Prison Friendships in Kairos

I've blogged before on my calling to visit men in prison. Currently I serve with about thirty other men who visit our brothers in Christ at Sterling Correctional Facility in Sterling, Colorado, about two hours drive ENE from Denver, out on the plains. We do two "short course in Christianity" weekends there, East Yard in the Spring and West Yard in the Fall. We then visit our brothers there the third Saturday of each month, East in the AM and West in the PM. It's a wonderful ministry. We bring the love and forgiveness of Jesus Christ to these men, with the proviso that we "Listen, listen, love and love". The weekends have food, bought and brought by the volunteers who serve. The format allows for continued support of the church and the chaplains in the prison.

Why the commitment to this population of men? At first, my fellow volunteers and I believed we were doing it for the benefit of the prisoners. However, nearly to a man, we now know that we receive as much grace from the experience as they do. To those of us seasoned by many trips to Sterling, we know that we do nearly nothing there. We have a structured weekend which is provided in a manual we use, featuring 14 short lay talks interspersed with chapel visits, poster contests, songs of praise and lots of laughter and fun. We get to mention during the talks how the theme of the talk has affected us. Other than that, we encourage their interaction at seven round tables at which six inmates and three volunteers sit for three and a half days. And we try to shut up.

This ministry works because each table "family" is visited by the Holy Spirit, tangibly. We know it, they know it. It is a powerful revelation that bolsters their examination of Christianity and their experiment in opening their hearts to God and to each other. There is no requirement that inmates be Christians. Buddhists, Wikkas, Satan Worshipers, and just plain Pagans attend. Many become believers during or after their Kairos, but all walk away from the weekend touched and changed by the experience. Back in the population, they are greeted by former Kairos graduates and inmate church leaders who involve them in Sunday worship services, bible studies and other transformational opportunities. They are informed monthly of our arrival and availability to visit, and they come and renew their friendships with us.

These men are guilty, convicted felons. They are murderers, drug dealers, bank robbers, extortionists, gang bangers, and they are just like you and me: Sinners in search of a loving, forgiving God.

It is a common observation among those who understand men that men's friendships achieve intimacy and depth in proportion to the conflict they go through together. For this reason, deep friendships can form in prison. The context of forming friendships with these men in the presence of God's Holy Spirit creates the deepest, abiding love, between them. We get to watch and encourage and enjoy the wonder of open vulnerable hearts and transformed lives.

I'm proud to say that some of my closest friends are volunteers and inmates in Sterling prison. Why don't you come along with me sometime and enjoy watching as the love of Christ filters through the bars and changes lives?

Holy Friendship

Looking for love in all the wrong places? Many have mixed up love and sex. Why settle for sexual satisfaction and miss an opportunity for love? Many think love is about marriage: that they go together like a horse and carriage, as the song goes. No. That's not it either. Marriage, done correctly, is filled with love. But loveless marriages show that the the horse can break free from the carriage. Some think love is a "feeling". Infatuation is certainly a feeling. Love is something more.

We're confused about love. Where can we find love? How do we show love? Some of the best loving relationships can come from friendship. I'm talking about "holy" friendship, the kind Jesus had for his apostles, and they had, eventually, for him. It is said that among men, friendship is only as deep as the conflict it is subjected to. The apostles went through it all and they had it all: fun, fear, disappointment, doubt, terror and deep love.

Friendship is open to everyone, not just the gregarious. Everyone. Cultivation of deep, meaningful friendships will cure most of our interpersonal problems, cure our obsession with sex, and can bring us closer to God, our father in heaven. From the scripture we are told that God is love and light. In Him there is no darkness at all.

How do you create a friendship of depth and purity? Include God in your relationship. God created us for relationship, with Him. Since the best way to get to him is love, the formula is simple. Show each other the love of God reflected through you. Voila! Deep, meaningful friendship. If you want to know what God's love is, see 1 Corinthians 13, then pursue the kind of friendships you were meant to have, that you were made to have.

Do we all worship the same God? Is it this one?

Someone asked me to support a "peace forest" as a sign of solidarity with all world religions. In the church we attend, from the pulpit I hear reference to all people "worshiping the same God in different forms". In a time when polls show that a plurality of Christians in America believe that there are more than one means of salvation, a peace forest to further blur the distinctions between religions is troubling. I'm afraid that we will reap what we sow.

I spent thirty years in Eastern religious pursuits, trying to do the same thing. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, my "master", and the Shankacharya tradition, the trunk from which Buddhism grew, were my context. Maharishi had encouraged me to broaden my devotion to God beyond the biblical Catholicism I followed his blend of science and Eastern religion closely. I was fascinated. I became a teacher of Transcendental Meditation, the Science of Creative Intelligence and later a Governor of the Age of Enlightenment (a practitioner of Patanjali's yoga sutras) -- a siddha. I spent three hours a day for decades in meditation and spiritual practice. I attended six weeks long advanced training classes of in Fairfield, Iowa to deepen my meditation experiences and add advanced techniques to my routine. I attended classes at Maharishi International University given by faculty from Stanford, Cal-Berkeley, Temple, MIT, and the most liberal of the small liberal arts campuses in America. Eventually, in an attempt to solve my intellectual dilemma, I pursued and was granted a Ph. D. myself from Kansas University in geography that focused on the role of consciousness in geographical knowing, dedicated to Maharishi. I've got some bona fides in this area.

Married to an ardent Methodist woman, I went to church and Sunday school throughout this time. She went to seminary and became a Methodist pastor. At her suggestion, I took a 34 week intensive bible study offered through Cokesbury called Disciple Bible Study. There, after a close reading of the scriptures and the following year of teaching the same course to others, I discovered the full truth of Jesus Christ and the Trinity, stopped my meditation practices and Vedic studies and followed Him. I have accepted the reality espoused by the apostles who saw him dead and resurrected. He is my Lord and my God. I am His disciple and a disciple of none other. He is the one True God-man, the fleshly expression of the Triune God. Buddha and Mohammed were men. Hinduism makes everything and everyone a god. Judaism and Christianity are the expression of the god of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Mohammed altered the Torah to create his doctrine of salvation by works alone. In doing so, he abandoned Yahweh.

We live in a time of syncretism and heresy for the sake of harmonious cultural relativism. The bumper sticker composed of the symbols of world religions to form the word "coexist" is the tune we are asked to march to in America. It is no harmony. It furthers the impression that all religions are equally true and keeps dialog civil at the cost of abandoning the Great Commission. How can you make disciples of all people when you are busy kow-towing to their mistakes. With this "peace forest" approach, we place Christ in the context of the primacy of peace, subordinating His message. But, Jesus came to bring a sword. He came to turn brother against sister, child against parent. He would not like us making an idol of Shalom. He is a jealous God, and would burn that forest. Remember Elijah on Mt. Carmel?

Are We An Accident, or a Creation?

Last night I read a story to my just 7 year old granddaughter. It was about a worm. The illustrations were charming. The theology was startling. The worm has been told by his mother that Gaia (Earth) is our mother and that all things come from her. No warnings, just there it is. God has been replaced in young reader's lives by the more politically correct Gaia.

Later in the day, I finished The Priviledged Planet, a wonderful book by Guillermo Gonzalez, that summarizes all the astronomical and astrophysical data that has been collected by numerous satellites and Hubble observations since 1965. The book starts with Carl Sagan's "Blue Dot" observation of a satellite image from outer space showing the insignificant size of the little dot, Earth. Sagan's observation morphed into the Copernican principle, now stated as "we are not special". In excruciating detail, Gonzalez and philosopher co-author Jay Richards, translate the learnings of astronomical studies since Sagan that show that it is becoming quite apparent that the opposite of the Copernican principle is true.

The planet we ride on is one of very few habitable locations in the universe. It is strategically located to be what Gonzalez calls the best workbench in the lab from which to study the cosmos. Sagan was wrong. We're quite special. In fact, we may have been placed here by design!

The details are many, covered in over 300 well-illustrated pages. We seem to be located on a terrestrial planet with sufficient carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and heavy metals to sustain life, which is extraordinarily rare. The planet has a thin crust plate tectonics system that keeps the heavier elements produced by our sun from sinking into the earth's core. The planet/moon relationship and core mixing allows an electromagnetic field to shield us from damaging gamma and other harmful radiation from our sun and others. Earth is the proper distance from our sun to allow liquid water. It holds the planet at the proper angle sufficient sun to maintain a life-friendly climate. We have an atmosphere clear enough to allows stellar observation, a moon and near planets that protect us from passing comets and asteroids. The moon is precisely the right size to allow total solar eclipses without which we could not understand the sun. We are located within our galaxy in the best location for maximum visibility of the whole universe. There is sufficient ambient "silence" in this part of the galaxy to notice the background "sound" of the "big bang". We are truly blessed. And, it is becoming apparent to those not blinded by ideology, that the big bang may have had a banger.

Consider the complexity of this story as opposed to the Gaia worship of today's children's literature. It is easy to see the slide we are taking into illiteracy and "science based" superstition that turns us from both our civilization and from its creator.

Gonzalez was hounded for this work by Darwinists who do not want to allow the examination of naturalist premises or be encouraged to fit of their story to any "hint" of intelligence in the universe. His film, beautifully narrated by John Rhys-Davies for Discovery, was boycotted by the Smithsonian staff, who attempted to squelch a showing in DC followed by a discussion. The scientists in the documentary have all been hounded by the scientific establishment for their heresy, of course.

What a strange time we live in!

How the Hitchens Boys Deal with God

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2010/03/how-i-found-god-and-peace-with-my-atheist-brother.html

I haven't blogged here for awhile, but I wanted to preserve this wonderful essay. I have loved Christopher Hitchens for years. His passion and his eloquent idealism and his use of language seduced me, long before his personality in debates about God. He is an international treasure. He is an original thinker. This link is to an essay about his brother Peter, a Christian, two years his junior and painfully at war with his brother for years about religion and other things. They love each other and have shared a life. Enjoy the rememberances and the wit and the essay on how their argument is resolving.

Goodness

Dennis Prager has recently blogged about "goodness" (see below). In doing so, he makes a few observations about how much more popular badness is in print than goodness. He surmises that our generation would rather think people are good and that badness is  an abberation than the other way around. Since the abberation needs "fixing", it gets lots of books and articles. Yet, in classical biblical Christianity and Judaism, this is backwards. We should expect people to be self-absorbed and needy in their lives, and aloof and detached from the suffering of others, for example. That is their nature, without God. But with Him as observant believers, we are told in no uncertain terms, our life is first about God, then others, then ourselves.  

If Prager does a series on this, follow it. He's a conservative Jew, quite complimentary about Christian evangelicals. He's smart and writes well. Enjoy. 

http://townhall.com/columnists/DennisPrager/2009/03/31/new_broadway_play_about_hero_who_is_…_religious!