Editor’s (admin’s) note. Lightly edited copy of an email I sent to my spiritual director last night in advance of our session for June. My mood has lifted considerably since President Biden announced his is withdrawing from the presidential race, for reasons that will become apparent below, but I think the long-term fundamentals haven’t changed; the threat of neofascist autocracy is still a clear and present danger, in the US and worldwide. I’ve been writing these monthly emails for several years now, primarily in order to help me focus my mind before we talk. It’s not a record or an agenda of our sessions. (Often enough, we start discussing something else and never get back to it.) I archive them to the blog so I can go back later and see what I was thinking about a given topic at the time I posted them.
Sat, Jul 20, 9:12 PM
Hi Sister —
Not much journaling this month. But I have a couple of posts to share, and something about Einstein — yep, Einstein! — on personal prayer that I’ve been thinking about. Between the ongoing atrocities in Gaza (war crimes I helped fund), the right-wing extremists on the Supreme Court and the psychodrama over who’s going to be on the Democratic ticket, I’ve been pretty depressed.
And compulsively checking the internet to see if there’s any good news anywhere. (Yay for the International Court of Justice holding that Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is unlawful!) All this doomscrolling doesn’t leave a lot of time for journaling, or for spiritual exercises.
But I’ve done a little. And, like I said, I’ve been reading about Einstein. Interesting guy, especially for someone from Oak Ridge where much of the research for the atomic bomb and later for medical applications of nuclear physics — I think his instincts about God, science and religion are close to my own.
Two links to blog posts:
1. https://ordinaryzenlutheran.com/2024/07/12/dream-2/ — “How a Jesuit spiritual exercise and a dream are helping me struggle with an apocalyptic election year,” July 12
My headline is a little cryptic. The post involves a dream I had, very loosely involving the upcoming recommitment retreat for Dominical associates. But also how a kind of simplified, freestyle approach to Ignatian discernment lifted me out of what I described as a “a three-alarm freakout.” First, a bit of background, following a reference to President Biden’s problems (he and I are the same age):
Add to that the very real possibility that he’s on track to lose the Nov. 5 election to a hard-right populist Donald Trump with a flair for fascist rhetoric and permission from the US Supreme Court to violate federal law as long as he deems it an “official act.” Also at risk now is the US House, which Democrats had hoped would be a bulwark against overreach by a second Trump administration. I think it’ll be more like Huey Long’s Louisiana than Hitler’s Germany, but Trump’s promises to “terminate the constitution” and “demolish the deep state” are — no pun intended — deeply concerning.
I’ve been depressed anyway by Israel’s indiscriminate war on Gaza, and US complicity in the war crimes committed there. It came home to me when an Israeli air strike destroyed a branch campus of Lutheran-affiliated Dar al-Kalima University in Gaza City. (During Holy Week!) When Debi and I visited the Holy Land, we toured the main campus in Bethlehem, so I felt especially complicit. Did my tax dollars pay for the bomb that flattened Dar al-Kalima? But I’m powerless to influence my government to stop it.
Spoiler alert: I was in a blue funk, and I consciously decided maybe it would help if I tried a bit of Ignatian prayer and meditation. So I did:
Here’s what I did last night. When I couldn’t go to sleep, I prayed. No mantras, no ritual actions, though. When I pray, I sound like the kid in Judy Blume’s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. But I did ask for a grace (step 2). Hey, God, it’s me, Pete. The world’s going to hell in a handbasket, if you’ll excuse the expression, and I’m feeling really, really anxious. I need some clarity, and strength to do better. As I inhaled, I repeated consolation each time, and as I exhaled, desolation. St. Ignatius would be appalled. This was more like what I learned as a Boy Scout taking First Aid lessons, “out with the bad air, in with the good,” than anything resembling spiritual practice. But it worked. I fell asleep.
And, as if in a vision of old, I dreamed about the upcoming Dominican retreat. Not only that, but I woke up thinking about my commitment to positive goals — how do I preach, as the Dominicans like to say, from the pulpit of my life? how do I set an example? — no matter what the world, the flesh and the beasts that stalk an apocalyptic election year might send my way.
2. https://ordinaryzenlutheran.com/2024/07/17/sumud-sundays6/ — “Sumud, accompaniment and Palestinian resistance — definitions and background for Sundays@6,” July 17.
Rather than a paraphrase, I’ll just quote emeritus Bishop Munib Younan of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land, who told a World Council of Churches gathering in Bethlehem, sumud “is the word used in Arabic to describe the steadfastness of the olive tree, firmly rooted in the soil.” He added:”Our resistance to the forces of empire must be sustained with this spirituality of prayer.” He explained:
In this context—surrounded by walls and checkpoints and every other expression of imperial self-protection—we must be careful when imagining God as a fortress, as a wall or barrier separating us from threat. In a fortress mentality, we pursue safety for ourselves and our community alone. In a fortress mentality, we seek security at all costs, even trampling over others in our way. In a fortress mentality, we do not hesitate to build walls to keep others out: walls of concrete and steel, walls of ideology and hatred, walls even within our hearts.
As a Lutheran pastor and former head of the Lutheran World Federation, I wonder how Bishop Younan squares that with Luther’s Ein Feste Burg, “A Mighty Fortress is our God.” I’m sure he does, but I’ll have to sit with that a while.
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_and_philosophical_views_of_Albert_Einstein#cite_ref-43 — My third link is to a remarkable collection of references on the “Religious and philosophical views of Albert Einstein” in Wikipedia, of all places.
The Wikipedia page, mostly consisting of quotes from Einstein in various secondary works, includes the often-quoted dictum, “I’m not an atheist, and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist … I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.” And this: “the problem involved [of God’s existence and nature] is too vast for our limited minds.” But I’m mostly interested in something he wrote in 1936 to a sixth-grade girl, who asked him if scientists pray. He replied:
Scientific research is based on the idea that everything that takes place is determined by laws of nature, and therefore this holds for the actions of people. For this reason, a research scientist will hardly be inclined to believe that events could be influenced by a prayer, i.e. by a wish addressed to a supernatural being. However, it must be admitted that our actual knowledge of these laws is only imperfect and fragmentary, so that, actually, the belief in the existence of basic all-embracing laws in nature also rests on a sort of faith. All the same this faith has been largely justified so far by the success of scientific research. But, on the other hand, everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe—a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is indeed quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive.
It’s nuanced, and it leaves me wondering: Can we pray to the “spirit […] manifest in the laws of the universe?” To Spinoza’s God? To Einstein’s? I think I can. But there’s a lot there to sit with.
And this email is getting pretty long. Looking forward to our Zoom session Monday at 6.\
[Uplinked July 21, 2024]
Ordinary Time 