Category / Faith-Related

This category is like Interior except that it covers faith and spirituality.

by Michael

A Response to Opposing Narratives

I originally saw this at Religious Dispatch.  People of faith should be praying, considering, working, and praying:

The current military operations in Israel and the Gaza strip should disturb all people of faith. The only moral path to a solution between Israelis and Palestinians (Israeli Jewish/Muslim/Christian and Palestinian Muslim/Christian) will be dialogue and negotiation. This is a long and arduous path, but the faith that grounds our traditions can sustain the slow evolution of history. The current conflict is an outgrowth of over a century of opposing narratives and ideological differences that no military operations can resolve.

Our traditions exist to uphold the moral foundations for civilizations and as such we urge an end to the current violence. While we acknowledge the need for self defense, when the can of violence opens, as it has now, worms of vengeance and blood-feud crawl out. Then people begin to abandon the principles of justice and mercy upon which civilizations are founded. Instead they turn to more tribal urges, seeking retribution for past wrongs.

We believe the current violence crosses that line. At some point people cease looking for solutions and instead succumb to base human urges for violence. They crave the blood of the enemy to compensate for the pain of loss. This is the way of our animal instincts, the ethos of ancient tribes and clans who exist only to protect all within, while opposing all others. The teachings of our ancestors rose above that thinking long ago to build great civilizations. We believe that when we look to our texts and traditions we can rise above the narrative of suffering and victimization to find roads to healing and wholeness.

The Torah this week teaches of the “Cities of Refuge” (Numbers 35: 6-28) places where a person can flee after an accidental death or manslaughter in order so that relatives of the deceased cannot exact revenge. The one who flees must face criminal justice, and the City of Refuge serves as both a haven and prison for the man slaughterer while restricting the blood thirst of the avenger. The people living in Israel and Gaza can look at the current situation and see only murder and intentional killing, or they can see how decades of hatred breed spontaneous violence. In these heated emotions, our traditions call for cooling off, seeking refuge, and then finding a path to justice. Only through such systems can order and peace be restored.

Several verses from the Quran also give us reminders to work for the protection of life and how to respond with good and forgiveness in times of major challenge and conflict.

Read the statement here.

by Michael

Creating a Rule of Life, pt 3

Prayer is much broader than saying something to God.  That’s a good partial summary of prayer.  But there are, at least, two things that would enrich that summary.  The first is small, the second a lot larger.

First, as much as prayer is about talking to God, it is also about God talking back.  Some people have trouble with that.  After all, God talking back can be problematic.

It’s hard to know when God’s talking.  It’s hard not to blame things on God after you’ve gotten adjusted to this God-back-talking.  People have said that God has said a lot of suspicious things.  Plus, there’s the problem of that creative utterance.  In the scriptures, when God speaks, things move, people live, people die, worlds that weren’t become.  God’s speech is full and capable and hardly tentative.

Back to the second part about prayer: it is communicating with God whether or not there are words.  There is a passage in the New Testament that encourages what Eugene Peterson calls “prayerfulness.”  The passage says that we should pray without stopping, pray all the time, pray constantly (1 Thessalonians 5:17).  Commentators split about what this means in the pastoral letter, and the way Peterson comes to such language is by talking about prayerfulness.

Prayer is at the center of the Rule of Life.  Communicating with God, you talking to God and God talking to you, is the assumption of the Rule.  Of course, if God communicates with us, then we can hear what God says.  We can keep in the direction of God.  We can continue listening to the various ways God will speak.  Even when there aren’t words, we can train ourselves and our gestures in God’s direction.  We can add things which help us attend to God.  We can remove things that take such full-awareness-of-God away.

The act of preparing a Rule, then, can be prayerful.  Breathing and whispering for God to guide you as you think about what to do and what not to do is as much prayer as anything.  Waiting for that guidance is prayer too.  Waiting all day long, opening yourself up, is prayer too.  Do you get the picture?

So, whisper that in your own way: what should I do, God?  What should I focus on?

You’re already surrounding the creation of your Rule in prayer.  And now, start listening.

by Michael

Creating a Rule of Life, pt 2

The center of your life never needs much explanation because life centers always have all of us communicating for them.  We communicate with our full selves who or what is at the center of us.

In other words, I know the bottom of a person’s spirit by good observation, listening, and patience.  Those three behaviors help me pay attention both to who that person is and to who or what sits at the center of that individual.

You can see my presupposition: everybody has something sitting at the center of his or her being.  There may be exceptions that I’d make to that comment, but most people have something or someone that is primary and of ultimate significance.  Something at the center.

Most people who practice a religion would accept their religious rituals and behaviors and teachings as outflows of that language about Someone at the center.  That would be God.

Religious or not (if a person can not be religious), living well cannot be done without knowing who’s there.  Further, living well cannot be done without conscious choosing who’s at the center and who gets to stay there.

To create a Rule, it’s helpful consider who or what is at the center of one’s life.  In that consideration, we question our behaviors and choices in an effort to inspect the bottom of those behaviors and choices.  We look at our selves through the lens of our experiences in order to wonder around into the deeper floors of our selves.

We ask, what am I doing?  It’s a plain question.  What do I spend myself on?  A calendar starts the answer.  I’ve spent my days, my thoughts, my time doing thus and so.  The surface level answers lead us to a less-seen, less-trafficked place: the center.

We ask more questions.  What does this calendar of thoughts and behaviors say about my values?  What do these things say about who is of importance to me?

Creating a Rule of Life is an activity of putting God continually at that center.  But the survey of who or what is there first may open us to the kinds of activities we need to employ in order to unseat someone else.

by Michael

A Prayer About Cancer For Three People Particularly

You know that we care for our mothers, whatever their ages, and I bring these three mothers to you in prayer.  You know their diagnoses, the particulars of their medical histories, their prognoses, and their feelings about it all.

Give them your closest ear as they whisper their questions, their prayers, their dreams, and their pains through the courses before them.  May you collect their every word, gesture, and ache, translate them into beautiful, powerful speech, and may you be moved by them to act gloriously.

Grant them your company through what may feel like both a crowded and lonely time.  May they sense you in glances, in whispers, in surprises, in meals, in quiet.

Heal their bodies through any means necessary, using doctors with their medicines, nurses with their many touches, technicians and their tests, and friends and family and children and strangers, making every single interaction a strong movement of divine healing.

Rebuke death all the way through, like you did in Jesus and reset their bodies to be increasingly vessels of health and glory.  Fill them with reminders that you have conquered death and all its effects, and keep them in that peace when all seems opposite.

Endure with them the broadness of unanswered questions, occasional doubts, hard-uttered gratitude, resentment, wondering, knowing and not knowing, and waiting.  Bless their efforts and their attempts to restore themselves while giving love to others.

Make them laugh.  Make them sit and stir and run in joy.  Make their evenings filled with splendid memories and their days cracked with blessing upon blessing.

Open before them and us your future, and make us to find our destinies in you.  Our collective future is in and with and for you, and may you grant us daily a proximity to that tomorrow.

Give them and us such generous spirits that we pray for the best, seek the good, and persist in the suffering along this way.

Empower every person in their path to be loving, gracious, good, faithful, and persistent even when we don’t know how such things come through us.

Grant us silence when words falter.  Grant us strength to submit to a redeemed life that ends and doesn’t end in you.  Equip us to be a supportive, fiercely loving, vulnerable and weak and bold and steady community of witnesses to what you’re doing.

In every way, remember Grace, Rob’s mother, and my mother.

In the name of the One who Heals all our diseases.

Amen.

by Michael

Don’t Look Away

Don’t look away while doing this.  I heard Martha Stewart say this while explaining how to slice potatoes uniformly on a mandoline.

If you’re unfamiliar with the instrument, it’s best that you listen and watch carefully as someone else slices with it.  As I watched the cooking school, I thought back to the one time I used the instrument to slice potatoes.  I cut a nice chunk of skin because, inexperienced, I was moving too quickly, cutting too deeply, and cutting too closely the potato’s end.  It became a painful metaphor for many things.

by Michael

Creating a Rule of Life, pt 1

I have been pulling together materials for a curriculum, in part, to teach and develop small group leaders in our church.  A piece of that lesson series is about the development of a Rule of Life.  One of the writers who is helping to frame my thoughts on the Rule is Debra K. Farrington.  She’s a writer, educator, and spiritual director.  I’ve also been influenced in understanding the Rule of Life as a practice over the years by writers Adele Calhoun, Richard Foster, Dwight Judy, and Marjorie Thompson.

According to Adele Calhoun, rules help us live toward what we most want.  We live by rules, whether we acknowledge them or not.  In fact, most of the rules we live by are unconscious.  Some might say that our rules are implicit rather than explicit.  When we’re asked a question about an implicit rule–why do you go to church on the weekends, for example–we wake up to the rhythms we’ve kept; we might inspect them, we might change them.

The Rule of Life is simple way of talking about what we most want, who we want to be, and how we will go about pursuing that vision.  It aides us in focusing on all our parts, not just our “spiritual” selves.  Most Rules have some language about work, rest, and play for example.  And the word Rule shouldn’t worry you.  It can be substituted by any of the following: way of life, practice of life, means of life.

I think of a Rule as a container of practices.  It is the statement that contains what practices, over a period of time, we’ll observe in an effort to respond to Love.  A Rule is a statement of things we’ll do, attitudes we’ll cultivate or intentionally be aware of, as we relate to a loving God.

Over the next several weeks, I’ll write a brief post using Farrington’s categorical outline for the components of the Rule of Life.  As part of these posts–or the background of them–I’m revising my own Rule.  I invite you to join me.

by Michael

Relationships of Accountability

I believe that anyone who has a responsibility for the spiritual guidance of others should be in a relationship of accountability with another for the sake of the people he or she guides, teaches, or preaches to.  Otherwise we are going to grow, if we grow at all, in a deformed shape that will be passed down to others.  I see such distortions frequently.  It is a biblical concept to be accountable to someone else.  Timothy was mentored by Paul, Paul by the disciples in Antioch.  Friedrich von Hügel, author and spiritual director, once wrote: “Behind every saint stands another saint.  That is the great tradition.  I never learnt anything myself by my old nose.”

From John Ackerman’s Listening to God (pg. 67).

by Michael

Something I Read

I was researching a question for someone, and I came across this in my work: The struggles you probably face in living a life centered on God–while they may be new to you–are not new to humankind.

This feels to me like a very good reminder.  It’s an impressive statement because it speaks to my own inferior places, my own fears, and my own hardships.  But it’s equally impressive because it’s right.

What we’ve experienced as we’ve attempted our religious reaches toward God, our responses to the One who has always reached first, these experiences are common.  Humans have always sensed the Divine, and humans have always experienced that sense as inviting and terrifying, as worthy and hard, as beauty and horror.

It’s the origin of creativity and art and prayer and sex and sleep and addiction. At the bottom of us is the mixed experience of struggle and relief which responds to great love.  And our struggles are not new.  They’ve been lived through before.

May we take comfort in the stories of others who have been where we’re headed and who have left good instructions for the paths under our feet.

by Michael

Something I Read to the Men in Church Today

Men:

I want to tell you

That you are beautiful and brilliant and beloved.  No matter what you do, what you’ve done, what you’ve left undone or how terrible of a man you’ve been—your beauty, your brilliance, and your belovedness—these things have been true, are true, and will be true.

I want to tell you

That the world is not only against you; it is against every good that can come from you, so equip yourself with a power greater than yourself and find the grace of God that has a track record of defeating the strongest enemies.

I want to tell you

That the greatest thing you can be is a gift to somebody else.  So wrap yourself up in the hope that you can be that generous, that you can turn your desires toward another, and make sure somebody else has the things you have, gets the things you get, and will have a fraction of the life you’ve had.

I want to encourage you

To stay with the best ways you’ve been taught to love.  We don’t usually learn to love so when we find little ways, we need to practice them so we don’t forget them, hold them while learn to love better, and appreciate our growth in the process.

I want to encourage you

To keep to some goal in your face, to be careful who you share it with, and to be relentless in pursuing it because even if you fail, you will succeed at a behavior that is more Christian you know, more formative than you can imagine, and more enriching than success.

I want to encourage you

To enjoy yourself at least once a day, which means you’ll need to find joy in your work, in your home, in your leisure, and in your nothingness.  Slowly inspect these spheres of life so that you always, every day, find joy.  It’s there.  Whether it seems hidden, when it seems altogether gone, joy is underneath the parts of your day, and it’s waiting for your discovery.

I want to remind you

That you will be greeted by hell every week, that you will be visited by enemies every day, that you will be undone by the hour, that you will be deconstructed at personal and systemic levels, so if you are not serious about finding your sustenance outside of society, you will find death without life.  If you are not serious about finding strength in the source who is God, you will find brokenness without hope.  If you are not serious about placing Mystery in front of you, you will never be covered from back to front with the power that is undefeated.

I want to challenge you

To love every woman with such skill that she will respect you, with such honor that she will speak well of you, with such care that she will trust you, and with such admiration that she will feel safe with you.

I want to challenge you

To sit alone, with yourself, for 10 minutes a day, sitting in silence, sitting and listening to the voice of God as it comes to you even if it sounds scary or strange or welcoming.

I want to challenge you

To find the people in the world who make you feel like yourself and spend time with them.  They may be the truest, rarest gifts from God you have.

I want to challenge you

To be someone’s father this year, biological or not.  Be a man who some child can look up to, call when she needs you, question when he wonders something, claim when no one else steps up for them.  Be the man who stands in the gap for a single mother or who stands alongside another father.  Be the support, the presence, the strength, the weakness, the shoulder, the legs, the backbone.  Live all year and hear this greeting in some form regularly: Happy Father’s day.

And may your children love you.

by Michael

Neighbors in Another Place

I’ve learned, as a preacher, to let sermons go when they’re done.  I learned that from Dallas Willard in a book, and I’ve been practicing it for years.  But a message I preached is still, in a way, with me.  I was thinking a lot about a Colossians text (3:1-17) that says that Christians live in both heaven and earth at the same time.  “In glory” is the language in most translations.  That passage, among other things, evokes the truth that we have neighbors in both places, people we see and know in both places, expectations and conversations in both places.

I have been thinking about my father who died more than a year ago.  His birthday last week was the same day Maya Angelou died.  It was the same week my city was visited again by the clutch of violence as a teacher and real estate agent was killed sitting in her office on 79th street.  My brother talked with me about that corner; he works that area as a security officer.  These good people, all of them dying sooner than anyone who loves them wanted, have joined the community in another place.

The Colossians passage comes up again as I read this quote from a Catholic thinker, Ronald Rolheiser.  His book, Forgotten Among the Lilies, is a full gift of reflections, meditations, and challenges for the soul.  In this reflection, he is discussing the Christian belief of the communion of saints.  While he’s from a decidedly Catholic practice, this teaching extends beyond those doctrinal borders to the older understanding of the word, catholic, i.e., universal.

To believe in the communion of saints is to believe that those who have died are still linked to us in such a way that we can continue to communicate, to talk, with them.  It is to believe that our relationship with them can continue to grow and that the reconciliation which, for many human reasons, was not possible in this life can now take place.

Why?  Because not only is there communication between us and those who have died before us (this is the stuff of Christian doctrine, not that of seance) but because this communication is now privileged.  Death washes clean.  Not only does the church teach us that, we simply experience it.

How often in a family, in a friendship, in a community, in any human network, is there tension, misunderstanding, anger, frustration, irreconcilable difference, selfishness that divides, hurt which can no longer be undone, and then–someone dies.  The death brings with it a peace, a clarity and a charity which, prior to it, were not possible.

Why is this so?  It is not because the death has changed the chemistry of the family or the office or the circle, nor because, as may sometimes seem the case, the source of the tension or headache or heartache or bitterness has died.  It happens because, as Luke teaches us, when, on the cross Christ forgives the good thief, death washes things clean.

I think of the unfinished business of these good people–my father, Maya Angelou, Betty Howard.  I think of the ways they are now in that cloud of witnesses, that communion of saints, and how they hope for us and pull for us and, as my Catholic friends would say, intercede for us.  I hope their deaths bring us clarity and love and motivation to live beyond ourselves, for others, and for world-making justice.