Pub Theology 10/15/14 -- Willie and wisdom from unexpected sources
Peter Trumbore • October 14, 2024
A couple of weeks ago we had a conversation about wisdom, what it is, where it comes from, whether we consider ourselves wise, and so on. I was thinking about this when I ran across an article about a book country music legend Willie Nelson wrote nearly 2o years ago. Nelson, now 91, wrote The Tao of Willie: A Guide to the Happiness in Your Heart, when he was a young man of 72. As you can guess from the title of book, Nelson's philosophy and outlook owe a lot to Eastern religious traditions.
According to the article I ran across (you can read it by clicking on this link), Nelson, who was raised in Protestant churches in Abbott, Texas, began to suspect that the songs he was writing as a teenager, about experiences and heartbreaks that he was too young to know firsthand, might have been the consequence of past-life experiences. He came to the conclusion that he had led many past lives. “I haven’t run into anything I haven’t seen or heard before. I also feel as if I can put myself in the place of just about everyone I see, and that gives me the feeling I’ve been in their shoes before.”
Beyond his belief in reincarnation, Nelson also came to think of the world's many religions as "a thousand paths to a single destination,” with the goal of bringing us closer to the divine. In short, Nelson has a lot of views that are consistent with some of what we've talked about in our PubTheo conversations over the last 11 years. So we're going to dive a little bit deeper into some of the nuggets of wisdom that Nelson shares in his book, and see what we have to say about them. The following is taken from Nelson's book and borrowed from the article mentioned above:
- The easiest mistake on earth is to forget to appreciate what you have right now. Happiness exists at just one time. And that time is now. You can be happy about how yesterday turned out, but you can’t be happy yesterday. You can only be happy today, this hour, this minute … now.
- Slow down. Not just your body but your mind. God is all around us, but it takes stillness to know his message.
- Breathing is its own form of meditation. Breathe from your chest; breathe from your gut; breathe from your heels. Breathing can calm you and put you in touch with your own spirit. It can deepen your contact with the world around you. If you concentrate and listen to your own breathing, what you will hear is the sound of God.
- As soon as you admit to yourself that everything good you do comes back to you twenty times over, then your life will change in incredible ways. Doing things because they’re the right thing to do—and not for some tangible gain—will ultimately reward you in better ways than money, power, or fame.
- Connections to those around you, to the world around us all, and to the universe that stretches into the great beyond are things that define us.
- The older I get, the more I realize it’s never too early to start appreciating the people in your life. If you love your family, it’s essential that you tell them. If you can make someone feel better with just a few words, why wouldn’t you use them?
- Love is what I live on. Love is what keeps me going. When in doubt, I try to remind myself that the path to God is paved with love.
Join us at Casa Real in downtown Oxford on Tuesday, Oct. 15 at 7pm as we consider the wisdom of Willie Nelson. Our discussion will start there and then we'll see where else it wanders.
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 and 10:00 a.m. We warmly welcome those who cannot attend in person to join us via our live stream.
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 and 10:00 a.m. We warmly welcome those who cannot attend in person to join us via our live stream.
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 and 10:00 a.m. We warmly welcome those who cannot attend in person to join us via our live stream.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.