One of the new books we’ve been working on here at Anamchara is A Handbook of Mysticism, a book of alphabetical entries that cover the gamut of mystics from all faiths, as well as the vocabulary they use. The book starts with an entry on Abhishiktananda (Henri Le Saux), a twentieth-century Benedictine priest who ended his life as a Hindu hermit in India. He saw himself as a Hindu Christian, a mystic whose deepest, most genuine experiences of Christ had come to him through the Hindu scriptures and practices.
I was recently telling my daughter (the Yale Divinity student, who knows far more than me!) about Abhishiktananda, and she voiced her discomfort with Christians who try to lay claim to other faiths, who seem to say, for instance, that Hinduism is somehow “really Christianity,” whether it knows it or not. By doing so, she indicated, Christians diminish the...
Soul Friends
Soul Friends
It’s been busy in the Anamchara/Harding House world. I spend most of my time these days working to do the countless mundane chores necessary to get books to the printers, complete with indexes and running heads, CIP data and back-cover copy, and hopefully, a minimum of typos or any other errors. This is not the most creative of times in the book-making process, nor is it the least stress-free, but I remind myself that books go out into the world and touch real people. They deserve my best effort till the end.
With two children graduating this year, one from college and one from high school, I am pondering the process of letting go—and wondering what are the connections that remain once you’ve made that act of surrender.
Last night, out of the blue, an old student of mine called me on the phone, someone I taught in a former professional life. My...
In Julie Clawson's April 19 blog, she writes about the Emerging Church as a place of community:
Coming face to face with the diversity in our unity might not imply immediate acceptance or respect or understanding, but it pushes us outside of ourselves. Seeing a slightly clearer picture of the world as it is forces us to acknowledge and often wrestle with what we see.
Call it interconnectedness, or globalization, or simply awareness of our neighbor, the church is emerging or perhaps converging upon itself. What gives me hope when I consider what is emerging in the church is that the conversation pushes us into this converging community. And when we are in community, when we start to actually know our neighbors, is when we can start to live out the call to love our...
(from Contemplative Outreach)
I welcome everything that comes to me in this moment
because I know it is for my healing.
I welcome all thoughts, feelings, emotions, persons, situations,
and conditions.
I let go of my desire for security.
I let go of my desire for approval.
I let go of my desire for control.
I let go of my desire to change any situation, condition, person,
or myself.
I open to the love and presence of God and His healing action
and grace within.
We've been continuing to think about the term "inclusive spirituality" as it relates to Anamchara Books for several weeks in a row now. As user QuietlyNow pointed out, the word "inclusive" is generally considered to be a "good" thing—but different groups define it differently. Do you think the word "welcome" is also defined differently? What does it mean to you?
Let us know what you think! Sign up for an AnamcharaBooks.com account and start commenting. Click here to register for an AnamcharaBooks.com account and make your thoughts known.
In response to our last question of the week, user QuietlyNow wrote:
Inclusiveness has connotations of welcome and embracing to me, while exclusiveness seems to feel unwelcoming. . . . Groups that I would think of as exclusive argued that they were inclusive because they wanted to welcome different kinds of people. But the difference between what they thought of as being inclusive and what I think was that they wanted different kinds of people to come to them and become like them. I'm not sure it's all that welcoming to tell someone you want to change them to be like you.
I agree that the word welcome seems to me to be inherent in the concept of inclusive spirituality. And as QuietlyNow pointed out, the word doesn’t imply, “Come inside my home so that I can make you just like me!" On the other hand, it also doesn't imply, "Come inside my...
In his blog, Robert Brow, an Anglican priest, answers the question of how he interprets the seemingly exclusive words of Jesus, "No one comes to the father but by me" (John 14:6). He writes:
Before explaining how I understand those words, I have to reject what is often added to this statement. Some evangelists tell us that no one can be saved unless they hear about the death of Christ, believe he died for them, repent, and make a decision to accept Jesus as personal savior. If that was true then we would have to consign to eternal damnation Abraham, newborn children, retarded persons, the ignorant, and all people born into other religions. None of them could make a decision to accept Jesus as personal saviour.
What the text actually says is that every single person who is taken...
O God of our many understandings, we pray that you will…
Bless us with tears – for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women from many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.
Bless us with anger – at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.
Bless us with discomfort – at the easy, simplistic “answers” we’ve preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth, about ourselves and the world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.
Bless us with patience – and the knowledge that none of what ails us will be “fixed” anytime soon....
...
As we continue to meditate on our identity here at Anamchara, we'd appreciate your thoughts on the word "inclusive." In your own mind, do you define inclusiveness as a positive or negative quality? And how does it relate to the life of faith?
Let us know what you think! Sign up for an AnamcharaBooks.com account and start commenting. Click here to register for an AnamcharaBooks.com account and make your thoughts known.
I've been continuing to think about why I feel so strongly that Anamchara needs to be a place for "inclusive spirituality." After all, I identify myself as a follower of Jesus of Nazareth (what is commonly called a Christian, though I sometimes hate to affiliate myself with all that particular word has come to mean). And when I say "I identify myself," I don't mean that lightly or casually: my identity takes its shape from my belief in Jesus, and my sense of life's meaning is firmly rooted in this belief. While I cannot claim that my identification with Jesus unifies my entire life and being into a single, coherent whole, that unity and coherence is my goal, the direction toward which I constantly aim throughout the many meandering paths of my life's journey. So by identifying myself as one thing (a believer in God, specifically and particularly as the Divine was and is revealed in...
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