“While [Jesus] was in prayer, the appearance of his face changed and his clothes became blinding white. At once two men were there talking with him. They turned out to be Moses and Elijah—and what a glorious appearance they made! They talked over his exodus, the one Jesus was about to complete in Jerusalem.”

Now, the common Bible translations don’t use the concept of “complete the exodus” in Jerusalem. Instead, their language is ”accomplish his departure”. Eugene Peterson, who wrote The Message interpretation, is known for trying to communicate the meaning of the text rather than aiming for word-for-word accuracy, so I decided to check for myself. The Greek words are, indeed, exodon (exodus) and pleroun (full or complete).

So Jesus really did go to Jerusalem to fulfill the exodus. It’s obvious why the more common translations don’t want to use the word “fulfill”. The history of Christians claiming that Jesus is the fulfillment of Jewish covenants is pretty ugly (see supersession), so we do well to exercise caution. Thankfully, I think there is a way to engage the spiritual dimension of this without suggesting that Jewish convenants are ”unfulfilled”, and while being clear that God did not transfer the promises or status as “chosen people” to Christians. All we need to do is set aside any intent to see The Truth about covenants, the relationship between Jews and Christians, and the true nature of Jesus. Instead, we can ask God to speak to us through the text and invite God to teach us about God’s relationship with Jesus and Jesus’ path to freedom. We can ask God to reveal truth about our own personal covenant with God, and show us our own spiritual bondage and path to freedom.  

Queries for prayerful consideration:

If Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection are “the completion of his exodus”, when did his exodus begin?
In what other ways is the ministry of Jesus similar to Moses leading the the Israelites out of Egyptian captivity?
In what ways has Jesus led you out of bondage?
What still holds you in bondage?
How will Jesus free you from captivity?

To my evangelical friends, I’m hoping you can teach me a little more about a couple of things.

Firstly, growing up as I did in Norway, the idea that the USA is favored in some special way is new to me. What is the basis for that belief?

Secondly, in Norway, I almost failed my Christendom exam in high school for failing to make the distinction between the Israelites of the Bible and the modern state of Israel. It seems that the distinction between Israelites and Israel is not as strong here?

Right now I want to share with you the impact the event had on me. As I start to get a little perspective, I realize this will be a milestone event for me. During this time of political, social, and religious polarization, I was privileged that an imam, a rabbi, a Christian minister, a Humanist celebrant, and priests from the Buddhist and Hindu traditions were willing to come together for this ceremony. I would like to say something profound, but don’t have the words.

Instead, try to imagine the 6 celebrants, each of them offering from their own tradition: the Tekbir (Allahu Akbar, call to prayer); Vedic chanting at an altar set up with flowers before Lord Ganesha (with the elephant head); intercessory prayer according to the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions; reminders to live compassionately from the Buddhist and Humanist traditions. 

Afterwards, I invited everyone present to give a symbol of their compassion. Each person was given a polished river rock to take into the Reflection Room. The rock was to symbolize something they thought that future users of the room might need, for instance strength, faith, love, celebration, peace, comfort, laughter, consoling tears. I love looking at the collection of rocks, thinking of the compassion that has been offered.

Another purpose of the celebration was to dedicate it to the memory of a kind and popular physician, Peter Kruger, who died very young in 1983. Peter Kruger’s widow and daughter honored us with their presence and and they were able to have conversations with hospital staff who had worked with Peter back in the 70s and 80s. I pray that was meaningful to them.

Generosity – that is the word that arises as I think of the event. The generosity of spirit of the celebrants from all the faith groups, the financial generosity of those who donated money to create the Reflection Room, and the generosity of love as we steeped the Reflection Room in compassion.

I am deeply grateful for the generosity I witnessed, and I rededicate myself to the belief that we are given life for the purpose of developing our capacity for compassion and love.

Query for prayerful reflection:

How will generosity of spirit be made manifest in your life?

How will you foster a spirit of generosity among those you know who may not be in agreement with each other?

Reflection Room Art

I was promoted in mid June, and my new responsibilities mean I do more administration – lots more – and have fewer patient visits and do less spiritual direction. I discovered a funny thing: management and administrative tasks don’t lend themselves as well to blog-worthy reflections. There are fewer human interactions, and of course it’s those human stories that touch me. My computer just isn’t as stimulating!

Hmmm. Let me rephrase that. Managing and administrating are plenty stimulating activities, they jusy don’t lend themselves as well to public blogging. More of my thoughts and reflections need to be kept to myself. My employment situation is a matter of public record, so there is no way of telling the story while keeping the institution anonymous. 

Are there any bloggers out there who have found ways to blog about their reflections on institutional life?

And yet there are many in the area of spirituality who believe in a corporate “soul” and believe that its soul is more than the institution’s culture and more than the sum of the individual employees’ souls. 

To be continued….

As a general rule, I don’t think God calls us to be in a state of perpetual motion. I usually interpret busy-ness to mean that a person has taken on responsibilities to which s/he was not called. I usually think of busy-ness as a failure of discernment – it means we said “yes” to doing something that we really weren’t called to take on. If there isn’t room for Sabbath, for some regular down-time, it is a sign to me that we have not been faithful.

This latest round of busy-ness in my life has me wondering if that understanding was a bit rigid. I experienced God’s presence pretty strongly throughout, and I didn’t have any indicators of being out in front of my spiritual guide. I never did feel cold and disconnected, nor was I prone to irritability – which are common signs for me if I’m out on my own. Instead, it was as if God was inviting me to engage in each of those areas. Prayer came easily to me in the midst of my activities, and so did a number of other healthy responses, such as an absolute and unusual craving for exercise, so strong that I had to give in, and exercise helped me stay balanced and grounded.

So my “felt experience” was of being called into this busy-ness, which led me to re-think my theology: Perhaps there are shorter time periods when we are called into extreme busy-ness, similar to when I was caring for a newborn? Obviously God doesn’t want any of us to be in a state of perpetual sleep-deprivation, exhaustion, and neglect of one’s own needs. But there is that shortish period in a parent’s life when that is what is required. So might God lovingly call a person into a short burst of extreme busy-ness? I think my answer now would be “yes”.  And what might God’s loving care for a busy person look like?

Part of the answer lies in my felt experience: prayer came easily and naturally, I was readily in touch with  God’s loving presence, and I felt a craving for things that are helpful, such as exercise, and I did a better than usual job of asking for help when I did get stretched too thin. In addition, it seems that my husband and daughters seemed more than usually sensitive to my needs, and I got more than my usual dose of hugs and snuggles, and I cooked fewer dinners than I usually do. There was a lot of affirmation from a number of sources. There were times in the midst of a frantic day when I – to my surprise – felt able to put everything down and take a nap or read a novel. This all felt like God’s care to me.

I also had the awareness all along that things would not be maintained at that level of activity, that this busy-ness was just for a short time. It would be wrong to ask for that level of support and understanding from my friends and family as an ongoing thing. Faithfulness entails looking for ways to slow things down and to put Sabbath rest back into the picture just as soon as possible.

Queries for prayerful consideration:

What is my theology of busy-ness? How does God care for me if I am called into intense busy-ness?

For the purposes of group discernment, it is clearer to me after the conference that we can and should hone our skills and learn techniques for guiding a group towards unity on an issue. It is even clearer to me that achieving unity is crucial to Godly decision-making, simply because voting or any other way of making group decisions sets up a situation where one group gets what it wants at another’s expense. Since God loves us equally, I find it hard to believe that God would favor one group over another. Also, I believe that God has ONE plan for a group (God isn’t giving different and opposing ideas to different groups of people) and I believe that God does tell us what that plan is and that we can learn to hear God’s invitations towards the right thing.

Occasionally God does speak to us through burning bushes and pillars of fire – in ways that allow for no contradiction or confusion. More often, however, I think God speaks more softly and gives us choices. Those who want to know God’s mind can hear it, and those who don’t can ignore it.

In my own experience, ultimately, it does boil down to how much we want to know God’s mind and how much we are willing and able to hear the Godly things through the clamor of cultural expectations. It never ceases to amaze me just how often God does something unexpected and suprising – in fact that is often a sign to me of God’s handiwork. But if our expectations are too rigid, our “prec-conditions” on how we think God works may limit our ability to hear. Here are some of the pre-conditions I sometimes notice:

If we expect “the right way forward” to be expressed through the voices of resourceful, educated, or “hardworking” people, we are likely to miss God’s voice speaking through or on behalf of those who have less strong a voice in society, be they children, minorities, people who suffer with mental illness, uneducated, unemployed, etc.

If we expect God to require us to pick up our cross daily and for it to be a hard thing to do, we are unlikely to hear God whispering to us that we are his beloved with whom God is well pleased, and any joyful and fulfilling calls God offers.

If we haven’t learned how God speaks to us – and God does speak in different ways to each one of us – or we believe that we have flaws that keep us from hearing God, we may miss God’s tugs and nudges.

So an important part of decision-making is to continually strip away our own notions of how God does and doesn’t act in the world, and let God speak for God-self.  

Query for prayerful consideration:

What are beliefs I hold that may get in the way when I seek to know God’s way?

And yet as I worked more deeply with the theme, it was clear to me that there are other ways, too, in which a person can start to rethink who she is and how God calls her to be in the world. As a spiritual director, I am acutely aware of how things can change in our lives without it triggering the kind of inward shift that I think of in connection with transition. A mismatch like that can often be a source of great pain.

So rather than thinking of a different skill set to pull out for use in transitions, I was drawn to thinking about the ways in which we change, whether they are gradual adjustments or there is a precipitating event that shakes things up.

When I think about transition now, I think about it as just another small step in the ongoing process of becoming the gift in the world that God wants us to be, to use Parker Palmer’s language. Every day of our lives, indeed, a multitude of times every day, we are given the choice of acting in ways that embody God’s love for us and every other created being. Moving through a transition is just like any other discernment process: we are seeking the way and the place where our gifts can be put to the use of our community in a way that will be enriching for all. We can move forward joyfully, confidently, knowing that God has good things in store for everyone. We can be assured, too, that even if we don’t get our discernment quite right the first time, God will find a way to bring good things out of the mistake we may be making. There is no cause for fear.

In fact, one of the ways we know we are making the right choice is the sense of peace, rightness, unity with others, and other “fruits of the Spirit” that accompany any movement we make towards God and God’s calling for us.

For prayerful consideration:

Think of a time when you know God was lovingly guiding you into the right place, a place that was fulfilling to you and met the needs of others. Think of a time when you think you may have made the wrong choice, and yet God brought good out of the situation.

But I didn’t interfere with my children learning the basics of karate, nor did I refuse to watch Karate Kid as the family movie. My belief is that forbidding things will only make them more tantalizing to my girls, and as my regular readers will know, I believe there is a gift to be found – if I am open to it - even in things with which I disagree. I know enough about martial arts to know that the goal is to avoid using violence rather than seeing force as the solution to a problem, so I was hopeful about finding a spiritual gift and having rich family conversations. I found the richest gift in Karate Kid II:

The old karate master, Miyagi, flies back home to Okinawa with his young protege Daniel when they learn that Miyagi’s father’s health is failing. Daniel learns the reason Miyagi left Okinawa: Miyagi and his friend Sato were in love with the same woman and Sato challenged Miyagi to a karate fight to the death. Although Miyagi tried to talk his friend out of fighting, Sato insisted that fighting was the only way to restore his own honor. Miyagi left Okinawa rather than engage in an activity that would leave one of the men dead. When Miyagi returns with Daniel to Okinawa, it turns out that Sato is still intent on having the fight. Sato throws insults at Miyagi, destroys his belongings, family home, and does everything imaginable to provoke Miyagi into a fight. Still, Miyagi refuses to fight.

Thankfully I don’t need to reveal the ending in order to move into my theological reflections:

This movie made me think about what honor is and where it comes from. In my reading of current events, it seems to me that a lot of violence is ignited when someone feels insulted, whether it’s a real or perceived insult. On the home front, when one of my daughters whacks the other, the one who hit almost always justifies it as the correct response to mean words or actions on the other girl’s part. In sports, there was the French soccer star who headbutted his opponent during a crucial World Soccer Cup match when the rival said something insulting about the star’s sister. Much street violence seems to arise when someone feels “dissed” and wants to restore their dignity by harming the “disser”. Even some recent wars and threats of war seem to have much to do with real or perceived insults – both the invasion of Irak and the continued escalation of international tension between the USA and Iran seem to have large elements of wounded national pride.  

These situations seems to presume that a person or nation has honor if they are treated well and their  dignity is respected by their surroundings. At one level, that is how it is with me, too. I know from my own life how hard it is to hold on to my own feelings of worth when someone finds fault with me.

But Miyagi, this quiet, unassuming karate master’s sense of honor is different. It is unrelated to what others say about him or do to him and his belongings. Instead, he seems to measure his honor in terms of his own ability to stay true to his principles: He will not fight except to save a life. He will not threaten under any circumstances. He will make any personal sacrifice – such as walking away from his home, family, and the woman he loves – in order to avoid being understood (or misunderstood) to be a threat to a person whose sense of his worth is more fragile than his own. 

We have had wonderful conversations at home with the 7 year old and the 9 year old this week. Although we all understand and like Miyagi’s ideas, my daughters still whack each other occasionally and I still raise my voice when I feel overwhelmed by a situation. But we have developed a shared understanding of the goal we are working towards – to know that we are beloved-of-God and to act out of a deep knowledge that we and all people are God’s beloved. Honor does not come from the outside, but from the inside. As God says through Isaiah in chapter 43: we are honored and precious in God’s eyes. Being precious and honored by God is the source of our own sense of worth.

If in my lifetime I manage to be half as honest and faithful as Miyagi, I will be pleased with myself. And yet, my husband and I have turned down the girls’ pleas to do karate camps this summer. Our ideal goes one step further than Miyagi - Miyagi knows that he COULD neutralize Sato if he had to. For our part, we follow in the footsteps of Jesus. His Way was to allow himself to be killed rather than fight. We do not want to think of using karate even as a last resort, nor do we want to gain the skills to use force effectively - for any purpose. Our hope lies in using no defenses, except the power of the Holy Spirit.

Query for prayerful consideration:

What is the source of my sense of honor and self-respect? Am I grounded in what I want to be grounded in? If not, how do I shift to a better source of honor?

One of the things I love about doing retreats is the atmosphere of longing for God that retreatants create. In this heavily scheduled day and age, a person who is willing to set aside a whole day for God is a person who is thirsty for God. God created us with a deep thirst that can only be satisfied by God, and I believe that mine and the retreatants’ holy longing and God’s answer to our longing are the transformative power of a retreat. When I facilitate a retreat, I fan the flames of holy longing. In my mind, holy longing is one of the deepest forms of prayer.

When a person is thirsty for God, anything can happen. When a person focuses on a transition in her life, hungry for God to continue the life-long process of transforming her into a gift to the world….. Miracles do happen.

I started the retreat with a stirring poem by Mary Oliver, made all the more poignant by being written soon after her beloved partner through decades of life had died. It is from her recent collection, Thirst.

Thirst

Another morning and I wake up with thirst for the goodness I do not have. I walk out to the pond and all the way God has given us such beautiful lessons. Oh Lord, I was never a quick scholar but sulked and hunched over my books past the hour and the bell; grant me, in your mercy, a little more time. Love for the earth and love for you are having such a long conversation in my heart. Who knows what will finally happen or where I will be sent, yet already I have given a great many things away, expecting to be told to pack nothing, except the prayers which, with this thirst, I am slowly learning.

Query for prayerful consideration:

How can I nurture that holy longing, my thirst for God?