Presby-Musings

I t started innocently enough.  All I was trying to do was watch a video on Youtube of a song from the musical Hamilton , but there were other videos that Youtube suggested I view as well.  Then there were others...  When I finally emerged an hour later from the "click hole" I'd entered into, I felt dazed and incredulous that I'd wasted so much time.   It felt a bit like I was Rip Van Winkle--awakening from sleep to realize the world had moved on without me.  I half expected to discover my kids were grown, and my dog aged and arthritic.   The 21st-century context we find ourselves in is one that is fraught with distractions.  We are constantly bombarded with ads, images, clickbait and the like all vying for our attention.   In his fascinating book  The Attention Merchant's  (a study on the history of advertising in America), author Tim Wu writes:  As William James observed, we must reflect that, ...

Over the past couple of days, I've been engaging in a ritual that I enact at least twice a year: Mass Unsubscribing ---or, to put it another way, the Cleansing of the Email .   Email marketing is sneaky.  You buy a few things online, or at a store that requires your email, and the next thing you know your inbox is full of advertisements.   The result: You end up receiving hundreds of emails every single day that are nothing but electronic junk, cluttering your inbox, and increasing the chance of overlooking the  real messages that you need to see (like this one!).   So, at least twice a year I go through the ritual of unsubscribing from very nearly every email marketing list I've been subscribed to in order to free me for a while from the clutter and electronic noise.  It's pretty liberating.  Wouldn't it be nice if in your low moments, when your self-talk has turned dark and hopeless, that you could just "unsubscribe" from th...

I found the courage today to look at myself closely in the mirror.  It took more than I thought.  I didn't try to put on my favorite glasses, and turn my head to the angle I'm convinced makes me look cool.  Instead, I squinted hard and faced the reality of my growing wrinkles, the blemishes and deepening furrows in my brow.  My face is nearly fifty-years-old and doesn't really resemble the one that used to peer back at me when I stared into the mirror half my life ago.  I forced a smile at myself to see if there was someone I could recognize in there somewhere.  And it was there in the midst of my smile lines and old-man, stray, grey hairs that I saw him.  Mind you, it was just a twinkle, but he was there.  I saw him plain as day:  The bright-eyed, young man filled with defiant, unbridled hope... The passionate firebrand ready to charge Hell with a squirt gun.  He is in there still.  The sixteenth-century Christian ...

Most of us live lives of self-impersonation. - Thomas Merton  The above quote by the late Christian mystic and philosopher Thomas Merton was nestled in the middle of a paragraph in a book I happened to be reading today, and it seemed to stand out on the page as it if were emboldened and in all caps.   I believe that far too many of us are living diminished lives.  When we do dream, we dream too small.  And we spend most of our days bending our heads to the six-inch screens we hold in our hand, bending our minds to the false reality those screens create.   Further, the images we offer up as evidence of our "realness"  (the photos we obsessively post on social media, the way we conspicuously consume, etc. ) only serve to perpetuate an illusion we secretly know can't be sustained.   Songwriter Ryan O'Neal writes of the quiet desperation that we feel in the midst of that struggle:  I know the further I go The harder I...

Why should I fear anything that cannot rob me of God...? - Thomas Merton  When I was a kid, I went through a season where I was afraid of the dark.  I can't really remember how long it lasted, but the whole time I endured it, I couldn't sleep unless there was a light on somewhere in my room.   At some point, my fear broke, and the night lights went off for the last time.  I don't know what happened to break my fear, but it did.  I began to see darkness not as a threat, but as a welcome respite from busyness, noise and the demands of daylight's often hard realities.     It's too bad that we associate darkness with negativity, unknowing, dread and fear.  It's also too bad that, for most people of faith, darkness is synonymous with a perceived absence of God, uncertainty, doubt, and desperation.   The lesson I learned as a kid is one that I find so life-giving to me now.   We all experience what we tend to de...

Today we're going to be leaving the Hebrew Scriptures for the last few weeks of our sermon series, and we're going to be meeting two of Jesus' disciples: Philip and Andrew. But before we dive into their story, let me ask you something... Have you ever started a conversation that ended up in an argument?  I know, right?  Everyone in here has had that happen.  You just started off thinking that you were having a conversation about---oh, I don't know... politics,  or football... And then the next thing you know someone has said something savage and your brother-in-law is gathering up the kids and telling your sister through clenched teeth that they are leaving. Let me ask you a question: How many of those conversations were about religion? I have this friend on Facebook who used to love to try and bait me into theological discussions.  He would post provocative questions on my Facebook timeline, just egging me into debating him. He particularly love...

"The one thing we owe absolutely to God is never to be afraid of anything." - Charles de Foucauld For ten years following the tragic terror attack on 9/11 the Department of Homeland Security utilized a color-coded threat level warning system.   I remember going to the airport and hearing the soothing tone of an announcer declaring, "The current threat level is orange."  I would wonder, "What exactly is orange? " Am I supposed to be afraid?  What does this mean ?"   The idea itself was unnerving, especially because it was being announced over a loudspeaker in eerily Orwellian fashion.  Although the color-coded system has been abandoned, there is still an underlying sense of anxiety that exists in our culture that is hard to shake.  I am beginning to believe that as a society we have lived so long with the spectre of terror over us that we have begun to internalize it.  We are slowly becoming what we fear, and are losing our...