Weekly Messages
Who IS the Enemy Jesus Said, "Love?"
Following on the idea last week, that the very notion of an enemy may be an illusion, we try to define clearly what makes an enemy.
Spirituality 401: Loving The Enemy (Prerequisites Required)
Loving our enemy. Was Jesus serious? We Christians generally ignore this verse because we simply cannot see our way there. We are encouraged to begin this 1000-mile journey with a single step. We enable ourselves through a process of working our circle of spiritual...
The Devastation and the Discipline of the Wilderness – Scott Bass
By Scott Bass We have a saying in our community that "It is our way to lose our way..." Losing our way is sometimes a good thing. The mystical experience is not part of most Christian's journeys these days. We don't see "the wilderness" or aimless wandering as a...
Lessons I’ve Learned from Being a Father – Chris Thomson
by Chris Thomson Fatherhood changes men as people and changes our spiritual walks.
Is Your Faith Holding on to a Rickety Cossack? – Chris Graebe
by Chris Graebe Everyone has their own story about how they got to NRCC. Everyone's wilderness journey is also a bit different, and many of us are still on that journey. Here is a bit of my own journey and what NRCC means to me.
On Adulting: Honoring our High-School Graduates
Today we honor our young adults who have completed their high school educations and listen in as they get some advice that we can all do better by heeding it.
Temporarily Out of Service
A commitment to service is one essential part of a healthy spiritual ecosystem. But service absent discernment can, at best, waste resources, at worst, cause harm. For many years the discernment was that NRCC was to focus upon building the other parts of the...
Mything the Point: Sophia and Her Daughters
The ancient myth of Sophia and her daughters illuminates a deep truth. The Way of Wisdom (Sophia) gives birth to the daughters, Faith (Fides), Hope (Spes), and Charity (Caritas). When we apply ourselves to the Way of Wisdom -- when we take up the spiritual practices,...
Fool of Love
When we tend to the inner life, the fruit we bear is Love. Modern standards might think love a fool because it bears all things kindly. It does not boast or envy or keep score. But when we know the Divine within, we become capacitated to love fully, not because others...
The Original Crowdsourcing of Biblical Proportions
This week we discuss the Jewish heroine Esther who despite her youth, sweetness, lack of wisdom and traditional power, leveraged what she knew about the spiritual journey. She helps us see how counter-cultural spiritual power really is. Esther calls her people to to...
Help Wanted: Counter Position
See what we did there!? "counter" and "counter." Same word, two meanings. Now that's big-time pun fun, people! In today's lesson, we imagine the conversation Jesus had with his disciples as he sent them to do their part healing the world. "Don’t act too magnificent,"...
Having the Christ-Mind
Folks who grew up in church have probably heard the term "the mind of Christ." (It's in the Bible.) Today's lesson suggest the term has the potential to help us out of the partisan pickle we find ourselves in as a nation. So far in this lesson, we've seen several...
A Less Wee Version of We
We've all got “sameness is safeness” instincts. They make it really hard to answer the question, "who is our neighbor?" But as we've been saying, everything is connected. A good way to imagine our connectedness is the metaphor of an ecosystem -- interconnected but...
Making the Connectedness Connection
Our brains are evolutionarily hardwired to detect difference and to fear it. This survival strategy makes it harder to see the deeper truth of our connectedness. Given that our hardwired instincts work against relating in oneness, the spiritual journey helps us. It...
The Gravity of Our Newtonian Inheritance
Five hundred years ago, Enlightenment scientists told us all things exist independently. All the social and cultural institutions we now live in, were built on instincts drawn from that basic understanding. Consequently, Western society -- and especially the US --...
No Trueness in Twoness
Science and spirituality have converged to affirm that we are all connected. Our separateness is an illusion that keeps us from living our lives in spiritual harmony with our interconnected reality. We all suffer the afflictions of living our two-ness illusion – chief...
Discerning Your Bent . . . For Lent
Since each personality has a bent, each tends toward specific fear-avoiding strategies. As we're learning to push back against our strategies, this lesson considers a whole menu of ancient spiritual practices, to help us counter a whole spectrum of fear-avoidance...
The Indignation Indication
A healthy dose of righteous indignation can be a powerful catalyst for action toward repairing the earth. ...key words being – healthy dose. But, sometimes, our indignation is yet another strategy for avoiding fear. When it is, our effectiveness at being agents of...
No Fear, No Transformation . . . Know Fear, Know Transformation
The regular occurrence of laments in our Christian lectionary cycle testifies to the fact that acknowledging affliction and fear is a healthy and a necessary part of the spiritual journey. When we distract ourselves with comforts and pleasures to avoid feeling our...
Don’t Let Your Tools . . . Make You a Tool
When we let our technology fool us into believing we are safe and invincible, our tools . . . make us tools. When religion devolves into just another technology we use to allay our fears, we miss the opportunity to transform our relationship with fear and enter into...
Trading Mudpies in the Slum for Sandcastles at the Sea
C.S. Lewis lamented that we settle in our lives, far too easily. In this lesson, we see that when we use religion as a tactic to calm our fears, we are settling for a second hand-religion. Religion can do better. It holds out the promise of first-hand...
A Divine Experience of Fear
Today's lesson is an introduction to our next series, "Transcending a Religion of Fear." We look at a point of origin for how religion has so often had an unsavory relationship to fear. When we use religion as a psychological crutch to avoid and distract ourselves...
Circling Back: "Being Christian in the Quantum Era"
NRCC’s journey began many years ago, desconstructing Enlightenment-Era church. After that, we began reconstructing a way to be Christian in the Quantum Era. Along the way, among the writings and practices of our ancient Christian Mothers and Fathers, we found a set of...
Follow Your Vice to Virtue – Robin Camu
Vice and virtue are two sides of the same coin. Rather than rejecting your “sins of the ego”, Robin Camu suggests bringing awareness to them in the moment, offering yourself loving kindness, and watching them melt into opportunities for virtue to flourish. Have a...