Manifesting the need deep in our (pastoral) souls

"What are you looking for really?"

I've got this colleague who's trying to form a new clergy group.  She sent me an email today, asking me (and a few others) to describe the kind of small, professional group we think could be helpful to us as pastors.  I've had occasional experiences of clergy communities that were remarkably helpful, but they were short-term: the CREDO conference a few years ago, and a pilgrimage on the Isle of Iona recently, come immediately to mind.   

Her question got me thinking--feeling actually.  And I figured that what I'm hungering for isn't isolated to me or to pastors.  I'm guessing it's a common human experience and that you'll resonate with the yearning whether you're a pastor or not, Christian or not.  

Here's what I told her:

First, here's what I'm not looking for:

• A reading group (good gawd, I already have a stack of unfinished books I want to read)
• A therapy group (I already have a pretty good therapist, thank you)
• A let's-compare-our-congregations-and-who's-better-at-leading-them group (totally not useful)
• A drinking group (don't need that either; though beer or wine together wouldn't hurt)
• Superficiality
• Insecurity
• Banality
• etc...

What I am seeking is:

Leadership of any kind is tough right now.  Perpetual white water.  Pastors lead from the tattered edge of a genuine emergence, a birthing, and birth is always messy.  There's fear, uncertainty, and enormous hopefulness (in me and in many of the people around me).

I don't know what is to become of church, though I'm confident expressions of soulful community will always find ways of flourishing, even if under the radar of institutional forms of religion or in direct contrast to it.  As a pastor, I feel the need to find ways of hosting the religious symbols, rituals, practices, and texts that help people make sense of the experience of living and living it well with a deepening sense of the presence of the Divine.  That is, pastoral leadership, as I see it, is more mythopoetic than it is techno-scientific (though pastors can't ignore the latter).  What is mythopoetic?  Think George MacDonald in Victorian times, and in the 20th century, Tolkien or CS Lewis.  Today, there are a whole host of artists doing this kind of work; Travis Reed comes immediately to mind (a filmmaker, he did the video I link to at the bottom of this post.)

I need to know how to bring transformation to the organization of the church, respecting its heritage, but also allowing the freedom of innovation to flow with as little inhibition as possible.  

I like what Ed Catmull, President and CEO of Pixar and Disney Animation, says in his new book, Creative, Inc.  

About leadership Ed writes:

"I believe that managers must loosen the controls, not tighten them.  They must accept risk; they must trust the people they work with and strive to clear the path for them; and always, they must pay attention to and engage with anything that creates fear."

"My job as a manager is to create a fertile environment, keep it healthy, and watch for the things that undermine it."

Ed's the kind of leader who can straddle the techno-scientific and the mythopoetic worlds artfully; Pixar is, after all, an organization driven by story and myth-making (and it's doing a bang up job of it to boot).

This is what I feel summoned to be and do.  But I feel can sometimes feel alone (as a leader).  It's downright tough to find others who view things this way, and once you find them, it's just as tough to figure out how you can spur one another on and get together face to face.  

So, I'd like to be a part of an intentional community of folks who are seeking wisdom and bravery for the era that's in front of us--the challenges and opportunities.  Folks we can be real and unguarded with about the way we see and experience the movement of the Spirit, who can express fears, and share dreams (real night dreams and visions, not mere vain wishing, but that which comes from the deeper places of the soul and can't be figured out in isolation).  Someone (I can't recall who) important once said, "we must dream our way into the future."  I believe that.  Thinking, frankly, is over-rated.

I don't know what this really will look like, but it'll take courage and humility to find our way into it.  It'll take a lot of unknowing, and a good deal of silent prayer rather than the kind of posturing-praying I can do when I'm in clergy groups.  

To use Brene Brown's language, I need a community where I can:

1.  Be me
2.  Be all in
3.  Fall, and get back up again, and find my bravery for the work before me

And Brene Brown's video manifesto at the top of this post puts what I'm looking for really well--not the bricks and bones of the structure, but the heart and soul of what I, and so many others need.

What does it mean to live in relationship with God?

Photo by Jason A.

Recently, a student contacted me.  She’s doing research “that explores the different sects found within in Christianity as well as my own personal endeavor to understand how one builds a relationship with God.”

She asked me four questions.  Below are my brief meditations on her questions about what it might mean to live in relationship with God.  

1.      How would you describe your experience/relationship with God?

Deep.  Wide.  Vast.  Unceasing.  Like a deep, subterranean river flowing always at the core of my being.  Of course, I talk with God, but the relationship goes beyond words.  God is nearer than the beating of my heart, close as my next breath.  God is the Beloved, the Source, Substance, and Goal of All that is.  I behold the Divine splendor in every blessed thing—each face, each sound, every flower, bird, and stone.  In the taste of wine.  In the breeze blowing on the surface of my face.  St. Ireneaus once said, "The glory of God is a human being fully alive."  My aliveness is my experience of union with the Beloved.

2.      Describe the moment in which you took control of your relationship with God?

“Took control” is an odd way of putting things when it comes to God.  One can never take control any more than one can hold back the crashing of an ocean wave or move the stars.  But I have taken responsibility for my relationship—that is, I have awakened.  But there is no single moment I can point to.  There’s the moment as a 14 year old when I realized there was something greater in the universe that all I see and feel.  There’s the moment when Jesus became more than a name for me.  There’s the moment I thought I was wise and understood God because I had become a professional theologian.  There’s the moment I realized how silly that presumption was.  And there’s the moment each day when I yield again the the unseen Presence and allow myself to grow in my awareness of my essential union with that Presence who is both Awe and Delight.  

3.      How did you go about taking control of that relationship and what was that like for you?

When in prayer, I grow still.  I become aware of the fire within me, my aliveness, the energy that shimmers in every atom.  I slip into the Mystery of the Divine and my union with God.  The Christian tradition describes this as “God in Christ and Christ us.”  And when I’m in conversation with another, I practice being present; I practice a “deep looking” into their eyes and I behold the presence of the Divine.  I realize that there’s no other moment, there’s only this now.  And I realize I am alive.  Here.  Now.  Nowhere else.  We spend so much time living in our heads—north of the neck—but never really present here, now, in these bodies of ours.  I can’t meet God in my thoughts.  God is not abstracted into some doctrine.  Doctrine, ritual are all derivative—they find their source and goal in the encounter with that which cannot be described or controlled.   So, whenever I draw myself into the moment, when I'm present fully, I am with and in God.

4.      What do you consider most important when understanding God?

That I can't understand God.  And I’m so grateful for that.  God is infinitely beyond.  God is expanding always, along with the always expanding universe.  And yet, God is dynamically present, down and in all things.  So, God is both transcendent and immanent.  Unfortunately the vastness of God, the transcendence of God often takes over in human imagination.  And for much of history, this view of God-as-up-and-out has dominated human civilization (especially in the West) and kept people from experiencing the tender presence of the Divine that runs through all creation.  Kings, and anyone in power, have promoted the transcendence of God because it justifies hierarchy, and hierarchical structures keep much of society in tiers of oppression and suffering.  But God is not separate from nature.  God is in and through it.  God is.  I am.  And I am of God.  God is everywhere.  Up.  Down.  In.  Out. Therefore, all things, all people have a God-breathed dignity that cannot be taken from them.  This, I think, is the answer to so much that divides and wounds us on this planet.  I recently wrote a poem that reflects this.  It's a form of the historic Christian Sanctus that's chanted during the Eucharist or Holy Communion.  I sing it myself each morning as I enter prayer and contemplation.  It expresses what it means to experience God.

Holy, holy, you are holy; 

Lord, your grandeur knows no end, 

Yet in humbleness you’re tender, 

holding every infant’s hand.  

Holy, holy, we are holy, 

vessels of the Luminous; 

bless the Christ who helps us see the 

light that dwells in all of us. 

Holy, holy, all is holy, 

nothing sep’rate from your love. 

Help us to behold your splendor, 

filling all—below, above. 

Enter Grace now

A moving mandala and visual journey done in collaboration with Richard Rudd and Theo Brama. Take 13 minutes to sit down, turn up the speakers (or put on headphones), turn down the lights and soak in the beauty of Grace. 

Soundtrack available at – https://entheois.bandcamp.com/album/living-wisdom-vol-1-2

How to break free from the madness

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My wife, Patty, and I are just back from a week along California's Big Sur coastline, one of the most astonishingly beautiful places on earth.  Just type Big Sur images into your web browser and see what I mean.  

Nature is God's art and it nourishes something deep within us.

Today I stumbled on a piece by Daniel Ladinsky who's spent his life writing contemporary renderings of the ancient mystic poets.  Here's what Ladinsky says about nature; his description gets at what I feel when I am drawn into the vast, Divine canvas: 

"Nature and art are sacred breasts we can feed on to grow. They are vital to our evolution. They offer a jailbreak or leave from the madness and demands we can get caught in. Of course love does that, too. Love dissolves boundaries and ultimately removes any contour that is not luminous." 

For more on the nature of nature and art and love, and especially poetry, see Ladinsky's full blog post on Huffpost here. 

Go there, because if you can't get to the Big Sur coastline or any other place of extreme beauty, you can pick up a poem and it might carry you into ecstasy.  (And Ladinsky's got a couple great poems in his essay, especially the spiritually flirtatious poem by Rumi, The Body is Like Mary).