God, Noise, Pain and Silence

Posted: February 17, 2020 in difficulty, pain
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I have questions: Does God speak to us through our pain? If so, what does God say to us when we are in pain? Or is pain just noise that keeps us from hearing and understanding God?

The other day I was trying to relax in my living room, I couldn’t. There was the constant roar of gardening equipment right outside my window. I looked out. A landscape company was trimming hedges and groundcover on the bank beside my house.

We live in a noisy world. It can make hard to hear. Is pain noise? Does it keep us from hearing God, truth, ourselves or does it lead us to truth?

The world is full of noise: cars, trains, planes, helicopters, jackhammers, chain saws, car alarms, generators, compressors, lawn mowers, dogs, street sweepers, data centers — noise, racket, din.

Is pain just more noise, a buzz saw in the central nervous system? Perhaps, yes, yes I believe sometimes it is just that. Sometimes it overwhelms my brain, eliciting confused thoughts and useless internal conversations that won’t stop and don’t help.

My wife tried out a new church today. The people who sat behind her never stopped talking, although they stilled a bit during the sermon, they got up for snacks in the back during communion and kept on talking through the Eucharist.

I can hardly be critical. I talk in church, and everywhere else too. I just keep chattering at others, myself, at my past, at God.

Pain can be like the noisy church-mongers. It can disrupt the holy places, in our bodies and minds. But, and this is hard, sometimes I think it does the opposite; it quiets us. Sometimes it may be God’s way to quiet us.

“Be still, and know that I am God.”

Psalm 40:10

I’m not quite sure how to put this to you, but perhaps God sometimes wants to say or does says to you and to me and our world, “Shush!”

In the Psalm we are told to be quiet in order to know God. Can pain be a way of quieting us?

I’ve never personally heard an audible “be quiet” from God nor have I — come to think of it — seldom heard a modern person tell me that God told them to shut up, but might God lovingly shush us through pain and difficulty?

In the last eight months I have experienced some severe chronic pain. And while I have talked about my pain to doctors, family, friends and written about it in my blog and while my cri de cœur has been to be healed, the truth is that in these months I’ve never been more quiet in my life.

I must be honest here. At some level of pain I cry. The noise of severe pain overwhelms me, but at other times and at another level, it strikes me agonizingly silent, voiceless. Pain dummies me up. Pain de-noises me. Cut off from social contact by it, and alone in my bed, during many of my pain days, I have become dumb in the face of pain — physical and emotional and spiritual pain. I have experienced the mind numbing silence of suffering.

In these times my prayers become short, “God have mercy” and “Give me wisdom and strength to endure this.“

But lately it’s come to me that perhaps God is saying something through the pain, doing something lovingly morphogenic through the pain. Pain isn’t always a noise that renders a cry. Perhaps sometimes God is saying to me through my pain and by my pain, “I’m rendering you quiet.” This is how the book of Job ended, God talking, Job silent.

There is something directional in silence.

Proverbs 17:28 says that “even a fool who keeps silent is considered wise.”

Is pain rendering me wiser by rendering me quieter? Time will certainly tell; it always does, but perhaps this is what God — in part — is saying to me and doing with me.

If so, how am I quieter, in pain, in a good way?

I notice that in pain I am apt to judge others less. Instead I hurt for those who do wrong or who fail. I want no one to suffer like I have. My suffering causes me to pray for the world, not to judge it. And it is the ones who have done the most wrong who suffer the most and are the most needy of forgiveness and help and prayer.

Pain has also quieted my complaints. My complaint to God concerns what he has allowed in the world and in my life that I don’t want, what I think doesn’t help or enhance me, and so by it I reveal that I have made life about me. I have lived life too much for personal comforts and ego fulfillment. God is silent concerning my complaints and so I can see that in giving such a complaint I indict myself.

And so without answers that I want, savaged by silence, I continue in faith and become more allegiant to him as I exercise faith without reward. It isn’t that this makes me like pain. I hate it! It is dispreferred; often it is unproductive; sometimes it is harmful to me and my relationships. It cuts me off from people, and yet it has its uses.

In pain, and by contrast to it, I find myself silently grateful for small bits of beauty, a ray of sun in my kitchen, a short moment of relief, a goldfinch in my garden, a bon bouche, a loving family.

Finally, in pain I am much less likely to give flippant advice to those in difficulty. In pain I am less of a know-it-all. In pain I listen better. I understand. I don’t plunder others with trite answers.

Orual in C. S. Lewis’s Til We Have Faces, gives her complaint, her issue with the silence and ambivalence and cruelty of the gods. She gets no answer and then dropping her charge she says this: “I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer.” In this answer there is much mystery and in my answers mystery too.

We each grapple with possible explanations for suffering. We each choose responses. All I am attempting to point out is that there is a quietness that exists within our options — and within God’s.

And so if we depart from noise we come again to silence and perhaps we can let it be that God is God even when he is silent.

Like Job we may then say, “I put my hand over my mouth. I spoke once, but I have no answer — twice, but I will say no more.”

Job 40:4-5

Scandalously Grateful!

Posted: February 15, 2020 in god, goodness
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This morning I awoke to my wife’s warm back against my back, soft blankets over me, pillows all around me, my cat warm against the back of my legs and the sound of a central air unit heating my home. 

I give thanks! 

The simplest things are the best things and may bring us into a lucid state of robust and capacious tranquillity.

Everyday things like warm blankets create hygge, the centuries old Scandinavian concept of a moment of well being, a cozy, warm, special and charming essence. 

My sweet wife and I keep our home simple and uncluttered. We are aiming for hygge. We want to experience the essence of the simple and yet refined. 

Our hardwood hickory floors are to me the great forests of the world and I love their knots and their grain patterns and their woody imperfections too. Our granite countertops, the producets of great heat and pressure, swilled and chunked with quartz and feldspar and mica, these are our ancient cliffs and lovely mountain peaks. The many windows and glass doors in our home —  these invite in the sunshine, green trees, blue sky and evening sunsets.. 

This afternoon I walked into the family room. The light streamed through the blinds and pane windows, jalousied, glorious, lambent, splendid, divine!

I see the essence of each thing and am grateful. I want to drop into a state of allostasis, emotional stability, and be at peace with my world. I try. I move a little way in. I want to go deeper. I want to see and give thanks. 

I think of Martin Burber and his book I And Thou. Buber writes of  “I-It” relationships, it being an object or even idea that is separate in itself, which we either use or experience.

The flowering pear tree I see though my double-paned windows, what this it to me? It’s now in full bloom. It looks like a bride, decked in white. If I comprehend its essence, if I respect it’s being, if I sense its center of value it becomes to me an entheogen. Inviting me into the presence it becomes a Thou, it moves from it to you, and I enter into a reciprocal, enlarging relationship with it. I become a transparent eyeball absorbent and give thanks for all trees, all plants and all living things great and small, and we are I and Thou.

Too often the things around me are assumed by me, undervalued, under-noted, unrecognized. I see them merely as out-of-focus background.

But what I am longing for is to see things for what they are and to rejoice in them and be thankful for them.

Simple things create the Japanese sense of wabi sabi. Wabi” is  defined as “rustic simplicity” or “understated elegance” with a focus on a less-is-more mentality. “Sabi” is translated to “taking pleasure in the imperfect.”

The Japanese idea of Shibusa is similar. It is an enriched, subdued appearance of something, say a vase, or the experience of intrinsically fine quality in an object with economy of form, line, and effort, producing a timeless tranquility. 

We have many decorative vases in our home, some bursting over with dried flowers. We have placed vases in our home because they are grace and beauty, their lines form curves of tranquility.  We take in their je ne sais quoi and intuit their household salience, surd, voiceless, aphonic yet known. 

I am very thankful, but there is even more and even greater to be thankful for.

I sat with my wife this morning over hot coffees discussing the highlights of our marriage. Her pour-over coffee equipment, my espresso machine, our its that are also thou’s fueled us with the jolt that made us talk. We love our technology, how it dialogs with us, hissing and beeping and gurgling life-giving juice. In steaming coffee mugs there is hygge.

 I give thanks. 

And as we talked we entered into Buber’s I-Thou, an  “I” relating to a “Thou,” a sacred relationship with each other in which the other is not separated by discrete bounds.

My wife and I are two but we are One. Our experiences have merged. The boundaries between us have faded. Ant yet they haven’t, and yet they move closer than ever before. We have been through fire and rain and it has put us in each other more. 

I’m putting her first more often now, to honor her uniqueness and make it my own. She often thinks of me and puts me first and often thinks of others. She’s a problem solver. She bakes for others, finds books for them, recommends doctors for them, sews for them, helps them raise their  babies. To me she is a thou that leads me toward deeper relationships with other Thou’s. 

I am so thankful for her! I surge forward, seeking more thankfulness for her. I am her, and so I take care of her as I take care of myself. This comes from God! All good things come from God. For Martin Buber the ultimate thou was God. 

God is not an it but a Thou who created all the its and they reflect him and he made all the thous and they have value because his image, his Thou, is in them, and his purpose is to make them one and so I long for a relationship with all things great and small and with all people and with all of God, a dialogic, value-laden, knowledge-heavy intimacy — hygge and wabi sabi in all things. 

Oh world, you can be so savage and so horrible but at the same time you are so beautiful and so intimate and so present as essence, quintessence and incandescence of God. 

I have a new appetency for gratitude.

I long and press on with all of you as you all long with me, and we long together to be scandalously, shamelessly and infamously grateful. 

Let’s Leave Nothing Out

Posted: February 13, 2020 in god
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Here is the standard, modern, pervasive Christian framework, thesis, mindset, paradigm: God is made known in health; God is made known in solutions; God is made known in gain; God is made known in being made known through what we want.

I just refinanced a small real estate loan at a fantastically low rate. My response? Thank you God! Every good gift is from the Father. It’s easy to give that “thank you.”

But this God-as-gain paradigm rides on a thin, brittle epistemic rail of truth; it easily slips off and crashes into a adamantine wall of misunderstanding.

Yes, every material blessing is a gift of God, every lovely forest, towering peak, rushing stream, safe home, good meal, loved one.

A few days ago I spotted a goldfinch in my white blossomed, ornamental pear tree. Astonishingly beautiful! God — a god of beauty.

Yes, God is a God of beauty and of truth and understanding and rationality, and solutions flow out of his very essence, every income stream, every medical cure, every healing, every building plan, every scrumptious recipe — He is somewhere there behind it.

My mushroom and leek gravy today, originally his idea.

Yes, God is the Creator God, architect, founder, maker, artist and through his mighty power we have gained the universe, our gorgeous, looping, spinning solar system, stunning planet earth and all the blue-green beauty and burgeoning fecund good that lies within our small corner plot of good earth.

But God is also made known in ugliness, in pain; God is also made known in difficulty; God is also made known in loss. This is equally true whether we want to hear it or not. The gold finch will one day molder in the ground and frightening a school child along her way — a horrid rictus, an ugly death. 

Yes, God is solution, but yes, His primary, core, existential, ultimate solution involved He himself entering into and embracing pain, difficulty and loss — the incarnation of God in Jesus, God experiencing human frailty, God experiencing human temptation, God experiencing our suffering, God hammered onto a killing machine.

The good news is that Jesus healed and redeemed. And the good news is that Jesus suffered, that God suffered. Let’s face this square on. God is found in pain. How so? His essential solution involved pain.

Last night I dreamed about a broken work relationship in which I felt powerless. It’s rough. I lived that dream. How do I hook theology up to my experience relational hate, rejection and hurt? 

We know that God — agentive — is love. We love that! Let’s never lose that perspective. But the complete truth is that God — by choice, as an agency — is an ouch and a scream and has experience rejection too. God is love — as an amalgam. He is pain-love. That’s his chosen status. Yikes! We wish to rush away in a frenzy of Christian cultural cringe from heaven’s compounded, ugly-beautiful remedy. We don’t want such axiology. For many of the blithely hopeful this kind of thinking is a kind of theo-polution, a negative doctrinal bizarrerie. They won’t have it, and yet they will have it, and they will have it on a plate, and they will eat it and they will grimace and try to spit it out.

I think we who love God want God to be Valentine’s Day, all kissy, gifty and lovey-dovey, chocolate and hearts and seduction. I do. And He is.

I bought beautiful, expensive Valentines gifts for my sweet thing this week, fine pour-over coffee equipment. God too gifts us because he loves us. We are his valentine.

But look around — unblinkered — if you will. All love, even true love, involves also the gift of suffering, involves making a place for things we don’t want in another person. My wife and I have both broken down recently in the face of some overwhelming circumstances. True love involves some ugly tears. It also involves some sacrifices, and it comes to accept the chronic pain of loss, the loss of former glories, and eventually the loss of loved ones from our lives.

Here is the truth: God is made known by being made known in some things that we don’t want. Our response? It is to fight, take flight or freeze or reject.

But what about acceptance of the things we can’t control? What about a salutary acceptance of reality, reality God himself has allowed — your pain, your loss, your relational derailments and deplorements.

What is needed involves a tender, merciful love for ourselves and others, no matter what the unwanted and unvalued physical and material empainments we and they and we-they suffer?

Quite lately, I’ve been learning to be kind to myself, to be tender with my less-than-perfect body, to titrate a new bifurcated identity, powerful and powerless, a new mixed bag of a man extruded out of difficulty, both compensated and decompensated.

In Greek mythology, the Minotaur is a mythical creature, head and tail of a bull, body of a man. The Roman poet Ovid, gets at it: part man; part bull.

God is kind of like the Minotaur, very loosely. He is one thing, comforting, and another, allowing and even embracing discomfort, and we don’t get only part of the great complex of Him. And this is no Minotaur myth. We get all of God; He is a God of comfort and of a tolerated pain and he unifies these much in the way he is unified as a Trinity.

Proof? God once entered our pain, and carried it on his shattered shoulder, and he is still entering into your pain and mine, entering with a keen specificity into our mounting losses. This is the truth, the same as it was with Israel. In all our distressed he too is distressed. Don’t believe those who want to present you with an impassable God, a god who can experience no pain.

Jesus was God, and he took a brutal bag of horrible for us and the Father himself saw it and was moved to weep for in that moment of his kenosis all the horrors, jealousies, atrocities, lies, abuses, rapes, murders and wars in the world were gathered into Christ as God and dealt with them to forgive them. And in this, God’s spiritual agony far outweighed his physical pain. 

Latch on to this. You experience and you hear God speaking to you in your pain too! Amazing! Not our way. Not my way. His way — not our way.

David Brooks has this to say about a life that is a mixed bag of goodies — and badies.

“The valley is where we shed the old self so the new self can emerge. There are no shortcuts. There’s just the same eternal three-step process that the poets have described from time eternal: from suffering to wisdom to service. Dying to the old self, cleansing in the emptiness, resurrecting in the new. “

“One task in life is synthesis. It is to collect all the fragmented pieces of a self and bring them to a state of unity, so that you move coherently toward a single vision.”

Brooks has it right. The great task of life is synthesis, a divine synthesis of our view of God and of ourselves, a synthesis that paradoxically combines comfort and suffering. We take our stand there within suffering and comfort, and we stand there within an enigma, we stand as a theologically branched tree standing strong in a orthodox forest of many other staunchly dual-trunked Biblical truths. 

Fellow warriors, honor the complex truth, this divine complementarity, honor the reality that stretches from you to the very horizon of your life, and  leave nothing out so that we might be complete.

Who Do You Look Down On?

Posted: February 9, 2020 in difficulty, love
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Last week I finally came around. I said I’d take care of emptying the cat box each day. My wife had been doing it. Why? Why should I begin to do it? Perhaps it is the lowliest task in our house. Perhaps I have to too often assumed the highest status.

One of my current goals is to make sure my wife feels as important as possible, as important as she is.

What seems to be important to much of the world is the issue of who is important. Who gets what they want? Who does the world revolves around? Who does the nation revolve around? Who does the business revolve around? Who does the family revolve around? Who do I revolve around? Myself? You?

For too long I have too often revolved around myself. I’m working on changing that. I’m working on putting other people first. Why? This is one of the keys to a better world. This is one of the things that wisdom teaches us to do — to count others better than ourselves.

Roles, titles, status, patriarchy, primogenitor, pecking order, gender, race, socioeconomic class, geography – all seem to determine importance in our world.

The problem is epidemic. A person in New York may look down on a person from Mississippi. A person in Shanghai may tend to look down on a person from Canton. Shiite may despise Sunni. Perhaps the Catholic looks down on the Protestant. Perhaps the cab driver despises the businessman, or the businessman the cab driver. Male lords it over female. Bosses dominate workers. Liberals despise conservatives and vice versa.

It’s interesting, but it seems that everybody has some kind a need to look down on somebody, and perhaps up to somebody else. No matter how much we tout the need for social equality, we seem set on the purveyance of inequality, preference, bias and privilege.

The world is crying out for justice. The world is crying out for attention to the underprivileged, the needy, the hungry, the broken, the poor. Many of us simply ignored such looked-down-ons or blame such ones for their status, for their own situation. We look out for ourselves, not others.

Considered poverty for example. The world revolves around the rich. It does not revolve around the poor. The rich are important. The poor are not. Is this right? Is this fair? If it is not right, then who is responsible to change it? Who has the power to change it?

Businessman Pete Kadens recently announced that he will pay college tuition, room and board, books and fees for the seniors at Scott High School in Toledo, Ohio. He will be spending about $3 million to send the students to college. He will also pay for one of their parents to attend college.

He said it wasn’t a gift. He said it was his responsibility. His parents set him up to go to college; he feels it is only right for him to set others up to gain the same opportunity. This brings up the issue. What is our responsibility to create equality, to put others first, to make other people besides our self important?

The question rings through the ages, “Am I my brothers keeper? The answer is, “Yes.”

I heard the other day that perhaps as many is 1/5 of our preschoolers in the United States live below the level of poverty. What a shame. How hard that is on them and their single moms. Are those preschoolers responsible for that? Can they change their status? Perhaps when they get older they can, but certainly not as preschoolers. One way we could change that is to put politicians in power who care about this issue. How do we help moms in such situations train, get good jobs, kick bad habits, stop making poor decisions, take responsibility for their households?

A few years ago my wife and I decided to pay the tuition of some students in Tijuana to go to school. Without such help they could not get an eduction. It is a small thing, but it matters. It is one small way we can give importance to someone who has very little. We were inspired to do so my friend that teaches at the school.

In 2019, some 70 percent of the world’s poor lived in Africa, up from 50 percent five years ago. Do people born in Africa choose to be born in Africa? Do children born in Mexico in the shanty towns of Tijuana choose to be born there, born in tin and tire sheds to parents with no money?

Poverty is often caused by forces beyond the poor’s control, a lack of education, systemic racism, being born into a culture of poverty and illiteracy. Great forces like overpopulation, epidemic diseases such as malaria and environmental problems such as lack of rainfall cause poverty.

I think it’s reasonable and responsible for each of us to ask what we can do. What is our responsibility? Why do we have what we have and what is our responsibility in using it?

There’s a tendency to think that such overwhelming problems cannot be addressed at our level. That’s not true. While it may take the force of institutions such as education and business and government to make significant changes, we can vote those into power who have a heart for the marginalized, lowly and oppressed. But do we do that? Do we vote for those with big hearts? Do we vote for those who are full of love? Are we voting for those who will empower the least among us. Or are we only voting for those who will retain our power, protect our power, increase our power?

I’m not talking about voting for those who simply give handouts. I’m talking about voting for those who have solutions to empower people to be responsible for themselves.

But we can do things on our own too. Changes can take place in our own homes within the ranking of the family members. Who gets to decide? Who gets to talk? It’s possible to be a snoutband and not even realize it, talking over other people, interrupting other people, always having the say, the final word.

Needed changes can take place at work, with how people are treated there. Do we come alongside those who struggle or do we simply criticized him or fire them?

Such changes to bring about opportunity equality can take place when we eat out, how we tip or treat those who wait on us. Needed changes can take place in what we do with our money and how much of it we are giving to help others.

I think of Jesus. He said, “Blessed are the merciful!” Approved are those who care for the sick, feed the poor and visit those in prison. I think of Amos. “Let Justice rolled down like a mighty stream.” I think of Martin Luther King junior, of Gandhi, Mother Theresa. All were highly esteemed for esteeming those who were not highly esteemed.

Who will be next to pace the way in our community, in our nation, in our world to set things right, to make the unimportant important?

It could be you and me.

Let the Worry go on Without You.

Posted: February 7, 2020 in babies, family
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My wife recently visited our daughter who is pregnant with her and her husband’s first baby. It’s a girl! Yea! During this time, my wife and our daughter bonded. There was an amazing baby shower, but just being together was so good, walking, eating together, talking.

When she got home my wife wrote our daughter the following email. I love it!

Dear Daughter,

This is something I thought about last night. Most of our life is spent planning for the next stage. Education is for employment. Employment is for making money and getting ahead so we can do the next thing (car, house, vacation, expensive purse, etc.) Sometimes worrying about what comes next takes up soooo much space in our heads–job problems, baby shower (:0)), how to juggle work and other aspects of life. And to another point, what we worry about is often insignificant because we are unaware of what tomorrow will really bring.

I never “got” the concept of mindfulness. It is  popular today. I guess I am ADD, but that’s Okay. Plus, to be honest, planning for something is really fun. Having something to look forward to, gets us out of bed in the morning.

This is laying the groundwork for my point. When you have that baby this goes into the background. She is THE THING. Holding her, feeding her, changing her diapers, this is the world. Smelling her head…..I am so glad you can take the summer months to enjoy your new baby without the pressure of work and school. I am so glad your husband works right next to your apartment so he can come home at lunchtime to enjoy the baby. You know I am glad there is no commute!

My main point is that with that baby it is Okay that your worries about the future, and thoughts about the next thing stops. Time spent holding her, kissing her, feeding her, kissing her head, this is the most important thing and it grounds you and forces you into the present, and it bonds you to this little person.

It is a privilege to be able to do that so eat it up. Let time stand still. Let the worry and anxiety go on without you.

…..

Nice! We can all use such wisdom. Time with our precious ones, time that idles along, that lallygags along, time that drops worry and embraces another — this is the best life has to offer.

I Invite You Home

Posted: January 31, 2020 in becoming, healing
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Recently, watching the news I saw disturbing images — children dug from earthquake rubble, reports of missing people, an arrested wife murderer, political infighting and name calling, failed governmental processes, corrupt, greedy leaders. I saw pictures of people with contagious diseases and images of terrible auto accidents.

I find that somewhere inside of me I want to reject there parts of our world, to get away from them, even deny them at times. Instead I want Isaiah’s peaceable kingdom. I want the wolf to lay down with the lamb. I want no more tears. I want no more harm.

Of course this is completely understandable, and of course there is the validity in longing for safety and reform and justice and newness, but rejection of our current world is not the answer. Rejection of people is not the answer; rejection of harm is not the answer. People will do wrong. There will be harm. The truth is that in this life we can’t get away from all of that.

This is a huge issue for us. we want aponia, the Greek ideal of the absence of pain. I love the absence of pain. But life has pain; it comes to us, and we don’t welcome it.

This tendency toward rejection of pain and difficulty isn’t just limited to our world. We also tend toward rejecting our own selves, our bodies, our own souls, our own emotions, our experience, our own behaviors, any parts of theses we don’t like.

We get sick, our teeth decay, we experience pain, our bodies change sizes, we need surgeries. In these hardships we don’t like how we feel. We don’t like how our bodies look or how they smell. Then there is the same response as to what we don’t like in our world. We reject the unseemly parts of our bodies and of ourselves.

We become separated from parts of ourselves, de-integrated, fragmented. We experience a mind-body division, perhaps our soul rejects our emotions. This can happen when we reject painful memories, when we reject our painful or damaged body parts, our sexuality, our physicality — our long nose, our thin hair, our bulging tummy, our aging face, our short legs, our scars, our wrinkles, our sadness, our depression, our seeming failures, our loneliness.

But this rejection will not work for us. We need integration and congruency with our world and with our bodies. We need to belong. We need integration. We need everybody who we have rejected and everything we have rejected to come home. We need a united kingdom, on earth and within ourselves.

How do we do this?

We do this by saying to our world and saying to our bodies, “I do not reject you. I am aware that you are part of me and I am a part of you.”

To those parts of our world of our body that we have rejected we say, “I welcome you back. I invite you home.”

We don’t invite evil, but we realize that we too are evil and not so different from the ones that we want to reject. We do not invite harm, but we recognize that we too harm and are harmed. Our souls and our bodies are harmed and we reach out to them and touch them and accept them, ragged, raddled and frayed as they are.

We take our direction from Jesus in doing this. In one of his most famous sayings, he said that he “did not come into the world to condemn the world but that the world through him might be saved.” Rescue came through him, in him, absorbed within him. And in his sacrifice Jesus engaged everything. Everyone.

Apply this. We are not in the world to condemn the world. Neither are we here to condemn our bodies. The dynamic, healing and therapeutic power for good comes not from rejection or condemnation. It comes from acceptance and from love.

But you might say that the Apostle John taught us to reject the world. He did not. He taught us to reject sin, harming others — evil, greed, pride, selfishness. John’s main teaching was that “God is love” and that anyone who does not love his neighbor does not love God. Love is the ultimate form of acceptance.

Place your hands on the people of the world that you have a tendency to reject and tell them you love them. If you can’t touch them still tell them that you love them. Seek complementarity. Tell yourself every day that you care for the whole earth. Place your hands on the parts of your body that you tend to reject and tell those parts that you love them.

This is the way. The way is not in rejection. The way is found in acceptance, forgiveness and love.

Consider the Finches

Posted: January 29, 2020 in beautiful, goodness
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This morning I went out and sat on the front porch about 9 AM. I was stressed, a medical procedure is scheduled for later today. The sun was warm on my face and arms. It’s January. But it’s the Southwest. I shed my long sleeve workout shirt and pulled my jammies up to my knees so I could feel the heat on my legs.

My wife came out to join me. We noted that the ornamental pear tree in the front yard is beginning to bloom; tiny red buds will soon pop out into white blossoms. Later in the season the bright white pedals will fall to the ground like spring snow when the wind blows. it’s turning spring in Southern California. The lantana’s in the yard are flowering purple, yellow and red. Weeds are popping up in the flowerbeds; grass is turning green in the driveway cracks. Life is renewing.

As we sat in the sun, small birds came and went from the pear tree like commuters arriving and leaving from a major airport.

We went in and grabbed some binoculars and bird identification books. I’ve always loved the birds, their amazing ability to fly, their beautiful markings and coloration, their robust busyness, their characteristic insouciance.

This morning the birds were like flowers in the trees, “There’s a red one! There’s a yellow one! Is that a warbler, no I think it’s a goldfinch. It’s so yellow but it has a white wing bar. And the red ones. I think the’re house finches. Look at all the striping on the chest, the red throat and head.

I’m never sure about some of these identifications. Maybe the goldfinches were warblers. It doesn’t matter. We saw them. We grounded ourselves in reality. We grounded ourselves in the supernatural.

We sat in the gold. The cool breeze brushed against our faces. We turned our eyes upward to sun, blue sky and tree. More birds came, a black phoebe, an Anna’s hummingbird. We heard a dove cooing.

These fragile, beautiful lifeforms remind us of something important. They reminders that we are taken care of, that we have been taken care of and that we will be taken care of, fed, sheltered, treasured.

They remind us that we are valued, cared for, that someone is watching us, someone who knows our names— without uncertainty — who knows our identities and knows our futures.

Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?

Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.

Matthew 6

So don’t worry. And don’t be afraid, the best you can. Right! This can be hard. I know. There is harm in our world. You will experience trouble at times. I understand. But be reminded that we overthink what we fear. Try to stop that. The habitual, mental loop goes nowhere. Stop trying to control what you can’t control. Let life, God, good come to you more rather than trying to wrestle it from the world. Practice good psycho-hygiene. Lean into the burgeoning good all around you. Breathe in provisions deeply. Be grateful.

Live like the birds. Take found food. It will be there in the tree in bloom near you. Fly with the flock from one safe space to another, unless you need to roost and rest. Find safe places to roost. Don’t be afraid to rest alone.

My heart is for you and with you. You are not alone. Your Heavenly Father is near and so am I, in this small blog, caring for you the best I can.

Under the Wing

Posted: January 26, 2020 in god
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He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge.

Psalm 91:4

So what are the feathers of God? And what is his wing?

Immediately I think of the red tail hawks that fly over the canyons by my house. They float so effortlessly on the updraft, hardly flapping at all. But raptor wings don’t quite seem to capture the mighty, global wing of God.

I imagine an owl’s wing, gorgeously layered, translucent in the sun, but again so small for the billions God watches over.

I imagine an owlet in the nest, sheltered under the wing the mother or father owl. That feels safe.

But then I imagine something greater, more omnipresent.

The sky and clouds overarching me, our atmosphere, protection from cold space, protection from the sun, the great blue dome, the wing of God for all.

And I imagine our Milky Way Galaxy, 100,000 light years across, its great spiral arms wrapped around our sun, enclosing our planet, hundreds of billions of stars wrapped around me and you and everyone, held in place by great swirling forces, and that just begins to hint at the vastness and power latent in the wing metaphor. Our Solar System is located in a region in between the two arms called the Orion-Cygnus arm. We are cradled safely there in the arms, in the wings made by God about 25,000 light-years from the galactic center and 25,000 light-years away from the rim. 

We are always enveloped in God’s, perfectly designed bright, physical wings of beauty, love and wonder. We are, know it, sense it or intuit it or not. This does not mean we will not suffer, feel lonely or die. It does mean we will do so within a refuge of ultimate safety, redemptive safety. You are covered. Rest and peace hover overhead.

And when these present protective wings pass away, a new wing, a redeemed heaven and earth will cover us and there will be no harm and there will be no end to our safety.

Reflections on Suffering

Posted: January 22, 2020 in difficulty
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When we suffer or when we are confused about what to do, despite the origin, we might learn something about ourselves, about our world. This may take some time. It may not be head knowledge. It may be body knowledge. 

“The right thing to do when you are in moments of suffering is to stand erect in the suffering. Wait. See what it has to teach you. Understand that your suffering is a task that, if handled correctly, with the help of others, will lead to enlargement, not diminishment. The valley is where we shed the old self so the new self can emerge. There are no shortcuts. There’s just the same eternal three-step process that the poets have described from time eternal: from suffering to wisdom to service. Dying to the old self, cleansing in the emptiness, resurrecting in the new.” 

 David Brooks, The Second Mountain

Lost we might have an opportunity to be found, and barriers may call from us new things.

“It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.” 

Wendell Berry “Our Real Work”

Grounding ourselves in reality, accepting our lives as led, as acceptable, as meaningful just as they are, this is a way to down regulate from our anxieties and to come to peace with what was, is and will be.

“Now, finally, I really had lost all desire for change, every last twinge of the notion that I ought to get somewhere or make something of myself. I was what I was. “I will stand like a tree,” I thought, “and be in myself as I am.” And the things of Port William seemed to stand around me, in themselves as they were.”

Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

We are not alone in our pain and in our identity search, in those times when we stand beyond desire, ego and passion for more. Christ is present where our lack is. It is a kind of presence we aren’t used to, and so it may be hard to recognize. 

After the cross, we know that God is not watching human pain, nor apparently always stopping human pain, as much as God is found hanging with us alongside all human pain. Jesus’s ministry of healing and his death in solidarity with the crucified of history forever tell us that God is found wherever the pain is. This leaves God on both sides of every war; in sympathy with both the pain of the perpetrator and the pain of the victim; with the excluded, the tortured, the abandoned, and the oppressed since the beginning of time. I wonder if we even like that.

Richard Rohr (Mediations)

Such words don’t fix us, I know that, take away the pain, give immediate relief, but they point us where to go and what to do with our pain. My prayer for you is that you enlarge even as you might feel like you are diminishing, my dear friends. And that you stand.

You do not stand alone. You stand with all who suffer. You stand, whether you feel it or not, with God himself.

Curiosity

Posted: January 21, 2020 in friends
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Dave Schools recently wrote an article for Forge entitled“The 2-Word Trick That Makes Small Talk Interesting.”The two words are, “I’m curious …”

Dave points out that some of the best interviewers use this phrase to draw information out of people. Why does it work?

It digs. It dives. It shovels into motivations, personal history, the human psyche. It communicates that the listener is interested, open and even eager to hear more about something important in the other person.

It’s a way to get beyond small talk, below the surface, into an interesting dialogue.

Another version of this is, “I’m really interested in …”

The trick really isn’t in the words; it’s in being really interested in other people. To be inquisitive, to be big eyes over another, to be socially investigative — it’s a treasure hunt. People are fascinating. Everyone has a story, a human narrative, even a universal narratology — now there’s the thing, bang, cha-ching!

I once met a young Muslim woman at a conflict resolution training in downtown San Diego. We went out to lunch with some people for sushi, and I got her talking about her faith. It actually lead to me visiting her Mosque. It opened my mind to new things. .

In the last few years I met some people who build houses for families in Mexico. I expressed interest. I asked questions. The result was that I ended up as part of a team who built a house for a family in Tijuana.

It was an amazing experience, super touching when we handed the keys to a new, furnished home to a family who had been living in a 6×8 foot shed with their new baby. One of the leaders of the trip is still one of my good friends.

Once I called the contractor to do some stucco work. Someone had mentioned to me that he was a Christian and did good work. We hit it off on the phone. He told me about his family and about his passion to help people. He came and stuccoed a new retaining wall at my church and the marquee sign — all for minimal cost.

Why? We went beyond small talk. We connected. I was interested in him and he in me.

On 13 March 1781 William Herschel made note of a new object in the constellation of Gemini. It was Uranus, the first planet to be discovered since antiquity and Herschel became famous overnight. He was appointed Court Astronomer. He was elected to the Royal Society and grants were provided for the construction of new telescopes.

There are more new planets to be discovered, human planets, fascinating people who might eventually orbit around us and add so much to us.

The fruits of curiosity — they’re good!

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