Prayer after Katrina

John Thomas, UCC General Minister and President, offers a prayer for use in UCC congregations in the wake of Hurricane Katrina

Aug. 30, 2005
Through the storm, through the night, lead me on to the light
Take my hand, precious Lord, lead me home.

- Be present, O God, with those who are discovering that loved ones have died, that homes and jobs are gone. Embrace them in your everlasting arms.

- Be present, O God, with those who suffer today in shelters, hot and weary from too little sleep and too much fear. Let them know they are not alone.

- Be present, O God, with those who wonder what they will find when they return to homes battered by wind and engulfed by flood. Teach them to hope.

- Be present, O God, with those who have not been able to reach loved ones, who are frantic with worry. Offer them consolation.

- Be present, O God, with those who have hardly recovered from last year’s storms, who are unsure how much they can bear, who yearn only for quiet. Grant them peace.

- Be present, O God, with all who respond - mayors, police, firefighters, FEMA employees, Red Cross workers, pastors, church disaster response coordinators. Their work is just beginning, and will not end for many months. Strengthen them for service.

- Be present, O God, with the people of the United Church of Christ in storm damaged areas, and especially with the staff and clients of the Back Bay Mission in Biloxi where we fear so much has been damaged. Inspire us by their determination to care for others amid their own trials.

- Be present, O God, to each of us as we pray, that distance may not deter us from generous giving and enduring companionship. Help us remember tomorrow, and next week, and next month.

- Be present, O God, with all affected by Hurricane Katrina. May Immanuel, God with us, our precious Jesus, take every hand and lead us home. Amen.

John H. Thomas
General Minister and President
United Church of Christ
August 30, 2005

If you're the praying type, I invite you to pray this prayer with me today.
--Amy

For more info on other ways to help: UCC's Disaster Response Page

Newsweek II - God Still Alive

The other bit that stood out to me in this set of articles was that they contrasted the many vibrant communities and forms of faith with an article written fifty or so years ago, whose controversial title was "Is God Dead?"

Apparently, the rational, provable God of the Enlightenment may be on his way out, but there are many people who recognize that God does not have to be proven in the same way that the speed of light would be.

So for example, I was reading a debate online about intelligent design, and the defender of ID made some very good points. I was starting to be convinced. But as I was being convinced, I also felt disappointed that God could be proven, somehow, and contained by science. It made God seem less beautiful.

I suspect that I'm not the only one attracted to God's beauty, mystery, and elusiveness, seeing the spiritual quest as a game of seduction, punctuated by life-changing moments of union with the divine, rather than as some kind of complicated math problem.

Newsweek Goes Spiritual

Newsweek has a series of articles on spirituality in the US.

Here's a quote I like from the profile on "Green Religion."

"My identity is not as an environmentalist," [Allen Johnson] says. "It's as a Christian. Because I am Christian, I should be involved with social justice, the poor, the needy. Environmentalism is one thing in my circle, but it's not my center."

I think what's most interesting and exciting from this survey and the accompanying set of articles is that there are a wide variety of ways to practice religion in the US, and they are not all what we expect them to be. I was surprised by the idea of a multicultural mosque, for example, or an environmentalist fundamentalist, quoted above. There is a lot more creativity and movement in the middle ground than the politicos might have us believe. This suggests to me that God's creative Spirit is in fact still at work.

Pointed Satire

In Slate, Jesus speaks at a Republican fundraiser. Worth reading, with the recognition that something similarly pointed could probably be leveled at the Democrats. Here's a sample:

Now a few loud people keep saying the government should forget about sanctity, forget about religion. They want separation of church and state. See these hands? See the holes in them? That's separation of church and state. (APPLAUSE) I know George W. Bush, and I know he won't ever let that happen to me again. (CHEERS, APPLAUSE)

**cringes inwardly**

Founder of Taize Community has Died

Taize is an ecumenical monastic community in France that has been a place of pilgrimage for many young people for many years, as well as the source of a revival of a contemplative music and worship style. Its founder, Brother Roger, was killed on August 17th. Tara has a good write-up.

Eternity, A Billion Years, and Evolution

The NYTimes is in on the talk about evolution and intelligent design. I think that intelligent design, if it's just an attempt to introduce creationism into the school system, is probably not a very good idea. But on the other hand, I've thought for a long time that evolution could be one way that God works in the world.

This op-ed piece from the NY Times makes you stop to think about how long, really, the planet has been around, and how long, really, evolution has had to work itself out. It suggests to me that God is indeed very patient.

In the Brian McLaren book I just finished (A Generous Orthodoxy) he points out that for Christians living 100,000 years after Christ, we will appear to have been very close to the origins of the faith. For me, that amount of time is hard to imagine, much less 1 million or 1 billion years. Wow.

Christian Contemplation

The weather today in Maryland is gorgeous. It's still warm because it's August, but the light is changing--fall is getting close. I think the natural world and its beauty are an opportunity for us to practice gratitude. God has made all of this, like a master artist, and we have been given the gift of enjoying it, as appreciative spectators. And even more than that, we've been invited to participate in the art.

It's easy for me to get off into my own thoughts and be wrapped up in this or that worry or concern. But hearing the wind in the trees--really hearing it--reminds me of God's presence in the silence, and my place as a creature created to enjoy and to be as much as to strive and to do. Thanks be to God.

Friday Humor

From the Christian Humor Web:

When my daughter was four years old, a beloved kitty died. She was thinking about Snowball when we were enroute somewhere. She said, "Is there a cat heaven?" Before we could answer her question, she added, "If there is a cat heaven, there must be a cat Jesus." ...JU

Images for the comments section, anyone?

Bridging the Divides

Brian McLaren, if you aren't familiar with him, grew up in a conservative Christian church, and helped found a very large church here in Maryland called Cedar Ridge Community Church. He tries to push the edges of what it means to be Christian, and in this article he talks about bridging the divides that exist in American politics today. Enjoy.

Theology of Evolution

This article, written Kenneth Miller, by a professor of biology at Brown University, is an excellent explanation of not only why the scientific discovery of evolution does not have to contradict faith, but also why its randomness is important for human freedom and moral choice.

Best-of contender

Friends, I believe this modest home deserves to be on the best-of craigslist. Please go see for yourself and contribute a vote if you agree.

Getting Ready to Die

A good, but difficult article in the New York Times about hospice care, palliative care and how people approach their deaths.

The basic questions:

How do we let go of a life? How much intervention is too much? When do all the small fixes stop making sense? How does a person know when to say, ''O.K., so this is what I'll finally die of''? We rarely ask such questions, because we don't believe, in our bones, that a terminal disease will end in an actual death. We don't want to cut short a closing life by even a matter of days. We want to be able to say that we did everything we could.

A story about a man dying of cancer. He had initially refused care, but had been taken to the hospital by his son after a seizure:

Readmitted to Mount Sinai, the man was sedated by a combination of antiseizure medication and the cancer itself. He was plagued by delirium and was only sporadically alert. He was in no position to reiterate his earlier decision to refuse therapy. The doctors decided that the only way to get food into the man, who was having trouble swallowing, was through a feeding tube, which has to be inserted through the nose, down the throat and into the stomach. It's uncomfortable to get it in and to have it in, and the patient kept pulling it out. The doctors restrained his hands. He pulled it out with his knees. They restrained his feet. Still he somehow managed to dislodge the tube 17 times, and each time the hospital staff replaced it.

Why, Meier asked the intern in charge of the man's care, do you keep reinserting that tube, when it's so clear the patient doesn't want it?

''He looked at me, and I will never forget this young man's face,'' Meier told me. ''And he said, 'Because if we don't do this, he'll die.'''

On death's unpredictability:

Death generally comes for most of us ''with unpredictable timing from predictably fatal chronic disease,'' Lynn wrote in ''Sick to Death and Not Going to Take It Anymore!'' But since the diseases are ''predictably fatal,'' why do we so often feel blindsided by death, even the death of an elderly person suffering from a long-term condition? Because the hardest thing to do is to really, deeply believe that we or our loved ones will die.

I Caught A FEESH!

Hey, just testing out the photo options on Blogger. Faithful Heather readers will have seen this photo already.

Iraq, revisited.

I'm having a Slate Day:

The United States is awash in human rights groups, feminist organizations, ecological foundations, and committees for the rights of minorities. How come there is not a huge voluntary effort to help and to publicize the efforts to find the hundreds of thousands of "missing" Iraqis, to support Iraqi women's battle against fundamentalists, to assist in the recuperation of the marsh Arab wetlands, and to underwrite the struggle of the Kurds, the largest stateless people in the Middle East? Is Abu Ghraib really the only subject that interests our humanitarians?

What would it be like if progressives stopped trying to pull the troops out of Iraq and started working on ways to help the people of Iraq develop their infrastructure and fight back against the anarchists/insurgents/fundamentalists/terrorists who keep getting in the way of progress.

We are at a crossroads here--we can keep trying to fight Bush at every turn, or we can recognize that there is a chance to do good and to make the world--specifically Iraq--a better place, even if the original war was a bad idea.

A Tidbit on the "Liberal" Media

Jack Shafer writes in Slate Magazine:

The larger point that the boneheads who so despise the media need to appreciate is that the mainstream American press is better than it's ever been. If you don't believe me, visit your local library and roll through a couple of miles of microfilm of the papers you're currently familiar with. By any comparison, today's press is more accurate, ethical, reliable, independent, transparent, and trustworthy than ever. Skepticism is a healthy disposition in life. I wouldn't be a press critic if I regarded the press as hunky-dory. But mindless skepticism is mainly an excuse for ignorance. Even the people who denounce the New York Times as the bible of liberals ultimately get most of their useful news from it.

Here's the full article.

Quantum Brain Power

I saw the movie "What the Bleep do We Know?!" the other day, and it makes some interesting points. The basic gist of the first half of it is this: what seems like solid matter to us from our macro-perspective, at the atomic level is really mostly empty space and magnetic force fields, with very small particles that pop in and out of existence all the time.

Since there is a relationship between solid matter and energy (E=MC2), and since matter is much more illusory than Newtonian physics admits, and since our thoughts are like electric storms of the brain, therefore--they go on to argue--the mind is able to influence reality through energy in ways that at first do not seem possible.

This is an interesting theory, but I wonder if the brain really produces enough energy to affect matter beyond the brain cavity. It's one thing to have the power of static electricity at your fingertips. It's another thing to do Jedi mind tricks.

The movie goes on to mind/body connections, and I found this to be a much more convincing line of thought. The connections between our thoughts and feelings and our health are strong. Feelings, in some ways, are the body's thoughts. And thoughts can certainly affect well-being--anxiety and stress have one effect, while feeling loved and stable has another. Some maladies are strictly physical, but even then, how we think about them affects how they can be treated or healed.

Similarly, the subconscious mind can affect our actions in ways we don't understand. Day after day, we receive an overwhelming amount of information through our five senses. The conscious mind focuses on a small percentage of that information, but the subconscious mind receives it all. It seems entirely possible that our decisions are guided by factors that are not entirely conscious.

So where does that leave us? I'm not ready to believe in direct control of the physical world through quantum brain-power. But I certainly believe that the health of the mind is tied to the health of the body. And I also believe that the things that we say to ourselves in our minds--over and over again without realizing it--do shape that lurking iceberg of subconscious thought and its connection to the conscious mind. It seems reasonable, in other words, that positive thinking can affect our lives in unexpected ways.

Start working on your affirmations!

Of course, having said that, I shudder to realize that Deepak Chopra is featured prominently on the movie's website. Oh well.

Finally

So yeah, Angela asked a question a while ago on my question blog. The answer's up now. Sorry for the delay.

Amy

Stealing From your Parents

Found this article a little disturbing--people in their twenties taking stuff from their parents' houses without asking. It's one thing to have something given to you--it's something else to just walk off with some "Monet prints."

This does confirm, though, the existence of a new stage of life between adolescence and responsible adulthood--something relevent to anyone who wants to minister to/with young adults.

Unfortunately, it seems to be marked by pilfering.