Dear Cyndy,
Welcome to this week's explorefaith.org Reflections Newsletter.
If you are having trouble viewing this newsletter,
you may
view newsletter online.
Reflections for Your Journey |
|
A Father's Day Thought
Every time Father's Day comes around I certainly think about
my own biological father, but my mind always turns quickly to
the "Our Father," that simple and beautiful prayer of Jesus...
The word "father" can make us think - depending on our
experience of our own parent - of anything from an oriental
despot to a drunken bum.
Still, that mental connection doesn't invalidate the insight into
God's essential nature.
God is most like the very best that an earthly father can
possibly be, whether or not we happened to be blessed with
that particular father within our own nuclear family.
I think there are several important implications to our
being invited by Jesus to think about and address the Creator
of all the worlds as "Our Father":
- It takes God out of the "vague oblong blur" category
and puts us at least on the person-to-person level of
acquaintance.
- It helps us understand and truly believe the rather
astonishing reality that we are beloved children and, ultimately,
heirs of all that is or ever will be.
- Fatherhood and family implies at least the possibility of
siblings-sisters and brothers who are equally beloved and
precious in God's eyes - so that, while our relationship to God
can be personal, it can never be private. We are our
brother's keeper if we really understand all persons
to be members, along with us, of God's family.
Parent, child, brother, sister - very ordinary common words,
but in them there are essential clues about the Christian
Gospel.
To acknowledge God as "Our Father" is to accept God's
love for ourselves, but just as importantly, to accept the
responsibility to be a sister or brother to every other human
being.
by Bob Hansel
from
"A Father's Day Thought"
|
A Father's Day Card From My Son |
|
A few years ago, I received a Father's Day card from my son
Tim. On the front of it was a picture of a little boy sitting up in
bed.
Terror was written on his face. His hair was standing
straight up, and the card said, "Dad, I want to thank you."
Well, I wondered, a Father's Day card with this boy terrorized,
had I done that to my son?
I opened the card up and it said, "I want to thank you for
helping me kill all the dragons of my mind so I could go out
and fight the real ones."
You know, we all have our dragons of the mind. My old
professor, Conrad Sommers ... said, "There are five drivers
that get in the saddle and drive us." ...
Here are the drivers he listed:
- Be perfect.
- Please everybody.
- Try harder.
- Be strong.
- Hurry up.
Have you got any of those driving you? At one time, I had
them all. ...
by Brooks Ramsey
from "A Father's Day Card From My
Son"
|
Male Spirituality and the Second Half of Life |
|
I contend that the second half of life can be our journey to
wholeness, a deeper engagement with those aspects of life that
we have tended to neglect in our earlier years. ...
... For most of us, particularly men of the middle and
upper-classes, the first half of life was about mastery. ...
It was about fighting wars, raising families, shaping our
communities. ...
Our lives and our religion concerned taking charge of
ourselves and transforming our world.
But in the second half of life, we meet a whole new set of
factors, which require a whole new approach to religion. ... the
second half of life demands that we move from religion to
spirituality. ...
In the second half of life we can remember what we have
forgotten; we can attend to the things we'
ve neglected.
For many of us men, this spiritual reorientation is a
daunting prospect because we are not accustomed to turning
inward.
Many of us do not really have much of a personal
"spirituality" or even know what spirituality is. ...
by Mark Muesse
from "Men at Midlife"
|
|
Faith & Life: What difference does Faith make in your life? |
|
Stories from the home, street and workplace with people
whose faith makes a significant impact on their lives.
CEDRIC JENNINGS
A Hope in the Unseen: Following God from the inner city to
the Ivy League
I don't limit what God can do, I don't limit God's power at all,
and I think that was a very strong thing for me to understand
at a very young age.
In doing so I was able to exercise faith in areas where
people would normally say, "This isn't humanly possible."
"I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me"
[Philippians 4:13] because he lives inside of me. That's a word
that sticks with me. ...
More with Cedric Jennings
GARY MALKIN
Film and Television Composer Gary Malkin finds a way
forward through grief, injury and divorce
You can't emerge from an experience like losing your father,
especially when you're close to him, without having a major
reevaluation of your spiritual beliefs and your sense of what's
important in life. ...
Six months after my father died, both my wife and baby almost
died. ... I guess looking back it was another huge chink in the
belief that everything's gonna go as you planned. It was
another death, if you will. ...
I had a very stubborn ego that was attached to the image of
having my success defined by the external world. ...
More with Gary Malkin
MARJORIE CORBMAN
A Tiny Step Away from Deepest Faith: A teenage author
reflects on the spirituality of America's youth
Teenagers today live desperately; this is our spirituality, how
we approach the world, how we open ourselves to what is
beyond. ...
Perhaps the good news is that we recognize the disconnections.
A thick cloud of boredom has settled over our age bracket, and
so we grope out through the mist. We reach out at extremes,
and pull back, disillusioned.
We know that we want our lives transformed. We know that we
are hungry, and we know that there is a way to appease that
hunger. ...
More from Marjorie Corbman
|
|