What God Wants For Your Life

Yesterday’s conversation brings me to the second tool: coherence, judging ideas by whether or not they hang together.

Here, again, this is a tool with its limits. Einstein was right, consistency (a near synonym for coherence), can be the hobgoblin of little minds; and sometimes divergent ideas can give us multiple ways of looking at a spiritual challenge that are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

But coherence has its virtues. Ideas that hang together can point you along a spiritual path that lengthens and thrives by virtue of the way in which you are brought back time and again to ways of thinking about a spiritual challenge.

Take, for example, the ideas about prayer. You could entertain notions about prayer that suggest that God can be manipulated magically — get the words right, make sure your attitude is good, God will respond. At other times you might assume that prayer is shaped by relationship. God cares about me and that is the larger issue. Whatever my prayers are, answered and unanswered, God loves me better than I love myself.

But, on the whole, if you lurch between the first and second kinds of prayer, the experience would probably be deeply frustrating and confusing. Eventually you would probably opt for one view or the other —- if not abandon prayer altogether.

I can promise you that if you begin to think of prayer in terms that emphasize relationship and God’s overwhelming love, you will begin to find prayer more meaningful and fulfilling. One of the best ways to see if you are being coherent in your prayers is to listen to what you pray and ask yourself questions like these: Does this prayer build up my relationship with God? Am I bringing all of myself, warts and all, to this relationship? Is this prayer an honest reflection of what I am thinking and feeling? Do I ‘listen’ for God to lead me, or do I do all the talking? Does this prayer rely on the conviction that God loves me better than I can ever love myself?

Paying attention to whether or not your spiritual ideas are coherent can be life-giving. They can center your life and provide a basis for spiritual growth and deepening.

Nothing is more confusing than the American spiritual landscape. The average bookstore shelf is a good illustration. Books on spirituality shade off into self-help, transcendentalism, and tarot cards.

Historically, we have always been a nation of seekers. But the ease and breadth of publication has created a world in which we are surrounded by a welter of possible spiritualities.

For people whose work-a-day world is devoted to other efforts, the question is, “How do I evaluate the spiritualities and guidance on offer?”

One way is to ask three questions (which I hope to explore over the next three days).

Critical Question One: WHERE DID THE IDEA COME FROM?

One of the most basic questions we can ask is where an idea came from. The origin of an idea may tell us something about the operative assumptions behind it and the larger system of thought into which it fits.

It’s not about deciding on the validity of ideas based solely upon where they came from. As one of my professors noted when I was in college, “all truth is God’s truth.”

Nor am I suggesting that where an idea originates tells us everything about its emerging value. Just as words have an etiology, but may come to mean something very different, so ideas can acquire new meaning.

For example, some people believe that sex is a bad thing and acceptable only because it is the one way in which you can bring children into the world. That way of thinking is based, in turn, on the conviction that human bodies are, by definition, nothing more than an obstacle to spiritual growth. If were spiritual enough, we would simply ignore our physical needs.

That way of looking at things derives from an ancient philosophy called Gnosticism and other ancient Greek philosophies. The Gnostics believed that the body is evil and the spirit is good. Minimize the physical and you get a person who is fundamentally better.

That is not what either Judaism or Christianity believes. Creation — sex included — is a good thing and a gift from God, when used properly and in a disciplined fashion. The origin of the idea that it is not, tells you something about the larger spiritual perspective at work.

Yesterday I noted that the spiritual values we embrace implies a story — about us, about the purpose of our lives, and about the larger purpose of the human story — or they should.

Of course we can convince ourselves that the stories we tell do those things — and this may or may not be true. It is easy for us to see what we want to see and believe what we want to believe. The spiritual stories we tell ourselves can be self-justifying and they are often unexamined. That is why Dr. Phil’s question “So how’s that working for you?” made such an impact. People stuck in self-destructive life patterns often pay little or no attention to just how destructive the stories they tell themselves can be.

So, there is a place to ask ourselves and one another critical questions — questions that probe the virtue, value, and validity of the things that we believe.

We are not inclined to do that. Self-examination is tough and often painful. And most of us resist it, because just on the other side of self-examination lies the pressure to act.

We are also resistant because our culture has taught us that someone who thinks critically is, by definition, judgmental — especially if we are critical of what someone else believes. That’s especially true when it comes to spiritual convictions. “You have your opinions, I have mine, it really doesn’t matter” —- I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard that bit of wisdom.

The problem is not all spiritual views and visions are equal. Some are self-destructive. Others foster cruelty.

So, this is important: Exercising our critical capacity is not the same thing as being judgmental. To be critical is to ask questions about the virtue, value, and validity of an idea. To be judgmental is to reject an idea — or a person, instead of the idea — without ever asking those questions.

As I tell my students, to be critical is to ask questions about virtue, value, and validity. To be judgmental is to say (or think)…I don’t care about the quality of your ideas, I just don’t like you.

Tomorrow…a bit about the kind of critical questions we can all ask and why they matter.

It’s a privilege doing retreat work, spiritual direction, and counseling. One of the great gifts in it all is the opportunity to walk for a while with people on their own spiritual journey.

One of the things you learn is that not all spiritual stories are equal.

Some spiritual stories are broad and all encompassing. Others are shaped by personal considerations and may not translate more broadly at all. Some of those stories are life-giving. Others are burdened with guilt, insurmountable demands, and leave people broken and struggling.

To some extent, the strength of a spiritual story — and, therefore, a spiritual path — lies in its ability to answer questions that we all share.

• The more they embrace…
• The better they summarize the challenges we face…
• The more convincing the story they tell…
• The more easily they are shared
• And the more easily we can find our stories in the larger stories.

This is not to suggest that questions of truth or history are unimportant. It is merely a matter of lifting up a little noticed consideration. Our spirituality needs to tell a story that makes sense, gives us hope, offers meaning, and provides us with the courage and energy to love and live.

Does your spiritual story do those things?

I was in a fairly serious car accident in the middle of my senior year in high school. On the way to an invitational debate tournament our coach, who was 26 years old, lost control of the car in which we were riding on a snow-covered road between Louisville and Bardstown Kentucky. The car fish-tailed into a head-on collision with a two-and-a-half ton truck. Our coach died en route to the hospital and the rest of us (four students in all) were hospitalized for varying periods of time. I spent 28 days in the hospital and another 6 months or so recuperating.

What took far longer was the effort to unpack what had happened. That took years — spiritually and vocationally. I had grown up with the God-who-moves-goal-posts. All I was sure of was that God wanted me to be hard working and good — as a son, brother, and student. All of that seemed pretty hollow and suddenly meaningless against the backdrop of an accident that could so easily bring life to an end.

The questions tumbled out and lingered in ways that are easier to name now than they were then:

• Was life all about performance?
• Was all that God cared about was being good?
• Why did God let a young, caring woman die?
• Why was I in a back brace for the second time in four years with a broken back?
• What should I do with the anger, frustration, and grief that followed?
• If life wasn’t about being good, then what was it all about?

I had managed to deal with the shattered arm, broken leg, and 28 days in the hospital (or, at least, I thought so). But another back brace and hospital bed brought me to an all-time low. Being carried by my father and friends up and down stairs — never mind graduating in a wheelchair with nearly everything in a cast — undermined the story I had been telling myself about life and about God.

One of the things that is easily missed about stories is the way in which they give our lives meaning and frame our spiritual convictions. In some sense, every great religion is a story and every spirituality is an implied story — stories about why we are here, what we are meant to be and do, the central spiritual challenges or needs that shape our lives, the way in which our personal stories fit into the larger human drama.

Tomorrow…more about what life-giving spiritual stories do and don’t do.

The film “Up!” begins with one of the most poignant sequences in film history. It tells the story of two young lovers (Carl and Ellie) who share the same hopes and dreams of high adventure, but whose lives — as pleasant and filled with love as they are — unfold in a very different fashion than they imagined. When Ellie dies, she leaves behind a scrapbook that created as a child. Most of the pages are blank and devoted to adventures she is going to have. After Ellie’s death, Carl agonizes that they never had the adventures they wanted to have.

It is only late in the film that Carl discovers that Ellie thought of their lives as an adventure and the pages, in fact, have been filled with photos of the things they did do together. Much to his surprise, at the very back of the book is Ellie’s invitation to Carl — “go have a new one.”

Stories loom larger in our lives than we imagine. We love to tell them, of course and, if they are told well, we love to hear them. They entertain, divert, teach, and inspire.

But stories are so much a part of our lives that it is easy to take them for granted. Their homely, commonplace character — the realization that anyone can tell a story and the assumption that if they are well told anyone can understand them — all this tempts us to believe that they really can’t be all that important. Factor in the rarified and specialized worlds in which we have all been reared and educated, where vocabulary, skills, and training initiate us into worlds that are cut off from other rarified and specialized worlds — and stories don’t seem to matter that much.

We assume, all too easily, that the wide, sure road to problem solving and wisdom lies in mastering concepts, memorizing data, and acquiring skills. But storytelling is actually far more powerful. As an instrument of personal, emotional, social, and spiritual transformation, stories (much more powerfully than concepts) possess the power to move, change, encourage, and heal us. If you can tell a story and then imagine how to tell the next chapter of that story you have discovered a powerful tool for spiritual transformation.

So, here are some suggestions for life-giving storytelling:

• What have been the major chapters in your life story?

• What has been at the center of the stories that make up those individual chapters — people, places, jobs, successes, failures, triumphs, and tragedies?

• Where are you in the story now?

• What is the next chapter about?

Tell your story to someone who loves you and will support you in writing the next chapter. Then go have your own adventure.

Stephen Asma, a professor at Columbia College, Chicago contributed the front page editorial in yesterday’s Dallas Morning News “Points” section.  The article, entitled, “Craving green guilt,” compared his own youthful fears and guilt about masturbation that was engendered in him by his Catholic up-bringing with that of his son’s all-consuming concern with the welfare of the planet and what he considers his father’s profligate use of electricity.

It is an interesting essay and it makes a number of valid points along the way, not the least of which is the religious function that many people’s political and social concerns play.  He even notes the social utility of such struggles as a brake on behavior that might otherwise explode in the violent self-defense of little more than personal privilege.

But at the end of the argument it is clear that Professor Asma attributes that struggle to little more than a social propensity and equates religion with a rather more venal and pointless version of that propensity.  Asma writes:

“Environmentalism is a much better hang-up than worrying about the spiritual pitfalls of too much masturbation.  Even if it’s neurotic, it’s still doing some good.  But environmentalism, like every other ism, has the potential for dogmatic zeal and obsession.  Do we really need one more humorless religion?  Let us save the planet, by all means.  But let’s also admit to ourselves that we have a natural propensity toward guild and indignation, and let that fact temper our fervor to more reasonable levels.”

Apart from equating all religion with venal preoccupations and describing all religion as “humorless,” there is a deeper problem with this essay which makes an otherwise important point.  The fervor of various social commitments is not a substitute for the guilt with which we struggle, it is all too often a substitute for a belief in God and the sense of purpose and meaning that goes along with it.  You see it among even religious people whose spiritual commitments amount to little more than a list of social and political convictions.  A functional atheism, it is faith, seeking meaning and purpose, but without God.  Such functional atheism will engender guilt — and despair.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/viewpoints/stories/DN-asma_31edi.State.Edition1.2805641.html

Friedrich Schleiermacher, a German theologian, lived from 1768 to 1834 and is well known for his apologetic lectures that were eventually entitled On Religion: To Its Cultured Despisers. In his talks Schleiermacher argues that his contemporaries are sadly diverted by the extraneous dogma of the Christian faith and should attend to what he describes as its “inspiration” — an intuitive longing for God.  The difference, of course, between balancing demands of faith and reason is a razor’s edge.  It is possible to jettison so much of what makes a Christian a Christian that claiming the name can only be explained as a fearful or mindless clinging to something one no longer believes.

Marilyn Sewell, a Unitarian minister, was reminded of just how perilous that balancing act can be — not by another minister — but by Christopher Hitchens, well-known author and atheist.  Playing Schleiermacher’s card in an interview with Hitchens, Sewell observed:
“The religion you cite in your book is generally the fundamentalist faith of various kinds. I’m a liberal Christian, and I don’t take the stories from the scripture literally. I don’t believe in the doctrine of atonement (that Jesus died for our sins, for example). Do you make any distinction between fundamentalist faith and liberal religion?”

Hitchens responed, “I would say that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.”

Not surprisingly, Sewell suggested, “Let me go someplace else.”

In the effort to balance faith and reason — as well as faith and practice — the phrase “fundamentals of the faith” may now conjure up images and issues that are of little help in attempting to think, pray, and live in ways that are authentically Christian.  We know those debates (or at least we think we do) and we quickly take up one side or the other of a long series of old debates.  But Hitchens is right — though it was hardly his point.  It is important for Christianity’s cultured adherents to ask themselves in what sense they can still be “meaningfully” called Christians.  Without a reflective response to that question, there is no balancing to be done at all.

http://www.portlandmonthlymag.com/arts-and-entertainment/category/books-and-talks/articles/christopher-hitchens/

My wife, Natalie, and I have been catching up on the Fox blockbuster 24.   Jack is back.  And as she observed on Sunday in her sermon, what is striking is the fundamental simplicity of the story  — all of the stories.  The fate of the world hangs in the balance between the choices made by two kinds of people: Those who know the truth and are willing to sacrifice for it; and those who believe and live a life of lies, large and small.  The navigation of life’s details is rarely quite so simple or clear cut, of course, and as any loyal 24 viewer knows, there will be difficult choices to make.  But the choices, no matter how difficult are still made by two kinds people who are fundamentally different in their orientation to the world.  What does God want for you life and mine?  In any given instance, the details may be difficult to navigate.  What is always clear is the kind of person God wants — men and women sold out to the Truth.