The Daily Disciplines
Everything we do is practice for the next time. When we cease to practice, we lose our fluency, and memory becomes imperfect. Some things are practiced by default- when did you last consciously practice eating? Other things require conscious effort. My handwriting is slow, laborious and has lost its fluency. I type without thinking.
When we took our young children back out to the desert where we had lived, they were profoundly uncomfortable with the open spaces. We noticed our son was happier and less fractious whenever we went walking in the enclosed space of mountain gorges. We become used to, and are affected by our environment. Years before, leaving the desert, my wife and I were depressed, dislocated and disoriented by urban life. A day out walking in the hills begins to resurrect memories and instincts which have been lost to our consciousness.
As urban westerners we live in a profoundly artificial environment. It is possible, even easy, to avoid the outside world for days at a time! Enter the garage by an inside door from the house, drive out using the automatic door opener, drive to the underground car park, and take the internal lift up to work. Leave before it is properly light, and return home after dark. We live in a world which we Australians especially, think we control. In truth, we are irradiated with uncontrolled advertising and other stimulation, rarely alone enough to be in silence, and uncomfortable if we are. We live in a noisy, crowded and driven world, which is the anathema of all that our spiritual ancestors learned is necessary for health. We have stepped out of reality into an artificial place.
The spiritual disciplines are designed to bring us back into the real world from our artificial place. They create time, silence and space for us to re-engage with the depths of life. They patrol the corridors of the mind, as someone has said, re-minding us of what is really important. Religion without practice becomes merely an idea, caught in the currents of the ideas round about, without the anchor of reality.
Progressive Christianity
These pages attempt to introduce Progressive Christianity. The label will strike some as a contradiction in terms! Others may feel the Christian part of the label says all that needs to be said.
We in the west are becoming profoundly religiously illiterate. Even educated people who understand the machinations and factions of political parties, or who engage in subtle debates over the historical details of events, often seem to think that words like Hindu or Christian refer to consistent wholes. They are not merely wrong; they are religiously illiterate. I emphasise this point because many loud opinions on religion, when analysed for their competence, should be treated with the same regard as uninformed political or historical or scientific debate: ill informed, shallow, and probably wrong! Opinion is free, and should be. But it is often ignorant.
Religions are factionalised. They have subtle, and sometimes major, differences of opinion which may, or may not, correspond with that factionalism! Dogma and doctrines, which are essentially the mores of the way a religion talks about itself, are competitive, and often contradictory, just like any other discipline of human endeavour. Like any human endeavour religion is beset with problematic specialists who seem to lose sight of the whole, with uninformed practitioners, fanatics, the insane, and the worthy and inspirational. To say Hindu or Buddhist or Christian is to say very little about a person or their beliefs.
Christian suggests some connection to the traditions around figure of Jesus of Nazareth, and that connection may not always be obvious! Ancient Christian groupings such as Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant (already glossing over many subtleties) are now bisected and connected into a crosshatching of new concerns born of justice, liberation, science, and psychology. To name a bare few!
One of the new groupings can loosely be labelled progressive. These pages form an idiosyncratic and incomplete introduction. Progressive Christianity is the self identification of this web site and the church which sponsors it. Like any religion worth the doing, our being progressive Christian is a work in progress!
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