Just As the Twig Is Bent, the Tree's Inclined; Or, the Value of Discipline

I don’t know it for a fact, but I’m reasonably sure that discipline is not a topic that generally appeals to people these days. Of course there are exceptions. Many of us value the discipline of learning a skill or an art, the discipline of running, or the discipline of regular yoga or gym visits.  Discipline generally doesn’t seem to be a bad idea if it is a way to manage ourselves the way we wish to be managed.  But if even for a moment discipline suggests something that somebody else is meting out, a punishment or corrective of some sort, well who does like that? 

And right off the bat that is a stumbling block for talking about something that in most contexts poses a problem but is integral to a truly spiritual life.  Such is discipline.  

Martin Luther

We are in that time when every third year we get a crack at reading the Letter of James.  Luther despised the Epistle of James, calling it an epistle made of straw.  Luther was on the wavelength of St. Paul, especially when it came to being saved by grace through faith.  He didn’t have any patience with James’s emphasis on works.  Frankly, I think that although James has only a few pages of the New Testament to his credit and Paul more than half of it, James actually won out as the major force in Christianity, which is almost always far more enchanted with works, behavior, practical approaches to everyday problems than with more abstract ideas such as “walking by the Spirit” or “putting on Christ through baptism.” 

I like Paul well enough, indeed very much.  But James serves us well by pointing to the actual practice of Christianity.  He writes in some depth about the human tongue, one of the more powerful and dangerous members of the body.  James gets a bit carried away writing about the tongue.  One wonders just what experience he had had with the tongue, his own or somebody else’s.  Chances are he had been the victim of some gossip line, or had seen others sliced to pieces by snarky so-called friends.  Compared to wild animals the tongue is more powerful than them all:  “no one can tame the tongue—a restless evil, full of deadly poison.”  Whoa!  Strong stuff there, James.  He immediately softens just for a split second to remind us that with our tongues we bless the Lord God.  Then he rapidly reminds us that we stick our tongues out and curse those made in the likeness of God. 

I seriously doubt that anyone would find that a difficult passage to accept as factual.  If you have made it as far as kindergarten, you have probably encountered some experiences that document what James is arguing.  But the issue is not so much what to do about the tongue as a weapon as it is to look at the larger picture of what a disciplined life really looks like.   James goes on to say much of what Paul says in his famous chapter on Love, or Charity, 1 Corinthians 13.  The way of Christ is the way of love, the way of humility, service, sacrifice, and deference.  James, like Paul, understands that, whatever social context in which we live, that society frequently rewards the opposite of those things.  Neither one, James nor Paul, was an American, but they might well have been talking about American culture in the 21^st century.  Because in the grand scheme of things, this culture, whose tentacles now reach into every part of the globe, in many ways prizes competition over common endeavor, acquisitiveness over sharing, productivity over idleness, activity above passivity, assertiveness over dependence, self-protection over vulnerability.  In many of those ways we are no different from the society to which the New Testament writers addressed their letters.  Although there are many things to which we can point that paint a very different picture, at the end of the day the world is still driven by the forces that amass power rather than by those that give it away. 

You know all that.  It is impossible to be alive and awake in this world without knowing it.  Some of you indeed know it better than I. Those who crow about empowerment have little regard for the virtues and ideals of submission and passivity, both of which are integral to discipline.  Their skepticism is understandable.  It is unfortunately true that the powerless have often been given a big dose of praise by the powerful for kowtowing to the very forces that oppress them. 

The reason that I go into that much detail about what I think James is driving at, namely the way to live in accordance with the example of Christ, is that it is absolutely necessary to see that the disciple who follows Christ cannot do so without discipline.  Furthermore that discipline is for the most part counter-cultural.  If, for example, following Christ—which is another name for the deepest part of your soul, for the God that is is the God that lives in your very flesh—if following Christ entails cutting your ties with family, with friends, with peer groups and communities in order to be yourself and to do what you know you must do, don’t expect that all of those folk will stand up and applaud you.  They will do everything in their power to pull you back into the old familiar orbit.  Less dramatically by a hair, if you embark on a lifestyle that differs from the mainstream of your community, say, for example, by giving up a lucrative career in order to advocate for people who are political liabilities, you won’t necessarily get support and congratulations from your best high school buddy. 

And that brings us to the heart of the matter. It is called the gospel.  Listen to the fierce, daunting words of Jesus: “If any want to become my followers let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.  For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lost their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.”  Disciples are those who follow Jesus, not those who merely worship Jesus.  To follow Jesus means precisely that.  And the stakes are pretty high.

In their amazing book, The Last Week, the late Marcus Borg and John Dominick Crossan trace the last seven days in Jesus’ life, arguing that what got Jesus crucified was his insistent advocacy for those oppressed by the collusion of the religious establishment with political power.  He was not despised and rejected by the common people, who heard him gladly.  He was despised and rejected by the powers that gripped the defenseless and toyed with the vulnerable ensuring that they were miserable.  That sounds harsh, but not nearly so harsh as the experience of being outcast, cut off, discounted, shunned, and shamed.  It was to those on the margins of health, wholeness, sanity, economic stability, and morality that Jesus reached the farthest and the most persistently.  Following him means doing as he did and going the way he went.  You are awfully lucky if you do all that and don’t lose some skin doing it. 

Let me speak plainly.  Because we are human beings, even at our most idealistic, we imagine that what Jesus is talking about or what Frank is driving at is actually what we already are doing.  If we are progressive, liberal, justice-driven Christians then what else is there to do but what we are doing?  If I were preaching today in some very different context, let’s say at a posh Episcopal church somewhere in suburban Alabama, I might rephrase that, saying something like, “if we are upstanding, respectable, morally conservative, responsibility-driven Christians then what else is there to do but what we are doing?”  Do you see my point?  I am convinced that the telltale sign of stale faith is self-satisfaction with who and what we are, to the point that we overlook the necessity of undergoing disciplines that transform us into true disciples.

Disciplines and practices abound. I actually have a list that I sometimes give to individuals and groups that I work with on which appear about thirty distinct practices that support a spiritually rich life.  Not all of them suit everyone, of course, and the list itself is partial.  Which ones fit us?  Which ones challenge us? I invite you to consider three.

I have found that a basic discipline for me, and I suggest you might try it, is making a daily intention, saying it out loud, perhaps even writing it down.  Keep it simple.  It might be the same thing for days at a time or perhaps for even longer.  I learned from a British woman who has lived for a long time in Mozambique that her neighbors in that African country habitually do one thing per day.  One thing!  We by contrast have our to-do lists and our reminders.  Well, not many of us are called to drop what we are doing and move to Mozambique, but we can take a hint from that practice.  Aim to put all your energy into one central intention.  And stick with it.

Another key discipline is to be courageous in examining ourselves by the standard of love that we see in Jesus.  This means building into regular observance a daily regimen of self-examination.  The idea is not to beat ourselves up about falling short but to discipline ourselves to be as honest as we can be about our motives and our behavior, not excusing or lauding ourselves, but being accountable for our attitudes and decisions.  Meditate, journal, reflect with a friend or partner, pray St. Ignatius’ examen, or review your baptismal covenant.  Any of those things can support the discipline of self-examination.

And a third one is, you guessed it, taking a cue from St. James and bridling the tongue. The nubbin that I want to say about tongue-taming is that the tongue actually takes its orders from the mind.  What we say, whether good or evil, originates not in the conscious mind but in the pre-conscious or subconscious mind.  There isn’t a lot we can do about managing what we aren’t conscious of, but we do have the option of feeding our inner lives with quality soul food.  To be honest, the biggest challenge for me right now is to wake up and do something besides look at my phone.  Why?  Because I can’t pick it up to see whose birthday it is on Facebook without running into a piece of news about some tweet that sends me into orbit. I cannot be centered, balanced, and focused on love if I spend much of the day hating Donald Trump and lambasting him to myself silently or to others with the full force of tongue.  I spent last week in a Zen center in New Mexico, during which time I was for the most part totally unplugged from twitters and posts.  Instead I was breathing, embracing others, listening, learning, and paying attention to my body. Breathing, yoga, and some other physical disciplines are working for me pretty well, much as did running daily for twenty-five or so years.  What works or might work  for you? 

Luther might find all this far too mundane, too “works-oriented” for his taste, and that’s just fine with me.  I love the speculative, intellectually reflective life, but there is a place where the rubber must hit the road if we are to go anywhere at all.  For years I wondered what on earth Jesus meant when he said that if I saved my life I would lose it.  I have finally come to see what he means, or at least I think so.  To follow him as his disciple is to live the way he lived, to love the way he loved, to confront others the way he confronted them, to risk everything including life itself in order to find the deepest part of yourself, the blueprint of your soul.  It is to live the life you are created to live.  Discipline is not for squelching yourself but for training yourself to be fully you.  Or, as Jesus put it, to lose your life in order to find it. 

A sermon for Proper 19 Year B on the texts James 3:1-12 and Mark 8:28-38.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2018

 

           

I'm Gonna Make You

Commandments. Many people associate religion with commandments. Even people who don’t consider themselves at all religious generally know what you’re talking about when you say, “The Ten Commandments.” (If you ask what those commandments are, don’t be surprised if almost no one can tell you anything much past “Thou shalt not murder” and “Thou shalt not commit adultery.”)

Commandments: non-negotiable demands laid upon a person by somebody else. Commandments are frequently quite useful precisely because they are clear. Their usefulness may be more to the person who is commanding than to the one commanded. 

But anybody who has had much experience with relationships, such as parenting for example, learns pretty soon that commandments can be about as problematic as they can be helpful. There is something built into the human psyche that isn’t easy with commandments. They engender guilt, fear, and nearly always the specter of alienating someone if the commandment is not observed.  They also have a way of kicking up resistance in lots of people. We are long past the day when people just accepted commandments lying down. Try to force your will on someone and you may get it, but quite likely not without a price, perhaps a very steep one.

So to operate as if religion—what is supposed to give life coherence and purpose—is fundamentally about keeping commandments is not unlike trying to keep a person always at the stage of the toddler in her “terrible two’s.” It might work for a short while, but it won’t build a lasting, realistic relationship. There has to be another way. And, in short, the way of relationship is the way of love.  Love, in order to be love, involves respect. In St. Paul’s famous words, “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.” And that is just for starts.

"The Washing of Feet," Ghislane Howard, b. 1953

Now we are back at Maundy Thursday, the day we call “Maundy” because on it Jesus gave a new commandment. That commandment was “that you love one another as I have loved you.” And what a surprise! At last a commandment not about what you have to do in order to be acceptable to an external authority, but about how we can actually embody and practice the essence of the command-giver in ourselves and in community with others. You’ll notice that “love” by its very nature suggests relationship. The most basic form of love is the love I have for myself. And even there in my personal experience is the essential pair:  the lover and the beloved. There is an “I” and there is a “self.” And “I” can decide to love my “self.” Indeed one of the exercises I sometimes give to clients who have a hard time with really loving themselves is to spend some time in front of a full length mirror beholding themselves naked, looking at every part of their bodies and appreciating them without criticizing. It doesn’t mean that they can’t decide to change this or that if it’s possible. But truly loving ourselves is exercising those things like patience and kindness towards ourselves without being incessantly critical or judgmental.

 

The love that begins with oneself does not end there. Indeed it cannot because the very nature of reality is that everything is connected. There is nothing that is truly separate. In fact, the heart of the human dilemma is the great illusion that we are separate—separate from God, separated from each other, separated from the rest of nature. While there is a definiteness to our individuation, our very individuality is linked to a greater commonality that we share with everything else in the universe. Everything, including us, is, to use philosopher Ken Wilber’s word, a holon within other holons. 

Ken Wilber

Chart illustrating holons

--> Everything, no matter how you dice it, is a part of something bigger, and something smaller, like a series of nesting dolls.  Your body is that way—every part of it distinct, yet relatively useless unless it is related to the other parts of the body. So there is nothing that is not in relationship, one way or another, with everything else.  That’s the big “secret” of Jesus in John’s gospel.  This love, which is the essence of God, is the energy of the relationship that Jesus shares with Abba and which he likewise shares with his friends, his community.  There are no spaces in between.  Things dwelling in the same thing dwell with each other.  If you and I live in Jesus and he in us, then we are every bit as much a part of the one, namely Abba Creator, in whom Jesus lives and who lives in Jesus.

That’s why we keep running aground when we fall into the trap of imagining that the world could really be run by force. Only for awhile will that work. But the reason it always fails on every level is that sheer force is counter to the energy that actually keeps the world going around. And you know what makes the world go round:  love. Nothing else will work—not on a personal level, not on a familial level, not on a communal level, not on a national level, and not on an international level. That is not to say that love has an easy time of it. Love is not some sort of marshmallow that takes up a lot of space but has little weight. Nor is love without the capability of having a hard edge. Let Jesus’ example sink in:  greater love has no one than this, that one lay down one’s life for one’s friends. Love is not about giving approval; it is about giving oneself away. And the Jesus who asks that we follow him models how love is never far from suffering. To love is to be vulnerable and to be vulnerable is sooner or later to be wounded, to know pain, to experience suffering.

The new commandment that Jesus gave his community on Maundy Thursday in the middle of a footwashing is the essence of what it means to live the Easter life. We’re nearing the end of the Great Fifty Days of Easter. The whole point of Easter, as we saw on Easter Day, is that we share the resurrection every single day of our lives. Were it only about suffering and pain who in the wide world would want that? But it is not “just” about suffering and pain. Jesus said to his community, “I have told you these things so that my joy might be in you and that your joy might be complete.” This is a man who was facing an excruciatingly painful death, a death resulting from precisely the choices he had made to come squarely down on the side of justice and liberation for those least capable of taking up for themselves. And yet he is full of joy. How? 

You and I could spend the rest of our lives trying to figure that out. But we never will. Not until we live it. We can’t first figure it all out neatly in our heads, give it a go, and test it out to prove it.  If you’ve ever fallen in love, you know what I mean. 

Years ago the Supremes sang, “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me.” For awhile you couldn’t turn on a radio that you didn’t hear that. 

Diana Ross and The Supremes

I suspect it was the Supremes that really made it popular, but I think that on some level it might be because we find appealing the idea that we could actually make somebody love us. Even if it worked for a time, we’d likely discover once more that you can’t make someone love you, no matter how hard you try. All you can do is give yourself away—in service, attentively, caringly, joyfully, gratefully, gladly—not counting the cost or begrudging what you give. Nothing is fool-proof or any other kind of proof. But at the end of the day it’s the only life worth living, and the greatest risk is not that we might lose but that we’d be too timid to try it and never find out what the Master meant by his joy being in us or our joy being complete.

A sermon on the text of John 15:9-17

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2018

Beyond Crazy

Luke 8:26-39

            Last Sunday, having finished two morning services in another parish, I arrived home for lunch, went to my office, looked at my computer screen and saw for the first time the headlines about Orlando.  Probably like most of you, I have spent all week sorting out my reactions and responses to this latest massacre, which, only because of the magnitude of its enormity, grips our attention.  Some time ago we reached the point where the average mass shooting, defined as one in which more than 3 people are killed, is on average a daily occurrence in the United States.  Among all the emotions churning up in me this week has been the exasperation that says, “Here we go again.” 

            We have developed a national ritual.  Indeed we are in the midst of it at the moment.  It is the American ritual for dealing with what you might say is an insoluble problem that shows no signs of going away any time soon.  Just as there are other public rituals that have all the marks of predictability, this corporate reaction to mass shootings is predictable.  The language we use, including such words as “outrage,” “senseless,” “gun violence,” “courageous first responders,” “terror,” “instability,” “lone wolf,” are stock phrases that you can count on figuring into reports and conversations for days. 

It will appear at some point that we might have a chance of actually solving this problem of perennial, devastating violence.  A new cascade of victims’ families and grief-stricken relatives will move us to new resolve.  We will find ourselves hopeful, even amid the cacophony of rage and counter-rage that continues to fuel more hatred and more violence.  Yet, as the prospect of new gun control legislation begins to rise, sales in guns will climb. 

This must strike you as something you already know, familiar as the back of your hand.  I imagine that you must be thinking that I have some sort of solution in mind or else I wouldn’t be talking about it. I suspect that you probably think that either I am a cynic who sees no possibility of change in all this, or, more likely that I am headed towards asserting that with proper public pressure we will be able once and for all to reverse this trend and possibly even to solve this intractable problem.

Let me remind myself and you that this is not a political speech, but a sermon.  My aim is to proclaim some gospel this morning, and that involves telling the truth, not just making ourselves feel better, though one might hope that the two are not mutually exclusive.  The truth begins with the fact that we are awash in what can kindly be called crazy behavior.  That is not to say that all of us have totally lost our minds, but that in the aggregate, the phenomenon that we’re in and I have described is insane.  You have heard it said that the definition of insanity is to repeat the same behavior over and over expecting different results.  Well, so far that nails us, doesn’t it?  That’s not all there is to it, but that is a big slice of what is wrong with this whole picture.  The question is how can we stop it?  Or, to use a phrase of St. Paul, who will deliver us?

How interesting that today’s gospel story is one about craziness.  It is, perhaps of all the stories in any of the gospels, the one that dramatizes the extent and depth of insanity.  The mad man of Gerasa is one of the most frightening figures on the pages of scripture.  He is strong, he is untamable, he is demonic, he is scary.  He roams about the tombs in the local cemetery, and it is a cinch that none of the villagers of Gerasa go there with their flowers and candles very much, knowing they will likely run into him.  The story is difficult enough, yet its challenge to us 21^st century people is compounded by the category in which the crazy man is placed, namely demon-possessed.  We don’t deal with demon possession very well in modern vocabulary.  We have other diagnoses: schizophrenia, sociopathology, and so on.  Not only that, but the bizarre story of demons begging to enter a herd of hogs who race down the bank and drown in the Sea of Galilee pretty much asks us to imagine more than we easily can.

What is really difficult for us to see is how this poor character has anything to do with us.  The very problem of modern life in the United States, and maybe the world at large, is that we are in a real sense deeply disturbed and don’t know it.  The very fact that we are the most medicated generation ever to live on the planet is itself a part of the problem.  Of course we are a far cry from raving around cemeteries; but we continue to nurse on delusions.  Huge swaths of our society cannot grasp the fact that no matter who we are, we are infected by racism.  To that extent, we are deluded.  Our systems conspire to keep us under the spell of imagined wellness.  Even when we see its flaws and dark side, we continue to spin with the wheels of capitalism.  Most of us are about as fundamentalistic regarding our Constitution as religious fundamentalists are about the Bible.  We corporately imagine that our constitutional system, with only a minor flaw here and there, is mighty near perfect.  And one of the favorite notions is that every social problem has a legislative solution. 

Into this quandary comes the Healer.  Notice that Jesus meets resistance from the demons.  Delusional thinking and its correlative, crazy behavior, do not vanish quietly.  Like the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky’s novel, voices in us and in our society say, “What have you to do with us, Jesus?  Do not torment us.  Leave us alone.”  We are doing quite well without you, even as we invoke your name and pretend to be following you.  Don’t upset us by dispelling our fantasies. If you ask us our name, we cannot answer because we have no lasting identity.  Our loyalties are divided among family, work, sex, gender, race, ethnicity.  We are legion.  We know no wholeness. 

And that is the root of the problem.  What we have great trouble seeing is that in this awful violence, we are in fact reaping what we have sown.  The poisonous flower of violence blooms on a stalk grounded in our own fragmentation.  Many of us, despite a whole industry of gyms, diets, beauty products, cosmetics, style, body decorations, and so on, really despise our bodies.  Despite all the self-help books and programs, we find ourselves stuck in the same old patterns.  We pay millions on therapy and hear ourselves saying the same old stuff week after week.  And all of this builds up into a great sea of internalized hatred and anger.  We get angry at our own frustration.  And all of that breeds a culture which gives rise to violence.  We’ll never see this unless we look at the whole scene, beyond our individual pieces of it.  It all didn’t start yesterday.  It has been a way of life for centuries.  Strife, dehumanization, unbridled competition, insecurities, jealousy, envy, discord, slave trade, sex trade, power games, oppression.  The list goes on and on.  We cannot get rid of violence by being violent.  We cannot cast out hatred by hating.  And most of all, we cannot heal from a deep sickness of soul unless somehow we are delivered from the very things that make our souls sick.

The demons gone, the mad man of Gerasa is no longer mad.  He is clothed and in his right mind.  He sits at the feet of Jesus, calm, peaceful.  That is what wholeness looks like.  Now the secret, quite well kept, is that the Jesus who heals us is not some distant god, but rather one that already lives right in us.  It makes little difference whether we imagine this Jesus to be external to us or internal (I do some of both). What critically matters is that we come to understand that our egos—that is to say our conscious, willing selves—cannot heal us.  Healing has to come from some deeper place.  In my vocabulary it is “soul healing,” which really means that, like the Gerasene man, we need deliverance from all that legion of crazy voices in us, including the voice that says, “You’re no good.”  Soul healing is being united with our truest, deepest nature.  Once that begins to happen, peace begins to supplant all the internal violence.

How?  It begins with our admitting our own powerlessness.  We move from there to something quite counter-intuitive:  submitting our wills to the Christ within us, acknowledging him to be our soul-maker and soul-mate.  We begin gradually to let go of our fantasy of being in control of others, our partners, our children, our neighbors, our enemies.  The more we do, the more we become supple, accepting what comes to us and not fighting it.  The less we fight, the more we are free to embrace.  We gradually find ourselves loving our own bodies.  Then it is not too hard for us to begin embracing our own mortality.  And one day we might begin to notice that we are living more and more soulfully.   We begin to live more joyfully, rooted in a practice of being grateful.  We look for the good in people rather than fixate on their foibles.  We make mistakes and take them as opportunities to learn.  We lose our cool and learn to observe our imperfections without laying hard trips on ourselves.  We treat ourselves well, take long hot baths and showers, give money away—lots of it, enjoy long walks, savor good food, celebrate our erotic energy, stop kicking ourselves with guilt, learn how to face into the very things that we are ashamed of, and begin owning our imperfections and vulnerabilities.  Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control:  these are the marks of soulful living, and they are the fruit of the Spirit of Christ taking hold of us, and shaping us into persons wholly one with our deepest nature. 

Easy?  No.  Quick?  Hardly.  But the only way I know of to get out of the tombs and into the clear light of day.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2016