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This month we are excited to share with you a sneak-peek of an upcoming series on the Beatitudes contributed by our own, Jim Peterson. Jim has given us permission to repost his introduction to the series with permission from HearkenBooks.org. This entry includes reflection questions at the end so we invite you to find some quiet time to sit with this entry. Let the images soak in and see what emerges for you. We will post other blog entries in the months ahead.  “The times they are a-changin” (Bob Dylan, 1964). Indeed, they certainly are in the social, economic, and political arenas, to name just three! There is much disruption and upheaval, not only in the U.S. but throughout the world. We feel overwhelmed and divided, uncertain about what to do, or what ground we should even stand on to formulate a response. Poll after poll seemingly confirms that in our current social divisions “never the twain shall meet.” With this blog we introduce a new monthly series drawing on what are commonly called the Beatitudes in the Christian scriptures. Our aim is to take a tour of these counter-intuitive teachings of Jesus, looking into what they might mean and how they might ground us in uncertain times such as our own. We will be sharing how we have encountered them in our personal lives, and in the process hope to stimulate reflection and even discussion on how these blessings might help “the twain meet.” For example, one beatitude says, “blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.” I have often thought of myself and been seen by others as a peaceful person. While sometimes I do serve to mediate informally and to bring a certain peacefulness to a conversation or situation, I also recognize that I can avoid necessary challenge, avoid saying hard things that need to be said, or avoid conflict even when that allows the problem to fester. What does it mean for me to be a “peacemaker”? Indeed, what is “peace” in the midst of differences of perspectives, experiences, beliefs, and values? And in our current social divisions? These are not easy questions or ones with ready answers, for me or, I expect, for you. The Gospel Context: The Sermon on Mount Beatitudes are found in two places in the Christian scriptures: Matthew 5:3-12, and Luke 6:20-26. These Beatitudes are only one segment of a larger set of teachings of Jesus, known as the Sermon on the Mount. The Beatitudes may be central to Jesus’ teachings but are not the entirety of them. And even the Sermon is in the context of the whole of the Christian and Hebrew scriptures. For example, Jesus, drawing on specific texts from the Hebrew scriptures, summarizes the whole of the “law” (or God’s desire for our way of acting and being) as “Love God with all you’ve got, and your neighbor the same way” (my paraphrase). Multiple Interpretations The Beatitudes have been explored in depth by commentators and biblical scholars and you may want to find and dig into some of these on your own. You will find that the interpretations and meanings ascribed to these teaching vary widely, perhaps reflecting the reality of the multilayered truths held in these teachings. For example, some interpret the Beatitudes as virtues: it is good to cultivate meekness, or peace-making — you will be blessed when you do. Others take a more radical approach — no matter what your state, whether mourning or hungering — you are blessed; God is with you no matter what. It is not our intention to add another such interpretation, but to share with you our own engagement with these texts and invite your personal exploration. Even in the Christian scriptures, the two versions (Matthew and Luke) have slight variations that indicate the different perspectives of these two gospel writers. Matthew phrases them with a more inward, introspective focus (“Blessed are the poor in spirit … “) whereas Luke take a more outward perspective (“Blessed are you poor … “). Clearly Jesus’ hearers heard them both ways (and perhaps in other ways as well). As original written texts were in Greek, the English versions we read are translations. These translations can cast different tones on our understanding as well. For example, what is most commonly translated as “blessed” can also be understood in translation to be “happy” or “fortunate,” among other things. “Fortunate are you [who are] poor…” has a different feel for me than “Blessed are you [who are] poor…”. I find it more jarring, harder to accept. What is most deeply true has a way of finding its way into the sacred scriptures of multiple faith traditions. This is true of the Beatitudes as well as such teachings as The Golden Rule. Where we are able, we will bring in texts from other faith traditions that affirm, expand, or cast a different and useful shade of meaning on these teachings expressed in the Beatitudes. Counter cultural Perhaps what makes the Beatitudes so compelling, and the focus of so much interest, is how radically counter cultural they are. They tend to turn accepted cultural norms on their heads. In their wording they acknowledge pain and brokenness, sorrow and hunger, persecution and conflict; and these are not just recognized as common human experiences but are called “blessed.” This is not what we tend to think or want. They echo other sayings of Jesus, such as “the last shall become first,” and those who lead shall do so by becoming servants. All of this suggests that there is a deeper gift, grace, or wisdom to be found in these sayings, but it takes some wrestling with the teaching to uncover what it may mean for us – collectively and individually. And this is the quest of our blogs. A Personal Perspective: Ours and Yours Our aim, then, is to share our own personal engagement with these Beatitudes, and to invite your own reflections. Thus, we will invite you, as you dig into our blogs on the Beatitudes, to wrestle with each of them out of your own life context and experiences and out of the broader societal context in which we find ourselves in these times. Bring to them your own questions; argue with them until they yield up their treasure for you. So now, in that very spirit, we invite you to pause and reflect on what you have read here and what is stirring in you:
 by Barbara Milligan
Would you like some help with your anxiety? I suddenly felt naked. And ashamed, like Adam and Eve in the garden, after they tasted the forbidden fruit. I wanted to hide under my desk. It wasn’t an audible voice, but a kind, gentle voice that I felt deep in my bones. And it sure wasn’t from me. I had asked the God who I believe in, who I also call Love, what I could focus on for the upcoming Lenten season. I was expecting a response—much later, not 5 minutes later—that was a bit safer, like finding new ways to pray or to love my neighbors. I did not feel ready to face a part of me that had been my lifelong companion. My whispered response surprised me. Is it really that bad? Instantly, my inner critic popped up and rolled her eyes. Oh, Barbara. That was pathetic. I had to agree. I was trying to hide the truth from myself and from the God who loves me and knows everything about me. I felt even more ashamed. Then I heard the first voice again. Would you like to be more free? I exhaled deeply. The anxiety was affecting my relationships, as well as creating conflicts within me, and trying harder to control it wasn’t working. I was trying to control the uncontrollable. And I needed God’s help. I also needed to reject my mother’s frequent, well-meaning advice to my three- and four-year-old self: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” My main fear about accepting God’s invitation to freedom was that the healing process would hurt. That fear was mostly irrational, because I’d already had many experiences in which God had lovingly healed childhood traumas, and the freedom I had experienced as a result was well worth facing the pain. So why would I not trust Love again now? I still don’t know the answer to that question, but I finally said yes. Yes, I want to be more free. Yes, I want your help with my anxiety. Yes, I choose to trust you to heal me. Yes, I’m willing to be changed. Yes, I believe you’ll be with me every moment, as you have been in the past. My God, my Love, help my unbelief. Although I can’t remember just how God began to heal me—the process, after many years, isn’t complete—I’m grateful to God for the gift of courage to come out of hiding and denial and to say yes. It was the start of becoming more free. * What would you like help with from God, or Love, or the Holy beyond yourself, although you haven’t asked for it? * What holds you back? * What might it be like for you to tell this Holy One about what is holding you back?  By Diane Pate
As I am writing, it is the day after Christmas, the day known around the world as the Feast of Stephen, the first Christian martyr. My first thought is that it’s a shocking story to celebrate immediately after Christmas, yet after some guided reflection, I am struck by how much this story underlines for me a word I’ve been considering this season and into the new year. That word is tension. In the Christmas story, as I see God breaking into the world as the “God with us,” there is tension between joy and sorrow. The baby born in a manger and heralded by angels and kings with great joy grew up to be despised, rejected and crucified, identified as “the man of sorrow, acquainted with grief.” Similarly, in Stephen’s story, Stephen, full of grace and power, did great wonders and signs among the people, yet he was stoned by those who could not withstand the wisdom and Spirit with which he spoke. Tension. In this violent scene, Stephen dies seeing Jesus standing at the right hand of God and he calls out for God to receive his spirit. Joy among the horror. Incarnation offers both promise and threat. Stephen hands over his life to Jesus as gift rather than as loss. I feel tension today as I wake up with a full stomach and a stack of thoughtful presents from yesterday’s family celebration, yet remembering that my brothers and sisters in many parts of the world are waking up to empty stomachs, fear and desperation. My culture’s ideology is inclined to success and strength, yet I am learning that God’s grace flows mostly downhill toward the lowly places. This grace is welcomed by the poor, the sick, the downcast and the outcast. This grace flows downhill in my life where I am humble, weak, vulnerable and poor. I am blessed by the many places where I am strong, loved, purposeful and valued, but I must remember to look for God’s grace with humility and trust as it rolls downhill to the lowly ash heap of my broken places. This is where the grace of God will appear. As I anticipate a new year, I want to hold that tension between joy and sorrow, knowing that the “God with us” is in both, and having an attitude of attendance and expectancy as God breaks into my daily and ordinary life. Coming into the new year, where do you see or experience tension in your life? Is there a lowly ash heap of your broken place that needs God’s grace? Where do you need humility and trust to receive God’s promise? What threat keeps you from accepting it?  By Kenton W. Smith, D.Min., DASD
3:36 AM. Awake…again. Mind working, whirling. Body tossing, turning. Spirit restless in the dark. In my mid eighth decade sleep is impoverished. But Presence is lurking. In the biblical narrative night is a time of brooding unaware of something unimagined being born in the unconscious. What I am writing is not routine, it is not in my training as a theologian or spiritual director. Something unorthodox taught me that chaos is something and a whole lot of something comes of it. I was trained as many of us in the spiritual arts of direction: silence, listening, the long loving look at the real, gazing, the Experience Circle, cataphatic/apophatic prayer, Lectio Divina, the Examine, Centering Prayer, journaling, walking in nature, the Rosary, Reformed spirituality, Catholic spirituality, Feminist spirituality, Ecospirituality, the Ignatian Exercises, discernment (personally and systemically), theopoetics, artistry, Taizé, et al. Like most of us I have practiced various forms of these disciplines for nearly thirty years. I was filled to overflowing…and then I was not. Maybe I was bored, distracted, trying too hard. Maybe I was aging out. Or maybe it was something Else. Something original, fresh born. In the early 2000’s I was a group facilitator in the DASD program at SFTS. Our instructor invited us to discover our own name for God. We could hold to one or all the names we knew for the Mystery we call God or search for something more personal, alive, enduring. I confess by this time the name of Jesus had worn out on me. Overuse I suppose, weaponized by some, commercialized by too many, hijacked by politicians. During an hour of silence it came to me, moving, stirring, energizing, bonding to my soul and body. Ever since I have been married to this secretive name*, never wavering, never fading, moving through me like a life form not my own yet my own. But I forgot the spiritual practice of naming. I kept on keeping on until I couldn’t. Twenty some years later it was 3:36 AM. Awake. Chaos inside. A cataphatic apophatic swirl of consciousness and unconsciousness streaming thoughts and images of God mixed with nonsense and longing. It felt raw unhinged like prayer without shape or discipline or practice. I forced myself to return to the mantra of my secretive name: Desire of My Heart*. Begging to fall asleep. Then out of nothing, something moving through from the other side, something unspoken, unheard, but present and active. It was just a notion like “Who am I to you, who do you say I am?” Only it wasn’t like that, it was more like a life-giving energy that sought me out. Over the next weeks the invitation returned nightly and “tapped” through my unconscious to my conscious knowing. These qualities are not theology or dogma which are attempts to describe God as a thing “[and] by their very nature are inadequate” but “can only be expressed in symbols or analogies(1)." Theology is faith seeking understanding(2) , spirituality is faith seeking intimacy (3). Intimacy with God is a whole lot of something. * The essential nature of God is Beauty. Beauty is a mystical presence (O’Donohue). All the world is beautiful, everyone is beautiful, I am beautiful. * The essential nature of God is Belonging. Everyone belongs. I belong. As a helpless introvert I have rarely known actual belonging. * The essential nature of God is Friendship. The existential nature of my knowing God is not that of superior but that of an equal. This is the meaning of incarnation, isn’t it? I am lonely for human friendship but this perceived experience of God is like a bond of mutual attraction. * The essential nature of God is Good. My (our) essential nature is good. Nothing about us can extinguish what God has created in us. *The essential nature of our nature is created Unfinished. Creation is unfinished. God is unfinished. I am unfinished. Like my secretive name for God these cautiously stated notions are mantras that grow my being and thriving in a way of knowing myself, seeing others, referencing my lived relationship to God. The mantras expand my consciousness of the world, its beauty, wonder, griefs and sorrows, work to be done. Are they enough? Of course not, the Mystery of God can only be expressed in limited terms and each of us will only have limited notions. I really can’t explain how this works, nothing is something, when I go into the unknown the unknown knows me and desires to be known by me. 1 Lucien Joseph Richard, The Spirituality of John Calvin (Atlanta, GA: John Knox Press, 1974), 186- 187. 2 Attributed to St. Augustine and St. Anselm. 3 Andrew Dreitcer, “The History of Christian Spirituality” (course notes, San Francisco Theological Seminary, DASD, 1998).  By Jim Peterson
Take a moment to gaze at the image. Really open yourself to let it in and stir you. Be fully present to the scene and immerse yourself in it for a while. What feelings arise? What memories are stirred? Does some inclination to respond come to you? 2 When we wake up or are struck awake fortuitously as I was by this scene, and truly pay attention -- when we pay real, deep attention -- we come to see the world in an altogether new way. We “see” what is deeper, more real, more alive. The world shimmers with light, vitality, and unity, all held in love. Poets have long known this and expressed it in ways that open us to this wonder. Two examples: O world, I cannot hold thee close enough! Thy winds, thy wide grey skies! Thy mists, that roll and rise! Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff! World, World, I cannot get thee close enough! Long have I known a glory in it all, But never knew I this; Here such a passion is As stretcheth me apart,—Lord, I do fear Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year; My soul is all but out of me,—let fall No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call. --Edna St. Vincent Millay: God’s World I have to wonder what scene Millay came upon that day. Certainly one comparable in awesomeness to the one I saw at Lake Tahoe. Such love does the sky now pour, that whenever I stand in a field, I have to wring out the light When I get home. --Saint Francis of Assisi Here Saint Francis does not seem to respond to an extraordinary scene that would catch the attention of all but the most jaded. He simply stands in a field, and sees with deep eyes. I recall an experience I had once when, upon going outside at midday for a walk I was suddenly struck by a light, a brilliance, an inner aliveness that seemed to pervade the bushes and trees nearby, and even to reside in everything I saw. It was as though the leaves were the very source of light, rather than mere reflectors. They seemed to dance and shimmer from an aliveness that came from within. The entire world seemed aglow. And I was a participant in it. I was indeed astonished! Though this experience lasted only a short while, I have since lived with the knowledge that what I saw then is always present, whether I notice it or now or not -- and I do get hints of it from time to time if I am paying deep attention. What astonishing experiences have you undergone that have opened you up to a deeper reality? Perhaps gazing on your newborn child, the wonderment of a new relationship, or … ? One of the barriers that keeps us blinded to the splendor of the world, is our practice of labeling what we see and, having labeled it, proceeding as though the label captures the essence. This is a useful practice for navigating our environment and our days -- if we stopped to truly see everything before us, we’d barely make it out of the house in the morning! But if we never stop and open to the wonder that is always all around us, we miss the heart of what it is to be alive. Sometimes it takes the actions of children to reawaken us to this wonder: the little girl reaching up to try to touch a butterfly, or a young boy delighting in making big splashes in a small puddle. My granddaughter wakened me to her wondering eyes once when (at about age 3) she lay down in the grass among the fallen autumn leaves, gazing up at the leaves still falling, and making “snow” angels with her arms and legs in the leaves already fallen. She saw just as Edna St. Vincent Millay saw. What habits or ways of making your way in the world have kept you from seeing with wonder and being astonished. Conversely, what opens you to being astonished? As you ponder these questions, may you find ways of letting your attentiveness lead you into an openness to astonishment. “Pay attention, Be astonished, …” Then, perhaps, you will be moved to “Tell about it!” Footnotes: 1 This is the second phrase in a three-phrase stanza (#4) of the poem, “Sometimes,” by Mary Oliver. The three together are: Pay attention; be astonished, tell about it! 2 The photo was taken at Lake Tahoe one afternoon. I was in a room overlooking the lake when I saw this happening outside and was so astonished, I quickly took out my iPhone camera and snapped the image. A pure gift, there for a moment and gone. |