Monthly Archives: July 2023
The Spiritual Journey to Wholeness
I am an idealist: The positive is that I want to make things better and often can. The negative is that since nothing and no one is perfect in this life, I have to fight the tendency to always be unhappy with what is.
I’m a people person: Relationships are important to me. The positive is that I reach out to people and notice and can respond to their obvious needs. The negative is that many people are not about relationship and either don’t notice my needs or find them overwhelming.
I respond to life emotionally first. The positive is that I care about people and want to help them. The downside is that I am not logical about limits to what I or others can do and am susceptible to giving up on using my gifts and sometimes on relationships.
I am intuitive which helps me be open to new ideas and possibilities and see connections that others may not see between cause and effect. The downside is that sometimes I connect things people do, or do not say or do, to motivations that aren’t real.
I focus on ideas, thoughts, and possibilities which can help me be creative and open to learning new things. But the downside is I often literally don’t SEE the concrete world around me that is important to others.
We are born with different tendencies to personal focus and values, so we have strengths and weaknesses in different areas, but our birth families and lives may challenge us to develop coping skills different, but less effective, than our natural gifts. So the degree of focus and competence will vary some, but generally not completely. We literally see and hear differently in the same situation. We did not get to chose this. And it affects everything.
The differences for all of us are loosely: Focus outward vs focus inward. Focus on the concrete and known vs seeking new ideas and possibilities. Responding to people and the world from logic vs emotions. The need to move quickly to closure/decisions vs wanting to stay open to other possibilities.
Our upbringing and early influences and survival needs can affect the strength and thus the balance of these tendencies, but will not wipe them out. So we can end up being a square peg in a round hole in our lifestyles, professions, relationships, and even religions.
I stress type differences because it was what I studied and actively worked with for twenty years and understanding it made a huge difference in my marriage of sixty years, since Julian and I were extreme opposites in every area of differences.
This does make marriage more challenging, but once understood it can not only help stay together, it can help us grow and change and become more balanced and understanding of those different from ourselves and free us to love across differences.
What I am working on understanding is if those of us who are : focused outward, open to possibilities, and inclined to stay open to possibilities may be called to lead in attempts to understand one another, so we can allow and maybe even benefit from a balance in these personality traits. Understanding frees us from hating and judging.
But it really has to begin by understanding and accepting the reality of our own strengths and weaknesses. For me understanding these differences helped me value my strengths and understand why some things are so hard for me and that I had to often learn by failing. This eventually not only helped me forgive myself for my failures, but to forgive those I love for their undeveloped sides. We’ve all got them, because we are unfinished human beings.
Now, something I began to recognize in my sixties was that I was becoming more capable in my weak areas, but at the temporary cost of my strengths even in my ways of being open to grace. Since women tend to share both their ups and downs, friends around my age began to struggle with the same thing. It began to occur to me that the second half of life is a series of dying to strengths (self) so we can develop our weak side. This is a journey to wholeness, perhaps holiness.
It’s nothing short of miraculous. When Julian was dying those two years, he needed caregiving in ways that used to would have been impossible for me. I’m sure since he knew me so well, that it was terrifying when I had to do things to/for him that required focus on small physical details and using physical skills that he knew I didn’t have! God bless him! And yes, it was scary and challenging for me and at the end I was grateful that he could have professional medical care in the nursing home though I stayed with him there for five months. But what a blessing for me. I was able to love him in ways I never could have before. And if we are open to these challenges of change, we will not only be able to love in ways we have never loved before, but to also better understand and love those very different from us. No one dies perfect, but we can die like Jesus did, understanding even our enemies.
The Beginning of My Spiritual Journey from Need to Love
Old age is like climbing a hill and watching trains go by. You can see all the parts of your life with their huge differences that you didn’t always notice when they were up close and personal. Each train had an engine carrying the weight of its life. Some were passenger trains with well stocked dining cars for affluent partying people. Some had cars with large open areas for a scenic nature experience. Others were working trains delivering necessities for survival. Some had a few older cars scarred by memories of the journeys of lost souls seeking a new life. The oldest trains have a lonely last car for looking back to where they’ve been.
There was a time in my early adult life when I had an affluent seemingly perfect life. It was the life my mother wanted but didn’t get. But I wasn’t like my mother, so it was a missed fit. I felt both inadequate and displaced, but didn’t have any idea of a better place. Along the way I had become disillusioned with my religion and since I had unknowingly made a God of my religion, I did not have faith in God to help me.
I felt inadequate and lonely, so I was mostly needy. And need is not only painful, but it is the opposite of love. Pleasure trumps pain, so I found a pain reliever in a party life with lots of alcohol.
Since the brilliant father I had adored had also been an alcoholic, I finally became alarmed by my need for alcohol to make it through the day. I sought help in a counseling group for alcoholics. After about six months, I broke down in a group session tearfully admitting that I felt incapable of loving anyone, even my very kind husband and my four small children. Instead of judging me, the others were not only understanding, but tenderly caring. It was a healing moment.
The next day as I was vacuuming and reliving that moment, I sensed a loving presence with a hand on my shoulder. It occurred to me that it might be Jesus. Then I remembered that I thought Jesus was a delusional dreamer who got himself killed. So, I put that possibility in my mental file of unlikely possibilities. But somehow being not only known and understood but still valued began to free me to focus more on others’ needs, to begin to love.
I also began to search for something that would help me make more sense of life. I read the Scriptures. I even took some introductory courses in some mainstream denominations, but I didn’t learn much about the role Jesus plays in today’s world. I also asked friends who attended churches about some of the miracle stories and the changed lives described in Acts. No one seemed to believe those were part of Christianity anymore. I even attended a Vanderbilt Divinity school course on other World Religions, but the teacher mainly pointed out their negative aspects.
Shortly after this some friends who were living the same affluent party life changed. They not only began to talk about Jesus but decided to go to work full time for Campus Crusade for Christ. It was a non-denominational non-profit ministry. I admit we all thought they’d lost their minds and hoped they had invested in something for their children’s education. But I couldn’t help but envy finding something worth giving up your affluent life-style. A year later the couple came back to town and Judy asked us to have a “Christian Coffee” for our friends where several women would give “witness” talks about the change in their life that came from accepting Jesus as their Savior and Lord. I helped by calling friends and telling them the talks would be short and the food delicious.
The women sharing about changes in their relationships and values did strike a chord in me. But my inner twin to doubting Thomas put that in my “Need More Information” file and I didn’t join in when they led the group saying the prayer accepting Jesus as Savior and Lord. When everyone was hugging and sharing afterward, I started washing the dishes. The woman who led the prayer came up to me and asked if I had said the prayer. I said, “No. I don’t believe in God and though I think Jesus was a really good guy, I think he was delusional.” She didn’t even blink, she just said, “Well, why don’t you say the prayer this way, ‘Jesus, IF you are who you said you were, the Son of God and our Savior, I want you as my Savior and Lord.” Well, I thought about that for a moment and decided it seemed like a win/win situation. If he was, I wouldn’t want to miss out on it. And if he wasn’t, it wouldn’t make any difference. So, I said the prayer that way and then went back to washing dishes. As I washed dishes I wondered how or when I would know. Suddenly I was overwhelmed with an absolute certainty that I was known and loved unconditionally with a love that passed any human understanding. Sheer JOY filled my heart to overflowing. It was mind blowing and life changing. The things I now knew with both mind and heart were that God loves us all. That Jesus came to flesh out that love and teach us His Way to love. I don’t call this being “saved” because that sounded like “finished.” But the kind of love I was experiencing was grace to grow in loving through whatever it took to become the person God created me to be. At eighty-six I am still growing in understanding and in my capacity for loving even the unlovable in me and others. And it’s a stretching process that often means not only seeing the light but feeling the heat.
Saying the prayer is not a magic incantation. It’s a part of a learning process…..some of which I actually did before taking that leap. Admitting the limits of my ability to love and that I was not meant for my lifestyle took a long time. It also took separating God from ALL the teachings of any ONE religion. God is bigger than our religions and though we need their community, we need to always remember that humanity itself isn’t finished yet. No one knows all the truth and nothing but the truth. As long as we DO NOT admit that we will keep disagreeing and fighting and separating and starting new religions. We only have to play the hand we personally are dealt the best we can and that doesn’t require any person or group being perfect/equal to God. Every person has their own time schedule for admitting the many different areas of our own life that need God’s grace and healing to free us. It takes a life time to let go of control and let God be God. I’m still struggling and as long as I am alive I will need prayers for grace. We all will.
Accepting That there are Other Ways of Experiencing and Seeing Life
Two quotes from Wendell Berry the poet, farmer, author, and protestor that resonate for me:
War, he suggests, begins in a failure of acceptance. He writes of exchanging friendly talk with Trump voters at Port Royal’s farm-supply store, a kind of tolerance that is necessary in a small town: “If two neighbors know that they may seriously disagree, but that either of them, given even a small change of circumstances, may desperately need the other, should they not keep between them a sort of pre-paid forgiveness? They ought to keep it ready to hand, like a fire extinguisher.” Without this, we risk conflagration.
“A properly educated conservative, who has neither approved of abortion nor supported a tax or a regulation, can destroy a mountain or poison a river and sleep like a baby,” he writes. “A well-instructed liberal, who has behaved with the prescribed delicacy toward women and people of color, can consent to the plunder of the land and people of rural America and sleep like a conservative.”
Jesus in our Suffering
Shortly before Christmas one year I woke up about three in the morning with an excruciating pain in one eye. Neither eye drops or compresses helped. My husband was recuperating from the flu and there were no Ophthalmologists in our small town. I decided to lie down in the living room and try to wait at least until time to dress to start out to our eye doctor in Nashville to wake my husband to drive me. As I lay there praying for relief, I decided to praise God in this since I had read a book about praising in the hard things. I praised as each pain hit for several minutes and then sensed a presence by the window. A sense of incredible love was coming from it. It was overwhelmed by love and even though the pains kept coming, I began to praise with total joy. The love was worth the pain! I continued praising joyously and finally simply fell asleep. When the sun came through the window I woke up without any pain. It never returned.
Another experience of sensing Jesus in a hard time was when touring a Cathedral in Prague. I was traveling in a wheelchair with my husband and son. The day we arrived for the first time in my life, I experienced rejection simply because I was in a wheelchair. Countries that had been under either German or Communist control were prejudiced against any sort of handicapped person. Handicapped family members were kept out of sight, often even in attics. It wasn’t because I was an American. When we got home, we even read about a family in Germany suing a hotel because their vacation was ruined by seeing a handicapped person at a near-by table at dinner. They were awarded $20,000 by the German Court. Often the only handicapped bathrooms were in airports and MacDonalds. This was thirty years ago, so hopefully that has changed.
I was only temporarily having to use a wheelchair, but when my husband was trying to get me out of the rain onto a covered sidewalk, several middle-aged women not only wouldn’t just move over a little to give us room, but as we had to pass them in the street one turned scowling and literally hissed at me. I felt crushed. Why would someone hate me when they didn’t know me?
That next day when we were touring the large ornate cathedral, my son wanted to climb the stairway to the top and my husband was trying to take photos of the ornate gold sarcophagus and the walls made with semi-precious stones. Crowds filled the cathedral, but we finally found a dark empty corner to park me in the wheelchair. I could see the main altar which was marble and had a lot of gold candelabra but didn’t have the usual crucifix with Jesus over it. My son and husband were caught up in admiring the architecture and decoration and as I waited and waited, I became very down about being crippled and rejected and stuck in a dark corner by myself. Finally, I looked up behind me in my dark empty corner and there was Jesus on the cross. I remembered his words, “Whatever you do to the least of my brethren, you do unto me.” I was not alone. And never would be. Whatever we suffer, Jesus is suffering with us.
Solidarity in Suffering
Richard Rohr believes that Jesus’ cross reveals God’s solidarity with suffering:
When we try to live in solidarity with the pain of the world—and don’t spend our lives running from necessary suffering—we will encounter various “crucifixions.” Many say pain is physical discomfort, but suffering comes from our resistance, denial, and sense of injustice or wrongness about that pain. I know that is very true for me. This is the core meaning of suffering on one level or another, and we all learn it the hard way. Pain is the rent we pay for being human, it seems, but suffering is usually optional. The cross was Jesus’ voluntary acceptance of undeserved suffering as an act of total solidarity with the pain of the world. Reflecting on this mystery of love can change our lives.
I think the acceptance of that invitation to solidarity with the larger pain of the world is what it means to be “a Christian.” It takes great inner freedom to be a follower of Jesus. His life is an option, a choice, a call, a vocation for us, and we are totally free to say yes or no or maybe. We do not have to do this to make God love us. That is already taken care of. We do it to love God back and to love what God loves and how God loves! We either are baptized “into his death” and “resurrection” (Romans 6:3; Philippians 3:10–12), or Christianity is largely a mere belonging system, not a transformational system that will change the world.
The “crucified God” as personified in Jesus revealed that God is always on the side of suffering wherever it is found, including the wounded and dying troops on both sides in every kind of war, and both the victims and the predators of this world; frankly, this pleases very few people. Our resistance to suffering is an entire industry now, perhaps symbolized by the total power of the gun lobby and the permanent war economy in America, the fear of any profit sharing with the poor, or the need to be constantly entertained. Maybe that is why some have said that the foundational virtue underlying all others is courage (cor-agere, an action of the heart). It takes immense courage to walk in solidarity with the suffering of others, and even our own. [1]
If God is somehow participating in human suffering, instead of just passively tolerating it and observing it, that changes everything—at least for those who are willing to “gaze” contemplatively. All humble, suffering souls learn this from God, but the Christian Scriptures named it and revealed it publicly and dramatically in Jesus.
We can’t do it alone at all, but only by a deep identification with the Crucified One and crucified humanity. Jesus then does it in us, through us, with us, and for us. Then we have become a “new creation” (Galatians 6:15) and a very different kind of human being. [2]
Laughter: Carbonated Grace 