Category Archives: Practice of Presence

God is not a King

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It certainly makes sense, doesn’t it, that we would have as one of our most dominant metaphors for God that “he” is like a king.  God is more powerful than the most powerful and the most powerful are the kings of the world. Anyone who is at the peak of or in charge of a particular field is the king.  The kings of commerce, the kings of comedy, the kings of the sports world… So if God is even more powerful, then God is the King of Kings.

It turns out there is something more powerful than a king.  

Just this week I saw a photograph that is going to be one of those iconic ones that will be remembered years from now.  It shows a Hong Kong police officer with his back to us pointing his gun at a man facing him, only a few feet away, looking straight at him, arms outstretched, defiant.  The officer is acting with the force of law, doing the bidding of the government, obedient to the “king.” And he didn’t shoot.

I once saw a murmuration of starlings. I was driving across southern Illinois and there was a huge flock of birds over the field to our right.  It was a bobbing and weaving cloud doing a beautiful dance. You can find several videos on Youtube if you have never seen them. How do they do that?  How do they know when and which way to turn?

I don’t know whether I have ever seen a slime mold.  My understanding is that, if you see them at all, they look like your dog threw up on a log.  If you watch the glop over time, you will see that it moves and that it consumes dead organic matter.  And then it is gone. Just disappears. Slime mold is a single cell organism which can live all by itself, and thus goes unnoticed, or it can come together with others of its kind into the aggregated state that appears to be a single organism.  

As scientists have studied starlings and slime mold one of the compelling questions has been, “How do they do it?”  And the first assumption in both cases has been that some individual tells the others what to do and when to do it.  There must be a lead starling. There must be a special kind of slime mold that tells the others when to get together.

Nope.  It turns out that there is no King of the Starlings.  What they are doing is all following the same rules of engagement.  They all know how fast to fly, how far apart from others, and to fly away from predators and towards the center of the cloud.  And the result is beauty.

The same is true for the slime mold.  Except for the beauty part. There are cues in the environment that tell them to go into the aggregated or disaggregated state.  No king.

Ants are similar.  We think they have a queen, but it turns out that she is actually a sex slave.  She doesn’t tell anyone what to do. All of the amazing things that ants do are the result of a set of rules they each follow, mostly, and by them create colonies with a lifespan many times longer than the lifespan of an individual ant.

This is how God creates. 

As humans, our rules for how we engage with each other are far more complicated than they are for slime mold or starlings or even for ants.  But the same principles apply. How we treat each other is how God is expressed in creation. No king. Just us, deciding to love or to hate.  Don’t ever think you are just a human. God arises as everything, everywhere, and is nowhere more than in you and me.

Islands of Sanity

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One of my tribes is the international community of folks working in the fields of organizational development and conflict resolution.  Margaret Wheatley is a primary source for many of us.  She has a new book coming out in a couple of weeks entitled, Who Do We Choose To Be: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity.  She says about it;

“I know this is the most important book I have written. Writing it in September 2016, I wondered whether readers would accept the descriptions of where we are; but now, the book feels descriptive, even a bit tame, given all that continues to unfold in the world at exponential speed.”

The book won’t be released until June 19 so of course I haven’t read it.  But the excerpts she has released make a couple of things very clear.

  • The problems we are facing in the world are not ones we don’t know how to solve.  We are not waiting for some technological breakthrough that allows us to address and resolve the social and environmental crises we are encountering.  We already know what to do.
  • What we are missing is not technology but leadership.  We can’t implement the solutions because our leaders are people who have come to power because they love having power.  They get power from the existing structures.  They are not willing to change these structures because that will mean a loss of power.
  • The leaders we need are not people who want to be in the positions of power and they are not the people that most will elect to office.  The imagination of the larger culture is not one which can contain the transformation we need.
  • So the global problems can only be addressed by local leadership.  We address them by forming organizations that are in Meg Wheatley’s lexicon, “Islands of Sanity.”

Beginning in July we are forming a gathering we are calling Sacred Soup Sunday.  We are planning to meet on the first and third Sunday evenings of the month.  We will give you details as we work them out.  We long to create for each other Islands of Sanity.

Love and Belonging at Christmas

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For the first time in my memory I experienced Christmas without a home church.  I went to the Christmas Eve Service at Pilgrim UCC where I am still technically a member and am known and welcomed but where I don’t have any leadership role.  I helped Leroy light the many candles and then he recruited me to help as an usher and I did my part to try to hold up the words of the hymns in the face of that mighty organ, but I am a visitor, not a pastor.

So I am experiencing Christmas in a different way this year.  I am less a participant and more an observer.

I have seen a couple of articles which question what it means that, “there was no room in the inn.”  But practically speaking this seems to have more to do with the crèche scene than the theology of the nativity.  Indeed, the theology of the nativity seems to have very little to do with Christmas as we celebrate it.

Which is quite okay with me.  We have created the holiday we need in the face of the stories Matthew and Luke have given us.  And it is a great holiday.  It is about family and giving and love for all and acceptance.  It is full of colors and light and smells and music.   It is about exuberance and excess.

But all of this manages to pretty much miss what the gospel writers were trying to say.  So while we think we are remembering Christmas, we are obliterating the fundamental messages.  What they told us was that the life of this human person Jesus was a revelation about the nature of the divine and of who God is and how God enters into life… into our life.  It is a stark contrast to the cultural values not only of ancient Israel but of modern America.  It is not about something amazing that happened long ago to someone else.  It is about what is happening right now… and now… to me and to you and to us.

One thing we have got right.  It is about abundance; an abundance of love.

Transformational Impact of Love and Relationships

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Comment by David Brooks in a conversation with E. J. Dionne and Krista Tippet for On Being held at Graham Chapel at Washington University sponsored by the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics posted October 20, 2016

In D.C., I have two friends named Kathy and David, and they had a kid who went to a public school, and that kid had a friend who had no real home. His dad had split, mom had drug and health problems. So they said to the kid, “Come over. Stay with us. You can live with us. Eat if you need. Go to school.” And then that kid had a friend in the same circumstance, and that kid had a friend.

If you go to them — their house — and I do every Thursday and hopefully on Mondays — there’s 10, 15, 25 kids there 18 to 22 just getting some food. Last week, a young woman came and said she was 21. This was the first time she’d been around a dinner table since she was 11. And I took my daughter once, and she said, “This is the warmest home I’ve ever been in.” They call Kathy and David Mom and Dad, and there’s just a warmth and embrace.

What we give them — we, as adults, give them the gift of being their audience. So there’s a kid named Ed who would read from his flip phone poetry he’d written. There’s a woman named Kasari who would sing like a New Orleans jazz singer. And you just receive them, and they define themselves in front of you.

And what they gave to us was a complete intolerance for social distance. So when I meet most of you, I shake hands, and there’s a little distance there because we don’t really know each other. But the first time I walked into their house, I reached my hand out to one of the kids, and he said, “We don’t shake hands here. We hug.” And so — big hugs and you’re just physically draped around each other.

We were in a forum, and I quoted this guy, Bill Milliken, who happened to be in the audience last time Krista and I were together, and he’s been working on youth issues for 50 years. And he said, “I’m often asked in 50 years of doing this, what programs work to turn around lives?” And he said, “I’ve done this 50 years. I’ve never seen a program turn around a life. I see relationships turn around lives, and I see love turn around lives.”

Pasted from <http://www.onbeing.org/program/david-brooks-and-ej-dionne-sinfulness-hopefulness-and-the-possibility-of-politics/transcript#main_content>

Because I Said So

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[Cover story on the PD on Monday 5-2-2016 about the prosecution of “failure to comply”]

Most of us know that we can’t control other people’s choices. This knowledge doesn’t stop us from trying, of course, but we aren’t really surprised when we tell someone to do something and they don’t. Even when this someone is our child the fact that we have given a command doesn’t mean we will get compliance. As often as not, the order will be met with the query, “Why?”

In the larger social order we want there to be a force that will control errant behavior. We create a certain class of powers that are supported by law and appoint persons to have these police powers. We train them and we require them to take an oath to properly uphold the law. We feel safer because of the presence of those who are pledged to protect and to serve.

But from time to time someone with the badge may order us to behave in a particular way that doesn’t seem to be consistent with safety and public welfare. The command may not be within what we understand to be the law and may even be experienced as an abridgment of our rights. We resist.

While this resistance is understandable, it is also a response that weakens the authority of the law. It becomes an occasion for the decay of social order. It demands our attention. Is this an overreach on the part of the police or a rebellion on the part of the populace? We must be very clear about this. Both the police and the populace have rules they have to follow. And when the populace comes to believe that the police are not obeying the rules, rebellion is the result.

The populace is by nature unruly. The police are by design disciplined. It thus falls to the police to police its own. When we have cops who go beyond their appointed powers they undermine the authority of all police officers.

Rev. Dr. Mark Lee Robinson
Monday, May 02, 2016

Freedom of Contempt

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This week the House Emerging Issues Committee of the Missouri Legislature failed to pass on Senate Joint Resolution 39.  This bill would place on the ballot a constitutional amendment to shield clergy, churches, and certain other businesses from government penalties and legal liability if they decline to participate in a same-sex wedding ceremony.   The authors of this bill frame it as protecting religious freedom.  In fact, were it to become law, it would protect the right to openly express contempt for certain persons under the guise of being an expression of “sincere religious beliefs.”

I am myself a Minister of the Gospel and am empowered by the State to sanctify marriages by signing a marriage license.  I have had couples come to me seeking my services at their wedding and I have had conversations in which we ultimately agreed that I would not do the service. But this was not because of my feelings about their lifestyle.  Most commonly it was because they showed me a lack of maturity in their relationship and I was willing to point this out to them.   As a result, they either decided not to wed, or to find someone who was not so frank with them to do the service.  But it was never because of who they were as persons.

Were I a baker I can easily imagine having to tell a couple that I couldn’t do their cake because I wasn’t skilled at what they wanted or because I was already too busy that weekend.  But what this bill seeks to protect is the right of a service provider to say to a person, “I will not serve you because I find some aspect of your being to be so odious and contemptible that I don’t want to have anything to do with you.”

While the bill itself doesn’t name any particular religion whose sincere beliefs would be preserved and protected, I do find a strong parallel in the Gospels to a sect called the Pharisees.  They were especially contemptuous of the behavior of one Jesus of Nazareth who had the troubling habit of partying with sinners and tax collectors.  While the contempt they showed for him is not something most people celebrate today, I can certainly see the importance of not discriminating against those who hold such views.  On the other hand, I don’t understand why it is necessary to protect those practices in the State Constitution.  It seems to me that we are better served by urging ourselves in the direction of greater maturity and health rather than protecting the rights of those who are less self-aware.

Many years ago I was in a meeting for my denomination, the United Church of Christ, as we were considering whether to ordain persons who were openly and actively gay.  Seated next to me was an anxious young man who spoke up against the resolution stating that, “We all have urges that we need to have help resisting.”  He believed he had to resist his own feelings of attraction to other men.  His fear of those feelings had led him to be contemptuous of himself and to ask the larger community to join him in that contempt.  How sad.

While I have compassion for the Pharisees, I don’t believe we are wise to enshrine such self-hatred into State law.

Rev. Dr. Mark Lee Robinson

Thursday, April 28, 2016

Why God? Which God?

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I am pleased to have been invited back to Parkway UCC to address the adult class again this year. I am on the schedule for October 11, 18, and 25 at 9:30 and 11:00. Having been given the chance to select my own topic, I will lead a discussion entitled

Why God? Which God?

For most of human history our individual identity was formed and expressed by the god or gods we worshipped. We were a member of a clan or tribe that had a god that gave us our identity and, if we were good, cared for us. While there are those who still ascribe identity to someone as a function of religion or ethnic association [we have folks who say that to be the President you must worship a Christian god] for the most part it is no longer true that one must have a belief in God. Indeed, it is likely that there are persons who are part of the Parkway community who identify as atheist or agnostic.

So if we don’t need to believe in a god, why bother? What benefit arises from a belief in and a relationship with a god? Given the role that religion plays in human misery, perhaps it will be better to live in a post-theist society.

I will show my hand here a bit to say that I observe a great many benefits to having a relationship with God. That will probably not surprise you. But I want to try to tease apart just what those benefits might be. It helps if we know why we are going to all the trouble to have a god in the first place.

Then, having clarified the benefits, we are presented with a great smorgasbord of potential gods. Which god is the best one for you? And what difference might it make if your god is not the same as the god held by others in your pew? Do we all have to worship the same god?

Does God know what is going to happen before it happens? Or is God limited by the Arrow of Time as are we mortals? Did God create us, or do we create God? Or are we mutually co-created? And what does that mean anyway? What is the relationship between science and religion? Does evolution argue against the power of God? Or does God create through evolution? Or does God evolve? Does God know everything? What is God conscious of and what is the relationship between my consciousness and that of God?

These are some of the questions we will consider as part of this class. I hope to see you in October.

JustConflict as a Contemplative Practice

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The origins of JustConflict as a discipline do not go back to the intention of deepening spiritual awareness. It arose out of a curriculum I designed for working with abusive men. It was only as I clarified the practices and applied them to a broader audience that I discovered their potential as a contemplative practice.

We normally think of contemplation as closely considering something. A contemplative practice is something we do over and over in which we focus on a sound or thought or object or our breath or on a sensation or collectively on a chant or text. We normally do this in solitude or in the context of a small and safe community.

JustConflict starts in the most opposite of places. The object of our attention is the thing that bothers us the most in the relationship that is, at times, the most trying. One member of the Living School recently named the mother of her step-son as one of her teachers. This was not because she is so calm and wise but because she has the power to cause so much distress in her family and pain in her heart.

Our starting point is with a persistent pattern of conflict in a significant relationship. These are the places that have the greatest potential for our transformation. This is the place where I most want things to change. But it is also not a place of calm but of turmoil. This is not a place of clarity but of confusion. This is not me at my best but at my worst.

How then can this be a contemplative practice, even a form of contemplative prayer? Let us consider what contemplation is more from the perspective of what it does than what it looks like. What is the impact of contemplation?

It helps us know what truly is. It grounds us in reality. It connects us to ourselves in a manner that allows us to be more fully connected to all that is around us. It may be a kind of conversation in which we experience conversion to a more fully true and complete expression of who we are, who we are created to be.

This conversation is one which we try to have with the fullest and purest expression of divine love. But the energy and the intelligence which gives rise to all that is is present in all that is. So we can have that conversation with anyone or anything at any time. And if the goal of this conversation is conversion, then the best time and context in which to have it is in the one where I most want things to be different. It is when I am the most raw, on my last nerve, most wounded, vulnerable, frantic, and confounded.

At the Retreat: The Practice of Presence we will be sitting in silence, and chanting, and focusing on movement and breath. But we will also each select a persistent pattern of conflict in a significant relationship and discover a way of being that will reliably create what we need such that we don’t require or expect that others will change but such that we will be creating what they need as well.