I had the great privilege of preaching a 3-part series in November 2018 called “God Is Always Home.” It’s my own unique riff on Luke 15. I channel Augustine’s lovely line: God is more near to me than I am to myself.
I hope it’s an encouragement for you during this season.
http://westminstergr.org/blog/entry/sermon-god-is-always-home
http://westminstergr.org/blog/entry/sermon-god-is-always-home-part-2
http://westminstergr.org/blog/entry/sermon-god-is-always-home-part-3
“There is a desire in many people in the modern world to see themselves clearly. But if you listen to them, between the psychological cliches and the chatter of false intimacy, what they’re seeing is a certain limited image that they have partly projected and partly excavated, but which is terribly limited in proportion to the vast immensity that’s actually within them.” John O’Donahue
One of the hardest things about writing a book on narcissism, and thus on “narcissists,” is the reduction of a human soul to a label. In my work prior, I’ve tried to honor the complexity of human beings. I’ve often said that each of us is both beautiful and broken, hiding and hidden in Christ, accessible and utterly inaccessible. I sit with people for hours, for years even, pondering the mystery of this, the beautiful mystery of you.
The soul is vast, expansive, mysterious, complex, and even unknowable at some level. Who of us truly knows ourselves? I remind people of this each time I teach the Enneagram, recognizing that we (in the West, in particular) are consumers of quick-fix tools that give us control. Tools are good. But they cannot tell the whole story. Knowing that you’re a 1 or a 4 or a 8 really doesn’t tell me much about you at all. But with curiosity it can begin a more expansive dialogue about you – your story, your passions, your uniqueness.
Psychological insights and categories are merely tools, too. Recently, a man confessed to me that his work and sleep schedule were impacted by “trauma.” He attributed the trauma to the national news, and he compared his trauma to a woman who’d been through sexual abuse, in fact. It was confusing, and so I probed further. After some time, we determined together that he wasn’t suffering from trauma. He was borrowing a word he’d heard tossed around on social media, and in so doing he was trivializing the stories of real trauma sufferers. What we did discover together was that his habits of hours of video games, porn, and Netflix were a nasty cocktail, rendering him soul-sick, at some level. Why had he become so addicted? That was a mystery to which we’d now attend. But it was important for us to take time to name things well, and not claim labels or diagnoses just because they’re bantered about on Twitter.
I was unfollowed and unfriended by a so-called expert in biblical and psychological understandings of narcissism recently because I was seen as too soft on narcissism. Once applied, the label of “narcissism,” for this person, is a label of wickedness which is irreparable. She could not believe that shame undergirds the narcissistic persona, or that a true self, imaging God, resides most deeply in one who is narcissistic. In a sense, to be a narcissist was to be irredeemably wicked. The label became the ultimate definition, and even damnation, of a human being.
Elinor Greenberg writes
Nobody is a Borderline. Nobody is a Narcissist. Nobody is a Schizoid. This may seem a strange way to begin a book on diagnosis, but it needs to be said. When we diagnose, we are describing a pattern, a particular Gestalt, never a person. All people are unique. Labels, however well intended, cannot do justice to human complexity.[i]
I’ve wrestled with this insight, even as I’ve decided in my writing to continue to use the psychological label “narcissist.” I think we can do this while holding the complexity of each image bearer.
The dualistic mind prefers easy and tight divisions – us vs. them, bad vs. good, grace vs. legalism, sick vs. well, unhealthy vs. healthy, busy vs. rested. This kind of labeling gives us power. But often when we label, we refuse to admit our own complexity. Some of the most (seemingly) psychologically savvy folks I’ve known over the years have been master labelers, quickly diagnosing a pathology or naming an Enneagram type, and yet I’ve known some of these folks to be quite unaware of their own control issues or pathological patterns. The desire for mastery, especially mastery of the soul, may reveal something about our own pain and brokenness.
I feel a greater weight writing this book in part because of the humility it demands. What’s my agenda? What am I missing about my own secret motives for writing? What is my own need behind definitions and labels? I find myself more and more cautious, wanting to honor complexity without minimizing the real harm done by toxically narcissistic people. It’s not easy.
And perhaps this invitation to humility, to a recognition of the vast spaciousness of each soul, is the hard work demanded of us today in a time of instant-definition. As O’Donahue says, we know so very little about each other from the images we project. I’m still learning things about Sara after almost 25 years of marriage. What makes each of us live and vote and love and eat in particular ways is an extraordinary mystery.
As always, there is a dance in this. I stand in awe before mystery. I seek not to label or judge, but long to know another at her depth. And yet, I’m given tools which, when used well, help me to help others, by naming patterns and personas which block vulnerability, stifle intimacy, and even threaten safety. I recognize the paradox of this even as I realize that there are depths of my own soul I’ve never explored. As so, I stand in humble awe, and yet I proceed, with the care of a surgeon with a scalpel.
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[i] Elinor Greenberg, Borderline, Narcissistic and Schizoid Adaptations: The Pursuit of Love, Admiration and Safety (Createspace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016), 3. Thanks to my friend, writer and therapist Heather Drew, for introducing me to this helpful book.
I’m excited to share with you my video course An Introduction to Contemplative Prayer. This five-video course is something I believe can be transformation for you, if you give yourself not just to understanding but to practice.
These days, mindfulness, yoga, meditation and other embodied practices are all-the-rage. Popular authors like Daniel Siegel, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Daniel Goleman and others are inviting ordinary women and men into life-transforming practices. Apps such as CALM, HEADSPACE and a host of yoga applications are keeping us accountable and giving us concrete practices for relief from anxiety, rest from our weariness, and rhythms for wholeness.
Yet, the ancient Christian tradition has offered practices of awareness, embodiment, breathing, centering, and intention for centuries. This course invites you into contemplative spirituality and practice in the Christian tradition. In the five videos, we explore the basics of contemplative prayer, the core theological value of “letting go,” the neuroscientific basis for it, the invitation to wholeheartedness, and the resource of contemplative prayer for our action in the world. Each video offers 30-40 minutes of teaching, along with practices to engage in-between sessions. The resources I offer come with dynamic links to books, videos, websites, and other important pathways for your further journey.
After completing this course:
Jump in, and do this on your own, with friends, in a church triad or small group, with a colleague, or a new friend in another state. I really do believe it will be transformational for you!
A little more than two years ago, I set out on an inner adventure. Contemplative practices came and went over the years, but I was ready to commit. A few things conspired to motivate me. A deep dive into neuroscience convinced me that our brains are malleable, and that with intention and practice we can literally die to old neural pathways and live into new, healthier neural pathways. A second realization was connected to my pace of life and obsessive-compulsive tendencies, which served me well in the first half of life but seemed insufficient, at best, and just plain unhealthy, at worst. Finally, I was on the verge of my first sabbatical, and rather than writing a book I intuited that this season required something far more difficult – a wrestling match with my “many selves,” as Elizabeth O’Connor might put it. I needed to venture into the dark wood and die. Sounds like a fun sabbatical project, huh?
These are my reflections on the good, the bad, and the ugly of this two year odyssey.
The good.
At 47, I feel more at home in my being, held inexplicably and unfathomably in Love. The paradise of God is not a destination, it is within. It is not acquired, but realized as gift, as already ours. On a cruise a week or so ago, I could not help but look around at the tropical beauty and feel as if I don’t need to travel 1500 miles for it – beauty resides within, the paradisal temple is as near as our own breathe. Augustine says, “Why are you always rushing out of doors but are unwilling to return to your own house. Your teacher is within?” The “interior castle” is not some faraway place, but the center of our being.
My contemplative practice usually involves 20 or so minutes of silence, breathing, and dwelling in Love, like a sponge in the Ocean of God. A line from a Cavanaugh poem accompanies me – “Me I throw away, me sufficient for the day.” Silence opens you to every inner obstacle to union, and the distractions pummel you like hail on an April day in Michigan. The ‘many selves’ have been large-and-in-charge for years, and in my case they’ve served me well. Our “false self,” as Merton puts it, isn’t bad, it’s just stubborn and egocentric. And in these 20 or so minutes, I’ve felt the grip of these imposters loosening, maybe just a bit, giving way to Self, in Christ. Old neural pathways which led to destinations called Envy, Comparison, Control, and more are giving way to new pathways which lead to Love, Rest, Belonging.
That’s the good. Some call this “experiential union,” and it feels like a daily bath in Love. Me-sufficient-for-the-day was a ‘me’ that pushed hard for a very long time, burying my shame under a mound of achievements, constantly creating, producing, and never able to turn off the inner after-burner. I returned to my colleagues after sabbatical without some major accomplishment. (Some say self-publishing ‘Falling Into Goodness’ served as that, but writing that felt like rest to me). Rather, I had this palpable sense, maybe for the first time, that I belonged, to them, to God, to the world. I’ve always felt like I was born on the Island of Misfit Toys. My Enneagram 4 inner narrative has repeatedly whispered, “You don’t belong. You’ll be found out as a fraud.” And I’ve continually tried to do as much as I can to make myself invaluable, even uniquely special. But emerging from sabbatical, there was a sense of – it’s ok. You are here. You are held. Be here now. Show up as you. You don’t have a shiny ‘sabbatical report’ to present – you have you. That’s enough.
So, that’s good, right? What’s the bad, then?
‘Bad’ is not the best descriptor. ‘Challenge’ might be better. The challenge is this – if I’m not my drivenness, what am I? If I’m not accomplishing, who am I? One of the messages of my false self (selves!) is that I need to create a sense of worthiness. A challenge of contemplative prayer is simply to sit in a way that isn’t doing, accomplishing, or mattering in the typical way, but simply being. It is inefficient. And it opens you up to the ugly demons you’ve been running from – shame, depression, insecurity, anxiety.
People see me (mostly) as winsome and confident. My highly intuitive friends and students can see through this sometimes, and sense my anxiety and insecurity. However, in the past couple of years, I’ve had to greet these old companions, facing them, acknowledging them, inviting them to be held in Love. Depression and anxiety have lived just below the surface of my life for decades. And my drivenness, living always a few feet off the ground and above my limitations, has kept them at bay. That…and Zoloft. But the Lenten invitation to return to the dust of my limitations reminded me that I’m only human, that in my mid-forties I can no longer push as hard as I used to, that my strategies are unsustainable. And through this practice of contemplation, I’m not sure how comfortable I am with the ‘me’ that is emerging, at times. The question is: will you like me? That’s been the age-old question, I suppose.
I was speaking with my two good friends who sit with me every Wednesday afternoon in a space where we can show up with these questions. I shared with them that I’ve felt less comfortable in the classroom this year. My other selves could show up as funny, sarcastic, sage-like, academic (for whatever occasion!)…but who am I when I’m not wearing the dressing of the false self? I’ve felt young and insecure, at times. In trying to befriend my depression, I’ve been melancholic instead of witty, flat instead of manic. A great gift in this season has been yoga, but yoga puts you in touch with your body, and it, too, conspires to prevent me from avoiding what lurks underneath. Sometimes, I’m not sure if the ‘me’ emerging from the transformative chrysallis is a beautiful butterfly or an ugly moth.
The dying sucks. Living this contemplative journey, however, feels like the only authentic way. It is a journey into and through the dark wood, so controlling the narrative, controlling the process, controlling the outcome isn’t possible. Merton writes, “There is in us an instinct for newness, for renewal, for a liberation of creative power. We seek to awaken in ourselves a force which really changes our lives from within. And yet the same instinct tells us that this change is a recovery of that which is deepest, most original, most personal in ourselves. To be born again is not to become somebody else, but to become ourselves.” What if the new self isn’t special? Isn’t cool? Isn’t relevant? What if the new self is an ugly duckling? What if the new self is rejected?
I fear that the disciples didn’t recognize the Resurrected Jesus because they were looking for someone else. We’re always looking for something else, someone else, someone more spectacular. The first contemplatives used the wilderness temptations of Jesus as the basis for contemplative prayer – we do battle with our demons, with our ‘many selves’, with every voice within which seeks to rival the true self. Jesus knew who he was, though, refusing to become spectacular and powerful. He was Loved, inexplicably held in an embrace that allowed him to walk toward suffering. Jesus is the ultimate ‘grown up’ in this sense, and I want to grow up too – to become myself, hidden with Christ in God. The work is hard, though.
Two years ago, I committed to these practices in earnest. Every damn day, as they say. Parts of me are still rebelling – “What are you doing, Chuck? – we had a good thing going.” I’ve become convinced that there is no other way, though. You can’t think or theologize your way there. You’ve got to submit to the dying-and-rising, even when parts of you cry out in rebellion. I’ve called this in my writings the journey to “wholeheartedness,” oneness and worthiness in Jesus. It’s beautiful, as I said at the outset, and it’s scary as hell.
I feel compelled to write more about this ‘growing up’ – I’ve been hesitant, and just wanted to honor the journey for some time. So, if you’re up for it, I may write some more in the coming days and weeks. For now, a sacred love poem to God from Rilke that has become a prayer for me, and maybe can become a prayer for you.
“I’m too alone in the world, yet not alone enough
to make each hour holy.
I’m too small in the world, yet not small enough
to be simply in your presence, like a thing—
just as it is.
I want to know my own will
and to move with it.
And I want, in the hushed moments
when the nameless draws near,
to be among the wise ones—
or alone.
I want to mirror your immensity.
I want never to be too weak or too old
to bear the heavy, lurching image of you.
I want to unfold.
Let no place in me hold itself closed,
for where I am closed, I am false.
I want to stay clear in your sight.”
*New Retreat! The Seven Paths to Transformation
Based on new material for my next book, I explore seven unique paths or stages of growth and transformation toward union with Christ. Inspired by St. Teresa’s “seven dwellings” in her Interior Castle, I integrate the wisdom of Scripture, developmental psychology, spiral dynamics, and more to imagine the places of challenge, growth and grace for a transformative journey. This unique “inner pilgrimage” was first inspired by St. Augustine who wrote:
Why do you go away from your selves and perish from yourselves? Why do you go the ways of isolation? You go astray by wondering about… You are wandering without, an exile from yourself. Return to your heart! See you there what perhaps you perceive about God because the image of God is there. In the inner being Christ dwells; in the inner being you are renewed according to the image of God.
This unique offering can be designed as a standard conference and it can be adapted as a contemplative retreat.
Wholeheartedness: Experiencing Oneness and Worthiness in Jesus
Based off of my book Wholeheartedness: Busyness, Exhaustion and Healing the Divided Heart, we explore our lives of fragmentation, exhaustion, and never feeling quite enough. This very human experience is not new – its roots are ancient. But we need not live any longer feeling pulled in a thousand different directions, playing our futile worthiness games to satisfy unattainable expectations. Wholeheartedness is not a goal – it’s a present reality that we surrender into. Together, we explore what this journey looks like.
Toughest People to Love: Becoming Courageous Lovers of Ourselves and Others
We all experience difficult people in our lives. More significantly, we experience our own pain and brokenness! Relationship is difficult, particularly in a world filled with people formed with unique stories and wounds. The self-help industry has provided recipes for fixing ourselves and others, but deeply biblical, historical and psychological framework reveals that we are far more complex than we realize…and not easily fixed, like machines. In this conference/retreat, we explore our unique image-bearing identity, what makes us human, what gets us stuck, and how we get unstuck. We explore the dynamics of disorder, addiction, wisdom, and self-knowledge. And in so doing, we gain a vision for courageous love for ourselves and everyone else, even the toughest people to love.
The Enneagram: Nine Obstacles to Union with Christ, Nine Invitations to Freedom
Having studied the Enneagram since the early 2000’s, I am grateful to see the growing interest among all stripes of Christians in this tool for self-awareness and transformation. The Enneagram’s roots are ancient, and its imagination is deeply Christian. It reveals our basic obstacles toward union by illuminating unique ways in which we get our needs met other than from God. Pulled toward power, security, or affection, we often find ourselves stuck in self-sabotaging patterns that rob us of joy and disrupt relationships. In this retreat, we explore the nine habits of the Enneagram, and imagine new ways of living and loving toward health and wholeness.
Dying to Be Loved: Embracing the Transformational Journey of Marriage
Every good marriage experiences many deaths. While the young couple in premarital counseling might proclaim proudly that they’ve never fought, veteran couples will reveal to you their battle scars borne through conflict and disappointment, woundedness and reconciliation. We cannot avoid the inevitable struggles of marriage, but we can learn to identify them, embrace them, and be transformed by them. In this retreat/conference, we explore the difficult dance of lovers, the ways that we stumble, and the pathways toward deep love and attachment. Employing the ancient Trinitarian wisdom of Scripture and the invaluable insights of psychology, we weave together a picture of participation in a divine dance with the One who made us to thrive together.
The Three Movements of Faith: A Retreat Through Luke 15
The story of the runaway son whose journey home to the Father brings drama and delight may be one of the most beloved in Scripture. It reveals insights about how we cope and relate, how we self-sabotage and secure happiness, and how our deepest original dignity is ultimately revealed. We trace three movements of faith we all experience in unique ways: fragmentation to security, fear to freedom, and from fixing to (courageous and self-giving!) loving. I’ve also done this as a men’s retreat and a women’s retreat.
Finding God in the Wilderness
Based off the insights from my first book Leaving Egypt: Finding God in the Wilderness Places, this retreat invites participants on a journey from their own unique and personal “Egypt’s” through the wilderness of life’s winding and rocky road into the promised freedom of union with God. We explore four signposts along the way: Egypt, Sinai, Wilderness, and Union. Each awakens us to new depths of how we’ve been hurt and how we’ve hurt others. Each invites us to examine where we are on our own journeys, and what might keep us ‘stuck’ in a particular rut. We discover that our stories are ultimately revealed in the beautiful, honest, and gritty Story of God.
The Spiritual Life of the Leader (a retreat uniquely designed for all kinds of leaders, but offered on occasion to specific leaders like church planters)
This leader’s retreat is designed to address the core spiritual and emotional needs of leaders, the common obstacles for leaders, and pathways to health and wholeness. I share many personal stories and adopt many of the key concepts in a course I teach called Pastor as Person, along with my own experience founding two counseling centers and co-founding Newbigin House of Studies, SF.
Lent is nearly upon us! Ash Wednesday is Wednesday March 1. I’ve been working on a little side project – a Lenten devotional – complete with short Bible readings, reflections, and prayers. The Kindle version is available now, with the paperback releasing within days. I invite you to use this personally, with a friend, in a small group, or in a variety of other ways you might imagine! To whet your appetite, I’ve included the first reflection for Ash Wednesday. If you like it, buy it today, write a review on Amazon, and share with friends!
RETURN TO THE GROUND
Ash Wednesday
All go to one place; all are from the dust, and all turn to dust again. Ecclesiastes 3:20
Ash Wednesday may be the most formative day of my year. On Ash Wednesday, we hit RESET. On Ash Wednesday, we return to the ground.
I don’t like the ground. I’ve designed my reality so that I can avoid the ground. I hover three feet above the ground at all times, resolved to avoid the calamities, the humiliations, the shame of life on the ground. The pace of my life, the avoidance of my pain, my perfectionistic tendencies – all reveal my fear of the ground.
When I was young, I remember Ash Wednesday as a rather morbid affair. I recall it as a day when pastors hammered the message of human sinfulness into our stubborn ears. I imagined the pastor waking up that morning like a delighted little child, anxious for this Lenten season of sanctioned guilt-driven preaching. To my young mind, the whole dark season felt like a manipulative ploy led by robed and hooded “sour-faced saints”[i] scheming to remind Christians just how scandalously sinful they really are. I didn’t know why we couldn’t just skip to Easter.
No one ever told me.
No one ever told me about the power of these words:
You are dust, and to dust you shall return.
No one ever told me what a gift it would be to return to the ground of my being, to relinquish the exhausting attempt to fly just a bit above everyone else, to relax my fatigued ego. No one ever told me that Lent was an invitation to rest.
Have you heard about this gift to us, to the church, called Ash Wednesday? Could it be a gift to you, as well?
For years as a pastor, I had the extraordinary privilege of imposing ashes on foreheads. Sometimes I longed to say, “It’s alright…come on down. Return to your ground. It’s so much easier down here.”
On the ground and in the dust there is no façade. No more hiding. Only rest.
And it’s where Jesus can find you. Jesus came down, you see. To the dust. In the flesh. And so, you no longer need to prove yourself or protect yourself. There is no ladder to climb, no stairway to the pearly gates, no performance strategy, no purity ritual.
Only surrender. Only rest.
“Come to me, all you who are weary,” Jesus says. “Not up there…down here!”
No more ladders. No more climbing. Into the dust, where God meets you and renews you.
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Prayer:
Creator God, you made me from the dust, but that has not always been a pleasant thought. Can you help me imagine dust as a welcome place, however, where I’m enough, just as I am, just as you’ve created me, just as you hold me in Jesus? I long for the rest this might bring. Amen
[i] St. Teresa of Avila
My denomination is engaged in a difficult conversation. But aren’t we all, and more often than we think? We’re always dancing around possible difficult conversations – with bosses and pastors, tough-to-love family members, obnoxious small group members, pestering employees, unhelpful custom service reps, and more.
As I prepare to facilitate a time to consider how we best have difficult conversations, I’m tapping into some categories I introduced in my book Toughest People to Love. Let’s look at some diagnostic categories for our difficult conversations.
Do not answer a fool according to his folly,
or you yourself will be just like him.
Answer a fool according to his folly,
or he will be wise in his own eyes. (Proverbs 26:4-5)
Even the writer of Proverbs is confused when it comes to have difficult conversations! Maybe that can allow us to practice some self-compassion and receive God’s grace when we find conversations difficult. I do think that Scripture paints, in broad strokes, a movement or continuum from foolishness to wisdom, from being hidden to living in the truth. In Toughest People to Love I offer three categories – Simple Fools, Self-Consumed Fools, and Sinister Fools.
SINISTER FOOLS
Sinister fools have no capacity for self-knowledge, humility, or repentance. Likely deeply hurt at an early age, they have now become the “bully.” They win through intimidation, manipulation, and demanding ultimate loyalty. They are always right, and they claim the backing of Scripture, Polity, the Constitution, or whatever text or person they deem authoritative. Because curiosity and compassion are impossible, it is important to consider carefully how or if you will engage a Sinister Fool. There is no healthy conversation possible when you disagree, only war. And so, more often than not, I counsel people to protect themselves, and to tread with extreme care and caution.
SELF-CONSUMED FOOLS
As the title implies, this kind of folly is marked by an orientation toward self-interest. While not cruel like the Sinister Fool, the Self-Consumed Fool may employ charm, compliments, affirmation and seeming agreement before turning on you. The Self-Consumed Fool is deeply scared and insecure, and so protecting his truth, his position, and his rights is paramount. Sadly, the Sinister Fool is often barely capable of seeing this. Even repentance, when it comes, feels like a form of self-protection. You might experience a kind of Jekyll-and-Hyde effect with the Self-Consumed Fool, and in that you’ll be as confused as the writer of Proverbs as to how and when you should engage. Be wise as a serpent, innocent as a dove as you engage. On the one hand, I have compassion for the Self-Consumed Fool, because it is obvious that there is deep insecurity, shame, and over-compensation at play. I try to connect to his vulnerability and create a safe place to engage honestly. However, depending on how self-protected and hidden the “true self” of a Self-Consumed Fool is behind a false self of charm, competence, and certainty, you may not get very far. Choose what hills you are willing to die on very carefully with this one.
SIMPLE FOOLS
I hope that most of us, with gratitude to Jesus, are Simple Fools. We are simultaneously running toward the light of truth within and unware of ourselves in key ways. Yet, we are receptive, willing to see our blind-spots, eager to confess when we’ve blown it. Simple Fools are not wallflowers; they have deep convictions. However, they hold their convictions with confidence, not certainty (see Lesslie Newbigin’s Proper Confidence). They choose connection rather than certitude because they live from a deeper inner authority and do not need to attach their ego to power or a position. They confess that they could be wrong. They affirm, with John Calvin, that we are all like little children whose theologizing is like baby talk. More so, they long to become like little children – playful, generous, never taking themselves too seriously. It is more important to them to shed their ego than to win an argument, more important to maintain connection than demand affirmation. They hold their convictions with a depth and beauty that is attractive, not coercive. Simple Fools are grateful to engage difficult conversations, and model for the rest of us how it’s done.
Conclusion
We enter difficult conversations with fear and trembling because we long to live in relational harmony, justice, and goodness with one another. We are made in the image of a Trinitarian God whose relational harmony could only be described by early church theologians with the image of a dance. The “perichoretic” perfect choreography of the Trinity is our design, our inheritance, and our destiny. This is why union and oneness is central to the Upper Room discourse of Jesus. Jesus prays that we might be one as he and the Father are one. But oneness takes work.
In my various roles as pastor, therapist and professor over twenty years, I am mindful of how long it takes to move from ego-protective certainty to connection, from “I am right and you are wrong” to “I am curious to hear how you got there.” I see married couples for months in counseling before they can even lower their defenses and take a step toward one another. I see abuse victims whose pains runs so deep that the thought of living in any way except self-protectively feels all-too-vulnerable. I work with victims of racism whose bodies carry decades of hyper-vigilance and trauma, and who have little time and patience to hear the defensive excuses of others. I teach women and men whose theology was crafted in a particular context and with particular certainties who feel like doubt about one issue amounts to the collapse of an entire theological system. There is much that mitigates against wise, healthy, non-anxious, curious conversations.
But what is in us is more powerful than what divides us. The great equalizer is the imago dei. The one you disagree with remains an image-bearer. The one who hurts you, even still, is one whose being is the dwelling place of the Spirit. Our disagreement does not diminish God’s commitment to us. Our attacks against the other do not denigrate the dignity of God’s divine image. We commit to difficult conversations, amidst difference, because the One who dwells in us dwells in the other, because the way, the life, and the truth has taken up residence in each and every one of us – conservative and liberal, gay and straight, citizen and immigrant. God seems quite pleased to disperse his presence amidst difference. God seems quite pleased to cultivate unity amidst disagreement. Perhaps our penchant for uniformity and agreement can even be idolatrous, at times?
I enter into a difficult conversation with a heart to listening to the Spirit in the other. If all truth is God’s, our commitment to connection will allow us, in time, to discern together. It takes time, because the ego is most often in the driver’s seat with all its rightness and certainty and judgment. Committing to difficult conversations and to difficult relationships requires deep discipleship, because we will surely die along the way. The Communion Table became so central to our family because at it we die, we rise, and we return with and in Christ.
I have much more to die to. Do you? Every difficult conversation requires some kind of death. It invites us to the narrow way of Jesus. The easy way is the way of avoidance, judgment, distance, attack, categorization, and separation. The way of the Cross calls us to much, much more.
Additional Resources
Chuck DeGroat, Toughest People to Love
Marshall Rosenberg, Non-Violent Communication
Transforming Church Conflict, Van Deusen Hunsinger and Latini
Craig Barnes, The Pastor as Minor Poet
Dan Allender, Bold Love
Patterson and Grenny, Crucial Conversations
Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace
http://www.restorativecircles.org/
God is our homeland, Augustine once said. It’s we who are not home. God in Jesus and through the Spirit has taken up residence in our “interior castle,” and yet we’re often away, scattered here and there, far from home.
Even amidst our religious practices, we might be distant from home. Our busyness – spiritual, vocational, relational or otherwise – keeps us scattered about going from this appointment to that project to this meeting to that ballgame for the kids. Often, we feel like we’ve got to take care of everything else before checking in with ourselves. We live externalized, disconnected. In theory, we might believe God lives in us but we’ve not experienced that profound union and intimacy in a long time.
Occasionally, there is a hint, an echo. Our memory is triggered, an ache is exposed. Our hearts are stabbed with longing. We see it in a flock of birds ascending, in a sunset over the lake, in the eyes of a newborn. We were made for something more.
I came across this lovely line from a favorite poet of mine, Mary Oliver.
Teresa of Avila has been our guide through these mansions to remind us of this. Eden’s loveliness dwells in us. God the Spirit has taken up residence, enthroned in the innermost chamber of the mansion, longing for our return.
This final ‘destination’ for Teresa is not some high and lofty and unattainable goal. Teresa does not speak down to us in a condescending voice. Humble as ever she says, “I’m worried that people might mistake me for someone who knows these things through experience.” She remains compassionate as ever as she considers those (like me?!) who remain so scattered about that they never come home: “These unhappy souls are trapped in a kind of dark prison with their hands and feet shackled.” This is hell. This is exile. Anything other than union is a living hell. And yet we’re quite adept at prettying up our prison cells and justifying our union-substitutes.
The seventh mansion for Teresa is the consummation of divine love, and I do love Mirabai Starr’s emphasis on “companionship” in her translation. Even in her busyness, she lives in God’s companionship. The soul is “more present than ever before. As soon as she finishes a task, she rests again in that divine companionship.” Any sense of disconnection is seemingly lost in this state. In our coming and going, we’re with God. At the grocery store, we’re in God. While filing our tax returns, the Spirit dwells. We enjoy an easy, conversational intimacy.
She ventures a metaphor that might help. The soul is like a drop in the ocean. Where does the drop end and the ocean begin? Another contemplative says that we are like sponges in the ocean. Sponges are sponges, but immersed in water they don’t really know the difference. Creator and creature are one. The caterpillar dies. The butterfly emerges. In this state, we take flight in freedom and joy.
In this oneness, even suffering and persecution cannot touch the deepest, truest self. The saying goes, “sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me.” For Teresa (who experienced suffering and illness frequently), her body might be beaten but her soul remains unshakable. Her idea is not to dichotomize soul and body. Better language might be “true self” and “false self.” The false self is insecure, fragile and subject to injury. But the true self, because it is the God-self, is steady, stable, centered. In this state, she says that “a special love for her persecutors grows in her.”
I think that there is an especially practical word for us here. I heard a speaker recently say that she grew up spiritually and emotionally repressed. She wasn’t allowed to feel, to have emotion, to be angry. She said, “Now I can be angry and let people see the real me. I say what I need to say. I live from my true self. If I’m pissed, I let people know it.”
Teresa would be grateful that this person has grown in freedom. But she might say – Do not mistake what is quite possibly another compensatory, false self for the true self. The true self lives in love. It is the embodiment of the fruits of the Spirit. It is not simply the raw, reactive person who emerges after being repressed. She’d rejoice and validate the journey, but counsel that we still have much work to do on ourselves. God wants us to die to every false self that attempts to rule in his place. The Beloved wants to remove every obstacle to union in true intimacy.
God is also kind to us in this mansion. Teresa always seems to exhibit great compassion and exercise great self-compassion. The person in this mansion is not some spiritual guru perpetually in a zen-state of calm, but prone to sin, struggle, and distraction. She writes, “Whenever the soul becomes distracted, the Beloved…wakes her up.” She says, “She makes many mistakes. She doesn’t mean to, of course.” What compassion! I realize that I’ve been trying to attain a sage-like state of contemplative perfection, and yet Teresa kindly and gently invites me to back to my humanness, my ordinariness. What grace!
Finally, a word of counsel that sustains her: “Fix your eyes on the crucified and everything else will seem insignificant.” Jesus is first and last for her. Jesus sustains, loves, and matures us. Left to our own, we’re scattered about. Left to our own, we want to save the world. She says, “it’s not necessary to help the whole world. It’s best not to start off exhausted by impossible efforts.” It’s as if she gets us. She knows how prone we are to trying to become the Messiah to everyone rather than living as uniquely you and uniquely me, being God’s very presence wherever God graciously places us. Let Jesus be Jesus. You be you. Keep walking. Keep loving. Do it all in my presence, coram deo, and life will go well.
What wisdom. What grace. What love. What a beautiful journey she invites us into.
I do hope you’ve enjoyed this series on the Interior Castle. Teresa has become a friend to me, a companion, a grace-giver, a challenging prophetic voice amidst my apathy and distraction. I’d love to see her get a much wider reading than she has received. But now you get to be the conduits of her vision and her love. May God bless you in this. And may God grant us all many returns home, many long days in the companionship of Jesus, now and forever.
_________________
Now Available! Chuck’s new book – Wholeheartedness: Busyness, Exhaustion, and the Divided Life
Catch up on the series, and join a significant group of people all over who are reading along and processing the journey with the book resources listed below.
Blog Post 1 – Introduction – (Re)Union
Blog Post 2 – Out of Illusions, Into the Depths
Blog Post 3 – Entering the Journey | St. Teresa’s First Mansion
Blog Post 4 – Resources for the Journey | The Second Mansion
Blog Post 5 – Entering the Third Mansion | Facing our Control Strategies
Blog Post 6 – Entering the Fourth Mansion | Grace is Always Flowing
Blog Post 7 – Entering the Fifth Mansion | Transformed for Union
Blog Post 8 – Entering the Sixth Mansion | Suffering Love
Interior Castle, St. Teresa of Avila translated by Mirabai Starr (I love Starr’s translation of Teresa, John, Lady Julian, etc. She is a fresh new translator of these classic works. Her introduction alone is worth the price of the book.)
Entering the Castle Caroline Myss (this book is the cheapest investment in your own therapy you’ll ever experience, though the emotional and spiritual investment may be costly!)
Into the Silent Land Martin Laird (this is best accessible introduction to the purpose and practice of contemplative prayer I know. Laird is an Augustinian priest teaching early Christian studies at Villanova U.)
This is a guest post by my friend and former student at Western Theological Seminary (www.westernsem.edu, @westernsem), Adam Lorenz. Here is how Adam describes himself:
Adam Lorenz is a mut of the Church currently looking to find a home. If he had to paint himself into a corner you could label him as a Lutheran-Non-Denom-Baptist-Charismatic-Fundy-Progressive-Emergent-Reformed-Anglican. Social media type? Follow him at @adamlorenz or don’t.
An inspiring post. Enjoy.
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Though the sun had risen, I lay in my warm bed struggling to scan across the room because there was still not light enough to see. I dragged my feet to the living room, looked out the window only to see the unusual fog and rain on a January morning. My recent internal wrestling’s seemingly manifested themselves into the external reality this morning.
I am in the midst of the season most avoid talking about. I call this a season because I have 
lived just long enough to see my life change and evolve; yet that has done little to normalize or bring understanding to me. I am in that time of transition, of being in between stages of completion and new beginnings. Let me be completely honest, his understanding doesn’t make things any better if any thing my frustration grows.
I thought I was prepared for this. For the first time in my life I have felt the clarity of how I am wired and how that is connected to some vocation. I have fallen in love and have a partner who is committed to journeying with me, and I with her, for the long haul. I have applied and interviewed, been offered incredible possibilities yet knew they weren’t that next, right thing.
From deep in my core, I am haunted by the truth that I’m exactly where I need to be. I can sense that my life is moving forward but as I look out all I see is the fog and rain. It is hard to tell which direction things are heading. This uncertainty is often overwhelming, frustrating, confusing, and extremely discouraging.
I am scared.
Somehow I have come to believe the promise that if I remain to true my faith, true to that inkling and itch the Divine had placed on my heart, that somehow it all would work out the way it should. Or what I actually mean, the way I imagine it should.
Who forgot to tell me that a calling doesn’t mean the ideal or the dream? Job’s words have become my own, “I cry to you but you do not answer me; I stand, and you merely look at me.” At least that is how it feels as I sit in this vocational fog in search of meaning.
Sure, I could throw a youth pastor or two, my generation, culture, or my upbringing under the bus for this. But the reality is – no one actually ever promised that to me. It was certainly not from God. This was a promise I had come to believe in my youth, a belief that I has carried over into my adult years.
I am selfish enough to say that I have believed myself to be just enough a big deal that I have felt I deserve some thing for my loyalty – a clear path and straightforward journey seems all to fair a trade for the commitment of my faith. Yet each and every time I allow myself to believe that I perpetuate and give validity to a lie that masquerades as a promise.
What, then, is truly promised? That potential answer scares me the hell out of me because it means that could the fog might actually be ok, that more of my life might simply hold unknowns rather than certainties.
Wendell Berry wrote, “Faith is not necessarily, or not soon, a resting place. Faith puts you out on a wide river in a boat, in the fog, in the dark.”
So my faith, the thing that I thought would keep me from this type of known, is the very thing that I’ve have been given. It’s a promise but more so it’s an assurance from God that He is always in the midst of it all – with us, with me – even when it seems the most unclear.
Right now, I don’t like that promise. I find little rest and peace in that. It seems and feels trite. So I don’t know how things are going to turn out. I don’t believe anyone who says they do. I do know that my current place in life has nothing to do with any lack of faith. And I’m slowly learning to accept that.
So in the midst of this fog, I choose to join the many in proclaiming ‘Onward!’ to explore what is at hand and whatever is just ahead.
As we travel into the depth of the interior castle, I find myself out of my depths. I long to know the experiential intimacy that Teresa speaks of, but I spend the bulk of my life ambivalently living with one foot outside of the castle and one foot in the first mansion. If I’ve stuck my pinky toe in the waters of the sixth mansion, I’m grateful.
Teresa begins with these words:
Here the soul is wounded with love for her spouse and is always looking for space to be alone. In response to her woundedness, she strives to strip away anything that might get in the way of for solitude.
So far, so good. I like alone time. I’d like to strip away things that get in the way of my solitude. This is Chuck’s kind of mansion…the mansion of introverts. But even in this simple passage, she hints at something much larger than my self-serving need for space. What does she mean that the soul is wounded with love? Clearly, we’re entering mystic territory.
In fact, if you take the time to read this lengthy description of the sixth mansion, you’ll see that the mystic sweet communion Teresa experiences is beyond most of our every day experiences. She describes rapturous moments where she experiences ecstasy, feels transported beyond herself, and knows intimacy and communion in her deepest being. She is careful to not make emotion that point. Certainly, these moments are experientially pleasurable and satisfying. But, something else is happening.
The question is: What is being stripped away? For Teresa, this intimacy is experienced because so much is being stripped away:
The surrender can only be described in erotic terms. This is a love affair. It is ripe with longing. The pangs of longing are wounds. We’ve all felt it…that stabbing sensation of love. C.S. Lewis once said, “Joy is the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing.” What does that even mean???
The words don’t come easy for Teresa:
Before fully uniting himself with her, he fills her with burning desire for him. He does this in such a delicate way that the soul doesn’t understand where her longing comes from, nor could I successfully explain it except to those of you who already know from experience what I’m saying. These impulses rise from so deep inside the soul and are so subtle and refined that I can’t find a fitting metaphor to describe them.
A story. When I lived in Orlando, one of the most lovely and generous people I’ve ever known became a kind of mystic-mentor to me. He recently passed. His name was Bruce.
He was a PhD mathematician who’d discovered the intimacy of divine union in and through several life-threatening diseases and treatments. His joy was unhinged. At times, it felt as if he was caught up in perpetual delight. He’d come to visit me at Border’s Books on Thursdays and tell me of his ecstasy. Sometimes, people would walk by and overhear our conversation, and I’d hide my face and cringe. What do they think? Who talks like this? Mystics do. And I suspect that Bruce was trying to share with me what Teresa offers to us in the sixth mansion.
The closest approximation we have to this biblically is Song of Songs, the story of two Jewish teenagers. It portrays the stab of longing:
I opened for my beloved, but my beloved had left; he was gone. My heart sank at his departure. I looked for him but did not find him. I called him but he did not answer.
And the thrill of reunion and ecstasy.
Take me away with you – let us hurry! Let the king bring me into his chambers. We rejoice and delight in you; we will praise your love more than wine. How right they are to adore you!
Many Christians are unfamiliar with and perhaps even suspicious of this erotic language. I remember preaching a sermon series on Song of Songs years ago and getting pushback from middle school mothers. (Please note: the main characters in Song of Songs were young teens.) We’re more comfortable with the religious language of legal transaction than divine ecstasy. But perhaps, we’ve not traveled into the depths of our interior castle. Perhaps, we’re choosing a substitute intimacy over the experiential union for which we’ve been made.
The Calvin College philosopher and theologian James KA Smith is helpful here:
I suggest that, on one level, Victoria’s Secret is right just where the church has been wrong. More specifically, I think we should recognize and admit that the marketing industry – which promises an erotically charged transcendence through media that connects to our heart and imagination – is operating with a better, more creational, more incarnational, more holistic anthropology than much of the (evangelical) church. In other words, I think we must admit that the marketing industry is able to capture, form, and direct our desires precisely because it has rightly discerned that we are embodied desiring creatures whose being-in-the-world is governed by the imagination. Marketers have figured out the way to our heart because they “get it”: they rightly understand that, at root, we are erotic creatures – creatures who are oriented primarily by love and passion and desire. As Augustine famously put it, “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” This is not a matter of intellect; Augustine doesn’t focus on the fact that we don’t “know” God. The problem here isn’t ignorance or skepticism. At issue is a kind of in-the-bones angst and restlessness that finds its resolution in “rest” – when our precognitive desire settles, finally, on its proper end (the end for which it was made), rather than being constantly frustrated by objects of desire that don’t return our love (idols). Desiring the Kingdom, 76-77.
In my tradition, we’re quite comfortable in the courtroom of Romans. We’re not quite that comfortable in the bedroom of Song of Songs.
Thanks to St. Bruce and St. Teresa, the invitation is ours. I don’t know about you, but this makes me really nervous. I’ve had tastes of this intimacy…perhaps even more regularly when I was first discovering the mystics in the early 2000’s. Today, I confess a bit of shame even as I write. Who cares? Who talks like this? Or perhaps more acutely…what if I’m just not cut out for the ‘dance’ of intimacy like Bruce and Teresa? What if my fear keeps me on the sidelines, like it did when I was at the middle school dances?
Courage Chuck! And courage friends! Let’s keep presssing into the depths of the castle. So much more is offered! Our cheap substitutes can be stripped away, and new depths of intimacy attained. God’s infinite love in the dance of divine union is ours…if only we’d receive it…
_________________
Now Available! Chuck’s new book – Wholeheartedness: Busyness, Exhaustion, and the Divided Life
Catch up on the series, and join a significant group of people all over who are reading along and processing the journey with the book resources listed below.
Blog Post 1 – Introduction – (Re)Union
Blog Post 2 – Out of Illusions, Into the Depths
Blog Post 3 – Entering the Journey | St. Teresa’s First Mansion
Blog Post 4 – Resources for the Journey | The Second Mansion
Blog Post 5 – Entering the Third Mansion | Facing our Control Strategies
Blog Post 6 – Entering the Fourth Mansion | Grace is Always Flowing
Blog Post 7 – Entering the Fifth Mansion | Transformed for Union
Interior Castle, St. Teresa of Avila translated by Mirabai Starr (I love Starr’s translation of Teresa, John, Lady Julian, etc. She is a fresh new translator of these classic works. Her introduction alone is worth the price of the book.)
Entering the Castle Caroline Myss (this book is the cheapest investment in your own therapy you’ll ever experience, though the emotional and spiritual investment may be costly!)
Into the Silent Land Martin Laird (this is best accessible introduction to the purpose and practice of contemplative prayer I know. Laird is an Augustinian priest teaching early Christian studies at Villanova U.)