Tag: christianity

Next time, let’s put the true Christ back into Christmas

jembendell

How was your Christmas? I had a lovely day walking the dog and recording a video of the amount of colourful trash “decorating” some of the trees here in Indonesia. We are in a majority Muslim country, which happily celebrates Christmas. That might be something to tell any grumpy neighbours who fear a Muslim “invasion” of where you live. Maybe they told you it’s time to put Christ back into Christmas, exhibiting a new religiosity with few prior symptoms (such as care for the poor or foreign). Reflecting on such declarations of the need to remember Jesus, this year I decided they have a point. Here’s why… 

Every December, as the tills jingle and the Christmas songs play, we are invited to celebrate the birth of a man who asked us to stop worshipping money and start paying attention to what was going on inside our own hearts. Naturally, we mark this by maxing out our credit cards as we imagine what random stuff might pass as thoughtful presents. But if we are to be serious about “putting Christ back into Christmas,” we could begin by putting the actual Christ back into view.

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Reclaiming “Kyrie Eleison” this Christmas

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by chiyo hiraoka

From a plea for pardon to an invitation to heal within a universe of unconditional love. 

Across centuries of liturgy, the solemn chant “Kyrie Eleison”, often translated as “Lord, have mercy,” has echoed through churches and cathedrals. It is one of the most recited phrases by congregations of Christians around the world, and can convey the idea that believers are penitent persons before an omnipotent judge. I heard it regularly during my childhood, in Anglican, Catholic and Evangelical contexts. After I stopped going to church, for decades I didn’t think about the meaning of the phrase. Not until I was in a field in Thailand, with two hundred people from different faiths, as we sang and moved in prayer. That set me on a journey into the meaning of the phrase “Kyrie Eleison”, and a discovery about the loss of Jesus’s original message, as quoted in the Gospels. This realisation is opening up the possibility to reconnect with my roots in a new way, through a Christianity more mystical than the institutions of religion convey. 

To understand the true meaning of the phrase “Kyrie Eleison”, it helps to journey back before the Gospels. It had been a common Greek plea, where “Kyrie” invoked a divine power. They had many to consider, from Asclepius to Zeus. The word “eleison” had a poetic meaning, because it was not only the verb “to forgive”. Our dance leader in Thailand explained it sounded similar to ‘elaion’, which meant oil. In ancient Greece, as in modern times, oils were used for various forms of healing, including wounds and aches. Thus, “eleison” meant something other than a cry for forgiveness from a sinning or guilty person. Instead, it was a plea, or an invitation, to “anoint me, soothe me, and heal me.” It is important to remember that the worldview at the time, across many cultures, regarded illness as a symptom of spiritual or relational disorder, rather than a random physical misfortune. To cry out “Kyrie Eleison” was to ask the divine to restore a person’s wholeness.  

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Christianity and Hope – when the Pope does hopium, what do the mystics do?

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For anyone who has grown up in a Christian country, the past week can be a time for reflection on values and purpose. It can be a moment where we find calm away from the rush of our normal lives and re-assess. Any religious festival can provide us with that opportunity, if we are open to that. On religious occasions like Christmas and Easter, people exposed to Western media will read or hear about what The Pope says about the world. So that’s why I heard the Pope’s new message on hope in difficult times. My discomfort about his message meant I shared some thoughts on social media, which generated feedback and dialogue. Rather than repeating myself in comments on those threads, I thought I’d write a post about ‘Christianity and Hope’ on my blog… so here goes.

The Pope’s message seemed to be asking us all to have hope in a better tomorrow. But he went much further than that, when claiming that hope for a materially better situation in the world is a requirement and concomitant with being loving towards others. He wrote:

“Those who love, even if they find themselves in uncertain situations, always view the world with a gentle gaze of hope.”

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Deep Spirituality in an Era of Collapse

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Reverend Stephen G Wright

[This essay is available as an audio, narrated by Jem Bendell]

As a follower of the contemplative-mystic Way for many decades, and written about it, guided others in it, even set up a School to ‘teach’ it, in recent years I’ve taken the idea and community of Deep Adaptation into deep discernment – to consider its impact upon my spiritual life and that of others. The unfolding ecological disaster, and its implications for our societies, is something I observe and experience from that contemplative-mystic approach to life. I have come to believe that deep adaptation will be spiritual or there will be no deep adaptation at all. By which, I mean that there will be no softening of the collapse of societies, for people or wider nature, unless more of us discover and prioritise our own spiritual response to this predicament. That is not a summons to fluffy feel-good spiritual experiences to keep the horrors at bay. It is a summons to fierce and profound inquiry, a deep plunge into the joypain of existence, and a wholly (holy!) different perspective on reality and what it is to be human in that reality. Such a Way lifts (or sinks) us into an utterly different relationship and perception of life; of self and that which is beyond the self. Without that we shall persist in limited perceptions of what it is to be human and part of all of life. Without it we would continue deploying our good intentions and rearranging bits and pieces of ordinary reality without fundamentally changing our relationship to that reality.

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