In her letter “Earth Hope,” Ghanaian theologian Mercy Oduyoye calls on future generations to encounter the reality of the earth and our place in it.

The long and short of all this is that if we want to live long, and have a healthy earth with healthy waters, we have to stop being self-centered. Life is stronger than us but life is also fragile and vulnerable in human hands. We are greedy and inconsiderate and so degrade the earth, the waters, and other human beings. If we are to leave a beautiful world for you and your grandchildren, we have to take seriously the fact that creation does not belong to us; we are part of creation. We cannot do what we like with earth, water, and other human beings. God expects us to keep the earth in good condition. The earth takes care of us and we have to take care of the earth and of each other.…

The spirit of God the Creator has been with us and we are all fired up like the disciples at Pentecost. We shall go out to tell others that another world is possible. I hope you will also tell all your playmates, classmates, and schoolmates that a possible world of beauty is in sight. [1]

Theologian Larry Rasmussen writes letters to his grandchildren, reflecting upon wonder, beauty, and our planet’s future: 

Did you know that before your generation, no humans of any stripe ever lived on a planet as hot as this one?…

Still, the world has not stopped being beautiful. You will remember our days on the red rock mesas of New Mexico, “this beautiful broken country of erosional beauty where rocks tell time differently and the wing beats of ravens come to us as prayers.” [2] You’ll remember our adobe-style house, too, and many patio hours sketching with colored chalk or doing a puzzle together. You may also remember dark skies of bright stars, even here in town, and the blue and pink stripes on the horizon at dawn.

I guess the Greeks had it right. Their word cosmos means “order”—those stars in their courses—and it also means “beauty,” as in cosmetics, though cosmetics is a bit trivial for the life and death of a hundred billion galaxies! Or for a striped dawn.

Cosmos as beauty and order belongs to life, [grandson], so go Greek and claim the beauty that exists. Let it guide you. Beauty is its own resistance, contending with all that is ugly and chaotic.…

If the tumultuous world has not stopped being beautiful, neither has love stopped being love: “Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy.” [3] That’s my latest most favorite author, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and she’s right: if we choose joy over despair and love over hate, it’s because Earth offers love and joy daily. [4]

The Problem with Experiences

After arriving at Elisha’s house, Naaman was furious for two reasons. First, the prophet had shamed Naaman by not personally greeting him. Instead, Elisha sent one of his servants to greet the “great man” from Syria and give him the instructions for healing his leprosy. And that was the second reason for Naaman’s anger.Elisha’s messenger told Naaman to wash himself in the Jordan River seven times. It was a shockingly simple procedure; nothing like the elaborate healing rituals demanded by the pagan gods of Naaman’s homeland. And there was nothing particularly special about the Jordan either. As Naaman noted, the rivers back in Syria were much more impressive. Therefore “he turned and went off in a rage” (2 Kings 5:12).Naaman’s pagan religion had taught him that asking a deity for an extraordinary request required an extraordinary ritual. He believed that the power of the gods was only accessed through sacred experiences, in sacred locations, and mediated by sacred priests. But Elisha was deliberately challenging Naaman’s pagan expectations. First, by refusing to even meet with him, the prophet was ensuring Naaman did not think Elisha possessed any control over Israel’s God. Now, with these uncomplicated instructions, he was showing that Israel’s God would not be manipulated by human rituals. Naaman was having his trust in both religious experts and religious experiences deconstructed.It’s remarkable how little has changed over 3,000 years. Every time we expect to encounter God at a massive, highly-produced worship event, or by traveling to some sacred retreat or conference, we are showing that Naaman’s pagan proclivities are still prevalent today. Many of us carry the assumption that to really know God’s presence and power, we must escape from our ordinary circumstances. We must metaphorically—and sometimes literally—climb a mountain. We need to surround ourselves with hundreds or thousands of others in a space made sacred through amplified music, theater lighting, and projected graphics. And when that “mountaintop” experience no longer gives us the spiritual high we seek, we’ll find another even louder and higher experience.Of course, even when these experiences do meet our emotional expectations we are still left wondering—We’re my feelings really the result of encountering God and his Spirit, or were they just the neurological byproduct of a meticulously controlled environment?Elisha wanted Naaman to have no doubts about who and what was responsible for his healing. So, rather than finding God’s power through elaborate religious experiences, he told Naaman to seek God in the mundane. Perhaps we should too. DAILY SCRIPTURE JOHN 4:19-24  2 KINGS 5:1-27 WEEKLY PRAYER Benedict of Nursia (480 – 543)Almighty God, give us wisdom to perceive you, intellect to understand you, diligence to seek you, patience to wait for you, eyes to behold you, a heart to meditate upon you, and life to proclaim you, through the power of the Spirit of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

The Really Real

Richard Rohr invites us to enter the Reign of God—what he describes as the “Really Real”—even though we face many difficult “realities” in our lives.

Jesus announced, lived, and inaugurated for history a new social order. He called it the Reign or Kingdom of God, and it became the guiding image of his entire ministry. The Reign of God is the subject of Jesus’ inaugural address (Mark 1:15; Matthew 4:17; Luke 4:16–21), his Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7), and most of his parables.

Once this guiding vision of God’s will became clear to Jesus after his baptism and time alone in the desert, everything else came into perspective. In fact, Matthew’s Gospel says Jesus began to preach “from then onward” (4:17). He had his absolute reference point that allowed him to judge and evaluate everything else properly. [1]

What we discover in the New Testament, especially in Matthew’s Gospel, is that the Reign of God is a new world order, a new age, a promised hope begun in the teaching and ministry of Jesus—and continued in us. I think of the Reign of God as the Really Real.

That experience of the Really Real—the “Kingdom” experience—is the heart of Jesus’ teaching. It’s Reality with a capital R, the very bottom line, the pattern-that-connects. It’s the goal of all true religion, the experience of the Absolute, the Eternal, what is. [2]

In order to explain this concept, it may be helpful to say what it’s not: the “Kingdom” is not the same as heaven. Many Christians have mistakenly thought that the Reign of God is “eternal life,” or where we go after we die. That idea is disproven by Jesus’ own prayer: “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as in heaven” (Matthew 6:10). As always, Jesus joins earth and heaven.

“Thy Kingdom come” means very clearly that God’s realm is something that enters into this world, or, as Jesus often says, “is close at hand.” We shouldn’t project it into another world. It’s a reality that breaks into this world now and then, when people are like God.

God gives us just enough tastes of God’s realm to believe in it and to want it more than anything. In his parables, Jesus never says the Kingdom is totally now or totally later. It’s always now-and-not-yet. We only have the first fruits of the Kingdom in this world, but we experience enough to know it’s the only thing that will ever satisfy us. Once we have had the truth, half-truths can’t satisfy us anymore. In its light, everything else is relative, even our own life. When we experience the Kingdom or love of God, it becomes ultimate and real truth for us.

When we live inside the Really Real, we live in a “threshold space” between this world and the next. We learn how to live between heaven and earth, one foot in both, holding them precious together. [3]

Our Limited Perspectives

For Father Richard, contemplation begins as we realize the limits of our own perspective. Reality is far vaster than we can perceive. 

Every viewpoint is a view from a point. Unless we recognize and admit our own personal and cultural viewpoints, we will never know how to decentralize our own perspective. We will live with a high degree of illusion that brings much suffering into the world. I think this is what Simone Weil meant by stating, “The love of God is the unique source of all certainties.” [1] Only an outer and positive reference point utterly grounds the mind and heart.

One of the keys to wisdom is that we must recognize our own biases, our own addictive preoccupations, and those things to which, for some reason, we refuse to pay attention. Until we see these patterns (which is early-stage contemplation), we will never be able to see what we do not see. Without such critical awareness of the small self, there is little chance that any individual will produce truly great knowing or enduring wisdom. [2]

Only people who have done their inner work can see beyond their own biases to something transcendent, something that crosses the boundaries of culture and individual experience. People with a distorted image of self, world, or God will be largely incapable of experiencing what is Really Real in the world. They will see things through a narrow keyhole. They’ll see instead what they need reality to be, what they’re afraid it is, or what they’re angry about. They’ll see everything through their aggression, their fear, or their agenda. In other words, they won’t see it at all.

That’s the opposite of true contemplatives, who have an enhanced capacity to see what is, whether it’s favorable or not, whether it meets their needs or not, whether they like it or not, and whether that reality causes weeping or rejoicing. Most of us will usually misinterpret our experience until we have been moved out of our false center. Until then, there is too much of the self in the way. Most of us do not see things as they are; we see things as we are. That is no small point.

When we touch our deepest image of self, a deeper image of reality, or a new truth about God, we’re touching something that opens us to the sacred. We’ll want to weep or to be silent, or to run away from it and change the subject because it’s too deep, it’s too heavy. As T. S. Eliot wrote, “human kind cannot bear very much reality.” [3]

That’s why I—and so many others—emphasize contemplation. It’s the way of going to the experience of the absolute without going toward ideology. There’s a difference. It’s going toward the experience of the good, the true, the beautiful, the real without going into a head trip, or taking the small self—or one’s momentary vantage point—too seriously. 

===================================

Everything is Going to be Ok. Everything.

Near the end of his life, Henri Nouwen, a Dutch priest, professor, and author, became fascinated by a German trapeze troupe called the Flying Rodleighs. In their flying and spinning, he saw more than an exhilarating show—he saw an illustration of our life with God.Nouwen recognized that the flyer—the person soaring through the air—was not the star of the trapeze show. The flyer’s maneuvers are only possible because he fully trusts that he will be caught. Everything depends on the catcher. Nouwen saw the connection to the life of faith. “I can only fly freely when I know there is a catcher to catch me,” he wrote. Nouwen continued:“If we are to take risks, to be free, in the air, in life, we have to know there’s a catcher. We have to know that when we come down from it all, we’re going to be caught, we’re going to be safe. The great hero is the least visible. Trust the catcher.”Nouwen’s trapeze illustration captures an important reality. The courage to obey God is proportional to how safe we believe we are. In Naaman’s story, this sense of safety is what the king of Israel lacked. His fear prevented him from courageously helping his neighbor, and from fulfilling God’s purposes for Israel. I suspect his vision of God and his goodness was deficient.Maybe the king had forgotten the stories of how the Lord had rescued his ancestors from Egypt with signs and wonders, how he gave Joshua victory when the people entered the promised land, or the great ways he protected David—Israel’s greatest king. The king most certainly had ignored God’s many promises to protect Israel if they remained faithful to his covenant. Without being grounded in these stories and assurances the danger of his enemies filled his imagination more than the benevolence of his God .For the Christian, the New Testament takes this assurance even further. The cross is where we witness Jesus’ ultimate surrender of control to the Father. In death, Jesus released the bar to fly through the air entrusting himself entirely into the Father’s hands, and the resurrection is proof that God caught him and that he will catch us too. Therefore, we are free to truly fly—to trust God by loving both our neighbors and our enemies no matter how much the world threatens us. Last year, Tim Keller, one of our generation’s most influential Christian ministers and thinkers, passed away. I had the privilege of meeting Tim a few times and found him to be as thoughtful, humble, and wise in person as he was in the pulpit and with his pen. In 2020, after his cancer diagnosis, he was asked what he would say to Christians who are nervous about the future. His response is a reminder to trust the Catcher:“If Jesus Christ was actually raised from the dead…then everything’s going to be alright. Whatever you’re worried about right now, whatever you are afraid of, everything is actually going to be ok. Because we’re not just talking about resurrected people—and this is where Christianity is unique—we’re talking about a resurrected world. There are plenty of other religions that talk about a future afterlife which is a non-material world. In other words, you get a consolation for the world we’ve lost. Christianity says it’s not just your bodies being resurrected but the world is actually going to be a material world that’s cleansed from all evil and suffering and sin. If Jesus Christ was raised from the dead then the whole world is going to be resurrected and everything is going to be ok. Everything. ”DAILY SCRIPTURE ROMANS 8:18-25  2 KINGS 5:1-27 WEEKLY PRAYERAmbrose of Milan (340 – 397)Preserve your work, Lord. Guard the gift you have given even to those who pull back. For I knew I was not worthy to be called your servant, but by your grace I am what I am. And grant that I may know how with genuine affection to mourn with those who sin. Grant that as often as I learn of the sin of anyone who has fallen, I may suffer with them, and not scold them in my pride, but mourn and weep with them, so that in weeping over another I may also mourn for myself. Amen.

Father Richard acknowledges the shift that is required to recognize and honor the soul of nature:

Acknowledging the intrinsic value, beauty, and even soul of creation, elements, plants, and animals is a major paradigm shift for most Western Christians. In fact, many in the past often dismissed such thinking as animism or paganism. We limited God’s love and salvation to our own human species and then in this theology of scarcity, we did not even have enough love left to cover all of humanity! To be honest, God ended up looking quite stingy and inept—hardly “victorious,” as our Easter hymns claim.

The word profane comes from the Latin words pro (“in front of”) and fanum (“temple”). We thought we lived “outside the temple.” Without a nature-based spirituality, it was a profane universe, bereft of Spirit. We had to keep building shrines and churches to capture and hold our now domesticated and tamed God. Soon we didn’t know where to look for the divine, as we made God’s presence so limited. We became like fish swimming around looking for water, and often arguing about who owned the water!

I’m not saying that God is all things or that all things are God (pantheism). I am saying that each living thing reveals some aspect of God. God is greater than the whole of our universe, and as Creator inter-penetrates all created things (panentheism). [1]

When God manifests spirit through matter, then matter becomes a holy thing. The material world is the place where we can comfortably worship God just by walking on it, loving it, and respecting it. Everything visible, without exception, is the outpouring of God. What else could it really be? The incarnation is not only “God becoming Jesus.” It is a much broader event, which is why John’s Gospel first describes God’s presence in the general word “flesh” (John 1:14). This is the ubiquitous Christ that we continue to encounter in other human beings, in a mountain, a blade of grass, a spider web, or a starling. [2] When we can enjoy all these things as holy, “we experience the universe as a communion of subjects, not as a collection of objects” as the “geologian” Fr. Thomas Berry said so wisely. [3]

When we love something, we grant it soul, we see its soul, and we let its soul touch ours. We must love something deeply to know its soul (anima). Before the resonance of love, we are largely inattentive to the meaning, value, and power of ordinary things to “save” us and help us live in union with the Source of all being. In fact, until we can appreciate and even delight in the soul of other things, even trees and animals, we probably haven’t discovered our own souls either. Soul knows soul through love, which Jesus teaches as the great commandment (Matthew 22:37–39). [4]

__________________________________________

Five For Friday John Chafee

1.
“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”

• Carl Rogers, American Psychologist
   
  The work of Carl Rogers has been drifting to the forefront for me.  Something about his approach of having “unconditional positive regard” for people resonates with me…  Probably because there is some lesson in that topic that is next for me to learn.

The Christian tradition has held on to the truth of this quote for a long time.  When we say that “grace changes people” it is because there is some ancient and universal truth that when we accept ourselves exactly as we are we are then most able to change.

Shame, on the other hand, has the unfortunate consequence of leading people to hide/excuse/rationalize/deny their problematic sides rather than accept them and confront them.

Grace and shame are in a sense dialectical opposites of one another.

2.
“Father Dan Berrigan was here: an altogether winning and warm intelligence and a man who, I think, has more than anyone I have ever met the true wide-ranging and simple heart of the Jesuit: zeal, compassion, understanding, and uninhibited religious freedom. Just seeing him restores one’s hope in the Church.”

• Thomas Merton, 20 Century Trappist Monk
   
  Most of my heroes in the Christian tradition were the punks and hooligans who stirred the pot, disrupted the status quo, and challenged conventions.  What is striking about these figures is that they came from deep devotion and reverence for the core of the faith, just like Jesus.  Most reformations were begun by people who were more than simply distanced admirers of Jesus and were people who sought to live out their cruciform lives with wholehearted conviction…  Just like Berrigan and Merton.

3.
“Religion depends on the maturity of the one interpreting it. If it is being interpreted by someone immature and unwell, then it will be immature and unwell. If it is being interpreted by someone mature and loving, then it will be mature and loving.”

• From The Wonderstanding of Father Simeon
   
  When I wrote The Wonderstanding of Father Simeon, I did not know what was coming out of me at the time.

By the time I was more than halfway done, I realized that the dialogue between the two main characters was two sides of my personality reconciling with each other, my cynical side with my monastic side.  Sometimes I would write a sentence or paragraph and realize that I just worded something I believed to be true but had not said out loud before…

Today’s 3rd quote was one of those insights.  Religion in the hands of mature people will always be interpreted in a mature manner.

4.
“Your imperfections do not shock me, for I see myself with so many.”

• Teresa of Avila, 16th Century Carmelite Nun
   
  Perhaps one of the reasons we fail to show compassion or hospitality for others is that we fail to see ourselves in others.  The reality is that we have far more in common than we initially realize. 

5.

• Chuck DeGroat, Pastor and Professor
   
  A short while ago Chuck wrote a fantastic book, When Narcissism Comes to Church.  It is a compassionate exploration of what can happen when there is narcissistic leadership and/or a narcissistic church culture.

In the book he covers how church cultures can be seduced by narcissistic leadership who (without their knowledge) have a pathological need to be in the spotlight and to do large or grand things for “God.”

He also covers how unhealthy church cultures have a vested interest in NOT confronting the unhealth within their emotional system because they have invested too much time and capital around the narcissistic leader who is still able to “fill the pews.”

Healthy church cultures are committed to action, not to whispering lip service.  They may not be perfect, but they at least can self-correct, self-diagnose, and self-regulate.  Chuck DeGroat is absolutely correct, healthy churches walk the walk rather than just talk the talk.

Parable of the Week:

The Gardening Samurai

One day, an older Samurai warrior was out in his garden.

A potential student approached him and inquired if he was still able or willing to take on a protege.

The Samurai put down his gardening tools, stood, and turned around to inspect the potential student.

He was young and strapping, clearly physically fit, and brandishing two swords at his hips, one short and one long.

The Samurai inspected him for a moment more, but not at anything without, he was inspecting something within the young man.

“No, I will not train you.  Go home to your family.”

“But I cannot, I gave everything up to follow this path in life.  I have trained and disciplined myself on my own for this moment… and you reject me?”

“You have not yet discovered that gardening tools are more desirable than blades.  You are in love with war, not with peace.”

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Potawatomi botanist, writes of our place in nature:

In the indigenous view, humans are viewed as somewhat lesser beings in the democracy of species. We are referred to as the younger brothers of Creation, so like younger brothers we must learn from our elders. Plants were here first and have had a long time to figure things out. They live both above and below ground and hold the earth in place. Plants know how to make food from light and water. Not only do they feed themselves, but they make enough to sustain the lives of all the rest of us. Plants are providers for the rest of the community and exemplify the virtue of generosity, always offering food….

Many indigenous peoples share the understanding that we are each endowed with a particular gift, a unique ability…. It is understood that these gifts have a dual nature, though: a gift is also a responsibility. If the bird’s gift is song, then it has a responsibility to greet the day with music. It is the duty of birds to sing and the rest of us receive the song as a gift.

Asking what is our responsibility is perhaps also to ask, What is our gift? And how shall we use it? [1]

Author Debra Rienstra considers the destructive role humanity has often played in relation to the earth:

If humans didn’t exist at all, life would continue on earth. Let’s not flatter ourselves: biologically speaking, the earth does not need us to tend and care for it. Life on earth existed for eons before we arrived. Have we made the earth better by our arrival? Theologians have long interpreted Genesis 1:26–28 [“be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it”] as God’s instruction to humans to unfold the potential of creation. Very well, but in our unfolding of potentials, we can also destroy, especially now that we have become so very fruitful and multiplied to so many billions. “Stewarding” and “caring” are only necessary because humans take things from the earth to survive.

Rienstra responds to Christians who do not take responsibility to care for the earth, believing “God will do something” to rescue us:

God allows people a great deal of freedom to do evil and ruinous things. Giving humans moral responsibility entails allowing us to act immorally and to suffer the consequences of our actions—or in the case of climate change, to let other people to suffer the consequences, at least at first. Do we really want to find out just how far God will let this go before God “does something”? Or could we instead perceive that God is indeed doing something, through the knowledge and work of people and through the self-healing powers built into the planet? The question for each of us is whether to resist or cooperate….

What can we give back through a pattern of reciprocity to a planet that gives us so much? What will make the more-than-human creation glad that we are here? [2]

__________________________________________________

Sarah Young Jesus Calling

Listen to the love song that I am continually singing to you. I take great delight in you…I rejoice over you with singing. The voices of the world are a cacophony (a harsh discordant mixture of sounds) of chaos, pulling you this way and that. Don’t listen to those voices; challenge them with My Word. Learn to take mini-breaks from the world, finding a place to be still in My Presence and listen to My voice.
    There is immense hidden treasure to be found through listening to Me. Though I pour out blessings upon you always, some of My richest blessings have to be actively sought. I love to reveal Myself to you, and your seeking heart opens you up to receive more of My disclosure. Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.

RELATED SCRIPTURE:

Zephaniah 3:17 (NLT)

17 For the Lord your God is living among you.

    He is a mighty savior.

He will take delight in you with gladness.

    With his love, he will calm all your fears.*

    He will rejoice over you with joyful songs.”

*Or He will be silent in His love. Greek and Syriac versions read He will renew you with his love.

Additional insight regarding Zephaniah 3:17: Zephaniah points out that gladness results when we allow God to be with us. We do that by faithfully following him and obeying his commands. Then God rejoices over us with singing. If you want to be happy, draw close to the source of happiness by obeying God.
Matthew 7:7 (NLT)
Effective Prayer
7 “Keep on asking, and you will receive what you ask for. Keep on seeking, and you will find. Keep on knocking, and the door will be opened to you.

Earth Spirituality

The ecological theologian Thomas Berry (1914–2009) reflects on our much-needed connection with nature:

What do you see when you look up at the sky at night at the blazing stars against the midnight heavens? What do you see when the dawn breaks over the eastern horizon? What are your thoughts … in the autumn when the leaves turn brown and are blown away … [or] when you look out over the ocean in the evening? What do you see?

Many earlier peoples saw in these natural phenomena a world beyond ephemeral appearance, an abiding world, a world imaged forth in the wonders of the sun and clouds by day and the stars and planets by night, a world that enfolded the human in some profound manner. This other world was guardian, teacher, healer—the source from which humans were born, nourished, protected, guided, and the destiny to which we returned….

We have lost our connection to this other deeper reality of things. Consequently, we now find ourselves on a devastated continent where nothing is holy, nothing is sacred. We no longer have a world of inherent value, no world of wonder, no untouched, unspoiled, unused world. We think we have understood everything. But we have not. We have used everything. By “developing” the planet, we have been reducing Earth to a new type of barrenness. Scientists are telling us that we are in the midst of the sixth extinction period in Earth’s history. No such extinction of living forms has occurred since the extinction of the dinosaurs some sixty-five million years ago. [1]

Berry calls for a spirituality that honors the natural world:

The ecological age fosters the deep awareness of the sacred presence within each reality of the universe. There is an awe and reverence due to the stars in the heavens, the sun, and all heavenly bodies; to the seas and the continents; to all living forms of trees and flowers; to the myriad expressions of life in the sea; to the animals of the forests and the birds of the air. To wantonly destroy a living species is to silence forever a divine voice. [2]

To preserve this sacred world of our origins from destruction, our great need is for renewal of the entire Western religious-spiritual tradition…. We need to move from a spirituality of alienation from the natural world to a spirituality of intimacy with it, … to a spirituality of the divine as revealed in the visible world about us, from a spirituality concerned with justice simply to humans to a justice that includes the larger Earth community….

We cannot save ourselves without saving the world in which we live.… We will live or die as this world lives or dies. We can say this both physically and spiritually. We will be spiritually nourished by this world or we will be starved for spiritual nourishment. No other revelatory experience can do for the human what the experience of the natural world does. [3]  

===================

A Contracting Posture of the Soul

Nothing changes a person more quickly or more dramatically than fear. We saw in Naaman’s story how the king of Israel misinterpreted the letter from the king of Syria because he was afraid. Rather than faithfully fulfilling Israel’s calling to reveal God to the nations, the king refused to help Naaman find healing, tore his own robes, and lamented what he feared was an imminent invasion from Syria. Here’s a more recent example of how fear causes a rapid and dramatic change. In a 2011 survey, evangelical Christians were the religious group in the U.S. most likely to say that the personal character of elected officials mattered. By 2016, evangelicals were the religious group most likely to say character didn’t matter. What caused the sudden reversal of values? Journalist Tim Alberta asked one prominent pastor and he answered with two words: “Under siege.”He explained that evangelical Christians now feel afraid, persecuted, and threatened. Under those conditions, their previous commitment to certain public principles and ethical standards has loosened or been abandoned altogether. Like Israel’s king in Naaman’s story, fear has caused them to forsake their calling to pursue safety instead. Thomas Aquinas, the medieval theologian, said fear causes a contraction of the soul. He compared its effect on a person to a city under siege. In the pre-modern world, when an army attacked a city, the inhabitants in the countryside would gather their resources and barricade themselves behind the city’s walls. From this contracted, inward-focused position they would hunker down and hope their food and water outlasted the attacking army’s resources and will to fight. Similarly, when we are afraid we also contract; we pull our resources—physical, emotional, economic, and moral—inward in a posture of protection and self-preservation. We can think only about ourselves, our needs, our survival, and nothing else. As Aquinas said, “Fear is such a powerful emotion for humans that when we allow it to take us over, it drives compassion right out of our hearts.”From this defensive, contracted posture the callings we’ve received from Jesus Christ get quickly abandoned, and the higher reasoning necessary for compassion and ethics becomes impossible. Give to the one who asks, forgive those who’ve sinned against you, turn the other cheek, love your enemy—these commands are nonsensical to the soul contracted by fear. As Henri Nouwen said, “Fear engenders fear, it never gives birth to love.”In this election year, regardless of your political affiliation, there will be many voices seeking to make you afraid, to contract your soul, with the effect of preventing you from following the generous, self-giving way of Jesus. Some of these voices may even claim to be Christian. But fear is never the way of Christ; it is the way of antichrist. Because God has not given us a spirit of fear, but one of power and love (2 Timothy 1:7). DAILY SCRIPTURE ROMANS 8:31-39  2 KINGS 5:1-27 WEEKLY PRAYER Ambrose of Milan (340 – 397) Preserve your work, Lord. Guard the gift you have given even to those who pull back. For I knew I was not worthy to be called your servant, but by your grace I am what I am. And grant that I may know how with genuine affection to mourn with those who sin. Grant that as often as I learn of the sin of anyone who has fallen, I may suffer with them, and not scold them in my pride, but mourn and weep with them, so that in weeping over another I may also mourn for myself. Amen.

The Stones Cry Out

Marya Grathwohl, a Sister of St. Francis, describes an experience with a longtime friend driving up Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains: 

Dorie, who had distanced herself from organized religion, nevertheless coins the phrase “rock rosary” to express the sequence of life mysteries locked in the rock layers: reptiles, forests, amphibians, fish, bodies of cooperating cells, photosynthesis.

As the mountain reveals the splendor of life’s evolution, I find myself asking, “Who are we human beings? Within this array of life-forms, what is our role, our gift to Earth?” These immense questions require a universe or religion….

Then near the summit, we abruptly round a cliff. Another sign: PRECAMBRIAN 2.9 BILLION YEARS AGO. GRANITE. And my soul slams into awe….

We find a pull-off. I race back to the cliff and near the sign pick up something small. A stone, heavy for its size, glistens with quartz. I hold it close to my lips.

“You,” I whisper, “you witnessed life’s genius in creating photosynthesis.”

I stand silent, listening. Time stops.

In my hands is a scripture, a stone crying out. I recall that it was a mere two thousand years ago that Jesus said, “If the people are silent, the stones will cry out” [Luke 19:40].

Earth, a rocky planet, cries out. Earth cries out against global mass extinction of species, the destruction of human-caused climate change, and the prowess of militarized and industrialized humanity to poison and destroy Earth’s support systems: soil, air, and water. Earth cries out against the suffering we humans cause each other.

Here is my question for the mountain. How do we learn to become contributing members of the pageant of life, of this ongoing story of a communion of species, subjects in their own right? [1]

Grathwohl describes soulful beauty in nature as the Divine Presence: 

After almost fifty years of being a Franciscan Sister, I learned that beauty for Franciscan theologians and philosophers is the ultimate and most intimate knowing of God, another name for God, the name for God. Saint Bonaventure and Blessed John Duns Scotus teach that the beauty and diversity of creation nourish us through suffering and loss. When we’ve run out of purpose, when memories of war sicken us, when Earth is attacked with unparalleled savagery for coal, gas, oil, timber, and profit, when poverty runs rampant and extreme wealth for very few soars, when friends betray us, and everyone we love lives far away … then, still beauty endures, and helps us make it through. Like God…. [2]

I sense now that soul knows itself and its life within the great compassionate Mystery we strive to name. Soul stirs, rises, grows toward and within the unnameable silence and beauty of God, a mothering watery God, a rain beyond Catholic, beyond any specific religion or creed, a rain that soothes us in suffering and challenges complacency. Soul flowers in this rain of the worlds, of meteor showers, of the cosmos. [3]

==================

Hillsong’s Joel Houston Clarifies Evolution Views After Sparking Debate With Worship Song ‘So Will I’

By Jeannie Ortega Law, Christian Post Reporter Friday, June 29, 2018

With one of Hillsong United’s latest hits, “So Will I (100 Billion X),” at the center of a creation versus evolution debate, worship leader Joel Houston is setting the record straight on where he stands.

“So Will I (100 Billion X)” is a song off of the album, There Is More, recorded live at ‪the Hillsong Worship and Creative Conference in Sydney, Australia. Houston was recently asked on Twitter why the song mentions evolution.

The lyrics in question are: “And as You speak/A hundred billion creatures catch Your breath/Evolving in pursuit of what You said.”

Houston, who is the eldest son of Hillsong Church’s founders as well as lead musician in the worship band Hillsong United and worship leader of Hillsong Church in New York City, responded by saying:

“Evolution is undeniable—created by God as a reflective means of displaying nature’s pattern of renewal in pursuance of God’s Word—an ode to the nature of the creative God it reflects—and only ever in part—not the SOURCE! Science and faith aren’t at odds. God created the Big-Bang.”

His response sparked a Twitter debate on evolution versus creation and drew some backlash. In back-and-forth exchanges with various Twitter users, Houston went on to offer some context to his earlier tweet.

He wrote: “Context—things evolve, they change and adapt, I DON’T believe in evolution as a theory of SOURCE, I believe it’s merely a pattern of nature—created by God, reflecting Nature’s desire for renewal, survival, new life—something-SomeONE—Like God.”

He also said: “I think what gets lost, strangely enough, is that in any case, The Word, comes before any kind of Big Bang.. ‘let there be light’!! BOOM!! And there WAS!!! 

When asked if he believes in the “Big Bang theory” or “literal 6 day creation,” Houston said, “It means I believe God created everything and His Word cane first..”

He further clarified his beliefs on whether man evolved from an ape, saying, “i believe God created humanity out of the dust.. and breathed his breath/Spirit into us..”

The popular worship leader admitted that when writing the song, the band was “aware of the implications ‘evolving’ would serve as a conflicting adjective for some” but said they still felt “it was worth it—if just a foolish desire to enlarge our thinking of a God who was-is-&-is to come, making all things new, ‘from-Him, through-Him, To-Him.'” 

He explained that God is “way bigger than we think,” and regardless of one’s theological or scientific beliefs, He “is undiminished by our limitations.”

“If God’s creative process was an easy working week, or finely crafted over six-ages of millennia, does it make Him any more or less God?” Houston posed. “Or us any more or less created in His image? Either way, it was an unfathomably wonderful six-day process, however you think to see it.”

He added, “The way I see it—the NATURE of a fallen-world evolves in-decay BECAUSE of our best attempts to adapt to a—’survival of the fittest’ kind of existence—yet God, fully reveals His NATURE in-and-through JESUS, who embodied ours, and showed us a DIFFERENT way. Spirit & Flesh.”

The millennial worshiper went on to break down the structure of the song to help critics understand the development of the lyrics. He maintained they couldn’t sing of or understand God’s promises (in second verse) without the premise of the first verse (God of Creation). “Nor can we fully comprehend the reconciling power of the third-verse (God of SALVATION), without the tension in the middle.”

“The entire premise of ‘So Will I’, is the redemptive, creative, authority & power of God’s Word. That at the end of the day, all our best theories, ideas, dogmas & best attempts at understanding, will ultimately surrender to the ‘Word at the beginning,'” he concluded.

The Soul of Nature

Father Richard encourages us to recognize how the soul of nature mirrors our own: 

The modern and postmodern self largely lives in a world of its own construction, and it reacts for or against its own human-made ideas. While calling ourselves intelligent, we’ve lost touch with the natural world. As a result, we’ve lost touch with our own souls. I believe we can’t access our full intelligence and wisdom without some real connection to nature.

My spiritual father Francis of Assisi spent many days, weeks, and even months walking the roads of Umbria and letting nature teach him. Francis knew and respected creation, calling animals, sun, moon, and even the weather and the elements his brothers and sisters. Through extended time in nature, Francis became intimately connected with non-human living things and came to recognize that the natural world was also imbued with soul. Almost all male initiation rites—including those of Jesus and John the Baptist (see Matthew 3:13–17)—took place in nature, surely for that reason.

Without such soul recognition and mirroring, we are alienated and separated from nature, and quite frankly, ourselves. Without a visceral connection to the soul of nature, we will not know how to love or respect our own soul. Instead, we try various means to get God and people to like or accept us because we never experience radical belonging to the world itself. We’re trying to say to ourselves and others, “I belong here. I matter.” Of course, that’s true! But contrived and artificial means will never achieve that divine purpose. We are naturally healed in this world when we know things center to center, subject to subject, and soul to soul.

I think of soul as anything’s ultimate meaning which is held within. Soul is the blueprint inside of every created thing telling it what it is and what it can become. When we meet anything at that level, we will respect, protect, and love it.

Many human beings simply haven’t found their own blueprint or soul, so they cannot see it anywhere else. Like knows like! When we only meet reality at the external level, we do not meet our own soul and we have no ability to meet the soul of anything else either. We clergy would have done much better to encourage Christians to discover their souls instead of “save” them.

While everything has a soul, in many people it seems to be dormant, disconnected, and ungrounded. They are not aware of the inherent truth, goodness, and beauty shining through everything. If God is as great, glorious, and wonderful as religions claim, then wouldn’t such a God would make such “wonderfulness” universally available? Surely, such connection and presence are as freely available as the air we breathe and the water we drink.

Making a Morning Connection 

In a talk offered in 2009, Father Richard shares his morning practice of engaging with the natural world:

On spring and summer mornings, I love to go out early with my little cup of coffee and walk through my garden with my dog Venus [DM team: Venus passed in 2017]. If I can somehow let my “roots and tendrils” reconnect me with the “givens” of life, as Bill Plotkin calls them [1]—not the ideas about life, but the natural world, what is—I experience the most extraordinary grounding, connection, healing, and even revelation. One little hopping bird can do me in!

Many of us have a sense of self or identity created by our relationship to ideas, thoughts, and words. We can spend our whole lives rattling around inside of ideas, rarely touching upon what is right in front of us, when it’s the “givens” that heal us and reconnect us to Reality. We spend a majority of our time interacting with thoughts and opinions about everything. We’re almost entirely fixated on our computers, smart phones, news feeds, email, social media, and selfies. This is, of course, an “unnatural” world of our own creation. We don’t even realize that we’ve disconnected ourselves from the only world that people lived in for most of human history. 

One of the foundational reasons for our sense of isolation and unhappiness is that we have lost our contact with nature. In the natural world, there is no theology to agree or disagree with. We don’t have to identify as Presbyterian or Lutheran, male or female, conservative or progressive. There is nothing to argue about. It is in contact with all the “givens”—that which has been available to every creature God has created since the Big Bang—that something is indeed given. I guess in the spiritual world we would call it grace. 

This is not some New Age idea. In Scripture we read, “What can be known about God is perfectly plain, since God has made it plain. Ever since God created the world, God’s everlasting power and divinity, however invisible, have been there for the mind to see in the things that God has made” (Romans 1:19–20). Every day, we are given a natural way to reconnect with God and it doesn’t depend upon intelligence, education, or a religion. It depends on really being present and connecting with the soul. 

Of course, it’s not as simple as just standing in my garden. If I get my email first or start worrying and planning my day, the moment’s over. It’s done because I’m not really present. But we can preserve and protect those sacred moments before we read the news or check our email, before we look at social media or review the day’s agenda. If we can find a way to be present to the “givens,” especially the natural “givens,” I believe we can be happy.

===============

Self-Fulfilling Expectations

After learning there was a prophet in Israel who could heal his leprosy, Naaman asked the king of Syria for permission to seek him out. The king did more than grant this request. He also wrote a letter to the king of Israel requesting his assistance for Naaman.The significance of the king’s letter is easily lost on us. This was more than a polite gesture. Imagine needing a rare medical procedure only available in a foreign country, and having the President of the United States personally contact the other country’s leader on your behalf to ask that you be given V.I.P. treatment. And then sending you there aboard Air Force One. In a way, that’s what the king of Syria did for Naaman.But his arrival in Israel did not go as he hoped. Rather than welcoming Naaman and helping him find the prophet, the king of Israel mistook the letter from the king of Syria as a threat. “As soon as the king of Israel read the letter, he tore his robes and said, ‘Am I God? Can I kill and bring back to life? Why does this fellow send someone to me to be cured of his leprosy? See how he is trying to pick a quarrel with me!’” (2 Kings 5:7).Syria and Israel shared a border, and the two countries were not always peaceful neighbors. Therefore, rather than reading the letter as a sincere request for help, the king of Israel interpreted the message as a trick; a kind of diplomatic Trojan horse the king of Syria was using to justify an invasion of against Israel.The king of Israel’s dramatic reaction to the letter shows how expectations can warp how we interpret messages and events. If we assume malice, we are more likely to see malice. If we expect a conflict, we will often unwittingly create a conflict. This tendency is known as a self-fulfilling prophecy. One psychologist defines it this way: “When you set certain expectations, those expectations can lead you to notice certain things but not pay attention to others. Your mind focuses on details that confirm what you expect.”A common example is waking up expecting to have a miserable day. Although each day is always a mix of positive and negative things, expecting misery will cause you to fixate and magnify any negative experiences and ignore or minimize any positive ones thereby guaranteeing you have the miserable day you expected. Likewise, the self-fulfilling power of negative expectations can make us misread the tone of a text message, taint important relationships, and sow the seeds of our own failure.Some will argue the solution is to banish negative thoughts and utilize self-fulfilling prophecy for good through what Norman Vincent Peale called “the power of positive thinking.” This is a wildly popular message among prosperity preachers and self-help gurus, who often push the concept into heretical absurdity. While I’m certainly not against positivity, I think there are two other antidotes more firmly rooted in godly wisdom.First, we should cultivate patience. The king of Israel jumped to the wrong conclusion because he did not slow down, question his own immediate reaction, and carefully discern the letter’s other possible meanings. Patience isn’t merely something we give to others; it’s a discipline we must extend to ourselves. While we cannot always control our immediate emotional reaction to something, we can give ourselves the space to examine our feelings before we choose to act.Second, we can practice gratitude. Even amid the most negative circumstances, there are always things to be thankful for, and we can train ourselves to look for them. The “power of positive thinking” that is widely peddled in our culture is often subtly narcissistic—think positively and positive things will come to you. Both its origin and goal are the self. Gratitude, in contrast, is a kind of God-oriented positivity that turns us outward. Thankfulness diminishes the self as our vision of God’s goodness expands.How different might the king of Israel’s reaction to the letter have been if he had practiced patience and gratitude? If he had slowed down enough to question his first reaction, and if he had the eyes to recognize God’s presence and goodness? DAILY SCRIPTURE EPHESIANS 5:15-20  2 KINGS 5:1-27 WEEKLY PRAYERAmbrose of Milan (340 – 397) Preserve your work, Lord. Guard the gift you have given even to those who pull back. For I knew I was not worthy to be called your servant, but by your grace I am what I am. And grant that I may know how with genuine affection to mourn with those who sin. Grant that as often as I learn of the sin of anyone who has fallen, I may suffer with them, and not scold them in my pride, but mourn and weep with them, so that in weeping over another I may also mourn for myself. Amen.

Be angry but do not sin. —Ephesians 4:26

Theologian Allen Dwight Callahan writes about a compelling biblical verse:

There are two imperatives in the opening phrase of Ephesians 4:26—two. One is a prohibition against sinning. The other is an exhortation—an exhortation to anger.

That’s right: The Bible commands us to be angry.

“Be angry. That’s an order.”…

Now, you may object that we’ve already got more anger that we know what to do with right now, and, of course, you’d be right. There is indeed a surplus of anger out there. With increasing frequency and intensity, people are voicing their anger, venting their anger, even voting their anger.

But there’s anger, and there’s anger.

Yes, there’s the anger of being cut off in the turn lane, of having a wait time that exceeds four minutes, of being berated in the comments on your post by a misanthropic troll….

Then there is the anger that leaves us shaken and shaking because a sacred trust is being treacherously broken; because those who have done no harm are being gratuitously harmed; because those who have too little now have even less, and those who already have much too much now have even more; because egregious wrongs are being perpetrated, and the perps don’t even admit that the wrongs they’re perpetrating are wrong.

What has happened—is happening now, here, and everywhere—is not merely a sin and a shame. It is an outrage, and outrage calls for rage, rage that ought to come out. Anger in such instances is not merely permissible. It is obligatory, imperative.

Thus, the imperative: “Be angry.”

Faced with an outrage, anger is the price we pay for paying attention. It is the rage that ought to come out, because, when faced with an outrage, it is a sin not to be angry. [1]

Richard Rohr honors the wisdom contained in powerful emotions like grief and anger:

Great emotions are especially powerful teachers. I’m so aware of this in the experience of grief, after experiencing the deaths of my mother, a teenage niece, and my father. Even anger and rage are great teachers if we listen to them. They have so much power to reveal our deepest self to ourselves and to others, yet we tend to consider them negatively. Yes, they are dangerous, making us reactive and defensive, but they often totally rearrange how we know—or if we know—reality at all.

Believe it or not, such emotions are ways of knowing. They have the capacity to blind us, but also the power to open us up and bring us to profound conversion, humility, and honesty. People who are too nice and never suffer or reveal their own negative emotions, usually do not know very much about themselves—and so the rest of us do not take them too seriously. Consider if that is not true in your own circle of relationships. [2]

____________________________________________

John Chaffe Five for Friday

1.
“In any given moment we have two options: to step forward into growth or to step back into safety.”

• Abraham Maslow, Developmental Theorist
   
  If all the Marvel movies have taught us anything over the past decade, it’s that there is a deep need within all of us to have examples and inspiration to step into the dangerous unknown rather than to slink back from it.

There is something in the human psyche/mind/soul that desperately needs to keep growing rather than fall into arrested development.

May we all find inspiration for that daring journey into perpetual growth.

2.
“Every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist.”

• Walter Brueggemann, Old Testament Scholar
   
  It’s always the poets, authors, playwrights, musicians, and storytellers who seem the most able to speak out the truth when no one else is willing to do so.

Perhaps that is why in most totalitarian regimes, as they ascend in power, they silence the voices of the artists early on.

To create is inherently a defiant act in an epoch that wants to keep its status quo.

3.
“It’s impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.”

• Epictetus, Greek Stoic Philosopher
   
  Over the years, as I have taught on the topics of Christian spirituality, biblical studies, and “systematic” theology I have found this quote from Epictetus to be true.

I have experienced pushback in the classroom and the church, as I shared and taught on the faith.  Sometimes it was an enjoyable dialogue exchange over a particular insight, and other times it was rather hurtful.

Well, perhaps hurtful isn’t the right word.

I have felt misunderstood and made to feel as though I was wrong, even though I was often quoting a part of the Christian tradition that the student in front of me knew nothing about.

It feels to me that Christian education in the West is not producing students as much as another generation of gatekeepers, of people who think they know something fully when they truly have not studied enough.

I care about education because, for me, education is more than just the transmission of information, it is about the transformation of the student as a result of coming into contact with new information…  Transformation cannot happen for any of us if we wall ourselves off from new information because we think we already have a final position.

4.
“The dark night is God’s attack on religion. If you genuinely desire union with the unspeakable love of God, then you must be prepared to have your ‘religious’ world shattered. If you think devotional practices, theological insights, even charitable actions give you some sort of purchase on God, you are still playing games.”

• Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury
   
  The Dark Night of the Soul is one of my absolute favorite topics.  I spent a whole year reading through the works of St. John of the Cross.  Although I did not finish all of his works by the end of the calendar year, it left an indelible mark on my heart, mind, and soul to do so.

Even writing briefly about it makes me want to go back and reread him all over again!

Rowan Williams reads to me as if he has also read The Dark Night of the Soul for himself.

Why do I think so?

Because the experience of the Dark Night of the Soul dismantles, deconstructs, tears down, overhauls, renovates, exposes, and, dare I say it, crucifies our understanding and dependency upon “religion.”

God is not willing for us to be content with anything less than the infinite and unfathomable Love of God present to us in every moment.

Religion is one of the safest places to hide from God.  We can hide from God behind robes, pulpits, gestures, ceremonies, rituals, etc.

The Dark Night of the Soul is without a doubt one of the most painful seasons of life, but on the other side of it, I don’t think it is possible to be anything other than a mature, Christian mystic.

5.
“Good souls many will one day be horrified at the things they now believe of God.”

• George MacDonald, Scottish Preacher
   
  I am sure that this is true of myself as well.

Lord, help all of us to change our minds/elevate how we think/be willing to reconsider everything we thought we knew about You.

Mirabai Starr writes of powerful emotions, including anger, that are part of losing someone we love:

If grief is a natural response to loss … then anger, as a common attribute of grief, is also natural. The power of our anger often correlates with the depth of our love. Anger takes many forms on the grief journey. Sometimes it manifests as a low-level irritability and other times as roaring fire, often unleashing itself on inappropriate targets. Sometimes it is directed at an individual we deem responsible for our loss….

Sometimes the anger is directed at God: “What kind of God could allow such suffering?” or “I was taught to believe God loved me. Apparently, that was wrong.”… While it is tempting to reduce this experience to a crisis of faith, such an easy explanation might obscure the rich spiritual transformation that is unfolding, as John of the Cross (1542–1591) might say, in the darkness of our own souls. Everything we thought we knew feels like it is unraveling and we have nowhere to turn but into the center of radical unknowing. Grief shatters our foundation and triggers a wholesale reorientation of meaning. Before we rush off to reconfigure the shards, we may choose to sit in the wreckage and allow ourselves to simply be broken.

From that place of devastation, we come face-to-face with our own groundlessness. We also get to see the extreme poverty of our previous conception of God. The box in which we had always confined the sacred has been demolished by the violence of our loss. The God we fabricated (with the help of society, our family, the church) has fled. No wonder we feel abandoned. No wonder we are angry. But that god was not the God. Our souls know that now…. Grief is an opportunity to reclaim an authentic connection with Mystery. [1]

Anglican theologian Maggie Ross writes about tears as an opportunity to “cleanse” our anger and pain:

Most of the time our anger is due to unwillingness to face the hurt we feel and the real reasons behind it. To learn to weep in order to be free of anger and know “rest” does not obviate self-respect and is not related to putting oneself down.

On the contrary, if we are struggling to seek God single-heartedly, to learn to weep the anger out of ourselves is a matter of self-respect.

The idea of tears washing anger from us is alien to the mores of power-oriented Western society. We are conditioned to justify our anger, to find the right place to put blame, and to always feel good about ourselves. Most of us associate anger and tears with tears that spring from anger, not tears that cleanse us from anger. But … tears of anger are themselves … a sign of choice, of potential change. [2]

___________________________________________

Sarah Young Jesus Calling

You are on the right path. Listen more to Me, and less to your doubts. I am leading you along the way I designed just for you. Therefore, it is a lonely way, humanly speaking. But I go before you as well as alongside you, so you are never alone. Do not expect anyone to understand fully My ways with you, any more than you can comprehend My dealings with others. I am revealing to you the path of Life day by day, and moment by moment. As I said to My disciple Peter, so I repeat to you: Follow Me. 

RELATED SCRIPTURE: 

Psalm 119:105 NLT

Nun

105 Your word is a lamp to guide my feet

    and a light for my path.

John 21:22 NLT

22 Jesus replied, “If I want him to remain alive until I return, what is that to you? As for you, follow me.”

Love and the Fire of Life

Ecological teacher Sara Jolena Wolcott values what our anger can teach us, especially when it joins with love:

Increasingly, I see anger as being like fire. Fire is necessary for life.… Anger is a part of the larger fire in our lives. Anger is an important emotion; it is part of the flight-or-fight response that is core to how humans respond to danger. As such, it has a valuable role to play in our lives. It is important to feel fire’s heat, but fire can burn out of control. The trick with anger is to let it inform us, maybe even to let it warm us if we have become too cold with indifference or apathy, but not to let the fire control or consume us.

Ultimately, we want our lives to be guided: illuminated, warmed, comforted, provoked by our deep love affair with the Divine. That love, as so many mystics remind us, can also be like an all-consuming fire. So love, not anger, needs to be the ultimate guide. Sometimes anger can point us to love.…

I have sympathy with those spiritual leaders who say we should strive to get rid of anger, or at least to not act in anger. Yet the classic example of anger and spiritual teachers, at least within Christianity, is when Jesus overthrew the moneychangers’ tables (see Matthew 21:12–13). If the son of God can do this, we get the sense that it is fully acceptable to be righteously angry at systemic injustice that harms the poor and the vulnerable.

However, in the end, I don’t think Jesus’ passion or his death were lived through in anger—certainly his resurrection did not arise from a place of anger. So, what does that tell us? Anger can inform us and sometimes guide us, but anger is not the ultimate, final word; love is. Love is bigger than anger. Love still overtakes the divisions and fractions. I think there is room for anger in love. It is in God’s holy fires that these emotions can be used well. [1]

Brian McLaren reminds us that we can trust God with all our emotions, including our anger: 

Opening ourselves to God when we’re in need says that we trust God and want God to accompany us, support us, and befriend us in every way.

We trust those we love most with our deepest fears, doubts, emptiness, and disillusionment. So we love God when we share those vulnerable aspects of our lives with God. Just as a little child in the middle of a temper tantrum can shout “I hate you, Mommy!” only because he knows his outburst will not end their relationship, we can express to God our deep doubts, anger, or frustrations only because we possess an even deeper trust in God’s love…. The fact that we share this pain with God rather than withhold it turns out to be an expression of love. [2]

================

Identity & Empathy

Naaman, the great military commander of Syria, and the enslaved Israelite girl who served Naaman’s wife, had almost nothing in common. And yet, the girl expresses concern and compassion for Naaman because he suffers from a skin disease. She tells him of a prophet in Israel who can cure him. What allowed her to find empathy for a person utterly unlike herself? The link between empathy and identity has been well-established by researchers. I found one study conducted in the U.K. to be particularly illuminating. The first part of the test invited soccer fans to take a questionnaire. The questions were written to identify Manchester United fans and, importantly, to reinforce their identity and allegiance to Manchester United.Each participant was then told that part two of the study required them to watch a short film about soccer in another building. While walking there, an actor dressed as a jogger and hired by the researchers would run past, fall, and grab his ankle while shouting in pain. Here’s where it got interesting. Sometimes the jogger wore a Manchester United shirt and other times he wore a Liverpool shirt (the rival soccer club to Manchester United).The Manchester United fans helped the injured jogger 92 percent of the time when he was wearing a Manchester United shirt, but only 30 percent of the time when he wore a Liverpool shirt. This study and many others have found that we are far, far more likely to have empathy for those with whom we identify and much less for those with whom we do not. But there’s more. The study also found that empathy increases or decreases based on which of our identities is emphasized.The same researchers repeated the study but with one significant difference. They changed the questionnaire in a way that deemphasized allegiance to any specific soccer club, and instead, the questions emphasized the Manchester United fan’s overall love of soccer. They then proceeded to have their encounter with the injured jogger. This time 70 percent helped even when he wore a Liverpool shirt.The dramatic increase in empathy was directly linked to how they identified themselves and the injured jogger. When the participants saw themselves as primarily Manchester United fans and the jogger as a Liverpool fan, empathy was unlikely. The jogger was one of “them” and not one of “us.” But when the participants saw themselves as primarily a soccer fan, that identity was broad enough to include someone wearing a Liverpool shirt. The injured jogger became one of “us,” and therefore worthy of their concern. Which brings us back to Naaman’s story. If the girl saw herself primarily as an Israelite and Naaman as a Syrian, empathy would have been unlikely. Or if she had identified merely as a slave and viewed Naaman only as a powerful general, again it’s unlikely she would have shown kindness to him. Instead, she found a point of connection; a place where her identity and Naaman’s overlapped and she no longer viewed him as one of “them” but as one of “us.” I suspect the identity they shared was rooted in pain.She knew the grief of being abducted from her home and family, taken to a foreign land, and enslaved. Naaman knew the pain of leprosy and the social isolation the disease brought. Did the young Israelite girl look at Naaman struggling with his skin disease and see a glimpse of her pain? Is that what kindled her compassion for him? Was their shared identity as sufferers enough to overcome their many other rival identities? As our society’s capacity for empathy continues to decline, we need to ask if the problem is actually a matter of identity. Maybe if we begin to change how we see and identify one another we will also transform how we treat one another. DAILY SCRIPTURE MATTHEW 9:10-13  2 KINGS 5:1-27 WEEKLY PRAYERFrom John Chrysostom (347 – 407) Lord, let us pattern our lives only on those things that are worthy of being imitated. Not gorgeous buildings or expensive estates, but on those people who have confidence in you. Help us to imitate those who have riches in heaven—the owners of those treasures that make them truly rich. Help us to imitate those who are poor for Christ’s sake, so that we may attain the good things of eternity by the grace and love toward man of our Lord Jesus Christ. Glory, might, and honor be unto him with the Father, together with the Holy Spirit, now and always, world without end. Amen.