Relationally Messy: It’s Normal

Posted: June 17, 2020 in relationships
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“Am I a good person?”

My daughter Rosalind asked my daughter Laurel this today.

Laurel gave her the Hasper answer. But first she asked a question.

“Why do you ask?“

“Well,” said Rosalind, “the house manager got mad at us today because we were getting into it with each other, and so she told us all that we need to shape up.“

Rosalind lives in a community of persons with disabilities. It’s a beautiful campus, with professional leadership, a model for the whole world.

“So you feel badly because she got mad at you?” Asked Laurel.

“Yeah,” said Rosalind. “ I don’t like it when people get mad at me.“

“Yeah I don’t either. Nobody likes that. But you have gotten mad at her haven’t you?“

“Yeah, I have.“

“Well, we all get mad at each other sometimes. The house manager sounded kind of like mom didn’t she?Getting mad doesn’t mean we don’t like each other.“

That’s the Hasper answer. When things get messy, we normalize messy. When we get a little crazy, we normalize crazy. That’s what human beings need. They need to know that the things they feel and the things they do are things other people have felt and done, because they have, but we lose track of that and we need other people to remind us of that from time to time.

“You’re not a bad person, Rosalind. You’re a good person.”

“Thanks,” said Rosalind.

I heard this story from Laurel when I talked to her on the phone later the same day, and so I called Rosalind and told her that Laurel had told me about the conversation. We went over it again and I reiterated to Rosalind that mad was normal and that it didn’t mean that she wasn’t good.

I told her, “You’re a good person. You are a kind person.

“Yeah,“ said Rosalind. “I think I would’ve been more lenient on everybody.“

“Yep,“ I said. “That’s who you are.“

“What does lenient mean?“ Rosalind asked me.

“It means exactly how you used it. It means to be easy on someone. It means to be kind and gentle and give them a break. I think that’s the way you are, kind like that.”

“Sometimes I get my words mixed up,“ said Rosalind.

”You get your words right a lot. That’s one of your strengths. You have a good vocabulary.“

So I piled it on, the Hasper way. Relational messiness is the norm. And we process it with words. And we help each other feel good again.

It’s good to see my girls living the way they were raised. Comfortable with mess. Lenient, especially when it comes to emotions.

I like it.

I need it myself.

It’s a model for the whole world.

A “Yay!” For Rosalie

Posted: June 8, 2020 in unity
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Today, I wrote a magical story, below, for Rosalie, my new granddaughter. It contains the values I hope she and every other human on this planet will come to hold, the value of all creatures and all persons of all kinds from all places. May we fly together and shout, “Yay!”

Wherever Rosalie went magic happened.

“Yay!” Rosalie yelled.

Rosalie’s mom took her to the ocean. They sat on a bench overlooking the beach. Her mom held Rosalie in her arms.

“Yay!” shouted Rosalie.

And suddenly Rosalie became a blue and pink whale wearing a soft, silver beanie cap. She looked at her mom. She was a bright orange whale. They swam together through a swarm of tasty treats.

“Yay,” she and her mom both cheered as Rosalie took big yummy bites.

The next day, Rosalie’s dad took her to the zoo.

They went to the elephant exhibit.

“Yay!” Rosalie shouted, and the next instant she turned into a bright orange elephant. She looked over at her dad. He was now a bright yellow elephant.

“Yay!” Rosalie tooted through her trunk, and suddenly she wore a blue blanket, bright yellow ear dangles and a red cap.

“Yay!” shouted Rosalie and she rose into the sky — trunk-in-trunk with her dad — and they flew above the animal enclosures.

And all the creatures of the zoo, black leopards, yellow giraffes, brown bears and striped zebras waved and cheered.

The next day Rosalie stayed home. But that evening as the sun set, her Papa grandpa took her by the hand and led her into the backyard.

“Look,” her Papa Grandpa said, and he pointed at a bright point of light beside a crescent moon.

“It’s the planet Venus,” said Papa.

“Yay!” said Rosalie and she and Papa suddenly turned into spaceships and floated up into the sky. They sailed past the silver moon, circled Mars and rocketed on toward the cloud swirlies of Jupiter and the golden rings of Saturn.

“Yay,” yelled Rosalie and Papa as they surged toward Pluto.

The next day her grandma took her to the library.

“Yay,” whispered Grandma and Rosalie in their special library voices.

And they sat together in the library and read books about people paddling in canoes in a far off places.

“Yay,” yelled Rosalie and suddenly she and her grandma were in a canoe. And as grandma paddled it along, its paddles became wings, and it lifted into the air and flew out over the big, blue-green world. And they flew to far off places, and everywhere they went, they stopped and made new friends.

“Yay!” their new friends shouted with them.

The next day, Rosalie’s whole family got together, and while dinner was being made her aunt sat with her on the couch.

“Tell me a story,” said Rosalie.

“Okay,” said her aunt. “Once there was a little girl named Rosalie, and she loved to yell, ‘Yay!’ And whenever Rosalie yelled ‘Yay!’ wonderful and magical things happened.”

“Yay!” yelled Rosalie and her aunt. By now everyone who loved Rosalie knew to yell “Yay!”

And suddenly Rosalie and her aunt and her mom and her dad and her papa and her grandma flew out of the window into the bright blue sky.

And holding hands, they soared out over the bright blue-green earth.

“Yea” her whole family shouted.

And looking back Rosalie saw a zoo full of yelling animals and a canoe full of yelling friends flying up to join them. And they all shouted, “Yay!”

Then around and around the earth they all went, Rosalie leading the way, the planets trailing behind them like the tail of a kite.

“YAY!”

The Usefulness of Uselessness

Posted: June 6, 2020 in becoming
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Jenny Odell in her book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy makes a case for re-examine our lives and considering seeing the “usefulness of uselessness. “

That rings a bell these days as we reflect on the last few months of social isolation. What have we learned? Perhaps we have learned how to do a nothing that is a something. Perhaps we have simply learned to tolerate being quiet. Perhaps we have been taught how to do less but love ourselves the same or more. Perhaps we have learned we have value even when we don’t appear in public.

Did we just lose two months? No, we lived those. And we connected with family. And we connected with others by texting and video chatting and sending pictures and anyway we could. Maybe we learned how to reach out with sincere concern for others more. Perhaps we learned not to wait for others to make contact.

What kind of life might we return to as society opens back up?

We might jump back into rushing around from place to place. Hopefully we don’t just renter the ratty-rat-a-tat-tat race. Let’s not fail to have learned that aloneness, repose, quiet, even fear have something to teach us. What have you learned in this time?

Perhaps we have learned that we are stronger than we thought. I learned I was both weaker and stronger. Perhaps we could see that society and work and school and even church and particularly social media drives us to keep trying to project public worth or success. But we have value because we exist. Gods love for us and our love for us isn’t based on starring. When we haven’t much to brag about on Facebook, we still have value.

Odell writes, “It is the invasive logic of commercial social media and its financial incentive to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction. It is furthermore the cult of individuality and personal branding that grow out of such platforms and affect the way we think about our offline selves and the places where we actually live.”

Do we have to appear on social media to feel alive, valuable, present? Nope. Do we have to post pictures that make us look happy to be happy? No, research shows us that online “likes” — the social validation and feedback loop — actually just makes us more anxious and insecure.

What if, as we re-enter being social or working again, we carry a new sense of a resilient self forward, a new appreciation for the family we live with, a fresh value for silence, a treasuring of the value of being alone, and the sweetness of a self-affirming interiority? What if we don’t go back to trying to prove we have value. We just do.

We are not first a brand or an image to keep up by showing up. We are not a personage appearing but a person always, not an it but a thou, not alone no matter how alone we were or are.

What have we learned by sometimes doing nothing that was something these last few months?

Perhaps, producing or not, being public or not, we have learned to hold ourselves dear, and to hold others dearest.

I Will Have Myself Carried

Posted: May 20, 2020 in god
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As Christians, what can we do when we can’t do any more?

What can we say when our health problems, relational problems, money problems or situational problems overwhelm us? What words can we use then?

We might consider twisting the English language. Perhaps the shape of a pretzel will work.

Consider some aspects of ancient languages that might provide a model for this. Greek, Sanskrit and Old Norse have a grammatical middle voice, a voice between the active voice (Mother’s adore their babies) and the passive voice (Babies are adored by their mothers). The middle voice can say this in a third way, “I will have myself adored.” That’s the middle voice. English doesn’t normally use that voice, but as you see, the middle voice can be voiced in an odd, twisted way.

Rachel Winner, in her book Still, gives two examples of the middle voice as she explores her wavering spiritual experience as a Christian.

“I will have myself carried.”

“I will have myself saved.”

I love those unique expressions of “ I will have.” They contain longing, hope and confidence.

The middle voice — found in “I will have myself saved” — indicates that it is another agent than oneself that does the saving. In this case, the implied agent for the Christian — saying such a thing — is God.

We Christians might think of this as a way of saying, “I will put myself in God’s hands, and he will rescue me,” or “I will present myself to God. He will save me.”

But the mid-voiced form, “I will have myself saved” is better. It is better because it says what we want to say concisely, and because it accurately respects something about God and about oneself that is true. It respects God as savior. And it respects oneself as worthy of being saved.

Also, notice that it is spoken in this pretzeled form of the language almost as a demand. “I will have salvation!” Or, it is spoken with certainty, “I will not entertain any options or scenarios of not being saved.” Or it comes across as a foregone conclusion, “I will not, not be saved by God.” Or, we may say, it is spoken with active confidence, “I will take action to render myself present to God to save me and he will do it.” It is all of those.

About God it implies, “I know that when I present myself to God, he will carry and rescue me.” It reminds me of Job’s famous, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him: but I will maintain mine own ways before him.” Job 13:15

This passage from Job is often misread. It is not an expression of the ultimate form of passivity. Job is presenting himself as both active and worthy. In maintaining his innocence, his ways, he is declaring himself worthy of salvation no matter what happens to him.

The NIV renders Job’s words as, “Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him; I will surely defend my ways to his face.”

The Message renders this as, “even if he killed me, I’d keep on hoping. I’d defend my innocence to the very end.”

We must not miss Job’s defense of himself in this scripture. Job is saying, “I will, no matter what I experience ahead, even if it is death, put myself in God’s hands to be carried and saved, and he will save me because I am worthy of this,” or to pretzel it in English into the middle tense, “I will have myself saved.” What we have here is an affirmation of grace, both original grace (we have worth because we were made in the image of God) and redemptive grace (we are made worthy by the sacrifice of Christ). Job unknowingly but rightly puts himself within Christ, within redemption when he trusts God to save him.

Try it on. See if it fits, the pretzeled, middle-voiced, grace-affirming, self-affirming cri de coeur. Use it to help yourself adopt the correct posture toward yourself when difficulty overwhelms you. Christians, you are not guilty. You are not being punished or condemned. You are loved; you are worthy; you are forgiven. It is okay, even encouraged by scripture, to be confident before God because God is more than willing to carry and save us. He has already saved us! It is ours to claim and receive, and he is pleased when we do.

“Since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus … let us draw near to God with a sincere heart and with the full assurance that faith brings, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience.”

Hebrews 10:22

Say it with me:

“I will have myself carried.”

“I will have myself saved.”

Almost

Posted: May 16, 2020 in beautiful
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I ordered flowers for my wife last week. They almost made up for all the demands I have put on her for about — one day, but it was my utmost for the moment considering the limits of the pandemic. While living in extremis, giving what we can is still satisfying.

Almost is often the beautiful and satisfying result of utmost.

I used to workout at the gym. I can’t do that now so I use my stretchy bands at home. It’s an incomplete form of exercise, and yet it still successfully competes with what I did before.

Incomplete can still compete.

I look to God as the foremost beings in the universe, and I pray to him, but I know my prayers aren’t perfect. Too much asking. Not enough gratitude I’d say. I even think sometimes I could even be accused of acedia, spiritual sloth. I can’t seem to pray like I used to, but it’s almost as good.

My almost for His foremost.

I built four stonewalls last year in my gardens. I overdid it. I do that, sometimes, and sometimes the amount of work I do in a day is just right.

Sometimes is more honest than always.

The last couple of months I’ve spent mostly prone. Sick. Yuck. Laid low. Vulnerable. Blinkered. But I did orchestrate new financial arrangements for my family that brought about gains for my wife and I and both of my daughters. I had to work on accepting my limits and find successes where I could.

A partial victory is the satisfying reward given to acceptance.

Yesterday, I almost made the quintessential cup of espresso. I missed because the milk didn’t foam quite right. Great! Shoot!

Almost is a kind of first — and last.

My wife retired from her career as an archivist and a library loan specialist and then the pandemic hit. She had plans to volunteer at the zoo and exercise at the gym, but both of those are put on hold. Loss. Now she shops for groceries in a mask and supports me in the rough patch that I’ve been going through with my body. She makes huge, valiant and heroic efforts to normalize our lives.

Effort is often heroic and exists as a kind of loss steeped in kettle of valiant.

I’ve had careers as a teacher, a writer and a pastor. I was fairly satisfied with those, but careers are always in process and always present new challenges and new decisions to advance new initiatives. The goal never looked like one peak; it was more like making an constinuous approach march to many different high places.

Life is not summiting; it’s trailblazing.

Now I blog. And you my dear reader, you read. Thanks for that. It bonds us. Through this we come to some degree of connected wisdom, but wisdom is always something we practice on the next new challenge, and we often almost get it right. That’s the way it works. It’s kind of like playing a song on the piano and then trying it again, trying to interpret it and put the emotion and meaning it deserves into it. Practicing always invites us to another try.

Almost is a routine part of discipline.

A few weeks ago, before dawn, I took my telescope outside and looked at Jupiter and Saturn. I could see the moons of Jupiter orbiting the great planet, and the gorgeous ring of Saturn almost resolved, but I noted that the telescope was slightly out of alignment and so the mirrors weren’t quite up to the task. I gave it my total effort and so did the scope. I almost saw the fine detail in beautiful things, and as I look back on it I did see something beautiful in the try.

Almost is one of the most beautiful and coveted outcomes of total.

By now you must be getting the point. Almost — it is as common as a potato on a dinner plate. Almost, is good, like strawberries when they are almost but not quite perfectly sweet and not quite deliciously ripe. They are still good, especially if you top them with whipped cream.

Life is full of “almost,” the almost perfect relationship, the almost beautiful garden, the almost but not quite completed persona, and accepting that in one area of the fight can act as a halo effect, giving us contentment in other areas that don’t live up to perfectly perfect. To be satisfied with life — the limits it imposes, the yet unsung song it sings, the way things don’t always work out perfectly, we do well to come to a deep acceptance of an essential and ever-present ingredient of it. We do extremely well to value and love the je ne sais quoi that makes us mature, the hard to accept, the challenge to embrace — the amazing “almost.”

……..

If you like short, pithy, aphoristic expressions of insight, you can find more of my thought-proverbs, aphorisms and epigrams at www.modernproverbs.net

Named By Love

Posted: May 8, 2020 in beautiful
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“Our determinations need constant reorientation. When labels start coming into our heads (loathsome, ugly, loser, winner), we should question them—recognize a label as the insubstantial thing it is, and let it go. It’s not helpful. It’s going to undermine our imaginations. Love something unusual. Kittens and lilies are fine, but maybe try the vulture or the dandelion …”

Debbie Blue

Love the dandelion. I like that. But vultures? I’m still working on the loveliness of vultures. Reorient your “determinations.” That’s sage advice.

Rather than “loser,” lover would be the healthy way to see ourselves. We are not ugly or ordinary or loathsome, even if our bodies or personalities don’t check all the beauty boxes society creates for being “hot” or “smart” or “handsome” or “attractive.”

Where do we get our sense of the beautiful or good looking? In many instances the fictions surrounding our concepts of beauty are crafted by culture. ”Beauty” is put on display by the power elite, by businesses, by media, advertisers, celebrities and influencers. They put “beauty” in front of us to sell things, to win attention, to manipulate public opinion — for gain.

And while there might be some innate sense of beauty based on size, morphology, proportion or symmetry, beauty is deeply subjective and as we commonly say, “in the eye of the beholder.”

An old man says his old wife, “To me you are the most beautiful person in the world “ and she is. A child says to her scruffy cat sitting on her lap, “I love you my cute kitty,” and the kitty is cute — named by love. These have gone beyond societies iron hoops of stigma and laurel.

One generation sees skinny and shiny as beautiful. Ours. Check out the ads. Another sees more flesh as beautiful. Look at the paintings of Rubens. Peter Paul Rubens (1577 -1640) was a seventeenth-century Flemish Baroque painter. He as a proponent of an exuberant Baroque style that emphasized color and sensuality. His nude paintings? Loads of fat! Layers of fat. Opulent, corpulent, rippling folds of fat — puffy knees and massive, bulging butts everywhere! Fleshy folds meant health, wealth, order and stability. A hilly, human landscape was in. Lean flesh and bones were for the poor and sick.

Things have changed. Plump is now déclassé. Or things haven’t changed. Manufactured images still rule our minds. Airbrushed and photoshopped pictures both reflect and rule our tastes. You know you are watching TV these days when everybody on the screen is freakishly beautiful by modern standards, ripped and royal, cartoonishly thin, perfectly plasticish, measuredly boobish and buttish with an amazing amount of thick, glossy hair and perfect skin.

Do this. Don’t buy that, an anemic, reductive, age-limited sense of the beautiful. Name yourself out of love for yourself. See your own worth to yourself and others. Engage in meta-consciousness. See yourself from above.

Here is the deal, a real deal. Be vatic; be self-prophetic. Be retromod. Look back on yourself with modern eyes. You are beautiful in ways that you can see and name. You are all you have ever been or done. Loyalty is beautiful. Servanthood, beautiful. Brave suffering is beautiful. Self-care is beautiful. Pregnant is beautiful. Old age is beautiful. Vultures are beautiful. They eat death, just as Christ eats death. Dandelions are beautiful. They feed bees. The more you know about something or someone often the more beautiful they become to you. Arachnologists think spiders are wonderful, even beautiful. They are.

Jean-Henri Casimir Fabre, a French naturalist, entomologist, and author known for the lively style of his popular books on the lives of insects, is proof in the entomology pudding. I love his love of the tiny creatures, his appetency for Pine Caterpillars, peacock moths and the unsung burying beetles. I love this poet of insects. He once wrote, “What matters in learning is not to be taught, but to wake up.” …

Advice from the trenches: Wake up to unsung beauty. See what others have missed. Move beyond subjective, cultural aesthetics and labels. Be meta-cultural. Run beyond beauty stereotypes. Such thinking is apotropaic. An accurate and affirmative sense of self has the power to avert evil influences, particularly the evils of self-condemnation.

Awake to yourself. Name yourself. Name something of or in yourself beautiful today. Name something that is different beautiful today.

Lessons From Doves

Posted: April 24, 2020 in god, recovery
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Yesterday I sat outside my house on the side patio. After a while I noticed that two mourning doves had landed in the corner of my yard on the wall surrounding my small decorative pond and fountain. They arrived as if from nature’s chef, an amuse-bouche, free, surprising, desirable. The tiny pond is a cool oasis full of water lilies, duck weed and water Hawthorne and around the edges grow nasturtiums and coreopsis and alyssum. It’s a lovely cool spot covered with a trellis full of passion vines.

One of the doves wandered over to the rocks around the pond to drink and began to splash around. Then leaving the pond, it walked along the bricks at the top of the stucco wall in front of it and sat down beside its mate in the shade of an orange blooming cape honeysuckle. It was a warm day here in San Diego, high 70’s, but there in the shade the doves sat side-by-side and settled into a mid-day repose, a luxuriating sloth, a robust calm, ataraxia, robust tranquility. Their legs disappeared. They sank into the cool bricks and widened. They so settled that when I moved my chair out of the sun, only 25 feet away, they didn’t move a feather to fly.

During the coronavirus pandemic, as we social isolate, for many of us there’s less to do than we are used to. In such a limiting milieu as this, I find myself flitting between uncomfortable feelings. What is it? Boredom? Lethargy? Anxiety? Malnoia, that vague feeling of mental discomfort. Unlike the doves, I don’t settle well in the shade.

Caralyn Collar, a blogger I follow at beautybeyondbones puts it well in saying, “we’re grappling with … restlessness.”

Yup! Nailed it! Caralyn is restless. I’m restless. The world is restless. Our children are restless. My cat is restless. Early the other morning while it was still dark, I stepped out to look at the rings of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter through my telescope. Unbeknownst to me the cat came out with me, at 5 AM! When I went back in, she was locked out.. When we got up we were like, “Where is the cat?” We found her huddled under a bush in the side yard. She was glad to come back in. She was lucky one of the local coyotes that roam our master-planned community didn’t eat her.

We all want to escape, run out the door, get out again. We want to get out to malls, coffee shops, stores, restaurants, breweries, the gym, parks, the beach, church, friend’s homes, work, parties, hangouts — and get food — anything but grocery store food — and hugs.

The restless don’t rest that well. I confess I’m addicted to movement. We all are. We are addicted to motion, ambulation, talking, meeting, driving, projects, errands, shopping! We’ve had a lifetime of consumerism. Sure we can still buy online but buying things on Amazon is getting old! I want to touch stuff! I want to hobnob with the checker.

What to do?

Sitting the other day watching the two doves in the shade under the honeysuckle on the cool bricks, I found myself admiring their equanimity, their composure, their even disposition, their ability to just be there, to rest.

The dove is a symbol of the Holy Spirit of God. I think we like the Holy Spirit just like we like our consumer culture. We like the Holy Spirit to be in motion, to come to us frenetic, with brio, with verve, with spunk, with clangorous tongues of fire, agentic, shedding gifts, flying lead bird to the next wonder-venture. And while all that is fine and good, my resting doves, by the pond, reminded me that the Holy Spirit is also a Spirit of comfort and of rest, and that our God is a spirit of rest, and invites us to enter his rest.

The doves came and sat with me. Sometimes God comes that way, just to sit with us, in silence, to sit with us in our uncomfortable feelings, to sit with us in our anxiety and to sit with us in our restlessness. He knows we are restless, and he knows the true rest is found in him, in sitting with him, in silence. Seeing that he isn’t all on edge to jump up and fly and fidget and fume and fix, seeing that he knows how to sink his legs and feathers into the everyday-shady-brick-mundane gives us permission to be content, at times, with doing nothing. God our quiet feathered flâneur.

I think I could take lessons from my neighborhood doves! To rest some of the day away with no shame attached — that’s progress. That’s progress in moving away from addictive motion and persistent restlessness. They’ll be time again for all that; perhaps this is the time to get better at resting.

This evening as I take my walk I hear a dove cooing gently, roosted, retired, settled for the night, signaling its intrinsic restful contentment.

The Weakness Door

Posted: April 20, 2020 in god
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At such a time as this we may feel weak and vulnerable. Living in a world pandemic has this affect.

We are helping some by social distancing, but it is a very small part to play. Few of us have a leading role, and even those who do are not masters of the universe. They too must wait; none of us has the power to say, “Stop,” and the virus stops.

And so we wait, and so we are weaker than we want to be. And so we hurt for those who are afraid, for those economically devastated and for those who are sick and for those who have died and for their families.

We may wonder how to experience God in such a time as this, a time when we can’t go to church, a time when our relationship with God is more up to each of us.

I have thoughts. Jesus did not come in power and authority over everything that happen in his time. He healed, but he didn’t heal everything. He influenced, but he didn’t influence everyone. The truth is he allowed himself to come in human form and to be weak and vulnerable like us. His moment of greatest weakness, the one he said he didn’t want, this is what saved us.

Debbie Blue writes, “Our response to smallness, weakness, being out of control, vulnerability, eventual decomposing is usually not very accepting. We don’t usually love what is small and weak and vulnerable in ourselves. Nor do we generally feel that loving toward what is small and weak and vulnerable in other adults. We feel threatened by our finitude and mortality.”

Debbie has us rightly identified here but it is unfortunate that we think like this because in our smallness and in our weakness and in our pain we actually have an opportunity to experience God.

Perhaps we have limited our awareness of God’s presence to big moments of joy in communal worship or big gushes of gratitude in times when things are going our way. But what if God is also known to us in our helplessness and weakness and smallness?

The unvarnished truth is that God in Christ himself became weak so as to enter into our weakness; therefore, we can experience him in our own weakness. This will take some getting used to, this truth that uncomfortable feelings also contain the presence of God.

Debbie Blue writes, “Maybe people wanted a mighty, fancy, elite sort of God. God gave them Jesus, who consorted with the commoners, died with thieves. And still we’ve (sometimes) tried to make him out to be a superhuman.”

Of course Jesus was and is super, truly God, and yet he chose to become human, like us, which in part means powerless, wounded, subject to death.

This is true and provides us with a unique opportunity in this season of weakness to come into connection and solidarity with God and other people through the mystic revelation that weakness is something that God is present in.

This is a time in world history to accept and even embrace our limits, to embrace the spiritual sensation of weakness as a way to experience God and be one with God. Our sensations of weakness, helplessness and smallness are actually doors that open onto the awareness that God is present with us.

How will we know if and when we are really experiencing God in weakness? I’m not completely sure. We will have to try on theses new feelings to know, but not like when we try on new shoes. The idea is not that we have found God, the right God, when we feel good, when it feels like we have a comfy fit with the divine. The idea might be that we will know that we are connecting with God when we notice that we have more compassion and love for weakness in ourselves and others.

Muck

Posted: April 17, 2020 in god
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Debbie Blue, creative theologian, cofounder of House of Mercy and author of Birds of the Bible writes, “Tertullian insists on maintaining the belief that God became fully human in Jesus, though he is clearly disgusted by some of the implications. ‘Start with the birth itself,’ he says, ‘an aversion, the filth within the womb of the bodily fluid and blood, the loathsome curdled lump of flesh which has to be fed for nine months of this same muck.’

“The womb. Somehow I get the feeling that the Spirit (like a dove) hovering over the deep, hovering over Mary’s womb, didn’t feel quite the same way about “the muck.’”

“The Spirit called the muck into being, so the story goes—God shaped it with God’s hands. God reveals Godself most fully, the Christian church professes, not as a rational system or a set of ethics or an unchanging principle, not as some magisterial deity or a pure white light, but as a living, breathing, bodily being. This is admittedly weird, but continually beautiful.”

I like this! This fits my experience. We’re in the muck these days, coronavirus, economic mess, social isolation. And we each have our own internal muck, anxiety, pain, uncertainty, identity confusion. It is good for us to resonate with the idea that God is willing to enter our mess, our muck, and be with us in it.

We want hide the filth of life. We may want to hide from our muck. We may think it keeps us from God. Not so. Not from God. In the beginning God created the muck. In the middle he entered it. In the end he redeems it.

We can help. We can be honest about our weaknesses. We can stop shaming ourselves for our muck. We can see God close to it, in it, with us, loving, understanding, caring.

He is!

The Loss-Gain Narrative of Easter

Posted: April 12, 2020 in god
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Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.

John 12:24

Jesus said this predicting his death, but even further he was laying out the loss-gain narrative of the universe.

Loss becomes gain. One becomes many. A kind of ongoing death becomes a new kind of ongoing life. The loss-gain narrative in Christ is paralleled in nature.

The acorn enters a dark place of transformation in the soil so a new oak may live. It waits. It waits for a unique trigger-combination of temperature-moisture-light. It waits for the right time. In the scientific sense of the word, the seed doesn’t “die” — but its shell protects, its nutrients feed, its form sacrifices itself for the new embryonic oak it engenders. The seed is used up in this process for the success and survival of the new tree it propagates. Jesus refers to this metaphorically as a type of death, one He would experience.

Jesus was used up to nurture, feed and birth a new, fresh embryonic us. Scripture says at the right time – the kairos— he literally emptied himself — the kenosis — in a real sense into us. He literally poured life into us at Easter in the same way the acorn pours life into the new tree.

And then perhaps the most radical thing of all: He asked us to lose our lives for others as well. To follow the loss-gain model, we like Christ are to protect, feed and nurture others by pouring ourselves into them. This seems particularly relevant to Easter 2020. The world is sheltered in place, waiting, giving up freedoms, mobility, connections, resources in order to save lives. We are currently living Easter! We are letting go of life to give and save lives.

And we are waiting, for what’s next! What’s next?

It is a beginning that will be the end of a waiting, a loss that will birth a gain.

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