I write, speak, invest, network, and question to stimulate fruitful conversation. Let's talk about human flourishing! It begins with freedom. Holy leisure is the key to human being, freedom and generativity. Please join me in the adventure of realizing Christ!
He Must Increase
I’ve just met Jason Nunez, of the John 3:30 podcast. Thanks to a listener who recommended me as a guest on his show, we had a lovely chat this morning. It’s now available here, and on Apple Podcast, Spotify, and anywhere podcasts can be found. Look for Episode #94 for my interview, and stay tuned for Jason’s big surprise in Episode #100, soon to come!
Here’s a bit more about Jason, from the John 3:30 site:
The John 3:30 Podcast is hosted by Jason Nunez. He is a Catholic Husband and Father who is doing everything he can to help get his Family to Heaven. Jason loves to watch movies with his family and he is a huge Dave Matthews Band Fan. He and his Family are Parishioners at The Church of The Holy Spirit in San Antonio TX. Jason was raised Catholic, but as most, he went through the motions for most of his Teenage, 20s and early 30s. After attending an ACTS Retreat in October of 2012 has been “on fire” for his Catholic Faith. Jason began to feel that God was calling him to spread the word on how “everyday” people keep their fire burning for our Catholic Faith. So The John 3:30 Podcast was created!! Join him as he shares the many ways our Faith can keep your fire burning. Thanks for listening and God Bless you all!!
“He must increase; I must decrease.” – John 3:30
Jason was interested in the resource I have available for free here: How to Plan a Great Catholic Event
We discussed the books Souls at Rest (endorsed by Dan Burke) Souls at Work (endorsed by Stratford Caldecott), Upschooling (endorsed by Joseph Pearce), and the Freedom Trilogy (You, Free , Full Spectrum Freedom, and 3D Freedom…endorsed by those I counsel personally). (These link to Amazon sales pages.)
He asked what one thought I wanted to leave with listeners, and that is: “If you need anything, please contact me. I actually respond!!!” Here’s a contact form for anyone reading or listening, who might have questions, need a phone chat or a correspondence or a speaker or help realizing their creative ideas, or who just wants to connect for conversation or some other adventure:
So Quote Me!
Flannery O’Connor says
“The ideal form for unadulterated wisdom is the aphorism.”1
A. G. Sertillanges, in Chapter 1 of The Intellectual Life, concurs:
“The world is in danger for lack of life-giving maxims.”
Well, here we go!
I love aphorisms, so may all my unadulterated wisdom be yours for the taking, or at least some of it I’ve managed to aphor-ize.
“Truth can comprehend error, but error can’t comprehend truth.”
“Don’t be a BB!”
“It’s not a great idea until it’s well-expressed.”
“Unless it moves through you, it doesn’t get to you.”
“Aim to get the child done through the work, not the work done through the child.”
“Your free act is an invitation to freedom for those who receive it.”
“Nothing is wasted in God’s economy.”
“You’re not going around in circles, but growing spirally, like a tree!”
“Christ makes you more truly and fully who you really are.”
“Today, you are more fully realized than ever before.”
“If it isn’t moving, it’s not mercy.”
“Sarcasm is the sound of one who despairs of being heard.”
“Frustration is the constant state of impatient souls.”
“Stop driving and dance!”
“To be free is to wield yourself according to your own desires, and to yield yourself according to God’s.”
“Think great thoughts!”
1Flannery, in a review of Walter F. Kerr’s book Criticism and Censorship, collected in The Presence of Grace (and other reviews by Flannery O’Connor), compiled by Leo Zuber, edited by Carter W. Martin, published by University of Georgia Press, 2008
Notes on the Use of Things
Are you making full and right use of things?
Your life is filled with objects that aren’t good or bad in themselves. Things ill-used, though, can become problematic for you – causing little ‘knots’ of attachment, blindness, rebellion and disorder in the soul, and thus disposing you to sin. Use of one thing can get disordered when we lean on it too much, or remove it from the context of other things, just as monoculture can be detrimental to the land and as vitamins are less effective than whole foods. Having just come through the salutary corrective of Lenten fasting, you may feel a newness of life, a lightness of soul and, thus be particularly well-disposed to do an interior scan for trouble spots.
To that end, I offer some paired statements – like scales into which you can mentally place some of your things. Notice whether your use of each thing resonates more with Freedom or Bondage. Then take steps to tip the scale toward freedom, untie the knot, change the way you use it. Each statement can apply to a variety of things, but I had these twelve in mind as things I, personally, need to ‘weigh’ regularly: food, alcohol, computer, desserts, friends, TV/movies, air conditioner, car, my imagination, books, and money. One final word on the right use of things: When you misuse, or use things less well, you increase your disposition to sin. When you bless them, they – actual things around you – help dispose you to receive grace! Here it is in the Catechism:
“Among sacramental, blessings (of persons, meals, objects and places) come first.” (CCC 1671) “Sacramentals…prepare us to receive grace and dispose us to cooperate with it. …There is scarcely any proper use of material things which cannot be thus directed toward the sanctification of men and the praise of God.” (CCC 1670)
Now I’ve learned from experience that the first thing that happens when I say, “Hey, the Catechism teaches that we should bless the things we use (CCC 1669: Sacramentals derive from the baptismal priesthood: every baptized person is called to be a “blessing,” and to bless. Hence lay people may preside at certain blessings; the more a blessing concerns ecclesial and sacramental life, the more is its administration reserved to the ordained ministry (bishops, priests, or deacons)” is that I’ll hear cautions about never, ever stepping into the role of a priest (I am NOT going there…the door is closed, Peter has spoken, I love that!) and not to think I’m ‘creating Sacramentals,’ and ‘only a priest can make the Sign of the Cross’. Okay, calm down everybody! The priesthood of all believers “derives from” our High Priest, Jesus Christ. This little possibility that our own little invocation, prayer, utterance that springs from awareness and gratitude and trust in God is not the stuff heretic alerts should be made of.
I don’t advise anyone to go around thinking they have magic powers…only whatever it is Jesus meant when He said we would do greater things than He had yet done. Somehow it resonates with me that those things are going to be greater because they are smaller, like blessing my computer, my garden, my art supplies. He seems to have allowed me in to play at asperging the world while His own Divine Mercy accomplishes the great washing by the blood and water flowing from His side. I have not found a definitive statement about not making the Sign of the Cross, but am willing to be instantly stopped in the practice by my bishop, or priest if it is in any way not the done thing. As I make that Sign over my world, I am praying, “God, please bless this notebook, this book, this stove, this car, this printer, etc…” and am never thinking I have just turned them into official Sacramentals. They do, however, now possess a heightened significance for me that, hopefully, disposes me to receive God’s beautiful grace. As I look around I am reminded to give God glory in profundis, and to be hopeful that my use of each little thing in my sphere will somehow magnify and please Him.
My Pavilion
I often think of Mary as a place where I can go to be held, to be with Christ in simplicity. Psalm 27:5 speaks of God as hiding me in His pavilion, His sacred tent, His pavilion, His tabernacle. This shelter, set upon a rock, keeps me safe in the midst of my enemies. The battle may rage around me, but God fights for me with His strong arm while I am at rest – the rest of the eternal Sabbath of the Lord’s presence.
I have the sense of seeing, there, a matrix of woven light that reminds me of the invisible support of the Holy Wisdom, whose light filters through the whole fabric of Creation. That light is intangible, but fully three-dimensional, filling the space with a kind of infrastructure that holds open space, within, for me, for the growing Body of Christ. This place is silent, but vibrates with life, with light. Sound is not far away, but I am buffered from a glory I cannot yet bear. The strands of light here are like crystal strings humming with a music played far away.
Meeting with Christ there, in a womb un-skewed, unstained, un-torn by sin, is to meet where He is most fully realized – Incarnate Word barely veiled by flesh. It is enough for Him just to be, and the effect of His presence upon me is great peace and joy at just being. Love holds me afloat like an ocean, pulsing with the gentle waves of a motherly heartbeat.
Delicious, profoundly restful, beauty-full.
Know any Podcasters who Need Guests?
Quantum Confusion
In my Freedom Trilogy (You, Free, Full Spectrum Freedom, and 3D Freedom), I speak of the human person as ‘three dimensional,’ rather than as the flattened, linear being he has been reduced to by post-Enlightenment scientific materialist reductionism. I’m not the only one talking about the reduction of man. Joe Dispenza has been called to my attention because he, likewise, speaks of our being ‘dimensional,’ and ‘non-linear’. I was familiar with Dispenza, having read his book The Placebo Effect and found it fascinating. I’ve now spent hours listening to him to see where we might resonate with one another. When he sticks to new scientific discoveries, it’s a thrilling ride. I fall away as he makes a new religion of it all.
I want to be on record as cautioning Catholics against uncritical acceptance of his (and similar) work. He and I, it would seem, both are interested in inviting people to find greater health, coherence, free agency, and happiness. The appeal of his work is, in part, the truly fascinating documentation of the scientific basis for the claim that our thoughts have tremendous potential to change our physical, emotional and relational experiences.
My problem with his approach, though, is that it offers escape from, rather than correspondence to reality; manipulation for power and gain, rather than glorification of God; and self-making rather than co-operation with God’s work in the human person for His own, greater, purposes. While I find much to disagree with, there are a few points of cautious agreement. I would definitely not recommend his work to those without mature, Catholic discernment. By ‘Catholic’ I mean, ‘actually Catholic,’ and not just ‘Christian,’ because it is clear to me that any fragment of the full deposit of faith will not be a sufficient ground for (and might be a dangerously shaky ground for) engagement with ideas like his that so closely approach received truths before bending them. In fact, much of the force driving uncritical acceptance of ideas like these is coming from a fractured Christianity looking to the quantum field for coherence instead of to the Church.
I, like many writers today, speak of ‘freedom,’ ‘energy,’ ‘hopeful futures,’ ‘resonance,’ ‘transcendence of past emotions,’ ‘cognitive restructuring of habit patterns,’ ‘neuroplasticity,’ and ‘wholeness.’ Unlike most, I do not believe that the ‘possible human’ is possible without God, or that there is any place in thought or on earth to stand as secure as His Church, for the full realization of human beings.
My ‘3D Free’ human person is coherent as one single personality over time, within the being of God, and may not look ‘highly evolved’ or ‘successful’ or even ‘healthy’ here on earth. His soul develops along with his virtue, his correspondence to reality (not his projection of self onto reality), and his love of God. Love (a Person outside him, not a feeling inside him) is the context of his being, and Love reaches toward him whether he reaches toward higher consciousness or not. His destiny is to be raised above the angels into eternal communion with the Person who made him. He will never be God, thank God, but will have opportunities while in time to grow better able to enjoy the adventure of life in co-operation with God. The only point of entrance into the divine mind is His own Word, Jesus Christ, who spoke definitively from the Cross the words continuously resounding through His Body to this day: Thy will be done.
I actually think that some of what quantum physics is probing is the ‘matrix of Holy Wisdom,’ pre-material structure of correspondences between the persons of the Trinity – a ‘web’ of law pulsing with the light generated by the Love flowing ceaselessly between them. If man is made for correspondence to reality, then it would seem he would eventually arrive at, at least, the outer boundary of this interior life of theirs to find his own earthly reality limited by comparison. It may be that in growing toward our destiny we will, collectively, come into possession of laws that supersede without negating all we know as natural law.
The havoc we’ve wreaked as we’ve learned to manipulate the laws of the material creation should teach us not to grasp too quickly for more. I believe that the protection of the Church, of Sacraments, of Christ’s interior presence and of clear doctrine is a necessary support even for approach to what may be a ‘dimension’ of seemingly incomparable ‘power and glory.’ The phrase, “To God be all glory and power” has never been so clearly needed as now, when man is on the verge of hacking his own brain. Those who enter this new territory unprotected and naively believing they are alone there, without non-material enemies who may more readily take advantage of them the more they dissociate from concrete reality may find it very difficult to maintain self-coherence and sanity as they pursue ‘possible futures’ that glitter with wish fulfillment.
Sadly, there are those I would love to reach who will discount my books out of hand because I approach this territory of self-realization, realization of hopeful futures, full human dimensionality. I use, for instance, the words ‘quantum shift’ to discuss the amazing power of the moment when a man becomes an actor, able to respond to reality, instead of an object being crushed by reality. Some won’t make it past the word ‘quantum,’ and such is life.
What follows are more specifics about the things that repelled and those that attracted me in Dispenza’s work. I believe that his intentions are good, and that he is dangerous not because of all his errors, but because of so much that is right in the mix, thus causing confusion. These are my own listening/reading notes and thoughts, and have not been formalized into full arguments. Take them as suggestions about what to consider, rather than as systematic documentation or proof. Please avoid his teachings unless you clearly understand the ‘red flag warnings’ below.
RED FLAGS
Gnosticism
JD offers the possibility of gaining access to higher consciousness, enlightenment, divine mind via special teaching, initiation, spirit guidance; notice that the speaker, once famous, offers himself to an increasingly narrow in-group of higher-paying true believers; if you currently have a ‘lesser evolved spouse,’ for instance, you might need a change to fit your new higher consciousness Note: Catholic teaching is available and accessible to all and is life-changing, life-supporting and life-giving to a degree never matched in history.
The Guru overrides the wariness of his listeners
JD subtly groups those who are ‘in’ and ‘out’, constantly asks “Are you with me?” cautions listeners against their feelings of wariness, a non-believer in the group might ruin the vibe for everyone in the collective mind…chilling cutting out of those with ‘lower consciousness’ Understandably, when the message is ‘believe rightly’ and you will get what you want, it’s important that our desires don’t clash (I can’t give you this power if you’re liable to use it to get something I don’t want you to have.), thus our beliefs can’t clash or we won’t evolve. Note: Jesus welcomes all, isn’t threatened by those who don’t believe. It’s interesting that the best support in the world for a society with respect for a plurality of beliefs is…drumroll please…Christianity. It wasn’t even a possibility in the pre-Christian world.
Escape Limitations
anything will be possible to those who believe and cultivate the power to create reality, the escape of the limitations of personality, past, concrete reality is a constant theme here; Note: true freedom is possible because of limitations. In the ‘reality’ the Church is talking about, the concrete/natural is woven together beautifully with the ideal/divine in such a way that we do not escape from, but rather reconcile our persons to, God.
Escape Dogmas, Doctrines
JD wants to achieve a direct connection to the divine; he is decidedly anti-religion and I have an article of his in which he advocates getting rid of the ‘big three’ by any means necessary…clearly we are interfering with man’s evolution; Note – God (a person, not an impersonal ‘divine mind’) has made Himself known through the incarnation of His Son, who is now present to the world (Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity) through the mediation of His Body, the Church.
Evolution of Super-Man as Dogma
JD et al understandably seek divinization, but without a god to bow to. Man will become his own god, create himself, sustain his own being by use of knowledge, power, technique. Note: growing up in all things unto Christ is the hope of the Christian and the path toward his divinization – it requires the person’s co-operation with the action of God upon the person; co-operation involves seeking knowledge of God as He is, in His Church, in His Eucharistic Presence, whereas this self-evolution sounds more like grasping at the possibility of the risen self without going through the identification with the crucifixion of Christ; I am not evolving to become a superman, but growing up to become, at my ‘highest’, a unique and unrepeatable realization of Christ, through whom I will continue to live as an individual not because of my highly evolved being, but because of His atoning sacrifice. So this desire for divinization is awareness of a possibility God himself designed…but to approach it outside his own ‘way’ of approach is dangerous.
Surrender
the experience of the ‘highest consciousness’ is one of utter abandonment to the experience of being, but this is a human person ‘angelicized,’ transcending the actuality of matter; Note: we are meant for surrender only to the Lord God Jesus Christ. Our souls long for this union with Him and then are prey to offers of surrender-experience that get around the actual surrender to Him. Such substitutes can be overwhelmingly positive as physical or emotional experiences (like concerts, drug use, illicit sex, etc…) and thus prevent our reaching out for the only thing that truly satisfies the soul’s longing for him. Self-generated gamma-wave states are not necessarily bad, and may do the body or mind some good, but the danger is that people are accepting them as the ultimate experience. The ‘enlightened ones’ are less and less able to turn and bend down to the reality of the life they lead on the ground, with actual people, serving unenlightened ones, or experiencing tremendous distress or difficulty.
Leaving the Self Behind
the utopia of ‘higher consciousness,’ even when it seeks physical health, seems aimed at the unmaking of individual selves; the teachings hit at the very notion of a single coherent self and lure listeners toward the ‘possibility thinking’ of continuous self-reinvention and merger into the collective mind; Note: the self is meant to be coherent over time, into eternity; so many voices are suggesting to people that they can be any number of selves/personalities and can write any story…I am not meant for ultimate mergence into some universal mind, or being, or force, but to become fully myself, inhabiting the destiny God has held for me in His own being since the moment in time when I was conceived and He gave me being.
Creating the Future
sounds like the ‘name it and claim it’ gospel…yes, we affect the future by our ideas and actions now, and yes, through prayer the Holy Spirit can “untie knots” caused by past events, but this sounds more like an attempt to control the future, or to have power over the future…I prefer to be truly peaceful by finding perfect trust in God to bring the self into encounter with whatever reality will help open my path into the future that leads to my destiny IN GOD…If you combine JD’s ‘great future’ with his ideas that religions should be squashed at all cost and that the less-evolved deserve whatever they get and you have a recipe for some very non-loving acting-out of people who’ve been taught they should get whatever they want in life.
Contempt for Means
I think protestant and secular culture have in common a ‘contempt for means’ that makes the Catholic, Sacramental way of being seem muddied with intermediaries and material stuff that interfere with ‘direct experience’ of God. So, the world is crying out for ‘experience’ and every marketer is feeding it to them through star intermediaries and material, imagistic, sensorial contexts crafted to be so immersive only the ‘direct experience’ remains embedded in the brain as pleasure-connected-to-product without the interference of the verbal, judgemental mind. People are sitting ducks for im-mediacy.
Mere Spirituality
lots of love and spirit and ecstasy and mysticism in these teachings; no allusion at all to any kind of angelic beings also operant in the ‘quantum field,’ so either the angels are not playing this game, or the demons are hiding until the boundaries of self are utterly broken down..Materialist vs Trans-materialist/spiritual are opposite extremes that could lead to worship of mammon, worship of …the quantum field? The possible self? An angelic guide? A guru? Note: no dogma, no doctrine = no ground, no foundation. All of this can be easily spiritualized to fit with any religion except ‘the big three,’ which may be why they seem so hostile and need to be gotten out of the way.
Imagination
the process JD teaches is the cultivation of an image of a desired-for Something, so vividly that the emotions of having received/achieved it are generated in response to the image. This is an amplification of the common, garden variety process by which people realize imagined ideas every day. One’s idea must touch the desire/emotions in order that the will be engaged to move toward the good. This is not a bad thing in itself, but how many people have the maturity necessary to both focus so intensely on an imagined good and also relinquish attachment to it? That detachment is a further necessity that brings even a great idea into tension with the will of God and the resolution of that tension is what actually ‘grows’ the person.
I worry about the greater context made possible by the extension of self imaginatively into the ‘quantum field,’ the future, or the field of all possibilities. Unless it becomes a vessel for the light of God, or an structure that leads upward to Truth, a context can become a trap (such as music, imagination, systematic theology) that serves for temporary expansion, but ultimately limits your horizons. In my Freedom Trilogy, I try to show, graphically, how the imagination can extend us forward, but also be a dangerous limitation in our encounter with reality.
I worry that your strongly imagined, filled-with-the-requisite-emotional-assent, intention may become a demand. If you demand to have what you imagine, you are not free. Your interior disposition prevents your acting in freedom to realize that idea, or move toward that desired good. I would never counsel you to fixate on developing a better mental image of what you want, because of this danger. You can become a slave to a strongly held idea.
Attraction
People are understandably fascinated by the scientific proofs that science doesn’t explain everything. A window has been opened in the bunker of materialism and a fresh breeze is blowing in. The romantic reaction to the scientific reductionism of the modern world has a new voice in quantum physics. Christians need to speak this language, but offer the necessary correctives I perceive in the one word, Church. With Jesus in John, Chapter 17, I pray that his people will be one – united under His headship to serve the world with clarity and confidence born of the Spirit’s protection of our doctrines and our unity.
Thanks for your attention to this. Please let me know what you think. I am very much open to cordial discussion of all these thoughts, and of those in any of my books.
Poets Can Be Troublemakers
Happy Birthday New Book!
Full Spectrum Freedom is ‘live’ and available at Amazon!!
More on Vain Imagination
Scripture tells us to “cast down vain imaginations,” so let’s get to it.
“Vain” isn’t just about vanity, though spending lots of time imagining your own beauty surely calls for some “casting down.” “Vain” is also “to no avail,” or “purposeless,” and those imaginations are, I think, the ones most important to dispense with.
Cast Out the Clutter
Your imagination is a tremendously important asset, whose order and spaciousness and ‘tone’ contribute to your effectiveness. Cluttered with vain imaginations, that zone of formation is compromised considerably. Just as you de-clutter by asking each item what it’s there for, how useful or important it is, where it actually belongs, and how it justifies the space it takes up, inquire of your imaginations as to their purpose.
Imagined Virtue
Discard imaginary virtue and heroics. They too easily distract from the development of real capacity to act virtuously. Needing lots of imaginary heroic action points to a sense of life-impotence, or perhaps fears that need to be faced. Discover what the payoff is for you. Meet the need through prayer and Sacrament and growing up, and discard the useless daydreams of Giving Selflessly and Saving the Day.
Imagined Future
Discard imaginary projection into the distant future. It’s helpful to be able to extend a bit into the real and near future imaginally. How else would we plan Thanksgiving dinner, get the remodeling done, arrange the logistics of a vacation, or practice the words we’ll say in freedom next time we face the same challenge? What is not helpful is to go farther and farther out into the possible results of today’s actions, the possible assaults to tomorrow’s freedom, the (vain) attempt to control factors of future reality that do not yet exist.
I know for a fact that imagining the time after I’ve forgiven someone a) delays my forgiveness and (when I go too far and picture a glowing new relationship with lots more self-giving and vulnerability) b)presents post-forgiveness hurdles I simply am not prepared to jump in this moment. Whoa, girl! Get back to the reality you face now, and simply respond to it. Do not move ahead imaginatively into “ungracious time” (my poetic way of saying there is no grace in imaginations, so the whole exercise is vain anyway as it discounts the most enormous factor of reality).
Imagined Strategies
Discard scenarios and strategies. Granted the need to think about the problems you face and the ones you expect to face in the near, real future. Your imaginations become vain when they become attempts to generate a playbook for every possible move someone else makes. Those others? They have become characters in your drama and you are responding to their virtual reality, not the whole, mysterious, radiant, image-of-God-bearing reality of their real presence. You? If you find yourself on the imagined stage of your own dramas, get out now! This is a dangerous place to be! The more you rely on media (books, TV, movies, music) to ‘carry’ your Self into imagined action, the easier prey you are to vain imaginations, and vice versa.
Imagined Scary Scenes
Discard imagined fear, and fearful scenarios. The need to dwell on fearful scenes is some self-defense against real and fearsome possibilities. The problem is that, as you generate the imagination, you also trigger your body’s response and flood yourself with hormonal ‘fear practice’! Instead of getting ready to meet something scary, you are compromising your capacity to meet what actually does come up in reality! Maybe, too, your rehearsals become self-fulfilling prophecies your imagination speaks into being first within you and then in your real experience. Of course I am not saying that bad things happen because people imagined they would, but it is absolutely the case that what people spend time imagining is more likely to become realized than what they haven’t thought up yet.
Imagined Replays
Discard replays as quickly as possible. It’s important to evaluate the results of your action. How can you learn from success or failure without a mental ‘debrief’ in which you go back over what worked, what didn’t , where the pivotal choice points occurred and why, etc…? Once those imaginations have served real purpose by giving you insight into your own behavior patterns, relationship dynamics, better ‘best practices,’ specific weaknesses that need to be addressed, and the like, let them go. They only serve to titillate your emotions, lock you into the past, cause new fears, or occupy you in imagined virtue and self-defensive strategy.
It’s Up to You!
Ultimately, you’ve got to do your own de-cluttering. One man’s Rube Goldberg machine is another’s cutting edge invention; one’s drama is an escape from life while another’s is an award-winning new novel. Just as there is no objective basis for saying whether to hold on to Great Grandpa’s Boy Scout badges, there is none for deciding about the clutter in your mental attic. But do attend to it, before that space has no room left in it for all the non-vain imaginings of which you are capable!
How to Get Nothing
Find Your Remove
I can be in unity with anyone, at some remove. Perhaps I’m not your cup of tea, or we just don’t sync well, or you’re just ‘not that into’ me, or a little bit goes a long way in our relationship. It may just not be our time yet. We both will continue to grow and change, and maybe the Great Dance will find us, someday, back in phase for a few steps. Or maybe not.
Ultimately, in the kairos of the Eternal present, we’ll reconnect. Meanwhile, we are held in the Spirit’s tether – his net of relationship. It’s a dynamic tension that generates a context between us – a space that we (or even just one of us, with the Spirit’s help) can fill with love.
In the comedy movie Hallalujah Trail, one character tries to keep step with others surreptitiously. The name he gives this maneuver is “maintaining detached contact,” and it’s what I love to do when I feel you’ve dumped me, abandoned me, blown me off, ignored me, or otherwise let go of our unity.
I know from experience that I don’t need your cooperation to hold you in my heart, to fill the space between us with love, to let my yearning for you become a prayer, to offer the pain of separation for your blessing.
If I’m maintaining detached contact with you, watch out! The Spirit is ever at work drawing us closer. One of these days, you may be surprised to find yourself wanting to see me, write to me, touch base with me, or remembering me fondly. I wish you well, and look forward to our reunion.
Going Home Empty Handed
Prodigality has two meanings:
to fritter away your riches and to give generously of them.
The Father of the Prodigal Son actually exhibited prodigality that pours itself out to provide. The Son fulfills that generous impulse in both the abandoned (if impudent and imprudent) spending, and in the trust implicit in showing up at his door empty handed.
Emptying the Self
I want, in a sense, to show up at my heavenly Father’s door ‘empty-handed’. I hope to be purged of my pickiness, crochetiness, self-centered-ness, defensiveness and pusillanimity, among other things. These are all problematic for anyone, but are especially nasty in old people. We don’t suddenly acquire the qualities, but they show up more in old-age ‘relief’. I want to let go of all that I carry, all that I’m attached to, all that impedes my opening to receive Him.
Empty Money, Impotent Money
The Prodigal and his older brother both had lessons to learn. One refused to own the greatness of his Father’s house and move its riches generously into celebration and licit enjoyment. The other abstracted money from its context in home, community, and responsibility, to ‘move’ it impotently. Whether merely spilled, or merely saved, money (as token of the Father’s character and intentions) is useless.
Two Sons, Two Lessons
The word ‘prodigal’ came up in a writing group recently – focus for an off-the-cuff 5-minute writing flow exercise. Here’s my take:
He gave it all away, yes…squandered it, maybe…lost it, no – because in the waste was the wielding of what was his. In the prodigality was the essence of the Father’s generosity. In the life with the poor and lowly was the movement of the Father’s heart: out, through his son, beyond the bounds of place and property, his yearning, his watchfulness, his hope filing the newly enlarged space between the sonship of pure love and the sonship of pure law; of begetting and begging; of justice and mercy. In that space between the Father who gave all and the son who spent all was a world of hurt and need, now reunited in one embrace to Comfort and Fulfillment!
Oh, long-suffering son of the house, how the Father longs for you to know the joy of prodigality!
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