Spiritual soldiers...

The US Army is facing questions over a "spiritual fitness" portion of a mandatory questionnaire, with some atheists calling it "invidious and not inclusive" of soldiers who are nonbelievers.

The Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation learned in December that soldiers were being asked to respond to statements such as "I am a spiritual person" and "I believe there is a purpose for my life."

It makes you wonder where they get their ideas from...

Agora

Agora appears on the surface to be a routine sword and sandals epic but as Roger Ebert points out is actually a film of ideas centred around the tragic, true story of Hypatia a female philosopher in late Roman Alexandria who fell foul of the Christian mob.

The ascendant Christians are convincingly portrayed as fundamentalists, but the faults too of the civilised “pagan” world are also evident. The film implies the response of the mob springs from their experience of slavery and poverty, their ignorance worn almost as a badge of pride in contrast to the hypocrisy of those who enslaved them.

A caption at the end of the film states it took humankind another 1200 years to build upon Hypatia's work. It leaves one meditating upon what was lost – certainly the habit is to see the period between the fall of the Rome and the Renaissance as the “dark” ages, a huge step backwards. But I’m not so sure.

I wonder if civilisations really reach a kind of comfort zone. Hypatia's work may well have added to mathematics, but would it have resulted in the internal combustion engine? The Chinese broke up their massive ships, said to have reached Africa and Australia, in the second century BC because they were concerned they ran contrary to the Tao. Technology did not necessarily equal progress for either Romans or Chinese – it was a means to an end, not an end in itself. They were quite happy where they were, thank you.

Christianity may have led to ultimately greater scientific and philosophical understanding in part because of its lack of ease.

We tend to forget how incredibly revolutionary Christianity was – how it shifted conscience from the ethical to the spiritual realm. In his Byzantium series, John Julius Norwich identifies as a turning point the Emperor who crawled to the Coliseum praying for forgiveness for some despicable act. It didn’t stop further wickedness of course, but it transformed the perception of it.

Man's dreams too. Christian utopianism can be found in many of the triumphs and tragedies of the modern world – the French Revolution, Marxism, the European Union are all examples attempts to build a kind of heaven upon earth, even as their architects invariably deny any association with the religious tradition that provided its impulse.

We mourn the loss of the Classical World, but it wasn’t all sunshine. If it had not moved forward in its first thousand years, there is little reason to suggest it would in its second.

The irony is that it was not a Reason but faith-based culture – one that transformed God in to human form – that may have created the conditions for the extraordinary developments of the last few centuries.

Perhaps we should not be surprised therefore that the single glaring inaccuracy of Agora is it was not a Christian mob but actually Julius Caesar who, albeit inadvertently, appears to have burned the contents of the Great Library.

Centuries later the Christians did indeed storm the building, but the books had long since gone up in smoke.

UKSpirituality Forum

The new UK Spirituality Forum is up and running. We hope that people will use it to discuss spirituality, share and explore spiritual practices, keep in touch with other members and event attendees, give feedback on events, and make new friends.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas, and remember, it's the spirituality and values of the event that are the most important aspects, not its literal truth.

What is true for me is that, in the peeling away of all the layers of history and pageantry and holy wars … and all the rest, peeling away until we’re back to the message Jesus brought, and seeing Jesus there with those he loved, the hungry, the poor, those in prison, the weak, those who were persecuted, and we catch sight of something of the hope they must have felt. Jesus burst into this world like a flash of hope. That is why we sing this month. That is why we light candles. This is what a Unitarian Universalist does with Christmas, does at Christmas. We sing. We light candles. We hope for a better world.

~ First UU, Concord

Unitarians were calling for the public observance of Christmas by about 1800. They did so in full knowledge that it was not a biblically sanctioned holiday, and that December 25 was probably not the day on which Jesus was born. They wished to celebrate the holiday not because God had ordered them to do so but because they themselves wished to.

~ Stephen Nissenbaum

Be ready at all times to give those you love the simply abundant gifts of Spirit. If you do, they’ll give you Christmas gifts you’ll never forget: happy smiles and contented hearts. And you won’t want to exchange them.

~ Meister Eckhart

“All religious stories are mythological stories, where asking ʻDid it happen?ʼ, ʻWhen did it happen?ʼ, or ʻWhere did it happen?ʼ, is completely irrelevant. They are stories to help you understand what life is all about”.

~ Father David Paterson of the Sea of Faith, speaking on Channel Fourʼs History of Christianity series.

Christmas is not so much a matter of explanation and interpretation, as it is a mood and a feeling. It is a time in the cycle of the year set apart by hope and fellowship and generosity. Christmas is the season of the heart.

~ Gordon B McKeenan

The Wicked Fairy At The Manger by U.A. Fanthorpe

My gift for the child:
No wife, kids, home;
No money sense. Unemployable.
Friends, yes. But the wrong sort –
The workshy, women, wimps,
Petty infringers of the law, persons
With notifiable diseases,
Poll tax collectors, tarts;
The bottom rung.
His end?
I think we’ll make it
Public, prolonged, painful.
Right, said the baby. That was roughly
What we had in mind.

Bridge of Light

a celebration of the full equality and dignity of all people

Location: Global event
Start Date: 26 December, 2010
Finish Date: 1 January 2011

Welcome in the new year with Bridge of Light, a new holiday honouring LGBT culture and spirituality.

People celebrate Bridge of Light by lighting seven candles, one for each color of the LGBT rainbow flag, on New Year’s Eve -- or from 26 December to 1 January, one candle per day.

Each candle stands for a universal principle and its expression in the lives and history of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people:

Red - The Root of Spirit (Community)
Orange - The Fire of Spirit (Eros)
Yellow - The Core of Spirit (Self-Esteem)
Green - The Heart of Spirit (Love)
Blue - The Voice of Spirit (Self-Expression and Justice)
Purple - The Eye of Spirit (Wisdom)
All Candles - The Crown of Spirit (Spirituality)


The candles are intended to provide a starting point for individual and group meditations on the meaning of spirituality in our lives.

Kittredge Cherry worked with Joe Perez, the founder of Bridge of Light, to revise the principles to include the chakras. You can read their discussions at the Gay Spirituality Blog. They’re open to future revisions, so let them know what you think!

Bridge of Light resources

Jesus in Love blog: Bridge of Light

Gay Spirituality: Bridge of Light

Joe Perez: Bridge of Light

Dance of the elements: words of inclusive love (a prayer and benediction for Bridge of Light)

Winter Solstice

Yes, Virginia, axial tilt is the reason for the season... and the perpetual mystery of the light being born from the darkness. The light of the sun, the darkness of night; the light of the divine spark in each one of us, born from the joyous mystery of flesh; the light of consciousness welling up from the dark waters of the unconscious.

One of the reasons why the celebration of the solstice runs so deep in the human psyche is that people feared, deep down, that the light of the sun might not return. It's also a moment of jollity and colour in the midst of the wet, cold, dark winter.

The winter solstice occurs exactly when the earth's axial tilt is farthest away from the sun at its maximum of 23° 26'. Just about every culture has a festival around the winter solstice.

One of my favourite sites about the winter solstice is Candlegrove, which has reflections on Solstice, Sacaea and Saturnalia, Yule and celebrating the solstice today.

"Shall we liken Christmas to the web in a loom? There are many weavers, who work into the pattern the experience of their lives. When one generation goes, another comes to take up the weft where it has been dropped. The pattern changes as the mind changes, yet never begins quite anew. At first, we are not sure that we discern the pattern, but at last we see that, unknown to the weavers themselves, something has taken shape before our eyes, and that they have made something very beautiful, something which compels our understanding."

--Earl W. Count, 4,000 Years of Christmas

Food Blessings

Rev Naomi started a conversation on Twitter about blessings for food. If you want to see it, the tag is #tablebless. It's a great idea for integrating spirituality with daily life, so I'm really interested in what people come up with.

I suggested the Pantheist Grace and a Pagan Grace by Isaac and Phaedra Bonewits.

Other offerings include:

• "We thank every being that brought this food to our table. We are all a part of the web of life" (by me)
• "Blessed be God who is our bread, may all the world be clothed and fed" (by chickpastor)
• "Thanks for what we receive! With joy, may we give far more than we receive and bless the world." (by Rev Naomi)
  
• "Rejoice in what gifts upon this table lay! Nourished here, may we go forth and feed the world." (by Rev Naomi)
  
• "We give thanks for the life that sustains our life, and the web of which we are all a part." (by TrulySocial)
  
• "For those who grew this food, those who made this meal, and for life that sustains us all, we give thanks!" (by Rev Naomi)
  

There's a collection of prayers before meals from various faith traditions at BeliefNet. Many traditions seem to have the impulse to honour where the food came from and to wish that everyone else will be fed too. For example, this Pagan prayer and this Buddhist prayer do that, and so does chickpastor's prayer (above). There are more ideas on the dance of the elements blog, where this post originally appeared.

Please add your ideas in the comments. Brevity is of the essence here - it needs to be easy to memorise and not make the food get cold!