The first two stories, domination and revolution, are a kind of yin and yang. Where one exists the other will inevitably follow. —Brian McLaren
Gareth Higgins grew up in Northern Ireland, a place haunted by cycles of violence and revenge. His experience shaped a commitment to live out a better story:
Throughout my childhood, nearly 4,000 people were killed and over 40,000 directly physically injured. Countless hundreds of thousands were traumatized or otherwise wounded by a conflict rooted in the domination story but met by the revolution story. I’m not sure that I like the word “revolution” because it’s also been applied to movements for the common good. If we take it literally, it actually means a movement that ends up exactly where it started. It might be better called the revenge story.
Movements that overthrow repressive regimes have not always replaced them with something better. In fact, unless a restorative consciousness is engaged, revolutions run the risk of merely turning the tables, replacing one set of broken relationships with yet more domination, perhaps a slightly less oppressive form of domination, but domination, nonetheless.
Instead of replacing domination with more domination, we need to imagine societies and institutions in which everyone is welcome at the table. The only rule for joining would be to agree not to harm anyone. For that to happen, the table needs to be enlarged, not flipped over, with the widest range of people possible involved in making and setting the table. It’s not my table, nor is it theirs. In the spirit of the Seventh Story of liberation and reconciliation, it’s Love’s table….
These past few years, many of us have felt more concerned than ever about elected politics. It’s felt like we’ve been living in revolutionary times, but really revenge times, times where we pit ourselves against each other and where we believe that the only way to have peace and security in the world is to totally defeat our political opponents. But whether your team or my team was in charge or not, whether they occupy the positions of power in society, there’s only so much that elected politics can do.
Higgins shares his hope for the future:
If you want a better world, tell a better story, even about the possibility of embodying justice without vengeance. If you think that sounds naive, I hear you. But I’m coming from a society where we have enacted significant generational, structural change. We have radically reduced the use of violence and taken some tentative steps toward cooperating with each other rather than just flipping the tables so that the people who used to be oppressed are now the people doing the oppressing. The reason [justice without vengeance] doesn’t sound naive to me is because I’ve seen it work.
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Jesus had strained relationships, too. (From He Gets Us.)
We were thinking about what Jesus’ relationships with friends and family might have looked like and were surprised by what we found. Pastel paintings and imagery of Jesus so often depict him having a peaceful, wonderful time with his loved ones, but a closer look at the text paints a more complex picture.
Shortly after beginning his public ministry, Jesus went back to his hometown to share his message. A whole crowd gathered to hear him speak. By the time he was done speaking, they were calling to have him killed. They even tried to take matters into their own hands and throw him off a cliff. If we read this story too quickly, we might miss the fact that the very people trying to kill him grew up with him. They would have been friends and neighbors that knew Jesus when he was a boy. And that’s not the only example of good relationships gone sour. One of Jesus’ closest friends gave him up to the authorities in exchange for money, and another denied ever knowing him while he was being arrested. His family doubted him, and his own mother likely felt the relational strains that came part and parcel of a full-time traveling ministry.
The point is, Jesus’ relationships were far from perfect. Betrayal, doubt, insecurity, disagreement and distance muddied the waters even for Jesus. He couldn’t avoid relational stresses, but he did give us a model for how to respond to them and work toward restoration. His model? Radical patience and forgiveness.
It might have been best illustrated in a story he told about a father and son. The son asked for his inheritance while the father was still alive—he valued the money more than the relationship. The father obliged, gave the money, and the son went off and spent it until he found himself completely destitute with nothing left. He resolved to return home to his father to humbly ask for a job—not to reclaim his spot as son, but as one of many hired hands. As he was walking up to the house, the father saw him from afar and ran out to embrace him. To forgive him. To welcome him home as a son.
Repairing broken relationships is incredibly difficult, and the forgiveness Jesus both talked about and displayed is often messy and complicated. But know if you feel the pang of hurt in your relationships, Jesus did too, and take encouragement in his resolve to repair what was broken.
In the podcast Learning How to See, Brian McLaren shares how he learned the story of domination:
Looking back at my schooling, our whole introduction to history was told in terms of domination. The mighty empires that dominated, the explorers sent out by their home countries to dominate the world. Even my religious background was deeply rooted in the domination story because we Christians believed that our religion should dominate…. Theologically, my understanding of God was that God was the ultimate and universal dominating force. I remember from my youngest age hearing a Bible verse from the New Testament, “Every knee will bow, and every tongue will confess that Jesus is Lord” (Philippians 2:10–11). What I pictured is this powerful omnipotent God with sword drawn … demanding you bow your knee. It was this dominating vision of God. In that way, domination was the way the universe was supposed to run. [1]
Episcopal priest Stephanie Spellers describes the story of domination emerging from our collective self-centeredness:
When you see cultures based on White supremacy, misogyny, environmental exploitation, consumerism, oppression, and domination, you are actually seeing the fallout from self-centrism. Entire systems, institutions, and societies are fully capable of this sin, as when a group places itself at the center and expects the rest of humanity and creation to support its singular prosperity.
There is no possibility for right relationship if one powerful group protects and sustains itself over and against all others. From there, it’s just too easy to construct binaries and hierarchies of human existence. Our group is good; all of you are bad. Our group belongs on top; we have to keep you low. Our group owns these resources and knows the best way to use them; you will only receive what we give you. Other members of the human family become objects and tools to be acquired, controlled, used, and discarded. [2]
McLaren points to the difference between domination and dominion in the Bible:
The book of Genesis is often blamed for the domination story because, in the Garden of Eden story, human beings are given dominion over the rest of creation (Genesis 1:28). People assume dominion means domination, but I don’t think you have to read the story that way. The nature of God in the first creation story isn’t God dominating and forcing the world into a certain mold. It is “Let there be light.” It’s a permission-giving power.
It’s such a fascinating phrase: “Let there be light.” And also “Let there be land, let there be sea, let there be crawling creatures, let there be fish, let there be humans.” It’s a permission-giving rather than a domination. Then when human beings are made in the image of God, and God says, “You can have dominion,” we would expect it should be the same kind of gentle presence rather than a dominating, controlling, exploiting presence. It’s not “Let there be exploitation.” It’s very, very different. [3]
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“God has many that the Church does not, and the Church has many that God does not.“
(Bonhoeffer says this in his essay, “Christ, Reality, and Good. Christ, Church and World.”)
In my graduate studies at Princeton, I had the opportunity to take a semester-long class devoted to the life, work, and theology of Bonhoeffer. I chose to write a paper on the middle section of the quote presented here in #3.
A main idea that Bonhoeffer noticed in the New Testament was that after Christ, there was no longer a true distinction between one realm/world that was “sacred” and another realm/world that was “profane.” That dichotomy was faulty and inaccurate. There is only one reality because of Christ, and it is “reconciled.”
For Bonhoeffer as a Lutheran pastor, this realization of a “reconciled world” was an important distinction. As a result, his ethics and theology were not able to call anyone or anything “sacred” or “profane” but only as “reconciled.”
And, it all leads me to wonder… “What could this world look like if we approached everyone and everything as already reconciled?
For the next two weeks, the Daily Meditations will be inspired by The Seventh Story, an e-book written by Brian McLaren and Gareth Higgins, which offers a vision of love, reconciliation, and hope. Father Richard describes how stories provide purpose:
It doesn’t matter how old we are; we all need stories to believe in. If there’s no storyline, no integrating images that define who we are or give our lives meaning or direction, we just won’t be happy. I can’t imagine I’m alone in longing for us collectively to embrace a better story, one with the power to change our hearts and minds and enliven our imaginations. [1]
Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions introduced the term “paradigm shift.” A paradigm is a set of beliefs, stories, images, concepts, and structures that govern the way we think about something. Kuhn (1922–1996) held that paradigm change becomes necessary when a previous paradigm becomes so full of holes and patchwork “fixes” that a complete overhaul is necessary. The shift in thinking which might have felt threatening at one time now appears as the only way forward and as a real lifeline. I hope we are at one of these critical junctures again. Might we be willing to adopt a new story, a new set of beliefs, values, and systems that could change (and maybe even save) humanity and our world? [3]
Brian McLaren uses the phrase “framing story” to describe a similar change in paradigms.
[A framing story] gives people direction, values, vision, and inspiration by providing a framework for their lives…. If it tells us that the purpose of life is for individuals or nations to accumulate an abundance of possessions and to experience the maximum amount of pleasure during the maximum number of minutes of our short lives, then we will have little reason to manage our consumption. If our framing story tells us that we are in life-and-death competition with each other … then we will have little reason to seek reconciliation and collaboration and nonviolent resolutions to our conflicts….
But if our framing story tells us that we are free and responsible creatures in a creation made by a good, wise, and loving God, and that our Creator wants us to pursue virtue, collaboration, peace, and mutual care for one another and all living creatures, and that our lives can have profound meaning … then our society will take a radically different direction, and our world will become a very different place. [4]
The Stories That Don’t Work
In their e-book The Seventh Story, Brian McLaren and Gareth Higgins create a tale of the origin of seven stories of how humans—The People—interact and live with one another:
One day, a long time ago, one of The People saw another one of The People holding something shiny. “I want it,” said one of The People, so he took it. When he got back home that night, the rest of The People were amazed. “Because I have a shiny object,” he proclaimed, “You have to listen to me.” He told them a story about what he had learned about how to be happy, how to have peace and security, how to keep the shiny thing that he had found. The first story [the domination story] said that the way to be happy is to rule over others.
But every time that story was attempted, people were unhappy because the rulers oppressed them. So a second story was invented: Let’s overthrow the rulers. This [revolution] story didn’t work either because it just turned the tables, putting new people under oppression.
Another story began in which the old revolutionaries withdrew into their own isolated spaces and judged the world. Nothing changed. These island communities used the same old stories to run themselves, competing to be in charge … and dominating each other.
Meanwhile, the domination story and the isolation story had a business merger, which resulted in an experiment: if they could get rid of the people they didn’t like, who looked or sounded different, or whose customs weren’t like their own, surely that would fix things? Of course, that [purification] story just led to more suffering.…
The People still weren’t happy, and they knew it…. The People tried to convince themselves that things were okay by accumulating things; toys or nations, it was all the same to them.… The People kept hurting, and hurting each other. A sixth story [the victimization story] was created…. The People would make sure that no one would ever forget that they were the victims, that their suffering was their very identity, and that no one had suffered as much as them.…
Then, something new; a poet came to town, a storyteller who knew that the domination story, the revolution story, the isolation story, the purification story, the accumulation story, and the victimization story were all destined to fail.
They were destined to fail because they invited every human being, who is already interdependent with every other human being, and even with the earth itself, to pretend instead that we are in a competition.… The poet had a radical idea, the seed of a Seventh Story that will heal the world.… In the Seventh Story, the story of reconciliation, we still get to win, just not at anybody else’s expense. In the Seventh Story, human beings are not the protagonists of the world. Love is.
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From our friend Gareth Higgins site, The Porch:
FULL VERSION: Seamus Heaney, who died ten years ago this week, had been such a presence in Irish and northern Irish culture from before I was born that his death was more shocking than most. His distinction not only as a poet in the traditional sense, but a national wisdom figure had taken on an almost supernatural quality. He helped us know ourselves; and probably more than any other writer of his time, had things to say about the suffering arising from the conflict in and about Northern Ireland. Things to say that transcended us versus them. Words that made things like pens and shovels seem like mythical artefacts, blackberries and skylights like miracles. Part of the point of poetry, of course, is to puncture our mundanity, revealing the beauty potentially underneath everything. Heaney, obviously, had a special gift, which he honed; I don’t know if he’s the best poet Ireland has ever produced, and I’m not sure “best” is a poetic category, but we needed him then, and we need him now, because he took what mattered seriously.
I once briefly worked for BBC radio, presenting an arts show; and when Heaney would appear on it (he was loyally generous to Belfast broadcasters), he communicated by fax. This was long after fax machines were unnecessary – but he didn’t do other forms of electronic communication, at least not with us (it’s well known that the last message he sent to his beloved was by text, noli timere, be not afraid. The Latin overcomes the digital tendency to superficiality.) Come to think of it, a handwritten fax sent by a Nobel Laureate to thank a production team for a good job felt a good deal more real than email. Perhaps he did consider fax to be necessary after all – it suited the humane depth you would expect from him in conversation.
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Celebrity culture and our current status hierarchies tell us that the meaning of our lives is proportionate to how many people are paying attention to our work (or even merely what we wear, or who we are seen with, or how much money we get paid). But that’s a lie. It doesn’t serve the common good nor our own individual wellbeing to remember Seamus Heaney as unreachably better than any of us, just because he was famous. Like all publicly successful artists, his prominence started out as luck.
The fact that he was a magnificent poet (which may be worth aspiring to) had little to do with his fame (which may be worth ignoring). So it is with all of us – your gifts are probably not proportionate to how many people are buying your books or records, or watching your films, or coming to your shows or festivals. “Success” comes through chance, being in the right place at the right time, or having something so awful happen that it attracts the attention of crowds.
Your book sales or social media stats or the number of people attending your community gatherings are not the measure of you – either your inherent value or what you bring to the world.
You are, we are like characters in a play in which all the roles are supporting parts. It’s the responsibility of poetry to help us value the lives that are usually out of the spotlight as much as those that are bathed in it.
It moves me to think that Heaney’s best known poem, Digging, is about something as small and as cosmic as the relationship between a son and his father; so mundane and astonishing as cutting turf and holding a pen.
I don’t know more than most of us about who Seamus Heaney really was. But his way of holding himself in his writing, and in public appearances, and the one time I talked with him – neither light nor heavy, knowing who he was but not letting it get in the way of your own unfolding – was one good answer to what we need right now.
To take life seriously but not take ourselves too seriously.
To breathe before we speak.
To reimagine the places we’re from and the people we are in ways that honor both the light and shadow of experience, the shock and solace; and in the way we story them, make them a little better than when they found us.
We are each given a field to tend, and a shovel to dig with.
I am beyond glad that Seamus Heaney tended and dug the way he did. Because of that, he helped me see myself, and to see through the darkness that so often threatened to overwhelm me and my people, and the place I’m from, over and over again. I can imagine a northern Irish upbringing without his voice, but I’m glad I don’t have to.
I am willing to risk saying right here that there is someone who needs your voice, today, as much as I needed Heaney’s then.
So please, keep digging.
If you haven’t started yet, because you don’t believe that your field or your shovel matter, or you didn’t know you had a field or a shovel, please, for the love of life, do us all a favor. Try experimenting with the story that you matter as much as anyone else, and that whether what you do is seen by millions or one person who needs it, the meaning of you may actually be found in interrupting the way you’ve always thought about yourself, and picking up the tool that has been waiting for you.
When fear rushed in, I learned how to hear my heart racing, but refused to allow my feelings to sway me. That resilience came from my family. It flowed through our bloodline. —Coretta Scott King, My Life, My Love, My Legacy
Author Cole Arthur Riley describes how she has faced a lifetime of fear, ultimately praying to God for restful steadiness.
More than most things, I’m afraid. When I say this, people always seem to want to assure me that it isn’t the case. But we know. Since I was little, I would always find a way to imagine the worst possible versions of the future. Maybe on some level I’ve grown to believe if I prepare for it, it will hurt less when it comes. But it makes for an agitated body and mind. When you always expect a demon around every corner, your most mundane moments still feel like a risk….
What do we do when our fears are in fact rational? When fear and wisdom are enmeshed? When we would be foolish not to fear? More often than we realize, fear is a protective intuition. It is what stops you from driving with no headlights on, from touching your hand to flame, from going outside to meet the coyotes. We don’t have to demonize our fear to survive it. For this reason, I have an aversion to language of “conquering” our fears. We are not at war with ourselves; it is better to listen with compassion.
As a child, maybe you were told there is nothing to be afraid of. As adults, when we’re most honest, I think we know we have everything to be afraid of. This world, which has been so unsafe to so many of us, cannot be trusted not to harm us again. This isn’t pessimism, it’s confession.
Still, to live in a constant state of fear will keep you from the rest you were meant for. They are near opposites, fear and rest. It is not likely that you’ll relax those shoulders if somewhere within you feel the house is on fire. I want us to honor our fears without being tormented by them. Sacred intuition without restlessness.
This quote from James L. Farmer is at the front of my journal: “Courage, after all, is not being unafraid, but doing what needs to be done in spite of fear.” [1] The implication, of course, is that if you’re not scared, it’s not courage. If there is any bravery in me, it is in my refusal to let fear eclipse my imagination for anything other than pain. To maintain imagination for both the beautiful and the terrible is to marry prudence and hope.
The Koine Greek word δικαιοσυνεν (dikaiosynen) is the word that is commonly translated in Matthew 5:6 as “righteousness.” However, it can also be translated as “justice.”
Here we are, thousands of years after Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount, and most people understand this verse as being primarily about piety rather than societal justice.
I wonder what the shape, color, and vitality of Western Christianity could be if it placed its emphasis on societal justice rather than personal piety…
And, what does it mean for us that this text is usually in red ink in English translations of the New Testament? What does it have to say about us that we have translated Jesus’ own words away from emphasizing societal justice?
Ever heard of Ambrose? He is the early Church father who shepherded Augustine into the faith and even baptized him. Without Ambrose, we wouldn’t have Augustine, and without Augustine, we wouldn’t have most of Western civilization as we know it today.
What I enjoy about this quote is both that it is true and that it is so ancient. This saying from Ambrose is nearly 1700 years old, and yet it has stood the test of time and been passed down through the centuries because of its brevity and wisdom.
Seriously, there are just pearls like this scattered throughout Church history that we so rarely hear about from the pulpit. It is sayings such as this that deepen my appreciation for Church history.
3.
“The best guru is the one who tells you that you do not need a guru.“
I have personally interacted with Rob a number of times over the past 20 years. One thing that is remarkable about him has been the way he has publicly shared his personal evolution at almost every step.
This idea from him, though, is just his distillation of a truth that transcends time and culture…
No teacher should want you to be their student forever.
One of the things that seemed backward to me in Church culture was the way that it sometimes created a spiritual co-dependency between the congregation and the pastor.
I would talk and teach about the need to empower people to interpret the faith responsibly for themselves, to teach them, to raise them up, and to let them become equals with the pastor because, in my mind, the pastor’s main job is to remind people they can be “pastors” for one another.
You know, that whole “priesthood of all” thing?
We need pastors who can help organize, teach the basics, and mentor others, but the best pastors are ones who elevate others to their own position or even higher.
The best gurus/pastors/teachers are the ones who are happiest when you cease being their student because that means it is time for you to grow beyond them.
4.
“Almost all problems in the spiritual life stem from lack of self-knowledge.“
Over the course of my own life as a head-oriented person, I have seen the ways in which I intellectualized things in order to distance myself from the intense emotions I was experiencing.
At some point, I probably internalized that it is so much “safer” to intellectualize/speculate about a situation that might make me angry, sad, or disappointed rather than actually experiencing the anger, sadness, or disappointment.
Sometimes I would feel the emotions of an even a full 48 hours later.
It was not healthy. I was not healthy. I realized through counseling and therapy that such a distance between the head and the heart was dis-integrating.
Ever since I have been trying to keep the head and the heart experience as close together at the moment as possible, I see how it is a common problem for us humans to do so.
And, if I am being honest, I have seen how it intimidates others just to name my own emotions out loud… “This makes me angry.” “I am sad to hear this.”
I have literally seen people freeze because they don’t know what might happen if they were to also admit their own internal experiences to themselves.
Anger is in some ways a motivating emotion, but it can turn and become too volatile. Sadness is the opposite in that it often saps our motivation or kills our hope before it even takes root.
Again, I think that many of us are terrified of deep feelings and so we cocoon/castle up in deep thinking.
All this goes to say, be integrated. It might be hard to keep the head and the heart both present in the moment, but I have found it to be revivifying.
Richard Rohr expands on order-disorder-reorder as the pattern of resilience and faith:
Order by itself normally wants to eliminate any disorder and diversity. Disorder by itself closes us off from any primal union, meaning, and eventually even sanity in both people and systems. Reorder, or transformation of people and systems, happens when order and disorder are understood to work together. [1]
I see this pattern in the Bible: (1) We start with group thinking; (2) we gradually move toward individuation through experiences of chosenness, failure, and grace; (3) then there is a breakthrough to unitive consciousness by the few who are led and walk fully through those first two stages. Consider Moses, David, many prophets, Job, Mary, Mary Magdalene, Paul, and Jesus himself. We could also describe it as (1) Simple Consciousness (Order), (2) Complex Consciousness (Disorder), and (3) Non-Dual Consciousness, or “the unitive way” (Reorder).
The unitive way—or what I am calling Reorder—is utterly mysterious and unknown to people in the first Order stage, and still rather scary and threatening to people in the second Disorder stage. If we are not trained in a trust of mystery and some degree of tolerance for ambiguity and suffering, we will not proceed very far on the spiritual journey. In fact, we will often run back to Order when the going gets rough in Disorder.
Thus the biblical tradition, and Jesus in particular, praises faith more than love. Why? Because faith is that patience with mystery that allows us to negotiate the stages. As Gerald May (1940–2005) pointed out in The Dark Night of the Soul, it allows God to lead us through darkness—where God knows and we don’t. This is the only way to come to love! Love is the true goal, but faith is the process of getting there, and hope is the willingness to live without resolution or closure. They are indeed “the three things that last” (1 Corinthians 13:13).
Having faith doesn’t have to do with being perfect. It has to do with staying in relationship, “hanging in there,” holding on to union as tightly as God holds on to us. It’s not a matter of being correct but of being connected.
I once wrote in my journal while on retreat:
How good of you, God, to make truth a relationship instead of an idea. Now there is room between you and me for growth, for conversation, for exception, for the infinite understandings created by intimacy, for the possibility to give back and to give something to you—as if I could give anything back to you. You offer the possibility to undo, to please, to apologize, to change, to surrender. There’s room for stages and for suffering, for mutual passion and mutual pity. There’s room for mutual everything.
That’s the genius of the biblical tradition. Jesus offers himself as “way, truth, and life” (John 14:6), and suddenly it has all become the sharing of our person instead of any fighting over ideas. [3]
For Dr. Barbara Holmes, our faith invites us to choose joy amid crisis and injustice:
Our current circumstances require resilience and the steadfast belief that joy is a healing inner event and a spiritual practice.…
BIPOC folks who remember the ways of the elders have seen it in action. Performance of joy while the wounds are still being inflicted is not a display of otherworldly strength. It is an act of faith that God will not give us more than we can bear.…
We are not required to fight for our reality; we can just live it. We can be weird and whole and as shapeshifting as necessary, for we are being called to another purpose. We are being invited to awaken to our true nature as spirit beings, energy sharers, and prophets of potential. The joy spoken of in Holy Scripture is accessible, but also has a certain “beyondness” to it: The world didn’t give it and the world can’t take it away. As we hear from Jesus in John 16:22: “So you have pain now; but I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.” [1]
Brian McLaren describes the radical trust and resilience that spiritual practices can offer in difficult times:
We have to prepare ourselves to live good lives of defiant joy even in the midst of chaos and suffering. This can be done. It has been done by billions of our ancestors and neighbors. Their legacy teaches us to see each intensifying episode of turbulence as a labor pain from which a new creative opportunity can be born. Life will be tough; the only question is whether we will become tougher, wiser, and more resilient.… The communities that learn and teach … spiritual resilience will become vital resources for everyone. (We can hope that some Christian communities will take part in this work.) These individual and communal practices will help us dump bitterness, fear, disappointment, and toxicity and refuel with mercy, vision, anticipation, and equanimity. They will help us ignore what deserves to be ignored and monitor what needs to be monitored. They will help us reframe our narratives, so we can mourn, grieve, and lament … even as we imagine, celebrate, and labor for the birth of a better future.…
To trust in the process is another way of saying to trust in an intelligence wiser than current human intelligence, to trust in a love deeper than current expressions of human love, to trust in a desire stronger and wiser than current expressions of human desire. Christians refer to this wisdom, love, and desire as God or the Divine or the Creative Spirit, and others can find their own ways of naming it…. To use familiar biblical language, we will need to walk by faith through the valley of the shadow of death [Psalm 23:4], always holding anticipative space for something beautiful to be born, especially during the most painful contractions. [2]
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A devotional from Andrew Lang
One of the scariest aspects of personal change – no matter how big or small – is that we can’t be sure of how we will be held in the midst of it.
I’ve given 30 years to this business – what will people say when I walk away?
When our divorce is made public, will my community still be here for me?
How will my partner respond to this new belief I seem to have?
With this diagnosis, will people look at me differently?
What will my family say and do when I tell them?
Will I be able to holdmyself with kindness?
Whether it’s a shift in our identity, a midlife transition, a change in our belief system, or something else entirely, this space of unknowing can often fill us with anxiety.
I invite you to reflect on the poem below and how you have experienced being held (or not being held) in the midst of your own life transitions and changes.
Buddhist teacher Lama Rod Owens writes of the “New Saint” as an individual who is faithful to the path of spiritual and social liberation in our own time:
New Saint is a contemporary expression of an ancient Buddhist tradition that understands the saint as a bodhisattva. Bodhisattva is roughly translated as “spiritual warrior” and is one who is motivated by the energy of bodhicitta, or a profound altruistic wish to free all beings from suffering. I feel that the world is desperate for a reframing of this tradition that is contemporary, direct, simple, and accessible to all folks, especially those who do not identify as Buddhist.
Saints are people from various spiritual and religious traditions who have deeply embodied love and compassion and whose embodiment has inspired countless others to aspire to that same practice. However, for most of us, sainthood seems a lofty and vague endeavor that is more divine and religious than practical. This current era is calling for saints—New Saints—who are from this time and place, who speak the language of this time and place, and, most importantly, who embrace the integration of both social and ultimate liberation. New Saints can surrender into the Divine or spiritual while disrupting systems of violence. I believe that we all can and must become New Saints for ourselves and our communities.
Owens describes how the New Saint works for freedom for all:
The New Saint’s end goal is liberation for themselves, all beings, and all phenomena. Everything must be freed. The cultivation and unification of clarity, love, compassion, and joy point the New Saint toward freedom….
When I say “freedom” or “liberation,” I am talking about our fundamental capacity to choose responsiveness over reactivity. Experiencing the sensations of our minds and bodies reduces reactivity and allows us to experience fluidity. When there is more fluidity, there is more potential for care, and that care helps us to reduce violence against ourselves and others. Freedom is the agency to choose how we want to be in relationship with ourselves and the world around us.…
On the community level, outer freedom means that the community has agency to determine what it needs and has access to what it needs. Individuals are held, loved, and given space to meet their needs within and with the support of the community. It means being able to live in harmony with other communities and not feeling dominant or feeling the need to dominate. There is room for cooperation and understanding.
Owens reminds us that we have a choice to be free:
In the end, we must understand that our feelings about freedom have nothing to do with freedom.Freedom isn’t a feeling; it is as much a state of being and experiencing as joy. To be free is to remember that I have always been free. The real labor of liberation is acknowledging that there is always a choice, even though I must work to get back to that choice
Father Richard defines resilience in the context of the Christian faith:
Resilience is really a secular word for what religion was trying to say with the word faith. Even Jesus emphasized faith more than love. Without a certain ability to let go, to trust, to allow, we won’t get to any new place. If we stay with order too long and we’re not resilient enough to allow a certain degree of disorder, we don’t get smarter, we just get rigid.
Unfortunately, this is what characterizes so many religious people. They’re not resilient at all. Then there’s another set of people who have settled down in disorder—believing there’s no pattern, there’s nothing always true. It’s a deep cynicism about reality, and that’s equally problematic. I think such faith in both good order and acceptable disorder—creating a new kind of creative reorder—is actually somewhat rare. [1]
To have faith, to grow toward love, union, salvation, or enlightenment, we must be moved from order to disorder and then ultimately to reorder.
Eventually our ideally ordered universe—our “personal salvation” project [2], as Thomas Merton called it—must and will disappoint us, if we are honest. Our spouse dies, we were rejected on the playground as a child, we find out we’re needy, we fail an exam for a coveted certification, or we finally realize that many people are excluded from our own well-deserved “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” This is the disorder stage, or what Christians call from the Adam and Eve story the “fall.” It is necessary in some form if any real growth is to occur; but some of us find this stage so uncomfortable we try to flee back to our first created order—even if it is killing us and the very things we love.
There is no nonstop flight to reorder. Various systems call it “enlightenment,” “exodus,” “nirvana,” “heaven,” “springtime,” or even “resurrection.”Reorder is life on the other side of death, the victory on the other side of failure, the joy on the other side of the pains of childbirth. It is an insistence on going through—not under, over, or around. To arrive there, we must endure, learn from, and include disorder, transcending the first naïve order—but also still including it!
Happiness is the spiritual outcome and result of resilience, full growth, and maturity. This is why I am calling it “reorder.” Ultimately, we are taken to happiness—we cannot find our way there by willpower or cleverness. Yet we all try! We seem insistent on not recognizing the universal pattern of growth and change. Trees grow strong by reason of winds and storms. Boats are not meant to stay in permanent dry dock or harbor. Baby animals must be educated by their mothers in the hard ways of survival, or they almost always die young. It seems that each of us has to learn on our own what is well hidden but also in plain sight. [3]
Consecrating the Chaos
Dr. Otis Moss III considers difficulties we face as individuals and in community:
A true crisis—a threat to yourself or someone you love—can sometimes do wonders to focus the mind. In the moment, if we have spiritual practices in place or we are blessed with inspiration, the noise and confusion may recede for a little while, and we may see again what matters. But … you don’t get that kind of clarity every time your blood pressure rises.…
In our darkest times, when the storm anxiety, worry, and chaos sweeps over an entire community, such feelings are everywhere. People who have children or elders worry they can’t keep them safe. Those blessed with jobs worry about losing them. Even following the news can be too much to take. People with mental health issues feel even more intensely challenged. People who self-medicate do it more and more. Activists who work in their communities start saying to themselves, “The more I do to fight back, the more the pressure builds. The dam is cracking, and every time I plug a hole with my finger, ten more holes show up.” The question haunts us: When will this end? …
Struggling in all that confusion, uncertainty, and violence, we become spiritually worn down. It’s too hard to keep believing.
We get tired.
We think:
My road is too hard.
The powerful will never treat people right.
I’ve tried everything, there’s nothing to be done.
It’s no use.
Moss believes faith can sustain us in chaos:
In the storm of chaos, lost in confusion and disorder, … the question is whether there might be some way to use the harsh, unpredictable winds and the relentless currents of our lives to get us moving to where we actually want to go. Do we have the spiritual audacity and the practical means to turn chaotic energy to our own purposes?
When you take on the confusion and the violence and you refine them, purify them into something new, you are doing what in the vocabulary of faith we call consecrating your chaos. To consecrate is to make holy, to put it into service for good. In consecrating chaos, you engage it, tame it, name it, take what seemed out of control and charge it with a duty.
The model here is the creation itself. We read in Genesis [1:2] that in the beginning, “The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep.” Scripture begins with a whole world of chaos. Then God begins to find the possibilities of design in that formless void, separating light from darkness, water from land…. God consecrates the chaos, giving it form. It is presented to us as an act of creativity and of choice. God works in the chaotic void until there is order and light, and it is good. The Genesis story reminds us that the void is not as empty as we think. Chaos is never as chaotic as we fear.
Father Richard explains how living with paradox can open us to experience the mystery of God:
The question we must ask ourselves is, “How do we live the contradictions?” Live them—not just endure them or relieve ourselves from the tension by quickly resolving them. The times when we meet or reckon with our contradictions are often turning points, opportunities to enter into the deeper mystery of God. I’m deliberately using the word mystery to point to depth, an open future, immense freedom, a kind of beauty and truth that cannot be fully spoken or defined.
Many mystics speak of the God-experience as simultaneously falling into an abyss and being grounded. This sounds like a contradiction, but when we allow ourselves to fall into the abyss—into hiddenness, limitlessness, unknowability, a void without boundaries—we discover it’s somehow a rich, supportive, embracing spaciousness where we don’t have to ask (or answer) the questions of whether we’re right or wrong. We’re being held and so do not need to try to “hold” ourselves together. Please reflect on that.
This might be the ultimate paradox of the God-experience: “falling into the hands of the living God” (Hebrews 10:31). When we can give ourselves to it and not fight it or explain it, falling into the abyss is ironically an experience of ground, of the rock, of the foundation. This is totally counterintuitive. Our dualistic, logical mind can’t get us there. It can only be known experientially. That’s why the mystics use magnificent metaphors—none of them adequate or perfect—for this experience.
Mystery is not something we can’t know. Mystery is endless knowability on many different levels. Living inside such endless knowability is finally a comfort, a foundation of ultimate support, security, unrestricted love, and eternal care. It usually takes much of our life to get there; it’s surely what we mean by “growing” in faith. Each soul must learn on its own, hopefully aided by observing other faith-filled people.
The source of spiritual wisdom is to hold questions and contradictions patiently, much more than to find quick certitudes, to rush to closure or judgment as the ego and dualistic mind want to do. The ego wants to know it is right. It wants to stand on its own self-created “solid” ground—not the mysterious solid ground of the abyss. This is why so much religion remains immature and is often a hiding place for people who want to be in control instead of people trained in giving up control to a Loving Presence.
A mature friend or a good spiritual director will companion us as we learn how to negotiate the darkness, how to wait it out, how to hold on, how to live in liminal or threshold space. The dualistic mind just doesn’t know how to do that. The dualistic mind cannot deal with paradox, but the nondual mind can. In fact, it almost relishes and revels in mystery. Nondual consciousness is at home inside of the abyss.
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1.
“God is at home, it is we who have gone out for a walk.“
Just before Covid hit the world, I began reading Brueggemann’s work and found it to be incredibly timely. There are many people for whom the Prophets only pointed to Jesus, which is a massive disservice to the Prophets as a whole.
The Nevi’im (Prophets) existed because they were called by God to rail against and to hold accountable the religious and political leaders of their day for having lost the plot, for having accepted bribes, for failing to implement true justice, and for being more oppressors with their power rather than liberators.
Brueggemann is a biblical scholar with his emphasis being on the book of Jeremiah.
According to the biography, Jeremiah 22:16 caused a radical shift within Brueggemann to realize that “the cause of the poor and the needy” IS the knowledge of God, not a cause or an effect, it IS the knowledge of God.
4.
“To hope for all souls is imperative; and it is quite tenable that their salvation is inevitable.“
It has been a long time since I divorced myself from the version of Christianity that has a morbid fascination with Hell and damnation. In all honesty, being raised Lutheran, they were never really a part of my framework or understanding…
Over time, though, I came across figures who I looked up to from church history who also disbelieved that the unconditional love and grace of God would damn anyone eternally. Figures such as GK Chesterton, Soren Kierkegaard, Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Avila, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor, George MacDonald, and so many others.
After stumbling across these figures, I chose to go back to the original languages of the Old and New Testaments and was pleasantly surprised by what I found… whole passages talking about the restoration, reconciliation, and renewal of ALL.
I believe it’s in there, folks, we were simply told not to find it in the English translations that already downplay it. The Good News is good for ALL.
In a sermon preached in the fall of 2014, shortly after the shooting of Michael Brown and weeks of protests in Ferguson, Missouri, Rev. Dr. Otis Moss III spoke about the unique way Black Americans hold the tension between despair and hope:
It’s a strange affair to be Black and live in America, and even stranger to be Black and a person of faith in these yet-to-be-United States, to carry around the burden of a socially constructed idea called race and yet be filled with a divinely inspired mandate to eradicate all limitations to the human soul. Being Black means you are born with a Blues song tattooed on your heart, and at the same time you still have a Gospel shout that is welling up in your soul about to come out.
Another way to say it is that we live with repression and revelation simultaneously swimming in the same tributary of our spirit. There is nothing more confusing to the postmodern personality, to the millennial sojourner, than to have to exist between the strange life of dealing with your Blues and Gospel all the time. Madness and ministry, chaos and Christ. My father heard an elder in Georgia say it this way. When he asked her, “How are you doing, Mother?” she said, “I’m living between Oh Lord and Thank you, Jesus.”
For the most part, many of us are living in between, not quite at “Oh Lord” and not quite at “Thank you, Jesus,” but somewhere in between. If you choose to be conscious and understand the system at work, study the history of repression, know what hate will do when it’s turned inward onto your own spirit, examine the forces of consumption, get a picture of colonialism, understand the root of imperialism, and begin to deconstruct the powers that be. At some point, you will find yourself leaning upon the Blues and facing despair, and wondering if you should give up.
Moss offers the example of Rosa Parks (1913–2005) as someone who faced despair and chose hope and nonviolent action. Moss preaches:
For those of you who have fallen into a level of cynicism, thinking that we “cannot” and “nothing will work,” let me tell you, when you get up tomorrow on Monday morning, it will be December first. That means nothing to you, but let me break it down, because you should shout every December first. December first was the day … Rosa Parks sat down so you could stand up.
When you get up tomorrow, you say, “God, I thank you for Rosa. That she could sit down so I could stand up.” And only God can teach you to do two things that sound contradictory at the same time, that she sat down and stood up at the same time. We must make our history sacred.
There’s this Scripture that kind of trips us up. Whether you’re a Bible reader or not, you’re probably familiar with it. “Do not judge, or you too will be judged.” Matthew 7:1. Jesus says this toward the end of one of his most famous sermons. He was calling out the hypocrisy of pointing out the faults in others when we have our own faults we should be working on.
But Can and Should I Judge People in Daily Life?
Truthfully, we must make judgments about people almost every day. When applying for a job, do I want to work for this person? When meeting someone I’m attracted to, should I ask them out on a date? When I need to confide in someone, who do I trust as a friend? Just spend a couple of minutes online, and we realize our entire world is now based on reviews. From doctors to hotels, restaurants to dog walkers, many businesses live or die by the number of stars by their name.
The Judging Jesus is talking about comes from a different oplace, it come from our egos….
Honest evaluation, however, is different from the judgment Jesus was speaking of. Honest evaluation of others is necessary for a safe and functioning society. The judging Jesus refers to comes from a different place. It comes from our ego. We’re often seeking to elevate ourselves by belittling someone else. Or we try to justify our own bad behavior by labeling somebody else’s behavior as worse. Sometimes, biases and grudges affect how we view and treat others.
By recognizing our own flaws, we can become a little more merciful, understanding and accepting.
With that in mind, Jesus asked us to stop pinpointing the shortcomings of others and to look inwardly and deeply examine our own hearts and motives. It’s not comfortable. But here’s why it’s so important. Jesus knew that if we focused on our own faults and weaknesses, we could become more empathetic toward others. We’d recognize that, like us, every person has challenges and struggles that we can relate to. And that’s how Jesus’ radical love is demonstrated today. By recognizing our own flaws, we can all become a little more merciful, a little more patient, and a little more loving toward one another.
Scripture References:
Matthew 7:1; “Do not judge, or you too will be judged”.
Luke 6:37; Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be
John 7:24; but judge righteous judgment; give your sense and judgment of things, according to the truth and evidence of them;
This CO2- (Church Of 2) is where two guys meet each day to tighten up our Connections with Jesus. We start by placing the daily “My Utmost For His Highest” in this WordPress blog. Then we prayerfully select some matching worship music and usually pick out a few lyrics that fit especially well. Then we just start praying and editing and Bolding and adding comments and see where the Spirit takes us.
It’s been a blessing for both of us.
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