Dissatisfied With a Bland Way of Life

An ebook excerpt—

The trouble started some fifteen years earlier with a very specific event—a vision, though I was then too blind to see it as one.  There was no ecstatic trance, no audible voice of God.  Nor was I knocked off my horse.  Rather a slant of light broke through, for just a fleeting moment, and left something of itself within me that’s kept me restless ever since.

Presbyterians gather regularly as pastors and elders of local congregations to worship and pray, deliberate and decide.  We eat pie and have our after-the-meeting-parking-lot-meetings where the real business gets talked about.  The meetings are mixed with testimonies to the church in mission, periods of haggling over policy matters, arguing the finer points of parliamentary procedure, and all too rarely an honest to goodness theological debate.  Much of these gatherings, as you might imagine, is rather dull and tedious.  It was during a rather tedious moment that, Stan, a pastor of one of our tall-steepled congregations tried to give a little life to his presentation about recent happenings at one of our conference centers.  Our camp and conference centers are often operating on a shoestring budget and in order to keep afloat try all kinds of things to bring in a little revenue.  Stan chaired the board of a one of our Presbyterian conference centers, which had recently rented its facility to a Hindu group for a spiritual retreat.  Stan was clearly aware that some Presbyterians might wonder why one of our mission organizations had opened its doors to welcome a bunch of Hindus.

After describing the Hindu gathering and the money we’d got hosting them, he told us about the moment when the Hindu leader had introduced him to the Hindu community.  “This,” the Hindu had said, “is the Presbyterian holy man.”  Telling the story, Stan burst into laughter and said, “Now there’s an oxymoron for you!”  And we all laughed, including me.  But as I laughed something cut at me, deep within.  In that laughter, that nervous dismissal, I felt a wound sliced open, a pain, a longing, a deep dissatisfaction with the bland state of pastoral life that could make us all laugh at holiness.  In that moment, a holy light pierced me and called out to me.

I think it was at that very moment that I resolved somewhere deep inside to become a saint, though I didn’t have the foggiest idea how.  Sadly, I didn’t know a single person who could show me the way.

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Seeing Beauty in Our Suffering

Suffering is inevitable; it's what we do with our suffering that matters.  We can't avoid it, so why not do something constructive with it?  What if we were to look deeply into our suffering and through meditation--earnest examination-- glimpse the flowers that can grow from the composted garbage of our suffering?  Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, says that without disciplined deep looking, we see only our pain and fear.  We are absorbed, even consumed by it.

But in deep looking we can also see the fruit our suffering will bear.  We see with the eyes of the Gardener, who prunes and feeds the vines through suffering (John 15).  And through the eyes of the Gardener we see grapes and peaches, tomatoes and blueberries in the unwanted garbage from the kitchen—for the garbage has become rich, dark compost.

So, I sit in prayer, and turn over and over what could otherwise be only garbage.  I enter my heart and feel the ache of fear and sadness, and I turn it over gain.  I may even have to hold my nose at the stench, but I do not flee.  With the eyes of faith I see flowers blooming, squash and beans and other things that delight eye and tongue.

On this, then, Buddhists and Christians are on the same page, for they both know that from death comes new life, from suffering comes beauty—these are two sides of the same coin.  The one is necessary for the other.  In every pain and loss is a new beginning.

I don’t have to create the flowers.  God has already scattered their seed in the compost of my despair.  But I do have to look, to cultivate a seeing eye for the beauty inside every brokenness.  That is hard, hard work.

The Nakedness of Pure Trust

God is love.  And so, prayer, the pursuit of God, is also a pursuit of love. Relationships then are the school of prayer.

There's a Sufi tale about a young man who came to a Sufi master seeking the life of prayer. "Have you ever fallen in love with a woman?" the master asked.  "No, not yet.  I'm only 18," replied the seeker.  "Then go and do that first." (for this tale see the Speaking of Faith interview with Dr. Keshavarz)

I'd like to think I can go the other way: love God and I'll learn to love others.  Frankly, it seems safer, purer.  But it can be more self-deceptive; I can hide behind my piety.  So, the Sufi mystic's got something right.  Love another truly and you'll learn the path to God. Experience the free-fall, the frightening tumble into vulnerability before the other.  Nothing between you.

Become "naked and unafraid" (Genesis 3).  This is the way of prayer . . . fragile and humbling, difficult and painful.

Love, and you'll find yourself right in the middle of the way of prayer.

Seek the face of the other whose love threatens to undo you, whose love will ask you to pull down the masks and illusions, challenging the falsehoods and pretentions.  For ultimately the mind with all its games stands dumb before the mystery that is God, and only love can carry you across the final abyss.

Love is "where God is encountered in the nakedness of pure trust."  Thomas Merton, see:

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When We Realize Something’s Died

An ebook excerpt—

Late in the second decade of my ministry, I took a long look at myself and wondered at what had become of me.  The same thing comes to many of us who’ve been related to something or someone for going on twenty years.  We wake up one day, look around at ourselves and at the person or career to which we’re yoked, and realize that something’s died.

My trouble had been coming, I suppose, for quite awhile.  Such things usually don’t just show up one day, knocking at the door unannounced.  We get hints along the way.  A whisper that haunts us in the night.  A gnawing in the gut.  An ulcer, high blood pressure, depression.  We get hints, but most of us don’t have a clue what we’re to do with them.  And even if we did, few of us have the time or space or wisdom to do much about them.  And so, we keep on—hoping things will change without us having to rock the boat, praying for a miracle so we don’t have to act, denying resolutely that we’re already living, to some extent, in the midst of a crisis.  But then the knock comes, crisis stands at the door, and we’re faced with a choice.  We can bolt the door and stop our ears against the crisis, or we can let it in.  Neither feels like a good choice.  But I’m learning—largely through the witness of those women and men who’ve lived life best—that embracing crisis is the path of God.  Ignore crisis and we’ve chosen a sure way to end up sidetracked or derailed entirely, maybe even dead.  And if not dead, at least feeling like we might as well be.

I think I knew deep in my gut that were I to ignore the crisis standing at the door, I could avoid some pain in the short term, but I wouldn’t have the muscle to hold off the pain further down the road—and with the freight my crisis was carrying, I feared I’d get buried sooner not later.  It was my desperation then, more than any psychological or spiritual savvy, that got me to open that door.

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The Problem with the Churches

An active and robust spirituality is what many people I meet long for.  They’re hurried and harried, fragmented and frustrated, and few have anyone to show them the way.  Unfortunately, many are turned off and turned away from Christian churches.  Churches too often meet those who seek God as too dogmatic and moralistic, oftentimes too concerned with church life to be much help to those seeking God.  Many of those who remain in the churches long for more, but figure this is all there is—read the Bible, give money, go to church activities, sit and listen to the preacher.  This is not what Christianity ultimately is.  And no one needs to settle for a second-hand spirituality.

To those who’ve dismissed Christianity as irrelevant to their heart’s desire, and those whose Christian experience is dull and obligatory, I extend this invitation:  join me in seeking a deep and continual experience of intimacy with God, awaken with me to the sacred in every day life, and to walk continually in it . . . revel in your sacred identity.

The interior life is the Way.

Deep within you’ll find God, and you’ll find the person you really are beneath the masks and charades, the wounds and busyness people like you and I use to prop up our aching selves.

This is what you’ll read about in these pages, and this is what I hope you’ll experience as you put into practice the invitation offered here.