In prayer and in lack of prayer, I found myself continually returning to the reality of a God unconditionally turned toward me, arms open, heart on fire, words speaking to me deeply and quietly and richly like the mournful, sweet tones of a cello cascading off stone walls in the sanctuary of my heart. In this space I am found and lost and found again…His Presence is enough.

Empty, quiet night.
My soul is weary,
orbiting on the periphery.
No change in sight.

Brooding, hollow space.
Prayers heavy, bloated,
drift slowly heavenward.
I can find no grace.

Sweet, fresh morning.
Awake in Presence,
enveloped in hope.
I am home again.

It’s hard to go back to church after experiencing relationship like this outside of church. In fact, it was the act of leaving that made it possible…walking blindly into the wilderness, away from community and predictability and safety in numbers. But now, I recognize a call back into the “Church”…and my cynicism remains.  It feels like a game…and I don’t want to play games.   Morning announcements, worship bands and dimmed lights, prayer supplemented by mood music, potlucks, Sunday smiles, prayer groups, classes, people finding comfort in uncomfortable seats, offering baskets, hugs and handshakes, “peace of the Lord be with you”…the cultural aspects of the American church experience, especially in the evangelical world. Some of this is beautiful…but something was always missing for me. The medium captures the attention so much that the message is lost in translation.  The power of influence given to preachers and pastors is frightening in a culture demanding express service and novel experiences.

But, sitting with Christ, I return to the realization that it is what it is.  God is who God is.  I am who I am.  My past is what it is, and my future is what it is. The church belongs, just as my experience outside of it belongs.  I don’t get to pick what fits and doesn’t fit. Right now, I am with Christ…and there’s nothing special about that.  No soaring oratory or regimented bible study to get me there.  I am here right now, and Christ is with me.  It really is a simple as that.

So is my impulse to reconnect with church a soft nudge from Christ, who is with me…or is it my own false shame, accusing me of not measuring up, not fitting in, not living rightly in light of the WORD OF THE LORD…which commands me to love my neighbor, tithe and regularly attend Sunday services? Grace is this: we have the freedom to figure it out.

The wilderness is a wild and dangerous place…but it’s exactly where God’s people were led in their delivery from slavery. It’s where Jesus was led in his delivery from the slavery of his own humanity.  It’s where I’ve been led as well, outside of the sanctuary of man and into the sanctuary of God…where I’ve found hope and tenderness in the arms of my Lord, the same Lord I was taught to fear, to perform for and eventually to ignore and despise.  But, I didn’t know Him then…in church.  I know Him now.  I am compelled to return to a community, as a man led into the desert and back again.  Let my response be total…

Hosea 14-15: “Therefore I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her. There I will give her back her vineyards, and will make the Valley of Achor a door of hope. There she will respond as in the days of her youth, as in the day she came up out of Egypt.”

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Each of us has a past, moments in our lives we’re not proud of, relationships we failed to take care of, shames we carry, burdens we bear.  And, every so often, the course of our normal everyday life is changed by the re-emergence of the past, abruptly entering the present and tearing us backward through the time we’ve hidden behind, the distance we’ve become comfortable in.  In these moments, torn out of the third-person narrative of our own lives, faced with the big picture, the overarching reality of who we are…we can face and make peace with our shadow.

Reality is a gift. Right now, I am who I am…and I can no sooner deny my shadow than deny my goodness. I want to suffer knowing pain I’ve caused, pain I’ve been dealt…I want to walk into it and accept it. When I have accepted it, I can sit freely in prayer and encounter love with a freedom not otherwise possible. Richard Rohr writes, “the path of prayer and love and the path of suffering seem to be the two Great Paths of Transformation. Suffering seems to get our attention; love and prayer seem to get our heart and our passion.” (Everything Belongs, p. 14) It all belongs…and though our natural tendency is to avoid pain and seek comfort, the call is to encounter our pain, walk into it…and find our comfort in the arms of our Father, who accepts us, and whose passion for us in our vulnerability is eternal and indescribable. “This reality, felt and not denied, suffered and enjoyed, becomes the royal road to the center. In other words, reality itself, our reality, my limited and sometimes misinterpreted experience, still becomes the revelatory place for God.” (Rohr, Everything Belongs, p. 15)

There is no end to the love of God…nothing else matters. The never-ending struggle to be “good” many of us are caught in leads only to more struggle, and for me ultimately to despair. The true journey…the path of peace that surpasses all understanding, is to reconcile with reality, to allow the mystery of God and the tragic beauty of life to play out within us. It is accepting the unacceptable, reconciling the irreconcilable…accepting that certainty and uncertainty, sin and grace, and life and death are not mutually exclusive, but belong together.

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.
For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.
Matthew 11:28-30 (New International Version)

Richard Rohr’s book, Everything Belongs, is a wonderful vision of contemplative prayer…

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The religious Right has successfully programmed a whole generation of Christians to believe that we are in an End Times struggle against Evil, represented by a Satanic Democratic Party.  It’s the good conservatives against the evil liberals, and our very salvation is wrapped up in which team we’re on.  When my wife and I decided to vote for Obama this last election, we lost friends and found a family relationship seriously strained.  It was as though we were murdering babies ourselves.  It doesn’t matter that in voting we were following our pro-life convictions, choosing a candidate and party we felt might finally change the conversation about an ethic of life in America.  It doesn’t matter that as followers of Christ, we felt convicted of the need for change, for balance…for a different direction.  I don’t write this to make a political statement, but simply to illustrate the point that as people of God, we are not defined by our relationship with a political party or system of thought within the Church…but by our relationship with Christ Himself.  Who are you to say that I’m not following His voice, even when in doing so I vote differently than you?

It’s a very interesting time to be a young Christian in America, for there are many others who find the old divisions and stale arguments largely irrelevant.  I think there is a movement toward contemplative spirituality within the developing church.  In some ways, this movement is apparent within the Emerging Church, the term given the interesting change within the church in recent years…across denominations.  But really, it’s bigger than that.  There is a fundamental difference between a spirituality based on relationship with God (grace-based) and spirituality based on rightness before God (shame-based).   In grace-based spirituality, we become intimately aware of our own smallness, and the largeness of God’s capacity to love.  In shame-based spirituality, we are caught in the cyclical struggle to maintain control of where we stand with God, to maintain our position as keepers of knowledge about God.  The former can accept unknowns and gray areas.  The latter is often defined by black and white thinking.

In the early years following my lifestyle conversion I became a fan of Francis Schaeffer, whose logical arguments for Christianity and large vocabulary appealed to my pride.  I wanted knowledge.  I wanted to convince and be convinced, to be sure and to be able to communicate that to any who would doubt me.  I adopted the defensiveness that defined the evangelical mindset, and become drawn into a need to defend God.   Schaeffer’s writing and the following it drew played a part in creating the conservative backbone of modern evangelicalism.   What’s so interesting is that his son, Frank Scaeffer, who played an important role in his father’s work, is now a fed up, fired up critic of the modern evangelical church.   Once active in the movement, he’s now a voice warning of the dangers of fundamentalism of the Christian kind.  Check him out at The Official Website of Frank Schaeffer.

In my long-winded way, I guess what I’m saying is that contemplative Christianity…a spirituality of Christ defined by prayer and mystical union…is an answer to fundamentalism and it’s shame-cycle.  I read an article a while ago about conflict in an Islamic country, where the fundamentalist Muslim majority was seeking to silence and control the Sufi minority.  Sufis are the contemplatives, the mystics, of the Islamic worldview, and have historically (in this context at least) been peace-seekers, where the majority has continued to wage war and control.  Its interesting to see the same dynamic play out in so many contexts.  Mysticism challenges black and white thinking, just as Christ challenged the black and white thinking of the religiously certain of his time.  The reaction to Christ was violence.  We see the same today.

When your world is built upon tightly controlled rules and systems, then you fight to protect your control.  The story of the prodigal son illustrates the dynamic beautifully. The oldest son had his world fairly well under control…he had earned his fathers love and respect with hard work and dedication.  When the prodigal son returned home and was received with such joy…the love given away for free…the brother’s response was anger.  We cannot control God.   Yet, when the worldview of conservative Christians is challenged, even if challenged by undeniable logic (such as proof the earth is older than 5000 years) the response is anger and defensiveness…if you’re not with us, God is not with you.

Its a difficult time and an exciting time to follow Christ in America.  There are hints of change, hints of new life beginning to emerge as a new generation comes of age.  The last election sent a message, as did the public disgrace of some powerful Evangelicals, that the vote-getting machine of the Religious Right is losing steam.  There is an opportunity for a new Christian voice to emerge, one that truly seeks to be “peacemakers”, to recognize those that are hungry and hurting among us, to call out for an ethic of life across circumstances…one rooted in devotion, not control…wisdom, not knowledge.

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Relationship with Christ comes first…it always comes first.  My acceptance by Christ has nothing to do with my behavior…how could it?  It has nothing to do with how I speak…how could it?  No, we first accept love from Him…we take the risk of loving Him in return…and we begin to love ourselves as broken images of our Creator.  It is the relationship that changes us, our behavior and our speech.  We are created and recreated anew in the context of the relationship with Christ, and this is utterly independent of anything we bring to the table. He cannot be bought or earned, controlled, withheld or given away. Let that sink in…let that become freedom.

Is God sitting on high with a legal pad, watching and critiquing us with a critical eye?  Or, is He infinitely close to us…gazing upon us with eyes of love and perfect acceptance?

If God is angry, mean and unpredictable we’ll surely walk on eggshells around Him, careful to “get it right’, careful not to screw up, or to be found lacking.

However, if God is a God of grace…a God who walked among us, suffered among us, and died among us…whose primary motivation seems to be our freedom and peace (that surpasses all understanding)…then perhaps we’d be less concerned with how we present ourselves and simply run and fall into His arms…

Richard Rohr:

It’s not, “If I am moral, I will someday achieve union with God.” That’s backwards. We must put the horse before the cart, and not the cart before the horse. Union with God is objectively already given to everyone from the moment of their creation. Who else created them? All we can do is awaken to it. We cannot achieve it. Once we live the life of union and abundance—not hating ourselves and apologizing for ourselves every minute—then we start living in our inherent dignity, a dignity that no behavior has given to us and no one can take away.

Then the horse is first and the cart comes along. Not “If I am moral, I will be in union with God, but when I live in union with God, morality will come naturally and powerfully!” A completely different path.

Adapted from The Cosmic Christ (CD#1)

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These words appeared on my cell phone last week, sent by my wife to encourage me during what was a challenging week. Life can be tough…in fact, if we’re honest, it just plain is tough.  Yet, life can be infused with holiness in the present moment…as we breathe this breath, and this breath, and this one…

I read bits and pieces of The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle this week, out of curiosity.  What I found was a kind of universalist approach common to contemporary, New Age-ish spirituality….but there is truth there as well.   Tolle writes about the true self and the false self, and describes the spiritual journey as primarily about letting go of the false self and living in the present.   Our false selves are full of woundedness, narcissism and judgment…where the true self, which is intimately linked to the essence of life,  is beauty and freedom.  When we can become observers of that false self, stepping out of it and into truth, we become free.  He’s on to something here…yet he paints a limited picture.

There is a part of each of us that is false…fallen if you will.  This is where our guilt and shame reside, our needs for comfort and power, our pain and our self-centeredness. Yet, the bible teaches this fallen self isn’t the whole story.  Adam and Eve were originally created for relationship and freedom, not for brokenness.  Contrary to those who proudly tout their “sinner”-ness, I think as images of God, we are more accurately thought of as inherently good…not inherently bad.  So, when the bible talks about Christ coming to dwell in us, the picture Tolle and others paint of freedom from false self becomes clearer.  The false self is the broken self, but not the whole self.  We were created for relationship.  When we release the burden of the old Adam and acknowledge the reality of the new Adam (Christ) in our life, we are claiming our true selves.

This is a call to live fully in the present reality of our restored relationship with Christ, not to continually struggle with sin and our broken nature, seeking forgiveness and screwing up again and again.  We are whole already…we only need to acknowledge it…moment by moment, breath by breath. If God is love, and Christ is in us and we in Him, then we can be free from the false reality that we are defined by our sin. Sin hardly matters…in fact, if you believe Romans 5:20, which says, “where sin abounds, grace abounds more”…then sin is only the shadow side of grace, and grace is grace, however you try to look at it.

Tolle is right…most of how we react to life on a daily basis comes from our false self…and through building awareness, we can begin to see that for what it is.  We can let go, and fall back into the gentle arms of Truth…and live in freedom. However, truth is not a hazy notion of some benign universal consciousness…is it Personal. I am who I truly am only in light of who Christ is. When I breathe His breath right now, I enter into reality…the incomprehensible reality of Relationship.

I choose to breathe the breath of Christ that makes all life holy.  We can choose to live His life in us…for we exist in the context of our relationship with Christ, just as He exists in the context of His relationship with Father and Spirit. It’s not something to be grappled with theologically or explained intellectually…we need to let go of those impulses to control and define. Relationship is personal, and Christ is right now waiting, with us and in us…all we have to do is breath…

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“Where do I need to recognize grace?

When Job’s life is about to be taken away from him, he can say one of two things.  He can curse God, as he is tempted to do, and say, “God, why not fifty-one years of life?” Or he can surrender to love and say, “God, why even fifty years?”  Why did I deserve life at all?  When we take on that attitude, we’ve made a decision for grace.

“Naked I came into the world, and naked I will leave” (Job 1:21), Job says.  What do we have, brothers and sisters, that has not been given to us?  All is grace.  All is given. Who gave me this hand?  Who wiggles these fingers?  Who created this eye which I cannot explain or understand?  I cannot even make this hair grow.  It is all gift.

From beginning to end, everything is grace, everything is given.  There is nothing that we have a right to or that we deserve.”

Adapted from Radical Grace: Daily Meditations, pp. 207-208
(Source: Days of Renewal)

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All this talk about relationship with Christ…as though it were something to be attained or sought after, researched or discovered, understood or somehow earned.  All that energy and talk, much of it self-serving and all of it meeting some unmet need, misses the point entirely.  What am I thinking?  What I seek I already have.

It’s been an interesting process leaving church and spending a prolonged period of time without a local church community. It’s been nearly a year now, and its taken this long to shed the skin of talk-driven spirituality.  I used to go to church looking for some magic words from a pastor, words that might touch something deep in me and help me get closer to God.  I would share this experience with peers, all of us using the comfortable language of earnest, missional Christianity, talking each other into relationship.  Prayer was the same – flowery language, words carefully chosen, a deep desire to meet the needs of the person or group one was praying with. It was for them, or for me, or for God.   None of this is bad, but it was empty in many ways.  For them, for me, or for God…but lacking Presence.

I never experienced God’s presence then like I do now…or rather, His presence hasn’t changed, but now I’m quiet enough to notice, quiet enough to rest, quiet enough to listen.  Words don’t get in the way like they did.  It’s hard to explain, though I find the everyday wonder of my marriage gets closest to touching it.  My relationship with my wife has deepened most profoundly in the quiet realm of our unspoken communication.  In an embrace, we are one.  In the undefined, unspoken bond of trust and commitment between us, we are one.  We are one, and we don’t need to say that to be that.  It doesn’t need to be defined, examined or studied…we just enjoy it, and it gives us life.  It is so interesting that the vision of relationship with Christ most widely used in the bible is the marriage.  Presence…oneness.

The Christian life is life…it doesn’t need to be dressed up or defined.  God is.  He is with us in all we do and all we are.  I think if I’ve learned anything, I’ve learned this is the hardest thing to grasp and live out.  I want to earn it, so I can lay claim to it.  I want to need it, so I can grasp it tightly.  The bare reality is that God simply is, and there’s nothing I can do to earn His love or screw it up.  As Phillip Yancey writes, there’s nothing we can do to make God love us less, and there’s nothing we can do to make Him love us more.   It just is…His love just is.

Those moments when I wrap my head around this make me want to cry.  In some ways, the tears are tears of loss…for life is terrible sometimes, and there is very often no comfort to be had.  Those who suffer more than I know this intimately.  Yet, the tears are also tears of joy…for in the midst of it all, I am known…I am home where I am.  In the midst of the bitter-sweetness of life, I am home in the untouchable embrace of God…who is the essence of relationship, eternally embraced and embracing, Father, Son and Spirit.

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I took away a sense of scale…and of beauty.  In the midst of the raw savagery and brilliance of the created world, one can only admit powerlessness.  We are so incredibly small…yet called to faith that moves mountains. Try contemplating this while standing next to an actual mountain.  Christ must have, spending as much time as he did in solitude at higher altitude.  Honestly, what it comes down to is this:  I have nothing.  This whole journey is too magnificent and wild to tame…yet, we try and try to define and control it…to wrap up the Christian journey into a neat package we can easily manipulate.  If we think we’ve got it figured out, our challenge is to go stand at the base of a 5,000 foot mass of solid basalt and pray it away…just a few inches away will do.

And yet…

Before the mountains were born
or you brought forth the earth and the world,
from everlasting to everlasting you are God.

God is God.  Creation speaks wonderfully of His nature.  God’s nature as expressed in Nature is not tame, not safe…but good.  Very good, in fact.  I think there’s a reason that solitude taken in the outdoors touches the soul deeper than even the most profound quiet moments in our created homes and churches.  Being out in the midst of Creation, in the presence of God’s creative expression of Himself, of His nature…being there ensures we remember who we are…where we stand…who we stand before.  Let’s follow Christ away from the crowds, up to that place, to the mountainside…into the presence of the One who makes the heavens shout and the mountains burst into song.

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Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

The crowds have grown, encroaching, suffocating…everyone wants a piece of Him…everyone wants to see and hear….they come poor, dirty, hurting…needy.  I might even have begun to resent them.  Jesus leads us up a mountainside, away from the din, to teach.  We wait for Him to speak, more of what we’ve wanted to hear…words of revolution, talk of new kingdoms, of renewal and change, and here we are in the midst of it…on the inside…it’s thrilling.  Yet in a moment, as He begins, the energy is drained from our self-centric view of it all…”blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

Blessed are the mourners, the meek, the hungry, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted, the insulted…

What…?

For so long I couldn’t even read the Beatitudes, and I imagine there were disciples who couldn’t hear it then either.  I wonder why we rarely hear this in church today?  We want clear directions…we want to know the rules…so we can be sure we remain on the “inside”.  However, these rules are unattainable…I challenge anyone to tell me the 5 simple steps to any of these.  Unattainable, yet this is the journey toward spiritual maturity.

Christ begins His teachable moment by saying, in effect, “good job to those of you who are poor in spirit…for that’s the insiders track…that’s the kingdom…that is the reward.”   I don’t get it.  It’s in giving up the inside track that we gain it… giving up preference, power, recognition… giving up our needs for these things…giving up the ways we meet these needs: ambition at work, leadership in our church, deference from our spouse.  It’s giving up the desire for the inside track, even giving up the notion that there is an inside track.  It is giving up.  We could never get it.  Poor in spirit is not something to be attained or earned…it involves loss.  Loss of self.

Even in writing these disjointed thoughts, I realize I still miss it.  Like the disciples, I’m left scratching my head…wondering what happened to that spiritual worldview that was all about me.  I only have the vague sense this simple, brief passage is central to the Christian life…death of the self, loss of the self, poverty of spirit. Lord, take me there…ask of me what you will.  Do I really mean it?

Richard Rohr again:

“…And the reward is present tense! I always say this one liner is the beginning of Jesus’ inaugural address: “Congratulations to the poor in spirit.” It is a key to everything Jesus will teach and live. Your opening line often contains your main point or leads to your main point. I wonder if most Christians have seen a simple, humble spirit as absolutely central to Jesus’ teaching?

To be “poor in spirit” means to live without a need for your own rightness, or any sense of moral superiority to anyone else. It’s a free inner emptiness, with no outer need for advancing your own reputation or any opinionated one-upmanship. If you’re actually poor in spirit it won’t be long before you’re poor in other ways too. You won’t waste the rest of your life trying to get rich because you’ll know better on the inside. Inner poverty precedes and lays the foundation for a simple, non-consuming lifestyle. ”

Adapted from Jesus’ Plan for the New World, p.130

and again…

Blessed are those who mourn: they shall be comforted
~ Matthew 5:5

“In this third Beatitude, Jesus praises the weeping ones, those who can enter into solidarity with the pain of the world and not first of all try to separate themselves from it. On our initiated men’s t-shirts, we have a quote from the American Indians, “A young man who cannot cry is a savage. An old man who cannot laugh is a fool.”

If you learn how to enter into solidarity with human suffering when you are young, you will create a humanity that makes it possible for you to smile when you are old. What a paradox. If the young are not led into this human “community of pain” in the first half of life, they become hardened, egocentric, and entitled very early in their lives. Yet baby boomer parenting has thought we needed to—or could—shield our children from all pain and human suffering. I don’t think Jesus would agree with that at all.

“The weeping mode” allows one to carry the dark side of things, the “tears of things” as the Latin poet said, to bear the pain of the world without needing to define perpetrators or victims, but instead recognizing the tragic reality that both sides are usually caught up in. I must hold these contradictions, I need to suffer them, I let them transform me. The weeping mode of life is quite different than the succeeding mode, the controlling mode, the fixing mode, the climbing mode, or even the explaining mode. Perhaps it is in the Beatitudes more than anywhere else that we see how utterly counter-cultural Jesus really is.”

Adapted from Jesus’ Plan for the New World, p.133

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The reality of God is devastating.  Lord, let me be devastated.

There are times when the spiritual life, ebbing and flowing, always in motion, slows to a near stop…when, lulled by the status quo, by the ordinariness of our life with God, our prayer, our life in church, our life at work, our life at home…we stop moving forward.  I am in that place…and seeing it, I am once again shaken, troubled…faced with the need to ask my Lord, fearlessly, to create, recreate, reconstruct me…to bring me down to death and back again.  My resistance to God so often manifests itself as apathy…

And yet, in this place of devastation…I am met once again with grace.  Anxiously returning home from my wanderings…carried away by my imagination, attention drawn away by worries of money and career, lulled to sleep by activity and a tight schedule…I am met at the road by my Father, arms wide open…and I am home again.

Come Creator…my teacher…my Lord.  Reconstruct me once again.