Daily Space with God Epilogue and New Creation

The following thoughts from Phyllis Tickle capture an end to this course that feels appropriate. I'm not sure I can fully articulate the connection with her meditations but they compel me to a truthful life in which God is not just outside of my priorities, but rather is all. Saying that Jesus is number one in my life is yet to terribly misunderstand. He is supposed to be my life. "Stitches do take the time they are made in and spend it to change the people who are making them." What a blessing to lead lives of intention in God where disciplines and hard work provide for beautiful art and also transform us through the time taken. This is to live truthfully, and for me is existentialism at its best.

When hands and thoughts are occupied in the goodness of small and needful creation, the spirit rests that deep rest in which it can attend itself and be attended by the sacred. Distrustful always of the time and circumstance entwined in human perceptions, my father spoke with his attention the established prayers of the psalms and the church and tradition; but he sent his spirit, refreshed and whole, when he would speak as himself to God. The result, like its motivation, was a singular reverence as well as a simple gift that wanted passing along.

This is my last official semester at Hartford Seminary. After this I will be working on my special project, a thesis-type experience. What a wonderful way to transition to the next phase God has for me...

Ethics and the gas pump

Well, the semester is coming to a close. The class, Daily Space with God, which was the impetus for this blog only meets one more time. This week the instructor, whose doctorate is in theological ethics, said that he had a conviction that by and large teaching ethics is wrong. That trying to teach something that is to be intuitive by hypothetical situations at best has little fruit and at worst undermines ethics. It introduces possibilities to hurt, kill, steal that when living a godly life aren't really possibilities. His hypothesis is that making space with God and the resulting life of contemplation is where ethical behavior flows from.

He's right. Prior to this class and even in it, I had become a little disillusioned. It felt like "works." If I stopped and just was, then the reality would be that my closeness with God would become distance. And while there is truth to this, another truth is that in the discipline of creating space for God and living in him, the discipline becomes intuitive. Your first reaction isn't always anger, but it starts to move to love. Your first impulse isn't self-preservation, but it moves to sacrifice. Your reliance on happy circumstances starts to move toward contentment and peace beyond your environment.

A couple of days ago I did a really stupid thing. I had been filling up my car and went into the quick mart for a candy bar. When I came out, I started the car and slowly backed away. I then saw and heard the nozzle still in the tank. Ouch. So I stopped and pulled out the nozzle. It was dripping fuel, but didn't look damaged. My tank door got bent pretty good, but the fuel hole looked untouched. So I replaced the nozzle, continued the transaction and left. I was relative sure that everything was fine, but had this nagging feeling it wasn't. So the next morning I drove by and sure enough there was a bag over the nozzle and a large sign saying the pump was down. I called a few minutes later and the manager was unaware of what was going on and said to call back that afternoon. I stopped by and gave the afternoon manager my name and number. Now, at different points in this episode I was thinking, well they probably got me on tape, so it's good to confess - any time the cops are on the way, often I didn't think at all about it, no the cost of this thing is incidental to them but when they realize they have a "live one" they're going to rake me over the coals - better leave this alone, but in the end it was a matter of how much is peace worth? Isn't the righteous life worth a few buck, maybe many hundred few bucks? I can say that taking God seriously and working through daily disciplines didn't have me at a place where I immediately responded righteously (or I should say I allowed some entertainment not to respond righteously although the steps generally were), but it did give me the ability to decipher the truly important.

Transitions

As I was working through the Jesus Wreath rosary this morning, I was drawn to the transitional beads. In many respects this is where the real work seems to take place. This is where faith is tested, where things are unknown, where in life you're not so sure what the next phase will be. It's impractical to reproduce this reality in a rosary and it tells a story that is part of the beauty, but sometimes it's good to look at the transitions.

Crystals and beads

As I was looking for a replacement to the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, I came across a rosary called The Wreath of Christ. Rosaries have always been taboo, probably because they seem to mostly be associated with Mary and penance. This one seemed interesting. So I went to a bead shop to build one. Each bead has symbolic meaning. So, yesterday and today I've been going through the prayers and have found the exercise pretty neat. There is something nice about touching something that represents mystery or the texture of sand. I also found it relaxing.

As a side note, before I got to the bead shop, I went to the natural food store for direction and there was a crystal for 50% off. I have fond memories of crystals lighting up beautifully at a New Age grade school. My apartment's windows face the East and I've thought often about getting one for its beauty. I've been reluctant because of the New Age-ness of it. But in getting it, I intentionally reject that symbolism and replace it with God's love. I have prayed over it that it must submit to what Christ is doing in my home. Perhaps this has delved into the superstitious a little, but the last thing I want to do is dishonor the Lord.

One of the thoughts I had as I was putting this entry together was on consumerism. Am I excited about this because I bought this? That the process of buying to fulfill the place of God is really the issue? I hope not, but we'll see...

Below are prayers associated with the Jesus Wreath:

• God (large, gold)- you are immense, you are near, you are light, you are beyond what I can image, yet you are in me through the Holy Spirit
• Me (pearl) - you created me as your own image. Let me see your image in myself and reflected in who I am and all I do
• Baptism (large, dark green)- you have invited me. In your hands I commend my life. Those things of old are gone and all things are new in you
• Desert (brown with lots of texture) - keep me holy and I will be holy kept. Heal me and I will be healed. Draw me near yourself, and my heart will have peace. Jesus the Christ, give me mercy
• Carefree (blue with other colors)- I give away my load of worries. I receive your peace. I breath out worry and I breath in your peace
• God's Love (round, red) - O Lord, you love me more than anyone else and you love the world whole heartedly
• Sacrifice (diamond-ish, red) - let me love my neighbor with your love. Let me appreciate your sacrifice deeply. I pray on behalf of...
• Mystery (three small, gray with black) - I give thanks, I ask for, I pray... I think, I am happy for... There are mysteries and needs beyond what I can fathom or make sense of. The touch of the bead is a prayer. Lord, you know. Take care...
• Night (black with gold band and three spines)- out of the depths have I tried to you, O Lord. Lord, please hear my voice. May distance collapse and my love for you be without ill motive. Do not abandon me
• Resurrection (opaque, green) - here there is no time. Here there is no distance. I have peace in my heart because of you. Here is where your touch in humanity has and continues to change everything. Help me to live the resurrection in all of my being. Here I want to stand
  

Ignatius down the tubes, but where to go with Merton?

Last week I started the final phase of the classes' spiritual disciplines. It is The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius. It is a serius of exercises that help place you near what is being experienced through visualization. For example, you are to envision having a conversation with Jesus as he is on the cross regarding your sin. I once met a Catholic who was into visualization and for him it was using a spirit guide to channel the experience. To me this was demonic, so I was a bit skeptical. But the first week was good with a few caviats. There are tips, requirements, and expectations shrewn throughout the week with what seems to me little order. When you get to the end there are even more requirements that pertained to the week you just went through. You can tell what day it is, but there are notes, exercises, contemplations, and sections with no apparent heading.

The first week is developing an awareness of sin and working on a particular one. I found it to be very helpful. But it wants to seperate you from God so that you feel how bad you are. It even recommends self-mortification to get there with admissions such as cutting yourself, but not to the bone. I get that it's an exercise and that other pieces are the reunion, but it seems dangerous spending so much time on how terrible you are because of sin. That being said, it also brought me to a place where I had to deal with sin and it really brought home the reality of how horrible and distructive sin is.

Today I started the second week and got so frustrated that now I think I will go in a completely different direction. It's the mechanics. I spent twenty minutes trying to figure out what you do when and couldn't find the pattern. It also looks like this is something designed to spend days with not parts of hours. It just seems unsustainable without being on a retreat (which is what it was designed for as well as for the monastic life). It also requires more "translation" and grappling with Catholic theology that becomes distracting. In the first week, a Hail Mary was required. Easy enough to incorporate the Lord's Prayer. But this week is on the Kingdom of God and the premise that the Trinity were sitting in heaven and one day noticed that humanity was going to hell and decided to send Jesus. From a theological perspective, I've never known how to work salvation prior to Christ and yet be consistent with why Jesus' redemption alone would be needed, but have accepted the paradox. But the idea that they were drinking lemonade one day and they realized that humanity was going to hell seems crazy to me as well.

I find that I identify with Thomas Merton and the contemplative life. But he intentionally doesn't do the daily exercise bit. It is unauthentic to look at it that way. I get this, but am also frustrated because I need to start somewhere and the clock is ticking on this class.

Persecution prerequisites and the Kingdom

"Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

Well this will be my last Lectio Divina for the season. This one was amazing and I've found that though I've not been as faithful to it (and even less so to the Augustine daily readings), it has included the path of the next daily disciplines that start tomorrow. They will be meditative and contemplative in nature similar to the Lectio Divina, but I'll blog about that a later.

I came to today's like many, a little depressed, not expecting much, realistically seeing it as another thing to get done today. Literally, one of the issues to work through today is the litany of tons of stuff to get done. And this was one of them. I guess when push comes to shove, it shows some foundational stress that needs to be addressed before the foundation drastically impacted. But, even in the terrible motives, God met me. As I was going through it, I found I was in constant communication with the Lord. It finally occurred to me that this was the connection, I even said out loud, "This is the connection with you that I've been looking for, right?" The answer, "yes, Yes, YES!!!" This isn't new to me, but it seems to be something I forget easily.

Verses 11 and 12 are the most intimate of the Beatitudes. In the ESV, Jesus refers to "you" five times while in the others he never does. It is the first one where he places himself within the story. It recognizes that words hurt, that being misunderstood hurts. Particularly, when you are walking in truth and trying to live an honest life.

It is the first Beatitude where others are mentioned. There is an us and there is a them. But they are not the issue. You are. Jesus doesn't call us to a relationship of enemy and hero, rather he gives us a response to persecution. As I was reading it, I misread this word multiple times and instead of "persecution," I was inserting "prosecution." What an amazing mishap. What if this had been written in terms of prosecution? Our just recompense from the others? Or do they even see what Jesus is saying as persecution, but rather righteous prosecution? When someone messes up the biblical apple cart in our eyes we prosecute them! Perhaps a subtlety is that at any point the you and the others can easily reverse - be cautious.

Jesus connects persecution with the prophets of old. I have to stop for a second. Like anyone I've experienced injustice. I've experienced pain. I've experienced desperation. But that's not what Jesus is talking about. I would like it to be. Perhaps they fit under meek or poor in spirit, or even those who mourn, but not the persecuted. To have someone hate me and act upon that because of Jesus, no that is something altogether different. I was enjoying the Lectio Divina to this point and then I asked, "What does this call me to?" In Brian McLaren's The Secret Message of Jesus he talks about Jesus' scandal. I would have thought the scandal was his message, hope, God loves you, redemption, the repressed haven't been forgotten, tears are not arbitrary to God, etc. But the prophets had had similar messages from God for years. The scandal was that the Kingdom of God is now and through Jesus. It is so specific. It is so risking and unintuitive. How nice it is to talk generally of God's love and how one day his hand will be strong. How nice it is to speak of heaven as the down hill ski-ers' paradisee or the ultimate hiking location depending on your thing. And the scandal touches us today, Jesus holds us accountable for ushering the Kingdom in every moment of our life with him. You see, before I can be counted among the "reviled" and "persecuted," I actually have to be doing something. Not just counting myself as part of the church or stopping sin. These are important, but I suspect that this Beautitude throws light on all of the preceding ones. It's in living a life that is poor in spirit, mournful, meek,thrusting for righteousness, being merciful, being pure in heart, and being peacemakers that we engage others and the Kingdom of God is manifest. God's standard through Jesus incarnates humanity again and again and again through us. And the others around us can submit to the Holy Spirit's mercy and grace or revile. So the scandal is will I lead a prophetic life? They heard God's voice, did crazy things on occasion, had a life and message that were in full continuity, sometimes said things that the established biblical authority didn't particularly appreciate, took responsibility for their life and message, and realized that the change God was doing was beyond them and even beyond their life spans. It would be presumptuous to say God is calling all Christians to a life of Isaiah, John the Baptist, Amos, Elijah, etc. but I think we should pause and let him shape our lives in ways that may be more congruent to these figures than we realize.

I've read these verses hundreds, maybe into a thousand times and always read them like this, "If tough stuff happens to you as a Christian, rejoice because heaven will be better." I missed the prerequisite of the prophetic life in Christ altogether, and I think artificially grouped persecution and rejoicing as the first step and then reward in heaven as the second step. But what if rejoicing while being persecuted is the message? That as the insults are being hurled the response is gladness and rejoicing because in this interaction God can work. What if rejoicing is a form aviolencee against the other (Matthew 11:12) that keeps them in the role of other until they move under God's mercy? If this is the case then the only reason to distinguish the other is to rejoice. Kind of different from how it happens today. Perhaps the message isn't, "Grin and bear it, when you are dead it all works out," but rather, "Be the poor, mournful, meek, spiritually hungry,mercifull, pure, and peacemakers and this is how I (Jesus) intersect with humanity on a moment-by-moment basis, but resistance will come and you are still responsible for how it plays out. Rejoice and be glad, and it continues to move forward and that finds a reward beyond today. You can't lose and the Kingdom cannot be stopped."

As I was meditating on this, I kept looking for an apology from Jesus. If people are hurt "on my account" I feel bad. Jesus doesn't apologize and as I was meditating on this aspect, itoccurredd to me how much grander his perspective is than mine. The last sentence of the paragraph above came together after I had written this paragraph and just highlights this point majestically.

Discipline, labyrinths, and rockets

I am slowly transitioning to a new set of daily disciplines. At this point I should be firmly established in them, but am liesurely moving there. I'm still doing Lectio Divina, but it's also still sporatic. I would like to geth through the Beautitudes and like the tension of taking the time and also wanting to be done.

The day before yesterday I read in the Emotional Displipline book from this weekend a quote that I thought was helpful about discipline, it should not be considred "dull drudgery aimed at exterminating laughter from the face of the earth... the purpose of the disciplines is liberation from the stifling slavery to self-interest and fear." Stephen Covey makes the same point. You can see piano practice as confining or you can see having the freedom to play the paino anytime you want as liberation.

I've been skimming through a book on labyrinths and will include many of its thoughts in my spiritual portfolio. It essentially asks you to come to the labyrith with a particular perspective, for a particular end, and often they are opposites. I thought about that for daily disciplines, what if today I focus on God's grace toward me from a near death experience and how that impacts each area, and tomorrow meditate on what it means to have space with God?

Yesterday I was reading some of Thomas Merton's works on meditation and found them to be congruent with the labyrinth wisdom. He has an analogy of a rocketship. In study through the Holy Spirit we are launched to heights just outside of our natural abilities to achieve and then one of two things occurs. The fuel is spent and the rocks falls to the earth. Or there is an explosion and fireworks light the sky. As we get beyond study, we get beyond ourselves. The fireworks are Jesus changing us and our loving through that change. One of the things I think Merton is getting at is that the inner life or meditation and love of God is not destined to implode the person into themselves, but force us to live lives of love, service, justice, and the like in ways that we don't necessarily understand, but metaphysically in Christ. The rocket dies, but how it dies is something we can participate in. I don't think I've got the analogy 100%, but the elements of study, meditation, Jesus's love, and being changed beyond my abilities are extremely attractive to me.

This morning as I was doing the Lectio Divina (for those who are persecuted), I was meditating more on Merton's thoughts on meditation. There are those pictures that have two distinct images in one. A popular one shows an old woman's face and from another perspective, a beautiful young woman. It takes a discipline of non-focus in order to see the second image. Perhaps meditation is that taking study and knowledge as far as it can and then "loosing focus" so that something new and extraordinary in God is seen?

Emotion and change

So, I should transition from the daily Bible notes/Lectio Divina daily disciplines to a daily discipline that is uniquely mine. I've gotten tons of material, but find it difficult putting down an actual rigor.

The daily Bible notes and Lectio Divina was a significant struggle. Emotionally, I wasn't into it. Though, each time I blogged about it, I found profound messages. The blogging was actually part of the experience. I wonder if I was changed by it invisibly or if it was more of an intellectual pursuit with uncertainty being given higher credence than solidity?

Does it make sense to be stuck because one feels failure a possibility? I purchased a book on emotional discipline today. In reading it some time ago, I found that emotion was a barometer to point to reality. It may not be reporting reality, but even in distortion it is reporting a status. Emotion should not be discounted or seen as evil. But it is often associated with "the flesh." True enough in one sense, but then emotion has convicted in love and confirmed in discipline. It has provided confirmation and revealed spiritual poverty.

Others see us

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God.

In doing the Lectio Divina today, the first thing that struck me about this Beautitude is that it touches on reputation. The title or character for those who work for peace is that of a child of God. I suppose if God is calling one a child of God, that identity sticks. Can we live with that? Does this alone satisfy adequate love for God through Christ?

Perhaps our entire understanding of Christianity could be wrapped up in the work of peacemaking. Peace with God. Peace with the other in our life. Peace with those we love. Peace with ourselves. Peace with circumstance, abundance, and perseverance. Peace with nature. Peace to recognize our seperateness and unity with everything. Peace in paradox and contradiction. In the Hebrew Bible, peace "conveys the image of wholeness, unity, and harmony — something that is complete and sound."1 I wonder if all of reconciliation and incarnational reality can be summed up in peacemaking?


1 New International Encyclopedia of Bible Words
by Lawrence O. Richards
Copyright ©1985, 1991 by The Zondervan Corporation
Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530
All rights reserved.
Electronic text hypertexted and prepared by OakTree Software, Inc.
Version 1.0

Purity as Jesus speaks

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

I wanted to get on the other side of "pure" and "shall." I wanted this verse to speak to a universal salvation of all humanity if they had this quality of pure. I wanted the shall to be translated into "immediately, without question." I wanted definition and distinction and lines.

Jesus doesn't offer boundary in that way. One person will probably read this verse and weep because the difficulties of life have provided a forum for purity and indeed they see God. Real. Another will read this as an affirmation that no one is good enough to see God. Who can truly be pure? And there is substantial hermeneutical grist to keep the theologian chomping along. But, in the end, Jesus is the logos. Blessing, purity, sight of God come from his mouth.