Is God really in charge of the universe? Do prophecies actually happen? Lots of interesting feedback this week, coming out of last week’s chat about prophecy, guidance and generally ‘hearing’ from God.
For some years now I’ve been thinking about our life as a collaboration with God, rather than God micro-managing everything. Christians, to me, often drift into a kind of fatalism, where everything is pre-ordained and planned. Such a concept of God seems to me to be more controlling than loving.
In this episode we returned to one of the central questions of theology: is it right to pray for a parking space? As I say in the programme, I believe in an interventionist God, but I’m not sure he intervenes in quite the way we think.
I was also really touched this week by an email from someone who, in the middle of a sad and difficult time, experienced a moment of mindfulness and grace.
This week Joe interviews an old college friend, Shaun Lambert, about mindfulness, wonder, and the need to ’re-perceive' God. It’s a really great interview, connecting mindfulness with spirituality in a very profound and helpful way.
A lot of it is about the need to pay attention to ourselves and the moment we’re in. Attention is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. In fact I led a retreat on the subject the week before lock down happened – an event which caused us all to pay greater attention in a whole new way!
Well, it’s been a pretty rubbish couple of weeks, but amidst the anxiety there are some good things.
This week Joe and I chat a bit about comfort. My thoughts were inspired by giving a talk on Sunday on 2 Corinthians 1:3-4 which really describes how we are comforted by God (largely through each other) and how we then have to pass that comfort on. So we live in this virtuous circle of giving and receiving comfort.
Crikey. We’ve done three hundred episodes of this podcast. Who’d have thought it?
Anyway, this week, Joe and I talk about some of the things we’ve learned along the way and, indeed, are still learning. This is my list…
What have I learned?
That there are a lot of people out there who are in this situation.
We're still going and the audience is still growing. So there are a lot more people out there who identify with mid-faith crisis than we imagined.
One of the things Joe and I discussed on this week’s show was redeeming the word ‘religion’, helped by a listener who wrote in that ‘I’ve actually started to use the word ‘religion’ again… At its best, religion and religious communities can teach and empower us to become truly human and leave behind our selfish survival traits.’
I think this is absolutely true. ‘Religion’ is a tarnished word, stained by centuries of abuse, hypocrisy and cruelty.
This week’s episode is all about money. It’s an interview with financial advisor Sian MacInnes FPFS which is all about the difficulties we have in dealing with the subject.
Personally I have always felt vulnerable around the issue. I have that internal conflict, which I suspect many writers and artists have, of feeling anxious about money, but at the same time making life choices which don’t guarantee any kind of financial security.
In this week’s episode, Joe and I – helped by some great feedback – talk about what we gain from belonging to a church, and also what we gain by not belonging. The topic was inspired by a talk I heard a friend of mine give. She was born and raised in Nepal, but moved back to Scotland, and so never felt that she really belonged in either place. But now she has come to see that not-belonging gives her a unique and valuable perspective.
Yes, in this episode, Joe and I return – for a bit, anyway – to the Bible, this time discussing how the Bible was compiled and what is meant by inspiration.
2 Timothy 3:16 is usually translated as ‘All scripture is inspired by God’, but the Greek is para graphē theopneustos which means ‘all [the] writings are god-breathed’.
First, there’s the issue of what ‘scriptures’ Paul is talking about. The Bible as we have it didn’t exist in Paul’s day.
This week Joe raised the topic of Christian outrage over the Olympics. One of the joys about not really being on social media means that this storm completely passed me by. It was only a couple of days later when I saw a news article about the organisers apologising for it that I realised anyone had got angry.
The idea of people being outraged because of a lampoon of an historically inaccurate painting of the last supper seems odd to me.