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- the Soul Desires crew

I highly recommend the mysterious and lovely poem “For the Pilgrim a Kiss” all 3 parts!

The Inner Landscape of Beauty | John O’Donohue’s Poems [Speaking of Faith from American Public Media]

John O’Donohue was an Irish poet and philosopher beloved for his book Anam Cara–Gaelic for ’soul friend’–and for his insistence on beauty as a human calling and a defining aspect of God. I sat down with John O’Donohue in our studios last fall.

by Michelle Smith

Do you know how watching a dubbed movie, unless it is a cartoon, is so disappointing because you lose the feel and warmth of the characters? This website is a twist on that idea. listen, listen, listen…

World Voices Project – Home

World Voices Project is an audio library of people reading the United Nation’s Declaration of Human Rights in their native language. It’s designed for an audio installation and intended as a reminder to world leaders and policy makers that human rights do not discriminate.

As you know by now, if you have read even the first page of this issue, the theme is changes in our relationship to ourself. Since this year, I will celebrate six decades of aging, I have resolved to be more curmudgeonly. Therefore, aside from this introduction, there will be no further discussion of the theme in this article. Instead I propose to offer you some suggestions for political reading in preparation for the impending elections.

As I have aged, (oops, a slip on my promise – I’m getting forgetful) my enjoyment of history has only waxed. Therefore, when the book Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America by Steven Waldman (Random House; 2008; $28.00) came to my attention, I leapt on it. And devoured it. And it was a very tasty treat indeed. Much is discussed these days regarding the religious attitudes of the framers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Were they Christians? Did they see the United States as a Christian country? Was separation of church and state to be a wall or the skin between two lovers? Waldman provides us with biographical sketches of all the major players. The sketches focus on their religious inclinations – the major influences, the changes that occurred over their lives, the ambiguities they struggled with, the inconsistencies in their thought, word, and deed. They become people who, like you and me, grapple with the questions of faith and morality and human frailty and divine action and inaction. He stirs these sketches into the crucible that was the local and state politics, the Continental Congress, the Revolutionary War, and international relations facing the 13 American colonies at the end of the 18th century. Waldman, who is founder of BeliefNet.com, approaches the work with no agenda to develop, only the question to answer (my wording, not his). “How did a nation founded by religious bigots and separatists become a nation dedicated to free religious expression?” It is a profoundly important read, if for no other reason than its glimpse into how people of differing and often conflicting viewpoints can come together to create something more dynamic and strong than any one could craft of their own resources.

Fast forward to the early years of the 21st century, to a time occupied by what some have dubbed the “culture wars.” Who are the people reaching across the divides of our making to those on the other side to find the common ground and continue building on that dynamic and strong foundation we have inherited? One of the names must certainly be Jim Wallis whose latest book is The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith & Politics in a Post-Religious Right America (HarperOne; 2008; $25.95). This book is in some ways, a travelogue of Wallis’ encounters with people across the country as he has attended workshops, made speeches, and met with students, lay people, pastors, and religious and civic leaders. Starting with a reminder of the great changes that can be wrought in the joining of a passionate faith with compassionate concern – William Wilberforce ending slavery in the British empire, and American abolitionism, child labor laws and civil rights – he leads us into the landscape of contemporary political issues. On the role of government in pursuing the common good, on immigration, on poverty, on stewardship, on life, Wallis recounts the stories he has been told and the events he has observed to describe the confluence of effort from left and right, conservative and liberal, all the corners of the culturewar playing field. This is a remarkably hopeful book.

Because I try to walk in the way of Jesus, how could I not spot a title like How Would Jesus Vote: A Christian Perspective on the Issues by James Kennedy and Jerry Newcombe (Waterbrook; 2008; $16.99). I include it, however, to say what I have never said in this column; this is a terrible book. Through bad logic, reiteration of stereotype, fear-mongering, and profoundly bad Biblical scholarship, we are guided to such conclusions as: Jesus’ top two economic concerns would be “honoring private property” and “do[ing] what we can to create an atmosphere that encourages work” (probably concerns since he didn’t seem to have either of them); that Jesus would support the death penalty because it upholds man’s dignity (besides, where would He be without it?); and that Jesus’ concern for immigrants would be expressed by us protecting ourselves. The positive outcome, however, is that I started researching the Hebrew words we translate as “strange(r)” and “foreign(er)” and “alien.” There are at least four words with distinct differences masked in the translation rather like the Inuit words for “snow.” It’s a much more insightful activity than finishing this book.

Rebecca Ann Parker, telling of her struggle to vanquish the ghosts of a deep childhood trauma haunting a living, warm and loving relationship in Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us (with Rita Nakashima Brock; Beacon Press; 2001, $18.00) writes,

“I tried prayer, but God seemed powerless to free me. One night, responding to my anguish, David said, “Try praying. I’ll pray with you if you want.” “No,” I said. “God is not any help. I’ve asked.” David said, “Your God is not helping you with this?” “No,” I said, angry and frustrated. “Well, then,” David said, “this is California. Get another God” (p. 195). This moment of humor injected into her painful bondage – bondage to her past and bondage to an image of God – provided a surgical clip loosening her shroud. Much as we are all fond of our images of God, periodically we get so caught up in them that a moment of grace is required to shed the scales from our eyes and remind us that our images are just that – products of our imagination attempting to grasp the unfathomable. The Bible provides us with manifold images of God as it records the attempts of a people of faith through the centuries imaging God in a different way after once again finding themselves in bondage.

For each of us, I think, there is a personal central issue around which we struggle to grasp the form and presence of God like Jacob at the Jabbok Ford. We are rather like oysters, and God the grain of sand which we coat and coat and coat again with lacquer, but which we never get rid of nor (hopefully) with which we ever get really comfortable. For some, like Rebecca Ann Parker, the issue is a deeply painful personal experience. For others like myself, it may be more abstract – what kind of God creates and allows such unjust division of the benefits of this world with me being on the excessively benefited end of the deal. We leave each struggle freed again, build an altar, and limp off into the world made new by another act of imaginative divine love.

Proverbs of Ashes is a deeply personal, probing, and at times disturbing recounting of Brock’s and Parker’s struggle to fashion an image of God for themselves out of the violence of their lives. Another woman tells her story in Memories of God: Theological Reflections on a Life by Roberta Bondi (Abingdon, 1995, $19.00). Bondi is one of my wife Susan’s favorite authors and she is high on my list too. If you read only one book of hers, this would be my pick, for she is able to tell flowing stories laced with wise insight about the binding that our understanding of God and faith can put on our souls. In a reflection particularly on point, Bondi writes about discovering in early church writings that “Sin [is] about being blinded and wounded by our own and society’s patterns of seeing, feeling, and acting so that we [can] not love one another or God” (p. 135).

Francis S. Collins is a geneticist of high standing and long time head of the Human Genome project. He is also a man of strong religious conviction and has written The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (Free Press, 2006, $15.00). In the first chapter he tells the story of his first real struggle with God, changing from atheist to Christian, as a result of encounters with people of faith and with C.S. Lewis’s writing, especially Mere Christianity. Intellectually he was convinced by the “Moral Law” that Lewis describes as fundamental to human existence. The editors attached the unfortunate subtitle to the book, for that is really his sole evidence for belief and the remainder of the book is really about the current state of Collins struggle with an image of God that correlates with the science he understands. He ably shows that vigorous theology and rigorous science are not strange bedfellows.

A compilation of shorter essays on images of God is found in The Changing Face of God edited by Frederick W. Schmidt (Morehouse, 2000, $12.95). Contributors include Karen Armstrong, Marcus Borg, James Cone, Jack Miles, and Andrew Sung Park. The book is designed for use as a study, but the articles stand on their own merits with or without a group discussion. To sum up, from Schmidt’s first chapter, “…our pictures of God are and should be forever provisional, shifting to meet both narrower and larger needs, grasping more of the nature of God on some level, while at the same time acknowledging that they are less than can ever be known” (p. 9).