Category Archives: a Jesus kind of love
Our Differently Timed Spiritual Journeys from Need to Love
As a first time mom, I made lists of worries about my baby, but my pediatrician laughingly said, “Everyone should have a practice child!” After my second child was a few months old, I informed the pediatrician that it would not help at all, since my second child was absolutely nothing like my first! God did not make us with a cookie cutter. We are born with very different ways of both perceiving and responding to the world. But obviously we are ALL born as needy little babies and we’re all unfinished. Our lives are a spiritual journey from need to love. Some of us need a moment in time fairly early in life when we experience the unconditional love of God so we can cling to that love as a source of grace. Others are more logical and find the law to be a road map source of safety. Some of us tend to trust the known and traditional, while others explore possibilities of all kinds. Over our life spans, our different journeys will finally challenge us to experience a very different way of being in the world than we are used to. It’s scary and we may resist it, but it will free us finally to recognize the validity of our differences. This is grossly oversimplified. But whether we try to lock everyone into a law and order path or an emotionally healing conversion with miracles, or a social justice focus, we are like the three blind men each trying to picture a whole elephant by one only touching its floppy ears, another feeling it’s large firm side, and the third just feeling it’s skinny little tail. We see through the glass of our inborn personalities darkly. We are loved, but we are unfinished. It’s a lifetime process and we start at different place, so it’s a circle, NOT a hierarchy. And the journey isn’t to perfection, but to the balance of wholeness.. We are not only born unfinished, but some of us get broken along the way. The journey of Jesus is also OUR journey and he is with us every step of the way whether or not we recognize him. He fleshed out BOTH the Love of God for us, and the Way for us to become loving. It’s a process that will include loving those like ourselves, those who seem strange to us, those we consider spiritual lepers, and not only our enemy, but even our own Religious Leaders” who want the power to control us just as His once did him. “Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.” Those words of Jesus ultimately will sum up our spiritual journey from need to love.
When we try to limit the Spiritual journey to the phase we are in, it creates a toxic religion for others. The timing is different because we started at different places. But we are ALL unfinished. So it’s time to begin trying to understand those on different pages, for our own sake, as much as theirs.
Finding Grace in Old Age
The challenges of old age can put me in a downward spiral sometimes. But lately I think my beginnings of dementia are showing a positive side. In volunteer work at my local Help Center to aid my granddaughter Hadley to get used to working with people she doesn’t know, I get pretty tired after standing for a couple of hours. But I recover more quickly than I used to, because I both enjoy the people we work with and it’s a good feeling at the end of the day to have helped not just my granddaughter, but other people too. Hadley has Autism so she is very good at detail, while I never was and am definitely not getting better since my brain leaks. We work well as a team now that she’s learned to remind me gently and kindly when I am forgetting. She loves to shop for hours, though often she doesn’t buy anything. I usually take a book to read with coffee somewhere. Today after I took her to see her cats and her dad a half hour away from my apartment, she ended up shopping for over an hour with me drinking coffee sans book. After a while I started focusing on the people coming and going. Soon, this led to praying for each of them. It kind of connected me to them and I actually began to care about them in a way. Some people were obviously from Arab countries, others looked and sounded like they came from Slavic countries, some were white and others black. It touched me particularly when two young men who weren’t together came in and sat near one another. One was wearing an earring and had a hat with a rainbow on it and the other had a sweatshirt from a Christian college that I get emails from. The emails have very enthusiastic reflections about Jesus and prayer, but are very politically conservative. Watching these two young men who are probably very different in many ways, because of my own experiences of the Love of God expressed in Jesus and also having two gays sons and a trans grandchild that I love very much, it gave me a feeling of an affectionate connection to both of them. I don’t know if my prayers for or my kind feelings toward the very varied and different people I saw there made much difference for them, but it transformed my day and somehow healed some of the fear and pain that today’s world has put in my heart. Sometimes I really do feel that if I am open to the world in the new ways in the amount of time that being 86 gives me, these may be the best years yet.
A Seriously Dysfunctional Family Are We!
Did you ever cringe over the scripture where Mary and the family of Jesus are outside where he is and worried about him and when people tell Jesus that his family wants to see him, his response is that his family were all those that ‘”get” him enough to follow him. As a mom that bothered me. But today I “get” it. Family is the basic unit of humanity. Now, as is obvious in the Scriptures, being human they often do not get along well. But the ideal of family remains. And Jesus says that those that “get” what he is saying enough to actually follow in his footsteps are his family. But there are many who have come to know and live what Jesus taught without knowing Jesus, but by hearing the Spirit of God within. And many who technically follow Jesus, but do not follow the Spirit within. “You will know them by their Love.” And that’s a love like Jesus loved when he died on the cross.
What does it mean to follow Jesus? To be a disciple? What did Jesus mean when he said that He is the WAY. Does it mean a momentary commitment asking Him to be not only our Savior, but our Lord? Is that like a magic incantation? Or is it just the beginning of our journey like it was to those confused disciples who thought it meant freedom from the hostile rule of Rome, freedom from suffering, freedom to be special and important, to be empowered and protected, and having the keys to the kingdom of God (or at least to the Sky room at the airport!).
What does it mean to pick up our cross to follow him?
Not ANY of the above.
What does the cross symbolize? Dying to self. It’s that simple and that scary and that inescapable.
Does being the family of Jesus mean we immediately have the truth, all the truth, and nothing but the truth? NO!
Peter who was the closest friend of Jesus argued with Paul about circumcision and Jewish rules. God had to intervene and show Peter both in a dream and by sending him to witness Cornelius and all his Gentile family experiencing all the gifts of the Spirit not only without being circumcised, but without being baptized! If that doesn’t make you question a couple of thousand years of theologians’ rules, you are clinging like the “good” Jews to thinking we can limit/control God and coast if we just play the game by the rules.
A relationship with God starts within. The Spirit of God is within us if we open to it whether we have met the technical game rules or not. It’s a relationship between the kind of human that we see in Jesus and the God that created everything and is still creating disciples like Jesus even through other teachers. Jesus is the Son of God. That’s a relationship. Jesus is our brother. That’s a relationship. The same Spirit of God within Jesus also connects us all as brothers and sisters. We ARE family. Like it or not! And the WAY of Jesus is the Spiritual Journey that he took where he started out thinking he was sent for his religious family, the Jews. And step by step the Spirit freed him from limiting the Spirit to just men, just the clean, just the righteous, just the Jews, just the conquered, just those that did NOT torture and crucify him. “Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.”
Watch whom he heals and recognize how each step of the way he broadened his understanding of the “People of God.” And look around you and see whom you consider your enemy and be afraid, very afraid, that you are missing the point.
Streams of Living Water
If you’d like to know more about the strengths and gifts of the different Christian denominations, I am slowly savoring an amazing book. It is “Streams of Living Water” about celebrating the great traditions of Christian faith. It’s by Richard J. Foster. It’s a thick book packed with Scripture based insight and an appreciation for the various parts of the broken Body of Christ. It also warns of the distortions that we fallible humans fall into in all of them. I so wish I had read this book when I was searching for God after becoming disillusion with religion. Even with my less knowledgeable understanding when I studied the major religions, I did see that each was protecting and polishing certain aspects of Christianity, but blind to others equally important. I finally found the love of God fleshed out in Jesus through friends who had given up an affluent life to work with Campus Crusade for Christ, a non-denominational organization leading people into a personal relationship with Jesus, not a particular denomination. This book simply overflows with the love of God through each approach to Christianity. It also alerts us to the dangers of being blind to other aspects of the love of God described in the Scriptures and lived out in Jesus. We are imperfect humans with different personalities that have different strengths and weaknesses. We need each other’s insights and ways of responding to God for balance, for wholeness, for holiness. This isn’t a quick read. It takes thought and at least a slightly open mind that doesn’t limit Christianity to either/or. There are riches to be discovered in each chapter about each tradition. Today’s chapter opened me to new insights and at one point while sitting outside reading it, closing the book and feeling totally immersed in the tender, overwhelming, Love of God.
The Saving Power of Love
Wow!! I have always struggled with the belief that Jesus was fully human and fully divine. To be fully human to me means having seriously scary struggles with temptations without any guarantee your better side will win. The recap of Jesus being tempted in the wilderness doesn’t describe any struggle. But the sweating blood in the garden of Gethsemane does. And so do some of his first responses to being asked to heal people who are not Jews, in fact even the child of a soldier of the hated Roman conqueror. I think the story of his face off with Satan in the wilderness is a recap, a summation of his winning battles against the unfinished side of being human. Being fully human is not a bad thing, it’s living up to our potential for good even in the face of all sorts of human idols like power, comfort, pleasure, and accumulating things. Jesus had supernatural power which had to be the strongest temptation of all when he faced the suffering and death described in the temptation in the garden. It wasn’t an easy choice, even if foreordained. Ultimately, Jesus chose love over power.
As a Charismatic(Pentecostal) Catholic, I witnessed and experienced humans having supernatural power through the Holy Spirit. But after a decade, I also began to see that spiritual renewal movement begin to become about power, not love. That doesn’t mean I am against being open to the gifts of the Spirit in us. Most of us do not have worldly power, so the spiritual gifts enable us to make a difference in this world for good. But it means that ultimately, unless we have grown past a love of things of this world, including power, we will fail to make the choice that Jesus made that was summed up in the wilderness, but fleshed out in the garden. It is the power of Love that saves.
Dresses and Pants, Marriage and Love, Lesbians and Gays
In pictures Jesus wore dresses. It was the style of his time. Until the sixties most women only wore pants for exercise or outdoor fun or work. A woman wearing pants to church was shocking and considered downright scandalous. I’m almost 86 and I haven’t worn a dress in about ten years. But I visited a church once where the preacher said that women having short hair and wearing pants were trying to attract other women. I looked around and realized I was the only woman with short hair and wearing slacks. My husband (Male) and I (female) were married for almost sixty years.
I remember my very conventional husband having a fit over our oldest son letting his hair grow long. I remember having to put a Kleenex on my head to go to the Catholic Church because the bible says women must cover their heads in worship services.
There are many normally kind people who are very threatened by change and can respond surprisingly unkindly to people who are different.
Sex variations are of course more difficult for very conventional people to handle.
I remember a great-aunt on my mother’s side, a librarian, who wore tailored suits and short hair and frankly, looked like very mannish. She lived alone all her life and seemed sad and lonely. I suspect she would have been a lesbian today. And there are pictures of a great-great aunt on my dad’s side who was extremely beautiful and feminine looking in a long-ruffled dress of that time. She somehow managed to get her MD as a pediatrician in the early 1900s and opened a pediatric clinic for the poor. When I asked the cousin showing me the family photos why I had never heard of this amazing woman, she pointed to another woman in the background of the photo and said, “Because she and that other woman lived together all their lives.” What gender that woman loved mattered more than her exceptional mind, courage, and kindness to poor children. I doubt any man’s ego in that era could have handled being married to her anyway! It seems a strange value system to me.
Making laws preventing same sex couples from marriage, which to me is the best school for learning to love another imperfect person, seems cruel and counterproductive for Jesus’ wish for people to grow loving when it’s hard.
There are people who have genitalia of both sexes. There are boys who are born obviously more feminine than male. There are girls that would never attract a male even if they wanted to! Learning to love is the challenge for us all, not just some of us. Who we marry is pretty much the most personal thing any of us does. I know a lot of gay marriages that have outlasted many of the heterosexual marriages I know.
Our culture is rampant with heterosexual couples having sex outside marriage relationships, many of which result in unplanned pregnancies with heartbreaking choices and/or disastrous marriages or one parent and child living in poverty. Gay and lesbian sex does not have that potentially tragic outcome. And two people without children who work will seldom be on welfare.
Jesus challenged those about to throw stones in judgement of a woman. He didn’t tell the Samaritan woman with many marriages that she couldn’t enter the kingdom of heaven by beginning to follow him.
Poor Paul advised Christians not to marry unless they just couldn’t resist having sex. I don’t think Christianity would still exist if celibacy was a prerequisite for Christians. I presume Paul thought Jesus would come back quickly. Obviously, Paul was mistaken.
There are many legal evils in our world right now with horrendous consequences. Same sex marriage is not one of them.
Jesus Came for Sinners
Some challenging words from Jesus.
“Love your neighbor as yourself. Love your enemy. Love one another as I have loved you.
All fall short of the glory of God. Judge not lest you be judged. I came for sinners.”
Richard Rohr writes about Anne Lamott:
Writer Anne Lamott chronicles her surprising conversion to Christianity while addicted to drugs and alcohol:
When I went back to church, I was so hungover that I couldn’t stand up for the songs…. The last song was so deep and raw and pure that I could not escape. It was as if the people were singing in between the notes, weeping and joyful at the same time, and I felt like their voices or something was rocking me in its bosom, holding me like a scared kid, and I opened up to that feeling—and it washed over me.
I began to cry and left before the benediction, and I raced home and … walked down the dock past dozens of potted flowers, under a sky as blue as one of God’s own dreams, and I opened the door to my houseboat, and I stood there a minute, and then I hung my head and said, “[Forget] it: I quit.” I took a long deep breath and said out loud, “All right. You can come in.”
So this was my beautiful moment of conversion.
And here in dust and dirt, O here
The lilies of his love appear. [1]
Lamott reflects on praying from the place of desperation and surrender:
Prayer … begins with stopping in our tracks, or with our backs against the wall, or when we are going under the waves, or when we are just so sick and tired of being physically sick and tired that we surrender, or at least we finally stop running away and at long last walk or lurch or crawl toward something. Or maybe, miraculously, we just release our grip slightly.
Prayer is talking to something or anything with which we seek union, even if we are bitter or insane or broken. (In fact, these are probably the best possible conditions under which to pray.) Prayer is taking a chance that against all odds and past history, we are loved and chosen, and do not have to get it together before we show up. The opposite may be true: We may not be able to get it together until after we show up in such miserable shape….
My belief is that when you’re telling the truth, you’re close to God. If you say to God, “I am exhausted and depressed beyond words, and I don’t like You at all right now, and I recoil from most people who believe in You,” that might be the most honest thing you’ve ever said. If you told me you had said to God, “It is all hopeless, and I don’t have a clue if You exist, but I could use a hand,” it would almost bring tears to my eyes, tears of pride in you, for the courage it takes to get real—really real. It would make me want to sit next to you at the dinner table.
So prayer is our sometimes real selves trying to communicate with the Real, with Truth, with the Light.
When we respond to violence with violence, we are perpetuating it forever. We become the enemy ourselves.
