Category Archives: A life in the Spirit

Stop the Repression

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Sometimes it looks like the only “safe place” we can understand is the self-protected heart-space we keep free of outside influence.

Sometimes we extend the idea of “having good boundaries” so far we can no longer get out of ourselves and express the love of Jesus.

Meanwhile, God has violated the boundaries of space and time to come to us in Jesus. Today in the liturgical calendar, he is in the heart of Jerusalem teaching us how to live. Nevertheless, self-protection, self-discovery and self-protection seem reasonable to us. But those reasons rarely lead to strength, tenderness or faithfulness, just more self-ness. Stop the repression!

Your poor child

barbed-wireA woman who was abused as a child finally felt like she needed to cut off her mother. She was an evil woman who would rather destroy her daughter than admit her husband had abused her.* For years the daughter “set appropriate boundaries” and “took care of herself.” These are such basic recommendations from psychotherapists that they have become cliches.

She applied their teaching and definitely experienced more peace and less anxiety as a result of keeping her mother at a distance. But she did not become more gentle or experience much joy. She was supposedly loving herself, but the way she did it cost her the thrill of giving herself to another. To maintain her new defense system she had to continuously reaffirm the necessity of protecting herself. She was like North Korea, expending costly efforts to maintain big weapons while the heart of her country starved. Hardening her heart to her mother’s horrible life did transform her from a passive, frightened pawn. But the hardness also moved her toward being an angry, tough woman who, ironically, was willing to destroy her love rather than let down her defenses – a lot like her mother.

Our abusers have no qualms about remaking us in their image. Evil has no reticence about expressing itself through us. Jesus wants to stop their repression. Love requires we lose the ways we have been saving ourselves in the face of what threatens us and find our true selves in relationship with our Savior. Then we might even gain the strength to undo the evil done to us.

Love feels so risky to the abused

Our network talked a lot about this risky love last week, here and there. We are trying to figure out how to love and it hurts sometimes. We are especially afraid of abusers and evil people who don’t mind telling us we are fools to follow Jesus, who ignore us, or who aggressively impose their Christ-less ways as if they were moral, even while they tell us to not be so aggressive. We are tempted to be passive in order to not be a nuisance or to cut them off contemptuously, or become like them in other ways.

When I see Jesus in the center of Jerusalem today, teaching in the Temple courts in full view of people who are plotting to kill him, people who can’t see the peace he would bring to them, I take heart and keep learning the lessons of love. His objective is obviously to bless people, not just make sure he is not abused. He refuses to live in fear. He is not so dominated he maintains some semblance of peace instead of being his true self. To love is to be more committed to the other person than we are to the relationship, to be more concerned about their soul than with whatever comfort not rocking the relational boat might bring to us.

We need to honor the dignity and admit the depravity of the ones we love in order to truly love them. We cannot love if we distance ourselves or overlook the damage of another’s sin; neither can we love if we fail to move into another’s world to offer a taste of life. Like Oscar Romero, we might have to sacrifice personal comfort for the sake of helping another experience their own longings and need for grace. The risk to love like Jesus is worth it. We need to stop the repression dominating us and stop the repression of others to experience the freedom and fullness of self-giving love.

Yesterday was Oscar Romero’s martyr’s day. Let me leave you with a quote from him, since he inspires me to risk love like the Lord’s, even though I have been abused, even though I am afraid, even though others might be evil and I might prefer evil in some ways, too.

 romero    I would like to make a special appeal to the men of the army, and specifically to the ranks of the National Guard, the police and the military. Brothers, you come from our own people. You are killing your own brother peasants when any human order to kill must be subordinate to the law of God which says, “Thou shalt not kill.” No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God. No one has to obey an immoral law. It is high time you recovered your consciences and obeyed your consciences rather than a sinful order. The church, the defender of the rights of God, of the law of God, of human dignity, of the person, cannot remain silent before such an abomination. We want the government to face the fact that reforms are valueless if they are to be carried out at the cost of so much blood. In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cries rise to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression.
      The church preaches your liberation just as we have studied it in the holy Bible today. It is a liberation that has, above all else, respect for the dignity of the person, hope for humanity’s common good, and the transcendence that looks before all to God and only from God derives its hope and its strength (Last Homily).

* freely adapted from The Wounded Heart

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Hope for Us and the Church Beyond Learned Helplessness

A life in the Spirit, Music, Psychological growth, The Mission, , , ,

The other night we began our public meeting at Circle of Hope Broad and Washington with Eminem’s and Rihanna’s squalid ballad Love the Way You Lie. We were trying to acknowledge that we are entangled in the ways of the world. And now I continue to be tangled up with Rihanna’s haunting chorus. That is, I am entangled with 547,269,483 (and counting) youtube viewers since the song premiered in 2010.

learned helplessnessRihanna said she joined the collaboration with Eminem because she could relate to the theme of the song, as she and Eminem had experienced domestic violence on “different ends of the table.” Eminem and his ex-wife Kimberly Scott had been in a difficult relationship, having divorced in 2001 and again in 2006 after a remarriage. In February 2009, Rihanna’s notorious relationship with Chris Brown ended following his felony assault on her. She described Love the Way You Lie as unique, realistic and deep, saying it “broke down the cycle of domestic violence because few people had insight on the topic” [MTV]. She tried to exploit the popularity of the original with a Part II that celebrates death and masochism with even less subtlety, if that is possible.

Learned helplessness should not be normalized

I admit I am an admirer of these artists because they are talented and clever survivors. If your song deserves a Wikipedia page, the least we can do is tip our hats.  There is a lot to say about a song that influences hundreds of millions of people. But I just want to say one thing: the learned helplessness being normalized in the song should not be normalized.

Rihanna: Just gonna stand there and watch me burn?
Well, that’s alright because I like the way it hurts.
Just gonna stand there and hear me cry?
Well, that’s alright because I love the way you lie.
I love the way you lie.
I love the way you lie.

Eminem: Now I know we said things, did things that we didn’t mean
And we fall back into the same patterns, same routine.
But your temper’s just as bad as mine is, you’re the same as me.
But when it comes to love, you’re just as blinded.

Baby, please come back, it wasn’t you, baby, it was me.
Maybe our relationship isn’t as crazy as it seems.
Maybe that’s what happens when a tornado meets a volcano.
All I know is I love you too much to walk away though.

Abuse, especially sexual abuse, presents the victim with a terrible choice. If she (or he) wants to live free of the pain, they must choose not to be alive in some way. She might come to say with Rihanna, “I like the way it hurts. I love the way you lie.” Or he might try to normalize it by saying, with Eminem, “Maybe our relationship isn’t as crazy as it seems.”

No, it is, and you know you are not getting the love you desire. Even though you might choose to kill the part of the soul that feels the pain, the grace of God renders you unable to destroy your own or someone else’s sense of being. But the powerlessness we may have experienced in our family, from an abuser and from our pain has terrible consequences to confront.

One consequence I want to highlight is the self-doubt that results in learned helplessness. Eminem doubts he can change and Rihanna has given up. They are helpless and hopeless. They expect to burn. The goal – a happy family, the end to the abuse, relief from the pain – is out of reach. Their perpetual question is, “Why can’t I make this work?”

I think 500 million people probably resonated with that question. The result of continued, frustrated labor that fails to reach the carrot of love at the end of the stick of an abusive relationship is learned helplessness. We learn to give up before we try because we have learned there is no hope. We are locked in a cell and no one will rescue us. “Hope deferred makes the heart sick” (Proverbs 13:12). We may leave the porch light on, feigning involvement, but no one is home; we never invite someone into our empty soul. We can’t do this completely, of course, the soul keeps popping up to be slain again. But when we try to keep it dead so we can’t experience the pain, we unleash terrible consequences.

What to do when you don’t get what you need from those who should provide it

This happens at a corporate level, too, in whole families and in the church. I want to talk about it as a church. We are a circle of hope that does not always get what we hope for. Lately we have been talking a lot about having a missional culture. I think we have been pushing some pained people to move beyond their learned helplessness. Maybe they have been “on the mission field” a long time and they have not been as successful in meeting their goals as they expected. Maybe they feel, like an abused child usually does, that if they just do better they will make it all right. But the increasingly vocal forces against Jesus have wounded them and the contempt for their powerlessness has made them feel ashamed. They have come to feel that they should not try to influence people at all; if they try, the giant forces against them will be too strong to stand against. They try to tamp down the soul of the church lest they experience it dying. Paul’s words sound like damnation, not inspiration, “Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand” (Ephesians 6:13).

The solution to the personal powerlessness that deadens one’s soul and the learned helplessness of the disappointed missionary is the same. Jesus and Paul both demonstrate this, if that helps convince you. We need to trade death for life, lose the life in which we are caged in order to find the life outside the cage which Jesus has provided. It will take turning off our fake porch light and walking through the darkness with Jesus until we emerge in abiding hope. We’ll have to forfeit our controlling, self-protective and mistrusting ways and turn to humble dependence on God and passionate involvement with others, which is what I think everyone wants, down in that indomitable soul.

Rihanna and Eminem exploit their pain for profit and unwittingly (I hope) teach their young fans to accept the despair of the powerless as if destruction were just what tornados and volcanos do. Connecting our powerless, pained souls with God is what enables us to stand in an evil day. When we keep connecting, as a church, we don’t end up submitting to the contemptuous forces of the world who teach us we are helpless and tell us we should just shut up and love the way they lie

[Check out Dan Allender’s book The Wounded Heart. It inspired some of what I wrote]

Disentangling from Addiction

A life in the Spirit, Psychological growth, , , , , , ,

When Jesus spent his “Lent” in the desert, I think he went into the wilderness to face the utter absence of anything that was familiar, to experience being saved in his vulnerability before he went back into a world fraught with attachments.

Old Foss Cemetery

When I was pondering the Lord’s radical trust after Ash Wednesday, I had a surprising image come up in my mind. I remembered visiting western Oklahoma with my family, the very towns in which my father grew up. Remembering how it all looked was almost like the Holy Spirit drawing me back into the wilderness of my father’s life and the emptiness from which I came. My mind went back to the time we stood in Old Foss Cemetery. Our steps on the brittle grass invaded the hush as we explored. My father found a family plot enclosed by an old iron fence. The rusty gate creaked in the wind as big black storm clouds blew in. The place was silent, desolate, and I felt the ache of my silent, desolate  father. I felt his unmet yearning. I still feel his yearning like I felt my unmet yearning for him. I think Jesus was feeling that absence and yearning in the desert.

Yearning in the wilderness

I think Jesus was in the wilderness to experience the yearning all people feel and to enter the ache of their wilderness, the pain of their emptiness. And in that vulnerable place he was tempted by the devil like we all are. He went there to do battle, like we all are doing battle in our most vulnerable places where we long to attach, to be loved and to love. Most of us will do almost anything to avoid going to that hurting place, so the devil often wins the battle because we don’t even show up.

Cross at St. Andrew’s Abbey, Valyermo

I have been to the geographic desert many times to try to show up, to follow in the footsteps of Jesus. Not too long ago Gwen and I made a return visit to St. Andrews Abbey in Valyermo where Gwen, especially, had some significant experiences of grace as she battled her temptations with Jesus.  For most of us, spending time in the geographic desert can be rare. Our geographic deserts mostly take the form of temporary, silent, solitude in a simple yet comfortable retreat center or hermitage. For everyone, however, the desert of the heart remains unchanged. And we can visit it anytime we dare. It is not comfortable. I have visited parts in me that are like a desolate, abandoned graveyard in Oklahoma.

Hungry for our addiction during Lent

The New Testament accounts of Jesus’ forty days of temptation in the wilderness are an intentional parallel to the Hebrews’ forty years of exodus. Lent is an intentional parallel to both. We are led into the desert by the Holy Spirit. There, while hungry and vulnerable, we are tempted by Satan. The three temptations Satan offers Jesus are all about desire, about yearning, and we will meet those same kinds of temptations ourselves. Because everybody has an inborn desire for God, whether you are consciously religious or not. This yearning is our deepest longing and our most precious treasure. Some of us have repressed this desire under so many competing interests and fears that we are mostly unaware of it. Or we may experience it as a longing for wholeness, completion or fulfillment of our potential. Regardless of how we describe it, it is a longing for love. We hunger to love and to be loved and to move closer to the Source of love. This yearning is the essence of what people call the human spirit. It is the origin of humanity’s highest hopes and dreams.  (Read Gerald May’s Addiction and Grace, please).

We describe this desire as God given. So Paul says in Romans 5: “We boast in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.” The Bible is full of people yearning for God and God yearning for his people. Because in an outpouring of love God created us and planted the seeds of this desire for love and loving in us. Then God nurtured this desire in us toward fulfillment of the two great commandments: Love God with all your heart soul mind and strength and love your neighbor as yourself.

But something gets in the way of God’s desire. We don’t fulfill the commandments even when we want to. We are usurped by forces that are not loving; we are captured. Our desires get repressed and stifled. Repression is one thing, but something even worse happens, our desire attaches to something or someone other than God, something other than true love. We get addicted.

Addiction enslaves the energy of desire to specific behaviors, things or people. The objects of attachments become preoccupations and obsessions; they come to rule our lives. They become gods. The psychological, neurological, and spiritual dynamics of addiction are actively at work in every human being. The same processes that are responsible for addiction to alcohol and narcotics are also responsible for addictions to ideas, work, relationships, power , moods, fantasies and so on.

The temptations that the devil presents to Jesus in the wilderness or to us in our wilderness, in the  emptiness we choose or the emptiness in which we are stuck, or which we inherited, all have to do with desires being attached, being nailed to something else.

Throughout these temptations, Satan was hoping Jesus’ desire in his vulnerable state would lead him to attach it to meeting his own needs, using his own power, or relying on the material world. Satan was trying to lure Jesus into the “I can handle it” trap, and Jesus could have handled it. But instead of giving in to the massive power of temptations to convince him to attach to something other than His true self in the love of God, Jesus stood firm in his own freedom, in his faith and in grace.

Jesus leads us home

Jesus was truly vulnerable, but the way he responded to Satan’s temptations reveals how people attached to God get through their deserts and get home. 1) He stood firm. He met the adversary, faced the temptation, and did not run away or rationalize. 2) He acted with strength: he claimed and used his free will with dignity. 3) He did not use his freedom willfully. None of his responses to Satan were even his own autonomous creation. He relied upon the truth that had already been revealed in love by quoting from the Torah. We are all working on being that free every day.

We go off into our wilderness of Lent to keep practicing being free, because we are still tempted. What’s more, like me realizing at a very young age out on a hill in Oklahoma, I have an emptiness in me yearning to attach and I need to be careful about what it latches on to.

It is an uncomfortable process to not merely avoid the pain. We have a proverb around Circle of Hope that speaks to that: We are all recovering from the sin addiction, expect conflict.

Recovering causes problems. It puts us in conflict with the whole society, which has notable addictions, en masse. I think, in general, the nation is addicted to fear, to carbon-based everything, to narcissism, to war, to radical self-reliance — even for poor people who aren’t allowed to be self-reliant, to freedom based on earning power. We live in a wilderness we did not choose in so many ways.

There is going to be trouble every day. As if where we live was not temptation enough, we all have our own personal drugs. Some are substances or habits like alcohol or sugar or painkillers or porn or Facebook. Some of them we don’t even see as addictions yet, because our desires are so trained by them, we are so enthralled to them, that they just seem like “us,” nothing else.

We need to get disentangled. Lent is a great time to face it all like Jesus in the wilderness, a great time to talk back and act back. Lent is a great time to exercise some freedom as members of an alternative society by going without addicted behavior we can recognize or to exercise some freedom by taking on new habits that come from grace, not bondage. Lent is for suffering the wilderness with Jesus, for aching. It is hard to show up for that battle, but losing by default is worse.

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A spiritual midwife: God’s helpers in birthing new life

A life in the Spirit, Leadership, , ,

People were clamoring for spiritual direction! One of the best things I heard throughout all the dialogue of our church’s mapping process last year was the persistent request for more help to grow in grace. We need to nurture further gifted people in the body who direct us. We need to pay attention to the people and resources we have already been given. We want to provide everyone with good opportunities to go deep. It will take more spiritual midwives — men or women who can help with the spiritual birthing process. We need them, whoever they might be.

Shiprah and Puah
Shiprah and Puah

We need clever and brave midwives like Shiprah and Puah, the forerunners of good midwives everywhere. Here is their story:

The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, whose names were Shiphrah and Puah, “When you are helping the Hebrew women during childbirth on the delivery stool, if you see that the baby is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, let her live.” The midwives, however, feared God and did not do what the king of Egypt had told them to do; they let the boys live. Then the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and asked them, “Why have you done this? Why have you let the boys live?”
                 The midwives answered Pharaoh, “Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women; they are vigorous and give birth before the midwives arrive.”
                So God was kind to the midwives and the people increased and became even more numerous. And because the midwives feared God, he gave them families of their own. — Exodus 1:15-21

Shiprah and Puah! Why haven’t any of our most recent female children been named after these great figures in Bible history? Is it because Moses gets most of the airtime in the Exodus story and these women only a few lines, so they are easily forgotten? Is it because our family story is written by and about men, primarily? Probably both.

Even though it is a male-dominated story, a very basic image manages to push its way to the surface quite often: narratives of  pregnancy and birth, stories of new life that redirect and transform.

God the midwife

Pivotal women in the Old Testament story set the stage for THE birth story. Luke’s sensitive telling makes the incarnation vivid. Mary asks the angel “How can this be?” Nicodemus asks Jesus when he is called to be born again “How can this be?”

It can be because God herself is the midwife. Psalm 22 spells it out as we are led to pray:

You brought me out of the womb;
you made me trust in you, even at my mother’s breast.
 From birth I was cast on you;
from my mother’s womb you have been my God. — Psalm 22:9-10

When we see God pictured like this, it should dawn on us, like Margaret Guenther says, “that the midwife helps new life into being and protects it; even more than the mother, she is the tender guardian of its safety…Shiprah and Puah may well stand as an icon, the foremothers of all midwives, but behind them is another guardian of new life. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. The Lord is my midwife, I shall be kept safe” (Holy Listening p. 84).

We need spiritual midwives

We need more directors who are like midwives for new birth: present to another in a time of vulnerability, working in areas that are deep and intimate, helping a birthing person to greater self-knowledge, assisting at a natural event. A spiritual midwife, like one who stays with a woman through a natural birth, sees what the birthgiver can’t see, knows the signs of transition, witnesses the crowning of newness. She or he recognizes the time to confront, the time to encourage and knows how to do both. Our goal for 2013 is to provide a roadmap for spiritual direction that helps people understand and exercise their options for growing in grace.

We are already blessed with people among us who have received training in spiritual direction. But we don’t need to wait to get on their schedule. We don’t need to go to the “spiritual birthing center” to give spiritual birth, per se. We have an assortment of ways we might meet the need. Our cells are hotbeds of spiritual direction, if one is listening and not devaluing. Our pastors are good directors, and getting better, as are our Cell Leader Coordinators. But one doesn’t need to wait for a one-on-one, you can access what is being taught in our meetings, dive into the pastors’ book recommendations, make a friend who is consciously a spiritual friend, or be involved in the day retreats of spiritual direction. We plan a whole brochure on the topic.

We can put Shiprah and Puah on the front of the brochure, but it won’t do much good unless people who are talking about needing direction receive the gifts given. We need directors, but we also need people who really want to be directed. It is often said that the person seeking to find direction finds a guide. A person who can’t be directed often complains they are without guidance.Enhanced by Zemanta

Whether you stole the baby or are searching for the perp

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One year there were a rash of thefts involving the baby Jesus. I don’t think they ever found the one that was taken from the crèche on Independence Mall.  I heard of one baby Jesus stolen in the Northeast by an eighteen year old girl who had an apartment overlooking the scene of the manger. I guess she was just mean enough to do it. Or maybe she was a young, deluded girl who just wanted a baby. As it turned out, the police, on the other end of the social scale, also ended up looking for Jesus. Maybe they were mean as they did it. Or maybe they just wanted to figure out what happened. Regardless, it is the season of looking for Jesus.

Locals like us

This next Sunday, our Advent pilgrimage is focused on the people in the nativity story who best represent most of us: the shepherds and wise men. Someplace along the spectrum of low-life shepherds to high-class wise men, you probably fit in. I also think that all of us have an inner shepherd and an inner wise man searching for Jesus — or needing to.

The shepherds get just a few lines in Luke, but their amazing experience gets all the imagination of the carol writers poured on them. That is probably because we all relate to them so well.

The Adoration of the Shepherds — El Greco

The shepherds were chosen from among the locals. I’m not sure how that occurred; maybe  the angels just happened upon people who were still up in the middle of the night. It is possible that the angel just had a prepared speech to give to whoever he met: “I bring you tidings of great joy, earthling.” But it sounds like these certain poor shepherds might have been selected.  I think the angel was actually being sensitive, like he noticed that the shepherds were looking over their shoulders wondering who the angel was really coming to meet, since they were normally among the invisible poor. That’s why he said, “No, don’t be afraid. I’m talking to you. I bring you good news of great joy, good news for everyone, you included. Go to Bethlehem and you’ll see what I’m talking about. “ Then the heavens erupted because this moment must be an especially great thing for heaven to see. The poor receive the love and justice they’ve been missing. A person trampled back into dust has new life breathed into them. This is what angels live for: “Glory to God! This is it! Life. Light. Joy.” It was nuts.

This is where I love to come into the story, along with all the artists. If you get what is going on, you must be eager to show up with your inner shepherd, out in the dark, out alone on a hill, out in the cold, poor in some way, not getting what you need in some way, ragged, mistreated, unnoticed. And the angel comes to you and says for God, “I choose you. Here is my message for you — needy, needy you.” I don’t know if we ever quite fully improve on this, no matter how many Advents we experience. We search out of our darkness. The light terrifies us — but it shows us the way out. We grope through the hills to find that it was just as we were told, again, but we, again, may not have believed it fully before we got there, again.

Foreigners like us

As for the wise men, the magi (I’m not sure how they got to be three kings except that they came equipped with treasure),  they are another story altogether. I think they get less songs and less art because they are from the mysterious places of high finance and deep learning. Plus, they are foreigners to Matthew, who is writing the story. They represent the “gentiles,” people who are called from far away.

The Adoration of the Magi – El Greco

Maybe the magi were Persian astrologers. However Mary or Joseph told the story, I am not sure they really knew. When they met them they were probably just glad to get some gold and other things to sell. But we come to find out that these men felt comfortable in King Herod’s court and went there first. And they had the means to travel from the East, across the desert, presumably, where they were getting directions from stars coming up in the West.

We also come into the story with our inner magi needing to get involved, our inner wise person, our king or queen self. We are brilliant, and God calls us in our brilliance just like he called these brilliant guys. We also search out of our light. The lack of a guiding star terrifies us and the presence of one brings us joy. We use our skills to get to some place where we can worship, like all our knowledge and skills told us we should. But we have to get there before we can choose to kneel.

I admit that I resent the way the Augustinian protestants made such an overwhelming emphasis on our dirty shepherd selves. They specialized in convincing us that we are terrible so we would recognize our need for Jesus.  They kind of stopped us from appealing to the best in everyone. It appears that Jesus draws the best of the Persians across the desert to worship him. They figured it out. Their astrology even led them to Jesus! Honest seekers after God find a lot of ways to get there. We are all shepherds, but we are all magi, too. We’ve got stuff, we are hopeful, we are ready to adventure. We are all these good things. And if we are not self-sufficient as a result of having them, and we respond to the revelation that is right in front of us — in our law studies, in sociology, in biology, in architecture, if we are searching there, we end up at the proper place to present our treasure.

Advent is the time of year when we celebrate this wonderful both/and:

  • God in flesh.
  • God present and future.
  • Ourselves as shepherds and magi at the manger.
  • Being chosen and choosing.

There are a lot of places to fit ourselves into the story, aren’t there?  It is “Peace on Earth! Good will to all!” If you are so low that you stole the baby, Jesus will likely influence your apartment. If you angrily searched high and low for the perp who stole the baby, at least the baby has a chance to preoccupy your thoughts.

God chose you where you are, especially if you are shepherdy. God called you from as far away as you have ever been, especially calling all your brilliance into its true service. Each of us is in the story. For us, too, it is “Come and see. Come and worship.”

Even my stable?

A life in the Spirit, Poetry,

Advent is always so revealing.

Yesterday I wrote a pensive little psalm about it. I was just plain distressed about that stable and that vulnerable baby in it being the incarnation of God in the world. The call to be that alive and trusting and welcoming can make me shiver in the bleak midwinter of my hard heartedness and self-occupation!

The Italians set up the kind of nativity scenes I'm talking about
The Italians set up the kind of nativity scenes I’m talking about. That’s one crowded baby!

There is room in the stable for shepherds, who may as well represent pickpockets and thieves of all kinds, the riff-raff of my relational universe. There is room in the stable for magi, who quickly turn into kings as time goes on, who may as well represent establishment figures of all kinds, the oppressors of my relational universe.

Do you ever pray prayers like this?: “I have too much leftover from my insecure attachment to entertain one more person bent on getting something for themselves! Don’t I? I have too much narcissism to allow even the occupiers of the power structure to be valued! Don’t I?”

Is there supposed to be that kind of room in the stable? Even my stable? The church is just your latest stable, Jesus?

If there is supposed to be that kind of room, and I am distressingly sure that there is, then I would like to be a more realized baby. Thus my psalm:

I wish I were not such a typical baby,
like Oliver tired and grumpy
running to grab whatever’s new,
running from Mommy then mad and searching.
You are such a good baby.

I wish no one would come to my stable
and trouble me with their feelings,
breaking the frame and being so real,
making me love and then feel unloved.
You are such a good baby.

I wish I never had to be vulnerable
and sponge up more sin and death,
feeling my desire and resistance,
running in fear then madly searching.
You are such a good baby.

What will become of me,
locked up with you on this scratchy hay?
What will become of you,
locked up with me in my itchy heart?

Sojourn at the Movies

A life in the Spirit, Film/TV, , , , ,

The U.S. embassy in Germany has a nice page on film. On it, they say, “Moving pictures were not an American invention; however, they have nonetheless been the preeminent American contribution to world entertainment.” Do you think that movies are what Americans do best? They are also good at drone warfare, but let’s stay thankful.

I am thankful for the stimulation the movies gave me over the holiday. Gwen and I often see one of the big movies when the distributors begin their winter releases. This time we decided to do it big and we saw four! Each one had some inspiration to offer in one way or another. If you can go to the movies as “play” they can be good for you. When a very young child is first playing with their parents, he or she is learning to discern between imagination and actuality, what is in my mind and what is in an other’s. When we go to the movies, an author, director and crew are telling an artful story. Experiencing the story, imagining what is behind it, and discerning what it all means is a rich experience of mental activity. Of course, if one just experiences the violence, language, sex, and noise in the film, it might be better to skip the sensory oppression. If one just consumes movies and does not relate to them, I’d avoid them.

The movies I saw each had something to say that is very relevant to where I live and to what is happening around me in the quickly-changing social landscape of the United States! It was like going on retreat! Let me tell you about them in the order experienced.

The Life of Pi

Needs a big screen

I went to see The Life of Pi when Wreck it Ralph was not an option. I was glad I did. I’ve been thinking about it ever since, as Ang Lee no doubt hoped I would. It is a stunningly beautiful film I would watch again without the sound on. I wish I had a more extravagant word than stunning to describe how beautiful. It also has a lot to say — layers and layers to say. But the main thing I took away was about the power of story in the face of the facts. It is a nice piece of rebellion against the rationalists who dominate so much of what is proper and legal in the United States. We all want to love, feel, and forgive, but we are forced to fight over facts, policies and definitions. One’s identity is more than the definition, one’s life is more than what happens.

Lincoln

Put DD Lewis on the penny

Lincoln was a revelation in so many ways. I am not a big critic of movies, generally, since I want to relate to them, not critique them. But I know a better one from a worse one, I think. I have to say that I don’t think there is anything wrong with Spielberg’s loving portrayal of St. Abraham. And Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens! One of my friends ran to Amazon immediately to find out about this unknown abolitionist from PA. Some critic said Sally Field was miscast as Lincoln’s troubled wife – poppycock. What I took away was all about leadership. Lincoln had his eye on “true north” and got there in whatever way he could. He seems to have been a master of doing the best with what was available. He learned while others were just defending themselves. And the 13th Amendment is a good thing. Democracy won’t save us, but let’s celebrate when the righteous last long enough in it to get something good accomplished.

Anna Karenina

The movie in a nutshell, I think

I like costume dramas and set direction, so I was looking forward to Anna Karenina. I was not disappointed by the art (although sometimes the artifice was distractingly artificial). “All the world’s a stage” and much of the movie is set on the literal set of an old theater. And Kiera Knightly wears some amazing stuff, when she is clothed. But they just told the story of Anna’s affair without much of the backstory Tolstoy was really talking about! It put me to sleep, literally (but then, so did the book, I admit). It reminded me of some experiences I have had when I am listening to someone and I am quite bored with what they are saying. Most of the time I need to pinch myself and get engaged because they aren’t really doing any inner work. I might need to pinch whatever they are doing so they can wake up. Lord knows that many people I know are totally led around by their lust and unprocessed obsessions, miserable and making other feel the same.

Silver Linings Playbook

Llanerch Diner!

I did not really want to go see Silver Linings Playbook. I’d only heard about it from Gwen. Once again, I find out how trustworthy Gwen is! If you love Philly and the people of Philly, this is worth the price of admission. I did not realize it was a great reflection of our fair city. A main scene happens in the Wanamaker building ballroom where I attended a Habitat fundraiser earlier in the year! But what I loved even more, with all my psychotherapy studies this year, was seeing troubled people doing good work and feeling better, plus troubled families managing not to be messed up by the system too much and finding their way home. Even the police are not too bad in this movie! What I took away was some encouragement to go with my best inspiration and let my positive attempts bear fruit. Good things can happen.

My sojourn in the movies turned out to be a good pre-Advent retreat. The incarnation is a great story. Teaching about it and leading through it requires being inventive in the face of an era of change in which people seem to be light on meaning and not so happy with that. I want to hold on to the surprising hope that does not disappoint. We are built for joy and Jesus is the continual spark that allows it to flame.

Is God Going to Punish Me?

A life in the Spirit, Doing Theology, , , ,

You are not condemned yet.

In God we live and move and have our being. God might be holding on to us by the slenderest of threads, but he is holding on. God wants us to live, not die. I think the last thing God wants is for us to live in fear of him dropping us into hell.

Yet we still wonder if we are about ready to be dropped. “Is God going to punish me?” — that is not a dumb question if you are a Bible reader. The Bible seems to plainly say that he is:  “He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might” (2 Thessalonians 1:8-9). In other translations, “he will punish” is translated “he will take revenge.” The root idea has to do with working out justice. Justice is going to be done. At the end of days, those who have turned away from God will be sent the direction they are facing forever. So yes, you could definitely call that punishment. God is going to punish us if we refuse to relate to him and we work out death instead of life.

We are not being punished for our sins right now, however. That’s not going to happen until time is up — and it is not up, yet. Consider that there is a difference between the punishment 2 Thessalonians is talking about, and the process of our father responding to the consequences of our choices. There is a final judgment that will bring things to right. But God is forestalling that day, and that punishment. What we experience now is his loving discipline that brings us to life. Romans 8 says that there is NO condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because the Lord Jesus took all of the Father’s condemnation on Himself on the cross. He wrestled evil to exhaustion. The true state of every Jesus lover is uncondemned.

Yet we still wonder if we are condemned. “Is God mad at me? What is going on? Why is this situation working out so poorly? Why do I work so poorly? Am I being punished? Did I cause God to make me sick or make me lose my loved one?” Those jumbled up feelings come with the process of being disciplined for life, not because we are locked up in condemnation, like we used to be. Here is a key Bible passage about that:  

Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as his children. For what children are not disciplined by their father? If you are not disciplined—and everyone undergoes discipline —then you are not legitimate children at all. Moreover, we have all had parents who disciplined us and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the Father of spirits and live! (Hebrews 12).

When uncondemned people experience the struggle of becoming free of the vestiges of sin and death hanging on them, they should consider it the discipline of the Lord, leading us out of darkness into light. We are like babies in the Spirit and we need our Parent to help us learn how to walk and run and build in the Spirit.

So if you are in Christ, God is not punishing you — and I say you only need a mustard seed of faith to be in Christ. You’ll want more faith, but it doesn’t take much to have enough —  and God is the judge of what is enough, not you or me. If you are turned toward Jesus and following, God is not punishing you in the sense that he has judged you unworthy of him and has given you over to die  —  and he never will.

But what do I do about feeling condemnable?

A young woman wrote into one of the internet question sites. She said “I am so depressed right now because I feel all the mistakes in my past mistakes are so many that I won’t have a good future. I’m 29 years old and I had 2 abortions before I was 20. Two years ago I slept with my boyfriend even though I was already a Christian; we went our separate ways because of this. (He’s also a Christian.) I have been single ever since and I have been told that I am being punished for all my sins. Does this mean because of what happened in my past I will never find peace, joy or fulfillment? Does this mean God will never trust me with a relationship again? Will I have to pay for the rest of my life? Will He refuse to forgive me since I made the mistakes when I was already a Christian? I have been so tormented by all this and I am in constant pain–my heart aches. I really don’t know what to do, I have prayed and asked for forgiveness, don’t know what else to do. All I feel is guilt, guilt, guilt.

What can we say to such a poor, dear soul? She is experiencing something most of us feel at some level. She has acted in ways that have consequences; she has sinned. She doesn’t experience peace, or joy, or fulfillment. A very simple way to respond might be, “It seems like your cup is upside down.” You think and feel like you are still condemned. God’s grace is bouncing off your condemnation.

When she asks, “Will I have to pay for the rest of my life?” The answer is, “No, you will not have to pay for the rest of your life.” God just wants you to turn your cup right side up. You already turned her way; you’re feeling the sorrow of being sinful. Don’t stay camped out in a living death with your cup upside down! If you are camped out in living death, feeling guilty and liable to punishment (maybe even feeling like you are being actively punished!), you need to turn your cup up and receive freedom from condemnation.

Maybe that sounds a little too easy to be useful. That’s probably true. Even though we are uncondemned, that condition has not necessarily made us smarter or altogether capable:

1. God is not interested in punishing us, but WE might be.

For instance, my parents were very poor as children and did not get enough to eat. When I was a child they taught me to eat every scrap of food I was given because there might not be more food coming. They did not mean this to be a big lesson, but it is what they thought. I took in what they believed and made it part of what I believe, even though we had enough food to eat. I still follow the rule even though I am surrounded by a sea of food. To this day, I almost never go out to eat without cleaning my plate completely of luxurious, expensive food. Should I feel guilty about not eating my food, as if I am a bad person, as if I will be condemned for that? Of course not! But what do I do, if I do feel that way, if I have that way installed in me?

I need to work with the discipline of the Lord, freeing me and making me holy. I would not want to resent the discipline of learning to live as a free brother of Jesus just because it is hard! I suppose I could see the whole experience of realizing something in me that is messing me up as a disaster that shows that I am unsaved and unredeemable — “I can’t stop fretting about food!” But what is really happening is this: I am being disciplined to be a free being. God does not want to punish me, but I might think being punished is normal, and might live under all sorts of irrational rules that kill me, not free me. I have thoughts and habits of the heart that are not fully aligned with how God sees me or how God wishes I could see the universe. I need to turn my cup up.

2.  God is not interested in punishing us, but the WORLD might be.

We could talk about the U.S. punishing Afghanistan as evidence. The NCAA is punishing Penn State. The irrational family courts are punishing husbands or wives. We are surrounded by a huge prison punishment industry in Pennsylvania. Cheaters on tests have been punished in our schools. Lance Armstrong lost his tour de France titles. We love “justice.” I am in school, so I am afraid of how my professors might punish my errors, as they see them. You might work in an office and feel afraid to talk to the boss for fear of what she might do to you. Everything is illegal in Philly, so most of us could be accosted by the police at any moment. We fear “justice.”

I am an uncondemned person, but what if everything around me tells me that what I am doing is wrong and expects me to take that seriously all day, or else? It is a problem, if we don’t work with it as part of the Lord disciplining us for freedom and grace. Turn the cup up.

3. God is not interested in punishing us, but EVIL FORCES might be.

The devil is not an anti-god who is able to influence us all day. But there are forces that would like us to fail and die. When Jesus was baptized and made his first steps toward the public ministry that would lead him to death and resurrection, it says that “Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. The tempter came to him and said, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.”  Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘People do not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”

Jesus could have made bread from stones, but humans can’t. One of the reasons he did not make bread from stones is because he was fully identified with us in every way — all the good and all the bad. In the event of the devil’s temptation, obedience to the process of discipline was more important than the gratification of not being hungry. Jesus did not take the situation into his own hands, like humans are tempted to do. He waited on God like humans need to wait. The discipline seems hard, but this first defeat of the evil one foreshadowed the ultimate thrashing Jesus is gave him in God’s time.

We were talking about feeling great as a church the other day. And then we started naming all the ways we felt people were being tempted and turned away by evil. Getting more free and being attacked are kind of the same process for God’s children. The devil might want the process of growing in faith to kill us, or at least feel like it is killing us. But since we are uncondemnable and are walking with Jesus, all that temptation just trains us for being our true selves. We need to keep the cup turned up.

I don’t think anyone needs to tell you, “You are hanging by a slender thread,” so you will wake up and not be cast into the fire. I think you have enough guilt right now to motivate you. I think you have enough fear. I think you have enough loneliness to make you wonder if God is punishing you. Elements of your own being, the world, and evil forces are all conspiring to make you feel condemned when you are not. Turn up your cup; you are not condemned! Though we are still a bit stupid and unable, God will help us as we face the temptation to believe the lies that tell us we are unforgiveable, or that we have a God bent on our destruction — you are not unforgiveable and you do not have that kind of Lord. You have a God determined that you will live forever. He has forgiven you and will forgive you and make you whole. If you don’t experience it all tomorrow, just wait; it is coming. Turn your cup up.

What if I don’t feel God anymore?: Ewan McGregor on spiritual development

A life in the Spirit, Film/TV, , , ,

The film, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, is parable about gaining faith. It helps us answer a question people sometimes surreptitiously ask: “What if I don’t feel God anymore?” What if I feel like a mundane Christian destined for mediocrity? What if what excited me doesn’t anymore? What if I am trying to feel God and it is not working?

Ewan McGregor’s development parable

In the film, Ewan McGregor plays a surly bureaucrat from the fish and game department who is unsatisfied with his life and his wife, and emotionally cut off from relationships with his colleagues. When his life is invaded by a charismatic, visionary sheik and the sheik’s wealth-managing, sexy assistant, things begin to transform. For one thing, Ewan’s love of salmon fishing ends up being a metaphor for his own change.

The movie is a somewhat odd story about getting salmon to thrive and reproduce in the Yemeni desert. At one crucial point, they have created a lake and a fish ladder and they have stocked the lake with farm-bred salmon (because the wild fish were too precious for enthusiasts to part with). The farm-bred fish are like Ewan McGregor: staid and stuck in a holding tank. Ewan has sat in his cubicle for a long time not really doing anything; he has sat in his depressing marriage not having children and not really making love. The question about these farm-bred salmon is: will they swim upstream, as salmon instinctively must do to reproduce?

As with all good parables, you are already asking the question: “Will I?” What about my development?

will they develop?They tensely watch from the dam and are sure their whole, huge experiment is a bust. But right when they are ready to give up, one salmon leaps out of the water and soon all of them are turning around and getting up the ladder and up the stream. Excitement ensues.

But then something horrible happens. Just like Ewan experienced in the middle of his new project when his wife decided to leave him, some person who thinks the sheik is a liberal threat to Yemeni culture blows up the dam and most of the fish are left high and dry. Just a little creek is left of the water project. They are sure all is lost. Ewan does not know what to do. But as he despondently looks over the project, one lone, surviving fish leaps in the air. They were not all killed! A lot died, but something new hung on. Their previous idea for the water project was still in pieces, but a new and better result sprang up from ruins of their work.

Ewan felt like a dried up scientist destined for the mundane. He tried something new and it didn’t work just right and he did not know what to do. Something unexpected took place as a result of him taking some initiative. He endured the loss of what was and entered into what is next.

If you don’t feel God, that is probably what is happening to you.

First of all, no one can really answer the questions, “What if I don’t feel God anymore?” because you are precious you. One size does not fit all when it comes to faith.

Second of all, I have some ideas about what might be going on. Don’t give up!

1)  Your childhood faith might be wearing out. It usually needs to move from head to heart.

I use the running the bases chart to talk about how we know God. It implies that we are always developing. That is a good thing, even though it includes feeling the uncertainty of moving further and the loss of standing safely on a base. The “game” is ongoing.

A lot of Christians only get to first base when it comes to understanding God. They have kind of a teenager faith. Many people come to faith when they are teenagers and they never get much farther than their original understanding. If you don’t experience the presence of God, maybe God moved on and you stopped following!

Old feelings pass away, but deeper feelings are in store. Spiritual “feelings” that are deeper than the reactions we learned in childhood are being developed in our much larger and deeper new eternal family.

2) You are going through a change of season and you need some new disciplines.

Just think about what is the center of having a “first base” faith in Jesus: knowing the Bible. It is quite a feat to achieve a basic understanding of what Jesus is talking about, much more to feel secure about the way you are going to do the word.  It takes a lot of concentration to just get started. It might be tempting to stay on the first base of faith, or second, or wherever you are, even though that season of development is over.

In the case of reading the Bible, spiritual development can’t stay at the level of merely understanding concepts. For instance, the Bible leads us to the basic disciplines of meditation and prayer. From reading the Bible we gain a collection of basic approaches to laying a personal, spiritual foundation that must accompany our reading. Meditating on the Bible saturates us with the truth and love that is revealed. We’re not just reading the words, we are responding to God and forming our relationship.

If that relationship does not keep changing and growing, something is stuck. In a new season we are called to run the bases at a deeper level. Our original idea of what they meant, as good as it might have been, turns out to have something deeper behind it.

3) You are experiencing psychological development

In our relationships with God we are always working on basic trust. We develop in the Spirit a lot like children develop in their families. Rather than milk we need solid food. Eventually, we need to develop agency. We have to endure losses and become adult. What doesn’t kill us helps us grow, it is said, and that is mostly true.

If you are wondering why you don’t feel God, it could be depression or anxiety talking. These symptoms are “friends” that alert us to deeper things happening in our souls. They may not feel like friends, but they are signposts of change. The uncomfortable feelings we often prefer to avoid are actually important to our spiritual development. The destruction of dams we thought should never be blown up often results in something better we never could have predicted.

Close relationships and young marriages often go through a lot of anger and hurt as the partners push one another to develop. When children are added to a family they push people farther. Losing one’s job or losing a loved one calls us to become deeper, to trust God. We need to listen to our anger, listen to the sadness and other feelings behind it and find out what it developing. Let’s not merely fight, flee or freeze in a self-defeating way, our typical way, the old way. Jesus is a new way.

Thinking over a parable, reading this blog post, relating to what is said, trying to stay open to God (even if you think your relationship is in a holding tank that feels less than fresh), are all ways to start moving in a new direction. You have spiritual instincts that are always ready to kick in. Let them leap.

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Attachment issues in the church: People move away sometimes.

Building community, Psychological growth, , ,

People do this. They ask: Why did you move out of town? my neighborhood? our shared apartment with five people in two bedrooms? They get a look on their face and a tone in the voice that implies — shouldn’t you be apologizing?

When I went back to Riverside, CA, this past summer, which I left in 1991, people were still talking about me leaving. When my friend from Riverside came our way to visit this summer, she took me aside and asked, “Why did you leave?” Paul had a similar experience when he left Ephesus, I think. People were crying on the beach (Acts 20). Even if you leave town because you are a Christian, because you think God wants you to do it, people cry and wonder if you should do it. We are important.

But for some people it is, “For crying out loud! You’re leaving?!” Some might even get huffy or pouty if someone seems to be leaving for less than holy reasons. “You don’t love South Philly? You don’t love me? What about what we were together? What about what we were doing together? The community garden! Brunch at Sabrina’s!” We are a community in mission and each player makes a difference.

The Bible talks about moving

This seems like kind of a “light” question for the Bible to talk about it so much. But it does.

  • Paul says: I am with you even when absent: “For my part, even though I am not physically present, I am with you in spirit” (1 Cor 5: 4, see Colossians 2:5, too).
  • Paul also says — I long to be with you to share my life.  “I long to see you so that I may impart to you some spiritual gift to make you strong. (Romans 1:11-13, see also 2 Cor. 10:10-11).

Present is better than absent. We are not pictures on Facebook, we are people. It does matter when we are physically together. We gain strength and comfort from the presence of others. Paul knows he can’t be who he is or give what he has unless he shows up. What we build together and give to each other really is irreplaceable.

We always have to talk about how spirit and body go together. We are both. We are spirit. We are spiritual beings longing to connect in love. We are also body. We are physical beings who cannot be every place at all times and need to be present to fully connect.

Be careful about how people attach. It’s complex.

I think some people might rely more on being physically present to connect. They need the physical. If you leave town, or maybe even the room, they might get anxious. I study attachment theory quite a bit these days. These kind of people might be like one type of baby Mary Ainsworth identified when she was testing to see what would happen if a baby’s mother left her one-year-old in a “strange situation.” A majority of children she studied had some concern about being left by their mothers, but they were secure, they explored, they were basically happy because they trusted that mom would come back and needs would be met.  About a fifth of the babies were anxious. Apparently, they experienced their mother as sometimes sensitive and sometimes neglectful. They were upset until she got back because they weren’t sure she was coming back! It might be the same if you up and leave town, a good number of people will be upset. You are just one more unreliable person! Some people might be really hanging on to your presence and getting some needs met. It is a loss for them.

One the other hand, I think some people might rely on spirit, maybe too much. They are kind of out there floating and are not attached securely. For about 20% of the Ainsworth’s crawlers, when mom left they were distant and disengaged. They just sat there and didn’t explore and would not connect emotionally. They had a subconscious idea that their needs would not be met. It made them avoid attachment altogether! It might be the same when you leave town. Some people might not say anything because they can’t really bear to feel more needs not being met. Maybe they never got close to you in the first place because they didn’t want to be left alone.

The marriage covenant causes similar issues to surface. Some marriages have a lot of problems from the very beginning because as soon as the intimacy begins, the attachment issues become evident. A person who has always trusted that his needs would be met, might be very insensitive to a person who never could trust her needs to be met. If you have a person who is avoidant and doesn’t instinctively attach connected to a person who is anxious, and so always wants to get closer and get reassured, that can take a long time to figure out.

In the church our covenant often works out in just the same way. That is why many people would not want to make one. They don’t expect it to be anything but trouble and disappointment. We get people connected in our cells and for some people that is a real stretch because they are allowing themselves to trust and to work on loving people, which includes becoming attached in a family-like way. Secure people are fine for the most part — it doesn’t take too much to convince them that there is enough love to go around. But for about half the population, it can be very trying to multiply and experience people separating into another cell. Then the whole congregation multiplies! And then you move away! Maybe they can’t really complain about God and the church but they can complain about you leaving town.

It is OK to have a problem with how love feels. Community doesn’t always feel good, but if we have any life in the Spirit at all, we will be patient with one another as we figure these things out. And even if we don’t seem to be figuring them out too well, we will still be patient.

Get securely attached to God and other things sort out

In soul-health terms, the goal is to be your true self. On the one hand that means being able to say, “I am who I am,” and feel like you are OK with that. You are free. You are yourself in Christ. At the same time it means you can be intimate. You are part of a “we” and able to say, “We are who we are.” You can choose to connect and choose to leave.

I think it is good for lovers of people to understand the processes by which we connect, or don’t. If someone is upset because you are leaving they may have several reasons that seem good to them, and they may have reasons that seem good to God. It makes sense to deal with them all and not just cut them off and move on with your life. They may be clingy because they are insecure. If you need to go, go. But they may object to being devalued because you did not connect. You may not be able to retrofit the relationship, but you might want to note the reality. You think you didn’t make a difference, and you did.

I hope their biggest reason for feeling loss when you leave is not just a personal feeling or a revisiting of an old grief, like the time their mom left them with Mary Ainsworth and they were an experiment! I hope they just longed to be knit together in love.

One last thought from Paul that shows his conviction that being one in Christ is central to be ing one’s true self:

“My goal is that they may be encouraged in heart and united (knit together) in love, so that they may have the full riches of complete understanding, in order that they may know the mystery of God, namely, Christ,  in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:2-3).

When a part of the body it lost, it is a loss. Because when we are knit together, eternity is opened up in significant ways.

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