Ordinary Life: Recent Episodes
Dr. William Kerley
Among other things, the Ordinary Life class will focus on: • What it means to be alive and aware. • More on the gospel of Jesus than the Jesus of the gospels. • More on being the way than the way to be. • And on the principles and practices we can put in place in our lives to experience these things and not just know about them.
If you listen to Ordinary Life with regularity, you could have finished that sentence on your own! We talk about how a dialy practice has changed us. the real change, however, is to listen to ourselves more deeply and with greater compassion.
Lewarn about a few groups Holly is co-facilitating with the remarkable Leila-Scott Price at The Center for the Healing Arts and Sciences.
We briefly introduce a new theme emerging in Ordinary Life, something about living in the stream. Listen in today and also in class on Sunday to get the bigger picture.
I think this term was coined by Nadia Boltz Weber, a combination of fear and rage, something many are feeling these days. We talk through this new emotion.
- Watch Afterlife on Netflix
- The answer is always "a Daily Spiritual Practice" or "use your blinkers."
- "Love kicks the ass of time and space." ~Hafiz
There is a thems of reconciliation simmering, of healing division and being okay with change.
Change is constant and it is also terrifying. it is also strangely liberating. When we can name it, we begin to heal it, to birth something new. This is our effort to do so.
We explore what it means to be an everyday mystic, how to inhabit a sense of oneness that can heal the self and community.
Eek. Some of the scariest words uttered in the evangelical movement. "Are you saved?" we will, over the next few weeks, explore what this means in a mystical consciousness.
Based on the story of the cleansing of the temple, we explore positive and negative uses of anger.
Whales kind of bookend our conversation today. We talk about the ways in which we can hear the songs we need to listen to that pertain to reimagining the sacred, reimagining the world.
This week we talk with Dr. Matthew Russell about the importance of breath, laughter, and fractals.
Do you want what you need and need what you want? this is not the only questions we ponder, but the one that will frame our conversation on Sunday too!
we give thanks for John Shelby Spong's life and talk about how inner work can change the world.
this is what we imagine the writers of John to have meant about God. How do we live as if this is possible and true?
This week we transition to the Gospel of John, hopefully shedding light on limiting beliefs.
A continuation of re-imagining the prodigal son story, and what it could mean to have a grown up faith in a grown up society.
Deepening our dive into the well known parable of the Prodigal Son. A few puppy yaps, a few poems as we bear the tension of trying to speak about non duality.
join us as we introduce our topic for the next few weeks, the parable of the Prodigal Son, and explore how we might interpret it through the lens of evolutionary cosmology and theology.
We begin to dig into the parable of the pearl of great price, but we are doing so in a way that invites us to reimagine everything.
Inspired by the paradoxical painting by Rene Magritte, "The Empire of Light," we talk about how the buried treasure in the field is more than what is seen, but what is experienced within as we learn to become our True Selves.
To embrace paradox and contradiction is to embrace that you are never one thing, nor is any experience of the sacred. Embrace the tension of opposites and you will become whole.
This weekend we will teach from the story of Saul's conversion and subsequent blindness. One of the metaphors is the road, symbolic of a journey, of time, and of life stages.
Based on a meditation inspired by 13th century mystic, Meister Eckhart, we talk through the dark and light within each of us, how to construct a world in which everything and everyone belongs.
We are entering the new. The new is unknown, but it cannot be known unless we deeply know the old.
We cannot go back to the no longer. The before was never normal.
We’ve seen too much, we know too much. We have not seen enough, we do not know enough.
These are just some of the paradoxes we face. We can understand paradox in syntax, but to really know it, like in our bodies, we must use our nondual, mystical mind and just accept that paradox is unknowable and absurd and wholly knowable and utterly sane at the same time.
I quote James Baldwin’s essay The Creative Process, which is well worth a read, again and again and again.
Several poems cited today: “Where I Come From” by Sally Fisher & “Dark Matter” by Rebecca Elson.
We want to curate a space where we can imagine flourishing, even as we are in uncertain times.
As we have all been dislocated during the past year, we are in a time of relocating ourselves and finding our way back to one another while still making space for grieving what has been lost.
The day after the verdict in the Derek Chauvin trial, we process a mixture of emotions.
we are still sitting with the "forgive us our trespasses" line in the Lord's Prayer. These last days give us some heaviness to sit with. How do we, as a nation, work to untangle the trespasses we have inflicted upon certain bodies more than others? Specifically non-white bodies.
Join us as we talk through a few new authors, how to de-center our thinking enough to get free from unhelpful theology, and imagine a community of belonging and empowerment.
This week we ponder a questions sent by one of our listeners: How do we reconcile with those who are so different from us?
There are endless ways to talk about God if you hold that it is essentially mystery. Of course our words can only ever point at mystery. The real beauty is recognizing we are amidst it all the time.
We begin to take the Lord's Prayer, line by line, and contemplate how it might apply to today's world and today's language.
A living religion is unfinished, ever evolving, as are we. To create something new, imagine new worlds, we must commute ourselves tot he process of growing up.
What a week to embody this saying of Jesus. Join us as we grapple with learning to love and be loved by those we perceive to be other than ourselves.
We talk this week about getting back into the Sermon on the Mount, how words matter and keep us situated in the work of being "in between."
Poems: “A Solstice Blessing” by Padraig O’Tuama & “The Boy Who Laughed at Santa Claus” by Ogden Nash
i refer to this podcast and highly recommend you listen!
https://onbeing.org/programs/richard-blanco-how-to-love-a-country/
How do two non-literalists interpret the saying in the Sermon on the Mount about adultery and divorce? Are we really to pluck out our eyes and cut off our hand?
Bill and Holly talk with St. Paul's former senior pastor, Jim Bankston. As ever, his gentle, steady hand offer us wisdom and hope for this time.
What a great way to connect during this time! Thank you Adam for joining us and giving us a window into your spiritual journey.
Cindy’s book, SQ21: Twenty-One Skills of Spiritual Intelligence is available HERE.
Here is a link to the sound byte played in the episode. "Get Home Safely: 10 Rules of Survival"
Is it possible to stand firmly on the side of justice and build cooperation over competition? How can we be "prophetic voices" for building a more just, compassionate society?
as we begin to explore this beatitude, we talk about getting right with our hearts and minds so that the interior and exterior worlds become seamless.
This week we chat with Dr. Jeff McDonald, senior pastor at St. Pauls. He gives us the scoop on the potential future of the UMC, and we explore what a new vision of “church” could look like in the wake of covid and the need to attend to social justice issues. “To love God and Neighbor” asks of us to rethink both God and who we call our neighbor. Have a listen!
As we think about “reframing Jesus,” we wonder what it could mean to approach the teachings of Jesus in a dynamic, evolving way. What assumptions are we as individuals bringing to our spiritual and social experiences, and can we move through these to be transformed in ways that create “a new world order?” As humans playing a part in evolutionary reality, we must constantly be held in the tension of letting go of the old and imagining new ways of being. We have a part to play in creating the world we want to live in.
This week we talk about being in the wilderness and learning to see in the dark. Surely during this time we are in an immense groping — for meaning, for understanding, for a path forward. Hopefully these talks give you a little light, a little companionship along the way.
Bill Kerley is a treasure. We are so lucky to still be in formation with him. In this episode we go form baby monkeys, to dog training, to the grief over missing simple gestures of affection during this time.
Includes a reference to the poem, “Scaffolding” by Seamus Heaney and two original graphics created by Brooke.
Join us and a special guest as we talk about art as Right Action, Braiding Sweetgrass, the importance of and, plus gratitude.
In this episode we talk about how to be in right relationship to those with whom we disagree without watering down what it means to be compassionate humans. It’s a little like being lost in the woods, allowing ourselves to feel disoriented and unsure but finding our way nevertheless. The poem to which I refer is Called “The Second Music” by Annie Lighthart.
Holly & Bill chat with Terry Thompson about sitting in discomfort, learning to see ourselves and others as we truly are.
Song provided by DeAndre Johnson, “It is Enough”
Poetry by Jericho Brown, “The Tradition”
In S1:Ep1, we introduce ourselves (Dr. Bill Kerley and Holly Hudley), talk about what it means to live between, and provide context about why both Jesus and Buddha are teachers for times such as these.