Tue, Feb 11 - Unmasked

As we have discussed throughout this series, to live a soul-centered life is to live authentically, and that requires being honest with ourselves and others about the issues and obstacles we face, both individually and communally. At times, those issues and obstacles can seem downright overwhelming - and it is precisely those times when we need a sort of spiritual balm. As I mentioned Sunday, weeping itself can be a bit of a balm for the soul, even though that runs counter to what we are sometimes taught. Especially as people of faith, we sometimes feel as though we should be able to put on a happy face, masking our pain, pretending as though we have enough faith that we aren’t all that bothered by whatever problems we are confronting. So all too often, we hide and deny our pain, pretending like everything is fine - sometimes to the degree that we not only try to fool others, but even ourselves. But generally speaking, the more we deny, the more the pain festers and grows. 

Our weeping is not an indicator that we succumb to whatever the difficulty may be, but is an indicator that we understand the suffering and we are willing to engage it, to feel it - which in the end, is the only way to authentically deal with it. Weeping is like a release valve for the stress, grief, anxiety, and fear we sometimes feel, serving as a sort of physiological and emotional detox necessary for our healing.  As an old Jewish proverb says, "What soap is for the body, tears are for the soul."  

The point is not that we are all called to weep. The point is that we are called to get real. Only in getting authentic - with ourselves, with one another, and with God - can we live into our true identities as reflections of the God in whose image we are made. As Thomas Merton writes in New Seeds of Contemplation, “For me to be a saint means to be myself. Therefore the problem of sanctity and salvation is in fact the problem of finding out who I am and of discovering my true self… God leaves us free to be whatever we like. We can be ourselves or not, as we please. We are at liberty to be real, or to be unreal. We may be true or false, the choice is ours. We may wear now one mask and now another, and never, if we so desire, appear with our own true face. But we cannot make these choices with impunity. Causes have effects, and if we lie to ourselves and to others, then we cannot expect to find truth and reality whenever we happen to want them. If we have chosen the way of falsity we must not be surprised that truth eludes us when we finally come to need it! Our vocation is not simply to be, but to work together with God in the creation of our own life, our own identity, our own destiny.… This means to say that we should not passively exist, but actively participate in God’s creative freedom, in our own lives, and in the lives of others, by choosing the truth. To put it better, we are even called to share with God the work of creating the truth of our identity... To work out our own identity in God, which the Bible calls “working out our salvation,“ is a labor that requires sacrifice and anguish, risk and many tears. It demands close attention to reality at every moment, and great fidelity to God as He reveals Himself, obscurely, in the mystery of each new situation.”

To become soul-centered requires authenticity. It requires admitting our pain, entering into our pain, learning from our pain. It’s time to set the masks aside.

Sun, Feb 9 - A Balm in Gilead

We’ve been talking about Becoming Soul-Centered for the past 6 weeks now. In order to live from the center of our souls, we have to speak and live with authenticity. And the honest truth is, sometimes our souls feel incredibly heavy, burdened and bruised. Sometimes, the weight of life and suffering seems to be too much. So we talked in worship this morning about how at times, we simply need a balm for the soul.

We were blessed in worship today with a song from the Bentonville High School Chamber Choir. I had requested that they sing a song that has long been a staple of their performances: A Balm in Gilead. If you were not in worship with us, it’s hard for me to describe the beauty of the Chamber voices and the power of that song. My favorite part of the tune is when the choir sings with individually somewhat dissonant voices that warble throughout the sanctuary before finally settling into harmonious whole. It is symbolic for me of the struggle for unity and harmony we seem to be suffering through in our present time - yet also a reminder that peace and harmony is not altogether lost.

Here are one verse and chorus from that song: “Sometimes I feel discouraged, and think my work’s in vain; but then the Holy Spirit revives my soul again. There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole. There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul.” The balm in Gilead is a reference to Jeremiah 8:22, where the prophet, distraught over the brokenness embodied by leadership and people of Israel, cries out: “Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?” As opposed to the declarative promise of the song, the broken-hearted prophet just asks the question, seemingly unsure as to whether there is hope any longer. He has seen the brokenness of the nation, which has turned its back on truth and justice and fighting for the neighbor. He knows that on their current trajectory, they are bound for self-destruction. And at least in that moment, he seems unsure whether they will turn back toward a healthy understanding of themselves and their neighbors. So he is left to just… weep.

I mentioned in worship that this is Black History Month. The Black journey in America has a lot to teach us about moving from brokenness to hope. I’m an enormous fan of the writing and speaking of Dr. Martin Luther King, and in reflecting about today’s message, I was reminded of a sermon he delivered at Mount Pisgah Missionary Baptist Church in Chicago in August of 1967, a few months before his life would be cut short by an assassin’s bullet. Dr. King was talking about the darkness he was experiencing in his movement for justice, and he referenced both Jeremiah and this song, whose lyrics were first penned by those trapped in the pain of slavery. Dr. King said: “I get weary every now and then. The future looks difficult and dim, but I’m not worried about it ultimately because I have faith in God. Centuries ago Jeremiah raised a question, ‘Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?’ He raised it because he saw good people suffering often and evil people prospering. Centuries later our slave foreparents came along. They too saw the injustices of life, and had nothing to look forward to morning after morning but the rawhide whip of the overseer, long rows of cotton in the sizzling heat. But they did an amazing thing. They looked back across the centuries and they took Jeremiah’s question mark and straightened it into an exclamation point. Instead of asking if there is a balm in Gilead, they sang, ‘There IS a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole! There IS a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul!’”

The brokenness of our days sometimes seems to fall more in line with Jeremiah’s haunting question than with the song’s declarative promise. Is there hope for our healing? Is there a doctor in the house? Sometimes, I wonder... But as discouraged as I sometimes may feel, yet still, I believe. 

At times, our brokenness leads me to tears. But our hope is not lost. What is dissonant in us now can once again find harmony. 

There is a balm in Gilead.

Fri, Feb 7 - Come Together

One of the central points of Paul’s repeated teaching about us being united as One Body in Christ is about our need to recognize our shared humanity so that we might come together and see one another as gift. We are, each one of us, gifts from God. So when we neglect our relationships with one another, we are really neglecting our relationship with God. When we fail to recognize our shared humanity, we fail to learn from one another as we ought, and fail to be blessed by one another as we were designed.

I’ve been thinking a great deal about our need to come together lately - our need to come together as people of faith, our need to come together as people of this nation, our need to come together as people across the globe. The pain of our national polarization today is the deepest it has been in my lifetime. It is far too easy to see one another as enemies, when we are called to see one another as various parts of one collective Body. That’s one of the reasons Jesus taught that we are to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us - that helps us to overcome our perceived separateness. Loving one another in the here and now, despite our differences, is essential to living and loving in the Way of Jesus.

Michael Gungor was a noted Christian worship leader and recording artist who in recent years has pulled away from the institutionalized church and institutionalized religion in general - but he still loves to explore all things spiritual. Bradley Webber recently sent me a quote from Gungor’s book, This: Becoming Free, where he writes: “Growing up, Jesus was presented to me like some sort of superhero who had gone away but would someday come back and make everything better. Jesus was to be found not in the present grittiness of life, like he said he would be, but instead in the traditions of old men and dusty books. We looked for him in the past and future, when all along he had pointed us to the infinite and eternal present of birds and flowers and neighbors. We keep going back to the places where we thought he was in our belief systems, traditions, and stories of some imagined future, but unless our thoughts, words, and practices ground us in THIS very moment, our religion is nothing but an empty tomb, and ‘he is not here.’”

Jesus is here. He is alive, in all of us collectively... Unless we continue to crucify Him.

Thu, Feb 6 - One Body

Whether we look at it from a faith point of view or a scientific point of view, if we go back far enough in history, we all share the same heritage - which means, in a very real sense, all of us are branches from the same family tree. The biblical story says that we all share the same spiritual DNA; and the scientific story is that we all rooted in the same physical DNA. We are all connected. We are all family. While our growth from that original DNA has taken us each in different directions, it’s still all related - and we know ourselves more fully when we see how much we share in common with others, and how even the differences we see in others is an extension of something that is in us. 

Paul says it much more succinctly. He discusses the unity in diversity of the Church, and by extension the unity in diversity of the human family, by talking about us as being different from one another, yet connected as ONE BODY. He reflects on this idea for the entirety of 1 Corinthians 12, perhaps because it was a really important idea in a place like Corinth, a major intersection for trade routes, rivaling Athens in ancient days. Due to that, there was incredible diversity in the city in Paul’s day - people from different parts of the world, of different cultural backgrounds, of various races, of different income levels, from the ruling class to the merchant class to the working class to slaves, covering a wide range of social strata. Yet as different as they all are, Paul reminds them that ultimately, THEY ARE ALL CONNECTED. They are all one Body - the Body of Christ. So they are not just to tolerate one another, they are made FOR one another:

To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good… Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot would say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear would say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body… As it is, there are many members, yet one body… If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it. Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it. (1 Cor 12)

Physically, when any part of your body is hurting, you can feel that pain in your entire body. Indeed, if left untreated, the pain in that one part of your body can spread to other parts of the body. If you do damage to your pinky toe, and you don’t take the steps necessary to care for it and allow it to heal, it can effect the way you walk… and give you hip or knee or back problems… which can then cause you to lose sleep… which can lead to all sorts of other problems. Worse, if you have an infection in one part of the body, and you do nothing to treat that infection, it can quickly become a much larger issue. To be healthy, we have to show care and respect for the whole body.

If we are all part of One Body, as Paul repeatedly declares, that has profound implications for how we are to live out our lives in both local and global community. We are all connected in the same body of humanity. So when we see another in distress, it is not just their problem - it is our problem, too. We can no longer pretend that the one who is hurting is not part of our own body - whether they are a refugee at the border, or a homeless man on the street, or a woman who cannot afford her medication, or a worker who cannot afford to put a roof over her family’s head.

We really are all in this together - and ALL means ALL.

Wed, Feb 5 - Universal Incarnation

Typically, when Christians talk about Incarnation, they are talking about the Incarnation of God in Christ - the belief that, in some mysterious way we cannot fully explain, the Divine and humanity found complete intersection in the person of Jesus. Traditionally, Christianity has defined the Incarnation as Jesus being both fully human and fully divine - which, to be honest, has never made sense to me. I’m a math guy. If you are 100% one thing, you cannot be 100% something else at the same time.

That is, unless those two things are not exclusive of one another. We have often thought of the ‘human’ and ‘divine’ categories as mutually exclusive, or even as total opposites. But perhaps one of the lessons we learn in Christ is that we are mistaken to think of those categories in that manner.

While I believe Jesus was a unique embodiment of God, I have come to believe that the embodiment of God in Jesus was more about a revelation of the Divine’s radical unity with humanity in general than it was exclusively about Jesus in particular. In at least some sense, Jesus shows us what it is to be fully human - and remarkably, when we live into the fullness of our humanity, we at the same time live into the fullness of the Divine Image in which we are made. Indeed, humanity and divinity are not opposites at all. When we fail to recognize the sacredness of the other, we are less apt to treat them as fully human; likewise, when we recognize the Divine Light that is in the other, and see that it comes from the same Divine Light that is in us, we see ourselves as part of one human family. The more fully human we become, the closer we reflect the Divine.

Richard Rohr speaks to this concept in talking about how God loves us by uniting with us: “God loves things by uniting with them, not by excluding them. Through the act of creation, God manifested the eternally out-flowing Divine Presence into the physical and material world. Ordinary matter is the hiding place for Spirit and thus the very Body of God. Honestly, what else could it be, if we believe — as orthodox Jews, Christians, and Muslims do — that ‘one God created all things’? Since the very beginning of time, God’s Spirit has been revealing its glory and goodness through the physical creation.... All things visible are the revelation of God’s endlessly diffusive spiritual energy. Once a person recognizes that, it is hard to ever be lonely in this world again.”

In other words, God is embodied in everything, everywhere. Including in me. And in you. And in your neighbor. Even the one you don’t like.

But by learning to recognize the Light even in the Darkness of the one we don’t like, we learn to be more human… and we reflect more fully the Divine. And in turn, we bring out the Divine in the other.

The Light shines in the Darkness, and the Darkness cannot overcome it. We experience Incarnation.

Tue, Feb 4 - We are all Stardust

I love science. Science is simply the study of the mechanics of the universe. Religion, on the other hand, is the study of the meaning of the universe. Science and religion should not be seen as competitors, but simply different lenses through which we see and try to understand life. My faith is informed by science, and never threatened by it. An honest and authentic approach to faith can receive the teachings of science as simply a different approach to truth.

One scientific theory that fits well with our overall Soul-Centered theme, and specifically with this week’s theme on all of us being Soul Mates, is the Big Bang theory. According to the theory, the universe began about 13.7 billion years ago with the Big Bang, at which time what had previously been a singularity (a single point of infinite density) exploded, rapidly expanding into a universe and the first elements, which over the course of billions of years went through other explosions and expansions and chemical reactions to form additional elements… which eventually wound up as part of each of us. If the theory is true, then the elements that compose the human body literally did come from the stars. Not only that, but if we go back far enough, all of us - and indeed everyone and everything that has ever existed - existed together in that infinitely dense singular point. (It’s striking to me that I’m writing about something being infinitely dense on a night I’m also watching the ridiculousness of the Iowa primaries and awaiting the President’s State of our Disunion address - but I digress…)

Franciscan Sister Ilia Delio reflects beautifully on the Big Bang in The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution, and the Power of Love.  She writes: “Every human person desires to love and to be loved, to belong to another, because we come from another. We are born social and relational. We yearn to belong, to be part of a larger whole that includes not only friends and family but neighbors, community, trees, flowers, sun, Earth, stars. We are born of nature and are part of nature; that is, we are born into a web of life and are part of a web of life. We cannot know what this means, however, without seeing ourselves within the story of the Big Bang universe. Human life must be traced back to the time when life was deeply one, a Singularity, whereby the intensity of mass-energy exploded into consciousness. Deep in our DNA we belong to the stars, the trees, and the galaxies.

Deep within we long for unity because, at the most fundamental level, we are already one. We belong to one another because we have the same source of love; the love that flows through the trees is the same love that flows through my being... We are deeply connected in this flow of love, beginning on the level of nature where we are the closest of kin because the Earth is our mother.”

We are all Stardust.

Mon, Feb 3 - Ubuntu

The overarching idea of the sermon yesterday was that all of us are ‘Soul Mates’ with one another, in the sense that each of us, in our heart and soul, reflect the image of the heart and soul of God. We are more than just a collection of individuals. We become part of one another when we live in relationship to one another. We become a more complete picture what it means to be part of the human family when we recognize our innate interconnectedness. As I mentioned Sunday, it reminds me of the South African idea of Ubuntu, which was introduced to the West by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Tutu describes the concept this way: "Ubuntu is very difficult to render into a Western language. It speaks of the very essence of being human... [In Ubuntu], you are generous, you are hospitable, you are friendly and caring and compassionate. You share what you have. It is to say, ‘My humanity is inextricably bound up in yours,’ for we can only be human together." 

That is such a powerful truth! We are created for relationship. We are created for community. We are not created for independence but for interdependence. After all, none of us enters life alone or on our own. We each are born into the world literally tied to someone else. You were born physically connected by a cord to your mama! Maybe that should tell us something. We need each other - and not just when we are children. We’re not designed to be in this life alone.

Elsewhere, Tutu also says this about Ubuntu: “We say a person is a person through other persons. We don’t come fully formed into the world. We learn how to think, how to walk, how to speak, how to behave, indeed how to be human from other human beings. We need other human beings in order to be human. We are made for togetherness, we are made for family, for fellowship, to exist in a tender network of interdependence.”

We are all part of the same human family, made in the image of One God. We are soul mates.

Sun, Feb 2 - Super Soul Sunday: A Game of Grace

As I write this, it’s about an hour before kick-off in Super Bowl LIV, when the AFC Champion Chiefs take on the NFC Champion 49ers. Neither of them are my team, but I’m pulling for the Chiefs. I’m pulling for the Chiefs partly because a good portion of our congregation pulls for the Chiefs, and a happier congregation makes for a happier ministry! Besides, 50 years without an NFL title seems long enough. On top of that, I’m pulling for the Chiefs because I’m pulling against the 49ers. I still haven’t forgiven Joe Montana & Dwight Clark for “The Catch” in their NFC Championship game against my beloved Cowboys in 1982. They say time heals all wounds, but evidently the healing process for some wounds is longer than 38 years…

Actually, no matter how long it’s been since a wound was inflicted, there is a crucial element that must be added to time in order for healing to take place: you also need a healthy dose of grace. We talked a bit about grace in our message today, which was about how all of us are called to be Soul Mates. As part of the human family, we all share in the same spiritual DNA. In some sense, we are all on the same team. Our shared humanity doesn’t change, even when we temporarily forget it and wind up wounding one another.

When we are cut to the quick by each other, we are given the opportunity to practice grace - and we are called to do just that, as image-bearers of God’s unlimited grace. The game of life in which we find ourselves is ultimately meant to be a game of grace. As hard as it can be to play the game that way, thankfully, God shows us the way. While we have to suffer the consequences and incur penalties when we cause an infraction (are you getting tired of this metaphor yet?), we will never be ejected from the game - because God is ultimately a God of grace. One example I cited this morning came from the story of Cain & Abel in Genesis 4. After Cain, in unrelenting anger, murders his brother, God imposes a penalty on him. Cain will have to suffer the consequences of his actions. But strikingly, God does not demand Cain’s life as payment for Abel’s life. And while Cain is cast out from what he has known up to that point, even in his punishment, God marks him to protect him. The perpetrator of evil in the story is marked as a member of God’s family! While God disciplines Cain, God does not disown him. God essentially lets Cain know that, despite what Cain has done, he is still God’s child. And if Cain is still a child of God, after what he’s done, then EVERYONE is still God’s child! We are ALL in the same family.

This is grace. As Philip Yancey defines it, “Grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us more - no amount of spiritual calisthenics and renunciations, no amount of knowledge gained from seminaries and divinity schools, no amount of crusading on behalf of religious causes. And grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us less - no amount of racism or pride or pornography or adultery or even murder. Grace means that God already loves us as much as an infinite God can possibly love.” 

When the game is over tonight, one team and fanbase will be giddy with joy, and the other will feel defeated and deflated. But soon after the final gun, both teams will meet on the middle of the field to exchange handshakes and hugs and congratulations. There will be wounds in the game, and healing to be done afterwards, to be sure. But there will also be grace.

Whatever our woundedness, my prayer is that in seeking to live from the center of our souls, we will begin to recognize the Divine Image in all others, and recognize that we are all sisters and brothers. We are all on the same team.

Grace and peace, my friends.

Sat, Feb 1 - Secure in God

I believe the most powerful thing in the world that gives us a sense of security is the knowledge that we are loved and worthy of love. Once we understand that, letting go and surrendering to God and Life is more a simple matter of trust. It becomes a leap of faith.

When I think of a leap of faith, a couple of images come to mind. The first is of teaching my kids to swim. In teaching them to swim, one of the first things they had to overcome was simply a fear of the water. They had to learn that, while they hadn’t yet learned how to float or swim, they could jump into the pool if they were jumping into the waiting arms of Mommy or Daddy. They knew we were trustworthy. They had felt us hold them and carry them thousands of times before, just in different circumstances and conditions. They just had to learn that while the conditions were different, they could still trust in the care of our arms.

I’m similarly reminded of the illustration of a trapeze artist. We would occasionally go to the circus when I was a child, and I was always mesmerized by those soaring through the air above on the ‘flying trapeze.’ A priest by the name of Henri Nouwen was likewise fascinated, and recounted a conversation he had with the leader of a trapeze troupe. The man explained to Nouwen, "As a flyer, I must have complete trust in my catcher. The public might think that I am the great star of the trapeze, but the real star is Joe, my catcher. He has to be there for me with split-second precision and grab me out of the air as I come to him… The secret is that the flyer does nothing and the catcher does everything. When I fly to Joe, I have simply to stretch out my arms and hands and wait for him to catch me… The worst thing the flyer can do is to try to catch the catcher. I am not supposed to catch Joe. It's Joe's task to catch me. If I grabbed Joe's wrists, I might break them, or he might break mine, and that would be the end for both of us. A flyer must fly, and a catcher must catch, and the flyer must trust, with outstretched arms, that his catcher will be there for him."

My part is to trust, to surrender, to give myself up - to let go of the bar, to leave the comfort of the poolside, and simply jump. God's part is to catch, to hold, to do in me and for me what I can't do for myself. We just have to trust in the trustworthiness of the One who waits for us with outstretched arms. 

You see, here’s the thing: ultimately, while we might occasionally find ourselves underwater, or fall to the ground, there is still really nothing to fear. As Dallas Willard puts it, “This universe is a perfectly safe place for you to be. The soul is simply not at risk.”

Jump.

Fri, Jan 31 - Secure in Me

As yesterday’s reflections touched upon, letting go - releasing control - is the essence of soul surrender. But obviously letting go is easier said than done. It is often difficult to let go because we find security in the status quo. Even if we wish we had something different, we know what we have now, and we have learned to make it work… sort of. Even if we wish we had something different, there is a strange sense of comfort in what we have, and we may fear (consciously or subconsciously) that if we let it go, we will be left with something less than that to which we currently cling. The key to overcoming that fear is security. So as we close out this week on surrender, I’d like to reflect today upon internal security, and tomorrow to reflect upon external security.

When it comes to ‘security’ in our society, we are usually focused upon establishing and maintaining our security from others, from forces or people outside of ourselves. But soul-centered security comes from within - and I would argue it is more essential than any kind of external security. Ultimately, I believe our greatest internal security is found in knowing that we are loved and worthy of that love. There is nothing so powerful in all of life than knowing that we are loved and worthy of it.

The essence of the soul-centered life, the essence of the spiritual walk, is living in Love. As 1 John 4:8 declares, God is love - so to live in love is to live in God. To recognize the love I’ve been given, and my worthiness of receiving it, is to recognize the Divine Gift and the Divine Image within me. And once I know that - once I truly know that - it gives me a security which cannot be threatened from without. Moreover, the recognition of that love and my own lovability frees me to accept myself, which I must be able to do before I can more fully become my true self. As Thomas Merton wrote, “Real self-conquest is the conquest of ourselves not by ourselves but by the Holy Spirit. Self-conquest is really self-surrender. Yet before we can surrender ourselves we must become ourselves. For no one can give up what he does not possess.”

God is Love, and you are created in God’s image. You are created in the image of Love. Divine Love lies at the heart of who you are, which means you - YOU - are worthy. You are worthy of God’s Love.

In that, you can rest secure.

Thu, Jan 30 - Let Go & Let God

As much as we might want to take control of our lives, becoming spiritually mature and soul-centered is in large part about recognizing and accepting our relative powerlessness… and learning to be ok with that. Becoming soul-centered is about trusting in something, or Someone, beyond ourselves - and trust always involves releasing control. I think that’s ultimately what Jesus meant when he made this sometimes perplexing statement in Matthew 16:25 - “Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”

Though it may seem counterintuitive, generally speaking there is more power in trust than there is in control. That’s one of the reasons that in scripture,God regularly announces God’s presence on the scene with the introduction, ‘Fear not!’ At the root of fear is a loss of control.  But to experience the newness of life which God offers, we cannot give in to that fear. We must lean into trust.

It’s no coincidence that the first step in the Twelve Step recovery process is admitting powerlessness: ‘We admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable.’ Nor is it a coincidence that the second step is about trusting in a Higher Power: ‘We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.’ Releasing control - or more accurately, admitting we never had control - allows us to more fully entrust ourselves to the One who is Trustworthy.

In the me I want to be, John Ortberg observes: “The Twelve Steps followed by many recovery groups lay out a way of life that is the single greatest path to freedom for addicts the world has ever known. But at the core of the steps lies a great paradox: In which of the twelve steps does it say, “Now try really hard not to drink”? In which of the twelve steps does it even say, “Now decide not to drink”? Amazingly enough, the most powerful tool against the most powerful addiction in the world never asks people to decide to stop doing what is destroying their lives. Instead of mobilizing the will, its followers surrender their will. Try to overcome the problem by your will, and it will beat you. Surrender your will, and sobriety becomes possible. Surrender, which we think means defeat, turns out to be the only way to victory.”

Let go… and let God.

Wed, Jan 29 - Get Real

What we are calling soul-centered living is about living from the depths of our spirit and soul; but do not mistake that for denying the coarse realities of life. One of the dangers of thinking about “spiritual” matters is when we think that things that are “spiritual” are necessarily disembodied and otherworldly. If our spiritual maturity is going to affect our actual, real, flesh-and-blood, lived-out lives (and isn’t that what we want?), then we cannot divorce spirituality from the actualities of our real, flesh-and-blood, lived-out lives. And the truth is, our real lives often have to deal with darkness.

But that is not all bad. As Joan Chittister writes, “There is a light in us that only darkness itself can illuminate. It is the glowing calm that comes over us when we finally surrender to the ultimate truth of creation: that there is a God and we are not it... Then the clarity of it all is startling. Life is not about us; we are about the project of finding Life. At that moment, spiritual vision illuminates all the rest of life. And it is that light that shines in darkness.”

I love this idea: ‘We are about the project of finding Life.’ To surrender to reality is not just to accept it, but to accept it so that we can find the Truth and the Life in it - so that we can find GOD in it. If we are too busy living in the ‘oughts’ - how things ought to be, or how they ought to act, or what I ought to have done - then we miss out on the joy and the majesty and the mystery of now. If we are too busy wishing things were like they were back in the good ol’ days, or wishing that I had something that I do not, or getting too tied up in shoulda-coulda-woulda, we miss what God is up to right here, right now.

Chittister writes elsewhere: “Surrender does not simply mean that I quit grieving what I do not have. It means that I surrender to new meanings and new circumstances, that I begin to think differently and to live somewhere that is totally elsewhere. I surrender to meanings I never cared to hear — or heard, maybe, but was not willing to understand... Try as I might to turn back the clock, to relive a period of my life with old friends, in long-gone places, out of common memories, through old understandings and theologies of the past, I come to admit that such attempts are the myth of a mind in search of safer days. The way we were is over… Surrender is the crossover point of life. It distinguishes who I was from who I have become. Life as I had fantasized is over. What is left is the spiritual obligation to accept reality so that the spiritual life can really happen to me.”

Get real. This is the day that the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it. (Psalm 118:24)

Tue, Jan 28 - Messy Spirituality

 We are reflecting this week on what it is to surrender - but I want to be careful here. In religious circles, I’ve often heard surrender used in the sense of us needing to surrender to God’s will for our lives. And that’s a good thing to do, to be sure. But “God’s will for my life” is something that is still somewhat amorphous for most of us. And I’m afraid, due to the religious baggage many of us bring to the table, what most people think about when it comes to “God’s will” is that God’s will is for us to be perfect people - or at least much closer to perfect than who we are at the present. And becoming more perfect people sounds more like work than surrender.

Now, I’m not suggesting that all of us don’t have things we need to work on in our lives; of course we do. But when it comes to spiritual work, rather than working on our spiritual lives, I think we are better off working from our spiritual souls. So surrender is not just about surrendering to God - it is about surrendering to the image of God within us. It is about seeing ourselves, broken as we sometimes may be, as children of God. Instead of thinking about surrendering to God’s will for you, I want to invite you to think about surrendering to God’s love for you. 

Mike Yaconelli wrote a beautiful little book a few years back called, Messy Spirituality: God’s Annoying Love for Imperfect People. Yaconelli writes that when Christians use the term ‘spiritual’ to describe someone, they usually use it “to describe people who pray all day long, read their Bibles constantly, never get angry or rattled, possess special powers, and have the inside track to God. Spirituality, for most, has an otherworldly ring to it.” Yaconelli, who was a pastor and nationally recognized youth minister (who was sadly killed in a car accident years ago), admits that he didn’t fit that description, and probably never would. I can relate.

He then goes on to say: “Spirituality is not a formula. It is not a test. It is a relationship. Spirituality is not about competency; it is about intimacy. Spirituality is not about perfection; it is about connection. The way of the spiritual life begins where we are now in the mess of our lives. Accepting the reality of our broken, flawed lives is the beginning of spirituality, not because the spiritual life will remove our flaws but because we let go of seeking perfection and, instead, seek God, the one who is present in the tangledness of our lives. Spirituality is not about being fixed; it is about God’s being present in the mess of our unfixedness.”

Yes! That. Surrender to that. Surrender to the messiness of life, to the messiness of you… and to the God who loves you in the tangledness of it.

Mon, Jan 27 - Out of Control

As much as we often grasp at control, one of the necessary steps to mature into a soul-centered faith is the increasing recognition of the limits to our control over much of life. These past couple of days have been a reminder of that. Yesterday, about the same time that we were addressing this idea in worship, the world was learning of the tragic passing at age 41 of Kobe Bryant, one of the greatest basketball players of all time. Bryant, along with his 13-year-old daughter and 7 others, were killed in a helicopter crash Sunday morning. It was a sad reminder of there being no guarantees about tomorrow.

Today also marks a day of loss, as this is the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the largest Nazi concentration and extermination camp in World War II. Over one million Jews were killed at Auschwitz. It serves as a sad reminder of humanity’s capacity for inhumanity when we fail to remember our shared humanity.

The truth of the matter is, sometimes life doesn’t make sense. And when it doesn’t make sense, we are reminded that we are not in control. I’ve come to terms with the fact that I am not in control of life; time has a way of proving that to us. But the deeper question with which I wrestle is this: Is God really in control?

I realize that may be disturbing to some, that a pastor would ask such a thing. But events like yesterday’s helicopter crash, where nine innocent lives were suddenly lost - and even more, events like the Holocaust, where six million innocent lives were summarily snuffed out - make me ask the question. Surely God didn’t will for that helicopter to crash? Surely God’s plan didn’t include the extermination of six million Jews?... It’s one of the oldest questions of our faith, and one of the questions that chase many people from faith. If God is good and loving, and God is all-powerful, then why do evil things happen?

If I had a straightforward and satisfactory way to answer that question, it would be worthy of much more than a blog post. But let me share how I’ve come to answer the question, Is God in control?... Ultimately, I believe God is. I believe God is love, and in the end, I believe love has the final word. Love is the most powerful force in all existence. It is more powerful than anything which stand in opposition to it. So in the end, I believe, love wins.

Ultimately, that is. In the end. But… in the meantime… there is something else about love. For love to truly be love, it cannot be controlling. While love is more incomprehensibly powerful than any other force in life, love exerts its power through incomprehensible vulnerability. So while God’s love is all-powerful… maybe, just maybe, God’s love prevents God from exerting control over every aspect of life.

Still, in the end, I believe, the power of that love wins out. In the end, love is the ultimate point. As Auschwitz survivor Viktor Frankl penned in Man’s Search for Meaning, “Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire… The salvation of man is through love and in love.”

Despite how out of control we feel in life, and how out of control life can really be, love has saving power. Even in loss. Even in the midst of atrocity. Even in death. As Paul writes in Romans 8:35-39, “Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?... No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

I surrender.

Sun, Jan 26 - Soul Surrender

We’ll be talking in worship today about “Soul Surrender.” Surrender is heard with almost wholly negative connotations in our cultural context. It brings up imagery in our minds of waving a white flag, of losing. And it is about losing. It’s about losing control - or really, about losing the illusion that we were ever in control in the first place. And what faith invites us to do is to replace that grasping for control with a willingness to trust.

Trust is essential food for the soul. We cannot become soul-centered without leaning more fully into trust. Trust is what frees us to truly be us.

John Ortberg writes: “How do you get the freedom that your soul craves? This is the great irony about freedom. To become truly free, you must surrender. Surrender is not a popular concept. It goes against everything we think we know about being free. Wars are not won by surrendering. Have you ever seen a football team surrender in the Super Bowl? But surrender is the only way to achieve freedom for your soul.

If you want to free your soul, you acknowledge that there is a spiritual order that God has designed for you. You are not the center of the universe. You are the not the master of your fate. There is a God. It is not you. True freedom comes when you embrace God’s overall design for the world and your place in it.”

Be free… by giving up. Surrender.

Sat, Jan 25 - Paying Attention

As we wrap up this week, thinking about feasting on the delight of the Divine, my thoughts move to the story where Moses first learns to do that. It occurs in Exodus 3:2-5. “There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.” When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” 

So Moses is tending his flock at the foot of Mount Horeb, when he notices a bush that appears to be aflame but is not being consumed. But notice, God does not speak to Moses from the mystery of the bush... until Moses turns aside to look. Only after ‘the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see’ does God call to him. Before Moses hears God’s voice, he must first give God his attention. And once Moses has given his attention and heard the truth of what was happening in the moment, he removes his shoes, recognizing the very space he occupies as holy ground.

Richard Rohr writes that on our spiritual journeys, “We must allow ourselves to be captured by the goodness, truth, or beauty of something beyond and outside ourselves. Then we universalize from that moment to the goodness, truth, and beauty of the rest of reality, until our realization eventually ricochets back to include ourselves! This is the great inner dialogue we call prayer… The one is the way to the many; the specific is the way to the spacious; the now is the way to the always; the here is the way to everywhere; the material is the way to the spiritual; the visible is the way to the invisible. When we see contemplatively, we know that we live in a fully sacramental universe, where everything is an epiphany.”

Everything is an epiphany. Everything is a revelation. Everything burns with the fire of the Divine. Everything.

But to see it… we must stop, turn aside, and look. We are called to feast on the mystery of life, every day, all around us. The space where you sit, right here, right now, is holy ground.

Fri, Jan 24 - Fulfilling our Desires

Desires are a natural part of us. Most of us want more. But what we really want is more life, not the accumulation of more status, more achievement, more wealth, more stuff. When we try to fulfill our natural desire for more with those lesser things, while they might give us a short-term high, we always find ourselves eventually desiring still more… because, in truth, the deepest desire of our souls was never met in those things.

But when I say that, don’t mistake it for meaning that the material things of life are unimportant; that’s not what I mean at all. In fact, if we approach the materiality of life from a soul-centered perspective, they can help us experience great delight. We can be led deeper into joy.

In his book, How Can It Be All Right When Everything Is All Wrong?, Lewis Smedes puts it this way: “Most of us spend our time crawling, groping, climbing, sometimes running, but always moving like the works of a clock. But now and then joy comes to arrest the motion; it stops the tedious taking of our life-clocks with the bracing discovery that we have received a gift. It works most magnificently when we feel our own life as if it were God’s gift to us... There comes a sense that life - now, here, today - is a gift worth blessing God for. When it comes, when this sends of being a gift comes, joy has come to us. Joy is not just the experience of God, thank God, though being with him, in the sight of his beauty, will be the ultimate joy. Not the least gift of grace is our joy in creaturely things. God is so great that he doesn’t need to be our only joy. There is an earthly joy, a joy of the outer as well as the inner self, the joy of dancing as well as kneeling, the joy of playing as well as praying. Any moment that opens us up to the reality that life is good is a parable of the supreme end for which we were made.”

You were made by God. even our physical selves are in some mysterious way an echo of the Divine. We all have physical desires, appetites that need to be fed to satisfy our need for food, drink, and physical touch. So it’s no surprise that throughout scripture we find God instructing the Israelites to feast, to drink and celebrate, to sing and dance and shout. These are all physical means of delighting in life… and a means by which we are reminded that life is good… because it reflects the goodness of God.

Thu, Jan 23 - One Sunset, Three Eyes

We talked on Sunday about the need for us to meet our desire for more life by learning to stop and delight in life, to drink life in, to “taste and see that the Lord [and the life God gives us] is good.” When we find the grace and delight that is at the heart of all Creation, it helps us to recognize that all of Creation is united by grace and delight.

Richard Rohr talks about that in terms of mysticism in The Naked Now. He writes, “Do not let the word ‘mystic’ scare you off. It simply means one who has moved from mere belief systems or belonging systems to actual inner experience.” As an example, Rohr talks about three different ways of viewing a sunrise. With your ‘first eye’ you can see and enjoy the sheer physical beauty of the event itself - and that is a good thing to do. But that does not fully get at the kind of inner delight we are talking about. With your ‘second eye’ you can see the physical beauty of the first eye while also being able to explain - thru reason, thru scientific understanding of the rotation of the earth, thru knowledge of the refractions of light as the sun approaches the horizon - exactly what is happening. But still, that does not lead us into the deepest delight. It is only when we can see more deeply thru the ‘third eye’ that we move beyond mere seeing and mere explaining to tasting the experience, leading us to stand “in awe before an underlying mystery, coherence, and spaciousness that connects [us] with everything else.” 

Rohr goes on to write something that seems especially appropriate, not only for this series, but for the time in which we currently find ourselves: “One wonders how far spiritual and political leaders can genuinely lead us without some degree of mystical seeing. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that ‘us-and-them’ seeing, and the dualistic thinking that results, is the foundation of almost all discontent and violence in the world. It allows heads of religion and state to avoid their own founders, their own national ideals, and their own better instincts. Lacking the contemplative gaze, such leaders will remain mere functionaries, without any big picture to guide them.”

In all that we experience, one key to becoming soul-centered is to see things more deeply. For the deeper we see the more we recognize our connection with everything and everyone around us.

Prayer: Lord, help me see… and know… and delight. Amen.

Wed, Jan 22 - The Sound of Silence

It was 16th century mystic Saint John of the Cross who initially posited that, “God’s first language is silence.” Three centuries later, in Invitation to Love, American Trappist monk Thomas Keating commented on that insight. Keating wrote, “Silence is God’s first language; everything else is a poor translation. In order to understand this language, we must learn to be silent and to rest in God.” 

Most of us know the power of silence to some degree. But in a world filled with noise and distraction, finding silence is anything but easy. From the moment we awaken to when our heads hit the pillow at night, we are bombarded. From our TVs, to our car radios, to the hassles at work and in our in-boxes, to issues at home, to the crowds at Walmart, to our blasted and ever-present cell phones, we are constantly reminded of everything we have to do, everywhere we should go, everything we should be doing, and all of the things we have yet to attain. For many of us, silence sounds great - but we rarely experience it.

And yet, not only in the monastic tradition but in scripture itself, we find indication that the Divine Presence is often found in the silence. Perhaps the most classic case of that is the story of the prophet Elijah in 1 Kings 19. Elijah is seeking refuge from the noise of his own life, which was under literal threat by Queen Jezebel. At Mount Horeb, the ‘word of the Lord’ says to Elijah: “‘Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.’ Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence” (1 Kings 19:11-12). Or you may be familiar the King James translation of that last verse, which says that after the fire passed, what remained was “a still small voice.”

Qol, the original Hebrew word being translated there, can mean "voice," but can also simply mean "sound." The other Hebrew words in that phrase also have multiple meanings: daq can mean "thin," "small" or "sheer"; and demamah can mean "whisper" or might just mean "silence." It’s hard to say whether the story is conveying that God’s voice is in the silence, or if the silence just prepares Elijah to hear from God - but either way, what is clear is that sitting in the silence is mandatory for Elijah to more fully experience the Divine. 

Occasionally, the voice of God to me is insistent and relatively clear; but most of the time, it is quite subtle. And almost always, it emerges out of silence.

So perhaps tonight, as an act of prayer, we should just put down our phones, turn off the TV, and sit… with the Sound of Silence.

Tue, Jan 21 - Daily Delight

One of the things we emphasized in Sunday’s message was the need for us to feed on delight. We can find delight in every moment, as Richard Rohr writes:

“Love can flow toward you in every moment: through a flower, in a grain of sand, in a wisp of cloud, in any one person whom you allow to delight you. You might be experiencing this flow of love when you find yourself smiling at things for no apparent reason.

Spiritual joy has nothing to do with anything ‘going right.’ It has everything to do with things going, and going on within you. It’s an inherent, inner aliveness. Joy is almost entirely an inside job. Joy is not first determined by the object enjoyed as much as by the prepared eye of the enjoyer.

When the flow is flowing, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing. You don’t have to be a priest on the altar or a preacher in a pulpit... You can be a homemaker in a grocery store or a construction worker at a work site; it doesn’t matter. It’s all inherently sacred and deeply satisfying. As the nineteenth-century poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning put it, “Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God.”

All is whole and holy in the very seeing, because you are standing inside the One Flow of Love... This is all that there really is. Call it Consciousness, call it God, call it Love; this is the Ground of all Being out of which all things—and especially all good things—come.

The river is already flowing, and you are in it whether you are enjoying it or not.”

Daily prayer: Lord, help me enjoy the flow of life.