case scenario for your life, whatever it costs you.  So let us read the above Psalm once again.

The post The Cost of Realism first appeared on Realistic Living.

In But Not Of

The quality of the Christian life has to do with being “in the world, but not of the world.”

“Not of the world” means an “end-of-time” happening in your present life.  It means the coming of a deep detachment from your family, your peers, your citizenship, your culture, your time in history, your self images, your personality habits, your gender, yes even your own body and all its time-bound characteristics.  But if  your state is only “not of this world” rather than united with “in this world,” your state is aloofness rather than Christian love.

“In this world” is just as important as “not of this world.”  “In this world” means an “incarnation” of your “out-of-this-world-ness” in your physical body, your personality habits, your self images, your time in history, your gender, your culture, your citizenship, having your peers and your family, your body.  All your temporal relations are fluid; they can change; they can be changed by you; they will change because of your “out-of-this-world-ness.”

Nevertheless, your “in-this-world-ness” does not go away.  Some form of “in-this-world-ness” will always be the case.  Also, the quality of this “in-this-world-ness” is not entirely up to you.  You have been assigned your “in-this-world-ness” by the Infinite Almighty Mysteriousness that has sourced your temporal existence and moves you inexorably toward the end of your temporal existence.  At the same time, you are totally responsible for what you do with what you are and with what you can become over the course of your life.

But if your state is only “in this world” rather than united with “not of this world,” your state is despair, torn and scattered by time’s inexorable march. And you will have no sustained attention and objectivity for what the Christian witness is pointing to with the word “love.”

Love of the Christian sort means a total affirmation of every aspect of your particular body, of your personality and changes, of your self images and your recreations of your self images, of your gender, of your ongoing relationships with peers and family, of your culture and how you live it and alter it,  of your citizenship and your time in history with its limitations and challenges, plus your responses to some of these challenges and the consequences of those responses.

Love of the Christian sort also includes a total affirmation of your end-of-time detachment form the temporal flow of the world.  This absolute uprootedness is your gift of objectivity and creativity in your living in this world. This uprootedness makes you a son or daughter of Eternity rather than a son or daughter of perdition.  This uprootedness is your power, your spirit energy, your equanimity, your rest, your hope, your undefeatable quality that no ups or downs of fortune can disrupt.

“In the world, but not of the world” is your human essence, but perfection in manifesting this essence is not to be expected in your real-time living.  This is a journey.  We may have been born into this quality, but we “press on to the full stature of Christ Jesus,” as the apostle Paul put it.  “We were crucified with Christ” Paul said.  This means our detachment in being “not of this world.”  And we were “raised up in Christ to newness of life,” Paul witnesses.  This means our incarnation in being “in this world” as the resurrected body of Christ.

So, what does this “in Christ” symbol mean for Paul?  It means a perfection into which we have been joined by a profound transformation of the overall direction of our lives—toward ever greater realism in love-relatedness with Infinite Reality and love-relatedness with all the temporal  realities that constitute our lives.  But this is a journey. We do not yet manifest this perfection in our personal life or in our social contributions.   Let us press on.  We are in a cosmic struggle between realism and illusion.

For more study of the “in Christ” symbol, I recommend this essay:

Here Already and Still to Come

Here is the downloading URL for this essay:

And for some companionship in further researching these far-edge topics, put these dates on your 2016 calendar:  Friday evening June 10 to Wednesday morning June 15th

This five-day set of two meetings begins Friday evening June 10, 2016 with a carefully orchestrated set of methods for a spirit-retreat on honoring women’s experience led by Joyce Marshall and Pat Webb.  This “retreat” lasts until Sunday noon June 12th followed by an afternoon break.

Then, beginning the evening of June 12th, we begin our Research Symposium Meeting on the topic “Is There a Post-Patriarchal Christianity” moving on with related topics until 9:00pm Tuesday evening the 14th.  People return home Wednesday morning June 15th.

The post In But Not Of first appeared on Realistic Living.