4Faith

PF Henshaw NY NY
id@synapse9.com 6/2005

7 The true authority of God on Earth is our own living faith, and for me, it is diminished by being explained away as something else. What matters is what WE bring to life, our steadfast faith is goodness, despite it all, our will to reach deep within ourselves for guidance, to open our hearts to love and truth, to become God's presence on Earth. To tell the truth, the presence of God is OUR magic, not miracles of outside intervention. Speculative magical thinking does still surround religion today, but it's either a metaphor for the power of our own faith or only a distraction left over from more primitive times. 6/4/05

6 It seems the origin of liberal thought was the radical vision of Emerson, Thoreau and Bronson Alcott that blossomed in Concord Mass in the 1840's. Bronson Alcott was a visionary school teacher, the father of Louisa May, and a great inspiration to all three. There is a great short biography of Alcott in the 1/10/05 New Yorker. Feed children's' minds, boys and girls together, and listen to their wisdom. Seek harmony between people and with nature. I think liberals today need to refresh their great vision, perhaps by again listening to their children.

5 If you come to hate your enemy you've lost the real battle. 11/07/04

4Trying to understand people you have differences with is very challenging, and can seem to threaten your own values. You don't need to fear loosing your mind, though. If you have faith in yourself it will hold you together. It's like diving for pearls. You can't breathe for a while maybe, but you will come up for air and return to your familiar world, perhaps a great deal richer than before. Still it's scary immersing yourself in someone else's world, and the pearls are not always there to find. Sometimes what you find seems really disgusting at first, and then changes to leave you in awe of a foreign wisdom. You can confront your fears, have faith and return to your secure and comfortable place shortly. 11/07/04

3 I'm a religious skeptic I guess, believing in the power of faith, even while questioning all the faiths I know. What they say always seems confused even if what they do is often wonderful in changing lives. Life's complicated. I think this (ALL this) is God, full and overflowing with his presence, and that the reason it doesn't always look that way to us is that we're just not very adept at looking beyond our small visions of ourselves. Still, what works in some way for anyone may offer hints for ourselves. My main fascination is watching the mysterious swarming currents of change, the ordinary progression of time as a kind of extravagant fireworks display or new things. Whatever little thing pops up next also conceals a torrent of connections with far flung roots and central organization uniquely born of itself. When you see how rich the fabric is it becomes a little less surprising how rich the fabric is. I'd like to share it, but I've tried and don't seem to know how. 11/07/04

2 Faith is empowering, but whether it's best to think of it enabling God do do things for you, or for you to do things for yourself is open to question. Believing the former does indeed seem to make for lots of the latter, especially with plentiful upbeat group support as in the motivational Christian churches. It's a key to their success. The danger is in believing in leaving yourself out of the picture and relying on God to do it for you, as taught by Joel Osteen ("Bible Based Church"), saying this morning that "the enemy always fights the hardest when God has something wonderful in store for you". That's similar to the teaching of Oswald Chambers ("My Utmost for His Highest", reportedly George Bush's daily devotional, NYTimes 10/28/04 A29) that the greater the resistance you confront the more God is testing your faith. That closes the door to learning, telling you to blunder ahead without eyes open and to make excuses about the weakness of your faith when the inevitable failure comes. The the election of George Bush turned importantly on his unwavering faith in what he began in Iraq. Eyes open, though, the resistance clearly multiplies as we attack it, and we're clearly killing a lot of people who would not be at war if we were not there. 11/07/04

1 Christian teaching is mysteriously lacking instruction on recognizing the difference between our mental maps and the territory of life it is our task to navigate. It's a natural problem, that we tend to think life is what our minds make up to represent it. We create all our own images and feelings, each constructed in our own internal language, out of our own special circumstances, sharing some common culture with others around us and different from others. The polarization in American politics comes from the development of different maps, that are all but incomprehensible to each other. The differences between Christian and Muslim cultures are even greater. Because its our natural human handicap, though, our maps are all we have to go by and it leads of conflict and confusion. Christ said to love your enemy, a kind of very profitable contradiction, a promise that even though our adversaries are living by maps that conflict with our own, they are still living in the one world and can, with faith, transcend the differences. There's usually a bonus in store, empowering insights and connections never before available.