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3cf552c
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Christianity did not begin with a confession. It began with an invitation into friendship, into creating a new community, into forming relationships based on love and service.
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Diana Butler Bass |
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41fa0dc
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If we think of belonging only as membership in a club, organization, or church, we miss the point. Belonging is the risk to move beyond the world we know, to venture out on pilgrimage, to accept exile. And it is the risk of being with companions on that journey, God, a spouse, friends, children, mentors, teachers, people who came from the same place we did, people who came from entirely different places, saints and sinners of all sorts, tho..
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Diana Butler Bass |
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e4636c7
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The whole message of the Christian scripture is based in the idea of metanoia, the change of heart that happens when we meet God face-to-face. Even a cursory knowledge of history reveals that Christianity is a religion about change. The Christian faith always changes--even when some of its adherents claim that it does not.
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Diana Butler Bass |
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24348e9
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There is, however, something odd about this pattern. Other than joining a political party, it is hard to think of any other sort of community that people join by agreeing to a set of principles. Imagine joining a knitting group. Does anyone go to a knitting group and ask if the knitters believe in knitting or what they hold to be true about knitting? Do people ask for a knitting doctrinal statement? Indeed, if you start knitting by reading ..
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Diana Butler Bass |
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fcff746
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Much to my surprise, church has become a spiritual, even a theological struggle for me. I have found it increasingly difficult to sing hymns that celebrate a hierarchical heavenly realm, to recite creeds that feel disconnected from life, to pray liturgies that emphasize salvation through blood, to listen to sermons that preach an exclusive way to God, to participate in sacraments that exclude others, and to find myself confined to a hard pe..
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Diana Butler Bass |
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901234f
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Awe is the gateway to compassion. It is a deep awareness that we are creators, creators who work with the Creator, in an ongoing project of crafting a world. If we do not like the world or are afraid of it, we have had a hand in that. And if we made a mess, we can clean it up and do better. We are what we make.
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Diana Butler Bass |
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c0d7e98
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Home is more than a house. It is a sacred location, a place of aspiration and dreams, of learning and habit, of relationships and heart. Home is the geography of our souls.
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Diana Butler Bass |
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00ab919
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Here in the labyrinth, I struggle to find words to describe what I feel. Up on the mountaintop, I knew the language to describe God: majestic, transcendent, all-powerful, heavenly Father, Lord, and King. In this vocabulary, God remains stubbornly located in a few select places, mostly in external realms above or beyond: heaven, the church, doctrine, or the sacraments. What happens in the labyrinth seems vague, perhaps even theologically elu..
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Diana Butler Bass |
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71ecc01
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To transform home is to transform the world.
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transformation
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Diana Butler Bass |
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b72bdd7
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That it is precisely when we recognize our common humanity--when we recognize our own humanity in the face of the other--it is then that we also recognize the face of God.
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Diana Butler Bass |
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c04fa8f
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At the same moment when massive global institutions seem to rule the world, there is an equally strong countermovement among regular people to claim personal agency in our own lives. We grow food in backyards. We brew beer. We weave cloth and knit blankets. We shop local. We create our own playlists. We tailor delivery of news and entertainment. In every arena, we customize and personalize our lives, creating material environments to make m..
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Diana Butler Bass |
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2c10c4a
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Sometimes critics decry spirituality as individualism, but they miss the point. Spirituality is personal, yes. To experience God's spirit, to be lost in wonder, is something profound that we can all know directly and inwardly. That is not a problem. The real problem is that, in the last two centuries, religion has actually allowed itself to become privatized. In the same way that our political and economic concerns contracted from "we" to "..
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Diana Butler Bass |
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17aa47d
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While contemporary Christians tend to equate morality with sexual ethics, our ancestors defined morality as welcoming the stranger. Unlike almost every other contested idea in early Christianity, including the nature of Christ and the doctrine of the Trinity, the unanimous witness of the ancient fathers and mothers was that hospitality was the primary Christian virtue.
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Diana Butler Bass |
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7edc7a1
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All those statistics - the ones about decline - point toward massive theological discontent. People still believe in God. They just do not believe in the God proclaimed and worshipped by conventional religious organizations. Some of the discontented - and there are many of them - do not know what to call themselves. So they check the "unaffiliated" box on religion surveys. They have become secular humanists, agnostics, posttheists, and athe..
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Diana Butler Bass |
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e7f0b04
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Where do you live?' is ultimately a sacred question.
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life
focus
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Diana Butler Bass |
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08f675c
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T]his impulse toward spiritual intimacy is found not only in the Abrahamic faiths, but in Buddhism, Hinduism, and native religions. Far too many people who understand God in these ways probably do not know how rich the tradition is that speaks of God with us, God in the stars and sunrise, God as the face of their neighbor, God in the act of justice, or God as the wonder of love. The language of divine nearness is the very heart of vibrant f..
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Diana Butler Bass |
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31c4238
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What we need is here. --Wendell Berry
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Diana Butler Bass |
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37e52ff
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Hospitality is the practice that keeps the church from becoming a club, a members-only society.
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Diana Butler Bass |
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9523b06
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Spiritual awakening is not ultimately the work of invisible cultural forces. Instead, it is the work of learning to see differently, of prayer, and of conversion. It is something people do.
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spirituality
religion
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Diana Butler Bass |
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0276a87
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While contemporary Christians tend to equate morality with sexual ethics, our ancestors defined morality as welcoming the stranger.
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Diana Butler Bass |
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92e2429
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shalom bayit,
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Diana Butler Bass |
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702409f
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chesed
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Diana Butler Bass |
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6240191
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Fear brings out the basest instincts," writes British political scientist Sue Goss, "and narrows our sense of belonging to self-preservation."16"
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Diana Butler Bass |
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45d59c0
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Irenaeus of Lyon (ca. 115-202): "The glory of God is the human person fully alive."
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Diana Butler Bass |
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e7f61d3
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Whereas militant Christianity triumphs over all, generative Christianity transforms the world through humble service to all. It is not about victory; it is about following Christ in order to seed human community with grace.
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Diana Butler Bass |
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3c2ff42
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The Samaritans and the Jews were enemies, two tribes caught in an ancient argument about birthright and ethnicity who lived in segregated neighborhoods. By Jesus's time they were forbidden to have contact with each other, and violent squabbles sometimes erupted. The lawyer, who was a Jew, surely knew of both the informal customs and formal laws separating the two groups. Samaritans and Jews were not good neighbors. Yet Jesus turns the ancie..
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Diana Butler Bass |
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4da3e02
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Theologians pitted devotion and morality against belief, defining faith no longer as a way of life but rather as intellectual assent to certain creeds or confessions; their books were filled with "quarrelling, disputing, scolding, and reviling."38"
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Diana Butler Bass |
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1b2fbde
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The overarching narrative of the Bible is that of humanity searching for home.
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faith
home
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Diana Butler Bass |
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8e179f1
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The moment that we think we know, we've lost our perspective on wisdom.
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wisdom
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Diana Butler Bass |
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2da0f05
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Spirituality is not just about sitting in a room encountering a mystical god in meditation or about seeing God in a sunset. Awe is the gateway to compassion. It is a deep awareness that we are creators, creators who work with the Creator, in an ongoing project of crafting a world. If we do not like the world or are afraid of it, we have had a hand in that. And if we made a mess, we can clean it up and do better. We are what we make.
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Diana Butler Bass |
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2fb5350
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Enacting love was a critical aspect of experiencing love. Devotion and ethics intertwined.
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Diana Butler Bass |
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a896c7a
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When the Bible is read from the perspective of divine nearness, it becomes clear that most prophets, poets, and preachers are particularly worried about religious institutions and practices that perpetuate the gap between God and humanity, making the divine unapproachable or cordoned off behind cadres of priestly mediators, whose interest is in exercising their own power as brokers of salvation. The biblical narrative is that of a God who c..
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Diana Butler Bass |
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2e088c1
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Conversion is not a single prayer. Conversion is pilgrimage.
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Diana Butler Bass |
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24e2fb2
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Unlike in our society, where we hide it, death surrounded medieval people. They had few hospitals, and so churches, poorhouses, and homes handled the dying and dead. Death was not a distant prospect at the end of a long, healthy life. It was integrated into ordinary experience. Medieval life was transitory, a journey through this world that often ended too soon and too abruptly. Death was often violent and unexpected. Extended death, throug..
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Diana Butler Bass |
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a18e7f7
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Who, Abelard demanded, would forgive such a God for killing his own son? Abelard proposed that Christ died for the sake of love, providing a model of self-sacrificial passion for humankind. Salvation entailed imitating Christ in his love for others, the love that God revealed in Jesus's death for his friends. As Christ had done, we also do. As contemporary theologians Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker say of Abelard's view, "The atone..
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Diana Butler Bass |
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2f88892
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When I get a little money I buy books," he confessed to a friend. "If any is left, I buy food and clothes."13"
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Diana Butler Bass |
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e6bfc60
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time. A new interdisciplinary community of scientists, environmentalists, health researchers, therapists, and artists is coalescing around an idea: neuroconservation. Embracing the notion that we treasure what we love, those concerned with water and the future of the planet now suggest that, as we understand our emotional well-being and its relationship to water, we are more motivated to repair, restore, and renew waterways and watersheds. ..
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Diana Butler Bass |
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fd1e96a
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Although churches seem the most natural space to perform spiritual awakening, the disconcerting reality is that many people in Western society see churches more as museums of religion than sacred stages that dramatize the movement of God's spirit.
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spirituality
religion
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Diana Butler Bass |
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7acff2b
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Gratitude is not about stuff. Gratitude is the emotional response to the surprise of our very existence, to sensing that inner light and realizing the astonishing sacred, social, and scientific events that brought each one of us into being. We cry out like the psalmist, "I am fearfully and wonderfully made!" (Ps. 139:14)."
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Diana Butler Bass |
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b0a8f30
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I'm waiting now, but I will be ready. We are mutual participants, you and I, intertwined.
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Diana Butler Bass |
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0276acb
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There is no one experience of gratitude; rather, it is a complex and episodic thing, and one that is deeply personal.
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Diana Butler Bass |
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660f59c
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We must abandon the external height images in which the theistic God has historically been perceived and replace them with internal depth images of a deity who is not apart from us, but who is the very core and ground of all that is. --Paul Tillich
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Diana Butler Bass |
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06aac95
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The language of mysticism and spiritual experience cuts a wide swath through the world's religious traditions, and it presents an alternative theology, that of connection and intimacy. In Christian tradition, Jesus speaks this language when he claims, "The Father and I are one" (John 10: 30), and when he breathes on his followers and fills them with God's Spirit (20: 22); it appears in the testimony of the apostle Paul, who converts during ..
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Diana Butler Bass |
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35f3042
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Gratitude is complicated. Feelings of dependence--and interdependence--can be both elusive and resisted, mostly because they are caught up with soul-crushing ideas of obligation and debt. But if gratitude is mutual reliance upon (instead of payback for) shared gifts, we awaken to a profound awareness of our interdependence. Dependence may enslave the soul, but interdependence frees us.
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Diana Butler Bass |