Currents of Faith: Open and Unfolding Reflections

We all want power. We should not be ashamed of that. Jesus was very powerful, and so were Socrates and Buddha. The question is, what kind of power? Do we want the power to control and limit others, even to injure or kill them? That is not the power embodied in Jesus, Socrates, or Buddha. Their power was the power to inspire, to persuade, to enable, to empower, to liberate to wider horizons, to open minds to the truth, in short, to lead into authentic life. That power is divine. It is the power God exercises in each of us all the time. It is the kind of power God gives us. It is the kind of power of which no one can have too much."

I learned about a significant part of my past in a counseling office. Dr. Paul King was my first psychotherapist at the Michigan State University Student Counseling Center. I was learning to counsel by experiencing counseling from the other side of the desk. During this time period we were talking about my fears and my guilt. Frequently as I spoke I would feel a strong tightening feeling surging upward into my neck then my head would shake rapidly back and forth uncontrollably. This was truly puzzling and disturbing. On one such occasion a flood of memories rushed into my awareness. I re-lived myself as an eight year old boy sitting on the basement steps, horrified, and clinging to my mother. I experienced moments of my past which had been repressed for years, too overwhelming and intense for me to bear.

by Pat Patterson

I have a deep sense of sorrow and depression.  Our country is, I believe, in a period of profound criminality and loss.  It is an era marked by war, murder, and the unleashing of violence in Iraq and Afghanistan; increasing control and exploitation by corporations in the global economy resulting in bourgeoning poverty; denial of devastating assaults on the environment; and erosion of constitutional, civil, and human rights.  The escalation of destruction on every side gives me a sense of despair, and I wonder if redemption is possible.

We drove through the gate into the school yard on that cold New Year’s Day of 1944. All our possessions were loaded into a pickup truck and our 1934 Chevrolet sedan. On our left was a small white building with windows across the side and wooden steps leading to a doorway. On the right was a tiny white frame house with a pile of coal near the door. Farther ahead were two out houses and a fenced corral. Two small trees graced the property. The school yard was surrounded by open fields, this time of year brown with skiffs of white from the most recent snow. Open space greeted our eyes in all directions leading to the majestic Sawtooth mountains in the distance. Our forty mile trip had brought us to Roseworth.

It was a day in May, 1960 and we were now living in Pullman, Washington. I was in my first year as a faculty member of WSU and approaching my twenty-seventh birthday. As a staff counselor my office was in a remodeled barn, which explains why the offices were on the third floor and the restrooms inconveniently located on the second floor. It was a normal morning of counseling and I had quickly walked downstairs to “prepare for my next appointment,” our euphemism for saying, “I am going to the restroom.”

God is an integral part of the center of creativity and it is here that I wish to focus. I wrote the story of God’s role in the motorcycle accident twenty years ago to illustrate God’s intimate and persuasive presence. I have deepened and enlarged my vision of God since then, first in a book, Eight Paths to Forgiveness, and more recently in a sermon I offered at Trinity United Methodist Church in East Wenatchee. This enriched vision follows.

I will now relate what I learned as I read that book years ago in preaching class, a book which still resides on my bookshelf bearing within it all the underlining in red ink. I cherish it because it was my source of hope which kept the original light bulb burning. There would be many more books read and presentations heard to bring me to the present.

I did find a job in southern California. I was to be an assistant minister at the West Covina Methodist Church, located some twenty miles from the school of theology. I would devote thirty hours a week calling on families and cultivating new members. I would join an impressive staff: senior minister, Rev. Miles Acker, minister of Christian education, Rev. Max Graham and Paul Biering, another beginning seminarian from the Northwest. The salary was slightly over half of what I was earning as a faculty member, but it included a pleasant parsonage several blocks from the church on Cherrywood Street. I was content. I was where I wanted to be.

I was the only graduate of Buhl High School to enter Idaho State College, indeed, one of a handful of young men who even went to college. So I enter alone and scared! There I was a sixteen year old walking from Ferris Hall, the freshman dorm, to classrooms around the campus wearing one of my home-made polka dot short sleeved shirts–green, yellow, or blue– tucked into my white cord trousers with rolled up cuffs. The Kid had arrived!

I was born during the Great Depression in the community of Twin Falls in Southern Idaho, surrounded by Harrys, my father, older brother, and uncle. Some would add my younger brother also, who was named Harold. Earlier I had been accustomed to saying that I was the middle of three boys until I remembered that there had been an earlier stillborn infant whose gravesite bears the simple name, Baby Brizee.

This is a story of a theology and a life and how they came together. The theology is process relational theology. It is a personal story told as clearly as I can remember.

Christmas is the season during which the whole church celebrates the theme that is most central to process theology: God’s incarnation. That God is present in us and in the world, working for our healing and growth, our direction and our comfort, our reconciliation and our redemption, is our message. The church historically has been somewhat ambivalent about how fully to affirm God’s presence in the world, sometimes limiting it to Jesus or to the church. It is to Jesus and the church, and the understanding of God that these gave us, that we owe our awareness of God’s immanence. Also in Jesus we see a distinctive, perhaps even unique, working of that presence. But the God we know through Jesus is always with us and in us whether we recognize that presence or not. We discern it and celebrate it in all people, indeed, in all living things. The awareness of God’s immanence, aided by the church’s teaching of incarnation, enables us to respond to God’s call more fully. Our faith enables God’s enlivening presence to work more strongly within us. Our understanding of incarnation strengthens our respect for all creatures, and especially for all people. The story of Jesus’ birth in a stable checks any tendency to think that God’s presence in the world supports the structures of authority and prestige than humans construct. God is present in the CEOs of great corporations. But we are called to attend in particular to God’s presence in beggars and prostitutes and lepers. ~ John B. Cobb, Jr