A Unifying Vision

On Thursday June 4, 2009 in a speech at Cairo University, Barak Obama articulated a shining vision for the human community.

It is a vision in which all people are free to speak their opinions honestly, openly, and without fear of reprisals. It is a vision in which people approach one another with mutual respect and openness, willing to put aside petty differences in the interests of the greater good.

I am convinced that in order to move forward, we must say openly the things we hold in our hearts, and that too often are said only behind closed doors. There must be a sustained effort to listen to each other; to learn from each other; to respect one another; and to seek common ground.

Obama calls us to focus on those things that unite rather than those things that divide.

the interests we share as human beings are far more powerful than the forces that drive us apart.

I want to particularly say this to young people of every faith, in every country – you, more than anyone, have the ability to remake this world. All of us share this world for but a brief moment in time. The question is whether we spend that time focused on what pushes us apart, or whether we commit ourselves to an effort – a sustained effort – to find common ground, to focus on the future we seek for our children, and to respect the dignity of all human beings.

In the complex, uncertain and dangerous world in which we live, we can no longer afford the arrogant rhetoric of division. We must be willing to hear those who disagree with us. We must be willing to learn from those who view the world from a different perspective. We must be willing to acknowledge that our way of expressing truth may not be the only way.

The first tool for bringing about Obama’s unifying vision is the willingness to listen to the other. It is more important that I hear you than that I convince you of the truth of my position. I can only learn from you if I am willing to hear you. As long as my ears are closed, I cannot receive the wisdom you have to share. And I will only win the right to be heard, when I have first listened deeply and sensitively to your voice.

The church should be the one place Mr. Obama might point to demonstrate the possibility that such a unifying vision could be a reality in the world community.

Tragically, the lessons Obama seeks to teach are lessons the church seems least able to embody. Increasingly factions within the church seek to divide the community of faith into smaller and smaller special interest groups. At a time when the world needs to see a vision of the uniting power of love, we offer a fractious vision of litigation, squabbling, and inability to move beyond minor differences.

A church that fails to heed Obama’s unifying vision will be judged for the division and violence it sows.
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A Non-Anxious Presence

We live in anxious, confusing times. Old and trusted patterns no longer hold. Everything seems to be up for grabs. Familiar roles collapse. Institutions are no longer reliable. It is hard to know what to expect next. There are days when it seems that nothing really works.

It is easy to feel anxious. Fear lurks around every corner. The only thing we can be sure of is that we cannot be sure of anything. We scan the horizon for a vision but it seems impossible to discern a clear way forward.

What might leadership look like in such tumultuous times?

I recently heard leadership defined as “being a non-anxious presence.” I do not know the origin of the definition; google leads me to believe it is neither original nor new. But it is new to me and it strikes me as a powerful vision for leadership in the deeply unsettled context of human institutions today.

When the way forward is unclear it is tempting to panic. Anxious leadership casts around desperately saying, “We must do something.” Someone finally comes up with something; anxious leadership declares, “This is something, let’s do it.” It does not seem to matter what the “something” is; it only matters that we do something. The tension of being still and holding the doubt and confusion is just too painful to bear. So we rush to whatever plan seems to present itself at the moment and pursue our plan with tenacity until finally we have to admit our plan has failed.

Richard Rohr says that a priest in the church has only one job. The priest’s job is to tell people, “It’s okay.” A priest is uniquely qualified to fill the role of being “a non-anxious presence,” because a priest has a larger, broader, and deeper perspective than sometimes presents itself in the midst of the turmoil of daily life.

A priest has the capacity to reassure the community because a priest is called to stand a little bit apart from the chaos of daily affairs and to bring the assurance that “this too will pass.” Whatever anxiety or fear currently grip our hearts, the priest reminds us that there is another deeper, fuller realm in which we can know that, whatever is going on on the surface, God is present in the depths; we are not alone.

I have a sign on the cupboard door in my office that declares, “It will all be okay in the end. If it is not okay, it is not the end.”

Julian of Norwich, though not officially ordained in the church, filled the priestly role when in her Revelations of Divine Love, she wrote, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

Julian was no pie-in-the-sky starry-eyed idealist. Julian of Norwich was a child when the bubonic plague first reached England. Within her lifetime nearly half the population of England died from the plague. Julian had seen suffering, pain, sorrow, and human tragedy beyond imagining. Yet, Julian could peer into the face of this desperate affliction and declare, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

This is the leadership of the “non-anxious presence.” Julian was able to offer this leadership, not because she believed everything in life always ran smoothly, but because she had found within herself a place of peace and steadiness. She had made the journey, in a time of great suffering, to her own non-anxious place.

The journey for a leader to become a “non-anxious presence” travels through deep and treacherous waters of doubt and uncertainty. The disciplines for this journey do not come easily to leaders in a culture that worships activism and reveres efficient management. But becoming a “non-anxious presence” is a powerful call for leadership in anxious times. If we intend to lead in the current upheaval, we must find our way to that non-anxious presence in the midst of the turmoil.
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Post-embarrassment Christianity

In the spiritual supermarket that has characterized religious culture for most of my adult life, there have been a vast variety of paths available to the spiritual seeker. In the past thirty years many options have been accepted as valid ways of living a spiritual life.

It is acceptable to be a Taoist, Transcendental Meditator, Sufi, Theravada Buddhist, Mahayana Buddhist, Tibetan, Zen, Pure Land, or Tantric Buddhist, a Hindu, Muslim, or Jain. You can practice reiki, yoga, Tarot card reading, or follow the Diamond Approach, gnosticism, or wicca. You can be a monist, a pantheist or a panentheist. You can believe in karma, reincarnation, astral travel, channeling and astrology or crystals.

But in polite spiritual company, outside traditional church circles, the one thing you might hesitate to say is, “I am a Christian.” Christianity seems to have been the one spiritual option that is often viewed with real suspicion.

To be fair, some of the bad reputation Christianity has acquired is entirely our own fault. We have been arrogant, narrow, judgmental, exclusivist, triumphalistic, and violent towards those with whom we disagree. We have lacked humility, compassion, openness, and flexibility. We have inflicted enormous pain upon innocent people. We have demonized those who took a different perspective from that which we believed to be the only true way of “understanding” God. There is a great deal in both the distant and recent past of Christianity, about which we deserve to be seriously embarrassed. We have a lot for which to apologize.

But, all human institutions and human attempts to formulate truth have tragic blind spots and painful failures. Christianity is not the only religion to have caused harm both to its adherents and to those who remain outside its belief system. The fact that a particular community has done harm is no reason for every member to assume blame for every failure. If we are only willing to commit to a perfect belief system we must either live in denial of our flaws or never commit to any spiritual practice.

Recently I spent a weekend with a couple of hundred health care practitioners who are all either practicing or interested in pursuing alternative healing practices. This is a group of sensitive, open, spiritually aware people. Many of these people have witnessed the harm Christianity has done and in many cases have been harmed themselves. This is a group you would anticipate might be enormously antagonistic to any kind of Christian expression.

In this group I was publicly introduced as the “Rector of an Anglican Church,” and an “Archdeacon of the Diocese of British Columbia.” Surely, if anyone should be shunned for the atrocities of church life, it should be an “Anglican Rector” and “Archdeacon.” Yet, I found myself treated with respect and sensitivity. I was welcomed into the conversation of faith and apparently viewed as speaking from a legitimate spiritual perspective.

Perhaps the day has come when Christians can stop feeling embarrassed for our faith as one voice in the diverse spiritual company that characterizes our culture.

If I am right and the necessity for Christian embarrassment is coming to an end, we must proceed cautiously. We must steer clear of our old patterns of arrogance, judgment, and exclusivity. We must be willing to acknowledge that God is at work in many ways which we may not understand. We must approach all spiritual practitioners with deep respect and openness, acknowledging that we have as much to learn from them, as we have to teach.

There is absolutely no room in the diverse conversation of our culture for simplistic, narrow-minded bigotry towards people whose lives have brought them to a different understanding of life and faith. We must always move toward healing and connection. Fragmentation and division will never lead to a deepening work of God in our society.

Jesus said, “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.” (John 14:2) God’s heart is a spacious place. It would be tragic to treat poorly those who have found room in the open embrace of God’s love simply because they may not look or sound just like me. Read more...

Shame

“I am ashamed of you.”

The words cut like a jagged saw through the child’s spirit. What could possibly motivate a parent to inflict such violence upon a child?

Words of shame come from having been shamed. Something in the child’s behaviour touches a deep wound in the parent’s heart. The parent feels ashamed and so shames in return.

The accusing voice worms its way into your heart. Unresolved shame is a psychic toxin choking your life, destroying your awareness of the generous abundance and blessing that are the true nature of life.

It fascinates me that the word “shame” rhymes with “blame.”

Something has gone wrong and you are to blame. You should have done this, instead you did that; now look what has happened and you are to blame. You did what you should not have done; you are bad. You could have done better; you are a failure. You should have tried harder, been smarter, or stronger. You have been tried and judged; you have been found wanting. You do not measure up. You should be ashamed.

Shame views life as an endless process of evaluation. We are not quite sure where it comes from, or who put it in place, but someone has established a standard of behaviour against which all our actions are judged. We never quite make the grade.

In the main office where I work we have posted a sign above the desk. It is a quote from my wife’s elderly Aunt who, with the gracious wisdom of her years is in the habit of saying, “I think most people are doing the best they can.”

The process of our lives has equipped us with certain tools. Some of us have bright, shiny and wonderfully efficient tools. Some of us have tools that are a bit rusty and cannot quite manage intricate complicated work. Mostly we have a mix of some good tools and other tools that are not entirely capable of doing the job. But we do the best we can with the tools we have at the time we face the task at hand.

When a saw becomes blunt we do not blame the saw for its inability to cut easily through wood. We do not accuse a saw of being bad because it cannot hammer nails. There is no moral judgment attached to the tool’s failure. We either sharpen or discard the saw and when we need to pound nails we put down the saw and pick up a hammer.

Life is the process of developing new tools and refining the ones we already have. We learn nothing from shame. Shame does not help us develop better tools or refine the ones we have. Shame paralyzes us, creating an identity out of the broken bits of our lives.

I am not the mistakes I have made, or the bad things I have done. I am not the sad things that have happened to me, or the cruelty I have encountered. I am something much more than blame would suggest.

Even the parent who shames the child is working with the only tools he or she has received or been able to develop through the processes of life. I need to look more deeply at the shaming parent to see the wound of shame out of which they act. Then I need to stop being named by shame. I need to open to the One who calls me by my true name saying, “I have called you by name, you are mine.” (Isaiah 43:1)

Through the prophet Ezekiel, God promises there is a place where we can forget all shame and dwell strong and secure. “They shall forget their shame, and all the treachery they have practiced against me, when they live securely in their land with no one to make them afraid.” (Ezekiel 39:26) This fearless land of no shame is not a geographical location; it is that place of purity and truth deep within where God is known and loved. Here we can know freedom from shame. Our true identity lies, not in the toxic words of shame, but in the one word of Love Who says, “you are mine.”

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Leonard Cohen

A version of this post appears in the June edition of the national newspaper of the Anglican Church of Canada, "The Anglican Journal."

There are 6,000 of us gathered in this sterile gray sports arena. We are mostly in our fifties. We are drawn here to listen to a seventy-four year old singer who has been part of our lives for the past thirty years.

No one would say he is the greatest musician who has ever performed. He is not the most profound poet. Certainly his appeal does not lie in the elaborate choreography and glitter of his simple stage show with six band members and three back-up vocalists.

Leonard Cohen’s enduring appeal lies in his honesty.

He tells us the truth about our lives. In his haunting anthem “Hallelujah,” he announces, “I didn’t come to Victoria to full ya.” And he is true to his word, gently pulling back the bandages on our wounded souls.

Cohen acknowledges that life is complex and we have navigated life’s winding ways imperfectly at best. He tells us that sometimes we have failed; sometimes we have lost our way and wandered astray. We have struggled. We have been guilty of sin, have tried to forgive and begged for forgiveness. We have stumbled along the path often leaving a terrible mess behind.

We have hurt one another, have let each other down, have betrayed those we love and failed to be true to our deepest convictions. We have been lost in loneliness and failed again and again at the mysterious enterprise of love. Our awareness of the impermanence of life and the closeness of death has been at times overwhelming. We have felt we might be drowning.

Cohen understands that “There is a crack in everything.”

It is not that he is complaining. He simply describes our lives as we have lived them. It is good to name the brokenness we know is true.

But he does not leave us with the broken pieces. Leonard Cohen finds shards of light in the midst of the fractured fragments of our experience. “There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.” He has found the faint outline of beauty all along the way.

We have done the best we could. And in the honesty and openness of his words, we find compassion for ourselves and for one another, perhaps even for the world with all its flaws.

Having stirred our hearts for three and a half hours, Cohen skips nimbly from the stage. We move quietly, almost reverently out into the night, perhaps able to live more gently towards ourselves and more kindly towards those with whom we share the often painful journey that is our lives. His honesty has left the world a better place.
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In the Midst of Chaos

How do we respond in the midst of chaos? How do we relate to confusion and uncertainty? What is our first choice when the future seems full of doubt and the way forward is unclear? What is our reaction when we do not understand what is going on?

Most commonly, faced with life situations that are in upheaval, we are probably tempted to panic. All we want is to get life under control, make things work, find our way back to an imagined stability and security we believe we once enjoyed.

It is easy to get caught in the drama of uncertainty. You feel the adrenalin rush that comes from looking down the dark tunnel of the future and seeing only foreboding and threat in the distance. We flail around desperately seeking easy answers we hope will get us back on track. We analyze, strategize, organize, and rush to finalize our plans. We long for the day when everything becomes clear and our fear begins to ease.

Perhaps there is another way to respond to the inevitability of instability and turmoil.

In her poem “Evidence,” Mary Oliver suggests,

We all/ have much more listening to do.

A better response in the midst of chaos may be to just stop. Let the fear subside; step aside from the intensity of the moment. The writer of Lamentations says,

It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord. (Lamentations 3:26)

Find a place of rest; stop; stay still.

In the midst of chaos, we need to heed Mary Oliver’s wise counsel in “Swimming, One Day in August,”

It is time now, I said,
for the deepening and quieting of the spirit
among the flux of happenings.

But quieting and waiting is not time for doing nothing. While you wait, you watch. In the quietness you listen to the words and stories others are telling in the chaos. From the stillness you pay careful attention to what is going on around you. You notice your own feelings; you observe the actions and choices others are making. You do not judge; do not rush to hasty conclusions. You sit at the centre of the turmoil and see what is unfolding. Gradually, something comes into focus.

In “Summer Story,” Mary Oliver writes,

now here I am
spending my time,
as the saying goes,
watching until the watching turns into feeling.

Good action comes, not from panic, but from patience. The disciplines of healthy choices are careful attention, attentive watching, and deep listening. As Mary Oliver points out, the “watching turns into feeling.” Some deep inner knowing begins to emerge, a gentle stirring happens within. It may not solve the chaos, but this gentle stirring guides you to the light; it moves you forward even in the midst of chaos.

You will know this stirring because it speaks with a soft and a gentle voice. It does not push or force. It moves gently and, wherever it leads, it creates openness, freedom and love. As you trust this inner knowing, you find that, whatever happens, you are able to thrive in the midst of chaos.
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Loss

I have only once lost a truly prized possession. It was prized, not because it was of such great value. It was a gift, given sacrificially by someone I love, a silent testimony of shared connection and deep affection.

One day I had it, the next day it was gone. There was nothing to be done. Hunting and hunting had not brought it home. It was just irretrievably missing. In its place a small emptiness opened – loss.

It comes in many forms – a bitter betrayal, an unfulfilled expectation, a petty meanness, a gaping chasm of misunderstanding. Circumstance or someone has taken from me that which I feel I cannot afford to let go.

What I meet in loss is my own deep longing, that nagging sense that something is missing which drives so much of our perceived need to accumulate and hoard or protect what little we feel we have. Life has not measured up to my standards. The persistent worm of regret gnaws at my heart.

The temptation is to rush to fill the empty space. Purchase a new possession. Find a new relationship to replace the one that has fallen apart. Make a fresh plan to fill in where the old plan has been left in tatters.

But the real challenge and opportunity of loss is to simply sit with the empty space.

This is the function of the ancient spiritual discipline of fasting. Fasting consciously and intentionally connects us with that feeling of emptiness, from which we spend so much time and energy in flight. Jesus said,

Blessed are you who are poor… Blessed are you who hunger now. (Luke 6:20,21)

Loss is our friend not our enemy. Loss creates an open space in which we begin to discover that we were created for something more than what we have lost. Our poverty and our hunger cannot ultimately be satisfied by any of those things to which we so tenaciously cling.

If we feel satisfied by anything this world has to offer, we have not looked deeply enough. We have not allowed the losses of our life to do the full work for which they were designed.

There is no human relationship, no possession, no professional accomplishment that can satisfy the depths of our human longing. We were crated for something more. We were designed to be finally content with God alone. Our hearts cry out for the invisible secret depths of God. Until we hear that cry, we will continue the endless restless struggle to achieve in the world, that which can only be achieved in the invisible secret realm of the human heart.

There are beautiful possessions in life. We may experience the gift of wonderful, deep, and nurturing relationships in the course of our journey. But they will all let us down at some point. Every relationship, experience, or possession will become another experience of loss if we hold on to it long enough. The challenge is to let go before they are wrenched out of our grip. Discover the freedom that comes from clinging only to that deep love that will never forsake us.
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Theology

When the church, as now, is caught in a confusion of conflicting voices it is difficult to know where to turn for help in finding our way through the jungle of disagreement. Most often we seem to turn to academics. We look to our theologians for wisdom. We hope that their careful parsing of verbs and analyzing of doctrine will uncover a magical land where we can all agree.

I have no doubt theology can play a valuable role in the Christian enterprise. But I am not sure theology has the power to guide us out of our present impasse.

Theology, as frequently practiced in our day, may lack the skills to lead us out of the barren land of disputation. It does not have the map to guide us beyond the polarities that paralyze church discourse. Too often it focuses its energy on the bad guys, identifying the heretics and making sure we all know who they are and why they are so dangerous.

At its worst theology seeks to fit imponderables into neat categories, pitting one position against another. Done poorly theology hopes to find truth in whichever argument is judged most reasonable at the end of the day. At its best theology leads us to the edge of knowing and confronts us with inexpressible mysteries beyond expressing. As Walt Whitman said, “Logic and sermons never convince,/The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.” (Leaves of Grass)

So, perhaps we should turn instead to the poet for wisdom in the turmoil of our time. Theology (theo logos – “God words”) may be more suited to poetry than to argument. When it comes to the deep things of life, the best we can hope for is to evoke. Precision of definition is beyond human capacity.

Poetry travels a path to knowing that journeys through the land of faith. We find this path in a way more analogous to our apprehension of beauty than the solving of a mathematical problem. As John Keats wrote, “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ – that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” (“Ode on a Grecian Urn”) Beauty is not right or wrong. It transcends the polarized categories in which faith cannot long survive.

Faith is born where beauty is beheld, in the heart. Faith comes from softening and opening. It is found in the land of not-knowing. It emerges when we surrender in the depths of our being to a power greater and higher than our reason or our understanding. Faith travels the territory where we acknowledge that our words are, at best, vague approximations of the deep realities to which they call us to surrender.

Perhaps a poet like Mary Oliver might guide us out of the tangle of our contradictions. Poetry Mary Oliver says seeks not to prove or to convince, but to open our hearts,

I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world. (New and Selected Poems, 2005)

Poetry wants to lead us to bow down before the wonder and mystery that is life,
Let me keep company always with those who say

“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads. (Evidence, 2009)

Perhaps the church would move forward in a more life-giving direction if we joined Mary Oliver and prayed,

God, rest in my heart
and fortify me,
take away my hunger for answers (Red Bird, 2008)

Theology points to the limitations of our ability to provide answers. Poetry asks us to step into the mystery, letting go of our determination to understand, opening to the possibility of living with the tangle and complexity our minds produce. The poet calls us to soften and expand embracing a dark way of knowing beyond the ability of reason to express.

In the poem we may find space for views of the world that seem on the surface to be incompatible. Poetry speaks to that deeper place within us where we discover that that which seemed to divide no longer separates.
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Pain

I don’t like pain. I don’t like it in any form, when I experience it myself, or when I see it in others. Most of us will go to considerable lengths to avoid pain.

The problem is, pain is not an optional part of the program. You don’t get to choose whether or not pain will penetrate your life experience. It goes with being human and being alive.

But truthfully, pain is not the problem. People can live with pain, many do with courage; it has not destroyed them.

What we cannot live with are the stories we tell ourselves about the pain we suffer. What really hurts are the little narratives we spin in our heads in an attempt to explain, or justify, or make sense of, or even to alleviate, our pain.

There are so many stories we create. “This should not be happening to me; I do not deserve to suffer.” “This is not fair.” “This is happening to me because I am bad; I deserve to suffer.” “My pain is your fault, the world’s fault, God’s fault.” “Someone should make this go away; make it stop.”

We hope if we can understand what is happening, the pain will ease.

But the stories never work, because the stories we use to try to deal with our pain find their origin in the common fallacy that pain is an unnatural part of life.

Our pain-stories begin to grow silent when we acknowledge that pain is nothing strange or alien. It is an integral part of what it means to be human.

When we stop telling stories about our pain, we discover that our pain has good work to do in our lives.

The proper work of pain is not, as we fear, to destroy us. The proper work of pain is to cause the cage we have built around our heart to break open. If we let it do its work, pain has the capacity to free us from the cages we build and to release the fragrance of gentleness and compassion.

When we resist pain’s work, we harden and condemn ourselves to being trapped on the surface of life. When we allow pain to do its work, we open, soften and deepen. Pain begins to uncover the richness and reality of life. When we accept our own pain and the pain of others, we discover the beauty that is the fullness of grace and abundance we have been given.

It takes faith and trust to embrace the pain that is ours. We cannot think our way towards this place of acceptance; we can only choose to act with the courage that sees clearly and accepts fully the reality of our lives as they come to us. This is the path through the inevitable pain we must at times all face.
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Violence

The Bible is a book full of violence – troubling, painful, angry, ugly violence. The Bible shows us innocent suffering, unjust retribution, harsh vengeance.

The world portrayed in the Bible is not a world we want to see, much less to live in. But it is the real world.

For most of us the violence of the biblical story seems far removed from our daily reality. We see pictures in the paper of death and mayhem. We hear news stories of horrifying human cruelty. But mostly, on a large scale, we are comfortably sheltered from the worst manifestations of the world’s suffering.

Be we cannot afford to be complacent about the reality of violence even in the protected world in which we mostly are privileged to live. Jesus took the issue of violence to a completely new level when he said, “You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder’; and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire.” (Matthew 5:2122)

The world of the Bible is violent because we are violent. There is violence in all our hearts at times; it may not manifest as murder, but it is none the less destructive to our deepest being and to the well-being of the world and the human community. In Jesus’ view, the violence of a harsh thought or an angry word is no different than the violence of murder.

The problem is that violence hurts everyone. When I belittle another person, or respond with harshness rather than gentleness, I inflict pain that spirals outward to affect the whole human community and the world in which we live. But it is not only the victim of my words or actions who is hurt, I am also damaged. My violence diminishes me as a human being created in the image of God. Jesus said, “it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles.” (Matthew 15:11) My violence defiles my own deepest and most true being.

I was not created for violence. I was created for gentleness and openness. I realize the fullness of my humanity, not by imposing my will upon the world and getting my way, but by yielding. The winners never win. Jesus said, “Many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.” (Matthew 19:30)

Violence ends when someone chooses to give way. When I am willing to let go, to surrender my cherished position, new ways open, new hope is born. The cycle of violence begins to unwind. The way of the cross of Christ shows that I am the winner when I am willing to be the loser. When I can bear the violence of life without retaliating with further violence, something deep and true opens within me and I find the light that is my true nature in Christ.
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