I am experiencing an abundant Lent, awash in cleansing self-examination and Holy Spirit’s grace and vision.  For years my compass text for Lent has been Isaiah 55, which beckons us to graced inquiry, trust, and joy.  Some tough things are going on for me right now, what Joyce Rupp describes as wilderness-imposed growth.  Yet I take refuge in this Word, and the community and path to which it points:

Ho, everyone who thirsts,
come to the waters;
and you that have no money,
come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
without money and without price.
² Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread,
and your labour for that which does not satisfy?
Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good,
and delight yourselves in rich food.
³ Incline your ear, and come to me;
listen, so that you may live.
I will make with you an everlasting covenant,
my steadfast, sure love for David.
⁴ See, I made him a witness to the peoples,
a leader and commander for the peoples.
⁵ See, you shall call nations that you do not know,
and nations that do not know you shall run to you,
because of the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel,
for he has glorified you.
⁶ Seek the Lord while God may be found,
call upon God while God is near;
⁷ let the wicked forsake their way,
and the unrighteous their thoughts;
let them return to the Lord, that God may have mercy on them,
and to our God, for abundant pardon.
⁸ For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.
⁹ For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.
¹⁰ For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven,
and do not return there until they have watered the earth,
making it bring forth and sprout,
giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,
¹¹ so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.
¹² For you shall go out in joy,
and be led back in peace;
the mountains and the hills before you
shall burst into song,
and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.
¹³ Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress;
instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle;
and it shall be to the Lord for a memorial,
for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.

The medieval mystic Meister Eckhardt said the spiritual life has much more to do with subtraction than with addition. Yet Christians today are involved in a spirituality of addition. Consumer culture wants us to have more. God wants us to let go.

– Richard Rohr

Check out more wonderful Lenten nourishment from Rohr.

At its core, civility isn’t an issue of choosing our words more carefully.  Civility is an issue of attitude.  Ultimately we will discover that every human exchange bears the promise of blessing instead of cursing each other.  The more we can admit that God is always at hand and loving each one of us as (equal) children, the more we’ll treat each other in ways guided by our common Father-Mother God.

– excerpt from The Christian Science Monitor’s devotional column on 3/5/12.

How might we be civil with those whose choices are causing pain?  With those whose short-sightedness or prejudice would distort or diminish the welfare of others? With those who use the name of God to perpetuate hatred or insular complicity in social ills?

This Lent, I pray for daily openness to transformation.  A transformation of heart and character, not just external matters and etiquette.  This piece on civility points to the heart of the matter: an equanimity of spirit about one another in our challenging relationships is the only way we can bear the fruit of blessing. Genuine blessing that empowers social change, just relationships, and thriving kinship.  Blessing is not cheap affirmation, but holding a vision of empowerment and generativity.

For me, striving to know and be a blessing means always striving to see the Higher Self in myself and others, even when  beliefs and actions are expressing limited current capacity for loving actions.  For my spiritual coaching clients, it often means creating some essential space to simultaneously nurture their own good and their practices of prayer for others.   We often have so many more choices than we perceive.  For all of us, it can sometimes be very very hard on the Ego, which really wants to name Good Guys and Bad Guys.  But its a kingdom pursuit that is every bit as worthy as the priceless pearl of Matthew 13:45-6

Did I say it was hard?

I will pray for you and I ask you to pray for me!

Here’s a real golden nugget, I think, from Emanuel Swedenborg’s True Christianity:

We read that we are to love the Lord God above all things, and our neighbors as ourselves (Luke 10:27).  To love our neighbor as ourselves means not despising our neighbors in comparison with ourselves.  It means treating them justly and not judging them wrongfully.  The law of goodwill pronounced and given by the Lord himself is this:  

“Whatever you want people to do for you, do likewise for them.  This is the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 7:12; Luke 6:31,32)

This is how people who love heaven love their neighbor.  People who love the world, however, love their neighbor on a worldly basis for a worldly benefit.  People who love themselves love their neighbor in a selfish way for a selfish benefit.

Wow!  Think about the entrenched ugliness of our unresolved pain and violence in this world.  Is it not much about comparing and competing, treating folks unjustly or allowing injustice, and judging wrongfully?

I am really savoring this collection of Emanuel Swedenborg’s writings, including the parts of it that are a bit strange metaphysically.  I love to learn about innovative ideas and experiences others have had (or thought they had), and to ponder what it might reveal about God’s reality.  One does not have to be hopelessly relativist to be committed to appreciating at face value the potential gift that others are bringing.  To listen and to understand does not mean to give over all discriminating faculties!  (Unfortunately, the sort of fundamentalism and evangelicalism that formed my early life would indeed have us fearfully separate ourselves from such encounters, rather than seek in them the practice of neighborly love and intellectual humility).

I especially love to read things outside the mainstream of acceptance (or, shall I say invisible histories/herstories and even “heresy”).  It is a spiritual practice — studying the breadth and spirit of experience, testimony and communal ethics that have been born amid human grappling with the presence and expectations of God.  And, striving to encounter these things with the heart, not just the endlessly dissecting intellectual impulse.  Swedenborg called these  ”sense-oriented” and I associate them with negative Ego grasping which other traditions name as our snare.

My coaching clients and students see this loving neighbors and self thing is the heart of the matter.  So, in fact did Jesus.  Swedenborg has some truly innovative ways of picturing and teaching this.  Tomorrow’s post will be especially interesting for those working on the spiritual projects of forgiveness and biblical self-care.

Maybe a Lenten practice that would be good Christian contribution to public discourse this election season:

To not despise our neighbor in comparison with ourselves.

To treat others justly.

To not judge wrongfully.

To do unto others as we’d like done unto us…

“The Law of Goodwill.”

“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand.The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell—and great was its fall!” — Matthew 7:24-27

This passage has held and nourished many returns – my returns to study — over the years.    It’s so simple really.  To hear and act upon the words of Jesus.  Jesus (not church or government or culture).  The words he’s just shared (the Sermon on the Mount, not later pronouncements of Tradition).

To hear.

What is it to hear?

To hear and perceive the Good News in them.

To hear and feel Gospel-style judgment (not condemnation) in them.

To hear and know more of God because of them.

To hear the Truth in silence beneath our hapless and self-centered words.

To hear the pain of this world, as He did.

To act.

What is it to act on them?

All of these are to act on them, in the manner Jesus himself acted upon Word:

To submit to their wisdom in hope,  obedience and simplicity.

To chew them with earnestness, as a sweet scroll, turning food into life and into waste as well.

To wrestle with them as Jacob, settling for nothing less than blessing.

To resist their use as weapons, as lifeless tools in the hands of prejudice or legalism.

To take upon — as a yoke — an inner meaning which is Life and Spirit.

To embody them as Word-made-flesh, unafraid of our place in the family of things.*

Jesus cried out with lament on another day,  ”If only you knew the ways that make for peace!”   Today, He stills beckons us to the blessing of the universal and nonviolent compassionate spirit of the Sermon on the Mount.   When we embrace such a life with our whole being, we must dissolve Ego’s opposition and the backlash of those who themselves are threatened by such grace.  But it is truly the way to the life of resilience and witness that is pictured by the  house on the rock.  It is the life of freedom from judgments, vengeance and prejudice.  It is the life that lasts.

Where do you see examples of the steadfast in your life, of the weathering of failure and finitude?

Where do you see the crushing impact of despair, discrimination, or disappointments?

What fresh word of life is for you this day?

*I am invoking Mary Oliver’s poem Wild Geese here.  Check out Panhala for the full text and lots more great poems.

“You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself. That is something you have charge of.” — Jim Rohn

This is a wonderfully life-giving and empowering reminder to me.  I do not hear it as piety but as prophetically wise, not as quietism but responsibility-taking, not as escapism but as incredible rigor.  My clients and students who are working on sustainable activism, biblical self-care,  forgiveness or coming out as gay or lesbian Christians are thriving because they are learning what they REALLY have charge of — their “energy leadership.”

This approach – quite suitable for Lent —  yokes self-examination with the tasks of transformation of circumstances.  It makes the interior life the starting point.

I join others from time to time in the critique of Western individualism and the corrosive impact it has had when taken to the extreme.  But I will not settle for a faith and a justice-calling that does not take seriously — reverentially — that resilience that can be cultivated only when we remember the limits of what we have charge of…

It is, I would go so far to say, GOOD NEWS.

What do you think?

I am enjoying reading a collection of Emanuel Swedenborg’s writing, and contemplating deeply the Lord of Love and Wisdom.

My former pastor, Rev. Ann-Louise Haak, gave me a great image of Lent a few years back. Like plants who turn toward the sun for greater light, warmth and thriving we are called in seasons like Lent to make those intentional turns — those course corrections — that have been depriving us of Love, Light, and Lasting Nourishment.  Any sacrifice or penance that is of God is for this.

On the way to the cross with Jesus, He enlivens my solidarity to care with increasing purity of affection about how the vessel which is my life serves Christ’s purposes of Love and Wisdom.  Like a plant seeking Sun, this is what I long for.

May all who claim his name and his calling, look deeply within our hearts and minds this Lent.

Does the form and the content of our Christian life bless this creation through Love and Wisdom?  Does our claim to the power of his life, death and resurrection make us more like him?  Or, does our “faith” rationalize a separation from the needs of this world, a judgment even of the frailties and sins of this life?  If truly enlivened by Christ, we long for the expansions of our hearts and minds and to be used fully by Wisdom and for Love.  We grow in our capacity to serve others, to see people with God’s eyes, and to acknowledge the humanity of all (to name them neighbors, even, capable of God’s good no less than we are).  That is the uncontestable victorious world-resurrecting power of his life.

Swedenborg writes in Divine Love and Wisdom about the self-love which manifests in behavior that is controlling, and how this is the furthest thing from Divine Love.  In every season, confession about such self-love is redemptive.  The self-love sins of the Church in this arena have been great, and are blemishes on its testimony to Christ.  This is most manifestly reflected today in the lustful and scapegoating opposition to gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender persons.  A frenzy of lies and distortions keep many well-intentioned conservatives in a place of fear and fear’s temptation to control.  When we stop trying to control others, we may be given the grace to truly see them as they are with all their frailties, shortcomings and gifts.  We are given the privileged and Good News opportunity to repent, for so often when we think we are loving the Lord we are really loving ourselves.

As I look around at the religious voices aiming for more control (so different from liberty!) in the public square, I lament at the collective sin of so much of Christ’s church.  As a lesbian Baptist minister and life coach, it is easy to name my horrors about the Religious Right and the pain these brothers and sisters cause.  But conservative and liberals in different ways fail the test of love and wisdom.  Where are the humble hearts who seek only to love the Lord (not so much our social idolatries)?  What could we create if we could acknowledge Others’ fears, understand them with Divine perspective, and bless one another even as we stand against injustice and violence?

May we be granted the grace to repent — each in the measure of our own need — and animated by faith to turn ourselves like plants to the great Creator of True Love and True Wisdom.

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.

Take my yoke upon you and learn from me,

for I am gentle and humble in heart,

and you will find rest for your souls.

For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

–Matthew 11:28-30

Who could you be if you took this invite of Jesus at face value?

What could you let go of?

What long could you wait in a period of rest?

How might you distinguish the false burdens placed by the world, from the worthy yoke placed upon us by Christ?

A Prayer from the Rig Veda

God makes the rivers to flow.

They tire not, nor do they cease from flowing.

May the river of my life flow into the sea of love that is the Lord.
May I overcome all the impediments in my course.

May the thread of my song be not cut

before my life merges in the sea of love.

Guard me against all danger, O Lord.

Accept me graciously, O King of kings.
Release me from my sorrows,

which hold me as ropes hold a calf.

I cannot even open my eyes without the power of your love.

Guard us against the grief that haunts the life of the selfish.

Lead us from darkness into light.

We will sing of your love as it was sung of old.

Your laws change not, but stand like the mountains.

Forgive me all the mistakes I have committed.

Many mornings will dawn upon us again.

Guide us through them all, O Lord of Love.

****

Jacki’s Reflection for Today…

I’m a life coach, a Baptist minister, a lesbian, a devoted disciple of Jesus Christ.  I give thanks for the wisdom, skill and poetry found in all world religions, and for the ways that learning from them helps to nourish my own faith and choices so much.  This happens when I deeply connect with something (as above), as well as those times when a different belief or form or practice is that which I clearly do not want for my life or would agree with as a wider social norm.

This prayer has long touched me, as well as my spiritual coaching clients and students.  During this year’s Lent I am especially keenly aware of the “impediments to my course” (of growth).  A renewed child-like trust in the Lord of Love, who I know as Jesus Christ, is being cultivated in me.  I have been readied for and chosen to receive anew that powerful love of His made so plain in his life.  That Love makes any sacrifice — when Divinely guided — worthy to make.  That Love makes a way of safe passage into the sea of plenty.  That Love cuts the cords that bind us in Ego’s condemnation (our own or others’) so that we may know true repentance and true wisdom.   That Love not only offers me forgiveness, but teaches me through the wildernesses of this life how to draw everlasting life from a Living Well (not solely for myself, but so that I might  know the bliss and freedom of serving others).

This is how I experience walking with Jesus… worthy sacrifice, safe passage, liberation from Worldly sorrows, and the Good News of repentance.

***

The Rig Veda contains the most ancient portions of the Hindu scriptures. Hymns, from which this selection has been chosen, make up the first part of each Veda; in the latter parts are found the Upanishads.  Read more about Passage Meditation…

For Lent today…

I am meditating  on Jesus’ baptism and soul-struggles in the wilderness temptation he faced.

At every turn, his Accuser challenged him to doubt his Divine blessing (“This is my Beloved Child, in whom I am well-pleased” is the message proclaimed at his baptism.)  This was the Gift given as he turned to his wilderness.

Trusting this — throughout his work and under increasingly escalated disappointment and attack  –  ultimately allowed Jesus to face his destiny, and it will allow us to face ours.  Along the way, we will be challenged to doubt and to test, to rely solely on material life, and to secure ourselves through Ego’s accomplishment.  That can mean falling prey to the ideas of Kingdom-building that rely on coercion and empire.  It can mean confusing others’ approval, ever limited by social prejudices, with God’s.  It can also mean falling prey to a belief that we are somehow more or differently blessed than any other child of God (and to the sins that such manifest destiny has often led us).

Lent is often cast as being about struggle.  Divinely ordained struggle.   We can endlessly struggle with ourselves, with others, with God.  Perhaps the greatest struggle-opportunity  of all is giving up struggle.

This might be a fresh way of seeing Jesus’ accomplishments in the wilderness.  Yes, it looks like victory born of struggle, but it might bear more fruit in us if we lift up a different vision.   He gives us the first larger-than-life signal that his victory would be nonviolent, and “gained” not by a win but by a surrender.  Not a surrender to temptation, but a surrender to the consequences of an Emptying proclaimed in a Philippians 2 hymn.  Jesus surrendered to the truth of his Divine oneness, and to the world’s ideas of loss and failure, even as he knew them to be false.

One of the great spiritual needs of our day is for LGBT Christians to give up the struggle for others’ approval, and to surrender into the delight of our Divine blessing.  We are part of the amazing diversity of style and love and family and  life which has always existed and has been ever-evolving.   In many past eras, same-sex love and intimacy have been accepted by some and rejected by others.

The tiny number of Christian scriptures which have become Accusers’ weapons do not speak for the God of the universe who continues to speak timeless truths of blessing.  They represent the struggles of the past, as our ancestors gave voice to their fear and ideals, their best attempts to protect themselves by condemning others and blaming others for the challenges of their day.  They need not sow enmity for today. Overturning their hold on today’s people of faith is a task which a table-turning Jesus relishes… but not for the sake of endless enmity and divisiveness about sexual diversity.  No.  For the sake, maybe, of forming a new people who know that abiding as the Temple of Spirit is God’s will for all of us.

I do not mean to advocate a political passivity in our wilderness, but to suggest that living in increased conditions of peace and prosperity will only come when are able to “love from the center of who we are.”  To work hard and witness – and even cause some trouble now and again — from that deep and unconditioned place.  And to join Jesus in disbelieving the Accuser’s lies and pictures of success that would verify or validate our Divine blessing.

May the testing of this life lead us always to reject the struggles which are false, alienating and divisive. May we, with Spirit’s blessing, recognize and live into our Divine birthright to know blessing and to bless, to know our royalty and servanthood all at the same time.

That could be the greatest “struggle” of all.

– Lent 2012

Rev. Jacki Belile, CEC, is a spiritual life coach and ordained Baptist minister.  She has supported LGBT people of faith and their allies on the journey of living out Christ’s radical welcome since 1996.