A Labyrinthine Journey

Last week for Ash Wednesday, I wanted to try to help my Confirmation students understand Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness. Last year I started working with my own version of Confirmation that links up with the Enneagram and some of the process perspectives that offers me. So it didn’t take much for me to see a link between the three temptations of Jesus and the 3 energy centers of the Enneagram (also the three energy centers of Thomas Keating).

But even that didn’t lead me to connect well with the students because the needs of the three centers are basic needs for life. What makes them traps for us is when we go to the extremes with the importance of or the means to achieve our needs. The common thread with all the temptations of Jesus was the temptation to do “Whatever it takes.”

Temptation 1: Turning Stones to Bread

We all have the basic desire for survival, to not be hungry. We like to feel safe and secure with all of our needs met and our fears taken care of.One of the things we really don’t like is that feeling of emptiness and it doesn’t matter if the emptiness is in our stomachs, the noise level around us, our bank accounts, our schedules, our understanding of life, or our inner spirit. We just don’t like it. In US society we loath emptiness so much we overindulge and hoard just about everything. We have fallen into the trap of confusing what we want with what we truly need all in the service of preventing us experiencing even the hint of being less. On the Enneagram this would correlate with the Head corner of the 6-5-7.

So Jesus in the wilderness after 40 days of no food sits in a place that we actively avoid. My confirmation students thought the idea of going 4 hours without food was ghastly enough let alone 40 days. So Jesus is set up for the first Whatever it Takes temptation. He was famished, and I can imagine that emptiness raising weakness and fear that he might not survive this time and the wilderness would be the end of his journey even before it really got started. So the temptation is to not believe that God will really take care of him, that the Spirit left him out here to die in the wilderness, so if Jesus wanted to survive, he would have to take care of it himself.

Both Jesus and Satan knew that Jesus had the power to make it happen and besides who would know. Jesus would know. And the truth he would know was that in the end he wasn’t able to trust God to care for him with even his basic needs, so he had to step in and fill the void of God’s activity in his life.

Whoa. That raises a lot of questions for me about all the things we do to “insure” that we will succeed in surviving our life. I will leave any personal reflections up to your living conversation with God’s Spirit.

But I find this temptation causing me to wonder how many survival programs for struggling churches are all based on the idea that God hasn’t stepped up to save you yet, so you need to do Whatever it Takes to make sure you have your needs as a church met. I’m all for hoping the Church of God continues (my income is a vested interest in that endeavor). However, I think we have lost sight of the idea that the Church is the Body of Christ and that the God who creates us and forms us together as a people is also desiring for us to live abundantly.

Where is the Trust that God holds the future and is faithful to us?

In many books and programs that come through my email and inbox the trust seems to lie instead on how we are processing the metrics of “successful” churches to “insure” our survival as a congregation or as a denomination.

Are we as the church being seduced by the Surviving by Whatever It Takes temptation? I’m afraid we are more than we would like to admit.

OK, this ended up being longer than I expected, so I will break it up into 3 parts and take each of the other two temptations.

Feel free to comment below.

Note: A long introduction to this post.

I’m approaching Lent with a different attitude this year. Instead of focusing on giving up something simply for the sake of giving something up, I sat down to see what I wanted to add to my life. More particularly, what can I add to my life that enhances and expresses my living relationship with the Presence of God.

I’ve from time to time found great value in daily journaling, but haven’t touched my journal for 7-8 months. So that is part of what I am taking on. I also have found that the two times a day Centering Prayer is foundational to so much of who I believe God is calling me to be. So that is the package. Over the 40 days of Lent it is my intent to develop those three pieces of my spiritual practice to the point where they are my basic core.

Now, to the flip side. In order to be successful in that intent, I do have to decide what in my life can be set aside to make room. The image I’ve been working on is the image of our lives being a bucket (or a water tank as a member of the church shared). Our buckets are already full of things we do. So, for me to be successful in making those practices a core in my life, something has to be taken out of my bucket.

As I thought about that, I have realized for a long time that aimless television viewing is a major time and energy sink for me. Notice, I didn’t say television itself, but aimless television viewing. This is sitting down, grabbing the remote and spending hours just flipping around watching for a few moments whatever catches my attention. Big problem. So, that is the giving up part of this formula.

If I have a show I want to watch, fine, I will watch it, but then I want to turn the television off when it is done. The other night, I sat with my wife and watched a couple hours of television. That’s fine, too. We were sharing some time together, we would watch, we would talk. Yet, I have to confess, when she left, I slipped right back into the aimless viewing that I was wanting to stay away from.

Now to the point of this post!

I realized as I was processing that event in my journal, that the larger attitude I am trying to give up is living without intention. To do something without aim, purpose, or intention leads to that larger experience of wasting the precious moments that God gives us. This is living without choice.

The gift of life is something wonderful and I want to waste less and less of it as time goes on. So whether it is watching television or surfing the web or pastoring a church or anything else in my life. I am realizing that to live it best is to live with intention. And that intention is to express in everything I do the living Essence of God within me.