Watch your words... they become your destiny

This morning, during a late Saturday breakfast, I opened the mail and discovered a small book of poem/songs by one of my Berkshire clergy friends.  Anne is a person of depth, soul and spirit who has been writing hymns to the glory of God for generations.  This slim volume, Be Thou a Light unto Mine Eyes, offers texts from a variety of sacred theologians for three broad categories of worship:  Morning and Evening Prayer - Advent, Christmas and Epiphany - Lent and Holy Week.  What a delight!

Her music - and this gift - drew my mind back to words I had read earlier in the morning while in prayer and reflection.  Fr. Richard Rohr wrote: Remember, always remember, that the heartfelt desire to do the will of God is, in fact, the truest will of God. At that point, God has won, and the ego has lost, and your prayer has already been answered. To sum up the importance of an alternative mind this message says it all: Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habits. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.

I like the way Rohr draws into focus what is at the heart of our all of spiritual disciplines and practices:  a life lived fully and well.  Our calling as people living into the way of Jesus is not about conformity, being nice or making others happy.  Rather our desire is for intimacy with God in this life and the next. This requires both guidance and patience as one small step leads to another that, over time, becomes our destiny.  How often I ache with grief - and sometimes also chafe in frustration - when a totally wounded and unhappy soul refuses to make any alteration in her/his daily thoughts.  They are in agony - and aren't afraid to tell me about it in great detail. 

But after all the keening and complaining are over apparently they are not yet sick and tired enough of being sick and tired.  So, as happens more often than any of us likes to admit, they return to thinking and speaking and acting as they have always thought, spoke and acted all the while expecting different results.  As the gentle folk in AA say:  If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got.

Eugene Peterson, writing about the calling of a pastor, notes that one aspect of our calling - not our job, mind you, but our ordained destiny - is to keep reminding people about God's kingdom as made real in the gospel.  He writes that when we are ordained, what the people are REALLY saying is:

We want you to be responsible for saying and acting among us what we believe about God and kingdom and gospel. We believe that the Holy Spirit is among us and within us. We believe that God's Spirit continues to hover over the chaos of the world's evil and our sin, shaping a new creation and new creatures. We believe that God is not a spectator, in turn amused and alarmed at the wreckage of world history, but a participant.  We believe that the invisible is more important than the visible at any one single moment and in any single event that we choose to examine. We believe that everything, especially everything that looks like wreckage, is material God is using to make a praising life.  We BELIEVE all this, but we don't see it...

Rather, he goes on to note, that what most people see most of the time is their pain or failures - their wounds that are either self or other afflicted - as well as their addictions, the evil and shame and greed of the hour as well as the countless distractions that keep us from resting in God's grace.  What most of us see is what Ezekiel saw - a valley of dry bones - so we must prophesy to the bones and help the community see what God is doing beyond the obvious.  And, he concludes, we must do so whether our people rejoice or complain, whether they get it or reject it:

There may be times when we come to you as a committee or delegation and demand that you tell us something else than what (we celebrate in the gospel.) Promise us right now that you won't give in to what we demand of you. You are not the minister of changing desires, or our time-conditioned understanding of our needs, or our secularized hopes for something better. With these vows of ordination we are lashing you fast to the mast of Word and Sacrament so you will be unable to respond to the siren voices.  There are many other things to be done in this wrecked world - and we are going to be doing at least some of them - but if we don't know the foundational realities with which we are dealing - God, kingdom, gospel - we are going to end up living futile, fantasy lives. So your task is to keep telling the basic story, representing the presence of the Spirit, insisting on the priority of God, speaking the biblical words of command and promise and invitation.

I know in my own broken and wounded soul, there were times I just wanted someone to make it all better. I wanted someone to give me a pass and then tell me the magic word that would take away my fear and shame.  And I wanted this for years and years and years. Thank God no one did.  Sure, my spiritual director let me weep and fume; we did some good emotional talk therapy, too - and even gave me space to whine and carp from time to time.  But in the end, his word to me was:  You have been baptized.  Like Luther, the shit may be falling all around you, your inner demons may be attacking with a vengeance, but you have been baptized.  That is, you have been embraced by God's grace and loved from the inside out. Trust that - do the inner work of this blessing and learn to trust it - and little by little there will be a change.  Maybe you won't notice it at first - I certainly didn't - but in time I cam to see that there was more grace than judgment and more light than shadow in my life.

The poet and artist, Jan Richardson, put it like this in a brilliant prayer/poem she calls The Blessing in the Chaos:

To all that is chaotic
in you,
let there come silence.
Let there be
a calming
of the clamoring,
a stilling
of the voices that
have laid their claim
on you,
that have made their
home in you,
that go with you
even to the
holy places
but will not
let you rest,
will not let you
hear your life
with wholeness
or feel the grace
that fashioned you.
Let what distracts you
cease.
Let what divides you
cease.
Let there come an end
to what diminishesand demeans,
and let depart
all that keeps you
in its cage.
Let there be
an opening
into the quiet
that lies beneath
the chaos,
where you find
the peace
you did not think
possible
and see what shimmers
within the storm.

This weekend, it seems, has been set aside to be filled with reminders of our sacred calling - and the invitation to nourish, cultivate and practice trusting God's grace. The book of Anne's hymns for the morning and later this afternoon dinner with our daughters at the farm. Tomorrow, in addition to Sunday worship, I travel to Westport, CT to participate in the ordination of a daughter of my congregation and all of the prayers and celebrations of that sacred commissioning.  And then on Monday evening my Sunday School teacher from high school days will visit with his wife. We'll discuss my rock and roll spirituality dissertation, tell old stories and reconnect.  Indeed, it is true: watch your words, they become actions... and in time they shape your destiny.

credits:
1) www.constantlyhealthy.com  
2) http://in-overmyhead.blogspot.com/2010/04/status-quo.html

3) projectregeneration.org

4) andyatfaith.blogspot.com