What does it mean to experience and express God’s love? The answer to this question is not as easy as it may seem. Well-known Catholic author Richard Rohr notes that “most of us were taught that God would love us if and when we change.” This means that most of us were taught in church that God’s love was conditional. If we changed to how God wanted us to be, then we would experience God’s love. If not, we could expect to experience God’s judgement. Oftentimes, the whole notion of God saving us was tied to this conditional understanding of God’s love. This conditional type of love is also what many of us as children experienced often from our parents. If we were well-behaved, our parents loved us as children. If not, we, as children, often found this experience of love taken away from us. What I have found interesting from the Diamond Approach is learning how our early childhood experiences when we were merged in some way with our parents shaped significantly our experiences of God. In other words, if we experienced lots of conditional love from our parents then, we will also experienced God’s love in a similar way throughout our life until we work through these difficult childhood experiences. In other words, not only are we taught that God’s love is often conditional in the church, we often caught this teaching about God’s conditional love from our childhood experiences. However, Richard Rohr also talks about another understanding of God’s love. Rather then God loving us when we change, Rohr notes that “God loves you so that you can change. What empowers change, what makes you desirous of change is the experience of love. It is that inherent experience of love that becomes the engine of change” (https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/461968-most-of-us-were-taught-that-god-would-love-us). This teaching of God’s love suggests that God’s love is unconditional, that this love is always present within reality, and that it is this experience of God’s love that causes us to yearn for change and makes spiritual transformation possible. The gospel writer John notes that “God sent Jesus not to condemn the world but to save it (John 3: 17). Often, we, as Christians, interpret this verse through the lens of God’s love being conditional, as Richard Rohr notes. Through people believing in the saving acts of Jesus, the church has traditionally taught that their sins are forgiven and they are no longer under God’s judgement. But if we see God’s love as unconditional love, that is, love that is always present in reality and seeking to be expressed and experienced in our lives, than how does Jesus saves us, as the gospel writer John indicates? By helping us see that this judgement trait that causes us to believe that God’s love is conditional lies within us, within the conditioned structures within the human soul or within human society, and not within God. When we review the ministry of Jesus, we see a human who practiced an unconditional love to people. While he confronted the fallen power and religious structures of his time, when it came to people, he sought to include them within God’s Kingdom. This is why Jesus preached the famous Sermon on the Mount where he taught, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Creator in heaven; for God makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous” (Matt. 5: 44-45). When love is unconditional, there is no judgement within it. Love is always present seeking to manifest in all who are open to receive and experience it….just as the sun is always shining warming the world despite there being clouds that keep certain parts of the world from experiencing directly the sunlight. This link between judgement and God’s love is really important to understand. One of the key teachings of the Diamond Approach is that the experience of unconditional love can’t arise when there is judgement present. Conditional love can coexist with judgement, which is always tentative, but not unconditional love that allows our soul and heart to settle, rest, and expand into the supportive holding experience that comes with this agape love. Now judgement is a dangerous dynamic for whatever we judge as bad or wrong or evil, we want to separate from ourselves. Everything we judge bad, we seek to create a barrier or wall between ourselves and it, but we believe that we will only experience peace if we get rid or annihilate that which we judge as evil. Many of the conflicts in the outside world are connected to this desire to get rid of the perceived enemy. But this judgement process also happens within us. Every part of ourselves that we judge as sinful or bad, we often bury, repress, and cut off from our experience. We are so accustomed to cutting off the parts we judge as negative that we are often not even aware that we are doing it. There is a humorous scene within the comedy movie, "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" that captures in a very graphic way the cost of such repression. We see, Arthur, the White Knight blocked from crossing a bridge by a solitary guard known as the Black Knight. Because the Black Knight is unwilling to let him by, an absurd sword fight happens. Throughout the fight, the Black Knight begins losing parts of his body. Seeing what is happening, the White Knight pleads with the Black Knight, “you got to stop fighting.” But the Black Knight totally denies what is happening to him, “Oh, it is nothing. It is nothing but a scratch, a flesh wound. I am fine.” In the end, the Black Knight is just a stump. This notion of conditional love and judgement is quite dangerous and painful, both to ourselves but also to human society including God’s creation. How can we move from this place of being conditional lovers to being unconditional lovers? There is a famous Christian mystic, Julian of Norwich (1342 – 1416) who wrote a book, “Revelations of Divine Love.” It is the first known book written by a woman in English in the Western World. She was known as a spiritual authority and people looked to her as their counsellor and advisor. Julian grew up in the time of the Black Plague in Europe. When she was six years old, ¾ of the people in her city died. The plague persisted for 3 years and everything in the city came to a standstill.(https:/thefreelancehistorywriter.com/2014/02/14/julian-of-norwich-mystic-theologian-and-anchoress/%20). Between 75 million to 200 million died within a 4 year span in the continent of Europe. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_of_Norwich). A plague-like disease returned when she was aged 19 and when she was thirty, she herself got sick with a fatal-type disease and came close to death many times. It was during this sickness that Julian had many visions that led to her writing her famous book on Divine Love. People believed the plague was sent by God as punishment for humanity’s sins. This was the common view of that time including the church. But Julian had a very different view of sin. She saw sin as both the cause of pain but also the doorway to blessing. She writes, “God showed that sin shall not be shame, but honour to man – for just as for every sin there is a corresponding pain in reality just so, for every sin, to the same soul is given a blessing by love” (http://www.melbourneanglican.org.au/NewsAndViews/TMA/Heroes%20of%20the%20Faith/Julian%20of%20Norwich%20-%20Heroes%20of%20the%20Faith%20-%20May%202012.pdf) For Julian, sin was not something to hide from or suppress or reject. Rather, it was something to honour, to acknowledge and welcome, and in doing so, this experience of sin led to an experience of God’s grace. A very different way of holding sin, not one of judgement but rather one of unconditional love, a love that is able to hold, without judgement, all experiences of life. It is from this theology of love that Julian penned the following words, “Sin is inevitable, but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” Within one of my Mennonite Church song books, we actually have a song based on these words of Julian of Norwich that is a favourite of mine. Let me share with you some questions to help you explore your experience of God's love:
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This past weekend the Christian Church remembered the crucifixion of Jesus on Good Friday and the resurrection of Jesus on Easter. While Easter is often seen as the highlight of this weekend religious celebration, I actually believe the Good Friday service is the key. It is here that we wrestle with the darkness of humanity’s fallen nature (both personal and societal) and the mystery of God’s response to this darkness. I have purposely used the word “mystery” to describe the Good Friday event. How can this day be called “Good Friday” when it was a day of tragedy and trauma for so many people? That is the mystery of this day, one that I still believe the church has not captured well theologically. What is this mysterious “goodness” that happened on this tragic day? (Please excuse the length of this blog. It is longer than I wish. I plan to return to shorter blogs in the future) Christians grow up in a church where the mystery of this goodness was expressed in these various ways. Jesus had to bear the sins of humanity. Jesus had to bear the suffering and consequences of human sin so that humans, rather than being punished by God, could experience God’s grace. Jesus had to paid the price of human sin, death, so that we, humans, could experience God’s eternal life. The Historical Roots Behind the Sacrificial Theology of Good Friday These understandings of Jesus’ death grew out of the Jewish sacrificial system that existed before Christianity emerge. Within that religious framework, when a person or family sinned, that is, did something that broke God’s law, one’s relationship with God was fractured. There was now a gap in one’s God-human relationship. To heal this broken God-human relationship, the Jewish religious law required that sin and guilt sacrifices be made at the temple to God. Through this confession of sin and ritual of sacrifice, the relationship between God and the person/family was restored. Since Christianity grew out of Judaism, this Jewish sacrificial system shaped how the early Christians understood the death of Jesus. They saw Jesus as the ultimate offering or sacrifice to God. The Biblical writers believed that Jesus had to bear the sins of humanity, to bear the suffering and consequences of our human sin because of God’s holy law. In Jesus paying this spiritual debt or price for us, it now became possible for humans to experience God’s healing and saving love directly without giving any animal or grain sacrifice to God. All Christians had to do was believe that Jesus became their holy sacrifice to God for their sinfulness, and in doing so, they restored their relationship with God. They now experienced God’s grace and reunion with God. This experience has often been called the experience of salvation or reconciliation within the Christian tradition. There are many Christian scriptures that point in this direction. Personal Struggle with Sacrificial Theology of Good Friday Personally, I have struggled with this Christian teaching of “Jesus dying for the sins of the world so that I could be saved” for many reasons. First of all, I didn’t grow up in a Christian church that stressed this sacrificial theology of Jesus’ death. Therefore, when I had a profound spiritual awakening in my early twenties, I didn’t interpret my conversion experience through this interpretative lens. Yes, I felt purified and my past forgiven, which is often what is highlighted in a “salvation experience” but I had no sense that my conversion experience was tied to Jesus’ death on the cross. None. For me, my experience was closer to the prodigal son parable in the Bible where I decided to return home to God, and in doing so, I found God waiting for me. In fact, I resonate quite strongly to the hymn “I sought the Lord” in my Mennonite hymnal where the singer discovers that in seeking the Lord, they find that God has been already seeking them. This is one reason I have struggled with the sacrificial theology of Jesus in the New Testament: It didn’t resonate with my life experience. Second, for most of my life I have struggled theologically with this Christian sacrificial theology. I could not understand how the God of unconditional love would require the sacrificial death of a holy man to fulfill the requirements of God’s law. We constantly teach in the church that the essential character of God is one of love, grace, and truth. And yet, as soon as the issue of human sin arises, suddenly this love, grace, and truth collapses and we become controlled by the dictates of God’s law. This means that God’s law must be the essential core of God’s character, not love, grace, and truth as the church teaches. I am aware of many Christians, like myself, who struggle with this contradiction within our Christian theology. Finally, if the essence of God’s healing and saving grace is based on the sacrificial death of Jesus, surely we would see this spiritual teaching at the core of dominant psychologies and pastoral counselling frameworks? This is not the case as I discovered when I went through pastoral counselling training 15 years ago. This is still true now as I work at training to be a supervisor-educator of pastoral counselling students. Since these psychologies and pastoral counselling models are evidence-based, this suggests there is little scientific evidence tying this understanding of Jesus’ atoning death to the human psycho-spiritual healing process. All of this points to the fact that there is a mystery about Jesus’ death that I believe we, as Christians, don’t understand well. Throughout my life, I have been looking for other interpretative frameworks in which to understand Jesus’ death, one that resonates more with my life experience, one that resolves the theological tension between love and law that Christians often placed within the character of God, one that flows into the psycho-spiritual healing process found within pastoral counselling. This spring, as I have been preaching at my Mennonite Church with the Lenten Christian texts and teaching pastoral counselling to my students, some new insights have emerged for me that open up a fresh way of understanding the crucifixion of Jesus, insights that resolve to a great extent the issues I have raised above. For the sake of brevity, I will be outlining these insights in broad strokes. Two laws: Law of Sin and Law of Spirit I have discovered that it is helpful to see two laws at work within life and human experience. The Bible calls them the law of sin (Rom. 7) and the law of Spirit (Rom. 8). The law of sin could also be seen as the natural law of consequence built into our world. When we hurt someone, two things happen. This sinful act causes us pain, guilt, shame, and negative feelings toward self. This hurtful act also causes others pain, hurt, and lots of negative feelings. I have found it interesting that psychology helps us understand all the ways that the human soul deals with sin, hurt and all the negative feelings that arise from these painful experiences leading to many egoic structures (beliefs, coping strategies, behavior patterns, self images, projections, compulsions, emotional conditions, etc.) forming in the human soul that really shape our human personalities and experience. The religious law of sin, the natural law of consequences, and the psychological law of the egoic personality all function in a similar way. They all follow a static set of rules, rules that provide us structure but also can bring us much suffering and pain. I find it interesting that Apostle Paul in the Bible says that this law cannot save us and give us life. The goodness of the law is that it shows us what is wrong, “what is sin”, "what is ego" but the more we try to follow the law, the more we become entrapped by it (Rom 7: 7ff). I do believe God created our world with all these laws…but these laws were designed to help humans realize what brings life and what doesn’t. They are static, never changing, have existed since the creation of life and this world just like gravity. Therefore, the negative consequences caused by these laws should not be interpreted as God actively, purposely punishing people because of their sins or past hurts in their life. The law of Spirit, Apostle Paul notes, is very different than the natural law that reveals the consequences of sin for it sets us free from this law of sin (Rom. 8: 1). When we are not ego-centred, not controlled by the laws of our egoic personality, Paul notes, we are “in the spirit” meaning that we are in a psychological space where we are being shaped by God’s spirit or the Spirit of Christ. Within the Diamond Approach, a sacred psychology, the law of the Spirit refers to the qualities of Essence that emerge in our soul in response to what our soul is experiencing, qualities such as compassion, strength, grace, love, steadfastness, power, etc. Within the Christian tradition, we call these qualities of Essence the fruits of God’s holy spirit. The law of the Spirit is very different than the law of sin. While the law of sin is good in that it helps us realize what is wrong, it cannot save us. It reveals to us what is causing our pain and how we are managing our pain, but the law cannot take the pain away. In contrast, the law of Spirit frees us from the law of sin for it is based on God’s gracious spirit responding to the pain and negative feelings caused by sin and hurt. When we feel pain, God’s spirit makes it possible to experience divine compassion. When we feel weakness, God’s spirit reveals to us the way to experience divine strength. When we feel guilt, God’s spirit makes it possible to experience forgiveness and grace. When we struggle with confusion or not knowing, insight and understanding arises for us. When we struggle with pain and other negative feelings and behaviours, by opening or surrendering ourselves us to the Law of Spirt, we allow God’s spirit to minister to our soul so that healing, reconciliation, and re-creation can happen. There is a responsive relational quality to the Law of Spirit that is not present in the Law of Sin. This responsive quality of the Spirit is always shaped by the character of God. By separating out the law of sin from the law of Spirit in this way, we no longer find ourselves caught in our theological contradiction between God’s law and God’s love, grace, and truth. God's law is static, fixed, always consequential based on our human actions. In contrast, God's spirit is dynamic and relational, always responding in positive ways to the consequences of our human actions. All of these blessings of the Spirit are moments of grace and gift. Beyond the human effort to surrender, no other aspect of human will is required to receive these blessings. In fact, the more the human will is engaged through human striving, the less likely we are able to enter this psychological space where these divine blessings arise. So, how we do enter this psychological space where we allow God’s spirit to minister to us? We know that when sunshine touches a closed rosebud, slowly but surely the warmth of the sun causes the rosebud to surrender to the warmth and light and open up to reveal its true beauty. What makes it possible for our contracted soul to surrender and open and reveal its true beauty? This is where Jesus' life and his death on the cross take on true theological and psychological meaning. Therapeutic Relationship and Holding a Person’s Pain Within counselling, research has shown that the therapeutic relationship is the primary factor that determines successful counselling. However, we are talking about a certain kind of therapeutic relationship, one that holds the client with positive regard and holds non-judgementally all the clients’ experiences (guilt, depression, weakness, anger, hatred, fear, all negative emotions and experiences) with compassion, grace and curiosity. Within the gospel stories, we see Jesus holding the people he ministered to in this special way. As he did, these people found themselves able to settle and surrender into this psychological space where they allowed God’s Spirit to minister to them…through the various fruits of God’s spirit arising like truth/understanding, forgiveness, acceptance, compassion, strength, awakening, healing, etc. It takes a special person to hold a person’s experience in this nonjudgemental way. It means that we, as a ministering person, have to hold our client’s pain and negative emotions without managing them. In other words, we have to allow ourselves to experience to some extent the pain and negative emotions that often are connected to our client’s struggle. Using Christian theological language, we have to “bear the consequences of the sins/hurts" of our clients. In doing so, through holding our clients’ experience in this nonjudgmental way, they learn to hold their experience in the same gracious way as we, as counsellors. do, As they do so, they find themselves settling deeper into a gracious psychological space that allows God’s Spirit to minister to them. This is how I have come to understand spiritual healing happening within the counselling context and other ministry settings. Holding Pain at a Societal Level What I have shared so far explains how Christian or spiritual ministry involves holding the pain of human struggle and sin. But how does this ministry framework apply to the reality of Jesus’ death on the cross? Throughout Jesus’ healing ministry on earth, we see him bearing the pain of the sins/hurts of the people he met. But when we hold people’s painful experiences in this way, there are things we cannot control. We can’t control how people will respond to our ministry, especially when aspects of our healing ministry involve confronting the many powers and authorities that are hurting the very people we are trying to help. In Jesus’ case, it meant confronting the religious establishment who was interfering with the people’s ability to experience God’s presence (Mark 11:15ff) . It meant confronting the rich and powerful who were taking advantage of the poor and were placing their desires over the needs of others (Mark 10: 17ff). As a result, many powerful people were rejecting Jesus' ministry. For Jesus to minister to those who rejected him, he had to hold their hatred, but this rejection soon became more than individuals dismissing him. This rejection became far more deeper, far more painful, far more dangerous for now major structures within society were rejecting him. The religious establishment rejected Jesus. It was far easily for the religious establishment to project its anger and negative feelings onto Jesus like a scapegoat than to own its anger and problems. The Roman government also rejected Jesus, but they did it in a passive way. It was unwilling to claim its power and speak its voice of truth so that Jesus could be saved from execution. Instead, it rejected Jesus by doing nothing and projected their powerlessness onto Jesus. In the end, Jesus found himself dying on the cross bearing the pain of human sin caused by the religous and political structures of his time. I have always found the words attributed to the dying Jesus very meaningful: “God, forgive them for they don’t know what they are doing” (Luke 23: 33). These words highlight to me that Jesus was well aware of what was happening to him…that he was bearing the painful consequences of the sins of humanity and the societal structures of his time. But Jesus was not alone in holding this pain. We read in the Bible that “the crowds who came together to see this event returned to their homes beating their chests after seeing what had happened” (Luke 23: 48). Witnessing what had happened, these people were now deeply aware of how Jesus was bearing the rejections of their political and religious establishments and them, the people. Through watching Jesus hold their pain, the crowds, disciples, and sympathizers of Jesus began to enter a psychological space where they could now hold the same pain that Jesus held on the cross, the pain caused by the unconscious injustices of their political and religious structures. In entering this painful vulnerable space, these people began to open themselves up to the ministry of God’s spirit moving in their midst through creating visions and inspiring them to do acts of justice that would lead to the transformation of their community and society. Seen in this light, one could argue that this was God's purpose behind forming the church. Purpose of Good Friday is to Hold Pain
This is why at my Mennonite Church in Mannheim the goal of the Good Friday service is not to celebrate how Jesus died on the cross for the sins of humanity and our lives. There is really nothing to celebrate on Good Friday. Rather, it is a day when through remembering the events of the last day of Jesus’ life, we realize how Jesus held and bore the tragic pain and evil consequences of human sin (both personal and societal) at that time. Through this remembering, we see how easily we can become like the people and structures in the Good Friday story who rejected Jesus for following a God of love, grace, and truth. But something else also happens through reliving these painful experiences of Good Friday. We see that there are many similarities between our world and the world Jesus lived in. We have religious establishments (including parts of the Christian Church), corporations, and governments that reject people in the same way Jesus was rejected. True, we don't crucify people in Canada or the Western world on wooden crosses...but our fallen structures creates lots of unnecessary suffering for people who ar judged or neglected for being poor, having the wrong beliefs, or being from the wrong race. On Good Friday, through holding the darkness of Jesus' last day on earth, we learn how to hold the darkness caused by human sin, both personal and societal, in our time. We learn how to bear the pain of our world and other's lives in such a way that we no longer reject it and project it onto the vulnerable people and world around us. In many ways, this is the purpose of what has been known as Holy Saturday within the Christian tradition, the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. It is day of waiting in darkness, of holding the traumatic pain of what happened with Jesus’ death on the cross and waiting for God’s spirit to arise, for Easter to come. In fact, Easter makes no sense until we truly understand the darkness of Good Friday and Holy Saturday. Questions to Ponder:
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