President's Note

Giving Thanks as a Life Changing Dynamic

Giving Thanks for the Good, the Bad and the Surprising

What does it mean to live as if I am surrounded by miracles, even though the kids are fighting, the mortgage is overdue, there seems no end to global conflict and my back hurts? Who should I be grateful to, and for what?

Gratitude seems to be getting lost in our consumer culture, and I point to two reasons for this.

We are losing the sense of where anything comes from.

We confuse gratitude with plenitude.

Where does life come from?

Thanksgiving has traditionally been a time to give thanks to a Creator God for the harvest. Giving thanks for the harvest was hugely meaningful at a time when a lean harvest would mean winter diets of turnips and cabbage soup; dried beans if you were lucky. For some it would mean starvation, or dependence on charity just to survive.

We've lost the original sense of thanksgiving because we don't have that challenge. We just truck over and tuck in, fly down and fry up. We buy bananas from the local store, oblivious to their 20 hour flight from New Zealand.  We fly in whatever takes our fancy from anywhere in the world, no matter what the season. It doesn't even cost more. Why should we be grateful for our food, when it all seems so easy? As Bart Simpson prayed before one meal- "Dear God, we paid for this stuff ourselves, so thanks for nothing,"

Of course we are paying for it big time. The journey of the banana from New Zealand leaves a trail of ecological disaster behind it; a reminder of our lack of gratitude, a massive carbon footprint that stamps "thanks for nothing" all over the sky.

By: G. Richard Wheatcroft

In the April 1995 issue of Theology Today, theologian Murray Joseph Haar lamented what he regarded as a "rampant" sickness within the American church. He wrote, "The symptoms of this illness sound like this: 'Jesus died for my sins, His pain my gain, He died to set us free, Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away my sins, I have decided to accept Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior." With words like these, many Christians proclaim and define their faith in the efficacy of Jesus' death on their behalf.  I contend that these words of faith indicate precisely the nature of the sickness at the heart of American Christianity." He calls the sickness, a "rampant, individualistic, self-serving redemptionism." (1)

The sickness continues today. The common understanding and frequent statement of many Christians is that "Jesus died for us." Standing alone, that is a distortion of the Christian faith, for it separates the life of Jesus from his death. A dramatic depiction of this separation is seen in Mel Gibson's film The Passion of The Christ. In the film the passion of Christ was almost entirely limited to his death. There was no understanding that his death was the consequence and fulfillment of the passion of his life.

To Read the entire article, click here: Jesus Lived

By: Meredith Jordan

...One letter at a time, interspersed with occasional visits in situ, the cowboy and the therapist have forged a friendship few men and women have. A friendship with deep love at its core, good courage to speak the truth, and the determination to listen well to another whose life experience is at once unique, even foreign, yet universally understood when received by the heart.

Once, I would have been reluctant to risk a conversation with men who were so different from me. When Jim extended his heart, we both became the grateful recipients of our own efforts to find a friend where we might not otherwise have looked. That is, of course, the happiest lesson of all, to find a beloved friend where we might not have looked for one, or perhaps even turned away from a potential companion lying in wait...

It is the high calling of prophets, artists, and teachers to help us see things more clearly and thereby to live more wisely and happily. For well more than half a century Lloyd Geering has combined these roles by enabling people the world over to see where they stand in the slowly unfolding process of human self-discovery.   

Such tutelage is never easy, for like children we are loath to give up our familiar toys until someone requires or persuades us to do so. Besides, the myriad events that comprise the broad sweep of global history are not easily arranged into understandable patterns. Engrossed by the trees that comprise our daily experience, we tend to ignore the forest that they are but a part of.

It has been said, for instance, that the driving economic engine of slavery so permeated first-century Greco-Roman culture that even religious visionaries paid little explicit attention to its inherent moral depravity. A noted scholar recently suggested that the dynamic force behind our global culture - capitalism - is a similar phenomenon.   However arguable that second hypothesis may be, it is certain that Lloyd Geering is correct  in pointing out something we often overlook: that secularism is both a growing force in society worldwide and the dominant feature of western culture  (even including the bastion of reactionary theology known as the United  States.)