A Labyrinthine Journey

I was checking out my blogroll and saw that Richard Hall quoted Darryl Dash. Here is a taste.

connexions » Something is Wrong

As I listen to people, I get the sense that almost everyone agrees something is wrong in the church.

A must read!

I must say that I have been struggling with that myself for quite a while. As I discuss things with people, I think this sense that something is wrong lies at the heart of my lingering depression and spiritual ennui. I love God and I believe God has called me to love the church, but I cannot get excited about “doing” church the same way anymore.

This is along the same lines as my recent writing about spiritual gluttony. We are program obese Christians who have become focused on producing results in the only way we know how: multiplying programs. I am sometimes frustrated, sometimes confused and mostly saddened when I think about what we are about and how we are the church. When we had to come up with our ministry goals for next year I proposed scrapping them all and having one goal for next year: spend the first 6 months learning and experiencing prayer as individuals and as a congregation. That’s it. Sure the normal things will happen, but I am hoping something different comes out of it.

The difficulty is that this is uncharted territory for me (us). All I know now is that I have a lot of questions and the sands of our journey show no path.

• How can we make true disciples of Jesus without just making people who have attended programs on disciple-making?
• How can we learn to pray without just involving people in another program on prayer, but where persons are led into a place to live the loving presence of God?
• How can we invite people who grew up in the church because that was the thing to do to be open to a new reason for involvement: falling in love with our Creator/Savior? How can we do that gently yet persistently while trusting the Holy Spirit to work in Divine Time?
• How can we be faithful in building individual disciples in the face of the pressure of a program-oriented church structure (at all levels, council, district, annual/general conference)? In other words, how can we avoid being sabotaged by the push to create structure when we are called to nurture relationships?
• How can we do that, while recognizing the importance of the structure to nurture accountability and responsibility at all levels?

I know there are many more questions in this struggle. I also believe that there are many people who are able to live within that tension. I have not found the way to do that yet. I keep looking and praying and waiting.

In a big sense, that lays out the essence of what many of will be doing during this American holiday. Many of us will gather with family (ours will be just 4 for Thursday) and others will not. One of the things I have been sensitive to for many years of meeting a few Native Americans, some of whom became friends, is that some of our celebration days are days of sadness for them.

There was a time when some sensitive people had the idea of denying those historical remembering days. While I have been one to not overplay some of those days, I have not been too much in favor of forgetting history.

I think we need to face these mixed heritage days (joy for some and sorrow for others) with an eye for learning and then remembering the fuller stories. Yet, isn’t that what most of our celebration days have become? War-based rememberance days like Veteran’s Day or Memorial Day are days to honor those living who served while also remembering with sighs those who served and died. And if we want to remember those days more fully we must stop and mourn the loss to other nations in terms of people and infrastructure because of those wars. Too much needless loss, needs to be remembered but then should spur us to live so it will not happen any longer.

Anyway, that wasn’t where I really started to go: thanksgiving. I found a good article written by a Keetoowah Cherokee Indian teacher and pastor on the site for Sojourners magazine.

Rev. Randy Woodley on God’s Politics

According to Barack Obama’s new book, white guilt has already run its course, so my sense now is to move quickly past how bad it really is – and it really is bad – and on to suggesting a way for us to heal.

There does come a point where the remembering and the honoring and listening and sharing need to be turned toward the purpose of healing. This is especially true when the contexts are broken relationships and cultural injustice. Healing does not come through overplaying the stories or forgetting them, healing comes by living through them to a new reality of relationship and society. A new culture of respect and commitment to be trusting and trustworthy.

The best point in Randy’s article (go read it if you haven’t yet) is the importance of humor in healing. A humor that can both gently and sharply lead us all to take ourselves less seriously and to find common ground in our humanness.

So, eat, laugh, remember, and sigh this Thanksgiving. It is good for the soul.

Doing a little more reflection on the whole idea of discontentment and how difficult it is for us. I think the problem is that we have little idea of where contentment arises.

I think we somehow think that peace and contentment is something that we can create or something that we can gather from outside sources.

Maybe that outside source is our stuff, our possessions, our status, or our associations. If we only had this, or had that, or had enough of whatever we would finally have peace. Trouble is, there is never enough of whatever. The more we have the more we think we need. We become less content and more fearful.

True contentment comes from our inner being, a spirit founded not on greed and gluttony and more things, but one based on the Spirit of Love and generous grace. When we are at peace inside our own skin and soul then we can find peace no matter what the circumstances are.

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst…” – Matthew 5:6

It goes against our grain to celebrate being empty. We are a people who seek more ways to live full lives. In fact in our US culture we aren’t satisfied with just being full and satisfied, we seek to be overfull. We have become gluttons in all ways. We are not content with just super-sizing our meals, we want the Hummers and the larger pickup trucks. We build houses that keep getting larger and larger. We are not content with just having an active church, we seek out the mega-churches. Somehow we think that the abundant life means living over the top in every way. I like to say we don’t do well with fasting in our church, but we are getting a head start on the feasting part.

We get stuck in that attitude with our relationship with God, too, I’m afraid. We are drawn from mountaintop emotional experience to mountaintop experience. Our criteria for a worship has become if we felt ourselves moved. Oh sure, we talk about the glory of God and how Great God is and all those good words, but are they just used to justify the excess. And does that lead to healthy lives: physically, emotionally and spiritually? I am skeptical.

Yet, with all that excess are we really full? I think not. We are still stuck with being discontent. We hunger and thirst for God, but fill our lives with programs and activities and committees and responsibilities and … and … I think you can fill in the gaps yourself. Therein lies the problem, we thirst for God and try to get filled with things of God, but they are no substitute for God’s Own Self. In fact, we could say that this is a definition of idolatry: putting things of creation in the place of the creator.

The discontent is the invitation to us. We easily view it as a problem, but instead it is the reminder that we are missing the main thing: our intentional living in the presence of God.

So what are we to do with this hunger and thirst? How are we to respond to the emptiness in the depths of our being? How should our lives reflect our sense that something is not right with our world and our selves?

One response is despair. We can choose to believe that emptiness is all there is for us to be. Instead of the hunger for God being an invitation from God to be filled with God alone, we can decide that God has abandoned us. We can live in the forgetfulness of divine grace and love. Our despair and depression becomes for us an existence enshrouded with worry, fear, hopelessness, or anger, bitterness and resentment. “God said we are to be filled, we have been hoodwinked.” Therein lies a major problem with a message that preaches the “good news” of prosperity. There is no place for wilderness wanderings. The holy mountains of Sinai and Olives need to become malls of spiritual baubles and blessings.

Our lives have become too full with the abundance of the things of God there is no room for God unless our lives become shaken and emptied out.

“… for they shall be filled.” Matthew 5:6b

That is not the only choice available to us. I have realized that the way to true abundance is to celebrate the hunger of my soul and bring it to God for God alone to fill. This is a dangerous choice to make, because it has to accept the idea that I have become too used to using false things to fill my thirst for God. I have for too long looked to my calling and people’s approval to cover over the discontent. I have tried a lot of the self-help programs (holy and unholy) to paint my empty rooms with new pleasant colors, but the discontent remains.

Lately, it is only when I come to God and give up all those other endeavors that I find a new and different abundance begin to fill my soul. It is when I come and confess the foolishness of my choices to be filled with other things that I see the way open up to make some new choices, choices that truly affirm the God-Life. It also means that I have to leave part of my life empty. As God fills our lives we grow more hungry and more thirsty for more of God. And as we grow we learn that there is no real substitute for that Loving Presence.

The other night I was up really late after trying to cough up my lungs (or at least that is how it felt) while struggling with my fall head cold. While up trying to settle my breathing down to return to bed, I flipped on the television and found Bill Nye the Science Guy. I am still too much of a geek; I love that show. The topic? Newton’s law of inertia: a body at rest stays at rest (or a body in motion stays in motion) until acted upon by an outside force.

I’m stuck in spiritual inertial pause right now.

I can name some of the forces that have stopped my inner motion: the physical affects of this bad cold, fatigue from possible sleep apnea (I have to say possible because we know I have apnea, Linda observes it regularly, but my sleep study a couple weeks ago didn’t show any–primarily because I didn’t sleep), and the ongoing affect of both depression and the anti-depressants; there have been many people trying to force my ministry direction but not in helpful ways or counter to the direction I keep trying to get myself going.

Every once in a while I try to get myself started. I try to grab onto some task or project that I will break the inertial pause. Yet other than a quiver of brief movement, things end up returning to the same place but only now I am frustrated and self-judgmental (which reinforces the failure voice of the depression). Then I give up. It’s too hard. I can’t do it. Maybe I never could and never can. Why don’t I just give up the illusion. That at least temporarily deadens the frustration.

But then I wake up and tell myself the Depression Sucks and I really don’t want this to be my life. Yet, what am I to do.

Thanks be to God,  that usually whenever I wake up to that thought, I also remember that I am not an outside force, I am the one needing to be moved. And even another person, while outside of myself, is not outside enough to really break the bonds of failure and weakness that hold me here.

In that “doh” moment I remember God.

The Beloved who is just waiting. Waiting for me to stop being so absorbed in my own little frustrations to reach out for real help. Waiting for me to realize I have tripped over my own toys and need a hand to get up. Waiting for me to realize that I need to clean up those toys and put away all those distractions and let go of all those attachments so I have a place to go when I am moved. Waiting for me to remember that spending time together helps me to let go of all those forces that stop me.

Now I must become the one waiting. Waiting with hands unclenched for the firm push of grace. Waiting without knowing which direction love will choose. Waiting knowing that healing does not come on my terms, but always with love. Waiting with anticipation that God is already moving my life.