What God Wants For Your Life

Famed composer and director Leonard Bernstein popularized — or at least exposed — the boomer generation to classical music. (Most of us were looking for electric guitars, a drum set, or the microphone that the lead singer was using, but Bernstein’s effort was heroic.)

At one point, he observed, “To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time.”

Ironically, I think that most of us would argue that a lack of time is the very thing that keeps us from doing a great many things — living our dreams, taking that defining risk, doing what we feel called to do. And I wondered — are we out of time or are we out of hope?

Out of hope that what we feel called to do in life won’t matter? Out of hope that the opportunities won’t be there? Out of hope that we are even equal to the task?

THIS IS NOT A MOTIVATIONAL PITCH…

Sadly, I think that it is actually possible for us to find ourselves in the place where we never get to do quite what we hoped to do. Or — in the midst of life — to find ourselves the proverbial day late and a dollar short. Life’s responsibilities, changes we could have never anticipated, the mean-spirited behavior of a co-worker or boss — there are countless reasons we might never do what we hoped to do.

In fact, I think that to one degree or another most of us are convinced of that we are not doing quite what we hoped to do. None of the friends I have talked with of late feel that they are doing precisely what they planned to do at the level and in the places that they hoped to do them.

To say, then, “I don’t have enough time,” might not be enough as a starting point for our prayers. It doesn’t name the loss, or the grief we feel.

Instead, the place to start is with acknowledging the bangs, bruises, and lost dreams we have experienced along the way. That’s the kind of honest prayer that allows us to ask…

“So, now what, Lord?”

I don’t know what the answer to that question will be for you.

I do know this: God loves us not our dreams and any effort we make out of the deep sense of love that God has for us and shares that love with others is never a waste. Efforts of that kind are, in fact, the best of gifts. By contrast, when I think about efforts done on a larger stage, with more in the way of fireworks, I begin to realize that no one would have necessarily connected with those efforts or would have been touched or moved by them quite the way that I thought that they might.

In fact, regardless of what I achieve, my love for the people God has put in my life and their love for me makes all the difference. And that gives me hope.

And the time? That is here, now…in this moment.

My prayer for you is that you will find that kind of hope in this moment as well.

I don’t know a great deal about Feng Shui (pronounced Fung Shwee), but it is, as I understand it, a Chinese concept of aesthetics that used the laws of heaven and earth to order one’s life in a way that maximized the use of life’s energy in a fashion that harmonized with the world around us.

Today it is used in a rather more trivialized and commercial fashion by interior decorators who probably don’t know a lot about ancient Chinese philosophy. But they do know an exotic way to sell their services when they see one.

In the middle of a rather lengthy business meeting last week, those of us around the table found a way to kill a few free moments by joking about the rather strange table arrangement we had been given for our meeting. The worst of it was that there were people left at tables behind us. They were forced to face the backs of our heads and we were forced to turn our backs on them.

Thus, one of the funnier “you had to be there to understand” moments was one in which we critiqued the arrangement as a product of “dys-feng shui.”

Whether you find that funny or not, I think it is true that the more we live into the spiritual life, the more we take responsibility for the world around us. We notice feng shui and dys-feng shui — or to turn the vocabulary in a direction that is a bit more familiar to me, you notice where the Spirit of God is at work and where the Spirit of God is marginalized.

I am not talking about some kind of soft social consciousness, never mind a body of political beliefs. I am talking about the capacity to look at the world around us through the eyes of God.

Not everyone who considers themselves spiritual necessarily takes that larger responsibility into consideration. In fact, most of us are taught that spirituality is about getting God involved in our lives, fixing our problems, comforting us when we are down, showing us the way. Our culture has taught us to think that way; and some spiritualities are devoted to that understanding of the spiritual life.

Now, at one level, I’m all for God being involved in my life. I don’t relish having problems. When God seems particularly close I enjoy the palpable sense of peace that goes along with such moments and I never mind knowing what to do next. But, at the same time, I don’t think that is the purpose of the spiritual life.

We have a larger responsibility. Feng shui doesn’t quite capture that responsibility, but it hints at a concept found in the Torah, in the prophets, and the teaching of Jesus — pretty much the entire Bible, in fact. It’s called the righteousness of God — the order God intended, to put it in more accessible terms. Put another way, we are called into partnership with Jesus to care about the way in which the world around us does or does not conform to God’s design.

Contributing to the righteousness of God won’t be as easy as rearranging the furniture in a room. Doing that in our world is a much bigger job. Not everyone will think that God’s opinion on where the furniture should go will agree with us. We won’t even agree among ourselves on where it should be all the time. And this side of eternity the furniture will never be where all of it should be.

But we can witness to making God’s righteousness a reality. We can make personal choices and relate to one another in ways that reflect the presence of God in our lives. Those may not be large pieces of furniture, but it’s a good place to start.

Nelson Mandela, President of South Africa from 1994 to 1999 once observed, “The greatest glory in living lies not in never failing, but in rising every time we fall.”

Failing is a part of life’s landscape. We fail by accident or through errors in judgment. We fail as result of ignorance. And, of course, we fail because we willfully make the wrong choices — we sin against God, against one another, against ourselves.

But many of us cannot distinguish between the kinds of failure we encounter and we find it hard to accept forgiveness for ourselves when there is something worth forgiving.

When that happens we can find ourselves carrying false guilt, because we take responsibility for everything that goes wrong. And, when we do need forgiveness, we find it hard to believe that it is possible. Sadly, for some people guilt and shame are, as a result, not just something they experience now and then, but a way of life.

The Lenten emphasis on repentance and forgiveness is not about adding to this struggle. It is about finding spiritual balance and health.

That involves distinguishing between accidents and sins. It involves distinguishing borrowed or carried guilt and shame from guilt and shame that is rightly our own. And it requires the knowledge that God can and does forgive us when we need to be forgiven.

Mandela is right. “The greatest glory in living lies not in never failing, but in rising every time we fall.” But that the knowledge that we do fall and the assurance that there is glory in rising is God’s gift.

Albert Szent-Györgyi lived from 1893 to 1986. A Hungarian physiologist, who fought in the resistance during World War II and later moved to the United States, he is credited with discovering vitamin C. Commenting on his work, he was once observed, “Discovery consists in seeing what everyone else has seen but understanding it for the first time.”

There are, of course, some ways in which his observation applies in a unique fashion to certain kinds of work. The discovery of vitamin C was a one-of-kind “discovery.”

But it occurs to me that in another sense, the spiritual territory that we discover within ourselves is another kind of adventure in understanding. The frontier between our own lives and the life of God is, by definition, an unexplored world for all of us. In broad terms some people have blazed trails for us that lead the way — St. John of the Cross, Theresa of Avila, Thomas Merton, and a long list of others.

In another sense, however, the journey for each of us has its own unique, autobiographical character. There are commonalities, but there is also endless variety.

In that sense, the adventure in understanding is one that is always opening up to us as we journey ever more deeply into God. “We know what we know, when we know it.”

That means that, if we are open to it, each of us is on a journey of discovery filled with fresh understanding and wonder. The spiritual life is not a long, slow, forced march. It is not a boring celestial choir singing 650 verses of “Just As I Am.” It is an adventure, filled with uncharted territory, endless possibilities for growth, and countless occasions for wonder.

Don’t drag, trudge, or march your way through the day. Go on an adventure.

To recap:

As I said yesterday, my wife and I recently watched the movie, “The Invention of Lying” last night, starring Ricky Gervais and Jennifer Garner. If you haven’t seen it, the premise is that the main characters live in a world where everyone tells the truth and no one lies. Part way through the story, Gervais learns how to lie and he uses his gift to reassure his dying mother that there is “a man up in the sky” and a life after death.

On one level, it could be argued that the film is hostile to religion. It is, after all, according to the film, a lie. And the description that Gervais gives of the man up in the sky to people is the worst kind of theology in many ways. Gervais himself also admits at his mother’s grave side that she is there, in the ground, not in heaven.

At the same time, when — thanks to his capacity for lying — he marries the character played by Garner, it is also clear that their happiness is insured by his capacity to lie. She is a lousy cook, but he assures her, the food is delicious and so does his son, who has also inherited the gene for lying.

It’s this other twist in the plot that struck me. The question that the movie seems to pose is this: “Is it right to lie in an intimate relationship?” On the other hand, these are not people who simply tell the truth, they are people without a cerebral cortex. They have no governor on their brains. They say whatever occurs to them. They consider their opinions, impressions, and experiences as the venue in which truth is found. And they seem to believe that whatever is on their minds is worth sharing.

This is truth without humility (or any other virtue), my truth as the measure of the truth.

Intimate relationships rely upon the capacity for honesty and candor and that level of confidence in another human being can create the opportunity for growth and mutual understanding that we cannot find anywhere else in life. But the kind of truth that the world practices before Gervais’ character learns to lie is far from that kind of honesty. It is truth telling that is brutal, disrespectful, life-denying, destructive and cold-blooded.

I dated someone years ago who was dedicated to this kind of truth telling. She called them the way she saw them. She asserted her right to call them; and she was also supremely confident that she was right — pretty much all the time.

There are at least two problems with this kind of “truth-telling.”

One, the person who takes this attitude also assumes a role that only God can play. We are all fallible and we are all imperfect. To confidently assert your right to judge another human being 24-7 is to assume a role that is not yours to play, no matter how often you are right — and no one is right as often as they think they are.

To own our humanity is to own our own faults, acknowledge our limitations, and foreswear the all-seeing, all-knowing role of God. Intimacy is not a license to run someone else’s life. It is, in some ways, a relationship that obligates us to exercise greater care in the “truths” we share.

In that regard, God is better at being God than we are.

Two, since I’m a first child, overly concerned about doing the right thing, and deeply in touch with my own imperfections, I didn’t really need another God, especially not that kind of God. What we tell one another should never be determined by what we think we are entitled to say or want to say. Intimacy grows when the other person’s needs are more important to us than our own.

If allowing that care and concern to modify what we say to one another is lying, so be it, I suppose — but I’m inclined to believe that it is simply the truth, tempered by love and humility. To cultivate the ability to give another human being that gift is not a bad thing.

Look for opportunities…they are there, today.

My wife and I watched the movie, “The Invention of Lying” last night, starring Ricky Gervais and Jennifer Garner. If you haven’t seen it, the premise is that the main characters live in a world where everyone tells the truth and no one lies. Part way through the story, Gervais learns how to lie and he uses his gift to reassure his dying mother that there is “a man up in the sky” and a life after death.

On one level, it could be argued that the film is hostile to religion. It is, after all, according to the film, a lie. And the description that Gervais gives of the man up in the sky to people is the worst kind of theology in many ways. Gervais himself also admits at his mother’s grave side that she is there, in the ground, not in heaven.

Now I am not yet sure how I feel about the film, but movies have the power to shape the way we think about the spiritual life, so it is worth making two observations about it. One about religion and God, the other (tomorrow) about relationships.

On God:

The film’s premise about religion is completely bogus. It assumes that for something to be true, there are only certain ways to know that they are true and the truth is all about what we can sense, that is, see, feel, hear, and smell. That’s why religion has to be a lie. But that’s a narrow construal of truth and the way we find it.

It completely overlooks the fact that many of the most powerful truths that shape our lives are truths that cannot be identified with our senses. For example, the love that two people have for one another is not something that can, as such, be sensed. All we can do is point to behaviors that suggest two people love one another.

The same is true of God’s love. For us to know something about God requires a different set of senses, a different way of knowing, and logically, while a knowledge of God has to involve human elements for us to understand it, it is also true that if God is not human, much of what it means to know God takes us into a completely different realm of being. The oldest lie about God is that what God wants for us can’t be anything but a lie.

Tomorrow…The Invention of Lying: On relationships.

I was walking the dog this morning and the nose was in gear.

Up in the air, working hard. So hard I’m amazed she doesn’t get a cramp in it, or a foreign object. We’ve jokingly described her as a nose with a transport system. That is who she is, what she does, and what she does when she is happy.

There are lessons here for all of us…

Find the passion that defines you.

Give yourself to it daily.

Don’t let others convince you that you should have a different passion.

Don’t let others take it from you by denigrating your passion or by substituting their passion for yours.

Don’t let circumstances keep you from living out of your passion, even if circumstances don’t allow you to give it expression in quite the way you hoped.

And remember, we were made to live our God-given passion, so delight in it.

If you don’t live out of that passion today, it will never be expressed quite the way it was meant to be expressed.

Tomorrow I will spend my day in a meeting at the National Institutes of Health, discussing a research design that physicians and others have developed in order to combat Sickle Cell Anemia. Sickle cell claims the lives of tens of thousands forcing patients to have repeated transfusions to deal with the disease; and even that standard of treatment carries with it additional perils — to say nothing of being forced to spend your life having the transfusions.

For victims of sickle cell life is never optimal. It is lived out on terms conditioned by the illness.

Often, I think, we are tempted to believe that in order to begin making spiritual progress, we allow ourselves to fall into the trap of believing that in order to begin, we need to have certain things in place: our health, financial security, more time — the list is theoretically endless. But Sickle Cell patients and almost all of us live life with less than optimal conditions and a certain number of inevitable limitations.

The very notion that we can achieve an optimal state of affairs that will then allow us to make spiritual progress is, in fact, a complete phantom. The circumstances of this day, no matter how desirable or desperate, provide an opportunity for listening, responding, and growing to the prompting of the Spirit.

Look for a place to get started. You already have what you need. You have today.

So how do we cope with freedom? A few thoughts —

One, grasp this: The freedom that you have is God’s gift.

That may sound fairly abstract, but acknowledging that our freedom is God’s gift and not a right, or our possession, is the key to using our freedom in ways that are life giving and healthy.

We don’t think very often about it, but the best of gifts is also something of a trust — we honor the giver and the giving in the way we use a gift. If your mother gave you a cherished crystal bowl, you wouldn’t intentionally drop it or feed the dog out of it unless you were trying to send a very different kind of message.

To use our freedom with reverence for the giver and the giving is to honor both.

Two, use your freedom in ways that accord with what you know about the will of God. Boundaries are not restrictions or an infringement on your freedom. They are there to promote a life-giving environment for the exercise of freedom. The Olympic athletes that we watched a couple of weeks ago accomplished what they did because they observed a practice schedule, ate wisely, and worked on their technique. From all reports, Bodie Miller’s performance in this Olympics exceeded his performance in earlier competitions because he acknowledged the boundaries.
Three, take responsibility for your freedom. Its exercise does not depend upon others, God is not responsible for how you use it. You are.

Far too many of us wait for permission, blame our choices on others, or choose by not choosing. Taking responsibility for our freedom is not something we can escape.

Four, be creative. Life is a canvas —- not paint by numbers. God delights in what you can do. If you worry about painting in the wrong place or outside of the lines, you will paint very little and leave a far smaller canvas behind.

So, why is freedom scary? There are, no doubt, a number of reasons and they vary from person to person.

Some struggle with the fear of failure, even when they are succeeding. Some tire and fray at the effort of performing because they are fairly sure that the love or regard that others have for them are dependent upon their last performance. And others hide from their freedom, afraid that if they exercise it they will run the risk of making a mistake. When we exercise freedom we also make commitments and decisions that define us and our future. The sheer uncertainty on the other side of such choices can leave us paralyzed and keep us from making any choice at all, or it can paralyze us mid-stream. “Why am I out here?” we ask ourselves.

At a more basic level, however, I think we also find freedom scary because we are uncertain about what to do with it without God’s help. When we make choices we have the same experience, that our dog had that I mentioned yesterday. “I’m out here, I’m not supposed to be out here, and it’s dark. Help!”

Some thoughts about how we cope with our freedom. For now it might be worth asking what kinds of fear keep us from exercising our freedom.