Pub Theology 5/14/24 — Getting stuck and unstuck

Pete Trumbore • May 13, 2024

“Hallo, are you stuck?” That’s the question Rabbit poses to Winnie-the-Pooh when he finds the plump bear wedged solidly in his front door following a visit that featured a little too much honey from Rabbit’s larder. Pooh, of course, first denies that he is in fact stuck. “‘N-no,’ said Pooh carelessly. ‘Just resting and thinking and humming to myself’.” But both he and Rabbit know the truth. Pooh is well and truly stuck, and there’s not much he can do about it.

I was thinking about this the other day when confronted with a really big task but no clear (at least to me) way to dive into it. Like Pooh, I felt stuck. Like Pooh, there was no going back, but I also saw no easy way forward. In my head I had become, in Pooh’s words, “a Wedged Bear in Great Tightness.”

So, with a nod of appreciation to A.A. Milne, the author of “Winnie the Pooh,” we’re going to talk about both getting stuck, and getting unstuck, in our conversation this week.

Have there been times in your life when you’ve felt stuck? What was that like, and what do you think was the cause? Was it a result of something you did or choices you made? For example, Pooh get’s stuck in Rabbit’s front door because he ate too much of his host’s honey during an unexpected visit. Pooh’s predicament is of his own making, as Rabbit points out: “It all comes,” said Rabbit sternly, “of eating too much. I thought at the time,” said Rabbit, “only I didn’t like to say anything,” said Rabbit, “that one of us was eating too much,” said Rabbit, “and I knew if wasn’t me,” he said.

And when you’ve found yourself stuck, in whatever circumstance or whatever that means to you, how have you managed to free yourself from that condition? How do you get your stuck self unstuck? Pooh himself could see no solution. But with time (a full week of no meals) and the help of some friends, (Christopher Robin, Rabbit, and all Rabbit’s friends and relations) Pooh managed to get out of the hole and on with the rest of his adventures. Such as they were.

We’re going to talk about getting stuck, being stuck, and how we get out of it in our discussion this week. Join us for the conversation this Tuesday, May 14, starting at 7pm at Casa Real in downtown Oxford.

By Andrew Guffey June 22, 2025
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 service is at 9:30 a.m.. We warmly welcome those who cannot attend in person to join us via our live stream.
By Andrew Guffey June 15, 2025
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 service is at 9:30 a.m.. We warmly welcome those who cannot attend in person to join us via our live stream.
By Andrew Guffey June 8, 2025
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. 
By Peter Trumbore June 3, 2025
Well, we've come to that time of year again. Now that June is here, your hard-working team here at PubTheo is taking a break from the rigors of figuring out what to talk about week after week. So we will be on our annual summer break until we start back up again in September. We'll see you on the cusp of fall. In the meantime, some of us are going to go fishing.
By Peter Trumbore May 27, 2025
Some seven years back, researchers at NYU and Johns Hopkins University launched a study in which they enlisted some two dozen religious leaders from a variety of traditions -- priests, pastors, rabbis, Zen Buddhist monks, Islamic prayer leaders -- to take part in a research project exploring psychedelics and sacred experience. The experiment was intended to assess whether a transcendental experience makes the leaders more effective and confident in their work and how it alters their religious thinking. You can read about the setup of the study in this article from The Guardian . It turns out that the study produced some really interesting results. A story published a few weeks ago in The New Yorker tells the tale. Unfortunately that article is locked behind a paywall, but the author, Michael Pollan (who has written extensively about the use of psychedelics and their effects), however, summarized some of what the study found in this interview . Pollan writes that the participants described their regarded their mushroom-induced trips as authentic mystical experiences, not just a drug experience. For some, the experience was truly transformative. One of the surprising findings that Pollan remarked upon was that "their experiences were not always consistent with the imagery or symbolism of their own faiths. One Christian theologian said God was like a Jewish mother. In fact, most of the people I interviewed felt that the divine they encountered was feminine. That blew their minds; and it blew mine, too. ... Just about everybody had an encounter with the divine, and for the most part it was a feminine, nurturing, sweet presence. We have such a patriarchal understanding of religion, and most stereotypes of God are gendered masculine. So I think it’s ironic, and somewhat humorous, that under the influence of psychedelics God turns out to be more female than male." Nearly all of the participants rated their first experience with psilocybin as among the top five most spiritually significant events of their lives. Among participants who had two sessions, the researchers found that a striking number—seventy-nine per cent—reported that the experience had enriched their prayer, their effectiveness in their vocation, and their sense of the sacred in daily life. It turns out that there is a long history of people trying to trace a connection between the early Christian church's eucharistic practice and psychedelic substances, though scholars have their doubts. This article from The Christian Century goes into some of that fascinating story. For our conversation this evening, we're going to talk about psychedelics and spirituality. Do you have experience with this? If so, what was your experience like? If not, would you try it? Do you feel that a spiritual experience augmented by substances is more or less valid than other spiritual experiences? The discussion starts at 7pm tonight, May 27, at Casa Real in downtown Oxford.
By Andrew Guffey May 25, 2025
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. 
By Andrew Guffey May 18, 2025
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. 
By Peter Trumbore May 12, 2025
Way back in January 1959, C.S. Lewis published an article in The Atlantic Monthly in which the author and Christian apologist explores the question of the efficacy of prayer. In short, Does prayer work? But Lewis, ever one to make us want to think, says that's the wrong question, as understandable a question as it might be. "For up till now we have been tackling the whole question in the wrong way and on the wrong level. The very question “Does prayer work?” puts us in the wrong frame of mind from the outset. “Work”: as if it were magic, or a machine — something that functions automatically." This isn't to say that petitionary prayer, i.e. asking God for things, is never appropriate, Lewis says. Only that's a small part of what it means to pray. So what does it mean our prayers don't get answered? For Lewis, that's not the right question. One reason for that has to do with being created with free will by an omnipotent God, who could do whatever we ask if God wanted to. But that's not the point: "For He seems to do nothing of Himself which He can possibly delegate to His creatures. He commands us to do slowly and blunderingly what He could do perfectly and in the twinkling of an eye. He allows us to neglect what He would have us do, or to fail. Perhaps we do not fully realize the problem, so to call it, of enabling finite free wills to coexist with Omnipotence. It seems to involve at every moment almost a sort of divine abdication. We are not mere recipients or spectators. We are either privileged to share in the game or compelled to collaborate in the work." If the question Does prayer work is the wrong question, then what's the right one? If your prayers are answered, does that mean you are special in God's eyes? And if they're not, does that mean God has forsaken you? We'll talk all about it in our conversation tomorrow evening, Tuesday May 13. Join us for the discussion starting at 7pm at Casa Real in downtown Oxford.
By Andrew Guffey May 11, 2025
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. 
By Andrew Guffey May 4, 2025
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. 
More Posts