One of my favorite authors is Barbar Brown Taylor.  She was named one of the top 20 preachers in America.  A few years ago she wrote a very honest memoir of her decision to leave her role as pastor called Leaving Church.  She is a person who was willing to ask the hard questions and see where the path would take her.  I resonate with her conclusion:

“I thought that being faithful was about becoming somone other than who I was, in other words, and it was not until this project failed that I began to wonder if my human wholeness might be more useful to God than my exhausting goodness.”

This deeply reflective author bring to us some wonderful questions to consider about our communities of faith and self.  This weeks installment of Walking with Questions calls us to stop and ponder the type of communities and relationships that we are a part of and are creating:

“What if people were invited to come tell what they already know of God instead of to learn what they are suppose to believe?  What if they were blessed for what they are doing in the world instead of chastened for not doing more at church?  What if church felt more like a way station than a destination?  What if the church’s job were to move people out the door instead of trying to keep them in, by convincing them that God needed them more in the world than in the church?”

What if we could listen more?  What if we had the courage of Barbara to unlearn what we think we know rather than continuing to look for things that confirm what we already think?

The journey is about two things.  One getting to know yourself in a clearer way without all the props and distractions we put around ourselves to hold us up.  But the second reason is the most important I believe, to learn to ask different questions.  We do this by coming into contact with people and places that we have never encountered.  The very act of walking into the unknown empowers the ability to question or at least encounter uncertainty which is a prerequisite for asking good questions.  Perhaps our most important life long adventure is to ask better questions.  It is our ability to ask questions that will release us from what we think we know in order to be open to what we could know.

For the next few posts I am going to introduce some people who have made me ask different questions in my life.  I will offer some of their perspective in hopes that you will go and engage them more fully on your own.  The companions you invite into your journey will make all the difference in both the way of the journey and destination you are likely to reach.

So, here we go…

“Christianity is the proclamation of the end of religion, not of a new religion, or even of the best of all possible religions.  And therefore if the cross is the sign of anything, it’s the sign that God has gone out of the religion business and solved all the world’s problems without requiring a single human being to do a single religious thing.  What the cross is actually a sign of is the fact that religion can’t do a thing about the world’s problems—that is it never did work and it never will…” Robert Capon – The Mystery of Christ and Why We Don’t Get It

What is beyond religion?  What would my life be like if I let go of religion?  What do I think I need to do to gain the acceptance of God?

Some time ago, I was reading through the announcements at my church.  Something stood out to me.  If I participated with everything that applied to me, I would have come to eight to ten meetings to talk about God and the Bible.  It seems that we have come to spend much of our time in our communities of faith talking about faith. There is a world of difference between hearing a truth and experiencing a truth. 

 There is a  passage in John’s first letter that calls us to reach beyond talking about our faith and actually experience it as we love others.  But to do so, we must begin in a very paradoxical place. 

             “My dear children, let’s not just talk about love; let’s practice real love.  This is the only way we’ll know we’re living truly, living in God’s reality.  It’s also the way to shut down debilitating self-criticism, even when there is something to it.  For God is greater than our worried hearts and knows more about us than we do ourselves.  And friends, once that’s taken care of and we’re no longer accusing our condemning ourselves, we’re gold and free before God!  We’re able to stretch our hands out and receive… (I John 3:18-22, The Message).

 The place we must begin to live in our faith is being honest with ourselves.  John reminds us that what limits us most is our own doubt and insecurity about ourselves. Our fear keeps us from reaching out, from fully engaging those around us, from really experiencing the grace that has been extended to us. 

 Too often we come to our churches wrestling with our own shortcomings.  We worry they will be revealed.  We worry that we do not measure up.  We too often come thinking we are here to prove something.  I wonder if John, as he was writing this passage, thought of another scene many years before when Jesus was on bended knee beginning to wash the feet of his friend Peter.  Peter struggled with believing the mystery of grace.  He did not want to be served.  He did not feel worthy.  And that is the point.  When we are worried about our worth we cannot receive the love and acceptance that Jesus freely extends to us and we cannot pass that love on to those around us.

 We are asked to come and trust what cannot possibly be true.  We are asked to trust that eating a little piece of bread and drinking a small sip of wine brings life to our spirit.  We are asked to believe that no matter what we bring in terms of our state of faith, God has already seen and known this.  It does not stop him from loving us.

 So as you reach out and consider the people around you, consider that reaching as a reminder that all has been made right for us with God and if we trust it, with each other.  There is more going on than we can understand.  Our job is not to explain it only to trust it.  As we receive what we can see, bread and wine, trust that we are also receiving what we cannot see – unconditional acceptance. When we truly trust this we will no longer live separated and divided.  We will live at ease with God and our neighbor and that will change the world.

Pilgrimage is one of my new passions.  It first got my attention when I read a book by Paul Boers — The Way is Made by Walking.  It was his reflections on walking the 500 mile Camino De Santiago route in Spain.  When I read it, I heard the urge to go for a long walk.

Boers defines pilgrimage as “religiously motivated travel for the purpose of meeting and experiencing God with hopes of being shaped and changed by the encounter.”  This was my hope this summer as I set off for Melrose, Scotland with my daughter.  Our 65 mile walk took us through many villages, past castles and abbeys.  We began and ended on two of the most famous Celtic thin places (places where it seems the phyical and spiritual worlds are closer and there is a history of interaction with God in those places).  I did not know what to expect from a thin place.  Would I hear a voice?  Would I get ideas that I had not before known?  The answer is I experienced a deep emotional openness and peace.  The night before we started our walk, we were in Melrose whose abbey was just a few feet away from our bed and breakfast.  I woke up in the middle of the night with a longing to return to a place that I had not yet left.  As I read my journal now, the question I had then was “Is this what the relationship God has called me to?  Nothing spectacular, simply a place to sit and rest?

For me, the pilgrimage is a place to find healing in the ordinary.  I can do nothing each day but put one foot in front of the other until I finish my days task.  I cannot change my circumstance only contiue on as the path leads me.   Each day I am given resurrection as my sleep turns my tiredness and brokenness into strength for another day.  I started our journey with a deep sadness and a hope for an encounter.  I ended with healing and peace.  The encounter was not spectacular or awe inspiring.  It was a stillness that came from the walk.  I continue each day to yearn for my next walk and just maybe another day in Melrose.

Where are you going?  What do you wish to encounter?  What adventure would bring you peace? Have you taken a pilgrimage? What is it about this experience that grips my heart and changes me?

As I looked behind me, I could see the top of the oak tree my long and slender platform extended from, shake and twist with every move I made.   Looking forward, I could see way below me the bottom of the ravine where it appeared the open maul of the earth was ready to swallow me.  I heard the metal clink as the karabiner gate closed into place. Immediately it hit me; the weight of the cables pulling me towards the edge.  The harder I resisted, the greater the tension on the swing cables and the stronger the draw to the edge.  I was faced with a decision at that point in time. On one hand, I could allow my fear to keep me frozen in place.  Although the status quo was unpleasant and unsustainable, I knew what I had there on the end of that platform.  The other choice was to keep resisting the source of my fear and let the weight of the cables do their job and pull me into the unknown where after the second or two of weightless uncertainty, I would experience the adventure of a lifetime.  I am glad I took the leap.

This same scenario could be a description of my life of faith.  I have had different sources of fear that motivated me towards God.  At first it was the fear of judgment and punishment.  I am glad that God had something much better in mind.  My experiences, both structured and planned as well as those happenstances of life, have continued to question the skewed vision I had of God.  Each time I was willing to question what I thought I knew, I discovered a clearer picture of the truth (Robinson, 2009).  What causes you fear?  Where might it seek to lead you?

Nearly twenty years ago now, I was sixty feet up an eighty foot cliff.  I found myself paralyzed by fear and uncertainty.  The person on the end of my rope was a nineteen year old who had never rock climbed before.  Although I knew the equipment would work and keep me safe, I did not have the same assurances about him.  Running out of strength, my mind clouded and I could not find a way forward.  In the next moments, I fell.  The rope held, as did my belayer, and I quickly completed the climb with little effort.

Looking back I see in this short encounter the essence of my experience on Frost’s “road less travelled”.  You see going down the less travelled path has been for me less some spectacular scenario and more simple choices. These choices are moments when I could have stayed trapped in what I knew or risk something unfamiliar; I was compelled into the unknown.  Whether it was the first time I started thinking for myself in high school rather than let teachers tell me what to do or start asking the tough questions about the faith and doctrine that had been programmed into me as a child, these were the points in time where my life path has been determined. 

Just like after falling on my climb, I realized that my fear was perceived rather than real, when I started listening to the restlessness, dissatisfaction and inconsistency in my set of beliefs about God and began asking different questions, I found that the fear I had about questioning what I thought was truth was more perceived fear rather than real fear.  I discovered that God was not afraid of my questions.  In fact, He was calling me into those questions. 

For me what has been at the end of the “road less travelled” is a real chance at life beyond fear.  The message that I heard and believed when I was young made me jealous, afraid, critical and distant just like the God I thought I had to serve.  What I discovered was freedom that did not depend on my performance but a peace to be found in the assurance of my acceptance by God.  For the first time, I have started liking myself, not fearing other people and experiencing something of the deeper mystery of God’s actions for humanity (Robinson, 2009) . What questions are you being called into right now?

“If the world is saved, it will not be by old minds with new programs but by new minds with no programs at all” (Quinn,1999).

This quote has stayed with me now for over a decade.  There is a haunting truth that I fear if we do not understand will result in much of the same, lifeless activity in the name of faith.  It has been the words of Eugene Peterson which has helped me understand the perilous nature of programs.  Spiritual formation, coming to understand and trust who God says we are, is a relational work.  The most important things in life: trust, love, forgiveness, compassion, acceptance are all relational. 

Programs are not.  Programs are efficient, clean, planned and antiseptic.  They are planned around abstractions and goals primarily of one person who wants to change other people.  Programs, no matter how well intentioned, are always focused on the planner and they leave the participant as generic receivers of the planners goodwill.  Programs are well organized means of relating without the need for real relationship.  We need “to recognize the unrelational ways set before us in the community—principles and abstractions, causes and programs—and see them for what they are, substitutes for love” (Peterson, 2005). They will not solve our toughest problems nor will they help us experience life and love.

So Quinn asks the necessary follow up question, “If programs don’t work, then what does?  What works so well that it never occurs to anyone to create programs to make it work?” I have come to a conclusion that the alternative to programs is process.  Perhaps even process is still too contrived but we live in a culture with schedules and slots of time rather than living in contexts where we naturally engage the natural processes of life together.  So process is an acceptable substitute for programs. 

Process does allow for some organization but it is an organization of the context and of starting points but not outcomes.  Process requires an adventurous courage and real relationship if done well.  Process asks questions without the need for any particular answer.  It sets out in a direction without a preconceived destination.  It requires ongoing listening and openness to what shows up in our interactions right now.  The content of process is not predetermined but co-discovered in our interactions together in a particular place at a particular time.  The outcomes are not reproducible on a mass scale for they are the product of a particular set of relationships.  Process honors mystery and thus makes it possible for us to encounter what we cannot even imagine.  What are you looking for in life?  Who is accompanying you in the search?  How are you searching?  Are you willing to be a new mind with no program?