Making room for mystery
Because of Future Shock – too much information coming at us too fast – we are forever looking for ways to simplify and categorize. In the case of many adherents of the Muslim faith, and too many Christians, this has rendered entire segments of humanity glassy eyed and unquestioning in the face of change.
I ran across a great quote that describes this phenomenon: 
“It takes a contemplative mind to be content with paradox and mystery. The daily calculating mind works in a binary way; either-or thinking gives one a sense of control. The small mind works by comparison and judgment; the great mind works by synthesizing and suffering with alternative truths. The ego cannot stand this suffering, and that is exactly why it is so hard for religions and individuals to grow up. The ego prefers a satisfying untruth to an unsatisfying truth because the ego demands instant satisfaction and the settling of all dust.”
If this is the kind of quote that makes you think, and you consider that a good thing, buy the book, Adam’s Return: The five promises of male initiation by Richard Rohr.
Program note: 4 people signed up so far for discipleship. Room for a few more. If you’re teetering, give it a shot.
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Seth told me about this book a week or so ago, so I bought it and started it, so far so good. Again Seth has chosen a spiritual path, i’ll recommend another male centric book….
Hitler’s Spy Chief: The William Canaris Mystery
I talked about this book today when I did chapel at Lancaster Bible College. For years I knew from the Dietrich Boenhoffer biographies that he was protected by the ABWER (The German Military Intelligence Agency), I just never knew why. Based on recently de-classified documents and research this new biography has been written.
While not written by a Christian per see, this book makes clear that Canaris was both a Christian and a German patriot. Canaris decided that the Nazis’s were pagans, and that he would use the resources of the ABWER to do no wrong, recruited people of like mind in the military and began protecting Christians, Jews, and thwarting the strategy of Germany by providing intelligence to the English. His list of actions is astonishing. His direction to his extensive staff was to “appear to cooperate” with the SS, and not to soil themselves with the wickedness that the SS was doing.
Throughout this time Reinhard Heydrich the head of the SS/SD (organizer and chairman of the Wannsee conference which create the “Final Solution”) hunted and sparred with Canaris, and as his next door neighbor would come and sing and play the piano with Canaris’s wife as Canaris looked on.
Canaris paid for these actions by his arrest in 1945 and was subsquentely hung with Bonhoeffer. With his arrest the SS took over the ABWER, but Canaris’s moral impact was so great, that the majority of the military staff resigned and volunteered for front line duty on the Eastern Front against the Russians. They chose near certain death, rather then do a moral wrong with the Gestapo.