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Archive - November, 2009

No Svengalis Please

November 7, 2009 in GODSTUFF with 2 Comments

DSC_2668 Dallas Willard has said that anyone who stands up and speaks for 45 minutes is bound to be badly mistaken about some things.  That’s a perspective I always try to keep in mind and that I hope my readers and students keep in mind as well.

To be a pastor is to presume to teach others and to teach others is to have to communicate a certain level of confidence about what one teaches.  This can come across as a sense that the teacher believes he/she knows everything, or has it all together.  Not the case!  This blog, over the past few months, has begun to pick up some steam and I think this is a good time to go on record as saying I’m not interested in being anyone’s Svengali.  Though I enjoy theological topics and write frequently on them, I am not a theologian.  (Okay, I am an armchair theologian.)  I never went to seminary and do not have formal theological training, other than the theology classes I took for ordination.  Having said that, here’s why I presume to teach, and why I write this blog.

Seminary isn’t everything.  Have you ever had contact with a pastor who seemed to know a lot about God but didn’t project any real understanding of people?  At its core, effective spiritual work with people is about bridging a gap between people and God, and this requires understanding of both.  In fact I am convinced we cannot understand God if we do not understand people, and we cannot understand people if we do not understand God (insofar as that is possible).  In fact I believe true understanding only happens where God and people converge.  My formal training is in counseling.  I believe I understand people pretty well, not just because I have degrees and a couple licenses on my wall, but because of 15 years of work with people as a pastor, teacher, administrator, counselor, leader, and communicator, in clinical, religious, and university settings.

In addition to this, I am a voracious reader.  Most of what I know was not learned in graduate school but from the school of life, and from books.  Many dismiss those of us who can’t get our noses out of books, claiming it’s impractical.  In some ways it is.  (You definitely don’t want me to work on your leaky faucet, or landscape your yard.)  But let’s face it, we bookish types are usually the ones people come to see when their real, everyday lives aren’t going very well.  But we are not consulted simply because we have read a lot of books, which leads to my next point.

Reading books and acquiring information can actually be dangerous.

Continue Reading…

Making the Spiritual World Real

November 5, 2009 in GODSTUFF with 15 Comments

©2009 Gary W. Priester - Image used by permission of the artist

At the risk of sounding immodest, I believe that what you are about to read represents the best thinking I have done thus far in my life on the subject of spiritual things. It is quite simply my favorite of all my original ideas.

I am a teacher.  My goal in life is to take concepts and ideas that can be difficult to understand, and make them accessible to people.  A few months ago, in an email conversation with an atheist friend of mine, I came up with a way of explaining the spiritual world that may not convince atheists to become theists, but I think can at least help them see why belief itself is valid.  I also think this is a good way of helping believers through times of difficulty and doubt.

The image above is a stereogram.  Stereograms are pictures that are not what they appear to be.  On the surface they can look like almost anything, but if you look at them long enough, stare kind of into them and kind of past them, (go ahead, try it!) a whole other 3D reality emerges and once you see it, it’s as clear as could be.  This is not magic, though it appears to be.  The truth is that the dots in the picture above have been placed in the way they are specifically so that the richer image inside can emerge if a person is looking at it the right way.  There are some people, I understand, who will never be able to see the richer pictures inside a stereogram.  Therefore, they will never have a single bit of evidence beyond the testimonies of those who have seen.

Among those who do see, some see with great ease and others see with great difficulty.  And for the sake of the analogy, let’s say that the picture in the stereogram isn’t of a dinosaur or a picnic basket, but an incredible 3D Rorschach inkblot.  In other words, something extremely real hidden in the plain random dots on the canvas, but then once a person sees it, people might be inclined to impose their own understandings as to what the image is.  No debate whatsoever that it is real and that the shape itself is exactly the same for everyone who looks at it, but people will take different things away from it when they look at the picture.  But nonetheless, they would be seeing, in spite of the protests of those who either do not see or simply have not seen yet.

Some would say, “I saw a frog.”  Others would say, “I saw breasts.”  Others might say, “I saw a house,” and others, “I saw what looked like random shapes and patterns.”  Now think about that – that’s what’s actually THERE!  So when you think about it, the person who gives what seems to be the least clear description is the one telling you most accurately what is actually in there.

But what would you make of someone who refused to even try to see?  Continue Reading…

Count me in with the crooks and whores

November 4, 2009 in GODSTUFF with 5 Comments

…it is the will to pray that is the essence of prayer, and the desire to find God, to see Him and to love Him is the one thing that matters.  If you have desired to know Him and love Him, you have already done what was expected of you, and it is much better to desire  God without being able to think clearly of Him, than to have marvelous thoughts about Him without desiring to enter into union with His will.

– Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

I wish that with a stroke of my “pen” (keyboard), I could cut out of people’s lives all the gangrene that they have accumulated by going to church all of their lives.  As a pastor I am certainly not against going to church, but the longer I do this job, the more convinced I am that the church probably stands as frequently as a barrier between people and God as it stands as a beacon, pointing the way to life.

Religion, with all its insistence that it knows the way, often does not know anything at all.  Knowledge itself is not inherently good or evil.  Knowledge can be used to light the paths of those who stumble, or to bludgeon those who disagree with us, and is used far more often for the second than for the first. Continue Reading…

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