Tag Archives: hope

Hope: The quality of aliveness in our own backyard

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

Contemplative prayer is often, even typically, presented in the language of personal healing and self-discovery:
I enter stillness in order to purify my unconscious, heal the emotional wounds of a lifetime, find my true self, and so on.
But there is a natural self-corrective mechanism built right into the prayer itself if we are willing to take it far enough:
my true self is found only in communion with others.
The personal can find its identity only in relation to the whole, which is the mercy of God.
— Cynthia Bourgeault in Mystical Hope

My own backyard

This month I kept running into hope. Sometimes it made me cry.

  • As soon as Pastor Sean began to speak at Algernon Baker’s memorial, I teared up. He insisted we turn into hope, since we knew our brother was ready to wake up into the dawn of his eternity. Then the young adult choir sang the most joyful song I have ever heard.
  • Then I watched my latest episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and felt something good is happening in the world because this moralistic, positive, super-woke show can still manage to get made and appear on the Ellisons’ network.
  • Then, a TikTok  doctor and a new book I am reading reminded me that my grandmother’s attention was one of the ways God reached out to me and undermined the toxic shame we all deal with.

I felt a bit by Dorothy, who has always been strangely central to my theology:

hope
Click the pic if you want to see the scene

We’re often like Dorothy waking up from her vision and realizing her heart’s desire was right under her nose the whole time and among those who love her. What a wonder it is that so many of us are drawn beyond our ordinary awareness and turn away from the death-dealing world to find God “in our own back yard,” so to speak.

Hope is that “quality of aliveness” we feel

As Cynthia Bourgeault ends her book Mystical Hope she tries to sum up her profound teaching about finding hope right under our noses — while rolling down Broad St., even,  and especially in the moments of love we give and receive. She teaches us to find hope in a new way — not as merely an object of our desire, but as the Subject who is as near as the turn of our hearts. I am going to quote quite a bit of it for you:

I have tried to suggest a new way of picturing hope. In this new positioning, the underlying sense of corporateness is physically real, the that “electromagnetic field of love” is the Mercy – and the Mercy is the body of Christ. Through this body hope circulates as a lifeblood. It warms, it fills, it connects, it directs. It is the heart of our own life and the heart of all that lives.

Hope’s home is the innermost point in us, and in all things. It is a quality of aliveness. It does not come at the end, as the feeling that results from a happy outcome. Rather, it lies at the beginning, as a pulse of truth that sends us forth. When our innermost being is attuned to this pulse it will send us forth in hope, regardless of the physical circumstances of our lives. Hope fills us with the strength to stay present, to abide in the flow of the Mercy no matter what outer storms assail us. It is entered always and only through surrender; that is through the willingness to let go of everything we are presently clinging to. And yet when we enter it, it enters us and fills us with its own life – a quiet strength beyond anything we have ever known.

And since that strength is, in fact, a piece of God’s purposiveness coursing like sap through our own being, it will lead us in the right way. It sweeps us along in the greater flow of divine life as God moves – and in the western religions, God does move – toward the fulfillment of divine purpose which is the deeper, more intense, more subtle, more intimate revelation of the heart of God.

Long before we knew Jesus, we had experiences of being swept up in the flow of God’s good purpose — maybe beside a stream like the one above. This “quality of aliveness” was called “righteousness” in the Old Testament, as in Psalm 23: “He restores my soul; he guides me in the paths of righteousness.”

Unfortunately, many people read that couplet as if the psalmist means we will be OK if we stay on the path, within the lines of a moral template so we will succeed at building an ideal replica of God’s kingdom and be justified by it. Far from that egoic reading, the psalmist is reminding us we live in a Spirit-charged “force field” (as we might picture it), a force field in which everything we do must move in order to come to fruit.

The reality of God with us, restoring and guiding us, is much more important than my ability to stay on “the path.” The psalmist is calling the inner (our souls) and the outer (our feet) to sync up, to move with the Great Mover who is giving us life. As our souls are restored and our feet are guided, Jesus says, we become good trees that bear good fruit. As Psalm 1 says, we are then like good trees planted by flowing streams of righteousness.

The quality of aliveness “in Christ”

In the New Testament, Paul calls this territory “in Christ.” In Christ we find that quality of aliveness we were made to enjoy, in which we hope.

To [his saints] God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. It is he whom we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone in all wisdom, so that we may present everyone mature in Christ….I want their hearts to be encouraged and united in love, so that they may have all the riches of assured understanding and have the knowledge of God’s mystery, that is, Christ himself, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge…As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving…For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have come to fullness in him, who is the head of every ruler and authority. – Colossians 1:27-2:10

The phrases “Christ in us” and “us in Christ” are another way to say “moving in the Mercy.” For Bourgeault, the mercy of God is a place of assured understanding, a place of loving  mystery which continues to unfold as we experience it in our hearts. As we are “encouraged and united in love,” Christ in us is the “hope of glory.” In Christ we come to “fullness.”

Paul sounds a lot like Cynthia Bourgeault as she piles up metaphors and viewpoints, circling around the mystical hope she can feel better than describe. Her everyday way to live “in Christ” is meditation that turns her in toward that golden kernel of her true self, protected and saved by God. In a somewhat seamless movement, that everyday prayer then turns her out to write her book, knowing that no self-giving love is wasted in the world, not on her and not on us, either. Our prayer, especially the prayer of meditation, is not only what saves us from the world, it is also the key thing we do to save the world. It is our way to hope, our way to become a people of hope, and our way toward embracing others with hope.

I have enjoyed sharing these five posts inspired by Bourgeault’s book. I’d love to hear how your own prayer was encouraged or developed as a result. Let me know.

More on Mystical Hope
Previous: Mystical hope in a deteriorating world
Swimming in the Mercy: The experience of hope
Anxious and tired: Meditation that turns us toward hope
There is hope: Death will help you enjoy it

 

 

 

Anxious and tired: Meditation that turns us toward hope

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

The notion that God is absent is the
fundamental illusion of the human condition.
— Thomas Keating

“Fundamental illusion” can be a way of life! But it does not have to be that way. Most of the wise people we all admire have a story about how they moved beyond their self-contained understanding to become who they became. Some found a hope deep inside that is vastly better than wishing and waiting for one’s illusions to be validated.

I think the best and deepest way that leads beyond ordinary, self-limited thinking and into hope is the way of meditation. Cynthia Bourgeault, my inspiration for this series, agrees:

Meditation, more than any other spiritual practice, nurtures the latent capacities within us that can perceive and respond to divine hope. In the classic language of our tradition, these capacities are known as the “spiritual senses.”

That little paragraph might have seemed so weird to a few of you, it drove you right back into your egoic thinking! So hang on.

“Egoic thinking” is another way of describing our limited, ordinary awareness. It simply means we humans have the capacity to stand outside ourselves and look at ourselves. As far as we know, we are the only species who can do this. Tigers don’t think, “I have a quick temper.” And whales don’t say, “I am really glad to be going north; I’m a cold-water kind of whale.” And tigers and whales don’t write children’s books where tigers and whales seem cute when they reflect. Humans can imagine these different realities, looking back and forward, dreaming and visioning. It is a great thing about us.

we are drawn to meditation

Egoic thinking is great…until it’s not

The downside of this reflexive capacity, Bourgeault says, “is the tendency to experience one’s personal identity as separate — composed of distinct qualities, defined by what holds one apart from the whole.” We can basically live in “our own little world” (my mother used to say!), revolving around our own sun — ourselves.

As a result of being alone and trapped within the boundaries of our limited senses, we all have a separation anxiety streak running through us because we really need and want to be together, not separate. To feel secure, the ego needs a lot of reassurance from others. It can’t get enough praise, security, accomplishment, etc. to help it overcome that dreadful sense of being left out, or thrown out, or just generally failing to be a full self in community. You can see how quickly we have all been driven into sin by this innate anxiety. And you can see why Jesus calls us to see our true selves in God’s grace, to look at ravens and lilies flourishing, to stop worrying and “seek first for the kingdom of God” as the means of becoming free of what is depriving us of joy.

Field of Lilies – Tiffany Studios, c. 1910.

Meditative prayer is a way of discovering and nurturing the latent capacity to see and experience life beyond our ordinary awareness. We can all perceive and respond to “the Mercy” I talked about last week. Nurturing our spiritual awareness is the primary way to experience the “mystical hope” I talked about the week before, the hope which is near and not the outcome of all our striving.

The centering prayer Bourgeault teaches is “a basic, no-nonsense method of self-emptying — simply letting go of thoughts as they arise — to help practitioners break out of their compulsive attachment to thinking and entrust themselves to the deeper stillness of God.” [Here is Martin Laird’s take on it.] The essence of this kind of meditation is not keeping a perfectly clear mind. The essence is recognizing the moment when one is distracted and willingly turning back into the stillness of the Mercy, toward hope. The essence is turning toward the meeting place we have inside as an act of faith and honor; letting go of our own stuff and holding a space open for all God gives and all God is.

We need to get beyond self-awareness and its evil twin: self-centeredness

We have a “self” awareness that is beyond the egoic capacity that makes us human — we also have spiritual awareness. Meditation leads us out of ego-centered consciousness and into a space where we meet God.

You may know almost every other feeling you can have better than the feeling of communion with God! Even so, someone has said we can meet God without even trying by 1) having a near-death experience or by 2) falling deeply in love. I do not wish you the first short cut and I do wish for you the latter. But I wish for us most of all the careful cultivation of meditation, which is the everyday path to knowing and loving God. Meditation is the discipline that helps us “die daily” as Paul says he does, and helps us be one in love as he hopes we will be. The prayer of meditation puts a stick in the spokes of our outer awareness and leads us into the warmth and abundance of our inner awareness and into hope in the Mercy.

It is a hard world right now. Maybe you are pretty numb like a newscaster said she was after covering the damage Trump and Hegseth have done to Iran and to the future of the U.S.  Or maybe you are afraid of more smoke from Canada and the extreme weather of our new climate. If it were not a hard world, we’d probably make it one. So it is time to pray.

Have you listened to Jesus saying this to you lately?

Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens,
and I will give you rest. 
Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me;
for I am gentle and humble in heart,
and you will find rest for your souls.
For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

Basic to that easy yoke is the prayer of meditation. We keep turning to it in our anxiety and fatigue and it keeps turning us toward hope. 

Try it again. We certainly fit into the first two lines, for the most part. Maybe his “easy yoke” is meditation where we experience his gentleness and self-giving heart. As a result of staying in that “yoke” maybe we do find rest for our souls.  Sounds like Jesus would love to bring us into the hope he carries, even through his suffering, doesn’t it? 

More on Mystical Hope
Previous: Mystical hope in a deteriorating world
Swimming in the Mercy: The experience of hope

Mystical hope in a deteriorating world

A life in the Spirit, , , , ,

We founded my former church, Circle of Hope, in a ripe moment of history and the outcome was beautiful. Then it wasn’t. And then Eliza Griswold wrote a book about how badly it all turned out that sealed its legacy through her lens. It made some of her reviewers weep.

When it all started in 1995, we sat in a small circle discussing what our name would be. We ended up with several versions of a name with “hope” in it. But some people did not like any of those versions. A few people (and in a circle of ten, a few is relevant!) thought it was just too much to put “hope” right out there in the church’s name.

Barack copied us?

Maybe they were right to be cautious. Regardless, they were certainly representative of many others, since many people think hope is far-fetched, even dangerous — mainly because they think it is something tied to outcome. If you are a “circle of hope” you invite expectations that might not be met.

So many people are laboring under all the “outcomes” required of them, and under all the “outcomes” they were promised which never came to fruit.

For many people, “hope” is an optimistic feeling — or at least a willingness to go on, because they sense things are going to get better. But is that sense about worn out  these days? What if you put “hope” right out there on your poster, like President Obama did, and then everything does not get better like you promised? Instead, there are drones, recession and bailouts. What if your church implies that Jesus is going to get you a job, provide a mate and cure your cancer and those things don’t happen? Won’t the name of your church just point out the fact that it did not happen? For some people, hoping just makes you look naive, at best, and like just another gaslighter, at worst.

We had a few people on our little team whose hopes had been dashed. What’s more, some of them had grown up in the church, where they even memorized Bible verses like in Psalm 116: “I love the Lord, because he has heard the voice of my supplication…I was brought very low and he helped me.” But their lives had not worked out just like the verse seemed to promise, empiricistettes as they were.

After a while, it is hard to figure out what to do with dashed hopes. Sometimes they are like a secret you would not disclose among people who still hope for some bright future.

I have memorized some Bible verses myself and I am an optimistic guy — and God has repeatedly helped me when I was “brought low.” Even so, I have never thought it was wise to make promises God was not going to keep, at least was not wise to act as if God were the Amazon of human want.

Another way of experiencing hope

The Bible does, indeed, promise God will meet our needs. But if you look deeper, it teaches that the promise is deeper than just meeting our expectations. I am re-reading a little book that beautifully points out there is another kind of hope represented in the Bible which is a complete reversal of our usual way of looking at hope in terms of outcomes. We can see that hope in Habakkuk 3:17-19 where the prophet dances on the heights even though the land is devastated, and we can see it when Jesus offers inside water for outwardly thirsty people in John 4:13-14, and we can see it in the “total immersion course” in the school of hope that the book of Job is where he ends up singing Job 19:25-26: “I know my redeemer lives.”

Cynthia Bourgeault calls this deeper hope “mystical hope” — and that is the title of her book, too. Mystical hope has three characteristics in contrast to our usual notions of hope. These usual notions, based on outcomes, are not bad, they just aren’t complete or entirely useful. She says, in light of the three biblical examples I just mentioned:

  • Mystical hope is not tied to a good outcome, to the future. It lives a life of its own, seemingly without reference to external circumstances and conditions.
  • This kind of hope has something to do with presence – not a future good outcome, but the immediate experience of being met, held in communion, by someone intimately at hand.
  • This hope bears fruit within us at the psychological level in the sensations of strength, joy , and satisfaction: and “unbearable lightness of being.” But mysteriously, rather than deriving these gifts from outward expectations being met, it produces them from within.

Our mystical hope

I think we had enough mystical hope when were were planting a church to work for good outcomes even when people thought they were not good enough. We came to know our existence was resistance. Our assessment of our value and impact did not define our worth.

But maintaining that view our ourselves was hard. We were just discovering the seismic shifts among the youth of the nation (our focus demographic) which experts have been talking about ever since. For instance, one week in 2017 our pastors passed around a couple of pieces that tested our hope. One was from the Census Bureau.

The map above shows the increase in the number of young adults (18-34) in the United States living at home with their parents in 2015 compared to 2005. The changes in that decade, and certainly the last preceding 40 years were staggering. More than 1 in 3 young people lived in their parents’ home in 2015. That was a huge increase in one decade. What’s more, of those people, 1 in 4 were idle; that is, they neither went to school or worked. Many people saw that reality as a poor outcome. Were all these people hopeless? Ten years later many of the men in the study are the incels of the manosphere.

The other piece the pastors passed around was about alone and lonely men. A journalist who researched psychology was pondering the horrible Las Vegas shooting. An apparently completely alone man was the shooter. As a “lone wolf” he was not that unusual among men. The author says:

As a man, you might be thinking, “Not me, I’ve got drinking buddies. I play poker with the guys. I’ve got friends.”

But do you have confidants? Do you have male friends who you can actually be vulnerable with? Do you have friends whom you can confide in, be 100% yourself around, that you can hug without saying “No homo,” without feeling tense or uncomfortable while you’re doing it?

For many men, the answer is “no.” So, we spend our time posturing instead.

From an early age, we have an unhealthy ideal of masculinity that we try to live up to. Part of that ideal tells us that Real men do everything on their own. Real men don’t cry. Real men express anger through violence.

The byproduct is isolation. Most men spend the majority of their adult lives without deeper friendships, or any real sense of community. Not to mention a complete inability to release anger or sadness in a healthy way.

Many woman feel exactly the same way, of course. And the evil ways of late capitalism have made a perfect environment to create unhealthy, isolated people — A.I. is just making it worse. I experience the outcomes all the time. Some days it just feels hopeless.

There is something other than bad outcomes

I want to say more about Cynthia Bourgeault’s book in the coming weeks. But for now, let me end with a quote from the early pages of Mystical Hope which talk back to twentysomethings who feel their future is bleak, and call to parents who feel their children are hopeless cases, and whisper to men and women who feel isolated and friendless, stuck in some pattern which feels hopeless. There is something deeper than your situation. Jesus has a promise that is better than you expect.

You’ll need to read her little book to get the full effect and all the references, but maybe you can get a taste from these lines:

  • Hope is not intended to be an extraordinary infusion, but an abiding state of being. We lose sight of the invitation – and in fact , our responsibility, as stewards of creation – to develop a conscious and permanent connection to the wellspring. We miss the call to become a vessel, to become a chalice into which this divine energy can pour; a lamp through which it can shine.
  • But what if we are intended to become this vessel, this body of hope? What if, in fact, this effervescent, “lightness-of-being” energy is the fuel that drives our human life toward its divine fulfillment? What if our insistence on treating it as a rare and exceptional phenomenon is a way of ducking the invitation that was permanently extended at the Samaritan well that blazing midday?
  • The journey to the wellspring, the to secret of Jesus, the Master of Galilee, is the great inner journey to which we Christians are called.

I am glad we put hope right out there in the name of our expression of the Church back in the day. It dared people not to meet Jesus. On the one hand, God produced outcomes that were MUCH greater than we imagined as we sat in a little circle of ten in our living room. We hoped good things would happen and even more than we hoped happened. So that’s great. But what about all that did not happen? What about when it all fell apart 20+ years later? What sustained us when we failed, broke up, died, lost faith, were betrayed and confused?

It is always that mystical hope, that turning toward the living water which energizes us to get up and live in joy as we follow Jesus through what is next.

 [As you can tell, this is the first in a set of updates of 2017 posts. They seem even  more important now than when I first wrote them.]

*******************

Today is Pantaleon Day! The martyr who gave away his wealth and doctored the poor for free. He used to be wildly famous, as a result. Meet him at The Transhistorical Body.

Planting hope: Even facing the impossibility of family

A life in the Spirit, Marriage and Family, Poetry, Spiritual direction, , , , , , , ,

We planted a dogwood tree in our little back yard. It is how we respond to Trump and his flailing fascism project.  We likely won’t see it come into its full glory. But, as we say, we will stay in the game of hope, realized or not, until the last buzzer.

In 1893 the U.S. Marines overthrew the government of Queen Liliuokalani of Hawaii; later that year the Panic of 1893 kicked off a economic depression. About that time, Lucy Larcom wrote a poem:

He who plants a tree
Plants a hope.
Rootlets up through fibres blindly grope;
Leaves unfold into horizons free.
So man’s life must climb
From the clods of time
Unto heavens sublime.
Canst thou prophesy, thou little tree,
What the glory of thy boughs shall be? — from Plant a Tree 

1n 1973 AIM activists occupying the Pine Ridge Reservation at Wounded knee surrendered to federal authorities after 71 days; later that year Alexander Butterfield informed the Senate Watergate Committee that President Nixon had secret recordings of incriminating conversations. Wendell Berry wrote a poem:

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns. — from Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Spend a minute with me and let’s nurture some seeds of hope with the poets.

We have a shortage of hope

One of our old friends was visiting last week so we invited the family over for dinner. I was impressed by her being impressed by their sense of security. They give me hope.

But they are inheriting a world full of insecurity. We’ll see if they become tree planters, or if they have grandchildren of their own.

You are probably aware that the birthrate is going down all over the world — especially in places where women have the right to choose their own destiny rather than being subject to a man. Their choice seems to be a strange thing to need to point out, but equality in the U.S. is not a done deal AT ALL. In 1973 the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade and we can see how fragile that was.

There are many reasons women are not giving birth at rates that sustain their nation’s population. In the New York Times this week, Anna Louie Sussman said the main reason is hopelessness. Married couples cannot justify launching their child into uncertainty. Sussman is the author of the forthcoming book Inconceivable: The Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty.

Prospective parents may be hopeless because they are godless people who think they are stuck with gaining enough power to rule their private world — and they can’t control it well enough. Or they may be hopeless because the rulers of the world in the last 30 years (here is your list of billionaires)  have infested the ground with weeds of disaster that overwhelm their every positive step.

Sussman provides an example of this new instinct among potential procreators:

Raleigh Rivera and her husband had spent five years fine-tuning their parenthood plan: In 2025, they would move from Los Angeles, where they have been living since 2023, back to Ms. Rivera’s hometown, Minneapolis, where they could afford to buy a home and start a family. “We both have been baby- and kid-crazy for our entire lives,” she said.

They had planned to start trying when Ms. Rivera turned 30, a birthday she celebrated last summer. But that same year, everything that had felt stable to them started to crumble. It began with the Palisades and Eaton fires decimating parts of the city they called home. The prospect of a first-time home buyer credit, something Kamala Harris had campaigned on, had disappeared. By summer, Ms. Rivera’s parents in Minnesota were choking on smoke drifting over the border from Canadian wildfires. Her husband is a citizen, but since he is Mexican American, she worried that racial profiling policies put a target on his back. Ms. Rivera, who has a master’s degree in public health, worried about sending a future child to school with unvaccinated classmates. “We felt like we had worked hard on ourselves, making sure that our finances and our health and everything was in order,” she told me when we spoke in August. “And those plans are on pause right now because everything is — it’s just impossible to know.”

An age of uncertainty

Researchers run into this sense of impossibility wherever they go. I run into it in my therapy office almost every day. If you are trying to make useful policies for the future or you are predicting what future demographics will be so you can get ready, you need to factor in that young people bring an inescapable and crushing sense to the discussion — that the future is too uncertain for the lifelong commitment of parenthood. Sussman says, “Call it the vibes theory of demographic decline.”

The future has never been assured, but it feels as though we are living in a time of spectacular uncertainty. Here are the reverbs concocting a vibe:

  • In the United States, workers spend less years at a job and experience less stable income.
  • Life expectancy, once inevitably increasing, has fallen for less-educated women and men.
  • Many of the forces our economy is built on — A.I., immigration, global trade — feel distressingly volatile.
  • “Disruption,” once a byword for a disturbance or a problem, is the governing ethos of a terrifyingly powerful sector of our economy.
  • The rise of prediction markets has turned the world into one large casino.
  • The climate crisis is spiraling.
  • The costs of everything that could enable parenthood, whether that’s a roof over one’s head or child care, are unaffordable.
  • The past half-century has brought us breathtaking inequality, accompanied by a sharp decline in social mobility.
  • Even declining fertility rates feed the vibe: How will society function if each generation is smaller than the last?

The two generations currently of childbearing age bear the psychological and financial scars of coming of age during world-scale catastrophes. Their trauma amplifies the vibe:

  • Older millennials entered the labor market during the Great Recession; many watched their parents lose their jobs or homes.
  • Members of Gen Z, whose lives were upended by the Covid-19 pandemic, now find themselves competing against A.I. for entry-level jobs and even prospective partners.

Now the man running America seems single-mindedly devoted to chaos at home and abroad.

You can probably feel the anxiety rise in you as you read all this stuff, right? If not, turn on a screen. The Great Recession’s outsize impact may also be due to its status as the first economic crisis in the era of a nonstop digital information deluge, which rendered it, and the sense of dread it engendered, all but inescapable, even for people not financially affected. The same kind of impact is now generated by natural disasters, political upheaval and war from anywhere in the globe; no one is insulated.  We don’t just bear our own uncertainty, we bear the amplified uncertainty all around us as well. It is hard to disentangle from what concerns mostly others to concentrate on what concerns mostly you.

Faith boosts fertility

In some studies, researchers have found an element that boosts fertility: faith. And I don’t think they were just collecting J.D. Vance sermons. For many believers, faith provides deeper certainty.

The famous Romans 5:1-5 is basically a poem about hope in the hands of the paraphraser, J.B. Phillips:

Since then it is by faith that we are justified,
let us grasp the fact that we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
Through him we have confidently entered into this new relationship of grace,
and here we take our stand,
in happy certainty of the glorious things he has for us in the future.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that we have only a hope of future joys—
we can be full of joy here and now even in our trials and troubles.
Taken in the right spirit these very things will give us patient endurance;
this in turn will develop a mature character,
and a character of this sort produces a steady hope,
a hope that will never disappoint us.
Already we have some experience of the love of God
flooding through our hearts by the Holy Spirit given to us.

To read these lines in the manner Paul wrote them, we need to exercise our spiritual awareness deepening into Holy Spirit awareness. We can all get there.

But it might be hard to get out of the gnawing fear we feel to do so. The ordinary awareness of this present age is rifled with uncertainty. That has always been the normal state of humanity separated from God. But today it is even worse, as humanity is wrapped up in a virtual oneness under the thumb of the purveyors and manipulators of an artificial intelligence.

My family experienced a large dose of uncertainty last month due to death and illness in the clan. I’ve watched us reach for the resilience to cope with loss and change. Some have turned to faith, and love. And I think there is some shaky hope that some did not live by until they needed to. It is sad to find yourself old and in need of hope in the most uncertain of times – your old age in the age of Trump.

Phillips gets at what Paul has to say to to encourage us — young and old alike, very well, I think:

  • Grasp the fact that we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
  • Here we take our stand, in happy certainty of the glorious things he has for us in the future.
  • We can be full of joy here and now even in our trials and troubles.
  • Character of this sort produces a steady hope, a hope that will never disappoint us.

I don’t know about you, of course, but when I read those lines a few times, I felt better. I made myself read them again just now because I want to feel better.

When the Tennessee legislature bends the knee to Trump and turns back the clock that  briefly marked an attempt to undo the racism of the U.S. society, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ and we take our stand in that.

When I drove over the line from gentrification to devastation in North Philly last night, I knew we could be full of joy here and now even in our trials and tribulations, not because we don’t care that the world is an uncertain, cruel place, but because the love of God is being poured into it.

So we plant trees. We have children in hope. Not because we are certain the world is worthy of our love and trust. But because we trust the love being poured into it.

We grasp the peace and take our stand in the certainty that God has hope for US! Jesus is joy, itself, no matter what the passing-away powers do. If anything can change the world and change us to see the goodness built into it, it is people who hope like that.

Mutualism: Creation keeps speaking the truth in love

A life in the Spirit, Building community, , , , , ,

The little back plot of land behind our new house needed to be reclaimed. Some kind of bamboo-like shrubs had overtaken it over 15-or-so years of neglect. We could not dig them up by ourselves, so our GC found Anthony from the Northeast who came in with his backhoe. He arrived later than promised, since he tried to get his too-tall trailer under a bridge and had to back it out of a single-lane road full of honkers. He had a long day.

Nevertheless, he worked hard. And we had a nice time getting to know each other. He was happy I guessed his unpronounceable last name was Polish. Similarly, the man from Guinea who had been working that morning on our cul-de-sac garden out front was happy I thought he might be from Conakry, which he was. The whole strange day felt like an island of mutuality in an ocean of polarization. My neighbor came out to explore gardening with me. The father groundhog came out at dusk to see what became of his wilderness. The first bird came to the new feeder. We were all in it together.

While Trump vainly tries to reignite the smoking heap of the Reagan Revolution, even as his past with Jeffrey Epstein nips as his backside, we all seem to be wishing for togetherness more and more. Last week lots of us were out in the street on John Lewis’s death day remembering how much we want to live in community. We really like mutual respect and we do not like diseased predators. The burgeoning protests are a natural reaction to the unnatural, survival-of- the-fittest heresy perpetrated by Eurocentric colonizers who still think their ill-gotten gains make them the fittest to rule.

Mutualism

Contrary to the new Darwinism-by-keyboard we face, there is a small backlash of mutualism that lapped on my doorstep last week and then kept reappearing when I got outside my living room and into my new neighborhood.

For instance, I learned in biology, when a symbiotic relationship between two different species is mutually beneficial, it is called a “mutualism.” This month, scientists studying ant plants in Fiji discovered a variation on mutualism. In a particular ant plant, two normally-antagonist breeds of ants were housed in adjoining chambers of the plant’s reproductive chamber. The ants were fed, the plant was fertilized, warfare was averted. The discovery took the biological study of mutualism to a new level [Phys.org]. Christian skeptics of Darwin’s natural selection theory of evolution, based on competition, quickly noted how his theory falls apart if animals and plants of different species are cooperating [UCG Canada].

The original sin may, in fact, be competition. The major achievement of mental and spiritual health may , in fact, be mutualism – a return to nature as built by the Creator for the way of love. As a marriage and family therapist I can give witness to the reality that competition for scarce resources of grace and hope (and the less-useful justice) can destroy one of the main factories of mutualism in the world: marriage.

My testimony this week is a paean to mutuality, again. I may have failed to bring about a golden age of togetherness through the church, as I intended to do. But every day is a new opportunity to be a true self, reflecting the glory of Jesus, who is the ultimate example of mutualism, becoming one with humanity and so teaching truth and love. From Guineans to groundhogs, we are designed to live in harmony. The more survival-of-the-fittest, the less fit we all are.

Three contrary things mutualism teaches

Christians need to outthink this era like they did for the first three hundred years of church history. So Morton Kelsey said when he took one look at Reagan. At the protests, I take heart when I see people outthinking the fraudulent leaders we have in the U.S. You can see their genius in their signs (well, not mine, usually). For example, my favorite sign last Thursday was this lovely piece of 3D art depicting the despicable Stephen Miller as a puppeteer. I wove my way through the crowd to get a close up picture. People who are carrying the weight of art and literature now are important.

Every scrap of community needs to be nurtured. Tony the backhoe man usually takes one-half down, these days, before he gets started because people don’t pay him. He told me he once took a sealed envelope from a business owner he respected and assumed the $8700 in cash he was owed was in it. He did not want to look disrespectful by opening it up and counting it. When he got home it was $8200. He went back in the morning and the guy said, “Get off my property. You should have counted it before you left.” Nevertheless, he took the risk to trust me. Some people never learn how to be bad. I gave him a tip.

Hope will not disappoint us. Ants look for food all day and ferry it back to their queen and the next generation. They are tempted to fight for it. Then an ant plant adapts to their differences and provides a way for both needy groups to get what they desire and provide what they can. It feels miraculous. We wander into goodness all the time, as well; we’re surrounded by it. For instance, we finally got our new backyard to square one by the surprising efforts of someone who went through hell to get to us and was suspicious we might not pay him, but who hoped it would all work out.

If we don’t find our way into Creation’s mutualism we will likely compete ourselves to death, saying that “selfishness is natural” on our way to the grave. If we keep hoping that love will find a way, we might be surprised that the best we could do to help it along, even though we are just one plant in a forest, is more than enough.

Your mind is an ecosystem: May you reach a positive tipping point

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

mind as ecosystem

I’ve been in the room when clients reach a tipping point. It is an honor. It is a moment when so much good work has been done it overwhelms their previous way of life. New beliefs and possibilities crowd out their previous view of themselves. They say, with some surprise, “I actually woke up the other day feeling good about myself. I think people call it joy.”

The self-defeating personality

Recently, some “masochistically-organized” clients started to tip. Let me create a composite of my experience with such dear people to let their stories inform what I’m trying to say. The people to whom I am refer are not “actual” in a personal way.

The two I am picturing are both “self-defeating” in their personality style, so we often talk about core beliefs having a “sticky” quality. Something like a less-than-permeable lining taints whatever is coming into their thoughts and feelings.  One of them described it like the burned-on gunk on the bottom of their ceramic skillet corroding their inner life. When they were young they were told they were no good and were severely punished for it. Another was left alone in a world where they were foreign and got the impression they were shameful. There is a lot more to their stories than that, of course.

You may have heard the term “masochistic” used to describe someone who derives pleasure, sometimes sexual, from being hurt. That is an extreme version of a common personality style. The disorder has been removed from the DSM, but clinicians have been revisiting it lately because clients keep showing up with the general characteristics.  A person with this self-defeating personality style probably started out with painful family relationships. They began to avoid successful or pleasurable situations because such circumstances did not fit in with their view of themselves as bad.

They may try to please others at the expense of caring for themselves because they still want to be seen and affirmed and taking care of others seems like the only way to get there. Their identity ends up based on caring for others, often people who are difficult to care for. At the same time, they are often isolated and do not seek help for themselves because they feel like they are flawed and are ashamed to be seen.  They self-sabotage – most hopes. Any positive narrative, any optimistic action faces a strong interior argument against it. They probably long for a different kind of life but have a terrible time taking action and often take up addiction as a way out of the problem.

The round-about way to health

In the process of unlearning these negative core beliefs about themselves we’ve scoured  the goo off the skillet bottom, so to speak, and let the original creation be seen and cared for. It took a while; it was burned on. And it seemed like fruitless work to begin with, since “I am just a pan bottom” and “it is my own fault I let myself get so messed up.”

For these and many other clients, their journey to better mental health did not follow a straight path. The meandering process of self-discovery and making new choices is very frustrating for many of us because we have adopted a metaphor for our minds that is inadequate for describing what is really going on in us. Metaphors matter.

Zachary Stein has spent a decade trying to change the metaphors we use to describe ourselves from mechanical to organic — that seems like an obvious choice since we are organisms and not machines. But you are probably comfortable describing yourself as “not firing on all cylinders” or “not computing” something. In a nice article, Stein gives a history of why we think like we do.

Scientific models of the human mind have evolved through a series of metaphors. Sigmund Freud used several metaphors to describe the mind, but the one with the most explanatory power was the metaphor of the steam engine. “Psychic energy” was understood as if it were steam compressed within a chamber. Bottle up too much energy and tension, and it will eventually explode elsewhere as a neurotic symptom that you cannot understand. Sex, of course, was the great pressure valve for Freud, a necessary way to release potentially dangerous buildups of energy. The dynamic workings of the mind, which Freud used to explain psychopathology, were all metaphorically related to the basic mechanisms that drove the machines that propelled the Industrial Revolution.

This view fell out of favor in the 1960s when cybernetics came on the scene, and soon computers replaced steam engines as the dominant metaphor for the mind. By the 1980s, the metaphor of the “mind-as-computer” was fully embraced by the emerging field of cognitive science, and it continues to dominate thinking today. By now it has even seeped into the popular culture and become a part of our everyday school vernacular. According to this metaphor, the brain is hardware and the mind is software. The mind is fundamentally about “information processing,” and our individual information processing units vary only in terms of their speed and memory capacities. Smart students have a lot of RAM and fast download speeds. Students who are struggling just “don’t have the bandwidth.” If students follow the right programs and sub-routines, they will encode the right information, which will be stored in memory and made available for retrieval later.

My clients, including the two composites I am thinking of, often feel like they are flawed and need “re-programmed.” Since I can’t effect that, they are often frustrated with me, too! Unfortunately (I guess), they are not computers. They are organisms and are much more variable and subject to their environments and history than a machine.

You are an organism, not a machine

Just as they are, my clients are much more beautiful than a machine. I often point that out, which does not always go over well, since they think they are worthless unless they have utility to someone else. If they ever do anything wrong (and who doesn’t?) or experience some setback (and who won’t?) their lack of value is reinforced. They assume they are about to be thrown out for a better model. They either double down on some guilt-ridden good-deed-doing or double down on avoiding their fruitless search for love. My admiration of them for who they are right now does not compute. Their metaphor won’t allow it.

Dr. Stein reinforces what my faith taught me as a child. We are organisms in the ecosystem called humanity. What’s more, the various elements that make us who we are individually form the psycho/spiritual ecosystem of our personal humanity. Jesus called us a system of heart, soul, mind and strength. Paul’s metaphor for life in the Spirit pictured us as members of Christ’s body, each an honored part. Our right/left brain, brain/mind/body reality is a flexible, moving, adaptable reality.

Stein refers to the great Swiss psychologist and epistemologist Jean Piaget to get some back up for insisting on an organic metaphor to describe us.

Piaget argued that the mind is best understood as an evolving organism — living, growing, and self-regulating in a metabolic relationship to its environment….

According to this view, the mind is best understood as a complex and dynamic system, always in process, always changing, growing, and becoming more diverse and differentiated. At the same time that they grow in internal complexity, ecosystems also become more integrated and specialized, filling up their niches and fostering symbioses. Ecosystems are composed of a wide variety of independent and yet co-evolving species, so there is not one central “unit” that can serve as an overall measure of the ecosystem. Rather, to understand an ecosystem, you must take multiple measurements in a variety of places across a variety of time scales. Ecosystems are also sensitive and actively responsive to the larger environments in which they are nested. They can be easily disrupted and thrown off balance, but they are also generative and creative, self-regulating, and self-transcending. They are adaptable, open systems, and are constantly in a state of dynamic equilibrium. As ecosystems evolve, they display nonlinear growth, with jumps, dips, regressions, and daily and seasonal changes and rhythms. Their growth is not simple and linear, but messy and dynamic. And no two ecosystems are the same. Every ecosystem is unique. Give two ecosystems the same input and you should not expect the same output.

Daniel Hannah depicting the metaphor.

Your personal ecosystem can change, too

These days our sense of being a part of an ecosystem is more apparent than ever since we are increasingly aware of how creation’s climate is changing. We are afraid of a negative tipping point that might occur any day. Scientists seem to know what humanity needs to do to reverse the impact of what we unwittingly did.

You may have already applied that last thought to yourself. I think we all know if we apply new behaviors and avail ourselves of new knowledge, our psychological ecosystem will change. It might not be easy if the previous habits of our hearts are burned on. Or to be more ecological, it might not be easy if an invasive weed has taken over the backyard of the new psychological house we are building (God help you if it is bamboo) and we need to dig for a while to get it unearthed.

I’ve had clients who were not only masochistically-oriented, they were computer programmers! I know of such a composite person who had filled up their life with a lot of positive action: anti-porn worksheets, meds from a psychiatrist, care from social workers, self-help books, and psychotherapists. I often wondered out loud how they could avoid going over a tipping point — a psychological application of Malcom Gladwell’s first book. They saw their searching as a series of examples of how nothing ever worked out for them and how they were a shameful failure, doomed to go the wrong way.

Yet they fitfully persisted. Until one day they came in and said, “I feel different. I remembered myself thinking a negative way and realized it was a memory, not a present reality.” They had gone over the edge. In their case, one of the central features that pushed them over was returning to the church. They went back to the one place they knew they were loved for who they are. Thank God they did not encounter a priest who reinforced their sense of being a terrible human being! In God’s ecosystem of love, the various positive elements began to cohere and a new environment was made.

One of the reasons I love the difficult work of psychotherapy is how realistic it is. It doesn’t work like an internal combustion engine or a computer. It is much more like the Earth, subject to the weather, to dry seasons and wet, and subject to constant surprise and endless change. But in our process, we can also be sure the sun will come up on time every day.

From my window, I look out over the huge expanse of trees in Fairmount Park; the sun is setting right now. That view makes it easier to also see my clients reaching out like the limbs of trees finding the light. The other day, when the Circle Counseling therapists met, I had to say how honored I felt to be in the room to see it dawn on them.

*********************

Today is Cyprian of Carthage Day! He was a leader facing the persecution of the church, disunity, and a pandemic! He was a prolific writer, so he offers us insight into his faith and the life of the Church in the 200’s. Honor his life at The Transhistorical Body. 

Slow resurrection breeds deeply rooted hope

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

My God, my God, this scene is long

Remember Game of Thrones? About 6 years ago Jon Snow got resurrected.

I can’t make sense of the well-blended pastiche of Western Culture that is GOT. But I can tell you John Snow’s resurrection was quite a media event. It was such a common topic SNL made fun of it (in an unfunny skit). The point of the skit is that the scene was incredibly slow.

The resurrection scene was so laborious and long that it was kind of boring, especially since you knew if they started it they were going to finish it. “Just get on with it and let’s do dragons!”

Resurrection is so much the essential Christian event, having it rendered on TV made me queasy. But I think many church people could relate to a laborious drama leading to resurrection: “Lent then Holy Week?!” Most people decided a long time ago that processs is just too much. “Just get on with it and get to the resurrection!”

One of my favorite quotes from Paul Tournier’s book, Creative Suffering, is “All liberating growth takes time.” I think it makes sense that Lent is long. We are not instantly ready for resurrection. It has to grow on us — and in us.

But I can feel it when people say, “It seems like my whole life is Lent and there are only random moments of resurrection!” The whole Christian year, even, feels like that — we have an incarnation day and a resurrection day, then a whole lot of trouble in between. It just does not seem right.

Slow resurrection

Hearing that kind of complaint in myself and others, I tried to listen to it hard. I came to another question: What if the suffering is not long, it is the resurrection that is slow? What if we just need to reframe the issue? Are we really bored? Or are we just resistant to the creative suffering we need to endure to develop. Like Tournier implies, it takes time. What if our slow resurrection is a good journey after all?

It did take a couple of days for Jesus to get to resurrection himself, after all.

The church doesn’t teach this much any more, but the “harrowing of hell” was an exciting topic for centuries during the early days of the church. The story goes like this. Between his death on the cross and his resurrection, Jesus used the “keys of death and Hades” he holds (Revelation 1:18) to free righteous people from the past who were waiting for the Messiah. The Apostle Paul tells us that Jesus “descended into the lower parts of the earth” (Ephesians 4:9) – the lower parts were understood to be the “abode of the dead,” a place Greeks called “Hades.” The Apostle Peter tells us that Jesus “preached to the dead” (1 Peter 4:6) and “to the spirits in prison” (1 Peter 3:18). Their “Lent” was long!

On Holy Saturday – the day before Jesus’ resurrection, the scene of Jesus descending into Hades (or Hell) was often vividly described in the old days. Jesus unlocks the door to Hades to announce his victory over death, Satan, and all the powers of Hell. He then releases Adam and Eve and all the “just” who were waiting for their redemption. A number of paintings and icons, especially from the Eastern churches, depict the scene. Christus Victor!

Descent to Hell, by Duccio in 1308-11

If you feel like your resurrection is taking too long, welcome to humanity. But I hope you can see that Jesus came to find you and walk with you on your long jounrey a long time ago. He is with you in the time between your death by sin and your entrance into the fullness of your resurrection life. He has descended to your level, too.

We’d prefer it to be instant, like everything else.

When I was in the Baptist church as a child, we highly anticipated the song we would sing every Easter: Up From the Grave He Arose, we called it. The tune for that line felt very dramatic and everyone sang it loud, which was exciting.

It is an instant song, “Well then, up from the grave he arose. Just like that!” As if Mary ran and told the disciples, “I was just weeping by the tomb and up from the grave he arose!” It kind of implies we ought to be rising up just like that too. I think some of us have. But for the rest of us, our partner doesn’t look at us and say, “Well, will you look at that, you rose!” We may, in fact, be more resurrected than we were last year, but sometimes it feels like the same damned things keep happening. That’s slow.

We may think, “Why is this scene so slow! Let’s pep this up. Make something happen; I am at the end of my attention span!” At least quit talking and sing a song! Singing Up From the Grave He Arose can still revive my interest. I’m glad Easter comes to keep me engaged in my own process of getting a life.

By the way, my childhood song has a worldwide following. I wish the Indians below did not look like they had been recently colonized, but I still find their sincerity irresistible.

I have to say these regular Americans singing it are much more my wavelength. This is how you should sing the old song, IMO.

Development takes time

All liberating growth takes time. My psychotherapy and spiritual direction clients are experiencing slow resurrection. It is always amazing to watch a loved one dip their toes into their mental and spiritual health and then be drawn into deep currents of love and hope. The writer of Ted Lasso and Shrinking recently had an interview on NPR in which he talked about his own slow resurrection of sorts. It is happening everywhere, right now, and is happening in many of you reading this.

Resurrection is more a relentless growing. Hope is not instantly accrued. I think the Apostle Paul is sharing his own experience when he says:

Therefore, since we are justified by faith,
we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,
through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand,
and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God.
And not only that, but we also boast in our afflictions,
knowing that affliction produces endurance,
and endurance produces character,
and character produces hope,
and hope does not put us to shame,
because God’s love has been poured into our hearts
through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.
Romans 5:1-5

Hope takes time. Sharing the glory of God develops. But when that grace has taken root and been nurtured, it has a way of sinking in. Resurrection is like the roots of the best kind of weed trees growing through our concrete defenses, finding a path to dirt and water through stones, harrowing parts of us that just need more light and air.

When we think of “harrowing,” we often think of some traumatic experience: “Saw III was harrowing!” But the word comes from a herding practice. Harrowing is removing dead thatch, which lifts vegetation up and levels mole hills. So we’re saying, Saw III really stirred me up and flattened me!” The process allows the turf to breathe and water to penetrate. It reduces disease by exposing fungi and bacteria to sunlight which is essential for the health of the pasture. Like Jesus was stirring up hell, his Spirit is harrowing us and bringing light to our darkness.

In the quote above, Paul is encouraging people in a young church in very uncertain times to stick with it. Turn toward sureness, not certainty. Turn toward being assured — saying, “Sure,” not being right. Be watched over. Stand in the grace and turn into the hope of the fulness of glory that is already here and yet to come. Learn to trust it.

If we go into every day turning toward hope, I think each day can surprise us with resurrection: “Thank you God. Up from the grave I arose. Up from the grave she arose. My God! There is hope for everyone!” I have spent a couple of hard years learning that lesson, again. I keep talking about Mahalia Jackson singing about how God sent the angel and said, “Touch her.” And she sang, “I rose up this morning and I want to thank God!”

Each day may seem like it is long: arguing with a mate, being abused or discriminated against, failing, feeling ashamed or disappointing, fearful. It can all feel SO long! But each morning we rise up! Hope can be reborn and strengthened! Jesus is risen!

The fourth week of Advent – The joy of hope

A life in the Spirit, Doing Theology, ,

[This is revised from an Advent message given during Circle of Hope’s “captivity” in Benjamin Franklin High School]

Advent is the pregnant season. It always seems to pop up and try to grab my attention just in time, right when I feel emptied out or adrift on an ocean of trouble. Thank you, Jesus!

The noisy prophet, Jeremiah, is often the tool God uses to focus my attention on hope instead of trouble. The revelation he experiences draws me into a listening space with him and I often end up pregnant with hope, myself. I hope that is your experience this year (after, again, what a year!). As Jeremiah speaks what he hears from God, he paints a picture that won’t be completely clear until God impregnates the world with himself in Jesus Christ and continues the process through His followers. Here we are being what he is seeing.

I love the richness of having Jeremiah open our eyes from his vantage point 2600 years before our time. He can do this because what we experience with God and remember during Advent is like what I hear is sort of a timeless moment women in labor experience just before the baby is born. For some women everything seems to stop – they may have a wild sense of euphoria or suspension, maybe a still point before the final push, when the seconds slow down and all times become this one time. We are called by Advent to enter into such a still point and be with God as God is with us. I believe Jeremiah had many still points when God came to him. What the Lord revealed then can teach us now. We can enter that timeless moment with him.

Jeremia uit de kuil getrokken — Jan Luyken, 1712

Some things never change

We need a Jeremiah during Advent to tell us to keep looking for the fullness. But don’t overlook what you’ve already received! Jeremiah did not have the already but not yet experience we have – he was fully into not yet. And his own people definitely overlooked him like yours may be dismissing you. But he has an amazing amount to teach us about hoping for God when he seems far away.

Jeremiah is a fascinating guy. God calls him into the middle of a huge political situation in Judah, which is the remaining functioning part of the nation of Israel at the time – we are in the 620’s BC, here. His little country is a political football between two huge empires: Egypt on the south, with which the kings of Judah have been allied for a while, and a new conqueror, Babylon, to the north, with its famous, brilliant, King Nebuchadnezzar. The powers that be in Judah, including some sincerely patriotic, but false prophets, are on the side of Egypt. But Jeremiah is convinced that God is going to use Babylon as part of His plan to fulfill what He started in Israel. So he says, “Don’t resist Babylon.” Because of this message, Jeremiah is a lonely, isolated, threatened prophet, trying to hold on to his faith and calling while the conquerors are at the door, as the city of Jerusalem is about to be taken over again, and as his own people think he may be a traitor. There is a lot of sadness and doom and personal struggle in the prophecies of Jeremiah that his buddy Baruch so carefully wrote down.

When you look at what Jeremiah says, it may seem like he lives in Philadelphia, or in your own town. He cries out about sin and separation from God, outright rebellion and disrespect — broken, antagonistic, competitive relationships are making a mess everywhere — everyone has their own agenda. Survival of the fittest reigns. Who you know, not what you know, reigns. King Zedekiah is generally considered illegitimate, a ruler who did not gain power in the proper way (no one “stopped the steal”).

From the belly of that city and situation Jeremiah tells what he hears from God. And I mean belly, quite literally, since the king throws Jeremiah into a cistern for a while so he will be quiet. From the pits, Jeremiah prophecies hope. God likes using people to do that. Jeremiah impregnates the city of Jerusalem, the navel of Israel, like a little seed planted in the cistern; he shoots up life into the air and talks about hope that is going to arise from this distressing pregnancy. God’s people have become like a woman with no prenatal care at all, but she is going to give birth to a remarkable, healthy child. That is his message.

See if you can listen to him over the 2600 years since he lived. I’m not sure anyone can do this anymore. We all think this “magic moment” is the only time we can share. But I think our eternal God can draw us all together across time. In these readings from Jeremiah’s prophecies, see if you can enter the moment with him. See if you can hope for something you don’t have from God yet and believe it will come.

Call Trump's Attacks On The 1619 Project What They Are — Censorship of American History

Hope in bondage

In this first piece, Jeremiah is speaking to people under the yoke, like so many of us and like even more of those around us. We see our version of this yoke in the bondage of addiction to drugs and porn, of self-destructive habits of heart and relating we can’t get rid of, the yoke of unbelief we cling to, of fear, the prison of disease and cancer and trauma, of demons and mental illness, of relationships that dominate us, of ignorance. From the belly of all that Jeremiah is crying out to get people to hear the possibilities of the coming of the Lord.

“In that day,” declares the LORD Almighty,
“I will break the yoke off their necks
and will tear off their bonds;
no longer will foreigners enslave them….
I am with you and will save you,”
declares the Lord. — Jere 30:8,11 (NIV)

Jeremiah doesn’t know when “that day” is, but he sees it. It is an eternal now, a live possibility.

Hope before your jump

Meanwhile, it has really gotten bad. The people and the whole nation have gotten to the point of no return. It is like some of us who teeter on the edge of diving into what kills us, and then jump, or like some of us who have been ambivalent about a relationship for so long that we finally get too far away to get back to reconciliation – too dismissed or dismissive, cancelled or cut off.

This is what the LORD says:
“Your wound is incurable, your injury beyond healing.
There is no one to plead your cause, no remedy for your sore, no healing for you.
All your allies have forgotten you; they care nothing for you.
You have been stricken as one would strike an enemy and punished as one would the cruel,
because your guilt is so great and your sins so many. — Jer. 30:12-14 (NIV)

Jeremiah’s pictures of what things are like, begin to feel like Philadelphia. It is like he is walking down some of the streets where quite a few of us work and live. Jeremiah sees the ruin, but he cries out for hope.

This is what the LORD says: “I will restore the fortunes of Jacob’s tents
and have compassion on his dwellings; the city will be rebuilt on her ruins,
and the palace will stand in its proper place.
From them will come songs of thanksgiving and the sound of rejoicing.
I will add to their numbers, and they will not be decreased;
I will bring them honor, and they will not be disdained.
Their children will be as in days of old,
and their community will be established before me;
I will punish all who oppress them.” — Jer. 30:18-20 (NIV)

Can anyone hear this? We were at Sampan on 13th St. the other night  (very good!) and they were blasting electronica and people were talking so loud we could hardly hear each other. Can anyone hear anymore? As it turns out, most people in Jeremiah’s hometown, Jerusalem, couldn’t listen.

Some people always see and hear the promise

You may see as well as Jeremiah, and even better. We can’t wait for a season that gives us a better excuse to celebrate all that God has born in the world than Advent. We strain to take it all in.

Keep trying to look to what is coming from God: in your yoke, in your bondage, in your incurable-seeming wounds, in the middle of your ruined city where so many lives are ruined right now due to their own sin and the sin of the system. Can you hear God’s message of hope? He says:

the Lord will not turn back
    until he fully accomplishes
    the purposes of his heart.
In days to come
    you will understand this. — Jer. 30:24

The LORD appeared to us in the past, saying: 

“I have loved you with an everlasting love;
    I have drawn you with unfailing kindness.
I will build you up again,
   and you…will be rebuilt.” — Jer. 31:3-4

God Used Holy Spirit To Cause Mary To Become Pregnant, Even Though She Still A Virgin | BabyCenter

Hope in the pregnancy

How is this going to happen? – how will this purpose accomplished, how will this this drawing to himself take place, how will this building up again begin? In a very strange image, Jeremiah says we hope in a pregnancy.

Study it for yourself, but Jer. 31:22 (NKJ) says:

The Lord will create a new thing on earth –
a woman will surround a man.

It is the language of sex, of procreation. “Surrounding” in the old English is a euphemism for having sex. Usually men are seen as the ones who surround the woman. But here is a turn of events. God is going to do something upside down, and a woman will surround a man! God had often been imagined as surrounding the nation of Israel, husband to wife. Can it be that Israel will surround God? Could this be Jeremiah dimly seeing God being born, surrounded by a woman from Israel? Jerome in the fourth century thought this was all about Jesus being “surrounded” by Mary in the womb. However much a person can get out of this, I certainly think it means that a new kind of pregnancy is going to occur. And from my vantage point, it has occurred.

What did Jeremiah see that gave him hope in the pits? In one of the most striking examples of being pregnant with God’s presence, Jeremiah sums it up, and he still gives me hope.  I hope this seems remarkable to you – not only because Jeremiah could see it, but because it all came about with the coming of Jesus.

“The days are coming,” declares the Lord,
    “when I will make a new covenant
with the people of Israel
    and with the people of Judah.
It will not be like the covenant
    I made with their ancestors
when I took them by the hand
    to lead them out of Egypt,
because they broke my covenant,
    though I was a husband to them,”
declares the Lord.
“This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel
    after that time,” declares the Lord.
“I will put my law in their minds
    and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
    and they will be my people.
No longer will they teach their neighbor,
    or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’
because they will all know me,
    from the least of them to the greatest,”
declares the Lord.
“For I will forgive their wickedness
    and will remember their sins no more.” — Jer. 31:31-4

Notice two things about this, OK, so you can be a part:

“I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts.”

This is about you and God. She wants to be incarnate in you, impregnate you with life and see life get born in you and from you.

“I will be their God,
    and they will be my people.
No longer will they teach their neighbor,
    or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’
because they will all know me,
    from the least of them to the greatest,”

This is about US and God. She wants to be incarnate in you, impregnate you with life and see life get born in you and from you. God wants US to know him, from the least to great. I know the church in the U.S. is a wreck right now, but there are multiple seeds in cisterns sprouting right now. God will be among us, knowable. We will know him in the biblical sense and be pregnant with him. And we will give birth to love and goodness and hope in the world.

This is as crazy as a woman surrounding a man! What do you do with this, apart from receive it and appreciate it? If you are listening to Jeremiah at all, you couldn’t do the “Christmas” thing with it and see Jesus as some nice little gift under your tree. The only true response is to get intimate, get pregnant, give birth, enjoy the timeless now of knowing and being known by God with us.

The parable of the man saved by trash

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

Thank God it is no longer February! That was a hard one. But it is still Lent; it is a pandemic. Despair in is the air, in the country and in the church.  If you think you are drowning or barely keeping your nose above water, I have a little story for you after a few paragraphs.

Despair threaded its way through my feelings last week, too. A further reason, as if I needed one, was this: I kept encountering Christians hemmed in by the trash theology to which they were committed. I mean the kind of thinking that invited Trump, the unbeliever, to lead much of the Evangelical church as if he were Cyrus the Great now freeing Christian exiles. I mean the principle-based thinking that consigns devoted people to understanding the Bible as the end of faith when it is just the beginning. I mean the hierarchical thinking that constrains people to makes excuses for the church leaders who do them wrong, to the point where they can’t even feel their own loss or trauma without feeling guilty for having any and for not following the spin the leadership puts on their power plays.

Pollution in the ocean of grace

Maybe I am just despairing because I never seem to keep my mouth shut about these things and feel displeasing, as a result. I was in a class in which our teacher was giving a very effective presentation about being aware of power in a spiritual direction relationship. During the subsequent dialogue her students were sincerely self-aware of all the ways they might be at fault. They were ready to learn of any way they might cross a line that would diminish someone’s autonomy or impede their free choice. I thought controlling our little dyad with a commitment to “freedom” might be too small a context, reducing it down to something I could control might be a bit grandiose; it might betray some unprocessed philosophy. So I had to get in my two cents worth, as well, appearing a bit too passionate, I’m afraid (as passionate as one can get in a Zoom session, at least). I said something like, “Our teacher got interested in power because Jean Vanier was exposed for taking sexual advantage of his directees, among others. What’s more, an authoritarian president unleashed a wave of threat in the country and a return to unveiled white supremacy!”

My righteous anger kept simmering until I read a little news story that became a parable of hope for me. Even less-than-complete thinking might be a means of salvation for our miracle-working God — Lord knows I am not complete! So I want to share the story with you, along with my interpretation. You are probably clinging to some bit of trash theology in a sea of confusion, threat and chaos yourself. And I think we all probably feel very small in a very big ocean every day, even when there is no virus to fear.

Here’s the story

Before I start, let me remind you.  While the legislatures rush to spend time on restricting rampant voter participation, the Pacific Ocean is quickly filling up with plastic. In 2019, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said the Pacific Ocean was “crying out in despair.” Scientists warn the pollution crisis could leave more plastic by weight in the oceans than fish by 2050.

Those two more cents being offered, here’s the parable.

Pitcairn Island

According to the Washington Post, a supply ship called the Silver Supporter left New Zealand on Feb. 8 for the 3,000 mile trip to the Pitcairn Islands (famously settled by mutineers from the Bounty in 1789). About seven days later, the crew discovered they were one member short. Their chief engineer was missing.

Around 4 am, during his watch on the night shift, Vidam Perevertilov from Lithuania felt hot and dizzy. He went out on the deck for some fresh air. Apparently, he fainted and fell overboard into the dark waters without a life jacket. He had trouble keeping his head above water as the sleeping ship steadily moved away. But he summoned enough energy to swim over a mile to a black object he could see on the horizon. The object turned out to be a detached buoy, a big piece of sea rubbish.

He was gone for six hours before someone sounded the alarm. The crew members studied Perevertilov’s work logs to try to pinpoint the coordinates of where he was last certified as on board. Distress calls were made to surrounding ships, and the French navy assisted in the hunt. A French meteorological service mapped a possible drift path. The ship’s captain continued to hunt for the missing crew member by steering the ship back and running various search patterns.

Despite his determination to pull through, as the hours slowly passed Perevertilov began to lose hope of ever being found. For sixteen hours he bobbed up and down in the cold and dark and then in the searing heat of the morning. He found himself using his final moments to reflect on his life.

Weak with dehydration, skin burning, and giving up hope, he was shocked to spot the Silver Supporter in the distance. He waved his arm and yelled for help. A passenger on board heard his cry, describing it as a “weak, human shout.” Everyone thought it was incredible someone heard a voice. The man’s ecstatic family thought the whole rescue operation was almost impossible to believe.

His son said his father’s will to survive was strong; even at 52, he was fit and healthy. When asked about the piece of trash he found, Perevertilov said he left the fishing buoy exactly where he had found it — just in case it was ever needed to save someone else.

Not a real island

I forget that God does a lot of good with “trash”

Don’t forget that he left the trash as he found it when he was found.

This story changed my mind about all the poor believers I lamented. Perhaps they had been overboard a long time and were about to give up. They swam toward some promising trash theology that kept them afloat. (I won’t go in to how relative my judgment of “trash” may be). They got spiritually dehydrated and often got burned, but it was better than drowning. In fact, the trash saved them until the big ship came and rescued them, brought them on board for healing and took them home. I can hear the Apostle Paul saying to me, “Would you despise the trash that saved your brother? Isn’t your sister’s life worth more than your estimation of goodness?” Well, no, I wouldn’t and yes, it is. Jesus is made known by a leaf in the forest, a small voice on a mountain or a Presbyterian sermon. A fine acquaintance from my youth started his journey of faith by pausing for a televangelist while flipping around the channels. God’s love is unrestrained.

I decided, once again, that I can afford to be a lot less critical of the dangerous debris floating around on the ocean of the collective unconscious. A lot of people have a will to live and not even trash Christianity can keep them from meeting God and growing into their fullness. I may be right to point out that the ocean of God’s grace is crying out in despair because it is polluted with a huge gyre of plastic, unnourishing, detrimental religious thinking.

But listen, there are all sorts of faint voices crying out and waving their hands for help. God sees. I should open my eyes, and my heart, as well.

Wrestling with rumors: WWJD with #WWG1GWA?

Doing Theology, The Mission, , , , , , , , , ,

On March 20, President Trump retweeted a 2-year-old video of a teenager receiving a zealous pat down by a TSA agent in the Dallas airport while his mother filmed the incident, knowing she would be delayed that much more if she caused any more trouble with the security guards (WP). I don’t want to show you the video, because it just gives it more playtime, and by this time, the video is a meme.

Image result for qanon rally

We are in a season of rumor

But I can’t help talking about the source who belatedly brought the video to Trump’s attention, through a winding path of Twitter celebrities. It shows where he gets his information and makes me wonder why the president, and so many others, are so fond of spreading conspiracy theories. The TSA is branded as an instrument of the over-reaching government and Trump spreads the rumor its all part of a conspiracy.

In general, we are all figuring out what is going on by spreading and assessing rumors. For instance, last week an FB friend asked me if an old rumor about Circle of Hope is true: “I was told you don’t believe in dinosaurs.” She sent me a screenshot of the FB dialogue about us and one person chimed in to verify our “unbelief.” “Absolutely true!” he said. We are in the season of rumors becoming accepted facts. BTW, I had just been to the Natural History Museum in NYC and saw some of the dinosaur fossil record, which I don’t think is an elaborate fake.

I suppose “conspiracy theories” are graduate-level rumors. My acquaintance, Nicholas  DiFonzo gave a brief outline of his extensive and helpful research on rumor on this video.

The video Trump shared appeared on a Twitter account called Deep State Exposed, which is operated by a man who pushes QAnon theories. I don’t pretend to know what is going on with QAnon since I just became aware of them. Although, being Anabaptish by persuasion, I’m probably in line with half their motivations. Regardless of my general ignorance, here is one man’s take on who the anonymous Q (and team) are: QAnon for beginners.

The man Trump retweeted has a Twitter bio which includes the phrase “WWG1WGA,” shorthand for “Where We Go One We Go All.” That hashtag is a rallying point for the narrative that ties together the Pizzagate conspiracy and a supposed “deep state” plot to control American politics (WP from last August). WWG1WGA is the main Q slogan.  It’s thought to come from the 1996 Ridley Scott film White Squall about a group of young people caught at sea in a terrible storm. “The Storm” is a common metaphor for Trump’s assault on the Deep State. Trump himself referenced it last October during a dinner with military commanders. People are painting the slogan on walls here and there.

in TribLive

The Washington Post sneers at such conspiracy theory purveyors, but it is useful to understand them. Once a rumor has been repeated enough and not debunked, it begins to build a worldview. Many QAnon people are persuaded Donald Trump is standing in the way of a cabal of the 1% who are determined to create a global police state that will take away their freedoms, and they are determined to be on the right side of history (an example of America’s doomsday obsession).

QAnon has a religious wing

Apart from the President’s collusion with them, my main interest in QAnon was generated by the following video from the blogger Sean/Cordicon (above). Through him, I learned about the QAnon manifesto. He also represents the religious wing to the movement which emerged out of the ooze of 8Chan. (You can see elements of the QAnon 8Chan  posts here). In the following video, Cordicon is a little disappointed with the marketing campaign for the movement’s seminal book, but he has more instructive things to say about the surprising connections being made with 1st century Christianity. {His YouTube presence gravitated to Telegram and Rumble. Here’s an amazing religification of Trump}.

Sean seems like a sensitive guy, and he is passionate about Jesus. At some point, he discovered a Jesus, promoted since the 1830’s or so, who is something of a prototype for himself: a person who has been denied his true existence by the powers. In case you did not watch the video (who has time for every link in this post!), I’ll tell you that, at one point, he held up the book below about the “Q” source for the gospels posited by some 19th century theologians. He claims this book represents the true Jesus.

Image result for the gospel of q

I suppose it was inevitable that QAnon and the Q Source for the gospels would meet and have a baby via the internet.

The Gospel of Q that has captured Sean’s imagination remains a hypothetical document. No intact copy has ever been found. No reference to the document in early Christian writings has survived. Its existence is inferred from an analysis of the text of Matthew and Luke.

James Robinson helped infer it. Robinson was part of the famous Jesus Seminar that began dialogue in the 1980s. He is also one of the main popularizers of the Gospel of Q. He says,

“The Sayings Gospel Q is even older than the Gospels in the New Testament. In fact, it is the oldest Gospel known! Yet it is not in the New Testament itself — rather, it was known to, and used by, the authors of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke in the eighties and nineties of the first century when they composed their Gospels. But then it was lost from sight and only rediscovered in 1838, embedded in Matthew and Luke.

After all, Q is a product of the Jewish Jesus movement that continued to proclaim his message in Galilee and Syria for years to come, but from which practically no first-century texts have survived. The New Testament is mainly a Gentile collection, and hence only preserves the sources of Gentile churches.”

The “Gentile churches” got a reputation with a collection of mainly German scholars, not for following the Spirit of God, but for imposing a European, Greek and Roman gospel that eradicated the original Jewish, Syrian Jesus. You can see how this easily morphs into general QAnon thinking. The QAnon people are rebelling against the “new world order” imposed by some “Illuminati,” the same kind of people who buried the real Jesus!

Here’s a little more about the hidden “Q” source for Matthew and Luke. Scholars compared Matthew and Luke to Mark and saw when Matthew and Luke tell the story about Jesus, for the most part they both follow the order and often even the wording of Mark. But, into this common narrative outline, Matthew and Luke each insert extra sayings and teachings of Jesus. And although Matthew and Luke do not put these sayings in the same order, nevertheless they each repeat many of the same ones, sometimes word for word.

The scholars thought it unlikely that either Matthew or Luke could have copied from the other, so how can this sort of agreement be explained? The answer appeared to be that Matthew and Luke each had two sources in common: the Gospel of Mark and another gospel, now lost, a collection of sayings known only as Q. Q stands for “Quelle,” the German word for source. Although no actual copy of Q has ever been found, many scholars are convinced that such a document once circulated in early Christian communities. Here is an essay about it from The Atlantic: The Search for a No-Frills Jesus.

Should we think about Q or do anything about it?

I wrote this piece to try to give some context to what is brewing in the U.S.. You might run into QAnon and think the theories are facts! Rumors grow into conspiracy theories and conspiracy theories become division and wars.

Even more, I wrote to question what amounts to a rumor and then a conspiracy theory that the true, original Jesus has been lost with Q. You might come to think if we strip away the narrative of the Lord’s “supposed” death and resurrection and all the miracle stories, we would see the real Jesus in the wisdom sayings that are left. We would then have the purest Jesus, relieved of the burden of European domination, Greek philosophy and expectations of power.

To be honest, I agree with some of what the Jesus Seminar was trying to do as they searched for Jesus beyond the trappings of His Westernization, even if they were searching from a position of authority with their Western academic assumptions firmly in place and came to spurious conclusions. But I don’t think we need to throw out the “bathwater” of the Bible to find the “baby” Jesus again.

And while I can appreciate that Sean would love to have a Jesus who emerges from behind the veil of the domination system, I don’t think we need to embroil the Lord in the latest conspiracy theory, as if he can be reduced to a LARP. Sean does not think he is in a live action role play, but I’m pretty sure he would admit he has plenty of people jumping on the bandwagon who aren’t as serious as he is. Jesus has often been used as a pawn in some political struggle. We don’t need to collaborate with the latest.

I was drawn to Paul again in 2 Corinthians 10 as a place to ponder what Jesus would do:

For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.

We must not wage war as the world does, not with its philosophies and not with its weapons. That seems sure. We must develop a deep, Spirit to spirit relationship with God, live in an authentic community in Christ where we can discern together, and trust that our meager attempts to understand the truth and tell it will be met with supernatural assistance.

Maybe most of all, I think Sean reminded me that Jesus listens to people, even on the internet, with compassion and openness, ready to honor their value and deepen their understanding. We are all wrestling with rumors. No rumor tells the truth about Circle of Hope and no link on this page tells the past, present or future story of whoever it is from or about. Paul is talking about saving eternal lives, not winning an argument.

Our open hearts and listening ears weaponize our love. Long after the present realignment in the world order is over, Jesus will still be fighting His battle the way he does, with suffering love and a hope that transcends whatever the rebels think they will achieve with their hashtag army. Until that day is done, we wage war, with Paul, with resurrection power, not mere words and certainly not based on our right to bear death-dealing arms. It is a confusing moment in our history, so expending the energy to live in truth will cost us. But as we enter Holy Week we can see again what kind of story we are writing with our expensive love.