The Practice of Conversation
In her wonderful book, Turning to One Another, Margaret Wheatley makes some powerful statements about the power of simple conversations. "Almost every major social change or move forward began with a few friends getting together and talking about what they cared about" This is true for so many large visions that have shaped our world from the abolishing of slavery to the birth of the Church. There is something powerful that happens when people let their guards down and risk being shaped by others. Last week in the service we looked at one of the biggest risks to our practice of transformative conversations: the pace of our lives. While Wheatley mentions this as well, she also outlines a few other foundational points that can either build healthy conversations or destroy them altogether. The following are elaborations on some of her main principles that allow conversations to be transforming: We Acknowledge One Another As Equals - In order to fully enter into conversation we must set aside our prejudices that we bring to the table. We must remember that we can learn from anyone and that a challenge to our ideas might be what we most need to become more clear about what it is we really hold as valuable and dear to us. We Try To Stay Curious About Each Other - A healthy conversation is a two way street not a monologue. In order to keep the back and forth flow going it is important to ask as many questions of the other person as we make statements ourselves. In order to fuel connection we must seriously want to know who the other person is and where they are coming from. We Slow Down So We Have Time To Reflect And To Listen - The pace of our lives can either allow us the time to connect deeply with one another or it can rush our conversations so much that we only stay on the surface of each others lives. One of the best tips to slow down for conversation is to take off your watch while you are in conversations with people. This will help you forget that the clock is ticking and will help focus on the person instead of the future appointments and things that you have to still get done. We Expect It To Be Messy At Time - When people really take the risk and reveal themselves through conversations it isn't always a peaceful thing. People disagree or simply misunderstand each other and often those conflicts need time and patience to be resolved. Often we end a conversation when we feel tensions instead of pushing through to really understanding the other person we simply write them off and move on. If we enter conversations expecting it to sometimes create tensions and become messy then we won't be as prone to running off and finding conversation with someone more like ourselves. Take some time this week to practice the art of conversation with people that you encounter. Remember that it is diversity that stimulates new ideas and creates potential transformation and that if we only converse with people who are like us then we will rarely be challenged or re-shaped in the process.
Toward a Theology of Love
The Art of Living – Toward a Theology of Love Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. 1 John 4:8 Human beings are starved for love. Whether we realize it explicitly or not, almost all of our actions and goals are hopeful attempts to grasp the love that often seems scarce in our world. From a deep place within our soul every human being desires the feeling of acceptance, respect and compassion that resonate as love in our hearts. We have very few places in our lives where we feel totally accepted and valued. We long for a place where people are open to entering into the lonely daily struggle of our lives. We chase after this love through sexual relationships and still end up feeling empty. We often feel that at the end of the long road of professional ambition we will find ourselves valuable enough to rest in love. Sadly most of our efforts to grasp love are in vain. Deep within we are still haunted by a nagging sense of loneliness and exile. As if our hearts were ill equipped to carry the heavy weight of our emotional journey. Will we ever find our souls at rest in love? In our modern world, love is a much used and often misunderstood word. What does it mean that God is love? When you look across the landscape of our modern church you can clearly see that there is disagreement about what the content and quality of love really is. On one side of the spectrum, many Christians see love as a universal embrace of everything and everybody. For many Christians love has been diluted to mean that there are no longer any ideals that separate Christians from the rest of the world. On the other side of the spectrum, many Christians see their judgment and criticism of the world as an act of love calling people to the holiness of God. Many Christians act as if God’s love were dependent on human beings getting their lives under control. How can both sides be correct? What does it look like when God’s nature of love pours out into the world? The Apostle Paul offers a description of the content and quality of God’s love in 1 Corinthians 13:4-8: Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. This is the quality of God’s love and the love that He calls His children to reflect into the world. We could look at this description in two ways. First as a fleshing out of the nature of the God who we learn in 1 John is love. Another way would be to see this passage as a description of the way that followers of Jesus are to be separate from the rest of the world. Jesus said “you will know my followers by their love”. Let’s explore these two ways of looking at this passage in a bit more detail. When we look back over the history of God and His people, one thing stands atop the heap of truths that are revealed: God loves the world he created and the human beings He has placed within it. The Bible is one long story of God pursuing, forgiving and restoring relationship with human beings. In fact Jesus’ most famous declaration from John 3:16 begins “For God so loved the world”. God’s love for His world is patient and not self-seeking. God’s love for His world is hopeful and trusting. God does not keep a record of the world’s sins but, with perseverance, protects and delights in the flowering of the truth of love. The rest of John 3:16 reveals the depths of self sacrifice that God is willing to endure for the sake of His children: “He gave His only son”. Throughout the Bible, the simple truth remains that God has always seen human beings, even in their fallen state, as His most treasured children. The Bible is God’s grand love story. It is the romance of the Creator God with His created world. A world that has not always recognized His love and rarely returned that love back to Him. In the Bible, we meet a few people who have felt the power God’s love and sacrificially reflected that love back into the world. In Exodus 32:31, Moses displays the nature of God’s love through his servant leadership. After the people of Israel had forsaken God and created a golden calf to worship, Moses goes back up to the mountain to plead with God for the sake of His people. Moses displays the true heart of a servant leader: Oh what a great sin these people have committed! They have made themselves gods of gold. But now, please forgive their sin – but if not, then blot me out of the book you have written. Moses’ deep love for His people made it possible to still respect the desires of God without compromise while offering himself as an atonement for Israel’s sins. Long before Jesus, Moses’ heart had been transformed by his relationship with God and had begun to take the shape of God’s love. We see this same reflection of God’s love in the heart of the Apostle Paul as he wrestles with Israel’s continual disobedience to God. He places his own life and relationship with Christ on the line as he expresses the love that he has for his brothers and sisters even when they are wrong about Christ. I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, those of my own race, the people of Israel. Romans 9:2-4 Paul continually makes the point that a true understanding and relationship with Jesus is the deepest thing that a human heart craves and in this passage his self-sacrificing love is willing to give that up for the sake of others. We find the fulfillment of this kind of radical love for the lost world in the life and death of Jesus. He sacrificed all human comfort and security. He sacrificed the human desire to be proved right by allowing it to appear as if He was a failed Messiah, even to His closest companions. Out of that position of weakness and servant hood, Jesus’ life revealed what God’s pure love looks like when it is wrapped in human flesh. Jesus displayed a love that wasn’t so diluted that it put up with anything and everything. Just like in the 1 John passage, “Love does not delight in evil”. Jesus had definite dividing lines between good and evil. Much of the liberal Christian world has, in its human attempts at love, decided to withdraw from the human struggle of good and evil altogether. Many modern Christians do not share the part of God’s heart that rejects evil and injustice with judgment, firm resolve, and right action. Often there is an avoidance or denial of the reality of sin and brokenness in the world. Although this is often a sincere desire to follow God’s heart, without the wisdom and courage to declare and enact God’s will, people are often done a huge injustice by not being called out of their lives of sin and death and into a new life in Christ. This is often the product of a naïve understanding of the scope of God’s love that clearly sees a difference between good and evil. On the other hand, there are many Christians who have an undeveloped understanding of God’s love in the other direction. They are so overly concerned with calling people into holiness and right behaviors that they are willing to use any means necessary. So much pain and shame have been caused in our world by people who see themselves as the gatekeepers of what a life with God looks like. They will use anger, judgment and violence to force people to submit to God’s will and they often feel justified that they are motivated by love. There is a very real struggle between good and evil and recognizing it is an important part of living in truth, but the weapons that we use in this battle are what define a true disciple of Christ. In between these extreme examples of trying to live a life of love in the world, Jesus offers a radically different path. A path that is echoed in the lives of Moses, the Apostle Paul and many followers of Jesus thought out the ages. It is the path of one that is loved by God and who in turn loves others. According to 1 John 4, the quality and depth of our love for others is shaped by the love we ourselves experience from God. It is not shaped by our faithful religious activities or the holistic nature of our theology. It is shaped directly by our personal encounter with God’s love. In his book Jesus’ Plan for a New World, Richard Rohr describes the journey beyond religious activity and needing to be correct in our theology toward the experience and reflection of God’s love: Jesus’ View of Conversion (page 98) 1. The Old Self on the Old Path – We use whatever means we can to secure the love that our hearts desperately crave. We manipulate, coerce and deceive in order to get our selfish needs met. We seek power, security and control, as attempts to feel loved deep within our hearts. 2. The Old Self on a New Path – Where religion begins and ends: new behaviors, new language and practices that are sincere but the underlying motivation is still self-centered. We use anger, control and even violence to defend our ideas of God or religion. 3. The New Self on a New Path – The total transformation of our hearts through the experience of God’s undying love. Our worldview and motivation becomes radically transformed and focused on others in love. We enter the human struggle with sin and suffering with the weapon of love alone calling people out of bondage to power and ego into the freeing experience of being fully loved by God. This new self on a new path offers a very different picture than the two sides of the spectrum that we have previously explored. Unlike the liberal universalism that refuses to draw lines between good and evil, God’s children who have experienced heart transformation, see that there are truly people and behaviors that are evil and that do not line up with God’s will; however, rather than resorting to anger, judgment and violence like the conservative legalistic side of human nature, they have faith that the only weapons that Jesus offers us is self sacrificial love and compassionate prayer. The path towards the kind of love lived by Jesus is a path that is surrounded on all sides by servant hood, self-sacrifice and compassionate prayer. As followers of Jesus in our modern world, we must continually come before our Lord in repentance for the many ways that we turn away from God’s love for us and find easy distractions by focusing on the lives of others. It is no easy thing for the puffed up human heart to humbly sit before God in submission and obedience. It is much easier for us to feel like we have already arrived and therefore have the right to pursue our own desires in the world. Jesus has always been calling His church out of the world by the experience of God’s love so that it can live within the world as the very presence of that love. The pathway toward the experience of God’s love is the pathway of confession and prayer before God. It is when we have the faith to be the most authentic and real before God about our brokenness and need for God that the experience of love is most present. If we practice this pattern of living authentically before God in humility, we will be led further and further onto a cross-shaped path towards God’s heart. We will become less concerned about being right and more concerned about being love. We will no longer be so focused on what our religious activity can do for us but instead we will hunger for more intimate experiences with God in our everyday lives. We will find less and less need to feel fearful and angry when things don’t go our way. Our concerns will shift from thoughts of where our souls will end up after we die and begin to be concerned about the quality of the lives of those around us. When we rest in God’s love we will no longer desperately seek places and people that will give us the love we desire but we will become people of love and create places that offer love and acceptance to others. Slowly on the path we will begin to let go of our private dream and learn to delight in the dream of God. Ultimately we will begin to see that God’s love is revealed not in power or by force but in patience and weakness. Dear Father May Your love be our love We are Your offspring Together we struggle and search for what is freely given: unending love May we find a sense of the love that restores us to relationship with You and with each other Forgive us for the ways that we embarrass You Grant us the courage and faith to identify and stand against evil With only the weapons of love, prayer and hope Allow us to bask in Your love until we return to You Christian McCabe
Letter From Mark Jordan
My last correspondence to you about "family", detailed the bond of love that many families share here in Cuba. This time of year, after just having celebrated Valentine's Day, it dictates further discussion on the topic of love. I guess it's not a secret to think that Cubans have something to say on this subject. I remember an argument I had last year at this same time with my Cuban friend. Normally, being single, I would bury my head in the sand at this time of year, enjoy a period of depression and funk, refuse to listen or watch anything romantic, and pray for the day to end. Being Cuban and full of life, my friend couldn't imagine that I wouldn't want to celebrate this day, with or without a "special someone". Cubans do not see this as a celebration for lovers, but as a celebration of love in any form that it takes. It has two names, Day of Lovers and Day of Friends. So you celebrate your love for your "special someone", your love for parents and siblings, for friends, neighbors, and just life in general. Everyone is greeted with "felicidades" (English - congratulations, as if this is everyone's special day. No one is left out on Valentine's Day) At the church, Flor Juarez organized a special lunch for the office staff and her missionary friend visiting from Venezuela. I stopped to purchase a bottle of wine for the occasion and the shop clerk greeted everyone with "felicidades" and to every lady, a complement on how lovely she was, regardless of the reality. Even on the street, the greeting was "felicidades" instead of "good morning" or "good afternoon". My landlady's husband took a picture of the two together and had a card made at a photoshop that made it appear that her face had come out of a rose. He said it symbolized that he had picked her out of a rose, and was accompanied by a script that said he'd rather spend one day with her than a lifetime without her. The card, with a picture frame came to less than three dollars.the look on my landlady's face.priceless! I took a group of friends out to dinner, something most Cubans very rarely can afford to do, and just celebrated our friendship. The evening was not a complete success because the only couple present, almost broke up because we guys were clowning around at the table, and my buddy did not heed the first, second, nor third warning! Hehehehe I did make sure that by the end of the night, the couple were happily reunited. Someone gifted me with a DVD of two famous Italian singers, singing in Spanish and a laptop case (A very unexpected surprise, indeed!) This year turned out to be a very joyous and upbeat celebration of life. What a contrast to times past. FRIENDSHIP, FAMILY, COMMUNION. Following Jesus' Way Mark A. Jordan
Lectio Divina
A selection from the Holy Scriptures is chosen ahead of time, often as a daily progression through a particular book of the Bible. Time Selecting a time for lectio divina is important. Typical methods are to pray for one hour in the morning, or to divide it into two half-hour periods, one in the morning and one in the evening. The key is to pre-select the time that will be devoted to the prayer and to keep it. Using the same time every day leads to a daily habit of prayer that becomes highly effective. Place The place for prayer is to be free from distractions. This means it should be isolated from other people, telephones, visual distractions, etc. Some find a religious icon to be helpful. The same place should be used for lectio if possible, especially as one first begins to practice it. Familiarity with a location reduces the possibility of distraction away from the prayer. Some practitioners conduct other devotions, such as praying before the Catholic Eucharist, as a preparation for Lectio Divina. Preparation Prior to reading, it is important to engage in a transitional activity that takes one from the normal state of mind to a more contemplative and prayerful state. A few moments of deep, regular breathing and a short prayer inviting the Holy Spirit to guide the prayer time helps to set the tone and improve the effectiveness of the lectio. Once the stage is set it is time to begin the prayer. There are four phases of the prayer, which do not necessarily progress in an ordered fashion. One may move between different phases of the prayer very freely as the Spirit guides. The Four Moments Lectio Divina has been likened to "Feasting on the Word." The four parts are first taking a bite (Lectio), then chewing on it (Meditatio). Next is the opportunity to savour the essense of it (Oratio). Finally, the Word is digested and made a part of the body (Contemplatio). Lectio This first moment consists in reading the passage slowly, attentively for several times. Meditatio A reflection on the text of the passage takes place, in which the Christian thinks about how to apply the passage's meaning to their own life. One may gravitate to any particular phrase or word that seems to be of particular importance. This should not be confused with exegesis, but is a very personal reading of the Scripture. Oratio This is a response to the passage by opening the heart to God. It is not an intellectual exercise, but an intuitive conversation or dialogue with God. Contemplatio This moment is characterized by a simple, loving focus on God. In other words, it is a beautiful, wordless contemplation of God, a joyful rest in his presence.
