One of my favorite prayers is, “Forgive me, Father, for my unbelief.”
I think it started as a kid when I was asking my parents about who wrote Genesis. When I found out how long after Creation it had been written, I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.
How could some dude who lived hundreds of years after the Creation of the earth have any accurate sense of how it had happened? It didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t care if he was inspired by God.
I have always believed deep down that science will confirm what the Bible says about how the earth was created, but when I was a kid, it was very important to evangelicals to believe in Young Earth Creationism instead of Evolution, and the two ideas were considered completely incompatible. Since then, discoveries like Mitochondrial Eve, established a much more recent beginning for humans (and confirmed we didn’t come from apes, which was one of the things I remember evangelicals being upset about).
A dear friend and a bit of a nemesis in high school confronted me with the conflicting accounts of different events in the Gospels. I bluffed my unconcern at the time, but I was horrified. If that was true, why hadn’t anyone told me?
Then a professor in college suggested that maybe God wasn’t a man.
Where do you shop for clothes? How often do you shop? Is it medicinal, or is because you have an identifiable need? Do you shop ethically?
I’m a medicinal shopper. I’ve historically been pretty good at making it seem at least part of the time like it’s an identifiable need, but usually, it’s just because I’m stressed out and looking for a way to control my environment.
As a lady in my Late Thirties, I’ve become a bit of a snob with my shopping. I don’t remember how I discovered Anthropologie, but their quirky, European-inspired, artsy offerings appealed to me immediately. I had realized the cheaply made, fleeting styles of third party sellers on Amazon were often disappointing.
I started with Anthropologie’s hand towels. On sale, they are often around $10-14. Which is pretty expensive for a kitchen towel, but these aren’t your average kitchen towel.
As I finished up Richard Rohr’s The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See, I was laying on the sofa with a raw throat, feeling feverish. I was surrounded by feverish, coughing kids laying next to me, on me, and across from me. And I knew I was in heaven.
The struggle to forgive reality for being exactly what is is right now often breaks us through to nondual consciousness. -Richard Rohr
That is the spirit of Rohr’s book: Recognizing the Kingdom of God is right now. He introduces Jesus from a perspective I first encountered in Breathing Underwater, and builds from there, using primarily scripture, but also the words of the mystics such as St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Ávila, and his own ideas.
His object isn’t to convert his reader, just to encourage another way of thinking about the world, so even if you don’t consider yourself religious, this book is a safe place to explore ideas about God without having to feel like you’re being backed into a corner. Yet the book doesn’t shy away from big ideas.
What’s your position on advice? What counts as advice? Do you find yourself peddling your life experience from time to time? Often? Rarely?
I’ve been thinking about this since this past fall. I got home from my trip, brain freshly scrubbed. I wanted everyone to know about my experience. How could I be true to myself and not talk about it?
And then my inner voice shot back, but you should feel that way about Jesus.
Good Friday. The two challenging kids who are usually in school were home. I was scheduled for a night shift. I was dreading the anticipated lost sleep that night, and wondering how I was going to get through the next week with all my little kids home, my oldest home, and my two big girls away visiting family friends.
