Category Archives: a Jesus kind of love
For All God’s Beloved Imperfect Children
Releasing Any Need for Perfection
Drawing on personal experience, Father Richard offers an encouraging reminder that we don’t need to be perfect in order to be loved and accepted by God.
We don’t come to God by doing it right. Please believe me on this. We come to God by doing it wrong. Any guide of souls knows this to be true. If we come to God by being perfect, no one is going to come to God. This absolutely levels the playing field. Our failures open our hearts of stone and move our rigid mind space toward understanding and patience. It’s in doing it wrong, making mistakes, being rejected, and experiencing pain that we are led to total reliance upon God. I wish it weren’t true, but all I know at this point in my journey is that God has let me do just about everything wrong, so I could fully experience how God can do everything so utterly right.
I believe this is why Christianity has as its central symbol of transformation a naked, bleeding man who is the picture of failing, losing, and dying, yet who is really winning—and revealing the secret pattern to those who will join him there. Everyone wins because, if we’re honest, the one thing we all have in common is weakness and powerlessness in at least one—though usually many—areas of our lives. There’s a broken, wounded part inside each of us. [1]
In the Everything Belongs podcast, Father Richard explains how he has been freed from his tendency to focus on “what’s wrong” with himself, others, and the world:
As a perfectionist by nature, accepting that things aren’t perfect has been at the center of my life’s inner struggle. I’m always seeing the wrong of everything. At the same time, I haven’t wanted to let “what’s wrong” drive the show—in myself and others. I want to be perfect, and I want other people to be perfect—but of course, the only perfection available to us is the ability to embrace the imperfect.
What I like to call “holy dissatisfaction” gave me my instinct for reform, but it also chewed me up. In the first half of my life, I was constantly thinking, “It’s not supposed to be that way!” I was constantly noticing, “That isn’t it! That isn’t it!” It’s only in the second half of my life that I am finally able to live in the holy tension of accepting that a “remnant” or “critical mass” is enough. Scattered in each group are always a few who get it, a few who live and love the gospel. When that became enough, and even more than enough (even in myself), I was free. So, this scriptural image of “remnant” or “yeast”—to use Jesus’ words—is very important for me and my own liberation. If I’m going to wait for the reign of God to be fully realized before I can be happy, I’m never going to be happy.
Eileen:
Our tendency to make “image” our God is a spiritual issue. Years ago becoming aware of my weakness of envy helped me recognize that I use sarcastic humor to “cut people I envy down to my size.” We all possess natural strengths and talents, as well as corresponding weaknesses. We naturally want others to admire our strenghts and overlook our weaknesses. Pointing out others’ weaknesses through sarcasm is an attempt to level the playing field.
Working with a Spiritual director many years ago made we aware of my unrecognized feelings of inferiority and attempts to bring others down to my level with cutting humor. Recognizing and accepting areas that I felt weak in helped me start accepting my humanity and quit trying to “cut people down to my size.” But later in life, having had to admit to failures to use my own gifts effectively, I had to recognize that I had resurrected that leveling weapon and was using it on people with similar personalities and talents to mine who had used them more effectively. Facing our inborn weaknesses is one thing. Facing our failure to effectively use our gifts for the benefit of others is a much harder challenge.
Father Richard Rohr writes of “the integration of the negative.” Rather than insisting that God values perfection or an idealized morality, Francis of Assisi intuited, through the example of Jesus’ life and death, that God could be found in all things, even those our religion and culture urge us to reject. Father Richard writes:
I suppose there is no more counterintuitive spiritual idea than the possibility that God might actually use and find necessary what we fear, avoid, deny, and deem unworthy. This is what I mean by the “integration of the negative.” Yet I believe this is the core of Jesus’ revolutionary good news, the apostle Paul’s deep experience, and the central insight that Francis and Clare of Assisi lived out with such simple elegance.
The integration of the negative still has the power to create “people who are turning the whole world upside down” as was said of early Christians (see Acts 17:6). Today, some therapists call this pattern of admitting our shortcomings and failures “embracing our shadow.” Such surrendering of superiority, or even a need for superiority, is central to any authentic enlightenment. Without it, we are misguided ourselves and poor guides for others.
Francis and Clare made what most would call the negative or disadvantage shimmer and shine by their delight in what the rest of us ordinarily oppose, deny, and fear: things like being insignificant, poor, outside systems of power and status, or weakness in any form. Francis generally referred to these conditions as minoritas. This is a different world than most of us choose to live in. We all seem invariably to want to join the majority and to be admired. Francis and Clare instead made a preemptive strike at both life and death, offering a voluntary assent to full reality in all its tragic wonder. They made a loving bow to the very things that defeat, scare, and embitter most of us, such as poverty, powerlessness, imperfection, and being ridiculed.
I personally think that honesty about ourselves and all of reality is the way that God makes grace totally free and universally available. We all find our lives eventually dragged into opposition, problems, “the negatives” of sin, failure, betrayal, gossip, fear, hurt, disease, etc., and especially the ultimate negation: death itself. Good spirituality should utterly prepare us for that instead of teaching us high-level denial or pretense.
Needing a ladder to climb only appeals to our egotistical consciousness and our need to win or be right, which is not really holiness at all—although it has been a common counterfeit for holiness in much of Christian history. The Ten Commandments are about creating social order (a good thing), but the eight Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3–12) of Jesus are all about incorporating what seems like disorder (a negative),which promotes a much better and different level of consciousness. ( Richard Rohr)
Recognizing our failures and knowing that God has already forgiven us is the grace for forgiving ourselves. And that can free us to grow and even change. (Eileen)
The “Guts” of my Faith
Trying to kind of sum up my faith and understanding of the spiritual in life.
Is there something/someone worth calling God? Yes! Why do I believe this? Because I’ve experienced unexplainable timing miracles over and over in my life and because when I separated Jesus from any religion, it became clear that Jesus fleshed out these things: 1. UNCONDITIONAL LOVE; 2. that we ALL are loved: and we are ALL created and called to love one another(even our enemy) just as WE are loved. 3. God’s essence (Spirit) is in everything and everyone if we are open to it. We are an essential part of the whole, but we individually are not equal to the whole. 4. Life, both as individuals and as humanity, is a school for the spiritual journey of evolution in loving, and we are learning to love still on the day we die. 5. We are not all dealt the same hand, so it is impossible to judge how well anyone is playing their hand. Only God knows that. 6. No person or group has all the truth and nothing but the truth. 7. We are part of God and God is part of us, but we are not the whole. 8.The Scriptures are letters from God written by people in earlier and more primitive cultures, but we hear God through the Scriptures with the understanding of the culture we are living in. with its differences AND its limits. 9.Truth and fact are not the same. Some Scriptures teach truth through metaphorical stories. The details are not facts, but the truth they are illustrating is real. 10. Jesus FLESHED out not only the Love of God for all humanity, but also the stages of growing into Loving as God Loves. His WAY is our WAY. He is the witness that we unfinished human beings can grow from the selfishness of an infant’s needs to the freedom to Love others more than ourselves, even those who seem to be our enemies, but who play a crucial part in our growing free to Love. 11. We not only can love our enemy, but choose to trust God when we feel abandoned just as Jesus ultimately did on his cross. 12.This life is not all there is. 13. Jesus as a person in History is not the only way to learning to love as God loves. But Jesus has definitely been my personal way, so I that is what I have to share.
At 87 I am still on my personal journey so may understand more tomorrow, but will not know it all in this life, just my God given personal potential through the grace of being loved. I pray for people, even those connected to cars broken down on the highway this way: “God, be with that person and their loved ones. Give them the grace they need physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually to become the person you created them to be. I ask this in Jesus’ name, who fleshed our Your love for us. Amen.”
Jesus Chose Love Over Power
Jesus chose love over power. And paid the price. Jesus fleshed out the Love of God. That was his WAY and the WAY we are called to also.
The early world of dog eat dog, of the fallen get left behind, of only the physically strong survive began to evolve into partnerships, into family, into tribe, into country, now into world, and soon into universe. It grows past hunter/gatherer to social networks of different skills working for the whole. Eventually we will all need each other across our differences, in fact because of our differences.
In our current world we often see greed as the root of all evil, but greed is just a way to power and power is still seen as safety.
Jesus was not about safety. Jesus lay down his life. He chose to be vulnerable even knowing the consequences. Because he knew that death was not the end. And survival is not the goal. Love is.
Jesus being fully human and fully divine is a paradox and our minds don’t deal with paradoxes well.
The problem for us is identifying with both. Divine implies bigger than life. And the human Jesus showed us what that means in the resurrection. Being human doesn’t mean bad or evil. It means “unfinished.” We come into the world dependent and needy and greedy. With the grace of knowing there is more than survival and pleasure we can become able to love, to value ourselves and others equally because life is not about personal survival but about humanity becoming Love which is Divine.
Humanity has the seed of the Divine within …….the Spirit of God , of Love. Like the fig tree we can yield the fruit of that Spirit. But it’s a spiritual journey from need to Love and that takes the grace of being Loved. And that’s where Jesus comes in. The journey of life is a hard one with hard choices and without the grace of knowing Love up close and personal it’s impossible. But we are different from one another from birth, so the journey won’t be exactly the same for us. But it is always a journey from need to Love.
For me that has been graced by knowing that imperfect and unfinished as I am, I am Loved by the creator of all , the whole, the great I AM and Jesus fleshed both that Love and the WAY , (the choices) to become Loving out for me.
I don’t personally think a creator, a father, a mother, would only have one way of loving and giving grace to love, so billions of their children would never know that Love. But for me it has been Jesus. I could not have come this far without that grace of being known and Loved. I don’t think we come into the world equal in ability, opportunity, freedom, cultures, so we are not cookie cutter children of God. Each of us comes with different strengths and weaknesses; physical, mental, emotional, situational, cultural, etc. which is what makes judging impossible.
The seed of the Spirit is in us. What awakens it and strengthens it will differ, like with Cornelius and his family. No one has a monopoly on God or grace. We can share our source of Grace, such as Jesus, but unless we Love like Jesus, it will not find soft fertile ground.
Scripture contradicts itself, such as the difference in the Gospel accounts of Jesus carrying or needing help carrying His Cross. The Gospel of John says Jesus did not need help carrying His cross. When I first hit a time when I felt I simply could not go on, I opened to the story of Simon of Cyrene helping Jesus carry his cross and realized some times we all need help and got an immediate phone call offering the help I needed. Years later when feeling overwhelmed again by circumstances, I opened to the Gospel of John that said Jesus carried his own cross and heard that as God telling me that now His grace was sufficient. And it was.
The Spirit speaks to us through the Scriptures in different ways at different times in our journeys. Do not make a God of one part of Scripture. Our personal journey’s from need to Love are different from each other’s and even at different times in our own lives. Jesus’s life is the WORD of God fleshed out for us and different people at different times need to hear different things. Do not set a Scripture in Stone and make a God of it.
Ultimately, each day has challenges to grow in Love in our own personal journey. But not necessarily in the same way as our parents, our pastor, or our best friend, but always in one of the ways and choices that Jesus made sometimes through tears, heartbreak, frustration, and even anger…..but ending with Love. “Father, forgiven them. They know not what they do.”
We Come Like the Shepherds to Jesus
What does the prayer “Jesus, come and be born in my heart?” imply?
Who first witnessed His coming? Shepherds…….not Kings. If we try to imagine being one of them, what would we be like? Poor obviously, politically powerless, without social status, accepting of physical hardship, called to put the wellbeing of defenseless sheep ahead of our own comfort, but being part of a band of brothers who share this vulnerability and commitment, and who one night are suddenly awestruck by a “charged” atmosphere full of significance around a vulnerable baby and its tired, worried, helpless parents. Those are the hearts that are open to Jesus. When we pray, “Come Lord Jesus, be born in our hearts,” we admit our vulnerability, our neediness, our call to protect and support God’s helpless ones, and our dependency on mutual support. To me this prayer describes both our own situation and our call together through openness to Jesus, as both our Savior and Lord. This is the heart of religion. This is Spirituality. And this is the call of the church. Are we listening?
Jim Palmer’s “What I Do NOT Believe” and Eileen Noman’s “Yes! I Agree! But What I DO Believe, Because I Have Experienced IT and It Is Life Changing.’
Jim Palmer
“I can’t believe in a “God” who condemns people to eternal conscious torment for not believing the correct theology, which is based upon the interpretation of an ancient book that predates modern science.
I can’t believe in a “Gospel” that claims the human species was afflicted with a genetic sinful condition, originating and passed down from a literal Adam and Eve as the primordial parents of all humankind.
I can’t believe that a woman was directly impregnated by God in order to give birth to a sinless child who would qualify for the perfect human sacrifice to complete God’s salvation plan for humankind.
I can’t believe that men are divinely anointed with special qualities, skills and wisdom that women do not have, which allows men to hold positions of leadership and authority in the church, but not women.
I can’t believe that the Bible, which is an assortment of chosen ancient writings that have been edited several times and approved by church councils out of political expedience, should be considered the infallible, binding, and only truth from God to humankind.
I can’t believe that the only hope for our world is that one day Jesus will descend from the sky on a white horse to claim his own and leave the rest behind for tribulation and suffering.
I can’t believe these things because they all violate rational thinking and the law of love.”
Jim Palmer , Notes from (Over) the Edge
Eileen Norman
I too don’t believe those things. I have also been on a spiritual journey that freed me from those, but I opened my heart to “God’s” (whatever “God” is) unconditional Love fleshed out in the Spiritual Journey of the person Jesus , who grew in understanding and empathy until he was able to Love not just the neighbor like himself, but all others, including his best friends who abandoned him, and even the “religious” leaders that had him tortured and killed. “Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.” Life is a journey from the neediness of a baby to the ability to love even our enemies. Ultimately, we are all one, whatever we do to anyone, we do to all. But there is a reality of a “force” of unconditional Love that is grace for the journey when we can be open to. It is both outside us and inside us. And though I experienced that grace/Love fleshed out in the person of Jesus, I do not believe God’s Love only comes through Jesus. Most of the prophets that began any religion said the same thing: We are all one. And the journey from the selfishness of need to the freedom to Love is what it is all about.
Same Song…Hoping if I Sing it Enough It Will be Heard and Understood
We are born innocent, but unfinished. We are born totally needy. Our spiritual journey is from need to being able to love an other or others more than ourselves. That was the WAY of Jesus. You can see him grow in understanding and in capacity for love in the Scriptures. His potential was to be perfect in love. We are born with different potentials….not necessarily going to be the same or perfect, but just fulfilling our personal potential for love. My experience has been that my last years have been a time of recognizing my journey from need to love and recognizing how slow it has been and that since I’m still here, I must still need to grow in my capacity for loving others more than myself. And the reality is that people who are different from us are harder to love up close than in theory. And they are having the same challenge!
One of the keys to loving is recognizing we didn’t get a choice about our unfinished personality or upbringing and neither did others. We may disagree strongly and work to bring about our view of a better world, but we cannot judge people as stupid or evil., they are playing the hand they were dealt the best they know how and judging them makes it impossible to ever learn how to work together using a balance of our natural inborn strengths..
Ignorance: The Human Condition
Reflections on Facing our Failures and Ignorance.
I have been sharing some of my struggles with facing particular failures to communicate my love. When I am able to forgive myself for being just a normal flawed human being, I experience a wonderful peace and a moment of sensing the unconditional love of God. This frees me to be real. Matt in our Sunday School class experiences that in his journey through AA. Ever since my conversion at thirty from agnosticism to Jesus as a source of grace for my spiritual journey, I’ve suspected that AA is closer to the early church experience than today’s Christian religions.
I do not agree completely with any denomination, but I may change in my few years left, because it is a spiritual journey with stages of spiritual growth all along the way. I don’t think anyone dies as a perfect human being, but I think we may make it to our personal best. And personal best probably varies greatly between us. This is why we CANNOT judge, because we don’t KNOW the hand anyone is dealt or how a particular life has affected them. We can be against what they do, but we can not write them off as stupid or evil. They may be smart at practical things, but not have the type of mind it takes to see the big picture, to understand those different from them, or worry about a future they have not yet witnessed. Some people may be very logical and not in touch with their own feelings, so they unwittingly tramp on ours. And if we tend to live in feeling mode, we may think they are being intentionally cruel. Ignorance is not the same as stupidity. And we are all ignorant.
Even those of us that consider ourselves intelligent and have minds that can make connections and visualize possibilities are ignorant. Most of us can not fix car engines or make our own clothes, unless that is what our parents emphasized and taught us.
Our politics are controlled by our personal way of being in the world at birth unless our significant others as children were different from us and remain our mentors. With enough LOVING challenges by those whose love we trust, we CAN change, but it’s part of our personal journey and may only happen late in life.
We can only influence those different from us with enough love that it can overcome their fear of change. That usually takes a one-on-one loving close relationship.
I got scholarships to several prestigious colleges. I chose Rice University for practical reasons. Everyone was on a full scholarship there, but at that time it was predominantly a school for scientists and engineers. I hated it! (Except that there were four boys for every girl, and I had gone to an all-girls high school!) I married out with some poor grades. I returned to college in my thirties, majoring in psychology which had changed a great deal by then, and I graduated summa cum laude. (God is in the timing.) My actual knowledge is mostly in what I am naturally good at. That is such a tiny percentage of all possible knowledge that my ignorance is humongously greater than my knowledge. This was also true for Einstein! It’s true for everyone though each generation adds to knowledge. (Not necessarily to wisdom!)
We are all ignorant. Some are considered smart and some intelligent. These are different and we need both. When we consider people stupid and show it and make them feel that way, there is no hope of sharing our different gifts across the gap.
Language is a big part of the problem. And I don’t mean the language of different countries.
I used to argue with my psychology professors about the point of creating/using language that was unique to our field. If psychology was a hope for understanding ourselves and each other, it was counterproductive to make it “technical” and limited to professionals in the field.
One of the kindest, most delightful people I ever knew grew up poor and got pregnant and dropped out of school at 15. She was competent and talented in both practical things and things of visual beauty in life. But after she joined a small Episcopalian church of intellectuals, she would often be sad, because much of the language used in Sunday School was unfamiliar to her. It made her feel stupid, so she didn’t ask what words meant. Often “intellectuals” speak their own language and consider anyone who doesn’t understand it as “stupid.” This woman was not only NOT stupid, she was a person in touch with her feelings who had been poor growing up and she became the “heart” of that church starting clothing drives for the poor and a church flower garden and often fixing delicious dinners for the whole church.
Some of the “saints‘ among us may not understand our language, won’t benefit from our ability to recognize dangers and the solutions to future problems.
As “intellectuals” we may care about immigrants who don’t speak our language, but not recognize how we are alienating our own people with our versions of everyday English.
Our problems are much more complex than just this issue, but I think this is the one we don’t recognize.
Motivation
Here’s my take on motivation in life:
Greed gives the illusion of importance.
Importance brings the possibility of power.
Power is about control.
Because control fosters the illusion of safety.
And we all, even women, want safety for ourselves and our loved ones.
Sometimes, without realizing it, we make faith about our need to feel safe.
But the journey of Jesus, who calls us to follow him, was not about safety,
It was about love and ultimately even about love for our enemies.
“There are these three: Faith, hope and love. And the greatest of these is Love.”
The Mystery of Prayer
Sunday’s sermon was on prayer and I find that my experiences bring me to a slightly different, but possibly important slant on it. My friend, Montez, pointed out that we have a two way relationship with God that is the basis of everything else. A relationship with God is the heart of the matter. And that relationship is expressed, fleshed out in our relationships with others. Prayer is an important aspect of caring about others.
We can’t really understand God, so our relationship with God is always going to be something of a puzzle. (If we understood God, we would be equal to God and the story of Adam and Eve points out the very human, but treacherous path that takes us on. ) Let’s face it, whether we live in a small cave in a world hard to explore on foot or in a world of trips to the moon and other planets, we are still teeny tiny vulnerable limited beings in a immense and scary universe. Our very understandable human desire for power, whether it comes from the illusion of power through knowledge, riches, weapons of destruction, or even our sense of a relationship with the creator of it all, it is to some extent an illusion. Our relationship with God is a dialogue that’s about growing in our ability to love unconditionally. It’s NOT about power.
My experience has been that a simple openness to something far greater than anything we are or know can be life changing. Unfortunately we are naturally limited in our understanding, so once we become aware of the size and power of whatever it is, the temptation is to use it for our own agendas. So it can be a temptation to turn prayer into an illusion of power.
Over and over Jesus turned to prayer for refueling, for understanding, for empowerment to both teach and heal and feed others. Prayer was his WAY of keeping his relationship with God open for understanding, strength, and the gifts of the Spirit, but MOSTLY it kept him aware of his dependence on God. In the end, he was powerless, totally dependent on his faith in the Love of God.
My experiences of both the power and the lessons of prayer have varied in extremes.
Once at a Catholic Charismatic Conference I witnessed the shorter leg of a young woman friend respond immediately to prayer with instant growth. She had to take her built up shoe off and go barefoot that weekend! Ten years later she was still able to wear flip flops and tennis shoes.
Yet, I watched my mother die by inches with Alzheimer’s for fourteen years.
A forty-year-old woman friend, who had not been raised in any religion, was in intensive care on a respirator in the hospital. She had a diagnosis of incurable idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and was told she would never again be able to breathe off a respirator. She wanted to be unplugged, but a woman stopped to talk to her in the ICU one night and told her to simply give herself to the God of Jesus and trust his Love.. She did this. Three days later she was permanently off the respirator. She became a beautiful witness to the Love of God that was fleshed out in Jesus for all. But she continued to have all sorts of other health crises, even losing a leg. After about ten years she was polishing the candle holders and praying in her Episcopal church and was finally freed to forgive her father, who had been so awful that she had actually been happy that he died in a fire. Shortly after this she had a heart attack and was freed from her earthly struggles.
God is simply beyond anyone’s understanding. So, prayer is also.
I have had many prayers answered so quickly that it was beyond doubting a connection. But also, plenty that seem to fall on deaf ears. This isn’t heaven. And though when we are suffering it seems like eternity, it isn’t even a blip in eternity. My youngest son was seriously ill from a heart defect his first four years, running temperatures that were beyond the thermometer. Every time he had to have a shot; it took three adults to hold him down. I’m sure that few minutes seemed like an eternity to him, because it did to me. At four years of age, he finally was healed without any medical repair. Through the whole four years I had many Christians of many denominations praying with me for him. (Note: Obviously as a child he was not being punished for anything).
My guess is that healings are so we will know that when God or medicine does NOT heal us, that it’s a part of our journey to a new level of faith and capacity for loving God and all others unconditionally.
Many Europeans seem to have given up on God. Most of the small churches have been turned into cafes or theaters. The crowds in Cathedrals are tourists. We in America have not had widespread bombing blitzes, fire-bombs, or nuclear destruction of our homes and cities. When in Holland my brother asked the tour leader if people in Holland thought we were now facing the end times. She said, “We thought it was the end times when we were eating our tulip bulbs to survive.”
Here in the USA, we don’t really realize how spoiled we are. We think it’s the end of the world when groceries cost too much, Hurricanes increase, and Covid makes us reclusive.
If it’s the end of our world, it’s because we killed it, not because Jesus is coming. Though I am seeing what seems to be some seeds of a renewal of faith in our country, as a History major, I’m pretty sure this isn’t the rapture.
Contrary to what Americans still seem to expect, this life is not heaven. As I’ve said before it seems to me to be a school for growing from need to the capacity for unconditional love……like the life journey of Jesus. And obviously we haven’t gotten there yet.
But I could be wrong, since I’m only 87 and God isn’t finished with me yet.
