ken wilson online

Just getting back from the arctic with various luminaries and a week’s worth of memories to unpack with family and friends. On day five we saw a rare sight at close range: three polar bears on the sea ice after taking a seal for food, with the arctic ivory gull flying around. It was a stunning sight. And a sight that is itself at risk because the ice is melting at a higher rate than expected. We sailed through areas normally shut off from the pack ice, but that’s all changing and it’s the reason polar bears have been placed on the endangered species list. Throughout the trip, I was meditating on Genesis, chapter one: the days of creation.
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There’s a biblical category they don’t tell you about in many seminaries: the category of the moral dilemma. There are moral dilemmas as surely as there are moral certainties. There are situations through which the way forward is not clear, just as surely as there are situations through which the way forward is is indicated with flashing lights, blaring horns, and a helicopter hovering above to draw your attention. Thankfully, the latter, in the realm of moral choices, exceeds the former, but the former exists. King David, for example–read the account of his life and some of the choices he faced, his heart being after God’s heart and all. How after serving for a time, he knew it wasn’t for him to build the temple because he had blood on his hands, and not just Uriah’s. Take Abraham, walking with his son Isaac to Mount Moriah–did what he learn about moral dilemmas in seminary prepare him for the one he was walking into? Can you even read that story without understanding that its dramatic impact makes no sense without the category of moral dilemma?
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This is one of those posts where I’m working something out, in this case trying to come to grips with a niggling annoyance that keeps coming up.  Pops up like a prairie dog and then down in the hole again, then up again, then down again.  Now you see it, now you don’t.  What was that?  Fear, but of  a particular sort.  Fear with a religious or pious bent.  It’s not that bracing fear that wakes you up either, a fear that clarifies and  sharpens focus. Like Isaiah in the temple fear or whatever the fear is that is the beginning of wisdom.  This is more like an anxious fear, a whining kind of dread that won’t look you straight in the eye.  It’s a worrying nervous sort of fear.
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One of the reasons you don’t pray more has nothing to do with your dedication to God or your capacity for self discipline or your forgetfulness in matters spiritual or your busy life. It has to do with your need to learn how to calm your praying brain. Too often you close your eyes to pray and it’s an unpleasant experience. You become more aware of your underlying anxiety. You become more subject to your grinding thoughts. You put up with it as long as you can, then open your eyes and move on to the next distraction. There are ways to calm yourself. Thankfully many ways. Here’s one: a way to present your embodied self to God, and it goes like this….
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Time arrived with this cover copy a while back: How to Win the War on Global Warming. Shall we confront a brutal fact in evangelical perspective? The thoughtful person on the outside of American Christianity looking in at its dominant form (evangelicalism) has every right to think: Evangelicals have been among the most dismissive of the effort to address global warming. If I am considering the Christian message, I should take this into account. If I support efforts to address climate change now for the sake of the vulnerable poor and future generations, I will be viewed as one of those environmental whackos by evangelicals. Life is stressful enough. I think I’ll get my spirituality on the golf course instead.
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I’ve had helpful conversations lately with some people pushing back on me for various things. Man, can you learn a lot from these conversations, especially when the people in question are mature, thoughtful, and friends. The kind of people you know are fundamentally for you. It’s what I love about being part of a church. A church is such a diverse place when it’s being true to its founder, so you find yourself loving, admiring, respecting people who have a very different take on the world regarding many different issues. So these conversations have helped me to zero in on the critique I have of the religious right. Sometimes in a sermon, I’ll make a passing comment, a sideways reference that impugns the religious right, and for those who identify with the religious right it can be quite annoying. So I’ve been challenged to state more clearly my concern. This post is one such attempt.
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