Last Week At ProgressiveChristiantity.org...
We delved into the topics of Resolutions, Compassion, Homosexuality and Birth Poems.
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Spiritually Literate New Year’s Resolutions
Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat
I will live in the present moment. I will not obsess about the past or worry about the future.
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1. I will live in the present moment. I will not obsess about the past or worry about the future.
2. I will cultivate the art of making connections. I will pay attention to how my life is intimately related to all life on the planet.
3. I will be thankful for all the blessings in my life. I will spell out my days with a grammar of gratitude.
4. I will practice hospitality in a world where too often strangers are feared, enemies are hated, and the “other” is shunned. I will welcome guests and alien ideas with graciousness.
5. I will seek liberty and justice for all. I will work for a free and a fair world.
6. I will add to the planet’s fund of good will by practicing little acts of kindness, brief words of encouragement, and manifold expressions of courtesy.
7. I will cultivate the skill of deep listening. I will remember that all things in the world want to be heard, as do the many voices inside me.
8. I will practice reverence for life by seeing the sacred in, with, and under all things of the world.
9. I will give up trying to hide, deny, or escape from my imperfections. I will listen to what my shadow side has to say to me.
10. I will be willing to learn from the spiritual teachers all around me, however unlikely or unlike me they may be.
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An Excerpt from The Hidden Power of the Gospels: Four Questions, Four Paths, One Journey
Alexander J. Shaia with Michelle Gaugy
Fresh, creative, and universal insights on the spiritual journeys explored in the four Gospels. Here is an excerpt on compassion ...
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Alexander Shaia presents fresh, creative, and universal insights on the spiritual journeys explored in the four Gospels. Here is an excerpt on compassion as revealed in the nine Beatitudes.
“The wisdom teachings in Matthew contain such an abundance of sensible counsel that we would do well to keep them close. They are a poetic guide to the promises and the dangers that greet us on the first path. The recommendations and responses they hold are truly Be-Attitudes designed to move us forward. They challenge us to:
• “Accept that we do not and will not know results in advance. We often feel ‘poor in spirit.’
• “Make farewells to our yesterdays and embrace the grief we feel.
• “Be humble in our willingness to journey. Yielding to exile will yield riches of Spirit.
• “Know that our true hunger and thirst are for Spirit, and only Spirit, despite all trials and temptations.
• “Greet all we encounter, within and without, in mercy, and reap the rewards of gratitude. Recognize that mercy derives from merces, a Latin word that translates as ‘reward.’ (It continued into French as merci, meaning ‘thanks,’ or ‘gratitude.’)
• “Be full of heart. Do not seek to remove any thought, any feeling, or any person from our inner life. Each is an aspect of Spirit. Welcome them all.
• “Believe in ‘Jeru-Shalom’ as a home of welcome that accommodates the true peace of respect for differing voices, if we will but listen.
• “Accept inner and outer hardship as needed for the sake of living a new life in the presence of God. Power and applause are not what we seek. Our journey leads instead to humility and service.
• “Anticipate lack of esteem. Be prepared instead for conflict — and meet it with respect and love.
“The nine Beatitudes reflect diverse parts of a harmonious unity which I endlessly reflect and touch each other as we go through our lives. At the very heart of Jesus’s teachings, their practice opens us to compassion. If we are able to place these on our hearts, walk with them on our feet, hold them in our hands, and seal them in our thoughts, we will have more insight along our journey. They will become our walking staff and guide for the arduous times we will face.
“We can certainly find equal relevance in the rest of the Sermon on the Mount. All of us have ‘heard it said’ — by parents, by friends, by society, by religious institutions — that we ought to ‘do this’ or ‘avoid that.’ Unreflectively, we may have accepted or rejected what we have heard. Jesus’s words ask us to become more conscious. He tells us that truth is not found on the surface. We are encouraged to explore the original purpose and meanings of the things we have been told, as well as their genuine truth and relevance in our hearts and lives today.
“We have talked about the risk of returning to older, seemingly simpler ways, but an equal peril lurks within this first path: the urge to rush in the opposite direction. Our ego-mind can just as readily deceive us into thinking that all of yesterday’s wisdom is empty folly — that nothing we have ever learned or been told has merit or benefit; that we are without guidance. Rejecting everything and racing off to the ‘new and better’ can be a sprint to isolation and despair. Either one of these extreme positions is only a trick, not a truth. Quadratos requires that we ignore these deceptions and dig deeper, explore further. Although many people and institutions have become protectors of empty practices, there are others who still hold truthful, living attitudes of heart. We are on a journey to discover which have real veracity for us and endeavor to claim them in our own personal way.”
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A Manifesto! The Time Has Come!
John Shelby Spong
I have made a decision. I will no longer debate the issue of homosexuality in the church with anyone.
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I have made a decision. I will no longer debate the issue of homosexuality in the church with anyone. I will no longer engage the biblical ignorance that emanates from so many right-wing Christians about how the Bible condemns homosexuality, as if that point of view still has any credibility. I will no longer discuss with them or listen to them tell me how homosexuality is “an abomination to God,” about how homosexuality is a “chosen lifestyle,” or about how through prayer and “spiritual counseling” homosexual persons can be “cured.” Those arguments are no longer worthy of my time or energy. I will no longer dignify by listening to the thoughts of those who advocate “reparative therapy,” as if homosexual persons are somehow broken and need to be repaired. I will no longer talk to those who believe that the unity of the church can or should be achieved by rejecting the presence of, or at least at the expense of, gay and lesbian people. I will no longer take the time to refute the unlearned and undocumentable claims of certain world religious leaders who call homosexuality “deviant.” I will no longer listen to that pious sentimentality that certain Christian leaders continue to employ, which suggests some version of that strange and overtly dishonest phrase that “we love the sinner but hate the sin.” That statement is, I have concluded, nothing more than a self-serving lie designed to cover the fact that these people hate homosexual persons and fear homosexuality itself, but somehow know that hatred is incompatible with the Christ they claim to profess, so they adopt this face-saving and absolutely false statement. I will no longer temper my understanding of truth in order to pretend that I have even a tiny smidgen of respect for the appalling negativity that continues to emanate from religious circles where the church has for centuries conveniently perfumed its ongoing prejudices against blacks, Jews, women and homosexual persons with what it assumes is “high-sounding, pious rhetoric.” The day for that mentality has quite simply come to an end for me. I will personally neither tolerate it nor listen to it any longer. The world has moved on, leaving these elements of the Christian Church that cannot adjust to new knowledge or a new consciousness lost in a sea of their own irrelevance. They no longer talk to anyone but themselves. I will no longer seek to slow down the witness to inclusiveness by pretending that there is some middle ground between prejudice and oppression. There isn’t. Justice postponed is justice denied. That can be a resting place no longer for anyone. An old civil rights song proclaimed that the only choice awaiting those who cannot adjust to a new understanding was to “Roll on over or we’ll roll on over you!” Time waits for no one.
I will particularly ignore those members of my own Episcopal Church who seek to break away from this body to form a “new church,” claiming that this new and bigoted instrument alone now represents the Anglican Communion. Such a new ecclesiastical body is designed to allow these pathetic human beings, who are so deeply locked into a world that no longer exists, to form a community in which they can continue to hate gay people, distort gay people with their hopeless rhetoric and to be part of a religious fellowship in which they can continue to feel justified in their homophobic prejudices for the rest of their tortured lives. Church unity can never be a virtue that is preserved by allowing injustice, oppression and psychological tyranny to go unchallenged.
In my personal life, I will no longer listen to televised debates conducted by “fair-minded” channels that seek to give “both sides” of this issue “equal time.” I am aware that these stations no longer give equal time to the advocates of treating women as if they are the property of men or to the advocates of reinstating either segregation or slavery, despite the fact that when these evil institutions were coming to an end the Bible was still being quoted frequently on each of these subjects. It is time for the media to announce that there are no longer two sides to the issue of full humanity for gay and lesbian people. There is no way that justice for homosexual people can be compromised any longer.
I will no longer act as if the Papal office is to be respected if the present occupant of that office is either not willing or not able to inform and educate himself on public issues on which he dares to speak with embarrassing ineptitude. I will no longer be respectful of the leadership of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who seems to believe that rude behavior, intolerance and even killing prejudice is somehow acceptable, so long as it comes from third-world religious leaders, who more than anything else reveal in themselves the price that colonial oppression has required of the minds and hearts of so many of our world’s population. I see no way that ignorance and truth can be placed side by side, nor do I believe that evil is somehow less evil if the Bible is quoted to justify it. I will dismiss as unworthy of any more of my attention the wild, false and uninformed opinions of such would-be religious leaders as Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart, Albert Mohler, and Robert Duncan. My country and my church have both already spent too much time, energy and money trying to accommodate these backward points of view when they are no longer even tolerable.
I make these statements because it is time to move on. The battle is over. The victory has been won. There is no reasonable doubt as to what the final outcome of this struggle will be. Homosexual people will be accepted as equal, full human beings, who have a legitimate claim on every right that both church and society have to offer any of us. Homosexual marriages will become legal, recognized by the state and pronounced holy by the church. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” will be dismantled as the policy of our armed forces. We will and we must learn that equality of citizenship is not something that should ever be submitted to a referendum. Equality under and before the law is a solemn promise conveyed to all our citizens in the Constitution itself. Can any of us imagine having a public referendum on whether slavery should continue, whether segregation should be dismantled, whether voting privileges should be offered to women? The time has come for politicians to stop hiding behind unjust laws that they themselves helped to enact, and to abandon that convenient shield of demanding a vote on the rights of full citizenship because they do not understand the difference between a constitutional democracy, which this nation has, and a “mobocracy,” which this nation rejected when it adopted its constitution. We do not put the civil rights of a minority to the vote of a plebiscite.
I will also no longer act as if I need a majority vote of some ecclesiastical body in order to bless, ordain, recognize and celebrate the lives and gifts of gay and lesbian people in the life of the church. No one should ever again be forced to submit the privilege of citizenship in this nation or membership in the Christian Church to the will of a majority vote.
The battle in both our culture and our church to rid our souls of this dying prejudice is finished. A new consciousness has arisen. A decision has quite clearly been made. Inequality for gay and lesbian people is no longer a debatable issue in either church or state. Therefore, I will from this moment on refuse to dignify the continued public expression of ignorant prejudice by engaging it. I do not tolerate racism or sexism any longer. From this moment on, I will no longer tolerate our culture’s various forms of homophobia. I do not care who it is who articulates these attitudes or who tries to make them sound holy with religious jargon.
I have been part of this debate for years, but things do get settled and this issue is now settled for me. I do not debate any longer with members of the “Flat Earth Society” either. I do not debate with people who think we should treat epilepsy by casting demons out of the epileptic person; I do not waste time engaging those medical opinions that suggest that bleeding the patient might release the infection. I do not converse with people who think that Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans as punishment for the sin of being the birthplace of Ellen DeGeneres or that the terrorists hit the United Sates on 9/11 because we tolerated homosexual people, abortions, feminism or the American Civil Liberties Union. I am tired of being embarrassed by so much of my church’s participation in causes that are quite unworthy of the Christ I serve or the God whose mystery and wonder I appreciate more each day. Indeed I feel the Christian Church should not only apologize, but do public penance for the way we have treated people of color, women, adherents of other religions and those we designated heretics, as well as gay and lesbian people.
Life moves on. As the poet James Russell Lowell once put it more than a century ago: “New occasions teach new duties, Time makes ancient good uncouth.” I am ready now to claim the victory. I will from now on assume it and live into it. I am unwilling to argue about it or to discuss it as if there are two equally valid, competing positions any longer. The day for that mentality has simply gone forever.
This is my manifesto and my creed. I proclaim it today. I invite others to join me in this public declaration. I believe that such a public outpouring will help cleanse both the church and this nation of its own distorting past. It will restore integrity and honor to both church and state. It will signal that a new day has dawned and we are ready not just to embrace it, but also to rejoice in it and to celebrate it.
– John Shelby Spong
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Weekly Liturgy
Week of: December 28th, 2014 Birth Poems
Reflecting on the birth of Jesus in poetry gives us yet another way to approach and assimilate this event.
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Birth Poems
Reflecting on the birth of Jesus in poetry gives us yet another way to approach and assimilate this event. Birth is always a miraculous occurrence, and this birth even more so. A spark of divinity becomes human, this time and every time.
Out of this House
Out of this house where there is no room
For the little ones that to him belong
(He is weak but he is God)
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The Risk of Birth, Christmas 1973
This is no time for a child to be born,
With the earth betrayed by war & hate
And a comet slashing the sky to warn
That time runs out & the sun burns late.
read more
The Outside Shed
The outside shed where Jesus lay
Was home to goat and ox;
It was a dirty place to be;
Fit for the shepherds’ flocks;
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Events and Updates
Be|Art|Now: Earl Lectures 2015
A public conference for activists, artists, & progressive people of faith.
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A public conference for activists, artists, & progressive people of faith
The 112th Earl Lectures and Leadership Conference
Thursday-Saturday January 29-31, 2015
Co-create and experience performances, exhibits, worship space, & public arts.
Be|Art|Now, the 112th Earl Lectures and Leadership Conference, brings you into conversation and reflection with theologians, artists, communities, and art itself. Guided outings will focus on the intersections between arts, spirit, and social change.
Featuring performances and lectures by artist-activists Adriene Thorne {pastor, dancer}, Michael Franti {poet, musician, composer}, Jinho “The Piper” Ferreira {playwright, musician, police officer}, and Tim Holmes {sculptor, philosopher}
BE there. {no arts experience required}
For more information, contact Earl Lectures Coordinator Maren Haynes at mhaynes@psr.edu or call 510.849.8218. Follow the conference on Facebook andTwitter for daily updates, community events, and inspiration.
**ProgressiveChristianity.org friends receive a special 10% discount on registration if you register by December 10th! Just use this code:
Earl Lectures and Leadership Conference is a three-day conference that addresses critical theological, pastoral, and social issues of the day.
Who comes to Earl Lectures? More than 500 clergy and lay leaders, artists, community leaders, activists, GTU and UC Berkeley students and faculty, and those interested in issues of spirituality, art, and social activism. While many of our attendees come from Northern California and the San Francisco Bay Area, a significant percent come from across the US.
PRESENTERS
 Michael Franti
Michael Franti knows all about the power of music. He knows how it can inspire to action, uplift and make people want to dance or cry. Franti’s singularly open spirit reflects his own eclectic and intriguing background. Michael was born to an Irish-German-French mother and an African American and American Indian father in Oakland, then adopted by a Finnish American couple who raised him along with their three biological children and another African American son. While studying at the University of San Francisco, Franti formed the punk band The Beatnigs, and later the far more hip hop-inflected The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy. In the mid-Nineties, Franti first formed Spearhead, and increasingly in recent years, he’s found his own voice musically and his own organic brand of popular success.
For a decade, Franti hosted the Power to the Peaceful free concerts in San Francisco, at first to support incarcerated political activist Mumia Abu Jamal, then as a platform to speak out against escalating violence around the globe. He also headlined the President Obama’s 2013 Peace Inauguration Ball, fostering cooperation and partnerships among the nations.
Through it all, Franti has crossed all sorts of musical and physical boundaries in order to make music for everybody. “We’re the music they put on when they drive their little kids to school, or hang out with the person they love at night. There’s no higher honor. So they have an investment in the music. And that means so much because this music is very personal to me too.”
 Adriene Thorne
Adriene Thorne, speaker, immersion leader Be|Art|Now participants will discover that the arts have the ability to drop us into the center of ourselves and our healing more quickly than anything else we can access. From that center, we touch the holy and reconnect with our authentic and creative selves. Adriene Thorne, dancer, teacher, healer, activist, and pastor, is executive minister of Middle Collegiate Church in the East Village of New York City. Middle Church is known for its strong expression of arts in worship and justice work. Thorne graduated with an MDiv from PSR in 2008 and is ordained in the Reformed Church in America. Prior to ministry, Adriene pursued a nearly 20-year career in the performing arts. She danced professionally with the Dance Theatre of Harlem’s Workshop Ensemble and toured the US and Canada in a Broadway musical. Adriene has performed at The Metropolitan Opera House, Carnegie Hall, and Radio City Music Hall where she was a World Famous Rockette. While no longer performing professionally, Adriene enjoys connecting various artists with religious institutions interested in transformational partnerships.
J inho Ferreira
Jinho “The Piper” Ferreira, performer, discussion leader Be|Art|Now participants will experience and discuss The Piper’s revolutionary play, Cops and Robbers, a sharp look at the dysfunctional relationship between law enforcement, the media, and the Black community. Centered on an officer involved shooting, writer/performer The Piper takes the viewer on an emotionally charged ride with unexpected twists and turns. He seamlessly travels through 17 characters, each with their own convictions, logic, and prejudices. Cops and Robbers takes no prisoners as it challenges the viewer to question all preconceived notions of “right” and “wrong.” Cops and Robbers is also a project and a book that Ferreira brings to schools and correctional facilities in the Bay Area. Performing the play at a recent mental health workshop offered a powerful opportunity to witness how it brought sectors of the community together. Jinho “The Piper” Ferreira is a rapper, actor, and screenwriter from Oakland, California. He is one-third of Flipsyde, an alternative hip-hop band that has toured internationally with artists such as Snoop Dogg, The Black Eyed Peas, Akon, The Game, Busta Rhymes, and more. Flipsyde has written anthems for the 2006 Winter Olympics and the 2008 Summer Olympics. The band continues to enjoy several song placements in television, film, and sporting events. In 2009, Piper won the Creative Promise Award for screenwriter at the Tribeca Film Festival for his CIA thriller: Walter’s Boys. In the spring of 2010, Piper paid his way through a Bay Area law enforcement academy, eventually graduating in the top percentile and delivering the commencement speech. The paradox of being a member of the Black community and a hip-hop artist, while simultaneously working in Law Enforcement, served as the inspiration to write Cops and Robbers. Though Piper is not a stranger to the stage, Cops and Robbers is his first venture into theater. The ingenuity of this play led to him being a scholarship recipient for a performance workshop with Anna Deavere Smith at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.The Cops and Robbers Project consists of a one-man-play, an audio play, a 6-song musical soundtrack, and a book written by Piper and his wife Dawn Williams Ferreira, Ph.D.
 Body Psalms
Tim Holmes, presenter, immersion leaderBe|Art|Now participants will experience and have the option to participate in Tim Holmes’ acclaimed Body Psalms project. Body Psalms is a celebration of the sanctity of the body through performance rituals and video sculptures involving ordinary people unfolding passages of mystical texts painted on their skin to create moving sculptural poetry. In Tim Holmes’ words, “In a capitalist culture increasingly governed by the ethics of pornography, where nothing is too sacred to be exploited by amoral commercial forces, the body becomes the preferred currency. Is this what we are meant for? “This art is meant to invite dialogue between separate value systems – personal, corporate and religious – that each one of us engages in our own way, but that are rarely addressed together. The current devaluation of the body can be seen as akin to climate change – a world problem that, regardless of whether we ignore it or face it, increasingly affects our lives.” Tim Holmes, American sculptor, filmmaker, and musician, is brother and son to PSR alumni. His work has gained notice also among some of the world’s peacemakers. Among Holmes’ best-known collectors are Nobel prize winners Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Jimmy Carter, along with many other international figures such as Václav Havel, Coretta Scott King and Mrs. Anwar Sadat. Holmes has created sculpture for many humanitarian projects such as the Physicians for Social Responsibility, PeaceLinks, and Cape Town’s bid for the 2004 Olympics. In 2000 he created the bronze sculpture Anima Mundi for the United Nations Millennium Peace Prize for Women, awarded to heroines working to bridge conflicts the world over. Holmes is a member of the political satire and comedy group the Montana Logging and Ballet Co., billed as National Public Radio’s “resident political satirists” during the Clinton years and which performed around the U.S. from 1976 to 2013 for audiences as diverse as the U.S. Congress, the National Press Club, and the Whitehall, Montana Public Library. Though Holmes is most well known for sculpture, he has worked in a variety of media from museum installation to film making and experiments in new media, including his acclaimed Body Psalms Project.
View all upcoming events here!
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