The Proper Use of the Will

"Every day is a day when we must carry the vision of God's will into all of our activities.  'How can I best serve Thee, Thy will (not mine) be done.'  These are thoughts which must go with us constantly.  We can exercise our will power along this line all we wish.  It is the proper use of the will."--Alcoholics Anonymous (The Big Book).

I was at a meeting on Saturday when I heard these words read.  It was a brief but electric moment of recognition.  Surrender is the proper use of the will.

In this blog entitled "Choosing Hope," I've spent the majority of our time so far on the second word of the title.  Once in a while we have glimpsed the nature of choosing, but not often.  What does it mean to "choose" hope?  What does it mean to choose at all?

My theological formation and perspective are drenched in Lutheran categories and thinking.  When I heard the words at the meeting, I thought to myself, "What in the world is Martin Luther doing at this meeting today?"  

After all, Luther was one who had real theological issues with the notion of "free" will.  He lived in a context where the job of the believer was to elicit God's help in the believer's project of holiness.  It was up to the believer to open herself or himself to the wonderful effects of God's grace.  The task was to choose a path that would allow Grace to perfect human Nature.

Such nonsense, said Brother Martin.  The moment I think I can choose God on my own I will be plunged even deeper into despair.  That choice itself will be tainted with self-absorption.  And the choice to choose will be tainted with self-absorption.  And that choice to choose to choose will be tainted with self-absorption.

It is no wonder that our worship services often begin with the shattering confession that we are in bondage to sin and cannot free ourselves.  The proper use of the will is not to choose God unilaterally.  Surrender is the proper use of the will.  For that reason, Luther talked often about the "freed" will--our capacity for choosing that has been freed for its proper purpose.

We who are followers of Jesus believe that we are freed for precisely that purpose--to surrender to what Jesus is up in healing this broken world and to allow ourselves to be used as tools in that healing process.  I know you might see much of that sort of thing among some Jesus followers, and I'm sorry for that.

My friends in AA remind me and one another of this reality of the freed will over and over.  Now, it is not that we do nothing.  We can prepare and position ourselves for God to do what needs doing.  That is the journey of recovery and the walk of faith.  It's not about having the right intellectual contents in my brain.  It's all about being in the place where I can most fully surrender to what's wanting to happen in my life.

Brenda and I are in the process of moving.  We are both changing jobs.  We're not all that clear about the next six months, much less the next six years.  We do have a choice in all this.  We could be sleepless, anxious, irritable, and controlling.  That is, we could work so hard on choosing that we would descend into daily insanity.

I, for one, have my moments in that regard.

Or we can simply put ourselves in the place to do the next right thing, take the next small step, act in ways that make sense for now, and wait to see how things turn out.  That perspective produces a sense of adventure, a realistic perspective and some really wonderful surprises.  It also makes it possible to sleep much better at night.

I, for one, am so glad to have a partner who knows how to do this well.

Surrender is the proper use of the will.  And when we use our wills properly, the product is serenity.  There's lots to do in that serene journey.  Controlling how life turns out, however, is not on our to do list today.

Choosing hope--the choosing part--is all about surrendering to what needs to happen and working on hope during the course of the journey.  

Talking Ourselves Forward.

We are moving on Saturday into an apartment for several months (Yes, we can use some help if you're free about 10 a.m. or so!).  

It's a long complicated story, but we've sold our house and aren't yet ready to purchase another.  So we are packing and sorting.  Some of the things will go into storage.  The necessities will go into the rental truck on Saturday.  It's another opportunity to identify what is most necessary for our daily life.  It's also another opportunity to sort through things that should go out the door in one fashion or another.

I have this odd reaction to the whole process.  In my brain, I know this is part of the adventure.  We are moving forward into another chapter--living closer to Brenda's new job and to family members.  It's another step toward having a house together--one that neither of us owned previously.  It is another step in my decade-long quest to live more simply, frugally, and with fewer things.  

That's all good.  And my brain is happy about all of that.

My guts are having a different experience.  I have moments of anxiety, sadness and distress.  I'm running across a few things from the past that might produce a bit of wistfulness.  But that hasn't happened much.  

I think I'm having an experience of sense-memory.  When I have cleaned and sorted and moved in the recent past, for the most part it hasn't been a happy set of experiences.  Instead, I have felt loss.  I have felt like a failure.  I have felt like I was abandoning important things and people.  It wasn't good.

I'm not doing any of those actions now.  But the cleaning and sorting and packing look and feel the same, no matter what the reason.  I have to keep telling myself--my insides--that this is all good.  I have to keep repeating to myself that this is a step forward and that we are accomplishing things that we have hoped for almost from the day we met.  I have to keep persuading myself that it's all good.

This makes me wonder how much sense memory plays into the flashes of grief that we all feel "out of nowhere."  

We are going along, minding our own business.  We do something and suddenly feel awful.  Was that something connected to a loss or trauma in the past?  Probably.  Our bodies remember things that our brains have worked hard to file away and put to sleep.  So I have to facilitate this negotiation between my neocortex and my guts.

Being aware that this is going on helps a great deal.  But it doesn't stop the process.  Brenda has asked me several times if I'm OK.  I am, but I have to keep reminding myself that I am.  I shared with her what I think is going on, and that helped a great deal.  That sharing put some distance between me and the experience of the moment.  It helps to do the packing in smaller doses, increasing in duration and frequency over a few days.  It helps to keep having the brain/bowels negotiation at a low level.  I think it will help to watch a good movie and get distracted a bit.

Most of all, I'm back to good old gratitude.  I know what it's like to lose a large part of my life.  I know what it's like to have to start over.  I know what it's like to feel terrible.  And this life now isn't any of those things.  It's an awesome life with amazing possibilities.  I tell myself that in great detail several times a day.  And I feel much better.

The body remembers and reminds us.  But we don't have to get stuck in the remembering.  We can talk ourselves forward into life.  That's a "choosing hope" kind of skill.

The July Audience...It's a Small World!

Here are places where "Choosing Hope" has been read this month!


United States
Russia
United Kingdom
Germany
France
Brazil
China
South Korea
Malaysia
Poland


I'm astonished!  Thank you for looking in.


And for those of you who have clicked on an ad--thanks for buying us a gallon of gas so far in July!

Getting Close to God...and One Another

Do I hold God politely at arm's length?  Or do I get in close with God and risk a painful encounter?

The Old Testament character, Job, chooses the first option--at least in the first chapters of his story.  He has a polite, civil, business-like relationship with God.  Job makes every sacrifice prescribed in the ritual regulations.  He makes extra sacrifices in case his children wander off the path of propriety.  Job does his part.  And for a while, God does God's part.  Job is blessed with material prosperity, good public repute, and a serene personal existence.  Job stays on his side of the street and expects God to stay on God's side of the street.

Alert readers (in Hebrew, anyway) notice that Job's name really means "enemy."  I don't ever quite know what to make of that, but I know that it matters.  Who is the enemy here?  As I read Parker Palmer's book, Healing the Heart of Democracy, I think of one of his lines.  "As long as we equate the stranger with the enemy," Palmer writes, "there can be no civil society, let alone a democracy where much depends on holding the tension of our differences without fearing or demonizing the other" (page 96).

Can the God we hold at a polite distance turn into anything other than the ultimate Stranger and Demon?  This is, I think, fundamental to Job's wrestling.  "If this is how God treats [God's] friends," noted Mother Theresa with a bit of acid," it's no wonder [God] has so few of them."

The New Testament character, that unnamed widow in Luke 18:1-8, chooses the second option.  "Chooses" is not the right description.  She is down to her last option.  The unjust judge won't even give her the time of day.  She is, after all, of no real account to him.  So she makes it clear that either she gets a settlement or he gets a smack in the face just below the eyeballs.  Not only would the judge suffer physical pain, but he also would be rendered a laughingstock among his peers.

While the relationship between the widow and the judge is not cordial, it is certainly close.  There is none of the careful civility we find with Job, none of the dignified decorum, none of the nodding acquaintance that leaves everyone comfortable and no one fully engaged in life.  This widow forces a rough and tumble, full contact, in your face (literally) relationship.

And that is the kind of relationship Jesus commends to his followers--passionate, muscular, turbulent, in God's face, and fully engaged--with God and with one another.

What we Christians proclaim is that we know the God who refuses--repeatedly, resolutely, and radically--to be the Stranger and the Enemy.  The heart of the Gospel is that Jesus is Immanuel--God with us.  The Book of Revelation reaches its high point with these words: "Now is the dwelling place of God among human beings..."  The Apostle Paul builds our relationship with God in the midst of an enmity to be overcome--"while we were still enemies [of God], Christ died for us..."

The God who refuses to remain at a distance enters fully into our lives and into the human experience--even to the point of death on a cross.  Our God is desperate to be with us and to lead us to be with one another.

Now we will find ourselves once again afraid of the Other, the Stranger--the Anonymous enemy.  I don't know much about the shooting in Colorado.  I do know, however, that we will be tempted to withdraw further from one another.  We will long to lock the doors, draw the shades, arm the alarms and watch our movies in private.

And if we do, then we will have surrendered to the real enemies of fear, isolation, and despair.  Please, dear Lord, give us the courage to be friends with the Stranger, to risk the relationship that brings healing to the world.

I Wish I'd Written That...

"The broken-open heart is not a rarity to be found only among saints but a common feature in the lives of ordinary people, including ourselves.  You suffer the death of someone who gave your life meaning. Then you go through a long underground passage of grief when life without that person barely seems worth living.  But one day you emerge and discover, to your surprise, that because of your devastating loss, your heart feels more grateful, alive, and loving.  The heart is an alchemical retort that can transform dross into gold."

--Parker Palmer, Healing the Heart of Democracy, page 60.

Our Community

"When we share the sources of our pain with each other instead of hurling our convictions at 'enemies,' we have a chance to open our hearts and connect across some of our great divides." --Parker Palmer, Healing the Heart of Democracy, page 6

I am just entering Parker Palmer's newest book, but I know it will be wonderful.  His lifelong struggles with clinical depression and his lifelong passion for peace with hope meet once again in this book.  Palmer lifts up what we know deep inside--that real empathy is the only hope for human community.

I was at a meeting where we talked about relief efforts on the other side of town.  We were supporting those efforts with dollars and volunteers and were benefiting hundreds of people, at least in the short run.  One person at the table said, "I hope we can learn how to do something like this in our community."

My heart sank into my shoes.  Somehow, the people less than ten miles away were not part of "our community."  

It is our natural tendency to regard those closer to us, more like us, and more likely to benefit us as more important to us than other people.  But one of the disciplines of being a compassionate grown up is to resist that tendency for all we're worth.  One of the disciplines of being a compassionate grown up is to extend our empathy to those who are farther away, less like us, and unlikely to benefit us in any way.

Experiences of grief and loss, vulnerability and weakness, pain and struggle--these experiences can deepen our capacities to connect with the lives of others.  These experiences can make us more empathetic if we will allow that to happen.  Of course, such experiences can also harden us to the needs of the world.  Such experiences can lead us to shut ourselves off to any further possibilities of pain.

Hopeful people choose to have healthy boundaries rather than solid walls.  One of our meditations  at the breakfast table this morning talked about that difference.  Walls shut us in and eventually kill, cutting us off from the real life of this world that exists outside of our own skins.  

Healthy boundaries allow us to maintain that sense of who we are and to connect with people who are not us.  

Healthy boundaries allow us to have perspective--to step back a bit in order to move forward.  

Healthy boundaries allow us to have empathy--to use our imaginations to enter into the pain and promise of another's life.  

Healthy boundaries allow us to embrace difference rather than having to screen others according to sameness and how they satisfy our self-interest.

Pain and loss can be pathways to such connections, if we can have the courage to let that happen.  Pain and loss can be pathways to such connections if we are willing, as Parker Palmer says, to let our hearts be open.  We Christians worship the God who sends Jesus to be God's open heart to us and to the world.  And Jesus is then the model for how we live our lives of hope.

"Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, 

who, though he was in the form of God,

   did not regard equality with God

   as something to be exploited, 

but emptied himself,

   taking the form of a slave,

   being born in human likeness.

And being found in human form, 

   he humbled himself

   and became obedient to the point of death—

   even death on a cross."

Philippians 2:5-8

All communities are our community.  Pain and loss teach us that.

Funerals

The day of the funeral for our loved one is a day most of us meet with dread.  It is the day when our numbness and denial collide with indisputable reality.  

There our loved one lies in the casket or in the urn or already in the ground.  For a few days between the death and the funeral, we could wait and hope that she or he might stumble through the front door and declare that it had all been a mistake or a joke or a misunderstanding.  Now those fond delusions wither under the glare of death's relentless spotlight.

One after another the guests come and say things like, "I'm so sorry."  If our loved one is still alive, then such statements are absurd and even silly.  But those statements are not absurd or silly.  People say those things because our loved one is dead.  

When I was by myself I could ignore such voices.  I could choose to hear nothing at all.  Now I have to listen.  And I have to say thank you to people for reminding me over and over that my loved one is dead.

Perhaps a funeral service is, as much as anything, the public enforcement of reality upon the bereaved.  No one wants to do that or takes any pleasure in such an exercise.  It is, however, one of the unavoidable elements of a funeral.  

Is it any wonder that people insist these days on having "celebrations of life" in a continuing campaign to deny the reality of death?

If no one had died, a funeral would be a pretty poor excuse for a party or family gathering.  The fact that all those nice people showed up with tissues in their purses and pockets means that something terrible has happened.  We all know it.  We can't escape it.  The funeral happens.

Then it's over.  We move to the cemetery.  Or we go home with the cremains.  Or something.  

In any event, we find a way to enact the words that Christians use at the grave site: "we commend our loved one to the ground--earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust..."  When our loved one is a veteran we hear "Taps" being played and know that this is a salute to the final sunset of a life.  One moment she or he was here, alive and breathing.  The next moment she or he was gone, silent and cold.  There's no getting around it.

No escape.  No denial.  No illusions.  It's no wonder people dread that funeral day.

In the midst of that, we Christians do something quite remarkable.  We celebrate--not just the life of the deceased, but rather the Life that cannot die.  It isn't that we are without grief.  No, life is a sweet and precious gift from God.  We hurt deeply because we love deeply.  We who follow Jesus weep with those who weep as well as rejoicing with those who rejoice.

Then we do one more thing.  We make an announcement.  "For I am convinced," we quote the Apostle Paul in Romans 8, "that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."

We are convinced.  That conviction carries us beyond the day of dread into a future with hope.