Daily Christmas Pageants

Is there anything more hilarious than a child's Christmas pageant?

The nose picking, the mistakes, the forgotten lines, the improvised props, the enthusiastic children singing off-key at the top of their lungs while having no self-consciousness, the desperate adults trying to stage manage a heard of cats, the children with the dear-in-headlights...

Years ago I went to a church that had a live donkey in their pageant....which was fine, until the orchestra and choirs started in with their anthem, at which point it seems having a trained handler to manage the understandably terrified donkey would have been a wiser decision. I'm sure if I polled my readers you would have equally amusing recollections of well intended but epic failures at these kinds of events.

And who can forget that scene from the movie Love Actually, where the pageant includes children dressed up in lobster costumes arriving at the manger. Which at first seems a bizarre historical inaccuracy, but at second glance reminds us that all of creation would likely have come to this event given the chance.

But beyond their sheer entertainment value - and there is plenty of that no doubt - why do we drag our children into these things?

I think it might have to do with the fact that deep down we know that there is a need for each of us to participate in this story of Christmas. That it's not enough just to read about it, or contemplate it from afar. Really good stories need to be lived.

There's the story of the headstrong child who wanders off to pursue what seems will make them happy, only to find themselves returning to their family having learned the hard way. It may be one of Jesus' great stories he tells, but for most of us at some point we live out this story in our lives.

There's the story of the parent who wants so desperately to protect their child who seems to wander and make bad decisions and can only wait for the day when they return to us, when we too will run to meet them and return them to the family. Many have lived this story too.

And what about all of the stories the scriptures give us of redemption, of being lost and found, of having suffering transformed into something beautiful and good?...These are the kinds of stories we all want to live deep at the core of our being.

As I watched my own children this week in their roles as sheep at a manager scene, this struck me: When we participate in pageants that recreate the Christmas story we are celebrating by putting ourselves, especially our children inside the central story of how God relates to humankind.

God relates to us by becoming one of us.

Sometimes in our familiarity with the story we lose sight of how revolutionary this idea about God joining us really is. In the ancient world gods were distant authorities who needed to be appeased. Even ancient stories about gods taking on human form were never about a god doing so because they loved their creation. This idea that the Jewish god Yahweh decides to come be one of us as the highest expression of love marks a monumental turn in the history of human beings.

So how do we enter into this story - beyond the humorous yet heartwarming low-budget theatrical recreations of the gospel accounts of Christ's birth?

What if metaphorically speaking we viewed our lives as a kind of Christmas pageant - a daily recreation of this story in which we participate and show others the mystery of the incarnation? 

How would our days look different if we lived as people whose lives and world are filled with God all around us? A god who is present and loving, not distant or angry?

You probably even have a jack-ass (donkey?) or two hanging around your scene! Although I suspect you are short an orchestra or any applause even when you forget your lines. But remember this: we are not here to impress the world with our excellence in recreating an historical event. Rather we recreate this story because it is the one in which light breaks through darkness. We recreate this story daily because it brings such joy to the world.


P.S. There is no room in this story for complaining about what Starbucks does or does not put on their coffee cups. The light of the world shines so bright that nobody would even notice what their coffee cups look like. Neither does this story care about whether or not it's competing with Santa Claus outside city hall's light display. It's such a revolution of love it has no need to cling to its own interests or preferences. And it certainly doesn't have any time for jamming down other people's throats the "real reason for the season" because it's too busy recreating in daily practical ways the beautiful mystery of incarnation.

Mercy Part 6- God uses Mercy to save the world

“For some time, I have been saying that Muslim immigration into the United States should be stopped until we can properly vet them or until the war with Islam is over. Donald J. Trump has been criticized by some for saying something similar.” 
- Franklin Graham, December 8, on his Facebook page

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/living/religion/article48805250.html#storylink=cpy

I think I only have one thing left to say about mercy - although I suspect I have started on a lifelong journey with coming to know and live mercy.

A rabbi I heard recently said something like this:

"If you think about life as a journey, even a small change in the direction you're headed can make an enormous difference over a great distance. Changing your heading by 2 degrees might not seem big in a day or a week, but over a lifetime, brings you to an entirely different destination."

Indeed, it is the small changes, accumulating over time that make an enormous difference in where we end up. I might be tempted to think of mercy in the big and dramatic terms like: how should we in western world respond to the recent terrorist attacks? And while these are good questions to wrestle with, those aren't things I have much control over. On the other hand the seemingly smaller day to day interactions I have with my wife, my kids, my friends, my neighbours, and the people in the community I worship in - these are all opportunities to be tapping into the flow of mercy and practicing in my own life, towards myself and others. How would life be different if I engaged in even one deliberate act of mercy every day for the rest of my life?

How might the world be different if mercy was a practice more of us engaged in on a regular basis?

So in a week when the world is trying to make sense of terrorist attacks, and Franklin Graham (yes, the son of Billy) is one-upping Donald Trump in vitriolic rhetoric about Muslims, here's my audacious suggestion to you all:

I think mercy is one of the things God is using to save the world.

Since mercy is an expression or form of love, I dare to believe that mercy is a force so revolutionary it can and will be the way God rescues and restores shalom in the world.

The violence we see in Syria, Iraq, Paris, and San Bernardino is only a mirror to the violence that lives in all of us and between all of us. Maybe I'm not the only one that cringes to hear Jesus say that if we have lusted or been angry then in our hearts we are the same as adulterers and murderers. I'll admit it, when I read Franklin Graham writing like a commentator for Fox News, anger, not mercy is my first response. But these words of Jesus about me being just like a murderer are also an opportunity for hope. For if mercy can change us, murders and adulterers that we are, it can certainly change others. We all know names like Mandela, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, Ghandi, Desmond Tutu and the like because they are our most renown examples of public mercy. But there is an entire world tapping into the flow of mercy. Partners in marriage who have been wounded by each other. Parents who have lost children to senseless accidents forgiving the perpetrators.  Communities opening their doors to refugees and sharing their resources in spite of their fears.

God give us the strength to engage in the practices of mercy in small ways on a daily basis. Help us to join You in using mercy and love to change our stories, and to change the course of human history.

Mercy Part 5 - What Mercy is not

"Nothing is so strong as gentleness, and nothing is so gentle as real strength" -St. Francis de Sales

Some of the great feedback I've been getting about this series on mercy has reminded me it's time to talk about what mercy isn't.

In thinking through the practical implications of mercy in my own life, I'm struck by just how easily mercy can be confused with things like avoidance, passivity, turning a blind eye to injustice and unfairness, and even weakness.

I expect that most of our expressions of mercy will be imperfect at best. While we'd like it to be clean and straightforward, it seems that most expressions of love between humans involve complicated and messy dynamics.

So while I wholeheartedly advocate for the practice of receiving and giving mercy, I'm wary of any approach to mercy that implies a simplistic formula for the practice or posture of mercy.

When I suggest mercy is meeting others at the point of their weakness with gentleness and kindness, some of you will wonder what that looks like when applied to dealing with those particularly chronic and difficult situations that come with commitment and love.

What about that alcoholic family member who's been causing all sorts of hurt and destruction with their behaviour. What does mercy look like when they're drunk, out of money, destroying their families, or failing to acknowledge they even have a problem? Do we ignore it? Do we take care of them? Do we talk about it or not talk about it? Where does "tough" love come into the picture?

Tough questions with no easy answers.

But I think the quote at the opening of this post by St. Francis de Sales, a 17th century Jesuit might help us. He writes, "there is nothing so strong as gentleness, nothing so gentle as true strength". Interestingly this phrase was re-popularized by a famous preacher of the early radio era named Ralph W. Sockman. Their idea might seem peculiar to us, but only because we mistakenly associate gentleness with weakness. Both Sockman and de Sales present this idea drawing from their observations of God. In Jesus we see a gentleness that brings with it the strength to melt even the hardest of hearts, and a strength expressed with gentleness that many of us find disorienting because it hardly matches what we believe about power and authority.

Here are some things I think that mercy is not:

1. Mercy is not the same thing as endorsing the behaviours of other people that are expressions of their weakness and brokenness. In mercy we meet others with gentleness and kindness, but it's not the same thing as supporting them by pretending that their actions are good or welcome. You might have noticed how in popular culture problematic behaviour is not only endorsed but sometimes made into a kind of virtue. We do this with workaholism. We also do this with shaming and personal attacks. Often we hear people's rude and unkind words justified as "just telling it like it is", or "just keepin' it real". We exchange the unfettered cruelty and shaming so common in public speech and turn it into something that becomes admirable in the form of so called "authenticity". Donald Trump is portrayed as being more authentic than his fellow candidates who are life-long politicians because he speaks his bigotry openly. But in mercy - we encounter the brokenness of a person like Donald Trump not by welcoming his bigotry and dressing it up as refreshing honesty - but instead calling it for what it is. Mercy openly challenges the attitudes and behaviours, without condemning the person or seeking his demise.

2. Mercy is not the same as being a door mat and letting others run all over us. It is not an invitation to the world to abuse us, or a spiritual justification for staying in relationship with those who mistreat us.  This really can be complicated.

Do we suffer because the weakness of others impacts us? Yes.
Do we perhaps suffer most from the brokenness of those we love because we are more vulnerable to their failings? Yes again.
Is it likely that entering into loving relationships will automatically bring us into hurt from the other person? I think so.
Do we cut and run whenever their weakness hurts us? No.
Do we stay in the relationship no matter what they do to us, no matter how they harm us  - as an expression of mercy? No.

When it comes to dealing with the fallout of others' failings there's a difference between being an unintended victim of stray fire versus being the deliberate target of abuse or harm. Mercy is open to healing and reconciliation with those who hurt us - but reconciliation at some point requires that the person who has hurt us must actually change. To say sorry may facilitate forgiveness. But to truly reconcile, the offender must repent (change direction) and engage in a process in which safety and trust can be restored through demonstrating change.

3. Mercy is not the same thing as being passive. Sometimes in the Christian tradition we've engaged in some mirky thinking about mercy and being a servant to others. We've invoked the image of "laying down one's life" as a kind of spiritual justification for being passive: by which I mean living as if only what others want or need matters, and what we want or need doesn't matter at all. The opposite, which is aggression - living as though only what we want or need matters and giving no consideration to others, is not the only option. Assertiveness, the state of acting and being in which both what I need/want matters and what others need/want matters as well. Assertiveness is the middle ground, and likely where we find our posture of mercy most often. The truth is that letting others have their way all the time, is not an expression of mercy or love, because it's simply not good for them to be allowed to mistrust us or others. If we think that putting up with abuse is merciful, we're fooling ourselves. Sometimes we love (express mercy) by refusing to let others harm their souls by being destructive towards us. Martin Luther King captured this when speaking about the civil rights movement: "The festering sore of segregation debilitates the white man as well as the Negro. We are struggling to save the soul of America". Mercy cares for the soul of perpetrators not by passivity, but by naming injustice and calling for repentance.

4. Mercy is not the same as tolerance. Putting up with others when we're hurt or bothered by them, is really just avoidance. Tolerance often seems like a civilized or enlightened way to be kind, but so often it masks true feelings or needs to avoid confrontation or conflict. Mercy is not conflict avoidant, because kindness and gentleness are not the same as being pleasant or nice.

Mercy is strong. It can be direct and confront things that are wrong. Because mercy belongs within the bigger concept of love, it wants the best for other people. So being merciful doesn't just let people stay where they're at with their weakness - it invites them to restoration and change.

But mercy isn't intolerance either...at least not in the kinds of aggressive ways we're familiar with. Mercy is different from aggression because our in our engagement with the other person we are not turning to hostility, dismissal, or retribution in our approach. Mercy may be very direct in confronting others about their weakness and failure, but it refrains from blaming, putting the other down, demanding compensation, or using the situation to gain some kind of advantage in the relationship. Ironically, when many of us think we're being merciful by ignoring what others have done to us, we wind up expressing our hurt and frustration in more passive-aggressive ways that aren't merciful at all.

5. Being merciful is not the same as choosing to be a martyr for our own cause. Some of us take on a self-imposed martyr role where we deliberately choose to suffer in order to satisfy the wishes and needs of others. There's nothing wrong with self-sacrifice, but I'm not so sure it's mercy if our primary motivation is to create or maintain an image of ourselves as a sacrificing or even victimized person. Sometimes we do this so that others will see us as the kind of saint who gives everything for everyone. And while it may appear we are meeting others in their place of brokenness with a kind of gentleness and desire to serve, it is not the same as mercy because martyr motivations are ultimately making it about how we will maintain an image of ourselves. Mercy is not a way of trying to earn God's favor or dealing with our own guilty feelings.

6. Mercy is not your point of entry to fix other people. We may incarnate God's love and presence to others in the midst of their broken humanity, but we are never the authors of other people's change. Those of us who grew up thinking we had a superior theology and way of life that others need to be compelled to agree with are particularly prone to allowing condescension to pose as mercy in our lives. We can even rationalize contempt by thinking of ourselves as helping others. On this I am an expert because of my own failure to understand how mercy is not imposing my solutions on other people . It is the tragic flaw of so many of us who teach, write, or engage in helping professions. Greg Boyle a lifelong helper to LA's gang members says, “Here is what we seek: a compassion that can stand in awe at what the poor have to carry rather than stand in judgment at how they carry it.” Mercy is that posture of awe rather than judgement. So often we help others as an expression of mercy, but it is a help than comes from awe, an awe we achieve by taking God's view of others, rather than our own human judgement.

Okay. This is one of the hardest posts I've tried to write, at least conceptually. I'm sure it's rather full of short-comings, but hopefully others will write back and help us all get a clearer picture of what mercy is and is not. Today may you experience and express that true strength that comes in gentleness.

Mercy Part 4- we will need more naps

What I'm learning in being merciful towards myself:

I am not defined by my flaws, mistakes, weaknesses, failures, or shortcomings. 

They are a part of my life, but they are not who I am. 

I'm also learning that you are not defined by your flaws, mistakes, weaknesses, failures, or shortcomings...no matter how often I view you in those terms. 

They are not what God sees when he looks at us. I'm sure he's aware of them, but they are not the defining image of who we are when he "sees" us. 

Mercy shifts the focus of identity from reducing people to their actions, status, or traits and moves it to seeing them first and foremost as kin....as fellow humans, as part of a family. While our minds are hardwired to sort everyone into various kinds of "other", mercy transcends this tendency and helps us reorient our perception. Mercy helps us to see other people as our brothers and sisters in the human race, rather than friend or foe.

Father Greg Boyle writes, “Mother Teresa diagnosed the world's ills in this way: we've just "forgotten that we belong to each other." Kinship is what happens to us when we refuse to let that happen.” 

We categorize the world into various groups of "other" for a very important reason - it's efficient. Your mind has limited resources in trying to help you navigate an over-stimulating world.  Your brain simply doesn't have the time or the energy to pay attention and think through all of the things it encounters in a day. It must take short cuts. It has to rush to snap judgments and rely on assumptions and heuristics. But mercy invites us to view the world in way that's infinitely more complex. 

It's easy to think that I didn't get much written today because I'm lazy and undisciplined. There's a simplicity to that judgement and explanation that appeals to my brain that's trying to save more energy for more important things like....dreaming about chocolate cake or worrying about the Blue Jays pitching rotation next season.

It's easy to think about the millions of illegal immigrants working in the US simply as law breakers who need to be met with unwavering execution of the current legal statutes. Deporting "criminals" seems like such a sensible and clear way to resolve the issue. It's the real essence of Donald Trump's appeal - reducing complex chronic problems into simple narratives that appear to explain and offer easy solutions. Take away the human element, the functioning of systemic evil, or our own role in incentivizing the use of cheap foreign labor, and it's much easier to shift those mental resources to wrestling with say....the difficult issue of what shade of greige (grey-beige) I should paint my living room. 

And I don't even know what to think about how people should respond to the terrorist attacks in Paris. Apparently everyone else in the social-media world does. My non-merciful side is inclined to agree with militaristic options that fight back and annihilate those responsible. But mercy keeps prodding me to consider that the webs of brokenness that spawned, and the webs of brokenness that will result from these events are so much more complicated than simple "good guys vs bad guys" ways of thinking. These perpetrators are my brothers...as are their victims. We don't just forget that we belong to each other, we are motivated to forget that we belong to each other because kinship and mercy require an extraordinary effort. 

I think being more merciful will require me to take more naps. Pushing past my natural human tendencies towards black and white thinking and othering people is exhausting. It certainly takes a lot more time and energy. But it also pulls more deeply at me on a heart level. Seeing others as my kin invites me into a world of hurt and sadness as I begin to share in the suffering that humans inflict on each other. Beyond the cognitive inefficiency issues, I also want a dehumanized and simplified view of the world because I don't want to feel too much about so much of the world's suffering. I don't want to know their names or hear their stories. I don't want to find out that they had brothers or children just like me. I don't want to encounter their brokenness because I'm more than aware already of how much loss and struggle and misery there is.

So I'm going to need more naps because being merciful might keep me awake at night wrestling with the pain that all of humanity suffers.

I guess this is why mercy is not just another self-help gimmick to make our lives better. Mercy is better is for us, but it also costs us. It is a way to tap into the flow of love in the universe, but it comes at a price. As a posture mercy welcomes us into a beautiful and loving way of being in the world, but it also requires us to transcend our mammalian brain and enter into complexity and pain as we bring kindness and gentleness to our broken kin.

I'm going to go take a nap dear reader, so that when I wake up I can refuse to forget that you and I belong to each other. 

Mercy Part 3: When mercy brings death

Sometimes mercy doesn't feel good - it can actually feel terrifying. Mercy can even be like a form of death.

Hear me out:

All of us have rules about how the world works.

There are rules about who's good and who's bad, who deserves what, and what should happen to people when they break the rules that are rooted deep in our psyche.

Some of these rules we agree upon and they become cultural norms and sometimes they're even codified into law. But lots of us have a sense of justice that runs much deeper than what the laws of our particular jurisdiction predicate. And even when something isn't technically against the law, we often have a much richer and complex sense of ethics and morality.

Often we think that our rules about how things should be are universal truths.

Usually this takes the form of something like: "people should get what they deserve". Which, mostly relies on our personal sense of fairness to determine what it is that we and others deserve.

But sometimes mercy, for all of it's goodness, threatens to violate our sense of justice: our rules about how we expect or demand that the world be.

And mercy can really mess with this. Mercy can be disorienting, because sometimes mercy challenges how we think certain people should be dealt with. Mercy can feel like chaos because the order we try to impose on the universe is not always exactly the way God acts.

Why do bad things happen to good people?

But why do good things happen to good people?

We like to try to reconcile these questions with our sense of fairness, that people get what they deserve...even if only eventually. However at some point most of us are confronted with a reality that people don't get what they deserve. Innocent people are victims. Perpetrators seem to get away with things. And the quandary of mercy is that it sometimes feels like it's lining up with that world of unfairness - or at least letting people off the hook when we would rather see them punished.

Again, the story of Les Miserables captures this human difficulty with mercy. In the musical version we have this excerpt from the ruthless inspector Javert. The prisoner Jean Valjean, who he's hunted over 20 years for a parole violation, after serving 20 years for stealing bread, has the chance to let Javert die. But Valjean shows him mercy and lets him go rather killing him when he has the chance. Afterward Javert sings this:

    I am the law and the law is not
          mocked!
          I'll spit his pity right back in
          his face!
          There is nothing on earth that we
          share!
          It is either Valjean or Javert!
          How can I allow this man
          To hold dominion over me?
          This desperate man that I have
          hunted...
          He gave me my life! He gave me
          freedom!
      

          And must I now begin to doubt
          Who never doubted all those
          years?
          My heart is stone and still it
          trembles...
          The world I have known is lost in
          shadow
          Is he from heaven or from hell?
          And does he know
          That granting me my life today
          This man has killed me even so?
 
For Javert, the experience of mercy is akin to death. While he is not physically killed by Valjean, the world he "knows" is destroyed, amounting to a kind of psychological death. (spoiler alert: Javert kills himself after this song because the idea of living in the world of mercy - the idea of doubting his 

entire life - is too much and death is preferable.
 
Seem dramatic? I don't think it is. I think lots of us choose a kind of death while alive instead of 

living in the world of mercy. We narrow our lives, we cut ourselves off from the world in ways that 

isolate us from mercy because our vision of justice is so precious to us, so integral to maintaining a 

sense of psychic balance and orderliness, that we prefer it to what seems like a fair scarier version of death - living in a world of mercy.

Mercy is a gift. A flow in the universe we can tap into. But it comes with a challenge. Mercy 

threatens our claims to be arbiters of right or wrong. It threatens our illusions of control by suggesting that the order we want to impose and live by is perhaps open to being challenged and even violated when we treat people better than we think they should, or when we are treated better than we deserve. 
The religious people of Jesus' day hated him because he kept violating their rules and practices in 

favour of caring for people. He tells them, "go and learn what this means, 'I desire mercy and not 

sacrifice'" He challenges their conception of how the sacrificial system (the religious purity laws) 

should be prioritized over the needs and care of human beings. He introduces the revolutionary idea 

that mercy should be prioritized over the law when it comes to dealing with people in their failings 

and weakness. Is it any wonder we have such a hard time following this Jesus who models a response to human brokenness that is at times so disruptive to our sense of how things should be?

I find the Jesus who's kind to the outsiders like women and ethnic minorities a beautiful thing. I have a harder time when he hangs out with tax collectors. Imagine Jesus going to a party with Bernie

Madoff, Donald Trump, and George W Bush, and loving them. That's the Jesus I find harder to follow.

Imagine Jesus having mercy on you. Imagine Jesus having mercy on you in such a deep and profound way that you can no longer be so hard on other people. 

Mercy brings a kind of death, because when we fully accept it, we can no longer hold on to our 

personal notions of how the world should work. It's that disruptive. 

It's so much easier to close our eyes to the flow of mercy in the world than to have to face the

challenge mercy poses to our categories of who's good and who's bad, of who deserves what, and of what we deserve. 

Perhaps it's a kind of death worth embracing. Maybe our egos and their sense of what

people deserve, need to die - to be crucified. It may feel suicidal - but it's not - because on the other 

side we find a life of abundance we can only dream of in our worlds of narrowly defined "justice" and "fairness".

Mercy - Part 2: Extending Mercy to Ourselves

So when you make a mess of things, how do you treat yourself?

In your own experience of weakness, how do you respond?

Do you punish yourself? Do you view yourself with contempt? Does shame take over?

If you notice that you turn away quickly and try to sweep it under the rug, you're probably reacting to shame about your weakness - you just might be so good and fast at sweeping that you don't even get a chance to feel it anymore.

I think the difficulty we have in extending mercy to others, is primarily rooted in our difficulty extending mercy towards ourselves.

My contempt for other people's weakness is because I have contempt for my own. Yuck. What an awful thing for a psychologist to admit. The truth is, in my professional work I rarely feel contempt for other people because mercy and compassion are an integral part of my role. I've always loved that the therapy context allows my better self to shine through because of the expectation both patient and therapist have that I will be gentle and kind. But as a regular guy, I can be so hard on people. Ask my wife and kids.

Who gets angry at a 5 year-old for still needing help putting their jacket on? This guy. Yep. I can even recognize in the back of my mind that my kids ask for help at times not because they actually can't do it themselves, but because they want physical and emotional closeness with me. But still, I'm pissed off that I have to stop what I'm doing and help them. I'm disgusted by their weakness...sometimes even when it is age appropriate. But why do I do this? Because I'm disgusted by my own weakness.

And there's a real temptation in the midst of this honesty about my own lack of extending mercy to call myself some terrible names and apply labels...to categorize myself as some kind of monster. There's a temptation to make myself out to be less than human because I fail to live up to my expectations that I should somehow be more than human.

But God doesn't view me with these same unrealistic expectations. Nor does God degrade me below my humanity by calling me the awful names I call myself either. God sees me, and you, for what we are: human. Repeatedly, in the Hebrew and Christian and even Muslim scriptures God's character is described as inherently "merciful", or literally: full of mercy.

So a life filled with expressions of mercy begins with a heartfelt knowledge that God, however you understand Him/Her/It, is first and foremost merciful towards you. In recognizing God's mercy towards us, we can begin to be merciful towards ourselves, and eventually merciful towards others.

1 John 4:19 says that, "we love because He first loved us". If mercy is a form of love, than it's also true that we are merciful, because He is first merciful to us.

When I being to deal with my weakness in the way that God deals with weakness -mercy- I am free to move past my contempt for myself. When I stop encountering my failures with contempt, I will begin to bring mercy rather than anger or dismissal or retribution to the way I deal with the weaknesses of my children and wife. And it's not just an intellectual exercise, although I think it could be helpful to have an explicit understanding of mercy. But primarily our capacity to extend mercy to ourselves and others grows out of experience - that deeper kind of "knowing" that humans have when we have been shaped by experiencing something in our own lives. When I experience the mercy of others towards me, I am able to give mercy to myself and to others.

Perhaps nowhere else in literature is this so clearly illustrated as in Victor Hugo's: Les Miserables. The story centres around Jean Val-Jean, a man who steals a loaf of bread to feed his starving family and endures the "justice" of 30 years in jail as a result. When he is finally released the merciful act of a priest allows him to start a new life, in which he devotes himself to acting mercifully to others, even those who were unmerciful to him, and particularly the ruthless inspector Javert.

In this exploration of mercy, one of the points Hugo seems to be making is that mercy that is given, largely grows as a response to mercy that has been received. The priest (a symbol of God's presence on earth) extends mercy to Jean Val-Jean, who in turn extends mercy to others. Not because mercy is some form of cosmic chain-letter, but because mercy transforms us at the core of our being.

So if we need to experience mercy in order to give it well to others, how do we get there?

Do we wait for something to happen in which other's can show us mercy? Do we intentionally do something terrible as a way of creating opportunities for others to be merciful?

I think mercy is woven into the fabric of the universe, and is ours to discover and experience if we are open to it. I think God and others are constantly expressing mercy towards us if we learn to pay attention to all the ways it is occurring but that so often we overlook in our chronic state of mindlessness. A friend of mine talks about the "flow of forgiveness" that is present in the universe. I think there's a flow of mercy too. It's a flow that contradicts survival of the fittest. It's a dynamic we can see everywhere that people are responding to each other with kindness and love rather than dominance and force.

I see mercy in the way my wife responds when I crash our car into an "invisible" post in a parking lot

I see mercy in the response of thousands of aid workers meeting the physical needs of a flood of refugees coming from Syria.

I see mercy from a neighborhood church that opens it's building to recovery groups.

I see mercy in a justice system when it recognizes that imprisoning people for minor drug related offences is futile and overly punitive.

I see mercy in a dad who is gentle with himself for failing to be always patient with his young children.

Where do you see it?

There's a reason why we cry when we watch Les Miserables, why our hearts are warmed by that story, and why it's the greatest selling musical of all time. It's because deep down we resonate with mercy. Our hearts recognize that it is an expression of the mystical force in the universe that changes people. The force that rescues all of us who are prisoners to something, and sets us free to become people of mercy ourselves.

Even today as we choose how to respond to ourselves in the midst of weakness, can we adopt God's merciful perspective in the way we think and feel about our failures?

May you find ways to tune-in to God's expressions of mercy towards you. May you sense the flow of mercy in the world and be changed by it.  May you join the flow of this force that sets you free from the prison of your own self-loathing and hatred and makes you into an instrument of mercy in this world.

Mercy - Part 1: Never saw it coming

Sometimes life flashes before our eyes and we realize how in an instant everything could be changed.

It happened to me last week when a neighbour of mine was backing out of his driveway and didn't see my daughters walking to school. Fortunately I saw him...and a tragedy was averted.

He was mortified. And somehow in my state of relief, I found the capacity to be merciful.

I don't tend to think about mercy very often, do you?

I've mostly assumed mercy was something a person in authority or power gave to another when they treated that person better than they deserved to be treated. Like a judge giving a lesser sentence than the crime deserves.  Or perhaps a teacher being lenient with a late assignment. To me, through most of my life mercy was reserved primarily for God forgiving our sins, and in the metaphor of penal substitutionary atonement: allowing wicked humans to escape from punishment.

And it may mean those things, but this week I've been experiencing a richer understanding of what it means to be merciful.

Mercy is the response of kindness and gentleness we extend to others in the midst of their weakness and failings. 

Where it seems so reasonable and natural to respond with anger, vindictiveness, retaliation, indifference, or a demand for justice - mercy chooses a different path. It chooses to be kind and gentle.

We can extend mercy to all kinds of people.

Sometimes to the stranger - how might we show mercy to the refugees of Syria?

Sometimes to our spouse - how do we respond when they hurt us?

Sometimes to our children - how do we respond when they do their own thing instead of accepting our loving guidance?

Sometimes to our religious leaders and institutions - how do we care for them in the midst of their failings to accomplish what we expect of them?

Mercy may not be so difficult when the infraction is small. But when we've been hurt or harmed by another person, it becomes so hard, maybe even seemingly impossible.

Part of my ignorance of mercy is a lack of conceptual precision. I always lumped it in that heap with ideas like forgiveness and grace and compassion. And likely this is so because they all do overlap. To me, forgiveness is the act of relinquishing the debt of another. Grace is any form of unmerited favour. And compassion is the concern we have for another.

But mercy is slightly specific in being an action of kindness towards another in their state of weakness. Mercy may be an expression of grace, it may involve forgiveness, and we may feel compassion in the midst of it. But it may involve none of those either. It is possible to be kind and gentle in the midst of weakness to those who fully deserve it, owe us nothing, and evoke little feeling of personal care or concern. You might even argue that mercy sounds a lot like love when you break it down, and I would agree. But love takes many forms of expression, and I think mercy is just one of the ways we love others.

Fundamentally mercy is a decision about how we will respond to the weakness of others. 

We are confronted with the weakness of others all the time. And those who are close to us bring expressions of their weaknesses most clearly and regularly, and they affect us most deeply with them.

Mercy is not easy, nor is it something we should expect ourselves to able to do in every circumstance. God's character is merciful - ours is not. We are becoming, but not yet like God. As humans we will find it very difficult at times to be merciful because most of us are relatively inexperienced in expressions of mercy. Like most things of value and character in life, mercy must be practiced. We must engage in an intentional practice of relating to others with mercy, learning to see the opportunities we have for it each day.

We talk in church about joining God in his mission of redeeming all creation. It seems such a grand and distant scheme at times. We struggle with the gap between our aspirations to be people engaged in mission compared to the reality of our corporate lives. We are frustrated with ourselves and each other about failures we have in accomplishing what we aspire to. But mercy is one of those specific and practical ways we can "be missional" without being fooled into believing that we must do "bigger" things to embody the kingdom of God. We can participate in God's saving of the world by being merciful in the small and the big of each day.

When our spouses live out their weakness.
When our friends seem to have abandoned us.
When our children don't listen or do what they're asked.
When our neighbours are selfish.
When our rights are trampled by the inconsiderateness of others.
When people we care about hurt us.
When the recklessness of others changes our lives in a tragic accident.
When leaders fail us.
When our values are attacked or violated.
When things that are sacred to us are scorned or ridiculed.
When we are betrayed.

We may not immediately recognize all of these things as signs of others' weakness...but almost always they are. They are expressions of failings and selfishness that are inherent in our human frailty. How we respond to them is an opportunity to choose mercy.

Most of us don't live lives where mercy is expressed in visible or dramatic ways. Few of us have opportunities like the bishop in Les Miserables who extends mercy to Jean Val-Jean by giving him a chance to restart his life with gift of those candlesticks instead of turning him over to Inspector Javert. (Did you know that the title "Les Miserables" can be translated: "the ones in need of mercy"?)

But the daily mercy we can give comes in those small moments of interaction when we choose to be kind rather than attack. It involves our tendencies towards "soft vengeance":  mocking,  criticizing, shaming, ridiculing, dismissing, or any of the things we do to place ourselves above those whose weakness we can so easily see. Instead of demanding "justice" as we define it, we take on God's perspective and meet people at their worst with an unexpected kindness.

My neighbour instantly learned his lesson about backing out without looking both ways- he has two small daughters of his own and I could tell by the look of realization on his face. But the other thing he didn't see coming was mercy. None of us do. Mercy is a shocking, life changing, better-than-you-would-ever-dare-hope-is-possible, gift from God. It allows us to be so much better than we could be on our own...and it might just save the world.

I think mercy is complicated and I want to unpack it further in my next post. But for now I invite you to rediscover mercy. Beyond our doctrinal notions of the place of mercy in the universe, I invite you to find and give mercy in your everyday mess. When weakness and its consequences invade your space, may you be open to trying on mercy as a practice, to yourself and to others.

“It is mercy, not justice or courage or even heroism, that alone can defeat evil.” 
― Peter Kreeft, The Philosophy of Tolkien: The Worldview Behind the Lord of the Rings

Anxiety Part X - Doesn't the Bible tell us not to be anxious?

There's some thinking and writing hanging around Christian circles these days on the topic of anxiety that I have significant concerns about. It would be easy to ignore if it wasn't being presented under the banner of a movement that refers to itself as "biblical counselling", which implies a sort of indisputable authority and truthfulness. But the work coming out of this school of thought is not just bad psychology, it's bad exegesis.

When looking to the bible for wisdom on anxiety the most frequently cited passages are: Philipians 4:6 ("...don't be anxious about anything...") and Matthew 6:25 ("...don't be anxious about your life, what you will wear or what you will eat...").

In both, the greek word being translated to "anxious" is merimna. This word has been translated to "anxiety" in these two passages but often translated to mean "worry" or  "care", as in 1 Peter 5:7 (..."cast all your cares upon him..."). But merimna really derives from the Greek merimnaō, which is about being separated from the whole. Some scholars suggest that this usage of the word is inferring a dividing and fracturing a person's being into parts. Perhaps a caring about something so much that it divides your soul rather than being a fully whole person. Interestingly, Jesus' words in the Matthew 6 passage are immediately following his teaching on not being able to serve two masters - that a house divided against itself can't stand.

It's a huge leap to assume that what Jesus or Paul, or the authors of the biblical texts meant by the word "anxious" was exactly the same as how we mean it today.

What do we mean exactly by the word "anxiety" today anyhow? This is another problem - we don't even have consistent or precise definitions of anxiety in our popular culture, or even in clinical usage. 

So before you go reading these passages and assuming God is against or displeased with your particular experience of anxiety, we need to slow down a little and admit to a lack of textual clarity.

Moreover, these passages in Phil 4 and Matt 6 are not the giving of commandments. Notice how when Jesus summarizes the law He says: "love the Lord your God and love your neighbour as yourself"....he doesn't add, "and don't be anxious, either". Obviously not all passages of scripture are commandments, some are instructive but within a particular context. When Jesus tell this group not to be anxious about clothing or food, he's talking to a specific context, not necessarily laying down a universally applicable principle. 

The sad thing is, by throwing these verses at people, we've often made them feel like failures for having anxiety, as if to experience this part of humanity is to have sinned. 

John McArthur suggests exactly this in his book: Anxious for Nothing. McArthur comes to the conclusion that anxiety is simply a failure to trust God, no ifs, ands, or buts. If you're anxious, you're sinning, because you're telling God He isn't enough, isn't worthy of your trust, isn't really going to take care of you.

Perhaps this works for McArthur in dealing with his own life, but from where I sit, this is not only terrible theology, it's useless psychology. It only makes people feel worse and keeps them stuck in their anxiousness. Now they're not just anxious, they're also feeling like depraved failures who are spitting in God's face when they worry.

I'm going to avoid a long rant here about so-called "biblical counselling", but this is exactly the kind of dangerous and misguided "advice" that movement is producing. It's dangerous because it pretends to have the authority of the Scriptures to give bad and even damaging answers to people who are in mental anguish. Even worse, its advocates openly state that health care providers not under this banner are giving untrue and ungodly counsel. The largest Christian domination in the United States publicly supports and funds this approach.

But let's not forget, friends of so called "biblical counselling" that Jesus sweats drops of blood the night before He's crucified. A bizarre physiological reaction indeed - but for sure sweating when not exercising is a classic symptom of anxiety. He also calls out to his Father to spare Him from being crucified. This seems like avoidance to me, which as most people know, is associated with....anxiety.  He can't sleep. Well, insomnia does tend to hound the anxious. So if anxiety is a sin, you're going to have to tie yourself in some pretty tight theological knots to explain away how the sinless Son of God is visibly anxious the night before his death. 

And just because you read the bible and quote it doesn't mean you're teaching God's truth. Jesus makes it plenty clear to the Pharisees of his day that they have a perverse way of using the scriptures to impose an agenda on people and that very often they've completely missed the ways God works in the world. So let's get off our Christian high horses and approach this with some humility and honesty about the complex ambiguity of scripture, especially when it comes to many things psychological.

What if we were to accept that anxiety is a natural human experience? An emotion, accompanied by certain kinds of physiological manifestations and certain characteristic ways of thinking?

Remember how years ago the church used to teach that sexual desire was a bad thing? In more recent  years some people of faith kind of came to their senses and realized that sex is a gift, that the desire for it is also a gift, but that the real problem is how we relate to that gift, or what we do with it?

It's time for anxiety to get a similar sort of re-understanding. Anxiety is a gift. It keeps us safe. Unlike almost any other species on earth humans can think ahead and anticipate the terrible things that could happen and plan for how we might reduce the likelihood occurrence. We wear our seat belts in our cars because we have the capacity to be anxious about being mortally wounded in a collision. And if the building you worked in today didn't collapse in a heap of rubble, you can thank human anxiety. Someone else lost sleep trying to anticipate the loads the walls could safely hold up without having a string of collapsed buildings to prove what was safe. We have building codes that require structures to be built in a manner consistent with what our thinking ahead has taught us..."thanks anxiety!"...because we don't have to experience every tragedy before we can plan ahead to avert others. 

Really, when you get down to it, anxiety, as the human experience to anticipate negative outcomes and to be motivated to avoid them, is one of God's great gifts to us as a species. To call the gift of anxiety a sin is absurd. 

What's broken, is our relationship to anxiety, our way of interacting with it.

Which really shouldn't seem so strange when you think about it, because most of our sin is about broken ways of relating to God's creation. The way we relate to each other - broken. The way we treat natural life and our environments - broken. The way we relate to God - broken. The way relate to our sexuality, our vulnerability, power,....broken, broken, and broken. (The attempt to use the Bible as a literal textbook for counselling complex psychological phenomena - also broken by the way) Why should our relationship to anxiety be any different?

So if the sin in this situation is not anxiety but the way we relate to anxiety, what else might these biblical passages have to teach us?

If the greek marimnao is pointing to the kind of experience of anxiety that involves being divided from self, overtaken, preoccupied, or drawn off course, we might have a little better idea as to what kind of relationship we should be trying not to have with our anxiety. It's the kind of relationship in which anxiety takes us away from ourselves: from being fully human and yet formed in the image of the Divine. It's the kind of relationship to anxiety that draws us away from being loving because we are allowing our fear to guide our decisions. It's the kind of relationship in which anxiety is our master, and we answer to it. The kind of relationship in which the gift of anxiety, has actually become something that enslaves rather protects us and leads us to flourishing.

Jesus corrects the Pharisees when they criticize him for healing on the Sabbath. He reminds them that the Sabbath is gift designed to help humankind, and the humans were not made to serve the Sabbath or be enslaved by it observance. The same is true for anxiety. Anxiety has been gifted to us for our flourishing, not to be our master or run our lives.

God meets us in the imperfect

“The argument is made that naming God is never really naming God but only naming our understanding of God. To take our ideas of the divine and hold them as if they correspond to the reality of God is thus to construct a conceptual idol built from the materials of our mind.”
― Peter Rollins

Can God be known?...like actually known and understood?

Is God just a construction of our minds? Are we forever limited to worship gods of our own construction because our finite minds cannot comprehend something so transcendent, something so beyond us?

Is agnosticism the only intellectually honest position on matters of the Divine?

I'm haunted by questions like these. I have been most of my adult life.

In the tension between faith and doubt, I've come to realize that I can't fully say "I know" much about answers to these questions.

I've learned that asking questions, rather than having answers, is where true faith is born. My faith is deeper and richer and stronger because I also doubt.

The nagging notion that God is a conceptual idol has been particularly formative in my spiritual journey. Please understand, that I'm not suggesting God is only something we make up. Freud's idea that God is merely wish fulfillment is a false dichotomy. Institutional religion's claim to have a flawless and accurate depiction of God is I believe, equally flawed. God is a form of wish fulfillment for all of us in some respects. But God is real beyond our constructions. He or She or It is more than just a product of human psyches attempting to cope with a difficult universe.

I took my kids to a local Jazz festival not long ago, and their anticipation was quite high in spite of my attempts to describe it ahead of time.  Upon arrival, they discovered that it wasn't the kind of festival they'd envisioned - kids activities, rides, junk food - but rather a sparse gathering of adults listening to music of a genre my kids are mostly unfamiliar with. Certainly the event was not how they had construed it to be in their minds. I had warned them of this ahead of time, but the word festival, and their own wishes for how it would be misled them. That doesn't mean the festival didn't exist. Just because it was different than their minds had created, doesn't change that it was an event they could access. And, they even found some aspects of it a source of joy, but in ways they had not anticipated.

In the opening quote of this piece, Pete Rollins reminds us of the problems with naming (which is an attempt to describe) and even trying to comprehend God. Our humanity inevitably leads us to create false conceptions. And when life turns out differently than we expect, or when God turns out differently than we expect, it's easy for us to despair.

Many of you on similar journeys to my own have shifted away from trying to box God into propositional truth, and opted for a richer experience of the divine. This is a good path. For too long in the Protestant tradition God has been an intellectual exercise, almost a theological hobby. And experience might allow us to encounter God as God is, rather than in tidy conceptualizations that inevitably mislead us.

But experience is imperfect too.

Experience occurs through a set of lenses that also warp and skew our experience of the Divine. For thousand of years philosophers have stated what contemporary neuroscience confirms. There is no pure perception, conceptualization, or experience of anything, let alone the Divine. We are limited in this respect by our human brains.

On a public transit ride home from school years ago I had a eureka moment (out loud) where it became clear to me that one of God's answers to this problem is Jesus. That in the mystery of the incarnation, we are given the opportunity to encounter God in a way that helps transcend our limitations: He becomes one of us. Truth is no longer limited to ideas, truth becomes a person we can encounter.

In years passing, I've become more convinced of this truth, but also aware that even our experience of Jesus is imperfect. Even if the red-letter words of scripture are His exact dictation, we still encounter his words through our filters: our experience, our biases, our expectations, our wishes, our traditions, and even our church's dogma. And it doesn't take very much time hanging out with people who claim Jesus as their own, to discover that even our experiences of Him are shaped by a whole host of factors.

So what occurs to me now is this:

God meets us in the imperfect.

God shows up in the midst of our idolatrous versions of Him/Her/It, and allows us encounter with the Divine.  We can spend our lives worrying about pure theology or seeking pure experiences, but God doesn't need that, because God shows up anyway. In those places of brokenness and distortion, of misnamed deities and culturally defined worship practices, God shows up.

In your messy circus of a congregation, with so many barriers to authentic encounter, God embraces imperfection and meets you there anyway.

In your solitude - away from the obnoxious imperfections of institutional religion - but equally steeped in the distortions and imperfections of your own mind  - God finds you and is present nonetheless.

We may be limited by human brains, but God is not. We may be limited by constructed ideas and experiences of God, but God is not. The transcendent transcends our imperfection. It breaks through to hearts and minds and stirs them. It gives them glimpses of a Divinity that it cannot fully grasp and leaves them changed, but still imperfect.

Today, may you be honest about the distortedness and imperfection of who you think God is, and how you experience God.

But may you also stop looking for the perfect place to find God, and recognize God meeting you in the midst of imperfection.

Waking up to bittersweet

I have a problem. I have too many pictures. I do love digital photography, but with the size of the files, and no longer paying for film...it's getting a little out of hand.

But's it's not just the ease of taking pictures that's led me to hard drives full of pictures.

I think some of it is an attempt to preserve what we know is passing quickly. I'm very attuned to how fleeting and precious these particular days of life with my family are. Summer makes it worse. I'm even more aware, even hyper-focused on the passage of time.

As I was I taking yet another picture of my kids on the beach at sunset, I wondered to myself:

"Is a photograph an attempt to deny the passage of time?"

Do we try to fool ourselves into believing that we actually can stop a precious moment and capture it? Sunset photos tend to disappoint me - you just can't capture the majesty of that light and those colors. Even really good photographs of other life events, never fully capture the experience of being there. The pictures are a nice reminder, but no matter how hard we try, we can't re-live those beautiful moments of our lives in the way we would like. Writing this on September's eve, I'm aware of how futile it is to cling to precious time.

And as I've started to live more of my life in the present moment, I've become aware of how bittersweet human existence is.

Even those moments of great joy and happiness that we experience are tinged by a sadness, because we know they are fleeting. Try as we might, we cannot cling to our happiness anymore than we can stop a handful of sand from slipping through our fingers. And the more we awaken to life as it is, we are aware of this tragedy - that life's beauty is momentary and passing. That when we find ourselves in a state of bliss, we are soon brought into grieving for its loss, knowing that we can't actually preserve those precious moments.

I think it might be that all of life is to some degree bittersweet by nature - if we are fully awake - fully aware of the passage of time and this endless cycle of joy and loss.

Is this why so many of us have these compulsive behaviours - pursuing relentlessly pleasure and happiness, always trying to capture or recreate the past joys, avoiding the grief and acknowledgment that those moments are gone? Avoiding the reality that happiness cannot be maintained by denial or creating a false sense of our ability to preserve it? Avoiding acknowledging that sorrow and suffering will always return? Refusing to accept that the essence of all human happiness is a bittersweetness because joy is so precious and evasive?

How much of our lives are constructed around trying to create and re-create happiness, fooling our selves that we can even pursue it, let alone capture it or preserve it?

Like so much else that is broken in our culture, we have created expectations for people of their own happiness. Expectations that are unrealistic and unsatisfiable - two ideal conditions for motivating people to produce and consume. But these false expectations of happiness seem to keep us only busily trapped in our own pursuit, hardly able to recognize or enjoy those things that might bring joy around us.

It is painful to acknowledge the bittersweet quality of life. I think it is worse to remain caught in relentless pursuit of things that can't be preserved.

Maybe it's not about too many or too few pictures. Maybe it's about what I'm trying to accomplish with my shutter fetish. As I wake up to the bittersweet quality of life, I realize that pictures in themselves are a joy, but like most technology, it mustn't be allowed to fool me into thinking I am anything but fully human, and fully trapped in the passage of a universe in constant flux.

I'm wondering if happiness is more about what we find in the present moment around us, rather than what we create. If I tell myself that I will be happier when I'm on a beach with people I love, listening to music and the surf, the temptation to cling to that moment when it arrives will be so strong, but also increase the sadness of its passage. If I tell myself I can only be happy in that situation, I think I will find myself more desperately trying to create the "right" conditions, and unhappy all the other times that I am not there. If on the other hand I merely open myself to what joys might be around me and take pleasure in that, there is so much less to be clung to or feared for its loss. I'm not trying to suggest we can escape the bittersweet of life, but it seems that the great wisdom traditions of our world suggest we will suffer less if cling less. That happiness will evade us if we make it our goal, and find us if we care more for others.

So I don't know if I'll take fewer pictures. But I'm definitely more aware of my relationship to pictures and what significance they might have to me. They cannot preserve the un-preservable. Instead, I'm here now. Writing this blog on my front porch on a warm August evening while my children sleep peacefully. I'm enjoying the creative process as something inside of me, perhaps even deep longings, find their way into words. And perhaps these words will open some new small part of the world for you as you read it.

The thought of that brings me a passing happiness.

Watering Weeds

I rather like dandelions. I enjoy the fields of yellow flowers in springtime.

Others in my life have a different view of them. Some others in my life have even been known to hate them so much they will poison the ground with dangerous chemicals in order to get rid of them. I understand that some kinds of impatiens are considered a weed in certain parts of the world, while we spend big money to transplant them into our gardens here.

What seems a weed to some, seems rather inoffensive, even desireable to another. But the best argument I've heard about distinguishing between a weed or not, is whether a plant is invasive. That is, does it take over and choke out other, more beneficial or desirable plants?

Personally I think grass is highly overrated - but the argument that dandelions are bad because they choke out and replace grass makes some sense to me.  

As I was watering some vegetables in my garden the other day, it occurred to me that I don’t always recognize which plants are weeds. They all got watered nonetheless.

And then I had this thought: 

"Be careful what you water in the garden that is your life."

You can cultivate all sorts of things - but just because they're green, or even have flowers, doesn't mean that they are completely good.

I realize that little habits in my life might come to resemble watering weeds.

In some ways I'm fortunate that my weeds are not the big vices like gambling or drugs or porn. Eventually most everyone knows those are weeds and comes to recognize how easily they take over, though they can be ever so difficult to uproot.

While I've been spared the destructiveness of the more obvious vices, there are those kinder, gentler weeds, less thorny ones, that aren't even always clearly weeds, that exist in my life and easily get watered. Sometimes it's because I really don't recognize them as weeds. Sometimes it's because I'm too tired or distracted to discriminate. 

For me, one of those weeds might best be called "living in the future". I'm prone to spending rather a large amount of time thinking about the future, and part of it has paid off handsomely for me. I'm usually a few steps ahead of things in life, anticipating and managing problems before they arise, planning well, and making decisions that account for a range of possible outcomes. I research. I take pride in being prepared, and a little secret pride in being more prepared than the next guy.

But like most innocuous weeds, what seems like a pleasant bit of greenery can become so much more. And "living in the future" can easily start to take over more and more of your conscious moments, taking you from the present, into the "what ifs?" of tomorrow.

Sometimes those "what ifs" are anxious. I know a lot of people for whom this is the case. Lots of days my future orientation is not anxious, but rather creative and imaginary. Which can make it even harder to recognize as a weed. I'm prone to spend a lot of time thinking about "the next thing". The next house, the next job, the next project, the next vacation, the next idea, the next big change...

This "next thing" kind of plant can live quite nicely in amongst the rest of the garden of my mind. But I've also noticed it has a tendency to behave like a weed as it starts to take over and dominate my thinking. Rather than enjoy and be present with what's happening now, my mind is always inclined to move on and push towards "progress". The joys of the present so easily get choked out by things that could or might happen someday.

How much beauty, how much goodness, how much of the presence of the Divine do we miss because our preoccupation with the future has taken over?

I think one of the ways we water these weedy thought habits is by spending time with them.

Neuroscientists have demonstrated that a rough correlation exists between how much time and practice you put into thinking something, and a corresponding physical change in neural networks. We strengthen the thought patterns that we practice. We are literally formed by the thought habits we have. The more time you spend thinking about the future, the more readily available those thoughts become, and more likely they are to be accessed. 

But beyond simple repetition, I think we water our weedy thought habits when we experience them as successful. Success reinforces us both in achieving a positive outcome, and avoiding a negative one. When we plan ahead, such as thinking through every detail of an upcoming event and it goes well, we feel our efforts were justified, effective, and maybe even responsible for creating the happiness we experienced. Worrying often has the same tendency to create an illusion of it’s own usefulness in avoiding a negative outcome. We often assume that by anticipating a something bad happening, if it fails to occur, that our worrying was warranted and useful. And while both of these may have an element of truth, the down side of it is that we are reinforced in our habit of being future focused, and without realizing it, it can start to become a lifestyle of the mind. Success makes us tempted to water the weeds without realizing exactly what it is that we are cultivating. 

Beautiful but invasive things can take over. And it’s not that there’s necessarily anything so wrong with dandelions. But it seems that humans flourishing requires a certain amount of diversity. Weeds, by their invasive nature, choke out diversity and one species takes over and dominates. Just as a good garden requires a diverse range of plant species, our mental and emotional health seems to require a certain diversity of thought life. We must be careful not to let thoughts about the future or the past take over and choke out our ability to be in the present moment. 

I can live with a few dandelions. Thinking ahead is fine and good. But I have to watch what I'm watering. I have to be aware of how easily a pretty yellow flower can take over. 

Funerals for the living

Have you ever been stuck listening to a conversation that you just didn't want to hear? 

I was on a plane seated beside a young couple who were on their way home from their own spur of the moment wedding in Las Vegas. They spent the first hour picking apart the flaws in each other's families in an incredibly mean spirited and vulgar fashion, and at volume that made it all but impossible not to hear.  At some point they seemed to realize that I was sitting beside them and they interrupted me to ask what I was reading. I told them it was a biography of Steve Jobs (which drew puzzled looks on their faces). I explained that he was the founder of Apple, and likely was responsible for Mac's and iPods and changed the music industry....but was now dead. Their response was one of horror. Apparently my saying the word "dead" was completely disgusting to them. Recalling the taboo around the word "dead" in some cultures, I quickly recanted and told them he had "passed". Upon which, they were visibly relieved and returned to their gruesome dissection of the personal traits of each other's friends. (Who knew that elbows were even part of the way people evaluate others' worth as human beings?...but to some people they are crucial. ) 

It reminded me of how quickly death and dying can elicit responses of disgust and horror. 

Our phobia of death and mortality is so pervasive that defences like denial have become entrenched and habitual, to the point that we fail to give recognition to what has passed, what is lost, and how we suffer because of it.

I think most people in our culture struggle to grieve well. By which I mean, we generally struggle to effectively confront loss.

I'm on board with the idea that funeral's should be a celebration of a person's life, but not at the expense of also engaging the true reality of loss and all the sadness that entails. One of my few painful memories from childhood was being told by a relative that I shouldn't be sad when someone dear to me had died. Even as a six-year old I knew that I needed to feel the pain of losing someone important. The possibility of afterlife changes the meaning of loss, but it doesn't eliminate the sorrow of it entirely, and to pretend otherwise is a fool's errand. Many of us skirt the feelings of loss these days when someone dies by either avoiding the unpleasant rituals of death altogether, or trying to divert our attention by focusing only on the positive (hence my hesitation about being celebratory without acknowledging sorrow).

But this difficulty with grief doesn't just apply to actual death. It's a problem with loss in general.

We often fail to acknowledge the passing - the loss of things in our lives - especially when there's no body to bury.

Theologians like Arthur McGill, and psychologists like Rollo May, have suggested that we avoid confronting loss altogether in our culture because it reminds us of death, that perceived ultimate loss that inevitably awaits us. So we pretend that people can stay young. We offer products and services that create the illusions that time isn't lost or passing. We even desperately grasp on to nostalgia and recreations of our past to shield us from the truth that everything is in a constant state of change.

There are real consequences however when we fail to acknowledge loss. Perhaps most important of those consequences is the difficulty it creates in allowing us to live the life we have in the present. 

So I've taken to giving some advice to people that seems a little peculiar at first glance: have funerals for things and people that are gone, even if they're still technically alive.

Sometimes people have changed so much they have become a totally different person than you used to know, and show no signs of going back. And this hurts. It hurts that they will never again play that role in your life, that they will never be the same person to you that they were. And like all loss, the more loving and important they were to you in the past, the deeper the hurt when they've become this new person who doesn't even resemble the one you knew. 

It's a loss and it needs to be grieved. You don't get to go to the funeral home and look at a made up body in a casket.  But you can bring in some elements of ritual that help you say goodbye and move through the grieving process. 

Write a eulogy. Identify all the dearest memories, all the funny stories, all the things that person meant to you. Read it out loud to friends at a pub, or write it on index cards with crayon while sitting in your bathtub and listening to music they loved. It doesn't really matter the format as long as you're clearly seeing and naming what was, and acknowledging that it has passed. 

Some of us need to have funerals for ourselves.

In a life permanently altered by an accident or medical condition, or even just the slow process of deterioration that comes with aging, we are changed so significantly that a part of us is gone. Very often our identities are tied up in what we "do" in our physical capabilities and activities. Is it any wonder then that an illness or disabling condition can feel remarkably like a part of our selves has died? This too is a loss we must grieve. The loss of self, even while we are alive is painful and disorienting. And if you need to have a funeral, go ahead. Wear black, bury something, make a poster-board of memories of what has passed. Honour your loss. Don't try to make it a good thing too quickly. Many of us have been lead to under appreciate the value and importance of negative emotions, thinking that we should quickly find a happier note to sing lest we fall into wallowing. A funeral can be a good place to find permission to be sad and cry. 

At the heart of all grief is the uniquely human emotion of bittersweet. We who are made in the image of the Divine have this capacity to feel both sorrow and joy at the same time. Joy for what was, and for what the person or thing meant to us. But also sorrow. Sorrow for the fact that it is now gone and can never be exactly replaced. Remember, that its irreplaceable quality is precisely what made it so precious and special while it was present. 

Loss is an ongoing part of our lives as they were in the past. Ignoring loss steals the present from us as well. 

On one hand I'm tempted to be critical of the couple that sat next to me on the plane for covering up the reality of death with a more sanitized word like "passed" to avoid facing the fear and pain associated with loss.

On the other hand, I think the word "passed" has it's own value for marking the constant flow of loss that happens in all of our lives. There will never be a day exactly like today. Friends I love are getting older and closer to illness. My kids are growing up. Opportunities to show love are vanishing as quickly as they appear. 

Today is passing. 

All of life around us is passing as we journey forward. It makes every moment precious. It means constant losses. 

I'm not writing this piece with any one person in mind. All of you who read this blog are on journey's of loss because you are human.

So may you discover the quintessentially bittersweet quality of human life in all of its fullness by acknowledging and honouring your losses. Even if it means having a small funeral for something that's alive but changed... and eating some triangle sandwiches in a church basement afterward. 

Jesus ain't your therapist...or is He?

I realized a couple mornings ago after talking to my spiritual director, that lots of times we treat Jesus like a therapist - someone we turn to, to help make us well.

Part of my frustration with Christianity has been it's failure to produce the kinds of changes in myself and others that I think it should be able to produce. And Jesus, just doesn't seem to be a good therapist after all - because I've been meeting with him for a bunch of years, but still find myself messier than I'd like to be.

I have a longing for deep transformation. But sometimes church makes me feel like I'm at an Amway convention where the hype seems bigger than the real thing most people are experiencing.

But in my helpful conversation a few mornings ago I came to realize that being changed by God isn't the primary reason I'm invited into relationship with God. The real purpose of following, is to be with Jesus. It's relationship, just for the sake of relationship. Or intimacy for the purpose of intimacy. God wants to restore the relationship broken between God and creation. It's reconciliation first, and then change as the by-product of being restored in the relationship. Like most people in my culture, I often just want God to be useful to me, without the entanglements of a real friendship.

Skye Jethani, in his brilliant book, "With: Re-imagining the Way You Relate To God", describes how frequently we take one of four postures towards God: Life Under God, Life Over God, Life From God, or Life For God. In Skye's perspective, all of these represent a half-truth, a distortion, a way of relating to God that ultimately ends up trying to control the world by placing God in a certain position, but neglecting to actually be present and intimate.

I think I could add one to Skye's list. It's a posture of "Life Consuming God", where we turn God into some kind of commodity to be used for our own purposes. There are plenty ways this plays out, but I'm particularly aware of how we use God or Jesus as a kind of therapeutic tool - to satisfy our fears and unhappiness with life.  Whether it's the big troubling questions of existence, or more like using God as our own personal life coach to help us make little improvements here and there, we follow a dominant pattern in our culture that encourages us to think about everything in terms of what it can be used for. 

But it we pursue God for our own ends, even if they are noble goals like wanting deep transformation, we taint the relationship by bringing our agenda to it, rather than wanting it for it's own sake. If I try to forge a friendship with a lawyer because I'm hoping for free legal advice, the relationship is never really about them as a person, it becomes based on what they in their role can provide for me. If I come to God primarily looking for some kind of method of personal change or growth, it places a block in the relationship. And in the case of God, trying to use God for our purposes is a gross distortion of the created order - it turns God into an idol rather than fully acknowledging that we God's creation and subject to God, rather than the other way around.

So Jesus isn't your therapist?

Well, yes and no.

Yes, a relationship with God is transformative, but there are problems if it's they primary reason or focus of pursuing closeness. It really needs to be a by-product of the relationship instead. Life with God is therapeutic. But it's important not to seek out God as our therapist, but instead seek God just because He/She is God.


Relationship purely for the sake of relationship. No agenda, no aims, no using the other person for something...and...with the God of the universe.

Mind-boggling isn't it?