A Labyrinthine Journey

Today, John Meunier wrote a post on The Gift of Wonder. A very nice story courtesy of his son as his spiritual director. It connected with a few moments in my life recently.

The other day, someone on Twitter mistyped sacred as scared. That caught my eye because I think it probably truly represents a lot of people’s connection or lack of connection with God. Like the community of the Exodus as they saw the awesome power of God on Sinai, we are scared by just the idea of God. Protect us from God we say. Sure we talk about God a lot and in theory we speak of intimacy with God, but when it comes to truly sitting in the quiet of the Divine Presence we fill it with our voices, or even the noise of our songs and words.

Out of fear we reinforce all kinds of filters and boundaries to our experience of God. We can do it with empty liturgy as well as with the illusion of casual familiarity. How often though do we accept the trappings of devotion as a disguise for our fear. Unless we are in control of the moments and movements in worship and prayer we are scared. So our ideas about God provide the means of our avoiding authentic contact with the Creator and Essence of Life.

While in the Black Hills on vacation last month, I sat on the porch of our cabin and remembered that the native inhabitants of that land held the land to be sacred. A special place that continued to invite wonder and awe. By holding it as sacred, they invited one another to not take the land or the gift of life for granted. The response to that sacred space was respect and honor. Instead of seeking to conquer the land to keep the fearful aspects of the wild under control.

On that porch I sensed an invitation to enter into a new relationship with the land. Rather than see the place as a thing to be used, manipulated and exploited, it has life and personality. The sacred land was calling me to love it with a different kind of devotion. Where we would work together as partners in the living creation.

The invitation from the Sacred Divine is a similar yet primal and primary relationship. God has no desire for us to so fear the Divine Essence that we do anything to avoid a relationship, but that we enter into that sacred intimacy. Yet we have to risk the scared to live in the sacred.

One of those issues that have been almost omnipresent in my life for quite a while is procrastination. That ability to put things off with regularity has led to more agony and trouble in my life than anything else in my life and in my ministry. I have tried all kinds of different time management and organizational strategies. Every year or so, I get really upset and frustrated with myself that I put in a lot of effort to get my life under control.

Yet, all those attempts last for only a couple weeks and I get back into the same cluttered morass that I was in before. Maybe even worse because now I add guilt and further frustration to the mix. The spiral of procrastination becomes a vortex.

In the last few months and especially the last few weeks I have been in another cycle of trying to wrestle the demon of procrastination into submission.

If I follow course, this attempt will last another week or two and then will fade away.

So, I’m trying not to follow course. I’m seeking this time for more than just a different technique (though I am open to tools that will actually work for me) but a new attitude to my dilemma.

One day a couple months ago, there was a reference on my twitter feed to Mark Forster and a new approach to working with lists called Autofocus. It is a way to trust one’s intuition in deciding what needs done at any time. I liked it. It fit better than any other tool I’ve tried. In the last week, Mark has released a version 2 of Autofocus which I am using now. Yet, it wasn’t yet enough. My struggle was still a source of great frustration. My war on poor management was still on.

Today I identified this as what needs to change.

In my reading up and studying Autofocus, I found a link to a set of pages on procrastination itself from the Department of Health of Western Australia. I am still working my way through the exercises, and I am excited since it offers me a new approach.

One important aspect of that approach is grace. As long as I approach my time use from a position of judgment and condemnation I was always working and fighting against myself. And with all the self-criticism all that happens is I dig myself deeper into depression and self sabotaging activity.

That hit me this morning as I was journaling about my frustration with my lack of motivation to change.

Before anything can change, I have to begin with God’s grace and acceptance. Even as I recognize that I can be more than I am now, I have to begin with who I am right now, procrastination and all. The freedom to become begins with the freedom to be.

That is God’s approach to our own transformation. Grace comes at the beginning of God’s work in our lives, infuses every phase of the process and provides our hopes and dreams. I heard someone say that God loves us enough to come to us just the way we are, yet God also loves us so much that we aren’t allowed to remain as less than we can be.

I want to say at the forefront that I like the United Methodist’s Rethink Church media campaign. I find it a refreshing reminder and call to the Church that it is important for us to keep reviewing and reexamining our calling to be the people of God, the followers of Jesus.

However, one of the frequent  and even valid criticisms of the campaign is that it is simply that, a marketing campaign that simply repackages the same old organization. For many churches it will be just that. They will take no time or effort to think about what they are doing and why they are doing it, so they will remain the same old people doing the same old things. And my fear is that if anyone responds favorably to the ads they see by attending a church near them, they will experience that same old church that might have kept them away from church in the first place.

While I can’t guarantee change (even in my own life), I at least want to give God the chance to transform me so there is a possibility of something different. In May I preached a series of sermons on Rethinking Church. Over the next few weeks I will try to put them into words (I don’t write sermons, so I have to either have the taped ones transcribed and edited or I will have to go back and try to recreate them) to share.

This one isn’t one of those, but it offers an important background context.

Our danger in the church is that we tend to confuse the Creation with the Creator. This is more than simply worshiping the natural world around us, this is a danger that exists anytime we look to anything that God has created for life and hope instead of trusting the God who created all things. Do we find ourselves trusting in the things that God does and getting so wrapped up in those things that we end up ignoring the God who blesses us.

I see this in my own spiritual life whenever I try hard to develop a spiritual discipline like prayer or scripture reading. I might even have a certain mount of success at it so I feel really good about what I have done. We want to be people of the Book or people of prayer. So when we look to the things that define our character or that we are proud of, we look to those things. Or maybe we have a profound spiritual experience (like Paul in 2 Corinthians 12) and so we want to hold onto that experience and we get a lot of mileage from how that makes us feel. So we go from conference to conference, or read book after book, or listen to song after song that helps us maintain that great experience of God’s presence.

And when the experience fades, what then? We try to recreate it, because that experience of God is what blesses us and defines us. Or maybe some other idea comes to us about who we are as God’s people, but it might dilute our self-understanding of being people of the book, or a praying people, or even a church beyond the walls.

The experience or the thing God has given us becomes our central focus.

We have slipped into idolatry. The created thing has supplanted the Creator.

The experience of God at the beginning is a great gift. Then we focus on the gift and instead of remaining open to God’s own self, we want that experience we had before. We choose the lesser because it is known and familiar and has become part of our image (of self or of God) so we close our hearts and lives.

The idea of Rethink Church as simply an marketing campaign to get people to come to church can set us up for that same trap. Are we simply trying to get more people to come to our church and join our organization (thus offering the created thing as the answer to people’s needs and wants) or are we using the living work of God’s people as Christ’s representatives, the body of Christ in the world, to bring people to experience God’s gracious presence in their own way.

One of those strange phenomenons I see in my own life is the cycle of discouragement.

The first step in the cycle is that I do something, or something happens to me that is wonderful. Maybe I am blessed with a surprising and special grace from someone. Maybe out of the blue, I have one of those experiences of God’s living and loving presence. Or maybe, I have done something that I know has truly touched someone’s life. A great success. A tangible and visible fruit of my words or leadership. I feel on top of the world. The day is a very good day.

Then, the other part of the cycle kicks in. The doubts arise. The emptiness in my heart is palatable. It comes as wilderness. My well is dry. The grip of inertia mocks any attempt I make to rouse my mind or spirit.

I hate it. It drives me crazy. It is virtually predictable and ever dependable.

Yet, I found myself today with the revelation that this cycle might be a great gift from the same loving God who blesses me with the mountaintops.

Well, Paul in this week’s lectionary helped in that seeing…

I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven–whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows. And I know that such a person–whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows–was caught up into Paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat. On behalf of such a one I will boast, but on my own behalf I will not boast, except of my weaknesses.
But if I wish to boast, I will not be a fool, for I will be speaking the truth. But I refrain from it, so that no one may think better of me than what is seen in me or heard from me, even considering the exceptional character of the revelations. Therefore, to keep me from being too elated, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me, but he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong.  – 2 Corinthians 12:2-10 – NRSV

Now, I don’t really know what Paul’s thorn was, yet I don’t think that detail matters as much as Paul’s process of taking something which really bothered him and frustrated him, and recasts it in light of God’s grace into something that does serve God and Paul’s love relationship with God.

Could my cycle of discouragement be God’s gracious antidote to feeding my own ego-centric tendencies? When I feel empty, is it a wonderful invitation from God to let go of my own experience of God’s goodness and to really trust in God’s goodness alone? I still find the discouragement hanging over my head as I write, but I think I will thank God for the shade and wait to see what God will do next in my life.

When I first started becoming aware of the presence of depression in my life, I would describe it as a void of emotion. At one level, the emptiness felt like a nothingness. I would look inside and would not find feelings or words. Even now as I see signs of burn out and even acedia in my inner landscape it would appear to be life/God forsaken.

One of the things I have been learning over the years is my experience of emptiness is more akin to overload. Instead of not feeling, I am over-feeling and my soul clicks a switch to protect itself from self-destruct. This remembering does help calm the fear and soothe the guilt which amplifies the emotional overload and keeps the breaker switch tripped.

While the image of the desert does come from time to time, the prevailing image for me is that of dense fog or overgrown swamp. It isn’t so much that I can’t find feelings to feel, it is a matter of I can’t sort through all that are there.

For example, there are many times when I feel like I have no strength at all and I am tempted to run away and not come out until I feel all better. Yet, as I continue to explore and accept my 8 Enneatype, I recognize that deep strength and energy are at the core of my essence. I learn to look for the ways I have lost sight of that essential connection with my core. And that core is really there all the time.

Another example is the bad thought of acedia (my Enneatype 9 wing), which is at its base an uncaring. In the grip of that thought I don’t care. I can’t care for myself, I can’t care for my family, my ministry, or anyone/anything. So I just sit unmoving. But Essence comes to me and bothers me. I find myself caring that I don’t care. I remember that I am a caring person, and if I feel uncaring, I have lost sight of that essential connection to my core (yes, I just repeated myself from above). Caring deeply for life and others (including myself) is part of how God made each of us and I need to believe that Essence is not lost even when I have lost the sight of the connection.

Usually, when I rediscover the connection, it is because I have too much. I am lost in the everything unable to focus on the lines and threads of life’s Essence.

I feel the same way with my longing and yearning to write. I have a growing folder of random pieces of paper that represent thoughts and ideas to reflect further on and write to share with others. Some of those become the source of my blog posts (the purpose of this nice technology for me) in a more raw form. I don’t do much editing with my blog posts (you can probably tell) by choice. Someone I read suggested that the raw nature of the medium provides some way to slip thoughts past my very active internal critic. The only critic I engage is the one that assesses whether the words will bring harm to others especially my family.

I talk about grace and compassion a lot. Part of the reason for that is that I find myself needing to practice that grace and compassion with myself as well. To not only invite my inner critic to have compassion upon me, but to have compassion on the inner critic part of me as well.

Only that personal and divine grace will bring clarifying light to the fear-filled fog/darkness/swamp/whatever in my life. And a big part of that grace is not to give up on myself or the work of the Holy Spirit.

Jesus tells the story of two houses (Matthew 7:24-27). Both houses face great dangers: storms come, waves crash, and winds blow. Can you feel the fear and anxiety?

Sounds familiar. We face many events that trigger anxiety. Does anyone really know what is going on with the economy? Many people’s futures hold uncertainty. Billions of people in our world aren’t even sure what today holds. Families and friendships near to us are being stretched and are breaking or are broken. With each passing day and year we find our bodies and minds unable to work the way we want them and we wonder what is happening to us. We listen to and read the news from around the world and around the corner and hear all the dangers from people who seek power through violence and about microscopic organisms that could be anywhere. The stress-inducing list continues endlessly.

Back to the two houses of Jesus’ story. One house withstands the storms, one house falls apart. What is the difference?

One house is built on the shifting sands of myriad lesser voices around and within us? We try to follow popular opinion, but it is always fickle and gets blown about by the winds of fear. It doesn’t work to follow whatever is trendy, interesting, or in our face either; nothing solid there. An ancient writer talks about bad and harmful thoughts that destabilize our soul’s foundation: pride, envy, anger, greed, apathy, lust and gluttony. So often the voices of other people’s disapproval and judgment lead us to the more fearful responses. Some voices tell us there really isn’t anything to be afraid of, then reality comes crashing against us. Other voices only cry out that we are doomed. All these sandy voices see only part of the truth of life.

So we come to the second house. This house is built on solid rock, a whole and holy view of God’s greater reality. Here we see something deeper and more enduring than the shifting sands of time and the passing waves of the fear-tsunamis and anxiety-storms. When Jesus invites us into a worry-less life (Matthew 6:25-34) he does so based on a foundation of hoping and knowing that God’s great Love is the bigger truth that underlies and fills our life.

How do we build on that foundation? By returning again and again to the story of God’s love for us. Read your Bible to keep remembering, gather in worship with a community of faith people, and exercise that growing hope in prayer.

As we enter into the season of spring we look forward to being finished with the gray harshness of winter. It has been a long and weary season with the restrictions of frigid cold air and biting wind chills. I am also glad that I can hopefully put away the penguin ice walk for quite a while. Sure, there are things to enjoy about winter, but for most of us we are at the point where we forget those entertainments and now only feel the length of it hanging around.

We also find ourselves at the end of the church season of Lent. A time when many of us enter into an intentional time of discipline to prepare for our celebration of Resurrection on April 12. I need to confess that my enthusiasm for this season of spiritual training was very high on Ash Wednesday, but my feeling about Lent mirrors my feeling about the end of winter. Isn’t it time to be finished with it so I can get back to “normal?”

As I catch myself saying that, I just smile and shake my head. I think the winter frost has affected my brain. As one who walks with and guides people on their spiritual journey, I see that I have turned things upside down. Lent is not a season to just “get through” without learning anything or growing up any. Lent is a training season that helps us to live more fully the New Life we celebrate at Easter.

So instead of thinking that we are finally done with this spiritual time of Lent and we can soon return to our regular programmed lives, we are instead invited to see that we can now more fully get started on the larger God-life that Jesus brings us. So as we anticipate the unfolding of spring around us, we can also welcome the revelation of our Easter life. Our journey of the last few months has prepared us to stand tall, step out, and walk with our Savior. The old hymn says it well.

Just a closer walk with Thee,
Grant us Jesus, is my plea,
Daily walking close to Thee,
Let it be, Lord, let it be.

There is a set of notes on this week’s sermon preparation worksheet that I am pretty sure won’t fit, that I don’t want to lose out on giving life to.

I woke up the other morning with this contrast in my head: “I cannot persuade or convinve, but I can behold and celebrate, witness and express.”

Ever since our Stephen Ministry training materials talked about the difference between being result oriented and process oriented, I have been chipping away at shifting my overall perspective of life to reflect that new way. Simply stated, whenever we find our goals and expectations connected to what another person does for or because of us, we are goal oriented. That orientation becomes a source of frustration within ourselves and a temptation to manipulate and control in relationship to others. For better self and other relationship the idea is to keep our focus oriented on our participation in the process of life.

In order to live fully while participating in the process of life, did you catch the tricky part? We have to relinquish control. As an Enneagram 8, this is a hard one for me. Control and the fear of being under the control of others is a big red flag within my heart and soul. To remain in process means that we need to cultivate surrender and trust in deeper and broader ways.

I’ve been casting my attention to personal and ministry goals lately and noticing how pervasive this goal-orientation is. What are common ministry goals for a church? To increase attendance in worship, to get more people in  small groups, to increase financial contributions by ??%, etc. They sound good, but they set us up for manipulation and despair when people just don’t respond as we expected/wanted them to.

So with that idea, it is harder for me to be satisfied with motivations and goals that include the idea of persuading or convincing people. Even the idea of making people’s spiritual lives better or imporving their walk with God pushes that control button for me. I have to keep reminding myself, that I have no power or control over what another person decides or feels or thinks, why act as if I can influence or change that.

I find ideas like witness and express becoming more important to my motivations for writing and preaching and teaching. People don’t have to agree with or even like what I say. Am I clearly and fully expressing my own heart and thought? I certainly want to do so in a caring way, because expressing includes being true to my own personal integrity. And if I am simply expressing without any expectation of a result I have removed the teeth of manipulation and control from communication.

The other ideas that fit within my spiritual direction and worship leadership lives are Behold and Celebrate. I cannot create an experience of God within my spiritual directees or within the worshippers. When I try, then I become invasive of their very heart and soul. I have experienced that from the other side and it is not pleasant or respectful. Yet, we can together behold what God is doing in life and we can as a community (whether it is one on one, in small group, or larger congregation) celebrate (give witness to) that activity of God within us.

As I make this shift in my own life, I find less frustration and more fulfillment in ever increasing parts of my life and ministry.

Yesterday I started a preaching series on Lessons from the Crisis Center. First focus area was worry and Care. One scripture source was Psalm 121. Here are the first couple verses:

I lift my eyes to the hills–
from where will my help come?
My help comes from the Lord,
who made heaven and earth. – Psalm 121:1-2 NRSV

I can remember a few years ago, I thought this was such a wonderful image: we go through troubled times and then we cast our eyes up to hills where God sits enthroned above the heavens and we find there, God’s help.

Then I was reminded of an important piece of the original cultural context that changed the dynamics of this image.

When the Psalmist wrote, this hills were not necesarily the residence of the God of creation, others resided there. The hills surrounding Jerusalem and ther other town in Judea held the High Places, the temples and worship centers for the various idols and other gods that were continued temptations and the shame of the people which led to their eventual conquering and captivity. While Yahweh created them and led them into freedom and the promised land, the hills and the rituals that resided there remainded active. The gods of fertility and harvest, the beings that resided in the air and the sea and the soil seemed so much more accessible to the people than Yahweh who eschewed those statues and visible representations. And as the cult in Jerusalem grew in influence, I can imagine it was much easier to just go to the corner high place to say a prayer and make a small sacrifice than to travel all the way to the temple or tabernacle site.

Even today we understand the importance of visibility and accessibility in marketing: location, location, location.

But of course, we in our modern/post-modern civilized society doesn’t need to worry about High Places and idol worship, right?

In my mind, I believe we become susceptible to idolatry when we seek in other people or other things the source of life and when we become more enamored of the creation over the Creator. With that idea, there are many places within and without the church that can become for us the High Places.

As I was thinking of “lifting up our eyes to the hills” to seek our help from other things, I can see us naturally looking in 3 basic places for help outside of God. And all three have a strong element of personal control.

The first one would be trying to fix things through our skills and programs (skill sets). Things aren’t working so we initially think we are doing something wrong. If it’s broken, maybe I can fix it. I can learn. I just need to find the right book/expert/trainer/helper/blog that will teach me just what I can do to make it all better. I have benefited (and continue to benefit) from authors of all kinds in learning about being a parent, husband, preacher, pastor, spiritual director, manager, more productive person, and a writer. My extensive personal library is a testimony to some of that assistance, but it is also a symptom of the vulnerability to this High Place in my life. I know the inner dialogue: “this book really helped me with this, but it isn’t quite right, maybe this new book will be just what I need to get it all figured out and under control… ooh, pretty cover.”

It doesn’t have to be limited to personal Skill learning, just consider the plethora (I love that word) of programs available to churches and businesses to get their ministry/marketing/fund-raising/inter-personal communications/etc on a winning track. Every church I have ever been in has a closet somewhere with old stewardship campaign programs that work for a year or two and then no longer “produce” so need new skill sets. I can also name in my own life many schools of thought that are important to who I am, but can so easily become the be-all-and-end-all of idea systems: process, post-modern, liberation, spirtuality, enneagram, labyrinths, missional, family systems, and lately emergent, and I know there are so many more. Good ideas and great learnings, but when they become our High Places and source of life, we each have a problem.

A second High Place would be technology and our tools. Nothing bad about them as far as they go, but it is so easy to become so wrapped up in the latest and greatest that we get out of focus. Just ask my wife, I love technology and I can so easily get wrapped up in computers, internet, blogs, twitter, and I know the next “best” thing will be attractive. I have been blessed with limited spending money otherwise I would be one of those who envy and drool over the latest hardware (look it is so tiny and does so much). Sure, I have tried Covey, and GTD, and other tools to get past productivity blocks, but I haven’t found the right one yet (so, the drive for more power and more help is fueled).  How much do we depend on our technologies (hardware and software and processes)  to be The Answer that will fix all of our personal and societal ills? The more we do, the more we “lift our eyes to the hills.”

The third High Place I considered is energy. No, not green or electrical or wind or ethanol, but personal energy. How often do we respond to something being wrong by trying to apply more energy to it. We work harder. We work faster. Somehow we think that we face our crisis and problem because we haven’t done enough, or we haven’t done it fast enough (overlap with technology), or well enough. (overlap with skills). We get stuck in that idea of personal control. I can fix my own problem with my own energy and my own work and using my own tools and applying my own skills. One of the hooks of idolatry in my mind is measuring. I don’t have what I want becuase I haven’t done enough to please the god. Or I didn’t practice the ritual correctly, I didn’t say the right words, but this time I will get it right and I will give enough so the god (of technology, of the market, of whatever) will finally deem me worthy of getting what I want.

Terrible traps aren’t they? We are all there and keeping coming back. I find myself a bit more sympathetic to those early Israelites and Judeans who just couldn’t give up their High Places.

But the witness and invitation of the Psalmist still comes to us. The source of our help needs to be based not in ourselves or in our control of things, but in the true source of life and help, the Creator. We are afraid and we worry because we find ourselves with a healthy shadow of doubt that God is there caring for us and helping us. And that is the grace of faith: to reverse the perspective. Put those technologies and skills and our investment of energy back into their places of serving  andbeing conduits for the flow of God’s Creating and Living Essence. We have to continue being intentional about seeing God working through those various gifts. As we do that, I think even the hills will breathe a sigh of relief to be able to be just what God created them to be: witnesses to all the ways God is at work in living.

I spent some time today trying to figure out what approach to take into preaching through Lent this year. For some reason, the lectionary passages didn’t capture my attention as they usually do when I do my seasonal planning.

As I reflected on themes, one idea kept resurfacing: what are we in danger of losing in life in the face of crisis.

Of course, a big crisis on people’s minds today is the economic one. Our finance committee had some unpleasant moments as they looked at lower donation numbers and higher winter heating costs. Yet, in the last few days I have been in conversation with people who are facing the crisis of marriage disintegration, cancer, emergency surgery, as well as job loss or the threat of it.

While hearing all those voices of fear and anxiety and despair and even panic, I hear the whisper of another voice. A voice that is seeking to remind me that life is still a good thing and that we are held beyond what we can remember.

So, my Lenten preaching is unfolding as a series of reflections on what the scripture and the Spirit want to tell us we are at risk of losing when we only hear the voices of fear and loss. And what is the more we can gain as we again attend to that tender voice of  the Beloved.

The list of themes is still forming and may spill over beyond Easter, but isn’t that the way it is supposed to be. In the midst of our darkness and fear, Life spills over out of the shadows to carry us beyond Easter eternally.