Presby-Musings

I was reading today about an interesting aspect of human development that resonated with me on a spiritual level, so I thought I'd share.  When we are very small, we want to have a measure of independence from our parents or guardians. We want to stretch the limits of how far away we will wander from them in a crowd, at a park, or a store, but we don't actually want to be too far  away.   As children, we want what is called object constancy , which is to say that we want to maintain our connection with our parent or guardian even as we wander a bit.  When we can still see them, or know that they are there--we feel safe.  This is why children will often rush back and forth from playing on a playground to the patient parent, who is sitting nearby on a bench.  They just want to be reassured the parent is still there before returning to play.  There is a lesson here for those of us who struggle sometimes to know that God is with us in our s...

One of my favorite lines from J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings  is actually from a short poem that appears a couple of times in the trilogy.  The poem, entitled "All That is Gold Does Not Glitter," reads, "All that is gold does not glitter/ Not all those who wander are lost; "   It's the last bit of that first line that resonates with me.   I did a fair bit of wandering when I was young.  I stopped really believing in God (at least the God I thought I knew) by the time I was fifteen.  By the time I graduated from high school, I had essentially rejected most of what I read in the Bible.   Over the next few years, I completely walked away from the Church, from God, from my Christian upbringing.  At some point, however, I came to a place where I had to confront reality, to take a long, hard look in the mirror, and I didn't like the person who stared back at me.  My journey back to the Way of Jesus didn't happen overnight.   Whe...

When I was growing up in the non liturgical, "low" church Baptist churches we frequented, the season of Advent was not something we celebrated... or discussed... or had ever heard of before.  It was not part of our language.  I suppose this was the case because the powers-that-be in the fundamentalist churches I attended thought things like "advent" and "candles" were too "Catholic" for "church."  I put a lot of things in quotes just then. And while most church-going folk probably won't give a second thought to Advent or it's meaning, I think that it's making a bit of a comeback outside the church.  For example, I just bought a Star Wars Lego Advent calendar at Target, which is the retail chain famous for encouraging it's employees say "Happy Holidays" instead of " Merry Christmas ." Boom.  There are undoubtedly some within the sound of my voice (or key strokes) who might be saying at thi...