Talk of Love and Hate

A couple of weeks ago I quoted from one of my favourite Leonard Cohen songs, Passing Through.  I want to start by doing that again:

Let's talk of love not hate, things to do: it’s getting late, there’s so little time and we’re only passing through.  

That line, “talk of love not hate,” has been on my mind a lot in the last two weeks.   I have struggled with my response to the Trucker Convoys that have taken over our national capital and other significant places in Canada.  I have found myself responding in an unusually strong reaction to the events that are taking place.  These thoughts and feelings are not how I am called to as a Christian; they are ones of hate.  I am called to love my neighbours and even my enemies and the people involved – at least some of them - are feeling more and more like my enemies and the enemies of this land which has always striven (though sometimes not succeeded) for peace, order and good government. 

As a Christian, I know I am called to strive to love and not hate as Leonard Cohen says so beautifully in that poignant song.  However, at times I find that hate is winning – and I do not like that or myself when that happens.  I am coming to the conclusion that I cannot love if I do not acknowledge the hate within myself.  Carl Jung identified the aspect in ourselves that is the unacknowledged or undiscovered part of our self which he called the shadow.  I know from sad experience that when I do not acknowledge the shadow and its content it comes up and bits me on the backside when I can’t see it coming.  Therefore, what I need to acknowledge today is to talk of love and hate. 

To hate is an aspect of human nature and is something which the world has had too much of, and is having too much of right now, not just in Canada but in the world in so many different places.  I am reminded that the opposite of love is not hate but is indifference.  When we hate we are in relationship with the person or thing that we hate.  It is not a good or healthy relationship but it is a relationship and one which can easily take control of us just as love can when we are in its thrall.  If we are to move beyond hate to love we must first acknowledge it and accept that it is a part of us and recognize that it is not what Jesus Christ lived and promises us.  We need to know in our hearts and minds and souls that Jesus did talk of love and not hate.  Coincidentally (if you believe in coincidences), the word today from SSJE is love:

Love is of God’s very essence. And love does not exist unless it is given away. God needs you, because God is love, and love can only be realized and expressed in relationship: the give and take of love.  -Br. Curtis Almquist, Society of Saint John the Evangelist

I will close with a prayer that I wrote a few weeks ago for our parish sessions on prayer.

Collect for Coming together, for healing, and for leaving in love.

Heavenly source of all healing, we have gathered as your faithful people who are in great need of healing.  The challenges that we face form the COVID pandemic have left us ill, in body, mind and spirit.

We ask that you open our hearts to those who approach the pandemic with differ attitudes from ours.  We know that many are fearful of the restrictions imposed by governments and institutions.  We are also fearful of those dangers which loom over us.  We ask that you calm our fears and let us know that you are always with us and you are our support and defend us.

We ask that you bind the wounds that have been inflicted on all during these dark days.  Let your light shine forth in the dark places of our souls.  Help us to see you in everyone that we encounter as we go forth from this gathering.  May the glory of your holy name ring forth in the world to bring love, peace, hope, and joy to all who hear it.  All this we ask in the name of our Saviour, Jesus Christ.

Blessings on your journey this week.  

 

Whither Leadership 2

Last week, I began to explore the qualities of leadership which were developed in the Rule of St. Benedict.  This week, I want to continue with that exploration.  The first quality I explored was that of actions as well as words.  The Rule requires that leaders, “are to lead the community by a two- fold teaching: they must point out to the monastics all that is good and holy more by example than by words.”

This week I want to explore what qualities the leader must have to be able to actually practice what they preach.  Chapter 2 of the Rule states, in part, “They must know what a difficult and demanding burden they have undertaken: directing souls and serving a variety of temperaments.”  Joan Chittister’s commentary delves into this seemingly straightforward - if not easy requirement - and truly brings out the essence of what this means. 

Chittister points out what the leader, and by inference all of us, must do to achieve this.  They must encourage those whom they lead to, “struggle as they have struggled to grow in depth, in sincerity, and in holiness, to grow despite (my emphasis) weaknesses, to grow beyond weaknesses.”  The challenge of this is brought into focus in Chittister’s closing sentence of the commentary:

We must each strive for the ideal and we must encourage others to strive with us, not because we ourselves are not weak but because knowing our own weakness and admitting them can we with great confidence teach trust in God who watches with patience out puny efforts and our foolish failures.

There is truly the rub as Hamlet might say.  To acknowledge our weaknesses to ourselves, much less to others, is no small feat.  Indeed, that goes against our instincts, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, our egos.  Our ego does not want to admit to any weakness and will go to great lengths to excuse, rationalize, and even hide them from ourselves much less ourselves.   Carl Jung identified that hidden part of ourselves which contains the collective weaknesses which are inevitable in ourselves.  He named that aspect the Shadow which is resident in our unconsciousness.  The Shadow can appear in our dreams as a dark, foreboding, character, often of the same sex as the dreamer.  It can be very helpful, and I propose necessary, to get to know the shadow part of ourselves as Chittister proposes.

The fact is that we all have weaknesses as well as strengths – or at least part of ourselves that we hold to be weaknesses. It is part of our humanity.  We are formed in God’s image as we are told in the book of Genesis; we are not gods.  However, the good news and the Good News is that if we are to acknowledge our weaknesses to ourselves and to others there is great strength which will lead others by example as well as by words.  It will truly enable us to love one another as Jesus loves us.

Blessings on your journey and do not be afraid to ask for directions when the way is not clear – or even when it is.

Ultimate Reality

Last week I wrote about the Snowmass Conference which was multifaith endeavor to engage in common points of agreement.  This was an example of how evangelism might move ahead in our multicultural and multifaith society:

In 1984 Father Thomas Keating invited a small group of contemplatives from eight different religious traditions—Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Islamic, Native American, Russian Orthodox, Protestant, and Roman Catholic—to gather at St. Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado, to engage in what he called “a big experiment.”

The Snowmass Conference Eight Points of Agreement were the points of common understanding among the traditions.  In those eight points I was interested to note that the word they used for God (in the Christian context) was “Ultimate Reality”.  On consideration, I believe that this is a very good term for God.  It engaged me in part because I had just finished reading the marvellous introduction to mysticism by the wonderful mystic and spiritual director Evelyn Underhill, Practical Mysticism.  This is a wonderful primer on mysticism and contemplation that I highly recommend to anyone who wants to explore that part of life. (A minor criticism of the form and not the content, the edition I have does not include page numbers so it is not possible to give page numbers for quotes from the book.)

Underhill poses the ultimate question which we need to consider, “What is reality”.  Underhill goes further and defines mysticism:

Mysticism is the art of union with Reality.  The mystic is a person who has attained that union in greater or lessor degree; or who aims at and believes in such attainment.

There are many things which prevent us from that union with Ultimate Reality (in the terms of the Snowmass Conference Eight Points of Agreement).  We have personal blind sports which have been called complexes by psychologists.  We have filters that block out much of what is around us as anyone who has noticed, for the first time, something he or she has passed by many times previously.  We have the facility to project onto others characteristics that we don’t want to recognize in ourselves-the shadow in Jungian terms. 

If we move beyond mere psychology there is the reality of other sciences such as quantum physics and astronomy – not to mention astrology -  which reveal a reality beyond anything our natural senses can perceive.  Underhill expresses this, speaking of the artist and the contemplative as people who are able to see beyond the surface of things:

Both have exchanged the false imagination which draws sensations and intuitions of the self into its narrow circle, and there distorts and transforms them, for the true imagination which pours itself out, eager, adventurous, and self-giving, towards the greater universe.

If we are to see the world that the Ultimate Reality (God) has created we must move beyond seeing the surface of things and have eyes to see and ears to hear the wonder of that creation which is beyond the mere sensation that we have learned to perceive the world in ways which we have been required to learn in order to survive on a daily basis.  We are, in so many ways, like that group of blind men (I think in this case it is okay not to put this in gender neutral terms) who are describing an elephant from their different perspectives which Richard Rohr recently used to address our perception of reality:

How do we know what is real? I’m sure you’ve heard the story of a group of people who are blind describing an elephant, each from a different vantage. One person, feeling the elephant’s tail, described a rope. Another, arms encircling a leg, said it was like a pillar or tree. And so on. Every viewpoint is a view from a point. The more ways of knowing we use, the closer we come to understanding, and yet the full picture will always elude us. In this way, mystery is endlessly knowable. 

In so many ways we are people who are blind or deaf or without the sense of touch trying to grasp a piece of the Ultimate Reality – without the realization it is only a piece.  Many accept their experience of the part of the elephant as the whole truth and nothing but the truth of the world.  May your Ultimate Reality give you ears to hear and eyes to see more of that Reality.

Blessings on your journey.

Free Will or Not Free Will; That is the Question part 2

Last week I went where perhaps fools rush in and began to delve into the question of free will.  I want to continue to explore that further this week.

As I noted last week the mathematics which is used to develop Quantum Mechanics apparently leaves no room for free will.  All in the universe is apparently predetermined if you have all the variables.  At least that is my understanding of what the theoretical physicists are saying.  However, the physicists whom I quoted last week, Leonard Mlodinow, did concede that that the universe and human beings are so complex that in effect it appears to us that we do have free will.

The other factor conceded, if not believed by physicists, is that the math does not account for an intervention from God or a god-like force interceding from outside of the structure of the universe.  However, as Mlodinow states:

If you believe that there are no exceptions, whether they be big miracles or minor deviations from the laws of physics, whether you look at the quantum laws that are fundamental or Newton’s laws, whichever laws you look at, neither set of laws has room for deviations or choice — let’s say, conscious choice. So if you believe that the brain follows those laws, as everything in the laboratory that we’ve ever looked at does, then it’s not a question for scientists.

So the question is directly in the court of those who believe in a higher power.  If God has given us free, will which I believe God has, what does that mean for us as Christians and other believers in a higher power? 

As I addressed in this Sunday’s sermon (attached), which wolf of our nature will we feed; the good one or the evil one?  This question is based on a Legend of the Cherokee people which is provided at the beginning of my sermon.  In effect, we have two wolves inside us; a good one and an evil one.  The question posed is which wolf will win?  The answer is the one we feed. 

Even if we do know which is which we do not always choose good one as St. Paul notes, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate”.  If, St. Paul is correct, and I believe anyone who has any level of self-awareness will agree, do we then have free will?  The reality is that we have less free will that we like to admit or even than we realize.

There are forces within us, symbolized by those two wolves, that seem to be at war and that at least influence if not control our decisions and our actions.  Carl Jung was the great explorer of these forces and developed/discovered the concept of archetypes which are the way that the energy within us is organized and operates to influence us.  These are unconscious forces we usually are not even aware which are influencing/controlling us; ergo the cry of St. Paul. 

The great gift of Carl Jung was to not only present a psychology which explains a great deal of how we have been created but to understand it in terms of how we can develop and mature into the people that God intends us to be.  Jung called it individuation. 

The challenge for me as a Christian is to become the person that God intended me to be when God created me.  There are many aspects of myself which I do not hold to be admirable and which I struggle to acknowledge; the evil wolf in the legend.  Jung has named these forces The Shadow.  However, these are a part of who I am and unless I acknowledge them and learn how to relate to them, they will prevent my better wolf from being fed. 

Let us feed the wolf of our better nature.  Blessings on your journey,

All Embracing Perfection

Yesterday’s Gospel reading for the 4^th Sunday after Trinity was Luke 6: 36-41.  It contains the wonderful message of Jesus:

Why do you see the speck in your neighbour’s^* eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? ⁴²Or how can you say to your neighbour,^* “Friend,^* let me take out the speck in your eye”, when you yourself do not see the log in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbour’s^* eye.

In the Anglican churches in the neighbouring communities here in P.E.I. that Lorna and I attend they use the King James Version.  The KJV uses “mote” rather than “speck”.  As with much of the KJV language mote is more poetic but I must admit that the NRSV version of speck is more descriptive and makes the point more expressively.  It is hard to imagine a log or beam in your eye that you can’t see.  However, Jesus tells us that we can concentrate on the speck in another’s eye and ignore or be ignorant of the log in our own.

One of the points my sermon addresses is Jesus’s command to be perfect.  He states the Gospel passage, “everyone that is perfect shall be as his master.”  Jesus states this command more clearly in Matthew chapter 5:48, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”  I have problems with the idea that we are called by Jesus to be perfect.  This, in my mind, is a barrier to the idea of seeing the log in your own eye rather than the speck in your neighbour’s eye. 

Jesus’s invocation about not seeing the log in your own eye and focussing on the log in another’s expresses a very important concept in modern psychological.  What Jesus is describing has been identified as projection. You see in others what is actually within you.  Often people will react strongly—actually overreact to another person or what that person does.  In doing so they are responding to something that is a characteristic that they are not conscious of within themselves which they do not find acceptable.  Carl Jung has named this as the Shadow archetype.

In effect the command by Jesus to be perfect will support the resistance that people have to acknowledging those parts of themselves which they consider do not measure up to their idea of what perfection is.  Therefore the Christian idea of perfection and the possibility of achieving that ideal can be a barrier to what is is proclaimed.

As I note in my sermon another way of understanding what Jesus desires for us is based on a different translation of the word ‘perfection’ in the Aramaic which is understood by scholars to be Jesus’s native language.  Neil Douglas-Klotz, in his book A Prayer for the Cosmos translates the word as “all embracing”.  This is an important understanding when considering the Shadow and projection.  If we do not accept i.e. embrace those parts of ourselves that we do not find acceptable we will never fully understand the person that God created us to be.  We will continue to see the speck in another person’s eye rather than the log in our own eye. 

The next time that you react overly strongly i.e. overreact to someone I invite you to consider that it may a part of yourself that you are actually reacting to.  The aphorism to ‘know thyself’ is not biblical but it is applicable and valuable.  Peace

Are You a crucifier or the crucified?

On Easter Sunday I made my usual appeal for people to volunteer to be crucifers.  However, what I said was, “please consider being a crucifier”; which might have been more appropriate for Good Friday.  There was a lot of laughter and I immediately corrected myself.  However, on reflection I wonder if there is more to this than a slip of the tongue.

On reflection what comes to mind is the old Burt Bacharach song “What the Word Needs Now is Love Sweet Love”.  Well I never thought I would be quoting a Burt Bacharach song as he is not one of my favourite songwriters to it mildly and that song is sentimental schmaltz.   However, to paraphrase Burt, we don’t need any more crucifiers.  The world seems to have plenty of them.  The question this morning after the Second Sunday in Easter is, when are we crucifiers and when are we crucified.  Put it another way, when do we look for a scapegoat to take all the blame for what is going on in our lives and when do we acknowledge that much of what we put on others is so that we don’t have to acknowledge it in ourselves?

It is human nature to not want to “see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye”?  Carl Jung named this phenomenon the shadow which can appear I our dreams often as a person of the same sex as the dreamer who carries all the unacknowledged parts of ourselves.   These are often negative qualities—or qualities we see as negative.  However, they can be positive and be carried by what is the bright shadow.  In any case as Jesus says we need to be able to acknowledge that log in our own eye if we are not to be crucifiers of others in this life. 

Blessings

Of Motes and Beams

Sermon July 13, 2014:  Fourth After Trinity

Luke 6: 36

Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is in thy brother’s eye.

We might call today’s lesson — rather than ‘of mice and men’ — ‘of motes and beams’.  I’m sure we know what a beam is — it is a very large piece of wood.  But what is a mote?  Well one definition of mote which I looked up is: ‘a very small piece of dust, dirt’.  So we get the comparison.  It is easy to understand that you might have a speck of dust in your eye.  Probably everyone here has had the experience — not a pleasant one but not something that is going to do you serious damage — perhaps unless you are driving along a mountainous road with no guard rails.  But having a beam in your eye — if you can imagine that — is certainly going to give you lots of trouble — if not permanent blindness.

Jesus then is setting up a comparison that it is impossible to misunderstand.  People are paying attention to the small things that they don’t approve of in others and they are blind to the big things that they should be paying attention to in themselves.  These are the hypocrites that Jesus is identifying when he declares, ‘Thou hypocrite’ or in modern English, ‘You hypocrite’. 

Let’s put this passage in context.  A lot has happened just before this passage.  Jesus has just passed through a grain field on the Sabbath and his disciples have sinned by doing work — they have picked some heads of grain to eat — being his disciples they probably didn’t always get regular meals.  The Pharisees criticize them for doing work on the Sabbath — I guess they hadn’t heard Jesus proclamation that the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath.   After this, Jesus is criticized again by the Pharisees for healing a man with a withered hand on the Sabbath.  Elsewhere in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus doesn’t pull any punches regarding how he feels about the Pharisees, “But woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in.”

So Jesus does not think much of people who are hypocritical.  The biggest culprits in this sin are the Pharisees.  The Pharisees were religious laymen — there don’t seem to have been any women Pharisees — which might have been part of their problem.  They were a sect or social movement which was primarily interested in the law — which of course in that time and place was the Mosaic Code — and ensuring that the law was fulfilled and obeyed. 

They were condemned by Jesus many different times first because they seemed to be making a god of the law rather than the law being a way which would bring people closer to God.  Secondly — and specifically in today’s context — they were more concerned with the mote — the speck of dust — in other’s eyes than in the beam or log in their own eye.  They ‘shut up the kingdom of heaven against men’ — I believe that is the greatest sin in Jesus’ eyes.  They not only block their own way to the Kingdom of God but they block others from reaching the Kingdom. 

Well, where does that leave us today? None of us like to think of ourselves as hypocrites.  But of course Jesus is speaking to us as well as to the people around him.  I believe this is where we need to consider the motes and the beams.  Do we ever fall into the trap that Jesus identifies in the Pharisees?  Of course hypocrisy is probably as common today as it was in Jesus’ time.  It just may have different subject.  Today people are rarely criticized for working on the Sabbath.  However, I believe that we are all subject to the beam and mote problem. 

We all will fall into the problem — or sin to put it in religious language — of seeing faults in others before we see them in ourselves.  It is human nature to do this.  In fact we often see in others the things about ourselves that we don’t want to acknowledge. 

In the psychology of Carl Jung he calls this the shadow.  We identify and react to those things in others that we do not find acceptable in ourselves.  In effect we see the beam that is in our eye as being the beam even if it is only a mote in another person’s eye.  One way of telling when this happens is the strength of the reaction that you have to the actions of behaviour or even appearance of the other person.  If the strength of your reaction or the depth of the emotions that are stirred up are out of proportion to the event then you are probably dealing with an aspect of your shadow — an aspect of you self that is not acceptable to you.  In effect the beam that you see in the other person may in effect be closer to a mote and in truth is your own beam. 

I believe that this is important for us as Christians because we need to be able to do all we can to follow Jesus’ lessons.  If we realize that the fault — dear Horatio — is in ourselves and not all in the other — we are more able to do as Jesus commands.  The Gospel lessons begins, “Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.  ³⁷Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven”.  These are the attributes that Jesus believes are the important ones — not the minutia of following the law.  We are to love one another as he loves us.  As Paul says to the Church in Corinth, ‘And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity”.

If we are to live in true charity with our neighbours and ourselves we will be following Jesus commandment to love one another.  Amen

The Enneagram Part 4

After my diversion into the Enneagram for Hummingbird last week, I want to get back to the application for the people of God.  Again I am drawing primarily on the work of Richard Rohr and Andreas Ebert — The Enneagram, A Christian Perspective. 

As I noted previously, I believe the strength of the Enneagram compared to the Myers Briggs Typology is the possibility of redemption which it offers.  As much as both systems are valuable for understanding ourselves and our world, what do we do once we have developed more fully that understanding?  Rohr and Ebert speak of root sins which accompany each type.  It is not all that popular to speak of sin in many circles today but I believe that is because of the moral implications which are attached to it.  Either people disregard sin entirely in the reductionist world of scientific atheism a la Richard Dawkins et al or believe that we should not call a spade a spade in the religious sphere and avoid looking at the log in their own eyes and rather condemn the speck in those terrible people across the street or the country or the other side of the world.  

Rohr/Ebert define sin as, “our primary emotional compulsion or mistaken attitudes.”  This perhaps is a little too much psychologizing but they define it further as ‘a separation or failure to reach a goal’ which is, to my mind’ more to the point.  Sin for me is primarily those things which separate us from God — as has been said elsewhere.  It can be moral sins but it can be in any aspect of life.  Much of sin is because of ego-based desire which puts ourselves ahead of God and God’s creation.  As Rohr/Ebert note the sins “promise advancement in life, but in reality they produce just what they are trying to prevent; loneliness, absurdity, emptiness”.  In effect it promises the world at the cost of our souls.  This mistaken attitude is the ‘false self’ which is Ego driven.  Rohr/Ebert identify a root sin for each type — these are based on the ‘seven deadly sins’ plus two additional ones — fear and deceit:

Type one — anger	Type six— fear
Type two — pride	Type seven — intemperance (gluttony)
Type three — untruth (deceit)	Type eight — shamelessness (lust)
Type four — envy	Type nine — laziness
Type five — Avarice

Being a (I hope partially) redeemed nine I can certainly identify with the root sin of nines.  I find it very easy to avoid undertaking what I want to accomplish — such as writing this.  I also find it easy to fall into the couch potato mode of operating. 

The first step in redemption is to accept ourselves.  As Rohr/Ebert note God loves us unconditionally including our dark side which we want desperately to hide form the world and as much as possible form ourselves — ultimately without success.  Those aspect of ourselves which we do not acknowledge (our shadow in Jungian terms) come back when we least expect it to bite us in the backside.  The Enneagram is not a source of redemption.  The source of redemption is from the false self is a gift of God’s grace.