Should I forgive someone if they won’t apologize?

A life in the Spirit, Building community, Psychological growth, , , , , ,

Gwen and I are getting ready to write an article that responds to some of the unreconciled relationships we recall and how forgiveness has worked in those places. I was reminded of this post from 2022 when the need to forgive was very fresh and Joe Biden had some issues with reconciliation to deal with too!

The Washington Post surprised me the other day with an op-ed featuring Warren G. Harding – the first president after World War I, who is most-remembered for the corruption in his administration. That’s him, above, throwing out the first pitch. So it has been a weird week. First, I liked Dick Cheney, of all people, for accompanying Liz to the Jan. 6 commemoration. Then I read WaPo and ended up admiring the super-capitalist, Teapot Dome president!

I did not know that Harding forgave Eugene V. Debs! He commuted the sentence of the  Socialist who ran against him from prison! Debs’ crime was doubting-out-loud the validity of WWI — he called it a diabolical capitalist war (I guess I would have voted for him). For his free speech, the Woodrow Wilson administration threw Debs in jail with a dubious application of the Espionage Act. When Harding followed Wilson, he decided to forgive Debs, against the advice of his advisors. He even made sure the “traitor” came to the White House on his way home from prison, so he could meet him and form some kind of relationship.

Biden has been acting out a similar public drama for us all year. He’d love to forgive people. But he took the gloves off on Epiphany (which he also loves to to) and laid out Trump. For most of the year he had been restrained, trying hard to bridge the political chasm dividing the country. But that appears to be over.

Are you similarly conflicted by your own relational chasms? Do you rehearse snappy things you would say to your enemies in your head — the zingers you will never get a chance to deliver? What do you do when your offender will not apologize, much less reconcile?

Have you decided how you are going to handle the people who have undermined you, lied about you and then blamed you for what they did to you? Maybe you just wait to see what will happens when the drama starts.

You won’t have to wait long, apparently. A lot of us are having a lot of drama. All over the country divorces have gone up, families have been divided over politics, churches have split and pastors have resigned. You can’t look at the news, if you dare, without someone worrying about American “democracy” – which Eugene V. Debs did not think much of when he was jailed for saying something that 900,000 people voted for.

It can be hard to forgive sometimes, but if Warren Harding can do it, maybe we can too.

What if they don’t say they are sorry?

This is always the big question when it comes to forgiveness. What if the person who hurt me is not sorry? It is not uncommon for someone to protest like this when forgiveness is suggested:

I can’t let my guard down. That would be surrendering and acting like they were justified in hurting me. They would get away with their crime! I would be just as vulnerable to more of the abuse I just suffered.

I will not forgive until the other person: 1) knows that wrong was done; 2) feels an inner sorrow for doing it; 3) apologizes to me; 4) and makes amends. Then I’ll know it is safe to forgive and enter back into the relationship.

Most of us are taught to apologize from a young age along the lines of those last four conditions.  Maybe you bit your sibling (well, I did, at least), said something cruel, pushed someone around, and a well-meaning adult intervened and told you, “Now, say you’re sorry.” As kids, those half-hearted apologies, sometimes followed with forced hugs, were enough to help us move on. But something changed as we got older. Aren’t apologies a little harder to come by, now? Aren’t the issues cutting a little deeper than, “She took my Sports Diva!”

What are you supposed to do when someone intentionally hurts you, rips your heart wide open, and then leaves you to pick up the pieces? What if they move on with their lives, and there is no well-meaning adult to come along and demand they apologize?

From our playground lessons, we’ve been conditioned to think forgiveness follows an apology. But things change and people forget how to apologize or think they are avoiding the problem by never having relationships deep enough to matter. We protest that someone is letting our hurt and their perfidy go unnoticed and all we hear is, “That’s your problem. Deal with it.” We get the unspoken message we’re wrong for being hurt. But living wronged with that prickly disconnection installed is a recipe for bitterness and it might even make us sick.

When hurt remains unforgiven, when the memory stays unprocessed, it sits in our hearts as if it is still happening. A lot of us are waiting for an apology in order to get some relief. Do you have anyone on whom you are still waiting? Is it fairly easy to get all worked up when their face pops into your mind or someone speaks about them fondly or you see them succeed? Jessica Harris wrote:

“My dad left our family when I was in elementary school. The pain caused by his abandonment ran deep. I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that someone I loved could hurt me so badly when I didn’t do anything to deserve it. Then, as I got older, I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that someone I loved could hurt me so badly and not care.

That ate away at my heart for years. The hurt remained unresolved as I waited for this man to return to my life and apologize for wrecking it. I thought my anger was my power. My ability to never forget was going to ensure I would never get hurt again. It was how I protected my heart.

That anger bled over into my other relationships. I became angry in general, always blaming it on my dad. If he would just admit he was wrong, my life would be better.”

I couldn’t tell that same story.  But I have definitely had to work through similar hurts in the last few years. You probably have had some hurts too. My clients certainly share them every day: a trauma that is lodged in the memory and won’t go away, a loved one who betrayed their trust, an unscrupulous salesman or contractor who swindled them, a family member who hurt them but has since passed on. They still feel deeply about people who cut them deep but have never once breathed an apology. You might feel you have a right to hold a grudge, yourself.

What if anger is not strength?

Bitterness is an enemy of resilience. It is the opposite of joy isn’t it? It is the taste of poison.  You cannot be strong and move forward with your life while still dragging around chests full of bitterness from your past like you’re Jacob Marley.

What kids rarely learn is that an act of forgiveness strengthens the heart of the forgiver as much as it frees the offender. Forgiveness is not, “I am OK with what you did.” It isn’t even, “I accept your apology.” It is, “I am not going to hold this in me or against you anymore.”

The point of forgiveness and apologies is ultimately reconciliation. It is great when an apology is extended by the person who committed the hurt; then they can be free of what they are dragging behind them. It is an everyday miracle when forgiveness is extended by the person who was hurt; then they can get over what the offender did to them. If those things happen, then two people who have freed one another can move on to work out how to live together in love, and creation is that much less ruined.

But even if you can’t get to reconciliation you can still forgive, and bring some kind of closure to a wound. Adults take charge of their traumas all the time. You can forgive even if there is no apology.

If you’re too hurt to forgive right away, take time to scab over. But try not to hold on too long. The anger you nurse is just the hurt hanging on. Being angry is not being strong. Forgiving brings strength that lets us really heal and move forward with life without waiting for someone to let us out of our bitterness prison.

Go ahead and forgive

Forgiveness is uncommon enough that it is actually studied — you can be a forgiveness expert.  A growing body of research shows that best way to forgive comes from exercising the moral virtue of forgiveness, even if there is no justice or hope of reconciliation. When we are good, within reason, to an offender, we will reduce our anger, anxiety  and depression and improve our self-esteem and hope (Robert Enright) — a good reason to forgive is to protect your health!

We dare not conflate forgiveness and reconciliation. People often do, but we dare not. Forgiveness is not dependent on reconciliation, restitution or justice. The offer of forgiveness can be unconditional, not dependent on the other’s response at all, including an apology. Forgiveness like that looks like Jesus, right? Reconciliation is much more likely  if it begins with that kind of forgiveness.

Reconciliation, when at least one party is deeply and unfairly hurt, is the fruit of forgiveness and apology and is conditional; it depends on how the offending party or parties understand their hurtful ways and change. Reconciliation like that looks like what Jesus is trying to build, right?

A forgiver is motivated by their desire to be rid of resentment and act as good as is possible toward an offending person. If that person has no inner sorrow, never intends to apologize or to make amends, you don’t need to act as if they do. Yet, you can still have the intention to reconcile if the person changes and a relationship becomes safe. You can even  show an outward quality of forgiveness, for example, by not talking disparagingly about the offender to others. If you do that, you’ll be working out Romans 12:18: “If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.” If a person keeps abusing you, you can struggle for peace instead of just struggling against hurt. You don’t need to bear their responsibility.

Why not be healthy? If you reject forgiving because you conflate it with reconciliation, you  deprive yourself of a chance to recover, lead a healthy psychological life, and even live a healthy relational life with others (if not necessarily with the offending person). Deep anger from injustices can lead to a lack of trust in general, thwarting potentially life-giving relationships.

How we think about forgiveness is important. If we make the mistake of waiting for an apology or holding out for an ideal reconciliation, we allow an offending person or a random act of cruelty dominate us for a long time, maybe even for a lifetime if the wound is deep enough. Forgiveness is a character trait healthy adults exercise. They can suffer the disappointment and loss of not being reconciled. They rely on faith, hope and love more than their capacity to create a preferred harmony. We are free to forgive, if we choose, regardless of the outcome, even if someone refuses to apologize.

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Today is William Seymour Day! Talk about a person who had a lot to forgive! He managed the trials with a radical faith fueled by the Holy Spirit!  Read all about  him at The Transhistorical Body.

 

Your pot of anger — a psalm

A life in the Spirit, Poetry

My pot boils.
I don’t attend it until the liquid is gone
and a dark, dead scum is left
to scrape off and wash away.
Whole kettles have been lost.

Sometimes a simmer
bubbles all day, attended and fragrant,
and a deadly anger turns to action,
into something to be savored
like a done just enough stew.

If one is evil, vengeance is food,
the feast of the grave
waiting by the door, unmastered.
If one is good, the feast is justice,
like a dug up garden
soaking up love to produce good fruit.

So don’t leave your pot untended.
Follow the fragrance up to your room.
Kneel on your bench and listen well,
or your heart will grow dry
and your mind imprisoned by your fears.

Anger needs to simmer.
Some days it is stew.
Some days it is death.
If not cooked in God’s kitchen,
who would know?

It is revenge week: Check your marriage and other loves

A life in the Spirit, Film/TV, Marriage and Family, Spiritual direction, , , , , ,

I have been shocked, at times, by married couples who are committed to revenge. For instance, I discovered part of the engagement ritual for over 50% of millennials includes making a pre-nuptial agreement — for one of my clients, at least, it was to pre-game the inevitable vengeance they expected when they divorced.

Bush vows revenge. Click for video.

I wondered this week if such habitual revenge might be the American way. After all, it is 9/11 week and we paused to remember the thousands of people killed that day — and we’ve begun to remember who-knows-how-many first responders and others who were poisoned by the air they were encouraged to live in. What’s more, we endured the president trying to insert himself into the day as if he did something heroic in 2001– even if he did, no one would believe him at this point.

It is the week we are encouraged to reset our mind on revenge. Pete Hegseth connected the attack on the Pentagon on 9/11 to the present debacle in Iran, while quoting scripture inaccurately, saying the Pentagon is “ever vigilant” to “enemies who hate us.”

“We’re still sending terrorists where they belong—to hell. And tankers to the bottom of the ocean where they belong, and we are ensuring that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon. The economic pressure tightens every day.” – the gospel according to Hegseth

The ex-president, mayors, and billionaires came out to NYC so we could again be persuaded the 8 trillion dollars spent on the first 20 years of the Wars on Terror and the 900,000 people lost amounted to appropriate revenge.

Here in Pennsylvania, insult is added to injury since Senator Fetterman increasingly becomes some kind of Republican because he is convinced Israel’s ongoing genocidal revenge for the October 7, 2023 attack (by the ever-vengeful Hamas) on Israeli citizens is warranted. Maybe he is scared — if some politician questions the right of Israel to use overwhelming force in the cause of justice/revenge, they might be attacked by AIPAC. Although some Hasidic Jews are speaking out against it all.

It is obviously not just Americans who are vicious. I have Britbox now, so I know that one of the most popular shows is another remake of A Woman of Substance. The blatant theme of that story is revenge – what it does to ruin love and why the heroine does not care to be distracted from her purpose in spite of that fact.

Pray as you go

I wish everyone, especially married couples, would listen to the Pray as You Go session we heard as we walked on September 10. “Love your enemies” is what Hegseth should be quoting. If one cannot master the Sermon on the Mount she can skip the rest of the Bible until she does.

I loved the sweet song they offered. I might have altered the chorus to plead with God directly: “Lover of enemies, even the children of your Father, who can’t love their enemies, teach us to love.” Here is the link, if you want to try it out: [link].

The enemy is not in faraway Iran where we can bomb them from Las Vegas. The enemy is not just the Emma Harte in your life vowing to destroy your family. It is also the person you are love the most, who hurts you the best and arouses the temptation to take revenge. Let’s not give in, even if it seems normal.

Marriage is the lab of loving enemies.

Don’t get me wrong, I see people who have delightful mates who love them deeply even though they see them without rose-colored glasses.

But I am saddened by the many people I see who have been wounded, betrayed and even abused, deeply or slightly, who feel it is only right they should get even. Have we all been influenced by the War on Terror?

It is sad how petty we can be. We are tempted to monitor how we are being wounded, betrayed and abused in the most minute way. I hear people say,

  • “I know I am going to make them mad at me,”
  • so they are predisposed to to be hurt
  • and so feel justified to “get even”
  • even before anything has happened!

Their mate is under surveillance! What in the world is “even” in a relationship anyway? I can understand developing reciprocity, but let’s not measure it.

On our neighborhood group chat the other day, a wife suggested her husband should not go out and talk to the person shaking our windows with the bass they were blasting because, “There are too many  hateful, crazy people out here!” So much for all you need to love.

Let me say again, being hateful to someone hateful results in more hatefulness. Assuming others are crazy before you know them is craziness. Keeping your sweet, religious husband from talking to strangers is stealing his joy. Avoiding the possibility of conflict or the work of reconciliation will not bring peace.  We need to build love, sanity, joy and peace person by person, if necessary. Right? Marriage is a basic place to do it.

Is revenge how we “stay safe?”

Revenge is about control and certainty — my own power to keep myself safe. We can see how nations failed to succeed at that in Afghanistan and Gaza. I regularly see the same goal unmet by married partners who won’t give up on it. These are a few questions I had this week when I thought about that:

  • Can’t such a person see they are making their mate afraid to commit some tiny infraction? Whatever they do is scrutinized. “You did not say anything after I weeded the garden.” or “You left your socks out.” A lot of sentences include “you.” And a lot of them imply, I need to be able to rely on you to not mess up what I require — or else.
  • Do you really need to correct things your mate says? They seem to be in a competition for who is the rightest, as if being right will protect something. I am usually in a small group of married couples most weeks. It is common to have one partner tell a story and the other one to edit it. You need to defeat their sentence?
  • Do you really need a pre-nup? One person said they were afraid to get married if they couldn’t nip the potential revenge in the bud. I am sad if it was already budding during the engagement! I am almost positive the relationship is going to have a high hurdle of mistrust to overcome on the way to a harmonious life together. You hired adversarial, U.S. lawyers to preside at your pre-marriage ceremony?
  • Aren’t you spreading hopelessness when you can’t forgive you partner for not healing your childhood wounds? I was musing about someone wanting to “be found” last week. That desire is kin to being “seen” and “known” — experiences most people want. But digging in your heals in front of various doors to intimacy until you are satisfied your partner has met your demands may not be the best way to receive what you need. Certainty-or-else seems like a recipe for relationship disaster.

We have a lot of ways to get even. Therapists call them “micro aggressions” when they are relational paper-cuts getting infected. Sometimes the aggression goes nuclear and activates the pre-nup! Unfortunately, a lot of us think that’s just normal life.

Preoccupation with getting and being even, staying safe, exercising control undoubtedly has many good reasons behind it; none of the reasons create trust and deepen love. We might want to start unraveling it by considering how the U.S. society has been promoting revenge for the past 25 years. Maybe we’re trained for it.

Some of your fear about being invaded and your commitment to preserve first-strike capabilities might be in league with The War on Terror. But any hint of relational terrorism in a marriage sets off the cycle of revenge everyone is already afraid of.  To be happy, we could at least not meet revenge with revenge. At best, we could love our enemies.

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It is John Chrysostom Day! Get to know this famous leader in the early church at The Transhistorical Body.

Being found: Six things we can do to get there

A life in the Spirit, Film/TV, Marriage and Family, Psychological growth, Spiritual direction,

I have a love-hate relationship going with my memory of the entry closet of my childhood home. I remember it fondly because it was the first place I was given the privilege of painting (which might have been as soon as I could hold a brush in my situation). So it is symbolically a place where I was trusted and counted worthy.

But before I was painting it, it was a place I would hide. I think one of my earliest  memories is hiding from my mother in the closet and waiting for her to find me. We weren’t playing hide and seek, I just disappeared. And she did not come to find me. I waited for what seemed like a long time in the dark before I peaked out the door. I could hear her voice in the kitchen talking on the land line. I came up to her and pulled on her dress. She looked down at me and did that sweeping up, “Shoo!” gesture and whispered, with her hand over the mouthpiece, “Go play.”  I started to say, “But you did not find me.” But she had already straightened up and was laughing that wonderful laugh of hers. So I just went to my room to look around at the toys again.

I don’t think I ever told her about that. But as you can see, I never forgot that one small moment of being lonely, invisible, and not worth finding. It is no wonder we all seem to have shame sticking to the walls of our inner selves. The tiniest things collect and build up like plaque.

Maybe your mate wants to be found

I thought of myself not long ago when a woman was lamenting how her husband seemed uninterested in “finding” her. She used the word. And she was not the first to do so. So many partnered people have trouble when they feel their partner leaves them alone; they are like babies in the crib who woke up by themselves and aren’t sure someone is coming to get them. We really want our mates to meet us there. It feels like they should do something about this attachment issue that keeps popping up. Some of us might get anxious because we don’t want to risk the possibility that they won’t find us and will never share the deep fears and loneliness we might carry.

I hope you will be found by your loved ones. But I am not counting on it. I hope you will be sensitive enough to find people, even find yourself. But I would not be surprised if you had already blown so many opportunities to do that, you’re not sure you should make any promises.

The movies don’t help. Those people are getting found all the time! We love watching it happen — why else would we watch the Hallmark Channel so religiously? The first example that comes to my mind is “Dear Even Hansen.” That might be because I’ve seen a few choirs of young people giving their hearts to singing the main song: “You Will Be Found.” The hope of being found is apparently a universal feeling, so this song has been sung around the world a few times. The other side of the song is moving, too, so people feel terrible when they realize they didn’t look for someone before they got left alone. The the song has made a lot of people cry.

But I think the song promises too much. You might not be found and need to do something about it yourself. What’s more, everyone might be waiting for you to show up rather than looking for you, or might be kind of paralyzed by the idea you might not want to be found by them, or might not be too aware or even able to notice you’re gone. You might need more than what humans can provide. Wonder about those things as you listen to the song. I provided the lyrics for you.

Have you ever felt like nobody was there?
Have you ever felt forgotten in the middle of nowhere?
Have you ever felt like you could disappear?
Like you could fall, and no one would hear?

Well, let that lonely feeling wash away
Maybe there’s a reason to believe you’ll be okay
‘Cause when you don’t feel strong enough to stand
You can reach, reach out your hand

And oh, someone will come runnin’
And I know they’ll take you home

Even when the dark comes crashing through
When you need a friend to carry you
And when you’re broken on the ground
You will be found

So let the sun come streamin’ in
‘Cause you’ll reach up and you’ll rise again
Lift your head and look around
You will be found

You will be found
You will be found
You will be found
You will be found

The message most people latch onto when they hear Evan Hansen sing is “You are not alone.” For all you people feeling alone even though you are in good relationships, I can say “You are not alone” – maybe you are not together with your loved one the way you wish you were, but there is more than your wishes. And for those of you who didn’t find someone who needed you, you are not alone, either. We all carry a lot of shame, but that doesn’t mean you are alone with it.

What we can do to be found and find

I remember thinking my mother decided not to find me and just left me alone. That hurt. I did not ask her about her motivation, but surely she could not have been unaware I was gone somewhere! – after all, she could hear me stealing candy from the cupboard a mile away! When I finally went out and pulled on her dress and got an irritated, “I’m talking on the phone!” That fact did not undo my feeling.

Your adult loved ones might be just as difficult. Dealing with your mate’s attachment issues can feel perilous, but it is so helpful if you do!  Here are a few things to notice and try if you’d like to feel found and like to feel adept at finding people.

1) See one another. In my opinion, Mom should have put down the phone and given me some loving eye contact. That might have demonstrated I was important and not just a nuisance. Same for mates; they need validation and reassurance.

She also could have kept track of me. It is OK to keep track of your mate; you’re not impinging upon their freedom or losing your own if you do. You might need to negotiate how much closeness and how much distance your relationship needs in order to get to your “happy medium.” But you’ll probably be happier if you try.

I have known a few people who say, “I think I will be happier if I don’t try. That kind of noticing is way too much to ask.” In that case the song would be “You are alone.” Because everyone is working out how to attach their whole life. They at least need to be seen.

2) Be yourself, not God. If someone asks to be seen it does not make you God, as if you could be all-seeing, all knowing and the answer to someone’s prayers. Don’t say “No” because you already think you will fail. Everyone fails. You’re probably good enough, even if you are facing a need in your partner that demands more than you have.

Facing the “demand” is what a lot of people mean when they talk about “showing up.” You stop hiding and risk finding. Just don’t take on all those expectations as if you are responsible to succeed at them. Just keep moving into your true self.

3) Listen. Listening for someone matters. They might be making a distant noise in their closet. If it seems too demanding to be so intense, your heart might need to get bigger. All intimate relationships grow our hearts. For instance, a client assumed his wife was self-reliant, but she was really a person who had to fend for herself because no one else did. She would say how needy she was and then behave like she was not needy. It was easier to relate to the unneedy one. But she was left feeling the ancient feeling of being left alone she hated so much. He learned to listen better and to move into what he heard.

4) Try not to hide. When I expected my mother to find me when she did not have a clue about what I’d decided to to, it was a recipe for not getting what I wanted. Fortunately, I did not hide in the closet every day trying to train her to find me on demand! But it would not be surprising if you and I were stubborn enough to try something like that.

We feel it is unjust to have to change rather than someone else changing. “Others seem to get found, why shouldn’t I be cared for like that?” If we just suffer the injustice of it all, the person who is loving you the best they can becomes someone who just holds out on you, but all the while you’re the one in the closet. It may pain you to do so, but you may need to come out and make yourself known, rather than insisting someone else has to do the work.

5) Make sure someone is listening. It takes quite a bit of humility to ask for what we really want. When you dare to do it, be sure to help the one you’re asking hear you. If I say, “I want to feel found. I want you to see me” in a way they can’t hear, that’s not really their fault. If I am just hurt and angry and I make them seem like a fool or a fiend when I tell them, their defenses will spring into action. Then we won’t be on the subject of what I am really hoping any more. We need to help people hear us now that we are adults. The crib is long gone. Being weak in a strong way is rarely a good  way to get what we need.

6) Be found by God. Jesus is well known for saying he is seeking the lost in order to give them life and joy. So there is ONE person who is interested in finding you. There is a hopeful verse in Jeremiah about this big part of God’s love:

For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon Me and go and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. And you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart.  I will be found by you, says the Lord, and I will bring you back from your captivity. — Jeremiah 29:11-14

I love “I will be found of you.” The best way to be found by some one is to be found of them. You are more likely to be found if you let them see you and struggle gracefully with them. To be fair to Evan Hansen, the movie goes on to teach just that. He needs to let himself be known and go through the pain of being accepted as he really is. He gets way down the road to being his true self, as a result.

Artists like the people who made “Dear Evan Hansen” keep coming up with ways to tell the parables of living in love because 80% of us are preoccupied with how to be known and loved and how to know and be loving every day. We’re the sought seekers we were created to be.

Jesus will face your shame with you

A life in the Spirit, Doing Theology, Spiritual direction, , , , , ,

My most-recent favorite book is Face to Face: Knowing God Beyond Our Shame (2023) by Fr. Stephen Freeman. Freeman is an archpriest in the Orthodox Church in America so, for me, he adds an interesting lens to look at life in Christ. I admit I am more familiar with the “Orthodox” church of the first 500 years of Christianity than I am with the one growing up in the United States, so I am enjoying his helpful reframing of how we understand shame through informed by some very old theology with some psychology thrown into the mix.

Jesus enters our shame

The Bible beautifully describes how Jesus is healing our toxic shame and teaching us to endure the reformative and sometimes transformative value of our natural shame responses. Freeman says:

The drama of salvation is described in this divine reversal: God has come among us in Christ, emptying Himself of His glory. Instead of glory, He enters into shame—even the shameful death of the Cross. And entering into that shameful death, He destroys death and ascends in glory. He conquers death by death. He overcomes shame by shame.

That summary may sound a bit foreign to your ears, not because it is foreign to the Bible, but because most American Christians have been taught Jesus came to solve our sin problem. We’ve been taught that sin leads to death rather than death leads to shame and then sin. But look at two iconic pieces of scripture on the subject and see where the Bible starts the discussion:

I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard; I hid not my face from shame and spitting. — Isaiah 50:6 (RSV)

Jesus is the suffering one Isaiah was talking about. He did not hide from the shame we experience, like we do. Many newer English translations trade the word “shame” here for “insults,” keeping the experience about abuse from oppressors. But the older versions are more correct, I think. Because there is an inner experience of injury to the soul the Messiah is entering as well as an outer. The Orthodox Jewish Bible expands it well for us:

I [Moshiach] offered My gev (back) to them that deliver blows, and My lekhi (cheeks) to them that pulled out [the beard]: I hid not My face from kelimot (humiliations, shame) and rok (spitting, saliva).

Paul makes it clear that the Savior‘s main target for our redemption is our shame. Jesus frees us from our slavery to death and sets humanity on a corrected course toward the fullness of our glory. Jesus left his joy and freedom behind in order to become small enough to fit into our shrunken humanity, bound by the shame of our bondage. He did not dominate us with his splendor

but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
assuming human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a human,
     he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross. — Phil 2:7-8

So please dial down the punitive theology

Since the lawyers and governmental types took over theology in the 1600’s, the preponderant image of the Lord’s work on the cross has been penal, meaning it is a courtroom drama. It says we are sinners who deserve to be punished and only God can stand in for us. He takes our blame because someone needs to be blamed. The most important thing is: who is right and who has rights.

The substitution analogy is not useless. But it breaks down if you push it too far, since it would mean the work of Jesus was about God not being able to let injustice pass unpunished, so he punished himself (or, as some object, abused his Son). What’s more, the actual perpetrators of sin do not receive the “justice” warranted since someone else took it. The Bible does paint the substitutionary atonement picture in serval places, but I think it was meant to be more metaphor than logistics. Paul, in particular, thinks law, in general, and the Mosaic Law, in particular, is a tutorial for something greater, not an everlasting rubric, since Jesus is the definition of the law and the law is love.

Rather than just solving the problem of sin and the resulting guilt, Jesus is entering our shame. In our era people have solved the problem of sin by acting shamelessly. Donald Trump is the flowering of that method. I have often said that Larry David was the prophet of that new “freedom.” But even though people have tried to change the subject, shame keeps bubbling up. My clients keep revealing to me how our trouble with shame will never be “rediscovered” after this generation is done with its version of fig leaves; it is an ongoing, core experience everyone has been weathering since childhood. It is setting the course of our relationships and coloring how we see ourselves. Freeman says,

We are unaccustomed in our culture to thinking of sin and shame as sharing a connection. We have been formed and shaped in the world of guilt and punishment. If we experience shame, we suppose, it is because other people are seeking to shame us. Thus we are likely to imagine that the shame in our lives is external, the result of social ills. If we fix society, our shame will disappear. This is not a surprising approach, given that our habits have long been directed toward sin as an external problem. But other people, regardless of our situation, are not our problem. The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said, “Hell is other people.” He must not have spent much time alone.

We are carrying the problem — and it is not just about doing the right thing or not. Our problem is about not being in right relationship with God, ourselves and others. Our lack of communion with God leaves us ashamed of our fraudulence and incapacity.

It is death that shames us

Back when I was a boy Baptist, sin was that main topic. There was a list of things in the back of the hymnal we were to do and not to do if we intended to be a heaven-bound Baptist. The covenant included being “exemplary in our deportment” (which in our church included not dancing, smoking or card playing), and  abstaining “from the sale and use of intoxicating drinks as a beverage” (which is self-explanatory). Our leaders had been influenced by the “holiness doctrine” that purported to perfect us and we determined to be pure. I was ashamed of not being pure and I was not that bad before I was given the assignment!

The theology was so much about me choosing, the whole thing became more about my holiness than God’s! It took a long time to learn the Adam and Eve story is not about “You idiots, you disobeyed God and now you will be punished forever when you could have had the  Garden of Eden!” It is more about “You poor people! You got out of communion with God. You turned your backs and now you are dying. You were meant to live forever.” My shame was not about my inability to do everything right. It was about being out of communion with God. With my non-Christian clients I can help identify the shame, which is often hidden under self-destruction or avoidance. But it is hard to cure it if one goes at it on their own steam, even when your therapist loves you! Freeman says:

Sin is much better understood as disease, fatal in its consequences. Sin, in a form of shorthand, can be described as “death at work within us.” At its most fundamental level, sin is the rupture of communion. We were created for a life of communion with God. In our sin, we have severed that communion and become strangers to God. Indeed, we have become strangers not only to God but to creation, to other people, even to ourselves. In an interesting side note, the secular shame researcher Gershen Kaufman describes shame as “broken communion.” Shame itself is not sin (or even sinful). Rather, it is an emotional signal that accompanies severed communion. It is, therefore, one of the things that sin feels like.

In John 6, Jesus teaches us about the mystery of communion with Him.

 “I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread that I shall give is My flesh, which I shall give for the life of the world. . . . Most assuredly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For My flesh is food indeed, and My blood is drink indeed. He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him.” — John 6:51, 53–56

I think my childhood teachers taught on these verses. But I think they were mainly talking , as usual, about how Jesus would raise us up on the last day if we trusted in his work on the cross. For me, and many others I suspect, most of what was happening in the mind of my teachers happened in the past. The communion ceremony was like the pledge of allegiance to the Christian constitution more than an emblem of the present communion we were experiencing and deepening. As I remember, if one didn’t “take communion” it usually meant they were too ashamed of themselves to dare. Ugh.

The shame of not being qualified to take communion due to sin and shame turns the Lord’s teaching on its head, doesn’t it? Jesus invites us to live, not die — the fact that we may be as good as dead right now is his main interest. No matter how much we think our good behavior or genius will keep us alive, we are all going to die — that is, we will be given over to the death we prefer if we do not commune with Jesus and live forever with him. Freeman says:

We were created to live in communion with God. His life is our life. When we read about the creation of Adam, we see that he becomes a “living soul” when God breathes into him. Without the life of God, we are dead clay. The warning regarding the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is not a threat of punishment; rather, it is a warning that eating of it will result in death. To break communion with God by ignoring His commandment is to live as though we had no need of God. It is to spit His breath back at Him and demand that we live alone. The result is death, and with the alienation of death, we enter into its companion: shame.

Communion with God is a breath by breath, moment by moment, day by day, year after year experience of discerning and moving with the Spirit. Not doing that is the essence of sin and the seed of the frailty and worthlessness we experience as shame. I do think people perfect their capacity to be OK with their shame. But I say human life without God is, in the end, no life at all, even if some people purport to be happy with their self-selected nothingness.

If you sit down with your frailty, worthlessness or nothingness, you might feel an intolerable shame well up in the silence. Memories, faults, criticisms, or scorn might start collecting. Jesus will enter that place in you just as he willingly and lovingly entered humanity. His presence is divine therapy that heals our shame. As Jesus says, “I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly” (John 10:10).

***********

Today is Aidan of Lindisfarne Day! Connect with him at The Transhistorical Body.

 

Hope: The quality of aliveness in our own backyard

A life in the Spirit, Film/TV, , , , , , ,

Contemplative prayer is often, even typically, presented in the language of personal healing and self-discovery:
I enter stillness in order to purify my unconscious, heal the emotional wounds of a lifetime, find my true self, and so on.
But there is a natural self-corrective mechanism built right into the prayer itself if we are willing to take it far enough:
my true self is found only in communion with others.
The personal can find its identity only in relation to the whole, which is the mercy of God.
— Cynthia Bourgeault in Mystical Hope

My own backyard

This month I kept running into hope. Sometimes it made me cry.

  • As soon as Pastor Sean began to speak at Algernon Baker’s memorial, I teared up. He insisted we turn into hope, since we knew our brother was ready to wake up into the dawn of his eternity. Then the young adult choir sang the most joyful song I have ever heard.
  • Then I watched my latest episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and felt something good is happening in the world because this moralistic, positive, super-woke show can still manage to get made and appear on the Ellisons’ network.
  • Then, a TikTok  doctor and a new book I am reading reminded me that my grandmother’s attention was one of the ways God reached out to me and undermined the toxic shame we all deal with.

I felt a bit by Dorothy, who has always been strangely central to my theology:

hope
Click the pic if you want to see the scene

We’re often like Dorothy waking up from her vision and realizing her heart’s desire was right under her nose the whole time and among those who love her. What a wonder it is that so many of us are drawn beyond our ordinary awareness and turn away from the death-dealing world to find God “in our own back yard,” so to speak.

Hope is that “quality of aliveness” we feel

As Cynthia Bourgeault ends her book Mystical Hope she tries to sum up her profound teaching about finding hope right under our noses — while rolling down Broad St., even,  and especially in the moments of love we give and receive. She teaches us to find hope in a new way — not as merely an object of our desire, but as the Subject who is as near as the turn of our hearts. I am going to quote quite a bit of it for you:

I have tried to suggest a new way of picturing hope. In this new positioning, the underlying sense of corporateness is physically real, the that “electromagnetic field of love” is the Mercy – and the Mercy is the body of Christ. Through this body hope circulates as a lifeblood. It warms, it fills, it connects, it directs. It is the heart of our own life and the heart of all that lives.

Hope’s home is the innermost point in us, and in all things. It is a quality of aliveness. It does not come at the end, as the feeling that results from a happy outcome. Rather, it lies at the beginning, as a pulse of truth that sends us forth. When our innermost being is attuned to this pulse it will send us forth in hope, regardless of the physical circumstances of our lives. Hope fills us with the strength to stay present, to abide in the flow of the Mercy no matter what outer storms assail us. It is entered always and only through surrender; that is through the willingness to let go of everything we are presently clinging to. And yet when we enter it, it enters us and fills us with its own life – a quiet strength beyond anything we have ever known.

And since that strength is, in fact, a piece of God’s purposiveness coursing like sap through our own being, it will lead us in the right way. It sweeps us along in the greater flow of divine life as God moves – and in the western religions, God does move – toward the fulfillment of divine purpose which is the deeper, more intense, more subtle, more intimate revelation of the heart of God.

Long before we knew Jesus, we had experiences of being swept up in the flow of God’s good purpose — maybe beside a stream like the one above. This “quality of aliveness” was called “righteousness” in the Old Testament, as in Psalm 23: “He restores my soul; he guides me in the paths of righteousness.”

Unfortunately, many people read that couplet as if the psalmist means we will be OK if we stay on the path, within the lines of a moral template so we will succeed at building an ideal replica of God’s kingdom and be justified by it. Far from that egoic reading, the psalmist is reminding us we live in a Spirit-charged “force field” (as we might picture it), a force field in which everything we do must move in order to come to fruit.

The reality of God with us, restoring and guiding us, is much more important than my ability to stay on “the path.” The psalmist is calling the inner (our souls) and the outer (our feet) to sync up, to move with the Great Mover who is giving us life. As our souls are restored and our feet are guided, Jesus says, we become good trees that bear good fruit. As Psalm 1 says, we are then like good trees planted by flowing streams of righteousness.

The quality of aliveness “in Christ”

In the New Testament, Paul calls this territory “in Christ.” In Christ we find that quality of aliveness we were made to enjoy, in which we hope.

To [his saints] God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. It is he whom we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone in all wisdom, so that we may present everyone mature in Christ….I want their hearts to be encouraged and united in love, so that they may have all the riches of assured understanding and have the knowledge of God’s mystery, that is, Christ himself, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge…As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving…For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have come to fullness in him, who is the head of every ruler and authority. – Colossians 1:27-2:10

The phrases “Christ in us” and “us in Christ” are another way to say “moving in the Mercy.” For Bourgeault, the mercy of God is a place of assured understanding, a place of loving  mystery which continues to unfold as we experience it in our hearts. As we are “encouraged and united in love,” Christ in us is the “hope of glory.” In Christ we come to “fullness.”

Paul sounds a lot like Cynthia Bourgeault as she piles up metaphors and viewpoints, circling around the mystical hope she can feel better than describe. Her everyday way to live “in Christ” is meditation that turns her in toward that golden kernel of her true self, protected and saved by God. In a somewhat seamless movement, that everyday prayer then turns her out to write her book, knowing that no self-giving love is wasted in the world, not on her and not on us, either. Our prayer, especially the prayer of meditation, is not only what saves us from the world, it is also the key thing we do to save the world. It is our way to hope, our way to become a people of hope, and our way toward embracing others with hope.

I have enjoyed sharing these five posts inspired by Bourgeault’s book. I’d love to hear how your own prayer was encouraged or developed as a result. Let me know.

More on Mystical Hope
Previous: Mystical hope in a deteriorating world
Swimming in the Mercy: The experience of hope
Anxious and tired: Meditation that turns us toward hope
There is hope: Death will help you enjoy it

 

 

 

There is hope: Death will help you enjoy it

A life in the Spirit, Film/TV, , , , ,

I’m still savoring the memory of Cynthia Bourgeault’s book, Mystical Hope, laying in my lap, a tear trickling down my cheek and a smile broadening across my face in deep relief and joy. I had just reached the part in which she quoted a little piece of a Thomas Merton cassette (!) speaking to his novices.  As I read it, I laughed out loud, since he recalled an image that was very similar to one I had experienced in prayer during a rich period of my thirties — an image that has sustained me ever since.

God is near to us at the point that is just before final destruction. Take away everything else down to that point of final destruction, and the last little bit that’s left before destruction, a little kernel of gold which is the essence of you–and there is God protecting it…And this is something terrific. …[We] don’t normally get into that center unless we’re brought to the edge of what looks like destruction. In other words, we have to be facing the possibility of the destruction of everything else to know this will not be destroyed.

Merton sounds a bit like he is inviting his novices to jump off a spiritual cliff, doesn’t he?! I suppose he is. I suppose I jumped. But he is also inviting relative beginners into a life of prayer, like my three previous posts have been doing. It is a life that leads to the place of surrender and revelation he describes in the quote above. It is a life filled with the mystical hope that does not come through ordinary means.

Meditation “puts us immediately in touch with that ‘little kernel of gold which is the essence of’ us and allows us to begin to recognize it and trust it.” That might be the best feeling in the world.

Unfortunately, your faith journey may not have led you into meditation yet. So much religion these days relies on a “good offense” or a “good defense.” On the one hand, many Christians offer victorious living when they promise an overcoming hope that seems hollow in the cancer ward, or when the baby is born with disabilities, or when the house is destroyed and a lifetime of memories seems washed away. On the other hand the Buddhist track and most of what “mindfulness” is about teaches us an equally deficient  approach when they call us to release our preoccupation with death and suffering in order to experience blissful, mindless oneness with all life.

Deeper than having a good offense or good defense and more in line with the Lord’s example is mystical hope. On the other side of suffering and death is hope. Bourgeault says, “Only if we are still hanging on…only in the measure that we fail to yield completely into the mercy of God, will hope fail us. If we are willing to take it all the way, it will take us all the way.”

Jesus went beyond destruction to hope.

This the journey of yielding completely Jesus took all the way. When he was arrested, he told his disciples to put away their swords because he, like us, needed to pass through his own powerlessness and hopelessness. He purposely did not put his hope in some nuclear arsenal of angels or call on a victory-making God to save him. When he was in the garden praying and meditating (as the disciples fainted), he found that “protecting nearness” at the center of reality. How he went “to the edge of what looks like destruction” is an example for us. It is the Lord’s death as well as his resurrection that is our salvation.

Words on a page don’t work as well as art to explain this basic Christian truth. But this old song gets to it:

O soul, are you weary and troubled?
No light in the darkness you see?
There’s light for a look at the Savior,
And life more abundant and free.
Turn your eyes upon Jesus,
Look full in His wonderful face,
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim,
In the light of His glory and grace.
Through death into life everlasting
He passed, and we follow Him there;

The wonderful old movie, Babette’s Feast, gets at it, too. In this film the wonder centers around a sumptuous meal that reveals many secrets. It is like another last supper, only this one is full of old Danish people facing death. They are gathered full of faith and full of their regrets. The General gets up and names the wonder that is happening among them, the same wonder that was seen when Jesus, the living truth, yielded himself faithfully into the Mercy. The General says, “Mercy and faithfulness have met; justice and peace have embraced.” And all the joys and regrets become one in love as the Alpha and Omega is present in fullness.

There is hope

In our Transhistorical Body blog, we look toward the people who have gone before us for the assurance that this wild thought is true: if I move over the edge of destruction, God will still protect the golden kernel of the true me. If I dare to meet the living God, my old self — my fallen, scarred, angry, abandoned, intolerably vulnerable self, might die, but I will live. We get this assurance not only from our ultimate example, Jesus, but last week we celebrated Claire of Assisi, who could have quoted Albert Camus: “In the middle of winter I discovered in myself an invincible summer.”

There is hope.

I remember a letter to the our old church from a new member. He was telling the church his story before he made a covenant at the Love Feast. He had gone through so much — and went through a lot more, but even now he has hope. He wrote,  “There had always been an emptiness inside me and after my mom passed, I fell into the grips of addiction. When I moved to Philadelphia to get sober, I was fortunate enough to meet Jimmy , in what will always be a “God shot” to me….I was immediately drawn to Circle of Hope and I now realize I was also being called to Christ. This journey brings me joy and deep connection. At times Circle Of Hope is all I felt I had, but the fellowship, my Cell, and my growing relationship with Christ have filled me and helped me to thrive again.”

There is hope.

God is protecting that golden true self at the heart of each of us, calling us to meet in that open-to-the-Spirit place where life moves us and draws us. The everyday way to living comfortably and securely outside our present-oriented injuries and fears and into our eternal now with God is the listening, feeling and releasing prayer of meditation. It seems like a new way, as Bourgeault says, “beyond linear, discursive thinking” into “inspired visionary knowing where Christianity finally becomes fully congruent with its own highest truth and its mystical treasures can be received into an awakened heart.”

If all that beautiful teaching from Merton and Bourgeault seem a bit much to you, just listen to Jesus and see where he leads. Or meditate on Claire of Assisi when you pray. Or appreciate the love that guards the members of the church, even when they have just been called back from far away.

There is hope.

More on Mystical Hope
Previous: Mystical hope in a deteriorating world
Swimming in the Mercy: The experience of hope
Anxious and tired: Meditation that turns us toward hope

 

Anxious and tired: Meditation that turns us toward hope

A life in the Spirit, Psychological growth, , , , , , , , , , ,

The notion that God is absent is the
fundamental illusion of the human condition.
— Thomas Keating

“Fundamental illusion” can be a way of life! But it does not have to be that way. Most of the wise people we all admire have a story about how they moved beyond their self-contained understanding to become who they became. Some found a hope deep inside that is vastly better than wishing and waiting for one’s illusions to be validated.

I think the best and deepest way that leads beyond ordinary, self-limited thinking and into hope is the way of meditation. Cynthia Bourgeault, my inspiration for this series, agrees:

Meditation, more than any other spiritual practice, nurtures the latent capacities within us that can perceive and respond to divine hope. In the classic language of our tradition, these capacities are known as the “spiritual senses.”

That little paragraph might have seemed so weird to a few of you, it drove you right back into your egoic thinking! So hang on.

“Egoic thinking” is another way of describing our limited, ordinary awareness. It simply means we humans have the capacity to stand outside ourselves and look at ourselves. As far as we know, we are the only species who can do this. Tigers don’t think, “I have a quick temper.” And whales don’t say, “I am really glad to be going north; I’m a cold-water kind of whale.” And tigers and whales don’t write children’s books where tigers and whales seem cute when they reflect. Humans can imagine these different realities, looking back and forward, dreaming and visioning. It is a great thing about us.

we are drawn to meditation

Egoic thinking is great…until it’s not

The downside of this reflexive capacity, Bourgeault says, “is the tendency to experience one’s personal identity as separate — composed of distinct qualities, defined by what holds one apart from the whole.” We can basically live in “our own little world” (my mother used to say!), revolving around our own sun — ourselves.

As a result of being alone and trapped within the boundaries of our limited senses, we all have a separation anxiety streak running through us because we really need and want to be together, not separate. To feel secure, the ego needs a lot of reassurance from others. It can’t get enough praise, security, accomplishment, etc. to help it overcome that dreadful sense of being left out, or thrown out, or just generally failing to be a full self in community. You can see how quickly we have all been driven into sin by this innate anxiety. And you can see why Jesus calls us to see our true selves in God’s grace, to look at ravens and lilies flourishing, to stop worrying and “seek first for the kingdom of God” as the means of becoming free of what is depriving us of joy.

Field of Lilies – Tiffany Studios, c. 1910.

Meditative prayer is a way of discovering and nurturing the latent capacity to see and experience life beyond our ordinary awareness. We can all perceive and respond to “the Mercy” I talked about last week. Nurturing our spiritual awareness is the primary way to experience the “mystical hope” I talked about the week before, the hope which is near and not the outcome of all our striving.

The centering prayer Bourgeault teaches is “a basic, no-nonsense method of self-emptying — simply letting go of thoughts as they arise — to help practitioners break out of their compulsive attachment to thinking and entrust themselves to the deeper stillness of God.” [Here is Martin Laird’s take on it.] The essence of this kind of meditation is not keeping a perfectly clear mind. The essence is recognizing the moment when one is distracted and willingly turning back into the stillness of the Mercy, toward hope. The essence is turning toward the meeting place we have inside as an act of faith and honor; letting go of our own stuff and holding a space open for all God gives and all God is.

We need to get beyond self-awareness and its evil twin: self-centeredness

We have a “self” awareness that is beyond the egoic capacity that makes us human — we also have spiritual awareness. Meditation leads us out of ego-centered consciousness and into a space where we meet God.

You may know almost every other feeling you can have better than the feeling of communion with God! Even so, someone has said we can meet God without even trying by 1) having a near-death experience or by 2) falling deeply in love. I do not wish you the first short cut and I do wish for you the latter. But I wish for us most of all the careful cultivation of meditation, which is the everyday path to knowing and loving God. Meditation is the discipline that helps us “die daily” as Paul says he does, and helps us be one in love as he hopes we will be. The prayer of meditation puts a stick in the spokes of our outer awareness and leads us into the warmth and abundance of our inner awareness and into hope in the Mercy.

It is a hard world right now. Maybe you are pretty numb like a newscaster said she was after covering the damage Trump and Hegseth have done to Iran and to the future of the U.S.  Or maybe you are afraid of more smoke from Canada and the extreme weather of our new climate. If it were not a hard world, we’d probably make it one. So it is time to pray.

Have you listened to Jesus saying this to you lately?

Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens,
and I will give you rest. 
Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me;
for I am gentle and humble in heart,
and you will find rest for your souls.
For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

Basic to that easy yoke is the prayer of meditation. We keep turning to it in our anxiety and fatigue and it keeps turning us toward hope. 

Try it again. We certainly fit into the first two lines, for the most part. Maybe his “easy yoke” is meditation where we experience his gentleness and self-giving heart. As a result of staying in that “yoke” maybe we do find rest for our souls.  Sounds like Jesus would love to bring us into the hope he carries, even through his suffering, doesn’t it? 

More on Mystical Hope
Previous: Mystical hope in a deteriorating world
Swimming in the Mercy: The experience of hope

Swimming in the Mercy: The everyday experience of hope

A life in the Spirit, Spiritual direction, , ,

Lynn Bauman’s poetic rendition of Psalm 103:11 warms my heart:

As the heavens reach beyond earth and time,
we swim in mercy as in an endless sea.

I need to hang on to that deeply hopeful picture! Don’t you? Read it again and feel it. May that deep, old biblical truth ascend as new Christian memes lose their strength.

I am longing for sayings like this to descend:

“Only God can turn a mess into a message, a test into a testimony, a trial into a triumph, a victim into a victory.”

And

“I know God has a plan. I pray for direction to follow it, patience to wait on it, and knowledge to know when it comes.”

I don’t think those hopefully-descending proverbs are evil. And I can honestly say they have generally proven true in my life — unlike for many other people I know. But they are more based on outcomes than connection.

I object to the way those cliches reduce hope to something that must be proven. They beg skepticism: “What if the mess does not become a message?” and “We got divorced and it still hurts.” and “I lost my leg in Jordan and I am impoverished as a result.” You may be kinder than I am, but televised stories of trials that turned to triumph often feel a little thin or strained to me. And, what’s more, neglected children learn to turn their trials into triumph because there is no one taking care of them. They only trust themselves, not some parental God. They often spend a lifetime proving they are worth caring about. They hear “turn a trial into a triumph” and there first reaction may be “One more thing to do.”

What’s more, I personally object to the idea that God has a specific “plan” as if she were making sure we get to her preferred outcome: the right job, the safe neighborhood, the healthy family that all “prove” God is good (and us, as a result). Even more, I dread the denial I am called to master in response to terrible outcomes that must be “part of  God’s plan” for me — while Kim Kardashian gets rich. People who have chronic illnesses or some unapproved identity can, indeed, take some comfort that this was somehow God’s plan for them,  but most people don’t have that kind of willpower. Isn’t that why the Barbie theme song was such a hit?

The mercy is not about me

My commitment to wait on the Lord is not the source of my hope. My passionate acts of goodness and faith do not necessarily result in hope. I can’t really manufacture hope. The Lord is my hope.

For God alone my soul waits in silence,
    for my hope is from him. — Psalm 62:5

Now you’ve read that line. Try waiting in silence for 30 seconds.

Thanks. Now I want to reinforce what the Psalm says. We are not the source of our hope. I  dare not apply my meager sense of what outcome I need in order to have it.

Even though we are not the source of hope, the source is deep within me. It flows to me with unrestrained abundance. It is so endless it would be more accurate to say I am deeply within it. The Mercy is like an ocean.

Maybe we are all like the proverbial little fish who just heard a rumor and swam up to his mother and asked, “Mama, what is water? I have to have it!” We are immersed in mercy like that, the everlasting, living water of hope. We don’t lack hope because we are doing something wrong so it is far away, or because we are waiting for what we expect to be fulfilled some day in the far future and just need to be pateint. We lack hope because it is so close, like air, or like a feeling, such as love. It is more intimate than our own sense of being.

As the heavens reach beyond earth and time,
we swim in mercy as in an endless sea.

Maybe The Mercy is more real than we presently are

Cynthia Bourgeault in her book Mystical Hope, describes the “embodying fullness” in which we live as “the Mercy.” Mercy is the water in which we swim. Mercy is what we know of God and the light by which we know it.

I adopted “Mercy” as my main prayer when I got used to the Jesus prayer: “Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” As I was riding my bike through town, avoiding car doors, potholes and pedestrians, I realized one day that the curses rising up in me, which added to my frustration and sense of alienation, could be replaced with a one-word prayer that turned me toward my center, toward a realization that I was still in the water, still swimming. Now I am likely to face a distressing or even hope-draining moment with “Mercy!” So much better.

Bourgeault explains “the Mercy” so beautifully:

When we think of mercy, we should be thinking first and foremost of a bond, an infallible link of love that holds the created and uncreated realms together. The mercy of God does not come and go, granted to some and refused to others. Why? Because it is unconditional – always there, underlying everything. It is literally the force that holds everything in existence, the gravitational field in which we live and move and have our being.

Just like that young fish looking for water, we “’swim in mercy as in an endless sea.’ Mercy is God’s innermost being turned outward to sustain the visible and created world in unbreakable love.” We see that so clearly as Jesus turns himself out on the cross and God turns creation inside out to return him to life.

The interpreters of the work of Christ keep looking for words to describe what they experience. Paul says:

Hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. — Romans 5:5

The basic work of the Christian ends up being a quest for the “water,” for an everyday, moment by moment experience of The Mercy.

It only sounds easy

Preachers often get up front and give the congregation a lesson in CBT: how to change you mind and thought patterns to get a Christian outcome. Some people get the lessons and many others get the shame of never effecting the perfect outcome. Either way, we are kind of in charge of making our own hope or responsible for the lack of it. The Jesus way is much deeper than what we can already do, if we just try hard enough.

If the narrow way of living in mystical hope were easy, we’d all be hopeful. It isn’t easy, but it is possible. The more we experience it, the more we get used to our true selves. Instead of living in a world run by scientific principles waiting to be proven again, or worse, a nobody-in-charge universe run by whoever manages to get into power, we become aware that we are “inside a warm-hearted and purposive intelligence, a coherence” of which we are part of the expression. We live in the creation of the Mercy.

Instead of God as a distant “other” we are restored to God as our “source and substance, the ground of our own arising, the foundation of our hope.” I want to talk more about how we might experience this reality in the coming weeks, since, for me, once experienced, it is undeniable and irreplaceable — and we really need it these days.

As I wrote that sentence, I was on hold with Citibank, which bought my credit card from Barclay’s, which did not process a fraudulent purchase for $15K (!!) before they unloaded me. Then Citi did not follow up after I called them. Now i was starting over a month later! Welcome to 2026. The climate-change-induced storm last week left a log from a dead tree in my back yard. The brazenly-corrupt Donald Trump is still president and desperate to undermine the elections which people think are their only hope.  Yes. I am turning into my irreplaceable source of hope as I write. It feels good. The turn is energizing. God is my hope.

So for now, I will leave you in hope. Whatever energy you exercise striving for some outcome you hope for would be better used for turning in to hope and swimming for joy in the Mercy. Then, when whatever outcomes emerge, miraculous or not, you can swim right up to them.

[Part One of this series: Mystical hope in a deteriorating world.]

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Today is Flannery O’Connor Day! Get to know her and her wild God at The Transhistorical Body.

Mystical hope in a deteriorating world

A life in the Spirit, , , , ,

We founded my former church, Circle of Hope, in a ripe moment of history and the outcome was beautiful. Then it wasn’t. And then Eliza Griswold wrote a book about how badly it all turned out that sealed its legacy through her lens. It made some of her reviewers weep.

When it all started in 1995, we sat in a small circle discussing what our name would be. We ended up with several versions of a name with “hope” in it. But some people did not like any of those versions. A few people (and in a circle of ten, a few is relevant!) thought it was just too much to put “hope” right out there in the church’s name.

Barack copied us?

Maybe they were right to be cautious. Regardless, they were certainly representative of many others, since many people think hope is far-fetched, even dangerous — mainly because they think it is something tied to outcome. If you are a “circle of hope” you invite expectations that might not be met.

So many people are laboring under all the “outcomes” required of them, and under all the “outcomes” they were promised which never came to fruit.

For many people, “hope” is an optimistic feeling — or at least a willingness to go on, because they sense things are going to get better. But is that sense about worn out  these days? What if you put “hope” right out there on your poster, like President Obama did, and then everything does not get better like you promised? Instead, there are drones, recession and bailouts. What if your church implies that Jesus is going to get you a job, provide a mate and cure your cancer and those things don’t happen? Won’t the name of your church just point out the fact that it did not happen? For some people, hoping just makes you look naive, at best, and like just another gaslighter, at worst.

We had a few people on our little team whose hopes had been dashed. What’s more, some of them had grown up in the church, where they even memorized Bible verses like in Psalm 116: “I love the Lord, because he has heard the voice of my supplication…I was brought very low and he helped me.” But their lives had not worked out just like the verse seemed to promise, empiricistettes as they were.

After a while, it is hard to figure out what to do with dashed hopes. Sometimes they are like a secret you would not disclose among people who still hope for some bright future.

I have memorized some Bible verses myself and I am an optimistic guy — and God has repeatedly helped me when I was “brought low.” Even so, I have never thought it was wise to make promises God was not going to keep, at least was not wise to act as if God were the Amazon of human want.

Another way of experiencing hope

The Bible does, indeed, promise God will meet our needs. But if you look deeper, it teaches that the promise is deeper than just meeting our expectations. I am re-reading a little book that beautifully points out there is another kind of hope represented in the Bible which is a complete reversal of our usual way of looking at hope in terms of outcomes. We can see that hope in Habakkuk 3:17-19 where the prophet dances on the heights even though the land is devastated, and we can see it when Jesus offers inside water for outwardly thirsty people in John 4:13-14, and we can see it in the “total immersion course” in the school of hope that the book of Job is where he ends up singing Job 19:25-26: “I know my redeemer lives.”

Cynthia Bourgeault calls this deeper hope “mystical hope” — and that is the title of her book, too. Mystical hope has three characteristics in contrast to our usual notions of hope. These usual notions, based on outcomes, are not bad, they just aren’t complete or entirely useful. She says, in light of the three biblical examples I just mentioned:

  • Mystical hope is not tied to a good outcome, to the future. It lives a life of its own, seemingly without reference to external circumstances and conditions.
  • This kind of hope has something to do with presence – not a future good outcome, but the immediate experience of being met, held in communion, by someone intimately at hand.
  • This hope bears fruit within us at the psychological level in the sensations of strength, joy , and satisfaction: and “unbearable lightness of being.” But mysteriously, rather than deriving these gifts from outward expectations being met, it produces them from within.

Our mystical hope

I think we had enough mystical hope when were were planting a church to work for good outcomes even when people thought they were not good enough. We came to know our existence was resistance. Our assessment of our value and impact did not define our worth.

But maintaining that view our ourselves was hard. We were just discovering the seismic shifts among the youth of the nation (our focus demographic) which experts have been talking about ever since. For instance, one week in 2017 our pastors passed around a couple of pieces that tested our hope. One was from the Census Bureau.

The map above shows the increase in the number of young adults (18-34) in the United States living at home with their parents in 2015 compared to 2005. The changes in that decade, and certainly the last preceding 40 years were staggering. More than 1 in 3 young people lived in their parents’ home in 2015. That was a huge increase in one decade. What’s more, of those people, 1 in 4 were idle; that is, they neither went to school or worked. Many people saw that reality as a poor outcome. Were all these people hopeless? Ten years later many of the men in the study are the incels of the manosphere.

The other piece the pastors passed around was about alone and lonely men. A journalist who researched psychology was pondering the horrible Las Vegas shooting. An apparently completely alone man was the shooter. As a “lone wolf” he was not that unusual among men. The author says:

As a man, you might be thinking, “Not me, I’ve got drinking buddies. I play poker with the guys. I’ve got friends.”

But do you have confidants? Do you have male friends who you can actually be vulnerable with? Do you have friends whom you can confide in, be 100% yourself around, that you can hug without saying “No homo,” without feeling tense or uncomfortable while you’re doing it?

For many men, the answer is “no.” So, we spend our time posturing instead.

From an early age, we have an unhealthy ideal of masculinity that we try to live up to. Part of that ideal tells us that Real men do everything on their own. Real men don’t cry. Real men express anger through violence.

The byproduct is isolation. Most men spend the majority of their adult lives without deeper friendships, or any real sense of community. Not to mention a complete inability to release anger or sadness in a healthy way.

Many woman feel exactly the same way, of course. And the evil ways of late capitalism have made a perfect environment to create unhealthy, isolated people — A.I. is just making it worse. I experience the outcomes all the time. Some days it just feels hopeless.

There is something other than bad outcomes

I want to say more about Cynthia Bourgeault’s book in the coming weeks. But for now, let me end with a quote from the early pages of Mystical Hope which talk back to twentysomethings who feel their future is bleak, and call to parents who feel their children are hopeless cases, and whisper to men and women who feel isolated and friendless, stuck in some pattern which feels hopeless. There is something deeper than your situation. Jesus has a promise that is better than you expect.

You’ll need to read her little book to get the full effect and all the references, but maybe you can get a taste from these lines:

  • Hope is not intended to be an extraordinary infusion, but an abiding state of being. We lose sight of the invitation – and in fact , our responsibility, as stewards of creation – to develop a conscious and permanent connection to the wellspring. We miss the call to become a vessel, to become a chalice into which this divine energy can pour; a lamp through which it can shine.
  • But what if we are intended to become this vessel, this body of hope? What if, in fact, this effervescent, “lightness-of-being” energy is the fuel that drives our human life toward its divine fulfillment? What if our insistence on treating it as a rare and exceptional phenomenon is a way of ducking the invitation that was permanently extended at the Samaritan well that blazing midday?
  • The journey to the wellspring, the to secret of Jesus, the Master of Galilee, is the great inner journey to which we Christians are called.

I am glad we put hope right out there in the name of our expression of the Church back in the day. It dared people not to meet Jesus. On the one hand, God produced outcomes that were MUCH greater than we imagined as we sat in a little circle of ten in our living room. We hoped good things would happen and even more than we hoped happened. So that’s great. But what about all that did not happen? What about when it all fell apart 20+ years later? What sustained us when we failed, broke up, died, lost faith, were betrayed and confused?

It is always that mystical hope, that turning toward the living water which energizes us to get up and live in joy as we follow Jesus through what is next.

 [As you can tell, this is the first in a set of updates of 2017 posts. They seem even  more important now than when I first wrote them.]

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Today is Pantaleon Day! The martyr who gave away his wealth and doctored the poor for free. He used to be wildly famous, as a result. Meet him at The Transhistorical Body.