2010 Reboot - The Voyage Continues

Still walking the path, pondering a fuller commitment to Jesus and the "Body of Christ" via becoming a member of the local Mennonite church, wondering what this means about "seeing other people" spiritually. In light of this sort of commitment, is it possible to be a Buddhist-Christian, a Mennonite Freemason, and a rock-and-roll, shamanistic weirdo? Conversely, is it even possible for me to be something other than what I feel myself to be? Is my fear of commitment to one faith tradition a sign of legitimate fears of religious intolerance and exclusivity, a symptom of a larger cultural spiritual consumer mentality, or something else entirely? (I know members of this same Mennonite family who are comparative religion scholars, biology professors, and devotees of Sai Baba, so it is also quite obvious that "committed discipleship" is more complicated than it sounds and that I'm not the only one who must sort out these sorts of issues.)

I also wonder what G-d is all about. If there is an all-powerful, all-loving God in the sense that my parents and most other Christians understand there to be, then how do you explain stuff like this without being glib? Why does an impersonal Godhead seem more acceptable in the contemporary intellectual world than a personal, theistic God? Perhaps more importantly, what is it about a personal G-d that is less acceptable to me than an impersonal, panentheistic Godhead? What would it mean for G-d to be more than personal, rather than less?

For the time being, here are things for me to read for the journey:

Buddhism and Christianity

Through the Eastern Gate: From Tibetan Buddhism to Orthodoxy

Please weigh in with thoughts and suggestions.

Someone has to do this: A fool and clown for God and humanity's sake

clipped from www.denverpost.com Shortly before 8 a.m. Thursday, Carl Kabat arrived outside a N-8 Minuteman III nuclear missile silo near New Raymer in Weld County. He donned his signature clown costume and breached the fences that surround the silo. He hung banners on the fence. He kneeled in his yellow wig, his one-piece blue jumper adorned with patches and smiley faces and his outsized red shoes. And he prayed. "St. Paul says we are fools for God's sake. I change it to say we are fools and clowns for God and humanity's sake," he said, explaining the clown get-up. I never will forget his response when I asked him why he does such things, always landing himself in prison. "Someone has to do this," he said with a laugh, adding that the missiles he attacks are 20 times more powerful than the one that wiped out 100,000 people in Hiroshima. "Just one of those missiles could kill 2 million human beings. I have to do this."

(And for my nitpick friends, please overlook the foolish misspelling on his placard and get the point.)

The Buddhist approach to happiness, according to Pico Iyer

clipped from happydays.blogs.nytimes.com We can’t change the world except insofar as we change the way we look at the world — and, in fact, any one of us can make that change, in any direction, at any moment. You make your way to happiness not by fretting about it or trafficking in New Age affirmations, but simply by finding the cause of your suffering, and then attending to it, as any doctor (of mind or body) might do. Think in terms of enemies, he suggests, and the only loser is yourself. Happiness is not pleasure, they know, and unhappiness, as the Buddhists say, is not the same as suffering. Suffering — in the sense of old age, sickness and death — is the law of life; unhappiness is just the position we choose — or can not choose — to bring to it. True happiness, in that sense, doesn’t mean trying to acquire things, so much as letting go of things (our illusions and attachments).

Right Here, Right Now

Beautiful mash-up of Alan Watts & Chögyam Trungpa from YouTube:

Mathematician sculpts "shadow" of 4th dimension

clipped from www.physorg.com

From the linked story:

"The sculpture, designed by Adrian Ocneanu, professor of mathematics at Penn State, presents a three-dimensional 'shadow' of a four-dimensional solid object."

Wow. Just wow.

Seeing small, beautiful joys

This hangs over my desk at work, and I wanted to share it with all of you:

I am not accustomed to rejoicing in things that are small, hidden, and scarcely noticed by the people around me....

Somehow I have become accustomed to living with sadness, and so have lost the eyes to see the joy and the ears to hear the gladness that belongs to God and which is to be found in the hidden corners of the world....

[Seeing the small and beautiful] is a real discipline. It requires choosing for the light even when there is much darkness to frighten me, choosing for life even when the forces of death are so visible, and choosing for the truth even when I am surrounded by lies....The reward of choosing joy is joy itself....There is so much rejection, pain, and woundedness among us, but once you choose to claim the joy hidden in the midst of all suffering, life becomes celebration. Joy never denies the sadness, but transforms it to a fertile soil for more joy.

from The Return of the Prodigal Son, by Henri J. M. Nouwen

The practice of mediocrity

clipped from robertgdavis.blogspot.com By making un-extraordinary acts and behaviors our ordinary practice, we entrap ourselves from knowing how precious life really is. We don’t use opportunities that come our way as a means of expressing how special we really are. Instead, we walk the walk with the rest of the herd and soon find ourselves in such a deep rut of limitations we lose sight of our own value. We become trapped in mediocrity.

I am guilty (more than I would like to admit) of making mediocrity my ordinary practice.