Cover Story: Barack Obama's Christian Journey. In 1. 98. 1 Barack Obama was 2. Columbia University student in search of the meaning of life. He was torn a million different ways: between youth and maturity, black and white, coasts and continents, wonder and tragedy. He enrolled at Columbia in part to get far away from his past; he'd gone to high school in Hawaii and had just spent two years . I withdrew from the world in a fairly deliberate way. Spiritual Maturity Published in Sufi Journal, Issue 64, Winter 2004 - 2005 Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee. When it is time for stillness, stillness; in the time of companionship, companionship; at the place of effort, effort. In the following scriptural passage there are eight steps to spiritual maturity. Have you started on your journey? Upon what step are you now standing? Have you tried to skip a step and fallen? Have you forgotten a prior. JesusWalk: Beginning the Journey is conceived as a mentor-based, spiritual formation and discipleship program for new Christians that will be available internationally to help new believers understand and begin to practice the. Often, he'd go days without speaking to another person. For company, he had books. There was Saint Augustine, the fourth- century North African bishop who wrote the West's first spiritual memoir and built the theological foundations of the Christian Church. There was Friedrich Nietzsche, the 1. German philosopher and father of existentialism. There was Graham Greene, the Roman Catholic Englishman whose short novels are full of compromise, ambivalence and pain. Obama meditated on these men and argued with them in his mind. Sign up. Sign up to our daily newsletter for up to date global news and features. But like many political leaders wary of offending potential backers, he has been less revealing about what he believes—about God, about prayer, about the connection between salvation and personal responsibility. In some respects, his reticence is understandable. Obama's religious biography is unconventional and politically problematic. Born to a Christian- turned- secular mother and a Muslim- turned- atheist African father, Obama grew up living all across the world with plenty of spiritual influences, but without any particular religion. He is now a Christian, having been baptized in the early 1. Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. But rumors about Obama's religion persist. In the new NEWSWEEK Poll, 1. Muslim; more than a quarter believe he was raised in a Muslim home. His baptism presents its own problems. The senior pastor at Trinity at the time of Obama's baptism was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., the preacher who was seen damning America on cable TV for weeks last spring—and will doubtless be seen again this fall. In the NEWSWEEK Poll, almost half of the respondents say Obama shares at least some of Wright's views; nearly a third say Wright might prevent them from voting for the presumptive Democratic nominee. The story of Obama's religious journey is a uniquely American tale. It's one of a seeker, an intellectually curious young man trying to cobble together a religious identity out of myriad influences. Always drawn to life's Big Questions, Obama embarked on a spiritual quest in which he tried to reconcile his rational side with his yearning for transcendence. He found Christ—but that hasn't stopped him from asking questions. Raised in the Midwest by two lapsed Christians, she lived and traveled throughout the world appreciating all religions but confessing to none. One of Ann's favorite spiritual texts was . When the family lived in Indonesia, Ann, on occasion, would take the children to Catholic mass; after returning to Hawaii, they would celebrate Easter and Christmas at United Church of Christ congregations. Ann later went back to Indonesia with Maya, and when Obama visited, they would take him to Borobudur, one of the largest Buddhist temples in the world. Later, while working in India, Ann lived for a time in a Buddhist monastery. In 1981 Barack Obama was 20 years old, a Columbia University student in search of the meaning of life. He was torn a million different ways: between youth and maturity, black and white, coasts and continents, wonder and. Our Spiritual Journey January 26, 2003 Bible Reading. Every year Jesus' parents went to Jerusalem for the feast of the Passover. When he was twelve years old they went up to the feast, according to the custom. Biblical Essentials GROWING TOWARD SPIRITUAL MATURITY Gary C. Newton CROSSWAY BOOKS A DIVISION OF GOOD NEWS PUBLISHERS WHEATON, ILLINOIS GrowingToward.45712.i02.qxd 1/20/04 10:10 AM Page 3. Visiting temples was not just tourism for Ann. The idea of human beings' striving to be better, having the curiosity and questions about all these things, ? Obama calls his mother . She would have been very comfortable with Einstein's idea that God doesn't play dice. But I think she was very suspicious of the notion that one particular organized religion offered one truth. He was raised, in part, by his stepfather, a man named Lolo, who . In Indonesia, Obama has said, he saw women with and without head coverings and Muslims living comfortably next to Christians. He has said that his life among Muslims in Indonesia showed him that . During his first two years of college at Occidental, he says, he was . William Araiza was in a political- science seminar with Obama their senior year, and what he remembers most is Obama's detachment. He was looking for a community that he could call home—a sense of rootedness and belonging he missed from his biracial, peripatetic childhood. The visits to the black churches uptown helped fulfill that desire. The exuberant worship, the family atmosphere and the prophetic preaching at a church such as Abyssinian would have appealed to a young man who lived so in his head. And he became obsessed with the civil- rights movement. He'd become convinced, through his reading, of the transforming power of social activism, especially when paired with religion. This is not an uncommon revelation among the spiritually and progressively minded. David Price, who knows Obama professionally and writes about politics and religion. Using the writings of Paul Tillich and, especially, Reinhold Niebuhr—and also King, African- American and Roman Catholic liberation theologians, and Christian fathers like Saint Augustine—local religious leaders emphasized original sin and human imperfection. Christ's gift of salvation was to the community of believers, not to individual people in isolation. It was therefore the responsibility of the faithful to help each other—through deeds—to respond to the call of perfection that will be fully realized only at the end of time. Adherents of this particular theology frequently refer to Matthew 2. When these ideas merged with his more emotional search for belonging, he was able to arrive at the foot of the cross. For one thing, Trinity insisted on social activism as a part of Christian life. It was also a family place. Members refer to the sections in the massive sanctuary as neighborhoods; churchgoers go to the same neighborhood each Sunday and they get to know the people who sit near them. They know when someone's sick or got a promotion at work. Jeremiah Wright, whom Obama met in the context of organizing, became a friend; after he married, Obama says, the two men would sometimes get together . She was, of course, always a wanderer, and I think he was more inclined to be rooted and make the choice to set down his commitments more firmly. He didn't officially join Trinity until several years later, when he returned to Chicago as a promising young lawyer intent on becoming a husband, a father and a professional success. Around the time Obama was baptized, he says he studied the Bible with gifted teachers who would . But after their first child, Malia, was born, they found making the effort more difficult. And if you went to the morning service, you were looking at—it just was difficult. So that would cut back on our involvement. Senate, he says, the family sometimes didn't go to Trinity for months at a time. The girls have not attended Sunday school. The family says grace at mealtime, and he talks to the children about God whenever they have questions. In 1. 99. 9, while still in the Illinois State Senate, he shared an office suite with Ira Silverstein, an Orthodox Jew. Obama peppered Silverstein with questions about Orthodox restrictions on daily life: the kosher laws and the sanctions against certain kinds of behavior on the Sabbath. He lost a friend in Wright—and he lost a home, however tenuous those ties may have been toward the end, in Trinity. He has not found a new church, and he doesn't plan to look for one until after the election. He says he prays every day, typically for . Kirbyjon Caldwell—who gave the invocations at both of George W. Bush's inaugurals and presided over the wedding of the president's daughter Jenna—is among those on Obama's prayer team. When Caldwell talks about Obama, he can barely keep the emotion out of his voice. The thing that impresses him most, he says, is that when he asks Obama, . Some on the right say his particular brand of Christianity is a modern amalgam—unorthodox, undisciplined, even insincere. James Dobson accused Obama of . I've said this before, and I know this raises questions in the minds of some evangelicals. I do not believe that my mother, who never formally embraced Christianity as far as I know . Should Obama beat John Mc. Cain, he has history on his side. Presidents such as Lincoln and Jefferson were unorthodox Christians; and, according to a Pew Forum survey, 7. Americans agree with the statement that . But it was, to some, also a speech about faith. Obama tried to explain his relationship with his pastor, to appeal to Americans' sense of the best in themselves. He spoke of racial divides in America as . We have relationships, they're all flawed, we're all broken. You can't renounce your history with a person at a stroke, we have to fare forward with other imperfect people and resist the claims to perfection coming from both sides.? Last week, aboard the campaign plane, he said: . Few things in life are harder, or messier, than the last months of a presidential campaign. Try Newsweek: Subscription offers. A Spiritual Journey's Surprising Lessons About Aging. From Meryl Streep to Sting to Dame Judi Dench, we have plenty of contemporary role models for aging well. But when I think of how I. Writer, healer, mystic, composer, philosopher, poet and naturalist, Hildegard was a Renaissance woman before there even was a Renaissance. The more I learned about her wealth of talents, the more intrigued I became. And I was not alone in my enthusiasm: Hildegard has as diverse a fan club as any celebrity. Musicians love her ethereal chants; health enthusiasts take inspiration from her writings on diet and healing; environmentalists appreciate her passion for the natural world; feminists hail her as a foremother; and in 2. Pope Benedict XVI named her a Doctor of the Church, an honor bestowed on only a handful of female saints. As we cruised down- river, I intuitively understood how Hildegard. The Hildegard tour is well marked and translated. A year later she published Scivias, a theological treatise on her prophetic visions. Hildegard Abbey, located on a high hill across the river from Bingen and home to a community of 5. Benedictine nuns. The imposing stone church was built long after Hildegard. She composed music for her nuns to sing, wrote texts on theology and medicinal herbs, advised political leaders, went on preaching tours and, at 6. At age 8. 0 she was still crossing the Rhine twice a week to oversee it. I could picture her striding purposefully down to the water, hitching up her robes before climbing into a boat, probably dictating orders to her assistant. Just before she reached the shore, the most remarkable thing happened: Hildegard looked back at me and smiled . It then took her 1. The takeaway: When you. Hildegard suffered poor health her entire life, but it didn. In fact, her own frailties arguably sparked her interest in healing. She also knew how to use her illness for leverage, as when she took to her bed until her superiors granted her request to found her own abbey. Inner harmony provides the wellspring for outer strength. Hildegard was deeply spiritual and intensely practical, a rare combination in any era. Nourished by prayer and ritual, she found expression in a steady outpouring of creative works. Speak the truth as you know it. While she had a deep respect for authority and the traditions of her church, she wasn. In fact, reading the sharply worded letters she sent to princes and bishops can almost make one feel sorry for the recipients. Joy should be the foundation of your life. A key concept in Hildegard. She nurtured it wherever she found it, giving what I think is one of the best pieces of advice I.
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