Breathing Exercises

When Mary said yes to bearing Jesus into the world, she said yes to considerable pain and risk. Who knows how well she comprehended the risks — to her reputation, her relationships, her family — when she heard the invitation to become pregnant by God and submitted her will to the divine. But no matter how prepared she was in the beginning, it must’ve been a little upsetting to hear the words of Simeon 10 months later, who upon seeing the infant Jesus, spoke a prophecy about the turmoil he’d bring to Israel, and then added this: “… a sword will pierce your soul also.” Ouch.

When this project was just a gleam in our eyes, we spent considerable time asking God to speak to us and to our friends before we took any steps forward. Some of the ‘answers’ we heard/saw/perceived were directly related to the choices we were making then, and some were more obscure. But we wrote everything down, and have now begun to work our way back through the list, in order to take seriously the things that came when we chose to ask, seek, knock.

One of the things we recorded was a picture that a praying friend saw in her mind’s eye: a pincushion with pins part-way in, stopped at some hard barrier. The person who saw this, also saw a thumb ready to push and heard a voice say, “They need to go all the way in!” and then heard, “The pins are people.” There were some immediate responses to this, as we asked God to help us understand … that pins just pushed into the outer surface of a pincushion will easily fall out; but not if they are pushed all the way in … that a pincushion is a metaphor for people: our interactions often stay on the ‘soft surface’, and this is one of the reasons we easily “fall out” of each others lives … that there is a kind of hard barrier that stops us from going deep. To go past this hard barrier (with a person’s permission) is to go into the deep mystery of life, into the dark, the unanswered questions, the doubts, the fears. To pass the barrier is to become anchored, more firmly fixed, less likely to fall away when tested.

Today, we’ve been doing some spiritual listening around this word-picture, to hear more about what it means to our community. We heard more in the way of confirmation that this is a story about how we relate. “We’re the pins.” … “The cushion is like my heart: I have to choose to let you in, even knowing it will hurt at first, into the deep parts of me.” … “The hard barrier is important–at least it’s to be expected–and while it is a kind of resistance at first, it becomes necessary to the holding.”

While I was noodling on these things, and trying myself to stay open to what God wants to say, I thought it would be fun to bring it all to life with a little participatory art. I went out and bought us a pincushion and a bunch of pins. The story I shared when I brought it out at a recent gathering, was that I was going to put a pin in the thing for each choice I had made to be honest, transparent, and real with Christ and my community, because when I made those kind of choices, I was also accepting that I was going to be pierced, as it were. During a reading of the story of Simeon’s prophecy (in Luke’s chapter 2) and silent response following, there was a chance for the each of us to press a pin or two into the pincushion. One for our original choice to be in community, and another pin for any other choice to offer ourselves for this kind of ‘piercing’.

It’s risky to let people in, past our hard shells. I let myself be wounded when I choose to let you in to my heart. And that’s also the inevitable piercing that comes from bearing Jesus into the world–he’s not just some fancy pants we put on to impress the photographers. He is the original deep place that calls to our deep places. We can’t bear him into the world without having experienced him in the deep places of our heart. And we can’t very well walk the same road he walks without exposing ourselves to pain. He never shied away from the pain that comes from loving people. And he gave us a heads up: the student never has it easier than the teacher. There is one consolation: when we willingly open our hearts to the piercing, the pain of being known is our choice. That makes it bearable, and more. The pain we willingly choose is part of the way we become more like Jesus.

About two months have passed since our small group of adventurers began to meet to discover what God might do with a community in this time and place. I’ve described the feeling as like being on a ship that’s just left the harbor for the open sea … and most of us have been on land for a while … and we aren’t used to working on a ship together, let alone this ship … and it’s … choppy. So I’ve been feeling a little woozy. I’ll own that: I might be the only one. In fact, I know that I in particular have had reason to feel a bit off-balance.

A couple of weeks ago, I told my ship-mates that I was feeling a little at odds, sort of in limbo, like I’ve had one foot each in two worlds. Here’s what I began to understand. When I committed to this journey, I had a pretty strong conviction that I wanted to share leadership, to trust the community to discern direction together, to hear from God together, and to move together. But as we started out, I had some items on my agenda, if you know what I mean, and so I asked for permission to lead the first bunch of meetings. We were going to meet every other week for a season, and, even though I knew I wanted to share the planning, we easily settled into a kind of rhythm, one that anyone who’s ever been in a church group would recognize. I was planning and running the meetings. I was becoming the executive-pastor-leader-administrator-visionary etc. etc. You get the picture.

But here’s the thing: I think that might have been fine, if that’s what I’d set out to do, or if that was the thing that I had felt God nudging me towards. But it wasn’t. And so there I was, doing what I’d seen modeled, doing what I had learned, doing what is pretty normal in churches (and might be really fine and good if that’s what God and the community have chosen), but I felt no blessing. Another word for the thing I wasn’t feeling is anointing. Both these words are used in churches to describe that thing that comes from God when we are in the sweet-spot, oriented, aligned, in-sync, flowing and grooving. I wasn’t so much feeling any of these things.

I also have a feeling that it had become hard to hold on to other convictions because I was outside of that sweet spot. Thankfully, when I raised the issue during one of our gatherings, others were not so clouded and were able to speak clearly from their perspective, bringing certain commitments back into focus. The good conversation that followed led to a course correction that I am very thankful for, and that I think will save us from going way off the path later.

We’ve decided to meet every week now, alternating our weekly content between talking (about what we want, and what we are doing, and will do) and practicing (the life rhythms and liturgies that help us grow in strength and knowledge). I don’t have to bear the weight of every decision, and I don’t have to take time away from our liturgical practices. And I get to take my place as one member of the crew again: yes, one who holds a leadership role, but who nevertheless doesn’t have to do everything himself to keep the ship moving. Ahh.

So there’s this big sea out in front of us. What direction will we sail? How will we handle the big waves when they come? How long until we get to feel like we know what we’re doing … and will that be the day we get humbled by some great white whale? I’m actually excited by all these questions, and happy to be on this ship, at the edge of this sea, with these people.

I have a little rock garden out in front of my house, and I love the picture of solidity contrasted with flow that a good rock garden is. This kind of dry garden is popularly called a Zen rock garden because we learn them from Zen Buddhists, who see them as an aid to meditation, or entering into a calm reflective state (which is pretty close to a root definition of Zen). I’m not a Zen Buddhist, but I love rock gardens, in the same way I love how any work of art reflects something about nature, and ultimately, about God, who is the maker of all.

When I decided to pour a bunch of sand from the California coast into a large wooden platter and arrange some rocks inside, I was excited to search out the formal rules of arrangement. I wasn’t interested in becoming an expert, or in slavishly conforming to Zen principles, but I wanted to understand. I learned about the implied flow of water that is created by the arrangement of rocks in sand, as if they were rocks in a river. Another way of thinking about this flow is as a kind of life energy: the chinese word for this energy is ‘Chi’, which is literally translated as ‘air’ or ‘breath’. In Christianity, the source of this energy is the Spirit of God, whose primary names in Hebrew and Greek are the words for ‘wind’ or ‘breath’, and who ‘moved over the face of the waters’ in the beginning.

The first humans were brought to a special kind of life (one not shared with animals) by God’s breathing into our dusty shells. As I looked at some examples of famous rock gardens, I saw how there was an attempt to invite this flow to move in favorable directions. I don’t believe that properly arranged rocks will cause the Holy Spirit to land on a bullseye in my home or my heart, but as a piece of art that communicates my desire to make the way straight for God to wash over me, I love the visual aid of rocks arranged in this way–they help me consider the landscape of my life.

So I carefully arranged my rocks to create a picture of ‘flow’ in that little bit of theater on my porch. Very satisfying.

Recently, we’ve been having a group of people over to our house to practice Christian community. Just as with me and my little rock garden, we are in the learning stage, we’re just beginning to look at some of the ‘formal rules’, considering examples, and trying our hand at arranging the pieces. We’ve only met a few times, but I’ve been noticing that at the end of our meetings, someone has been hanging around on my porch and messing with my rock garden, and they’re totally breaking all the rules. After the first meeting, my rocks, carefully arranged in a sort of inverted triangle on smooth sand, had now been unceremoniously lined up straight across the platter, in the middle of the sand, which had been churned up by digging. Yikes! My flow has been interrupted! The following week it was changed again, the rocks no longer in a line, but spread out, and the sand marked with finger holes. Who’s bright idea was it to make rock gardens look so much like sandboxes?

Serene source of meditative calm? ... Sandbox? ... Or both?

What will I do? I could fix the rocks each week. I could hang a sign that says You Are Beginning to Damage My Calm. I could hide the rock garden in my closet and not let anyone else see it, let alone touch it. But I don’t want to do that, not even remotely. I think I like that the rock garden is more like a sandbox than a precious work of art. And anyway, it’s just a rock garden and it’s not like someone is rearranging the pictures on my bedroom walls after using the bathroom.

Here’s what I know: when we invite people over to our home and into our lives, things don’t stay neatly arranged. I can’t hope to maintain the arrangement of the rocks, or the chairs, and certainly not the social landscape of all the members of my family or my community. We are making a place where it’s safe to say what we think, and it’s not always going to be clean or well ordered. If I wanted to keep my garden neat, I would have to stop inviting people over, or hide my garden. If I do invite people over, house rules will be broken and sand will be spilled. But the life of community, when we make room for it, is like the rock garden: an ever-shifting picture of the move of the spirit within the person who currently has their fingers in the sand. It’s not always going to follow the rules, but there will be beauty.

Back in January, I put up a post called Mystery, which encoded a short piece of text in a QR code. A QR code is a two-dimensional black and white image that can encode text (vs bar codes which only encode numbers). I gave no explanation for it, just put it out there, wanting to see how much people would work to understand something that was not immediately obvious. Here’s the code again:

If you scan the full-size version of this with a QR reader (apps are available for smart phones, and decoders are available online), the following text would appear:

“Jesus often left things unexplained, yet invites us to pursue understanding. Why would he conceal truth behind cryptic statements? A better question: ‘how hungry are we for the truth?’“

One of the proverbs says “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter,  but the glory of kings is to search out a matter” (25.2). There’s an interesting tension in this text. God, who could be understood to hold answers to the great questions of our lives, somehow includes mystery as an aspect of divine glory. God ‘conceals matters’, and that’s apparently one of the great things about God? That feels like a kind of a bummer … but there is some hope in the second half of the text. Somehow human glory (like the best qualities of the best king) is to not be satisfied with mystery, but to go knocking, asking, seeking. We are meant to go after God. We can see God welcoming this kind of trouble throughout scripture. Consider how the epic troublemaker Jacob was allowed to best God in a wrestling match, while demanding a blessing.

The reason why I hid my text in a code was that I wanted to make the point that if I ever say or do things that are incomprehensible, I would want people to come after me … to try and understand (vs. settling for not understanding). I have spent enough time working with people to know that we generally do not try to understand. For example, if a person does something we don’t like, we write them off as the kind of Person That Does Things We Don’t Like … instead of asking them why they make the choices they do.

I’m for a community contract that says we don’t ever leave a mystery unexplored. Especially when the mystery is a person.

Jesus said, “The kingdom of God is like a man who casts seed upon the soil; and he goes to bed at night and gets up by day, and the seed sprouts and grows–how, he himself does not know. The soil produces crops by itself …”. (Mark chapter 4)

Something about the growth of the divine community is a mystery. It’s like this: a seed, dead and buried in the dirt, yields a flower. The farmer doesn’t know how that happens (doesn’t need to know), but the soil knows.

The kingdom is like that. A mother doesn’t know how the child grows in her (nor does she need to know), but she’s made for it nonetheless. The soil knows how the flower grows.

The community of God, the kingdom, the place where God’s grace is active, grows in strength and effectiveness in this way. We get up early, throw seed, pull weeds, go to sleep tired … and in the end we trust the soil to know.

The church is growing.

woodcut by Spyros Vassiliou, c. 1945

One of the very interesting things to me about Christian communities is that they are in some way meant to be a priesthood. Strange, when we’re used to thinking of priests as a specialized class of people, set apart for special duty within the church. It’s true, there will always be people set apart for certain tasks in any community, but some of the most important duties are meant to be shared by all. Priesthood is like that.

When a person comes to recognize that they belong in some way to God, they take on a new relationship with things. This can include changed perspectives, changed attitudes, and changed responsibilities. For the person in God’s camp, each of these things add up to the qualities of a priest: they now see with God’s eyes (the perspective of a priest), they love with a God-like love (the attitude of a priest), and they are sent to help people encounter God in a fresh way (the responsibility of a priest). Going back to some of the earliest stories in the bible, the whole collection of people that made up the people of God were somehow understood to be in priestly service to the rest of the world (you can read about how God gave them the job in Exodus 19).

This is a different way of thinking about priesthood: it is not a special class of people serving only the people within a special community, ie, church. It’s every member of a community (therefore the community as a whole) serving everyone else. The priestly burden is to be shared. ‘Priest’ does not mean solitary leader or ruler or gifted teacher. It means mediator of God’s perspectives, attitudes, and responses. Another way of thinking about it is that priests stand for God. And you can’t reserve that for a special class of people. Our God has taken a stand for each and every man, woman and child. And if God stands for each of us, then each of us can stand for God.

But how do we think about priests today? As an anachronism? As one third of a good joke? (Or, all of a bad joke?) Could the priesthood ever again be understood to be mediating the power and grace of a living God? Priests are pretty far from what you’d call popular: they’re no rock stars, who seem to be able to pull off bad behavior with no risk to their reputations.

I think I’ll be returning to this question of what a priest is more than once. Today I’ll leave as my first offering to the discussion a remarkable woodcut made by my wife’s grandfather, an artist who lived in the middle of the last century. He was an Orthodox Greek, and so the measure of his faith is somewhat obscure (which is always the result when religion is so intertwined with a culture). His work suggests that he thought deeper about the faith than most: he painted the interiors of a few important orthodox churches in Athens, which, if you know anything about orthodox churches, is a little bit like translating the entire bible and a good portion of sacred history into pictures.

by Spyros Vassiliou, c. 1944 (click to enlarge)

In this woodcut (about which I’ve written before), a priest is doing battle of a kind that most people wouldn’t understand today: his weapon is prayer, and he brings it to bear on a group of devils attacking a ship, which is in danger of sinking under their influence. This priest has got something going on that I don’t think I’ve ever seen in any other depiction of a priest: power, courage, guts, and an uncharacteristically kick-ass attitude. He’s come to play. I love it. The theological term for what you see in this portrait is not ass-kicking, begging your pardon, but intercession,  which means going to battle (usually in a spiritual mode) for the sake of another who needs your help. It’s not rock and roll, but if you’re on the sinking ship, it totally rocks.

This is a part of what it means to be a priest, which is a job-title that can be applied to anybody living life in the way of Jesus. A priest is a spiritual fighter, ready to get in the way of trouble, to intercede for the weary and the weak and the innocent, whenever and wherever they are at risk of being overcome. Often this is a spiritual exercise, accomplished in prayer. But not always.

I know that as a word, “priest”, hasn’t got a lot of street cred today, and I don’t know how to restore it except by making new histories. Looking at that portrait, painted almost 70 years ago, I get excited about the job. I can’t help it.

(Extra Credit: while nobody would mistake the priest in the woodcut for a rock star, there’s something going on there that even a rock star can recognize. The woodcut was used last year for the cover of Picture Atlantic’s awesome EP, Dulce Et Decorum Est.)

While hanging out with the gang last night, Person To My Left says, “I used to think I was a _____ -ist, but I’ve been reading the writings of _____, and now I think I’m a _____ -ist”, and went on to describe a little of what that meant, all of which was a bit-too-steep of an onramp to an unfamiliar way of thinking, which is why I can’t remember how to fill in the blanks above. But I was interested, so I made sure we would be able to hear a longer-than-2-minute story about what it means to be a _____ -ist. Then, the Person To My Right says, “I’m pretty sure I’m a _____ -ist“, which was different than the first -ism, regarding which you will just have to trust me, because I can’t remember what the second -ism was either. Into all of this I interjected, because I am a humor-ist, “Hey, our first split!”, by which I meant our first sch-ism. Ha. But Person To My Right, rightly, said what I believe anyway, which is, no, it’s got to be allright for us to have different ists and isms if we’re going to be in community. Yes, amen.

Homogeneity is unsustainable except in isolation. If I wanted to hang out only with people who saw the world just like I do, then I’d have to give up my dream of being a part of a functional community that could legitimately claim the name of Jesus Christ, who invites all kinds to come and empowers all kinds for the work. A homogeneous community can only grow by working to eliminate contrary perspectives, or by fracturing repeatedly. Of course there are ways that communities align naturally along certain lines, and a community that gathers around the life and leading of Jesus will necessarily come to be aligned in many ways, and choose certain important boundary lines.

But the way that people gather around Jesus has always been unique in the world: the idea is that we people are like parts of a body … hands, legs, ears, eyes, and we become powerful and functional only when we come together – like the way my hands are so much more useful connected to my eyes and feet, to pick a couple helpful others. Our place in the Body of Christ, is as parts which cannot survive alone and which are not very productive when in isolation. In this spiritual body, Jesus holds the honor of being the head and as such is the source from which we take life and leading. But while we have this relationship to the head in common, it’s good that we all have really different ways of engaging the world and different purposes in the body. This may seem a simple truth, but in fact it’s very difficult in practice. What holds the dipsarate parts together? Further, what gets them to work together? How do we learn to accept that people with whom we live might have an entirely different way of seeing and speaking into the world? Instead of seeing different as complimentary, we see it as a rebuke against what we are, and we fight.

I’m counting on the fact that the head has the key to alignment, and I can be somewhat ignorant of how it all works together. I figure one thing I can do is regard the other people in my community with the honor due to someone who is learning how to be loved and led by God. This is part of my current three-way attentiveness model (which I just realized I have): attentiveness to the head, attentive to others-in-my-community, and attentiveness to the surrounding world. Each of these could describe any healthy part of my physical body, and also my whole self, inasmuch as I am a part of the body of Christ.

In recent years I have come to appreciate (and depend on) the complimentary and sometimes contrasting perspectives of friends. If it weren’t for them I’d be more cozy in my perspective but less functional in the world. I am both wary of and excited about the twin facts that as the number of people in my community grows, there will be more complexity and, along with that, there will be more functionality.

Who’s in the room when people gather? Specifically, who’s present when a community gathers in Jesus’ name?

1. A bunch of individuals, each with their own histories, hopes, dreams, and each also uniquely inspired by God

2. A community of people (a different entity than the individuals); that is, a body, directed in some mysterious way by Jesus Christ (who is called the Head of the Body), composed of people, and having the potential to hear, speak, and act as one.

3. The Spirit of God, present to awaken us to the immediately pertinent details of the divine perspective, and to speak through and to us on behalf of the Father and Son.

If these thing seem obvious (because it sounds familiar, because you’ve been to church), ask yourself, “How does this actually work?”. Who are we actually paying attention to in a worship gathering, most of the time? If we learn anything from our school experiences, if we learn anything from the architecture of church, we tend to focus our attention on the people in the front of the room — who tend to be the expert and the talented. This is, at least, normal.

How, in contrast to this, could we honor the above realities? I dream of each of these things being true in a way that sends a shiver down your spine. Really. That we leave each other’s company having really experienced one another as inspired, gifted, people (not just talked about it), having grown in awareness of the mysterious body which is being formed and guided by Christ (not just described it), and having experienced the real presence of the Holy Spirit (not just prayed and asked for things). If just saying something aloud doesn’t necessarily make it real for us, how will we engage in these realities so that every-one is aware of every other one in the room?