Resurrection Sunday: Let Him Easter in Us

For a week or so I’ve been drawn to the Gerard Manley Hopkins line, “Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness in us.” I’m reconsidering its meaning this year.

I first saw the line in a Catholic bookstore at an Iowa retreat center 20 years ago. Hopkins’ words were incorporated into the mission statement of a female religious order in the Midwest, and one of the Sisters of the order had painted the line in watercolor, beautifully depicting the phrase in a way that caught my eye. I’ve kept the framed work in a place where I can see it almost daily since that time.

All these years, I’ve been moved by the novelty of Hopkins’ use of “easter” as a verb, an action word. Again this Holy Week, I’ve played around with what “let him easter in us” might mean. At the moment, I only have hints and guesses. For now, I’m exploring.

A couple of days ago, I randomly connected Hopkins’ line with a familiar verse from Mary Oliver. Surely to “let him easter in us” has something to do with life and vibrancy.

The Mary Oliver question which came to mind in my pondering simply asks: “Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?”

The line comes squarely in the center of her lengthy, “Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches,” a poem which invites us to a more vibrant, alive existence by getting out of our self-focus and into the lives of things around us: The long branches of young locust trees in early summer, or the sea, or the grass.

She writes:

And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away
from wherever you are, to look for your soul?
Quickly, then, get up, put on your coat, leave your desk!

And then:

For how long will you continue to listen to those dark shouters,
caution and prudence?
Fall in! Fall in!

It has occurred to me this week that “breathing just a little and calling it a life” is not the same as letting him easter in us.


Further, this week I am holding the tension of reconciliation as I ponder “let him easter in us.” Paul wrote in 2 Cor. 5 that this was Christ’s work in the world, reconciling the world. I assume this work continues in an even greater way post-Resurrection. Christ eastering in us and in the world surely has something to do with reconciliation, making right the divisions and factions that exist within us, among us, and in the world.

Reconciliation is making right, making peace. The dictionary definition says “to restore to friendship or harmony,” so it includes a work of restoration.

Many times I am like the political leaders who urge oneness and harmony among partisans, but who really mean, “There will only be oneness and harmony if you come to my position on this issue, if you see things my way, if you adopt my value system.” This is a sham of harmony and has nothing to do with reconciliation.

Authentic reconciliation stands in the center and holds all the sides, all the partisans, all the variances together. Again, Paul said that in Christ, there is no Jew or Greek, no male or female, no rich or poor, no slave or free, but all are one in Christ. So it sounds like, when I take one position or another – and believe me, I definitely have my firmly-held positions!! – I’m in no place to reconcile. If I am in one position or another, dug in, I’m no longer able to reconcile, to bring together. I may be entrenched, but not in a place of restoring friendship and harmony.

From that place, people in the “opposing camp” become “elites” or “snowflakes,” or they become “a basket of deplorables.” Reconciliation cannot happen there.

It seems to me that reconciliation somehow holds both (or all) the extremes together, in order to work toward healing and oneness. This is strenuous work, and requires that we get outside of ourselves, that we take on a new mind, that our lives are oriented as “the mind of Christ.”

It is a bogus oneness to say that we all need to come together as one nation or one denomination or one whatever, while advocating that everyone needs to agree with me . . . that only if others come to my position can there be oneness. This is a pseudo-oneness, a sham of reconciliation.

To reconcile is to make peace, to live into a wholeness which transcends one position or another position. To make peace – shalom – brings completeness . . . making peace and restoring friendship with God . . . making peace among the scattered parts of ourselves, befriending our own lives again . . . making peace with others, especially those with whom we disagree.

Are some causes unjust? Certainly!

Are other causes worth fighting for? Definitely!

But in every case, we are invited to follow Christ, whose work was reconciling the world to God . . . to be reconcilers, to make peace, to listen to the other, to treat the other with respect and friendship, to work toward shalom . . . the invitation stands for those who are post-Resurrection disciples.

Let him easter in us. At some level, at least in my thinking today, Christ eastering in us means we join him in his work of reconciling the world.

A Check on Your Opinions

The world contains a huge amount of anxious, angry energy at present. Maybe it always has done so . . . this anxious and destructive energy likely has always existed just beneath the surface. But somehow it feels more toxic now that it had made a home in plain sight.

Colliding worldviews and divisions give us pause even to engage in conversations that once would have been considered normal and everyday. [Am I the only one with an wary eye on Thanksgiving week and the family gatherings that include emboldened, combative voices from across ideological spectrums?]

As one of my favorite sports talk-show hosts used to say, "Opinions are like noses: Everybody has one." Indeed, everybody has an opinion.

But not all opinions are created equal, and simply holding an opinion strongly or loudly or stubbornly does not make that opinion life-giving or healthy or whole-making.

In fact, maybe we would do well to hold up those phrases to the ideologies or worldviews to which we cling:

** Is it life-giving? Is it life-giving for you? Is it life-giving for others? Does it lead to fullness of life for everyone concerned? Or does it diminish life?

** Is it healthy? That is, does it come from a place of healing and reconciliation? Does it lead to health (spiritual, emotional, physical) in you and others?

** Does it make the world whole? Does it help persons become complete? Does it help you and others live in the world as people who follow in the steps of Jesus? Is it something Jesus would support or advocate for? Does it hold together divisions? Or does it create more splits and deepen chasms?

I fully realize that not everyone will want to ask questions like these of themselves. But I also realize that for those who call themselves followers of Jesus, these are basic, fundamental stances for Christian disciples.

The "Who" and "What" of Wheat and Weeds: Part 2

Jesus then told them this story:

The kingdom of heaven is like what happened when a farmer scattered good seed in a field. But while everyone was sleeping, an enemy came and scattered weed seeds in the field and then left.

When the plants came up and began to ripen, the farmer’s servants could see the weeds. The servants came and asked, “Sir, didn’t you scatter good seed in your field? Where did these weeds come from?”

“An enemy did this,” he replied.

His servants then asked, “Do you want us to go out and pull up the weeds?”

"No!” he answered. “You might also pull up the wheat. Leave the weeds alone until harvest time. Then I’ll tell my workers to gather the weeds and tie them up and burn them. But I’ll have them store the wheat in my barn.”

(Matt. 13:24 - 30)


In the parable's landscape, if the field stands for my life or your life, then the wheat and weeds represent those qualities or characteristics which make up who we are, how we see ourselves, and what we do in the world. I'm calling these aspects of ourselves the "what" which lies within the field of my life or yours. We may judge some of those qualities as positive and helpful (wheat), while considering other characteristics to be negative, harmful, or unwanted (weeds).

The parable suggests we cannot presume to know what is wheat and what is weed within our interior field; therefore, Jesus encourages us to allow everything to grow in the field and leave the work of separating the two to God.

This "letting be" can be arduous work in itself. Our notion of what is right and what is wrong can be deeply ingrained within us, and to find something within the field of our lives that does not sync up with our vision of what it means to be "religious" or "spiritual" can prompt us to move heaven and earth to remove the "weeds." At the very least, finding weeds within the plot of our lives can lead to overwhelming guilt and shame.

"Let everything grow in your field," the parable teaches.

Who
There is another level at which the parable may be read, this one suggested by Jesus himself. It is social in nature. In this interpretation, the field is the world. The wheat and the weeds represent various people in the world -- the "who's" sown in the field -- some who do good and work for life . . . others who are more destructive and whose presence diminishes life. But people, scattered throughout the world, embody the images of wheat and weed.

[I would argue that no single person is completely "wheat" or completely "weed." Rather, each of us exist as some combination of wheat AND weeds, some confused mixture of the two . . . with most of us trying to maximize our wheat and trying to hide or minimize our weeds. . . . all a matter for another essay at some other time.]

Some people who are sown in the world look appealing. They appear to be doing good for others (perhaps advocating for a cause we find admirable or beneficial) or seem to be successful in their own right; however, in reality they cause fractures. They divide and separate. Appearances notwithstanding, they do not bring life and healing to the world. The parable acknowledges that we cannot presume to know, from the ways things appear, what impact this person has on the well-being of others and the planet.

On the other hand, there are some who appear to be weeds. They live on the fringes or they seem disreputable. We might think of their behavior or lifestyle as scandalous. We can see little in their lives which seems life-giving to us; yet, some of these people are wheat, according to the parable. They are subversively bringing life and wholeness to the world.

The parable admonishes us to allow everything in the field to grow without trying to rid the world of one thing or the other. I find this a remarkably difficult stance to take in current culture, given my own observation of what seems to be life-threatening and harmful. I want to judge, to presume to know who is good and who is bad, who to support and who to protest.

The ongoing, insidious temptation for religious people is the tendency to judge others. Those on an intentionally spiritual path are not exempt from this tendency to judge, and in fact may be more prone to judgment than others.

I find it easy enough to judge others according to the light I have at the moment. Further, I presume my way is THE Way, and then judge those who have chosen some other way. Of course, in such judgments, I am always the wheat and you -- if you don't agree with me -- are always the weed.

Don't be quick to judge others, the parable teaches. Don't be presumptuous enough to label either wheat or weeds in the world. Don't assume what you see is all there is. Any assemblage of people, whether the Church, the coffee group, or those gathered at the halfway house, is a strange and confusing combination of wheat and weeds. Every person in the field of the world is full of complexity and holds within themselves an awkward mixture of wheat and weeds.

Including me. And you.

The Journey of Unknowing (part 2): Two Maxims

Those looking for certainties are seldom long on a deepening spiritual path. Many of us have experienced that the life of the Spirit does not offer an abundance of answers as we journey on, but rather more questions. At the same time, however, there also grows more tolerance for the questions, more willingness to let things be unresolved, more acceptance of what we do not know, more willingness to step into areas that seem dark and foreboding in the soul's landscape.

I try to keep these two maxims about spiritual growth before me always. They help me to stay open to whatever is next, whatever comes, whatever is.

1. The spiritual journey is going to take you to a place you cannot imagine.

If you think you know what the destination of your journey looks like, it is not truly a spiritual journey -- that is, guided by Spirit. The spiritual journey means stepping into the unknown, into cloud and darkness, without have a predetermined notion of what the outcome will be.

Many of us begin the journey because we want some specific outcome from it. That's fine. Go ahead and begin the journey that way. But hold the outcome loosely, because eventually you will find your own expectations altered as you realize God has an altogether different goal in mind for you.

Thomas Merton wrote about this sense in which we travel without knowing where exactly we will land.

"No amount of imagination and metaphor can begin to convey what is meant by contemplative experience of God present in one's own soul. . . . It is a kind of interior revolution, drawing the soul inexplicably out of its normal routines of thought and desire to seek what cannot be thought and to grasp what lies beyond all desire. . . . The soul simply plunges into the darkness without knowing why, and tends blindly toward something it knows not. Only later is there a strong, subjective verification of the truth that this "something" toward which the soul is groping is really God Himself and not just an idea of God or a velleity for union with Him." (Merton, The Inner Experience, "Infused Contemplation," pp. 72-73.)

2. The road that takes you to your destination will not be the road you would have chosen for yourself.

Most always, the road that leads to our destination is full of difficulties and the pain of letting go the things -- ideas, beliefs, people, possessions, achievements, and so on -- to which we have clung for happiness over the years or decades. At the very least, we are invited over the course of the journey to be in relationship with those "things" in very different ways than previously.

In reality, we don't get to choose what appears on the path. The road we walk is itself out of our control, beyond our ability to manage, at least if it is a true spiritual path. We don't get to choose the options that are necessarily easy or pain-free, the courses of travel that have least resistance.

For example, I don't have the option of choosing yes or no on the cancers, the deaths, the forced terminations, the hurricanes and floods, the economy, the random acts of violence, the divide between me and family members.

In her classic poem "The Journey," Mary Oliver describes the path that seems to choose many of us. In the middle of the poem she describes the impediments on the journey in this way:

It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
(Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems: Volume One, Boston: Beacon Press)

"The road full of fallen branches and stones" . . . who chooses that? Yet, most always the spiritual path will be littered with various fallen branches and stones.

As I said previously, if you can imagine the journey's outcome and the path you need to take in order to get there, then you may be on a journey of your own design and your own making. The spiritual journey is a journey laid out, guided, and shepherded by the Spirit of God . . . a journey to which we are invited in trust and faith, not in certainties and absolutes.

"Farming" . . . Just Because I Can!

I am not a farmer, nor the son of a farmer.

My father, who grew up in rural Northern Oklahoma, wanted nothing to do with the natural world as an adult. As I child, I had to beg him to go fishing. And as an adolescent, when I wanted to grow tomatoes and watermelon in the backyard of our home in the heart of the city, it was my mother who helped me, not my dad.

My thumb tends more toward brown than green. I never was very good at the gardening . . . either too much water, or not enough. I've unintentionally killed more plant-life in my days than I have aided growth. I learned about my deficiencies firsthand in that adolescent garden. Further, the basketball, which I truly loved, kept bouncing into the plants when I would miss to the right, so the tomatoes had a rough go of it. In any given year that I planted a garden in that corner of the backyard, it only yielded a few tomatoes. But it was something I wanted to be a part of, something that was important to me.

The dream lives on, though, so this year with some space to garden -- I'm calling it "farming", just because I can!! -- our son Bradley and his family (Rissa, Ainsleigh, and Sullivan) have helped Paula and me prepare beds and put in vegetables of many varieties. We are calling ourselves the NW Arkansas Wendell Berry Garden Club -- again, just because I can! -- after the noted Kentucky farmer/poet/environmentalist/activist. It's not that I fashion myself as Wendell Berry, but I do take him as my role model.

I'm concerned, now that I'm late into the autumn of my own life, that my gardening skills have gotten no better, that I will do something to sabotage the seed and seedlings, causing them not to grow, not to produce fruit. I'm really a novice at this with no real experience, but I've enlisted good help -- Bradley and Rissa have cultivated gardens and produced an abundance of fruit for many years, so they bring the know-how while I provide the grunt labor. And the labor, thrusting my hands into the soil, mixing the compost and the peat . . . this is what I love, and what I have been disconnected from for decades.

I recognize that soil and water and sunshine and nutrients and humans, all bring their own energy to this endeavor. The success of the "farm" depends on the energy we each bring to the process. There is so much I, as the human energy, cannot control; however, there are some thing I CAN control. So I'll do what I can, the best I can, hoping that in two months there will be fruit to show for the effort . . . when all the various elements come together in an onion, in a potato, in a salad.


"The Man Born to Farming"
by Wendell Berry

The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,
whose hands reach into the ground and sprout,
to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death
yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down
in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.
His thought passes along the row ends like a mole.
What miraculous seed has he swallowed
that the unending sentence of his love flows out of his mouth
like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water
descending in the dark?

Post-Election: A Pastoral Letter

I am the pastor of a Contemplative Community in Houston, Texas. It is a diverse community of seekers, who are intentionally engaging a life-stance rooted in the Christian mystical/contemplative tradition. For months, the Presidential campaign had sent ripples through the community, making conversations awkward and straining relationships. The election itself only served to bring those tensions closer to the surface. As a clay-footed pastor of this beautiful and imperfect community, I wanted to speak into our life together in a healing way. I wrote this pastoral letter to my "flock" about 24 hours after the election results were in. I include the letter here as I sent it to my congregation.



I have struggled over the last 24 hours to know what to say to you as your pastor. Some, I realize celebrate Tuesday’s election as a victory. For others, it is simply relief to finally be done with it. Others have found themselves numb. Many have expressed grief and anger (“sad” and “mad” are both primary emotions, but very different, though sometimes hard to distinguish). The uncertainty felt by some has morphed into fear in others.

In short, I’ve seen no “typical” or generic response to the election. We each feel what we feel. Our emotions are not right or wrong . . . we don’t need someone to fix us or to quote a Bible verse to make us feel better . . . we don’t need to gloat that we were right and others were wrong . . . we don’t need to feel vindicated if identified with the majority nor defeated if identified with the minority.

The aftermath of the election was sure to be this way, regardless of who became the President-elect. Either way, his/her supporters were going to be at odds with her/his supporters. The strain felt among families and friendships, in workplaces and congregations for months leading up to Nov. 8 has now become an awkward tension as we collectively ask, “What’s next?”

Institutions and structures change, shift, fall, are rebuilt . . . that includes nations, political structures, companies, and even the Church. It is one – of many – reasons Jesus said not to place faith in the institutions, in leaders, in political parties, or even in the Church. He foresaw, for example, the fall of the Temple as a religious and national institution within Israel. His words were heard as blasphemy, especially when he said that he would build another Temple, this time in the human heart. But Jesus was forever taking these outer events and symbols, and pressing them inward toward the heart. He asked interior questions about outer events and happenings in the world.

Therefore, wherever you are with the events of the last few days, I invite you to tend the garden that has been given to you. Trying to solve the world will lead to frustration, despair, and ultimately more anger. You can’t fix the world singlehandedly – as even President-elect Trump will learn in the coming days. But you can tend the garden that is yours. That garden, first and foremost, includes your own soul. That garden also includes your relationships, those within your sphere of influence. Tending your garden is not about fixing someone else’s garden, not about locating all the problems “out there” in others, or in the system, but rather about turning the soil of your own life. It’s about working your side of the street.

How am I trying to do that in this season? First, I begin with myself, my own stance, my own feelings. I do soul-work in a deeply honest way. It shifts from finger-pointing at others to a personal glance.

So I take inventory of how it is with me.
• “What does it feel like to be Jerry today?”
• “And what has been touched in Jerry that has produced these feelings? What values have been threatened? What core values have been touched, so that I either celebrate or lament?”
• “What does it feel like to be Jerry feeling this feeling?”

I ask this of myself, not to become more inward focused, not for the sake of introspection, and not in order to judge myself as a failure, but in order to be familiar with myself and my own landscape. I want to be aware – or conscious – of my own interior, in order to see what is at work within me. This is a part of the illumining work of God’s Spirit.

I want to let this work take its time in me, because I realize that most often, my first reaction (the first glance or first gaze) is self-protecting, self-serving, and not grounded in love. Usually the first glance is defensive, judgmental, and categorizing. When I press myself to stay with the interior work, I can often get to that second glance or gaze, which most always includes threads of mercy and the capacity to see self and others more generously.

Second, I want to become aware of my mind’s chatter . . . whether it is the chatter of election elation, or the chatter of election analysis, or the chatter of fear and despair.

[The internet and social media can be a great gift, but they can also feed the worst impulses within us. Consider a fast from news feeds and social media for 24 hours or so. In my experience, these sources only feed and perpetuate my mind’s chatter, increasing the number of “monkeys” jumping around from swing to swing within my head. It’s almost impossible for me to cease my mind’s chatter when I’m constantly feeding the monkeys more food.]

Some form of contemplative prayer – Centering Prayer or Christian meditation – that invites you to disengage from thoughts and feelings may be especially helpful, so that at least for a few minutes, you can let go of the chatter and the cycling of your analytic mind.

Third, consider carrying a breath prayer along for this season of your life . . . a phrase that you can breathe or whisper as you move through your day, especially when you find yourself overwhelmed by the situation. Whisper the prayer as you work, as you walk, as you drive, as you eat, as you wait on hold. Let the simple prayer itself hold you.

“Be still and know that I am God.” (Ps. 46:10)
“The earth is yours, and all that is in it.” (Ps. 24:1)
“You are the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” (Ps. 27:1)
“In your light I see light.” (Ps. 36:9)

Finally, I affirm that we are a diverse spiritual community made up of persons from across the political, racial, socio-economic, educational, sexual orientation spectrum. We do not represent a single political vantage point. A glance across the Chapel on any given Sunday morning, and I see a multitude of life-situations and perspectives, each with meaning for that particular person. Our task together is love and mercy. It is the growing edge for all of us, especially in our life together and in our witness to the world. We each find different ways to embody the life of Christ to the world. None of us do that in the same ways. We are united by the common quest to deepen our lives into the heart of God for the transformation of the world . . . not by common perspectives or beliefs or ideologies.

We may not always sense it at a surface level, but we are one in the One who has called and named us.

I am glad – and sometimes overwhelmed – to be your pastor in a time such as this.

In love and peace,
Jerry

Snow and Ash: An Ash Wednesday Poem by Steve Garnaas-Holmes

I've recently found the work of Steve Garnaas-Holmes through some friends who regularly forwarded his poetry and psalm-work to me. His website is www.unfoldinglight.net. Steve will also add you to his daily mailing list if you you'd like.

His work has touched me, and this morning's poem is beautiful.


SNOW AND ASH

This snow, deep but fine like ash
drifting over your sidewalk
will be gone in weeks.
But you shovel it today anyway
because today you need to walk out of your house.
You shovel it while it is snow
before it is regret.

Before it melts
this short life is yours
to choose well with,
what to shovel, what not to shovel.
Hard to do, to put your shoulder
to the work of compassion
when you could stay in.

So many conflicting winds
would drift your life
into ruinous places.
Only the warm energy of life
guides you, carving out
this path and not another.

Mortal,
pause amidst your labors,
and receive the grace you need.

Remember you are snow,
and to snow you shall return.


--Steve Garnaas-Holmes (www.unfoldinglight.net)

Two Images for Life and Prayer and Reality

This summer a large group of folks with whom I share life is reading Anthony De Mello’s The Way to Love. I’ve come across a couple of images in recent days that illumine the spiritual journey in some helpful ways. It occurs to me that they may be companion images that would help process De Mello’s ideas in The Way to Love.


First, we each respond and react to life and to life situations in ways we have learned over many years. Most of these responses live beneath the surface of our awareness. We react in certain ways and then assume, “This is just the way I am,” or “That is just the way life is.” In a sense, we have a whole storehouse of internal videos that play in our heads. These “videos,” which include our commentaries on people and events, also include attributing motives to others which may or may not be factual.

For instance, if we feel excluded, we may have a video that plays back other times we felt excluded, and the video may include a commentary that says things like, “That person has always excluded me,” and “I must be a bad person to be excluded like this,” and “She is a bad person because she has shunned me” . . . and on and on it goes.

For me, anyway, the impact of this internal video and commentary is spiraling. I spiral downward . . . downward . . . downward. The further I spiral, the more outrageous my commentary becomes. And all the while it seems very reasonable to me. If I don’t catch the “spiral” early and stop the internal video, I can be in a deep funk for hours and even for days. (“I needed to talk to him. . . . He didn’t answer my phone call. . . . He never answers my phone calls. . . . He must not like me. . . . I’ll never call him again. . . . Maybe I need to quit my job. . . . I should move to another city. . . . I’m such a failure. . . .”)

See? It makes no rational sense. If it weren’t so real, it would be humorous to see it written like this. But this is the internal noise with which each of us lives.

Every person has a whole host of these internal videos. In a sense, they have served to help us make sense of life. And for most of us, they have served as defense mechanisms, ways we have protected ourselves from the hurts and cruelties of life.

Most often, though, these videos are the cause of our upset, turmoil, fear, and defensiveness. We may say to another person, “You did this to me,” but the other person did not “cause” our specific reaction to their behavior. While their behavior may have been inappropriate, unhealthy, and even hurtful, our response to them is mostly a product of the internal video that plays within our minds in reaction to them.

The spiritual life invites our awareness of these internal videos that play within us, some of which are dear to us or seem hardwired within us. Awareness of the videos is the first movement toward detaching from them and from their compelling, addicting pull on us.


Here is another image.

Imagine you are in a valley, looking up at a mountain. You see the mountain and its shape, the trees and rocks that cover it, and the peak of the mountain. The mountain is really there. But take your gaze off the mountain for just a moment . . . then look at the mountain again. This time, you cannot see much of the mountain, because clouds have moved in to block your view. Your vision is obscured by the weather pattern.

If you didn’t know better, you could believe that the mountain no longer exists, or at least that the mountain’s pinnacle is no longer there. You could easily believe that the clouds are the main thing, that the weather is the only reality. After all, on this gaze, the weather is all you can see.

And in fact, the weather pattern is one part of the reality, but it also masks another more solid, more foundational reality . . . which is the mountain or the landscape behind and beneath the clouds.

If I am not careful, I can allow the clouds or the weather to determine my perception and shade how or what I see.

And the reality is that the weather will change. The clouds will move in and out, based on the weather.

You could liken the clouds and the changing weather to our human perception of reality, to the way we see life. To lean on the previous image, the clouds are something like an internal video. They are the immediate focus of our sight, what we most quickly perceive. If our gaze stops there, we will miss the more solid, foundational reality behind and beneath the clouds.

In a sense, the clouds, though beautiful, are a distraction. They obscure the mountain and its peak. The clouds come and go, but the mountain remains.

Spiritual vision, which is grown within us over time, is a function of prayer and meditation, the slow unmasking of the clouds and the gradual learning to trust what is behind the clouds. Quiet prayer, contemplative prayer, gives a foundation for connecting most deeply with God, grounding us in the Real, learning to recognize the distractions for what they are, and helping us to see beyond the scope of our physical vision.

A Psalm for the Cycle of Death (Good Friday) and Transformed Life (Resurrection Sunday)

Last week on Good Friday, the day of Jesus' Crucifixion, I found Psalm 137 appointed for prayer in one of my prayer books. It is a difficult psalm to pray under ordinary circumstances. It is bold and violent, audacious in its fist-waving at the "enemies" . . . and even a bit toward God.

I tried to stay with it for as long as I could, and found myself praying the psalm in light of the Death - Resurrection rhythm that seems to be inscribed upon all things. We live . . . something within us dies . . . some form of new life emerges where we thought there was only death. And the patterns continues. It seems to never end. Every day is full of small deaths, ways great and small of letting go of that which has died. It seems to me that we live much of our lives in a kind of "Holy Saturday" time, between the deaths of "Good Friday" and the transformed life of "Resurrection Sunday."

So using Psalm 137, this is what I ended up praying about that in-between time. Perhaps as you read these words, you would also open Psalm 137 from the Hebrew Psalter . . . so that you are praying not about the Babylonians, but about the death of your own dreams, ideas, or postures toward life.


Psalm 137 Psalm-Prayer
for Good Friday 2013


The dream has died
a long death
and I sit empty, angry, despairing
grieving the loss
alone, looking for a next step
remembering the way I thought it would be
remembering the plan that never came to pass

I’ve laid aside the instruments
with which I planned the party
the celebration when You did
(what I wanted You to do)
what never came to be

The death of the dream taunted me
mocked my sadness
shamed my inability to sing “happy songs.”

What can I sing when the dream has died?
All I have are laments
the song of a place
I do not want to be

Yet, this is my truth
This is who I am
where I am

The dream has died a Friday death
and now I wait
a long Saturday
for life
the liminal space
that is my own transformation

And for this in-between time
faithfulness
(I pray)
to be here,
and now,
fully
not forgetting You
as I wait
stay open
for the next thing

I’m tempted, here,
to curse those
through whom the dream was dashed
to strike out at those
through whom this death came
in my anger and disgust

Yet Your Project is beyond
and somehow includes this death
though I cannot see it now

Somehow this death of my dream
is woven into Your life for the world

I cannot see it now
and I cannot yet rejoice
But I will stand in faithfulness
I will wait
with all the openness I can muster

And I pray for the eyes to see
when this death
becomes life.

The Experience of Resurrection

Easter, the Day, came and went a couple of days ago.

Easter, the Resurrection Experience, goes on.

As Sunday approached and I thought about the different worship expressions that would happen around Christendom on Easter, I was struck that in many ways, the Church has made the act of Resurrection something to believe in or something to be happy about.

I became aware that for me, the Resurrection is not something to believe in as a doctrine or as something that would form the basis of a creedal statement. Resurrection invites my awareness of the new life that God is birthing in all times and in every place, including within me . . . and it invites my participation in this new life of God’s birthing.

Awareness and participation are different kinds of belief. They are lived experiences, lived beliefs. They are beliefs that get worked into the fabric of our living. They are not agreements to doctrinal positions or proud assertions of what is and is not true. Awareness and participation invite us into life-as-it-is.

And life-as-it-is includes death and resurrection. This is the order of the world God created. Death (Good Friday) is the threshold to new life (Resurrection Sunday). All my daily dyings, great and small, lead to life. I am not invited to believe that . . . in the same way that I’m not invited to believe that gravity is holding me in my chair at this moment. I am invited, though, to live into it, or to live with it. I am to live into this reality of Resurrection.

Notice the Resurrection in Jesus, . . . but also notice Resurrection in the world around you . . . and then, notice it in yourself. Become aware of it.

Then participate in it. Participate in Resurrection as if it were written into the DNA of the universe, as if all things were moving not toward death, but toward Resurrection life.

Easter, the Day, came and went a couple of days ago.

Easter, the Resurrection Experience, goes on.

One Foot in the Dark and One Foot in the Light: A Rilke Poem

I'm aware of my tendency to label things as "good" or "bad" depending on how they impact me. It may be that way with most all of us. Our vantage point is always self-referenced, so that we evaluate the events in our lives and in our world by the measure of how they impact us. Those things that are "good" bring me happiness and well-being. Those things are "bad" that cause me pain and discomfort. These are the standard value-judgments with which most of us live.

I'm convinced that a growing life with God relies less and less on such value judgments. Over time we recognize that there are some things that are "good" for me that don't necessarily feel good in the moment. Pain and struggle are valuable parts of the human experience, as well as laughter and gladness. As we grow up spiritually, we acknowledge that we can't fully see through every situation to the bigger picture. Our sight is limited, so that we don't often see the larger work God is accomplishing in our lives and in our world, even in the struggle and uncomfortable seasons of life.

[I read an excerpt from Richard Rohr a couple of weeks ago in which he mentioned discernment as the spiritual gift of being able to see that what may be "good" for me may also be "bad" for someone else in the world . . . for someone close to me or for someone somewhere else on the planet. It takes a maturing person, a person who is becoming a spiritual grown-up, to recognize that not everything that feels good or appears beneficial to me is also good for others and for the created world.]

It is difficult to hold this tension, to live in this liminal space where things are not as we wish them to be. We tend to want one or the other. We want the bad turned into good, the water turned into wine, the darkness turned into light, the earthy turned into the celestial.

Most often in life we are invited to stand between the two, to wait at the threshold, to live with one foot in the light and another foot in the darkness. It is a marvelous grace to be able to do this, and one that runs counter to what most of us want from life.

Last week a poem from Rainer Maria Rilke's Book of Images found me. The poem, in German, is entitled "Abend." In English, that would be "Evening" or "Sunset." It speaks, at least to me, of this way of holding the tensions, of living the "both/and" rather than the "either/or."


Evening
by Rainer Maria Rilke

The sky puts on the darkening blue coat
held for it by a row of ancient trees;
you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight,
one journeying to heaven, one that falls;

and leave you, not at home in either one,
not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses,
not calling to eternity with the passion
of what becomes a star each night, and rises;

and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)
your life, with its immensity and fear,
so that, now bounded, now immeasurable,
it is alternately stone in you and star.


[Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. by Stephen Mitchell (New York: Vintage International, 1980, 1981, 1982), 13.]


Some contemporary critics of Rilke's poetry call this poem "ludicrous" and "bombastic." I'm not up on my poetry criticism, so I don't know about that. I do know that the poem stirred me with its images.

First, there is the image of evening or sunset, that twilight (literally, "twin lights" or "two lights") when the daylight lingers but also the darkness of night is closing in. I recognize that much of life is lived in this evening time, holding onto the light of day and resisting the darkness of night. In this twilight, a person belongs to both the light and the darkness, while at the same time belonging to neither one.

As the poem unfolds, Rilke shifts the image from the light/dark of evening to the two movements represented by stars ("journeying to heaven") and earth ("one that falls"). Again, Rilke says that we live in both realms. Both are true of us.

The old rabbis taught that each human has two pockets. In one pocket is the message, "You are the dust of the earth." In the other pocket, the message says, "For you the universe was made." I think of the "dust pocket" as my humanity. I'm not to deny it or to change it. I am invited to live a fully human life. I am the dust of the earth. From dust I have come and to dust I will return.

I am also, however, created in and for connection with God. There is a grand, bigger-than-life design woven into my DNA by God. I, like you, have a destiny that is larger and more expansive than I can possible imagine. So there is a part of me that lives fallen to the earth ("stone in you," Rilke says) and a part of me that "journeys to heaven" (the "star" in me).

So here's the challenge: I am invited to recognize each within me, simultaneously, and to live into the fullness of both. In Rilke's poetic language, he says it leaves you, "inexpressibly to unravel your life (or "untangle your life") with its immensity and fear" . . . both "bounded" and "immeasurable."

"Immensity" speaks to the feet which stand with light and with the heavenlies . . . and "fear" speaks to the part of us that is familiar with darkness and with the earth/dust.

In fact, in the original poem, "immensity" and "fear" are only two of the three words Rilke used in that line. The third word is rendered in other translations of the poem as "growing" or "ripening."

These are the challenges of every human life . . . to untangle our lives in their immensity and fear and ripening. I sense the invitation to live into my God-designed life in all its hugeness and fearfulness and growing edges. I can have feet planted in all those places. I don't have to choose one or the other.

It is in this way, I believe, that I'm invited to live fully with and for God in every season.

The Quest for Perfection: Jerrying My World

Jesus' statement in Matthew 5:48 scares a lot of folks, and gives the impression that life-with-God is virtually impossible . . . or at least, impossible to live well.

"Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect."

Mostly, the verse has been read as an injunction to moral perfection . . . that there is no sin in God; therefore, there should be no sin in the human. At least that was my interpretation of the verse for a long, long time.

I remember sitting in spiritual direction many years ago with my Roman Catholic spiritual director, a Sister wise in the ways of the Spirit. I was struggling with my humanity, with my sinfulness and my propensity to stumble and fall in the same ways time after time after time. I felt like I was in a rut that I couldn't get out of. And frankly, I felt like a spiritual -- and moral -- failure, all because I could not get through these things. After all, I was supposed to be perfect as a God-follower, because God is perfect.

That Sister did not chastise me. She simply reminded me in a couple of different ways that the position of "God" was filled already, and that my vocation was to be human, not God.

That afternoon almost 20 years ago really was a turning point for me, almost a new beginning. It signaled for me a movement into discovering how to live my own life fully, the one life God has given me and for which God has created me. To be sure, the journey since then has been filled with bumps and false starts, but I have sought through these years to discern the shape of Jerry's life, and what it means to live into the fullness for which God creates and sustains me.

Truly, the word translated "perfect" in the New Testament literally means "whole," or "complete." So the passage is not about moral perfection; rather, it is about living our lives fully or wholly. God is perfectly or completely God. God is the fullness of God, not lacking anything of what it means to be God. Just so, the invitation to each human is to be fully himself or herself as fully as God is God. We are each invited to live our unique, personal fullness on behalf of God and the world.

The early Church, in the centuries just after Jesus, believed, "The glory of God is the human person fully alive." In other words, when a person lives his or her life fully (or "perfectly"), God is glorified.

Maybe I could say it this way: God gods perfectly. God gods completely. God is wholly God.

In the same way, I am invited -- encouraged! -- to jerry my world, to jerry as fully as possible the world in which I live. Can Jerry jerry completely? That is the question for me.

And you? You are invited to brenda your world . . . to richard your world . . . to debra your world . . . to gregg your world . . . to annie your world. Whoever you are, wherever you live, this is the invitation God extends to you . . . not to live as someone else lives, or to measure up to some other external measure for life, but to live fully the one life that God has given you. We are invited, in the Spirit of God, to live a whole life in relationship to self, others and the created world.

God gods perfectly. May you "jerry" -- or whatever your name -- in the same way.

Waiting for Things to Finally Come Clear

Sometimes I hear from people who are exposed to some idea or teaching that stands a little outside their personal believe system. In fact, often I am the "messenger" who offers an alternative viewpoint or another way of seeing something. It never ceases to surprise me that people so quickly and easily characterize something as "untrue" simply because they don't understand it or because it is outside the realm of their own life-experience.

I know . . . after so many years I should stop being surprised, yet for some reason I am. I really want to believe that as a human family we are not so narrow as to define issue and matters by "my experience" or by "my stance" . . . but I do it, you do it, we all do it.

Maybe it's just a result of our humanity, our fundamental tendency to interpret all of life from our own point of view and from the place where we sit at the center of the universe. This self-referenced stance seems hard-wired within us. We humans have a persistent capacity to whittle truth down to bite-sized portions . . . as bite-sized as our personal experience, outlook and belief systems.

In fact, I find it rather remarkable when someone is big enough to admit to the huge field of truth that lies outside their current situation. It is a significant mark of maturity to be able to say, "Yes, this is my truth . . . but it is not the full extent of truth. There are things I have yet to experience and things I have yet to understand."

The Cloud of Unknowing is a spiritual classic, a fourteenth century anonymous writing about prayer and the contemplative life. It is a classic because its insights into the spiritual journey are timeless, and especially helpful for those who are open to contemplative prayer and practice.

I've read the book (it's fairly short) several times. The first time through many years ago, I had no idea what the author was saying. Each time through, I understand more layers of meaning.

The writer of The Cloud knows he is dealing with difficult material, writing about things for which there really is little point of reference. These are mystical things, spiritual realities that don't lend themselves easily to discussion and analysis. So at one point, midway through the book, the author writes this:

"If what I am saying is correct, but does not make any sense to you, then let my instruction rest until God opens your understanding." (The Cloud of Unknowing, modernized by Bernard Bangley, p. 44)

This counsel is so very important! You read along . . . read along . . . read along some more . . . and sense that what you are reading is significant, that it is important to get it . . . but you have no idea what it means.

That happens to me a lot. I read something. I sense that it is true and probably important enough that I need to internalize it. I need it in my life. But I have no idea what the it is. It's out of reach, over my head, and beyond my grasp.

I used to get frustrated and angry about it, impatient with myself. I would fight my lack of understanding.

Now I just set it aside and say, "When the time comes, I'll understand. I'll experience. God, help me to stay open so that when the time comes, I won't miss it."

Sometimes it's days later, or maybe weeks -- more often its years later -- I'll come across the same material again, and this time I see. I get it. It makes sense.

The counsel of The Cloud parallels the ancient Oriental wisdom that says, "When the student is ready, the teacher will come." In my experience, often the teacher has been there all along, but as the pupil I have not been ready to hear or learn from the teacher.

So back to the beginning paragraphs . . . if I can admit that I'm not ready to receive everything right now, that there is some truth or teaching or experience that I'm incapable of receiving, then I can also admit to the large body of truth and goodness that is outside my current experience.

For instance, what if I were able to say, "This may be truth . . . but it just doesn't connect with me right now." So rather than dismiss it by dualistically dividing things into "true" or "false" -- which is likely conditioned by where I stand at this particular moment -- what if I stay open to and admit to a wider field of truth than my current understanding and experience? Something may be true or helpful for me, but it may also come at a time when I'm not ready to receive it.

Just because I'm not ready to receive some idea or concept or framework for life does not make it untrue or invalid. It simply means I'm not ready for it yet.

So maybe the division is not "true" or "false."

Maybe it's more like:
truth I have experienced
truth I am experiencing
truth I have yet to experience

As always, the main stance for this attitude is openness. I want to stay open to whatever comes and whatever is revealed. I want to be receptive to however God may open my understanding to something that at one time was closed to me.

This seems like a pretty important life-stance to me. The author of The Cloud offered that one little throw-away line, but it speaks to a life-stance that really is larger and more all-encompassing for the spiritual life. It speaks to a posture for moving into life with graciousness, for taking in what we are able to take in, then staying open to whatever God brings in the days ahead.

Do these things resonate within you as truth? Or do they sound like a lot of hogwash?

"If what I am saying is correct, but does not make any sense to you, then let my instruction rest until God opens your understanding."

More Psalms for Prayer

Praying psalms from the Hebrew Scriptures has been an important part of my prayer practice for years. I know that many folks have difficulty with psalms because some of them express rage, partisanship and violent urges.

To be sure, the Old Testament Psalms are not meant to be sources of doctrine. To draw theological truth from them is like fishing for salmon in a South Texas lake. You're not likely to catch any.

Rather, the psalms come to us as the prayers of people in the midst of real-life angst. While the situations certainly were different for the persons praying the psalms, they no less were entangled in life-as-it-is, not life-as-it-should-be. The psalms help ground us in life-as-it-is, the real life you and I live. Further, the psalms say to us that it's ok to pray life-as-it-is, as opposed to the lofty and exalted prayer of life-as-it-should-be.

Thus, these prayers are raw and edgy, and a bit outside the mainstream. They are not interested in pretense, and they don't pretend to be polite. They engage God in the honest stuff of life. They don't coat over life with bows and fluffy bunnies. They remind me that God can handle my anger and that discourse with God is an appropriate expression for the full spectrum of my inner emotional world.

From the Hebrew Psalms, I first learned the value of honesty before God. I came to sense that God could handle my honesty about life and that even though my perspective on life was skewed, it was still the way I experienced life. And even that skewed perspective was appropriate for prayer.

I mentioned in the last post a psalm book that I recently found to be helpful in my prayer. I referenced a psalm from that book.

Today I'll post a psalm from another book I've come upon lately. This one appeals to me as a rendition of the Hebrew Psalter from the hands of a Jewish woman with a poetic background. I have found her images for God to be fresh and insightful, and her perspective as a woman to be another helpful doorway through which to enter the Psalms. Her name is Pamela Greenberg and her translation is The Complete Psalms: The Book of Prayer Songs in a New Translation.

This is how she renders Psalm 62:


PSALM 62
For the Conductor of the Eternal Symphony,
To the Beloved, a Psalm of David

In the face of the Creator alone, my soul is silenced;
my salvation comes from the Source of Life.

Only God is my Rock and salvation,
my high place of refuge;
with my Upholder I will not stumble much.

How long will you fall upon a man?
You will slay yourselves, all of you.

You are like a leaning wall,
a fence crumbling under its own weight.

For loftiness alone
they conspire to bring me down.

They delight in deception;
with their mouths they bless
but inwardly they curse -- Selah!

Only God is my Rock and salvation --
my high place of refuge;
with the Holy One I will not stumble.

God is my salvation and my glory,
Rock of my strength, one I turn to for help.

Trust the Source of Life at all times, O people,
pour out the contents of your heart.

God is our shelter -- Selah.

In truth, humanity is nothing but vapor;
an illusion they are, all the children of women and men.

Weighed on the scales, all of them together,
they are lighter than breath.

Do not trust those who wield emblems of power;
do not empty yourselves in plunder.

Though wealth bears fruit,
don't give to it the entirety of your heart.

One thing God has spoken;
these two I have heard:

true strength comes from the Creator,
and you, my Upholder, provide kindness.

For you bring all people contentment
according to the wealth of their deeds.


[Pamela Greenberg, The Complete Psalms: The Book of Prayer Songs in a New Translation (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010), 128 - 129.]

Singing a New Song

God put a new song in my mouth,
a song of praise to our God.
(Ps. 40:3)

Sing to the Lord a new song,
sing to the Lord, all the whole earth.
(Ps. 96:1)

Sing to the Lord a new song,
for the Lord has done marvelous things.
(Ps. 98:1)


"A new song" . . . the phrase shows up frequently in the Hebrew Psalms. I've long been willing to pray and sing the words, but I haven't always known what I was saying.

Is it simply a unique way of putting together some chords and lyrics, cutting and pasting chord patterns and some rhyming words? Is that "singing a new song"?

When does a "new song" become an "old song." I mean, it's new the first time through, right?

Then it's almost new . . . then sorta new . . . then kinda new.

I'm fond of a version of Psalm 40 put to music by Bono, the Edge, and the rest of U2. It's a great song, and my friend Peter Johns does a wonderful version of it for our weekly Contemplative Worship. The song's chorus goes like this:

I will sing, sing a new song
I will sing, sing a new song
How long to sing this song?
How long to sing this song?
How long, how long, how long,
How long to sing this song?

By the time you sing that chorus three or four times in the course of the song, you get to the end and want to sing a "used-to-be-new song to the Lord."

If a "new song" is just a metaphor, a clever device aimed at getting us to think outside the ruts of our lives, outside the places where we are stuck, where we are stale and dragging through sameness, then it works with me for awhile. It gives some temporary hope that when the world seems small and closed-in, the narrow field of possibilities really is larger than I had thought. There are doors of possibility I haven't seen, or haven't acknowledged. These doors that I haven't seen or stepped into may be the "new song" of my life.

So as a metaphor, it may work in the short term for getting me to open up a bit to the God-shaped possibilities for life.

I want to suggest a meaning for "new song" more basic and fundamental. I think the new song I am to sing is my life, my unique life, one-off-a-kind, lived as only I can live it.

My new song is the unique way I am connected to God, and it is the unique way I am connected to you, to others, and to the world.

My one-of-a-kind life is the new song I have to sing . . . and your one-of-a-kind life is the new song you have to sing.

It is a new song because it has never been sung before. No one else has ever lived your life. No one else has ever faced the exact set of challenges you face, has celebrated the specific joys you celebrate, has been connected to God in just the way you are, or has lived among the specific set of people you have.

If nothing else, your family and friends and neighbors and co-workers -- the whole web of relationships you have -- make your life entirely unique.

You are not invited to live your life the way I live my life. . . or the way anyone else lives their life. You are invited to the fullness of your unique life, as I am invited to my unique life. I sing my song, you sing your song.

And the song I sing is always a "new song," always different and fresh, because each day my life is different. Each day I am presented with new possibilities and new challenges and new ways of being in the world for God. So on and on into the future, the song my life sings is ever-new.

You don't have to find the pre-ordained notes to the score God has written. As God lives within you, inhabits you, energizes you, you are the score. Your moment-by-moment life is the pattern of notes, the harmony to the song you are given to sing and to be.

I hope you can sense, then, that your new song is not something to figure out, to wrestle with and struggle over as you try to come to whatever your song is. Usually we think about the "will of God" as something difficult to find, something that takes great effort to discern. Rather, in this view, your new song is something to live, something to be. It is your everyday, ordinary life lived with God for the good of the world.

Your very life is a new song, non-repeatable, creative, expansive and uniquely your own.

Don't try to sing someone else's song. Sing your song. Live your life.

Several days ago, this is how I imaged my new song in the language of Psalm 96:1 - 2:

I sing to you a new song,
the only song I can sing,
the song of my life,
played out for you in my own tune,
the tune no one else can play.

I sing my song to you before the whole world;
I sing my life to you and it mirrors your Name;
my song, a testimony to your goodness and generosity
toward me every single moment of every single day.

Fruit That Feeds the Hungry

John 15:12 - 17

"My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because servants do not know their master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit — fruit that will last — and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. This is my command: Love each other."


The Gospel reading for today begins and ends in "love." What stirred me, though, came in the middle of the paragraph . . . the initiative of Jesus in choosing me (because I generally think that what happens in my life comes as a result of my choices, my initiative, my influence) and then the “appointment” upon me to “bear fruit.”

“Fruit” comes at the end of the tree, literally the produce of the tree’s essence. The fruit that hangs at the end of the tree only reflects what is within the tree, what begins in the roots and is real through the trunk. The fruit that appears at the end of a branch is always consistent with what is happening in the roots and within the trunk of the tree.

Further, at the right time, the tree drops the fruit or it is picked. It does the tree no use to hold onto fruit. In fact, to do so would do great harm to the health of the tree. The tree, rather, lets go of the fruit, trusting that with a healthy root system, with bark in place, with a trunk sturdy to bear the tree’s weight, more fruit will come.

I tend to think of the fruit that grows at the outer limbs of my life as my creativity, my giftedness, and all the ways I spend myself in the world. That takes a number of forms for me, as yours does for you. Always, though, the fruit expresses what is within the root system and trunk. So the fruit is not the only thing going on. In fact, in order to be fruitful it’s more important to tend to the roots, to nourish the unseen parts of the tree than to obsess with what is seen.

It’s a metaphor that helps me understand who I am and how I am invited to express my being in the world. For the unseen, interior, more soulful, rooted aspect of my existence is my essence, my true “name.” In another analogy, it contains the song I’m to sing in the world. The fruit at the end of the branch, then, is the tangible expression of that essence in the world. In short, it is what I do or what I produce.

In the John 15 passage, I hear the invitation of Jesus to bear fruit in the world, that is, to feed the world with my unique fruitfulness. It’s not as easy as it sounds . . . for I recognize in myself a tendency to want my fruit to look like someone else’s fruit.

I see some tremendous good being done in the world and I want to be a part of that. I want to do it just that way! I want to join my life to that train, to that person, to that ministry, to that movement.

I’m afraid traditional expressions of Christianity don’t do us many favors here. We’re accustomed to hearing or reading that there are certain things we should all do as Christians, the non-negotiables of Christian life that are for all of us. It’s a kind of one-size-fits-all contemporary Christianity. There are certain things that real Christians do, and of course, certain things that those who are not Christians ("unreal Christians"??) do!

Really, though, I think that’s part of the naiveté of the religious people of Jesus’ time, and partially why he pushed back so hard against them. They insisted on laws that everyone followed and a lock-step, mindless adherence to a system for the sake of adherence to the system. The end result was a monochromatic religion in which the personal creation of each human was distilled away.

How do I – and how do you – find my uniqueness and the particular way that I’m invited to live out my vocation and spend the fruit of my life in the world?

In one of his early books, Frederick Buechner wrote that vocation or calling is that place where your deepest love/passion meets the hunger of the world. That’s still a helpful way for me to think about calling.

So I consider what I love, what passions run wild in my soul. That’s the essence of my root system, the base of my “tree.”

Then I consider what the world around me is hungry for. What do the people around me need? What is the cry of my life-world? Do I have any fruit on my tree to offer this hunger?

There are some hungers around me that I can acknowledge, but if I try to feed them I will only do more harm than good. The fruit I have may not satisfy every hunger. I have to know my limitations, what I actually have so that I’m not trying to give fruit I do not actually have to give. I cannot give someone else's fruit. I cannot do all things. I cannot give what I do not have. I cannot be all things to all people.

But there are some cries that I hear regularly, and they are cries for which I have some fruit, borne of my unique tree. It is this fruit Jesus invites me to offer . . . the fruit I have, not the fruit I don’t have.

For me this is the intersection at which I’m invited to live out the one-of-a-kind life that God has appointed to me.

Lazarus Walking

I want to tie a couple of cords together. Stick with me for a moment. It's going to take me a minute or two to get there.

First, over the past 15 years or so I have discovered within me a deep love for poetry and art. If you've read much of this blog over the last couple of years, you know that. Names like Rilke, Stafford and Oliver show up quite a bit.

I remember about 20 years ago reading some poems written by a noted poet and thinking to myself – with more than a little embarrassment, I’ll add – “I just don’t get it!” But slowly over a long period of time I kept reading poetry and began to be intentional about noticing works of art. Looking back, the interest in poetry and art was not coincidental. It coincided with an expanding immersion into prayer and a more soulful exploration of my own life with God, with others and with the created world.

The interest has not been a fleeting fancy. I still read poetry as a part of my daily discipline. I’ve found reading poetry to be a contemplative act. To read a poem I must slow down. Read, repeat, read, repeat. I digest a line, a phrase. I ponder an image. Like artists, poets don’t tell you everything. They leave great spaces unfilled. In those spaces, the reader is invited to insert his or her life. The same, I believe, is true of great art. The spaces – or absences – are intentional invitations, extended by the artist to the one viewing the work of art.

Some poetry and art has been especially meaningful to me because there are poets and artists with whom I feel a unique kinship. For instance, I first came into poetry through the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the English Jesuit priest. His stunning poetry became all the more meaningful to me as I studied his life and felt as if I shared in his personal struggles.

I’ve also sensed a kinship with Rainer Maria Rilke. Rilke was a German-speaking poet who wrote as the 19th century turned into the 20th, as Hopkins had. Like Hopkins, his personal life was often scattered. A difficult childhood and meandering adulthood notwithstanding, Rilke wrote with a ferocity that immediately appealed to me. His intensity has drawn me magnetically over the years. I feel as if I’ve known him as a brother for a long, long time. (Perhaps you've noticed my fondness for him!)

The artist with whom I’ve felt most connected has been Vincent van Gogh. Even before I knew much about his mental and psychological state, I picked up the tension of his life from his paintings. I’ve read many of his letters. I’m drawn to his faith and to his struggle for faith. I’ve traveled long distances to see his paintings.

Hopkins . . . Rilke . . . van Gogh . . . I feel like I know them, and they know me. In fact, I’ve often found myself – or lost myself – within their poems and paintings.

That’s some background into my love of poetry and art, and into some folks who stir my soul. File that for a moment.

Second, I pulled out a poem recently that I had filed away a few years ago, written by contemporary poet David Whyte, and entitled, “The Lightest Touch.” The short poem is about how good poetry gets inside you, stirs you, awakens you to something you didn’t know could possibly be alive in your interior. This is the last stanza of the poem:

In the silence that follows
a great line
you can feel Lazarus
deep inside
even the laziest, most deathly afraid
part of you,
lift up his hands and walk toward the light.

A great line of poetry . . . a beautiful chord in a piece of music . . . the shape or color of an object in a painting . . . there are so many ways that our breath can be taken away, that something lifeless and limp within us can be stirred to spirit again, as the voice of Jesus awakened his dead friend Lazarus to life out of his stony tomb (John 11:43 – 44). We may not know just what the stirring is, but we do know that for just a brief moment, we are fully alive, fully engaged, fully opened up to what is most real in the world. I have those moments and you have those moments. We all have experienced what David Whyte lined out poetically.

The spiritual path is not about capturing and holding onto those moments, but about recognizing them more and more, being open to them and receiving them, then releasing them so we can receive the next “great line”.

So those are the cords. Here is the tying together:

Two weekends ago I went to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston to see the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist exhibition on loan from the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. . . . My visit was a Christmas gift from my son and daughter-in-law. The exhibition features 50 paintings by the artists who represent the shift toward impressionism in the late 19th century: Monet . . . Renoir . . . Cassatt . . . Manet . . . Degas . . . Cezanne . . . and of course, van Gogh.

I could have stayed for a long, long time, but the rooms were pack with folks who wanted time with these artists and works as I did. So I slowly worked my way through each room of the exhibition, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers, in awe of what I found on each wall. The name of each artist was painted in their unique signature-style on the walls above that artist’s work. Thus, as I entered each room I was able to see whose work was displayed there.

I used those signatures as markers to locate the works by van Gogh. First room, no van Gogh. Second room, third room, fourth room, still no van Gogh. By the fifth and final room I anticipated that I would finally find the paintings I had most looked forward to seeing.

As I went through that last door, my eyes scanned the walls around the room, beginning to my left. I noticed a couple of Vincent’s paintings on that left wall as I panned the room, but it was what I saw when I turned to the right that I remember most. On the floor-to-ceiling pedestal on the right side of the room, standing apart from the wall displays, I saw the cursive “Vincent” about 9 to 10 feet off the ground. Directly beneath it was the unmistakeable self-portrait of van Gogh, painted in his characteristic bold, broad strokes at the end of a period of illness which left him pale and weak.

I simply stood at the door for a moment – at a distance – and noticed my eyes moistening.

I froze, motionless for about ten seconds or so, and everything inside me shut down to silence.

And I felt Lazarus deep inside the laziest, most deathly afraid part of me lift up his hands and walk toward the light. For just a moment, I was alive again.

Choose for a Discerning Life

One of those days Jesus went out to a mountainside to pray, and spent the night praying to God. When morning came, he called his disciples to him and chose twelve of them, whom he also designated apostles: Simon (whom he named Peter), his brother Andrew, James, John, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, James son of Alphaeus, Simon who was called the Zealot, Judas son of James, and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor. (Luke 6:12-16)

In a book I use for daily Scripture readings, reflection, and prayer, Luke 6:12-16 is the text assigned for today. It describes Jesus spending the night in prayer on a mountain. The next morning he gathered his disciples (apprentices or learners who follow) to himself and chose twelve of them to be apostles (literally, "the ones who are sent").

The traditional reading of this passage says that prayer is crucial to the life-choices we make. It points out that before this most critical "choosing" -- which would shape the entire future of his ministry and of the Church -- Jesus spent a significant amount of time in prayer. Decisions need to grow out of our prayer, the interpretation goes. It implies that the bigger and more far-reaching our decision, the weightier should be our prayer.

The entire matter raises the issue of discernment. How do we choose? On what basis do we make decisions? These are questions with which we struggle, ingrained in our daily living as they are.

The track that most of us take was offered by the book I used for my prayer this morning. In essence it says that the larger the decision, the more earnest our prayer should be. It goes something like this: "Jesus had a huge decision to make regarding the persons he would send into the world as his emissaries. That decision was so weighty and significant that he spent all night praying about it; therefore, like Jesus we should devote ourselves to prayer in order to discern the directions we should go. And the more significant the decision before us, the more we should pray."

We see how that gets played out most everyday in our life-world. Persons faced with a significant decision about job or moving to another city or a medical condition or where to go to school will become very serious about prayer. They will enlist others to pray. They don't want to make a faulty decision. In fact, prayer may be one piece of a larger pattern that persons undertake in order to make a decision.

Some in the Church talk about engaging a "process of discernment." That language is popular currency these days, and speaks to the belief that when faced with a major life-decision, I can roll out a process that will lead me to the right answer. In following the steps of the process, I'll know what to do and when to do it. A "process of discernment" provides a formula to follow, some prescribed steps to take.

It implies that I can arbitrarily lay a process or pattern on top of my life and then come out at the other end of the process with some kind of result or product: A good decision. In the context of Luke 6:12-13, that process may involve extended, night-long prayer.

Here's what I see: Jesus did not go to the mountain to spend a night in prayer because he had a major life-decision to make the next day. It was the pattern of Jesus' life to spend significant periods of time in prayer. Jesus lived in constant awareness of his communion with God. His connection with God was constant. His formal times of prayer were frequent. So spending the night in prayer was a regular practice for Jesus, not an emergency measure that suddenly seemed important because a critical life-choice needed to be made the next day.

Further, because prayer was the habitual pattern of his life, it gave him the resources to discern, to make the right decisions at the right time. He didn't have to shift into "emergency-prayer-mode" because a critical decision loomed. He didn't have to initiate a special "process for discernment" when it was time for a major step. The resources he needed for those times were already there because they came in the normal, everyday, everynight flow of his life.

I'm not discounting special prayer here, or prayer that is particularly earnest in certain seasons of our lives. But I am suggesting that our best discernment grows out of a daily attentiveness in which I attend to God day-by-day and attend to the flow of my own life.

When I live in daily awareness of my life with God, noticing the rhythms of my life, attending to the places of light and love, as well as attending to the shadows, I grow as a discerning person.

When I notice daily the patterns of consolation and desolation within me and around me, I grow as a person able to make wise choices.

When I live in awareness of what brings life to me and to the world, as well as what drains life from me and the world, I grow as a person able to choose out of inner spiritual resources. My choices increasingly reflect the light and life of the One to whom I am connected. All of life, then, becomes the field for my discernment, not just the big steps or the major decisions.

By this approach, discernment is not a "process" in which I engage when something big is on the horizon. It is not an artificial "plan" layered on top of the choice-of-the-day. It is a lifestyle, a way of doing all of life in which I grow as a discerning human being, a person intimately connected with the God of Life.

Obviously, coming at discernment this way is not a quick and simple fix. To become a discerning person takes intentionality and time. It invites me to be still, to listen, to become aware of those things (for me, others, and the world) that bring life and those things that take away life.

This way of discerning does not yield quick results. It can be slow and messy. When we set our hearts to this course of wisdom, we make a decision for the long haul, believing that over time, God will shape our hearts until we become the kind of people Jesus was . . . persons who do the right thing at the right time because we have chosen to live our lives intimately connected to the One who is our Source.

Overheard: Merton and Bly on Moving toward Our Purpose

Life consists in learning to live on one's own, spontaneous, freewheeling: to do this one must recognize what is one's own -- be familiar and at home with oneself. This means basically learning who one is, and learning what one has to offer the contemporary world, and then learning how to make that offering valid. . . .

The world is made up of the people who are fully alive in it and can enter into a living and fruitful relationship with each other in it. The world is therefore more real in proportion as the people in it are able to be more fully and more humanly alive: that is to say, better able to make a lucid and conscious use of their freedom. Basically, this freedom must consist first of all in the capacity to choose their own lives, to find themselves on the deepest possible level.

[Thomas Merton, Choosing to Love the World: On Contemplation, ed. by Jonathan Montaldo (Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2008), 37.]


Every man and every woman on this planet is on the road from the Law to the Legends. Surely every person reading this book is. The Legends stand for the moist, the swampish, the wild, the untamed. The Legends are watery, when compared to the dryness of the Law. It takes twenty years to understand the Laws, and then a whole lifetime to get from there to the Legends.

The Law stands for the commandments we need in order to stay alive, the rule that says which side of the road we drive on, the law of gravity. We need to learn the axiom that we cannot take water into our lungs and keep breathing; the dictate that keeps us from murdering each other over a slight rebuke; the canon against self-slaughter; the postulates that encourage prudence, politeness, and appropriateness; the precepts that help us control our madness. . . .

We are each on the way from the Law to the Legends, from dogma to the Midrash, from the overly obedient man to wildness. . . . The closer a person comes to the Legends, then the closer he or she comes to depth, moistness, spontaneity, and shagginess.

[Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book about Men (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1990), 140-41.]

The Real in Reality

I'm usually not too interested in "reality" television. Most days my life has enough reality without having to live someone else's reality vicariously. Most folks probably feel that way, too. For most of us, daily life itself is a hand-full.

We have all the reality we can handle, so a part of the human impulse is to find ways to escape that reality, or at least to soften the bluntness of it. We do that through addictions and attachments, hobbies and leisure, overwork and medication.

And very often we find some sort of religious expression to be our escape from the reality of the world. Religious expression very often promises persons an escape from reality, an open door to a better life, or at least to a different life. And if we can't have the better or different life now, at least we know it is promised in some eternal By-and-By. It is part of the appeal that many of us find in spiritual endeavors, a form of escapism which says that it's possible to get around real life now. If not now, it will surely happen when I die.

I am interested in and given to Christian spirituality. I say to folks all the time that a part of this spirituality -- which I believe is reflected in the Christian Gospel -- is awakening to an alternative framework or structure for life by which we live differently in the world, out of a Gospel-paradigm for being and seeing and doing in the world. This alternative paradigm unmasks the illusions of the prevailing "reality" of culture/tribe and liberates us to live soulfully from an inner core where we are intimately connected to God.

Having said that, though, the goal of Christian spirituality is not escape from the world. Rather, the world itself is the context for our spirituality, for our being and seeing and doing.

In other words, the life-giving, soul-connection with God which is at our center is lived out in the real stuff of our everyday lives. Spirituality does not separate us from the real stuff, but immerses us into it in a different, life-giving, healing way. We are not escaping challenges, weaknesses, and shadows, but rather living into them differently.

Frankly, I witness that a lot of people are attracted to spirituality because they see it as the missing link, perhaps the one piece of gnosis that has eluded them for years. To many people, it seems at first blush that a more inward spiritual journey has as its main benefit the escape from responsibility and challenge and shadow. It sounds like a fresh message, an appealing way around the things that life throws at us.

Through the years, for instance, I've run across folks who felt they could serve God very well -- or that life would be really wonderful -- if they could just stay on retreat 24/7. Some of them wanted to run off and join a monastery -- heck, I wanted to do that in one extreme season of my life! -- as if that were the solution to the difficulties of their lives. Others just wanted to go on perpetual retreat, or attend every conference, workshop, or class possible to find answers for the realities of their lives. In all, the goal for many people is to escape life as it is, not be more immersed in it.

The Church and most religious systems of belief tend to perpetuate this idea of escape from reality. Our preaching and teaching envisions the world as evil and problematic. We sing, "The world is not my home." We're convinced that if we could get to a state of "holiness" and "pure spirit" we could get around reality.

Our desire for prayer can too often be rooted in our desire for a better life, our desire to get around the reality of our life-circumstances.

Our concern for heaven can be an antidote for our fears about the reality of death.

Our longing for healing as the eradication of sickness causes us to sidestep the teacher and companion that often is experienced as disease.

When we escape reality, though, we may also be escaping God. A few years ago I heard Paula d'Arcy say, "Most often, God shows up as life."

Thomas Merton wrote, "Reality itself is God's epiphany."

And these words, first heard thirty years ago from one of my mentors, have rooted me since: "Whatever you believe, if it won't play in a cancer ward or in a shoddy nursing home, it's not the Gospel."

Spirituality is not an escape hatch. It roots us in the Real, Who is revealed in reality. It is a connection to and attentiveness to what is, not to what might be or what we hope one day to be.