Walking the Bible by Bruce Feiler

Walking the Bible by Bruce Feiler

When  Abraham is to offer Isaac on the altar - it is the first  interactive moment in the Bible first time the Reader is asked what would I do in this situation.

How do we likin the Scriptures unto ourselves we should enter the story yourselves. Reimagine ourselves in bondage and reconsider the feelings of awe  fear, apprehension and expectation we have upon being  released by a God we're just seeing and feeling for the first time.


To walk in the land of Israel is a holy thing to do.
When the spirit speaks to your spirit it is like some homeless portion of my consciousness that hasn't even realized it was looking for a home suddenly found  a place where I feel comfortable and surge forward to put down anchor
An objective less to prove the Bible and more to witness its atmosphere and lingering appeal. 
With the old testament the 10 Commandments in the first covenant with God written down all others are oral  renewed with words.
In much of religion the services are profoundly solitary nature and also deeply communal

In ancient times a monk would be a top the path he would hear persons confession to make sure that he was spiritually prepared to be at the sacred-place you come to the monastery you purify yourself and then you ascend -what happens when you get in the holy ground- this is holy ground when you get there your heart will be beating in your head will be light .just shut your eyes and listen closely God will tell you what to do.

"The three pillars of the structure of Israel history are revelation covenant and law" Gunther Plaut. -interesting to observe the parallel process the LDS faith developed revelation - first vision and covenant - temple and the law-D&C built in crossing the in the wilderness In search of  a promise land - Zion ( by accepting  the law they to become part of Israel)
That an individual cannot reach salvation without a community
For Feiler  to experience the desert is like we would talk about experiencing the temple "I see this road seven times in the week and every time it's different because the sun hits it in a different place because I am in a 
different mood and for me it's always new"

Stiff-neckedn is a reference to an ox that refuses to lower its neck which It 
must do to be properly fitted into a yokel

The details of the Bible are the important part but knowing the stories is. Anyone who has a wish to be faithful and honest will have a crisis of faith in study of the details. However when you go certain places you feel him you feel of His spirit. When you do you come away a better person. Since you always can't be in certain places we have the written word in the Scriptures to also help us feel of that spirit become a better person. Only by entering the story ourselves can we truly understand its meaning. All I need to do is remember what I was looking for for somehow I already knew. Denied entry Moses actually gets more he gets prophetic vision personally granted him by God . Moses may not get the land but He gets the promise. The land alone is not the destination, the destination is the place where human beings live in consort with the divine.





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Becoming wise

Becoming wise: An inquiry into the mystery and art of living

by Krista Tippit

I enjoy Kristen Tibbetts podcast on being - listening to her interviews of people with various spiritual backgrounds and beliefs trying to come to a common ground . I read this book hoping it would be well written and bountiful in thought - it was both. 

'“I’m a person who listens for a living.  I listen for wisdom, and beauty, and for voices not shouting to be heard.  This book chronicles some of what I’ve learned in what has become a conversation across time and generations, across disciplines "

 
Review stated: "In Becoming Wise, Tippett distills the insights she has gleaned from this luminous conversation in its many dimensions into a coherent narrative journey, over time and from mind to mind. The book is a master class in living, curated by Tippet.
 The wisdom we seek emerges through the raw materials of the everyday. And the enduring question of what it means to be human has now become inextricable from the question of who we are to each other. It insists on the possibility of a common life for this century marked by resilience and redemption, with beauty"

Some favorite snippets:

Wisdom leavens intelligence and ennobles consciousness and advances evolution itself.

 Listening is about being present not just about being quiet.generous listening is powered by curiosity

What we practice we become- What's true of playing the piano and throwing a ball also holds for our capacity to move through  the world mindlessly and destructively or generously and graceful -(Related to Wilcox talk grace saves us and helps practice living in grace as the Savior lives changing our nature . )

I have yet to meet a wise person who doesn't know how to find some joy even in the midst of what is hard, and to smile and laugh easily including at oneself

There is such a thing as a bad question generous listening in fact yields better questions. Questions illicit answers in their likeness answers mirror the questions they rise or fall to meet. It is hard to meet a simplistic question with anything but a simplistic answer it's hard to transcend the combative question it is hard to resist a generous question

Words

Choose from the words 

that even now sleep on your tongue and to know that tangled 

among them terribly new is the sentence that could change your life 

What a wonderful way to think about the power language the mystery of it comes from in us

The question of listening is also a question of how do you listen to yourself

'He's looking with an eye that was deeply filled by love and compassion that Eye opens us up to see many things that might otherwise be missed '- seeing things through the filter of God's eyes not man's eyes

A Hug provides the boundary around an experience embraces one with love and says this is a limit to the pain that you can suffer

Muddled words

Awe - wonder of the ineffable of God

Vs awesome -totally radical dude

Beauty – that in the presence of which we feel more alive. Acts of kindness works of goodness – beauty incarnate, The spirit of living the beatitudes, proceeds through exuberantly inhabiting the given imperfect raw materials of the every day

Loving reality in all it's imperfection is the necessary prelude to discovering God present and alive

Vs Beaut - something sexually vivacious

People with Disabilities can bring this thing is precisely to the equilibrium of the heart beauty and purity of the world

The Buddhist word citta meaning the heart and mind are the same thing like into D&C 8:9 Lord telling you in your heart and in your mind

Excerpts from a poem by Elizabeth Alexander - what if the mightiest word is love?

Love Beyond marital, filial,  national 

love that casts a widening  pool of light 

love with no need to preempt grievance.

My heart cannot be educated by myself. It can only come out of a relationship with others. And if we accept being educated  by others, to let them explain to us what happens to them , and to let yourself be immersed in their world so!they can get into our world, then You begin to share something very deep.

We find our fulfillment  where we choose to find our fulfillment. if you're told you can only find it here you don't look it where it is , which is your life , you keep thinking it's coming. OK it'll will be here one day I'll get the big love. Well we have a big love.  it's already here.

(in capitalism what is engineered is longing, engineered longing and desire and us what can be in the future. It's always about the next product the next big thing) everything is all hooked into the seduction. What if we were actually content with our  life's?'The daily subtle simple gathering of kindnesses'

Muddled words continued

Wonder

Wondering is it beautiful way to begin to speak of a shared vocabulary of mystery we might embrace across our disciplines or contrasting certainties and our doubts. 

We need to look at examine the world with wonder we need to keep asking not just asking in our youth. 

Children connect with the questions the inquiry enormous curiosity about this universe and The hope that somehow those answers will come about. Spiritual life is a way of dwelling with perplexity searching for the purposes  as well as its perils its beauty as well as its ravages.

We are called to be the good Samaritan and lift our neighbor out of the ditch. but After you lift so many people out of the ditch you start to say maybe the whole road to Jericho needs to be transformed.

It's worth pausing every once in a while and taking in -isn't it -this dramatic change in our lifetime -when you travel you know you're not really doing so in order to move around you travel in order to be moved!

"The point of gathering stillness it's not to enrich the sanctuary or the mountaintop (or the temple ) but to bring that calm to the motion the commotion of the world."

'And the thing is being a wise parent or a spiritual parent doesn't take extra time. It's enfolded into the act of parenting.'

Hope like every virtue is a choice that becomes a practice to become spiritual muscle memory. It's a renewable resource for moving through life as it is not as we wish it to be .  - and cynicism is not more reasonable than hope .unlike almost every worthwhile thing in life cynicism is easy it judges things as they are but does not lift a finger to try to shift them. 

And hope is not an emotion. Hope is a cognitive, behavioral process that we learn when we experience adversity, when we have relationships that are trustworthy , when people have faith in our ability to get out of a jam. - The moments that make you are the moments of struggle. Hope is the function of struggle. resilience is a successor to mere progress, a companion to sustainability. To nurture a resilient human being is to build an expectation of adversity a capacity for inevitable vulnerability. Resilience is it once proactive pragmatic and humble. it doesn't overcome failure so much as transmutes it integrating it into the reality that evolves.

(We need to learn to fail gracefully - see book ' learning how to fall')

 Hope inspires the good to reveal itself

Humility has a lightness of step not a heaviness of heart. This lightness is the surest test for recognizing wisdom when you see it in the world or feel it's stirrings in yourself.

Plenty of mini sermons in this book. Plenty  to ponder on -  faith hope and love ultimately leading to wisdom

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