The Creative Recovery Initiative is a labour of love I’ve developed over the past couple years living with my wife in Edinburgh, Scotland as global personnel with Serve Globally, our denomination‘s mission wing. I don’t pretend to be a professional vlogger, influencer, or documentarian. I don’t even own fancy equipment. What I have however is an iPhone, a story, a Saviour, and a desire to tell that story to as many who might benefit from hearing it.
Perhaps you’ll find yourself here in some way? Perhaps someone you know might find hope from the stories I tell here? Either way, I invite you into this space to join me in the telling. In so doing, we’ll find healing and build community, together.
I found this prayer on a favourite Facebook chatroom this morning, “Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality.” It comes from Dr. Lou Kavar. I don’t know Dr. Kavar, but if the following gorgeous prayer is any indication, he’s likely one we should get to know! Read this prayer slowly, intentionally, communally, and often, especially as we struggle together in difficult times.
Sir, I thank you for this. My readers will as well I am sure.
A Prayer in the Midst of the Pandemic
Author of Life:
In your wisdom, the cosmos was born filling the expanse with immense diversity.
In your creativity, a blue planet with unique life sustained by water and a perfect atmosphere came together from particles of cosmic dust.
In your compassion, life evolved to enable human beings to be conscious of the great expanse of the cosmos and to stand in awe at the wonder of being alive.
Sustainer of Our Being:
In this pandemic, we’re facing the fragility of life in a new way.
In this health crisis, our concerns for our future have confused us as we’ve struggled to respond to a new illness and, at times, have diminished our own well-being.
In this global crisis, our desire to maintain the ways of life we have known has prevented us from acting wisely.
Source of Compassion:
Today, I am mindful of all those who suffer because of COVID 19, who fight coronavirus infection in their bodies.
Today, I mourn the loss of hundreds of thousands of people who have died alone struggling for breath because of this strange illness.
Today, I join with those in grief who have lost loved ones, often without the opportunity to be with them as they passed or to bid them farewell.
Pillar of Justice:
Move the hearts of lawmakers whose desire for political gain prevents them from acting to promote the common good.
Bend the hearts of those who scheme of ways to profit from the suffering of others.
Melt the hearts of those who in their fears and uncertainty cling to conspiracies that endanger them, their loved ones, and their communities.
Fount of All That is Good:
Give us wisdom to protect ourselves and to live healthy lives during this pandemic.
Give us reverence for the lives of others as we wear masks in public to lower the rate of viral infection.
Give us patience as we adapt to new ways of living, working, learning, and sharing in daily activities.
Give us the faith to understand that you are with us through every moment of life, both in the blessings and in the challenges.
It is in trust of your goodness that we pray this day, affirming that life itself is truly an amazing gift, both today and every day. Amen.
Some of it reasonable I suppose. Some of it, well, shit. Not because I’m stupid or otherwise callous. Maybe because I’m oblivious to all the information required to make believable judgements on things. Perhaps I just like the sound of my own voice. Either way, I muster the faith available, mix whatever humility might be kickin’ around, and offer this hopeful scenario and prayer to help ease our collective pandemic pandemonium.
After weeks of isolation, riots, racism, growing suspicions, job losses, and a general fear of everything, it is hardly a surprise that the faith of many grows cold. Two things should, by now, be evident: humanity is more blind and broken than we’d even suspected. And, two, if God is sovereign, where the hell is (S)he?
In such a broken, sick, divided hour, can hope still be on the table as a viable option? When everywhere one looks the gloves are off, all manner of gauntlet thrown down, ideological lines drawn in neighbourhood sand, trigger fingers itching and ready, ideological (and, for some, real) guns cocked, barrels loaded and pointed, each of us in someone else’s crosshairs, can we still see another human being as worthy of concern? Equally broken? Equally beloved?
These days, our days have intrinsic meaning not because we can count on them for all the reasons we once did – a routine, a schedule to keep, pants awaiting your legs (not a given during lockdown!), coffee waiting to be made, a family awaiting their breakfast, a job awaiting our attention, responsibilities, decisions. Instead, these pandemic days must find their meaning in more faith-led ways; because of their place in the God-created, God-loved cosmos.
We could choose to do nothing at all from beginning to end of day and it would still be sacred. But how creative, how “productive”, how formative a day can be rests in our hands. Each day can move from intrinsically meaningful to prophetically responsible as we awaken to its possibilities.
Let today, this day, be instantly recognizable as a gift. Are we grateful to arise to its potential? Can we place ourselves at God’s disposal to hear and delight in whatever we hear? Can we trust enough in the Divine initiative to carry our lack of it into good places of prayer and friendship and encouragement? Can we lay aside the weight of our own pandemic pandemonium enough to hear that of another?
“Let my love, demeanour, and trust carry the wonder of these days to others. Let my faith be the harbour into which lonely, fearful souls find safety and rest, a place to rebuild. May there be enough faith in me today that, after it spills out to those around me it may grow to encompass my own fears and insecurity. Today, I choose to sublimate all fear under the embrace of a much greater God whose arm remains strong against every storm.
For the longest time I had attributed it to the insistent paradigm of the poet’s logic, the lover’s unrequited dreams, the shifting clouds of the philosopher’s quest – all searching for something – a reality as numinous and perfect as it is deceptively secret and stubbornly resistant to conquest.
An ever-present sense of melancholy, a numbing ache, an unnameable yearning – desolation even – has draped my consciousness for many years. It seems I am a walking advertisement for mood enhancing substances and the pharmaceutical drug trade (or, maybe just self-pity?)
Sometimes, and inexplicably, my soul is shot through with little darts of light – suggestions of heaven, of how things truly are. They come unbidden mostly as ghostly sojourners, inhabitants of a more perfect realm come to slake my wheezing soul with wine, bread, and perhaps a song or two.
In recent days, this ubiquitous, verbose Demon of Grey Souls has gnawed at me for so long that it seems, by virtue of that fact, to have overplayed its hand. The hide ‘n seek after contentment, so long now the haunt of my days, has been smoldering behind its best hiding places under new rays of sun. I had willingly become a pawn in a cat and mouse game and my overseer has grown too fat to hide well.
New light, still diffuse and weak, but less coy or troublesome, is asking me a question; the ironic question Jesus once posed to some poor bugger by the Jerusalem Sheep Gate: do you want to be healed?
On the surface it’s a question as ridiculous as asking two young lovers, separated by time and circumstance, whether they’d like to make love. Upon reflection however, it reveals shear genius and a profound knowledge of the human psyche. In asking such a question, Jesus becomes more than just miracle-worker, more than a first-century doctor. He becomes psychologist and spiritual director.
He gazes beyond the obvious malady to which this fellow is chained and sees something else. His question is aimed at the man’s fear, not of remaining ill, but of the unknown world that might just open to him in the face of his healing. To be healed is to rejoin society. It is to refuse the Hogwart’s sorting hat from placing you once again into the House of Sufferin’. It is to relinquish the comfortable role of pitied and pitiful, dependent on the succoring cries of others, and take up one’s place responsibly as contributor and co-builder of a just and compassionate world.
The Spirit of God is revealing to me just how long I have sat beside my own Beth-zatha (see Jn. 5:2ff) with the expectation of healing but full of excuses for why it shouldn’t have or hasn’t yet happened. The brooding and mysterious artist persona, complete with philosopher-poet mystique and generous helping of eyes-down, hood-up melancholy is no longer a big enough hiding place for the overwhelming presence of this question, posed by Jehovah-Rapha (God, our healer).
Perhaps it’s about timing, we must wait until our own “fullness of time” (Gal. 4:4)? Perhaps God is content, as in the case of Job, to let us sit in our sackcloth and ashes long enough to remove all doubt that we’re so buried that only another can save us? Perhaps it’s just “our turn?”
Says Marilyn Gardiner, “We sit, often for years, with our paralysis. It may not be physical paralysis, but it is just as debilitating and defeating as physical paralysis. It prevents us from truly living, from being who we are called to be.”*
Whatever the case, I am ready to answer ‘yes’ to the question of Jesus. I am ready to shed one skin, now old and overused, and don a better one. I am ready to see what has always existed just below the surface of my murky water.
April 29, 2010. For me, a day in infamy. Before I begin a more thorough reveal of my travail, here is the short version. I fell off a 20 ft. scaffold and bounced off a cement floor breaking my pelvis and shattering my left arm in so doing. Perhaps in my earlier years when I was lithe and daring, I would have been more willing to do such things for the inevitable showering of praise from my peers. This was anything but willing, lithe or daring. It was jarring and rather horrifying at first; later, embarrassing; still later, a blessing. Stay with me as I begin to share the tale of woe and the surprising blessings of pain.
In rather dizzying drama, 2010 will be forever my “year of the fall.” However, neither the event itself, nor the injuries sustained, the post-event healing or even the post-recovery return to work are the central, defining landmarks of last year. The deeper discoveries have been far more significant.
I begin.
I feel normal. How I got there is rather less than normal. For the better part of my adult life I have exhibited some particularly vexing emotional demons. Far too easily have I slipped from a relatively safe emotional perch into some quagmire of baffling darkness. This is usually accompanied by generous helpings of self-loathing and profound lack of self-confidence. Where many people might look at new challenges as potential opportunities for advancement or growth, I’ve wilted before them in abject fear and unexplainable trepidation.
Yes, I know, what a catch.
Coping mechanisms for this travail have too often included a host of self-destructive behaviors, which have provided a welcome respite in euphoric escapism but did little in advancing me anywhere close to something one might call “normal.” Besides, as a favorite singer-songwriter, Bruce Cockburn quips, “the trouble with normal is it always gets worse.” Good, I’ll avoid it altogether. It is as though I relish living life at the periphery of sanity, swimming in a sea of anguish and self-pity. Actual contentment seemed to be the proverbial carrot dangling from a string before my nose, just out of reach, but plainly visible. It has often been the emotional equivalent of the Chinese water torture.
Albeit fewer than I’d like, in more lucid moments, I’ve at least had sufficient clarity to see my lack of clarity. My combination of DNA, personality wrinkles, emotional disparities and psychological proclivities have too often conspired against me, leaving me a heap of human plasticine. In my groping after the perceived safety of quick fixes this plasticine mess has found all the wrong sculptors. I end up shaped more like a phallic symbol than anything more usable to anybody. Well, actually…oh, never mind. That is, of course, unless I consider further screwing myself to be “usable” in any redemptive sense.
More recently, of the numerous challenges, any one of which could be blamed for exacerbating this dizzying array of dysfunctions, I began to hear God’s voice. To hear God’s voice through a haze of old mental tapes playing, the poorest self-memory ever and the latest chemical concoction for emotional tranquility is truly miraculous. Let’s admit, God’s ridiculous insistence on pestering us with grace is rather impressive.
I noticed (a word I don’t generally associate well with) a deeper than normal malaise; something mostly dealt with by a daily dose of ADD meds. Around the time of the second of two online courses I was taking in Spiritual Direction, I drooped into a level of complacency, which drooped still further in mind-numbing apathy that bordered on despair. It was the spiritual equivalent of shrugging one’s shoulders before punting the cat through the screen door…
innerwoven 