Since this is my spiritual retreat, I’ve been focusing on sites that reflect my own Christian spirituality. I’m finding vast micro-worlds to explore, each with its own long history, tradition, values, and emphases.
What is it I’m looking for? That’s a fair question, and I have asked myself this more times than I can count over the last few years. The simplest answer is that I am looking for a sense of peace and direction for myself. But of course there’s way more underneath that.
When things shatter, you constantly wrestle to understand what it is that broke. Was it a design flaw? Poor materials? The storm of the century? User error?
What am I doing now? Am I rebuilding? Looking for all the broken pieces? Seeing if my piece belongs in some other building? Figuring out how to be my own solitary shard?
Ooooh.
In the act of writing out that metaphor, I realize there is something else. Am I a piece of the building, dependent on some other to expertly craft me into position? Or am I my own builder, seeing everything around me as material to graft in or leave out as I see fit?
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While on this pilgrimage, I’ve taken a deep dive with 900 year old Hildegard, a Spirit-filled visionary trying to reform church and world. I’ve walked Martin Luther’s 500 year old path, where the words of scripture brought powerful new life that shook all ecclesial and secular power structures. I’ve stood in soaring cathedrals, the teachings of the church visible in stained glass and statues, saints and biblical figures intermingling. And I unexpectedly discovered 800 year old Elisabeth of Hungary, a royal woman who laid down her crown to feed and to heal the poor.
It seems there has always been Mother Church, the institution, carrying the responsibility of holding and forming and teaching what life with Christ is all about. Without it, so much is lost.
It seems there has always been corruption, oppression, and injustice, as the church and its leaders see their role as defending holy truth.
And it seems there are always, in every generation, those who experience the heart of God in all its beautiful, radical, loving, grace- and justice-filled power. Some tirelessly work within the structure to bring Spirit guided transformation. Some leave it to start something new. And some just go be the hands and feet of Jesus, living with and serving the hurting people of the world.
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Several people over the years have taught me the analogy of the three-legged stool as a way to discern the will of God. (I taught it myself a time or three, although in my stubbornness I often made it a four-legged stool. But that’s a different post.)
The concept is that we need all three legs in order to have stability. In the Evangelical circles I grew up in, we always began with the “first among equals” leg of scripture. The bible gives us the objective revelation of God, with “all we need for life and faith.” The second leg is direct revelation from the Holy Spirit, the idea that there is a living God who still speaks and to whom we should pay attention as we discern God’s will. And the third is the tradition of the church, orthodoxy, the beliefs handed down and discerned by many.
The clear purpose of this analogy was to rein us in, to keep us from going off the rails with our crazy Spirit leadings.
My first a-ha on this trip was the way the three main parts of my pilgrimage represented each of the three legs. Hildegard and her strange visions, with her beautiful prayers constantly reminding of how God’s Spirit enlivens all of creation, is the direct revelation leg. Luther and his bible is the scripture leg. And these stained glass cathedrals and the Holy Roman Catholic Church are the tradition leg. In my first a-ha, the blog post was going to be about needing them all.
But then St. Elisabeth jumped out at me from nowhere, appearing at the Wartburg Castle where I was supposed to be following Martin Luther’s trail, unlooked for and a bit annoying. She was wrecking the blog post. She didn’t fit on the three legs of the stool (and she didn’t fit my fourth leg, either, but that’s the other post).
But my goodness I like her.
She just does stuff.
She just loves people like Jesus did.
Hmmmm.
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The second blog post that wanted to be written didn’t get very far in my brain. You can see where it was going with the Elisabeth track—the whole stool image is broken, because it centered on dispassionately discerning some “truth” from God. It missed doing justice and loving mercy. We, the second blog post wanted to say, just need to remember Elisabeth and go be the hands and feet of Jesus.
But I can’t write the second blog post, either, because history and my brain and my experience of the Living God cry out that there are some things missing here, too.
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At the risk of living into the stereotype of myself, I’m going to reference Miroslav Volf. Again.
Volf was one of the professors who influenced me most during my time in seminary, and who over the years has continued to shape and challenge my thinking about how to live as a follower of Jesus. I just finished wrestling with his book “Exclusion and Embrace” with a couple dozen people, but this time I’m going to refer to his book on the nature of God and the nature of the church, called “After His Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity.”
One of the many powerful ideas he shares in that book is a reflection on the phrase “born again”, and how when we think deeply, it reflects something important about who we are as followers of Jesus. To be born again draws in all the richness of the Protestant Reformation, remembering that there is a decision, an act on our part to choose to receive the gift of Jesus. There’s something powerfully important in actively choosing to make the pursuit of Jesus our life’s goal.
At the same time, to be born again recognizes all the richness of the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions, remembering that we are never solitary individuals without any context, able to act independently and alone. Jesus is a gift birthed in us. We receive it from others. Jesus is mediated through community. The church—I’m thinking church as living organism with Christ as the head, more than as institution—the church births Jesus in us. There’s something powerfully important in humbly receiving faith from a community outside ourselves and recognizing our interdependence in this life of faith.
(As an aside…he’s making the same point I thought I had brilliantly come to on my own on this trip. There are no new ideas under the sun.)
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So did you catch what I left out, up above, when I was writing about how Elisabeth critiques what the stool analogy leaves out? Go ahead, take a minute and scroll back up and see if you can figure it out. I’ll wait.
Did you find it?
I made a reference to Micah 6:8 when I said: “It missed doing justice and loving mercy.” But the verse goes on to make another point: “You’ve been shown, O Human, what the Lord requires of you. Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God.”
As I was learning about St. Elisabeth on the tour of Wartburg Castle, I stared at an exquisite little book, her Psalter. Drawings and words blended together beautifully, in this handwritten, before-the-printing-press book. It’s powerful evidence that she spent time nurturing her faith. She had a regular practice of reading the Psalms, drawing nourishment for her personal encounter with God.
I also learned that her concern for the poor did not come out of nowhere. Rather, early members of the Franciscan Order came to Wartburg Castle when she was a young girl, with their vows of poverty and charity and their example of giving their lives to serve the poor. St. Francis of Assisi became her conscious role model, as she received from the church community a more full example of the heart of God. It was compelling to her.
Until her dying day, it seems she continued to remain within the church community, giving and receiving, challenging others, and being hurt and wounded herself. I don’t claim to be anything close to an expert on her life—I basically took a tour and read Wikipedia. But it seems that once again I come face to face with this: All of this journey, all of this wrestling to find how to live as a follower of Jesus in a world of oppression and church corruption and failure…once again, it’s all really super complex and intertwined.
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This pilgrimage to find Hildegard has gone on longer than this trip, and while I can’t wrap this blog post up with a neat and tidy bow, I will push myself to try and share some of where I am settling down.
Disclaimers: *Your mileage may vary. *Past performance is no guarantee of future gains. *This comes from a broken professional on a closed course, try this at home at your own risk.
I want more than just finding God’s will. I want to be moved to do justice, and to love mercy. If not, what’s the point of discernment?
I believe this journey is teaching me that in order to act justly and with mercy, I must also learn to walk humbly and dependently on God.
My foundation in Jesus has never broken. Honestly, it never even cracked. But I have needed to figure out more and more ways to intentionally tie my day to day life into that foundation, as the ground has shaken far more than I imagined possible a decade ago.
Part of my journey has been borrowing from all kinds of different traditions, trying their practices of faith. After the last few years, it’s sort of proven beyond a doubt that Quakers don’t have all the answers. So I’ve chosen to tie into the foundation in multiple ways.
I’ve been reading these women mystics. I’ve been reading my bible. I’ve joined “charismatic” friends for nights of song and worship. I’ve tried to ask (most days) how I can serve other people with the time I have in the day ahead of me, however God leads. I have structures for daily prayer and I look for how to increase the amount of spontaneous conversations with Spirit.
The wisdom of the saints before me and the whispers of the Divine Now are converging around the word humility.
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Shepherd of our souls,
and First Voice of creation,
now let there be…freedom.
For we’re still wretched creatures,
always weary, always weak,
and only You can rescue us
from the unhappiness we make.
Hildegard of Bingen, (1098-1179)
There she goes again, starting out so well, and then crashing and burning in that pit of self-mortification. Why this heavy focus on wretchedness, weariness, weakness? Why does this theme appear over and over again, even as she also calls out the life-filling and life-giving presence of God in all living things?
Over the millennia the church has certainly used this sin and depravity language as an oppressive and harmful weapon. It has launched crusades and inquisitions to eliminate evil. Preachers pound out condemning language from pulpits, in hopes of moving people to come “Just as I am”. And for those growing up in churches, hearing the color of their skin or their gender or sexual identity named as weakness or evil, they internalize a self-hatred with devastating consequences.
Why not just get rid of this focus on wretched weakness and stop hurting each other? Isn’t that exactly how we will be rescued “from the unhappiness we make?”
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I think I’m going to answer “No, I don’t think that’s the way of rescue.”
Each of these amazing reformers I’ve followed on this pilgrimage, with all of the good they did, had some colossal blunders. Hildegard’s letters hold remarkable animosity to those who disagreed with her, and they also betray her extreme class prejudice. While she showed an amazing egalitarian insight, recognizing that it was only God speaking to her that gave any justification for her actions, she also betrayed a gigantic class prejudice, keeping her Abbey only for women of noble birth like herself. She even used a barn analogy assigning “low-born” people to the worst of livestock.
Books and books have been written describing Luther’s grave errors. A couple stand out to me from this trip. Luther was appalled at how his insights were being used by Thomas Müntzer to incite violent revolt in what became the Peasant’s War. He said: these are battles of ideas and words, not swords and violence. But then when the revolt got bigger and bigger, he had no problem throwing his support behind the noble class to violently put down the peasants.
More appalling, Luther’s anti-semitism is well documented. When his thoughts and words didn’t lead to Jews converting, when they didn’t become like him, he fanned the flames of the age old hatred for people of the Jewish faith.
Where did it go wrong? Even as their experience with God healed their own self-doubt and self-hatred, they couldn’t seem to extend that transforming experience to those who were (too) different from them.
The message of human weakness and frailty and sin and evil is most effective when we allow it to unlock our own errors, our own need for different actions, our own need for God’s forgiveness and healing. It can, with Spirit help, build humility.
The message of human weakness and frailty and sin and evil is most dangerous when we refuse to see it in ourselves, when we aim it at others, when it gets tangled with the power structures of church and society. It can, without much help at all, destroy and shame and literally incite war.
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I tried for a lot of years to create space in a church community where we pursued God’s love and justice. Where we could reform and not oppress. Where we could see our failings, each others’ failings, and follow the leading of the Spirit together into healing and community. I failed. We failed.
Today I sat in the church where Martin Luther preached more than 2,000 sermons. I walked through his home, which became a center of learning that literally transformed the world. And I saw all the failures, too.
I saw the church walls lined with later paintings of war as people killed those who didn’t believe correctly.
1967 was the 450th anniversary of Luther nailing the 95 theses on the Wittenburg door. I read how that year, Eastern and Western Germany each used Luther for their own purposes and according to their own values. The reality is we use people, we filter ideas, we even make Jesus into our own image—we use it all to support (often unexamined) values inside us that somehow have more power than the one we claim to worship.
We all fail. And the historical reality is, we fail most spectacularly precisely in the moments where we are attempting to act for justice. When we are fighting corruption. When there is evil everywhere.
And there is evil in me. Weakness in me. Failure in me.
The great balancing act is to live in that humble acknowledgement in a way that causes me to long for God to heal me, to prod me toward love and justice—without falling into self-doubt and self-hatred which paralyze me.
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Now I’ll try and bring this together.
There was this moment at St. Hildegard Abbey. Gray light and cool air greeted me as I walked up the hill, my heart pumping and breath rising as the bells called me to worship. I joined the sisters for the first public prayers of the day. I couldn’t understand the words, whether in Latin or in German.
But the powerfully imperfect harmonies of the sisters’ chanting washed over me.
At this 5:30 am hour, around the world in the various time zones, I knew there were gatherings of sisters and brothers who were chanting the same musical words, because their communities were also punctuated each day by the prayers of the Daily Office. I knew this had been done for centuries, without a single day being missed. Someplace in the world, it has happened every day for millennia.
I’ve usually thought of the life of a nun or a monk as a solitary life, something you do alone, to find God within yourself. But that morning I saw a completely different reality.
There was this realization that in a sense, they gathered each morning as a community to speak God’s presence into being, into this new day. Now, I’m well aware that God’s existence or presence isn’t dependent on human awareness, so hang with me for a minute.
There is a sense where, imperfect as we are, we gather as a community of followers of Jesus to help each other speak and act and breathe God into each and every day. There is a sense where God’s presence is both handed to us by those who have gone before, as well as by our brothers and sisters right now at our side; and there is also a sense where our willful participation in this activity sort of hands God’s presence to others.
We receive and we give God’s presence.
Imperfectly. With sneezes and hacking coughs. Sometimes monotonously rushing through words we aren’t sure we believe, but hoping they are still true.
But we get up, and we choose to both receive and to give the presence of God to each other.
This may be all we have.
This may be all our hope.
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I am choosing to make space in my life, my mind, my soul, to receive the presence of God…in all the myriad ways that happens. I am choosing to trust Spirit to confront my stuff when needed. I am choosing to be with others who follow Jesus and receive and learn from them.
And I am choosing to give the presence of God to others. My honest prayer is that in this screamingly unjust world, God will show me my part in joining the justice work. I want Divine Love to fill me and spill out through me at all times.
I’ll need your help.