Archive for the ‘thoughts’ Category
The year has passed. Each day has died with the setting sun never to rise again, but the steps we took each day have brought us to this place. The New Year may be fresh with potential, calling us to look back on the road we have come and consider re-directing our steps, but we rose today at the same spot we left off last night. Flipping the page of our calendars does not create some magic door to Narnia. We may renew our resolve, but we rose today with the same mental and physical and emotional energy that we had yesterday. Be gentle with yourself. Each year is a marathon, not a sprint, and coming too quickly out of the gate is sure to backfire, leaving you exhausted, discouraged, and shamed.
If this is your time for an annual audit, and you find you have come short of your own expectations and goals, perhaps the fault lies with unrealistic goals, not weak efforts. Perhaps the voices inside your head demanded too much of you. In that case, rather than redoubling your efforts, you might consider trimming down your goals. But even if you did lose your way last year, you cannot “make up for it” now without straining your soul. Leave those failings in the gracious hands of God to redeem, to re-touch with His masterful skills. You cannot get back in God’s favor by redoubling your efforts because you never lost His favor, for His grace is unshaken by our failings. Use those failings to call you back to His grace, to stop trusting in your own goodness and to trust more fully in the goodness of God, who loves you regardless of your shortcomings. Perhaps this year resolve to settle more deeply into God’s grace, to be more accepted rather than more acceptable.
Let grace set the course ahead for this year. Resolve to live more fully in the consciousness of God’s love. Instead of harnessing your spirit to unwanted demands like a bull dragging a sledge, pursue those things that will lighten your journey, give you wings instead of weights, release your spirit to truly live. What puts a smile on your face, bounce in your step, peace in your soul? Perhaps those are the new year’s plans that will energize you to find delight in God. Perhaps it is not resolutions you need–a call to the will to override your desires–so much as New Year’s Joys–a call to the heart to fulfill your deepest desires. “Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.”
When I pull on my tennis shoes, my two dogs begin to dance, spinning and hopping backwards down the hallway in front of me in anticipation of our walk. I love their joy and it’s good exercise for me, but I mostly take to the road for the sake of my soul. In 3 to 4 miles the calm of woods and field settles into my spirit, and I always come back more at peace than when I set out. Why is nature so deeply healing for us? That has always been a mystery to me.
Then I read these words last week: “True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation.” A single incisive sentence can silhouette a truth that otherwise blends into the commonness of life. The idea had been niggling at the edges of my thoughts this year as I felt my spirit relax around each graveled curve and then suddenly cramp again at the sight of a dilapidated house, reminding me of my own languishing projects, or a solid stone wall that scolded me for my broken one. Every touch with others, or even thought of it, brings some weight of obligation, especially for those of us who are duty sponges. Certainly there is joy and comfort, insight and stimulation in our friendships, but there is always a trade-off, a compromise, a curtailing of ourselves and our desires. Relationships are both pleasure and obligation.
We sense others’ expectations and shape ourselves to meet them, tempering our words and ideas, hiding what feels unsafe to share. Even with those closest to us we are inhibited because we don’t want to hurt or anger or sadden them or be hurt by them as they respond to our true selves. Every human interaction comes with a large or small box of “shoulds”. Even if we have enjoyed the evening with you, our guests, we feel ourselves relax when you leave and give a sigh of relief as we settle back, kick off our shoes, and flick on a mindless sit-com. When I am by myself, I am most free to be myself, understand myself, drop the self-defenses and peer deep into the pool of my being. And in becoming truer to myself, more self-accepting, I am able to offer myself more genuinely to others.
True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation.
One’s inner voices become audible.
One feels the attraction of one’s most intimate sources.
In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives.
The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature,
the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures.
–Wendell Berry
The tensions we feel in connection to others are natural, a part of being imperfect humans in relationship. If we respond to them in healthy ways, they become resources for insight and growth, both personally and relationally. However, part of a healthy response includes the solitude that offers duty-free reflection, and for those like me with an over-wrought sense of should, that’s best done “in the wild,” far from human detritus. When we take time away from being who we should be, we discover who we are. It is only as we know ourselves that we can share ourselves.
The true spiritual journey leads into the depths of our hearts, an excavation, really, since it is a constant breaking through to new levels of realization. That effort takes great courage in facing the intense fear and pain that have held us back, keeping us blind to our true selves. Each new layer of self-realization opens wounds that have been hidden safely away by our mind’s defensive strategies, but we must drop our guard and feel the sharp edges of our suffering if we want our bruised hearts to be truly embraced. The path of growth is strewn with the barbs of truth that pierce our feet each step of our journey home.
Here is where self-compassion rather than self-blame is crucial in working our way through. Healthy transformation is always grounded in grace. Nowhere is grace more needed than at this point of freshly acknowledging our brokenness. This is not avoiding responsibility, but embracing responsibility, since our primary duty at this stage is receiving grace, a bedrock belief that we are loved unconditionally by our heavenly Father. There will come a time to focus on giving others grace–of understanding and forgiving the wounds they have inflicted–but this is a second step. We can only give what we have first received.
To give others grace before it has settled into our own hearts is to try to pour water from an empty pitcher. You will lose sight of your own suffering if you jump too quickly into defending others, which is a reaction forced on you by guilt or obligation rather than a gift offered to others freely from an overflow of grace in your heart. This shortcut is unsustainable and will lead to a cycle repeated over and over of wounding, reaction, and return to the status quo. This quick fix is often accompanied by “forgiveness” or compromise, but the underlying issues are never resolved and so they keep returning without leading to deeper mutual understanding and acceptance. True forgiveness springs from grace, not obligation–ask any child forced to apologize–and grace must first be received before it can be given: “We love because He first loved us” (1 Jn. 4:19).
Self-compassion is nothing more than seeing ourselves as God sees us, agreeing with Him that we are deeply and fully and unshakably loved. When we open to, welcome, embrace, trust, relish this love of God for us, we are living by faith, faith in God’s grace and love. We live in the reality that we are supremely loveable because God himself declares us to be, and none of our failings makes Him value us less than his own eternal and perfect Son.
But so many Christians fear grace, caution against its freedom, worry that self-love will lead to spiritual neglect or self-indulgence by those who think their screw-ups no longer matter. In fact they matter even more because the relationship we now damage is one of supreme value and importance to us, our life-sustenance. If true value comes from God, then our relationship with Him is our vital force. Imagine a deep-sea diver saying, “Well, now that I know my oxygen comes to me regardless of how I behave, I can cut my own hose and it won’t matter.” God does not turn off His grace towards us or close His heart to us when we turn from Him–the oxygen keeps flowing–but we can no longer access that vital source. He wants to grace our relationships, but when we take advantage of others, He is blocked from gracing that relationship until we turn again to His loving way. When we neglect or belittle others, when we are greedy and demanding, His grace is restricted from flowing into our daily interactions, and life sours around us and in our hearts, which are now being overgrown with the deadly effects of godlessness (having less of God). Grace is the door into life and relationship with God, not an escape hatch from all that is good and beneficial. If we seek for life by pushing God and His truth away in “selfishness”, it is rather an act of self-abuse–like a drug fix. This does not spring from too much self-compassion, but too little; it springs from a doubt in God’s love, not a confidence in it. Everything that leads us away from the supreme beauty and goodness of God into our own self-destructive way is self-hatred, not self-love.
Every year Christmas is a cultural blitzkrieg of celebration, carrying many along in its triumphal sweep while capsizing in its wake those who cannot keep up with its jubilant spirit. Be happy or be left out. In our chipper American culture, that is the flavor of the year, as Ella Wheeler Wilcox so aptly described it:
Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone;
For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
But has trouble enough of its own.
Even those who are forgiven for a downcast spirit on an average day are expected to step up to the occasion when the band starts playing, which it does ceaselessly from Thanksgiving till the last relative shambles out the door and the long, bleak, cold winter blows inside.
I’m no sour-puss. I like celebrating Christmas if I can bring all of myself to the party–the sad parts as well as the hopeful parts, the tears and smiles, winces and hugs, serious and silly words. When my uncomfortable emotions are welcomed, my winsome emotions have room to express themselves genuinely rather than as a pretense. Let me weep freely with you, and the laughter you hear will be deep-hearted as well. My soul is chilled when I’m pressured to be false to myself, to express inflated or deflated feelings to please others who care more for an acceptable presence than a true presence. Of course some contexts call for safe, superficial connections, and in that sense every office party is a masked ball, but then everyone enjoys it for what it is–play acting–and does not confuse it for genuine connection.
But even “genuine” can be a canny facade. Many folks who think they are being real are so cut off from their own heart that they are simply reacting, sharing the surface emotions they feel in the moment that serve to disguise–even to themselves–the deeper underlying emotional currents, the submerged rip-tides that are too threatening to acknowledge. Under the intense pressure of Christmas conformity, these can burst out suddenly and without warning. Anger can cover for shame, tears can hide anger, cheerfulness can mask fear. The underlying emotions which are unacceptable or painful are transmuted into acceptable or comfortable feelings. The intensity of those feelings may wake us to some deep lying issues but will fog up our skills for interpreting them.
The inflated expectations of the holidays is not a safe harbor to dry-dock the soul and begin to scrape away decades of clinging barnacles. Sometimes the best any of us can do is try to ride out the storm of cross-current conflicts that arise. But these family gatherings are rich with telltale signs of underlying issues, and once we get enough distance to look back with compassion and insight, we may be filled with fresh personal discovery. Next year we can bring more of our true selves to the party and welcome the true selves of others as we grow into the grace of understanding and accepting ourselves and others more fully.
“I’m sorry for being impatient with you Sunday night,” I told Forest, one of my student workers, as he sat down at the circulation desk. “You were doing your best, and that is all I can ask of anyone.” I am not a patient man, with myself or with others. I “came by it honestly” as my mother would say since Dad was highly committed to efficiency and raised us on the double: if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing quicker. “What took you so long?” was cliched into the moral soundscape of our lives, a diagnostic metronome to gauge our pace in life. I never earned my efficiency badge, so it became an obsession of sorts as I chased after the qualifying time that kept eluding me. Life was a race and I was losing, but instead of quitting, I just ran harder.
My hopped up need for hustle exalts efficiency over more Scriptural values like patience, and even when I demote it, it still mucks up the works by prodding me to bark at consequences instead of intentions. That is, if you get in my way, I’ll get hot whether it’s your fault or not. Forest is diligent, but learns slowly. Impatience (if ever legitimate) must burn at his negligence, not at his learning curve, over which he has little control. Scolding a slow person for being slow is abusive, and the first step down that harmful path is expecting too much of others… which usually springs from demanding too much of myself.
So the cure, ironically enough, begins with grace towards myself, even about my abusive impatience towards others. I cannot in any healthy way scold myself into virtue. Being patient with myself is not at all the same as excusing myself or minimizing my fault. Rather, it is fully admitting my faults, but seeking a cure in God’s greater grace rather than my greater effort. Divine grace is key not only because it forgives me, but because it creates a whole context of grace, a circle big enough for all our failings, mine and Forest’s both. Excuses, far from being an expression of grace, are a rejection of it. They are a claim to need no grace since no wrong has been done–I only need your understanding, not your forgiveness. Excusing myself closes the door to grace just as surely as loathing myself. Self-justification and self-condemnation are both blockades to grace–in the first I am too good for grace and in the second I am too bad for it, but both express a legalistic worldview. and trying to validate them by calling them “righteousness” and “contrition” respectively will not change their antagonism to grace.
I scolded Forest shortly before we closed Sunday, and I was already feeling guilty by the time I walked out the door. I wrestled with it on the way home, refusing to play the devil’s song of shame in my head, but embracing my failings and the grace I needed to relieve my shame. Instead of spending the two days till his next shift beating myself–a common habit of mine that is so personally and relationally destructive–I settled into the relief of God’s all-encompassing grace, and when I apologized to Forest on Tuesday, it was not from a shame-induced defensiveness or groveling, but as a fellow recipient of grace. We both fail, we both need grace. May we all learn to grace ourselves and one another more freely.
I’ve been staying with dad for 10 days, keeping an eye on him while his wife is in Australia. Dad is a man of habit, finding comfort in a daily routine. I think he would call it discipline. Each morning he gets up, makes a cup of coffee, and takes it into his office where he has a long-established pattern of devotions: singing old hymns, reading the Bible, and praying through his list of requests. I expect he would feel discombobulated all day if that pattern was knocked loose.
Each morning here I go for a walk along the Broad River Walkway. At first I was taking along Barney, their border collie mix with long, thick, uncontrollable hair, but he kept falling behind, so I started walking alone. The solitude crowded my head with thoughts, mostly reflections on childhood and its repercussions.
Broad River Walk
This morning, prompted by the choruses I sang with dad last night, I headed out to walk with the old hymnbook tucked under my arm. The red cover was warn smooth and dark from years of family devotions, the ancient supportive tape on the corners blending seamlessly. As I stood and watched the water cascade over the spillway that stretches between the banks, I flipped the book open and the pages divided at “Nearer My God to Thee.” Those words dusted off cob-webbed memories of my deeply religious youth when I was “sold out to God” as we called it. I spent hours in prayer and Bible reading, I listened to sermons and worship on the radio, on tape, and at church. I read Christian authors and talked with Christian friends.
All this effort was to reach an oasis, relief for my parched soul, but the God I sought was a mirage. The farther into the desert I pushed myself, year after year, the more lost I became, until I was crawling through the sand towards water that wasn’t there, and I finally collapsed. Every step in the direction of a misconceived God is a step away from the true God.
I worshiped a God who was harsh and judgmental, and based on these assumptions, all my Bible reading and prayer and devotion simply drove me deeper into this skewed faith. I read verses about God’s wrath and judgment that negated for me any verses about His gentleness and love. Sermons about God’s kindness came across to me as soft and insubstantial, as merely a carrot to get me to work harder at being good so God would accept me. The more I sang “Holy, Holy, Holy” the more unworthy and rejected I felt–who could ever measure up to absolute perfection? I worked to strengthen my faith, but it was faith in God’s power and omniscience and righteousness that were scrubbed of any scent of His patience and mercy and grace. That is, his power and omniscience and righteousness were frightening, not encouraging, the basis for his condemning me, not his rescuing me.
Love was there, but it was not foundational as these other attributes were. Fundamentally, God was pissed off at me and could only be mollified by the death of his son. Jesus kind of forced God into accepting me against his better judgment, bought God off so to speak. The harder I worked to be the person God wanted me to be, the more I realized how far short I fell. I heard Amy Grant’s song “My Father’s Eyes” and knew the look in those eyes: eternal disappointment.
This was not the kind of error that I could tweak my way out of. It was fundamental, all encompassing. It was not until my worldview, my belief system, crushed me beyond recovery that I was able to let go and discover the God in whom I now believe, a God of infinite grace. It has taken many years to unlearn, discard, loosen my fearful grip from my long held false securities and to cling stubbornly to my new faith, my new God, my new life and relationships… and even a new Bible and hymnbook. Nearer my God to thee.
This afternoon Kimberly and I were listening to an NPR Fresh Air interview of musician Sam Baker. He was the victim of a bombing in Peru by the communist group Shining Path, which prompted one of his striking lyrics: ‘Everyone is at the mercy of another one’s dream.’ Yes, we daydream of weddings and families, homes and careers, but our plans collide: mother and daughter over weddings, husband and wife over child-rearing, homeowner and banker over late mortgage payments. If we can’t agree over a music station driving to Walmart or where to hang wet towels, how can we compromise our deepest, longest held dreams. Must I abandon my dreams to fulfill yours or do we each halve our hopes? Does relationship shrivel potential?
Group goals differ from personal goals, and each has advantages and disadvantages over the other. Choosing relationship changes dreams, but if we are innately social beings, then purely individual plans are misguided and incomplete. We can only be our true, whole selves and fulfill our potential within the context of relationship. It is in togetherness that our richest dreams are shaped. With God’s help even difficult relationships can enhance our journey; we can turn the barricades thrown up by our enemies into stairsteps to the stars, just as Sam’s devastating injuries gave him a new and better purpose, to write songs on albums titled Mercy and Say Grace. I want to live in such a way that those who cross my path, even briefly, find help on their way rather than hindrance, encouragement rather than pain.
* * * * * *
After the interview I told Kimberly I like NPR anchors. They are nice people. Even when they disagree with their guests, they are polite and respectful. On his website, Sam reflected about his interaction with (NPR’s) Terry Gross, “I talked to her last week in Philadelphia at WHYY. I am a long time listener and a fan and was nervous (and a bit intimidated) to talk with her. She is gracious and charming and I am deeply grateful.” Kimberly replied to me, “Those gentle people are the only ones I want as friends.” I said, “That’s funny because you didn’t marry one!” Mind you, I try to be gentle. I’m just not very good at it, like a lumberjack with a bone china teacup, and I often feel deeply flawed as a human being for not being nicer. So why would Kimberly choose me?
We’ve had this discussion many times. In spite of warming up to nice, she keeps choosing real instead, because (as it turns out) you can’t really have both–no one can always be sweet and still genuine. When we let our insides out, the shadows appear. Kimberly was raised on nice, and didn’t discover her anger until she met me. She fearfully buried that part deep inside from everyone, even herself, and it was killing her. The folks who keep the ugly locked inside not only hurt themselves, but short-circuit their relationships. If I trust you only with what’s admirable, then you don’t know me and can’t love me for who I am. To truly connect at the heart level, we have to share more than happiness. As it turns out, I’m very good at real, both in being vulnerable and accepting others in their vulnerabilities, and that is what Kimberly needs most deeply. When she committed to our relationship, she gave up on her safe, carefully crafted dream and woke up to a reality far better.
Some dreams are in fatal conflict, and pursuing them tears everyone down. Surprisingly, fairytale endings often fit this mold because they are unrealistic, delusive, and usually selfish, and they depend on everyone involved having precisely the same unchanging vision. Trust me, after the credits roll, the sheen of Prince Charming dulls quickly as he wipes his mouth on the kitchen towel and forgets to replace the TP roll, and if Cinderella enforces her Hollywood dream, everyone else is going to be living a nightmare pasted over with smiles. May we all learn to dream together, to find the richest, fullest expression of ourselves in the symphony of relationship.
Go in peace, go in kindness,
go in love, go in faith.
Leave the day, the day behind us. Day is done.
Go in grace. Let us go into the dark, not afraid, not alone.
Let us hope by some good pleasure, safely to arrive at home.
–Sam Baker–
Jesus walked this lonesome valley.
He had to walk it by Himself;
O, nobody else could walk it for Him,
He had to walk it by Himself.
We must walk this lonesome valley,
We have to walk it by ourselves;
O, nobody else can walk it for us,
We have to walk it by ourselves.
We sang this mournful spiritual in church last week. Loneliness is miserable, so why do I feel uplifted by this song?
Is there something in music or poetry or art that somehow ennobles or beautifies sadness?
Or is it the sharing of sorrow that salves the sting?
Perhaps it is getting outside of your experience to look on it with some level of detachment?
Or maybe it is the courage that is displayed by facing into the pain rather than running or hiding?
Why is the experience of a broken heart terrible, but the story of a broken heart strengthening?
**Please give me your thoughts**
I was washing dishes in the kitchen yesterday and thinking. My mind follows me everywhere and won’t shut up. Suddenly I felt the bottom drop out of my stomach as I reflected on a political article I had been reading. The current state of civic engagement in America is deeply disturbing to me, but what drives the stake into my heart is the entrenched position of my own people, the church… at least that part of the church I have always called home spiritually. It feels to me like our world is careening around hairpin turns in the dark and the headlights just died. This is not going to end well. And leaning against the sink with dripping hands I realized another huge source of my depression.
I have known for many years that my personal sense of failure drove me into a deep depression. I gave it everything I had and just couldn’t make it work: the overwhelming poverty of India mocked my attempts to help. It is a great blow to realize your life is meaningless in the greater scheme of things, that your world, even your small corner of the world, will go on as it always has with or without you. Still, though I wasn’t making a difference, someone was making a difference. I had lost all hope for my own personal relevance, but I knew that the good side would win.
Then I slowly realized my pointless life was not in contrast to the overall progress of the world, but was a microcosm of it. All the good in the world–the huge, sacrificial efforts of selfless people–did not and could not ever reverse the direction of this tragic human story. Suffering is alleviated and evil stopped in small back eddies of history, but the world as a whole flows on in its destructive ways.
At some point in my own journey I finally understood that the positive, upbeat message on which I was raised was a false narrative that we told each other to keep us fighting a losing battle. Against all the evolutionary optimism of my culture, the world would never be a better place, and there was nothing any of us could do to change that. One war would succeed another, today’s tyrant would rise on the ashes of yesterday’s, a new disease would always spring up to laugh in the face of all our medical advances. We were doomed to play violins on the deck of our sinking Titanic. I was not just a failure in my own small sphere, but my story was one line in a great tragedy. My impotence was a small, dark reminder of the miserable whole. I was not simply hopeless about myself, I was hopeless about the entire world.
I’m not suggesting we should stop playing our violins. If we are all going down, perhaps we can bring some small comfort to face the disaster. But if we hope that our stringed ensemble will keep the ship from sinking, we set ourselves up for repeated disappointment, and despair at last. We will either strum more and more violently trying to drive back the rising waves or we will pretend the ship is fine and turn a deaf ear to the cries around us. In a crazy way I found hope in hopelessness yesterday. Sweeping away false hope clears a space for realistic hope.
It is not useless to adopt one mangy mutt from a city full of strays, give one store clerk a smile in her long, harsh day, clarify a point for one person on a website crowded with dissenters. It is no small thing to bring laughter to a child’s cancer ward, to give a sandwich to a man three days hungry, to hold the hand of a mother whose son was killed in Iraq. Perhaps I cannot cure Alzheimer’s, but I can listen lovingly to the same story repeated for the fourth time.
We have violins, let us play them.
A week ago I was sitting at the library reference desk and one of my student workers was talking to a couple of friends. We allow this for a couple of minutes, but they kept jabbering. When there was a pause in the conversation I said, “If you want to keep having this discussion, why don’t you take it elsewhere.” The visiting students were clearly embarrassed and immediately apologized and headed out the door. The student worker continued with her shift, but at the end of her hour she got up and left in complete silence. I’m not deaf to social cues and guessed she was upset with me. Sadly, I can come across as more harsh than I feel… something in the tone of my voice, the look in my eyes, the cock of my brows.
I know this because Kimberly regularly yanks my chain about what I have said or done with others that seems completely tame to me–I was not barking, I was not even growling. Apparently my perception of “normal” is skewed towards blunt and angry. I take umbrage easily. I lack grace. And even when I manage to have a gracious mindset, my frown lines still crease–my mom was right: making ugly faces does stick. I have improved a great deal, but Kimberly keeps wincing, so I’ve clearly got a ways to go.
Every plain statement comes with assumptions, context, implications, connotation… in short, the unspoken part of our message is often more powerful and important than the spoken part. This is true not only because we can give it more weight, even unintentionally, but because the unspoken has unusual advantages, being unseen it easily slips past all our defenses.
- It’s often felt, but not identified consciously, so the person falls under its influence without a chance to examine and question it.
- It’s hard to call out because it can easily be refuted with “that’s not what I said” or “that’s not what I meant.”
- The person reacting has no “proof” so he doubts himself and may not even understand why he is reacting as he is, even blaming himself for feeling blamed, a double whammy.
When dad says, “That was a great science project. Next year you’ll probably get first place,” his words are floating in a relational stew. The boy knows his father, knows what he thinks about science versus sports, knows how he weighs second place versus first, knows how he values his son’s achievements compared to his job or favorite sitcom or other kid’s accomplishments. The father’s sentiments override everything else, and his actual words are powerless in such a competition. We are all born intuitively perceptive, remarkably so, even if we cannot put it into words or rational explanations.
No amount of care in choosing my words or facial expressions is going to change the experience others have of me, except in the most superficial interactions. My only hope is to grow more into a gracious heart, for the heart always comes leaking out between and around all my words, my polite behavior, my planned smiles. The truth has an inevitability, even when I try to suppress it, even when I’m blind to it in myself. Sometimes people know me better than I know myself. So I listen to them, even when it sounds like poppycock 😉 .
Janathan Grace Reflections 