Nouns and Verbs

Of the Christian life, Brennan Manning once said that we are not travel agents handing out brochures to places we’ve never been. We should not be about pushing people toward a kind of life that we are not yet living.  We are living a life that should be — or at least should become — compelling in and of itself, enough that someone taking notice might ask what it is we are holding to (see 1 Peter 3:15).  Not that it should be in itself the reason we are living it, that others would take notice.  Nope, the Christian life is meant to become the most un-self-conscious kind of life available, natural, easy, organic and fluid.  Life as it was meant to be (as much as possible in the part of the story we are in, this side of the return of Christ) and our character being formed as it was meant to be.

Early on in my life with God I would become really distressed, even frantic, over the bits and pieces of myself I didn’t like and all that I wanted to become. I was intrigued and taken by the possibilities that lay before me, and was scared that I would be left behind.  I wanted to become passionate.  I wanted to become a healer and one who lived the truth out before others.  I wanted to be done with some stupid habits and immaturity.  I wanted to offer life.

Pretty soon, my wife started telling me, “Stop trying so hard to become, and just be.”  Somehow, that spoke pretty deeply to me, giving me permission to rest a bit and not try so hard.  To start enjoying living the kind of life I bumped into rather than trying so hard to offer it.  I could enjoy being enjoyed, right where I was, by a God so passionate for me.  I could enjoy having the resources of the Kingdom at hand — community and friendship, truth about life that finally made sense that brought fragmented pieces of my own story together, taking in sights that I never could see before but always felt like must be there somehow.  A heart that was beginning to beat again.

Over the years, I’ve come to understand life with God to be about both being and becoming. We really do get the best of both worlds: intimacy with a God who is fascinated and fascinating and the chance to grow into a kind of man or woman that we only dare imagine possible.  For me, that is a man of deep heart and faith, bold, full of a consistent joy toward life and love toward Jesus, competent and strong and life-giving.  The first counts us as worthy because of Jesus’ worth; the second grows us up into that worth, like a kid fitting into his daddy’s cowboy boots.  The first is the adventure of knowing and walking with God, of being His companion — a state, an identity, a noun; the second, the risky business of letting the Spirit temper and heal and develop us into the thing that is most alive, to form the image of God in us — an active, moving, following thing — a verb.  The first is the chance of an intimate adventure beyond our imaging and one we’ve been looking for all our days; the second is chance to grow into a character that can handle that kind of life and that depth of living.  The first is to experience the Kingdom; the second, to extend it through an allied partnership with the God we’ve come to befriend and trust intuitively.

It’s not always pretty, this kind of life.  Good grief, I think much of what I see in friends around me and in myself is a kind of cleaning out and exposing of the wounds and brokenness that prevent us from taking on that life.  But the result, and the journey along the way, is worthy it.  It’s worth it.  I am more today like the heart of God, with a greater capacity to both experience and express it.  My joy is in being that man, and my hope is in becoming even more so.

 

The Soul’s Worth

I’m reading through a book by Gerald May called The Dark Night of the Soul.  Gerald May was a psychiatrist who, in his own words, became weary of the medical profession’s way of handling the soul of patients.  He eventually became a spiritual director and author of several works related to spiritual development.

In Dark Night of the Soul, May, exploring St. John of the Cross’s work by the same title, discusses the work of the Lord God deep within a person’s being as a mysterious and beautiful thing, an intimate work that is initiated in love and is designed to free us for love.  St. Teresa of Avila was a contemporary of John, and in fact, he counted her as one of his spiritual mentors and teachers.  Being contemplatives, both Teresa and John recognize the utter worth of the human soul, its beauty and goodness.  May quotes Teresa as saying, “I can find nothing with which to compare the great beauty of a soul… we can hardly form any conception of the soul’s great dignity and beauty.”

Those words certainly sound mystical to our ears.  We rarely speak of the soul today, although it is gaining more attention in some circles, like  Christian psychotherapy.  John and Teresa recognized it as, next to God Himself, the most beautiful and worthy thing.  They loved it, adored it, respected it, because they began to see that God treated it with such dignity and love, that Jesus came for ransom of it and freedom for it.

There is a recent movement in Christendom to recognize what’s been called the “good heart.”  This “New Covenant” movement (as one author puts it), which I believe God is very much behind, seeks to bring to light the inherent goodness and strength of a heart given over to Christ, that it is no longer “deceitfully wicked” as the Scriptures say of a heart detached from Him (Jeremiah 17:9), but rather “good” and even “noble,” to quote Jesus (Luke 8:15).  This runs counter to much contemporary theology, which seems to see the heart as perpetually wicked, and which tries to operate a kind of “sin management,” in Dallas Willard’s words, to keep the believer from running amok doing all kinds of bad things.

The implication of the “good heart” theology is pretty radical.  It means that we can begin valuing the deep heart within once more, and recognize the awesome thing that it is.  It means we can work with one another to help set each other free, and that once we are disentangled from all the briars (what John of the Cross calls “attachments”), we can “run in the paths of [God's] commands” (Psalm 119:32) and walk in the “path of life” (Psalm 16:11) that God shows us.  We can drop the sin management stuff and bring dignity back into our ministry with folks.

What stands out to me in what Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross say is that recognizing that the heart is “good” isn’t enough.  They push the envelope even further.  They suggest that the heart (or “soul” in their vernacular) has “great beauty.”  John writes that once we enter fully enough into union with God, we will see ourselves aright.  ”The soul,” he says, will “see herself as a queen.”  This is far beyond merely being “good.”  This is a kind of glorious honor, an extravagant dignity.  The soul is ravishing.  Glorious.  Beautiful beyond compare, especially to the One who made her.

Could this be a part of the “secret wisdom” that has been “hidden” and that “God destined for our glory from before time began”? (1 Corinthians 2:7).

In our Christmas hymn, we sing of how “the soul felt its worth.”  But how often has that happened?  How many people do you know who can say, truly, “I have felt the weight of my soul’s worth, and it is beyond telling.”  Can you say that?  Can i?  What is that, the soul’s worth?  What could that be?

Sitting in my office meeting with people day after day struggling with life, what would it mean for me to recognize that, no matter how scarred and damaged and suffocated their souls may be, they are still beautiful and the reason for the Great Invasion brought by Christ?  I wonder, what would this mean to our ministries and our churches if we were to really believe it.  What would it do to our personal lives, our interactions with God and with one another.

 

An Enemy Among Us

I realize lately that when I write, I am consistently harping on the reality of busyness and its role in our lives.  This blog is as much journal as anything, a locale I come to occasionally to offer what’s on my heart and mind, and this topic is apparently a consistently weighty one for me.

In a sociology class I teach, I asked the students to comment on a portion of Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy I had given them.  It was an intro, a prologue, to the book, and there was very little in this portion that was what I would call particularly spiritual or religious, except that Willard was addressing our contemporary confusion over morality and meaning.  He termed it flying upside down, that in our present age we cannot tell what is up and what is down, and we are headed in a dangerous direction and don’t even know it.  Among several realities he referenced was the plague of busyness, the way we dash back and forth and in and out like rats in a cage, trying to find — or else thinking we have found — some sense of trascendent meaning and existential purpose.

In reading the responses of the students, I realized that I am not alone in seeing the problem with our living “in the matrix,” to borrow from the movie’s idea of a small, cramped, and unreal arena in which we act out our lives.  The comments from the students’ papers were consistent in labeling this as a problem they have come to recognize as well.  I was blown away at their perception.  The understanding of this thought of “flying upside down” is well-known, I suspect, something that we each recognize on some level.

I think it was Richard Foster that said busyness wasn’t a device of the Enemy; it is the Enemy.  Maybe so.  Maybe the Evil One masquerading as an angel of light.

Think about our culture for a second.  What is the typical response of someone you meet up with when you ask them how they are?  There are those few exceptions, but generally the reply goes along the lines of, “Oh, so busy” or, “Lots of things going on” or, “You wouldn’t believe what I’ve got on my plate” or something of the like.  Even in church circles — or, in my experience, especially in church circles.

Why is that?  What’s the story there?

Sometimes it may be a sincere gesture to try to catch you up on good things happening in life, especially for someone you haven’t seen in awhile.  Sometimes.  But not typically.  More often, it is a substitution for meaning, something nearly lost to us in our society.  But we desperately need meaning. This is not an option for us.  So we create it ourselves, replace it from something else we are familiar with.

And we are certainly familiar with busyness.

The other night I was listening to a Podcast of some theological discussion (honestly, I can’t remember what the discussion was really about), and was struck by some off-handed comment that the Bible is primarily about God, not about man, and that, in fact, man was only a minor blip on the screen of God’s live and story.  That is certainly not a common view of reality by Christians I know and read about.  We have become the center of everything going on.

I’m not good with that description either, by the way, the thought that we are minor players on the stage.  I happen to believe that God has given us a very prominent role in His cosmic script, but I do agree that we are not the central object around which the universe revolves.  I think most of us would agree that the Lord God is, of course, our gravitational center and around whom all things move.  Picture the planets encircling the sun.  ”In Him we live,” I think is how Paul put it, “and move.”  Even here, the sense is not so much that we live around Him, but within Him somehow, as if we are not so much planets around a sun, but rather the corona itself, prominences, solar flares.

But somehow we end up zipping off from our Center and shooting out into an endless and cold void, trying our hardest to find something larger than ourselves to clutch to so as to give us at least a small taste of our rightful place with God, so that we can feel even a subtle feeling of being held in place.  And these objects and events and ideologies we busily define ourselves by, they are so tempting exactly because they can make us feel connected and purposeful.  They do draw upon our need for transcendence.  Otherwise, they would not be so alluring.

Have you noticed how it can be anything?  We’ll take our hearts to the smallest and most insignificant moment or memory or habit or object or idea and begin building our lives around it.  A fragment or debris from some far-roaming object.  And before long, that’s all we can cling to.  How could we ever find our way back again, and so we cling desperately and tenaciously to what we must know is not great enough for us, not worthy of our devotion and worship.

School.  A person, even a romatic relationship.  A band.  Going to concerts or shows.  Sophistication.  Money.  A social cause.  An identity as a “good person.”  Reading.  Video games.  TV shows or movies.  Church attendance.  That new car we’ve got our eyes on.  The economic “crisis.”  Reputation.  

The list is literally endless.  I’ll give us this — we are pretty creative when it comes to our busyness.  Our godless worship.  Our idolatry. 

And let’s face it.  We are, all of us, guilty of this.  We’ve got to come there first if we are ever to break free from them and find our way back home again.  Step one is to recognize we are far away.  

Step two?  Own the fact that we are made for more, that we are made to encircle and have our being in God, and that only that will satisfy our longings that threaten to destroy us.

And the third step?  Only this: crying out to the only One who can save us from these things we cling to and that cling to us.  

I know this because I am here.  It seems sometimes like a daily experience for me to wake up, recognize that even through the night I have wondered from my place in Him, embrace my desire and longing for Life – which is to say, check my compass and recall that I am headed somewhere, and that this isn’t it.  And then cry out for God to rescue me.  This is why the Psalms are full of that very thing — cries for rescue and deliverance from their enemies.  To be restored and refreshed in this Life that is Him, to be reconnected to the true Vine of that Life.

My friends, the enemy of our day — not the only one, perhaps, but certainly one of the greatest and most effective tactics the Evil One uses — is “busyness” as a replacement for true meaning.  It’s a stow-away, a double-agent, an angel of darkness masquerading as one of us.  We’re made for more.  So much more.  Let’s find what that is.  Let’s remember what that is.  Let’s  be done with things that we know in our hearts will never be good enough.  And let’s ask our Creator and Lover to bring us back into the source of that Life.

 

Something Bigger

Your life is now hidden with Christ in God.
-Colossians 3:3 

I have a friend who is a major St. Louis Cardinals fan.  When I say “fan,” keep in mind that it is shortened for “fanatic,” as in whoa, that dude is a fanatic or have you ever met someone as fanatical as he?  That’s the level of “fan” I’m talking about here.  He’s a devotee, a follower, an admirer of the Cardinals.

Apparently, he has difficulty functioning when baseball season comes around.  He goes to work and all that, but is constantly obsessed with the games and scores and players.  He’s told me about times when he couldn’t listen to the radio in the car because the day before the Cardinals lost and he couldn’t bear to hear the repeat of their failure over the airwaves.  Or how he meant to study for one of his classes but couldn’t because a game was on.  The other night I road with him for an hour in the car and counted 8 times that he checked the current game’s score on his phone.

One of the things about his fanaticism that I love is the way he identifies himself with the team.  He uses words like “we” and “our” and “us” when talking about them, like we played a good ball game last night or our manager in an interview said…   He connects with them so much that he talks as if he is a part of their team. 

I thought this was the strangest thing in the world, so I asked him about this once.  His reply was something along the lines of, Yeah, it’s my team.  We’re in it together.  He spoke of how at games, the entire stadium would stand as one when a good play was made, and he would be giving high-five’s to complete strangers sitting around him.  Everyone joined as one for this, their team, either celebrating or grieving depending upon their performance, rising and falling with the ins and the outs of the games and the lives of their players.  

So, in a sense, this friend “owns” the team and everything about it — not as a possession, but as a way of identifying himself with them.  Whatever they do, they do together, even with their greatest fanat –er, fans. He marks himself with the Cardinals team, connects himself with them, tags himself as a fan, labels himself, names himself, recognizes himself as the team does.  They win, he wins.  They lose, he loses.  They get injured, he feels the pain.  

We could talk about existential things like transcendence and how my friend is attaching himself to something bigger than him and about perhaps the society in which we live that has lost so much of the sacred that we used to be able to associate ourselves with.  But I think the most instructive thing in all of it is the nature of identifying with something.  There’s something sacred in it still.

It may be a sports team, a band, a business or professional organization, a school, a church, a religion, a whiskey bottle, a brand name, a family, a group of friends — all kinds of things.  The point in it is that we are made to live a life bigger than just us.

Maybe that’s what Rich Mullins meant when he said, “If I want to identify fully with Jesus Christ, whom I claim to be my Savior and Lord…”  (This Jesus who is the greatest and most transcendent thing we can attach ourselves to.)  Then the best way to do that is to throw yourself into His life the way this man does the Cardinals’ life.  Fully.  Completely.  Immersed.  Associated with, labeled, named, tagged, linked, connected.  Adoring with the whole self, “in secret, between the shadow and the soul,” as Pablo Neruda had it:

“So close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.”

 

Moses’ Training

The following article comes from a recent report from Training Ground.  It is so good, it needs no introduction.  I wanted to post it in its entirety…,

Leadership Through the Story of Moses

For Moses, 1/3 of his life is a great picture of where young men find themselves today. Till 40, Moses was “educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and was powerful in speech and action.” (Acts 7:22) He emerges already as a leader. Strong. Persuasive. Wise. (Many of the young men coming through Training Ground) But, he had been given everything. The golden boy. A life of wealth, privilege, and entitlement in the Egyptian courts. He was far from his people (the Israelites) life of slavery and hard labor. It says in Acts, “when Moses was forty years old, he decided to visit his fellow Israelites.”

Can you imagine the disconnect? The two different worlds colliding. This “prince” in beautiful Egyptian covered clothes, shiny clean, and trim, walking around, visiting “his people” covered in dirt and sweat. I can’t imagine what the Israelite men thought of this guy strolling around.

Moses wants to be the hero for the Israelites. He is beginning to feel the injustice of his people and even experiences his call to lead them. He is in a position of power and influence. But even his actions show how self-righteous he was. Right before he murders the Egyptian (his way of vengeance) it says, “Moses thought that his own people would realize that God was using him to rescue them.” (Acts 7:25)

Gosh, how I can relate. The narcissism. Believing that in me is that power to change the world. All those graduation speeches telling us to seize the day. All those promises of what our life could be about.

And like so many guys, Moses is relying on his own life and the power of what is around him. But, he is really untested. There is not a deep settled confidence. He has been given a life void of real experiences of pain, suffering, and hardship to know God, and how Gods works through them. The real roots of faith. He has only come into these through a fate outside his own control (leaving him ungrateful). He has little to no understanding of the people he wants to lead, and their own struggles.

We see this happening all the time, today. Isn’t that how presidential candidates are spun as being unrelatable and disconnected to the people? “They can’t relate to the working class. They are out of touch. Have never been through financial hardship. Never suffered through real life.”

But God, using Moses choice of violence and flight, leads him into the place he needs to experience. Loneliness. Blue collar work. Desert. Wilderness. Pain. Abandonment. Frustration. Loss. Even confusion. We know this as the scriptures say that Moses named his son, Gershom, “I have become an alien in a foreign land.” (Exodus 2:22) This wasn’t a process welcomed or even understood by Moses. Proving, even at the time, Moses didn’t appreciate or understand what he was needing to go through. He had given up. Believing he was removed, and far from God’s place to lead the Israelite people.

It’s the irony of God’s training for leadership. By the time God taps him as the leader of the people, he doesn’t believe God. Instead of seeing himself as ready and prepared, he sights every reason why he would be horrible at it. Oh, the irony! It’s the perfect place for God to restore Moses, and finally be his God, and his Father.

He spent 40 years being educated, and entitled. 40 years in the wilderness and in hardship, and then 40 years being God’s voice, and leader of the Israelites who are taken into desert and wilderness.

It is a beautiful picture of how education is important, suffering and testing is essential, and restoration and leadership is birthed somewhere between the two.

 

The Authority of a Child

I was driving on a windy road in a small residential area yesterday evening. Glancing in my rear view mirror, I noticed a line of cars. When the road straightened enough to get a god look, I counted maybe 10 or 12 trailing behind me. It’s a pretty road, with lots of old oaks and foliage overhanging the street and generous yards serving as buffers between the slow but constant traffic and the homes. The houses are a bit older, constructed I would guess back in the 40′s and 50′s.

Just a few blocks from my turn, two kids caught my eye. I could see them a block away. They came running from a house directly toward the road. They couldn’t have been older than 6 or 7. As I came near, I slowed to a near stop, not sure what they were going to do. The girl and boy came to the edge of the road, and the boy looked both ways with a kind of fearful panic on his face, as if all the warnings of his parents about the dangers of crossing the street came back to him. Not the girl. She stepped on the edge of the road, facing directly ahead — which was perpendicular to the flow of traffic — stood tall, held her chin high, and stretched both of her arms out straight and aimed her palms toward the line of cars. One hand faced me, the other the car coming the opposite direction. She could have been a traffic cop. She stood still for several seconds. She then looked at both lines of cars, first to her left, then to her right, then to her left, and back again. She stood perfectly still, with an air of dignified authority, until she was sure all the cars had stopped and it was safe to cross. Then, with just as much gusto as she had when she stepped up to the street, she and the boy took off running across and made it safely to the other side.

My general reaction to seeing young kids playing near the road like that without an adult in sight would have been one of disgust. “Where are the parents?” I would have scorned. Not this time. I was struck by the commanding presence of the little girl, the surety of her actions, the certitude and confidence in her demeanor. Her authority.

Here we are, 10 or 12 cars strong, moving at 25 or 30 miles an hour, in both directions on the street. That’s 20 tons or so, times two. And here is this little girl, all of 70 pounds, who stands at the edge of the street with her hands up and knows that she will stop the traffic. It is apparent that she has done this before, and it has worked. She has not the power or the will to stop these vehicles on her own, of course. Not at all. Yet she does it. How? In other words, from where is her authority?

You could say that it is in the kindness of the drivers. After all, no one would have had to have stopped. She wouldn’t have been hit from where she was standing, though it would have been too close for comfort. Maybe the young girl appealed to the drivers’ protective instincts. I wondered later if the traffic would have stopped if that had been a teenager or even a grown man or woman. Certainly it would have had it been a uniformed officer. But this is a little girl!

But ultimately, the authority the girl invoked was that of the law. At bottom, I knew I had to stop for the fearless child because I did not want to run the risk of hitting her or the boy with her. But it was not only because of the law. It was also because of her command of it. Though I doubt she understood traffic laws, the girl knew that if she approached the busy street close enough and put her palms up toward the cars, they would stop.

I tell that story because it is so instructive for our place of authority in the Kingdom. When we ask “in the name of Jesus” (John 16:23), we receive not because God is obligated or because we in ourselves have the power to get things done, but because we operate under the covering and in the authority of the Lord of lords. When we rebuke demons “in His name” (Luke 10:17), they submit not because they fear us, but because they are defeated by the work of the Cross on our behalf. We invoke an authority that we may not fully understand — we are, after all, children in our Father’s house — but it is an authority just the same, not too much different from the little girl stopping 40 tons of steel and rubber and glass by the gesture of her hands. We do not have to understand it all; we simply trust the One in whose name we operate.

Driving by once the kids had crossed the street, I glanced over to see what they were after on the other side. Why did they cross the road? A playground. Seriously. That was what it was all about for them. They had their eye on the prize. We are not to rejoice in the authority we have in Christ, but rather that, like the children, we are on a journey, headed somewhere, and walk in the spirit of “power, love, and sound mind” (2 Timothy 1:7) that God has given us so that we can get there.

Would that we would become like these little children!

Just because we may not fully understand our role in the Kingdom does not give us an excuse to not seek understanding or to disbelieve. Walking in Christ’s authority is crucial, but so is a sincere belief and mindful approach to our walk with God. I love Annie Dillard’s take on this. In Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters, she writes,

Why do people in church seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? … Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us to where we can never return.

We in Christ live in a very real and very present Kingdom that requires at the same time a childlike trust in our Father’s goodness toward us and the way He said things work as well as a full-grown (or growing), mature (or maturing), wisdom-seeking devotion to God.

 

Will the Real Men Please Stand Up

A free verse reflection on Christian manhood by Keith Drury

I am a man.
At least I want to be.
I am male,
for sure.
But am I a man?
What makes a male a man?
What turns a boy into a man?
I need models.
Please show yourself, men.
So I can see you.
Study your ways.
Admire you.
Imitate you.
Will the Real Men
Please Stand Up.
Silence.
Fidgeting
Chuckling.
Uncertainty.

(View the full verse here.)