It has been along time since I  have been here.  I don't think I am alone in noticing that spirituality is cyclical, it strengthens and wanes, just like everything else in nature.  One who claims to be in a constant state of spiritual bliss is either telling a fib or has reached a supernatural state of nirvana that not many have lived to see.  I find that when I am in the low part of the cycle, when I need to meditate and pray and find that special closeness to God, is the time when its the most difficult to do.  I am happy to say, however, that persistence pays off!  One of those happened today in fact.

This morning I was reading the selection in the Anglican Cycle for daily prayer, or the Daily Office.  It was the story from the the book of Acts (Ch.12) where Herod has Peter imprisoned, presumably to behead him as he had just done with James, the brother of John.  In the night, the Angel of the Lord comes to Peter and frees him by causing his shackles to fall from his wrists, then leads him past the outer guards and through the gate "which opened for them of itself".  Peter was free.  Just prior to this action we are told that the entire church was praying for him.
 
I am faced once again in this reading with a remarkable story of miraculous deeds attributed to prayer and the appearance of the Angel of the Lord.  My 21st Century brain has to attempt to process all of this in light of what I know, or at least, what I have been taught and what I have taught myself about how things work in the universe.  And, it is precisely at places like this where many will exit the bus of religion, because they think it is trying to take them to some type of land of Oz.  I used to blindly accept the magic of these stories and think to myself, who am I to be so arrogant as to challenge the reality of the power of God?

But there is another way, a way that takes me to the core of my being and that leaves the Godly miracle completely intact.  By seeing what this scripture is saying, rather than by looking for the proof of the written action, these stories take on a powerful dimension that enables me to see straight to what the Holy Spirit is all about.  Perhaps the people of year zero needed to have a miraculous story to believe in the God of Jesus, or maybe, they just needed a story, period.  They were all about stories after all.  And they were far more clever about understanding the meaning and function of stories than we are today.

Here is what this is for me.  I am imprisoned on an almost daily basis by something.  Usually something very worldly- money, self doubt, what other people think my favorite football team- stuff that in the long run doesn't really matter.  It is not the literal chain and shackle of imprisonment, but these things can take on the character of the real thing, stopping me dead in my tracks and making me go in directions much darker than I would like.  But here is the point, the point of most religion, really.  The Angel of the Lord is always here, always ready to remove those shackles, often miraculously, and to have the gate of the prison open of its own accord allowing me to walk right out to freedom.  Like waking from a nightmare and being so relieved to realize that I was just dreaming. 

This is what God does.  For me at least.  God is the miracle worker, the angel who removes the chains and provides the light for me to able to walk out of the darkness.  It is a long walk  more often than not, and it is strewn with heartache and fear, but there is always freedom beyond the gate.  The writer of Acts knew that.  I know that.

God is.....

My wife and I enjoy reading the meditations of the late Rev. Oswald Chambers in his book My Utmost for His Highest each morning. (At least on the mornings when no alarm is set and we don't oversleep.)  The reading for January 9th turned out to be one of those thought provoking entries, in that it deals with the ubiquitous Holy Spirit and how it preserves us through the trials of life.  The key for us this morning was Rev. Oswald's instruction to read Psalm 139 in connection with his commentary. We did.

Psalm 139 is labeled in the The Harper Collins Study Bible, NRSV, as"The Inescapable God". The first 18 verses describe God as the all knowing, all seeing and all encompassing spirit.  "Where can I go from your spirit?", he asks, "..where can I flee from your presence?"  The psalmist makes the famous assertion that it was God who formed him and knit him together in his mother's womb, that it is God who laid out the plan of his days as written "In your book".  And finally comes the plea to "Search me, O God and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts."

There must have been something in the coffee this morning, because after this we picked up  Day by Day from the Forward Movement, and read in the meditation on Acts 19:2, "I much prefer the word Spirit to God.  The latter has been anthropomorhphized from an unseen but undeniable force into male qualities:  the white-haired old man and the blue-eyed suffereing son.  God is boxed into a certain form we think we can know and understand."

I believe that the Psalmist and the authors of today's meditations are all saying the same thing, and it is a thing I have felt to be true in my soul since the occurrence of the transforming moment of enlightenment I had as a youth-  We can never know or understand God on our terms, we can not put God in a box and claim to know who or what he really is.  God has made life as God is, and has made our understanding as it is- infinite and mysterious.  One knows there is God, but there is no way to define God with anything other than descriptions that are limitied by the number of nouns and adjectives we have in a our vocabulary.  A mystical experience, a sacremental moment, communion with the Holy Spirit, are things felt and experienced, but always inadeqately described.

The psalmist makes clear that God transcends anything we can know or think.  That God is part of everything, living and dead, animate, inanimate.  God is the air, the rocks and the sea; God is our thoughts, our happiness and our sadness.  God is the dark space between the stars and the planets. We are all a part of the fabric of God and God is a part of all that is, both seen and unseen. God knows us so well because we are all fundamentally the same, we are driven by the same inteligence, the same madness. 

Can anyone ever prove God?  Why is there a need to when God simply is?  Trying to make a literal being out of such an ephemeral concept is foolishness, and the results of such foolishness are always in our face, every day.  Look no further than the newspaper or the evening news.

God is.  I pray that we can allow him to be that.  Only then can we be like him.

The Power of Light

In this season of Christmas, as in every Christmas season, we hear a great deal about light.  I never thought much about it until this season, I usually hear the words and let them go by as the days wind down to the Feast of the Nativity and then fade into the New Year. This year it meant more, and I think it meant more because I heard someone speaking about it on the radio in a way that I had not thought about it before. 

I am not certain who it was, the person speaking about light, so I won't try to quote them and give credit because I may credit the wrong person.  But it went like this:  The darkness that exists in the world is far reaching, in fact, darkness is everywhere that light is not, by definition.  But as prevalent as it may seem, darkness is never powerful enough to overcome light.  Light always wins the struggle, effortlessly it appears- darkness simply cannot withstand the presence of light.

This little metaphor is so powerful in its application.  If one accepts the definition of God as the pure light, the source of light, the creator of light, then darkness is the absence of God.  What happens when there is no God?   I have seen the answer to this in my own life, in the times when I attempted to replace God with other sources of energy- money, people, intoxicants- those times were like living in a dark closet, feeling my way around in a very small world cut off from my self and from all that I knew to be good.  Darkness is a place where only those who hate the light are bound to live, preying on the light of others for their sustanence.


As I listened to the man on the radio, I realized that light does not happen on its own- physical or spiritual.  Light only happens as the result of the expenditure of energy.  Substances or particles are involved in a reaction, often violently, and the result is energy released as light. (I am no physicist, but I think I am on the right track here).  The light in our homes is the result of electrons being pushed around in wires by huge generators forcing them to find a point of release.  And so on.  Coming out of the darkness also involves a violent reaction of some kind, a realization, a letting go, something that the ego and the id do not want to have happen.  At the end of that struggle is light.

It is the same with me.  Light only comes into my life when I take positive action to open up my heart and mind to the power being pushed around the universe by God, the mystical generator.  I have to accept it and consciously keep the circuit open to keep it flowing within me.  Jesus, the light of God who became flesh and walked among us, is God's light in this world.  That other energy, the self indulgent energy so powerful at first, burns dimly and bathes one's mind and soul in the amber glow of what pleases in the moment. Jesus is for all time.

For 2015, I am resolving to keep that light burning bright, to open myself to the flow of energy from Jesus that is love in its purest form.  It is source of clean, renewable energy, and it is abundant.

The key to a healthy spiritual life is in seeking rather than knowing.  Simply stated, with knowing comes familiarity, and familiarity (as we are taught in the fable) breeds contempt.  When something is known it ceases to have meaning beyond its definition, it may be categorized, cataloged, and filed away.  It is no longer sought out except as trivia.

We are told in this age of hyper enlightenment, that most everything is known. Those things that still evade us, such as the edge of the universe, the content of dark matter, solutions to certain mathematical theorems, the cure for the common cold, are all soon to be discovered and then we will indeed know everything.  This brings me to a point of embarkation which must necessarily be avoided, although the desire to veer from the present topic is strong.

Those among us who study day and night to prove things, have spent a great deal of time looking into religion and concluded that all is known here as well and that it is no longer relevant.  It has been shown by science that God, whatever that is, does not exist.  For these individuals, Marx has proven to be correct in that religion is the opiate of the masses, and that s all. The curtain has been pulled away from the universe and there is no gray haired man back there turning knobs and pulling levers.  Lets move on to the next mystery. 

If religion and God have become irrelevant, then I say that art, literature, drama, music, and poetry must be dismissed as well.  But wait, Mr. Kendrick, are you equating these things with God?  No, it is much more clear than that, I am saying that these things are God.  And that is what I am going to seek to do here in this spot, develop support for that statement, knowing that I will never be able to know if I have supported it or not.  And that too, is God.

God's gifts to each of us are enormous, if we simply look for them.  The greatest of all that I have found is the gift of opportunity.  Opportunity is a word that conveys the feeling of progress, advancement, and as the American Heritage Dictionary reads, "A favorable or advantageous combination of circumstances". 

In my life in God, I am presented daily with favorable circumstances, opportunities to make choices between living spiritually or being purely human.  In the past, most of my choices were driven by the overwhelming power of human nature, rooted in habits that developed out of instinct and from years of looking for ways to satisfy the hunger that arose from an unquenchable feeling of loneliness.   Such things drive a soul to darkness in a way that chips one apart, a little piece at a time, while looking for that fulfillment that will surely be just around the next corner or behind the next bottle.  All trailing opportunities missed.

An ancient psalmist writes, "He reached down from on high and grasped me; he drew me out of great waters... He brought me out into an open place; he rescued me because he delighted in me".  I have felt the joy and relief behind these words in my own life, the day that I finally seized an opportunity to chose, and realized that I in order to live, I must surrender all of the things in my life that are driven by anything other than love.  Every door was opened and  the light of goodness filled each corner and  the rushing breeze of the Spirit removed the dust and darkness.  I set myself free from myself, and prayed to God that He would be my mind and my heart.

Another psalm, "remember not the sins of my youth and my transgressions; remember me according to your love..."  and another, "the Lord is my strength and my shield; my heart trusts in him, and I have been helped".  These are  words of comfort, the words that convey the situation of life today.  So, do I feel that I have I been made perfect or better than anyone?  Of course not, and I never shall be. But by realizing and seeing that one thing, that each day is an opportune gift from God to restore life in goodness and hope, I know that I can live. 

Live a life today, live as if you are who God created you to be.  Living away from your self is not a fearful place, it is not a lonely place.  It is where we all belong in order to be who we are.  The opportunity is always present, it is a gift waiting to be accepted.

What in the world?

There is something going on.  In the world.  If one doesn't realize this, then one must have one's head in the sand.  Keep it there long enough, and someone will cut it off at the neck. 

Yes, I believe it is that bad.  However, I also believe it is necessary and certainly not unique in the history of mankind.  "Things" never remain the same forever, and in our technological world, forever doesn't last very long.  There have been major cultural shifts, "turnings" if you will, through-out history.  We are seeing one now.  The greatest fear in these periods is not who will end up winning the illusion of control, but the mere fact that things are changing.

Who's at fault?  Every single one of us and none of us.  We are all people and we are consistently thus.  We all spend, we all hoard; we all love, we all hate; we all strive for truth, we all lie.  The only the difference is the magnitude of these things. 

Is God in the middle of this?  I don't know.  But I believe that all is as it should be all the time and that God is in the middle of that.  How we handle change, upheaval, revolution, idiots, whatever, is a function of God in us.  We who believe have our instructions and we have the experience of centuries of thriving in and hiding from human constructs of governance.  There is nothing to fear.  There is much to pray for.

It's hip to cite hyposcrasy

IN blog comments, letters to the editor, interviews, social media, and everyday conversation; it is very hip to rationalize away the idea of religion based on the "hypocrasy and intolerence" of religious people.  What a concept!  Such statements presume that those who openly identify themselves with a (Christian) religious group are claiming to be something they are not, and expect everyone else to be so as well.  There is only one rational response to these folk, in words that today's culture understands unequivocally- bullshit.

Granted, there are denominations out there which do proscribe to sole source salvation, and believe that those who don't belong are done for.  And yes, there are those who believe that actions speak louder than anything else and their faith is demonstrated through an elitist, exclusionary approach.   (You know who you are.)  But this is not religion, this is not Christianity.  This is what happens when human beings play cosmic arbiter.  And, it applies equally to the smug non religious person living high above the fray, who's own "tolerance" does not reach quite as far across the board as he or she may imagine.

Religion is about an individuals approach and relationship with a higher power.  Most of us refer to that power by the noun, God.   It encompasses an infinite number of forms and as many theologies.  There are actually those of us who are Christians, who can accept this fact and live with it, without feeling that such a belief diminishes our relationship with Jesus in any way.  Or, more importantly, that such belief diminishes Jesus and his message in any way.  Which is the way this whole Christian thing began, as I understand it, before humans began to improve it, (tongue in cheek). 

Anyway, explaining this would take years of blogging and make little difference to anyone.  Which is sad.  Just as sad as reading the cynical, prejudiced thoughts of the enlightened who enjoy their right to condemn and besmirch what they fear.  I know far, far more Christians from many, many denominations who would try to understand those viewpoints and pray for those people, rather than drag their attitudes through the mud and condemn them to hell.  But for some reason, those folks just don't get it. 

Oh well.  I guess I'll go out and be hypocritical and intolerant for the rest of the day.  What else is there to do?