Category Archives: Spirituality

Stepping Out in Faith

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These days we are all walking on water. Beneath us, supporting us, we experience not the solid ground of our once familiar lives—predictable routines, reliable institutions, and in-person engagement—but the deeply disturbing uncertainties, the chaos of this ongoing pandemic. Or worse. Some have experienced the disease firsthand, some have lost family or friends, some have lost businesses, jobs, homes, savings. Struggling to survive, fearing to go under completely, we are walking on water.

Reportedly, Jesus made it look easy; our own experience is more like Peter’s:
Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus. But when he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried out, “Lord, save me!”
We try to remain confident, to take things a day at a time, but these are terribly uncertain times, and despair is not far away. The pandemic has robbed us of so much, taking lives, separating us, and punishing those most who have the least.

Yes, we have learned the practices that can help to keep us healthy: washing, masking up, maintaining distance, limiting our “bubbles.” All that is surely good. But the measures we take to guard our health have come with a cost to our well-being. Even those who are fortunate to have jobs and health must nonetheless face separation and confinement, deprived of the many ways we gather: in schools and businesses and concerts and ball fields and places of worship.

We are all walking on water these days, and it is easy to become weary of the effort. It is easy to become afraid and to lose hope as the days have turned into weeks, and the weeks have turned into months, and the months threaten to turn into years before we can reclaim the freedom and togetherness that we long for. Faith is essential. Science will ultimately offer some relief from the threat; it is a source of understanding and a guide to tactics. But meanwhile, we need something in addition to tactics; we need to resist being overwhelmed by fear and isolation.

Many years ago, speaking to a conference of clergy, Ernest Campbell said, “The reason that we seem to lack faith in our time is that we are not doing anything that requires it.” Though we certainly could wish it otherwise, our time requires it. The disciplines of our time require it: to apply the best practices dictated by science, restrictive and repetitive as they may be; to cope with the disruptions and demands of these chaotic circumstances; and to bear the losses, which continue to mount with no clear end in sight. Faith gives us a focus beyond the turbulence of today on a real and hopeful but distant horizon.

I Will Not Give Up

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It was above the timber line. The steady march of the forest had stopped as if some invisible barrier had been erected beyond which no trees dared move even in a single file. Beyond was barrenness, sheer rocks, snow patches and strong untrammeled winds. Here and there were short tufts of evergreen bushes that had somehow managed to survive despite the severe pressures under which they had to live. They were not lush, they lacked the kind of grace of the vegetation below the timer line, but they were alive and hardy.

Upon close investigation, however, it was found that these were not ordinary shrubs. The formation of needles, etc., was identical with that of the trees farther down; as a matter of fact, they looked like branches of the other trees. When one actually examined them, the astounding revelation was that they were branches. For, hugging the ground, following the shape of the terrain, were trees that could not grow upright, following the pattern of their kind. Instead, they were growing as vines grow along the ground, and what seemed to be patches of stunted shrubs were rows of branches of growing, developing trees. What must have been the tortuous frustration and stubborn battle that had finally resulted in this strange phenomenon!

It was as if the tree had said, “I am destined to reach for the skies and embrace in my arms the wind, the rain, the snow and the sun, singing my song of joy to all the heavens. But this I cannot do. I have taken root beyond the timber line, and yet I do not want to die; I must not die. I shall make a careful survey of the situation and work out a method, a way of life, that will yield growth and development for me despite the contradictions under which I must eke out my days.

In the end I may not look like the other trees, I may not be what within me cries out to be. But I will not give up. I will use to the full every resource in me and about me to answer life with life. In so doing, I shall affirm that this is the kind of universe that sustains, upon demand, the life that is in it.” I wonder if I dare to act even as the tree acts. I wonder! I wonder! Do you?

       This meditation was called to our attention by Samaritan therapist John Baumann, MDiv, LMHC, who sees clients in Seattle, Renton and Federal Way. John says: “I was introduced to Howard Thurman in 1995, some 14 years after his funeral.  Reading his biography brought a sense of wonder at the grace-filled and graceful manner in which he lived.  He spoke of offering a meditation a half hour before each Sunday service and discovering that calls for counseling began dropping.  I quickly ordered his book, Meditations of the Heart.  I find myself returning to it from time to time and each time I find a new jewel.  As always, the jewel seems to shine ever brighter as I read and reflect again and again.”

 

 

The Nature of Unconditional Love

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We are shifting from winter’s two coldest months into February. With Valentine’s Day approaching, we are reminded to warm our hearts with love. These months likely bring more time indoors and more quiet nights, perhaps, bundled up with a blanket in the living room. These quieter times offer an opportunity for reflection on the love that exists in our lives. It is around each of us in abundance. I invite you to take an inventory of all the love present around you.

You may begin with the simple fact that you are unique, and that alone is miraculous. No thumbprint is like yours. You have been formed in a unique way from your mother’s womb. Your birth order forms you. Your urban or rural upbringing influences your worldview. All of these weave together to create your own story. A story that has purpose, meaning. You are here for a reason. Though that reason may not always be clear, your presence makes a difference in the world. Many of my clients in depressive states and those in severe health situations question what the purpose and meaning of suffering is, as well as how to live their life with purpose.

Another client cries in the darkness alone in her retirement home searching for connection with her family who have rejected her. What is the purpose and meaning?

Partners of those addicted to alcohol or drugs which wreak havoc on their finances, mental health, and behaviors begin to wonder what the purpose and meaning is in their relationship; and, without that relationship, where do they look for love?

When all else fails, remember that love is your innate state. It is available to you in all moments. Many religions and philosophies agree that the purpose of this life is to love. Jesus summarizes it all: “Love one another.” St. Augustine says, “love, and do what you want.” Buddhism encourages meditation and deep breathing to be at peace and calm which can guide each step of our journey. There is an unconditional love from a Higher Power available to each one of us. Our “job” is to receive this love and let it work on our human condition so that we can unconditionally love others. Oh, how impossibly possible this is. In a Higher Power, all things are possible. Let us all come home to our own heart and love our own self so that we can give that love to others. Let us make this a better world both inside of ourselves and in our community.

And what if love does not feel available? What if there appears to be more darkness than light? We all have those moments. I suggest a meditative technique of focusing on your breath. Each breath keeps us alive in this moment of NOW. We receive it, we hold it and we express it. A rhythm that becomes so automatic we can almost take for granted. This breathing allows us to move from the past, and holds us into the NOW until we are ready to move into the future. Then we begin the rhythm all over again. We are given this “present” to remind us to be “present.” This invisible reality is our gift, grace, spirit and life.

Go ahead. Take a very slow breath now: receive, hold, and express. Notice how your body changes into the calm energy of life. May our breathing keep us moving through dark and light moments; pain and free movement; hard and soft moments in life.

What (Really) is Mindfulness?

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Maybe you have noticed, or is it me, that mindfulness is everywhere these days. Like many currents that flow through the media streams and the popular awareness, it is often used imprecisely and poorly understood. As a result, mindfulness can be dismissed as a fad or even misunderstood as a practice quite opposite from its actual intent. So with the help of mindfulness trainer Jonas Batt LMHC, whom I very liberally quote below, let’s consider mindfulness: what it is, how it is practiced, and what it offers.

Mindfulness is a practice of awareness. At its essence, it involves bringing the body and mind into the same place at the same time in a purposeful, open-hearted, and non-judging way. Mindfulness is not a philosophy or a theory that can be learned from a book; it is the practice of bringing compassionate awareness to the immediate circumstances of our lives, moment-by-moment.

Instead of turning away from our experience and letting our minds wander into the past and future and everywhere in-between, we turn our attention to the present moment’s experience with curiosity, acceptance, and kindness. When we are aware of our experience in the present moment – thoughts, sensations, emotions – we have the opportunity to make choices. We can be increasingly responsive and skillful in our thoughts, words and actions and less unskillfully reactive due to old, unconscious, habitual patterns.

Mindfulness practice can cultivate our own natural capacity for presence and ease. The practice is fostered by simple, repeated disciplines—a variety of gentle and meditative activities, some achieved while sitting or lying and others that engage the body in movement. All of them draw us into an awareness of what is actually happening right now, allowing us to relax the body, find the breath and rest into the present moment. We discover how to turn on our bodies’ natural calming system. We increasingly feel a sense of agency and empowerment in working with our lives.

So the “point” of mindfulness is to get calm, relaxed, peaceful and at ease, right? Actually no, that is not the aim of practice. While very pleasant states of happiness and “ok-ness” are fruits of the practice, mindfulness supports us to meet whatever comes, whether pleasant and joyful or difficult and sorrowful, with resiliency and balance. Since we are human beings with human experience, we will experience ups and downs, joys and sorrows. When we are present and aware in the face of what life offers us, we experience greater wellbeing, no matter the situation.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, a pioneer whose work has helped bring mindfulness into the mainstream, calls mindfulness simply “the art of being fully human.” It does not promise to eliminate life’s difficulties, but works to change our relationship with those difficulties, to give us the gift of our best, most resourceful and empowered selves. It helps us transform habitual patterns of reactivity, resistance and judgment into compassionate self-awareness in the face of all life’s joys and challenges. It is an art well worth the path to mastery.

The Heart of Listening

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People freely acknowledge that they want to listen better. Listening well, they admit, can be a huge challenge. They have heard the complaints of their partners and friends: You miss my real point! You seek only to fix my problem! You don’t seem to hear or acknowledge my feelings. These are real barriers. But there is another obstacle that derails or overheats many of our conversations: moral certainty.

We experience it in our private lives. And with dispiriting regularity, we hear it in the public arena: one voice with ironclad moral certainty arguing fiercely with an equally strident and equally certain opposing voice. So many important issues that seem deadlocked in hostility; so many people with opposing positions, sometimes espousing hatred and violence.

In a recent radio story, a local man related his efforts to help a few homeless people living in tents near his neighborhood. Passing the encampment on his commute to and from work, he began to meet and speak with some of the unhoused men and women about their day-to-day hardships. A common theme emerged: the lack of bathrooms. With no nearby accommodations, people resorted to squatting in the bushes, a practice that they found unsanitary, unsafe, and undignified.

The man got the idea of supplying materials for a camp toilet: an army surplus tent, toilet paper and sanitizer, cat litter, and a five-gallon bucket with a seat. The idea caught on, and over time he has delivered more than 75 of these toilet kits to encampments in the Seattle region.

What struck me about his account—a tech worker with an idea and a desire to help—was not so much his action as his frame of mind. As he pursued his project, he encountered neighbors and friends who objected to his do-good gestures. “You aren’t really helping; you’re just contributing to the problem,” they complained. They contended that he was actually doing harm by enabling the unsheltered families and individuals to continue in an unstable and unhealthy way of living.

His reply has stayed with me: “This has become my mantra: ‘If you have moral certainty, you aren’t in deep enough.’” He was not insisting that he was clearly right; he was contending that the problem becomes more complex as you get in deeper. Certainty becomes difficult or impossible.

It’s a notion that I have encountered again and again in my life and work as a professional listener. “If you have moral certainty, you aren’t in deep enough.” Being with people in their moral dilemmas, accompanying them as they “get in deeper,” generally means one of two things: in many cases we discover that they are uncomfortable with moral certainties (their own or others’); other times, their discomfort lies in their experience of moral uncertainty—and our conversations often reveal that this unsettled state of mind is actually more faithful to the complexity of the issue than a wished-for moral certainty might be.

Listening well is a challenge in all our lives. The health and growth of our relationships depend on it. Can we recognize and suspend our moral certainties in the interest of listening and relating? Can we go deeper into the complexity of morally difficult problems that face us as persons, families, and communities? Can we let go of certainty as the goal—striving instead for some measure of personal clarity about moral issues that is rooted in a recognition of their complexity? That appears to be one of the critical challenges of this time and place.

A Restaurant, a Waitress, a Chef and Me

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Several times a year I go away for several days for alone time and solitude in order to refresh and renew my being.  I was reading and reflecting about agape love, that unconditional love that Jesus invites us to embrace, as well as the Spirit of Agape.  As I returned to the mountain village where I was staying for an evening meal, I became intentional about “being love” to anything I encountered and to be in the Spirit of that love.

The voice inside me spoke and guided me away from the restaurants I was considering earlier in the day.  Walking a mile from the heart of this village, in the rain, seemed so absurd.  There, the last hotel and restaurant in town seemed to draw my feet and soul.  When I glanced at the menu, my jaw dropped.  On it were items from the Swabian Alps in Southwest Germany, where my paternal ancestors resided before coming to America.  These dishes are a cultural heritage, yet not seen outside of that region.

I sat alone at a table.  The waitress approached and asked me to please be gentle with her because it was her first night on the job.  I told her we would get through this together.  I asked her before she offered me any water, to please inform the chef that I was taken by the menu selections.  In a matter of moments Chef Joe poked his head out of the kitchen, found my gaze upon him, and lifted up his thumb in gratitude.  An energy and synergy was in the air.  To my surprise, it was not the waitress that brought me my German dinner delight, it was Chef Joe!

The next day I was led back to the same restaurant.  This time I asked the waitress to ask the chef if he would prepare a meal with two of the other Swabian Alp menu offerings onto one plate.  Chef Joe came and asked me if I liked red cabbage.  I replied, “yes.”  Then Chef Joe replied, “I’ll take care of you.”  The level of energy between the chef, the waitress and myself was so noticeable that the hotel manager came to me and asked if I she could take a photo of the meal prepared for me by Chef Joe.  She wanted to get her corporate boss to get approval to add this dish to the menu.

Chef Joe personally brought me my meal of three different Swabian Alp delights.  I then told him what had me so appreciative of these dishes-I had travelled three years ago to the Swabian Alps region to frequent the region of my ancestors.  He then asked me if I wanted to know anything about him.  I  learned that he knew all about this region, that he was trained to be a chef in the Pearl of the Swiss Alps, that he and his team won the Olympic Chef Gold Medal. The connection between us, the waitress, the management was so spirit filled with love for the invisible reality that makes up our very being and nature in this time and space.

What a difference awareness of being agape and in its spirit makes.  Without it I would have simply sat at the table, had a meal, watched the TV, paid the bill and departed — never connecting with anyone.

Can We Help Each Other Change?

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Couples who are coming into counseling to deal with anger in their relationship often wonder:  Is this really going to help?   Will the therapist be able to help my partner see things differently?  Will this be worth the time and effort?

To me, it seems to be a question of hope.  Is there hope?  Yes, there is.  Hope does not disappoint (Romans 5:5) but the answers to our questions might be disappointing. We can’t change our loved ones and they can’t change us. The hope lies in learning that we can help each other change by changing ourselves.

For example, asking ourselves questions like this: What was I doing right before the temper flare?  Was I pushing buttons?  Was I criticizing or yelling?  Was I stonewalling?   Realizing that tempers are not lost in a “vacuum,” we look for the extenuating circumstances.

When we start to look at the big picture and at our part in the big picture, we begin to understand what we can do to help our loved one solve what we’ve been thinking of as “their” problem.  It begins to become an “our” problem.

Taking this position of helping each other change is one sure way to make therapy worth the time and effort. If we can recognize the triggers that lead to our partner’s losing their temper, we can learn ways of coping that will be more effective.  An equally important piece of the puzzle is learning their buttons, choosing not to push them, and letting the other person walk away when they need to.  When we learn more effective ways of communicating, we’ll be more successful  when we sit down and try to solve a problem.

If we think that we’re just an innocent bystander and the conflict is all about our partner, we might want to spend some time asking God to show us our blind spots. Or we could even ask our partner what they think we contribute to their temper flare ups. When we are able to control our anxiety and consider another person’s point of view, we can learn something  important about our relationship journey.  Controlling our anxiety and agreeing to hear constructive criticism isn’t easy but it can be done, especially when our partner is willing to offer their thoughts in a kind and gentle way.

John Gottman, in his work at the University of Washington, says that if you can allow your partner to influence you and if your partner can gently share their opinions, you’re well on your way to a healthy relationship. And a healthy relationship can tackle many mountains, including the anger mountain–when you’re doing it together.