Listlessness and the Consuming Fire

Lately I have felt listless and depressed. Without the challenge of my Masters program to occupy my time, I have become acutely aware of the tedium and slow death inherent with just hanging on. My feelings over the last couple months are spoken eloquently by this quote via Jamie:

"...it is always easier to busy ourselves than to merely exist. Even important and useful work can distract us from remembering who we are, and what our deeper purpose might be. Monastic wisdom insists that when we are most tempted to feel bored, apathetic, and despondent over the meaninglessness of life we are on the verge of discovering our true self in relation to God. It is worth not giving up, because when we are willing to do nothing but 'be,' we meet the God who is the very ground of being, the great I AM whom Moses encountered at the burning bush." [Acedia and Me - Kathleen Norris].

I want to hide from these words.  I have cherished my darkness, grieving the loss of a stage of life. I have felt unprepared to stare into the burning bush. Yet even in the midst of the paschal mystery, Christ is there.  These last couple weeks leading up to vacation have been an easing of the darkness for me.

Today I retreated into the consuming fire.  I made my way to Northfield and enjoyed an americano in reverie.  I really love Northfield or the romantic dream that is Northfield in my mind. Mom told me this morning that my cousin Jon is talking about planting a church in Northfield with a friend.  Here again I enter the paschal place.  I have long harbored a dream of doing just that.  It doesn't seem likely that we will leave the Michigan District to come back to Minnesota, still it is hard to give up a dream.

I went over to Carleton College and walked the Stewsie Island Labyrinth.  In the center I sat with God and gave up my dreams. As I walked the path out - the path of ministry to the world, I felt God offering me encouragement for ministry in Sebewaing.  I could use my newfound love of spiritual direction when visiting with people, but I have resisted doing it.  God challenged me again to obedience.  This challenge would have seemed convicting, even condemning since fear has made me disobedient for so long, had it not been for God's laughable word a few weeks ago "I trust you."  God trusts me?!  Back in the car, the words of Switchfoot go straight to my heart:

Free,
Come set me free
Down on my knees
I still believe you can
Save me from me
Come set me free
Come set me free
Inside this shell
There’s a prison cell

And today I do believe God can save me from me.

A Monstrance

From the consuming fire of the sun beating on the labyrinth, I went into the consuming fire of Divine Mercy Adoration Chapel.  The Catholic church in Faribault set this chapel up ten years ago for perpetual adoration. It's like the 24 hour prayer movement contemplative style. There I sensed the presence of God  with power.  It made me tremble.  One neat practical application of Catholic Eucharistic Theology is the monstrance.   The believe in the actual presence of Christ in the bread and wine.  The monstrance is a display in which they can place the consecrated host so they can stand in the real presence of Christ.

I am not a practiced catholic, (not really a catholic at all, shh!) I haven't quite figured out how to genuflect.  In the presnence of the monstrance I prayed these words:

You are my King

and I don't know how to honor You

You are my Lover

and I don't know how to love You

You are my Soul

and I don't know how to trust You

I imagined the presence of Christ being concentrated in that peace of bread in the center of the monstrance. (Why not?) If we can see the presence of Christ concentrated in a wafer, how much more in the real and visible body of Christ  - each other.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu said,

"If you and I took our theology seriously, this is the point -- we bear God in us; we are sanctuaries; we are temples of the Holy Spirit. We shouldn't just shake hands and greet each other in the normal kind of way. We ought, each one of us, to genuflect before one another." 

Somehow that thought brought me to tears. Perhaps it was a powerful realization that I am not alone, grieving my losses in some corner, but I am part of a living and active body. I have a place and so do those around me that my eyes see with distrust.

Sky-Rocket

Mental prayer is therefore something like a sky-rocket. Kindled by a spark of divine love, the soul streaks heavenward in an act of intelligence as clear and direct as the rocket's trail of fire. Grace has released all the deepest energies of our spirit and assists us to climb to new and unsuspected heights. Nevertheless, our own faculties soon reach their limit. The intelligence can climb no higher into the sky. There is a point where the mind bows its fiery trajectory as if to acknowledge its limitations and proclaim the infinite supremacy of the unattainable God.

But it is here that our 'meditation' reaches its climax. Love again takes the initiative and the rocket 'explodes' in a burst of sacrificial praise. Thus love flings out a hundred burning stars, acts of all kinds, expressing everything that is best in man's spirit, and the soul spends itself in drifting fires that glorify the Name of God while they fall earthward and die away in the night wind!

...The contemplation of 'philosophers,' which is merely intellectual speculation on the divine nature as it is reflected in creatures, would be therefore like a sky-rocket that soared into the sky but never went off. The beauty of the rocket is in its 'death,' and the beauty of mental prayer and of mystical contemplation is in the soul's abandonment and total surrender of itself in an outburst of praise in which it spends itself entirely to bear witness to the transcendent goodness of the infinite God. The rest is silence.

- Thomas Merton

Saints of service

At first thought one might place Mother Teresa in the Social Justice stream of Christianity. As I think on her life though, I see a mix of influences, Holiness and Contemplative, but the most predominate being the Incarnational life.

“The Incarnational Stream of Christian life and faith,” says Foster, “focuses upon making present and visible the realm of the invisible spirit. This sacramental way of living addresses the crying need to experience God as truly manifest and notoriously active in daily life” (237).

In his appendix, Foster lists Mother Teresa as an example of Social Justice, but I find her actions more directed toward making the love of God manifest to the poor, making His Kingdom felt, than addressing the underlying causes of injustice. She made this sacramental way of life an entry point to the life of the Spirit and experienced it hand in hand with the contemplative life, calling her sisters “Contemplatives in the wold,” all the while demanding a high standard of holiness, determined to offer saints to Jesus.

Mother Teresa seemed always to hear Jesus calling her beyond herself. From her “second vocation to the poor,” to her abandoning her preferences and comforts to become a world media figure she was growing and stretching always. In her later years she perhaps took so hard a line on holiness she may have bordered on legalism were in not for her persistent love.

Mother Teresa would readily recognize the grace of God in her life from an early age. As young Agnes Bojaxhiu, daughter of Drana, grew up, her mother was a constant source of Formation for her. “At least once a week Drana would visit an old woman who had been abandoned by her family, to take her food an clean her house. She washed and fed and cared for File, an alcoholic woman covered with sores as if she was a small child” (Spink 7). Agnes accompanying her mother to visit File would create a powerful model for her as she later ministered to the poorest of the poor, lonely and forgotten. Her visits to the shrine of the Madonna of Letnice as a child would provide a conteplative basis for her life. She would identify herself always with the contemplative Thérèsa of Lisieux.

She was completely grounded in the institutional Catholic Church, first receiving formation in the Loreto order then creating the Missionaries of Charity as a Catholic Order. She was completely devoted to Catholic orthodoxy and the Pope, yet she ministered to, and cooperated with people from every creed.

Teresa always saw the political workings as the hand of God. She did not get involved in politics except to call for peace and love, trusting the leaders to do their duty in the end. She saw the crumbling of Communism as an opening door to spread tender love to the poor in those lands. Her ministry was not restricted to those who agreed with her, even staunch atheists would cooperate with her in Cuba, the Soviet, and other places.

In a wold of growing affluence and separation from the poor, her ministry to the poorest of the poor as though each one was Jesus in “distressing disguise” was and remains a prophetic word. She did much to proclaim the kingdom of God without preaching or giving an “altar call.”

Is there a difference between a saint and an ordinary person with an extraordinary desire and willingness to serve God? Mother Teresa was in her energy and determination a human dynamo, perhaps an extraordinary human power, but her formation in the selfless way of Christ, her consistent treatment of each individual as Christ in disguise shows her to be a saint. We are all called to such saintliness.

Elaine Martin is another such saint. Her faithfulness and fruit show her devotion to God. Her life of service to people shines as an example of the compassionate life. She grew up in a Lutheran home and appreciated her mother’s efforts to instill in her a spirituality.

It wasn’t until she went through a divorce that she began seeking a deeper relationship with God. Through a divorce support group at a church she found the depths she sought, along with the in-filling of the Spirit. The loneliness of the single life, the pain of divorce and concern for her family has been a challenge for her. She moved back to the Sebewaing area to be with her father before he died, caring for him, and praying him to Christ.

Over the years she has felt God call her to “come along side” individuals needing care and support. She has been a live in aide for many people. As a single woman she is surprised by the way God works, over recent years the people she has been directed to have been men. Sometimes her supportive relationships have raised eyebrows but she has remained faithful to do what God has called her to do.

She is a free spirit, at home anywhere with God. She goes where ever the Spirit directs her, so no one church has had a claim on her, though she lists many that have had a strong impact on her spiritually.

She is a prayer warrior and offers her devotion to God along with the person she is serving. She often makes use of the daily scriptures from the Book of Common Prayer we print in our bulletin, reading and praying with her neighbor each day. She is in her seventies and her neighbor, who she is serving is in his eighties. She remains vigorous and her service and support have been meaningful to me as her pastor.

Mother Teresa also challenges me. The service of the poorest of the poor, not just as though they were Christ, but actually seeing the suffering Christ in them, is a thought is forming and shaping me. I am wrestling lately with how meet the needs of the blue collar culture I am in. Mother Teresa challenges me to love them, though I gravitate to the intellectual and liberal postmodern crowd, she challenges me to see Christ wearing the blue collar garb of the workers in Sebewaing. Lord help me find ways to serve like Elaine and make of me a saint in the mold of Mother, with eyes only for you.

“Pray without ceasing…”

Increasingly on my spiritual journey I have met Jesus as divine lover. Strangely I enjoy imagining his masculinity. It has never struck me as strange, but Sarah refered to God with a feminine pronoun in a post, which got me thinking. With all the romance my relationship with God enjoys, why I don’t also see God as feminine. Dare I say I feel feminine around him. During my times of prayer I sense his presence mastering me, ravishing me. He makes me feel pretty and vulnerable too.

My heart has led me back to my lover through out the day more often as I have grown close to him, but there are times a plenty when the business of my day has crowded out thoughts of love and left me with empty loneliness. I am beginning to resonate with Martin Luther when he said, “I have so much business I cannot get on without spending three hours daily in prayer” (Foster 34). I have returned this week to the joy of praying the hours. I have found times of meditation stretching and coming back to me. I spontaneously start a breath prayer, “Jesus!”

The repetition of the Liturgy of the Hours, the rosary and breath prayers have brought a rhythm to life and spirit. The disadvantage is the repetition can become rote and I can disengage my attention. I also have to deal with the funk when the rhythm breaks down.

Since experiencing the spontaneity of breath prayer erupting in me, I have tried to make it a discipline. It is overwhelming. I breath in the breath of God. I imagine him filling my inner being, as the breath escapes I whisper breath on me. The power of his spirit filling me is too much for me to handle. This kind of prayer will take much practice to be able to withstand its power for longer times. With greater endurance a breath prayer could powerfully bring me back to attention on God throughout the day.

I was surprised when I learned that most Catholics who pray the rosary do it with a particular intention. I guess my intention is to know God. The intention is what you want God to do, your greatest desire. Praying the rosary like centering prayer is how I express my desire for God.

Delight

Delight is a word that feels good in my mouth. I wrap my tongue around it with joy. It's like ice cream. My kids especially delight in ice cream, their excitement is palpable.

What do I delight in? A good shot of espresso for one. The day I replaced the pump in our coffeehouse espresso machine and pulled our first really good shot was a day of delight. I was hopping around the room hooting and shouting. I was so gleeful that tears came to my eyes as I giggled like a little girl. I'm a geek. I know.

So many things in my life have been delightful: realizing again how much I love my wife, getting a computer to work, really good Greek food or my kids quoting rhymes from The Princess Bride (Does anybody want a peanut?).

I was floored today with a verse from Psalm 149.

For the LORD takes delight in his people;
he crowns the humble with salvation.

Let the saints rejoice in this honor
and sing for joy on their beds.

That God would delight in me somehow hit me hard. It was somehow to tangible and rich. Sobs were stuck in me. It was too much, like when our kids are so upset they can't even cry, they just stand mouth agape, confusion in their eyes wondering why nothing is coming out. It is indeed humbling - his delight.

Contemplative prayer is like a shot of espresso

"Am I really willing to drink this cup?" A question I love to ask my self pushed back from a table at a coffeehouse. Especially if it is a bold, Marrakesh Espresso that rumbles like thunder, grabs your tongue and wrestles you to the floor and finishes with a kiss and a playful bite. Ah the contemplative life!

....Oo! I think I just found another analogy!

Contemplative analogy revisited

The first thing I do when I go into the coffeehouse is pull a test shot. This is both yummy and a chance to quality control. It is a little known fact that the grind must be adjusted several times throughout the day. Humidity and temperature changes affect the way the grounds come out and how much crema the extraction produces. After pulling a test shot, I can fine tune the grind. Fred mentioned today that he did the same thing as a quality control chemist, he first had to calibrate and recalibrate all his instruments. He likened that to his devotional times. The contemplative life recalibrates us to live incarnationally. God definitely likes his coffee with holy high crema!

Spritual Formation and Spiritual Frustration

I have been hearing some frustration in the posts by my classmates lately (mine included). I think by and large that goes along with Spiritual formation. Like my friend Pam says the contemplative life is like a path tangled with roots. It is a difficult way. How do we get others to come along with us? How do we really do social justice? How do we really allow God’s power to work through us in supernatural charisms? How do we start? Who do we blame when the Body isn’t as beautiful, sweet smelling, as the incarnate Christ should?

In War and Peace, Tolstoy makes a case that it wasn’t Napoleon or Alexander who determined the course of history, it wasn’t their genius or that of their generals that determined their battles success. It was the hearts of the men, each fueled by the flow of history that determined the war.

As a staff pastor I thought, “if only the the pastor got behind my vision, if only he announced the intergenerational sunday school class from the pulpit, I could succeed.” As I a senior pastor I am learning how little structures and programs affect the hearts of the masses. I can hold out church planting as a last hope... “if only the church’s DNA was different, if only it was hard wired to love the way of discipleship...” If only.... some how I think these hopes are just as hollow unless I can find the place to start. “Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand and I can move the world.”

Skimming through The Great Omission by Dallas Willard, I ran across this quote.

What to do now!
Convert the world? No.
Convert the church? “Judgement,” it is famously said, “begins at the house of God.” It has the divine light and divine provisions, and because of that is most responsible to guide humankind.
But “no” again. Do not “convert the church.”
Your first move “as you go” is. in a manner of speaking: Convert me.

The place to start is in me. The great hope is in me! (and greater is he who is in me than he who is in the world.)

The silent power of God

What is the purpose of pentecostal power? If it is mystical, then what is the purpose of contemplation? It desires to do. Foster calls the charismatic stream the power to do while the holiness tradition is the power to be. Being strongly rooted in the Pentecostal tradition, I can wonder if we’ve even begun to tap into a power to do. Looking at the bigger picture we can see we’re doing, the Assembly of God is growing by leaps and bounds especially world wide; at home much slower, but we are still the fastest growing denomination. Still when we look at local narratives we don’t always see it fleshed out. Am I any more empowered to do than my brothers who pastor other churches and do not claim the pentecostal experience?

Rolhieser tells of Daniel Berrigan’s response to the question of God’s presence in today’s world.

He simply told the audience how he, working in a hospice for the terminally ill, goes each week to spend some time sitting by the bed of a young boy who is totally incapacitated, physically and mentally. The young boy can only lie there. He cannot speak or communicate with his body nor in any other way express himself to those who come into his room. He lies mute, helpless, by all outward appearance cut off from any possible communication. Berrigan then described how he goes regularly to sit by this young boy’s bed to try to hear what he is saying in his silence and helplessness.

After sharing this, Berrigan added a further point: The way this young man lies in our world, silent and helpless, is the way God lies in our world. To hear what God is saying we must learn to hear what this young boy is saying.

This is a powerful image of finding God in the silence, of finding the power that “lies muted, at the deep moral and spiritual base of things.”

Foster reminds me that for William J. Seymour, the renewal of the sign of Pentecost signaled divinely initiated racial reconciliation. Just as the original day of Pentecost had people from all regions of the Roman world hearing their own language, and has been seen as reversing the disintegration of Babel, this new Pentecost could bring integration reversing the babble of segregation. If this was God’s intent, and I believe it likely was, we quickly throw our monkey wrenches into it. Charles Parham quickly dismissed as sinful the worshiping together of black and white brothers. And the Assemblies of God became the white Pentecostals as the Church of God in Christ became the black. Some of this may have had to do with the strength of Wesleyan holiness with its view of sanctification as a second work of grace in black spirituality, but I’m sure the majority of the issue wasn’t theological but racial.

So if Azusa street was to usher in a power to do reconciliation, have we failed? I asked myself this yesterday as I pondered. If the power of my pentecostal experience is supposed to be a conduit to flow to those around me has it failed? As a fellowship have we embraced the Pentecostal power to change?

“Ask Zollie Smith if we failed.” The still voice came to my mind. Zollie Smith is the first black man to be on our national executive leadership team, moving from Executive Presbytery to be Director of Home Missions this year. It took a hundred years but God isn’t through yet! It is interesting how God chose the Charismatic Stream to effect Social Justice in his church. Zollie inspires me, not because of who he is, but because he shows who we are becoming as a church. Like Barack Obama challenging our concepts of race in presidential politics simply because he’s there, God is challenging the world through us because we are here.

So if the power of the Spirit is meant to make me a conduit of God’s power, to change me so powerfully by his presence in my life that my life changes the world with it’s presence, what will that look like? Lord God use me, let that power that underlies all that exists flow through me to the world around. Flow river flow. Spring up oh well of eternal desire!

Espresso fueled poetry

Contemplation of your beauty is like
The cold mist
It refreshes
And it bites
It tingles my nostrils
And empties my body of it's flame
Like the prick of coming tears
It widens my lips and glosses my eyes
Contemplation of your mystery is like
The cool fall
It enfolds me like a turtleneck
And transforms me with its colors
It makes me feel dashing and handsome
And warms my hands with coffee and apple cider and cocoa
It is perfection
And it is gone

Henri Nouwen - "In The Name of Jesus"

Yesterday I received some materials for my master's course. One was this amazing little book. I read it in one sitting, so the truths about Christian leadership are resonating in me right now with a multitude of harmonics. It will take some time for me to fully appreciate the melody. There is one note, perhaps a chord, that is really sticking with me tonight.

Nouwen cites one temptation to Christian leaders as being relevance. Relevance is certainly a word we hear a lot about these days, so my interest was piqued. He takes relevance out of its buzz context and talks about our personal desire to feel relevant - to feel that we have something to offer.

I recognize how I often feel small when my perceived relevance isn't having any real impact (that's not really very relevant is it.) Nouwen declares that I can give up this worry. To the world, I am completely irrelevant. That is how it should be. That is not to say that the Church or the gospel should be irrelevant. But I am irrelevant. Anything I have in myself in no way useful to the world. I must rely on God. Nouwen give a powerful weapon to dismantle our habit to seek relevance: contemplative prayer. O how I love this! This is why I long to identify with the Christian Mystics of old. O to only love Christ, and focus all through that lens!

I have been dealing a lot lately with discussions of politics, both church and state. I am trying to hold on to my Love in all these. In that spirit I keep longing for a less pragmatic stance by my brothers in Christ. I feel affirmed and challenged by these words:

"Christian leaders cannot simply be persons who have well-informed opinions about the burning issues of our time. Their leadership must be rooted in the permanent, intimate relationship with the incarnate Word, Jesus, and they need to find there the source for all their words, advice, and guidance. Through the discipline of contemplative prayer, Christian leaders have to learn to listen again and again to the voice of love to find there the wisdom and courage to address whatever issue presents itself to them. Dealing with burning issues without being rooted in a deep personal relationship with God easily leads to divisiveness because, before we know it, our sense of self is caught up in our opinion about a given subject. But when we are securely rooted in personal intimacy with the source of life, it will be possible to remain flexible without being relativistic, convinced without being rigid, willing to confront without being offensive, gentle and forgiving without being soft, and true witnesses with out being manipulative.

"For Christian leadership to be truly fruitful in the future, a movement from the moral to the mystical is required."