For the Joy of the Journey

Quarantine Reflections -All Lives Matter

George June 20, 2020 Quarantine Reflections 3 Comments

It would be hard to imagine someone who has not heard “Black Lives Matter”. BLM has become a trigger. Some hear a clarion call for justice. For others is is a mantra calling for revolution and anarchy. It is difficult to distinguish who is saying what in the chaos of protests.

Black Lives Matter, but I am reluctant to publicly proclaim it for fear of being misunderstood. Certainly I wouldn’t say “Black Lives Don’t Matter”, I don’t believe that. Struggling with that dilemma, my reflexive response is “All Lives Matter”(ALM).

By all indications, I’m in good company, ALM seems to be the overwhelming rebuttal to BLM. My perception is that ALM is mostly a “Christian” response. There is ample justification for Christians declaring ALM. After all, God is love and cares about every person. As Christians we’re commanded to love our neighbors, even our enemies. All lives matter is an unequivocal truth for Christians.

So, why are there visceral reactions to “All Lives Matter”by some Black Lives Matter” proponents’? Shouldn’t there be an appreciation for my love and compassion for everyone, which, of course, includes black people? Because I am who I am, It would be presumptuous to answer for BLM proponents.

In the course of wrestling with this dilemma, I thought of times in our previous church when a member would come to the front for prayer, in response to an invitation song. Often in deep distress because of tragic and/or unjust circumstances, baring their soul in despair. Standard protocol called for an elder to receive their lament and then share their story with the congregation, followed by a prayer on their behalf.

I painfully remember that on some occasions, their story being shared by an elder, followed by well intentioned words of encouragement that went something like:
“God loves us all and I want you know to how much you are loved by everyone here today. These are difficult times for you, but let me tell you, we’ve all had troubles and we survived and so will you. Let us pray.”

Thinking back to that scene, I now see her desperate need to know she mattered to God. Often in the midst of distress we perceive God to be absent, despite “don’t worry He will be with you” assurances.

“When he passes me, I cannot see him; when he goes by, I cannot perceive him.” Job 9:11 NIV

We believe God loves everyone but still struggle to believe He loves us. To paraphrase, our answer to “Do I matter to God?” , we said “All Lives Matter to God”. Hearing all lives matter was like a mother of five telling one injured child, “Don’t worry, you know how much I love all you kids”.

I doubt anyone believes the shepherd in Jesus’ parable of the lost sheep, did not love the nine-nine he left to find the one lost sheep.
Each of us need to know we matter, to know if we wander off, the shepard will come for us. The parable records celebration in heaven on the return of one lost sheep. I imagine a joyous celebration by the ninety-nine, not so much for the stupid sheep who got lost and was found, but for the shepherd, they knew would come for them if they were lost.

Declaring all lives matter to God, discounted her as God’s daughter and His particular concern for her. Her pain and circumstances were minimized as ordinary.

Hear my cry, O God; listen to my prayer.
Psalm 61:1

It is true “All lives matter to God’, but in the cacophony of grief, fear and doubt we are unable to hear.

“When everything is important, nothing is important”.

Thinking about that story is helpful in my struggle with BLM vis-a-vis ALM.
It prompted me to hear “Black Lives Matter” as a plea to be heard, not an indictment to be refuted. Not a demand, but a plea to listen.

Listening that produces understanding and shared humanity.
Listening which restrains the impulse to answer in protection and defense of my rightness.
Listening that refuses to minimize and diminish others’ pain.
Listening that affirms “All Lives Matter”

I am keenly aware of the risk that comes with suggesting listening as a response to “BLM”. It seems naive and simplistic. For my social justice friends, it sounds patronizing, “please tell us your story”, another way to void the hard work of addressing systemic injustice. My “All Lives Matter” friends will sigh with relief from angst about “What can I do?”, suddenly relieved by the novel idea of listening. Wrong on both counts.

I call us to to respond to “Back Lives Matter” with listening shaped by Jesus:

“Think of yourselves the way Christ Jesus thought of himself. He had equal status with God but didn’t think so much of himself that he had to cling to the advantages of that status no matter what. Not at all. When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, became human! Having become human, he stayed human. It was an incredibly humbling process. He didn’t claim special privileges. Instead, he lived a selfless, obedient life and then died a selfless, obedient death—and the worst kind of death at that—a crucifixion.” Philippians? ?2:5-8? ?MSG??

Our listening posture is to be like Jesus …not thinking of ourselves, giving up any status or privilege, being human, selflessly accepting a humbling experience.

Bonhoeffer wrote concerning listening:
“Just as love for God begins with listening to his Word, so the beginning of love for the brethren is learning to listen to them. It is God’s love for us that he not only gives us his Word but also lends us his ear.
“Many people are looking for an ear that will listen. They do not find it among Christians, because these Christians are talking when they should be listening. But he who can n o longer listen to his brother will no longer be able to listen to God either; he will be doing nothing but prattle in the presence of God too. This is the beginning of the death of the spiritual life, and in the end there is nothing left but spiritual chatter and clerical condescension arrayed in pious words.”

If Jesus isn’t enough here are some words from secular friends:

A recent study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology … studied the tension between Palestinians and Israelis, as well as Mexican immigrants and white Arizonians.

What they found was that when individuals were given a chance to share their stories and experiences with people from the other side, it helped improve their attitude about the “opposing group.” This effect was even stronger when it was a member of the “disempowered group” being heard by someone from the “dominant group.”

Disempowered groups often feel like their voice isn’t being heard. They think their values and needs aren’t being considered, and this can fuel resentment toward the more dominant group, who often has more of a stronghold over public debate.

However, when the dominant group makes an effort to hear things from another point-of-view, the disempowered group begins to feel that their values and needs are being listened to. This can be a great starting point for easing conflict and tension.

The power of being heard can be life-changing! It’s so important to us, and rightfully so. It feels amazing to open up to someone, and they ACTUALLY listen to us!
https://heyitskristikay.com/the-power-of-being-heard-why-is-it-so-important/

Learning to Listen
It can be stated, with practically no qualification, that people in general do not know how to listen. They have ears that hear very well, but seldom have they acquired the necessary aural skills which would allow those ears to be used effectively for what is called listening.
https://hbr.org/1957/09/listening-to-people

There is no absence of resources to learn how to listen. The state of our society should create an urgency to learn to listen.
I believe Bonhoeffer gave the best reason to listen:

“…he who can n o longer listen to his brother will no longer be able to listen to God…”

Notes Anthology 6-12-2020

George June 15, 2020 Notes Anthology 0 Comments

I use the iPhone Notes app religiously ( no pun intended). Most often I save quotes, quips, etc from daily readings. I save them, hoping to eventually post about them or share later. Mostly they stay hidden on my iPhone. There is no intended theme or thread, but they may give some insight into the drumbeat in my head.

A better future
…if you start from the philosophical premise that the past has nothing to teach you and the present is just the poisoned fruit of the past, you’re not destined to recreate something better. You’re virtually guaranteed to recreate something worse
Jonah Goldberg

Some day
…making ourselves imperious so that there will never be a doubt in anyone’s mind who is the god of the day, the messiah of the moment, the king of the mountain, the goddess of heaven, the person in charge, the abbot, the boss, the president, the power. But down deep, that may be the most powerless position of all. If we refuse to ask for help, if we distance ourselves from the strengths of others, if we cling to the myths of authority and power where trust is needed, we leave out a piece of life. We condemn ourselves to ultimate failure because someday, somewhere, we will meet up with the thing we cannot do and our whole public self will depend on our being able to do it.
From “Scarred by trouble, Transformed by hope.”

The Crowd
The passions of crowds often seem to empower a group to do something that a single individual would never dare or even wish. There is an anonymity that comes about in which personhood begins to be obscured and lost. It is a dangerous episode in the life of any nation, regardless of the cause.
Fr Stephen Freeman

Courage
Courage is not nearly so rare a quality as we sometimes like to think it is. We forgive ourselves the responsibility to muster it on the grounds that it is the unwonted virtue of unusual people in momentous circumstances. The truth is that courage is what carries simple people through an average day. It is not an action; it is an attitude. It is the spiritual strength that gives direction in the midst of confusion. It is no more uncommon than fear. It is, in fact, the child of fear.
Joan Chisttister

Common Ground
The first and most basic area of common ground is that we are all made in the image of God. Without agreement on this most basic assertion there can be no agreement on anything else. …The denial of that fundamental equality, in thought or practice, is not simply a denial of the stated laws of most modern nation states, it is a denial of God’s work in creation and of Christ’s Incarnation.
Phoenix Preacher

Speak to be heard
“you must speak (or write) in a way that people can hear you.” If you simply write to offend, no one will listen other than people who already agree with you. It seems that many don’t care anymore if anyone can hear them or not, they just love the sound of their own voices and the offense they create…
Phoenix Preacher

Listening
Younger people realize you haven’t been listening. It’s not the position people hold that is offensive. It is the fact you don’t value people and their view point enough to be able to articulate it to other people. You aren’t capable of the hard work of listening, the reason is you’re not humble.
We are led by people who have always been in power. When you are in power you don’t have to listen, people do what you want.
Josh Graves

Internet
The internet is a biopsy of the human soul. A context where what is inside of us is pulled out of us and is made public, revealing any malignancy within us.
Erwin McManus

Preaching the Gospel
Preaching the the Gospel does not begin with being verbal. You can not talk people into love, surrender, love of truth. We must be verbalizing experience and experience that doesn’t ring true won’t go far.
Richard Rohr

The Mind of Christ
To get the mind of Christ we must practice, practice, practice.
Landon Saunders

Free Advice

So much to think about.

Who am I?

George June 12, 2020 Faith Challenges 2 Comments

Listening to a podcast this morning, the conversation turned to the subject of personal identity, essentially, who are you are? A life long task for me has been the pursuit of understanding who I am. For some, especially, my Christian brother and sisters, that may be a silly question for a Christian, to ask. Christians should have a ready answer, “I am… a Christian…Christ follower…believer…child of God… for starters. That answer may come out in the conversation but it is probably not my first response when I engage people who don’t know me.

More often I’m asked “what do you do?” rather than “who are you?”. In our society, you are what you do. Status, value and worth is all tied up in what we do. The competition for status is fierce. There is an industry devoted enhancing job descriptions on resumes. Stories of inflated resumes abound in the media, often with dire consequences.

It is my suspicion that people who ask “what do you do?” of new acquaintances, have an answer prepared when the question returns. Many people may not have an answer that can compete but if they do, the conversation may very well take another direction.

As I thought more, it occurred o me asking “what do you do?” is a handy and effective way to establish superiority and diminish or shame the other. Whether or not that is our intention, the result is the same. I remember my father-in-law always introduced me as a manager at Ford Motor Company. I’m sure he had no idea of the baggage that came with that if anyone knew much about Ford production managers. Thankfully, the spotlight dimmed when he introduced my PHD brother-in-law.

During the afore mentioned podcast, it was suggested, whenever people ask “what do you do”, resist answering and, if you do, be as vague as possible and redirect the conversation in a way that will engage them and find opportunity to know them and vise versa. What they do is not who they are.
I particularly encourage Christians to consider the mine field created when asking”what do you do?”, our goal is to engage and love others. Also, it might be helpful to rethink canned responses of “I’m a …Christian…Christ follower…believer…child of God… et al” and please don’t say I am a member of _______ church. Those descriptions may have entirely different meanings for unbelievers. Whatever we are are, they will find out soon enough when they get to know us. Besides, it could help to avoid embarrassing Jesus and his followers.

Here are a few things I’m pondering.
How to answer “What do you do?”?
What should I answer if asked “Who are you?”?
If I shouldn’t ask, “What do you do?”, what should I ask?

So much to think about.

Notes Anthology – 6-8-2020

George June 8, 2020 Notes Anthology 0 Comments

It has been a crazy week. So much information it’s hard to winnow it down, but here goes.

Forgiveness
Desmond Tutu wrote: “Until we can forgive, we remain locked in our pain and locked out of the possibility of experiencing healing and freedom, locked out of the possibility of being at peace.”

No atheist in a foxhole?
Godfrey Diekmann, a legendary Benedictine liturgist, recounted being sunk up to his hips in a swamp while gathering watercress and having to be pulled out by a truck hoist. It was delicate and dangerous business. In the Christmas letter he wrote following the event he said that after more than fifty years of monastic life, “What bothers me is that during the entire ordeal of about twenty-five minutes I didn’t have a single pious thought!”
from “Scarred by Suffering, Transformed by Hope”

The Essence of Life
The essence of life is not to find the one thing that satisfies us but to realize that nothing can ever completely satisfy us. And that’s all right.
Joan Chittister

Self-Deception
In their own eyes they flatter themselves
too much to detect or hate their sin.
Psalms 36:2

NT in one sentence
It will take the Word of God in concert with the Spirit of God to transform people of God into the image of God so they can participate in the will of God to redeem the world of God. If I had to reduce the New Testament to one sentence, that would be it.
J D Walt

Racism
“I recognize that most people who make this declaration of racism being ‘a sin issue, not a skin issue’ have good intentions. They rightly infer simple legislation can’t establish racial harmony. However, it is dangerous for the church and its relevance in society to continue to infer racism will only be made better by personal sin management. We must address the deeper complex implications of racism being an issue of idolatry. Otherwise the church will continue in it’s legacy of being complicit in the persistence of the racial divide.”
Mike Frost

Power to be
And what of social or political arrangements–however important in their own right–can guide and empower me to be the person I know I ought to be? Can anyone now seriously believe that if a people are only permitted or enabled to do what they want, they will then be happy or more disposed to do what is “right?”
Dallas Willard

Loving the unlikable
In the Church, we talk about loving our enemies. But truth be told, our enemies are not the hardest people to love. It’s not those who antagonize us, but the pariahs, the socially awkward—the people with boundary issues, the guy with the wildly inappropriate jokes, the girl who talks like she’s paid by the word count—who pose the real challenge.
Some people are just unlikable. Try as you might, you cannot muster the desire to spend time with them. You don’t want to talk to them, and when given the opportunity, you will go out of your way to avoid the awkward, culturally expected niceties.
We tell ourselves we love them; we just don’t want to spend time with them or be seen in public with them. One trick we are taught to master from a young age is the ability to justify. We rationalize not liking certain people because they just aren’t likable.
Yet Jesus has the audacity to tell us to love other people. Not just that, He says it’s the second most important commandment in all the law. The only thing more important than loving other people is loving God Himself.
Tyler Edwards

Broken spirituality
…we feel the spiritual yearning burning in our hearts and souls, but we struggle to keep this quest from devolving into superficiality and triviality. We long for spiritual depth, but I fear our “spiritual but not religious” approach to faith is just some mystical tinsel we’d sprinkled over our consumerism and self-absorption.
Richard Beck

Doing Nothing
My experience is that questioning our responsibility for history’s outcome will always be met with anxious objections that we would be agreeing “to do nothing” and the results would be terrible. Keeping the commandments of Christ is not doing nothing. It is, however, the refusal to use violence to force the world into ever-changing imaginary versions of the good.

Think with me for a moment and ask yourself this question – “Have you so rationalized the world around you that prayer and obedience to Christ and his teachings now feels like doing nothing?”
Fr Stephen Freeman

Remember this the next time you complain about having to walk your dog.

Quarantine Reflections – Life Interrupted

George June 7, 2020 Quarantine Reflections 0 Comments

I am in the process of reading “Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope” by Joan Chittister. In chapter 8 writing about “When Life is Interrupted”, I found her thoughts particularly relevant and helpful. Perhaps you will also.

When life is interrupted

The great interruptions of life leave us completely disoriented. We become lost. The map of life changes overnight and our sense of direction and purpose goes with it. Life comes to a halt, takes on a new and indiscernible shape. Promise fails us and it is the loss of promise that dries in our throats. What was is no more and what is to come, if anything, is unclear. All the things we depended on to keep us safe, to show us the way, to give us a reason for going on, disappear.

I understand only two things in my helpless rage: that there must be enemies somewhere and that they have managed to destroy me though see them I can’t and know them I don’t.

I am left plunged in black loneliness, the life behind me a little thinner now, the life before me a little less welcoming. Through it all, I find myself blindfolded and spinning somewhere in an inner space I have never known before.

We find ourselves on a wet, grey slope of sliding clay, being towed under, being swallowed up and taken down, no towline to save us. Who has not known this helpless, sinking feeling? Who has not known the God of Absence? Who has not felt abandoned by God?

It is the moment of personal crucifixion in which we finally say out loud what we most fear: that there is no God, at least not here, not now. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” becomes a personal cry. In the depths of pain, we suddenly find that this universe is, at base, a gross and teasing thing, purposeless, unguided, unwanted, uncared for. We doubt the God of losses. We doubt the notion of any God at all. We certainly doubt that God has anything real to do with us. If there is a God, it is a God who laughs at butterflies impaled on a board.

Sure of the absence of God, we actually become aware of the presence of God. It is the paradox of faith. It is the fortunate misadventure of life. By losing everything, we come to the realization that everything is far less than we think it is and far more than we ever dreamed it could be. In the end, everything is what cannot be taken away, what cannot be lost, what will not fail us in our hope. Everything is the nagging awareness that always there is more and that I already have it. I am reduced by misery to stop and look through the darkness to the light on the horizon that never changes.

Struggle is what forces us to attend to the greater things in life, to begin again when life is at its barest for us, to take the seeds of the past and give them new growth.

We fear darkness and we avoid it. Nothing chills the soul more than lightlessness. It threatens our confidence. It jeopardizes our sense of self-sufficiency. To be in new space, to be where we do not know the contours of the place, cannot see the exit sign, cannot control the environment shakes us to our roots. We become pawns in the hands of the great unknown. And then, just then, we begin to believe in God in a whole new way. Darkness is the call to faith.