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Traditions of Unfolding 6
Wednesday, September 30, 2015
Jerry Webber
Prayer with Psalm 29
Webber
Your voice shouts
whispers
blaring silences
declaring Presence
and Absence
Inviting me to shouts
for just living
to whispers
for imbibing oneness
Over the waters
through the trees
Your whispered shouts
animating all created things
always
and
everywhere
Your speech creates
You shape our becoming
You shower the world
with Your Self
generously Self-giving
extravagantly giving away
what it means to be God
Ssshhh
my heart
be still
silent
listen
Your lover appears
comes
woos
quietly, relentless
to bring you home
to shepherd you on
to give you back
your self.
Week 6 – September 30, 2015
© Jerry Webber
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Ask Me
William Stafford
Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.
I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.
[William Stafford, The Way It Is: New & Selected Poems, (St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1998),
56.]
Worth Remembering
“The soul is the patient part of us.” (James Hillman)
“Waiting patiently in expectation is the foundation of the spiritual life.” (Simone Weil)
“The shell must be cracked apart if what is in it is to come out, for it you want the kernel, you must
break the shell.” (Meister Eckhart)
“Conversion is a continuous and lifelong process. Conversions proceed layer by layer, relationship
by relationship, here a little, there a little – until the whole personality, intellect, feeling, and will
have been recreated by God.” (John Westerhoff)
“When order crumbles, mystery rises.” (John Shea)
A Practical Unfolding of the Spiritual Journey
Last week we introduced material on faith development, or the movement of the spiritual
journey, or the unfolding of the spiritual life as it seems to take place from a sociological
perspective. We talked about the first three movements in this model, before running out of time.
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© Jerry Webber
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Today we’ll briefly review the first movements, and then continue through the final four
movements.
1. Beginnings: Conscious Openings. God dwells within every human being, as the core or the
center of who we are. The image of God, the God-seed, the immortal diamond . . . however
you would like to think of this Presence with us . . . this is the stage where we become
aware that we embody God in the world . . . either as an evangelical “conversion”
experience or a much quieter, dawning awareness that God dwells within.
2. Gathering and Belonging. This is a stage of learning, gathering knowledge through study
and association with other persons. Often this learning comes from a gifted or charismatic
teacher to whom one is attracted. And this gathering of knowledge comes in the company
of other persons; thus, a natural affinity to particular identity groups is formed: “These are
MY people!” In this stage, it feels good to learn and belong. It feels good to have solid
answers to our questions about life. We don’t question those answers, we simply adopt
them as the way it is. And it is comforting to hold those answers in the company of others
who believe as we do. While we are not particularly reflective or critical in our learning, we
do absorb much material. Sometimes we mistake going to a new study or gatherings new
information for growth in this stage. While we may expand our knowing or our learning,
we are not actually going deeper; rather, we are simply learning new things at the same
stage of development.
3. Serving, Leading, and Giving. Those who persevere stage 2 may at some point be invited
into a role of leadership . . . teaching, heading the committee, leading the service project or
mission trip. This stage is about doing, producing, and activity. Basically, at this stage a
person is being asked to give away to others what they have been given in stage 2. Those
who give and serve at this level can get stuck for a very long time. Most of the Western
Church has lifted this stage up as the pinnacle of the Christian life, and has not
acknowledged anything of the spiritual life beyond the giving, serving, and leading of stage
3. Those who get stuck here often burn out in this stage. Their lives are so continuously in
“giving-mode” that they have no source of internal renewal and replenishment. They give
until they have nothing left to give, then they may drop out . . . or leave for another
church, where they can slide back into a stage 2 role.
The Wall. The Wall is some kind of life-event – often a crisis or major challenge – that puts
us in a place beyond the resources we’ve gathered to this point on our journey. The Wall
cannot be dealt with by the resources we’ve gathered in stages 1, 2, and 3.
When folks hit a wall, almost always they default to working harder, to exerting more
energy. But hyper-busyness does not negotiate the wall. In fact, people experience much
stress as they find that their usual resources no longer work; thus, they feel that they have
“lost God” or “lost their faith” or “lost their ability to pray.” Old certainties disappear. The
values and beliefs that we thought were trustworthy no longer work. At the Wall, we are
invited to let go of our old certainties – the things we were told are true – in order to find
who WE truly are and what WE truly believe, apart from what others tell us we should
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believe. So the Wall invites an inner journey, a journey that asks more questions, a journey
in which new forms of prayer take shape within a person, a journey toward wholeness that
would not have come apart from the difficulties of the Wall.
In fact, our excessive busy-ness at the wall is often a diversion, a distraction, from the much
more subtle invitations in the wall to slow down, to be still, to pay attention, to give
ourselves to what Alan Jones calls “the still journey.”
Poor Alice in Through the Looking Glass has to run furiously in order to stay in the
same place. We, on the other hand, have to learn to stand still in order to continue
our journey. We must stand still. . . . The more we run around, the more we lose
touch with ourselves, the less of us there is. . . . The still journey of the soul takes
forever. 1
It may be more helpful to think of this experience not so much as a Wall, but as a liminal
space, that is, a threshold experience that invites us into a new stance toward life, new
ways of being with God, self, others, and the world, and new ways of doing our work in the
world. A threshold suggests transition. While the image of a “wall” may be helpful for
thinking of a challenge that we face, the experience may be more like a threshold
experience in which we transition to another season or way of being.
You may think of this movement using Carl Jung’s stages of life. Jung believed there were
two major seasons of life: The first half of life he called the “morning,” in which the person
establishes his or her identity in the world, builds a world of relationships, and finds her
orientation in the world by developing the ego. (In the framework we are describing,
Jung’s morning of the soul would represent stages 1, 2, and 3.)
The second half, or what Jung called the “afternoon,” is for accessing the interior life by
developing the True Self, what we are describing in this model as stages 4, 5, and 6.
The transition from morning (1, 2, 3) to afternoon (4, 5, 6) comes through what Jung
described as a mid-life crisis (a Wall or threshold experience). He believed that “every
midlife crisis is a spiritual crisis, that we are called to die to the old self (ego), the fruit of
the first half of life and liberate the new man or woman within us.”
Wholly unprepared, they embark upon the second half of life. Or are there perhaps
colleges for forty-year-olds which prepare them for their coming life and its
demands as the ordinary colleges introduce our young people to a knowledge of
the world and of life? No, there are none. Thoroughly unprepared we take the step
into the afternoon of life; worse still, we take this step with the false presupposition
that our truths and ideas will serve as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of
life according to the programme of life’s morning – for what was great in the
1Alan
Jones, Journey into Christ (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1977), 52; quoted in Sue Monk Kidd,
When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life’s Sacred Questions (New York:HarperSanFrancisco, 1990), 33.
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morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening
have become a lie.2
The transition from morning (1, 2, 3) to afternoon (4, 5, 6) is difficult because it involves a
deconstruction, dismantling, or breakdown of our old spiritual and psychological
structures, the masks and personas that have been woven so deeply into us that we have
not realized they existed. Walls and midlife crises, thresholds and spiritual crises, provide
the opportunities to enter the next season of the soul with a deepening awareness of who
we are and of our place in the world.
4. Moving toward God and Self: The Inward Journey. The experience of the wall invites us to
cultivate spiritual practices that we haven’t needed to this point in the spiritual journey.
Thusfar, the journey has been about learning and knowing, belonging and following,
leading and serving. We can do most all of those things without ever making an journey
inward. Now, facing a challenge that cannot be overcome by the skills and tools we have
gathered to ourselves at previous stages on the journey, we must find other more subtle,
more interior resources . . . resources like silence and reflection, solitude and meditation,
contemplation and open listening. We find ourselves asking more questions and less
satisfied with easy, pat answers. At this stage of the spiritual journey, it is almost
imperative that a person have some kind of spiritual guide, spiritual director, or soul-friend
who has made this part of the journey for themselves, and has experience with the sense
of darkness, cloud, and unknowing that are part of this experience. This soul-friend is also
one who is able to remind us that all the resources we need for accessing God and
navigating through these thresholds are already present within us. We don’t need more of
this or more of that. We simply have to access those aspects of our soul-connection with
God that to this point have gone untended and have lain dormant within us.
5. Moving toward Others and the World: The Outward Journey. The inner journey is never
undertaken for its own sake alone. Some persons, no doubt, are tempted to stall out on
the interior journey, seeking their own healing and growth in self-awareness. But the
inward journey is always in the service of an outward journey. We move back out into the
world of relationships, people, and issues, but with a new grounding, having touched the
center – the inner journey of stage 4 – so that we engage the world now from a new
stance. Stage 5 is different from stage 3, where we served and led in the world, but from
personal motives and for our own gain. In stage 5, we are more aware of our own ego, and
our service is less egocentric. In other words, we are serving and giving our lives for others,
not so we can gain or profit from the service somehow, but because this is how we want to
offer ourselves in the world . . . this is who we are . . . this is our calling, the expression of
our vocation – literally, “voice” – in the world. So when we serve in this stage, we do not
seek recognition for our service. We do not want to be rewarded for it. In fact, most often,
we offer it anonymously, simply because it represents who we are and what we are called
to do in the world. In stage 5, persons often contemplate a change in jobs. Or if they don’t
2C.
G. Jung, “Stages of Life,” quoted in Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits: Spiritual Direction for Life’s
Sacred Questions (New York:HarperSanFrancisco, 1990), 9.
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© Jerry Webber
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actually change “paycheck” jobs, they spend their leisure time in very different ways than
previously. Sometimes, formal retirement from the work-force presents an opportunity to
give time, energy, and resources more intentionally to the causes and situations that stir
one to service.
6. The Life of Love. The culmination of this life is simply a life of love, a life which is
thoroughly saturated with love for God, self, others, and the created world. Most of us will
touch this life of love periodically, but wanting to capture the moment and hold onto it, will
lose it. This is not a moment-by-moment “what-would-Jesus-do” kind of deciding how to
act or what to do. Rather, it is a life which IS love. Love, mercy, compassion, and generosity
become the natural outpouring of this life. We are not willing ourselves to love. We ARE
love.
Moving on from the Struggle: Jacob’s Story
Genesis 32:22 – 32 (CEV)
22-23
Jacob got up in the middle of the night and took his wives, his eleven children, and
everything he owned across to the other side of the Jabbok River for safety. 24 Afterwards,
Jacob went back and spent the rest of the night alone.
A man came and fought with Jacob until just before daybreak. 25 When the man saw that he
could not win, he struck Jacob on the hip and threw it out of joint. 26 They kept on wrestling
until the man said, “Let go of me! It’s almost daylight.”
“You can’t go until you bless me,” Jacob replied.
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Then the man asked, “What is your name?”
“Jacob,” he answered.
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The man said, “Your name will no longer be Jacob. You have wrestled with God and with
men, and you have won. That’s why your name will be Israel.”
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Jacob said, “Now tell me your name.”
“Don’t you know who I am?” he asked. And he blessed Jacob.
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Jacob said, “I have seen God face to face, and I am still alive.” So he named the place Peniel
[Face of God]. 31 The sun was coming up as Jacob was leaving Peniel. He was limping because
he had been struck on the hip, 32 and the muscle on his hip joint had been injured. That’s why
even today the people of Israel don’t eat the hip muscle of any animal.
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© Jerry Webber
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Jacob’s entire life and existence has been given to stealth and deception. At birth, emerging from
the womb holding his twin brother Esau’s heel, he was given the name “Jacob,” which means
“the one who deceives.”
Years later, he bought a hungry Esau’s “older-brother-birthright” in exchange for a bowl of stew.
And on the deathbed of his father, he fooled weak-eyed Isaac into giving him Esau’s blessing.
Jacob literally lived out his life as a deceiver. He spent most of his days on the run from trouble. In
Genesis 32, Jacob is preparing to meet his brother, with no guarantees of how that encounter will
go. Jacob years back had stolen from Esau that which was most precious to any Hebrew young
man. Jacob had every right to expect conflict and struggle.
What happens in Genesis 32:22 – 32 stands in the context of this one who is a liar and cheat, who is
suspicious and nervous of what lies ahead. It happens in darkness. It happens when Jacob is
alone. It takes place at the threshold of a major event in his life.
What breaks out is a fight, a struggle, a wrestling match, a two-person brawl.
Usually, preaching or teaching on this passage spends time on the identity of the unknown
stranger who fights Jacob in the darkness. Is it God? . . . an angel? . . . a demon? . . . Esau?
I’m wondering if those questions are diversions and distractions from the real issues at stake here.
I’m saying that perhaps it really doesn’t matter who this opposing stranger is, this fighter opposite
Jacob . . . whether identified as God, angel, man, demon, or a robber. In the Hebrew narrative, the
actual identity is not highlighted, as the reader is not told the identity of this dark stranger. It is as
if the story says to us, the identity of Jacob’s opponent is not nearly as important as the fight
itself, the struggle itself. The wrestling match is the thing, the fact that Jacob is engaged in
struggle that will change him so much that afterwards his name will be changed.
And more, it is not so important who you and I believe this fighter is; rather, it is vitally important
who Jacob believes he/she is. Whatever the actual identity of the fighter, Jacob connects the
struggle with God. Jacob recognizes that God is present in the difficulty. It is as if the struggle
itself asks him, “Don’t you know who I am?” to which Jacob responds, “I have seen God face to
face and I’m still alive.” He names the place, Peni-el, which means “the Face of God.” He asks for,
and receives, God’s blessing. God has been present in this struggle.
In the process of the fight, Jacob is wounded. The wound is a mark of the encounter, a sign that
he will be forever different because of this fight or struggle. You might think of it as a kind of
“soul-mark,” a “memorial-wound” that would remind him of this struggle until his days ended.
The final scene of the story takes place at daybreak. Darkness is over. The light of awakening and
illumination is dawning. But Jacob – whose name is no longer Deceiver, but now is Israel, that is,
“one who wrestles with God” – walks into the sunset with a limp. He hobbles into his future with
this limp, but as a changed, unfolding person.
Week 6 – September 30, 2015
© Jerry Webber
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The Man Watching
Rainer Maria Rilke
I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can’t bear without a friend,
I can’t love without a sister.
The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.
What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.
When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler’s sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.
Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.3
3Selected
Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. by Robert Bly (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1981),
105 – 107.
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If the choice were ours, Rilke says, we would spend a lifetime fighting tiny things, things over
which we could easily prevail . . . a lifetime of small victories that would confirm our strength and
not cause undue stress.
But the things, persons, and events that shape us – the way “storms” shape the landscape – are
“great” and “immense” and “extraordinary” and “eternal” . . . and they will not be bent by us.
Rilke says that winning the struggle does not matter. “Winning does not tempt that person.” In
other words, there is nothing for the ego in winning except a larger, stronger, more settled and
defended ego.
In the landscape of unfolding, where our lives connected to God make a difference in the world,
what matters is not winning, but engaging the struggle. The fight itself kneads us “as if to change
our shape.”
And in the end, our lives unfold in surrender, in losing, in letting go: “by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.”
An Unfolding Life in Meditation I: John 3:16 and Meister Eckhart
John 3:16
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in
him shall not perish but have eternal life.
Meister Eckhart
I have often said
that God is creating the entire universe
fully and totally
in this present now.
Everything God created six-thousand years ago – and even
previous to that – as he made the world,
God creates now all at once.
Now consider this: God is in everything, but
God is nowhere as much as he is in the soul.
There,
where time never enters,
where no image shines in,
in the innermost and deepest aspect of the soul
God creates the whole cosmos.
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Everything which God created millions of years ago
and everything
which will be created by God after millions of years –
if the world endures until then –
God is creating all that in the innermost and deepest realms
of the soul.
Everything of the past
and everything of the present
and everything of the future
God creates
in the innermost realms of the soul.4
An Unfolding Life in Meditation II: Prayer with Thomas Merton
My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of
me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself,
and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am
actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please You does, in fact, please
You. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never
do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this You will lead me
by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust You
always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear,
for You are ever with me, and You will never leave me to face my perils alone.5
4Meditations
with Meister Eckhart, versions by Matthew Fox, O. P. (Rochester, VT: Bear & Company,
1983), 24 – 25.
5Thomas
Merton, Thoughts in Solitude (New York: Farrar, Staus and Giroux, 1956, 1958), 79.
Week 6 – September 30, 2015
© Jerry Webber