Embracing tenderness...

Somewhere in time about 12 years ago, I realized that I was starting to hate the person I had become.  I was driven and serious, highly competitive and assertive in the pursuit of church growth and increasingly demanding of both staff and lay leadership to "get things done RIGHT!"  And by right, I meant in ways that added numbers to our membership roll.  I could sense that I was losing touch with my heart, but I didn't know how to get off the roller coaster ride that had become my "career."  So I kept going faster and faster.

Thanks be to God for burn-out. You might even call it a break-down of sorts, for while I mostly kept going through the necessities required by my public role as pastor, I was starting to shut-down inside, shedding my inner skin en route towards another way of being. The poet, Robert Bly reports that men must experience two downward paths in their lives if we are to become whole.

The first is the rite of passage found in adolescence where a boy-child moves towards responsible masculinity through an encounter with mortality. These rites all include circumcision, scarification, knocking out a tooth or some other physical reminder that our bodies are fragile and sacred. Usually, select wise elders - who are not the fathers of these young men - lead young teens through a series of events that literally and figuratively scare the shit out of normally cocky boys.  After the fear they are initiated into the leadership of their tribe with the admonition that all their wild energy must now be used to protect and serve the community. The Celts sometimes say:  Before a warrior can use his sword, he must learn how to dance.  That is he must learn how to submit, how to serve, how to focus male aggression into acts of protection and healing and learn to reverence beauty.

The second descent usually happens sometime around age 50 for men when we must choose to honor our limits or else continue to ripen into old age as either fools or a grouchy old cynics. This is mistakenly called a "mid-life crisis" in popular culture mostly because without spiritual guidance men do incredibly stupid and childlike things during this transition. You know the drill: buy red sports cars, leave their wives for younger trophy babes, go on expeditions, etc.  And while there are no formal rites for this passage, the challenge is real:  men must choose to live into the presence of their limitations and come to peace with them with humility. For without this serenity, all hell can break loose.

Part of the Easter Vigil liturgy speaks of this second descent: "O felix culpa - o happy sin or fault" that has caused me to fall in order that I might finally be raised into new life by experiencing God's grace in Christ. In grace, there is resurrection, but it only comes through darkness and death.  Mine was a slow downward spiral - I could feel it bubbling around inside me for months - and I fought it every inch of the way. It was ugly and stubborn, too. Thomas More and others have observed that the soul knows what it wants and needs and will engage our shadow to either heal or kill us in the process of growing up. Thank God there are wise and compassionate elders who have learned and listened to the terrifying descent others have endured as they moved through their dark nights of the soul.  I had the presence of mind to engage a no bullshit spiritual director at the start of my collapse - and he both loved me and held me accountable through it all - and truly saved my life as well as my professional life and marriage.

The only thing that seemed to be a constant during those 8 or 10 months of hell was a confession that Martin Luther used during his most trying times:  I have been baptized! Despite my feelings, actions and all the evidence, I trusted that at some level I was God's beloved and would not be abandoned. We did a shitload of work together that year as I came to rest within and then embrace my dark night.  Mostly I hated every moment of that journey (even though I valued and respected my director's compassion and wisdom.) During it I wanted to throw away everything I knew and try on another way of living - a way without all the striving and judgment - a way beyond competition and struggles for success.  In AA they call this the "geographic solution" wherein life MUST be better than where I am; the only problem with this, of course, is that wherever you go you have to take yourself with you.

I ached to get on a motorcycle and drive off into the sunset, but that was not meant to be: I had been called by God to be a pastor so I had to learn how to be a healthy and gentle pastor even when the thought of doing so made me nauseous. About 10 years before my collapse, Bruce Springsteen had recorded a song, "Living Proof," with the line:  "You do some sad and hurtful things when its you you're trying to lose, you do some sad and hurtful things... and I've seen living proof."  Me, too...

I revisited this agony last night while reading a small but clarifying book, Becoming Human, by Jean Vanier.  He, too, speaks of being led from one life into another in which he exchanged striving for joy. Vanier describes learning to live and love Antonio, a profoundly intellectually challenged young man, who "lived a love of trust... when one loves with trust, one does not give things, one gives oneself and, so, calls forth a communion of hearts." This rang true to me on so many levels.

Antonio changed my life. He led me out of a society of competition where one has to be strong and aggressive into a world of tenderness and mutuality, where each person, strong or weak, can exercise their gifts... (through him) I came to know that we bring each other to birth as we respect and love one another and as our value is revealed to us through the love of others... We need other people who will call forth what is most beautiful in us, just as we need to call forth what is most beautiful in others.

For the past 12 years, I have been wandering into a life grounded more in beauty than success:  "a way of living that leaves the serious world for a world of celebration, presence and laughter - a world of the heart."  Vanier's book is humble and profound and it helps give my ever-growing sense of this new ministry some shape and form.  I was particularly moved by this extended quote concerning tenderness:

Tenderness is the language of the body as a mother holds her child, as a nurse touches the patent's wound or as an assistant bathes someone with server disabilities.  Recently, in a Buddhist monastery, I watched a sister as she served us food and tea with great delicacy; it was as if the meal itself was sacred, revealing a presence of God.  And so it did, because it was treated so. Tenderness is the language of the body speaking of respect; thus, the body honors whatever it touches; it honors reality. It does not act as if reality itself must be changed or possessed; reality belongs to humanity and to God...There is no fear in tenderness. Tenderness is not weakness, lack of strength or sloppiness; tenderness i filled with strength, respect and wisdom. 

And that's the word - and reality - I've been searching for during these past 12 years: tenderness. I've been on a heart quest for a way to live tenderly as a person of faith, a husband, father and friend.  My allies have been music and art for these are forms of communication born of the soul and heart. They have given me permission to go deep - to explore vulnerability - to practice tenderness. I knew when I ordered Becoming Human there was a deeper reason for reading it on vacation than just my curiosity about Vanier.  Now I know it was another clue into this journey. 

This path offers a clear alternative to the violence of our age.  It is also a humble and quiet challenge to the bottom-line obsessions of our consumer culture.  And it communicates the grace of God in small acts of embodied compassion. Vanier writes:  How can we move from a constricted, elitist concept of belonging - a belonging that deprecates others - to this freedom of the heart that loves and appreciates all who are different?  We need to become free from our compulsive need to succeed, to have power and approbation. 


As in the past when I practice waiting and trusting, the path is revealed.  And now it is clear:  onward towards a year of tenderness.