I’ve been treating myself lately to as much John O’Donohue as I can get my hands on. And, since he was hospitable and richly forthcoming with his output, it is readily available and just, oh, so, nourishing. Please read slowly. Read again and again. I did. It’s so worth it. Enjoy…
“Where is the “re-do” button on my life?” I have wondered that more than once. My computer has a restore point that, when the all else fails to fix the mess, I can take my computer back to where it was a day ago, a week ago, even longer. How many times have I wanted a link to click on that will take me back several decades.
The problem is I want to take the lessons I have learned up to this point with me. I don’t want to go back to where I was without the hard-won truths I now possess. I’m not even sure that Steve Jobs could have figured out an app for that one.
There is hope, though: God restores our souls and the re-set button God uses has a fancy term called the “discipline of confession.” It really is a fresh start. By saying the truth of who you are and what you have done, without any excuses or rationalizations, we open the door to God to hit the “restore” link in our souls. The 12-steps in A.A. and its affiliates say it this way:
We admitted we were powerless over alcohol (or food or sex or lying or drugs or fake religiosity hypocrisy or [fill in the blank]—that our lives had become unmanageable.
Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves [I am using the word God in this essay but call him/her/it what you want; see next point] could restore us to sanity.
Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of Godas we understood Him.
Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. [The Church calls this the “discipline of confession:” no excuses, no rationalizations, just straight-up talk about how wrong we were in all kinds of ways.]
Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
As we open up our lives, we partner with God-as-we-understand-him/her/it, allowing God to hit the “restore” link in our life. Next, we show ourselves and others that the mess really is being dealt with and not swept under the rug. [The Church calls this “penance.”] The next steps shows us how to begin to make that happen:
Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
The need to hit “restore” happens more than once:
Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.
We then seek to move forward, creating less destruction and havoc with ourselves and others:
Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
We return to the practice of these steps regularly:
Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
The Church calls the yearly springtime process of doing this intentionally as a group “Lent.” It is a time of invitation to people, whether they can admit to others in a group their deep brokenness or not, to stop running and hit the “restore” button in their lives. Unfortunately, the Church does not always facilitate or explain this process well to its people. At times, the Church needs the folks in the 12-Step groups to show it how to do this more effectively.
That doesn’t mean that the idea of Lent with its invitation to fasting, almsgiving [hospitality and care for others] and confession are wrong or useless. People can and do mis-use a 12-Step program by lying to themselves and their sponsors, having remorse only over being caught and cornered into a program. That doesn’t make A.A. any less effective.
And so it is with the way God works through the Church to restore souls. Just because people who consider themselves Christians can be mean, small-minded, bigoted, hateful, unloving, lacking in generosity and hospitality, and/or unrepentant for really bad things, does not render God’s good gift useless or ineffective.
We all need to get back on the wagon, no matter which wagon we were riding on when we fell off. The Church calls that “daily repentance.” It is what Lent is all about. Think of it as a six-week long A.A. meeting with restoration [or Resurrection] at the end.
Valerie Hess is an author, instructor in the Spring Arbor University’s Master of Arts in Spiritual Formation and Leadership (MSFL) program, retreat speaker, musician, mother and pastor’s wife. She does a weekly blog at www.valeriehess.com and has written numerous articles, mostly on the themes of spiritual formation through the spiritual disciplines and church music. She has written three books: Habits of a Child’s Heart: Raising Your Kids withthe Spiritual Disciplines (co-authored with Dr. Marti Watson Garlett), Spiritual Disciplines Devotional: A Year of Readings and The Life of the Body: Physical Well-Being and Spiritual Formation” (co-authored with Lane M. Arnold). Her husband is an Associate Pastor at First Presbyterian Church in Boulder, CO. She has two daughters.
I stopped by to tell you a story. I remember the last time I saw New York City. It was from the cold floor in the back of a dirty New York City bus station, through heroin eyes. And I remember the spring morning I ate peyote in a self-directed Native American rite. I was looking for a real supernatural God.
Among church folk, I stopped telling these stories years ago, because the wilder and crazier story you could tell, the more approval and attention it could win. It wore thin.
What I do want to tell you is a different type of story. Not the story of coming out of a drug hazed culture, or out of Buddhism, or Native American shamanism, but of the person who led me out.
And why I followed him.
You see I’ve got a Spiritual Guide, and it’s called the Holy Spirit. And I’ve got a Spiritual Master who walks beside me, and his name is Jesus. And the reason I follow him is not because of who he is or what he’s done, but why he did it. And why he did it for you, too.
Dumbfounded
When I look at what Jesus did and what he went through for you and me, I’m startled. Not so much by what he did, but why he did it. His love baffles me. I can’t grasp it. It’s beyond me.
We all do things for love that we would never do for any other reason.
In my lifetime, I’ve sacrificially done things for my wife and children that I might never have done for myself. Love calls me further than I’m willing to go. Its then I find that my ‘line in the sand’ is behind me. Nothing is too great for the extravagance of love. It will go anywhere. Love will do whatever it takes for the object of its affection.
Because of love, God sent Jesus to make a way where there was no way.
When Scripture tells us that love is as strong as death, Jesus proved it. In fact, he shows us that our Father God’s love for us is stronger than death and hell, and anything else. Jesus broke through death and hell because he loves you and wants you and me to feel his love and acceptance. Jesus, “for the joy set before him, endured the cross, scorning its shame.” Love broke through.
It startles me. It baffles me. It captures my heart. It’s a love that’s overflowing with joy and peace. Such love is beyond human beings. It’s because of this love that the God of all creation would carry the brokenness of all creation in his human body, ending it on the cross. It dumbfounds me.
Jesus could have come, and just shown us the way to God. He could have come and simply spoke of truth. Instead, he comes and says, “I Am God, come to rescue you.” So he comes under us, to lift us up. He comes to fill us with eternal life. But more than that, He comes to sit down beside us as a friend. Some who knows what we’ve been through, and loves us just the same.
It’s crazy that he doesn’t ask us to change anything. But he knows we really can’t. Our brokenness is embedded in our DNA, a hundred generations deep. So, instead of asking us to change, he does the exact opposite. Jesus asks us to receive him. He says “Come to me,” and then begins the change that changes everything that is. “Jesus un-wounds evil bit by bit” as he heals our lives from the inside out.
He says, “Come to me, all who are worn out and broken down, and I will give you rest.” And then he tells us how he’s going to do it. “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I’m gentle with a humble heart. You’ll find rest for your souls because my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
The beauty of surrendering into the arms of love is that we can do it a thousand times a day, because we’ll need too.
When I stop and turn my eyes to what God has done for us, I see love that dumbfounds me and captures my heart all over again.
When I was in Buddhism, I reached a point where I thought, “Wait a minute, God wouldn’t make it so hard to reach him. God would make a way for the sick and the diseased and the mentally handicapped to come to him, and it wouldn’t take a thousand reincarnations to get there.”
I was hearing the call of love. I hope you hear it, too.
Hi, I’m Bob Holmes. I came to Jesus during the Jesus Movement and I haven’t recovered yet. I’m a professional Grower who’s an Anglican Franciscan Postulant. You can find me writing at Contemplative Monk, or hanging out on Facebook and Twitter.
Is time dependent on that which we invent to measure it? Or is it merely how it is perceived? Is it what we build in, around, through and in spite of it? How different, really, are the past, present and future if we embrace none of them?
The future came and went far
too quickly to be remembered.
It left me with my foot stuck
in a borrowed door, jimmying
a lock on a broken chain
draped loosely over the sloping shoulders of
today. It ran past me backwards and
jokes still waiting for punchlines, mouthing words not yet spoken, songs still unsung,
How odd to see your own head from
behind. How disconcerting it is to
build wasted efforts, futile undertakings when
outcomes are clearer than their inspirations.
Mistakes made shame the steps
yet untaken. How lonely to stop
singing notes yet uncomposed in
company unmet with hands still
red from clapping out rhythms never danced to.
_______________
I want to think back with delight
on the future, lived, loved and
remembered in the mirror of these
moments spent writing of others spent,
yet to come – the moments reconstructing yesterdays.
But, alas, such is not our lot;
a die caught and counted before the cast.
Final pages on stories told
make little sense pasted in
the wrong book. Words, once read,
cannot be unread, only forgotten.
Horizons, once past, only open up more of the same,
It’s hard for me to share that openly, especially with an audience that might think that’s weird. But it’s true. When I’m praying, God often gives me pictures, symbols, images — even whole scenes — that unfold in my imagination.
But maybe you can relate to this. Maybe you’ve had vivid dreams, where you woke up and just knew it meant something important. Or maybe you’ve had moments when you just knew something came to you from a source other than yourself —something that felt like God, the universe, or something cosmic or otherworldly speaking to you or showing you something or answering your prayer.
Maybe it’s not such a far stretch for you to believe God can speak through our imagination.
It’s true. God can. It happens to me a lot.
So, here’s a story of a time that happened that maybe will mean something to you. Maybe you’ll see yourself in it. Maybe you’ll see God.
You know how sometimes in a dream, you just know someone in the dream is a certain person? In this image, my experience was like that. I was walking along a grassy hillside, and I just knew the person walking beside me was Jesus.
Then we got to the crest of the hill, and he stopped and turned, drawing my attention to a scene below us.
A dark and rundown city.
The city was surrounded by a high concrete wall, and over the wall I could see buildings upon buildings of all shapes and sizes.
The next thing I knew, we were standing outside the city wall, getting ready to walk through to the inside.
Once inside, I could feel the soot. All the pollution, filling up the air. Buildings towering above us. People hurrying along the streets, scuttling from one street to the next, not catching a single eye, not saying one word, just hustling and bustling to get where they needed to be.
Do you know what that’s like — rushing along the street, not catching the eye of a single other person? It’s rather lonely.
—
Then we were in a dark hallway of a dingy apartment building. A lone light bulb hung uncovered near the door. At the far end, against the wall on the ground, huddled a lone dark figure.
I couldn’t see the figure’s face. A hoodie covered their features.
But Jesus walked toward them. Approached them, quiet but sure. Knelt down beside them. His shoulder touched theirs. Leaned his back against that same wall. Pulled his knees up to his chest, sitting just the way they were.
Jesus in the dark and dingy places.
Jesus in the places we’re alone.
Jesus with his back against our wall.
Jesus in the same posture as us.
Jesus a quiet presence.
Jesus a sure pursuer.
When people talk about Lent, this is one part of what they’re talking about: the belief that God really enters our experience,that God actually comes to us, that God meets us where we are, that God even experiences what we do.
It’s a 40-day walk toward Easter, where we meet upon the idea that God entered the human experience so fully, God even experienced death.
People talk about “giving up” something for Lent. Some give up eating chocolate or meat or soft drinks or coffee. Some people give up Facebook. It’s a way of letting go of things we might normally use to cover up our pain, just like God gave up avoiding the pain of human experience and death.
What if we practiced giving up loneliness? What if we chose to look people in the eyes when we walk those city streets, rather than scuttling along in silence? What if we let ourselves believe Jesus is right here, sitting in the hallway in the darkness, next to us?
Christianne Squires is a writer and spiritual director who lives in Winter Park, FL, with her husband and their two cats. She has a pretty imaginative prayer life, but God uses it to change her life — and she’d love for you to experience the ways it can change your life too. Learn more at www.stillforming.com.
She fumbled through her purse for her phone. Its unnecessarily loud wring matched the other bells and whistles blasting in her head. They were the kind that told her old lies, played old tapes.
Lipstick, business cards, flash cards for her Spanish class, gloves, make-up mirror…where the hell is that damn thing? she cursed. Out loud apparently. The pastor, full-robed, full-throated, and in full-sermon, rebuked her with a glare. She’d seen it before. Often. It would have been less humiliating to slap her.
She was flustered and wound up tight as a bedspring. And, she was frustrated at her own lack of discernment. Why the hell didn’t I turn this thing off? Who’d be calling now? It’s Sunday, they shouldn’t even be open today she thought, half angry, half relieved. After dropping almost everything, she fingered the noisy culprit. Sliding sideways past her pew neighbors, she answered just in time to catch the call she wished she hadn’t “Your test results are in, ma’am. Can you meet with the doctor tomorrow?”
Ashes.
He fell backwards against the brick wall, his guts, freshly emptied of the remains of fish-dinner-a-la-dumpster. His head, swimming in too much shit wine, conspired with his stomach against all lucidity and balance, let alone self-respect. He smelled of piss, puke and pain. These days, only shame kept him alive and the dull remembrance of a life once lived, once alive with the common promise of…well, promise.
Was it only yesterday that he’d felt the warm body of a wife sleeping next to him? She had stayed with him through the final merger, the one he’d promised would bring them financial freedom. She muscled through his two affairs and the drinking that bridged them both. Now, two years, a foreclosure, divorce, and bankruptcy later, he thought he smelled her hair, the fragrance of mint intermingled in aching reminiscence. But it was only the smell of loss mixed with dog shit on his one remaining shoe. He’d lost the other earlier that day foraging for what was left of his meal, now part of his concrete pillow. And, as it began to snow, he blacked out.
Ashes.
She was desperate. It had been too long between hits and her most regular but equally violent trick had just buzzed to be let in. She frantically ravaged through her regular places searching for her small bag of white, powdered courage. If she could get high enough quick enough, perhaps he would get enough soon enough and leave her just enough to start the whole process again.
He pounded on the buzzer. Now, he wasn’t just horny but pissed off and, most likely, more violent as a result. Her lust to forget competed with his to be remembered and a battle ensued as to whose needs would be met first. She gave up. This time, a paying customer in person overruled her quest to be absent. After safely shoeing her daughter away in a back room, yelling for her to lock the door, with quivering hand she buzzed him in.
He stormed and swore his way up the four flights of stairs. It was a distance not her friend when it came to her chances of getting through this unscathed. Her door flew open, along with his zipper and a stream of obscenities. Everything aligned in a perfect storm, conspiring against her and sealing her fate. She lucked out this time and suffered only one punch before he got down to business. Through a left eye, now starting to swell, she toughed it out through one more indignity.
Ashes.
Ash Wednesday. Ashes indicate something. They tell us something has been used up, finished. There is nothing left. Any fuel that had provided light or heat no longer exists. It is rendered useless. Ashes are basically meaningless and, at one level, can provide a bleak picture of what many of us feel about our lives. Sometimes, life offers little more than the used up fodder of someone else’s fire.
In the Gospel however ashes become something more than foul smelling carbon. Jesus reveals to us how the ashes of death are turned to the fertilizer of new life. In his name, we trade our ashes for God’s beauty. Death and dying for life and living.
An anxiety-ridden woman receives the call; a washed up businessman is now one with the streets; a hooker walks a tightrope of addiction and fear to survive the only lifestyle she knows
All of us are only a hair’s breadth away from ruin or reward, disaster or dream, life or lies. We’re in this together. And wherever our lives may be in ruins, God can bring about beauty from our ashes.
