Janitor style leadership

Spirituality and work

How can I lead people to find the spirituality of work from the ivory tower of vocational church life?  How can my spiritual formation matter to people in the real world when I am seen as an oddity? Spirituality is my work. I am paid to pray, to study scripture and sit and think for long stretches.  How can I say anything of substance to Marv about finding Jesus in the oil and gears of the engine I barely understand?  How can I ask Jeff to find Jesus in the electricity flowing in the lines he is repairing at the sugar factory on a Sunday morning, keeping him from joining us at church?  What does my intimacy with Jesus do for the retiree struggling with meaning after putting in years of labor at the steering gear plant while I haven’t loaded my “sixteen tons?”

These are just the questions I live with in a blue-collar community. I’m not sure I would be any better equipped to minister to them if I were shackled to an industrial job – especially if I was thrown off balance and couldn’t manage to continue to explore my spiritual formation. No, a pastor is what they need, but how to make it real to them that work can be more than what we do? Spiritual direction would be a wonderful place to explore this.  Most of my working people aren’t seeking the spiritual let alone direction. Perhaps informally, doing direction with out them realizing I am – allowing my own deepening in grace to form questions and conversations that would get them thinking and looking for the presence of God at work.

What does God need?

In our ministerial group we have on occasion batted around the question: does God have real needs? Does God need us? Does God need companionship? Does God need our service?

In thinking so about God's nature the thought occurs to me that if God has a deep inner need, it is the need to reveal himself.  God's self-revelation is a gracious mystery.  We have no explanation for it.  Indeed by creating the universe and human beings to observe it, God has made a vehicle for communication of the Divine nature. God's self-revelation is also necessarily transformative.  One cannot gaze into the awful abyss of God's nature and not be changed - from glory to glory.

As a human being I am created to not only search out God's personhood but to proclaim it, to worship.  God invites me to participate in this revelation of the beauty of God's being, leading others (in the end all of creation) to transformation.  To me that is the spirituality of leadership - firmly rooted in the Boundless.

Reflections on In the Name of Jesus by Henri Nouwen

The central question facing Christian leaders today, I think, is: Are we going to be led? Nouwen rightly points out that the cure to the temptation to relevance is mysticism. The Christian leader must be a mystic rooted in the reality of the living Christ to navigate the waters infested with sharks of ego, power, efficiency and world-success.

The central question for me as I face leadership in the coming future is how can I lead people into a desire for the mystic reality of Christ in the intimacy of the Lover. How can I be a part of the Spirits drawing them to the depths? Year after year, as a pastor, I feel like I am treading water. People seem to make little movement toward desperation and hunger for the transformed life. If they so successfully resist the wooing of the Spirit, what does my leadership stand to offer?

Eternal Summer

Anxiety threatened to steal my day
Oppressed me like the mourning
A freight train whistled
Delivering me to
The eternity of an Indian summer

Longing for eternity

Thou movest us to delight in praising Thee; for Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee - St. Augustine

Last night as I was praying night prayer with divineoffice.org the beauty of the opening hymn sent me into reverie. I began to think, how often does a song, a scent, a landscape send me into a warm and fuzzy place. Call it nostalgia, call it idyllic dreaming, call it holy longing. What ever it is, it seems to me that these are glimpses of eternity. My soul resonates with these moments because they speak to me in my deepest longing for my home in God.

Ecclesiastes 3:11

Biking

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Today, I didn't bike to Unionville as I would normally do. The espresso machine is disconnected at the coffeehouse until the health dept. finally comes through. In addition, Mary has requested that our drink cooler be turned off as well. So, what is there for me there now anyway? Mindless work, only.

No, instead, I took a ride to Kilmanagh, a little town to the east of Sebewaing. Not that there is anything there, but I didn't expect there to be. (Unlike Unionville and it's broken promises of espresso...)

On the ride I listened to a couple podcasts from "Interfaith Voices." One tidbit I gleaned from the April 15th show was from John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, authors of God is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith is Changing the World. They said China created a perfect environment for the spread of Christianity with their policy that a group of more than 25 worshipers is illegal. As a result house churches must split and multiply at 25!

Spiritual Lessons from Kung Fu Panda

Kung Fu Panda offers some lessons for spiritual formation for those with eyes to see. Here are some things to look for:

• Indirection

In Kung Fu Panda, Shifu cannot train Po directly. Po is out of shape and has never studied kung fu. He is not quick to learn. Shifu however discovers that to reach food Po can do amaizing things. So instead of getting Po to concentrate on kung fu, he gets him to concentrate on getting the food.

As Dallas Willard says, the spiritual life burns grace like a jet burns fuel. Without grace we cannot address the things that need transformation in our lives. We cannot address these needs head on. Instead through Spiritual Disciplines we place ourselves in a position where God can pour grace through us transforming us into something new.

• Freedom through discipline

After training, Shifu tells Po that he is free to eat the dumpling. It can't be that easy can it? Po has to use all of his skills to get the dumpling from Shifu.

Richard Foster writes in Life With God,

Again, Spiritual Disciplines involve doing what we can do to receive from God the power to do what we cannot do. And God graciously uses this process to produce in us the kind of person who automatically will do what needs to be done when it needs to be done.

This ability to do what needs to be done when it needs to be done is the true freedom in life. Freedom comes not from the absence of restraint but from the presence of discipline. Only the disciplined gymnast is free to score a perfect ten on the parallel bars. Only the disciplined violinist is free to play Pagannini's "Caprices." This, of course, is true in all of life, but it is never more true than in the spiritual life (18).

Wrecked for God

The Divine Conquest by A.W. Tozer

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Are you sure you want to be filled with a Spirit who, though He is like Jesus in His gentleness and love, will nevertheless demand to be Lord of your life? Are you willing to let your personality be taken over by another, even if that other by the Spirit of God Himself? If the Spirit takes charge of your life He will expect unquestioning obedience in everything. He ill not tolerate in you the self-sins even though they are permitted and excused by most Christians. By the self-sins I mean self-love, self-pity, self-seeking, self-confidence, self-righteousness, self-aggrandizement, self-defense. You will find the spirit to be in sharp opposition to the easy ways of the wold and of the mixed multitude within the precincts of religion. He will be jealous over you for good. He will not allow you to boast or swagger or show off. He will take the direction of your life away from you. He will reserve the right to test you, to discipline you, to chasten you for your soul's sake. He may strip you of many of those borderline pleasures which other Christians enjoy but which are to you a source of refined evil..." (123).

Being so immersed in the world of espresso, I have been wrecked to inferior coffee. At times I ironically proclaim, usually to Elaine, that my coffee snobbery is my burden to bear. That is the way it is with the Spirit, says Tozer, He wrecks us. We no longer are satisfied with the "borderline pleasures," but long for something deeper and more real. The good and pleasurable Folgers or Maxwell House becomes "refined evil."

"Through it all He will enfold you in a love so vast, so mighty, so all-embracing, so wondrous that your very losses will seem like gains and your small pains like pleasures. Yet the flesh will whimper under His yoke and cry out against it as a burden too great to bear. And you will be permitted to enjoy the solemn privilege of suffering to 'fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ' in your flesh for His body's sake, which is the Church. Now, with the conditions before you, do you still want to be filled with the Holy Spirit?" (124).

Reading this my mind again wandered to a hot straight shot of espresso. Those of us who drink it, know that we don't do it for the fun of it. It is not a soft drink. No it is hard and rumbly. Its ultimate pleasure is through the suffering.

Dear God, wreck me for you. Bring me along the way of the cross!


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Biking from one town to another

Today I got in my head to ride my bike. We've been biking a lot as a family lately, but I wanted to go it alone and see how far I could get. I checked the tires and topped them off, the back one has been feeling a little squishy lately. Then, I shouldered the messenger bag, stuck my headphones in, started the Speaking of Faith podcast put on my helmet and struck out on my way.

I must have looked like a cross between a geezer and a geek. This year I am riding a Huffy Cranbrook, a throw back to bygone classics. I was wearing some hip plaid shorts, but with the blue socks Elaine found (the only pair around). This year I have also been wearing a helmet to be a good example for the kids. I am afraid it is not flattering. The overall impression must have been pretty laughable, which probably accounts for the guy on the motor cycle revving past me in mockery!

I stopped at the church, about half way between Sebewaing and Unionville. I drank a water, still listening to the podcast. Krista was interviewing Jon Kabat-Zinn about meditation. It was a welcome reminder as I slowly made my way past growing fields, trees, houses, being mindful of my own breath and the growing sense of power in my legs.

That power reminded me of scrambling up the Sierra Madre foothills at Mater Dolorosa. For a guy who is constitutionally opposed to work and excersize, these glimpses into how good it feels is remarkable and spiritual.