February 8, 2023February 5, 2023 by Michael

Host Your Dreams

I have been thinking about dreams, at least, since I listened to Dr. Sam Chand talk about himself as a dream releaser when he consulted with us at Sweet Holy Spirit almost twenty years ago.

I was very new and just as young while serving the church. Almost daily, I confirmed in my mind that I was not equipped to serve as an executive pastor. With my degrees, with my history growing up at the church, with my spiritual sonship threading through my life there, with occasional phone calls on random days from Grandfather Ellis to calm me down.

Sometimes, the work is more convincing than the dreams. Sometimes, the reality is that you cannot do what your dreams tell you that you can. Sometimes, we live in the real world so long that we believe the world of our dreams is not how God pulls us together, nightly, fixes our brain breaks, and inspires us to do what our ancestors and our communities need.

Even though I knew the church, it was my home, like the back of my head, I did not know all that it needed. As a part of the church staff, we needed a person to come and stoke the dreams of the church, of the pastor, of the staff.

Among the things Dr. Chand did was listen to the dreams of our leadership. He talked, listened, considered. Something about his ministry vitalized me. He was, among other things, hosting our dreams.

He did more than that, but in those first gestures, as an experienced leader, he was modeling for me how to host the dreams of others.

Everyone needs dreams. Everyone needs to pursue dreams. Everyone, in order to pursue dreams, needs people to host those dreams.

There is a place for challenging them and certainly a place for practically weighing the costs of pursuit, for considering the routes to their fulfillment. But it starts with locating the hosts of what’s so close.

You need a host for your dreams–and one that isn’t only you and that isn’t only God. You may not unroll all the dreams to one person, but the act of sharing even pieces of your dream is an act of becoming whole.

Ask God to send you hosts for what you’ve held, capable hosts for what’s deep within. You don’t have to carry your dreams alone, even during seasons of particular loneliness. You don’t have to go after or fulfill them alone either. May you have the company you need.

January 19, 2022 by Michael

Imagine, Keep Dreaming, Keep Doing

Faith-Related, Interior Life, Play, Spirituality, Work
A Beautiful Revolution, Common, Emmanuel Afolabi, PJ
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December 26, 2020December 24, 2020 by Michael

Trauma, Disparities, & the Exercise of Needed Distrust

I’m thinking about Dr. Susan Moore, a Black physician who recently died after battling for her own quality medical care and against Covid 19. And I’m thinking about a mother named Mary from a long time ago who was unmarried and who spoke sonnets about her experience of getting impregnated and carrying a baby whose existence was misunderstood from mystical beginnings.

Trauma, a word coming out of an early surgical model for discussing injury, has come to encompass a full set of pains. Trauma is an injury, a bewildering injury or set of injuries.

A trauma can occur to a person or a people. A lot of people from many disciplines are talking about trauma these days, how it happens, what it means to be trauma-informed, etc. From anthropologists to neuro-scientists, chaplains and therapists, and social workers and teachers, lots of folk are discussing and working to respond to traumas in people.

There is language in these discourses about how a trauma is a discrete event in many cases. It happens; it ends. There is a healthy discussion on when and if that’s always true. Some traumas do end. Some are protracted and are, in a real sense, unending. I won’t get so much into that but I want to write a little about the way trauma can return.

After occurring and “ending,” it/they can revisit persons in seen and unseen ways, through known and recognized forms, as well as through insidious and unacknowledged means. Sometimes we see the re-visitation coming. We anticipate it. When we do, we can prepare and draw upon resources to help through the revisited pains. When we don’t see them coming, we are likely more reactive, doing anything in response to the unexpected-but-somehow-still-known.

Disparities in healthcare and medical treatment can be a means of trauma recurrence. Unfairness and mistreatment become a mechanism whereby trauma returns. Now, you’d have to accept a cultural transmission of trauma to appreciate this reality where earlier experiences are translated and handed over to subsequent persons related to those who have experienced trauma. In other words, what happened in prior times affects these times. There is another post somewhere in this direction that combines cultural trauma (at least that type of trauma) with attachment theory to explain this transmission and the patterns and connections making this possible.

Still, interacting with a disparity in the emotional neighborhood of a prior trauma is an uneasy psychological experience. I’m thinking about healthcare but this is true in other places. Whenever a person meets the reminders of prior pain, the body recalls and sends all its resources to preserve life. Emotional life. Spiritual life. Physical life. You don’t want to be hurt. You never do. So if you’ve been hurt, if your people have been hurt, you consciously or unconsciously respond to the disparity, the trauma, at least because of deep memory.

This is evidence of what, in The Inward Journey, Howard Thurman called a “strange quality of renewal.” The response to the disparity is to, in some way, resist it as a means of death. Resistance is a sign, a strange one perhaps, of life. Thurman says, “this is the way of life.” When you’ve experienced traumas and bruising pains, and when those are revisited among you, your reactions are little signs that life is present.

The exercise of distrust by Black people, then, is a needed one. It is needed because that distrust is evidentiary of a different trust, a trust in life. I call it everlasting life. Black distrust of the traumatic opens the world to the actual agitating presence of the God of life, the Source of life. Distrust of one system illuminates abiding trust in another. Distrust of medical science or research practices, say, points toward the life bonds elsewhere. Isn’t the question, “how do I find the life here?” Or “What does trust look like then?”

Take it from there. Look for the next sign of life. But name that life force. Relish the presence of Spirit. Moving against the brokenness and the flagrant disregard of life is a spiritual resistance that itself is being visited in the world through your own act of resistance.

Listen to the Spirit. Act with the Spirit to preserve life, to vanquish non-life. Do what will counter the forces of death and what will make right – or righter – what was wrong the first place.

August 26, 2016 by Michael

Staring Contest That Is Spiritual Direction

I located this post in my blog drafts. It’s worth my reading it as I prepare for the coming days. Even though it’s six years old, it feels relevant!

“If you fall asleep while you’re praying, you are either too busy or you are running from something.” That’s something my spiritual director told me in one of our earlier sessions almost two years ago. She was quoting Ignatius. I thought about that quote for weeks. I still remember it when I’m struggling to pray, when I’m avoiding prayer, and when I’m tired.

I mentioned in a few posts that I was completing the process of ordination. Some time after I started pursuing ordination with the C0venant, I started seeing a spiritual director.

Spiritual direction is an ancient practice or discipline where a person seeking direction meets with a director. It is an old practice, direction. When I started, it was at the encouragement of our denomination’s Board of Ordered Ministry’s Executive Minister. I was taking a class on vocation a couple years ago, and I decided I wanted to “enter spiritual direction.”

I had heard about it in seminary. I read about some of the comparisons between direction and counseling. I had been in counseling before by then but not in direction. I sensed that direction would be helpful to me as I sought to fundamentally be a director to others though as a pastor. I’m influenced by Eugene Peterson’s perspective on spiritual direction (prayer and worship leadership) as the pastor’s primary tasks.

Pastoral ministry very much includes this kind of work. In many instances, I provide spiritual direction to people in my congregation. There are folks I counsel, but there are certainly folks who I am directing, even if they don’t know the nuances between the two. Counseling, in a church context, tends to be directive and short-term. Direction is broader and wider.

Rather than having a problem to fix, the problem is God. The context is not my relationship with my wife or my church leaders. The context is my relationship with God. So that direction becomes an experience in listening for the movement between me and God. It’s an unending source of moving, dancing, singing, struggling, and silence–my relationship with God–and direction helps me face the movement.

It opens me up to being broader and wider. It opens me.

Michael Washington

Reflections on the Spiritual Life

“If people are going to see me on social media, I want people to see my real life, the good, bad, and ugly of it all because human perfection is not beautiful, it’s a lie.”