…I can see that life was unfolding before I was born and will continue to do so long after I’m gone. And that while I have a role to play, I’m not the star of this particular movie. Which is a huge and blessed relief, because it means I can just relax and enjoy my life as best I know how to do.

I don’t need to suffer to be of service – in fact, over time it’s the one thing sure to stop me. Suffer long enough and you begin to shield your eyes from the suffering of others. 

In fact, the simple but paradoxical rule of thumb seems to be this:

The more I enjoy my life, the more compassion I feel for the suffering of others.

Have fun, learn heaps, and be kind – to yourself and to everyone else!

***

The above letter provokes me into thought, prayer and conversation about a theme that I am working out “with fear and trembling” (that’s old-fashioned King James biblical language, not literal fear).  The crux of the complicated wrestling:

How can it be that so much of Christian thought and effort seems to be attached to suffering and sacrifice?

Where is this damaging preoccupation manifest today among conservative AND liberal notions of bearing the cross?

What does it look like to prosper in joyful growth, service and community with the humility of the Gospel (laid out in the Sermon on the Mount)?

My clients, students and I are working this out together.  Because the notion that enjoying this life is a betrayal of the Gospel or necessarily a block to the outpouring of compassion and justice has damaged countless precious lives and distorted the integrity of our worshipful offerings.  The cost, in terms of Biblical self-care, is that we risk false and prideful sacrifice rather than the “living sacrifice” which we see in Romans 12.  And, that we fail to make “every thought captive to Christ” by savoring the gifts of this world: loving relationships with self and others, nature, collaborations of all kinds, music and art and all sensory embodied experiences.  Being with others’ joy and pain in graced silence.  And so much more.  And, the time to truly know all these.

Thanks for being on this journey with me, and with provocative mentors and conversations like Michael.

Peace and love,

Jacki

– A West African Song

Thirteen years ago, a blessed brother traveler read this aloud in a public setting and dedicated the gift of this poem to me.  It was a time of difficult transition, and his great heart saw and felt my great need for new Grounding.   Another precious friend framed a beautiful version and gave it to me upon my ordination that year.  It has provided a kind of measuring stick, mantra, and mirror-question many times since.

The Course in Miracles teaches about the danger of special attachments and special relationships.  In my coaching and teaching, I often draw upon my own journey of recovery from workaholism (in which illusions and attachments to excellence abound).  I have often found capacity to let go of outward achievements wherein lay temptation to “excel the world” or “remind the world of my deeds.”  I faith, I am pressing on for a different prize: “to be alive to hear this song” and to be Christ’s presence in it.

Today, I draw upon this Life Text as I honor my grandmother, Elizabeth Schrock, who died Monday.   She embodied victory in her Christian life as she lived out humility and perseverance while receiving no great outward honor.  She is not famous, yet she is a hero. My hero.  And her life is a model of victory.

I am grateful for so many lessons along life’s path, and for the example of Jesus Christ through whom we see “the express image of God.”  Thank you so very much, Grandma Schrock, for the gift of your life.

+++

‘Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.’ – from a parable of Jesus in Matthew 25:23.

I’d like to reread, soon, Miguel de la Torre’s book Liberating Jonah: Toward a Biblical Ethics of Reconciliation.  I’ve always loved the story of Jonah, and began serious discipling study of it in 2005.  Miguel’s book offers some wonderful challenges about what it means to forgive injustice and to truly envision reconciliation. And there’s no sugar coating it.

That’s really important: no sugar coating.  As we embark together in coaching and classes this year as part of Living Well Ministries’ Forgive for Life programs, we will support one another in a forgiveness journey which holds truth of pain and radical compassion together.  No sugar coating.  No self-righteousness, either.

I hope that I can support, in these settings and others, the sustainable prophetic work of those called to transform  injustice in our world.  So very often I encounter those engaged in justice work I truly value and share in interactions which reveal such animosity, resentment, and demonizing toward “the Other” who they would blame for society’s ills.  No doubt, many structural injustices and systemic prejudices — such as racism, heterosexism, ageism, ableism and sexism — permeate our current reality and hold many in bondage through invisible systems of privilege and unequal power and opportunity.   In Buddhist terms, our attachments to blame and our aversions poison us all. The liberating and creating work of justice-making cannot thrive while we are stuck in that abyss.

As a Christian coach, I hold the vision of shalom for us all.  Peace, completeness and well-being might be modern aspects of this Hebrew concept.  In my personal life, public ministry and coaching/teaching work, I hold space for people to articulate the pain and damage they feel and see WHILE LETTING GO of Jonah’s temptation to make the human vessels of harm out to be evil incarnate.   I have slowly shed a view (now, to shed in daily experience!)  of God as one whose wrath would come down to punish my/our enemies.  Or, that I have the power and right to  dehumanize those whose beliefs and actions cause harm.

We have the opportunity to cultivate a Divine heart that, unlike Jonah’s, truly desires the well-being of all victims and all violators.   (That’s the approach to forgiveness I take, inspired by Marjorie Suchocki’s work).  Anticipating Lent is a good time to recall that a forgiveness that demands a punitive judgment is not Christ’s gospel.  Forgiveness looks like acceptance, bold truth-telling, and a welcome Home.

“While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”   Romans 5:8

– Joyce Rupp

Open the Door: A Journey to the True Self

“Love from the Center of Who You are” is how Paul puts it (via Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase) in Romans 12:9a.   My clients and students at Living Well Ministries are creating and recreating lives with a passion for such a life.  We look inward not in selfishness or escapism, but in order to truly feel and act from the grace which we profess to be God’s.  We boldly explore our present energy blocks, the ideas and habits which get in our way as we aspire to live generously and sustainably in this world.  We dare to look at lifestyle habits of greed, gluttony and compulsion in which we trade spaciousness and receptivity for endless tasks.  In the reality of experienced brokenness, we are learning how to rest in what Parker Palmer calls “a hidden wholeness.”

As I prepare to teach next month’s class on biblical self-care, I am reminded of Coach Cheryl Richardson’s wise challenge.  How can we be truly follow our God’s guidance if we do not make time and room to get to know and listen to our True Self?

Joyce Rupp shares this passion, and I am grateful for the privilege of sharing her work as an invitation for fellowship and discernment among a sacred group of sisters in ministry this year.  We call care so much about following our Lord in a calling to love the world. Really and materially.  It’s my hope that this is a year for all of us of deepening that “Living Well” from which we can do so with joy.

Oh, how wise and wonderful are Nouwen’s words.  As a “recovering” extravert, I can confess that the capacity to hold such silence has been something I’ve been slow to learn.  But it holds so much reward, both for my friends and clients as well as for myself.  It’s truly a spiritual discipline to practice such stillness, and to be reminded over and over again how Present God is.  This God cannot be reduced to Expert, Fixer, Preacher, or even Knower.  Thanks, again, to Nouwen for giving us words for this grace.  It empowers my imagination about the truly HOLY interplay of silence and proclamation…

The highlighted portion above, in this amazing passage, almost made it into my sermon this morning at St. James.  It’s so awesome I couldn’t NOT proclaim it.  So, Facebook friends, I would welcome your thoughts about it.

It’s true, I believe, of individuals AND communities, and a vital piece to recognize for achieving the graced health which is our birthright and out of which we can truly do bold things for Jesus’ cause of justice.  I am pondering further today and tomorrow – in honor of Dr. King – the energy connections between the kind of self-rejection Nouwen describes and the weakness and timidity of the white moderates he so righteously critiques in Letter from a Birmingham Jail.  (We read portions of that today in worship.  Wow. It never ceases to feel like Jesus’ Gospel of Repentance in full force…)

In my coaching, I  serve folks who are beginning to wrestle with this great enemy of self-rejection.  I also support many who have already achieved much liberation, but whose energy is blocked in current areas of life and service. They’re  LGBT and straight, single and in relationships, old and young, lay and clergy.  Individuals and churches.   Together, we are embracing a path that is very very distinct from the religious paths on which many of us began.  Many of our earlier paths have shaped our habits of self-rejection, and can sadly thus be seen as creating obstacles to the REAL spiritual life.

In a lovely reminder from Romans 8… Nothing can separate you from the love of God in Christ Jesus.  No matter your faith background or desire for formal labels or affiliations today, drinking this in (from the Living Well!) will empower you to do great things for yourself and for this world so in need of your creative power.  Let’s explore, together, what that looks like for you.

Are you ready?   I will be thrilled to support you in any way I can.

I am mindful that the Christian season of Advent is filled with rich reminders of this sort of expectancy.

Perhaps you’ll hear in it these echoes ancient and new…

 A context of occupation and tension and lives claimed by the Empire’s false peace.

A world of encounter amid diversity and transformation amid conflict.

A community of communities wrestling for blessing and name.

A people — some in despair, some with resilience, and a few with star-fixed hope.

A temptation toward triumphalism, and a truth born in a manger.

Then and now, God comes to us disguised as our life.  Ever at work in all of Life, and always greater than all our designs,  Emmanuel is announced again at Advent.  And when the Divine in our life  is looked upon with welcome and praise, we give birth again to redemption and hope. 

Wherever you walk, however you name yourself, I pray that Jesus’ birth brings good news this year.  That his church brings blessing, not burden, to you.  That a New Year awaits you with the graces needed to discover this:

God comes to you disguised as your life.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

A path of intention and of practice. 

One element is discernment, the kind of discernment we do when we decide if, when and how we spend time with others when  relationships are tender and compromised.

As we live into another multi-holiday season, we will often be making choices about how to be together (or not)”celebrating” in times of fracture and pain.   As I support my clients in this season, I am reminded that the best framework for defining forgiveness INCLUDES — at the heart of its definition – the ongoing work of discernment.   It does not serve us well, I think, to define forgiveness as some kind of stand-alone transaction, that happens or occurs with a finality that then makes discernment about next steps possible.

Instead, practicing discernment about how and with whom we spend our time in this season can be viewed instead as part of forgiveness practice.*

Making choices

to spend time or not

to validate solitude or not

to draw certain boundaries or not

to set intentions or not

It’s all about practice–

holding truth and love,

honor of self and others,

past and present unfolding,

now and not yet.

A forgiveness practice could be just the right holiday practice…

* In my coaching and teaching, I prioritize Marjorie Suchocki’s definition of forgiveness, paraphrased here: “Taking into account the full extent of the harm done AND choosing to will the wellbeing of all the victims and all of the violators.”

Behold the Sun

at midnight.

Build with stones

On lifeless ground.

Find in decline,

In death’s night,

Creation’s new beginning,

Morning’s youthful night.

The heights reveal

The gods’ eternal word.

The depths guard

 The peaceful treasure.

Living in darkness,

Create a Sun.

Weaving in matter,

Know Spirit’s delight.

– Rudolf Steiner

A tattered poem on Winter Solstice tumbles out of my wallet this morning. It is a few weeks away, but I am in the mood nevertheless. 

This Word has spoken to me often from its secure little nest, on the days I pull it out for mantra and on the days it just travels alongside of me.  I have carried it for seven years, this Word. On days and nights that seemed long, that seemed without light or path for others, it steadied me with an ancient, creation imperative. The Sun was present and I knew it. It brought delight and rebirth.

I wonder now if I am done with it.

The wondering passes. I am not.  I need this Word. People and places I love need this Word. 

This brings the resolve of Rest. It is not a resolve of tirelessly plodding on, like a sturdy oak, mindless of fatigue or surroundings. It’s Presence Possible only in the bearings of that Sun. It’s a body-mind-spirit delight found when I sense the right place, the right time, the right work.

 It’s faith.

I am grateful,

and not alone.

I always make a turn to Advent in October or November, round about the time of All Saints Day.  My clergy colleagues tease me about my own private liturgical calendar.  I can do no other… I am in the present mood of longing, of listening to past and whispers of future too.  Of waiting AND working for the good that is only God’s to do.  Of seasons’ turn and unceasing rhythm.  Of connections and communion which are design – not sacrament  – of this whole life.

These musings may be cryptic or opening to the reader. Or both.  Reach out if you want more. I can only say that for me the time is Ripe. We are not alone. Christ’s birth is yet happening, as are  his fiery courage and tender simplicity and scandalous partying and counting the costs and shameless death and renewing resurrection. 

With my clients and students, I also am doing the spiritual work of deepening faith long-held and retrieving and discovering new depths of truths previously unknown.  Setting aside the childish versions of a “winner takes all” Christianity is one part of the work – both intellectual and intensely soulful — that I try to do and support all year long. It’s helpful to name it as we approach advent, in hopes that a welcoming of the Christ child might happen in a different, more humble and healing key.  Perhaps one that resonates with “good will to all”.

One sacred text I am reading in my November Advent time… this spirited history piece which reveals stories untold and promises presently unfulfilled in much of death-loving Christendom.  Check it out at www.savingparadise.net.

Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire restores the idea of Paradise to its rightful place at the center of Christian thought. Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker offer a fascinating new lens on the history of Christianity, from its first centuries to the present day, asking how its early vision of beauty evolved into a vision of torture, and what changes in society and theology marked that evolution.