Nooners reflection for July 25, 2021

This week's reflection is from Marv Hiles published in the Day Book.

    In the midst of summer exuberance there are silences that call us to return to what is forever essential inside us.  We have lived under many disguises across a lifetime.  Summer makes us remember when we were disguised as boys and girls.  
    Do we remember?  The child-mind is native to summer.  Children, according to David Ignatow’s observation, do not try to make things “fit” – that exhausting habit of adulthood.  In the “loosened” days of summer, something calls out our name in the high grass, in the wind at the shore, or in the drone of a long, hot afternoon.  These summer sounds have to do with destiny.  We want to re-cognize, to know again, among the layers of our beings, the “Something More” about us that we tend to forget.  
    Watch for the long, lovely lines of sun falling between trees and buildings late in the day.  There are many ways to “know” what we most desperately need to know.  Sometimes we are only required to watch the passage of the light.  There is wisdom in observing, in listening.  
    The ancient Greeks believed the cosmos was the manifestation of musical harmony.  How deep can we hear?  These days are open gates to becoming aware again of the external rhythms on which we ride out our lives.  What is the sound of a July night in the heavy, becalmed middle of summer?  It is an invitation to reverie and to a healthy laziness that will enable us to find the path ahead.  Such knowing rises from “the one clear place given to us when we are alone,” as the poet Mark Strand wrote.  
    The meditative-breath focus in Isaiah 55:12 “You shall go out in joy and be led back in peace.” For breath meditation use: out in joy / back in peace.

By Marv Hiles

A Prayer for Today

         Loving God, you fill all things with a fullness and hope that we can never comprehend. Thank you for leading us from following leaders of falsehood and into a time where more of reality and truth is being unveiled for all to see.   

       We pray that you will take away our natural temptation for cynicism, denial, fear and despair. Help us have the courage to awaken to greater truth, greater humility, and greater care for one another. May we place our hope in what matters and what lasts, trusting in your eternal presence and love. 

       Listen to our hearts’ longings for the healing of our suffering world, and give us the wisdom to see and accept our responsibilities for this task. 

       Knowing, good God, that you are hearing our hearts better than our words, we offer these prayers in all the holy names of God. 

Amen.

A (Lord’s) Prayer

Eternal God-Spirit

Earth-maker, Pain bearer, Life-giver,

Source of all that is and that shall be,

Father and Mother of us all,

Loving God, in whom is our heaven;

May the hallowing of your name echo through the universe!

May the way of your justice be hallowed by the peoples of the world!

May your heavenly will be done by all created beings!

May your commonwealth of peace and freedom

Sustain our hope and be fulfilled on earth.

With the bread we need for today, feed us.

In the hurts we cause and absorb from one another forgive us;

In times of temptation and test, strengthen us,

From trials too great to endure, spare us,

From the grip of all that is evil, free us.

For you reign in the glory of the power that is love,

Now and forever. Amen.

Religion in the Post-Modern World

An adult class at Trinity Church is now studying and discussing a book by Dr David Griffin entitled “Religion and the Modern World”.   Dr Griffin describes the “Modern World View” within which we all ”live and move & have our being” as the current dominant scientific view of everything, understood as nothing more than matter or objects in motion that have evolved over millions of years and finally (?) to have arrived to us human beings.  So in this modern view, everything that is now or ever has existed can be studied and known empirically by scientific observation (sight, sound, hearing, smell), including religion.

Dr Griffin, a Christian “Process” theologian, points out how religions world-wide, including Christianity, have been discarded from the curriculum in the scientific universities as not worth the time, money or energy. UCSC abolished its Religious Studies Department thirty years ago. 

Christians and other religious people my feel  increasingly ignored and left our of this  modern scientific world-view’s dismissal of what may be not only real but precious to us. But it is true that the pre-scientific ages of religious influence on human culture has shrunk precipitously in our modern scientific culture. The old “orthodox” traditional conception of an Omnipotent (all powerful) Omniscient (all knowing) God who lives in a place we call ”heaven,” somewhere beyond our earth or cosmos, and who intervenes at will in human affairs for good or ill to achieve His ends, is simply no longer tenable.  Such a pre-scientific view of a Divine Being living somewhere (in heaven) who may or may not respond to our prayers and entreaties has been reasonable rejected by the Modern Scientific World View.  Unfortunately this “orthodox” Christian view is often maintained in our churches, though largely by very strident evangelical Christians.

Dr. Griffin urges Christians & other thinking religious people to move beyond this old medieval- orthodox faith and also the current “modern scientific” worldview to a “Post Modern World View” that includes empirical science but also includes an “animism” or life force in which “God” and therefore “Religion” can play  an important but limited part  

So Griffin proposes a “Post Modern” World-view that includes a GOD-energy  which is real but has self-limiting power in the world.   God is Love, but Love is also God, which means the God-energy is never intrusive but always appealing and luring us to respond in loving, forgiving and caring ways in all we are and do. 

In this “Post-Modern World View”, God-energy is part of the emerging Process in which we, by faithful, loving lives, may play a vital part within our space-time limitation.   We Christians can discover that part by paying attention not only to the ancient. O. T. value commandments, the O. T. prophetic writings, and most especially to the life and teachings of Jesus, but also to our earthly & human history. And by keeping alert to what our particular calling is toward creating the reign (kingdom) of God=energy on earth in our time as we imagine it to be in an eternity where our highest God-inspired  human & planetary values reign.