contemplative life

As I read Richard Foster’s “Streams of Living Water” and his description of the “contemplative life” (living life with the steady gaze of the soul upon the God who loves us), I find that I can relate to the movements through a prayerful life that he describes so very much.

I am going to paraphrase Foster’s second chapter here:  but he describes the fundamental movements of a Christian living their life with a steady gaze upon God, or the contemplative life.  These fundamental movements flow through love, peace, delight, emptiness, fire, wisdom, and transformation.  Oh, how true! 

As we first come to think upon God and cast our gaze on Him, we sense a delicate but deepening love, a love that in the beginning is so quiet and unobtrusive that it is hardly even perceptible.  But little by little, this love comes, high and low, hot and cold, but in time always growing deeper, stronger, and more steady.

As love grows, in slips a peace that really cannot be analyzed – truly it is a “peace that passes understanding” (Phil 4:7).  This peace is not due to the absence of conflict or worry or grief, but rather due to a Presence with us in the chaos.  And in time this quiet peace wins over the chatter and clatter of our noisy, restless, or hurting hearts.

Love and peace are then followed by delight – a deep joy.  A playfulness even.  Or a childlikeness.  This delight is not uninterrupted, it will ebb and flow, but it is an exquisite delight often mingled with a painful yearning for more.  And that yearning brings us to an opposing, almost contradictory movement – emptiness.  The delight of finding God’s love and peace leads us to realize it is not a complete finding.  We have a “dissatisfied satisfaction” or as John of the Cross calls it, “a living thirst… the urgent longing of love.”

The awareness of the incomplete feels like emptiness, and can also have a deep darkness as we realize we are experiencing a God who feels hidden or veiled from us.  But the emptiness, the darkness, the grief, the dryness - these are all forms of prayer themselves too.  While delight is the feasting of the Lord, emptiness is our fasting – and both are needed for the growth of the soul.

As we pass through seasons of delight and emptiness, we eventually experience fire.  Our varying experiences with God intensify our love for Him, becoming a steady flaming fire.  And we come to the point of feeling and welcoming God’s fire because we know it is the purifying fire a love that burns away the dross – the stubbornness, hate, self-promotion, and self-sins of our life.  Fire leaves fertile ground for love to be planted and flower.  As God’s love blossoms, wisdom appears. 

The knowing and inflowing of God himself arrives and we “filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord” (Hab. 2:14).  We know as we are known, as we are privileged to listen in and participate in the self-communication of the Trinity. 

God is using this process to slowly capture first our hearts and wills, then our mind and imagination.  The result is the transformation of our entire personality into the likeness of Christ as we take on his habits, feelings, hopes, faith, and His love.  What a beautiful process.

💔

“What’s going to happen is, six months will go by, and everybody’s going to think, well, it’s passed.  But you’re going to ride by that field or smell that fragrance, receive that flashing image, and you’re going to feel like that day you got the news.  But you know you’re going to make it when the image of your dad, your husband, your friend, crosses your mind, and a smile comes to your lip before a tear to your eye.  That’s when you know, and I promise you, I give you my word, I promise you, this I know, that day will come.  That day will come.”~ Joe Biden (National Grief Day)

How true those words are... at some point the memories do begin to bring a smile before a tear, and you know you will make it.  Grief is such a difficult road but also such a transforming one.  Grief breaks a heart wide open in such a painfully shocking way.  But you know you will make it when you begin to see and realize how God does not waste a thing.  God even (especially) uses brokenness for good.  A heart busted and split right open in pain can then be used to allow love and compassion to flow in and through it.  It is our job to keep the heart open, to stay tender, to hold the space grief and sorrow created, and to not let our hearts scab over in bitterness or hardness.  For God uses the tender, broken hearts the most.  I think those hearts are capable of loving harder and stronger than ever before, if we let them.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.  Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.  Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.  Blessed are those who hunger and thirst, for they shall be satisfied.  Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.  Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.  Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.  Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” (Mt. 5:3-10)

love as God loves

I am reading “To Love As God Loves” by Roberta C. Bondi this week and I am struck by her practical, tangible steps for living a life of love.  Below are a few passages I was particularly moved by.

Excerpts from Chapter Five:

If the passions (our own thoughts, emotions, and habits) are the enemies of our ability to love other people and God, how do we fight them?... Prayerful introspection and prayer itself.

Introspection means looking inside ourselves to see what it is that makes us tick, or fails to make us tick, in order that we may love.  It has to do with observing ourselves to see what we think or feel or do that hurts us or makes us hurt others so that we can do something about what needs to be corrected, and strengthen what needs to be strengthened…

All of us know ourselves at some level much better than we want to admit we do.  No matter how blinded by passions (our own thoughts, emotions, and habits) there always is a bit of us that can see the truth.  Nevertheless, we often do not care to see it, and so we use up a lot of energy hiding from that seeing part of ourselves and denying what it sees.

This certainly does not mean that since we can almost always see the truth, no matter how faintly, we should just grit our teeth and overcome our thoughts, emotions, and habits by self-control.  We are all like Paul: even when self-deception does not get in our way, much of the time the good that we want to do we cannot, and the evil we do not want to do, we cannot seem to help doing (Rom. 7:19).  Often self-deception keeps right on functioning even when a part of us knows better… We cannot seem to change our behavior.

Being able to look inside ourselves and see what is going on is a crucial part of breaking free of destructive passions (thoughts, emotions, and habits).  Watch yourself as you interact with others and the world around you and puzzle over what you see until you know what your destructive passions are: pride or depression or restless boredom, or whatever else.  Looking inside and seeing things is the first step away from these.

Find your own real needs.  Too many times as Christians we believe we have a problem with, say, irritability, and we try to conquer irritability head on, by prayer and self-control.  But the truth may be that we are not taking seriously our own anger at something that needs to be corrected.  Anger is not hiding reality from us, rather it is our fear of anger and lack of humility in the form of low self-esteem that needs to be tackled.  Real needs that are not met are among the sources of our destructive thoughts, emotions, and habits – such as a need for rest and quiet, for prayer, for leisure, for food and sleep.

Often, however, we are not able to see what is causing our problem, or if we can, the information is not helpful.  We may not even know we have a problem.  Having a teacher, guide, or trusted friend is of real importance to the process of learning to escape our own distortions of reality in order to learn to love. 

Rooting out self-deception can be excruciating.  And we are in need of people we trust outside ourselves who, when we are in trouble or trying to grow in the Christian life, can tell us what they see us thinking or feeling or doing.  Theoretically, a Christian could live in isolation from other Christians, but it would be a very sad thing.  We need each other.

The place of a teacher can be taken by our Christian community.  Ideally, this often happens in worship.  Sometimes the words of scripture or prayer or the sermon can cut right through our self-deception to speak the truth to us; we might be jolted out of a fearful and helpless frame of mind by the hearing of a the words of Psalm.

Just as important, we also need to be able to count on individual friends, or a group of friends to function in this way for us.  Somehow, in most of our churches, we are not prepared to take enough risks with each other.  We need our friends to help us by being real with us.  It will most certainly feel awkward at first, and it may continue to be a bit uncomfortable until you are both used to it.  It is well worth the discomfort, fear of embarrassment, and the work because a Christian can never be a matter of only ourselves and God.  We are part of the body of Christ, and were created to need the other parts as well.

Being able to look inside ourselves deeply takes real humility.  Each of us is vulnerable in all sorts of ways, and God who made each one of us also loves each one of us in all our fragility.  This means that we need not feel set apart from others by whatever introspection or conversation turns up within us, no matter what it is. 

Cultivating humility also means that we will begin to stop measuring ourselves continually against others.  Humility takes the fear out of a lot of introspection, making us courageous and strong.

Humility also makes us patient with ourselves when we do find the things we probably will see in ourselves.  We will be able to accept it as true that the thoughts, emotions, habits, feelings, attitudes, obsessions, and certain kinds of behavior do not go away all at once simple because we have identified them.  Humility reminds us that the process of becoming free of our destructive passions is often a long one, and that is all right.  Do not try to do everything at once; take on only one thought or emotion or habit at a time.  Learning to love is a slow business.

Humility, finally, will enable us to hear what others tell us and will help us cultivate within ourselves a continuous attitude of listening to the world around us, to friends, to those who are not so friendly, to what we encounter in prayer and worship.  Humility makes us receptive to all that comes to us that might bring us to love of God and of each other.  Humility is the only possible attitude out of which we can ever speak a word of truth to another person without doing terrible harm to ourselves and the other.  After all, what we are about is never ever executing God’s righteous judgment on another person, or ourselves.  

plumeria blooms in my front yard

meadow blooms in Sequoia National Park

 

quotes

Two quotes I read this morning that spoke to me:

“Life is good, but it also holds great pain for us that we would be better off acknowledging than redescribing.” -Roberta C. Bondi,To Love as God Loves

“If He who in Himself can lack nothing chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed.” -C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

Giant Forest, Sequoia National Park

proposal

Six months ago today a wonderful guy asked me out for lunch.  After two hours of conversation over yummy Mexican food, I realized I really wanted to get to know this sweet person better. We then spent most of the spring and summer going on all kinds of adventures together - some awesome hikes, Disneyland, local plays, cooking together, painting together, and even meeting up with our kids in Hawaii.  I have watched our children play and bond and I have had someone to ask parenting advice to when being a single parent just plain stinks.  In the past six months a beautiful, loving, and joyous friendship has formed.  And our four children - his daughter and son and my daughter and son - have all built giggly, fun, precious friendships that warm my heart.  They ask when we are getting together and my children seem disappointed when they have to do something with just mommy alone.  Laughter and noise and joy fill my home when Dan and his kids visit.  And it’s a joyful noise that my kids and I have just craved after the grief and quiet of past seasons.  God has been so good to us these past six months and I am so thankful. 

This past weekend, while out on one of our many adventures together, Dan and I stopped for a picnic lunch at the beach.  There by our picnic blanket I “found” two geode rocks just lying amidst some other shoreline rocks.  One sparkly rock was cracked open and the other one still whole.  I was so amazed at what I found and excitedly showed Dan.  He encouraged me to crack the second one open so we could see what was inside.  I worked on it and cracked it open.  Inside was a ring.  And then Dan asked me to marry him and spend forever with him.  I was surprised, I teared up, was speechless, and I said yes.  I love you forever, Dan.

I am happy.  I have been happy here and there in every season, but I feel deeply contently happy in this season.  I feel spoiled that I get to love both Ryan and Dan.  That I have permission to do that.  I am thankful for a past that shaped me and Ryan’s love that matured me but also that God would allow me to keep all that and still move me forward into a new season.  It is a gift I do not take for granted.  Dan and his children are a gift in my life.  And I am humbled to see my children cling to their daddy in heaven but now will have Dan come alongside them for future years, along with new friends to laugh and grow with.  It is absolutely beautiful for me to see my children hold that space for their daddy, knowing no one fills that space, but also see them let their hearts enlarge enough to allow others to come in to love and support them.  I have said before that my prayer has been that God use all my pain to keep my heart tender and loving, not hardened or closed.  And He is faithful.  I have been brought to tears to see joy and love begin to form and then bloom.  And I know there will be challenges as the two of us (the six of us) begin to blend our lives together, but we all are so excited about the challenges and the adventure that we can’t wait.  God is so good.  All the time. 

the geodes I “found” 

 

attempting to take a picture under a waterfall  

 

 

 

   

 

Dan made this cute graphic 

bread of life

I loved every word of this article by Leslie Leyland Fields:
When You Need to Know Your Story is Not Over Yet

“Who does not want the bread Christ feeds us sometimes more than Christ Himself?  Which bread feels more real?

Tonight I look around my table.  Look how filled we are!  I am so in love with all that Jesus has given me, so often I want only that.

But take all this away—no children, no husband, no sea, no tables full of halibut and bread and will I love Him still, this Christ?”...

Lake McDonald, Glacier National Park, MT