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?
Monday, June 15, 2015
Thursday, June 4, 2015
The Perils of Success
It seems self-evident that success is a good thing.
Not many people would advise you to careful about success, or tell you that it can be...dangerous.
Psychologists often talk to people about not taking their failures to heart too much. That is, we help people step out of their perceived failures and understand that the assumptions of personal responsibility that most of us make when it comes to failure, are often incorrect, or at least distorted.
You are not a failure, even if you have failed many times. Or, as a wise person once said, "failure is an event, not a person". What we seem to know about failure is that in many situations our minds are inherently biased to attribute far too much of the failure to our own personal inadequacies, and spend far too little energy appreciating the complex reasons that a person may have failed. (there are for sure exceptions to this, but it doesn't diminish my argument to ignore them for the time being)
Even our definitions of "failure" and "success" are prone to change depending on perspective and time. If you're anything like me, you might look back at your life and see things that seemed like great failures at the time, but now see them as crucial changing points and opportunities that led to all sorts of good things in your life. The same can be true with successes. What seemed like a great accomplishment years ago, may have become significantly less important over the passing years, or even may no longer seem like a success as what you deem important in life also changes. A mentor of mine once advised me that there's no such thing as "winning" and argument with your spouse...that success in being "right" also comes with a cost to the relationship.
More commonly though, success carries with it a particular danger and it has something to do with the reasons we tell ourselves for why we were successful.
In failure or success, what we attribute as the cause of the outcome is absolutely critical. If we consider ourselves to be the source of our failures, we often overlook a host of factors that were beyond our control and end up believing things about ourselves that are untrue. If we consider ourselves to be the source of our successes, we make the same mistake.
Either side of the coin, we feed our false self more incorrect information about who we really are. We begin to take responsibility for things that aren't really our responsibility. While it may be obvious how problematic that is with failure, we're not usually aware of how it works with success.
Success often creates the illusion that we are more than we really are. That we are more in control, more able to influence outcomes, more clever, more skilled, more knowing than we really could ever be. Success creates the expectation that if we are able to have things go our way one time, that we should be able to create the same outcome again in the future.
The trouble is, success, when we attribute it to ourselves, can so easily narrow our understanding of situations that we neglect to notice all the other things that went right, but that were not under our control.
And if we make success a habit, that false self we all have begins to be shaped and molded into a belief that we are the makers of our own destiny. That we are in are charge of our corner of the universe. That we make things happen.
Success breeds the myth of the self-made man/woman. All of the other people and factors, all of the gifts and sacrifices made by others that contribute to, or even make our success possible are ignored as we begin to believe ourselves to be the authors of our own life stories.
Is it any wonder then, that all of us must learn through suffering? Not just any suffering, but the kind of suffering that mortally wounds our false selves and exposes us to the true vulnerability of being a human in this universe. If we see the impact success has on our egos, it becomes obvious that we can only really learn through failures that destroy the illusions of our past successes and force us to see how we are but one small factor in an enormously complex world.
Suddenly the Sermon on the Mount makes a new kind of sense to me. It is all of us who have been crushed to the point where we recognize our true poverty as humans that are truly "blessed". Suffering brings us the gift of becoming "spiritual zeros", who begin to really find God, and not just some God-type religious product that we were actually using to build our own empires. Maybe Jesus doesn't say "blessed are the successful" because He knows how dangerous success can be. He knows that success will build us a false self that becomes an idol: one that takes the place of God and becomes the source of our worship. But those who have failured, the ones who see their true place in the universe, neither locating themselves as the full source of success or failure, they're the people who see God because they are not putting themselves in His place.
Be wary of success my friends. Remind me of my own words in the future if more success comes my way.
Not many people would advise you to careful about success, or tell you that it can be...dangerous.
Psychologists often talk to people about not taking their failures to heart too much. That is, we help people step out of their perceived failures and understand that the assumptions of personal responsibility that most of us make when it comes to failure, are often incorrect, or at least distorted.
You are not a failure, even if you have failed many times. Or, as a wise person once said, "failure is an event, not a person". What we seem to know about failure is that in many situations our minds are inherently biased to attribute far too much of the failure to our own personal inadequacies, and spend far too little energy appreciating the complex reasons that a person may have failed. (there are for sure exceptions to this, but it doesn't diminish my argument to ignore them for the time being)
Even our definitions of "failure" and "success" are prone to change depending on perspective and time. If you're anything like me, you might look back at your life and see things that seemed like great failures at the time, but now see them as crucial changing points and opportunities that led to all sorts of good things in your life. The same can be true with successes. What seemed like a great accomplishment years ago, may have become significantly less important over the passing years, or even may no longer seem like a success as what you deem important in life also changes. A mentor of mine once advised me that there's no such thing as "winning" and argument with your spouse...that success in being "right" also comes with a cost to the relationship.
More commonly though, success carries with it a particular danger and it has something to do with the reasons we tell ourselves for why we were successful.
In failure or success, what we attribute as the cause of the outcome is absolutely critical. If we consider ourselves to be the source of our failures, we often overlook a host of factors that were beyond our control and end up believing things about ourselves that are untrue. If we consider ourselves to be the source of our successes, we make the same mistake.
Either side of the coin, we feed our false self more incorrect information about who we really are. We begin to take responsibility for things that aren't really our responsibility. While it may be obvious how problematic that is with failure, we're not usually aware of how it works with success.
Success often creates the illusion that we are more than we really are. That we are more in control, more able to influence outcomes, more clever, more skilled, more knowing than we really could ever be. Success creates the expectation that if we are able to have things go our way one time, that we should be able to create the same outcome again in the future.
The trouble is, success, when we attribute it to ourselves, can so easily narrow our understanding of situations that we neglect to notice all the other things that went right, but that were not under our control.
And if we make success a habit, that false self we all have begins to be shaped and molded into a belief that we are the makers of our own destiny. That we are in are charge of our corner of the universe. That we make things happen.
Success breeds the myth of the self-made man/woman. All of the other people and factors, all of the gifts and sacrifices made by others that contribute to, or even make our success possible are ignored as we begin to believe ourselves to be the authors of our own life stories.
Is it any wonder then, that all of us must learn through suffering? Not just any suffering, but the kind of suffering that mortally wounds our false selves and exposes us to the true vulnerability of being a human in this universe. If we see the impact success has on our egos, it becomes obvious that we can only really learn through failures that destroy the illusions of our past successes and force us to see how we are but one small factor in an enormously complex world.
Suddenly the Sermon on the Mount makes a new kind of sense to me. It is all of us who have been crushed to the point where we recognize our true poverty as humans that are truly "blessed". Suffering brings us the gift of becoming "spiritual zeros", who begin to really find God, and not just some God-type religious product that we were actually using to build our own empires. Maybe Jesus doesn't say "blessed are the successful" because He knows how dangerous success can be. He knows that success will build us a false self that becomes an idol: one that takes the place of God and becomes the source of our worship. But those who have failured, the ones who see their true place in the universe, neither locating themselves as the full source of success or failure, they're the people who see God because they are not putting themselves in His place.
Be wary of success my friends. Remind me of my own words in the future if more success comes my way.
Monday, June 1, 2015
Inattentiveness
I realized something the other day.
My dog doesn't realize that I pick up his poop.
He is always looking somewhere else as I do it. He knows there are bags. He knows there is a pause after he does his business in which he is supposed to stay put. But I really don't think he knows that I pick it up. I also believe this because he is so choosy about the spot he goes...you'd think after 13 years, if he really knew that it was going to get picked up anyway, that he wouldn't care about the laser precision with which he must choose his spot. (Regardless by the way of whether it is 40 degrees below zero, or a tsunami is immanent)
So I was having difficulty sleeping a few nights ago and thinking about this - what seems like a trivial issue - and decided to do the math in my head....I've been walking this dog for 10, almost 11 years and if my calculations are correct, I've picked up in ballpark of 7000 dog turds. Some people count sheep when they can't sleep, I count....
Well after I finished counting, and still couldn't sleep, I got to thinking this:
"In my own life, what kind of things have happened around me 7000 times that I don't ever pay attention to, or even know is going on?"
In some ways the question is impossible to answer: if I haven't paid attention to it, how could know whether I've missed it or not.
But the possibility that there are things constantly going on around me that I'm inattentive to, is perhaps more crucial than the things themselves.
And as I still couldn't sleep that night, I reflected upon all the thousands of nights when sleep has come easily to me. So easily, that I didn't have to pay attention to it at all.
It's so often the case that we don't really pay attention to things until there's a problem, or the things we're used to having run smoothly suddenly don't.
What do we miss by not paying attention to the commonplace things of life? With all the distractions in our lives is there a hidden cost to being so incredibly absent from our experiences? I realized recently that when I'm teaching mindfulness, this is one of the mental postures I'm inviting people to engage. That there is tremendous value to tuning in to the commonplace and ordinary things of our lives. That our default setting as humans is to only pay attention when things go "wrong" and neglect what's happening in those big spaces that make up the rest of our lives. We become that manager or spouse, or coach, or parent that everybody loathes; the one that only says something when there's a problem, and never acknowledges the beauty and goodness in the in-between.
Life is a gift. Everything in our lives are also gifts. If our attentiveness is limited to problem-solving, to novelty, to the unexpected, we miss out on most of the amazing gifts that exist in the mundane, run-of-mill, feeding and cleaning up after kids parts of our existence.
I know I'm not even remotely saying something new here. Others have articulated it more beautifully than I have. But perhaps today we can stop and notice. We can remind each other that there are things like picking up dog poop going on all around us. While my dog may not grasp the significance of the act even if he were to notice it, there is goodness and beauty in the act of removing his fecal matter from my neighbor's lawn. There is a demonstration of care - for the dog, for the neighborhood, and for my wife who can stay inside on bitterly cold days while I walk the faithful hound. Care is a gift. The capacity to care, and the opportunities to care for, are also gifts.
And while my dog may not have noticed the act of my poop removal, until now, I hadn't really paid much attention either....at least not to the significance of this ordinary act, repeated 7000 times, but that points to the caring and gifting in daily life.
Even insomnia, for one night, is a gift if it brings my consciousness to how God shows up in what seems to be insignificant and meaningless places, if only we can notice, and pay attention.
But paying attention I'm learning, takes much deliberate practice. It is not something we change through a moment of insight, but through a life in which we choose disciplines and rituals that slow us down and orient us towards contemplation and reflection, towards a practice of attentiveness that runs counter to our human brain's proclivity for crisis management.
So today I might encourage you to pay attention. But more so I encourage you in the journey of practicing attentiveness, of finding practices and rituals that regularly bring you back to attention to all that is going on around you. And in the midst of it, whether it be dog poop or insomnia or any of the 7000 normal things in your life, may you see and enjoy God's gifts and care.
My dog doesn't realize that I pick up his poop.
He is always looking somewhere else as I do it. He knows there are bags. He knows there is a pause after he does his business in which he is supposed to stay put. But I really don't think he knows that I pick it up. I also believe this because he is so choosy about the spot he goes...you'd think after 13 years, if he really knew that it was going to get picked up anyway, that he wouldn't care about the laser precision with which he must choose his spot. (Regardless by the way of whether it is 40 degrees below zero, or a tsunami is immanent)
So I was having difficulty sleeping a few nights ago and thinking about this - what seems like a trivial issue - and decided to do the math in my head....I've been walking this dog for 10, almost 11 years and if my calculations are correct, I've picked up in ballpark of 7000 dog turds. Some people count sheep when they can't sleep, I count....
Well after I finished counting, and still couldn't sleep, I got to thinking this:
"In my own life, what kind of things have happened around me 7000 times that I don't ever pay attention to, or even know is going on?"
In some ways the question is impossible to answer: if I haven't paid attention to it, how could know whether I've missed it or not.
But the possibility that there are things constantly going on around me that I'm inattentive to, is perhaps more crucial than the things themselves.
And as I still couldn't sleep that night, I reflected upon all the thousands of nights when sleep has come easily to me. So easily, that I didn't have to pay attention to it at all.
It's so often the case that we don't really pay attention to things until there's a problem, or the things we're used to having run smoothly suddenly don't.
What do we miss by not paying attention to the commonplace things of life? With all the distractions in our lives is there a hidden cost to being so incredibly absent from our experiences? I realized recently that when I'm teaching mindfulness, this is one of the mental postures I'm inviting people to engage. That there is tremendous value to tuning in to the commonplace and ordinary things of our lives. That our default setting as humans is to only pay attention when things go "wrong" and neglect what's happening in those big spaces that make up the rest of our lives. We become that manager or spouse, or coach, or parent that everybody loathes; the one that only says something when there's a problem, and never acknowledges the beauty and goodness in the in-between.
Life is a gift. Everything in our lives are also gifts. If our attentiveness is limited to problem-solving, to novelty, to the unexpected, we miss out on most of the amazing gifts that exist in the mundane, run-of-mill, feeding and cleaning up after kids parts of our existence.
I know I'm not even remotely saying something new here. Others have articulated it more beautifully than I have. But perhaps today we can stop and notice. We can remind each other that there are things like picking up dog poop going on all around us. While my dog may not grasp the significance of the act even if he were to notice it, there is goodness and beauty in the act of removing his fecal matter from my neighbor's lawn. There is a demonstration of care - for the dog, for the neighborhood, and for my wife who can stay inside on bitterly cold days while I walk the faithful hound. Care is a gift. The capacity to care, and the opportunities to care for, are also gifts.
And while my dog may not have noticed the act of my poop removal, until now, I hadn't really paid much attention either....at least not to the significance of this ordinary act, repeated 7000 times, but that points to the caring and gifting in daily life.
Even insomnia, for one night, is a gift if it brings my consciousness to how God shows up in what seems to be insignificant and meaningless places, if only we can notice, and pay attention.
But paying attention I'm learning, takes much deliberate practice. It is not something we change through a moment of insight, but through a life in which we choose disciplines and rituals that slow us down and orient us towards contemplation and reflection, towards a practice of attentiveness that runs counter to our human brain's proclivity for crisis management.
So today I might encourage you to pay attention. But more so I encourage you in the journey of practicing attentiveness, of finding practices and rituals that regularly bring you back to attention to all that is going on around you. And in the midst of it, whether it be dog poop or insomnia or any of the 7000 normal things in your life, may you see and enjoy God's gifts and care.
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