Gareth Higgins and Brian McLaren describe how Jesus invites us into the Seventh Story:
[Jesus] radically interrupted the six stories, saying that instead of getting stuff and keeping others from getting stuff, you can’t actually possess stuff for yourself alone in the first place. Instead of building walls, you are invited to show the same kindness toward your neighbor as you would want them to show to you, to celebrate his joys, to grieve her losses. Even more provocative: instead of defeating enemies, you are asked to love them. We call this the reconciliation-liberation story.
The most revolutionary part of the Seventh Story … is this: in each of the six stories, humans are masters of “our” domain, the world is divided into “us” and “them,” and the purpose of life is to be a selfish economic unit, producing bounty to keep for yourself and your group. The six stories are all based on reacting to other people’s desire; they invite separation at best, and violence at worst; and they seek to avoid suffering…. And in a world where we have the power to destroy ourselves, they are evolutionarily inappropriate.
But in the Seventh Story, human beings are not … masters of “our” domain, but partners in the evolution of goodness.[1]
McLaren discusses freedom to create a better story, and how Jesus lived out the Seventh Story:
I think it would be dangerous if there was some version of the Seventh Story imposed upon everybody to achieve world peace. There is something about the Seventh Story that needs to be powerful without exercising power, and needs to be persuasive without backing people into a corner. Something about it has to involve freedom and discovery and choice….
What we need isn’t a storyline that wants to erase all the others. What we need is story space that invites people, in whatever story they’re part of, to stop and wonder, “I don’t like where this story is going, and I don’t like how this is going to end. Is it possible there’s a better story to tell? Could we make a change and find a better ending?” That, to me, is what good news is about. For example, Jesus went around saying, “Repent.” I don’t think that necessarily means we should feel guilty and shameful about things we’ve done. I think it means rethink the story of your lives and open yourself to a different and better ending.
Jesus doesn’t give up on his story, but to the very end, he lives this Seventh Story. In the resurrection stories, he doesn’t come back saying, “Okay, enough of that love story. I’m going to come back a second time to get revenge on all those people.” The story of the resurrection is, “Let’s keep this story going.” He tells his followers to go into the whole world and keep this story going. Jesus lives and dies by a story of love, and the protagonist of the story is love. [2]
Gareth Higgins shares why the story of accumulation, which is second nature to most of us in West, can be so damaging:
The accumulation story is about money and fear. It’s a story about being possessed by things rather than enjoying and sharing them. And it’s a story nested within a bigger story about how sometimes when we think we have more, we actually have less…. Whether it’s bigger sofas or bigger houses or bigger jobs or bigger bank accounts or reputation or ego or a bigger empire, we don’t have to look too far to find the accumulation story at work. The story that says we will achieve peace and security through having more things. It’s an expansionist narrative, but it doesn’t expand peace and security. The more you think you need to accumulate, the bigger fence you need to build around yourself and the fewer people you will trust and let into your life. It’s the inverse of what it means to live in true peace and security, which only comes in the context of relationship with people you can trust. [1]
Author Lynne Twist names the malignant effects of buying into the accumulation story:
Money has only the power that we assign to it, and we have assigned it immense power. We have given it almost final authority. If we look only at behavior, it tells us that we have made money more important than we are, given it more meaning than human life. Humans have done and will do terrible things in the name of money. They have killed for it, enslaved other people for it, and enslaved themselves to joyless lives in pursuit of it…. We all, at one time or another, have demeaned and devalued ourselves, taken advantage of people, or engaged in other actions we’re not proud of in order to get or keep money or the power we believe it can buy. [2]
Richard Rohr often critiques the story of accumulation:
Jesus is absolute about money and power because he knows what we’re going to do. Most of us will serve this god called mammon. Luke’s Gospel even describes mammon as a type of illness, as Jesuit John Haughey (1930–2019) explained: “Mammon is not simply a neutral term in Luke. It is not simply money. It connotes disorder…. Mammon becomes then a source of disorder because people allow it to make a claim on them that only God can make.” [3] “Mammon illness” takes over when we think all of life is counting, weighing, measuring, and deserving.
To participate in the reign of God, we have to stop counting. We have to stop hoarding in order to let the flow of forgiveness and love flow through us. The love of God can’t be doled out by any process whatsoever. We can’t earn it. We can’t lose it. As long as we stay in this world of accumulation, of earning and losing, we’ll live in perpetual resentment, envy, or climbing. [4
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A blessing from Gareth Higgins
A BLESSING FOR THE NEXT STEP It’s no wonder you want to be a peacemaker, for you have seen so much conflict. It’s no wonder you want to heal shame, for you have been a home for humiliation. It’s no wonder that you have sat in the ashes of loneliness, for you have been scapegoated to the point of wanting to die. It’s no wonder that you want to transform supremacist stories, scapegoating stories, selfish stories, separation stories, for you know the weight of what happenswhen humans do not do their inner work. So May you go to places of most delighted knowing with friendsand deepest intimacy with loversand through the dangerous, exhilarating woodsof activism with comrades. May you emerge into spacious places, finding reassurance that you did not deserveto be burdened by other people’s shadows. May you discover that poisonous shame is built on a lieand your loneliness is not the end. May you find the path to honest amends for your mistakesand repair for the hurt you have known. As the pain is healed and the gifts come into bloom,may they dance with each other. May the fruit of kindness and solidarity be full on your lips. And may you discover, and carefully hold,a vision of what you’re here for. Brilliantly creative, courage when you need it, with all the community you want, woven into the fabric of this moment’s crisis,and this moment’s gift. A sovereign, a lover, a magician, a warrior-protector for the common good. May your wound transform first into a scar, and then a medicine story.
The Daily Meditations continue to explore the “seven stories” inspired by Brian McLaren and Gareth Higgins’s e-book The Seventh Story. Father Richard describes how the gospel offers us a new story:
If we’re honest, culture forms us much more than the gospel. It seems we have kept the basic storyline of human history in place rather than allow the gospel to reframe and redirect the story. Except for those who have experienced grace at their core, Christianity has not created a new story, “a new mind” (Romans 12:2), or a “new self” (Ephesians 4:24). The old and tired win/lose scenarios seem to be in our cultural hard drive. The experience of grace at the core of reality is much more imaginative and installs new win/win programs in our psyche, but has been neglected and unrecognized by most of Christianity.
Up to now, Christianity has largely imitated cultural stories instead of transforming them. Reward/punishment and good people versus bad people have been the plot lines of most novels, plays, operas, movies, and conflicts. It’s the only way a dualistic mind, unrenewed by prayer and grace, can perceive reality. It is almost impossible to switch this mind with a short sermon during a Sunday church service.
As long as we remain within a dualistic, win/lose script, Christianity will continue to appeal to self-interested moralisms and myths. It will never rise to the mystical banquet that Jesus offers us. The spiritual path and life itself will be mere duty instead of delight, “jars of purification” instead of 150 gallons of intoxicating wine at the end of the party (John 2:6–10). We will focus on maintaining order by sanctified stories of violence instead of moving toward a higher order of love and healing, which is the heart of the gospel. [1]
The great traditions give name, shape, and ultimate direction to what our heart inherently knows from other sources. This is not new or unorthodox but exactly what Paul taught: “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 of creation” (Romans 1:20). Similarly, as the Hebrew Scriptures say, “It is not beyond your strength or beyond your reach. It is not in the heavens, so that you need to ask, ‘Who will go up to heaven and bring it down to us?’ Nor is it beyond the seas, so that you need to ask, ‘Who will cross the seas and bring it back to us?’ No, the word is very near to you, it is in your mouth and in your heart” (Deuteronomy 30:11–14). We must honor the infinite mystery of our own life’s journey to recognize God in it. Or is it the other way around? It seems that God is not going to let us get close unless we bring all of ourselves—in love—including our brokenness. That’s why the Good News really is good news. Nothing is wasted. [2]
The Story of Victimization
Buddhist teacher angel Kyodo williams describes how clinging to harmful stories may increase our suffering:
The movies we replay in our heads—held on to from lives past—cause us to recycle stories that no longer serve us, if they ever did.
We run these stories over and over again and like hamsters on a wheel; we go nowhere in our inner life development, and as a result we suffer as adults from the wounds of our childhood.
Slowly these toxic stories crowd out the potential for joy and ease that is the birthright of every human being…. If we simply give ourselves over to this narrative, to the storyline of “Uns and Nots”—unloved, unseen, unappreciated, unwanted, uncared for, not good enough, not smart enough, not attractive enough, not powerful, not rich enough, not the right color or gender or position or class—then we abdicate the one thing that can reposition our relationship to the entire experience of our life: responsibility.
I often say, “It’s not your fault, but it’s your responsibility.” It is quite true that there are many conditions in life that confer a less-than-desirable experience. But it is also true that at the end of your days on this planet, your life will have been lived only by you. How you experience whatever conditions life hands you correlates directly to how much responsibility you choose to take. None of us can control all (if any) of the conditions, but we can choose how we experience the conditions we find ourselves in.
If we do not begin to debunk the deep inner myth that many of us carry that we do not deserve greater joy, love, or ease in our lives because we are _______ (fill in the blank with your choice of Uns or Nots), then we condemn ourselves to the role of victims in our own movies. [1]
Brian McLaren witnesses how the Seventh Story can free us from other unjust stories, including the story of victimization:
The stories that we’ve looked at—the stories of domination, revolution, purification, isolation—these stories create victims. These stories victimize people, and very often people’s lives are devastated, destroyed, or ended by these stories. We might be able to say that in millions of people’s lives, their experience of being a victim of these other stories becomes the biggest reality of their lives. This reality becomes the story of victimization. Part of the Seventh Story framework is that it communicates to people who’ve been victimized by other stories and says, “We’d like to give you permission to not let that story be the defining factor in your life, but rather to help you see and understand yourself in some other way.” Domination creates victims. Revolution creates victims. Purification creates victims. But victims have an alternative in how they define their lives. The Seventh Story can liberate us from our lives being defined by oppression, abuse, exploitation, marginalization, or vilification in some way. [2]
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From John Chaffee
“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding about ourselves.“
Everything is our teacher. Not just our friends and our successes, but our annoyances and our failures. Perhaps it is because I am approaching 40 in December, but I have been internally shifting to the things that Jung calls the “second half of life.” The first half is all about building our ego and sense of self, the second half is all about letting it go and learning from our failures.
It is not easy, but it is good work to get around to doing. Keep growing. Everything is your teacher.
Gareth Higgins explores how our tendency to isolate ourselves springs from a genuine need for the inner work of contemplation:
The isolation story is ultimately a story of separation: separation from each other, separation from God and goodness, separation from the earth and the ecosystem of which we are a part. It’s a story of separation even from ourselves.…
Jesus came to subvert all stories of violence and harm, not to repeat them. Instead of advocating escapist stories of isolation [like John the Baptist and the Essenes], he sent his followers into the world to be agents of positive change like salt, light, and yeast. But even Jesus needed peace and quiet sometimes, and this reveals the legitimate need that the story of isolation answers….
It’s not the need to completely withdraw from community, and it’s not that we shouldn’t participate in groups that have boundaries. What the story of isolation answers (poorly) is the need of the inner life for contemplation.
There is a universal need for finding a space inside and tending it through practices of contemplation that can enable us to become what we might call strong peace…. Some peace is as strong as a block of marble. We might become strong peace through contemplation even in the face of roaring traffic, of people on a city street, or the bombardment of headline news on our screens….
Instead of withdrawing from the world, whether as individuals or groups or nations, we are called to be fully immersed in the places we are. Learning to discern light and shadow, bringing what we have and asking for what we need. Our contemplative practices are always ways of being more alive in the world and more active for the common good.… When we exchange isolation for contemplation, we discover it’s not where you live or with whom you live, but how you live. Instead of a lonely, separatist, isolationist life, we can become the contemplative life of the party or the most hospitable hermit. [1]
Author and translator Carmen Acevedo Butcher shares how contemplation disrupts unhelpful stories that run through her mind:
One of the things that contemplation does for me is what Meister Eckhart calls Gelassenheit. [2] [It allows me] to let go of my own stories. We all have these stories going through our minds … these different aspects of ourselves that are always having an inner conversation. When I practice contemplation, whether it’s walking down the street … or just returning to love, somehow, I’m letting go of my stories for the moment. There comes a quiet where I can hear again what Beatrice Bruteau calls that “radicaloptimism.” [3] What I love about contemplation is that it’s kind of like that record scratch … where everything stops and you go, wait, what am I doing? Who am I? Why am I just participating in this blather inside … when I could sink into this real love that is who I am and who everyone is? [4]
Everyone knows someone who can spin a yarn. At gatherings, they capture the attention of those within earshot and never let go until the fish is caught, the lost item is found, or someone is saved from complete disaster. There is a smile in this storyteller’s voice, a way about their words. And their stories get passed down and around until they become nothing short of family lore.
On a larger scale and in much the same way, history’s best storytellers and their stories endure. Homer’s poetry. Shakespeare’s plays. And yes, Jesus’ parables. It’s likely — whether you’re familiar with Jesus’ personal story or not — that you’ve heard a few of his narratives. Perhaps it’s “The Prodigal Son” or “The Good Samaritan”? Even if those titles don’t ring a bell, you’ve probably heard their retellings. Because we haven’t let these stories go. Jesus captured our attention with them.
During his time, it’s obvious he captured the attention of his immediate audience, too. He was known to draw a crowd whenever he spoke, whether walking outside or sitting around the dinner table. And you can imagine the joy in his voice when he spoke about a shepherd finding his lost sheep or a father welcoming back his wayward son.
Jesus’s stories were — and still are — compelling.
But like all good stories with staying power, they do more than entertain. They hold meaning. That’s what gives stories their value. Some call Jesus’ stories “logos,” which simply translates to “word,” but we all know words must be put in the right order to amount to anything. And Jesus ordered his words with purpose, pointing to the truth about wisdom, discernment, and love. When we see this “logos” in any story — from Jesus’ parables to our favorite fairy tales, from popular movies to the news — we recognize it. It resonates when goodness prevails. And this goodness is what holds us all together. It’s part of our shared human experience.
This is why we can still look to Jesus’ stories and use them as reference points. It turns out, things haven’t changed that much. Humans are still humans, and the world still runs on stories. And Jesus told some of the best of them. ___
Did you know Jesus told nearly 40 parables?
There are so many to discover, but here are the few mentioned above:
Parable of the Prodigal Son: Luke 15:11-32 Parable of the Lost Sheep: Matthew 18:10-14 Parable of the Good Samaritan: Luke 10:25-37
Scripture References:
Luke 15:11-32,
The Parable of the Lost Son
11 Then He said: “A certain man had two sons. 12 And the younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the portion of goods that falls to me.’ So he divided to them his livelihood. 13 And not many days after, the younger son gathered all together, journeyed to a far country, and there wasted his possessions with [a]prodigal living. 14 But when he had spent all, there arose a severe famine in that land, and he began to be in want. 15 Then he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country, and he sent him into his fields to feed swine. 16 And he would gladly have filled his stomach with the [b]pods that the swine ate, and no one gave him anything.
17 “But when he came to himself, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger! 18 I will arise and go to my father, and will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you, 19 and I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your hired servants.” ’
20 “And he arose and came to his father. But when he was still a great way off, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and fell on his neck and kissed him. 21 And the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and in your sight, and am no longer worthy to be called your son.’
22 “But the father said to his servants, [c]‘Bring out the best robe and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand and sandals on his feet. 23 And bring the fatted calf here and kill it, and let us eat and be merry; 24 for this my son was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ And they began to be merry.
25 “Now his older son was in the field. And as he came and drew near to the house, he heard music and dancing. 26 So he called one of the servants and asked what these things meant. 27 And he said to him, ‘Your brother has come, and because he has received him safe and sound, your father has killed the fatted calf.’
28 “But he was angry and would not go in. Therefore his father came out and pleaded with him. 29 So he answered and said to his father, ‘Lo, these many years I have been serving you; I never transgressed your commandment at any time; and yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might make merry with my friends. 30 But as soon as this son of yours came, who has devoured your livelihood with harlots, you killed the fatted calf for him.’
31 “And he said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that I have is yours. 32 It was right that we should make merry and be glad, for your brother was dead and is alive again, and was lost and is found.’ ”
Matthew 18:10-14,
The Parable of the Wandering Sheep
10 “See that you do not despise one of these little ones. For I tell you that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father in heaven. [11] [a]
12 “What do you think? If a man owns a hundred sheep, and one of them wanders away, will he not leave the ninety-nine on the hills and go to look for the one that wandered off? 13 And if he finds it, truly I tell you, he is happier about that one sheep than about the ninety-nine that did not wander off. 14 In the same way your Father in heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should perish.
Luke 10:25-37;
The Parable of the Good Samaritan
25 On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
26 “What is written in the Law?” he replied. “How do you read it?”
27 He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’[a]; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’[b]”
28 “You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”
29 But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”
30 In reply Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead. 31 A priest happened to be going down the same road, and when he saw the man, he passed by on the other side. 32 So too, a Levite, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. 33 But a Samaritan, as he traveled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him. 34 He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put the man on his own donkey, brought him to an inn and took care of him. 35 The next day he took out two denarii[c] and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Look after him,’ he said, ‘and when I return, I will reimburse you for any extra expense you may have.’
36 “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”
37 The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.”
Brian McLaren describes the deep and compelling attraction of the story of purification:
There’s a scary tendency you find across nations, across cultures, religions, centuries, social classes…. It’s called coalitionary aggression. There’s this tendency of human beings who form groups to then find some minority within their in-group, whom the majority then begins to bully, pick on, or marginalize. The majority calls itself clean and they call this minority unclean. The majority is acceptable, the minority is unacceptable. The majority is normal, and the minority is queer, odd, or different. The majority eventually creates a kind of coalition aggression against the minority. And in so doing, they make themselves feel good, and they unite themselves because now they’ve created a common enemy close at hand….
We see stories of purification going on in our politics, in our churches, in our business power dynamics, in our families, even in our own psyches. When we’re feeling guilty or tense about something, it really does help to find someone else to project our anxieties upon and to make ourselves feel innocent, pure, and clean…. [But] scapegoating others does not actually create peace and security. It almost creates an addiction. Every so often we need a new victim upon which to pour out our accumulated guilt or shame or fear or anxiety or hostility.
McLaren describes how Jesus directly challenges the purification story:
All the people that Jesus hangs out with and eats with are people who are being scapegoated, people who are being used for somebody else’s purification narrative. These are the people that Jesus humanizes: people such as Zacchaeus, Matthew and his tax collector friends, a leper, or the woman caught in adultery…. If you read that story in chapter 8 of John’s Gospel, notice Jesus’ physical posture. It’s as if he’s using his body to draw attention away from the woman and becomes an interruption to a purification narrative that was heading toward a deadly end.
McLaren acknowledges the complexity that arises when we challenge these stories:
The purification story strikes me as especially dangerous to people who want to be good…. That desire to be good can then create in us this need, especially when we feel that we’re failing at being good, to find somebody who looks bad or somebody we can portray as bad to lift ourselves up.…
In a certain sense, what we’re inviting people to do [by identifying these stories at work] is not to make their lives simpler, but to give them some clarity on the complexity of life. We’re inviting people to see that there are these domination stories, revolution or revenge stories, and purification stories out there at work. It doesn’t make life simpler, but when we understand the stories that we find ourselves in, perhaps it gives us enough clarity to try to be a more moral and more peaceful agent in this world.
Jesus was fed up with politics, too. (From He Gets US)
In Jesus’ time, communities were deeply divided by bitter differences in religious beliefs, political positions, income inequality, legal status, and ethnic differences. Sound familiar?
Jesus lived in the middle of a culture war, too. And though the political systems were different (not exactly a representative democracy), the greed, hypocrisy, and oppression different groups used to get their way were very similar.
Let’s set the scene.
Jesus was born at the height of the Roman Empire’s power. They’d conquered most of the known world, and Israel was no exception. Unlike previous empires that would try to destroy cultures by displacing conquered peoples’ leaders, the Romans didn’t force people to change their religion or customs as long as they kept their obligations to the empire. Rome would install a client king (a puppet government) and exact tribute (cash) in lots of different ways. Families were charged taxes per person—farmers on crops, fishermen on catches, and travelers were charged fees to use the roads. This was in addition to local business and religious taxes charged by priests.
In Israel, political and religious factions were one and the same. Back then, it was Pharisees and Sadducees. Today, we have conservatives and liberals.
The Pharisees were the most religiously conservative leaders. They had the most influence among the common working poor, who were the majority. They believed that a king would come one day to conquer Rome with violence and free their nation. Some preyed upon a mostly illiterate population by adding extra rules and requirements that were designed to force the working poor into a posture of subjugation.
The Sadducees were wealthy aristocrats who had a vested financial interest in Roman rule. They were in charge of the temple, and they didn’t believe any savior king was coming. They made themselves wealthy by exacting unfair taxes and fees from the labor of their own people and by contriving money-making schemes that forced the poor to pay exorbitant prices to participate in temple sacrifice—a critical part of their religion.
There were Zealot groups who hid in the hills and violently resisted Roman occupation, and then there were the Samaritans, often oppressed and marginalized because of their racial and ethnic identities.
And so, the common farmer, fisherman, or craftsman’s family lived through a highly volatile political period. Overbearing religious leaders who despised and oppressed them, wealthy elites who ripped them off, racial and ethnic tension with neighbors, and sporadic violent outbreaks between an oppressive occupying army.
So where was Jesus in all of this? Did he align with the religious elites? With the wealthy and powerful? Or did he start an uprising to overthrow them?
None of the above.
He went from town to town, offering hope, new life, and modeling a different way to live and to change the world. Instead of pursuing power, money, or religious authority, he shared a loving and sacrificially generous way of living. He chose not to go along with the schemes others used to impact the world. Instead, he championed a better way.
And so, each of these political groups saw him as a threat. The Pharisees recognized his movement as an affront to their authority—exposing the hypocrisy of their practices. The Sadducees saw Jesus as a threat to their power and wealth because he exposed their money-making schemes. The Zealots violently rejected one of the essential themes of Jesus’ movement: love your enemy.
In the end, it took all three of these groups to have him killed. A Zealot (Judas) betrayed his location to those seeking to arrest him, the Sadducees brought him before the Romans to be executed, and when the Romans couldn’t find a crime committed, the Pharisees rallied the people to force Rome’s hand.
Isn’t it funny how political foes can come together to destroy a common enemy that threatens their designs? But in spite of their best efforts, his execution was only the beginning of a movement that continues to impact the world thousands of years later. Jesus’ movement was so impactful because he actively resisted and rejected participating in culture-war politics.
Scripture References:
Matthew 9:35-38, 35 Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness. 36 When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. 37 Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. 38 Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.”
Luke 19:10; For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”
The first two stories, domination and revolution, are a kind of yin and yang. Where one exists the other will inevitably follow. —Brian McLaren
Gareth Higgins grew up in Northern Ireland, a place haunted by cycles of violence and revenge. His experience shaped a commitment to live out a better story:
Throughout my childhood, nearly 4,000 people were killed and over 40,000 directly physically injured. Countless hundreds of thousands were traumatized or otherwise wounded by a conflict rooted in the domination story but met by the revolution story. I’m not sure that I like the word “revolution” because it’s also been applied to movements for the common good. If we take it literally, it actually means a movement that ends up exactly where it started. It might be better called the revenge story.
Movements that overthrow repressive regimes have not always replaced them with something better. In fact, unless a restorative consciousness is engaged, revolutions run the risk of merely turning the tables, replacing one set of broken relationships with yet more domination, perhaps a slightly less oppressive form of domination, but domination, nonetheless.
Instead of replacing domination with more domination, we need to imagine societies and institutions in which everyone is welcome at the table. The only rule for joining would be to agree not to harm anyone. For that to happen, the table needs to be enlarged, not flipped over, with the widest range of people possible involved in making and setting the table. It’s not my table, nor is it theirs. In the spirit of the Seventh Story of liberation and reconciliation, it’s Love’s table….
These past few years, many of us have felt more concerned than ever about elected politics. It’s felt like we’ve been living in revolutionary times, but really revenge times, times where we pit ourselves against each other and where we believe that the only way to have peace and security in the world is to totally defeat our political opponents. But whether your team or my team was in charge or not, whether they occupy the positions of power in society, there’s only so much that elected politics can do.
Higgins shares his hope for the future:
If you want a better world, tell a better story, even about the possibility of embodying justice without vengeance. If you think that sounds naive, I hear you. But I’m coming from a society where we have enacted significant generational, structural change. We have radically reduced the use of violence and taken some tentative steps toward cooperating with each other rather than just flipping the tables so that the people who used to be oppressed are now the people doing the oppressing. The reason [justice without vengeance] doesn’t sound naive to me is because I’ve seen it work.
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Jesus had strained relationships, too. (From He Gets Us.)
We were thinking about what Jesus’ relationships with friends and family might have looked like and were surprised by what we found. Pastel paintings and imagery of Jesus so often depict him having a peaceful, wonderful time with his loved ones, but a closer look at the text paints a more complex picture.
Shortly after beginning his public ministry, Jesus went back to his hometown to share his message. A whole crowd gathered to hear him speak. By the time he was done speaking, they were calling to have him killed. They even tried to take matters into their own hands and throw him off a cliff. If we read this story too quickly, we might miss the fact that the very people trying to kill him grew up with him. They would have been friends and neighbors that knew Jesus when he was a boy. And that’s not the only example of good relationships gone sour. One of Jesus’ closest friends gave him up to the authorities in exchange for money, and another denied ever knowing him while he was being arrested. His family doubted him, and his own mother likely felt the relational strains that came part and parcel of a full-time traveling ministry.
The point is, Jesus’ relationships were far from perfect. Betrayal, doubt, insecurity, disagreement and distance muddied the waters even for Jesus. He couldn’t avoid relational stresses, but he did give us a model for how to respond to them and work toward restoration. His model? Radical patience and forgiveness.
It might have been best illustrated in a story he told about a father and son. The son asked for his inheritance while the father was still alive—he valued the money more than the relationship. The father obliged, gave the money, and the son went off and spent it until he found himself completely destitute with nothing left. He resolved to return home to his father to humbly ask for a job—not to reclaim his spot as son, but as one of many hired hands. As he was walking up to the house, the father saw him from afar and ran out to embrace him. To forgive him. To welcome him home as a son.
Repairing broken relationships is incredibly difficult, and the forgiveness Jesus both talked about and displayed is often messy and complicated. But know if you feel the pang of hurt in your relationships, Jesus did too, and take encouragement in his resolve to repair what was broken.
In the podcast Learning How to See, Brian McLaren shares how he learned the story of domination:
Looking back at my schooling, our whole introduction to history was told in terms of domination. The mighty empires that dominated, the explorers sent out by their home countries to dominate the world. Even my religious background was deeply rooted in the domination story because we Christians believed that our religion should dominate…. Theologically, my understanding of God was that God was the ultimate and universal dominating force. I remember from my youngest age hearing a Bible verse from the New Testament, “Every knee will bow, and every tongue will confess that Jesus is Lord” (Philippians 2:10–11). What I pictured is this powerful omnipotent God with sword drawn … demanding you bow your knee. It was this dominating vision of God. In that way, domination was the way the universe was supposed to run. [1]
Episcopal priest Stephanie Spellers describes the story of domination emerging from our collective self-centeredness:
When you see cultures based on White supremacy, misogyny, environmental exploitation, consumerism, oppression, and domination, you are actually seeing the fallout from self-centrism. Entire systems, institutions, and societies are fully capable of this sin, as when a group places itself at the center and expects the rest of humanity and creation to support its singular prosperity.
There is no possibility for right relationship if one powerful group protects and sustains itself over and against all others. From there, it’s just too easy to construct binaries and hierarchies of human existence. Our group is good; all of you are bad. Our group belongs on top; we have to keep you low. Our group owns these resources and knows the best way to use them; you will only receive what we give you. Other members of the human family become objects and tools to be acquired, controlled, used, and discarded. [2]
McLaren points to the difference between domination and dominion in the Bible:
The book of Genesis is often blamed for the domination story because, in the Garden of Eden story, human beings are given dominion over the rest of creation (Genesis 1:28). People assume dominion means domination, but I don’t think you have to read the story that way. The nature of God in the first creation story isn’t God dominating and forcing the world into a certain mold. It is “Let there be light.” It’s a permission-giving power.
It’s such a fascinating phrase: “Let there be light.” And also “Let there be land, let there be sea, let there be crawling creatures, let there be fish, let there be humans.” It’s a permission-giving rather than a domination. Then when human beings are made in the image of God, and God says, “You can have dominion,” we would expect it should be the same kind of gentle presence rather than a dominating, controlling, exploiting presence. It’s not “Let there be exploitation.” It’s very, very different. [3]
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“God has many that the Church does not, and the Church has many that God does not.“
(Bonhoeffer says this in his essay, “Christ, Reality, and Good. Christ, Church and World.”)
In my graduate studies at Princeton, I had the opportunity to take a semester-long class devoted to the life, work, and theology of Bonhoeffer. I chose to write a paper on the middle section of the quote presented here in #3.
A main idea that Bonhoeffer noticed in the New Testament was that after Christ, there was no longer a true distinction between one realm/world that was “sacred” and another realm/world that was “profane.” That dichotomy was faulty and inaccurate. There is only one reality because of Christ, and it is “reconciled.”
For Bonhoeffer as a Lutheran pastor, this realization of a “reconciled world” was an important distinction. As a result, his ethics and theology were not able to call anyone or anything “sacred” or “profane” but only as “reconciled.”
And, it all leads me to wonder… “What could this world look like if we approached everyone and everything as already reconciled?
For the next two weeks, the Daily Meditations will be inspired by The Seventh Story, an e-book written by Brian McLaren and Gareth Higgins, which offers a vision of love, reconciliation, and hope. Father Richard describes how stories provide purpose:
It doesn’t matter how old we are; we all need stories to believe in. If there’s no storyline, no integrating images that define who we are or give our lives meaning or direction, we just won’t be happy. I can’t imagine I’m alone in longing for us collectively to embrace a better story, one with the power to change our hearts and minds and enliven our imaginations. [1]
Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions introduced the term “paradigm shift.” A paradigm is a set of beliefs, stories, images, concepts, and structures that govern the way we think about something. Kuhn (1922–1996) held that paradigm change becomes necessary when a previous paradigm becomes so full of holes and patchwork “fixes” that a complete overhaul is necessary. The shift in thinking which might have felt threatening at one time now appears as the only way forward and as a real lifeline. I hope we are at one of these critical junctures again. Might we be willing to adopt a new story, a new set of beliefs, values, and systems that could change (and maybe even save) humanity and our world? [3]
Brian McLaren uses the phrase “framing story” to describe a similar change in paradigms.
[A framing story] gives people direction, values, vision, and inspiration by providing a framework for their lives…. If it tells us that the purpose of life is for individuals or nations to accumulate an abundance of possessions and to experience the maximum amount of pleasure during the maximum number of minutes of our short lives, then we will have little reason to manage our consumption. If our framing story tells us that we are in life-and-death competition with each other … then we will have little reason to seek reconciliation and collaboration and nonviolent resolutions to our conflicts….
But if our framing story tells us that we are free and responsible creatures in a creation made by a good, wise, and loving God, and that our Creator wants us to pursue virtue, collaboration, peace, and mutual care for one another and all living creatures, and that our lives can have profound meaning … then our society will take a radically different direction, and our world will become a very different place. [4]
The Stories That Don’t Work
In their e-book The Seventh Story, Brian McLaren and Gareth Higgins create a tale of the origin of seven stories of how humans—The People—interact and live with one another:
One day, a long time ago, one of The People saw another one of The People holding something shiny. “I want it,” said one of The People, so he took it. When he got back home that night, the rest of The People were amazed. “Because I have a shiny object,” he proclaimed, “You have to listen to me.” He told them a story about what he had learned about how to be happy, how to have peace and security, how to keep the shiny thing that he had found. The first story [the domination story] said that the way to be happy is to rule over others.
But every time that story was attempted, people were unhappy because the rulers oppressed them. So a second story was invented: Let’s overthrow the rulers. This [revolution] story didn’t work either because it just turned the tables, putting new people under oppression.
Another story began in which the old revolutionaries withdrew into their own isolated spaces and judged the world. Nothing changed. These island communities used the same old stories to run themselves, competing to be in charge … and dominating each other.
Meanwhile, the domination story and the isolation story had a business merger, which resulted in an experiment: if they could get rid of the people they didn’t like, who looked or sounded different, or whose customs weren’t like their own, surely that would fix things? Of course, that [purification] story just led to more suffering.…
The People still weren’t happy, and they knew it…. The People tried to convince themselves that things were okay by accumulating things; toys or nations, it was all the same to them.… The People kept hurting, and hurting each other. A sixth story [the victimization story] was created…. The People would make sure that no one would ever forget that they were the victims, that their suffering was their very identity, and that no one had suffered as much as them.…
Then, something new; a poet came to town, a storyteller who knew that the domination story, the revolution story, the isolation story, the purification story, the accumulation story, and the victimization story were all destined to fail.
They were destined to fail because they invited every human being, who is already interdependent with every other human being, and even with the earth itself, to pretend instead that we are in a competition.… The poet had a radical idea, the seed of a Seventh Story that will heal the world.… In the Seventh Story, the story of reconciliation, we still get to win, just not at anybody else’s expense. In the Seventh Story, human beings are not the protagonists of the world. Love is.
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From our friend Gareth Higgins site, The Porch:
FULL VERSION: Seamus Heaney, who died ten years ago this week, had been such a presence in Irish and northern Irish culture from before I was born that his death was more shocking than most. His distinction not only as a poet in the traditional sense, but a national wisdom figure had taken on an almost supernatural quality. He helped us know ourselves; and probably more than any other writer of his time, had things to say about the suffering arising from the conflict in and about Northern Ireland. Things to say that transcended us versus them. Words that made things like pens and shovels seem like mythical artefacts, blackberries and skylights like miracles. Part of the point of poetry, of course, is to puncture our mundanity, revealing the beauty potentially underneath everything. Heaney, obviously, had a special gift, which he honed; I don’t know if he’s the best poet Ireland has ever produced, and I’m not sure “best” is a poetic category, but we needed him then, and we need him now, because he took what mattered seriously.
I once briefly worked for BBC radio, presenting an arts show; and when Heaney would appear on it (he was loyally generous to Belfast broadcasters), he communicated by fax. This was long after fax machines were unnecessary – but he didn’t do other forms of electronic communication, at least not with us (it’s well known that the last message he sent to his beloved was by text, noli timere, be not afraid. The Latin overcomes the digital tendency to superficiality.) Come to think of it, a handwritten fax sent by a Nobel Laureate to thank a production team for a good job felt a good deal more real than email. Perhaps he did consider fax to be necessary after all – it suited the humane depth you would expect from him in conversation.
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Celebrity culture and our current status hierarchies tell us that the meaning of our lives is proportionate to how many people are paying attention to our work (or even merely what we wear, or who we are seen with, or how much money we get paid). But that’s a lie. It doesn’t serve the common good nor our own individual wellbeing to remember Seamus Heaney as unreachably better than any of us, just because he was famous. Like all publicly successful artists, his prominence started out as luck.
The fact that he was a magnificent poet (which may be worth aspiring to) had little to do with his fame (which may be worth ignoring). So it is with all of us – your gifts are probably not proportionate to how many people are buying your books or records, or watching your films, or coming to your shows or festivals. “Success” comes through chance, being in the right place at the right time, or having something so awful happen that it attracts the attention of crowds.
Your book sales or social media stats or the number of people attending your community gatherings are not the measure of you – either your inherent value or what you bring to the world.
You are, we are like characters in a play in which all the roles are supporting parts. It’s the responsibility of poetry to help us value the lives that are usually out of the spotlight as much as those that are bathed in it.
It moves me to think that Heaney’s best known poem, Digging, is about something as small and as cosmic as the relationship between a son and his father; so mundane and astonishing as cutting turf and holding a pen.
I don’t know more than most of us about who Seamus Heaney really was. But his way of holding himself in his writing, and in public appearances, and the one time I talked with him – neither light nor heavy, knowing who he was but not letting it get in the way of your own unfolding – was one good answer to what we need right now.
To take life seriously but not take ourselves too seriously.
To breathe before we speak.
To reimagine the places we’re from and the people we are in ways that honor both the light and shadow of experience, the shock and solace; and in the way we story them, make them a little better than when they found us.
We are each given a field to tend, and a shovel to dig with.
I am beyond glad that Seamus Heaney tended and dug the way he did. Because of that, he helped me see myself, and to see through the darkness that so often threatened to overwhelm me and my people, and the place I’m from, over and over again. I can imagine a northern Irish upbringing without his voice, but I’m glad I don’t have to.
I am willing to risk saying right here that there is someone who needs your voice, today, as much as I needed Heaney’s then.
So please, keep digging.
If you haven’t started yet, because you don’t believe that your field or your shovel matter, or you didn’t know you had a field or a shovel, please, for the love of life, do us all a favor. Try experimenting with the story that you matter as much as anyone else, and that whether what you do is seen by millions or one person who needs it, the meaning of you may actually be found in interrupting the way you’ve always thought about yourself, and picking up the tool that has been waiting for you.
When fear rushed in, I learned how to hear my heart racing, but refused to allow my feelings to sway me. That resilience came from my family. It flowed through our bloodline. —Coretta Scott King, My Life, My Love, My Legacy
Author Cole Arthur Riley describes how she has faced a lifetime of fear, ultimately praying to God for restful steadiness.
More than most things, I’m afraid. When I say this, people always seem to want to assure me that it isn’t the case. But we know. Since I was little, I would always find a way to imagine the worst possible versions of the future. Maybe on some level I’ve grown to believe if I prepare for it, it will hurt less when it comes. But it makes for an agitated body and mind. When you always expect a demon around every corner, your most mundane moments still feel like a risk….
What do we do when our fears are in fact rational? When fear and wisdom are enmeshed? When we would be foolish not to fear? More often than we realize, fear is a protective intuition. It is what stops you from driving with no headlights on, from touching your hand to flame, from going outside to meet the coyotes. We don’t have to demonize our fear to survive it. For this reason, I have an aversion to language of “conquering” our fears. We are not at war with ourselves; it is better to listen with compassion.
As a child, maybe you were told there is nothing to be afraid of. As adults, when we’re most honest, I think we know we have everything to be afraid of. This world, which has been so unsafe to so many of us, cannot be trusted not to harm us again. This isn’t pessimism, it’s confession.
Still, to live in a constant state of fear will keep you from the rest you were meant for. They are near opposites, fear and rest. It is not likely that you’ll relax those shoulders if somewhere within you feel the house is on fire. I want us to honor our fears without being tormented by them. Sacred intuition without restlessness.
This quote from James L. Farmer is at the front of my journal: “Courage, after all, is not being unafraid, but doing what needs to be done in spite of fear.” [1] The implication, of course, is that if you’re not scared, it’s not courage. If there is any bravery in me, it is in my refusal to let fear eclipse my imagination for anything other than pain. To maintain imagination for both the beautiful and the terrible is to marry prudence and hope.
The Koine Greek word δικαιοσυνεν (dikaiosynen) is the word that is commonly translated in Matthew 5:6 as “righteousness.” However, it can also be translated as “justice.”
Here we are, thousands of years after Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount, and most people understand this verse as being primarily about piety rather than societal justice.
I wonder what the shape, color, and vitality of Western Christianity could be if it placed its emphasis on societal justice rather than personal piety…
And, what does it mean for us that this text is usually in red ink in English translations of the New Testament? What does it have to say about us that we have translated Jesus’ own words away from emphasizing societal justice?
Ever heard of Ambrose? He is the early Church father who shepherded Augustine into the faith and even baptized him. Without Ambrose, we wouldn’t have Augustine, and without Augustine, we wouldn’t have most of Western civilization as we know it today.
What I enjoy about this quote is both that it is true and that it is so ancient. This saying from Ambrose is nearly 1700 years old, and yet it has stood the test of time and been passed down through the centuries because of its brevity and wisdom.
Seriously, there are just pearls like this scattered throughout Church history that we so rarely hear about from the pulpit. It is sayings such as this that deepen my appreciation for Church history.
3.
“The best guru is the one who tells you that you do not need a guru.“
I have personally interacted with Rob a number of times over the past 20 years. One thing that is remarkable about him has been the way he has publicly shared his personal evolution at almost every step.
This idea from him, though, is just his distillation of a truth that transcends time and culture…
No teacher should want you to be their student forever.
One of the things that seemed backward to me in Church culture was the way that it sometimes created a spiritual co-dependency between the congregation and the pastor.
I would talk and teach about the need to empower people to interpret the faith responsibly for themselves, to teach them, to raise them up, and to let them become equals with the pastor because, in my mind, the pastor’s main job is to remind people they can be “pastors” for one another.
You know, that whole “priesthood of all” thing?
We need pastors who can help organize, teach the basics, and mentor others, but the best pastors are ones who elevate others to their own position or even higher.
The best gurus/pastors/teachers are the ones who are happiest when you cease being their student because that means it is time for you to grow beyond them.
4.
“Almost all problems in the spiritual life stem from lack of self-knowledge.“
Over the course of my own life as a head-oriented person, I have seen the ways in which I intellectualized things in order to distance myself from the intense emotions I was experiencing.
At some point, I probably internalized that it is so much “safer” to intellectualize/speculate about a situation that might make me angry, sad, or disappointed rather than actually experiencing the anger, sadness, or disappointment.
Sometimes I would feel the emotions of an even a full 48 hours later.
It was not healthy. I was not healthy. I realized through counseling and therapy that such a distance between the head and the heart was dis-integrating.
Ever since I have been trying to keep the head and the heart experience as close together at the moment as possible, I see how it is a common problem for us humans to do so.
And, if I am being honest, I have seen how it intimidates others just to name my own emotions out loud… “This makes me angry.” “I am sad to hear this.”
I have literally seen people freeze because they don’t know what might happen if they were to also admit their own internal experiences to themselves.
Anger is in some ways a motivating emotion, but it can turn and become too volatile. Sadness is the opposite in that it often saps our motivation or kills our hope before it even takes root.
Again, I think that many of us are terrified of deep feelings and so we cocoon/castle up in deep thinking.
All this goes to say, be integrated. It might be hard to keep the head and the heart both present in the moment, but I have found it to be revivifying.
Richard Rohr expands on order-disorder-reorder as the pattern of resilience and faith:
Order by itself normally wants to eliminate any disorder and diversity. Disorder by itself closes us off from any primal union, meaning, and eventually even sanity in both people and systems. Reorder, or transformation of people and systems, happens when order and disorder are understood to work together. [1]
I see this pattern in the Bible: (1) We start with group thinking; (2) we gradually move toward individuation through experiences of chosenness, failure, and grace; (3) then there is a breakthrough to unitive consciousness by the few who are led and walk fully through those first two stages. Consider Moses, David, many prophets, Job, Mary, Mary Magdalene, Paul, and Jesus himself. We could also describe it as (1) Simple Consciousness (Order), (2) Complex Consciousness (Disorder), and (3) Non-Dual Consciousness, or “the unitive way” (Reorder).
The unitive way—or what I am calling Reorder—is utterly mysterious and unknown to people in the first Order stage, and still rather scary and threatening to people in the second Disorder stage. If we are not trained in a trust of mystery and some degree of tolerance for ambiguity and suffering, we will not proceed very far on the spiritual journey. In fact, we will often run back to Order when the going gets rough in Disorder.
Thus the biblical tradition, and Jesus in particular, praises faith more than love. Why? Because faith is that patience with mystery that allows us to negotiate the stages. As Gerald May (1940–2005) pointed out in The Dark Night of the Soul, it allows God to lead us through darkness—where God knows and we don’t. This is the only way to come to love! Love is the true goal, but faith is the process of getting there, and hope is the willingness to live without resolution or closure. They are indeed “the three things that last” (1 Corinthians 13:13).
Having faith doesn’t have to do with being perfect. It has to do with staying in relationship, “hanging in there,” holding on to union as tightly as God holds on to us. It’s not a matter of being correct but of being connected.
I once wrote in my journal while on retreat:
How good of you, God, to make truth a relationship instead of an idea. Now there is room between you and me for growth, for conversation, for exception, for the infinite understandings created by intimacy, for the possibility to give back and to give something to you—as if I could give anything back to you. You offer the possibility to undo, to please, to apologize, to change, to surrender. There’s room for stages and for suffering, for mutual passion and mutual pity. There’s room for mutual everything.
That’s the genius of the biblical tradition. Jesus offers himself as “way, truth, and life” (John 14:6), and suddenly it has all become the sharing of our person instead of any fighting over ideas. [3]
This CO2- (Church Of 2) is where two guys meet each day to tighten up our Connections with Jesus. We start by placing the daily “My Utmost For His Highest” in this WordPress blog. Then we prayerfully select some matching worship music and usually pick out a few lyrics that fit especially well. Then we just start praying and editing and Bolding and adding comments and see where the Spirit takes us.
It’s been a blessing for both of us.
If you’d like to start a CO2, we’d be glad to help you and your partner get started. Also click the link below to see how others are doing CO2.Odds Monkey
Steve Harvey Introduces Jesus To A Secular Audience
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