Return Trip to Barcelona

He was loud, he was drunk, and although I could not understand him, his lack of respect for personal boundaries was making me nervous.

I checked the faces of my fellow train passengers, and they ranged from apathy to concern, but mostly they tried to ignore him. A few had moved away. He seemed more interested in the pretty girls, so I puffed up my physique a little, hoping to dissuade him from engaging my wife. He was yelling in Spanish, of which I spoke none, and which made him feel a little more menacing. I'd already been robbed on a subway train in Madrid a few days before, so fear was taking over and I was looking for an exit.

Some of the things he said were clearly disgusting the locals, for that set of reactions seems universal.   It was a mixed group of what seemed like commuters and tourists. Some dressed in the comfort-oriented clothes cherished by tourists. Others, more fashionably dressed and non-plussed by the theatrics I assumed were perhaps inhabitants of the area. I could only imagine what he was saying as he made his way down the train car closer to our seats. I didn't know this particular person, but I felt I'd seen enough in my life to "know" the basic situation. Contempt for him began to saturate my thoughts.

I was riding a train to Barcelona in the first place, because we had been visiting the legendary Monestario de Montserrat. This is a cathedral and religious community built 900 meters up in a mountain in the 12th century. Legend has it the holy grail was kept here for a period. But it's more recently famous for it's statue known as the "Black Madonna". Visitors can file by and touch the foot of the statue, with the hopes that it will bring some kind of blessing to them for having made the pilgrimage to the sacred site. There are claims of miracles over the centuries in this hallowed place.

After visiting the statue, I felt nothing, except perhaps a sense of confirmed skepticism. Relics like this have never much inspired me. And I even felt somewhat alienated from other religious people who seem to find connection with these sites so meaningful and even mystically gratifying.

Perhaps it was because we took the cable car to the top of the mountain instead of making the hike of several miles up the mountain on foot.

Perhaps I carried with me an unrealistic notion that God would be hanging out in European cathedrals because they're really old and beautiful and somehow more apt to capture the presence of a deity than the newly minted "auditoriums" of evangelical Christian churches.

Perhaps it was my skepticism going in to the whole experience, that caused me to miss whatever it was I was supposed to experience.

And while I felt a certain awe for the devotion of monks who laboured so tirelessly for this place, as well as for those who have preserved it for the centuries since, I couldn't completely quell the uneasy feeling that God seemed so distant in a place we expect her to inhabit.

Such abstract reflections quickly vanished when the intoxicated gentleman on the train ride back made eye contact with me, before taking up residence in the seat across the aisle. Now I could smell the mix of alcohol and filth, and virtually taste the distress of his existence. He sat down next to an elderly lady and began to wax eloquent.

Unlike the other passengers she made eye contact. She listened. There was a softness in her face and demeanour towards him. After several minutes of earnest listening, she asked him a question. I couldn't tell what it was, but it stopped him cold in his tracks. For the first time in thirty minutes of train ride he was silent. We all began to watch as the quiet transpired.

"Abrazo" he said, with tears forming in his eyes.

Somehow I knew what he was asking. Perhaps it's because "abrazo" sounds so similar to the English "embrace", that I knew he was asking her for hug. The eyes of the train focused on the drama unfolding in front of us. But without hesitation this humble fellow passenger rose to her feet and opened her arms to him. She held him in her abrazo for as long as he needed. I don't remember how long it actually occurred. I think those of us witnessing this act of love and compassion soon averted our gaze as if to hold sacred by granting privacy the intimacy that was taking place in our midst.

I feel fairly certain I encountered God on the train to Barcelona.

I'd been disappointed to find God missing in the cathedrals and relics, but found him instead in the love and compassion of an old lady toward what seemed to me someone pathetic and frightening. No matter what cynicism was perverting my mind at the time, I could not miss the meeting of heaven and earth when when one when human gave generously of her love to another human that most of us were despising. At the end of my train ride I started another journey; one of looking for and finding God out amongst his creation and especially among his people.

Like all journeys it's had highlights and it's had forgettable moments. Times of boredom and despair, and times of wondering if I'm on the right track, or if there even is such a thing as a spiritual journey. But God keeps showing up in the most unexpected places. Or as Nadia Bolz-Weber calls them, "all the wrong people". God shows up in the saints and the sinners, the self-proclaimed faithful and the self-proclaimed atheists, and sometimes I get the strange sense that she shows up in me.

Recently I've even found God showing up in church buildings, in congregations, and in the lives of religious people of both great faith and great doubts. After meeting God on the train, I often assumed that God had abandoned the religious and was only showing up in weird and unexpected places. Sometimes when we've been hurt by people and institutions we can start to assume he can't be there in the midst of those places or those people.

But as fans of the film The Big Lebowski will recall, "The dude abides"

Wherever love is shown and wherever love is needed, "the dude" abides.

And sometimes "the dude" converts hearts of ordinary religious folk like me. Giving us a new story to live, and shaping us into the kind of people that somewhat resemble the old lady on the train to Barcelona. Helping us to become people who are not so afraid that we might embrace the world and its brokenness.

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.

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?

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.

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.

The difficulty of grasping freedom

I've been fascinated by the Netflix series "Rectify", about an accused death-row inmate who gets released from prison when DNA evidence overturns his original conviction. There's some fascinating depictions of human struggle, and some good questions about God and faith raised throughout. But what particularly strikes me is the difficulty the lead character has in accepting, and adjusting to freedom after spending 20 years on death-row. Who says there's nothing good on TV anymore?

Others in real life have documented this experience.

Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist who chronicles his experience in a German concentration camp writes about his liberation: "Timidly, we looked around and glanced at each other questioningly. Then we ventured a few steps out of the camp. This time no orders were shouted at us, nor was there any need to duck quickly to avoid a blow or a kick. 'Freedom,' we repeated to ourselves, and yet we could not grasp it." 

While our expectation might be to assume that the opportunity for freedom would automatically lead to joy and delight, it appears to be not quite the case. (I'm limiting myself to these two examples, but there are a myriad of others)

We think about the concept of freedom in Christianity a fair bit. We talk about liberation from sin and freedom from bondage to our past lives lived in darkness. The scriptures use imagery of prisoners being released, of slaves set free, and even metaphors of death and resurrection to convey the kind of rescue and new life that God offers us.

But many of us don't live like we've been set free.

Sometimes I hear preachers suggesting that the problem is we just don't realize we've been set free. And they seem to think if they're just enthusiastic enough about reminding us of the fact, that we'll be jolted into recognition and come to our senses. Others have proposed a series of practices and routines to help us integrate the reality of liberation into our identity.

But that doesn't quite ring true for many of us does it? It's not just a lack of awareness, or even taking the liberation of our souls for granted that explains the difficulty of living in freedom.

It seems that like all prisoners, we struggle to grasp freedom, struggle even to embrace it for a far more complex reason than a lack of awareness.

After watching Rectify and reading Viktor Frankl, I suggest to you that perhaps our difficulty accepting freedom is this: that imprisonment, whether it be a real prison, or an emotional/spiritual prison of our own making, changes us. To be imprisoned by anything is a fundamental degredation of our humanity, and we are powerfully shaped by it in ways that make liberation and freedom enormously difficult to embrace.

And it's not just a matter of identity. It's not just that we take on the role of a prisoner and integrate it into our self-concept, as important as this might be. Viktor Frankl suggests it is also the fundamental breakdown of a human's capacity to have a future, or live for a goal. Prison leads us to believe that the real opportunities in life have passed. Over time imprisonment forms this belief in us so deeply that we cannot fully experience freedom when granted, because we have been shaped into humans that cannot imagine a meaningful future.

Others have eloquently written about the overwhelming anxiety that comes with freedom, because freedom infers responsibility. Responsibility to choose well in this life, or at least choose meaningfully, is all the more difficult in a society where all the stories of what constitutes a good or meaningful existence are subject to being contested. Without our modernist certainty, we are aimlessly afloat looking for something to tell us what to choose in a field of myriad life options.

So freedom, whether it be the dehumanizing forces of being imprisoned, or the anxiety that awaits in being responsible for one's life, is not nearly so simple as naming and claiming it.

I don't have answers for what do about these terrible dilemmas. But I think there is some value to all of us being honest with ourselves and each other about the difficulty of grasping freedom. Let's not glibly assume that the spiritual liberation of the Christian story is an easy or immediate experience. Let's not expect of ourselves or each other that we will walk into freedom with any less hesitation than any other prisoner who's been released. As Frankl describes in his later writings, many who were liberated spent the lifetime afterward struggling to accept liberation and be free. Some never did. Others found ways to restore their humanity and re-discovered that the real opportunities of life had not passed but were indeed in front of them.

Let us at least be honest enough to acknowledge that freedom is a wonderful gift, and yet also a difficult and troubling journey that involves re-discovering our humanity and wrestling with it's terrible implications.

Let us be more patient with each other, understanding that the freedom God offers is a process of liberation, not a one-time event. That each of us is perhaps moving towards freedom, but struggling to grasp it. And when we return to our broken and imprisoned ways, it is not an ungratefulness to our liberator, but merely a reflection of the normal human process of moving in and out of the freedom we are offered.

Let us exercise compassion towards each other as fellow prisoners who are struggling to accept liberation: all of us as former inmates on a journey towards freedom.

In Defense of the Easter Bunny

This morning at my house we had lengthy conversations about the physical improbabilities of the Easter Bunny and his (her?) delivery tactics.

It seems my girls have reached an age where they are struck by the seeming logistical impossibilities of a bunny delivering chocolate eggs to our house, and they are more ruthlessly logical and scientific in their questioning than I would have expected them to be.

I keep explaining to them that there is a certain magic to the whole process, a magic we simply can't understand or explain. I liken it to the magic of Santa and the Tooth Fairy, but alas, they are already wary of such answers.

Now some would say I'm doing them no favors by continuing the charade. Teaching them to believe in such fantasies is considered unhealthy by some, and unchristian by others. But I've decided I disagree.

I'm sticking up for the Easter Bunny and his other seasonal associates because I believe there is something important about all of us learning to believe in magic, in mystery, in wonder, and in things we simply cannot explain.

There will be plenty of years for them to be immersed in scientific rationalism. But for all my education as a scientist I've found an empirical world-view to be sorely lacking when it comes to deciding how to live a life worth living. In my thirties, learning to encounter and embrace mystery has been crucial to my sanity. (some may object to this...the part about me being sane that is....)

It turns out, that to live in acceptance that there are things I cannot explain or understand has far more integrity than the false certainty of religious or scientific dogma.

So I'm going to let my kids believe in magic for as long as they choose. They'll get more than enough materialism in their lives in due time. I think it's more important to nurture their sense of wonder than for them to know exactly who or what is "real" and who isn't.

And next year they may not believe in the magic of a bunny who stealthily hides treats in our house. But I want them practice living with magic, mystery, and uncertainty in this thing, so that they can learn to live with the other great mysteries we wrestle with at Easter.

As we read in 1 Cor 15:51:

"For behold, I show you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed"

Their questions about the Easter Bunny are just a precursor to the questions that I, and hopefully someday they, raise about this mystery of resurrection.

It's good to ask questions, but I don't have to understand it. It's historical details and scientific feasibility are becoming less important to me as I learn to witness resurrection.  Things die and new life springs forth. People see parts of themselves die, and new life emerges. Old habits, old ways of seeing things, old fears, old grudges, old sadness, old selfishness, old destructive patterns...all of them can be put to death and new life emerge in their place.

May you this Easter practice the mystery of resurrection in your own life....

....and may you witness this mystery of resurrection all around you.

Snakes on a Post (...not on a plane)

Today in church we heard that interesting little story from Numbers 21...here's the important excerpt:

⁶ Then the Lord sent venomous snakes among them; they bit the people and many Israelites died. ⁷ The people came to Moses and said, “We sinned when we spoke against the Lord and against you. Pray that the Lord will take the snakes away from us.” So Moses prayed for the people.
⁸ The Lord said to Moses, “Make a snake and put it up on a pole; anyone who is bitten can look at it and live.” ⁹ So Moses made a bronze snake and put it up on a pole. Then when anyone was bitten by a snake and looked at the bronze snake, they lived.

Now I'm not quite sure what to make of a story like this...but I think a there's truth that lies within the text, hidden, waiting to strike (like a snake?).

What does putting a bronze snake on a pole do that saves people from venom? 

How does looking a representation of the thing that hurt you produce healing?


Is this just some divine magic? Is God just providing a random ritual? Could he have told them to do just about anything (like get down on the ground and slither while making hissing noises) and the outcome would have been the same?

Maybe so, but maybe not. 

One of the principles of healing that I've learned over the years, is this:

 People often need to be able look at the thing that hurts them before they can be healed from it. 

In fact, some of us believe that one of the key elements of good psychotherapy is the process in which people take their internal torment, and by talking about it with another caring human, are able to place the things that are causing torment outside of themselves. It's a kind of psychological distancing. Writing often plays a similar function in people's lives (which is perhaps part of the reason why some of us blog). 

To be able to distance oneself, to observe and reflect upon things that are "poisoning" us, appears to offer a valuable source of healing.  

And it turns out this isn't just true for psychological issues. There's an interesting bit of scientific literature documenting the effects of people "seeing" their illnesses, or at least being able to visualize them. I'm admittedly skeptical about claims of people imagining themselves "killing" their own cancer cells as a cure. The truth is I (we) don't fully understand very much about mind and body connections in disease. But something is there. Something in this ancient Hebrew text echos through history into our own context, reminding us of the value of looking at, and contemplating the things in our lives that poison us.

The snake is often associated with evil or the devil (although they are not synonymous; the Genesis creation story never says it's the devil who tempts Eve, just a serpent) 

So when this story in Numbers 21 tells us that we should look closely at the "snakes" that bite us, perhaps the metaphor is even richer. It's not just that we need to look at our illnesses in order to heal. The truth is that we need to look carefully at the evil within us, the poison in our blood, before it destroys us. 

I think I'm mostly done with deciding what particular bible stories "mean".  This one leaves me with plenty of questions about the idea that God would send venomous snakes. But this morning as I listened, the story stirred within me a reminder to look closely at the poison inside me, to recognize that I'm snake bitten along with the rest of humanity. I prefer the idea that I could just avoid snakes and avoid getting bit. But it seems that there's far greater healing to be found in learning to recognize the source of my torment, my brokenness, and to look closely at it.

Losing the close ones hurts.

Don't skip out on this post too quickly...it's not really about football, it's about something bigger.

So on Sunday my beloved Packers lost an excruciating and crucial game. They had a 16 point lead. There just didn't seem near enough time for the Seahawks to come back. A series of critical errors would have to unfold for them lose. A trip to the Superbowl was within their reach... and yet they managed to snap defeat from the jaws of victory.

Why do close games that we lose hurt like they do?

On one hand it seems silly to even use words like "hurt" when talking about being a fan of a professional sports team. Isn't it just a game? A game played by strangers, who's only really affiliation and allegiance is one I willingly (and somewhat arbitrarily) give them by choosing to consider it of any importance in my life?

Isn't it just another form of entertainment?

Yes. It is. But...

I wonder if our emotions in response to watching games (just like theater or movies) pulls for something deeper? Doesn't it pull for something in the emotional dramas of our own lives?

Actually, I don't wonder, I'm pretty convinced this must be true because how else can we explain the compelling and consuming force that professional sports are in our culture (and have been throughout history so far as I understand it)?

The dramas, the stories, the intense feelings we (okay, some of us) experience when watching sports, are likely so captivating because they parallel a different set of dramas, stories, and feelings in our own lives.

We love the underdog sports story, because we've all been the underdog at some point and can empathize with how that feels. The victory of an underdog has a kind of therapeutic value for us because we delight in the idea that all of us who have been underdogs can overcome our struggles in life.

But what about the losses? What about the kind of loss that happened to the Packers yesterday, where everything was going so well, only to have a collapse at the very end and seemingly be unable to do anything to stop it?

For me it taps into a deep anxiety I have about the world.

It's the gnawing sense that when things are going your way, tragedy lies just around the corner.

It's about that deep sense of vulnerability that all of us experience, but many of us hide.

When life, or the tragedy of a sports team, puncture our illusions that we can construct for ourselves a world of self-sufficiency and safety, we are left to confront that terrible vulnerability we experience because the universe appears to be an enormous, chaotic, unfriendly place. And we appear to be insignificant suffering creatures who can do little to control anything, least of all our imminent death.

We are vulnerable, and it is terrifying. And it may seem like a giant leap to you that I've taken thirty lines of text to get from yesterday's sports scores to the quintessential dilemmas of existence. Maybe I am blowing things out of proportion. Maybe I go looking for any excuse to find parallels so I can talk about my own existential angst.

But the truth as I see it, is that any reminder of our human vulnerability is painful but also a tremendous gift. To embrace our vulnerability is to at least temporarily confront the illusions we live by. And while those illusions might help us live "normal" lives, we need to be aware of our own vulnerability and neediness, so that we can truly see it and respond to it in others.

No lead is safe in football. No lead is safe in life. We are vulnerable. Control is an illusion. But if are willing to engage our vulnerability rather than cover it up, perhaps we can live with clarity, compassion, and love.

P.S. After the game the Seahawks quarterback, Russell Wilson was reported to have said he was convinced that divine intervention had played a critical role in their victory. The Packers quarterback, Aaron Rodgers, later responded that he didn't think God cared at all what happens in football games, although he thinks God cares very much about the people who play in football games.

Nicely said Aaron.