Category Archives: Dealing with stuff

January 15, 2008 · 3:33 pm

Freedom

Just a verse that has been going through my mind a lot lately:

John 8: 31 and 32

31 Jesus said to the people who believed in him, “You are truly my disciples if you remain faithful to my teachings. 32 And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

I think it is telling me not to be afraid of investigating truth because God is found there. The kind of truth that is illuminated by God’s wisdom is freeing, not something to fear.

So, I must spend time really listening to God as I study.

You know I think I’ve been in this place before. God was there and I learned to trust him/her to b e a bit bigger than an old image of him was. There was freedom from fear there as well.

I guess I should trust that my questions won’t scare God away.

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January 14, 2008 · 4:41 am

Open or Classical?

We began quite the discussion tonight deciding to delve into the book God of the Possible by Gregory Boyd.   The Open view of God as opposed to the Classical view is explored in his book.  We decided to read it since last week we were grappling with some of the issues it discusses – issue that keep coming up in conversations about God.

I’m not sure we knew what we were getting into.

I looked up some stuff on the internet to see what was being said about this and came up with this and this.   Lots of interesting discussion.

I think we will  certainly stretch our minds a bit as we discuss this.  We are no theologians but we need to be aware of this and weigh the evidence for both sides as best we can.  I personally find that the open view makes sense to me but I also know that God’s ways are not always going to be understood by me.  I can accept that.  I also know that it is not necessary for me to choose between the viewpoints but to learn from both.

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January 7, 2008 · 8:50 pm

I am amazed

by the way the stuff I am led to investigate for my papers becomes a useful source of information for the questions people pose in real life.

I am writing – well getting ready to write – an essay on mysticism and ecstatic experiences in Christian spirituality.

Last night our group of women book readers spent a long time talking about this very subject. I’m not even sure what led up to the beginning of the conversation. It was good to share stories. It is good to remember the experiences we have had with God.

Then this morning, a staff member is getting into a book on psychic stuff. That is not where I want to go. I know too much to think that this stuff is harmless. It seems as if people are fascinated by spirituality but stay far away from the real source of spiritual power,God, finding their information in the “wisdom” of another human.

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January 3, 2008 · 11:26 pm

Reflecting on a quote from Morton Kelsey

This was an interesting bit out of a book I am reading , Discernment: A Study in Ecstasy and Evil by Morton Kelsey.

Many Christians have a strange attitude toward disbelief and disbelievers.  They treat them as the worst of sinners and shun them the way that many people shun the sick and the poor.  Yet if there is a meaningful reality which we humans can know and be touched by, and we are unable to find it, the trouble is with our understanding and with our experience; our morals are not defective.  Perhaps the reason for this attitude toward agnostics and atheists is the unconscious lack of belief on the part of many Christians in the last three or four hundred years.  Condemning others may well be the Christians’ personal reaction to their own unconscious doubt.  It threatens them to have to face and handle someone who does not believe as they say they do.

He goes on to describe practices that need to be evident in people who desire to help others, one of which is to be an example of the meaning to which they direct the person seeking meaning.  So, if I want to help anyone questioning issues of faith or the meaning of life, I must be living a life which has meaning, is authentic and consistent with my faith.  I will have had to have wrestled my way through some of the issues others face to a place of knowing who I am, some of what has meaning in life for myself and authentic faith lived out in action in my life. 

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November 3, 2007 · 3:44 pm

Processing the Lewis Speech

We heard Steven Lewis last night – a privilege. One comes away from a talk like that with many things to process. And I must be a bit of a slow processor. I need time to mull it all over in my head and deal with some of the information we were given. And not just for the sake of processing but to somehow respond in an appropriate way.

The Virus of Inequality I think we are all infected with it to a certain degree – and it can drive us mad with despair or paralyze us with hopelessness. I think it can probably cause us to jerk with spasms of frantic activism as well, thinking that our efforts will make the world change overnight by our own efforts. And of course that leads to hopeless despair as we come up against powers that are too big for us to budge. Or we can become deluded into a sort of selfish haze of indifference where we tell ourselves that we have worked hard for all we have and if only the rest of the world would shape up and share our political systems and economic ideals they would pull themselves out of the pits they are in. And above all we must protect what we have worked so hard to acquire.

What is a Christian to do?
I think we are called to something more like health. Even to a place of joy – not happiness, but a deep sense of wellness within that frees us to give ourselves in service to others. Nouwen says,

Ecstatic living entails a constant willingness to leave the safe, secure, familiar place and to reach out to others, even when that involves risking one’s own security. On an international scale this means a foreign policy that goes far beyond the question “How can our nation survive?” It would be a policy primarily concerned with the survival of humanity and willing to make national sacrifices. It would be a policy which realizes that idolizing the security of the nation endangers the whole of humanity….

…As long as national security is our primary concern and national survival more important than preserving life on this planet, we continue to live in the house of fear…. Nouwen, Lifesigns, Image Books, p 95

There is an inner joy that comes from knowing God – the “ecstatic” life that Nouwen talks about here that changes our relationship to the world around us. As he says, it exists in “the house of love” where we as Christians are called t o live. Loving and being loved frees us to serve others and the world and should send us out into the world around us almost like antibodies to this “Virus of Inequality” that Steven Lewis spoke so eloquently about. We do what we have to do in the areas we are placed. We stand for justice and honesty in our lives and in our politics. We do as Jesus did in standing for the oppressed. We have lots to do just in our little radii of influence but we also need to hold our leaders accountable for our actions as a nation and for the promises of our nation to the world.

The talk last night by Lewis was a great challenge to me. I will not be paralyzed into despair by the horrors that have been perpetrated on great segments of the world’s people, especially the women and children in countries at war. Living in the freedom of a deep joy that comes from knowing who I am in Christ, I will work in as many ways as I can to share the love that I have experienced with the hurting of the world. And I will renew my efforts to pass along these concerns to my children.

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November 2, 2007 · 1:33 pm

In the middle of the night

From time to time I have these periods of time when I wake, become quite alertly awake, in the middle of the night. I can’t say as I like to wake up at 3 am. It is too much middle of the night to get up and too late to get up and read awhile so that I will get sleepy. (If I do that I find that by the time I get sleepy it is too late to go back to bed before work- not a good thing going off to work with only 4 hours of sleep.)

Quite often I will lie there thinking. Usually not particularly helpful thoughts. Fairly often those thoughts will turn into prayer after I have in my frustrated mind tried to solve the problem myself (in my head) for awhile.

Last night I was doing the same. I was thinking about my children and how maybe if I had done this…, or maybe if I had chosen to stay home when they were young… or maybe if I had been more… Then a new thought came to me, “I could never have been a perfect mother no matter how hard I would have worked at it. I don’t have to carry around all sorts of guilt around in my head because I made mistakes. Of course I made mistakes.”

Then it came to me that this is just one of the situations God has in his grace covered for me. He’s always known I was making mistakes and still he loved and cared for me. I can leave it with him. So there was an immediate sense of relief. The kids are really responsible now for themselves, not that I won’t love them forever and help them where I can. And of course I will continue to pray for them and sometimes worry about how they are doing. But maybe I will let go of all those useless “should haves” that pop up to keep me awake in the night.

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October 24, 2007 · 3:55 pm

Moving deeper

The deeper our prayer becomes the closer we come to this mystery of God’s love. And the closer we are to this mystery the better we can live it out in our daily life. It frees us to appreciate other people’s talents without feeling diminished by them and to life up their uniqueness without feeling less unique ourselves. It allows us to celebrate the various ways of being human as a sign of the universal love of God. (Nouwen, Lifesigns p34)


At church council last night we talked about spiritual direction a bit. One comment was that it would be mainly for those who know God and wish to go deeper. That is true although anyone can be seeking a deeper spiritual life without already knowing God in Christ. In fact, some of my deeper spiritual conversations have been with people who do not even know what they are seeking. I see God at work even when they remain oblivious to who it is that is drawing them towards him.

Perhaps one of the greatest benefits to the Christian community of the work of spiritual direction is that as one goes deeper and draws closer to God in prayer one becomes more aware of this “mystery of God’s love.” And the experience of this mystery compels us to live out this love of God in our daily human lives. God calls us to live as lights in our dark world and I believe that our lights will together shine more brightly as we move deeper into the mystery of God.

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October 11, 2007 · 2:35 am

Can too much be said about love?

Randall had a little discussion going on love.  A friend told him that he has discovered that a lot of the complexity of his life has been simplified by his discovering that he is loved.  He stated that he was “just a boy who needed to be loved.”  

I think that this is a pretty profound discovery.  I don’t think he is talking about the kind of stuff that passes for love between young people that after a few months dissipates, revealing it for what it was really – simply infatuation, sexual attraction or even hero worship.  I believe the sort of love he is speaking about carries with it a deep knowing within him of acceptance for who he is by another who knows enough about him to know many of his warts and bumps and loves him anyway.  The other not only accepts him for what he is but delights in him.  And I take it that there is a reciprocal acceptance of the other.

This sort of love is found between parents and children as well.  Dixie wrote about the love she has for her children and how, in spite of her not always doing the right thing for her children, she can be a good mother because she truly loves them.  In fact it is partly because she loves her children so much that she cares that she does the right thing when it comes to childrearing.  

I believe these kinds of human love reflect the love God has for us.  And I think that our need to be loved in order to be healthy humans reflects something within us that has been planted there by our designer.  If the essence of God is love then perhaps our search for love is in reality a search, at the deepest levels of who we are, for God. 

One of Randall’s anonymous commenters said he didn’t think the kind of love that helps  a person discover who they are exists in his world.  Makes me sad to think that many people don’t know what that is like.  Human love can really be life changing, as it has for this friend of Randall.  It is healing and transforming and good.   I think it is the kind of expression of God that we as his human followers need to live out.  We need to make it real in the worlds of people who need to experience it because it really does change people.  God is like that.

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September 19, 2007 · 9:19 am

On Songs and Mystics

Marc responded to a post by John Stackhouse on songs that speak of love for Jesus in fairly intimate personal terms – along the line of lyrics designated as "Jesus is my boyfriend".  The post on Stackhouse’s blog elicited some interesting comments.  I would recommend going there and reading it.  It certainly brings up the issue of those songs that raise discomfort in people who do not like expressing their relationship to God in this kind of intimate language.  I guess we need to be sensitive to the aversion and the wrong kind of message that songs strong on love language and weak in theological content give to some participants in worship services. 

Stackhouse also interjects some comments on the mystics and obviously does not appreciate the type of ecstatic language and experiences recounted by them.  Here I think he is off base.

I don’t think the tradition of "Jesus is my boyfriend" songs comes from the mystics. They may have had what we would consider erotic ecstatic experiences but from those visions came writings that were not so individually oriented as some of the songs for which we are questioning the theology. There came writings on prayer and on seeking deeper prayer experiences with God and there came expressions of adoration of God. 
 
Hildegard of Bingen is noted for her musical compositions and, though many speak of adoration of Mary and saints that we protestants find foreign, I would hardly call them "Jesus is my boyfriend" type lyrics. Here is a short example.  I thought the English translation would be appreciated more than the Latin!
 
O Shepherd of souls
 
O Shepherd of souls
and o first voice
through whom all creation was summoned,
now to you,
to you may it give pleasure and dignity
to liberate us
from our miseries and languishing.
 
 
I think we have much to learn from the mystics who had such deep relationships with God that they actually experienced him in ways most of us today find foreign.  Maybe that says more about our life styles that leave little time to develope this kind of intimacy with God than about the "whackyness" of their experiences.

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August 22, 2007 · 3:00 pm

Soul Detox

This summer I became conscious of God’s love in a new way. 
 
For those of you who try to reach some level of communication with God, you will know what I mean when I say that there are times when God just doesn’t seem to communicate back.  This was the case for me for, well for most of the months of May to July.  I know that my busyness raises up obstructions to the sort of communication with God that I would really like.  And so the busyness and awkwardness of living in a house being renovated began to get to me. It occupied so much of my time and energy just living, trying to make meals and dodge obstacles that I was worn down.
 
If you can, imagine a large room.  Then add to the room a whole truckload of junk, twisted and broken and dropped right in the middle.  The pile of stuff was not so high that I couldn’t see over it but there was enough of it that it kept me from crossing the room.  At least not without doing something pretty drastic with the junk.  And in that same room, on the far side, against the wall stands Jesus.  He is not half so upset about the junk in the middle as I am for some reason.  So, he just stands there waiting patiently – for me to make some sort of move I guess.  Or maybe to start clearing away the stuff so we can reach each other.
 
Something in me just did not seem capable of doing anything to bridge that distance between us. I think I was hoping that God would just sort of snuff out the junk; do one of those room makeovers while I was out or something.  But he just waited.
 
Then I went away to Chicago for the second summer intensive course for the Certificate in Spiritual Direction. I was hoping that the week would be good; that somehow I would experience the closeness of God again.  Here I was, feeling way more distance from God than I wanted.    One thing a spiritual director must be able to do is sense the hand of God in another’s life, sense where God is moving people and be able to listen with another to the activity of God in their life.  How could I listen with another when I couldn’t seem to hear God very plainly in my own life?
 
I would have to liken the summer intensive of this summer to attending a spiritual detox centre. It was good for my soul. I guess I detoxified from the renovation stress, from the work stress and from a bunch of the other stresses that made up that pile of junk in my room where God was.  My fellow students, in listening to my stories, became a part of my remedy.  
 
Then, to my surprise, God moved across the room.  The stuff was just not there.  In fact, that morning, in vision-like imagery, he came running towards me with arms outstretched, lips puckered up like a little child who delights in his grandmother for no other reason than that she is there and he loves her.  And she delights in him because he loves her and asks only for her love in return.  The image came to me so vividly and was such an exquisite moment that it has become the most valued treasure of my summer. 
 
My grandchildren continue to remind me of that treasure as I knew they would.  I believe they are not only a reminder of the fact that God loves me just because I am his but are in themselves a gift to be treasured and loved.  

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