Musings

I Am

I am,
said God to Moses from the burning bush.

I am the light of the world...
I am the way...
I am the gate...
I am the vine...

I am the bread…
Before Abraham was, I am...

said Jesus.

And when the light went dim,
When the way was run,
And the gate was left open,
And the vine was wilted,

And the bread was eaten,
what remained of him was:
I am.

I am a body.
I am a personality, defining a name.
I am a member of a tribe, a faith, a family, a profession.
I am all these identities and more.
But when all my identities pass away,
what will remain of me will be:
I am.

JIM BURKLO
Website: JIMBURKLO.COM     Weblog: MUSINGS    Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
See my GUIDE to my books, "musings", and other writings
Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California

Musing on God

(My next HITCHHIKING TO ALASKA: The Way of Soulful Service book talk:  June 9, Sun, Adult Forum at 8:30 am, Manhattan Beach Community Church.    Watch these two videos of my book talk at USC on 4/24:
 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhlsEbE1-XI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzGukh7aGC0&feature=youtu.be )

Musing on God

God is all without being any thing
while being the all in every thing.

God is the perhaps at the edge of every moment of choosing. God does nothing but nothing does without God. God is the freedom to do and the urge to act. God does not exist because God is existence. God is change, God is flow, God is relationship: In, with, and through. God is love: silently attracting, never compelling. God does not have power because God is power. God is the unforced force coursing through all events. God is the potential for transformation in all relationships. To be God's friend is to pay attention to the flow in all things... even those that seem to stay still. It is to savor what is behind and within all appearances, events, relations. It is to feel the allure of what could be, latent in the wonder of what is. JIM BURKLO Website: JIMBURKLO.COM     Weblog: MUSINGS    Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo See my GUIDE to my books, "musings", and other writings Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California

Substitutionary Sniffles

Before Jesus died for my sins,
Did he catch cold for them, too?
Did he sniffle for my pettiness?
Did he cough for my pride?
Did he sneeze for my anger?
When Jesus stubbed his toe,
Who was forgiven, and for what?
When he scraped his knee,
Whose load of guilt was lifted?
When he cut his finger,
What little evils were washed away
By that half-teaspoon of his blood?
What layers of resentment
Were peeled away, and from whom,
When Jesus had a sunburn?
Did Jesus sacrificially offer his headaches
To substitute for the consequences
For our willful ignorance
Of the sufferings of others?
If he did, I want to be like him,
And put my miseries to work
For the incremental salvation
Of humanity.
My runny nose
Erases your greedy deed.
My sore back
Forgives your white lie.
My age spots cover
The stupid stuff you do in your youth.
If all of us dedicated our wounds and aches
For the cause of forgiveness,
If we let our weaknesses
Open doors of compassion for each other,
Maybe nobody would have to die for our sins –
Not even Jesus.
 
 
(Watch these two videos of my HITCHHIKING TO ALASKA: The Way of Soulful Service book talk at USC on 4/24:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhlsEbE1-XI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzGukh7aGC0&feature=youtu.be )

Bombshells to Church Bells

(Friends:  Please "LIKE" my Facebook page for my new book, HITCHHIKING TO ALASKA - there, you can contribute to an ongoing dialogue about soulful service with your stories and musings.  How have you been soulfully served?  How have you soulfully served others?  How can you move from charity to social change?  The book is a conversation-starter for individuals, groups, schools, and congregations in the quest for deeper helping relationships.)

(My next book talk/signing: Sunday May 5, 9:30 am - PLURALISM SUNDAY, at Seaside UCC Church in Torrance, CA - http://seasidecommunitychurch.org/ )

Bombshells and Church Bells

 

A few years ago, I discovered an unusual use for a pressure cooker.  I took a thin copper pipe, flared one end slightly, curved the pipe into a "U" shape, and fitted it over the top vent of a pressure cooker.  I put water in the cooker and brought it to a boil, and used the steam coming out of the copper pipe to froth and heat a cup of hot chocolate.  A cheap alternative to an expensive espresso machine!  And a lot better use of a pressure cooker than to make a bomb out of it, as the attackers did in Boston last week.

"He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more." (Isaiah 2:4)  It's a beautiful and inspiring vision of the possibility of peaceful resolution of conflict.  Isaiah's imagination swings like a hammer on heated steel.  It's spiritual alchemy, turning the leaden hate into golden hope. 

 

About 15 years ago I was in a junkyard looking for metal to use for artwork.  In the muddy back lot, I found two brass artillery shell casings, about 3' tall and 6" in diameter.  I took one of them to the church where I was the pastor, and hung it up on a rope in the corner.  It's still there today at College Heights Church in San Mateo, used as the bell to gather the people for worship.  A artist who was a member of the church, Susie Stone, rendered the "swords to plowshares" passage in calligraphy, and it hangs on the wall near the bell.  

 

Now I am a member of Mt Hollywood Congregational United Church of Christ here in Los Angeles.  We recently sold our building, and now we rent a beautiful worship space in the nearby Hollywood Lutheran Church.  With the sale of the church building, we lost our beloved belfry bell.  So I mounted the other artillery shell casing on a moveable frame and placed it in our new sanctuary.  

 

This past week, at a conference at Esalen Institute on peacemaking among the Abrahamic faiths, a group of activists, scholars, and media producers gathered to consider how to turn swords into plowshares.  One of the attendees, Mohammed Dajani, is a Palestinian scholar and activist from Jerusalem.  He founded a movement called Wasatia - moderation - pressing for moderation, compromise, tolerance, and democratic values in all religions and cultures.  I asked him, "How do you get people excited about moderation?"  He laughed and said "We need help with that!"  Blowing up a bomb made with a pressure cooker gets more people excited than building a beverage steamer out of it.  The explosives in an artillery shell make a lot bigger bang than the lovely ringing sound of the shell casing being struck with a wooden mallet in a church.  But really, what's more impressive?  Any disaffected person can kill people with fireworks and a piece of common kitchenware.  But it takes high art, phenomenal patience, and astounding self-control to achieve peace after a long and bitter conflict like the one between Israel and Palestine. 

It can be done.  Think of Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address, in which he invoked "malice toward none, with charity for all".  He interpreted the Civil War as the wrath of God on all of America, north and south, for the shared national crime of slavery.  He invoked the "civil religion" of America - a simple, non-dogmatic expression of humility before God as the underpinning of our democracy - to lay the moral and spiritual basis for the peaceful reconstruction of the country. With soulful persuasion he fired the furnace in which swords could be beaten into plowshares, bombshells into church bells, pressure cookers into espresso machines. 

Calling all artists, musicians, poets, photographers, graphic designers, filmmakers, social media wonks!  We need creativity to fire the moral imagination, in order to magnetize humanity toward a future of reconciliation and economic and social justice.  The power of peer pressure that seduced the younger of the two Boston bombers must be steered toward the glorious challenge of making this world more peaceful and compassionate.  It has been done, and it can and must be done again.  

 

JIM BURKLO 
Website: JIMBURKLO.COM     Weblog: MUSINGS    Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
See my GUIDE to my books, "musings", and other writings
Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California

Aiming High

(I'll be preaching on the themes of my book, HITCHHIKING TO ALASKA, and signing books this Sunday 4/21 at Fairfax Community Church in Marin  County CA at 10:30 am - hope to see some of you there!  I'll be doing the same in Torrance, CA, at Seaside Community United Church of Christ at 9:30 am on PLURALISM SUNDAY, May 5.)

I'm attending a conference at Esalen Institute near Big Sur this week. It's hosted by Esalen's Center for
Theory and Research.  It's focused on peacemaking among the Abrahamic faiths. After the first day of the meeting, I got into a rich conversation with Esalen's co-founder, Michael Murphy, two rabbis, and a medical doctor with Talmudic training.  For hours we talked about resurrection, reincarnation, and the far reaches of human spiritual and physical capacities.  Then I went alone for a walk, gazing over the ocean into the brilliant night sky, and this poem came to me:

Aiming High
While leaping to catch the moon,

    Orion tripped, his right foot caught
       on a silvered cloud

        hovering over the shivering Pacific

             beyond the high dark bluffs
                of Big Sur.

If he fell on Esalen Institute,

    would that be such a bad end

       to his reach for his full human potential?

 
JIM BURKLO
Website: JIMBURKLO.COM     Weblog: MUSINGS    Follow me on twitter:
@jtburklo      See my GUIDE to my books, "musings", and other writings
Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California

Catch and Release

(I'll be preaching and doing a book talk/signing for my new book, HITCHHIKING TO ALASKA at Fairfax Community Church in Marin County on April 21, Sun, 10:30 am.)
(I'll be doing a HITCHHIKING TO ALASKA book talk/signing at the USC University Religious Center (URC building) Fishbowl room on 4/24, Wed, 4:30-6 pm - open to all.)

Catch and Release

Every Wednesday at noon here at USC, I lead a mindfulness meditation session in our University Religious Center.  We have a group of "regulars" who are a mix of students, staff, and faculty, and we always have "newbies" who come to learn meditation practice.  I open the session with a short introduction to mindfulness practice and then we keep silence for about 30 minutes.  There is great diversity in this group, from age to ethnicity to religion to level of meditation experience, and this adds richness to our time together.  At the end, we share briefly how our practice is going, offering each other encouragement to stay with it.

Last Wednesday, as I was meditating, an image came to mind that I shared at the end of the session.  It seemed to me that meditation is a lot like fly fishing for trout.  You snap the line onto the water, wait attentively, and catch thoughts or feelings as they swim by.  You pull them up to consciousness, contemplate them, then unhook them and toss them back into the stream.  Catch and release, catch and release.  I've never gone fly-fishing, but people tell me that it is a meditative sport.  Calming, relaxing, beautiful.  As I meditated I vividly imagined a placid stream in bright sunlight with gleaming fish darting under the water.  I caught that image, admired it, then unhooked it and dropped it back into the stream of my thoughts and feelings.

I led a group of six students to Tucson, Arizona for the week of Spring Break this past month.  It was a service-learning trip to explore the work of interfaith activists for border justice  in southern Arizona.  One of our stops was to the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration.  Their monastery is a beautiful compound north of downtown Tucson.  Our students were amazed at the physical, mental, and spiritual liveliness of these mostly older women, and the level of their engagement with the world despite their semi-cloistered way of life.  The sisters practice perpetual adoration of the blessed sacrament.  Their meditation practice is to stare at a box with closed doors, holding the wafer of the eucharist within.  An unusual job, is it not?  -- to perpetually adore a piece of bread.  We joined them for their vesper service, which begins and ends with adoration of the sacrament.  We stared at the box containing the wafer at the far end of their big, ornate chapel.  I contemplated the box itself, the idea of adoring the wafer, the wafer itself, the mysterious idea of Jesus and the Christ and God - and all of us and everything else - being one with that wafer.  I kept my gaze fixed on it. When vespers was over, I released that focused attention and noticed its "echo".  Focusing attention, and then releasing it, made me suddenly more awake to everything and everybody in the chapel. 

It turns out that this is also a form of Buddhist meditation practice - to focus attention narrowly and then release it, in order to widen consciousness.  I learned about it this summer from Arthur Zajonc, emeritus professor of physics at Amherst College.  I was attending a conference on the use of contemplative and meditative techniques in all kinds of classrooms in higher education.  He is a leader of the movement to use such practices in university teaching and learning.   He has his students look at powerpoint slides showing raw data.  He'll ask them to concentrate on one of these images, and allow for plenty of "dead air" time to do so.  Then he turns off that slide, and asks them what patterns or connections they noticed.  This discussion then leads into his presentation of the theory of physics that accounts for the raw data.  Arthur doesn't tell his students he's using a Buddhist "attention and release" meditation technique, but that's the basis of his teaching method.  He finds it very effective in enabling students to gain a deep and enduring understanding of the subject matter.  (New research on meditation practice, from UC Santa Barbara, confirms this sort of result.)

On Easter Sunday, preaching at my church, Mt Hollywood Congregational, I propped up a loaf of bread on the pulpit and invited my fellow congregants to adore (temporarily) the blessed sacrament.  We contemplated the Easter narratives in the New Testament, in which the resurrected Jesus offered bread to his disciples on the shore of Lake Galilee, and blessed and broke bread (and then disappeared) at Emmaus.  I asked us all to stare at the bread for a while, then release our attention and notice whatever "echo" followed that experience.  We caught the bread, and then released it.  The disciples caught a glimpse of Jesus at Emmaus, and then the vision released when he disappeared. 

We are streams of water flowing, with experiences swimming through us.  Catch, admire, observe, appreciate them.  Release them back into the stream.  Catch and release, catch and release....

JIM BURKLO
Website: JIMBURKLO.COM     Weblog: MUSINGS    Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
See my GUIDE to my books, "musings", and other writings
Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California

HITCHHIKING TO ALASKA: The Way of Soulful Service

(This past Tuesday, I had the privilege of introducing Rob Bell for a public talk, hosted by my office here at USC in Los Angeles, before a highly enthusiastic crowd of 440 people, most of them students and other young people.  I pray that all progressive Christians pay attention to Rob Bell and befriend the large numbers of mostly young, disaffected evangelicals who are following him toward theologically and socially progressive expressions of the faith.  In a chat with him after the event, he told me, "I keep meeting these progressive Christians who've been saying and doing this stuff all along.  But they are so quiet!  People don't know about them."  My "musing" on his book, LOVE WINS: here.  My "musing" on his most recent book, WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT GOD: here.  His evolution continues: recently he came out in favor of same-sex marriage rights.)

MY NEW BOOK is now in print!  

HITCH-HIKING TO ALASKA:

The Way of Soulful Service

by Rev. Jim Burklo

Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California

Adjunct Professor of Public Policy, USC Graduate School of Social Work

available now at amazon.com

to order multiple copies, contact St Johann Press:  d.biesel@verizon.net

 

How can spiritual practice (whether or not it is formally religious) help me to help others better?

How can I "hang in there" in service, when the going gets tough?

How can I grow in faith through service?

How can I go deeper in helping relationships?

 

In this guide to soulful service, Jim Burklo draws from his deep well of experience working with homeless people, leading service-learning programs for university students, and pastoring churches.  With touching stories, poetry, and parables, HITCHHIKING TO ALASKA illustrates universal principles about the spirituality of helping relationships.  It shatters facile assumptions about what it means to serve.  It inspires people of all religions, or of no faith affiliation, to aim higher in their works of service.  HITCHHIKING TO ALASKA is recommended reading for anyone in any kind of helping relationship.  It is particularly useful for service-learning professionals and students in secondary and higher education, and for leaders and volunteers in religious congregations and faith-based service organizations.

 

“Jim Burklo’s HITCHHIKING TO ALASKA: The Way of Soulful Service is a must-read for those interested in exploring the intersection between service, learning and meaning-making.  Through stories and thoughtful prose, Burklo offers a loving critique of our common preconceived notions about service and artfully presents a framework for engaging in ethical and meaningful action.  I know of no other person who could better blend deep intellectual explorations with rich spiritual questions through such powerful story telling.  Pick-up the book and begin hitchhiking to a more profound way of seeing service.”     Kent Koth, Director, Center for Service and Community Engagement, Seattle University, and Director, Seattle University Youth Initiative

 

" Written with raw heart energy fueled by years of disciplined reflection and practice.  Whether you are Christian or not, read this book when you are close to burn-out and ready to quit your job in the good works department." Dr. Ulrike Wiethaus, Professor of Religion and American Ethnic Studies, Wake Forest University

 

"In this powerful and provocative book, Jim Burklo brings to life the faces of those whom we so easily marginalize, and in the process redefines the spiritual life."  (retired) Bishop John Shelby Spong, author of Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World

 

What Is Service? 

(the chapter headings of HITCHHIKING TO ALASKA)

 

Service is honoring the dignity of the other.

Service is seeing those who are unseen.

Service is listening.

Service is asking questions, helping each other refine our stories until they ring true.

Service is taking, as well as giving, gracefully.

Service is letting go of attachments.

Service is social change, not just personal charity.

Service is persistence and faithfulness and patience.

Service is grace that redefines and regenerates justice.

Service is healing, not just curing.

Service is empowering people and nurturing community, building social capital.

Service is living in paradox: entering impossible situations and staying awake to unintended consequences.

Service is being with, not just doing for, others.

 

Excerpts:

 

“Having a higher goal than our immediate intentions serves us in building a better world.  Knowing we are hitchhiking to Alaska gets us to Seattle quicker, and with a better attitude.  It delivers us to the holy compassion at the heart of service.”

 

"Dignity or bread:  

don't make me choose!

Too often the bread of charity 

is baked in the shape of chains.

But the aroma of justice 

makes the heart hungry 

and unlocks the fetters of the soul."

 

“I have discovered that the skills required for me to be aware of the states of my own mind and body are also essential in listening and responding sensitively to other people.   I may not be a success in fixing all the problems of the people I aim to serve, any more than I can solve all my own.  But in the process of trying, I can have loving, caring, soul-satisfying relationships.  To attend to others lovingly, to accept them as they are, to be present with them fully – this enables me to be more useful to them.  It leads me out of selfishness and into the heart of the divine.”

 

“No matter how good our government policies might be, no matter how strong a “social safety net” we weave - and in America we’ve got a lot of weaving yet to do - there will be times when love must trump the rules.  Being of service leads us to take graceful action above and beyond the written and unwritten rules by which our society functions.  And we trust that our acts of grace will lead by example, pressing for change in the system.”

 

JIM BURKLO
Website: JIMBURKLO.COM     Weblog: MUSINGS    Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
See my GUIDE to my books, "musings", and other writings
Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California

Welcome to Progressive Christianity, Rob Bell!

Welcome to Progressive Christianity, Rob Bell!

A Review by Jim Burklo of Rob Bell’s new book:

What We Talk About When We Talk About God (2013: HarperOne)

 

A few years ago I wrote a “musing” about Rob Bell’s book, LOVE WINS, in which this former evangelical megachurch pastor abandoned the idea that anybody is going to hell. He now espouses the Christian theology known as universalism: that Jesus saves absolutely everyone. On the cross, love won, and from then on, nobody has been hellbound. One way or another, in this life or the next, God, through Christ, brings everybody to heaven.

 

On 3/26, Tues, 6 pm here at the University of Southern California, my office will host Rob Bell for a free public event in which he’ll discuss the theme of his latest book, What We Talk About When We Talk About God. We already have hundreds of RSVPs. Bell is attracting a huge following, particularly among the young, to the consternation of many evangelical leaders who think he's a theological traitor.

 

The book is a quick read: it’s written in the style of an informal, conversational sermon. Most striking about what he talks about when he talks about God is what he doesn’t talk about. The evangetechism about God's identity is conspicuously absent. He points out the problems with traditional definitions of God as a supernatural being. Instead, he says God is with us, for us, and ahead of us (p 17). In a long, lively discourse about science and religion, he uses (and abuses) quantum mechanics to argue that there's not a clear distinction between the physical and spiritual world. This, he suggests, opens the possibility of miracles. But he carefully glosses over the question of whether or not God is supernatural.

 

The book is about our relationship to God, not so much about God's nature or identity: "...when we talk about God, we're talking about the very straightforward affirmation that everything has a singular, common source and is infinitely, endlessly, deeply connected." (p 118) That assertion positions his thought close to process theology, which grew out of the early 20th century philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, whom Bell does not reference in his bibiliography. Process thought sees the world as a web of relationships rather than a universe of discrete objects. As did Whitehead, Bell talks about God in terms of God's relationships, rather than describing a discrete, separate supreme being.

 

Bell beautifully illustrates the human impulse to reverence with personal stories and biblical texts. He celebrates human spiritual experiences of awe, love, and attentive appreciation, and associates them with God. He takes a phenomenological approach to spirituality. He doesn't deny an evangelical statement of faith; he waltzes problematic doctrines to the other side of the room, if he faces them at all. He focuses on the ways that the Christian tradition illustrates and inspires human spiritual experience. And that's how Rob Bell makes his exodus from his native orthodoxy, crosses the Red Sea, and makes his way, whether he knows it or acknowledges it, into the realm of progressive Christianity.

 

The final section, "Resources, Nods, Notes, and a Few Shout-Outs", is perhaps the most useful and intriguing part of the book, opening a window into Bell's spiritual formation. It includes a wide variety of sources like Paul Tillich and Teilhard de Chardin and Ken Wilber and also writers more familiar to evangelicals. He invites his readers to engage intellectually with thinkers outside the theologically conservative closet.

 

Rob Bell's "hip megachurch" cred and his rhetorical style preserve his audience among evangelicals. He's gone over the bridge, but he hasn't burnt it. He may well be the most influential progressive Christian in America without identifying himself as such. He manifests an historic convergence that's well underway. The heartfelt devotion of evangelical Christianity is merging with the social commitments and pluralistic theology of progressive Christianity. Could this reunion be the salvation of the Christian faith in America?

 

This Is Not a Pipe - and other opinions...

I'm involved in an initiative here at USC to encourage the use of contemplative and meditative techniques in teaching and learning, in all kinds of classrooms.  The last gathering of our Contemplative Pedagogy Faculty Interest Group was led by James Collins, assistant professor of classics.  He introduced us to theater games which he employs with students to get them to go deeper in contemplating philosophical questions.  One of the warm-up "improv" exercises was for us dignified professor-types to wander around an elegant old room in Doheny Library and point at things and call them by any names but the ones we'd usually give them.  As we aimlessly milled about the room, someone would point at a chair and call it an orange.  Someone else would point at a book and call it a rhinoceros.  After a few minutes we got into the rhythm of it and all sorts of seemingly nonsense names rolled easily off our tongues at the objects in the room.

And we get paid to do this?  - you might ask.... 

Yes, a pretty silly exercise.  But one that awakened us, or re-awakened us, to the fact that much of learning requires unlearning.  In physics, students must unlearn the idea that an object is uniformly solid, and then they can learn that most of what looks solid is actually empty space: the entire cosmos started out as a dense point the size, perhaps, of a golf ball.  If we can loosen up and pretend that a book is a rhinoceros, perhaps we'll be ready to unlearn the assumption that humans are fundamentally superior to all other creatures, and begin to comprehend that the genes of mice are 99% the same as those of humans.  

The Belgian surrealist painter Magritte became famous for his painting of a pipe with words below it, in French, reading: "This is not a pipe".  His was a visual reminder that our names and definitions of things are very often, if not always, opinions.  We're entitled to our opinions, but we equate them with reality at our peril.

This morning I had a long conversation with the mother of an adult son whom she believed was in an emotional crisis.  She wanted my advice about how she could intervene to help her son.  It became clear in the course of the conversation that the mother was the one in crisis.  Yes, the adult child had emotional issues.  But the mother was the wrong messenger for the message.  The mother was too tangled up in her son's emotional history to be useful as a change-agent.  The mother was devastated by her son's anger toward her.  I suggested to the mother that her job was to give love and attention, and not advice.  "It's a hard spiritual discipline to let go of our diagnoses of our kids and our opinions about what they should do," I said.  "Our kids know when we are harboring any kind judgment of them in our hearts - they are telepathic for these sorts of things.  We have to release them, so we can be fully present and compassionate." 

When I do an accounting of the costs and benefits of the opinions I've held and shared with people over my lifetime, it's clear that I could have functioned very well without at least 90% of them, and the world around me would have been none the worse for their absence.  Lately I've been challenging myself to see how few opinions I can hold.  I find this to be an extremely challenging discipline.  I love having opinions and I enjoy expressing them with vigor.  In my job, I'm asked to expound on serious matters.  But it's better for me to lighten up, not weigh in.  As a preacher, as a pastor, as a professor, as a writer, my greatest contribution is to ask questions, pose viewpoints, and encourage people to think and feel for themselves.  To put my ego and my opinions off to the side, so that people can see farther and understand more deeply.  In teaching, I put brackets around my opinions by making the "time-out" gesture with my hands, to cue my students to turn on their critical attention and not receive my opinions as facts.

"Who do you say that I am?" Jesus repeatedly asked his disciples (Mark 8:29).  They would answer, but, mysteriously, he would immediately instruct them to keep their answers secret from others.   What if Jesus was posing a sort of Zen koan to his disciples, to get them past their opinions and ponder Jesus' true nature, and their own?  What if he asked them to keep their answers secret, so that others would have ponder the question for themselves?

The mother I spoke with today said something very sad, but also familiar to many parents.  She said her son told her "you don't know who I am".  That hurt the mother's heart.  We all want to be known, not as the object of somebody else's definitions, but as the essence of who we are.  Jesus wanted his disciples, his best friends, to know that he wasn't just a personality named Jesus.  Not just the son of Joseph and son of Mary.  Nor was he just the Messiah, as the people of Israel came to define the person who would save them from foreign dominion.  He was more than the names given him by others.  He wanted his disciples to know him, all the way down to the sole of his soul.  His question may have been a contemplative pedagogical tool to get his disciples beyond evaluations and declarations that get in the way of fuller comprehension. 

How can you and I un-name the world so that we can know it better?

_________________________

PUBLICATION DATE: 3/22/13, St Johann Press --- 

order on Amazon now - 

 

HITCHHIKING TO ALASKA: The Way of Soulful Service

by Jim Burklo

Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California

 

Excerpts:

 

“Having a higher goal than our immediate intentions serves us in building a better world.  Knowing we are hitchhiking to Alaska gets us to Seattle quicker, and with a better attitude.  It delivers us to the holy compassion at the heart of service.”

 

“I have discovered that the skills required for me to be aware of the states of my own mind and body are also essential in listening and responding sensitively to other people.   I may not be a success in fixing all the problems of the people I aim to serve, any more than I can solve all my own.  But in the process of trying, I can have loving, caring, soul-satisfying relationships.  To attend to others lovingly, to accept them as they are, to be present with them fully – this enables me to be more useful to them.  It leads me out of selfishness and into the heart of the divine.”

 

“No matter how good our government policies might be, no matter how strong a “social safety net” we weave - and in America we’ve got a lot of weaving yet to do - there will be times when love must trump the rules.  Being of service leads us to take graceful action above and beyond the written and unwritten rules by which our society functions.  And we trust that our acts of grace will lead by example, pressing for change in the system.”

 

“We don’t have all the answers.  It’s not always clear how best to help, and sometimes it’s hard to tell if we’re helping more than we’re hurting.  But it sometimes it is in areas of moral murkiness that our presence is needed most.”

 

“We often think of service taking the form of practical aid to others in times of need.  But usually what is needed most is our presence: showing up, body and soul, and fully attending to the other.”

 

 

JIM BURKLO
Website: JIMBURKLO.COM     Weblog: MUSINGS    Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
See my GUIDE to my books, "musings", and other writings
Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California

Free Will or Lively Imagination? and my new book...

A week ago, I attended a conference at Chapman University in Orange, CA, devoted to the topic of free will.  The speakers included a physicist, a Sikh spiritual teacher, a rabbi, a Tibetan Buddhist monk, and a couple of philosophers.  The physicist mused about the possibility, at least at the quantum level, of future events influencing the present in something like the way the present is shaped by the past, thus challenging the idea that past actions entirely control present outcomes.  The Sikh pondered that we behave like we believe in free will, even if we deny its existence.  Otherwise, how do we hold each other accountable for our actions?  The Tibetan monk bluntly declared that if we want to continue suffering, then we ought to maintain the false belief in free will. 

Their conversation was inconclusive, to say the least!  But it did stimulate me to ponder further this perennial question.   Saint Paul wrote in Romans (7:15) that "I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate."  Saint Augustine (City of God, 14:17) argued against full free will with a simple proof.  (Take a deep breath and prepare yourself for it!)  He said that before the "fall" men had free will control of their erections.  But after Adam and Eve disobeyed God with their free will, men's penises developed minds of their own, so to speak!  Disobeying God through our free will resulted in a loss of free will.  The Calvinists believed in radical predestination, but the Baptists and other Christians hold that accepting salvation is a free choice.  Clearly, there is no clear answer to the question in Christian theology.

The longer I live, the less I believe in free will.   I have concluded that I should claim a lot less credit for the good results of the choices I've made, and put a lot less blame on others for the bad results of their choices.  About a year ago, a long-time friend of mine died after a long and mysterious illness.  His behavior had exasperated his friends countless times.  When his disease was diagnosed, it was revealed that he had suffered from it for his whole life, and it might well have been the cause of the many quirky choices he made.  The diagnosis changed his friends' opinions of him, but should we ever have held those opinions?  It's disturbing to suggest that we don't have free will, but believing that we do can lead us to inappropriate judgments of ourselves and others.

 

This little poem of mine came to my mind as I heard the physicist, Yakhir Aharanov of Chapman University, speak at the conference:

 

                    look for

                                         leaf causes

                    not just

root causes

 

 

  

Perhaps the idea of free will could be replaced with the question of imagination.  If someone commits a crime, we can then ask if the person was capable of imagining the consequences of his or her actions - and if the person was in a social environment where imagination was nurtured.  Perhaps our freedom of choice is really the attractive influence of future possibilities on our present actions, liberating us from imprisonment in the causal nexus of the past.  Imagination is the telescope through which we peer into these attractive possibilities.  By cultivating our imaginations to conceive vivid scenarios of positive futures, and by infecting our culture with them through art, media, religion, and rhetoric, we increase the likelihood that we'll make good choices.   "Where there is no vision, the people perish," says Proverbs 29:18.  Conversely, where there is vision, the people flourish.  By actively envisioning a future society of justice, peace, creativity, and kindness, we make decisions today that will make us more God-like tomorrow.

 

I doubt I've come close to plumbing the mystery behind this classic theological and philosophical problem.  But by putting a lot more time and energy into stimulating our imaginations with positive visions, maybe we can exercise the moral equivalent of free will without getting caught in the blame-game that goes with that concept.  

 

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MY NEW BOOK  --  PUBLICATION DATE: 3/22/13, St Johann Press --- 

order on Amazon now - 

 

HITCHHIKING TO ALASKA: The Way of Soulful Service

by Jim Burklo

Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California

 

“Jim Burklo’s HITCHHIKING TO ALASKA: The Way of Soulful Service is a must-read for those interested in exploring the intersection between service, learning and meaning-making.  Through stories and thoughtful prose, Burklo offers a loving critique of our common preconceived notions about service and artfully presents a framework for engaging in ethical and meaningful action.  I know of no other person who could better blend deep intellectual explorations with rich spiritual questions through such powerful story telling.  Pick-up the book and begin hitchhiking to a more profound way of seeing service.”   Kent Koth, Director, Center for Service and Community Engagement, Seattle University, and Director, Seattle University Youth Initiative

 

" Written with raw heart energy fueled by years of disciplined reflection and practice.  Whether you are Christian or not, read this book when you are close to burn-out and ready to quit your job in the good works department."  Dr. Ulrike Wiethaus, Professor of Religion and American Ethnic Studies, Wake Forest University

 

"In this powerful and provocative book, Jim Burklo brings to life the faces of those whom we so easily marginalize, and in the process redefines the spiritual life." Retired Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong, author of Re-Claiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World