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]  

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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]

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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.

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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]

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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]

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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]

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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.

We are trying to hold one another, while our knees are weak, chests are tight, our worlds on fire, burning and burning and burning and burning.
—Danté Stewart

It took time for author and minister Danté Stewart to acknowledge and allow his own anger:

After running from rage my whole life, it took some getting used to. I noticed that rage neither set me free nor made me feel better. But it did give me some words and some energy to fight white supremacy in myself and white supremacy in the world, and all the ways white supremacy destroyed us and those we loved. It shook me out of my illusion that the world as I now knew it was the world that God wanted. It forced me to deal with the ways in which my Black body and Black children, women, and men live in a system of injustice—a system of inequality, exploitation, and disrespect. It became my public outcry that our bodies and our souls must be loved, and that our bodies and our souls mattered to God, and that our bodies and our souls must find rest.

I started to see that my Black rage in an anti-Black world was a spiritual virtue…. Black rage is the work of love that protests an unloving world. It is the good news that though our society has often forgotten us, there is Someone who loves us and believes us worth fighting for.

Stewart recognized power in joining his anger with love: 

I began to see that being enraged becomes dangerous when it is not channeled through love, serious deep love for ourselves and our neighbor. It can become a lonely place, and I have had my struggle with loneliness. When rage becomes the spark that embraces Black flesh, moves us to universal love, to struggle, to fight, to pray, to embrace, to remember, this becomes a sword and shield. In a world that wounds our souls and bodies, this becomes the work of love: holy, healing, and liberating work. Love dancing with rage, rage dancing with love, becomes the greatest spiritual, moral, and political task in each generation. It is a call for us as Black people to what Jesus called abundant life, spirit of the Lord upon Black flesh, freedom for all people.

Stewart writes that Jesus embodied love, healing, and liberation: 

Jesus loves bodies, no matter who or where or what they are. And Jesus does not hurt people in order to love them. He did not live out of his own woundedness; he did not cover up his pain by enacting it onto others…. Jesus wanted us to learn love…. I learned too late, but I learned. I learned that we all live in brokenness, deep brokenness. I learned that Jesus does not forget bodies, despised and abused bodies, but becomes good news to them by remembering them, touching them and being touched, and creating a world where their bodies are liberated, redeemed, and resurrected

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The Single-Story Problem

The story of Naaman in 2 Kings 5 begins by introducing two people at opposite ends of the social hierarchy. First, we meet Naaman who is described as a “great man.” He commanded the armies of Aram—Israel’s neighbor and frequent enemy which is also called Syria. Naaman was valiant, victorious, and celebrated even by his master, the king of Syria. He was one of the most famous and respected men in the country.The other character is Naaman’s opposite in almost every way. He was a great man; she was a young girl. He was Syrian; she was a foreigner from Israel. He commanded Syria’s army; she was taken captive by Syria’s army. He possessed great power; she was enslaved with no power. Naaman’s name was highly respected even by the king; she was so unimportant that her name was never even identified.Despite the seemingly insurmountable distance between their social locations, we soon discover that the young Israelite slave girl would forever change the life of the great commander of the Syrian army. How this was possible teaches us important lessons about the link between identity and empathy that we will unpack over the next few days. To begin, we need to recognize our temptation to reduce everyone’s identity, including our own, to one dimension. If the enslaved Israelite girl only saw herself as the victim of Syrian injustice, and if she only saw her master as the man who led the army that kidnapped her, it’s unlikely that her capacity for empathy would have extended to Naaman.Nigerian novelist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, calls this the danger of a single story, and she experienced it acutely when she attended college in the United States. In her 2009 TED Talk, Adichie said, “My American roommate was shocked by me. She asked where I had learned to speak English so well, and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language. She asked if she could listen to what she called my ‘tribal music,’ and was consequently very disappointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey.”Adichie grew up on a university campus in Nigeria, in a middle-class family with professional parents. She was highly educated and cosmopolitan, but those were not the identities her American roommate had been told Africans could possess. “She felt sorry for me even before she saw me,” Adichie said. “Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe. In this single story, there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as human equals”.Her experience illustrates the problem that occurs when we see ourselves or others as possessing only a single identity—it eliminates virtually any possibility of meaningful connection. Today, there are numerous forces—economic, political, and cultural—seeking to minimize your multifaceted and complex identity to a single story, and in the process widen the gap between you and others or between a group you belong to and ones you do not. Not only does this fuel the divisions in our society, but it also eliminates the possibility of empathy toward those who do not share your narrow identity. DAILY SCRIPTURE GALATIANS 3:26-29  2 KINGS 5:1-27  WEEKLY PRAYER From 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.

Jesus’ Anger

Reflecting on Jesus’ cleansing of the temple in John’s Gospel (2:13–22), Father Richard explores the implications of Jesus’ anger and actions: 

Jesus’ actions in the temple are what finally get him killed. After this, religious leaders are dead set against him. Whenever law and order are based on interpretations of divine proclamation, what invariably happens is that the church and state, or religion and government, start working together and operating as one. It’s still true in many countries to this day. Government leaders like to have religion on their side so they can feel like everything they’re doing is blessed by God.

A few years ago, I was at a meeting in Washington, D.C. with nineteen representatives of various denominations. We wrote a statement that listed six different issues where we felt what Jesus teaches and what our government was doing are almost exact opposites. The issues revolved around racism, nationalism, classism that always favors the rich and the powerful, the terrible lack of truth in government, and our constant idealizing of money, war, and power. On every issue, the teaching of Jesus is in direct contradiction to the way our government has often operated.

Yet, if I’m honest, in many ways it’s always been that way; this is nothing new. It’s what’s playing out in this prophetic gospel reading (and in Matthew 21:12–17 also). The temple has become totally aligned with King Herod, with the collecting of taxes and money, and the selling of forgiveness.

Whenever religion gets into the business of the “buying and selling” of God, or of requiring sacrifices to earn God’s love, we have a problem. When Jesus said, “Get these birds out of here,” it’s a clue to the source of Jesus’ anger. The ordinary people had to sacrifice to be right with the priesthood and the temple. They sacrificed oxen and sheep, but the very poor were allowed to offer doves. Mary and Joseph had to give doves when they brought the infant Jesus to the temple (Luke 2:22–24). Jesus knows that his religion is not taking care of the poor; in fact, it’s stealing from the poor, and making them give even the little they have to feel they are right with God.

Jesus is angry about this, and many use this passage to justify violence because Jesus appears pretty violent here. But note that he’s violent toward things, not toward people. He’s liberating animals and trying to liberate the poor from their oppression. Of course, the religious leaders want to protect the building, the temple, but Jesus is redefining the temple. He identifies his body as the temple (John 2:21). The new temple is the human person; we are the body of Christ.

We see Jesus making this great revolution, transforming religion from a concern for sacrifice to earn God’s love to trust through which we know God’s love. And where does that trust happen? In the human heart.

Good and Necessary Anger

Dr. Barbara Holmes describes her felt experience of anger: 

Anger is intense. Often, there is a flash of heat and disorientation and the need to justify or retaliate. When I was a child, anger was my response to hurt feelings. When offended, I would lash out or run crying to my mom. In her arms, and with her reassurances, I could quell a heat of rage so intense that it threatened to overtake me. Anger is an emotion that consumes mind and body—but sometimes anger is necessary for survival. [1]

Richard explains how anger helps develop healthy individuals and communities: 

Anger is good and very necessary to protect appropriate boundaries of self and others. In men’s work, we call it the “good warrior” archetype. On the other hand, anger becomes self-defeating and egocentric when it hangs around too long after we have received its message. But conscious, visible, felt anger is a gift to consciousness and to community. We need it to know who we are and what boundaries must be defended, along with the depth of hurt and alienation in ourselves and in others with which we are dealing. [2]

Holmes continues: 

Many spiritual traditions warn us against anger. We are told that anger provides fertile ground for seeds of discontent, anxiety, and potential harm to self and others. This is true. However, when systems of injustice inflict generational abuses upon people and communities because of their ethnicity, race, sexuality, and/or gender, anger as righteous indignation is appropriate, healthy, and necessary for survival.

Jesus expressed righteous indignation when he encountered the unjust systems of religious and Roman authorities, yet Christian theologies shy away from the integration of anger into their canons. How can churches continue to ignore anger and still be relevant during this era when everyone is angry about everything? People of color are angry about police brutality, white supremacy, white privilege, and economic marginalization.…

A theology of anger [for communities under siege] assumes that anger as a response to injustice is spiritually healthy…. A theology of anger can help us to construct healthy boundaries … [and] the healthy expression of righteous anger can translate communal despair into compassionate action and justice-seeking.… The question is whether or not we will recognize our wounds and the source of our anger so that we can heal ourselves and others and awaken to our potential to embody the beloved community….

If we take a theology of anger seriously, first we come together, then we grieve together, then we consider where we are and where we are going. If there is opportunity, we engage in deep considerations of cause and effect, and we listen for the whispers of the Holy Spirit.… Our health and wholeness require that we take off our masks of Christian piety and do the difficult work of acknowledging our anger, our vulnerability, and our pain. It is this contemplative work that moves us toward forgiveness, for when we recognize our own human frailty, we can more easily forgive the fragility and failings of others. [3]

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FEB 23, 2024 A Greater Artist Than All Others

Vincent van Gogh’s struggles with mental illness are well known, and the accepted account of his death in 1890 is that he committed suicide during a particularly difficult lapse in his mental health after leaving the hospital in St. Remy. Numerous discrepancies in the narrative have led more recent biographers to question this account, postulating instead that Vincent was accidentally shot in the stomach by a group of drunk teenagers with whom he was acquainted.This alternative explanation may explain why Vincent while dying was concerned about others being blamed for his death. He told two officers, “Do not accuse anybody, it is I that wished to commit suicide.” His words echo those of Jesus who said, “No one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord” (John 10:18). Whether his death was an accident or caused by his illness, it is evident that his faith remained until the end.Van Gogh’s funeral was attended by many artists. One of them, Emile Bernard, described the setting: “On the walls of the room where the body lay all his canvases were nailed, forming a sort of halo around him, and rendering his death all the more painful to the artists who were present by the splendor of the genius that radiated from them. On the coffin a simple white linen, masses of flowers, the sunflowers which he loved so much, yellow dahlias, yellow flowers everywhere. It was his favorite color….”   It was fitting that Vincent’s body was covered with yellow flowers—the symbol he so often used in his paintings to represent God’s presence and healing love. Directly above the casket hung a single painting—his Pietà showing the lifeless body of Jesus with Vincent’s own face and red hair awaiting the resurrection. Both the flowers and the painting were an affirmation that Vincent believed not even death could separate him from the love of God in Christ.It’s appropriate to conclude this series on the faith and art of Vincent van Gogh with his own words about Christ: “Christ alone, of all the philosophers, magi, etc.—has affirmed as a principle of certainty, eternal life, the infinity of time, the nothingness of death… He lived serenely, as a greater artist than all other artists, despising marble and clay as well as color, working in living flesh. That is to say, this matchless artist, hardly to be conceived of by the obtuse instrument of our modern, nervous, stupefied brains, made neither statues nor pictures nor books; he loudly proclaimed that he made…living men, immortals.” DAILY SCRIPTURE ROMANS 8:31-39  JOHN 10:1-18  WEEKLY PRAYERFrom Henry Van Dyke (1852 – 1933) O Christ, the brightness of God’s glory and express image of his person, whom death could not conquer, nor the tomb imprison; as you have shared our mortal frailty in the flesh, help us to share your immortal triumph in the spirit. Let no shadow of the grave frighten us and no fear of darkness turn our hearts from you. Reveal yourself to us as the first and the last, the Living One, our immortal Savior and Lord. Amen.The post A Greater Artist Than All Others first appeared on With God Daily.

Depth psychologist Carol Pearson considers the gifts shared by those who have completed the hero’s journey of inner transformation:

At the beginning of the classic hero myth, the kingdom is a wasteland. Crops are not growing, illness is rampant, babies are not being born, and alienation and despair are pervasive. The fertility, the sense of life, has disappeared from the kingdom.…

A more youthful challenger goes on a journey … [which] transforms the challenger, whose treasure is the discovery of a new and life-affirming perspective. When the hero returns … fertility and abundance are restored. Rain falls, nourishing parched ground. Crops spring up, babies are born, the plague is cured, and people feel hopeful and alive once more.…

Heroes, then, are not only people who grow and change and take their journeys; they also are agents of change.… The hero’s task always has been to bring new life to an ailing culture.

In ancient times, societies were governed by kings and queens.… Today, however, we prize the achievement of democracy. Yet living in an egalitarian society carries with it responsibilities. Instead of only exceptional people going on the quest, we all need to be doing so. Heroism today requires us all to find the treasure of our true selves and to share that treasure with the community as a whole—through doing and being fully who we are. To the degree that we do so, our kingdoms are transformed. [1]

Richard locates the generativity of our spiritual journeys with our deeper connection to the Source of all life:

The hero “falls through” what is merely their life situation to discover their Real Life, which is always a much deeper river, hidden beneath the appearances. Most people confuse their life situation with their actual life, which is an underlying flow beneath everyday events. This deeper discovery is largely what religious people mean by “finding their soul.”

The hero returns to where they started and “knows the place for the first time” [2], but now with a gift or “boon” for their people or village. As the last step of Alcoholics Anonymous states, a person must pass the lessons learned on to others—or there has been no real gift at all. The hero’s journey is always an experience of an excess of life, a surplus of energy, with plenty left over for others. The hero has found eros, or life energy, and it is more than enough to undo thanatos, the energy of death.

Interestingly enough, this classic tradition of a true “hero” is not our present understanding at all. There is little social matrix to our present use of the word. A “hero” now is largely about being bold, attractive, rich, famous, talented, or “fantastic” by oneself, and often for oneself, whereas the classic hero is the one who “goes the distance,” whatever that takes, and then has plenty left over for others. True heroism serves the common good or it is not really heroism at all.

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Sarah Young Jesus Calling

 Be on guard against the pit of self-pity. When you are weary or unwell, this demonic trap is the greatest danger you face. Don’t even go near the edge of the pit. Its edges crumble easily, and before you know it, you are on the way down. It is ever so much harder to get out of the pit than to keep a safe distance from it. That is why I tell you to be on guard.

    There are several ways to protect yourself from self-pity. When you are occupied with praising and thanking Me, it is impossible to feel sorry for yourself. Also, the closer you live to Me, the more distance there is between you and the pit. Live in the Light of My Presence by fixing your eyes on Me. Then you will be able to run with endurance the race that is set before you, without stumbling or falling. 

RELATED SCRIPTURE: 

Psalm 89:15-16 NLT

15 Happy are those who hear the joyful call to worship,

    for they will walk in the light of your presence, Lord.

16 They rejoice all day long in your wonderful reputation.

    They exult in your righteousness.

Additional insight regarding Psalm 89:14,15: Righteousness, justice, love, and truth are the foundation of God’s throne; they are central characteristics of the way God rules. They summarize his character. As God’s ambassadors, we can exhibit the same traits when we deal with people. Make sure your actions flow out of righteousness, justice, love, and faithfulness, because any unfair, unloving, or dishonest action cannot come from God.

Hebrews 12:1-2 NLT

God’s Discipline Proves His Love

12 Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a huge crowd of witnesses to the life of faith, let us strip off every weight that slows us down, especially the sin that so easily trips us up. And let us run with endurance the race God has set before us. 2 We do this by keeping our eyes on Jesus, the champion who initiates and perfects our faith. Because of the joy awaiting him, he endured the cross, disregarding its shame. Now he is seated in the place of honor beside God’s throne.

Additional insight regarding Hebrews 12:1: This “huge crowd of witnesses” is composed of the people described in Chapter 11. Their faithfulness is a constant encouragement for us. We do not struggle alone, and we are not the first to struggle with the problems we face. Others have run the race and won, and their witness stirs us to run and win also. What an inspiring heritage we have

Additional insight regarding Hebrews 12:1: Long-distance runners work hard to build endurance and strength. On race day, their clothes are lightweight and their bodies lean. To run the race that God has set before us, we must also strip off the excess weight that slows us down.