My interview with Tripp Fuller on the Homebrewed Christianity podcast has just been released.

Excerpt: "Contemplative practice is a real struggle for us Westerners, and maybe even more so for Protestant Christians, because we're so used to consuming information as the primary aspect of our spiritual live." 

http://homebrewedchristianity.com/2017/11/14/process-thought-and-contemplative-christian-practice-with-daniel-coleman/

A few things I've learned...

1. If something seems really stupid to me, there is a possibility that I'm completely misunderstanding it and, therefore, I am actually the one that is stupid.

2. If my religion makes me prioritize keeping rules (doctrines, creeds, statements of faith, particular scriptural interpretations, etc.) over treating people with kindness, then I have probably misunderstood what the original teacher of my religion (Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Moses, etc.) was trying to convey and, in doing so, I have quite possibly become the antithesis of what my religion was supposed to be about.

3. It is very liberating to say "I don't know." The older I get and the more I learn, the more often I say this.

-DC

 “Creeds are at once the outcome of speculation and efforts to curb speculation... Wherever there is a creed, there is a heretic round the corner or in his grave.”

--Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas

"God speaks in the great silence of the heart." 

-- St. Augustine

I had the most amazingly vivid, detailed dream last night. So astonishing that I awoke at the end of it, not in fright but in wonder. I dreamt that the city, and in fact the entire region, was evacuated due to some impending cataclysmic natural disaster (the exact nature of which I can't recall). But some folks opted to stay behind, including my wife and I. The mostly empty city did not devolve into a Walking Dead/Road Warrior hellscape however. Instead there was incredible cooperation and care, camaraderie and bonhomie among the remainders. Everyone helped each other, took care of each other, visited each other. People who stayed gravitated to the university campus to interact with one another. The abandoned shops and supermarkets were left with their doors unlocked so that people could come in and take whatever they needed, and people only took what they needed.

At one point my wife and I went into a convenience store. No one was there and the lights were off. She went into the back to use the restroom and I decided to grab a bag of Chips Ahoy cookies. Just then, the proprietor came in through the back door. He was a muscular young Pakistani man with a three-legged German shepherd dog (like I said, amazingly detailed). For a moment I expected an angry confrontation but instead he grinned and greeted me, tried to talk me into taking more things, and refused to accept any money. As we left he gave me a big hug and wished us luck.

Maybe, in my dream, what made us all so caring for one another and so unconcerned with worldly goods and with profits and losses was that we all were very aware that soon we would die.

I'll try to take that lesson into my day.

-DC