Prodigal Kiwi(s) Blog

Dressed in Gentleness

“Once in a while we meet a gentle person. Gentleness is a virtue hard to find in a society that admires toughness and roughness. We are encouraged to get things done and to get them done fast, even when people get hurt in the process. Success, accomplishment, and productivity count. But the cost is high. There is no place for gentleness in such a milieu. Gentle is the one who does "not break the crushed reed, or snuff the faltering wick" (Matthew 12:20). Gentle is the one who is attentive to the strengths and weaknesses of the other and enjoys being together more than accomplishing something. A gentle person treads lightly, listens carefully, looks tenderly, and touches with reverence. A gentle person knows that true growth requires nurture, not force. Let's dress ourselves with gentleness. In our tough and often unbending world our gentleness can be a vivid reminder of the presence of God among us.” 

Henri Nouwen

 

The Resurrection: Holding Onto Christ

“Life is unpredictable.  We can be happy one day and sad the next, healthy one day and sick the next, rich one day and poor the next, alive one day and dead the next.  So who is there to hold on to?  Who is there to feel secure with?  Who is there to trust at all times?  Only Jesus, the Christ.  He is our Lord, our shepherd, our rock, our stronghold, our refuge, our brother, our guide, and our friend.  He came from God to be with us.  He died for us, he was raised from the dead to open for us the way to God, and he is seated at God's right hand to welcome us home.  With Paul, we must be certain that "neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nothing already in existence and nothing still to come, nor any power, nor the heights nor the depths, nor any created thing whatever, will be able to come between us and the love of God, known to us in Christ Jesus our Lord"  (Romans 8:38-39).”

Henri Nouwen

 

Why Not Love? And the Wide Open Spaces It Opens

Following on from yesterday's post, another link to Chelle Wade. This time, a reflection around the question, “why not love?” by Alison Sampson from Melbourne. I quote:

Originally published in Melbourne’s The Sunday Age Faith column on 26.2.12.

Why not love?

“Some people are naturally loving. I’m not one of them. For as long as I can remember, my first impulse has been to dislike, to feel angry, and to judge. I have fought and hurt many people unnecessarily; and I have often needed to apologise, even go through mediation, to restore a relationship damaged by my anger.

It’s not something I’m proud of.

But one day five or six years ago, as I felt myself growing furious over nothing in particular, three words dropped into mind: ‘Why not love?’

Three simple words, one little invitation. Why not love?

If it had been an order, ‘Thou shalt love’, I would have rejected it out of hand. A reactive soul who has always deeply resented being told what to do, I would have pointed out the ways I had been offended. I would have explained exactly why it was reasonable for me to be angry; with arrogance and disdain, I would have wielded my brutal honesty like a weapon; and with sickening self-righteousness, I would have justified the ensuing destruction.

But I wasn’t given a command. I was asked a question; and because of this, I felt surprisingly free. I didn’t have to react. Instead, I could engage with the question, holding it gently and turning it to and fro as I looked at it from different angles. As I did so, I realised I had an option. I could choose to go with my usual motivators, anger and fear, and lash out yet again; or I could take a deep breath, count to ten, and find a way to love.

Which option I took depended on who I wanted to be. Did I pride myself on being an angry little girl, flailing about and striking at will; or did I want to try a new path, which might just lead to kindness?

The choice was obvious. I knew what sort of adult I wanted to become.

Why not love? I unclenched my hands, and slowly breathed out. I don’t remember exactly how that day ended so many years ago; but I can say that there were no fireworks or angry tears. Instead, I recall a sense of lush green growth, a sign of renewal and hope.

I have carried the question with me ever since. Of course, there still have been many times when I have chosen not to love – always a mistake, and always more harmful to me than to anyone else. But thanks to the question, there have been many more times when I have opted to try; and in so doing, I am awkwardly stumbling my way into the wide open spaces of freedom.”

Why not love? I guess one reason, as yesterday's post indicated, if you don't have a framework for understanding what love is, then its likely you'll not be able to enact and embody the practices of love (cf. St. Paul's list; and any book on couples and relationships will have a whole list of practical suggestions and actions). The sad reality, as many discover too late, its easier and more transformatively humanising to love than it is to take the opposite course. Certainly I've had seasons in my life where Sampson's reflection rings true for me, but like her, I made a decision many years ago, in response to a similar question, to work for love - because I loved, however imperfect that has been at times, and with hindsight I can look back and see and feel the depth of transformation that has been wrought by love, grace, and Spirit in my life. And wonderfully, I am loved by a great many people, and that too is deeply transformative and life-giving. Its a gift! 

Love’s Work

The Message – 1 Corinthians 13:1-7 

1 If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don't love, I'm nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate. 2If I speak God's Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, "Jump," and it jumps, but I don't love, I'm nothing. 3-7If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don't love, I've gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I'm bankrupt without love. 

   Love never gives up.

   Love cares more for others than for self.

   Love doesn't want what it doesn't have.

   Love doesn't strut,

   Doesn't have a swelled head,

   Doesn't force itself on others,

   Isn't always "me first,"

   Doesn't fly off the handle,

   Doesn't keep score of the sins of others,

   Doesn't revel when others grovel,

   Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,

   Puts up with anything,

   Trusts God always,

   Always looks for the best,

   Never looks back,

   But keeps going to the end. 

Gillian Rose wrote a remarkable little book – largely autobiographical – called Love’s Work: A Reckoning with Life. It’s a rich and evocative work; one I read a few years back, but which I recently got back down off the shelf following an e-mail from Chelle Wade. The book is described in this way: 

“Love’s Work is at once a memoir and a work of philosophy. Written by the English philosopher Gillian Rose as she was dying of cancer, it is a book about both the fallibility and the endurance of love, love that becomes real and lasting through an ongoing reckoning with its own limitations. Rose looks back on her childhood, the complications of her parents’ divorce and her dyslexia, and her deep and divided feelings about what it means to be Jewish. She tells the stories of several friends also laboring under the sentence of death. From the sometimes conflicting vantage points of her own and her friends’ tales, she seeks to work out (seeks, because the work can never be complete—to be alive means to be incomplete) a distinctive outlook on life, one that will do justice to our yearning both for autonomy and for connection to others. With droll self-knowledge (“I am highly qualified in unhappy love affairs,” Rose writes, “My earliest unhappy love affair was with Roy Rogers”) and with unsettling wisdom (“To live, to love, is to be failed”), Rose has written a beautiful, tender, tough, and intricately wrought survival kit packed with necessary but unanswerable questions.” 

Here’s a quote that I underlined when I read it: 

“…The work [of love] equalises the emotions, and enables the two submerged to surface in a series of unpredictable configurations. [This] work is the constant carnival; words, the rhythm and pace of two, who mine undeveloped seams of earth and share the treasure… 

…With me or away, in relationships or alone, the specific difficulties of each individual history are accentuated not arrested, relieved, developed, or baptised. They may have no more or less to learn, but I did, and still do. For, while those communions had their complexities, they did not display the intractability, the withdrawal of love, the refutation of shadowlands, which I now face. Matured by love, practices in the grief of its interminable exercise, I find myself back at the beginning [reflect here on the tagline for this blog – above.]… 

…Neither self-effacement nor self assertiveness, neither exhaustible patience nor reminders of his [the Lover’s] power, will bring me what I desire… L’amour se revele en se retirer. If the Lover retires too far, the light of love is extinguished and the Beloved dies; if the Lover approaches too near the Beloved, she is effaced by the love and ceases to have an independent existence. The Lovers must leave a distance, a boundary, for love: then they approach and retire so love may suspire. This may be heard as the economics of eros; but it may also be taken as the infinite passion of love: Dieu se revele en se retirer. Love and philosophy may seem to have had the most to day, but friendship and faith have been framing and encroaching by night and by day…” 

And her closing paragraph: 

“…I will stay in the fray, in the revel of ideas and risk; learning, failing, wooing, grieving, trusting, working, reposing – in this sin of language and lips.”  

It in-turn led me to reflect again on “love”; particularly in relation to it being such a misunderstood and mis-practiced word in contemporary Western culture and thus clearly, amongst individuals in that culture. Recollect how many times you hear, whether in media, or amongst friends: “I don’t love you anymore”, or “I just don’t feel in love any more”.  But, how often to we stop and reflect on what we’re actually saying and what that says about how we (mis)understand and thus enact “love” in relation to others. How often are these (mis)understandings of love and our lack of the ability to recognise genuine love when we see it related to alarming statistics around infidelity, divorce etc? We don’t understand love, and the heart-breaking and tragic consequences of that pile up around us.

Against Innocence: The Gift of Peacemaking and Reconciliation

On the enneagram “nines” are often named as “peacemakers”. I’m not a “9”, but over recent times have more and more found myself in the peacemaker / reconciler role. I want to hold difference together. To encourage people to remain in conversation, to finds ways forward together, and to harness and focus the gifts of difference. I had to do it last week at work. 

In his foreword to Against Innocence: Gillian Rose’s Reception and the Gift of Faith (authored by Andrew Shanks) Giles Fraser writes:

“…The mediator pursues a theology that refuses that a disagreement can ever reach a point where there is no benefit to be gained from further conversation. Put a different way, it is a refusal to accept that two seemingly irreconcilable positions are indeed irreconcilable…” 

Quoting Rowan Williams, “…Reflection requires that the plain opposition of positive and negative be left behind. Thinking is not content with the abstraction of mutual exclusivities, but struggles to conceive of a structured wholeness nuanced enough to contain what appeared to be contradictories.” 

“…The sort of peace negotiation suggested by [Gillian] Rose and [Andrew] Shanks has a definite strategy: It attempts to dismantle our desire for innocence. For what is recognized by the true mediator is that innocence - of the ‘longing to be utterly sure of our rightness’, as [Rowan] Williams puts it – is exactly the motivation that leads people to reject compromise and continue with [conflict]…” On the contrary, Shanks writes, the aim of the mediator is to resist “the stubborn desire for the sort of moral purity that refuses negotiation” and a willingness to finds ways of compromise, ways forward together. Peace and truth do not stand in opposition to one another (cf. South Africa’s profoundly courageous commitment to the outworking of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission)

But, as you will have noticed, the first step is to dismantle any sense that we are entirely innocent. None of us are! We’re all compromised. We all have egos. We all have a deeply entrenched commitment to living out of our false selves. We all only ever see in part, and often on see what we want or need to see. The work of mediation and reconciliation requires great courage. Firstly, the courage to face into ones own interior realities (motives, false desires, sin, woundedness and brokenness, our shadows etc). Secondly, to have the courage to remain open, open to deep listening, seeing from the perspective of the other, being fully present, vulnerable and humble, and feeling with the ‘other’ (i.e. being genuinely empathetic). And, finally, it is to have the courage to trust, to be willing to enter uncharted territory, and to see in the other the presence of gift and invitation, the invitation to me to become more than I am, i.e. the courage to accept the invitation to continuing change and growth. 

I am not a “9” but I am deeply committed to the work of mediation and reconciliation; to finding healthy and hopeful ways forward, even though those things mean I often have to place myself in very vulnerable places, aware that I am not ever wholly innocent, or without shared responsibility for what is broken, for particular outcomes etc. 

Work for peace and reconciliation requires ceaseless effort, a profound willingness to sit with ones own pain, great moral courage, humility, and a vision of what might be possible. In this sense it is deeply eschatological work. It is the work of the gospel. It is the Jesus-following way. 

Giles Fraser writes, “Rose’s work is an encouragement to pay attention to the philosophical condition of human fallenness. Human beings are haunted by complexity, compromised by mixed motives, and debased by threads of complicity and cruelty and untruthfulness. We continually seek to represent ourselves with various fictions of our own innocence… This isn’t so much a counsel of despair; rather, it’s a fearlessly honest description of what it takes to love our neighbor…”          

Simplicity

“…Simplicity ultimately consists in the perfect ordering of all the parts so that the whole acts with ease, enjoyment, and peace. Everything looks easy, natural, and harmonious and thus simple, while in fact the simplicity is the result of immense complexity, ordered into a unity of purpose and motivated by the discipline of letting go and limitless trust in God. 

The path to this simplicity begins with simplicity of life style and a life of prayer. it also liberates us from the attachments, both conscious and unconscious, that create division and lack of peace within. It moderates the tumultuous emotions that tear us apart and undermine all sense of being rooted in the state of life we have embraced with its relationships and group identifications. In any case, our attachments and excessive emotional reactions are bound to be activated by the ups and downs of daily life or by something that we look upon as a disaster. 

Simplicity is the union of contemplation and action in our daily lives. Contemplation is not the same as action, but they are not separate. They are distinct but God is as much in one as in the other. It is we who may not be present to one or the other. 

Simplicity is based on the truth about ourselves, God, and all reality. It is the acceptance of everything just as it is, which is true humility.” 

Fr. Thomas Keating, from here.

Transforming and integrating life’s polarities (Mk.9:2-9)

Marie Morgan offers a brief reflection on Mark 9: 2-9. I was particularly struck by, and in agreement with the following extract as I reflected on my own journey, personal change, and growth: 

“…How do we extract ourselves from these polarities that much of our daily reality consists of, to begin to grasp and integrate into the oneness?  How does the Christ get us from points A vs. B to all being one in the One?  

The polarities all around us are easy to spot …and too easy to speculate about.  But let’s talk about the polarities within each of us, in the realm where we might actually have some sway in the matter. 

The “vs.” often comes from fear, or lack of understanding of the other.  We must become one with ourselves before we can become one with anything outside ourselves, because if we skip this step, fear will always find a way to dictate the terms of our understanding.  We rarely can recognize the parts of ourselves that we like least…so we project those characteristics on other people, indeed onto “other” people.  What being in Christ offers us—through this one Jesus who practices unconditional love and acceptance– is the safe place to begin to befriend these less acknowledged parts of ourselves.  Even our worst fears have something to teach us; often they are voices from the past that really only want to protect us.  And just as Jesus (in last week’s reading / Mark 9:1-15) reaches out and touches the most rejected member of the community—in fact the one forced to live ‘outside the camp’—we can learn to reach out and touch our own inner characters most feared and avoided.  And as we heal these parts, we free ourselves to be more open to other people who once represented enemy…”

You can read the whole reflection here.

We all have to struggle to contend with and face into our interior realities. We all need grace, and from a Christian point of view, we need God, so the challenge, as David Benner, Thomas Keating and others rightly note, is to find ways of becoming increasingly open to God, allowing God to do the deep work of inner healing and transformation. So, for example, think of a person with strong narcissitic tendencies. For them, psychiatrist Alexander Lowen notes, "the denial of feelings characterstic of all narcissists [whereever they are on the scale] is most manifest in their behaviour toward others. They can be ruthless, exploitative, manipulative, controlling, sadistic, or destructive to another person because they are insensitive to the other's suffering, feelings, or experience. They are unable to engage and work with the other's perspective. The insensitivity derives from an insensitivity to their own feelings, an inability to face into and work with their own inner and behavioural realities..." And this is a huge challenge on so many levels, particularly as we change and grow only in relation to others, only as we see ourselves as other's see us, hence the critical importance of healthy relationships as the contexts within which and out of which we grow.

So, you get a sense of the challenge we all have to face into, whether narcisissim is our thing, or its something else. We all have to become increasingly open to ourselves, if we are going to be able to be genuinely open to others, and to God. The three, self, others, and God are profoundly interrelated. 

The Storms of Life: A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

Via Len. Timely! And appreciated. 

 

Consequences, Judgement, and Thinking About God & Self in Meaningful Ways

Barry Taylor offers a few thoughts on what he terms “magical thinking”. I always find it interesting reflecting on god in times of crisis; who is god? Where is god? Does god give a shit? And what kinds of people do we become in times of crisis? What drives us? What animates us? What feelings? And where are the invitations to transfiguration – too engaging with the deep places in our lives – where is the “more”? Why do some people find it so difficult to face self-critically into their own inner realities, preferring instead to blame God, to blame others? God’s invitations to become more than we currently are. Invitations to grow up. There are invitations too, to grow our conceptions and experiences of God. 

Anyway, Taylor’s reflection took me to some useful places, some places free from magical thinking (not one of my natural inclinations) including my reflecting again on Bruggemann’s conceiving of God’s judgment: “… God will not intervene to protect us from the inherent consequences of our pervasive sin…[from our choices]. When we so blatantly violate God's intention[s] … the expected consequences will follow.  

Here are some excerpts from Taylor: 

“…I know that life is understood by more than rational thinking but every once in a while I want to shake a few people and demand that for once they take off their religiosity-smeared glasses and look at life with a different lens--the devil is not out to get them, they are not in a spiritual warfare battle because the doctor looked pensive while he was doing the biopsy, they haven't upset god, and if by some mad chance they had pissed off god enough to bring them to this place in their life, surely their own belief in grace and Jesus would be enough to let them know that their sins are not accounted to them--Jesus!! I just want to scream right now. I completely get why all the detractors of religion are so militant--some of it is completely bloody nuts, and worse, it leads people into terrible places in their life… 

…Tomorrows lectionary gospel is Mark's account of the Transfiguration of Jesus--a strange tale for Mark to tell smack dab in the middle of his somewhat dark account of the life of Jesus-a resurrection story written back into the account to perhaps offer those early follower some comfort or guidance in the midst of the shitstorm of their existence. What struck me most about the story was the response of Peter, one of the disciples. It's his misplaced piety that sticks out--he is enthusiastic, ecstatic even, and wants to make shrines for Jesus and Moses and Elijah (if you don't know the story--it's in the Bible--Mark 9)--but he is completely off-base, that is the last thing that needs to happen. We are told by the writer that his response is simply fear-driven and that fear cuts him off from experiencing the very thing that might perhaps sustain in his moment of fear. We tend to locate our ideas of the sacred in a particular way, or in a specific location (my church/synagogue/mosque/temple etc) - but it is often fear that drives that choice and the transfiguration story is an invitation to experience something else, something more--in fact a 'sense of the more' is what permeates the story for me.

I realize that my views about sacredness, about religion, about god, are different than others, and I have no desire or need to convert anyone to my way of looking at it all, but I do strongly resist the way people speak and act for god when it is ultimately fear that is driving things. Perhaps we need to deal with ourselves, our desires, our drives and our fears before we can start to think about god in meaningful ways…”

Read the whole reflection here.  

Incarnation.

“…Most of us need a good infusion of understanding of the rich significance of Jesus’ humanness. He did not become flesh and blood simply so that he could die. He became a man so that he could show us what it means to be fully and truly human…” 

J. R. Daniel Kirk, from here. Referencing an article by Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen on Jesus in the Jan. 2012 issue of Christianity Today.