Cars Seat Spiritual Guides And Saint Paul: Conversing Between Beliefs and Faiths

Zen pilgrims traveled from monastery to monastery across ancient China to learn from spiritual masters who used puzzling, of paradoxical statements and stories, to prompt spiritual awakening. I undergo a similar process while driving my daughters around town.

The spiritual masters sit in their flower-print, front-facing cars eats and pepper me with theological questions, revelations, and absurdities.

"God is the sky!"

I hear the statement, think about it and then respond. The masters question me until I give them an appropriately tangible and well-reasoned response. Or, until a yellow car drives by. If a yellow car drives by, the spiritual masters chant "Banana!"

During a recent trip, my oldest daughter Fiona said that her best friend "doesn't know God."

My wife and I paused for a second and then asked to elaborate. It became clear that the issue wasn't due to any lack of sermoning from Fiona.

Fiona wanted to know what to do.

In other words, how can she balance the love and respect she has for people with different beliefs than she has while still fulfilling her duty to share her own spiritual vision with the world?

The relevance of that question is only going to grow. Fiona's immediate family is full of Catholic, Russian Orthodox, evangelical Christian, and "spiritual but not religious" people that she loves and depends upon. Her extended family is even more diverse. We've got dear friends that follow Islam, Hindu and Native American traditions.

My wife and I did our best to answer Fiona. It was a hard response and hardly guided by a grown up world filled with warring factions fighting over faith. The following night, I found guidance from Saint Paul in his second letter to Timothy.

"[P]ursue righteousness, faith, love, and peace, along with those who call on the Lord with purity of heart. Avoid foolish and ignorant debates, for you know that they breed quarrels. A slave of the Lord should not quarrel, but should be gentle with everyone, able to teach, tolerant, correcting opponents with kindness." 2 Timothy 2: 22-25.

It's a heavy challenge, but an essential one. To ensure that we honor the Lord not only in what we tell others about the Divine, but in how we tell them.


p.s. Let me know if you have a biblical quote or other spiritual guidance that you'd like included in the "Running with the Current" videos. Even better, post your own "Running with the Current" video on youtube and I'll add it to the playlist. Thanks again for reading.

Running with the Current: Psalm 103's Praise Of God's Love and Kindness

This is an amazing section on God's love and kindness from Psalm 103. I filmed the video on my way home to Helena from Billings. I hope you like it.

matt

Text: Psalm 103:11-17

Background: Yellowstone River near Reed Point, Montana.

Quantum Physics and Hootie: Navigating Concepts Beyond Understanding

My father-in-law is a quantum physicist from Russia. My mother is a mental health counselor from Butte, Montana. The conversations between those diverse backgrounds are always interesting, often deep and sometimes unintentionally hilarious.

This Sunday was my son's baptism. Each new memory brings back a dozen old ones and my mom asked my  inlaws about raising their children.  She asked my father-in-law whether it seemed like only a short time ago that he was a student at Moscow University with a young baby of his own.

My father-in-law looked at her a little quizzically and then stated, "I don't understand time."

From anyone else, this would have been a throwaway statement. If I'd said it, the most obvious response would be "Uhh, you messed up the words to that old Hootie and the Blowfish song - again."

[Gratuitous Hootie and the Blowfish Video]

However, it's a little different when a quantum physicist makes a statement about human beings' inability to understand the basic nature of time. Since Einstein, physicists have realized that time changes, speeding up or slowing down depending on how fast one thing is moving relative to something else. Scientists also know that time curves, the fabric of time-space to be more specific. But the most honest physicists, like my father-in-law, won't hesitate to state that human beings have only begun to understand the nature of time.Scratching the surface might even be overestimating how far we've come in unraveling those mysteries.

The Bible supports with the physicists' complex view of time. In Psalm 90, Moses wrote that "A thousand years... are merely a yesterday" in the eyes of the Lord. Saint Peter further described that "with the Lord one day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like one day." 2 Peter 3:8

Yet, the complex changing nature of time is not a valid excuse for me to pick my kids up from daycare after 5:30 p.m. Closing time is closing time and each minute after that costs a dollar. The obscurity of time does not prevent millions of people around the globe from tuning in at exactly the right moment to watch the opening kick off on Super Bowl Sunday.

Human beings have figured out how to navigate through the unknowable characteristics of time enough to rely on it to guide the tasks that we need. My alarm clock may not be reliable within a certain range of a massively dense cosmic black hole, but it does just fine on my night stand.

We are faced with a similar challenge in facing the complex, obscurity of the Divine. It is impossible for human beings to fully understand spiritual mysteries. It is an intellectual realm beyond our grasp - by design. We can see the outlines of the deeper truths, but the mind of God eludes our comprehension.

In our faith life, we come across Bible passages that grind against each other. Religious leaders more human than divine. Dogma that offends reason and reason that disappears in the face of the largest questions like dew under a rising sun.

• How can we prevent the complexities, obscurities and contradictions of our faith from becoming a barrier to our spiritual development?
• How can we take the complexities, obscurities and contradictions of our faith and use them as the foundation for our spiritual life?

 There are no easy answers to these spiritual questions. The beauty of faith depends upon that obscurity; but humility, prayer and love are powerful sign posts and no one becomes lost while following them.

Running With the Current: Trials of Serving the Lord

Here is another installment of "Running the with Currrent." It's a powerful piece in Sirach on the trials of serving the Lord. I recorded the video on my way to Bozeman from Helena. I hope you like it.

matt


Text: Sirach 2:1-6

Background: Headwaters of the Missouri River near Three Forks, Montana.