“What the heart loves, the will chooses, and the mind justifies.”

Clearly Cranmer was among the happiest of the reformers...

Thomas Cranmer was the Archbishop of Canterbury during Henry the VIII's reign. He saw a lot of craziness from the king of his time but he also saw a lot of craziness from the schism in the Church that has come to be called the "Reformation." 

Ever a student of his surroundings, Cranmer noted much about the human condition that recent Psychology and Behavioral Economics has come to ratify. Cranmer's anthropology is perhaps best summed up by the Cranmer specialist, Ashley Null, who stated it this way: “What the heart loves, the will chooses, and the mind justifies.”

As products of the "enlightenment" we like to think that we make rational decisions and that our decisions are guided by reason and understanding the facts of the matter. We hang our hat on the idea that if we could just get the other side to see the facts and use their reason, they too would see as we see. If only liberals could see the silliness of their desire for a greater national government! If only conservatives could see the irrationality of their position!

Cranmer understood that our mind is not doing the choosing. It is our heart and our gut. We use our mind to only justify our already desired choice. Much of our desire to "learn the issues" is the work to discover the "flaw" in the others position and to reinforce our previously held position. Open your heart and you will see where your decisions will take you. Perhaps more importantly, look at the heart of another and see that they too are just like you, just trying to choose and justify the longing of their heart.

Go easy on one another. 

Can we stop fighting terrorism?

My friend Rev. Lance Marshal  is a much better preacher than I am (as well a better academic,  much more creative, thought provoking and all around a better person). A few weeks ago in a sermon after the Paris attacks he spoke about terrorism. Specifically he drew the parallel to terrorism as cancer. 

In his sermon Season Of Saints: The Way of Healing on November 14, at minute mark 25 Lance fleshes out this metaphor. 

If you don't listen to it, you are missing out on some of the best 5 minutes of preaching. Take time to listen to it. 

Seriously, the last 90 seconds is a prayer so if you only have 3:30 minutes take it to listen to Lance. 

When you do you will hear Lance, a cancer survivor himself, talks about cancer as something that is to be cured despite it is something we talk about "fighting". If it is true that if all of humanity being one body of Christ, then when we "fight" terrorism with more pain, terror and bombs, we are only fighting ourselves. Like cancer, terrorism is not anything you can "fight" or "beat" it is something that can only be cured. 

Just a reminder, it is Sin. Not sins.

"Have the men of our time still a feeling of the meaning of sin? Do they, and @@do we, still realize that sin does not mean an immoral act@@, that "sin" should never be used in the plural, and that not our sins, but rather our sin is the great, all-pervading problem of our life? Do we still know that it is arrogant and erroneous to divide men by calling some "sinners" and others "righteous"? For by way of such a division, we can usually discover that we ourselves do not quite belong to the "sinners", since we have avoided heavy sins, have made some progress in the control of this or that sin, and have been even humble enough not to call ourselves "righteous". Are we still able to realize that this kind of thinking and feeling about sin is far removed from what the great religious tradition, both within and outside the Bible, has meant when it speaks of sin?"

"I should like to suggest another word to you, not as a substitute for the word "sin", but as a useful clue in the interpretation of the word "sin", "separation" . Separation is an aspect of the experience of everyone. Perhaps the word "sin" has the same root as the word "asunder". In any case, sin is separation. To be in the state of sin is to be in the state of separation. And separation is threefold: there is separation among individual lives, separation of a man from himself, and separation of all men from the Ground of Being. This three-fold separation constitutes the state of everything that exists; it is a universal fact; it is the fate of every life. And it is our human fate in a very special sense. For we as men know that we are separated. We not only suffer with all other creatures because of the self-destructive consequences of our separation, but also know why we suffer. We know that we are estranged from something to which we really belong, and with which we should be united. We know that the fate of separation is not merely a natural event like a flash of sudden lightning, but that it is an experience in which we actively participate, in which our whole personality is involved, and that, as fate, it is also guilt. Separation which is fate and guilt constitutes the meaning of the word "sin". It is this which is the state of our entire existence, from its very beginning to its very end. Such separation is prepared in the mother's womb, and before that time, in every preceding generation. It is manifest in the special actions of our conscious life. It reaches beyond our graves into all the succeeding generations. It is our existence itself. Existence is separation! Before sin is an act, it is a state."

The Shaking of the Foundations by Paul Tillich - Chapter 19: You Are Accepted