FAITH HOUSE Manhattan

A Call to New Yorkers!

~ by Samir Selmanovic

On June 26, our family moved into a two-bedroom apartment.  The girls have bunk beds in their room.  Vesna’s and my bedroom doubles as my office, our living room doubles as a guest room, and, best of all, we have a covered patio to accommodate more guests!  And that’s where you come in. 

School for our daughters begins the first week of September, so before the new routine begins, we want to connect with our old friends and meet some new ones.  So, if you are reading this blog and you live in New York City or in the vicinity, and you want to help Faith House become a wholistic community, please come to a party at our home! 

We have come a long way since the group we call “prime movers,” or Family Support Team formed, and we were blessed by receiving endorsements from a variety of advisors as they wrote and published articles on this blog to help us grapple with a multitude of issues, which all culminated in us actually coming to this city. 

But this is only just a beginning.  The next step is to build a Faith House Launch Team, a group of people that will assist us in launching this new congregation.  There are countless questions to be answered, tasks to be accomplished, and prayers to be said.  We cannot start this without you.

So please join us for the birth of this great adventure!  We would love to have you be an integral part from the very beginning.

When? Saturday, August 18, 2007, 4pm and into the evening.

Where?  Our apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan (86th St. and 2nd Ave).  Please email to RSVP or if you need directions by clicking HERE .

What to bring?  Love, courage, curiosity, wisdom, and peace (dinner will be provided along with a sweet movie in the evening).

Whom to bring?  Your friends and family that would be interested to help launch this venture of faith.  (Of course, your children are welcome too!)

Just recently I heard a song on my daughter’s iPod by John Mayer titled “Waiting On the World to Change”.  The poet is troubled.  Here’s how he starts:

Me and all my friends
We're all misunderstood
They say we stand for nothing and
There's no way we ever could

Now we see everything that's going wrong
With the world and those who lead it
We just feel like we don't have the means
To rise above and beat it

So we keep waiting
Waiting on the world to change
We keep on waiting
Waiting on the world to change
…

Well, there’s no more waiting for us!  Faith House is an exercise in impatience!  And this month we’re going to establish the dates and the tasks that will take us to the launch date!   

Those of you who live around here but can’t make it on August 18, please contact me.  I would love to meet with you some other time.

Those of you who are far away, all around the world, and thus can’t come to our home later this month, please stay in touch.  Pray, support, and keep telling us if we are making sense, or if we are not!  We have never felt so dependent on God, and God’s people, in our whole lives.  We brace ourselves as we face the immediate unknown future. 

A Sabbath Poem (Eckhart)

AN IMAGE THAT MAKES THEM SAD
~ by Meister Eckhart (1260-1328)

How long will grown men and women in this world
keep drawing in their coloring books
an image of God that
makes them
sad?

(from the Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices
from the East and West, translation Daniel Ladinsky
- Penguin Compass, 2002, on this website)

About God (part1): The Big Bet?

~ by Nathan Brown, author, Editor (Signs of the Times, Australia / New Zealand)

In Pascal’s Pensees the seventeenth-century French mathematician and philosopher proposed a suitably mathematical approach to faith. In a formulation that has come to be known as Pascal’s wager he suggests we can look at the truth of the God of Christianity as a game of chance. When it comes down to it, he argues, “either God is or He is not.” The difficulty is that reason alone cannot get us beyond this point. We cannot argue conclusively either His existence or nonexistence. However, Pascal maintains it is an unavoidable choice--it is simply a matter of which way to choose. Because of its inevitability, “your reason is no more affronted by choosing one rather than the other,” he writes–both are equally legitimate options.

Pascal’s solution is to look at what is to be won and lost in the cosmic wager he proposes: “If you win you win everything, if you lose you lose nothing.” In other words, if God exists as we believe, we receive eternal life and all the promises of the Bible, and if He does not exist, we die. While that is the end of the story for us, it is what would have happened anyway. According to Pascal, while the odds of God existing may be only one in an infinite number of possibilities, we risk nothing by betting that way–and have everything to gain.

Christians have adopted and repeated the argument in a variety of forms since he first published Pensees in the 1660s. But the question remains whether his wager constitutes sufficient justification of and foundation for a credible belief in God. Doubt still nags us. As William James, an American philosopher writing in the 1890s, suggested, “you probably feel that when religious faith expresses itself thus, in the language of the gaming table, it is put to its last trumps” (The Will to Believe).

It seems that even Paul, writing in the New Testament, was uncomfortable with arguments along the lines of Pascal’s. “If Christ has not been raised [the central tenet of Christian faith], our preaching is useless and so is your faith. … If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men” (1 Cor. 15:14-19, NIV). For Paul, it is not good enough to conclude that if it is not true, we have not lost anything. The truth or otherwise of God and the claims of Christianity are of utmost importance.

Another problem James identifies in Pascal’s proposition is that we can equally apply it to any other formulation of belief–Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, or whatever promise of eternal reward. Thus it can only be a clinching argument for a Christian God when the prospective believer has a preexisting tendency toward such a belief.

So we find ourselves back at the uncertain position in which we began, unable to argue our way forward. However, it does not have to be the end of our search for God or faith. “In truths dependent on our personal action, then, faith based on desire is certainly a lawful and possibly an indispensable thing” (James, The Will to Believe). Thankfully, the possibility of faith in God does not depend upon our ability to argue philosophy.

James argues for a freedom to choose: “a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there would be an irrational rule” (ibid.). In addition, it is not irrational to believe in that for which rationality can provide no answers. Even then, we find evidence of God in our lives, in the world around us, and in history–“too much to deny and too little to be sure” (Pascal)–and it is always a matter of choice. But we respond not as a gambler but as a pilgrim on a journey toward truth.

(adapted from 7 Reasons Life Is Better with God by Nathan Brown, 2007)

A Sabbath Poem (St. Catherine)

HIS LIPS UPON THE VEIL
~by St. Catherine of Siena (1347-1380)

He has never left you.

It is just
that your soul is so vast
that just like

the earth in its innocence,
it may think,

"I do not feel my lover's warmth
against my face right
now."

But look, dear,
is not the sun reaching down its arms
and always holding a continent
in its light?

God cannot leave us.
It is just that our soul is so vast,

we do not always feel His lips
upon the
veil.

(from the Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices
from the East and West, translation Daniel Ladinsky
- Penguin Compass, 2002, on this website)

Atheism At Its Best

~ by Samir Selmanovic

Atheistic Fundamentalism is atheism at its worst, a dogmatic expression of a worldview equally capable of destroying humanity with zeal and effectiveness as any fundamentalist religion. Shutting out the spiritual, mystical, metaphorical, and transcendent, atheistic fundamentalism resorts to cleaning up the world of those who disagree with it and creating a naked public square, devoid of any options but its own.

Atheism at its best is an expression of faith in humanity, even faith in religious humanity, first by asking the difficult but legitimate questions that religious people are prone to dismiss. And then by dedication to a kind of believing that is committed to denying the existence of God until a picture of “a God worth believing in” emerges. Atheism at its best is a rebellion against the god offered in the market of religions, a demand that God ought to be what God should be, if God is in fact there at all. Atheism at its best grabs us by our collars and throws us on the ground, demanding to see the righteousness we talk about, forcing us to dig deeper and harder into the best of our own religions. Atheism at its best is hanging on to the hope that our religions have not grasped reality adequately, and that there must be more to the mystery, beauty, and justice of life than what we have offered.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam need such atheists. They have a prophetic ministry to us. For the option of believing that God is not there is always available to the world. And it sometimes makes more sense than God we are conveying to the world.

James Kavanugh is a Catholic priest, a poet and a writer.  His poem entitled My Easy God is Gone is one of the great examples of atheism at its best.  If you are a believer, I think this poem will hurt you.  And somehow help you heal. 

Milorad Kojic, a genetic scientist from Manhattan, New York, sent it to me after our conversation about "God with eyes too blue to understand" (Thank you Milo!).

My Easy God is Gone

I have lost my easy God - the one whose name
I knew since childhood.
I knew his temper, his sullen outrage,
his ritual forgiveness.
I knew the strength of his arm, the sound
of his insistent voice.
His beard bristling, his lips full and red
with moisture at the moustache,
His eyes clear and piercing, too blue
to understand all,
His face too unwrinkled to feel my
child's pain.
He was a good God - so he told me -
a long suffering and manageable one.
I knelt at his feet and kissed them.
I felt the smooth countenance of his forgiveness.

I never told him how he frightened me,
How he followed me as a child,
When I played with friends or begged
for candy on Halloween.
He was a predictable God, I was the
unpredictable one.
He was unchanging, omnipotent, all-seeing,
I was volatile and helpless.

He taught me to thank him for the concern
which gave me no chance to breathe,
For the love which demanded only love in
return - and obedience.
He made pain sensible and patience possible
and the future foreseeable.
He, the mysterious, took all mystery away,
corroded my imagination,
Controlled the stars and would not let
them speak for themselves.

Now he haunts me seldom:  some fierce
umbilical is broken,
I live with my own fragile hopes and
sudden rising despair.
Now I do not weep for my sins; I have
learned to love them.
And to know that they are the wounds that
make love real.
His face alludes me; his voice, with all
its pity, does not ring in my ear.
His maxims memorized in boyhood do not
make fruitless and pointless my experience.
I walk alone, but not so terrified as when
he held my hand.

I do not splash in the blood of his son
nor hear the crunch of nails or thorns
piercing protesting flesh.
I am a boy again - I whose boyhood was
turned to manhood in a brutal myth.
Now wine is only wine with drops that do
not taste of blood.
The bread I eat has too much pride for transubstantiation,
I, too - and together the bread and I embrace,
Each grateful to be what we are, each loving
from our own reality.
Now the bread is warm in my mouth and
I am warm in its mouth as well.

Now my easy God is gone - he knew too
much to be real,
He talked too much to listen, he knew
my words before I spoke.
But I knew his answers as well - computerized
and turned to dogma.
His stamp was on my soul, his law locked
cross-like on my heart,
His imperatives tattooed on my breast, his
aloofness canonized in ritual.

Now he is gone - my easy, stuffy God - God,
the father - master, the mother - whiner, the
Dull, whoring God who offered love bought
by an infant's fear.
Now the world is mine with all its pain and
warmth, with its every color and sound;
The setting sun is my priest with the ocean for it's alter.
The rising sun redeems me with rolling
waves warmed in its arms.
A dog barks and I weep to be alive, a
cat studies me and my job is boundless.
I lie on the grass and boy-like, search the sky.
The clouds do not turn to angels, the winds
do not whisper of heaven or hell.

Perhaps I have no God - what does it matter?
I have beauty and joy and transcending loneliness,
I have the beginning of love - as beautiful as it
is feeble - as free as it is human.
I have the mountains that whisper secrets
held before men could speak,
I have the oceans that belches life on
the beach and caresses it in the sand,
I have a friend who smiles when he sees
me, who weeps when he hears my pain,
I have a future of wonder.
I have no past - the steps have disappeared
the wind has blown them away.

I stand in the Heavens and on earth, I
feel the breeze in my hair,
I can drink to the North Star and shout
on a bar stool,
I can feel the teeth of a hangover, the
job of laziness,
The flush of my own rudeness, the surge of
my own ineptitude.
And I can know my own gentleness as well
my wonder, my nobility.
I sense the call of creation, I feel its
swelling in my hands.
I can lust and love, eat and drink, sleep
and rise,
But my easy God is gone - and in his stead
The mystery of loneliness and love!

(source: The Recovery Emporium, © Copyright -  James Kavanaugh)

A Sabbath Poem (Rumi)

 

                    TIME TO THINK
                    ~ by Jalaludin Rumi (1207-1273)

                    Sit down and be quiet.
                    You are drunk, and this is the
                    edge of the roof.

(from Turning to One Another, by Margaret J. Wheatley,
2002, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.)

Her Prayer

~ by Samir Selmanovic

Those of you who have been in touch with the Faith House project through this website might recall the post Not A Believer Yet where I described how my younger daughter Leta (9) strenuously argued with her sister Ena (11) and me that the Faith House project cannot succeed.   

Grown ups in general have not given her much hope. Sometimes I have thought  of giving up too and walking up to them and surrendering to prevailing beliefs about humanity, “Yes, you fears are justified.  Humans are selfish and will exclude one another to the very end.  There is nothing we can do about it.” 

Then I realize how stupid it would be for a believer to do such a thing, let alone teach it to my children.  If we believe that humanity and God are actually incapable of imagining and bringing about a better world, why would the (or anyone) join us?

We have painted a picture of a Helpless God.  In contrast, looking back to the Bible, I see God full of hope in humanity, God with faith in us.  And while we may sometimes have given hope and faith, my daughters have not.  They are just entering the stage of life where they are becoming a part of a community greater than the enclosed world made of words and meanings from inherited religion. 

They are full of faith in what can and must be. 

If they are going to be believers at all, they will do it with high expectations of God and high expectations of God’s followers.  They fully expect us to get our faith act together and give up on our power struggles.

Most importantly, they have no interest in belonging to a religion that constantly strains to be on the top.  I used to believe that in order to belong to my religion, my religion must be on top; that only if my religion is supreme, is it worth being a part of.  To that end, I constructed what I thought to be an amazing arsenal of proof:  rational, emotional, biblical, scientific, philosophical, social, and personal. Most of us believers have been in a spiritual arms race.

The major output of the energies of my peers and me went to establish the supremacy of our religion or worldview.  The reality, for us, was not the “kingdom of God,” but a world that is competitive, dangerous, and treacherous place, where God needs to be defended by his followers.

Then I asked myself, “Would I follow Christ even if Christianity were not on top?” 

If I can’t live without that, then it is not Christ that I follow.  It is not faith that I live by, but fear.

What if Christ and Our Father in Heaven are perfectly content with not having Christianity on top?  What if Christ did not come to start a religion, but to teach a way of life?

Soon, very soon, the new generation will push back.  Religion that will not know how to take a back seat to something larger than itself and live for the common good of entire world will be abandoned by them.  And rightly so, I am beginning to think.

What if we are waiting for the fulfillment of a promise that has never been made?   What if love, instead (or in spite) of our religion, is going to take over?  What if the Spirit of Christ is alive and well outside the boundaries of our religion as the Bible affirms?

Recently as we were getting ready to move, my younger one, Leta, got her first email account.  And here is the email message that she sent to me (published with her permission).

_______   

From: Leta Selmanovic
Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2007 17:25:54
To: Samir Selmanovic 
Subject: moving

Dad,

I love you!  I'm nervous and excited about moving to New York.

Here is a game for you.  Unscramble the words.  The words make a sentence together.  The words are about the faith house.  The answers are on the bottom.

1. Chrisanits   2. ewjs   3. mslimus  4. adn   5. ahteists   6. toeghtre.
_______

As I was reading it, tears welled up in my eyes.  She is not a believer—yet, but there’s a glimmer of hope in her that we can find a way to bless one another, rather than ignore, neglect, or abandon one another.  This little game was her prayer.

I want to follow Christ, regardless of whether any one can classify me as one of the Christians or “Chrisanits.”  Grace for every one, every where, and every time.  Unconditional love. And I believe that right now in some Jewish, Muslim, and atheistic homes some little girls are begging their fathers to give up on the supremacist fantasies of their religions or worldviews and to join the rest of humanity in humility, wonder, and appreciation of the mystery we all find ourselves in. 

We are called to begin the work of hope and faith in others, joining God who hopes and believes in us.  The sons and daughters of our shrinking planet want us to unscramble our faiths and get on with building a world in which they can not only survive, but live richly—“toeghtre.”

A Sabbath Poem (Okri)

          from MENTAL FIGHT
          ~ by Ben Okri, Nigeria

          What will we choose?
          Will we allow ourselves to descend
          Into universal chaos and darkness?
          A world without hope, without wholeness
          Without moorings, without light,
          Without possibility for mental fight,
          A world breeding mass murderers
          Energy vampires, serial killers
          With minds pining in anomie and amorality
          With murder, rape, genocide as normality?

          Or will we allow ourselves merely to drift
          Into an era of more of the same
          An era drained of significance, without shame,
          Without wonder or excitement,
          Just the same low-grade entertainment,
          An era boring and predictable
          ‘Flat, stale, weary and unprofitable’
          In which we drift
          In which we drift along
          Too bored and too passive to care
          About what strange realities rear
          Their heads in our days and nights,
          Till we awake too late to the death of our rights
          Too late to do anything
          Too late for thinking
          About what we have allowed
          To take over our lives
          While we cruised along in casual flight
          Mildly indifferent to storm or sunlight?

          Or might we choose to make
          This time a waking-up event
          A moment of world empowerment?
          To pledge, in private, to be more aware
          More playful, more tolerant, and more fair
          More responsible, more wild, more loving
          Awake to our unsuspected powers, more amazing.

          We rise or fall by the choices we make
          It all depends on the road we take
          And the choice and the road each depend
          On the light that we have, the light we bend,
          On the light we use
          Or refuse
          On the lies we live by
          And from which we die.

(from Mental Fight, by Ben Okri, 1999, David Godwin Associates))

10,000 Visits Celebration!

Since this FAITH HOUSE Manhattan website opened in January 2007, we have published more than 60 posts and have received now more than 10,000 visits from all over the world (click on ClustrMaps widget on the bottom of the left column to see the map).

With gratitude to our numerous guest contributors, we excerpt some of the highlights from the contributed articles. We also appreciate and thank those of you who have taken time to reflect and comment on the submissions. As you read these highlights, feel free to click through, read the entire post, and make a short comment or two. We would love to hear from you.

"In the matters of God, only by being a student at all times can qualify you to be a teacher some of the time."

Samir Selmanovic, A Caravan of Hope, January 3, 2007

 

"Percolating beneath the expressions of fundamentalist conviction and righteous indignation are doubts about the rightness of their cause and the appropriateness of their actions."

Julius J. Nam, Blessed Are the Ambivalent, January 9, 2007

"We fight, in part because so much of our societies depend upon our continued fighting."

Mark F. Carr, Why We Fight, January 16, 2007

 

"Can we open ourselves to the possibility of learning as much from our neighbors as they will learn from us? My contention is that much that has passed for evangelism and/or mission work in the US and elsewhere has been shaped more by a colonial than by an incarnational imagination."

Ryan Bell, Pitching Our Tents, January 24, 2007

 

"We have colonized the name of God with our religions, and many in the world have simply had it with us. They believe we have nothing more to say. … We all ought to take time and grieve about this--so that we can hope again."

Samir Selmanovic, Waiting for the Dawn, January 29, 2007

 

"We want to live our way into the answers, holding space open for the many people we have not yet met."

Samir Selmanovic, Seven Questions, February 1, 2007

 

"There are these extraordinary, serendipitous moments when a grand dream for your life intersects with the grand dream of another person for their own."

Kevin Kaiser, Holding Space, February 5, 2007

"In looking for a new approach, perhaps we need to learn to tell others how and why they are right, to share and celebrate their faltering steps toward spirituality as they share and celebrate ours."

Nathan Brown, The Hole in How We Do It, February 13, 2007

 

"Sadly, the diversity of faith and non-faith in our communities often leads to division and misunderstanding.  A byproduct of this dysfunction is the loneliness and isolation that we feel, even in the dense crowds of city life."

Justin Kim, Seeking More Than a Conversation, February 20, 2007

 

"Today, I had a noisy day, the voices in my head chanting songs of fear I have picked up along the way from the empires of our religions, nations, and corporations. They have been yelling one thing, but God has been whispering another."

Samir Selmanovic, Is Another World Possible?, February 27, 2007

 

"We lose our ability to see the good in those who our own faith tells us are image bearers of God. We reach but fail to touch (or, even worse, to be touched)."

James Mills, Seeking Good in Good News, March 4, 2007

 

"If only I had stopped and thought more about what really matters; if only you had stopped and done the same! Instead of living three parallel lives, we could have learned more about the treasures each one of us has been carrying. I am convinced now that with your help, I would follow Christ better!"

Roy Naden, A Letter to the Three Friends I Wish I Had, March 6, 2007

 

"In her superb—and Pulitzer Prize-winning—novel Gilead, Marilynne Robinson has her narrator comment that, in the face of attacks, he consistently refused to defend his religion. 'It only confirms them in their skepticism,' he reflects. 'Because nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense.' … We are always 'resisting the attacks' from other religions, philosophies and world views. And our whole way of believing is molded into a 'posture of defense.'”

Nathan Brown, In Defense of the Faith?, March 27, 2007

 

"I was speechless listening to my daughters. Two of the most tender beings I know were discussing arguably the hardest problem on earth. They have to. It’s their future that is at stake."

Samir Selmanovic, Not a Believer Yet, April 2, 2007

 

"Our world relates to religion today in terms of exclusion. Our identity is that we’re not you. As a leader in a Christian community I have witnessed first-hand how exclusive religion can be. However, this exclusivity is not part of the Hebrew story or the Christian story as understood in the life and teachings of Jesus."

Ryan Bell, The Good News Can Get You Killed, April 11, 2007

 

"Although it is easy to be pessimistic about the possibility of this new world and believe that folks who are willing to invest their lives in such possibilities have lost their minds, it seems to me that the opposite is true. Perhaps believing that the world is neither salvageable nor worth saving is a form of madness."

Sean Evans, Has Samir Gone Mad, April 23, 2007

 

"… 'unequally yoked' … Roger wondered aloud what that phrase should even mean to us, seeing as he knows a Christian/Atheist couple and other religiously diverse couples who seem infinitely closer and in tune with one another than many Christian/Christian pairings."

Courtney Perry, Different Religion, Equal Yoke?, May 7, 2007

 

"… there is a grace in being outnumbered. Removed from the easy assumptions and taken-for-grantedness of our everyday lives, we are challenged to think about what is most important in our beliefs and culture. … And we also come to realise that we are not as outnumbered or outside as it might first appear. Our first connection with the people we meet and spend time with is that of fellow human beings."

Nathan Brown, The Grace in Being Outnumbered, May 14, 2007

 

"My nighttime frustrations with God and life led me to believe that reality is relational, and that it is only through people and threads that connect us that the world can be changed. That’s why God always sends us to each other."

Samir Selmanovic, Prime Movers, May 15, 2007

 

"The kingdom of God is like unto a South African Dutch missionary who went deep into the bush to not only to reveal, but also to find God."

Melvin Bray, Faith Houses (part 2 of 2), May 28, 2007

 

"We are caught between the fear that there might not be a God and the equal fear that there might be a God, either is terrifying and world-shaking."

Nathan Brown, Book Review: Falling Man, June 19, 2007