Butler Bass Belonging

Butler Bass belonging

“Instead of believing, behaving, and belonging, we need to reverse the order to belonging, behaving, and believing. Jesus did not begin with questions of belief. Jesus’ public ministry started when he formed a community.”

Diana Butler Bass, Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening, Harper One, pp. 11-64, 2011.

Diana Butler Bass tries to help us understand what is happening in the present day changing Christian landscape where religion is now no longer the center of a member’s life. She reminds us that our religion started with community, not confession. Thomas Watkins from Wilson, North Carolina also tries to explain how our church might change using the South’s love of football in an article in Journal of Preacher (“Game Day: Becoming a New church in an Old South”, Pentecost 2017, volume 40, no. 4) “They (fans) are not asked to show their diplomas at the stadium gate. Perhaps congregations should begin to nurture relationships with those individuals who claim connections to congregations but never join.”

One of the most frequent questions of those coming for spiritual direction is “I don’t know if I believe or what I believe anymore. Maybe I am no longer a Christian.”  If the person belongs to a confessional denomination or a church of orthodoxy where he or she must believe a certain set of doctrines, this can sometimes be a problem. There are denominations that are churches of orthopraxy where its members are held together because of a way they worship or practice their faith. In that circumstance, a changing belief is considered at times an asset, a sign of growth. Our relationship to God will change as our God becomes larger, as we come to see the Christ in more and more people, people who are very different from ourselves. I often quote that line I first heard from Alan Jones at a Trinity Wall Street conference at Kanuga in the early 2000’s: “the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty.”  Doubting is a sign that God is working in us; our relationship is changing. Sometimes this change in relationship can feel like the movement of the earth’s tectonic plates. Sometimes it can be like a volcano erupting. If we can just take it as a “good” and not a “bad” thing and try to stay steady; a new relationship, a new life will arise.  I remember a quote attributed to Catherine Marshall, “ Those who never rebelled against God or at some point in their lives shaken their fists in the face of heaven, have never encountered God at all.”

This is also where community is so important. In a church that is alive with the spirit, there will be many others who have experienced this as well who can walk and hold a steady hand when the foundations that we thought were our beliefs are threatened.  We come to see that these beliefs are not threatened, but enlarged, and we learn this because of belonging in a community.

Joanna                joannaseibert.com

Margaret Guenther Holy Listening

Margaret Guenther I

“Let all guests who arrive be received like Christ, for He is going to say, “I came as a guest and you received Me”, Rule of Benedict, Chapter 53.

 This line from the Rule of Benedict opens the first chapter of Margaret Guenther’s book, called Holy Listening, The Art of Spiritual Direction. The title could so easily have been “Practical Spiritual Direction for Clergy and Lay.” Her writing describes very practical wisdom about being a spiritual director with illustrations from her experience and biblical stories.  She says her book is for the “beginner,” but I have kept her writings at my desk at all times for years. At her writing in 1992, Guenther was one of the few women doing and writing about spiritual direction. Her feminine wisdom adds a new way of talking about direction, allowing the director to self-disclosure or sharing parts of her life when appropriate (as opposed to therapy).   After a short “catch up time,” she begins the session with silence, asking the spiritual friend to let her know when she or he is ready. She ends the meeting with a “little” prayer. She keeps no written records and cautions the spiritual director to recite ten “Jesus Prayers” before saying anything or interrupting. She lets the spiritual friend know the session is nearly ending by saying “we’ll have to stop in a few minutes,” knowing that the person will now speak about the most significant material.  She still stops the session at the appropriate time by saying, “Let’s start with that next time”. She keeps reminding the spiritual friend to talk about herself (“This is your time.”), keeping on track with “what do you want me as your director to do for you? and What do you want Christ to do for you?” or “Tell me about your work, your family, your friends, your health, your Christian community, what you do for fun”.  She knows that sometimes, what is being said is a confession, and she names it. She tries to help spiritual friends discern the “next right thing” similar to Mr. Dick in David Copperfield. sharing humor, tears, modeling Jesus as a spiritual director.  Guenther compares the spiritual director to a midwife, waiting, like a ministry of presence amid the rocks, a hand to be held in the prevailing fear of labor, naming transitions. She identifies the process with the shedding of the skin of a snake, a skin which had to be formed to grow but no longer is useful. She describes a spiritual director as encouraging like a coach, celebrating new life.

 Guenther spends her last chapter talking about women as spiritual directors and the gifts they may have to offer and the special concerns of women seeking spiritual direction. I love some of her feminine approaches, “If Priscilla had written our epistles instead of Paul, I suspect there would have been more about Incarnation and relatively little about circumcision.”  This was meaningful to me as I have been reading Guenther’s book on a trip to  the Greek islands and thought so much about Priscilla when we were at Ephesus, as she had moved there from Rome when the Jews were thrown out of Rome. She became a big supporter of Paul. Some have said that she might have written Hebrews. I will reread Hebrews and see if that might be true.

Joanna joannaseibert.com

The Trinity

The Trinity

“What if we actually dropped into this Trinitarian flow and let it be our major teacher? Even our very notion of society, politics, and authority would utterly change, because most of it is still top down and outside in. Trinitarian theology says that true power is circular or spiral, not so much hierarchical. It’s here; it’s within us. It’s shared and shareable; it’s already entirely for us. We have the power of “the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Romans 5:5). God’s Spirit is planted within you and operating as you! Don’t keep looking to the top of the pyramid. Stop idolizing the so-called “Top 1 %.” There’s nothing worthwhile up there that is not also down here. Worst of all, it has given much of the world an unnecessary and tragic inferiority complex. The Trinity says that God’s power is not domination, threat, or coercion, but of a totally different nature, one that even Jesus’ followers have not yet adjusted to. If the Father does not dominate the Son, and the Son does not dominate the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit does not dominate the Father or the Son, then there’s no domination in God. All divine power is shared power. This should have entirely changed Christian religion, politics, and relationships.”

Richard Rohr,  The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation, 95-96.  Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations, March 6, 2017.

Robert Capon says that when humans try to describe God, we are like a bunch of oysters trying to describe a ballerina. But we can’t help but try, especially in trying to understand the doctrine of the Trinity, perhaps one of the greatest mysteries of the Christian faith.  A Greek Orthodox bishop, Timothy Kallistos, at a lecture at a summer course at Oxford introduced us to Andrei Rublev’s 15th century icon named The Trinity or the Hospitality of Abraham. It pictures the three angels who visited Abraham at the Oak of Mamre (Genesis 18:1-8) to announce the coming birth of his son, Isaac. It has been interpreted as a symbol to help visualize the mystery of the inter-relationship of the parts of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Each of the figures is in a circular harmony with the other, humbly pointing to each other with mutual love.  If we only relate to the Trinity as its separate parts, we miss the mark. They are in community, transparent to each other, indwelling in one another, in love with each other. They have no secrets from one another, no jealousy, no rivalry.  They are teaching us how to live in community. Barbara Brown Taylor describes their relationship as the sound of “three hands clapping.” The doctrine of the Trinity calls us to a radical reorientation in our way of seeing and living in the world. We are what we are in relationship with. The God of the Trinity is not an I but a we, not a mine but ours. Our belief in and understanding of the Trinity can definitely make a difference in how we drive our cars, how we fill out our tax returns, how we relate to others of different faiths, a different color, different political views, how we relate and respond to war, how we treat the person sitting across the aisle from us as well as the person living across the interstate as well as the people who live outside our country’s borders.

Rohr’s and Barbara Brown Taylor’s thoughts are good to mediate on when we are having difficulty with another person, when the Christ within us is having difficulty seeing Christ in another. 

Barbara Brown Taylor, “Three Hands Clapping,” Home by Another Way, 151-154.

Joanna joannaseibert.com