Where would you like to go from here?

Sheelah, thank you for all your comments, on my last post, and in your many other responses. You’ve taken the time to reflect on what I wrote. Your persistence and counsel have helped me reach this ending point and have helped me to grow in patience and understanding.

My two and a half year experience here…[Read more]

Discuss the different ways goodness and badness is achieved according to sacrifice and according to mercy.

Goodness According to Sacrifice works through beliefs and actions the believer employs to shield him or her from the effects of God’s violent response to human sin. Death reflects the contamination of human failure to find perfect cover f…[Read more]

In the Discussion Forum of this unit, share ways in which you have noticed the content, questions or insights from the previous session showing up in your life.

What have I been noticing? I am much more patient than I was. Recognizing the privilege of spending time with another person, I argue less. If I must argue a point, I say my piece and…[Read more]

In the Discussion Forum for this module, join the conversation around – “The approach in Paul’s letters is not ‘do X, and then you will become Y,’ but rather, ‘Because you are finding yourself X, so do Y.’ ”
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Rules that say Do X to become Y, until I took this cou…[Read more]

In the Discussion Forum for this module, join the conversation around these questions: Describe someone who has been a mentor in your life. What about this person inspired you? What qualities or abilities of your mentor did you try to incorporate into your life? How did those qualities or abilities express themselves in your life?

When April…[Read more]

In the Discussion Forum of this unit, share ways in which you have noticed the content, questions or insights from the previous session showing up in your lives.

Sheelah, thank you for your comments and for sharing James’s quotation regarding the ‘grandeur of creation erupting through subtle changes in the relationships among ordinary peo…[Read more]

What grandeur is made possible by finding ourselves part of a real family, one that forms its unity around the presence of the Forgiving Victim?

Jesus, the Forgiving Victim, opens up each one of us to the grandeur of discovering our true selves as created daughters and sons of God. We are not the false selves, the patterns of desire, that the…[Read more]

4.4.8b-The grandeur in the everyday: Listen and Share — Please share what Mary, Jesus’ mother, has meant to you and your faith journey. Has your understanding of Mary changed in response to this module? In what way?

I think of Mary playing only a slight role in the growth and change of my faith journey. James describes Mary as one who “… pat…[Read more]

What once was a safety line or a lifeline, can, under new circumstances, bring harm, not security, into one’s life. For example, unorthodox eating patterns that may have been healthy as an adolescent when carried unaltered into later life may be related to obesity or bulimia. When ‘bad habit’ patterns first come together, they meet some real or…[Read more]

4.8 The grandeur of the everyday: Remembering ourselves
How do our memories remind us of who we are?

We were fishing for halibut on my friend John’s boat in Kodiak Island’s Roslyn Bay on the Gulf of Alaska one breezy June 1973 day. Our long-lines had been soaking on the seabed for a couple of hours, so it was time for us to reel them in. We h…[Read more]

In the Discussion Forum of this unit, share ways in which you have noticed the content, questions or insights from the previous session showing up in your lives.

Peaceful Listening, acceptance of people and situations that would have been bothersome before my time studying here come to mind as Forgiving Victim insights ‘showing up’ in my life mor…[Read more]

Thank you, Sheelah, for taking the time to respond to my posts! I’m glad the Raven Foundation followed through to repair the JFV website’s technical issues. I will send Maura a thank you email.

You wrote about James’s “vastly superior force moving [me] towards them.” Often now, this dynamic is quite apparent to me – both in private and in social…[Read more]

In what ways might God still be active in Creation? How might God involve you in the ongoing work of Creation?

While I don’t know exactly how God might “… still be active in Creation,” I am free to “taste and see” bit.ly/taste_see God’s Creation knowing that Jesus said I am so much a part of God’s Creation that even the (diminishing…[Read more]

“James says that in Luke’s account of the Passion, we see Jesus, the definitive Adam, getting right what the first Adam got wrong. What was it that Adam got wrong? What is Jesus getting right? How does it feel to discover that the Creator loves you that much?”

The Discussion questions for this lesson made sense but also engendered feelings of c…[Read more]

“God isn’t finished with me yet!” This phrase implies that God and I are separate and that God has some goal or end-state in mind for me. “… isn’t finished with me” suggests “failures and imperfections,” so also there must be successes and perfection. Apparently, both God and I are working on me. What separates us? I can fail, or succeed. What i…[Read more]

In the last Unit, “A Little Family Upheaval,” James introduced the concept of “secondariness.” Our lives rest in and are dependent upon God who is always infinitely loving and forgiving.

Arthur Koestler, in his 1967 book ‘The Ghost in the Machine,’ coined the word: holon, which I think is related to James’s notion of “secondariness.” <htt…[Read more]

What does the world look like through the eyes of one who lives on the outer margins of society? From a distant vantage point, as if on a branch high up in a tree, I watch InvisiblePeople.tv chronicle the lives of many on the ground who are homeless, living on the streets.

Who is my neighbor? Riley’s InvisiblePeople.tv witness from her place on…[Read more]

I like to watch episodes of the television series ‘Blue Bloods’ on Netflix. Blue Bloods http://bit.ly/2k6YaiU chronicles New York City police work through the lens of the Reagan family. Frank, the father, is the Commissioner of Police. Son Danny is a detective. Daughter Erin works as an Assistant District Attorney. Youngest son Jamie is a cop on…[Read more]

4.6 A little family upheaval: Just draw!
This module focuses on the new understanding of sin and forgiveness made possible by what Jesus has been doing in our midst.
Before we jump into that discussion, let’s think about the phrase used by children in rebellion against parental authority: “You’re not the boss of me!” That phrase often capture…[Read more]

I wrote about rules, and humor, and faithful iteration in my last post. My entire career as an IRS Revenue Agent was about rules, about rule interpretation, and about who gets the final word on a revenue ruling’s meaning in particular circumstances.

When I think of ‘rules of devotion’ for personal faith, I know they are different from Church rul…[Read more]