Gratitude

Thanksgiving always turns me toward the concept of gratitude, and this year is no different. Hubs and I cooked an entire dinner, complete with turkey, dressing, various casseroles, cranberry sauce, rolls, and pumpkin pie. For 2 people! We're gluttons today, folks.

But lately, I have felt an overwhelming gratitude for many things in my life. I am thankful for being in a profession where I feel I can daily live out my calling and use my gifts. Most times, I leave sessions saying, "THIS is why I do this." I am thankful for a husband who respects me, adores my independence and my ideas, and thinks that this overweight body is delightfully appealing. Our marriage has felt especially rewarding these days.

However, my thoughts also inevitably turn to our next steps. For the longest time, my academic background in sociology, training in community psychology, and idealistic nature has combined swimmingly with our shared Christian faith and Hub's love for social justice and a Tony Campolo type of Jesus faith. The result is that we have long felt a call to live in a neighborhood many young professionals would shun. One where the houses are less than pristine, where crime is not an anomaly, where people work hard and many never get caught up, much less ahead.

If we head back to our home in Tennessee for my internship, we plan to buy a home in such a neighborhood. In my head, we'll be these urban Christian hippies who grow our organic garden in the backyard and invite our multi-colored neighbors over for happy hour with everything from Pabst Blue Ribbon to pomegranate martinis.

I joined the neighborhood yahoo group for one such area where we might live, and the reality busted my bubble a bit. Yes, there are regularly scheduled social events in this diverse neighborhood, but there are also neighborhood meetings on how to respond to prostitution, public relations initiatives to explain those two murders, and other evidence that our children would likely NOT be riding their bicycles down an idyllic tree-lined street, as I did in my youth.

I am not doubting what I feel is God's call to stretch myself beyond the comfort of my white-bred (and white-bread) rural upbringing to grasp what is good about living in the reality of a grittier, less insulated life. People breathe, and people breed, and people live, and people die. I don't want to miss that, but I do seriously doubt my own faithfulness to do this. Can I go from one of the most affluent, predominantly Christian suburbs of Chicago to the reality of an impoverished small city in the American South?

My brother points out that I could minister to "those people" without living with them. My father points out that the resell value of our home will likely not be good. My mother worries about the schools our children will attend. I am not naive, these are worries that I have, as well. But, I can't get past that all of these are selfish concerns. All about if me and mine are getting the best, if we can insulate ourselves from the reality that many have no choice to live in and with everyday. Realities of poverty, discrimination, disadvantage, disappointment, and suffering.

I don't have hopes of swooping in and saving anyone, that is not why the desire to live in this way came about when I was 19, and has not waned one iota. It's because as much as I feel I have something to offer, I also have something to gain. But what I have to gain is more intangible, less measurable, and more elusive. Thus, I listen to the doubters who doubt for good reason. They love me and they want to forestall their own losses by keeping Hubs and I safe.

Gratitude. Can I be grateful for what God is calling me to? That, I'm not sure. Not yet, anyway.

How My Faith Impacts My Clinical Work

I am grateful for God’s provision in my life in the form of Christian parents, a Church that provided for spiritual parenting, and a rural small-town upbringing that protected me from experiencing many of the more painful realities of this world. Yet, like all parents, although the Church was “good enough,” I came away with my own set of wounds. Along with the messages of justice, faithfulness, and holiness, I took away from my religious upbringing the quality of being judgmental, an emphasis on impression management, and more fear than freedom.

All of this was transformed over the past five years that I have spent in graduate school. During this time, I came to a new faith experience through mourning the losses of my life and entering into my disillusionment. God has painfully yet lovingly stripped from me my false self, and invited me to enter into a relationship with Him that is based on honesty and genuineness. My journey to accepting that I am God’s beloved has been a difficult and ongoing struggle to know my self so that I might be able to better know God. Because of my unbelief, I had my very name, “beloved” permanently tattooed on my physical body, so that the identity I struggle to daily accept cannot be denied.

This experience of God, as a lover of my true self, has been instrumental in how I view the context of therapy. Based on this understanding of God, therapy becomes a journey toward self-knowledge, health, and restored relationships for patients. Regardless of our respective belief systems, when I enter into a relationship with a patient, I bring my true and authentic self. I reflect who a patient is so that she can see and discover her true self. By understanding and knowing the self, a patient learns about the Creator through studying the creation. Balancing grace with truth, therapy is a place to ‘bind up the broken hearted and to set captives free.’ Because of my beliefs, therapy becomes a journey of faith where change is assumed, innovation is expected, and rebirth is welcomed. Rather than reacting out of fear, I rest in my identity in Christ, able to come alongside patients as they wrestle with and through the questions of life and God.

God also calls us to mirror His creativity. Beauty, art, and imagination are instrumental in this process of knowing and being known. These mediums are understood as coming from the Creator and as a means to better experience, express, and understand the various aspect of ourselves, others, and God. Thus, therapy also becomes a space where I encourage patients to explore creative means of knowing and engaging the self through art therapy, mindfulness, contemplative practices, or role play.

I appreciate that God equally values the individual self and the community of multiple selves in relationship. God, whose nature is relational, calls us to live in a community of people where individuals can bring their full selves in order to both know others and be known in such fullness. I strive to provide such an experience in the therapy room so that patients may go out and engage in healthier relationships, participating in the narrative that God is telling through scripture, history, and experience by fully engaging in their communities.

Random Insanity

I am about 250 pages into the last installment of the Harry Potter series. That's not so bad, considering I had a guest over the weekend, my comprehensive exams before that, and that I'm busy finishing up my (hopefully!) final draft of my dissertation proposal.

But, I've had several near misses.

WGN news on in the living room, while I am brushing teeth and what not. They started talking about the ending of the book. I stuck my fingers in my ears and sang out loud until the segment was over. The cats think I'm nuttier than they are.

Very annoying, self-entitled man having a loud cell phone conversation in Ogilvie Train Station in the city. We missed the train by 10 seconds, literally. Sigh. But, the man starts talking about the Malfoys and such and I about lose it. I ask him to please talk less loudly or to not talk about that. He acts all put out, so we leave the waiting area to find a safer place to wait.

Today, Panera Bread. Working on the dissertation, because I can't make myself work at home with the computer(s), the TV, the book in question, 2 cats, and free food to distract me. Two young women sit down and start discussing loudly the book. Loudly. Did I say loudly? I stick my fingers in my ears, afraid to move or to interrupt them because I might hear something other than random snatches of Harry, and something about someone getting married, and some celebrity gossip thrown in for good measure. Finally, someone interrupts to share their love of the book. I speak up and ask for agreed upon moratorium on discussing the novel. All agree. Probably because these teenagers see me as old. That, and I had 3 allies who supported my request...a very intimidating looking group of nurses.

Also, this guy is wearing a shirt that says in BIG BOLD LETTERS..."EFFORT UNDER GRACE." Because Tshirt theology is veracious and effective, I'm sure.

Jesus was a Bleeding Heart Liberal Jew

Spending time in Europe with conservative Evangelical Christians is always a bit of a paradigm shift for me. For three years now, I've had the privilege to serve for a week some of the top academics in Europe who are also Christians. Part of the agreement of being a servant volunteer is that we absolutely cannot, without a doubt, discuss politics with these people. This policy, born out of the typical Europe/U.S. divide on political issues, is a great one. Those who volunteer are there to serve, not to be served, make their piece known, or to find some sort of camaraderie. However, it is so hard to remain quiet among my Christian siblings and not hug them, kiss their cheeks, and say..Yes! Yes, exactly!"

It always blows my mind the things I hear in the conversations among the theologically conservative (often bordering on fundamentalist) Evangelical leaders. A dinner conversation where the U.S. is described as a bully, Bush with a foreign policy likened to Hitler's, and the desperate state of affairs in Iraq, is the type of conversation I'd like to be a part of. It's so compelling to encounter Christians who have not tied their partriotism to their faith.

One of my Hungarian friends even said, "Yeah, nationalism is good. We can all cheer "Go my country!", and it is good for morale. But, a Christian, a Christian must think beyond what country he lives in. Because I am not first a Hungarian, but a person, a person loved by God. He doesn't care what country I'm from, or that guy's from. So my country cannot come first. God must, so there is no keep out or you don't deserve this because you are not Hungarian or American or whatever...because as Christians we are all people, all the same." And I watched the jaws clench among the other volunteers from the States who were sitting nearby. I wonder why this is so upsetting to my fellow citizens. Why are so many American Christians threatened by such sentiments? I cannot imagine any other way to view ourselves that is Biblically sound or in keeping with the life of Christ.

Or why is it that the other volunteers all assume that we're not allowed to talk about politics only for the benefit of the the attendees? How do you think I learned of so many of these dinner conversations? Well, because of the complaints of my fellow volunteers, of course. One particular volunteer started to complain about the "horrible" conversation her husband had to sit through that negatively cast U.S.'s foreign policy. I mentioned that we don't talk about politics with anyone when serving because we cannot assume that we all agree on anything, regardless of our citizenship or theology, although this hint was evidently not strong enough because she continued to go on and on.

My thoughts, personally, were that if I were sitting at a table having dinner with some of Europe's top theologians, and they felt this way....then maybe I might have something to learn. I'm just sayin'...

Regardless, my point is that Christians who are U.S. citizens are in grave danger of confusing patriotism with faith. I know this because 9 times out of 10, when spending more than an hour with a group of Christians Stateside, something is said that infers that we all hold some universal Republican based political ideology that I happen to not hold. It's become so inferential and assumed that such sentiments creep in nearly continuously and without notice from most people. And these are sentiments held only by Christians in the U.S. I have yet to meet a Christian from another country who has such convoluted ideas about their faith and their country. It makes me sad, and it makes me want to move.

So, my fellow Americans, just remember that what may be best for you, for me, for the United States, may very likely not be what God wants you to do. And the rest of our Christian brothers and sisters seem to see that much more clearly than we, we could learn from them.

It's busy up in here.

End of the semester means lots of things to do and little time for the Internets. ;) So, I thought you might enjoy some of my pastoral care paper on my vision of soul care.

The soul care giver is to enter into relationship with others in a deliberate way so as to nurture and love them while providing gentle correction for the broken ways of relating evident in their lives. The soul care giver, as explained by St. Gregory the Great (1978), engages in relationships where “discourse…should be adapted to the character of the hearers, so as to be suited to the individual in his respective needs, and yet never deviate from the art of general edification (p. 89).”

...

The role of the soul care giver is also to be the voice within the Church that speaks for the spiritual disciplines, prayer, silence, and simplicity. In today’s raucous society of efficiency and production, the soul care giver works to make space within the institution of the Church for instruction on spiritual practices, and is the constant reminder of the true purpose of humanity in creation. Richard Foster (2005) uses the term “passion to possess (p.3)” to describe contemporary society’s need to own and produce and its inevitable outcome of producing a fractured and fragmented way of life. As Lisa McMinn states in her book, The Contented Soul,

To see our selves as a soul that belongs is to accept an invitation to hold life, relationships, and possessions loosely, hands open, recognizing that nothing is really ours but that we belong to God and to all that is around us—our family, neighborhood, communities of work and worship, our country, our neighbors in the world, and the earth that sustains us all. A soul that belongs is a contented soul living in a place of quiet joy, and it invites, welcomes, and calms those who draw near (p.22).

The soul care giver strives to be a person that lives a life of simplicity and authenticity that draws people to the calming contemplative way.

The soul care giver carefully holds all of these important goals, and is only able to do so with even tenuous success if she is a person who practices and strives for holiness through spiritual disciplines. The soul care giver ultimately is one who seeks out intimacy with God, and who conducts a ministry that supports, loves, and cares for others in ways that encourage them to engage more intimately with God. The soul care giver makes no promises that the spiritual way is easy, but only that she will walk with and care for parishioners no matter where their journey leads, even through such horrible afflictions as the Dark Night of the Soul. As Evelyn Underhill states in her book The Spiritual Life:

The spiritual life then is not a peculiar or extreme form of piety. It is, on the contrary, that full and real life for which man is made; a life that is organic and social, essentially free, yet with its own necessities and laws. Just as physical life means, and depends on, constant correspondence with our physical environment, the atmosphere that surrounds and penetrates us, the energies of heat and light, whether we happen to notice it or not; so does spiritual life mean constant correspondence with our spiritual environment, whether we notice it or not (p. 41-42).

The soul care giver practices the spiritual life and draws attention to and makes intentional for others the spiritual environment so that we might benefit more from it, and so that awareness of God and his whisperings will be more acute.


...

Soul care ministry focuses on ways to deepen believers’ knowledge and openness to God and His work. Soul care is also the part of the Church that deepens an understanding of one’s self and others in order to grow toward conformity of character and inner life in the image of Christ. Doing so, besides being a command of Christ, ultimately benefits the global Church and the local congregation.

The benefit comes in that a body of believers who are listening to God and seeking God’s direction become less concerned with programs, logistics, and the “doing” of church. A congregation that has a pervasive and appropriately integrated soul care ministry supports and develops Christ followers who long after God and God’s work in their lives. They serve joyfully where God has instructed. They express love to the community around them. For it is only through soul care and its call to the contemplative traditions that can produce a faith community where God dispenses his grace through us, and changes the world through us. Soul care has to offer the church the dream of a body who loves so well, people are drawn closer to God through Jesus Christ.

...

In his book, Letters to a Young Evangelical, Tony Campolo (2006) calls for a reclaiming of the contemplative (predominantly Catholic) traditions that were removed from Evangelicalism at the reformation.

After the Reformation, we Protestants left behind much that was troubling about the Roman Catholicism of the fifteenth century. I am convinced that we left too much behind. The methods of praying employed by the likes of Ignatius have become precious to me. With the help of some Catholic saints, my prayer life has deepened. Ignatius and other Catholic mystics such as Teresa of Avila have been of incredible help to me in developing a kind of praying in which God becomes a real and felt presence (p. 31).

Although I have now become a member of a very nontypical Christian church, it remains the same Evangelical tradition. Although there exists a growing appreciation for the spiritual and contemplative, there remains little structure, instruction, or support for pastoral care. The church incorporates more psychological ministries, including support and recovery. However, there remains a vast emptiness concerning pastoral care.
I hope to follow the example set by the atypical Evangelical leader Tony Campolo in his personal ministry and writings, for a pastoral care ministry that incorporates an acute sense of social justice and the Church Universal in addition to having an intimate relationship with Christ. Campolo (2006) suggests the practices of centering prayer, contemplative Bible study, and an accountability group that helps you maintain spiritual disciplines for consistent Christian living.

Dunked....

Last weekend, our church did an impromptu baptismal service. Without all the usual baptism classes and standard education, they offered to baptize whomever felt led to do so that night, New Testament style. Communion was being served and whoever felt led was to go to the back of the auditorioum.

As I sat there in the service, I felt an anxiety that I know could only be the Holy Spirit. God was telling me to be baptized. Immediately, I started to resist. I told myself all sorts of things... "But I'll look so foolish, I've been a Christian for over a decade." "Theologically, this just is not what is right." With every excuse came that feeling of being sick. I actually told myself, "Just hang on through the next fifteen minutes, this will all be over, and you can pursue baptism some other time."

But, I got up some courage and whispered to my husband, "I think I'm supposed to be baptized."

Thank God for him, because he responded, "Then go. Do you want me to come and support you?"

I said, "Of course!"

So, the theologically savvy among you are wondering how this Baptist girl was getting baptized when she's been a Christ follower some 13 odd years. Well....

I grew up in a church that was generally pretty supportive, though not without flaws. I never felt pressure to make a committment to Christ, and that wasn't quite on my radar yet at the age of 11. I loved Jesus, but the idea of becoming a Christian wasn't one that I fully comprehended, or even partially comprehended.

Enter old school interim pastor (OSIP).OSIP decided he needed to have a Sunday to teach Sunday School for the children, and that all the classes should be taught together. Being a small church, I was the youngest among that late childhood and adolescent crowd. He gave a very evangelistic message in Sunday School and then asked whoever wasn't a Christian to raise their hand. That was....um, me. OSIP came over, put his arm around me, got in my face and asked, "Do you love Jesus? Will you do that today?" Being 11, with an old man asking me to do something, I wasn't going to say, "No."

I said yes. And I made my parents take me home halfway through the church service, crying. I didn't understand what I was doing, but whatever it was, it felt confusing and so wrong. My parents convinced me to go out for lunch, even though I didn't want to because I knew that OSIP would probably be there. My parents assured me OSIP wouldn't bother me.

But he did. I got ambushed in the salad bar line. Confronted by a 70+ year old man about why didn't I come forward. There he went with the hugging and being in my face again. There I went with the crying and feeling violated again. After several other poorly executed attempts by OSIP, my father told him if he ever bothered me again...well, I don't know what he said, but it worked. OSIP left me alone and we got a new pastor.

Six months later, our new pastor told a rousing sermon, and our church experienced a huge revival. This was miraculous for the unemotional straight laced church that raised me. Nearly the whole church went forward to be recommitted, to join the church, or make professions of faith. I saw my opportunity, I could go forward, get baptized and everyone would leave me alone for good. So I did. And it meant nothing to me.

Two years later, at the age of 13, I truly did become a Christian. I didn't tell anyone. Why? Because they all thought I already was one. Talk about embarrassing. So, for 13 years I've wondered about whether to get baptized again or not. I've been counseled by people of all different Christian belief systems about whether to get baptized or not, and been told a a myriad of answers. But, for the past 3 years, I know that it's been something God has wanted me to do, regardless of what I thought I knew about theology.

Every time that I started to get baptized, or mention it, or seek someone out, I would feel too ashamed, too judged, too prideful. But I did it, finally! Making the experience all the more meaningful, my husband was the one who was able to baptize me. When I imagined my true baptism, I never imagined it'd be a loaned pair of men's swim trunks from the church and a tshirt that everyone who is baptized at our church receives. But, I can't imagine a better time or place in my life for making my baptism more meaningful or symbolic of my new life in Christ, for only in these last 4 years have I felt truly remade, refined, and grown by God.

So..now I'm telling everybody.

A (not so) brief paragraph on the process of healing.

The Process of Healing

Healing, in its various forms, is a complicated process. While God sometimes chooses to intervene in miraculous and seemingly immediate ways, more often God leads the human to healing through a process. The reasons for this are many and often known only to God. However, through the wisdom of scripture, tradition, and personal experience, there are methods through which we find healing often happens.

One of these paths is having another bear witness to one’s pain and suffering. Witnesses hearing testimony and confession confirm the reality of one’s story. Any individual who has long held a secret to the point that he or she doubted its truth will attest to the incomplete but remarkable relief experienced by speaking such secrets aloud to another person. Healing also often occurs in the context of relationship. From relatively high functioning individuals to the severely character disordered, we all posses a level of inherited and acquired relationship patterns that are convoluted by sin. By entering into loving and caring relationships with others (and with God) that disrupt or frustrate these patterns and provide new ways of relating, we can experience a measure of healing. Such experiences compel us toward healthier and holier interactions with one another and with the Creator.

Finally, healing is reflected in the developmental process. God, being fully aware that we are never fully aware, orchestrates our individual experiences in such a manner that we learn in a cumulative but somewhat lock-step way. Each experience has the potential to yield new insight that we previously could not grasp because of the cumulative nature of each experience before that moment. Such a developmental path to healing accounts for the temporal nature of certain dis-eases.

Soul Making

Tonight we hear more from Alan Jones in his book Soul Making: The Desert Way of Spirituality (1985). Referring to the works of Graham Greene, we find:

First, the believer has an uneasy conscience, and so is incapable of committing atrocities (however minor) with equanimity. Second, the believer identifies with all human beings—the good, the bad, and the indifferent—and thus is an unlikely candidate for totalitarian seduction. Finally, the believer has a certain capacity for disloyalty—disloyalty to existing arrangements, to the principalities and the powers. The believer is not good at the usual excuses. The phrase, “I was only obeying orders,” would stick in the throat of the believer. The Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann, has become the exemplar of this unimaginable obeyer of orders from above. He was pronounced perfectly sane; and, as Thomas Merton has pointed out, “It is the sane ones, the well-adapted ones, who can without qualms and without nausea, aim the missiles and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones have prepared.

Believers reject this kind of “sanity” and choose the kind of craziness that is committed to expanding existing horizons, crossing frontiers, and stepping over boundaries. They don’t believe in abstractions, which are the spiritual weapons of governments. They are suspicious when their “responsibility towards the State” is invoked. Their loving is local, particular. To quote William Blake, they know that those who invoke the general good are often “scoundrels, hypocrites, and flatterers.” The believer is a sort of subversive in the world, one of God’s spies trying to make room for hope.

Amen.

A wise man once said...

...to me today, "God is telling me to say to you, Nicole, "I will never leave you."

God will never leave you.

Today, this moment, this second, all I must do is breathe.

What's wrong with your church?

Since coming to graduate school, I find myself asking this question more often. I've been more than just a little disillusioned with the fact that some very basic theological concepts, the corpus of church history, and other important aspects of the Christian faith were never introduced to me, though I grew up in the Church, with dedicated and faithful Christian parents. I wonder what exactly the goal of our churches, congregations, and church based ministry is if it's not to teach about theology, church history, and how to encounter God in ways that challenge people toward growth.

I sometimes wonder if I'll ever again sit in a church service without a somewhat critical eye. I'm that annoying person behind you who won't sing the lines of the song that have poor theological implications. I'm one of those who leaves angry when we have an entire service on the dark night of the soul, silence, and despair without a single time of silence in the actual service. I am the one that is just a little bit suspicious when the pastor is ALWAYS happy EVERY Sunday. It's the same suspicion I have in life or in the therapy room when someone always has it all together. That's just not reality. How authentic is that?

However, I don't feel cynical. I love the church that we attend these days. I am hopeful for the Church, and I don't want to be estranged from the body in that way ever again. I've encountered a preponderance of Christians who are uncomfortable with questioning, doubt, and turning a critical eye to our human manifestations of church, religion, and faith here on Earth. It's as if questioning who we are and contemplating the flaws of our attempts at being the Church are questioning God, questioning God's perfection or holiness. That's just not the case. In fact, failing to acknowledge and embrace our weaknesses and shortcomings leads to an unhealthy neurotic and narcissistic idealism that leaves us leaning on our own understanding and strength rather that our imperfection leading us to seek God more.

I'm convinced that we all do need to ask "What's wrong with my church?" It's not about criticism. It's not about tearing others down. It's about discernment. It's about an open forum so that disappointments do not turn into seething anger and contempt for the Church or a church. And the response we need to give when we're on the receiving end of suggestion, is not defensiveness. Nor is constructive criticism to turn into merely criticism or our only way of relating to others. There are always naysayers. If you're always the nay sayer, well, then it's a problem.

So, I am asking, what's wrong with your church? Not, "What do you not like?" But what is wrong theologially? What have you or another been hurt by? What's the institutional sin of your church?

Lately, what's been on my mind about the church we attend (and other worship gatherings I've been to lately) is the music. The music which we sing lately has taken on an unbalanced slant toward almost gnostic understandings of spirituality. Gnosticism devalues the physical and earthly world in favor of honoring the spiritual world as better than the physical one. The specific things that seemed especially problematic today were "Cause nothing on this earth is as beautiful as you" and, this one I can't remember exactly, but it was along the lines of "Jesus is like no one else on earth." I thought that the entire point is that Jesus was 100% "like" us, while also being 100% God. But, it's clear that both of these songs have a bit of bad theology going on. Hey, and it's just not contemporary praise songs, but classic hymns as well. Away In a Manger is one of the worst, with its devaluing of the human nature of Jesus.

So, is this a phase? Will my apophatic nature wane when graduate school is over? How do we deal with such frustrations and disappointments and still maintain relationship and love? I'd love to hear your thoughts.