Jubilee! A Call to Life!

Below is an essay about Jubilee! by Avery Shackelford for her Introduction to Religious Studies course at St. Andrew’s-Sewanee School in Sewanee, Tennessee. Avery is the granddaughter of Mimi Shackelford, who has been involved with Jubilee! since the beginning and who made the lovely fabric wall hangings that adorn the interior walls at Jubilee!. By the way, Avery recently graduated after receiving an A+ on her paper.

Jubilee! A Call to Life!
By Avery Shackelford

In the mountains of North Carolina there is a place where hands come together to work, pray, create, celebrate, and love.  These hands belong to the members of “a unique Community of Faith”1 called Jubilee!. Jubilee! is an inclusive community filled with people of many different religious backgrounds and beliefs, and as Minister Howard Hanger states, “Diversity is our middle name!” The people in this community, who refer to themselves as Jubilants, live up to their namesake as they personify all of the word jubilant’s synonyms including joyful, exultant, and exuberant. In a place where love is given out as freely as candy at a parade, there is certainly much to be jubilant about.

Jubilee! has a mission to make their community and the world a better place. In 1989, when Jubilee! first got its start, the group donated ten thousand dollars to organizations both locally and world-wide to feed and shelter the hungry and homeless.2 Today, Jubilee! annually donates about thirteen times the amount they gave out in their first year; as Mimi Shackelford says “Our goal is to give half of what we take in.” Among the agencies that receive from Jubilee! are Habitat for Humanity, Meals on Wheels, and Boys & Girls Club. Service based ministries in Jubilee! include “Outreach” whose mission is “ministering to needs of others through the appropriation of our outreach dollars” and “The Service Team” who “locates and facilitates ‘action oriented, hands-on projects’ that benefit those in need.”3     One unique way in which Jubilee! helps lend a hand is through their “Room In the Inn” program, “a local program of Homeward Bound, sponsored by 26 Asheville area faith-based communities, to provide safe and overnight accommodations and nourishing meals to twelve homeless women.”4 Approximately four times each year Jubilee! provides food and housing for these women with the help of 70 hands. Why are Jubilants so willingly ready to help?  This question is answered by Jubilee! member Pam Raymond in her essay “How Much We Love.” She says, “We love…we love wildly and freely! We love the kind of love that is not afraid of dirty hands!”  She goes on to say, “Radical love can change a life. Relentless love can change the world – one heart at a time. Keep on loving, Jubilee! that’s what is real.” Jubilee!’s drive to help make their community and world better stems from their perpetual love for all human beings.

The attitude of many Jubilants reminds one faintly of the ideas of the romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge both of who discuss the importance of human beings’ connection to nature in their writing. In Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” the narrator talks about his discovery that even the slimy snakes in the sea are part of God’s creation. Likewise, Jubilants say “Even the beasts of the field and every creeping thing praises God, according to the psalms.”5 The Jubilant! church year is unique in its use of “the vias”, “used as a quarterly focus for worship[, there is] one via for each season: Summer—via positiva, Autumn—via negativa, Winter—via creativa, and Spring—via transformativa.”6 The purpose of the vias is to help create your own path of thinking and being while still giving you clear spiritual guidance. The vias are a path, not “THE path.”7 Via positiva is a celebration of yes. Summer is a positive “yes-like” season in the abundance of color and nature. Via negativa affirms that there is darkness in life and that darkness should be approached with courage.

Autumn represents this darkness, as life appears to be dying. Via creativa helps produce a creative time to go inside one-self. Winter is the season of creativity. Via transformativa represents positive change and fullness of life. Spring is a time of change as life is reborn anew.8 In a recent via transformativa celebration, the congregation sang a song about the earth of which Mimi Shackelford says, “After we sang this Howard [Hanger] suggested we imagine singing it to the planet—the moon, stars, earth, and flowers.” Jubilants feel a deep connection to nature. Members of Jubilee! can actively participate in “Earth Team” whose goal is “creating awareness of the interconnection of all things and sponsoring projects related to the environment or justice”9, but being part of the Jubilee! community is enough to help one realize nature’s great effect on and connection to humanity and foster a deep appreciation for the earth.  Aliyah Schick says, “I believe that everything that exists is part of the whole, part of what we call sacred, part of what we call God. All that we know and encounter is expression of the sacred and contained within it. Things change form—we live in change, everything is constantly changing—but nothing just ends or stops existing. It transmutes to another form. Water becomes ice, a tree becomes compost, minerals become crystals, oil becomes heat; matter becomes energy and energy becomes matter. There is much more going on than we humans will ever begin to imagine, let alone understand. I have a powerful sense, deep in my bones, that all is well, whether I know the details or not.” Jubilants have come to realize that God is with you in nature and the closer we are to nature, the closer we are to God. (more…)

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010

Pry Me Off Dead Center

Pry Me Off Dead Center
by Ted Loder, Guerillas of Grace

O persistent God
deliver me from assuming your mercy is gentle.
Pressure me that I may grow more human,
not through the lessening of my struggles,
but through an expansion of them
that will undamn me
and unbury my gifts.

Deepen my hurt
until I learn to share it
and myself
openly,
and my needs honestly.

Sharpen my fears
until I name them
and release the power I have locked in them
and they in me.

Accentuate my confusion
until I shed those grandiose expectations
that divert me from the small, glad gifts
of the now and the here and the me.

Expose my shame where it shivers,
crouched behind the curtains of propriety,
until I can laugh at last
through my common frailties and failures,
laugh my way toward becoming whole.

Deliver me
from just going through the motions
and wasting everything I have
which is today,
a chance,
a choice,
my creativity,
your call.

O persistent God,
let how much it all matters
pry me off dead center
so if I am moved inside
to tears
or sighs
or screams
or smiles
or dreams,
they will be real
and I will be in touch with who I am
and who you are
and who my sisters and brothers are.

Thursday, August 13th, 2009

“The Four Agreements” by Don Miguel Ruiz

If I could choose only five books to take with me on a long and arduous journey, The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz would be one of them.

The four simple but profound agreements are:

1. Be impeccable with your word.
2. Don’t take anything personally.
3. Don’t make assumptions.
4. Always do your best.

Below is a evocative and inspiring video based on the book.

Friday, April 10th, 2009

The birth of Jesus as told by the Jubilee! teens

The re-enactment of the birth of Jesus by the Jubilee! teens as it might happen today in Asheville. If you take your religion really seriously, you may find this video a bit irreverent. Well, OK, highly irreverent . . . maybe even blasphemous . . . but hilariously entertaining nonetheless.

Filmed and posted on YouTube by Jim Brown.

Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008

Parker Palmer on the economic crisis

Words of wisdom from Quaker, author and educator Parker Palmer:

Alexis de Tocqueville, the nineteenth century French scholar famous for Democracy in America, wrote a less well-known book titled The Old Regime and the Revolution, arguing that the French Revolution happened long before it happened. The eruption that shattered French society at the end of the eighteenth century was the result of small seismic shifts that had been accumulating for decades deep underground. If people had paid attention to the tectonic instabilities caused by greed and injustice, and had responded wisely to the nervous needles on their inner seismographs, the “Reign of Terror” might have been avoided.

A parallel point can be made about the economic terrors that now engulf America: at some level, most of us knew they were coming. Who doesn’t know that a society in which the rich get richer while the poor get poorer is a society that will someday have to pay the piper? Who doesn’t know that when a relatively small fraction of the world’s population uses its power to command and consume a disproportionately large fraction of the world’s resources, the chickens will come home to roost? Who doesn’t know that an economic system that encourages us to live beyond our means and refuses to regulate greed is one in which our avarice will come back to bite us? Who doesn’t know that at every level of life, from personal to global to cosmic, what goes around comes around?

The problem is not that we don’t possess a capacity to know these things. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t have all the colloquialisms I just used! The problem is that the knowledge we need, like the seismic shifts that create eruptions, originates underground. It comes from a place within us deeper than our intellects, a place the poet William Stafford calls “a remote, important region in all who speak,” a place sometimes called the inner teacher or the soul.

But rarely do we allow ourselves to go to that place. Instead, we fill our lives with noisy distractions, blocking our access to insights that might scare us but could also save us. The purpose of an authentic “inner life” retreat is not to flee from a frightening world, but to give ourselves access to those deeper sources of knowing that can help us find our way through what we fear.

Read “Trusting our Deeper Knowing: On Cataclysms, Contemplation, and Circles of Trust” in its entirety at the Speaking of Faith website or listen to a podcast of the show on which Palmer was interviewed by host Krista Tippett.

Tuesday, December 16th, 2008

So religion really is the opiate of the people?

Personal growth blogger, writer, speaker Steve Pavalina offers ten reasons not to be a member of an organized religion.

***

10 Reasons You Should Never Have a Religion
by Steve Pavalina

While consciously pursuing your spiritual development is commendable, joining an established religion such as Christianity, Islam, or Hinduism is one of the worst ways to go about it. In this article I’ll share 10 reasons why you must eventually abandon the baggage of organized religion if you wish to pursue conscious living in earnest.

Since Christianity is currently the world’s most popular religion, I’ll slant this article towards Christianity’s ubiquitous failings. However, you’ll find that most of these points apply equally well to other major religions (yes, even Buddhism).

1. Spirituality for dummies.

If you have the awareness level of a snail, and your thinking is mired in shame and guilt (with perhaps a twist of drug abuse or suicidal thinking), then subscribing to a religion can help you climb to a higher level of awareness. Your mindset, however, still remains incredibly dysfunctional; you’ve merely swapped one form of erroneous thinking for another.

For reasonably intelligent people who aren’t suffering from major issues with low self-esteem, religion is ridiculously consciousness-lowering. While some religious beliefs can be empowering, on the whole the decision to formally participate in a religion will merely burden your mind with a hefty load of false notions.

When you subscribe to a religion, you substitute nebulous group-think for focused, independent thought. Instead of learning to discern truth on your own, you’re told what to believe. This doesn’t accelerate your spiritual growth; on the contrary it puts the brakes on your continued conscious development. Religion is the off-switch of the human mind.

Leave the mythology behind, and learn to think for yourself. Your intellect is a better instrument of spiritual growth than any religious teachings.

2. Loss of spiritual depth perception.

One of the worst mistakes you can make in life is to attach your identity to any particular religion or philosophy, such as by saying “I am a Christian” or “I am a Buddhist.” This forces your mind into a fixed perspective, robbing you of spiritual depth perception and savagely curtailing your ability to perceive reality accurately. If that sounds like a good idea to you, you’ll probably want to gouge out one of your eyeballs too. Surely you’ll be better off with a single, fixed perspective instead of having to consider two separate image streams… unless of course you’ve become attached to stereo vision.

Religious “truths” are inherently rooted in a fixed perspective, but real truth is perspective-independent. When you substitute religious teachings for truth, you mistake shadows for light sources. Consequently, you doom yourself to stumble around in the dark, utterly confused. Clarity remains forever elusive, and the best answer you get is that life is one giant mystery. Religious mysteries, however, arise not from what is truly unknowable; they arise from the limitations of trying to understand reality from a fixed frame of reference.

A more intelligent approach is to consider reality through a variety of different perspectives without trying to force your perceptions into an artificial religious framework. If you wish to learn more about this approach, read Spiritual Depth Perception. (more…)

Friday, June 13th, 2008

Just in time for Easter: Fiery words from provocative preachers

Damn you rich! You already have your compensation.

Damn you who are well-fed! You will know hunger.

Damn you who laugh now! You will weep and grieve.

Damn you when everybody speaks well of you!

Sound like some angry black preacher ranting from his pulpit in Chicago? Guess again. These are the words of Jesus of Nazareth as stated in Luke 6:24-26, Scholars Translation (via Devilstower at Daily Kos). So how do Jesus’ uncompromising edicts differ from Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s provocative pronouncements?

God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human.

God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.

Not much, in my opinion. In fact, the words of Jesus and Rev. Wright, though adamant in tone, rather resonate with me. I know that I can fall asleep and forget who I really am and why I’m on this planet. Therefore I rely on my minister, Howard Hanger, to regularly awaken me from my slumber, to disturb my complacency and self-satisfaction, to dissipate my judgment of others, to inspire me to walk my talk, to rekindle my desire to be more loving, to motivate me to use my gifts to help create a more just and compassionate planet.

More from Devilstower at Daily Kos:

From Gandhi to King, it’s in the nature of spiritual leaders to grab their audiences by the throat and their nations by the short hairs. This was true at the time of the Civil War and during the Civil Rights movement. Martyrs did not become martyrs by appealing to the status quo.

[ . . . ]

The purpose of a good sermon isn’t to placate, ease, and make people comfortable. A dangerous religion isn’t one that challenges people and makes them squirm. Makes them angry. A dangerous religion is one that is too amicable to what you already think, one that pats you on the head and sends you forth in assurance of your own righteousness. If you want to search for “traitors” in the pulpit, turn your eye toward those who never find anything wrong in the actions of this nation.

And, in honor of the Easter season, a few words from the inimitable Arthur Silber over at Once Upon a Time:

I don’t care in the least whether you think Jesus was the Son of God, or the weird guy from that little village over there, or an actual historical figure. I’m talking about the actual essence of the story of Jesus as that story has come down to us. In fact, the Jesus of that story challenged every aspect of the behavior and thought of the ruling class of his time. He condemned that ruling class in stark and notably unforgiving terms. He was threatening to the powerful of his time to a degree that the powerful found intolerable.

You might recall that the threat Jesus represented to the powerful elites of his time was so extreme that they killed him because of it. But in a pattern that is repeated over and over again throughout history, the ruling class found a very clever way to disembowel the threat Jesus represented, once they had disemboweled the individual in question. The ruling class appropriated the religion he had preached, purged it of each and every element that criticized them, and repackaged it as a bland, easily digestible pablum. They then pretended this tasteless, empty, sentimentalized religion was what Jesus had offered all along. And many people fell for it.

However Jeremiah Wright did not buy the watered-down version of Christ and Christianity but believed instead in the radical Jesus, the one who challenged (and challenges) us to actually live by the principles he espoused. And some evidently are frightened by his audacity–Jesus’ as well as Jeremiah’s. So now Wright is being crucified in the mainstream media, and another spiritual leader who was willing to speak his truth is being silenced just as surely as if he were nailed to a cross and left there to perish.

Monday, March 17th, 2008

Belief-O-Matic — A quiz about your spiritual beliefs

Ever wondered how your spiritual beliefs align with various religious practices? Well, Belief-O-Matic™ at Beliefnet.com can tell you. Just answer 20 questions about your concept of a higher power, the origin of life, etc., and Belief-O-Matic™ will tell you which religions most closely match your responses.

Example question from quiz:

1.	What is the number and nature of the deity (God, gods, higher power)? Choose one.
	Only one God–a corporeal spirit (has a body), supreme, personal God Almighty, the Creator.
	Only one God–an incorporeal (no body) spirit, supreme, personal God Almighty, the Creator.
	Multiple personal gods (or goddesses) regarded as facets of one God, and/or as separate gods.
	The supreme force is the impersonal Ultimate Reality (or life force, ultimate truth, cosmic order, absolute bliss, universal soul), which resides within and/or beyond all.
	The supreme existence is both the eternal, impersonal, formless Ultimate Reality, and personal God (or gods).
	No God or supreme force. Or not sure. Or not important.
	None of the above.

FYI, the top six religions that most closely matched my beliefs were:

• Mahayana Buddhism–100% match
• Taoism–96% match
• Unitarian Universalism–90% match
• Liberal Quakers–89% match
• Theravada Buddhism–89% match
• Neo-Pagan–88% match

Click here to start the quiz!

P.S. I don’t belong to an organized religion; I go to Jubilee!

Saturday, February 2nd, 2008