New Year's Meditation

"You crown the year with your bounty" (Psalm 65:11).

What is the meaning of the "year"? The earth laps the sun once more, the seasons pass: leaves gather, grow thick and luxuriant, then dazzle us with gold, red, then browner, falling to the earth. Life is not just a single arrow flying, but a circle, a web, life given, life lost, life renewed, so natural, God's constancy played out annually.

The Christian marking of time is not the fiscal year, not the calendar year. We begin, rather weirdly, just after Thanksgiving, with Advent, a little ahead of everybody else, and when the darkness is long. Every year we re-rehearse the full Bible story: Jesus is born, is baptized, tempted - and so we observe a 40 day fast during Lent. Jesus is raised, the Holy Spirit comes - and so we observe Easter and Pentecost. Every year of our lives, we rewind and re-watch the Bible's dramatic epic; we live inside the story, and discover our place on the stage - not asking Is the Bible relevant to my life? but Is my life relevant given the Bible?

In his 1980 debate with Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan asked "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" Maybe the Christian asks each year, Am I closer to God than last year? Am I serving more faithfully? Have I grown in my giving? in my prayer? in holiness? It's just one more year - but then recall how fraught with profound meaning the numbers we attach to a year can be. 1967? My grandfather died. 1986? I got married. 2001? 9-11. 2012? That was the year I got serious about my faith...

My grandfather’s tombstone shows eight numbers with a little dash in the middle: 1904-1967. Peek under any such dash and you see a year, and more years (and there never seem to be enough of them when you love the person), a moment here, an act there, a lazy afternoon, working past dusk, a trying week, a blissful month, a year of anxiety, three years of declining health, a decade on the best job you ever had. Our attention spans are short (and getting shorter all the time) - but Christians, especially at the turn of the year, take the long view, as God does: “A thousand years in Your sight are like a day” (Psalm 90:4). We stop, step back, soar up high, and gauge the broad sweep of time, in which this afternoon's situation is merely a pebble on the beach, in which my entire life is a single measure in the triumphant symphony of God’s great composition of the universe.

How many years will I have? and what would make them “full”? In faith, we look back: can you remember what God has done in your life? Rifle through the boxes of old photos in your memory and notice a hand, a smile, a circumstance, a moment, and notice what God has done to bring you to this place. There are wounds, too - and you go there, and let God’s healing mercy heal.
But like Janus, we look back, and then turn forward. Inevitably our orientation is toward the future, God’s future. Today’s agonizing sorrow, or today’s heady success, will be eclipsed. Martin Luther King, coping with terrible setbacks, said “I am no longer optimistic, but I remain hopeful.” Optimism says everything will be better tomorrow; but hope is prepared for whatever happens tomorrow. Optimism depends on you and me doing better; but hope depends on God. The year to come is in God’s hands, and I would put myself into God’s hands now, and all year long.

And so we pray that classic John Wesley prayer for the New Year: I am no longer my own, but yours. Put met to what you will, rank me with whom you will; put me to doing, put me to suffering. Let me be full, let me be empty. Let me have all things, let me have nothing. I freely and heartily yield all things to your pleasure and disposal. And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, you are mine, and I am yours.

Christmas Message 2011

This is not a column about Christopher Hitchens, although his death (or rather, his life) and the losses and doings of Steve Jobs, Kim Jong Il, and whomever it is you wish were here today are why I’m writing. But not really: I am writing to try to explain the Christian message to those the Church has confused, or wounded, and maybe even for satisfied Christians who’ve missed the point, as we all do from time to time.

Within minutes of the announcement of Hitchens’s death, I received multiple inquiries: is he in heaven now? How to respond? “I hope so,” or “I guess he knows now God really is great”? His book, God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, bugged me. Religion really has poisoned lots of things – but not everything. We poison things quite well on our own without religion, and we’re the ones who poisoned religion – including Christmas. Jesus in heaven must look down and shake his head over all the froth, the frenzy of self-indulgence. Sure, we remember to toss in a little spasm of charity, a toy for some child we’ll never meet – and then we paste a “Jesus is the reason for the season” sticker on it all so we whose true religion is consumerism feel semi-righteous?

What is Christianity? It is not that God is great. Rather, God is small. What we believe is that God’s greatness is that God became small to win our hearts. Absolute power, the kind Kim Jong Il wielded, intimidates; God wants to be as unscary as possible. Who’s scared of a child? And who can’t identify with God’s self-revelation as an infant? If God became tall, witty, muscular, or rich (or even a mother or father), many of us couldn’t connect. You once were small, vulnerable, dependent, needing lots of love, like Jesus.

And you will be vulnerable and needing the love again one day. We are mortal; our truest carol phrase is “Lo, the days are hastening on.” One day you won’t be here to do Christmas any longer – and you know this, because there is somebody you couldn’t imagine living without who won’t be there Christmas morning, or ever again. I mention this, not to frighten or manipulate. Rather, it’s just reality that we are transient beings, not here for so long – but we never feel comfortable about that. We want more, we yearn for a future, for deeper meaning.

Which brings me to Steve Jobs, and his awful gadgets that require us to be somewhere we aren’t. I fume when I’m with somebody who isn’t there; he’s pecking at a screen, he’s someplace else, but not there either. And yet, this impulse to find meaning somewhere else, this urge to reach for a linkage beyond the room where I am is absolutely on target. This world isn’t enough; we are hardwired to reach beyond. Children know this: they daydream, their world is enchanted, they can believe in the unseen. The story of Christmas is that God is – and God is, even if we are tone deaf to God, even if we are mean to God like Christopher Hitchens or mean to other people like Kim Jong Il.

I suspect this is why God thought the best way to reach us was by way of a child. Big people can make you fight, defend, grab. But a child evokes tenderness. How could a child be the solution to our really large problems, like economic and political turmoil or even violence? If we could remember the little children (as Jesus said once he got bigger) we really would get our priorities straight and stop shooting, grabbing greedily, and bickering. Think Jerry Sandusky. Every one of us is mortified: no one should stand by and let a child be hurt! So God showed us God in the shape of a child, inviting us to rise up and refuse to settle for injustice; children elicit goodness in us.

Notice there is no judgmental attitude in this message. To consider the idea that God entered our world as a child isn’t harsh judgment on anybody. Jesus didn’t sit up in the manger and denounce others, or deliver a lecture entitled “We are right, everybody else is wrong!” Jesus is the affirmation of all people, including you and me. Jesus isn’t my trump card defeating you. The idea of God-down-here is something special we treasure, and it causes us to treasure you, or we’ve missed the point. Jesus is the truth that we are all indelibly noble, worth loving and protecting, and that we can’t help but love other people, and not merely with a toy in December but with food and shelter (which Jesus’ parents had a hard time finding!) all year round.

And so, let’s contemplate the wisdom and hope in God being not great but small, and discover that God really does want to get close, the child being the only hope for such wonderful things as goodness, hope and love.

A Prayer for Thanksgiving Day 2011

O Give Thanks to the Lord, for He is Good (Psalm 118:1). What shall I render to the Lord for all His bounty? I will lift up the sacrifice of Thanksgiving, and call on the name of the Lord (Psalm 116:17).

Almighty, gracious, compassionate and faithful God, we get confused about giving You thanks, as we are more likely to bow our heads and enumerate the things we have achieved for ourselves than to realize what You have actually given, more likely to notice what distinguishes us from or vaunts us above other people than to recognize how, like a good Father, You love and bless all Your children.
So on this Thanksgiving day, we choose to “be still, and know that You are God” (Psalm 46:10), that “You have made us, not we ourselves” (Psalm 100:3). We thank You then

for Dependence, even in a culture that prizes independence, for we need You, we cannot take a breath without You; we are utterly dependent upon You, the way a flower needs rain and sunshine, the way a child needs mother’s caress – and therefore we thank You then

for Life, and not just the fact that I am still surviving, but for the fullness of life, the goodness of being able to see a face, and be seen, my heart beating, the breath I just took for granted, the wonder of rising in the morning to say “This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it” (Psalm 118:24), the calm that can weather troubles and anxieties because we cherish the simple fact of being – and therefore we thank You then

for Recollection, as the richness of life is not merely now, but the memories of those we have loved, some of whom we have lost, magical moments, words spoken, kindnesses received, and coming to understand the plot of Your goodness over many years, certainly in the days of Abraham, Moses, Mary, and Paul, and in the lives of the saints, but also in our days and years, and we gladly bear the light burden and humbled delight of gratitude as we reminisce, tell stories, gaze at old photos – which reminds us to thank You then

for the Senses, without which we could not see a smile, the harvest moon, the trees or a deer, without which we could not hear a child’s giggle or words of love, without which we could not smell a bouquet of flowers or danger from the car’s engine; without the sense we could not feel an embrace, or taste our food; and without our senses we would not be able to visualize Jesus, who was God in human form, with eyes and ears, who touched and fed, and made us then to be His eyes, ears and hands, and so we see and feel what breaks God’s heart, giving us more cause for thanks for the privilege of being the answer to somebody else’s prayer to God for help – and therefore, strangely, we thank You then

for Frustration, that inner instinct You have woven into our souls about how things ought to be, a keen awareness that the world is broken, and that things are out of sync not just with our wishes but with your will, so we know to right things, not to be complacent, and thus we thank You for the labors of justice and mercy You to which You call us – and therefore we even realize to thank You

for the Outcasts, the people nobody else wants, the despised, ostracized, or hurt, who are never invited to anything or honored by anybody, who strike us as weird or scary, and yet we know they are not weird to You, but much beloved – and so we thank You for them as they remind us of the breadth and depth of Your love, they help us to reconcile with the secret strangenesses in our own selves, and gift us with the lovely labor of hospitality – something on which was founded another cause for gratitude,

for our Nation, that like all people on God’s good earth, we take pride in our homeland, and pray for better, truer days when we live out our ideals of virtue and striving together for the common good; we might actually be grateful for who we are, and pray for our leaders more than we rage and complain, and even find the way to peace with others who love their nations – and to do so we are aided in all these endeavors by the special people You have raised up to bless us, as we thank You

for Heroes and Saints, many of whom we have known, and miss this day, many we have only read about in storybooks or the Scriptures, and yet they inspire us, and prove the nobility You have planted deeply in all of us, which we will never realize until we learn to give You thanks

for Sacrifice, increasingly undervalued and shunned in our society; yet we rejoice that sacrifice has always been at the very heart of Your way in saving us, and sacrifice remains the highest calling to which we might aspire – and the very idea of “aspiring” stirs us to give thanks to You

for Transcendence, that implacable desire to reach beyond merely what we see, or what we can achieve for ourselves, to soar beyond all we can know or manage, and reach out to You, only to discover You have been not just reaching out to but also embracing us all along when we were too foolish to notice, and that our restlessness is nothing less than You calling us home to Your own loving heart – glimpses of which You grant us constantly, as we thank You  

for Beauty, not the shiny baubles we can purchase, but the wrinkled smiling face of a grandmother, the stunning hues in the clouds at sunset, the pinpricks of nighttime light that have been streaming our way for years, a wildflower, a country hillside, an old white A-frame church, a family photo, the autumn leaves, whose beauty is defined in their moment of death, whose frightening specter gives us cause for perhaps the deepest gratitude of all –


for Hope, that there is a future, even beyond what we get done in this life, a day with no sorrow, no failure of gratitude, and all will be praise, celebration, and delight, and we will cavort with saints, and sinners, outcasts and those we have lost, praising you forever and ever.

O Give Thanks to the Lord, for He is Good (Psalm 118:1). What shall I render to the Lord for all His bounty? I will lift up the sacrifice of Thanksgiving, and call on the name of the Lord (Psalm 116:17).

Change or Die, by Alan Deutschman

Alan Deutschman opens Change or Die by citing baffling statistics that expose the brutal truth about something in our nature. Knowing change is required, we just don’t change – and sometimes we quite literally die because of it. “A relatively small percentage of the population consumes the vast majority of the health care budget for diseases that are very well known and by and large behavioral. That is, they’re sick because of how they choose to lead their lives. Around 80% of the health care budget is consumed by just five primarily behavioral issues: too much smoking, drinking, and eating, too much stress, and not enough exercise.”

Now healthy folks who exercise, don’t smoke, eat carefully and drink moderately might feel smug – but Deutschman points to health issues in order to expose something more fundamental in human nature. We all indulge in something that is self-destructive – but the point of his book is How can change happen? Mistaken notions dominate American thinking about change. Deutschman speaks of the 3 F’s: facts, fear, and force. We think If we just let people know the facts, they will change – but this is not true. We think fear motivates change, but scaring people with regard to their addictions or their deeply rooted habits only casts a cloud of trembling gloom without producing change. We think force will make change happen – but try forcing an alcoholic not to drink, or a teenager to behave, or … well, fill in the blanks.

Deutschman has studied many programs that work, and interviewed experts in psychology and behavioral dynamics, and his “mission is to replace those three misconceptions about change (facts, fear and force)” with a new threesome, the 3 R’s: Relate, Repeat, Reframe.

Relate: “You form a new, emotional relationship with a person or community that inspires and sustains hope. If you face a situation that a reasonable person would consider ‘hopeless,’ you need the influence of seemingly ‘unreasonable’ people to restore your hope – to make you believe that you can change and expect that you will chance. This is an act of persuasion – really, it’s ‘selling.’” This is why the inspirational hero, the caring mentor, and even a new community of positive folks around you will actually cause change to happen, change that can never happen without a dreamer who can believe in your future, without healthy relationships that foster growth.

Repeat: “The new relationship helps you learn, practice, and master the new habits and skills that you’ll need. It takes a lot of repetition over time before new patterns of behavior become automatic and seem natural… Change doesn’t involve just ‘selling’; it requires ‘training.’” Change takes practice, patience, something like Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours, acting as if you have changed perhaps before you’ve actually come to embrace change on the inside.

Reframe: “The new relationship helps you learn new ways of thinking about your situation and your life. Ultimately, you look at the world in a way that would have been so foreign to you that it wouldn’t have made any sense before you changed. These are the three keys to change: relate, repeat, and reframe. New hope, new skills, and new thinking.”

Deutschman points to an interesting study that compared various therapeutical approaches in counseling – and as it turns out, they all work about the same! “The common denominator, it turned out, was that going to therapy inspired a new sense of hope for the patients… The key factor was the chemistry of the emotionally charged relationship formed by the patient and the therapist or the group, not the specific theories or techniques that differentiated the particular school of therapy.”

The Delancey Street Foundation in San Francisco has an unbeatable track record when it comes to the reform of criminal and drug addicts. The secrets seem to be that inmates are given broad responsibility for the program; they are asked to lead – and from the beginning they are required to behave and dress as if they are professional people. As they begin to act in noble ways, the inner psyche catches up to the outward habits being practiced, and deep lasting change dawns.

Studying turnarounds in corporate America, Deutschman demonstrates that the 3 R’s work not just at the personal level. New thinking, new leadership, and new habits can revolutionize even disastrously dysfunctional businesses. Sometimes even past success can be a barrier to the new changes required for a new day; so change is the one constant! “When you’re locked into the mindset that helped you succeed, then it’s difficult even to think about the profound changes you’ll have to respond to. But if you practice change, if you keep up your ability to change, if you use it rather than lose it, then you’ll be ready to change whenever you have to.”

There are powerful barriers, always, to change. Denial: “When we find ourselves in seemingly intolerable situations and feel overwhelmed by tension, anxiety, and a sense of powerlessness, or when the harsh realities of our lives threaten to crush our self-esteem, our minds unconsciously activate a number of powerful, built-in, automatic psychological strategies to help us cope. We shield ourselves from the threatening and humiliating facts. We banish the bad news from our conscious awareness. And who among us hasn’t been guilty, now and then, of Projection – blaming other people for our own faults? And does a day not go by before every one of us engages in Rationalization? But while our defense mechanisms are helpful in the short run – getting us through the day or the week – they block us from solving our persistent problems.”

Figuring out how to grapple with our past, and even pronounce our past a failure, can be paradoxically a self-defeating battle. Change “demands new explanations for a past that’s now cast in a darker light. The New Self has to come to terms with the Old Self. If it turns out that you can live as a sober, responsible, peaceful, and productive member of society, then why didn’t you live that way in the first place? One of the reasons we resist change, unconsciously at least, is that it invalidates years of earlier behavior.”

To make any progress, we need to recognize how essential it is to celebrate Short-term Wins: in corporations, in recovery programs, in marriages, in politics, “when organizations of all kinds try to change the habitual ways their members think, feel, and act, they need victories that nourish faith in the change effort, emotionally reward the hard workers, keep the critics at bay, and build momentum. Without sufficient wins that are visible, timely, unambiguous, and meaningful to others, change efforts invariably run into serious problems.”

And yet sometimes radical, big change must occur, given the complexities of small changes. Sometimes radical, sweeping, comprehensive changes “are sometimes easier for people than small, incremental ones. People who make moderate changes in their diets get the worst of both worlds: They feel deprived and hungry because they aren’t eating everything they want, but they aren’t making big enough changes to see an improvement in how they feel, or in measurements such as weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol.”

Then there is the principle that we change when we help others change. Studies have shown that therapy is “astonishingly therapeutic for the therapist…" At Delancey the convicts could develop self-respect from helping one another, even though their own knowledge and skills were limited.

All this syncs well with what we believe within Christianity about change.  Jesus never mailed out a bunch of scary facts and threatened people into change - although Jesus' churches have tried such tactics.  It's about relationships, and a stunningly marvelous vision, empowerment, trust - and yes, practice, developing new habits over time as we begin to become holy, children of God, followers of Christ.

10 Years after 9-11

   By noon on 9/11, a steady stream of people with a crazed mix of emotions, numb, panicky, teary, enraged, and confused, not knowing what else to do, showed up at churches like mine, even though it was a Tuesday. Much was said that week about God, sanctuaries were packed on Friday and again on Sunday – and now ten years have elapsed.

  I try to think of all that has transpired, what has changed, how we are different. We might have hoped America would rise up like a phoenix from the ashes into a grand new epoch of greatness. But the overwhelming emotion I read in my gut is simple, deep sadness. Let me reflect on the sadness, the acknowledgment of which might be the best way to rediscover hope.

   I know precisely where I heard the news, with whom I watched the unfolding horror, and the absolute urgency of needing to speak with and hug those I love but took for granted earlier that morning. A friend’s brother was in one of the towers: he phoned, said he was helping others to get out, and not to worry; we never heard from him again. 

We all felt helpless, watching the utter and devastating helplessness of the unrescuable; I wonder about the long-term paralyzing effects of these harrowing images etched in our souls.

   I could not sleep that week, and spent the wee hours in my children’s rooms, watching them sleep, grieving that they would grow up in such a violent world, praying for children I did not know by name whose parents had died in the attacks, or in efforts to rescue others.

   Ten years ago, national pride swelled, and some vow was made to rid the world of evil.  Ten years later, the economy is in shambles, and we are still mired in an unwinnable war (launched on the basis of dicey suspicions that proved to be wrong). Saddam and Osama are dead, but evil and violence still stalk the earth. The troubles of the world are so overwhelming we feel impotent, and don’t trust anybody any more.  And perhaps we are less willing than ever to ask hard moral questions about the way we pursue security.  We may be meaner than we were ten years ago; but if we are, it is because we are scared.

   I’m a bit embarrassed we've proven to be shallow people.  A decade ago this week, there was much talk about our unity as a nation, and that a great spiritual revival would sweep over our people. That marvelous feeling of unity lasted less than a month. Now the rage we should reserve for enemies in distant places is heaped on one another. We have seen the enemy, and the enemy is us; politics is an embarrassment, and we have become a bitter, angry people.

   The hypothetical spiritual revival was even more short-lived. Attendance in worship boomed – for about a week. Now, if anything, religion has been discredited. Wasn’t it a crazed, twisted faith that motivated the killers? And who looks more foolish? Those who say God orchestrated the events to judge us? or those who’d naively believed God would always protect us?

   Where is the blessing from 9/11? If there’s a God, this deity isn’t a genie who shelters us but not others. If there’s a God, it must be a God who cares about all people, all countries, and until we think about a good God in all places, and the way that goodness in God can and should manifest itself through all religions, we will shrivel into permanently frightened, angry victims.

   As a country, we now know what all other countries have experienced through history. Perhaps knowing, we can sympathize, and not intimidate so much as befriend, and maybe move toward the forgiveness and reconciliation that are at the heart of our faiths. We’ve learned that the immense power we wield (as our military still dwarfs all other militaries combined) cannot insulate us from harm; perhaps we can learn to ask how our bigness might foster understanding and peace. Perhaps we renew our claim to the moral high ground.

   Where should 9/11 rank among the days? To me, 9/11 is like 12/7/41, or the day my grandfather died, or the day a tornado touched down and killed a friend, or a shooter rampaged through Virginia Tech – tragic days, solidly and thankfully in the past. Evil probably loves so much attention being lavished on such a dark, violent day. 

   More crucial, and hopeful world-changing days in the past for us Americans might be not 9/11 but 7/4, when the good of independence was declared, or 1/1/1863, when the unjustly enslaved were emancipated. My children’s birthdates merit pomp and circumstance, for they are days that celebrate life, not death. Is Ground Zero sacred ground – a place where evil pumped its fist? Or is it the labor & delivery room? Or our sanctuaries where we pray and hope? or the classroom where a student gets a bold idea?

   What dates changed history? Christians point to Easter, Jews to the Passover liberation from bondage in Egypt; other traditions have their sacred, life-giving days as well. A graduation?  A wedding?  These are days with a future, with hope and joyful optimism. After a decade of grieving, fear and anger, might our next decade become one of a revival of courage and hope? Can we shake off the numbness and come back to life, to be the people who’ve been knocked down but get back up, unified not by rage but by hope, the kinds of people envisioned by those who signed on 7/4, the noble who celebrate Easter, Passover, birthdays, weddings or graduations? We reached out for meaning and help, love and hope, on 9/11. Might the best memorial be a new reaching out, and forward? Perhaps we may hope this 9/11 that there is such a God who can open a new window of hope, and the phoenix of goodness does finally rise from the ashes.

Mental Illness and Great Leadership

     Okay, so I enjoy the Colbert report far more than most sermons I hear (including my own).  In a recent episode, I giggled as Stephen Colbert interviewed an author – and I promptly ordered the book:  A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness.  This poor author, Nassir Ghaemi, not surprisingly was bested by Colbert (and gently criticized in The New York Times), but the book is wonderfully thought-provoking, and perhaps could prompt some intriguing discussion among religious professionals.

    Himself a psychiatrist (and specialist in mood disorders) who teaches at Tufts, Ghaemi explains with great clarity various dimensions of depression, mania, hyperthermia, neuroticism, and other mood disorders, and then assesses the way some of our most brilliant leaders – especially during times of crisis – have suffered from these at-times debilitating illnesses.  We may be familiar with Churchill’s “black dog,” or the intense darkness into which Lincoln would plunge, the overwhelming depression of Martin Luther King, Jr., or the near-suicidal bouts of agony endured by Gandhi, the scary symptoms exhibited by Gen. William Sherman, or the frantic mania of media mogul Ted Turner – not to mention the self-evident insanity of tyrants like Adolf Hitler.

     What we are unfamiliar with is Ghaemi’s best insight into the function of the suffering.  It is not that these titans overcame their illness, or managed to achieve much despite their illness.  Ghaemi persuasively illustrates the way depression fosters not just sympathy but realistic assessments, the way the manic can be energetic and creative when others are sunk in despair, the way survivors of inner torment develop a kind of resilience, without which leadership breaks down during times of duress. The sane, men like Neville Chamberlain or George W. Bush, simply do not have the stuff during a crisis; they do fine when all is running smoothly; but in times of peril and national distress, they simply cannot rise up and lead heroically, having never suffered much themselves.  For those who combat mental illness, darkness is not a strange land; horror is not an unfamiliar terrain.

     Can you say “theology of the cross”?  How many of the great saints, theologians and heroes through Church history might Ghaemi analyze and discern to be laden with mental illness?  Luther, surely; Francis, no doubt; Teresa of Avila, beyond question; and all those freakish ascetics like Simeon Stylies (squatting on a pillar for a few decades? Are you kidding?).  And what might this mean for ministry, and even for clergy evaluations (on which I wrote last month)?  Can we imagine a search committee pleased that a prospective pastor suffers bouts of depression?  Can we conceive of a day when a minister’s self-reported manic-depression would be cause for the people to think “Now we are on the verge of stellar leadership”?  Don’t we hide our darkness? and at best seek ultra-confidential support if something is awry in our heads?  We all know we all struggle internally, but isn’t there a game of pretend or obtuse optimism that, even if everybody else wages dreaded combat against mental issues, it is the clergy person who should be immune – or long since healed?

   Eugene Rogers (After the Spirit) wrote that the Spirit has so arranged things that our limitations are intended for our benefit.  Could it be that our darkness, our craziness, is not merely a burden to be overcome, but an actual gift of the Spirit to the Church? and not merely to those individuals among the Body who battle darkness, but actually the Church as the endangered institution that is is?  If the Church is indeed in its own “dark night” (as Elaine Heath wisely claims in The Mystic Way of Evangelism), don’t we need the unstable, those who have barely hung on by a thread, women and men who’ve been to the abyss to lead, for the unromanticized and terrifying but yet peculiarly hopeful gifts of inner pain to be used for the benefit of God’s Church?

Knowledge, Learning and God

     Knowledge is underrated these days – in at least three ways, and all three are of profound important for the Christian enterprise.
     We hear all the time that what you know doesn’t matter so much as what you do. But how is action driven by knowledge, or perspective, or viewpoint? Isn’t knowledge the springboard, the impetus for behavior? If we had more solid thought, wouldn’t our action be more purposeful, and anchored in something meaningful, instead of mere frenetic busy-ness (even in the name of God)?

     In our society, knowledge is reduced to a the lowly status of a means to an end. We get an education – but why? To get a good job, to make money, to get ahead. But once upon a time, knowledge was simply good. To know a fact from history wasn’t potentially valuable; it was itself of great value. If we know something, our minds are then close to God, for God knows history, all that has happened; God knows science, how things work and why they are as they are (since, after all, God made all things); God is the ultimate mind, and when we know, we are close to God.

     Who gave you your brain? God gave us minds whose potential we barely tap. I think God wants us to learn, to know, to be aware, to believe truth matters, to sift through the garbage of chatter and get to the marrow of things. God wants us not to think as the political cranks wish for us to think, all ideology and no fact; God wants us to think deeply, factually, but with wisdom, and perspective – to see what God sees, to understand as God understands.

     Some foolishly think knowledge is at odds with God - that faith is somehow anti-intellectual, or the abandonment of thinking.  God is puzzled, and saddened by this misconception.  God wants more knowledge, always, for truth is at the very heart of God.

     We can’t say I’m too old, or I already know what I need to know. We learn all the time; it may be news of heat in the Midwest, or that a FB friend’s kitten did something cute (with photos supplied); it may be a new conviction you’ve come to after listening to a pundit, or politician, or perhaps Steven Colbert. What am I learning? And from whom? Whom do I trust as teacher? Political ideologues? Novels? My neighbor, or coworker (after a few cocktails)? Jesus invites us to be attentive to what we know, what we focus upon, what we soak up, and why what matters actually matters to us – and if any of what we know brings us closer to God, or makes us wiser.

     Finally, knowledge changes things. Dictators and muckrackers want to shelter us from facts; they prefer we buy into their ideological hysteria. When we know, we understand; when we know, we cut through the nonsense that becomes idolatry and misleads us into bogus behavior and prejudicial judgment. If we know others, we know their foibles, but we also see the image of God in the other person; social psychologists teach us that “familiarity breeds liking” (not contempt). When we know the hard facts, we are motivated to act, to demand things not stay the way they are. We wake up, we now know.

     Jesus didn’t call do-gooders or piety specialists. He called “disciples,” and the word means “students.” Jesus as the teacher, and we are the students, and not just in Sunday School when we are seven years old. Lifelong learning, a quest to plumb the depths of the very soul of God, to think God’s thoughts ever more clearly, to adopt the divine perspective on whatever we perceive in our lives and in the world.

     Nothing is more important for you, for me, and for the future of humanity, than learning. And so we sign up, we embrace some curriculum, not because it is perfect, but because it is there, it is our best chance at knowledge, at mimicking the mind of Christ.

     Our Church, like many churches, offers the marvelous, intriguing, informative set of programs under the banner of Disciple. But we have much more – and even the stuff we put online, emails, YouTubes, and much more, are trustworthy projects to help all of us, together, to know God, and to know what God knows, and to value what God values.