​My is faith is expanding through my experience of the generous nature of God and that has enlarged my sense of stewardship as a member of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church.
 
Several years back, heart-break gently forced me to take responsibility for my own joys and sorrows. Until then, I was living as I had been raised. This was my understanding: smart, white men are doing the significant, important work. They were the big-time stewards. Cathleen, your tasks are small in comparison. Just take care of your family, work in the nursery, co-lead the pioneer girls, be a good neighbor. The scope of my stewardship was tiny in comparison.
 
But, I had hit bottom and my old assumptions came to an end. I was at an impasse.
 
I remember one night, when I felt like I was in free fall having no idea when or where I would land nor how hard that landing would be.
 
On other nights, before I lay down in bed, I would step onto the deck, and look up for the brightest light in the sky. That spring Saturn had drawn closer to the earth than usual. It was beautiful and gazing upon it brought me some peace.
 
I needed symbols that could function as signs of eternal significance.
 
As the days passed, I was okay. I hadn’t lost everything. Day after day I found my footing.
 
Of course, my experience is not unique. I can see that in James Fowler’s chart of the stages of faith. I had simply moved from an inherited faith to one that I was beginning to own for myself.
 
It was as if my image of God had been held in a small, tight 9 X 11inch frame that had broken and was giving way to an image of God larger than I could measure.
 
On the recent ECW diocesan retreat Bishop Audrey Scanlon talked about transitions. She referenced the work of William Bridges who sees three distinct steps to a transition: ending, neutral zone and new beginning.
 
When I was in the neutral zone I looked around at what was sturdy, what was holding me. It was the people in the Spiritual formation school with whom I had been spending one weekend a month. It was some friends, but not all, it was the consistency of days, and of the spiritual life here at St. Luke’s that I was just beginning to enjoy.
 
And I did something I could have never imagined doing: I applied to the Holistic Spirituality graduate program at Chestnut Hill College, in Philadelphia. I was accepted and drove back and forth a hundred times in the course of 4 years. That wasn’t the old me. I was being made new. I learned to read academic texts, write fairly well and to speak up in class. It was new and amazing.
 
Now the scope of my stewardship, what I am protecting and being responsible for, has enlarged as a member of my immediate and extended family, in my vocation as spiritual director, in relationship with friends and neighbors, and all of you here at St. Luke’s.
 
Constance Fitzgerald describes the inner resources that can open for us in the impasse or neutral zone this way: “the left side of the brain, with its usual application of linear, analytical, conventional thinking is ground to a halt. The ending or impasse forces us to start all over again, driving us to contemplation. On the other hand, the impasse provides a challenge and a concrete focus for contemplation . . . It forces the right side of the brain into gear, seeking intuitive, symbolic unconventional answers, so that action can be renewed eventually with greater purpose.”
 
So when the end comes, it’s not the end. That truth is built into the pattern of life that God has made. When we feel we have lost more than we can endure, God, who is generous by nature, gives us more.
 
Once when I was talking with my mother, out of the blue she said, “The lord is rich.” That kind of observation was unusual for her. So, I paused and asked if she would like to say more about the Lord’s riches.  Without any hesitation, she replied, “He has so much and we take so little.”
 
Perhaps our ability to be generous like God in what we steward, influence, judge, give and serve is connected to taking more, and more of the gifts of the Spirit.
 
We have certainly all experienced endings, impasse, hitting the wall and falling down. In the neutral zone that follows such an experience, we can hunker down and try our best to resist growing in faith or we can have faith and relax in God’s care, stand up, dust ourselves off, and begin again with an enlarged understanding of what and how we are to steward.
 
Psalm 65 breaks open our awareness of having being richly cared for—even assuring us that our strongest sins, those sins stronger than we are ourselves (see verse 3) will be generously blotted out by God.
 
This puts us in a new place. Starting over, we are given new opportunities to follow Jesus with greater confidence. We, too, can do this most important work. We grow in faith, our connections deepen, and we are inclined to become more generous in every way.
 
A couple of years ago my friend Lynn told me about a young family who are recent immigrants from northern Sudan. Their daughter, Sara, had met Mona, the Sudanese woman at Mechanicsburg’s public library one day when they had each come with their children. The young mothers began talking and Mona invited Sara to her apartment. Sara noticed how near to the bone they were living. So Sara told her folks about Mona’s family. My friend Lynn and her husband quickly befriended them.
 
I don’t recall the first time I met Mona, but I can tell you that as I spend time with her, my respect grows. Last year Mona gave birth to another baby whom she named Lynn, after my friend.
 
It is not hard to be generous out of my abundance. Along with Lynn, Sara and a few other folks, including some of you, we can think of places Mona might like to visit, of a class she and her children might like to take, of resources she may be able to receive for herself and her family at New Hope
 
Mona and her family are our neighbors here in this borough. They need to know in these early years of their transition, that they are welcomed, respected, and even loved as they grow into this new beginning among us.
 
I wonder how God has been generous to you? Can you identify endings in your life that opened you up to deeper faith in God and a richer life? How do your experiences of God’s generosity influence the scope and stewardship of your resources?

      Five authors join me in a conversation on waiting. Suzanne Mayer writes with punch and profundity in her article The Poverty of Waiting and It’s Riches:

"There is a waiting in life that stultifies and destroys and a waiting that sacramentalizes and strengthens . . . as with any human phenomena, the attitudes and actions of waiting range the full spectrum from grace-filled to soul-destroying." (2)

     Learned helplessness is not sacramental waiting. When an individual is disempowered it may indicate she was so wounded that she can not continue on a normal developmental course of self-discovery. Attentive or active waiting invites the future into what is, to disrupt what has been. Simone Weil, with whom Mayer is already conversing, says,

     If we consent, God puts a little seed in us and he goes away again. From that moment God has no more to do; neither have we, except to wait . . . it is not as easy as it seems, for the growth of the seed within us is painful . . this gardening amounts to a violent operation. (79-80)

      Mayer describes this active waiting as a discernment process, seeking to perceive a future God is fashioning. Sue Monk Kidd quotes a friend who puts it this way, “Be quiet and still so that you can begin to see the thing God is already weaving” (130).

     Mayer discusses the signal event called ‘imaginative shock’ in which logic, analysis and reason having failed are left behind as the waiter explodes into ‘second order responses,’ a release of unconscious right-brained imaginings (3). This new level of activity requires the waiter to hold the condition of suffering in one hand while imagining new choices with the other. Mayer continues “Persons able to balance such extremes of height and depth . . . are rare.” These persons are able to welcome the presence of Christ into the present moment, thus freeing the present from being a continuation of the past. They learn to “take another road home” (3). Thus, what is false is allowed to fall away and the real is made manifest. Could it be that when we experience imaginative shock we have allowed ourselves to fall into the hands of God? Weil states “Only blind necessity can throw men to the extreme point of distance, right next to the Cross” (73).

     In The Love of God and Affliction, Weil tells us,

"Affliction is an uprooting of life, a more or less attenuated equivalent of death . . . there is not real affliction unless the event that has seized and uprooted a life attacks it, directly or indirectly, in all its parts, social, psychological, and physical." 68

     When we come near in spirit to Christ on the Cross, sharing our affliction with the One who was afflicted, Weil believes we are with God in the most intimate way.

     Mayer discusses the importance of the quality of openness, which is necessary to begin to imagine something that one has not known from her own experience. I believe one way we recreate the past daily in our lives is by refusing to know our critical weaknesses. In this state of denial, we cannot be open to new possibilities. If we cannot name what we desire, we cannot have it. So openness is a state of being in which we are open first to what cripples us before we can open ourselves to a better way, a higher quality of living: “hold the condition of suffering in one hand while imagining new choices with the other” (Mayer 3). True openness requires we stand up, and with arms outstretched, open our hands. In one hand is our brokenness, in the other Christ’s gifts of presence and healing. I came to understand that where there is affliction and disempowerment, Christ is present. This awareness created in me the ability to act and react in new ways.

     Learning to read messages using our right-brain is an apprenticeship in love; it requires a growing ability to trust “in the holiness of life to hold us up” (Kidd 142). These intuitive messages will be both awful truths and amazing delights. We cannot have it any other way. When I was ready, I had an experience of imaginative shock, and the second order responses were released. The backlog of messages only my right-brain could read were suddenly there and legible. In the painful attending to those messages, I could finally step over my paralysis and frustration at trying to make sense of my life. I realize now I had not used even my left-brain well.

     I agree with Weil who tells us in affliction we are closer to God than at any other time. Sometimes I would picture myself lying near the cross while Christ suffered. This imagining brought me comfort.

     Kidd tells us

"Father Sylvan believed that the growth of a person’s soul was activated whenever she experienced the pain of contradiction or the sustained state of questioning. In other words, the actual groping and searching is the way our deeper self evolves and is released." (159)

     Father Sylvan’s description of soul growth makes sense to me. I am becoming strong through naming what was amiss, what I desire and conforming the pieces of my life to my heart’s desire. That is how I have experienced the “pain of contradiction.” In this incredibly awkward place of searching I am becoming obedient to God and able to sense “the obedience of the whole universe to God” (Weil 78). I am finding there is full provision made for me.


Kidd, Sue Monk. When the Heart Waits; Spiritual Direction for Life's Sacred Questions. New York: HarperCollins, 1992


Mayer, Suzanne. "The Poverty of Waiting and its Riches." Spirituality Today Winter 1990: Vol. 42, no.4.


Weil, Simone. Waiting for God. New York: HarperCollins, 2001

As Spring Follows Winter

            Sue Monk Kidd tells us that a crisis is a “holy summons” inviting us to travel through a liminal space. This involves a severing from former patterns, noticing “deadening loyalties that no longer serve us” and stepping beyond them (87). Kidd tells us that the Chinese word for crisis is made of two characters, danger and opportunity. She leads us into an analysis of the quickest ways we tend to react to crisis, which are: unexamined acceptance or angry rejection. But there is a third way that requires waiting and creativity—this is actual soulmaking that only emerges through transformation.

            Kidd brings in John Sanford’s voice from whom we learn that soulmaking may be experienced as violence. It is destroying a twisted and inflexible way of being in relationship to one’s world. I have experienced at least my first awakening, which certainly was violent. I felt as if I had survived a ship wreck only to find myself hungry and alone on an unknown and uninhabited island. Over time, I am finding that this island is my soul and it is a creative place within me, where I experience God’s easy presence and feel for the first time in my life that I can stand up straight, unashamed and unafraid. I resonate with the narrow gate Kidd references from Luke 13:24. I have sensed my spirit easily passing through a vertical opening in a concrete wall.  

            I knew a little girl who I believed experienced profound emotional abandonment and perhaps physical abuse. I have known older women who experienced something very similar—a father whose personality is exploding and a mother whose personality is imploding. Many move through the decades of their lives as the frightened children they once were. But the overwhelmed child in the adult can be rescued and development resumed.

              Often through childhood wounds we learn to dissociate from our pain. But as Jean-Pierre de Caussade tells us “The essence of spirituality is contained in this phrase: complete and utter abandonment to the will of God” (101). This will always include letting our present experiences and those we have hid from in our past come before us, naked and telling the truth we will learn to know before we can begin our metamorphosis. This letting go of our grip on the stories we tell ourselves does not happen in a prayer or two. As Kidd says, “it’s a winding, spiraling process” (102).

            A couple of years ago my son gave me a small edition of Alice in Wonderland. I considered it irrelevant to my life and a nearly tasteless gift—no kidding. Now that was a strong reaction! Kidd opens up a possible connection for me with this intuitive gift from Benjamin. I had been put off by the chaos Alice experiences, just as I had refused to spend time with the chaos within my relationships. 

            Kidd points out that it hurt Alice and made her entirely uncomfortable to grow in her small room so she shrank herself to a very tiny size to fit, rather than break out of that restricting space. That is absolutely what I had done—repeatedly. I really put forth a lot of energy to refuse growing. I can see that now. But I feel compassion toward myself for my extended diapause.

            Kidd discusses the similarities between Thomas Kelly and Thomas Merton’s insights into self-abandonment. Both seem to say that it is the work of the Holy Spirit within because we cannot find that creative, fresh way provided for us until we let die our insistence on the way our lives should have been or could have been. And this feels like utter abandonment. “Granting infinite, loving freedom, God offers us the experience, events and encounters that help us find the courage to open them ourselves, with gentleness” (Kidd 108).  From that humble position we encounter God who comes beside us to slowly, oh so slowly, pry our clinging fingers from the illusions we clutched. Perhaps for the first time in our lives, we find we can relax not just our grip but our whole selves.

            It is interesting to note that the word courage originates from the French word Coeur, which means heart. Only when our hearts are touched by love can we relax enough to exchange courage for fierce protection. We find our real lives are imperishable, they have been “hidden with Christ in God” ( Colossians 3:3). With Wisdom in our hearts, we have powerful love to guide us.

            I am intrigued by Kidd’s winsome statement: “I sat quietly and wondered what it must be like to spin a cocoon” (119). I remember a morning lying prostrate in prayer, sensing a cloth being laid over me, completely covering me and telling God I wanted to come out, not go into hiding. I felt like my life had been hidden long enough. But just because I am ready to let go of my old life, like a leaf on a tree is finally ready to fall to the ground, it does not mean that I am not required to trust that the seed of my true self, planted before the dawn of time, will grow in good time. I must wait.  


Written after reading Sue Monk Kidd's book, "When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life's Sacred Questions. 

For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. 1 Corinthians 13.12

                                
    I am the owner of a nearly 150 year-old golden oak book cabinet. It stands eight feet tall and six feet wide. Glass doors enclose the deep shelves. Although the lock broke probably twenty years ago, I still have the small, nicely designed key that sits in it.

My great grandparents purchased it as newly weds when they were about to set up house in Jacksboro, Texas. My grandmother inherited the book cabinet. It stood in the entryway of their house in Dallas, Texas until my mother and aunt moved them into a retirement home. I was married at the time and living in west Texas, so when this was happening, my husband and I drove out to see my family. While there, mother asked me if there was anything I would like from their home. I chose the rather stunning book cabinet out of several interesting pieces.

My mother arranged for it to be shipped to her home along with the things she had chosen. There, my father carefully refinished the lovely oak in his suburban basement. I have enjoyed using it to hold my books for thirty-three years.

Recently, I realized that although I still think the book cabinet is beautiful, I no longer want it. It seems too big for every room it has been in. I want to reach my books without opening two creaking doors. I am tired of seeing my guests admire it. I no longer tell the old story that “This book cabinet once held the law library of my great grandfather,” because I realized that I know nothing about the man’s character. I wish I knew something of his wife’s wisdom. So, now, I am eager to give it to my daughter or my son. I just need to figure out what to do with all those books.

This morning I recalled the words I heard on the radio of a young man who, as he lay dying of AIDS, said, “I am a happy man. This is not a tragedy,” and I thought about my book cabinet that I once treasured, but treasure no longer and I sense that when I am dying I will believe that my life was beautiful, but will have lost interest in living it any longer. I pray that I will easily let it go, trusting myself to be fine without it.

"Speak to God from your heart. If you speak from your heart you will speak to God. And if you do speak to God you will ask for nothing less than life. But we close our eyes against our hearts, and instead of asking for life we pursue our desires for a different life, thereby asking for something we cannot have—because such asking is contradictory and therefore not asking at all." The Silence of God, by James P. Carse (56)

Carse asks “With what does God answer prayers . . . and why is it so terrifying to open ourselves to it?” (56). To answer these questions, he looks at the way we trust people. Often what we call trust is closer to control or obedience. To actually trust creates an atmosphere of surprise. And “If I can genuinely trust you, I can expect you to do exactly what I do not want, but exactly what I need for growth” (60). To embrace this attitude and allow others the freedom it will bring them requires that we be willing to become stronger persons.

Returning to our ability to trust God, Carse says “Even if we are certain that God loves us, we can have no certainty whatsoever how this love will express itself, or even that we can recognize it as love” 65). Then he asks, “How can we speak to someone when it is impossible to know what they have heard us say, or whether they have heard us at all?” (66). He also points out that “If I control what you hear or how you respond, it is no longer you listening” (67). Carse is challenging us to see that authentic speech actively welcomes something more than just wanting to be understood. If my purpose in speaking is to eliminate the difference between us, the conversation will come to an end. Informing and silencing another is not speech. To keep my mind open too your response keeps me open to life. Real listening is equal to radical trust.

Carse introduces the concept of theatrical and dramatic speech. Theatrical speech is essentially acting. One is speaking and observing oneself as the speaker. This is a controlling behavior. Dramatic speech is open-ended—we cannot know how we will be heard. Carse continues, “Whenever we presume to know the mind of God sufficiently to know how we are being heard, God is no longer God, and we are no longer listened to” (72). He suggests the gospel brings evidence that God has limited use for theatricality. If we try to direct the responses of those listening, we do not believe the words we say. The future is open. It is God’s unintelligibility, God’s silence evident in all the chaos of the world that offers us the chance of a real life.

As I read Carse’s essay, I feel really good about my life. I feel like my life is good enough to be real. I feel surprisingly whole, like having some earlier understanding of my life given back to me. Carse affirms my recent journey that includes inconceivable aspects of my life integrated into my consciousness. I am thinking this listening to authentic speech includes listening to my own intuition.

When we can understand the silence of God as giving us space to be fully human we begin to see the theatrical dimensions of our world. We see we have created scripts we have the power to alter or to throw out altogether. Good theatre does have a legitimate roll. Good theatre is playful. It gives us opportunities to imagine new worlds for ourselves.

Carse does not simply use styles of human conversation to talk about prayer, rather he asks us to see our relationships with God and those with human beings as both requiring the expanded kind of speaking he is writing about in this essay. Carse points out that even when we are attempting to listen in the most relaxed and open posture, we still are listening for something (74). We are listening with an effort to shape our reply, simply because we will always be limited to some degree in our humanity. But God listens offering us “the gift of authentic humanness” (76).

Indeed, the more predictable and rational a world is the more it suffocates true discourse between persons, and the less possible it is to speak to each other from the heart. In a family where everyone has a clear part and adheres consistently to an order all the others observe, we may be certain that the wishes of the heart are not known to each other. (76)

“The wishes of the heart are not known to each other,” how painful. This was true in my family’s life together. Fear and control, secrets and lies held captive our true selves. The horrible thing about it is that we hid out fairly effectively in the established church structure. I was a ‘good Christian woman.’ I played my rolls well even through my anger and loneliness. Finally, when my son could no longer play his roll, I figured out I had a lot of catching up to do with reality. It has been painful and liberating each step of the way. I am feeling stronger and realizing Christ is here especially in each moment I am willing be aware of pain.

Carse suggests God’s silence does not destroy human culture, rather it is our habit of speaking on God’s behalf. When encounters are filled with surprise and grace we have real conversations. Carse says that this is miraculous. Idolatry tries to replace the silence of the holy with the world’s voices. But God’s silence is more powerful and “rots out the feet of all our idols” (77). The truth is that we are given the ability to create our worlds. If we use theatre well, artists show “us a way of looking and listening that makes a new world possible” (78). They expose the rules of a society as only one way things could be.

In conclusion, when I speak to God, God gives me more than a response meaningful in my world. God invites me into the whole world. God invites me to be surprised and if I am willing, supported by mystery.  

A few years back, I did a careful reading of a book written by a college classmate of mine, Jeff Staley. His book title appeared on the list of books my professor in Biblical Studies, Hal Tausig had given the class. Another class mate covered the first half of the book; yet I believe this hefty section can stand alone. We were to choose one to read and present in a 30 minute slot. I include that last detail to encourage anyone who might be interested in reading this essay. You can read it yourself much faster than it took for me to read it aloud.


Reading With A Passion; Rhetoric, Autobiography and the American West in the Gospel of John by Jeffrey L. Staley

Part Two Reading the Reader: an autobiographical turn in reader criticism

Chapter 4

The Father of Lies: Autobiographical Acts in Recent Biblical Criticism and Contemporary Literary Theory


There is no theory that is not a fragment, carefully prepared, of some autobiography.

Paul Valery, as quoted in Lionnet, Miller, Olney, et.al.

All Autobiographers are unreliable narrators, all humans are liars . . .

Timothy Adams

Listening carefully to lies is sometimes very revealing of the truth.

Tony Hillerman

When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies. John 8:44

Jeff intends this chapter to bridge himself as formalist reader and some-other-kind-of-reader. He asks, “So what if those readers that I and others have been discovering in the biblical text and writing about for the past ten years were, as some critics have been saying, just our own selves disguised by the critical language of academic discourse? Could we then turn around and do an exegesis of souls that parallels our exegesis of texts? What would be the fallout if we unearthed elements in our personal experience—outside of our professional training—that might have influenced our views of the bible’s rhetorical strategies as much as, or perhaps more than, our reading in critical theory?” (115) Jeff looks at three, who have already woven into their reading of Jesus’ life, their own stories: Marcus Borg, Sandra M. Schneiders and Mikeal Parsons. I am going tell you what he says about Marcus Borg. Borg was the Jesus Seminar spokesperson and the author of Meeting Jesus for the First Time. In this book, Borg frames his purposes and theological goals in an autobiographical section. But Jeff cautions us—just because one appears revealing does not mean one is. Borg was raised in American, Scandinavian Lutheran pietism and became an Oxford-trained New Testament scholar. In an unfamiliar country church, Borg listened to missionaries tell stories of China. Jeff suggests that this experience created an environment for his own spiritual pilgrimage and an acceptance of the journey motif as an unexamined assumption.

Jeff also suggests Borg’s experiences in North Dakota near the Canadian border may have framed Borg’s Jesus who crosses the borders of Jewish purity systems. “Like the strange but friendly border scenes from his autobiography, Borg’s Jesus challenges stereotypical American religiosity from the outside and simultaneously soothes white middle-class American fears about the cost of radical sociopolitical engagement and subversive boundary crossing.”

In Meeting Jesus for the First Time, Jeff observes that the destination of Jerusalem and the cross seem unrelated to following Jesus—Jesus’ death is only found in the footnotes. Jeff wonders if Borg has kept problems of rejection and death at arms length, because Borg’s Jesus is neither dismayed nor humiliated by a politically charged death.

In coloring Jesus’ life with his own crayons, Borg says discipleship is not an individual path, but his spiritual quest is nurtured primarily by private experiences. Borg does not flesh out the Jesus movement nor does he have much to say of his own church relationships. Hence, Borg’s journey into autobiography is typically male, privileging individuality over connectedness. Finally, Jeff notes both Borg and Jesus are men of spirit who practice the politics of compassion. Would a more conscious awareness of the modes of autobiographical writing have caused Borg to present himself or his Jesus differently in his text?


Chapter 5

Net Yet Fifty: postcolonial confessions from an Outpost in the San Juan Basin

The deepest side of being an American is the sense of being like nothing before us in history . . .

Alfred Kazan

I am because my little dog knows me.

Gertrude Stein

Very truly, I tell you, before Abraham was, I am. John 8:58

Along with the narrow fundamentalism of his Plymouth Brethren community, he encountered a culture radically different from that of his own family. “We lived our first fourteen months at Immanuel Mission in a two-room adobe and stone cellar, sharing the single bathroom with Yellowhair, an ancient Navajo who knew no English and was a survivor of the “long Walk.” (1864 the Navajo were forced into exile), Yellowhair was more than a hundred years old when we first met him, and when he smiled, his face would wrinkle and crease, making him look like the loose skin that covered the joint of my thumb. For twenty years he had been the only baptized Navajo in Morning Meeting . . . Lately I have found myself yearning to find a place where I could meet Yellowhair once again, speak his language and explore the shriveled memories of his youth.”(154)

“Immanuel means God with us. For the mission staff, the us part, was a crucial exclusivistic term. God could only be found with us, on that ten acres of fenced desert, and nowhere else within a fifty-mile radius.”

Jeff writes, “my most vivid childhood memories are of dogs. They haunt my dreams. To the Navajo, a well fed, grinning dog meant only one thing: a cunning sheep killer. Dogs were not well treated by the Navajos.”

At the mission, Jeff experienced difference. “Outside our childhood home, white-skinned people were dirty, smelly and stupid. To most of the Navajo children we played with, our heads were strangely shaped, protruding out from the backside of our necks like grossly overgrown tumors, likewise our genitals were curiosity pieces, a topic of frequent speculative conversations. We transmitted ghost-sickness, and a strange, cow-like odor followed us wherever we went. I was learning by fits and starts that brown skin denoted intelligence, along with beauty, cleanliness, and everything that was good in the world.” (170)

Jeff married a dark-skinned woman, a Chinese woman. Although he grew up being different and married into difference, being different didn’t always separate him from the Navajo people. He climbed the mesas and buttes with the Navajo boys and learned to sense danger as they did whether cougar or lizard. And he learned to ride bareback, and to swim in quicksand. He ate fry bread and mutton stew in his friends’ homes and invited the Navajo boys home to tuna sandwiches and chips, reading comic books together and playing cards into the night.

His father was his teacher for four of his eight years of grammar school. With a natural curiosity about the new world to which he had brought his family, in the fall or spring, when they had science class, he would take the class on hikes around the area with the Navajo children as his guides. Collecting insects, rocks, plants, they would take them back to school, catalogue and display their treasures with scientific names written beside Navajo names, and an explanation of its use in Navajo culture. But miles, time and career have separated him from the reservation. So there is distance as well as difference in this story.

Tools of distance. On the Indian reservation Jeff acquired skills to see things from a distance, easily perceiving difference. He says that perhaps without this background, he may not have been so willing to question his subculture and its certainties of interpretation. When he began his career in biblical studies, he avoided the Fourth Gospel, it seemed two-dimensional, the seeing versus the blind, the truth tellers versus the liars. It was when he led students in Greek exercises that he began to use the Fourth Gospel. It was then that he discovered the unreliability of the narrator that peaked his interest—ambiguity! Tricks! Something to play with, trails to follow, expanded meanings to detail.

He could enjoy studying this discovered dimension in the Fourth Gospel with the tools learned in the formalist reader-response approach because he could read both critically (with difference, distance) and imaginatively. “Assuming that no text (or worldview) has the whole truth, reader-response criticism has given me a set of critical tools with which to ask questions about the Gospel’s imaginative, dramatic story and how it intends to affect its audience (187). Reflecting on his own social context, Jeff believes that difference, distance and defamiliarization have been part of his psychological makeup from the age of 7 when he moved to the Navajo reservation.

He has learned to read the Johannine narrative like he learned to hike the puzzling land of the canyons and mesas of Arizona.” Whether I am wrestling with geology or theology, Saint John or San Juan, I will always treasure my initial probings into that Gospel. Like the red desert sand of my reservation childhood, the book is my blood. So I am now beginning to believe that the critics of formalist reader-response criticism have an important point to make. Perhaps all our readings of Scripture are autobiographical and circular.” (195) He wonders, if perhaps he cannot find that elusive encoded reader; maybe he can only find himself in the text. Has he discovered anything useful for anyone thus far in his work?


Chapter 6

Postmortem passion play: John 18:28-19:42 and the erosion of the reader

No one has ever done exegesis of John’s writings until the reader has received, as a vital reality, the message of the work and has felt its impact in his own life and existence.

John Dominic Crossan

I am going to . . . read the Gospel of St. John as an Indian. Secondly, this Indian is not a hypothetical being . . . whom I have imagined. This Indian is myself.

M.A. Amaladoss

Let us . . . cast lots for it to see who will get it. John 19:24

The passion play has roots deeper than medieval Europe; the roots go back to the ancient marketplace and a carnival of the underworld. The setting for Jeff’s Passion play is neither the underworld, Oberammergau nor Spearfish South Dakota, but somewhere within the postmodern struggle against totalizing theories of texts and selves.

He observes that this is a passionless passion. As Jesus is being flogged, slandered, and crucified, he does not defend, flinch or cry out. In his passion play, his characters notice the difficulty in expressing pain and wrestle with the text’s silences.

Then the characters propose various interpretations in response to the text’s resistance to expressing Jesus’ pain. Finally, the characters act as witnesses who check what happens in interpretation and refuse to go along when an interpreter overwrites the text. Since no one character represents a specific ideology; I will not distinguish the individual voices. Rather, I will summarize their conversation.

As the play begins, three corpses are slowly being taken down from three crosses by a Roman soldier and begin a tortuous conversation about the Johannine passion.

The passion narratives are the most carefully plotted parts of the Synoptic Gospels and the Fourth Gospel. Jesus is handed over and enters his passion, he is passive, bound, led, and brought. Jesus is acting like a good and loyal son in a Mediterranean household, voiceless, uncomplaining. Power and powerlessness are juxtaposed. (All this while one corpse is having nightmares about dogs).

The ancient Mediterranean world is a ‘high context society’ which produces sketchy texts, leaving much to the imagination. Everyone knows what a crucifixion is like. We don’t have to spell out all the gory details. And narratives, by definition, have to reflect high contexts—to keep the plot moving, they cannot stop to tell the details.

Jesus was killed in an honor/shame society. Crucifixion is meaningful as a shaming act in that narrative. So the Johannine author refused to dwell on its most shameful details. The implied author works to convince the encoded reader that despite appearances, Jesus does bring honor to his father. What we need to notice is what is implicit and what was left out. (Cynicism, argument and logic are all here. There is talk of dogs as symbols of evildoers).

The important question underlying all others is whether Jesus is a threat to power, not whether he is a King, the Son of God or anything else. Handing over Jesus, the chief priests have safeguarded their positions of power against the threat of their Roman overlords. In handing over Jesus Pilate is safeguarding his position of power against Caesar. And in handing over his spirit, Jesus will safeguard his place of power.

Repetitions, patronage, kinship are all discussed in relationship to power in an honor/shame culture. Repetitions reveal the implied author’s theological point of view.

A look at the fourfold plot: arrest, legal charges, crucifixion and burial with sequences fixing blame for crucifixion on collusion of roman and Jewish power, slowing down plot in first three parts. Jesus’ experience of being handed over is detailed. The narrative and story times are compared in first and second halves of passion narrative. He goes on to note scene changes, characters, scripture fulfillment, and surprise that when Jesus is lifted up the narrative account encourages the reader to look away.

Change in narrative point of view: Jesus is the ‘focalizer’ the encoded reader joins him gazing down at those around the cross. But what do we make of humanity’s craving for unity, for essence, for the real and the true? That is a primitive passion.

The passion play abruptly ends. Have we just witnessed the deconstruction of the encoded reader? Perhaps. For as the corpses have been talking, interrupting each other, insulting one another, what Jeff playfully calls the eroded reader, which appeared in three persons, is being eaten by dogs.

Epilogue

Despite the limitations, the impossibilities of an accurate autobiographical voice in his exegesis of the Fourth Gospel, Jeff chose to enlist corpses, (over-the-top characterization) to represent the various and common perspectives within himself and the Johannine text.

Jeff recalls Normal Holland saying that coherence in his interpretation is evidence of a psychological identity theme, where interpretation is a function of identity, a fantasy pushing for gratification upward toward coherence and significance. This hide and seek game of self in text and text in self is quite controversial.

Conclusion or a second ending

Things not written in this book

Jeff sees recent literary theories of autobiography helping biblical reader-response critics reinvent themselves for a postmodern age. Yet he also sees two possible dangers within in his book: first he would feel sadly misunderstood if readers read his last two chapters as a reconfiguring of biblical readers in radically individualistic terms. Secondly, he would feel doubly sad if someone construed those chapters to support a naïve, unreflective reading of the bible. And he feels he could have added a chapter on the influence community has on the way he reads.

Jeff believes that readerly fictions that give a place to the voiceless at the table are those that ultimately are theologically and socially constructive and useful.

And then, finally, his poem in which he is an unreliable poet, misleading us as we of course misunderstand what is in the oak cabinet. A revolver, right? Oh, it’s revolving! “The blackened disc with a hole in it is the spinning gospel record, now imagined as though some marksman (God?) shot a hole right through the middle of it. Maybe ironically, it (the gospel, God?) only works when there is a hole in it.”

I wrote a research paper on Catherine of Siena’s use of water imagery to revive dry souls, as seen in her letters to her confessors. Catherine lived from 1347-1380. She was illiterate and given scribes to whom she could dictate letters, prayers, and her book. I found twenty-eight letters to her three confessors, written between 1374-77. Eight of those included water imagery. Here is an example, written to Frate Raimondo da Capua:

Learn from the Master of truth, who preached virtue only after he had practiced it. In this way you will produce fruit and will be channels through whom God will offer his grace within the hearts of those who hear you. . . . [Paul] even said, ‘I refuse to glory except in the cross of Christ crucified.’. . . He knew it so thoroughly that he became like a sponge absorbing water, so that as he traveled along the way of humiliation he absorbed the boundless charity and goodness with which God supremely loves his creatures. . . [H]e became a vessel of love filled with fire, to carry and preach God’s Word. . . . For those who see themselves not selfishly but for God, and who see God for God. . .[w]hen they contemplate God in blazing, consumed love discover the image of the human person in God. . . . For when they look at their reflection in the fountain, the sea of the divine Being, they feel at once compelled to love their neighbors as they love themselves. . . . [J]ust as we look into a fountain and see our image, take pleasure in it and love ourselves. But if we are wise, we are moved to love the fountain before we love ourselves. . . . So think, my dearest sons. There is no other way we can see either our dignity or the faults that mar our soul’s beauty, except by going to look into the quiet sea of the divine Being. . . . [W]ith bold and blazing heart stretch your sweet loving desires to go and give honor to God and your best efforts to your neighbors, never losing sight of your goal, Christ crucified.

Joan Patterson Del Pozzo, Speaking In Imagery, Speaking In Ecstasy, a discussion of St. Catherine of Siena’s language and style, included this in her dissertation: Huizinga sees the late medieval era as characterized by an extreme saturation of the religious atmosphere, and a marked tendency of thought to embody itself in
images. . . As indicated by Dante’s letter to Can Grande Della Scala, texts other than the Bible were intended by their medieval authors to be read as if they were scripture. . . The human author, from the Dantean vantage point, would interpret God’s work, enunciate His Word, and comment on the divine texts of Creation and Scripture. Inspired writers would speak in words as God spoke in things; their writings would reflect both scriptural truths and the material world. Human creativity would be analogous to divine creativity, but would operate in reverse, for God’s materialization of the spiritual would tend downwards, toward humanity while human works would tend upwards, toward God. A process of human to divine and divine to human communication is implied by this medieval view of the religious writers function, and a conception of such a two-way exchange was basic to Saint Catherine’s poetics and spirituality (Del Pozzo 60-62).

In Suzanne Noffke’s essay The Physical in the Mystical Writings of Catherine of Siena, she states that Catherine’s theology rests in the crucified Christ. His blood is identified as water and fire. Noffke sees Catherine pointing us to “incarnation and redemption, two mysteries which . . . are really one.” This single mystery, which integrates the physical with the spiritual is given to us in the picture of an embrace: the divine embracing the human with the human embracing the divine (Noffke 112-114). Catherine stirs the imaginative waters of the soul to life. It is as if her words break away layers of lime encrusted within us, preparing our souls for the fullness of God.

In this medieval tradition, Catherine points us to the fountain as an image of Christ. If Christ is the fountain at the crossroads, Catherine can stand at any point around the perimeter of the fountain directing our gaze to those living waters, flowing with the blood of Christ. Catherine asks the reader to drink, bathe or drown in those living waters. She would have us drown our selfish, frightened selves and be turned to fire, ready to be poured out for others. That, she instructs, is the invitation the cross of Christ brings to the world.

Her gaze was always resting upon Christ. So, whether it is water or fire or bride or any other image Catherine is always bringing us to join her at what is central and life-giving. This faith within her is alive and as vibrant as if we were literally standing in the pool of the fountain itself with her, feeling its sprays of cool water on our skin. When she spoke these heart-felt words, something came to life and that life still awakens a sleeping faith within the reader.

As Suzanne Noffke, the leading Catherine scholar says, For Catherine, the reason for every recounting of a physically vivid experience, for every image introduced and woven into the fabric, is to clarity for her readers a view of God and human spirituality which both incorporates and transcends the physical.

I argued that faith requires imagination, quoting Carol Lee Flinders, in her essay on Catherine in Enduring Grace, Living Portraits of Seven Women Mystics, by involving the power of her own imagination, Catherine was doing what human beings have regularly done when confronted by forces they cannot control, forces that would crush them or stunt them or strip them bare. Imagination seems to be a vital component of genuine nonviolent resistance, for it allows us to hold on to a positive view of ourselves no matter what the world tells us we are.

Catherine’s passion was for unity, within oneself, one’s community, the church and the world. She saw how the sins of the shepherds of the church zapped their vitality to shepherd, to keep their sheep well.

The Gospel of John was one of her favorite books in the Bible to draw on for her spontaneous use of images. In the fourth chapter, we read the familiar words Jesus spoke to the Samaritan woman at the well:

If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water. . . . Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water I give them will never be thirsty. The water I give them will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life. . . . (John 4:10-14)

As we listen to John the Baptist, we can hear Catherine’s voice also. It is as if she has joined John when he says, “I am the voice of one calling in the desert, make straight the way of the Lord” or let the spring within you be opened. Resist it no more. (John 1:23 ).

In Catherine’s writing, as in all wisdom literature there is an unrelenting call to be made whole, to experience the mercy and love of God embracing our utter poverty. Then we are to serve in humility, as Christ did for us. It is necessary for us to stop being offended by sin in a personal way. We leave that to the completed work of Christ on the cross and find we are free to love. Catherine’s fervent writing has increased our capacity for that task.

I did this study on Jan Van Ruusbroec 8 years ago. The gem that stays with me is his sense that God comes to us from within and from without. By that I believes he means that we can know God through our private ruminations and also through our shared life. 
The challenge is to awaken to God coming to us in both ways.

Summary

Jan Van Ruusbroec was a Flemish mystic. His life can be seen in three phases: his youth including life with his uncle at a cathedral church, his ordination as priest and work as a chaplain at the large collegiate church, St. Gudula and the remaining third of his life as prior for the canons regular of St. Augustine in the forest of Groenendaal. His duties included solitude and writing.

We have two selections from Jan Van Ruusbroec’s treatise The Spiritual Espousals. These selections are a part of a whole that begins with a discussion on the active life. Our excerpt begins with The Interior Life.

The text from which Van Ruusbroec wrote is simply this: “See. The bridegroom is coming. Go out” (Matt. 26:6). In this first section, Van Ruusbroec discusses the various ways of meeting God. Van Ruusbroec proposes that we have union with God in two ways: without intermediary and with intermediary. In presenting the way without intermediary, Van Ruusbroec states, “According to its essential being, you should know that the spirit receives Christ’s coming in its bare nature. . . ” (188). Our spirit receives Christ ceaselessly. The spirit lives in God and God in it. This shared dwelling includes the possibility of participating in God’s glory and power. For the spirit receives the imprint of God upon her nature.

In presenting the way with intermediary, Van Ruusbroec states “In this unity the spirit must always be either like God by means of grace and virtue or else unlike God because of mortal sin” (190). So we can lose our likeness to God but not our image. When we present our will to Christ, he comes to us in both modes--filling us with himself, his gifts, and delivering us from our sins--and sets us free.

Thus, Van Ruusbroec says the practice of dying to oneself at once fills us with blissful love, an experience so deep it can be only simply understood. Here we find rest for our souls. This unity with God is more highly valued than all one’s natural or supernatural gifts. “In this unity we are received by the Holy Spirit, and we ourselves receive the Holy Spirit, the Father, the Son, and the divine nature in its entirety, for God cannot be divided” (191). We have an experience with the Trinity. Our spirit is fed and we gain in power to grow in virtue. Union with God brings union within our spirit and grace to live a fruitful life, grounded in Love. Van Ruusbroec believes that this active meeting as a continuous movement.

Van Ruusbroec describes meeting God without intermediary in three modes: emptiness, active desire and both resting and working in accordance with righteousness. Emptiness is blissful savor, a profound sense that one is well loved. Active desire is an intense longing to be fully united with Love. God often brings the gift of savorous wisdom in this mode. The third mode--both resting and working in accordance with righteousness--Van Ruusbroec understands it this way: “An interior person therefore possess his life in these two ways, that is in rest and in activity and in each is whole and undivided, for he is completely in God when he blissfully rests and is completely in himself when he actively loves” (195-6). In this mode one richly experiences a sense of wholeness in enjoyment of God and all holy and natural activity.

In The Contemplative Life, Van Ruusbroec speaks of an embrace with God, comprehending God in the deepest way, with an interior gaze to this light. This requires a dying to self, an orderly exterior life, a devotion like that of fire and a final reorientation to the Godhead. Now one can contemplate eternal life and “find oneself to be nothing other than the same light which he sees” (200). The bridegroom ceaselessly comes birthing illumination. Van Ruusbroec brings us to understand one can enter a sense of timelessness, the eternal now. This likeness is . . . one with the very image of the Holy Trinity which is the wisdom of God, in which God contemplates himself and all things in an eternal now that has no before or after” (202). Van Ruusbroec explains that when we join God in seeing himself, we pursue the divine light and find our life.

Van Ruusbroec teaches that the bosom of the Father is our own ground and origin (202). When we choose to reside in the bosom of the Father, we find our freedom and are masters of ourselves. “With each loving movement within, he is able to grow in nobility of life beyond anything that is humanly understandable.” (203) We begin to resemble God’s nobility. Now is the time for savoring and seeing, without amazement, for our spirit has been brought beyond itself, made one with the Spirit of God.

Analysis

Van Ruusbroec wrote from a deep well. He was immersed in mystical theology and the patristic heritage of the east and west. We are aware that Van Ruusbroec wrote in response to the rise of quietism and pantheism. Yet, the content of this treatise transcends those concerns. In The Spiritual Espousals we see Van Ruusbroec was given a gift of desire and ability to express corrective and informing treatises on spirituality that he honored with this work before us.

Van Ruusbroec proposes that the divine within is a given. By virtue of my existence, I am well loved and invited to experience healing, growth, delight and joy. Van Ruusbroec is not alone in building his spirituality around image and likeness. His particular contribution is in exposing to us what it means to be created in His image. He does this well, describing the origin of our union with God. He states “Christ comes to us from within outward, while we come to him from without inward. It is this which gives rise to a spiritual meeting” (188). Since Christ is the divine light within us, at our invitation, he will move out gathering all of our brokenness, making us whole. While we can bring our scattered selves inward, where Christ is, ready to orient us to this divine light, within the darkness of our soul.

Van Ruusbroec describes well the experience of being in relationship to God with intermediary. “. . . it is the powers of the soul which act, but in whatever way they act they derive their power and potency from their originating source, that is, from the unity of the spirit, where the spirit subsists in its personal mode of being” (190). As I read this section, I pictured a doe moving about the forest of its own power given her. She is not carried by other animals. She has her own muscle, sinew, thought and senses to allow her to move in a dignified way.

Van Ruusbroec builds a detailed case to show us how through God’s grace and our virtues we can become like God and experience bliss. As I reflected on this section, I thought of the macrocosm and microcosm Lars Thornberg described in “The Human Person as Image of God,” It is in knowing and sensing in our spirits that we have a transcendent home, beyond our flesh and that we are a part of something much bigger than ourselves, that our spirits find bliss and our egos rest. Describing union with God as an active state, not static, assures us, welcomes us, into relationship with a God who is alive, not just an idea. Van Ruusbroec is convincing us that embodied spirituality is possible and available for all.

As I mentioned we are aware that Van Ruusbroec wrote in part in response to quietism. Quietism espoused that one had need of no one but God. Van Ruusbroec’s treatise speaks of two primary ways we relate to God. The first is experienced in an entirely private manner, without intermediary. But the second, with intermediary, is only realized in relationship to other people. For grace is not realized apart from a response we often identify as virtue, such as, kindness, patience, forgiveness. Van Ruusbroec teaches that we are to be familiar with both ways of being in relationship with God.

Perhaps somewhere else in Van Ruusbroec’s writing he describes in more detail the pain involved in giving one’s will to God. For usually, that is done after much failure living without God at all, or half-heartedly. We have all been wounded by those who say they love us and by those who never pretend to. Acknowledging our wounds and how we have hurt others by living out of them is a life’s work. Van Ruusbroec says: ”He imprints his image and likeness upon us, namely, himself and his gifts, delivers us from our sins, sets us free, and makes us like himself” (190). Van Ruusbroec describes the union with God after we are delivered from our sins, but does not help us with the painful struggle itself.

Application

In this picture of God given to us interiorly, we know that God has made an eternal covenant with us that can not be severed by the foulest sin. All that God would ask to enliven a broken relationship with him is acknowledging our sin and giving our wills to him. A powerful reminder to someone experiencing great sorrow and hopelessness around one’s deeds. We can choose to be refreshed by God at any moment. The power of God is ready to be ignited in each of us. No one has been left out.

Let me repeat myself. Van Ruusbroec writes from the simple, short text: “See, the bridegroom is coming. Go out.” Van Ruusbroec perspicuously states in The Spiritual Espousals, that the heavenly marriage proposal is an invitation to not just a life of honor but of bliss. “Now Christ comes from above as an almighty Lord and generous Benefactor. . . ” (188) He convinces this reader that choosing Christ as one’s bridegroom, no matter what the cost, is a winning choice. I am entirely convinced as I contemplate the image of a divine bridegroom courting me that this is a wedding I do not wish to miss! This is a bridegroom I would be foolish to resist.

Van Ruusbroec, Jan. “Spiritual Espousals.” Light from Light, An Anthology of Christian Mysticism, Paulist Press, 2001. Eds. Louis Dupre and James A Wiseman. New York:Paulist Press, 2001. 182-207.

I begin with Mary Oliver’s poem, stanza 6 from The Leaf and the Cloud.

I will mention them now,

I will not mention them again.

It is not lack of love

nor lack of sorrow.

But the iron thing they carried, I will not carry.

I give them—one, two, three, four—the kiss of courtesy,

of sweet thanks,

of anger, of good luck in the deep earth.

May they sleep well. May they soften.

But I will not give them the kiss of complicity.

I will not give them the responsibility for my life.


In her poem Oliver notes four people who cared inconsistently for her. Through their action or inaction Oliver was hurt. But she is not wedded to them; she declares that she will not carry “that iron thing” they carried, their bent, painful ways. She will bear the responsibility for her life. Oliver is ready to move on, to walk in her own power. How will she do that?

In the The Dark Night of the Soul: A Psychiatrist Explores the Connection Between Darkness and Spiritual Growth Gerald May says that we can come to the place where “we know who we are, what has been happening in the darkness and are awake to love” (182). In this state we experience growing freedom and energy liberated from attachments that restrained it (183). May goes on to say that we no longer pray to God, but find that we are keeping God company in what God is experiencing with us.

This is our new dawn and the brightness of this day may appear to us as a bright cloud. May tells us that “The reason of the obscurity” . . . .“is to keep us safe so we don’t stumble because we think we know where we’re going” (194-95). Have you ever had such an experience? I recall talking with Jesus about my future. I sensed Jesus standing at my back with his right hand on my left shoulder, showing me where to look. It was as if I were in a cloud. Sometimes I try to make out what is there.

Trusting in the power of the Passion of Christ, we are no longer trapped in old ways. We are free. But free for what? How does a former prisoner adapt to freedom? What does a responsible, grateful, joyful life look like?

In the 23rd Psalm we hear David announce that the Lord prepares a table for him in the presence of his enemies. Do we want this? What will it require of us to eat at that table knowing that those who have hurt us are present? Can I become part of a new compatible relationship with the one who wounded me? Gerald May encourages me when he says that true compassion is the essence of creation: if we remain free from our ego attachments, compassion will arise directly and spontaneously within every situation. (184) “Here actions and feelings flow from a bottomless source within us (185).

I believe that we are made for the story we are in and that there is more good than bad in everyone’s story. But we are not to spend too much time analyzing if I really have had more good than bad. Perhaps you have heard that “God writes straight with crooked lines.” So let us just know that as we attend to our story with our best effort and faith, God is alive, well and acting on our behalf.

We are to live in the moment, right? People tell us not to live in the past, nor to project our cares into the future. Live in the moment, only in this moment can I experience grace, or have faith, or move those mountains. But in order to live well in this moment, I do need to be aware of my context in order to respond and act with efficacy.

Sometimes a word comes to me as I am writing and I am not quite sure what it mean. This happened just now with “efficacy.” So I looked it up. Efficacy refers to the power of capacity to produce the desired effect. So efficacy does not just mean the ability to respond, but to respond in a way that I desire! Acting in this self-aware way requires that we be persons of agency, persons who are capable of exerting power on our behalf.

In Isaiah, one of my favorites verses declares: “Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat . . .. Eat what is good and delight yourselves in rich food” (Isaiah 55:1). In John 7:37-38, Jesus says “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink.” We are familiar with the petition “give us this day our daily bread” from the Lord’s Prayer. (Mt 6:11)

We recall Jesus saying saying “I am the bread of life” (John 6:35). At the last supper, Jesus tells his disciples to “eat this bread and drink the cup” (1 Cor. 11:26). In scripture eating and drinking call us to the table where there is good food ready for us to enjoy in good company. So how does one come to the table? I believe that coming to the table of the Lord is a process of becoming conscious, of coming to know ourselves as we are known.

A few years ago through prayer, I had a sense that I was standing at a sideboard. Over time, I became aware that there was a table in this room and in fact, there was an empty place at the table for me. Since that time, I have been practicing coming to the table of the Lord. This has required me to accurately describe what is on my plate. Imagine the plate is a metaphor for the realities of my life experience found in my relationships. I could not actually “eat” what was given to me, until I named it. I noticed there were things that had been sitting on that plate for a long time, waiting to be named. Once named, it was as if the Risen Lord transformed the contents of my plate into something edible. The work I have done to name and accept the rough contours in my life has bonded me to the Risen Lord and to those in the body of Christ on the earth today.

At first it was very difficult work. Now, there are still times I cannot understand why something needs to be on my plate, but I have become more aware deep within that I am well fed. If our stories are found on our plates, what is on your plate?

During a recent workshop I attended, our facilitator asked the group if three or four of us would share a time of great darkness in our lives and explain how our experience of that dark night or impasse changed our understanding of God. A few of us did, and afterwards one man observed that by hearing the stories he believed that the group had a more profound experience of God. The telling of a few sad tales, did not disturb our faith, rather it connected us to one another more deeply.

One of the blocks I believe that often face us, as we even unconsciously begin to consider changing our patterns of relationship through forgiving is the sense that “it is too late for us.” But I challenge that one-dimensional thinking. What if bringing this part of broken creation to the cross is your earthly task? What if bringing your experience of pain is the primary action God desires of you?

Of what value can my broken heart be to God? I have sometimes likened my experiences with sin and its hurtful patterns in families as bits of a burst balloon. I have never met anyone who wanted that garbage. But now I know that God does not judge my damaged moments as garbage. These are the bits of life that God uses to create something beautiful. So I have been practicing giving and trusting God with my disappointments and in those acts, I am being regenerated from the ground up.