Crying Out to God as a Spiritual Practice

As part of my seminary training, I’m working at a men’s homeless shelter and participating in a recovery group that meets at the shelter each morning. These men are tortured by demons. I really can’t think of a better way to describe the struggle with addiction.

One man in particular, newly sober and detoxed, was going through a really horrible time a couple of months ago. He was waking up screaming in the middle of the night and pounding the wall in his sleep. One morning after our group meeting, he asked me, “How do you pray?” It seems like a perfectly reasonable question to ask a seminarian, right?

But I wasn’t quite sure how to answer. I mumbled something about my own practice of centering prayer, which involves finding a quiet place and choosing a sacred word or phrase to put at the center of my consciousness in order to contemplate and experience the presence of the divine.

Not surprisingly, my homeless friend’s eyes glazed over somewhat as I described my way of praying. To my credit, I quickly realized that what I was talking about was not going to work for him at this particular time. So, I suggested that he talk to some of the other men in the group about how they pray—as I know that many of them are quite religious and would be happy to share.

It turns out that what he needed was really what I need sometimes, too. When you are tortured by demons, contemplative centering prayer may not get you where you need to go. What you need to do is cry out. You need to make known your pain. You need to give voice to your deepest, darkest suffering and grief and ask for help.

As Anthony Bloom wrote in "Courage to Pray": "God reveals himself to us in this awareness that we are essentially a cry for him."

And from Rumi (via Coleman Barks): "The grief you cry out from / draws you toward union. / Your pure sadness that wants help / is the secret cup."

One of the old jokes about UUs is that we begin our prayers with the words “To whom it may concern . . .” But the fact is that, with some notable exceptions, there’s just not a whole lot of praying of any kind going on in our congregations (unless, as another old joke goes, it looks like a Democrat is about to lose an election).

If you ask a group of UUs what their spiritual practices are, you are likely to get answers like the following: “My peace and justice work is my spiritual practice.” “I try to parent in a mindful and spiritual way.” “I practice my spirituality in spirited discussions about vital issues with people.”

Those are nice things, but I'd like to see all of us go a little deeper. If we are to minister to a suffering world, we need to find ways of expressing our own suffering--which is what will ultimately connect us to one another and to something greater than ourselves.

May it be so!

Same Language, Different Accents

Through the soul-churning work of deep sharing with those we perceive as radically different from ourselves, I hope we start to learn that the language of the heart is something that all of us can comprehend – we may speak it with different accents, but it is the mother tongue shared by all of us who are sojourners on this planet, strangers in a strange land.

What's a contemporary Schleiermachian to do?

How do I make and articulate the connection between my highly personal, individual religious experience and the larger work that I believe springs (inevitably) as a result of reflection on these experiences?  How do I, as a religious leader, help move people along the continuum that I believe exists from direct, unmediated experience of the divine to engagement with others to larger prophetic work?

As a result of my recent liberal theology course and other experiences I have had, I now think of myself as a Schleiermachian for the most part. For me, the essence of religion is feeling and intuiting. I cannot explain religious experience, but I can come close to describing or communicating it through poetry and music. Because of the internal nature of this kind of religious experience, religious sharing becomes an exercise in imperfect description that may or may not lead to a perfect understanding.

But, for me, religious experience is something that must be shared.  In fact, although my idea of religious experience is highly personal, the experience itself is almost always born in a moment of intense engagement—either with other people or creatures or with the inanimate world.  And I believe religious experience of this sort—especially if it is felt intensely—almost always leads to action of some sort.

So, my own experience of religion is a circle in which highly personal experiences of the infinite necessarily lead to sharing with others about meaningful experiences, which leads to more intense interactions with others toward a moral—if not salvific—end, and, to complete the cycle, these intense interactions with some “other” or others inevitably lead to a personal experience of the infinite.

The problem, of course, is that not everyone dances this same dance. And many people will not be interested in learning the steps or even swaying to the rhythm.  And yet, I do believe that nearly all people, whether they recognize it or not, have these moments of highly personal religious experience. But, because most of us are trained to abandon our natural creative impulses at an early age, we give up on trying to communicate and share these experiences with others, and, in fact, downplay their significance even to ourselves. Further, I believe that if people give up on this first step, the other steps of possible deep connection with others and movement toward something bigger are severely limited.

For me, unmediated experience of the divine is not in any way supernatural but, rather, is the most natural of experiences available to the human being.  I see it in children.  I see it in some artists and writers and musicians.  And I sense it in nearly every loving relationship that I have known. So, it is a real challenge for me to deal with people who are not as inclined as I am to run with feelings and intuition without an overwhelming regard for rational thought.

I plan to start testing my beliefs in regard to this question. Specifically, I want to really challenge people with whom I work and live to reach inward to their most elemental creative selves, the parts of our being that have been squeezed thin or ordered out as we have grown older. And I want to work with the people who are, in many cases, the hardest nuts to crack (namely Unitarians Universalists) when it comes to setting aside rational thought sometimes in order to do something that has real and lasting meaning. I also want to explore this question actively with others who are trying to do something similar in their congregations and communities.

A Hermeneutic of Trees

Two trees stand naked on Lake Michigan:
one twisted and bent at broken right angles,
the other an ideal of arboreal roundness.

Silently they reach for each other, for light,
for air, for earth and sky, for water, for life.

In reaching, they do not mind the cold wind--
Chicago’s winter cannot stop their branching
out toward oneness while moving in their own
wholly unique way.
                     There is no other way
than this--to stand near the stillness of each
other while letting a great song emerge, sighing,
from the depths of difference and connection.

Dusk on Lake Michigan

I walked down to the lake after class today. I love the water and the trees in winter--beautiful and quiet and settling.

Liberal Theology: Wrap-Up

On this, the final day of our Liberal Theology class, we discussed James Luther Adams extensively.  The challenge he posed to liberal theologians in  1940 is still very much the challenge of today. I am thinking specifically of his plea "for a religious liberalism which, though permitting and encouraging variety and breadth, will acquire a precise character, a cutting edge of its own . . . if it is to be effective in the arena of competing world-views today, [liberalism] must know pretty definitely what its convictions are and expect at least its own adherents to take them seriously."

So what is it that we take seriously or ought to take seriously? This whole week has been helpful for me in refining my personal vision for ministry and my vision for what liberal religion and Unitarian Universalism must take most seriously.  I believe it comes down to this:

We must be a church that ministers not to ideas but to people and the world--people and the world just as they are at this moment. Liberal religionists do not minister in order to save souls but to practice radical acceptance and radical service. We do not minister in order to convince everyone else how wrong-minded they are and how right-minded we are. We do not minister to make idols of the status quo or white, educated middle-class ideals or anything else.  We minister because we love human beings and we love the world.

At least, I believe that's what we ought to do, and to follow the Kantian turn I learned this week, because we ought to do so, we can do so. So may it be!

Walking Along Lake Michigan

One of the greatest things about Chicago is the path that follows the shore of Lake Michigan.  Took a beautiful and bracing walk there today at lunchtime. In the winter, as my friend Tisha pointed out, downtown Chicago looks like something from a snow globe--or maybe the Emerald City.

Liberal Theology Day 3: Emerson & Parker; Dewey & Pinn

Mike reviewed two of the most important themes of the course: authority (what are the sources of religious knowledge or experience) and the changing reputation of human nature (from total depravity in Calvinism to inherently moral in other places). Transcendentalists, as represented by Emerson and Parker in this course, described human nature at its most respected and the source of authority as completely inward.

One of the concepts introduced today that was interesting to me was what Mike called a "strong misreading"--that is, misreading someone else's work, but then running with the new idea that you've developed from your misunderstanding of the other person's view in order to create something entirely new. Such, Mike says, is what the Transcendentalists did with their misreading of Kant. (After having read Kant--and after having read the Transcendentalists--I am grateful for their misreading.)

A prayer for my fellow seminarians and me: May all our misreadings be strong misreadings and may they shed light on the dark parts of our misunderstandings!

Liberal Theology Day 2: Schleiermacher, Channing and Ballou

We started the day with a wrap-up of Kant (rationalist and moralist, denied knowledge of God to make room for faith, believed that what can be known does not exhaust what can be thought, etc.), then plunged into Schleiermacher.

The Methodist in me was pleased to discover that the Wesleyan Quadrilateral is still taught in divinity schools. If the four sources for theological claims are tradition, scripture, experience and reason, we can see that Kant pretty much rejected tradition and put reason first.  Schleiermacher also rejected tradition for the most part, but put experience first. Unlike Kant, Schleiermacher believed that religion could only be described--not explained.

For Schleiermacher, religious experience was an unmediated experience of the infinite, an intuition of the Universe.  He believed that any religious formulation that posited God as a being among beings was a sort of idolatry.

Mike asked how can an object of intuition be pre-conceptual (a la Schleiermacher)? In other words, he has a hard time buying that anything can be intuited without our already having some notion of what it is we are intuiting.

I, on the other hand don't understand how anything that is intuited can be described as other than pre-conceptual. From my perspective, intuition is by its very nature unshaped by language and ideas--although we can use language and ideas to attempt to describe the object of our intuition.

So maybe I'm a mystic after all!

I'll not write about Channing and Ballou here, but the lecture and discussion were both very useful and informative.  And I led the morning devotional today. A beautiful, snowy day in Chicago!

The View from My Window

Liberal Theology: Day 1

We sprinted through an introduction to and overview of liberal theology this morning, and spent the afternoon on Immanuel Kant's philosophy of religion.

Mike Hogue is brilliant and is keeping us on our toes.  A special treat is that the class is being co-taught by Myriam Renaud, who has a very direct teaching style and, as a UU minister has some good ideas about how some of these ideas might find their way into our congregations (or how they're already there).

The description of liberal theology that I like best is that it is the "anti-tradition tradition." One of liberal theology's distinguishing characteristics (the most important one, I think) is that exists in friction with other traditions.  So, what we see in many UU congregations today is a deeply ingrained tradition of being averse to all traditions including our own (!).

It's pretty obvious to me that this kind of attitude is not sustainable--or maybe it would be more accurate to say that this kind of attitude will not help sustain healthy, thriving congregations.  The trick is how to engage constructively with other traditions and with our own history.

Mike asked us to work on developing the ability to understand other people's ideas and beliefs on their own terms.  All the authors that we are reading are dealing with issues and questions that are vital to them, and there is almost certainly something for us to learn from them, whether or not we agree with much of what they say or the ways in which they say it.

My best hope for liberal theology and liberal religion is that we might be able to stop seeing other theologies and traditions as being somehow less highly evolved than our own. In a world in which everything is increasingly interconnected (including ideas and theologies), we would do well to lean into some of these challenging engagements with other traditions, rather than avoiding or dismissing them.

Meadville January 2011 Convo: Day 1

Very good start to the convocation today. Started with musings on theology and music from Mike Hogue, interspersed with beautiful singing led by Dent Davidson. Afterward, we had breakout sessions; I attended one led by Leslie Takahashi-Morris and Jean Pupke on "Ministering Across Cultures." Interesting insights from both of them, especially about using music in ways that can attract or repel a more multicultural crowd than one finds at the typical UU congregation.

We ended with a good vespers service that included lots of hymn singing, readings, a dramatic reading by three of our faculty members and a great sermon from Leslie. She quoted one of my favorite Martin Luther King, Jr. speeches (from his address to the 1967 Southern Christian Leadership Conference:

"A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will 'thingify' them—make them things. Therefore they will exploit them, and poor people generally, economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have foreign investments and everything else, and will have to use its military to protect them. All of these problems are tied together.

"What I am saying today is that we must go from this convention and say, 'America, you must be born again!'

Back in Chicago

I'm delighted to be back in Chicago and very much looking forward to Meadville's January convocation and intensive classes. I'm happy to have arrived a day early to get a bit settled in. I have spacious living quarters this time at a brownstone apartment owned by the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, just one block from where our classes are being held.

I feel like I need to do some decorating to make this rather drab and empty apartment come to life as a cozy home for me for the next couple of weeks: