The Mystics

The Mystics

I do not know what I know. Nor do I know as much
as I suspect that I know.

Reading through a scattering of Christian mystics this summer, I've been challenged to rethink what I believe, what I do, and why. In that process of re-perceiving and re-acting my faith, I have wondered how much of my learnings should stay with me, informing who I am as a Christian, and which -- if any -- might be good to share with you. Here are just a few:

1) God is bigger than my imagination. In addition, my experience (and knowledge) of God is limited. I do not know what I know. Nor do I know as much as I suspect that I know.

2) If I really desire to experience the presence of God, I must work on identifying what is and what is not me, letting go of all the stuff I carry around, the stuff that burdens me and blocks me from actually seeing (let alone, knowing) God.

3) From time to time, it's not a bad idea to let go of all the traditionally pious practices – spiritual mourning, loving prayer, physical suffering, confession, study of the Gospel, simplicity, solitude, child-like adoration and worship – in order to simply express and experience love of God, in God’s presence.

4) Finally, if I cannot find God, it may be that I’m looking in the wrong places. If God's presence is as simple as a kiss, the breath of another, a challenging conversation, then I might be able to find God – and especially the love of God – by intermingling my life with the lives of my friends.

Spiritual Autism

It is a gift that sets aside our initial and limited physical sensations and that opens us to a super-sensual experience of God’s creation, of God’s people, of God’s nature.

Gifted children often carry extra burdens. For instance, during my years as a facilitator of gifted and talented programming, I found that the most intelligent students at my school were also – in many cases – the most likely to be diagnosed with depression, ADD, autism and a variety of anxiety disorders. I worked to meet the needs of each but found that I had a special ability to relate to the experience of children on the autistic spectrum. I could get “inside their heads” and help them to make important connections. I was frequently asked to meet with such students outside of the classroom. One of these students taught me an important spiritual lesson.

I met with this boy each week. He was intelligent. He was curious. But he was also different from his peers. He struggled to make and maintain eye contact. He missed (or misinterpreted) social cues. He experienced great difficulty discerning the difference between what is intentional and what is unintentional. He had only limited language for his feelings. In fact, this boy’s biggest problem was that his inability to name his feelings made it almost impossible for him to process and resolve them. Instead, he had “meltdowns.” In our meetings, we would explore the events of his day. I asked questions, looking for emotional buttons. I knew I’d found just such a button when this boy refused to answer a question. And I didn’t let up when he shut down. I worked at getting a response – any response – tears, a clenched fist, yelling. Then we would analyze his experience. How did his face feel? His hands? His shoulders? His stomach? Hungry? Tight? Bloated?

“I don’t know,” he would say. “It just hurts.”

“Does it hurt because . . .” I would ask, listing a number of reasons derived from what he’d shared. We negotiated. By the end of our conversation, he had named a new internal experience. On a good day, he had also come up with strategies he could try the next time he had this feeling. I was giving this boy words for his emotional and social experience. I was trying to be a sensitive ear and an honest mouth for him.

Jacob Boehme, a 17th-century shoemaker (and Christian mystic), suggests in one of his books, “Breaking the Chains,” that God can teach us to do this kind of work.

For God.

We can actually, really, physically be God’s body, God’s “eternal hearing, seeing, and speaking.” God can hear and see through us. But this hearing and seeing isn’t a kind of therapy we offer God. Instead, it is a miraculous opening, given to us by God, that we might see and hear what God sees and hears. It is a gift that sets aside our initial and limited physical sensations and that opens us to a supersensual experience of God’s creation, of God’s people, of God’s nature. And when we give ourselves up to God, we let God become a sensitive ear and an honest mouth. We let God open for us the mysteries that we otherwise miss, that otherwise overwhelm us because of our own spiritual autism.

The Trinity

The Trinity Within

We bear in ourselves
a living representation of Father,
Son, and Holy Ghost.

Put three children in a room together, and they will play.

Take them to the lake, and they will swim and laugh and explore. They’ll take turns pulling a raft. Or pushing. Swimming in front or behind. Pulling down a corner to fill the raft with water. Then jumping in and helping to bail it all out. They’ll attack from beneath, flipping the raft and its occupants. Then they’ll have a mud fight. Go for a swim. Jump in the raft together and do it all over again.

Take them to a waterfall. They’ll climb rocks: “Look! Up here!” “How’d you get up there?” “There’s a trail. No, over here. It’s easy!” One will find a snake and yell for the other. Or maybe they’ll slide as far as they dare toward the back of a hole behind the falls.

Choose what children you will. It doesn’t matter. Even those labeled “shy” or “loud” or “disagreeable” find a way to fit, to take part, to interact, to play.

One of my new favorite writers – William Law – suggests that we must turn “to the Light and Spirit of God” that is within us. We bear in ourselves, he claims, “a living representation of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”

We were created for communion.

Children know this, and they are naturals at creating community through play.

I spend most of my days with children and youth. And it is this aspect of my job that gives me so much for which to be thankful. My schedule from just one week this summer: On Sunday, I drove a handful of fourth- and fifth-grade girls to Twin Rocks. On Monday, I took a dozen students to the St. Paul Rodeo. On Tuesday, I hiked to Wahclella Falls with 10 middle school boys. On Wednesday, another youth pastor and I drove 20 students to Hagg Lake. On Thursday, back to Wahclella Falls with another group of boys.

And it’s not always a joy.

They spit paper at each other while I’m driving in Portland traffic. They run ahead of the group and try to lose the girls. They toss their empty water bottles in the creek and complain when I ask them to wade in and retrieve them.

But they also play.

They let Thomas have the front seat even though Noah got to the van first. They lean into one another for a group photo. They offer to stay and clean the van when we get back to the church.

They don’t even have language for their experience. Other than that it is fun.

But I do.

And I am thankful for what I see, thankful for this every-day experience of communion, hoping that I am faithfully reflecting “the Light and Spirit of God,” hoping that I am helping youth to see in themselves, “a living representation of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”

Misogyny

In his advice for men, Miller used the words
seductive or seductress five times. In his advice for women,
Miller used a form of the word slut four times.

Earlier this month, Donald Miller, author of Blue Like Jazz (and quite a few other really good books), wrote a pair of blogs about love. He counseled men to provide safety, security and emotional stability if they want to be attractive. He wrote that women should “stop acting like a victim. If you want a strong man who can protect you and your children, stop trolling for predators by crying all the time.” In his advice for men, Miller used the words seductive or seductress five times. In his advice for women, Miller used a form of the word slut four times. Miller tells men to write “a great love story.” He then says to women that they must “train hard” in order to get included in such a love story, likening it to a marathon and further counseling women that they must suffer in order to win.

Nine days later, Miller announced the deletion of both blog posts, offering a kind of ersatz apology. But he didn’t apologize for denigrating women. He didn’t apologize for blaming women. He certainly didn’t apologize for the sexist content of either blog post. What did Miller apologize for, exactly? Here it is. In his own words:

. . . I write blogs on a whim. . . . I’m thinking out loud. What I never expected was to incur the amount of traffic the blog received. And for that matter, the feedback both negative and positive.

Miller apologized, first, for the negative comments his blog received. He was only thinking out loud. He had no idea this many people were reading. He stresses that there was also positive feedback.

To be honest, I wrote the blogs and never reread them, even after all the traffic. I’m writing books at the moment and didn’t feel the need to go back.

Miller apologized, second, for not actually caring enough about the subject to pay any attention to it. He’s writing books, after all.

I write blogs, misspellings and all, as a way of journaling through ideas. That said, after receiving critical feedback from people I greatly respect (along with support from people I greatly respect) I feared a backlash. Not a personal backlash, mind you, but a backlash against the actual ideas the blog presented. That is, I feared many would say “who are you to tell me how to live or how to love, I’m going to do anything I want.”

Miller apologized, third, for people who don’t understand or agree with his argument. He also indirectly labels such people sexual libertines. Reading through the comments on Miller’s original posts makes it clear that many of these people are women.

I’ve seen this sort of backlash before in other arenas. I’m convinced a number of preachers drive as many people away from Jesus as they invite toward Jesus through the harshness of their rhetoric. I’m not interested, then, in driving people away from a good love story simply because I used language and presented ideas they found offensive. Especially when the ideas were generated in no more than half an hour . . . .

Miller repeats his out that he’s too busy for this kind of thing.

But he’s not.

Yesterday, Miller posted a new blog, asking, “Ladies, Why Do You Hook Up?” Maybe Miller’s just curious “why some girls give up sex easily.” Maybe Miller really does believe that women “use sex for some kind of social power.” Maybe Miller doesn’t know that the Getty Images photo he posted with his blog is the same photo used by Time Magazine in its online post Monday regarding the top 10 most promiscuous cities.

When one of Miller’s readers asks why Miller isn’t “asking the same questions to men,” it might just be that Miller’s right in saying, “All questions can’t be asked at the same time to all groups of people. While I appreciate your consideration, it really isn’t helpful. Honestly.”

Then again, maybe not.

Humanity

To Be Human

we live in a
culture that can't talk
about sex

I read an essay not so long ago, written by a woman who received a Facebook friend request from a man who 13 years earlier had raped her. Although she never accepted the request, she did call him. Opened her woundedness. Asked him to talk about what he did and why. She writes that this “hour-long phone conversation with the man who raped me . . . was more helpful than 1,000 hours of therapy.”

It was a compelling piece of writing, and the author handled her subject both honestly and carefully. It was refreshing because – frankly – we live in a culture that can’t talk about sex. Not without a sneer, a snide comment, a joke, or some kind of sotto voce complicity (as though the discussion itself is suspect).

That’s what I find so refreshing in the Bible’s Song of Solomon. There is no shame. Instead, there is honesty, vulnerability, passion – even the passion that will continue to pursue in spite of cultural boundaries (implied by the beating received at the hands of those “sentinels of the walls” who “took away my mantle”).

And that’s what I find so frustrating in some of the early church fathers, such as Origen, who seems convinced of the evil of “fleshly desires.” He writes that only those “free of the vexations of flesh and blood . . . withdrawn from the desire for corporeal nature” may read this Old Testament book. And that’s what I find so frustrating in Bernard of Clairvaux’s insistence, likewise, that perceiving the message of the Song with “any shadow of corporeal substances” is nothing more than an “evil suggestion[s] . . . forced upon us by the bad angels.”

If Jesus was fully human, then we should be free to be the same, opening our woundedness and our longings, discussing with honesty and passion what it is to want.

At Barclay Press.

Community

As to how we make community happen, I often feel like I'm stumbling in the dark, not even sure what it means (let alone how to get there). What I do know is that I have a longing for shared living. I have a longing for being known, being understood. I have a longing to know and understand. I have a longing for relationship. I believe these are universal longings, and this is why I argue that the “love” part of Christ’s crucifixion isn’t so much the sacrifice as it is the opening for reconciliation, the opportunity for celebration, the invitation to community.

Androgyny

if we aren't willing to
let our perspectives be shaken, we'll never
really learn to see

The two creation accounts in Genesis have largely been read as separate stories; but the fact that they are next to each other demonstrates that someone thought they should go together. Rather than arguing over the differences, we would do well to consider why they have been treated as they have, what this paradox of placement reveals about how the texts are meant to be read and experienced.

What if the first story is vertical, emphasizing the relationship between God and the cosmos? The second story, then, is lateral, focusing on human existence in God’s creation. Notice how the two stories hinge on Sabbath, a point at which the first story of “the heavens and the earth” is flipped and projected into a future story of “the earth and the heavens.” The ending, then, of God’s creation – Sabbath – offers a transition into a new beginning, a new creation, a time in which human work and God’s plan coincide to start the long-term work of cooperatively creating.

The problem with this reading – as seductive as it is – is that the texts don’t present a unified view of humanity. In Genesis 2, the relationship between man and woman is unequal, a major difference from Genesis 1 in which God creates both man and woman in God’s image. In Genesis 2, inequality of the genders is demonstrated in the order of creation (man first, woman second), the quality of creation (woman derived from a man-part) and the purpose of creation (woman created as “a helper”).

The two texts were put together. But why? Maybe there’s a question left un-answered in the first, a problem that has to be solved. Maybe it’s a question we can’t see because of the cultural expectations (and assumptions) we bring to both texts. We do have a key, however, and that key is the work of P. A. Bird, work that makes clear the terms used for male and female in Genesis 1:27 are “biological, not sociological.”

What if, instead of reading these stories as poetry or historical narrative, we try the genre of mythos? What if these two accounts are meant to be read as potentially fantastical stories that answer questions of identity, purpose and morality? The fantastical part, according to Jennifer Wright Knust, the part we miss, is the possibility that “male and female” is referring to one, not two. If she’s right, then like the Native American story about how the chipmunk got its stripe, the second creation account answers, among other questions, why we are no longer androgynous.

Crazy? Only in that it controverts the way we're used to reading the stories. And if we aren't willing to let our perspectives be shaken, we'll never really learn to see.

Creativity

I think of playful creativity as one of humanity's greatest gifts, so it makes sense to me to consider that gift a reflection of our Creator. But I've taken it for granted. I haven't considered whether it's true. Or what it might mean.

Between-ness

I find that much of my work as a youth pastor involves helping students to live in rather than evade the tension of authentic living. Within my own denomination, for example, there are emphases on both simplicity and stewardship. Should I carefully steward what I have for the future? Or give away everything, taking a vow of poverty in order to live simply?

It's human to want to resolve the tension, to want to move in one direction or the other. But that kind of resolution almost always ends in an extreme (making me an extremist). It's much harder to live in the tension, to daily struggle with balance, with paradox, with the between-ness of never quite getting it right and never giving in or giving up.

On Hell

What if there were no punishment and destruction outside of what we call "natural" consequences? What if our conception of hell is just a concept? Is it useful? Does it work? What if the purpose of God's "barking" against sin is to draw me away from danger, to draw me into relationship and community? Does that bark need a bite?