Category Archives: Jesus’ Journey is our Journey
The Call to Change
I am still reading Richard Rohr’s “Jesus’ Alternative Plan …The Sermon on the Mount.” It’s not a simple or easy read. I have to stop and reflect and sometimes write about the awareness he provokes. Part of my delight is his confirmation of so much of what I’ve had to learn the hard way, from experience. But I think that is the best way because it helps facilitate actual change, not just intellectual assent. As I get farther in the book, I am challenged to face the areas in my psyche that have not been transformed yet by appropriation, that are still just intellectual assent. The journey gets harder along the way and I’ve been on it a long time. I’m obviously a slow learner!
Rohr is a theologian, so sometimes his language gets beyond my everyday understanding and makes me feel stupid. Then I have to struggle with both Google and my feelings of intimidation, so I won’t skip over those parts.
I’m in a very challenging part of my journey and I’m really struggling with it. I use various escapes often and don’t deal with issues that involve so much hard, even painful, self-honesty. I really resist being willing to die to what I like about myself. Which is what we have to do to focus on the nitty-gritty areas in order to see what needs to be let go. And then the hardest work is giving up my emotional pain relievers that I hang on to that keep me from experiencing the growing pains.
One of my escapes is depression. At an unconscious level it’s a choice. My other escape is being around other people who are also letting themselves focus on the bad things in the world outside them, rather than the things within us that need changing. There are some things we can do to try to make the world our version of better. But the biggest challenge ultimately is ourself that with honesty and grace we are called to change for the better. For most of us the “Beatitudes” are a greater challenge on the spiritual journey than the ten commandments.
Ultimately our spiritual journey is the same as Oscar, the Grouch’s: admitting it’s our own attitude that needs changing and seeking the grace to do it.
And sometimes I have needed either a Spiritual Director or a group that is also seeking the grace to grow and change. Right now I don’t have either, but I am seeing and hearing God’s call to change. So, I am focusing on that part of the journey and Rohr’s book really focuses on that challenge. God is in the timing!
Our Delusion that This Life is Supposed to be Heaven
Jesus healed many people, more than the Gospel stories name. But those same people eventually died. And he was not everywhere, so many were not healed. When he said “Your faith has healed you.,” it wasn’t their faith in healing, but their faith in a God that is for us and with us. But that is the same God that let Jesus die on the cross. That is the same God that let Jesus feel abandoned on the cross. But Jesus’ faith ultimately was in a God that loves and wants the best for us in eternity. The best is being like Jesus who ultimately trusts God and says, “Into your hands I commit my spirit.”
American faith often is that God should make us healthy, wealthy, and happy here on Earth. But our journey here is not heaven, it’s a school. It’s a journey from the dependency and need of a baby being transformed into the ability to love another and ultimately all others more than ourself. That takes faith not in healing, but in God’s love for us that will ultimately be grace for that journey.
Jesus had to take that same journey. In fact his journey is the map for ours.
I have experienced and witnessed healings. But my mother died by inches over fourteen miserable years with Alzheimer’s. And I was helpless to make it better no matter how hard I tried and toward the end I neglected her because I couldn’t bear it. Ultimately I was able to be with her as she died for eleven days and witnessed not healing, but some sort of peace. When my husband of almost sixty years was dying, I was able only through grace to take care of him and to not lose it myself. That part of the journey was a gift for me through giving me the grace to love him in ways I did not think I was capable of managing. And God gave me the grace to let go at he end. He died from many health issues, but not from the one we feared most. Suffering and sorrow and growing in love in and through it and ultimately like Jesus trusting in death, our own and our loved one’s, is part of the journey of the school of life. We follow in the footsteps of Jesus. The healings teach us that when we are not healed, it’s part of both the learning to trust God and growing in love and in letting go of our delusion that this life is supposed to be heaven.
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.
Laughter: Carbonated Grace 