My Bookshelf

Repenting of Religion

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor and theologian in Germany, was killed by the Nazi regime just weeks before liberation of the prison camp by Allied troops. In his relatively brief life, Bonhoeffer set out a path for what he called ‘religionless Christianity.’

It was a call to reject ‘religiosity’ and embrace a living and active faith that includes the whole person and affects every aspect of life.

In Repenting of Religion (Baker Books, 2004), Boyd uses Bonhoeffer’s ideas as a challenge to begin practicing a ‘faith-life’ based in love rather than a ‘religious-life’ based on prescriptive doctrines and practices.

From this perspective, he says, “The practice of judgment should be foreign to Christian character.”

If your viewing lens is conservative Christianity, as was mine for most of my life, the following clippings from Boyd’s book should get your attention:

The pharisees of our day will be offended. The church that loves as God loves has to be willing to have their reckless love scorned as compromising, relativistic, liberal, soft on doctrine, anti-religious.

After all, what kind of church attracts and embraces prostitutes, drunkards, gays, and drug addicts? What kind of church routinely has smokers, drinkers, gamblers, and bums ushering during their services, hanging out in their small groups, singing in their choir, signing up for classes, volunteering for ministry and so forth – without anyone immediately confronting their sin? . . . What kind of church blurs the boundary between those who are ‘in’ and those who are ‘out’ to this degree?
The answer, I submit, is a Jesus kind of church.

To love like this, a community has to freed from an obsession with its perimeter – its ability to know or decide who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out.’ It has to be okay with wheat and tares growing alongside each other.
It has to be willing to live in total ambiguity as to who is in and who is out.
It has to live from the center not the perimeter, from the core not the edges.

So, I now either have your attention or you are already gone. Track with me as I summarize the flow of Boyd’s explanation for what gradually went wrong with the Church. He takes it back to Genesis and the Garden of Eden.

When naked and not ashamed, Adam and Eve were free to wander with no restraint other than “Don’t touch the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil!” They ate from all the Garden’s fruit including the Tree of Life which provided for a totally fulfilling relationship with each other and with God. The best way to define this relationship was Love.

It is reasonable to ask, “Why not eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil?” A simple answer is that they didn’t need to know how to make judgments based on perceived goods and evils. As long as they were totally nurtured by the Tree of Life, such judgments were unnecessary. Everything was screened through the perfect lens of Love. All of that changed, however, with one bite from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Now Adam and Eve are still naked but ashamed. The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil has given them the ability to make judgments. And God has a problem. He can no longer allow them to eat from the Tree of Life. In the words of Genesis, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever” (3.22).

This new ability to distinguish between good and evil is now the core of their identity. Adam and Eve have separated themselves from relationship with their Creator. [They may not be getting along too well with each other either]. To eat from the Tree of Life and add eternal life to the mix would make them like God but driven by judgment and not love. Another way of putting it is that love doesn’t need judgment but judgment without love is devastating.

Fast forward to today. This ability to judge prevents us, in ourselves, from fulfilling what we were created to be and do, namely to live in loving relationship with God and others. We have displaced God and moved ourselves into the center. And now we ascribe relative value to things and people based on our human judgments of them as being good or not good in our sight. We draw life from the ‘rightness’ of our beliefs and the ‘correctness’ of our behaviour, and judge others accordingly.

You may ask, “So are we trapped in this dilemma?” Is the fulness of what the Tree of Life offered no longer available? Well, in Christian theology, Jesus is the new Tree of Life as represented on the Cross. He becomes the instrument for raising his followers above the limitations of judgment and restoring them to relationships with love in the center. As the new Tree of Life, he supersedes the dehumanizing power of the other Tree. In Christ we become truly and fully human again.

After an extensive biblical study to document his perspective on judgment and love, Boyd shifts to practical implications of the Church’s need to ‘repent from religion.’

With a no-holds-barred approach, he takes on gluttony and homosexuality. In Jewish culture, not controlling your food appetite was viewed on par with not controlling sexual appetite; both were labeled as “shameless passions.” Boyd wonders, “Why isn’t the sin of gluttony portrayed as the sin that makes America a modern Sodom and Gomorrah?” Yet in conservative evangelical churches, “No one questions the genuineness of the faith of overweight people.” They are generally welcomed into church fellowship without any suspicion – even obese pastors! He asks, “Why is this same gracious mindset not extended to gays?” On the contrary, the mindset of most conservative Christians is that the sin of homosexuality is a deal breaker. It defines who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out.’ The genuineness of their faith is more often questioned or even denied.

For Boyd, the essence of life is not found in correct doctrine or pious behaviour. As important as these qualities are, to base life on these things is religion. The community of faith needs to ask forgiveness from God, and from the world, for being religious. We have eaten from the forbidden tree and constructed our own self-serving sin list to determine who’s ‘in’ and who’s ‘out.’ Instead, we are called to turn from our religion of addiction to the tree of knowledge of good and evil. We are called to repent of placing our self-perceived judgments about ‘rightness’ above the command to love.

Repentance (a decision to turn) is the first evidence that we have stopped eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and, through the Cross of Jesus Christ, have begun eating from the Tree of Life. In other words, we can be restored to God’s original intention of true life and fellowship with Him, with Creation, and with each other.

Of Time and Turtles

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*Mending the World, Shell by Shattered Shell*

This book brings back memories. My Dad had a pet guinea pig he named Toodie. I don’t know where that name came from as Dad didn’t talk much about all the stuff he was thinking about. Toodie lived freely in our house, leaving compact little turd pellets anywhere it pleased. And would come running every morning when Dad came down the stairs whistling its name.

Dad also had a budgie bird that he named Foxy. Again, sure wish I knew how he decided that name. Foxy flew around without restraint. It would sit on his shoulder and gently pick at Dad’s eyebrows and tap away on his glasses. And seemed to love sending little guinea pig Toodie running for shelter under the sofa.

I’m trying to recall if our family ever had a pet turtle. In the United States, baby turtles -just the right size to fit in a child’s mouth- have been illegal to sell since 1975 due to fear of salmonella bacteria. Laws in Canada have been mixed regarding their sale and possession. We probably did have a turtle since they were available in every aquarium/fish store at that time. I have no recollection of putting one in my mouth.

Looking at just the cover, one might think it to be a whimsical book with a few ‘morality’ lessons. It is everything but that. Sy Montgomery is a global naturalist and “internationally bestselling writer of thirty-six celebrated books for adults and children.” Her insightful analysis and narrative ability have converted the realities “of time and turtles” into a fascinating metaphor to enhance our awareness on several fronts.

On one level, this book uses the plight of turtles to focus on ecological and environmental issues. Montgomery traces the daily missional work of men and women who are devoted to rescuing and restoring turtles from the ravages of the world, primarily the highways around which they live. With a 50% reduction of commuter traffic during the COVID pandemic, one study showed that “the numbers of animals, from cougars to turtles, saved by the reduced traffic will be estimated in the tens of millions.” This COVID connection reminds me of the satellite pictures taken over China that showed, for a brief duration of time during the pandemic, it was possible to see the ground undisturbed by air pollution.

Since I am in Canada, I must include the author’s Banff illustration. She describes how Banff (“in Canada”) has created safe corridors for wildlife to cross highways. There are 6 overpasses, 38 underpasses, and extensive fencing to guide wildlife away from the roads. The net effect? It is “estimated to have saved more than 200,000 individual animals, from lynx to toads, since completion in 2017.” That’s pretty good, eh!

For the men and women in Montgomery’s story, “caring for turtles is more than a job, more than a charity: It’s a sacred devotion.” The reality narratives of daily ‘in the trenches’ work done by these heroes are worth reading on their own. But the author also uses the turtle to raise a more conceptual and philosophical issue – the idea and experience of time.

A predominant feature of turtles is their longevity. One fascinating fact from Montgomery: “A turtle who recently died at age 288 was alive when George Washington was born, when homes were lit by candles, medicine largely consisted of enemas and bloodletting, and mental illness was treated with powder made from the hooves of moose.” Wow! I had to read that twice.

Montgomery says, “Everything takes a long time for a turtle.” They live and breathe slowly. Their hearts beat slowly and they even die slowly. Examples abound in the book of these extraordinary qualities. It may take several days for a turtle to gradually respond to an anesthetic or antibiotic treatment. They are not assumed dead until decomposition sets in since it is common for a turtle to appear dead for quite a while then gradually stir again. As Natasha, one of the key rescuers in the narratives, says, “Time is what the turtles have.”

Time. A concept that philosophers, astronomers, and many others have wrestled with for a long time (I hope you get my attempt at provoking a smile). The arrow concept of time was proposed in 1927 by physicist Arthur Eddington. Like an arrow’s flight, time goes in only one direction. In comparison to space, which moves forwards and backwards, time always moves forward, never in reverse. I can’t help but think of all the novels and movies that aim to ‘challenge’ this reality with tales of elaborate contraptions and excursions into the past or future.

Just to muddy the waters a bit more, the author adds Albert Einstein to the discussion. His concept of time was not an arrow pointed in only one direction. When one of his close friends died, Einstein wrote to the grieving widow, “Though he has left this strange world a little before me, this means nothing. For us who believe in physics know the distinction between past, present, and future is nothing more than a persistent stubborn illusion.” For Einstein, his friend was still on the landscape of life but just over the next hill where we cannot presently see him.

With this deep awareness of the magnitude and mystery of time, Montgomery links the concept of time to her focus on turtles. She affirms that people throughout history have tried to explain how time began and used the turtle as a vehicle of explanation. Hindu and Buddhist mythology have the tortoise Akupara who carries the world on her back. China has the World Turtle named Ao whose legs prop up the heavens. Indigenous peoples refer to North America as Turtle Island. And, interestingly, this is the continent with the most turtle species in the world.

Linking time and turtles to philosophical and religious paradigms, Montgomery challenges us, even in the midst of global calamities like the COVID pandemic, to take ‘the long view’ of turtle wisdom. Maybe time is not linear at all. Rather than being an arrow, perhaps time is an egg. She suggests that we make it “a turtle egg – with its promise that each end might lead to a new beginning.”

On the Brink of Everything

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*Grace, Gravity and Getting Old*

How do you decide when you have something, or something more, to say?

After publishing his 9th book at age 72, Parker Palmer thought he was done. Then, years later, his editor asked if he was working on anything new. He said ‘no’ but the editor wasn’t convinced. For Parker had been writing some brief essays and a bit of poetry. She asked him is he realized what all of that was about and he replied that he just writes his stuff not reads it. So she informed him that pretty much all of it was about “getting old.” The end result was this new book published at the age of 79.

I like Palmer’s 3 G’s in the sub-title. We spend a lifetime trying to figure out what Grace is and where to find it. Gravity finds us as body parts begin to sink towards the ground and feet must try harder to move forward. And Getting Old just happens. Yet Palmer, on the cusp of 80, still affirms that we are “On the BRINK of EVERYTHING.” He insists that we must “reframe aging as a passage of discovery and engagement, not decline and inaction.” And then he proceeds to offer his experience and encouragement through a collection of 24 brief essays and a variety of poems.

At 76, I still don’t think in terms of ‘getting old’ – although the reality of gravity and the need for grace are certainly alive and well. As a slow learner, I just retired from ‘carrying my lunch pail’ a year ago. I didn’t have a master plan. I just kept showing up for work. And, even after I went from employee status to one-year contracts (at my request) at age 65, no one ever came to me and said, “Your services are no longer required.” So, after 10 more years, I decided it was time to join other retirees in having all day to fight gravity, seek grace, and talk about getting old. Here I am, just finishing the first year and it is like I am starting to live all over again. Having to figure out a whole new agenda. On the brink of everything.

Don’t hear me wrong. I miss my work community of colleagues. And the last 5 years, where I had no administrative responsibilities, were the most satisfying of my 40 years in college and seminary work. I could focus entirely on my teaching areas and relationship to my students. But now, that’s gone. And its departure has made room for all that lies over ‘the brink’ of upcoming years.

What kinds of things does Palmer want to keep in mind as he moves into his 80s and beyond? And is any of this relevant for you at this point in time? If you are 50, that is a whole generation younger. If you are 20, that is two generations. I find it difficult to conceive how I can be 60 years older than my oldest granddaughter and 70 years older than my twin granddaughters. No wonder I am so unsure about how to be effective in relating to them.

If you’re still reading, I guess you want to hear a bit more about what Palmer sees over ‘the brink’ of his coming years. He focuses on several themes:

Young and Old: The Dance of the Generations – to seek creative engagement with the young.

Palmer says, “When young and old connect, it’s like joining the poles of a battery. Together, we generate energy for personal and social change that an age-segregated society cuts off.” Mentoring becomes a two-way street flowing both ways between young and older. Parker calls it music and a dance. If we can “knock down the walls that keep us apart and meet in that in-between space,” the end result will be that all of us are smarter.

Getting Real: From Illusion to Reality – to gain more insight into ‘the mystery’ of life.

Palmer says, “The spiritual journey is an endless process of engaging life as it is, stripping away all our illusions. . . and moving closer to reality as we do.” He implies that true spirituality is not the illusion of floating above the realities of life (i.e., being so heavenly minded that we are no earthly good) but rather being immersed in real living. Being engaged. The vehicle for this process may be different for each person and may evolve through one’s life. Palmer himself grew up in the Methodist Church, migrated to the philosophy of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, and landed in his zone of comfort as a Quaker.

Work and Vocation: Writing a Life – to clarify the difference between the jobs by which we make a living and the callings, or sense of vocation, that give meaning and purpose to all that we do.

Here Palmer asks us to tune in to what has given, and hopefully still gives, us joy and internal satisfaction. It may have been connected to our work life but could also be outside of it. This is the unction that we can take with us over the brink when the job is left behind. The creative force that will continue to make meaning during the next phase of life. For Palmer, that passion was writing.

Keep Reaching Out: Staying Engaged with the World – to maintain a live connection to the world around us.

Palmer’s words say it best – “When I’m with elders whose world has shrunk to the dimensions of their TV room, and have no health problems to limit their mobility, it’s as if I’m with the walking dead. But when I’m with elders who have a mind-and-heart connection with the world beyond their walls, I find their vitality contagious, even if they are confined to their homes.” As an indication of his old-age bravado, Palmer takes off the gloves and shares his political convictions. But I’ll leave that part to your own reading of the book.

Keep Reaching In: Staying Engaged with Your Soul – to ‘know thyself,’ to embrace Socrates’ declaration that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living.’

Palmer affirms the necessity of growing our personal inner life irrespective of, and even unrelated to, any religious tradition. He says it is a “silent, solitary process of reflection. . . where we put our lives in perspective, embrace our shadow and our light, transcend the regrets and fears that often come with age, and reconcile ourselves to what the poet Stanley Kunitz calls the heart’s ‘feast of losses’.”

I don’t know how I would respond to this book if I was 45. Probably would let a lot of the content slip by me and encourage it to move on to someone else. Someone like myself now reading it for the second time at age 75. It is more pressing now than ever that I take seriously Palmer’s injunction, “Knowing yourself and sinking your roots into the ground of your being are critical in old age.”

He declares that I must embrace the whole of who I am, all the affirming and incriminating qualities. For Palmer that includes the conflicting qualities of “self-serving and generous, spiteful and compassionate, cowardly and courageous, treacherous and trustworthy.” He sees himself and, by extension, me, as a masterpiece of conflicting tendencies housed in a being that is nearer the end of life’s trajectory than its beginning. And he encourages me to face all of it with honesty and humility. Doing so, I have a chance to truly be “on the brink of everything.”

Singletasking

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*Get More Done – One Thing at a Time*

I would like to say this book changed my life. But I can’t. Old attitudes and behaviors are hard to shift even in the face of new evidence. I don’t know about you, but I often assumed the persona of being able to multitask at a high level.

A bit of pride is usually attached to that stance. I think I had some pretty good arguments to support my perception that I really was doing multiple things at the same time. Then along came Devora Zack.

In some ways it was a bit like the nursery song. I was Little Miss Muffet, sitting on my tuffet (computer chair), eating my curds and whey (basking in simultaneous use of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Safari, iPad email, and cell phone social media).  Then “along came a spider (Ms. Zack) and sat down beside her (me) and scared Miss Muffet away.” The breakdown occurred at ‘scaring me away’ from my tuffet and multiple devices. It wasn’t that simple. But that is jumping to the end of the story. I’ll go back and fill in some of the gaps. And you can decide what to do when ‘along comes a spider’ to your tuffet and starts messing with your curds and whey.

So, what is this ‘singletasking’ (getting more done – one thing at a time) all about? Zack’s fundamental premise is that multitasking is a myth. Okay – that kind of hits where it hurts. To Zack, what I (and perhaps you) call multitasking, she calls task-switching, even if it is done at what appears to be the speed of light. She quotes a neuroscientist, “You cannot focus on one task while doing another. . . there will always be interference between the two tasks.” To say we can multitask is “deluding yourself.” But how can that be true? Many of us study and play music at the same time. Drive and talk to a passenger in the car. Watch tv and knit. Mop the floor and sing.

Zack’s response is that “activities that require virtually no conscious effort can be performed in conjunction with simple tasks and do not fall in the bandwidth of multitasking.” Such ‘simple’ tasks are “automated, low-level functions, including rote activities that do not require concentration.” There is no competition for the same mental resources. I’m not really listening to the music until something catchy comes on and I shift my focus from studying to what I am hearing. I am an experienced driver in a familiar car who knows this road well. I have done so many knit-one pearl-two’s that I can knit while doing jumping jacks. And, while singing like Zorba the Greek, I am hardly even aware of the floor. In fact, I am likely not aware that I am in fact dancing with the mop.

Are we getting the point? We think we are doing multiple things at one time. And perhaps we are. But only one of those things is really getting the primary focus of our attention and energy. And usually it will be the new or newer thing that hasn’t been rehearsed into being automatic yet.

A major concern for Zack in offering her thesis is that, in our overly distracted states of trying to do too many things at the same time, we lose out on the very essence of quality and value of each experience. We ‘blow’ through life like a hurricane then wonder why we are stressed out and not really enjoying enough of it. Zack calls us to immerse ourselves in the present experience, BE here right now, and do one thing at a time.

Her subtitle is “Get more done – one thing at a time.” Yet perhaps the best value of what Zack shares is that we might eventually find ourselves gradually shifting from the mania of DOING to the serenity of BEING.

The Power of Habit

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*Why We Do What We Do in Life and. . .*

I typed ‘motivation’ into Amazon.ca’s little white box and it offered me over 100,000 titles. ‘Psychology of motivation’ reduced the number to over 50,000 titles. But you don’t need me to tell you how pervasive the concept of ‘motivation’ is in all fields of study and explanation of human behavior.

Somewhere along the path of life, I encountered the phrase, “There is a reason for everything.” It stuck with me. When I saw an expression of anger by a customer at a sales checkout stand, I could temper my internal response with that phrase. How could I know what was going on in that person’s life at that moment? There was a reason for a loss of emotional control.

You can think of your own examples, probably even from today. And, if you haven’t ‘left the house’ yet to encounter another human being, you likely have been an example yourself in some way. Think about it. There is a reason for everything. Keeping that phrase close at hand just might allow me (and perhaps you as well) to walk through a day with more compassion and mercy.

But there is good news! You don’t have to cycle through 50,000 or more items. People like Charles Duhigg have created models of understanding and behavioral change to help us. In The Power of Habit, Duhigg addresses three circles of habits starting with individuals, then organizations, and finally, societies. My interest here is the primary context of individuals. That means me and you.

After describing new learning from two medical case studies of men named ‘E.P.’ and ‘H.M.,’ Duhigg outlines what he calls ‘the habit loop.’ It’s a pretty straightforward process in our brain that unfolds in three steps:

  • Cue – is a trigger “that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use.”
  • Routine – is the physical, mental or emotional sequence we go through in response to the cue.
  • Reward – is the end result; the strength of our interest in the reward will influence the brain’s level of assessment as to whether this particular loop is worth remembering for next time. 

The marketing of consumer products is totally invested in cultivating these habit loops. Duhigg describes how Pepsodent toothpaste ‘rocked its world’ in the early 1900’s. Dental care was so non-existent that “when the government started drafting men for World War I, so many recruits had rotting teeth that officials said poor dental hygiene was a national security risk.” However, by 1930, the crafting of a crafty habit loop created the daily brushing ritual for most of the American people. How did they do that?

The cue was marketed as “Run your tongue across your teeth. . . you’ll feel a film. . . that’s what makes your teeth look ‘off color’ and invites decay.” The reward, after the simple routine of a quick brush with Pepsodent, was a prettier smile. And so, the use of toothpaste in America went from 7% to 65% of the population.

Claude Hopkins, the instigator of the Pepsodent tsunami, became rich and pontificated two basic rules of human psychology: First, find a simple and obvious cue (e.g., tooth film); and second, clearly define the rewards (e.g., beautiful teeth). Hopkins’ rules, even today, “are a staple of marketing textbooks and the foundation of millions of ad campaigns.”

If you find this drama interesting, check out the equally fascinating story of how Procter and Gamble moved Febreze from the dustbin of obscurity to the front shelf in the laundry room of every home in America.

So what good is all of this to you and to me? Well, our interest – at least my interest – is “How can I create new habits?” How can I change patterns of my behavior to move in new directions? How can I get rid of behavior patterns that are no longer (or never were) desirable? Duhigg has more good news.

With the assistance of rats and monkeys, researchers have established that the sight (or sound, or any of the senses) of the cue stimulates a craving which then jumpstarts the routine towards the reward. Seeing an enticing food ad on television sends us to the fridge or Uber Eats, Skip the Dishes. . . you know what I mean. The Marlboro Man had the power to raise many a man (and woman too) from their couch to grab a smoke. The chime of a new text coming in causes many cell phones to be balanced on knees under the table during meetings. The list goes on and on.

So, what’s the good news? In its utter simplicity, it is – Revise the craving! Bring the reward to the front of the bus. Frame it as a cue that inspires our motivation. Allow it to gently nourish a new craving. So, I go to the gym (or jog, or eat more healthy food, or. . .) more regularly not for some vague future promise of goodness but for the fantastic reward of feeling so good at the end of today. To know that I spent a whole day doing better than I did yesterday gives me a euphoric sense of wellbeing.

I crave that feeling of accomplishment. To anticipate a drop of .5 pound (I don’t know how many grams that is) when I step on the scale tomorrow morning makes all the discipline and supposed sacrifice worthwhile. And what is most beautiful is that very soon it won’t feel like sacrifice at all. We will experience the joyful creation of a new normal.

This ‘Book of the Week’ narrative is getting rather long. I don’t know how long it should be. It’s my first one. There is so much more in The Power of Habit. How new routines can be inserted into old habits. Alcoholics Anonymous is a powerful model where new and more life-giving cravings use even the former cues and rewards to move a person towards success by changing the routine.

That’s a wrap. A pretty cursory overview of key elements of Duhigg’s first circle of attention – the habits of individuals. In his second and third sections, the habits of organizations and the habits of societies, he continues to provide thought-provoking examples (Aluminum Company of America, Starbucks, Target stores, the Montgomery bus boycott). But that is on you.