What God Wants For Your Life

Are you the sinner-in-touch-with-your-sin or Simon-in-denial?

In helping you to answer that question, I have been making a few observations I hope will be helpful. Today, this:

The only way to receive love and forgiveness is to own our need for it.

The literature of spiritual direction talks a lot about false selves — the images of ourselves we project, the things we hope people will think about us, the edited versions of our lives fit for public consumption. It is not just movie stars or politicians who do this — though they have reduced it to a fine art. We all do it to one degree or another.

And, to some degree, it may be unavoidable. Not everyone can be trusted with the unedited version of our lives. Not all relationships warrant it.

But what people do know about us needs to be consistent with the full nature of our lives. Some people need to be trusted with most of what we are. And — above all — God needs to know us as we are.

Until that happens, we cannot fully receive God’s forgiveness, nor live completely into God’s love.

And that — not the fact that he was religious — was Simon’s problem. He didn’t know his own sinfulness fully and he didn’t own it fully in God’s presence. That was clear in his reaction to Jesus’ visitor. His false self — the image that he wanted Jesus and others to see short-circuited his ability to receive God’s forgiveness. He thought he was on the right path and she was not. What he failed to see, in a sense, is that there was no difference.

So, in what Jesus says it becomes clear that neither Simon, nor the woman are our models — what is at issue is the degree to which we are in touch with how much we all depend upon God.

Now, that might leave us all wondering if it wouldn’t be better to be like Henry —- new born, no scars, no losses…

The problem, of course, is no one gets to stay a baby forever. But there is another kind of innocence — an innocence far better than innocence of our making: the innocence of complete dependence upon God.

I have a friend like that who is a recovering alcoholic. The thing about alcoholism is — if you survive it — you get clear about your own frailty in a hurry and you live in daily dependence upon it.

And Skip is like that. He has gotten over his several false selves — some the product of a Harvard medical degree —- some of it the product of building a one of a kind medical practice — and some of it the product of the pride that accumulates around dealing with life and death, as physicians so often do.

There were layers of false selves and the lies to go along with them — and a portion of his own testimony is that he no longer needs to keep track of the lies. And as a result, he also lives with reckless, generous abandon. Caring for people who don’t know him, giving extravagant gifts to people in need, sitting for countless hours for others facing the same struggles he confronted.

He knows he needs God — God’s love, God’s forgiveness. And he is neither as young nor innocent in the way new-born Henry is, but he doesn’t need to be —- nor do you.

He has found innocence version 2.0, the kind of innocence only God can give. The kind that follows on forgiveness and builds in love.

That’s the kind of innocence meant for every sort of sinner who is prepared to acknowledge his or her need.

Are you the sinner-in-touch-with-your-sin or Simon-in-denial?

In helping you to answer that question, I want to make a few points you should keep in mind. Today, this:

We all need God’s love and forgiveness.

A lot of us probably think from time to time that we don’t. We run along — more or less doing the right thing, more or less considerate of our neighbors, more or less aware of God.

In fact, there are points in our lives —- most of them really, really early —- when it’s easy to suppose that most people are “basically good,” as the expression goes.

We had a grandson born this week. Henry is his name— and it’s hard to believe that all of the spoiling, care, love, and concern could be more than Henry deserves. In fact, it is tempting to argue that he is the exception that proves the rule. He is just perfect.

But, in truth, babies are the symbol of innocence and not fifty something old men for a reason. They haven’t been around long enough to make mistakes, hurt people, be hurt, mislead, be misled —-

Henry may never do any really outstandingly awful things — I hope for his sake he finds a way to avoid life’s hardest experiences. But we all accumulate what my wife and I call “road dust” — and I bet you have too. And as you age, the road dust accumulates and the need for forgiveness — given and received — becomes clearer.

Are you the sinner-in-touch-with-your-sin or Simon-in-denial?

In helping you to answer that question, I want to make a few points you should keep in mind. Today, this:

God loves you and wants to forgive you — and you can’t do a thing about it.

God is going to go loving you and longing to forgive you, even if you refuse — for whatever reason.

And that’s good news. There is nothing that can separate us from the love of God. We can delay the gift. We can make it difficult for God to get to us. We can say to ourselves that we don’t need God’s love or forgiveness. We can compare ourselves with other sinners beat ourselves up over the sins we can name, or just convince ourselves that we are just plain unlovable. But that is not going to put God off.

God is in the love and forgive business.

I had a student years ago whose mother told her in a hundred and one ways she was unlovable and unforgiveable. Her mother had two boys and, then, finally, her daughter. The girl was the focus of her mother’s aspirations — for a mother-daughter relationship, for frilly dresses and bright pink everything.

But Ellie was born into a house dominated by two brothers and a father who lived easily, laughed, loved, fished, hunted, and played football. So, not surprisingly, Ellie wanted to be a part of the action.

Instead of going along, her mother’s disappointment hardened into brittle disapproval and Ellie felt it all. By the time she was a young woman she had internalized her mother’s message: you are ugly, you are unlovable, you are a disappointment, you are unforgiveable.

For Ellie it wasn’t just what she did that made her unlovable, it was who she was that was unlovable. And nothing her father, brothers, or even her husband told her could fill the chasm her mother’s hurtful messages had created.

It was only, when with the help of a spiritual director that she could name the things that had driven her, forgive her mother for the hurt that she had caused her, and release the hatred in her own heart that had grown in response, that God’s love and forgiveness broke through.

But whether it is who you are, or what you have done that is the obstacle, there is nothing that can keep God from loving you.

“Then turning toward the woman, he said to Simon, ‘Do you see this woman? I entered your house; you gave me no water for my feet, but she has bathed my feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in she has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment. Therefore, I tell you, her sins, which were many, have been forgiven; hence she has shown great love. But the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little.’”

Sweet Jesus, meek and mild?!?!

Not really. No holds barred…no quarter given…in your face spiritual direction. But what is his point?

Big sinners who love big get forgiven? Pious types who go to the Temple all the time, don’t? That’s certainly the way I’ve heard this one preached. In fact, a lot of preachers go one better. They argue that the woman was a prostitute and the next thing you know we are talking about prostitutes with a heart of gold. Great material for a seedy detective story, not such great theology and not such great exegesis.

There is no direct evidence in the text that the woman is a prostitute. She isn’t forgiven because she loves, she loves because she has been forgiven. And while Jesus is really tough on Simon, there is no indication that he believes Simon isn’t forgiven or even loving. It’s just clear that Jesus believes there is a difference between the extent to which the woman and Simon are in touch with how much they both need to be forgiven.

So, what we have here is not the lionizing of big sinners and the big time smack-down of the apparently religious. What we have here is a story about the spiritual life that in the final analysis describes the spectrum of growth that is possible.

And the growth possible is directly related to the ability we have to grasp our need for forgiveness. So, the take away, the bottom line here is this question: On the spectrum Jesus describes — how in touch are you with your need for God’s forgiveness? The more in touch you are with your need, the more you will live with love and freedom.

My wife’s eldest son and his wife had their first child last night. His name is Henry. And I found myself wondering this morning, do grandchildren change everything?

Grandparents who are well on the other side of that divide will know better than I do. The experience is not even 12 hours old yet. But I am betting that it does.

We talk a great deal about future generations. But when we are young, life can feel like it is all about us. When we have children of our own, life can still feel like it is all about our generation, even if it is not just all about us.

But grandchildren have a way of changing everything.

It becomes clear that our own lives are a brief chapter — partly told, partly untold, understood, and misunderstood, begun and almost over, present and already past —- part of a much longer, larger story.

Grandchildren also have a way of populating that future. It is no longer an untold future of unnamed generations. It is a future into which Henry has already moved and will grow. And that makes it a future for which we feel far greater responsibility than we did yesterday.

The world might not be a different place than it was, but our sense of it has cdertainly changed.

Welcome, Henry.

Reassuring wisdom from a medieval saint:

We have learned that every soul—
even though sin-burdened, vice-entangled, pleasure-enticed;
even though in exile, a prisoner-of-war, incarcerated in body,
mud-stuck and mire deep, limb-fastened and care-fixated;
even though strung-out over business wrangling,
fear-knotted and sadness-crushed;
even though errant in wrong-headed wanderings,
in anxious uneasiness,
in restless suspicions,
even though a foreigner in a foreign land, among enemies,
and—as the Prophet says—one polluted by death with the dead
and numbered among those going down to hell—
even so, we have learned, I believe, that every soul
(however condemned, however hopeless)
can turn around, can turn back, and breathe once more
not only the hope of mercy, the hope of pardon,
but can even dare breathe the aspirations of wedding-nights
with the Word.

Bernard, SCC83.1
William Harmless, translation, in Mystics, 56

The most recent edition of the Harvard Business Journal explores the importance of a “decision audit.”

The authors, Michael Mankins and Paul Rogers, note that businesses are often reorganize in the effort to grow, but it rarely pays off. What businesses need to do is conduct a decision audit. Decide which big moves need to be made that will change everything and which small moves, made on a daily basis, will yield fundamental differences.

In business, the life of the church, and in our individual spiritual pilgrimages, the same principle applies — not just because it works, but because there are spiritual issues at stake.

Reorganization, fatalism, selling property, retrenchment, and endless conversations about how our lives and the lives of our communities are going to be different one of these days often have their roots in a lack of faith, rather than in sound decision-making.

To identify decisions that need to be made and to act on them requires courage and boldness; and in its most deeply spiritual form that kind of courage and boldness is an act of faith, not bravado.

God worries less about our failing, than about our failure to decide.

Some years ago, Gary Smalley wrote a book in which he outlined the elements of a common Hebrew practice — the blessing. Used as a means of conveying property rights, the practice also served as a means of extending the divine blessing to each successive generation. The elements Smalley identifies are:
A meaningful touch
Spoken words,
Affirming the value of the one blessed,
Picturing a special future for the one blessed,
And promising active commitment to the one blessed

No one in the ancient world would have broken the practice down into individual elements, but Smalley’s treatment does provide a picture of a practice that is all but missing from modern life.

Both men and women often spend a lifetime looking for all five elements in the intuitive search for a sense of connection with the presence of God in their lives.

Where and when have you been blessed?

Where and when have you blessed others?

Ok, I’m going out on a limb. If this bumper sticker is on the back of your car, I’m in trouble. I’ve seen before, but I saw it a few days ago with new eyes:

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

I know what it’s meant to say…wake up, there is more to life than eating, drinking, buying, and selling. Don’t dither your way to the grave collecting a bunch of stuff that they won’t let you take with you.

But when you examine it more closely. When you consider the wisdom of that bumper sticker with a careful, critical eye….it’s — well, to be technical — stupid.

Just exactly what is the human experience if it is not spiritual and what is a spiritual experience if it is not human?

Think about it…

Are the choices you make about what you do with your body really empty of spiritual significance?
Is the way you rear your children without spiritual consequences?
Are the ways in which you spend money a guide to what you really value?
Are you really untouched by being a man? By being a woman?
Have all the experiences you have had, growing up, winning, losing, loving, grieving, left you spiritually untouched?

And if you took all of that human behavior out of the equation, what would be left?

What is spiritual experience if it isn’t grounded in life?

And what on earth — or anywhere else, for that matter — are we talking about when we talk about spiritual beings that aren’t human?

Are we talking about Zombies? Martians? The life of bees?

The truth is we are both human and spiritual — and to fail to acknowledge that we are both closes us off to important truths.

The truth that our lives are an integrated whole.
The truth that we can be fully healed, body, mind, and soul.
The truth that our bodies are not less important than our spirits.
The truth that our minds need not be at war with our souls.
The truth that our emotions can serve us as spiritual guides.

And that, at least in part, is what Jesus is telling his disciples —- the resurrection changes everything. The spirit of truth is going to show you how. And the message is this: “God loves you better than you love yourself and you were meant for glory.” Put that on a bumper sticker.

God in human form, experiences life, plows the way spiritually, shows us what transformed, liberated, God-centered life looks like and —- then —- in the resurrection of his body, pronounces that which was always good, the object of God’s love.

I am convinced that life brings every one of us to the point where we recognize the need for a healing word that promises we are loved.

The mother or father who loses a child needs to know that their child is loved, cradled and embraced by a God who doesn’t know children generically, but loves their Christie, Bobby, or Jenifer.

The person who loses a job wants to know that God loves him or her, values her, and that his self-worth did not evaporate along with the job.

The person who struggles with a critical diagnosis wants to know that he or she is still Robert or Martha — and not the cancer patient or heart attack in room in 316.

And even when things go well, we all need to believe that the decisions we make in our homes, on the job, and in our communities have spiritual consequences and bless the lives of others.

Human life is spiritual and spiritual life is human.

Sister Joan Chittister is a Benedictine Nun and writer. I had the privilege of meeting her some years ago when I invited her to speak at Washington National Cathedral.

Her order which is based in Erie, Pennsylvania, runs a kids’ café that provides a safe after-school environment for over 250 children. A young man who grew up in the neighborhood, but moved away years ago and (I suppose) wanted desperately to put the experience behind him took her to task one day.

“Look, why are you doing this? Why spend so much time and energy?”

She looked him squarely in the eye and responded, “We are doing it because you moved away, but I’m going to give you a second chance.”
I worked for years as a volunteer in a Catholic hospital and I witnessed this kind of in-your-face spiritual direction more than once. It is a role that nuns play particularly well. Like our mothers, they can sometimes tell us things with the kind of direct, brutal honesty that only a handful of people can tell us in a way that gets through our defenses and takes root.

The broader message she taught the young man and the message we all need to hear, I think, is this:
We have two things we can do with painful experiences: We can run from them or we can mine them for insight and compassion. There is nothing wrong with transcending our circumstances, but there is great and good reason for listening to even painful experiences and learning from them.