Disclaimer: These interviews are my account of what was said. I tried to represent to the best of my ability, the intent of the interviewees. They vary in accuracy, however, as some interviewees edited their statements to better reflect their intent; others did not. Some names and places have been fictionalized to protect the anonymity of the interviewees.

Rev. Jim Roberts was born in 1942 and grew up Swedish Lutheran on the South side of Chicago, at Elim Lutheran Church.  It was a really sweet place to be and he had a wonderful childhood.  What didn’t happen was that no one talked about what was real.  In the 1950’s, this is how things were everywhere.  He became very compelled to understand the big questions, “Why are we here?” and “What is this God story about for real?”  There was no sense of passion, truth or vulnerability in the Church. 

He reacted and became very angry when a junior in high school.  He became an atheist when he was a senior.  He went to Augustana in Rock Island for the science program.  He went through a bad depression.  He became engaged and went to graduate school in nuclear chemistry at Iowa State.  He worked for the Atomic Energy Commission in 1964, at a particle accelerator hidden under a cornfield. 

While living there he went through a real spiritual crisis.  He lived in a basement and when it snowed in the winter, it was like a cave.  This was a Via Negativa experience for him.  He went into his soul, maybe for the first time since he was seven years old.  He would run at night in the countryside in the dark.  One night he felt he was pursued.  There were crosses in front of him and behind him.  He heard a voice say, “Renew my church.”  He felt he had been grasped by the divine, but he had hated those words because he hated the church. 

Jim left the PhD program after a year and went back to Chicago.  The engagement, broke up, which was a painful breakdown.  He was like a child again starting all over.  He had lost his career and sense of direction.  He went to seminary to find his way.  He went to LSTC in Maywood which he found to be an academic atmosphere which didn’t help him to relate to the mystical experience he’d had.  He had no language to talk about his experience. 

After 3 weeks in seminary he was drawn to the Civil Rights struggle.  He marched with Martin Luther King in 1965 in Selma, Alabama.  He saw passion like he had never seen before.  The Baptist church at night was wild with energy and singing.  King was speaking.  Everyone got up each morning and was ready to die.  He had never seen the connection between spirituality and justice. 

He went back to seminary.  He hated the church even more because of its lack of response to the civil rights movement.  He became absorbed in intellectualism and academicism of the seminary.  He was very interested in the study of scripture.  He still didn’t want to be a part of the Church.

For his internship he tried to find something that was not a church.  He ran a coffeehouse in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1968, one hour’s drive from Philadelphia.  People in the Black power movement came there.  It was the only place where whites and blacks could sit down and talk to each other at that time. 

He went back to seminary and worked with all kinds of things, trying to avoid the church.  He took 1½ years of clinical education at Elgin State hospital.  He was sent to a parish in Wilkes-Barre , PA.  There was a major flood.  The Susquehanna River overflowed with thirty feet of water and the city was destroyed.  With other churches they became a flood relief center.  He was taken by the possibilities of the Church doing something that made a difference to the world.  10,000 volunteers came and helped rebuild the city.  The city gave the churches credit for its recovery and its help in rebuilding.  Seven small struggling churches had come together in the crisis; two stayed and merged and formed a new ministry. 

He went to serve a parish in Rockford, Illinois.  Meanwhile, he had lost the reality of his mystical experience of God and that inner life but had become very successful outwardly.  He had lost his soul while a pastor in the 1970’s.  The wheels came off in his marriage and in the church.  He had been totally seduced by the professionalism of the ministry, didn’t know who he was and was in great pain.  He went all over the country for the healing of his soul and a recovered his spiritual journey, beginning in 1978.  He went on a silent retreat.  There he made a commitment to an hour a day of inward journey, which he has kept ever since. This has led him to many different places.

Roberts found a church in Washington DC, The Church of the Saviour, with an emphasis on the inward and outward journey and the seriousness of how to take a spiritual journey.  He went to a retreat center in New York and found a wild man who taught about soul healing which helped the pain and anger in his soul.  This started to free him to go more deeply into the inward life.  That teacher became his mentor.

Then he discovered a woman in New Mexico who led long dances, dancing from sunset to sunrise to the sound of the drum.  They watched the mother bear and the great swan circle around all night long while the moon took its path.  They heard the sound of the owls and birds in the morning with the sound of the drum.  It was an ecstatic spiritual path, a ceremonial dance, which changed his life as well as connecting him to the universe.  He started to lead long dances in Canada and New York.  She taught him more about ceremony and ritual than he ever learned in the Church.  He went on a vision quest in New Mexico.  Those people were enormous in his journey, though he didn’t know how to fit this with his role as a Lutheran pastor.

Jim had also been an environmental activist in the 1970’s, though that was part of his burnout.  He had tried to close a nuclear power plant and was on TV debating Commonwealth Edison.  He became angry and burned out.  There were no resources to support his inward life.  He was seeking a way to express his concern and love for Creation and began to do slide shows about the beauty and wonder of the Universe. 

Then in New York he went to a conference where Matthew Fox and Brian Swimme gave a dialogue about the universe.  He met other creation mystics as well who became companions on a journey which had a Via Positiva as well as the Via Negativa that had taken him so far down.  He began to realize that there were Creation mystics and prophets in church history that we hadn’t heard about.  Matthew was digging up their graves.  There was a tradition for mysticism in the church.  He decided he had a right to be here and would stay.  He’s been a pastor in Rockford for 31 years.

Jim was interested in Carl Jung and dream work in the early 1980’s.  In 1988, with three other couples, he and his wife bought land in Wisconsin to do ceremonial and retreat work.  They have ceremonial grounds and retreat space where they can integrate these different worlds.  He leads retreats and integrates ceremonial and mystical tradition, Christianity and Creation Spirituality.  His focus is the connection between the healing of the soul and the healing of the planet.  He met Robert Bly in the early 1980’s and was involved with the early men’s movement in Northern Minnesota.  Bly introduced him to Rumi and got him writing poetry, which is great way to work with the soul.

Roberts is also interested in helping leaders who have lost their soul.  He can spot them in a minute.  He works with the recovery of the soul in religious work. 

Jim has since written a short book called The Third Species, about the connection of the human community to the earth community in a positive way.  Rather than closing a power plant, ceremony is created to connect people with Creation so they feel the connection and then are able to act morally.  He is currently working on a book relating the spirituality of Jesus to the healing of the soul and the healing of the world.

~~~

I was able to contact Dr. Larry Rasmussen, the author who I quoted extensively in my dissertation.  Since I had quoted him so much in my paper and was in the thick of interviews, he wrote something for the interview collection.  He wrote that his response to my question about creation spirituality and Lutheranism would be what he has written in the three chapters in Earth Community, Earth Ethics, Returning to Our Senses, The Cross of Reality, and Song of Songs, where he refers a lot to Luther and Bonhoeffer, and which relate to his own sense for what "being Lutheran" means. 

            While I don't write in the manner of a personal faith statement, I easily make the connections.  Part of this is a deep background.  I grew up in a farm community, though in a small village, where the Lutheran church was core in the community.  The closeness to the land, and essentially growing up as much "outdoors" as "indoors," left its marks.  Moreover, this was the Scandinavian Lutheranism of farmers who, at that time, were still doing "mixed farming," not industrial mono-cropping (that's no longer true in that community).  So my grandparent's and uncles and aunts farms were also places of a microcosm of life--animals, gardens, crops, harvesting, food preparations, "feasts," the

cycle of the seasons and of life itself, etc. 

            No one ever mentioned "creation spirituality," of course, but the church year included "Rogation Sunday" and other markers of the goodness of the land and its fruit, etc.  Likewise the piety of the hymnody, and the themes of Bible Camp, etc., picked up on what was a "natural" connection of faith and its practices.  Of course, in retrospect I have some major criticisms--these are also in those chapters.  But I don't think we can underestimate what the imprinting of childhood experiences is, and for me, that setting probably goes very deep in establishing certain sensibilities for creation-rich theology.

 Two of his grandparents were born in Denmark and came to the U. S. as small children.  A third grandparent was born in the U.S. of Danish immigrants and the fourth grandparent was born in the U. S. of Swedish parents.  None of them kept close ties to their families in Denmark and Sweden, nor did their children.  The church in Petersburg, Minnesota (southwest corner of the state, near Jackson) was the old ELC, founded by Norwegian immigrants.  It is now ELCA, several mergers later.  He went to grade school in Petersburg, then High School in Jackson, and then to college at St. Olaf, originally a Norwegian Lutheran college.

~~~

Ida was raised Baptist in Louisiana and moved to Berkeley, California to join family here as an adult.  She worked for a Department store for many years until her retirement.  She volunteers regularly for church and several social service agencies.  She is developing plans to do reconstruction to open a day care for seniors at her home. 

When Ida was in midlife, a friend said, “You have a problem that you’re not recognizing and dealing with.  You should try the Christian Science Church.”  So she did and it was a great help.  There she learned to listened to the Spirit and to allow it to help with healing.  She prays for one thing at a time, such as a part of the body that is ill.  “We go to the doctor but there is no pill for some things that hit us in life.  Some healing can only come from within.”

For several years Ida helped raise her niece’s children as her niece was addicted to drugs and alcohol.  She is concerned that young people are not learning to relate to the Spirit because they have not been exposed to religious teachings.  So many teenagers have problems which they don’t know how to deal with.  They get involved with the wrong crowd that doesn’t want to do anything.  She says they need to learn to listen to what the Spirit can tell them. 

People ask her, “Why bother?” but she knows she must go on.  She said, “We are all put here on this planet for a reason and there is a reason and a purpose for everything that happens….  We all need to take inventory of our lives in order to discover our goals….  A lot of people spend a lifetime in unhappiness, have breakdowns and never find peace.  We all have storms and tornadoes,” but need to develop the right spirit to keep going.  Then we need to be patient and things will fall into place in due time.

~~~

Rev. Sarah Isakson is the pastor at my church and is a on the committee for my dissertation so had read most of it before the interview.  Her ancestors were from the British Isles and she grew up as Congregationalist.  She said she understands why Matthew Fox is trying to relate to the younger generation.  She agrees that because of modernization of civilization, it behooves us to look at creating men (and women) in a different way and in a new light.  The world is a different place than in Martin Luther’s time.  She thinks fear and phobias are the biggest motivational factor in peoples’ lives and Luther had this too.  Our fear of loss drives us toward spiritual enlightenment.  At the time of Luther’s conversion, he feared to go against his father yet needed to save his own soul.

Growing up, Sarah understood hell before heaven.  She saw a lot of people doing bad things to each other in violence as a young child.  The war in Viet Nam was the ultimate violent act to her and she was ashamed to be part of this as an American.  This drove her to look for a God of peace and compassion and forgiveness.  She lived in the Middle East for several years, in Kuwait, but traveled to other countries.  While walking the streets of Baghdad during the Eid, a Muslim feast where only men were allowed outside, apart from tourists, she felt an overwhelming sense of evil.  She went on a quest for a different view of God where fear of violence was not the motivator. 

Sarah found Mennonites whose lives were based on peace and kindness.  She saw them living wonderful Christian lives as married couples.  She saw medical missionaries as caring, compassionate healers.  She saw this as the only hope in the world.  She didn’t see this in Islam.  This helped her heal from alcohol abuse. 

Sarah had a healing experience after finding faith.  She prayed to God, “If you’re there, tell me.”  She heard a voice say, “I am.”  This was a theophany, God speaking to people.  As she studied over the next 30 years she came to understand this phenomena of the “I am” in the Old and New Testament and in other cultures and religions.  Her spiritual core now is compassion, peace and oneness with God.  She strongly believes everyone is welcome in God’s plan without division.  God is not the judge but a welcoming host and protector who includes all.  She still feels very responsible for people’s greed and revenge and lack of compassion.  She feels there is a corporate responsibility to speak out against this. 

When starting graduate school in Amherst, Massachusetts, Sarah went church shopping .  Rev. John Stendahl, son of the well known Swedish theologian Krister Stendahl, was pastor at a church she visited.  He asked her to become a Lutheran and gave her the book, Baptized we Live.  She joined his church and said he was very compassionate, understanding and welcoming.  He was also very scholarly, and she appreciated how well he led her older son through confirmation.

Sarah is currently studying suffering in Buddhist vs. Christian perspectives.  Buddhists use ascetic practices to become closer to Spirit.  The question she asks is should we focus on alleviating suffering or on walking through it with people.  It is important to admit it exists.  She says it is caused by our own selfishness: putting self in front of others’ needs. 

She had a dream where God said, “Read Luke Chapter 12.”  She responded, “You mean, chapter 2.”  God said, “No, Chapter 12.”  She calls Luke Chapter 12 as well as 2 her “life chapter” as there is a lot about spiritual direction and life application there.  God wanted her to read 12 but she felt a need to read 2, about Mary and the Christmas story. 

Sarah meets regularly with a spiritual director who helps her do guided meditation in which she converses with Christ.  She enters into this state by praising God.  Sarah said the author and speaker Rosemary Radford Ruether is talking now about healing the earth, along with feminist spirituality and Buddhist-Christian dialogue.  Sarah’s  view of Christ allows her to explore other faiths.  She said, “Jesus must have known about Buddha.”

~~~

Glen Gersmehl was born in Chicago and grew up in small town in Ohio.  His father was a Missouri Synod Lutheran teacher; some of his first teaching positions were in one or two room schools.  The Missouri Synod has had about the same percentage of children in parochial school as Catholics.  Glen and his siblings attended elementary school with two grades per room.  Each had their father for two years as a teacher.  This was a high quality education for many children from low income families.  Both his brother and sister have doctorates. 

Glen studied at Concordia, River Forest, a suburb of Chicago, majoring in English and Theology.  He received a full fellowship in 1969 after graduation but his Ohio draft board said graduate school would be dodging the draft and he’d be sent to Vietnam.  Instead, he taught in a Lutheran high school in Minnesota.

He moved to New York City (NYC) in 1970.  After working in construction, he got a job at Christianity and Crisis (C&C) magazine, a respected publication founded by Reinhold Niebuhr, across the street from Union Theological Seminary. At the time, the magazine included John C Bennett, James Cone, Harvey Cox, Michael Novak, and others on its board.  Glen was an editorial assistant, worked on a wide range of articles, including interviews with farm workers and Cesar Chavez. 

There are several distinctive core assumptions of Lutheranism which relate to social justice, Creation Spirituality and advocacy.  Lutherans have historically said that the defining center to understand the Bible is the Gospel.  God reaches out to us through grace, over every divide, and offers the possibility of renewal, for something better.  That principle in turn helps us find the focus of the Bible in our lives.  For Glen, important texts are include:

I the Lord have called you and given you power to see that justice is done on earth… (Is 42:6); Leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother and sister, and then come and offer your gift (Matt. 5:24); Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed…Live in harmony with one another…do not repay evil for evil…If your enemies are hungry, feed them" (Rom. 12), and All this is from God who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:18). 

The second principle or understanding is to contrast several ways in which Christians have understood ethics. One is "The Imitation of Christ" – an approach that has some similarity to the social gospel and the evangelical question popular a century later, "What would Jesus do (WWJD)?”  Glen finds these approaches attractive in contrast to the more typical Lutheran approach to ethics characterized by a one sentence ending to sermons that encouraged people to live out a response to redemption but gave no help or community support on how to do it.  In Glen’s experience, Lutherans have simply dismissed the imitation of Christ or WWJD as works righteousness, the idea that you are saving yourself through works. 

However, Glen did find a lot of help in the Lutheran concept that we are simultaneously saint and sinner.  There is tremendous freedom in the concept, "sin boldly," which has also been misunderstood.  This perspective gives a freedom to be creative but also a skepticism or humility to understand that we are never totally free from sin.  What Luther understood was the tension of ethics, between this radical freedom to break free from assumptions on the one hand and the radical awareness that we are never free from our self interest.  For example, our political leaders regularly demonstrate how easy it can be for us to justify wrong-headed things that are in our self interest only.  This is a distinctly Lutheran grasp of reality.  If you emphasize mostly one or the other side of that tension, you will not be as effective ethically in the world.  It is a more powerful ethic to take the power of grace and foster a climate in a congregation that has this freedom and creativity and spirit. 

Glen made the point that humans are fundamentally in community and referred to Martin Buber’s concept that there is no I without we.  Individually, very few of us are capable of making the most of that radical freedom or understanding to live in service to the world – not to mention how to be cautious, careful and thoughtful about the danger of intruding our own self interest into our ethical conclusions.  Ethical decision-making happens in community.

Glen has read a fair amount of Matthew Fox’s work and understands creativity and the willingness to stretch boundaries and not be limited by old assumptions, to live in the present, in a fresh way and not just rehashing the tired conclusions of the past.  Martin Luther was frustrated by scholasticism that is assumed as the right way.  The Missouri Synod has too easily become embedded in a scholasticism of its own and has lost a lot of that creativity. 

Glen said that Luther believed the sacraments and preaching of the Word were empty if they didn’t result in good works that occurs in a community setting.  A lot of churches behave (and sometimes say as much) as though all they need to do is preach the Word and celebrate the Sacraments and that’s final.  As a child, he remembers 20 minutes of the sermon about what the Bible says, finished by a 30 second statement, "Go and do likewise."  He said that you can’t imagine, plan and conceptualize to do much if you have to do it on your own.  We need a community of people. 

The ELCA has been exploring what looks like a very fruitful process, which they call “moral deliberation.”  This is an interesting emphasis which can create a climate where the community together grapples with issues.  Glen asked, "What better way to solve problems than for Christians to come together and deliberate seriously over a period of weeks or months, ending with serious conversation on how to act on our moral beliefs, followed by engagement and action (preferably also in community).  He has observed or worked with people in every denomination who do some form of this.  He said that Lutherans are behind on some things but have the ethical theological tool to do this very well.  It is to our discredit that we haven’t been more successful at grasping those tools and acting on them. 

While at Christianity and Crisis (C&C) magazine, Glen was able to take classes at Union Seminary.  C&C was also within a few blocks of Riverside Church, Columbia University, and the Interchurch Center, a large building on Riverside Drive that is the single largest office space for denominational and inter-church organizations in the U.S.   At the same time, these elite religious and intellectual institutions all overlook Harlem which stretches for many blocks to the East and North.  Glen got involved working with poor elderly for more than a decade, mostly in the highest crime areas of NYC and later Oakland, California.  Glen lived for most of the 1970s in the lower east side of NYC, a high crime area.  He said he has been within 2 or 3 feet of guns and knives, 25-30 times, in connection with fights, muggings of others or himself. 

While at C&C he joined Trinity Lutheran Church, a Missouri Synod church in the Lower East Side.  Art Simon, founding member of Bread for the World and brother of the late Illinois Senator Paul Simon, was there and Glen was a founding member of Bread for the World.  While working in New York, Glen studied Liberation Theology in both community-based groups and occasionally in workshops with theologians like Gustavo Gutierrez who led a two week seminar at Maryknoll Seminary.  In the mid 1970s, Glen attended the first gathering of North and South American liberation theologians in Detroit. 

His work with low income elderly made a serious impact on his perspective.  It was particularly helpful that many of the leaders among the seniors had worked in the trade union movement and other progressive settings.  In 1977, Glen was hired by the Nader-affiliated NY Public Interest Research Group for five years, where he did organizing and teaching, coordinated health and aging policy, and directed a large community leadership training program.  He played a leadership role in a number of efforts such as transportation policy and prescription drug laws.  His work was featured on many national news programs and virtually all of the major New York media.  He worked alongside and learned from quite a number of extremely effective activists and researchers. 

Then he moved to Oakland, California, where he worked with poor elderly from 1982 to 1986.  He left California to pursue a masters degree in public policy and public administration at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.  After graduating, he directed and taught in the Peace Studies Program at Clark University for three years, then moved to Seattle to work on peace and justice issues, for the past ten years as national coordinator of Lutheran Peace Fellowship (LPF). 

Glen helped found a peace & justice library in New York City in the mid-1970s while teaching courses on social justice in a community college.  In 1977 it became the Peace & Justice Resource Center and it now has over 12,000 volumes, most of them housed at Central Lutheran Church where LPF’s office is located.  They have one of largest collections in the country on nonviolence, social change, social movements, post-World War II conflict, and combating racism, sexism, economic exploitation, etc.  A number of people working on books or dissertations have said they found more material at the PJRC than at the University of Washington, one of ten largest university libraries in the country.  PJRC members lead several dozen workshops every year (e.g. at the annual meetings of groups such as the Peace and Justice Studies Association and its predecessors), and have assisted scores of libraries and peace studies institutes. 

In July 2004, Glen began his 11th year at LPF.  Glen was in a reflective mood about how he got into peace activity from his predominantly social justice background.  It stemmed from his interest in international conflict.  His major policy paper for his masters degree was on weapons of mass destruction.  He saw the potential for enormous violence as a social worker in the highest crime district of NYC in the South Bronx where the crime rate was higher than in Belfast, Beirut, or the West Bank.  He has had friends who experienced domestic violence, so has observed violence across the spectrum, as multidimensional.  In fact, he thinks the smartest way to do nonviolence training is to look at violence across the spectrum, from interpersonal conflict in the congregation, to the workplace, domestic, racial, cultural, media, and international settings.  They all shed light on each other.  Some people can’t think clearly about international issues but can learn to grasp on an interpersonal or congregational level, the same principles that can prevent war. 

In the past decade LPF has led over 1000 workshops and developed scores of resources for youth directors, families and adult forums, on such topics as Biblical peacemaking, conflict education, hosting a hunger awareness meal, "Reclaim the season" (on simple living), and what discipleship means in the public arena.  While Glen joined Central Lutheran, an ELCA church, ten years ago, he said he feels a continuity with his conservative Lutheran past, and observes as well that a lot of good people have been formed in the Missouri Synod tradition because of its strong Biblical orientation.  His brother is a geographer who often has found ways to address ethical themes. For example he worked with a group of young people in Milwaukee to plot maps of intersections where children were injured to figure out where to recommend new stoplights.  His sister, Marva Dawn, is a widely heard speaker and prolific author of Christian books who frequently writes on ethical themes.

~~~

Marina has worked as a gardener, has an M.A. in Psychology and now primarily works as a Senior Companion.  She has worked with people with terminal illness.  She finds that having an understanding of spirituality is helpful for being around people who are close to death.

Marina grew up in southern California.  Her father didn’t go to church.  He worked in his garden; that was his church.  He enjoyed being outdoors.  His father’s family came from Scotland and his mother’s came from Germany.  Her mother’s family came to this country very early.   They were Huguenots and were persecuted for their religious beliefs.  They moved from Norway to France to England, then to the U.S. in the 1600s.

She started going to church when she was 7 or 8 years old.  Her mother was looking for something; she was a seeker.  They went to Presbyterian and Baptist churches and ended up Episcopalian.  She went along and enjoyed it somewhat, but stopped going when she was 13 because she couldn’t relate to it.  It seemed more social than spiritual.  She did like the stained glass windows and the music.  There were really nice Christmas eve ceremonies which she was fond of attending, but she did not like church otherwise.  Looking back, she sees her lack of interest was due partly to her personal issues and partly to the lack of appeal by the church to what interested her.  Her mother was upset that she was resistant and stopped going.  Her mother felt that she needed to be there.

Years later, Marina took her mother to several Eastern spiritual centers and groups and felt gratified when her mother said, "that now she felt she had found what she had been looking for."  She and her mother had many conversations about spirituality and spiritual growth.  She enjoyed this spiritual connection with her mother, especially since her mother had also found spiritual satisfaction in Eastern meditation and thoughts.

Marina read spiritual books in college on Eastern religions because she was curious.  She didn’t go to any services because they seemed so different from what she was accustomed to.  She moved to San Francisco and went to school.  She moved to Berkeley where she had a Psychic reading.  The Psychic told her to do activities that she felt drawn to doing.  She took Psychic classes, acupressure classes and Aikido, which started her on a spirituality journey.  It was very popular at that time to experiment with spirituality.  It started with the Beatles, whose interest in Eastern religions ignited an interest in spirituality by many young people at that time.   

She met someone with a spiritual teacher who encouraged her to go and listen to him and joined the group that followed that teacher.  They gathered for meditation and took trips to the desert to listen to talks and trudge around in the sand.  She said it was a little like Carlos Castaneda’s books about Don Juan.  He talked about the mystical aspects that related to Carlos Castaneda in the desert, and how to be a spiritual warrior.  They saw Indian spirits, or were supposed to be connecting to them.  She didn’t see them but found it to be a fun spiritual adventure.  Her involvement in the group was positive and it helped her focus on learning meditative practices.  That ended when the teacher started telling some people to leave. He seemed to change and this changed the spiritual focus of the group.  Some people stayed but she left.

Marina went to an Eastern Meditation center where she was involved for eight  years.  They had Hindu practices, meditation and a community.   There she sought to learn about  transformation, spiritual growth and meditation.  Then she left that and every once in awhile finds a group that seems interesting to attends to explore its meditative practices.  She has gone to a lot of East Indian spiritual groups.  She has enjoyed reading about various spiritual teachers, also.  At some point, she realized that she has been on a spiritual path, and that it has been a focus of her life.

She said that many people in the 1970's left Christian religions and went to Eastern religions, because it held something for them they weren’t getting in Christianity.   This was the "New Age Spiritual Generation". The Bay Area was at the apex of  this spiritual revolution.  She realizes that she moved here, because this is where it was happening. 

For her there seemed to be more of a spiritual connection evident in the Eastern meditation groups.  It was fulfilling for her to meditate and follow spiritual practices.  She believes as the Hindus do that there is an after-life, and that people come back for another life to work out their karma.

Since she started Eastern meditation, Marina has gone back to church.  She has changed and has brought her spiritual awareness with her.  She appreciates Christianity more now than before.  Before it seemed like fairy tales, not real.  She thought the way Mary's pregnancy was presented sounded like a fairy tale, as did the miracles in the Bible.  Now it seems more real.  She sees Christ as a great spiritual teacher.  Since she has experienced spiritual teachers, she realized Jesus was like them, but even better.  She had to go through other teachers to appreciate Christianity the way it’s practiced, now.

She is also interested in feminine spirituality of ancient times when farming and the earth were important.  They prayed to a god but experienced religion in a different sense.  She believes those ancient practices were more grounded than churches, in their connection with nature and the environment.  She's had a great interest in Native American spirituality.  She has learned about Native Americans such as the Hopi and other pre-Christian groups, that connect to earth and nature through spiritual practices.

She feels that many forms of spiritual experience or practice all boil down to seeking something outside oneself to help people get by, day to day.  She also believes that people have always searched for something that gives meaning to their lives.  She feels that all spiritual and religious practices lead ultimately to one source and unifying principle, that everything and everyone is connected and are one.

It is important to Marina that several leaders of the spiritual groups she has been part of more recently are women.  She feels that in these situations, women leaders have been particularly supportive to women participants like herself, in their spiritual journey, which Marina has found this to be a great help to her personally.  She realizes that Women leaders have brought changes in the way women are perceived and treated in various spiritual groups both western and eastern. 

Marina is presently attending a group who is guided by a teacher who emphasizes the power of the present moment.  It's a simple philosophy, that in some ways resembles Zen.

~~~

Pat has worked for many years as a journalist and book editor.  Her family was of Norwegian and Swedish heritage.  Her father seldom went to church, but she went with her mother and sisters. They went to a Methodist church for awhile but when she was12, her mother made sure she went to a Lutheran church for confirmation.  This was an important requirement among Scandinavians.  She has remained in the Lutheran church since then.

Pat worked for awhile for Carl Lund-quist, who was General Secretary of Lutheran World Federation, many years ago.  She has studied studied theology and social ethics as well as writing. Her spiritual life needs grounding in a tradition that has evolved for centuries, which gives it credibility.  She has always been oriented toward religious literature and what ancient peoples have found important enough to write down and retain as their sacred texts.  The way the amorphous term "spirituality" is used today, it is becoming a new thing, a "New Age" collection of beliefs.  She has not read much of "New Age" spirituality itself, but does believe in a Holy Spirit. 

Books about religion today are a phenomenon in the publishing world.  There are huge sales in both religious and popular bookstores.  Often books on "spirituality" are meant to be a quick fix for existential problems like finding happiness and love.  Traditional religions then seems irrelevant if you believe religion can solve personal and societal problems.  That is a superficial understanding of religion. At the same time, traditional religions have been evolving, changing to meet contemporary understandings and needs.  Those who leave traditional churches for popular movements often aren't aware of the changes occurring.  They don't understand that traditional beliefs can be modified.

Pat believes traditional religion has been short changed, though she does agree that traditional religions need to change more to be more relevant to the modern world as well.  She believes the mysticism and mystery of the various world religions needs to be respected more, but this attitude is not widely appreciated.  

Pat said that people are recognizing the human need for transcendence, which goes beyond whether one has a good life or does good work.  She said that Lutheranism is not very different from Catholicism because of their mutual appreciation of the mysteries of the sacraments and liturgy.  Because of this, she would more easily join a Catholic church than a Presbyterian or Methodist congregation where sacraments and liturgy are not as valued. 

Calvinism was adopted by many Protestants after the Reformation and resulted in  the Reformed church among others and are often known for an emphasis on good works.  Pat studied Reinhold Niebuhr, a Reformed theologian, while studying at GTU.  In post-Reformation Germany, some of the Protestant or "Evangelical" state churches became Reformed, some were Lutheran and some were mixed. 

Pat learned that Niebuhr emphasized Christian Realism, a theological set of ideas to help understand the roles of Christians within a political order.  He looked at the modern worldviews and compared them to the understandings of several other worldviews.  For instance, he wrote that secular humanism differs from Christian realism.  She said that Niebuhr believed secular humanists faced with unbearable human suffering would give up humanitarian service before a Christian who has seen the depth of despair in the brutal crucifixion of Christ and the height of hope in the saving grace of His resurrection and will not feel as defeated as a result.  Mother Theresa worked where there was no hope for saving the lives of the people she served as did Dr. Tom Dooley in Cambodia many years before.  Believing Christians can and have "stuck with it" due to a worldview that includes the worst that could happen as well as a certain hope for the future.  She said that a lot of young people want to make a difference for suffering people but at some point give up their service without a Christian faith to carry them on.  She said, however, that she doesn't know enough about other religions to determine the extent to which their followers would also be willing to serve the needs of people who are outside their own families or tribes.  When people continue serving in awful situations and stay intact as humans, it is not just a desire to help people but something profoundly spiritual that keeps them going.

We live now in an axial period of history when social, political, and religious changes are happening too fast for all beliefs to keep up.  There have been other periods in history like this.  One was around 400 BCE when most of the world's major religions were formed.  An axial period can last for several centuries.  The current axial period may have begun in the 19th Century with the Enlightenment and then the beginnings of the communist ideology and political revolutions.  Pat believes we are more aware of the current axial age because of globalization and our ability to communicate all around the world.  Our languages everywhere are changing; each dictionary is outdated as soon as it is published.

Pat has read a book by Matthew Fox which is a collection of quotes from philosophers and spiritual leaders from around the world, with his commentary.  She respects and admires his work and is generally supportive.

~~~

Dr. Loren Halvorson is Professor Emeritus of Pastoral Theology & Ministry at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota.  His religious and spiritual journey began deeply embedded in the Scandinavian pietistic tradition, where personal faith was the center of one’s life.  There is a consequent public aspect to that, which is rarely thought of.  Having deep inward roots can be the basis for strong public action.  He was opened up to how his faith related to public life when he worked in Germany with refugees of World War II.   After World War II as well, when the church found it hard to engage people embittered by their cooperation with the government and created “Academies,” which were platonic places for dialogue. 

I said that reminded me of the Scandinavian folk schools.  He said that he came to a concept of Grundtvig’s all on his own.  When his wife started the A.R.C. (Action Reflection Celebration) retreat center, an hour north of the Twin Cities, he quit one of his posts, a one-third time position, which was to equip the laity to work beyond the sanctuary of church.  He taught three days at the seminary and started to spend four days at ARC, doing maintenances well as participating in the life of the community.  He came to a healthy balance between using his head, heart and hands. 

In the 1960’s he worked at organizing and strategizing in the public arena for community wide events called Faith In Life Dialogues and Town Meetings based on the German Kirchentay and Kirchlichewochen (Church Weeks) conference centers and traveling peoples’ fairs for social change.  He was invited to Geneva, Switzerland to work with Lutheran World Federation at the Peace and Human Rights desk.  His wife, Ruth, became interested in the Sisters of Grandchamp, a contemplative tradition that developed in response to the World Wars in Europe.  Brother Roger, who he said came from the Reformed tradition, was influenced by these sisters before starting the Taize Center in France.  Out of the crisis and dis-ease in Europe, a lot of contemplative movements arose.  Many centers developed which deepened the spiritual roots.  He said he hopes that will happen in the U.S. now in response to the crisis we are in. 

Out of his wife’s discovery of this kind of group, she decided to open a retreat center, so they moved back to Minnesota to do this.  The A.R.C. center is independent but closely related in working with staff and leaders through retreats and conferences with the official church.  He said it is natural to reach out ecumenically to get closer to the roots and to strengthen the movement for healing in an outer sense.  It is like what happened in the folk school movement in Denmark.  The mid 19th century was a time of great unrest.  Carl Marx developed his ideas then. 

Hans Nielson Hauge started the pietist movement in Norway around this time.  People needed to have an interior faith in contrast to the exterior structure imposed by the state church of Sweden, who dominated Norway at that time.  Another group of pietists in Germany, after the 30 years war, met in prayer groups and on at least one occasion, afterwards marched to the State and demanded they do something about the orphans of war.

The statement that the way to understand God’s will is to have the Bible on one knee and the daily newspaper on the other, came from The pietists Praicke and Spener and not from Karl Barth, as many have said.  It is unnatural to divide and separate the personal and spiritual from the public.

When his wife Ruth retired, they published A Deepened Self in a Widened World.  Charles Peguy was a French socialist in the 19^th century who combined his political beliefs with his Christian ones and wrote, “What begins in mysticism ends in politics.”  You cannot seek a deeper reality with God without embracing your neighbors’ needs.  In response to the Communist Manifesto in 1848, the same year as Marx’s Communist Manifesto, Johann Wichern wrote the Protestant Manifesto, which called the church to attend to their calling for a national conference on social justice.  But the established church was so scared by the Left that they didn’t heed his call.  If he had succeeded, the communist movement might have not had such an anti-religious bias.

When they created A.R.C., they didn’t think of themselves as escaping the world, but going to its roots (radix meaning to the roots, the center) to connect to their neighbors
in a deeper way.  They are not getting people out of the world, but to reconnect in a more effective way.  If salt has lost it savour, it can make any difference.  A.R.C. is a place to recover that savour.

I brought the subject connecting spirituality to the earth.  He responded by telling about ARC.  They were given the land to build it on and asked the Department of Natural Resources to help them care for it.  They found out it was a sacred site with sacred graves of Native Americans.  When there building had been constructed, a forestry student came up to give them advice.  Loren showed him around and he didn’t say much.  Finally, he spoke up like a poet in the Wendell Berry tradition.  He said you should do three things.  1) Live with it;  2) Find out what it’s trying to do; and 3) Join it.

He talked about a retreat center, Shalom Hill Farm, in Southwest Minnesota, started by a couple who moved from the city to the country where they bought a historic farm.  They said they were inspired to do this while on retreat at A.R.C.  They work with rural people as well as Christian ministers, seminarians and lay people, to learn about cultural, rural and environmental issues.  They thought when they started that they would have to important the expertise, but found it instead within a ten mile radius.  People were already engaged in the newest forms of technology.  Loren commented that the best model for experts is the bumble bee, as cross-pollinators.  It’s not what they bring from some central offices but what they pick up at the places they visit that makes them experts.  He mentioned environmentalist, Wes Jackson of Kansas City (author of Becoming Native to This Place (The University Press of Kentucky: 1994) and Bob Rodale of the Regeneration Project in Emaus, Pennsylvania, as other important
environmental educators helping people in community settings.
 
He commented that Jesus remained silent for 30 years, before coming into the radar screen.  The East German government collapsed in 1989 after 40 years during which time there were small groups that met for political vespers.  They were allowed to gather in the evening for birthday parties.   Actually, they would simply have a birthday cake present, just in case, but they did not necessarily party.  They would definitely worship and equally important, were able to discuss things.  When it came time to make a change, they discovered that the critical mass point had already happened though the people themselves did not know it nor did the authorities.  It was already done.  People had already made most of the changes in their thinking by meeting and talking among themselves.  So much can be done under the radar screen.  He called it the “You too” movement.  People would show up in marches in Germany and find others they knew as neighbors, but had no idea what their convictions were from other circles and would say, “You too!.”  Is important to strive for this critical mass.  This is eschatology, the things we imagine only in the end times have already happened.  Loren said, “God is ahead of us as any self respecting deity should be!” when we come to a time when big changes have already happened.

~~~

The late Rev. Richard Swanson (known to many as Swanie) was born in 1932 and grew up in Sycamore, in northern Illinois.  His parents were Lutheran, though his mother grew up as Methodist.  He grew up attending a Swedish Lutheran church.  He graduated from Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois in 1954 and from the Augustana Theological Seminary in 1958.  His first call was to begin a new Lutheran congregation in a Northwest suburb of Chicago, St. Matthew’s, from 1958-66.  In 1966, he was called to Augustana Campus Church, which was the only actual Lutheran congregation at a college campus that was independent and self supporting.  He was the pastor there until it disbanded in 1983. Then he became Director of College and Alumni Relations until 1987, when he became Dean of Ministries.  He retired in 1999 as Chaplain Emeritus.  He has been married for 50 years, has three sons and nine grandchildren.

Swanie’s spiritual formation began as child when he developed a profound sense of God’s presence in our lives.  Sometimes this was presented as judgmental, but a real presence all the same.  He was active in church, though not strong at prayer or reading of scripture.  In college and seminary, the spiritual dimensions of religion were perfunctory.  He married, buried, counseled and preached. 

At Augustana, he was opened up to a wide range of spiritualities beyond Christian and Lutheran.  He came to be influenced by Buddhism and Catholic Benedictine spirituality.  While he was at Augustana they hired a full time Catholic priest on staff which continues now with a Benedictine nun in that position.

Swanie is also appreciative of Judaic spirituality and sees the many ways in which it resonates positively with Christian spirituality.  He regrets the continuing shrinkage of the Jewish community where he lives.  He recently served as a pallbearer for a Holocaust Survivor.  He said it was a deeply humbling experience to be a Gentile Christian in an Orthodox burial service.

He has been most influenced by Christian meditation and centering prayer and has worked with contemplative outreach in the Catholic church.  Swanie became a Benedictine Oblate at St. Mary’s Monastery which started in Nauvoo, Illinois in 1874 and moved to Rock Island in 2002.  He serves as a volunteer, participates in contemplative and centering prayer sessions and has become increasingly involved as director of group retreats.  He leads spiritual direction for pastors and is on the Northern Illinois Spirituality Formation Committee. 

He finds that spirituality leads to personal wholeness with God and others in the world and that there is a legitimate Christian spirituality focused in Jesus Christ.  He tends to be liberal about Christology and sees God’s presence in Jesus.  However, he believes it is found in all humanity, that we are all sons and daughters of God and that the same spirit that animated Jesus animates us.  He teaches spiritual awareness of “self” and others.  He has been influenced by Biblical scholars of today who see Jesus as our brother and not a high unattainable being. 

Swanie has been deeply ecumenical and has done a lot of ecumenical outreach in the Quad Cities, the metropolis where Rock Island is located.  He was awarded the Hope for Humanity Award by the Jewish community.  I remember being introduced for the first time to Jewish Christian dialogue by Swanie’s organizing work while going to Augustana College.  Swanie said he believes God is not limited to Christianity.  Our spiritual calling is to love, whether or not we feel loved: not to change people but to love them.  He considers himself to be non-evangelistic.

Currently he is reading a book on Christian meditation by James Finley, a former Trappist monk and a mentee of Thomas Merton.  He shares a lot of his thoughts and feelings.  After Finley left the monastery, he became influenced by Eastern Spirituality.  In his own thinking he came around to Christian Spirituality.  He sees spiritual power in Jesus’ life that is unique and now teaches Christian meditation.

Swanie said he doesn’t spend hours a day in prayer.  He has been influenced by the Benedictines and a monastic dialogue that is inter-religious.  A long time ago, he spent time with Brother David Steindl-Rast, who was the successor to Thomas Merton in inter-religious dialogue.  Another mentor has been Henri Nouwen.  He has also been influenced by Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist who was a runner-up to the Nobel Peace Prize awarded Martin Luther King, Jr.  Thich Nhat Hanh teaches mindfulness better than anyone he knows, that God is “I am… look for me not where I was or will be but when I’m washing the dishes.”

Swanie finds that Lutheran laity respond to spirituality.  He has taught at his neighborhood Lutheran church, St. John’s in Rock Island, which was originally Swedish, but is now dwindling.  It has clung to its Augustana past, though today its mission statement says it is a place for all people to share Gods love, it is grounded in Christ, hospitality, healing, diversity and nurture. They are becoming the first Reconciling in Christ congregation (welcoming to gays and lesbians) in the Northern Illinois ELCA synod. 

Swanie hopes to focus more on helping to develop the spiritual community at St. John’s in the future.  He strives to be spiritually centered and compassionate, which includes a concern for justice.  He has walked daily, with a daily prayer, for many years.  He bicycles frequently, but there is less time to meditate while riding a bike. 

He talked about the Folk March, a Peoples Walk in Denmark, where large groups of people would go out and walk in the countryside for 10 to 15 miles or overnight walks.  He also mentioned the pilgrimage walks in Spain and Mexico, when people would visit shrines along their walk.  Henry David Thoreau used the term saunterer.  When the crusaders walked by, people would say, “There they go a la Sainte Terre.”  It was intended in a negative way, meaning they weren’t going anywhere, just wandering around.  Thoreau said that every walk can be a walk a la Sainte Terre.  Swanie said that a sauntering walk brings one to the Holy Land every time.

Swanie said he thinks of my father, Lee Jackson, (see early section of Interview Collection) as a pioneer in the Psychotherapeutic movement.  He remembers Lee’s “open edge to life which really stimulated him and made him feel that there is hope for those who don’t live in a straight jacket.”

~~~

 Faith Fjeld is working at the Alaska Native Heritage Center in Anchorage this summer.  She is the founding editor of Baiki: The North American Sami Journal, a magazine by Sami (Lapp) Americans about their Scandinavian Indigenous heritage.  In Alaska, she greets tourists from a lavvu, a Sami tent dwelling.  She teaches them about the natural way of living in the lavvu, that everything is alive, and how the Sami people live out in the natural world.  A few weeks ago at the exhibit, one woman hung back after her talk.  She said, “I guess you’re not a Christian.” Faith replied, “No I’m not.”  The woman said, “We worship the Creator and you worship the Creator and  Creation.”  Faith said, “That’s right…. Everything is alive and we have to give back what we take.  We’re part of nature and we have to take care of where we are because it is a gift from the Creator.”

 Faith said that there is a difference between the Indigenous world view and what are called the major world religions which are manmade.  They are a controlled belief system by people.  She has read Matthew Fox’ book on Creation Spirituality and thought, “this is just another man trying to figure this out.”  She has always felt connected to Native people and now she really is. The Sun dance and sweat lodge influenced her life. She is currently learning about Arctic spirituality. There is not a name for it, it’s a way of life.  Some Native people have embraced Christianity and turned it around to the Native way.  The Sami religion is also a way of life.  It is an every day experience, which includes eating food from nature and sharing food with people.  It is like the teachings from Jesus, not from the church.  She talks to many Indigenous people.  The songs and dances and other ways of life that the missionaries forbid are coming back.  This movement is resurfacing and no man is in charge of it.  Faith believes it is a mistake when some guy talk about religion like experts. “This movement is about people thinking for themselves, with no man or other leader in charge.”

 Leaving the church was a process which started in college. She realized she was praying to some man in a white night gown, trying to force and convince herself that she believed what she was doing.  It was during the Viet Nam war.  She thought, “These people do not walk their talk.”

Faith was raised in a strong Lutheran environment.  When her mother passed away, she returned to Native ways, partly thinking that her mother could have been part Indian.  Also at this time, the love of her life passed away, and she went to sweat lodge to deal with her grief.  She was told by an American Indian that the purpose of the Sun Dance is to bring people back to their lost tribes.  That was when she became involved with the Sami culture of her ancestors.

There is no name for Indigenous religion, it is a way of life.  She woke up and saw things in that other way.  Many people have these experiences, she said, and there are many ways to do it, through Creation Spirituality or however it resonates with you. For her, she resonates and connects in a spiritual way with nature.

When she was growing up, she went to church every Sunday.  Her father was a Lutheran minister, a hymnologist and a seminary professor.  She was confirmed, for which she memorized The Catechism and read the Bible.  They had devotions every night.  It was very spiritual.  They were not hypocrites; they believed what they were doing, but there were a lot of the laws that didn’t make sense.  One of them was against dancing and secular music.  Her father hated Black American Jazz music, which she loved.

At St. Olaf college, she saw that folk dancing was OK, but dancing to the music she loved was not.  She thought, “How can these men tell us what to do with our lives.” She thought the Lutheran  church was very hypocritical about its racism and refusal to stand up against both the Korean and the Viet Nam wars.  It didn’t make sense to her.  Jesus was the prince of peace.  Jesus and the church don’t necessarily coincide.  There have been holy people, Natives as well as Jesus.  There have been medicine people who left their wisdom behind them, but didn’t lead or act like experts.  She said that manmade religions are falling apart and the period of manmade religions is about to leave us. “Nature is coming back and will be a way of life, if this war In Iraq doesn’t destroy us all.”

Growing up in a parsonage, Faith was given a strong set of ethics and a conscience.  She feels guilty when something wrong is done.  She doesn’t want to hurt people because she will feel bad about it.  That was a good thing her parents gave her.  A lot of young people today are not learning those lessons.  She grew up in a strict environment, but had to take herself away from that to think for herself.  That happened when she left the church.

She believes that the story of the Garden of Eden is about the battle between the Indigenous world and the Western way.  The Garden of Eden closed up when people began living by the sweat of their brow instead of from the land and the sea.  They became separated from the spiritual acts of nature.  When people lived in Garden of Eden, it was the same as the Indigenous way of life.  People are given what they need if they honor the Creator and follow the cycles of nature.  When people started to think they were better than Creation, they had to work for a living and get a job.  Their way of life consumed nature.  Then man became the dominant force.  He took dominion over nature, according to the book of Genesis.  All of a sudden man was more important than nature.

Faith said that the subsistence lifestyle works.  As soon as we are dominated by men, the lifestyle changes.  People need licenses to harvest whales.  She sees that two forces, Indigenous lifestyle vs. the western way, are at loggerheads.  Regular folk want to live in a natural way, while others want total control.  In any case, the Nature, the force of life, will continue.

After she had stopped going to church, Faith went back once in awhile and looked back with different eyes.  She couldn’t relate to the prayers being written down.  In the sweat lodge, people form their own prayers. She thought, “Someone else is telling me how to speak to my Creator.  I talk to the creator every day of my life.  I talk to my ancestors too.”  She said that one’s ancestors give guidance and help.  The church labels Ancestor worship as superstition, which confuses people. She doesn’t approve of the church telling people how to believe.

Faith said that the indigenous world is waking up and doing things the church has tried to kill.  It is coming back much stronger.  The movie about an old Sami legend, Pathfinder, tells a story of a young boy who disconnects from his captors, the Tchudis, who want to kill everything in sight.  As he leads them over a treacherous mountain pass, he cuts the rope that connects him with them and they fall into a ravine.  An avalanche  does them in.  She feels the Tchudis represent the Western way and she and others in the Indigenous way are disconnecting from them and waiting for those on a destructive path to destroy themselves so others can get on with their lives.

~~~

Sue was a roommate at college and we were both in orchestra and Campus Church.  She grew up in Rockford, Illinois, going to an ALC church that is now ELCA.  Her mother belonged to the Missouri Synod and her father’s family went to various denominations.  Her mother’s family is very divided between the Missouri and  Wisconsin synods.  She has cousins who work as ministers or who are married to ministers in the Missouri Synod.  Her family has diverged from that tradition on her mother’s side.

As a child, she said, you have different needs and one is to have a stable relationship with your parents and God.  You don’t question and are pretty sure of a lot of things.  As you get older, you start questioning, which is pretty healthy.  She is still questioning and doesn’t think you can have a deep faith without having doubts.  She thinks you constantly have to ask questions and to challenge your beliefs and that nothing is black and white.  She has never read Matthew Fox but has heard discussions by friends.  

She has taught grade school in the past and now works in a department store.  She taught at a Catholic school for three years in Texas, from which she learned a lot.  She has gone back to the church of her childhood, though it has changed, like river that you can never step into twice.  She is involved with the Sierra club, a reading group, and a  couple other environmental groups

Sue has been greatly influenced by a couple books.  One is by Marcus Borg, called Meeting Jesus Again For The First Time.  She likes that he asks the same questions she’s been asking regarding the divinity of Jesus and a lot of dogma, including the Nicene Creed.  She has also been reading the History of Religion by Karen Armstrong, which put things in perspective regarding how Christianity evolved in relationship to Islam and how it diverged from Judaism and Islam

Sue said she doesn’t think she’d be doing what she does without her faith.  Her feelings about the environment come out of same place as her feelings about religion and she doesn’t think she would do the environmental organizing she does without her faith.

She said that she and others she knows have been searching for more mystical experiences and the church she goes to has responded to that by offering Taize services a few times a year which are more meditative.  She goes on walks two or three times a week which is meditative and calming for her.

She said that faith in religion and developing one’s belief is an evolving process.  Some people have big experiences and say they’ve been saved or convert suddenly, but for a lot of people, conversion means a life long process.  What is most important to about her faith is how you live out your life and how you show your faith

~~~

Paul is a computer programmer in the health care industry.  He lives in the Midwest and has two sons.  His religious background is the Augustana Lutheran church.  He belongs to a Lutheran Church now that was originally Swedish Lutheran and he has gone to some of the Augustana Heritage Gatherings occurring every other year.  The Augustana heritage was the environment he grew up in and which he still considers to be his guiding moral, spiritual and cultural model.

I asked him how the Augustana Heritage was different from other traditions.  He believes what is different is the focus on salvation by grace, that all people are saved not just by faith, but by grace, which is a positive outlook on life. For Catholics, when someone dies, they go right to purgatory if they’re lucky.  Paul thinks more conservative religions have negative and contrived outlooks, such as the Promise Keepers, a version of the men’s movement.  They have a more cookie cutter description of what is the right way to live.  His spirituality is a lot more complicated and more flexible than that.

Paul has been influenced by the work of Carl Jung, which our father studied when he was a Chaplain, and which he as a Psychology major understood.  He thinks Jung’s work in archetypes and synchronicity is complimentary to Augustana’s spiritual roots.  He doesn’t think  other dimensions explain synchronistic or mystical events.  Rather, we create meaning from the random occurrences we experience and those meanings help us prove to ourselves that the world is a positive and friendly place.

He has read Original Blessing and thinks he has an idea of God from that. Other than the parent image, he doesn’t believe in personifying God.  The idea that God’s creation of us came about through a creative force that is a part of the universe appeals to him.

Paul was influenced by Swanie (interviewed above), the campus pastor at Augustana College, his alma mater.  Swanie's sermons were about grace.  Paul picked up the idea that God is like a parent to us and smiles with satisfaction when he sees us succeed, achieve or act in a moral way and do the right thing.  On the other hand, God as parent isn’t so happy when we do the wrong thing, but we are still his children, therefore we are still loved by God.  Things happen to children and parents can’t prevent them from happening.  Children become autonomous and make their own decisions and a parent can’t prevent them from making wrong decisions.  A parent can’t prevent other children from hurting their children, even by accident.  Other than providing us with a world that has the potential to be nurturing, he doesn’t think it’s God’s role to protect us.

He read an article on whether or not there is intelligent life on other planets. The article said that it is possible there is intelligent life elsewhere, maybe one planet per galaxy.  The idea that out of the billions of stars and planets we are the only one makes our situation special and rare.  But the Earth is still subject to all the physical forces that are happening in the galaxy.  For example, there are lots of asteroids out there, but the fact that they tend to hit Jupiter and spare the Earth has provided long periods of time for intelligent life to develop.  Those asteroids are still out there and it is still possible that one will end us just as it ended the dinosaurs.  If there is an asteroid out there that is aimed at the Earth, he doesn’t think that it will be God’s role to step in and divert it.

God’s role is more like that parent who hopes for the best.  As much as a parent cares for their child, children grow up and go off to other things and eventually get old and die.  He sees that as what’s going to happen and that it doesn’t take away from God’s position.

I asked Paul about art and spirituality.  He said he wrote a paper once in college about his own theory of personality.  He postulated the symbol of a lump of clay as symbolically resting in the chest of all people as being where their personality comes from.  He sees that our personality is a reflection of God.  Where art and art appreciation come from is the same place.  Art is created from our center, where our personalities come from.

One of the things that shapes his sense of spirituality is the fact that he is more visually-spatially oriented than linearly.  His spirituality is not a list of things, but rather a 3-D place, made up of different sizes, colors and shapes, which occupy places, inter-connect, ebb and flow.

I asked him about social justice. He said again, that as parents are concerned about fairness and well being for all of their children, God is concerned about the fairness and well being of all people.

I asked him about the Environment. He said he doesn’t have a spiritual feeling except the appreciation of it as a creative thing. His interest is more practical: damage to the environment makes the earth less habitable, and it doesn’t make life better for God’s children. The environment comes in, in line with social justice. For the welfare of all people, it is important to take care of the environment.

I asked him about meditation. He said he meditates sometimes and I reminded him that he walks frequently, which is a type of meditation.

Paul works in the health care field. He appreciates the fact that he can feel a sense of right livelihood in this job. He almost was in a situation where he would have had to take a job managing credit card data for companies offering pornographic services on the Internet. That would have been an example of not practicing right living.

~~~

Rev. Neville Kretzmann is originally from South Africa but has lived in northern Illinois for many years.  My father had known him when he was in seminary in Rock Island and I and my parents visited his family in South Africa while on a trip to visit my uncle’s family in East Africa in 1976.  Within a few years, Neville and his family happened to move back to Illinois and lived three blocks from us.

Neville grew up in a conservative German Lutheran tradition, similar to the Missouri Synod, in South Africa.  His family went to church regularly, was very conservative and supported the status quo.  However, he went to the University of  Capetown which was fairly liberal.  Then he went to the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago (LSTC) as it was transitioning and merging five seminaries into one in Chicago.  He spent the first two years studying in Rock Island, Illinois and his final year in Chicago.  After graduating, he did one year of Clinical Pastoral Education at Elgin State Hospital in Illinois.  LSTC was a challenge to his faith, as it was more liberal than what he had been accustomed to.

He and his wife went back to South Africa to serve at the only English speaking white Lutheran church, which was much more liberal than the others.  The other white Lutheran churches were in the German language, including synod meetings, where he had a translator.  The settlers who came in the 1850's imported their clergy from Germany to minister to them, but when their term of service was over they returned to Germany.  They tended not to speak out on social issues so that the South African government would not withdraw their Visas.  Those clergy tended to emphasize a very spiritual theology in which segregation in the church was tolerated.  They said that true unity would be realized when everyone reached heaven.  Neville said that is was easy for those who had power and privilege to hold such views. He struggled with  those kinds of issues.

He looked at some of Matthew Fox’ theology that I wrote about, in terms of realized eschatology, and the Kingdom of God on Earth and thought about it in terms of Martin Luther.  In some ways, Luther was very much concerned with daily life and participating in the life of society and politics, but he also had a heavy  emphasis on the fall of man and the need for redemption.  Luther had a fear of facing God when he died.  He struggled with the question of how a sinner could be justified and accepted by God in order to get into heaven.  The answer Luther came up with is that salvation is a gift from God and there is nothing you can do to earn it.  You just need to accept it in faith.

Neville pointed out that this preoccupation with getting into heaven tends to encourage an individualistic faith.  He suspects that the majority of people believe that they are saved by God’s gracious love.  Therefore they do not see a need to belong to or to participate in the life of a congregation.  This, coupled with the individualism that is present in society, tends to diminish a sense of loyalty to the church.  So people attend when they feel like it and not out of a sense of loyalty to the community.  That is what Neville sees has happened.  As a minister, he doesn’t  know what to do about it or how it will impact the Church in the future.  Perhaps this individualism will not yield all that people are looking for and they may find a need for more community.

Neville has been reading a book, violence unveiled, by Gil Bailie, a theologian in California.  Bailie traces the need that social groups have to use a scapegoat to bring about stability in their midst.  The greater the instability, the greater is the sacrifice that is sought.  According to Christian theology, Jesus’ death and resurrection make such sacrifices unnecessary.  Part of what Bailey says is that the Church  hasn’t adequately conveyed the message that it is no longer necessary to shed blood in order to appease  God for something that’s wrong in society.  Bailey sees that a lot of the big movements in the world can be traced to Christian roots, such as the founding of the United Nations and the animal rights movement.  He sees how Christianity has impacted the world in all of these ways but not in terms of affecting society’s need for blood sacrifice.  The Church has not interpreted the significance of the death of Jesus to society appropriately.

This relates to some of the rethinking about the Atonement and the need to somehow pay for one’s sins so that people will be justified and acceptable.  Neville said he doesn’t know if most people have a real sense that they are sinful anymore. Atonement theology might still speak to those who have really messed up their lives with drugs, violence, etc.  For most people in society, he doesn’t know if the atonement is that meaningful anymore.  On the whole, he believes that people have bought into the belief  that God is love and if that is so, then God will deal with them in a loving, gracious way.

In regard to Creation Spirituality, he brought up Martin Luther and his interpretation of the Creed.  The first petition says, I believe in God the father almighty, Creator of heaven and earth and talks about how God created and takes care of us.  He said that is a pretty good statement which grounds Luther’s theology in Creation and our every day experiences.  Viewing theology from this perspective allows for the development of a stewardship of Creation in various ways.  Such a theology does make its presence felt but in the past much of the focus has been on individual salvation as illustrated by the hymns of the church.  They emphasize salvation, the fall, redemption, the blood of the lamb, death and resurrection. 

When Neville looks at pictures of stars and galaxies taken by the Hubble telescope, he feels that this individualistic view of salvation is rather limiting.  There has to be much more to life than God deciding who goes to heaven or hell.  That seems to be such a narrow, self-centered and humanistic perspective.  What happens when we die has to be far greater than that.

~~~

I interviewed, Dr. John Bilorusky, the founding director of the Western Institute for Social Research.  His mother’s family was English, French and Scot Irish, and his father had Russian, Polish and German background.  Growing up with his mother in Colorado, she intermittently attended various Protestant churches.  Her mother had been raised in a fundamentalist, fire and brimstone, Southern Baptist church, which she didn’t care for.  She was influenced by it in that she didn’t dance.  John’s mother was influenced by a mixture of Victorian era strictness as well as a liberal side with tolerant and open views.  His mother thought the Victorian influence was kind of uptight.  She came of age in the 1920s, which was like the 1960s in that young people were wanted to be sexually less uptight, and for instance, danced the Charleston.  His mother was not wild by modern day standards, but from a Victorian perspective, was a free spirit. 

She didn’t have a particular interest in conservative Protestantism.  She had a liberal perspective of religion and didn’t feel she had to go to church every day and had him baptized Episcopal.  John didn’t go to church much for most of his first 12 years.  He attributed this partly to the fact that his mother was exhausted, working two jobs as a single parent.  Occasionally, she talked about religious things in a vague way and they practiced a somewhat religious version of Christmas.

When John was an adolescent, there was a huge and prominent church in their neighborhood, that was liberal and youth oriented.  They had Friday night dances which he and his friends went to.  He loved basketball and they had a team which he played on.  After awhile, he and his mother decided he should go to Sunday school, since he was involved in youth activities. 

He and his mother attended regularly for about five years.  John liked the youth minister, but had some negative experiences, and felt the main minister was money hungry.  His mother noticed that the minister ignored her when she wore ordinary clothes, but when she wore fancy clothes, he fell all over her.  At that point, John and his mother rapidly developed a critique of the very materialistic character of the main minister.

John was an acolyte for one year.  He was very serious about it and always showed up on time to light the candles.  Because of his conscientiousness, the youth minister tried to persuade him to go into the ministry and offered to help get him a scholarship for Duke, a Methodist university, but he wasn’t interested.  In college and since, he has only gone along to church a few times if the people he is with have wanted to go, but doesn’t have much interest.

As he came of age, John evolved in the direction of many peers, to be interested in spirituality in a general way and not necessarily turned off to religion but skeptical of religious institutions based on his experiences and the culture of the 1960’s.  People were interested in spirituality and curious about eastern religions but not committed to any one, certainly not any western mainstream tradition.  He read some things and was aware of Eastern religions, but didn’t become involved.

Today, he has spiritual feelings.  When his children ask if there is a God and what happens when we die, he responds with a vaguely stated belief that there is life after death but no one knows for sure.  He believes there is a higher being that we could call God, for all practical purposes.  He doesn’t have one set of beliefs or practices, but his feelings and intuitions about things.

A lot of John’s interest in spirituality relates to his studies in Physics and Cosmology, which he finds awe inspiring.  He said that if you think about the enormity and complexity of the universe, the way physicists are becoming aware of it, it’s incredible.  There isn’t evidence, necessarily, that some anthropomorphic being created it, but you have a sense that there is some kind of whole that is much bigger than the sum of the parts and that it’s not unreasonable to imagine why people would wonder about God and create stories like in the Bible and in other faiths.  Earth wasn’t created in seven days, but metaphorically it evolved in an incredible way over millions of years.  It is thought that perhaps there was even another universe before this universe.

John finds it fascinating to learn about certain facts that can make a big difference in the development of life.  For instance, water is one of the few substances which is lighter in its solid that its liquid form.  However, ice is lighter and can float on water.  If ice was heavier, it would sink to the bottom.  That one unusual property of water makes an incredible difference in terms of whether life is possible on earth.  If ice sank to the bottom, the ocean would fill up with ice.  This would keep the oceans much colder, would totally change the climate, and make life harder to exist.  Findings like this are beyond what he can put into words and he feels the wonder of it all at a gut level.

~~~

Another Paul I interviewed is my uncle and was a minister. His father, my grandfather, was also a minister.  He started Augustana seminary in 1950 and was ordained in 1954.  I asked if it had changed from when his father was at seminary, and he said that perhaps the dogmatics were a little less dogmatic, but he didn’t know that it was that different.  Paul made a career change after about 18 plus years and then worked for 25 years as a computer programmer. He has now retired.

In response to my question of what his beliefs are and how they may have changed, Paul said his family, growing up, was conservative Lutheran.  He has noticed, however, that whether people are conservative or liberal, they often change to become more open to and appreciative of other views in time, which has happened to him.  He still appreciates the faith taught him by his family and doesn’t reject any of those beliefs, but has come to realize that there are a lot of equally valid viewpoints along the whole spectrum, from conservative to liberal thinking. 

Looking back, though he remembers his father as having conservative views, he realizes that he was kind of open too.  He remembers his father, called Papa, had an appreciation and openness to science.  For instance, Papa knew, from studying geology, that the world was much more than 6,000 years old.

Paul follows the findings of science and said there is nothing in Creation that does not somehow bear the image of the Ground of all Being.  He has always been interested in viewing Creation through Astronomy and the Cosmos, the theory that the universe started out as a primordial grain of energy and the story of the Big Bang, 13-14 billion years ago.   He appreciates not only the bigness of the universe, but at the other extreme, subatomic reality.  He has not gotten into chemistry and particle physics, except to see the relationship between what exists on a vast scale of being related to not a micro but a nanoscopic basis.  A nano second is a billionth of a second, the time it takes light to travel one foot.  The fact that in today’s technology, that becomes a measurable thing, amazes him. 

Global positioning, made possible by satellites, provides the technology for a device in a car to show precisely your location and to plot your course from there.  You can plug it in and tell it where you want to go and it will calculate where to turn.  Satellite technology is so precise, he finds it too much to fathom.  He appreciates it and reads a little, but never ceases to marvel, that not only this exists, but there are people who understand and develop systems based on this knowledge. 

Paul belongs to an astronomy club that meets once a month, where he enjoys looking through a telescope and talking with people.  His wife Eileen is a teacher and for her third grade class, they get the kids and their parents out once a year to look at the planets and stars.  For the big meteor shower a few years ago, Eileen put out a flyer that said, “You don’t have to be a little crazy, but it helps.”  At 4:30am, every kid in the class, with their parents, were outside watching this great display.  Last June, they were out to observe the transit of Venus across the face of the sun, which hadn’t happened for 120 years.  Paul remembered reading as a kid that it would happen on 6/8/04 and then that day came.  It was a cloudy day, but just before it ended, the clouds parted and those who had stayed could see the transit of Venus across the sun with a device designed so you didn’t look at the sun directly.  They were able to then go back and tell the others they should have stayed to the end!

Paul continues to go to church as he did when he was younger, though not as often as when he was a minister’s son, when there was no question about it.  In some ways it’s the same, in some ways not the same, though he finds it hard to pinpoint what the differences are.

            Over the years, Paul has wondered about the potential of carrying the human potential and faith in the Creator further, to see what we as human beings are capable of, to grasp and understand intellectually.  He thinks about this not only in terms of science, but also in terms of interpersonal relationships and the ability to love and care for one another.  He feels the potential for this must somehow reflect the image of the Creator, the Ground of Being from which all that exists came forth.

~~~

Mark Carlson is the Director of the Lutheran Office of Public Policy in California, based in Sacramento.  He began work there in 1984, with a project for the Lutheran Church in America (LCA) on acid rain, when that issue was getting attention similar to what global warming is receiving now.

Mark’s father, Elmore, was a Lutheran minister, from the Swedish Lutheran background. As a small child his family lived in Idaho where a lot of his values and interests developed before he started school, when he spent time with his family at church camp and vacations outdoors. They spent time near rivers and mountain lakes, connecting with nature.  His father helped pick out a wilderness site for a Bible camp.  His father helped select the Stanley Basin site for Luther Heights Bible Camp.

His father found nature to be a healing place.  He took Mark to Celilo Falls on the Columbia River in 1956 before it was flooded as a result of the building of the Dalles Dam.  They saw a spectacular site of one of the premiere Native American fishing sites, where they used dip nets.  His father told him they would not see that again.  It has been an open wound for Native Americans along the Oregon and Washington border.  It was a moment when Mark learned to cherish and to want to try to protect natural phenomenon to prevent them from disappearing. Today there is a museum and visitors’ center near where the Falls were, with a video showing Native Americans reflecting on the tragedy.

When Mark was in high school in Fremont, California, someone at church recommended he read the Population Bomb by Paul and Anne Ehrlich, which was a life changing experience.  He also encouraged Mark to join the Sierra Club, which Mark did during his senior year in high school.  He volunteered for the Tri-City Ecology Center in Fremont, which helped people recycle.  Scouting was also important.  In service projects they planted shrubs and trees in an urban area and around his church.

Mark went to college intending to become an environmental lawyer.  He wanted to make a difference in protecting the Earth.  He went to Bethany College in Lindsborg, Kansas and took history and science prerequisites for law school.

He helped instigate and organize the first Earth Day while a freshman at Bethany in 1970.  He has two memories of that day: one of the campus having a picnic, the other was the resulting mountains of waste paper plates and cups.  There was also a panel to talk about pollution and transportation. The point was made that even though cars are less polluting now, there are more of them and our addiction to automobiles will bring trouble ahead.

He became acquainted with Wes Jackson who taught Biology and was a prophetic voice in agriculture at a Methodist college, Kansas Wesleyan.  Mark visited the Salina, Kansas dump and water and sewage treatment plants where he saw the environment from a community based perspective.

Mark went to Sweden to study Swedish environmental policy for a year at the University of Stockholm Institute for English Speaking Students.  In the mid 1970s, they had a strong environmental ethic and had recently hosted an international conference on the environment.  He interviewed party leaders and a lot of state agency people.  He looked at environmental controversies related to land, water and forestry.  He also learned about the park system, nuclear energy, hydroelectric power, and the yet to be constructed bridge between Malmö and Copenhagen.

Mark decided not to go to law school, partly because his personality is more cooperative than adversarial.  He went to an environmental studies graduate program at the University of Montana.  For his paper, he wrote about the church’s response to energy development and coal mining in the Northern Plains and Rockies.  He referred to the work of Richard John Neuhaus, who wrote Christian Faith and Public Policy, although he is disappointed today that Neuhaus has since moved in a more conservative direction.

Mark connects his environmental concern to his faith that God’s creation is beautiful and still evolving.  It has spectacular beauty, while at the same time we’re dependent on it.  Where things get fuzzy or controversial is the question of what is the role for and value of humans in the scheme of Creation.  He has a middle of the road view, that we’re not the same thing as a plant or rock.  We obviously have power and influence and are a special and unique species.  However, we need to be very conscious of our role and think about the consequences of our actions for our own health as well as the well being of the planet.

In addition to basic sustainability, Mark feels it is very important to have access to a wilderness experience or urban park.  It is an immensely important part of being human, to be able to connect with the earth and Creation, for emotional as well as spiritual health and well being.

Mark is the person who first told me about Paul Santmire, one of the few Lutheran voices expressing a concern for Creation.  He has also heard Larry Rasmussen lecture once or twice.  In addition, he knows of a Lutheran who was the head of Jimmy Carter’s Council on Environmental Quality who is well published.

In his community in Sacramento, Mark recently attended an event by Solar Cookers International, who are evangelists for solar ovens and appropriate technology.  They assist women and men in poor rural communities around the world to use solar ovens to treat their water and cook food to prevent disease.  He commented that the Church should support this empowering kind of work when they respond to hunger appeals.

Mark read something by Wendell Berry which related the theme of communion to the environment, that when we literally break the body and shed the blood of God’s Creation, we need to have the right attitude. It can be a virtue if we do it knowingly, lovingly and humbly. But if we do it in a negative, careless, thoughtless and exploitive way, it’s a sin.  For Mark, that addresses the understanding that we are dependent on the Earth.  It is difficult to be a completely benign purist in this culture and economy.  It is important to think about leaving a small footprint and “living lightly in the light.”

In Mark’s advocacy work in Sacramento, poverty issues are the main focus and environmental issues are secondary.  There is an obvious justice component to this in that what we consume has consequences, especially when some people take more than their share of resources or poison their neighbors.  Loving earth and loving neighbor go together as components of human justice.  We can express gratitude to God by caring about our impact on others.

I first met Mark at an Augustana Heritage Gathering.  When he saw the film about Conrad Bergendoff and the way Bergendoff related to world concerns, he felt affirmation for his work.  He recently went to a Lutheran conference on rural American issues and saw a monument at St. John's Lutheran Church in downtown, Charleston, South Carolina, which listed Rev. John Bachman, one of the leading Lutherans of German heritage in the South.  There is also a statue of Bachman at Newberry College.  He was an associate of John James Audubon and a well-known naturalist.  Mark said this shows that Lutherans who are concerned about nature should not just be labeled and discounted as “new age.”  There is an older tradition.

Another way he relates this work to Lutheranism is the awareness of the potential for sin or falling short.  We need to be humble, to confess where we have erred and take responsibility.  We should keep our eyes open to see how humans are hurting and how the Earth is hurting and to ask, for future generations, what harvest will they reap?

~~~

He thinks of Jesus as a gentle human being who cared for people and whose appreciation for the environment is evidenced by his frequent illustrations in his teachings using examples from the natural world.  When Tom looks out into his yard and sees the many species of trees, shrubs and creatures, he is impressed with and constantly believes that God is there and is continuing to create and bring to fruition his plan through his creatures.  God’s plan includes that we humans appreciate and consider ourselves to be part of the world God has created.  As a result it is important for us to see not only all humans, but all creatures too, as fellow creatures.

Tom has been an environmentalist for many years.  He is active in a local nature conservancy, which works closely with the concerns of the larger community to protect the environment and to make sure parts of it remain green.  They have purchased large tracts of land for the preservation of its natural state as well as the water we drink and air that we breathe.

Tom frequently preaches in churches in the community while pastors are on vacation.  In  the junior sermons, he frequently talks about how God appears to us in the natural world.

In his ministry, he worked for many years as a minister in parishes in New York City and Pittsburgh.  He also worked for many years, mainly with the mentally ill but also with prisoners, in institutions in New Jersey, New York City and Pittsburgh.  He both enjoyed and felt this was important work, to reach out to people who needed to talk and have someone to listen to them and sympathize with their concerns.