Jesus as a Teacher of Wisdom

After nearly ten years of work, the results of their efforts are soon to be published as the Critical Edition of Q. The "recovery" of the Q gospel has stimulated a debate about the nature early Christian communities, and by extension, the origins of Christianity itself. One scholar, Burton Mack, has advanced a radical thesis: that at least some Christian communities did not see Jesus as a Messiah; they saw him as a teacher of wisdom, a man who tried to teach others how to live. For them, Jesus was not divine, but fully human. These first followers of Jesus differed from other Christians whose ritual and practice was centered on the death and the resurrection of Jesus. Their did not emerge as the "winners" of history; perhaps because the maintaining the faith required the existence of a story that included not only the life of Jesus but also his Passion.

More About Q and the Gospel of Thomas

An accidental discovery in Egypt seems to confirm the existence of the 'lost' gospel of Q.

by Marilyn Mellowes, 

Frontline, From Jesus to Christ 

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The Lost Gospel, a collection of sayings known only as Q which stands for "Quelle," the German word for source. Many scholars are convinced that such a document once circulated in early Christian communities. There are about 235 verses in Matthew that are paralleled in Luke but not in Mark or John. The most popular view among biblical scholars is that Matthew and Luke both drew upon two main sources in writing their Gospels—Mark and Q. This is known as the “two-source hypothesis.”

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I find it quite interesting that very early on the sayings of Jesus were considered important enough to collect. We have a sampling in the canonical gospels and other books such as the gospel of Thomas. Further, Peter did not claim that Jesus of Nazareth was God. He "was a man commended to you by God by the miracles and portents and signs that God worked through him when he was among you." The belief that Christianity was compatible with what we now call paganism helped Christianity spread through the Roman Empire. Although some Christians argued there was only one god and Christians shouldn’t worship any others, this wasn't how many people in the Roman Empire understood Christianity at the time, says Edward Watts, a history professor at the University of California San Diego and author of The Final Pagan Generation: Rome's Unexpected Path to Christianity. After awhile, the view that Christians ritual and practice should be centered on the death and the resurrection of Jesus won out.

Last Sunday, we ended a prayer with the words "Inspire us to be the kind and compassionate presence needed in this world." It seems that this has not been incorporated into our rituals. It seems almost entirely absent from the creeds and the Lord's prayer. We sing so many hymns with questionable theology. My understanding is that theologians tried to keep the worst of them out of our hymnal. Our pastor was preaching on a particular popular hymn and talked about she struggles with the words of many hymns. Even though she has conflicted feelings, she respects the history of how this was meaningful and came about in the life of that particular person. She went on to say how as a young pastor, she has so many friends that are no longer believers because it's common to talk about how its God's fault, when these terrible things happen in our lives. She said well God doesn't choose who will die but that "God suffered is key to me." She tells them "they should immerse themselves in God and be embraced rather than blaming God." We don't know why the world around us is suffering, but we should "be more gracious and exude kindness. We should lean in rather than run away." This is where God talk really fails me so I would rather just not talk about God. This is also where I find Buddhism to be so practical. Rather than having mysteries as the explanation for what happens in life, Buddhism has "a way of knowledge that leads to liberation from suffering. The awakening in which it culminates is both a wisdom based on an accurate understanding of reality and a freedom from the disturbing emotions and obscurations caused by ignorance." 

Meditation is more than either stress relief or enlightenment

....meditation is about deep transformations in the ordinary ways that consciousness operates, developing altered traits rather than merely altered states.....

If the ordinary egoic sense of consciousness evolved for environments where a constant hum of fight or flight mentality helped keep us alive, advanced meditation may offer a way of reprogramming some of these inherited tendencies that no longer serve us in our comparatively new evolutionary environments, like discarding clothes that no longer fit.

“There was this initial focus on meditation as attention and emotional regulation practices,” said Ruben Laukkonen, an assistant professor at Southern Cross University. “But over time, there’s been a recognition that in contemplative traditions, that’s not really the goal. These are side effects. When you talk to people who really take this stuff seriously, you find that there’s these layers of experience that unfold that are much deeper.”

In a 2021 paper, Laukkonen and his colleague Heleen Slagter suggested that one way to think about the depth of meditation is the degree to which the mind is engaged in abstractions or conceptual thought. They describe meditation as a process of deconstructing engrained habits of mind “until all conceptual processing falls away, unveiling a state of pure awareness.”

The idea of meditation as a means of awakening flared up and then began fading out along with the counterculture itself. The hippies’ rejection of the soulless, sexless mainstream failed to build an alternative that could last, leaving their gusto for higher levels of consciousness adrift, sailing out to the cultural fringes

Kabat-Zinn authored a few studies on MBSR in the 1980s, but it wasn’t until the early 2000s that mindfulness research really took off. At the 2005 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting, the Dalai Lama told a crowd of 14,000 conference participants that Buddhism and cognitive science share deep similarities. “I believe a close cooperation between these two investigative traditions can truly contribute toward expanding the human understanding of the complex world of inner subjective experience that we call the mind,” he said.

Daniel Ingram, a former emergency room physician and author of Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, cautioned, “there’s basically a long, slow trainwreck happening between people getting into these experiences and the clinical mainstream just not understanding them.”

While very rare, these can range from anxiety spikes to psychotic breaks. Young told a meditation student about “falling into the Pit of the Void,” one of the ways Buddhist tradition describes how intense experiences can go wrong. Until the professor of psychiatry Willoughby Britton’s research on adverse meditation experiences, or “dark nights of the soul” (later rebranded as the varieties of contemplative experience study), there was little clinical support for those suffering from negative meditation experiences.

Meditation is more than either stress relief or enlightenment

Exploring the wider range of meditation is no longer reserved for the monasteries. The new science of meditation is just getting started.

By Oshan Jarow Aug 22, 2023 Vox

Christian Theology and Reverence for the Body

Barbara Brown Taylor:

When I compare the teaching of World Religions, which was full of practices, dance and music, and body decoration and mandalas, and going from that to Intro to Christian Theology, it was like going from a festival to a cemetery, in terms of where the body just vanished. It all went up into the head to figure out whether our ontology fit with our eschatology and whether our doxologies were adequate. It was a big challenge for me to either stop using the language or find a way to put skin and flesh on the language. And I’ve kept that through the years. I’m a champion of body language when speaking of the holy, which for some people is counterintuitive, because they’ve been taught the body has nothing to do with what is holy. But I beg to differ.

Tippett:

Yes, you wrote about the Christian reverence for the body: “the neighbor’s body, the leper’s body, the orphan’s body, the Christ’s body — the clear charge to care for the incarnate soul.”

Taylor:

And these days, more and more for the body of the tree and the body of the mountain and the body of the river.

On Being with Krista Tippett - April 26, 2023

Barbara Brown Taylor

“This Hunger for Holiness”

Mindfulness Without Community Isn't Enough

According to the researchers, mindfulness can actually be a powerful tool for the crises we collectively face in the world: climate change, the rising cost of living, and violence, just to name a few. And the benefits of mindfulness, they add, have never been more important, "in terms of reducing suffering, increasing connection, and cultivating compassion."

Mindfulness Without Community Isn't Enough, New Research Suggests

Author: Sarah Regan August 17, 2023

Closure, Acceptance, and Letting Go.

You may remember Thich Nhat Hanh words from that sutra we recite, Please Call Me by My True Names. I can't remember the exact words, but something about my joy is overflowing and my suffering is like a river of tears. So it's the nature of life, if we've developed an empathic connection with everything, then our life has a kind of joy to it but it doesn't ignore and it doesn't lose an empathy for the experience of suffering, that either we experience or other people experience in life. But it's kind of like it's okay; that's just the rich experience of being a human being. 

Closure, Acceptance, and Letting Go (Grief), by Geoff Dawson, August 10, 2023, Ordinary Mind School of Sydney

Matthieu Ricard: Three Rules for Life

“Can you give us the three secrets of happiness?” I said: “First, there’s no secret. Second, there’s not just three points. Third, it takes a whole life, but it is the most worthy thing you can do.” I’m happy to feel I am on the right track. I cannot imagine feeling hate or wanting someone to suffer.

The ‘World’s Happiest Man’ Shares His Three Rules for Life By David Marchese, August 11, 2023, New York Times Magazine 

See Sacredness in the Everyday

Rachel Martin: To see sacredness in the everyday means purging yourself of cynicism, doesn't it? Which is sort of the social currency of the moment, it seems.

Rainn Wilson: Yeah. I was fortunate as an actor to study with the great acting teacher, André Gregory, the focus of the movie, My Dinner With André, and he would meet with the students. And I had tea with him once, and he said, "How are you doing, Rainn?" And I said, "You know, André, I'm just feeling so cynical. I'm feeling pessimistic. The world is a pile of crap, and it's getting worse." And I'll never forget this experience. He grabbed my arm like a vise, and he looked into my eyes and he said, "Stop it. Don't do it. Don't be cynical. Everything wants you to be cynical. Everything out there in the world wants you to be pessimistic. If you're cynical, they win. You have to keep hope alive."

And that was transformative. And I walked out into the West Village, out of his apartment, and I really saw the world in a different way and realized that fostering hope and fostering joy in others is maybe our highest spiritual calling that we can do. We have to keep hope alive that we can transform ourselves, that we can transform the planet. And that is a key pillar to the spiritual revolution.

Why 'the guy' from The Office wants a spiritual revolution

August 13, 2023

Rachel Martin, NPR

Love, not Atonement

Today I was reminded what it means to be a Christian. I was looking through my Pocket account that I had a long time ago and that have recently started to use again rather than Evernote to save interesting articles. I found a 2015 article by Marcus Borg, Why Be Christian?  It is a great read and also reminded me about how to simply explain the Christianity that I practice. Just this last January, 2023, I saved a reflection by Richard Rohr called Love, not Atonement which I blogged about here. I did a web search and found a talk called Transaction or Transformation? and linked it in the blog post also. Recently, I transcribed Geoff Dawson on  Attachment, Detachment, Non-attachment in which he concludes ...you cultivate love and compassion and joy and equanimity. A sermon of Jane Johnson I copied along with Richard Rohr has a similar conclusion.

I often think about what I would say about myself as a Christian when asked in detail. Lately I was having trouble explaining to myself why I practice Zen Buddhism and consider myself a Christian. The discovery I have described reminded me what it means in both the view of Jesus's life and the community that we can be a part of. I sometimes feel very alone in my belief, but I'm determined to consider myself and remain a member of the Christian community, specifically my local church. Marcus Borg is especially helpful here when he says, Even though I think one can be an individual seeker, that's like going out and hunting for food when there's a banquet set right in front of you.  I am convinced also that my two seemingly different faith communities are consistent in the modern form that attracts me: love, compassion, joy, and equanimity.

Restoring Nature

Historian Steven Ambrose once said: “In the 19th century, we devoted our best minds to exploring nature. In the 20th century, we devoted ourselves to controlling and harnessing it. In the 21st century, we must devote ourselves to restoring it.”