34\u00a0 68%\u00a0 26%\u00a0 0mph\u00a0 bar 29.66\u00a0 steep fall\u00a0 windchill33\u00a0 Winter<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 New Moon<\/p>\n
“Let your capital be simplicity and contentment.” – Henry David Thoreau<\/a><\/p>\n Yes, it’s a stretch after a week of wires and bytes and high definition, but Thoreau’s got it right.\u00a0 If we can’t be happy with what we have and content with our life, then we doom ourselves to slavery, handcuffed to the next big thing as sure as if we rode in the middle passage.<\/p>\n Then what?\u00a0 After my change of mind about the exclusivist claim of Christianity, I floundered for several years.\u00a0<\/p>\n There had been a prior change in my spiritual life, of a seemingly subtle nature, but it began to play increasing importance.\u00a0 At some point on my Christian pilgrimage I began to resist transcendence and the many, many metaphors for it that take us up and away from our Selves, our inner journey.\u00a0 Heaven, God as a being resident there, the Bible or the Pope or church doctrine as a source of truth.\u00a0 Remember Bacon on method?\u00a0 Ascension.\u00a0 Rapture.\u00a0 Rooting my ethical decisions in the literature of a long dead people.\u00a0<\/p>\n Emerson made a lot of sense to me here:\u00a0 “Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”\u00a0 Introduction to Nature<\/a><\/p>\n Since I found Emerson in my first church experience after Presbyterianism, I oriented toward liberal religion.\u00a0 Liberal religion is more a method than a faith, that is, it proposes to apply the Enlightenment to religion:\u00a0 reason, tolerance and freedom.\u00a0 At first the literally heady mix of those three allowed me to swing wide the doors of my spirit and just play, considering this possibility and that.\u00a0 At some point, though, I can’t pinpoint just when, this\u00a0tradition began to raise in me the same quandry Emerson had seen after only three years in the Unitarian ministry:\u00a0 it was corpse cold.<\/p>\n Reason, tolerance and freedom are good tools to open up a space for free thought in politics, religion and science.\u00a0 In the end, however, they are tools, not content.\u00a0 They can take apart political ideology and scientific speculation, but in themselve they neither decide for or against, say, democracy or socialism or communalism.\u00a0 Though they also are great aids to understanding the world through scientific investigation, they offer us no clues as to why there is a world investigate, a cosmos to explore.\u00a0 In religion, again, they are tools handy for dismantling false claims like the inerrancy of scripture, or, even, the universality of a particular religion’s dogmas, but as constructive tools they do not build a faith of the heart.\u00a0 No, that can only happen when, as John Wesley said, the heart is strangely moved.<\/p>\n More on that which moved my heart later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 34\u00a0 68%\u00a0 26%\u00a0 0mph\u00a0 bar 29.66\u00a0 steep fall\u00a0 windchill33\u00a0 Winter \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 New Moon “Let your capital be simplicity and contentment.” – Henry David Thoreau Yes, it’s a stretch after a week of wires and bytes and high definition, but Thoreau’s got it right.\u00a0 If we can’t be happy with what we have and content with … Continue reading What Moves Your Heart?<\/span>