A Labyrinthine Journey: Soon Coming in 3-D

I don’t know about you, but without thinking about it, my office space can quickly become overrun and unmanageable. The piles of papers seem to multiply overnight and the notes pop up in strange places so there is less and less space for me to use. And I know that without attention I easily lose wonderfully creative ideas somewhere. That usually continues until I finally pay attention, then once I get past the feeling of being overwhelmed I have to face the situation. Over time I have learned that when I get to that point, I just have to begin someplace and persist in choosing to keep up with that area until there is space again for work.

I see the season of Lent in much the same way. Without really thinking about it we so easily clutter up our lives with many things that just fill up our soul space. Sometimes it shows up on our calendars: we find ourselves running from one thing to another thing and then we have so many things that we think would be wonderful to do and before we know we have no time for friends, family, or God. Then other times we find our hearts overwhelmed with worries and fears that leave us tired and weary, so there is nothing left to even think about other people in our lives or to even begin to consider God’s presence.

So for me, Lent is about Making Space. We are offered the opportunity to stop and see how our lives have been filled with distractions and spiritual clutter that our souls are choked up with the weeds of the junk of the world around us. One meaning of salvation is that God by grace gives us room to move and freedom to live and grow. Yet, we must begin somewhere in responding to our soul messes. We cannot do it all at once nor can we do it all by ourselves, but in Lent we can make the choice to allow God’s Spirit to get started in clearing out the spiritual clutter.

So the Lenten question becomes “What clutters up my life leaving no room or energy to love God or to love my neighbor?” Take a look at your schedule, what can be dropped from our time line to allow you to spend time with family or in prayer? What about attention and focus. Multi-tasking is a myth that only keeps us always tired and worn out. Or if we can find the energy to do all those things, we are left with anxiety and stress that rob our spirits from being able to do anything with anyone. How about possessions: do the things in your life possess you and keep you from enjoying them because you are always worried that something might happen to them? Or maybe there is something else in your life that you recognize clutters your soul and mind leaving you with no time or space for God and all the blessings God offers us.

This Lent, let go of what gets in the way of your walk with God and be open to beholding the presence of God. All this is so you can be more free to live the compassion, the freedom, and the joy-filled lives that God comes to bring.

One of the issues for me in the last few months and maybe even for years is that I have tended to follow the various winds around me without my own personal direction. There is a great value to being spontaneous and “infinitely flexible,” but there is also a great cost. I tend to be open to allowing other people determine who I am to be and how I am to act and function.

One underlying theme throughout my own spiritual journey lately has been the desire and endeavor to find my own voice. One of the purposes of this blog was to hopefully stimulate that exploration and that expression of my personal view on life. So there was a personal agenda functioning. Yet, one reason I am in ministry and another reason I started this blog was the idea that as I explore my voice and view that we all can grow in the sharing and in the dialogue.

Well, one thing I learned was that the blog itself was not going to help me define my vision and my voice. I needed to have that voice already and use this tool as a way to explore the voice I already see myself having. Make sense? The answer to my quest was not here, but still needed to be explored in my own inner space.

During the last couple months I have been trying to be more intentional about searching for that voice in order to have something to not bring to this space, but to my preaching space and maybe even to other writing spaces. I have pages and pages of snippets of ideas for writing short or long, but was still blocked. Last month, I ran across the following article that inspired me to take up the task.

Should You Write a Personal Mission Statement? – Dumb Little Man

Your personal mission statement should be a concise representation of what’s most important to you, what you desire to focus on, what you want to achieve, and, ultimately, who you want to become. In its purest form, it’s an approach to your life, one that allows you to identify a focus of energy, creativity, and vision in living a life in support of your inner-most beliefs and values.

That was what I was searching for. So I have been brainstorming and reflecting and praying and mind-mapping first my own personal set of values and beliefs. What are the items that color and energize everything I do that makes it appropriate to me. I ended up with quite the document, it was a mindmap with 6 main branches and each one leading to 2, 3, or more sub branches. The other day, I looked at what I had and decided that it was in good shape, so it was time to move onto the Personal Mission Statement.

Last night I sat down with my values and beliefs mindmap and a number of key pages from my personal journaling and reflection over the last months and years to fill my head with possibilies and then went to bed on it.

That was an important thing for me to do. Part of my belief system was that I am not the creator of my own agenda, but that my life flows most freely as I listen to God’s will and trust that will to be expressed in the faithfully personal way God has set up for me. The idea is that God created me the way I am (whether I see and understand that way or not is irrelevant) and so the best one to help me understand how to best be myself was God.

I went to bed last night not knowing when God was going to work or how or what was going to be given to me, but knowing that it was best for me to place it in God’s hands.

Little did I know.

Around 4:00 in the morning I woke up with a phrase in my head and the sense in my gut, and whole body actually that this was it. I laid there for about half an hour trying to play with the statement to see if it was good or better or worse than other variations on the theme. None of the variations had the same sort of spirit affirmation that the original phrase had.

To Behold the Abounding Presence of God

So for now I have a personal mission statement. I don’t  really fully understand the implications of it all, but as I sit with it, I find myself excited and energized with the possibilities this statement holds.

Over the next few days I want to reflect further on it and hopefully enter into a dialogue with the Spirit that will lead to a more free experience of life and love.

Every Christmas season, a different character from that original story catches my attention and invites my personal reflection. Usually they are not what we might call the main characters, but are those who are either briefly mentioned or whose presence can be inferred. This year I find myself considering the Innkeepers.

Here we have people who make their living by extending hospitality to others. They depend on welcoming strangers for their livelihood. The good innkeepers don’t do it just to make a buck. I can picture them being people who enjoy reaching out to people and making them feel at home. After all, if a traveler comes through and finds a nice place to stay once, you will have a steady customer who will spread the word to others. In order to act as they did in the story, they must have been overwhelmed with the census business. We know how difficult it is to be generous and hospitable when we feel stretched and stressed. So I find myself thinking that if they had only known who was standing at their door seeking a place of rest and a place to be born that they would have done whatever needed to be done to make a place for them.

At least, I would hope they would. Yet, when I look deeper at my own attitudes and actions, I wonder if they would have made the effort if they had known. There is a self-centered part to each of us that doesn’t want to be bothered. Maybe we find ourselves too busy seeking to get and receive to slow down and consider how we can give simply and genuinely. Maybe we find ourselves too focused on seeking specific goals in our lives that we miss the spontaneous gift of love that God offers us. Or maybe we know that by opening ourselves up to Love that our lives will be changed forever. Christmas is about the world changing forever anyway. We yearn to be more alive and loved, yet when that Love and Life comes to our doors it is too easy to be too busy.

Christ asks for a home in your soul, where he can be at rest with you, where he can talk easily to you, where you and he, alone together, can laugh and be silent and be delighted in one another. All this may seem daring, but it is true; it is the meaning of the Incarnation.

[Caryll Houselander, from Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany with Caryll Houselander, edited by Thomas Hoffman.]

This Christmas hear the invitation of God to make room in your heart and life for the Joy of the World to come and fill you. Merry Christmas.

Yesterday I met with my Spiritual Director and the topic of discussion was a sensed invitation to rest. This morning to continue my thoughts I played with iMindMap and came up with this graphic about the thoughts and ideas. Here are some words to give part of my reflection to the mind map.

There were a number of facets to this rest. One was to see self-care as a broader kind of rest. A rest of actually nurturing the body that God gave me by resting well, eating well and moving well. Just sitting still alone didn’t seem adequate for the kind of rest I was sensing my body needing. I have been watching what I eat and am trying to daily move my body in a relaxed yet sustained way. In the last 3 weeks I have managed to lose 10 pounds. That is a good thing, but the rest will not come so easily. I still have about 30-40 pounds I want to lose to get to a healthy weight. That way, my body can rest well as it lives (all that extra fat makes the heart work harder).

Another facet of rest is the idea of the holistic sabbath. This is broader than just taking a day a week for rest (which I still have as a challenge to do). I saw this as an invitation to see in my centering prayer and in giving God time for contemplative prayer and scripture reading a giving of sabbath to God in each day. So prayer does not become simply something I think I have to do each day, but it becomes a gift of space and time in my life every day to be intentional about God’s presence.

The other main image that came from the idea of Rest was the image of flow. The flow of water through a stream bed has been there for a few months for me. And until lately, the image has been one of the stream being blocked and dammed up. So my desire and frustration and struggle has been to find freedom for myself. And this struggle has been long-standing. Every few months I will rankle against the feeling of being bound by something and unable to be free to be myself or to do what I want to do. I am usually standing on the shore trying to figure out what the damming rocks are and how to get rid of them. And usually I never discovered the answer.

The facet of rest as Flow is to see that I have been the damming obstacle. I have placed my self-centeredness in the center of the flow of God’s love and grace in my life. I have wanted to control the power of the Spirit for my own ends and to match my own desires. Even my desire for freedom was cast in terms of what I wanted for myself. The invitation to rest is becoming for me an invitation to get my ego-self out of the way of the free flow of God’s will. To maintain the stream bed image, I need to let go of the felt need or desire to direct the flow in my direction and allow myself to experience the freedom that comes with following the current of what God is doing in and through my life. My own struggles and frustrations were not simply in response to the blockage to the Spirit, they were a big part of the obstacles themselves.

So the invitation to rest is the invitation to let go of frustration and struggle and surrender to God’s will. This surrender is my consent to being re-oriented in how I choose. The reality of life is that God is already at the center and I need to let go of my illusions that my will is the center of life. Therein lies the freedom, but not as the goal of my struggles, but as God’s response to my surrender.

I’m sure I will reflect more on this.

Ah, Thanksgiving time here in the United States. A wonderful excuse to blow out your diet, take time off, and then max out your credit cards with Christmas shopping. OK, that is the cynical side of things, but I really do love thanksgiving and this year I have been doing a lot of reflecting  on grateful living.

For children’s message the other day I defined saying thanks as telling others that they have made your life better. Whether it is the person who hands you a glass of cold water, or the Creator God who gave you life in the first and in the eternal place, gratitude is a wonderful gift to give back to someone. The great thing is that by naming that interdependency with another, we are also making their life and the whole universe a better place. Gratitude is one of those always good things in my mind.

As long as we stay away from the 1811 Syndrome we are fine. The 1811 Syndrome? Hear the word from Luke 18:11:

The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector….”

Ooo, how often do we start out seeking to piously give thanks for all God’s blessings in our lives and we fall into the 1811 Syndrome’s trap: turning the gift around and making it into a source of pride, vanity, and self-centeredness. A lot, I would guess.

We do this is many different areas of life. We might start out being grateful for the circumstances of our lives (country, home, work, car, income, etc) and end up feeling superior to others and then disrespecting those whose homes are not as nice as ours, or who don’t live in our great land (whatever great land we might happen to live in). I think if you think about it, you can find your own set of paths into the trap.

The reponse? Generosity. A big part of the problem with the 1811 Syndrome is the idea that our blessings are for us. In re-reading the great Christ hymn in Philippians 2:5-11, the line is verse 6 is very appropriate:”

[Jesus], through he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited (or grasped)”

The example of Jesus shows us that he did not see the great power and glory of the Godhead as reason for personal gain or self-centered exploitation. I see Jesus’ ability to avoid the 1811 Syndrome (though if anyone had reason to boast it would be the Son of God, don’t you think?) linked to his letting go of privilege and glory all in the name of compassion and generous grace.

So be thankful. But in stead of stopping there, be thankful and generous and giving and gracious and hospitable and kind and all that goes with being loving.

Here is a headline you probably won’t see too often:

Homeostasis: Friend, Foe, Gift

Before you really think I have gone off the deep end, let me unpack this some for you. Homeostasis is a sort of internal gyroscope that is always trying to keep life steady. You can see it in action if you spin a wheel and then try to tilt that wheel from side to side. You will feel the wheel resisting that action. It does change, but with a lot of energy used to change the tilt. Homeostasis is the term used by those who work in soul and psychological arenas to describe our natural tendency to want to maintain the status quo and to resist change. Sometimes that process within us is a helpful thing, sometimes it is not.

Homeostasis is a good friend to us when we go through trying and upsetting times in our lives. On a ship, when a big wave comes and tilts the deck to one side or the other, the inertial dampeners in the ship try to bring it back to an even keel. The storms of life do come at us from many different angles and they can tend to really through our lives out of balance. It is nice to know that with time, our natural tendency is toward balance. If you look back over your life you can see where you have faced many truly life-changing events, but through them all your life has pretty much re-oriented itself. At times, that is truly nice to know.

However, at certain places in our lives this process becomes a great enemy. Homeostasis is in one sense a neutral force in our lives. It does not know or care if our current “normal” is healthy for us or not. Consider when you have a bad habit you wish to change: homeostasis doesn’t know it is a bad habit, it just sees it as our normal. This is part of the power of addictions in our lives, some habits, activities, and attitudes have become so much a part of us for so long, that they are now “normal” to us. It goes the other way also. Maybe we want to develop a new routine of exercise, or eating healthy food, or even a new practice of prayer and Bible study, but we find ourselves stuck after a few weeks. The old routines of life just become easier. No matter how hard we try to will change in our lives, either to change unhealthy patterns or to begin healthy ones, we keep being pulled back to the old way of being “normal” for us.

Herein lies the gift of homeostasis: we must ask for help! If you are like me, you try to make all these changes on your own. You say to yourself that you can do this. But you and I can’t. Not without help at least. That is why people form support groups, or join classes to make some changes in life. Yet, the biggest thing we must remember to do is to pray asking for God’s help. Some changes we want to make can only happen as the Spirit of God comes into our spirits and souls and transforms us from the inside out. Then as God makes those changes with our inner orientation then our receiving and giving help to one another becomes truly gifts from God in leading us toward greater holiness and wholeness of living.

Sorry I haven’t been on lately, a lot of things involved with moving, including having to find new routines. To get back into things, here is the monthly newsletter article I wrote yesterday.

How’s your balance lately? Mine isn’t all that great at the moment. It takes me a while to read the symptoms, but whenever I find myself weary, stressed out and feeling lost, I can usually find something that is out of balance. I’m not too surprised with everything turned upside down in our lives. So my spiritual journey right now is to restore that sense of richness to my life.

Richness? Isn’t balance a more precarious endeavor? I used to see balance as if we are walking on the edge of a very thin line. We had to be afraid of extremes and wary of any changes to the delicate nature of our living. There was always an underlying uncertainty about whether or not we were living our lives the right way. We had to watch every step we took with fear and judgment. If we didn’t we fell and we were unsure if we would be able to get up again.

Then my image of balance changed. It was all part of that seeking to discover what Jesus meant about the abundant life. An important element of that abundance was the elimination of fear and a greater appreciation of the certainty of the presence of God’s grace and love. The knife’s-edge view of balance would not allow that. The balanced life of God is not about fear but about fullness. I began to visualize the image of animals grazing in a field. If they all ate in the same corner of the pasture the grass would be ruined and they would become ill. The herder desires healthy animals and a field that would serve for a long time. So the grazers would be led to enjoy the fullness of the field. They would explore the different flavors of grass and grain as the field is used in a balanced way.

Seeking balance in our own lives has that same kind of feel to it. God did not mean for us to become limited in what is life to us. Life is much more enjoyable and rich when we find ways to play, work, and rest. We need to learn how to be alone well and how to be with others well. Our vision of where we live must includes the neighbors who live within feet, yards, and miles of us as well as expanding to the edges and ends of this globe that God loves. We need to learn to truly listen to others as well as how to speak plainly with integrity and compassion. We need to grow in being people of prayer and being people who serve. And how much richer can life be when we can enjoy the beauty of silence, of song, of laughter and even of tears.

This is not easy, but it more promising to seek to enrich life with God’s boundless love than to risk failure without it. Where do you need to stretch out in the pasture God is leading you to live in?

One of the books I picked up on my retreat a month or so ago was The Daily Reader for Contemplative Prayer, a compendium of excerpts from Father Thomas Keating. I would highly recommend this to anyone who wants to go deeply deeper into their spiritual lives. The other day, there was a line that I am still pondering.

The paradox is that we can never fully fulfill our role until we are ready to let it go. [June 24, p. 175]

This struck me as profoundly true. There was a time when I hungered to preach. I couldn’t see myself not preaching, so I had a sort of desperation to be the one who preached all the time. However, over the past years I have been learning that my life can be fulfilling whether I am preaching or whether I am not. I have seen this leading to a greater freedom in allowing others to preach in my presence (sounds incredibly arrogant doesn’t it. well, it was) without having to critique their “performance.” I have also seen this leading me to greater freedom in my preaching and others have noticed that new release of energy once I let go of the need to preach.

I have also experienced this in the process of being a developing spiritual director. When I started out, I have to confess, I did it because I thought it was something with prestige and honor. It was something that not too many people were doing (that I knew at the time) and so there was a need I felt within me for that kind of recognition. However, over the last three years of this training and now as I stand on the threshold of this new ministry, I see that the most important part of the preparation wasn’t the classes (as great and wonderful as they were) or the readings (what can I say about the life-giving words I have found in the last few years), but the process of letting go of those false and self-centered motivations for answering this call of God toward offering direction to people who are seeking. I am learning that I serve best when I let go of any personal need or gain from the “honor” of being a spiritual director. It isn’t about me or anything I may gain, but it is all about what God’s Spirit is doing in someone’s life. If I am allowed the gift of being with someone on the holy ground of their journey with God then that is enough. If I am allowed to see from afar what God is doing in someone’s life then that, too is enough.

It is about letting go of my false ideas of “happiness” according to Keating that lead to living in my true human-ness.

Went to the labyrinth this afternoon because I thought I needed to refocus. It has been difficult with the move coming in 6 days (a surreal feeling) to stay focused on the things that I think I need to be doing. So I went seeking a gift to concentrate and focus more on my stuff and on God. The temptation with all the busyness is to say I will get back to God when things settle down. Yet, you and I know that then is the time when I most need to seek God’s face.

Anyway, back to the labyrinth. As I walked I realized that focus was indeed my problem, but not in the sense that I didn’t have enough of it, but as in I had too much of it. What I needed from God was not more focus but more openness. The whole playing field was being changed in front of me. I need to have my heart broken open to let all of God’s presence in. The dilemma was that I was working real hard to be so focused on this project or that task that I was focusing God’s presence out of my living moments.

What is the essence of obsession and addiction? An almost compulsive (read binding as in prison) focus on something. One danger of this compulsive focusing is that we close our hearts, minds, souls, and bodies off to the other parts of life. I had my headphones on the other day, focused on something on my computer (I don’t even remember what now) when I felt this slight touch on my shoulder. I jumped and then turned and saw that my wife was home early from work. My shutting down of my senses led me to miss hearing the presence of love.

Is God’s presence focused? Can God only be found in this sacred place or that holy mountain? Does God speak only in one way or in many ways? How have we closed ourselves off to many of the ways that God wants us to delight in Grace and Love by thinking we have to focus more on a limited set of ways God’s presence is with us? I am so glad that as God creates the universe that God didn’t focus obsessively on only a few things but comes to us with broader strokes of fine detail and outrageous color and shape.

Ironically, as I walked, I realized that I am able to accomplish more things better and with greater joy when I am broken open to the breadth of God-life than when I focus exclusively on only one or two things. That also keeps my heart open for those gentle touches of Love that invite me into a new way of delighting in Life and the God-life in me, in us, in the universe.

A saying from Abba Achilles:

Abba Bitimius said, ‘One day when I was going down to Scetis, someone gave me some fruit to take to the old men. So I knocked on the door of Abba Achilles’ cell , to give him some. Be he said to me, “Brother, from now on I do not want you to knock on my door with any sort of food if you do not go to knock at any other cells either.” So I withdrew to my cell, and took the fruit to the church.’ [The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Benedicta Ward, trans, Cistercian Publications, 1975, Achilles #2, p. 29]

This is a bit of a challenge to our pride and privilege based culture. A culture that we who are clergy fall prey too very easily. One thing I am learning from reading the desert wisdom is that humility is absolutely essential to their view of spiritual health.

Yet, this temptation of pride leads me to be tempted by people who want to give me an advantage because I am “the pastor,” or even to people who want to offer a courtesy to me and I too easily accept. In my own mind I am simply accepting their act of generosity and gratitude, but Abba Achilles would most likely say this is a feeding of pride not humility. How many times do I find myself seeking to be named as a special presence in a group as a pastor instead of simply being left a person in the crowd? Is that pride? Maybe.

I have heard of clergy identifying themselves as Reverends when pulled over for speeding to avoid the ticket, or to excuse their passing by lines or asking to be served specially. I think Abba Achilles would be very definite about naming that as anything but humility and being overt pride. I would probably even wonder if there is a question of injustice at work when we seek to use “status” to avoid responsibility for our own actions or to take advantage.

Abba Achilles invites me to reconsider how I use my ordination. If I use it for pride and privilege then I need to “return to my cell.” If I use it for service with humility then I must be joyously grateful for the opportunity.