Category Archives: Contemplation, prayer

Small Things, Great Love

Posted on October 30, 2009 | Leave a comment

messy officeMy desk is a rat’s nest of notes, files, cards, books, pens and unfinished projects. A pile of bank statements and bills waits on the credenza. I am writing a blog, an essay, and a book, as well as meeting with clients, preparing for classes at church, responding to pastoral care needs, and planning for youth group. I have several presentations coming up and other projects on hold. My pantry ought to be roped off as a hazardous area. Then there are the meetings to attend, my 96 year old mom, my daughters, friends, pets, and oh, yes, God.

If this does not sound like the life of a hermit pray-er as I describe myself on the About Page of this blog, bear with me. I am still praying. I suspect things might be a little more organized and tidy if I were not, but overall things would be a bigger mess.

This week I received two quotes from friends in my email. One was from Mother Teresa: “We can do no great things, only small things with great love.” The other was from Charles Spurgeon: “Learn to say no. It will be of more use to you than to be able to read Latin.” Here’s where I went wrong. I took four years of Latin in high school.

Charles H. Spurgeon was a 19th century English Baptist who preached to crowds of ten thousand in London. As many of us, he had his hand in a lot of other things as well. I figure you know who Mother Teresa was. Both of these busy servants of God came into my life this week to offer their two cents on how to handle something which afflicts not only pastors, but just about everyone else I know.  Overwhelmed with tasks, stressed, and anxious many of us need to learn how to say no. Moreover, we need to learn to say no not only to other people, but also to ourselves. For I have found most of us are usually the most demanding, unreasonable, and, frequently, atheistic boss we have.

Recently someone described how she is simplifying her life. She asked herself why she was doing what she did, and was she really called to this. When I find myself on the treadmill of over doing, I notice an odd thing that happens to me. The more I am trying to do, the more I think I need to do, until I totally lose perspective and am worrying about accomplishing things, which in more sane moments I realize I do not need to do. This loss of perspective and over functioning which feeds on itself is a characteristic of addiction.

Mother Teresa says, “Don’t sweat the great stuff – getting big projects, big plans accomplished. Instead do small thingsBook on shelf with great love.” I like that. I can do that. Stay in the present. Put the file away carefully with reverence. Respond to this email thoughtfully with love. Gratefully gather up all the scattered pens and pencils. Put the books back on the shelf with thanksgiving. See the wonder of God’s provision in the goodness of this moment, as I think of you, yes, you, with love and gratitude. Just tend to the next small thing with all the love and generosity you can bring. Leave the outcomes, the great ends to God.

“The smallest thing, touched by love, is immediately transformed and becomes sublime,” wrote Thomas Merton. I still need to learn to say no, but I also want to learn how to work in such a way that what I touch becomes holy. I think it is all in the focus. Is God the center of my concern, or my Latin assignment? It makes all the difference.

Assignment: Practice doing small things with great love this week. Let me know how it goes.

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What Is Truth?

Posted on October 8, 2009 | Leave a comment

 Butterscotch and Ahs Discuss Epistemology

In this time of crumbling institutions, conflict and rapid change, the question of what is truth emerges as we weigh in for and against various approaches to solving our problems. How do you express and live out truth as you know and experience it? How do you respond when your truth collides with someone else’s? What does Jesus mean when he says he is the truth?

Butterscotch, the golden rex rabbit, and Ahs, the collie, reclined in the shade under the pear tree. A gentle breeze lifted the hair on their necks. Butterscotch stretched her hind legs out behind her stubby tail. Ahs lay with his chin on the ground, nose close to her cage, eyes watchful. He heaved a long sigh.

Butterscotch 3“Stinky Dog, it is rude for you to drool like that when you look at me,” Butterscotch said. “Don’t think for a minute that I don’t notice how your jaw goes slack and you begin to salivate every time you see me. A prey species never has a moment’s rest. Which is why I say Jesus is getting a bad rap. Folks sniffing him up one side and down the other, running circles around him, chasing him into the brush, cornering him with their philosophies and theologies, poking him with their politics, trapping him in their minds – like he was some wild thing somebody wanted to make a hat or mittens out of.”

The dog sighed again. The rabbit pointedly rubbed her nose with her paw. Carnivores have terrible breath. “How do you know he doesn’t like it? Hasn’t even brought it all about?” asked the dog.

“Well, if you really knew him like I do, you’d see my point,” she sniffed.

The topic for the afternoon was epistemology – truth, and how you know what you know. Specifically, the two creatures were discussing the quest for the historical Jesus, the search by Biblical scholars to determine the historical reliability of the gospels. Their findings are seen by some as a frontal attack on Christianity.Ahs

Not that the rabbit put much store in two legged saviors. But she was able to recognize truth when she saw it. Ahs, on the other hand, slavishly worshiped two leggeds, followed them about, whined and begged to eat their food, and lie next to them. She knew for a fact that he let them pet him and never cleaned up afterward.

Since the pair could not read they hadn’t got as far as taking votes on whether Jesus really said and did the things that scripture claimed. Besides the sun was warm on their backs, the wind just right to waft the fragrance of honeysuckle their way, and neither believed the veracity of scriptural witness was the real issue.

068_le_christ_redempteur 14th CHow does one know what one knows? On what do we base our hope? On what authority does one make a claim? And just what does real mean anyway?  Butterscotch, like the blind man in John, rested her case on the indisputable facts of her experience. “Whether this man is a sinner or not, I do not know. One thing I know, that once I was blind, now I see!” Her reality was corroborated by the testimony of witnesses. Toad in the flower bed south of the house agreed that she was indeed a changed creature following some kind of encounter with this Jesus. Mourning Dove reported that the rabbit was more humble and compassionate.

Ahs, on the other hand, more faithful or more gullible, relied on the testimony of tradition and the dogma of the church. Yet each appreciated the limitations of his or her perspective. Neither the uncritical acceptance of systematic dogmatics, nor the subjective witness of the inner bunny could completely satisfy the inquiring mind. In the end the two were left with the disquieting notion that everything might be in the eye of the beholder, the universe a dream, and the two of them, snoozing under the pear tree, only the imagination of some mind greater than their own.

There is a bit of the scientist in every mystic, who sets out to test in his or her own life if Jesus Christ is really all he is cracked up to be. “Prove it,” he says to God. Here are all these promises: freedom, joy, abundance, peace, wholeness, justice, truth, and life eternal. “Show me,” says the mystic and sets out to experiment with divinity in the laboratory of her experience.

In the beginning God is the object of the search. At some point God may peremptorily rise out of the test tube and take over the experiment. I find myself being dissected. My soul is flayed open by truth.light and trees I am blinded by glaring light and toasted over a Bunsen burner, where my impurities are burned away and I am distilled into my essence. I am no longer in control of this process. The knower and the known have shifted places. And truth is not something I can find, but something that has me in its grasp.

Theologian Lesslie Newbigin observes, “Reason, even the most acutely critical reason cannot establish truth.” … [This is because] You cannot criticize a statement of what claims to be the truth except on the basis of some other truth-claim – which at the moment – you accept without criticism. But that truth-claim on which your critique is based must in turn be criticized. Any claim to know truth is, therefore, simply a concealed assertion of power.” 

The work of scientist Michael Polanyi reminds us that “all knowing involves the personal participation of the knower, that knowing always involves the risk of being wrong, and that the struggle to know calls for the fullest exercise of personal responsibility.”

Instead of seeking proofs of God from reason or experience, the contemplative finds fulfillment simply and humbly dwelling in love in God’s presence.  The contemplative gives God entry into the world, not through a claim of truth, but through a believing heart. Instead of an exercise of power through the assertion of my reality over yours via dazzling argument or feats of spiritual prowess, the contemplative takes the vulnerable route of allowing God to make God’s own appeal through the context of his or her surrendered life.

That’s how Jesus did it. He seems to me to be asking us to do the same.

Agony in the Garden

Excerpts from Letters from the Holy Ground – Seeing God Where You Are, Loretta Ross (-Gotta), Sheed & Ward, 2002, p 118-120.  Read more….

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Solving Problems Elijah’s Way

Posted on September 30, 2009 | Leave a comment

Elijah and leaseI took my puppy, Elijah, for a walk to chew over something I had read by Nicolas Berdyaev. “There is something morally repulsive about modern activistic theories which deny contemplation and recognize nothing but struggle. For them, not a single moment has value in itself, but is only a means for what follows.”

Berdyaev was a Russian Christian philosopher who spent a lot of time in exile, first for criticizing the institutional church (Russian Orthodox), and then for not accepting the  Bolshevik government.

Contemplation as a “legitimate,” widely recognized means for understanding and finding resolution for the issues we face is largely denied or relegated to something one might do for a few minutes in the shower, or before drifting off to sleep. The prevailing images for our corporate approach to problems include struggle, battle, war, and exertion of power, control, or persuasion. Such approaches assume winners and losers, victories, and defeat. The struggle approach both creates and thrives on resistance.

Elijah, I am discovering, is a dog with a contemplative bent. He stops still in the middle of the quiet street, sits down, and looks at the house on our right. He looks at the roof, the yellow flag waving in the breeze, the rows of orange, magenta, white, and yellow mums. He looks at the front door with the flowered wreath. He watches a flock of starlings rise out of the oak tree and scatter across the blue sky.

I tug on the leash. “Elijah, come. Let’s go.” He, intent on his reflection, will not budge. He gazes at the windows. He tiElijah contemplatinglts his head and looks at the shrubs. He sniffs the air. “Elijah, come!” I have to write a blog, do bookkeeping, and clean off my desk. I want to cross off “take dog for walk” on my list and get on with things. He looks at me calmly, sighs, rises, and trots along.

Contemplation begins and ends with surrender, with saying I do not know the answer and with recognizing the truth that we all see truth from different perspectives – “through a glass darkly.”  It is sitting down in the middle of things and looking long and hard and sniffing the air. It is refusing to be dragged along by someone else’s agenda. Contemplation is the willingness to walk around an issue, nose, nudge it, and tilt one’s head in order to view reality deeply and truly.

Contemplation requires one to divest oneself from a particular outcome, to detach, let go and trust the Spirit working in the spaces we create by our self-emptying. Contemplation is not about being efficient and productive, nor does it promise quick resolution. Contemplation cannot be made to be a means to anybody’s end. Instead contemplation asks us to see ourselves and whatever dilemmas we face as subjects of the ends and purposes of One who is greater than we.

Pink zinniaBerdyaev makes another point about the denial of contemplation: “Not a single moment has value in itself, but only as a means for what follows.” When we seek to respond to the difficulties and problems we face from a contemplative stance we have a different perspective on time. A moment is not just the means to some greater end. A moment and all it contains has value in itself, for itself: A dog sitting in the street watching the man mow his lawn.  The gray cat sunning herself on the flowered bedspread. The hot pink zinnia licking up the light.  Such are some of the moments in this day free for the seeing and appreciating, each whole and holy in itself. Time is not given so we may accomplish our agendas, so that we can plow through the moments of our day gouging out what we figure we will need for the next moment. We are not given time in order to be ruthless strip miners of the ground of our being, carting off what we can sell or store up in barns or banks.

Elijah stops again. He gazes at the swings in the park, the slide and merry go round. He looks up at the tall pine trees with their thick drooping branches. I follow his gaze and see the branches riddled with slender yellow pods of young pine cones.

A shift occurs in us as we begin to comprehend and appreciate the infinite worth and endless wonder inherent in each moment of our existence. The pragmatic, narcissistic, restlessness which ruthlessly turns everything and everyone into a cog in its agenda of efficiency and accomplishment sits down on its haunches in the middle of everything and looks at what is so. At last it is quieted and stilled by the fullness of a larger Reality than itself.seal sunning

What riches we miss, when our heads are full of our own answers and solutions. What truth remains hidden in those unseen, unsavored moments, when the dog pauses, when the cat yawns, and when the yearning of your heart stops you in your tracks to feast on the beauty of your own precious life.

Elijah sends his love and is available for walks at the drop of a hat.

Elijah lease 2

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Day of Prayer

Posted on September 22, 2009 | Leave a comment

deer at dawn

I woke surrounded by warm pink light. Dawn filled the room like a rosy fog and drew me outside to look at the eastern sky. Banks of darker clouds, edged in gold, piled above the rose glow. Within minutes the sky darkened. Thunder rumbled. Rain fell gently throughout the morning and afternoon.

I spent the whole day chasing after that rosy suffusion which called me to awareness. But the light had flown to some other window, some other sleeper. I was left with a soft kiss, a sweet promise, and an ache in my heart that burned like a flame.  

This day my prayer was bare and to the point: I want you – not my way, my plans, my hopes, my dreams. Not peace on earth, healing for the suffering, hope for the broken hearted, or justice for the oppressed. I want YOU- giver of dawn and rain and this yearning in my heart for something unnamable, but ever compelling and true.

“The soul is not thought, nor is the will controlled by thought. It would be a great misfortune if it were. The soul’s profit then consists not in thinking much, but in loving much,” advised Teresa of Avila. I would rather think, connive, plan, strategize, manipulate, control – anything, but love this Author of our Being. But love is the way, says Teresa, as well as a whole company of others, including the Beatles.

Little renders us more vulnerable than love. A desire, a longing for someone, something beyond my grasp requires me to recognize my need and my limits. To love is to esteem the freedom of the Beloved and bear the pain of the essential separation of oneself from what is other than oneself. Love asks us to suffer the anguish of the reality that we may never fully possess what we love. Love asks us to be poor and naked in our need and our dependence upon the mercy of our Beloved.

No wonder we try to satisfy our longing for love by attachments to things which appear at first glance to deliver more and ask less of us than the uncompromising call of Christ. No wonder we attempt to extract from people, possessions, and work what only the Source of Love can give us. However, we soon find ourselves enslaved to and sucked dry by the insatiable demands of such false lovers.

Today I am sick, sin-sick, of my attachment to the world and my ego with its endless unappeasable needs.  I am weary and sore from the brutality and violence of a drive to succeed, ignoring my limits, and trying to do too much and be too much. Who can save me from myself, this body of death?

Only Love, Vulnerable Love entering into our misery as Christ Jesus, summoning us from our sleep, whispering, “Let go. Let go of it all. Follow me. I am all you will ever need.”  

So this day my prayer is a famished stumbling after Love. It is holding out my heart saying, “Here take it. I am yours.” It is Peter telling Jesus, with that desperate hope, “Lord, there is no one else that we can go to! Your words give eternal life. (John 6:68 CEV)  

Today my prayer is bearing the pain of this mystery, this rosy dawn which woos and embraces us all.  Amen.

 deer at dawn small

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“Getting to Know You, Know All about You…”

Posted on September 17, 2009 | Leave a comment

42-16474021After their dinner date, Sandy was mildly disturbed. What was it? Something was eating at her. She really liked Greg. Everything seemed to go well – good conversation, a few laughs, great food, even some electricity in the air.

Oh, it came to her: that remark he made about her sister always being late. It stung. Why? Just what did he mean? Maybe she was over reacting…but his remark sounded catty…

Greg sat with his morning coffee and smiled to himself about the date. It went really well. Sandy actually listened to him. She was funny and pretty and he felt relaxed. He wondered if he should call and tell her how much he enjoyed the evening.

Sandy and Greg have unfinished business – the business of relationship building, the business of deepening intimacy and trust. A business which is the foundation of love.

We naturally review and reflect on conversations and our encounters with others. We sort out the positive and negatives. We go over what we wish we had said differently or left out. We discover questions we want to ask, more information we need.

We may even make a follow up call. “Hey Greg. It’s Sandy. I just want to tell you what a good time I had last night and thank you.” She took a breath, “Greg, I need to let you know something too. I am real loyal about my family and sensitive when people put down my sister. She’s gone through a lot dealing with her disabilities. I felt hurt when you made the joke about her always being late.”

OK. The ball is in Greg’s court now. His response will reveal more about himself, his needs, and experience. Greg and Sandy may build and deepen their relationship with greater trust and honesty in this process, or determine not to do that.

CB035813Let’s apply this idea to our practice of prayer. Sometimes we treat God as a combination landfill and filling station, rather than as a growing relationship of intimacy and trust.  Prayer becomes a place to dump our trash and get refilled with peace of mind. We drive up, open the trunk and haul out our anxieties, worries, sin, pain, sorrow, and confusion and toss them in the containers. We slurp up some high octane Living Water and drive off. “Well, that’s done,” we say. “Now, let’s get on to the important stuff I need to do today.”  In such a scenario of prayer God exists solely to meet my needs.

I suspect that the landfill/gas station approach characterizes quite a bit of our prayer. Yet God is mercifully patient with us about this. God knows that most us we will not come to God unless our trash is overflowing, filling our homes, spilling out the doors and down the street and we feel totally overwhelmed with the demands of our lives. We will wait until our tank is on empty, or we have run out of gas and are stranded on some lonely road late at night.

However, at some point we may notice a shift in us during our visits to the landfill. We may find a desire toj0314126 stay a little longer and linger at the filling station. We may feel a curiosity about the Landfill Owner and his generosity in taking in everyone’s trash and rotting garbage. Appreciation and questions may emerge. A conversation may begin with the Filling Station Fellow, an ebb and flow of mutual disclosure in coming to know each another. We may begin to notice changes in ourselves – an eagerness to get back to the Landfill, a greater sense of peace, a growing intimacy, and – Dare you say it? What will your friends think? – love for the Filling Station Guy.                                                                                                                                                                                              

Intimacy and love with one another and with God are built on a foundation of trust and honesty over time. As we are open with our individual truth, we are drawn into the larger more spacious truth of God. As we return to share more of ourselves, we learn more of God. We get to know and like and hope the other likes us too. The Filling Station Guy is, of course, already won over and hopelessly in love with you. I suspect Greg may be too.

 sanctuary-tree-tiny1

The Landfill will be open this Friday for Midday Prayer, 12:15 – 1:00 at The Sanctuary office at 1600 SW Campbell. Stop by, if you can, for a splash of  Living Water and get to know the Filling Station Guy. I think you will find he is a keeper.

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God’s Been Missing You

Posted on September 8, 2009 | Leave a comment

 

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The wilted remains of pea salad, oriental chicken salad, jello, macaroni salad, and drooping concoctions of cool whip, cherries and graham crackers weigh down the table in the church basement. We finished our salad luncheon and were listening, as I was being introduced as the guest speaker. Invited to address church women of Sabetha, Kansas at their annual spring gathering, I prayed silently, “Jesus, what do you want me to tell the people?” I had planned my remarks, but I often prayed this question before a presentation. Usually I heard, “Tell the people that I love them.” On this spring afternoon in 1991 what came was, “Tell the people that I miss them.”

Over the past eighteen years the message has remained the same: God misses you. Your presence and attention to the Divine matters, makes a difference, counts. God grieves when you are absent from communion with the Holiness filling this world.

 “We live in an age of unbelief,” writes Ronald Rolheiser. “What sets this apart from past generations is that, today, this is often as true within religious circles as outside them. The problem of faith today is especially that of unbelief among believers.” In his book, The Shattered Lantern – Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God, Rolheiser writes about our struggle with faith and agnosticism. “We still have some experience of God, though rarely is this a vital one wherein we actually drink, first-hand, from living waters.” (pages 17-18)

What does it mean for you to drink, first-hand, from living waters of God? What shift needs to occur in us in order to turn aside and reach for a felt presence of God? For me it begins with the recognition that fundamental peace and clarity do not come from my achievements, intellect, or effort, but rather from conscious contact with the Living Reality which sustains all life. To turn toward a God who misses me begins with a conviction that God is more active,  effective, and powerful in my life and world than I am.

In 1926 Evelyn Underhill addressed a class of young seminarians preparing to go into the ministry in the Anglican Church with these words:

We, the laity, know instantly the difference between the churches which are served with love and devotion and those which are not. And we know from this, what their ministers are like. And what you are like is going to depend on your secret life of prayer; on the steady orientation of your souls to the reality of God.                   

I love Underhill’s phrase, the steady orientation of your souls to the reality of God.compass   Such orientation is radically different from the business as usual orientation of the world.

 Remember those compasses people used to put on the dashboards of their vehicles before we had GPS? As a child I loved to watch the dial bounce around in the fluid as the driver turned the wheel and we changed directions.

How do you determine when your direction is steadily aligned with magnetic pull of God? For many of us there is no felt pull toward the holy, toward the compelling mystery of life and love. At the same time many people have a sense that something is missing – a dryness, loneliness, a searching for something of more substance and depth than celebrity worship, political posturing, or being defined as a consumer of commodities.

What is magnetic north in your life? What has the strongest pull on your attention and direction? Where is that direction leading you? Toward greater satisfaction, peace, and generosity?  Or toward something else? 

When we acknowledge that there is a God who misses us and that we are missing God, we set aside our agendas, the chaos, and allure of the world and enter into a larger, more generous, and wiser Reality. We are cleansed, rinsed by the refreshing, renewing Living Water, which soothes and realigns us with our deepest truth and purposes. Here is our heart’s true home, the soul’s magnetic north.auto compass

This Friday The Sanctuary Foundation for Prayer will resume Midday Prayer gatherings from 12:15 – 1:00.  Held weekly at The Sanctuary office at 1600 SW Campbell and open to the community, these periods of contemplative prayer focus on communal silence. Join us in body or spirit and orient yourself to Ultimate Reality. God may be missing you way more than you know.

  sanctuary-tree-tiny

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Done with Great Things and Big Things

Posted on September 2, 2009 | 1 comment

leafSeptember is stepping over the doorsill. A change is in the air. Futurist M. Rex Miller (The Millennium Matrix – Reclaiming the Past, Reframing the Future of the Church) writes about the revolution in communication brought by digital media. Digital media, both expresses a desire for, and makes possible authenticity, community, connection and something simpler and more intimate. “New sensibilities are rising. The connected nature of digital communications has already created a shift back to community:  to more open and connected neighborhoods, town centers, and urban revitalization, as well as smaller, more human-sized services that go along with them.” (p. 120)

Miller makes some startling claims about the successful growth model used in our society and mega churches. “We are beginning to realize that much of our churches’ emphasis on growth has produced the spiritual cousin of suburban tract homes, strip mining, and fast-food franchising. Unfortunately, many hungry churches are still buying into the fast-growth premise and promise without fully understanding the side effects.” Miller cites two of these side effects: “Rapid member turnover and staff burnout within many such churches keeps them forever having to replenish their congregations and leadership core.” This successful growth model has come with a price: a lack of relational cohesion. (p. 121)

In my work as a spiritual director with clergy and church leaders, I see many people trying to cope with the negative side effects of the growth model with its exhausting emphasis on numbers, productivity, and efficiency.

Near the end of the nineteenth century American psychologist and philosopher, William James, wacorn_sproutas also sniffing a change in the air, when he declared, “I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success, and I am for those tiny invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, yet which, if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of man’s pride.”

I find in James’ words a prescient and powerful description of the yet to be invented world wide web.

In the spring of 1978, I stepped over the door sill to a new way of living and made a choice for the tiny molecular forces over the great institutions and big success. With only a vague sense of what the consequences might be, I took the less traveled road of a life of prayer and attention to the things of God. As I walked to the parking lot of Glen Oaks Community College, where I worked as an administrator, I was absorbed by an acute sense of my own seeming insatiable need for importance, for making a name for myself. I was weighed down by a restless dissatisfaction, the urgency to figure it all out, and get my life right. Mostly I was just so sick of myself and my whining. Out of that moment of personal honesty and weariness, I heard a call to ministry. I know. It sounds weird. A voice, which sure didn’t seem to be my mine, said, “Be a minister.” I was a church drop-out. I had never considered such a vocation before.

road-to-Ra-bbit-Ridge-web-vYet I turned my back on great plans and big success and set off on a path of downward mobility. I confess that I am still not entirely converted. I am easily diverted by hype, glamour, and the allure of various definitions of success. Like my puppy on a walk, I get distracted by some new smell and go off the path to investigate. Before long I have forgotten my original intent and have become lost in the tantalizing tastes and odors of the swirl of big things, big tasks, and big impressions.

Ministry of course I soon discovered is not immune to big success. In fact we frequently get off the path and fall down before various idols – our organs, our windows, our buildings, our music department, our youth program, our pastor, our mission, our doctrines….

Here is William James again, writing to his friend H.G. Wells: “The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess Success – that – with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word ‘success’ – is our national disease.” 

Early in September on the threshold of a new season in the digital age convergence of William James, M. Rex Miller, and my own story I find a synergy of hope and resonance. May some pieces come together for you this season too.

 Here is a prayer, an inoculation, if you will, against our national disease:

Oh, my God in heaven, save me from significance. Yank me by my collar from snuffling and slobbering before the bitch goddess, success. Help me to have more faith in things I cannot see, than things I can measure and bank and drive around town in. Teach me to trust those tiny bursts of energy jumping from person to person as slivers of grace, kindness, wisdom, and cheerfulness. Deliver me from my own insufferable self importance. Oh Indestructible Goodness, lie me down in the soft green pastures of humility, where I can spy your kingdom come, grinning and creeping through the crannies of the world.  Amen

sanctuary-tree-tiny1

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Elijah and the Gentle Leader

Posted on August 25, 2009 | Leave a comment

I led them with cords of human kindness, with ties of love… Hosea 11:4 (NIV)

Elijah - foot at 11 weeksI got a new pup, a black lab with some golden retriever mixed in. His name is Elijah. We are in love. Thank God. Learning each other’s rhythms and limits in fits and starts, shouts and barks, foot stamping and puppy pouts, we are pulling at the restraints of the discipline, which all relationships require.  Without the love, we would never make it.

When people see Elijah they say, “Oh, how cute!” Then on taking a closer look, they shake their heads and add with pity, “He’s going to be a big dog.” I try not to shudder. The little prophet dog is mostly feet, knobbly knees, long legs, and a single minded purpose to chew. My last dog died at sixteen years. He had long given up gnawing at things and people.

Elijah has all the approved chewing materials. We go to puppy training. At the advice of friends,  I got a training halter device which requires a degree in dog mechanics and six arms to put on your puppy. In spite of liberal use of hotdog bits, it didn’t go at all like the video showed. Obviously the demonstration dog had been drugged.

The device comes in a box resplendent with marketing genius, Immediate gentle control. “My pup was changed in a mere ten minutes.” The nose loop encircles your dog’s muzzle in the same way as a pack leader gently, but firmly grasps a subordinate’s muzzle in his mouth. This is a clear signal that You are his leader!  My dog is still working to pick up that clear signal.

Elijah detests this device with a passion. However, I confound him by offering the tastiest treats I can find, when I put it on and when I remove it. I rubbed hotdog juice all over the part that goes around his nose. When we walk, he turns summersaults over the grass trying to shake it off, or writhes on the ground like a snake. Then he will flop prone in the street with a huge sigh and pout. Despite the period of adjustment for us both, things are improving. Once he gets over his hissy fit, he trots along in fine fashion being the dog of my dreams. 

 Gentle Leader

Do not be like the horse or the mule, which have no understanding but must be controlled by bit and bridle or they will not come to you. (Psalm 32: 8-10 NIV)

The amusing name for this device is Gentle Leader Head Collar. This cracks me up. I got the giggles thinking about it in church this week. I had this picture of God struggling to put such a halter on us, while we flop about in our lives, straining to get loose from the constraints of our own realities. Our genetics, life experiences, choices, and environments wrap around our snouts and bind our movement. Such discipline may gentle us into surrender to the truth of who we are. We may come to accept the conditions placed upon us by our journey and the reality that we are not the leader of the pack, or we may toss ourselves in summersaults, whining, and wriggling against our limits.

“Now be ye not stiffnecked, as your fathers were, but yield yourself unto the Lord, and enter into his sanctuary (2 Chronicles 30:8),” I say to Elijah, who is trying to chew the darn thing off his head. The Hebrew scriptures frequently compare the people of Israel to oxen with stiff necks who will not submit to the yoke, or a horse who will not follow without bit and bridle. The notion of discipline and surrender to the Leader of the Pack appears also in Paul’s writings. In fact it is often the prophets, including Elijah’s namesake, who serve as God’s harnesses to restrain an unruly rebellious nation.Elijah 3 months 2

If Elijah could see the positive benefits of his Gentle Leader, he might not put us through such a struggle. His resistance only increases his discomfort. Being conformed to the harness requires repetition, discipline, love, and a good deal of faith in the Leader on both our parts. The way to Elijah’s abundance is a counter intuitive surrender to what feels at first as terribly confining. Not a bad prescription for the spiritual life.

 

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I Want It and I Want It Now!

Posted on August 18, 2009 | Leave a comment

Speeding trafficFeeling overwhelmed by the speed of life? M. Rex Miller, (The Millennium Matrix – Reclaiming the Past, Reframing the Future of the Church) identifies seven qualities to describe the dynamics of our present world. He lists the qualities, which are inherent in digital age media, as interconnection, complexity, acceleration, intangibility, convergence, immediacy, and unpredictability. These seven qualities, largely absent from the Biblical world, are directly affecting the life of our churches and the life of our souls.

I want it. I want it now. And by gum, I’m gonna get it!
Let’s look at one of Miller’s qualities, immediacy.  “The time it takes us to absorb and adjust to digitally paced activities grows ever shorter. As the interval between question and answer, request and fulfillment, grows narrower, we are asked to respond to the world with an immediacy similar to that required by fighter pilots in combat… where high speeds require the F16 fighter to master a different set of rules for decision making.” Miller quotes Colonel John Boyd as he asks the question, “How do we function in an environment where reality leaves us little or no time for reflection but ‘changes ceaselessly, unfolding in an irregular, disorderly, unpredictable manner,’ despite our vain attempts to ensure the contrary?”

The disembodied voice at the drive-through chirps, “Which of our twenty four different topping combinations for your pizza would you like today? If you order in the next five seconds you may get your choice of a quart sized cooler, air freshener, or five dollars off your drink order. What would you like for dessert today? We have eight new shake flavors and are offering a special on our smoothies. If you buy two you get one free. Would you like to try our hot apple pie? Oh, sorry we know longer carry hamburgers.”

The quality of immediacy precludes a contemplative, thoughtful approach to our experience and our desires. The lapse between awareness of a desire and its fulfillment is potentially much briefer. Does twenty four hour access to the global market begin to render delayed gratification and patience obsolete? If I want or need something- a conversation, some information, a consumer good or service, a  relationship, something to eat – I want it fast. I want it now. And very often I can get it.

Digital immediacy leaves little or no breathing space between desire and fulfillment, event and response. We do not have time to absorb, savor and reflect upon our experience. To consider broader implications and what God might be saying to us will only hold up the line and irritate the person waiting behind us. We  find ourselves continually reacting to, being manipulated by, or attempting to protect and shelter ourselves from the immediacy of our environment.

Are we to mindlessly adjust to this reality, as a lobster in a slowly warming pot of water, and hence be transformed by it into somebody’s supper? Do we need to learn like the fighter pilot how to respond with greater precision and accuracy to ceaseless rapid change? Or do we have something to bring to the immediate digital age from the tradition of reflection, thoughtful consideration, and listening? Might people of faith draw on a different resource than a fighter pilot’s highly tuned nervous system and hyper responsive physical abilities?

An Antidote for Immediacy
An ancient spiritual practice can restore your balance and perspective. Wisdom from a deeper, truer source than the twenty four news cycle can shape our lives. The examen was developed and taught by St. Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuit order. In recent years the examen has found popularity among people of many faiths. In its simplest form it consists of a daily examination of your experience, asking the Holy Spirit to reveal God’s presence and activity in your day.  The examen is based on the assumption that God speaks to us through our deepest feelings and yearnings, or consolations and desolations. Consolations are things that satisfy and unite us with others, God, and creation in love, hope, and peace. Desolations are negative feelings – anxiety, fear, despair, anger, which tend to isolate us from ourselves, others, and God.

Here are some questions for your examen as presented in my favorite book on the subject, Sleeping with Bread – Holding What Gives You Life, by Dennis Linn, Sheila Fabricant Linn, Michael Linn.

For what moment today am I most grateful?CB022113
For what moment today am I least grateful?

There are many other ways to ask the same questions:
When did I give and receive the most love today?
When did I give and receive the least love today?

When did I feel most alive today?
When did I most feel life draining out of me?

When was I happiest today?
When was I saddest?

What was today’s high point?
What was today’s low point?

This exercise pulls us out of the sucking vortex of immediacy to notice and name our internal reality. What is giving me life and joy? What is diminishing my peace and serenity?  Instead of knee jerk reactions to the demands of immediacy, we stop to consider what is moving us closer to  the way of God, and what seems to be drawing us away from the qualities of holiness. We begin to see a thread, a direction for our lives, and a sense of God’s activity and call to us.

The Immediacy of God
The digital age did not invent immediacy. That rapid connection between thought and fulfillment, need and satisfaction is a quality of the divine. Scripture describes God as accessible, present, alive, and more immediate than the air we breathe. Wisdom 7:24 captures this immediacy of God with the words: Wisdom is quicker to move than any motion; she is so pure, she pervades and permeates all things.
Mulberry Tree
The examen, practiced over time, connects us with a Divine Immediacy more compelling, and satisfying than the life sucking immediacy of our digital age. It gives us direction for our life choices and gentles us into conforming with the will of God. In Divine Immediacy we discover the spacious and timeless grace of the present moment, in which we receive all we need. Right here. Right now.  

 

The Ignatian Daily Examen

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A Calm and Quiet Soul

Posted on August 11, 2009 | 2 comments

It is a simple psalm – the shortest in the Hebrew Scriptures, only three verses, easy to miss. It is a little announcement, a tweet, a facebook status post:

 O Lord, my heart is not lifted up,C, Co 1987 002
   my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things
   too great and too marvelous for me.                             
But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
   like a weaned child with its mother;
   my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.
O Israel, hope in the Lord
   from this time on and for evermore. Psalm 131

The psalmist does not offer his knowledge, answers, opinions, strategies, outrage, or some new technological advance. He does not blast his enemies and ask for God’s vengeance. He does not recite a litany of his sorrows, nor does he plead for mercy. He does not even offer God praise or thanksgiving. He simply posts a calm and quiet soul and out of his serenity emerges a message to his friends, Israel: hope in God.

Here is no flashy super hero, no glamorous celebrity, no clever talking head striding up to the microphone to silence opponents with verbal repartee and inflammatory speech. Instead we find a balm for all wounds and a cool hand to smooth out the furrows in the forehead of a distracted, feverish world.

Peace is polite and unassuming. It does not force its way on others or announce itself with strobe lights and blaring headlines. With the irony, sarcasm, and impatience so endemic in our world, we may think, “Big deal. So the guy’s calmed himself down. Whatever.”

It is easy to miss the importance of this. I think some of you know how much work it takes to create and maintain inner peace. You have an idea of the courage and selflessness a calm and quiet heart requires. Such peace is won by the bloody confrontation with inner truth and the battle with all in oneself that resists or thwarts reconciliation.

D, Co 1987A calm heart is the heart of a weaned child, no longing gasping and grasping for nourishment from its mother. The psalmist has mastered his appetites and addictions. He has grown up and can return to the source of life free of the demanding temptations of ambition, restlessness, and narcissism.

The psalmist does a startling thing here. Notice that he is not blaming, or damning, or threatening to sue whatever has upset him or caused him to despair. We do not know what has set him about calming his heart. What we do know is that he has assumed responsibility for his inner peace and his outward response to the world. He does not hold others accountable for his difficulty. He is reconciled with his own experience. His soul is at rest and his desire for his friends is the hope he has found in God.

A calm and quiet soul is a great lake of strength and serenity, a pool of stillness reflecting reality where many come to drink. Yet the cacophony of the postmodern world has little appreciation for such souls. These are hidden folk with no desire for their five minutes of fame. They remain rooted and grounded in the soil of love, flexible, bending with the winds of change, and standing tall in tough times. I have known a few. I want to be someone like that more than anything. Don’t you?

For the past couple of weeks I’ve had the “eye twitch.” You know, that annoying  hysterical jerk of the eyelid? I’ve been so tired. I have not been respecting my limits. My sites have been set too high. I have been occupying myself with things too great for me.

It is a simple psalm. It is really a lullaby. Sing it to yourself this week.

 DC, Co 1987 1

If you alone find inner peace, thousands around you will be saved.
– St. Seraphim of Sarov

New issue of Holy Ground, a quarterly reflection on contemplative life, published by The Sanctuary Foundation for Prayer is out! This issue is about what happens when discernment appears to go wrong, resistance to love, and a puppy named Elijah. To request a free copy:  email info@fromholyground.org. Include your name and mailing address. We will send your copy right away.

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