Faith Calls Us to Joy

For Dr. Barbara Holmes, our faith invites us to choose joy amid crisis and injustice: 

Our current circumstances require resilience and the steadfast belief that joy is a healing inner event and a spiritual practice.…

BIPOC folks who remember the ways of the elders have seen it in action. Performance of joy while the wounds are still being inflicted is not a display of otherworldly strength. It is an act of faith that God will not give us more than we can bear.…

We are not required to fight for our reality; we can just live it. We can be weird and whole and as shapeshifting as necessary, for we are being called to another purpose. We are being invited to awaken to our true nature as spirit beings, energy sharers, and prophets of potential. The joy spoken of in Holy Scripture is accessible, but also has a certain “beyondness” to it: The world didn’t give it and the world can’t take it away. As we hear from Jesus in John 16:22: “So you have pain now; but I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.” [1]

Brian McLaren describes the radical trust and resilience that spiritual practices can offer in difficult times: 

We have to prepare ourselves to live good lives of defiant joy even in the midst of chaos and suffering. This can be done. It has been done by billions of our ancestors and neighbors. Their legacy teaches us to see each intensifying episode of turbulence as a labor pain from which a new creative opportunity can be born. Life will be tough; the only question is whether we will become tougher, wiser, and more resilient.… The communities that learn and teach … spiritual resilience will become vital resources for everyone. (We can hope that some Christian communities will take part in this work.) These individual and communal practices will help us dump bitterness, fear, disappointment, and toxicity and refuel with mercy, vision, anticipation, and equanimity. They will help us ignore what deserves to be ignored and monitor what needs to be monitored. They will help us reframe our narratives, so we can mourn, grieve, and lament … even as we imagine, celebrate, and labor for the birth of a better future.…

To trust in the process is another way of saying to trust in an intelligence wiser than current human intelligence, to trust in a love deeper than current expressions of human love, to trust in a desire stronger and wiser than current expressions of human desire. Christians refer to this wisdom, love, and desire as God or the Divine or the Creative Spirit, and others can find their own ways of naming it…. To use familiar biblical language, we will need to walk by faith through the valley of the shadow of death [Psalm 23:4], always holding anticipative space for something beautiful to be born, especially during the most painful contractions. [2]

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A devotional from Andrew Lang

One of the scariest aspects of personal change – no matter how big or small – is that we can’t be sure of how we will be held in the midst of it.

• I’ve given 30 years to this business – what will people say when I walk away?
• When our divorce is made public, will my community still be here for me?
• How will my partner respond to this new belief I seem to have?
• With this diagnosis, will people look at me differently?
• What will my family say and do when I tell them?
• Will I be able to hold myself with kindness?

Whether it’s a shift in our identity, a midlife transition, a change in our belief system, or something else entirely, this space of unknowing can often fill us with anxiety.

I invite you to reflect on the poem below and how you have experienced being held (or not being held) in the midst of your own life transitions and changes.

How to Listen

by James A. Pearson

​

I’m not asking you

to come down here

and clean up

the muddy corners

of my life.

​

I’m asking you

to be a forest,

where mud and leaf,

shadow and light,

growth and decay

all have their

unquestioned belonging.

​

I’m asking you

to be an ocean,

where even great storms

don’t trouble the depths

and each tear is welcomed

as a homecoming.

​

I’m asking you

to be as spacious

as the vast darkness

behind the sky,

which will never be afraid

of what I do

or don’t choose.

​

I’m not asking you

to hold me together.

I’m asking you

to open so wide

you can hold all the ways

I come apart.

Becoming a New Saint

Buddhist teacher Lama Rod Owens writes of the “New Saint” as an individual who is faithful to the path of spiritual and social liberation in our own time: 

New Saint is a contemporary expression of an ancient Buddhist tradition that understands the saint as a bodhisattva. Bodhisattva is roughly translated as “spiritual warrior” and is one who is motivated by the energy of bodhicitta, or a profound altruistic wish to free all beings from suffering. I feel that the world is desperate for a reframing of this tradition that is contemporary, direct, simple, and accessible to all folks, especially those who do not identify as Buddhist.

Saints are people from various spiritual and religious traditions who have deeply embodied love and compassion and whose embodiment has inspired countless others to aspire to that same practice. However, for most of us, sainthood seems a lofty and vague endeavor that is more divine and religious than practical. This current era is calling for saints—New Saints—who are from this time and place, who speak the language of this time and place, and, most importantly, who embrace the integration of both social and ultimate liberation. New Saints can surrender into the Divine or spiritual while disrupting systems of violence. I believe that we all can and must become New Saints for ourselves and our communities.

Owens describes how the New Saint works for freedom for all: 

The New Saint’s end goal is liberation for themselves, all beings, and all phenomena. Everything must be freed. The cultivation and unification of clarity, love, compassion, and joy point the New Saint toward freedom….

When I say “freedom” or “liberation,” I am talking about our fundamental capacity to choose responsiveness over reactivity. Experiencing the sensations of our minds and bodies reduces reactivity and allows us to experience fluidity. When there is more fluidity, there is more potential for care, and that care helps us to reduce violence against ourselves and others. Freedom is the agency to choose how we want to be in relationship with ourselves and the world around us.…

On the community level, outer freedom means that the community has agency to determine what it needs and has access to what it needs. Individuals are held, loved, and given space to meet their needs within and with the support of the community. It means being able to live in harmony with other communities and not feeling dominant or feeling the need to dominate. There is room for cooperation and understanding.  

Owens reminds us that we have a choice to be free: 

In the end, we must understand that our feelings about freedom have nothing to do with freedom. Freedom isn’t a feeling; it is as much a state of being and experiencing as joy. To be free is to remember that I have always been free. The real labor of liberation is acknowledging that there is always a choice, even though I must work to get back to that choice

Faith and Resilience

Sunday, January 21, 2024

Father Richard defines resilience in the context of the Christian faith:

Resilience is really a secular word for what religion was trying to say with the word faith. Even Jesus emphasized faith more than love. Without a certain ability to let go, to trust, to allow, we won’t get to any new place. If we stay with order too long and we’re not resilient enough to allow a certain degree of disorder, we don’t get smarter, we just get rigid.

Unfortunately, this is what characterizes so many religious people. They’re not resilient at all. Then there’s another set of people who have settled down in disorder—believing there’s no pattern, there’s nothing always true. It’s a deep cynicism about reality, and that’s equally problematic. I think such faith in both good order and acceptable disorder—creating a new kind of creative reorder—is actually somewhat rare. [1]

To have faith, to grow toward love, union, salvation, or enlightenment, we must be moved from order to disorder and then ultimately to reorder.

Eventually our ideally ordered universe—our “personal salvation” project [2], as Thomas Merton called it—must and will disappoint us, if we are honest. Our spouse dies, we were rejected on the playground as a child, we find out we’re needy, we fail an exam for a coveted certification, or we finally realize that many people are excluded from our own well-deserved “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” This is the disorder stage, or what Christians call from the Adam and Eve story the “fall.” It is necessary in some form if any real growth is to occur; but some of us find this stage so uncomfortable we try to flee back to our first created order—even if it is killing us and the very things we love.

There is no nonstop flight to reorder. Various systems call it “enlightenment,” “exodus,” “nirvana,” “heaven,” “springtime,” or even “resurrection.” Reorder is life on the other side of death, the victory on the other side of failure, the joy on the other side of the pains of childbirth. It is an insistence on going through—not under, over, or around. To arrive there, we must endure, learn from, and include disorder, transcending the first naïve order—but also still including it!

Happiness is the spiritual outcome and result of resilience, full growth, and maturity. This is why I am calling it “reorder.” Ultimately, we are taken to happiness—we cannot find our way there by willpower or cleverness. Yet we all try! We seem insistent on not recognizing the universal pattern of growth and change. Trees grow strong by reason of winds and storms. Boats are not meant to stay in permanent dry dock or harbor. Baby animals must be educated by their mothers in the hard ways of survival, or they almost always die young. It seems that each of us has to learn on our own what is well hidden but also in plain sight. [3]

Consecrating the Chaos

Dr. Otis Moss III considers difficulties we face as individuals and in community: 

A true crisis—a threat to yourself or someone you love—can sometimes do wonders to focus the mind. In the moment, if we have spiritual practices in place or we are blessed with inspiration, the noise and confusion may recede for a little while, and we may see again what matters. But … you don’t get that kind of clarity every time your blood pressure rises.…

In our darkest times, when the storm anxiety, worry, and chaos sweeps over an entire community, such feelings are everywhere. People who have children or elders worry they can’t keep them safe. Those blessed with jobs worry about losing them. Even following the news can be too much to take. People with mental health issues feel even more intensely challenged. People who self-medicate do it more and more. Activists who work in their communities start saying to themselves, “The more I do to fight back, the more the pressure builds. The dam is cracking, and every time I plug a hole with my finger, ten more holes show up.” The question haunts us: When will this end? …

Struggling in all that confusion, uncertainty, and violence, we become spiritually worn down. It’s too hard to keep believing.

We get tired. 

We think:

My road is too hard. 

The powerful will never treat people right. 

I’ve tried everything, there’s nothing to be done. 

It’s no use.

Moss believes faith can sustain us in chaos:

In the storm of chaos, lost in confusion and disorder, … the question is whether there might be some way to use the harsh, unpredictable winds and the relentless currents of our lives to get us moving to where we actually want to go. Do we have the spiritual audacity and the practical means to turn chaotic energy to our own purposes?

When you take on the confusion and the violence and you refine them, purify them into something new, you are doing what in the vocabulary of faith we call consecrating your chaos. To consecrate is to make holy, to put it into service for good. In consecrating chaos, you engage it, tame it, name it, take what seemed out of control and charge it with a duty.

The model here is the creation itself. We read in Genesis [1:2] that in the beginning, “The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep.” Scripture begins with a whole world of chaos. Then God begins to find the possibilities of design in that formless void, separating light from darkness, water from land…. God consecrates the chaos, giving it form. It is presented to us as an act of creativity and of choice. God works in the chaotic void until there is order and light, and it is good. The Genesis story reminds us that the void is not as empty as we think. Chaos is never as chaotic as we fear.

=================== Closing Thought

“We do not preach great things; we live them.“

– North African Christian Saying from the 3rd Century AD

What we do is more important than what we say.

Father Richard explains how living with paradox can open us to experience the mystery of God:

The question we must ask ourselves is, “How do we live the contradictions?” Live them—not just endure them or relieve ourselves from the tension by quickly resolving them. The times when we meet or reckon with our contradictions are often turning points, opportunities to enter into the deeper mystery of God. I’m deliberately using the word mystery to point to depth, an open future, immense freedom, a kind of beauty and truth that cannot be fully spoken or defined.

Many mystics speak of the God-experience as simultaneously falling into an abyss and being grounded. This sounds like a contradiction, but when we allow ourselves to fall into the abyss—into hiddenness, limitlessness, unknowability, a void without boundaries—we discover it’s somehow a rich, supportive, embracing spaciousness where we don’t have to ask (or answer) the questions of whether we’re right or wrong. We’re being held and so do not need to try to “hold” ourselves together. Please reflect on that.

This might be the ultimate paradox of the God-experience: “falling into the hands of the living God” (Hebrews 10:31). When we can give ourselves to it and not fight it or explain it, falling into the abyss is ironically an experience of ground, of the rock, of the foundation. This is totally counterintuitive. Our dualistic, logical mind can’t get us there. It can only be known experientially. That’s why the mystics use magnificent metaphors—none of them adequate or perfect—for this experience.

Mystery is not something we can’t know. Mystery is endless knowability on many different levels. Living inside such endless knowability is finally a comfort, a foundation of ultimate support, security, unrestricted love, and eternal care. It usually takes much of our life to get there; it’s surely what we mean by “growing” in faith. Each soul must learn on its own, hopefully aided by observing other faith-filled people.

The source of spiritual wisdom is to hold questions and contradictions patiently, much more than to find quick certitudes, to rush to closure or judgment as the ego and dualistic mind want to do. The ego wants to know it is right. It wants to stand on its own self-created “solid” ground—not the mysterious solid ground of the abyss. This is why so much religion remains immature and is often a hiding place for people who want to be in control instead of people trained in giving up control to a Loving Presence.

A mature friend or a good spiritual director will companion us as we learn how to negotiate the darkness, how to wait it out, how to hold on, how to live in liminal or threshold space. The dualistic mind just doesn’t know how to do that. The dualistic mind cannot deal with paradox, but the nondual mind can. In fact, it almost relishes and revels in mystery. Nondual consciousness is at home inside of the abyss.

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1.

“God is at home, it is we who have gone out for a walk.“

– Meister Eckhart, 13th Century German Preacher

What do you think this quote means?

2.

“We do not preach great things; we live them.“

– North African Christian Saying from the 3rd Century AD

What we do is more important than what we say.

3.

“‘[Josiah] defended the cause of the poor and the needy, and so all went well.

Is that not what it means to know me?’ Declares the Lord.“

– Jeremiah 22:16

Currently, I am halfway through Walter Brueggemann’s Prophetic Imagination: A Theological Biography by Conrad Kanagy.  It is amazing.

Just before Covid hit the world, I began reading Brueggemann’s work and found it to be incredibly timely.  There are many people for whom the Prophets only pointed to Jesus, which is a massive disservice to the Prophets as a whole.

The Nevi’im (Prophets) existed because they were called by God to rail against and to hold accountable the religious and political leaders of their day for having lost the plot, for having accepted bribes, for failing to implement true justice, and for being more oppressors with their power rather than liberators.

Brueggemann is a biblical scholar with his emphasis being on the book of Jeremiah.

According to the biography, Jeremiah 22:16 caused a radical shift within Brueggemann to realize that “the cause of the poor and the needy” IS the knowledge of God, not a cause or an effect, it IS the knowledge of God.

4.

“To hope for all souls is imperative; and it is quite tenable that their salvation is inevitable.“

– G.K. Chesterton, British Catholic Author

It has been a long time since I divorced myself from the version of Christianity that has a morbid fascination with Hell and damnation.  In all honesty, being raised Lutheran, they were never really a part of my framework or understanding…

Over time, though, I came across figures who I looked up to from church history who also disbelieved that the unconditional love and grace of God would damn anyone eternally.  Figures such as GK Chesterton, Soren Kierkegaard, Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Avila, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor, George MacDonald, and so many others.

After stumbling across these figures, I chose to go back to the original languages of the Old and New Testaments and was pleasantly surprised by what I found…  whole passages talking about the restoration, reconciliation, and renewal of ALL.

I believe it’s in there, folks, we were simply told not to find it in the English translations that already downplay it.  The Good News is good for ALL.

In a sermon preached in the fall of 2014, shortly after the shooting of Michael Brown and weeks of protests in Ferguson, Missouri, Rev. Dr. Otis Moss III spoke about the unique way Black Americans hold the tension between despair and hope:

It’s a strange affair to be Black and live in America, and even stranger to be Black and a person of faith in these yet-to-be-United States, to carry around the burden of a socially constructed idea called race and yet be filled with a divinely inspired mandate to eradicate all limitations to the human soul. Being Black means you are born with a Blues song tattooed on your heart, and at the same time you still have a Gospel shout that is welling up in your soul about to come out.

Another way to say it is that we live with repression and revelation simultaneously swimming in the same tributary of our spirit. There is nothing more confusing to the postmodern personality, to the millennial sojourner, than to have to exist between the strange life of dealing with your Blues and Gospel all the time. Madness and ministry, chaos and Christ. My father heard an elder in Georgia say it this way. When he asked her, “How are you doing, Mother?” she said, “I’m living between Oh Lord and Thank you, Jesus.”

For the most part, many of us are living in between, not quite at “Oh Lord” and not quite at “Thank you, Jesus,” but somewhere in between. If you choose to be conscious and understand the system at work, study the history of repression, know what hate will do when it’s turned inward onto your own spirit, examine the forces of consumption, get a picture of colonialism, understand the root of imperialism, and begin to deconstruct the powers that be. At some point, you will find yourself leaning upon the Blues and facing despair, and wondering if you should give up.

Moss offers the example of Rosa Parks (1913–2005) as someone who faced despair and chose hope and nonviolent action. Moss preaches:

For those of you who have fallen into a level of cynicism, thinking that we “cannot” and “nothing will work,” let me tell you, when you get up tomorrow on Monday morning, it will be December first. That means nothing to you, but let me break it down, because you should shout every December first. December first was the day … Rosa Parks sat down so you could stand up.

When you get up tomorrow, you say, “God, I thank you for Rosa. That she could sit down so I could stand up.” And only God can teach you to do two things that sound contradictory at the same time, that she sat down and stood up at the same time. We must make our history sacred.

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From Jesus Gets Us…

Do Not Judge or you too will be judged…

There’s this Scripture that kind of trips us up. Whether you’re a Bible reader or not, you’re probably familiar with it. “Do not judge, or you too will be judged.” Matthew 7:1. Jesus says this toward the end of one of his most famous sermons. He was calling out the hypocrisy of pointing out the faults in others when we have our own faults we should be working on.

But Can and Should I Judge People in Daily Life?

Truthfully, we must make judgments about people almost every day. When applying for a job, do I want to work for this person? When meeting someone I’m attracted to, should I ask them out on a date? When I need to confide in someone, who do I trust as a friend? Just spend a couple of minutes online, and we realize our entire world is now based on reviews. From doctors to hotels, restaurants to dog walkers, many businesses live or die by the number of stars by their name.

The Judging Jesus is talking about comes from a different oplace, it come from our egos….

Honest evaluation, however, is different from the judgment Jesus was speaking of. Honest evaluation of others is necessary for a safe and functioning society. The judging Jesus refers to comes from a different place. It comes from our ego. We’re often seeking to elevate ourselves by belittling someone else. Or we try to justify our own bad behavior by labeling somebody else’s behavior as worse. Sometimes, biases and grudges affect how we view and treat others.

By recognizing our own flaws, we can become a little more merciful, understanding and accepting.

With that in mind, Jesus asked us to stop pinpointing the shortcomings of others and to look inwardly and deeply examine our own hearts and motives. It’s not comfortable. But here’s why it’s so important. Jesus knew that if we focused on our own faults and weaknesses, we could become more empathetic toward others. We’d recognize that, like us, every person has challenges and struggles that we can relate to. And that’s how Jesus’ radical love is demonstrated today. By recognizing our own flaws, we can all become a little more merciful, a little more patient, and a little more loving toward one another.

Scripture References: 

Matthew 7:1; “Do not judge, or you too will be judged”.

Luke 6:37; Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be

 John 7:24; but judge righteous judgment; give your sense and judgment of things, according to the truth and evidence of them;

The Wisdom of Paradox

All that is hidden, all that is plain, I have come to know, instructed by Wisdom.… Within her is a spirit intelligent, holy, unique, manifold, subtle, active, incisive, unsullied, lucid, invulnerable, benevolent, … dependable, unperturbed, almighty, all-surveying…. She pervades and permeates all things. She is the untarnished mirror of God’s active power.… She makes all things new. In each generation she passes into holy souls.
—Wisdom 7:21–24, 26, 27, Jerusalem Bible  

Richard Rohr believes wisdom arises from living with paradox. 

Whenever I teach, I am not trying to change anyone’s dogmas or beliefs, but only the mind with which they understand those dogmas. This new mind has everything to do with seeing and thinking paradoxically—grasping the truth of something that seems a contradiction. Great dogmas of the church are almost always totally paradoxical: Jesus is human and divine, Mary is virgin and mother, God is one and three, Eucharist is bread and Jesus. Because paradox undermines dual thinking at its root, the dualistic mind immediately attacks paradox as weak thinking or confusion, somehow separate from and inferior to hard logic. The modern phenomenon of fundamentalism displays an almost complete incapacity to deal with paradox, and shows how much we’ve regressed. Today the church is trying to catch up to what mystics have always known, and great scientists now teach as well.

The history of spirituality tells us we must learn to accept paradoxes, or we will never love anything or see it correctly. The above passage personifying Wisdom is an insightful description of how one sees paradoxically and contemplatively.

Each of us must learn to live with paradox, or we cannot live peacefully or happily even a single day of our lives. In fact, we must even learn to love paradox or we will never be wise, forgiving, or possessing the patience of good relationships. “Untarnished mirrors,” as Wisdom says, receive the whole picture, which always includes the darkness, the light, and subtle shadings of light that make shape, form, color, and texture beautiful.

Reality is paradoxical. If we’re honest, everything is a clash of contradictions, and there is nothing on this created earth that is not a mixture at the same time of good and bad, helpful and unhelpful, endearing and maddening, living and dying. St. Augustine called this the “paschal mystery.”

Western Christianity has tended to objectify paradoxes in dogmatic statements that demand mental agreement instead of any inner experience of the mystery revealed. At least we “worship” these paradoxes in the living collision of opposites we call Jesus. But this approach tends not to give people the underlying principle that Jesus, the Christ, has come to teach us about life and about ourselves. Jesus, as the icon of Christ consciousness (1 Corinthians 2:16), is the very template of total paradox: human yet divine, physical yet spiritual, killed yet alive, powerless yet powerful.

Jesus reveals the great cosmic mystery and calls us to see the same truth in ourselves and all of creation.

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“Theology without practice is the theology of demons.“

– Maximus the Confessor, 7th Century Monk and Scholar

“A theology of demons.”  Whoof.  That packs a punch.

Paradox Holds Us

Author Debie Thomas considers the paradox of Jesus’ parable of the weeds and wheat:

In the Gospel of Matthew [13:24–30], Jesus invites us to lean courageously into paradox. A householder plants seeds in his field. While everyone is asleep, an enemy sneaks onto the field, sows weeds among the wheat, and goes away. When the plants come up, the householder’s servants are baffled. “Master, did you not sow good seed in your field?…. Where did these weeds come from?” The householder doesn’t spare them the truth: “An enemy has done this” (13:27–28).

But when the servants offer to tear up the weeds, the householder stops them. “No, for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let them both grow together until the harvest. At harvest time, I’ll instruct my reapers to collect, bundle, and burn the weeds, and then I’ll gather the wheat into my barn” (13:29–30).

As I ponder this parable, I see Jesus asking his followers to hold seemingly contradictory truths in tension. One: evil is real, noxious, and among us. Two: our response to evil must include both acknowledgment and restraint….

I tend to get worked up about weeds. Weeds in my own life, and weeds in other people’s. I tend to get eager, preachy, and zealous for the purity of the field. Possessive about the integrity of the householder. Impatient for a quick, clean harvest.

Also, like the servants, I tend to lead with confidence rather than humility when it comes to moral gardening: “Jesus, trust me, I know how to separate the weeds from the wheat. Let me at it, please, and I’ll have that field cleared for you in no time!”

But Jesus says no. “No” and “wait.” Jesus insists on patience, humility, and restraint when it comes to patrolling the borders of the field. He asks us, even as we acknowledge the pernicious reality of evil, to accept his timing instead of ours when it comes to destroying it. Why? Because there is no way we can police the wheat field without damaging the wheat. There is no way we can rid ourselves of everything bad without distorting everything good. When we rush ahead of God and start yanking weeds … we do harm to ourselves and to the field. Our sincerity devolves into arrogance. Our love devolves into judgment. Our holiness devolves into hypocrisy. The field suffers.

Thomas understands that Jesus calls us to be held in paradox:

Evil is real, noxious, and among us, and our own response to evil must include both acknowledgment and restraint.

If this ambiguity worries you, then remember that we are braced by a God who is too big for one-dimensional truths, and this is a good thing. It’s not that we hold paradox; it’s that paradox holds us. We are held in a deep place. An ample place. A generous place. Though we might fear paradox, God does not. We’re safe, even in the contradictions. Weedy, perhaps, but safe.

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Quote shared by John Chaffee

“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding about ourselves.“

– Carl Jung, Swiss Psychologist and Philosopher

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.

The Inefficiency of Faith

Richard Rohr writes that holding the tension of paradox helps us grow in consciousness and love.

All the great religions at the more mature levels learn and teach a different consciousness, which we call the contemplative mind, the nondual mind, or the mind of Christ. The levels of spiritual development begin with dualistic, exclusionary, either/or thinking and become increasingly nondual, allowing for a deeper, broader, wiser, more inclusive and loving way of seeing.

If we are to live on this Earth, we cannot bypass the necessary tension of holding contraries and inconsistencies together. Daily ordinary experiences teach us nonduality in a way that is not theoretical or abstract. It becomes obvious in everything and everybody, every idea and every event, almost hidden in plain sight. Everything created is mortal and limited and, if we look long enough, paradoxical. By paradox, I mean something that initially looks contradictory or impossible, but in a different frame or at a different level is in fact deeply true.

I am talking about just holding the tension, not necessarily finding a resolution or closure to paradox. We must agree to live without resolution, at least for a while. This is very difficult for most people, largely because we have not been taught how to do this mentally or emotionally. We didn’t know we could—or even should. As Paul seems to say (and I paraphrase), hope would not be the virtue that it is if it led us to quick closure and we did not have to “wait for it with patience” (Romans 8:24–25).

I think opening to this holding pattern is the very name and description of faith. Unfortunately, in Christianity, faith largely became believing things to be true or false (intellectual assent) instead of giving people concrete practices so they could themselves know how to open up (faith), hold on (hope), and allow an infilling from another Source (love).

We must move from a belief-based religion to a practice-based religion, or little will change. We will merely continue to argue about what we are supposed to believe and who the unbelievers are. We need contemplative practices to loosen our egoic attachment to certainty and retrain our minds to understand the wisdom of paradox. [1]

Contemplative prayer is largely just being present: holding the tension instead of even talking it through, offering the moment to God instead of fixing it by words and ideas, loving reality as it is instead of understanding it fully. In our daily lives, this prayer is most commonly articulated as a willingness to say, “I don’t know.” We must not push the river, we must just trust that we are already in the river, and God is the certain flow and current.

That may sound impractical, but the way of faith is not the way of efficiency. So much of life is just a matter of listening and waiting and enjoying the expansiveness that comes from such willingness to hold. [2]

The Tension of Nonviolence

Peace activist John Dear recalls how Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) used nonviolence to bring long-ignored racial tension and injustice to global awareness: 

One of Dr. King’s greatest examples of creative nonviolence was his 1963 direct action campaign in Birmingham, Alabama. Thousands of African Americans, mainly teenagers, were arrested by white police officers for marching against segregation. They kept coming forward, even marching into the face of the fire hoses, and one day, a miracle happened—the white firemen put down their fire hoses and let them march. When that happened, segregation fell. King himself spent Easter week behind bars where he wrote his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” perhaps the greatest document in U.S. history. “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny,” he wrote in his jail cell. “Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” [1]

In his letter, King illustrated how a nonviolent stance both creates and “holds the tension” of conflict, opening opportunities for transformation:

Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored…. I just referred to the creation of tension as a part of the work of the nonviolent resister…. I have earnestly worked and preached against violent tension, but there is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth.… So the purpose of the direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation….

Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured as long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its pus-flowing ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must likewise be exposed, with all of the tension its exposing creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured. [2]

Dear describes the creative and healing outcome of Jesus’ nonviolent life:

If we engage in active nonviolence as the nature of God … as Jesus did, then we will discover that nonviolence is infinitely creative. There are vastly more creative alternatives with nonviolent resistance to evil and injustice than with violent resistance….

From the perspective of creative nonviolence, the Gospels present a new image of what it means to be human. In the life of Jesus, we discover that to be human is to be nonviolent, to be nonviolent is to become, like Jesus, fully human…. Nonviolence leads us to the fullest possibilities of humanity—to becoming people of universal love, universal compassion, universal solidarity, universal peace, indeed, total nonviolence. [3]

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Give me a place to stand, and I will move the whole earth with a lever.
—Archimedes

Richard Rohr uses images of a lever and a place to stand to explain why social transformation needs both action and contemplation:

Archimedes, a third-century BCE Greek philosopher and mathematician, noticed that a lever balanced in the correct place, on the correct fulcrum, could move proportionally much greater weights than the force actually applied. He calculated that if the lever stretched far enough and the fulcrum point remained fixed close to Earth, even a small weight at one end would be able to move the world at the other.

The fixed point is our place to stand. It is a contemplative stance: steady, centered, poised, and rooted. To be contemplative, we have to have a slight distance from the world to allow time for withdrawal from business as usual, for contemplation, for going into what Jesus calls our “private room” (Matthew 6:6). However, we have to remain quite close to the world at the same time, loving it, feeling its pain and its joy as our pain and our joy. Otherwise, our distance can become a form of escapism.

True contemplation, the great teachers say, is really quite down to earth and practical, and doesn’t require life in a monastery. It is, however, an utterly different way of receiving the moment, and therefore all of life. In order to have the capacity to “move the world,” we need some distancing and detachment from the diversionary nature and delusions of mass culture and the false self. Contemplation builds on the hard bottom of reality—as it is—without ideology, denial, or fantasy.

Unfortunately, many of us don’t have a fixed place to stand, a fulcrum of critical distance, and thus we cannot find our levers, or true “delivery systems,” as Bill Plotkin calls them [1], by which to move our world. We do not have the steadiness of spiritual practice to keep our sight keen and alive. Those who have plenty of opportunities for spiritual practice—for example, those in monasteries—often don’t have an access point beyond religion itself from which to speak or to serve much of our world. We need a delivery system in the world to provide the capacity for building bridges and connecting the dots of life.

Some degree of inner experience is necessary for true spiritual authority, but we need some form of outer validation, too. We need to be taken seriously as competent and committed individuals and not just “inner” people. Could this perhaps be what Jesus means by being both “wise as serpents and innocent as doves” (Matthew 10:16)? God offers us quiet, contemplative eyes; God also calls us to prophetic and critical involvement in the pain and sufferings of our world—both at the same time. This is so obvious in the life and ministry of Jesus that I wonder why it has not been taught as an essential part of Christianity.

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John Chaffe; 5 On Friday

1.
“Nobody’s smart enough to be wrong all the time.”

• Ken Wilber, Philosopher and Founder of Integral Theory
   
  Integral Theory is built upon the idea of seeing the entire universe as a massive interrelated epiphenomenon, not full of hierarchies but fully of holarchies.

Along with that is also the idea that everyone is, in fact, correct in their observation of the world.

Yes, each person was coming from a particular vantage point and describing it with their own, particular and limited vocabulary but everyone is at least partially correct.

This means that you and I can always learn something true about ultimate reality from those we interact with.  Everyone has some part of the truth of everything correct, so we better listen carefully in case they say it to us.

2.
“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world.  Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”

• Rumi, 13th Century Sufi Poet
   
  I think that this may also resonate with Carl Jung’s idea of the two halves of life.  The first half of life is all about wanting to change the world.  The second half of life is all about changing ourselves.  Some of us get to the tasks of the second half of life early.

Every darn day, I am realizing the need to change myself more and more.  I can sadly admit that I did not always think that way.  It is certainly a part of youthful hubris to think that we can or even should change the world without first changing ourselves.

3.
“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.”

• William Faulkner, American Novelist
   
  Gotta love a good quote about leaving the familiar to journey into the unfamiliar  Reminds me of The Hero’s Journey by Joseph Campbell.

4.
“All mature spirituality is about letting go.”

• Fr. Richard Rohr, Franciscan Priest
   
  The 13th-century Christian preacher and mystic, Meister Eckhart von Hochheim, was the first person to teach “letting go” from a Christian perspective (I think).

Despite being trained in Latin and required by superiors to preach in Latin, he rebelled against his superiors and preached in the common, pre-Germanic hillside language.  To communicate many of his ideas to the farmers in his care he would invent new words, words such as “gelassenheit.”

“Gelassenheit” was just Eckhart’s word to describe “letting-go-ness.”  For him, spirituality was all about “gelassenheit, gelassenheit, gellasenheit.”

Surely, Rohr was influenced by Eckhart when he said this week’s 4th quote.

5.
וְקִרְע֤וּ לְבַבְכֶם֙ וְאַל־בִּגְדֵיכֶ֔ם וְשׁ֖וּבוּ אֶל־יְהֹוָ֣ה אֱלֹהֵיכֶ֑ם
(“Rend your hearts rather than your garments and return to the Lord your God.”)

• Joel 2:13
   
  I do not know why, but this passage has passed through my mind numerous times this past week.  There is something to it that haunts me in a good way.

Even the prophet Joel recognized our ability to change our appearances but not change our hearts.  We certainly do the same thing today.  We curate our appearances without remembering that God sees through our charades.

May we rend our hearts, not our garments.

What Is Our Task? Care and Hope.

For theologian Sallie McFague (1933–2019), facing the truth of the world’s crises is the first step toward loving action and change.

Surely, the most difficult task facing us as we finally acknowledge our responsibility for planetary health is summed up in one small word: hope. Is it possible to have any? The more we learn of climate change—the apocalyptic future that awaits us unless we make deep, speedy changes in our use of fossil fuels—the more despairing we become…. It appears that we human beings do not have the will to live differently—justly and sustainably—to the degree necessary to save ourselves and our planet. The single most difficult obstacle to overcome is, then, our own lack of hope. The issue cannot be brushed aside. It is important to face the facts….

It will not be a world simply of less water, more heat, and fewer species of plants and animals; rather, it will be one of violent class wars over resources, the breakdown of civilization at all levels, and the end of certain facets of ordinary life that we have come to expect…. 

We must allow our imaginations to begin to live within the world that responsible science is telling us will be our fate unless drastic changes are made soon. We must do this so that we can acknowledge where our hope really resides—not with us, but in the power of love and renewal that lives within the universe, the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God [and our cooperation with the Spirit].

McFague describes a faith-filled hope that grounds our engagement with a world on fire:

As we consider the basis for our hope, let us recall who God is. We must and can change our ways, live justly and sustainably on our planet, because of God, not because of ourselves. The hope we have lies in the radical transcendence of God…. God’s transcendence—God’s power of creative, redeeming, and sustaining love—is closer to us than we are to ourselves. God is the milieu, the source, of power and love in which our world, our fragile, deteriorating world, exists. The world is not left to fend for itself, nor is God “in addition” to anything, everything. Rather, God is the life, love, truth, goodness, and beauty that empower the universe and shine out from it….

Thus, “mysticism” is simply this awareness of God’s presence in and through and with everything for its well-being…. Curiously, this faith, not in ourselves, but in God, can free us to live lives of radical change. Perhaps it is the only thing that can. We do not rely on such hope as a way to escape personal responsibility—“Let God do it”—but rather this hope frees us from the pressure of outcomes so that we can add our best efforts to the task at hand.

Engaged Christianity

Brian McLaren traces how he and Father Richard have been on similar journeys, charting a path for a Christian faith that is engaged with the world’s needs:

The titles of my books reveal that I was encountering something in my faith tradition that didn’t sit right with me…. I felt like I was peeling an onion. I noticed, for example, that people who spend a lot of time in church often seemed to be some of the meanest, more arrogant, and most judgmental people that I met. I noticed the same being true of me at times as well…. It seemed that Christianity had become for many people an evacuation plan (how to get your soul out of earth into heaven) rather than a transformation plan (how to help God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven).

When I was introduced to Richard Rohr in the late 90s, I realized that Richard was on a very similar path. He was many steps ahead of me and helped me to understand that there was something we were both struggling with and seeking to repair, fix, heal, correct in our inherited Western tradition…. Eventually, I came upon the important work of Thich Nhat Hanh, and I realized that Thich Nhat Hanh had been on a similar journey as Richard and me, but in his Buddhist tradition….

I think this parallel struggle, in Catholicism and in Protestantism, in Buddhism and Christianity, is the struggle to have a faith that isn’t an evacuation plan or an escape into private bliss, but a way of seeking to have a spiritual transformation in our own lives that will express itself in change and transformation in our world. We’re on a quest to find out how to have an engaged expression of deep spiritual life that makes a difference in a world on fire. [1]

Inspired by the writings of Thich Nhat Hanh and The Fourteen Precepts of Engaged Buddhism, McLaren wrote The Fourteen Precepts of Just and Generous Christianity. Here are some of the guidelines McLaren offers:

Lifelong Learning: Do not think the knowledge you presently possess is changeless, complete, and absolute truth…. Be open to the Holy Spirit and practice childlike humility….

Gentleness: Do not force others, including children, by any means whatsoever, to adopt your views, whether by authority, threat, money, propaganda, or even education….

Love: Do not maintain anger or hatred…. Make love your highest goal.

Serenity: Do not lose yourself in dispersion and in your surroundings. Dwell in the presence and peace of God to come back to what is happening in the present moment. Be in touch with what is wondrous, refreshing, and healing both inside and around you….

Nonviolence: Do not kill and do no harm, and do not stand by when others seek to do so. Find creative, just, and nonviolent ways to prevent or end conflicts and to promote and strengthen peace. [2]

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From our friend John Chaffee

“It is no secret that institutional religion in the West finds itself in decline…  What treasures should we take from the burning building?  One such treasure is the mystics – the creation-centered mystics (St. Francis of Assisi, Julian of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen) whose worldview is so fit for an eco-age.“

– Matthew Fox, Former Dominican Monk

Perhaps what the world needs right now, are the Christian mystics, who speak from deep experiences of God about the world as being a sacrament worth taking care of rather than exploited.

The Christian mystics, if I am being honest, saved my own personal faith more than any formal theologian or logician.