Answering the Call of God.

Note:  This is from a 1/26/14 Sermon I did at my church in Ellensburg Washington from the first part of Matthew Chapter 4.  Even though this was written for a Christian audience,  non-Christian readers can generalize the message to learning to discern your own deepest callings of Spirit in response to what speaks to you from that sacred place - an important task for all faiths.

When Jesus approached Peter and Andrew, most historians believe they were probably using cast nets.

Elizabeth McNamer

The cast net is circular, about 20 feet in diameter, with weights of lead attached to the border. One man usually flings the net in a round circle from the shore but it is also done from boats. It required great skill since it had to open completely when it landed on the water trapping the fish underneath it. Peter and Andrew were occupied with this type of fishing …when they spied Jesus standing on the shore (Jn 21:7)

Jesus spied them too, and it perhaps wasn’t an accident that he chose who he did.  Fishing was the primary commercial activity in that time, and those engaged in that business had to be both hard working and socially competent, able to speak Hebrew, Aramaic, and some Greek, and able to get along with the poor, working classes, just as well as the ruling politicos (to whom they paid their taxes), and the commercial/business class.  Fish knew no borders, as they graced the tables of jews and gentiles, working poor and high-society Greeks and Romans – and fishermen crossed all of those borders effortlessly.  They were the chameleons of that society.  Jesus calling them was no mistake.

Think about your own day-to-day job, or activities, and put yourself in Peter and Andrew’s place – looking up from your cubicle, or book, or classroom to see Jesus looking at you expectantly.  Not sure what metaphor Jesus would have to use for you here.  Put down that Powerpoint presentation, and follow me!! 

And herein lies the mystery – why did Peter and Andrew, and soonafter James and John, follow him?  Why did they choose that moment in time, in their lives, to drop everything and follow Christ? In those crossroads of their life, they turned towards Christ and answered God’s call.  This is no small thing – leaving their father and, presumably, their family business behind.  Maybe, like some of us, they truly hated their jobs, and so anything sounded better – but that’s hard to believe given Jesus’ financial disposition.  He only promised them crosses and homelessness and persecution.

We can speculate from Scripture and theological commentaries that Andrew, who followed John the Baptist, learned from his “behold the lamb of God” comment that Jesus was the Messiah – the Son of David who would become the new King of the Jewish people.  Perhaps Peter and Andrew saw in Jesus a chance for a place in this new Kingdom.  That was, indeed, a very compelling story at the time, even if their idea of “kingdom” was much different than Christ’s.

We’ll return to the idea of “Kingdom” later, but first there is another compelling story here by these dropped nets. A call story. In his call to the disciples – Jesus conveys urgency to follow him.  No small task for fisherman, who left their father behind. But they follow without hesitation.  It is one of the most critical moments in the New testament – A “Kairos” – the Greek word for time in the urgent moment,  versus chronological time – a supreme moment.

What are some of your “Kairos” moments in faith? Can you recall the moment (or moments) in your life where you decided to answer a spiritual call – to follow Christ – to seek a relationship with the Divine?  How did it happen, and why did you choose what you did?  Obviously, you’re sitting here in a church, so unless you’re just here for the awesome coffee hour food, you have a call story.

I remember a moment when I attended the Methodist Exploration 1990 in St. Louis, MO.  This was the same event that some of you attended last year, but back then I believe it was in black and white.  I had to sneak in, because I wasn’t 18 yet, but I was seriously considering ministry at the time, and doing a lot of discerning and stuff :p. 

I was walking down the hall with my friend Beth, only 18 or so herself, when we came across a middle-aged woman sobbing outside of her hotel room.  Without saying a word, Beth wen up and starting hugging the crying woman twice her age whom she had never met, and telling her "don't worry, it's going to be OK".  The woman looked up with disbelief and gratitude, saying "thank you so much for caring!".

I can’t remember a single lecture or presentation from that whole weekend, but I’ll never forget that moment – it was the moment I first thought I wanted to be a Methodist minister.

And then, just as quickly, the moment passed.

-        On my 18^th birthday, January 16, 1991, my country invaded a sovereign nation under the pretense of Peace, with our president concluding the speech announcing this invasion with “May God continue to bless our nation, the United States of America”

-        The next year, in 1992, the General conference of United Methodist Church voted 710-238 to reject an amendment removing the Book of Discipline language asserting that Homosexuality was incompatible with Christian Teaching.

It would be 17 years before I came back to the church, and when I did, I sat right there in that pew, and once again was presented with a moment where I would have an opportunity for discernment.  Here’s what I wrote about that moment afterwards, when I was presenting my own call for ministry to the SPRC almost 2 years ago:

When I arrived to the sanctuary of the Ellensburg United Methodist Church in February of 2009, I wept.  They were the kind of tears that only come from Grace.  It had been 17 years, half my life at that point, since I really attended a protestant church, but I realized that I was home.   I didn’t need to read the history or mission of this church, which had risked welcoming all of God’s children, even when it was unpopular.  I didn’t need to ask people theological questions to determine if they possessed the spirit of Grace and acceptance that I sought in a community of faith.  I could see it in people’s eyes and feel it in the bones of this church.  You guys know what I’m talking about – you know what this church is.  It’s why I can’t think of a better church to send me toward my call, if that is the will of this church.  It’s because you answered your call that I’m here.

As for my own call, I spend a lot of time thinking about unanswered prayers – that person sitting alone in a room, uncertain whether it’s safe to hope, and asking for God to show up in their lives.  I think about that person all the time.  Maybe they are praying for an end to violence or suffering in their lives, or for community and connection, or simply to feel the presence of a higher power to lift them up.  We haven’t shown up for them yet.  They do not yet sit in our congregation, feeling Grace, like I did 3 years ago.  God is trying to answer their call, but needs us to help with that – needs me to help with that.  I could spend the rest of my life making excuses for why some theological detail of the church as a whole doesn’t fit with me, or why some imperfection in my own life or faith disqualifies me from the job, but that’s not answering that person’s prayer.  That’s not answering God’s call. 

How are you called to incorporate God into your life?  I would invite each of you to engage in a discussion with God about your own “call story”.  No, I’m not talking, necessarily, about ordination – I’m talking about what you have to say to Jesus, calling to you from the shores of your busy lives.  There’s no need to rack yourself with guilt, or make a bunch of promises you may or may not keep.  Just open up some lines of communication and have an honest discussion.  Let me explain how to do this.

Look back on this last week, or month, or year, and try to find some mundane moment where God was lingering just beneath the surface of an interaction and relive that moment as if God is there next to you, or peering through you.  For example, when you are asking your friend or family member how their day was – listen and wait for a response.  If you have periods of idle time during the week where you’re bored stiff or just on autopilot kind of wasting time, take 15 minutes of that time and give it to God in some way that’s meaningful to you spiritually – prayer or meditation, volunteering, writing a letter of support to someone who is sick, writing a letter to the editor of the newspaper about a social justice issue, calling up someone who doesn’t know too many people to invite them for a cup of coffee, welcome a stranger into your life or our church family. 

This is a foundational spiritual practice – learning to listen for and respond to God’s voice in our moments of life – it’s the first step to deepening our relationship with God and our faith.  But we have to take a moment here and there to stop and listen for God.  Can you put down your “nets” – your Iphone, or your busy schedule, or the second hour of SportsCenter – and step into the Kingdom for a moment? 

We live our lives – always – at this spiritual crossroads. We’re standing out in the waters of our lives, clinging to our nets, with Christ calling out to us from the shore.  At every turn, in every moment, is an opportunity to follow Christ and access the Kingdom of Heaven. Behind every interaction, underneath each breath and spoken word, within each action, is that open invitation. The Kingdom is near at hand – always.  We are lost to the Kingdom by our failure to recognize those moments, but only for those moments.  It’s OK, because we are also found and live into the Kingdom for each moment where we see and engage God in our lives.  

And here’s a reassuring thought.  God will be there when you return even if you lose faith sometimes, like God was for me after 17 years – like Jesus was for Peter when he began to sink into the water moments after walking on its surface.  The Kingdom is always, ever, near at hand.  We only need to drop our nets, or trappings, and our distractions, and reach out towards God just for a moment.  With Practice, one moment becomes a few more, with each successive moment of turning towards God, we take one more step toward the Kingdom, which again is always at hand.

Richard Rohr has a special name for the saints among us who have mastered these moments so well that they have fully transformed their lives – he calls them “Kingdom people”:

I hope you’ve met at least one “Kingdom person” in your life. They are surrendered and trustful people. You sense that their life is okay at the core. They have given control to Another and are at peace, which paradoxically allows them to calmly be in control. A Kingdom person lives for what matters, for life in its deepest and lasting sense. There’s a kind of gentle absolutism about their lifestyle, an inner freedom to do what they have to do—joyfully.

Kingdom people are anchored by their awareness of God’s love deep within… When you live in the Kingdom, you live in a “threshold space” between this world and the next. You learn how to live between heaven and earth, one foot in both worlds, holding them precious together…”

The Spirit Steward: In the Belly of the Whale

The Spirit Steward: In the Belly of the Whale: When I was a boy, and I found myself making a mistake, I would often panic and immediately make several  more mistakes in rapid succession...

In the Belly of the Whale

When I was a boy, and I found myself making a mistake, I would often panic and immediately make several  more mistakes in rapid succession.  Maybe I’d spill my milk when pouring it into my cereal, try to catch myself and drop the entire milk jug on the floor, reaching to catch the milk jug only to knock the cereal bowl itself and several neighboring dishes of stuff all over the kitchen floor.  A dropped and broken glass could become three or four broken glasses, and maybe a couple of plates to boot, in a matter of seconds.  My parents learned to just try and grab me as soon as possible if I spilled or broke something.

I’d like to say that adulthood has cured me of that pattern, but I’m afraid I can’t.   That package I forgot to send my sister for Christmas might not get there by Valentines Day, even though I realized weeks ago  I forgot to send it.  For me, I can despair so much over the mistakes I’ve made, I lose sight of my ability to resolve the issue while things slowly get worse and worse.  And before I know it, I’m a hot mess – agonizing over what a terrible person I am.

I used to believe I was uniquely terrible, but I’ve been lucky enough to have people in my life who are willing to share their own struggles with me.  Maybe it’s an estranged friend or family member that they got into a tiff with several months ago and won’t call back because they just figure the person hates them.  Or a bill that is long enough overdue that the collection company is considering resorting to a brut squad to get their money back.  Or a visit to the dentist that they know is going to be painful, expensive, and full of bad news about their prospects of eating solid food in the near future.   I’m glad I have friends I can talk to about this stuff – being a disaster is so much easier when you have company.

The pattern is easy enough to identify.  There’s that flood of negative feelings when we fail at something, or don’t achieve what we had hoped, or experience a difficult and unexpected hardship, and we are left to cope with those feelings.  Do we run away?  Do we dive into our hidey holes and hope no one finds us?  Do we allow despair to  engulf us to the point of nearly drowning?  How we cope with these storms is one of the most important challenges of a spiritual life.

God calls to Jonah, a Prophet, to go to Ninevah and Jonah, though a prophet jumps a ship in the other direction – as far away from Ninevah as possible.  A big storm comes and every guy on the ship tries to figure out whose God is angry. Taking no chances, they begin praying each to their own God and tossing everything they can get their hands on overboard.  Everyone, that is, except Jonah, who is mysteriously passed out downstairs despite the storm.  They rouse Jonah and ask him to beseech his God, the God of Israel , for help.  Jonah tells them to throw him in the sea.  After trying to row to shore, they give up and toss Jonah in, as he wishes.  Instead of allowing Jonah to drown, God sends a whale to swallow him.  Inside the whale, Jonah prays in thanksgiving for his deliverance from the darkness.

One thing that really struck me about the story of Jonah was that this guy running away wasn’t just any guy – he was a prophet.  He was not a centurian or a farmer or a fisherman, he was a man who had answered God’ call to ministry.  A prophet.  There is no doubt he had a strong relationship with God, and had been chosen by God as a representative of God’s word to people like the Ninevites.  And yet, away he ran, just as fast as he could, prophet or not.  I think about my own call to ministry 20 years ago, and how it wasn’t until a couple of months ago that I finally got around to answering it.

It makes me wonder – what was going on for Jonah?  Why was he so afraid to go the Ninevah that he jumped the first ship out of Dodge?  And why did he hide for so long from his own calling that it took him getting thrown overboard and almost dying to find his way home again? 

Listen to Jonah’s prayer after he’s swallowed by the whale.  “The waters encompassed me, even to my soul, the deep closed around me, weeds were wrapped around my head, I went down to the foundations of the mountains, the earth with it’s bars closed around me forever.”  Now if I went into my therapists office and told them this, I’m pretty sure I’d walk out with a prescription to Celexa, and rightly so.  This is a man who is describing depression.  If you read later on in the book of Jonah, he actually asks God, repeatedly, just to take his life. 

When I read this scripture, I found the symbolism to be remarkable.  Many of us have found ourselves on these metaphoric liferafts, clinging for life against the storms raging against us – trying to figure out how to survive.  In the middle of those storms, it feels like it takes every last bit of strength you have to hold on for one more day.   Maybe you’re that person, or maybe someone you know or love is that person.  When the depression hits, it’s based on a very rational notion that it’s a waste of energy to fight.  In fact, biological research on depression suggests that it is an adaptive behavioral trait in the animal kingdom – allowing animals to save their energy to fight another day.  But the feeling is what Jonah describes – sinking down, drowning, getting scraped down to the foundations of our souls until it feels like there’s nothing left.

It hurts like hell.

And just when you think it can’t get any worse, you get swallowed up by a whale.  That last vicious blow comes when we’re at that weakest point.  For people who have experienced Jonah’s story, this can take many forms – maybe it’s losing a job or a home, maybe it’s the death of a loved one, or a divorce, of flunking a class, or an arrest for drugs or alcohol.  Either way, it is often a moment of feeling utterly forsaken by the world, by ourselves, and by God.  Rock bottom, if you will. 

Jonah was an interesting guy, though.  Unlike some people who feel this overwhelming sense of abandonment by God, he was aware that it was he who had abandoned God.  And so, overcome by his own guilt and shame and self hatred, he believes that God should abandon him because he was a no-good rotten piece of garbage.

But this is where the spiritual message makes it’s entrance into the Scripture, and in ways that surprised and humbled Jonah.

Did God abandon Jonah, even when Jonah pleaded for it?

What does God do in this story?

He calls Jonah to go to Ninevah.  When Jonah bails out of the job, God creates a storm that causes Jonah to be thrown into the sea.  When Jonah settles on his fate of drowning in the bottom of the sea, God  saves Jonah from drowning via the whale.  And when Jonah is at the absolute end of his rope, to the absolute bottom of his soul, God  has the whale deposit Jonah on dry land, giving him a second chance.  It was far from pleasant, due to the very natural consequences of Jonah’s choices, but at every single step of the way, God is attending to Jonah’s redemption.  Even if all Jonah is aware of at the time is being in a pool of whale vomit.

Wherever Jonah was and whatever Jonah had done (or not done), God met him there.  God emerged as a graceful and loving God.  God showed up for Jonah, had mercy for Jonah, even when Jonah had trouble showing up for much of anything and had zero mercy for himself.  Everything that “happened” to Jonah was not to abandon him or leave him to the storm, but to save him and redeem him to his rightful place as a beloved child of God.  As Jonah says, “you have brought me up from the pit.  When my soul fainted within me, I remembered the Lord.”

I have experienced personally much of this story – the running away, the storms of suffering and struggle, the depression, and the unpleasant feeling of being scraped down to the rawest threads of my soul.  I remember times when my soul felt like the landscape after a volcano erupted – nothing left but scorched earth.  It was not pleasant.  It will probably happen again, periodically, and that won’t be pleasant either.

However, I am immensely grateful for it.  Because it is in these dark and hard places at the bottom of things, seemingly at the end of things, that I have found and learned to trust God.  It is in these very painful and unpleasant times that I have experienced redemption – not the redemption that you think of as being an awful terrible person that is saved by some jujitsu move of faith or good deeds, but the redemption of becoming aware that you are always, no matter what, being attended to by God.  The redemption of knowing that, no matter how lost you become, you can always be found by God. The redemption of knowing that wherever you are and whatever you’ve done (or not done), God will meet you there.  That God is a graceful and loving God.  That God is a merciful God. 

And that feels very, very good.

A Call to Ministry

I have recently taken the first steps towards ordained ministry in the United Methodist Church.  As part of that, I have been asked to share with my local church a statement of my ministry call.  I'm including part of it here, so let me know what you all think!

I spend a lot of time thinking about unanswered prayers. Specifically, I think about that person sitting alone in a room, wondering it’s safe to hope, and praying for God to show up in their lives.  I think about that person all the time.  Maybe they are praying for an end to abuse or suffering in their lives, or for community and connection, or simply to feel the presence of a higher power to lift them up.  However, I do know one thing about those who utter unanswered prayers: we haven’t showed up for them yet.  They do not yet sit in our congregations, feeling Grace, like I did 3 years ago when I found my current church.  God is trying to answer their call, but needs our help with that.  I could spend the rest of my life making excuses for why some theological detail of the church as a whole does not fit with me, or why some imperfection in my own life or faith disqualifies me from the job, but that’s not answering that person’s prayer.  That’s not answering God’s call. 

Much of my call to ministry is because of the prayers that we. as a community of faith, as a denomination, as disciples of Christ, have yet to answer.  The world is full people trying to find God, of God trying to find them.  However, according current trends in our society, each generation finds less relevance for their spiritual life in a traditional church.  But their spiritual needs are increasing – not decreasing.  My Master’s work in community-based sociological networks looked at how break-downs in interpersonal connections in communities dramatically impacted their ability to solve shared problems, and psychological researchers are documenting similar impacts on basic human relationships.  Recent studies at Duke and the University of Arizona concluded that most American have only 1-2 close confidants with whom they can share their most important life concerns, while 25% have no one at all.  How many of these people live near our churches?  How many of these people go to our churches?

The theologian Frederick Buechner has written, ”vocation is where our greatest joy meets the world's greatest need.”  My greatest joy is that look in a people’s eyes when they experience the Love and power of God in their lives.  Stripped down to its most basic element, Christianity is about connecting people to God and each other with that love – Christ’s Love.  The Methodist faith talks about transforming the world by connecting people to Christ’s love through Discipleship.  My vision in ministry is to help make Christ relevant again in peoples’ lives, by listening to the spiritual story of each person, and learning how to be the face of Christ for them.  It does not matter what shape or color or size their faith comes in.  It just matters that they have someone who shows up for them after they pray.  If we can do that, God only knows what’s possible.

(A clarification here:  I know many who read my blog posts are not Christian per se.  As I hope you already know, my aim in this blog is not to evangelize and convert, but rather to share my own stories of spirit.  Despite our spiritual lens, I believe we are all  ministers in our way, Christian or not, ordained or not, if we decide to heed that call.  So even in this post where I am talking about my own plans for ministry, I am aware that all of us, all of the time, are ministering in our own ways.)

Like I’ve done so well the last 20 plus years, I can easily list the excuses for why I should not go into ministry.  However, I’m left with that call of the unanswered prayer.  How will I respond to that voice crying in the wilderness, once I have heard it?

The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness,

Prepare ye the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low:

and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain: (Isaiah 40:3)

O righteous Father, the world doesn't know you, but I do; and these disciples know you sent me. And I have revealed you to them and will keep on revealing you. I will do this so that your love for me may be in them and I in them. (John 17:25-26)

Forgive us our trespasses/sins/debts/whatever

Trespasses? debts? sins? Our relationship with our faults is fraught with challenges. The word "sin" brings up a lot of resistance and baggage for people, including me. So, when I was asked to fill in to preach for our pastor this Sunday on the part of the Lord's Prayer that says "forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us", I had more questions than answers.

 So what's in a word? Matthew and Luke include the Lord's Prayer in their respective Gospels, but even they used different words here. Matthew used a word which means debts, while Luke used a word which means sins. Meanwhile, several translations later, the word trespasses appears. After some admittedly lazy google-based research, I gathered that a plurality of biblical historians agree that Jesus taught/preached in the local Galilean dialect, a form of his native Aramaic. In that language, the word hobha means both sin and debt, but the Gospels were written in Hebrew, and the two disciples used the two different words. Of course, after subsequent translations in latin, greek, etc, on the way to English, the same translations led to "trespasses" in the current form. In other parts of the New Testament, Jesus actually replaces hobha with another word that means trespasses.

 Perhaps it doesn't really matter, after all. Jesus was trying to get people to stop thinking about the words, the laws, the recipes of religion at the time. So, he didn't preach in the educated language of Hebrew, but in the accessible language of Aramaic. Also, he used several different words, ideas, parables, and more because he didn't want people to get lost in the words. He wanted them to find the point. He wanted to open the door that connected everyone to God and that had been locked far too long by an exclusive religious community. He wanted everyone to have the choice to walk through that door and find a spiritual life with God.

 As I myself move beyond the words, there are two things about forgiveness that I feel very deeply. One is what I wrote about before, which is that living in a state of forgiveness and graciousness to those around us allows us to live in that state ourselves:

... we choose which state we decide to live in with the world. We can choose resentment and revenge, based on a fear of self protection, or we can choose to live in a state of forgiveness, based on a connection with the higher power of love to transform our relationships.

The other has to do with how the act of confiding in God and each other about our mistakes improves our relationships with both. The best examples I can think of why this is important are in parenting and interpersonal relationships.

As a parent, one of the things that's always on the list of things to figure out is how to deal with a child that has misbehaved. It's easy to get caught up in our kids bad behavior, to become frustrated with it, to try to control it through some combination of punishing, pleading, or preaching. However, the worst thing that can happen with our kids is not that they behave badly. The worst thing that can happen with our kids is that they stop talking to us. Usually, poor choices in a child's behavior happen because they are trying to deal with a problem or situation, or impulse, and don't know how. Maybe they're forcing you to drag them out of the door and power-buckle them in the car when you're already 10 minutes late for school because they're afraid of a situation there, or they were in the middle of playing with or watching something. It's easy to see, with a little bit of space, that most of the problems that lead to bad behavior are resolvable. What we as parents hope for is that we can teach our children how to come to us when they've made mistakes, or are making mistakes, and let us help them figure out a better way to live.

 I misbehaved as a child, on occasion. I remember one time, in Jr. High, when I got into a fist fight on a friday night. My mom or dad picked me up from the teen club at the church, and I quickly got into the back seat to hide my black eye in the dark. I knew fighting was wrong, and I feared getting in trouble. But there was a lot more going on than just that. Even though I made it to my room without being noticed, I was in a great deal of turmoil. I had not chosen the fight - it was orchestrated by other kids so that they could see a fight that night, and my entire social standing would hinge on whether or not I fought this other kid that I had no desire to fight. The black eye didn't hurt, but the feeling of being forced so viciously into something I didn't want to do was unbearable. It was hard, but I walked out of the room, and told my parents "I got in a fight". I was lucky to have parents that didn't rush to judge me, but instead asked "what happened?". In fact, it was my faith and hope in that response from them that brought me out of my room. It helped them to help me, and though refusing to join the game in the future challenges led to an excruciating loss of social standing, it also eventually allowed me to find better friends.

 It's not about our sin, or the defeatist notion of us all being sinners. The power of asking for forgiveness from God is that it allows us to engage a dialogue and a connection with Him/Her. As spiritual beings, this dialogue with a benevolent higher power means everything. It allows God to help us during our darkest and weakest times, and creates a connection between our searching souls and a deeper source of power. It's kind of one of the main points.

 In our personal relationships, such as in our marriages, family ties, professional or church communities, and friendships, how we deal with mistakes and trespasses in ourselves and others may be the most important thing we learn how to do. The best relationships don't come from perfect people - they come from people who learn how to own their imperfections, and accept them in others.

 Do we identify with our mistakes, and own them? Do we feel like we need forgiveness? For many of us sometimes, the goal is to not let people see our sins and imperfections. We try to hide that from each other. We try to hide that from ourselves. We even try to hide it from God. But acknowledging, and confessing, our imperfection and transgressions - our sins - is the first step to healing and freedom. Doing so unleashes our authentic selves; not that filtered version we're trying to appease everyone with all the time. Wouldn't you rather be that person? Wouldn't you rather be around that person?

 How do you interact with your sin? Do you rack yourself with guilt? Do you systematically ignore it as it builds up to 100 times it's actual size? Do you blame others for your mistakes? Do you find other ways of cutting yourself off from redemption and healing?

 It's strange how the whole passage about sin/trespasses in the Lord's Prayer elicits so much resistance and negativity, when the it's inclusion is actually about hope. The point is not that we make mistakes - the point is that, despite our mistakes and brokenness, we can come to God and find healing amidst our struggles.

Surrender

Not just no. Hell no!

That is my instinctual response to the spiritual idea of surrendering. The response is reflexive, like flinching when someone throws a baseball at my head. This means giving up control over, as I see it, everything I need to survive. "From my cold, dead hands," my ego screams, and who am I to argue? I can practice this spiritual mumbo jumbo tomorrow, I reason, when the wolves are a little farther from the front door.

What is spiritual surrender? There are many explanations out there, but I think of spiritual surrender as a very conscious and intentional act of releasing our fate to the Grace of God. "Grace" is a key idea here, and by Grace I mean the unconditional gifts of a benevolent higher power. All people of faith admit to the existance of some higher power, irrespective of the diety they choose to worship. While I don't judge any person's deistic path, I do question putting one's faith into something that you wouldn't feel comfortable surrendering to. Why claim a faith, and it's associated positive aspects, and yet not stand by it, or surrender to it, in your times of need? I have to ask myself this, as a reminder, at least once a day. If we think of our faith as a set of clothes that we put on each day, then I think each moment we fail to step into that faith, we are spiritually naked. Spiritual surrender is like dressing our souls for life each day, and ensures that we aren't living out the recurring nightmare of walking around in our underwear.

I love thinking about surrender, even if I'm not as good at practicing it as I'd like. It forces me to reflect on all of these programs, fears, and otherwise bad habits that take me out of the moments and spiritual spaces where I can connect with God. It cuts to the chase pretty quickly when I'm feeling exposed and afraid, because it's usually because I have put my trust into something less benevolent than God. A fundamental practice in any faith is learning how to reprogram our responses to the world to something more meaningful, to something that transcends or fears and defenses. It is unbelievably hard, and violates our basic tendencies - like jumping off the high-dive, or allowing a friend to take care of us when we are sick, or getting on an airplane.

Let's talk a little about Carl Jung, just for fun, and to provide a more "scientific" explanation for our internal conflicts with surrender. He coined the idea of the collective unconscious - which is the idea that all of our experiences in life get hard-wired into our brains, or programmed. This provides our automated response to the world around us, and the challenges it provides, as a way of keeping us safe. Our immediate responses to the situations in our lives are as functional as what we have programmed into our brains. These responses can be healthy or unhealthy, which I'll leave you to decipher for yourself, but an example of unhealthy response might be a methamphetamine or gambling addiction, while a healthy response might be talking to a friend or meditation/prayer when things get rough. Whatever choices we have made in the past for how we cope, our brains natural response is going to be "I have to respond this way to survive!!!!!!". That is our programming.

So, this brings us back to spiritual surrender as a conscious, and sometimes difficult, act. Remembering that the whole point of having a spiritual life is to connect us with a higher, and more benevolent power. Spiritual surrender aligns us with that power as often as we engage it - even when our immediate fears and worries are telling us otherwise. In fact, this is the immense power of a spiritual life - it opens a new door of hope, even in our darkest times, and shows us the way to happiness, to Grace, and to God.

What We Can Learn from Flowers

One of Nature's boldest acts of faith is a flowering plant. From the darkness below, it brazenly asserts it's claim to light. It thrusts out gawdy petals and decadent perfumes. It woos the bees and the butterflies with nectar and fruit. It knows it's place in the world, and owns it.

We celebrate flowers for their unapologetic beauty, for their audacious sense of entitlement to brilliance. And then, in our uniquely human way, we pluck them and keep them in vases in our dining rooms, or give them to loved ones to spark romance or reconciliation. We attempt to harness something of their energy to infuse into our own lives, cloyingly holding them to our breast the way a child might smother an unsuspecting kitten. Yet, soonafter, the flowers wither in our vases and clutching hands, leaving us with dried-up stalks and blowing seeds.

What is it that we seek from flowers?

Imagine a person interacting with the world the way a flower might - wandering down the street with a big smile on their face and announcing to the world how beautiful and worthy of love they are. Imagine them looking at others in anything but disbelief if they were not unconditionally adored and showered with love and light. We would likely say, "who the hell does this person think they are?", or mutter disdainfully "they act like they're God's gift to the world!"

Unfortunately, too often we present ourselves, and each other, with a much different fate than flowers. Instead of simply acknowledging that we really are God's gift to the world, and celebrating that light in ourselves and others, we decide to cloud the skies with our own judgements and statements about right and wrong. We decide to stop simply trusting the light. We become weeds.

It's no wonder we got kicked out of the Garden.

It is a quintessential quest of spirituality to find our way home from this wilderness of weeds we create in our lives. It begins with shamlessly claiming our own God-given right to love, beauty, and light, and continues by allowing, giving, and defending that same right in others.

Ultimately, we decide whether our lives flower, or become choked by weeds.
What will grow from the seeds you have planted?