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Spiritual Jigsaw Puzzle

As part of my Advent devotions I have been using material sent by The Merton Institute for Contemplative Living

www.mertoninstitute.org. They concluded their daily meditation for yesterday  with “Throughout this day, pause, take a breath, and listen with your heart. Name your scattered pieces and intentionally create a jigsaw puzzle of your spirit.”

As it happened I just saw the “Gods Must Be Crazy” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gods_Must_Be_Crazy  again and it struck me how scattered our “civilized” lives are and  how unified the lives of “uncivilized” people are.

It reminded me of a sermon I heard by Martin Luther King Sr. a number of years ago when he said ..”most people live in a one story house…they never go upstairs to visit the Lord…he said we need to “go up to the second floor more often.”

As we wrap-up 2011..go upstairs and create a unified whole of your spiritual  jigsaw puzzle which the Lord has laid out before you, and is waiting for you to complete.

Blessings for the New Year!

Joe Landis

Executive Director

Peaceful Living

2210 Shelly Road, Suite 2

Harleysville, PA 19438

PH:610.287.1200

FX:610.287.7121

email jlandis@peacefulliving.org

web:http://www.peacefulliving.org

Thanksgiving 2011: "A Stingy Planter" vs. "A Lavish Planter"

Thanksgiving 2011: “A Stingy Planter” vs. “A Lavish Planter”

Thanksgiving 2011

One of the texts for the lectionary for Thanksgiving this year is from 2 Corinthians 9^6-15 http://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/texts.php?id=171

One of these verses is a key verse right off our Peaceful Living webpage:

¹²For the ministry of this service is not only supplying^(T) the needs of the saints but is also overflowing in many thanksgivings to God. http://www.peacefulliving.org/Docs/Welcome.aspx

This is not the easiest verse to understand..the context is giving of ourselves..unselfishly.   Earlier in

2  Corinthians Paul says:

 ^6-7Remember: A stingy planter gets a stingy crop; a lavish planter gets a lavish crop. I want each of you to take plenty of time to think it over, and make up your own mind what you will give. That will protect you against sob stories and arm-twisting. God loves it when the giver delights in the giving. (Thanksgiving weekend is the biggest fund raising time of the year, we see the suffering around us and for the most part understand we are very fortunate..most of us have not spent our Christmas money…yet)

 ^8-11God can pour on the blessings in astonishing ways so that you're ready for anything and everything, more than just ready to do what needs to be done. As one psalmist puts it,
   He throws caution to the winds,
      giving to the needy in reckless abandon.
   His right-living, right-giving ways
      never run out, never wear out.
This most generous God who gives seed to the farmer that becomes bread for your meals is more than extravagant with you. He gives you something you can then give away, which grows into full-formed lives, robust in God, wealthy in every way, so that you can be generous in every way, producing with us great praise to God.

The irony of talking about these verses at this time is almost more than I can bear…to talk about the need to be generous and caring for the marginalized and stigmatized, in a commonwealth that was founded on Quaker principles of compassion and justice, when our legislators clap and heartily endorse the cuts to these people (as they did in a session last week, week of Halloween..scary!)  on hearing the savings our Secretary of Public Welfare has cut from his own budget, $400,000,000 off the top of the Department of Public Welfare budget, and as much as $100,000,000-$200,000,000 in take backs and further reduction of funding in the Office of Developmental Programs for persons with intellectual disabilities. The result of these actions by our Secretary of Public Welfare Gary Alexander, was to immediately drop 18,000 children out of the system, eliminated  adultBasic, http://www.portal.state.pa.us/portal/server.pt/community/health_insurance/9189/adultbasic/592645 , a health care plan for people in the low income brackets,  at the same time the census data shows we in PA have the poorest city in the United States, Reading… http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/27/us/reading-pa-tops-list-poverty-list-census-shows.html?pagewanted=all and our legislature is clapping over this?

We however as a faith based agency have a different narrative..Paul was in Macedonia (North of Corinth) when generosity broke out, he writes in 2 Corinthians 8^1-4:

The Offering

 ^1-4Now, friends, I want to report on the surprising and generous ways in which God is working in the churches in Macedonia province. Fierce troubles came down on the people of those churches, pushing them to the very limit. The trial exposed their true colors: They were incredibly happy, though desperately poor. The pressure triggered something totally unexpected: an outpouring of pure and generous gifts. I was there and saw it for myself. They gave offerings of whatever they could—far more than they could afford!—pleading for the privilege of helping out in the relief of poor Christians.

Jan and I worshiped at the Valley View Presbyterian Church last Sunday in Pittsburgh, a church wealthy in love and caring, not so much material wealth, however when the offering plate came around it was heaping full. This is the kind of giving Paul was talking about.

So when Paul wrote

¹²For the ministry of this service is not only supplying^(T) the needs of the saints but is also overflowing in many thanksgivings to God.

He was talking about how to respond to each other in tough times….

We do have a lot to be thankful for today, especially at Peaceful Living.  I believe God has totally blessed us and that means we need to be totally generous in our outlook and sharing our time, resources, and love for each other, even if the atmosphere is saturated with self interest, egotism, posturing and being stingy to people who are marginalized, Paul’s’ approach in 2 Corinthians of being a “lavish planter” not only blesses us all, but it blesses God as well.  Will you be lavish in your approach to others?

The congregations was singing a song at the Valley View Presbyterian Church,  last Sunday which relates directly to a different narrative:

Joe Landis

Executive Director

Peaceful Living

2210 Shelly Road, Suite 2

Harleysville, PA 19438

PH:610.287.1200

FX:610.287.7121

email jlandis@peacefulliving.org

web:http://www.peacefulliving.org

Solidago: The Lord is continually sending us messages through scripture, nature, the cosmos…to be totally present in our lives, minute by minute, day by day, season by season..and every fall we get this message. Are we listening?

Pimp My Ride

“Pimp My Ride” or “Pimp My Mind”

Sometimes around our lunch table at Peaceful Living office we get to talking about the different TV/Cable shows we watch.  We all have our reasons for watching a wide variety of shows.

Some of the office staff are surprised at how much I liked watching “Pimp My Ride” and how disappointed I was when I could no longer find it when playing roulette with the 300 TV/Cable stations.

I’m not sure if it’s coming back this fall or not, but thanks to Hulu I was able to find my most favorite pimp job, about Dante’s ice cream truck.

Xzbit comes knockin’ on your door…

You need to answer that knockin’ on your door

And be honest about the shape you are in.  Here is Dante with his truck:

Front view

Side view

Inside view:

This is not a pretty site….

I see this as a parable…I mean; look at us where would we be without the Love of the Lord….look at what He does for us every day of our lives.  We receive a “new mind”…unfortunately we still have our same bodies, so in one sense our bodies are not “pimped” but our minds are, if we want them to be.

So when the Lord comes knockin’ on our door, we need to answer. If we do not answer that knock, he can’t come in. The one picture I remember in homes growing up was this picture of Christ knockin’ on “your” door. Only later was it pointed out to me..there is no door knob on the outside…

If we answer, we have the capacity to receive a gift…the gift of a complete life and joy will be ours. So if we are going to receive this gift we need to take the initiative. We receive this gift, not because of anything we have done…it is a complete gift and it is ours for the taking and for us to “Pay It Forward” Movie: Pay It Forward

On a deeper level this story is also “sweet” because of the other Dante.  In Dante’s Divine Comedy Divine Comedy he believes we must actually go thru Hell before we can get to Paradise. He has to let go of Virgil who had accompanied him through Hades and Purgatory, and go with Beatrice who leads him to Paradise. Dante also had Hades as ice cold..so perhaps that’s why this story is a classic, all the ice cream would be in good shape in his version of hell.  We do need to let go of our former life, or mind set if we are to move into Paradise.

Anyway, for whatever reason, Hulu does not show the final pimped ice cream truck, so I can’t show that picture…and we need to leave that to our imagination, as we do ourselves because we never actually know where the Lord leads when we let Him pimp our mind, for our ride here on earth.

Joe Landis

9.10.11

Kingdom Fireworks or the Mind of the Lord

Kingdom Fireworks or the Mind of the Lord

4^th of July 2011

Paul wrote in Romans 7^22-25:

²² For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; ²³ but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me. ²⁴ What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? ²⁵ Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord! (see Romans 7:14-25 NIV for the compete section on his internal struggle)

In his book The Social Animal, David Brooks spends a lot of time on the mind and how powerful our minds are, especially our unconscious mind. In his section on “Fellowship” he says…. “We are like spiritual Grand Central stations.  We are junctions where millions of sensations, emotions, and signals interpenetrate every second.” (Brooks, p.xvi)

In the “Empire of Emotion” he talks about our conscious mind being..” like a general atop a platform, who sees the world from a distance and analyses things linearly and linguistically, the unconscious mind is like a million little scouts. The scouts careen across the landscape, sending back a constant flow of signals and generating instant responses. They maintain not distance from the environment around them, but are immersed in it. They scurry about, interpenetrating other minds, landscapes, and ideas.” (Brooks, p. xi)

While he is very clear in the introduction that he “does not to try to discern God’s role in all of this, but if there is divine creativity, surely it is active in this inner soulsphere, where brain matter produces emotion and love rewires the neurons.” (Brooks, p xvii)

At the end of the book however as Harold, one of the main characters of the story, is dying...   “There were no analytics, no reservations, no ambitions, no future desires of past difficulties. It was just I and Thou. A unity of being.  A higher state if knowledge.  A merger of souls. At this point his questions about the meaning of life were no longer asked, but were answered”

           “Harold entered the hidden kingdom entirely and then lost consciousness forever.” (Brooks, p. 376)

The strange part about this is, the way he describes Harold’s final few minutes of life, is pretty much how I feel whenever I meditate. For me, I do feel I’m “dead” to the world but totally alive and immersed in God’s oneness, and can feel His Presence.

 Richard Rohr in his A Lever and a Place to Stand; The Contemplative Stance, The Active Prayer (ISBN:9781587680649), alludes to this in the beginning of his book.. …”the beauty of the unconscious is that it knows a great deal, whether personal or collective, but always knows that is does not know, cannot say, dare or try to prove or assert to strongly, because what it does know is that there is always more and all words fall short…and later what is needed for the integration of action and contemplation is..1) a strong tolerance for ambiguity; 2) an ability to allow, forgive and contain a certain degree of anxiety; and 3) a willingness to not know and not even need to know” (Rohr, p.x).  Rohr obviously takes it further than Brooks, but Rohr has a bigger agenda, but the essence of the experience is the same. Rohr also references Thomas Merton in his preface “Brightness and the Holy Spirit”. Rohr cites a Merton quote, “I die by Brightness and the Holy Spirit”, which is also part of my meditative experience.

I usually do see a “Brightness” that Thomas Merton refers to, when I’m deeper in my meditation and I’m not sure how it happens.  After I go through “The Examen of Consciousness” (Ignatian Prayer) and start to repeat the Jesus Prayer (The Jesus Prayer), a star which reminds me of what I imagine the star of Bethlehem to be, emerges out of the darkness.  And soon after it emerges it is swallowed up by the darkness, but it reappears again and again, like “Kingdom Fireworks.”  This goes on for a time but it is a timeless state of mind until I suddenly “pop out” of my meditative state and  feel refreshed and at ease about the world, but it wasn’t always like this.

My first attempts in the late 70’s at mediation were guided by the book You Must Relax by a E. Jacobson…. sounds relaxing just by the title, right?  The image and song that would continually emerge when I was trying hard to relax then was from Pink Floyd’s song, Comfortably Numb…because when I was a child I did have a fever, and my hands did feel like two balloons and every time I had a fever, I had the same dark scary dream…not quite as bad as Pink Floyd (Comfortably Numb)..but too scary to endure.  After a while I decided I must not relax like this, and later in 1983, I heard Herbert Benson talk about his The Relaxation Response.  I used this for a number of years and things started to improve. The big change came in 1987 when a friend gave me the book The Way of the Pilgrim and Pilgrim Continues the Way  (The Way of the Pilgrim) written by an anonymous pilgrim in Russia (Late 1800’s) and it set me on a course with the Jesus Prayer which has been with me ever since.

I do believe the Lord does want to spend time with us, but we must want to spend time with Him.  And in that time of mediation and with same Divine Mystery by which He gave the gift of life, breath, and consciousness we do enter into “soulsphere” (Brooks) or “One Flow” (Rohr). However, “Your mind must be renewed by a spiritual revolution” (Ephesians 4²⁴, The Jerusalem Bible) to… simply put, “Follow me” (Jesus).

So, don’t be like the Harold’s of this world and wait until the end of your life to experience the Lord’s oneness. Learn to meditate. Do I spend enough time meditating? No. Do I always do what I think is right? No. Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord.  If you do meditate in a faith tradition, Christian or otherwise, what has been your experience?

in the Presence of the Lord

Joe Landis

Executive Director

Peaceful Living

2210 Shelly Road, Suite 2

Harleysville, PA 19438

PH:610.287.1200

FX:610.287.7121

email jlandis@peacefulliving.org

web:http://www.peacefulliving.org

Please Join Us On Friday morning, July 15, 2011 for our 1st Quarterly Mini-Conference entitled:

“The Future of the Disabled in a Liberal Society”

The seminar is based on Hans Reinder’s Book The Future of the Disabled in a Liberal Society; An Ethical Analysis

For further information and to register online click on: http://conta.cc/HansJuly15

Building a Peaceable Kingdom

Opening devotional for Initial meeting of the Proposed International Voluntary Service Unit for the Indian and North Penn Valley

Tuesday April 26, 2011

Deep within them I will plant my Law, writing it on their hearts. Then I will be their God and they will be my people.  There will be no further need for neighbor to try to teach neighbor, or brother to say to brother, “Learn to know Yahweh!”  No, they will all know me the least no less than the greatest­- it is Yahweh who speaks- since I will forgive their iniquity and never call their sin to mind.

-Jeremiah 31^33b-34

What is written on their hearts?

Yahweh forever faithful,

gives justice to those denied it,

gives food to the hungry,

gives liberty to the prisoners

Yahweh restores sight to the blind,

Yahweh straightens the bent,

Yahweh protects the stranger,

he keeps the orphan and the widow.

Yahweh loves the virtuous,

and frustrates the wicked.

Yahweh reigns for ever,

your God Zion from age to age.

-          Psalm 146^7-10

Yahweh, who lifts up the humble,

humbles the wicked to the ground.

Sing to Yahweh in gratitude,

Play the lyre for our God:

Who covers the heavens with clouds

To provide the earth with rain,

To produce fresh grass on the hillsides

And the plants that ore needed by man

Who gives their food to the cattle

And to the young ravens when they cry

The strength of the war horse means nothing to him,

It is not infantry that interests him.

Yahweh is interested only in those who fear him,

In those who rely on his love.

                                Psalm 147^6-12

I was pressed, pressed about to fall,

   But Yahweh came to my help;

Yahweh is my strength and my song

    He has been my savior

Shouts of joy and safety

     In the tents of the virtuous:

Yahweh’s fight hand is wreaking havoc,

     Yahweh’s right hand is winning!

                                Psalm 118^13-16

These are only some of the themes written deep within our hearts, they are common threads uniting all of humanity. They are there if we are listening. And at times they emerge on a broader scale:

               

Like now with the civil unrest in the middle east

Like they did when the wall fell in 1989, Walter Wink The Powers That Be said 1 billion lives

were democratized in Russian, China, South Africa, Chile, Indonesia, Kosovo

               

Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement Letter from Birmingham Jail

               

  Gandhi’s throwing off the British Empire: Satyagraha

               

Tolstoy  Why Am I A Pacifist

               

Martin Buber: I-Thou: Martin Buber

               

Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount: Matthew 5-7

I chose today as the kick-off as memory of what we want do not want to be… Today is the anniversary of the bombing of Guernica Bombing of Guernica on April 26, 1937. It was yet another way to show mankind’s cruelty to mankind, so well depicted by Picasso:

This is the image we want to move away from.

The image we want to move toward is:

The Peaceable Kingdom by Edward Hicks: Hicks Peaceable Kingdom.

If you would like to read more about what happened at our initial meeting of individuals from the Muslim, Jewish, Hindu and Christian faith who gathered in dialogue that day,  please see an article in the Souderton Independent:

Indian Valley, North Penn faith community leaders gather with goal to serve locally

Joe Landis

Executive Director

Peaceful Living

2210 Shelly Road, Suite 2

Harleysville, PA 19438

PH:610.287.1200

FX:610.287.7121

email jlandis@peacefulliving.org

web:http://www.peacefulliving.org

Womb to Tomb, My Easter Story

Tomb to Womb..My Easter Story

April 24, 2011                                                                                   

In the Summer of ’87 I was getting ready to celebrate my 40^th birthday and I was running on empty. I thought I had had my mid-life crisis early, at 21 and would not be facing another “spiritual awaking any time soon.  I knew that around 60 a lot of males 66%, (according to Newsweek 4.25.11 “Dead Suit Walking”) suffer bouts of depression and sadness. However  I have since learned that what I experienced at 21 was my “quarter life crisis” and at 40 I suffered my mid-life crisis so I was relieved to know that what happened to me was quite normal.

So I was about to turn 40 and headed straight into darkness….when I had the chance in August of that year to attend a week long retreat with Jean Vanier at Mundelein, just north of Chicago. Little did I know what the Lord had planned for me.

The strange part of what I learned was to walk into my fears, walk into what I was hiding inside of me from growing up, and stop running from myself. I had to finish what I initially started to address in my quarter life crisis. Only this time Jesus was there to help me deal with my fears, that were binding me up. What I had been running from and throwing into my inner tomb… I had to stop running, turn around, let Jesus take me by the hand as I walked into my inner tomb. And during the course of the week Vanier did just that.

I was so moved by the retreat that after I came home I asked my pastor if I could give my testimony in church, which actually turned into a full blown sermon. While giving that sermon, I was trying to drive home the point that we have filled our so full of activities and entertainment and work simply to keep us running from our inner vulnerabilities and I raised my voice and said we do this “…. until we are SHOT!”  It kind of exploded out of my mouth and the whole auditorium fell silent and from ¾ of the way back of the audience a little voice shouted back “Shot..”That is right” I said. “ shot”. Ok well at least one person heard me.

People we need to stop filibustering ourselves and stop filling our lives with distractions. We need to learn to sit quiet and wait upon the Lord for our strength. By doing this He can set you free from the fears that have been holding  you hostage and taking your wounds healing them, allowing you to grow, in effect turning what was festering inside of you as a tomb…into a womb.

This is a gift of persons who are severely disabled who ask…be with me, I will accept you for who you are, sit quite with me, be fully present with me and I will be present with you.

Joe Landis

Executive Director

Peaceful Living

2210 Shelly Road, Suite 2

Harleysville, PA 19438

PH:610.287.1200

FX:610.287.7121

email jlandis@peacefulliving.org

web:http://www.peacefulliving.org

Your Joystick

The headline on the Divine Power of Friendhip conference is that we have all been given a joystick, the question is, are we going to use it to join the powerless peace pilgrimage, as we walk together building relationships with all humanity as we build the Lord’s kingdom? Will we do this based in identifying and incorporating the Lord’s Divine Power in every relationship we have, discovering and admitting our own inadequacies and reconciling ourselves to each other along the way? Or will we veer off the path and be guided by self interest? 

 

 

Joe Landis

 

 

Joe Landis 

Executive Director 

Peaceful Living 

2210 Shelly Road, Suite 2 

Harleysville, PA 19438

PH:610.287.1200

FX:610.287.7121

email jlandis@peacefulliving.org

web:http://www.peacefulliving.org

 

 

Spontaneous Acts of Kindness

Spontaneous Acts of Kindness

In his letter to Philemon, Paul has a request of Philemon, that he take back his own runaway slave Onesimus, as a brother. Paul and Philemon are dear friends in the Lord however Paul does not want to take advantage of Philemon’s friendship.  Paul writes:

I am sending him back to your and with him – I could say – a part of own myself.  I should have liked to keep him with me; he could have been a substitute for you, to me while I am in chains that the Good News has brought me. However, I did not want to do anything without your consent; it would have been forcing your act of kindness, which should be spontaneous” (Philemon 1^13-15)

The future of a fugitive slave was not very bright…not only were they outcasts..they would be severely punished. However this is not what Paul is suggesting here.  He is talking about forgiveness and acceptance not only as a person but a brother and a brother in the Lord.

This is exactly what Hans Reinders is talking about in his “three way relationship” p. 319 in Receiving the Gift of Friendship.  We respond to each other because of the way we have been treated by the Lord in the first place. We are not approaching it as a civil rights issue or any other rational (self-determination, legal rights) even though these approaches are important. We are looking for “Spontaneous acts of Kindness”..or “Paying it Forward” as we were paid forward with the gift of life we were given.

Joe Landis

Executive Director

Peaceful Living

2210 Shelly Road, Suite 2

Harleysville, PA 19438

PH:610.287.1200

FX:610.287.7121

email jlandis@peacefulliving.org

web:http://www.peacefulliving.org

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Join Us September 24 -26 for our Fall Conference

The Divine Power of Friendship

Souderton Mennonite Church

105 W. Chestnut St ,Souderton, PA 18964

For More Information or to register Click Here

 or Call 610.287.1200

4th of July Neighborliness