Tag Archives: life

  • boy-bowing-down-in-gods-hands1

    Self Righteousness, Election and Healing

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    How’s this for the most pretentious opening line I’ve ever used for a blog post?

    So, I was talking with my therapist yesterday . . . .

    OK, maybe pretentious is too strong a word. But yes, really, I was talking with my therapist yesterday. Because when you’re going through so much and your support system is failing like a fat woman’s bra and you have a bunch of kids who might be adversely affected by watching their mother break into a million tiny shards, the responsible thing to do is to get a therapist. I’m just hoping I can get my shit straight before they start coming after me for all the co-pays, but that’s another story.

    Anyhow, my therapist was going through the 8 types of emotional experiences/stressors which can end up being stored as unresolved issues in our autonomic nervous system. As she went through, I stopped her and said, “that one – unmet needs. That’s exactly what I’m hung up on right now.”

    We talked a bit about some of these unmet needs – little things like the need for comfort, belonging, affirmation, knowing that someone gave a crap if I ended up as a self-sufficient adult or a hobo. Stuff like that. And for a moment, I started to feel that strangely narcotic thrill of self-righteousness. I’m sure every human knows just what I’m talking about – that simultaneous feeling of being superior and victimized. The one which allows us to use other’s wrongs to elevate ourselves while condemning them.

    There’s something about feeling self-righteous which is so  . . . . satisfying. Ego boosting. Seductive, even. Over the years I’ve noticed that I can let go of many things pretty easily, but there’s something about this feeling of self-righteousness which feels almost like being in a warm embrace. Letting go of it feels like a loss in a way that letting go of anger or desire or frustration just doesn’t.

    But as I sat there in the momentary thrall of this feeling of self-righteousness, my spirit whispered, “those people who didn’t comfort you, who comforted them when they were small and hurting?” Which brought me and my gloating pity-party up short.

    The reason I think self-righteousness is so enticing is because it feeds on the knowledge that we’re right. We’re (at least in our own minds) innocent – or close enough to innocent to count. The other person is guilty. Not just guilty, but unjustified as well. What’s wrong with simply pointing out facts?

    But the reality is that the other person has an identity that has nothing to do with what they did or did not do for me. No matter how satisfying it is to slap the name tag “Guilty, Unjustified” on their chest, their true identity is actually “Human, Image Bearer, a little bit broken”.

    The truth is that my list of unmet needs exists in large part because those people I want to label “Guilty, Unjustified” have much the same list of unmet needs themselves. Someone who was never comforted, encouraged or affirmed will often be at a loss for how to offer comfort, encouragement and affirmation to others. What’s sad about it is that this can be true even when there is an enormous amount of love present.

    People have a hard time leading others someplace they’ve never been to and giving others what they’ve never received.

    Perhaps it hurts to let go of self-righteousness because it means letting go off our often-well-earned right to feel aggrieved. But it’s no virtue to feel superior to someone whose real crime is often having been broken themselves. God himself says, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice”, so who am I to withhold mercy?

    Of course, forgiving someone doesn’t mean that what they did no longer hurts. While I can offer mercy to someone else who hasn’t given me what I need, the need is still there. And just as importantly, I’m hardly the only one with such needs – every person I meet needs the same things from me as well.

    I’ve done therapy briefly a couple of times before and one of the benefits for me has usually been that it allows me to see that I’m actually a surprisingly healthy human being. Despite everything I’ve been through. I’m hardly perfect and its an ongoing process to be sure. But all-in-all, I’m pretty awesome. ;p

    Yet the only reason that I’m pretty awesome is because I didn’t have to depend on other human beings to give me what I needed. I’ve spent the last 25 years walking with the God of comfort. The God who tells me who I really am. The God who says, “you are mine.” It still hurts not to get those things from other people, of course. We are made for relationship with each other. But God isn’t broken or lost like we humans are. So he was more than able to give me what I need. And because he’s given me what I need, more often than not, I’ve been able to turn around and give those precious gifts to others as well.

    The funny thing is, I didn’t chose to have this God fixation. And despite my best efforts, I’ve never been able to let it go. Sometimes I wonder if there isn’t something to the idea of election – that some of us do get chosen for relationship with God. But not so that we can spend eternity in heaven. Instead, maybe some of us are chosen to be in relationship with God so that we can do this work of receiving what humanity needs from His hand and then pass it on to others. Perhaps God is using his people in Christ to seed humanity with what it need to heal and reach redemption. That’s certainly worth letting go of self-righteousness’ embrace for, isn’t it?

  • What if life's like this? Only without the TV on our head.

    Life as a Video Game

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    There are scientists working right now to try and figure out if the universe is actually a massive holograph. Frankly, I’m not really sure what it would mean if it turns out it is. As long as our only awareness is within this realm, I don’t see how knowing that I’m stuck in an intricate projection would change anything. But I do have my own unprovable theory about technology and the nature of our lives which I think could be useful. It’s this: what if we thought of our lives as us taking part in a massive, intense, virtual reality video game? Now, I’m no gamer myself, so I’m sure I’m going to miff some details here, but bear with me.

    See, I think that when we become embodied, it’s like starting to play this virtual reality game. The physical realm is the setting for the game. One of the game’s features is that it’s so all-encompassing, we tend to forget that it’s not reality (or at least doesn’t represent ultimate reality which would be the spiritual world). It seems likely that some of us retain the memory that we’ve entered into this alternate world for a while when we are very young. Thus the common beliefs/reports that infants and small children can see angels.

    Like a video game avatar, everyone gets a body to use during their time in the game. While each of us bears the image of God, these bodies are shaped by a nearly endless array of genetic differences, environmental exposures, quirks of growth and such before we are born. Add the influence of external factors – circumstances, relationships and parents and each of our avatars carry God’s image in completely unique ways as we move through the game.

    Like all games, this one was made with challenges, risks and even unavoidable traps and dangers. In the Christian tradition, there has been a tendency to think that prior to the fall, the world was perfect. Unless you were a plant, because everyone – even the tigers and vampire bats – ate you. But the reality is that God declared the created world “good”, not perfect. All of the evidence we have points to the reality that there have always been earthquakes, sickness, droughts and animals who think we look like a tasty treat. But if we remember that this life is a game, then we can also remember that any game worth playing has challenges and risks or its just not worth playing. Part of what happened at the fall seems to have been that we decided that life – including ourselves – wasn’t good enough. But even with flesh eating bacteria and spiders the size of our heads, the world was made good and it still is today.

    I think that the story of the creation of man can be the story of the day when God said to adam – humanity - “come and see this place I’ve made for you to play in. It has plants and animals, day and night, mountains and valleys for you to enjoy and cultivate. I’m going to start you off in a garden where you can tend to the land and the animals there to start off with. You will be paired as male and female to have children so that everyone can get a chance to play the game and learn and grow there. Some of you will play the game for many seasons and some of you will kind of pop in and out. At the end of your turn, we’ll take a look back and see how you did. There are risks, of course, but I made you very good. You’ll figure out how to advance in the game to deal with these risks over your generations.” 

    I think that the tree in the garden – the one with the fruit man was forbidden to eat from – worked like a cheat in the game. Eating the fruit would take humanity straight from the level we were at to the level that God plays the game at - as one who knows good and evil. The highest level available for the game – in our world, at least.

    God told us that if we ate from that tree, we would die on that day. Which shows how dangerous jumping straight to that level was. On the day we ate that fruit, humanity would be condemned to die. Given that it took a good 6.5 billion years or so for the planet we are playing the game on to be ready for us, and that the creation story condenses that into 6 days, no doubt humanity is still living out that day. The human race is still in danger of losing the game entirely. We certainly have the ability to wipe ourselves out at this point in human history – and may we do so if we don’t change how we are playing the game.

    In this context, the story of our faith is the story of the rescue mission through which God is trying to help us avoid that fate. As it turns out, just as there was a cheat which allowed us to jump to a level we hadn’t earned and weren’t ready to play, there’s a cheat which lets us find our way out again. It works like in a hedge maze where people entering it are told, “if you get hopelessly lost, just keep turning left and you’ll eventually find your way out.” In our case, the fail-safe is love. This was the message Jesus was giving us when he said that the whole of the law was summed up in the commands to “Love the Lord your God [ie Love] with all your heart, mind and being and love your neighbor as you love yourself.” If as we go about our business of raising families, studying bugs, learning to make cakes or whatever we are doing, we would all devote ourselves to love and nothing else, we can find our way safely through. In fact, if we all embrace this, we will not only find our way through, but our game-playing ability will catch up to the level of the game we are playing at. We’ll discover how to use the resources of this good world created for us to sustain it and ourselves. How to treat each other in ways which bring life and dignity rather than oppression and death. The challenge is convincing everyone to stop trying to play the game in the way that seems best to them and instead pay the price of learning to live lives which are expressions of pure love – ie as images of God.

    It’s that convincing everyone to use the fail-safe built into the game which is the real problem we now face. Religious people often like to talk about free will, but only when it’s as an explanation for people going to hell or sinning. But choosing love is as much an act of the will as sinning has ever been. God can’t just descend, tell us what to do and have it be so. We have to choose to live differently than we and our people have been up until this point. In fact, all of scripture can be seen as a record of how through his relationship with Israel, God has sought to take humanity from our own, erroneous and limited understanding of how to play the game and help us choose to re-orient them ourselves to Love. It’s the only way we can be redeemed from the death which we are on a path towards. And at the end of our lives, as we review how we played the game, this will be the standard by which we are judged. How well did we love? How much closer were we able to bring humanity to the day when we’d all be living by Love above and beyond anything else we could be doing.

    Which leads me to an often missed feature about this video game. It’s a group project. Jesus made it clear that we are supposed to be living our lives for the benefit of others, not just for ourselves. The point of the game isn’t just that I would learn to play it well. Rather, by learning to play it well, I will be making the game easier for others to play well. I will be leaving the game in a better working state than it was when I got here. Jesus didn’t pray for us to be good individuals, but for us to be one as he and the father are one. That we would see ourselves working and acting as one unit rather than a separate from each other.

    Jesus even told us that we ought to be willing to give up our lives in order to achieve this goal. Many people think that a good life is a long life and a life cut short is a sign that the game isn’t working or is unfair. But the only good which comes from having a long life is having more time to make the game better. A short life, done well and received well by the people around us, is sometimes the best contribution a person can make to moving us forward in learning to love. At the end of the day, Love is the one and only purpose which will last from this game we are playing.

    So, how’s your game going?

  • grief3

    The Gift of Delayed Grief

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    My early twenties weren’t exactly a stellar time. Within a short period of time I was raped twice. I found out I was pregnant shortly after I decided to take Jesus’ words that it’s better to enter the kingdom maimed and had broken up with then boyfriend. The people around me didn’t exactly rise to the occasion. One woman I told about one of the sexual assaults told every-freaking-body. A man she told became so belligerent towards me that I had to interrupt his screaming rant to let him know that if he laid a hand on me, I would call the police and have him hauled away. One of my dearest friends died after a life-long struggle with a rare blood disorder.

    I had been studying to become a high school English teacher, but would now need help so I could complete my student teaching in order for that to happen. Instead, I was sent out into the world without so much as a chair to sit in or a bed to sleep on. I became homeless and wound up in a homeless shelter/half-way house for single mothers. My roommate was an orphan who stole a ridiculous amount of money from me. The other women there were children of drug addicts, forced out by violent step-fathers, recovering from addictions themselves, etc.

    Some of the people around me felt free to demand that I go into hiding and then place my child for adoption so my siblings, relatives and community wouldn’t know of my shame. (The idea that perhaps a person who has already had their right to self-direction grossly violated shouldn’t be told what to do with her own baby didn’t register, of course. And no, this wasn’t the ’50s. It was the mid-90s)

    After I had my son and decided to follow God’s leading and raise him myself, family and friends refused to have anything to do with me. Some went so far as to tell me directly that I wasn’t welcome to come around anymore – particularly if my son was with me. I did manage to eventually finish my degree, but what sort of work to pursue with a degree in Literature and Communications still eludes me. I was poor, alone and directionless beyond knowing that I needed to care for my son.

    There were a few brighter spots. My then 16 year old sister was supportive and actually happy about her new nephew. A local church held the only baby shower I had until a couple of my husband’s friends’ wives threw a spectacularly under-attended shower for me when I was pregnant with my 5th child. So, at least I had a stroller when my son was born.

    The local crisis pregnancy center was a God-send. They gave me a maternity dress and money so I could buy a pair of maternity jeans, as well as a crib for the baby, the occasional $20 for gas and later a $100 a month stipend which my roommate repeatedly stole. And they provided weekly sessions with an amazing counselor which made a world of difference.

    In the years that followed, I gained the life-sustaining friendship of an amazing women I had met while doing prison ministry. And after our son was born, my now husband began stepping up to the plate. Some of the people in my life insist that he’s a terrible person and can’t understand my relationship with him, but the reality is that he’s always been the only person who has been there and done whatever he could figure out to help me out when I needed help staying off the streets or getting access to transportation or whatever. Which as my kid’s father and later my husband was only right, but he had scarcely any more support than I did and really needed people who would help him out as much as I did.

    As I went through all of this, it hurt, of course. But I refused to give into anger. I forgave profusely even though it would be nearly a decade before any sort of apology at all came. I didn’t throw people’s failures or my suffering in anyone’s face. I didn’t judge the people who hurt me, but chose to recognize that they were limited people who were still beholden to their limitations. I didn’t create additional turmoil by demanding what people were unwilling to give. I rarely allowed myself to wallow in self-pity; it’s pointless and draining and I couldn’t afford it. I let go of the friendships, my reputation, my ministry, any material comforts and a future I had already worked very hard and overcome many obstacles to set-up for myself. What’s been done can’t be undone and the only thing to do is to keep moving forward.

    I stumbled through, tried things and failed, took enormous pleasure from being a mom, eventually married my husband and despite some ridiculous challenges and against enormous odds, we made a life together. The people around me continued displaying an often appalling level of callousness towards me, but I just kept forgiving, letting go, returning kindness for evil and seeking God. And in the last decade even the worst offenders have become much more supportive and kind. So, it was a royally sucky way to start life, but it wasn’t the end of my story by any means. And I do get to take pride in the fact that looking back, for whatever mistakes I made, all-in-all, I handled everything like a fucking super-hero.

    Part of what allowed me to survive was this amazing thing which our minds will do in the face of trauma and loss. You see, although I faced my challenges head on and never intentionally stuffed anything, going through so many awful things and suffering so many tremendous losses has a way of creating a great amount of pain. Far more pain than I was emotionally or practically able to cope with when these things were happening. So, my amazing mind, in all of its wisdom, dealt with what it could as it went and tucked the rest away.

    As I say the memoir portion of my book The Upside Down World ~ A Book of Wisdom in Progress:

    Emotions are funny things; like energy they never actually go away – they just move from one form to another. Using the tools I had to combat emotional reactions which were simply too much for me to deal with was like holding a beach ball under water – eventually you lose control and the ball will come shooting out in unexpected and uncontrollable ways.

    For most of this year this is exactly what has been happening with all the crap I went through in my twenties. Those emotions which I was unable to process fully as I went through have been coming out to be dealt with and released.

    This isn’t the first time I’ve had this experience. It happened in my late teens and again when I finally dealt with the trauma of losing all of my friends after having my son. Almost everything I’ve read about the fairly common experience of delayed grief has spoken of it as a bad thing. What happens when you aren’t willing to face reality, live in denial or avoidance. But I think it’s genius. An amazing sort of grace which allows us to survive and thrive in the face of devastating suffering and loss.

    There was no way I could have done as well as I did in life if I had been weighed down with the sort of pain and grief I have been experiencing this year on top of everything else. By tucking this pain away to be dealt with later, when I was safer, stronger and more secure than I was as a young adult, this delaying of grief allowed me to survive and even sometimes thrive. It gave me time to mature, grow stronger and become more settled before having to face it. Dealing with this pain has nearly done me in this year. I can’t imagine what it would have done to me back when I was couch surfing with a toddler or looking for change in the cushions for food for my kid.

    The problem with this sort of delayed grief, I think, is that we often don’t recognize it for what it is when it comes up. Often, our brains will wait until things are fairly settled to let these emotions out. Which is good but often confusing. I’m finally in a safe place, so why am I so miserable, we’ll think. We’ll wonder if maybe there’s some other problem – a failure of forgiveness or a need to change direction or an unrecognized problem with how we are currently doing life which is at the root of our suffering. Sometimes we keep trying to use the same coping mechanisms which we used to shove aside the pain the first time – perhaps denial or minimizing or internalizing – only to discover that they are no longer working. Hopefully, either on your own or with the help of a good friend or counselor, you will figure out that it’s old pain demanding to be dealt with and released.

    Delayed grief is something which many people experience, but it’s not something which is very widely known or understood, which can make it hard to recognize. Most of what is written about it is, as I said, negative and usually written about those who have lost someone to death. But loss takes many forms. It can be the loss of relationships, reputation, work, security, or anything else we care about. It seems to me that as hard as a loss of a loved one to death can be, unless the death is particularly unexpected or violent, grief from death is usually much easier to process than the grief which comes from the evil we do to each other. Physical death is a normal part of life in this world whereas the things we do to each other comes from the brokenness which mankind has been struggling with since the fall. It is unnatural and beyond what God created us to have to cope with.

    Since one of the reasons delayed grief is so difficult to deal with is that we often don’t recognize it when it happens, here are a few signs of delayed grief:

    • You find yourself dwelling on past events. You may find yourself repeating the story of what happened to yourself over and over. You may imagine conversations you could have had or even think you might want to have with the people involved.
    • Like the grief which is experienced after the death of a loved one, the pain you are experiencing may sideswipe you unexpectedly. You may suddenly start crying, being angry or exhausted or anxious for no particular reason.
    • While reading, in conversation, watching TV or movies, etc you may find that hearing or seeing things which are similar to your past events triggers intense emotions.
    • The pain you are experiencing tends to be more draining than regular frustration, hurt feelings or anger. Grief tends to be particularly draining – both emotionally and physically. You may find that you just have less energy over all than normal.
    • Sometimes you may find that you are re-experiencing past events, almost as if you are right back in that moment. This can be a sign of PTSD. If this is happening, it’s particularly important to find someone to talk things out with.

    Of course, no one wants to be in pain. But one of the good things about the pain of grief, is that its a healing pain. Once it passes, you will be whole-er and more peaceful than you were before. So it’s not a bad thing. Of course, there are things you can do along the way which will make working through grief harder than it needs to be and perhaps even complicate it so it poisons your life going forward.

    Some of the ways you can avoid this and allow grief to do its work:

    • The most important thing is to allow yourself to experience whatever pain you have. Pain that is experienced can be released. If you refuse to allow yourself to feel it, it will never go away.
    • The presence of grief doesn’t mean that you’ve done something wrong and need to be making changes. If you need to make changes in your life, by all means do that. But if your pain is coming from the past, changing the present won’t be much help.
    • Having forgiven someone doesn’t mean that what they did doesn’t hurt. But you may discover that there is unforgiveness or anger present which needs to be dealt with. Dealing with that can help move the process of grief along.
    • Resist the urge to second guess or blame yourself. Even if you screwed things up along the way, we all do the best we can figure out how as we go. If you know better today, be grateful and proud that you know better now rather than you did then. Some people go through their lives never learning anything.
    • Be compassionate towards yourself. Don’t tell yourself that your pain is ridiculous or that you should just get over it. Much of our pain is created when others lack compassion towards us. Don’t join in and pile on. Treat and talk to yourself the way you would a good friend who was going through a hard time.
    • Find someone to talk to. Just make sure they are safe. If you try to talk with a friend, family member or fellow Christian and they don’t respond in a way that makes you feel better, don’t do it again. The fact that this person should be someone you can lean on doesn’t mean that they are. Don’t hesitate to see a counselor to talk things out, even if you only go a few times. Staying isolated will only make things worse.
    • Do things to help others. It does help to have other things to focus on as you work through your grief. As you help others, you will often be exposed to experiences, ideas and insights of others which might be helpful to you as well.
    • Give it time. Grief is a process which often follows a two-steps forward, one step back progression. But over time it will lessen, episodes of intense pain will come further apart and eventually be less intense. Eventually, your grief will be more memory than anything and you will have gained healing and peace for your efforts. But it does take time.

    One last note. I went to find a picture for this post and put “grief sculpture” into the image search. Almost every single picture which came up was of a woman or female form. Almost every. single. one. Men: you are allowed to grieve. You need to grieve, just like we women do. Please know that and don’t buy into the cultural nonsense that men always have to buck up and take it. It’s not true. Suffering is not a female experience. It’s a human one. And its worth it. There is healing and peace on the other side, which after all the suffering, we all deserve.

  • Not really relevant. Just funny. ;p

    I Guess Jesus Was Telling the Truth

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    There’s a saying that you should never put a period where God has put a comma. But as my readers know, there does come a time when one has to wonder how many commas can fit into one damn sentence. Which is where I’ve been for the last few months. I’ve allowed comma after comma to be added to the ongoing story of my life until it just seemed ridiculous to continue thinking that somehow, this story was going to work itself out. So I decided that this time, I would put that period in and take a look at how things looked.

    To a certain extent, I suppose this is a pretty normal state of mind for an oldster like me. I’m going to be 40 in a few weeks. Surely now is as good a time as any to stop and take stock of how it’s gone so far. And the verdict is, they’ve gone pretty damn crappy. In fact, the prospect of another 40 years of more of the same practically sent me into a death spiral.

    Part of it was that by this point I had slipped into depression which brings what is bad into sharp focus while dimming one’s view of what is good. But a lot of it was that as I looked back, I saw a life lived following God and his ways the best I could. This had lead to me making what more realistic, sober minded people would see as some poor decisions, but every step of the way, I simply trusted in God. Until I just couldn’t convince myself to allow one more freaking comma. The time had come to put that period there. Looking at my life, all I could think was, “I followed God and trusted him. And this is where it got me? Seriously?”

    The problem has been where to go from here. If I got here by following God the best I could, then maybe I needed to find another way of doing things. However, as I mentioned, I’m getting to be an oldster now. I’m a bit set in my ways. I don’t really know any other way to live than the way that I have been living. Being selfish and angry and shallow and materialistic just seem like soooooooo much work. I’m to lazy for all of that. Old dogs and new tricks.

    I read a post a few months ago (can’t remember who wrote it at the moment) in which the writer basically said, “if you ever find yourself poor, worn out, mourning, yearning for things to be set right, not up for the task in front of you, sick of all the conflict, friendless and wondering why being a good person doesn’t seem to do you any good, Jesus says you’re doing it right. He says you are blessed. In fact, he says you should be rejoicing.”

    The problem, of course, is that when you are poor, worn out, weighed down by injustice, oppression and cruelty, feeling small, friendless and wondering why all the good you’ve worked so hard to grow hasn’t amounted to anything, you don’t feel blessed! Instead you feel, well –  poor, worn out, weighed down by injustice, oppression and cruelty, feeling small, friendless and miserable. Reading the beatitudes feels like Jesus saying, “who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?”

    At some point I had to seriously ask myself: do I actually believe Jesus? Do I believe that he’s telling the truth? Do I believe that the truth he’s telling is worth chasing after? Out of habit if nothing else, I wanted to say yes. The problem being that believing Jesus up to now has lead me to a place of being poor, worn out, weighed down by injustice, oppression and cruelty, feeling small, friendless and like a failure. Depressed? Yes. Rejoicing? Certainly not.

    And that’s where I’ve been stuck. Until a couple a days ago, I had a small epiphany about why I have been suffering so terribly this year. I’m not going to get deep into it in this post, but essentially I realized that I’ve been dealing with delayed grief. And much like when a person has been struggling with an undiagnosed or misdiagnosed illness, finally having the right diagnosis for what is going on is an enormous relief. You finally have a name which is attached to your experience and can be used to explain it. You have a prognosis, some idea of what is actually causing the problem, what lies ahead and can choose an appropriate course of action. My problem has been a terrible grief over terrible experiences which my psyche is now strong and able enough to experience the pain of. I’m going to get into the details of this sort of grieving in another post, but for now I want to get back to this issue of commas and periods and being blessed while you feel like crap.

    So I finally understood that at its root my suffering for the last few months has been a normal part of working through the pain created by some really fucked-up experiences. Which is good for me. Unlike making money, friends, my husband happy, my house orderly or some of the other things I’ve been struggling to do to lift my suffering, I know how to do grief. So my perspective has been shifting ever so slightly. And to my astonishment, I’ve started to discover that what Jesus said is true. Even with that period I have been insisting on putting in place. Yes, I have been poor and miserable and struggling. But I’m realizing that because I did follow God, I have been unexpectedly blessed.

    For example, I have a clear conscience. My life has not been error free, but I’ve always forgiven freely, always loved the best way I knew how, always followed God’s lead when I could discern it. I have rarely been intentionally mean to anyone, known the right thing to do and chosen to do something else, ignored someone who was suffering or in need. I’ve done crappy by the world’s standards in life. But I have a clear conscience which I’m realizing is a really great gift to be able to give yourself.

    There was a lovely guest post at Ann Voskamp’s site (mute button on the bottom to the left) by Lysa TerKeust the other day which posited that

    And you know what I’m tempted to do as a mom?  Draw a straight line from my child’s wrong choice to my weakness in mothering. . . . But what if that’s the wrong line to draw? . . .

    What if God said, “What mama is strong enough, persevering enough, tough enough to bend without breaking under the weight of the choices this child will make?

    What mama is willing to be humbled to the point of humiliation yet not blinded to the wisdom found like diamonds in dirty places?

    So what if I’ve had this terribly hard, unfair life because God looked around, said, “who is strong and wise enough to carry the burden of other’s sins and a large sized serving of humanity’s pain and work through it without passing it along and multiplying it?” What if that was me? If the world looks down on me, but God saw me as good and able to the task, then maybe that is cause to “rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven”.

    And there’s something else. Five years ago, ten years ago, twenty years ago, when the things which I find myself grieving today were happening, I loved God and did my best to follow him. But in the last couple of years, through terrible struggle, I’ve gained a perspective I didn’t have then. Then I thought of myself as moving in and out of God’s presence. God could descend from without or rise up from within. For a while, I could even access that presence pretty much at will. But as of late, I’ve become aware of God’s continual presence with me. Not in a watching over me from above sort of way. Or even a carried within me sort of way. But rather as a just there – in the everyday, here and now, mundane world sort of way. Like air or atoms or life itself. Always just there. (Which, if you recall, I have been a wee bit frustrated with.)

    So now, as I look back, I understand in a way that I never could have then that God really was with me all along. When I was lonely, he was there with me. When I was heartbroken, he was there with me. When family and friends turned me out or mistreated me, he was as close to me as ever. I was never alone. I was never unnoticed. I was never uncared for. Those are all things I knew in my head even then. But now, I understand them in my bones in a way that I simply couldn’t have then.

    So I guess that what Jesus said was true, even though I couldn’t see how it could be. I am blessed. And if he was right about that, then I guess I can count on the fact that as this terrible grief passes, it will be replaced with rejoicing. Because in this kingdom he brought down, great is my reward.

    BTW, I think I’m ready to get back to regular blogging, but grief does tend to use up a lot of energy, so we’ll see. But if you miss me when I’m not writing here, you should go “Like” The Upside Down World on facebook. Even when I’m not blogging, I share thoughts, articles, pictures and such pretty regularly over there. And I’d feel extra special if you’d join me. :)

  • If we have no peace it is because we have forgotten we belong to each other

    Moving From “Me” to “We”

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    If you are an American Christian, odds are really, really good that at some point you have been told that as you read scripture, you should try inserting your name for the word “you” in parts of scripture where Israel or God’s people are being addressed. So, I could read, “Rebecca shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the LORD, and a royal diadem in the hand of her God. No longer will they call Rebecca Deserted, or name her land Desolate. But Rebecca will be called Hephzibah, and her land Beulah; for the LORD will take delight in Rebecca, and her land will be married.” (Isaiah 62:4) It’s not a terrible idea; sometimes we do need help personalizing scriptures and realizing that the love expressed applies to ourselves. Of course, if you do this, eventually you will end up with something like “Rebecca also took her beautiful jewels made of My gold and of My silver, which I had given her, and made for herself male images that she might play the harlot with them.” (Ezekial 16:17) Which is a little too personal maybe.

    Now, if your pastors/teachers are any good at all, they have probably also taught you that in nearly all of the places where God speaks to “you” or even where Paul and Jesus address “you”, unless a specific person is being addressed, the word used indicates a plural you. So it’s more of a “y’all” than “you, Rebecca, sitting over there eating jelly beans.” This ought to be obvious as usually the word “you” is being used to address the nation of Israel or an entire church or the group of people being spoken to. But we Americans are notoriously hyper-individualistic. So with or without a anyone’s encouragement, we do tend to read scripture as if it were speaking to us individuals rather than to a collective group.

    A while back, I became convicted that the hyper-individualistic programming of our culture isn’t compatible with Christianity. I matter as an individual, but I am also part of a larger body. My life is not for me alone, but for the good of God’s Kingdom – a Kingdom which encompasses all of creation. If I see my life and my faith as primarily about me, I am very much mistaken.

    What I came to realize is that countering hyper-individualism isn’t just a matter of prioritizing social justice or even church fellowship. Rather hyper-individualism hides very deep truths about our identities, our purpose and even the meaning of our lives from us. Because the truth is that my life isn’t about “me”. My life and your life and the life of every other human on the planet is about “we”.

    Now, that might sound like some new-agey, mumbo-jumbo, but it’s actually very deeply embedded in scripture. Go back to the very beginning. God made “adam”. That’s adam with a lowercase “a”. It means “man” as in “mankind”. God didn’t make A man. He made humanity. And he called humanity Adam. (The word “adam” is actually used several hundred times in the Old Testament. It really does mean mankind/men/people!) When God was dealing with Adam, he was dealing with humanity.

    Ages ago, my husband pointed out to me that with few exceptions, God judges nations – peoples – rather than individuals. I found this idea offensive, frankly. I should be judged on my own merits, not on what the people around me are doing! But the reality is that a culture and a society are made up of the individuals in it. Unless, I am like Abram and have followed God’s lead to come out from among a sinful people, I am part of the society I live in and will be judged as it is judged. Look at the story of Sodom. God agrees that if there are even 10 righteous men in the city, he will not destroy it. In the end, the city is destroyed because it was beholden to a culture of violence, depravity and inhospitality. Lot clearly is not an innocent (he offers up his virgin daughter’s to a mob, after all!). But he does at least stand up to the forces of the culture around him and for that God allows him and his family to escape destruction. We are responsible not just for personal morality, but for how we handle ourselves in relation to the culture around us.

    Shortly before his death, Jesus prayed over his followers and over us – his followers yet to come. In that prayer Jesus prays repeatedly that we would be one as he and the father are one. We often read this as being about church unity. But it goes much deeper than that. Trinitarian theology teaches that God is both one and three. Over the centuries, a great deal of time, hot air and ink has been spent trying to parse out what that means. But what we know is that in some way God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit are all one being, despite being three persons – for lack of a better word. When Jesus prays that we will be one as he and the father are one, this is the sense in which he is praying. That we would be both “I” and “we”. Both me, Rebecca and we, humanity, of which Rebecca is one individual. (Of course, theologically speaking, Jesus, God and the Holy Spirit are all of one substance which has its own implications for us – am I of one substance with you and just don’t know it? Many spiritual teachers have claimed just that. Our scriptures are largely silent on this beyond teaching that we retain our identities after death.)

    Or let’s consider it another way. Each of us has the same identity. Each human being was created in the image of God. It is, at the root, who we are. There’s an ancient rabbinical saying which Jesus would have known as well that says, “When Caesar puts his image on a coin, all the coins come out identical. When that One who is beyond rulers puts the Divine Image on a ‘coin,’ all the ‘coins’ come out unique.” Yet for all of our differences, we all have the same identity as image bearers. I recently read somewhere else that every person I meet is another version of me. That’s how deeply we are connected. And that’s what we are missing when we are working out of a hyper-individualistic mindset.

    As I started understanding these realities, I rather purposefully shifted my language to reflect the reality that I am not simply “me”, but am part of a larger “we”. It was an illuminating shift. I found that when I’m thinking in terms of “me” rather than “we”, it’s hard to see the forest for the trees. But once I started using we language, I could see that the news was about the way we humans were behaving towards each other rather than about discrete events. Movies are the stories we tell ourselves about who we are or were or could be or wish we were or might have been. Our laws and policies are about the way we organize ourselves, set our priorities and treat each other. If I don’t like the way we are behaving, well, that’s an awful lot like when I don’t like the way I am behaving. If I don’t like the way I am behaving, I need to figure out why I’m doing things I know I shouldn’t be doing and set about fixing and unlearning and relearning. I don’t start a war with myself or engage in daily arguments with myself over it. I figure out what the problem is and make real, practically changes to address them. It works the same when we aren’t behaving the way we should.

    Reverend Terry Hamilton-Poore has said:

    According to the Presbyterian Church’s Book of Order, when a person is baptized, the congregation answers this question: ‘Do you, the members of this congregation, in the name of the whole Church of Christ, undertake the responsibility for the continued Christian nurture of this person, promising to be an example of the new life in Christ and to pray for him or her in this new life?’ We make this promise because we know that no adult belongs to himself or herself, and that no child belongs to his or her parents, but that every person is a child of God. Because of that, every young one is our child, the church’s child to care for. This is not an option. It is a responsibility.

    If we have no peace it is because we have forgotten we belong to each otherThis is how it works – we belong to each other. This has always been true, but this moment in history is probably the first time we’ve been able to see the reality of it so clearly. If I eat chocolate, odds are very good that a child in slavery harvested the beans for it. Another version of me has the life they have because of seemingly innocuous things that I do. My engagement ring probably bought a gun that was used to kill someone. Someone made with the same image as me at their core. I am wearing clothing sewn by a woman in a sweat shop. A woman just like me, only in a different place. And if she were in my place, she’d be wearing a shirt made in a sweat shop too. It’s overwhelming, really to have to face the reality that we human beings can’t do anything without it affecting people a world away who we barely know exist. But if you take that reality and add to it the fact that we all belong to each other, hope appears. The idea that the $100 I was going to spend on a new lamp might actually have been meant for someone else is no longer so strange and incomprehensible. It starts to make sense to me that I was given that excess so I could make sure it got to someone who needs it. We really are all in this together.

    One of the amazing things about learning to think in this way is that rather than my own personal identity disappearing, as those still caught in hyper-individualistic thinking fear is the case, I actually matter more. Who I am is part of a larger whole. If I want the larger whole to be better, then I have to be better. That’s the part that I control. It’s my little piece of the puzzle to work on. And the healthier and more whole I am, the more I am able to tend to others. And as I tend to others, I run into those parts of me which are still broken or immature or neglected. The parts of me which are selfish or prone to dysfunction or scared. And as those are uncovered, I can bring them to God for restoration. Instead of becoming better because I’m supposed to or I want to, I am becoming better so that I can help humanity be better. As we all do it, the world starts to change.

    Despite suffering from Parkinson’s disease, Muhammad Ali sometimes given speeches in support of his social advocacy work. At the start he will hold up one finger and say, “me.” Then he will hold up a fist and say, “we.” Power doesn’t come from the hyper-individualistic me. Power comes from “we”. We are all in this together. We are Adam – mankind. We do belong to each other. And it was Jesus’ fervent prayer that the we would be one as he and the father are one.

  • submission-umbrellas

    Worst Clobber Verse EVER – Christian Patriarchy Edition

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    In a more perfect world, the title of this post would be complete jibberish to all of my lovely readers. But alas, we live in a world which is in the process of being redeemed, so some of you know all too well about Christian Patriarchy and clobber verses. However – joy of joys! – we live in a world which is in the process of being redeemed and I know that some of you have no idea what Christian Patriarchy or clobber verses are. So, for the blissfully uninitiated, allow I to explain a bit.

    At its simplest, Christian Patriarchy is the teaching that there is a God ordained hierarchy in which men are over women and children. A daughter is under her father’s headship until she marries and responsibility for her is transfered to her husband. Ideally in this arrangement, the man is responsible for protecting his wife and daughter from other men as well as providing for her and overseeing her spiritual, moral and personal development. In exchange for this protection and leadership, a female treats her father/husband with respect, obedience and deference. Although this arrangement has been propagated around the world and throughout time irregardless of religion, Christian Patriarchy proponents insist that this is a Christian arrangement rather than just something people have had a tendency to do. Like going to war or practicing dietary restrictions.

    A clobber verse is a verse of scripture which is used to provide definitive proof – in the mind of the person using it – that a particular idea or teaching is true, biblical and theologically unassailable. Now I have a few verses which I will use this way all day, everyday. “God is love” for example. What makes a clobber verse a clobber verse is that inevitably, they are pulled completely out of the context they were spoken into. Nearly always, on closer examination  the verse in question doesn’t even say what the person using it seems to think it is saying. And as a rule, the clobber verse is used to support something which is expressly forbidden by scripture – like oppressing someone, condemning someone or creating division in the body. An example of a classic clobber verse is “I am the way, the truth and the light. No one comes to the father but through me” getting pulled out as proof that only Christians will go to heaven. Even though it doesn’t actually say that at all.

    submission-umbrellasNow, the theological problems with Christian patriarchy are so numerous and obvious that books have been written on the topic. (In fact, if someone wants to give me an advance, I’d be happy to add another one to the genre!) Pretty much every point used to support the idea can easily be unwound to reveal it for the hot mess it actually is. But for today, I just want to focus on the clobber verse that gets used as a foundation for the whole thing. It’s Ephesians 5:23:

    For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior.

    And we may as well throw 1 Corinthians 11:3 into the mix for good measure:

    Now I want you to realize that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God.

    More than any other, these verses get pulled out as incontrovertible proof that it is the job of the husband to protect and lead his wife. Just like Jesus does the church. Except that Jesus offers very, very little protection to his followers. And his leadership of the church is, to put it mildly, not so strong. Now, even among those who aren’t Christian patriarchy types, this idea of Jesus as protector and leader may seem obvious and perhaps I lost you there, but really, let’s look at the evidence.

    I know that many of us have and do pray to Jesus for protection which is fine. But really, we’re talking about a man who repeatedly told his followers to expect to be crucified. And many of them were in the years after his death. If it’s protection you are looking for, Jesus isn’t really your go-to guy. In fact, if you’re really big on safety, Christianity probably isn’t the religion for you anyways.

    There are two times I can think of that Jesus actually expresses a desire to protect anyone. The first was when he lamented over Jerusalem saying:

    “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing.”

    (For those of you who aren’t up on your barnyard basics – a hen is a FEMALE chicken, btw. Not really a great support for the idea of men as protectors.*)

    And then in his prayer over his disciples in John 17:

    “Holy Father, protect them by the power of your name—the name you gave me—so that they may be one as we are one. While I was with them, I protected them and kept them safe by that name you gave me.”

    Which is fine except that the whole prayer is one expressing ideas of equality, mutuality and unity – NOT hierarchy. Jesus protected them so that they would survive to act independently without him, not as a sign of his position above them!

    As for leadership, let’s think for a moment how exactly Jesus leads his church. Did he give his followers a plan to follow once he was gone? Nope. Did he tell them how to pick leaders? Nope. Did he tell them how to dress, how to handle their money, where to preach or leave behind a catechism to follow? Nope, nope, nope and nope. If you’re looking for justification for command and control leadership, Jesus definitely isn’t the role model you are looking for.

    Of course, Jesus did frequently tell people to follow him. And he was recognized as a teacher by his followers. But even in his life, his goal was always that those who followed him would be able to learn and then go out into the world independently. He sent his disciples out to practice preaching and casting out demons on their own, for example. In Luke 6 he says, “a student is not above his teacher, but everyone who is fully trained will be like his teacher.” Jesus asked people to follow him so that they could become like him, not so that they could be under him.

    So, there are elements of protection and leadership between Jesus and his church. But to read that a husband is to his wife as Jesus is to his church and come away with the idea that protection and leadership are what a husband ought to orient himself to is absurd. If we want to take this verse seriously, we need to look at what Jesus’ actual relationship with his people is. Jesus variously said that he came to lift oppression, offer freedom, offer rest, challenge, love, rescue, save, comfort, bring salvation. Those verses which say that the husband is to his wife as Jesus is to the church are saying that men ought to do for their wives what Jesus does for his church: offer freedom, rescue them from oppression, offer rest, love, comfort, etc. Like Jesus did with his followers, husbands are to help their wives get to a point of being able to stand on their own two feet and go out into the world as a strong, whole human being (ie unified). The verses which say that the husband is the head of the wife have nothing to do with hierarchy, power, control or roles and responsibilities. In reality, they teach just the opposite of what Christian Patriarchy proponents take from the verse.

    The truth of the matter is that Christian Patriarchy takes a man-made construct which addresses worldly concerns like who is over whom and attempts to use Christianity to justify it. But it doesn’t work. It’s not consistent with Jesus’ teachings or his behavior. The whole thing is nothing more than an illustration of that bible verse that says, “There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death.” (Proverbs 16:25) The idea of men over women has seemed right to humanity for a very long time. And yet, it does lead to death. Despite having been tried for thousands of years and in a myriad of contexts, there has never been a culture in all of human existence where placing men over women as worked to make a peaceful, abundant, just society. All too often it has meant literal death for women at the hands of the men who were supposedly placed over them to protect them. Far from being God’s design for men and women, putting women under men is exactly the sort of thing which husbands are instructed to be rescuing their wives from – just as Christ rescued his people what was oppressing them.

    If you haven’t already, you can read some of my other writing on women and Christianity by clicking this link.

    ****************************************************************************************************************

    *Slightly off topic, but I feel compelled to address the issue of men as protectors a little more. I have had men react very strongly to the ideas I’m explaining here. For some men, being a protector is part of their identity and seen as one of their primary purposes in life. When I have challenged the idea of husband as protector, they felt personally attacked and diminished. So let me be clear: I think that men who view themselves as protectors can be a wonderful, Godly thing. Especially men who feel called and compelled to stand up for those who are too weak to stand up for themselves. I in no way mean to say that this impulse and virtue in men is bad.

    However, a willingness to protect is in no way primarily a male virtue. This is shown in scripture where God describes himself as a protective mother bear or mother eagle. As well as in our everyday lives where women are often fiercely protective of others. In fact, I have known several people who were raised with predatory men and always the mother was judged in the harshest terms for not protecting her children from the abuser. For all our talk about men as protectors, we have strong expectations that women be protectors as well.

    The problem we often run into with men as protectors is two fold. First of all, protection often becomes a justification for restricting the freedom and autonomy of the people being protected. In contrast, the model seen in scripture is primarily protection by driving away threatening forces so that the protected can live freely and unencumbered. Secondly, male protection has a tendency to fixate on physical safety to the exclusion of the daily need to protect hearts, spirits and even emotions from being crushed. As we see in scripture, Jesus wasn’t really concerned with the physical safety of his followers – he promised them death. But he was careful to protect them from the enemy who could destroy their souls.

  • you_are_loved

    Do You Know How to Feel Loved?

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    Pretty regularly my three year old Olivia will tell me, “Michaela loves me.” Or Noah or Dad or whoever in the family she’s just been dealing with. Believe it or not, this doesn’t just happen when someone hands her a piece of candy. Often it’s just after being hugged or read a book or being talked with. Just simple things that seem to make her realize that she is cared for. As a mother, I don’t think I’ve ever heard more reassuring words come out of a child’s mouth than Olivia’s, “everyone loves me.”

    I know people who would probably think it is unseemly to declare oneself loved. We’re supposed to tell other people that we love them, not proclaim ourselves as loved. Even if it’s sweet for a 3 year old to say such a thing, it would seem weird and awkward for us to say it. However, as much as we tell people we love them – and we should! – what a gift to tell people that we have received and experienced the love they have for us as well. I know from experience – and I’d bet most of you do too – that there is little which is more hurtful than a loved one rejecting our love. To be a parent who realizes that as fervently as they have loved their child, that for one reason or another that child doesn’t feel loved. A spouse whose partner feels unloved after they’ve poured themselves out heart and soul for them. Or a friend who prayed over and sat with a dear one only to hear, “no one cares about me.” As wounding as never hearing, “I love you” can be, “I don’t feel loved” can be even worse.

    Sometimes the people around us don’t feel loved because we’re doing it wrong. But I know a lot of people who simply struggle to experience the love directed their way. They may know that their own love for others is true, deep and passionate. Yet they tell themselves that others are just being nice, don’t know any better, or simply saying what they think they are supposed to say when people direct love towards them. I know I’ve done this. It wasn’t until I had my own daughters that it dawned on me that my own mother might actually have meant all of the kind, encouraging things she had said to me over the years. I knew she loved me, but I had rarely allowed that love to actually touch me – to feel it. Even with my own children, I’ve tended not to allow their love to reach me. After all, kids will love even the crappiest mom – it wasn’t personal. Except of course, it is personal to them.

    It took me a good amount of time as well as being on the receiving end of the “your love can’t touch me” phenomena for me to realize that I was doing this. And that’s it’s not OK. I’d like to say that I realized that it’s not right that someone as lovable as me would not feel loved. But really, what finally got through to me was my middle daughter. She’s a sensitive, passionate girl who sometimes reminds me of myself as a child. And she loves me. As a preschooler she would regularly set-up and invite me to “I love mommy” parties with water in her tea set, crackers on napkins and stuffed animals wrapped in blankets as presents for me. For a while I figured this was her way of getting me to play tea party with her. Then one day I looked at her and remembered how fervently I loved my own mother as a child. And it occurred to me that it was wrong for me not to allow for my child’s love to be just as real and intentional as my own had been. Whatever the reasons for not allowing love to touch me were, it was wrong. And I needed to stop.

    Now I very intentionally pay attention to the love which is directed my way. And as I am given a hug or kind words or a gift, I follow Olivia’s example and tell myself, “s/he loves me”. I will myself to actually experience the love being directed at me – to feel rather than simply know it. And more and more I am able to feel the love that comes my way. But in doing this, I’ve found that there’s something very, very deep in me which resists receiving love. I’m sure I could come up with all sorts of ideas as to why – self-protection after being hurt, lack of trust, not feeling lovable, my sister sneezing in my hair that one time when I was three. Who knows? But of all the false ideas and beliefs which I’ve confronted over the years, this one seems particularly deeply embedded. There’s something about allowing myself to feel loved that feels very uncomfortable and dangerous to me.

    Often when my brain is filled with toxic muck as it is sometime wont to be, I will use a mantra to crowd out everything else. I’ll focus so strongly on a particular phrase or prayer that my brain simply can’t get another word in edgewise. Often I’ll use the Jesus prayer. Or if I’m really struggling, I’ll tell myself over and over, “all you have to do is take a breath. And then another. And another.” The other day I woke up from a night of bad dreams to the sound of my dog vomiting up what looked like squirrel hair on my bedroom floor. And somehow I just knew that I needed to focus my brain on one thought: “God loves me.” Over and over for the last couple of days I’ve repeated to myself, “God loves me”, breathing in on the “God” and out on “loves me”.

    It’s been like magic. Within a couple of hours, I felt better than I have in I’m not sure how long. Yet in the quiet moments, when I’ve been able to really pay attention to this mantra, I’ve found myself wrestling with the idea that God loves me. And it’s felt an awful lot like that same struggle I have with allowing myself to feel loved in general. It feels dangerous, I realized, because some of my hurt has become bitterness. Because at times God’s love has felt like a lie. And maybe the truth is that it often feels like I’m serving a demanding God who just takes and takes from me, until I’m completely drained. Just like I often feel with everyone else in my life.

    But it occurs to me that the real problem is that I don’t get to dictate the terms of God’s love – I just have to accept it as it comes. I don’t get to hold out for something more to my liking. To feel loved by God, I need to forgive God and myself and my life for not being what I thought it was supposed to be. I just have to allow myself to ease into what is and enjoy the ride. Because that’s all I have – the right here and now. Where God loves me. And might my struggle to accept love from other people in my life have its roots in the same realities?

    I’m still wrestling with this hard part of myself that doesn’t know how to be loved. Perhaps it’s like loving itself – it’s an ability, not a feeling or even a choice. Something that has to be learned and nurtured. And yet, here comes Olivia telling me, “you love me.” It makes me think that perhaps if we’d focus a little less on convincing each other of our love for them and a little more on offering the gift of letting each other know that we see and receive their love, we’d all be better for it. And if our own love is received, perhaps it won’t be so hard to allow ourselves to receive it from others as well.

  • lovedoesnthurtyou

    “Love isn’t a feeling . . . It’s an ability”

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    One of the things that is both frustrating and fascinating to me is how bad we tend to be at loving. We really think we love people even when we are destroying them. Or we have very loving feelings towards people who experience us as aloof, uninterested and disapproving. We say that another’s happiness means more to us than our own and then make them miserable by trying to impose our preferences and vision for how they should find happiness on them. Just over and over again, we do things which hurt those we purport to love and then get upset with them should they have the nerve to say, “you’re hurting me!”

    lovedoesnthurtyouI came across a post today on the blog “The Registered Runaway” that I want to share with you. We’ve all heard that love isn’t a feeling, it’s a choice. But this writer starts with an even better idea: love is an ability. IOW, it’s a skill we have to learn and develop. It seems to me that we are so bad at loving in part because of our old issue of not ever wanting to be wrong. We want to think that we know how to love when we’ve never put in the time and effort it takes to unlearn our mistaken ideas about love and learn how to do it well. So in the interest of education, I’d like to share a few choice excerpts from this lovely blog post “Love is an Ability”:

    Most of the time, an ability is not given, it is grown. You have to feed it and nourish it and work like hell to make sure it thrives through each and every season. Love is no different.

    I am convinced that saying you love someone doesn’t count as love. I am also convinced that willing your mind to love someone that you’ve never reached out and touched, doesn’t add up to much. . .

    You cannot love someone until you know someone and there is a clear-cut difference between knowing of someone and really knowing someone. You can put people on pedestals, but you can’t love them until you know them. You can leave the word love as the lasting residue of your rant, but you don’t love the folks you’re talking about, not really. . .

    Love surrenders its shoulders to runny noses. It holds no pre-requisite for its remedies and it does not ask for that which is inappropriate. It comes without strings and is abundant in grace. It just wants to sit, just wants to listen, just wants to nod and stay until you’ve said all you need to say.

    Love doesn’t dip into your past like a paintbrush to create an idea of who you must be today. Love asks questions and honors how far you have come. Love doesn’t whisper about you- it converses with you. The most unloving words can be said in the name of love . . .

    Love dwells. It doesn’t stop by on its own terms and convenience. Love is born into the dumpster of poverty. It snuggles with the shipwrecked instead of rolling with royalty. It goes off the map into dangerous territory because there’s a woman at a well that needs to know something. Love selflessly dies for those indifferent to its sacrifice. It rises three days later, because it never ever fails.

    Love is engagement. It is entering into polar opposite worlds. . .

    Growing in love is messy and exhausting and tedious. But little by little it gets easier. Our jagged edges get sanded down. After all the stumbling and tumbling and screw-ups along the way, it will become an essential part of how we live. We will experience it in one another without thinking or trying. We will live to love. Truly.

    I would encourage you to head over to read the whole thing . . . and leave a word of encouragement to the anonymous writer.

    I think I’m going to make this a thing around here – exploring what love actually looks and acts like. So we can work on developing our skill at doing it*. Perhaps this is part of the real mystery of the Christian faith – that God would take so much time, demand so much devotion, endure so much grief over us. To deal with and get us to finally admit that we don’t really know how to do this most basic of things – love. So maybe if we can finally admit our lack and learn to not just feel love, but do love and live love, then God who is love will truly be with us.

    *(If you have something you think would be good for this, feel free to email it to me at ratrotter73@yahoo.com)

  • hold earth

    Faith, Doubt and Love

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    There have been a number of times in the last year or two when I’ve very, very seriously contemplated throwing my faith away entirely. Just deciding that there is no God and chalking all my prior spiritual experiences up to indigestion and an over active imagination. Decide that my fixation on religion was really an unhealthy obsession which had come to cause me more anxiety than comfort. That I should free myself from the idea that there’s something bigger going on with my life so I can make better, more practical and more profitable choices about how to live it. Given the silence of God and the way my life has gone, why not just accept that there is no God and we’re just here by happenstance?

    And then there is someone close to me who keeps telling me that he has no doubt that God is real. But he’s also quite certain that God isn’t good. He doesn’t care what happens to us. He’s just as petty and demanding and selfish as the human beings who are supposed to bear the image of God in this world. God made us to be pets, he says. That’s all we are to him – pets created for his own amusement who got out of hand. Now he’s just sick of us. Which isn’t the nicest thought in the world but perhaps it lines up more closely with reality than my high fa-luting ideas about redemption.

    I have this thing I do all the time which helps me figure things out. It’s very simple; I just ask myself, “what if this is true?” So any number of times in the last year or two, I have walked right up to these ideas – that there is no God or that he isn’t good and asked, “what if this is true?” In doing so, I’ve learned something important which has kept me from tossing my faith. It’s that even if there is no God or he isn’t good, I still want to live in a world that is being redeemed through love. If it came down to it, I could let almost everything else I believe go, but not that.

    Christians often speak about bringing our lives into line with God’s will. And then they parse through scripture or try to read the tea leaves during prayer time to figure out what that will is. But what I’ve learned from walking right up to the line of abandoning the idea of a loving God is that the real question isn’t what God’s will is. What really matters is what my will is. If there is a God or if there isn’t a God, I’m still faced with a choice of how to live my life. What to give my heart to. Whether the world will be better for me having been here or not. And if God isn’t good and doesn’t care what happens to us, too bad. I care. I can’t make God exist or not exist or be good or not be good, but I exist and I can be good.

    A lot of Christians believe that there will come a time when Jesus comes back and sets everything right and are just waiting for it. But I decided a while ago that I’m done waiting. I don’t care what God might be waiting for; for my part, I’ve decided that enough’s enough. This world isn’t good enough. Not by a long shot. If God’s not going to come set everything right, then I’ll go right ahead and do what I can to get the ball rolling. If my standards are higher than God’s, then so be it.

    Of course, once we get down to it, I don’t actually believe that my standards are higher than God’s. In fact, I believe that this part of me that isn’t willing to settle for the crap we have going on is a reflection of God. Even more than that, I’ve learned that my real devotion isn’t to some old man in the sky who is benevolently poking and prodding his creation in the direction he wants it to go. My devotion is to love. Which as luck would have it, is actually what my faith teaches me God is anyways. At the end of the day, this is what keeps me from chucking my faith. As long as I am devoted to the idea of a world being redeemed by love, I’m devoted to exactly what Christianity teaches me God is and is about.

    Sometimes people will read things I write and challenge me with the idea that we don’t need God or Christianity or religion for the things I write to be true. We can be good and loving without God. Which is like a fish saying it can swim without water. Whether fish know they are in water or not, that’s what they are swimming through. And whether we know it or not, our goodness and love exist in and through God. It’s something you can be willfully unaware of, but its not something you can escape from anyways.

    And I can talk fiercely about love and a redeemed creation, but I’m one person out of 7 billion. I’m like one skin cell trying to move an entire body out here. But through Christianity, there’s this whole body of people who are seeking the same thing that I am – a world being redeemed through love. So if I can understand what that looks like or how that works and share it with others, then one in 7 billion little me might actually be able to start something. Jesus left behind a couple dozen followers. So we have an example that a small movement, grounded in love of God, neighbor and self can change the world.

    When it’s too hard to go on, when I feel like I’m being ground up into dust, there’s always the cross and the resurrection. Maybe other people can stick it out and suffer greatly to live a life of love all on their own. But I depend on that cross and resurrection. I need to know that even the greatest suffering can be a prelude to joy. Without that, frankly, I would have quit many times over by now. I’d be a bundle of angry, bitter, unforgiving selfishness. I might want to live in a world redeemed by love, but I’d be pretty hard pressed to get myself to actually do my part to make that happen without the assurance offered by that empty grave.

    I suppose if you wanted you could devote yourself to doing your part to create a world redeemed through love without being devoted to Christianity. But the funny thing is that even if somehow we’ve got it all wrong and there is no God or he’s not good, the Christian message and the life, death and resurrection of Jesus still offers the way, the truth and the life of a world which is being redeemed by love. And whatever else I could let go of, I just can’t let go of that.

  • girlreadingweb

    Is Reading Scriptures Literally, Literally Wrong?*

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    I came across a blog post by Father Stephen, an Orthodox priest about the problems with taking scriptures literally. On this blog, I have tended to focus on how insisting on taking scriptures literally leaves us vulnerable to being unable or unwilling to deal with reality or to losing our faith altogether when our literal understanding comes into conflict with reality. Father Stephen points out another, probably more important problem with a literal approach to scriptures: it engenders a shallow reading of scripture. From his post:

    The Scriptures, particularly those of the Old Testament, are frequently misread (from a classical Christian point of view) in a literal manner, on the simple evidence that the New Testament does not read the Old Testament in such a manner. Rather, as is clearly taught by Christ Himself, the Old Testament is “re-read” from a Christological point-of-view. Thus Jonah-in-the-belly-of-the-whale is read by the Church as Christ in Hades. The first Adam in the Garden is but a shadow and antitype of the Second Adam – the One who truly fulfills existence in the “image and likeness” of God. The Passover and the deliverance from Egypt are read as icons of the true Passover, Christ’s Pascha and the deliverance of all creation from its bondage to death and decay. Such a list could be lengthened until the whole of the Old Testament is retold in meanings that reveal Christ, or rather are revealed by Christ in His coming. . .

    A “literal” reading of the Old Testament would never yield such a treasure. Instead, it becomes flattened, and rewoven into an historical rendering of Christ’s story in which creative inventions such as “Dispensationalism” are required in order to make all the pieces fit into a single, literal narrative. Such a rendering has created as well a cardboard target for modern historical-critical studies, which delights itself only in poking holes in absurdities created by such a flattened reading.”

    Now, I do know that it is possible to see the deeper Christological meaning of the scripture stories while also maintaining a belief that these things are literally historical events, recorded in scriptures. And certainly there are certain things which we need to be literally true. For example, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:17 “And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins.”

    However, I think that Father Stephen is right that by seeing much of scripture as a record of events which can be shaped into a literal narrative, there is a strong tendency to “flatten” scriptures into nothing more than an account of historical events. A person who takes a very literal view of scriptures, will often also find themselves spending a fair amount of time either defending their perspective or avoiding what can threaten their perspective. To the extent that they are willing to deal with ideas contrary to a historical view of scriptures, they do so through the reporting of those who agree with them.

    I believe that scriptures themselves make it abundantly clear that in many places, the historical accuracy or lack thereof, is largely besides the point. We often miss it because we are reading translations, but a great deal of scriptures are written in poetic form. The use of imagery is widely used. There are places where we find hyperbole. Some stories are repeated and contradictory. Jesus himself taught using parables rather than finding “true” stories to illustrate his point. To insist that scriptures must be understood as historical accounts, even well written historical accounts, seems to me to be a violation of the very fabric of scriptures. Which again, is not to say that nothing in scriptures is literally true, and there are events such as the life, death and resurrection of Jesus which are supported by a variety of sources. But when we hang our faith on the idea that scriptures must be literally true, we are putting ourselves in grave danger of being left with a shallow, incurious faith which doesn’t reflect the full glory of an unlimited God.

    *Originally posted May 2008.