Scots Church Adelaide - Uniting Church in Australia

The Daily Disciplines
Everything we do is practice for the next time. When we cease to practice, we lose our fluency, and memory becomes imperfect. Some things are practiced by default- when did you last consciously practice eating? Other things require conscious effort. My handwriting is slow, laborious and has lost its fluency. I type without thinking.

When we took our young children back out to the desert where we had lived, they were profoundly uncomfortable with the open spaces. We noticed our son was happier and less fractious whenever we went walking in the enclosed space of mountain gorges. We become used to, and are affected by our environment. Years before, leaving the desert, my wife and I were depressed, dislocated and disoriented by urban life. A day out walking in the hills begins to resurrect memories and instincts which have been lost to our consciousness.

As urban westerners we live in a profoundly artificial environment. It is possible, even easy, to avoid the outside world for days at a time! Enter the garage by an inside door from the house, drive out using the automatic door opener, drive to the underground car park, and take the internal lift up to work. Leave before it is properly light, and return home after dark. We live in a world which we Australians especially, think we control. In truth, we are irradiated with uncontrolled advertising and other stimulation, rarely alone enough to be in silence, and uncomfortable if we are. We live in a noisy, crowded and driven world, which is the anathema of all that our spiritual ancestors learned is necessary for health. We have stepped out of reality into an artificial place.

The spiritual disciplines are designed to bring us back into the real world from our artificial place. They create time, silence and space for us to re-engage with the depths of life. They patrol the corridors of the mind, as someone has said, re-minding us of what is really important. Religion without practice becomes merely an idea, caught in the currents of the ideas round about, without the anchor of reality.

Making Sense

Being Christian means that Jesus of Nazareth is a guide and inspiration to our living. Jesus lived 2000 years ago and there have been many developments in the way he is understood since then. Widely divergent traditions have evolved. To be Christian unavoidably means to think out, and make sense of what the various traditions about him mean for today. Some will inform us. We will repudiate others.

In our thinking we are trying to be open to the rich variety of human experience. We want to use it to illuminate our tradition. We want the wisdom of our tradition to guide us, but not become a dogma which limits our search for truth. All questions are permissible. If God is God, all questions are permissible. If we must limit our questions, or close ourselves off from certain experiences to be Christian, then the Jesus tradition is an inadequate way of living.

This means we must be open to the best scholarship we can manage, be critical in our questions, and honest in our conclusions. If we do not do this, our thinking degenerates into wish fulfilment and a retreat from life. It will not make sense of life. It will avoid life.

In the messy overlaps of thinking and doing, acting and reflecting, learning and forgetting which form life, this section of our website focuses mostly on the thinking, making sense,  and reflecting.