During joys and concerns on Sunday, a man shared he could hardly contain his excitement as this would be his first time to vote as a new American citizen. He came here from war, hunger and turmoil and now feels that he can finally begin living the story written on the walls of his soul. A story he was cut off from most of his adult life due to simply having to survive day to day.
This election season, there’s been a huge debate over what makes us great. We often think it’s something or someone in the outside world that can make us great, that greatness is a thing waiting for us on the horizon somewhere, if only we could pull the right levers, meet the right people, get the right education, etc. But we are confused about greatness. It is not something we can do for ourselves, rather, greatness is something planted in us by a Divine hand, it is love.
We are all born with greatness in our hearts, it is just part of our DNA, our innate ability to love and receive love. But we are also cut off from it in many, many ways in our world. Our ability to access this deep love already within us and connect with it is what makes greatness grow.
As we exercise our freedom today to choose a new leader for our nation, let’s remember what makes us truly great. It is connecting with our deep reserves of love within and building bridges with others. We make a refuge for one another in our hearts as great love grows in us.
I’ve shared a few thoughts here and a song from the old hymn book that was co-written by one of my heroes, theologian and poet, Georgia Harkness.
…the kind of imagination it will take to re-invent the world.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes said that the words “wild” and “woman” create a fairytale knock on the door of heart. Theologian Paul Ricoeur convinced us that words create worlds. “Deplorables” as a word used to describe a group of people with heartbeats who pay taxes and love their children is unacceptable, too.
Words create worlds and we are all wondering what kind of world we will wake up to on Nov. 9th. Whatever that world looks like, the reality is, it will be up to us to re-invent it and it will require a great deal of imagination and care for the words we choose.
The truth is, as much as I am reluctant to admit it, one whose very profession is studying the nature of God in the world,much of our impoverished imagination comes directly from the ways in which we have interpreted Bible.
Depth Psychologist C.G. Jung said that in order to understand the American psyche, one must read the Bible. And what he meant by that was that America was built largely through an early partnership between politics and church. My own denomination, Methodism, was the largest Protestant sect in early America, forming towns, cities, schools, hospitals and was the a great center of the civilizing force of our country. Ulysses S. Grant said that there were three great political parties in America: Republicans, Democrats and Methodists. The best selling book in the world, the Bible, still has major game and influence when it comes to worldview.
The wake up call for us is that the Bible’s social and political framework for a delivery system for the Word of God was patriarchy, and not necessarily the benevolent kind. The stories that narrate our faith world and have formed the psyche of a nation, the stories that make up the best selling book ever in the world, the stories that tell us who we are as a people are often hostile to over half of our national population. That said, even this realization hasn’t hindered individuals and faith communities from practicing the Bible’s mandate of unconditional love, it just doesn’t seem to make the daily news.
What we realize, faith communities who choose to re-imagine faith in the 21st Century, is that just because the Word of God came to us in the framework of a social and political system beginning over three thousand years ago known as patriarchy, doesn’t mean faith communities are confined to a system that is oppressive for many people. In fact, even Jesus challenged to reform by saying to his followers “you will do greater things than me.” And we all know he was a liberator of those oppressed by the system, particularly women.
And just because the candidates for leaders of the free world (one of them Methodist) may lack imagination in the words they use to describe one another doesn’t mean we have to go and do likewise. In fact, we can do better.
Our world will only be as good as we can imagine it to be. Because imagination is actually our built in communication system with God, we can even re-imagine our interpretations of Bible. Because there are also stories that tell of a counter-narrative, hidden in the Bible’s unexplored territories in which women rise above their status as property and become leaders: warriors, prophets and military heroes.
We don’t have to throw out our old traditions in order to grow to a place that creates an environment of flourishing for everyone. In fact, that would be tragic. We hold on to the traditions that help us move forward even as we let go of the ones that hold us back. Tradition pulls one way, progress pulls the other, and we arrive at a third way forward. That is how we grow. Because love is always preferenced as the way of God in the end and to love is to allow people to grow. Too much emphasis on either tradition or progress causes stagnancy or deterioration. We learn to grow best in the tension. Our democratic system is actually built for positive movement forward, that is, if we can only imagine it.
On November 9th, we will all have a new reality no matter who is elected and the truth is, we will all have a big job on our hands, the re-imagination of our world. Perhaps the true leadership is in our hands and our hearts and yes, even and especially in our faith communities.
Near a remote monastery near Bardstown, Kentucky called Gethsemani, I sat in the living room of the nun who managed the guest house down the road as she read me this poem. I had no idea what it meant at the time. In what I refer to as my mass Exodus moment, I had just left a life of being a rock star and the marriage that came with it. I had exchanged a role in which I got to play a goddess with crunchy guitars, with a private wind machine and spotlights, for a life of waiting tables at a pasta restaurant in downtown Nashville. Only four blocks away from where I had played to 15,000 people on the river at a summer festival and just four months later I was asking people on a nightly basis whether they wanted ranch, blue cheese, thousand island or balsamic vinaigrette with their endless salad and butter soaked rolls. Yet, somehow, I felt safe. When the nun asked me what I wanted, I simply said, “I want to be clean.” That’s when she read me this poem.
One day you finally knew
What you had to do, and began,
Though the voices around you
Kept shouting
Their bad advice‚ Though the whole house
Began to tremble
And you felt the old tug
At your ankles.
“Mend my life!” Each voice cried. But you didn’t stop. You knew what you had to do,
Though the wind pried With its stingers At the very foundations‚
Though their melancholy Was terrible.
It was already late
Enough, and a wild night,
And the road full of fallen
Branches and stones.
But little by little,
As you left their voices behind,
The stars began to burn
Through the sheets of clouds,
And there was a new voice,
Which you slowly
Recognized as your own,
That kept you company
As you strode deeper and deeper Into the world,
Determined to do
The only thing you could do‚
Determined to save The only life you could save.
-Mary Oliver, The Journey
A wild night had fallen upon me that lasted eleven years. My mentor tells me that God works in the form of a four letter word: S-L-O-W. There simply are no shortcuts on the path of the soul’s journey and that is okay. The soul’s calling may be urgent, but it is not in a hurry.
She read another poem, as if to say, read this anytime you have trouble locating your navigation point. and I suppose I have navigated between these two poems and a spiritual journey as I have sought to claim the truth within me and live it out in the world, that thing in my spirit that keeps tugging at me, saying, “let me live.”
We have not come here to take prisoners But to surrender ever more deeply To freedom and joy. We have not come into this exquisite world to hold ourselves hostage from love. Run my dear, From anything That may not strengthen Your precious budding wings, Run like hell, my dear, From anyone likely to put a sharp knife Into the sacred, tender vision Of your beautiful heart. We have a duty to befriend Those aspects of obedience of our house And shout to our reason “Oh please, oh please come out and play.” For we have not come here to take prisoners, Or to confine our wondrous spirits But to experience ever and ever more deeply our divine courage, freedom, and Light! -Hafiz
I studied theology and got my M.Div. during those eleven years and became an ordained minister, drawn to the mysteries of the sacred life, I am a pastor who seeks out creative expressions of the soul’s life in the world. A theology professor, after spending years training us up in the technical aspects of the church, God, Jesus and the history of how it all got to where it is today, finally said, with a sigh, “after everything is done, the most important thing is poetry.”
To quote a line from one of my songs based on the life of one courageous woman prophet warrior, Deborah, from the hidden pages of the Bible, “Your life is poetry and every time you love, you set the hurt of the world free.”
What sacred and tender vision is calling out to you today? What is keeping you from answering it?
One day you finally knew what you had to do….
May you have the courage to live it out, just for today, your soul’s love sonnet to the world.
“Everything has been said already, but not yet by everyone.” – Karl Valentin
In our world today, it can feel impossible to do a very simple thing such as finding your own voice amidst all the competing forces. We often feel as if an inner critic lives in us that agrees with all the criticism we hear in our daily lives, in the news cycles, in Presidential campaign rhetoric, and even in religious experiences where we may have felt toxically shamed.
Often the hopeful and imaginative voice that was alive in us as children goes into hiding as we become the adults we need to be to make it in this world. But, along the way, we may begin to receive messages from our Inner Child, or our True Self, a nagging, a symbol that keeps re-appearing in our lives, or something that continues to speak up. Some even believe panic and anxiety are messages from our Inner Child, reminding us that we need to get back on the path she was on. This voice within may be telling us to go back and rediscover the one that believed in goodness, love and dreaming. However, it is difficult to give ourselves permission to seek out this Inner Child, but it can be done, even in today’s culture, and it is one of the most rewarding journeys you will ever take. Not only that, but it is a critical moment in our time. Now, more than ever, we need to dig deeply within the depths of our own souls and manifest the love that is hiding there in our Inner Child. For ourselves, for others and for a Divine, Higher Power many of us call God.
One of the main challenges to connecting with our authentic self in the world is that we all seem to be swimming in a stew of constant criticism and it’s confusing as to what we’re supposed to be. We live in a culture in which most people do not feel truly valued, have few intimate friendships and lack the support systems needed to cultivate the kind of trust and love it takes to mine the voice within. We often feel that we connect more deeply with ourselves whenever we are experiencing nature, nurture or an experience of self-love but may find it difficult to bring these moments into our every-day lives, moments where we feel connected to ourselves.
In recovery groups for trauma, addiction and dysfunction, this voice of criticism that is constantly running is known as the Critical Parent. We use a Loving Parent within to silence this Critical Parent and help us develop the dreaming of the Inner Child, where our true voice lives. As we take our painful experiences and begin to address the voice of the Critical Parent with the voice of the Loving Parent within, we see a little tunnel of beauty open up inside of us. We lovingly raise the goodness, dreams and imagination of our Inner Child to the surface of our lives, allowing our voice to come to life.
In indigenous peoples, a child’s dreams were a special way of living out the story written upon the walls of our souls. A dream was given on behalf of the community to each person to be lived out in the world so that others would benefit. It was a parent’s responsibility to bring the child’s dream before the Great Spirit as a sacred thing, to be nurtured, cultivated and lived out in the tribe. This is an action of love. But in our culture, we seem to have taken the idea of a dream and turned it into a commodity, something that should be profited from or should bring us fame, glory or success. In doing so, we’ve actually created a kind of trap or snare for a dream in which we may feel if it doesn’t produce or make us money, it’s not worth pursuing. But nothing could be further from the truth. Though dreams may lead to profit, the purpose of a dream is to bring one closer to God, others and provide something useful and beautiful for the community. Pursuing a dream is about falling in love with one’s own true voice and life itself and sharing this with others for the benefit of all.
St. Irenaeus said, “The glory of God is a person fully alive.” As we apply the voice of the Loving Parent to our Inner Child within, over time and with much practice and diligence, we begin to become fully alive and see the beauty of our inner world shining out from within. We mine the depths of what God has placed in us already, love. All the saints remind us, Jesus, too, that love is the highest form of praise and the most important thing we can do, for ourselves, for God and for one another. What’s interesting is that, as we do this, we find others that are on this journey, too, or perhaps they find us. As we resolve to love, love becomes that force that connects us more deeply to the sacred in the world.
We live in a time when there is an enormous amount of information available to us but not a lot of wisdom. Wisdom travels beneath the surface of things, is usually passed down through stories and can be quite slippery at times. Yet, if we have any hope for catching a glimpse of our authentic self, that soul self that guides us to purposeful living, then somewhere along the way, we have to make an appointment with Wisdom, herself, and listen. Or, we might just ask the foxes.
Reasoning with the foxes is a great place to start. One can learn a great deal from observing foxes and the way they hunt for prey beneath the surface of things. This fox has a technique of hunting in the snow in which he must get very, very quiet and listen for the smallest of movements.
Not only that, scientists have discovered as told in this article from Discover magazine, that the fox uses the earth’s magnetic field as a kind of “rangefinder,” pinpointing a north easterly direction. When he is pointed in the right direction, the fox catches its prey 73% of the time, otherwise, the odds are around 18%. Just like this fox, if we want to find our purpose in this life, we also must be pointed in the right direction and be willing to take the leaps and accept and learn from the failures that occur along the way. It takes a good portion of our lives for most of us to get ourselves pointed in the right direction and a great deal of grit and surrender to keep trying.
How do we know when we are pointing in the right direction? Like the fox, we must become very quiet and listen to what is going on beneath the surface of our busy lives, we listen for the sound of what is moving within. We use the region of our heart to guide us, just as the fox uses the earth’s magnetic field to position ourselves in our true direction.
I often think it would be so much easier if we could just take a stethoscope and hear what our hearts are saying, but this is a different kind of listening, we are learning to observe with our spiritual senses. As we do, we become re-grounded to our roots, to the ground of our being, our spiritual life within, through slowing down our breathing and breathing deeply. We begin our meditation with a focused prayer. We listen to the field of our hearts to hone in on our spiritual purpose for being in this world. We focus on God alone, which is focusing on the deep reserves of love moving within us, some call this a Higher Power.
We can trust that God’s purpose is hidden deeply in our hearts, waiting for the right time to emerge in our lives, waiting for us to get pointed in the right direction and open our hearts to the Divine will. Just like the subtle sounds of vibrations moving beneath the heavy snow, Wisdom will guide us as we become more and more willing to surrender our own will to what is moving deeply within us, the Creator. We may make many nose-dives beneath the surface before we come up with anything that resembles a direction, but we keep practicing, trusting Wisdom to guide us to our true north.
In my tradition, centering prayer is a very effective tool for listening for the heart to speak, for God’s will to be made known more clearly than all the other competing noises. Once we are pointed towards this, we continue to ground ourselves in that alignment. We learn what it feels like, what our breath sounds like in these moments where we feel re-grounded, and we seek this out again, each day until it becomes a practice. Over time, we begin to experience the world through the senses of our hearts.
There are many centering prayers available online, some really beautiful ones from the Native American traditions as well. Here is one of my favorite centering prayers from St. Teresa of Avila:
“Let nothing disturb you, let nothing make you afraid. All things are passing. God alone never changes. Patience gains all things. If you have God, you will want for nothing. God alone suffices.”
The largest tomato was stolen
From the community garden
No one cared, really…
“We give our food away to the hungry,” she proudly said.
She, the gardener,
who stood in the courtyard
of garden plots surrounded by
rusty chain link fence and broken asphalt. The stench of pollution lingered
among dejected apartments.
A light breeze blew.
Eden
in the world
is both frightening and peaceful at once.
She mentioned it a few times Like the chorus of a blues song,
“someone stole the one thing
I asked everyone not to touch.”
She had left it on the vine
until the very last moment of ripeness, “Too long,” she shook her head.
The caretaker of spontaneous combustion. Of earth, sun, rain and God. In my mind
I imagined her
standing over the hoe, waging her gentle, ferocious war
with the weeds.
In one second,
a season’s work
plucked
from the vine
at the precise moment
she was not keeping watch (which was almost never.)
I imagined the large, red tomato
in her hand,
an old, skilled hand
of a dark color called “ancient”
by the spirits,
and “black”
by those with
a severely impoverished imagination.
She stood with her ancient hands on her hips To push away pride.
But it had already
taken root in
her soul.
She had tucked the whole incident away in a box marked “hurt”
in her heart,
a routine gesture.
There was asparagus to talk about sprouting up from the ground like tiny trees.
“Break off a piece,” she said
I did, it tasted like sweet leaves and rain “this is how we get our monies,” she said.
We found out later on that often
she must choose between food and medicine Depending on the month.
“God sustains,”
we all say,
but some days the irony is too great. Perfect things
don’t last long
in this distorted paradise
we call the world.
Things of wonder
juxtaposed
against too much pain
are simply
irresistible.
