Journey Center Blog

Today was one of those days… the ones where you feel like everything you choose is wrong. You start out with the best of intentions, but along the way, unforeseen things (like traffic accidents) derail all your best plans. And no matter which path (route home) you choose, you end up deciding something else would have been better and you just get more stuck and further behind.

Do you ever wish, like I do, that you could look into the future and really see the various outcomes of different choices you have? Do you ever wish you could call up God and get His Google Maps perspective of where your life’s red and black traffic lines are and where it’s green all the way? What if we could know the future, would it change the choices we make today?

One of my favorite current TV shows is “Flash Forward”. (I know, there’s probably only 3 of us out there watching this show. SciFi never seems to make it long on TV.) At the beginning of this series, the whole world loses consciousness for a few minutes and their minds shift forward in time by several months. Everyone gets to see a few minutes of what will be happening in their life in the near future. For some, it’s a wonderful vision – marriage, having a baby, being in love, becoming famous. For others, it’s a terrible vision – unfaithfulness to their spouse that they love, being killed, accidentally killing others.

After these characters wake up, knowing their future has an interesting impact on their present life and choices. We get to see how they either try to change their future, make it happen, or do nothing. We’re about to see if the decisions they’ve made and their actions will lead to the future they saw or if the characters who wanted to, were able to change the outcomes. Interesting premise… I think.

Well, of course, none of us can really know our futures or entirely predict how our choices will affect our lives, but it’s good to be aware of the choices we’re making each day and what path they’re leading us down. I’ve been thinking a lot about my own choices lately… how my life really adds up to a long (hopefully) series of choices. I think I’m going through a sort of mid-life crisis. (Yes, at age 34.) I’ve been looking back at all the choices I’ve made since graduating high school – colleges, jobs, friends, boyfriends, activities, beliefs, dreams, plans… And I see how each decision I’ve made along the way, some small and some large, has brought me to where I am now, and not only that, has really affected the type of person I’ve become and my position in life.

Did I intend for those choices to bring me to this point? Not all of them. If I could have “flashed forward” and seen my current life, would I have chosen some things differently? Probably. But by observing my past choices, I’ve realized what awesome freedom and responsibility I have to really create my own life, meaning and purpose. Understanding this has made me want to try harder to make sure the small and large choices I make every day are leading down the path I want so that I will end up at the destination I have in mind.

It’s amazing that the Creator has given me this awesome power to shape my life. I get to be a creator too – make things happen, determine outcomes, bring more good or evil into the world. My actions are not entirely pre-determined, not controlled. There is much I can decide for my life, even whether to seek out and acknowledge the Creator or not. It’s entirely up to me whether I make the choices that move me closer to aligning my life with what I was created for or not. I’m not forced into obedience or belief. It’s really up to me… what do I choose?

Do I pursue life or death? Do I spread love or resentment? Do I bring more light into the world or more darkness? I have the freedom to decide… My mid-life crisis is bringing me to a place of trying to live deliberately. I’ve wasted a lot of time on auto-pilot and fear of the future. I’ve spent a lot of years as a slave to making choices based on past experiences or unhealthy beliefs and feelings. I’m trying to break out of that and determine what I really want in life and make the choices that will bring me closer to those things.

I can’t “flash forward” to see my future and all possible outcomes, but I can envision what I want and do my best to make the choices that will lead me there. I need to write down my preferred future, post it on my wall, remember it and think of it every day so this vision can guide me and the little choices I make every day that eventually add up to my life. There will always be unexpected things happening, bends in the road I didn’t see coming, choices I’m forced to make that I don’t want to, but that doesn’t mean I can’t try really hard to determine as much as possible of my future by making more deliberate choices each day.

Last week I was having coffee with a good friend, who is a Buddhist. She was brought up Baptist, and left as a teenager as her thirst for deeper experience of ’something meaningful’ eluded her in the Christianity her family professed. We began to speak about lent,and shared stories about what we were both taught — laughing ruefully about the similarities between Southern Baprtist and Irish Catholic concepts of sin and repentance.  I was telling her how eye and heart-opening it was for me to discover that the real meaning of repent is to change focus/direction–to change the direction in which I am looking for happiness. That opened up a conversation about the Buddhist idea of detachment/non-attachment and the  Christian teachings about the false self and the ways in which this wounded part of us addictively searches for happiness/meaning/fullfilment. My friend said– isn’t there a story about that in scripture? So she took out her laptop, opened a Bible site (I didn’t know there was such a thing) and we found  The Rich Man story in Mark 10:21-21.

Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said,’You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.’ When he heard this, he was shocked, and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.

My friend and I sat and read this over and over–I think we were doing Lectio Divina in the coffee shop– and it brought tears to our eyes. For us, it made another connection between our spiritual paths–neither of us really knew before that this teaching was in Christian scripture–so this deepens and expands our own conversation. But what moved us both–was Jesus ‘compassion and love– so poignant as he looks at this man, understanding the goodness of his heart and his devotion–and how he was still captured by what he owned.  We were right there– feeling in our own bodies the shock of coming up against what we were attached to and unable to release. Part of what moved me so much was this man’s shock –and then grief. I get the feeling that he not only did not realize Jesus would ask him for this–but that he may have, in that moment, discovered something very painful about himself– that he was possessed by his possessions. I see him walking away, and nursing this new knowledge about himself in his heart–does he stay with it? Can Christ’s loving gaze help him to stay with this awareness, and perhaps lead to some healing/ Or in his pain does he shut down, and perhaps cling even tighter to what he discovers he believes he needs.

I notice that I pray for this man– 2,000 years ago–and so I pray for myself and all of us who want so much to repent–and who are still holding on for dear life to what prevents us from following our deepest heart’s desire. The love on Christ’s face accompanies me in that prayer– and so I hope, in this moment, that the transformation Christ promises can occur in me.  My Buddhist friend said that for her, she will incorporate that loving gaze into her own practice-.I like that– I see Jesus holding her in love as she practices meditation and blessing her too. Whatever our path and practice, may that gaze of Love tend us and accompany us and gently help to unravel that crack in our defended hearts when we are shocked and grieved into facing our own limitations. May we all discover that which truly brings happiness and fullness of life. I give thanks for lent and this time of learning what true repentance invites all of  us into.

I was recently listening to an old sermon by a previous pastor. He was addressing relationships between men and women and was talking about that often hated, misunderstood, mistreated, wrongly used, sometimes vile “s” word…the word that has made me angry and defensive and hurt and scared…

“Submit.” There I said it.

Don’t stop reading this blog. It’s not as vile as you might think.

I don’t know many people that like this word. But I think that’s because we don’t understand the meaning of it, especially as it involves relationships. And it’s been misused against women with the religious mandate for wives to submit to their husbands. I get a pit in my stomach when I hear this and want to argue that I’m every bit as capable of thinking and making decisions and doing things as a man is.

The problem with telling women to submit to their husbands is that people often leave off the part about men also submitting to their wives. If you continue reading the Bible passage where this is discussed, it equally addresses the man’s role in this act of submission. This kind of submission isn’t putting oneself under the control and dominance of another. It’s about mutual submission, people equally submitting to one another, not just husbands and wives, but all people.

My pastor put it this way, “You’ve begun to enter into mutual submission when you truly believe the others’ thoughts, feelings, opinions, ideas, needs, fears, anxieties, hopes, dreams are as important as yours are and you begin to behave accordingly. When you start doing that, you start breaking off each other’s bonds. We are not very good at breaking our own chains, but we are very good (when we want to be) at breaking off others’ chains. At encouraging, lifting up, unburdening, lightening the load…”

Wow! I feel like I could read that statement over and over. Anyone who has ever struggled in a relationship can probably see how not submitting to each other caused many problems. And anyone in a good relationship can probably see how when we truly deeply care for the needs, desires, fears, hopes and dreams of the other and treat them as if they are as important as our own, deep trust and love can happen.

I’ve experienced being in relationships that break off emotional and spiritual bonds. This kind of deep love, deep trust, and deep caring does break down my chains of mistrust, guilt and pain. And I don’t think those chains could come off any other way. I know – because I spent years trying to remove them myself!

I’ve also found that the love of God has removed many of my chains. When I understand the deep, deep love and respect between God and myself, I feel so free and unburdened. The image I love of Christ the most is the one of the humble servant. He spent his life healing people, meeting their needs, addressing their concerns, helping them with their problems. He taught them that the person who was the greatest among them was the one who was the servant of all. This image of Christ is so backwards from the concept of putting yourself first and caring for your own needs first… And definitely backwards from the idea of men sitting back smugly while the women around them submit to them.

Why do I submit myself to Christ? Because he is worth it. Because what he has to offer is something worth submitting myself to. Because he also submitted himself for me, even to the point of death. Submit myself to love? Definitely. Submit myself to wholeness? You betcha. Submit myself to the amazing transformation that comes from true, deep communion with the divine? Sign me up! Submit myself to those around me – to care for their hearts as much as I care for my own? It would be truly revolutionary!

“Prayer is not asking for what you want, but asking to be changed in ways you can’t imagine” (Kathleen Norris)

Nine years ago, when I turned 50, I began to say a prayer: “Great Spirit, take away from me anything that interferes with my becoming who I came here to be, so that I can do what You want me to do”. It was a scary prayer-as I had no way of knowing what would follow-but it was what came to me whenever I got quiet.  Soon after the prayer began to take up room in my heart, my spiritual director taught me Centering Prayer, and consenting to the presence and action of the Spirit in my life became a daily prayer practice. 

As someone called to and committed to the contemplative journey,  I continue to discover, sometimes to my dismay and sometimes amusement, the ways and places in which I still try to control my journey with the Holy. I hope –and pray–that at some point in this long unravelling of the false self/ego I will be brought to the place where in fact I can more fully trust and surrender. Years ago a friend who was a therapist told me that no one would undertake therapy if they fully realized what it was going to be like. I think the spiritual journey may sometimes be like that too—so I just continue to ask for help in following this mysterious path into unimaginable places . I don’t know what you are doing, Spirit, but something inside of me keeps saying YES! (My Irish Nanna would say, “God help me!)