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Spring Cleaning: The Deeper Retreat
April 20, 2008
Retreats are to the spiritual life what spring cleaning is to a house. They give us the chance to go deep. They help us see what’s cluttering up the joint. In retreats we find better footing and often gain excellent perspective on what seem to be intractable problems. But precisely because they’re like spring cleaning, they can’t be what we survive on. If you only cleaned your apartment or house once every few months, the in-between time would get, well, interesting. (My sophomore year of college I lived in a house with six other guys, and about half of them liked the once-a-semester approach to cleaning.) So small daily chores like wiping down counters and washing the dishes, and weekly rituals where you go a little deeper are needed. When I’m with others for the purpose of offering spiritual direction, I’m always probing to discover whether there are daily and weekly rituals of quiet conversation with God. Without them the more extended retreat of 3-5 days, though still useful, can’t meet the expectations imposed on it. There’s simply not enough time to really dial down and address the cluttered aspects of your life. So by all means clean your “house,” but tend to the daily and weekly needs as well.
Alone and Still
April 19, 2008
“Anyone who intends to live the inner and spiritual life has to get away, with Jesus, from the crowd.”
Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, 1.20
There’s a famous line by Blaise Pascal that, loosely translated, goes like this: “All the troubles we experience can be traced to one thing: not knowing how to sit peacefully in a room.”
Monasticism has, for most of its history, recognized the truth of this statement and seen the “cell” (the small room a monk or nun inhabits) as a crucial element of spiritual formation. I’m reminded here of another quotation from Thomas à Kempis: “You’ll grow to love your cell if you learn to stay in it; if you don’t it will only be a drag.” [my translation] Of course a cell doesn’t have to be in a convent or monastery. Any dedicated space will do. The point is to have “a place apart,” to get comfortable being in that place (without the aid of flickering images and sound directly in front of you), and to quiet oneself internally.
I’ve heard lots of messages on Psalm 46.10 (”Be still and know that I am God”), but I don’t know of any instances where the practice of being alone and the skill of quieting oneself internally are presented and taught as part of the basic grammar of discipleship to Jesus. Yes, churches here and there offer seminars and classes that introduce people to more contemplative practices, but these are presented as good ideas to be considered rather than essentials to be mastered.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer made the sound observation that community is loaded with danger for people who aren’t comfortable being alone (and conversely, that solitude is toxic for people unanchored from community). His point is that learning to be alone teaches us how to be with others. The practice of solitude, then, brings health to the community. In the subtraction of people and words, there’s finally room for addition. We can understand at deeper levels that God is present, that God is sovereign, that God is good.
Not once have I ever come back from a period away for solitude, silence and prayer feeling less capable of being with others. In every instance I’ve returned more aware of who God is, who I am in God, and what my place is among his people and creation. As odd as this may sound, I come back realizing that in the final analysis I don’t need them in order to know who I am or whose I am. If I don’t need them then I’m free to love them. But if I need them I’m likely to manipulate them.
Sustainable Faith: Defining the Term (4)
March 5, 2008
I was thinking this morning of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s biggest and most powerful particle accelerator that’s scheduled to go active in Switzerland in May 2008.
This thing is a beast, and I don’t mean that pejoratively. Its construction has taken years, cost into the billions, and involved an international consortium of physicists and engineers; its deployment will give scientists an unprecedented look into the particles of which our universe consists. I’m personally jazzed about how it might speak into string theory, but what I was thinking about this morning was the absolutely staggering amount of human life, energy and money that went into its creation in order to squeeze out a little more energy so that scientists could peer behind the curtain, so to speak, just a little deeper. Without a doubt the next advance on the LHC will require unimaginably larger expenditures to go even just infinitesimally deeper. You can only have a handful of these “big deals” in a lifetime because of the high cost attached to them, yet many leaders within the church have, I think, believed or hoped it would be the norm. In moments of unfaithfulness we’ve lusted after a church version of the LHC. But few are asked to wear the ring, because few can wear it. (And here it’s worth noting that a few people probably can wear the ring.)
So this was part of my morning reverie, but I promised we’d go down a different path, so let’s talk about sustainable faith and holism. Many authors, too numerous to name, have spoken incisively of the way western Christians has been entrenched in a very strong dualism: there’s spiritual life and then there’s everything else. Spiritual life has been seen as non-material, non-corporeal, and “the flesh” as that poverty-stricken thing from which we’ll some day escape. But even within the so-called spiritual life we sometimes speak of separate lives. Richard’s Foster’s wonderful book Streams of Living Water gives evidence to that compartmentalization, as my friend Jeff Cannell pointed out to me. So we have the incarnational life, the disciplined life, the word-centered life, the compassionate life, etc. Now, I know that Foster sees all of these “lives” are mere tributaries of the one life flowing from Christ (The Really Big River). For him it was simply a convenient way of grouping and talking about the various ways the church has expressed herself throughout history. Nevertheless, it still reflects the way our minds — his, mine, yours — have been trained to operate: this, not that; that, not this. It’s a language of distinction and quantification and compartmentalization, and we’ve been heading down this road ever since the ancient Greeks, so we have about 2,500 years of practice in the west. But things are changing. Synthesis is becoming all the rage.
We’ll still make distinctions. After all, it’s hardwired into us and useful for our existence: this mushroom (which can kill me) is different from that mushroom (which I can sautée). That’s a difference i want to know. But the emerging church, thank God, is more interested in connections and synthesis than in disjunctions and analysis. Einstein showed us that space and time are connected. Quantum mechanics showed us the connection between the observer and the observed. People now understand that hurricanes and butterfly wings are connected thanks to Chaos Theory. The current generation is completely familiar with six degrees of separation. In short, the world for them has become more fluid and plastic and connected. Consequently, they’re looking for a radically holistic faith, one that embraces the body as much as the mind . . . which is the body as well. The current renaissance of experiential worship didn’t arise in a vacuum. It’s a natural push toward a very physical, multi-sensory, eyes-wide-open experience. Personally, I rejoice in its arrival and believe this holism is an essential part of vibrant, sustainable faith. The radical dualism that has permeated western Christian thought creates an interior dissonance that the emerging church finds not only repulsive but unsustainable.
The other day while I was waiting for my wife to finish up some grocery shopping, I went into the McDonald’s fast food shop nearby to try their “new and improved coffee.” As a habit I avoid all fast-food chains, but my curiosity got the better of me, so I ordered my small cup and simultaneously handed my mug (which I carry with me) to the employee, asking him if he could rinse it with some hot water because it was dirty and cold. He looked puzzled but did it. Then he put the mug down, pulled out a large styrofoam cup and walked to the coffee pot. “Excuse me,” I said, “but is that for my coffee?” “Yes,” he answered. “But I don’t want my coffee in that. That’s why I gave you my mug.” He paused and said, “I’ll do it this time, but we’re not allowed to use your mug. It’s against company policy.” I was really exhausted that day and very much on the cranky side. If I could have a re-do, I’d say “I understand. Don’t bother, then. I’m happier to go without.” But what I said (with thinly veiled sarcasm) was, “So McDonald’s would rather I take their styrofoam needlessly and then clutter up some landfill with it for next gazillion years?” And then the hammer fell. Handing me the mug he said, “Well, it doesn’t really matter because God’s going to give us a new heaven and earth anyway.” A wire tripped in me, and my reptilian, emotional response came gushing out: “So it really doesn’t matter if we piss all over the earth — yes, I’m afraid I said the word piss — and pollute God’s gift to us, because, you know, God’s going to give us a new one after we’ve mismanaged this one!” He backpedaled and stammered, “That’s not really what I meant,” but I ended the conversation with a crisp, “You know what, you need to get yourself a new theology.”
So he had a theology that made no connection between stewarding creation and loving God. And I, in my fatigue and “righteous indignation” showed a theology that, in the moment at least, made no connection between loving God and showing respect for another human being. May we close the gaps, Lord, wherever they exist.
Drinking a Fifth
March 4, 2008
“It is estimated that Americans now spend, on average, fourteen years of their lives watching TV.”
“We tend to over-report our good behavior, under-report our bad behavior.”
* * * * * * * * * *
Fourteen divided by seventy-four — a life span.
Multiply the quotient by one hundred.
Nineteen percent.
About one-fifth of your life (if you’re average, of course).
Sever one leg completely from your body.
Take it from the hip down.
Now run fast.
Take your house and board up a room
(without first removing anything from it).
How cramped do you feel?
Are there five in your family?
Shoot one.
How long will you grieve?
Drop your salary from forty to thirty-two thousand.
Burn eight thousand one-dollar bills, on by one.
Cover yourself with their ashes.
What is twenty percent of our vision?
When gone, are we legally blind?
Lose ten points from your IQ:
Slam your head against a brick wall
repeatedly.
Can you still understand this?
And if all this is too daunting, go down easy:
watch others live their lives.
Disregard your own,
the real one,
the one slipping away.
21 Observations on American Culture
March 4, 2008
• We’re flooded with noise and have little respect for silence.
• Our days are overly busy.
• We abuse our bodies with poor food and too much food.
• We abuse our bodies with too little sleep.
• We abuse our bodies with too little activity.
• We’ve surrendered to mindless, pernicious distraction.
• We’re over-eroticized by the marketing of sex.
• We value money over ethical behavior.
• We value individual rights over the community.
• We idolize youth and are afraid of death.
• We’re awash in possessions, having more than we either need or use.
• We’re can’t control our spending and are awash in debt.
• We’ve mistaken the vulgar for the beautiful.
• We’ve lost trust and have become litigious.
• We’ve mistaken information from wisdom.
• We’ve grown callous toward the very young and very old.
• We neglect our promises, especially when there’s a cost to us.
• We fear long-term commitments.
• We’re losing our ability to concentrate.
• We’re quick to take revenge, slow to forgive.
• We’re temporocentric, unwilling to remember the past or imagine the future.