What God Wants For Your Life

A student of mine drew my attention to this story from Anthony Bloom’s Beginning to Pray:

The lives of the saints are enlightening in this respect, and in the life of St. Philip Neri just such an occasion is described. He was an irascible man who quarreled easily and had violent outbursts of anger and of course endured violent outbursts from his brothers. One day he felt that it could not go on. Whether it was virtue or whether he could no longer endure his brothers his Vita does not tell us. The fact is that he ran to the chapel, fell down before a statue of Christ and begged Him to free him of his anger. He then walked out full of hope. The first person he met was one of the brothers who had never aroused the slightest anger in him, but for the first time in his life this brother was offensive and unpleasant to him. So Philip burst out with anger and went on, full of rage, to meet another of his brothers, who had always been a source of consolation and happiness to him. Yet even this man answered him gruffly. So Philip ran back to the chapel, cast himself before the statue of Christ and said “O Lord have I not asked you to free me from this anger?” And the Lord answered “Yes, Philip, and for this reason I am multiplying the occasions for you to learn.”

There are lessons to be learned here about prayer:

One, when you pray to become a better person, get ready for a learning curve.

Two, prayer is often the beginning of an experience that is not just about prayer.

Three, prayer isn’t just about asking for something, it is about heightened awareness of “the things of God.” It’s about tuning in, paying attention, living it out.

Finally, as they say, “be careful what you pray for.” God is not a vending machine. God is a fellow sufferer, companion, teacher, comforter, and guide. Some prayers uttered at the bottom of a mountain are only answered through a long climb to the summit.

I have a friend who is addicted to all things Mac.

Steve Jobs announced the arrival of the new Mac Air Book two days ago and yesterday my friend negotiated his Christmas present. As a fellow Mac devotee, I am keenly aware of how strongly attractive this all is. In fact, I’ve often thought it is more than a little scary that the company logo is an apple with a bite taken out of it. Great shades of Adam and Eve. But I take refuge in the knowledge that the Hebrew doesn’t actually say it was an apple.

In giving my friend a hard time about his record-time capitulation to the allure of the newest toy, he responded, “The thing is we all have our thing.” Never were truer words spoken.

Jewish and Christian spirituality is hammered out in the real world. From Genesis to Revelation the goodness of creation is asserted. In Genesis with the pronouncement that God’s work was good — in John’s Apocalypse with the creation of a new earth. It’s no surprise, then, that “we all have our thing.”

The key to spiritual balance lies in not allowing our things to have us. Finding that balance is never easy to achieve. That is why some have abandoned the effort to nurture their souls and others have run from the created world.

Both are soul-killing over-simplifications.

Live with freedom. Experiment with the balance.

You will make mistakes.

But God loves you. God made you a spiritual being. God made the world. God is present to you in both.

In a world where we are accustomed to fixing or replacing things, it is not surprising that we find ourselves wanting the same thing in our spiritual lives.  We want our spiritual struggles ended now.

But typically, what goes around comes around.    All the biggest issues in our spiritual lives are usually defining for us.   They revolve around early, formative experiences and relationships or around life-shaping characteristics.  And for that reason, they can’t be fixed and forgotten.  Some examples:

• A controlling, overbearing, or abusive parent will set a child on a lifelong quest to find love and battle his or her own anger.

• A perfectionistic streak in us can be reinforced for a first child by birth order or a demanding mother or father, launching us on a lifelong quest for grace and a struggle with a tendency to be judgmental.

• Struggles with feeling insecure or inferior can be reinforced by experiences at school or a sibling who seemingly achieves his or her goals with ease, setting the stage for a lifelong struggle with envy.

• Our gifts can determine that what goes around comes around.  Your talent for caring, nurturing, teaching, problem-solving, making music, writing, speaking, working with your hands, or visualizing solutions will shape the world in which you live.  Each world has its gifts, but each one also presents peculiar challenges that often last a lifetime.

• Sadly, in many arenas even our personalities, race, and gender can present a lifetime of spiritual challenges and as economies and societies shift, it’s not always obvious who will struggle.  There are many places where strong, capable women continue to struggle with a glass ceiling, in spite of advertised progress. But as our work worlds change, there are times when the ostensibly privileged white male will find it hard to live into his life’s vocation.

So, what are we to do?

First, set aside the unrealistic expectations:

Not all spiritual challenges are fixed forever.

Second, set aside the guilt.

Just because you continue to struggle with some issues does not mean that you are a spiritual failure, that God doesn’t love you, or that spiritual progress isn’t possible.

Third, embrace the truth.

What goes around comes around.  And what goes around is often the more important, formative issue in our lives.

Fourth, embrace the opportunity.

If it’s important, this is also where you will build true spiritual momentum in your life.

Fifth, live in hope.

Some issues may come around again and again.  But if you embrace the truth and name it, eventually even the frequent fliers in our lives will yield more easily to spiritual progress.  Those who struggle to feel loved will remember more readily that they are loved.  People who struggle with insecurity will learn that their gifts are nurtured in God’s presence, their value is not diminished by the gifts that others possess.

What goes around often comes around because it needs to come back around and on the other side lies freedom.

Not all guilt is good guilt.  Good guilt is temporary.  It alerts us to spiritual danger and provides us with a way back to God.  Good guilt is not a way of life.  It is a way back to life.  That’s a good thing.

Bad guilt has nothing to do with God’s desire for us.  It hangs around, makes a home, and drives us away from God.

There are at least two kinds of bad guilt.

One kind is false or unreasonable guilt…a sense of remorse or responsibility for things we have no power to change.  People who suffer with chronic illnesses often “feel guilty” about the work they cannot do, for example.  People who are gifted care-givers will often suffer from guilt when they confront circumstances beyond their control.

Another kind of bad guilt is projected or carried guilt.  In spiritual direction, I often find myself listening to the struggles of people who labor under the burden of false guilt.  Women will often confess to a sense of shame; men will admit to a sense of inadequacy.  When I begin to ask questions about those feelings, my directees often discover that the origin of those feelings date back to their childhood and to a time when they could not have possibly done anything to deserve reproach for their behavior.

More often than not, that is when they discover that the guilt they experience is actually not about them at all.  It is — more likely — about the struggles of their parents:

• mothers who have never addressed the sense of shame that they feel (or the shame that yet another generation projected on them)

• fathers who have never faced their own insecurities (or the insecurities of their fathers)

Bad guilt of this kind is almost always about someone else’s struggle — or need for control.

Both unreasonable and carried guilt are dramatically different from good guilt and they can be recognized:

• Bad guilt hangs on, it doesn’t allow us to move on.

• Bad guilt is almost never about our own wrongdoing, but about something else — a sense of responsibility for things beyond our control, a sense of shame or inadequacy that really belongs to someone else.

• Bad guilt never offers an opportunity for confession and amendment of life, but traps us.

Name it.

Let God free you from it.

Take refuge and comfort in the knowledge that God has set you free.

And then allow God to help you build the kind of life that bad guilt has kept you from building and enjoying.

Your struggle with bad guilt may come back around.  Often the watershed experiences in our lives set up a dynamic that cannot be conquered all at once.  But if you name the bad guilt that has been undermining your spiritual growth, it will get easier over time to recognize it and dismiss it.  God loves you better than you love yourself and you were meant for glory.

We tend to think globally or categorically about emotions, lumping all of them under one heading.  But, in fact, each of our emotions vary enormously in character and origin.

For example, not all anger is the same in origin:

It can arise out of the disparity between what we want and what is.  And what we want can be a healthy and good thing to want — and it might not be.

Our anger can arise out of the disparity between what is and what should be.  And we can be wrong or right about what should be.

Our anger at circumstances can be in accord with the will and ways of God.  And it can be all about us, acting like God.

What instantly becomes obvious is that when we run from a feeling like anger, or we fail to ask ourselves important questions about the particular shape of our anger, we are closing the door on important information — information about ourselves, our relationship with God, and the world around us.

In working with a spiritual director our emotions can be an important ally, but only if we are willing to sit with those emotions long enough to learn from them.

When did I begin to feel this way?

What prompts this feeling?

Is my first explanation for the way I feel, the real explanation — or are there deeper, unspoken reasons for the feeling I am experiencing?

What do those feelings tell me about my relationship with God and about the needs of my soul?

Are these feelings born of deep congruence with the will and ways of God, or are they born of the impulse to make my own will felt?

If they are congruent with the will and ways of God, am I being invited into some kind of new effort?

If my feelings are all about me, what do they say about unhealed needs, or unacknowledged sin?

Questions of this kind will recruit our emotions as important allies in spiritual growth.  Finding time in spiritual direction to recruit them in this way can be a healthy way of exploring them, even after the fact.  We can be less defensive and more open.  We can explore them thoughtfully and prayerfully in God’s presence with the help of a spiritual director.  And over time the practice of exploring our emotions can make it easier for us to evaluate them in the moment.

Our emotions are not all the same and they have things to teach us.

Last night after a long evening of work I stopped by the grocery for something prepared to eat for dinner.  Regularly the clerks ask, “Did you find what you were looking for?”  It sounds like a casual question, but it isn’t, of course.  If the associates have been properly trained it is a spot inspection, a window into customer satisfaction, and a mission-oriented enquiry.

Are we meeting your needs?

Getting the job done?

Accomplishing our goal?

Selling you product?

Likely to see you return?

It occurs to me that the same question is something we could ask ourselves on a regular basis about the way that we live life.  But for most of us — at one time or another — and a lot of us — all the time — we are far more haphazard and unfocused in the way that we live.

But which matters most…the chicken scaloppini at Whole Foods, or the way we live our lives?  The spiritual life is an intentional life.  That doesn’t mean it is lacking in spontaneity, surprise, and play.  It does mean that we live with some sense that we have found what we are looking for.

Surprisingly — or perhaps not so surprisingly — some people seek spiritual direction without ever intending to follow it.  Like some who seek therapy, they prefer to discuss the challenges they face, rather than transcend them.  They seem to be made of Teflon.  Nothing you tell them seems to stick.

Behavior of this kind can be willful — the refusal to respond to respond to God’s prompting — but more often than not there are deeper issues:

In some cases, the directee has yet to understand the deepest roots of the spiritual challenge he or she faces.  Unseen and unnamed struggles continue to disrupt the spiritual progress they might otherwise make.  More listening is still needed.

Other directees fear the changes that transformation might bring.  Spiritual growth is a good thing, but it is also inherently disruptive.  And it takes effort to live into the changes that it brings.  Some directees will evade the responsibility for living into those changes as long as possible.

When the prospect of change is daunting, it is also easy to identify what is familiar with what is good.   When that happens, the familiar can enslave us — we reinvent the patterns that are comfortable.

That’s important information for a spiritual director, but it is also important information for spiritual directees.  If you see Teflon behavior surfacing in your life, ask God for the spiritual imagination to identify the source of your resistance, and the strength to break free.

I said that Bernard’s metaphor of a reservoir conjures up images of a life with deep, living origins, a place to which others are drawn.

The difference between a canal and a reservoir is the nature of its source — or more to the point, the fact that it has a source.

The journey outward requires a journey inward.

Bernard is not talking about motivational categories here.  He is talking about insights into the Christian life that are as old as the Christian faith itself.

Jesus observed that the issue isn’t what is on the outside that makes the difference, but what is on the inside.  The interior life changes how we live, but the exterior changes are not the point.  We aren’t looking for a different result, we are looking for a different kind of life — one “hidden in Christ.”

Therein lies the attraction of reservoir-like lives.  In those who live out of a deep dependence upon God, we sense something extra-ordinary — born not of achievement, brilliance, or effort, but of a source beyond human resourcefulness.

I said that Bernard’s metaphor of a canal-like life suggests a fixed stream, without a living source, stagnant, and self-contained.

How does that happen in our lives?

Fear can strangle fresh vision and hope.  We can worry too much about shaping or mastering the future.  We can spend all our time safe-guarding what we have.

Scarcity — real or imagined — can lead to hoarding and we can strangle the natural sense of openness and generosity that accompanies the act of loving and giving to others.

Addiction can close our lives off to others.

There are also other physical and situational factors that can lead to stagnation.

But what is critical to note about most canal-like life is this: More often than not it is a choice to live like a canal.  Even in the face of true loss and grief, I have known people who were capable of choosing not to live that way.  They have convinced me it isn’t necessary or inevitable to be a canal.

Bernard of Clairvaux famously argued that Christians should be reservoirs, not canals.  The contrast is vivid and direct.

The one image suggests a fixed stream, without a living source, stagnant, and self-contained.  The other image conjures up images of a resource with deep, living origins, a place to which others are drawn.

I plan to reflect a bit on the spiritual implications of Bernard’s images, but for now, an invitation to ask yourself this:

In what ways is your life a canal?

In what ways is it a reservoir?