Monthly Archives: August 2015

Deeper prayer life

My so-called prayer life

I’ll say it right up front: this is a posting for people who like prayer. I know of lot of us scoff at prayer, you’re all very welcome here, I would love to talk about that sometime soon, but not today.

I like prayer but unfortunately (like many of us), I am not particularly good at it. There have been moments— those prayers of earnest seeking when God is suddenly so present for one tiny instant, and then the wave crests and it all ebbs away. Or those vindictive moments when I remember to turn to God, then am shocked to discover I have found my way to love for my enemies. Those are the times when the power of prayer is like an electric force coursing through my body.

Then there are the other times… When my mind keeps getting distracted by shiny things. When I know I promised to pray for someone but can’t remember who. When I feel like a petulant child with my bullet-stream of requests, when I want to pray better but can’t think how, when I wander from topic to topic or (being honest) fall asleep.

How can we pray better? How can we have more of the immediate, intimate prayer life we want? Partly the answers must be found individually. The Christian walk is a relationship, and as there is no single secret to a happy marriage, there is no single secret to an intimate prayer life. However, there are some common threads, and I would like to highlight two that have proven meaningful for me, which are: space and intention.

Space

We live in a busy time. Everything is crammed in; nothing receives the attention it deserves. As 2013 New York Times editorial rather poignantly put it, “Being a Working Mother Means Always Having to Say You’re Sorry.” Little wonder, then, that our prayer times are crammed in as well. 1 Thessalonians 5:17 does instruct us to “pray without ceasing,” but again, the analogy to marriage is a good one: simple small acts of love are wonderful, but they don’t replace the periodic date night. Any healthy relationship requires genuine investment.

This is not to say that neglected prayer time is one more thing to feel guilty about. Guilt may have its place, but it’s not a fruit of the Holy Spirit. A better way to think of it is that, when we crave deeper intimacy with God, a way is available to us. “Behold, I stand at the door and knock,” says Christ. When that thirst for God becomes greater than the other needs that press in upon us from every side, he is there to be found.

As a practical note, one way to carve out space in our lives is with a clear start and finish. Small prayer-time rituals can have enormous value: ring a bell, light a candle, roll out a prayer mat… any such practice can reduce the muddy splashing of the everyday onto our sacred space/time.

Intention

Prayer needs to have the right focus, which is surprisingly easy to forget. During my flickers of transcendent prayer, the clearest memory is what I felt. So, the attempt to recreate those feelings is one very natural, but very wrong, approach to prayer. Because it is such an easy mistake, many Christian authors have written about it.

Way back in 1875, Hannah Whitall Smith wrote, “The common thought is, life is to be lived in the emotions. As they are satisfactory or otherwise, the soul rests or is troubled.” More recently, Bill Bright described the Christian experience as a train. “The caboose we will call ‘feelings,'” he writes, “It would be ridiculous to pull the train by the caboose. In the same way you, as a Christian, should never depend on feelings or seek after an emotional experience.”

Much of the core gospel message is concerned with love, which we think of as an emotion, but in scripture, “love” tends to be more of an action verb: “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son,” “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us,” “Let us show love, by which we may offer to God an acceptable service.”

Christian love, by definition, is other-focused rather than self-focused. The richest prayer life becomes available to us when create real space and time in our lives for it, and when our focus is on God, his work in the world, and our place within that.

 

Leave a comment! What practices help you to have a deeper and more transformative prayer life? 

 

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All the delicious anger

This week, I was invited to be angry. That happens almost every week, but this week I had an unusually large smörgåsbord of options to be angry at— Ashley Madison cheaters, hackers who exposed the Ashley Madison cheaters, Josh Duggar, Jared Fogel, police gun violence, criminal gun violence, abortion/Planned Parenthood, anything to do with Donald Trump, anything to do with Hillary Clinton.

Now many of those causes are important, and many of you are probably angry about them; some of you are probably angry at me for not being angrier. A popular saying nowadays is, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” Personally, that saying reminds me of Despereaux, failing mouse school for being too brave, and his teacher imploring him, “There are so many wonderful things in life to be afraid of, if you just learn how scary they are!”

That is to say, maybe I am paying attention, but I choose peace over anger for reasons of my own. Maybe I feel that nothing good comes of the anger. Maybe I have seen too many souls I loved whose anger filled them up like bitter poison. Maybe I am simply following the advice of God.

The case for anger

I believe that much of the anger-seeking in our society is motivated from a good place, namely, a wish to identify what is wrong with our world and to fix it. Our society has big problems and it feels wrong to be complacent about them. Keeping ourselves educated is important. All of that is true, but none of it requires anger. Passion for injustice has taken many forms throughout history. Only recently have we begun to mistake non-angry responses for indifference.

In fact, other emotional responses may be better suited to positive action. (Quiet steely resolve comes to mind.) Contrary to our paradigm, anger by itself accomplishes little. We may raise awareness, but that only helps if unawareness is the problem (see “cigarettes cause cancer”, circa 1950). Yet we apply the salve of “awareness” to a vast array of unsuitable ailments as though it were a magic cure-all. Everyone remembers the ubiquitous “Kony 2012” campaign of a few years back. How much awareness was raised? How much outrage was generated? Yet what, if anything, was accomplished? In April this year, Relevant Magazine posted an editorial: “I Feel Like Kony Won.” Unless Kony follows American Twitter accounts, did he even know we were fighting? It’s almost as though ranting to like-minded friends on Facebook is not an effective means of toppling a hostile foreign dictator.

The cost of anger

Meanwhile, we are paying an enormous price— both individually and collectively— for our “take no prisoners” mindset.

Once we see that anger is not the only possible response to injustice, it becomes clear that our anger is something we are choosing. We meditate on topics that anger us, we listen to radio programs for facts that confirm our views and stoke our anger, our social media feeds are peppered with our angry shouting. All of this requires a large investment of our most precious and limited resource: our time. As with any limited resource, whenever we invest time to purchase that satisfying hit of righteous indignation, something else is being sacrificed. A recent XKCD cartoon showed a wife calling her husband (working on his computer) to bed. “I can’t,” he responds, “This is important.” “What?” she asks, and he responds, “Someone is wrong on the Internet.” Solomon never envisioned the Internet, but his 3000 year old advice still rings true: “A fool multiplies words… Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you yourself will be just like him.” Social media addiction is a real phenomenon whose cost is only beginning to come clear. How many of us are literally staying at the keyboard and sacrificing relationship in a way that is nothing to laugh about?

Apart from time spent, cultivating anger has a more pernicious personal cost. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” says the scripture. The brain is like a muscle: the parts we exercise become stronger. Who we are is literally the sum of the daily choices we make. When we train ourselves to anger, that response becomes more easily available to us. As the old saying goes, if all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. Words can hurt, and carelessly wielded, anger is a hammer with enormous destructive power. I know. I have been the angry shouting guy, I have been the guy who finally lost it and lashed out, and I have been the guy at anger management group, learning tools to turn it around. But how much better off would I be if I had never walked so far down that road in the first place? When James warns that “the tongue is a restless evil full of deadly poison”, I do not think it is a tongue full of gentle, gracious words he has in mind.

We are paying a cost as a society as well. Think about this: when we take time from our spouse and kids to invest in the anonymous stranger, being honest, are we there for his or her welfare? Or are we just after the adrenaline rush? When our interactions with each other become a form of video game, we have strayed far from the path marked out by Christ when he commanded, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Like all the bible’s commands, this one is offered as much for self-preservation as for its ability to please God. When we are working toward the collective good, by definition we all benefit, yet a battlefield is not a place where working toward the collective good is possible. And a battlefield is what our society becomes when we make contemptuous statements about each other’s motives, when we belittle and dismiss one another. We all are made in the image of God, and Christ died for us all. We would do well to remember that before we say to our brother, “Raca! (that is, ‘You fool!’)”

A better way

Despite the deep-­seated problems we face, there is still hope. It wasn’t always this way. The issues that stir our passions can motivate us in many ways that result in an outpouring of love and renewal and healing. When Mother Teresa’s heart was moved on behalf of India’s untouchables, she could have done all the things that come so naturally to us now: berating Indian society for their callousness, attacking from the outside, raising awareness among other westerners who already shared her worldview. Instead, she took up a rag in love, and personally began washing out sores. She took up those with broken bodies, and laid them in soft beds to show them kindness and mercy before they died. She took up her own personal cross and carried it all the way to her own personal Calvary. And as a result of her actions, the fragrance of a new, less callous worldview began to infuse that place until all of Indian society had caught the scent.

We have quite recently known how to do that here in America too. We have had our Malcolm Xs, it is true, but we have also had our Martin Luther Kings. Confronting a certain set of gross injustices, we were offered one vision, informed by worldly wisdom, of transforming American society into a battlefield; and we were offered another vision, informed by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, of sacrificially drawing America out of darkness into light. It was the latter vision we embraced. It was the latter vision that transformed us. I have heard it said that Dr. King’s vision was too weak, that its changes did not last. But has not the loss of our positive transformation coincided with our descent into a society polarized against itself? If the prescription now proffered is hatred of our enemies, then that medicine is the very agent that is causing our disease.

There is a way for us to turn back. There is a way for us to return to the upward path. It is not the easy path: the “click-tivism” of signing an outraged petition costs us nearly nothing, but quite likely, it also accomplishes nearly nothing. It is not the natural path: sacrificial service to our enemies does not trigger any adrenaline rush. But if we are to be spared, we must leave the path we are on. “Refrain from anger, and forsake wrath,” warns the scripture, “it tends only to evil.”

There are a lot of causes in the world; this week was example enough of that. We do care about them, and we should; they are important. They are worthy of our best, but our best cannot emerge from our anger. Our best can only emerge when we are seeking one another’s good in love.

Take a stand, or spineless for Jesus?

Take a stand: be spineless for Jesus

This week an atheist replied to one of my tweets. I agreed with him that the world is a beautiful place.

One of my posts was linked from Reddit’s “/r/Catholicism” forum, then suppressed on the grounds that is was heresy. I agreed with them that sin is real and harmful.

Why am I agreeing with all these people who disagree with me? Am I being spineless, seeking the favor of man, failing to take a stand for God? Or rather, what if “looking for common ground, building bridges, and being kind” is my stand for God?

“Take A Stand”

So much of our modern Christianity seems to be informed by the need to keep people from being confused. “If I fail to take a stand,” the reasoning goes, “people will think I support x, y, or z.” First of all, are people really going to be confused about what we believe simply because we were nice to someone who believes differently? But more importantly, what if they are confused? So what? Why do we care so much what people think of us?

Paul didn’t. Numerous places in scriptures, he talks about that “dirty word” concept— accommodation of culture— in his efforts to spread the gospel. For example:

“To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law), so as to win those not having the law. To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some.” (1 Corinthians 9:20-22, emphasis added)

At one point in Acts, he arrives in Athens and is “greatly distressed to see the city full of idols.” So what does he do? Get in their face? Condemn the idols in order to take a stand for Jesus? Tear his clothes to show his great zeal? None of the above. Instead, he compliments them on the very thing he objects to: their religious fervor. He goes on to present the gospel as the great fulfillment of that fervor, but he never circles back to say, “Oh, and by the way, idolatry is wrong.” He is more interested in spending his airtime on the core gospel message than on having his personal belief system clearly understood.

Live at peace

The news nowadays is full of ways that we Christians are defining ourselves by our refusals. Just today there were two: people who feel their faith forbids them to conduct ordinary business because the opposite party is “in sin”. But Jesus specifically refuted that notion. “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s,” he said, despite behavior by the Romans  that was every bit as much an affront to God’s law as anything going on in modern-day America. That the bible objects to a behavior does not excuse us from a Christlike response to that behavior. Whereas we, in casting about for some kind of public response to “sin”, have landed firmly in a seat at the moneychanger’s table. 

Rather than stand off at a distance and refuse to engage, a more Christlike model comes close and engages completely. “Live in harmony with one another,” scripture urges, “If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.” So much of our public persona nowadays is the farthest thing from that; I have trouble understanding it as anything other than spoiling for a fight.

Christ portrayed us as a light on a lampstand, a city on a hill, the salt of the earth. None of those things sits in a posture of judgment. How can we, as salt, give our flavor to that which we refuse even to touch?

Hotel Europa Belfast, before and after

Three things we must learn from 50,000 casualties in Belfast

Ten days ago, I was standing in front of the most bombed hotel in the world. It’s the Hotel Europa in Belfast, center of “The Troubles” of Northern Ireland that, from 1968-1998, killed or injured more than 50,000 people.

As we drove around the city, our tour guide showed us 200-year-old buildings still scarred with shrapnel damage. She spoke about her three most formative decades, living in fear. All of that changed with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. “Now,” she said, “we have real nightlife here in town center. Bit late for my generation o’ course, but I do love leadin’ tours now. We used to have terrorists; now we have tourists.”

What changed? Significantly, not much. We saw neighborhoods where most houses were flying the Irish flag, and others all flying the Union Jack. So then how was peace made after 30 years of strife? To me, the more our tour guide spoke, the more it sounded like all the Christian parties involved had simply started applying the teachings of Christ: forgiveness, togetherness, acceptance. It is a lesson that we in America would do well to heed.

Forgiveness

You’ve heard the U2 song. “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” invokes the memory of a peaceful protest march shattered when British soldiers spontaneously opened fire on unarmed Irish civilians, killing 14. It’s a stirring anthem. I have heard it used to score a call-to-action video, juxtaposing images of the massacre against the evocative words. There’s just one problem with that. Far from glorifying the events or calling for continued violent resistance, the song’s only point is to deplore the violence on all sides. “How long?” the lyrics ask, “How long must we sing this song?”

In early live performances, the natural emotional responses were so strong, the tendency to misunderstand was so prevalent, that the band had to fall all over themselves to underline its passivist message. “This is not a rebel song,” was an oft-repeated introduction. They soon began planting a white flag at center stage while performing. Why was it so difficult for people to understand it as a song, not of reliving our grievances, but of laying down our grievances? Because the teachings of Jesus that inspired the song are not natural. They are supernatural. “You have heard it said: love your friends and hate your enemies. But I say to you: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you… No greater love has a man than this: that he lay down his life for his friends.” Christ proved that in his willingness to lay down his own life, invoked in the song’s final lyrics: “Claim the victory Jesus won…on [a] Sunday, bloody Sunday.”

What happened in Northern Ireland was not that there were suddenly no more wrongs to avenge. It was not that perfect agreement was achieved. It was not that one side “won”. People simply decided that 30 years of blowing each other up hadn’t solved anything; that maybe it would be worth trying to coexist and work together for a change. They decided, in effect, that Jesus’ advice might be right.

Togetherness

The one substantive change in Northern Irish society described as we drove though those flag-flying neighborhoods was this: strong laws have been put in place to prevent discrimination and foster integration in public life. In the past, discrimination was a primary engine of conflict. Now, schools mix Catholic and Protestant children in classrooms. Workplaces must report detailed demographics to show they are practicing equal opportunity. The result? Former enemies are getting to know each other.

The lamb shall lie down with the lion, says scripture. Togetherness has enormous power; the great humanitarian travesties of our time are all rooted in artificial divisions & separations that give animosity its power. There was always an awful lot of bad-mouthing “the others” before any real violence broke out.

Absent real firsthand knowledge of “the other”, any manner of falsehoods about them can take root and flourish. This can happen so long as we won’t trouble to know them, even if they live right next door. God’s example to us is exactly the opposite; even the very name of Jesus— Emmanuel— means “God with us.” Matthew 18 teaches that the only path to healing division is, sit down face to face and talk to each other. Christ’s final recorded prayer was for unity, his deepest grief as he overlooked Jerusalem was that he could not gather them all to himself, and the portrait of heaven in Revelations consists of great host from every nation, all together as one and praising God.

Bringing it to America

In America today, we are being taught to hate one another. Messages in all of our political media, left and right, reinforce the teachings that “they are not like us,” that they want to destroy the things we value, that there can be no common ground between us and them. Many of us believe those messages, but our country’s last, best hope may be this: that deep down inside, some part of us still knows otherwise. Deep down inside, we cannot wholly reject the fact that we work every day alongside people who are aren’t like us, and we do so  in peace and mutual respect, despite what the popular narratives say. Even in states of deepest red and blue, a landslide majority is only 70/30. We have “the other” all around us, and every day we are partnering with them to serve tables and erect skyscrapers and type computer code.

The truth is, what unites us is stronger than what divides us. For proof that this truth is still true, we have only to shut off the television, shut off the radio, shut off the computer, and open our eyes to look around. Far from trying to destroy what we hold dear, “the others” are mostly just doing what we are doing: raising kids, paying bills, pursuing happiness. If you’ve heard different, I challenge you this: do what Jesus did. Find one. Go near. Sit down. Take a little time and get to know. Find a common goal and work towards it together. Go running or fishing, make quilts, play chess.

If we would all do that, in the end, it wouldn’t take long before we all would realize that “the other” isn’t nearly so bad, or so easy to hate, as we thought.