Itinerant Seminarian

Theist or Atheist

2011-12-04T14:28:00.001-05:00

One of my very best friends is an atheist. He is a doctor and a scientist and prides himself in his use of logic when dealing with questions of life and meaning. Last week when our families got together for dinner we got into a discussion of beliefs – one might be tempted to call it a theological discussion. It started with a compliment on something I had written in this blog – it had made him think. And so the conversation was on.
Most of my friend’s questions about religion are wrapped up in an understanding of religion that smacks of pre-Vatican II Catholicism mixed with fundamentalist Sunday school platitudes – and, no, I do not believe in all of that. But if I don’t believe in a robed grandfatherly Michelangelo god, he asked, then who or what is god? Well, I start talking about Tillich’s concept of the ground of being and the in-dwelling force of life which is what I call god. But I cannot point to it I say. So I try to make an analogy: I ask, “Where is the life in one of your patients? Can you point to a place in the body?” How is it that at one moment the patient is alive and the next moment, still and lifeless? What happened? Was it the stress of the operation? Had he touched some life line that flipped the switch? No. Of course not. There is no place that holds life more than the other (though I suppose you could argue for the heart or the brain – but he got my point).
And that is when he pops the real question; “Are you afraid of dying? Because I am terrified of the nothingness.” Behind the question was the whole eschatological orchestration of heaven and hell and afterlife and redemption, and my friend just could not get his logic to go there. I told him that I really did not know if there was anything after death. Perhaps it just ends there for our bodies. But this life force that beats within our hearts, I believed, did continue. No, I did not believe in the resurrection of our bodily physical form – because then I would have to ask which form – my 21 year old or my 36 year old or this failing 62 year old body. My ego might want the youthful one but, I told him that it was my belief that most of the afterlife stories were the fantasies of too many men’s egos desire for special treatment. And I don’t believe in that kind of god – a god that grants favors.
I told him I felt that god was the source of life and that that force ran through all things – but that is was everywhere and nowhere at the same time. You cannot point to god any more than he could point to life. And when our physical bodies die, that life force simply rejoins with the mass of universal energy that is god. He told me I sounded like an atheist (in terms of the actual definition of the word) and I told him he sounded like a believer who was missing words to describe his fears and concerns. I don’t really know, but I do know that we aren’t that far apart, that such discussions don’t scare me, and that each time we have these talks, we both feel closer as friends.

Jumping Back in the Pool

2011-09-13T19:03:00.004-04:00

I took a semester off last spring - the official reason being that I had a truck load of work to do. But that's what I call the pretty lie not the dirty truth. The dirty truth is that last fall's course in Systematics just poked me in the eye! I walked away from the experience feeling like I belonged nowhere. I could not claim my Lutheran heritage; I certainly wasn't Calvinist or Catholic; I didn't care for the otherness of the Jewish God and couldn't adhere to the "I'm not worthy" aspect of basic Christianity as I have heard it preached. The desert fathers had something as did the Gnostics, but modern theologies seemed to be coming unglued. Nothing fit. So I went on, what we call in Men's work, a walkabout. It is a kind of desert experience outside of the village walls - an emptying and listening time. And I took notes - here's what I learned.

I am most certain that I experience, have experienced and will continue to experience the presence of god inside of me and in, through and around everything outside of me. I am certain that the teachings of Jeshua of Nazareth (or Jesus if you prefer) are not only profound but totally misunderstood by the masses of those with whom I speak. Despite that, I find them (in the way I read them) to be compelling. But I am equally convinced of the truth of the Buddha and his legacy of teachers whose words simultaneously disturb and enlighten me. And most importantly, I am convinced of the universality of those teachings and others like them - that one and only one source could cause such diverse sources to have such a common cause and message.

I cannot deny that any more than I can deny my name... or my calling to stand among the next generation of teachers, preachers and laborers in the field of spirituality. And so tomorrow I shall jump back in the pool and see if I sink or swim. It is the only way I know right now.

Divine Intervention

2011-08-20T21:48:00.004-04:00

In one week my son will become a bar mitzvah – quite an important and unique occurrance in an interfaith marriage and I was not quite sure how I was to prepare myself to be fully present at this special event. But for the past three days I have been providing testing and career counseling to a small segment of the third generation members of a very large orthodox Jewish family business. I met with young adults with names like Shmuel, and Sorah, Reuven and Rivka; Chaim and Chana; young people who were on their way to a year in Israel or having recently completed their first, second or even fourth year studying and learning there. To a person they were bright and clear-eyed and filled with a profound spirituality. It was truly impressive – and I was deeply moved by not only the spirituality of their religious life, but by the open and effusive love they afforded each other.

We spoke openly about having been called to religious life by G-d (in respect to their tradition of not naming the Almighty) and how to integrate that into their desire to serve through a career – whether in the family business or elsewhere. While the success of the family business made nearly anything a possibility (including choosing a life dedicated to the study of Torah), all of them voiced a strong sense of responsibility to be a contribution to their family, to the family businesses, and to society.

What once appeared to me as perhaps odd or on the fringes of life, transformed before me into a rich and wonderful world. My attitudes toward the customs of orthodoxy shifted from thinking of them as almost neurotic to a kind of respect and wonder. There are deep roots to each of the actions and, like all ritual practices, each added to the richness of the individual’s experience as he prayed or studied. Because I got a chance to become intimate with these young people (psychological testing is like looking into the core of a person’s being and is about as intimate as it gets), I became immersed in their world for the time I was there. And, as is my habit, I fell in love with a whole new segment of humanity.

Yea, love. Love has this accepting, unquestioning, and unconditional quality to it that changes the lover probably more than the person who is loved. And that is really how it feels. I came here to offer my skills and services, but I was the one who was changed, opened up and moved. Oh perhaps I did my job well and helped them out on their path, but in the process, I was the one who really moved. Isn’t that always the way the Divine works?

Safely Behind Bars

2011-07-29T07:13:00.005-04:00

I had a dream last night that resulted in seeing an analogy I was becoming aware of. I guess it all started because I had watched a trailer for a Disney film on African Cats – I have always loved and been fascinated by the big cats. I love their power and speed and what looks like the ruthlessness of their rule on the savannah. But that wasn’t really the point of my dream.

You see I do a lot of psychological testing of corporate leaders and executives and I tend to notice certain things about the aggregate scores over time. Leadership is missing a certain vitality. Though certainly on a one-at-a-time level some leaders have a little of one part and others have a little of another, but as a whole, there are some core essentials missing from our leadership. Worse yet, most tests aren’t even set up to measure them. But I am coming to believe that they are essentials.

I am talking about passion, love and faith – words that are not even spoken much in corporate realms. The closest we tend to come to that is looking at committed action (perhaps a version of passion). These are the big cats of human experience! We are attracted to them and will stare endlessly at movies about them in cinematic portrayal, somewhat akin to spending hours ooh-ing and aw-ing at a National Geographic special on the big cats of the savannah.

But we don’t dare get too close to these wild things. They are dangerous and unpredictable. Take passion, for example. Passion has gotten a bad rap of late; perhaps attributable to the many CSI/police dramas on TV that portray passion as the source of murder – crimes of passion, they are called. The motive: passion run amok. But passion is actually defined as a state of heightened emotionality driven by some external force – almost alien to our nature or common behavior. Passion overpowers us and takes control, we think. But can this wild beast be brought inside? Can we truly “live with passion,” as Tony Robbins so often exhorts us to do? How many of those who I test and coach would I claim have some degree of passion running through their leadership? I’ll tell you: very, very few. Passion scares employees – passion scares most of us. Nice to watch, but that cat could rip you apart!

Then there is love. What a magnificent word; the source of so many songs; the foundation of philosophical stands; the mandate of every great teacher or sage. All you need is love. Yet it is curiously missing from our management and nowhere to be seen in testing. “Does this manager exhibit signs of love; does he or she truly love employees?” Can you imagine the reaction to execs coming across that item on an evaluation? No, love, too has gotten a bad name. It is too strong a word to be allowed into the realms of corporate leadership.

Ken Blanchard recently wrote a book with Southwest Airlines’ Colleen Barrett called Lead with LUV (using Southwest’s ticker symbol LUV instead of the word love it stands for). Southwest Airlines is one of the few companies we can all point to that actually talks about love as a leadership principle. And while there are probably many more smaller and far less known companies who actually dare to use that word, the scales are balanced pretty heavily in the other direction. What is so fearful about using love as our foundation of leadership? I’ll tell you: love is vulnerable and brings out the vulnerability in the other. In today’s litigious society, that threat could place someone at risk – why that could be construed as a hostile work environment! Really! Hostile? People fear love! That’s why it is the second of the big cats..

But the stealthy killer of the pack is faith. Faith, unfortunately at a conceptual level, has been stolen and distorted by fear mongers and evangelical ne’er-do-well’s to mean buying into some pre-packaged pseudo-religious dogma that has no basis in truth or spirit. So right out of the starting blocks this killer is marked. But even without that, faith stands in defiance of rationality. Faith is holding onto some truth when there is absolutely no evidence for it. On the positive side, it is the essence of The Secret, but against that is any business or scientific “fact-based” logic. You can’t build a business on faith – no bank would fund that proposal!

Yet people of faith (real faith) can and have moved mountains. They seem to have uncanny luck and “get all the breaks.” They have “the eye of the tiger.” In actuality perhaps they just see what their more logic-bound sisters and brothers can’t see, but their success and their faith scares us. We fear that we have to buy into some Jesus stuff or God language, and then what would people think. Yet despite that, there are many examples of faith-based companies that, strangely or not, are still quite successful.

Yea, those are the wild cats – the big guys we love to look at on NatGeo, but would not necessarily want in our house as pets. So what do we do with them? Well, just like the real African cats, we put them safely behind bars. And that’s what I saw in my dream: passion, love and faith safely locked away for visitors to come and visit on Sunday or holidays. Good Pastors and Rabbis get to use these words and play them out as harmless abstracts for us to consider. Harmless – and behind bars.

Passion: the King of the beasts – a thousand pounds of pure power! Yeah, harmless!
Love: that can overtake you with the speed of the cheetah, and you don’t have a place to hide! Not exactly what I’d call safe and harmless!
And Faith: with all of the stealth of a leopard, just waiting on the branch overhead to spring on you! I don’t think so!

So we cage them and keep them safe and out of harm’s way. And they don’t appear on any test or in any boardroom, and certainly not walking around among us – they are just too dangerous! Indeed!

What Are Your "Stones?"

2011-07-29T06:50:00.004-04:00

Here’s an interesting twist on faith as pointed out to me by a great mentor. An often overlooked tidbit in one version of the Easter story, two women were making their way to the burial site of their master early that morning apparently with the intention of anointing the body with oils and perfumes to keep it from smelling up the countryside. And one says to the other, “Who will roll away the stone?” The story goes on to have them find the task already done when they arrive – and we get caught up in the whole angel dialogue and risen lord thing.

But wait – there was the message there – right there; and we stepped over it again. You see, the women thought, “there is a big stone in the way of our practicing our faithful ritual. We want to do what is right, but, hey, we can’t because of the stone.” Ain’t that the truth! There are these big stones in the way of our faithful practices. Most of mine live in my head but some consist of things outside: social expectations, my job, family responsibilities and the like. They are big stones – heavy stones that I don’t think I can move all by myself.

And the howling error that always confronts us (me, if I am willing to tell the truth here) is that the stone is removed for us. Always! It is just gone. That's not what I think - I am certain that there are these things stopping me. And from an egocentric perspective, it appears as though there is a barrier – that there will always be some barrier that I have to muscle out of the way. But that is how I do things. I think I have to do it or it won’t get done. That is not God’s way. That is not how the Universe works and always works. There is no barrier – it has already been moved from my path. Gone. Poof! Not there! The stones are all in my head.

How heavy my head must be with all of those boulders and stones in there – all the ones I have had to move (or thought I had to) in the past and all of the ones I am ever so ready to place in my way as the necessary hurdle to make me worthy of the prize. But the prize is already ours, the stone is already removed, and the prize (surprise) is there waiting for me to come around the corner.

Whose Prayer?

2011-03-03T21:21:00.000-05:00

Here’s another one of those thoughts that I have that may not be terribly popular. It has to do with how we pray and with the essence of prayer. And sorry - this is a bit longer than usual.

The great teacher Jeshua of Nazareth almost never answered a question directly (Another sorry, about the Josh thing. Folks tend to get flaky about his popular name if you do anything less than take him literally. So, because I am going to say something quite possibly viewed as blasphemy, I won’t use it). In fact, I read somewhere that of the nearly 200 questions put to him, he directly answered only three! Furthermore, when teaching a lesson, he invariably taught – as in he never varied from this pattern – through paradox, metaphors and parables; stories that were intentionally puzzling to the listener. Yet against this backdrop, nearly every person I know views the “Lord’s Prayer” as a discrete formula to be taken literally at face value, or at least to be memorized precisely.

Why? Why would his pattern be different for this one lesson? Remember, this is the same man who actually ridiculed formal prayer as either empty or something tantamount to show-boating. Always the consummate Rabbi, what if Joshua was staying true to form? If we suspend our literalist thinking for a moment and examine this instruction – his answer to the request, “Master, teach us to pray,” – through the lens of the other 99% of his teaching style, we just might see something else. Let’s start from the top.

“Our Father in heaven.” As he continually taught, the kingdom of god is now, here, and most importantly within you and me. Why then a reference to a heaven (elsewhere)? Might this instead be a reference to the kingdom among us and within us and not to a divided world of heaven and earth or heaven and hell? Jeshua was fervently interested in having his followers see the kingdom in the here and now. Furthermore, I am told (though I have never read the original text) that his word used for father was the child-familiar equivalent of “daddy” again suggesting that such a “heaven,” if not inside us already, may be closer and more accessible than the priests wanted us to believe. Then, almost as a wake up call he adds, “Thy kingdom come.” Might this perhaps be a declarative or even stated as a done deal? But wait, there’s more.

“Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” follows in the same vein. This is spoken into a time, not too unlike our own time, when whatever might be “god’s will” is clearly NOT being done. The truth is that human willfulness was the rule of the day (and still is). Thus this phrase and its later partner, “forgive our sins as we forgive others,” seem most surely to be a Jeshuan trap. It is more like a double trap, actually. First of all, attaching our forgiveness to our own praxis of forgiving is quite simply ludicrous. Our egos have very little ability or capacity for true forgiveness – they are too concerned with being right and better-than. But secondly, and more importantly, following a literal path we are trapped into hoping that god’s forgiveness could or should be earned by anything we do. The teacher never said either of those – in fact he always said exactly the opposite, in nearly every story, parable or teaching. You are already forgiven; you can't do anything to improve your chances; the kingdom is with(in) you.

So what could possibly be going on with this “how to” manual for prayer? There are two killer requests that need to be addressed before we answer that. “Give us our daily bread” and “Don’t put us to the test.” One of the greatest failed test stories in the bible is the manna in the desert. Our daily bread most likely refers to the daily allotment while in the desert during their flight from Egypt. The tribes were instructed to trust god and to take only enough for one day. Any more than “enough” would rot and turn poisonous, which of course, owing to our human scarcity model, was exactly what happened. Test failed!

Dare we even pray not to be put to the test – the test of our trust in god? C’mon, our very lives are an antithesis of that 24/7! How often do we free fall into our trust in the divine? I don’t know about you but I regularly trust and rely on me (and my effort, intelligence and perseverance) more than I remember to trust and rely on god.

But knowing this, our great teacher must have been lining up a litany of human errors to show us how praying should not be concerned with our human worries. What’s more, our prayer should not – cannot – be about our trying to get it right! We have not gotten it right, ever. It is almost – from this perspective – a mockery of our neediness for rules and boundaries of right and wrong (“Master, teach us the right way to pray – the only way to pray, the way that if we do it correctly, we will be assured of being better than everyone else.”) So he just stacked up a short list of our most stupid and non-spirit-filled errors, for fun! “Look guys, don’t even go there, no one can teach you how to pray, not even my cousin John. Prayer is about getting to human nothingness in order to let in the divine. Empty yourselves and you will be closer to real praying.”

Unfortunately, it is extremely difficult to teach the simplest things. It is the conundrum faced by all the great spiritual teachers (who, by the way, all used koan, metaphor and parables to confuse and get their students out of their heads). The instruction which I can most likely envision from Jeshua – to sit down, shut up and listen –would not have made good press for whomever was writing the story. So we got this… this, “Lord’s Prayer” concoction. I am beginning to seriously doubt that it was OUR lord’s prayer – ever – it is so out of context with the rest of his teaching. Unless, of course, he was following his standard formula of confusing the logic out of us. You will have to decide that one for yourself. Meanwhile, you’ll have to excuse me – I think I need to go empty my cup once more – it is too full to receive anything else!

Systematic Theology

2010-11-14T10:55:00.007-05:00

Wow - It has been a while since I posted here, though admittedly most of these are more like my talking out loud than postings with the intent of generating tons of responses!

This semester I am in a class called Systematic Theology - subtitled perhaps "how does all of this stuff hang out together in your head or heart?" I have to admit it is kicking my butt mostly because it is forcing me to put in writing that which I have gotten away with not having cleanly defined for most of my adult life. Topics like: What is the nature of humanity? If you believe in a god, what is it that you actually believe? And the big one for me is if I call myself a Christian (on the days that I do call myself that) then what is it that defines my Christianity?

It requires first and foremost a starting point: would that be god or humanity? Since I cannot ever comprehend fully god as the fullness and source of all is-ness everywhere, I have to start with humanity. It led me on a path of recognizing that we only can know anything in our own language and limited through our own experience. So certainly whatever I may claim to understand is most certainly NOT god. It is only my experience of god, and at that, it is still limited to the antecedent referent list of tools, experience, vocabulary and imagery that my history, ethnicity, gender, society, economics (etc, etc) has afforded me.

All I can come to then is that this (all of this world, this universe, this life) is but a mere reflection of god - not god nor even full evidence of godliness - just "reflections as in a mirror" as Paul wrote. And to be certain the point of view from which I see that reflection is not the one from which you (any of you) see your version. But theology courses want you to come down with a theory or a theology (literally some god words or god logic) that you could espouse.

Hey, I am working on it!

Finding Hope

2010-07-05T21:04:00.004-04:00

It is my considered opinion that most of us do not know what true hope is but rather that we move with what might be considered a false hope. We hope in what we have and what we know or can imagine. We hope in some prepackaged design of "something better." We hope in a heaven - and we hope there is no hell. We hope to win the lottery, and for happily ever after marriages.

But what is hope itself? The dictionary says hope is the feeling that what is wanted can be had or that events will turn out for the best. I think that is wishful thinking.

So for right now I am trying on a new type of hope. I am working with a hope that does not know what things "should" be or have an idea of what turning out for the best might look like. Maybe it borders more in the realm of trust. I trust that god (or infinite wisdom or universe or whatever you may wish to call it) is infinitely smarter and more powerful than I and that how things are working out is more likely according to some process far larger than I can comprehend. And I place my hope in its care.

To say I have hope is - for now - to say I trust that whatever happens, occurs for a reason and is my invitation to come along with it. Hope should not resist what is in deference to something one's ego has decided would be better. Hope is a state of being found in living in gratitude for everything just as it is - and loving every bit of it as the rich stuff of life. At least I hope so!

Gaping Chest Wound

2010-06-14T05:18:00.004-04:00

I note with great interest our reaction to the Gulf of Mexico oil crisis. How we see the "problem" and how we address it are very telling. We tend as a people to see big problems as what Douglas Adams called SEPs (Sombody Else's Problem) and with that comes a convenient blame that we can affix to the culprit, BP.
But more than that, we seem to be seeing the problem as a separate and distinct entity apart from ourselves. Like so many of our human ailments: cancer, depression, AIDS - you name it - we naievely believe that: a) it is not integrally interwoven into how we live our lives, and b) that there is or can be created a pill (a solution) that can make it go away, without any other effort on our part than simply swallowing it.
How foolish can we be? First of all, how foolish it is to think that poking holes in our body will not have some disasterous results at some point; that it somehow will not result in our bleeding to death. More importantly, how foolish it is to view the earth and a separate entity, an object here for our taking, and not the core and source of our very being as a spicies. In our dualisic logic, we have come to believe that what is not "this" must be "that," that what is not me is other and therefore could possibly be mine or at least used by me without any cost to me. We have failed the first great cosmic rule: that all is one and inseparable from itself. This truth, taught by every great sage that has grown out of this life form and moved about within its veins, is undeniable. We have forgotten that we are merely some six billion hairs growing on the surface of our collective body.
And how foolish can we be to think that this ailment we now face can be healed by placng a bandaid on the hole? We have a gaping chest wound that has punctured our lungs and heart and, with the blood gushing out at a million barrels a minute, we will think to stuff some gauze in it. We hope - in vain I fear - that there is a cure. Where is the Prozac to make this better? Isn't there some antibiotic to make it go away so we can get back to feeding our egos and consuming ourselves?
I am so sorry to be negative. I am so embarrassed to be part of that collective mind that believes this. I want to kick and punch my way out but I can't. I am a part of the whole. I, too, am bleeding to death. I will - like each of you - climb into my oil consuming automobile later this morning and drive off to work, and somehow pretend not to know that I/we are dying.
There is no pill.
There is no individual fault.
And there is no individual way for one person, one company or one country to make it better.
Our only hope is we and us, and to see that this blood spilling out is related to Darfur, Afghanistan, Israel/Palestine and all of the other 90 some wars and blood-letting ceremonies in which we are now engaged, as well as to the deforestation of the Amazon, the melting ice caps.
Oh people, join hands, wake up, help out. This is serious.

Separate Truths

2010-04-25T16:39:00.002-04:00

Commentary on Professor Prothero’s “Separate Truths” (with apologies for the length.

First of all, I cannot step over the need to express appreciation for Professor Prothero’s daring and well-informed essay in the Globe Ideas section (Sunday, April 25, 2010) – daring in its venture in to the un-vogue territory of recognizing and embracing differences (and in particular religious differences) and obviously well informed from the Professor’s years of study. Furthermore, I admit to not having read the full text from which his comments are taken. But unfortunately, from my personal perspective as a novice student of theology, the article fails on both the front end assumptions and on the concluding end of resolution.

The Professor points in great detail to the many differences between the world’s religions as the foundation of his argument and produces from that foundation the obviously related concept of their mutually exclusive goals, using as example the differing goals of various sports. Obviously earth’s many peoples and cultures have a plethora of differences. Why for example do roofs on Norwegian houses have a different pitch than those in the Sonoran desert? Why is the attire of the Inuit inappropriate in the Congo basin? Or allowing for the sport analogy, why must one relinquish the ball when tackled in rugby but cling tightly to it in American football, its second cousin?

The questions that might be asked are not how are these sports different in goals and rules, or why do houses and clothing differ, but rather why do humans play sports and games and why do they seek shelter from the elements? Do we as humans share a need to believe in something, and if so how do those beliefs evolve into group think, cultural mores, out-grouping and hate crimes or perhaps in a shared need to find commonality? While the professor sweeps aside Karen Armstrong’s earlier work, A History of God, he might do well in reviewing her more recent deep dive in The Great Transformation.

In this more recent work, Ms. Armstrong ties together not so much the tenets of some major world religions, but rather the socio-political and economic precedents to them. Evolving out of some common threads in world history and founded in what appears to be a universal human need to understand one’s existence, Armstrong makes a more compelling argument for the commonality of the human spiritual quest. The great sages that developed those religions she traces did so in an effort to make sense out of human suffering and tragedy. Our pains, large or small, personal or societal, are differently named (as our sports are) and so, in the dualism that follows defining one thing from another, the courses of action and thought processes that ensue are even more radically differing.

Humans appear to have a shared need to understand their existence, how they got here and to what end they are moving. Even atheists have an explanation to the why and what of existence (personally I love reading Douglas Adams’ brilliantly articulation of the atheistic point of view). The problem comes not from the religions, theisms and a-theisms, but rather from the very human act of meaning making wherein we all differ radically. Our brains have evolved to make sense out of the myriad stimuli bombarding us at each instant and to relegate some to meaning and others to irrelevance. The bulk of that happens through what psychologists call associative learning – “this is like that.” Since no two people (not even identical twins) share exactly the same perspective, our meaning-making begins to differ from the time we are born (and some would contend even before that). Thus when these somewhat to wildly differing meaning structures encounter human difficulty and the ensuing need to make sense of it, it is a wonder that there are not 6 billion religions on our planet.

But we talk to each other, and something as important and central to life as why we are here and where we are going frequently comes up, eventually rolling up to some commonly held themes as “our beliefs” – and the rest, as they say, is history. Additionally, along with the evolution of these beliefs and themes, our moral/ ethical processes also develop (some more than others). The Professor would no doubt be aware of the work of James Fowler, who outlines the stages of spiritual development from the undefined to universalized (an understanding level few ever get to). Parallel to the work of Kohlberg and Perry, Fowler found that development may stall out at some level, and as Perry found, under duress or challenge, people often regress to a lower level of understanding such as fundamentalism. There, life is simple once again – there is a right and a wrong and everything fits neatly into the package. To the fundamentalist, right comes from god and anything diverging from that is false, and therefore comes from the devil. Combining these aspects of human psychology with the evolutionary history of religions produces a vast array of religions and belief structures not only about morals, ethics and their source, but about who is or is not included and excluded from the defined principles and goals.
And to what point should this argument take us? Professor Prothero correctly points out that denying the differences is both ignorant and insulting. Whether fundamentalist or enlightened universalist, spiritual beliefs are closely held and sacred to the holder. Disavowing those individual beliefs, whether by exclusionary practices or pseudo-intellectual feints toward inclusiveness, is not just ignorant, it is morally wrong. Trying to make things fit neatly into our pretty little ethnocentric packages has virtually destroyed the environment, raped the land, justified wars and genocide – you name it. History should have provided enough evidence that such beliefs and practices don’t work.

But there is a pluralism that embraces diversity that may be a step beyond Dr. Prothero’s end point (which may perhaps be included in his book). Diversity requires our embracing differences as other component parts of the human condition. Not including the perspective of some Aboriginal villager in a world economic forum is as blind as not accessing the creativity of a person living with a mobility handicap when discussing a corporate strategic plan. Religious diversity is not adopting the “New Jerusalem” ideal that Stackhouse espouses, but rather making room at the table for every perspective in discussing our plight.

The problems of today’s world are more complex than ever and some might contend, are foretelling our demise. Unless we recognize that the solution is the unwieldy and awkward coming together of human perspectives, we may not be able to do anything about it. Adam Kahane outlined the process of creating resolutions to the complex and difficult problems presented at the Mont Fleur (South Africa) and in the Vision Guatemala discussions – both of which sought to include representatives of all elements in the discussions. Because religions play such a central role in the actions of peoples around the planet, they may (some would say should) have a role in working toward both a global peace and environmental survival. We as a people are suffering, and suffering, as Armstrong points out in her concluding paragraph of The Great Transformation, “shatters neat, rationalistic theology.” We need to let the pain of genocide in the Middle East, attacks like 9/11 (resulting in our retaliatory warring), and the suffering from natural disasters sink in and shatter the self-righteousness of exclusionary belief systems. We need compassion; a compassion that accepts others’ individual differences and that has room for differing beliefs. We need to follow the lead of Tony Blair and others who are attempting to call the religions of the world together in inclusive mutual respect (for our many differences) and, placing all the guns and knives on the table, begin the process of open and healing dialogue – trusting that somewhere in their respective practices love and compassion have a voice.

Rethinking Church

2010-02-06T09:50:00.003-05:00

I love my daughter! It's not just that she is a brilliant scholar and theologian; it's that she is an explorer - or maybe she is a guide to my own exploring. Whatever! In any case she recently noted that she was rethinking church (and truthfully, I really don't know what she was referring specifically to). But it got me thinking. Yea, church - the whole concept and set of practices we hold about church - needs a radical make over.
I am thinking that we need to turn it literally inside out. Let's just look at three simple aspects of church. First of all, what if we stopped thinking about going to church all together - I mean stopped thinking that it is some place we go. Because when we go inside the church building, we have entered into an exclusion of others - we have walls around us that hold us inside all safe and sound (not even noticing that in doing so we are walling others out). So what if we start letting church to come into us in a way that turns us outward, that tears down the walls and propels us outward toward others? What if?
And what if we stopped thinking of prayer as something that we do or even chose to do but rather that we got prayed. Richard Rohr says "prayer happened and we were there!" For years I have been thinking more like life lives us and that we are in service to the greater life force that flows through us. Well prayer is just like that. Prayer is our attempt to get out of the way and let the spirit of the divine flow through us and out into the world. What if we started getting prayed?
Then what if we stopped thinking that god was out there - as in anywhere other than everywhere, including every cell of you and me and everything everywhere? How might we act if there was no heaven apart from earth, no place to get to if we got it right? How would we act if we only had right now and recognized that we are inseparable from one another but were actually all entwined as one great living whole?
I want to be that church - that re-thought church!

Another One Bites the Dust

2010-02-04T20:47:00.003-05:00

For years I have been trying to get it right (whatever "it" is). It was a journey to perfection that I thought would refine my being. If I could only get this right or that perfect, then... Then what? I would be perfect, or right, or whole? I don't think I really thought much about the "then what" part.
But lately I have begun seeing that perfection is a false idol. It is idolatrous to pursue getting it "right" in the first place. God never tells us we have to get it right or perfect - not ever. Oh from time to time in the Bible there are human references to living the pure and chaste life. But those are man-made rules, not god-rules. God's rules are simple: "If and when you screw up, you get another chance - I am the reset button, just come to me and I will reset you."
What the quest for perfection creates, in reality, is separation. It creates a state of better than and worse than - a caste system of being and doing, if you will. Seeking perfection is seeking to rise above the masses, to get better and better and to reach a level of god-like-ness. It is trying to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Perfection.
But there is an alternative path that has been coming into view. When I let go of the drive for perfection,I begin to seek union, oneness and joining of the shredded and torn-apart life we live. Unity is embracing the "bad" with the good. It is the making whole from all of those parts I want to divorce from myself and pretend don't belong to me. Unity is god's commandment - but not just out there, in here as well. Unity demands that I embrace all of me, and do away with the distinctions of good and bad altogether.
And overarching all of this, the search for perfection is a search for certainty - the quest to know completely that this is it, the best, the fullest! In such a place there can be no doubt, and without doubt, there is no need for faith. And then where would I be. When I arrived at that thought - the thought that I would have no faith if I continued my quest for perfection, the wall came crashing down. And then the wall of divisiveness, came down, and then the insistence on good and bad, and me and other, each in turn fell. And one after another, as Freddie said, "Another one bites the dust, and another one gone, and another one down - another one bites the dust." Oh happy holy day!

Non-Dual Living

2010-01-29T18:21:00.004-05:00

Father Richard Rohr drives a great (albeit a phenomenally universal) concept of non-dual living. The basis of non-duality (oneness, in Eastern thought) is that there is no this-and-that, no right-and-wrong, no good-and-bad. We are called to live in completeness of embracing our whole selves and our whole being. It is the step after the AA Seventh Step Prayer where one says "I am now prepared to give you all of me - good and bad." It is that "all of me" thing that throws us humans.
We think that goodness is somehow apart from badness and that we can strive for being just all good.
But that is not the message of the masters. Yin and yang are inextricable from each other. Good and bad are part of the same beingness. What that means is that in striving to walk the straight and narrow, in striving to do the bidding of god, I need to recognize my dark side. Any less, and I am deceiving myself (because certainly I am not deceiving the all-knowing eye!). Then that being the case, the question becomes how do I actually embrace my less-than-sacred self, my profane self?
And that is where we actually discover compassion. Not in the feeling sorry for the less fortunates of the world. No. Compassion is what is found when we actually look inwardly at our own wanting, and lust, and selfishness, and willfulness and, seeing them all for the beautifully human characteristics that they are, we gently reach out and embrace them - and hold them, and comfort them and tell them that they are okay and forgiven.
In truth, we cannot know compassion without knowing our own fallibility. Compassion levels the playing field. In non-dual living, we come at last to full acceptance - of others and, finally, of ourselves!

When the Convergence Hits the Fan

2010-01-28T21:21:00.002-05:00

A friend of mine, Doug, is a transformational coach and lives at the very edge of his being. He is always pushing his own limits of growth and development. It is both exhilarating and something that will wake you up at 2AM in a cold sweat. Doug knows the developmental truth that you cannot get to the next level without passing through the eye of the needle – which is not fun and in essence means that you must experience the breakdown of your current way of being before you can break through to the next.

It is the age-old truth of the universe and of nature herself: the death/rebirth cycle. It is everywhere in nature. Winter is the grandest death with the rebirth of spring causing us all to jump up and cheer everything back to life. But you cannot get there in a straight line - it comes at you in bursts and in random fashion. And it’s what Doug lives on a daily basis.

Nature and life don’t handle things in tidy little packages, all lined up, one after the other. Sometimes they cascade over us, one and then another and then ten at once. Doug calls it “breakdown stacking!” It is a great concept. Especially if we become intentional about our growth and development. Breakdown stacking is that “bring it on” attitude that looks concurrent breakdowns squarely in the face and shouts, “yippee, another breakdown! I must be doing something right to have this much crap bubbling out!” What if we actually looked for our breakdowns – recognizing them as the equal and opposite reactions to our intention to live life at an even higher level? Now that would be stacking. Bring ‘em on!

So I Am Getting Older

2009-12-18T12:17:00.002-05:00

When you are young, you tend to think of yourself as immortal and as a result life may not mean much. Life is taken on a personal level and is a banquet on which we feast. But as you get older and begins to contemplate your end, mortality and the eventuality of death, values begin to shift - you can see more clearly what is really important and what is trivial. Problems are placed in a greater perspective and as a result are not taken so personally. Wanting what you don't have is seen as a waste of time as you realize that you have always had what was needed to get through - after all you made it to here.
And because death is the source of all egoic fears (as Tolle teaches) you begin to learn a new and freer fearlessness - not the bravado of youth but a fearlessness borne of having made peace with death itself. Life moves from a quest for personal survival to an experience of thriving, opening and surrendering. I guess aging isn't all that bad

Net Intimacy

2009-11-25T07:41:00.002-05:00

There is - I think - a deep human longing for intimacy. However, given today's fractured society where everyone bustles along with ear buds plugged in or cell phones lodged between ear and shoulder, it seems we are even less connected than ever. I noted the look on a passenger in a car the other day as her driver chatted away to someone else while toodling along the highway - it was sad! Families are scattered from Michigan to Maine and Boston to Boca and often neighbors don't even know each others' names.

So we turn to Facebook! I have noted with growing alarm the number of intimate details that have been revealed on people's FB page - arguments with lovers and spouses, pain and grief over life situations and all nature of political, moral and ethical views. Not that it is inappropriate to express one's views, au contraire! I am happy people can express views and have a language for their feelings. What concerns me is that those same people (or me too) might not have an intimate friend to sit beside, or whose shoulder they might weep upon, or with whom they secretly confide a new, budding love. Have we lost that?

There are times the all three of us will be in the home office all working away on our respective computers - and not saying a word to each other! OOOO! The family that 'nets together, gets together! When I notice it (not always because I am focused on work, or my son on his homework), I try to interrupt the separation and bring us all into conversation. But I worry about others, about the strange mixture of aloneness and the loss of boundaries that exposes one's innermost self to the passing public. I fear that my 11 year-old son might grow up thinking that he is having a relationship with someone because they txt each other and that he is expressing himself because he has an array of emoticons! And I wonder if the Amish might not be so strange afer all! Reports show that suicide rates, though quadrupling in our society are lowest and staying put among the Amish and among cultures with lower technology.

And of course, as I write this, I think I had better call a close friend and talk about it!

It's Just Perfect!

2009-11-08T19:07:00.003-05:00

Last week I gave a lecture at the Sloan Business School of MIT on the topic of rapid assimilation into a leadership or management position. Throughout the talk I fielded questions on disharmony and disagreements - the thought being that if one has done a good job selecting and interviewing, there should be a lowered probability of problems. At one point I even asked the audience how many people had the experience of being hired for a job and finding out after the fact that either the job had radically changed or that there were some deep dark, and untold secrets that had not been revealed during the interviewing process (nearly all the hands went up).

Ignoring the irrational expectation that a company should reveal its warts prior to your becoming an insider, the really big problem that lies at the base of this discussion is a belief that a perfect world is one in which all live in harmony. As far as I can tell that belief is the single most destructive belief in the world. It certainly has been the source of more marital problems than any other belief! It just isn't how things are. We are each unique in our being and in our understanding of our world view. Just as no two fingerprints are the same, no two personalities are the same. That is the fun part of life. I wouldn't want to marry someone just like me (how boring is that?) and it would almost feeling like talking to myself were I to work with someone just like me.

Believing that we should have no disagreements also stifles creativity. Nothing really creative can come from agreeing with each other. But in disagreeing - and doing so vehemently - we are forced to find a new solution. The more invested we are in the two poles of a disagreement, the greater our creativity has to be. Our inability to engage in disagreements is further exacerbated by our not knowing how to disagree, debate, and find solutions without taking things personally. Our society - the ME society - has taught us that everything is about us. "If you like my clothes, you must like me" translates into "if you don't like my ideas, you must hate me." And now I can tweet you with what I am doing at any given instant. C’mon: Do we really think that our lives are so important that anyone would be interested in knowing that it is time to take a shower or that you are standing in line at the Stop and Shop? I hate to be so blunt, but we need to get over it! Life is not about you – your life is not about you. Life is to be lived in service to and relationship with others. And relationship is all about working out the differences.

I don’t know if my audience heard the message, but the answer to “what if you and your boss disagree?” and “what if the mentor you have is at odds with the person you report to?” was, and still is, forever, “work it out!” That is the stuff of life, and that is just perfect!

True Authority

2009-08-27T07:26:00.002-04:00

Pain is - in my mind - the great teacher. I have often said that we learn little or nothing from our successes. What we learn (if you want to call it that) is that whatever we just did worked. But with pain - the kind of real pain that comes at the end of a 2x4 smack across the head, or the kind that comes from deep suffering - with pain comes introspection.

When we suffer, we begin to inspect what just happened. We look at the events leading up to it, the triggers, and we inspect the reaction we had to each. We take things apart and crack the code. We begin to piece the puzzle together in new and different ways. We are opened, at last, to learning because the great teacher - pain - has spoken.

Those who have suffered - the poor, the oppressed, and the true victims of this world - know this lesson and they have a wisdom that speaks volumes of what it means to be human. They can speak with authority about what life is and about what it means to be human. Their authority is never wielded with power and cockiness. And they listen far better. I think perhaps this is why Jesus taught the poor and oppressed, and why Gandhi wove his own clothes and walked with the Untouchables.

The wisdom and character that one receives from suffering and pain is compassion. There is not artificial way to develop compassion. Do Kings and Presidents wield compassion (I am hard-pressed to find one, and alternately nauseated at the media events of former presidents hugging a widow or an appropriately cute child in the hurricane shelter) - no I think that for the most part they have no clue, because the have never suffered great pain. Richard Rohr, my teacher of late, gave a talk once called "The Authority of Those Who Suffer" and I think he nailed it. That is the real authority of "been there, done that" only it's more like "been there, ouch, got that lesson too!"

The Splendid Torch

2009-08-13T10:09:00.004-04:00

I listen to the oldies station in Boston, and yesterday I heard one of those place-and-time specific songs that threw me right back to when I was maybe 23! I suddenly was flooded with scenes of what I was doing at that time and the choices I had in front of me. Back then I had all of my body parts in tact, schooling, opportunities and yet... it seems that I lacked the urgency to decide.

Thoreau said once that we live in the "arrogance of a tomorrow." Back in 1972 I thought I had all the time in the world. Youth is like that! I had ideas (like I do now) of writing, something I had always liked, but must have felt that there was mo much more time. I got the chance a couple of years later to co-author with my mentor and remember calling my mom the day the book arrived from the publisher with my name on it. It was too fantastic to be real! That was 1976. I think that is when I caught the bug, but I let it go dormant until just a few years ago - 2006 to be exact, when I started writing again.

We are pushing for a December deadline now - just because we said so! That is how I live now, as the author of my living. It won't happen unless I do my part. I guess the nostalgia induced by that song made me take a long look at what I hadn't done and shoulda, coulda, woulda! I don't normally do that, but I have long held as my theme a passage by GB Shaw called "the Splendid Torch." Sometimes I live it and many times I seem to have forgotten.

Shaw wrote, "This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. [geez I love that phrase!] I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no "brief candle" for me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations."

Well George, I think I need to crank up the lumens to catch up for some less-than-bright times. Oh and if you are wondering, 1972 was the year of "Day by Day," "American Pie," and "Roundabout" but the song I heard yesterday, that I used to sing as I shuffled across the campus at Penn State was Bill Withers' "Use Me."

Respect the Net

2009-07-20T12:30:00.001-04:00

This past weekend I was part of a spectacular wedding. What made it spectacular was not the dollar amount expended (it was actually done on a shoestring, comparatively), nor was it the stunning beauty of the bride (though in fact she was just that) nor the swarthy handsomeness of the groom (ditto). What made it spectacular was that it involved family and friends in a very unique and special way.

The bride is a Brazilian from a small coastal town an hour’s flight north of Rio called Aracaju. Aside from the fact that she speaks little English and communicates with her new husband through their mutual Spanish and the expressions of her always sparkling eyes, she had come to our area to get married here first so that her citizenship might be made easier; leaving the formal hometown wedding to take place in November. That meant that all of her family who could not make the trip were still back home and would miss the event.

Not if we could help it. So the internet jockeys among our friends who were putting together all the arrangements, arranged for the friends and family to be in one room with a computer hook-up via Skype. We, at the other end had a series of digital cameras and webcams trained on the entire ceremony, and bingo, the world got smaller! The most special part was about three-quarters of the way through the ceremony, they turned up the volume in the Brazilian room and the family spoke to their daughter, granddaughter, and sister. Though most of us present spoke no Portuguese, the international language of joy and pride and tears was more than enough to know what was meant.

Lately I have been ragging on the Twitter-hyped world of obsessed technology. But I lay that all down today because somewhere in Brazil, a grandmother is boasting to her friends about how beautiful her child was walking in the sunlit path toward her new life; how tender the kiss was and how radiant she looked on her first dance – because she was there and saw it all. That was spectacular!

Spiritual Discipline

2009-07-08T15:17:00.003-04:00

Spirituality is a discipline not a concept, and of late I have been undisciplined. I have not been attending church services, I have not been praying at the beginning, end and/or the middle of my days, I have not been reading sacred literature. All of these practices and more are the disciplines of my spirituality, and I have become lazy and lethargic. Well it is not that I have become that - it's more like that is who I am and the disciplines take me away from my natural state.
I exercise every morning, and people always say things like, "Oh, you are so disciplined. I wish I could be like that!" That is not, I explain, discipline. I exercise because I have no other choice. Without exercise my left leg, orphaned by an athletic injury that cut off much of the nervous impulses that once went there, starts cramping up around 3PM or so. I HAVE to exercise!
But it appears as though my soul does not go into spasms if I forget to pray one day - and the next - and the next after it. It just withers and atrophies until one day I wake up all cranky without the slightest reason for why. My spirituality takes effort, routine and training. I believe the definition for discipline is a practice that shapes and molds the spirit. Without the regular rigor of those exercises, my soul looses shape - without the slightest hint. It just goes away.
Last night I did a whole mess of sit-ups for the first time in a while and my stomach aches today. It's a good ache, the kind I want to feel again in the pit of my soul.

Father's Day

2009-06-24T20:59:00.002-04:00

So I am a few days late but after a recent conversation I have been thinking about what fatherhood really means. And I think we have it backwards a bit. What we really might mean when we honor fathers is not how we fathers as cool and groovy, but perhaps how very honored we are to be "father" to some one.
So for me, I have been thrice honored. The gifts I have been given are beautifully unique and wonderful. My eldest is a blessing of the deepest spiritual kind. She has always been able to put into words those mysteries most of us can only feel. Her gift of speech, her wisdom that has been evident since her childhood and her passion and compassion are wonders to me and I have had the honor of being a steward of her as she grew into what she is today.
My second is spiritual in a different way. She has always had a sixth (and maybe a seventh and eighth) sense about people. She can read a room like a book and can actually see how you are feeling without your ever speaking a word. And her touch - her touch is nothing less than divine healing. She is sensing incarnate and has turned that into a gift she uses to heal any with whom she has contact. But beyond that this one is a peacemaker. She is a truth-teller and an arbiter who cannot be ignored or dismissed. She WILL change you!
And my son, my word, what an honor to be gifted with him! He is sensitive - I don't have any other word for it - he feels things with an amplification that makes him like a receiver. Sometimes I have to be careful what I expose him to because he feels it so deeply. We don't know how he'll turn out (he's only 11) but his gift is already evident. No less articulate than his sisters, this one is destined for another type of greatness.
So this Father's Day I really did get some gifts - the gifts that just keep on giving. You can't get better than that!

Ordaination

2009-06-14T09:41:00.004-04:00

Yesterday I witnessed an ancient Rite of Passage, one that has been handed down through thousands of years. The ordination of priests was first described in Exodus (though in typical ancient Judaism, with sufficient quantities of blood splashed about) and has been a ritual observed for consecrating our spiritual leaders since the earliest of times. It is, however, a double-edged sword. In one ceremony the ordinand is both lifted up as a leader, and humbled forever into the servant's role forever placing the ordained person in an irresolvable paradox.

Perhaps that paradox is purposeful as it serves to keep the priest in the question, and it is only in the not-knowing state that one is clear enough to see, feel and experience the Divine. Perhaps its purpose is to make certain that the power of spiritual leadership is never abused (which, history has proven, is so easily done). I cannot say - I just don't know. But as with most ritual, I am certain it is on purpose!

But the culmination of the Rite, is a point when the other priests, and ordained who have mentored and taught the new initiate lay their hands on the ordinand and pass the blessing and the paradoxical commission on to her. I am told by those who have received this, that it feels light a lightning bolt passing through your body.

Yesterday I witnessed the ritual of ordination for probably the 10th time, though for me it felt like the first time. I got to see that ancient tradition passed on to my daughter. And for me it was an out-of-body experience (I can only ask her what it was like up there). And I will let her tell others whether the lightning struck.

But what I can say is that the greatest gift a father can receive is to see his children honored - in form and title (like Reverend, or Doctor or whatever). It is the most unbelievable and breathtaking experience. Yesterday was one such day, and the power of that blessing really hit me - like a lightning bolt passed right through me!

Gifts

2009-06-14T09:16:00.003-04:00

Least anyone reading my last entry (On Becoming An Elder) think me a depressive or negatively-oriented person, let me just add that life itself is a gift. Everything about is a gift - especially the present (time)! But do we really earn gifts or are they given, just because the giver wants to give? I think the latter, whether the giver is life, the cosmos, god, your best friend or a family member. Gifts are given, not earned.

Whizzing past 60 at relatively break-neck speed, celebrating its passage in living color, with family and a great many friends, but in celebration of life is how I would have wanted it - and befitting my attitude on life and living. This is all a gift. So much of my experience in life - the greatest percentage by far and away - is just given to me as a gift. I delight in every moment and even in retrospect have fully embraced the few lumps and bumps of my own screw-ups.

So if these gifts are not of my doing but the lessons of my failures are, then I can only lay claim to those. Oh sure - did I actually DO the accomplishments? Yes, I ran the Boston Marathon, yes I hiked the Himalayas, yes, I have DONE so many things of which I am proud. But these occur to me as the gifts of my privileged life - the gifts I have been given. Without the gift, they would not have been nearly as possible. So, yes, I did something with the gifts I was given. And when I messed up the opportunity - the gift - I learned, and grew, and gained. The gift never lost its giving properties.

So I seem to have talked myself into a corner here. Life is a gift (but only when I/we receive and do something with it), the lessons of failure, were sourced from a gift, that I could only receive after I got the lesson. So I either have to claim it all as mine, (given to me to do with and/or fumble as best I can), or recognizing them all as gifts, step back and be thankful for the abundance of gifts I have been given.

On Becoming an Elder

2009-06-03T07:28:00.005-04:00

Well, it's official: I am now 60 years of age. It doesn't feel any different - really. Oh there are things like I can't life a refrigerator anymore and a solid day of construction makes me ache all over, but other than a few aches and pains, my mind still thinks I am something like 48, to pick an arbitrarily stupid figure.

But this number comes with some titles and labels, the main one of which that I would like to adopt is "elder." Now being or becoming an elder carries some trappings with it. For example, it is precisely twice the age we swore never to trust anyone older than, back in the 60's. It probably looks a tad silly for an elder to be rocking out to AC/DC, so my view of myself as a rocker may need some alterations. But most formally, an elder ought to be a mentor, not to anyone specifically, but to society and people in general.

So what is it that I have to give? On what do I offer my mentoring? All I really have to claim solely as my own are these scars - wounds from various battles - and lessons taken from really screwing up royally. But, you see, that is the wisdom of aging. We don't really learn much from our successes. We simply note it and say something like, "Cool, that worked!" But our failures - wow - we ponder them; we slice and dice and analyze them until we figure out where we went wrong and use the pain of the failure to make certain that the lesson sinks in so that we don't repeat the same mistake.

Several years ago I wrote an op-ed piece on what I called the "Shadow Resume" - the compilation, not of all our good accomplishments, but of our lessons taken from the crash-and-burn failures. That is what I have to offer today - I survived all of those tough, painful, don't-want-to-do-that again stuff. Perhaps it is all any of us really can lay claim to.

Unraveling The Threads

2009-05-06T06:46:00.006-04:00

It is funny how this process works - this introspective thing, I mean. As I have been rapidly approaching the completion of six decades of residence on this orb, a date which is now less than a month away, I have been on a quest of unraveling the icon of self-ness which I have fabricated from the strands of memories, events, accomplishments and failures, to discover what lies beneath and beyond all of that. In two recent blogs I have peeled that down to the raw, naked "so what, now what?" However, that has all been about discovering who and what I actually am in my authentic self. But what then of god?
Following the same logic - that the concept of god is mostly a fabrication of myths and beliefs passed on to me by others, sewn together with experiences and reflections of my own - then what is or might be god that is not that when and if we are able to strip that away? The theologian John Ackerman makes the beautiful distinction between the god of our experiences and the experience of god. It raises the question of whether we can ever, really experience god's god-ness devoid of our preconceived categories and language for those experiences. Is it possible to have an authentic experience of the divine? I cannot speak for anyone else here, as I am certain to offend the righteous, the devout believers and he "faithful," so I will speak only of myself.
I have entered on a quest of discovery to seek the authentic experience of god without categories, words, theologies, epistimologies, and eschatologies (don't you just theo-babble!!). I choose to call this phase of spiritual development the Seeker phase (for lack of any better term). I feel like a Seeker. Armed with only a knapsack, a notebook (as it were) and nothing more, I have strapped on the proverbial hiking shoes and headed out into the wilderness of not knowing. These posts have been postcards from that trek, notes along the way as I continue to explore my unknown world. I would love to invite you along and ask that those of you who read these posts occasionally check in with me. Am I making sense? Do you take issue with these precepts? I will never know by myself, just as I will never know who I am without being in relationship with you all. Well? Is there anyone out there?

Undoing the Self (part II)

2009-04-26T06:55:00.004-04:00

In recognizing that the self, which we have so long identified as who we are, is not the authentic self; and in stripping away layer after layer of evidence to that effect, we are left standing naked before god and the universe. The question we face in our nakedness is, "If I am not that, then who am I?" Our introspection leads us to what might be called our potentialities. But even these have taken on a different quality. No longer do we see our potentialities as what we can or might do or accomplish. Our true potential is to be used in whatever service each situation might require of us - to be an instrument of god's workings.

When I stop to think of that, I am forced to realize that I am not all powerful, I cannot "do" everything and this aging body certainly is not capable of what it once could do. That notwithstanding, the requirements of being an instrument of god's workings in the world seem far larger than any of that which my ego-driven self has been or ever will be able to perform. But that isn't the issue. It is god working through us, not our (willful) working of what we think god wants of us. There is a difference. I think that the 12-steppers slogan of "let go and let god" means that (though their arrival at that slogan and interpretation of its meaning may vary greatly).

This is no blind faith, It is a step out over the void like the Indiana Jones scene before he throws dirt on the invisible path. It is Moses in the desert saying "Okay, but I don't know why you would pick me!" It is the blind Saul going to the home of his enemy, Francis stripping off his clothes and stepping into the arms of his bishop. No slogans here! Just fear and trembling... and stepping forward, saying "Here I am, take me."

Hope

2009-04-25T22:27:00.002-04:00

Hope is the power of the present moment that serves to interrupt and alter the current path of past-to-future that we perceive as existing within our worst-case fears, and moves us in the direction of possibility.

Undoing the Self

2009-04-22T06:07:00.001-04:00

I think for the most part, developmental theories have it all wrong. Most believe that the tasks of growing, developing and maturing are learning what it is that we can accomplish and do with our lives. And while to an extent that is true, we make a critical error in assuming that is who we really are. As infants we make this discovery that we can grab and manipulate the things of our world. So as we grow we layer on that basic belief that the more we can do and control the more a unique individual we become. This, the theorists claim, goes on throughout our stages of establishment and generativity to a point when we can no longer sustain that level of output identified with our self concept. Thus in later years we are told we enter a period of decline and begin preparing to die! Erikson even says that we either get that as a level of acceptance or we fall into despair.

But what if our task as mature adults is not simplification and decline but one of recognition of the essence of who we really are? The complexity of the veil, the disguise we have concocted and used as the projected (false) self through all of those years, begins to unravel and be exposed for what it really is. Wisdom begins to recognize all of the actions and accomplishments as delusions and begins to detach from them in an effort to rediscover the true self that is already, and has always been, there. Simultaneously we begin to uncover the in-dwelling god that as well has been there all this time, from whom we have succeeded in distancing ourselves through all or our doing.

However, because we have such an investment in the idol we have constructed out of our accomplishments, this transition often does not happen without some significant disruption of the self, or more accurately, of the ego. Thus many only come to this realization after a near death experience, after a debilitating injury, after the body begins to fail. In the sadness that may fall into despairing over the lost trappings of our youth, we turn inward to contemplate (some for the first time) who we really are if we are not our doing-ness and our accomplishments. The great sages have been preaching this message for eons – that we are not what we do but how we are that matters. (part II to follow)

Fractal Spirituality

2009-04-19T21:32:00.010-04:00

Okay hold onto your suspenders for this one. I have been trying to make sense of all of the literature on spiritual development and to the best of my understanding it fails on two counts: One, most theories of spiritual development start with a presupposition of some religious belief system and track the development of individuals through and around that systematic belief. Two, most of the spiritual development theorists if not all seem to follow along with the same stage theory as cognitive development (most of which tracks through youth and teen years but stop at young or middle adulthood).

I would like to play with a different theory of development - fractal theory. In the mid seventies, scientist who had been studying chaos in nature found that instead of pure randomness, that which seemed to be chaotic actually followed extremely complex but self-repeating patterns. Everything from shorelines to crystal growth patterns seemed to fit these complex patterns produced by interacting forces. The name fractals is credited to Benoit Mandelbrot, an IBM mathematician and Harvard professor. The easiest way to describe a fractal is by looking at a head of cauliflower. If you were to look at one clump of the whole head up closely it would look exactly like the whole head, and if you broke off one flowerlette it too would look like the whole head and so on. Ferns, river deltas and the ubiquitous 70s paisley are all fractals. And so is, I contend, the growth, pattern and development of the individual spiritual experience.

But what is most remarkable about fractals is that there is something undiscoverable about them. While much of the pattern can be reduced to complex formulae, when it is reduced to its smallest element the pattern is still there in its entirety (not totally reduced and understood) and when looked at through the widest perspective that same undiscoverable element seems to be present. Its puzzle cannot be known - only seen and observed. Furthermore, there is no real stage system to its increasing complexity, just greater and greater complexity revealed.

It seems to me that we grow our spiritual side in this beautiful, complex and ultimately puzzling way. Some element of what I believe today has within it the imprint and patterning of what was set in place originally in my DNA and early prayer life. And why my unfolding is different than yours or Luther's resides as well in the magnificently complex intertwining of the fields and forces that shaped this life. Mandelbrot's original question concerned measuring the shoreline of Great Britain, causing him and his students at the time to wonder about the forces patterning coastline development. So too is our spirit shaped, moved and modeled by those great unseen forces within and without us.

The Gospel According to Nikos

2009-04-11T21:53:00.003-04:00

Forgive me. I have just watched for the umpteenth time the Last Temptation as brought to us by Martin Scorcese, William Defoe, Harvey Keitel and Nikos Katzanzakis. I cry every time; I get sick every time; I am turned inside out every time. I don't care that Matt or Mark or Luke or John didn't write it that way. There is more real "gospel" in that story than anything I have ever seen.

Does anyone really know the story? Why is it we wait for a Messiah or believe one to have been here? Is it so unbelievable to accept that god lives and beats in each of our hearts? Is that so difficult to believe that we have to make up stories of some superhuman god-like being that came and walked among us; to ascribe holier than thou characteristics to some other person? Is it so uncomfortable to believe that normal idiots and screw-ups like you and me would be chosen?

Well just look at the evidence. God ONLY chooses screw-ups. Not saints - you and me. The bible and history are filled with examples of the kind of sinful ne'er do wells that god picks for this work. (Still William Defoe dutifully plays the perfect one). But what about you? What about me? Aren't you perfect? Do you fight the voices in your head like I fight mine? Like I am called? C'mon! For 35 years I fought that voice calling me - and it has never stopped. Am I to believe that voice is god? I am so regular, so sinful so filled with sin, so average.

Is there a movie of a regular messiah - an everyday messiah? I wonder.

Apologies

2009-04-11T08:37:00.004-04:00

Sorry, sorry! If these things get sent immediately upon posting then you got three versions of that last one as I successively saw different mistakes or typos. I don't know how not to have that happen.

Also a quick apology for my absence - I have a heavy reading load in my course and it consumed all of the extra time I might otherwise have spent here. KG

The Space In-Between

2009-04-11T07:43:00.006-04:00

It's Saturday - the Saturday between "good" Friday and Easter Sunday. I suppose Saturday could get jealous - if it were that kind of a being. But such is not the case with this Saturday. Its purpose is very clear - to be a space in-between.

How should we observe In-Between Saturday? What happens on this day. I think for most of us it is just a day to get over or through. But imagine THAT first one - the the one that was not yet In-Between. The darkness was all around, the execution had happened, the curtain in the temple had been ripped and the earthquake had really shaken everyone. They probably hid and got drunk trying to numb it or just blot the whole damned thing out. Half horrified, half scared out of their minds (who was going to be next to suffer that fate?

Saturday - a time of crouching in the corner and thinking waaaay too much. Who am I? Who was he? What do I really believe - if I can ever believe in anything again? We don't talk much about Saturday as "Holy Saturday" (I think perhaps traditional Catholics still do). But this is the truly "holy" space. It is the in-between space where god does god's best work on us. It is only when we are sufficiently disturbed, sufficiently ripped out of our made up "realities" that we are not deafened to the Divine message. It takes going into the in-between space (what Richard Rohr calls the liminal space - the threshold betwixt and between) to get the real work done.

Real persons of faith know this place - they know that this is the only place where faith becomes just that - faith. This place of not knowing, and of not trusting one's own mind and senses - this is where faith is forged. Everyone who was there on Friday, who had any wherewithal with which to perceive anything, knew what happened! And Easter, well, SOME of those who were there saw and believed (blessed are those who did not see and still believed) and some could not. I somewhat suspect that those who saw and believed, and those who didn't and did, were the ones who went deep into the In-Between space that Saturday.

It is difficult to stay in the In-Between spaces. We are an instant gratification culture. We want it now. We even manage and expedite changes - thinking we are in control of it all. But Saturday - Holy, In-Between Saturday, teaches us to sit and wait - a skill we have all but lost. That is how I intend to spend today - sitting, wondering, waiting, scared....

Faith's Bottom Line

2009-02-14T17:59:00.001-05:00

I have written several times about how belief is that which you do when there is no reason to believe, but I want to make some clarifications to the general idea. I also noted that I had recently read Richard Rohr’s book on Job and how Job had never doubted the existence of god. When these two come together, it requires some explanation.

God is. Period – end of story, good bye, thank you very much! There is no ifs ands or buts about it for me. And yet with that, I concede that there is no scientific evidence to “prove” god’s existence. It is my belief, my faith that I stand on when I assert that. But let me be clear that it is not my saying so that makes god exist for me. I exist in god’s world, and I exist as a part of the overall divine manifestation in this world. My faith and my belief has only to do with my understanding of that and my relationship with that.

I had heard that a great master was once asked if he believed in god. He answered that he existed in god’s kingdom to which the questioner repeated, “but do you believe in god?” This ping pong match continued for several rounds with the master never conceding to answer the direct question of belief. Ultimately he said tat those who “believe in god” suffer from and live in a world of doubt.

So these two exist: belief and is-ness, and where they come together is in the verse from Mark 9. I do believe (I am certain the god is) help me in my unbelief (those times when I need evidence and proof). Job is the embodiment of this human struggle between an absolute faith in the existence and reality of god and a human need to hang one’s belief on some evidence or sign of objective reality.

Choose or Be Chosen

2009-02-12T22:13:00.001-05:00

I have been observing the function of focus lately in an attempt to see how focusing on the divine altered the experience of life. The great news is in fact that doing that, like focusing on beauty or seeing love in others, has a marvelous effect. Suddenly the entire world looks sacred and holy.

In addition it was my intent to actively choose this focus. While all of us have that part of the brain that concentrates our focus on foreground, relegating all else to background, actively choosing to focus on this or that engaged the RAS and its focusing function. When in the middle of that mental conversation it hit me how arrogant or ego-centric it was to assume that my choosing made the sacred appear. It was not m choosing at all but in fact that god had already chosen me – all of us.

I cannot pretend that I am choosing god – god has already, always chosen me. And there is nothing in my choosing that can alter that, except that I forget and turn away from time to time. But each time I turn back there is god waiting, accepting, and welcoming me back. So while I do have a choice (whether to look away or toward god’s light) it is not my choosing that makes it so. It is that god has – long before you or I ever had this thought – chosen us, in the very act of giving this life to live.

The thought suddenly relaxed me – like my shoulders dropped from their tensed p position – like feeling as if it was all a huge effort I had to do. It isn’t. It is quite easy, Kris. Just shut up and accept the gift (I am not good at receiving gifts – much better at giving I think). Oh I am certain I will forget this lesson and turn away, but as it always has been, all I have to do is turn back and remember, effortlessly, and there it is. I think this is what others have called surrender.

A Wordless God

2009-02-05T10:13:00.003-05:00

Yesterday I was talking with my Spiritual Director and found myself saying something I had not really articulated before - how difficult it is to use words to describe the spiritual experience. Oh, at times I have claimed that others had co opted words like god to mean something other than what I think and experience (definitely the bearded Moses-esque grandfather figure on high). But that wasn't what occurred to me yesterday.

It is my experience and belief (and I am not claiming this to be the truth that others should believe - it is just how it occurs to me) that god is not only the life force that causes us to breathe but that which is in, through and around us in so interwoven a way that it could not even be isolated on a DNA or RNA chain. God is in the conception, and it is god that births us. God is present within us from before we were and is certainly the unifying one after we have ceased to exist on this earthly plane. Thus we are born knowing god - but if so, what happened?

We happened; words happened; events happened; and meaning happened. As we assembled a meaning and identity in our youths we left behind the one thing that we absolutely, intimately knew in search for words and meanings and skills to cope with our living life. And along came the theologians - attuned to the yearning sense inside each human - and gave us words to describe both the feeling and the source. But the horrible thing was that the words took over the experience and became the full extent of the meaning.

I was talking yesterday about how I missed the experience, of how I seemed to well up and choke on some words in hymns we sang in church. When I was pushed to identify that feeling, it resembled the longing and "missingness" I feel for my dad (who died some 41 years ago when I was only 18). I know god, and I believed in a historical Jesus, and I am awed/inspired/humbled by the thought and reaity of the crucifixion, but I was missing something, and there were no words to label that something.

I miss the being of being one with god. I know that sense and I have known that oneness. But when I try to describe it there are no words - because it comes from a knowing as old as I am that predates my knowing all these nifty theological words. I feel it tug in me and call to me to sit with it swirling around in my blood and bones and between the cells, vibratinng the chromosomes. It is a presence that is not distinguishable from my presence (when and if I am ever fully present). There may be zillions of names suggested for what that is, but I don't know them. I only know that when I don't pay attention, when I am not awake - as in fully present - I miss that and am missing who I am that I am. And isn't that what god called himself?

Focus, Focus, Focus

2009-02-01T12:49:00.002-05:00

I haven't written in a few weeks because my focus has been elsewhere - in a book. It was not a focus I intended but a required one for a class I am about to begin. I was focused on depression and on the sadistic twist of fate that results in those least capable of coping being hit hardest with this disease/disorder/state.

But what I notice most is the function of focus played in mental health and mental unhealth. As the spiral of depression kicks in on someone, their focus turns downward to the pain, the losses, the what ifs, until even movement, or walking or swallowing saliva is an event of momentous effort. But what seems to be a common thread throughout these books is the role of one's focus.

I recall from my undergrad and grad work the research of the Gestalt movement and their description of the Reticular Activating System - a central part of the inner brain's functioning. The RAS is like a switching servo-mechanism that distinguishes foreground and background so that we don't get overwhelmed by the zillion stimuli bombarding us at each instant. In essence, the RAS is our focusing switcher. Yet I see no reference to it in any of the depression literature I am reading so far.

The reason I am fascinated with focus comes from another recent event. I was talking to a friend about his infatuation with a woman with whom he said he was in love. I related to him how I had re-fallen "in love" with my wife during the year of preparing for her 50th birthday extravaganza. Each day I had done something requiring my focus on her and with each day became more infatuated. I know it sounds cold and unfeeling, but I suggested that his state was more a result of his intense focus, the dozens of daily text messages, the hourly anticipation of seeing her again - the intensity of his focus may have been more the issue than anything else.

Does depression work the same way? Is the RAS part of the cause or solution in depression? If so, what little is there to focus on when one lives in austere poverty - nothing but loss and refuse and vacant lots or deserts. Is my friend's focusing actually the root of the intensity of his love? And if what we focus on alters our emotional state, what choice might we have in shaping our moods, our successes and failures and our fidelity and relationship successes? I don't know but it sure seems like it is worth asking. And when we turn our focus to god, and begin to focus daily or even hourly on that relationship with our god, what might we notice then. I don't know but it surely seems like it might be worth the try.

I do not mean to lessen the personal tragedy of depression for those going through it nor suggest anything less about its toll on people and societies. I am only wondering if there might be a connection with the RAS and with the function of focus.

What Is Hope?

2009-01-20T20:09:00.004-05:00

Like nearly all Americans today, I watched and listened and hardly dared to breathe, least I miss a moment or a word. But I started realizing that it wasn't about the man. I started hearing people of reason acknowledging how much work we all had to do. I heard a leader talk in realities. No flowery platitudes, no campaign promises. Just realism and challenges and hard work ahead. So why is it that I feel so hopeful?

I have grown tired of empty suits and political rhetoric. I am wearied from chest-thumping machismo and might-makes-right mentality. I have been worn down by far too many agendas. I need to have my feet planted flatly on the floor.

I don't need to hope for things to come. I don't live my today in the promise of a hereafter. I need to be present - here - right now, and nowhere else. and when I see another who looks like that is what is up for him, I am heartened and lifted up.

I don't know if he can live up to the expectations but I know that those whose expectations are unrealistic will certainly be dashed. I do not know if he will win over his opponents, but I am certain that those who think less of him will find all the evidence they will need in future days. But I am filled with hope today, because one man told his truth. I am encouraged today because the cameras saw all the colors of the faces. I am uplifted because I saw strangers smiling at each other and embracing in the cold air. And I really really want to believe that we can be more together than we are separately, and that something started today that is unique and different in the world. It started today - and I felt it and saw it. And that is what hope is all about.

The Well of Grief

2009-01-13T06:09:00.002-05:00

In honor of the surviving family and lovers of Jon Choate and Rebecca Raboin, I submit this brief poem by David Whyte:

The Well of Grief

Those who will not slip beneath
the still surface of the well of grief
turning downward through its black water
to the place we cannot breathe
will never know the source from which we drink,
the secret water, cold and clear, nor find in the darkness glimmering
the small round coins
thrown away by those who wished for something else.

By David Whyte from Close to Home

Words Fail Emotions

2009-01-13T05:44:00.006-05:00

There is a fundamental problem we have as humans and that is that we invented words and then made the mistake of letting them become the feeble container of what we really meant. Though poets can write volumes in just a few short lines of well-chosen words, somewhere around the space of emotions, words just fail.

I am certain that if you look up the word "love" in a dictionary it would say something like "a warm fuzzy feeling about some person or thing." And I am equally certain that such a definition doesn't enter the neighborhood of the length and depth and breadth of the actual feeling I have for my wife or my children. That definition (or any definition) doesn't have the color, depth, vibrancy, history, pain, joy, pleasure, and myriad other dimensions that my love has at any nanosecond.

And grief, I believe, is more complex.

I was reading my daughter's blog as she prepared to eulogize her step-dad Jon Choate, and let the half dozen other responses from friends and family sink in, really touch my inner being, as I read through them. And I am in awe at the texture and dimensions of grief/love that abound in and through all of that discussion. That we humans are capable of such love and only then open to such pain and loss is beyond miraculous. It is stunningly beautiful. There are no words when smiles and tears and love and pain all embrace each other simultaneously. There is only being.

My friend Bill had a daughter born 18 years ago so severely handicapped that she never walked, talked or even fed herself. Faced with the option of institutionalizing her, Bill and his wife decided to love her for as long as she lived. That commitment ended last weekend as Rebecca finally slipped into death. Though there were so many times it felt like a burden, Bill never stopped loving and caring. And now he still cannot stop. He doesn't know how or where or what it looks like. Grief has that depth of love in it that only lovers and parents and real risk-takers know.

I am proud and honored to be part of a family that so easily and openly expresses emotion, and who so fully risk loving. And with all of our words, we don't even come close to what we know each other to be feeling. I love you guys!

Testamony to a Great Man

2008-12-26T22:15:00.003-05:00

A little more than 20 years ago I was involved in a rather nasty set of events that resulted in my divorce. My ex, a wonderful woman, professional and mother eventually ended up building a life and relationship with another man. John was a farmer but so much more. Running an organic farm just a mile down the road from my refuge at the time, Karme Choling, I am certain John, too, was a frequenter of their halls in those days. He had a depth and a quiet spirit that I admired. He epitomized the salt of the earth and gave a stability and grace to the growing-up days of my two girls, who remained behind with their mom when I left.

I never really got to know him much because I only saw him at dance recitals, weddings and graduations. But to me his testimony and his legacy are evidenced in the exquisite women that my girls have grown into. Both have chosen great men, but especially my younger (three at the time of the divorce), who was most influenced by John, chose a strong, silent and peaceful man like him. I am certain that his fathering was a source of much of her understanding and choosing a mate. But John also loved and cared for their mom, most likely in ways I could not and did not. He was calm, and accepting, and seemed (from my vantage point) to never expect more of her than who she was. And when his body began to fail him, she hung in and cared for him in a way that he deserved.

John died this morning, leaving behind a world a little less stable for lacking the pillar that he was. Thank you, John. I wish I could have told you how very great I thought you were.

What's It All About, Alfie?

2008-12-26T17:49:00.002-05:00

Reflections on Job and the Mystery of Suffering, by Richard Rohr

Though I barely remember the 60’s version of the Michael Cain film and did not bother with Jude Law’s newer/fresher Alfie, the “what’s-it-all-about” question has all the staying power of an old cigarette jingle, without any of the narcotic effects. It is an ancient and hauntingly human question that has no real answer. All of our “why’s” seeking some rational explanation to life, the universe and everything (short of Douglass Adam’s whimsical 42), inevitably fail to assuage the empty itch at the source of the questions. Why am I here? What is the purpose to my life? Why do bad things happen to seemingly good people?

Take, for example, Job – the ultimate Alfie questioner. Faced with what must have been years of insufferable pain and despair, Job keeps asking god, “Why?” “What is this all about?” “Did I do something to deserve this?” Job had lived a good and devout life and he felt that he had done nothing to deserve the pain, loss and despair that he now suffered. To make matters worse he is taunted by three of his (self-professed) friends, Moe, Larry and Curley, who try to convince him of his guilt and harangue him with mainline religious platitudes. No one from the mainstream will ever understand the journey of the dark night. It refuses to fit into logic and comfort.

But Job has to go on a trip of monumental spiritual proportions to get to the other side of his suffering. Through the process, Job seems to map out the emotional course that Elizabeth Kubler-Ross described many thousands or years later – shock, anger, denial, bartering, and finally acceptance. And the cosmic lesson that Job (and all of us) must learn (though I pray not so harshly) is that there is no rationale to justify suffering as long as we are looking for it from a personal/human, ego-justification level. If we read Job thoroughly, we find that he pleads his case before god like a lawyer in court trying to make sense out of it from his (Job’s) ego-perspective. It is not until Job gives up trying to make it make sense and surrenders to god, that god actually concedes to talking to Job.

It seems that there are three deeply profound lessons that we must learn in the Job experience. First and foremost, as long as we are looking for understanding of events from our perspective – as if suffering, or joy (do we ever inspect that in the same way?) must have some deeper meaning – we are bound to come up empty handed. There is no meaning that exists outside of our own personal meaning making. Things and events have no intrinsic meaning. Nothing means anything until we make up a meaning. So Job’s attempt to find some cosmic meaning is fruitless because there is none to be found - and god knows this so he doesn’t even play the game. Furthermore, despite lacking meaning, Job wants to be justified – found innocent of any wrongdoing (the meaning he has ascribed to the source of suffering) – so that his ego can feel okay and virtuous. Again god refuses to even play the game of ego importance. God maintains a stonewall approach to these machinations of Job. But the third (really big) lesson is that not only is god in charge of the whole game, god and divine understanding is so beyond our human comprehension that to try and fix a human rationale to it or to apply some kind of right and wrong checks and balances to it is not only impossible it is downright illogical.

With a final sigh, Job gives up his attempts and instantly, god steps in and speaks – not in answer but in beautiful, powerful metaphor. Even then, when god speaks, he does not even address the questions of rationalization. In a sense, god says, “I am in charge and always have been. Just trust that and try not to figure it out!” It is the ultimate spiritual message – the message of the experience of Job, the teaching of the Nazarene, and of the Buddha and of every great spiritual sage throughout time. Live in the question, surrender to god’s way, and live in relation to god, to others and to the world around you. Let go of your ego’s need for self-important meanings. It is a humbling and simultaneously filling message. Alfie would have been gravely disappointed. Dionne Warwick sang in the theme song, “What’s it all about, Alfie? Is it only for the moment we live?”

Well, yup, that’s about it!

Of Joy and Suffering

2008-12-21T09:34:00.001-05:00

I am preparing to run a series of workshops for the unemployed and soon-to-be-unemployed in our church and the first thing I think of is the emotional state that I hear everyone is in. But a thought came to me in this preparation that is a distinction I have not made before. Think of this: the nature of fear, grief and depression – of most “negative” emotions is aloneness. That is, we almost always experience those emotions uniquely and by ourselves. In fact, we most often feel that no one feels the same as we do, no one fears this or that thing the way we do at that moment. Who is comforted in the least by someone coming to you in your grief and saying, “I know how you feel.” Like hell you do! This is my grief, my fear, my depression and no one knows how it feels but me!

Now bear with me for a moment while we go to the other side. What about joy and passion and excitement? Who among you can contain those feelings; who, upon first feeling them, does not want to immediately jump up and find a friend or even a stranger with whom those feelings can be shared? Joy, passion, elation, excitement, and all of these “positive” emotions are made even better by sharing. They are public emotions where the downers are private.

But what if we have it backwards? What if we do not feel those emotions first and then have the public or private reaction? What if being alone is the source of fear, being abandoned is the source of grief, and being isolated is the source of our deepest depression? Contrarily, what if it incoming together that we first feel elation, if passion is the feeling only two or more can experience, and joy is only joyful when it is shared? What if?

I think our culture is suffering from a disease of epidemic proportions – the disease of individuation or individualism. We suffer from terminal uniqueness. We are so convinced by the harangue of advertisements and marketing that insist that we can “have it our way” – from form-fit clothes to designer drugs. But we humans were meant to be social creatures – to come together, not to move apart. In indigenous cultures where the norm is belonging, people are invariably described as happy and the incidence of depression is almost nil. Even their grieving is done collectively – but then it is over.

So this job search group will not be an individual experience. We will be in it together, to draw from the positive energy of being with our own kind, to share leads and laugh through mistakes and learn collectively. And in doing so, perhaps we can fuel the passion, and increase the joy, and revel in the success that can only come from working “with” instead of “against.”

Miracles?

2008-12-18T12:26:00.002-05:00

This time each year, my wife and I run a holiday gifting charity that serves a bunch of kids in shelters and temporary living settings around eastern Mass an southern NH. It involves getting the wishes of these kids and hooking them up with about 250 volunteers who then purchase the gifts and get them to a central location so that we can truck them all out to the charities and shelters. In the process of doing that over the past seven years it never fails to provide the opportunity to observe – directly – a miracle.

Last year just as we were bursting at the seams in handling twice as many kids as we ever had, we got a call from a shelter that had heard of our project (Operation ELF) and wondered if we could help them – they had about 70 – 80 kids who were getting little or nothing for Christmas. We couldn’t say no but we said that we often have a few extras that were bought “just in case” so she would be welcome to come at the end of the event and take what was left over. The very next day we got a call from a person who said that she normally took a bunch of presents to an Air Force base in upstate New York but that she was ill and couldn’t make the trip this year – could we use the presents? We said yes, that would be most helpful. She showed up that Sunday with 150 presents and toys for our Elf kids. When the last shelter came for the “leftovers,” we filled two more cars and made a celebration happen where none was even hoped for.

Another one just happened again this year, though the numbers are not officially in yet. However, I begin to wonder is it a miracle? A miracle is what happens when you don’t expect anything. But the nature of god and universe is abundance. It is our scarcity that is always surprised. So why should we be surprised when this happens yet again. Rest assured that we will not slip the other way into arrogance and expect that it should happen. But why should we be surprised by the miracle when it is the natural response of our caring and providing god? Is it a surprise to a child when, having skinned his knee, he gets a hug, kiss and a band aid from a compassionate mother? No – it is just how it happens. Maybe it is a miracle. But the miracle already happened (we are loved despite ourselves), and all this other stuff is just the state of living we get because of it.

Fear Not!

2008-12-08T06:34:00.006-05:00

Why is it that the standard greeting of angels, and for that matter, of Jesus post-crucifixion? As I see it there are two possible reasons. First of these could be that angels may not be the beautiful, white-robed, winged, runway models that the renaissance painters made them to be - that in fact they might be fearsome, fierce, and powerful creatures that no one this side of Jacob would ever want to wrestle with. That would fit with my understanding of god's humor (see blog entries like: Reverse Logic 8/4, God's Humor 7/12 and Transformation 3/21) - to send the message of hope and joy in a frightening package - just for cosmic giggles!

And what of Jesus? I have often considered that in keeping with this twisted god logic, Jesus may have been butt-ugly! I mean, god would not want people following him around just because he was some heart-throb hunk. Remember, this is the god who sent a stuttering, exiled, killer back to the scene of his crime to rescue the Israelites, and who came to visit not as a king but as a helpless infant born to a displaced, homeless, unwed couple in a stench-filled barn! Now when you combine that with the fact that Jesus might have been ugly and had just been killed in a most gruesome fashion, that may indeed have been a frightening sight.

Fear not indeed! I am not a monster!

But the other possibility - the one that is think is the more likely reason - is that god knows that we live in constant fear. Fear is the natural by-product of the ego which thinks that it can manage the universe (or at least my little corner of it) quite well all by itself, thank you very much. Yet confronted with a zillion pieces of evidence that it cannot do such a daunting task, the ego ducks and covers in abject fear. The truth is, alone, without god, life is frightening; pain and loss are frightening; and we recoil in fear.

But the message of the ghoulish archangel, of the blood splattered crucifixion victim, and of god in every instance is "fear not, for I am with you, even to the end of the earth!" "Fear not, I bring you glad tidings of great joy!" "Do not be afraid" (there are at least 100 passages where this phrase is used) Gotcha! You have been found out. Your fear is evident and yet the divine message keeps coming back, like some relentlessly caring mother, comforting her startled infant, "Shhh, it's alright, don't be afraid, I have you and you will be okay. Hush, shhhh"

The CHristmas message was "Behold!" But this Christmas I invite you to "be held" and comforted, and not afraid! Peace be with you all.

On Gratitude

2008-11-29T20:52:00.004-05:00

It does not take wizard level perception to notice that we just celebrated the high feast of gluttony and consumption. And by mocking it please know that I am not taking your inventory - but mine. We baked, we cooked, we uncorked wines and even smoked a very nice cigar outside in the waning afternoon sunlight - and yes we said "thanks" over a sumptuous meal with friends and family. It was wonderful and filling, and for it all I am grateful.

But I have been practicing a different level of spiritual awareness of late - one that looks to find faith when there is no reason to believe, and one that celebrates gratitude when there in nothing on the plate in front of me. And I must admit with chagrin that I find this discipline very difficult. I am privileged. I am gifted with abundance - affluence, really (on a world scale what would be called wealth). I am blessed with a life without pain or threat of daily violence. In short, I am not challenged.

How then can I claim to develop and advance my faith? How can I exercise true gratitude? Do I really want to pray for this all to be stripped away? (No freaking way!!) Do I really want to volunteer for the Job experience? (Hell no!) And yet, devoid of these litmus tests of faith and gratitude, I am but a clanging gong or a noisy cymbal.

I have been contemplating the idea of going on a fast - like a five day or seven day fast. But then even that occurs to me as a luxury that I enjoy. Like I can even "choose" to go on a fast, the hardest part of which is that I can choose to break it at any point. There are those who can choose neither - whether to fast (as it most often occurs with the regularity of a neighbors visit) or to end the fast (as if they even know when the next hunk of bread (forget about a meal) is going to come. So fasting just seems like some arrogant, elitist Uncle Tom-ism to me.

All I really want and pray for is to know my god more completely, to strip away all that stands between me and my maker and source. It is just a quest, my quest, and for all of the challenges in trying to fulfill that quest..
...I am most grateful.
Happy Gratitude Day

Eschatological or Scatological

2008-11-21T14:18:00.002-05:00

Oh - I know I am going to hell for this one!

I heard in a lecture the other night (see Rock Concert, November 20) that the only way one could serve in a priest or prophet role - that is, to coach leaders in spiritual discernment, is to start with a clear eschatological frame of reference. In other words - to what end am I or are you coaching your client? Max makes his case that for example globalization is a god-inspired process moving toward the New Jerusalem. This is the coming kingdom where all live in harmony and the trees grow again and produce clean ripe fruit, and the lion and lamb play Scrabble without thoughts of blood or lusty feasts, and yada yada yada. But that anyway we must have that vision in order to know where we are taking our client.

Oh Scat!

Literally and figuratively! With all apologies to Dear John’s vision, I do not buy it. But not because it is silly or pure fantasy or, as some suggest, drug induced. I don't buy that we - any of us - can know what god has in mind nor do we have the capacity to understand it were we to have access to it. It is our ego-driven need to pretend that we can discern the "will of god" or the end of time and it has been a quest of human's kind since the beginning of thought - "Where is this all going to?" But that takes us down the wrong path. We have to make up a lot of scat to even get in the ballpark. And in my book that is wasted time.

Rather we need to let go of that ego-bound self importance and let god become manifest in and through us without our help or interference. What if we are to let god flow through us in to the spaces between us and the others? What would happen if we entered the discussion not presupposing but letting god manifest a future before us that none of us could ever imagine? Now that sounds like the way god works!

Look it is all well and good to have myths about creation and the end of time but Jesus and every prophet of every major religion has always entreated us to live now – the Kingdom is here now… if only we let it happen in god’s way and on god’s terms. Everything else is scatological.

Rock Concert

2008-11-20T20:19:00.009-05:00

Last night at school I experienced a edu-nerd's delight. The class was set up to be a lecture and discussion with Max Stackhouse, one of the most prolific writers in the field of theology. Max's specialty is the ethics of globalization and creating "moral business." But Max brought with him one of the foremost legal ethicists to critique and cross-examine him. And following them were a cadre of Boston's finest theological and legal minds.

And just when we were getting seated, in walked another, and I should mention, unsuspected icon; Harvey Cox. I know that might not mean much to some of you, but for me it was like being at a Bruce Springsteen concert and having Jackson Browne walk on to the stage, just for fun, to jam with his old pal.

Now Max has written over a hundred books and is without question an authority, but none has ever made the NYT Bestseller list. Harvey has done it three times - The Secular City, Feast of Fools, and Seduction of the Spirit. I was in geek heaven! I got to listen and then ask questions of some of the greatest thinkers in my beloved field.

Interestingly one of my classmates asked me afterward why I had not challenged Max like I do so often in class - Was I worried or just respectful? My answer came from my dad - "when you are in the presence of a master, shut up and take notes!" I say, when you are at the concert with The Boss, listen and enjoy the music!

Rock on!

Breathing

2008-11-20T20:00:00.002-05:00

I have a friend who is tremendously giving. The only problem is that she is not too terrific at taking in compliments or receiving gifts from others. So i wonder about her health. Giving without receiving is a lot like exhaling without inhaling - eventually you will pass out from lack of oxygen. And by the way, the opposite is also true - all receiving with no giving is like inhaling but never exhaling; eventually the build up of carbon dioxide will cause you to pass out as well.

So what we really have to pay attention to is breathing god's abundance. We can not do one without the other. It is not better to give than receive - nor is it better to receive than to give. Life and the abundance of the creator are like the air we breathe - to be taken in and given out, in full and measured balance.

My Lutheran stoic heritage would have me believe that I am to be self sacrificing and self-effacing. I should feel guilty for even asking for help but should never turn another's request away. But that is not the breath of life god meant for us to share. Isn't it funny how distorted we have made the gifting of the almighty.

Giving and reciving - like inhaling and exhaling - are the basic elements of life. Do both or suffer the consequences of losing consciousness!

Meeting The Challenge

2008-11-07T06:05:00.003-05:00

"Nature does not do bailouts!" I was reading a recent article by Al Gore (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122584367114799137.html) where I came across that line. It is so true, and it is what has been bothering me about this whole damned fiasco since the beginning of the discussions. It is the drug mentality all over again! We live in a society that has come to expect a quick fix for any ailment that besets us. More Valium, Prozac and Xanax are prescribed and used in America than all other over the counter and prescribed drugs totaled. We have an industry built on surgical procedures to alter obesity. We want instant gratification, instant solutions, and, yes, bailouts.

Sorry, that isn't how it works! Development and maturity are the result of meeting challenges and adapting our childish need for "having it our way" into some other way that lives in harmony with the world. It is critically important for us to learn to live life on life's terms, not ours, and that seems to be where the train derailed some years ago. Part of the science that started engineering our planet in an effort to provide for improvements and cures grew into a larger-than-life Frankensteinian monster that now stomps about out of our control. We (collectively) learned that we don't have to suffer and that generalized into anything that might be even the slightest bit disconcerting. Continuing down this line, we will atrophy our ability to create any true solutions and adapt to our surroundings, and that just reads like a bad sci-fi novel.

It is time that we reverse the trend and face the music. Meeting this challenge (market correction) head-on for the truth it teaches us won't be easy. Our "problems" carry a truth - a lesson - in them that is important to capture and which is conveniently stepped over when we get bailed out. Overspending, gluttony, consumption, leveraged credit all are lies, the consequences of which we have to face. And there is always a consequence, you don't get away with anything - even though you think you can. Life does not work that way! This is hard, it is not easy to meet such challenges head on, but bones become brittle and porous if they don't carry a load, muscles weaken and shrink it they aren't exercised, and minds go senile if they aren't sufficiently challenged. The consequences of a bailout may be more severe down the road than those of sticking our faces in the mess and working through the painful process of dealing and adapting. But the result of the latter is nature's way, and life's process of healthy living.

Why Do You Call Me Good?

2008-11-02T16:51:00.003-05:00

Can you say humility, Neighbor? I knew you could! (I miss Mr Rogers) Today's scripture lesson in church was the story of the rich man who asked "Good Teacher, what do I have to do (yada yada yada)?" and is often the springboard to a homily about not being attached to worldly possessions, and so on. But did you ever notice Jesus's response starts with a simple and confusing question: "Why do you call me good?"

'Scuse me? The speaker of that phrase is either the Messiah (if you believe in him) or at the very least one of the most value-driven, ethically pure and selfless men to walk the planet. What is wrong with this picture? Why would he say that? He is the good one and I am allegedly the bad one. So it is I who should say, "aw shucks, don't call me good. I'm just a worm." But that is the problem. You see, I don't say that. In fact I do wish people would recognize the good things that I do. I try to do good in the world, hopefully to offset the not-so-good I also do. But deep inside I hope and pray that the good outweighs the bad enough so that at least someone will notice and call me good.

And then I read this, and there is a hollow in the pit of my stomach. Who am I to be called good, to wish to be called good when he won't even allow that adjective for himself. Oh don't hear that as some in-bred Lutheran or Calvinist guilt. It just hits me like this huge lesson in what humility is really supposed to be like. It is doing all those same things without ever thinking of or wishing for praise. I can and often do all the right things for the wrong reasons. What I have to get to is that station where I just do them because they are what I do. Oh my, I do have such a long way to go on this road!

Tis the Season - Already?

2008-10-27T21:06:00.004-04:00

I overheard two people talking over the weekend. One said that their family was going to have a simple Christmas this year - no big gifts and overspending. It was half said out of sadness and half out of relief. We actually have a reason to start looking at Thanksgiving and seeing what we are thankful for, we have a chance to embrace the miracle of Hanukkah, and we have a shot at feeling the joy and the spirit of Christmas.

Oh My!

In the last few years the commercialization of these coming holidays has gotten out of hand, ridiculously gluttonous, and downright embarrassing to be around. Children have come to feel entitled to all of the gifts on their wish list, and like Dudley Dursley, whine, "but there were 34 presents last year, is that all?"

When did it all happen? When did Christmas get to be only about presents? When did we okay the ads starting before Halloween? Enough! I am grateful for a recession that forces to look at less and maybe see beyond the stacks of Barbies and model AK-47s and see that we actually are celebrating a rather special version of god's twisted little game - a surprise entrance where we least expected it - with a pregnant out of wedlock teen, displaced with her fiance to a place where no one welcomed them, to give birth in a stinking barn. Leave it to god to pull off that one!

So don't be surprised when godliness makes a guest appearance or shows up, like the oil that kept burning, and refuses to be what we expect. Don't spend this holiday. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner with family. Pray in church and at home - not for our selves or for our wish list but for others, for enemies, for people who have even less. Fall is the season of gathering - gathering the apples and the harvest - gathering together. Maybe we have a chance to do it in an uncluttered way this year.

Praying the Rosary

2008-10-22T15:02:00.005-04:00

Yesterday I had an appointment at one of the large teaching hospitals in Boston that has a significant women's practice. And as I was walking away from my appointment I came across a small group or protesters with signs about abortion being murder and killing and such. But what struck me was the elder man in the middle of the group in what was an obviously different state. He was praying the Rosary, working his way around a string of beads. I hadn't heard the Rosary in years and the whole vignette stopped me in my tracks.

I don't know what your beliefs are on the subject, but I know mine, and while different in many ways from the philosophy on the signs, I was moved by this man's presence. First of all, I don't see many people praying in public, at least not many who are not at all concerned with what others may think. There was not self-important "look at me pray" element like some TV evangelist. The man WAS praying and clearly deeply into it. His state reminded me of what I read in one of Merton's texts, that prayer changes us not god. It was spiritual and holy, not righteous.

But beyond that, his presence reminded me of my lost practice of ritual prayer. I fancy that I have some kind of conscious and real conversational relationship with the god of my experiencing, and so my prayer over time has become more of a fireside chat than formal. But what Merton says is true - for me, as well, if I recall. There is a power to ritual prayer that is not present in my conversation, even if some of the associated "theology" and concepts are contrary to my current set of beliefs and experiences. The power is that ritual lifts us from normal space/time experience into what Rohr calls "liminal" or threshold experience - that space where we are neither here nor there and we can become open and opened to what is trying to make its way into our consciousness. I remember that I experienced my calling, way back when I was 17, after pulling an all-nighter prayer vigil where I literally prayed every ritual prayer over and over for something like 12 hours.

It is something I too often forget, but thanks to a bunch of people I might never have talked to, I got re-grounded in a tool of spirituality that I had forgotten for some time. Even if I don't believe in Mary's intercessory role or ability, I am grateful for the man and his Rosary.

The Purpose of Religion

2008-10-16T04:49:00.003-04:00

It would appear as I ask this question that the world is divided into a few camps on the purpose and relevance of religion. What got me here was an intensive course on Max Sackhouse's in-depth coverage of "God and Globalization" or the theological and moral basis of of global business. Max's camp would seem to believe that religions inform societies' meaning-making by establishing the values, morals and ethics by which those societies operate. He contends that, in fact, all societies are based in religious beliefs (even lumping Marxist/Communist countries in under that umbrella). So to Stackhouse the real purpose of religion is to define the rights and wrongs for societies so that they might come together and work together with some mutuality.

There are those also whose belief seems to be that the purpose of religion is to scare people into submission. These people hold a Machiavellian belief that the rich and powerful created dogma and doctrine to oppress the masses, and while there have been periods of history where that appears to be true, I do not think that over time this is a true purpose. To be sure religion is powerful and power will corrupt. So there have been Pastors and Popes who have sought personal gain from the institution of religion. But these are aberrations.

Yet a third camp feels that religion's purpose is to assuage the pain of being human just living this broken life. Life is pain and we seem to have evolved to this place where pain is neither allowed nor accepted as part of it. So religion comes to the rescue like some great vile of Prozac or Percoset (I don't know which is worse). Prayer and meditation are supposed to place you in the loving arms of the benevolent who will make it all better. Or at least that what it seems like from this side.

Then there is this little island of people (I audaciously assume that there are others) who believe that the purpose of religion is to teach and develop - actually, to provide the tools that teach and develop us as humans on this wacky trip of life. From this perspective, I admit that life is pain (and joy, yes, but lots of nasty painful things happen) and I admit that there are forces and powers far greater than we are and with each of these we must cope, no doubt. How? That is the operative question. Unlike Stackhouse, I do not believe that any religion can map out all of the scenarios that provide a handy dandy rule book of right/wrong. So into the gray and unknown and painful and powerful we venture - but not alone. Taken as lessons, the pains, our "sins" or our foibles, the forces of nature can be seen as things that teach us who we are and how we are to be with each other. Failure is the greatest teacher - think of it. And Jesus, as far as I can tell, never once got mad at or chastized a "sinner" or a fallen person or someone caught doing something "wrong.". The only people he called out were the self-righteous!

Sacred texts are most often inclusive of confusing and contradictory stories. Of course they all contain the obligatory short list of do's and don'ts but the bulk of them are life stories of men and women struggling into the void of not knowing - not, however, as examples - but as case studies meant to force our thinking to adapt. Like the koan, most of these stories don't have an obvious answer. They force us to think. And that I believe is the real purpose of religion - to force us and guide us to thinking and acting in an ever-adaptive and spiritually grounded way. It is not the easy interpretation (rules are a lot simpler way - just tell me what to do) but it works for me.

Trinitarian Experience

2008-10-14T06:09:00.004-04:00

My wife is Jewish and wonders at times about my belief in what, to pure monotheism, may appear to be polytheistic - the trinitarian god experience of father, son and spirit. So this morning I was thinking about my experience of god. In particular I was thinking about how we all experience god. Uniquely, freshly, each time that experience happens.

I do not believe in a monolithic god - a one-size-fits-all god. In fact I do not believe in a god that is a "thing" at all. There can be no "thingness" to a god who is all things, unless that thing is everything. And if that be the case, then each individual experience of god is perfectly that which the one experiencing it needs, wants and believes it to be. Add to this Pascal's famous axiom that "we do not see the world as it is but as we are," and the result is that we experience (see) god exactly as we are or as we need at that moment.

But how is it that we experience our world, our life and therefore our god? Simply put, we tend to describe our living realms as mind, body and spirit. I relate to my world first from what I think and know - and that informs my overall meaning making. It is the source for all meaning making - that is, it "fathers" (you women-folk in the studio audience can translate that to "mothers" or "births") meaning. Secondly, I come to know my world through my body, my physical being. This a pure flesh-and-blood experience of life incarnate - the ultimate experience of humanness. And thirdly, I experience life in wonder, and belief, and the pure miracle of the life itself that breathes in me or perhaps that breathes me.

So then, if these are our three ways of knowing, it seems only a logical extension that theologians across the centuries should describe their collective experiences of god in those same ways - as source (father/mother), as flesh (a being like us that walked and talked and lived among us) and as the spirit, the essence of life itself. The triune god, the trinity, is simply a handy dandy way of describing the channels through which one experiences god. What do you expect? We are human and cannot do otherwise. Our containerization of god in no way diminishes the all-everything-ness of the Divine. But it has gotten in the way for millions as, over time, the labels became the thing. At the end of it all, I think the Jews got it right in refusing to even speak god's name; they knew better. God's blessings to you all - in everything that may mean to each of you!

Deepening Faith

2008-10-12T21:22:00.008-04:00

Hey, no one needs a market analyst to recognize that the market here and abroad has recently fallen through the floor. While it seems bottomless, there is no solace in knowing that there is an absolute floor of resistance the the averages will bounce off of. People - everywhere - are scared and the recession-proofing that was built into the stock market, does not account for fear of this nature. Interestingly, people living in poverty are not as scared. And to be certain they will bear the brunt of this recession more than anyone. They aren't scared because they have not lost anything - they had none to lose.

But we in the middle and others like my client I wrote of (Moment of Truth, 10/7/08), we have lost some of the future in which we had invested: retirement plans, 401K's, Social Security. Uncertainty has become the state of things for now and the foreseeable future. And yet our leader (W, himself) wants us to pretend that all is well in happy land. Sorry, Dubyah, I do not have faith in you, nor do I accept your ignorance and empty promises.

So what are we to do in times like these? Politicians and money brokers are looking out for their own best interests and that may or may not work out for all of us in the long run (secretly, I think that whatever solution "they" work out will ultimately benefit mostly "them"). The answer is not what you want to hear - nor is it an answer at all. You see, these are the times without answers. These are the times of doubt. These are the times that try men's souls. So the reality is that we look into these times and hone our faith. We need to view these situations like Peter stepping out of the boat, and ask ourselves, "do we believe?" "But when [Peter] noticed the strong wind he became frightened and, beginning to sink, cried out,'Lord, save me!' Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him saying, 'You of little faith, why did you doubt?'" (Mt. 14:30-31)

Do we have faith now when there is no reason to have faith? Do we believe when there is nothing in which to believe? We need to move beyond our inner Peter and inner Thomas to exercise true faith. So yesterday the Almighty Dow jumped in some shark-like feeding frenzy response of bargain-hunting. And we are all happy again. Indeed! "Have you believed because you have seen? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe." John 20:29

Spiritual Fitness (Yom Kippur)

2008-10-09T06:04:00.005-04:00

My friend Peter and I have this running discussion on spiritual fitness. We got it in our heads that spirituality is something that either gets flabby or is exercised and is kept in shape - that in other words, we are not just gifted with spirituality, it doesn't just happen or just exist - it takes a certain discipline. So we started getting carried away with the discussion and the analogies of late. It seems to us that the fitness center is life itself - life, seen for what it really is and not through our illusions or denials. Life provides all of the stations of the universal gym of spirituality! Stick you face in that and go to town!

But then there are also spiritual exercises that in and of themselves tone up our spiritual fitness. (The discussion continued and spread through my friend Jeffrey.) These are literally physico-spiritual movements and positions - like yoga positions - that, in doing them, help tone and shape the spiritual muscles. And they come from every tradition: from yoga (when one surrenders to the position and no longer fights it) and the simple act of humbling oneself by getting on your knees; to various vipassana postures from Buddhism, the twirling of Sufi dance, and davening from the Jewish traditions. Each of these movements lifts us from our human and mundane experience and shapes and forms our spirituality. It is a workout routine with different stations!

But why bother? For me, I have no choice. Let me explain. I have a spinal injury that resulted in my left calf receiving no impulses and as a further result in atrophying that muscle. If I do not exercise daily, I am in pain by mid-afternoon. I suppose I could choose not to exercise and have the pain, but to me there is no choice. Spiritually, I am in the same place. I suppose I could choose not to exercise and have the hollow ache of lacking spirit or lacking the experience of god's presence in my life, but to me that is not a choice - ergo the only alternative is getting on my knees, stretching in the lotus, whirling in ecstasy, posturing in reverence, and rocking in prayerful experience at the east wall of the the life I see all around me.

The final element of Yom Kippur, Jeffrey tells me, is tachlit - the spiritual version of a hot soapy shower after weeks of hiking in the backwoods of Maine, or just that refreshing one after my exercising; letting the water wash away all of the sweat and smells of the spiritual workout! The whole thing is one big fitness routine. I get it! Now if you'll excuse me, the gym is calling - gotta go!

Moment of Truth

2008-10-07T05:49:00.004-04:00

One of my clients told me yesterday that he had lost more than two million dollars over the last week. When I share that with others, I am surprised at the reactions: "That's a rich man's problem, at least he had it to lose!" "Wow - I guess it's a sign of the times." But the one that got me was: "Why did you continue the session instead of letting him get back to work?" That translates to why talk about improving his leadership when what is most needed is action? But really, when is there a better time to talk about leadership?

I have written before about faith - the kind of faith that one finds when there is no reason to believe and nothing in one's mind and soul wants to believe. I think the same is true about leadership. Most situations of leadership are a cake walk. when people willingly line up behind the leader and when the mission is clear, it really doesn't take much to lead - just the title and the willingness to open one's mouth and say, "Let's go!" But when the chips are down, and when everyone is either looking the other way or at least over their shoulder, it takes everything you have and much of what you don't have to lead.

What doesn't work at times like this is cheerleading, pie-in-the-sky optimism, bravado, or sexy powerpoint presentations. What doesn't work is all of the aphorisms learned at leadership school, the lessons of leadership in Jack and Built To Last and The One Minute Manager. What doesn't work is "been there done that," "this too shall pass, and "win this one for the gipper."

This is the moment of truth, the dark night of the soul, the death valley experience. And what works here for you has not yet been invented. What works here is not resident in one person. What works here is simple, gut-wrenching, knee-to-knee, eye-to-eye engagement with others in the process of discovering through open, co-creative dialog what none of us knows nor even knew we had. Leadership at the moment of truth is open and inviting, humbling and being humbled, questioning and being willing to listen to what is said but perhaps as importantly to what has not been said. Most of all, leadership at this point takes the courage to be incredibly present to others - each other we encounter - and to stay present when everything inside wants to duck and cover. After all, leadership isn't about the leader - it is not about you.

Twisted

2008-09-29T16:45:00.004-04:00

Okay, I can't be serious all of the time. From the twisted mind of yours truly comes the following observation on the bleakest of Monday's on the NYSE: I was looking at the big board listings on CNBC (all red down arrows) and noted with a giggle that turned into a raucous belly laugh (or is it gallows humor) that aside from the safe haven of gold which soared above the $900 mark, the only stock that went up today as the Dow fell 777 points was Campbell's Soups!!

I looked for Kraft Macaroni & Cheese but it isn't a stock symbol.

It's All Good

2008-09-27T06:57:00.005-04:00

I have been haunted by memories of late. I guess when one is approaching a full six decades there's a lot the inner haunter has to choose from. But don't hear that as a bad or a good - it just is what is happening. In fact, that is the problem: what is showing up in retrospect is how what seemed good, wasn't (or may have been) and what was a horror has become the foundation of a towering strength today. So these reviews are more like movie watching - scary scenes and fun scenes but both just some screen event with no real power over me anymore. The take-away here is that each event held within it the power to be positive or negative depending on how I chose then or see it now.

The Greeks had a word for spirit, daemonae (my Greek is 40 years old so sue me if it's spelled wrong), which was not just the demonic (evil) as it is known today. It was actually the force within that could be good (rightly used) or bad (improperly used). It was the root of happiness (eudaemonika) as well. I think they nailed that one. Life is like that - each moment is rife with the power of good and bad. However I see it, however I choose, it becomes that. Moreover, after the fact, it still maintains that power to morph from good to bad or bad to good. And, think I, if that is so of life, is it not also true of my experience of god? My belief in god (should you not have read others of these blogs of mine - god is a word of convenience but not to be confused with the bearded, robed, grandfatherish thing of lore) is that god is in through and a part of all life and movement throughout the cosmos - and that includes me and my tiny little corner. God holds that same daemonic power - the source of joy and the fear of destruction (remember, you and I can be taken at anytime). What if god were not good or bad (those are human terms), what if god just was/is; all powerful, meaning just that - the power to source everything and be channeled to good or bad?

Then that puts the responsibility squarely on me to choose (right and wrong) and to interpret the past (good and bad). Thanks god! It would be so much simpler if the rules were just spelled out, I mean beyond the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule. But of course that is impossible - 6 billion people times a lifetime of living an infinite number of moment-by-moment choices - it would not be possible to write the rule book for that. Se we - I - have to think and choose, and who is to say what is good or bad? Life is just rich - filled with the spirit of it all, with the daemonic, the yin and yang of all-in-one richness.

Yesterday I got a note from a friend of long ago - someone who in the good and bad of it all I thought I had hurt. In telling her life story to her 18 year old, she had reflected warmly about our years together. Well - there you go! It's like Glenda asked, "Are you a good witch or a bad witch?" I dunno - which witch is which? I guess to me it's all good!

Theology of Words

2008-09-18T22:13:00.003-04:00

I don't have the words right yet to deal with what is tumbling around inside me. I am in this class with a magnificent professor - brilliant and pedigreed - and of course I find myself debating with him in class. It is sport and my own unique way of learning (if I can dialog with him the words and concepts have a better shot of sticking in with the cobwebs inside my cranium). And then it happens: this brilliant man says something that leads me to think that what he calls theology - a legacy of concepts from Niebuhr to Tillich to Stackhouse - a sound and well honed discourse, is in fact light years away from my personal theology. My beliefs are borne of those and other readings but then lightly tossed in a big bowl with a lot of vinegar, or more like dust and blood and events and dark nights alone in prayer. And as a result my "theology" if it can be called that, is not only personally defined but quite different.

Belief - that is the operative word - is something that I have because there can be no evidence for what I name god. (Sorry but I use that word/name for convenience because Voldemort stole "He who cannot be named"). Anyway faith and belief is what appears in the void not what happens when some Sunday School Teacher says "cuz the Bible tells me so." I believe in and follow what Joshua (aka Jesus the Nazarene) preached - a somewhat radical and reverse logic that in order to be filled one must be empty, in order to save your life you have to lose it, that the rich are poor and the poor have abundance. He told us that what we think is good is what is in the way and that when we embrace what is bad (our faults and defects) we are made whole and filled with compassion for others. This practical but counterintuitive logic seems to be quite different from the teachings of my church and certainly this classically educated professor.

Now I am not a suck for a grade, and I can go to the mat with the best of them, but I do feel this dilemma. How am I to explain and justify that which is only my journey? Each of us has a personal spiritual journey and most likely none of those will fit within the structure of any classic theology. It can't. Textbook theology is perhaps what we are supposed to think and espouse, but the experience of spiritual contact cannot be defined, or bottled up or very often spoken. Then what am I to do? Argue my points from a textbook definition which no longer lives for me? Or struggle to place my experience in some conceptual framework knowing that it may never make "real" sense to anyone but me?

The Groundhog

2008-09-07T09:27:00.004-04:00

We have a groundhog in our neighborhood - that I think lives under my tool shed. - and who helps himself to our herbs and flowers as well as the apples that fall over the fence from my neighbor's tree. He is big, and fat, and as it appears to me, quite happy in life.

I was watching him this morning at breakfast. He sat peacefully on the hillside, alternating munching on well watered grasses and observing the occasional joggers going by. I wondered what I could learn from him. First of all, he wants for nothing, yet he did not plant it, care for it or invest anything in it. If he could speak I am certain that he would view this world as his idea, his garden, his tossed salad on a silver platter! Yet I worry so much. How will I pay for this or that? Will I be able to feed my family? What about the leak I always get in the cellar after a heavy rain? How can I start seeing the world as my garden?

But he is also serene. Nothing seems to hurry my rather annoying visitor. He knows where his safe places are - the nearest bush or tunnel to escape me or another neighbor who has had it with his confounded eating our precious flowers. But he is calm and, yes, serene. he eats peacefully, looks up and surveys his world peacefully, and returns to his apple slowly and calmly. He isn't rushed - as I am - running from pillar to post, from one client to the next. Where is my peace, my pace, in this hurry-up world in which I live.

So I have declared today as Groundhog Day! And maybe tomorrow too. But unlike the movie of the same name, it will not be reliving the same events to get it right. It will be to see the world as my salad plate, to take my time, to know where my safety really is and to observe everything with a calm serenity. I have despised the little bastard, for always showing me up and outsmarting my attempts to stop him. But now he has the audacity to become my teacher!

Rest

2008-08-29T20:26:00.003-04:00

Weird day. I awoke in a rush and did my usual routine but somewhere in the zoom lost my phoneberry. (unrecalled by my conscious mind - I had put it in my briefcase). In a panic and rush I left home (I thought) without it. I found it though when it vibrated in the silence of my car. I had been meditating on the fact that the world I am in is whirling much too fast and I want to get off. Calling home I told my compassionate wife that I needed to have a day of grace and relaxation - I just wished I could have a mini sabbatical.

I got to my first appointment and found that she wasn't there - she had just been called into an emergency meeting and left apologies for the missed meeting. Cool! Found time called wife again and found myself saying, "gee god sure answers quickly." So I checked in with my next two appointments just in case it was a divine plot to answer my request. 11AM said, I just can't meet today, let's reschedule," and my 1PM confirmed. It was now 9:30 and I went home to write and reflect on how wonderful it was to ask for time to rest and have it appear so quickly.

I remember Carolyn Myss saying once that things show up in a timeliness that is equal to your living in the present. Wow! Good connections, eh! And now I am contemplating going to bed at 9PM. I need some rest, thank you, God!

Abundant Life

2008-08-26T06:45:00.004-04:00

First of all, thanks to my Pastor for his sermon last week (noting the true definition of the "abundant" life that is our birthright) and to my magical eldest daughter, Pastor B, for her notes from a recent trip back to the barrios of Ecuador which re-frame once again my understanding of abundance and scarcity.

So here is the question: Why is it that those who have the most (wealth, toys, land, holdings) suffer most from a feeling of scarcity and wanting, while those with so little are so giving and seem so willing to share ALL that they have? Isn't that backwards? Doesn't that strike you as, if not impossible, at the very least improbable? But that is the truth. And it is the core message of the sacred texts. Give it away and you have more. More what? Simple: more abundance.

Then what is this abundance and this so-called abundant life. It is a freedom - freedom from the addictions of the ego and its petty righteousness around things and symbols. The ego, it would seem, needs to count and to measure. It needs to believe that it means something. But ego, like Kubrick's computer HAL, is a tool gone bad. The mind is an organ of the human body designed to make sense out of nonsense, to make order out of chaos. That's its sole purpose. But along the way it begins to distinguish (in its task of ordering things) self from other, and in doing so begins to count. "I have more of this than he does." "I am not the same as he." "I am different, special, unique, and therefore uniquely loved by my maker." OOO-yeah, I slipped that last one in there as a sucker punch. See that's where it goes of the deep end. And we cannot seem to call it back at that point, "I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that!"

And so god points us to the poor among us, to the children among us, to the widowed, outcast, disenfranchised; to those who HAVE nothing, as the examples of how and where to access abundance. That is not a non sequitur. It is simply that devoid of the entrapments of stuff, spiritually-inclined people are able to access an abundance of the meaning and meaningful stuff of life - love, aesthetics, charity, compassion. They are able to "get it" because their identity is not so wrapped up in the structures and counting of their ego. As a matter of record, I would contend that their egos have been relatively smashed. All-in-all not a bad thing.

How then do we access this abundant life? It may not be, as Jesus instructed the rich man, to sell of all our possessions and give the proceeds to the poor, unless, of course (as was the case with the rich man) our identity is all wrapped up in that stuff. But can you become, as the Buddha instructed, detached from it? What would you or I need to do to get us to the point of smashed ego-function, and live free from any - ANY - attachment to the stuff and the accomplishments and the numbers in life? Most importantly, how do I teach my son that value (I am confident both adult daughters live there)?

Abundant life is a discipline - a way of being - that practices detachment to stuff and acts with charity in all times and places. It is not a state one can achieve (yes, that would be ego talking again) - it is only a path, a discipline that eventually shapes the mind and soul. Freedom is the state of being that results from the discipline of abundant living. Freedom from counting, freedom from worry, freedom from scarcity, freedom from oppression (can you dig that? - you cannot oppress a man who is ego-less, you cannot take anything from one who holds on to nothing).

Do You Suffer Enough

2008-08-22T02:12:00.006-04:00

The Buddha says that it is suffering that moves us to change toward enlightenment and I must agree. I have written about pain before (Purposeful Pain, 7/14/08) but that is purely on an individual level and of the nature that prevents me from further hurting myself. What I am thinking of now is actual suffering and grief.

On a personal level the suffering in the dark night of the soul is the place where we discover real faith and hope. In truth, it cannot exist anywhere else. Seriously, what kind of faith is it if you have all the evidence in the world that god has provided for you. That is evidence. Faith is only evident when there is doubt, or as Carolyn Myss is fond of saying, "In order to have faith you need to have an experience that demands you find it." So a real purpose of our pain suffering and doubt is that it forces us to develop deep faith and the endurance of a distance runner.

But in the transformational journey, the waves of darkness keep coming. (Oh you thought it was over and that the lesson was learned - wrong!) Each time we dip into the dark night, another layer of ego is stripped away, and another door or window to the world is opened. We gradually evolve from self centered living to allocentric living - other centered. The Buddha calls these outer layers of consciousness a movement toward oneness. As the illusion of separateness is eroded by spiritual suffering (sometimes it is more like being ripped away), our consciousness opens to the global experience of what it means to be human. 'I' becomes 'we' and the limited awareness of one's "sheltered" thin slice of humanity widens to include many others. This is good and right, right?

Wrong! Not good! Because with this awareness comes the suffering of 3-4 billion of the world's population. Not spiritual suffering alone: not just hunger - but starvation; not just sickness - but plague; not just pain - but torture. Human suffering is the awareness of the transformed soul. And what can we do with that level of awareness? The answer is not in turning away, or in numbing our brains with drugs and alcohol. No, the answer is, feel it, let it course through your body and rip out the last vestiges of an ego that thinks it has the power to solve the problem, and then sit with the grief! (O, fun, sign me up for that ride!)

The price of admission to the transformation ride is awareness - disturbing, painful, awareness. The kind that wakes you up at 3AM in the question of, "What am I going to do today that works toward the side of justice and mercy?" And so I sit here with the question (I have gotten used to living in the question) wondering at what point will the suffering be so unbearable that I chuck the roles I currently have and take greater action; global action. At what point will I no longer be able to silence the voice that wants to scream out at the profitability machine, "Enough!" When will I have suffered enough for that? Do you suffer enough?

Surrendering

2008-08-18T18:35:00.005-04:00

I have been thinking a lot about the role of surrender and how we engage in the process of surrendering - whether to the will of god or life's issues. It seems to me that surrenderers (is that a word?) fall into two groups: those who, through their insight and reflection of the events, seem to be willing to “turn over the keys” and let the universe or the powers do the driving (I'll call that a "standing surrender"), and those who have to be beaten into submission and get to the point of knowing that it is either “surrender or die” (which I will call "on your knees" surrendering). The qualitative difference between the two groups is not in the nature of the surrender itself, however. It is in their willingness to surrender and in their view of the end point of the process. The second group (who resist the surrender) seem to believe that there must be an end point. They hope against hope that “this too will pass” but in the end join in with Churchill who allegedly said after the Battle of Britain, “nothing focuses a man’s mind like a loaded pistol next to his head.” Each time they surrender (yes, on their knees again) they get up thinking that this time was "it" and that they finally learned the lesson.

The former group (standing surrender) however, come to a realization that there is no end point, that in fact it is the process of being willing to surrender over and over (see Between the Garden Gates, posted 12/27/07) that is the result. They seem to understand what is at stake. Surrendering fully is letting the ego die of starvation. The great masters knew this truth and followed this path or guided their students along the path. They systematically denied anything that would feed ego or even looked like it might be self serving. In fact, they willingly took direct shots from the world around them knowing somehow that the pain would eventually defeat and drive out the pride and egocentrism that prevent the surrender which would lead them to advanced leadership. Richard Rohr says it a bit more succinctly, “In the great spiritual traditions, the wounds to our ego are our teachers and must be welcomed. They must be paid attention to, not litigated.” In today’s world we have built a society that wishes to program away or drug out anything that may be even marginally perceived as painful or uncomfortable. Yet those are exactly the conditions that produce and shape our development. The ego will not go quietly! Its whole identity is at risk. The belief that we can prevail and conquer anything, any condition – even death itself – must pass away and yield to a greater truth of life: that life is borrowed time, that living is for service to others and not the self and that ultimately universal chaos is in charge, not our petty little plans and schedules. Surrender is the process of facing the inevitable setback and pain in the knowledge that through it we become shaped into vessels.

Shock and Awe

2008-08-17T08:22:00.002-04:00

It's the weekend and I am beat. I have been staying up late to watch the Olympics every night this past week (despite being able to see most events upon awaking recorded on www.nbcolympics.com). By the way those who don't know me well may not know that I never (underline that) never watch television. Except during the Olympics. This one has certainly provided me with more than enough substance to far outweigh the repetitive and often annoying ads.

If you remember the old ABC Wide World of Sports tag line "the human drama of athletic competition" you will certainly find it in these Olympics. Say whatever you like about the obsession it takes for someone like Michael Phelps to become synonymous with world record -watching people strive to be the best they can be, fail at it and embrace their fellow competitor is awe-inspiring. The range of emotions I am host to as a slug on the couch at 11PM, has astounded even me! Sometimes I just don't know what to feel; these games being set in the belly of China, a country that tried its best to blot out its record of human rights issues with an ostentatious display of over-the-top technology combined with precision to the 2008th power! When I add to that watching the effort put out by every athlete, the joy of Burundi or Serbia winning their country's first ever medal, the dedication of Dara Torres at 41 in her fifth Olympics, or the electricity as our local Home Depot literally came to a halt while they watched their own "girl from checkout" compete for and win a bronze in judo, I frequently well up.

There will be accusations of drug use or performance enhancement of course; and no doubt some will be guilty - competition does that. But for two short weeks, I will forget my politics, I will believe in the human spirit, and I will go with too little sleep - and dream that I am somehow a part of all that is happening a half a world away. Sorry, I am an idealist.

Talking With Dragons

2008-08-15T06:06:00.002-04:00

This is a quick one!

Two weeks ago I bought a voice-to-text software tool called Dragon-Naturally Speaking (v9). And in those two weeks I have become a walking talking advertisement for it. This is the smartest piece of software I have ever seen. Not only does it recognize what I am saying with amazing accuracy, it learns and corrects itself each time. The only real problem I have had so far is when Joe and I are working on the book in Starbucks, the background noise, chatter and music confuses it somewhat - so the editing gets a little hard. But at home, the Dragon is close to flawless. Best of all I got it at Staples for $50 after rebate! This is a writer's dream come true.

Reverse Logic

2008-08-04T21:38:00.003-04:00

Lately I have been studying the process of transformation as a metaphor for some of the deeper spiritual work we sometimes face and it seems to me that we have this all backwards. Most of us (I include me in that) think of the work of transformation as learning how to delete the nasty and less desirable aspects of ourselves - our defects of character - so that we might live purer, more saintly lives. On closer inspection of the scriptures, I find that it is just the opposite.

Think of it this way. Those desirable parts of our personalities, the ones we think are good, actually get in the way of letting in the divine goodness - or perhaps more accurately, letting it out. Furthermore those same characteristics might serve to make us think better of ourselves than we should - hey I am proud of my charitable works, it is what I am supposed to do. But look at our scriptural heritage: From Judaic tradition prior to Passover the family was to select the purest lamb from the flock and bring it in to the house. There it lived as one of the family for four days, while the kids played with it, fell in love with it, named it and cuddled it at night. Then after the fourth day, it was slaughtered! Not some nasty old goat - the cute, pure innocent lamb. Likewise from Christian tradition, Jesus (not the criminal Barabbas) was executed - the good guy, not the bad guy. God always seems to pick the flawed ones to do that Divine work. How that got turned around into working to cannonize saints, I don't know!

Transformation is reverse logic - we need to let in our faults and defects, embrace them in order not only to heal them but to realize how similar we are to others of our kind. Letting them in and accepting my faults releases a flood of compassion for others that I could otherwise never access. And when that is accompanied by killing off the parts of me of which I am most enamoured - my best stuff - I find I am no longer competing with God or trying to play the godly role. I can finally step aside and let the true goodness flow through me.

Once again I come to the conclusion that human logic is not Divine logic - But I hope I am beginning to catch on.

For Once - Ya Done Good

2008-07-15T20:23:00.003-04:00

From the Boston Globe: "The Massachusetts Senate today passed a bill that would repeal a 1913 state law that prevents gay and lesbian couples from most other states from marrying in Massachusetts. The law originated when lawmakers in many states were trying to prevent interracial couples from crossing state lines to marry. "

"The bill now heads to the House, where it is expected to pass and be signed by Governor Deval Patrick by the end of the month. "If that bill comes to me, I will sign it and sign it proudly," Patrick said Monday."

Commentary: I hate labels: Tall man, old man, gay man, handicapped man, Jew, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, fat, white, black, chink, gook... the list is endless. One of our most common tendencies is to out-group - define who we are by saying who the "other" is. It is a function of our ego's need to differentiate self from other. But that is dead opposite from every sacred principle in nearly every practice I am familiar with. In all of the great faiths, the mandate is not simply to accept the "other" but to reach out and bring in, welcome, and embrace. I remember reading a National Geographic photographer describing what it was like to come across a tribe of Bedouin. He said something like, while I was still far off I saw them coming out to welcome me, with bread and oil and wine in their hands. And wasn't that the reaction of the father in the story of the Prodigal Son, wasn't that what Abram did for the strangers, and so too wasn't that the welcome Muhammad got when fleeing from his city.

So my take on the issue is that if I (we) believe that god or a bit of god is in each of us then when "two or more are gathered" or come together, there is more of god's presence present. And if our goal is to have a conscious connection with god, then that is good. Contrarily, anything that separates us from god is wrong/sinful. Thus keeping others out, rejecting others, other-ing and labeling "them" is also a sin. I don't care who you are. I don't care where you have been. I don't care how you see things - even my brother-in-law who is a radical republican right winger - is welcome at my door. And, no, I (we - that is me and my family) will not try to make you the same as me/us. I will welcome your differentness as part of our greater humanity, and rejoice in your differences as part of the godly whole.

And today, I am proud that the state that I live in and the politicians with whom I have so many differences of opinion, today my state moved a little closer to being whole, and human and embracing. There is a god!

Purposeful Pain

2008-07-14T13:24:00.003-04:00

It has been said that in order to have faith you first must encounter a situation big enough and disorienting enough to require that you find it. Likewise there are certain thoughts and awarenesses you get to that can only be arrived at as a result of passing through a significantly large enough disruption of your current way of thinking. Translate that disruption into pain, because the ego/mind likes its way and resists - tooth and nail - anything that disrupts its current course of action or thought pattern.

I have begun looking at pain - physical and mental - as a portal to insights. In fact for a few years now those who know me have heard me say that I got my disability in my left leg because I was not in dialogue with my pain. I had internalized coaching from my earlier years ("no pain no gain" "pain is weakness leaving the body" - yea, I liked that one too!) so that when I felt the pains in my leg and lower back I just pushed harder. Now that that is no longer an option, courtesy of a severed nerve, I must listen - and deal with it.

But least you think I am just talking about physical pain (which is just a convenient metaphor for the real stuff) what I am referring to is the kind of pain that we call mental anguish or what Carolyn Myss calls "spiritual madness." This is the place where due to the assertions of my conscious mind, I seem to have lost contact with god. (just to note: god never loses contact with me - it is when I lave lost the connection) In those dark nights of doubt and skepticism I must turn to what I see most missing - faith, trust and an unquestionable constancy. The paradox of this type of learning is that what I miss most is that which I am called on to provide (otherwise I might not be missing it). Have you ever been in one of those meetings where you just know the truth is not being spoken - but somehow you are the only one seeing it?? It thus falls to you to speak that truth. Well it is the same way here. When I am sorely missing my faith, I must call on it; when I hear no voice of god I must trust on it; when I doubt my own leadership I must speak it out loud and step forward and lead. It is backward and counterintuitive, but is the way god and the universe teach. And pain? Well that is the beacon light of learning - pain signals big things a-coming!! Bring it on!

God's Humor

2008-07-12T20:44:00.002-04:00

When my girls were young our favorite movie was Watership Down which begins with the tale of El-ahrairah (the prince of all rabbits). El-ahrairah was clever and tried to trick god but got caught and ran to hide. But god sought him out and asked him to come out so that he might bless El-ahrairah. The rabbit prince, whose head was half-way down a hole said, "if you want to bless me, then bless my bottom." Which is why the rabbit to this day has a beautiful white tail and strong back legs.

Rewind the tape some 3000 years, to the time of Moses. Moses it seems wanted to see God - after all he had been employed by this Deity for some time now - it only seemed fair. But YHWH was not to be had like any simple relationship and told Moses that he would pass by but would shield him from seeing his Divine "killer" face. However god was not totally unreasonable, and allowed that Moses could see his back side. (Though the Oxford translation simply says "his back") I actually think this is emblematic of the humor the Divine one operates with - I mean, really, god was greatly responsible for creating me and that has been a hoot! So Moses, the ultimate leader (who by the way is a stutterer, and, less we forget, a convicted killer), is permitted to see the Promised Land but not actually to get there, and in the scene in Exodus 33:23, is permitted to see god but gets mooned in the process! Moses never says what he saw, but I wonder if God was wearing a big fluffy white tail or what.

My God just cracks me up!

Insomnia

2008-07-11T03:37:00.002-04:00

It's 3:37AM as I begin to write this. I have been waking up in the middle of the night lately and not being able to get back to sleep. I don't know if this is an aging thing or stress related or what, but it is rather annoying, not to mention the negative effects on the following day's productivity!

I have found a website that lists 41 remedies for insomnia and note with some frustration that I have tried at least 27 of them tonight alone. Surely I can't be the only person who wakes up and can't get back to sleep. I try prayer, meditation, muscle flexing/relaxing, deep breathing, peaceful images, (no sheep-counting though) and a variety of pre-bedtime rituals. It is possible to abuse enough ibuprophen to be asleep all night but I fear the hit my liver will take from that.

So this is the most recent therapy: writing. Though right now I feel more awake than when I sat down. I think th eidea is to stop thinking not do more of it. I'd go for a long walk around the neighborhood but fear the local constables wouldn't like red and white palm tree pajama shorts, so maybe it's best to just lay there in bed and relax - sleep or no sleep.

Downright Dirt Dumb

2008-06-23T20:30:00.003-04:00

One of the 60th year goals I set was to earn a color belt in TKD (in which my 10 year old son is a First Degree Black Belt). Tonight we sparred and it has been QUITE a long time since I did anything in competition against another human. Add to that the fact that as one of the few adults in the class I had to spar against a couple of third degrees and a fourth degree BB.

Now did I say I was like dirt stupid? Oh yea the title. Well I jumped right in like I was 30something and I am not.

Men are like that. Ow.

Wine Tasting

2008-06-19T20:34:00.003-04:00

A friend of ours is having a hand fasting (not really a full fast - their hands are going to drink water or something) this weekend. We thought we would buy the wine. So I have a new mission in life - beyond the spiritual one - only still dealing with the spirit. I have to select the best (of the least expensive) wines we can bring. Believe me we aren't wealthy so price and flavor are both a major factor.

Now before we go getting all fancy schmancy let me qualify the discussion. Rule one I learned years ago was if you find a wine you like, stick to it. So after years of consuming one particular label and vintner (my fav) I finally found myself in the valley at their winery and decided to taste their premium wine. Same grape, just top of the heap. So tasting this grape (whose signature flavor I could ID in a line up blindfolded) I asked the steward what the difference was between it and the $20 bottle I usually bought. He explained. I did not understand. I smiled broadly. It tasted not a bit different from my favorite despite the $125 price tag. I learned that day that I had a marginally discriminate palate - cheap drunk, my wife calls it.

So tonight I have three Cabernet's and an Argentine Merlot. Sip after sip I am doing my best to find the best $4 bottle I can buy a whole bunch of. The only problem is that now I forget which one is which. I know I think I liked this one but then again this other one has a subtle undertone of berry, but, no that was that one, or was it.

Hic. Better stop, tomorrow's a work day!

How Old Are You?

2008-06-16T21:02:00.003-04:00

Having just turned 59, I got this crazy thought in my head that I might like to set some goals for the coming year - my sixtieth year on this planet. Some are sane goals like I want to have something published within the year (I am currently working on three different fronts at once) and I want to be able to jog/walk a 5K fun race like the Feaster Five in Andover.

Let me explain. Several years ago I had a goal of running a marathon and when I hit 48, it occurred to me that I was getting no younger. So I set out to do it and with the help of some great coaches at Dana Farber, I completed not one but two for them as a charity runner. I figured that was enough but when my 9-month old son had cranial surgery at Children's Hospital, I was so impressed and grateful that I decided to run one more for charity.

That did me in and severely blew a disc in my back and partially severed the nerve sending signals to my left calf (are you following this?). As a result I now have an atrophied left calf and weeble when I walk - no more running.

So I decided to go out for TaeKwonDo (I go twice a week anyway to support my son - why not get a workout?). So here I am a 59 year old white belt hanging out in a room full of black belts and trying to fit in (ego is a nasty thing). Honestly I cannot help myself, nor can I stop myself. I keep thinking I am 29 not 59 and best as I can tell there is a difference.

Back in the Saddle

2008-06-16T12:37:00.003-04:00

Well I have been out of pocket for some time tryinng to figure out what to say and do in this space. Many of my old postings had been written as an expression of creative writing - and often a tad lengthy. I do not know what works in the blogosphere but am here to find out.

Like everything I experience, life is not in the knowing but in living into the not knowing. Faith, says Carolyn Myss, is a by-rpoduct of living: "in order to have faith, you have to have a challenge that requires you find it." I think that is so true for everything.

I have a friend who is about to give up on his relationship with a magnificent woman, because, as he puts it, he is not ready, and he does not know who he really is. I told him today that, unfortunately, you only find out the end of the story on the last page and then it is too late to have a relationship, because the last sentence on that page is "you die." Life is the process of figuring things out one event at a time and relationship is what happens when two people try to do that while living into the answers together.

I love the messy unpredictable part of life - Rumi would call it succulent and juicy! He's right.

Transformaion and Easter

2008-03-21T14:20:00.007-04:00

Transformation is a sticky topic no mater what realm you happen to be dealing with - leadership, personal growth or spiritual. By its very nature and definition, transformation engages one at an entirely different and deeper level. But more important than that, transformation involves the most elemental of living processes - the death/rebirth cycle. The old way of being, when it no longer works to handle the newer challenges, must die to make room for the new/next way of understanding. It is as basic a process as spring and conception. Just as the seed dies to give birth to the shoot, so must a part of our being die to give birth to the next level of our functioning.

But that means pain, sometimes real, intense pain - not just your run of the mill old headache - gut-wrenching, breast-beating, up-chucking pain. And that is a problem for many of the people I deal with in my day job. I might be so bold as to say that is a problem with our culture. The general popular reaction to pain is to ask, "Isn't there a pill I can take for that?" "Ask your doctor if Xantac, or Prozac or (fill in the blank) is right for you." Since the advent of the information age, we have cultivated a culture wherein patients can research symptoms and drugs and go in to their doctor's office deeply informed (unfortunately about what they think they see or need) and "suggest" a recommended treatment. But often that course of action is not to listen to the pain - let your body speak its wisdom - it involves ignoring or squashing the feeling.

Transferring that same discussion to the experience of transformation, we get requests regularly from both companies and their employees and leaders to speed up the transition. "Instant Karma gonna get you, gonna hit you in the face, better get yourself together darlin', join the human race." (O Johnny-boy I miss you!) I can't say that I ever heard someone request a coach who would lead them into and through their pain point! Life isn't that way! But transformation is. Transformation is like an Easter experience.

Prior to Good Friday/Easter things were looking good. Hey, hanging out with the Messiah must have been great! Sure there was the danger of arousing suspicion from the centurions or the government officials, but this guy seemed to have some special charm. And then, WHAM, the whole thing came tumbling down, and in rapid fashion, too. And what is worse, the charmed one was executed - killed! Dead! Gone! I cannot imagine the fear and pain his followers must have felt. But in that darkest hour, the transformation of their beliefs began. It's like that!

Transformation does not happen without death and pain and aloneness. The old MUST die in order to make way for the new. The problem for us seekers however is that we don't go around seeking those painful experiences. Rather, we seem to want to know more about that which we already know. It is a rare person who walks down the street thinking "what is it that I don't know, that if I was aware of would make me pass blood through my pores, that I need to take on?" Transformation does not come from the inside. It comes upon us like the tsunami, like an earthquake, without prediction, without warning and often in the middle of the night. I don' think for a moment that Peter really thought that Jesus was talking about anything real (it must have been metaphor) when he said "you will deny me, three times."

But transformation has a nasty habit of being more than real - to be stark and harsh. It is in our faces. Like the crucifixion. Like the feedback I recently got about my win rate in coaching "bake-off's" (oh did I mention that the numbers suck?) So isn't it just perfect that in this season of transformation I am faced with a bit of pain that just might be the impetus for my next transformation. I must, I will stick my face into it.

I will feel the pain. And let it speak to me. I will...

say tuned, this might not be pretty

Another one bites the bust

2008-03-14T07:34:00.003-04:00

The other night I met with my men's group and the obvious topic was Mr Spitzer's fall from favor. But the discussion quickly veered away from prostitution (as well it should have) since prostitution was not the issue! Prostitution is as old as sex itself and like alcohol, its prohibition only serves to drive up prices and proliferate its use. No. Prostitution is a symptom of a societal and human ill, and Elliott Spitzer is only a symbolic representation of how we want to pretend this disease is someone else's problem. If I/we can focus on him (as he apparently focused on others) and the speck of dust in his eye, then perhaps wee can somehow ignore the log lodged in our own.

But what is the problem? is it simply the greed of wanting more than the other guy has? Or is it the deep spiritual vacuum we have created in "modernizing" our life that allows us to live under the pretense that an Afghan or Iraqi or Mestizo or a woman or a gay are not as human as ourselves. It appears as though we would believe that others are just so much livestock inhabiting the planet without which we all would somehow be much better off.

Nonsense. When I talked with the border crossers, whose drive to feed their children was so deeply rooted that they had no other choice, when I saw the fear in the eyes of the border guard telling us of having to go into situations without "backup", when I played with the kid on the other side of the wall, I felt their humanity - no, read that more like I felt their souls.

What allows a Spitzer to lie to his wife and his constituents? Not his lack of soul but his denial of theirs. What makes us think that putting up a wall or banning a practice will alter the inequities already present in every fiber of the fabric of society; it's our thought that we can legislate problems away because we don't see the souls and faces of the people involved.

Years ago I dreamed of starting a business practice and calling it the Rehumanization Project. I am more convinced today that that is what we need. We (and I do not exclude myself from the masses) have lost our humanity, we have lost our souls, and we need desperately to find them again. Perhaps we should thank Mr Spitzer for the stark reminder that we are all suffering this disease.

Weigh In

2008-02-22T06:18:00.003-05:00

I have to admit that I have waffled on this presidential election campaign more than any ever before. In my younger years there was either only one logical (from my perspective) candidate or none! The last time I got drunk was when George Bush, the II was elected (I couldn't even do that upon his re-election as alcohol does not mix well with depression). But for this one, I have to admit I struggled with two and was mildly interested that the Republikan party even had people of some character, despite not agreeing with their platform.

I have always been swayed by strong articulate women, and Mrs. Clinton is certainly that. She is brilliant, articulate and deeply knowledgeable. On most of her stands I seem to agree (a very difficult thing to admit for an aging leftist, ex-hippie). Her years of experience and campaign work while the First Woman (Lady?) is strong. But then there was that debate back in January where she was downright vicious and catty, and I waffled.

Mr Obama, on the other side, is slick and articulate. His way with words and poise in front of a crowd is beyond critique. His politic of change is refreshing and the media campaign behind him is seductive (did you watch the YouTube video of "Yes We Can?") and I was seduced - to say nothing about the fact that here is a contest between a woman and a man-of-color; two firsts at this level.

I even was reveling in the fact that Mr. McCain had character, was from the borderlands and had a somewhat thought out border policy. Then this week happened and the veil was lifted.

Someone threw a mudball and smacked John McCain and, I don't care if it is truth of fiction, exposed me to the realities of political campaigning in this country. Politics in the US is all about positioning and image - not substance and character. How good can you look? How many babies can you shag a photo-op with? Are you seen in church with your spouse looking contrite and pious? And if you are really good, can you surreptitiously smear, discredit or cause a shadow of doubt to fall over your opponent? I suppose I should give someone in Huckabee's camp credit for the mudball. Who cares?

And wen the veil was lifted, I had heard the promise of change (so sincerely spoken, yes indeed) spoken one too many times without the backup. Do you notice that answers are seldom, "this is what I have done about that, and you can take it to the bank that I will continue" but rather another promise of hypothetical results-orientation? Sorry, Mr. Obama, I want to believe, but I am too disheartened by history. Thanks Mr. McCain for giving us some substance beyond rhetoric, pork-barrel positioning and thinly-veiled economics that lines the pockets of the wealthy.

And when the dust settles, Mrs. Clinton is still standing. Standing not because I am seduced by powerful and brilliant women, but of her own and on her own - Bill be damned! I want to hate her because she didn't dump the philanderer for what he and so many of us arrogant masculinist bastards have done. She stood firm, and took the high road that I didn't even see. She is still standing, despite going on the attack against her opponent. And she is still standing on her record of tireless work that she has done.

I like Barack Obama, He seems to be a good man, but it is time for a change; he's right! It is time that we seek a leader who does unpopular things out of commitment and convictions, not because they look good. The groundswell of popularity that Obabm has enjoyed in recent weeks opened my eyes - we Amerikans love our look-good politicians - sorry.

I am weighing in. And the truth is that in the primaries I voted for Obama. Okay. I was falling for it. I cannot remember a time when I actually respected a candidate or political official. And I respect him. ButI think I am coming to respect Hillary Clinton even more.

Nine Year Old Minds

2008-02-17T21:48:00.004-05:00

So I have a 9-ear old boy - it's like having a perpetually renewing edition of Calvin and Hobbes as a live-in guest (nobody in their right mind would actually sign up for this). Jesse and I have just finished our evening ritual of reading before lights out and the book we concluded tonight was entitles Beetles, Lightly Toasted - a little midwestern ditty about a bunch of fourth graders who are in a creative writing contest.

Andy, the protagonist, wins with an essay on how to enhance your diet and save on grocery bills by using beetles, grubs and worms in cooking, the title coming from his use of toasted beeltes in brownies as nuts. Jesse is enthralled and tomorrow we will no doubt be looking up recipes that we will try here at Chez Girrell. Oh yum! But far be it from me to stifle his creativity and investigative mind!

Now the only problem with all of this is that Jesse is certain that the only insects that are kosher are locusts and they are pretty rare around these parts in February. So we have to look further into some kosher websites to get clearance on grubs and beetles. (I might explain that another element of the joy of my life is that I am married to a Jew and therefore am bringing up our son in both traditions, the bulk of which right now is formal Hebrew schooling).

See it's a lot easier to be a Christian. First of all we have John the Baptist who ate that kind of stuff (but we all know he was a few bricks shy of a load anyway). But there was that dream that God tells the (oh heck who was it Peter or Paul who was about to have dinner the next day with the Roman centurian) writer to sit and eat all of these unclean things. So there it is right there in the good book for all to read, that you can eat lobster and bugs cuz God made 'em.

Then again maybe I'll convert to Judaism and limit my choices to fried locusts!

Still Too Much

2008-02-02T21:44:00.000-05:00

Andover, MA
Saturday, February 2, 2008, Groundhog Day, one day before the Superbowl - and all I can think of is "I wonder if they made it?" Any of the men and women we met. They had to try, as one said to us, "I would rather die trying than stay at home and see my family suffer because I hadn't." So they kept on throwing themselves at the border.

I have been trying to sort all of this out and to be able to answer the questions I undoubtedly will get at church tomorrow, "So what did you learn - how was it?" And I haven't had it all fall into one nifty trim little sentence yet. Maybe that's because it isn't neat or tidy. It is a broken mess - a failed border policy that doesn't work - a failed treaty that ends up hurting more than it ever helped - an economy so dominated by old arcane Conquistador hierarchies that it produces both the richest man in the world and many of its poorest. How do you put that into a sentence, let alone discerning what God would have me do and say and be as a result of having gone there?

Encounter at the Wall

2008-01-30T21:04:00.001-05:00

A few days ago, after returning from our deepest penetration of the trip into migrant-land, we were at the Nogales wall. We were on the Mexican side of the border and viewing this monstrous steel structure of 20 plus feet of recycled landing strip (courtesy of Desert Storm). Cecelia (our wonderful Mexican guide), who originally hails from Nogales was telling us that before the wall, the residents of the twin city would come together for fiestas and events. She said that that they would dance and party back and forth across the little fence that marked the border, and when it was over, they would each go home. But the families on either side could visit and have holiday meals together at any time.

Now looking at the impenetrable steel barrier, you could see no one and no thing. It felt inhuman and divisive. How could you have a relationship with anything you could not see? It was about then that through a little crack under the steel I saw some movement. I went to have a better look and saw two boys playing along the drive the Border Patrol use to police the wall. So I stuck my hand through and called to them. Nothing happened and we figured that they were scared of what might be over here, or afraid that they might get in trouble with the BP. So I gave up, but just as I was turning to go I saw a little chunk of rusted metal shoved through the hole.

I knelt down and pushed it back to the edge. It got pushed back to my side. And the game was on! Back and forth like the game of "football" we used to play in the cafeteria with folded triangles of paper. He stopped for a minute and I thought he had quit. Then the hand came through holding a dirty silk flower! I was stunned - a gift from a boy, a thank you for momentarily dissolving the wall. I took the flower and put my hand through to wave to him, and said "thank you, I have to go now."

My most prized memory of the day - perhaps of the whole trip - was this (maybe) 5 year old hand pushing through the hole waving goodbye to me.

Walls are constructed from fear, but children and families know that once you reach out to the other side you don't need a wall to protect you from the "other." There is no other in brotherhood and love.

Mass in No Man's Land

2008-01-27T10:45:00.000-05:00

January 27
We just returned to Casa Misericordia from our trip to Altar. I am so filled with images and thoughts. There was undeniably a sinister air about Altar though the CCAMYN center for refugees, where we stayed, stood out like an oasis in the desert. The accommodations for the migrants were clean and new and the meeting/meal room itself was beautiful and spacious.

This morning we went to the Catholic Church (the only church in town) for mass and the children were the choir and the lectors. It was a ray of sunshine to hear their beautiful and powerful voices in this church when only moments before we were interviewing migrants and watching out for the coyote in the square outside. It was one of the strangest things I have ever seen. Picture this town only a few blocks square with a central square at the hub. On one side of the square is a church and on the other three sides are openfronted shops selling either ready-to-go food or hats, coats and rucksacks (all black for heat absorption and cammouflage). Roving the square are small groups of migrants (all men and boys that day and due to the cold and rainy weather, not as many as the 1200-1500 usually passing through). The coyotes carefully watch their groups from fixed positions on the corner or nearby. They eye us with a mixture of scowls and distrust.

When we walked around the square telling the migrants about CCAMYN and asking them questions, I was watching for the coyote. Brita (our professor) asked me how I recognized them and I told her about how they stayed fixed to one place and would go over to the group we had talked with and then returned to their position. I also said I had noticed their energy.

And then, at 10AM the church bells began to ring and everyone filed into the church. Regular members, children, migrants, coyotes and our band of seminarians and professors. Truce! It was miraculous - for that entire hour everyone was Catholic and prayerful. The children sang like angels, the priest gave a lighthearted but spirit-filled sermon, people commmuned - and there were no borders, no migrant or resident, just God's children gathered together as one family.

When it was over, the priest introduced us to the parish and we went up front to speak to the congregation and they applauded us. But we all felt that they deserved the applause for keeping a faith in such a place.

Afterward he escorted us to a boarding house where the migrants stay in their short time. It was horrific and he said that this one was one of the better and cleaner (there are no "ratas y cucarachas" there). The accommodations weren’t much better than the Amistad bulkhead.

Traveling so much and so far in this cramped van has really taken a toll on my back and legs. There are three of us who have L5S1 problems and we call each other the L5 club. We are all taking care of each other but it is hard. Our only consolation is that we know that the migrants have to travel in rougher conditions than we have, sometimes 20 or 30 in the same size van as we cram the 14 of us and our equipment.

Migrant Sendoff

2008-01-25T10:42:00.000-05:00

Jan 25
One month after Christmas and 46 days since Daniel left Argentina. This morning we had breakfast with about 20 migrants and prayed with them before they left for the border. It was a tearful goodbye and I really did not want to see them leave. As each one went out of the door, he would turn around and smile at us. It felt like seeing a platoon of young soldiers off to the battle front. Carlos with his cut hands. Hector with his torn coat. Both victims of last night’s failed attempt. But they each had to keep trying.

From there we went to the wall and had a memorial service for the ones who hadn’t made it. One of the names I read was Roberto age 27 months old and I broke down crying again. Do people actually think that his mother or father intended him to die in the desert? Do people actually think that their crossing is anything less than the last desperate effort for survival?

These are people, men women, boys and girls just like us just like Ari. How can we look at them and feel anything other than love and compassion? If I get nothing else from this trip, I will take home these two things:
Flesh and blood have no borders – we are all part of the human family.
Those who want borders for safety have it all wrong – it is in the moment we are vulnerable that we dissolve the fear, break down the barrier and become safe with each other.

Conversions at the Border

2008-01-24T09:49:00.000-05:00

Jan 24
What a remarkable day. Today we met with Mark Adams at Frontera de Christo, a Presbyterian minister who lives the word better than anyone I have ever seen. His commentary and commitment were beyond that of Jim Stevens of C2C. Truly a man on a mission. He talked about how he saw examples of faith in the people in Mexico that he had never seen before. He choked up telling us about when he had been first invited to a cement block walled (with no roof) new construction of a house for some bible reflection. The house if he could call it that was two rooms and one bedroom the size of a small apartment. There were six people living there. That night they read the gospel of John and he was thinking “how could these simple uneducated people understand such a complex and theoretical passage?” But when asked how they had heard God speaking in the passage one man said, “and the word became flesh and dwelt among us… that means that God understands what it is like to be out of place, because he left heaven and divinity to be with us. He knows what we feel.” On a subsequent visit there were 12 people living there and by Christmas there were 20. Mark asked if some could come and live with him but the home owner said that he had plenty of room. He said that when he had left Chiapas he thought about building a casita but he had decided instead to build a big home where many people could stay. Mark could not finish the sentence with the thought that what he had considered a tiny house was to this man a spacious home with room for everyone.

It has us all thinking about the scarcity that we Americans operate from. If only we saw life with the abundance that these people lived with we might approach it all differently. He spoke so openly and articulately about this like it was a conversion experience. Yesterday we listened to Mike Wilson of Tucson who diligently puts out water bottles at various stations along trails in the Tohono O’odham nation lands. Mike was a former Special Forces green beret in El Salvador and one day he was working and it was hot. So he decided to have a banana split. He was outraged by the price of $3.60 he had to pay but, heck, he had the money and paid. Later that day he was to have dinner with some people he had befriended so he went home with the wife and her two kids. After dinner her husband came home from his job of driving a bus along the rural routes. He was exhausted and he put a mason jar of change on the table and began to count out his days wages – over 12 hours of driving. As he stacked up the coins and tallied his entire wage for the day, Mike was crushed with guilt and embarrassment – the man had not even made as much as Mike had paid for his ice cream treat.

These little events are the conversion experiences these folks describe. Mike thinks of himself as Saul turned Paul – a former trained killer now saving lives on a daily basis. Where yesterday I was so weighed down by the gravity of it all I could hardly speak, tonight I have hope.

We are staying tonight at a refuge called CAME in the Mexican border town of Agua Priete. We had dinner with some of the migrants – some who are on their way to the US and two who had just been deported after 13 years in Phoenix. One of the men going north was Daniel, who had waked on foot from western Argentina through Peru, Ecuador, Panama and then was canoed through the jungle waters of Panama into Costa Rico and eventually walked into Mexico. He had done this in just 45 days. This man was determined. The stories are all like that. Two young men from a little further south who were trying to go across were just the most polite and wonderful young men you could want to meet. Neither spoke a word of English and none of us had much Spanish. But we communicated with the occasional help of our interpreter.

We spoke with two of the volunteers – one of which was just 18 years old. Steven had been volunteering every day after school for the last four years. I asked him why he did this and he said that everyone in his church does it - it is needed so he does it. Just that simple. I told him that I hoped my son would grow up to have those values as well.

Everyone is asleep now but I have stayed up – filled with good thoughts inspired by people who are living their mission and who see god in every person they meet.

Notes From BorderLinks, Tucson

2008-01-23T17:55:00.000-05:00

Greetings from near the BorderLands. At this point in our trek, we have been pummeled with so much information on all sides of this border issue. Each presenter has been opening our eyes to more and more of the elements that contribute to the problem of migration and our borders. There is a point in assimilating such devastating information that one starts to numb out. (I rarely drink coffee in the afternoon, but am taking a hit as I write). The problem though that is forming in my head right now is how will I ever become articulate enough to string together some kind of coherent thought pattern to open the eyes of others?

As I look into each issue, my particular lens is trying to see through to the complicity of our various corporate entities. In what ways do the sourcing patterns, the employment practices, the consumption and distribution of all of our products and goods and services impact this problem. Take for example the inclusion of corn syrup in most of our foods in the US. Hybrid and genetically altered corn not only produces corn syrup but floods the corn market driving down the prices in Mexico so that the farmer cannot sell his own. So our addiction to sugars, our inclusion of corn syrup in cereal, catsup, baked goods, mustard, you name it, combined with NAFTA has resulted in a greater poverty, driving someone potentially off the land to seek employment and food for his family elsewhere. But that is such a little example of one complicit event adding more fuel to the conflagration.

As of yet I do not know how I will be changed by this experience. But I do know that I must stay alert to take in each next moment and message. God help us all.

Sidebar From The Developing World

2008-01-19T08:55:00.001-05:00

Ok, I can't be fully serious and all theology all of the time. And thanks to one of my magnificent daughters, I am now enlightened regarding some of the "excellent" efforts of the Indian peoples toward the prevention of AIDS and overpopulation. The link, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTLj_3R0-2g is a very pop view of sex-ed featuring four men dressed as condoms (complete with a Michael Jackson-esque dance troupe of backup singers) doing a little ditty on the benefits of the love glove! I was hysterical, but you know what, if it works for them, you gotta love it!

Living by Faith - from Thomas Merton

2008-01-16T21:21:00.001-05:00

In getting the best of our secret attachments - ones which we cannot see because they are principles of spiritual blindness - our own initiative is almost always useless. We need to leave the initiative in the hands of God working in our souls either directly in the night of aridity and suffering, or through events and other men. This is where so many holy people break down and go to pieces. As soon as they reach the point where they can no longer see the way to guide themselves by their own light, they refuse to go further. They have no confidence in anyone but themselves. Their faith is largely an emotional illusion. It is rooted in their feelings, in their physique, in their temperament. It is a kind of natural optimism that is stimulated by moral activity and warmed by the approval of other men. If people oppose it, this kind of faith still finds refuge in self-complacency.

But when the time comes to enter the darkness in which we are naked and helpless and alone; in which we see the insufficiency of our greatest strength and the hollowness of our strongest virtues; in which we have nothing in our nature to support us, and nothing in the world to guide us or give us light -- then we find out whether or not we live by faith.

Thomas Merton, The New Seeds of Contemplation, 1961, page 257-8.

Make It Worth It

2008-01-14T19:03:00.000-05:00

I just learned that the wife of a friend and associate, a vibrant and beautiful woman of just 42, died suddenly a few days ago. What makes this already tragic loss hurt even deeper is that my friend had worked diligently for many years to achieve a level of success that would afford him more time with his partner and friend. And through all of that she had been a champion, running the race with him both figuratively and literally (as they had run several Boston Marathons together). Last May the ship came in and my friend, then the president of a thriving firm was rewarded for his efforts as his company was bought. When we talked then he said that though he was staying on in a consulting role for a while, his delight was that he could spend some quality family time.

Part of that ended Thursday. I cannot begin to imagine the depth of his pain and emptiness. I can only take notes and learn. When my son was first born I used to evaluate everything I did other than work in terms of trading time with Jesse. The "Jesse factor" as it became known would literally cause me to leave a meeting if it seemed to be going nowhere fast. "Am I willing to trade two hours of Jesse's life for this?" I stopped doing that after a while; I thought I had things pretty well in control.

But this event has just kicked me in the can. I didn't even know her, but I knew how much he loved her and how he smiled when spoke of her and the kids. She had to have been special. As Sarah and Jesse are to me. It seems like a platitude to talk of making every moment count, or to be reminded of what Thoreau called the "arrogance of tomorrow." But damn it all, it's the truth and we do need to burn it in - I need to burn it into my flesh or write it with Delores Umbridge's quill until it bleeds through where I can never forget it.

I am leaving on a class trip for nearly two weeks next Monday. I am all signed in, paid and packed. I damned well better make it worth it. There are no "trade-back's" in the game of life.

Dazed and Confused

2008-01-13T21:34:00.001-05:00

I have always been in charge of my career or at least that's what the self-reflective organ in my skull would have me believe. I have always gotten the job I wanted and even when a job disappeared I quickly secured some temporary work (cooking or tending bar) to bridge through the period of searching. I did that, my determination, my sense of responsibility.

But my confidence in that as fact is crumbling and as each chunk succumbs to gravity, what is revealed is the core engine that has been at work all the time - driving my machinery all along. That force is God; the divine force of pure intention. So I am faced with the possibility that none of this past was of my doing but that I have been led through all of those changes, peaks and valleys for the express purpose of getting here with, now, with these particular experiences and tools.

Thank God!

There are two problems with this realization: 1. I am now faced with having to discern God's intention for me - like what do you want me to do next, Oh Great One? and 2. My profession classifies what I am now doing (talking openly and regularly with some unseen force or entity) as delusional. Let me start with the first. This conversation I keep having with God goes something like this: OK God I give up, you win, I'm yours. Now what would you have me do? (Otherworldly Voice in my head) I cannot tell you that. (Me) Might I ask why? (OV) Sure, if I tell you, then you will try to "do" it and do it your way, and if you have surrendered to me, then I would like you to do it my way. (Me) And that means not knowing? (OV) And trusting completely. (Me) But that is no way for a professional to manage his career. (OV) So manage your career, this is my work we are talking about. (Me) Which is...? (OV) Sorry.

And so it goes - round and round.

So that is when the other voices of my professors and the ghost of Dr. Freud kick in: (SF) You are actually hearing voices? (Me) Duh, I just wrote it out in plain text. (SF) That, son, is delusional, whacked, touched in the head, a couple of bricks shy of a load, well you get my drift.

But the truth is that I have longed all my life to have an active and conscious contact with God. I envied Abraham as he walked and talked with his God. Heck, it was nothing for people in biblical times to hear voices or to see God walk into their village and sit down for a meal with them. Were times so different? Did God get bored of us or were they all whacked back then?
As for me, I am just confused.

But I will not give up. Fifty eight years of doing it my way had some severe limits. So I have done the Sam and Elijah thing and uttered those fateful words,"Here I am, take me." Dazed and confused, but putting one foot in front of the other.

The Next Border to Cross

2008-01-10T19:36:00.000-05:00

I have begun looking at activities from the metaphor of Border Crossings: where and what are the boundaries (real and artificial) that we or I have established in our living and in our professions? I look at all of the rubrics of my profession (I am an executive coach). I must not cross into the land of the spiritual - at least I think that is the unspoken mandate. People I coach must be allowed to be their own person; free from moral challenge from (especially) their coach. But it seems to me to be an artificial barrier. It relegates people into feelingless and flat doings not beings.

The question becomes how and where do I cross the borders? Do I need some coyote to lead me across this border? Do I sneak across under the cover of night or do I brazenly flaunt my rebellious character in front of the cameras and guards? Hey, I regularly cross the skin color line and the homo-hetero line - they aren't a challenge anymore! Every PC do-gooder has done those. And the political Hillarobama righteousness is even beginning to be acceptable - gosh how these walls are falling!

But the spiritual/moral boundary (unless you are willing to be a conservative, right wing fundamentalist - for God and for Country) - that one must not be touched. That one is verboten. See, we dare not think of what it means to be economically successful in spiritual terms, because that means we might have to think about the women in the sweat shops just across the border of El Paso and Nogales who assemble parts at unthinkably low wages. That means we have to consider that our smart use of vegetable fuels for our oh-so-PC hybrid cars means that the Mexican farmer whose balanced protein formerly came from corn and beans now must eat ramen noodles instead of his own corn. Oh, and we dare not talk about Jesus of Nazareth, that radical great great great grandson of a Moabite refugee intermarriage (Oh did we forget that too?), this potentially illegitimate son of a teenager, who dared talk to women, children, tax-collectors and heathen, and who dared to call the ruling power elite "vipers!"

I am a border crosser. I am a follower of that rebel. I choose to call the question. I dare to taunt the guard enforcing his arbitrary boundary. I can't stay quiet any longer.

This trip is not a metaphor. This trip is my coming out party. Bring it on! Where is the next line? If someone must be the first to step there, let it be me! Here am I Lord, take me!

Aliens Among Us

2008-01-08T18:43:00.000-05:00

Oh here we go again! The thing I keep coming up against in the Christmas season is this whole CB DeMille view of the star and the pristine manger and cutsie lambs and shepherds all stunned into silence by the choirs of heavenly beings singing "Glory to God."

But in my mind I imagine a good man with a (somehow, but by his doing) pregnant teenager as lost and homeless aliens in a foreign territory where even the language was so different they didn't recognize what people were saying. So they found, as so many homeless do, the only shelter they could, a barn, ripe with manure, probably crouching in the back so none of the "real people" of that territory could see them. And to this alien, homeless, scandalous couple, was born a child - not a king, not a floating avatar of divinity - a baby. Little. Helpless. Undocumented alien. Perhaps unwanted, at least for now.

God, the all-powerful, supreme all, the incomprehensible source of all, chose a homeless, undocumented, unmarried alien couple to host this divine coming out party! Crossing the threshold from divine to incarnate/human might be easy if you happen to be the Almighty, so why cross over in such an enemy, foreign, and hostile place? Unless... unless there is some reason, some message that these inhabitants of the third rock from Sol needed to learn. So I go there and follow the Christmas story.

And the lessons abound, none the least of which is that entry. So if it was purposeful, then perhaps I am called to see Christ in the homeless, see God in the most desperate situations, and hear my calling as a beckoning to cross the many arbitrary thresholds (boundaries and barriers we erect to keep us in and the "other" out). I am recently inspired by Jerry Gill's Borderland Theology (2003) and the analogies he finds in the life of Jesus as a "border crosser." It fits with my understanding of this God-like message. (Oh I love God's twisted sense of humor!)

It seems to me that the reason God speaks through the poor and infirmed, that the reason God chose a child of an undocumented homeless couple as an entry portal, that the reason Jesus continually worked through the unwanted and outcast is simply that any other way might have seemed magical. In my work life I have seen companies so cash rich that they literally could do anything. But when times got tough they faltered. It is those who with little who do much that really set the standard of excellence. Had Jesus been a rich man, or apparated as an adult in full glory, we would be left with an awe of his grandeur but just as clearly with a sense that none of that was within our grasp.

But when we walk among the poor, when we cross over the boundary from our station into the realm of just being human - with not even a single trapping of civilized and pampered existence - then we have access to understanding the true human experience. Then and perhaps only then can we begin to feel true compassion. And when we give of ourselves from that (presumed) nothingness, we are capable of divine love.

Two millennia ago, love passed through the portal and smiled up through the darkness. And it just may have been quite alien for anyone who noticed it.

Prayer and Meditation

2008-01-06T09:29:00.001-05:00

I’ve been thinking a lot about prayer and meditation lately. Interfacing with The Divine, with God, or at least my experience of God. Now, in order to do that, I have to deal with a lot of abstract and previously defined concepts (or at least defined previously by others, or maybe even defined in other ways by others). Take for example the experience of God. I need to use that terminology to distinguish between how I become aware of God’s presence in my life, as differentiated with what others have identified as God-like characteristics (ranging from anthropomorphic God – you know, bearded and robed and sitting on high like some sky father – to conceptual referents like omniscient, omnipotent, and the omni-lists of catechism). I also need to be wary of confusing the God of my experience with the true experience of God and getting present to how else that might manifest in each unfolding now of my mortal existence. And that’s just for starters!

So I start with an assumption of God – that God exists and is, like life itself just “is.” And I recognize that for some, that is a leap of faith – “How do you know God is?” That one at least is easy for me: because I look for God in everything, I see God in everything. The same logic is true for the atheists: because they doubt God’s existence, they are looking – in essence for the absence of God – that is their perception. But for me, there is God; present in through and around every living thing. But I stop there because right behind that statement follows a whole raft of self-defined experiences I have had of God’s presence. I am wary of ascribing what I experienced as the expression of God-ness to being what God is, because to do so would immediately begin to limit The Divine though and by those definitions. They are just my experiences of God’s presence to me. So I think it must be true of others, that how we experience God becomes what God is. Therefore, the God of our understanding is a uniquely defined and individual experience.

Perhaps in organized church religions, God may be described by the masses in similar ways creating a “majority view” of God-ness. But weren’t they told what they were looking for in the first place? Isn’t it true that we always see what we expect to see? It’s like what I call the “new car syndrome.” The day before buying my new midnight blue Saab 9-5, I was not terribly aware of how many others there were on the road. But that purchase shaped my seeing such that the experience was almost as if that same day hundreds of other Bostonians went out and bought midnight blue Saab 9-5’s – there were suddenly so many of them. So likewise, if we are told to look for God as manifest in bread and wine, or the smiles of children, or as the Virgin of Guadalupe, or whatever, that will be what we see. But that is not simply the power of suggestion. Rather it is the opening of eyes to what is already present, but to yet another select set of manifestations, as opposed to the complete, total and incomprehensible range of God’s infinite possibility.

So meditating on God for me is not looking for the predefined but rather trying to be present to what wants to be seen this time. Surprise me! I am waiting and open to what you would have me see. Open like this, the experience of God washes over me and opens my seeing to some new (and sometimes renewed) awareness. That hasn’t changed much in recent years – that sitting and opening to the next experience of how God presents “I am-ness” to me. But what has evolved is prayer – my communing and attempting to open the other channel of communication with The Divine.
I remember all of the different classifications of prayer I learned in my childhood: prayers of request, prayers of and for forgiveness, supplication, contrition, and so on. But those were to a God of otherness for me; a great God of the sky, who could and would grant wishes, or wash me to be “whiter than snow.” But what becomes of that type of prayer when God is infinitely incomprehensible? How do I commune? In fact, if I start from an assumption that God is in everything, knows everything and completes everything, then why (if at all) do I need to inform “him” of my needs, wants and wishes?

I don’t.

And suddenly prayer shifts from “out there” to “in here.” Prayer becomes speaking out loud that thought path to alignment with The Divine purpose already at work, and already manifest even before I become aware of it (like the ubiquitous Saabs I had not noticed. As I sit in prayer, I mentally and verbally begin to align my thoughts to Divine intention. And as I do that, the language of my prayer shifts from my laundry list of needs, wants and fears to seeking the humility to become an instrument of God’s work in my world.

It isn’t easy. I want a God who will fix it for me. But, like I always say, I am on a journey here, not looking for the end point, just on the path.

Still Puzzled

2008-01-01T14:06:00.000-05:00

Beginning the new year has always been a bit of an enigma to me. Why is this day any different than any other (sounds like a child's question at the Seder meal)? Really? What is so special at this point? Why don't we just celebrate the day after the solstice as the beginning back to light? Or why not March first or December first? Heck why not the start of each month? I think it's just that we need to mark beginnings - a chance to wipe clean the slate, drop the guilt of last year's attempts bobbled and relieve the guilt of missions failed. Jews and Muslims do this in the fall with their high holy days but the rest of the people of the book choose to close the book at the end of December and start clean in January.

So I look back at the year - marked with less than exemplary performance at work, but balanced with a hat trick of "A's" in seminary courses. Our charity, Operation ELF, served more than twice last year's number of kids, but the satisfaction is quickly staggered by the recognition that poverty seems to be growing faster than we can counter it. So we just press on.

And this year, as we head into January and I anticipate a trip to Nogales and Altar and the land of despiration that drives even women and children to attempt their futile crossings of Desolation and Sonora, I wonder what value I can put into the stream of life. I don't even know really what my calling is or even why God has me going this way. So I press on.

Still puzzled.

The Devil's Highway

2007-12-30T15:14:00.000-05:00

For a course I am taking in January, I am to read Urrea's The Devil's Highway. It is a powerful account that starts with unraveling the death of the Yuma 14 (14 of 24 Mexican and Central Americans trying to enter the US through the desert west of Nogales and Tucson. I usually read while exercising on a recumbant bike but yesterday (it was cold here) I decided to read in my sauna. Being of northern European decent I have the sauna genome embedded in my DNA and built one in my house right after we moved in. However the absurdity suddenly hit me reading of those men dying in the Arizona desert in temps of 108 to 114 degrees - oh this is rich - I sit here in my Andover home trying to crank up the heat to get over the temperature that cooked these men's souls, and stuck their tougues to the rooves of their mouths, that so dehydrated them that when cut they do not even bleed. Oh yea that's is incredible! The heresy of my crime pulled me out of the sauna, but left me with an even sicker feeling than reading the book.

Between The Garden Gates

2007-12-29T13:44:00.000-05:00

Lately I have been reflecting on my spiritual life as anyone in seminary might do. And though I would like to report that all is well in Eden, I can’t. I think of those times when communion with the God of my experience is in tact; when I have a conscious and continual contact with that-which-cannot-be-named. It is, in a word, beautiful. It is like Eden – fragrant, sweet and peaceful. I feel a Divine presence around and through me as if I were able to walk side by side with God in intimate conversation. It is a feeling of being known down to my innermost thoughts and feelings, and it is good. Here is a warm, peaceful feeling of being embraced by something greater and more powerful than I. I feel like a child sitting on the lap of my father with his huge laborer’s arms wrapped around me. Somehow I understand why the Greeks and Romans built mammoth statues of their gods, because something that would be proportionately large enough to hug me as a 6’3” child with 30” broad shoulders would have to be immense. My “Abba” must be enormous to hold me with such power and strength.

But that is only sometimes. I am reminded daily that I, like the Adam myth of us all, have actively engaged in getting myself thrown out of this wonderful garden. God did not expel me (or Adam) – I did it. I, with my ego-driven, megalomaniacal desire to be lord and master of my own destiny, have driven myself out of Eden. I played (and continually play) god, and that god I pretend to be is what throws me out onto the streets of my desolation. Out here I am alone. I exist inside my insular bag of bones and blood and somehow see myself as distant and apart from others.

It is a nasty and treacherous by-product of having a mind. Mind’s job is to make sense of things, but I believe mine gets carried away. The sense-making my mind goes into starts delineating self from other. Isn’t there space between us? My mind thinks so and therefore deduces that we are separate and, if separate, different. From there the dominoes begin to fall until lives and bodies lie helter-skelter all around me. It is lonely and desolate out here and as Shakespeare wrote, “I all alone beweep my outcast state.”

Or maybe it was the Psalmist who captured the sentiment even more fittingly as, “My god, my god, why have you forsaken me?” But my God has not forsaken me. The Almighty is also infinitely patient and the garden of love and peace waits silently and patiently for me to return. My mind, in its never-ending attempt at sense-making, tries to protect me from the harsh reality of what I have done and blames an uncaring “other” for my calamities. I feel abandoned, alone, cold, frightened. There is no joy out here and the landscape outside the garden is barren and rocky. So I stumble in a zigzag path from rock to thorn bush looking for anything I on which to hang my hopes. I often wonder if I am not the only one out here in the barren wasteland of self-will and I can see why my ancestors made up stories of devils and evil powers at work to capture us lost souls. It certainly feels at risk.

But in my darkest hour, when I am about to give up all hope, I think I see a garden gate ahead of me. Finding my way to that garden is not easy – I am pummeled by all sorts of demons and fears, each taking successively more and more from me until I sometimes feel like I can’t take another hit. It feels at these times as if I am crawling and clawing my way forward on my hands and knees until at last I fall, totally spent, on my face into the garden. But it is not the same garden – this one is different. My new garden is one of surrender and humility; the Garden of Gethsemane. It is a place where I rip at my clothes in vain attempts to throw off the pain, guilt and shame of where I have been. It is a place where at last I come to terms with my “self will run riot” as Bill Wilson wrote.

But nothing happens until, in desperation I open again to God. I give up trying to play god; it just doesn’t work. I surrender. It is at this point that my spirituality begins to return to me. It is here that I start letting God back in, first asking to be relieved of the burdens I have carried, then ultimately surrendering to Divine will, and stepping back onto the real path of spirituality. To be certain, the problems I have created don’t magically disappear, but I am equipped to deal with them in a different and more effective way – through and with the power of that ever-present Divine force and on God’s terms and in accordance to God’s “will.”

Reviewers of the new book Mother Theresa: Come Be My Light, might have us believe that even the “saint of the gutters” had a crisis of faith. But I am not so sure it was a crisis of faith as much as it was the correspondence of a fellow trekker telling the truth about what it is like in reality. The reality is that having once seen into the beauty of the garden, all else looks and feels like desolation and desert. Worse yet, the deepest truth is that as humans we continually separate ourselves from God, albeit through all those terribly normal aspects of being human – we evict ourselves. I wish I could say I lived in the Garden, but I can’t – it’s just not the truth. Like the epileptic boy’s father, perhaps like Mother Theresa, I am forced to say, “I believe, help me in my unbelief.” That unbelief is fueled by my realities and pushes me far away from the garden or any Sunday school pretense that life can be a fairy tale.

And so there is no happily ever after to this story, because before I know it, I have gotten myself tossed out again – out of the garden by practicing some sort of self-reliance (that’s a good thing, I was taught). The reality I am faced with today is that my spiritual life – my spiritual quest, as it were – is the journey back and forth between the garden gates. My Garden of Eden being those rare few moments of childlike innocence whenever and wherever I allow myself to be fully embraced by Divine love– the result of putting myself back in God's care, power and love. My Garden of Gethsemane is when (each time) finally I understand that I am not the center of the universe, I am not in charge and I cannot manage without God squarely in the center of my life. The truth is that I spend more time, most of my time, between those two gates than in the Gardens. Out there in the wasteland I am alone and know deeply what Mother Theresa wrote that “the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, — Listen and do not hear — the tongue moves but does not speak.” In a strange and sick way, it feels good to know that someone of genuine faith was out here in the desert, felt alone and separated from God’s presence, and wept in pain in her Garden of Gethsemane – just like me. I just thank God that the gate was open and someone left the light on for us.

Application to Seminary October 2006

2007-12-01T14:35:00.000-05:00

The experience of a calling is one that rarely, in my experience, comes with an exact road map or specifications for the precise career direction attached to it. To some it occurs as a gentle whisper, to others a voice calling their name. But even Francis of Assisi mistook “rebuild my church” as a mandate to get into the construction trades. For me the call came in the middle of a prayer long ago during a vigil for the Arab-Israeli War of 1967. It was a voice I had never before heard and I was overwhelmed at the way in which it cut into me to my core. And while I can remember the feeling to this day, there never was fear or doubting associated with that calling – just the undeniable truth of it all that this was my life’s purpose.

My path in pursuing that purpose was perhaps more winding, dusty and filled with potholes than Francis’ since my “knowing” had no direction. Initially I thought that I should be a minister – as that had been the only role model I had seen. But after an all-too-brief foray into seminary at ANTS, I left to pursue counseling and guidance as a profession. That road led from career/placement counselor to executive search to corporate outplacement and career re-direction and eventually to leadership development and coaching, my present career. Along the way I found out several things about my calling. I found that what I had assumed was a unique (and therefore different and alone) experience is one in fact that many – perhaps all – people have experienced. Continually, I have heard that haunting in others; that not knowing but knowing that something bigger is beckoning from somewhere out there (or is it in there – one can never really tell). I learned also that others – like me – have struggled to find their path. I have discovered that the path was and is always there for each one of us, like some cosmic chalk line snapped straight out to the future. We all have been zigzagging through life apparently crisscrossing the line again and again. The common report is that each time we cross over the true line of our life’s purpose we experienced some jolt, some spark of excitement and that haunting feeling almost like déjà vu. And through it all I learned to embrace the journey as the thing that helped me – and all of us on our searches – discover what we need to learn. With each new discovery I gained greater and greater compassion for the human experience. Through all of my career iterations the common experience is that human hunger for meaning, for making a difference, and for a connection to a higher purpose. Whether that is in every one or a result of what I brought to each conversation, I cannot say but I found it everywhere.

I have the privilege and honor of working with people in how they lead and direct the activities of hundreds and thousands of others. Their burden as leaders is that they know somewhere inside that life has more meaning than 9-to-5 working and slaving only to get home to some other quest for meaning. Leaders are beginning to take seriously the responsibility they have not only as fiduciary stewards for the company but more importantly as guardians and stewards of human capital and the meaning employees seek in all their “doing-ness.” But despite the fact that our leaders, our work and our products have become more “meaningful” over the last 35 years and that workers are expected to be more of a “contribution” to their workplace, the vast majority of employees in America still report a genuine dislike for their jobs and a feeling of underemployment, of being under valued. In the place where we spend the greatest portion of our lives we find the least amount of meaning. So what is missing is not in the work itself. What is missing is something in us. What is sorely missing in our culture today are the fundamental tools that help us to make meaning itself.

American culture in the 21st century is suffering from a dearth of values and most of us, and most of our systems, do not have a clue on how to teach values. It is my experience that values and valuing cannot be easily taught. For most of its existence the organized church has attempted to teach values. The role of the church has been to teach what Jesus and the ancients taught – to love and respect each other, to pray for guidance, and to trust that God will and does provide for us all. While pedagogical methods may work with kids, who sponge up just about everything, adults learn mostly be experience. And the passive experience (for most) of sitting in a pew receiving the word is not sufficient to mold or define their values and valuing.

Over the same time period of the latter third of the 20th century, church memberships have been declining, whole churches have closed, and the numbers of young people seeking ordination have dropped. In a world moving toward no absolutes, the church may have backed off from the “olde tyme religion” of our forefathers and in doing so, lost something in the translation. With the possible exception of fundamentalist movements, organized religion seems to be struggling. There will always be a certain group who desire a stricter and more rigid set of guidelines for living life. But how do the rest of us, who eschew the King James translation and “word of God” strictness of reading, find our way? And perhaps most importantly, how do we create and solidify our core values if they are not mandated for us? I believe that this role still falls within the jurisdiction of religion but that maybe the church needs some different “missionaries” out in the working world.

The role I play in my career as an executive coach is one of accelerating human development. Truthfully, I cannot, a coach cannot, cause anything to happen that would not normally happen. People develop; given food, water and fresh air, they grow and develop until their last day of life. All a coach can ever do is accelerate that process – help the client get from point A to point B a little more rapidly than it would happen under normal growing conditions. But the methods used in my profession are powerfully effective in doing this. And when applied to the realm of value development, they work equally as well. Using the most challenging of the person’s situations (not hypothetical discussions) we paint the executive into a corner that forces his/her decision. And, interestingly, those decisions made under heightened pressure (I call them “battle conditions” or “live ammunition” situations) rarely have to be revisited.

I had the unique privilege of conducting a two-day leadership seminar for 36 international managers of a global corporation on September 10 and 11, 2001. We had been using real (corporate) crises as the teaching tools on Monday and were debriefing another exercise Tuesday morning when the President of the company came into the room to announce that we were in a national emergency (which the participants initially thought may be another exercise). However, after we had all watched the towers fall for the umpteenth time and found that we not only could not use our cell phones, but that these leaders (from places like Singapore, Japan, all over Europe and the Americas) were not going to be traveling anywhere, we decided to continue the workshop. What followed was the most poignant and powerful program I have ever led. No longer could we discuss values and lives as hypothetical precepts. Life was fragile; the people they/we were leading were entrusting us with their very lives, and we needed to step up to that trust. It was the intensity of that day, and the process of using that intensity and awareness, that broke through the participants’ dull pretenses and into the clear air of value-driven decision-making. These leaders changed!

Churches played a role that day as well. Immediately they rallied scores of trained volunteers and clergy to help the masses deal with their shock and to grieve. And while this was certainly valuable, it was just as clearly not what we did in that training room! Though serving a need, my experience of the situation was that “the church” did not step up to the greater challenge of the day. And it is just an example of why I feel that churches and organized religion have not been able to fill the widening gap of values and valuing in today’s society. The church has defined its role as either educators of the prescriptive values of the scriptures or as empathetic caregivers to the broken hearts and souls of the community. It does not seem to me that organized religion has carved out a role as the catalyst of ethical development and that the roles churches do play are insufficient in stemming the tide of the crisis I perceive in today’s society. If churches see this as their realm, then they may need to learn some of the principles of coaching and development.

One postscript to the 9/11 experience is that, with rare exceptions, it was not too long before the bulk of the population was back to life. Granted there was a wound (however deeply cut that day) that was healing, but in a society that tries so hard to avoid feeling discomfort, the wound was bound up and medicated as quickly as possible. However, change and transition only happen through discomfort. It takes staying with the discomfort and actually feeling the pain to transform the old way of being into a new one. In many ways this appears to me to be similar to the difference between Paulist (peaceful resolution) and Christic (disquieting revolution) theologies. Jesus talked about a very uncomfortable path, one that would turn a household against itself. In telling Nicodemus to sell his goods and give the money away, he wasn’t so much advocating poverty, he was telling us to let go of our attachments to things and to the comfort of our current thinking. His methods and his path were intense, and often exploited the discomfort of the moment to cause a breakthrough to his new way of thinking and being.

I do not know if the church and clergy can or wishes to step into such a developmental role. What I do believe, however, is that the role must be filled and that there is a serious need. Perhaps it falls to the theological institutes to begin training a new cadre of workers who breech the values gap in the work place. Perhaps it falls to people in roles such as mine to be the providers of transformative pushes that bring on the needed development. I am not entirely certain. But as Martin Luther’s ministry prayer reads, I might not be much, “but as the people are here and in need of a teacher,” perhaps I might be allowed fill that role.

The ministry to which I feel called is to bring the spiritual quest for purpose and meaning into the working world. Most people spend the greater portion of their waking hours at work. The amount of time that a church or clergy person has access to their minds and souls is perhaps an hour or so each week (and often much less). Business leaders can – and in my experience, do – shape the values of their employees. It would appear that the current shape that value is taking does nothing to develop a set of life values, let alone doing anything to deal with the human need for meaning and purpose. I find that I have an ability to bridge those worlds. On my own and in the company of a few colleagues who think like this, we have begun to elevate the business discussion of executive leadership and coaching into the realm of effecting peoples’ lives. I look for the spark of connection in each session I conduct. If anything has been rewarding in my career, it is the times when not only have we achieved the ROI expected from my coaching, we have awakened a sense of inspired purpose in the executive, that cascades over many individuals and their families that he/she leads.

My goal in entering this program of study is to push my thinking and to further hone those skills that I use in driving this conversation. I am looking for resources – both academic writings and the people with whom I will connect – that will assist me in providing that service. My coaching is not advice giving. What I do is tantamount to asking good questions; questions that provoke a deeper thinking and valuing on the part of my client. I do not have the answers – ever – in my work, nor am I looking to find those answers. I simply see myself as a fellow traveler down the same path these leaders are taking. It is my hope to become more attuned to the questions they are asking themselves, and to the discomfort of pushing myself into the realms of my own unknowing. Discovery only begins when a person is willing to say, “I don’t know,” and step forward from that point. Most of the time I am working, I am trying to keep my client on the cutting edge of not knowing and discovery. For my clients, who are accustomed to knowing and being the source of direction for others, this is extremely disquieting. In keeping myself uncomfortable in my own unknowing and seeking, I believe that I can better fulfill my role of keeping others in that same uncomfortable place. It is what I do and it is what I want to do for more. My goal is to use the certification program to gain those tools, to gain a new and larger circle of peers who are on the journey with me, and to gain a deeper understanding of what creates and shapes values for us all.

So I believe the above covers the assigned points. But it is not all of what I would want you to know. What has transpired for me over these years of gradually honing in on that center line of purpose is that I have only continually rediscovered what has been there all the time. I have found the tools that I need to work with, both for myself and for helping others in their quest. But more importantly, what has happened is that I have become more human. When I attended ANTS back in 1971, I was a kid of 21 and full of great ideas. While I was in love with God and bursting to tell others that they could have that same feeling, I felt different and apart. My travels of the past 35 subsequent years have made me one with everyone else. I used to look at some clients as “uncoachable,” or buy into their boss’ evaluation of them as a jerk or in need of “fixing.” But through this transformation of the years, I now see them as just another one of us in the family. There is something about each client I seem to fall in love with – not through any kind of transference – but in a true sense of compassion. It is similar to what I feel in church. I watch as people go up for communion or even just enter the church and I well up inside with the feeling of appreciation and love for their uniqueness and beauty. Words often fail me in trying to describe my state or what I feel has happened in this lifelong trip. Simply, I have come home to a clarity that perhaps was always there, but that I now am certain of. David Whyte captured that feeling in his poem: The Opening of Eyes. He tells of his discovery of his life’s purpose like this:

That day I saw beneath the dark clouds
The passing light over the water
And I heard the voice of the world speak out.
I knew then, as I had before
Life is no passing memory of what has been
Nor the remaining pages in a great book
Waiting to be read.

It is the opening of eyes long closed
It is the vision of far off things
Seen for the silence they hold
It is the heart after years
Of secret conversing
Speaking out loud in the clean air.

It is Moses in the desert
Fallen to his knees before the lit bush
It is the man throwing away his shoes
As if to enter heaven
And finding himself astonished
Opened at last
Fallen in love with solid ground.

I cannot say it any better than that. I have fallen in love again. And I am standing on my path, with all the astonishment and certainty that Whyte describes. That is what I am here for; that is what I wish to return to your classes for, and that is what I really would want you to know about me.