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12/04/2009 - Over the course of
a complicated life, I've sailed through the doors of an awful lot of churches and temples and mosques. I've been inside
tent revival meetings and group meditations and well ...you get the picture. I'm always a visitor. I don't really
feel at home, but I've almost never felt unwelcome. Actually ... I got caught inside a closed conference of the Divine
Light Mission. Boy, was I unwelcome that day. Mostly, though, I understand the good feeling that accumulates in a room
full of people who have gathered to experience something bigger than themselves, bigger than the sum, even of themselves.
It's still a little bit of a mystery though. Why some people seek it out and why some people can't stand it. John
Updike, often seen as the great poet of modern angst and alienation, said he got hungry for church if he didn't go for
a couple of weeks. “When I haven’t been to church in a couple of Sundays I begin to hunger for it and need to
be there,” he said, standing at a podium in front of the altar, against a backdrop of Byzantine-style mosaics and dressed
in a gray suit befitting one of America’s elder statesmen of letters. “It’s not just the words, the sacraments.
It’s the company of other people, who show up and pledge themselves to an invisible entity.” -- John Updike
49:20 minutes (23.69 MB)
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12/03/2009 - The people, who in
my opinion, were the most confused about today's topic were the Puritans and any other immediate descendants of John Calvin.
Because, according to them, you really couldn't do anything to make God like you any more or any less. Grace was irresistible.
Salvation was unconditional. So theoretically, you could be a total reprobate and still have your soul preserved in heavenly
bliss, while the guy down the street, a veritable Ned Flanders of virtue, got nothing. But that theology didn't really
set people free. It made them anxious. I mean, probably you should act like you're saved, just so people don't go
around saying, based on your cruddy behavior, that you couldn't possibly be saved. It was kind of a neurotic notion of
good works. But all of us struggle with the question of how to be righteous, whether we think God is watching or not.
49:24 minutes (23.72 MB)
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12/02/2009 - So, to get ready
for today's interview for Bishop Peter Rosazza, I've been cramming. Tomas Merton, Thomas Moore, Marcus Borg, Yoda,
you name it. But it's really Merton who seems best able to prepare me for this talk, and he has this lovely passage about
not preferring things to people- that that's how you get in trouble. And today, as I was backing out of the driveway,
this other car came up and kind of leaned on its horn, and I got mad, and I wound up chasing him through the neighborhood,
and right now I'm thinking a lot of good Thomas Merton and I did each other. Really, at that moment, I wasn't even
seeing a human being. I was seeing a Volvo with no human presence connected to it. Sorry about that Mr. Or ma'am. It's
hard to be good. Even when the recipe for being good is that last thing you looked at before you got in the car. It's
hard to be good. How do you do it? Well, if our guest doesn't know the answer, I'm running out of people to
ask.
49:28 minutes (23.75 MB)
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12/01/2009 - So I used to room
with a Jewish guy who played the French horn. And during the Advent season he would add himself to the brass choir at the
local Congregationalist church. He really liked playing those carols. And he got along with the people at the church so well
that inevitably someone would approach him and say, "Mark, we love you. You should join us." And Mark would politely
explain that he liked them too and thought the church was a terrific place and a wonderful community. And he loved playing
the music. But he didn't believe. How could he join if he didn't believe? For him, the music was beautiful in its
own right, and the fact that it was about the birth of Jesus was sort of an ancillary issue. Sometimes you can separate the
music from the message and sometimes you can't. That's what today's show is about and about the fact that
faith, faith of almost any kind, seems almost inseparable from the urge to make music about it.
49:30 minutes (23.77 MB)
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11/30/2009 - So, OK, I don't
pray. Not so much. And I can't really say it's working out for me. But I was up at a conference in late summer at
the Omega Institute and I heard somebody talk about the idea of at least, at the start of every day, thinking a thought that
connects you to something meta - God, the higher power, the quantum field, whatever. And I thought: I could do that. I should
do that. And then I thought, what kind of wuss-bunny weak tea compromise is that? You can't even make a commitment to
pray? To pray hopefully? You have to think a thought that connects you to something meta. Grown a spine, you pathetic bet-hedger.
And then I thought: that's exactly the kind of self-recrimination I am being urged to avoid here at this conference and
in my something-meta-thinking. Oh what a tangled web we weave when we approach something as simple as prayer with a spidery
sideways scuttle.
49:28 minutes
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