Patience

Consider the story of Jesus' healing of Bartimaeus, a blind beggar who called out from the roadside.  You can find it in Mark 10.  In the story the disciples are impatient and dismiss the man.  But Jesus calls him over and utters one of his signature healing pronouncements, "Your faith has made you well."

If we were in the crowd of disciples, trying to follow Jesus that day, we would either have been the ones who tried to shut Bartimaeus up or the ones who didn't say anything while that exclusion was happening.

In our own lives, who are we impatient with?  We are impatient with people:

· for being tiresome

· for not being logical

· for trying to sneak in the side instead of waiting in line

· for asking yet again for what they've asked for before

· for not changing their tune after all these years

· for not waiting quietly

· for being indiscreet

· for having a problem that can't be solved

· for refusing to be overlooked

· for not doing "what any normal person would do"

· for not showing up on time

· for not dressing correctly

· for not filling out the right forms

· for having done something in the past that means they can't get a job now

· for having done or said something in the past that was offensive to us

· for forgetting something

· for not hearing us the first time

· for it being their own fault       

What would you add to the list?  Go ahead.  It is easy to come up with reasons to be impatient with someone who is driving in front of you, driving up behind you, or sitting on the seat next to you.  It is easy to make the list, right?

Okay, so we know that we are impatient sometimes, but surely that's not a great big deal.  I mean, we attend to those in need as we can, right?  And those annoying people are annoying, right?  We are, many of us, busy and tightly scheduled, right?  It's not really got anything to do with religion, with Jesus, or with spirituality, right?

I find it significant that Jesus in this part of the Gospel of Mark, is on his last journey.  The next chapter begins the great drama of Jesus' final week with what we call Palm Sunday.  Because the end is near, it should sharpen our attention to what is important enough to still be included in the story and how this is God still speaking to us. 

I suggest that there is a lesson Jesus' behavior imparts in this story that matters to your life this very day.  Jesus demonstrates patience instead of impatience.  This alternative has two important purposes to offer you. 

The first is that the practice of showing others, however annoying, the face of kindness and attention makes the world more like the kingdom that Jesus is always teaching us to live in.  This story calls you to follow Jesus' lead in being kind and focused on those who we and the world tend to push aside.  How will that change your next encounter with your neighbors?

The second purpose is that the practice of turning toward those who are irritating and problematic is frequently the path to spiritual growth, to unexpected experience, and to emotional maturity.   What Jesus chooses to do is to drive home the message that there is something deep, something profound in our interactions with each other.  Jesus chose to demonstrate and repeat how our salvation, the path to your salvation in this world, leads straight to those people with whom you are most impatient.  That is the place where your growth is stunted now and your growth will flourish if you stop sending them to the back of the line.

It's tough medicine for you to take, I know.  Jesus invites you to give it a chance anyway.  Try to notice the next time you are impatient.  In that moment, practice finding a way to move to patience.  Draw your focus more directly to the object of your impatience and try to see him or her as deserving of your attention.  Breathe.  This is an opportunity for you to bring the kingdom of God a little more into being, today, this very day.  Keep trying too, because you'll get better at it.  I promise.

Spirituality 102 - on the path

I walk on woodsy paths more frequently than some of you, I suspect.  Walking in the woods comes with the territory of living with a Labrador retriever who is ready at any moment to head out and find the next adventure.  

Briar's experience on the walk in the woods is like mine in some ways.  We cover some of the same ground and we start and end the walk at the same time.  Yet anyone watching Briar, or knowing even a little about dogs, knows that Briar experiences something quite different from what I experience.  

To authentically follow the inner, spiritual path, one must practice observing what one sees on the journey.  This is problematic because we already have a way of seeing ourselves and what is inside us.  If we consider moments in our lives, decisions we have made, principles on which we have settled, etc., we may find a well-defined series of monuments to our own righteousness, our woundedness, our shame, our pride, our accomplishments, our thought processes, our taste, etc.  I use the word "monuments" to convey that they are frequently unchanging, "cast in stone."  We see them in the way we've come to see them.  Yet that fixed nature of what we expect and have prepared for will often prevent us from learning and growing.  That fixed view of our lives makes our inner journey the same each time through.  It can prevent what might have been a spiritually deepening experience from being anything more than a stroll down our memory lane of what we see as the facts.  In other words, it is not much of a spiritual journey.

Most of us take these inner journeys alone.  We think.  We ponder.  We decide.  We walk the same paths again and again.  This does build our character a certain way.  This solitary journey can strengthen our opinions and cement our principles.  Also, there is something appealing about doing it ourselves, independently.  I confess that my mode of introspection has mostly been of this solitary sort.

Well, except for my example of walking with the dog.  When Briar and I walk a path together, what she sees changes what I end up seeing.  The path is a different experience when we walk it together.

So one way to improve the depth and breadth and ultimately the spirituality of your introspection is, at least some of the time, to take someone else along. One use of therapeutic counseling is to reconsider how we have come to regard the elements of our inner life.  Note that I am naming how we can revisit our way of looking at people, moments, accomplishments, losses, loves, etc.   The purpose of such conversations is not so much to excavate hidden facts as it is to push past the meaning we settled upon long ago into a new meaning, freshly meaningful to who we are now.  This is also the domain of the spiritual director or guide.  Those, then, are two kinds of people who will go with you along such journeys.

Which brings us to our religious tradition.  Particularly at Grace Church, we invite people to walk the journey of life with us ("No matter who you are …")  Our part of that is to invite one or more other people to walk the spiritual path with us.  Our part of that is to allow our experience in worship to enter into our consideration of the path we're on right now.  Also, our tradition is full of Bible study, book study, conversations, special services, prayer groups, pilgrimages, retreats, shared chores, cooking together, work in the Stearns Farm field, and shared stewardship for our church, our property, and the world beyond our parking lot.  All of these are places of journey, places of spiritual encounter, and places where we share the path.  I conclude that being part of a church can be a way to find companionship for your spiritual journey.

Which leaves you and me with the question of the day, "When is your next chance to share with someone else with the idea that you are, together, on the spiritual journey?"

Spirituality 101

I don't frequently look up definitions, do you?  I seem to hold the belief that the last time I needed to look at a dictionary was in school, that whatever I think a word means is good enough. 

Perhaps you recognize the reference to Humpty Dumpty's pronouncement in Alice In Wonderland?  "'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'It means just what I choose it to mean - neither more or less.'"  Of course, the author, Lewis Carroll, wants to show that Humpty Dumpty is an arrogant egg.  With good British wit, however, Carroll's H.D. is also speaking the truth.  For even though we acknowledge that words have meanings, the layers of meanings in what we say modify generally accepted meanings thoroughly.  

Consider the word "green.'" 

Or how about the word "Christian?" 

From our conversations about "spirituality," we've discovered a variety of meanings and an uncertainty, for some of us, about any meaning.  Perhaps some definitions will help.

-- Spirituality: having to do with the human spirit.  That's a good start, although it kind of postpones an answer. 

-- Spirituality: having to do with the soul, incorporeal, not pertaining to material things but to intangibles.  That helps a little more, I think.  We are in the domain of the 'intangible.'  For those of us who like concrete information, this suggests, we're likely to be unsatisfied.  Spirituality is not something concrete, not something you can touch. 

-- Spirituality: to be distinguished from our physical experience, our material body.  This is helpful.  It is a very old idea, embedded in much of the Bible, that the material body and the spirit, or spirituality, are separate domains.  Do you agree?  Separating spirituality or spirit from the physical experience of being a human is helpful, up to a point.  It helps us to see clearly.  However, it also makes a false distinction between mind and body.  For we are mind and body – one entity.  There is no mind separate from the physical and chemical activity of heart, lungs, brain, etc. 

-- Spirituality: belief in an ultimate or an alleged immaterial reality.  Do you believe that there is a reality beyond what we can perceive?  Do you assert that there is  "more?" 

-- Spirituality: an inner path enabling a person to discover the essence of his/her being.  That's an interesting one, isn't it?  Now the definition is leading us to consider not so much how the cosmos is arranged or the nature of reality but how we experience and use this thing we name spirituality.  

I think we can stop there for this posting.

Would you consider these aspects of spirituality and let me know your thoughts?  I'm not asking you to go find more definitions, although you certainly may do so.  Rather, I invite you to consider the questions posed so far in this survey of meaning.  Spirituality's intangibleness, the idea of a separation between you as a physical body that is alive and you as something spiritual, the idea that there is something, some reality that is "more" than our concrete experience of reality, and especially, that there is an inner path which, by taking it, you can discover the essence of your being.

And pray with me too.  

Dear God, Dearest God, reveal to us sufficient insight into the mystery of  ourselves and our relationship to this wonderful creation.  We attribute our creation and all creation to you and so we give you our attention, our love, our praise, and all the glory.  Amen.