Die before you die

Linn of Muick, Duncan MacMillan

“Tell me who has died?” “I have” Waking with this mysterious question and answer hanging in my conscious awareness, I was haunted by it for several days. The mystery of ‘dying to self’ is much more profound and imminent now than when I was younger and much more black and white about virtually everything. Looking back now on how I experienced scriptures on death to self, they seemed like an invitation to a heroic endeavour, something at which I could excel if I gritted my teeth enough. By effort and personal application, I could achieve death to self. Now it seems much bigger than anything I could manage. It feels more like something I’m falling into. And whereas my own intentionality is significant, I know myself to be experiencing the truth or Richard Rohr’s wise but paradoxical statement “You can’t get there, you can only be there”.

Gus MacLeod

Fowler and the stages of faith

The road less travelled

Scott Peck, referencing Robert Frost’s poem ‘The Road Not Taken’, encourages us to take the ‘road less travelled’. Sometimes in the middle of life, with questions of faith and church and growing older all coming to the fore, it can seem as though we’re no longer on a road at all. Not adrift from the fundamentals of our faith (however we experience or express those) we can say – in the memorable phrase of a good friend - “I’m not lost but I don’t know where I’m going”.

God is not ‘here’ or ‘there’ but truly to be found in all things.

For several of us who meet together as the “two halves of life” group, reading and discussing some of Fowler’s work on the stages of faith proved profoundly affirming. Knowing that there are those who have walked this way before and experienced the feelings of dislocation and even alienation in faith and life – and have named and travelled through these – brought a deep sense of being held in something much bigger. God is not ‘here’ or ‘there’ but truly to be found in all things.

Gus MacLeod

[If you’re interested in finding out more about the stages of faith refer to either of the following books: ‘Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning’ by James W. Fowler or ‘A Churchless Faith’ by Alan Jamieson]

How to be me

I'm much less sure of many things than I used to be, but what I am sure of I feel quietly solid about. I struggle/am challenged with 'how to live my life well'. How to be me, how to be fully alive. How to love more...

Forward! Do! Head!

Catarina Carvalho, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blades_of_grass.jpg

Andrew writes... I've hit that spell again. That engine, that revving sound that indicates restlessness. The feeling that I should be doing something (more?), that I am responsible to make a difference. It's like being on the front foot all the time - I have more trouble sitting down, too much forward thinking. Forward! Do! Head! Yet when I stop to reflect on what God may be saying in the midst of this: lie down in the green grass, sink down and feel the cool blades pass your cheek. Lie back. Hmm, what is most authentic? Why does the latter seem not enough? I'd like to get better at noticing the signs that indicate the existence of this tussle. I'm now thinking about the mantra Down! Be! Heart!

Questions I was afraid to ask and face

I have increasingly gained confidence to ask questions I once feared to allow myself even to consider. Where once I thought I was backsliding I now realise I a growing as I should.(Rob, Alan Jamieson interview/story)

Jekyll and Hyde

I longed for something that underpinned life both in an overtly Christian culture and also in a working culture. Was there a resting place for being in both and all places and such that I didn't feel fractured or split, even if it wasn't as black and white as Jekyll and Hyde? I guess my question was, Is life all a piece?

Right and Wrong

I think I felt choked. Faith seemed constrained by the questions of right and wrong. It felt like some head based selection and discernment process - what and who to leave, ignore or be wary of. To preserve is good but it felt a bit desperate and lacking in trust.

The world is as you are

There is a line in the Vedic texts which says “The world is as you are”.

Letting the world be as it is

We can – each one of us – see the same film, read the same book or listen to the same piece of music and experience them quite differently. The world is as I experience it, as you experience it. And at one level this is of course right. How could it be otherwise? And yet we can experience – perhaps more and more as time goes by – a strange upending of this. More and more I find that the allusive, elliptical, koan-like parables of Jesus call me into a different way of being, more inclined – on my better days! – to let the world be as it is without my first having critiqued or categorised it. From this place emerges the rich possibility that the parables are reading me rather than me reading the parables; the world reading me rather than me reading the world.

Gus MacLeod