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. 

Rest - Part 7 - The Paradox of Rest

So my last post appears to have created a contradiction.

On one hand I've discovered that rest takes work (see this post for details)

But now I've also discovered that rest is a gift (see this post for details)

I've said that rest isn't something we can achieve, but I've also said you have to work at it, and part of our difficulty is often that we expect rest to be an entirely passive thing that will happen automatically if we just stop doing.

Perhaps it's not so much a contradiction, as it is a paradox.

Remember, a paradox is something that appears to contradict itself, but captures the reality that two different propositions can be true at the same time.

So one way of thinking about this paradox is that while rest is a gift, it is a gift we have to work at accepting.

We assume that accepting gifts is passive; requiring no effort from us at all. But this might not quite be true. Most gifts require some kind of action. You have to show up at the party. You have to accept it from the giver. May you have to unwrap it. And certainly accepting a gift often means using the gift in some capacity.

This might be simple if the gift is socks, or the always classy Christmas tie (you know the ones with little LED lights that light up, or maybe even play Joy to the World)

But what if the gift is love, or authenticity, or vulnerability, or forgiveness, or even...

....rest.

Maybe in the case of gifts like rest our acceptance is not the passive, "allowing things just to happen" kind of posture, but requires a type of work on our part.

And maybe that work involves overcoming the kinds of conditions of the heart I talked about in the last post: self-sufficiency and the cult of personal achievement. Perhaps the hard work of allowing ourselves to depend on God rather than our personal efforts is a bit of pre-condition to being able to fully experience the gift.

Maybe in our daily lives the work of rest involves saying "no" to a whole bunch of things so that we have space in our schedules, our minds, and our hearts to say "yes" to the gift of rest. Saying "no" is often hard work - it exposes us to a host of anxieties. We worry about letting others down. We worry about how our "no" will appear to others. We even struggle with how saying "no" doesn't fit with the image we have of ourselves as a certain kind of person.

If only it were easier to know what we should say "no" to and what we should say "yes" to.

But we don't. We simply can't see the future, so most of us err on the side of saying "yes" to too many things, and end up struggling to be able to receive rest.

So rest is a paradox.

We work hard to accept it as a gift.

And maybe some of us have more work to do in our hearts and minds and routines before we really can receive it as a gift.

Rest - Part 6 - Rest is a Gift

"You have made us for Yourself O Lord, and our hearts are restless until we rest in You"
-Augustine

Rest is a gift.

Which of course seems like a good thing...

...after all, who doesn't like gifts?


If something's a gift, than all I have to do is accept it. What could be hard about that?

But some gifts are difficult to accept, and in this case it probably has to do with our illusions of self sufficiency, and our achievement oriented culture.

Accepting a gift can mean that others can provide for me things that I can not or have not provided for myself. It opens me to needing other people. It exposes my finiteness and my personal limits...my dependency on others.

Which, as I have acknowledged here before, my ego does not particularly like.

Now considering rest as a gift to be accepted from God brings me into these same conflicts with wanting to preserve the illusion of self-sufficiency.

I am forced to acknowledge that I am not the source of all things in my life.

The source of true rest is God....and...it is a rest I cannot provide for myself, no matter how clever or knowledgeable I become about the topic. As Augustine points out in the quote that begins this post, all other rest will be insufficient until I find my true rest in God.

In this quest to find rest, I'm becoming increasingly aware that I cannot strive too hard to find it, or else it becomes...another exhausting activity.

It might seem stupid, but I think lots of us actually would prefer the exhausting pursuit of rest to accepting it as a gift, not just because of our claims to self-sufficiency, but also because we are so habitually formed to achieve everything for ourselves.

North American culture is a cult of personal achievement.

We've come to define ourselves in terms of our "profiles" (facebook, linked in, twitter, even our resumes). And if you've escaped the incredibly dangerous thinking about "personal branding", consider yourself lucky, and sane. But it's not just what you've accomplished that defines us in this culture, it's also who you should become. Our media is saturated with content that suggests all sorts of ways you can improve yourself. If you just follow the right steps, the right program, if you just had the right information....you can fix anything you don't like about yourself...at least, that's what they tell us.

So learning to accept rest stands squarely in contradiction to the prevailing ethos of our culture, where everything gets sucked into the vortex of our personal achievements, even to the point of attempting to re-create who we are.

But the gift of rest says: "you are not able to do all things for yourself, you must come in dependence on a higher power to receive this restoration from all of your other frantic efforts".

Acceptance, not achievement.

Dependency, not self-sufficiency.

Gift, not possession.

These are ideas we intellectually ascent to, but because of our embeddedness in our culture they are much more difficult to embrace and live out.

But accepting the gift of rest is therefore something with the potential to transform us beyond just the experience of being restored, but also in re-aligning us into our proper relationship to God and creation.

When we receive the gift, we are forced to move back into role of dependency on God, and out of the slavery of self-sufficiency and achievement.

And perhaps this is the wisdom of Augustine's opening quote - that we cannot find rest until we find rest in God, because any rest outside of God allows us to stay in our self-sufficiency, and the restlessness it creates.

Rest - Part 5 - To Rest is Divine

By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work.  Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.  (Gen 2:1-4)

Did God need a break?

Why does God rest?

Does God get tired?

Why does the Hebrew story of creation make such mention of a God who not only rests, but makes resting "holy"? While all the other "days" of creation are described as "good" or "very good", the day of rest is sacred.

The Hebrew word the Torah uses to describe the seventh day is "Kadosh", which was generally meant to indicate being "set apart", or referring to the distinction between the divine and the created. Things that are Kadosh have the character of the divine, they reflect those higher things that transcend this world and its ways.

I think the point in this passage is that rest is a reflection of God's character. God doesn't rest because God needs it. God rests because God is God...it's just something that God does. God's resting isn't about fatigue or limits or boundedness, it's about God's own essence expressing itself.

Which may not seem very earth shattering at first, but if we consider ourselves to be people who imitate God, who try to live lives that reflect God to the rest of the world....

It seems we have some resting to do.

And not because resting is utilitarian, and maybe not even because we need it.

Essentially we should rest because resting is divine. To rest is Godly. To rest is to imitate God. Or for those of us who describe ourselves as Jesus followers; part of following Jesus is resting.

Now maybe that doesn't seem very new to you. But it is to me.

I always thought following Jesus was about doing.

Maybe it's not just doing the kinds of things that Jesus does, but being the kind of person Jesus was...a person who rests.

Think about all of the times Jesus pulls away from the crowds: all the missed opportunities to heal and teach. Maybe if he'd spent a little more time giving sermons, our theology could be a little clearer today. But he doesn't. I always just assumed he was being strategic, or at least wise...you know, resting so that he could get back out there and really do his thing. I never thought that resting for Jesus might just be a part of who he is. He isn't frantic, or restless, or perpetually busy, or driven - even though that would seem to be the best way to maximize the outcome of cramming his life ministry into three short years.

So today I encourage you to imitate God in both ways:  work hard, create, be productive just like God was for 6 days. But then also imitate God in resting.

Not because you want to,

not because you need to,

but because to rest,

is divine.

Rest - Part 4 - Restfulness as a posture of the mind and heart

I think that I have re-discovered, that in part, restfulness, is a posture of our minds and heart.

What stresses us, what feels demanding, is heavily influenced by our interpretations, our ways of thinking about the world, and the things we love and desire.

I've noted before that my exhaustion is in part caused by an overwhelming sense of responsibility. I even constructed a list that seems like good solid objective evidence that I have big responsibilities.

But as I meditated this morning, the question that came into my mind is, "what are you actually responsible for?"

In my practice, am I responsible for outcomes? I think I know better than to try "fixing" people, but do I still expect myself to produce changes in people through my skills and determination? Do I have to accept all the pressure from others to accomplish certain things in my professional work?

In my role as a father, am I responsible for ensuring my kids turn out a certain way?

What about life in general; is it my responsibility for how things turn out?

How much of the responsibility I feel is unwarranted, unhealthy, unachievable, and unnecessary?

Everyday we're surrounded by messages of expectation about creating our own little personal empires, about setting goals and making them happen.

What is my true responsibility to others... to my self... to God?

How much of my stress, my restlessness, my chronic angst is a product of responsibility run amok?

How much of my sense of responsibility is in actuality an idol, a place where I worship my own illusions of independence, competence, and desire to transcend human limitations?

Last night I had a dream that I could fly. I was flying over my house, my workplace...I was completely euphoric. It didn't take me very long after waking up to understand what it meant. I'm constantly trying to live in excess of my human limits...like living a life that involves flying. And I revel in my illusions that I'm more than human.

Perhaps I'm not the only who does this? Perhaps others join me in going too fast, expecting to much, and never being okay living inside the boundaries of human limits?

Maybe this is why the curse Adam suffers for trying to be like God in the creation story, is that he'll have to toil and labor the rest of his life. Is the story telling us that our efforts to be more than human end up dehumanizing us in the form of bondage to work?

Is that quality of restfulness that I'm seeking, at least in part to be found in submitting to being human, and not trying to take God's place in the world?

If restlessness in part is a product of idolatry, how much more restfulness is to be found in a proper relationship between myself and the Creator? A relationship in which my sense of responsibility is always viewed through the lens of what God asks of me, rather than keeping up with my own grandiose sense of what I should be able to do?

What if I stopped expecting myself to be super-human...and became satisfied with just being human...just being who God created me to be, and wants me to be in this particular moment?

If my ego wasn't driving me so hard, could I be restful, even in the midst of circumstances which seem demanding and stressful, because I could recognize what is truly expected of me?

If the posture of our minds and hearts were right, could we find restfulness without changing very much of the other external elements of our lives?

Rest - Part 3 - Confusing Restlessness with Ambition

I've always associated being restless as just a synonym for agitation, boredom, or under-stimulated.

When I started thinking deeply about rest, I realized that rest-less-ness is more than agitation. It's that state of not being rested, or perhaps even, unable to rest. 

And I always considered myself ambitious - which I thought was a good quality. But I'm starting to wonder if I've sometimes confused ambition with restlessness. I've put a positive spin on the difficulty of finding rest by labeling it in my own head as ambition; a quality our culture admires and praises. I'm even pretty good at appearing to make it not about myself, by making my "ambition" a spiritual quest to do good in the world. If there's a real danger to our thinking about living God's mission on earth, I think it's that we can quickly take the theology and make it a justification for trying to be spiritual superheros.

But I'm not just ambitious, I'm restless.

Chronically restless.

My conscious mind may not always recognize it, but clearly when I listen to the clanging of my semi-conscious thoughts, the truth is, I'm restless and revved up. When I sit and try to be still, I'm inundated with all the things I should be doing instead.

These things I should be doing?...usually they fall under the heading of "responsibilities".

I have lots of things I'm responsible for. My chosen profession puts me in place of high responsibility for the care of lots of people. I have a business to manage. I have kids. I have a mortgage. I have retirement to save for. I'm trying to change my lifestyle and prevent health issues down the road. I have friends and neighbors I take care of. I have a church that wants to see me use my gifts to bless them.  I have a deep conviction that the way most of middle class folks live is unsustainable and problematic for the 2/3 rds world and future generations...and a profound sense that I should be doing something significant about that.

It became crystal clear to me after being away from my normal life for two weeks this winter that things in my world have become too complicated and involve too much responsibility. Or at least, it feels that way.

And yet at the same time I have this compulsion to take on more. Even to take on new responsibilities. I say no to lots of requests...I'm not that guy who feels guilty for turning people down (usually). But I am the type of person bursting with creative energy, always wanting to take on new projects, start new things, and, if I haven't admitted to it already on this blog, save the world.

So it seems that a part of my difficulty resting is having too much responsibility. There are too many demands on my time, energy, resources...and admitting that I need a break from some of it is hard to do.

In the last few months, I've taken some steps to simplify, to shed unnecessary projects, to slow down.

But the tension I struggle with is an inward drive against my efforts to simplify and slow down.

Every time I try to stop doing and allow myself to just "be", my mind kicks in with a new set of efforts and ideas that I want to pursue.

Even just reflecting on rest has me thinking about how to elaborate these ideas into writing a book. Which ends up making my pursuit of rest into a project filled with activity.

So I think I've realized that part of my journey is making some structural changes to my life, including adding some practices that promote rest. Some of it might require me to pull back even more and allow myself to just be a person, rather than all of the other roles I perform.

But I'm also becoming aware that resting will require some internal changes. Changes in my own inner world, and this apparent compulsion I have to activity. Restlessness, not Ambition.

Rest - Part 2 - It takes work

The first thing I've come to discover about rest is counter-intuitive.

It takes work to rest.

Resting isn't just stopping activity.

At least, the kind of rest that actually restores (notice how the word restore has "rest" in it? Oddly I never had until recently) seems very often to involve some kind of practice or activity that engages us differently than our usual work does. If we think about rest as being a fundamental biological need, it logically follows that obtaining it will often require an effort on our part. To feed ourselves, to find and maintain adequate shelter, to stay close and sustained by our tribe, even to love and be loved; they all require effort or work on our part.

And maybe this is one of the reasons why so many of us crash, burn-out, or struggle so hard with resting: by the time we choose to rest, we're already too exhausted to engage in the kinds of things we need to do to rest.

It's a little like depression. Most people caught in a full depressive episode lack the energy to engage in the activities that will help them get out of the depression. That's often why they're stuck and need some kind of intervention beyond their own efforts and knowledge.

When I first started noticing this exhaustion I've been having, I knew I needed to get more physical exercise. But when you're trying to drag your tired butt off the couch to work out, you experience that counter-intuitive reality about rest and effort. It just seems so natural when you're tired to lay on the couch. The idea of intense effort seems so impossible that most us choose to wait until we have more energy to exercise....and hence we have a multi-billion dollar gym industry that makes its money off unused gym memberships.

So if rest takes work, and that's not only counter-intuitive, but requires us to act with energy we don't seem to have, how do overcome this hurdle?

I think the truth is we must establish rhythms in our life that draw us into the kinds of activity we need for restoration. I've know this be true from a few sources:

1) The most successful way of helping people out of depression is by developing routines of activity that push them over the hurdle of low energy and motivation.
2) The people I know who are the most rested, calm, purposeful, and present in their lives all have established routines and rhythms that they stick to. Rather than reinventing the wheel, I started looking at people's lives who emulate restfulness.
3) The great wisdom traditions all teach and have elaborate rituals (rhythmic practices) to assist disciples in their path of learning and transformation.
4) There is an overwhelming importance placed on rhythms, particularly Sabbath rest, in God's instructions to His people in the Hebrew scriptures. Some of the endless detail of the rituals and rhythms is what makes the Torah such a difficult read at times. (I'll get back to Sabbath in future posts)
5) Our biology is rhythmic. From sleep-wake cycles, to heart beats, and the variety of homeostatic mechanisms that establish balance in our bodies, there are rhythms that seem crucial to human flourishing.

The thing is, all this talk about routines and rhythm and ritual, about practices woven into the fabric of lives is a pretty counter-cultural way of thinking. It's not that our culture doesn't have rituals or rhythms, or even sort of liturgies. But most of them are based on the activities of consumption and production. Holidays are about shopping and eating. Sometimes we add obligatory closeness with family, although even this is mostly a nostalgic experience to be consumed. Our leisure activities, which our culture confuses with resting, are expressions of the dominant modes of consumption and production. (much more on this in later posts)

But what if you or I made it a regularly scheduled practice to engage in the kinds of activities that bring about restoration?

What are the practices that bring about restoration? Are they are certain set of things laid out for all time and people? Or, are the practices fundamentally about the mind-set (or heart-set) that we have when entering those practices?

And while establishing practices, routines and rhythms also requires work I suspect that once established they become less strenuous and helps enter into restorative activity with less dependency on personal willpower or discipline. Even if it requires us to swim upstream in current of our culture, perhaps theses routines will offer us the venue to be practiced in art of resting, and eventually require less effort in our attempts to rest.

Rest - Part 1 - I don't know how

Does anyone out there know how to rest?

A few months ago I realized that I don't...or at least I don't know very much about resting.

I came back from a vacation and realized just how exhausted I was, and ever since one of my preoccupations has been with trying to understand and practice resting.

The next few posts on this blog will be my current journey into learning to rest - but it's something I'm still very much in the middle of. If anyone reading this has anything to add or teach me about it
please tell me, maybe even add to the comments section so we can all learn.

So, I've been trying to slow down...which is hard...and it only seems to make a little difference.

I tried Googling it, I tried Amazoning it, and I'm really surprised that there isn't much out there (at least in the standard ways we access information these days) about rest and resting.

Perhaps it's a sign of the times.

Perhaps we've been busy and tired for so long that we've forgotten what rest even looks like. If you look at a lot of the advice that's out there about resting - it tends to focus on engaging in certain practices mostly for purpose of being able to squeeze more out of life and be more productive.

I haven't been entirely sure how to even define "rest".

Before this, I assumed resting was just cessation of activity, but I'm learning that's not quite right, or at least, it fails to capture the complexity of tiredness and rest. There isn't just one kind of fatigue, so it probably makes sense that there isn't just one kind of rest.


I'm starting to think that rest isn't just about activity levels, it actually has something to do with the demands we experience in our inner and outer worlds. That rest and fatigue depend heavily on how much we or others are requiring ourselves to do and be responsible for.

But more on this later.

For now, I invite you who read this blog to journey with me. To search and hopefully find rest in our lives. To find the kind of "rest" that "rest-ores" us.

Now back to work :P