Sacred Threshold ::

Re-Membering Again :.

Twenty years ago in a land far, faraway, I was a retreat and program coordinator for a small contemplative community. In the heyday of our life together, we were doing two silent retreats a month, providing quiet and teaching on prayer and the spiritual life. There I learned many things about myself and God including the deep riches of contemplative prayer as taught by the ancient saints.

Today I went back to one of the places where we did retreats in that time long ago. It was a brief visit to a familiar place. There I learned about leadership, servant-hood, community and calling. From a well within, I remembered the good and bad of that time in my life. The sweetness of ministering together, the discovery of the rough edges of my personality, the hard lessons of learning to love, and the call to a transformed life. The building spoke to me. I was able to hear its voice and the voices of friends no longer by my side.

I don't have any neat new insight or takeaway to note from my experience this morning. I left grateful for God's continued action in my life, both back then and now. The call is the same. The way before looks like a familiar face. I am glad once again for the circles in which God is leading me back to go forward.

Drive Through Spirituality

A Reading: Luke 19

Jesus taught us, saying: “So I say to you: Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; everyone who searches finds; everyone who knocks will have the door opened. What father among you, if his son asked for a fish, would hand him a snake? Or if he asked for an egg, hand him a scorpion? If you then, evil as you are, know how to give your children what is good, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”

Everyone...everyone...everyone...three times the word "everyone" is used.

So if everyone pursues with persistence, then you will receive, will find and the door will open? This passage is a troubling one to those among us who have asked, searched, and knocked and nothing came out of it. We asked. We knocked. We sought. We have not gotten what we expected in return for our effort. If this passage is true, then what is it saying to us?

In prayer this morning, this passage caught me. Fresh out of three hours of class on the "dark night" focusing on trauma and its impact, I admit I am puzzled. When did we begin to take Jesus' instruction like some kind of drive-through at the local McDonalds--decide what you want; order at the screen; drive a few feet; pay your dues; and then in another couple of feet, receive the goods? Does it have any correlation with the consumer culture we live in?

John of the Cross elaborates on the practicalities of life pursued in God. Change is not instant to John, nor is his expectation of how God works in the soul. There are no drive-throughs in John's mystical theology. The life lived in surrender and obedience to God goes through trials and fires of transforming love as it unlearns and then learns the truth of who God is. Asking, knocking, and seeking take on a much different meaning in the dark night of the soul. It is NOT goods and services we receive, these are stripped away by the divine work of purgation, but the gift of God. Spirit to spirit, God illuminates the soul, and ultimately the whole being of the person. Asking, seeking, and knocking are the posture of the heart as one continues on in dark faith with desire and longing, trusting in a God who is hidden but secretly comes, enlightening love within. The instant, magical faith of the drive-through is undone and remade in the darkness. It is replaced by nothing less than God's very Self experienced in love.

No drive through here.

 

Wisdom of the Dark Night :.

When the spiritual life feels so uprooted, it can be almost impossible to believe--or even to consider--that what's really going on is a graceful process of liberation, letting go of old, limiting habits to make room for fresh openness to love. Still, I have known some people who carried at least a glimpse of this wisdom through their experience.....They never grieved or raged about what happened. They acknowledged the loss, but they seem somehow to know that what they had lost was not God, only their palpable feeling of God.

Therein lies the wisdom. Teresa (of Avila) and John (of the Cross) both say that we easily become so attached to feelings of and about God that we equate them with God. We forget about these sensations are only speaking to us of the divine One. They are only messengers. Instead, we take them for the whole of God's self, and thus we wind up worshiping our own feelings. This is perhaps the most common idolatry of the spiritual life.

--Gerald May from The Dark Night of the Soul

Eat Your Vegetables :.

As children we are given the instruction to eat our vegetables.

"Try everything on your plate, young obi-wan."

"Yes, it is green."

"Yes, it smells funny."

"You don't like it?"

"Yes, but its good for you."

As grown ups, we are a lot like children and vegetables when it comes to our interaction with Scripture. We eat only those things we like. We rarely try new things or eat a well balanced meal. We prefer to feed ourselves with our favorite fast food entree or have "dessert only please" if left to our own volition. 

Let's be honest. There are parts of the Holy Writ we plainly just avoid. Take the psalms of lament for example. When was the last time either in private devotion or in our faith communities, you read or prayed an entire psalm out loud with a reference to our desire to actually kill someone or including the honest admission we have lost hope in God? Not recently I bet.

A few years ago, when on retreat, I had the opportunity to pray the Liturgy of the Hours with a Carmelite community of nuns. I remember distinctly my interior feelings as we prayed the psalms together. I felt confusion, pain, disgust, anguish and restless anxiety. How dare we give voice to such evil thoughts? Where is our ability to self edit and redirect our feelings of the human experience to a positive interaction? Haven't we yet learned what is okay to say in public and what is only to be said in private with someone who has training to hear such an outburst of primal expressions? Boy, we have a lot to learn.

Boy, did I have a lot to learn.

"Stay with it, Jan. Let these times of prayer teach you."

As I settled into the rhythm of prayer, the first questions and reactive feelings ebbed away and new ones appeared.

How do these words fit with my experience of God right now? When was the last time I thought this way? When have I come honestly before God, engaging with integrity, declaring my real feelings about the pain and questions in my life? Do I believe God will listen to me if I really say outloud what I truly feel?

Oh God help! Where are you? Why are you far from me? My enemies surround me. They desire my life. Keep me safe, O God. You are my high tower, my place of refuge. Shelter me in the shadow of your wings. I run. I am running. Where can I hide?

Praying, studying, meditating on the entire Word of God, not skipping the parts that are not pleasing to our palate, eating the entire meal, with all the green vegetables, is important to the  nurturance of a healthy and whole person. As adults, we understand the dynamics for basic healthy nutrition of our body. What about our soul?

The ancient Benedictine rhythm of prayer is to pray through all 150 psalms communally in an one week cycle. All of them. No skipping. No plugging the ears and humming loudly to oneself to hide from the reality of the words. All the psalms are prayed: every word, every week, every month, every year. Not living in a monastery, it probably is not feasible for any of us to tackle all 150 chapters of the Book of Psalms in one week. If we started small, say with a willingness to refuse our inclination to edit, how would praying the psalms on a regular basis change us? What would we learn about God and ourselves if we embraced a practice of reading and meditating on entire portions of Scripture and not just our favorite parts? What would we discover as faith communities if we would do the same corporately? Maybe some of our dis-health and disease in our lives and churches could be remedied with a healthier diet.

Eat your vegetables. It's good for you.

The Wall :.

Hagberg and Guelich, in the book The Critical Journey, describe a place in the life of faith as "the wall." It is a disorientating place where what was once known about God and God's ways is shattered or dismantled. In class yesterday, we bantered about the question if everyone experienced "the wall" as a place of suffering and confusion in their spiritual life. Most people said "yes" it was normative to experience "the wall" and most of the time it manifested in suffering. I disagreed.

Here are my thoughts...

First, I don't think everyone hits the wall as named in the book. Maybe everyone hits mini walls from time to time, when a portion of one's idea of God and how God is in the world is challenged but the wall is small and in the end the change is needful but is an adjustment of one's thinking and affective response to God not a transformation. Second, if we understand John of the Cross' description of the dark night of senses and of the soul correctly, these experiences are normative for those who are proceeding in their relationship with God. Not everyone advances in their life with God nor wants to. And third, Teresa of Avila, John's dear friend, also does not talk about the dark night ("the wall') in her writings. Her sixth mansion in the Interior Castle describes mystical graces which transform the beloved into a experienced sense of union with the Triune God. Although Teresa did suffer during her life through illness, persecution and misunderstanding, she does not equate these in the same way as John does whose life story includes intense suffering and persecution at the hand of his companions.

As I sat in class, I wondered what most understand faith development to be to hold to the idea "the wall" as an everyday experience for all Christians. I know many people who have come close to a wall experience in their lives but I honestly know few who have traversed to the other side. Most people camp out in the shadows of "the wall" for a while and then get real busy doing many things to avoid the pain and confusion of what is happening. Even when suffering comes as an external visitor, an unwanted guest, pushing the God seeker's nose to the wall, hemming them in, there are a sore lack of guides to help them stay attentive to the experience however long they need to wait at the wall's edge. So, in the end, the opportunity to discover the other side is lost or given up on. And the tales of those who are gently lifted up and over "the wall" to a new land of experience with God are usually found in books and not in the person who is sipping their coffee with you at the local cafe who wouldn't dare utter a loud what is experienced in secret unless they really trusted you and your understanding of how God works in the soul.

If we only knew how much more was possible would we be willing to continue in trust with God throughout all of life's journey?

Longing :.

The soul must long for God in order to be set aflame by God's love; but if the soul cannot yet feel this longing, then it must long for the longing. To long for the longing is the also from God.
                                                                            --Meister Eckhart

Ready for Silence :.

Then hear now the silence
He comes in the silence
in silence he enters
the womb of the bearer
in silence he goes to
the realm of the shadows
redeeming and shriving
in silence he moves from
the grave cloths, the dark tomb
in silence he rises
ascends to the glory
leaving his promise
leaving his comfort
leaving his silence

So come now, Lord Jesus
Come in your silence
breaking our noising
laughter of panic
breaking this earth's time
breaking us breaking us
quickly Lord Jesus
make no long tarrying

When will you come
and how will you come
and will we be ready
for silence
            your silence

--Madeleine L'Engle, The Weather of the Heart

Dang :.

Today we talked about grief in class. I must admit, I almost skipped class. Knowing the topic, knowing what I had to do this week, knowing I really didn't want to go there, I slept in late on purpose. It's rather out of character for me but sometimes sleeping is a much better alternative to feeling. At the last minute, I changed my mind, got up, quickly showered, grabbed my coffee and drove forty five minutes to talk about grief.

Dang.

It's Holy Week and I am grieving. You might say to me, "It is very appropriate to grieve during Holy Week. There's a lot of saying good-bye and dying going on in the stories we reflect on." But that's not it. I miss Holy Week. I miss being wrapped up in the Story and telling it for all to hear. I miss the Good Friday silence and the candles of the Easter Vigil and pushing myself to again think of new ways to make the Truth all new again. I miss the people and the hurry and then the holy hush that descends as we once again remember together.

Dang. I hate feeling the loss.

Dang. It's really Holy Week. A little more dying in my soul. A little more rising yet to come.

Dang.

A Spirituality of Place :.

For years of I have known I am a person of place. Dwelling in a church culture for whom place and space was not important, I felt like a duck out of water. When I tried to ascribe meaning to the feelings deep down inside, I found myself sometimes misunderstood. It was as if I was speaking another language. Now being a person without place, I am desiring to find new words to desribe the interior tension and loss I am experiencing.

Last night I began reading a new book I have recently purchased for a class I am taking entitled Landscapes of the Sacred by Belden Lane. The book is full of the meaning of "placefulness" while unpacking the spiritual depth of "placelessness." Here are a few quotes I am ruminating on.

"In the empty spaces of our lives--in those apophatic moments of tragic loss--we too are invited to new possibilities never before imagined. There in the deserts of placelessness ("without form and void"), where we survive by denial and pretense, the Spirit of God moves like a wind over the dry arroyos of chaos, and the imagination constructs new places in which to dwell."

"The preeminence of placelessness in prophetic thought calls men and women to a God who stands alongside displaced peoples everywhere, a God who is known more clearly in exile than in the security of any given locale, a God who refuses ever to be pinned down."

And in the chapter entitled, "Liminal Places in the Evangelical Revival"....

"As I look back now, the threshold experience of the revival has formed me more than I knew. Its liminal places led me to openings that have been nurtured all my life. These include a deep appreciation for anti-structure, for the incapacity of any fixed place or institution fully to contain the holy. They involve the expectation of being found in God in the disconcerting moments of transition and movement in my life, as well as the discovery of the Holy Spirit on the margins of society, at those points where the people of God embrace the pain of others. I have willingly yielded to the impact of the revival on my manner-of-being. But I've learned also its limits. There was always, in my past, a sense of tentative transience even to the most exciting events of the tent and storefront--an awareness that even here the faithful had not fully caught the glory for which they grasped. They all harbored a fear that the power wouldn't last. And, indeed, it didn't...They were people who were touched by angels, but who finally were too frail to hold for long the power of God."

I am beginning to understand...

To Arrive :.

In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.

                                                                            --T.S. Eliot