Relating and loving, His way

Creating a Home Together (Henri Nouwen Society)
Many human relationships are like the interlocking fingers of two hands. Our loneliness makes us cling to each other, and this mutual clinging makes us suffer immensely because it does not (because it cannot) take our loneliness away. But the harder we try, the more desperate and upset we become. Many of these "interlocking" relationships fall apart over time, because they become suffocating and oppressive. Human relationships are meant to be like two hands folded together. They can move away from each other while still touching with the fingertips. They can create space between themselves, a little tent, a home, a safe place to be. True relationships among people point to God, live in God. They are like living prayers in the world. Sometimes the hands that pray are fully touching, and sometimes there is distance between them. They always move to and from each other, but they never lose touch. They keep praying thankfully to the One who brought them together in the first place. They honor both the pain and the transcendence into bliss that is only possible through the pain.

Kahlil Gibran on Love
When love beckons to you, follow him,
Though his ways are hard and steep.
And when his wings enfold you yield to him,
Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.
And when he speaks to you believe in him,
Though his voice may shatter your dreams
as the north wind lays waste the garden.

For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning.
Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun,
So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.

Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself.
He threshes you to make you naked.
He sifts you to free you from your husks.
He grinds you to whiteness.
He kneads you until you are pliant;
And then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for God's sacred feast.

All these things shall love do unto you that you may know the secrets of your heart, and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life's heart.

But if in your fear you would seek only love's peace and love's pleasure,
Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love's threshing-floor,
Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.
Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself.
Love possesses not nor would it be possessed;
For love is sufficient unto love.

When you love you should not say, "God is in my heart," but rather, "I am in the heart of God."
And think not that you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.

Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.
But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your deepest desires:
To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;
To rest at the noon hour and meditate love's ecstasy;
To return home at eventide with gratitude;
And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.


I am asked often about love, mostly from those who suffer in its painful unfolding and maturing, and the answer is always very hard to hear, because it is so damn unreasonable, and yet so annoying clear:

”Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends (and always wins).

-- 1 Corinthians 13:7-8

”Marriage (committed love) is about total nakedness, exposure, defenselessness, and the very extremities of intimacy. It is about simple, unadorned truth between two human beings, truth at all levels and at all costs, and it does not care what pain or inconvenience must be endured in order for the beautiful habit of truth to take root, to be watered, and to grow into full maturity.”

-- Mike Mason


Yes, it is meant to burn and crush you (the “you” that wants and/or needs justice, kindness, manageability, or pleasure) and then to birth YOU (the “YOU” that loves, simply because it must come alive and express itself, no matter what – it is all there is to do, to be)! It is so like the phoenix rising from the ashes of itself, and you get to climb on and take the ride, but only if you are courageous enough to endure the burning.

Overwhelm

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe and its needs. To be your own person is hard business. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes very frightened, especially as calamities mount. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself."

-- Rudyard Kipling

"Seeing that a Pilot steers the ship in which we sail, Who will never allow us to perish even in the midst of shipwrecks, there is no reason why our minds should be totally overwhelmed with fear and overcome with weariness. At the same time that we are not enough, we have access to unlimited capacity for peace."

-- John Calvin

"Next time you are feeling totally overwhelmed, remember the quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The creation of a thousand forests is inside one acorn,’ and take that first step toward growth and transformation."

-- Catherine Pulsifer, in Overwhelmed

”Man has a limited biological capacity for deep change. When this capacity is overwhelmed by events and demands, this capacity often goes into a state of future shock."

-- Alvin Toffler

Life can occasionally get a little overwhelming. When it does, it feels compelling to speed up to keep up with it, when the only answer is to – you guessed it - s l o w d o w n. I am feeling it over these last few days. My cell phone speaker went dead on Wednesday (first sign of a coming series of changes), and then Anne replaced it with an iPhone (her help and support have been amazing, but so has the magnitude of my adjustment), and she also switched me to Microsoft Outlook on my computer, instead of Outlook Express, so that I can sync up my calendar, technologically speaking, and I am adjusting to that very slowly as well, and Jake’s first baseball game of his Little League season was that same night (a great night for him, but cold and exhausting for us spectators), and then I went back to see my doctor yesterday morning, only to discover that I have a new infection on the same finger (so I’m back on antibiotics), and my blood pressure is high (possibly as a result), so I had to have a stress test (and yes, it was stressful, under the circumstances), and then I learned that Jake had hurt his leg that morning and was hobbling, and Heather was home sick from school, and the phone keeps ringing without me knowing how to answer it and return calls very crisply, and I am exhausted from all of it, feeling out of control and spastic, and I feel myself desperately wanting to “keep up” with it all, but I can’t. My heart has said, “NO!” This is to notify you of my wholehearted intention and commitment to slow down instead, knowing that I have access to the infinite and He’s in charge, and I needn’t concern myself with all the overwhelm (whether circumstantial or purely internal). I’m breathing deeply again. I’m about to go walk the dog. I’ll put one foot in front of the other, into my day with peace.

Setting our hearts and minds, choosing our actions and schedule

"Inevitably, we all wonder when our time will end. Time is absolutely irreversible and irreplaceable. All of us are running out of it, and God says to actively redeem it (Ephesians 5:16; Colossians 4:5). In order to accomplish our goals, it is vital to get control of our time. But life is full of time robbers, scheduling conflicts, and unexpected events that demand the use of our time. Very frequently - in fact, every day - demands upon our time force us to make difficult choices among conflicting priorities and urgencies. When this happens, we wish we had more time, or that things would be scheduled with more consideration of our dilemma, or that we were more efficient and effective in setting our priorities and using our time. We often regret having waffled and procrastinated. Extra time is something only God can give. He 'expands' both us and our time, when we ask for and allow it. In the fifth commandment, He promises, 'Honor your parents, and I will lengthen your life' (Exodus 20:12). That's more time! If we make the right choices, putting things in their right order, He will expand both time and us and will smooth our paths so that we make the most efficient use of the time we have."

-- John W. Ritenbaugh, in "Simplify Your Life"

"The only way to nurture my relationship with Jesus is to set my heart and mind on the kingdom of God, which requires that I slow down to really see the truth. The fundamental building block of an apprentice of Jesus is living closely to Jesus in our ordinary, everyday lives. If we can learn how to spend an ordinary day with our hearts and minds set on things above (which requires that we recognize and put aside the things below), we will have learned one of the most important spiritual exercises in the Christian life. To build our lives on this 'rock,' we need to take ruthless control of our time, instead of letting time control us. The most frequent excuse for not growing in our spiritual lives is lack of time (we seriously tend to worship our own busyness). Most of us live at the mercy of our schedule (as a 'reflection' of our true value and worth), instead of being fully responsible for our schedule and its alignment around our 'apprenticeship'."

-- James Bryan Smith, in The Good and Beautiful Life

"We've all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That's who we really are."

-- Sirius Black to Harry Potter, in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (as posted on Anne's facebook page)

"I'm starting to think that there is only one cause worth fighting for, and that is love."

-- Anne, before finding the above posting


The truth is so simple, but clearing out what is NOT it, and then executing on it and living in it, challenges us to the core.

The choice is very simple. It's "listen and obey," knowing that, as Jesus said, LOVE is the most important thing (which takes a total surrender of one's control and the very practical and reasonable other "responsibilities"), or else it's this:



"So if you're serious about living this new resurrection life, act like it. Pursue only the things over which Christ presides. Don't shuffle along, eyes to the ground, totally and breathlessly absorbed with the meaningless things all around you. Look up, and be alert to what is going on around him — that's where the action is. See things from his perspective."

-- Colossians 3:2 (The Message)

The bridge (from painful subjectivity to blissful objectivity) that is Love Machine

"While never denying the objectivity of truth, Bernard Lonergan claimed that most religious people have 'an exaggerated view of the objectivity of truth' and especially their 'capacity to understand it.' It is a humorous paradox that in a faith that speaks about the 'journey' of following Jesus, so many Christians claim to have total and absolute truth from the beginning, while scientists, who are supposedly largely atheists and agnostics, are quite willing to work for decades knowing that their theories and hypotheses are merely provisional.

Lonergan taught that the only real way to find and grasp objective truth today was to help people identify, clarify, and heal their subjectivity through kindness and love. Lonergan gave a very old-fashioned word for that new process - 'conversion.' He believed and tried to demonstrate that the 'process' of 'conversion' was itself the great clarifier and was the healing of our own deep woundedness, neediness, and egocentricity so that 'true seeing' could be possible, insofar as it is possible. He sounded a bit like William Blake when he said: 'All we need to do is gently cleanse the doors of perception, and we shall see things as they are - infinite.'

Authentically converted people would see truth, as far as humans are able and would see it in a way that could be shared, at least with other converted people. I know how 'safe' and energized I feel when I am sharing even my most offbeat ideas with the truly holy or loving people of this world - or really good counselors and therapists. Perhaps you know this feeling as well. You know they will understand what you are searching to say, or at least they will give you the listening room to wrestle with it with them. Among antagonistic, insecure, or dualistic people, you always feel unsafe. Lonergan moved from searching for and arguing about airy abstractions to 'changing the seer' himself or herself. This was his 'new foundation' for truth-seeking. And this was a remarkable breakthrough for the West, in my opinion, and in part he learned it from scientists, who knew the connection between the seer and the seen.

Jesus, not accidentally, sent his apostles to 'fish for people.' We have spent much of our history instead clarifying and defending concepts, campaigns, and organizations - fishing much more for 'right ideas' than for people. Lonergan boldly says that 'conversion is the experience by which one becomes an authentic human being.' My assumption would be that human beings attract other human beings to the same level of awareness - just by 'being,' as St. Irenaeus put it, 'fully alive.' This inherent attraction, and not the promotion of my ideas versus your ideas, is how we are to 'fish' inside of religion."

-- Richard Rohr, in The Naked Now

While so many seem to be striving for global dominance of an ideology, arguing over doctrine and law and theology, while setting up the machinery for mass conversions in order to "win the game," I have no real concern, desire, or need to have sole possession of the right idea about any of that, or to be popular in my approach to listening and loving, or to be right about the belief system or ideology behind that. I only care about fishin' for people's hearts, the way Jesus reaches and teaches me every day. In all sincerity and with reckless abandon, I have given up the fight and/or the need to be right

... and have just

And if you want to do some really honest repentance work ...

take a hard, honest, and ruthlessly specific look at all the places and in all the relationships where you are possibly hiding like this -


acting all nice and safe and smart and sweet (even downright godly) on the outside and in public, while quite deceptively harboring desires, intentions, judgments, and even malicious plans that, if known, would see you exposed and rejected. Can I really face this possibility inside myself? Well, it's very important that I at least examine my next question very carefully and honestly. The right "next question" for me is never "What do you or they have to do to get more aligned with God and His Truth?" It is always "What do I have to do to get myself more aligned with Him and His ways?" And if I think I have the definitive right answers about that every time, I'm a dangerous predator, indeed, and I'm more and more dangerous to myself and others the more I feel I'm the protector of someone or some great truth. None, including the most theologically learned, are specially appointed as the sole source of that, and I can so easily use my "protection motive" to justify just about anything on my part. And God sees all of it. So, if you're hiding it from others, you're hurting yourself most, and stripping off the costume is the start. If you are feeling rather bitter or snarly underneath that calm or smiley exterior, or maybe that false "innocent victim" one, then exposing your heart, changing your mind, beginning again, is the only path of redemption. Fortunately, it's always available, but only for the very sincere and very specific asking.

And by the way, chances are, based on human nature, if you have been elevated in rank and status and granted a little bit of societal, organizational, or community power by some others (and this includes as a parent, as a leader/manager, as a wealthy donor, as a pastor/priest) then YOU run the risk of being the most dangerous predator in the field, so your work is harder, not easier, than most others, and that's probably why you're this leader, because you're up to that level of self-scrutiny, but with this level of responsibility, abandoning, abdicating, or avoiding it can sure wreak the most havoc of all.

Remembering warmly, and then leaping into the light again

The beginning of this phase of my journey, at this particular level of depth inside myself, and at this level of surrender to God and my walk with Jesus, started the year after my Dad passed away, which was in 2003, and I found this message from the anniversary week of Revolution Consulting in March of '04 (the 6th year of the journey, halfway to here) as a fitting reminder of the level of ongoing surrender required to fully "live" one's spiritual awakening and path in the "death" and ongoing surrender of one's personal ambitions and plans. I have been receiving many affirmations and many thanks lately for the quality, openness, and availability of my life, in all of its rawness and realness, and these blessings could (only if I went totally unconscious) leave me feeling at some place of spiritual "arrival," and the message today keeps me keenly aware that I am never, ever going to be "there," only "here," and the magnificence of the "HERE" and the "NOW" is all there really is, and the Kingdom keeps unfolding in the present moment, to the full extent I am willing to see, receive, and leap boldly back into it, again and again and again.


---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Fly into the face of your mind's resistance. (March 5, 2004)


"To fly, we must have ample resistance."

-- Maya Lin

"There is no security on this earth, only ongoing, unfolding opportunities."

-- Douglas MacArthur

"People wish to be settled and 'there'; only as far as they are unsettled and 'here' is there any hope for them."

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The important thing is this: to be able at any (and every) given moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become."

-- Charles DuBois

"It is only through ever-increasingly more bold adventures and total surrender to transformation that people ever succeed in finding themselves - in knowing themselves - and ultimately in abandoning themselves for something far greater."

-- André Gide


I know how seductive it is to want to see and then to get to some magical "finish line" in doing one's personal and spiritual growth work, and there is none - there is no self-controlled progression to a finish line. It is an endless journey into mystery, not a fixed destination, and it often gets impossibly harder, not gradually easier, the deeper and further we travel into it, as we gain more and more access to our inherent capacity and connection to Him and get more and more spiritually fit from the increasingly tougher road. The more I come to know God, myself, others, and the world, the more I realize how vast my ignorance (in my flesh) truly is. The more I seek healing of my emotional pain, the more capable I become of seeing the depth and pervasiveness of human suffering, and that there is no human answer in it. The more I surrender to God, the more I can see (and am willing to jump into) the gap between my attitudes, behavior, feelings, knowings, and His wisdom. The better I come to feel about myself and the place at which I start believing I have arrived and the "quality" of my spiritual life, the more I then realize how critical it is for me to give it all up and die once again, and to start over again at the beginning (life is an ongoing series of new "beginnings," which require such inconvenient and ever-more-frequent "endings"). Jesus said we must die to live. The truth of that is very irrational and inconvenient to the mind. I have come to find a joy and peacefulness in the bold, risky, "self"-sacrificing, lift-off into the face of my mind's trembling and weakening resistance.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------


The only comfort, peace, and satisfaction comes when giving up the desperate need for comfort, peace, and satisfaction. God is good. He has designed it all. We can't understand it. In the acceptance of that, glimpses of understanding come. When I identify and name the end of me, inviting Him to take it from there, I get to experience quite an exhilarating ride. When I give up on fully experiencing my ride, while knowing the truth of it, I focus on trying to get others to go on theirs. This is not the point. Mine will not end. Quite the contrary, it will deepen. I have to leave it to boast and pontificate. God does the spreading of it in the depth and fullness of my surrender to it. I can sometimes get confused about that.

"Without a continuing repentant attitude - a persistent desire to turn away from our nature and to seek God's nature - ongoing spiritual growth is impossible; in fact, loving God and receiving and sharing His love is impossible."

-- Charles Colson, in Loving God

"Unfortunately, the appeal of modern Christian evangelism is not for continuing 'repentance' and a life of ongoing spiritual growth, born of spirit and love, but for spasmodic, sporadic 'enlistment' of others and a life of ongoing campaigning, born of mind and ego. To put it even more bluntly, so many so-called evangelists see their so-called converts as nothing more than trophies in a big game hunt, and they measure their success by numbers and rates, as opposed to the amazing and boundless new opportunities to love with God's love found right under our feet, which is only really possible through our own continuing, deepening, and ever-more-faithful obedience and repentance."

-- Edwin Orr


So, as a final reminder of the key point of this message: REPENT! Change your mind! Metanoia! Whatever you think you are doing, especially if you think you are finally "doing it right" (and have fallen asleep on that note), please STOP!, for your own sake, and think again. See the astounding light, and leap boldly back into it ... again and again and again.