Ground of Being

Yesterday my girlfriend and I had one of those rare convergences of a day we were both free of commitments or plans and could spend the entire day together.  And we wanted to do something special as it is rare… our instinct would be to go someplace like the zoo, lake, etc… but the weather being in the high 90’s really precludes this.  So Tamra had the excellent idea of going around and doing the three daily offices and compline in different places.

And that’s exactly we did. We did morning prayers at home, but then went into the city and did noon prayers in a small garden at the Episcopal cathedral which was cool and green in the shade.  After that, we tracked down a local restaurant neither of us had ever been to and had lunch, and then headed on.

We did evening prayers walking through a small forest, she played guitar and I conducted the liturgy.  It was odd and certainly ‘hippy-esque’ but really beautiful and wonderful.  But it gets better.

For compline, we drove out to where she normally works at a summer camp.  The camp was deserted this week, so we were all alone in the middle of nowhere.  We walked down to the lake onto a distance dock and sat in the middle of the lake, surrounded by water and forest and a crystal clear night sky and did the compline service, with more music and just at awe of the beauty of it all.

It was such a wonderful idea, and such a wonderful day.  I’d recommend it to everyone.

As I indicated in the update to the last post, this thing took on a life of its own and we’re going to base this around the new website EmergentOutliers.com.  Don’t worry, you don’t have to be one of those wacky Emergents to be a part of it!

But do please head over and let us know when you would like to have our book club meetings and if you can’t participate in a video chat option so we can work out the best way to handle this.  If you’d like to know a bit more about the book we’ll be reading you can check out this page we put together!  Thanks!

UPDATE: We’ve moved this over to EmergentOutliers.com.  Please head there and let us know what times are good for you and we’ll work something out!

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Due to what can only be described as an enormous amount of jealousy regarding Peter Rollins’ Theology Reading group – Blake Huggins and I have been talking about putting together an online reading group that will focus on theology from interesting fellows such as Zizek, etc. but we were thinking of starting a bit easier with John Caputo.

But first, we were thinking of doing this via video chat – something like TokBox.com and perhaps even seeing about using the embedded TokBox on the Emergent Village site this way we can really talk to each other regarding the text.

This would be welcome to all, Emergent and non-Emergent, and while I imagine there will be an Emergent-ish and Postmodern focus I doubt it will be sufficient to be a deal breaker for those not interested.

So our first book, unless we hear better suggestions, will be John Caputo’s On Religion which is  a short but challenging little book by one of America’s leading theologians.  This is a small book, less than a 150 pages, and we were thinking we’d read half and then meet in about two weeks.  This would put us around mid-July so once we know who wants to be involved we can workout time/date.

Camus gets it right….

There is in this world beauty and there are the humiliated, and we must strive, hard as it is, not to be unfaithful, neither to the one nor the other.

(he very often does)

I’m pretty sure I’ve talked about this before… I generally subscribe to the authoritarian vs. questing religious types, but they are imperfect.  Authoritarian scales up well (it depicts both individual and community behaviors) but questing really doesn’t – it retains and individualistic bias.  But I think Brian McLaren, in describing what is going on in Iran and the ‘two Islams’ there explains it very well.

I’ve been saying for several years that I think there are two kinds of Christianity, along with two kinds of Islam, Judaism, and every other religion and non-religion too: one of social control and one of social transformation … one to hold people down, one to lift them up … one an opiate to pacify people into compliance, the other a stimulant to empower people to imagine a better world, a better future, a better life … giving them the courage to live in peaceful defiance of violent, corrupt, and greedy power-that-be. – Iran… Two Kinds of Islam and Two Kinds of Religion in General | Brian McLaren

What do you think?