Pub Theology 11/19/24 -- What can we learn from atheists?

This Sunday, all are welcome to join us for a morning of worship and fellowship. Whether you are with us in the sanctuary or joining from afar, your presence strengthens our community. Our services are at 8:30 & 10:00 a.m. We warmly welcome those who cannot attend in person to join us via our live stream for the 10:00 a.m. service.

So we're one week removed from the latest presidential election, and, unsurprisingly, about half of the country is happy with the outcome and about half sees it as little short of a catastrophe. While I am friends with people in both camps, I spend time more often with the later rather than the former. For example, as one colleague put it to me the other day, "I feel like we're headed into dark times." I don't know about you, but that sounds like the basis for a PubTheo topic to me. The idea of "light in the darkness" is one that we find throughout scripture. For example, in the Gospel of Matthew, (5:14-16) Jesus compares his followers to a light that cannot be hidden. In John 8:12 Jesus says: "I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life." And in the Old Testament tradition, the prophet Isaiah (42:6) says God has called the people of Israel to be"a light to the nations." The notion of a light in darkness is a powerful image. J.R.R. Tolkien taps into this in The Fellowship of the Ring in the passage where Galadriel gifts Frodo a glittering crystal phial, proclaiming: "May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out." It's also a familiar image. We're familiar, especially here in the Great Lakes, with sight of a lighthouse on the shore. We're familiar with needing a flashlight to illuminate our way during the next inevitable power outage (thanks DTE). We're familiar with the pull-cord bulb hanging from the basement rafters. Let's take this idea and talk about it in our conversation this week. What does it mean to you? Where have you looked for light in the darkness when you've needed it, and where do you find it now? What would it mean for you to be a light in the darkness? And does that have particular meaning for us as we look to the four years ahead? We'll talk all about it in our discussion this Tuesday, Nov. 12, starting at 7pm at Casa Real in downtown Oxford.

This Sunday, all are welcome to join us for a morning of worship and fellowship. Whether you are with us in the sanctuary or joining from afar, your presence strengthens our community. Our services are at 8:30 & 10:00 a.m. We warmly welcome those who cannot attend in person to join us via our live stream for the 10:00 a.m. service.

This Sunday, all are welcome to join us for a morning of worship and fellowship. Whether you are with us in the sanctuary or joining from afar, your presence strengthens our community. Our services are at 8:30 & 10:00 a.m. We warmly welcome those who cannot attend in person to join us via our live stream for the 10:00 a.m. service.

So what is the meaning of life anyway? And no, this is not a reference to the Monty Python movie, so let's all just move along shall we? But before we do, let me recommend the film to you. It's great. I gave a little mention to this topic last week, and there was an immediate response from one of our regular participants that makes me think there's something for us to talk about here. I had said something about the idea of "finding"meaning in our lives, but our regular straight up pounced on the notion, arguing instead that we should talk about "making" meaning instead. So let's do both! The idea for the topic came up a couple of weeks ago when I ran across this article at The Atlantic website: "The Meaning of Life is Surprisingly Simple," in which the author. Arthur Brooks, reminded us that those people who believe they know their life's meaning enjoy greater well-being than those who don't. But he acknowledged that it's a lucky few who figure it out early. For the rest of us, he says, there's work to be done. And the search can be difficult and frustrating: "Philosophy is often unhelpful, offering abstract ideas such as Aristotle’s human function or Kant’s “highest good” that are hard to comprehend, let alone put into action." The easiest response, then, may just be to throw up our hands and conclude that the meaning of life is unknowable, at least to us. This would be a mistake, though, and Brooks offers the reader a suggestion: Make the quest manageable by breaking it down into what he says are three easily digestible steps. These start with an understanding that we can think about finding meaning by assessing our life along the following dimensions. First is coherence, or how events in your life fit together. "This is an understanding that things happen in your life for a reason. That doesn’t necessarily mean you can fit new developments into your narrative the moment they happen, but you usually are able to do so afterward, so you have faith that you eventually will." Second is purpose, or the existence of goals and aims. "This is the belief that you are alive in order to do something. Think of purpose as your personal mission statement ..." And third is significance, or the sense that your life matters. Together, he describes these as macronutrients: "the elements that we need for a balanced and healthy sense of meaning in life." With the in mind, let's take a look at Brooks' digestible steps toward figuring out meaning. Step 1 -- Check your diet. If you have a sense that your life lacks meaning, then take a look at your "macronutrient balance" and ask yourself the following questions: Do you feel out of control, tossed about in life without rhyme or reason? You might need a better sense of coherence. Do you lack big plans or dreams or ideas about your future that excite you? If not, that's a purpose issue. Do you feel like it wouldn't matter if you just disappeared, that the world would be no better off with or without you? That's significance. Step 2 -- Search in the forest. If you find you have a deficit in one of the above, go look for it in a productive way. The good news for us Pub Theologians is that we may have an already existing spiritual or philosophical outlook that can guide us, like prayer, or meditation, or even therapy. The key, though, is to approach the search the way you would anything that's important to you, by being intentional and doing the work. Step 3 -- Make sure you don't search too hard. H ere Brooks makes the point that your quest for meaning becomes counterproductive if it gets in the way of your happiness: "If you feel lost in your search for meaning, cut yourself some slack and go back to the basics." All of this, Brooks acknowledges, stems from the starting assumption that life does in fact have meaning. That's a perspective that not all of us may share, and so that is going to be our starting point for our discussion this week. So, first, do you think that your life has meaning? Even if you're not sure what that might be? Then second, what do you make of the distinction between "finding" meaning and "making" meaning in our lives? Are those really different ideas? Finally, what do you make of Brooks' overall argument here? Do the concepts of coherence, purpose, and significance resonate with you? And do you think Brooks' three simple steps are a a good way to figure it all out? We'll talk all about it in our conversation this Tuesday evening, Oct. 29, The discussion starts at 7pm at Casa Real in downtown Oxford.

This Sunday, all are welcome to join us for a morning of worship and fellowship. Whether you are with us in the sanctuary or joining from afar, your presence strengthens our community. Our services are at 8:30 & 10:00 a.m. We warmly welcome those who cannot attend in person to join us via our live stream for the 10:00 a.m. service.

Every once in a while I pay attention in church on Sunday. And every once in a while, when I'm paying attention in church, I also pay attention to the sermon. This last was one such Sunday. For the past several weeks in our Sunday lectionary we've been reading passages from the Book of Job. In his sermon, Fr. Andy raised a point that made me think we might have a good discussion topic on our hands. In a nutshell, Fr. Andy suggested that Job didn't know whose story he was in. Job believed that he was the author of his own story, and thus was in a place where he could demand that God account for why his life had been ruined and why he was suffering. But the story here wasn't Job's, but God's. Rather than God being a character in Job's story, Job was one in God's. That's an interesting idea to contemplate. And so here is how we're going to approach it. Do you know what story you are in? Is it your own, or is it someone else's? What is the difference? And what are the implications for how we think about how we live and move through the world? I mean, is life just one big "choose your own adventure" story, or is there something more to it? To bring things full circle, is God a character in your story, or are you one in God's? We'll talk all about it in our conversation this week. Join us for the discussion this Tuesday, Oct. 22, starting at 7pm at Casa Real in downtown Oxford.

This Sunday, all are welcome to join us for a morning of worship and fellowship. Whether you are with us in the sanctuary or joining from afar, your presence strengthens our community. Our services are at 8:30 & 10:00 a.m. We warmly welcome those who cannot attend in person to join us via our live stream for the 10:00 a.m. service.

A couple of weeks ago we had a conversation about wisdom, what it is, where it comes from, whether we consider ourselves wise, and so on. I was thinking about this when I ran across an article about a book country music legend Willie Nelson wrote nearly 2o years ago. Nelson, now 91, wrote The Tao of Willie: A Guide to the Happiness in Your Heart, when he was a young man of 72. As you can guess from the title of book, Nelson's philosophy and outlook owe a lot to Eastern religious traditions. According to the article I ran across ( you can read it by clicking on this link ), Nelson, who was raised in Protestant churches in Abbott, Texas, began to suspect that the songs he was writing as a teenager, about experiences and heartbreaks that he was too young to know firsthand, might have been the consequence of past-life experiences. He came to the conclusion that he had led many past lives. “I haven’t run into anything I haven’t seen or heard before. I also feel as if I can put myself in the place of just about everyone I see, and that gives me the feeling I’ve been in their shoes before.” Beyond his belief in reincarnation, Nelson also came to think of the world's many religions as "a thousand paths to a single destination,” with the goal of bringing us closer to the divine. In short, Nelson has a lot of views that are consistent with some of what we've talked about in our PubTheo conversations over the last 11 years. So we're going to dive a little bit deeper into some of the nuggets of wisdom that Nelson shares in his book, and see what we have to say about them. The following is taken from Nelson's book and borrowed from the article mentioned above: The easiest mistake on earth is to forget to appreciate what you have right now. Happiness exists at just one time. And that time is now. You can be happy about how yesterday turned out, but you can’t be happy yesterday. You can only be happy today, this hour, this minute … now. Slow down. Not just your body but your mind. God is all around us, but it takes stillness to know his message. Breathing is its own form of meditation. Breathe from your chest; breathe from your gut; breathe from your heels. Breathing can calm you and put you in touch with your own spirit. It can deepen your contact with the world around you. If you concentrate and listen to your own breathing, what you will hear is the sound of God. As soon as you admit to yourself that everything good you do comes back to you twenty times over, then your life will change in incredible ways. Doing things because they’re the right thing to do—and not for some tangible gain—will ultimately reward you in better ways than money, power, or fame. Connections to those around you, to the world around us all, and to the universe that stretches into the great beyond are things that define us. The older I get, the more I realize it’s never too early to start appreciating the people in your life. If you love your family, it’s essential that you tell them. If you can make someone feel better with just a few words, why wouldn’t you use them? Love is what I live on. Love is what keeps me going. When in doubt, I try to remind myself that the path to God is paved with love. Join us at Casa Real in downtown Oxford on Tuesday, Oct. 15 at 7pm as we consider the wisdom of Willie Nelson. Our discussion will start there and then we'll see where else it wanders.