Beginnings I: French Study (1993)

It seems that I am in a time of transition, with things circling back around in interesting ways. Just two weeks ago, I moved out of my apartment where I had lived for 13 years and into the apartment I lived in when I first arrived in 1994.


Looking back, I have found some of my journal entries from back when I started out on my overseas journey. This one is from the day I arrived in France for french study:

7/22/93

In France, August 1993

      Arrived today in France, eight years after my first SIL courses and a little over 20 years after my folks went to Lebanon.  It's hard to believe that I'm really a missionary now  (as if location really means anything).

      It's 11:20 pm and for some reason I'm still up.  I haven't slept in 30 hours or so.  I left DFW at 5:30 pm Wed (7/21/93) and arrived in Paris at 9:30 a.m.  Took a taxi with all three of my huge bags and my carry-ons to Le Gare d'Lyon.  Had to wait there for 4 hours.  I was really worried about getting all my bags from the airport to the station and on to the train.  A really nice French man ( a porter) helped me find a locker and get change to plug it.  He even took me to information.

      Looked everywhere for an elevator (to get my bags upstairs). Returned in despair to my locker, only to find one 5 feet away.  God provided (in advance)!

      The train ride was fun.  I kept catching glimpses through the trees as I rode backwards at high speed.  I never could get a good look - just snatches here and there, kind of like a movie preview.  Really beautiful scenery.  I literally caught my breath a few times.

      Leaving Oklahoma was strange.  It was odd to have so many things stripped away at once:  car, keys (one by one), library card, Blockbusters card....  I was left feeling naked, as if part of my identity had gone with those things.  I guess keys and cards give you access to places and things, there by giving you some importance.  Your car, of course, gives you total independence.

French Study retreat in Switzerland, Fall 1993

      Didn't really think about leaving until 2 days beforehand.  It was kind of like being in a dream.  Slowly, it sank in.  Not until I was on the plane to France, did I realize "I'm not going to see anyone I know for the next 4 years."

      Scared about the trip and traveling details, but I made it.  God's grace and presence were surely with me.  It's nice to be in the strong grasp of the "Swift Sure Hand" (Stephen Lawhead).  I guess next time I travel it will be easier because I'll be able to communicate some.

It is odd looking back on this time with 19 years of distance. I flashed back to the first train on my trip to France in May this year. And this time I helped someone who did not know any French figure out the train. And I still had more bags than I could handle!

I have identified the stripping away of keys many times since as part of the cycle of going back and forth between the US and Africa. You start with many keys, then "turn them all in" until you have none. Then you go to the other side and get your keys "back" from wherever you left them.

Emptying out my apartment earlier this month and getting rid of 80% of my possessions feels very similar to the stripping away of identity I felt in 1993.

It is comforting to read about my 1993 fears about going to a new place where I did not know ANYONE. Looking back, I can say that most of the people I know and interact with friends today I have made on this side of the ocean.

God is good! May I find my identity in him and in what he brings my way. 

Counterbalances to our Natural Impulses (Disciplines)

As I have read and reflected over the past 7 months on my sabbatical journey, the spiritual disciplines keep coming up, something God is calling me back to, or in some cases, to do for the first time. As I read more about various ones, I find that they almost always seem to be a counterbalance against some aspect of our nature, which when left to itself leads us far away from God. The disciplines are like course corrections, guiding us back to center.

It might seem that without these, you will keep going straight, but our sinful natures pull us off to the left, further and further off course, without us even noticing. These disciplines pull us back to the right until we are heading straight on course again. Like a rudder they counteract the winds and currents pulling us off our heading.  

In evangelistic Christian circles, we have a tendency to question certain disciplines as being legalistic and binding. The October monthly reading in Common Prayer: A liturgy for Ordinal Radicals ( p. 462) speaks to this:

“Growing up in a legalistic Christianity” many of us have developed a suspicion a discipline and order that can lead to a pretty sloppy spirituality. Reacting against the institution’s sickness, we easily find ourselves with little to help us heal from our own wounds, create new disciplines and carve out a space where goodness triumphs. People who are afraid of spiritual discipline will not produce very good disciples.”

So here are some of the disciplines I have run across. Not an exhaustive list, and perhaps better called Practices.

[1-4 are time oriented, operating on daily, weekly, annual or even longer cycles. The other ones are not really tied to cycles in the same way]

1.      Daily prayer at set times in the day - “the office” as practiced particularly in monastic communities. As protestants, we resist scheduling times to pray, but if we don’t, we often forget. Oddly enough, we don’t have to schedule daily meal times. We just stop and eat as a matter of course. Stopping to pray at set times regardless of what else is happening reminds  me that the work I’m doing in the kingdom is not paramount. I bend the knee to something that takes priority over what contribution I happen to be making at that moment. Prayer reminds us of our dependence on God and that the real fruit comes from him, not our efforts. It’s a way that God chooses to involve us in the outcomes, even though He is sovereign. St. Igantius says, “Work as if everything depends on God and pray as if everything depended on you.”

2.     Weekly Sabbath keeping is a counterbalance to the idolatry of control through work and technology and the quick pace they bring. Sabbath keeping – it provides a detachment from the workplace, from the world’s way of doing things, from our compulsion to take things into our own hands. Or as Eugene Petersen puts it ‘a weekly housecleaning’ that allows us to enter the week “uncluttered with idols”. It “erects a weekly bastion against the commodification of time, against reducing time to money, reducing time to what we can get out of it, against leaving no time for God or beauty or anything that cannot be used or purchased. It is a defense against the hurry that desecrates time.” (Christ plays in 10,000 places, p. 111)

3.      Lent is an annual time to look at our habits and weaknesses. We examine our habits and lifestyle for areas that may seem harmless but may not be and abstain from them. It is also a time to remember Christ’s suffering in the month leading up to Easter.  

4.      Pilgrimage – As mentioned, the first four disciplines take their place in daily, weekly, annual and higher cycles. Pilgrimage is on a very slow cycle, perhaps something you do only a few times in your life. It is also one that few people actually do. The book, Sacred Journey posits that pilgrimage is a counterbalance to Gnosticism, a heresy that says that the spiritual is “good” and the body and all things physical are “bad”.  Going on pilgrimage calls us away from the many aspects of our lives that we control (lodging, meals, who we interact with), to follow God where he leads us, out onto the periphery of society, rubbing shoulders with whomever, depending on the kindness of strangers, etc.  (See Journey's End, Wielding the sword for more from this book).

5.      Fasting is a way to take the focus off of things that distracts us from Jesus. In A man’s guide to the spiritual Disciplines, Partick Morley says “Fasting releases the participant from the confusion of competing voices. Your personality and temperament will affect the kinds of things that distract from your relationship with God. For me, it’s work. I’ve discovered fasting as a way to slow down my RPM’s protecting my focus on Jesus Christ.“ p. 121.

 

6.      Living in Community is a balance to living centered on self. The Benedictine monks placed a high-value on “Stability”: staying put to get somewhere. That is staying with the community of people God has called you to, rather than flitting from church to church and job to job when we come across someone or something we don’t like. If we wander from place to place, we become slaves to our wills and appetites.  God has placed us in communities and has called together “this particular constellation of people to speak and hear from each other what is needed for their mutual growth in Christlikeness.” (Monk Habits for Everyday People, Dennis Okholm, p 91)  Community forces us to practice our gifts, and roots out our selfishness, and develops character in us as we learn to love others, even the difficult ones.

7.      Lifestyle of Poverty – Intentionally living with less, sharing or having things in common. This can be a balance to our protestant work ethic and the materialism around is in the wider culture.

8.      Eucharist – The Lord’s Supper – communion. I keep bumping up against the mystery of the Eucharist, realizing its importance and reality on a level higher than just as a symbol. As someone who grew up Baptist, this is one of the disciplines we regularly do –not often enough, perhaps, but we do hold to it as a practice (ordinance) to be done as a church body.

Communion, as the name implies, is always taken in community, and thus is a counterbalance to our desire for independence, to experience God on our own terms – “just me and Jesus”.  You can’t to communion by yourself. You HAVE to have a group, and it is not even a select group of just folks you like. Everyone gets to come to the table, rich or poor.  Rob Bell calls it a “public display of solidarity wherein we come together and carry each other burdens, elbow to elbow.”

Thomas Merton talks of being “nourished by the sacraments”. What does this mean? The Eucharist seems to have a deep mystical meaning to so many, a mystical meal that nourishes us spiritually, but how? Rob Bell says it is a “time of centering ourselves on where our real strength lies. It is the center of the Christian experience, trust in Jesus crucified.”

It reminds us of Christ’s sufferings, God’s solution to our sin problem: “the fellowship of sharing in your sufferings and so somehow to attain to the resurrection from the dead”.

At one level, the Eucharist very obviously replaces the Passover meal, which was tied to the first covenant. Jesus established the Lord’s Supper as he ushered in the new covenant, sealed with his own sacrifice. The first meal was to be “a memorial day, keep it as a feast to the Lord, an ordinance forever”.  Exodus 12:14.  If Passover is no longer to be observed forever, then it must be only because it is superseded by this new meal.  And so we do what believers have done since that first Lord’s supper: Eat the bread, drink the cup. Receive Christ crucified.

Petersen says participating in the Eucharist “keeps our participation in salvation healthy and not just ‘our thing. It prevents salvation from “being dominated by our feeling and our projects”. (Christ plays in 10,000 places, p. 170, 202). We are tempted to make salvation about what we do, but communion is not about what we do, it is just about reenacting in the meal a picture of what Christ did for us. We proclaim the Lord’s death and receive over and over again what we cannot take or perform as our own.

Finally, the Eucharist keeps Christ before us as central to salvation. Otherwise we might think of Jesus only as our Great Example, Great Teacher, or Great Hero. When we take communion, we are not receiving just ideas ABOUT Jesus, but rather receiving life from Jesus.  (Peterson, p 202).

Okay, there they are -  8 practices or disciplines, among others. Lord, grant me the grace to practice these and stay on course to destination’s end.

Journey's End, Wielding the Sword

 

On Saturday at 1 a.m., I arrived back “home” in Mali after my sabbatical journey and more normal furlough activities in the US. It is hard to say whether I feel more at home in Mali or in the US.  After 18 years or so of going back and forth, it is almost like slipping back and forth between different realities that are both valid, but very different. When you arrive in one, it’s like putting on an old comfy pair of shorts that fit nicely and feel great. It’s like you never left. And then you go to the other and pull out the clothes that go there and say, “I love the way this sweater feels on a cold day.”

But there is a real sense in which you are never QUITE at home in either one.

I’ve just finished reading a book called, “the Sacred Journey” by Charles Foster, which looks at the ancient Christian practice of pilgrimage. I kind of bought the book on a whim, since I had a few other books in that series, and was about to set off on my bike ride across Oklahoma, which I didn’t think really qualified as a pilgrimage. However, there is much in the book that has rung true with my spiritual journey this last year.

Certainly being on furlough this time was a time of travel. I counted that I had slept in 38 beds over the 8 months I was in the US. I was on the road from March to mid-july, averaging about a week in each place I stayed. My car was so full, it looked like I was someone who had lost his home and was living out of it: summer and winter clothes, two bikes (one for each leg), books, some food, tools, speaking materials. . .

A pilgrim travels light. Jesus sent his followers out two by two and tells them not to take anything for the journey. “Don’t take a walking stick, a traveler’s bag, food, money or even a change of clothes.”

My luggage, the first time I packed it!

Oops! I tend to think I live rather simply compared with what a lot of people have, but I did have to repack my bags both in Denver and in Houston because they were overweight. I ended up with a trunk, a suitcase, a duffel and a carry-on and some hefty excess baggage charges. Now that everything is all unpacked, I wonder if all I brought is really necessary.

Foster says in his book

“We ask Jesus to be realistic in the constraints of the real world. We don’t have the luxury of wandering luggage free around the world.”

Jesus replies:  ‘WHY NOT? Come. I never said it would be easy. Try my system instead. Few ever have.’ ”

Foster argues that pilgrimage helps us leave behind pain, work and the humdrum of life. “It makes us vulnerable and different. Do something heroic and completely empty ourselves. Leaving things behind and discovering things, destroying things. Vomiting out the old!”

For me, this was very much the case on my sabbatical. There was healing of pain, laying aside of work concerns and distractions, and allowing God to speak through the people and places I encountered.

On the road, there is a stripping away of the things you thought you’d need. You find you really can live with a lot less. The things you thought that were a central part of your identity end up being fripperies.

You learn to depend on other people and to accept hospitality. When you are not living somewhere – not settled, you give up a lot of control, about where and when you will sleep, what you will eat, even where you will go to church.

 Jesus was a traveler and asks us to follow him – and not just on twitter. He traveled the margins of society and mingled with the marginal.

Jesus says: “The Kingdom of God is among you. Get up, get out, wake up, walk on, open your eyes. Ask for new eyes: you’ll see it if you are really looking for it… It’s on the road. I’m walking. Walk the road, too, with me. Reclaim the ability to be taken by surprise, and you’ll see it there, glistening, so brightly you will never believe you could have missed it.

The Kingdom of God “is all happening at the edges, in the forgotten places, in the places you can’t get to by car or where your auto insurers wouldn’t let you drive, among the people you’ve put out with the trash.” (Sacred Journey, p. 78).

Foster reminds us, as did Captain Jack Sparrow, that, “It’s not the destination so much as the journey.” Historically pilgrims seldom have epiphanies when they finally get to Jerusalem or Rome or wherever. “If epiphanies happen, they tend to happen in the anonymous no-man’s land en route.”

And then, eventually, you must return home, as I have. This should not be the end of the journey, but a beginning, a time to put into practice what you have learned on the road, to reintegrate that into your life and create something new and better.

RS Thomas says,  

“The point of traveling is not to arrive, but to return home laden with pollen you shall work up into the honey the mind feeds upon.” (p. 178 of Sacred Journey)

Foster tells the story of a man who was given a special sword. It disappeared suddenly and he was sent on a quest. He presumed the point of the quest was to find it, but really it was to get him to the point of asking “What am I going to use my sword for?”
Once you figure that out, THAT is why you have to go back home.

“Get up and go! Come back and wield your sword in the part of the kingdom where you can wield it best.”

This talk of wielding your sword resonates with one of my first blog posts where I wrote about my time in Dallas at the beginning of the journey. I learned that I needed to take time for myself, for reflection and contemplation and planning and rest, so that I could leverage my strengths (my sword) to serve others and advance the work in Mali.

Pray for me as I try to put into practice what I learned on the journey for the daily journey ahead.