Monday, April 30, 2012

more from Wendell Berry

Last week, Wendell Berry delivered a speech to the National Endowment for the Humanities. All who have ears can give it a listen by watching the video here.

I'm cautiously heartened that Wendell Berry's work is lately getting attention. The fact that he gave this speech at an event put on by our federal government, and the fact that he was chosen to write the forward to Prince Charles's book about feeding the planet sustainably means that more people will hear his thoughts.  And we need to hear what Mr. Berry's been prescribing for the last 40 years; from the way we eat, to the way we pattern our weeks, to the way we raise our kids, to how we think about where we live. It is ancient wisdom, wearing (semi-)modern lenses, and spoken in a Kentucky accent.

I was struck in listening to the speech, how consistent Mr. Berry's message has been throughout his career. The book that put him on the map, and the one that first captured my thoughts, is a collection of essays called The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. Much of what he said in his speech last week is a reworking of the same themes he developed in that book, which was publishing in 1977.

Below are some excerpts from the book that grabbed my attention right away; they struck me as both startlingly different from anything I'd heard before, and startlingly true.

Here is his first paragraph:
One of the peculiarities of the white race’s presence in America is how little intention has been applied to it. As a people, wherever we have been, we have never really intended to be. The continent is said to have been discovered by an Italian who was on his way to India. The earliest explorers were looking for gold, which was, after an early streak of luck in Mexico, always somewhere farther on. Conquests and foundings were incidental to this search – which did not, and could not, end until the continent was finally laid open in an orgy of goldseeking in the middle of the last century. Once the unknown of geography was mapped, the industrial marketplace became the new frontier, and we continued, with largely the same motives and with increasing haste and anxiety, to displace ourselves – no longer with unity of direction, like a migrant flock, but like the refugees from a broken anthill. In our own time we have invaded foreign lands and the moon with the high-toned patriotism of the conquistadors, and with the same mixture of fantasy and avarice.

A few paragraphs later, he goes on:
If there is any law that has been consistenly operative in American history, it is that the members of any established people or group or community sooner or later become "redskins" - that is, they become the designated victims of an utterly ruthless, officially sanctioned and subsidized exploitation. The colonists who drove off the Indians came to be intolerably exploited by their imperial governments. And that alien imperialism was thrown off only to be succeeded by a domestic version of the same thing; the class of independent small farmers who fought the war of independence has been exploited by, and recruited into, the industrial society until by now it is almost extinct. 

Sunday, April 1, 2012

Immanuel Approach continued

Much of my thinking about God and man lately has stemmed from using the Immanuel Approach to Healing Prayer. I learned about this approach at a conference held by Dr. Karl Lehman  back in November, and have been testing it out on my (daring) friends since then. I knew some things about healing prayer going into the conference, but the new stuff I learned there excited me. I hoped as I left the conference that this slightly different approach to helping people pray through pain and trauma was easier to use and  more effective than the approach I had used before (something similar to Theophostic prayer).

I have not been disappointed. For all the sessions I've done (barring those where the pray-er had to hurry and catch a train or something) the people have heard from Jesus directly to their hearts in really powerful ways. In some cases, people who haven't felt the presence of Jesus in years have been able to receive breakthroughs.  Before you think in your mind that I'm doing something altruistic here, I have to say that watching Jesus show people what He has to show them is fascinating for me personally.  It's like watching a true movie about the truest thing there is, but told in a different way, and to a different person with every session. All of this goes a long way in enriching my own faith walk.

Dr. Lehman wrote up a brief description of the Immanuel Approach, that I think is clear and succinct.  I haven't found it online anywhere, so 'm typing up and posting it below for people who want information about Immanuel prayer. Also, if you life near Illinois, Tennessee or Kansas here is a list of people (all of whom are more qualified than I) who you can contact for help in removing the barriers between you and Jesus.

So here it is in a nutshell

The Immanuel Approach:

  • Immanuel means "God with us" in Hebrew, and the Immanuel approach takes the reality of God's ongoing presence as its primary foundation.
  • Thousands of professionals and lay people around the world are applying the Immanuel approach to resolve past pain, deepen intimacy with God, and discern God's ongoing guidance. 

The Immanuel Approach to Emotional Healing:
  • Shifts the primary objective from "resolve trauma and relieve symptoms"to "help the person connect more intimately with Jesus by removing barriers between her heart and Him." We gratefully accept the resolution of psychological trauma and the associated symptom-relief as side benefits, but the more important priority is to remove blockages that stand between our hearts and Jesus. 
  • Starts with recall of positive memories and deliberate appreciation, to prepare our brain-mind-spirit systems for connecting with the Lord; and then establishes a living, interactive connection with Jesus as the foundation for the session.
  • Is organized around turning to Jesus, focusing on Jesus, and engaging directly with Jesus at every point in the session.
The Immanuel Approach to Life:
  • Includes healing for psychological trauma, but clearly recognizes that this is only one part of God's agenda for working in our lives. For example, the Lord also wants to build our capacity, grow our maturity, and spend time "just" being with us as a friend.
  • Takes the tools for helping us connect with the Lord outside our special "sessions," with the ultimate goal of helping us get to the place where we perceive the Lords' presence, and abide in an interactive connection with Jesus, as our usual, normal, baseline condition as we walk through life each day.
  • Again, identifies the primary objective, the most important priority, as intimacy with God.