How to become a saint

There is a church called St. Gregory's of Nyssa in which they have a huge mural called "Dancing Saints". A selection of saints are along the upper boarder of the entry space of their sanctuary are depicted in a dance around the sanctuary. I have never been there but according to the website, the Jesus is 12 feet tall.

I am sure the size of Jesus and the other saints is in part because because of their location in the sanctuary - they need to be large in order to be seen.

However, it could also be that we view saints as larger than life.

Saints are not larger than life. Saints are normal people (like you and me) who have come to embrace their light and shadow sides.

When we come to embrace the reality that humans are a combination of sinner and saint we are take the first step toward sainthood.

Christians can never worship in isolation

Thinking a bit more about worship lately and came into a conversation with someone who shared that she disagreed with my definition of worship. For her, worship is not limited to a corporate experience and that she can worship by herself in the beauty of nature.

I stated that while that I beautiful I would not call that Christian worship. Devotion? Sure. Worship, no.

Worship is never done in isolation. It is not something that is a part of the Christian experience. Even Jesus worshiped in the community and never alone.

What became apparent to me in my conversation with this woman I respect was that for many people "corporate" or "community" means having people around. So when going into a closet and shutting the door means one is not in a corporate setting - that person is alone.

Here is the kicker, in Christian thought we trust we are not alone. We have the Advocate (Holy Spirit) we are surrounded by the "great cloud of witnesses" we are in communion with God in Christ.

Every time we are alone and we are in a worshipful spirit, we are never alone. Our worship is a constant celebration with a community that is fully present. Christian worship is never done in isolation.

With that in mind, there are times in our lives when we are truly alone. When we are abandoned by all, but these times are not worshipful. Abandonment is something that Peter Rollins takes on full force in his book Insurrection - which I hope to post about soon.

The brain as a home for the communion of saints?

RadioLabs got me thinking again.  It tends to do that as it is rather amazing radio show.

You are faced with allowing 5 people to be run over by a train.  You can save these 5 people if you pull a lever and redirect the train, however in pulling the lever the train will kill one person standing on the new track.

Most people, according to the RadioLabs sources, say they would pull the lever.

However, if you modify this thought experiment to say that instead of pulling the lever to save 5 people your only option to save these five people would be to push one person in front of the train.  When faced with this option, very few people would push the one person.

We are generally okay with pulling a lever and killing one person in order to save five people, but we are generally not okay with pushing a person and killing a person in order to save five people.

Why is this?  It is still murder of one person just the means are slightly different.  What is going on?

The suggestion that was put forward was that our brains, through evolution, have come to have different voices vying for our attention and action.  So part of our brain wins and part of our brain looses each choice we make.  So the deep parts of the brain win out over the more advanced logical parts of the brain when we choose to not push the one to save the five.

This deep part of our brain, this emotional and raw part of our brain, is sometimes dubbed the lizard or reptilian or the monkey brain.  What if, however, this part of our brain is the collective wisdom of the past.  This part of our brain is the collective wisdom of the people who have come before us and with each choice.  You have the part of your brain that is informed by the past and does not understand the current society very well, but it has a deep wisdom that we ought to heed.  At the same time we have other parts of our brain that are "newer" and do not have the wisdom of the past but can rapidly understand the present culture.

If we dispose of the idea that one part of the brain is "higher order" than others, then we have this idea that our brain may be the house for which the communion of saints (the past humans) dwell.  We have a part of the brain that is connected, through the process of evolution, to the past.  We have a way to access the deep and rich history of the ages if we only were willing to listen to it more often.