The History of My Silence

When the “Unsayable” is Spoken

Over the last decade, I have been a part of a men’s community. In this group, our kinship revolves around an ongoing process of what many call “work.” This work, due to our Christian naming, is a process in which salvation and redemption are applied to the realities of our broken lives. Wholeness, which many may see as an essential part of, if not the purpose of salvation, is what we strive for. Integrity means integration, thus all things must be brought into the circle of trust. All things must be submitted to the mind of Christ. All things must be brought out of the silence into a trusting reverent moment where the men are gathered.

Over the years I have been blessed to hear hundreds of stories. Many are filled with laughter and light and the blessings of loving families and communities. Scores of others are mingled with a mix of deep anguish and loss as well as the elation of undeserved blessing and enlargement. Occasionally, through the narrative of a particular man, the group steps into a dark shadowy land of malevolent energy that can only be named as evil. In these moments what has been wordless and voiceless begins to find sound.

At a very primal level, words are merely sounds. They are utterances to which we apply meaning. It appears that some feelings are difficult to name and thus we hum or sing nonsense phrases. Other sounds are much more difficult to identify because they are rarely if ever spoken and they are off putting in their manifestation. In the book Unsayable, author & therapist, Annie G. Annie Rogers tell us that “whatever is terrifyingly present in our body, yet unsayable takes on a coded form in our speech and actions.” I have learned that nearly all the unsayable is a coded poetry, a dance with words that reveal a heinous crime against someone’s very soul. As much as emotionally returning as best one can to the scene of the crime is essential, it is the lifelong trauma that marks the body becoming invisible and inarticulate that makes these stories intolerable and agonizing.

The first inklings of some kind of significant brokenness in a man may be a rupture in his speech pattern. People can offer up the most horrendous experience and treatment with cold detachment. When the sense of disconnection between words and emotion is significantly disengaged from reality, it is usually the case that deep trauma has offered up a counter narrative that rules the conscious mind. I hear over and over again, “Well he is a nice guy. He did not mean to do that. She was suffering a lot herself. They were just acting upon a long held prejudice or hatred. As right as those assertions may seem to the logical mind, bringing these wounds to remembrance is challenging. This is due to the emotionally charged repressed knowing which is fighting to tell the truth but is unsure and undecided. How could this have happened? These memories seem so wrong. My father could not have done this. My uncle was a good man. My family had so much going for them. These interpretations could go on a life time and for some they do. Some of us will never ask the deeper questions, look beneath the quandary, or touch the tender and sore spots on the soul.

But it is the confounding nature of our experience that forces our souls into ambivalence. Part of this is denial’s gift as facing the shocking realities of our histories can force our bodies into the involuntary sickness of revulsion. For some of the men, this may be their first time that they have admitted indeed what has happened to them. This is the first time they named the pain within. This is the power of silence. Much of what has marked the body is written in invisible ink. It is nigh unto impossible to to detect without an interpreter or a spiritual curator who is schooled in the historically charged world of soulish antiquities. As though ancient hieroglyphics, this offering up of the unsayable becomes a shared language as others who know their own dialect offer up questions to the story teller. Time after time we would watch sounds and words call up something out of the ordinary, plant it in a man’s body and watch it remake his world. This is why we often ask a man, “Where is it in your body?” What we are asking is, “Where has your emotional storage of that experience been located in or on your body? Where do you keep these secrets? What part of your body holds the secret?”

What if I told you the truth? What if I could? Robert Pinsky

I might not be able to carry it, Mr. Frodo, but I can carry you!

The indicators of something sorely wrong are often first manifest in the voice, visage or posture of a man. There appears a crack in the silence and falling out of this previously hidden place we may hear a muttering or a low pitched whine. His head may slump towards his knees,. He may stare into space for long periods of time and say nothing. When he does begin to speak one can hear sounds nearly animal like. It often shakes the soul and sends chills up the spine. Sometimes the opening crack closes as quickly as it appeared and the man must be asked by another, “Where were you just now?” Over and over again you will hear the man say, “What do you mean where was I? I am right here.” Once again the query from another, “No…where did you go inside yourself. You changed. Your face, your voice, your pose. Where was that place you went?”

Usually when one is unconsciously coming upon the unsayable, the body will begin to fidget and show signs of inner terror. In the case of men who see themselves as stoic and strong, it may only appear in slight and hardly detectable body ticks. If you know the man, you may see a tick that usually comes out during stress or intense situations. Now here they are sitting in a circle with men and those same body messages are beginning to rise to the surface. If we are quiet and stay in a position of sacred listening, the man may just begin to utter the unspeakable. This is the place Christ has always been. This is the place He desires to inhabit. For His presence to be acknowledged one can only go there. Go there again. No one who has experienced the unspeakable will ever desire to go there again. In fact, many have made an invisible pact with their most vulnerable childlike self to never ever allow themselves to be in that position again. Thus, all the resources here to date the unconscious has mustered to protect are now fighting the healing. The unconscious has no script to read. It does what it is told. To untell it is to reprogram a number of stories (therapists call them complexes) and listen to and rename countless things. That is why we call it work. It will take a lifetime.

I have heard many stories that are nearly unbearable. No! They are unbearable to hear. Often when someone is sharing their horrific past I want to stand up and scream at the top of my lungs. I want to find this person who did this, track them down and do to them what they have done to this person. But that is my work. That is my story. That is how I found myself with these men. I began to name the unnamable and say the unspeakable. That is the history of my silence.

But when I quell my own need for revenge or justice I can step back into the hidden & protected language this man is offering up to me and to others. It is in those blessed holy moments that something beyond the group emerges. Sometimes the story has been carried for generations as in the case of those who have experienced racism & genocide. To hear the names men have been called from nigger to chink to yellow man breaks your heart. When it is offered up in true vulnerability it becomes too sacred to ignore. You must embrace any part of that sin that might be yours and silently repent to the brother to remain present and clean of soul. To detach yourself and your own behavior from this man’s story is to assume he is not a part of you. We often say, “Your work is my work.” And indeed this is true. For another man to continue articulating the unsayable, I must take responsibility for his pain be it personal, corporate, or even out of complacency. Justice is not an abstract ethic but my responsibility to protect the other from abuse, sin, greed, or lack.

There are occasions where a man’s past and suffering is so repugnant that speechlessness is an act of properly naming the offense. In these moments there are no words to offer up to the suffering of another. Words can often be explanations for the sake of the “talker.” In light of what is being spoken, often for the first time, these expressions can make the story small and inconsequential. When the weight of grief and torture are unimaginable, all the men can do is bear witness to its enormity and cruelty by weeping. Weeping as a family. I have seen grown men fall to their knees and weep and wail for another. This was the only response one could have to such unspeakable atrocities done to people. To hear them is to see redemption in a new light. To hear them is to see evil as more than a concept or some devil in some red suit. You begin to see our own role in the passing on of great hurt and pain. I can become a part of great hurt in another’s life. I can become as well a healing voice with protection an comfort. I choose either way. This is a frightening truth. I have in my own heart such power. The more I name my own brokenness the more I can stand beside those who are yet to name theirs and do so as a sacred calling.

This naming, of course, is easier said than done. For some, the darkness is just that. To bring something from another realm is to feel once again the same violence, abandonment, or injustice which formed or informed so much of their lives. The calling up of those darkened events long forgotten or submerged is indeed the loosing of strongholds. It is the unraveling of years and yes, generations of thinking, acting, and naming.

In the case of severe trauma, be it physical, sexual, or emotional violence, transporting these shadowy and threatening remembrances is all but horrific. On some level, it is to live them all over again. For this reason many will never go to these places. They will instead hideaway the suffering of the soul, deny its reflexive blindness and wander through life half full or nearly empty.

It is said that we cannot be conscious of what we are unconscious. So as good as we would desire to be, something is always in collusion. Something is always complicitous in our acting out, our sin, our projections of pain on others. But we cannot find the root. We do not see the cause. For many that cause is hidden from our memory to such an extent that even when ask we may draw a blank. This blank does not negate the realty of our experience. It merely reinforces the power of denial to shut away the remembrance of painful times. Some of these experiences are so painful we turn to anxiety relief through denial, repression, suppression, or addiction.

It’s Hidden in the Words

What is the quality of knowing that is hidden in our speech? What can be discerned about a person in what they say and more importantly, what they don’t say? I am a victim. There I said. I loathe that word. I even loathe that posture as I interpret it in the lives of others. For when I encounter a real victim, a deep calls to deep. Just their carriage and pose can trigger rage in me. It can take me to me knees. Just the look in their eyes can cause my breathing to get shallow, my superficial happiness to crash and my head to fill with venomous fatal ruminations that scatter my presence to the wind. In an emotional sense, I leave the room & hide. That is the power of converging silent stories. This is the part of me that reminds me of how weak I was back when my story first began. This is why alcoholics can pick each other out in stadium. The deeper the wound the deeper the frequency of the unspeakable cry. This cry is only heard by another who is feeling or has felt that depth of pain. Many of us go through terrible anguish as children. It always marks us on some level. Who can understand the resilience of one and the seeming fragile shatteredness of another or the violent rage of another that takes their pain and compounds it on countless others?

Therapist Annie Rogers, who worked many years as a staff psychologist at a mental ward working with teenagers, remarks as to the uncanny manner in which the body and language are in collusion. “When all traces of history have been erased and the body itself is inscribed with an unknown language, how does a child begin to speak? How is it possible to listen so that that child comes to know something vital, and speaking freely becomes possible, so that living inside one’s own body is no longer a nightmare?”

I am convinced we are all experts on our lives. If we can only find a place where people really listen, we can discover a healing not privy to our souls otherwise. Why? Only those who have listened to the unspeakable can hear the unsayable. As Parker Palmer says in A Hidden Wholeness, circles of trust are needed to coax the soul from its tender hiding. A group, be they Christian or therapeutic, cannot shout for the soul to come out. So much of our dialogue is the dialect of listening and practiced silence. So few of us can wait for the soul to check its territory and borders for safety and protection. We are so trained to offer answers we often give the wrong answer at the wrong time. How many Christians have spent years of their lives living the answer to a question that was that of another? Are not most books a configuration of a shadowed projection we writers superimpose on humanity? In our minds we believe the world needs one more book, one more explanation, one more piece of insight.

Running in to Our Self

When I am Tired of Being Human

Reality TV has its detractors and rightly so. But if there is an up side it is the unabashed revealing of just how volatile, vulnerable and easily influenced we humans are. In the midst of following any person be they a speeder or a rejected jilted lover, one thing seems clear. We are all looking for something and we need it bad.

So what is it that we all need? Love and sex seem like front runners but most of us over 30 in or out of a healing or broken marriage know that relationships are paradoxically rich and fulfilling as well as exhausting and debilitating. No quick fix here. But the search for the beloved goes on. Driven to find that gaze of “the other” reflected back with near worship and adoration, we move from scenario to scenario projecting all this energy into the middle of the room but unaware of its beckoning power we remain aloof & distant.

So the paradox of humanness persists. We desperately need & constantly diminish that neediness through hip posturing and distancing. I guess we would all rush towards the shadow, towards what is not being said, what is not being addressed if we only knew it were there. But alas, profound insight into our blindness seldom provides the exotic rush of projecting the beloved or the rescue upon another or another experience. We are unconscious of what we are unconscious.

Recently I watched my inner self played out in a relationship. As much as I may have wanted to distance myself from a friend based on my interpretation of life and its challenges, my love and history with them would not allow me to ultimately demonize their actions. I could only see myself, our self. It was me (we). I was him.

As I watched the play role out and parties line up to take sides, all I could do was hope some insight might emerge I could offer up. I had a lot of thoughts about what I thought was going on but none of them really sunk deep into a more vulnerable honest part of my soul. What my friend really needed was compassion. What I really had very little of was compassion.

As I sat in that lack I wondered why it was so hard to muster up even a sliver of empathy and kindness. What was the glitch in heart on this one? Often when I see others struggle with identity I project my own submerged sense of dislocation and abandonment on them and become cold & mocking. How can this guy or gal be so screwed up and self absorbed? I have unfortunately learned to soften my projection of narcissism on to others by feigning interest, asking questions but at times my heart still remains distant and cold. I have already named them (me) and it is settled at a deep unconscious level. By settled I don’t mean I am at peace with myself. I mean I have spiritually acquiesced to my impotent attempts to be present and authentic so this person’s exposure of the inflated exalted self is especially grievous and offensive to me. My shallowness is being revealed in the moment. My inability to love at a deep level frightens me as I pronounce some verdict in my heart upon them. Now I realize this judgment falls on us all. I do not escape my own inability to be compassionate. What I deny to my friend I deny to myself.

I need compassion. As life unfolds and the Father draws me unto Himself, I am discovering that the unfolding of the soul is not merely a personal journey. I practice His love on others. I practice His love on myself. This is the one thought I have so much trouble submitting to. Why am I not convinced of how much I need compassion? Why would I not offer it to others? This is the condition of my own heart. I would rather go without my own bestowment of compassion so as to remain arrogant & proud. Rather than see in others my deepest need, I deny my essential nature & loose touch with my own brokenness.

Today I make room for myself in my heart so as to make room for others. Do unto to others…oh yeah. I’ve heard that before.

The Wisdom of Distance

Searching for Hidden Affinity

We are paradoxical creatures. Simultaneously we long for the expression of our uniqueness and yet yearn for belonging. Given our seemingly oppositional proclivities towards individuality and relationship, it is often the case that we view the distance between ourselves and others with fear and self protection. John O'Donohue reflects on these tendencies of the soul in his book Eternal Echoes – Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong. He names this space we call distance as “longing.” This longing is a manifestation of the deepest nature of the soul which is relationship. How odd that we are seemingly drawn towards the very thing that reveals this distance. It is O'Donohue's following statement that intrigues me and is the focus of this pondering.

“Distance awakens longing; closeness is belonging. Yet they are always in a dynamic interflow with each other. When we fix or locate them definitively, we injure our growth. It is an interesting imaginative exercise to interchange them; to consider what is near as distant and to consider the distance as intimate.”

So much of our inner world is unclear & opaque even to ourselves. Why are we are so amazed at how incomprehensible many of the acts and feelings are into which we inhabit the idea of ourselves? As much as we desire transparency, there is at our core a portion of our soul that is inaccessible to those without. Yet community reveals that no one is cut off from others completely and much of the reticence and caution we display regarding others reflects a deeper yearning to connect. Although much of our world is private nothing is indeed exclusive.
Scripture speaks of unity over and over again. The Spirit’s advocacy appears to bring with Him a profound sensitivity to discord. Harmony within the Body of Christ is more than group think or unanimity. Surely it is the restoration of what the Creator’s intentions must have been from the beginning within the Trinity. That is a complete awaking to just how much we all belong. Many in our community have read Rohr’s "Everything Belongs.” In this work Rohr points again & again to the powerful awareness that our own center is never discovered alone. At this core reality we uncover the sacramental moment where no one need compete, judge or make comparisons, or seek to dominate. In this present moment God uses everything. In and through the lens of divine foresight nothing is wasted, all is recycled, & everyone & everything belongs. All is grace.

It is only the holy fool who walks into this way of being for it is beyond mere thinking. Until I regard the distance between myself and others as an invitation rather than a signal to cut & run, I will name it punitively. In a post modern world where much of our humanity is abstracted and real presence is always tempted to become mere simulation, how do we quell the crisis of belonging and the great divide between us all? Once again we must seek a new designation for this longing? Could this restlessness within our hearts be a voice rising up for form and presence? Are we like the Greek mythological character Echo who sitting in the eerie silence of the forgotten self longed for Narcissus’ love? But alas, mistaking Narcissus words for her own she ran to him and discovered his self absorption and felt her own deep rejection. As Rohr alludes in Everything Belongs, there is a place within the heart that we all share. In this silent depth we are open to love, to touch, to affection, to trust. Out of this place the distance we thought was powerful & real now is transfigured into a guiding vacancy, a divine opening in the soul awaiting the shelter of community. Being is being with. I am fully myself in & through my brother’s welcoming.

Let me end with another O’Donohue quote as his writing is so powerfully guiding in this piece.

“There is something incomplete in purely individual presence. Belonging together with others completes something in us. It also suggests that behind all our differences and distances from each other, we are all participating in larger drama of the Spirit. The life and death of each of us does indeed affect the rest of us. Not alone do we long for the community; but at a deeper level we are already a community of the Spirit.”

To the Orphans on Mother's Day

The Mothering of God

The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe."
- Albert Einstein

Then he said to the disciple, 'Behold, your mother!'" Jn 19:26-27

I have always been inept at physical nurturing. Touch and affection come hard. With the exception of our cat buddy, allowing anyone into my space is daunting and frightening. It is on mother’s day that this experience finds a name.

I always dread mother’s day. Church usually offers up a fairly maudlin version of motherhood & for anyone who doesn't fit the mold (most of humanity?), the very presentation & sermon meant to encourage tends to dishearten and depress. As I glance around the congregation and see countless adults wiping away the heartbreak they had buried for years, I find myself wondering why God made us this way. What is it about our relationships with our mothers that speaks so deeply to our being? Why did God create us with such a deep longing to be cherished & cared for?

I have read countless times the scriptural teaching on God’s loving character. I catch glimpses of this in the men I walk with at times but the memory of my mother’s gaze is much more painful & problematic. One only needs to ask my wife to discover how difficult it is for me to see my own loveliness. The burden of my broken estate & the subsequent flaw that is my birthright is real & resident to me. Is it possible that God has sent mothers to offer up a small & initial glimpse of how the Father sees & knows us?

To be nurtured because one needs it is one issue. To be cherished is entirely different & transforming. For those who have not had the experience of being treasured, this part of God’s character is estranged and distant. We are all orphans from the Father. To know His heart for us is to be able to imagine how He longs for our very presence. We first become familiar with this idea when our mothers welcome us home after a day at school. When our homecoming (not every day mind you) has a high degree of focused love, care & celebration, we can then imagine the fanfare of the prodigal’s father.

Today is a day of remembrance. Undoubtedly is will be bitter sweet as is most of life. But for those who long for love, these mother child memories can weigh heavily on the soul. To the orphans this day I say let the Father mother you. Surrender to that ache & let Him touch that profound sense of being unattractive to yourself, to your lover, to your friends & family. Surrender to His unrelenting pursuit. Let His Abba Fatherness be your mothering. Let His welcoming presence be the arms you never felt. Let His tender eyes reveal the pleasure He takes in you. Allow His still small voice to whisper just how much He values your company & looks forward to the intimate times you have together.

Remember, Jesus had a mother. She bore the Son of God. She is counted blessed by the entire family of God since her time on earth. So it must be important that you had a mother. So….To the motherless by circumstance or pain, let this day of remembrance find its meaning in the Father’s heart. For you are the apple of His eye.

The Imposition of Ashes -Ash Wednesday

We Are Tortured Wonders

The Church’s practice of Ash Wednesday has become a powerful metaphor for life’s transient nature. The very act of bowing one’s knee and having another human place darkened ashes upon your forehead tells a powerful story to our bodies that we are indeed going to face our end. Growing up in the holiness tradition I was fairly unfamiliar with the sacraments and rituals of the high church. Ash Wednesday and its formative power were missed on me and others like me. What was the point of wearing some kind of darkened ash on one’s forehead? In his book Tortured Wonders, Clapp reflects on an experience an Episcopal priest friend of his had during an Ash Wednesday service

As the priests were offering up prayers and the Gospel, they prepared to offer up the reminder of each and everyone’s frailty in light of the body’s fragile reality. As one of the priests administered the ashes on the foreheads, a stunningly beautiful woman dressed obviously with fashion and panache walked forward and knelt before the priest. Her reticence and awkwardness were obvious and at some point she leaned forward as if she wanted to say something to the priest. He instinctually drew closer to her whispering only to hear her say in halting speech, “Father, I am a model. I know I only have a few years, and then I will be too old for this work. My body is aging, and I can hardly admit it to myself. I do this once a year, at this service. So rub the ashes on. Rub them hard.” Page 170 Tortured Wonders

I bring up the season of Lent for it is the system of time under which we live. We all live under some construct of time and ascribe value to it. We know how we value time by observing how we manage it, how we talk about it, and how we attempt to capture more of it for our use. Time tells us when to go to work, when to rest, when to allow leisure, when to celebrate, when to mourn and on and on.

When we as Christians introduce the Church calendar as a lens through which we see and value time, it is going to form and frame our lives differently than clocks set to other standards of value. If one travels at all they begin to see that the perception of time and its presence is defined and expressed very differently from one culture to another. Any time spent in South America and it is clear that smaller increments of time do not exist. Time is measured in hours at best but mostly in days and those days are broken out into things like sunrise, the heat of a noon day son, and the cooler hours of impending nightfall. If one treks down to Columbia or Ecuador, they quickly learn that smaller configurations of time (like minutes and hours) usually are considered porous expressions of intentionality and not literal containers into which life should be lived.

Time is different for believers. The nature of this sojourn demands we regard this seemingly vaporous experience with great care and stewardship. The Church calendar is a value system created by believers that reflects this honoring. We see and value time in a distinctly Christian manner. As stewards of life and its resources, we are not ultimately going to see time as merely a container for our own personal needs and preferences. This is not to say that we do not see ourselves living inside of time as a person but that there are grander purposes into which life and truth, goodness and beauty can be expressed and time is one of those containers.

Lent is a season that takes us into a cycle of repentance and mourning. It is clear that as we approach Easter, our hearts and minds begin to see the impact of our personal sinfulness and the sinfulness of the world. So much of our suffering comes from our unwillingness to embrace our limitations and our rootedness in our own agendas for life. Thus, we need a calendar or a clock if you will to tell us to mourn this condition. We must set aside some time to remind ourselves of our own finitude, our own limitations, and our own divine confinements.

Divine confinements is a phrase that came to me as I sat in a hospital wondering why the season of illness had befallen me. Wondering is probably a softened term for in fact, I was feeling God’s hiddeness and most of my prayers were those of desperation and crying out. As we allow ourselves to fall under the power of the Church calendar we begin to see that our Savior as well entered into this time where the confinements of life and His impending death were looming large on the horizon and overwhelming to His humanness. The wounds of overwhelment and insufficiency plague us as humans. This is the space out of which we question our faith, question, God’s existence, question the very thought of a kind and gracious God.

Michael Card makes it clear in his book Sacred Sorrows, that real mourning is different than despair. Despair comes when we do not think God is hearing our cries, when we take our crying out, and like Nietzsche, scream it into the abyss of nothingness to a God that is a figment of our own imagining. It is during times of great lament that the aloofness of the mystery now moves from being merely an intellectual conundrum solved by philosophers and preachers to an emotional necessity that we settle once and for all whether God and us can handle the visceral exchange that takes place during lament.

The Imposition of Ashes (Ash Wednesday) is in many ways the Churches answer to the ultimate question which is, “why do we die and why must I know that I am going to die?” Animals of course don’t seem to have this awareness. This may be open to debate as some elephants do seem to mourn the loss of their mates and many have said that other animals do as wall. Regardless of the level of consciousness of animals, it is clear that for humans, the question of our forthcoming death is a foundational exchange that all of us have at some point or the other. Ernst Becker in his ground breaking writings talked about the power of death as a back drop for much of life’s intensities and challenges.

As Christians we do have a hope and much of the modern church tells us to focus only on the hope side. Real lament seems to me to take hope into consideration but it also allows for the soul to cry out. It allows for the soul to tell a Father that the pain is too much; the feelings of sorrow and abandonment go deeper than they ever imagined they could feel, the seeming sense of insufficiency and overwhelment stand like cold specters over our shoulder reminding us daily of our impotence.

Any cursive reading of Scripture reveals quickly that much of the Old Testament writers did not sugar coat their laments. I am fearful that our satiated sense of self sufficiency that comes through abundance, keeps us from feeling at a deep level that this life is just not enough. The perks, the positions, the joys and pleasures in the end do not keep death from our door. Thus, this is a portal through which all enter. Death is the great leveler if you will.

As we enter the season of lent we are being told by our ancient heritage that honoring the lament, repenting over our ways of engaging each other and the created realm, are ways to redeem the time. There are ways to spend our time wisely and mercifully. Any spirituality that does not allow for lament is a cheap religion. It is not what God came to earth to offer us. In Jesus we see that God cares about the suffering of His people. In fact, the rain falls on the just and the unjust implying that God’s common grace is not merely an over flow but intentional in the sense that He wants this part of His character to be preeminently available. Crying out is something He welcomes. Deep questioning and sacred sorrow are things He is familiar with as his own Son questioned the very plan of salvation on some level. “Why have you forsaken me? Why? Why?”

As we continue to explore our spiritual roots we begin to see that the prayer of abandonment is an entry point into the heart of God. To seek after God is to first of all speak into the darkness with truth. Are you there? Why are you hiding?

It is during times of darkness and its shadow that we feel the tension of this life with a vengeance. We cannot hold back the tears. We cannot explain well enough to our souls the sense of impending loss. Thus, wisely, our brothers and sisters from times past have said….come under the canopy of this clock. Come under the story of time offered to us by our Hebrew brothers and sisters and then through the atoning story of our Savior begin to see yourself and your relationships to time and space through this blessing of permission. We have a time set aside in our lives to see it as it is. We do not have to deny the seasons of the soul, the journey of the heart. Regardless of what time the clock says, what time zone we are in, what part of the world we are in, there is a moment set aside for us to face the divine confinements of this life and mourn. We can do this without shame and hiding. We can even make this time oddly enough one of beauty. Wear the ashes with humility and grace.



A Poem

The Final Boxing Up of Life’s Things

Death will peer thru the front door window
Quietly come in unannounced
Only to discover most of my projects in moderate disarray
Exposing just how unsettled I really am
But alas, the one uncovering my cluttered domicile
Will most likely miss any sense of meaning and placement
My things will dissolve into their separateness
Revealing little about the tapestry I was constructing
This unwelcomed intruder will box up my things indiscriminately
Never to reveal anything to anyone regarding
The underside of my life’s weaving mystery
Only You see the life we’ve formed

Ash Wednesday Historical Background

The imposition of ashes on the foreheads of Christians is an ancient Christian practice, going back at least to the 10th century. Biblically, ashes are a symbols of purification and penitence (see Numbers 19:9, 17; Hebrews 9:13; Jonah 3:6; Matthew 11:21, and Luke 10:13 ).

In the early church, people who had been separated from the church because of serious sins might seek to be re-admitted to the fellowship by observing a formal period of penitence during Lent. These people were generally sprinkled with ashes or given rough garments sprinkled with ashes as a sign of their sorrow for their sins.

Beginning in the tenth century, the observance of Ash Wednesday became a general rite for the church. The ashes, which were a symbol of purification in the Old Testament, remind us that we are mortal. In many churches the ashes are made by burning the palms from the previous year's Palm Sunday. Ashes are placed on the forehead, usually in the sign of a cross, in a ritual known as the Imposition of Ashes. As the ashes are placed on the forehead, words such as these are spoken:

"Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return," recalling God's words to Adam in Genesis 3:19.

The ashes are prepared by burning palm leaves from the previous year's Palm Sunday celebrations and mixing them with olive oil as a fixative. In the Roman Catholic Church, Ash Wednesday is observed by fasting & abstinence.

The Scarcity of Wonder & Awe

The Reduction & Domestication of God


Blessed are they that mourn for they shall be comforted.
Matthew 5:4

I am called to be sad, confused, and disenchanted. Why? The times demand it. The epoch in which I live is experiencing much chaos and bewilderment. This deep sensation of uncertainty is not merely a passing condition of the soul based on a self ordained distancing from God but an attentiveness to our age. Lord, help my unbelief….

My assertions that God is easily accessible, discernable, and approachable quickly disclose my own audacity. As the Orthodox theologian, John of Damascus wrote, “God does not belong to the class of existing things, not that God has not existence but that God is above all existing things, no even above existence itself.”

The assuredness of the past is gone. Those preceding dispositions now speak more of self-belief and self-reliance than faith as all our foundations of knowing are up for grabs. To ignore the seeming domestication of God, His apparent departure from our awareness, the daily skirmishes between faiths and inner battles for power of those leading these various religious camps, makes public the inner barrenness of today’s supposed spiritual practitioners. The caustic banter of the day regarding faith & spirituality belies our glowing claims of piety and points to our overconfidence masquerading as faith. As Heidegger said, “We are in-between gods.”

Ironically, it is the very words about God and His nature that reveal our barrenness. We have reduced God to a text. We have diminished the miracle of faith to mere hermeneutics, creed, liturgy and a three point presentation as Peter Rollins says. Rollins goes on to say, “ The Word, if it exists at all, if "existence" is even the right word to describe its mode of dwelling, is not then the patch of meaning that covers over the wound of our unknowing but rather is that which causes the wound itself.” We cry out for a word, a voice in the wilderness and when we encounter this presence deny the very rupture in our beings that lead us to this event and encounter. We babble on and on about the inexpressible. In our attempt to bring our own inner world at one with itself we assault God’s revealing and systematize the text casting the very utterances of God out of our consciousness leaving us with nothing but the letter of the law. We then feast night and day on this dry & lifeless manuscript hoping for God to indwell a copy of Himself.

For believers, this assessment may sound dark and foreboding if not defeatist and full of unbelief. This is not the intention of this blog. In fact, my intentions, if I am in touch with them on some level, are to make sure I am here now. I want to make sure I do not nostalgically re-present time as if I could bring the former days into the now through wistfulness and longing. I do not want to offer up a picture of God, bloated and assured with His own being but a deity in tears, hidden from Himself, face down in the garden in prayer. This is God being disenfranchised by God. This is God embracing the real condition of humankind at this moment. This is Jesus.

Blessed are those that mourn. It is this overwhelming sense of loss, helplessness, and despair that Robert A. Guelich says expresses the grief of Jesus’ followers. Richard Rohr adds that this notion reveals clearly those who have entered into solidarity with the pain of the world. This is the incarnation. When the world is as it is, how else would Jesus’ followers be? We live in a world where even believers must admit the apparent absence of God. As Heidegger asserted many decades before, "the world of the Christian God has lost its effective force in history.” Christendom is dead.

There is a deeply personal and previously concealed disclosure to this observance. In fact, my recognition of this condition in the world begins within me. Much of my personal faith walk to date has been an avoidance of my own condition as well as the world’s. I was looking for an antidote that would immunize me to all the drama and pain of this world. I spent much of my adult life looking for this potion presuming my search was for truth. In fact, I was looking for a magic elixir that would get me high and keep me above the fray of life. I was looking for that supernatural buzz that quieted all the beasts and allowed me to offer my doctrinal and theological conclusions as ultimate answers instead of my own body. I honored the idea of the cross and yet denied its reality in my own life. I believed in Christ. I was not a follower after Him and His life.

I now see much of this search as a need to escape the real world. Rather than walk as my Savoir into the mysterious caldron of suffering and madness, I took the road most traveled, ate fruit from the lower branches, and kept my circle only to those who heartily agreed with all my speculations on the cosmos. I made the Church the Kingdom. The busyness of religion was my vocation. There was no need for a supernatural God breaking into my world. I had captured the essence of the message and was fine tuning its dissemination and calling it love. I had created my own cultural and spiritual monastery. I had successfully cloistered myself inside a bubble of denial that became, in the end, my own demise. For the degree to which I denied the world without was the same degree to which I denied the world within. But there is no escaping my own pain, and my complicity in the pain of the world. I am now tragically aware of my collusion with bigotry, poverty, sexism, phobias on countless marginalized peoples, and the daily blindness that comes with my inordinate desire for things. This admission is not a self flagellation but an emptying of my spiritual pride. How could I truly love when my presumptions of its presence manifest themselves in convincing arguments as to who was ultimately disserving?

For me to more fully embrace this tension is to admit to others that which I most want them to ignore in me. To allow others to speak into my arrogance, my selfishness, my glib responses to extreme suffering is to prepare myself for a deeper wonder. I am being formed into the New Adam. I do not simply allow this. It is happening to me sovereignly. I must indeed place myself in a position of possible transformation but to regard this deep conversion of the heart as something to which I requested or sought would be a great exaggeration and untruth. No one walks towards the cross without tremendous misgivings, great doubt, and immense trepidation. The cross appears. It is not something we seek. This apprehension is due to the nature of the encounter. Only a God of love would allow His most loved creation to be offered up to chaos. Only a God whose affections were tragically tied to His Son and the created world would consent to this torturous aching. We will not know this God until we step into this part of His heart.

I am daily becoming aware of how tight fisted I am with the blessings of grace. My calculations as to who is discerning, who is in a position to appreciate the truth and obey accordingly, is just not the way the Savior encounters me nor calls me to be. I am consistently smaller than my calling. I avoid the truth countless times and return to what brings me personal comfort. Only when I am willing to sit for a brief period in my own inner discord, do I begin to feel the real hunger of my heart

I was raised to believe that this transformation came through study, prayer, and obedience. There is truth in those practices. In fact, there is enough truth within those practices and postures to last a lifetime. I now thank God my own sense of inner chaos forced me out of my private contradictions to see the world as it really is. I am living in a time of great change and turmoil. Undoubtedly, any historian worth their salt would point to countless facts that could paint any and all times as those of great turmoil, but indeed, the current age is one of seeming collapse and great disenchantment.

I have remarked in previous writings as to the impact of the repression of beauty. I would include in that assertion the accompanying inner qualities of wonder and awe. In fact, for Christians much of our struggle is to avoid regarding the presence and immanence of God as comprehensible, easily recognizable and intellectually obvious. Quite the contrary. Until we dwell in the concealment of God, the sorrow of this world, and the seeming absence of a God who should be manifest in power and might, will we begin to contemplate our current estate.

Many of my friends are currently struggling to feel and witness God actively moving in their lives. Although this most recent writing was about my own search (the blog), I do often think about the current disquiet of entire communities who are experiencing great loss and suffering. From those in Palestine to Wall Street, great suffering is come upon this world and we cannot deny its presence and power. As we pursue answers to the misery and affliction of so many we wonder why and how all this can be taking place in a world where God is. Where is He? We discover that He leaves us seemingly strung out in the middle of the cosmos with little to go on. I am beginning to think that this indeed the Zeitgeist of our times and that unless and until we sit in this seemingly emptied space, we will not discover the God who is there. This is a place of contemplative wonderment and awe.

The Dark Providence of Suffering

The Beauty of the Flaw

The Wound has left its imprint John O’Donohue

I am enthralled with the Incarnation. Here we have a God wholly other who decides to take on the limited nature of His creation knowing full well the risks in this encounter. Mel Gibson’s picturesque capturing of Christ’s anguish is played out in the Passion and it was so clear the dilemma that God had allowed Himself to encounter. Destruction appeared imminent to our Lord in the garden and in His humanity He could not escape the shawdowlands of pain thrust upon His frame. To know of things to come but also sense the beauty in this flawed universe it to truly be torn asunder. This is dark beauty. This is God being abandoned by God. What seemed a foreign opening to His soul now became the portal into which true redemption could flow. Out of this dark beauty came a new authority, a new way of being, a new kingdom, a New Adam.

Years have a way of blurring if not blinding us to our inner beauty. Inside the seeming emptiness of labor, the weightiness of sickness and loss, and the incomprehensibility of discovering our own complicity in the dispensing of our life and light, we discover a shadowy mysterious destiny. This vocation is only sanctioned and animated through the beauty of the flaw. That which is hidden to all but children comes in later years only to those who have traversed the cold bleak winters of doubt and despair. In this journey they unearth this extravagant barrenness called the sacred wound. Only in this terrain of the soul seemingly emptied of light and heat comes the discovery of this luminescent gift.

My tradition of faith has taught me much. I am so grateful for the love of sacred writ, the excessive favor of the Father, the assurance of faith, and the fellowship of saints. However, I was also invited to experience God in ways that now seem full of presumption and projected requirements upon God. I prayed. I experienced God in one situation. Why would not all my prayers have some kind of shelf life to them before the seal was broken and the answers poured forth. Time, it now appears, is deeply in collusion with the Healer. Time is a companion that continues to edit and do great surgery to my lexicon of faith and spirituality. Words and descriptions that I wrapped around experience at some point proved to be unable to carry and illuminate the true import of life’s events.

It is not clear to me whether I am genetically prone towards depression or whether I am merely aware of the grandiosity of grace given my true estate. In recent years I had decided to make my secret weeping more public and at times I am haunted by my own brokenness. Why would I choose to chronicle this litany of ashes? What is the motivation that chants the liturgy of mourning? Why remain vulnerable when it appears to preclude the accolades my soul desires? Is it the dark providence released in this vulnerability that continues to bring me to this place? All of life has been an intervention.

John O’Donohue, a recently deceased poet and aesthetic philosopher, speaks of a “refined interiority” that comes with those willing to take the inner journey, the road less traveled. I am so tempted to define myself from the outer most reaches of my soul. I am what I own. I am how I look. I am what I know. I am who I know. If anything, this penchant for excessive yearning must point to a need. A need so profoundly planted within the core of my being that I have only two choices. Live or die. As we enter the limitedness of our form, we suddenly encounter the cold clarity of our ultimate demise and the insistence of the heart to call forth beauty from the flaws.

The incarnation pointed out this ultimate contingency. This divine embodiment confirmed the glory in the darkness. Millenniums later we return to the cosmos’ ultimate disturbance only to find these hours of darkness shine forth with splendor and wonder. Being drawn to the secret force of this apparent weakness and failure on God’s part gave Satan a false bravado. He still mocks us in these moments of revealing and taunts us to ‘rage against the dying of the light.’ But the incarnation is a much more expansive story. Its unfolding includes even the beautification of death. Our very being is returned to forms that transcend the sadness and we often leave behind to our family and friends hints of the invisible. For those willing to stand with others in the dark corridors of death, they discover something profound and divinely wonderful. As the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral said “No, I don’t believe that I will be lost after death. Why should You have made me fruitful, if I must be emptied and left like the crushed sugarcanes? Why should You spill the light across my forehead and my heart every morning, if You will not come to pick me, as one picks the dark grapes that sweeten in the sun, in the middle of autumn.”

Now even our death is embraced in the dark providence of suffering. We often see affliction and death through the awful outer circumstances that usher in the end. But beneath and within is a prevailing grace and a final reminder that we are more than we seem.

Just recently my father passed on to the next realm. Towards the end it was clear to me that his body was engulfed in his soul and not the reverse. After years of discerning primarily through the mind and body, it was now evident that his soul was preeminent in the naming and descriptions of his swan song. The final frontier of death was all that lay ahead of him. As much as his body was worn and weary, his resilience was an anticipation of the final gathering up of things and a welcoming of the crossing. “Behold I am making all things new.” He heard the Savior’s voice and now even the shadows of his final days could not damper his enthusiasm.

As much as he longed for the new, it was his memories of his life that awakened this longing full bloom. O’Donohue said, "Memory is the place where our vanished days secretly gather.” This final harvesting took all that hurt him, all that diminished him in his own eyes, all that spent his life energy and through his memoires pointed to the resurrection. He did not and could not see suffering and death as the final reversal and unraveling of this mystery called life. Now, more than ever, the shame and condemnation were loosened and he heard the sentries guarding the outposts of heaven chanting his welcoming. He would continue on as himself. How all the flaws would make it into this next land was not a worry. Somehow he and the Savoir had created a life of companionship and he welcomed his own vanishing. I watched him become more beautiful as he neared the Kingdom. I too forgot his flawed estate and limitations and saw the radiance of the eternal blush his cheeks. I want to pass this way.