Aesthetic Monasticism

“Art Monks in the House”

I am formed by capitalism & technology to want to buy things I do not need. In the pursuit of this search, my time and money now come under the submission of desires that have been surreptitiously formed in me only partly by my doing. How has this taken place?

I take much of my daily trek through life for granted. I do not question its impact on my soul nor do I question its formative power over how I express my very life. Gifts, talents, and skills are given to all and we are stewards of these giftings if these gifts are brought under Christ and His Lordship. However, I do not get off that easy. I am like a frog in hot water. I am slowly becoming part of a soup of which I think I am outside. I do not question for my perception is one of distance and autonomy. My free will has extreme powers to separate myself from the pack and allows me the ability to pick and choose which forces from my very being. Oh really?????

Society’s materialism and the church’s complacency towards it.

In many ways the church in America has found itself not only in complicity to the formative power of capitalism but a willing participant. How so? The ideology of personal and corporate success as a sign of God’s blessing have a long and illustrious history of which this article is not going to address. Yet it is clear that for many of us, our relationship with God is centrality monitored and assessed based solely on the acquisition and embracement of our personal and corporate goals and dreams. Much of our prayer life, or books and articles written in evangelical circles are written as a templates and guides for personal and corporate affluence and self sufficiency. This is an implicit value hidden deeply in capitalism in America. The power to buy is intrinsically tied to the power to define oneself. I am what I purchase. You will know my inner self based on my outer accoutrements. My wine cellar, my hair cut, my perfumes, my car, my house…all these things tell you something very significant about who I am. If you want to know who I am take notice of the accouterments for they are indicators. Once again we must ask ourselves if this is how the Bible and the Kingdom describe what it means to be human and a follower of Jesus.

There is much Scripture and narrative in our story that would say that as a Christian we assess a person solely on the basis of his or her innate worth as a creation of God. God’s image is written into their very being thus nothing they could do or own will intrinsically change this person on any level. This is not to say that stewarding our gifts and living with gusto are not parts of being human. What we are clarifying here is that what a person owns or buys actually says very little about whom the are a deep level.

Suburban life offers many benefits on certain levels of comfort. We have large entertainment centers in our family rooms. We have stereophonic sounds systems in our bedrooms that rival a sound stage. Many of us have libraries and reading rooms that allow us to ponder the beauty and glory of words and stories. Our children have their own play stations, their own cell phones…I could go on and on.

It is clear that being middle class or better has its perks. Much like drugs or sex, the front end of that world unbridled obviously brings some pleasure. Do we, however, ponder the downside of what capitalism and the bourgeois world have done to the clarity and liveliness of our souls? Do we count the cost of having to earn so much money to even exist and do we embrace the shear madness that accompanies much of our financial struggles as we attempt to weather all this terrain on our own?

As we move forward into dialogue within our mutual communities, I hope our conversations would occasionally be directed to the realties of the fallen world as it impacts our “work” and our need and attempts to survive in this world. Have we unwittingly cocooned to the point where one or two bad moves and we are heading for the poor house? Have we allowed our very heart of hearts to be formed and informed around what we own and buy and trade?

There is an urban monastic movement taking place in the States. Numerous groups are purposely taking vows of poverty and using their abundance for Kingdom purposes. Once again, this is a dialogue and conversation, but I can tell you that since arriving back in Chicago I have seen the dark underbelly of capitalism and its impact on how Christians navigate their lives. Is it possible that some of us will be called to give up some of the privileges to into which we were born? How can we live faithfully in this host culture that seems to have run amuck regarding possessions and their place in our lives?

What might be some distinctives that would guide and direct our communities?

Are we the New Sub/Urban Monastic???

1)    Submission to the larger church

2)    Living with the poor and the outcast

3)    Living near community members

4)    Hospitality

5)    Nurturing a common community life

6)    Some form of a shared economy.

7)    Peacemaking

8)    Reconciliation

9)    Care for Creation

10)  Celibacy of Monogamous Marriage

11)  Formation of the new members along the lines of the old novitiate

12)  Contemplation

It is my prayer that more communities would arise that use their abundance for the sake of the poor and beauty. There are many on the margins of life that will only be reached and heard as we listen to their cries. Are we the New Friars of this age? Are we more like a Jesuit Community of Priests that sets up an order in a particular community? Let us do small things with great love rather than simply doing great things. Let our advocacy be for the voiceless and the weak not only outside our community but within it as well.

I end this blog with an experience that to this day marks my heart. Some years back, a group of us had store front church out of a bar in the near north side of Chicago. Dave and Angie Carlson were a part of this as well and we had a real impact on that community despite the fact that urban professionals are some of the hardest “people” groups to reach.

One Sunday morning I stopped by the 7/11 to get a coffee. Out front a disheveled gentleman was panhandling as is the case on many corners in Chi-town. He approached me and as usual I felt a degree of discomfort and wondered how I was going to either turn him away or reach into my pocket and wallet and decide just what he was worthy of receiving from me on this given day.

Upon looking into his face and connecting with his soul, these words came rolling out of my mouth.

“I am sure you prayed today that God would provide a meal or two for you and I can appreciate that. I have an offer for you. I can give you some money for a few meals and I am glad to do that. However, I am a part of a family right down the street. If you would like, you can come and join us and if you do, everything I have is yours. What do you say?”

It was as if time stood still. This panhandler was not a drunk or a wandering street person. You could tell this was a man who was down on his luck and needed some money today just to make it through the day. He could hardly respond as I could tell he heard what I had said. Finally after what seemed like minutes he responded. “I’ll just take the cash.”

I reached into my back pocket and pulled out my wallet and gave him what seemed like a reasonable and yet caring amount. But as I returned to take my coffee back to the store front church I kept hearing my own words run through my head and heart. “All I have is yours if you join our family” I realize that those were the words of the Savior on my tongue. I did not say that. I could not say that. In fact, upon sitting in the service that morning and pondering what I had said, I was convicted as I realized just how rhetorical my responses to the poor in my midst generally are. I talk a big talk but at the end of the day, I am selfish to the bone and everything I do and say is for my own aggrandizement. That day, however, I felt the Savoir move inside my own heart and tell me that this was Him calling me to Him. It is my poverty that my Savior is longing to heal. My sense of being above or being better than this man are a sham. I am moments away from being homeless on many levels. This day may we offer up our seeming abundance as baubles to the Kingdom and see the riches of His love towards us and those who are in our lives.

To the revolution!!!

When Creaiton Places a Collect Call

When Creation Places a Collect Call

The Need to Fully Embrace Nature’s Welcoming Uncertainty

The Peace of Wild Things - By Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

We are created beings. Despite our current preference for the “ideas of life” over its very real presence, there is a place between the earth and our bodies that is the terrain of our humanness. Daily, without fanfare, the sensuous reality of this creation offers itself up and over to us. We neglect its dazzling gestures at our own peril for its mystifying topography is the language of the somatic soul and thus the song of humans. The created order communes with us. Do we hear and respond to its rich and luxurious affluence of beauty?

As a Jesus follower, I grasp the oft felt groaning sighs of a world caught up in a moral drama. Antagonists and protagonists rise and fall & we humans dominate time as if it were our own. Is there a much more worthy cosmology in which to plant our fragile souls clothed in such permeable and sentient cloth? Might the created order, nay the very Creator Himself have not merely embedded an inner beauty in this realm we call life but one much more tangibly mundane, accessible, astonishingly ordinary and yet extravagant in its embracing glory?

As modernism’s massive under taking & narrative wanes in the West, it appears to be building steam in the East (i.e. China, Korea). Caught up in the ways of reason and logic, capitalism and consumption become the center of humankind’s endeavors and the relegated inferior position of the created order appears present & honored only in esoteric conversations & works by so-called radical ecologists or earth worshipping new agers.

Dave Abrams, an exquisite reporter of nature’s etymology sees this penchant for pushing the experiential world away from our daily lives as tragic and dangerous to the earth’s future. Whether we wish to step outside of or live above and beyond the daily realm of the created order, or take charge of its ways through some technological utopian dream, we still remain hidden from “the shadowed wonder and wildness of earthly existence.”

For Abrams, this overt disempowering posture is at its core much more primal and unacknowledged. Science and the promises of a bio engineer and his/her predictions of “mastery” over the forces of nature have planted in them a parallel dystopian nightmare as well.He wonders if this eschewing of nature’s true place in our lives is much more about our deeply felt knowing that indeed we are in relationship with a powerfully dangerously beautiful lover. The observable fact that those closest to us pass from this realm & are no longer here in our presence, is one sign that earthly reality is overwhelmingly confusing. Abrams profoundly articulates, “To exist as a body is to be constrained from being everything, and so exposed and susceptible to all that is not oneself- able to be tripped up at any moment by the inscrutability of a pattern one cannot fathom.” For believers, this mystery is sacramental. However, many of my brothers and sisters in the faith do not acknowledge this conundrum thusly. Nature is still a bag of candy, a flower shop with an 800 #. Or it is only a fallen space where powers and principalities prevail. Thus, the power and presence of the created order on & in our lives goes underground and unconsciously speaks from our shadowed pathologies.

Holding life at bay in some detached manner allows me to manipulate its offering as if variables in some equation. I call the earth’s bounty “resources” as if their manifestation as a tree or a hillside or a far off planet were merely evolutionary predictability or cosmic whim.  Might there be an intended shared experience our Creator set into the very fibers of our being? Is there a possible kinship with Creation that calls out of us a much more gracious and humbled enfolding? Is David Abrams (author of the Spell of the Sensuous & Becoming Animal) correct when he bemoans how long we have cut ourselves off from nature’s intention for a "participatory" life with our senses?”

Ancient cultures did not have the option of the deluded aloofness from nature we moderns have. For us, long periods of time may pass between a devastating flood like the one in New Orleans or Japan’s tsunami. Nature’s fury, as the phrase goes, is made manifest generally in areas more remote than our protected urban centers. So when something of such magnitude dares to jump the walls, break down the gates or storm the Bastille, as if were, we are befuddled and taken aback. How could we not have seen that coming? Who is to blame for such a catastrophe? Have we not conquered the puny presence of nature?

Dave Abrams comes from a new bread of anthropologists, ecologists and philosophers who ponder the relationship between humankind and the environment in which humans live out their lives. He contends we have taken refuge in the false hope of technology and science. I am not sure his personal perspective on spirituality but from his writings it would appear that at the least, he sees monotheism and its tendencies for a detached all powerful deity distressed at the mess humankind has made with creation as a less than imaginative way to engage this world. Religion’s history with science, truth seeking no matter the cost, and the fear of the frighteningly new, rarely brings to a people embedded in an ancient story a narrative of grace, openness, and mercy. So much of Abrams critique is indeed insightful on some level.

What is so moving in the works of Abrams is his venture into the created realm with descriptives that are poetic and magical. It is clear he deeply honors the created order (my words not his). Out of this place of deep respect and awe, Abrams prophetically calls out what has been lost in the Cartesian obsession with thought and knowing as an epistemology that only comes when one distances himself from nature. On the contrary, for Abrams, the real is only experienced as it is encountered in participation with the created order. There is no experience above or outside the realm in which our bodies abide. He says that his work is “foremost to the matter of becoming more deeply human.”

As I daily practice resurrection, I am discovering the resplendent beauty offered to me when I regard myself as a “part of” something bigger than myself. By acknowledging my smallness I am able to, like Abrams, to find myself in the rich immensity of the created order.  Let me end with a few lines from one of Abram’s works. 

This is from his diary following one of his daily hikes into the wilderness.

For how many hours have I been stumbling through the folded terrain? Pink spires leer down at my tiny form as I walk along the edges of gullies, slipping into and out of fractaled ravines….I’ve seen no trace of humankind, however, just a jackrabbit darting between the bushes, and what I think was a kestrel hovering against the cliffs.

I left the car by the side of the highway this morning, drawn out of the vehicle by fascination with what my eyes were seeing. I slung a strip of cloth dangling a bottle of water over my shoulder and wandered out into this impossible landscape. The longer I wandered the wider the scape seemed to grow. By noon I was thoroughly , blissfully lost in the sculpted immensity of this place- a small two legged insect making its way between the toes of giants…How hopelessly insignificant the human is-a speck lost and blundering through the limitless depth of the macrocosm, drinking from the voluminous air, dazzled by reflected rays and drawn upright by a hundred flesh toned cliffs and slopes…Such encounters with the outrageous scale of the larger Body we inhabit bring a shuddering humility, yet they can also release an unexpected intuition of safety, a sense of being held and sustained by powers far larger than anything we can comprehend. A safety that comes from being merely an anonymous part of What Is, from feeling oneself as a clutch of sodden soil and hollow bones with the same wind blowing through them that gusts the high ridges. From being in intimate alliance with the bedrock. It’s the weird security of realizing that one is part of something so damned huge…And so I‘m in the grasp of this strange, skin tingling sensation of my own insignificance as I climb the steep slope of a butte.

Let me close for now with my poetic mentor.

“Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.”  ― Wendell Berry

Love as a Vocational Calling

I am called reluctantly to the vocation of love. As a married man I am constantly brought up short with my limited supply of grace, compassion and mercy. Clearly more an act than a feeling, the love that would die for another is beyond my imagination and only reveals glimpses of its radiance in the day to day “small self dying” necessary to be in relationship and community.

The therapeutic narrative offered to Western enlightened folks such as myself has been both liberating and spiritually infantilizing. By being foundationally directed to see my parents as the core creators of both my joy & pain, I inordinately reflect upon my journey as one of discovery through retrieval of my original self. The thrust of this narrative is that I am deeper and truer than anyone including my parents could have ever seen thus I must allow my earliest years of “harm and help” to be sacralized and offered up to heaven or a therapist. I wonder if this therapeutic bent towards the familial bond as central to my spiritual map has inadvertently stifled and stunted my truest calling – and that is my vocation towards and into love.

Great stories have staying power. They remain in our corporate memory, are retold by our leaders and spiritual story tellers and over time begin to find their way into the motivations and intentions of entire countries and continents. Christianity is one story and Christ is one man whose life, although short in terms of years, has had profound impact on how civilianization’s engage the very nature of this life. What seems unduly odd to me, however, is the centrality of love and sacrifice in the life and message of Christ and its seeming replacement by lesser truths. If, as most Christian theologians and scholars would purport that God is love, why do we so relegate that truth to sentimentality or obscurity in light of other lesser impactful postures God is purported to display?

Christ’s life finds much of its controversy when we move beyond belief in some historical insight and engagements over who He said he was, or who His disciples said He was towards our findings as to what He did. It was what Christ did that got Him killed. It was what Christ did that led Him to offer His message up to the riff raff edges of a Palestinian countryside. It was His seeming obeisance to a Kingdom unseen and yet pregnant with divine expectancy that threatened Roman authorities and ultimately His assassinators, the professionally religious of His day.

I mentioned to my wife that being an expert or scholar in or on love is something I have yet to see offered or displayed in Christian circles. On some level, this is as it should be, but this absence of conversations and engagements with the challenge of love is not born of humility. The absence is due in truth to the shear idiocy of claiming such a status. Anyone claiming such depth and understanding of love and its outworking places upon themselves the onus to act lovingly. There is lies the rub. I can talk of love but those closest to me will surely weigh in with the pretense or outright exaggerations I might offer up as insight when indeed all my observations and insights are borrowed from mentors and guides. I am consistently unloving.

Maybe this is how it should be, that my real life silences my arrogant assertions. Talk of love should be presented sacramentally as an offering before one’s community, marriage, or intimate relationships. This allows this “talk of love” to be covered with preemptive confession and amends. As I sit within in heart shot of Christ’s most profound calling “to lay down my life for a brother” I am more than humbled. I am tempted to put away all “talk” of faith and spirituality and spend the day looking outside my head and heart to the otherness of the world. I need to sit in that revelation of my own preoccupation even when I am offering it up a spiritual insight. Love, real love takes me away from my proclivities, my giftedness, my career and ambitions, my need to be desired or praised, worshipped or even considered wise and godly. It is all ”not love.”

What makes the acts of love so seldom offered up in teaching or preaching is love’s call to see the other as one that is “not you.” When the soul is a project and spirituality is some kind of evolutionary 2^nd life, I now take the very presence of others as fodder for my own spiritual friendship profile. I see them as pawns in my virtual narrative, in my induced self projected godlike persona I offer to the world as my audience. There is something potentially demonically insidious in the hidden intentions of spiritual writing and leadership. Freud, whether feared, respected, or derided, none the less lobs a heat seeking device into the heart of deceit most leaders call God’s voice and reveal just how “needy” the human ego is regardless of one’s age, history, and supposed insights. I am constantly seeing life through the narrow lens of my false self and unless and until my truest calling towards love is reintroduced or held before me as not merely a truth to adhere to or admire but the truest representation of what my very being was created out of and is being called towards, the spiritual talk becomes chattering and navel gazing. I was born in love and will return. These are truths to big to know as I have been taught to know.

Thomas Merton talks constantly about the false self. I have found much Christian doctrine and teaching (in evangelical circles at any rate) on the self and its deleterious energies as lacking in insight and daily outworking in regards to the specter of the false self Merton so powerfully raises in his writing. The oft quoted mantra of “dying to self” sounds good during corporate times of testimony and small group disclosure but in the thick of the daily grind where those closest to me need love, my love, someone’s love, I am often not only an empty vessel but a deterrent to the vocation of love’s calling.

It is love that causes me to sacrifice a present comfort for something the future beckons. It is love that sits heavy on my shoulders when the guilt of some betrayal or deceit peers into my heart of hearts. It is love that demands the truth be the mother tongue of my voice in my marriage friendships and community. It is love that deems conflicts and the distance hurtful speech cause in community to be a priority when we meet for worship. The suffering I do for love is the walking out of my truest calling. To agonize over my choices and their impact on those I love informs me daily of my need for something divine to intercede. When chaos appears to destroy whatever love and trust I have experienced to date, love calls me to empty myself of those presumptions or memories as fond as they may be in live right now in the dying of self I am prone to avoid.

If indeed my truest vocation is that of love, it makes profound sense to my deepest most persistent longings. I desire to belong, to be known, to be heard, to be held passionately as a gift and to be seen as a reflection of a more radiant glory. To that end I submit my self to the school of love and it’s vocational setting – my life.

The Doing of the Thing

Between the Creed and the Tears

This blog was in part driven by Bob Bennett's song..

The Doing Of The Thing
Words & Music by Bob Bennett
© 1991 Bright Avenue Songs
P.O. Box 1578
Cypress, CA 90630-6578
Reprinted/Posted by Permission
All Rights Reserved

Fleeting glimpses of you everywhere
Like sunlight at dusk
Through this ocean of trees
And me in speeding car
Headlong into the future
Your perfume through this poison musk
My eye on letter "E"

Mistake the nodding of the head
And all the words that can be said
Mistake the very song I sing
For the doing of the thing

She in white dress
He in rented clothes
Bargains are struck
And promises made
But soon we find those people
Are already dead or dying
They just exist in photographs
That show how far they've strayed

Mistake the nodding of the head
And all the words the can be said
Mistake the wearing of the ring
For the doing of the thing

And in that quiet cemetery
Where theories go to die
It's not a question of believing
It's not a question of the lie
It's the distance that we will not cross
For the fear of suffering
Between the creed we speak so easily
And the doing of the thing

Broken souls covered in broken skin
No resolution on the video screen
And half a world away
Somebody does our bidding
Because we like to pray
With our fingernails clean

Mistake the nodding of the head
And all the words that can be said
Mistake the sympathy we bring
For the doing of the thing
The doing of the thing

Though I knew the good, I do not the good. Paul in Romans

So why this persistent discrepancy, this gap between intention & outcome? James Hollis

Ultimately we are far more than the fictive fractal stories we tell about ourselves or are told. In the larger Kingdom story we are part of a restoration narrative that can only be done in community. This is the doing of the Church. This doing has an undoing dimension to it as well. Together, the seemingly factitious stories our inner man tells about itself or reveals each and every day, now becomes cohered into something redemptive and beautiful and good and true.

In the larger shadow of modernism’s narrative, we have unwittingly submitted our ultimacy to this autonomous assessment via rational means. So indeed, we do have an over arching oracle & story that animates and empowers our defining. It is this constant disaffection with ourselves as reliable sources for any certainty (postmodernity) but remaining in the posture that this assessment is the most accurate of any we may experience.

The kingdom doing of the thing offers to us sacredness to our rumination. For indeed we do think we are. (Descartes). But is the miracle that alone, that projection of thought upon the chaordic experiences of each day are not enough to quell the fears that we are not enough? Is this sense of lack a divine message as to our truer nature? May my inner sense of dislocation actually be a message of something greater & truer beyond myself? Could my very questions be the answer?

As we enter an age where our world as whole seems to be facing a reckoning and summons, we are beginning to grasp that the coming together of life cannot merely be the task of an individual for themselves alone. Although moral action and its consequences do indeed rest upon us an individual’s, can the “doing of the thing” ever really be done or sustained by the individual? My holy hunch is no. I cannot do this alone for I am not alone. One could read that sentence many different ways. I am not alone means someone is with me. I am…not alone might also mean that the very ontological nature of my existence cannot be realized without the corporate other. The doing of the thing is not a solitary task. It is s Kingdom assignment. Being is as much about submission as it is obedience. Being is as much about service as it is accomplishment. Being is as much about acts of love as it is acts of presence.

We are sitting in the cross hairs of a great smack down between myths. As believers, we are discovering how malevolent the shadow side of the modernism’s penchant for the separation of the observer and the observed. In offering this unique authority to the individual’s task of discovery, we have disempowered the Kingdom currency that animates and projects a truer self upon the cosmos. This is not an "I am" as much as it is a "we are" therefore I am.

The Kingdom naming of the “body” cannot be a mere coincidence. We are “parts.” We do not merely function “better” when we work as a body, we are “not” alive and true to or natures when we are operating outside these created portals and designs for humanity. It is not merely a better way but as they said in the first century, “The Way.” It is a mystical and dangerously frightening way for it demands we begin to deposit with others all these fictitious stories about ourselves and our world into and upon the hearts of others. In this depositing redemption begins to take place as we see that we are indeed particular selves. We have never been totally autonomous, however, & this projection upon our deepest parts is in error.

In the Kingdom doing we see the shadow stories begin to be dismantled and redeemed. In this dismantling of the shadowed story, we discover we are potentially capable of such beauty and wonder (name numerous grand & wonderful art works and accomplishments of humankind) but simultaneously offering to the world a brokenness that puts forth Hiroshima’s, German Prisoners camps, Poll Pot, slavery in the US, what we did to the American Indians, etc...

In the Kingdom space we see emerging a beautifully bejeweled book with a reader who is the Spirit. When we pause He comes to the center of the room and begins to speak. In this space, even the manifold darkness has no ultimacy over the larger story. In this space where we truly wonder about the doing of the thing (for purposes of integrity) and reluctantly offer up our hidden agendas and deepest darkest heart felt desires. In this space, our singular stories begin to be transfigured, redeemed and a way of knowing re-emerges that not only acknowledges some degree of healing but is healing and wholeness itself.

What we discover is that alone, I am incapable of defining my inner world with enough glory to empower the doing of the thing. Deep within my own historic past, the shadow of forgotten and unrealized factitious narratives rule and reign over the very truth I so vociferously proclaim to others on Sunday or in my testimony to the saints. But in honest and open moments of contrition and broken openness, I see that there indeed another within me. This “other” is hidden and yet present. He knows this realm in others and unless and until I acknowledge my deepest yearnings and my deepest lacks, the shadowed part of us all goes unmasked so our story has two powerful themes never acknowledged and the redemptive power and grand nature of this restoration has no real presence in my life for I do not need redemption that deep, healing that profound, restoration that complete. I am an isolated self hoping to get to heaven, worrying about my own salvation, wondering if the “the Divine Other" looks my way.

In the kingdom doing I spend little time in this autonomous posture absorbing the love of the Father for I am finding it wherever I go. I discover the doing of the thing was never meant to be something I did to accumulate my own worthiness before the Father. The grace I am offered is truly the very “thing” I need to engage this duplicity of shadowed stories even to the point where I see my own righteous projection as part of the story that is yet to be submitted. Could it be that the doing of the thing is my admission of my inability to do the thing?

As I started out with Paul, let's return to the statement, "I do what I don’t want to do." Yes…let us say this daily. "I do what I don’t want to do." Why? I am a being only when I cease to define myself alone. I am only beginning to be alive and true to my very creation when I am a being with other beings. We are here together. I am not here alone. Why? I am not made to sustain this awareness of self without a deep cynical malaise coming over my consciousness. I am too much to bear for myself. As I draw nearer to the core of my being, without community I become a Sartre, a Nietzsche and many others in the last few centuries, full of disgust about my own moral dishonesty. Like Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, I am an anti-hero.

The social sciences have in part done what the Church was always meant to do. They have given us humans a glimpse into the inner workings of our fallen natures. They have offered up countless narratives (& anyone studying in these fields knows the myriad of philosophies and perspectives on social sciences) that tell us of our agendas, our own personal sense of the ridiculousness in ourselves. What the social sciences have done is give us a great glimpse into the story of humankind without any real reason to do any better. What is the point if there is no point?

The question now is, “So what is the point?”

How do we live in this tension where we are now able to feel and know on a certain level our inability to know? So we begin to return in some ways to the more powerfully mythic postures of our ancient pre-modern family of humankind. We begin to acknowledge the limits of our rationality and self knowing and possibly sit in awe and mystery of this paradox of knowing.

The fact we can know our noble truer selves and simultaneously know our most hideous and fallen selves is overwhelming on some level. Can this ability be a curse or a blessing? The answer may indeed be hidden in the question itself. To know my desire for love and goodness and to do it not is a curse. To be told that indeed there is built within the very nature of creation a prevenient presence and power that undergirds me on a deeper level called grace, that already know this would happen and be experienced is to have a brief respite for clarity of the soul.

The Kiss of Heaven

Can I take a few moments in my life to ponder this type of story that offers me grace in the midst of this dilemma which begins to rename the life I live from a problem to be solved to a mystery to be lived? And it will always be mystery. How do I name the mystery? How does this naming allow me to live within it ebb and flow with a degree of integrity and noble beauty? I contend it is this submitting of my story to the larger narrative of worship.

It is worship’s narrative forming power that offers me the grace I need to be the antidote to modernism’s cynical posturing. It is worship in all its broadness and fullness that coheres a larger story into which I am placed that gives me this grace. The grace I need to exist if only truly offered and manifest in this body. I am not meant to be isolated for I am not truly who I am without placement into this larger narrative of doing. I am not doing things in life to win salvation or redeem myself. This mystery of life appears not to be something individuality can glory in with true gusto on their own. Once again worship is the truest celebration of my being. Worship is my being, along with the whole of creation, honoring, and celebrating our complete imbededness into a gorgeous tapestry of nonfiction that celebrates our “unknowing” through a corporate leaning into the paradox. Rather than avoid it, we, like David Dark, celebrate all the questions as an act of worship. This life is sacred. That is what I beginning to know at a deeper level when I am doing the thing with others. I find it is my truest self that is being loved. My acts, although essential to me as they are me engaging the world, I am more than what I do.

To begin to grasp that I am more than what I do is to discover the grace to begin to be restored in my inner most parts. This kind of spiritual work is an act of worship and one that coheres me with the body. I cannot do this alone.

There is an inner distance in the soul that represents a large chasm. This is the distance between the belief and knowledge of what is true, good, beautiful and loving and the doing of the thing. I am convinced that much of my Christian upbringing has been a highly cerebral experience where much of my beliefs were stuck up in my head. I thought about them daily, wrote them down, took classes to understand them better, talked to my friends countless times about them, corrected those I thought in error of what I knew to be true, and finally assumed by understanding of what I know to be true drew me close to God. I have been in deep error in this regard.In fact, I am convinced that my excessive knowing, discussing, debating, and studying may very well have taken over the very heart of my supposed faith – and the doing of the thing.

It is clear that I am able to deceive myself into believing that my awareness of certain truths, my pondering of their impact on my life and their implications for the rest of the world can very well be ruminated over again and again and not once engender a doing of anything. It may be that the excessive pondering is more a byproduct of some inner dis-ease than a real desire for truth and the actions of faith.

I am saddened by my detachment from my own body. I thought I was my mind alone. Rather than worship, obey, serve, and love others, I obsessed on the knowing of a truth through rational means, assuming my disciplined inquiry would birth the certainty I needed in an uncertain world. Ironically, in looking constantly outside myself for the truth in teaching, preaching, scripture, and tradition, I detached the very act of doing from the encounter.

The doing of the thing involves an entirely deeper part of my humanity. The doing of the thing involves a deeper repentance into my body to discover what parts of my will refuse to budge, refuse to love, are a still unreconciled to what I know to be true. Once again, I have in the past perceived the lack of action to be an issue of an unclear understanding or a need for more information. I now see that space between the knowing & the doing as being. I am more myself when I obey what I know to be true than if I merely ponder or ruminate over it. I am Christ’s in truth when I love Him enough to obey what I believe.

It very well might be that a culture that excessively honors the mind and rationality when it comes to spirituality may fall prey to the deception of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is not some isolated event that a few deluded individuals purposely invent for the sake of power or deceit. No! This is a part of the human heart unwilling to look at the “troubling discrepancy between expectations for ourselves and the consequence of our behavior,” according to James Hollis in “Why Good People Do Bad Things.”

Why do I avoid in myself what I know to be unreflective of my truest values and commitments? Why do I condemn many of the same sins in others that I know reside within myself? Why do I minimize the impact my sin and lack of love have on my world while pointing out in others their obvious contradictions? What part of my very nature obfuscates the way of wholeness and purity? What lies in the way of such persistent fantasies about the impact of my actual life on my health, thought life, ability to be present and living to others and my actual love of the Savior? The distance between intention and choice does indeed involve my will. As a moral being I am given the ability to act upon certain inclinations and urges and understandings. I am not a puppet. So why would this freedom of sorts become such an existential blemish?

My experience with my men’s group and the ongoing inner work we do has given me glimpse into what appears to remain on some level intractable & persistent in our spiritual journeys. We are indeed beings in the process of either engaging life or ignoring it. As the 12step program says, “What we resist will persist.” The struggle we men have is the hidden strongholds that remain untouched by our beliefs, faith filled utterances and contrite postures of the heart. As Paul said, we want to do the good but…”

It may very well be that the ego’s most grandiose manifestation of hubris is the projection of its own sovereignty on its actions and thoughts. During what we men have come to call "work," it is clear that much of the inner world hidden away from our daily regimen is indeed the very realm in which forces and mandates are being deployed daily without our direct awareness. I say direct because we are aware but this insight does not come through what we have deemed the sovereignty of our ego or what some may call our persona. For those of us who are seeking a higher way or more authentic reflection of our Savior, we are indeed attempting to form a certain “type” of person. We desire others “see” us a certain way, believe our proclamations regarding our faith, and hope that our lives indeed do tell others about our commitments and allegiances.

Only if it were that simple that our desired persona was indeed the one that most clearly reflected our deepest selves. But alas, that is not the case. As men go deeper into the discrepancies of will and action, it becomes apparent that we are not a unitary whole in our persona or projected ego we offer to ourselves and others. What we are beginning to glimpse in our “work” during our daily and quarterly weekends, is that the desire for Christ likeness is certainly work and the exertion and toil of the soul needed to integrate the disparate parts of our hearts and minds is our salvation being worked out in fear & trembling.

The fear of disclosure has to be one of the most powerful energies hidden behind the confident and often arrogant persona we offer to others and even ourselves. Our daily lives so remove us from these anxieties that we are unaware of their toxic and discrete energy they deploy through our daily lives. The avoidance of humiliation seems to be such a primal force in humans that hiding is an option we take when our outward experience touches an inner un-resolvedness.

Because we believe the autonomy of our egos and personas are accurate and reflective of our truest selves, any sense of that idea of self eroding or being attacked throws us into a highly defensive posture. We now become defensive and angry. Our initial state of weakness is now being covered over with anger and we get lost in the attempts to correct any discrepancies or flaws another may being projecting on us in the moment or so we think & feel.

Much of the denial and avoidance we display daily is necessary to function. To consistently look into the inner crannies of our hearts and emotional lives is more than daunting. It is dangerous & impossible to be done alone. The journey is much like a group climbing a mountain or entering a volcanic crater. Whether climbing to the heights or the depths, we need ropes tied to our hearts and minds. We can get lost in our woundedness and angry at ourselves and others and in the process add to our lostness and anger.

Men naturally protect themselves. When that protection has been violated, when that ability to trust and receive love has been deeply scared and wounded especially in early childhood, the projected energies of denial, repression, suppression and avoidance get magnified. These are all mechanisms to avoid the anxiety of viewing our inner discrepancies with clarity. In some extreme cases one may even disassociate from themselves to the extent that they can engage in certain behaviors and nearly be unaware on some levels of the episode. To some degree, our personas our different identities. They are different people we offer to the world as to who we are. As Nate Larkin says, he has the church Nate and the husband Nate. We could probably name countless personas within us if we named them in this manner. The point is that spiritual work is not merely articulating beliefs but drilling down into the very strongholds that animate and energize the aforementioned anxiety management systems of denial, repression, etc. So in our work in NA we create a space for the man to sit in the anxiety. We extend to him a safe container to begin to ponder, express, report, offer up, any details, emotions, and possibly hidden reflections on their life to date. Nothing is off the table. Nothing is deemed untrue or false at initial offering.

Over the weeks and months of work we men begin to hear a story about ourselves that we have been telling others for years. We begin to hear the stories others have told about us. We begin to hear the story we believe God is telling about us. We hear the story, in the case of believers, of the Church upon us. We are a storied people. It is the multitudes of these stories that offer quantum energy to our lives and in some ways adds to the seeming discrepancies of our commitments and our behavior. Why don’t we do what we know to be right? We must find out. We can find out. This is the gift of the Savior's restoration. Salvation is more than a belief system but the very nature of God moving within in us to bring us into wholeness, integration. He desires we become whole and begin to offer this story up to His Holy Spirit for a re-write if you will. This re-write is written by the family of God. It cannot be written alone for much like there are legions within, so we need the power and presence of many to untie these fractal selves within our hearts.

Whenever a man enters the weekend retreat with a powerfully animated sense of self, it is clear that it takes much of his inner spirituality to cohere this energy for others to see. "I am powerful. I am smart." And the most difficult one to maintain, "I am holy and good." As the inner journey ensues, it becomes more and more apparent that “life" is inherently contradictory and conflicted, and any view that seeks to finesse these contraries is ”operating in bad faith,” says Hollis. As much as our ideas about our commitments seem congruent and befitting to our ego or personas, they are not powerful enough to touch the deepest inner contradictions or character flaws. No amount of ritual, repetition, reading sacred texts, will replace the work of exploring our hearts in the presence of His people. This is our life time work to grow in Christ tighter.

The working out of our salvation is what this life offers as the road of truth. The road of religious piety can offer others your persona and all its good intentions. This is not to imply that we are disingenuous or even deceptive when we offer this aspect of ourselves. But, as we grew in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord, we begin to see the subtle hubris that forms these personas and continues to allow them preeminence in our daily interactions with our spouses, friends and co-workers. At some point humility is the inner admission of your admitting the discrepancies are indeed a part of who you are as well. We are this strange mixture of our dreams, our commitments and our humanness full of duplicity and moral weakness.

When we remain in the level of our persona that moralizes around certain acts we tell ourselves we are evil, we may indeed have a history of acting a certain way. This is obedience on some level but it is not righteousness formed by deep contrition for my good works and outward persona is what I use my energies to sustain. This is not an outward manifestation of an inner work but an outward energy sustained by an outward persona. This is why we may call it a superficial or surface self. It is shallow for it does not emanate from the authentic self but the self we have concocted in our minds and the persona we actually believe we are. This is delusion and we act thusly on a day to day basis.No amount of haranguing the ego or will can turn this conflicted persona into a whole person. This is why moralizing over sin never works if it is a besetting sin as the Scripture calls it. Besetting sin that it is persistent and powerful in its impact on our lives. On our weekends we are most concerned with these besetting sins for they are a sign of the core voices and stories that are here-to-fore ignored in this man’s inner life. This is the portal for entry into the story that enables and empowers this person he does not want to be but in moments of truth can admit he indeed is.

The Church today is challenged to provide safe places for this unveiling to take place. These kinds of inner journeys do not take place during a Bible study or morning Sunday school class. These are strongholds that take an initial weekend and months and even a lifetime in some cases to begin to unravel and reveal the narratives that rule our will and heart. The strategies that many men’s groups’ offer, which is to promise you will not do a certain behavior ever again are on some level noble attempts to obey God’s laws. But the power needed to be restored at a deep deep level does not come from us. This is not to downplay the power of the will to engage in “acting” a certain way. In fact, once again, the 12 Step movement talks about “faking it till you make it” which is revealing the power of the body obeying what the mind knows to be true even when the mind is still playing tricks or recalcitrant. We cannot and will not see or hear the stories that undergird our deepest wounds and besetting sins until we stop certain postures towards life. Denial that our drinking, over eating, addictions to power, religion, lust or other drugs of choice, must be seen for their darkness and poison they are to begin the descent. The admission of and the willingness to engage may mean total withdrawal from a certain action or engagement. This detoxing from sin, allows the heart to begin to feel the anxiety that animates and cooperatives with our sin natures when we fall. We know the sin is sin. We are now looking at the “doing” or the “not doing” of the thing.

The Crisis as Threshold

A crisis is a holy summons to cross a threshold, says Sue Monk Kidd in her seminal work “When the Heart Waits.” The word crisis derives from the Greek word krisis and krino, which mean “a separating.” It is clear that deep inner change only comes about through crisis or profound and enduring prayer. As most of us have not developed such disciplines, crisis is the usual gateway to redirection and a straightening of one’s way. Most of us live in middle class neighborhoods, attend sedate churches, engage in soft hobbies, avoid harshness of any kind and settle in nightly to a routine of television & sleep. Our desire is less for peace of mind & heart and more for comfort. In this anesthetized world of habit and consumption, our inner man is sedated through routine. When circumstances hint that rough road may be ahead, we usually begin to barbiturate ourselves through doing more of whatever is numbing us out, dumbing us down. This is why for men at least, it takes a persistent addiction to reveal the true condition of the soul. The somatic messages of the body herald and rudely name what our minds are unwilling to welcome. And so a crisis describes our inner landscape, our soul’s longing.

Humans can only take a crisis every once in awhile. It is clearer that for some, under the moniker of bi-polar syndrome, crisis is ever present at least on an emotional level. What is even clearer from observing this tragic pose is that the very weightiness of one’s humanity is enough for those who contemplate their own brokenness occasionally and this ever present revealing for those with BP unveils nothing long lasting. We are not meant to gaze into the abyss of our own ruined will at length. In fact, standing at the threshold, in the seemingly abandoned space of contrite observation can destroy one without the grace offered by others willing to bear witness. We bear witness to the irrationality of our wayward hearts and obstinate wills. We nod in solidarity as we observe a brother over come with his own imperfection. We know we will undoubtedly be in that same “inbetweeness” once again ourselves.

The Threshold as Reality

Just as the madness of bi-polar ruminations are a curse for so many, so too is the mistake of attempting to live in the tension of our own duality. I like to see myself as one who embraces nuance and subtlety in life. However, when it comes to my own lack of perfection I am tossed between the oppositional forces of self love and self loathing. Ernest Kurtz in “The Spirituality of Imperfection” offers up this healing insight when he observes, “ To pursue perfection because we despise our imperfection-is to find neither satisfaction in successes nor wisdom in failures. Life becomes a constant battle, a never ending struggle to get somewhere, to achieve something, to produce something. Having split our world (and our selves) into either or dualisms- god or beast, angle or devil, right or wrong, left of right, good or evil, up or down- we lack all sense of balance. We tend to sway precariously on the teeter totter of life, running from one extreme to another, missing the point that the only stable place to be is in the mixed-up- middle. In the reality, that is the only place we can be.”

The phrase “reality” is so diminished and bastardized. I am the chief of sinners here in its demise as a God word. Let me vamp a bit here through an idea David Dark’s latest book The Sacredness of Questioning Everything spawned in a late night pondering of “reality.” For me Dark’s book is a poetic rant on the ontological subtleties of faith. His pages are filled with a luminous recounting of just how duped we are to our own convictions of certitude when it comes to truth and in a particular the reading of Scripture. As a recovering Evangelical, I have grown up in the climate of biblical presumption. Part of my heritage if not tutelage involved the projection of snippets of the Bible over life’s conundrums without impunity. This is what we did. We named “reality” quickly and with precision. Dark so powerfully reveals not only the shady under belly of the presumption but the impact on us humans when we deny the anxiety that accompanies these very conundrums. Dark says, “But the pretense of certainty come at a cost.” Indeed it does. This cost is the inability to “do the thing.”

I need the truth to set me free. I need the in breaking power of God’s Spirit into & upon my very being to be given the power of will to obey. This is being loved into action. What Dark made clearer for me was the “real time” prophetic power of the Scripture being pronounced in the moment of revealing. When Jesus read Scripture in the temple something was indeed happening. When He said, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing” He was pointing to the reality of truth breaking into the moment. So much of my understanding of Scripture remains sequestered in a static recognition of “reality.” I know what I know. Correct? Well no. I don’t know what I know because I don’t know what I don’t know. And, until the moment of revealing, my ability to know may be veiled in my own limited ability to see and grasp the depth and breadth of reality.

Many times I have seen a man transformed right before my eyes through what we call “work” in New Adam. After this unveiling of the truer deeper real self, many times a Scripture will be read or recited over the moment of revealing. Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing,” seems to be exactly what is happening here. We were seeing the witness of all the ages manifest right in our midst. A man was ushered into this place where the naming of his very being is now aligned with eternity and the very voice of God as manifest through His holy writ. Now that is bearing witness to the infallibility of Scripture. Notice, however, it is in the in-breaking nature of this truth revealed that we see what lies before us. We did not see it before this time. So life is always revealed in retrospect. We look to the future in faith and see the truth of our beings revealed in the rear view mirror. The doing of the thing is a grand spectacle that involves the fullness of God’s revealing. I can only sit under it in awe and worship. Worship with others who are doing the best thing.

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.