Scarcity & Sabbath

(To see what we will be doing this Lent in regards to "Time" - go here.)

Over at the experimentaltheology.blogspot, the issue of Time & Scarcity has been blogged about in a very interesting and in my opinion, helpful way.  The three posts are:

1) The Biggest Obstacle to Spiritual Formation

What is that problem?

Scarcity.

Here's how Brene Brown describes scarcity in her book Daring Greatly, a quote I've shared before:

We get scarcity because we live it…Scarcity is the “never enough” problem…Scarcity thrives in a culture where everyone is hyperaware of lack. Everything from safety and love to money and resources feels restricted or lacking. We spend inordinate amounts of time calculating how much we have, want, and don’t have, and how much everyone else has, needs, and wants.

2) The Scarcity Trap

Why are we over-committed and addicted to busyness? Because saying Yes to everything makes us feel wanted, needed, important and vital.

In short, in our thirst for self-esteem--our drive to be noticed, needed or successful--we become over-committed and over-worked. Which causes us, at the end of the day, to become depleted and exhausted. The drive for success and significance, or the flight from shame and failure, exhausts us and runs us into the ground. Neurotic anxiety produces basic anxiety.

That is the scarcity trap, how our neurotic fears of failure and insignificance cause us to push harder and harder which, in turn, exhausts us.

The scarcity trap is how the shame-based fear of being ordinary tempts us into work and busyness depleting us of time, energy and resources.

The scarcity trap is how shame produces exhaustion.

3) The Therapeutic is the Political: Sabbath as Spiritual Warfare

Conservative Christians like to think that spiritual warfare is about the spiritual, psychological realm. Liberals like to think of spiritual warfare as being about the political realm. Both are missing the point.

Pay attention to what I'm saying here. The therapeutic is the political.

As Walter Brueggemann reminds us, Sabbath is resistance. Sabbath resists the spirituality of the principalities and powers--the capitalistic and consumeristic rat race--to nurture the physical and psychological resources to fuel further resistance, making us increasingly available for both community and prophetic ministry.

If shame is the fuel of capitalism then Sabbath is the fuel for the Kingdom of God.

But, and here's the big take home point, Sabbath-keeping requires shame-resilience. Sabbath requires relaxing into the "shame-based fear of being ordinary" as we allow the world to rush by as we settle into the humble, small and human rhythms of Sabbath. To practice Sabbath means to go quiet, to be less noticed, to rest into the ordinary. And it takes shame-resilience to do that.

The therapeutic is the political. 

Sabbath is spiritual warfare.

Read the blog, you will be glad for it.

Getting Ready for Lent 2015

Over the next five weeks, we look forward to delving together into the theme of Time, meditating on how we can make time to Stop, Pray, Work, Play & Love.

The first few days of this series serve as a time of introduction and preparation. In the four short videos, Brs. Geoffrey Tristram, David Vryhof, Curtis Almquist, and John Braught introduce some of the key concepts the Brothers will be discussing in the coming weeks.

We hope that you will use these opening days to view the four introduction videos, answer these initial questions, and read through the supplemental resources online at www.SSJE.org/time

This is a time to think deeply about your own relationship to time.  What is working well in how you use time, and what could work better?

Time: Redeeming the Gift – Br. Geoffrey Tristram

We are probably more aware than any previous generation of how we have polluted and exploited our beautiful planet. Every day, the news brings fresh evidence of the ravages humans have exacted upon the spaces we inhabit. We recognize now that we are in the midst of an ecological crisis.

What we are, perhaps, slower to recognize is that our ecological crisis also reflects a theological crisis. The earth we have polluted is none other than God’s creation. The Book of Genesis expresses in unforgettable language the great act of creation: With power and love, God brings forth dry land from the watery void, and in successive stages creates a wondrous world filled with every kind of plant and animal, and at creation’s climax, makes humankind. To these humans is entrusted the incalculably important task of caring for this dazzlingly complex and precious work of God. “Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”(1)

But Genesis goes on to describe in tragic verses humankind’s Fall from grace and its dire consequences. Humans, who were created to live in harmony with the whole of creation, were doomed to experience a profound sense of rupture and alienation: “cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life.”(2) They would now live in a fundamentally ‘disordered’ relationship with all of creation.

Looking around us now, it is not difficult to see traces of this disordered relationship with creation in our lives. On a global scale, we see how our greed and insatiable appetite for more have encouraged us to plunder and exploit the earth’s resources in irresponsible and unsustainable ways, as we live with the consequent pollution and global warming. And in our individual lives, we are becoming aware that our disordered and unsustainable relation to the created order is a cause of malaise and great suffering.

Now, there is another gift from God, given in creation, which is equally fundamental to our well-being as our relationship with the Earth. This gift, too, has been abused and polluted, although the destructive effects of this abuse may be less immediate for us to discern. This is the gift of Time.

Read it all here.

Respecting the #BlueLivesMatter WITH Accountability

Across the country, 50 officers were killed by guns in 2014 compared to 32 in 2013, according to the website of the non-profit fund, which aims to increase safety for law enforcement officers.  The most deadly states were California, Texas, New York, Florida and Georgia, the group said. "Fifteen officers were shot and killed in ambush, more than any other circumstance of fatal shootings in 2014," the website said.

This is taken from an article: Gun deaths for U.S. officers rose by 56 percent in 2014: report

I have a friend who is a police officer who feels quite discouraged by what has happened in 2014.  I don't blame him.  Good police officers have been treated as if they were bad police officers.  Laws are passed that put police on the defensive.

Myths and Misconceptions About Indiana's New Self-Defense Law 

I can't imagine what it is to put on a badge (and gun), knowing that your duty to serve and protect, may put you in harms way.

http://www.abqjournal.com/520552/news/flagstaff-officer-killed-on-duty-laid-to-rest.html

That is what we ask of our police officers.  And we should pray for them:

O gracious God, watch over all police and law enforcement officers everywhere. Protect them from harm in the performance of their duty to serve and protect all citizens. Defend them day by day with your heavenly grace; strengthen them in their trials and temptations; give them courage to face the perils which beset them; and grant them a sense of your abiding presence wherever they may be;
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. 

Even as we pray for them, police officers must be held accountable.  For too long, deaths at the hands of police officers were ignored or excused as being in our self interest. And yet, as the chart shows, police officers kill at least once a day in our nation.

Smug television broadcasts in Russia and China have wildly exaggerated the sickness of which Ferguson is a symptom. But it is real enough. The police in and around Ferguson have shot and killed twice as many people in the past two weeks (Mr Brown plus one other) as the police in Japan, a nation of 127m, have shot and killed in the past six years. Nationwide, America’s police kill roughly one person a day (see chart). This is not because they are trigger-happy but because they are nervous. The citizens they encounter have perhaps 300m guns between them, so a cop never knows whether the hand in a suspect’s pocket is gripping a Glock. This will not change soon. Even mild gun-control laws tend to fail. And many Americans will look at the havoc in Ferguson and conclude that it’s time to buy a gun, just in case.

This is from the Economist:

The Ferguson riots: Overkill Police in a Missouri suburb demonstrate how not to quell a riot

Not every person shot is a bad shoot.  But the old adage, "shoot first, ask questions later," seems to be the modus oprendi for many police forces. To use your gun should be the last resort not the first. In a country that seems gun crazy, it is up to our police officers to lead the way in responsible use of a weapon.   

I pray the numbers of death from guns goes down, way down, and we have some common sense brought into this very violent nation.

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The Problem is Guns

We continue to argue the merits of gun control in this country while too many people die because of the proliferation of guns and how easily criminals can get their hands on those guns.  Sadly we see this in the headlines:

Tracing the Gun Used to Kill 2 New York City Police Officers (from a Pawn Shop)

West Virginia felon, accused killer of 4 bought gun on Facebook

Matthew Warren Bought Unregistered Gun Online To Use In Suicide, Rick Warren Says

Too many see guns as a right rather than a privilege with responsibilities. And yet the purpose of guns is to kill, plain and simple.  We must ensure as a society that those who bear arms are:

1) Background Checked
2) Licensed
3) Trained
4) Weapons bought/sold traced

We do this with cars, we should absolutely do this with guns.  Sadly, though, all this will not prevent accidents and tragedies with guns:

The inside story of how an Idaho toddler shot his mom at Wal-Mart

How often do children in the U.S. unintentionally shoot and kill people? We don’t know.

And let us stop blaming it all on mental illness:

Stop blaming mental health for gun violence. The problem is guns.