Week 1: Introduction
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010
From the beginning, spiritual truth has been delivered in stories; stories about Things Beyond Us, stories about people experiencing Truth, Beauty, or God.
Over time, from these mini-stories, there emerges a broader, capital “S” Story. It is the Story we tell ourselves about “The Way Things Are.” In this broader Story, we tell ourselves what Ultimacy is like; what can be known or experienced of God, what human beings are really like, what has gone before us in history, and what will come after us.
We tell this Story to help one another live out the deeper aspirations of our souls. There is a driving desire within each of us for a higher form of life, a deeper level of consciousness. We aspire to something higher than war or hate, prejudice or lust. We aspire to a Divine kind of life; a life of Love, Peace, Kindness, Goodness, Virtue, and Contribution.
And once we shape this Story about The Way Things Are, it in turn shapes us.
This Story is more than an interesting tale we tell our kids. It is powerfully deterministic in the kind of life we live. It tells us what Reality is like, and what we should be looking for as we travel through our days. And of course, what we look for, we find. If we tell ourselves that this is a dog-eat-dog world, and that we have to watch out for ourselves, that’s exactly what we will find. If we tell ourselves, as many in the Christian tradition have, that we are unlovable, polluted, and deserving of the wrath of God, this will affect us as well.
One more thing about these Reality Stories; we rarely examine them. Usually, we inherit them from family members, priests, teachers, or significant people in our lives.
At NRCC, we’ve been suggesting for some time, that the Story the mainstream Christian Church has been 
telling for many generations is failing us. It’s not powerful enough to inspire us to the lives we want to live.
Demographic studies of Christian people show its failure to inspire us to lives that transcend greed, bigotry, intolerance, or prejudice. It doesn’t inspire the lives of love, virtue, and goodness that Jesus taught about.
For generations, the Christian Story has told us that the point of life is to escape the wrath and punishment of God in the afterlife. It has told us that ‘original sin’ is so toxic that God cannot abide to be in or with us. The whole point of the God/Jesus story then, we are told, is to repair this legal breach, assuage the wrath of God, and to secure for ourselves a place in heaven.
This year, I’ll suggest that this is so limited a telling of the Story of God, that it is actually toxic and destructive to our spiritual lives.
Hopefully, this year-long, retelling project will yield a Story that inspires us to live more nobly, with more dignity, decency, tolerance, forgiveness, and grace. Hopefully, our Story will inspire us to be good stewards of the planet, and of all the people of this earth that God loves.
We’ll look at the Story in seven parts…
1. what about the Bible, or…
“Why do We Wear Poly-Cotton?”
We tend to pick and choose parts of the Bible we feel have authority in our lives. What assumptions guide how we make those determinations? How should we think about the Bible? How should we use it in our lives?
Then we’ll look at the players in our Story…
2. what is God like?
I’ll suggest that the assumptions many Christians make about the nature of God make for a bad Story, and bad people.
3. what are we like?
I’ll suggest the same about many Christian assumptions we make about ourselves.
4. what is Jesus like?
Is Jesus a diety? When we use that word, it evokes images of Zeus or Poseidon. Is Jesus like that? Or if not, is he a half-deity like Herecles or Perseus? When Christian people say Jesus is “divine” what does that mean?
And what was the fundamental message of Jesus? Did we get that right?
And then we’ll take a stab at telling the Story…
5. what happened?
What happened before we got on the scene? When we come to consciousness, we look inside ourselves and see two natures; a beautiful, selfless, virtuous one, and a selfish, petty, sometimes even evil one. What happened? How did things get that way? Is God doing anything about it? What should we do about it ourselves? How does Jesus fit into this whole thing?
6. what will happen?
How does this Story turn out in the end? What happens when we die? Is there an afterlife? If so, is it good or bad? Good for some, bad for others?
And finally, we’ll look at the spiritual life…
7. how shall we live?
In light of our Story, how does one live a good life? How do we experience the Divine? How do we become good people?
So… that’s the scope of this year-long project.
I (Doug) will do most of the lessons, but I’m not sure I believe all of what I’ll be saying. Instead of being an authoritative source, my hope is to precipitate a dialogue that will help us together be able to tell our Story in a way that helps us forward on our spiritual journeys.
Consequently, your posts comments on Wednesday evenings are essential to the success of this project.
Welcome.