tales of copper city

Listening

Listening as a discipline and practice came up at our church here in Bisbee, last Sunday, and I decided to post again a piece I wrote on listening back in 2009.  I need to read this frequently, maybe once a week, to remind myself of how poorly I listen, and how much I need to change that. Listening can become a practice, much like meditation is a practice to Buddhists and others. Perhaps that's my New Year's resolution.  Here's the piece:

 Yesterday, on the Fourth here in Bisbee, 2009, we had a large crowd at our house, watching the parade, eating, and talking. It was a fun day all around and the fireworks last night were spectacular. 

Our house is on the parade route in Warren, one part of Bisbee.  When we lived in Bisbee for 10 years before, from 1996 to 2005, we lived in "Old Town" or old Bisbee up the road and on the canyon walls. Now we are down in the flatlands, still at 4000 feet or so in the high desert.

Religion is poetry

Today is Christmas and I'm a little disappointed that I started out with bloviating about liberalism.

On this day, after a Christmas Eve celebration at St. John's with so many people I love, Carole and I find ourselves talking about what we believe and what we don't, and I nearly always wind up with one person, James Carse.

Carse is a student of religion generally, which is why I think he goes further than anyone else in capturing the dilemma of those raised as Christians or Jews but who balk at a lot, a whole lot, of the theology (in the case of Christianity).  Here ia a recent interview with Carse on Salon that captures where he's coming from.  

And what's missing from that interview is his profound spirituality, a spirituality of everyday life.  I have written a lot about him in the past (see the entries under "Carse" as a category, listed on the first page of the blog), and he has helped me enormously, encouraged me to keep on trying to make sense of things "religiously", when the conventional ideas of "God" just don't help anymore.

 

The elephant in the pews

Every Christmas season our small Episcopal Church holds a Christmas service. The church is packed and there is standing in the back, behind the pews. This past season, Valerie, our daughter was there, and a friend of ours whom we have known since we first moved here, talking to Val in the Fellowship Hall after the service, suddenly asked her, "Why does your Dad believe all of this religious stuff?"

Valerie said, "Why don't you ask him?"

My friend never asks me, but always she brings me the latest news about the most recent outrage from right-wing Christians, or Israel, or the Muslim fundamentalists. Much of what's wrong with the world can be traced to religion, she says. She may be right.

My friend is not alone in Bisbee. Many here share the same stance toward church. Most say they are much closer to Buddhism. "Can't take all that Jesus stuff," they say.

Listening, again

In hearing or reading about how we as a nation talk to each other---how little we listen and learn---I was brought back to a blog entry I wrote last summer after the Fourth of July about listening.  I wrote about listening in the context of "focusing" a kind of meditation that I fitfully practice.  But "listening" is also central in the writing of another author that I "listen" to: James P. Carse and particularly his book, The Silence of God.  I have written about Carse before.

This book is the best thing I have ever read on prayer, on faith, and on the power of listening and being heard. 

As a former college professor who often described the graduate school setting as "the academic captivity," I now realize its most devastating feature: no one listens.  Professors don't listen to each other and they don't listen to students and, consequently, students tune out professors. And then professors go home with the voice of God in their mouths and there no one listens to them, either. This creates the most incredible loneliness, all the way around: the academic captivity.

At any event, I thought I would run the entry again because it captures so great a weakness that I suffer and should, above all else, seek to remedy. It is the principal spiritual challenge I face.

How to have faith when you don't 'believe' in God

Thanksgiving morning, as we get ready in our small church to serve Thanksgiving dinner to over 200 people in Bisbee, I think it might be a good time to reflect on why I spend so much time in church when in fact my thoughts about faith and God are so, well, unusual.  Besides, politics and health care reform are beginning to drive me totally crazy. So here goes.

I am a Christian.  I have faith but I don't 'believe' in God.

There, I've said it and I'm glad.

But hold on a minute:  the statement "How to have faith when you don't believe in God," does not quite mean what it might seem, at least for me anyway.

The silence of God and faith in life itself

I attended a meeting yesterday of Vestry members---a kind of lay council of leadership in local churches---from Episcopal churches in the southern part of the Episcopal Diocese of Arizona. The topic was doing a better job of stewardship among the Episcopal church. It was an interesting meeting but the assumption of the meeting was that we need to work harder in "selling" the Episcopal church to our members and others by treating "pledging" or financial support, as a way of "strengthening our relationship with Jesus."  

Having grown up in the South that way of putting things really turns me off.

Acceptance and the grace of insecurity

In a recent Sunday, in church, we read Second Kings, 5:1-14.  This is a wonderful story about Namaan, a top commander for the King of Aram, a man who had saved the King's fat in battle at various times.

Namaan was a leper. "The man, though a mighty warrior, suffered from leprosy."  

More on life itself as gospel

For years now, and especially since our move to Bisbee in 1996, I have written about "life itself," in this blog here and many other places and, earlier, in a newspaper column for the Bisbee Observer, during 1998 to 1999. 

I have never been very clear in my own mind about what "life itself" means precisely.  I think this is a good thing. I have used the term to more or less refer to a stance of celebrating ordinary life, life with "nothing added," life itself as sufficient.

I think it was the Buddhists who first helped me use this term, the Western Buddhists that is.  They seem to endorse a “nothing special” existence that celebrates the world that is.  Charlotte Joko Beck comes the closest to expressing this view in her book, Nothing Special: Living Zen, but there are others who express this view also like Pema Chodron.

John Cowan doesn't use the term "life itself" explicitly but this is what he is talking about in his wonderful book, Taking Jesus Seriously: Buddhist Meditation for Christians. Again, I discussed his book here.

Another meaning of the silence of God and faith

From time to time I write about James Carse's book, The Silence of God, as a modern spiritual classic.  Carse offers a powerful argument that God's silence is a kind of presence that is waiting for us to speak and act.

Those who do no accept the idea of God will find this puzzling or wrong. Those who believe that God is constantly speaking will also find it simply wrong.

A holiday letter from Bisbee

I wrote this in late 2007. We had moved back to North Carolina for family reasons but were back in Bisbee for two months during the Christmas holidays. We have been back in Bisbee for a year and a half and since the border is becoming a bigger part of my life I thought I would link this.  February, 2010.)

People who read these scribblings know that it started out with stories about Bisbee, Arizona, a town on the U.S. Mexico border where we lived for almost 10 years.

Carole and I live now live in Durham, NC, but we are back  in Bisbee for a two months visit.

Yesterday was Christmas, and it was so wonderful a day that it deserves a letter.

And before I start, I want to start with recalling a story from one of my favorite authors, James Carse, that helps explain the gift that is Bisbee.