Jesus Revolution
I saw the movie, Jesus Revolution, yesterday. I realized that the Jesus revolution in the Catholic Church was the Charismatic Movement in the same times. It too stressed accepting Jesus as your personal Savior and Lord, but also prayer for receiving the gifts of the Spirit.
The gifts of the spirit are the Word of Wisdom, the Word of Knowledge, the gift of Faith, the gift of Healing, the working of Miracles, Prophecy, Discernment of spirits, diverse kinds of Tongues, the Interpretation of Tongues. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. (Some translations of the fruits are different)
But you can see that the gifts are for the building up of the church and the fruit would be the spiritual growth from experiencing the gifts and grace. And then there are ministries within the church such as apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers. It’s logical that these would work together for the good of not only the church, but the world.
My experience has shown me the reality of all of these. But sadly, also that our human tendency to let the temptations that Jesus resisted get the upper hand, often leads us to misuse them for our own profit and ego.
After my search and my conversion to Jesus rather than a religion, I went back to the Catholic Church. Then a Presbyterian in my ecumenical prayer group put me in contact with a Catholic Charismatic prayer group at the Sisters of Mercy’s convent. There they were experiencing what I was. Interesting to me was that the liberal and more intellectual branch of the Presbyterian church, and the Episcopal and Catholic churches with their formal worship services and very structured hierarchies, seemed to be where the Spirit was exploding. I learned that the most important fruits for leaders in this kind of renewal are faith, humility, and openness to the Spirit. In my sixty years in Catholicism, I did every ministry that women were allowed to do. I was, at best, mediocre at all of them except being Director of Religious Education for the Catholics for the Chaplains Division at Fort Campbell. There I was good at doubling the number of students, recruiting and encouraging teachers, and finding two awesome volunteers to be my right and left hands, who put in forty hours a week working as volunteers. My job was a civil service position, so I was getting paid. I am a good talent scout, recruiter, and cheerleader. I am not a leader or a teacher. I am a cheerleader. And though in the Catholic church, most of the preaching ends up as teaching. They are not the same. Preaching is inspiring others to be open not only to God, but to their gifts and ministries in the church. Everyone can experience the gifts when needed for the benefit of the church, but different personalities are better suited for different ministries.
I began attending the Presbyterian USA denomination after being in a Catholic Diocesan Ministry Training course that went two years for women. If men wanted to be Deacons….which allowed them to Baptize, officiate at Marriages, and Preach, they went a third year. I was certified to train Catechists. I was on a Diocesan Education Committee with a Priest who was a Scripture Scholar for Vatican ll, a theologian who taught at a Catholic College, A Catholic Psychiatrist, and the Diocesan Director of Religious Education. So when the men needed to have someone with credentials to write a recommendation for them to become a Deacon, they came to me for it. Most admitted to me they didn’t really “get” the Scriptures and didn’t want to preach. It was kind of the last straw for me as a woman.
I found my niche at First Presbyterian doing what I call my “Sermon from the Molehill.” I get to open our worship service and give a three to five minute “pep” talk at least once a month. It’s within my skill set and praying, reading that week’s Sunday scriptures, reflecting to see connections in my own life, writing several drafts, then timing it and editing takes me from twenty to thirty hours spread out over several days. I take any Scriptures on my Sunday as letters from God to me personally. So it’s wonderful spiritual food for me and time listening to God. And sometimes I get feedback that what I’ve said has made a difference for someone.
I miss the Charismatic Conferences at Notre Dame and I miss the music group on Saturday nights in my years in the Catholic Church, and the wonderful friends I had there, but those experiences and the amazing things I have witnessed continue to keep me tuned into God even when I am sick or dealing with worry for someone I love.
Thanks to my Methodist mother who, when I came home from Catholic school and told her she wasn’t going to heaven because she wasn’t Catholic, replied with great conviction: “Honey, you and your dad are going to get into heaven on my Methodist prayers, That was my first clue that nobody has a monopoly on God. When searching in my late twenties, I attended introductory classes in other Christian denominations and realized that each focused on parts of the Scriptures and ignored others. After my conversion to Jesus as my Savior and Lord, the Scriptures came alive and relevant to my daily life. I begam to give witness talks to Sunday School classes or was on weekend renewal teams for Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian and Episcopal denominations. I found there were people in all of them who had found what I had found in Jesus, but others who had inherited their parents religions, but had missed the main point. God is alive and well in our world in spite of us! Jesus lived and died to flesh out the unconditional love of God and to show us the way to grow spiritually to learn to love as God loves us. The Spirit is within us. But sometimes we have to let go of preconceived ideas and listen to God’s voice in the Scriptures, in the ‘coincidences’ in our life, and find quiet moments to hear the voice of the Spirit within us.
The Gospel of the Poor
Jesus says he has come to preach the Gospel to the poor since, in fact, they’re the only ones who can hear it! They don’t have to prove or protect anything.
We always have to ask: In what sense are we ourselves rich? What do we have to defend? What principles do we have to prove? What keeps us from being open and poor?
The issue isn’t primarily material goods, but our spiritual and intellectual goods….my ego, my reputation, my self-image, my need to be right, my need to be successful, my need to have everything under my control, my need to be loved….
The words of the Gospel never let us live in self-satisfaction. Rather they always make us empty. They always make us repeat the truth of Mary’s “Let it be done unto me according to your word.” They allow us to keep our wounds open so we can receive Christ in us.
It seems we are quite incapable of welcoming Christ, because we are so stuffed full of ourselves. The real thing we have to let go of is our self.
Fr. Richard Rohr “Simplicity: The Art of Living”
Republicans and Democrats Lend Me Your Ears
Many people are naturally accepting of the reality of what is, but by nature are not comfortable with the unknown. So rules and the status quo are their comfort zone. They are the keepers of tradition. They tend to live in the present moment. They are practical, often talented in working on things in the immediate physical world. In relationships they are like my husband, who said, “I don’t understand her, but I accept her as she is.” A neighbor or fellow worker, even one who is foreign or different from them, can gradually become understood and trusted enough to become a friend that they will help even at a cost to themselves. But that trust doesn’t necessarily extend to others of that differing group.
Other people come into the world naturally idealistic and open to those differing, but with ideas about how everything and everyone can be improved. Change is the favored tool in their box. They work on self-improvement, but also tend to do as I did, encouraging (dragging) their spouses to explore means of self-improvement. They tend to see the big picture, but sometimes are oblivious to what is right in front of them. These people often focus on the future, anticipating problems and wanting to head them off. They tend to be interested in and care about the concerns of people who are different from themselves, those of other nationalities, races, genders, and people with disabilities
We are only beginning to become familiar with the inborn differences that are strengths with up sides and a down sides. People naturally focus on different aspects of the world and life.
For a democracy to survive and flourish we need both. The challenge is that at any given time, we may need to emphasize different needs. And that takes cooperation and compromise and recognizing the need for the differing gifts of all.
When we see each other as the enemy rather than our partner, violence and fear become a daily part of all of our lives.
My Short Version of Christianity. What’s Yours?
Christianity is about experiencing the unconditional Love of God fleshed out in Jesus with both our heart and our mind.
Christianity is about forgiveness.
Christianity is about passing on that Love.
Christianity is about loving people more than loving being right.
Christianity is about the awesome God of the universe being within each of us.
Christianity is about accepting that we are all “earthen vessels,” which means we are all probably at least slightly “cracked.” So, though we are Spirit filled, we leak!
Christianity is about recognizing that Jesus is a well where we can go to refill.
Christianity is about realizing that the Spirit of God works differently in diverse people, maybe like a geyser, or a brook, or even an underground river.
Christianity is about valuing the fruit of the Spirit: peace, love, joy in whatever wrapping or label it wears.
Christianity is about Jesus showing us that this life is not all there is.
A Holy Balancing Act
The Daily Meditations this week focus on the first of Richard Rohr’s “Seven Themes of an Alternative Orthodoxy”:
Scripture as validated by experience, and experience as validated by Tradition, are good scales for one’s spiritual worldview.
We use the metaphor of a tricycle to illustrate this dynamic relationship. The front wheel is experience and the two back wheels are Scripture and Tradition. Richard explains:
People have every right to ask preachers and teachers, “By what authority do you say what you say?” That’s why I want to declare our methodology right at the beginning and say that it’s three-wheeled, which allows us to move forward. The front wheel, experience, may seem surprising, because neither Orthodox Christians, Catholics, nor Protestants were taught a lot about it. We make experience the front wheel because we all filter Scripture and Tradition through our own experience anyway! We cannot not do that. It’s common sense. It’s obvious.
But we didn’t have the courage or maybe the awareness to state what we now realize is obvious. Catholics thought that all our teaching was based on Tradition with a big “T”: the Tradition of the first 1,500 years at least. Well, maybe, but it was more Italian tradition, French tradition, German tradition, and that’s tradition with a little “t.”
So, we make it our work to get back to the big “T,” the perennial Tradition. What keeps recurring? What keeps coming back, century after century, in mystics, saints, and councils of the church? What do wise people keep saying? The Catholic intellectual St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) held that if it’s true, it’s from the Holy Spirit. [1] And if it’s from the Holy Spirit, it’s going to keep being discovered again and again.
Scripture is validated as well by two other wheels on our tricycle. If it’s true—and this is an act of faith—we would say that it somehow has to be found in Scripture. It can’t be directly contradicted by Scripture. We Catholics weren’t too good at that. We put all our eggs in the Tradition basket. So, let’s look for validation in both worlds—in verses from Scripture, and in writings of mystics, saints, prophets, church Fathers and Mothers, and Councils of the Church. [
Since the Reformation in the sixteenth century, much Christian infighting and misunderstanding has occurred over the Catholic and Orthodox emphasis on Tradition versus the Protestant emphasis on Scripture. Tradition usually got confused with small cultural traditions, and the Protestant cry of “Scripture alone!” gradually devolved into each group choosing among the Scriptures it would emphasize or ignore. Both currents have now shown their weaknesses and biases. They lacked the dynamic third principle of God experience: personal experience that is processed and held accountable by both Scripture and Tradition, as well as by solid spiritual direction and counseling. This is our trilateral principle at the Living School for Action and Contemplation.
Hope or Delusion
No person, no group, religious or otherwise, knows All the truth,
Only the truth, even with the help of God.
That would make us equal to God.
It would also lock us into outdated ways of understanding
both the world and God.
Humanity is a work in progress.
Sometimes when I’m wondering about humanity and
whether we could actually be evolving, I get hopeful that maybe
in a few millenniums, we may evolve enough to love as well as dogs do.
Pass On the Good News Your Way
A wonderful blessing of face book and other sharing internet places is that we can pass on what truths have been grace for us and their source. And those of us who feel called to share are encouraged when someone “gets” what we share and finds it helpful. A very erudite elderly priest who had founded a college in the Philippines once commented about another priest who wrote an amazing amount of novels with moral themes. He said, “That man has never had a thought he didn’t share with the world!” I don’t think he was saying it as a compliment!! Perhaps this is a difference between the ministry of an introvert and an extrovert!
I worked with the MBTI about how differences in inborn personality types affect our learning/teaching style, our very different ways of expressing love even in marriage, and the way we relate to God and with others spiritually, and how middle managers need to understand the big differences in what rewards motivate different people. I know from experience how different styles of discipline have very different responses from even my own five children.
Understanding how different we are is a huge challenge. Even knowing what I learned decades ago, now in my eighties I’m finally understanding the importance of other ways of being in the world in all aspects of life. I think for our mental, emotional, spiritual growth it takes a lot of time, challenges, and even grace to begin to value all the differences in people enough to recognize we need all of them to work together in different areas and ways and times.
As an extrovert, with all the new outlets, I tend to share everything I am currently learning or finally understanding. The hard part isn’t seeing that many people aren’t in a place in their particular journey to understand and value what I share. I, as an extrovert, struggle when I realize that many times when people actually hear and “get” what I’m saying and even apply it to their own lives, they don’t necessarily share it!
My expectation or hope that they will is admittedly mostly an ego problem. But to me it is also a spiritual problem for our world…..not that my insights are world changing. But so much of mine do come from my spiritual journey and the totally unconditional Love that God has expressed in Jesus. I don’t think I would have them without that grace. And I realize again that people whose strength is responding intellectually and people whose gift is responding emotionally are on a different schedule on their journey. And a whole person response to Jesus takes both. Once more that is a reason for us to value both those who value law and those who respond to Love and find a way to work together since it takes a lifetime to get those two sides of us working equally well.
I hope that makes sense.
In my youth I played by the rules mostly out of fear of rejection or judgment by others. After I was simply overwhelmed by an experience of the love of God, I struggled with the feeling that the law was a prison of sorts that limited curiosity and creativity. So, one day as I was doing breakfast dishes, I prayed, “Lord would you show me how law is loving.”
The next moment I heard a thumping at the door. When I opened it, our dog had dropped a bird there. The bird was flopping around and seemed to have a broken wing. I brought the bird in and wrapped a dish towel around it, to keep the wing straight. I decided to make a sort of incubator to keep it still in a round bowl on the stove near a kettle steaming slightly for warmth. It simply wouldn’t accept the limits, thrashing around and almost throwing itself against the hot kettle. So, I wrapped it with a larger towel carefully and held it, trying to soothe and eventually trying to feed it. It simply thrashed and fought until it died. As I was burying it, it hit me. The law is our incubator until we become spiritually mature enough to love others as we love ourselves and to accept the limits that requires. Let’s face it, that takes time and a lot of grace.
Consequences are built into life and if we cannot accept limits, we end up learning the hard way. We are unfinished people at every age. It takes a lifetime of challenges and grace to learn to love others not only as ourselves, but as God loved us in Jesus.
If we believe intellectually in the God of Jesus or have been awakened by an experience of that Love, we are called to share in both word and deed using whatever gifts God has given us and working together at encouraging and helping others to do the same.
Jesus fleshed out God’s Love for us. Pass it on.
Good Things Becoming Addictions to Avoid Emotional Pain
Addictions can be good things, used for the wrong reasons. Pleasure trumps pain. It can be the pleasure of completing tasks, making crafts, even a juicy apple, even exercising. If something has the power to make us uncomfortable with ourselves or to threaten heartbreak, any of the above or almost any thing else, can be an addiction used to avoid emotional or mental pain. Our spiritual journey involves a lot of uncomfortable things like admitting we avoid reaching out to people who unintentionally hurt us instead of risking being honest and reconciling. Years ago, I cut two women out of my life who had been very kind to me. One had unknowingly made me feel ridiculous and the other had spoken about a “fag” she was actually fond of, not knowing I had gay sons. Neither intended to hurt me. I let them die without ever explaining. Avoiding people who are different from ourselves keeps most people divided politically and spiritually. Because we are simply blind to one another’s ways of being in the world, we can’t put ourselves in each others ways of being, seeing, and valuing. . Another abuse of perfectly good things is finding ways to not grieve losses that have the power to break our hearts. My first response to most things is emotional. This makes me vulnerable to hurt and a tendency to find ways to avoid experiencing painful losses. I did not grieve the loss of my much loved father for six years. We didn’t live near each other and he died on the other side of the world. It was a closed casket funeral. So, I managed to unconsciously just pretend to myself that he was somewhere else. When my husband died four years ago, I spent the first year or so focused on learning to live alone for the first time in my life. Then Covid hit and I focused on surviving it by diet, exercise, and writing and getting published in a couple of county newspapers. Finally in the fourth year, I found I could not enjoy even happy memories without crying. It’s been a process of getting brave enough to let myself go into that dark scary place of heartbreak. I’m a devout coward frankly, but there is where I find God and grace when I risk it. And then the happy memories can heal me. In my old age I’ve begun to recognize how many ways I have of avoiding dealing with things about myself or my life that when faced can be healed by the Love of God, which is grace for the journey. Self knowledge is often painful, because we so badly want to be, if not perfect, at least better than somebody else. Knowing that unconditional love of God expressed in Jesus frees us to begin to accept the imperfect us God created us to be and to admit we need even the people who are different from us, who sometimes inadvertently make us feel inferior or superior. When it’s not either, it’s complimentary differences. I’m not explaining this very well. But until we understand the differences that we are born with and which are all needed, conflict can’t be avoided and we can’t help each other make this a better world.
I do know that having someone who understands us and can simply cry with us rather than trying to fix us is a key to freedom to accept ourselves, our limits, our pain and thus paradoxically become able to grow. It’s scary because we’ve spent our lives perfecting our image and letting down the mask always involves risk. And though I still struggle with it, I know from experience it’s the key to spiritual growth and true community across our differences..
How Many Loving People Are Needed to Save the World?
In the Scriptures Noah and his family are saved from the flood because they were good people. Abraham bargains with God to save the people in an evil city, “If ten people are righteous, will you spare it?” We might look at Jesus as the one righteous human, convincing God we are worth saving. I read a book once called the “Hundredth Monkey” about how on an island certain monkeys learned a new survival skill and when the number reached 100, they all seemed to “get” it. And it was found that the same thing was happening with monkeys on other islands. Sunday’s scripture from Isaiah was about the “people of God” having been through dark times, but now God was doing an new thing and they would be blessed. How many people learning to love rather than hate or fear others do you think it would take for change to happen in our world? If you are given the grace to be one by your knowing first-hand the love of Jesus, please please share it!!!! Love, not law, changes people. We can love and help people, but the Love of God fleshed out in Jesus can heal and change wounded frightened angry people. Find a way to share it, not impose it, or come over as righteous or chosen. Those of us who have accepted that love need to admit how much we needed it and how much we still need it and how that love is the grace we all need to become the people we were created to be. (Not like anyone else, just our own best imperfect human self.) The Love of Jesus is the fuel for the spiritual journey until our last breath. Share it! It can make a difference for other people and maybe if enough people open up to that love it can make a difference for our world. This isn’t about being chosen or saved this is about being healed and changed by Love that has no conditions. It’s about grace.
