Category: Spirituality

Gifts in a Time of Pandemic: The Freedom of Love

Consider two different responses to the pandemic:

  1. A group of people protests in front of a state capital building, some carrying assault weapons providing an image of threat and intimidation. They are protesting the infringement on their “freedom.” Social distancing orders have deeply affected their lives, their freedom of movement, and, for many, their employment. They have framed their losses as bondage.
  2. An elderly man is given a ventilator by people who love him, in a nation where there are not enough ventilators for all who need them. A band of people has found a way to pay for and obtain a ventilator for this man they love. It is a gift to him. He receives it and then gives it away to a young man who also needs a ventilator. He then succumbs to the COVID-19 virus.

Which of these two responses to the pandemic is an expression of freedom? Is freedom found in my ability to do what I want (do my thing) even when it infringes upon the lives of others, disregards their ability to live? Or, is freedom found in the ability to freely give up my life for the life of another?

Freedom is often expressed in terms of our ability to do what we want. But, as theologian Karl Rahner expressed in one of his essays, there are spheres of freedom. When it comes to our freedom of choice, one person’s sphere of choice is larger or smaller than another. Our spheres of freedom impinge on or affect the freedom of others. One person’s sphere of freedom can diminish another’s. Historically, the “privileges” given to white people by racism have limited the choices available to black people (choices regarding schools, vocations, health care, freedom from violence, etc.). The present economic disparities in our nation depict different spheres of freedom to make various choices. Those who are wealthy have many more choices for escaping the effects of the coronavirus than those who are poor.

The only thing that truly begins to address the disparities and injustices is the freedom that is love. Martin Luther King, Jr, understood this with great clarity: “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.” This is true because love enters into the sphere of the other, even when that may mean diminishing one’s own sphere of choices. The elderly man, in giving up his ventilator, narrowed his choices. Again, Martin Luther King: “Love is the active outpouring of one’s whole being into the being of another.”

Love may have us narrowing our choices, but it also may have us expanding them. Love calls people beyond the limitations placed on them by others. It has us pressing forward, expanding our sphere in order to live out our calling in the compassionate use of our gifts in relation to others.

Whether our choices narrow or expand, love freely gives itself. It is the reality that cannot be coerced. We cannot make another person love us and we cannot keep another person from loving us. Even our evil actions against another cannot undo love, for love forgives. (Jesus from the cross: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”) Love, compassion, mercy, justice (making right what is wrong), bring true life-giving change and liberation.

The pandemic that we are enduring calls out for compassion and love. The disparities, along with leadership that ignores the poor and props up Wall Street, cry out for radical acts of love. When we see people answering this call, we see them freely giving themselves for the sake of others. Their actions heal and restore, do justice and liberate. We see genuine human freedom in these acts.

Regarding the two responses to the pandemic that I began with, each has a different feel to it. The first feels like the bondage of self-absorption. It does not feel like freedom to show up with weapons to demand that you get your way even at the cost of others’ well-being. The second feels like freedom, the freedom of giving oneself, one’s life, for another.

The opportunities to love are always there. But, in this time of a pandemic and the new situations it has created, it may be that the call to love—to the freedom that is love—is more easily distinguished from other voices. A gift is being offered to us: the call to love. Therefore, paraphrasing Jesus, “Let those who have ears to hear, let them hear and obey the call.”

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Gifts in a Time of Pandemic: Darkness

Hello darkness, my old friend
I’ve come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping

Paul Simon

If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light around me become night,”
even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is as bright as the day,
for darkness is as light to you.

Psalm 139:11-12

God is present in the light and the darkness. In joy and sorrow. In success and failure. In gladness and affliction. God is in the darkness and darkened future of the present pandemic.

This year, I started growing plants for my vegetable garden from seeds. I had the opportunity to observe what many others have known: Seedlings grow faster at night. They capture the energy of the sun during the day and much of their growth happens in darkness. I am considering this as a metaphor for our growth into our true humanity. Growth often happens in the darkness and in the midst of trials.

The psalmist says, “Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes with the morning.” (Psalm 30:5) Our lives include both night and morning, weeping and joy. Both darkness and light are necessary. God is in both.

I recall entering a time of trial and darkness. Because of previous experience, I was desirous of receiving what God had to give me through what I was enduring. When I came out of that period of struggle, I had mixed emotions, wondering if I had received everything from it that was meant for me. (Likely not, but I was grateful for what I did receive.)

Some trials are personal, some communal. We are presently enduring a global pandemic. It is a dark night that we share with others—although not all in the same way. Those who have lost loved ones to the virus experience the darkness acutely. Health workers on the front lines experience the depth of this pandemic in ways that most of us escape. And there are great societal disparities in the way this pandemic is experienced.

There are pandemics in the midst of pandemics. The pandemic of racism has a long history that continues alongside the coronavirus pandemic. The recent shooting death of a young black jogger by two white men (who were not charged until a video surfaced two months later) is a manifestation of this brutal pandemic—as are the historic inequities that are exacerbated by the virus. One pandemic affects the other. Will the darkness of the one help us to enter, in some manner, the darkness of the other? Because of the great unevenness of this virus’ impact, mainline news has had more to say about disparities than we are used to hearing. Will we stay with the hearing and go deeper?

The COVID-19 pandemic may be heightening our awareness—as the darkness often does. If we are open, we may no longer be able to ignore these other pandemics. We may gain hearts that move us to do justice and love mercy. We may find ourselves working to overcome the divisions that we have erected. We may receive an elevated sense of community that calls us to action, as we share with others during this pandemic.

In the darkness of this pandemic, there is great potential for change and growth. In the darkness, we may become more self-aware and engaged in inner work, acknowledging our false attachments, motivations, and attitudes. In the quietness of the night, we may wonder about our purpose. What is our true calling? What is truly essential for our growth as human beings? In the darkness, we become still and wait. We become open and receptive. In the darkness, we let go of trying to secure ourselves and, in letting go, we gain our true humanity made in the image of God.

God is in the darkness as well as in the light. We find God there if we do not attempt to fill the darkness with something foreign to it: binge-watching videos or drowning ourselves in social media or dulling our fears and insecurities with various addictions. And yet, even our addictions may play a part. Their enchainment may bring us to our knees and have us crying out to God for deliverance. When that happens, we have allowed ourselves to enter the darkness to receive its gift: The gift of growth and change and greater awareness of our need and the needs of others and the sharing of ourselves in the building of true community.

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Anxiety and the Coronavirus

It is hard to tell ourselves or others not to worry. Our lives are being upended by a virus. The whole of our society and the global community is in combat mode directed to this invisible attack. Growing numbers are contracting this virus. Health workers do not have all the equipment they need; there is fear that the health system will be overwhelmed. Businesses are shut down, many are out of work, schools are closed, travel is halted, and we are being directed to distance ourselves from one another. And we do not know how long this “new normal” will last. So very much is out of our control. Of course, each of us can take steps to help in this situation, but we are also dependent on the steps others take—including our leaders. Anxiety is a natural and even necessary response. Fear gets us responding to situations that need quick action. It got our attention to the realities of the present crisis so that we would act. And yet anxiety can undo us. Fear can overcome and immobilize us. So, how can we tell ourselves not to worry?

For followers of Jesus and others who are open, that is exactly what Jesus tells us: “Do not worry.” With these words, Jesus calls us from fear to faith and assumes that it is possible to trust rather than be taken over by, and act from, anxiety. With this directive to not worry, Jesus expresses the possibility of our taking steps away from anxiety. Here is the passage: Matthew 6:25-34. Here are the first two verses of that passage:

I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?

The reality that makes possible the movement away from anxiety is that God cares for us. When Jesus says to us, “Do not worry,” he is calling us away from the anxiety that would direct our lives, to a trust in God in whom “we live and move and have our being.” He assumes that the empowering Spirit of God will help us to turn from being driven by anxiety, to the care and direction of God.

Jesus also describes the alternative to anxiety: “But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” Make the focus of your life, God’s reign, God’s ways of governing, and God’s will. Anxiety, when it directs what we do (rather than merely telling us to act fast), will have us losing our humanity and purpose. Anxiety tempts us to believe it is all up to us. It will make us feel that everything is urgent all at once, and it will have us getting frantic and acting rash. Trusting in the One who holds our lives together frees us for action—for compassionate, life-giving action.

The movement from anxiety to liberated action happens in the relinquishing of our lives to God and God’s purposes for this time in which we live. God calls each of us with our gifts and ways of serving, for the time we yet have, to love one another. The message, “Do not worry,” is the same as “Trust God.” Our heavenly Father knows what we need, knows what we need right now in this time, and cares for us. We are simply to go after God’s reign and purpose, and trust that God will provide what we need to do what God calls us to do.

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Beauty and Awe

This month of December, my daughter and I, along with her dog, Fiona, drove from Chicago to Anchorage, Alaska, where Elizabeth has been called to pastor a church. At Dawson Creek, in the upper part of British Columbia, we were at mile zero of the Alaskan highway—ahead of us, 1580 miles of mostly snow-packed roads and mountainous terrain of astonishing beauty. We started our days, of increasingly shorter daylight, before sunrise and ended them after sunset. We experienced the beauty of snowy mountains, some of which reached 19,000 feet, in various kinds of light, blue sky, and clouds. We lived in awe of the beauty that surrounded and enveloped us.

God has been referred to as Being itself, Life itself, Love itself. Jonathan Edwards, the eighteenth century American pastor and theologian in a time of great awakening, referred to God as Beauty itself. We meet God in the beauty around us and within us, large and small, magnificent and lowly.

Beauty meets us in the grandeur of mountains and the delicacy of a beetle. I meet beauty in my backyard. I encounter it in the chickadee that grabs a sunflower seed at my bird feeder and, unlike the sparrows, does not linger, but flies away to a solitary place to enjoy it. I meet beauty in the sunflowers that the birds plant in my garden and the butterflies that visit them.

Beauty meets us in the human body and the human mind, in form and thought, in sound, sense, and creativity; art, music, and dance. I am taken in by the beauty of Chicago’s cityscape lit up at night and viewed across the water of Lake Michigan, and by the canyons and cliffs of its skyscrapers during the day—and the peregrine falcons that nest there. The city itself is an expression of nature, of human nature and therefore of the divine nature and of Beauty itself. The sin and evil that reside in the city (and in its making) and in the world cannot overcome the beauty. It shines in the darkness.

And God is in it. Beauty itself draws us. The awe we experience is our drawing near. We are invited to come nearer, to enter in and to receive and be changed.

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Where Security Resides

At some point in my early twenties, in college, it occurred to me that I was not simply seeking knowledge for the sake of knowledge and truth. I had told myself that that was what I was doing; it was a conscious desire. But I came to admit that there was more going on than simply a search for truth. There was a desire to secure my life with knowledge. There was the feeling that if I just knew enough, I would feel more secure in the world and perhaps feel that things were a little more under my control. I became increasingly aware of this attempt to secure my life, along with the realization that it was not working.

When it came to my relationship with God, in whom there is true security, I found that I was often attempting to think my way to God, a decidedly futile project. I despaired of it and continued a journey of surrendering my life to God.

I am seventy now and am mindful that my efforts to secure myself have never gone away, even as I have found security in God who, in the words of Karl Rahner, is Incomprehensible Mystery. My security is in the Incomprehensible! It is in the Mystery! Since my attempts at securing myself have not disappeared, I have been on a journey of relinquishing my life. My security is found in losing my life, my insecurity in trying to secure my life. (“For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” – Jesus)

The struggle remains. And God’s grace remains. God knows where I am in the midst of this struggle, for which I am grateful; I am thankful that God knows me and knows where I am. And God is my deliverer. The journey I am on is a journey of grace.

I share this experience, because I realize I am not alone in this, and I understand the danger of seeking knowledge and information as a way to secure ourselves. This danger is certainly found in the ways that technology can give the illusion of power and security. And the scientific method, while achieving much growth in empirical knowledge (and at the same time multiplying the questions and keeping us immersed in mystery), can, nevertheless, for some, be a means of “pinning things down” in order to gain a sense of security. When technology and science become a way of securing ourselves, our lives narrow to a very mean (as in “small”) self. On the other hand, when science is pursued for the sake of knowledge rather than security, as with all forms of knowing, it opens us up to wonder and mystery—and therefore to spirit. (Read the Journey of the Universe, by Brian Thomas Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker.)

But an attempt to secure ourselves by our knowledge may reach its most dangerous level in theology. The temptation to have our thoughts about God secure us is great. For many, the fall into this temptation is most obvious in fundamentalist thinking, where, for example, Bible quotes are provided as pat answers to all manner of life’s problems. However, the danger exists for any theological project. We are tempted to think our way to God, rather than reflect from our lived experience of God. The danger is that our theology becomes merely another ideology that keeps hidden the primary idols (false centers) that drive our lives and undermine our relationships. Theology replaces experience rather than reflecting it. Essentially, this is the cause of so many forms of Christianity revealing little or nothing of Christ.

Jesus speaks to this when he prays, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants.” And when he says, “Let the little children come to me…for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.” And “Unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Therefore: Leave aside all your thoughts, your intelligent and well-formulated answers. Become like an infant, not knowing, open to receive. Be silent. Be still. “Be still and know.” (Psalm 46) Wait. “Be still before the Lord, and wait patiently for him.” (Psalm 37) Release your thoughts and yield to Incomprehensible Mystery. Be open to the One you can never wrap your thoughts around. You have put your faith in your thoughts; now trust the Mystery. The One you cannot comprehend will bear you up and secure you. In silence and trust, the eyes of your heart will be opened, so that you become aware of both your great need for God and God’s gracious acceptance. In that awareness, you may find that you are discerning your next steps. Your next steps, as God gives them, are prior to and greater than your reflections. Knowing and doing God’s will are preeminent over any theology.

As a response to God, the steps you take grow your true self. This experience gives rise to reflections so that you are not merely repeating what you heard from others or read in the Bible, but rather you are witnessing from your own lived reality.

Furthermore, you find that you are not bound to any one formulation of reality, but you are free to find new ways to express your experience as you change and grow. You increasingly become open to the many ways God comes to us and the many ways others have expressed this reality. You discover that, in the words of C.S. Lewis, “God is the great iconoclast.”(A Grief Observed) God keeps breaking up our images of God (for new images) lest we make any one image that in which we place our trust, our security being in God alone.

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The Coming Collapse

Hanns Lilje, a Lutheran pastor in Nazi Germany, in his book, The Valley of the Shadow (1950), shares his experience with arrest, interrogation and a trial that ended with his being sentenced to death. (Before the sentence could be carried out, however, communication broke down and the Allies gained control of Germany.) One of his observations in this book was that the Nazi regime was collapsing from within. He sees the collapse in the faces, features, and actions of guards, interrogators, and judge.

He views young men whose lives were “empty,” who “were forced to be brutal” which “caused them to crumble inwardly.” He describes the judge’s face, at his trial, in this way: It “had originally been a good one, almost noble, with clear-cut and intellectual features, but it had decayed (as it were) from within, and all his features bore signs of a terrible inner decline.”

Of tyrants, like Hitler, Lilje writes: “God allows the tyrant to follow his way blindly, to the end, until nothing remains.” Evil sown reaps the decline and fall of the evil-doer.

We are reminded of Paul’s words: “Do not be deceived; God is not mocked, for you reap whatever you sow.” (Galatians 6:7)

Evil sown carries its own demise within it. Sin is like a parasite. It eats away at truth, compassion, justice, mercy, and faithfulness until it has nothing left to feed upon. St. Augustine says, “Sin is nothing and human beings become nothing when they sin.” Sin always robs us of reality. The “nothing” that is sin produces no love; it undoes love. It shows no compassion, no mercy. Where justice is required, it is unjust. And it is untruthful: It takes away from and distorts the truth.

We experience this undoing personally, and we see it taking place all around us. None of us are without sin, and we all experience the breakdown sin causes in our lives and relationships, whether from our own sins or the sins of others against us. We see this corruption on a social and global scale. We see the loss of compassion daily in the mistreatment of human beings at our border, in our warring ways, in the gangsterism on our streets and in corporate boardrooms, in sexual assault and harassment, and in all forms of inhumanity towards others: the injustices in our criminal justice system, discrimination in housing, health care and educational resources, and in the neglect and hurt of the most vulnerable among us.

We see the disintegration of truth and compassion among those who are placed in positions of leadership. We currently have a man in the office of the presidency who has lied or made misstatements, according to fact-checking, more than 11,000 times in his presidency. Many have become numb to this situation. We have leaders who disparage and demean various ethnic groups and religions among us and leaders who show little regard for future generations as they refuse to address the issues of climate change, seeing such actions as disadvantages to their wealth and power.

But what we are seeing is not only the great hurt being perpetrated on others but the steady breakdown and destruction of the perpetrators themselves. They are unwittingly sowing the seeds of their own demise. Their corruption is eating away at branch and root. It is not surprising that our present government has had a steady flow of those who have had to leave their positions.

The New Testament book of James says, “Not many of you should become teachers…for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness.” Not many should become leaders. Judgment awaits. What has been sown will be reaped. If we have sown to destruction (the destruction of compassion and justice and mercy), we will reap destruction. We will reap our own inhumanity with its consequences in the hollowing out of our lives and our eventual collapse. Yes, we will leave carnage in our wake, but we will also lose our own souls.

We see this debilitation in the leadership of our government. It is a sickness unto death. That does not mean that we can simply sit, watch and wait for it all to fall apart and then attempt to pick up the pieces. That would mean more affliction on the most vulnerable, and it would mean our own disintegration. People of faith know that they are called to be witnesses. We are to witness from the grace, compassion, and justice we have experienced. As we learn to live from the Source of love, we know that we are under a call to speak to the corruption by witnessing to God’s compassion and justice. We are to join with others to call for compassion, justice, and mercy and do so by addressing the specific injustices of our time, working to make right what is wrong. We are to do justice. We are to be channels of the kind of love that effects actual change.

To those who continue down the road of destruction, who have committed themselves to that road, we will be viewed as subversives. To those who hold onto power for themselves (and “their people”) over against others, we will be called radicals. But then love, care for the truth, and doing justice are radical; they go to the root (radix) of being the humans God calls us to be.

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Christmas Reflections on Incarnation

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. (John 1:1-3,14)

Christmas is not the celebration of baby Jesus but of the entirety of Jesus’ life and the whole of humanity. It is the celebration of incarnation, the “Word become flesh.” We are giving thanks that we become truly human by becoming divine. The Word of God, God’s self-expression, participates in our humanity. Or to say it another way, humanity participates in the divine nature through Christ who is the Participant of the divine nature. (2 Peter 1:4)

In the early centuries of the church, especially with eastern Christianity, the word “divinization” was used as a way to express the meaning of incarnation. God, who created all things through the Word or Image of God—stamping all of creation with divine reality, raises up God’s creation into union with God. God “divinizes” God’s creation. We humans are that aspect of an evolving universe that has become self-conscious and that experiences itself as open to God. We are spirit as well as matter.

What this means is that God does not come to us as an afterthought or an add-on to creation and to our humanity, but inseparable from who we are, when we are truly ourselves. We cannot be truly human without, at the same time, being divine—that is, “children of God.” We were created for union with God.

When we are alienated from God (what Christians mean by “sin”), we experience the loss of our humanity. What we have lost is our divine center. We have tried to make ourselves the center of our own universe, no longer at home with God or the universe. We construct a false self and produce broken relationships and broken societies and a broken enviornment.

We have ways of expressing this loss of humanity. We speak of our inhumanity. We speak in negative terms. We are unloving, unwilling, untruthful, ungrateful, unfaithful, impatient, unkind, unspiritual, in a state of disunity, discord, disorientation, etc. What we have lost is the fruit of the Spirit of God, “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” (Galatians 5:22-23) When we are godless, we are inhuman.

When Jesus proclaims God’s reign and calls us to repent, he is telling us to turn back to God as the center and source of our lives. He is expressing the same call as the prophets before him: “Return to your God, hold fast to love and justice, and wait continually for your God.” (Hosea 12:6)

Jesus declares that God’s reign is near. The source and center of our lives, the fountain of life and our true humanity, is not far away. We can turn again to the divine center. “In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.” (Isaiah 30:15) Therefore James tells us to “draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.” (James 4:8) Right now, in this moment, we can again draw near to God, knowing that God is drawing us near.

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Walking by Faith Through the Storm

A great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped. But [Jesus] was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. He said to them, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” (Mark 4:37-40)

Jesus was in the stern, asleep on a cushion. I count this as the first miracle in the story. The second is the calming of the storm.

We relate to this story because we all experience storms. They take many forms: natural catastrophes, breakdowns of one kind or another, the inhumanity of human beings toward each other (our sin that dehumanizes us and the sins of others that hurt us). Whether our storms come from within or without, they create disturbance and fear and test our faith in God. They occasion the question, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?”

Fear tempts us to trust in ourselves rather than God. Anxiety creates an urgency to take things into our own hands as if there is no time to wait on God and discern next steps. Faith, on the other hand, will have us at peace in the midst of the storm—even in the midst of a societal breakdown. It will, therefore, free us to act in life-giving ways.

Faith in God enabled Jesus to sleep as the storm raged, and also enabled him to calm the storm. It is by faith that we realize God’s presence and power. I have the impression that when Jesus, after calming the storm, said to his disciples, “Have you still no faith?” he was implying that if they had believed, they would have calmed the storm themselves rather than wake him up. After all, he said, elsewhere, that if they had faith the size of a mustard seed, they could move mountains.

Jesus calls us to desire after God and to draw near to God that we might increasingly live from God. We are encouraged that a very little faith—a mustard seed size—will take us a long way in facing and engaging the disorder of our time. By faith, we find that we can walk through storms, and receive, learn and grow. The storms will come, and some will be long-lasting, but, by resting in God, we will rest in the storm. And, at times, be given the power to calm the storm.

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