If I Were Asked
Podcast: Download (2.1MB)
Subscribe: More
If I were asked to confess my faith or my beliefs out loud, and I were scrambling for some place to begin, I would start in the desert, in the lonesome valley, and say that first of all and ultimately we are alone. No god abides with us, caring, watching, mindful of our going out and coming in. The only certainty is chance connections, both chosen and involuntary, that matter most of all and ultimately help and heal and hold us.
Sun/God
Podcast: Download (1.3MB)
Subscribe: More
Your missionary ancestors told Indian people that they were worshipping a false god when we prayed to the sun. The sun is the most powerful physical presence in our lives. Without it we could not live and our world would perish. Yet our reverence for it, our awe, was considered idolatry.
A Prayer
Reflections on God
Podcast: Download (6.2MB)
Subscribe: More
We asked each of our ministerial interns to share a reflection on what God means to them. Here’s what they had to say. Read more →
From Your Minister
Podcast: Download (5.2MB)
Subscribe: More
Are you there, God? It’s me, Meg.
Yes, and if you don’t mind, I’ll keep calling you Margaret. It confuses me when you young people are always taking nicknames. It’s hard enough learning one name for each of you! Read more →
REsources for Living
Podcast: Download (4.7MB)
Subscribe: More
If you were going to look for God, where would you look? Would you go up on top of a mountain? Would you look in the crashing ocean waves? Would you be more likely to find God in a giant sequoia redwood tree, or in a tiny plant growing in the pinch of soil between mountain rocks? Would you look up towards the stars or down toward the earth that supports us?
Touching our Strength
Podcast: Download (840.3KB)
Subscribe: More
We touch this strength, our power, who we are in the world, when we are most fully in touch with one another and with the world. Read more →
God
February 2013
“God has no religion.” —Mahatma Gandhi
Articles
A God We Can Believe In
At home on a bookshelf we have a massive folio-style slipcover book titled Cabinet of Natural Curiosities by Albertus Seba, a pharmacist in eighteenth-century Amsterdam. Read more »
People Ask About God (Excerpt)
People go astray in their search for God because they do not take the right starting-point. We should never begin by asking, “Is there a God?”– as though God could be something outside of ordinary experience; or, to put it in the old-fashioned way, something outside of Nature. Read more »
If I Were Asked
If I were asked to confess my faith or my beliefs out loud, and I were scrambling for some place to begin, I would start in the desert, in the lonesome valley, and say that first of all and ultimately we are alone. Read more »
Sun/God
Your missionary ancestors told Indian people that they were worshipping a false god when we prayed to the sun. The sun is the most powerful physical presence in our lives. Read more »
A Prayer
World that is my home,Spirit that matters,Speak to me in the voices of Ralph Waldo Emerson,yes, and Florence Nightingale… Read more »
Reflections on God
We asked each of our ministerial interns to share a reflection on what God means to them. Here’s what they had to say. Read more »
From Your Minister
“Are you there, God? It’s me,” Meg.”Yes, and if you don’ mind, I’ll keep calling you Margaret. It confuses me when you young people are always taking nicknames. It’s hard enough learning one name for each of you!” Read more »
REsources for Living
If you were going to look for God, where would you look? Would you go up on top of a mountain? Would you look in the crashing ocean waves? Read more »
Touching our Strength
We touch this strength, our power, who we are in the world, when we are most fully in touch with one another and with the world. Read more »
Pro-Life/Pro-Choice
Let’s start the conversation here. Everybody is pro-life. OK, everybody who is not Lord Voldemort and his Death Eaters. Honestly, do you know a single person who would describe themselves as pro-death? All of us are pro-life, and none of us is infinitely pro-life. All of us value some lives more than others. Is there a person living who feels the same way about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. as they do about the assassination of Osama bin Laden? Have we had the kind of public mourning for children killed in drone strikes in Afghanistan as for the children gunned down in Newtown? If you had to make a choice (and you do) between feeding your own kids and feeding kids in Libya, is there any question who gets fed? We all are pro-life, and we all put more weight on some lives than on others.
Yes, a fetus is a human life, and if you have been trying for that pregnancy, then nothing could be more precious. And yes, the human body routinely self-aborts fertilized eggs, and unless we are trying to get pregnant no one really thinks of that as even sad, let alone tragic. When we say we treasure life, we mean that we treasure the lives that we choose to cherish.
We make religious assertions: “Life is sacred.” “We affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person.” And those assertions matter. But we are fooling ourselves if we think that those affirmations have easy and obvious applications in the real world. Some people are pro-life, but in favor of the death penalty. Some people are pro-life, but support sending troops into combat. Some people are pro-life, but believe that people need access to guns so that they can defend themselves with lethal force. Some people are pro-life, but favor the right of terminally ill people to choose the means and timing of their death. Some people are pro-life, but favor access to safe and legal abortions. In the real world absolutes fall apart pretty quickly.
So what then are we to do? Choose life. Knowing that the way you choose life might be different than the choice someone else makes. Because, really, all of us are pro-choice. We all want to be free to follow the dictates of our conscience. Everyone wants the autonomy to examine the world in which we live and our place in it, to make the best of what we find, to create love and prosperity and justice. Everyone wants to find their way to life more abundant—for themselves, their family, their friends.
For one woman choosing life might mean choosing to carry a pregnancy to term even though she knows that she can’t raise that child, choosing instead to place the baby for adoption. For another woman choosing life might mean having an abortion so that she can finish her education and build a decent life for herself—and potentially for children she might choose to have in the future. Both are choices. Both are life-affirming.
The job of religion is not to set out false absolutes, declaring that the church has the capacity to decide which lives matter the most. The job of religion is to call us to continually examine what it means to choose abundant life, and to make life-affirming choices. And then the job of religion is to remind us that we must continually expand our vision of which lives matter, of who deserves to have life abundant.
Faith to Live, Faith to Die
I spent yesterday with an almost 90 year old woman I’ve loved for decades, just home from the hospital following congestive heart failure.
A cracker jack team of doctors, as well as a bevy of loving friends and family members, have surrounded her all week, attempting to figure out exactly what is causing her heart to weaken and not pump efficiently. They’re talking about medicine and diet and possible surgery.
She’s clear, herself, about what’s going on: “I’m old,” she says calmly. “My heart is old.” She seems completely at peace with what will happen next, be it more tests and fussing, be it, ultimately, drawing her last breath on this planet sooner rather than later. I can see from her strength that she won’t do anything she doesn’t want to do, but she isn’t troubled by what other people need to do around her either.
Her devout Catholic faith brings her great comfort now, as it has every day of her life.
The priest has been to see her at her hospital bedside, performed what she says is no longer called last rites but “prayer for the sick” and told her, “Your sins are all forgiven now, so don’t mess it up!” She twinkles when she repeats this.
Her daughter, who practices Vipassana Buddhist meditation, spoke to her in awe about her clarity and peace. “Mom, this is what meditation is all about – developing the kind of serenity that you have, no matter what happens! How did you get this way?” to which she simply smiled, and shrugged, as if it were nothing. Just another day in a quietly heroic life.
I’ve watched a number of people meet their deaths over the years, or face sickness and old age, and each time I see someone exhibiting this kind of grace, I pray that I will be like them. I pray that I won’t be fussing over the annoyance of an oxygen tank or telling people to get out of the room and give me some space, but that, rather, I will welcome the presence of others with this kindness and acceptance.
My own mother was a mentor. A lifelong atheist, she told me in her dying days, “They say there are no atheists in foxholes, but here I am. I’m not afraid to die!” Her courage and strength in her final days caused everyone at the hospice to comment on her faith. This seemed a little ironic to me, so I told my Mom what those around her were saying.
She responded, “Faith is how you live, not what you believe.” And when a hospice nurse started praying over her in the name of Jesus, my Mom waved away my scowling reaction. “It’s for her, honey,” she said quietly. “It makes her feel better. I don’t mind her prayers at all.” I, ostensibly a person of faith, pray I won’t be snarling at the well-meaning nurse by my side about church/ state separation.”
Watching these beloved women, and so many others, meet their final days, tells me that faith is indeed how you live, not what you believe. Their beliefs couldn’t be further from each other. And yet, for each of them, as for the rest of us, how they’ve lived, and how they die, is truly faith in action.
