living through our season of consequences: part one

Nearly every morning as I am drinking strong hot tea, I read the daily reflection posted by the Henri Nouwen Society (see @ https://henrinouwen.org). Not all of his words speak to me at any given moment - a lot depends on my head, heart and body - but that is equally true for poems and Scripture, too. How often have I waded through the Psalms before a long ignored passage comes alive - and then becomes a cherished source of authentic wisdom? Different translations and settings matter, as do the seasons of the year, and the state of the world around me. For decades I missed the blessings in Psalm 131 only to experience them again some ten years ago through the poetry of the Book of Common Prayer: 

O Lord, my heart is not proud; 

my eyes are not raised in haughty looks.
I do not occupy myself with great matters,
with things that are too high for me.
But I have quieted and stilled my soul,
like a weaned child on its mother’s breast;
so my soul is quieted within me.

Over the past few days these reflections have felt potent and full of insight. His words stand on their own, of course; Nouwen knew how to speak to the human condition. Appreciating his story, however, adds another layer of intensity to a wisdom hard won. Nouwen, you see, wrestled with depression and anxiety for most of his adult life. Further, he often felt restless, incomplete and inadequate as he moved from Yale into Latin American liberation congregations and then Harvard. Reading his books and letters from this era shows a sensitive and tender man who struggled to be at rest with himself. His heart had not been quieted nor his soul stilled. His academic colleagues at Harvard Divinity School exacerbated Nouwen's insecurities when they withheld their welcome and judged his professional value to be inferior because he had not followed the Ph. D. track. Thanks be to God for Jean Vanier of L'Arche who reached out to a despondent friend and offered him simple hospitality. In time, Nouwen found his true home and deepest calling within L'Arche. Learning to live in the moment with love was essential. Keeping his heart open in a safe and gentle home was how he came to commune with the holy. Even the hell of his emotional break down at L'Arche Daybreak led Nouwen to a deeper trust of God's grace and presence. No wonder he was able to write:  

When productivity is our main way of overcoming self-doubt, we are extremely vulnerable to rejection and criticism and prone to inner anxiety and depression. Productivity can never give the deep sense of belonging we crave. The more we produce, the more we realize that successes and results cannot give us the experience of “at homeness.” In fact, our productivity reveals to us that we are driven by fear.

There are not many places in our culture where we can live openly beyond the cult of productivity. Not the church. Not our schools. Certainly not the market place. And rarely inside the institutions of the not-for-profit realm. Our culture and economy are defined and driven by an obsession for more: more wealth, more space, more toys, more entertainment, more energy, more individuality, more sex, more power. Even the way we speak about the inner, spiritual journey is infected by this obsession: spiritual growth, church growth, the gospel of prosperity. In the introduction to Cynthia Bourgeault's small masterpiece, The Wisdom Way of Knowing, she reminds us that at this moment in time, our addiction to acquisition has come when most of our religious institutions have been discarded:

As the pace of modernity seems to leave mainstream Christianity increasingly in the dust, many younger seekers are simply no long interested in a religion that strikes them as doctrinally calcified and culturally antiquated; they have bypassed the church altogether. Whether their disillusionment is justified or unjustified, the bottom line is that the baby tends to get thrown out with the bath water... (but) without the basic ethical and devotional orientation points of religious practice, it is very hard to escape the powerful gravitational pull of contemporary cultural materialism, with its myriad attractions and seductions. "The one with the most toys when he dies wins" - that cynical bumper sticker I spotted one day while hurtling down the Los Angeles freeway - speaks to the anguish of a whole generation hungry for meaning but alienated from the spiritual containers in which meaning has traditionally been conveyed. (Bourgeault, xviii)

The consequences of this crisis are clear: climate change, the intensification of nativism around the world, the on-going war against women, race hatred, fear of the stranger, an epidemic of addiction and even suicide, mass murder. The current regime in the White House personifies our dilemma in staggeringly ugly ways nearly every day. For we have become a culture, a nation, a generation unmoored and unhinged. Former US President Jimmy Carter wasn't kidding when he told us that "America gets the leaders it deserves." 

To be clear, human brokenness is not new: the old preacher of Ecclesiastes, Qoheleth, taught that "there is nothing new under the sun. What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again." Much of the wisdom found in this fifth century BCE text was borrowed and reworked from the older wisdom traditions of Babylon. "To everything there is a season and a purpose to all things under heaven: a time to be born, a time to die." My hunch is that we are now living into the season of consequences. We are experiencing, feeling and coming to grips with what we have created by our excess. Some will always remain in denial for there truly IS nothing new under the sun. But incrementally there are more and more people of every race, creed, color, gender and class who know that life is destructively out of balance. You can see clues like Wal-Mart changing its practices of selling weapons and ammunition. Or Dick's Sporting Goods quitting the sale of guns. Or the popular will of Americans turning against the National Rifle Association. Or the #Me Too and #Black Lives Matter movements. There has been a culture of death born of our addictions. Now a culture of new life is stirring. To everything there is a season.

One insight from the ebb and flow of life and death in culture is that during the season of consequences - a time of sorting and reordering priorities - many feel helpless to advance real change. I believe that this feeling is important as it is another layer of addiction dying within us personally and collectively. We must fully grieve the consequences of our obsession with productivity if we are going to learn a healthier alternative. That's what the blues are all about. That's what anguish and soul searching evoke. A cleansing. A renewal. A repentance and change of direction. Until our grief is complete, however, we will continue to feel hopeless. Walter Brueggemann's take on the prophet's of ancient Israel is clear: renewal and new life will not come until we are emptied of our addiction to the status quo. This requires our world being turned upside down, grieving both the loss of what was good and what was broken, learning to sit in silent emptiness until God's spirit - not our initiative - sings a new song within and among us.

So what I have been thinking and feeling over the past few months - and  I could be way off on this, ok? - but what keeps coming back to me from within the emptiness is this: during this season of cleansing and grief could we use a 21st century version of the Celtic monasteries of the Middle Ages? They were both centers that preserved the wisdom and literature of previous cultures - what all those monks were transcribing besides Scripture were the buried classics of Greek culture - as well as outposts of radical hospitality and safety in a world saturated with danger and fear. Small communities of equality, often with both men and women, scattered about a day's journey from one another that welcomed the stranger, protected the vulnerable and kept the light of wisdom burning when darkness was the rule of the day. In his essay, "Monasticism: the Heart of Celtic Christianity," Paul Cullity of the Northumbria Community writes that the pre-Christian Celts:

...maintained “bardic schools”, “Bards” being that class of the Druids who carried on the history, music, and general knowledge of the culture. This learning was completely oral, and often took decades to complete. The value of these schools in Ireland and Northern Britain was such that Celts from Gall, Spain, and Southern England would often send an oldest son to train there. These schools and their dedication to learning was to be adopted by the Christianised Celts, and later be responsible for such works of art as the Books of Kells and Durrow, and the Lindisfarne Gospels. It would also be responsible for preserving almost all that we know of the Classical World, by copying the texts of Greece and Rome, in addition to religious texts, and keeping these manuscripts safe during the tumultuous Middle Ages.

(see https://www.northumbriacommunity.org/articles/monasticism-the-heart-of-celtic-christianity/)

In a follow-up blog post, I will share a few thoughts about what the reclamation of this tradition might mean for our current season of darkness, consequences, grieving and emptiness. The practices of the Celtic monastery were informed by the experiences of the Desert Mothers and Fathers where the wisdom traditions of the Middle East were preserved and nourished. In time, some of the practices of the desert were formalized into a commitment to ora et labora according to the Rule of St. Benedict of Nursia. We, too require guidance into the now lost traditions of wisdom. We, too could benefit from small communities of safety. We, too are hungry for sensual, practical and intellectual insights into living with tenderness and trust. Another quote from Bourgeault's book puts it like this:

I want to speak about Wisdom and specifically about the recovery of a genuine wisdom dimension to our individual lives and to our common life... Beneath the surface of our well-being, a malaise - perhaps a crisis of meaning - as long been brewing. For all our affluence, stress and anxiety seem to be higher than ever, family life is in disarray, and the rushing to keep up leaves us empty and exhausted. The Old Testament prophet Haggai sounds like he could be speaking directly us in these words, which are more than two thousand years old: "So now... think; take stock; what do you REALLY want? You eat but still hunger; you drink but still thirst; you clothe yourselves but can't get warm, and your wages run out through the holes in your pockets." (pp.3-4) 

She continues with what I believe is an important clue: "When the center starts to wobble, it's a pretty sure bet that what is lacking is not means, but depth." Not more, not greater productivity, not more things, but life that goes deep into love.