Amnesia and the Big Picture

Greeting NEXUS Friends,

I want to extend a few thoughts to you regarding our lesson for Sunday. It is titled “Amnesia and the Big Picture” and deals with the lost identity that we all seem to suffer from. Life is really about becoming fully and consciously who we already are. The problem lies in that the self does not really know its authentic self. It is almost as if we are suffering from a huge case of amnesia. I fondly think of the movie Hook where Peter Pan grows from a boy into a man and completely forgets who he is. It takes a return to Neverland for him to discover his authentic self.

Over the past few years, I have enjoyed being a member of ancestry.com. I had previously made a few attempts at tracing the family genealogy only to run into dead ends several generations into my tree. I discovered that using ancestry has allowed me to trace different lines of my family back over 300 years and have so far identified over 700 ancestors. I am quite aware that I am actually searching for myself and who I am.

God has been offering an invitation to discover ourselves during every moment of our life. 2 Peter 1:4 offers this invitation with these words: “Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature……”

John also relates to us that we already know our true self – 1 John 2:21 “It is not because you do not know the truth that I am writing to you, but rather because you know it already!” Many great thinkers have proclaimed that spirituality is much more about unlearning than learning and Jesus said to his Apostles in Matthew 18:3 that “Unless you change and become like a little child, you will not enter the kingdom of God.”

So maybe it is just a matter of remembering who we are. God offers an invitation to join in the divine nature and enjoy communion with him. This Sunday as we share in Holy Communion during worship, perhaps you can try to remember who you really are.

Let’s explore this some more. Please join me this Sunday for the NEXUS Experience at 11:00 AM at AUMC immediately following the Connexion Service. As a side note, you should try to attend Connexion this week as we are really doing a different and interesting mix of worship music, and as mentioned above Holy Communion.

Peace,

Home and Homesickness

Greetings NEXUS friends!

I know, I know it is Saturday morning. After a pretty intensive day yesterday, I was just honestly too tired to write or even think last night. However, I am excited about the topic for this Sunday’s NEXUS Experience. It is a topic that I have deeply felt, even intuited throughout my life and Richard Rohr was able to put it into some simple words and metaphors that came alive for me. It is about Home and Homesickness. Rohr’s explains this yearning as “not pointing fingers at the moon, but the moon itself – including the dark side of the moon”. We are no longer satisfied to keep our spiritual life somewhere else or even observe it from afar, we want to fully experience it within us or as in the case of the moon, make a journey there and fully embrace the delicious trip.

This archetypal idea of “home” points in two directions at once, according to Rohr. It points backward toward the original hint and taste of union that began in the bellies of our mothers. We all come from some form of home, even perhaps a bad one, that always plants the foundational seed of a possible and ideal paradise. At the same time, it points forward, urging us toward the realization that this hint and taste of union might actually be true!

It is a strong internal pull that constantly remains, strengthening and waning during different periods of our life. Occasionally we follow it, but I might argue that most of the time we resist it. This deep yearning was planted in our very earliest beginnings of life and for each of us as a great mystery revealed, and yes planted in our genesis. We so long for “home”, but it is both from the comfort we remember as a tiny creature and the deep longing that forever pulls us forward towards something better. Some of us refer to this tug as the soul, perhaps even the Holy Spirit living within us guiding us home.

Do you want to explore this idea some more? Then meet me Sunday at AUMC beginning at 11:00 AM for the NEXUS Experience. See you there….

Peace,

All Creation Groans

Dear friends,

I so hope this missive finds you doing well. I struggled all week to write this Friday letter, as it is a difficult message to digest. It is the topic of “Necessary Suffering”. I am not sure where along the line we learned that if somehow we could avoid suffering, life would be a grand walk in the park. But I am afraid this is a lie. Life is very difficult and there is no escaping it in this life. Some of you will know well what I am speaking of, and it is these difficult times of suffering where dramatic life changes usually occur. Paul states it quite bluntly in his letter to the Romans in chapter 8, verses 20-25. Read what Paul writes:

For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has?
But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.

Carl Jung also said it so well when he wrote that so much unnecessary suffering comes into the world because people will not accept the “legitimate suffering” that comes from being human. In fact, he said neurotic behavior is usually the result of refusing that legitimate suffering. Therefore, the refusal of the necessary pain of being human brings to the person ten times (an order of magnitude) more suffering in the long run.

It is quite interesting when you just look around you and observe that the natural world fully understands this. As Rohr puts it, nature already believes the Gospel and lives the patterns of death and resurrection. It is the very cycle of life of living, dying and resurrection. The sun must set each evening and resurrect in the morning to give life to this planet and its inhabitants. The changing of the seasons that causes our trees and plants to die in the winter and resurrect again in the spring. Even the violent world of animal predators and prey are essential to life dying and resurrecting. It is only the human species that tries to avoid this agreed upon pattern and the dance of life and death.

So what does this have to do with the second half of life? It is in this stage that we began to finally accept and in fact embrace this cycle of life. Prior to this, we wanted to build and sustain life and avoid any loss or even potential loss.

I leave you with another scripture and it is one that has carried much controversy over the centuries and perhaps one of the most misunderstood scriptures in the New Testament. Jesus goes straight to the heart of the matter in Matthew 14:37-39 when he says: Anyone who prefers father or mother to me is not worthy of me. Anyone who prefers son or daughter is not worthy of me. Anyone who does not take up his cross and follow in my footsteps is not worthy of me.

Luke 14:26 states it even more harshly: If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.

Are you wondering now what that scripture really means? Well, that is exactly what we are going to discuss in the NEXUS experience this Sunday at 11:00 AM at AUMC immediately following the Connexion service. Come join us. There is always an empty chair especially for you.

Peace,

Dance of Life

Dear Friends,

I realize my Friday letter is coming on Saturday night, but I just arrived home today from two weeks in the Netherlands for both pleasure and work. I do want to thank Kenny and Nancy for leading the NEXUS class last Sunday in my absence. I am back now and will be regulating my schedule again now that the holidays and traveling is over.

One of the advantages of holiday and travel time was the opportunity to read and study more and I have focused quite a bit of my efforts on this current study of Richard Rohr’s book Falling Upward. This Sunday (tomorrow) we will continue through Chapter 5 and probably into Chapter 6 where we are going to grapple with some difficult topics. I want to start with a quote from Chapter 5:

We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the present and let our illusions die. W.H. Auden

Life is a naturally fragile journey, but we would prefer to live an insular life and maintain through it without suffering. Frankly put, there is no practical or compelling reason to leave one’s present comfort zone in life. We work hard to provide food, safety, shelter and clothing (and much, much more) and we want to maintain that status quo. Maintaining that status quo or improving it is viewed as “success”. Any loss or lessening of it is deemed failure.

Yet, if we look at three of the parables of Jesus found in Luke 15, they are about losing something, searching for it anew with some effort, finding it and in each case throwing a big party afterwards to celebrate. A sheep, a coin, a son are all lost and found followed by some type of inner celebratory experience that comes with any new realization. Why would Jesus tell three parables on this topic if he were not trying to get a deep point across?

Most of us, at one time or another in our lives go on a self-help journey to find something that we realize is missing or to fill some void. More times than not, we are usually not satisfied with the outcome and that is because it is being driven by our own ego. Our true self-discoveries almost always come with loss, sometimes a very tragic loss. I know this is a hard one to swallow, but we must be led to the limits of our present life plan, and find it insufficient to really understand the real source of this stream of life. This is when we celebrate.

We work so hard to not fall, to hang on, keep the appearances up and by doing so miss the opportunity to join this dance of life and really become the person God intended us to become. I think I am beginning to really understand what Jesus meant when he said “they gained the whole world, but lost their soul.”

Do you want to delve into this topic some more? Join me tomorrow morning at 11:00 AM for the NEXUS experience at AUMC. I hope to see you tomorrow!

Peace,

The Tragic Sense of Life

Greetings and Happy New 2012 Nexus friends,

I wanted to send this note to remind you that the NEXUS Experience will pick up again this Sunday, January 8th, 2012 at 11:00 AM at AUMC. I will be out this Sunday and Kenny and Nancy Shortsleeve will be leading the class. I will be back to teaching on January 15th. I so hope your holidays were peaceful and relaxing and that the time spent with family and friends was healing. It certainly was for me.

This Sunday, we wil pick up with Chapter 4 from “Falling Upward”. This is one of my favorite chapters because Richard Rohr deals with the “tragic sense of life”. He begins by citing the author of the phrase “tragic sense of life” as Miguel de Unamuno, a Spanish philosopher. He believed that the church had distorted the meaning of faith by aligning it with the Western philosophy of “progress and success”. This was contrary to what he saw as rather evident in the Judeo-Christian scriptures. Jesus and the Jewish prophets were fully at home with the tragic sense of life and it made the shape and nature of reality very different for them. Life as the biblical tradition makes clear is made up of many paradoxes – loss and renewal, death and resurrection, chaos and healing. It is a collision of opposites. Faith to Jesus and the Jewish philosophers is the underlying life force that carries us throughout this journey. It is believing that there is something much greater than ourselves that will get us through. It is believing that there is purpose to life and that it is just not a random event. Life is inherently tragic, and that is the truth that only faith, not our seeming logic, can accept.

It is in the “second half of our life” that we can really begin to fully realize that life is not perfect order, even though we work so diligently to try and create this illusion. Our Newtonian concepts that have slowly eroded over time no longer support a universe of order. We would love to relax in a “cause and effect” view of order, but this is not the world we live in. The truth we are now beginning to respect is that the universe proceeds through a web of causes, just as human motivation does, producing ever increasing diversity, multiplicity, dark holes, dark matter, death and rebirth, and loss and renewal in different forms. Chaos and non-predictability sits at the very center. We learn much more about our universe and life by gleaning from exception than by applying certain rules to make everything fit.

Jesus did recognize this and even provided advice that today continues to appear paradoxical to us. One of my favorite Jesus paradoxes is about love and honor. Jesus says in Matthew 25:40 to “honor the least of the brothers and sisters” and “to clothe them with the greatest care.” He tells us to love those we should loathe the most. One of my wife’s favorite saying is that “I need your love the most when I deserve it the least.” We should love others when they are at their lowest, yet this is a time when we usually reserve for them our anger, frustration, disappointment and sometimes even rejection. It is so counter to what we have been taught growing up.

Jesus threw our world upside down so many times during his ministry. It is a matter of seeing down as up, or as Carl Jung puts it “where you stumble and fall, there you find pure gold.” Next time you see someone who is down, don’t pity them or feel sorry for them, understand that they are very, very close to up. The genius of the biblical revelation is that it refuses to deny the dark side of things, but forgives failure and integrates falling to achieve its promised wholeness.

In this divine economy of grace, sin and failure become the raw material for the redemption experience. Talk about a paradox here. The church has a difficult time tolerating sin and failure, yet it is the makings of perfection. Salvation itself is sin turned on its head and used in our favor.

Jesus is never upset with sinners or those that are falling, He is only upset with people who do not think they are sinners. Jesus was fully at home with the tragedy of life. He lived, died and rose inside of it. It is the reason that the true Gospel heals and renews all it touches.

I so hope you will join the NEXUS Experience this Sunday. I know Kenny and Nancy will bring a magnificent message and experience. I will see you January 15th. Until then,

Peace,

Christmas 2011

Merry Christmas NEXUS friends!!

Well it is Christmas Eve and I am a few hours late sending my Friday letter. I hope all of you will be with your family and friends and this will be a blessed event for you. Don’t forget the Christmas Eve services tonight kicking off at 4:00 PM for the children’s service followed by Connexion service at 5:30 PM. Then a traditional service at 7:00 PM. There will be no NEXUS experience tomorrow or the following Sunday, so we will kick off the New Year with NEXUS Sunday, January 8th and Kenny and Nancy Shortsleeve will be leading the class.. I know you will not want to miss this experience with the Shortsleeves as we continue our journey of “Falling Upward”. I will rejoin you again on the 15th of January.

I wish to leave you today with an excerpt from a Christmas Poem by Richard Crashaw:

Welcome, all Wonders in one sight!
Eternity shut in a span.
Summer to winter, day in night,
Heaven in earth, and God in man.
Great little One! Whose all-embracing birth
Lifts earth to heaven, stoops heaven to earth.

Peace on earth, good will to all,

By His Stripes

Dear NEXUS friends,

I have been wracking my brain this week trying to think about how to word this letter and prepare the lesson for NEXUS this Sunday. I really want to confront an illusion that the world would like for us to live under. It is the “everything will be ok” lie and if someone asks you how you are doing, just answer “fine”. This deceit is if you are wounded don’t “act like it” and better yet, just deny it. Society gives us plenty of opportunity to practice this from work, to social settings, to school and even within our own family. This seems to be a pre-requisite in our first half of life where it is very important to hold it together because being wounded is perceived as being weak.

In the second half of life we begin to understand that our wounds are actually our strength. I am not talking about being “wounded identified” which is using one’s wounds as a ticket to sympathy and an excuse for not serving, but instead using our wounds to redeem. Turning our physical and emotional wounds into sacred wounds that liberate us as well as others.

We need a place to “be wounded” and I would hope that our churches would provide that sanctuary for us. It is the very heart of our heritage in which “by His stripes we are healed” Isaiah 53. I hope as you gather for church this Sunday and again at Christmas Eve, you can think about your wounds being the main characteristics that actually defines who you really are. Your wounds are your greatest strength and from them will you find your “sacred self”. Despair can sometimes be just a few steps from victory.

I hope to see all of you this Sunday for the NEXUS Experience at 11:00 AM at AUMC, immediately following the Connexion service. I also hope that you will find peace and rest this Christmas season with your family and friends or even if you are spending it alone. I want to close with a paragraph by Henri Nouwen.

When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares. ~Henri Nouwen

Blessings,

The Hero and Heroine’s Journey

Dear NEXUS friends,

We live in a world today where we are the true beneficiaries of spiritual and informational globalization. Civilization has never experienced this tremendous flow of transformational information. It is easy to lose one’s way in the world of complexities. A true attribute of a great leader is one who can take something that is difficult and complex and make it simple, yet profound. It is a way of illuminating a clear path forward.

Friar Rohr introduces us in Chapter 2 to the journey of the hero and the heroine. He parallels the hero’s adventure to finding the way in the second half of life. He gives us five characteristics of the heroine’s journey and provides the markers along the journey.

1. They live in a world that is taken as a given and thought to be sufficient, yet feel a call to do more than they are presently doing.

2. They have the courage to answer the call to leave this home behind and embark on the journey. Something stirs inside to go beyond their present comfort zone.

3. On this journey or adventure, they in fact find their real soul. They are almost always wounded in some way and usually encounter a dilemma. This wounding becomes a great epiphany and can be thought of as a “secret key”, maybe even a “sacred” wound that changes them dramatically. This is the precise meaning of the wounds of Jesus.

4. The journey may begin with a “first task” to accomplish, but this quickly becomes just the “warm up” act. The hero or heroine “falls through” his or her life situation to discover his or her real life.

5. The hero or heroine then returns to where they started, but with the distinct call to help others. As the last step of AA says, a person must pass the lessons learned on to others – or there has been no real gift at all.

Unfortunately the classic tradition of the real hero has been lost. Present day holds a hero to be someone famous, or bold and muscular, or rich and talented and has achieved some form of great success. But this is always done by oneself for oneself. True heroism serves the common good, or it is not really heroism at all.

I so hope that you will join me this Sunday for the NEXUS experience. We meet at 11:00 AM at AUMC immediately after the Connexion service. See you then!

Peace,

The Best is Yet to Come – Falling Upwards

It was a silent morning. She sat by the icy window watching the snow slowly fall to the ground. Peaceful, with long ago memories gently floating through her brain, she remembered the days of her early life. Her first life. The excitement of the courtship, the dates that seemed almost too good, the moment of engagement and finally the wedding. Her first child. Painful, yet nothing compared to the ecstasy of holding that infant against her breast. Then more children and the process of early care, first day of school, knees scraped, hearts broken, graduations, balancing motherhood, career and volunteering. Then almost as if it happened in one day, the house was quiet.

She caught the reflection of herself in the glazed window. Still young looking, but with wisps of white streaking her hair. Through that timescape, the memories were still vivid and a sense of knowing and peace permeated them. Vivid, yet deep. Turning her memory more to present day, she smiled lovingly thinking of her grandchildren. With a wisdom and grace only accomplished through age, or sometimes tragedy, she now possesses a deeply meaningful understanding of the stages facing her children’s children. She has emerged as a generative human, concerned about the next generation and not just herself. She lives in a deep time and not just in her own small time. The past, present and future all belong to her by the window.

She knows somehow that from this moment she will almost naturally float forward by the quiet movement of grace when the time is right – and the old patterns will become insufficient or dissolve away. She pulls the blanket tighter around her shoulder, glances one more time at the peaceful, silent falling snow, gently closes her eyes and sleeps.

Most of us are never told that there is a second half of life, but this is the entire journey of life. Friar Rohr says that “those who walk the full and entire journey are considered “called” or “chosen” in the Bible.” They are the ones who have heard a deep invitation to “something more” and set out to find it by both grace and daring. As Bill Plotkin, a wise guide, puts it, many of us learn to do our “survival dance”, but we never get to our actual “sacred dance.”

Want to chat more about this second journey of life that awaits us all? Come join us in the NEXUS Experience to continue our study of “Falling Upwards”. 11:00 AM at AUMC immediately following the Connexion Service at 9:30 AM. See you then!

Peace,

Falling Upward – The Two Halves of Life

Dear NEXUS friends,

A happy thanksgiving to all! I pray that the time spent with families, friends, significant others is a blessing to all. If you are traveling, please be safe. I look forward to seeing all of you this Sunday!

Carl Jung wrote, in his book The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche – “One cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning; for what was great in the morning will be of little importance in the evening, and what in the morning, was true will at evening become a lie.”

As we discussed last week, the first half of life is focused on creating a container for one’s life and answer the first essential questions: “What makes me significant?”, “How can I support myself?”, and “Who will go with me?” The task of the second half of life is, quite simply, to find the actual contents that this container was meant to hold and deliver. Problematically, the first task invests so much of our blood, sweat, eggs and sperm, tears and years that we often cannot imagine there is even a second task.

Friar Rohr explains that “The second half of life can hold some exciting new adventures, but that normally means that the container itself has to stretch, die in its present form, or even replace itself with something better. This is the big rub, as they say, but is also the very source of our midlife excitement and discovery. Only when you have begun to live in the second half can you see the different between the two. Yet the two halves are both cumulative and sequential, and both are very necessary. You cannot do a nonstop flight to the second half of life by reading lots of books about it. Grace must and will edge forward. “God has no grandchildren. God only has children,” as some have said. Each generation has to make its own discoveries of Spirit for itself. If not, we just react to the previous generation, and often overreact. Or we conform and often over conform. Neither is a positive or creative way to move forward.”

No Pope, Bible quote, psychological technique, religious formula, book or guru can do the journey for you. If you try to skip the first journey, you will never see its real necessity and also its limitations; you will never know why this first container must fail you, the wonderful fullness of the second half of the journey, and the relationship between the two.

I am looking forward to further dialogue with all of you as we further explore “Falling Upward” this Sunday at the NEXUS Experience. Be safe, enjoy your families and Happy Thanksgiving. Remember, NEXUS at 11:00 AM at AUMC immediately following the Connexion service.

Peace,