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.

August 18, 2016 by Michael

When Suicide Happens

I’ve read of the suicides of many people in the past, and no such story is a good story. Whether it’s a person who’s in the public eye or a person who was hardly noticed, we lose a person. A mother devastated by her toddler’s death. An actor who suffered in bruising isolation. A seminarian whose struggle was largely unseen. A doctor who couldn’t continue under mental anguish. A pastor who was overwhelmed by everything.

The loss is aggravated by the circumstances surrounding the death. Those left to respond rotate a series of questions, all of them in big-deal categories. We question life, ours and theirs. We wonder about God and faith. We query our social relationships and relatives. We turn to the tragic circumstances that form around an individual and try to see them.

Here are a few things I think are worth doing–commitments worth making–when someone commits suicide, in no particular order. They sound too general because I’ve written them about “a person” and I fully intend for that be come across as a person who comes to mind, a particular person, a designated individual or individuals who you love:

We commit to being and not only doing, to tunneling into the beautiful wonder that is the self and to emerging from that wonder with a stubbornness for searching for the same in others.
We commit to grieving, feeling as fully as possible, the deep fissures in us when someone kills herself or himself.
We commit to becoming more human by relating to individuals differently and based upon their uniqueness all the time.
We commit to the hard work of paying attention to what turns a person, lifts up a person, spoils a person, hurts a person.
We commit to loving as much as possible in the present moment.
We commit to getting mental and emotional support for ourselves and our communities in the forms of clergy who are permanently slanted in the direction of full liberation; therapists who are helpful in pursing with us our own deep change in the face of psychologically rough worlds; spiritual directors who can listen us into freedom as we journey into the company of God together; family members who embrace us unconditionally and love us lavishly; and friends who are just like family and who stay in place when family diminishes, drops, or dies.
We commit to asking better questions, even when the question is “How are you?” and staying around for the response.
We commit to telling another person how they impacted us, how we felt because of something they did or said, and how we are changed specifically because they matter.
We commit to standing close when a person feels abandoned, reminding them by our physical presence when our unheard words ring hollow that we are with them.
We commit to responding after any death with a voracious invitation to our own special life, to cultivating healthier relationships, to dealing with the destructive dynamics in our own lives, to being different and better people, and to advocating for everybody’s healthcare and self-care.

Also, if you’re in Chicago, consider attending the National Day of Solidarity to Prevent Physician Suicide.

July 22, 2016 by Michael

America’s Next Top Model

Sunday before service started I told Nate Noonen that the sermon was hard for me, hard in the preparation. I told him it was harder for me than the words appeared to me on the page after I’d written it.

Usually I try to move beyond a sermon when it’s over. I know that many preachers find this difficult, even if by virtue of our work we, simply, have to go off to the next thing. I learned from Dallas Willard how important and ministry nurturing it can be to move along, to keep going, and to not get stuck in a sermon.

It can be a tempting thing to linger over what we say as preachers. Aside from our easy proclivity to esteem ourselves, we can also lose sight of the purpose of the sermon. It’s purpose is, in part, to move people to action.

Lingering and action contrast. The best sermons are worth lingering over, returning to, hearing again, and they somehow move us to act, to be in the world, and to be different in the world.

For me, moving beyond Sunday’s sermon has proven particularly difficult. I invited the church, our intentionally multiethnic church, to listen to and learn from the life of Hannah, a sister in the first testament who spent years asking God to remember her, asking God for a son. Most of us don’t embrace the real experience of waiting while asking for the same thing. I personally find it’s more efficient to keep going. Especially in terms of injustice and other topics that prove our country’s lack of growth, conception, and productivity.

As part of the sermon, I gave a few names of people that I think our church folks would be tutored by in our work of reconciliation. These people “came up before me” during my sermon preparation the weeks prior. They aren’t, by any means, an attempt at a longer treatment of the question. Of course this was in the same message that I offered my personal and hard questions about why that ministry of reconciliation is even important and how hard it is despite its biblical relevance. Hannah is answering some of my personal questions these days.

My brother, David, has offered a wonderful resource on the topic and related themes of reconciliation in the form of an annotated bibliography. You need to read it here.

At Nate’s request, here are those names of people I mentioned. I characterized them as contemporary renderings of 1 Samuel 1-2, fully realizing that these folks themselves would use other words to describe their work. Thanks for asking, Nate Noonen.

The writings and work of Audre Lorde whose poem, New York City, I read as a contemporary version of our scriptural passage (1 Samuel 1:1-20)
The writings and work of Peggy McIntosh
The writings and work of Patricia Leary
The writings and work of Tim Wise
The writings and work of Ida B. Wells
The writings and work of bell hooks
The revolutionary suicide post on Dr. Melissa Harris Perry’s blog was to be my second contemporary version of the text but I didn’t have the time to include it; it’s here.

July 8, 2016 by Michael

For Tonight’s Service of Lament

by Gabriel Barletta Tonight we pray for the people of our city, our country, and our world because we have seen, participated in, allowed, and suffered so much violence. In our pain we ask for your enduring mercy.

Oh, God, hear and answer us.

Tonight we pray for the parents who have lost children because of police violence, state-sanctioned violence, faith-sanctioned violence, grief-induced violence. In our pain we ask for your enduring mercy.

Oh, God, hear and answer us.

Tonight we pray for the spouses and significant others to those who have died at murderous hands, that you would grant them vision to see again new life even while noticing how all their plans have shattered. In our pain we ask for your enduring mercy.

Oh, God, hear and answer us.

Tonight we pray for the children who are without mothers and fathers, asking that you would come close to them in special ways and offer them every needed grace for a life you never imagined for them. In our pain we ask for your enduring mercy.

Oh, God, hear and answer us.

Tonight we pray for the fallen that their names would be remembered as you recall them, that their stories would be among your best told ones, and that their deaths might inspire us to fix broken law enforcement programs, to face the fundamental wickedness of white supremacy, to turn from the error of all hatred seen and unseen. In our pain we ask for your enduring mercy.

Oh, God, hear and answer us.

Tonight we pray for those Dallas police officers who were murdered this week and for the Alton Sterling and Philando Castile and other victims of excessive force and for every family involved that your grace would be as overwhelming as their grief, that your kindness would envelope each one like a protest, and that your tears would mingle with ours as we suffer. In our pain we ask for your enduring mercy.

Oh, God, hear and answer us.

Tonight we pray for the unarmed who have fallen from bullets by police in 2015 and by name:

Dontre Hamilton

Eric Garner

John Crawford

Michael Brown

Ezell Ford

Dante Parker

Tanisha Anderson

Akai Gurley

Tamir Rice

Rumain Brisbon

Jerame Reid

Tony Robinson

Phillip White

Eric Harris

Walter Scott

Freddie Gray

Matthew Ajibade

Leslie Sapp

Brian Pickett

Andre Murphy

Tiano Meton

Alvin Haynes

Jeremy Lett

Natasha McKenna

Terry Price

Calvon Reid

Thomas Allen

Darrell Gatewood

Charly Keunang

Naechylus Vinzant

Bernard Moore

Anthony Hill

Terrance Moxley

Askari Roberts

Brandon Jones

Denzel Brown

Keith Childress

Bettie Jones

Kevin Matthews

Leroy Browing

Roy Nelson

Miguel Espinal

Nathaniel Pickett

Tiara Thomas

Cornelius Brown

Chandra Weaver

Jamar Clark

Richard Perkins

Stephen Tooson

Michael Marshall

Alonzo Smith

Yvens Seide

Anthony Ashford

Lamontez Jones

Rayshaun Cole

Paterson Brown

Christopher Kimble

Junior Prosper

Keith McLeod

Wayne Wheeler

India Kager

Tyree Crawford

James Carney

Felix Kumi

Wendall Hall

Asshams Manley

Christian Taylor

Troy Robinson

Brian Day

Michael Sabbie

Billy Davis

Samuel Dubose

Darrius Stewart

Albert Davis

Sandra Bland

Salvado Ellswood

George Mann

Jonathan Sanders

Victo Larosa

Kevin Judson

Spencer McCain

Kevin Bajoie

Zamiel Crawford

Jermaine Benjamin

Kris Jackson

Alan Williams

Ross Anthony

Richard Davis

Markus Clark

Lorenzo Hayes

De’Angelo Stallworth

Dajuan Graham

Brandon Glenn

Reginald Moore

Nuwnah Laroche

Jason Champion

Bryan Overstreet

Terrance Kellom

David Felix

Lashonda Belk

Gregory Harris

Terry Chatman

William Chapman

Samuel Harrell

Norman Cooper

Brian Acton

Donald Ivy

Frank Sheppard

Darrell Brown

Dominick Wise

Jason Moland

Nicholas Thomas

Quintonio LeGrier

Bettie Jones

In our pain we ask for your enduring mercy.

Oh, God, hear and answer us.

Tonight we pray for the perpetrators of violence, be they police, children, racists, politicians, citizens, people we love or people we hate; will you do the impossible and the unthinkable and save them in every just way. In our pain we ask for your enduring mercy.

Oh, God, hear and answer us.

Tonight we pray for the people who are responding out of fear and pain alone, that they might arrest their own turmoil and refuse to allow it to cause more harm. In our pain we ask for your enduring mercy.

Oh, God, hear and answer us.

Tonight we pray for the churches and faith communities which have been too quiet, done too little, and barely accepted your truth; that you would open us to reality as you know it and that we would be absolutely changed. In our pain we ask for your enduring mercy.

Oh, God, hear and answer us.

Tonight we pray for a gospel experience with Jesus that will convert us to the truth of love that dies but that always, always, always defeats death. In our pain we ask for your enduring mercy.

Oh, God, hear and answer us.

Tonight we pray for a Pentecostal experience that we might be shaken and roused by the holiest of spirits who will give us right words. In our pain we ask for your enduring mercy.

Oh, God, hear and answer us.

Tonight we pray for hope because Black folk have lost it, protection because no legal system provides it, wisdom because all our best rules never seem to apply to us, and justice because it can only really come from you. In our pain we ask for your enduring mercy.

Oh, God, hear and answer us.

July 6, 2016 by Michael

Rohr on Resurrection, Transformation, & Humanity

I might quibble over a point in this, but today’s meditation was a gift to me, given recent challenges to my soul, recent deaths I’m dying. Here’s part of it:

Resurrection is not a miracle as much as it is an enduring relationship. The best way to speak about the Resurrection is not to say, “Jesus rose from the dead”–as if it was a self-generated miracle–but to say, “Jesus was raised from the dead” (as many early texts state). The Eternal Christ is thus revealed as the map, the blueprint, the promise, the pledge, the guarantee of what is happening everywhere, all summed up in one person so we can see it in personified form.

If you can understand Jesus as the human archetype, a stand-in for everybody and everything, you will get much closer to the Gospel message. I think this is exactly why Jesus usually called himself “The Son of Man.” His resurrection is not so much a miracle that we can argue about, believe, or disbelieve, but an invitation to look deeper at what is always happening in the life process itself. Jesus, or any member of “the Body of Christ,” cannot really die because we are participating in something eternal–the Cosmic Christ that came forth from God.

Death is not just physical dying, but going to the full depth of things, hitting the bottom, beyond where you are in control. And in that sense, we all probably go through many deaths in our lifetime. These deaths to the small self are tipping points, opportunities to choose transformation. Unfortunately, the vast majority of people turn bitter and look for someone to blame. So their death is indeed death for them, because they close down to growth and new life.

But if you do choose to walk through the depths–even the depths of your own sin and mistakes–you will come out the other side, knowing you’ve been taken there by a Source larger than yourself. Surely this is what it means to be saved. Being saved doesn’t mean that you are any better than anyone else. It means you’ve allowed and accepted the mystery of transformation, which is always pure gift.

If we are to speak of miracles, the most miraculous thing of all is that God uses the very thing that would normally destroy you–the tragic, the sorrowful, the painful, the unjust–to transform and enlighten you. Now you are indestructible and there are no absolute dead ends. This is what we mean when we say we are “saved by the death and resurrection of Jesus.” This is not a cosmic transaction, but a human transformation to a much higher level of love and consciousness. You have been plucked from the flames of any would-be death to the soul, and you have become a very different kind of human being in this world. Jesus is indeed saving the world.

June 25, 2016 by Michael

The Occasion of Your Ordination, Winston

The first time I was ordained I didn’t want it. I didn’t want those ministers signing their names to a document that would permanently connect me to this call. I went through the occasion with reservations, reservations I didn’t have when I was ordained by the Covenant.

Of course, that local church, my home church, was the best place to get that first experience. It was and is meaningful because it was the ground out of which God let me come to understand who I was as a person and as a servant. It was altogether right for me to be ordained there, even if by a local assembly.

The connectional ordination came much later, after much more specific, strategic work, but work in the same direction. You remember how important my being in Estes Park with the people of the Covenant was because of what happened with us and the boy. You heard me tell that story. You were there in spirit to contain and appreciate and mourn the badness. Of course, you were a part of the process of getting me through that ordination experience and there to help me engender and add the capstone of it in the conversation I had with Dr. Taylor.

Now that we’re celebrating this step in your journey, I hope that you can find an exactness and a rightness to this moment. I love that the church is acknowledging this call of yours, one that was underlined in the classrooms we both trafficked and one that the Spirit was fashioning in you in deep woods long before we met. Your journey with all its twists. Your journey expressed in children’s ministry and community building. Your journey with all of those words. Your journey locating wisdom from the ages for the people in your path.

Certainly God has used you. The church makes that known in its laying on of hands, its public declaration, its symbolic gifts. You are a great friend. You are a great pastor. You are great at so many things that I will keep out of the public post.

Consistently humble and attuned to the complex truths of your human experience, may you be ever mindful of your greatness. May this be, among other things, a clarifying series of moments for you. May you gain crisp pictures of wide places where God will use you. May you hear the voice of the One you have known before you knew you were praying. May you sense in compelling ways every blessing. May you have every needed grace for every next step.

Michael Washington

Reflections on the Spiritual Life