[Dialogue] 5/20/10, Spong Lauren Elizabeth Failla

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Everyday Health, Inc., John Shelby Spong's online publisher, is pleased to inform his readers that at the graduation ceremonies at Drew University on May 15th, 2010, an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree was conferred on Bishop Spong, "Honorus Causa." We offer our congratulations.




Thursday May 20, 2010 

Lauren Elizabeth Failla
1985-2010

When I got the telephone call, it was like absorbing a blow to the chest that left my heart pounding and my body breathless, "Can you come right away. Lauren has been killed." The voice had an urgency that did not allow for further questions. Christine and I went at once.
Lauren was Lauren Elizabeth Failla, a young 25-year-old woman, the sole surviving child of two close friends. Their other child Emily, Lauren's older sister, had been killed just four years ago at age 24 in a mountain climbing accident. I could not believe that a similar tragedy had struck this family yet again, removing from their lives their last child.
I had known Lauren since she was a babe in arms. I met her, if one can be said "to meet" an infant, about twenty-five years ago in church on an August Sunday. Her family of four had just moved to Morristown and was attending this church for the first time.
We watched these two girls grow up as they and their parents, Kay and Frank, created a special dimension in the life of our congregation. Far too quickly they became inquisitive pre-adolescents with beautiful voices that found an outlet in the girls' choir. Then, as if overnight, they became teenagers — talented and self-giving persons, who pressed the boundaries of life at every turn as if they might miss something if they did not. Then Emily went off to Vanderbilt University and Lauren became a single star, shining even more brightly. Since I was at this time a very active bishop, I did not get to this church except when off duty at Christmas or in the summer, so I did not see them often, but there was a bond which was obvious whenever I saw them. Both of them always made me glad to be alive. All who knew them had a similar response.
Then the first tragedy struck. Emily, by now a university graduate and a primary school teacher in the state of Washington, was engaging in her favorite sport of rock climbing, rappelling as it is called, when her ropes broke and she fell 400 feet to her death. She was 24. The devastation experienced by those who knew her was palpable, but it tore most deeply into the soul of her sister Lauren. Emily's death was the most painful pastoral moment I had ever known until I got this call and learned that Lauren had herself been the victim of a tragic accident, attacked by a crocodile while scuba diving, ending her life at age 25.
It is not as if I am unfamiliar with death and human tragedy; one does not enter the priesthood and not expect to deal with pain. The fact is, however, that some experiences in life are more rending than others. For parents to lose their only two children, both in bizarre and unnatural ways, seemed to me to be something no one should have to bear. When human suffering gets this intense, I begin to understand just why it was that the biblical character we call Job wanted to curse God and die!
I have lived long enough to know that life is not fair. Yet the idea, which is probably more a hope than a conviction, that God is both just and loving is tested, even shattered, in our embrace of human tragedy. Something is clearly not right with the logic of religion. Where in these circumstances was the God who promised to "deliver us from evil?" If God has supernatural power, as the Bible suggests and as most of us assume, but does not intervene in a tragedy like this, is God not malevolent and even blameworthy? If God does not have this supernatural power then is God impotent? Are we then simply the victims of an impersonal world of chance? We cannot help but wonder if God is anything more than a pious delusion? Those appear to be the options. Must our choice be a malevolent God or no God at all? Why was the God who was said to have saved the Jews from slavery in Egypt more than 3000 years ago, not able to save the Jews from the Holocaust in the 20th century? Tra gedy sends us into the darkness of the soul, where we grope to find meaning in unfathomable human pain that causes so many of our religious concerns to sound empty and devoid of reality.
If there is a God, there must be more to this concept than religion seems to understand, becomes our inevitable conclusion. It is this hardness of reality, the inequality of suffering in life that has propelled me, and I suspect many others, onto a different kind of journey that has now carried me beyond the boundaries of traditional religion and into the mystery of life itself. That journey has been the hallmark of my entire priestly career. In the hope that others might resonate with this quest I wish now to share some aspects of that journey with you briefly.
My first step was to recognize that the traditional definition of God as the "supernatural, external being" was, at best, little more than an inadequate human definition, probably expressing our hope more than our confidence. So, I started this journey by setting that definition aside. The external deity who would do for us what we could not do for ourselves died, and I turned my gaze away from the skies that seemed so empty and began a search for God in a new place. I journeyed into a study of the meaning of life in general and human life in particular.
While life has been on this planet for 3.8 billion years, consciousness emerged less that a billion years ago and the self-conscious life that marks our humanity is probably no more than 250,000 years old. To be self-conscious is to relate to life in a new way. We become aware first that only self-conscious human beings know that we are alive and thus only self-conscious beings also know that we will die. No plant, no other animal knows that it is the destiny of all living things to die. That is something that only human beings share. It is not easy to embrace mortality and yet human beings must do it every day. Only self-conscious human beings live knowingly inside the medium of time. Plants are not aware of time. Animals appear to experience time as an eternal present. Only human beings, therefore, can forge lifelong relationships, for that requires time. Only human beings know who our parents are or who our children are after those children are weaned. No lion, tiger, ape or dog grieves when one of its grownup offspring dies. That is a human capacity alone. One of the glories of self-consciousness is that human beings form lifelong relationships, which remember the past, transcend the present and anticipate the future. Because of this capacity we are able to give ourselves to those we love. It is in that gift, however, that we also awaken to the vulnerability of losing the ones we love. Yet who among us would sacrifice our most precious life-giving relationships to avoid the inevitable pain of losing that relationship? Would any of us, who have known Emily and Lauren Failla, be willing to exchange our present pain and grief if the only way we could do that was never to have known or loved each of them? Is it not in loving another and in giving ourselves to another that the essence of living and the joy of meaning are found? It is not easy to be human, but does not the joy outweigh the pain? So we have to choose. I choose life and love. I choose life-giving relationships even though this means that I must eventually endure pain and loss. Making that choice is the second step in my journey.
Having once made that decision, I recognize next that in embracing the self-consciousness of humanity, I am propelled beyond my limits to a new vision of what life can be. I escape the limits of time and space and there I encounter an ultimate reality, which I can experience but never define. That is the reality, but still the mystery, that I now call God.
In the depth of my self-conscious humanity, I confront the essence of life, which has now transformed the way I think about God. I no longer see God as a supernatural being able and ready to come to my aid, but as the source of life flowing through the universe, present in every living cell, every plant, every animal, but coming to self-consciousness only in human beings. If God is experienced as the source of life, then the only way to worship God is by living fully and, the more fully I live, the more this God, this source of life, becomes visible. I now see God as the source of love that is also in every living thing. Love is the power that enhances life and it is present in plants that turn their leaves to the sun, in the birds that feed their young in the nest, in the cat that licks the fur of its kittens, but this instinctual life-giving power comes to self-consciousness only in human beings. If God is experienced as the source of love, then the only way I can wor ship God is by loving wastefully, and the more wastefully I love, the more I make God visible. Finally, I now experience God not as a being, but as the ground of all being, which means that if God is identified with being, the only way I can worship God is to have the courage to be all that I can be. The more I am myself the more I make God visible. That is when I am forced to acknowledge that living is not about the quantity of days, but about the quality of life. 
I will not avoid the vulnerability that comes with self-consciousness because that is what enables me to live, to love and to be, and that is the experience that also relates me to God who is the source of life, the source of love and the ground of being. It is also in giving myself to others in relationships that I discover that I transcend time, and that is the moment when I touch eternity. Eternity is entered when I allow someone else to be part of me and allow myself to be part of someone else. Eternity involves recognizing that no one can be human alone.
So I weep openly at the graves of Emily and Lauren Failla, but even as I weep I also know that it is only in being self-conscious that I was privileged to know them so deeply that the pain of their deaths is now so rending and so traumatic. It is not easy to be human, but only in that humanity is meaning discovered and love shared. I have also learned that it is in sharing life, love and being with others that I begin to recognize that I am part of who God is and God is part of who I am, and that all of us are part of those we love and they are part of us. That is now for me the place where God becomes visible and again, for me, that is where eternal life begins.

– John Shelby Spong
 



Question and Answer 
With John Shelby Spong


Anne Fox, via the Internet, writes:
I have recently read a lot of your work in my search for a Christianity that makes sense and doesn't involve blind faith ignoring the contradictions of the Bible. Although your books have helped me to finally have the courage to walk away from many of the "traditional" beliefs, without fearing retribution, I find myself searching for the meaning of our existence. I used to find comfort in believing that innocent people who had miserable lives would no longer suffer after death and go on to a new "chapter" in their spiritual existence in some form of life after death which was a positive experience, wherever and whatever that many be. Now I found myself struggling to find meaning in life when so many people suffer. I really want to believe there is something more to us that just the physical cells. What do you think happens to us when our bodies die?
Anne Fox, via the Internet, writes:
I have recently read a lot of your work in my search for a Christianity that makes sense and doesn't involve blind faith ignoring the contradictions of the Bible. Although your books have helped me to finally have the courage to walk away from many of the "traditional" beliefs, without fearing retribution, I find myself searching for the meaning of our existence. I used to find comfort in believing that innocent people who had miserable lives would no longer suffer after death and go on to a new "chapter" in their spiritual existence in some form of life after death which was a positive experience, wherever and whatever that many be. Now I found myself struggling to find meaning in life when so many people suffer. I really want to believe there is something more to us that just the physical cells. What do you think happens to us when our bodies die?



Dear Anne,
You are wrestling not with some tangential idea, but with reality itself. I congratulate you on that and urge you not to give up your quest. You are just at the beginning of discovery.
Western religion has traditionally taught us to think of God as external to this world, but who is nonetheless the source of life's meaning. It was the assumption of this theological position that this God can and will invade this world to make things right. That is why the unfair world is so difficult for most people to understand and why we have traditionally invested our hope for fairness, not in this life, but in life after death.
Many things have shaken our confidence in these concepts. This God above the sky seemed far more real when we thought the earth was the center of a three tiered universe. The all-seeing God above the sky was then endowed with record-book-keeping efficiency so that the afterlife would be appropriately be used to reward or punish us based on our deeds and misdeeds. What does one do with these ideas in the light of Copernicus and Galileo and the field of astrophysics that has flowed from them, confronting us with a universe so vast that our minds boggle to embrace it? The universe seems to be empty of this kind of divine presence.
We once defined this God above the sky as a "being," maybe the "Supreme Being," who possessed supernatural power and we expected this God to intervene into history on our behalf to accomplish the divine will or to answer our sometimes very self-centered and immature prayers. The work of Isaac Newton challenged this supernatural world of miracles and magic and left it gasping for life.
We once defined human life as a special creation made in the image of God, endowed with an immortal soul and "just a little lower than the angels." Then came Charles Darwin who defined us instead as "just a little higher than the apes." We began to see ourselves not as fallen angels, but as highly developed animals linked by DNA to everything from the plankton of the sea, to the cabbages, to the chimpanzees. Suddenly we wondered if there was any meaning to life other than the biological processes of being born, maturing, mating, reproducing and dying.
So it is that faith wavers in the modern world and the external supernatural being we once thought of as God might just turn out to be little more than a stage in human development. Certainly the God who is the one who rewards and punishes is little more than the behavior controlling parental deity that immature children seek.
I urge you to turn your attention inward not outward, to go so deeply into your own humanity that you escape its limits and begin to experience that which is transcendent or the divine presence. That is the only doorway that in my experience enables me to contemplate life after death. At least that is the path I sought to develop in my recent book, Eternal Life: A New Vision. 

– John Shelby Spong






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