Shame and Vulnerability: A Lenten Meditation

Here's a video I showed recently to my ministry students at Fresno Pacific University/Seminary.  We were exploring the nature of clergy burnout and the forces that impel ministers toward poor health.  It's a needed meditation for anyone who's human and any community that wants to help people into the vibrant humanity offered by God through Jesus.

Brene Brown offers an insightful meditation about the nature of community; she explores our need to create spaces where we can truly sit with pain.  

This isn't easy in contemporary life, even inside communities of faith where such deep work ought to be common.  In my quarter century of pastoral experience, creating spaces where pain can be shared honestly and held reverently is the vital work of being a pastor.  And if we follow in the way of Jesus, it is the vital need for Christian communities today.  

Trouble is, we both don't want to do it and we don't know how to do it--even though there is no let up in the pain we are experiencing in our lives, and that this space is precisely what the gospel hopes to create in our world.

Brené Brown, Ph.D., LMSW has spent the past decade studying vulnerability, courage, worthiness and shame. Brené's 2010 TEDx Houston talk, The Power of Vulnerability is one of the most watched talks on TED.com, with over 7 million views. Since then she has appeared on Today, Katie and Oprah Winfrey'sSuper Soul Sunday.

There is a deep beauty within you. Seriously.

Photo by tinyenormous

I've got to say a little something about the beauty of our humanity.  Yours.  Mine.  Everyone's.

I said things kinds of thing last Sunday in a sermon.  And it struck a chord.  It seems there's a darkness and heaviness that lies heavy over a lot of us.  Maybe this is a time when seeing the beauty of ourselves is, for a lot of us, particularly difficult.

And so, to convey something of our essential beauty, I'm exploring the words of two witnesses to this beauty:  Jesus Christ and Dante Alighieri.  Jesus likely doesn't need an introduction, but maybe Dante does.  He's the thirteenth century Italian genius, who's epic poem, the Comedia or Divine Comedy, may well be the ultimate masterpiece exploring the inner work of spiritual transformation.

Dante begins his vision of the path of inner, spiritual transformation with these words:

“I woke to find myself in a dark wood.”

The spiritual journey is a journey, often dark and frightful, to discover what is within us all the time. 

And what is within us?

Jesus said, “You are the light of the world” (Matthew 5).  He means that there is within each of us a light that comes from God and will never be put out.  The problem is that there are forces in our lives that have distanced and disconnected us from that light—the parent who told us that we’d never amount to anything, the relative or neighbor who abused us, the loved one who abandoned or neglected or betrayed us.  These kinds of things lead us to believe false things about ourselves—things opposed to the truth Jesus tells us about ourselves.  

“You are the light of the world,” says Jesus.  But we say, “You gotta be kidding.”

Jesus means to open us to a deeper truth too long hidden from our eyes.  He means to soften the hard ground, to give light within where too much darkness abounds, to bless where shame and pain hold us in an inner prison.  Sin loves the shame the shrouds our souls.  Sin exults in the pain that blankets the inner light.  Sin is the great deception that would lead me, for example, to believe that I’m worse that I really am.  Of course, it can also lead me to believe, in a self-inflated way, that I’m better than others. 

The work of transformation isn’t easy work.  It’s a journey from darkness to light, from falsehood to truth.  It means suffering—for all that is false and ugly must be pulled from me.  The things I cling to, the things that hold me captive must go—my illusions about myself, my addictions, my failures . . . all this must go, and none of it will go without a fight.

Embracing the truth about myself, the light I hold within me, will mean that I must journey through suffering into wholeness, from ugliness into beauty, from fear into wonder.  It’s a journey into the depths of my beautiful, God-breathed soul—a soul made by God, cherished by God, held by God.  It’s a journey into freedom.  But that I have trouble seeing that beauty doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

Jesus says, “You are the light of the world.”  

Something inside me scoffs and hisses in my head, but something else within me hopes and wonders.

Am I?  Are you?

In a dark wood it’s hard to see anything at all.  And so, we, as did Dante on his journey into the depths of fear and pain, will emerge in paradise, through suffering, to find the light Jesus says was there all the time.  Dante ends his great poem with these lines:

“As in a wheel whose motion nothing jars/By the love that moves the sun and the other stars.”

That love and light is within you and me, it holds the center of our lives.  Our spiritual work is to become what we, made in God’s image, already are and will more fully become . . . sooner or later.

Whenever difficulty gnaws at your heart

Blaise Pascal said, "In difficult times carry something beautiful in your heart."

I like that.  

It's so easy to find ourselves overwhelmed by what's broken--by darkness, fear, and trouble.  And there's plenty of all that around us.  

Instead, carry something beautiful in your heart.  It'll hold it all that at bay; it'll push back against the darkness that sometimes feels so suffocatingly powerful--both the forces outside us and inside us.

Beauty is bigger, more powerful.  It has a force of light and the eternal about it.  It is a source of hope.  

So to any of you who find the shadows drawing near you.  If winter's lingering long in your soul, the earthen clay of your heart hardened by whatever it is that creeps around inside you, making you feel dull, bleak, cold and hard . . . then here's a little beauty that can--if you hold it to your heart, feeling its warmth--bring a little of the greening power of spring to the winter of your life.

I suggest you find a way to just sit with this after the eight minute visual poem is finished.  Don't hurry or let another task pull you too quickly from the beauty that wants to carry you through whatever difficulty gnaws at your heart.  

And take care that you don't do too much theology or philosophy or science.  It's a poem.  If you try to explain it or debate it, you'll have missed it.  

Peace.

2014 Central California Prayer of the Heart Conference

The prayer of the heart unites us with the GOD who delights in the splendor of the material world.  In this often violent and fractured world, beauty often seems scarce.  But wherever GOD is, there is beauty.  And wherever beauty is, GOD is there.

Join us for this conference exploring art, nature, and daily experience as ways to open our hearts to GOD. 

A handful of local people practice different forms of art--from pottery to poetry, nature films to musical forms.  They will offer short, curated presentations, each inviting us to engage our own daily experience, finding the beauty around us as a way to open our hearts to the presence of GOD.   

For more information--schedule, presenters, and online or snail mail registration instructions click HERE.  Space is limited and we expect a sold-out conference, so please register soon.  

Seriously, this is not a gimmick to get you on board early!

Why I’m a slacker when it comes to mindfulness

Despite the rage over mindfulness these days, I confess I’m a slacker.

Sure, I’m all for the focus meditative practices bring into my life.  I practice at least twenty minutes of meditation once a day.  Sometimes more.  I have for years.  Meditation centers me, pulls me away from the continual lure of distraction, and helps me train my mind not to follow every thought wherever it wants to take me.  Through meditation the cage full of monkeys in my mind grows calm and still—or more calm and more still than it otherwise would be.  

Photograph by Peter Hapak for TIME

What’s more, meditation involves me in more than mental health exercises that balance the brain and free my body from many of the stresses of the modern age.  Through meditation, I draw my renegade mind down into my heart and become more fully integrated as a human being—rooted in a non-grasping experience of the love of God who gives me a deep sense of belonging, meaning, and empowerment.  I wouldn’t likely know all this without this kind of praying.

That said, while I practice what many call mindfulness, and I’m grateful for its growing popularity and the broadening of its practice, there are at least two reasons I’m slow to jump on the bandwagon.

1.  The term for me is a turn off and, therefore, unhelpful.  

I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be full of my mind.  I’ve had enough already of all that goes on inside it.  I want less of my mind not more.  And mindfulness conjures up in my head visions of an oversized brain.  Of course, Jon Kabat-Zinn and others will tell me I’m mistaken, and I maybe am.  They’ll tell me that mindfulness isn’t about thinking.  I get that.  But mindfulness is a word like playfulness and joyfulness, awfulness and hatefulness.  It is the state of being as full of mind as I might be full of hatred.  

And I don’t want to be full of my mind.  

To be fully and authentically and robustly human, I want my mind to find its proper place within me.  And I don’t think that place is to fully dominate the rest of me.  

Now of course, I know that’s not what mindfulness practitioners are after.  But words matter, and frankly, the word just doesn’t help me to get where mindfulness is supposed to take me.

I’d rather experience the presence of mind.  That is, I’d like to cultivate a mind that’s more present to my body and my heart (or soul)—a mind that knows and values its place within the larger household of my being.  

So, when I become still and silent, I’m neither filling myself with my mind nor am I emptying it.  To help my mind become present to the rest of me and to God, I pray this prayer that I’ve drawn from the ancient Christian tradition and recrafted for today:

I still my lips that my mind may seek;

I still my mind that my heart may seek;

I still my heart and hide inside the Deep Silence,

'till What I seek finds me.

Following this prayer, I just sit and bring my full self to full attention before God.  Click HERE for an example of this kind of meditative practice.

In this way, my body, mind, and heart are drawn together in a unity of surrender and presence before God, and I avoid privileging any one of those parts.  I mean no disrespect for those who practice mindfulness and who draw their practices from other religious traditions, but for me the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ honors the fullness of my humanity—all of me and not only one part.

Someone will say I’m splitting hairs over words.  But hey, if mindfulness is a useful word for you and helps you find the balanced humanity we're made for, more power to you.  But for me, and for a number of others I suspect, it’s a word that doesn’t carry me where I need to go.  

2.  There are benefits that come to a wandering mind.

While there are many benefits that come from mindfulness training—focus, clarity, release from the relentless machinations of the mind’s thinking function, and an increased ability to be present here and now—there's a downside to all this.  Current research on mindfulness training shows us that there are real benefits that come from a mind that isn’t so taut, so disciplined, so focused on one thing . . . or no-thing.  

This doesn’t mean that we want to celebrate distraction.  No, distraction’s an epidemic today.  And if mindfulness can help heal us of the disease, I’m all for it.  But studies show that a mind that is too focused may not have the necessary freedom to wander down the interior paths that can lead us to insight, discovery, and creativity.  

A week ago last Sunday, the New York Times ran an article called Breathing In Verses Spacing Out: Is Mindfulness Always Best?  “Mindfulness could have unwanted side effects,” writes Dan Hurley.  New studies in mindfulness show that “raising roadblocks to the mind’s peregrinations could prevent the very sort of mental vacations that lead to epiphanies.”  

What this means practically is that the practice of meditation or contemplation—my mind present to the rest of me (that is, in my body and in my little part of the world rather than following my thoughts wherever they wish to carry me)—meditative practice can create an inner space that’s free enough from the relentless distractions of our modern world so that I can allow my mind to graze freely like a horse in an open pasture.  Contemplative practices like “mindfulness”, tether the mind, or fence it in, so that it doesn’t wander too far afield.  But if the mind is too tightly corralled the mind doesn’t have the freedom to discover new things.

So, yes, let's practice the presence of mind—focusing our awareness on the here and now—so that we can heal ourselves of the relentless distractions that pull and claw at us.  And then let us let go and let the mind wander with freedom so that our creativity can flourish and we can stumble upon those epiphanies (or let them come to us) that make life interesting.