A Labyrinthine Journey

There was a time when I would describe myself as being declared a heretic in at least 2 different churches. As I consider some of the tools I use now in my spiritual and pastoral toolbox, I think I might have to expand that level of condemnation. And maybe I have done my part to intentionally amplify that status in the last few years. I confess that I have a bit of a stubborn streak when it comes to people trying to control me (Enneagram Type 8 for those of you who care).

I hoping in the next few weeks to begin to write extensively here about my learnings from and ministry application of the Enneagram in this space. If you google “Enneagram” you will find a few sites that are very eloquent in its condemnation of the Enneagram as a tool of the occult bringing spiritual chaos into the church. I suppose the Enneagram symbol does look occult/mysterious/secret-society like. And after all, most of the early adopters of the Enneagram are non-Christian mystics and psychologists. If that is the case, then the labyrinth would also be placed in that category of anti-Christian symbols that appear occult. For me, both that labyrinth the Enneagram are symbols and tools that have great power and usefulness in my work as spiritual director and pastor as well as in my own personal walk with God.

The more I think about it, there are other reasons for falling into the heretic mold for some people. I am very much a process oriented person. Not only do I still use the family process perspective on relationships from Murray Bowen and Ed Friedman in my counseling and spiritual direction, but I definitely see myself as a Process Theologian. God’s love might be unchanging, but our God is a Living and Dynamic Being who responds to and is affected by the divine involvement with history. So how God works in my life is never the same as how God works in another person’s life. Beyond that, how God works in my life today is not the same as how God has worked even in my own life. There is no “God only works in these prescribed ways” point of view in my theology. Not only would those Baptists in my history be aghast, but my Reformed Church colleagues would be convinced that I have lost something important.

I, however, think I have gained far more than I have lost. And that gain lies behind my title. it also lies behind a deeper reorientation I think the church should examine about many things we do that are acceptable means of grace within the church.

The key reorientation is to not become focused on the various forms of God’s grace, but to keep our eyes on the Grace of god itself.

I enjoy the symbol of the labyrinth because I do believe it has a certain beauty and symmetry to it. I have experienced some profound moments of God using the labyrinth in directing and transforming my life, but the symbol of the labyrinth should not become a magical talisman that holds power itself. It is powerful as it holds and contains and brings my life into contact with the living and dynamic presence of God. The symbol of the labyrinth is simply that of a tool (a very good tool for many people, but worthless to many others) that God is able to use to slow down our lives to be able to see, hear, and allow God to work within us. The focus is on the God at work, remaining thankful for the tool.

Same thing with the Enneagram and Process theology. I am a student of both and a witness for both in my life and ministry even if I don’t mention the names themselves. Why? Because God has used both the process orientation and the Enneagram to open up a deeper and profound perspective on the spiritual journey that rings true as I seek to follow God. There are so many aspects of the spiritual life that it is easy for me to forget and to get lost in all the nuances and details that come from Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. The Enneagram has become a very easy way to remember and to process what God is doing in my life and in the lives of those I know and love. I get excited about how it helps me sort through all the details to hold the core gifts of God before my heart and my preaching. There is no magic in the symbol, but there is power because I keep finding the ways that it makes sense of what God is doing. While I am thankful for that understanding, it is simply a tool, a very powerful one to me, that keeps my focus on the god who is ever making us and remaking us into the imagio dei.

Yet, my title goes beyond that. I find myself continuing to remind myself of this tool perspective for more things in the church. How many of our worship wars come about because we have our eyes so focused on the form of our worship (music styles, liturgical styles, media, architecture, etc) that we forget Jesus leading us to be people who worship God in spirit and truth (John 4:23). Worship is important and we need to do it often and well, but when we become so wrapped up in what worship looks like, have we lost our way confusing the means with the grace.

How about church budgets and apportionments? Do we become so focused on the dollars and cents and the power that goes along with them that we lose sight of our money being tools that God gives us in order to witness to God’s love in word and deed? I have been trying for years to keep my focus on the grace we are stewards of during the annual finance campaigns. I believe that as we keep our focus there, the tools will no longer leads us into anxiety, but will become occasions for celebration and greater generosity. Or how about administrative structures (both local church and denominational)? We are way too focused on the forms of our structure that we forget what they are there for.

Even spiritual disciplines (I could go on, but this will be my last set of examples). For years, I would become discouraged because I couldn’t journal everyday, or read my Bible every day, or even pray every day as I knew I should, or even as I wanted to. I would really kick myself for not being a very disciplined person (as this blog will demonstrate). Lately, I have realized that my self-defeating discouragement was another form of putting the means before the grace. I was always thinking that the important thing was the reading, the writing, the praying, the whatevering, and since I kept failing that I was a failure (recipe for depression). However, what if I kept the focus on why those things were useful as tools of God’s work in my life? What is the purpose of prayer and scripture reading? To spend time with God and growing in my relationship with my Beloved. What would be the purpose of journaling or writing? To remember and nurture what God is doing in my life. As I have been reminding myself of the primacy of living God’s grace, I have not only had less anxiety about what disciplines I do or do not practice, but paradoxically, the actions of the disciplines flow more freely and more naturally.

But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us - 2 Corinthians 4:7 NRSV

I know that Paul is reflecting on the wonders of how our mortal, fragile beings can be vessels for the gospel, but I think it can apply to these other tools as well. Whether the clay jars are more “acceptable” like worship styles, words of scripture, church buildings, disciplines, or more fringe such as the Enneagram or the labyrinth, we need to keep our eyes on the extraordinary treasure which is the living presence of God within us, for the transformation of the world.

Another entry in a series of reflections from Ed Friedman’s A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix [1999 The Edwin Friedman Estate, Bethesda, MD].

One of the interesting things about Ed Friedman is that before his death he advised clergy of all kinds as a Rabbi, he challenged the thinking of family systems therapists as one who trained with Dr Murray Bowen, he also advised leaders in corporate America as well as government and military. I can’t help but wonder about his thoughts in the current state of things in the Beltway and our society today. But his book gives some help in that direction. Today’s reflection quote comes from a series of concerns he has as he looked at American society on page 10 of his Introduction.

A regressive counter-evolutionary trend in which the most dependent members of any organization set the agendas, where adaptation is constantly toward weakness rather than strength, thus leveraging power to the recalcitrant, the passive-aggressive, and the most anxious members of an institution rather than toward the energetic, the visionary, the imaginative, and the most creatively motivated.

This isn’t really about evolution it is about maturity. I think he captures the important value of being in the process of growing and maturing and taking more responsibility in our life.

I confess that I am generally a supporter of the ACLU and while a centrist and independent politically, I do tend to drift to the left on issues while trying to stay out of the muddy waters of the extremes. Yet, if I have any quarrel with the ACLU and with the litigiousness of our society it is related to Ed’s point about being oriented toward weakness. The cases we usually hear about in the media are the ones where people are easily offended and think that is injury. Offence is not really being hurt. True oppression can sometimes masquerade in that way, but if we let the weaker members of our systems call the shots we truly stop growing only at the level of the weakest link. In another part of his book he has a problem with empathy. However, challenge and strength does not truly hurt and destroy people (torture and abuse is ALWAYS wrong). There comes a point where standing up for one’s self will “offend” some people, but we have to live our lives, not someone else’s.

As I read that, I find it hard as a preacher of the Gospel of grace that calls Christians to be bringers of hope and healing to people who are poor in body and spirit to write that, but I think there is a difference between being compassionate for people who are lost and being pulled into their wilderness with them.

The image I like to use is one where you have fallen into a deep hole. Who would you need to help you? Someone who empathizes with your situation and crawls into the pit with you to feel your pain, or someone who sees your need and goes to get a rope which they then use to pull you out of the pit.

Being oriented to the weakest in our families, churches, communities, societies (or even the weakest part of my own spiritual life) allows them to determine the agenda. In every church I have served it is a struggle to keep focused on helping people grow toward their strength, which always involves responding to challenge and struggle. It is far too easy to let the pain (real and perceived) determine what we do.

When I worked out, the fitness center I used shared space with the physical therapy department of the hospital. In talking with the therapists, we shared a commonality: without the therapist (preacher/spiritual director/counselor) there to push people beyond their pain point, people will not get better and will not grow.

Maturity is about raising our threshold for pain and going just a little bit further then we went before. That is the challenge of the creative visionary: to go further in our thoughts and living then we have gone before (or at least for a while). And that is why it is so hard to seek to be one: it is just so hard to keep on pushing people beyond where they are comfortable.

The only way I find to be able to do that (and at the moment I am in a low tide part of the cycle for this) is to be very focused on the living relationship with the Creator who is seeking to grow ME. As God works in my life (through meditation on the Word and a growing contemplative life in prayer) I will be stretched and supported so I can continue to invite others to be a part of what God is stretching us all toward doing. For our good, and for the good of all the levels of community we find ourselves to live in.

Got back from a short vacation and found this story in The Moderate Voice. Follow it to a very interesting couple stories bringing some cogent criticism on some of the more media-covered religious right lately.

The Moderate Voice - Jewish Leader Condemns Religious Right (UPDATED) A prominent Jewish leader has blasted the religious right in a very public way.

What has been validly brought out in the commentary in those stories is that this is true of the religious right in any religion. However, I would want to go further and say that the process is true in any extreme movement, religious or not, right or left, north or south, or west or east. The difficulty comes from the gridlock of imagination that comes from the polarities.

This is not my original idea, though I whole-heartedly believe it. (Be patient, I need to set this up) For a few days, I am going to dig out some quotes from Rabbi Dr. Edwin Friedman (Bethesda, Maryland) who before is death in 1996 was a major interpreter of the Bowen Theory of Family Emotional Process through a well-known book, Generation to Generation. At his death he was in process of writing another book, and it is from that book I will be quoting. The books title says a lot, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix. Upon his death, his publisher dropped him, but his wife and estate published his unfinished manuscript in 1999. These quotes are copyright the Edwin Friedman Estate.

Now back to polarized thinking. Ed Friedman believed that we were a society that has been imaginatively stuck in gridlock and needed to be unstuck. Hear Rabbi Friedman on polarized thought, then I will be back with a couple more comments.

The Third characteristic of imaginatively gridlocked relationship systems is polarized either/or, black/white, all-or-nothing thinking, and eventually, similar forms of relating that restrict the options of the mind [emphasis mine] Paradigms that might begin simply as theoretical differences become hardened into intense, oppositional, emotional commitments over even the most unemotional subject matter. [p. 45, A Failure of Nerve]

This is where I expand the view of Rabbi Yoffie from just applying to the religious right to the religious left as well. In the United Methodist Church we have our share of both and it is always painful to watch them battle on the floor of conference (or in the media of the church). It is obvious that they not only cannot listen to each other, but they will not. And it is the choice to restrict the options of their minds that causes the most damage to whatever system they are in whether it is the church the synagogue, the society, the house, the senate, the home, the work, the blogosphere or even the world stage.

For any of our systems to survive the vagaries of life we must listen to all the options available to us and we must be ever looking for the one that responds best to the challenges before us. Otherwise the storms and the struggles will win.

A little more from Ed that points a bit toward the way out.

Whether one is baking a cake of examining an institutional mix, the interaction of ingredients is almost always a function of the temperature and pressure of the environment. When troubled couples, for example, make a breakthrough, often the issues that they have differed over have not gone away but the two sides have become less reactive to one another. [p. 46, A Failure of Nerve]

That is one of the key reasons I find myself an independent moderate. I don’t have to play the reactive role. I don’t have to stick to the script of my polarity. If I can stay unscorched from the fires of the edges and listen to the points of view, somewhere in all that noise of words is a composition of the truth that will lead us through our current situation.

Unfortunately what often has to happen is that the polar ice-scripts have to experience melt-down before they will begin to see that maybe they don’t have the only answer (the arrogance that Rabbi Yoffie refers to in his comments) and that somewhere in the mix of ideas and ingredients and relationships comes inspiration.

I always hope we don’t have to experience that, but we usually do.