Monthly Archives: March 2009

A Global Warming Skeptic

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This essay is about Freeman Dyson, the 85-year-old Princeton physicist and mathematician, known lately for his skepticism about global warming.  He also doubts string theory.  Here is how a colleague describes him:

Around the Institute for Advanced Study, that intellectual Arcadia where the blackboards have signs on them that say Do Not Erase, Dyson is quietly admired for candidly expressing his doubts about string theory’s aspiration to represent all forces and matter in one coherent system. “I think Freeman wishes the string theorists well,” Avishai Margalit, the philosopher, says. “I don’t think he wishes them luck. He’s interested in diversity, and that’s his worldview. To me he is a towering figure although he is tiny — almost a saintly model of how to get old. The main thing he retains is playfulness. Einstein had it. Playfulness and curiosity. He also stands for this unique trait, which is wisdom. Brightness here is common. He is wise. He integrated, not in a theory, but in his life, all his dreams of things.”

In seminary I often walked in the woods behind the Institute for Advanced Study and wondered what they did there.  Apparently they write things on blackboards.  I don’t worry much about string theory or global warming, but if I live to be 85 hopefully people characterize me, like Dyson, as playful, curious and wise.

Draped In Black

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Yesterday our church’s choir, the Wesley Chorale, performed Harvest of Sorrows, a cantata by Joseph M. Martin.  Chorus, soloists and narrators told the story of Christ’s passion in Jerusalem.  More than one choir member was visibly moved in the telling.  The music included the lovely melody Herzliebster Jesu. At various points in the story, black cloth was draped over the altar, Bible, pulpit and a cross standing to the congregation’s left.  People afterward commented on how the simple action of draping things in black added to the presentation.

Our church loves music, and events like this are an important part of its yearly liturgical celebrations.

Meals On Wheels and Diane Rehm

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I delivered Meals On Wheels today, the fourth time this week.  My wife’s church volunteered for this week, and I’ve been helping out. 

We go over to the Adrian Senior Center on Frank St, a building that was a Catholic school in an earlier life.  We pick up a brown insulated bag with the hot part of the meal, a cooler with the cold part, and a clipboard with a list of addresses.  There are many routes — ours goes out on Hunt Rd and Wolf Creek Hwy.  It takes about 45 minutes to complete.  Today’s meal was vegetable soup and an egg salad sandwich. 

I listened to the Diane Rehm Show, driving from house to house.  Her guests discussed world hot spots and the global economic recession.  The guy with the British accent kept correcting the guy with the American accent. 

Toward the end of the route, I took a meal into a man’s home on Clubview, near the golf course.  He was sitting in his recliner watching televangelist Joyce Meyer on his big screen TV.  I’m thinking Joyce Meyer and Diane Rehm have different worldviews. 

Diane Rehm mentioned that we can follow her show on Twitter now.  It made me smile to hear her measured voice say the word twitter.  And it occured to me that the popular Internet sites typcially have nonsense names — Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Flickr, and now Twitter.  (Information giants in an earlier generation carried standard names, like Time or Life.)

I got back to the senior center just before noon.  The dining area was packed, so I took my lunch to go.  When you volunteer to deliver, you can have a free meal yourself.    I feel a little more virtuous after delivering Meals On Wheels — that day at least I did something useful.

Divine Conspiracy 6

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In chapter 6 of The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard addresses ‘the deceptions of reputation and wealth,’ looking at Matthew 6 where Jesus questions religious practices done for show and advocates detachment from mammon, an old word for wealth.

The key word is treasure.  If I treasure power, property and applause, then this is what I will have.  But if I treasure God above all else, then these other things will find their proper place.

At the end of the chapter, Willard makes a perceptive comment about the religious landscape today:

The ‘Western’ segment of the church today lives in a bubble of historical illusion about the meaning of discipleship and the gospel.  We are dominated by the essentially Enlightenment values that rule American culture:  pursuit of happiness, unrestricted freedom of choice, disdain of authority.  The prosperity gospels, the gospels of liberation, and the comfortable sense of ‘what life is all about’ that fills the minds of most devout Christians in our circles are the result.  (p. 214)

I’d never heard anyone lump together the prosperity gospel and liberation theology before.  They are both obsessed with mammon – the one with accumulating it, and the other with redistributing it.

A key insight came to me this week.  For years it’s been hard to see myself as a follower of Jesus.  It’s a long story, but for too long I’ve let other people take Jesus away from me — people for whom following Jesus and, say, opposing American ‘empire’ are essentially the same thing.  ‘If you don’t protest America the way we do, you can’t follow Jesus,’ they seemed to say.  This thought has hobbled me for too long.  But Willard is giving me back Jesus.  Willard’s Jesus undermines earthly kingdoms; he does so, though, not by protesting them but by establishing his own.

What I mean is that this book is free of political axes.  But neither can it simply be dismissed as pietist.  Dallas Willard is presenting a Christian philosophy of life that satisfies the mind and heart.

Dealing With Dementia

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Today I drove thirty miles to the Chelsea Retirement Community for a seminar on dementia led by a researcher at the Michigan Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center in Ann Arbor.  He invited us to call him Dr. Bruno.

His presentation taught me the difference between dementia and Alzheimer’s.  Dementia is a decline in cognitive ability, impacting a person’s ability to perform everyday activities.  Alzheimer’s is a progressive brain disorder that leads to dementia.  Researchers know pretty well what happens in a brain with Alzheimer’s, but they don’t know how to treat it.  5.3 million Americans have Alzheimer’s, including about half of those over 85.  The disease afflicts women more than men.

There are promising drug therapies in the works, although it takes hundreds of millions of dollars to develop a drug and up to fifteen years to bring it out to the public.  Dr Bruno also noted the natural things we do to promote brain health — proper diet, exercise and social interaction — may delay the onset of dementia and blunt its effects.

To highlight the importance of these natural remedies, Dr. Bruno ended his presentation with a quote from Cicero:

We must stand up against old age and make up for its drawbacks by taking pains. We must fight it as we should an illness. We must look after our health, use moderate exercise, take just enough food and drink to recruit, but not to overload, our strength. Nor is it the body alone that must be supported, but the intellect and soul much more. For they are like lamps: unless you feed them with oil, they too go out from old age.

The Importance of Play Time

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I skipped out of traditional worship two Sundays ago and joined the children for an hour of Sunday school.  (Our traditional service and Sunday school run concurrently.)  The theme of the day was prayer, and the children learned how to make a string of colored prayer beads.

When asked for their prayer requests, one child wanted “a better playground.”  I’d thought our church’s outdoor playground was a nice one, but then I don’t see it through a child’s eyes.  (It’s also possible another playground was in mind.)

I saw a large church in Ohio last month with an indoor playground, the kind you see often at McDonald’s.  A cut-out window made the play area visible to the parking lot.  “What a great idea,” I thought.  A playground at a church usable all year round.  I’ll bet it appeals to young parents looking for a church for themselves and their children.

Psychiatrist Stuart Brown, whose office is in a treehouse, believes adults don’t play enough.  Their lack of play leads to more stress:  “A life of rigidity, lacking in creativity. A life without joy, minus sustained pleasure.”  In his mind almost any activity can become a form of play:

A big part of the solution, he says, is opening up to the idea that play is a state of mind. Every day, there are opportunities to play, which he defines as “an absorbing, apparently purposeless activity that provides enjoyment and a suspension of self-consciousness and sense of time.”

Play is especially important, Brown says, in these times of economic fear and uncertainty.

I love to play with my dog Jazz.  I will lift my arms and pretend to be a monster, and she will pretend to be scared and run away.  Soon she trots back as if to say, “Can we do it again?”  Jazz is a rescue dog.  The longer she’s lived with us, with a warm bed and a secure source of food, the more her playful side has emerged.

I hope play includes left-brain activities.  In high school math class I loved doing word problems, and I would lose myself in them for hours, which is exactly the ‘suspension of self-consciousness and sense of time’ that Brown speaks of.

Play is a key part of a healthy spiritual life.  Jesus said children are like a gateway to the kingdom of God.  Perhaps that includes adopting their sense of the importance of play time and seeing the whole world as our playground.

Physics Says Life Isn’t a Story

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Contemporary physics undermines two common notions about how the world works.  So say David Z. Albert and Rivka Galchen.

First, experience tells us that for one thing to influence another, it must be in proximity to it.  I can throw a rock across the creek because I’m standing close enough to pick it up.  This relation is called locality.  Even change that happens over long distances can be broken down into a chain of causality — one thing influencing the next, and so on.

But Quantum Mechanics posits a phenomenon called entaglement which says objects need not be near one another in space or time to influence one another.  Two particles may be ‘entangled’ with one another even though one is on the opposite side of the universe from the other.  No intermediate causes are necessary.  One thing need not be in proximity to another to effect change in it — which sets aside our notions of how change ordinarily happens.

Second, we tend to think of life as a story.  One thing happens, followed by another and another.  But this may only be an illusion.

The other recent result, discovered by one of us (Albert), showed that combining quantum mechanics and special relativity requires that we give up another of our primordial convictions. We believe that everything there is to say about the world can in principle be put into the form of a narrative, or story. Or, in more precise and technical terms: everything there is to say can be packed into an infinite set of propositions of the form “at t1 this is the exact physical condition of the world” and “at t2 that is the exact physical condition of the world,” and so on. But the phenomenon of quantum-mechanical entanglement and the spacetime geometry of special relativity—taken together—imply that the physical history of the world is infinitely too rich for that.

However we may conceive of life as a story, the actual reality that comprises existence may be ‘infinitely too rich for that’ term.  A story may be useful and moving (especially in religion), but like any other art form a story is artificial, not natural.  The complexity of nature, including human nature, far exceeds any sequence of events in a story.

Saturdays At the Office

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Friday is my day off (apart from funerals and hospital visits).  I usually spend most of Saturday at the office.  The To Do list includes

  1. Talk through sermon outline four or five times.
  2. Prepare Powerpoint slides for traditional and praise services.
  3. Get prayers and worship notes ready.
  4. Write on blog in avoidance of Nos. 1-3.

Actually, the list is longer.  I putter around the church, a productive (and occasionally procrastinating) little worker bee.  Typically the building is empty, but today a birthday party was happening down the hall. I work to get things done by dinner.  Some pastors prepare their sermon Saturday evening or early Sunday morning, but I’ve never been able to do that.

I like Saturdays.  After Friday, it’s my favorite day of the week.  That it’s named for the Roman god Saturn is just a plus, I guess.  We all probably have little pagan left in us.

Dirt Worship

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On the glorious splendor of your majesty, and on your wondrous works, I will meditate.  (Psalm 145.5 NRSV)

Last night my wife and I stopped at Meijer to pick up a new microwave oven.  The Litton she’s had for 23 years died at last.  We got a sleek black Sharp, 2.0 cubic feet, for $160.  Since we’re supposed to spend money to revive the economy, she and I did our part.

In the parking lot there was a silver car with a bumper sticker, ‘Tree-hugging  Dirt Worshipper.’  The driver was promoting an environmental consciousness.

I have mixed feelings about environmentalism.  On the plus side, it’s brought a renewed sense of responsibility for the earth.  We do a better job now of caring for creation, or at least we attempt to.  What concerns me, though, is how for many people it has almost become a substitute for religion, as in the phrase dirt worship.  There’s also a streak of latter-day puritanism in it — the Scarlet Letter is now a ‘P’ for polluters.

I’m also skeptical of the fear that we will ‘destroy the planet.’  According to a National Geographic special on TV, the earth will recover from the worst humans could ever do to it, although it might take a million years.  We may destroy our civilization, but we can’t destroy the planet.  It was here long before we were.  And the evolutionary processes of nature have destroyed untold numbers of species.  Nature itself is destructive.

It’s wise to care for nature and conserve the resources it offers.  Polluting less is good.  Hybrid vehicles are good (although with some modifications, any small car can approach that same mileage).  It’s when these things become occasions for moralizing and melodrama that problems arise.  Since this is what I associate with environmentalism now, I prefer the term conservation.

I don’t worship dirt, but I meditate on its wonders — all the tiny organisms that ‘live and move and have their being’ in a cubic foot of soil.  Their life makes me grateful for mine and leads me to praise the author of life.

Divine Conspiracy 5

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I’m reading Dallas Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy as a Lenten discipline.  In chapter 5 he presents his understanding of Matthew 5:17-48.  (It appears the central chapters of this book are an exposition of the Sermon On the Mount.) 

Willard views this teaching about murder, adultery, divorce, oaths, retaliation and enemies not as a new laws to be obeyed, but as illustrations a what life looks like when one has a heart like the heart of God.

The various scenes and situations that Jesus discusses… are actually stages in a progression toward a life of agape love.  (p. 139) 

This progression happens as one’s “thoughts, feelings, assurances, and dispositions” are transformed by divine love itself (p. 183).  In practice, I think it’s hard to keep Willard’s distinction between laws and illustrations, but his approach to the subject is thoughtful and helpful. 

The last two areas of ethics — retaliation and enemies (Mt. 5.38-48) — Willard sees solely in terms of personal relationships.  To apply these teachings to larger issues of society and the state, he views as a fundamental misreading of Jesus’ message.

Sermons At the Grocery Store

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I work on upcoming sermons at the Country Market deli area, unusually empty in this picture.  Dan Moseley, my preaching professor at CTS, said a sermon that doesn’t make it out of the pastor’s study won’t make it out of the pulpit either.  Dan took his sermons ‘out for a walk’ in the woods.  I take mine to the grocery store, where they have donuts.

St. Paul or John Wesley might actually have preached here — I merely write and reflect.  An assortment of shoppers walks by:  an elderly woman with a cane, a young dad with two small children, business folk in their suits and skirts.  Store employees in green shirts come over too to sit down for a mid-morning break and check their cell phones.  Sometimes parishioners stroll by and we chat for a bit.  I like to sit by the window where there’s also a good view of the parking lot.  Everyone comes to the market.

I’ll make notes on the scripture for Sunday, reflect on people’s lives as they wander by and wonder how the two worlds intersect.

A Problem With the NRSV

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At a monthly ministers meeting last week, representatives from a local literacy initiative offered a presentation on their work, which teaches reading skills to first and second language English speakers.  Their stories were so touching, like a man who grew up in rural Arkansas and never learned to read.  He finally did — in his 80s — and his new joy is reading the Bible.

I learned the average reading ability in the U.S. is at the eighth grade level.  This has raised the question for the first time for me of the suitability of using the NRSV Bible in preaching and worship.  The NRSV is written at a 10-11th grade reading level, well above the national average.  Its language must be harder for the average worshipper to understand than, say, the NIV, written at a 7-8th grade level, or the NLT, written at a 6th grade level.

The NRSV does have a children’s version which would be worth exploring, but I’ve begun to wonder if the original 1989 version is more suited to private study than public worship.

Added:  It looks like the NRSV children’s Bible isn’t a simpler text, but the same text with study aids and pictures.  So not what I thought.

Diogenes Allen On the Afterlife

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Recent posts have touched on the issue of life after death.  It’s fitting, then, to include a quote that has informed my understanding and beliefs about this.  I studied the writings of Diogenes Allen for my Doctor of Ministry project, and in that work I came across these words:

Our present life is one where we begin to learn what it is to be limited, to be isolated, and yet yearn to be bound to others.  This life is to be seen as in the process of transformation by another seeping in, a replacement that does not and cannot take place fully without a new heaven and a new earth and new minds and bodies.  So Christianity does not promise life beyond death; this life is limited in extent and it will end permanently.  Only what has entered this life from the heart of God — the life that he himself enjoys — which we see in Jesus and know now in self-forgetful perception and especially in mutual reception of one another will continue and be consummated.  But for the rest, what it will be is a completely blank tablet, since we and our universe must be transformed for the consummation of love.  Christianity does not solve the problem, but it offers a vision of what life is, and a taste of what true living is.  That life, now only glimpsed, and in serious conflict with the present, is said to be incapable of destruction because it is the life of God and to live in it fully is a destiny given to us by God.  (The Path of Perfect Love, Cowley 1992:  85-86)

Dr. Allen, who is orthodox in his theology, presents here his vision of the afterlife.  When I first read it, it exploded in my mind.  He says our human life ends permanently, which would include bodily and psychic life.  What continues on is the life of divine love that has seeped into us and begun to transform us, a love we see embodied in Jesus and experience in fragments now.  What Dr. Allen tells me, if I understand him, is that my life does not continue after death — in other words, my soul does not go to heaven.  What continues is whatever fragments of God’s life that have mingled themselves with my personality and begun to transform it.  Elsewhere Dr. Allen calls it a seed of love planted in us.  This continues and presumably grows and awaits the new creation, which is unimaginable to us right now.

I don’t know how to square this with popular beliefs of going to heaven and being reunited with loved ones, but it’s a way of thinking that is compelling and intelligible to me.  Dr. Allen has taken traditional Christian beliefs of eternal life and resurrection and filled the words with new meaning — which is exactly what good theologians do.

Do Pets Go to Heaven?

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Martha Hoverson, a pastor in Portland, Maine, lost her beloved dog Molly last month.  Molly was Martha’s ‘partner in ministry,’ rehearsing with the choir, going along on nursing home visits and embodying the universal love of God.  She writes about Molly here. 

To the inevitable question children ask, ‘Do pets go to heaven,’ Martha replies in this way:

Of course, everything we imagine about heaven is just that: imagining. Heaven contains those we love and the things we value, a treasure house of the spirit with a banquet table for all who love God and are loved in return. I would like to think that loving attitude matters more than a creed or a pledge, that God reads between the lines of our lives and knows our hearts.

By Martha’s account, Molly was surely one who loved God and was loved in return. 

Abraham Joshua Heschel, the Jewish mystic and theologian, once said we continue on after death in God’s memory as God’s thoughts.  There is traditionally little sense of an afterlife in Judaism, but Heschel posited one in God’s own mind.  Maybe this is heaven. 

If there is room in God’s memory for thoughts of all human beings, then surely there is room for thoughts of all creatures God has made in all times. 

I like to think the pets I’ve lost – Duke, Duchess, Shadow, Teeter, Carly — live on in God’s memory, as they do in mine.

Half Dead Man Walking

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I love to walk in Oakwood Cemetery. Addison and Sarah Comstock, the founders of Adrian, are buried there, as is Michigan governor Charles Croswell.

Sarah Comstock named our city. She was reading a history of the Roman Empire, and the Emperor Hadrian impressed her with his reputation for laws and good government. She dropped the ‘H’ and christened our community Adrian.

The cemetery today extends about a mile, and probably a quarter mile at its widest point. Stately old oaks and maples look over grave markers scattered across undulating ground. It’s a perfect place to walk, think and keep company with the dead. At 45, I’m over halfway to dead myself. I stay mainly to the west side overlooking Island Park. Sometimes I talk through sermons while walking, or I pray.

In his book The Path of Perfect Love, Diogenes Allen says when we die our life ends permanently. What continues is the life of God that’s taken root in us, and an inconceivably new life awaits us at the resurrection.

My own resurrection sounds pretty inconceivable, but I like the notion that fragments of God’s life planted in me will last forever. I wonder what they will grow into.

Believe In the Best Version of Yourself

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On CSI New York Wednesday night, the main story line explored an act of eco-terrorism.  The alternate story line featured Danny and Lindsay, two crime scene investigators in the lab.  They’ve been the focus of some serious Urst in the show.  (Urst is unresolved sexual tension, a staple in dramas.)

Lindsay is pregnant with their child.  She struggles to trust Danny because he’s been unreliable.  He doesn’t trust himself either.

In this episode he walks into the office of his supervisor, Mack Taylor, and confesses, “I don’t want to disappoint her.”  Mack says to Danny, “You can live by your fears, or you can believe in the best version of yourself.”

Danny takes Mack’s advice, and in the last scene he and Lindsay get married at the courthouse, with Mack and another co-worker Stella as witnesses.  Danny and Lindsay have both taken a step forward in trust.  It’s a sweet ending.

Believe in the best version of yourself.  That’s good counsel.  Taken to an extreme it becomes narcissism, but in modest doses a simple confidence in yourself and your abilities is necessary to live well.

A Latin sententia that’s stuck in my mind for years comes from Seneca:  Unum bonum est, quod beatae vitae causa et firmamentum est, sibi fidere.  ‘There is one good, which is the cause and foundation of a happy life — to trust oneself.’

Trust yourself — not as a replacement for trusting God but as a compliment and corollary to it.

Lenten Reading

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Here are 33 Lenten meditations from the CC Blogs network. Enjoy.

Don’t Eat Alone The Connection Pastor’s Post

Faith at Ease Holy Vignettes I-YOUniverse

Where the Wind As the Deer The Other Jesus

Mark Powell Getting There Ellen Haroutunian

Theolog Welcoming Spirit Living Word by Word

Where the Wind Faith in Community When Grace Happens

Theophiliacs J. Stambaugh Theophiliacs A. Hunt Everyday Liturgy

Available Light Work in Progress Allan Bevere

A Diner at the End of Time The Painted Prayerbook Just Words

The Church Geek Breaking Fast on the Beach The Pocket Mardis

Reflectionary One Hand Clapping Unorthodoxology

A Bug’s Life

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At the Coalition for Older Adults meeting Tuesday, I watched a bug crawl up the wall on the other side of the room.  It made slow progress until it reached the line where the wall meets the ceiling, then it turned upside down and began making its way across the ceiling.

Gil Grissom on CSI would have known at a glance what kind of insect it was, but I didn’t.  It was larger than an ant and smaller than a beetle.  I wondered what the little critter thought about as people at my meeting talked.  Insects must have some rudimentary intelligence and sense perception to move and function.

The wisdom writings in the Bible invite us to reflect on insects:

Go to the ant, you sluggard;
consider its ways and be wise!
It has no commander,
no overseer or ruler,
yet it stores its provisions in summer
and gathers its food at harvest. (Prov. 6:6-8 NIV)

As I watched the insect, I realized what was happening in the room was occurring on the human level and the insect level.  What we humans were doing went far beyond what the tiny creature could perceive.  It was oblivious to us.

In my college calculus class, a professor said we perceive life in three or four dimensions, but mathematically there can be any number of dimensions.  You simply add more variables to the equation.  Which impressed on me then the same thing the bug taught me Tuesday.  What is real may be far more than I know.

This leads me to two conclusions.  First, when the New Testament portrays a spiritual realm that impinges on my earthly reality, I take this seriously.  It’s not a primitive worldview.  Second, I don’t take my own theology too seriously.  Frederick Buechner wondered if beetles studied human beings and called it humanology.  My perception of God may resemble an insect’s perception of me.  Which is cause for reticence.

And the good news of Christian faith, with apologies to Athanasius, is that God became a bug so that bugs could become God.

Kiss Your Bleeding Feet

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On Sunday I preached on the theme of passionate worship, the second of Bishop Robert Schnase’s Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations.  The scripture I chose was John 20.24-29.  Jesus shows his wounds to Thomas, who cries out, “My Lord and my God.”

My sermon theme was how the suffering of Christ evokes passionate worship — when we see Christ’s wounds with the eyes of our heart, as Thomas saw them with his physical eyes, heartfelt devotion wells up within us.

For an illustration, I recited lines from a Charles Wesley hymn:

Oh let me kiss thy bleeding feet
And bathe and wash them with my tears,
The story of thy love repeat
In every drooping sinner’s ears,
That all may hear the quickening sound,
If I, even I, have mercy found.

This hymn isn’t in the current United Methodist Hymnal, but the early Methodists sang these words, and this kind of blood imagery appears repeatedly in the poetry of Charles Wesley.  A devotion to the passion of Christ was a key part of early Wesleyan spirituality.

Five years ago the movie The Passion of the Christ appeared.  I saw it opening day and later returned for a second viewing.  The film moved me, but I was puzzled by the criticism it provoked in other Christians.  I listened to the objections, and inside I wondered if a deeper reason was visceral — an objection to the blood itself and the theology around it.

After Sunday’s sermon, a parishioner said it was the best sermon they’d ever heard in a Methodist church.  But there were probably listeners uncomfortable with it.  We have different sensibilities about the wounding of Christ.  And all sermons do not reach all listeners.

Six Ways To Ease Sadness

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Scientific American reports on University of Pittsburgh research that says cheerful women live longer:

Women who were most cheery were 30 percent less likely to die of heart disease and 14 percent less likely than their pessimistic peers to die from all causes during the study period.

Researchers looked at data from 97,253 women.  The writer is careful to say that cheerfulness is a link, not a cause of longevity.  Nothing is said on whether cheerfulness assists men in a similar way, but it seems logical that it does.

The Book of Proverbs commends cheerfulness:

A cheerful heart is a good medicine,
but a downcast spirit dries up the bones.  (17.22 NRSV)

The opposite of cheerfulness is sadness.  In some situations sadness is a good and necessary thing.  When our beloved cat Carly died, we cried tears of sadness.  But when sadness arises from an inexplicable source, or it doesn’t lessen over time, then it can be a problem.  This kind of sadness can sabotage any potential for peace and joy.  This may be why the tradition of spiritual theology lists sadness as one of the Eight Deadly Thoughts, which was precursor to the Seven Deadly Sins.  Sadness can be deadly because it ‘dries up the bones’ and pulls us away from God and life.

I’m prone to sadness.  Sometimes for no reason a melancholy mood comes over me.  But I’ve found a few simple remedies.

1.  Exercise.  Physical activity will cleanse away sad thoughts.

2.  Affirmation.  Repeating a phrase like, “If God is for us, who can be against us.”  This replaces the negative thought with a positive one.

3.  Humor.  Laughing at jokes, stories and silly television commercials.  Even the simple act of smiling can lift my spirits.

4.  Nature.  Experiencing the beauty of a flower, a tree or the rain.

5.  Creativity.  Any creative activity can dispel sad thoughts.

6.  Sharing.  If I share sadness with a friend it weighs less on the heart.  This includes sharing it with God in prayer. 

On Saturday, when I began a draft of this post, I felt sad and listless for no reason.  I wanted to do anything — even poke nails in my eyes — rather than work on my sermon.  So I began writing about the sadness (#5).  Later I went for a walk (#1).  By Elm Street it started raining (#4), and by the time I reached home, my clothing was soaked and streams of water were pouring down my face.  I laughed (#3) at the foolish man who went out without an umbrella.  By the time I dried off, the sad thoughts were gone, and a cheerful spirit returned.

I have no urge to live longer, but I do want to live better, and sadness inhibits life.  Chronic sadness may require medical attention.  In the more modest forms I’ve experienced, these are some of my strategies for combating it.

What do you do to ease sadness and foster cheerfulness?