Surviving an Emotional "Double-Tap"

I just finished my 5th men’s retreat in Chetek, WI (just north of Eau Claire). It was cold outside, but great on the inside -- with “burning hearts” we made another incredible journey deep into our lives and deep into the life of God.


Those of you who have being reading this blog know how committed I am to this all-volunteer men’s retreat called, “One Year to Live.” The first time I attended this retreat it helped change my life and, I think it’s fair to say, made me a better husband and father.

But now, looking back, it did even more for me. This retreat-experience and the men whom I befriended and befriended me (yes, I can say whom I love and who love me!) help save my life. Why do I say this?

Last summer after thinking that we had control of my wife’s cancer, it came raging back. Within a few weeks of that, one of my sons committed suicide in California. I was a cop for over thirty years. One thing we learned in combat shooting was something called the “double tap.” This came about after some research surrounding the “effectiveness” of shootings. Frequently, an assailant would not be put down with one shot from a handgun – research showed you needed two, and you needed to fire them sequentially within a few seconds of time. This became the “double tap” in combat shooting.

This summer, I got hit by an emotional “double tap” and I went down. My dear wife was a major player in my recovery even though she is fighting an incurable cancer along with my surviving children. But she couldn’t do it alone. She was fighting this cancer. So when I got back home for the memorial service, and after my children had returned home, I needed something else, I needed my brothers in Christ. And they stepped up to the plate. They visited me, they prayed for me and after a few months I was able to fully function again. I was slowly getting on my feet – I was moving from casualty to survivor.

As a cop, I was lucky (blessed) none of the bullets that were fired at me hit me. For that I am deeply thankful. But then there were the emotional hits I took: the multiple fatality traffic accidents and being a member of the police underwater recovery unit and recovering those bodies in the lakes of Minneapolis. For the adults I recovered, I could always “re-frame” the situation as the person had a chance to live into adulthood. But for the children. The children were something else. Having a number of young children in my own home made this an entirely different situation for me. I remember one child I recovered one bright afternoon in Cedar Lake who had fallen out of a boat. And there he was, hands-together as if in prayer, sitting on the bottom of the lake. It took a year of Clinical Pastoral Education at age 56 to work through the grief I had suppressed over the years I was a police officer. And it was love that did it, not more information in my head.

So this morning, after an intense weekend, all this has come back to me again – it’s the love – the love I see absent in so many men today. Generally, men are alone and lonely. Sure, those of us who are blessed by marriage have our wives (and God bless them or we wouldn’t have made it this far).

But as much as I love and need and respect and cherish my wife, I know today that I also need men in my life. And today, more than ever, I cherish these “no-bullshit,” highly-accountable relationships that I have been able to develop. And this has happened primarily through these retreats.

Tired as I am this morning, I look back again to this weekend and the absolute out-pouring of God’s Spirit I saw this weekend -- just as it has in each and every weekend I have attended! As I awoke this morning, I sensed God was giving me a word of scripture. Words that I need to hear and to try and understand. Words of passionate love that God is so desperately trying to say to those people, those new Christ-followers in that small church at Ephesus:

I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power… to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ. (Chapter 3, v. 17-18).
I am over seventy years in age and it has taken this long to really understand (grasp) that power and how wide and long and high and deep it is. It is a protective power that in the worst of life’s tragedies (those “double-taps” in life) we can survive -- and not only survive, but to live, and grow, and thrive.

Thanks be to God!

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If you are interested, the next local One Year to Live retreats are:

The Mackenzie Center (near Poynette)

     March 25-27, 2011
     September 16-18, 2011
         (the cost is usually under $200)

For more info and One Year Live Retreats see:
http://www.lutheranmeninmission.org/events/oytl.html

Playfulness and Spirituality (Holiness)

A few days ago Christians entered into the liturgical season of the Epiphany – the manifestation of the Light of Christ not just to Jesus’ brothers and sisters, but to ALL the world! 

This, as it always does this time of year, gets me thinking about the Light of Christ.  Who is it? What is it?  And what I came to mind was this (and maybe this is not fair, but stay with me...): I thought about the world’s religious leaders; those whom most of us know -- at least through the media.  There is, of course, the Pope, the Dalai Lama, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and maybe for some of us the head of the American Evangelical Association.  All of them are known to a great part of the world. 

But, here's my question: In which of these people do I see the Light of Christ?

I will have to confess that I see it in the Dalai Lama and not so much in the others.  Why? Because I sense wisdom, humility, humor, compassion, and, yes, playfulness, in him.  To me, there is a link between playfulness and godliness; between playfulness and even holiness. 

It is in being playful that we can try to get away from our arrogance and self-centeredness.  Being playful (especially when discussing theology) is being open to the “other;” to seeking truth, to seeing the Christ in other people, and to new possibilities. 

I don’t see seriousness as one of the fruits of the Spirit; instead, it seems to breed arrogance and claiming only we have the truth.  Playfulness is really about dancing with the Spirit of God; dancing with ideas, new life and personal transformation.  But above all playfulness is about love – the grand movement of love in and out of our lives. 

At the same time, playfulness is ego-shedding and when we can shed some of our ego, our self-centeredness (even a little bit!) there become more room for God in us.  You know, I bet Jesus was quite playful in his relationships.

So, come on, let’s play!

For an example of what I am talking about see the Dalai Lama at a press conference:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osVowEWEyAs

Against Religion

For a number of years I have subscribed to the Christian Century, a progressive monthly magazine on things Christian. Often, one of their articles grabs me as did Douglas John Hall’s article this month: “Against Religion: The Case for Faith.” Hall taught at McGill University in Montreal for years and is the author of many provocative books including, The Cross in Our Context: Jesus and the Suffering World. What he had to say is worth our consideration; especially those of us who struggle with the obvsious differences between the Christian religion and the faith of Jesus. I have tried to summarize the main points of his essay below -- especially the difference between religion and faith.


Hall begins with a quotation by prominent atheist, Richard Dawkins, written on the day after the attacks on September 11, 2001:

[Heretofore] many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where’s the harm? September 11th changed all that. Revealed faith is not harmless nonsense, it can be lethally dangerous nonsense. Dangerous because it gives people unshakeable confidence in their own righteousness. Dangerous because it gives them false courage to kill themselves, which automatically removes normal barriers from killing others. Dangerous because it teaches enmity to others [who are] labeled only by a difference in inherited tradition. And dangerous because we have all bought into a weird respect, which uniquely protects religion from normal criticism. Let’s now stop being so damned respectful. The Guardian, September 12, 2001.

Okay, let's!  Our spiritual traditions: namely Amos' denunciation of religious pomposity or the more scathing letters to the churches of Asia Minor in the Book of Revelation. It was also the young Karl Barth who wrote, “The message of the Bible is that God hates religion.” What “we must say [of religion] is that it is the one great concern of godless men.” Then there is Paul Tillich in his sermon “The Yoke of Religion;”

We call Jesus the Christ not because He brought a new religion, but because He is the end of religion, above religion and irreligion, above Christianity and non-Christianity. We spread his call because it is the call to every person in every period to receive the New Being, that hidden saving power in our existence, which takes from us labor and burden, and gives rest to our souls.

And Dietrich Bonhoeffer contrasted two important biblical stories: The story of the Tower of Babel and the day of Pentecost. The Tower was an attempt to grasp God; to possess God – as it turned out, a tragic and futile effort! On the other hand, Pentecost is no longer humans trying to grasp God, but the divine Spirit descending and transforming human beings from within. Pentecost, the birth of our faith, is all about reconciliation -- even among those who cannot fully understand one another. This is powerful stuff. It is the caution uttered by St Augustine in the 4th century: “Si comprehendis, non est Deus” – “If you think you understand, it’s not God you’re talking about”). What better words of caution for today?  But does not organized religion seek an exclusive certitude of God?

As soon as the Christian faith took upon itself to be a religion – a religious establishment – the very experience that once gave birth to a “community of faith” is lost and corrupted. What is lost is the “experience” of faith, of trust not in an individual or institution, but in, as Hall describes, a “transcendent Presence that defies containment, definition, or even comprehension. A religion that wants to commend itself to everyone and to dominate (to be Christendom) cannot afford to be self-critical. It must be promotional, upbeat, positive (my emphasis).

This, Hall reminds us, is what happens when religion seeks “imperial status.” And when imperial status is being sought, out goes critique and doubt – "our way or the highway!" I find great comfort in Hall’s critique of religion (versus faith) especially in the light of most religions (or even denominations within Christendom) stating that they alone have the truth.

This is a time in human history in which we all need to live with the religious diversity that surrounds us in an increasingly smaller planet with diminishing resources. Religion is about certitude and finality and has little interest in other claims of truth. Instead, it develops a "spirituality" that is closed and zealously guarded and, as Hall, cautions, breeds seeds of its own destruction:

With its clamoring for ultimacy, its frenetic triumphalism, its incapacity for existential doubt and the entertainment of alternatives, such religion inevitably courts violent opposition. The newly minted atheism of today understands this an capitalizes on it. It argues with a kind of dogged logic, that the only way humankind can avoid the great catastrophes to which this situation points is by dispensing altogether with “the God delusion.”

To Hall, faith is “awe and trust in the presence of the holy.” Faith will always be a part of religion, but “the thoughtfully faithful will nevertheless be able to distinguish between what comes of faith and what comes of religion. And the greatest distinction of all in this contrast will always lie in the readiness of faith, unlike religion, to confess its radical incompleteness and insufficiency – indeed, its brokenness.”

Hall concludes with a quote Jacques Ellul and what he had to say about faith and what I, too, believe faith is:

Faith… puts to test every element of my life and society… It leads me to ineluctably question my certitudes, all my moralities, beliefs and policies. It forbids me to attach ultimate significance to any expression of human activity. It detaches and delivers me from money and the family, from my job and my knowledge. It’s the surest road to realizing that “the only thing I know is that I don’t know anything.” (Living Faith: Belief and Doubt in a Perilous World, translated by Peter Heinegg).

This is the kind of faith we need today. Not the religious bravado of certitude and exclusivism. Faith, not religion, is the prerequisite for religious dialogue today – and, ultimately, faith is essential for our very survival as human beings living in a diverse, cramped, and unequal world -- not religion.

Being You, Seeking Light

I ran into a great story to begin the new year and to think about our spiritual growth in the coming months:

I am about to face the Holy One, blessed be He, and justify my sojourn on the world. If He will ask me: Zussye, why were you not like Moses? I shall respond, because you did not grant me the powers you granted Moses. If He will ask me: Zusye, why were you not like Rabbi Akiba? I shall respond because you did not grant me the powers you granted Rabbi Akiba. But the Almighty will not ask me why I was not like Moses or why I was not like Rabbi Akiba. The Almighty will ask me: Zussye, why were you not like Zussye? Why did you not fulfill the potential which was Zussye, and it is for this question that I tremble. (Rav Zussye)

So, why aren't we ourselves?

Last week was the Epiphany and the first reading for that day comes from Isaiah 60:1-2:

Arise, shine, for your light has come,

and the glory of the LORD rises upon you.
See, darkness covers the earth
and thick darkness is over the peoples,
but the LORD rises upon you
and his glory appears over you.

It really is all about LIGHT isn't it?  Being light.  If we wallow in darkness and hang around with those who live in darkeness, so shall we be. This past Sunday, I asked my parishioners, "Who is the light in your life?"  How do you answer this question?  Who is the person(s) who have brought light and direction into your life, who have helped you grow as a decent, spiritual, God-fearing person? (You can pause here and think about this question...)

Nevertheless, if we have no such "light-person," then we should be called to SEEK out those who shine light into the world.  You know them when you see them.  Along this line, I am reminded of a book of poetry by Elizabeth Alexander with the captivating title: CRAVE RADIANCE.

Isn't that what we all should be doing -- absolutely CRAVING radiance?  Alexander's poem, "Praise Song for the Day" was read at President Obama's inauguration.  This is the ending (or beginning):

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,

others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

praise song for walking forward in that light.

Amen.  A praise song for walking forward in and into that LIGHT!  Let's roll!

The New Year

Arise, shine, for your light has come,

and the glory of the LORD rises upon you.
See, darkness covers the earth
and thick darkness is over the peoples,
but the LORD rises upon you
and his glory appears over you.
[Isaiah 60:1-2]

This is the first reading for the Feast of the Epiphany -- a day we seem to forget.  It is the day we remember God's promise in Isaiah; that the glory of the Lord is for the whole world blasting away the thick darkness that often covers us.

In two weeks, I will join my brothers in Christ in Chetek, WI, just north of Eau Claire for another "One Week To Live" (OYTL) men's retreat. (I have a number of writings on this site about my experience with OYTL.  It is a great weekend (Jan 15-17) for all men of faith to experience.  IT'S NOT TOO LATE TO SIGN UP!

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I recently came across this piece written by the Catholic monk, Thomas Merton.  He wrote this in the 1960s, but his words apply so much to today's life.  Let these words be your meditation for the coming year as you plan to grow spiritually...

We live in the time of no room, which is the time of the end. The time when everyone is obsessed with lack of time, lack of space, with saving time, conquering space, projecting into time and space the anguish produced within them by the technological furies of size, volume, quantity, speed, number, price, power and acceleration.



The primoridial blessing, "increase and multiply," has suddenly become a hemorrhage of terror. We are numbered in billions, and massed together, marshalled, numbered, marched here and there, taxed, drilled, armed, worked to the point of insensibility, dazed by information, drugged by entertainment, surfeited with everything, nauseated with the human race and with ourselves, nauseated with life.


As the end approaches, there is no room for nature. The cities crowd it off the face of the earth. As the end approaches, there is no room for quiet. There is no room for solitude. There is no room for thought. There is no room for attention, for the awareness of our state.

In the time of the ultimate end, there is no room for us.


[Source: Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable, 1966]