Faith Venture

Not what you can justify.

Humans are unique in the development of a prefrontal cortex in the brain. That is the “thinking” region. We can and have developed logical thinking. That reasoning and thinking ability have enabled us as a species to adapt, grow, and thrive.

And also at times look at our situation and wonder how we’ve survived.

But also, it is a powerful tool of delusion.

“I didn’t start that fight; I was only responding.”

“It wasn’t my fault. [The devil] (or Ahmad, or Susie, or Josh…) made me do it.”

“I did that because [our tribe] are always being picked on.”

We can that justifying our actions and thoughts. Not the theological version of justification where God’s grace treats us “just as if” we had not sinned.

No, this justification attempts to explain away our sin by ignoring the underlying motives and denying our role in a situation.

When we do what is just, we don’t have to worry about justification.

Yogi Berra, the philosopher of baseball (and a pretty good catcher and coach), said, “You can’t think and hit at the same time.”

I played a lot of tennis while in high school. Being inquisitive and a reader, I found a book that was sort of a Zen and the Art of Archery (I read that one, too) for tennis. It didn’t teach the differences of hitting a serve versus ground strokes or even the different grips for hard court versus grass courts versus clay courts. It was more of a mental/spiritual approach of stilling the mind, focus on the ball, letting the body hit the ball.

I’m a terrible golfer. But to be any good takes more practice than I had time for. Or cared to find time for. But, when I’m playing with a beginner and they are getting worked up over stance and swing and stuff, I will gently say, there are a thousand things they teach you about the golf swing. Forget them. Look up at where you want the ball to go. Look down and focus only on the ball. Hit the ball.

Assuming the coach had practiced the player hitting the baseball over and over, the best coaching I’ve heard during a kid’s game to a hitter—see the ball, hit the ball.

Spiritual practices (disciplines) can be like that. Thinking about them, following some set of rules about them, that all gets in the way of the practice.

When you sit down to pray…pray. Talk and listen. Don’t make it complicated thinking about all the varieties of prayer. Talk and listen. Or, listen and talk.

Study is reading, pausing, thinking. Looking up words you don’t know. Considering new points of view. The more you read, the easier to get into the flow of study.

Meditation need not be complicated either. That is because in whatever tradition you are trying it—saying on of the mantras (sounds) from Yoga (Om, or Ram, and so on), or a Zen koan (the sound of one hand clapping…), or repeating the Jesus prayer (Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner)—these are designed for you to focus the mind, listen to your breath, find stillness.

The more you try, the harder it is.

All of humanity’s problems stem from the inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

Blaise Pascal

Back when I truly discovered psychology and read everything I could find that Carl Jung wrote, I came across this story of a client.

A man came to Jung with problems. He was full of anxiety and was driven to succeed, but everyone was driven away from him. Jung advised solitude and stillness. “Go to your office at home, close the door, and sit with yourself for an hour a day,” he prescribed.

Next session, Jung asked how he did. The man replied that he could not sit still. He got up and played on his violin. Then looked at books in his library. He could not sit still. [Note, he didn’t have today’s problem of a smart phone and social media.]

Jung noted that the man couldn’t even bear to be with himself. He said, no, you don’t understand. You don’t do anything. You sit with yourself, quietly, and listen.

Pascal wrote in the 16th century. Jung in the 20th. The famous David of the Hebrew Bible wrote 3,000 years ago of the need for stillness in his songs.

Yet, today, how long can you go without checking Facebook or Instagram? How long can you sit and pray? Let alone meditate? Do you need an app even to spend 5 minutes of quiet time almost alone?

Quiet time alone at least once every day will cure many problems. Maybe you’ll really hear yourself. Maybe you’ll really hear God.

During the French Resistance against the Nazis, a leader of the resistance was captured. One dawn as the firing squad sounds greeted him, guards took him to the commander.

“Tell us where the leader is and we will set you free. Otherwise, you are next in front of the firing squad,” he said.

The man thought for a moment, then shrugged his shoulders, and told them that if they would go to such-and-such graveyard behind one exactly detailed gravestone, they would find the leader of the French Resistance hiding. They left him back in his cell. They returned a short time later and set him free.

He had made up that entire story. But that is exactly where the leader was.

This is a story by Sartre, if I remember correctly. Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus (al-ber cam-oo) were leading French intellectuals before and after the war. Exponents of a philosophy called existentialism, they wrestled with the sometimes conflicting issues of freedom and justice. I was reminded of this recently by an essay on Big Think blog.

Such was my reading when I was at university. I started graduate school to further read in this, then chucked it all and went back to a career in technology.

What is freedom?

Some very vocal people have the opinion that requiring the wearing of masks to stop the spread of a nasty virus is an infringement of their freedom. People who have wrestled with this problem of freedom intellectually and with their lives would think that opinion taking the concept far too lightly.

Spiritual thinkers, writers, practitioners for millennia have pondered the same problems of freedom. The Apostle Paul wrote his ideas in the letter to the Galatians. Essentially living a life with the spirit is living free.

It’s not an accident of nature like the existentialists imagined. It’s not adolescent rebellion against being told what to do. It is being filled with the spirit and building practices to maintain that filling of spirit that gives us a life of freedom. Try it.

[I’m not putting down the political and activist versions of trying to be free. I just believe it really must start within or it eventually becomes another form of authoritarianism. That was the eventual dispute between Sartre and Camus.]

Last weekend I was doodling in my notebook and I jotted “gratitude” and “generosity.” Then I paused. And looked. Do these ideas, these attitudes, these ways of living, go together?

Yesterday I thought about generosity adopting a thought from Henri Nouwen’s With Open Hands. Today, I thought of Nouwen again. This time Adam: God’s Beloved.

In the final year before his death in 1996, Henri Nouwen began to write an account of the death of his friend Adam, a severely handicapped young man from the L’Arche Daybreak Community. In the story of Adam he found a way to describe his own understanding of the Gospel message. Adam could not speak or even move without assistance. Gripped by frequent seizures, he spent his life in obscurity. And yet, for Nouwen, he became “my friend, my teacher, and my guide.” It was Adam who led Nouwen to a new understanding of his faith and what it means to be Beloved of God.

It is not a long book. It is not filled with theological jargon, as if Nouwen ever wrote that way. It’s a story.

As I read it, I sensed Nouwen’s gratitude for the gifts that Adam gave him. Here was a famous professor and author living in a community of severely handicapped people. Nouwen moved in. Was introduced to Adam. Adam messed himself. Nouwen asks what to do. The leader said, help him clean up. You are his caregiver. Famous professor to caregiver caring for every little thing.

And yet I read the gratitude Nouwen felt for what Adam gave him.

Can I be grateful for what someone shows me from the most unexpected place? Could I be so generous of my time and energy as to help an Adam?

It’s a challenge for us all to consider.

Henri J.M. Nouwen opens his marvelous little book on prayer, With Open Hands, telling a story of an elderly woman who had collapsed in her apartment. When the EMTs arrived to treat her, and eventually transport her to the hospital, they noticed she was clutching something in her hand so tightly they couldn’t pry it open. At the hospital the staff was able to open her hand. She was clutching a coin, as if it were the last and most important of her possessions that would save her.

It was an appropriate story to discuss prayer as opening our hands (and hearts) to God.

Is it a metaphor for the way we live? For our orientation to life?

Many (most? all?) Gen X and Millennial generation look at our Boomer generation and that would be what they think. How would I know? In my professional work those are the generations I interact with often. I listen. I observe. (After all, I’m true to my Enneagram 5 part.) My generation is seen as a generation all about themselves.

Of course, that is not 100% true.

But it is worth pausing to consider—just what is my stance toward generosity?

The next time I come into some “extra” money, what is my first impulse? More important, what is my reflection on my first impulse?

Will I help someone with some or all of that money? Will I satisfy a desire of my own with that money? Build up someone, or build up my own ego?

The existentialists of the 20th century and old-fashioned Baptists had one thing in common that is true for all of us, in all times, in all situations—we decide what we will do, we decide how we will react, we decide in life-changing situations.

What is your decision (and mine) toward opening our hands and hearts with generosity?

Superficiality is the curse of our age. The doctrine of instant satisfaction is a primary spiritual problem. The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people.

Richard J. Foster wrote this 42 years ago in Celebration of Discipline. Unfortunately, it is still true. And amplified by social media.

We can so easily spout off an opinion on some topic without so much as a thought. We see something that appeals to our emotions and hit “share” or “like” without ever stopping to check on the “facts” or statistics. Without even a thought of how we’re being manipulated—by Russian or Chinese trolls, or cynical politicians, or people just intent on spreading hate and discontent.

A woman posted a catchy little video on Twitter last week about what it means to be a woman on the internet. I scanned the thread for a bit out of curiosity. I could not believe what so many men called her (the irony being they were all called out on the video). The least offensive was “whiny”.

I hope these morons didn’t call their daughters these things and bring up a generation of emotionally disturbed women.

Taking a moment to pause, reflect, absorb the message, perhaps they could eventually develop that character trait known as empathy.

Therefore, the reason Foster wrote his book (which I read perhaps 20 years ago when I discovered it, and from which I have taught, and I am still influenced by his thinking). The spiritual disciplines, otherwise known as intentional spiritual practices, lead one deeper.

And we need more, many more, of those deep people.

Meister Eckhart said, We deafen God day and night with our words, “Lord, thy will be done.” But then when God’s will does happen, we are furious and don’t like it a bit. When our will becomes God’s will, that is certainly good; but how much better it would be if God’s will were to become our will.

Sometimes we use that phrase “thy will be done” as a way out just in case the things we ask for in prayer don’t happen. Jesus taught us to pray with intention. Don’t be weak in prayer. Be strong. Of course, sometimes the things we hope for don’t happen. That’s life.

Sometimes we aren’t sure what our next step is. Should we change jobs? Attend another church? Join a study group? Marry that person?

We ask God for guidance. What is your will, God?

Then we fail to listen for the answer. And our choice doesn’t work out. And we know whom to blame…and it’s not ourselves.

Or, perhaps we get an answer. But it isn’t the answer we were hoping for. It’s the hard path, not the easy one.

But when our spirit aligns with God’s and we are living the with-God life, as Eckhart taught, that would be much better.

Ryan Holiday, author of The Daily Stoic and several books on Stoicism referred to the recent commencement address by Arnold Schwarzenegger, “If you want to endure and overcome obstacles, it’s not about what you are in life, but who.” What he’s talking about is the primacy of character and virtue over recognition and position. Are you going to identify with your stuff or with your abilities? Holiday also referred to Marcus Aurelius’ “epithets for self”: Upright. Modest. Straightforward. Sane. Cooperative.

I read this not long after I had been thinking and writing yesterday about the mess John Ortberg and his board have made of things following a very poor decision on sexual ethics.

But that can happen to us all. We make a bad decision. We don’t seek counsel. When someone inevitably finds out and points to our failure or shortcoming, we rush to cover up as much as possible. We don’t acknowledge, repent, seek forgiveness, make things right, change our ways.

No, we try to make light of our failures and then hide for a while hoping the situation will melt away and we’ll be left with our reputation intact.

I have liked the teaching of some of the mega-church pastors. But events proved that there was little congruence between their words and actions. I’ve learned more about character from “good ol’ boys” working on their cars under a shade tree than from many rich and powerful people.

It’s better to learn from the good examples. Sometimes we need the shock of a bad example to wake us to reality that could be ours. We all have the seeds of sin within. But we can choose to be — Upright; Modest; Straightforward; Sane; Cooperative.