Liberal Christianity

Lesson 5: Personal Spirituality and Practice

Living Religion

Reason, which is so much more than simply applied logic, includes an intuitive way of thinking and knowing. One does not get a sense of one’s self through pure logic and one cannot get a handle on how one really feels by someone else’s definitions – someone else’s magic.

Reason applied spiritually is prayerful – prayer in its purest sense. Reason is reflection of one's own experience and, integrated with intuition, is the means by which the inner soul speaks in a voice sufficiently loud to be heard by the outer consciousness.

This is where one senses, feels and hears God whispering. If one cannot sense one’s inner soul, hearing that voice divine is impossible. One cannot answer spiritual questions if one cannot sense the wisdom of that part of us that never sleeps.

The most important compilation of personal knowledge and wisdom is stored there and nowhere else. Ignoring inner knowledge and feelings during life’s moments of pause and reflection – focusing merely on external collective values in measuring one’s own current state and status is truly giving away the ability to make healthy course corrections.

Exercises:

1. Personal spirituality is very much the lifeblood of embracing life as it IS rather than naively embracing life as it might be according to someone else’s magic. That magic may be very accurate and totally useful, but until personal experience confirms such a knowing, someone else’s magic remains a borrowed attribute.

This borrowed spiritual attribute by naïve assumption can become habitual and addictive; more internally defined with conscious insistence and lazily labeled "faith" than by honest and critical testing.

Such is an appeal to the lazy in us for it basically offers us the use of someone else’s kayak- which works in their reality - when in our own we need something with which to negotiate an uphill climb on a mountain path.

However, if we are convinced that the kayak is the only way to climb the mountain, we will remain in Borg's state of pre-critical naiveté, struggling upward at great loss of opportunity for personal wisdom and an honest faith attained thru critical thinking and experience.

a. Please respond to the following contrasting questions in detail:

“Does it matter more that one seeks good because seeking good is a commanded practice with the promise of happiness and future reward?”

"Or does it matter that one seeks good for the sake of goodness itself."

2. Martin Buber, referring to a non-verbal experience of the divine, wrote, “God is the Mysterium Tremendum that appears and overthrows, but he is also the mystery of the self-evident, nearer to me than my I.”

a. What do you think Buber is saying?

b. That which we have labeled “the mystical” is in reality a part of most everything we ourselves create and accomplish. Can we not truly say that the Mysterium Tremendum is the ultimate end we seek in actively involving ourselves in a Christian life? Why or why not?

c. Without a mystical sense and approach to both worship and daily living, our congregations busy themselves as social clubs more concerned about public opinion and conformity, perceiving themselves as an island surrounded by a sea of hostile, stupid or indifferent waters? Agree or disagree and why?

3. Working in a mystical venue has always been a part of living. Farmers plant corn because in their minds eye they see a field of ripe corn. Buildings are constructed because an architect visualized in his mind what he later designed on paper. Meals are prepared from scratch by mothers who know recipes by heart, bring together separate materials and turn them into tasty and satisfying dishes.

What is visualized internally is the source of what is created externally.

a. Agree or disagree with that last sentence and why?

4. A gospel of monarchical laws, ordinances and obedience was not Jesus’ good news. Jesus’ good news was His, and our, innately mortal theology. It is a theology of relationship rather than worship, edified and communicated by ordinances and ritual which formed the basis of symbolism leading to a mystical, epiphanic and on-going relationship with the God of experience.

a. Agree or disagree and why?

5. Dr. Borg offers an equally powerful objective:

“Now I no longer see the Christian life as being primarily about believing. The experiences of my mid-thirties led me to realize that God is, and that the central issue of the Christian life is not believing in God or believing in the Bible or believing in the Christian tradition. Rather, the Christian life is about entering into a relationship with that to which the Christian tradition points, which may be spoke of as God, the risen living Christ, or the Spirit. And a Christian is one who lives out his or her relationship to God within the framework of the Christian tradition.” – MEETING JESUS AGAIN FOR THE FIRST TIME, Marcus Borg, HarperCollins, 1994.

a. Please write what you believe Christian (or any other) spiritual life is about.

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