Traveling Light Relay

good power and bad power

• Good power is what Ken Wilber, in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality calls “growth hierarchies,” which are needed to protect children, the poor, the entire animal world and all those without power. Bad power is power that is used merely to protect, maintain and promote oneself
• Psychologically and spiritually, there is no such thing as a triumph by force. Domination is domination, not transformation
• Spiritual power, however, is the ability to influence events and others through one’s very being
• Doing will always take care of itself when your being is right
• god sets the tone
• We will not trust spiritual power until we have experienced a God who operates in the same way, a God who is willing to wait, allow, forgive, trust and love unconditionally. It is largely a waste of time to tell people to love generously when the God they have been presented with is a taskmaster, loves quite conditionally, is easily offended, very needy and threatens people with eternal torture if they do not “believe” in him
• barren women & rejected sons
• It’s never the fertile, self-sufficient woman who is special, but the woman who is by herself incapable, and then is “graced” from Without.
• It is important to know that people can be personally well-intentioned and sincere, but structurally they cannot see certain things
• It’s always the forgotten one, like rejected prophet Jeremiah, or the unjustly suffering Job, who understands things more deeply and breaks through to enlightenment
• before encounter God is perceived as omnipotent power; after encounter God is perceived as humble love. This has always been the Franciscan emphasis: that God, against all expectation, is humble!
• It is the utterly false self that we bring forward for conversion, and merely joining a new group, or having an emotional God experience, does not usually convert that self at a very deep level, if at all. That is the work of a lifetime of grace, surrender and prayer
• psalms
• Most of the Psalms (not all) reveal a rather high level of spiritual consciousness, and also of diverse stages of faith. They reveal both good and bad power in people
• good power
• Until you don’t need external power, you normally cannot handle power. When you have real power, you do not need to flaunt it. When you know you are being used by a Higher Power, you do not take your small power too seriously
• Religion is largely populated by people afraid of hell; spirituality begins to make sense to those who have been through hell, that is, who have drunk deeply of life’s difficulties.
• rites of passage
• there was a very privileged way of knowing, and it came to those who were in any way marginalized, expelled, excluded, disabled or in any minority position whatsoever. They all know something that you cannot know in any other way
• He’s sending them into a situation of certain failure, rejection, vulnerability, where they have to rely upon other people and upon God. It teaches the way of humble love and trust, and it forces you to look from the outside in
• Isn’t it ironic that most of the gospel has probably been preached and taught by people who are very comfortable?
• architecural theology
• Probably the main structural reason for the misuse of the Bible is that, largely, it has been used and taught by people on the inside and people at the top. It creates an inner and specialized jargon, which has no possibility of outer critique.