Christianity – Intelligent Christian Spirituality

Boost Your Spiritual Growth with These Easy Practices

If you adopt any of the following suggestions, it will have a big impact on your spiritual growth.

Get to know a homeless person and try to find out how they became homeless.

Read the scriptures of another religion.

Start the day with prayer, meditation, scripture reading, or any spiritual reading. It will set the tone for the day.

At the end of the day, keep a spiritual diary and record where you met God that day or what God taught you. Record your prayers and review them later to see if they were answered.

Use natural breaks in the day, like meals, coffee breaks, or when you shower, drive, exercise or wait in line to think of others in prayer.

Extend your present daily spiritual practice from 15 to 30 minutes or 30 minutes to an hour.

Adopt a child or family in a developing nation through World Vision or a local charity like Save-A-Family-Plan and develop a relationship by writing back when they write you.

Volunteer to visit people in jail, read to the blind, be a friend to the mentally ill, or help prepare meals and clean up at a local church soup kitchen.

Hire the person on the traffic island with the sign that says they will work for food or money.

Attend the place of worship of your own faith regularly if you do not do so.

Prepare yourself before going to your place of worship by praying or reviewing the readings beforehand.

Visit the place of worship of another denomination. For example, if you are Presbyterian attend a Mennonite service.

Visit the place of worship of another religion. Christians could attend a local mosque. Muslims could attend a synagogue.

Get to know someone of a different religion and find out what they believe.

Check out www.beliefnet.com, a vast website where you can learn about any spiritual or religious tradition and dialogue with those in it.

Join an online prayer community like that at www.sacredspace.ie. You can put your prayer requests out there and pray for the requests of others.

Get to know the writings of a major spiritual thinker like Thich Nhat Hahn or Henri Nouwen.

Do a “retreat at home.” Take a whole morning, afternoon, or evening once a week or once a month to pray or meditate more deeply.

Attend a local retreat center like the Michaelite Fathers just outside London, or Five Oaks in Paris, Ontario.

Get to know the Enneagram, a powerful tool for spiritual growth and awareness at http://www.enneagraminstitute.com.

Learn new ways of praying, like Centering Prayer, Ignatian Prayer, Taize Prayer, or learn new ways of reading scripture, such as Lectio Divina.

All these things will help you on your spiritual journey.

Bruce Tallman is a London spiritual director and educator of adults in religion.

http://www.brucetallman.com

Debunking Myths Between Catholicism and Anglicanism

Etiquette in interchurch dialogue nowadays prescribes emphasizing your own church’s weaknesses and the other church’s strengths. However, Connie Woodcock, an Anglican, breached this in attacking the Catholic Church based on stereotypes in “Thanks but no thanks, Pope Benedict.” Bob Ripley, a United Church of Canada minister, was much more balanced in “Rome bends rules in a conservative way,” but even with him, a few stereotypes slipped through.

In the interests of reconciling Protestants and Catholics, it needs to be said that, while there is some truth in both sides’ stereotypes of the other, the reality is far more complex.

Before I begin attacking stereotypes on both sides, I want to note “the sudden invitation to become a Roman Catholic while remaining Anglican” was not an “ill-conceived attempt at church poaching” as Woodcock claimed. It was simply the Pope’s response to numerous requests from Anglicans. Also, the format Benedict proposed is not new. Ukrainian Catholics, who are part of the Catholic Church, have their own distinct liturgy, and their priests can marry, but bishops are celibate.

Woodcock’s first stereotype about “why Catholicism turns us off” is “the Pope’s infallibility.” Ripley likewise said, “The authority of the Pope is, of course, non-negotiable.” The reality is Catholics consider 99.99% of what the Pope says to be “authoritative,” not “infallible,” and we are taught to follow our own informed conscience, not blind obedience.

Woodcock also complains about Catholicism’s treatment of women with “second-class standing.” The reality is that every priest is aware that most Catholic parishes would not survive without the immense contribution of women.

Woodcock rails against Catholic teaching on birth control, but the reality is the Catholic church promotes the Billings method of natural family planning which is quite safe and effective in preventing unwanted conception.

She also derides “top-down imposition,” but the reality is that Catholic lay people regularly give their input to priests and bishops in parish and diocesan councils. Woodcock states that in Anglicanism, there is “lots of room for varying shades of opinion,” whereas she seems to think Catholicism is one monolithic block. The reality is there are social justice people, evangelicals, liberals, conservatives, charismatics, intellectuals, prophets, and mystics of every kind all inside the Catholic Church.

On the other hand, Catholics often hold the stereotype that the Anglican faith originated with Henry VIII, but the reality is that the Church in England was one of the earliest established, and Henry merely built upon what already existed.

Catholics also have the stereotype that the United Church of Canada is exceedingly liberal, anything goes, and there is no central authority. The reality is there are many conservative United Churchers, and the church is governed by a central General Council that sets policy for it every three years.

All Christians would be much more tolerant of each other if we focused on reality rather than stereotypes.

Bruce Tallman is a London spiritual director. www.brucetallman.com

Effective Prayer: Seven Key Habits for Spiritual Growth

Most people who believe in God, whether Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Bahais, or Jews, pray at least occasionally. For many, prayer is central to their spiritual journey. However, like anything else we do, prayer can be effective or ineffective.

The key to prayer is desire for God. St. Augustine’s classic Christian definition of prayer is “lifting up our hearts and minds to God.” In this sense, whatever we do, whether working, playing, or even just walking the dog, can be prayer if we use it to connect to God.

Another key to effective prayer is silence, both internal and external. It helps to pray in a quiet environment and to take a moment to still the constant cacophony of thought before beginning. However, God can be found in the midst of noise and chaos as well.

Having a special designated place and time can be helpful, but where, when, how often and how long you pray depends entirely on your schedule and whatever proves fruitful for you.

In preparing to pray it helps to get into a comfortable posture, whether sitting or kneeling, and then follow the A.C.T.S. formula: Adoration (instead of starting with requests bring to mind God’s glory: e.g. “Almighty God, source of all being, truth and life…”), Confession (examine your conscience, repent of and surrender to God all negatives such as unforgiveness and deceit), Thanksgiving ( remember all God’s blessings), Supplication (pray for the needs of others).

It is also okay to pray for your own needs, as long as this does not become the major focus of your prayer. As well, the Jewish scriptures say that if you pray for someone else’s need and you have a similar need, God will supply your need as well. You don’t even have to ask for it.

There are seven habits of people who are highly effective at prayer:

First, their prayer is based on their own experience of God, so they are praying from their heart as well as their head, not just mumbling prayers composed by someone else.

Secondly, their prayer is simple and direct. Good prayer is possible for anyone, not just the religious professionals. You don’t have to have a doctorate in theology to pray well.

Next, their prayer is bold, strong, and durable. They boldly approach God because they know God as a God of compassion. They do not timidly address God as if God’s grace did not outweigh their failings. Also, their prayer gets stronger, not weaker, during the hard times.

Fourth, their prayer is deep and loving. It involves a radical commitment to God and others, particularly their enemies. For them, prayer is broad and hospitable. It welcomes all human beings, all creatures, and the whole planet into their hearts. It is never just about their own little group.

Fifth, they listen to God as much as they talk, and they take this listening attitude into their daily life. Throughout their day they are sensitive to the subtle promptings of the Spirit. In this sense, they “pray always” as St. Paul exhorted Christians to do.

Sixth, their prayer is socially conscious. They are particularly aware of the marginalized, the people the rest of us often forget about because they drop through society’s cracks. Their prayer takes in the social issues of the day. It is never just about “God and me.”

Lastly, their prayer is integrating. It integrates their faith with their life, their contemplation with their action. After they pray, they do something that addresses what they prayed about. As someone said, the person who is effective at prayer “prays as if it all depended on God and then acts as if it all depended on them.” They know that what the world needs now is effective prayer harnessed to effective social action.

Bruce Tallman is a spiritual director and educator of adults in religion. brucetallman.com

Transformative Loss: Finding Strength in Lent

Lent is a time of loss. The 40 days before Easter are meant to commemorate the 40 years the ancient Israelites were lost in the desert before coming to the Promised Land. Lent is also a time when Christians lose things, give them up, as a way of commemorating Christ’s great loss, the sacrifice of his life on a cross.

Lent is a time of repentance, of turning around, of turning away from things that may be addictive habits the rest of the year. Some give up chocolate, dessert, or that lovely glass of wine after work. Many go deeper and see Lent as a time to lose unholy attitudes: jealousy, self-pity, unforgiveness, adulterous thoughts, the internal sins that no one knows about except us.

Some choose loss during Lent, and some have loss thrust upon them. Due to the financial meltdown, people are losing their jobs, homes, businesses, retirement plans, and peace of mind.

Those who work in palliative care, hospice, and hospital emergency departments receive training in how a person’s “assumptive world,” all the assumptions they have about the way life will be, can implode in an instant: their son or daughter is killed in a car accident, their spouse learns they have cancer, has a stroke, or dies. The normal response is to feel like the ground under your feet has suddenly disappeared, you are falling, and your whole life is falling apart.

The scriptures contain one of the most spectacular stories of loss ever recorded, a story that makes most of our losses seem small by comparison. Job was a man of God who had it all: great wealth, a wonderful family, and an outstanding reputation. Then he had a total meltdown: he lost all his money, his family, and even his health. His friends accused him of bringing all this on himself through some hidden sin, although he couldn’t think of anything he had done to deserve this. Even his wife urged him to “curse God and die.” However, despite all the absurdity, he continued to trust God.

A time of loss can be a time of personal transformation. When people lose precious things, they start to realize that, despite their former assumptions, life is very vulnerable, dreams are fleeting at best, and one’s fortunes can suddenly reverse. The natural response is to ask, “What is really important in life?”

In the face of all this loss, people search for a solid foundation for their life, something eternal and unchanging. People start to realize that the only lasting thing is God. Quite simply, it’s God or nothing.

It’s not surprising that church attendance goes up during individual or social meltdowns. Next to God, the church is one of the few constants in our civilization. It has been there through the collapse of the Roman Empire, the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the advent of modern science, communism, two planetary wars, and the Great Depression. The church has witnessed many severe storms come and go.

People who build their lives on the solid foundation of God know that, with God’s help, they can withstand any storm, crisis, or meltdown, just as the church has. They also know that God can bring a greater good out of any loss.

Throughout the scriptures, God brings new life out of evil, no matter how great. Job trusted God and was vindicated in the end: everything and more was restored to him. As our human exemplar, Jesus trusted God and was resurrected so that all of us could reach the Promised Land.

No matter how bad it gets, as long as we trust God, all is well, and as Julian of Norwich said, “All will be well, and all manner of things will be well.”

Bruce Tallman is a spiritual director and educator of adults in religion. http://www.brucetallman.com

The Absurdity of Atheism in Maher’s ‘Religulous’

“Religulous,” a mockumentary, is a two-hour assault on religion. The not-very-subtle message is that to be “religious “is “ridiculous.” The title combines the words.

Bill Maher, the host, delights in skewering the seeming absurdities in religion: babbling in tongues, silly hats, the manipulation by televangelists. I think Jesus himself would likely laugh or weep over our folly. Religions need people like Maher. He is like the court jester employed by wise medieval kings to point out when people were getting too pompous.

Maher also attacks the dangerous side of religion: the holy wars, suicide bombings, anti-science, and potentially self-fulfilling prophecies of nuclear end-times. Maher does religion a service by courageously showing us when it is absurd, mindless, and destructive. He mainly attacks Christianity and Judaism, but also dares to criticize Islam.

However, he does religion a disservice by presenting the extremes as the norm. There is a danger the uninformed might think this is all religion is.

He conveniently leaves out when religious people live according to their true values, have a deep spirituality, found service agencies and hospitals, educate and feed the poor, protest war and injustice, promote the sacredness of life and marriage, and constantly remind us life is more than the unbridled pursuit of money and self-centered pleasure.

He conveniently leaves out the many profound and very rational Jewish, Christian, and Muslim thinkers: Abraham Heschel, Martin Buber, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Thomas Aquinas, Avicenna, and Averroes, to name a few.

He conveniently leaves out the constant progression in religious thinking and that atheists are stuck in a time warp in their criticism. Sure, there were absurd things written in the scriptures 2500 years ago, and God was often portrayed as an angry despot. Sure, there were crusades, and the church condemned Galileo hundreds of years ago. However, most believers today have repented of those ways of thinking and left them far behind.

This is where Maher totally misses the mark. The inconvenient truth for him and other atheists is that most people in the mainline synagogues, churches, and mosques are not extremists but moderates who believe in a loving God, are in favour of rationality and science, and are themselves critical when their traditions become absurd and dangerous.

Maher also conveniently leaves out that atheism itself may be dangerous and absurd. Without religion, people make up false gods, for example, absolute ideologies like capitalism and communism. Maher conveniently leaves out that atheists like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao killed 80 million people in the twentieth century, more than all the religious wars in all of history.

He conveniently leaves out that it might be more rational to believe there is a Supreme Intelligence behind all the order of the universe than to believe it all just happened by chance. He conveniently leaves out that without God, life might seem ultimately absurd when you are suddenly downsized, become sick, or lose a loved one. He conveniently leaves out that God and religious faith may, in fact, be the only real answers to life’s absurdities and dangers.

Thank you, atheists, for keeping religion honest and accountable, but please don’t try to convince people that religion is all absurdity and destruction, and please be as self-critical as you ask religious people to be.

Bruce Tallman is a London spiritual director and educator of adults in religion. brucetallman.com

From Winning to Losing: Navigating life’s Challenges

The universe is all about loss – things are constantly becoming, that is, changing. Nothing stands still, so we are constantly losing the way things were. Loss is built into the very fabric of reality and is essential to all life. Every creature is born, grows, and then dies.

The first half of life is about winning, getting, and accumulating. Most people gain an education, their first big job, a spouse, a house, and children in the first half of life. The second half of life is about losing: the children grow up and move out, friends start dying, your spouse may leave you or die, you may be downsized, you retire, you may move out of your house, and your health starts to deteriorate.

Eastern societies had a way of coping with these losses. There were four recognized stages of life: student, householder, withdrawal from active life to contemplate your losses and death, and finally, leaving everything to become a holy man or woman. In Western societies, there is no conscious process like this – you are supposed to keep accumulating throughout your life.

Therefore, it’s a shock when we start to lose, but contrary to what we all believe, we are more losers than winners in Western societies. Loss always begets sadness, and the rapid change in our culture means rapid loss. However, we have no structured life stages that can help us cope with this. This may explain why we have suffered an epidemic of depression, as witnessed by the high proportion of the population that is on anti-depressants.

We believe we are a society of winners because the media emphasizes the lifestyles of the rich and famous. What it doesn’t highlight is the thousands of people who tried but failed at becoming an American or Canadian Idol, or the five hundred individuals who applied for one job and didn’t get it, or the team that lost. The media makes everyone who is not a superstar feel inadequate, and so, alongside the epidemic of depression, we also struggle with a plague of diminished self-esteem.

All these losses have four main purposes. First, to gain wisdom. In the first half of life, you grow in knowledge and material things; in the second half, you are meant to grow in wisdom about spiritual things, a spirituality of subtraction. The second purpose is to gain compassion. You can only open your heart to the suffering of others to the extent that you have suffered yourself. Thirdly, all these small losses are meant to prepare you for the biggest loss of all, your own death, in which you literally lose everything. Finally, these losses are meant to motivate you to search for and find the only permanent thing, that is, God.

In the face of financial meltdowns and all the other losses in our lives, the only real losers are the ones who have not gained compassion for the setbacks and struggles of others and the wisdom to know that all of us die and all things pass away except God.

Christians believe in a man who was arguably the biggest loser of all time. He started his earthly life in an adoring family and was adored by wise men and angels. He ended his life on earth publicly humiliated and put to a grisly death by the secular authorities as a criminal and by the religious authorities as a heretic. He failed his divine mission, failed everyone, even God.

However, Jesus clung to the bitter end to his faith that the one thing no one can lose is God’s love, and so God rewarded him for this faithfulness. Two thousand years later, he still has more followers than anyone in history, people who come together to adore the wisest and most compassionate person who ever lived and, therefore, the biggest winner of all.

Bruce Tallman is a London spiritual director and educator of adults in religion.. http://www.brucetallman.com.

Atheists not scientific about religion

For the past few decades, atheists have been speaking freely about their lack of faith. In part they have been emboldened by two vociferous atheists. In both Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, they take the worst examples of religious folly and advocate getting rid of religion because it is an irrational curse on the human race.

There is no denying that they are both partially right: religion has been the cause of a lot of irrationalism and evil, witch-hunts and terrorism. However, there is also no denying that they are largely wrong: religion has been responsible for untold good. There is not only unhealthy religion, but also healthy religion.

As my friend Dr. Larry Cooley, a philosopher of science and religion, put it: “From a scientific viewpoint, Dawkins and Hitchens are unscientific when it comes to religion. In formulating a theory, a competent scientist tries to account for all the data.” It’s surprising that Dawkins, a respected scientist in the field of genetics, would throw out the scientific method when it comes to religion. In arguing that we should get rid of religion, both he and Hitchens have not taken into account all the data about bad science and good religion.

It would be easy to attack science based on all the evil it has brought upon the human race. Science and the technology that derives from it have brought us all manner of weapons of war: bombs, machine guns, tanks, and biological and chemical warfare. Science has been responsible for the maiming and deaths of hundreds of millions of people.

Science has also robbed people of hope for the future. I remember thinking in the 1980s that my family and I probably had no future because of the constant threat of nuclear war. Now, people in their twenties tell me they have no future because of the destruction of rain forests, pollution, and global warming brought upon the human race by science and technology: bulldozers, chain saws, cars, planes, and factories. Science is once again threatening our planet with destruction. Science has totally failed to bring us the utopia promised by the Enlightenment. One could argue that science is evil and should be done away with.

On the other hand, Dawkins and Hitchens have not taken into account all the data about good religion. The World Council of Churches and the Vatican have issued and implemented numerous statements and strategies about war, social justice, poverty, hunger, welfare, and the environment. Most universities and hospitals in the western world began under the sponsorship of Christian churches. Here in London, Ontario, for example, St. Joseph’s Hospital began as a mission of the Sisters of St. Joseph, and Parkwood Hospital began with the Women’s Christian Association. The University of Western Ontario began with Huron College, an Anglican seminary.

The whole Canadian system of universal health care happened because of the efforts of a Baptist minister, Tommy Douglas. Our legal system and moral code are based on Judeo-Christian precepts. As Michael Coren once said, “Quite simply, without Christian groups and Christian people, the social network of Canada would collapse. This is not hyperbole. Walk along almost any main street and look at the names of the houses, associations, and institutes that work for the poor.” In London, we have the Salvation Army and numerous soup kitchens sponsored by churches, and most churches educate their congregations about social justice issues and engage in charitable activities here and abroad.

Countless missionaries have brought not only religion but also education and medicine to developing countries. I think of my friend Dr. Harold Fast, a Mennonite who lived and died selflessly helping thousands of Muslims as a medical missionary in Pakistan. Save a Family Plan, operating out of St. Peter’s Seminary here in London, has helped tens of thousands of the poorest of the poor in India become self-sufficient.

On an individual level, religion has given billions of people a sense of significance, that their lives have transcendent value and meaning, that they are more than a cog in the drudgery of daily existence. Religion has brought people a sense of personal ethics, community, comfort, and hope for the future.

The problem in the world today is not science or religion. The problem, and the glory, is human nature. As human beings, we have the capacity to take these two great endeavors of the human spirit, science and religion, and make them into something very compassionate or very destructive. Dawkins and Hitchens seem to miss altogether the fact that, whether as scientists or religionists, we are capable of unlimited good and evil. Religion, at least, predicts this.

The most serious criticism of fundamentalist atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens is their inadequate scientific method: not taking into account all the data about healthy religion and unhealthy science makes them incompetent thinkers from their own scientific viewpoint.

Bruce Tallman is a London spiritual director and educator of adults in religion: brucetallman.com.

Resolving Religious Conflict: A Path Through Faith Development

Throughout history, there have been conflicts between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: pogroms, crusades, and jihads. There have also been conflicts within religions: Orthodox versus Reformed Jews, Catholic versus Protestant Christians, Sunni versus Shiite Muslims. Religious conflicts are often rooted, at least partly, in different stages of faith, and the cure lies in reaching the higher stages.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Dr. James Fowler of Emory University conducted the first research-based study on how faith develops. Researchers interviewed thousands of believers from all religious traditions and identified six distinct stages of faith.

Stage One, Imaginative Faith, does not cause conflict as most people pass through it by age seven. Stage Two, Literal Faith, normally extends to about age twelve. However, many adults clearly get stuck here, taking stories like Adam and Eve or Noah’s Ark as literal history rather than as faith stories meant to convey a profound theological message about fall and redemption. Since fundamentalists in any religion consider anyone who has different beliefs to be a heretic, this is fertile ground for conflict.

Most religious conflict happens between Stages Three and Four. Stage Three, Group Faith, is marked by conformity. The Stage Three motto is: “I believe it because my religious group believes it.” Faith is a simple matter of following group rules. People in Stage Three defend their own in-group, believing “my church is the only true church” or “Islam is the only true faith.” Anyone who disagrees is seen as their mortal enemy.

Usually, at some point, Group Faith gets shaken up by life’s injustices, conflicting opinions of others, corruption of religious leaders, or new teachings such as those of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), which moved many Catholics from Stage Three to Stage Four. Still, some want to revert to the 1950s when the Catholic laity was taught to “pray, pay, and obey.”

Stage Four, Personal Faith, begins when a person asks, “What do I really believe?” Usually, there are a lot of struggles as the Stage Four individual no longer believes things just because someone else says they should. As many questions arise, the Stage Four person often feels like they are losing their faith, but if they keep the essentials, they are going deeper as they begin to own their faith, not just blindly follow the crowd.

People in Stage Four may seem dangerous to the faith of those in Stages Two and Three, whereas people in Stage Four may see those in Stages Two and Three as a threat to rationality and civilization. Again, this is fertile ground for religious conflict.

The solution is to go to Stage Five, Mystical Faith, characterized by the ability to understand another person’s faith from their point of view; and paradox, the ability to simultaneously hold two conflicting points of view. This creates great respect for other traditions. For example, a Stage Five person might think that “Jesus Christ is the only way to God and yet it is quite clear to me that there are also other ways to God. This goes beyond logical reasoning, but I am willing to suspend my judgement about what God thinks about these other traditions while being committed to my own tradition.”

Finally, Stage Six, Sacrificial Faith, means that you are willing to fight to defend the foundational human right of religious freedom and even lay down your life to bring reconciliation between people with differing beliefs. This was Gandhi’s faith, who, in attempting to promote peace between Hindus and Muslims in India, paid for it with his life. A Hindu fundamentalist killed him.

To prevent religious conflict, we need to be aware that differing stages of faith often cause it. We also need to work towards Pope John XXIII’s recommendation: “In essentials unity, in nonessentials liberty, and in all things, charity.” That is, we need to strive for the highest stages where the unfathomable essence of the One God transcends all differences, and we need to be charitable toward those with differing beliefs. After all, God is exceedingly tolerant and loves everyone regardless of their faith stage.

Bruce Tallman is a London spiritual director and educator of adults in religion. brucetallman.com

The Secret: Understanding the Law of Attraction and Its Flaws

The Secret was a book by Rhonda Byrne that became a self-help phenomenon because it was cleverly mass-marketed as “the secret to life” that all the greatest people down through history have known – now being revealed to the public! It promised greatness for everyone, Oprah Winfrey endorsed it, and so it was a mega-bestseller.

The Secret is “the law of attraction” – whatever you focus on, positive or negative, you draw to yourself. In general, this law is true: if you focus on becoming a doctor, your chances of becoming one are much greater than if you focus on being an airline pilot. If you worry all the time about becoming ill, you may make yourself sick.

The problem with the Secret, from a Christian point of view, is that it takes things too far. Advocates of the Secret tell you that whatever happens to you in life, you have drawn to yourself. The underlying message is that you are totallyresponsible for your life. If you are homeless, for example, it is because you want to be homeless. It has nothing at all to do with corporations cutting wages and downsizing jobs while the government simultaneously lifts rent controls so that your income disappears while your expenses skyrocket.

This philosophy allows us to conveniently blame the victim. That way, you do not need to be compassionate towards anyone because whatever has happened to them, they brought upon themselves, whether they are refugees, battered wives, or schizophrenics.

The disturbing thing is that this philosophy also infects a lot of Christians. It’s part of the “prosperity gospel,” that is, if you have worldly success, it must be because God is blessing you, whereas if things are not going well, you must have drawn it upon yourself.

One of my directees (person receiving spiritual direction) has chronic fatigue syndrome. She has tried repeatedly to identify what sin in her past God is punishing her for but can’t come up with anything that deserves such a severe illness. She laughs, “If tomorrow they found a pill that would cure this, would that suddenly make me a righteous person?”

The Book of Job in the Jewish scriptures was meant to end all simplistic reward/punishment religious thinking. Until then, the thinking was that your external life was a sign of God’s blessing or wrath.

Job suddenly loses all his wealth and his family and becomes sick. His religious friends tell him that it must be due to some unconfessed sin in his life, but Job protests his innocence. We learn that God agrees Job is an innocent man, and there is no necessary correlation between what happens to you in life and where you stand in God’s eyes.

In the end, God reveals God’s glory to Job, showing him that there are things that utterly transcend human understanding. As John Henry Newman wrote in his famous prayer, “Perhaps my sickness serves God, though I know not how.” Perhaps our faithfulness under trials will inspire someone else to hope in God.

Jesus always struggled with the Pharisees to have them put compassion before their purity laws. His story of the Good Samaritan is a classic example of this, where the religious leaders refuse to compassionately treat a man who has been robbed and beaten because it would make them ritually impure. So, they avoid him, whereas a man from Samaria, a land considered full of heretics, goes out of his way to take care of the injured man.

At one point, Jesus says to the Pharisees, “Do you think those laborers upon whom the tower of Siloam fell were any more evil than anyone else?” Things happen that defy rational explanation. Other parts of Scripture state that the righteous can expect trials and persecution if they do not follow the crowd. Thus, virtue can actually attract suffering to us.

Job is meant to be a foreshadowing of Jesus, the totally righteous man who has the worst injustice fall upon him: being publicly humiliated and put to death as a criminal and heretic. The crucifixion is the ultimate demonstration that very bad things can happen to very good people through no fault of their own.

Being responsible for our actions is important, and the Secret has some good points, but the main problem from a Christian point of view is that it exalts personal responsibility over compassion.

Bruce Tallman is a spiritual director and educator of adults in religion. http://www.brucetallman.com.

The Historical Reality of Jesus: Myths vs. Truth

Within Christianity in the past thirty years, there have been persistent attempts to recast the basic tenets of Christianity itself. One of the most remarkable attempts came from Tom Harpur, who noted in The Pagan Christ that other cultures had myths about the dying and rising god, and therefore, the early church just made up a myth about the dying and rising Jesus.

Myths in many cultures have been powerful carriers of cosmic truths, and the early church knew this. However, according to Harpur, over the course of its first three hundred years, the church gradually came to claim that the myth they had made up was a historical reality called Jesus Christ.

My sense is that Harpur is either not being true to himself or has somehow forgotten his theological studies as an Anglican priest. Every student of Christian theology is taught that the distinctiveness of the Jewish God was that this God acted in history. One of the most dramatic examples of this was when God liberated the Hebrew slaves from Egypt. God acted throughout Jewish history from the time of Abraham to the kings and prophets.

This experience of God acting in history simply continued in the most dramatic way of all when God became human in Jesus Christ. God acting in history was not a new idea that the early church made up. The church did not try to change a myth into a reality. Rather, it proclaimed that all the myths of other cultures suddenly became a reality when Christ was born. This was Paul’s basic approach when he told the Greeks and Romans that Jesus was their Unknown God.

Harpur is right that God has always been incarnate in all of God’s creation, and therefore, there are many paths to God, but the traditional belief of the church has been that God was incarnate in a special way in Christ and therefore, Christ is a specialpath to God. This idea that the Infinite Ruler of the Universe can be in a specific location in a special way is, again, not a new Christian idea. Jews believed that God was present in a special way in the sanctuary of the temple. Catholics, Anglicans, and Lutherans have taken the special incarnation of God a step further in their belief that the cosmic Christ is incarnate in a very special way in the communion host.

It makes sense that God would not just tell us how to live, as God did in the Ten Commandments, but God would also showus how to live by becoming human. In Christ, God gave us a three year audio-visual demonstration of what a true human being is and also what God is really like.

There were many witnesses to the specialness of Jesus before, during, and after his life. First, there is the ancient scriptural record. Before the historical Jesus appeared, there were dozens of prophecies recorded in the Jewish scriptures of what the Messiah would be like: royal, suffering, and divine. Jesus fulfilled all these prophecies, particularly the ones by the prophet Isaiah, who said that a child will be born who will be called “Mighty God” and “Everlasting Father” and will have a kingdom without end (Isaiah 9: 6-8). This suffering servant will be “pierced for our sins”, but “by his wounds, we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5)

Then there is the vision of the prophet Daniel of a man who was led into the presence of God. God gave this man everlasting authority, sovereign power, and glory, and the people of every nation worshiped him (Daniel 7:13-14). There are many other Jewish prophecies like this.

During Christ’s life, he gave great and sublime teachings such as the Sermon on the Mount, in which he first focused on the nature of true happiness in the Beatitudes. The rest of Christ’s teachings also extended and completed the spirit of the Law and the Prophets.

Another witness is the astounding miracles: Jesus calming the raging sea, multiplying food for the hungry, healing all manner of illnesses, driving out evil spirits, and raising a man to life who had been dead for four days!

Even if we overlook the miracles, there is the witness of the way Christ lived. His courage, integrity, wisdom, and compassion were so complete they must have had a supernatural source.

There is the witness of the appearances of Christ after his resurrection to hundreds of disciples, and there is the New Testament record of miracles performed in the name of Jesus by these disciples.

There is also the witness of people dying for their faith in Christ, the record of all the martyrs in the early church. No one would lay down their life for some mythical human being. Then there is the record of the ongoing growth of the church through the centuries and of so many present-day martyrs.

Put all this together, and one is almost forced to conclude that in Jesus, something extremely special was going on. In fact, it all points to one reality: that God was in Christ, reconciling the world to God. In the birth of Christ, God gave us the greatest gift of all: God in the form of a human being.

Bruce Tallman is a London spiritual director and educator of adults in religion www.brucetallman.com