The Thread of Joy

Click on the picture above to watch the video about my thoughts on joy.

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While I wouldn’t say I’m a person who tries to explain the unexplainable, this cancer journey I’ve found myself on has prompted a torrent of questions that don’t seem to have answers. I don’t mean the, “Why is this happening?” question. I don’t ask that one. Or the, “Could Steve have done anything to prevent getting a pleomorphic sarcoma?” That actually sounds ridiculous as I say it out loud. 

The questions I have are related to my internal state of mind and heart. On some days it’s questioning whether I’m doing a good enough job as a caregiver. At other times I try to make sense of those verses in the Bible that say to rejoice in my sufferings because it will produce endurance and character and hope. Or to count it all joy that I’m going through trials, because I will learn patience. Or that weeping endures for a night, but joy comes in the morning. I have to be honest with you, admonitions like these don’t help me feel better. I cry a little bit every night, and I don’t feel joy in the morning. But then again, how long is the night?

I do take the Bible seriously, and short of getting a degree in theology at this late date, I’ve been wrestling with what it even means to seek and obtain joy while I’m in the hardest circumstance of my life. What does joy look like on a good day, nevermind in the darkest of times? That’s the current question for me.

I’ve begun thinking of my present life as a tapestry of dark colors that have taken on a life of their own. I can see it in my mind’s eye: it undulates and moves and envelops me whether I want it to or not. I’ve taken to calling it the tapestry of my suffering. I envision joy as a thick gold braid that’s woven into the dark tapestry. It has texture and it stands out. I’ve meditated on that braid, asking God, what is joy made of? The image I received is that suffering carves the pathway for joy, the way water over time carves out the rocks for rivers to flow that change a landscape. Suffering itself is changing the shape of my being, I actually feel it every day: that my circumstances are re-working deep places. So where does joy fit in?

That golden braid of joy tells me two things: One, that what’s happening isn’t for nothing. My grief isn’t wasted, it’s too holy for that. It’s a moving force that is making space for the truth that sorrow can poke a hole in the veil between earth and heaven. Sorrow is itself a thin place, and it invites joy to meet it. Jesus said that we will have sorrow, and our sorrow will turn to joy. The same circumstance that produced the sorrow has the glint of joy in it. That kind of alchemy is not of this world. But one has to prospect for it, to dig down into the darkness.

The second thing I know is for sure I’m not alone. I mean, Jesus met me in my kitchen! He has capacity to hold all my suffering because he suffered so deeply in his body, mind and spirit. I’m thankful he’s with me because he never says the wrong thing and he doesn’t try to fix it. He’s just present. He’s also non-anxious at all times, which is extremely helpful right now.

The writer of Psalm 16 described being in God’s presence as the “fullness of joy.” So maybe that’s what joy is, being filled up on the inside with safety and golden love. My suffering is at work carving out new vistas for the golden ribbon of joy to unfurl and give light to my path.

That’s what I know so far.

Beautiful Borders

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I want to describe a new way to think about where you end and other people begin. In psychology the term is “setting boundaries,” and boundaries are often tricky to navigate, to actually know how much emotional space to put between you and basically everyone in your world. And boundaries can change over time as we make ourselves emotionally vulnerable to safe people and step back from people who behave in hurtful or untrustworthy ways. It’s not easy.

I’d like to give you a fast pass to think about boundaries a little differently. I’m borrowing ideas from two women, one is a novelist from India and the other is a professor at Yale. They write very creatively about borders between countries in different parts of the world, and I’m adapting their words to our personal lives.

Think about boundaries as a border between you and others that doesn’t enclose but rather has the ability to open out. It creates a shape, an edge where both parties can meet. And then in your mind make the border beautiful, embroider it with a shimmering vine or a profusion of flowers. Fix precious stones in your border, give it your own personality. Make it lovely, a reflection of your own beautiful self. It’s not a hardscape but rather a lush expression of self. It’s kind of holy.

 A border gives strength, it says, “here I am.” It increases the recognition of yourself to others and it helps you know your own limits with people so that you can stay safe and open at the same time.

I’d also like you to think about this present moment as its own border. The present, the now, is the crossing between what has already happened in your life, what cannot be changed, and what is coming in the future, what the possibilities are in going beyond who you have been to who you are becoming. The present is its own border crossing every day. And we can be mindful and alive to it.

I’ve been to countries with dramatic borders. I’ve visited the so-called Peace Wall in Belfast, Northern Ireland, which separates Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods. The wall is covered in street art, mostly words about hopes for peace and reconciliation. My son Justin wrote on the wall when he lived in Belfast. He wrote, “violence is for those who have lost their imagination.” He took us to the spot but said we could only stay a few minutes because it was too dangerous there.

I’ve been to the so-called Peace Wall that separates Israelis from Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. That wall is also awash in graffiti, some of it painted by the famous street artist Banksy; it too contains many pleas for peace. I’ve been in a town in Jordan only a few miles from the Syrian border, where desperate refugees were streaming in to find safety from the civil war that was destroying their country.

Walls do not make good borders, whether it’s between countries, communities, or in personal relationships. We have to have more imagination than that. Healthy borders can have gates and doors. Yours can open to a secret garden to those who come in peace. Construct your borders with love and creativity, realizing there is a border that’s also in this present moment, separating you from what has been in your life and what can yet become. There is still time.

Finally, Jesus said I am the door. Allowing him to be at your borders means you’re never alone as you navigate your days. Jesus said going through his doorway brings life, freedom and satisfaction, because he came to give abundance, more than we could ever expect. 

As we say here, this is living now.

Emotional Muscle Memory

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You know when you exercise regularly you gain muscle memory over time so that as you repeatedly do the same form of exercise your muscles automatically engage and are at the ready. They help you gain endurance and tone and overall fitness.

We have emotional muscle memory too, and the process works in a similar way. As we go about our lives we experience an array of emotional responses; some are painful and some are pleasant. Each experience gets stored somewhere in our internal world - body, mind, soul, and spirit - sometimes in all four areas. We have a seemingly infinite storage capacity for our emotional selves. Plus, our unconscious remembers everything. That’s the backup system.

Fast Pass

I want to give you a Fast Pass for how to be on speaking terms with your emotional muscle memories.

First, a lot of people struggle with even knowing what their emotional response is in the moment to a given situation. They may truly not know how they feel, but their emotional muscles are trying to communicate with them. It sounds elementary, but a first question to ask yourself is: “Do I feel positive or negative right now?” Notice that positive and negative really aren’t feeling words, but they can point you to whether you’re in emotional pain or something’s happened that makes you feel good.

The next question to ask is, “Where do I feel this in my body?” Every emotional experience elicits a chemical reaction in the brain. Those chemicals are stored somewhere. For me, when I experience something pleasant or fun or beautiful, I feel it right in the center of my chest and across my forehead. I just feel delighted and alive.

Painful emotions are also stored, and when there’s been trauma, layers of pain build up over time. These muscle memories are easily triggered - a negative experience in the present can inflame old feelings of pain or fear or abandonment. For me, negative emotions from the past or present are stored on the right side of my lower back, a very specific area! The more I’ve recognized first what my physical response is, the better I’m able to name the emotion that’s cascading over me in the moment. When we can name the emotion we gain so much power over it. I say it out loud: “I feel fantastic!” Or, “I feel hurt and rejected.” That’s the beginning of healing right there.

There is more to understand about painful memories and emotions and what to do about them, but today I want to give you the good news: Whether past experiences are painful or pleasant, they are giving you a gift, they are your emotional muscle memories. You can draw on them as you move forward. For example, a painful time in your past has given you perseverance, wisdom about who is worthy of your trust and care, and the knowledge that you are stronger than you think, because look at you now. Saying out loud, “I have muscle memory for this,” is a huge aid when daring to risk yourself emotionally.

Positive accomplishments and experiences also give you muscle memory: When you’ve successfully done something that was challenging, you gain muscle memory to do the next hard thing. You can say to yourself, “I have muscle memory for this ,” and you know what? Your sturdy emotional muscles are ready to be engaged for whatever is coming next: a new job, a move, a big project, a new relationship. Do you know what I tell myself? I say, “Janice, be brave, because you’ve got strength in all your muscles.”

This is living now

On top of everything, let me remind you you’re not alone in the universe. You can ask God to show you what the heck is happening right as it’s happening, and you’ll receive insight and love. And maybe some clues about what to do next.

Two Things Can be True at the Same Time

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A phrase that’s become kind of synonymous with me is, “two things can be true at the same time.” I first started using it when I was working as a therapist to help clients see their past or their present from a different perspective. Lately I’ve been thinking about it in relation to this golden journey we’re on together. 

I want to focus on preparing the way for the presence of God by doing two things at once: having a wider lens for our life and also having a smaller lens. First, I want to describe the wide angle lens, or how to see the bigger picture.

The Wide-Angle Lens

It’s natural, when looking at one’s life, to say, “I don’t know the big picture of my life, I don’t know where I’m going, I don’t know what my purpose is, AHHHHHH” This isn’t a sign of being flighty or in the slow group about how to live adult life, it’s rather a link to all the generations that have come before you. Basically everyone feels like this. It’s being human. But it’s also helpful to want a life where the ruts are smoother and the rocks are cleared out so you can find your way. What to do?

First, here’s God’s point of view:

Isaiah 65:1, “I am ready to be approached by those who do not study me, ready to be found by those who do not seek me. I say, ‘I am here, I am here,’ to people who do not even invoke my name.”

To me that means that even before you do anything to be ready and open to the presence of God, he’s already here. He’s always been in you because he made you, we’re never apart from Him. The currents of his love have been flowing, but whereas before we were drifting around, now we swim. The wide-angle lens allows us to view the current of our lives AND the world around us, this current which is filled to overflowing with the presence of God.

But we have to live in the practicalities of day to day life, too. Which can sometimes be murky.

George Orwell said it best, “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly, child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply.”

It’s like placing your hand on the barre in class, a light touch helps steady us, as we’re doing hard things at the same time.

Next, having a wide-angle lens enables us to experience our life with a combination of two things: awe and surrender. The spiritual journey is the interplay between moments of awe that slightly stun us, followed by surrender to that moment. The layering of those moments draws us upward and inward to wonder, and the HS traffics in wonder. It’s healthy for us to to be captured by goodness, beauty, truth, something outside ourselves that reeks of mystery. And then to surrender to it and let it fill you up. We resist awe in our rational mind, and we resist surrender in our will. But awe and surrender are the highway to glory.

God often comes at us indirectly, to catch us off-guard, and we need spiritual eyes and ears to pay attention that He’s everywhere around us. We’re never really  separate from God except in our own mind. He’s here, tune into Him. He won’t hurt you. 

Finally, to help practice using the wide-angle lens, I want to introduce you to “beholding.” I’d like you to try something in your own life: go outside alone in a place you like. Draw a symbolic line in the sand and then step over the line, expecting things on the other side to be special and invitational. Use the silence to help you see everything with its inherent dignity on display. Every time I go bird watching I’m conscious of beholding, and it produces that lovely awe and surrender that is so good for my soul. Deep calls to deep, as it were. I experience awe at the holiness of each moment and I surrender to that moment, basking in the Presence, safe in God’s company.

We also need a small lens, to see what’s inside us and right up close. A good image for this practice is a pair of reading glasses, which sharpen and bring clarity to the many details of our lives.

The Small Lens 

In the 1600s a French monk named Brother Lawrence wrote a series of letters that were published in a small book called The Practice of the Presence of God. For thirty years Brother Lawrence scrubbed pots in the monastery kitchen, that was his job. And it was in that kitchen that Brother Lawrence daily practiced tuning all his senses to the charged air of the presence of God. He reveled in it, he talked to God all day long, asking for help and just hanging out with him. All of his work was drudgery, washing the same dishes over and over. But he made the kitchen a cathedral because his focus was on God and his love. Not God and his judgments or his rules or his requirements, but how God lavished love on him, all day, every day. 

His writings were nothing short of revolutionary, because in the 1600s they were burning women as witches for not obeying the rules of what was considered godly behavior. No one was writing about god’s love raining down blessings and how that results in us responding to god’s love with more love of our own.

Brother Lawrence encouraged a familiarity with god, what he called a “holy freedom” to converse with god throughout the day as we go about our responsibilities. He described it as a “secret conversation with the soul of god,” where the “King, full of mercy and goodness, embraces me with love, makes me eat at his table, serves me with his own hands, and gives me the key to to his treasures. He treats me in all respects as his favorite.” That is extremely appealing to me, and it takes practice to first believe that we can have conversations like that with god, and then to experiment by actually doing it.

It doesn’t take much from our end, either. The smallest lifting up of the heart toward god is enough. “It’s me, hi, I’m the problem it’s me,” is as good as way to start as any. The least remembrance will always be acceptable to god. You don’t have to cry out to god very loud, he is nearer than we are aware of and he wants your sufferings.

The Quakers call the presence of God the “light within.” In the beautiful mystery that is God in us, he increases our inner light so that it spills over to others. We don’t have to work at it, it’s a spontaneous reflection of our spirit joining up with the HS in all her loveliness.

This enables us to do two things at once on a daily basis: think, plan, work, do chores, raise children, and at the same time, at a deeper level we can pray, worship, feel God’s love, be attuned to the divine breathing deep inside us.

The Quaker Thomas Kelly said, “Walk and talk and work and laugh with your friends, But behind the scenes, keep up the life of simple prayer and inward worship. Keep it up throughout the day. No one need know about it.”

I love that last part. It’s a private conversation between Jesus and me.

The more we accept the Presence all around us, the less words it can take to pray. It often leads to the repetition of a few phrases. One of my favorite authors, Anne Lamott’s, prayers are a string of “help me, help me, help me, thank you, thank you, thank you.” Mine tend to be along the lines of, “ I’m yours, stay close, what do I do now, thank you.” As an added bonus, the Bible says that even when we don’t have words, the HS is praying for us. Allow yourself to be in the orbit of prayer, it’s happening all around you. Brother Lawrence said that those who have the gale of the Holy Spirit go forward even in sleep. This is comforting to me, because I don’t have to always be pushing, striving, organizing, second-guessing everything. Even when I’m sleeping there is more light growing inside me. It can happen for you, too.

Now what? Where do we go from here? When I was a teenager and extremely boy crazy, I memorized a Bible verse:

Romans 8:25: “If we hope for something we cannot see, then we must settle down and wait for it in patience.”

That verse didn’t get me the boy in tenth grade I had a crush on, but I learned a valuable lesson: to believe that my best life was still to come.

This is Living Now

Begin where you are now. Use what tiny element of belief and hope you are capable of to live in the present moment. Tell god “yes” to his presence around you and his light within you, and then go about your ordinary life being attuned to wonder and the wisps of glory that pass by you. Start with a single sentence that’s just between you and God. Make it your own and repeat it every day. That will be enough.

Waiting for God Knows What

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L O V E is here

We are at the threshold of Christmas, when at the darkest time of the year we welcome light that filled the sky with angels singing, when a star shone so brightly it lit a path to a lowly barn. Inside that space a laboring mother gave birth in the dark to her son. He was given a most common Hebrew name, Joshua, and the name means, “God rescues, or saves.” We know him as Jesus. 

Advent is the season when we remember that divine love put on flesh and moved into the neighborhood. Jesus being born in a barn tells us that God shows up in the most forsaken corners of the earth. He brings with him, in his person, the final Advent gift: Love. 

For Jesus, love was muscular. It was an encompassing, energetic love that radiated from him with powerful tenderness for the weak and the hopeless. He noticed everyone around him, and he made time for those without status: women, children, the infirm. He spoke truth to the powerful and gave mercy to anyone who asked for it. Jesus’s love reflexes were honed and strong because he risked, over and over again, getting close enough to others to feel their pain and offer acceptance and hope.

We, too, have muscle memory for love. If we’ve been loved well, our reflexes are trusting and at ease with others. If we’ve been forsaken, our love can be constricted, fearful of being hurt again, skeptical of contentment. We hold back, relying on the false fruit that self-protection will keep us safe.

But the promise of Christmas is on our side. The love that Jesus brings is redemptive. It heals the pain from other loves gone wrong and restores us to our essential selves. We are made for connection and relationship, with a muscular love that has practiced caring for others in a healthy way so often it becomes an automatic reflex. Christmas reminds us that we can always start again on the path of love, because Jesus himself will be our companion. 

This is Living Now

Our waiting has not been in vain, for just as was promised, Jesus broke through space and time with the gift of himself. He endured the entire human experience in order to bring you the gift of your full self, filled to overflowing with hope, peace, joy, and true love. Let heaven and nature sing.

“Little by little you begin to feel that you’ve stepped into a shape that was waiting there all along. And that is love.” -Anne Lamott 

Waiting for God Knows What

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J O Y in the waiting

Joy is perhaps the most disguised of all the advent gifts, because it’s so connected to our very deepest self. If we don’t know ourselves all that well, we’re vulnerable to misinformation about what produces real joy in our lives. We can find ourselves chasing the counterfeit, which leaves us hollow inside. So how do we know what joy actually is?

Feeling happy is well and good; I’m all for happiness, it helps us keep going. But happiness is related to our circumstances, while joy is of a different essence.

Joy makes its home inside us when we have wholeheartedness - when we shed the false self that leans into perfectionism, or approval seeking, those times we say yes when we actually mean no, or when we can’t answer the question, “why do I do what I do?” These elements are our false self trying to run the show. It usually doesn’t go very well.

Wholeheartedness means our inside world and our outside life match up, we’re the same person wherever we are. We are authentically ourselves, separate and distinct from anyone else who has ever lived. Wholeheartedness means you know yourself and love your true self, just as you are. That’s the first requisite for joy, because joy needs a welcoming place in our spirit to settle into.

Do you think you don’t deserve joy? You do.

Do you feel like you’re not enough?  You are.

Have you had a winding journey to get to where you are now? Good. 

It’s made you deeper and richer on the inside, more wholehearted.

Nothing is ever wasted.

One of the gifts of joy is that it can exist alongside sadness, they’re not mutually exclusive. You can be sad and still have joy, which is good news, because life brings hard times. Joy enables us to say, and mean it, “I’m hurting right now, AND I believe in the healing to come.” Joy can be present regardless of circumstances, because joy is steadfast, it protects us from losing hope and giving into despair.

The next gift of joy is that you can’t conjure it up by striving for it. Joy doesn’t respond to a “fake it till you make it,” mentality. You can’t fake real joy no matter how hard you try. But you know it when you experience it. The beautiful mystery of joy is that its source is not in us, but in the supernatural. It’s a gift straight from heaven. You don’t have to work for it.

If we can’t strive for joy or create it on our own, how do we get it? That’s the best gift of all: It’s found in the presence of Jesus, who is already here and also coming anew during Advent. There is joy in our waiting for his arrival. If you ask Jesus to come close, he will bring that joy we long for to fill up the empty spaces in our souls. And it will be a perfect fit, because it’s just for you.

“Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.” James 4:8

This is Living Now

If we can’t strive for joy or create it on our own, how do we get it? That’s the best gift of all: It’s found in the presence of Jesus, who is already here and also coming anew during Advent. There is joy in our waiting for his arrival. If you ask Jesus to come close, he will bring that joy we long for to fill up the empty spaces in our souls. And it will be a perfect fit, because it’s just for you.

Waiting for God Knows What

Because we all love listening to Janice’s soothing voice we captured the devotion this week on video for you to watch. You can also read below.

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P E A C E in the waiting

An unmarried teenage girl is feeling labor pains, though she doesn’t know what they are. She just knows she’s extremely uncomfortable, and her mother isn’t there to help. Her fiancé is going from place to place, trying to secure them a room for the night, to no avail. No one would give up a bed for the pregnant woman; there were only the blank stares of rejection. 

Picture them, in the dark, not knowing anyone, or what to do next.

Mary was young, but she knew things. She had been told by the mighty angel Gabriel himself that her unexpected pregnancy was a great gift to the world, and she actually believed him. Her “yes” to God was wholehearted: Mary’s body, mind, soul, and spirit all agreed that while she didn’t know what would happen next, she was all-in. 

“I belong to the Lord, body and soul, let it happen as you say.”

How was Mary so brave? She lived with radical hope, which is the kind God specializes in. Mary dared to believe that the outrageous can give way to the possible, and once that belief takes hold, the world might as well be one where all good things can flourish. Even justice. Even freedom. Even peace. Mary was quite the revolutionary for a first century girl, but the even more revolutionary act was how she nourished herself on the words she knew were the truth, like they were manna from heaven. She was rooted, which gave her fresh, deep peace.

Mary didn’t know how anything would turn out, but she knew she wasn’t alone. She trusted the words in her mind, she leaned into her body and its changes, she poured out her soul in song and prayers of thankfulness, and she joined her small spirit with the infinite Holy Spirit in partnership. And then she kept her eyes open to glory.

The path to peace always winds through pain and uncertainty. Peace isn’t the absence of conflict, it’s the presence of vision, layered with desire to bring that vision to life. Mary and Joseph sat in the dark, in a stable, waiting. Pain was coming, they knew it. Yet they pressed into it, for they knew that wasn’t the end of the story, but the beginning.

“The kingdom of God is righteousness, peace, and joy.” Romans 14:17

This is Living Now

It often takes pain to help us make room for deep peace, because we have to take the step to see beyond our pain to what else is coming our way. One of the names for Jesus is Prince of Peace. He’s right here and he’s also on the horizon, bringing more authentic peace straight to you. Breathe in that beautiful gift, and then exhale it to the world. Your capacity for more will only grow.

Waiting for God Knows What

H O P E

Advent means waiting or arrival: the Sundays before Christmas are the beginning of the yearly liturgical church calendar. Advent begins not by celebrating but by waiting - waiting for God to act.

Waiting is not having: It assumes a lack of something and we don’t like that feeling. It’s the embarrassment of sitting alone at a table for two and telling the server that your date will show up any minute, yet inwardly you’re already feeling the shame of having been stood up. We fear our waiting has been in vain and we feel ashamed.

The Bible says that no one who waits for God will be put to shame. But even if we truly wait for God, we don’t really know what we’re waiting for. That’s the mystery of Advent in a nutshell.

“What are you waiting for?” “God.”

“What’s he going to do?” “I don’t know.”

A natural question to ask is, “Why wait if you don’t know what will happen?”

The paradox is we wait not for what we know but for what we don’t know. And most of our waiting for Jesus happens when we’re in the dark, figuratively and sometimes literally. Advent tells us not to wait for an event, an occurrence, a specific goal, but to wait for God himself. Because God is always bigger than our ideas, our plans, our programs.

Maybe you’ve felt stood up by God, but we can choose to stay at the table because in our spirit we know better - we can speak to our own soul that God will come, and we won’t be disgraced. The Bible is full of people who speak the truth to their inner selves in order to restore their own hope.

“Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him.” Isaiah 42:5

Advent is the preparation for a newness that can break the patterns of fear and loneliness in our lives. We can anticipate newness through an old story that rewrites itself every December. This story mostly takes place in the dark. But we don’t have to be afraid of the dark, because even when we don’t know what we’re waiting for, God offers the same message: do not fear. Because God is already here, AND he’s coming with more. The Presence of God is infinite, everywhere, always, and forever, AND he’s coming with more.

There is something on the horizon, and it will be God himself coming to rescue us from our own brokenness, our exhaustion, our divided self that’s spread too thin. He will come and lead us into wholeheartedness: body, mind, soul, and spirit all connected at last. Only God could be so outrageous as to burst into our world when we’re not looking and bring us gifts. Every week during Advent a new gift will be unwrapped. You’re invited to see what’s inside.

This is Living Now

For now, though, we wait. Advent is not a time of casual waiting, it’s the movement from something to something more. Even when it seems like nothing is happening, God is sowing seeds for something to come forth in your life. Seeds grow only in darkness and quiet. It takes time. And it means hoping for what we do not yet see, which takes bravery and trust in the unknown.

Then God has room to do something amazing and wholly unexpected: He strews light and beauty around you like rose petals, enveloping you in love and anticipation for the new, the more, the grand gifts of heaven. Make room, and it will change your life

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Risky Business

If we’re actually going to trust each other enough to create community and deep friendships, we have to figure out what to organize it around.

Jesus had some very specific ideas about that, and they kept getting him into trouble. He persisted in breaking the rules of his culture, which relied on the observance of laws and hierarchy, of knowing who had power and who didn’t. Jesus’s focus was in an entirely different, radical direction. It’s best described as the difference between conventional wisdom and alternative wisdom.

Conventional wisdom of his (and our) day serves to reinforce “what everybody knows” about how to live, the taken-for-granted understandings about the “right way” to navigate society’s norms. Conventional wisdom describes what’s appropriate behavior, with built-in rewards and punishments to keep everyone clear on the rules.

Jesus upended that dynamic by teaching and modeling what theologian Marcus Borg labeled, “alternative wisdom.” Relying on the wisdom of the Spirit, the Sophia, Jesus advocated a way of life centered in compassion as the core value for life in community. In Hebrew, “compassion” is related to the word “womb.” It means to feel with someone at the deepest part of oneself. It also highlights yet another feminine aspect of God, that God’s compassion for us is tender and womb-like. According to Jesus, God’s character is infinitely compassionate, with its elements of giving life, nurturing, caring, and encompassing us in love, not judgment. This was not normal in religious circles of the day. Or in any day. But Jesus specialized in turning conventional wisdom on its head.

Conventional wisdom declared that wealth is a blessing from God for right living, while poverty is a sign one hasn’t behaved appropriately. Jesus instead taught, “blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of God.” Putting compassion into practice was an individual act, but it was also political, for Jesus taught that every person is worthy of dignity and respect. Even the poor.

He really got into trouble applying alternative wisdom when it came to women. How do we know this? First off, he kept attending festive dinners and parties with all the wrong kinds of people: the unclean, the ostracized, and yes, the women. These dinners were served at long tables where everyone reclined, which is Bible code for saying that they were fun and relaxing. Regular meals involved guests sitting upright in chairs. Also, there was always wine involved. Women traditionally served the food but were never invited to the actual meals.

Jesus was in the risky business of welcoming women and their questions to the dinner table, even if they had dubious reputations or occupations. Jesus was in the business of not counting their past against them, while conventional society literally stoned women who were judged as sinners. Is it any wonder that women followed Jesus in droves? His alternative wisdom set them free.

“Be compassionate as God is compassionate.” Luke 6:36

This is Living Now

Jesus no longer walks the earth, but the Spirit is all around us, filled with compassion for our fragile selves. Dare to believe the voice coming to you from heaven is loving and accepting and beautiful, not harsh or shaming. Then begin practicing that same voice to others this week. Deep calls to deep, from Jesus straight to you and from you out to others. If I want to be like Jesus, I want to be doing risky business, too.

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Deep Calls to Deep

If you’ve lived on this earth you’ve had your heart broken in all kinds of ways: the shock of grief, mistreatment by someone you trusted, abandonment, betrayal…the list is basically endless. It’s the price tag that comes with the gifts of joy and the glory of being fully alive. It also sucks at times. 

Getting knocked down can be corrosive to your inner self, creating scar tissue that hardens you from the inside out. The effect on your soul and spirit is substantial, because it causes them to hide from you. How can you discover who you really are if your deepest self is encased in trauma and disappointment? That hardness is self-protection, sure, but it doesn’t actually work. It just results in us feeling alone and overwhelmed.

Our soul and spirit also get lost in the labyrinth of our mind as we go around and around in our own head. We try to think our way out of our circumstances, as though the brain has magic powers to heal us on its own. The mind is our helper, but “mind over matter” doesn’t coax the soul and spirit out of hiding. They’re sensitive and tender. They need love, not lectures.

This is why we need other people around to help us along the way. Because our spirits communicate with each other; it’s like they use geolocation to connect us together. I know you’ve felt this, how someone draws out not only your best self but helps to actually reveal your own depth to you in ways you didn’t even realize. The Bible describes that as, “deep calls to deep.” It’s so evocative. God, Jesus, and the HS have so much depth to share with you, and they’re so creative that they even use our own human relationships to showcase their love that doesn’t quit.

The spirit to spirit communication is powerful in the good times, and it’s also so meaningful when we’re going through adversity. It’s this connection with others that gives us courage and support and self-acceptance as we learn more and dare more. We need a circle of trust to create a charged force field that helps protect us as we grow from the inside out. “Deep calls to deep.”  

The inner life can’t be navigated alone, it just doesn’t work. And thankfully, we don’t have to do it that way. Let’s be grateful and press into it together. 

This is Living Now

Even the most serene among us feel insecure or self-conscious at times to risk opening up in a deep way. We use distancing moves like humor or denial or defensiveness to keep people at bay. Some use certainty as a cudgel. 

Mimi Steed of Bar Method reminds her students to, “be brave in your breath.” I want to add another layer: “be brave to relax into relationships.” Jesus will catch you every time. And the HS will be right by your side. Ask yourself the question: What’s a step I can take to be brave and lean into deep relationships?

“My deep need calls out to the deep kindness of your love.” Psalm 42:7

6.0

Wisdom and the Spirit: They Always Twin Together

When your own inner spirit makes friends with the HS, the Holy Spirit, an amazing portal opens. Light and blessings and wisdom come pouring in. I know, it sounds too good to be true. But try an experiment: ask someone you know who is spiritually wise and attuned to God what it’s like when their spirit connects to the divine spirit. They will probably describe it in a similar way. It’s the real deal.

The word wisdom is a feminine noun in both Hebrew and Greek. In Greek it’s  sophia, a woman’s name. The wisdom of God is female. And the Hebrew word for spirit is ruac, which means breath or wind. Spirit wisdom is a female attribute of God: The wisdom part, the sophia, is coupled with the breath of God, the ruac.

Using your breath correctly is a skill, we aren’t born with it. I didn’t know how to breathe until I began taking Bar Method classes, where breathing is as important a component of exercise as stretching the muscles. Breathing doesn’t only expand the chest and deliver necessary oxygen to our body. When we tap into the spirit breath of God, the simple act of breathing takes on beauty and connection to the massive love of God that surrounds us. Inhale the spirit, exhale the spirit into the world. Repeat a million times.

I refer to the Holy Spirit as “she,” because she’s sophia. I have to admit, viewing the HS as feminine makes her friendlier and more approachable. I have more convos with Her that way. She gets me, and she is waiting to pour light and blessing and wisdom into my deepest self. To help me be at home with myself.

The graciousness of God is ever-present: As we seek wholeness it’s like these parts of ourselves are gift boxes that we get to unwrap. It’s exciting to unwrap how your body and mind are connected, and then to go deeper and discover the authentic self that resides in your soul. Once you’ve begun that, you can receive and give more love, because there’s more inner spaciousness. You gain capacity for deep relationships.  

 But there’s more. Your spirit, your deepest center, is another gift waiting to be unwrapped. And it’s full of wisdom and breath and wind. The HS, the Holy Spirit, She, is waiting for you there to be your deepest friend. 

“Those who have the gale of the Holy Spirit go forward even in sleep.” Brother Lawrence (1614-1691)

This is Living Now

You can embark on the adventure of truly knowing the person you really are and share her with others. You are never too old to meet your real self. What do you have to lose?

5.0

The Spirit is Speaking

It’s time to talk about your deepest essence, your spirit. The spirit is at an even deeper level than the soul. It’s the most personal, private part of ourselves, and it can be dormant or activated, depending on our choices. It can feel scary to access one’s spiritual self, because who the heck knows what it’s really about and what we might find there? 

But here’s the good news: The spirit is where love and divine grace meet to communicate with us and repair all our brokenness. And it’s where we can gain spirit wisdom as we grow our relationship with God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. We can actually learn to navigate life’s messiness by trusting that when our spirit is linked to the beauty of God’s spirit, we’re stronger and more sure of ourselves.

Once we truly connect with our spirit a great thing happens: We are ready to be partners with God, to not only have a relationship that means we’re never alone, but to be part of the Kingdom of God that’s unfolding all around us. We get to help build that loving kingdom on earth. Which is very exciting.

This inward/outward process has been described as looking,

“out upon the world through the sheen of the Inward Light, and reacting toward people spontaneously and joyously from this Inward Center.” - Thomas Kelly

I mean. Doesn’t that sound like an adventure?

This is Living Now

Your spirit has been with you your entire life. It’s at your core. What if you were a tiny bit brave and started conversing with it? I promise God will show up and guide you. Why not give it a try?

4.0

Jesus is the Alexander Hamilton of his day

(There might be too many historical nuances that would need to be explained, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true) 

Alternative Hypothesis: Jesus would have loved Instagram

Jesus showed up in the material world to reveal that immense, mysterious, beautiful god-love in action. The first thing to know about Jesus is that he is a badass.  He’s sly, and smart, and sarcastic, three of my favorite qualities. He kept getting into trouble with the religious authorities because he persisted in hanging around people, including women, who were marginalized and powerless. If Jesus had lived in the 21st century he definitely would have posted all his events on Instagram. With music.

But the main quality Jesus possessed is that he is a spirit person: He is a funnel, or conduit for the Spirit. He had this supernatural ability to translate all the power, love, and beauty of the infinite God into his hearers’ daily lives. Imagine that: Your best teacher ever could not only explain the intricacies of life and relationships, but do it in a way that made you feel connected to divine purpose and love. And he communicated in layered, sometimes confusing ways, which is a hallmark of the deepest thinkers.

This Is Living Now

People like Jesus make you work for the truth, but it’s worth it. As a spirit person, Jesus helps us unwrap our own spiritual essence, what lies in the deepest part of ourselves. There is so much to explore. 

That’s for next time.

What would you like to learn from Jesus about who you really are? The answer is knowable, just ask it. 

3.0

The Most Sacred Force at the Center of Existence

All the world’s religions describe the soul a little differently, but what they have in common is the tenet that the soul is the spark of the divine in us that connects us to God. God isn’t a concept or an article of belief. It refers to the most sacred force at the center of existence, the holy mystery that’s beyond the material but is also present in the material world.

God is referred to as a person, but I think that’s way too small of a definition. If God’s a person we’re kind of in trouble, because we’re all people and look at us. And if he’s a person who figured everything out and achieved perfection, then we’re also in trouble, because we’ve all tried for perfection and it’s never, ever worked out.  

This Is Living Now

God is so much more expansive than that, He’s literally other-worldly. He’s all around us and within us. God is fully and completely the source of love and goodness. And there’s always more of God to experience, because he’s infinite, and you don’t have to live a certain way to experience God and his love. But you can choose to block him, and since he’s a gentleman, he won’t break down the door. He’s polite.

God’s main desire is for a deep relationship with us that’s created around love, not rules. 

Doesn’t that sound more inviting? If you ask for it, you can receive it.

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2.0

Wholeness From the Inside Out——— Not the Other Way Around 

Being whole on the inside doesn’t mean we’ve figured ourselves or anything else out; it means first of all accepting brokenness as an integral part of life and continuing on. And daring to believe that there’s hope in the brokenness.

This is good news, because life is hard and we mess up a lot and we get broken. Living an undivided life means all our parts are integrated: body, mind, soul, and spirit. Let’s focus on the soul as an essential element of wholeness.

The soul is the core of our humanity, the part that is more than our five senses. The part that tells us the truth about ourselves, gives us inner vitality and wants us to pass that gift along to others. It’s the seat of our unique identity, separate and distinct from anyone else who’s ever lived in the history of the world.

This Is Living Now

Part of our inner work is to get to know that unique person.

• who is she really?

• why does she do what she does?

• what are her values?

• what are her boundaries?

That’s all soul work. Are you ready for it?

1.0

Thin Places —————————— Where Connection Happens

The first step in recognizing the dimensions of our inner world is to become more sensitive to places outside ourselves where the veil between this world and the next is lifted for a moment. These are “thin places,” a term attributed to Celtic monks who arrived at stark, rocky, windswept islands off the coast of Ireland and Scotland in the sixth century. They spent their years there in isolation copying manuscripts of the Bible and other texts, essentially saving western civilization and Christianity in the centuries between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance.

Those monks described their stony and cold island homes as thin places, where the distance between heaven and earth shrinks, where time and eternity embrace. A thin place has its own energy and power that isn’t easily described. It may be possible to get a glimpse of what one’s life is all about there, and experience awe in what your senses are discovering. You could be in nature, but it feels like a cathedral, it feels holy, set apart. Your heart might beat a little faster, and you feel in the presence of something bigger than yourself.

According to the monks, “Heaven and earth are only three feet apart, but in thin places that distance is even shorter.”

This Is Living Now

For many people, places like Montana de Oro, Big Sur, and Yosemite are thin places. They provide beauty and peace, but they also pierce our souls with their heavenly glory. That’s when you know you’re in a thin place.

Where’s yours?