hvad ef...

Letting Go of Worry

What if we knew for certain that everything we're worried about today will work out fine?

What if . . . we had a guarantee that the problem bothering us would be worked out in the most perfect way, and at the best possible time? Furthermore, what if we knew that three years from now we'd be grateful for that problem, and its solution?

What if . . . we knew that even our worst fear would work out for the best?

What if . . . we had a guarantee that everything that's happening, and has happened, in our life was meant to be, planned just for us, and in our best interest?

What if . . . we had a guarantee that the people we love are experiencing exactly what they need in order to become who they're intended to become? Further, what if we had a guarantee that others can be responsible for themselves, and we don't have to control or take responsibility for them?

What if . . . we knew the future was going to be good, and we would have an abundance of resources and guidance to handle whatever comes our way?

What if . . . we knew everything was okay, and we didn't have to worry about a thing? What would we do then?

We'd be free to let go and enjoy life.

Today, I will know that I don't have to worry about anything. If I do worry, I will do it with the understanding that I am choosing to worry, and it is not necessary.

- From The Language of Letting Go by Melody Beattie

Unitarian universalists

er frjálslynd kirkja hér í Bandaríkjunum og víðar, A religious association of Christian origin that has no official creed and that considers God to be unipersonal, salvation to be granted to the entire human race, and reason and conscience to be the criteria for belief and practice.

Þessi kirkja var einna fyrst til að gefa saman samkynhneigða og hefur gert svo síðan á 6.áratugnum. Sja wikipediu.

Ég hef ekki heimsótt þau en heyri fólk i kringum mig tala um hana og ætla ad kíkja einn daginn. Líst vel á þetta.

Unitarian Universalism (UU) draws from many sources:

• Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life;
• Words and deeds of prophetic women and men which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love;
• Wisdom from the world's religions which inspires us in our ethical and spiritual life;
• Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God's love by loving our neighbors as ourselves;
• Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit.
• Spiritual teachings of earth-centered traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature.

These principles and sources of faith are the backbone of our religious community.

- af heimasidu theirra.

Hvað eiga egg, kanínur og Jesús sameiginlegt?

jú nýtt líf, upprisa, von, vorið.

Merking páskanna:

Easter is a Christian celebration of Christ's rising, but this holiday also has pagan origins. Where did the colored eggs, cute little bunnies, baby chicks, and lilies come from? They are all symbols of rebirth.

Easter falls in the spring, the yearly time of renewal, when the earth renews itself after a long, cold winter. The word Easter comes to us from the Norsemen's Eostur, Eastar, Ostara, and Ostar, and the pagan goddess Eostre, all of which involve the season of the growing sun and new birth. The Easter Bunny arose originally as a symbol of fertility, due to the rapid reproduction habits of the hare and rabbit.

The ancient Egyptians, Persians, Phoenicians, and Hindus all believed the world began with an enormous egg, thus the egg as a symbol of new life has been around for eons. The particulars may vary, but most cultures around the world use the egg as a symbol of new life and rebirth.

 

af hverju að vera kristin?

viðtal við Marcus Borg guðfræðing um breytingar sem eru að verða á kristni.

Why Be Christian?

Revisionist Jesus scholar Marcus Borg explains why "Christianity makes persuasive and compelling sense." Interview by Deborah Caldwell


In renowned Jesus scholar Marcus Borg's latest book, The Heart of Christianity, he responds to an audience of readers who, over the years, have asked him about the essence of their faith. How, they ask, can Christianity be relevant in a time of ever-expanding historical and scientific knowledge? In a conversation with Deborah Caldwell, Borg answers that question, touching on the afterlife, living in a multi-cultural society, the meaning of salvation, and being born again.

You say that Christianity in North America and Europe is going through a paradigm change-that a new vision of how to be Christian is emerging. What is it and why is it happening?

Broadly speaking, there are two different visions of Christianity in North America today. The earlier vision is the product of the last few hundred years, especially the last 150 years. This earlier vision of Christianity is literalistic in its understanding of the Bible, absolutist in its understanding of the ethical teachings of the Bible, and exclusivist--meaning Christianity is the only way.

That's the vision of Christianity that the majority of us grew up with, whether we are mainline Protestant, Catholic, or conservative Protestant. But that way of seeing Christianity has become unpersuasive to millions of people--who can't be literalists or absolutists or exclusivists. But now there is an emerging vision, an emerging paradigm.

The conflict between these two paradigms can be seen in many different places. In the second half of the 19th Century and early in the 20th Century we saw conflict over evolution. Thirty years ago the conflict was over ordination of women in mainline denominations, and of course today we see the conflict about gays and lesbians in the church. For Protestants, the two visions have everything to do with biblical authority. The earlier vision sees the Bible as divine product with a divine guarantee to be true. The emerging vision sees the Bible as a human historical product, the product of two ancient communities [Judaism and Christianity]. It tells us what they thought, not what God thinks.

- áfram hér.

Krossfestingin

What is the significance of the cross and the crucifixion of Jesus?  

First of all, I see the cross of Jesus as having a political meaning. Jesus was executed by the authorities, and if we ask why, the most persuasive historical explanation is because of Jesus' passion for the Kingdom of God, which involved him in radical criticism of the domination system of his day. The domination system killed him. On the one hand, the cross tells us what domination systems oftentimes do to those who oppose them. It tells us about the typical behavior of empires.

The cross in the New Testament also has a more personal and individual meaning as a symbol or an image for the path of transformation, for what it means to follow Jesus. It means to die and rise with Christ. We find this in Paul. "I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me." The cross there is an image for that path of spiritual and psychological transformation that leads to a new identity and way of being.

Then there's the cross as the once and for all sacrifice for sin. If we literalize that language, as … much of conventional Christianity has done, the only way God can forgive sins is if adequate sacrifice is offered: Somebody has got to be punished, and that person is Jesus. Also only those people who know and believe in that story can be saved. Thus, literalizing that language is a slur on the character of God. If you see Jesus' death as part of the divine plan, as part of the will of God, that suggests that God required the suffering of this immeasurably great man. It is never the will of God that an innocent person be crucified, and to suggest that is to suggest something horrible about God.

If, on the other hand, we understand the language of Jesus’s being the sacrifice for sin as a post-Easter interpretation of his death that emerges within the early Christian community, we can then see that, metaphorically, it's a proclamation of radical grace. The connection is this: If Jesus is the once and for all sacrifice for sin, understood metaphorically now, it means that God has already taken care of whatever it is that we think separates us from God. It means that God accepts us just as we are and that the Christian life is not about getting right with God. God's already taken care of that. The Christian life becomes about something else, namely, living within this framework of radical trust in God and relationship to God that makes possible our transformation, and, ideally and ultimately, the transformation of the world.

--Dr. Marcus Borg

hedan

Paskahugleiding

Marcus J.Borg  

Easter About Life, not Death

As I understand Easter, to the extent that Easter can be understood, it is not about something happening to the corpse of Jesus, but about the continuing experience of Jesus among his followers after his death.

And it is not just about experiencing him as one might experience a ghost, but experiencing him as "Lord," as a divine reality who is one with God and who invites our allegiance and loyalty.

All of this is included in the early Christian post-Easter affirmation, "Jesus is Lord." The lords of this world - a collusion of religious authorities with Roman imperial authority - said "No" to Jesus and executed him. Easter is the reversal of Good Friday: it means that God has vindicated Jesus, said "Yes" to Jesus and his vision over against the rulers of his world. God has made him "both Lord and Christ," as Acts 2.36 puts it. "Jesus is Lord" is the most common post-Easter affirmation of his significance. He is Lord - and the would-be lords of this world are not.

Were the skeletal remains of Jesus to be indisputably identified, it would not matter to me. To think that the central meaning of Easter depends upon something spectacular happening to Jesus' corpse misses the point of the Easter message and risks trivializing the story. To link Easter primarily to our hope for an afterlife, as if our post-death existence depends upon God having transformed the corpse of Jesus, is to reduce the story to a politically-domesticated yearning for our survival beyond death.

Rather, what mattered for his early followers was that they continued to know him as a living figure of the present after his death - not just during the forty days of appearances that the author of Acts mentions (Acts 1.3), but in the years and decades (and centuries) ever since. And to affirm, as Christians do, that the living presence of Jesus is Lord is to commit oneself to the story of Jesus as the central revelation of God's dream for the world. It means to stand against the powers that killed him and to stand for the vision of God's kingdom that he proclaimed.

Easter is both personal and political. The lordship of Jesus is the path of personal liberation from the lords of culture, and the affirmation of a very different kind of world. To lose this emphasis in a debate about what happened to the corpse of Jesus is to be distracted by the lords who killed him.

Guðfræðingurinn Marcus J.Borg

Er að lesa bók dr.Borg: Meeting Jesus again for the first time. Er ansi hrifin af guðfræði hans þar sem hann er að reyna skilja hismið frá kjarnanum. Hér í Ameríku sér maður hvernig trúarbrögðin geta þróast úti ýmislegt miður fallegt og því er gott að lesa menn einsog Borg, enda hættan alltaf sú að við sköpum Guð í okkar mynd. Hann er af sænsk-norskum ættum og úr lútersku kirkjunni.

Borg er með blog hér og þetta er þaðan:  

Blind Acceptance is Idolatry

Without questioning, faith is idolatrous. Just as patriotism without questioning risks becoming idolatrous nationalism, so faith without questioning risks becoming idolatrous religion.

To explain: when faith is defined as unquestioning acceptance of "tenets or traditions," whether drawn from the Bible or doctrine or both, then the object of faith is no longer God, but the tenets and traditions themselves. Something other than God has been given an absolute status - which is what makes it idolatrous.

- more... 

 

ad vera i innsta hring

eda ekki. Hversu langt erum vid tilbuin ad ganga til ad falla i hopinn a vinnustad eda annarstadar? Gudfraedingurinn C.S.Lewis:

His starting point is taken from Tolstoy's War and Peace in which Boris, a soldier in the Russian Army, discovers that there are really two kinds of rules: the ones laid down by army regulations-the written system-and also an unwritten system of rules dictated by an inner circle or ring

Lewis takes this example as a paradigm of the Christian life. All of us, he suggests, want to be part of the Inner Ring-that group of people in any organization or institution who really organise things, get things done: the people who have power to make things happen. While the existence of such rings is not evil in itself, Lewis maintains that membership of a ring may require us to do something which otherwise we might regard as wrong. The following describes a membership invitation:

Over a drink or a cup of coffee disguised as triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still-just at that moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naif or a prig-the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which is not quite in accordance with the technical rules of fair play: something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which "we"-and at the word "we" you try not to blush for mere pleasure-something "we always do". And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world.

It would be so terrible to see the other man's face-that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face-turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected. And then, if you are drawn in, next week it will be something a little further from the rules, and next year something further still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit. It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude: it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school. But you will be a scoundrel.

Lewis concludes: `The quest of the Inner Ring will break you heart unless you break it'. Again: `Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain.'

- Meira her: Anglican theological review

ad losa sig vid kilo

andlega sed. Getur verid god leid ad losa um reidi og gremju, ein leid af morgum:

Angel Letters

Forgiveness of self and others is very important for your health and well-being. There are many ways of going about the process of forgiveness we do some very practical exercises on the workshops, but this is something you can try right now. It is not necessary for you to believe in angels to do this. Follow the instructions below.Set aside at least fifteen minutes for this at a time and place where you will not be disturbed. Get some writing paper and a pen.

At the head of the paper write "An Angel letter to the higher self of.........carried in love by the angels/my higher self" (filling in the name of the person you wish to forgive or have forgive you).

Start your letter "Dear....." then follow with a paragraph or more, put here all your feelings and experiences which have caused dis-ease between you, be direct and honest.

Next follow with a paragraph or more about the good things that have happened between you, or details of what you have learned from the difficult experiences (there is always something good that comes out of any situation). You can also add here the way you would like things to be between you (only positive loving thoughts please).

Finish with this: "I bless you and release you to your highest good. The spirit in me forgives you for all the anger and sorrow that has been between us. The spirit in you forgives me for all the anger and sorrow that has been between us, now and forever. In the spirit of love, signed...........".

This letter is now carried to its destination by the angels/my higher self for the good of all concerned.Now fold the letter, address it to the person or situation concerned and place it in a special place (where no one else will read it) for up to 48 hours. You will know when it has been sent. Then burn it or throw it away.

hedan 

chaplains, ekki bara a sjukrahusum

eda hernum, heldur hinum ymsu fyrirtaekjum lika. Grein i NYTimes um starf chaplains a vinnustodum.

From car parts makers to fast food chains to financial service companies, corporations across the country are bringing chaplains into the workplace. At most companies, the chaplaincy resembles the military model, which calls for chaplains to serve the religiously diverse community before them, not to evangelize.

“Someone who has never thought about this might assume they pray with people, but the majority of the job is listening to people, helping them with very human problems, not one big intensive religious discussion,” said David Miller, executive director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture and the author of the book “God at Work.”

The spread of corporate chaplaincy programs, especially out of the Bible Belt to the North, is part of a growing trend among businesses to embrace religion rather than reject it, Mr. Miller said. Executives now look for ways to build a company that adheres to certain Christian values. Some businesses offer Muslim employees a place and the time to pray during work.

Workplace chaplaincies are generally less costly to operate than the more familiar employee assistance program model of counseling and making referrals. Most chaplaincies also go beyond such programs to bring something of the local pastor to the workplace: the person who is on call around the clock to rush to the hospital when an employee has been in a car accident, or to find housing for families burned out of their houses, or to visit a worker’s relative in jail, even to officiate at weddings and funerals.