Every generation’s endangerments are equally threatening and of equal concern. I am suggesting that the way each generation manages threats has much to do with human ingenuity AND with that generation’s spirituality: how do they understand God/Godde/Higher Power/Allah/YHWH and themselves in relation to God?
I am positing that errant ideas about divine power contribute to disabling despair in the face of many threats.
There has been a significant spike in anxiety disorders (anxiety that is omnipresent, irrational, and paralyzing) in American teenagers since 2011. There have always been anxious kids. Why the uptick? It is not only about cultural performance pressure or national politics, and not simply about parental dysfunction, even over-parenting anxious parents. The two factors cited as most responsible for this anxiety are Facebook and Instagram. (See NY Times Sunday Magazine, 10/15/17 “The Kids Who Can’t’” by Benoit Denizet-Lewis) Fear of cyber-bullying and public exposure is chronic.
There are few things as contagious as anxiety gone viral. And if there is anything an adolescent needs it is safe space—both socially and within oneself.
Is my school safe? What about the building where my parents work? Can I go to a movie without being shot or bombed? Is my neighbor secretly insane? Even a church isn’t always safe, and besides they’re locked! Can I trust that there is a God who cares and saves as I learned, or who even exists? Jesus didn’t do that hot.
Not feeling safe in your own skin is crippling. There are many good treatments and schools are getting on board. My focus is spiritual. What has happened to the immanence of God? Has it been hijacked by overemphasis on a transcendent deity?
I believe that self-knowledge and God-knowledge are correlative, and that if there is divine power by whatever name, then God works from deep within the soul of all living matter—like a deep tissue massage—to bring forth life—even in death. The process seems to me to be akin to the way the biblical Genesis describes the creation process in which every living thing is intimately connected within the image and likeness of God by whatever name. One-time Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple (1881-1944) wrote about this interweave, calling it the immanence of the transcendent.
Studies show that millennials and young adults long for quiet contemplative spaces in which they can, yes, escape the frantic pace of the culture, but also experience a non-threatening embracing Immanence. This could happen in designated religious spaces or not. Writer Pico Iyer seeks out chapels. “Chapels are where you can hear something beating below your heart.” This kind of spiritual experience happens mostly in solitude when one is free to be in touch with deep personal truth within the Presence of Loving/Listening Immanence.
Too much silence and solitude however can enable anxiety. Anxious teens often make bed their “chapel.” That’s just isolation. But what if kids felt less alone because God was there—everywhere?
Why can’t we go public with this theology? Why don’t religions teach it more? To do so we’d have to change our ways—our public worship and language. Religions would have to talk, pray, sing, and ritualize Immanence more consciously and conscientiously.
Would more people attend public worship if the theology of immanence were proclaimed? Though changes have happened in thought and language, and individual writers and speakers have made superb efforts to re-imagine the image of God with gender-neutral language, God in our liturgies remains trapped in transcendence, aka masculine omnipotence. Trickle-down theology apparently doesn’t work any better than trickle-down economics did.
When I pray with people in need I pray that God will be a spirit of strength, healing, courage, peace within them. This kind of inner divinity, believe me, is as “almighty” as the one we address most often in public prayers as “Almighty God . . .”
I don’t want to rob people of reverence and awe. I do wonder, however, if it is possible sometimes to feel those stunning feelings when the proverbial “sunrise” is not the object of your gaze, but instead your own inner power is.
I once felt a power surge of Immanence when I confronted a bishop to argue my case for ordination to the priesthood, which he was not disposed so to do for many reasons. I wanted to run but spoke out over my anxiety anyway. This was a very strong experience. I felt it was me and God inside me together. Most of the time one feels this power more gently but just as firmly. It’s not magic it’s just God within.
A common theological god-idea is exemplified in this quote from a Boston Globe article (8.9.16) about a novel cancer treatment from Cuba. A U.S. patient discovered the drug, sought it out at great cost, and bought himself some time. His doctors here were flabbergasted and are now at work to test the new medication. A U.S. oncologist said: “Outside of divine intervention this guy shouldn’t be living right now. If you believe in God it’s God. If you believe in science it’s CimaVax [the cancer drug in question].”
It’s not either/or. This healing could be God Immanent at work from within science, medicine, and the ailing patient himself.
Anxious teens learn strategies to combat their fears with good psychological support. Along with therapy and medication, a balanced theology of immanence helps overcome despair with hope, anxiety with action—one dash at a time. We just have to let it be known.
Showing posts with label William Temple. Show all posts
Showing posts with label William Temple. Show all posts
Sunday, October 15, 2017
Sunday, February 14, 2016
2016.02.14 Turning a LIfe Around?
I know I should be Happy Valentine-ing it so Happy Valentine's Day to all you dear readers. I do love you, ya know. And love, even in its smallest, funniest expressions, least expected or traditional, does turn lives around.
A man in treatment to recover from addictive disease once told me that he hated love because it was so gooey. I asked him what he loved, and he burst into hearty laughter, saying: "Gooey caramel candy covered with melty chocolate. Better than a beer!" And there you have it.
When things turn around there is usually a tumult of reaction, inside and out. It can be a new direction you decide to take, a new understanding of a relationship, a sudden humorous take on what you thought was sacrosanct or right for you. Or a new way of thinking about God and your relationship or your language about God.
On Thanksgiving in Maine, 2014, I wrote: "Along the Kennebunk beach road looking out to sea there was a sunset so spectacular people stopped and stared; people pulled their cars off the road and jumped out with their i-phone cameras to snap a shot. Reverse selfies!— turning the camera's eye away from the self toward something much grander and more beautiful." Such a switch is refreshing in this age of selfie-ism.
Beauty will save the earth, I'm sure. It arrests us, even those in the midst of despair or in the grip of evil. All it takes to turn a life around is one moment, followed by a lifetime of hard work and commitment. Watch for the moments. And by all means feel free to project theology onto them.Such beauty may be a beckoning.
How do you know what is transcendent and what is immanent? Whether God beckons you from without or within?
William Temple, one time Archbishop of Canterbury (1942-1944) wrote a brilliant book called Nature, Man, and God. I read it years ago in seminary and didn’t understand much, except that I never forgot the way Temple fused aspects of Divinity which our tiny minds inevitably separate: the close presence of God, immanence, and the distance of God, transcendence. Is God far away or is God as close to us as our own breath? Can we have one without the other? Nope. Temple wrote about the transcendence of the immanent and the immanence of the transcendent. We’re stuck with both together at once. (Temple's mind was not blurry like this image:)
Christians see this fusion in Jesus the Christ. Look for it in yourself, too—or in Nature or Music or Humor or any prayer.
I know a woman who calls God “Honey". She regularly loses her keys and other small possessions that matter to her and prays: "God, Honey, I lost my keys again. I was sure I left them right here. Any ideas?” Then she bustles about and usually finds what is lost.
My one-time Jesuit spiritual director once suggested that I find an affectionate name for God, something to down-size divinity, draw it close, like a lover or a teddy bear. (My comforting god was my thumb which I sucked mercilessly as a child.)
Overwhelming almightiness and superpower dominance is admirable of course in a window, or miles away at the high altar, or in the towers of cathedrals, but I wanted to touch and feel and sense—and name with affection. I tried calling God sweetie, then darling, my mother’s favorite term of endearment, but nothing stuck until I thought of beloved. I don’t regularly call anyone else that, but for God, whose love I’d been taught was too vast even to imagine, let alone hold onto, and I can imagine anything, Beloved seemed close enough.
Henri Matisse, born in 1869, in Le Cateau, France, had no interest in art. He went to law school in Paris and never visited a single museum. Had it not been for a case of appendicitis, he might never have become an artist. Bedridden for several weeks during his recovery, he took up painting as a way to pass the time. It was a revelation, a turnaround. He said, "For the first time in my life I felt free, quiet, and alone ... carried along by a power alien to my life as a normal man." At 22, he quit the law to begin work as a full-time artist. He was a revolutionary who dressed like a bourgeois, and he once said, "It has bothered me all my life that I do not paint like everybody else.”
Don’t worry if you don’t think of Godde like everybody else. Just find a way for you. Just make it your own. Then see how it feels when you behave toward yourself and others exactly as your god-image behaves. You might find out it's pretty much as you want to be treated yourself.
“Wheresoever you go, go there with your whole heart.” -Confucius
A woman who is struggling through rounds of chemotherapy for cancer, without remission, asked for prayer just to stay with the treatment. She said humor helps. She also said that a fresh new day with the sky pure blue and the sun in full shine mode, even a winter day, raises her soul She has had many blood transfusions and calls herself Vampire Jane (not her name). "Vampires are strong. They get good blood, right?" Right.
And I can not resist sharing a couple of typos. Mistakes, even unintended, can break right through fear and tension and the most violent of prejudices and differences, everything that mandates against going out on a limb, everything that causes us to fight.
Occasionally the institutional Episcopal church goes out on the limb and doesn't fall off the tree—yet. After the Rev. Gene Robinson, an openly gay man, was elected bishop in New Hampshire in 2003 there was plenty of flak.
Maine's Bishop Chilton Knudsen offered "listening sessions" at every congregation she visited after the controversial consecration of Robinson. People could come to talk, ask questions, even kvetch—and also listen to each other. The bulletin in one parish read (Freud would love this one!):
"After the service today, the bishop will remain in the chancel for a listening session to hear your comments about the election of Gene Robinson. You are welcome to stay and share your thoughts with her. If you don't wish to stay and meet with the bishop, please heave quietly."
“Be not sad, surly Allah is with us.” Surely Allah is, along with all of Allah's other divine names and images, is with us. It is we who are "surly" and we who "heave"— and we, too, who can turn lives around.
A man in treatment to recover from addictive disease once told me that he hated love because it was so gooey. I asked him what he loved, and he burst into hearty laughter, saying: "Gooey caramel candy covered with melty chocolate. Better than a beer!" And there you have it.
When things turn around there is usually a tumult of reaction, inside and out. It can be a new direction you decide to take, a new understanding of a relationship, a sudden humorous take on what you thought was sacrosanct or right for you. Or a new way of thinking about God and your relationship or your language about God.
On Thanksgiving in Maine, 2014, I wrote: "Along the Kennebunk beach road looking out to sea there was a sunset so spectacular people stopped and stared; people pulled their cars off the road and jumped out with their i-phone cameras to snap a shot. Reverse selfies!— turning the camera's eye away from the self toward something much grander and more beautiful." Such a switch is refreshing in this age of selfie-ism.
Beauty will save the earth, I'm sure. It arrests us, even those in the midst of despair or in the grip of evil. All it takes to turn a life around is one moment, followed by a lifetime of hard work and commitment. Watch for the moments. And by all means feel free to project theology onto them.Such beauty may be a beckoning.
How do you know what is transcendent and what is immanent? Whether God beckons you from without or within?
William Temple, one time Archbishop of Canterbury (1942-1944) wrote a brilliant book called Nature, Man, and God. I read it years ago in seminary and didn’t understand much, except that I never forgot the way Temple fused aspects of Divinity which our tiny minds inevitably separate: the close presence of God, immanence, and the distance of God, transcendence. Is God far away or is God as close to us as our own breath? Can we have one without the other? Nope. Temple wrote about the transcendence of the immanent and the immanence of the transcendent. We’re stuck with both together at once. (Temple's mind was not blurry like this image:)
Christians see this fusion in Jesus the Christ. Look for it in yourself, too—or in Nature or Music or Humor or any prayer. I know a woman who calls God “Honey". She regularly loses her keys and other small possessions that matter to her and prays: "God, Honey, I lost my keys again. I was sure I left them right here. Any ideas?” Then she bustles about and usually finds what is lost.
My one-time Jesuit spiritual director once suggested that I find an affectionate name for God, something to down-size divinity, draw it close, like a lover or a teddy bear. (My comforting god was my thumb which I sucked mercilessly as a child.)
Overwhelming almightiness and superpower dominance is admirable of course in a window, or miles away at the high altar, or in the towers of cathedrals, but I wanted to touch and feel and sense—and name with affection. I tried calling God sweetie, then darling, my mother’s favorite term of endearment, but nothing stuck until I thought of beloved. I don’t regularly call anyone else that, but for God, whose love I’d been taught was too vast even to imagine, let alone hold onto, and I can imagine anything, Beloved seemed close enough.
Henri Matisse, born in 1869, in Le Cateau, France, had no interest in art. He went to law school in Paris and never visited a single museum. Had it not been for a case of appendicitis, he might never have become an artist. Bedridden for several weeks during his recovery, he took up painting as a way to pass the time. It was a revelation, a turnaround. He said, "For the first time in my life I felt free, quiet, and alone ... carried along by a power alien to my life as a normal man." At 22, he quit the law to begin work as a full-time artist. He was a revolutionary who dressed like a bourgeois, and he once said, "It has bothered me all my life that I do not paint like everybody else.”
Don’t worry if you don’t think of Godde like everybody else. Just find a way for you. Just make it your own. Then see how it feels when you behave toward yourself and others exactly as your god-image behaves. You might find out it's pretty much as you want to be treated yourself.
“Wheresoever you go, go there with your whole heart.” -Confucius
A woman who is struggling through rounds of chemotherapy for cancer, without remission, asked for prayer just to stay with the treatment. She said humor helps. She also said that a fresh new day with the sky pure blue and the sun in full shine mode, even a winter day, raises her soul She has had many blood transfusions and calls herself Vampire Jane (not her name). "Vampires are strong. They get good blood, right?" Right.
And I can not resist sharing a couple of typos. Mistakes, even unintended, can break right through fear and tension and the most violent of prejudices and differences, everything that mandates against going out on a limb, everything that causes us to fight.
Occasionally the institutional Episcopal church goes out on the limb and doesn't fall off the tree—yet. After the Rev. Gene Robinson, an openly gay man, was elected bishop in New Hampshire in 2003 there was plenty of flak.
Maine's Bishop Chilton Knudsen offered "listening sessions" at every congregation she visited after the controversial consecration of Robinson. People could come to talk, ask questions, even kvetch—and also listen to each other. The bulletin in one parish read (Freud would love this one!):
"After the service today, the bishop will remain in the chancel for a listening session to hear your comments about the election of Gene Robinson. You are welcome to stay and share your thoughts with her. If you don't wish to stay and meet with the bishop, please heave quietly."
“Be not sad, surly Allah is with us.” Surely Allah is, along with all of Allah's other divine names and images, is with us. It is we who are "surly" and we who "heave"— and we, too, who can turn lives around.
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