Month: February 2019

Recently, I gave a short interview on my faith journey at my church. It was wonderful to talk to fellow church members and the thought that something I say or have done could help others on the journey, well that is humbling. During that interview, once it was discovered that I am a contemplative, the inevitable question arises “what is a contemplative”?

I have been asked this many times and I have spent a great deal of time contemplating a good answer. Perhaps I have found one that works for my fellow spiritual pilgrims. Let’s start with the definition of contemplation from the Merriam Webster dictionary:

a : concentration on spiritual things as a form of private devotion

b: a state of mystical awareness of God’s being

So a Christian contemplative is someone who concentrates on spiritual things as a form of private devotion and is mystically aware of God’s being. And now, let me add in these words from Hebrews 11:1 (The Voice translation): Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. The assurance of things hoped for is concentration on the spiritual things that God has promised. The conviction of unseen things is the mystical awareness of God. In this one verse, the substance of Christian contemplation comes to life.

I am going to use this as the best explanation of contemplative Christianity. Closely examine what contemplation is: concentrating on spiritual things (private devotion) and being mystically aware of who God is (and by extension) who we are in God. I would recommend you join me for a few minutes in being contemplative and concentrate on the spiritual mystery of the greatness of God and our being fully his good creation.

TMM

When I was a kid, every afternoon after school, I would turn on the black and white television and watch cartoons. Popeye the Sailor Man was always the lead cartoon. I know, I am old and the cartoon is corny, but go with me on this one. If you ate your spinach, you could be “strong to the finich“. I have no idea if the cartoon actually got kids to eat spinach, but we loved to watch the cartoon.

Popeye also had a saying, “I yam what I yam and dats all what I yam.” I think without us knowing it, Popeye was doing more than being a spokesman for spinach. I believe that buried in the cartoon was a statement on self-esteem and ego. I mean, think about it, I yam what I yam is recognizing that we don’t have to play games, we can just be who we are. The next phrase, and dats all what I am, sums up all we will ever need to know – we are complete as we are.

I have spent years telling clients and students, know who you are and whose you are. Popeye most certainly knew who he was and that being himself was good enough. I wish I could say that starting in my childhood I knew who I was and I bet, if you are honest with yourself, on any given day you might not be so sure of who you are. It’s okay, we are all but humans, trying to find our way.

Jesus was such a person, the perfect one to embody both who he was and Whose he was and he came to us all to show us who we are and whose we are. We are the embodiment of the Living Christ, we are heirs with Him. When we say, I yam what I yam….we are making a statement that we are the Divine Creation in whom God is pleased. Start there, I am pleasing to God as I am? How can that be? I have not followed the rules and I have not always been a good person. God, are you sure about this?

The answer to the above question is that God has always been absolutely sure that Divine love comes with no strings attached from the moment of the first creation, when God said, “It is good.” It is hard for us to get our mind around our inheritance and that there are no strings attached to it, we did not earn it, it is just about who we are in God.

Oh, and that last part, “and dats all what I yam”. We are complete, just like we are and have all that we need to be the best us we can be. Next time you think of Popeye (and you know you want to look him up on YouTube right now) just remember, you are the Christian “Popeye” and you are a beautiful creationg. And that is all any of us will ever need.

TMM

When I was a much younger baseball player, if you made the last out or the error that cost the game, you were the “goat”. I never really thought about what that meant until now. You see that is a clear religious expression about the “scapegoat” that the Hebrew people used to get rid of their sin.

Have you ever been the goat? I have, in all of its pure meaning. In ancient times, the Hebrew people would bring a goat to the priest and they would lay all of their sins on the goat and force it into the wilderness and that is the origin of scapegoating. So, in baseball terms, you are blaming one person for the faults of the whole team. It happens a lot. It happened to me when I was the CEO and the Board decided that every thing that had ever gone wrong was my fault. It doesn’t feel real good, I can tell you.

Why didn’t they use a lamb? Or a sheep? I have thought about that and the sheep were always highly prized, deeply valued for their sustaining of life for the people. The goat is much more independent and apparently a bit smarter. So, in ancient times, the goat, the self-sustaining and independent one was used to carry away the sin. A sheep would always try to return to the flock and thus bring the sins back.

Now that just wouldn’t do would it, send all of the sins away and yet they come right back. But Christ wasn’t a goat, he was the Lamb of God. We took the totally trusting and loving Lamb, put all of our sins on Him but he did not go to the wilderness, he stays right here among us, silently bearing our sins, for us to see. This picture is much more personal and humbling for me. Every time I go my own way (sin), the silent Lamb lovingly remains in view, as a reminder of the price that is paid every day.

I love these words: Christ did not come to change God’s mind about us. God never had to change God’s mind about us. Christ came to change our minds about God! We are the scapegoats/sheep now, we forgive our enemies, love the unloveable ones all while standing among all of life. We are called to bear in our bodies, the sins of the world. We Christians are the living Eucharist of the World.

TMM

What are you afraid of? For me, I have had a lifelong fear of falling. No, really, of falling. I am not afraid of heights, I love to see the view from 35,000 feet or from tall buildings. But if you ask me to stand at the very edge and look down, uh, nope not going to do that. I have never like climbing trees for the same reason, but I love tree houses, you know the kind with steps up to the house.

Fear kills our ability to think and our ability to react. The “deer in the headlights” is the response between fight or flight, it is just frozen in place. Fear has its place, of course. If you fall from a high place you get hurt. Fear discourages you from putting yourself in danger. It can literally keep you alive. But what about irrational fears? There are many in mental health that are irrational, even one that is the fear of the number 13. Really, afraid of a number? It is no less real to the person who has this than my fear of falling is to me. It is irrational only because seeing and touching the number 13 will not cause physical damage.

What about the fear to think for oneself? That is the one that does the most harm. In church life, quite often the church tells us what to think about various issues. When did becoming a Christian cause me to “lose my mind” and not think for myself? Over the years I have seen the fear of thinking for oneself do so much harm to so many. Two hundred years ago, letting someone else think for them allowed the slave trade to be justified. One hundred years ago, letting someone else do the thinking demeaned women and taught that they could not be pastors and ministers. Today, the issue is about LBGTQ persons.

What we never seem to learn is that it is always bad to let someone else tell us how to think. It is always unhealthy to be paralyzed with the fear of thinking for oneself when it comes to God. God is so much greater than all of our fears, including thinking about God. Letting someone else tell us how to think has hurt so very many people. Has led to us acting contrary to the love of God in Christ.

It is time, dear ones, to decide to think for ourselves. To think about what it means to follow Christ. To unlearn what we have been told to think. To think from the “heart”. To let love lead us to treasures we would otherwise miss. My daughter’s church has a motto that I love: Free to think, Bound to serve. This congregation, at this writing, has been ongoing for 175 years! Let’s think about that history. In all of those many years, always free to think. May we each know that same freedom.

TMM

We must atone for our sins. I have heard this all of my life in the church. Christ was that atonement, that sacrifice for what I have done wrong. This makes God the supreme punisher who is out for blood. Someon have to pay. Blood is the only acceptable coin of the realm in this case.

It has taken awhile but I cannot fathom a god who is actually out for revenge. And, revenge for what? This is punitive justice and if this is really what Christ did for us and we are to behave as Christ did, then we should punish everyone until they make a “profession of faith in Christ”. Before you laugh, think this through: Christ was punished for our sins because a price had to be paid. We are to imitate Christ, so we should die for the sins of those around us or hold them to a strict justice until they repent. Please don’t scoff at this, look around our society today and you will discover exactly this behavior going on in churches everywhere.

This is the only way we can ignore the poor, the homeless, the children and all of those in need. You see, we have a system that says you have to earn our kindness, our handout, our tax dollars. And how to those with no money earn anything? Why that’s simple, they have to be “good people”, whatever that means. And, that means someone else gets to decide what goodness is. This is not the Christ or God I choose to follow.

Instead, to borrow a phrase from Richard Rohr and others, I believe in a restorative justice. Jesus walked this earth and did not demand anyone become good, or earn his love, or even be particularly nice. Instead, he just healed people because he loved them. If we are really becoming “christians” (little Christs) then shouldn’t our lives look like his?

For too long, we as Christians have bought into the societal view that people should be punished and people should be good enough to receive assistance. Thanks be to God that this is not how God does things. I would never be able to be good enough for God’s love. And yet, this is what we do to all who are different, who are poor, in prison, addicted, hurting, or disabled. It is somehow their fault and they must earn or at least deserve to be helped.

How long will we choose to be this way? How long will we let our society teach that this is the only way to think. Let’s start with ourselves. Let’s provide restorative justice to ourselves and others. As Rohr says, let’s call it at one ment. That we are one with God every moment, every day.

TMM

“Oh, grow up!” You may have heard it or said it at some point in your life. I teach human growth and development and there are certain things we all go through to grow up. We used to call these stages but that has changed mostly because it is not a simple step by step progression. Instead, we often go through one stage ahead of the one we should be going through. Still, stages help us to understand how things progress in general.

We have known that psychologically and physically we go through certain stages. Why have we not discovered that we do the same spiritually. Fowler, a number of years ago, wrote a book about the stages of spiritual development that is often read in seminary but rarely shared with people in church. I get it, many have not read the book but we should know better.

Why have we not taken the new testament words to heart, “when I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child…” Paul said this but few churches develop Sunday school classes to address the stages we go through spiritually. Fewer still are the preachers who “grow” their congregations by addressing stages of development. If we did that, then I would not have had to unlearn or redevelop my spiritual life as I have grown into contemplation.

When we have “new” Christians, why don’t we assume that they are babies in the faith and explain things to them that will set them on a course of healthy growth? Instead, new Christians are expected to listen to sermons and Sunday school teachers and catch up on what they have missed out on. This means that old and tired platitudes and dogma are used. We teach them the rules but not the substance. We teach them either/or but never both.

Examine your own spiritual life. If it was healthy development then the very first thing you learned was how loving and caring God is and that God doesn’t punish or hurt people but instead stays right there with them in the midst of the pain and hurt. Be honest though, weren’t you taught that you needed to be saved and then you needed to follow the rules so you would be a good person? Doesn’t that skip a few steps?

Christ said come as a child would, with total love and total trust. No rules mentioned, no sins mentioned, just trust, which leads to deeper love. We start kids (in some denominations) with confirmation classes, when they are around 10 and that is important to learn the rules of the faith but seriously, why do we wait ten years? And if you are an adult, you don’t really get confirmation classes at all, though some churches provide such classes to all.

Beloved ones, how can we go wrong if we start with every new Christian at the point of trust versus mistrust and love? We should start at: the Creator of the Universe cares for you deeply and personally and is trustworthy to never leave you. Start at love and trust, after all, the Psalms express this very thing over and over again. That is a healthy foundation to build on, one you can always come back to, that God loves me unconditionally and if that is true, then I can learn how to love God back and love my neighbor.

And, you know what, it is not too late. Each of us can go back to the first stage and examine what went right or wrong there. We can start over again with Love and grow from there. We can return to child-like wonder and then build on the love and wonder to be healthy children of God.

TMM