mainline ideologies

a recent survey by Public Religion Research found that among the mainline denominations,
pastors identified their political ideologies like this--from most liberal to least liberal:

United Church of Christ
Episcopal Church
Disciples of Christ
Evangelical Lutheran Church
Presbyterian Church USA
United Methodist Church
American Baptist Church

defs

An article by Rodney Clapp creates some new definitions. Here's my favorite:

Fliturgy: A hyperactive worship service designed for short attention spans--with a sermon under ten minutes, no more than two verses of any song sung, and prayer time limited to two minutes.

Here's another good one:

Egocessory prayer: A public prayer centered more on the pray-er and his or her eloquence and cleverness than on God.

This one's okay:

Lexlexia: When the pastor mistakenly preaches on a lectionary text not assigned for the day.

Another one:

Bulletinnitus: The dazed, ear-ringing sensation you get when the announcmements for the day drone on and on.

(from Christian Century, April 7, 2009)

Mentally ill Christians

The blog below was written by Therese Borchard:

I was invited by Mark Brown of Brownblog.com to respond to the question: How do you grow your faith as a person with a mental illness? Here's what I wrote on his site:

This morning was fairly typical: I was both inspired and ticked off by the reading of the day, in Mark's gospel, when Simon's mother-in-law lay sick with a fever. Jesus grabs her hand and her fever immediately leaves.

"Nice, Jesus, good going with that one, " I said to the Son of God, half sarcastically and half sincerely. Because all of us who live with severe depression, bipolar disorder, or any mood disorder know that our illness is chronic. Even on the good days, we wade through some pretty thick crap, and sometimes it feels like we spend the entire day on our knees, begging for that tap on the hand -- when the negative thoughts will painlessly evaporate and our hippocampus will stretch instead of shrink, when all the cells housed in the prefrontal cortex of our brain get ready to party, and tell our nervous system that there is absolutely nothing to be afraid of.

But that's not the way faith works when it comes to a mental illness. At least not in my life and in the lives of most of my readers.

The healing process is slow. Really bloody slow. Most often we take three steps backward for every four forward.

The most difficult task for me -- and for many believers -- is to weed out the illness from the spiritual flat tire. Because yes, depression can be a telltale sign that something is amiss in our lives, that some aspect in our marriage, in our jobs, in our relationship with God needs attention. It's screaming: "Yo, me! Some care, please... over here!" That is, if we slow down long enough to listen. And I don't mean just depression. Any illness -- arthritis, chronic fatigue, sinus infections -- can indicate that a piece of our mind-body-spirit puzzle is hiding underneath the couch cushion, waiting to be found.

I agree with author Tim Farrington who writes in his forthcoming memoir, "A Hell of Mercy," that "doubt as to whether you are in a dark night or 'just depressed' is probably a very good sign; it means you're alive and paying attention and that life has you baffled, which is the precondition for truth in my experience." And I also agree with Peter Kramer, author of "Listening to Prozac" and "Against Depression" that with more education and research, depression will be stripped of its charm and its virtues, that "we idealize depression, associating it with perceptiveness, interpersonal sensitivity and other virtues." When treatment for depression becomes routine, Kramer asserts, "we may find that heroic melancholy is no more."

I know my position sounds wishy-washy: because either depression is an illness that we treat systematically without regard to the life of the spirit, or we pray away our sadness, because, if we believe enough, Jesus really will tap us on the hand and make it all go away.

The water between those continents is murky, and I wade in it every morning as I pray. Even as I write this, I'm blasting Josh Groban's "You Raise Me Up," hoping it will give me the spiritual gas that I need to drive my bipolar car, to ignore the negative intrusive thoughts and keep writing these paragraphs. An hour ago, when my jumbled brain and I sat down in front of a blank screen, I prayed that God make me an instrument, a mere pencil in his hands.

Every day my biggest job is to try to grow my faith as a person living with a mental illness. I ask God to help me know what my job is ... the cognitive behavioral techniques, the gratitude worksheets, a better sleep schedule, more therapy, or less caffeine and chocolate. And then I beg him to take the rest ... all the stuff I'm pretty sure I can't control.

I agree with Jean Vanier, the founder of the L'Arche, an international work of communities for the mentally disabled, that the healing process is gradual for the majority of believers. It's no tap on the arm. Vanier writes in "Be Not Afraid":

Being reborn in Jesus is not rapid for many of us. It is a quiet, gentle growth, like the growth of the child in the womb of his mother and like his gradual growth in knowledge, affection, physical strength, and understanding after birth. The healing power of the Spirit is a quiet, gentle power. He makes die in us all the fears, the desire to possess or to destroy, the hurts and the frustrations, all the power which wants to dominate. There is a growth in the power of listening, the power of compassion, of patience, of learning to wait for the hour of God. We learn to surrender to the power of the Spirit and the power of God, to stop agitating, to let God take over our lives, to abandon ourselves to the Supreme Healer.

Bible versions

One of the blogs I read regularly is the Better Bible blog. I've put the link below to a current post on that blog. It's about which versions of the Bible are now selling the most. The comments on the blog will take you at least 15 minutes to read if you read all of them slowly. I found them very interesting. The bottom line is that which versions of the Bible sell the most have nothing to do with which ones are the best. Rather, it has to do with how they are marketed, and who has influence over the publishers and marketers. I think the best version of the Bible is the TNIV (Today's New International Version). It's the one I use for study and reading. (Although for study I use several versions plus the original languages to a certain extent.) Anyway, if it's something that interests you, here is the link: Better Bible Blog

God the Architect

from Father Bede Jarrett, a Dominican priest from England:

With regard to the word we may be called upon to do, and each one of us has some special work to do for God, God made his plans for us before we came into the world at all - for the work is of primary importance, it comes first in God's thought, and we follow as instruments. When an architect is commissioned to build a house [prior to 2009 of course], he has to know first its destined use, its locality, and the weather conditions, etc. Every detail must be taken into consideration. Only then can he collect his materials and begin to work. The foundations are very slowly made, with pain and trouble and much work if the building is to endure...

God is the architect. He has made our souls a certain size and shape, to fit certain holes, so to speak. It is not for us to say that we are incapable, or unfitted for the work given to us. He has placed us in a certain position, and if he wants us to do a certain work, we shall do it. If he doesn't, we shan't. In any case, it is not for us to judge, but to obey his will. The doing of his will is not only the reason for all our Lord's life, but of our life, of all life. In its accomplishment lies the fullness of life.

"Now this is eternal life--that we may know thee." The will of God is made known to us through the interplay of our own interior impulses and desires, and our exterior circumstances.... Nothing is ever quite what we anticipated. There is the interplay of circumstances on our desires. It makes known to us what is God's will for us; and so we give up in our desires what does not fit in with God's plan for us, content to do as he wishes.

[copied from the Beyond Blue blog]

sins

A letter to the editor published in The Presbyterian Outlook (March 30, 2009):

"More than 30 years spent on a debate about one small sin while the Greed has destroyed our economy, Gluttony has made us a nation of obesity, Lust is still a major player in the market place, and Arrogance and Pride have led us into two major wars. It is not likely that we will come to an agreement on the mind of God on this matter. Calling homosexuality a sin does not help. We have divorced elders and ministers who have remarried, and Scripture calls them sinners. We need to get a bigger battlefield. There is a lot more evil in all of us than we have focused on." (Rick Brand, Henderson, N.C. & Ellsworth, Kansas.)

Bless-ed?

One psychologist's beatitudes:

Blessed are the scared in spirit; they are protecting their life force.
Blessed are the dependent: they have not become cynical, or given up on love.
Blessed are the depressed: they shall learn to relish the anger that shall heal them.
Blessed are the narcissists: they are holding their selves together against all odds.
Blessed are the whiners; they have not given up on communicating their pain.

My comment: the point is that inside every symptom of disease there is a
creative potential for life trying to get out. I think Jesus saw that tiny seed of health
in everyone he met. So can we.