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I won’t answer for Brian, but, for myself…because the “spirit” tells me I’m okay…and I finally quit “kicking against the pricks” and just accepted the answer the gods were giving me. SilentDawning wrote:What was key in leading you there Brian?
I failed enough times. I failed and got back up to fight some more. Rinse and repeat. Nobody else really seems to do a whole lot better at it. So I must be good enough. Enough. That’s the key perhaps — being satisfied. If God wanted a better Brian, He should have made a better one than what popped out into this world. Seeing that I am what I am, I must be good enough for God. He likes me. I make Him laugh at himself for creating me
I like Cwald’s use of phrase “kicking against the pricks.” At some point, I figured out that banging my head against the wall was giving me a headache. So I stopped. Now my head doesn’t hurt anymore. It sounds dumb to say it that way. But heck, I guess we’re all pretty dumb (humanity in general).
SilentDawning wrote:Right now my boundaries are motivated by self-protection, some indignation, as well as sheer burn-out. I feel that I’m taking a risk in being so contrarion, and see local leaders partly as adversaries. Hate to say it, but that’s how I feel.
Boundaries. Self-protection. Indignation. Burn out. Those don’t sound like you are satisfied. Maybe you still need to fail and beat your head against the wall some more? *shrug* Get crackin’ at it. You’ll eventually wear yourself out. If not that, whatever is bugging you will pop out your ear. You’ll feel a lot better.
cwald wrote:I won’t answer for Brian, but, for myself…because the “spirit” tells me I’m okay…and I finally quit “kicking against the pricks” and just accepted the answer the gods were giving me.
I like this answer. Being open to the spirit is how we’re taught to do it. I assume the spirit would warn me or shake me and wake me up if I was getting real off-course. But I’m OK with my relationship with God, and go with it, avoiding the “shoulds” “woulds” “coulds” that used to plague me so much. I feel like God likes me, so, like Brian, that is enough. Perhaps He likes me because I keep trying, and just keep swimming…keep swimming…keep swimming.I can’t remember the source, at all, but my wife’s loves the idea of “enduring well enough”. cwald wrote:I won’t answer for Brian, but, for myself…because the “spirit” tells me I’m okay…and I finally quit “kicking against the pricks” and just accepted the answer the gods were giving me.
i always thought that expression had a particularly appropriate viewpoint of some of the leaders we kick against…During my first period of less activity, I had a pretty awesome Bishop who left me alone, and asked me to check in with him once a year. At one point he said, although I wasn’t paying tithing or in the temple — “I’m not worried about you, because I always feel the Spirit when you speak or teach”. I think that was the closest thing to being OK without being full-on I ever experienced…perhaps that’s the compass..
I am at the beginning steps of this topic: Rediscovering my relationshop with God. Before I can do that, I have to define what I really believe.
Many of you, through this web site have helped take the first steps.
I will keep you informed of my progress.
I don’t think this is going to be an easy process.
It should be an interesting journey.
The missionaries of our ward are coming over for dinner tomorrow night.
I’m going to ask them this same question: What do you believe?
I’m not going to let them give me the “canned” response.
Mike from Milton.
Sometimes I feel like if God wanted me to have a relationship with him, he wouldn’t have sent me down to this dung heap and severed all forms of non-coded communication. That’s probably not a great attitude, but I certainly do wonder about this “plan”. Mike wrote:The missionaries of our ward are coming over for dinner tomorrow night.
I’m going to ask them this same question: What do you believe?
I’m not going to let them give me the “canned” response.
how did it go?Sometimes I wonder if it is good idea to pop the baloon of conformity. Not everyone responds well to it; perhaps they are walking around in the matrix as happy as can be, without wondering what is behind it.
Others of us cannot help but wonder what is behind the matrix, and somedays that isn’t always a happy place.
when the god of our religious upbringing dies, there is a hole in the support network. From the vast history of god, gods, and religion, it didn’t seem to matter that none of that was real, people of faith thought it was, and that was good enough. filling that hole is an immense challenge.
Confucius didn’t speak of faith, but he did participate in the ritual faithfully. Here is a snippet of the Lun Yu – the Analects:
Confucius in his Analects 3:11-13 wrote:Some one asked the meaning of the great sacrifice. The Master said, “I do not know. He who knew its meaning would find it as easy to govern the kingdom as to look on this;— pointing to his palm.
He sacrificed to the dead, as if they were present. He sacrificed to the spirits, as if the spirits were present.
The Master said, “I consider my not being present at the sacrifice, as if I did not sacrifice.”
Wang-sun Chia asked, saying, “What is the meaning of the saying, “It is better to pay court to the furnace than to the south-west corner?”“
The Master said, “Not so. He who offends against Heaven has none to whom he can pray.”
Some of this language is hard to understand. The bottom line is that he did not know the nature of god (the great sacrifice), did not think the spirits or ancestors were actually present, and given a choice between the furnace (symbolic of the practical aspects of life) versus the south-west corner (the area of worship in the house), he disagreed — prayer has a purpose, and to reject god entirely leaves one without a god to pray to.So, a rational man, Confucius prayed, went through the rituals with all respect to the spirits he knew were not present. Yet in his mind, he did the actions, and prayed to god regardless, and found personal benefit thereby.
Elie Wiesel lost his belief in the god of his religious upbringing in Auschwitz, forced to look upon the face of a child being hung slowly to death. His ‘god’ died that day. He relates a very interesting account about why he continued to pray:
Karen Armstrong, relating a story by Elie Wiesel in Night, wrote:There is a story that one day in Auschwitz, a group of Jews put God on trial. They charge him with cruelty and betrayal. Like Job they found no consolation in the usual answers to the problem of evil and suffering in the midst of this current obscenity. They could find no excuse for God, no extenuating circumstances, so they found him guilty and, presumably, worthy of death. The Rabbi pronounced the verdict. Then he looked up and said that the trial was over: it was time for the evening prayer.
I’m not sure it’s a geat idea to kill the god in our understanding. In walking through the Holocaust Memorial in DC, I felt nothing at all–blackness. The ‘shoe room’ brought home the magnitude of the evil of the holocaust. The sheer efficiency and productivity with which holocaust was conducted speaks to the idea that any god who would allow such evil to occur is not worthy of worship. My naive god died there and many other places.Yet I still have felt the spirit after this realization as strongly as I did when I was a naive believer in the magical god of my upbringing. Defining what I believe is defintely part of that spirit, and many times it carries me to spiritual heights.
Not this morning though. I feel pretty lonely and worthless. I have no happy face to put on today, probably because of god knows what. The monster I have come to know as depression is often alive and well in me. I once thought that was because of sin. Now I understand it’s just part of being human, and that’s ok.
i think it’s time to pray.
How do you reconcile the fact they convicted God, but then prayed to him immediately afterwards? Was this simply an expression of the unhappiness they had with God, while recognizing ultimately he exists and is their master? SilentDawning wrote:How do you reconcile the fact they convicted God, but then prayed to him immediately afterwards? Was this simply an expression of the unhappiness they had with God, while recognizing ultimately he exists and is their master?
:lolno: in my impression, the god of our religious upbringing must die in order to understand that god is beyond all understanding.
does that make any sense? not to the rational mind, it doesn’t.
but there is another mind, much more primal, inside of us, deeply linked to our emotions. it is a mind much more in touch with the Way things work at a subconscious/unconscious level. The mind within doesn’t much care for logic, but it yearns to be connected to something. we see that connection happening throughout nature, in the flock of birds or school of fish, the underlying need to be “part of” or “one with” is always there.
In my understanding, god is not ‘out there’, separate, some puppet master or ideal that orchestrates what is happening here, to whom we pray for favors. God is “I am” – “in there”:being itself as reflected inside of me: the Atman. Not the logical mind, not the passion, neti, neti.
Even a flock of rabbis needs to connect, spiritually, to that which is beyond logical understanding.
So i pray, not for favors, not even for understanding. I pray to connect. Or better said, I pray
andconnect. And in so doing, I pray with more meaning, more passion, and more spirituality than ever. wayfarer, the missionaries come over to night. My goal is not to embarass them.
I want to see if they can think “outside the box”.
The “senior” seems very spiritual. He bore his testimony on Sunday.
It was very moving.
This isn’t going to be a test.
More later.
Mike from Milton.
Mike wrote:wayfarer, the missionaries come over to night.
My goal is not to embarass them.
I want to see if they can think “outside the box”.
The “senior” seems very spiritual. He bore his testimony on Sunday.
It was very moving.
This isn’t going to be a test.
mike, i didn’t mean to suggest that you would be testing them. I was just rambling in my very pensive mood this morning. i think my response was just my prayer this morning, that’s all… I appreciate you being my god for the moment
wayfarer wrote:in my impression, the god of our religious upbringing must die in order to understand that god is beyond all understanding.
does that make any sense?No. It does not make sense. But that is exactly what makes it so true.
I think he’s talking about the process of deconstruction and reconstruction. For me, God hasn’t changed much since I was a teenager, and prayed at the side of my bed, and felt his presence. When i joined the church, I thought for a time, that I had found a clearer perception of God, and what He expected of me, but quickly, that faded as I experienced the business men who run this Church. No longer could I reconcile this concept of a kind loving God with the behavior of my SP at the time….but somehow, I felt spiritually and socially supported in serving a mission by close friends, and continued buying into the LDS religion on the strength of the warm fuzzies – -mentally and unconsciously separating God from the formal Church organization, however.
And then, the shoulds of our religion took over my conscience — not God — and this is where I sit now — rejecting and re-evaluating whether the LDS shoulds are really all that happiness-producing (in my experience, they are not always — they are often self-serving for the Church AT THE EXPENSE of happiness). While trying to protect myself from the depression my Church membership has triggered given my experiences there. And while trying to maintain a certain respect for the religion, without doing everything everyone expects me to do.
And somewhere in there, is a new relationship with God to be found, with some pure “shoulds” that come from HIM and not the local Bishop or SP who has an agenda — which may, or may not be inspired. And even if it is inspired, may not be right for me at the moment…
You have me thinking that the best thing I can do now is devote extra time to mediation and seeking God’s will again — but without undue deference to the Church.
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