revelations

As I reflect on who I am through the lens of my behavior and seek to find its origin, I think about family members with whom I seem to share personality components. Grampy George, my childhood hero, was a man of substance and depth, at least in my eyes. He was emotionally sensitive, maybe even a conflicted soul, and loved fiercely. He loved nature and music and would sacrifice and fight for people and the earth with all its creatures. He also was a man of strong opinions, impatience with people, and anger and bitterness over losses and grievances. In all of this complexity, which I'm sure I only know in small bites as I observed him as a child without an adult's fuller understanding of people and situations, I recognized a thread of passion. I have seen this thread running through my mother in her strong sense of justice, her impassioned beliefs, and her love for her family, especially her grandchildren when they were young, and her great-grandchildren. As with all human qualities, these are coins with two sides.

I inherited this sensitive, passionate, impatient thread running through me, as well, but that inheritance alone did not fully form me. The crucible in which my soul was formed was a culture of performance, judgment, punishment,  guilt, and a denial of strong emotional expressions. I was nurtured in an environment that allowed for no ambiguity in issues of right and wrong and that encouraged strong moralistic teaching and confrontational interactions about behavior and life style choices. Fear was an underlying and constant presence, fear of failure and judgment. Even in early adulthood, this pattern of relating and "helping" others was enforced by Christian psychologists that I read.

So I suppose it is no surprise that my life has been marked by passion, a passion for people and causes, a passion for "getting it right" and perfection, a passion for self-sacrifice. I have never even considered that my life's purpose was anything other than service to God and people. A savior, a helper, a rescuer, a teacher, a spiritual exhorter--these have been my identities. While my passionate, sensitive nature has positive aspects which I want to embrace and accept, I am learning that my approach with others has been sorely misguided. I have strongly entrenched patterns of relating to people that, as Parker Palmer says, push the shy soul away causing it to flee to the woods. In my passion and sincere love, I have over and over "attacked" the shy souls in my life, smothering them with my words and advice, so sure that they need to hear the truth from me. After all, the book of Ephesians says to "speak the truth in love." My personality, with its direct (no beating around the bushes) tendency, is big on exhortation and helping the Spirit reveal truth to those around me, most often family members, but I've seen it also in work-related interactions. There are so many scenarios that run through my head of times in which I very directly and passionately interacted with people, passionately made my opinion known, passionately pleaded for behavior changes. I'm not saying that there are never times in which passionate pleas or exhortations are necessary; sometimes people may need to be firmly confronted about their sin or misguided thinking. However, I am learning that that is not always the case, probably usually not the case. I advise, and people don't usually need my advice. They need the safety of a listening heart, one that is patient enough to wait for them to discover the truth within themselves.

Here I am now with decades of behavior patterns that, it turns out, may have actually caused more harm than good, despite the sincerity of my heart. This is a humbling place to be. And sad. However, I also realize that my tendency is to be very dualistic in my thinking, to look at my life as a total failure because of this new knowledge. That cannot be true. I have loved deeply and given my life in sacrifice to others, and good has come of it, but if I want what is left of my life to be better, more loving, more helpful to others, I must embark on change. I repent of ineffective and even damaging ways of relating to others and commit myself to growing in building trust and loving others.

Parker Palmer, in A Hidden Wholeness, writes of circles of trust in which people do four specific things:
1.  Speak their own truth.
2.  Listen receptively to the truth of others.
3.  Ask honest, open questions instead of giving counsel.
4.  Offer the healing and empowering gifts of silence and laughter.

These are signposts for this moment in my life. New focus for my soul with regard to relationships. I'm sure it would be very helpful for me to attend a retreat featuring a circle of trust. Maybe one day I can do that. But for now, I at least have a new direction to follow. Sadly, I know it will take years of stumbling as I seek to alter the way I interact with others. This will not happen overnight, but I hope with God's help to begin a new journey of better love.

I have written this on purpose, knowing that it makes me vulnerable. Vulnerable to being fixed, dismissed, or judged when I fail. Taking that risk is part of my journey.

I believe a true and deep understanding of love, the source of which is God, has the power to transform and heal even the most broken lives. Perhaps seeking healing and transformation any other way will always fall short and add to the accumulation of guilt, shame, and hopelessness. Yet, how can I see or experience this love when my vision is obscured by the clamor of my own self-seeking and endless attempts at shielding myself from pain? I must be willing to go down to the depths of pain, suffering, and self-denial to recognize the Christ who is already there, who indeed has shown me the way. I must not equate the love of God with the gratification of my self-serving desires. This God in Christ has expressed love in a far greater and eternal way through becoming flesh and suffering all possible indignities, losses, cravings, and pain (physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional). He crushed all of these elements of death and then rose up into eternal and glorious life. He offers that to me. And he does this by going with me, not just sending me into the abyss. "Even when I walk through the darkest valley, I will not be afraid, for you are close beside me.Your rod and your staff protect and comfort me" (Psalm 23:4).

There is no greater love, only cheap imitations. There is no other way to be free from the bondage of addiction, lies, delusions, and disappointments. There is no other gospel. 

Theodicy...

I often think about evil and suffering in the world. It's hard not to if you have a pulse and pay any attention to the news. Most people don't even have to listen to the news; there is enough fodder in their own lives to prompt such musings. I also hear people who teach about healing ministry say things like, "God wants everyone to be healed," and I ponder the credulity of that assertion. While I believe the statement on one level, and I respect and learn from those who teach healing ministry, something inside me jerks back when I hear it. If God wants everyone to be healed, why isn't everyone healed? The answer I give myself is that everyone will eventually be healed in the afterlife, but is that all there is to it? We live in an exquisite world without a doubt, but it is a world that also seeps pain and suffering--a fallen, broken world. To think that God wants everyone to be healed and eventually will accomplish this has not satisfied my quest for meaning in this brokenness.

Peter Kreeft, in chapter 27 of Bread and Wine, penetrates beyond questions of how a good God can allow evil and suffering in the world and turns the lens on the character of this God. In contrast to an aloof, unaffected God (like Buddah), one who is disconnected from the tortured existence of his creatures, this God in Jesus Christ descended to our depths, entered our suffering spaces and gave the gift of himself. In an ironic twist, Jesus outwitted Satan  by voluntarily taking the death penalty for our sin and our suffering with the promise that by his wounds we would be healed. Does this just refer to soul salvation and healing in the afterlife? Not so says Kreeft, who contends that Jesus took our blows on the cross and descended into all of our hells.  Indeed, even when he doesn't heal our wounds in the present, "he comes into them and is broken, like bread, and we are nourished." And, "since we are his body, we too are the bread that is broken for others."

Everything belongs, according to Richard Rohr, in a book by that title, because God can hold everything. We can't, but he can. That gives me the freedom to embrace brokenness as so much more than a curse of living in this world. In brokenness, we are invited to be in Christ, because he has come to be in us and in all of our suffering. Maybe this is what Paul had in mind when he said, "that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death" (Phil. 3:10, ESV). I can do this because he became like me first.

Daily Office Lenten Reading
Hebrews 2:11-18
       
        ". . . Since, therefore, the children share flesh and blood, he himself likewise shared the same things, so that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death. For it is clear that he did not come to help angels, but the descendants of Abraham. Therefore he had to become like his brothers and sisters in every respect, so that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make a sacrifice of atonement for the sins of the people. Because he himself was tested by what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested."

Did He sometimes feel like time was crawling and that He would never get to do the work of ministry?

Did He sometimes feel like time was speeding toward his ruin and destruction?

Did He sometimes wonder if He was actually hearing the voice of His Father or just operating out of some fancied construct?

Did He sometimes wonder why He didn't hear the voice of His Father more often or feel alone when He didn't hear the voice of His Father at all?

Did He sometimes strain under the injustices of life?

Was He sometimes tempted to doubt the goodness of His Father?

Did He sometimes feel impotent in the face of society's power structures?

Did He sometimes feel like His Father was not listening to Him, didn't hear the cry of His heart, or worse yet, heard but then turned apathetically away?

Did those 40 days in the wilderness seem interminable, and did He sometimes wonder if He wouldn't survive them?

Thank you, Oh most vulnerable Savior, that because you were tested by what you suffered, you are able to help us who are being tested. Help, we pray, for we have no other hope but you alone. 

In my youth I would wonder how someone could pray multiple hours a day or "without ceasing" because I thought prayer was talking to God. I think contemplative prayer answers that question. As I have been reading my spiritual guides over the past two years, I have been learning to understand prayer as so much broader than what is typically assumed. Richard Rohr tells of a prayer learned from a Jewish rabbi that involves simply breathing in yah and out weh. Breathing God in and out. Listening for God, experiencing God in each moment. What a riveting concept and a practical way to abide in Christ and let Him abide in me. God is as necessary to me as breathing air. He is as present as the air I breathe. 

Eleven days. That's how long I have been metaphorically "sitting" here in Ohio feeling like time is crawling because events are unfolding languidly like a movie in slow motion, the film blurringly stretched. Jordan's crash has been exceptionally painful and the way back has been fraught with warring in his soul, not the "quick fix" of the last hospitalization eight years ago. The vigorous attempt to find the right medicine regime, the arduous search for a new residential placement, the agony of crushing his dreams and accomplishments, the outraged response of challenging my guardianship--these are all in a swirl of emotion and thought (both rational and irrational) and Jordan's own version of alternate facts. (It's interesting how he mirrors the world.)

Though experiences like this are shatteringly painful, I always find myself on a deep spiritual journey through them. It is as if I walk through these circumstances on two different plains, like Bilbo walking toward his destiny, sometimes keenly and sometimes vaguely aware of a dimension of reality in addendum to the tangible "in the flesh" reality. I find at times that the disappointments which occur during these struggles tend to drive me deeper toward understanding and connecting with truth and love. My soul is cultivated and enlarged in ways that I can't always describe, but that I hope produces a more thoughtful, more compassionate, more hospitable me, one with paradoxically more gravitas and more joyful celebration.

So here I am waiting, watching, working--hoping and praying for a positive outcome for Jordan, and, at the same time, watching and hoping for the refinement of my own being. So I search--search for God, search for meaning, search for signs of growth--like a terrier sniffing under every bush. Sometimes my search is rewarded, like this morning when I picked up Richard Rohr's book, Falling Upward, A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life. I'm reading a chapter about the tragic sense of life, "the 'tragic' natural world," and came upon a passage that blazed with light. Rohr says that, "In the spiritual life, and now in science, we learn much more by honoring and learning from the exceptions than by just imposing our previous certain rules to make everything fit. You can see perhaps what Jesus and Paul both meant by telling us to honor 'the least of the brothers and sisters' (Matthew 25:40; I Corinthians 12:22-25) and to 'clothe them with the greatest care.' It is those creatures and those humans who are on the edge of what we have defined as normal, proper, or good who often have the most to teach us. They tend to reveal the shadow and mysterious side of things...The exceptions keep us humble and searching, and not rushing toward resolution to allay our anxiety." (italics mine) Wow! Jordan keeps me experiencing humility, searching for truth, grasping for ways to love, trusting when I can't see deliverance, and willing to live with tensions and mystery. I can't line up all my thoughts, all the facts, all the events and circumstances into a tidy line or logical progression. I have to live with the grief and loss that forever accompany this son of mine. However, Rohr reminds me that "Jesus had no trouble with the exceptions," and his love and grace sweep us all up and are enough to deliver us into his presence.

As a teacher, I approach each day hoping that what occurs in the classroom will be profitable for students. Once in a while, the experience in the classroom is riveting, even life-changing. It was one of those treasured moments in my ABE/GED classroom today. I'm getting more and more ESL students, and today the room was half American-born (all people of color) and half immigrants. Our lesson was divided between a writing assignment using the week's vocabulary words and practice summarizing short reading passages. Feeling the frustration and sadness of the current news reports of African Americans shot by police, I decided to give students an opportunity to use their vocabulary words from this week to write about a conflict that they had experienced either in the workplace or with some authority figure. The vocabulary list included the following words: biased, annoyance, deplete, anxiety, and dispense. I had a hunch that some of the students would resonate with this assignment and have no trouble using these words. According to my prediction, students were readily able to write about their personal experiences using the vocabulary, and one student, in particular, recorded an experience of glaring injustice in an encounter with law enforcement. I believe this assignment primed the pump of their minds for what was to happen next.

We began reading a passage about ninjas, and the first paragraph was about the origin of the word ninja. The article claimed that the word originated from a Chinese word and gave the reasoning behind the theory. We had almost finished reading the paragraph when one of the ESL students said, "That's not true." This particular student, like most of my ESL students, is very quiet and studious and rarely initiates discussion. All eyes were on this student as we queried her about her ardent assertion. As it turned out, this student is from Japan and could read the supposed Chinese word, and verified that it was a Japanese word instead. (The article was in error; the word ninja actually comes from a Japanese word, not a Chinese word.) It was as if Pandora's Box had been opened as conversation erupted about assumptions and misunderstandings and biases. In the course of the discussion, we discovered that our group consisted of one student from Ethiopia, one from the Gambia, and two from Afghanistan, in addition to the one from Japan. Questions and responses were flying around the room, and students were expressing amazement at their own lack of knowledge and understanding about others. We talked about religion (Islam, in particular), beliefs, power structures, stereotypes, prejudice (bias--there's that vocabulary word), and profiling. And I was not leading the discussion; the students were. Each of my very quiet and reserved ESL students enthusiastically engaged in conversation with my American-born students who were humbly admitting their erroneous and stereotypical assumptions about the students' countries of origin and cultures. Empathy and a feeling of connectedness, even an awareness of our need for one another, emerged. The goodwill in the room was palpable. I believe students left the classroom feeling empowered in their ability to learn, grow, express themselves, and connect with people from very different backgrounds. It was a good day.