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Where your security lies

Sunday, March 14th, 2010

I’m having trouble focusing on things today. My friend’s death has stirred up a lot of difficult stuff.

I’m reading Francis of Assisi by Leonardo Boff. It’s a heady book. But I’m finding it worth the wade. for example:

How, beyond the mysticism of gentle and compassionate identification with the poor and the Crucified, did they make sense of their want?  No one lives by mysticism alone. Life has demands that cannot be opposed permanently. How did they humanize this objective dehumanization that is poverty? It is precisely within the context of poverty that Francis places the problem of fraternity.  Each one’s  poverty implies for others a challenge, in order, to their care, gentleness, and the creation of an atmosphere of openness and security, denied by radical poverty. For Francis, having has been toppled from its pretension of granting security and humanization to persons. Only care for one another truly humanizes life…. Care is the way of being human.

Leonardo Boff, Francis of Assisi: a Model for Human Liberation. (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2006), p. 66.

I can’t describe what happened to me as I read these words. Of course!! I thought. This is it!!

My African brothers and sisters know this principle, because they live it. “Nobody’s poor here, unless they’re alone,” they said. Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement also knew it.

Jesus did exactly this: he invested in people, flesh and blood, fallible people, like Peter and Mary Magdalene.  If they failed, he failed.  If they succeeded, he succeeded.

I don’t know the specifics for me yet.  But I do know the principle: our ultimate security lies, not in bank accounts or IRAs, but in caring for one another, as God cares for us.

Your Father knows what you need before you ask him.

Matt 6:8 (NRSV)

Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you.

1 Peter 5:7 (NRSV)

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Hollow cake

Thursday, November 12th, 2009

I tried my baking skills the other day. I had an orange-cranberry muffin mix, which called for an added cup of water.

Flush with the success of earlier efforts, I added a protein booster whey powder, a couple eggs, and two tablespoons of oil.

After 25 minutes in the oven, the knife came out clean.

We cut the cake the next day to store it. It consisted of an outside ring, inside ring and center.

The outside was perfect, a dream of a cake.

The inside was still semi-liquid, doughy.

The center was empty.

T. S. Eliot:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Wow! What an image of spiritual life!

It is critical for our spiritual lives to be real, nourishing, whole.

Not cream puffs without cream.

And, when you’re starving, a good hearty piece of bread is better than a pastry.

I’m reading Dom Helder Camara in the Orbis Books series Modern Spiritual Masters. I was intrigued that I never heard of him before, yet the blurb identified him as a major player in Vatican II and an archbishop (?) who implemented changes to move the Brazilian and Latin American church toward ideals of Poverty and Service.

He embodied the bishop Victor Hugo described in the opening pages of Les Miserables. Fluent in French,  he must have known that book well. The Brazilian dictatorship of the 1960s silenced him in the country, but could not outside.

Conservative, fervent anti-Communist pope John Paul II dismantled most of his accomplishments. His writings are largely in Portuguese and housed in Recife, I believe. Orbis is doing world Christianity a great service in bringing the riches of his thought to light.

I confess I  got a flyer offering them at half off. I purchased:

  • Dom Helder Camara
  • Pedro Arrupe
  • Thomas Merton
  • Evelyn Underhill
  • Simone Weil
  • Writings on Contemplation and Compassion, ed. Robert Ellsburg.

Easily a year’s worth of reading and reflection.  I was introduced to the series by the volume on Dorothee Sölle, the German theologian. That led me to read her magnum opus The Silent Cry, which I’ve written about.

Reading is a way out of despair for me. It helps me in these increasingly dark days. Advent is around the corner, my heart cries out for light, light, light!

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Beauty and the Tyrant

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

Why bother with Arenas? A comment follows this quotation.

Quoting Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls (1993):

“At the [Cuban] National Library in 1969 Lezama [Lima] gave a reading of perhaps one of the most extraordinary essays of Cuban literature under the title ‘Confluences.’ It reaffirmed the creative force, the love of language, the struggle for an integrated image against all  those who opposed it. A sense of beauty is always dangerous and antagonistic to any dictatorship because it implies a realm extending beyond the limits that a dictatorship can impose on human beings. Beauty is a territory that escapes the control of the political police. Being independent and outside of their domain, beauty is so irritating to dictators that they attempt to destroy it whichever way they can. Under a dictatorship, beauty is always a dissident force, because a dictatorship is itself unaesthetic, grotesque, to a dictator and his agents, the attempt to create beauty is an escapist or reactionary act.” p. 87

Arenas is not somebody conservative Christians typically read. He was a promiscuous gay activist in communist Cuba. His writings caught the acclaim of an international audience, and of Castro’s State Security, which hounded Arenas and imprisoned him in El Morro, a notorious lockup for murderers and the like.

Arenas was brutalized. Even after he escaped Cuba by slipping into Key West in the Mariel exodus in 1980, Castro’s agents sought to destroy him.

One night a mysterious blast, like a gunshot, shattered a glass of water in his apartment. Unfortunately, because he was debilitated due to AIDS, poverty, and the struggle to publish as an ostracized Cuban expatriate, he took this shattered glass as an omen, a metaphor of his life. The protective aura he had enjoyed from childhood abandoned him. He died.

He ended a letter published posthumously:  “I do not want to convey to you a message of defeat but of continued struggle and of hope. Cuba will be free. I already am.” (p. 317)

Yet, I find some lessons from his memoir:

  • Faith and a living relationship with God make a difference. As tyranny hammered Arenas, he could have benefited from experiencing the unconditional love of God [not the stereotypical right-wing deity, however].
  • His commitment to Beauty, truth expressed through literature, and his refusal to use his gift to glorify the state, have transcendent value. Quakers speak about “that of God in everyone.” Arenas’s commitment to writing were “that of God” in him.
  • His experience of America as “a country without a soul,” a country tyrannized by “the power of money” is a legitimate warning. I know another America, where people’s love of God and one another is the primary power. But I believe Arenas’ experience is also true. I can’t read the Hebrew prophets, who condemn the rich for caring not at all about the poor, without recognizing parallels in the US today.

Other voices have sounded the warning, too. Aleksandr Solzehnitsyn addressed Harvard; he spoke about how human potential must be balanced by belief in a Supreme Being who gives value to human life and responsibility to human freedom. I also compare Maria von Trapp in Sound of Music with Sally Bowles in Cabaret, two figures iconic of America–but which will we ultimately choose to become?

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In Spirit and Truth

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

I always get into what I’m reading. I’ve been wanting some biography, and happened on Before Night Falls through a book list. It’s a memoir of Reinaldo Arenas, Cuban poet, freedom fighter and gay activist.

Not the kind of book you’d expect a preacher to be reading. Lots of rowdy sex.

Besides that, what I like in this book is the longing evident from early days in Arenas’s life, a longing for something missing in the Communist paradise he grew up in.

Maybe food. As a boy he often ate dirt to fill his stomach.

His writing brought him to the attention of the literary community in Cuba. Despite the many parasites who sold out to State Security, there were others who gathered in small groups to read their work.

In one meeting the poet read his original poems, then burned the only copy in a hibachi to the gasps of the crowd. In Cuba it’s criminal to write except in connivance with the State.

Arenas’ friends smuggled his work out of Cuba, and it was published in France, winning acclaim.

He writes that tyranny hates the Beauty of a poem which cannot be enslaved to its purposes.

He would have liked Ephesians 2.10, “We are God’s works of art…” [lit. poema] NJB.

In my heart is a longing that Arenas somewhere, somehow met the God, who might be known by other names—such as Beauty, Medicine, Truth, Justice, Love. Transcendent names.

I don’t know. I’m just really clear that the system I grew up with, in which people were either saved or lost (no other possibilities), doesn’t cover all the people I know.

There are those souls who long for a better God than all the gods they know, souls who serve their better God even though they have no proof their God exists, souls who put many “saved” folks to shame.

C.S. Lewis wrote of one such soul in The Last Battle. Emeth [Hebrew word meaning faithful] was an enemy soldier who loved the pagan bird god Tash fiercely, risked his life to catch a glimpse of Tash, only to learn in Aslan’s country that he had worshiped the great Lion all his life.

Lewis explained, you can’t offer true worship to a false god; nor can you give false worship to the true God. By whatever name they call God true worshipers serve the true God; false worshipers, false gods.

O true God of mercy, love and grace, you have other sheep, belonging to other folds. May you bring them home in peace at the last. Amen

 Note: high pain today, so I can’t write a lot.

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Active and passive moves in prayer

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009

If you find these reflections useful to you, that’s my goal. I’d love to hear from you. Thank you for stopping by.

Loss of pastoral care and counseling centers and training programs

I first encountered Gerald May through his book Will and Spirit: A Contemplative Psychology, (1982). At the time I was a full-time resident at the Virginia Institute of Pastoral Care (VIPCare), one of pastoral care and counseling’s premier institutions. We didn’t know then, but only one resident would come after me. Economics would slowly squeeze the educational program, until today it is a faint shadow of what it was.

Although almost nobody noticed, we lost one of the most valuable assets in the field, and not only at VIPCare. Across the nation pastoral counseling centers themselves are going out of business, and training and certification has been handed off to the university and the state.

Pastoral counseling uniquely focuses on the personhood of the counselor and her spiritual and professional formation. Secular training programs, modeled on the university, train the intellect and barely nod at the person, whose own largely unexamined unconscious and spirit will drive her counseling practice.

Active and passive praying

Anyway. Back to G. May and his writing. Gerald May’s The Dark Night of the Soul is deceptively simple. (G. May, of course, is distinct from Rollo May, also an outstanding psychologist and author.)

He gives an overview of the lives and writings of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, 16th century religious geniuses. John also is Spain’s national poet.

I’ve never had much success reading either of these people.

May defines “meditation” as primarily all the exercises and forms of prayer that we do, whereas “contemplation” is God’s sheer gift. All we can do with regard to the latter is “to welcome it with open arms.” These definitions vary with different writers. The definitions I’m more familiar with are:

  • meditation, the first stage of praying, active, characterized by use of methods, images, thought.
  • contemplation, a usually more “advanced” stage of praying, passive (receptive, welcoming with open arms), open, imageless, thoughtless.

I”m sorry to use the word “advanced” because it brings in all kinds of unwanted associations. But I can’t think of a better term.

May says prayer is active and passive. The two intermingle. You go back and forth from beginning to “advanced” phases. (There is no such thing as “advanced”; in prayer we’re all beginners.)

I like the image of God and soul as dance partners. (The “soul” is the deepest part of yourself, where you are most truly you, where God also is.) In active praying the human partner’s movement is more in view; in passive, God’s movement is. But both are interactive in both.

The human activity in the “passive” phase, however, is being receptive, welcoming with open arms. This is what Buddhists and others call “mindfulness,” a relaxed state of loving attentiveness to all that is.

(continued)

 Your feedback will be especially valuable to me. I hope you find these explorations of use in your daily walk with God.

 

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A Spiritual Treasure

Saturday, September 12th, 2009

The following is from a spiritual treasure I became aware of while a pastor in rurban Virginia. We had folks who were committed AA members, who invited me to attend an AA meeting at our church because they needed another warm body. It was a small meeting.

It was the closest I’ve ever been to an ideal “church.”

The book (now online here) is As Bill Sees It, selections from the writing of AA’s founder Bill W. Organized topically, it addresses nitty gritty issues of personal spiritual growth.

38

Pipeline to God

“I am a firm believer in both guidance and prayer. But I am fully aware, and humble enough, I hope, to see there may be nothing infallible about my guidance.

“The minute I figure I have got a perfectly clear pipeline to God, I have become egotistical enough to get into real trouble. Nobody can cause more needless grief than a power-driver who thinks he has got it straight from God.”

(LETTER, 1950)

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Leggo my ego!

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

leloir_-_jacob_wrestling_with_the_angel

Leloir, Jacob wrestling with the Angel, 1865 (Wikipedia)

Ego and egolessness!

A hot potato. The more you try to set aside the ego (the executive self), the more the unconscious self (the subversive self) takes over.

Paul the neurotic puts it well:

I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.

Romans 7:15 (NRSV)

Anyone who’s done time in the church knows that Satan reserves the pulpit and piano stool for somebody’s I, somebody who has to be “the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral.”

(I don’t deny there are truly godly exceptions.)

In Romans 8 Paul identifies the two states: ego (mind set on the flesh) and egolessness (mind set on the spirit). The terms aren’t interchangeable, but for the Christ-follower they’re close enough.

Ask: who’s driving? who’s in the back seat (keeping his or her mouth shut)? “Flesh” is I driving, Spirit is God driving.

Ironically, flesh (ego) will drive to church, volunteer for Meals on Wheels—anything, to stay in the driver’s seat. And,  the moment I become aware that God is driving, I stop the car and take over.

I’ve been struck by Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount:

On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many deeds of power in your name?’ Then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; go away from me, you evildoers.’

 Matt 7:22-23 (NRSV)

 What hits me in the face every time I read this section is that Jesus calls people evildoers who prophesied in his name, cast out demons in his name, and did deeds of power in his name!

“I never knew you,” he tells them.

Why?

Because the spotlight never left their ego while they did all these ostensibly spiritual things.

Acts 19.11-17 tells the humorous story of the seven sons of Sceva who attempted to cast out demons in the name of Paul and Jesus. But the demon replied, “Jesus I know, and Paul I know, but who are you?”

The power of evil clearly recognized that ego was in charge of the show, not God.

 Dorothee Sölle writes about “Ego and Egolessness” in chapter 12 of The Silent Cry. She describes the insights of Simone Weil, Leo Tolstoy, and Dag Hammarskjöld into the shedding of ego.

She looks back at medieval asceticism, one attempt to rein in ego. Of asceticism Paul writes,

These [regulations] have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-imposed piety, humility, and severe treatment of the body, but they are of no value in checking self-indulgence.

Col 2:23 (NRSV)

 Victor Hugo’s achingly accurate depiction of Claude Frollo, the archdeacon in lust for Esmerelda, the gypsy girl, reveals how so-called spirituality becomes a vehicle for pride and violence.

Sölle suggests, correctly, that in today’s consumer society simplicity is a better alternative than hair shirts. She identifies the sexism and privilegism built into old practices. In order to flourish spiritually, many women and the poor need to build up a self, rather than strip it away; for, their selfhood has been abused and put down by the world.

Sölle quotes the saying: ”Live simply that others may simply live.” (The biggest temptation I’ll admit to here is buying books.)

Ego and egolessness, from the human perspective, are like the bright and dark sides of the moon, two parts of an indivisible whole.

The goal remains, again as Paul says:

I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

Gal 2:19-20 (NRSV)

 But egolessness and selffulness (Andrew Lester’s beautiful word) is not something I can achieve, no matter what physical or psychological gymnastics I perform. It is a gift only God can give; a gift God sometimes gives in illness, failure, suffering, pain, or death; a gift God always gives in mercy, compassion, and joy.

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Notes on joy

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

Dorothee Sölle ends the second major section of her book The Silent Cry with a chapter on mysticism and joy.  Here are a few snippets.

  • Tthe Buddhist concept of “mindfulness” or “attentiveness” is being fully present now. An example: You can wash dishes to have clean dishes, or you can wash dishes to wash dishes.
  • The Hasidim said, “Melancholy is the dust in the soul Satan spreads out.”
  • Rumi: “Someone who is in God is drunk without wine and full without meat.”
  • A woman who heard Sölle preach, wrote her: “teach the people whom you send to ’study God’ to dance…teach them things other than–or not only—educated words.”
  • “Joy wants to inhabit us and not merely drop in for a visit.”
  • In praise “something …is loved out of darkness into light.”
  • A midrash on Psalm 104: “the world becomes visible only where it is lifted up in song.”

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“Will and Spirit,” Gerald G. May, received

Sunday, September 6th, 2009

The used book trade via the Internet has got to be a huge advance for humankind, at least for bibliophiles like me. Will and Spirit came today!

I’ve had more than one peak experience reading some book or other that opened my mind and heart to new vistas.

I’d welcome hearing from you what books led you to intellectual and spiritual highs.

Omitting classics like Imitation of Christ and The Cloud of Unknowing, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, here are some of my all time best reads (in no particular order):

Rollo May

  • The Meaning of Anxiety
  • The Courage to Create

James Fowler

  • The Stages of Faith

Gerald G. May

  • Will and Spirit
  • Addiction and Grace

Erich Fromm

  • The Art of Loving

John Fortunato

  • Embracing the Exile

Irvin Yalom

  • The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy

Findley B. Edge

  • The Quest for Vitality in Religion

Martin Buber

  • I and Thou

Dietrich Bonhoffer

  • The Cost of Discipleship
  • Life Together

Dorothee Sölle

  • The Silent Cry

Thomas R. Kelly

  • A Testament of Devotion

A series I’ve enjoyed is from Paulist Press, Classics of Western Spirituality

  • Anabaptist Spirituality
  • Quaker Spirituality

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Ups and downs today

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

9:00 p.m.

End of a long day, a stream of consciousness reflection.

Day began at 1 a.m. with Sandy unlocking the front door and coming in. She came home from the hospital in a taxi. At these times I wish I could still drive.

We slept, a little later than normal. She had a doctor’s appointment.

Peritonitis had occurred, not that unusual for starting PD.

She’s been on the end stage renal diet (what a bad name) for seven weeks, and is finding the cardboard-styrofoam-library paste menu hard to choke down.

Sandy’s taken in stride so many challenges, it rattles me to watch her struggle.

I concocted a simple sauce made of margarine, sugar free red raspberry jam, sugar free cranberry juice, and water. Reduced that by about half. We poured it over roast pork and barley Mary Fran brought earlier in the week.

A highlight of the day came when Sandy enjoyed the sauce.

Flavor! Flavor! the name of the game.

Some patients actually starve because they just can’t take the  restricted diet.

I’m resolved to find some tasty alternatives on the net and in various cookbooks, as well as trying my hand at some things.

Tonight we had phone calls that assured us that we do not stand alone.

But I admit I feel kind of blue.

Letting go of feelings

This morning I felt high reading Sölle’s book The Silent Cry. She defines mysticism as “direct experience with God,” the chief value of my childhood faith, and looks to some on the left wing of the reformation, the Anabaptists, as models.

Their spiritual writings in the Paulist Classics of Western Spirituality (for me, not including Menno Simons) literally light my fire.

Sölle writes:

  • “[I]n praising the source of all good, the ego that is possessed by goals and that craves dominance vanishes. It has stepped out of itself. It has scuttled itself.”
  • “That we may live without Eigenschaft [what is one's own: characteristic features, idiosyncracies, and singularity, as well as love of self and egoism]…is an expression of the most profound freedom we can attain. We become free when, no longer wed (ledig) to fears and constraints, we are in God’s presence “without a why or a wherefore.”

I re-member (am joined again to) exalted feelings as I think about this.

In Philippians 3, using accountant language of profit and loss, Paul writes about leaving behind all things, bad and good, for the sake of Christ: “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (v. 8).

He goes on to say that he longs to share in Christ’s sufferings that he may also share in Christ’s resurrection (vv. 10-11).

A year or so ago, I discovered this:

 For [God] has graciously granted you the privilege not only of believing in Christ, but of suffering for him as well.

Phil 1:29 (NRSV)

My gut response was being pissed off. No thanks! I thought.

I read some prayer of someone asking God to make it really hard, agonizing, for them. They could take it!

Not me! I thought. I know suffering from the inside. I’ll use my Get out of jail FREE card any time I can.

What I am learning, I hope, is to become less enslaved to such feelings.

Some days are diamonds,
some days are stone.
Some days the cold wind
won’t leave you alone.

That’s how it is. So what?

In  good times, in bad times, feeling fine, feeling lousy, feeling nuthin’—may I praise thee, God. May I praise thee!

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