It is nearly ten years since “9/11”, one of the most heinous acts of violence ever perpetrated on American soil. Whatever one may believe about the socio-political ramifications of what our response should be/should have been to this event, the fact remains that we are left with a sense of violation, vulnerability and uncertainty. As is the case with all international conflicts there are common patterns that emerge when we look at the players involved.

We experienced many of the same feelings of shock, dismay and indignation that faced the nation after the bombing of Pearl Harbour in 1941. There is a certain déjà vu rooted in our psyches that can haunt our shared memory. What are we to make of all this? What does it say about God? About our world? About us?

One man of God, a German Lutheran preacher, writer and theologian, Dietrich Bonheoffer, asked these hard questions to an audience who watched with baited breath the insidious advance of the Nazis through Europe during the Second World War. As one well acquainted with a dark and broken world desperately needing the redemptive touch of God, few others can speak more capably to the gospel notion of life through death. Bonheoffer’s personal commitment to Christ and the humble way of the cross led him into a Nazi prison and ultimately to a martyr’s death at the hand of his captors literally hours within reach of an allied rescue and the fall of the Third Reich. As we seek to follow Jesus and the way of the cross, we, like Bonheoffer and countless ones before and after him, will be expected to “die” in order that others may live.

Ash Wednesday, historically the beginning of the Lenten season, pictures Jesus’ 40 days of fasting in the wilderness and signifies a time of contrition – of repentance, humility and self-inspection before God and others. Whether in the larger events of our day or the minutiae of our lives both hidden and otherwise, we are beckoned to the desert with Jesus. Bonheoffer’s writings invite us, especially at the Lenten season, to a place of introspection and smallness before God. We are urged to frame the question, how are we ‘dying’ to live?

As the Word in the word slowly transforms us we come to live in kairotic ways; the time behind time, the spaces between the words in which God works mystical wonders in us. In abandoning ourselves to this encounter we become incarnational shadows of Ultimate Reality. This cannot be the case if we approach holy writ as mere text; God reduced to a subject of textual dissection. In so doing, we deny the Spirit in the text access to an available and willing subject for the healing scalpel of God. God wants not to be a concept for us to master. God invites to submit ourselves to the revealing light of the Logos, witnessed to in Scripture, whereby we are laid bare before the One with whom we have to do.

If, as Bob suggests, the Scripture is to be approached as a place for transformative encounter with God this presents a most baffling dilemma. We must place ourselves before the text as we would our spouse, in utter love, humility and surrender for understanding. As Wesley insisted, we must come to the text in the same spirit in which it was inspired and recorded. It can then do its deepest work as a living entity; alive because of the Life dwelling both in and outside its pages.

Experiences like a January Residency would feel more sterile and less dynamic were it not for the communal context in which we may, together, seek. It is one thing to speak of love. It is quite another to see it at work and be the object of the same. Such mysteries beg description like setting to words one’s first kiss or hearing the needy cry of one’s newborn child. Few things feel so jarring to the soul as the dislocation one experiences in the shadow of the Mount of Transfiguration. The memory of fellowship, still ripe with nuances and hope-filled déjà vu can seem a mockery when trying to retro-fit ourselves for life in the low places. Says the Psalmist, “I think of God, and I moan; I meditate, and my spirit faints. You keep my eyelids from closing; I am so troubled that I cannot speak.” Although spoken in a spirit of anguish, the Psalmist here outlines the bemusing distress of his own spirit before Yahweh.

This perfectly describes my post-Residency anguish. It is my fifth; my third as a student. In none of them have I walked away so utterly undone as this one. Was it the fact that, for our cohort at least, it was the last one? What was so different this year than other years when all of the elements that make these residencies so magnificent were just as present? What were all of the intersecting points between who they are to me and who I am becoming?

As mentioned in a previous entry, I am enjoying the rigors of an online Master’s program in Spiritual Formation and Leadership through Spring Arbor University. My next few posts will be reflections on our annual January Residency requirement. What follows are the beginnings of my thoughts from our most recent one. To wit…

It has been a rare occasion indeed when I have walked away so wrecked from an encounter than from this year’s January Residency. All of the reasons for this will, quite possibly, never be totally clear to me. What I can unpack with any sense of intelligibility is what follows.

Particularly appropriate to, and ironically illustrative of, our time with Dr. Robert Mulholland was a 2-day spiritual retreat under the leadership of Dr. Wil Hernandez. The inner nourishment provided by means of silence, community, liturgy and prayer served as an ideal foundation, the soil as it were, into which words about the Word might be planted. And that was the essential point of the entire week: how the word is ever the Word or Logos to us, God as text, the place of transforming encounter with God. My continuing reflections seek to answer some of the questions posed to us in a communal song, “The Summons”:

Will you come and follow me if I but call your name?

Will you go where you don’t know and never be the same?

Will you let my love be shown, will you let my name be known?

Will you let my life be grown in you and you in me?

Like millions before me, my initial introduction to the Scriptures was welcome, warm and winsome. Words fell effortlessly off the page to meet eyes lusting after more truth than I could possibly understand, let alone live. Jesus seemed alive in the gospel narratives. Paul’s careful exegesis of life, church, Jesus and their interrelationship was at once intriguing and alluring. The Psalms whispered or shouted in turn their voice of blessing, comfort, anger or woe and the Prophets proclaimed loud and clear God’s desire for holiness of life and faithfulness in worship.

Numerous study Bibles and countless marking pens later and I was neither appreciably closer to God nor to God-likeness. In fact, it was actually starting to become boring and stale. I found reading Shakespeare or Gerard Manley Hopkins more satisfying, theoretical physics more challenging and novels interpreting Arthurian legend more engaging. It seems that I had fallen under the same spell as any other post-Enlightenment, rational, Western individualist and treated the Bible much like the DVD Player or X-box instruction manual. What happens when I get it mastered? What then? Should I move on to more “difficult” material than God? When all the pieces are finally put together, as is the intent of such an approach, will I be more like Jesus? More fulfilled? More?

Dr. Mulholland set out to address this among other issues related to the role of Scripture in the process of spiritual formation. He was tacitly engaging, consistently interesting and a model of the interplay between keen intellect and deep faith. How could this not be a challenging experience!? In the words of Thomas Merton (a favorite author of Mulholland), “it is of the very nature of the Bible to affront, perplex, and astonish the human mind. Hence the reader who opens the Bible must be prepared for disorientation, confusion, incomprehension perhaps outrage” (Thomas Merton, Opening the Bible, pg. 13). Mulholland sets out to address why this is so.

Of particular interest to me were Bob’s (see how I did that? I waited before being so presumptive) stories and analogies which richly illustrated his thoughts. As a Presbyterian church music director I appreciated his analogy of Scripture as a symphony – in this case the Third of Beethoven – by which we might come to understand the heart and intentions of a God made “real” in a musical score. It is not a dry, academic exercise. It is the evocative dance of lovers set to the music of heaven. God’s heart is best seen in poetry and art than prose and mechanics. As Bob describes, the Scripture is iconographic in that it provides for us a living, multivalent window into the sacred.

In a sense, rather than having our nose pressed to a book for study we were taken high above the Scripture to see it as birds see the ground. The knowledge we seek is not a factual mastery of text but the relational subtleties of experiential knowing. To “know” our spouse in a biblical way seldom seems to translate to our knowing God in a “biblical” way: a visceral, sensual, vulnerable reality between two lovers in communication.

Part 2 later…Rob

Christianity is a lived reality, not just an idea.

It is also something shared. Faith is a communal notion. It was never intended that we be individual ivory towers of righteousness. Rather, we are made strong in community with others whose gifts and strengths augment our own; where our weaknesses are rendered small and insignificant in light of the strengths of those around us who also name the name of Christ. This is about that – the Body of Christ, or as Ronald Rolheiser says, “God with skin.”

At times, our bodies work well. At other times, not so well. For example, we may be on the mend from a broken leg but still suffer migraine headaches. Or perhaps we suffer from rheumatoid arthritis but our minds are keen and sharp, providing clarity and wisdom for others.

When two friends know each other intimately they share life and joy even when they hold to very different views on topics. A husband and wife will often finish each others’ sentences. They think as one. They act as one. They live as one. Two old lovers can sit silently in front of the fireplace, he with pipe and paper, she with pillow, knitting and the cat on their lap and say everything that needs to be said without speaking a word. They say everything without a sound. Their relationship has been forged in the crucible of life and experience and suffering and overcoming and failure and time. Its richness is seen in the ability to simply be in the presence of the other without pretense or embarrassment or expectation.

At certain periods in our relationships, be they childhood friendships, a husband or a wife, or spiritual kin in the family of Jesus, there will be times of celebrating newness. A child is born – we celebrate a new life. What kind of parent would we be if we never rejoiced in the little successes of our children? Two people who, unknowingly perhaps, sought for each other for many years finally meet, fall in love and are united in marriage – we joyfully celebrate their new union. What kind of spouse would we be if we never voiced our appreciation and love for the one who shares life with us? A close friend whose chronic disease is finally brought under some measure of control and we see them laugh for the first time in years – we celebrate new life. A young woman dogged by years of career failure finds her niche in a new job discovered “by accident” – we celebrate her newly resurrected self-awareness and pride of place. What kind of local church would we be if we never took time to champion the selfless efforts of our brothers and sisters?

What indeed.

In the name of the “God with skin”…