Reignite

 

It is important to point out from time to time what difference the practice of faith can make in a person's life. Progressive religious people like myself can sometimes be reluctant to do this because we don't want to seem like we're pushing a hard sell on someone, or promising that all of life's problems can be magically solved by joining a religion or signing up to something. Any wise and reflective person knows that life's problems are always there and we're always learning how to live life well. There are no shortcuts in the art of living. There are no simple solutions. But to leave it at that sells ourselves short. The practice of faith does make a difference. It does make give us deeper joy, peace, and love in life, if we truly practice it. This doesn't mean, in itself, signing up to a particular religion or just believing in something you didn't believe before. It means practising something: doing something day after day, week after week that ope...

The older I get (I'm now 42) the more I find myself convinced of the need for faith that is not just progressive/liberal but also contemplative. And the more frustrated I find myself at the lack of communities that truly are both progressive and contemplative.  Progressive Christianity without a spiritual contemplative heart tends to get stuck in its own head (or in more colourful language, perhaps stuck up its own arse). It tends to be quite... boring, quite stuck, very heady and intellectual. People just say the same thing again and again and again. It defines itself only in negative terms: "we're not homophobic," "we don't believe in taking the Bible literally." But it finds very little to say positively. If it says anything beyond negatives it can just drop into banalities, dropping Christian language completely and talking about gardening or knitting or things like that. Not that I have anything against gardening or knitting. It's just at that p...