Waking Up to Weakness as the Way to Holiness

 

Can we accept that growth in holiness comes through vulnerability?

Waking Up to Right Use of Resources

 

Doom to the one making evil gain for his own house, for putting his own nest up high, for delivering himself from the grasp of calamity.

                                                                                                     Habakkuk 2:9

 Habakkuk was one of the texts for our weekly morning prayer service this week. While not a book I read often, this particular verse stood out to me that morning, and convicted me. How often am I concerned about making myself safe, putting my own nest up high, and not doing enough to make things safe for others? I expect that most of us able to read this post do what we can to keep ourselves secure—physically and financially. There is nothing wrong with that except when we stop at our own safety and security and fail to work to make the same provision for others in our world.

 The Common English translation of Habakkuk 2:13 says this: Peoples grow weary from making just enough fire. That seems to reinforce verse 9. We make just enough “fire” for ourselves, and fail to make a fire big enough to provide warmth to others. That we do so without any compunction or guilt says that we’ve forgotten that we are all interconnected. This is something I continue to struggle with in my life—how much provision do I need for myself, and what of my resources should I share with others?

 I don’t recall when I first read this quote by St. Basil the Great, who lived from 329-379, but I do know that when I read it, I was convicted, and I continue to be convicted by it:

When someone steals another’s clothes, we call them a thief. Should we not give the same name to one who could clothe the naked and does not? The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry; the coat unused in your closet belongs to the one who needs it; the shoes rotting in your closet belong to the one who has no shoes; the money which you hoard up belongs to the poor.

 Reading this quote for the first time was an awakening moment for me. It was another of the experiences that reshaped my notion of what faithful discipleship looks like. It’s pretty amazing that Basil lived in the 300’s, not in the materialistic culture of the United States! In the same way, Habakkuk speaks out against those who take care of themselves while others suffer. Throughout time, we show ourselves to be selfish, self-absorbed residents of the planet.

 I could just shrug my shoulders and say, “That’s just the way it is.” But doing that would not be faithful to the one who gave his life because of limitless love.

 I believe that when we make Christianity a morality show, we often do so in order to not face our own greed and selfishness. In the well-known story Jesus tells in Matthew 25, the question that separates sheep from goats has nothing to do with personal morality. Rather it is about caring for others. To fail to share what we have with others, according to Basil, makes us a thief. May we struggle with how to make right use of our resources, and may we not numb ourselves to the needs of others that we can meet.

 

Another Waking Up Experience

A couple of weeks ago I shared a post about one way I had awakened to a different way to be a follower of Christ. You can read it here. This week I'm sharing a video post made for my church. It speaks of another way I have awakened.

Lizards, Snakes, and Spiritual Formation

 

I'm sharing a video post this week with some reptilian examples!

An Experience of Waking Up

 Life should be a process of waking up. I was recently thinking about some of my own waking up experiences. I define waking up experiences as times when you realize that something is other than what you thought it was, when you become aware that what you know is insufficient, or skewed, or seen through a lens that distorts your vision. Paul talks about seeing a dim reflection in a mirror in 1 Corinthians 13:12, and Rumi says “Wake up, wake up! You have slept millions and millions of years. Why not wake up this morning?”

 Father Richard Rohr had a recent series of daily messages about corporate sin, the sin perpetrated by powers and principalities that we often fail to see as sin because we benefit from the system. Reading these reminded me of one particular waking up experience. I woke up to the way I was swept up in a materialistic, acquisitive culture, and how incompatible that was to my faith.

 I was not asleep to the disparities among people, both within our country and in the world in general. I’d participated in mission trips and I knew that I had significantly more resources than most of the world’s people. But the waking up was the recognition that I was allowing myself to be swept along in the general current of American culture, which is oriented toward acquiring, holding, and protecting assets, and that this way of living did not feel healthy for me as I sought to practice being a faithful disciple of Jesus, who had very few assets.

 It’s interesting how we pick and choose which parts of Jesus’ teachings we want to follow and practice, or any of the Bible’s teachings for that matter. Some of my waking up experiences have been around the recognition that I cherry-pick which of Jesus’ examples I try to follow and which I choose to ignore or explain away as irrelevant or unrealistic.

 I realize that to live in our culture I will need certain assets to function effectively in the vocation I feel called to practice. But I am also aware that much of what I have is superfluous. While I am far from living as simply as Jesus did, I am continuing to work to detach from the desire to acquire and hold material assets because it is an expected practice of our culture. It requires attention and discipline, because even in the Western Church, we don’t necessarily advocate for going against the grain of our culture with regard to materialism.

What experiences have you had of waking up? Are you fighting to stay asleep? These are questions worth pondering, and questions I return to time and time again.

 

Faith as Not Knowing

 

Some thoughts about faith, surprise, wonder, and worship.

Sanity is No Excuse for Hate

 Last week my blog post was a video in which I shared a couple of stories that disturbed me. They remind me that no matter who we are, we are not immune from behaving in cruel ways. If you didn’t see the video, you can find it here. I want to spend a little time today reflecting on why it is so important that we not turn away from stories that make us uncomfortable.

One of the things I thought about, especially as I read the story of Stephen Biko and the cruelty inflicted against him, plus the government official practices that sought to make black South Africans feel inferior to whites, was that these practices were likely created and enforced by people who considered themselves Christian. Certainly not everyone involved in their creation or implementation would have considered themselves a Christian, but I’m pretty certain that there would have been white churchgoing South Africans who were actively involved in perpetuating the belief that black South Africans were inferior to themselves. And they may have excused their behavior because they were “obeying the law” or “doing their job.”

We certainly have our own history of such belief in the United States. And that belief was held by people who called themselves Christians. Beatings, killings, racial slurs and derogatory thinking about people different than we are does not get checked at the doors of the church. Sadly, it persists today.

We have to be better. We have to do better. Hatred is incompatible with the teachings of Jesus. Arrogance and a belief in your own superiority cannot be supported by the Sermon on the Mount. We cannot justify calling other people, who are, like us, created in the image of God, any derogatory name, whether it is “animals” or “heathens.” (And I’ve heard church leaders use both of these to describe others).

A meditation by Thomas Merton entitled “A Devout Meditation in Memory of Adolf Eichmann” should give us all pause. Merton says this:

One of the most disturbing facts that came out in the Eichmann trial was that a psychiatrist examined him and pronounced him perfectly sane. . . The sanity of Eichmann is disturbing. We equate sanity with a sense of justice, with humaneness, with prudence, with the capacity to love and understand other people. We rely on the sane people of the world to preserve it from barbarism, madness, destruction. And now it begins to dawn on us that it is precisely the sane ones who are the most dangerous. It is the sane ones, the well-adapted ones, who can without qualms and without nausea aim the missles and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, have prepared.

Merton goes on to say:

And so I ask myself: what is the meaning of a concept of sanity that excludes love, considers it irrelevant, and destroys our capacity to love other human beings, to respond to their needs and their sufferings, to recognize them also as persons, to apprehend their pain as one’s own?

Along with Merton, I wonder how we can fail to apprehend the pain of others as our own? If we claim to follow Jesus, we can neither condone or keep silent when policies and practices developed (and often made into laws) create and perpetuate systemic hatred and demeaning treatment of others. We cannot hide behind sanity. That is not a sufficient standard for Christians to follow.