This past fall in my new role as Spiritual Care Provider to palliative care clients in the community, I visited a man who was terminally ill with cancer. He was quite anxious about his pending death because of his view of the afterlife. In this blog, I want to outline how I, as a Christian spiritual director, have come to understand the judgement process and the afterlife. My client’s fears were around him not being good enough to get into Heaven. When I tried to reassure him that God was gracious and would embrace him upon his death, he challenged me by saying, “God does not let everyone into Heaven. There are evil people in this world like the people behind the Rwanda genocide or the people running the Jewish concentration camps in World War 2. He proclaimed that there is no way God would allow them to get into Heaven.” I was quite troubled by his fears of the afterlife for it had been nurtured by teachings in his church. The church has taught that our death is a day of judgement before God, and that this judgment determines our destiny in the afterlife. The way the Church has understood this judgement has not changed much since the days of the early church 2000 years ago, which is surprising considering how much the theology of the Church has evolved over the centuries in so many other areas of thought. God’s Two Sets of Children: The Prodigal and the Religious It is clear to me that our Christian tradition teaches that God loves all people unconditionally. This is often called God’s agape love. The Bible story that captures this unconditional loving nature of God the best is the popular Prodigal Son story (Luke 15: 11-32). In the Bible, we read Jesus telling this parable to an audience made up of two groups of people: outcasts and sinners and religious leaders. This parable provides a helpful framework in understanding God’s agape love and how it plays out on both Earth, our physical world, and Heaven, the spiritual world. One could see the parent and the parent’s home in this parable as God and Heaven. From this heavenly home comes two sets of God’s children who are born into our physical world, Earth. It is very apparent in the parable that both sets of children become lost on Earth. One set of children grow up and find the physical world appealing and full of possibility. They end up seeking happiness in the external world. They become prodigal children. The second set grow up suspicious of the earthly world and instead seek happiness by becoming religious children. They seek to please God through doing their religious practices with the hope that someday they will experience God’s gracious love. After many years seeking earthly treasures, the prodigal children get to a place of bankruptcy, possibly physically, relationally, morally, and spiritually. They realized that they are totally lost. Seeing that they are the cause of their poor choices, they become repentant and humbled. It is during this time of starving that they begin to remember God and the Heaven they came from. A hunger arises within them for the treasures of Heaven that they remember from their heavenly home. And so, they begin their journey home. Upon getting home, they hope that God will be gracious enough to give them a task to do that will allow them to earn a place within Heaven. You can imagine their surprise that upon arriving home God welcomes them with open loving arms and wants to celebrate their homecoming by throwing a big banquet of the best. These open arms symbolized the unconditional gracious love of God. In contrast, the religious children, in the parable, are horrified at God receiving such sinful children into Heaven. This cannot be possible. The religious children are upset because they have tried to please God all their lives by doing faithfully their religious practices, but not once did God throw a party on their behalf. It is interesting how this parable ends. God basically says to his/her religious children, “I have always been with you; you have simply not been able to experience me. All of my treasures are yours to have; you have not allowed yourself to enjoy them.” This parable, as I have interpreted it, provides a helpful framework from which to address many key questions that people have around Heaven when we died. God’s Love is Unconditional and Never Changing It is very clear from this Bible story that God’s agape love is unconditional. To love unconditionally means that God’s love never changes, never becomes less or becomes more. It is a divine love that is the same today as it was yesterday as it will be tomorrow. Jesus compares God’s unconditional love to the sun, that rises on both the evil and the good, and to the rain, that falls upon both the righteous and the unrighteous (Matt. 5:45). This is why Jesus teaches that it is possible to love those who hurt you rather than retaliate (Matt. 5: 38-42), to love our enemies as well as our friends ( Matt. 5: 44). It is clear that the unconditional quality of God’s agape love is very different than the love humans normally show each other. One simple teaching that the church often uses to capture this notion of agape love is that we are to “love the sinner but not the sin.” But the reality is that few people can practice well this teaching of love. The Narrow Gate to Heaven Christians often challenge this notion that God loves everyone and will accept everyone at death into Heaven. Like the religious children in the parable or like my client, they argue that this cannot be possible. People who have committed terrible crimes should not get into Heaven. Furthermore, these people often quote that Jesus taught that the door to life or Heaven is narrow (Matt. 7: 13-14). These people argue that the reason this door is narrow is because of God’s holy character. They believe that God is very particular about who gets into Heaven: only the faithful followers of God do. This begs a question. What does it mean to be a faithful follower of God? As the parable of the prodigal illustrates, just because you are religious and believe the “right things” or do the “right religious practices” does not mean you will pass through the narrow gate and experience the fullness of life and God’s unconditional love? The religious people in the parable didn’t. In fact, they were outraged at God’s gracious love to the prodigal people when God celebrated them coming to heaven. So what does it mean to pass through the narrow gate? I want to suggest that this narrow gate has nothing to do with God’s judging people. As the parable teaches, God’s loves prodigal people and religious people equally. However the parable does teach that some people find themselves in Heaven while others don’t. I want to suggest that judgement tied to the narrow gate has nothing to do with God’s heart. God’s heart always loves unconditionally. The narrow gate is connected to our human heart, how our heart can be open or not open to receiving God’s gracious love, just like we see in the parable. Some embrace God’s gracious love while others don't. This is why I said to my client that he has nothing to fear about the afterlife when he dies. His heart clearly longs to experience God’s gracious love upon his death. Our Experience of Judgement is not due to God’s Heart. This emphasis that the human heart is key to experiencing God’s love is found throughout the Bible. The first commandment of the Jewish Ten Commandments states that humans are to worship the true God and no other gods (Ex. 20: 2-3). To worship is an act of the heart where our hearts wants to align with the heart of God. Jesus taught that all the Jewish commandments can be condensed down to two commandments: to love God with our whole mind, heart, will and soul and to love others as ourselves (Luke 10:27). The human heart was created and longs to be aligned with God’s heart of love. The second commandment of the Ten Commandments stresses the importance of not worshipping other gods (Ex. 20: 4-6) that can easily lead our hearts astray. These false gods are like the tempting gods in the world that prodigal children chase after for happiness or the idols that religious people become attached to like right beliefs or right actions or religious identities. It is interesting to note that these verses in Exodus also talk about how God punishes humans for God has a jealous heart and has no tolerance for a wayward human heart. How do we make sense of these teachings about a jealous judging God in the Bible (and there are many such teachings in the Bible) with the unconditional loving God of grace found in the Parable of the Prodigal Son and numerous other places in the Bible? These opposing teachings cannot be both true. Personally, I experience God as unconditionally loving. God’s love is always present as well as all of the other fruits of God’s spirit: compassion, grace, truth, joy, peace, kindness, strength, trust, etc. All of God’s spiritual fruits are always present or accessible in our lives for God’s spirit is unconditionally present in our lives all the time. This is why Jesus said, “God is like sun that shines upon both the faithful and unfaithful people in our world.” But, as we know from our natural world, just because the sun is shining does not mean we feel it all the time. Often clouds are in the sky which keep us from experiencing directly the light and warmth of the sun. The darker the clouds, the less light and heat we feel. Furthermore, we know from our seasons of summer and winter that distance between the sun and earth does affect how much we feel the warmth of the sun. All of these patterns about sun, clouds, and our experience of life are true about our ability to experience God. When God’s love becomes blocked or distorted by the clouds in our heart or feels far away from our heart, that love starts to lose its loving quality and begins to develop a non-loving quality. If God’s love is totally blocked, that love becomes transformed into its opposite, the experience of “no love” or “hate”. Let me provide a chart to illustrate how these clouds in our heart can affect the aspects of God’s unconditional character. Divine quality Divine Quality totally blocked/distorted/far away Light Darkness Warmth Cold Love Hate Compassion/grace Judgemental Strength Weakness Truth Confusion, Lies Clarity, knowingness Doubt Joy Despair Trust Anxiety Grounded Ungrounded Freedom Bonded, enslaved This pattern I am illustrating is built upon the Theory of Holes taught by the Diamond Approach, a psychospiritual work school that I have been part of for 15 years now. When seen in this way, we can begin to understand how God’s love can be experienced in two different ways depending upon the condition of the human heart. If our hearts are like the repentant prodigal children in our parable, then we will experience directly the amazing grace of God’s unconditional love. If our hearts are like the religious children in the parable, filled with many clouds, then we will experience God’s love as being very conditional. Two very different experiences of God's love, but the reason for the difference is not because of God’s divided character. It is because of our human divided heart. However, we often project this difference onto God’s character. We believed that God’s character is divided when it is really our own. This interpretation brings a further new meaning to the narrow door to life and Heaven. The door to Heaven is actually wide open. All people whose hearts long for God will be received with welcomed arms. It is the divided condition of the human heart that has made the door to Heaven narrow. This is why Jesus taught that the “poor in spirit”, a humble repentant heart, will receive the Kingdom of Heaven (Matt. 5: 3). This is also why Jesus taught that those who are treated “last” by the world, like the prodigal, will discover that they will be first to be received in Heaven (Matt. 20: 16). Their heart longs for the gracious love of God. We Experience Heaven on Earth First Many people believe Heaven is very different than life on Earth, that Heaven is only found in the Afterlife. But our Christian tradition is very clear that the experiences of Heaven happen here on Earth too. The Lord’s Prayer recited in many churches stresses this truth. It begins with the words, “Our Father, who is in Heaven, hallowed be your name, your Kingdom come, your will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.” There are many other teachings of Jesus which highlight the “here, but not fully here” Kingdom of God. It is interesting how Jesus stresses that the Kingdom of God cannot be directly observed in the physical world and objectified (Luke 17:20-21). Rather, he says, the Kingdom of God is found among or within us meaning that we notice the Kingdom of God through our internal experience as humans. In other words, we notice signs of Heaven here on Earth through our internal human experience. This is why in my palliative care ministry I encourage people to reflect on the times in their lives when they have experienced sacred moments. People do have such moments, often many whether it be in nature, or in their relationships, or mysterious coincidences in their life, or through the meaning they find in their work like being creative, helping people, or making this world a better place. It may be a repentant experience similar to what the prodigal encountered when they realized they were spiritually lost. However, in realizing their spiritual disconnection or remembering past sacred times, many people experience a longing to return to their spiritual home. That longing is a sign of God’s spirit transforming their hearts such that their hearts begin to point in the direction of Heaven. They begin, like the prodigal, to travel their sacred journey back home to God. The Journey to Heaven Begins on Earth It is important to realize that this spiritual journey home begins for many people on Earth, long before their death. Many people seek out a religious community or spiritual director for this very purpose, so they can begin to experience Heaven on Earth. This spiritual work involves reducing the distance between a person’s heart and God so that they can feel more intensely God’s light, warmth, love and all the qualities of God’s spirit within their lives on Earth. It also means doing the psychospiritual work necessary to melt the clouds within our hearts so that our hearts align more closely with the gracious loving heart of God. As we work at our spiritual transformation, we experience more often and more deeply the dynamics of Heaven in our earthly lives. As people do their spiritual work, people notice a difference between the dynamics of Heaven and the dynamics of Earth. As the prodigal discovered, the dynamics of Earth are very physical and concrete. There is a strong pull downward to the physical world that operates at a lower vibrational frequency, one that can we experience through our five physical senses and observe through the scientific method. We can become quite attached and addicted to the dynamics of this physical world. However, this downward pull vibrationally also happens everytime we "rigidize" or solidify our beliefs, emotional states, the ways we do things or how we hold experiences in our physical bodies. When we give in this downward pull, we find ourselves attached or addicted to our internal states just as we can be to aspects of the external world. This temptation to control our earthly experiences is quite appealing and as a result, our hearts are pulled downward and often become trapped in these lower frequencies. The dynamics of Heaven on Earth, often called the fruits of God’s spirit, are very different. Rather than being external and physical, the qualities of love, grace, truth, joy, peace, etc. arise from within us, within our mind, heart, will, and body, within our human soul. This is why they are seen as having their source from God or Heaven rather than from our physical world. These heavenly dynamics are also more subtle meaning that these dynamics cannot be noticed by our physical senses or by scientific instruments. Yet, our heart, mind, gut, and body clearly sense them which suggests that these spiritual dynamics operate at a higher vibrational frequency than the dynamics of Earth. But there is a catch with these spiritual dynamics. As soon as we try to control these qualities or seek to become attached to them, they lose their godly quality. It is like these heavenly energies fall in frequency to earthly vibrational levels, and all the divine aspects of love, grace, and compassion disappear. It is only when we stay in a posture of surrender and trust that these aspects of God's spirit remain within our earthly human experience. As we realize this truth, we come to know that these heavenly experiences are truly a gift from God, moments that we can only experience when our hearts are aligned with the heart of God. This is why Jesus stresses the importance of learning to surrender our attachments to the physical treasures of earth (Matt. 6: 19) and seek instead the Kingdom of Heaven (Matt. 6: 33). The Experience of Heavenly Judgement on Earth It is important to realize that the treasures on Earth have the potential to pull our hearts downward. As we experience something pleasurable like ice cream, we want to experience more of that goodness, because after a while, we don’t get the same kick of pleasure. We need more of that pleasure to get the same positive experience. As result, if we are not careful, our mind, heart, will, and body will become more and more desensitize and find ourselves soon enslaved and lost to the dynamics of our Earthly world. As we all know and as the prodigal found it, there are painful consequences to any earthly addiction: broken relationships, poverty, guilt/shame, self hatred, etc. These are the consequences or judgements of God’s Law, one could say, that arise due to our choices when we follow our flesh or sinful desires (Gal. 5: 17-21). In other words, the experience of judgement or Hell-like experiences happen on Earth long before we get to Heaven. In contrast, for us to experience the higher frequencies of Heaven, we have to practice surrender, letting go, the emptying of ourselves (Phil. 2: 7) of all our passions for this earthly world. You would think that when we let go of control and surrender to God’s spirit and the flow of life we would fall downward. But as Richard Rohr explains in his book, “Falling Upward”, the opposite happens. We find in surrendering to the experience of Being that our souls wake up and become more sensitized to the subtle dynamics of God’s spirit. We begin to experience more fully the fruits of God’s Spirit on Earth. Instead of falling downward into the denser energies of Earth, this relaxing of our soul allows it to rise to experiencing the more subtle, higher frequencies of Heaven on Earth. That is, we experience the judgement of our choices on Earth, but in this case, we experienced being blessed by the fruits of God's spirit and often by others in the world. How is Heaven different at Death? This begs the question. If we can experience aspects of Heaven during our life on Earth, what happens at the moment of death when we leave this earthly plane of existence? One big difference in the Afterlife is that the physicalness of Earth passes way. Everything associated with our physical body and physical life disappears. What remains is our human soul with all of its patterns of thinking, feeling, longing, and being that were developed on Earth. Another key difference in the Afterlife is that upon death we enter a totally different dimension of time and space. Time and space essentially disappear. As two different writers in the Bible suggest, a thousand years is just a day in God’s time (Ps. 90:4; 2 Peter 3:8). This suggests that the notion of past, present, and future vanishes, at least as we understand it on Earth. In the heavenly dimension, God and the spiritual world are described as eternal, everlasting, timeless. We get a taste of this heavenly timelessness sometimes when we have sacred moments in our earthly lives. However, since the realm of Heaven in the Afterlife is no longer restricted by physical reality, we experience immediately the consequences of the thinking and emotional patterns in our soul. While consequences can take days, years, or even a lifetime on earth to happen, and sometimes not even then, we now experience them immediately. It is interesting reading stories from Near Death Experiences and other research on human consciousness that reveal how Heaven is a world shaped instantly by our thoughts, feelings, and longings.
What this means is that the heavenly journey of spiritual growth on Earth continues in the Afterlife. All the consequences related to our soul’s thinking, feeling, longing, and being are now realized quickly leading to the possibility of faster growth. While on physical Earth there is a subtle pull toward the higher frequencies of living nurtured by the dynamics of Heaven, in the Afterlife, this pull upward to experiencing God’s agape love and all the spiritual fruits is far stronger. And yet, it seems, based on the Scriptures of the different religions and consciousness research, that there are levels of goodness and conscious awareness in the Afterlife, just as there are levels on Earth. The hearts of people in the Afterlife still respond to God's unconditonal love in different ways, some embrace it fully whiles others distrust it or even reject it. How people's hearts respond to this divine gracious love at their death determines, it seems, where their spiritual journey begins in the Afterlife. Questions to Ponder:
Gord Alton MDiv RP CASC Supervisor-Educator
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This past fall (2020) I read John Swinton’s book titled “Dementia: Living in the Memories of God” (2012). It was recommended to me by a good friend who was potentially showing signs of dementia. With this excellent book, Swinton unpacks the experience of dementia through a totally different framework then the one commonly used within Western society. In doing so, he opens up profound ways to see spirituality present within the experience of people living with dementia. In this blog, I want to summarize key insights from his book that help us know how to care spiritually for people struggling with dementia. Swinton begins his book by describing the current framework used in caring for people with dementia, namely a framework that sees dementia as a condition of the physical brain. This leads to what Swinton calls defectology (41), a focus on the pathology of dementia, namely that “dementia is conceived and conceptualized as a series of deficits, malfunctions, and losses” (42). He also creates a distinction between the process of thinking and the process of communicating thought. This difference is a sign of what he labels the hermeneutics of distance (58). Caregivers who are close relationally to people with dementia notice thinking happening despite the fact that the person is finding it hard to communicate thought (58). In the end, Swinton argues that it comes down to “which story one chooses to put one’s faith in”, the ‘impaired thinking’ story or the ‘thinking but impaired communication’ story (58). In his book, Swinton outlines an alternative dementia story, one that goes way beyond the “impaired thinking” story. Swinton begins by stating that “every psychological experience is at the same time a neurological experience and vice versa; the two simply represent the two descriptions of the same event” (76). Every experience can be described neurologically, based on the physical interactions happening in the brain noticed through CT scans and MRIs. This same experience can be described psychologically, based on the changes the person notices in their thoughts, images, emotions, body sensations, behaviors, etc. Furthermore, Swinton notes that “unlike other organs, the brain (like the nervous system) is plastic” (78). By this, he means, the brain’s shape, form, and development are responsive and formed by the environment and the physical and psychological experiences that a person has lived throughout their life (78). In other words, there is an interactive dynamic between our physical neurology and psychological experience of life. Sometimes, our neurology shapes our experience, sometimes our psychological experiences shape our neurology, and sometimes these back-and-forth interactions happen simultaneously. Swinton claims “society may well have a profound relationship for causing the symptoms of dementia rather than simply responding to them” (80). To unpack this connection, he explores what he labels as a “malignant social psychology” (80). The dynamics of malignant social psychology arise in social environments where forms of interpersonal interactions and communications occur that diminish the personhood of those people experiencing that environment” (82). In seeing this negative social psychology present in how dementia persons are treated within the medical system, he does not suggest that that medical model should be rejected. He believes instead that it just needs to be expanded and modified (84). To help his readers understand how this malignant social psychology works, he draws upon the research of Steven Sabat, Professor of psychology. Sabat sees the experience of self actually consisting of three components: self 1, self 2, and self 3. Self 1 refers to how "the person’s experience of himself/herself in the present moment” (95), the sense of me, myself, my, mine, etc. in contrast to yours (94). Clearly, a dementia person has a sense of who they are, even though they forget their names, or the names of those around them (105). “Unless a person is terminally unconscious, Self 1 remains throughout the experience of dementia” (95). Self 2 refers to a person’s sense of identity, their self-concept, and their beliefs about self. It “contains the person’s physical characteristics and their biography coupled with their awareness, interpretation, and valuing of such characteristics and experiences” (95). A dementia person retains an awareness of their Self 2. However, this sense of self, this history and biography, is nurtured in a positive way because those, who love them, work very hard to keep them located in that history (through storytelling, memory books, reminiscences, etc.) (105). by , Self 3 is very different from Self 1 and Self 2 which are controlled by the individual. Self 3 derives from how a person is experienced by others, their community, and the world. It has to do with the way a person presents or is represented to the world (96) and how that relationship to their community or world is supported (97). It is not possible to be a teacher unless students grant you that status. It is not possible for dementia to have a positive public profile unless people respond positively to it (97). It is this Self 3 aspect of the self that is lost when a person gets dementia. They no longer feel valued or reflected by their world, their community, even those close to them. This shift in treatment is most apparent when people ask “does she recognize you?” If the answer is no, people begin disengaging for the dementia person has shifted from being seen by them as a person to a non-person (103). After this discussion about the three aspects of self, Swinton concludes that “dementia emerges out of a complicated dialectical interaction between neurological impairment and interpersonal processes” (107). “Dementia is the product of both damaged neurons and the experience of particular forms of relationship and community” (107) As a result, Swinton concludes “dementia does not entail a loss of mind. Rather it provokes others to presume there is a loss of mind” (108). Furthermore he claims, “dementia does not entail a loss of self. Understood properly, the self remains intact even in the most severe forms of dementia. Any loss of self relates to a failure of community” (108). When seen within this framework, “’symptoms’ of dementia such as aggression, depression, withdrawal, anxiety, and deterioration in emotional control, social behavior, or motivation may not in fact be caused by failing neurological processes alone. When understood properly, they can be seen as reasonable responses to difficult, frightening and frustrating situations” (108). In the book, Swinton now turns to a key question that is at the essence of care for people with dementia. Is the person lost to their illness of dementia? Does their sense of personhood no longer exist? Here Swinton shares stories of how many people are starting to believe this to be the case. The legal system granted a husband release on compassionate grounds for smothering his wife with a pillow who had extreme dementia by arguing partially that his wife ceased to be the woman he married (115-117). Some Christian leaders, like Pat Roberts, have said it is OK to divorce a spouse with dementia for dementia is a type of death (117-118). Some people with dementia, themselves, are choosing Medical Assistance in Death because they don’t want to be a burden to their family or society (120-121). There is a sense in some of these stories that some people believe that people with dementia have a “duty to die”. Swinton claims that the responses to these difficult questions, and the issues they raised, come down to how we understand personhood. Many times, personhood is defined, for legal and ethical purposes, “in terms of a capacity for self awareness, identity, continuity of thinking, a sense of self over time, consciousness, and above all memory” (123). Furthermore, a person is safe as long as those around them value them and offer them relationships that reveal and reinforce the practical meaning of that value (125). In an individualistic society that is prevalent in Western Liberal democracies, “to be a ‘person’ means that one must be able to live one’s life, develop one’s potential, and develop a purposeful life-course without any necessary reference to others” (130). With this understanding of personhood, a person with dementia has little hope of being seen and treated as a person. While this may be an objective view of people of dementia, they are seen as an “it” that has no intrinsic value or sense of “being” outside of what people attribute to them. Is there another way to understand personhood that does not lead to objectifying people into an “it”? At this point, Swinton looks at the essence of person-centred care that is becoming more popular in working with seniors and other settings. With person-centred care, instead of applying general principles that arise from treating people as objects of study, the goal is “to come close to people, to move beyond their diagnosis and to treat them in ways that acknowledge their value and worth” (137). “It implies recognition, respect, and trust and is not based on the presence or absence of particular capacities” (140). When we relate to dementia people in this way, we move from an “I-it” relationship to forming what well-known philosopher Martin Bruber calls an “I-Thou” relationship. Swinton works extensively with Bruber’s understanding of the I-Thou relationship and applies it to caring for people with dementia. It is in this I-Thou relationship that spirituality becomes front and centre. To relate with a dementia person as a Thou “requires a non-objectifying moving toward the Other and into the space between one’s self and the Other” (142). For Buber, the Thou in the I-Thou relationship with another is more than the person’s personhood. When we enter this Thou relationship, we experience both the personhood of the person and the personhood of God. Swinton quotes Bruber when he writes, “As a Person, God gives personal life; he makes us as persons become capable of meeting him and with one another” (146). The best way to understand this notion of Person in the I-Thou relationship is to equate the experience of Person with the experience of Being, the experience of being in the present moment where you experience yourself one with everything and others and no sense of separation between you and your experience of that moment. Swinton describes it this say, “the I-Thou relationship is a place of experiencing, without conceptualizing, of being without knowing. In this sense, there is indeed a deep apophaticism about the I-Thou relationship” (147). When we understand personhood in this way, as the experience of Being that arises in the I-Thou relationship that makes us a human Being, then “to be a person has to do with possessing a way of being rather than a set of capacities ( 155). Seen in this way, where humans are part of a human community of I-Thou relationships, “the dual and unshakable premises of birthright and mutual recognition bind together all of its members. Membership of that community is biological and genealogical and therefore clear and irrevocable” (157). From this understanding of the I-Thou relationship, Swinton unpacks what it means to experience Being in human form. To be human is “to be (1) dependent and contingent, (2) embodied, (3) relational, (4) broken and deeply lost, and (5) loved and profoundly purposeful” (161). Let me unpack briefly how Swinton understands each aspect of being a human being. By being dependent and contingent, Swinton means we, as humans, are totally dependent on God. Everything we receive and experience is truly a gift and expression of Being. “There is nothing that anyone has that has not been given to them” (161). Swinton’s notion of embodiment builds on the Christian theological notion that we, as humans, are both “formed of earth”, that is physical creatures, and “formed by spirit” through God breathing spirit into us (166). This is another way of saying what Swinton describes earlier in his book as humans being both physical/neurological and psychological/spiritual. In terms of Swinton’s third aspect of relational, we experience ourselves on a personal level through relationship with others, self, and Being (178). “To be human,” Swinton notes, “is to be loved; to live humanly is to love” (180). The fourth aspect of being human involves our experience of being broken and fallen. By choosing to turn away from our experience of Being, we develop coping patterns including experiencing our sense of mortality and fear of death which affects every aspect of our life (183). Seen through this lens, dementia is not judged as a sin but rather an aspect of the painful chaotic reality of life. Finally, Swinton concludes that “nothing exists apart from God’s desire for it to exist” (184) This means that dementia has some form of meaning or divine purpose within life. Dementia is not a punishment or the work of the devil but rather “a mystery that is firmly rooted in God’s creative and redemptive actions in and for the world” (184). These five aspects are all elements of our experience of Being in human form, all elements that will arise as we relate in I-Thou relationships with people with dementia, in fact, with any other human being including ourselves. Swinton, toward the end of his book, explores the issue of memory. Polls indicate that people fear dementia more than cancer (187). Furthermore, people have fears like, “if we can’t remember who we are, how can we know who we are” (190). Such fears show how our sense of identity and personhood is often tied up with our memories. There are also fears around people’s faith and the afterlife. Will my loved one with dementia know God or go to Heaven when she dies when she can no longer remember? To answer these questions around memory, Swinton draws upon the reflections of Christine Bryden as she wrestles with her diagnosis of early onset dementia. Swinton writes, “Bryden recognizes that her memory and her cognitive faculties are slipping away. But she frames that slippage quite differently. She trusts that God will remember her. When her memory has gone, her true self will continue to exist and ultimately even flourish in the Resurrection” (194). What does it mean for God to remember us when we have dementia and can’t remember? To answer this question, Swinton draws upon research about human memory. He notes that “memories are constructed not only out of what we think we remember in a historical sense, but also in accordance with our current needs, desires, and the ways we see the world and expect it to be” (p. 208). Our human memories are not accurate tape recordings of our past but rather memories that often shift each time we revisit them based on our beliefs, needs, and longings. As a result, Swinton concludes that “human memory is inevitably flawed and open to deception and distortion. This, combined with our inherent fallenness, means that there is a real sense in which we can never know who we really are” (p 210). However, Swinton claims, “we may be uncertain about who we are, but God is not. God remembers us properly. God remembers us because God knows us” (210). It is apparent God’s memory is quite different from human memory. Swinton highlights that God’s memory “is different not only because it’s not a neurological act, but also because God’s memory holds and remembers us as we actually are, not simply as we think we are or have been” (213). Furthermore, God’s memory does not “simply recall events and actions, not least because past, present, and future aren’t concepts that can be applied to God. God sits outside of time, and thus there is, in a sense, no past to recall and no future to move toward” (214). If God’s memory is not found in our human brains and is also located outside time, that means that the “concept of memory is broader than our standard neurological and psychological definitions” (214). It suggests that God’s memory as well as the divine aspects of I-Thou relationships arise from a place or dimension beyond the physical and psychological dimensions of our earthly world, what the mystic traditions commonly call the "The Unmanifest" or Void. It is from this divine place of memory that God remembers us. However, this sense of God remembering is not God helping us recall our past experiences. Instead, Swinton claims, “when God remembers, God acts” (216). By this, he means that God “re-members” us by restoring us from a fragmented sense of self into a state of wholeness in God (216). Anything God forgets no longer exists (214). It is gone. Anything God remembers become part of our current experience of self. This means that “we are who we are because God remembers us and holds us in who we are. We are who we are now and we will be who we will be in the future because God continues to remember us (218). In conclusion, Swinton asserts, “while many things are forgotten by human beings—indeed, sometimes everything is forgotten—nothing is forgotten by God unless God chooses to forget. There is no reason to think God chooses to forget those who have advanced dementia” (218).
In summarizing the key insights within Swinton’s book, “Dementia: Living in the Memories of God”, it is clear that Swinton’s framework of understanding dementia is very different than the framework people with dementia often experience in the world. His framework of dementia care is more wholistic and person-centred and provides ways for people with dementia to experience God’s spirit in the midst of their dementia experience, even when they no longer have access to their memories. Questions to ponder:
Gord Alton MDiv RP CASC Supervisor Educator The Christian season of Advent and Christmas has taken on special meaning for me this year. During this religious time, Christians remember and prepare for the birth of Christ, who we see as the Saviour of the world. What makes this year different from other years is that I am deeply in touch with our need for a Saviour within our world and culture, but also within the people I see in my palliative work and private practice ministry. In this blog, I want to explore this need we all have, whether we know it or not, for a Saviour. Let me begin with the broader context. The reality of COVID-19 has shocked our human civilization to the core. It has revealed how vulnerable we truly are. On the personal level, COVID-19 threatens our physical health, our mental and emotional health, our social and family connections, our paying jobs, and our ability to pay our rent, mortgage, monthly bills, save for retirement, even to buy food for our tables. At the personal level, we have never encountered anything close to this disruption since the Great Depression when my Dad was born some 86 years ago. On the societal and cultural level, the negative impacts have been just as disruptive with many industries, businesses, and organizations struggling to survive financially as COVID-19 challenges our ability to gather safely in any significant numbers whether it be at work, shopping, travelling, eating out, enjoying sports, music, movies, or enjoying religious, cultural, or communal celebrations. With so many aspects of our lives affected or on hold right now, we struggle with how to bring meaning and purpose to our lives. As we grapple with the negative realities of COVID-19 at both the personal and societal levels, there is a profound powerlessness that we feel. There is so much in our lives that is beyond our control to change. It is this helplessness that causes us to look beyond ourselves for help, to search for a saviour that can help restore order to our lives so that we can again feel some sense of power and control over our lives. When people feel such powerlessness, they often look for their saviour in the world, some political or religious leader who can help them deal with their lost of control. I am suspicious that this is why Donald Trump became President of the USA in 2016. Many people, feeling very powerlessness in their lives, saw him as their potential saviour who could save them. We see similar dynamics in our country of Canada with the tremendous pressure Canadians are placing on our political leaders, both national and provincial, in solving our COVID-19 problem. It is a difficult time to be a leader for there is little hope that our political leaders can meet all of these saviour expectations placed upon them. When these expectations are not met, people often crucify the saviours they at one time hoped would save them from their helplessness. This is how our desire for a saviour gets played out in the world. We are looking for a Divine saviour, a Saviour that transcends the human saviours we see in the world. I see this same longing for this type of Saviour very evident in my ministry in palliative care, spiritual direction and psychotherapy. In my palliative care ministry, the issue of powerlessness is front and centre. No one can beat death. I often hear clients share many stories of how they have arisen above many challenges in life, whether it be health, relationships, or financial issues. As one client said to me, “Gord, I have been a problem solver all my life, but I can’t solve this problem.” Most people look to their health care professionals as their saviours, but when clients receive a palliative care prognosis, they realize their heath care saviours have failed them. They feel totally helpless. Their life is outside their control. Now, what human can be their saviour? When I make my first visit as a spiritual care provider, I know that part of the reason I have been invited is to discern if I could be their saviour in some form. Sometimes, I am not invited back for a second time; I was not the “saviour” they were looking for. They don't realize it yet but they are seeking a different kind of Saviour. In my private practice of providing psychospiritual therapy and spiritual direction, I often encounter a similar issue of powerlessness. This is most evident in people who wrestle with mental health like depression, anxiety, addictions, anger, self hatred, compulsion disorders, etc. They find themselves wrestling with emotional and mental dynamics that are beyond their control. The more they try to fix themselves through managing their thoughts, emotions, and behavior patterns, the worst their mental health issue becomes. They feel helpless to fix themselves. Some of them realize they need a Saviour to bring about the transformation and healing they are seeking. However, I have come to realize that this sense of brokenness is not unique to people struggling with mental health. This feeling of fallenness is more universal in nature for I see it also in my spiritual direction ministry. People come to me for spiritual direction with the hope of deepening their relationship with God, others, and all of reality. As they work with me, they soon discover the ego structures within their soul that interfere with their longing to experience oneness with Spirit and life. Most people try to transform themselves by their own efforts though managing their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors and doing spiritual practices with the hope of experiencing God more deeply. But it often does not work for them. The more they try, the more they become frustrated in not feeling the gracious presence of God. They soon realize that they are powerless in deepening their relationship with God. It is beyond their ability. They need someone beyond themselves, a Saviour to help them do something they cannot do for themselves. What do we make of this need for a Saviour that is present both within our society but also the individual soul? It turns out that this human need for a Saviour is not just a present phenomenon but has appeared throughout history. Nicholas Gier, professor of philosopher and religion, wrote an essay in 1979 in the Journal of Dharma titled “The Savior Archetype” where he observes that saviours are at the heart of the major religions. In fact, he noted that there are significant parallels between these “saviors’ attributes, experiences, and plans for human redemption” (Gier, par. 8) . These parallels include:
For those of us raised in the Christian tradition, these traits of the Saviour echo almost exactly with the Saviour of Jesus Christ in our tradition. And yet, as Gier outlines in his article, there are similar stories about Saviours within older religions like Hinduism, Buddhism, and Zoroastrianism. Some scholars have argued that these religious similarities are due to cross-fertilization happening between the different cultures and histories of our world. However, Gier comes to a different conclusion. He claims that the "Savior Archetype was not the result of a direct interchange of ideas; rather, it was sui generis to the various religious cultures. The Savior Archetype manifests itself as something deeply psychological, and, therefore, it is not primarily due to religious syncretism. Edward Carpenter’s assessment is correct: 'It is impossible, I think, not to see that the myriad worship of saviors all over the world, from China to Peru, can only be ascribed to the natural workings of some…law of human and tribal psychology springing up quite spontaneously and independently, and (so far) unaffected by mere contagion of local tradition' (Pagan and Christian Creeds [New York: Harcourt, Brown & Co., 1924], p. 155)" (Gier, par. 10). In other words, Gier claims that the Saviour dynamic or archetype emerges from the soul of humans and the deeper common soul of humanity In saying this, Gier is not claiming that no interchange of religious ideas happened between the religions. There is clearly evidence of some sharing between religions. However, he claims their “research has shown solid parallels in terms of the general characteristics of the archetype, but the specific details are most always different. This leads us to conclude that although the Savior Archetype was in place, each religion supplied its own detail according to its own cultural and religious history” (Gier, par 13). It is important to see this Saviour archetype as more than an expression of our common human need for a Saviour that arises during times of profound helplessness. It goes deeper than that. The Saviour archetype points to a deeper spiritual dynamic within our soul and reality that emerges when we find ourselves in a place of powerlessness, when we surrender and trust a deeper spiritual flow of life. When we embrace these moments of surrender, we often find ourselves being ministered to by a Saviour archetype, what Christians call the Indwelling Christ or God’s Spirit or the Holy Spirit. Followers of other world religions would have their own names for this internal Saviour archetype. When we understand the Saviour archetype in this way, we begin to comprehend how the Saviours found at the centre of the world religion became embodiements of this Savior archetype. They were not born saviours at their births like when a royal couple gives birth to a prince or princess. No, they became Saviours by learning how to be with their powerlessness in a prayerful surrendering way that allowed them to follow and merge with the Saviour archetype that was emerging in their soul. As they united with this Saviour dynamic, they began to embody this spiritual energy and guidance and manifest it into our world through their lives. This is why people came to see these spiritual leaders as incarnations of God or Divine Reality in our earthly world. This is why these humans, like Jesus, became seen as Saviours in our world. I don’t know if this is true for the Saviour figures of the other world religions, but Jesus, in the Christian tradition, never pointed to himself as the Saviour of the World. He was a faithful Jewish rabbi who believed what the Torah taught, that there is no other Saviour besides Yahweh (Isaiah 43:11). Many people, during Jesus’ time and following, have seen Jesus as their Saviour but Jesus always pointed to God as his Saviour. Jesus knew God was the source of every dynamic in his life, the source of his wisdom, the source of his healing, the source of his love, compassion, and grace, the source of his power. In the gospel of John, we read Jesus saying, “I can do nothing on my own, but only what I see God doing; for whatever I perceive God willing, I can do” (John 5: 19). But how did Jesus get to this place of knowing how to allow almost every aspect of his life to be an expression of God’s spirit? Jesus had become a friend to his experience of powerlessness. He knew that every time he was in a place of trust and surrender, the spirit of God would manifest in his life in whatever form that was needed at that time whether it be love, compassion, forgiveness, courage, peace, anger, or acceptance. Jesus had matured in this faith in God to the point where he prayerfully asked himself often, “not my will but your will be done.” From this place of trust, Jesus responded through actions, words, listening, or often non-action by compassionately bearing the suffering of others for that was all that could be done. I think this was the message that Jesus was trying to pass on to his disciples and future followers. He was trying to show them how to follow this God that he was following. He was trying to model for them how to become a friend to their own powerlessness experience. It is only when his followers learned to live from this posture of trusting surrender in God would they become able to “do the works Jesus had been doing, and even greater works then these” (John 14:12). In many ways, Jesus was trying to get his followers to follow the Saviour archetype within their soul, that spiritual dynamic within the ground of all reality that is always present and eternal. Now, we are finally getting to the place of understanding why Advent and Christmas have taken on new meaning for me this year. I am very much in touch with this need for a Saviour, both in our world with its many complex seemingly unsolvable problems but also in the people I meet in my ministries. The experience of powerlessness is very prominent everywhere, and I feel it very much myself. But this is where the season of Advent and Christmas provides me hope. Through doing the spiritual readings and practices associated with Advent, we connect to our powerlessness and begin to touch into our need for and experience of a Savior. We join the Jewish people as they long for the Messiah to come to free them from their oppression and economic struggles found in their daily lives. We unite with Mary and Joseph in their powerlessness as they wrestle with what it means to have a Saviour being born into their personal lives—the waiting, the confusion, the uncertainties, the whys, etc. We also wonder with Mary and Joseph as they receive signs from God in these moments of powerlessness that confirm that God is soon bringing a Saviour into their lives. We identify with Mary’s and Joseph’s helplessness when they discover there is no room for them in any inns in Bethlehem for Mary to give birth to the Saviour within her. Then, we are surprised by the people who are open to receiving this Saviour, lowly shepherds, the outcasts of society, and astrologers and scholars from foreign lands. No religious leaders. No wealthy land owners or powerful leaders. It seems that only people who understand the experience of surrendering, trusting, and following are open to seeing the signs of a Saviour. As we travel this Advent journey, we find that aspects of this Christmas story connect with our own personal story and our need for a Saviour. As a result, when Christmas Day finally does come, we find ourselves celebrating with Mary and Joseph and all the surprising onlookers at the wonder of this miracle. We are not just celebrating the birth of the Saviour born in a manger some 2000 years ago, but we are also celebrating the reality of this Saviour in the midst our lives now. Thanks be to God.
Bibliography Retrieved (Dec 13, 2020) https://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/ngier/307/archetype.htm. (Adapted from N. F. Gier, "The Savior Archetype," Journal of Dharma 4 [1979], pp. 255-267, with additions and deletions) Questions to Ponder:
Gord Alton MDiv, RP, CASC Supervisor-Educator As I work within the Hospice and Palliative Care environment, I see many people wrestling with the conflict between the desire to live and the desire to die. Often these desires within our culture are judged in opposite ways; the desire to live is good and the desire to die is bad. I have found it interesting to learn that Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, believed that humans had two opposing sets of instincts, the life instinct and the death instinct. The life instinct included the survival, pleasure, and sex drives, often captured by Freud in the term Eros (Verywellmind, par. 3). In contrast, he “maintained that life instincts were opposed by the self-destructive death instincts, known as Thanatos” (Verywellmind, par. 5). In this blog, I want to re-interpret Freud’s life/death instinct framework in a way that shows the relevance of the death instinct within the process of spiritual transformation and palliative care. Freud is well known for saying the provocative quote, “The goal of all life is death” (Verywellmind, par. 8). He believed that people typically channeled their death instincts outwardly through acts of aggression or inwardly through acts of self harm or suicide (Verywellmind, par. 8-9). In support of his theory, "Freud noted that people who experience a traumatic event would often re-enact that experience. From this, he concluded that people hold an unconscious desire to die but that the life instincts largely temper this wish” (Verywellmind, par. 10). I want to propose another way to interpret what Freud labeled the death instinct, one that fits with the evidence that Freud provided for the death instinct, but one that resonates with the teachings of the Christian tradition and the Diamond Approach, both spiritual frameworks that I have come to value in my life. It is clear that Freud was talking about physical death when he explained the death instinct. Freud believed that this death instinct was an internal desire that all people were born with. However, there is another way to understand this death instinct beyond physical death, namely spiritual death. Through this spiritual death lens, the death instinct takes on a new profound meaning. Seen through this framework, the death instinct is actually an expression of our life instinct. To understand the death instinct within this new framework, we have to understand the spiritual dying process. Within the Christian tradition, there are many Bible verses that talk about the importance of “dying to the self.” Here are four core scriptures that teach this important practice of spiritual dying.
All of these Christian scriptures talk about spiritual dying in different ways, through crucifying ourselves with Christ, through denying ourselves and taking up the cross daily, through dying to ourselves, and through emptying ourselves. As Christians, this spiritual dying process makes total theological sense for we often struggle with our fallen or sinful nature in our lives as taught by our Christian tradition. To be free of this pain and struggle caused by our fallen self through spiritual death would be a wonderful gift to discover and experience in life. Where the challenge comes is that the Christian tradition does not have a clear psychological understanding of how experientially this spiritual dying or transformational process happens. To understand this spiritual dying process better, I have turned to the Diamond Approach, a psychospiritual framework that I have been studying and using for my own spiritual transformation journey for 14 plus years now. Within the Diamond Approach, the experience of spiritual dying involves dying to all the dynamics of our egoic self within our human soul. These ego dynamics include our mental chatter, our emotional management strategies, our coping skills, our relationship patterns, our compulsions and attachments, all our historical preconditionings from our past. This process of spiritual transformation is an intentional ongoing journey happening over many years involving numerous moments of egoic deaths when through mental insights and emotional surrendering experiences, psychic structures within our mind, heart, will, and body dissolve or become digested and thus disappear. With each egoic death that happens, our soul relaxes and settles a little bit more. . When we have experienced many of these egoic dying moments, we begin to have moments of mental peace and inner stillness, moments when all mental and ego activities cease. At first, we experience these moments as expressions of Being or God’s spirit entering our lives. We see ourselves as fallen human beings who are having God’s experiences, and we are thankful to God for these restful and restorative experiences. But, as these moments of peace and inner internal calmness become more frequent and deepen, a shift in identity occurs within us. Instead of being identified with our fallen egoic self, we realize that during these moments of inner silence, we are now experiencing our True or Divine Nature. This is who I am. That shift in identity is profound for now we have a longing to follow the spiritual journey that involves dying over and over again to this fallen egoic self that we have taken ourselves to be for years.. There are many levels of dying to the egoic self, and each level of spiritual dying involves letting go of a certain ego identity. Our ego identities are often attached to our possessions, our relationships, our beliefs and self images, our thoughts, emotions, actions, and longings, our physical bodies, and in the end, our sense of self awareness and consciousness. As we learn to hold our attachments loosely and allow ourselves to rest more deeply into our Divine nature where we feel we are part of God, there will be eventually times when we will settle into what the Diamond Approach calls the Death Space. This Death Space is a space that every person experiences in their physical dying process, but we can also experience this Death Space ahead of time as we spiritually die to our ego’s attachment to our physical body. Almaas, cofounder of the Diamond Approach, describes this process of descending into the Death Space in this way: "Attachment to the body then is not just attachment to the physical body, but also to what the physical body means to you, all the pleasures and the comforts and the safety you believe it gives you. There is nothing wrong with these things, it’s the attachment to them that creates the misunderstanding that is experienced as frustration and hell. I’m not saying you shouldn’t want all these pleasures, that’s not the point. The point is, the attachments to them will inevitably cause suffering. Becoming free from this attachment has to do with becoming free from the attachment to pleasure, all kinds of pleasure. It is the loss of attachment to physicality, to your body from the inside. It’s not a matter of image here, but of direct sensation, direct feeling. This identification is very intimate; it is something you’ve lived with all your life, and you always believe it’s you. Ultimately, it gives you comfort. When you see this identification for what it is, it also will dissolve, because it isn’t any more real than your driver’s license identity. This realization in turn brings in a new space, a new awareness of the void, what we call “death space.” At this point a person experiences what is called death. It is what happens when somebody dies physically; they actually disconnect from the body. Death is a deep dark black emptiness; of course, this death space can be experienced in life. You don’t have to physically die; all that is required is to lose the physical attachment to the body, and the death space will be there. You will know what death is, you will know that you are not the body, and then the identification with the body will be lost" (Diamond Heart Book Two, pg. 55). This Death Space is what our soul longs to experience, especially when we are experiencing profound suffering in our lives. Our soul wants to be free of all internal suffering. It wants to experience this profound peace and inner calmness that can only arise when all mental and emotional egoic activity stops. This profound peace found in the spiritual death of our egoic self is the essence of the death instinct, as I have come to understand it. Most things Freud taught about the death instinct are still true, but I believe that instead of seeking physical death, our soul is seeking spiritual death. For example, people act out their death instinct through aggression hoping to remove the person in their life who is causing them stress and suffering. If people worked at transforming the ego structures tied to this person behind this stress and suffering, they would find that this death instinct would diminish. Freud interpreted the suicide impulse in the same light; physical death means end of personal suffering. If suicidal people were taught that their soul is seeking internal rest and peace rather than physical death, this would open the door to exploring the problematic ego structures that are causing the stress and overwhelmness and the suicide feelings so that more inner peace could finally be experienced. Finally, when clients re-enact past traumatic experiences, their soul is seeking to find resolution from that unresolved trauma so that they again can experience internal peace and stillness, that is spiritual death, not physical death as Freud theorized. Seen through the framework of spiritual death, Freud’s well-known quote makes total sense, “the goal of all life is death.” Understanding the death instinct as the soul’s longing for spiritual death highlights the importance of spiritual care during the palliative care journey. This is why when we know we are dying, we want to do a “therapeutic life review” with our spiritual care provider. Our soul is seeking to find ways to settle to a more peaceful state in the midst of our upcoming death. Part of this life review involves celebrating our accomplishments and treasuring our positive moments in life. But just as important, we frequently bring up painful moments from our past that we are not at peace with, whether it be harm that was done to us or harm we have caused others. Our soul is seeking ways to process these traumatic memories bonded up in our egoic self with the hope of understanding and finding meaning along with the possibility of healing through forgiveness, reconciliation, or letting go of the pain. As was noted earlier, there are many levels of dying to the egoic self within the spiritual dying process. What is different about this process when we are physically dying is that this spiritual dying process is no longer voluntary. It is forced upon us whether we want it or not. Through our physical dying journey, we are forced to release our attachments to possessions, relationships, control of our life, and in the end, our attachments to our physical bodies and everything we connect to our sense of ourselves, our thoughts, emotions, longings, memories, and consciousness. As you can imagine, this surrendering journey is hard and causes us many feelings of loss and grieve. And yet, without this spiritual dying, these attachments create even more immense suffering placing us in a painful paradox. On one side of this paradox, our egoic self is resisting surrender and death at every turn. At the same time, due to this immense suffering, our deeper soul has a profound longing to surrender and spiritually die, to be free of this distress. This is why it is crucial for the spiritual caregiver to help us practice the art of surrendering and spiritually dying over and over again. But what are we surrendering to? This is a key question for us, who are dying, for our egoic self does not believe in surrendering. I remember Wayne Dwyer, a popular spiritual writer, defining ego as the dynamic within us that “Edges God Out”. This makes total sense to me. Many of the powerful parts of our ego formed during those times in our life that were painful and traumatic, times when we experienced God as not being there for us. No wonder our egoic self does want us to surrender to the mystery of God for it imagines the same pain and trauma happening all over again. And yet, to not practice surrender in the dying journey leads to so much more pain and suffering for us who are dying. So how do we learn to surrender again? To heal this fear of spiritual dying, it is important that our spiritual caregiver works intentionally at helping us rediscover our faith in God or the Divine Mystery again. This involves inviting us to explore those deeper experiences in life when we experienced the sacred whether it be through our religious community, nature, family and friends, silence and spiritual practices, arts and music, etc. What makes these sacred experiences so special is that in those moments, we were experiencing a foretaste of heaven, times when we were no longer connected to our egoic self but connected to a deeper part of our soul, one that was united with the mystery of God. If we unpack these sacred times even more, we will discover that these special moments arose when we allowed ourselves to surrender to the present moment where we encounter God. As we re-experience these sacred times and have other divine moments, our trust in the mystery of God begins to heal, and heaven becomes more real and less fearful for us.
Questions to Ponder:
Gord Alton MDiv RP CASC Supervisor-Educator Because of my new spiritual care provider role within hospice and palliative care, I am doing a lot of processing about what it means to help people die. The physically dying process is understood well but death is not just a physical process. It also involves a spiritual dying process. Over the past 2 months, I have been digesting an eighteen video series titled “The Wisdom of Life and Death” taught by A. H. Almaas, co-founder of the Diamond Approach. I have been a student of a Diamond Approach spiritual school in Ontario for over 14 years now. Within this video series, Almaas shares how the process of spiritual dying that has to happen in the physical dying process is very similar to the spiritual dying process that is necessary for spiritual growth and maturation. In this blog, I want to highlight some of the key teachings that Almaas shares about the spiritual dying process. Within the Diamond Approach, spiritual dying involves the dying to the egoic self. We are born with a spacious soul but as we develop as children and then adults, we develop an egoic self or ego for short. This ego structure is made up of many parts that consists of all our beliefs, coping patterns, self images, attachments, object relationships, compulsions, relationship patterns, etc. that we have developed throughout our lifetime, many of them developed during difficult times in our life. Our ego is also very self-centred, always looking for ways to avoid pain, especially the pain within our unresolved memories, and to seek after pleasure and our desires. When we are operating from our egoic self, we are trying to manage our life to make life the way our ego wants it to be. When this happens, we rarely experience the present moment as it really is. This is unfortunate for when we live from the spacious part of our soul, that part of our soul which is free of the structures of our ego, we no longer seek to control our life. Instead, we experience the present moment in life as it really is, as it is emerging from one moment to the next. When this happens, we are living what the Diamond Approach calls a “selfless life", a life free of the influence of ego. When we live in this way, we notice that there is a dynamic flow to life and within this flow, we notice divine qualities arising in response to what we are experiencing, essential qualities like compassion, joy, love, truth, strength, grace, resilience, support, power, wonder, curiosity etc. Our soul loves this place of selflessness, a place where we experience peace, total acceptance, and unconditional love. As adults, we find that there are two parts to our soul, the spacious part of our soul and the egoic structured part of our soul. The secret to living this selfless life more often is learning to die spiritually, that is, dying to our ego and no longer following the control patterns of our egoic self. But how does one do this, die spiritually? It means to do the very opposite to what our ego wants. Instead of joining our ego in managing our life, we seek to surrender to the present moment and allow ourselves to join the flow of life, and experience the qualities of Essence or God’s spirt that emerge in that flow of life. Every time we practice surrender to the present moment, we are dying to the pulls of our ego and living a selfless life. As you can well imagine, our ego is hugely resistant to letting go of its role of managing our life. This is why it is so important to see clearly the pain that our ego creates in our life. Only then will we be motivated to begin the process of spiritually dying, that is, separating slowly from our attachment to joining our egoic self through the process of surrendering to the flow of the present moment. One key reason why our ego creates so much psychic pain is because it resists continually the transitory nature of life. The reality of death forces us to see that life is always changing, always going through the dynamics of birth, life, and death. We see this pattern in nature with the seasons, the life cycle of plants and animals, and everywhere in human experience. There are beginnings and endings. Growth happens. Aging occurs. Decisions occur. Nothing in life stays the same. However, our ego fights this truth at every turn for it wants life to be static. This is why our ego seeks to create attachments; it is trying to block the flowing nature of reality so it no longer flows. It seeks to manage and control our life so nothing changes. We become attached to our loved ones; we become attached to our possessions; we become attached to our youth and good health; we become attached to our friends; we become attached to our self images; we become attached to our jobs; we become attached to behaviors. The list of attachments are endless. And these attachments are not just positive; they can also be negative. We can become attached to negative self images, negative feelings, negative experiences in life, even negative people. Our ego seeks stability, not what is good for us. Of course, all these attachments don’t change the reality of the transitoriness of life. Just as death is inevitable, so all forms of change or little deaths are inevitable too. But every time a form of dying happens, our ego fights that change for it is attached to that person or thing or experience never changing. In many ways, that emotional attachment is part of the structure of our egoic self. When that structure falls apart, our ego feels like it is literally dying. No wonder we experience so much emotional distress around change and in particular around death for the process of dying involves many changes. The greater the emotional attachment, the greater the resistance from our ego, and the greater the emotional pain when this attachment collapses. When we understand our ego in this way, we can begin to understand why it is so helpful for people to practice spiritual dying before their physical death. We can also perceive what spiritual dying looks like. The process of spiritual dying involves dying to those egoic attachments before the realities of life force us to release them in the final act of death. It is important to realize that spiritual dying does not mean we can’t enjoy our loved ones or enjoy our job or enjoy our friends or enjoy our health or enjoy our youth. No, when we surrender to the present moment, we enjoy these moments fully. However, we enjoy them knowing that someday that they will no longer be possible. Someday, these experiences in our life will end, will die. But that fact of dying, in whatever form it takes, helps us cherish these moments now even moreso. Accepting the reality of death helps us treasure life more. In mid-October, 2020, I participated in a webinar on Medical Assistance in Death (MAiD) and Bereavement. One of the speakers was Dr. Gary Rodin, chief researcher at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre. He highlighted that people choose MAiD not because of physical pain but mainly because of non-physical pain. This non-physical pain is caused primarily by all the attachments our ego possesses in life. He stressed the importance of helping people process this non-physical pain long before the last few weeks of their life. If not, by then their nonphysical pain is so intense that MAiD seems like the only option available to help them deal with their pain. This is why Dr. Rodin developed CALM (Cancer And Living Meaningful) therapy, a form of counselling that helps people process their nonphysical pain. In many ways, CALM is about helping people start working at spiritual dying before they face the immediate reality of death. The journey of spiritually dying is not a journey that we can complete in a week-long retreat or even over a year. It is a process of developing the practice of prayerfully surrendering to the present moment, as much as one is able, rather than managing one’s life experience. Many of the spiritual practices like prayer, meditation, contemplation, and rituals within Christianity and other religions involve this surrendering process, letting go of managing our life and allowing God’s spirit to minister to us in the present moment. In the video series, The Meaning of Life and Death, Almaas highlights that when people work at this path of spiritual dying intentionally, they will eventually encounter moments when they enter what he calls a “death space”. For those of us who are meditators, there are times during meditation when we enter this death space briefly for a few moments. This occurs when, during meditation, all activity in our mind stops and then, we hear our meditation bell chimed, and we cannot believe our meditation time is over. Where did the time go? At first, I believed that I fell asleep during meditation, but when I examined closely this experience, I eventually realized that this was not always true. There were times when there was no drowsiness before I lost awareness, and no tiredness afterwards. In fact, I was alert, often felt refreshed, more enlivened afterwards. This timeless space that we can touch into briefly during meditation or centering prayer is the beginning of what Almaas calls the death space. As we work at dying to our ego more and more, our experiences of this death space will deepen. When we enter fully into this death space, Almaas teaches that all our images of self eventually disappear. Since our mind believes these self images are real, it actually feels like we are physically dying, but it is only an emotional experience. Not only do our self-images disappear, but so do our images of others which is the basis of many of our relationships. When this happens, Almaas notes that it feels internally like people are leaving us, and we feel are all alone. If we allow our experiences of this death space to deepen even further, we will eventually enter what Almaas calls an annihilation space. It is here that all suffering begins to cease for in this space, our sense of self awareness or consciousness disappears. All our experiences of self stop. If we allow this annihilation space to develop fully, Almaas teaches that we will notice that the experience of life all around us stops. In this place, Almaas claims we merge with the Absolute. As Christians, we might say we merge with and become one with God, the Alpha and Omega. We are dead spiritually, do not exist experientially, for a moment in time. Then, Almaas highlights that we are spiritually reborn from this place of Unmanifested Reality. As Christians, we might called it the Unmanifested God or the Void as it is described in Gen. 1:1. Our consciousness re-emerges along with all aspects of our egoic self that we are still attached to, aspects that we still need to work at understanding more so that we can release more of these attachments in the future. What I have outlined very briefly is how I understand Almaas explaining the spiritual dying process of the human soul at the deepest levels happening within the living experience of human life. Using this as a framework, he sees the process of spiritual death occurring in a similar way when we physically die. The only difference is that spiritual death is forced upon us due to the physical dying of our body. People, as they are physically dying, will eventually go through the spiritual dying process. All of the attachments within our ego are confronted by the reality of our death. And, we have no choice but to release these emotional attachments. The deeper these attachments are, the more fear and pain our ego will cause us to experience, and the longer we hold onto them until finally physical death forces their release. Eventually we will enter the death space, where all these attachments are gone. Then, we will enter the annihilation space where our sense of consciousness disappears. We are no longer able to experience anything, not even our existence. It is at this point when our soul disconnects from our physical body. Almaas notes that this can happen a little before physical death, at the point of physical death, or a little after physical death. I remember being present when my brother Jamie died in 1992 and how my experience of him shifted about 15 minutes before he died. One minute I experienced him as a person dying in bed. The next moment that vibrant person was gone, and I was watching a cold impersonal biological engine chugging away in the bed. I watched as that breathing machine chugged along, then sputtered, then finally gave its last gasp before it stopped. Based on what Almaas teaches, that would be an example of when the soul leaves the physical body before death. While we can’t know for sure, Almaas believes that our human soul is reborn again in the afterlife, similar to what happens when we experience spiritual death and rebirth in the spiritual dying process in this earthly life. While Almaas does not believe that God plays judge over our lives and determines what our afterlife experience is like, he does theorize that our experience of the afterlife is shaped by the attachments we choose to hang onto when our consciousness re-emerges in the afterlife…just like what happens when our consciousness is reborn after experiences of spiritual dying occur in our earthly life. If that is so, then the different theories and understandings found in the major religious traditions about what happens in the afterlife (heaven, hell, reincarnation, purgatory, etc.) may provide a glimpse into what the afterlife may be like.
Questions to ponder:
What dig-deep button do you push? When you find yourself stressed, overwhelmed, having too much to do, push to your limits, etc., what dig-deep button do you hit? Brené Brown, well-known research psychologist, claims there are two buttons we can push. The first dig-deep button is one that most people push, one that involves us just striving harder and harder but the treadmill we find ourselves on often never stops, at least not for long before we find ourselves on it again. However, Brown says there is a second dig-deep button we can push, one that takes us to a very different place. In this blog, I plan to explore what it means to push this other dig-deep button. At the promotional session of the group on Wholehearted Living that I, along with 4 other spiritual directors and psychospiritual therapists, facilitated last week, we explored these dig-deep buttons based on Brené Brown’s book, “The Gifts of Imperfection” (2010). Brown describes the dig-deep button as “a secret level of pushing through when we’re exhausted and overwhelmed, and when there’s too much to do and too little time for self-care” (Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection, p. 3). To get a sense what it looks like and feels like to push this dig-deep button, we entered a group process where we shared, popcorn style, the signs that we are using this button. Everyone participated in this process including the five facilitators. Here is the list of what was shared:
Can you relate to that list? Most people can. In this list, we see quite plainly the down-side of always pushing this dig-deep button, but it makes you wonder. Why do we push this dig-deep button if it is so hard on us? We ask ourselves, as a group, a question similar to this, “Why is it so easy to push this dig-deep button?” Here are the responses we shared:
The other thing we noted was the many cultural beliefs and values that promote pushing this dig-deep button. As a group, we noted the following cultural messages:
Wow! You can begin to see why it is so easy to push our “dig deep” button. No wonder we do it so often. This begs a question. Does it have to be this way? Is there another way than pushing this “dig-deep” button? Brené Brown claims there is. From her research, she found that people who lived from a place of wholehearted living also dig deep…but they dig deep differently. Brown discovered that when these people dug deep, they connected to something beyond themselves. Brown developed the acrostic DIG to capture this way of digging deep. D -- Deliberate in their thoughts and behaviors through prayer, meditation, or simply setting their intentions. I -- through this practice of contemplation and becoming connected to Being, they were inspired to make new and different choices G -- Going – this inspiration led them to take action, to live into these choices. (Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection, p. 4) So, what is different about this way of digging deep compared to the previous way? Here, we again turned to the group process to flush out what this means. Here is what we came up with:
Let me go a little beyond what we, as a group, unpack that night. For us to push this other dig-deep button, we have to first become aware of our compulsion to push our own dig-deep button. This is why the pause is so important for it begins to break the compulsion. Once we pause, it then becomes possible for us to become aware of the powerful impulse within us to push this dig-deep button. This new way of digging deeper involves us bringing as much prayerful awareness and presence to this impulse dynamic as we are able. As we bring awareness and presence to this impulse, we will eventually come to realize that there is “me” and there is this impulse within me to push this dig-deep button. This sense of me is often called the "witnessing I" or observing self within certain psychological frameworks. If we allow ourselves to experience this sense of me in all of its fullness, we become aware of our field of consciousness, what is often called the human soul. When we begin see this impulse to push the dig-deep button as not me, we come to see it as an egoic structure within our spacious soul. Every ego structure contains many beliefs, feelings, memories, roles, coping patterns, etc. that keep this psychic structure intact and active in your life. It is very easy for us to become attach to, identify with, and believe this psychic structure is us. This identification is why it is so easy to believe that we have no control or power over using this dig-deep button. In this new way of digging deep, we first practice the pause and bring awareness and presence to our impulse to dig-deep. This prayerful awareness will eventually cause us to separate ourselves from the egoic structure of our dig-deep button. When space in our soul opens up between our witnessing I and our dig-deep button, we are now in a place where God’s spirit can minister to us. We are in a place where we can listen to God and watch how God’s spirit interacts with this dig-deep button and with our life. Due to this space that has opened up, we are more free to set our intentions, to discern more clearly what to do, to reach out to others to help us with our tasks, etc. We are also now in a more open, spacious place where God’s spirit can minister to the various components our dig-deep ego structure. As we inquire into the beliefs of our deep-deep button, God’s spirit reveals new truths to us. As we explore the often-painful memories connected to our button in a prayerful way, these memories slowly transform. As we hold the often-painful emotions connected to our button, God’s spirit brings forth compassion and grace, and these feelings settle. As we inquire into our compulsive patterns, we slowly regain our freedom from the impulse to push our dig-deep button. This added psychospiritual context provides a better sense of what it means to push this other dig-deep button, and how this dig-deep button is so different from the compulsive dig-deep button. Brené Brown, in her book, The Gifts of Imperfections, outlines ten guideposts to whole-hearted living. Each of these guideposts are built on the reasons why we impulsively push our dig-deep button which are listed in the visual above.
In looking at each of these trigger points, Brown provides a guidepost or spiritual practice, one could say, that helps people pause and touch into the more life-giving way of digging deeper. This is what we will be exploring and practicing in the Wholehearted Living group this coming year. The Wholehearted group has its second meeting on Tues evening, October 13 at 7 pm on Zoom. That night we will explore the primary emotion that Brené Brown claims causes us to compulsively push our dig-deep button, namely the experience of shame. We will investigate how shame is so different than all the experiences that cause us to possess fullness of life. Then, in each the following sessions we will explore and practice one of Brown’s guideposts and discover how it helps us push that different dig-deep button which leads to wholehearted living. Questions to Ponder: 1. What does it look and feel like when you are pushing your impulsive dig-deep button? 2. What makes it so easy to push your dig-deep button? 3. What cultural messages did you learn that causes you to push your dig-deep button? 4. Brene Brown describes a second dig-deep button, one that is very different than our impulsive dig-deep button. When you have connected to this other way of digging deeply? What made this possible? How was that experience different from pushing your impulsive deep-dig button? The Wholehearted Living Group on Zoom is still open for new participants. To learn more, please click here and go to our web-page where you can register for the group. Within the Christian tradition, there has been an emphasis on witnessing to God’s good news. Often, this good new was understood by Christians in terms of Jesus Christ, a Jewish prophet named Jesus who lived some 2000 years ago, embodied fully God’s Holy Spirit, died on a cross for the sins of humanity, and then was resurrected three days later on Easter morning to become the resurrected Christ and savior for all people. For those of us, like myself, who grew up in the Church, we were taught these tenets of the Christian faith, and so witnessing this Christian good news meant sharing these beliefs with people outside the Christian faith. For many people outside the Christian faith today, these beliefs make little sense to them, and thus they are not responsive to such witnessing. In recent years, through my work as spiritual director and psychospiritual therapist, I have come to a different understanding of what it means to witness to God’s good news. Instead of witnessing being the sharing of beliefs about God’s good news, it is the sharing of what we are witnessing and seeing, right now in the moment, as others, including myself, experience the manifestations of God’s spirit. Let me explain. For my last sermon at Mannheim Mennonite Church as their pastor, I reflected on the Bible story (Acts 1:6-14) that describes the last time the resurrected Jesus was with his male and female followers before he ascended into Heaven. In this text, Jesus instructs his followers, that after he is gone from their lives, they are to “remain in the city of Jerusalem until they receive the power of God’s holy spirit.” And so we read how these disciples waited as a community in prayer. As I noted in a previous blog (June, 2020), the real purpose of prayer is to nurture our ability to let go of control, to become truly open to God’s spirit ministering to us...through giving us insight, helping us make hard decisions, giving us the inspiration, strength, wisdom, grace, and power we need to follow through with these hard decisions. Jesus concludes his speech to his followers by saying, “When you have received the power of God’s Holy spirit, you will become my witnesses in the city of Jerusalem, in all the regions around Jerusalem, and eventually to the whole world.” When we begin to have experiences of God’s holy spirit, Jesus says we will become witnesses, witnesses of something new and different. These suggests to me that in receiving God’s holy spirit, we will see things differently than before when we were waiting for God’s spirit to come. This new way of seeing is what I described in my previous blog (Aug, 2020). When you read the famous story of Pentecost (Act 2: 1-18), the day the Holy Spirit came in profound ways to the early community of followers of Jesus, this is exactly what happened. We read that not only were their eyes opened, but their tongues were freed and people’s ears were unstuffed. Many people saw and heard the good news in ways that they could understand and truly believe in. It no longer sounded like nonsense. True, we read that some people rejected this experience, scoffed at the followers of Jesus, and claimed they were drunk and crazy. But many people, with their minds, eyes, and ears, now opened came to be followers of God’s Spirit. The day of Pentecost, when the God’s Spirit manifested in profound ways, is often seen within the Christian tradition as the day the Church was born. The Church didn’t exist before these profound spiritual experiences, only afterward. But I want you to notice something. Who was part of this Pentecost experience? There were followers of Jesus, but also many people who were not followers of Jesus. These Pentecost moments when God’s spirit emerges are shared mutual experiences between followers of God and those who are simply seeking, maybe even wondering if God is even real. In other words, the church was born when followers of God and non-followers of God had shared experiences of the Spirit. So, if this is the case, what does it mean to witness in this scenario? To witness certainly does not mean that we, as followers of Jesus, bring the good news to non-followers of Jesus. In fact, I have discovered that the very opposite is true. I find God’s good news arises as I interact with people who are struggling with their faith, whether it be in the Living Room group (a mental health support group) I facilitate, or in my spiritual discovery groups, or in my spiritual direction sessions, or in my Hospice visits with people living with a terminal illness, or with my students in supervision, or even with people in my past congregations. It is in that mutual experience of prayerfully waiting and contemplating and struggling with difficult life and faith questions with others that something mysterious and mystical often happens, when God’s holy spirit emerges in ways that are hard to describe, whether it be moments of insights or experiences of grace, compassion, strength or unexplainable inner peace. Within the Diamond Approach, Almaas talks about three levels of life that we, as humans, can develop. One is the physical dimension of life, how we interact with the physical world with our physical body, and our five senses of sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. The second is the emotional and mental dimension of life where we learn to be aware of our feelings and thoughts, the feelings and thoughts of others, and how to work with and negotiate this aspect of life. As we contemplate these feelings and thoughts, we often notice that many aspects of these mental and emotional dynamics are structured and shaped by ego structures, identities, attachments, compulsions, beliefs, etc. based on our history and lack much freedom, spaciousness, and openness. This is the dimension that most psychotherapists work at. However, there are also experiences that are emergent, that arise when areas of our soul are open, spacious, and free of historical conditions. These essential experiences, Almaas claims, arise from the essential dimension of life, the True Nature of Being/Life, what Christians would call the workings of God’s Holy Spirit. This is the dimension that many psychospiritual therapists and spiritual directors seek to minister in. These sacred moments I described above are not just emotional and mental experiences. There is something more happening in them, something that suggests they are coming from a deeper place within our soul, the essential realms of Life. What is interesting is that often both I and whoever I am with when these sacred experience know it. It is a shared mutual sacred experience for many of those involved. When that happens, how does witnessing happen? It certainly is not me bringing good news to the person or people I am with for it is a mutual experience...just like the first Pentecost experience. One can say that God is the source of this good news. I find my role of witness is highlighting the sacredness of the experience so it is not lost. Sometimes, insights come to me during these sacred times and I share them, but I find that insights can just as easily come from others in the setting, even those who are struggling with their faith or believing in God. And when that happens, my role as witness is to validate and affirm how God’s spirit has spoken through these other people. That is how I have come to understand the role of witness within God’s Kingdom. This is exactly what happened at the Pentecost experience recorded in Acts 2. Did you notice what happened after everyone found themselves speaking or hearing or understanding in their own foreign tongues? Yes, people were amazed. Yes, there were some people who scoffed, and rejected the whole experience as nonsense, expressions of being drunk or on drugs. But something else happened.
A realization came to the disciple Peter. His eyes, mind, and heart became opened and he noticed something he had not noticed before. He quickly stood up and said something similar to this, “Judeans, and everyone who have been part of this experience. Know this! We are not drunk. After all, it is only 9 o’clock in the morning. Rather, what has just happened is referred to in the Jewish scripture, ‘In the last days, God says, I will pour my Spirit on all people. (Not just followers of Jesus but all people.) Your sons and daughters will prophesy. Your young will see visions. Your elders will dream dreams. Upon all of my servants, upon all who are willing to let go and trust me, I will pour out my Spirit in those days and they will prophesy and speak my words.’” Peter was a witness to everyone present to the wonderful workings of God’s spirit that day. As you prayerfully play with these ideas I share in this blog, I encourage you to become a similar type of witness...where you become a witness to the workings of God’s holy spirit in the present moment. For us to become this type of witness, it means that we have to learn how to wait with others and contemplate the dynamics of God’s spirit so that God can open our eyes, hearts, minds, and souls in new ways. In doing so, we will be in a position to more accurately discern and see the many ways that God’s spirit manifests in our midst. That is the good news that people today in our world need to hear and want to hear. They don’t want to hear how God worked in the world 2000 years ago through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. While this is an important part of history for Christians, people today are not able to see the relevance. It is not good news to them. They want to hear how God’s Spirit or the Spirit of the Christ is at work in the world and their life today. Now that is relevant good news. Questions to Ponder: 1. What does it mean for you to witness to God’s good news in today’s world? How has your understanding of being God’s witness changed over the years? Do you feel comfortable being a witness of God’s good news? Why or why not? 2. Almaas talks about three dimensions of life: physical, psychological (mental, emotional), and essential. While clearly essential experiences have mental and emotional aspects to them, they come from a deeper level in our soul. How would you describe these sacred experiences as being different from other psychological experiences in your life? How are they good news to you or others in your presence? 3. When have you found yourself having a sacred experience with other people? What happened? How did witnessing to God’s good news happen in this context? Were you the witness? Was someone else the witness? How was the good news shared? On Sunday, August 30, 2020, I finish my role as pastor of Mannheim Mennonite Church. This will be my last pastorate as I move into full-time ministry as a spiritual director, psychospiritual therapist, and spiritual care provider for Hospice. As I come to the end of my congregational pastoral career, I have given much thought to the decline of the church in our time. There are many reasons for this decline, some which are related to the church. But there are other causes that are tied to our culture and how our culture sees, understands, and experiences life. The dominant worldview of culture now is non-spiritual, that is, our world is material and physical and that there is no such thing as non-physical reality. One such expression of this dominant worldview is the Medical Model of health. In this blog, I want to explore how the Medical Model has transformed psychiatry from a profession that heals the soul to one that heals the brain. This shift also explains a key reason why religions like Christianity are in decline. But this loss of the soul also provides a doorway to how Christianity and other religions can regain their place of relevance within our culture. It requires inviting people to put on glasses that allows them to see in spiritual colour again. Let me explain. This summer, during holidays, I read a fascinating book titled “Healing the Soul in the Age of the Brain.” Within it, the author, Dr. Elio Frattaroli, a psychiatrist, shares how the field of psychiatry has lost its original roots. The word psychiatry comes from two Greek words, “psyche” which translates as “human soul, mind, spirit” , and “iatreia” which translates as “healing” (p. 12). This means that psychiatry is the healing of the human soul. In his book, Frattaroli shows the transition in psychiatry from healing the soul to that of healing the brain. For decades, Frattaroli notes that the treatment of choice within psychiatry was the psychotherapeutic process, that is, a medically trained person listening closely to the person in distress with the goal of addressing the cause of this distress. This involved the “entire process of self-reflection—paying careful attention to one’s conscious experience of anxiety, shame, and guilt, and then to the deeper layers of disowned, less conscious emotions they point to” (19). At the basis of this process is the universal experience of inner conflict between opposing needs and the tendencies within the self that triggers anxiety, shame or guilt (16). Frattaroli notes that this existential inner conflict is “recognized and described by virtually every known religion as the opposition between the Flesh and the Spirit; between the lower passions (our bodily appetites and emotional needs for pleasure and power) and the higher desires (our spiritual yearning toward truth, love, and virtue)” (16). When professionals do this type of listening, Frattaroli claims we are listening to the soul (19). In saying this, Frattaroli is not saying that medications were not important or not used. They were used to manage the symptoms but psychotherapy was seen as the process that led to healing the person’s soul. Frattaroli labels this model of psychiatry as the Psychotherapeutic Model of psychiatry. However, with the emergence and advancement of medicine, the Medical Model began to arise in psychiatry. Frattaroli claims that this model teaches that “anxiety, shame, and guilt are meaningless neurological glitches, and not an urgent call to self reflection. It denies the relevance, and even the existence of inner conflict and discounts the usefulness of psychotherapy as a process of healing self-awareness” (24). Through this Medical Model, the inner conflict within the soul is reduced to a chemistry problem within the brain, a problem that can be solved with the right medication. By 1995, the Medical Model was so pervasive within psychiatry that Frattaroli notes that “in the age of the Brain, dynamic psychotherapy, once the cornerstone of psychiatric training, is no longer considered relevant to psychiatric practice and so is taught minimally, or not all in most psychiatric residency programs (81). As a pastor as well as a psychotherapist, I find this shift in psychiatry very interesting for it provides a key reason why religion and the Christian church are in decline. In many ways, psychiatry and the Christian Church are in a similar business. Both professions are addressing the anxiety, shame, and guilt issues that arise within human experience. As noted above, in the past, psychiatry connected these negatives feelings to the inner conflict people experienced between the dynamics of their Flesh and the dynamics of Spirit. The psychiatric treatment of choice then was psychotherapy. The Christian Church has perceived a similar inner conflict within humanity and addressed the resultant feelings of anxiety, shame, and guilt through spiritual practices, rituals, songs, and teachings. Now, thanks to the pervasiveness of the Medical model, the experiences of anxiety, shame, and guilt are no longer seen by our culture as Soul or Spirit issues. They are seen primarily as issues of the neurological system within our brain, issues that proper medication can managed and even possibly resolve. If this is the case, why would anyone in our culture look to the Christian Church as a relevant place to address their experiences of anxiety, shame, and guilt experiences? They wouldn’t. In fact, the Christian Church has been portrayed by our culture as place where such negative feelings have been induced in people for the selfish purposes of growing the church. If one looks closely at the history of the Christian Church, it does not take much effort to find evidence for such a negative view of the church. However, just because the Medical Model has little space within its philosophy for the dynamics of the Soul and Spirit does not mean that these dynamics don’t exist. It interesting to notice what while the practice of psychotherapy has fallen in use within the profession of psychiatry, it is still used by psychologists, social workers, and by a new group of practitioners who focus entirely on the practice of psychotherapy. In 2015, the College of Psychotherapists of Ontario was formed to regulate these practitioners, including myself. While the Medical Model believes that anxiety, shame, and guilt have its roots in our brain chemistry, there is a growing group of people, like myself, who believe in the older theory that these negative feelings arise because of the inner conflict between the dynamics of Flesh and the dynamics of Spirit within a person. So how do we help people rediscover the dynamics of Spirt and that their soul is more than their biological brain? Within the New Testament, Jesus talks about the importance of sight. Jesus said that he came into the world so that those who don’t see could see, and that those who claim to see would become blind (John 9:39). We live in a culture right now that I sense is very blind to the dynamics of the human soul and Spirit. Our culture now believes and thus teaches that the world is essentially physical, something that you experience through your five senses of sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch. Therefore, all our thoughts, feelings, dreams, images, longings, intuitions, and sensations are simply biochemical and neurological processes that we can see and measure through using scientific devices such as MRIs, etc. But what if our sight and all our physical senses are missing something? What if our scientific devices are not picking up all that there is happening within reality? Are they sensitive enough? And futhermore, what is triggering the biochemical and neurological processes that we are seeing on MRIs that lead us to having thoughts and emotions and intuitions? There are clearly lots of mental and emotional dynamics where we are not the source but rather the receiver of them. One of my directees sent me a video a couple of months ago that I found very useful as a metaphor for what I am trying to describe in this blog. It is a video of a sixty-six year old man receiving a special gift from his family for his birthday. It was a special pair of glasses that looked like sun glasses. He is a little puzzled at first as to why his family think these glasses are so special until he puts them on. Then he takes them off and then puts them back on again. He cannot believe what he is seeing. For the first time in his life, he is seeing colour. He starts to show tears of joy and amazement. (Click here to watch a video of this man seeing colour for the first time) From the day he has been born, he has been colour blind: dark and light and many shades of pale colours in between were all he ever saw. I don’t know when he discovered he was colour blind, when he discovered that most people saw the world differently than him. But now, with these glasses, he sees the beauty of colour, every shade of colour. He sees his world in a totally new way now, one he was not able to see before. One way of describing our culture is that it is spiritually colour blind. Due to the cultural belief that the world is only physical, that is what most people can only see. They are blind to all other dimensions of life. Even many religious organization including churches are spiritual blind, except their spiritual blindness works differently. Many people within these organizations have very set views of how God or Spirit works in the world. As a result, they are blind to all the other ways that God’s spirit works outside their faith framework. This was the blindness that Jesus was talking about when he shared this teaching about blindness to the religious leaders of his time. He was describing them as being spiritually blind. We live in a world where most people's sight only allows them to see the world as just physical or to see the world through black and white lenses, or both. What would happen if when people entered the church doors, they were given a set of glasses to wear all the time, glasses that allowed them see the different colours or dynamics of Spirit in their lives and in the world? No longer would they see the world as just physical; no longer would they see the world in black, white, and gray colours. If people had that experience of church, I suspect our churches would be full to capacity and beyond. Now, it is important to remember that when we put these special glasses on, we will see full colour. We will see all the different shades and expressions of Spirit in our lives and in the world. This includes all the dynamics of love, grace, truth, compassion, kindness, strength, all the fruits of God spirit. That is one half of the spiritual colour spectrum. But we will also see the other half of the spiritual colour spectrum, that is, all the dynamics that cause us that inner conflict that all humans experience, the experiences of anxiety, shame, guilt, and all the negative dynamics of Spirit. Often, these negative dynamics of Spirit are judged as sinful or evil when they are viewed through the black and white lens of good and evil, a common lens in our culture, even in our churches. When this judgement happens, these negative spirits go into hiding within us and within our culture and stay there in the unconscious causing us grief through experiences of anxiety, shame, and guilt and often much violence and pain. However, this judgement does not happen when we view these negative dynamics through spiritually colour glasses. Instead, these negative dynamics are seen as they are, fallen expressions of Spirit, expressions that when held with compassion and grace, by others like a psychotherapist, spiritual director, or a wise mature Christian or person of faith, can come out of hiding and reveal their truth and provide the insights and experiences needed for the person to take the path of transformation home. When we see life in colour spiritually, when we see all the different dynamics of Spirit, we not only see the wonders of God’s creation with nature but also within human experience. We also begin to see more clearly how human fallenness happens but more importantly, we see the paths of transformation that people can follow that will take them to a place of greater human wholeness and fulfillment. All because we now see life through spiritually colour glasses. Questions to ponder:
1. Consider the glasses you wear that shape how you experience the world. What are the blind spots in your glasses? What aspects of life do your beliefs keep you from experiencing? When do your beliefs keep you from seeing and experiencing the spiritual dimensions in life found in the dynamics of your thoughts, emotions, intuitions, and sensations in your body? 2. Consider the colours that your current glasses allow you to see. Which dynamics of Spirit are easy for you to see and experience? Which ones are harder for you to see and experience? 3. When do you find your glasses only allowing you to see in black and white? When do you find yourself judging experiences into good and evil categories ---within others, within yourself? 4. What gifts have you discovered by being able to see the world and your life through spiritually coloured glasses? As a spiritual director and psychospiritual therapist, I have come to realize that my role is to help my clients clean their internal mirror so they can see and hold themselves and their experience with a gracious, unconditional love. When this mirror is clear and allows people experience grace and unconditional love toward themselves, one could call this internal mirror a God mirror. It permits people to see and experience themselves as God does, with an unconditional love that has no aspect of judgement within it. This God-mirror also allows them to experience the different aspects of God’s spirit in response their different life experiences. Unfortunately, most people’s internal mirrors are very dirty and warped causing them to see all their flaws, shortcomings, and mistakes. Instead of unconditional love, they experience readily self judgement and condemnation. In this blog, I want to explore this internal mirror, how it becomes dirty and warped but more importantly, how this internal mirror can again become a God mirror, allowing people to experience directly the unconditional love and grace of God and all the qualities of God’s spirit. When we are born as babies, we don’t really have any mirror or maybe it is more accurate to say that our mirror is so clean, clear, and thin that we see and experience ourselves with no judgement, no sense of good or bad. In fact, as infants, we have no sense of self reflection for that human quality has not been developed yet. We just experience ourselves as just is, and this isness does not only include us but everything within that experience. There is no sense of us and other, only just the experience of life as one reality. When we unpack what unconditional love actually is, we eventually realized that unconditional divine love allows reality to be as it is. This means that when a parent is expressing unconditional love to their child, they are able to embrace their child’s experience without any judgement. Because of that love, the caregivers can hold all of their child’s experiences without judgement whether the child is happy or sad or scared or anger or even hateful. When a parent is in touch with this Divine love, a parent realizes that there is a reason behind all experiences of their child, and so no experience should be judged as good or bad. If children were raised in this way, they would grow up with internal mirrors that would function more like God mirrors allowing them to experience lots of unconditional love and grace flowing in their lives. But this is not how most, if not all children, experience their parents. Most parents view positive experiences as good and praise their children when they have these positive moments. Similarly, most parents see negative experiences like sadness, fear, anxiety, anger, hatred, etc. as bad or wrong and thus they critique, scold, and even punish their child for having such experiences. So what happens to a child’s internal mirror when they experience their parents in this way? They develop an internal mirror that follows the same rules that they experience through their parents: positive experiences create judgements like “I am a good person” and negative experiences create judgements like “I am a bad person.” Since scoldings are experienced as very painful by children, these negative judgements carry a lot more emotional power compared to the words of affirmation they heard from their parents. By the time, people enter their teenage and young adult years, they have internal mirrors that are very dirty and distorted. Many people struggle with lots of negative self chatter, negative emotions, and negative self images. This distorted internal mirror is the common human condition, a major part of what Christians call the human fallen nature. When people come for spiritual direction or counselling, I know they will be struggling with unhealthy internal mirrors, mirrors that actually keep them from experiencing the unconditional gracious love of God at the base of all reality, and the other many elements of the Spirit. So how can these internal mirrors be cleaned and transformed so that people can regain their God-mirror potential? This is a very good question. To help me answer this question, I have found it helpful to consider insights from Self Psychology. I will be applying these insights through a spiritual direction and psychospiritual therapy lens. Self psychology teaches that every person had three core needs as a child: mirroring needs, idealization needs, and twinning needs. Lets look briefly at what these core needs are. The mirroring need is most obvious and the easiest to understand. A child needs someone to reflect back to them accurately what they are experiencing without judgement. When this mirroring happens well, people felt seen accurately by others, and they begin to view themselves in the same way. They slowly develop an internal mirror that reflects back to themselves their own experience exactly as it is without judgement. Due to healthy mirroring, they experience their own sadness as just sadness, their own anger as just anger, and their own anxiety as just anxiety. When this happens, their internal mirror becomes a God-mirror where people begin to see and experience themselves the way God does, with only unconditional grace and understanding and no judgement. As people learn to trust their God-mirror more and more, they need less accurate reflection from those outside themselves to function well in the world. Every child also has idealization needs. A child needs someone to idealize, that is, someone to look up to and trust to take care of them. Part of this trust involves a child receiving the emotional support they need as they face challenges in life. Part of this trust includes getting wisdom and insight from others that they needed as a child to make sense of their life. Part of this trust encompasses having the idealized person protect them, as best as he/she was able, from the painful elements of life. When people, as children, are fortunate to have persons in their lives who meet their idealization needs, that is, provided well their childhood needs for emotional support, wisdom and insight, and protection, they begin to discover these qualities emerging within themselves. These qualities arise from what I am calling the God-mirror. As people experience getting their idealization needs met by others, they begin to notice internal experiences where they feel compassionate emotional support, divine wisdom and insight, and protective strength/power emerging from inside themselves in response to their life circumstances. As people learn to trust these emerging internal experiences, they begin to trust the many dynamics that can arise from their God-mirror. As with mirroring needs, as people learn to trust their God-mirror to meet their idealization needs, they have less need to look to other people for this support, insight, and protection. When these idealization needs are not met, the opposite happens. Not developing a trusting relationship with their inner divine support and truth, aspects of their God-mirror, people look often outside themselves for others to support and guide them. When this happens, they have little sense of God’s supportive presence and divine revelation within their own experience. Finally, every child has twinning needs. A child has a need to experience from their parents and key loved ones in their lives that their caregivers understand him/her, that they can relate to his/her experiences. When this happens, a child feels their experience is validated and valued. If this twinning need is not met, their internal God mirror becomes distorted. A child will feel that they are different, an outsider, and that no one can truly understand and empathize with him/her, not even God. When people find others that can validate and truly understand their experience, then these validating experiences begin to develop another aspect of the God-mirror within their soul. They begin to notice that not only does their God-mirror reflect back their experience accurately, but they have an internal sense of being totally understood and validated. They notice compassion emerging and often even grace arising from inside their soul in response to their difficult experiences. As people trust these emerging compassionate experiences from their God-mirror, they look less to getting their twinning needs met from the outside world. They sense that God gets them and loves them deeply, and they can now truly embrace the Christian teaching that everyone is a child of God, even those who thought they were too different or too broken to be part of God’s family. When you understand these three primary needs of human beings, as taught by Self Psychology through a spiritual direction lens, it becomes evident how our distorted God-mirrors can be transformed and heal. We need to be in relationship with people who can hold our life experiences well, especially our painful life experiences. At a community level, this is a key purpose of a faith community like a Christian Church. But when our faith community cannot meet these needs of mirroring, idealization, and twinning satisfactory, we need to seek a friend, spiritual director or psychospiritual therapist who can.
As we develop a trusting, caring, therapeutic relationship with our spiritual director/therapist, our God-mirror begins to transform and regain its original reflecting and nurturing qualities. As we experience our director mirroring our experiences well, our God-mirrors begins to reflect these life moments in the same objective nonjudgemental way. As our psychospiritual therapist meets our idealization needs, we begin to notice and trust those moments of inner support, truths and insights, and even inner strength that arise in us in response to our life experiences. As our pastoral counsellor fulfills our twinning needs by validating our many diverse experiences, we come to realize that God also understands our experiences and has much compassion for our pain and shows much grace toward our mistakes. Through continuous experiences like these with our spiritual director/therapist, our once distorted and dirty God-mirror begins to recapture it original state. When this happens, we find ourselves no longer at odds with God but experience many moments of God’s presence in our life experiences. Questions to ponder to help you reflect about your God mirror:
Due to COVID-19, we are living in very different times. We have been forced to let go of many things in our lives, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, as I will illustrate in this blog, “letting go” actually opens up space for experiences of “letting come” to happen that often bless us. Let me explain. Sometimes these times of letting go are forced upon us by life like COVID-19. These forced “letting go” moments often arise when we lose our job, or when we lose our health, or when someone we love dies, or when a leader resigns, or when we find ourselves in conflict with someone. Sometimes these times of letting go are chosen by us. These chosen moments of “letting go” occur when we change jobs or chose a new career, like when I chose to leave my computer job at Canada Trust in 1989 and pursue pastoral training. They occur when we choose to move to a new community like my mother-in-law Veronica did when she moved from Canada to St. Lucia in 2017 where she knew no one. They occur when we, as parents, choose to have a child. However these times of letting go happen, whether they happen due to life or by choice, they are always times of unknown, times when we feel we have lost some control of our life. We live in a culture that sees little purpose to “letting go”. How many of us first throw out something before we get something new, that is, throw out old clothes before we buy new clothes, throw out old books before we buy new books, etc. No, the focus in our culture is one of “letting come”, adding more and more things or responsibilities or experiences to our life. As a result, our lives get fuller, and busier, and often more stressful and we have to strive harder and harder to keep up with the fullness of our life. No only can we become attached to things and activities, and a certain way of life, but we can become attached to beliefs. Our minds can become full of our belief system, unwilling to consider new perspectives or take on new attitudes. Our hearts can become attached to our emotions, become so full of them that there is little room for other feelings or experiences to arise. Something happens when we practice “letting go” in our life. This “letting go” lessens the fullness in our life and creates space for something new to come to our life. As we let go of our beliefs, space opens up for new insights to come. As we let go of our attachments to certain emotions, freedom opens up for new experiences to come. As we let go of our attachments to things and pass them on to others or throw them out, there is now space in our life for new things. As we let go of commitments or loyalties, this creates time for us to follow new visions and make new commitments. Letting go allows openness for letting come to happen. Seen in this way, times of letting go are often times when we create space for God’s spirit to emerge in our life in new ways. When we let go, whether it be by force or by choice, we find ourselves in a place of surrender, where our lives are no longer in our control. We find ourselves instead in the hands of life and God. This is the gift of “letting go.” It allows the openness within our life for God’s spirit to minister to us, to even do new things in our life, if that is what is needed. In these times of letting go, we often experience many moments of Divine blessing. To help us understand how Divine blessing arises, I want to explore the Bible story (1 Samuel 1-2) of Hannah who found herself unable to become pregnant. (this was the essence of my sermon at Mannheim Mennonite Church on June 7, 2020) This story begins with Hannah struggling with the way life has gone for her. She finds herself unable to have children despite the fact that she wants children. Children were seen as a sign of Divine blessing in her culture. What makes this barrenness extremely hard to live is that her husband Elkanah’s second wife has been blessed with many children. (It was common in that culture (around 1100-1000 BCE) for husbands to have multiple wives.) So you can imagine how hard this must have been for Hannah, seeing her husband’s other wife bear many children, while she had none. It certainly didn’t help that her husband’s other wife made fun of her because of her barrenness. There was nothing Hannah could do except pray, trust, and wait. Each year she would go to the temple with her husband and his other wife. Each year she saw Elkanah give many offerings to God, most for his one wife and children and one offering for her...a yearly reminder of how Elkanah’s first wife was so blessed compared to her. In the end, we read how she would cry, the sense of rejection and failure being so deep. Then we read that, at one of her yearly visits to the temple, Hannah is very upset and can’t stop crying as she prays to the Lord. In the midst of these tears, she gets to the place of praying that if God would allow her to bare a son, she would dedicate her son to the purposes of the temple and God. In that culture in those days, bearing a son was a sign of divine blessing. The priest Eli witnesses Hannah’s prayer and once he finally understands the essence of her prayer, he responds, “May you go in peace. And may God give you what you’ve asked for.” It seems at this point in the Bible story that something shifted for Hannah with this experience at the temple. A “letting go” happened within Hannah’s soul. We read that “Hannah went on her way, ate some food, and was not sad any longer. The next morning the family worshiped a final time at the temple before going home.” It seems that because of this letting go within Hannah, the spirit of God was able to move in a new way within Hannah. Soon thereafter, we read that Hannah conceived and gave birth to a son and she named him Samuel which means, “I asked the Lord for him.” The next year when the family went to the temple for their annual sacrifices Hannah stayed home. She said she would not go to the temple until their child Samuel was weaning age, sometime between the age of 2 and 4. So, Hannah stayed home with the child and nursed him until he was weaned. When Samuel was finally weaned, Hannah brought Samuel to the temple for the family’s annual sacrifice to God. On this occasion, to celebrate the blessing of her son, Elkanah sacrificed, on behalf of Hannah and her child, a bull, a vessel of flour, and a jar of wine. But this was more than a celebration of Samuel’s birth. It was also, I think, a very bitter-sweet moment for Hannah. Hannah was releasing her son Samuel into the service of the Temple for life, just as she had promised in her prayer. Hannah says, “I prayed for this boy, and the Lord gave me what I asked from him. Now, I give this boy back to the Lord. As long as he lives, he is given to the Lord.” Hannah was saying goodbye to her son. Then, we read in the Bible that they worshipped the Lord. And part of that worship, as it is remembered, includes Hannah singing the words, “My heart rejoices in the Lord. My strength rises up in the Lord! My mouth mocks my enemies because I rejoice in your deliverance. No one is holy like the Lord—no one except you. There is no rock like our God.” Following this song of praise to God by Hannah, we read that Hannah went each year to the temple for her annual sacrifices to God, and part of that visit involved visiting her son Samuel. We are told that Hannah made a robe for Samuel each year to give him. Furthermore, we read that the priest Eli would bless Elkanah and his wife, Hannah, and pray, "May the Lord repay you with children by this woman for the gift that she made to the Lord." They then returned home. We are then told that the Lord continue to bless Hannah for she conceived and bore three sons and two daughters. In this story, we see Hannah practicing the prayerful act of letting go, and in doing so, the letting go created space for the spirit of God to come to her and minister and be experienced in new ways. A new life path opened up. The end result was that Hannah felt blessed by God by not only having her son Samuel but by having many more children. For me, this begs two questions. The first one involves our experiences of blessing in our life. When we look back on our times when we felt blessed by God, did those blessings arise during times when we were practicing letting go? I wonder. The second question is a more subtle question. What does it mean to truly practice the act of letting go? What is happening within us when we practice “letting go”? For many years, we read that Hannah annually went to the temple with her family group, and while there, she would cry to God about her barrenness. Clearly, she had prayed many times before but nothing changed, no letting go happened. She left the temple each year feeling as a hopeless as she came, a barren wife with no future. Often prayers are mental or verbal, words we think or say to God, telling God what we want. Sometimes our prayers are demanding God to respond a certain way. Some people pray with an answer already in mind, and they are only open to God answering their prayers in that way. When we pray in this way, we remain in control of how God will respond to our prayers. There is little to no “letting go” within this prayerful attitude. So what made Hannah’s prayer at the temple different this time from her previous prayers? It seems that this time a “letting go” happened within her prayer to God, a “letting go” that opened up space within her for God’s spirit to minister to her in new ways. I can imagine God’s spirit responding to her openness in various ways. Hannah could have sensed that God would finally allow her to become pregnant with a child, possibly a boy or possibly a girl too for God cherishes equally both boys and girls. Hannah could have sensed that it was not part of God’s plan for her life to have her own child, but that God had another blessing in store for her, maybe adopting someone’s else child or being a special aunt to one or more of her cousins, or maybe a special role or purpose in life, like becoming a prophetess within her faith community. However, what Hannah sensed, in the end, was that God would give her a son, and that this son would need to be dedicated to the temple and God. For Hannah, this perceived response from God was enough for her heart to leap with joy and be satisfied. The sadness lifted. The depression parted. A calmness settled in and she went home a different woman then she came. I suspect at this time in her life she had little to no sense that she would end up having 5 more children. She was just happy to have one boy, even if it meant dedicating him for life to the temple and Lord. When we practice “letting go” in our prayer times, it feels quite different inside us. We often feel a “letting go” occurring within the four aspects of our soul: our mind, heart, will, and body. Rather than our mind actively thinking, we notice our mind softening, moving into a listening, observing mode, noticing what thoughts, feelings, longings, and sensations are arising in the moment. We may notice our hearts soften a little, becoming more tender and sensitive and less numb or hardhearted, allowing ourselves to feel our experiences of life a little deeper. We may also notice the will centre of our soul a little freer as we become more aware of our longings to act or not to act, to speak or not to speak. Finally, when our body experiences “letting go”, we may notice releases of tightness and tension in different parts of our body like our head, eyes, jaw, shoulders, chest, gut, and pelvic areas. When we find ourselves letting go, it often creates openness within our mind, heart, will and body for experiences to come. “Letting go” creates space for “letting come” to occur.
Questions to ponders:
is judgemental feel different than a sensitive, compassionate heart? c. How do you experience “letting go” in your "will" centre? How does a compulsive pattern feel different than when you have freedom to experience your longings, and then act or not act depending upon what you sense is best? d. How do you experience “letting go” in our body? Where are the places in your body you carry tension and stress? What happens when these are released? During this two month time of shutdown and isolation due to COVID-19, I suspect many people are wrestling with major longings which are not being met. In the past, these longings were unconsciously filled by the things and experiences we spent our money on whether it be food, leisure, alcohol, clothes, sports, status symbols, properties, books, social gatherings, cars, etc. Or we filled these longings unconsciously through befriending or merging with people who possessed traits in their lives that we enjoyed. Often, this happens because we found them missing in our own life, traits like strength, love, compassion, joyfulness, pleasure, order/structure, etc. Due to the economic and social shutdown of COVID-19, we can no longer do the things that take these longings away. We must now live with them, and this can be hard. However, living with these longings can truly be a gift to us. In this blog, I want to explore the opportunity this time of shutdown is creating around our longings in hope that we will not waste this precious gift that Life is giving us. Leonard Cohen wrote the song “Anthem” in 1992. Within this song, there is a set of lines that are sung many times. These words, seen below, have captured many people’s imaginations including mine. Ring the bells that still ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack, a crack in everything That's how the light gets in. During this COVID-19 shutdown, we are seeing all the cracks within our personal lives. Each crack is evident in every uncomfortable longing we feel. Normally these longings are well covered up through the many purchases, activities, and relationships we have in our lives. We usually avoid feeling these uncomfortable cracks until we are forced to due to economic realities (ie. we can no longer afford or are able to buy our emotional fixes), health realities (ie. we can no longer hide the fact we are aging or ill), or relationship realities (ie. people die or move away or no longer meet our needs). Thanks to the magnitude of the COVID-19 shutdown, which is affecting majorly our shopping habits, relating patterns, and financial resources, the cracks within our structured personalities are exposed clearly for us to see and experience. Now that we are made to live with our longings, we soon discover that our minds are often judgemental toward these urges. We frequently view these longings as bad, a sign that there is something wrong with us, a sign of our neediness, especially in our culture that stresses independence, invulnerability, strength and control. This is why we so quickly, often unconsciously, remove these urges by covering them up. But, what would happen if we approached these longings with a totally different attitude? Rather than one of judgement, we perceived our longings as an invitation, an opportunity to take a healing journey toward greater spiritual wholeness. As Cohen sings, these longings and associated cracks are how the light gets into those areas that are asking for spiritual and psychological healing. In the quote below from the famous Sufi mystic Rumi, these longings are really the Divine reaching out to us. If so, are not these cracks the doorway to spiritual growth? These longings, from a Diamond Approach perspective, arise from the holes that have formed in our soul during our early years of life. For us to find what we truly want, we need to understand where these longings come from. It is here that I have found the theory of holes, taught within the Diamond Approach, so useful. The theory of holes is based on major theories of psychology related to human development and attachment but integrates them within a spiritual framework. When we are born, our soul is born in an infant state with the potential to develop into a mature whole soul. All of the qualities of spirit are already present in our baby's soul waiting to sprout and develop, qualities like love, guidance, compassion, strength, courage, peace, inner support, trust, grace, connection, etc. There are no holes in an infant's soul. However, by the time we enter our teen years, the foundational aspects of our personality structure are already in place. Some aspects of our personality are free and reflective of our true nature and essence of Being but there are many other personality aspects that are structured, protective, reactive and restrict how we express ourselves so that we can cope with life. These coping patterns were developed to keep us from feeling the negative feelings found within the holes within our soul. Within the Diamond Approach, these coping patterns are known as ego structures. In the Christian tradition, they make up our fallen or sinful nature. How does this fall from grace, as it is known in the Christian tradition, happen? For us, as a child, to develop toward full spiritual wholeness, we needed a "perfect holding environment" from parents, family, and life that allowed our soul to mature in these ways. After many years of reflecting about what a perfect holding environment might look like, I confess that it is not as obvious as it sounds. I don't think it is possible to pass through our childhood years without us developing coping patterns and ego structures that make up our fallen nature. We come out of our childhood with life strategies that avoid pain or seek pleasure, or include a combination of both. Furthermore, there is no such thing as perfect parents or a perfect family, or even a perfect life, for the reality is that life, itself, is not perfect as COVID-19 is showing us again. Suffering, pain, and challenges are a part of life. This means that an important part of an ideal holding environment is not creating a setting where we, as children, never experience hardship but rather become a safe place where we develop skills and insights that allow us to work through and grow from these difficult experiences when they arise. We also need to integrate pleasurable life experiences in beneficial ways. If our developmental years are full of only pleasurable experiences, we will still enter our adult years with a significant fallen nature. It is only in those moments of challenge that the qualites of Spirit like strength, power, resilience and determination arise and develop within us. It seems that a "perfect holding environment" involves helping us integrate, in advantageous ways, both pleasurable and challenging times in our life. However, none of us grew up in perfect holding environments. Instead, we, as young children, experienced many moments in our lives when life was too painful, too scary, or we didn’t get enough of certain experiences like love, grace, encouragement, etc. To cope with these difficult times, we developed coping strategies that basically numbed us or took us away from these painful realities creating many holes or deficiencies in our soul. To live with these deficiencies, we quickly developed many other coping strategies that were our child’s best attempts at living with these limitations. Or, our life was too easy and pleasurable due to us being blessed too much by doting parents or by the many privileges that life can provide for us. Due to these many blessings, we, as children, came to expect others, God, even life itself, to spoil us. Having such beliefs and expectations, we developed another set of life strategies that caused us to look to others and life itself to cater us. As a result, another set of holes formed in our soul around the divine qualites of strength, power, determination, and resilience, even faulty concepts of love, truth, and confidence. By the time many of us become age 6 or 7, most of these holes in our soul are in placed, which is when our self reflection and logical thinking begin to develop. This is why these holes, and the coping strategies around them, feel like they are part of our personality, who we think we are, our identity. These holes or deficiencies are at the base of our longings in life. Since we feel these qualities missing in our lives, we look to the outside physical world to get these experiences. This is exactly the reason the prodigal son, in the well-known parable in the Bible (Luke 15: 11-24), left home. He believed the outside world had everything that he longed for. We too find ourselves, pulled by our longings, in many external directions. We believe the outside world has all that we are missing inside. This means, however, that our healing spiritual journey involves going in the opposite direction that we are tempted to go. Instead of looking outside for the solution to our longings, we are to turn inward. As we learn to contemplate our longings, and what is at the root of them, we become aware of all our coping patterns, our patterns of thinking, our patterns of feelings, our patterns of doing, all patterns designed to take us away from the painful or unhelpful experiences and beliefs at the root of our urgings. These ego patterns function like bandages that have no healing properties for the goal of these ego structures is to take us away from the painful or unhelpful experiences and issues in our life, not transform them. The thought of taking off some of these bandages is a way too scary for most people. This is why we seek out a spiritual director or a psychospiritual therapist or some member of our faith community or friendship circle so that we can be with people who know how to support us as we begin to explore the painful wounds beneath our coping bandages. As we do so, we will discover what Cohen meant when he sung, “the crack lets the light in.” What the theory of holes teaches us is that these qualities of Being are not found outside us in the physical world, and thus we will never find them there. Rather, they are found within us, within our very soul, often buried within the very holes and memories of our past that we have sought to avoid all our life. This inward journey home means revisiting those longings and deficiencies with the hope of discovering the very qualities and experiences of life that we are missing. As we permit ourselves to feel the negative emotions and unhelpful beliefs at the base of our longings, we will eventually experience a compassionate loving tender energy flow within our soul toward us, the first signs of Divine light getting in through the crack. This soothing energy, having a similar quality to sadness, is known as essential compassion within the Diamond Approach or the spirit of God’s compassion within the Christian tradition. The soothing energy of tenderness softens our soul making it more vulnerable allowing us to enter more deeply into our painful memory. As this happens, new, previously buried, experiences and insights arise from remembering those times, an indication of more Divine light breaking in. As we receive these new truths, we may feel anger, even hatred, emerge toward the injustice or unfairness or unhelpfulness that has happened to us. These energies of strength and hatred are evidence of Divine strength and Divine power arising, more signs of God’s light getting in. These more powerful energies from God are often needed to give us what we need to bring about change in our problematic behavior or our unhelpful environment. Now, our human ego, with its many coping patterns, either hates these energies of sadness, anger, and hatred and shuts them down for safety reasons (these feelings are too dangerous). Or it loves these energies and seeks to hijack them for its own purposes to make sure no one ever hurts us again. When this happens, the cracks of vulnerability are quickly covered up by our coping patterns and the transformation process comes to a dead halt. This is why a supportive companion or faith community is essential so that these times of light coming through the cracks of our egoic personality are experienced as healing moments, not re-traumatizing incidents. When we permit the Divine light of compassion, truth, strength, and power to shine through the cracks within our personality shell, these spiritual energies penetrate and transform the painful wounds and unhelpful experiences of our past. Part of the transformation process involves first releasing all the negative emotions trapped underneath the egoic bandages of our personality through these opened cracks. This is often the role of Divine Compassion at first, to allow us to freely vent all of our emotions within a gracious tender field of grace, free of judgement. Until that emotional energy is released, there is often little space for the essential qualities of compassion, truth, strength or power to emerge with any depth into our experience. Once that pent-up emotion is freed, the crack opens more and there is now spaciousness for the different aspects of God’s spirit to minister to the wound at the root of those powerful trapped emotions, leading to much spiritual healing.
In this blog, I have explored how our longings that we are experiencing due to COVID-19 are really a doorway into profound spiritual healing. I invited you to see this time of waiting for the pandemic to pass as an opportunity, an oportunity to look deeper and discover how your longings are really a crack that makes it possible for God's spirit to enter more deeply into your soul. As you allow God's light to enter the cracks within your personality shell, you will discover God's spirit ministering to your deepest longings. In doing so, you will learn that your sense of wholeness cannot be found in the external world as you thought, or as our culture often teaches. No, your true spiritual home is right here, in the present moment, within yourself. As you explore your sense of Being (God's spirit) within yourself, you will soon discover that your experience of Being expands to include everyone and every living thing in the world, that you and I and all of life are part of a Greater Being, what the Christian tradition calls God. Questions to ponder: 1. During this time of COVID-19, what longings have you become aware of? 2. What are you missing in your life right now that is causing you to be aware of each of these longings? What aspects of Being or God's spirit are you missing in life that is causing you to experience these longings (compassion, grace, truth/knowing, strength, feeling valued, feeling loved, confidence, determination, resilience, joy, pleasure, etc.)? 3. What coping strategies have you discovered that cover-up your holes in your soul? How do these holes/longings connect to your experiences during your childhood? Which ones are due to painful experiences in your childhood? Which ones are due to life being too easy for you in your childhood? 4. What are your hopes as you turn inward and begin your journey home? Written by Gord Alton, Apr 13, 2020 Due to COVID-19, the celebration of Good Friday and Easter has taken on new meaning for me. We, as a world human community, have been and are experiencing profound suffering, a trauma that we are, in many ways, powerless to stop. All we can do is witness and hold this suffering...just as many people witnessed the innocent suffering of Jesus, the Christ, on the cross two thousand years ago. This ongoing COVID-19 tragedy is our modern day Good Friday experience of the suffering of Christ, except the spirit of Christ is not embodied in the historical person of Jesus, but in the universal body of humanity. In other words, the spirit of Christ is embodied within the body of humanity. If what I am saying is true, then what does the resurrection of Christ look like when seen through this lens? This is the question I plan to explore in this blog. The Person and Way of Christ Being a Christian pastor for twenty-five plus years, I know how strange this idea is of understanding the body of Christ as the world body of humanity. I certainly was not taught this theology when I attended seminary in the early 1990’s. Then, the emphasis was that the spirit of Christ resided within one historical person, namely Jesus of Nazareth, believing that Jesus was the Christ, and that we, as Christians, were to believe that Jesus was the Son of God and follow in the ways of Jesus Christ. As a result, Good Friday and Easter were about the suffering and death of this Christ on the cross, and Easter was about the resurrection of Christ, that not even death could contain the person of Christ. This is the dominant understanding of Christ within most churches today, that the spirit of Christ dwelt within the historical person of Jesus, and we, as Christians, are to follow Jesus as a model of how to live our lives. The Archetype of Christ I soon became dissatisfied with this understanding of Christ, partly due to my spiritual direction training (1996-1998), partly due to relating to people outside the church who embodied many aspects of the spirit of Christ, partly due to studying the Bible and discovering that there are many New Testament scriptures that talk about Christ in other ways. I began to see Christ as the spirit of Christ that dwelled with Jesus but also could dwell within any human being, including myself. I began to see Christ is an archetype, as Carl Jung, a prominent Swiss psychologist, understood it, “a collectively inherited unconscious idea, pattern of thought, image, etc., universally present in individual psyches” (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/archetype). Below is the icon of Jesus which shows both his humanity in the human portrayal of Jesus and his divinity through the Christ archtype evident by the sacred heart and the halo around his head. This way of understanding Christ opened up a whole new Christian spirituality for me where the focus shifted from mental beliefs and ethics about God, Christ, and Spirit to that of relationship with the archetypes of God, Christ, and Spirit found within the human soul. The only way to truly understand these relationships is by helping people focus on their experience of their relationships with God, Christ, and Spirit. There are many texts that teach this way of understanding Christ, especially if we look at these texts through a relationship framework instead of a belief framework.
As you can imagine, this way of viewing Christ changed how I preached the incarnation of Christ at Christmas time. No longer was I just teaching about the birth of Christ in Jesus, but I was also helping my church people explore how the spirit or archetype of Christ could be birthed in them, how the spirit of God can hover over the womb of our human soul in the same way as God’s spirit hovered over the womb of Mary leading to the incarnation of Christ. For me, Christmas involved celebrating both the birth of Christ within the baby Jesus but also within ourselves, as human beings. A similar shift happened in how I approached Good Friday and Easter. No longer was the Good Friday service just revisiting the suffering and death of Jesus on the cross, but now the focus was on helping my people join Jesus in his suffering experience, so that we, as humans, learn to bear the sufferings and sins of humanity and our world, just as Jesus did. In other words, Good Friday was all about embodying the suffering Christ, both within the historical Jesus, but also within ourselves as followers of Jesus. The same shift happened at Easter time. In celebrating Easter, not only did we celebrate the risen Christ within Jesus, we also celebrated the risen Christ within ourselves, that even though we will someday die, due to the risen Christ living within us, our human soul would not die but live on eternally. The Field of Christ In recent years, I have begun to see and experience another dimension of Christ, one that goes beyond the Christ archetype found within the individual souls of people. I became aware of this dynamic after many years of being part of a Diamond Approach school in Toronto, a spiritual work school that I have participated in for the past 14 years. For example, when I did spiritual direction with people, I became subtly aware of a broader sense of soul, a spiritual field one could say, that formed between my directee and myself. This field included my directee’s soul and my soul, each which contained our historical conditionings and psychic structures from our respective pasts, but I found that there was a common experience arising between us in response to what the directee was sharing. When my directee shared some painful experience, I notice compassion arising in the spiritual field that we shared. Sometimes, a common anger would arise due to the wrong or evil that had been done to my directee. As a Christian, this experience of the common field brought new meaning to Jesus’ teaching, “when two or three are gathered in my name <that is, when people become aware of their experience and look for Christ within that experience>, I, <Christ> am with you” (Matt 18: 20). I came to realize that Christ was not just an archetype within the human soul, but a dynamic within the spiritual field that transcends the individual soul. In other words, the dynamics of Christ can be found within the spiritual fields or souls of couples, families, organizations, faith communities, etc. Where two or more people are gathered, and become present to the experience of their spiritual field that arises amongst them, they will notice the dynamics of Christ and all the fruits of God’s spirit arising in their midst. How many of you have attended a funeral, and upon entering the chapel, you sense a heaviness and grief in the space? Or upon arriving for a wedding, you sense a lightness and joy as you enter the sanctuary? As I explore these experiences, I have come to realize that these dynamics of heaviness and grief or lightness and joy have their roots in the spiritual field created by the people gathered, which I have just joined. This way of viewing these dynamics may seem strange to you, but I invite you to explore the different ways that Apostle Paul talks about the Body of Christ in the New Testament. It is actually quite startling for Paul is describing the body of Christ as a spiritual field. Let me give you a taste of his teachings:
The Web of Christ Now, I am finally getting to the goal of this blog, that there is another dimension of Christ that we need to embrace, namely the Universal Christ that Richard Rohr, prominent Catholic teacher and mystic, describes in his recent book, “The Universal Christ” (2019). Can we broaden the above concept of “field of Christ” to include the whole body of humanity? Science has taught us that life is all interconnected biologically through what is often called the “web of life.” Could something similar be true at the spiritual level, that all humanity is spiritually connected through what could be called the “web of Christ.” (For those who don't identify as Christian, please don’t get hung up with the word “Christ”; this is what Christians would call this spiritual dynamic. For Jews, they would probably use the term “Yahweh” or “Lord”, for Muslims, “Allah”, for Buddhist, “Buddha”, and so on.) Many Christians consider the gospel of John their favorite gospel. The gospel of John begins very differently than the other three gospels by focusing on Jesus’ relationship to the Word that God created first before physically creating our world. John writes that “all things came into being through the Word, and without the Word not one thing came into being. What has come into being in the Word was life, and the life was the light of all people” (John 1: 3-4). This Word was the source of all life and, John claims, this Word became flesh in the human Jesus who became a light to a world of darkness. And all who received Jesus and believed in his name, that is, form a relationship with the Word within him, he gave power to become the children of God (John 1: 10-12). Many Christian theologians see this “Word” as the pre-existent Christ, the universal Christ, who became incarnated in the flesh of the human Jesus. But if we take John seriously, this Word, the Christ dynamic, became not only incarnated in the historical Jesus but in all things created, including all humanity. I have come to understand that this is what it means for humans to be made in the image of God, that all people have this Christ dynamic within them, that all people are connected to God, the Ground of all Being, as prominent theologian Paul Tillich named it. Humans are all connected to the Web of Christ and the Ground of Being. When we see humanity in our world in this way, as part of a spiritual field, we see that humans are all connected to one another. While there may be boundaries based on national identities, racial identities, economic identities, religious identities, and individual identities (based on our biological bodies) at the physical or surface level, when we look deeper into our experience, we see that we are truly connected emotionally, spiritually, all part of the oneness of God. When one part of the universal body of Christ suffers, we also suffer, and if we don’t experience this suffer, we need to realize that there is something wrong. Some form of structural sin is blocking the flow of God’s spirit within the body of Christ. When one part of the body of Christ is honoured, the rest of the Body of Christ rejoices, and if this mutual rejoicing is not happening, we need to investigate why. Some form of structural sin within our national, communal or individual spiritual field or soul is blocking the flow of the spirit of joy and goodness. The Suffering of the Universal Christ During our world's COVID-19 pandemic, I have been struck by two things, one which ties into the experience of Good Friday, the other which gives hope to the coming of Easter. First, I have been deeply troubled by what the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed about our world, and hopefully many of you are deeply troubled too. We are noticing all the ways that our economic frameworks don’t support well the flow of God’s spirit through the web of Christ. We are observing how many people don’t have access to the health care they need. We are seeing the major gaps between the rich and the poor, those who have health care and those who don’t, those who are isolated and those who are not, those who have secure jobs and those who don’t, those who are vulnerable and those who are not. We are witnessing all the ways that structural sin is blocking the flow of God’s spirit from the Ground of Being throughout the web of Christ. All these structural sins existed long before the pandemic, but they were hidden from our awareness by band-aid fixes or denial. Now, thanks to the pandemic, these structural sins are exposed as open wounds for all of us to see. One could say that we are experiencing the suffering of the universal Christ in ways we have never felt before. We are experiencing the pain from the network of Christ within our world. And like Jesus on the cross, these suffering people are suffering for the same reason Jesus suffered. Jesus suffered and died, not because he was a bad person, but because of the structural sin within the political establishment, the religious institutions, many individual people, even by his own friends and followers who denied or betrayed him in the end. This is true for most who are suffering now in the world due to this pandemic. They are victims of structural sin embedded within our economic frameworks, government institutions, health care systems, national and racial identities, religious communities, even within our families and friends. Those, like myself, who benefit from our current world order and structure are all guilty for some of the sufferings these people are experiencing due to the pandemic. We need to see and experience this suffering within the network of Christ. It is important we experience their suffering for we are part of one humanity, and if we don’t, it is evident that we are not connected to the Web of Christ or to the Ground of Being that gives us all life. This suffering is the suffering inherent to the experience of Good Friday which should really be called “Bad Friday” for it was a very bad day in history then, as this pandemic is bad now. The Resurrection of the Universal Christ However, I have seen something else during this time of pandemic. I have seen many signs of the spirit of God flowing through the universal web of Christ within our world humanity. Health care workers decide to keep caring for those who have COVID-19 despite the risk to their health and the health of their loved ones. Some retired health care workers are willing to return to work to help our government care for the many health care needs. Provincial governments like Alberta are sharing medical supplies with other provinces like Quebec who are badly in need of these supplies. Many individuals are reaching out with compassion to those in need through making masks for those who need protection or delivering groceries or making phone calls to those who are isolated. We are seeing holy anger arise as people raise questions about the care happening in some of our nursing homes leading to investigations to discover the truth, so changes can be made. We are starting to see the sharing of medical supplies even between nations. And I could go on. I have been impressed about how many governments have seen their role as addressing the many issues behind the suffering coming through the network of the Universal Christ. I am very thankful for all the ways people, communities, organizations, and nations are responding with compassion, kindness, courage, anger demanding truth and justice, and resilience during this difficult time, all signs of God’s spirit flowing upward from the Ground of Being into the Web of Christ that connects all of humanity together. For me, these have been signs of Easter coming, signs of the resurrected universal Christ breaking into our world reality.
Within the Christian tradition, we have a teaching about the second coming of Christ, a time in in the future when Christ will come again and restore the Reign of God on earth. For me, this second coming of Christ refers to the rising of the universal Christ within humanity on earth, a time when a new earth and new heaven will emerge, a time when God’s home will be among all mortals who realize that Christ dwells within them, a time when God’s spirit will comfort every tear from their eyes for death will no longer have power over us, mourning and crying and pain will no longer control us, for the old has passed away and the new has come (Rev. 21: 1-4). I see this pandemic helping us move toward this realization of Easter within our whole world. Questions to ponder:
During my lifetime, I don’t recall a time like we are experiencing now involving the coronavirus. The fear I encounter in the news and around me is profound, and this fear is really affecting our ability to discern, plan, and live our lives in helpful ways. Fear is a very powerful emotion, but this fearful part of us is not our centre. There is another part of our soul that feels this fear but is beyond it. It will important in the days and weeks ahead that we intentionally work at living our lives from this calm centre rather than from our fears. Within our current times, we are becoming very aware of the two-sided nature of humanity, the fallen structured egoic part of our soul and the divine unstructured Being part of our soul. Our fallen nature, based on many past childhood experiences when we were not seen, validated, loved, and held unconditionally, is very sensitive to fear and distrusts easily. When we become centred in this egoic nature, fear often overwhelms us causing us to think and act in ways that fuels this fear even further. We often become fearful, impatient, judgemental of others, and quite demanding of others to take away our anxiety. This is what happens when we become centred in the fallen part of our nature; we lose touch with ourselves looking to the outside world for all our answers and support. We lose faith in others, ourselves, life, and God. But what happens, if instead of becoming centred in our fearful egoic nature, we intentionally work at staying connected to our divine centre that is not fallen? We experience this divine part of us as very different. It is unstructured, spacious, a sense of being to it, that has not been distorted by the sufferings and pains of our life. When we live from this centred part of us, we are able to experience the different aspects of God’s spirit ministering to our fears and doubts through compassion, strength, truth, grace, power, resilience and rootedness. We will still feel fear for it is a part of us that contains our history of when we have been fearful in our past. Furthermore, there are many unknowns regarding the coronavirus that make us also fearful now, but we are led to intentionally seek out good information so we can live with this unknowingness from a place of rootedness, neither inflating nor bypassing our feelings or risks to ourselves, our friends and family, our neighbourhoods or the broader world. There is a story in the Gospel of Mark (Mark 4:35-5:4) that highlights this two-sided nature of people involving fear. Jesus and his followers, after a day of public teaching with the crowds, take many boats to go to the other side of the Sea of Galilee. The other side was the place where the Gentiles live, non-Jewish people who Jewish people were to avoid due to religious purity reason. It seems that Jesus wants his followers to lean into their fears that rise as they relate to Gentiles. As they are crossing the sea, a great wind arises causing huge waves that threaten to swamp their boats. These winds and huge waves also capture symbolically the internal winds of anxiety and waves of fears of the fallen nature that is threatening to swamp the souls of Jesus’ followers as the boats get closer and closer to the Gentile shore. The followers of Jesus are very afraid and yet Jesus is asleep in the stern of one of the boats. It seems Jesus is not troubled by the weather and waves or by any emotional turmoil within himself. In panic, his followers wake Jesus up. Upon seeing the conditions and how it is affecting his followers, Jesus rebukes the wind and says to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” We read that the winds settled down and that the sea became calm. And then Jesus asks them, “why are you frightened? Don’t you have faith yet?” His followers are in awe of Jesus and how he was able to calm the winds and the sea. In this Bible story, we see people living from two very different parts of their soul. The disciples have become attached to their egoic fearful part, a structured part containing much fear and many coping strategies to deal with this fear. In contrast, we see Jesus living and speaking from the "Being" part of his soul, a spacious soul that is able to feel fear but not get lost in it. Instead, he also feels strength, power, an inner peace, and holds a more accurate perspective of truth that allows him to realize that things are not as bad as his followers believe. He is in touch with a faith, a knowingness, that arises from the state of Being that his followers have lost touch with. When Jesus speaks, not only do the external winds and waves calms, but so do the internal winds and waves within his followers. Both the winds and seas but also the followers become calm and settled again. Our world, including those closest to us, those in our community, and beyond, need people right now who are able to live from this Being part of their souls. Our world needs people who are mature, wise, resilient, attuned to other, seeking to understand and open to new information, and have this sense of being centred in Being. Probably, many of you, readers, have already found these and many other qualities in your own experience, as you live through this challenging time of crisis caused by the coronavirus. But it is easy to lose connection with our divine centre of Being due to the fearful pulls of our fallen nature. This is why it is so important, especially now in this world of fear, to take our spiritual practices seriously that keep us connected to our spiritual nature. The practices of centring prayer and meditation help us steady ourselves and deepen our capacity to disconnect from our anxieties and settle into the nonreactive presence with God. The practices of contemplation and inquiry makes it possible to help identify outdated, constricting historical patterns and other obstacles allowing the fruits of God’s spirit to minister to us more. As we do these spiritual practices and others, we find ourselves more naturally embodying and expressing those divine qualities that are needed for our time. Our current times of so much fear is a good time to rededicate ourselves to our spiritual practices. In the news we have heard a lot about the spread of this coronavirus and how contagious it is. It is also worth noting that the fear connected to this virus is also very contagious. But I want you to realize something else, that Carol Penner, Associate Professor of Conrad Grebel University College, reminded me of in her Pandemic Prayer that she published last week (link to Carol’s prayer). The love of God is far more contagious then this virus or this fear is. And it is not only the love of God that is contagious, but all the essential qualities of God’s spirit are very contagious too like compassion, grace, truth, determination, courage, power, peace, joy, etc. This is why it is so important that we commit ourselves to do our spiritual practices regularly now so that we can manifest these spiritual fruits more consistently in our daily lives, and allow them to minister to all the fear present to the people around us right now. During worship last Sunday (Mar 15, 2020), the last service before we closed down public worship due to the coronavirus for a few weeks, I took Carol’s Pandemic Prayer and adjusted it to capture this sense that the fruits of God’s Spirit are already active in our world and combating the viruses of fear and mistruths that are connected to the coronavirus. I share this with you below as a prayer of hope. Questions to Ponder:
Published by Gord Alton, Mar 18, 2020 What does it mean to die wise? That is an interesting question for often the question is, “what does it mean to die well?” which usually means to die with as little discomfort as possible. A couple of months ago one of my directees encouraged me to read the book “Die Wise” written by Stephen Jenkinson, a past program director at a major Canadian hospital and a palliative consultant to palliative care and hospice organizations. In reading his book, Jenkinson caused me to do much rethinking about what it means to help people die well and wise. Let me share some of his key insights. When people are asked what would be a good life and a good death, Jenkinson noted two responses often come up. First, a good life is often seen as a long life (58), and a good death is a quick death (59). When Jenkinson explored what people meant by a quick death, he discovered that people wanted to die without having to experience the dying process...like dying in your sleep or dying instantly in a car accident. People wanted to die without knowing they were dying (60). But we live in a culture where most dying happens slowly meaning the dying process happens slowly. So when we ask the question, “how do we die well or wisely?”, we are really asking the question, “how do we do the dying process wisely?” You would think that this question would be a fairly easy to answer but it isn’t. We live in a culture that is all about managing death. For Jenkins, managing death means that we help people go through the dying process without the experience of dying, that we help them live “not dying” until death occurs. A major theme of Jenkins’ book, “Die Wise”, is unpacking how this contract of “not dying” plays out with the dying person, and how medical professionals, hospice caregivers, and family support defend this contract, making dying wise a very hard endeavor to nurture. A managed death is all about symptom management and pain control. When people are dying, the patient and their family are quite open to a visit from the physician or nurse. However, offer a visit from a nonmedical practitioner or counsellor, and the welcome vaporizes (27). Jenkins notes that “the patient and family are saying: The body comes first. I am what my body needs, and my body needs medical expertise” (27). The process of dying has been reduced to taking care of the physical body. There is little room to address the emotional and spiritual suffering caused by dying. These needs are dismissed. While there would be time to talk about dying, there is little space for this conversation for the focus is on physically dying well, dying with as little pain and symptoms as possible. One common aspect of managed death is the offer of palliative chemotherapy and radiation. Patients choose this option because they are promised “more time” in their life, but what does this more time look like? It is not the fantasy people imagine. Jenkins notes that what people can actually do with this more time ”bears no resemblance to anything most people have lived” (35). More time almost always means more dying (35), more time living with the reality of death in the rear-view mirror, and death getting closer and closer. Now that physical pain and symptoms are managed, these people have to live with the emotional pain of the dying process: fear, terror, dread, emotional numbness, anxiety, etc. (33). “This <reality> makes them prime candidates for sedation and antidepressants” (33). Jenkins stresses that we need to be more honest around this “more time” with patients so that they can plan more intentionally how they want to work at the dying process that is ahead, which will need to involve spiritual care providers, psychospiritual therapists, as well as medical professionals. Due to how well we medically manage death, we no longer have the nightmare of uncontrolled pain and unexpected death. Instead, “we now have a new nightmare of controlled pain and an unexpected wish to die, a wish that can’t be accounted for by worsening symptoms and can’t be soothed by reassurances that no one will be allowed to suffer. They are suffering. Dying people are suffering a torment we once thought would only come at the hour of their death. Now the hour of death is months long, sometimes longer” (44-45.) While suffering is part of the dying process, our culture has little tolerance for suffering. Rather, our culture follows, Jenkinson highlights, the religion of Quality of Life; the temple we go to practice this religion is the hospital, and the God we serve is the “demand to live” (50). Within this religion, there is no place for suffering; suffering is seen as an illness that needs treatment. Furthermore, we worship also in the temple of want. We expect the world to fill all our needs and desires. When our wants become a god in life, our death is the ultimate insult, “the ultimate frustration of our right to have things go as we deserve until we decide otherwise” (182). And yet, suffering is a natural part of life just as dying is. Because of our culture, we have a “diminished ability to suffer”, “little instinct or capacity for grieving,”, and a “headlong flight from discomfort, hardship, dying” (49). Life has become an entitlement or right rather than a gift and that causes everything that is experienced as negative to be something that should be removed or treated. It is important to realize that all experiences in life are a gift, including our times of suffering. The gifts of these negative moments only become apparent as people find gracious places to share these difficult experiences. This is why Jenkinson stresses that ’’people need to learn how to suffer” (54). What makes dying so hard to talk about is because there is so much resistance around talking about death and dying. Jenkinson claims that we instinctively know the following statement to be true although it sounds strange and unfamiliar: “knowing we could be dying somehow begins our dying.” He has found that the dying process begins for people when they realize they could be dying. For me, my dying process began the day I came to grips with the dying of my two hemophiliac brothers 20 plus years ago. This dying process has continued as I, as a minister, do many funerals, as I embraced my premature white hair in my 40’s as a sign of my aging, as I accepted my body aches and pains in my 50’s as signs of aging, as I observed my parents getting frailer as they entered their later senior years. As I embraced these signs as indicators of my dying, my relationship with dying and death has changed. Dying and death is not as scary. Jenkinson claims that because of this innate connection between “knowing we could be dying” and the dying process, our culture’s fear of dying has led to a cultural belief that people have the right to “not know they are dying” (62). He has found that professional caregivers will defend the belief that the patient has the right to chose how to die, even if it means dying badly, that is, living in denial of death right up to the point of death (63). Even though everyone knows they are going to die, our whole culture around caring for the dying is to act like this is not true, that no one should be told they are dying (78). Another reason people avoid talking about dying is how dying is framed. Dying is often seen as something that happens to us, like a disease. We often say that “cancer killed him”, that cancer is the enemy. But English grammar prevents us from saying “cancer died him.” Dying is not something that is done to us but rather something that we must participate in or do. (72). This suggests that people need a map or guide to help them participate in the dying process. From this point onward in the book, Jenkinson begins to develop a map of what spiritual care might look like for people who want to do well the dying process. Jenkinson notes that it is important to validate the endings that death brings. “It ends marriages and families as they were, workplace dynamics, plans for retirement, plans for childbearing, all manner of hopefulness, and on and on” (98). We should avoid euphemisms like "passed away", "gone over", or "no longer with us" that try to soften the endings associated with death. These endings are not transitions. Things will never be same again. Jenkinson highlights that he has found that there is a lot of pressure to find meaning at the end of one’s life. There is a religious belief that death is ground zero, that a judgement happens, that you will find out if your life was a worthy thing (99). From a psychological view, the focus is often on how well the patient is adjusting to the diagnosis, but what does adjusting well mean when someone is dying? It suggests that there should be a steady sense of self that is “suppose to prevail in spite of dying” (101). But is that realistic? All of these approaches to meaning-making and the dying process assume that death is the problem, that people have to chose between living and dying. If death is always portrayed as the enemy, then people have no choice but to fight it at every turn (103). However, “you won’t change what dying means by fighting it. It will always mean ‘loss’” (111). Instead of imposing meaning onto the end of one’s life, Jenkinson proposes another approach. Meaning in one’s end of life is something that is discovered as one contemplates one’s whole life. “We are heirs to the meaning of life and not its creators, from an indigenous point of view” (96). I would say that this is also true of the Christian faith. To find meaning using this framework, we have to help dying people wrestle with the way their life has unfolded. This means seeking to understand how the holy has been part of their life, and helping them wrestle and even hate the holy from time to time for having to learn the way things are (108-109). Part of this wrestling with God involves wrestling with the angel of death, not fight it for you will surely lose, but wrestle with it. The purpose of this wrestling dance, Jenkinson claims, “isn’t to get to the end, to have it be over, to resolve it, to let go of it, to accept it. The purpose is to move, to dance. Wrestling has an intimacy to it that fighting will never attain” (113). Wrestling helps you enter into the wonder and mystery of life, the place where there are no great answers, only great questions that cannot be answered (119). When we begin to wrestle with the angel of death, we begin to question the earthly hope that is often provided people who are dying. Hope, Jenkinson claims, is the soap of palliative care (119). Hope often becomes connecting to “hoping for more time.” He argues that hope is a mortgage; you are mortgaging the present for the sake of some possible future that might come to pass but just as likely might not (132). “As long as you are hopeful, you are never in the land you hope for” (132). More life is the reward of more time, so the hope goes, but more life at the end of life is very different than more life when you are not sick. It includes more dying, a lot more dying than you could ever imagine. There are lots of treatments to help you get more life, but there not many offers to teach you about how to be with more dying (133). Jenkinson possesses a similar attitude to “Quality of Life” as he does with hope. People score high on Quality of life inventories when they are living a life people have in mind for themselves: lots of autonomy, where they are masters of their destiny (143). While this inventory captures the adult dreams that we first envisioned in teenage and young adult years, the legitimate realities of dying are missing, the fact that our body, heart, and self are dying (145). Instead, Jenkinson argues that these Quality of life inventories reflect our addiction to competency and our cultural- wide mandate to be in control (148). Jenkinson notes that there is much resistance to the notion that there is a good way of dying that people can follow. Many professional caregivers believe that dying is very individual and that each person must determine what a good death is for them (174). But why do we hold such beliefs? We don’t let dying people determine how a doctor should treat them; rather patients look to their medical professionals for guidance. Yet, when it comes to the process of dying, we assume that the dying person knows best. And yet, Jenkinson has found that dying people “have no greater knowing than those who are not <dying>” (197). They are not experts; they are simply trying to survive. In fact, dying people need help from spiritual care experts to help them die well and wise. Another reason it is hard to talk about dying is that we are not taught about dying and death. It is all kept hidden from us. Jenkin notes, “if you think sex education in schools was an uphill battle, trying getting death education into curriculum” (154). As a result, all our instincts around dying have been domesticated and/or distorted by our death-denying culture. Now, in our current death phobic culture, we have many people dying not-dying, that is, physical dying without living through the dying process, and it is raising some challenging questions like, “is terminal sedation now an acceptable response to profound mental anguish at the end of life?” (160). Jenkinson argues that most of the suffering people experience around their dying is tied to our culture’s belief and practice that all emotional distress should be avoided in the dying process. As a psychospiritual therapist, what Jenkinson is highlighting is true for all negative emotions. The more people reject and avoid feeling anxiety, anger, hatred, depression, fear, guilt, shame, hurt, etc., the more intense their suffering becomes. However, when people are giving permission to share and explore these powerful experiences, meaning and insight begin to arise and their suffering lessens considerably. If our culture took a similar approach to the experience of dying, dying people would have a very different experience of dying and death, far less suffering. This intense suffering that dying people are experiencing is not because of death, as advocates of terminal sedation argue. Rather, Jenkinson counterargues, it is “our way of dying and not dying---that is what should be under scrutiny in the terminal sedation debate” ( 162) If you believe dying is traumatic, then the wheel of sedative salvation is already in motion (163). What is described as profound mental anguish is actually heart-brokenness from a spiritual point of view, but heart-brokenness is something our culture sees as suffering that should be treated. However, Jenkinson claims, “you cannot treat heart brokenness or suffering, nor can you manage them or contain them or make them less of what they are and must be” (168). Why do we ask dying people to put on a brave face when they are actually dying inside as well? Heart-brokenness is a condition of the heart that requires spiritual care involving listening and helping wrestle with the angel of suffering and death. For us to provide this spiritual care, we, as spiritual caregivers, must know this experience of heartbreak around dying deeply with all its dimensions. We must know what it means to die well, and what it means to “die while not dying”, the norm in our culture. We must also know experientially all the different aspects that make up the knowable mystery death not much known by our culture.
Questions to Ponder: 1. What has been your experience of dying and death? What aspects of this blog do you resonate with? What aspects do you wonder about? 2. When have you been able to help people share about their heart-brokenness? What did it look like to help them wrestle with the angel of death? 3. Jenkinson says that “we are heirs to the meaning of life and not its creators." How have you found this to be true, when you found that aspects of your life was part of a greater divine plan? 4. Jenkinson believes that the intense suffering from dying has been made worst by our culture's fear of death, and that this fear is a primary driving force to the use of Medically Assistance in Dying (MAID) in our current time. How has the common experience of death become a trauma that must be medicated? We live in interesting times with the rise of fake news and continuous battles, often verbally vicious and sometimes physically violent, around what is true. But that does beg the question, what is truth? Being raised in the church, I was taught that God’s truth was the essence of truth, but what is this Divine truth that guides our world, and what does it mean to seek it? These are the questions we will explore in this blog. There are two key teachings about truth that the Christian tradition highlights that Jesus taught. One is found in the gospel of Matthew. Here, we see the teaching, “seek first the Kingdom of God and God’s righteousness and all your needs (what you eat, drink, and wear) will be given to you as well” (Matt. 6: 33). This teaching highlights how God’s righteous or truth is something we are to seek. This invitation to seek righteous suggests to me that God’s truth is not always obvious, or that you ever get the full revelation of truth. There is a sense that you are always seeking it, that you don’t just find it and then your seeking is over, but rather you find aspects of truth that whets your appetite to keep seeking so you can learn more aspects of this truth. The second Jesus teaching comes from the gospel of John where Jesus says “that if you follow my word/truth, you will know this truth for this truth will set you free” (John 8: 32). This Jesus teaching highlights an essential quality of God’s truth: it is a truth that sets people free, not just me, or Christians, but anyone who embraces that truth. God’s truth is a universal truth, a truth that everyone can embrace, a truth that sets everyone free. From these two teachings, we learn that truth is something we are always seeking, and we know truth if it sets all people free. But this is not the way many people understand truth in our world. Instead of always seeking God’s truth, many people claim that the truth is something you can possess, control, and protect. And yet, all of these people, who claim to possess this truth, don’t agree with one another. This is why we have such intense battles around truth in our culture right now. Furthermore, these truths that people demand as being essential truth are not very universal in nature; these truths may bring freedom to members of one group who embrace this truth, but those, from other groups who can’t embrace this truth, don’t experience this freedom. So how do we make sense of all this conflict around truth in our world? I have found Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory helpful in understanding these different conflictual views of truth. This Integral framework is based on a developmental view of humanity. His Integral Theory talks about three different aspects of human development: growing up, waking up, and cleaning up. The process of “growing up” refers to the natural psychologial development that the human soul passes through as people mature. The process of “waking up” involves the expanding of our consciousness where our awareness moves through different levels of development leading to greater, deeper, and broader awareness. Finally the process of “cleaning up” involves people working intentionally at the shadow side of their life, the often unconscious blocks and patterns that keep humans from developing and maturing at the psychological and consciousness levels. The Growing Up Process When we look at the “growing up” process, we see that humans pass through different stages of development. Lets look at each stage briefly. Notice how each stage of human development has a different notion of truth. One of the earlier states of human development is known as the Magical stage. Before we experience education and the school system, we naturally, as young children, look upon our life experience through a magical lens. Most things in our life feel outside our control and so we need stories involving magical entities like Gods and angels and demons and fairies to help us make sense of our life. These magical stories bring order to the often-chaotic experiences of positive and negative in our life. These magical stories were our truth, and we were often convinced of their truth. The next stage of human development is what Wilber calls the Mythic/Literal stage. Over time, due to our magical truth system failing us, we look more and more to external authorities we trust to guide us in making sense of our world and life experience. Education and religious communities like schools and churches, and the books they use, become key sources of truth for us. If you grew up in a Christian home like me, the Bible was important document of truth as were the textbooks we studied in school. Teachers at school and church along with parents were important sources of truth for us. However, due to how humans develop, people with a mythic-literal faith see truth as literally true. If the Bible recorded it, then it had to be literally true: it happened exactly as written. If our school teacher or a history book taught a certain version of history, that version was literally true. There was no other version of truth. When we hold truth in a literal way, there is no such thing as historically true or scientifically true or rationally true or emotionally true or any other form of truth. Our minds, at this stage of development, cannot grasp such nuance understandings of truth. Any other forms of truth we quickly dismiss for it challenges our literal truth, which we are certain is truth. This certainty has a lot of emotion wrapped up in it for this mythic/literal truth framework brings order to the chaos that we see and are experiencing in life. If this literal truth is wrong, we fear getting lost or overwhelmed or hurt by the chaos that we anticipate will follow. As we progress in our education, our minds often develop further and we find ourselves developing critical thinking and enter what Wilber calls the Scientific/Rational stage. We begin to look closely at the discrepancies between what we have taken to be literally true and the truth we see in front of us due to direct observation or experience (science) OR the truth arising through careful logical thinking and reflection (philosophy/theology) OR both. Rather than dismiss these challenges of literal truth, people who enter this stage of human development seek to investigate the discrepancies to fully understand them. Overtime, literal truth found in the mythic/literal stage no longer makes sense to us. No longer do we see a religious and educational institution having authority to simply declare truth to us. Truth must be now verifiable, able to be confirmed through scientific observation or rational thinking. People who fully embrace this scientific/rational stage of human development are often quite critical of those who have a mythic/literal view of truth. Due to further education or broader life experiences, we discover that people who take scientific evidence and critical thinking seriously come to different conclusions, even when they are analyzing the same experience of life or the same collection of writings. Through my time in seminary 30 years ago and since, I have encountered different approaches to interpreting the Bible: historical, cultural, canonical, scientific, narrative, feminist, psychological, queer, etc. And each of these approaches bring to the surface different insights and truths, even when analyzing the same section of scripture. It becomes apparent that truth is dependent upon what lens one brings to the area that is being studied whether it is Bible, history, life experience, etc. Furthermore, since being a pastor and spiritual director for twenty years, it has become apparent that even my personal sense of history (male, privileged, white, Irish/English, Canadian, family man, religious, heterosexual, etc.) shapes the truth that I discern in someone’s life experience or in something I am reading. No longer is their one objective truth which the scientific/rational stage of human development professes, but now there are many truths depending on one’s context and lens. Once we fully embrace the Postmodern stage of human development, we are often quite critical and dismissive of any notion of objective truth espoused by people who value the scientific/rational framework. Wilber's “growing up” framework of human development helps us see the seeking nature of truth as I highlighted earlier. The reason human development happens in this model is because there is a conflict between our current understanding of truth and what we are experiencing in life. This discrepancy creates a desire to seek the deeper truth and this seeking naturally causes us to grow in our understanding of truth. Our understanding of truth deepens. As this truth deepens, we also notice that this truth brings greater understanding and freedom to our world. We are free from the false truths that we see embodied in the lower levels of human understanding. However, this freedom is not complete for we see that in each stage of human development, there is a often a rejection of the people who are less developed. We can no longer value their version of truth even though at one time in our human development we did. We noted earlier that, for truth to be fully true within the Christian faith this truth must set everyone free, not just a select or self-chosen group. What does this mean? It means that there must be another level of human maturity or development that gives us the ability to experience a deeper truth that builds upon the truths we know from the different levels of human maturity, but goes beyond. Wilber calls this level the Integral stage in his “growing up” model of human development. But what does this look like? And how do we get there? It requires another type of human development to occur, what Wilber calls “waking up.” Lets explore briefly this process of waking up. The Waking Up Process Based on scientific research, Wilber describes another human development process involving different states of human awareness. The lowest state of awareness is what is called the Waking state, and most people spend all of their time in this waking state. This is our world of thoughts, feelings, and all the input from our senses. Our sense of truth is wrapped in all the things we notice in this waking state. Within Christianity, this waking state is symbolically labelled as Earth, all the dynamics we notice in our physical earthly world. However, Christianity, and the other religions, teach that there is more to reality than what we notice in our waking state of consciousness. In Christianity, this other realm is called the Kingdom of God/Heaven which is seen as the spiritual dimension of earthly existence. When we have mystical experiences that arise spontaneously or through intentional acts of prayerfulness, contemplation, meditation, or mindfulness, we are no longer experiencing the waking state. We have entered one of three deeper levels of awareness that scientific studies have uncovered, maybe the subtle state, or casual/inner witness state, or nondual state of awareness. Let me briefly describe each of these states of awareness. When we are in the Subtle state of wakefulness, we notice more things happening in our experience beyond our thoughts, feelings, and input from our senses. We notice in this subtle moments that a separation or space has opened up between our sense of “I” and what we are thinking or feeling or sensing in our field of experience. There is a sense of “I”, which is often called the “witnessing I” or “inner observer” and what we are experiencing. This is often called self awareness but normal self awareness for most people happens after the fact. We notice that we were angry or sad or happy or we remember what we were thinking a few moments before. This suble sense of self awareness is different from this normal self awareness that people talk about. This subtle self awareness is in the moment for we are aware of what we thinking or feeling or experiencing right now as it is happening. Because of this dis-identification with our current experience, we can now explore and analyze the subtle or previously hidden dynamics of our experience. Our realm of wakefulness has expanded beyond the normal wakefulness to this suble level of consciousness. All of these dynamics in this deeper place of awareness will feel emergent in the sense that you feel you are not the cause or source of them. Rather, these emergent dynamics arise in response to what you are experiencing in the moment. For example, when we feel pain, compassion or inner tenderness will often naturally arise. When we feel safe and free, a sense of joy and playfulness may arise. When we are curious or seeking understanding, truth may emerge. All of these life-giving emergent dynamics that arise are seen as fruits of God’s spirit in the Christian tradition. However, we may also see other dynamics arise and these dynamics seem to be more structured and their goal is to shut down or manage your experience. For example, when pain arises, instead of inner compassion, we may feel pressure to shut down the pain—through suppression, avoidance, changing the topic, medicating through food, drink, technology, sex, etc. These managing dynamics are often called egoic dynamics or fallen or sinful dynamics within the Christian tradition. When we are functioning more from this subtle place of wakefulness, the insights and understandings that our “witnessing I” experiences feel very true to us. As we spend more and more time in this place of subtle awareness, and develop skills and comfort in this space, we will have moments of deeper states of awareness, what Wilber calls the Causal/Inner Witness state of wakefulness. In this state of deeper/broader wakefulness, we come to realize that we are part of something bigger than us, a field of conscious reality that what we, as Christians, call God or Christ Consciousness or the Kingdom of God/Heaven. No longer do we experience ourselves as a separate entity from God but as an active part of God’s Kingdom that includes many parts, and we are just one part. Truth in this place of wakefulness changes. No longer is truth defined by me, as it is when I function from previous states of awareness, but now I see ultimate truth as beyond me, something that is held within the mind of God. My goal now is not to find ultimate truth for we realize that this ultimate truth is beyond our grasp and can't be controlled. Instead, we focus on receiving the truth that is needed right now to experience greater freedom and life for all. Finally, the final state of wakefulness occurs when we experience reality, ourselves, and others as Non-dual experience. When this happens, we experience moments of no separation between God and us; we feel that we are one with reality, nature, with all of creation. We experience times of no separation between us and others; we are all part of one common human field. We encounter experiences of no separation within ourselves between our good parts and our negative parts; all are included in grace without judgement. Even the boundary between life and death can break down in these moments. In these non-dual moments, we embrace reality as it fully is with all its complexities and mystery. I realize that for almost all people this nondual state of wakefulness is myth, outside their reality, but more and more people are encountering moments when they experience heaven on earth. What Wilber highlights is that the development pattern of these wakefulness states is independent of the different psychological stages of human development. Anyone, regardless of their stage development, can have a mystical experience, and at any stage of wakefulness. But, how they will interpret their mystical experience or express the truth of their experience will be shaped by what stage of psychological development they are functioning from. If they are functioning from the mythical or magical place of human development, they may use angel and demon or God language to describe the dynamics they are noticing in this place of wakefulness. If they live from the scientific/rational stage, they may describe their mystical experience in biological or psychological terms with little reference to transcendent realities. If they think through a postmodern lens, they may interpret their profound experience through a very personal lens and how their transpersonal moment was shaped by their history and context. But it is unlikely, Wilber stresses, that each of these people could embrace as true the truth shared by the other people about their mystical experience, unless it agrees with their version of the truth. For all of these people, truth is something that we can possess, something that we can define, which suggests that we are the centre or determiner of this truth. We believe that we can know exactly what this elephant of truth looks like. This self-centred view of defining truth holds until we start having experiences of life beyond waking levels of awareness. When that happens, we begin to experience ourselves as part of something bigger than us. As these "heaven-type" experiences happen more often in our life, a humility begins to set in. We start to realize that we are less the definers of truth and more the the receivers of truth that comes to us from this larger Divine Mystery and Life that we find ourselves belonging to. It seems that people need to have a certain level of human wakefulness and psychological growth before they can begin to release their attachment to defining truth. While we can never nail down exactly what truth is, our heart’s longing for truth is the compass that helps us stay on the road of truth, and return to this road when we stray, a narrow road that leads to life and freedom for all. Questions to Ponder:
In the Christian tradition, the four weeks before Christmas are the Advent season where we focus on waiting for the coming of Immanuel, the Christ Child. Waiting can be very difficult, especially if we find ourselves in situations beyond our control. Waiting in this context means we have to surrender to the flow of our life. What makes this waiting bearable, manageable? Let me suggest an answer. When we see signs of Immanuel in our waiting, signs of “God with us”, which is what Immanuel means, these signs tell us that we are part of God’s greater plan for our life, despite our life being beyond our control. When we realize this, suddenly our attitude toward what is happening to us changes. We are now willing to wait, to go with the flow of our life for we believe that this flow is part of God’s plan for our life. In this blog, I want to explore how signs of Immanuel help us surrender and trust the flow of life that is happening to us. One of the core Bible stories (Matt. 1: 18-25) read during the Advent season involves a man name Joseph having an Immanuel experience. When Joseph found out that his fiancé Mary was pregnant, and not with his child, he struggled immensely in his waiting. His life was now out of control. He was filled with anxiety, fear. We read that Joseph had plans of quietly ending his engagement with Mary. This was the only way he could bring personal control back into his life, but then this happened. In a dream, God revealed to Joseph that he should not be afraid to take Mary as his wife. He learned that this child within her was a special child, and that this child would be part of God’s plan for healing people and the world. Through this dream, Joseph realized that he was part of God’s plan, that God had chosen him to be the father of this child and together God wanted Joseph and Mary to raise this special child. This sign from God changed everything for Joseph. Knowing that he was part of God’s plan, Joseph was now willing to live with his fear caused by his life being outside his control. He willingly accepted his God-given role as Mary’s husband and Jesus’ father. Due to this sign of Immanuel in the dream, Joseph was willing to surrender to and trust the flow of God’s plan and spirit in his life. In this blog, I will explore how signs of Immanuel in two different contexts help us live with our fear to the seemingly uncontrollable aspects of life, that of pregnancy and that of living with the reality of illness and death. What does it mean to watch for signs of Immanuel…within ourselves, within other, within the broader world? And how do those signs help us to wait in a place of surrender where we realize that we are part of the flow of God’s spirit? Watching for Signs of Immanuel in Pregnancy I think it is fair to say that the mother’s journey of pregnancy is one of constant surrender. So much of their life is outside their control: the changing experience of their body, their emotions, and life. Only by surrendering can mothers, and fathers too, experience the flow of God’s spirit within their life. Erin MacPherson, in her blog “What God taught me during pregnancy?”, describes her pregnancy this way, “Pregnancy is exhausting, exciting, exhilarating, and stressful all at once, which means that you’re going to be exhausted, excited, exhilarated, and stressed for the next nine months. Not an easy thing to be — especially when you’re gaining weight at a rate of three pounds per week.” She continues, “When I first got pregnant, I was giddy with excitement. And who wouldn’t be? I was going to have a baby. I couldn’t stop thinking (or talking) about it. But then I got tired. And sick. And bloated. And suddenly I wasn’t so giddy anymore. In fact, once those pregnancy symptoms kicked in, I turned into a whiney, moaning, self-pitying mess. I resented my baby for making me feel so bad and resented everyone else because they didn’t feel as bad as I did. I resented my job because I had to go to it. I resented my husband because he could sleep and I couldn’t. I even resented my dog because she could spend the entire day basking in the sunshine while I had to actually get up and function.” She continues, “That resentment I felt because I was sick, tired, and fat quickly turned to guilt. I felt guilty for resenting my baby, who was supposed to be my pride and joy. I felt guilty for resenting my husband, who was honestly trying to help me as much as he could. Mostly, I felt guilty that I wasn’t thrilled to be pregnant. I started to wonder if God didn’t approve of my pregnancy and my baby. Crazy talk, right? I know that now, but at the time, I felt so awful and so confused that I started to doubt God’s providence” (https://www.faithgateway.com/what-god-taught-me-during-pregnancy/#.Xfjzi2RKhPY). Erin provides a good description of the different ways mothers feel they are losing control of their bodies, their emotions, and their life. I am sure I could have found stories of future fathers too on the internet, stories like Joseph, where they also wrestle with their fears of the unknown and life being outside their control during the times of pregnancy. To live with this feeling of losing control, and the anxiety and fears that go with this lost of control, mothers and fathers need to learn the pathway of surrender and acceptance of what is happening to them. This is the role of faith, and a major part of this faith involves watching for signs of Immanuel, signs of God with us in the midst of this life journey where we have little to no control, signs of God with us that help us let go of control and go with the flow like Mary and Joseph did. If you are a mother or father, what were some of the Immanuel experiences that helped you surrender and go with the flow of life during your time of pregnancy and delivery? Here are some of the key signs of Immanuel for my wife and I as we went three times through the uncontrollable journey of pregnancy.
Watching for Signs of Immanuel in the reality of aging and health We all know we are aging and that we are going to die someday. These are parts of our life that are uncontrollable. And yet, these realities of life we keep in the background of our awareness until life forces us to deal with them. And when that happens, we struggle for the circumstances of our life and our emotions seem outside our control. In fact, we often fight with God, and often fight with life trying to keep it under our control. When this happens, this is when we need our faith, when we need to look for signs of Immanuel with us, like Joseph did when his life felt out of control. In a previous blog, I might have described my battle with God around the death of my first brother Jamie more than 25 years ago. I was very upset with God for not answering my prayers by healing my brother Jamie from HIV/AIDS. I remember preaching a sermon at First Mennonite Church in Kitchener in July of 1992 expressing my anger at God due to what was happening to my brother Jamie. I could not see any signs of Immanuel, God with us, at that time. Three-four weeks later, Jamie died. (My brother Jamie is in back row on the left side behind me) With his death, it was like my faith in God had died too. I remember being emotionally numb for the next few days as I endured 4 times of visitations. But something happened when I entered the sanctuary with my family at the beginning of my funeral. I noticed the sanctuary full of people, many of them in tears. Then, the veil over my heart split in two, and I realized that God was crying with me in my pain, and I began to sob. I finally let go of control. Those crying people in the pew were my sign of Immanuel, God with me, and suddenly my brother’s funeral transformed from a day of painful sadness to a sadness that also coexisted with gratitude for my brother who I loved and admired in my life. That experience of Immanuel at Jamie’s funeral began a journey for me, a slow journey of learning to let go and trust God in the flow of life. When I became pastor of Hagerman Mennonite Church a year later, it was a part-time role and so I found myself looking for other part-time work. At first, I volunteered as a volunteer chaplain for the AIDS Committee of York Region and ran a peer support group out of Hagerman for families living with HIV/AIDS. Here I found myself ministering to people who found their life out of their control. My pastoral role was to help people practice living a life of faith and surrender in the midst of the AIDS. In many ways, I was helping people watch for signs of Immanuel so that they could join what God was doing in their life, despite the reality of AIDS in their life. Through visitation, the peer support group, and officiating many funerals, people received grace, love, compassion, strength, and insights from God’s spirit that help them live with their fears of what was happening. They had many moments of Immanuel as they practiced the skill of letting go to the flow of their life so that God’s spirit could minister to them. This volunteer work led me to be invited to be pastoral counsellor for the Community Care Access Centre (CCAC) of York Region, what is now called the Local Integrated Health Network (LIHN). And here I found myself doing the same thing, helping people let go of control and watch for signs of Immanuel in the midst of living with cancer, living in palliative care until their death, or mental health. Earlier in my blog, we explored about how signs of Immanuel appear during pregnancy and birth. But as an on-call chaplain for Markham-Stouffville Hospital, I also had to help people see signs of Immanuel in the midst of delivering a stillborn child, a painful tragedy beyond the parents’ control. The spiritual practices of prayer and ritual were key to help parents surrender for a moment so they can experience Immanuel experiences in this context. A year after my youngest brother died from HIV/AIDS in 1992, my middle brother Kevin began to show signs of HIV/AIDS. Like Jamie, he got infected from the contaminated blood products he took for his blood condition hemophilia. My brother Kevin is on the far right of picture Unlike Jamie’s death, I knew that fighting Kevin’s death would only made my suffering and grief worst. I knew I needed to surrender to the flow of these difficult dynamics of life for me to experience signs of Immanuel. But it was not easy for I still experienced Kevin’s death as painful, maybe even more painful for I was closer to Kevin in age, and I had a deeper relationship with him than my younger brother. And, yet Kevin’s funeral was another profound Immanuel moment for me and all who attended. It was funeral involving many tears but also much laughter and gratitude. My brother Kevin had a great sense of humor that came out in his funeral. This dynamic of surrender is an ongoing challenge in my life and I suspect in your lives too. It is far more comfortable to live a life where we seek to control everything that feels uncomfortable to us. But when we live our life in this way, we really limit how God’s spirit can minister to us, especially in our moments of pain and negative emotions. It is during those times when we seek to control our life the most. But, it is also in those times when we feel most separate from God. This is where Joseph found himself, in the place where he wanted to take control of his destiny and quietly divorce Mary, his pregnant girlfriend. But then an Immanuel experience happened for him…and that changed everything. Questions to Ponder 1. What causes you to take control in your life? What were those experiences like? 2. When have you found yourself in experiences beyond your control? What were those experiences like? What helped you surrender your control and accept and join the flow of what was happening in your life? 3. When have your experienced Emmanuel-type moments in your life? How did those moments help you surrender and go with the flow of your life? What did learn about God and life through these moments? So much of psychospiritual therapy and spiritual direction involves helping people explore and transform the problematic internal structures in their soul that keep them from experiencing the Present moment and all the divine qualities of God’s Spirit that are trying to emerge to minister to what they are experiencing. These internal egoic structures include our unhelpful beliefs about self and others, our thinking patterns, our emotional coping strategies, our relationship patterns with others, our impulsive and compulsion behaviors, etc. The roots of all these egoic structures go back to our various key holding environments in our childhood, the primary one being the holding environment of our parents. This means that parenting plays a key role in the spiritual formation of children. My goal in this blog is to explore how parenting and spiritual formation come together. The Young Child as a Unified Field When a baby is born, it experiences all of its life as one unified reality including mother, father, bottle, diaper, cat, bassinette, etc. There is no sense of “me/I” and “you/other.” One way of understanding this unified reality is to see it as a unified field that has a physical aspect to it, but this field is far more than physical. This field has also emotional and spiritual aspects to it. Within the Diamond Approach, it teaches that this unified field has aspects of Basic trust, support, value, peace, calmness, love, compassion, strength, awareness, joy, pleasure, etc. already present in the field. When a parent expresses love to their baby, the baby connects more deeply to the love already present in their field. When a parent holds the baby in their arms, the baby connects more deeply to the inner support that is already present in their field. When a parent plays with their baby, the baby connects more deeply to the joy and playfulness already present in their field. When a parent comforts a crying baby, the baby connects more deeply to the compassion already present in their field. When parents respond appropriately to their baby, the child stays connected to the experience of Basic Trust already present in the field. Since a baby experiences life as one unified field of reality, a baby has no sense of an individual self. This then begs the question. How does a child develop its sense of self? How does a child discover who it is? Here, I find the insights of self psychology useful. Self psychology teaches that a child has three core self-object needs, needs that help it develop its sense of self. They include mirroring, idealizing, and twinning. Mirroring and The Internal God Mirror For a child to discover their true sense of self, that is, a soul-field or soul that is distinct from the soul of others, the child needs parents that can reflect back accurately their experience. For a parent to mirror their child well, a parent needs to be able to witness all of their child’s experiences without judgement. There is no such thing as a good or bad feeling; all feelings are simply information or signs that tells what is happening within our child. We need to reflect these feelings back accurately and non-anxiously so that our child develops a healthy understanding of their internal experience within their soul, and begin to trust this experience, and the truth it reveals to them. This trust and truth are spiritual qualities that emerge and develop within the child’s soul. When a parent mirrors well, a child develops their own internal mirror within their soul that allows them to witness and understand their internal experiences accurately and graciously. I sometimes call this healthy internal mirror that develops within people’s souls a God-mirror for it reflects to them exactly how God sees and is interacting with them. Can you begin to guess what happens when we, as parents, don’t mirror accurately? Our children will develop dirty or distorted internal mirrors that are full of unhelpful beliefs about self that creates much emotional and mental angst. If we, as parents, mirror that sadness or anger is wrong, how will our children view themselves when they find themselves crying or full of rage? They are going to believe that there is something wrong with them, that they are flawed, possibly even unlovable. It is essential that parents learn to mirror well their children. Mirroring is the first of three core needs that children need fulfilled by parents for them to develop a healthy experience of self. Lets turn to the child’s self-object of idealizing. Idealization and The Internal Comforter/Guide What happens to a child when they encounter a difficult experience in life? They go to their parents, the people they idealize and look up to in life, for comfort, protection, and guidance. When we, as parents, fulfill this idealizing role, not only are we able to mirror our child’s experience without judgement, but we are able to hold emotionally our child’s experience and validate it. When this type of parental holding happens regularly with our children, they experience the dynamics of comfort and soothing emerging in their soul-field which allows them to settle emotionally and feel held internally. Thanks to their parent’s ability to validate and hold their experiences, the child develops their spiritual ability to validate and hold their own experiences. Our children may even internalize our gentle soothing parental voice and begin to hear an internal voice or receive thoughts that brings comfort to them. Often, this soothing is called “self-soothing”, but this soothing, if it emerges naturally and not through intentional positive self-talk, is actually the dynamics of Essence arising in the child’s soul in response to their negative experience. Within the Christian tradition, this gentle soothing voice or through process is often interpreted as the Gentle Shepherd or guiding voice of God’s Spirit or Christ. I have just described what happens if we, as parents, fulfill the idealizing need of our children. Our children develop the spiritual ability or faith to allow their soul or God's Spirit to validate, comfort, and minister to their life experience, just as their parents did when they needed, as children, to idealize their parents. However, like mirroring, it is easy to fail our children in their needs around idealization. How often do we actually hold our children’s experiences in a way that validates, brings comfort, and guides them? Attachment theory and research teaches that adults, based on their childhood, have two common attachment styles, that of anxious attachment or fearful withdrawal. An anxious-attachment parent will seek to maintain a merged relationship with their children through over-involvement with their children, solving their children’s problems, smoothing over all negative experiences, and undermining their child’s autonomy. The parent’s anxiety of losing connection with their children gets in the way of the parent having a healthy relationship with their children where the child’s idealization needs are met. A fearful-withdrawal parent is conditioned to distance themselves from all experiences and people that they judge as not safe. They avoid all vulnerability. These parents often avoid, dismiss, manage tightly or distance themselves from conflict or negative experiences with their children. Since fear-withdrawal parents manage so much of their life, these pent-on emotions sometimes burst into the family scene created much pain. Children of a fearful-withdrawal parent find their parent either not physically or emotionally available or not able to truly hold their life experiences, especially the difficult ones. I noted earlier how children, when they are held well by their parents, internalize their parent’s soothing and guiding voices within their own soul-field. Unfortunately, this internalization process works both ways. As a spiritual director, I spend a lot of time with my directees helping them understand and become liberated from the dynamics of their inner critic voice. Research indicates that our inner critic voice is the internalization of our caregivers, often our parents, when they were at their worst behavior, the times when we, as children, felt hurt or traumatized by them. As a result, many people struggle with critical voices and thoughts that they find very disempowering and often condemning, all because their idealizations needs were not met well throughout their childhood or at key times during their childhood. Twinning and the Experience of Being a Child of God So far, we have looked at the childhood needs of mirroring and idealization. Self Psychology also highlights a third childhood selfobject need, namely the need of twinship. A child needs to experience themselves in some way similar to their parents. If a child feels too different from their parents, they struggle in accepting themselves. This twinning is also true at the spiritual level. For me as a Christian spiritual director/psychospiritual therapist, this is why I believe the doctrine of the Incarnation is so essential to the Christian faith. In Jesus, we see how God’s spirit became manifested or embodied in a human person, just like you and me. There are many texts in the New Testament that describe us, humans, as children of God, just as Jesus was a child of God. When this childhood need of divine twinship is met, we realize deep within ourselves that God’s spirit can manifest in our lives in a similar way to how it manifested in Jesus’ life, and the lives of many other Christians who followed in the footsteps of Jesus. If we, as parents, don’t fulfill this twinship need well in our children, they will struggle in accepting themselves and their spiritual nature. Part of meeting this twinship need is helping our children see how their spiritual nature is similar to our spiritual nature, as parents, which is similar to the spiritual nature we see embodied in the historical life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. If all of these three selfobject needs are met well, our children will grow up to become adults with healthy spacious dynamic soul-fields that naturally meet their needs through:
The Parenting Role But as you, as parents, probably realize from your spiritual journey, nobody gets all of these core needs met perfectly in their childhood. None of us comes into our adult years with a perfectly formed internal God mirror. Our mirrors are often quite dirty or distorted at times. None of us are in touch with the comforting, guiding, and ministering presence of God’s spirit in our soul all the time. Many times we find ourselves operating very self-sufficient in our lives, totally disconnected from the present moment where God’s spirit actually responds and ministers to us. None of us experiences a continual sense of twinship with God based on our divine identity. In fact, many times we struggle in experiencing this sense of being worthy to be called a child of God. At least, this is how I experienced my Christian faith as I tried to raise three children with my wife. I felt quite incompetent as a parent around spiritual formation at times despite the fact I was a pastor, spiritual director, and psychospiritual therapist. Being now a parent of three adult children, I am well aware of both my successes and failures in meeting these core needs in my children. How I wish I could redo my parenting years so that I could replay key moments of my children’s lives differently? I can’t but I have discovered that I still can help my children process and become slowly liberated from their childhood wounds for these wounds continue to play havoc in their current adult lives. How can I do this as a parent, you may wonder? My son David and Me By meeting their core childhood needs now as they process their struggles and pain with me, their father. I have come to realize that I will never outgrow the father role in their lives, at least not until all their core self-object needs are met. My children still need me, as their father, to be their mirror, but now I can be a better mirror, one that mirrors more accurately their experiences. They still need me to hold and validate their experiences and provide comfort and guidance, but now I can perform this idealization role in a way that truly empowers them and builds that internal spiritual support system. They still need me to meet their twinship need, but now I can meet this need better so they can embrace more easily their spiritual nature and divine identity. And so, the role of parenting in the spiritual formation of our children never ends. It just changes.
Questions to ponder:
So often we picture God as very separate from us, that there is me and there is God. But is that true? Or is God very close to us? In fact, the word “close” is probably still the wrong word for that still implies that God and us are separate. Apostle Paul writes that “The Spirit of God, who raised Jesus from the dead, lives in you” (Rom 8:12), lives in us. Other Bible scriptures point to this same truth when they indicate that “God’s light shines within us” (2 Cor 4: 6) or that the indwelling Christ lives within us (Gal. 2:20). One could picture this Christ light within us as a divine flame. What does it look like to nurture and free up this divine flame that seeks to burn within us? That question is essence of this blog. To help understand this spiritual flame, let me turn to the Christian tradition that I am most familiar with. Christians often talk about how Jesus Christ was both human and spirit. The human part of Jesus is easy for us to see. Based on historical records, including the Bible, there is doubt that Jesus was part of human history. Jesus was a human that people could see, touch, hear, smell, and relate with. It is very obvious that Jesus was human, just like you and me. The "spirit" part or the “Christ” part of Jesus is harder to understand. One way to understand this Christ part is to imagine that there was a Christ flame burning within the human Jesus. This Christ flame was the source of all the essential qualities we see manifesting in Jesus’ life: compassion, love, grace, truth, strength, resilience, joy, truth, power, grace, etc. The human Jesus felt all of those experiences coming from the Christ flame burning inside him, and these spiritual experiences shaped how Jesus acted and what he said. It also shaped how people experienced and responded to Jesus. This Christ flame burnt so brightly within Jesus that people began to call the human Jesus, "Jesus, the Christ" meaning "Jesus, the anointed one of God." People came to see Jesus as God’s Light in the world. But Jesus expanded this idea of God’s light a lot further, radically further, and this truth has often been lost in the church. He said that each one of us is God’s light to the world…just like him (Matt 5:14). Each one of us, has a Christ flame burning inside of us, just like Jesus. Wow! That is pretty amazing. Just as Jesus is both human and spirit, so are we. Just as Jesus was a child of God, so are each one of us a child of God. In fact, every human is born as both human and spirit. When we were physically born, there was already a young bright Christ flame burning inside of us. And this burning Christ candle is why children are so responsive to love, so responsive to joy, so responsive to being held, so responsive to grace, and all the other fruits of God’s spirit. The more young children experience these spiritual fruits from their parents and their family and friends, the brighter their Christ flame glows inside them. I want to take this Christ flame metaphor one step further, and this gets at the essence of this blog. This Christ flame in each one of us is meant to shine brightly but that is not what often happens. Instead, this Christ flame often gets buried under what Jesus calls a bushel basket (Matt 5:15-16). Different Bible translations use other words rather than bushel basket like bowl, tub, or bucket. When I preached this sermon at Mannheim Mennonite Church, I brought two examples of bushel baskets---a weaved basket and an iron pot. When I place this weaved basket over a Christ candle, that basket impacts our ability to see the Christ flame. This basket represents how I and many other faithful spiritual people experience the Christ flame in our lives. There are moments when this basket is missing and we have very pure experiences of the Christ flame in our lives. In those moments, we are very present and aware of our experience including whatever aspects of Christ’s spirit that maybe flowing within us and through us whether it be compassion, joy, love, strength, inner confidence, truth, etc. And we often express these Christ-like qualities to the people we encounter. But many times in our lives, we have a basket like this one over our Christ flame. While there are moments when we are connected to the Christ flame, there are many other moments when we are lost in our thoughts, or feelings or busyness or work or relationships and have very little awareness of the Christ flame burning within us. In these moments, we are not near as Christ-like in our behavior to those around us. But many people don’t have a bushel basket like this over their Christ flame that burns inside them. No, they have a bushel basket like this iron pot over their Christ flame. When this iron bushel basket is over our flame, we find it very hard to experience the light, warmth, and all the aspects of the Christ flame burning within us. When we experience life like this, how would we see ourselves? Would we identify with the Christ flame inside the pot, that is, believe we are a child of God, a brother or sister to Christ, something we rarely experience? Or would we identify with the pot, the pot that shapes almost every experience in our life? Most people identify with the pot…that this negative self image or identity is who I am. For the past few weeks at Mannheim Mennonite Church, we have been working through the deadly sins and holy virtues. We have noticed how each of the deadly sins is a coping strategy that we use when we lose touch with the experience of the holy virtue or spiritual fruit connected to that deadly sin. For example, when we lose touch with the divine experience of our inner confidence (virtue of humility), we have to self-generate that confidence by lifting ourselves up and putting others down. That is the coping pattern of pride. When we find it hard to experience divine rest (virtue of joy), we have to self-generate that sense of rest and settling by avoiding all situations and people that cause us stress. That coping pattern is often judged as laziness or the sin of sloth. When we struggle to experience intimate connection that comes with healthy boundaries (virtue of chastity), we self-generate that sense of intimate oneness by seeking to control another through the act of sexual intercourse. That is the coping pattern of lust. When we lose connection with divine trust that helps us realize that life/God will provide more than enough for our needs (virtue of generosity), we have to self-generate this trust by making sure we have lots of wealth and assets for our future. This is the coping pattern of greed. When we find it hard to feel divine contentment, we project this missing contentment onto others and the outside world. This causes us to envy others who have something we don’t have, the coping pattern of envy. When we struggle to experience divine fullness (virtue of abstinence), we feel a deep hunger in our lives, an immense apetite food, drink, things, etc. that will take away that empty feeling inside. This is the coping pattern of gluttony. Finally, when we lose touch with our divine love for someone and experience them instead as dangerous, we will see them as our enemy and seek to destroy them. This is the coping pattern of wrath. These coping patterns, and the deadly painful experiences at the root of them, are all part of what makes up our bushel basket. The more painful experiences we carry in our lives from our past along with the deadly coping strategies we wrestle with connected to this pain, the thicker and harder our bushel basket or pot is that interferes with our ability to experience the Christ flame. In contrast, the seven holy virtues, plus many other spiritual fruit, are all expressions of the Christ flame shining within us that seek to heal and transform us and our bushel basket so that more of our Christ light can shine through to the world. This begs the question: how do we work at the transforming our bushel basket so that the Christ flame inside us can be nurtured to become a blazing fire that warms our soul continually and shines out to those around us? As I have come to understand it, there are two primarily ways that this spiritual transformation can happen. One is life circumstances. Due to the realities of our suffering and pain, our bushel basket sometimes gets cracked open allowing us to experience our Christ flame and the comforting presence of God. Sometimes, but less common, we experience profound moments of joy or mountaintop experiences in life that again caused our bushel basket to crack allowing our Christ flame to brightly shine through. The second way we can work at transforming our bushel basket is through spiritual practices … like coming to church to worship, sing, pray, be with other Christ-centred people (other religious tradition would say this differently) … like reading the Bible or other spiritual writings … like having times of centering prayer or meditation … like praying by having conversations with God through talking or writing (journalling) … like taking contemplative or mindful walks in nature, … like listening to Christian music or music that helps you enter into a place of contemplation … and many more. Transforming our bushel basket is also the primary purpose of people seeking spiritual direction. By working regularly with a spiritual director, people intentionally work at softening their pot or bushel basket interfering with their Christ flame. As the shell of their structured personality softens, people are more able to sense the Christ flame that shines within them, and allow its light and influence to flow into more and more aspects of their life. (To learn about my expanding spiritual direction practice, check out my updated website.) Questions to ponder:
This past month my church began a new sermon series titled “Snakes and Ladders” where we are relooking at the “deadly sins” and the “holy virtues” which shaped the medieval church for a thousand years until the sixteenth century. Up until then, ethical thinking in Western civilization was virtue-based or character-based. However, with the rise of reasoning and the emphasis on the Bible in the Church Reformation, ethical thinking became more behavior-based or law-based. All virtue teachings that focused on deepening or enriching one’s life gradually disappeared and was replaced by a law-based system of commandments based on, duty, obligation, etc. In this blog, I want to explore again these deadly habits and notice how nurturing the virtues connected to these deadly experiences can lead to a more abundant life, a deeper sense of spiritual life then can be found through just teaching theology and following ethical principles or a religious law. The early church fathers identified seven deadly sins: sloth, pride, lust, greed, envy, gluttony, and wrath. Connected to each of these deadly sins, the church father identified seven holy virtues that arises as one works at and transforms each of the deadly sins. From transforming sloth comes joy/inner rest, from pride arising humility/inner confidence, from lust emerges chastity/intimacy, from greed comes generosity/abundance, from envy arises contentment, from gluttony emerges temperance/fullness, and finally wrath transforms into love/power. The deadly sins point to what happens to our soul when it is not fully oriented toward God and God’s love. Our soul becomes sick with the dynamics of sloth, pride, or lust or greed or envy or gluttony or wrath…or some combination of these diseases. The stronger these dynamics, the more unwell our soul is, the more symptoms of soul unwellness we will experience and express. The holy virtues point to what happens to our soul when it is more oriented toward God and God’s love. When this happens, our soul becomes healthier and this is evident through the dynamics of joy, humility/confidence, chastity/intimacy, generosity/abundance, contentment, temperance/fullness, and love/power being more present in our lives. The church fathers call these seven sins the “deadly seven sins.” By “deadly”, they meant that all human sins could be traced back to these seven sins. These deadly sins or orientations of the human soul were the root of all sin and all evil. When you understand the deadly sins in this way, you can begin to appreciate why the holy virtues became so important in the medieval church. These holy virtues were the signs of spiritual health, signs of Christians being in healthy communion with God, signs of Christian souls being spiritually transformed by God’s spirit from their diseased soul caused by one or more of the deadly sins. People tend to see sins and virtues as simply human acts or behaviors often caused by wrong beliefs or simply ignorance, that “people don’t know better.” If you see sins and virtues in this way, the solution is obvious: we need to educate people. If people are properly educated, people will soon stop sinning and live a more virtuous life. This is the basis of much character education in our schools, in our families, and possibly in our churches too. Many people believe that we can teach people to become good virtuous people. The early church fathers who formulated these deadly sins and holy virtues had a totally different way of thinking about spiritual formation. They believed the reason people sinned was not about ignorance or wrong beliefs. It was caused by the human soul becoming improperly formed. I want to take this insight one step further than the church fathers did. They saw these deadly sins as the root of all sin. But what is the root of these deadly sins? I want to suggest that these deadly sins are the coping strategies people use and developed to cope with what I call “deadly experiences”, experiences in life that deeply damage their human soul. Let me illustrate what I mean. When a child experiences being seen, mirror, and valued by their parents and others in their holding environment, they will develop a natural inner confidence, appreciation of self, and a healthy pride. But when this healthy mirroring is not reliable, then the child has to self-generate this self confidence for themselves which is formed by always comparing oneself to others, and making sure we are perceived as better than others. That deadly experience of not being mirrored well by our parents is the root of the sin of pride. The sin of sloth develops when a person is not able to experience a profound sense of self-acceptance and self-love, experiences that arise from divine reality when we are loved and supported well by our parents. When our holding environment allows us to have these types of experiences, our nervous system settles and we move into a place of deep rest and being. When we are not able to experience these valuable experiences of divine love and rest, we seek to self-generate these restful experiences through being lazy and irresponsible. That is the sin of sloth. And this is true of all the deadly sins. No longer able to easily experience intimate connection naturally, our ego seeks to make intimate connection happen with others leading to the sin of lust. The sin of envy is our ego seeking to get what others have so we can enter a place of contentment, an inner contentment that often fails to rise naturally. When we struggle to feel the experience of enough or abundance, we become greedy believing more materials possessions will fill that hole in our life. The sin of gluttony arises due to our inability to feel fullness and satisfaction that arises from within. The resultant hunger causes our ego to look to the outside world where we gorge ourselves with hopes of satisfying that hunger. Finally, the sin of wrath arises due to our inability to feel our inner power. As a result, we hate all those who cause us to feel powerless. Each of the seven deadly sins are coping strategies our ego develops to cope with the holes or disconnections we feel in our soul with our divine nature. And all of these holes, hungers, and blockages are due to experiences in our life, often in our childhood’s holding environment, that deaden aspects of our soul. These deadly experiences and deadly sins have profound effect on the formation of the human soul. If we feed our soul with things that are not good for the human soul, guess what happens: our human soul stays unwell. But, if we feed it with things that are good for the human soul, then our soul starts regaining its health, getting stronger, and feeling more vital and alive. Rebecca DeYoung uses a very helpful image in his book, Glittering Vices: A New Look at the Seven Deadly Sins and Their Remedies, to help people understand how the human soul is formed. She describes it this way. “When you first go down a hill and you’re sledding, you have to break through all that fluffy, piled-up snow, and the sled goes slowly, and you have to push it forward. But the second or third time you slide down the hill, then you get a track and you wear a groove, and it becomes icy with repeated use. And all of a sudden, it’s very hard to slide out of the track, and once you’re tipping a little bit out of it, the track will sort of groove you back down the hill at lightning speed. And that’s one picture for the way in which individual choices become cumulative in our character” (https://teddyray.com/deadly-sins/). This is a wonderful image of how spiritual formation naturally happens. We develop patterns of living and these patterns form a groove in our soul that shapes how we live. The deeper the groove, the more this grove shapes how we live our lives. When we experience trauma or a deadly experience, a large groove forms immediately that then shapes the path our sled takes down the hill. Deyoung goes on to note that these grooves work both ways. “These grooves can take you down the wrong path and these grooves can take you down the right path” (https://teddyray.com/deadly-sins/). Seen through this lens of deadly sins and holy virtues, spiritual formation is not about just teaching children and ourselves about God, Jesus, and Spirit and all the key stories in the Bible. Spiritual Formation involves also getting people to contemplate their practice of life and paying attention to where their grooves are, and work at transforming those grooves that are not driven by the fruits of God’s spirit or the holy virtues. This is the major purpose of spiritual practices. Through spiritual practices, you soon discover the dominant grooves in your life, and whether these grooves nurture life for you or do the very opposite, gradually suck life from you like a disease or illness and weaken your soul and spirit. Furthermore, these spiritual practices support you in developing more healthier grooves in your life when you realize how a certain groove is hurting your life. Often spiritual practices are done with the same expectation that we have with medicine. We are sick. We go to a doctor and get a prescription. We take the medicine. And bingo, within a day or so, we start feeling better. Spiritual practices do not work like that. Instead, the purpose of spiritual practices is to open your soul and put you in a place of surrender and waiting. It is only in this place of surrender that God’s grace can emerge. In this place of waiting and prayerfulness, you notice all the dynamics happening in your soul. At first, you will especially notice the dynamics tied to the deadly sin or the deadly experience you are wrestling with, the groove where your soul wants to go. For example, if you practice fasting, you will soon experience all the mental chatter and temptations around food connected to the deadly sin of gluttony and its roots. But spiritual practices not only help you become aware of the deadly experiences you are wrestling with. You also become aware of the dynamics of God’s spirit and grace ministering to you. Let me give an example to illustrate.
If you practice the spiritual practice of centering prayer, you will notice quickly how noisy and persistent your mind is with thinking and how boring your mind thinks silence is. This dynamic is called ‘monkey mind’ and there is lots written about it. The awareness itself is a fruit of God’s spirit. Through that awareness, you discover how deep the groove is around your mind being busy. Eventually, that will make you curious, another aspect of God’s spirit. You may ask yourself, “Why is my mind so busy because when I was young as a baby, it was not. It was quiet.” You begin to realize that all of this mental chatter is a coping pattern, a deep grove, that keeps you from actually feeling deeply and experiencing life. This insight is the spiritual fruit of truth. Seeing this pattern, you begin to long more deeply for a mind that can be quiet, and this longing makes you more determined with your practice of centering prayer. This longing and determination are both fruits of God’s spirit. Eventually, through repeatedly practicing the spiritual practice of centering prayer, you begin to experience short moments when your mind is quiet, and in those brief moments, you will notice your soul relaxing briefly…becoming more settled, more peaceful and calm…more fruits of God’s spirit. And onward the transforming process goes. What I have just described is the gift of doing spiritual practices regularly. As you allow God’s spirit to minister to you in this way, the dynamics of the deadly sin, and the deadly experiences underneath it, lessen allowing you to have more and longer moments of the different aspects of God’s spirit in your life. Questions to Ponder:
Spiritual practices like prayer are seen as essential in relating to God as a Christian or religious person. Prayer is foundational to having a personal relationship with God. Many of the seniors in my congregation talk often of praying to God when they struggle in life or when their family or friends are going through a tough time. For my seniors, prayer makes total sense to them. They talk about how God has answered their prayers. But as I relate to younger generations, prayer makes less and less sense to them. They question this relationship to God and how praying to God can actually make any difference in their life. In this blog, I want to explore how the dynamic of emergence actually helps us understand this relationship with God and how prayer works. As I noted in my last blog, the term “emergence” has been one term that I have found helpful in seeing the role of Spirit in human experience. I first began aware of this term in 2007 when I learned about Theory U developed by Otto Scharmer, a theory used to work at organizational transformation. In this theory, Scharmer highlighted the steps of surrender that an organization must go through before an organization can enter a place of “presencing”, a place where insights and new experiences “emerge” causing the organization to re-organize around this new vision and experience of itself. As a spiritual director learning about Theory U, it seemed that Scharmer was essentially teaching an organization how to pray. This form of prayer involved 3 steps, three different forms of surrender. These steps also highlight three levels of relationships we can have with God. Let me apply these 3 steps to the practice of personal prayer for I think they are very instructive in teaching a person to pray. First, personal prayer involves practicing surrender with our mind, that is, suspending all our judgments to thoughts that enter our mind so that our mind is fully open to all thoughts that come. As we pray in this way with God, our minds receive insights and truths from Divine that shape and guide our experience in life. Through surrendering in this way, we develop a dynamic mental relationship with the Divine. Many people who possess rigid belief systems struggle in opening their mind in this way for they are so used to managing their thoughts only allowing acceptable thoughts in. All “bad” thoughts are suppressed away. For our prayer experience to deepen, the person can practice a second form of surrender, that is, a letting go of our protective, cynical, hardened, heart so that our heart can become softened and sensitized to the many different feelings that can arise in the heart. Due to this more open heart, we are able to experience moments of God’s compassion, grace, love, strength, etc. in our life which transform our lives in bigger ways. When this deepening happens, our relationship with the Divine contains both mental and emotional aspects to it. Again, many people manage their feelings only allowing acceptable feelings in. All other “bad” feelings are repressed and go underground. This emotional management really limits how much people can experience the emotional fruits of God’s spirit. Our personal prayer experience can deeper even further through a third form of surrender. This involves a surrendering of our fears and aspects of our structured self so that our will and soul can open up more fully into a free state where larger emergent experiences can happen. When our relationship with the Divine deepens in this way, not only are we in touch with the mind and heart of the Divine, but we begin to trust the Divine implicitly in guiding our life. Our human will opens and seeks to follow the ways of God’s will. Again, since all people wrestle with an egoic structured self and its need for control, we all manage our lives constantly so that we avoid this fear and anxiety and having to trust the Divine in this way. Only the brave, faithful and courageous are able to open their will and soul in this significant way. But, when we are able to move into this open state of mind, heart, and soul, Scharmer claims that we enter a profound state of “presencing”. While it is posible to experience smaller moments of emergence when our mind or heart is open, it is here when all aspects of our soul are free and unemcumbered that deep emergence happens. Here, we receive insights, realizations, and experiences that profoundly transform our soul, heart, and mind and future life. Using psychotherapeutic language, these would be called the corrective emotional experiences that result in significant changes in our client’s lives. Using religious language, these would be called mystical or conversion experiences that have major impact on our present and future life. When we see prayer through this lens of Theory U, prayer is really the spiritual practice of nurturing emergence. This means that prayer has little to do with getting God to listen to our prayers and is more about surrendering our mind, heart, and soul so that God can act in our lives through the process of emergence. This past week a senior shared with me how God had answered her prayer by helping her grandson get a job. As I explored her prayer experience, I came to see how her prayers had helped her surrender her grandson’s future into God’s hand. Her prayer had released her anxiety a little and allowed her to have more trust in God and the goodness of life. I suspect also that her prayer life also helped her encourage her grandson in a supportive, less anxious way so when he had his interview, he was able to be in a more open, hopeful space. Due to both the grandmother and her grandson being in a more surrendered space, the dynamic of emergence was able to bring about the possibility of her grandson getting a job offer. You can imagine the grandmother’s excitement when she learned that her grandson got the job. No wonder she said, “God had answered her prayer.” I remember a powerful moment of emergence happened in a church I pastored over 20 years ago. Early in the pastorate at Hagerman Mennonite Church, a church of about 60 active members, it became apparent that there were two visions in the church. One vision was to be a church at Hagerman Corners in Markham. Another vision was to start a church in Stouffville, a town 10 minutes to the north of Markham. As we processed these two visions, it became evident that half the membership supported one vision, the other half supported the other vision. To work through this conflict, the church decided to setup a prayerful process group of four made up of 2 people from both visions. In their wisdom, they chose to keep me outside the group although they referenced with me often. Over the next 6 months, this process group led monthly congregational meetings prayerfully focused on key questions with the hope that a common solution would emerge that both groups could support. They brought in a consultant for one important congregational meeting so that we could hear everyone’s position/interests within the congregation. It appeared that fall that our congregation was at stalemate when a shift happened early December and openness arose around giving permission for two churches to emerge, a new church in Stouffville and a church continuing at Hagerman, albeit a new church for this church would be very different than the current Hagerman Church. The whole congregation met and discussed this new joint vision and amazingly the whole group decided by modified consensus to support it. I found myself pastoring a two-point pastoral charge. I marvelled as the congregation spontaneously sung together, “We are one in the spirit.” Both these examples highlight the process of emergence and prayer. Through the spiritual practice of prayer, we nurture the conditions of surrender that allow the dynamic of emergence to happen.
Questions to ponder:
Gord Alton |