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+ updated at 11:53am EST on Thursday, January 17, 2013

 

+

If you could get rid
of yourself just once,
The secret of secrets
Would open to you.
The face of the unknown,
Hidden beyond the universe
Would appear on the
Mirror of your perception.
-- Rumi

 

I found that quote at http://www.allspirit.co.uk/sufism.html

 

+ Urgent > Deadline Monday: Fight the largest coal export terminal in the United States

Dear Friend,

As climate change wreaks havoc across the globe and scientists issue dire warnings of a 9-15 degree increase in temperatures this century, the coal industry wants to ship more than a hundred million tons of dirty coal to Asia each year and make the problem much worse.

Peabody Coal and SSA Marine are moving forward with plans to build the largest coal export terminal in the country in Washington -- the Gateway Pacific Terminal. This is one of the most important fights against coal in the country right now, because if we lose, it will seriously undermine much of the progress we've made to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and reduce the amount of dirty coal burned in the United States.

The Army Corps of Engineers is accepting public comments on the outrageous Gateway Pacific Terminal proposal to determine which environmental impacts of the project it should study.

Whether or not the Gateway Pacific Terminal is allowed to move forward could be determined by which factors the Corps includes in its impact statement. A full accounting of Gateway Pacific's impact on global greenhouse gas emissions would be devastating for the project, so our public comments are crucial.

http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/gpt_coal_exports/?r_by=53456-10635-Cesx_Mx&rc=paste2

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+ updated at 4:51pm EST on Wednesday, January 16, 2013

+ My friend John Preston is among the authors of "Glimpses of Environmental Justice" offered by Unbound.

+ This is interesting: http://truth-out.org/news/item/13890-the-second-amendment-was-ratified-to-preserve-slavery

+ This is a fantastic course, the videos of Brother David and the study suggestions that go with them are simply divine. You can still catch up with the practice circle but that is not even necessary. Once you sign up, the course is yours forever.

Spirituality & Practice: E-Courses: Choosing to Love with Br. David Steindl-Rast

www.spiritualityandpractice.com

An Online Retreat on one of three Divine Virtues: love, which Br. David Steindl-Rast defines as the choice to say yes to what life brings us. Subscribers are able to view film footage from Br. David Steindl-Rast's talks during an Alaska cruise

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+ updated at 5:15pm EST, Tuesday, February 16, 2010

+ I'm blown away by the wisdom and compassion being shared in InterSpiritual Wisdom, the E-course I'm taking at Spirituality and Practice.  Swami Atmarupananda brought our attention to this powerful verse from the Bhagavad Gita:

Through devotion one knows Me truly, who I am and what is My nature. Having known Me in truth, one forthwith enters into Me. (18:55)

This is a lot like a saying of Jesus:

I am the way, the truth and the life and no one comes to the Father except through me. (John 14:6)


The Bhagavad Gita was written 1000 years before Jesus.  The sages of the ages all find the source, the foundation, of our wisdom traditions.

+ TimesOnLine (London) offers "If global warming is real why is it cold?" by Colin Summerhayes. Excerpt 1: "There is a very good reason why our local temperatures have been cold in contrast with the global picture. This winter has seen a 'blocking high' over Greenland and Baffin Island that has brought temperatures 7C above normal in these areas, and cold weather to the surrounding regions - Northern Europe, the UK and the north east coast of America." Excerpt 2: "Data from satellites and surface measurements show that January 2010 was globally the warmest in the 32-year satellite record, but the overwhelming focus on "white-out Britain" meant that this record went virtually unremarked."

+ Spirituality and Practice offers "Will You Be E-Mailing This Awesome Column?" by Mary Ann and Frederic Brussat.  Excerpt: "A big surprise: people preferred e-mailing articles with positive rather than negative or sensational themes, and they liked to send long articles on intellectually challenging topics. But most interesting of all was the finding that readers wanted to share pieces that inspired awe. The Penn researchers defined this quality as 'an emotion of self-transcendence, a feeling of admiration and elevation in the face of something greater than the self.'"

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+ updated at 5:33pm EST

+ Recently, Mary & I enjoyed viewing Paris, a French film which highlights the themes of Attention and Being Present according to the Spirituality and Practice review of this fine film.

+ I finished reading The Lost Symbol by controversial novelist Dan Brown.  I liked it even though the gruesome parts were entirely too gruesome.  I really appreciate his knowledge of symbols and his devotion to the Perennial Philosophy, or Mysticism.  An LA Times book review misses the mark completely only focusing on the plot and not the philosophy.  But here's something good:  "Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol: What is True?" posted by Shelf Talk: Your Seattle Public Library at Seattle Blogs.

I may add to this post or come back to this in another post.  Let me know if you are interested in exploring the meaning of The Lost Symbol.

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In her latest post, Presbyterian blogger Viola Larson has responded to my advocacy of the Perennial Philosophy as the common ground of all religions including Christianity.  My comment has been posted and here it is in its entirety:

I just wrote the following to my wonderful friend and colleague John Shuck:

Hi John.

Let me work for common ground. For some reason, it is important to me. Keep doing what you are doing.

Marcus Borg has it right. Those who take the Bible literally are OK unless they decide who is in and who is out. That's where he draws the line and I do too. But I am going to keep working on it because I do believe the main problem is language and not our core values. I do believe that even the early Christians knew what they were doing as they creatively worked with archetypes and symbols. But they did speak a different language in many ways and that makes it hard to embrace their doctrines. I do think we can and even must find common ground as Progressives allow the Church to have Literalists within our big tent and Conservatives allow people to receive the ancient creeds and scriptures as totally metaphor and sacrament (Borg's idea).

Thanks for all that you are doing.

+++

Viola,

There IS room in our big tent for John Shuck and me and you. We are all fighting for an authentic Christianity. I respect your right, even duty, to promote the beliefs and values you hold dear. I do believe there is far more common ground than you are willing to acknowledge at this time.

I embrace the human and divine Jesus as Lord and Savior. I am comfortable with that language. I also am comfortable with the belief of Orthodox Christianity through the ages that the Trinity is a Mystery. It simply can not be explained adequately with words. We do our best but sooner or later all of our attempts to explain the ways of God become incomplete and even possibly wrong due to our human limits which are indeed profound. Yes, we are sinners relying totally on the grace of God.

I appreciate your devotion to Jesus Christ and even your particular path. I will probably never be able to convince you of the validity of the Perennial Philosophy as the common ground of all religions. But I can ask you over and over again to allow me to "work on my salvation in fear and trembling" on a path which seems heretical to you but not to me, to allow me to be a member of the flock even if I differ a lot from you in my understanding of the cosmos and the way God works among us.

Please remember that Calvin was dealing with a political and cultural reality far different than our own. He lived in a world where Europeans considered all the rest of humanity savages and primitives. He lived in a world where even he could burn a "heretic" at the stake.

Working for the "peace, unity and purity" of the church is hard work. It takes huge doses of "energy, intelligence, imagination and love."

Thanks for your blogging. I love blogging. There's some common ground. Right?

You are a fantastic and wonderful person. God made you that way.

Love + John A Wilde + Whitesboro NY + The John A Wilde Blog"The spirit of liberty is the spirit of not being too sure you are right.” – Judge Learned Hand

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+ updated at 4:04pm EST.

+ Thanks to the Witherspoon Society, we can discover that Presbyterian blogger John Shuck wrote a beautiful Advent message for his church newsletter.  Clearly, Presbyterian blogger Viola Larson doesn't think so as her latest post makes clear.  John finds the criticism childish.  I think there is plenty of common ground the two can walk on together if they choose to find it. 

3:42pm update: John Shuck's message and another great message about the Second Coming of Christ by Presbyterian minister Bruce Gillette can be found at the Witherspoon page, "Entering Advent".

The common ground of all spirituality is found in the Perennial Philosophy which is summarized well by Aldous Huxley in an introduction he wrote for a translation of The Bhagavid-Gita about 70 years ago.  He wrote an excellent anthology called The Perennial Philosophy. 

Alan Watts said that all of our religions offer the Perennial Philosophy but imperfectly and incompletely.  We can often find what we are missing by seeking the wisdom of other traditions.  In Myth and Ritual in Christianity, he writes in a comprehensive and appealing manner that the Catholic Christianity of the Middle Ages came close to capturing the essence of the Perennial Philosophy.

I believe strongly that all of our wisdom traditions (as Huston Smith likes to call them) have found the amazing grace God offers humanity.  We use different symbols and stories to express our beliefs and values but there is an underlying unity.  Two websites I have found express this beautifully: Peter Russel's THE CHURCH OF I AM and Gary L. Beckwith's THE TEN TEACHINGS OF ALL RELIGIONS. 

The Charter for Compassion is a huge effort to find common ground recently begun due to the dedication of Karen Armstrong, a renowned scholar of religion.  I invite you to affirm this charter as I have and over 27,000 others.
 
+ A great place to buy coffee these days is your local church because many churches sell Equal Exchange Coffee and Tea and other products which are fairly traded.

+ I'm searching for a device to convert thousands of slides to digital photos.  My grandfather Wilde, my father and father-in-law and I took a lot of pictures over the past 60 years or so.  I think I found one at a reasonable price which is liked by a lot of customers.  It's the Epson Perfection V300 Photo Flatbed Scanner.

+ It's Advent. Repent.  IOW make some changes in your life which bring you closer to God.

AMAZING JOURNEY -- AJ6

+ The Amazing Journey continues: Breathe + Pray + DailyZen + DailyLectionary

+ What do we mean when we say we are The New Church for the New Age? Church simply means a community of people who are called by God. The New Church understands that the old church often put the will of human beings ahead of the will of God. The New Age is a metaphor for an era when humanity will move beyond the limitations of the past and embrace wisdom from all over the planet.

So, belonging to the New Church for the New Age means that we have developed an intention to accept God’s invitation to make all things new, to create a glorious new realm of abundance, joy, wisdom, beauty, love, truth, peace, justice and freedom.

Sooner or later, those who accept God’s invitation realize they must engage in a variety of time-tested purification practices which are needed to attain these heavenly characteristics. These practices are stillness, silence, solitude, simplicity, detachment, discernment, devotion, delight, humility, healing, holiness and heavenliness.

It is the intention that matters. The old church for the old age got hung up on creeds and dogmas which blocked the sacred intention to do God’s “new thing,” to create heaven on earth. That’s God’s will. That’s what it’s all about. That’s where we can find common ground because all of the wisdom traditions are united in this sacred intention.

The foundation for all of our wisdom traditions is the Perennial Philosophy, or Mysticism. It is not easy to describe the Perennial Philosophy but Aldous Huxley did a fantastic job in his book, The Perennial Philosophy. He wrote an excellent brief summary of the Perennial Philosophy in an introduction to a translation of the Bhagavad-Gita.

+ AJ1 + AJ2 + AJ3 + AJ4 + AJ5