Original intention:
To live out a good and fair God of love…
Actual production:
GOOD-centric Exterior Spiritual Disciplines focuses on our living out love, goodness, and fairness through the disciplines of simplicity, service, stewardship, and celebration; but without a loving, good, and fair God who existence was slayed, for me, by natural evil. I have thrown in that extra “o” and now love Good in the same way that I used to love God and I live the same life centered in love, goodness, and fairness. Please join me!
Opening Epigraph
“Do all the good you can. By all the means you can.
In all the ways you can. In all the places you can.
At all the times you can. To all the people you can.
As long as ever you can.”
~ John Wesley
Preface: From GOD-centric to GOOD-centric
“If the you of five years ago doesn’t consider the you of today a heretic, you are not growing spiritually.”
~ Thomas Merton (attributed)
Introduction: GOOD-centric Exterior Spiritual Disciplines:
To Live Out Good
“May your life preach more loudly than your lips.”
~ William Ellery Channing
Excerpt: GOD-centric and GOOD-centric share the same call to transformative action and the same mantra: “How would my action affect the movement of love in the world?”
Ch. 1: Simplicity
“Since Transcendentalists were convinced that life was too precious to waste on the mere pursuit and enjoyment of things, their common goal was to develop modes of living that reduced their material and institutional needs to a minimum so that they could more easily pursue spiritual truths, moral ideals, and aesthetic impulses.”
~ David E. Shi, The Simple Life
Excerpt: When it comes to the exterior spiritual discipline of simplicity, both GOD-centric and GOOD-centric might ask: “How might I set up my life in a way that frees me to better affect the movement of love in the world?”
Ch. 2: Service
“On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”
~ Martin Luther King Jr., “A Time to Break Silence”
Excerpt: When it comes to the exterior spiritual discipline of service, both GOD-centric and GOOD-centric might ask: “How might we set up our world, so love, goodness, and fairness thrive?” … GOD or GOOD-centric, the exterior spiritual discipline of service calls us to influence the world so that its educational and economic infrastructures are ones in which love, goodness, and fairness thrive.
Ch. 3: Stewardship
“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
~ Albert Einstein
Excerpt: When it comes to the exterior spiritual discipline of stewardship, both GOD-centric and GOOD-centric might ask: “How might I better affect the movement of love in the environment and non-human life?” … GOD or GOOD-centric, the exterior spiritual discipline of stewardship invites us to extend to non-human life our building of a world in which love, goodness, and fairness thrive.
Ch. 4: Celebration
“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is though everything is a miracle.”
~ Albert Einstein
Excerpt: When it comes to the exterior spiritual discipline of celebration, both GOD-centric and GOOD-centric might ask: “How might I join in community with others to rejoice in and rejuvenate our movement of love in the world?” … GOD or GOOD-centric, the exterior spiritual discipline of celebration will fill our wells collectively, just as the interior spiritual disciplines do individually, so we can live out love, goodness, and fairness.
Epilogue
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
~ R. Buckminster Fuller
Excerpt: If Truth is thus a never-dying process, then our answer may yet be found in “and” rather than “or”: GOD-centric & GOOD-centric, a paradox and, hopefully, a love story… Let’s carry on, my wayward GOD-centrics and GOOD-centrics; there may be peace when we are done.
Closing Epigraph
“My country is the world,
and my religion is to do good.”
~ Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man
