Elaine, How I Love Thee

Music to accompany this post.

The last few weeks I have been falling in love with my wife all over again. It is like a spiritual awakening. I am seeing her with fresh eyes. I see the wrinkles forming around her eyes and mouth. She is taking on a look of maturity, and it matches her growth spiritually. There is something very sexy about those lines.

I look at my hands, something I often have done while contemplating my own personhood. Coming out of anesthesia after having my wisdom teeth removed, my mom told me I was looking staring at my hands funny, like they weren’t my own. Some how, though looking at them and realizing they are my own has sometimes granted me a heightened self awareness, I am alive, I am separate from the world, the world exists apart from my imagination. Rolhieser suggests that it is this separation that is at the basis of sexuality. To be sexed is to be divided from the rest of humanity based on gender. I see in my hands today knuckles that are growing knobbier, with more creases. They remind me of my father’s hands, rough with work. I have caught myself taking on attitudes and postures so like his as well. I am maturing. I’ll be thirty this year. I am a pastor, a father, in short an adult. How subtly all this snuck up on me. How subtly Elaine grew from a college sweetheart and salacious girl into a woman.

I step back, and realize what has caught up with me. My breath is caught away; she is so beautiful, inside even more than outside. I held her tight the night before she went away to Chicago, attempting to convey through the touch, through the pressing of her body the depth of love I have for her.

I said, “I’m scared you might not make it back to me.”

“Why?” She asked.

“Because,” I said, “in the movies with someone realizes how much they love another, that is when they loose them.”

I thank God for this romance of the Spirit, for it is as much a romance with him as it is with my wife, his gift to me. My heart races even in the writing of this post, and the praying of this prayer.

Defining Spirituality

Borrowing some from Rolheiser, I would define Spirituality as what we do to sort out and express the divine madness in our souls. The restless longing of the dreamer, the quixotic refusing to accept the surface reality, the madness given by the gods by which we hunger for more, for meaning, for completion. Spirituality seeks to express these longings and fill them with something Divine.

At the beginning of the television series Heroes, Mohinder Suresh asks what it means to be in the image of God,

"Where does it come from? This quest? This need to solve life's mysteries though the simplest of questions can never be answered. Why are we here? What is the soul? Why do we dream?
Perhaps we'd be better off not looking at all. [But] that's not human nature. Not the human heart. That is not why we are here."

It is indeed maddening to seek transformation into the image of our creator. A Holy Madness is appropriate for all who lay themselves down on the operating for this intense surgery. To be conformed into the image of Christ is to be made into the Human of Design, to be the kind of person who looks out for others, the kind of person who is not only holy as his maker is holy, but is also to be the kind of citizen that would make a truly just world possible. It would be making a world the way God had intended it.

This formation into the image of Christ is not an undertaking, but rather an in-working. In John 21 the disciples fished all night and caught nothing, but a word from Jesus and their own effort to cast the net and haul it in was met with the grace of 153 large fish. We can work all night long and get nowhere, but how blest our work can be when we do just those actions Jesus has directed us. We clothe ourselves with him as we hear his voice. We put flesh on the word, we incarnate it, this is the way of spiritual formation.

Spirituality meets pavement

Of all the spiritualities Rolheiser talks about, it is the spirituality of sexuality that has stuck with me most. Through it, I have seen how I can refocus my madness, my eros, into a life giving laser, by offering my relationship with my wife as a true sacrament. Through it I can truly embrace every one, by focusing all my sexual energy on her, I am in a real way focusing it on God. By becoming one with her, I am in a real way becoming one with the cosmos. Crazy stuff! I also like how when I’m not becoming one, when I am feeling acutely the isolation of sleeping alone, even when she’s beside me, I stand in solidarity with the poor and the lonely, the cast offs, and Jesus himself. Though not in the same chapter, Rolheiser talks about taking into oneself the tensions of mystery. I like that.

My spiritual rule would step up my discipline in the contemplative arena. Especially since its fall and I have given up mowing my labyrinth, I need now more than ever to engage in the contemplative. I have greatly enjoyed praying the hours. I need to discipline myself to get back into it. I have always like meditation and contemplation, it fits my personality, but I have been greatly challenged by action. Our forays into social justice have been exciting. I wrote a bit about my environmental goals for blog action day, and I am excited to see where the projects our ministerial have started in the school will go. I also would like to help out a the soup kitchen again regularly.

I always have had a dream of having a coffee-shop while being a spiritual director. I’m not sure God’s dreamt it the same way that I have, but it is interesting that in many ways I’m already doing it. The coffeehouse we’ve started with high school kids has given me many opportunities to interact with them about their spiritual formation. My great goal for taking my masters in Spiritual Formation and Leadership is to learn how to lead people from zero to mystic. What I have already learned is that there is indeed great hope to change people, the church, and the world, and that Hope resides in me as I change myself.

The Environment: a field for biblical social justice

I've been discovering that to help bring about real social justice I need to focus first of all in changing things in my sphere of influence. This means removing myself from systems that perpetuate injustice.

Ronald Rolheiser in his book, Holy Longing, suggests that social justice finds its source in the creation story. He explains that Genesis gives us four truths about social justice (175). These affirmations are:

1. God made all people equal

2. The earth belongs equally to everyone

3. Everyone is equally responsible for protecting the dignity of others

4. The physical earth needs to be respected

It is a holy endeavor to protect the earth. God pronounced it good. It is funny that some right wing evangelicals wish to point out that global warming isn't a consensus issue among Christians. God has declared all creation good to his heart, and seeks to redeem it to himself.

So I've been thinking about how to influence the systems around me and remove myself from systems that perpetuate the rape and depleting of creation.

Here are some of my goals:

• Reduce my carbon footprint and then offset it by buying CO2 Offset
• Here are some ideas:
• Mowing my lawn with my antique rotary mower
• Turing down our heat (even though Elaine will complain, I might get a better response if I get a timer that will turn the heat up just before we get out of bed)
• Unplugging things that heat even when off like the dvd player or those d/c converters
• Turn off the espesso machine at church, even if that means I have to get there an hour early to turn it back on.
• When the coffeehouse gets a building I will remodel it with green ideas, like a light scoop.
• Buying locally produced food
• Switching to Panache EcoTrade espresso for the coffeehouse
• Using E85 in our van

Is there sex in heaven?

Holy Longing talks about a heavenly sexuality. I have been thinking along these lines for a while, so here is a good chunk of what Rolhieser said:

Janis Joplin was once asked what it was like being a rock star. She replied: “It’s pretty hard sometimes. You go on stage, make love to fifteen thousand people, then you go home and sleep alone.”

Jesus was once asked, as a test: If a woman marries seven times and all her husbands die before she dies, whose wife will she be after the resurrection? He answered that, after the resurrection, we will no longer marry or be given in marriage.

These two answers Janis Joplin’s and Jesus’, are not unconnected. Each, in its own way, says something about the all embracing intent of our sexuality. What Janis Joplin is saying is that, in our sexuality and our creativity, we are ultimately trying to make love to everyone. What Jesus is saying is not that we will be celibate in heaven, but rather that, in heaven, everyone will make love to everyone else and, already now, we hunger for that within every cell of our being. Sexually our hungers are very wide. We are built to ultimately embrace the universe and everything in it.

To understand our sexuality and to live with its unfulfilled tensions, it can be most helpful simply to understand this. In loving, the ultimate wound is not to be able to marry everyone. The greatest human hunger, felt in every cell in our being, is that we cannot be completely united with everyone and everything....

It is important to understand this, but it is also important not to misunderstand it. Because our sexuality is ultimately geared to embrace everyone does not mean that we can be promiscuous and, already here in this life, try to live that out. In fact, paradoxically, it means the opposite. Only God can sleep with everyone, and thus, only in god can we sleep with everyone. In this life, even though our sexuality has geared up for universal embrace, we only have two options that are life-giving: Either we embrace the many through the one (by sleeping with one person within a monogamous marriage) or we embrace the one through the many (be sleeping with no one, in celibacy). Both of these are ways that will eventually open our sexuality up so as to embrace everyone. If we go the route of promiscuity, eventually, we will embrace no one.

Look here for what I take from this.

What if this Lon Kauffman print was about Social Justice?

I imagine the horizon line is the edge of what Anaxamander called the boundless. Or as Rolheiser puts it, the turbulent silent power of God that underlies all that is. That line is the thin veil, the crust, the skin of God. The faces in the vertical line remind me of the Triune God, revealing his boundless, infinity rich mystery to the world. So great a revelation is too much for us to see in just one face. If it is the skin of God then it is also us, and as the mountains rise we take on this brimming omnipotence of God thrust into the world. His very nature is just so as we explode the body of Christ into our world, so too we bring justice. Imagine the areas in the foreground are envelopes, letters from us to the world, bringing the prophetic to bear in the four arenas Foster mentions.

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!

Tilting at windmills

In Holy Longing Ronald Rolheiser suggests that Social Justice is different from personal charity, that if we are to engage in Social Justice, we must address the systemic concerns of injustice rather than just meeting the needs that result from the injustice.

A few years back, our local ministerial association started what we called Project Caritas to be an arm of our collective churches to address social justice concerns. The main effort of the project was a fund, fueled by our community Lenten offerings. Since I was so gung ho about engaging in social justice, I became the treasurer. We used the money to meet the urgent financial needs of people who came to us. A couple weeks back we ran out of money, and decided to end the project.

The question remains, "did we engage in social justice at all?" Did we address any of the underlying injustices that caused these problems. We talked about them... Things like unemployment, health-care costs, a difficult economy, but what could we do? Addressing such systemic issues seem too big for state or even federal government to handle. What can we do?

I wished we could start a revolution like Che, but without the guns.

The task is too much, I feel like a solitary Quixote in a world of injustice. Yet Rolheiser calls this work, our tilting at the windmills, a non-negotiable essential to our spiritual formation.

I am reminded of Willard's Divine Conspiracy: we undermine the world's system by living in the kingdom of God, by becoming like Jesus, so that the kingdom rules in the areas of our influence. In so doing we subvert the world and chip away at evil's hold, the devil's injustice.

Rolheiser agrees. "The struggle for justice and peace is not ultimately about winning or losing but about fidelity."

We go on tilting at windmills, regardless of our results, because ultimately our motivation isn't our own gain, or notoriety, nor is it even about humanity and making the world a better place. Our motivation is that divine fire within that compells us to live, and to love. It is the beating of a heart much too big for our chest, indeed too big for the universe to contain. So we fight on. Not with the arms of Quixote or Che, but with peace, love and a subversive spirituality.

Defining Spiritual Formation

Rolheiser suggests that Private prayer, private morality, social justice, mellowness of heart, and involvment in a concrete community are “nonnegotiable essensials” to the formation of classic Christian Spirituality.

These remind me of Foster’s streams of Christian tradition, Contemplative (private prayer), Holiness (private morality,) Justice, Charismatic (mellow heart?), Evangelical, and Incarnational (Rolheiser would certainly see this to include having community).

Even we Pentecostals don’t go so far as to say that the Charismatic stream is essential for salvation. But then that isn’t the point; we’re not talking about a moment of justification, but a process of being formed. Perhaps each of these traditions is an absolute, nonnegotiable essential. Perhaps it is precisely those differences that sometimes divide us that in the end are the key elements to wholeness. I like this thought, and I think it is truly what Foster is getting at. The Evangelical stream isn’t singled out by Rolheiser, though I am sure the Word and it’s incarnation are central to his Catholic theology.

In keeping with these essentials, I would define spiritual formation as “Being formed by God into the very image of Christ as we are immersed in the streams of a wide Orthodoxy unto depth of intimacy with Trinity and Man.”