The following is from one of the best books I have ever read and offers some very important and vital information.  The book is Parker Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak*:

Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about – quite apart from what I would like it to be about – or my life will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest my intentions.

That insight is hidden in the word “vocation” itself, which is rooted in the Latin for “voice.” Vocation does not mean a goal that I pursue. It means a calling that I hear. Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am. I must listen for the truths and values at the heart of my own identity, not the standards by which I must live – but the standards by which I cannot help but live if I am living my own life. (4-5)

Verbalizing is not the only way our lives speak, of course. They speak through our actions and reactions, our intuitions and instincts, our feelings and bodily states of being, perhaps more profoundly than through our words. We are like plants, full of tropisms that draw us toward certain experiences and repel us from others. If we can learn to read our own responses to our one experience – a text we are writing unconsciously every day we spend on earth – we will receive the guidance we need to live more authentic lives.

But if I am to let my life speak things I want to hear, things I would gladly tell others, I must also let it speak things I do not want to hear and would never tell anyone else! My life is not only about my strengths and virtues; it is also about my liabilities and my limits, my trespasses and my shadow. (6)

Great words to ponder on this Labor Day weekend.

*http://www.amazon.com/Let-Your-Life-Speak-Listening/dp/0787947350/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1346441573&sr=8-1&keywords=Let+Your+Life+Speak

With this post we take a short break from the regular subject matter of this blog to pay a tribute to my maternal grandmother.

Edna LaVaughn Sargent Wattenbarger was born on August 28, 1896 and died in January of 1989.  In many ways she was the most significant influence on my early life and development.  Together with my grandfather – George Warren Wattenbarger (some folks insist that he spelled his middle name “Warrn”) – they taught me much about life from the very beginning of my days.  I was born in their home – the parsonage for the Methodist mission church in Bunch, Oklahoma – in the Cookson Hills in the northeastern part of the state surrounded by the beautiful and wonderful Native American people whom they faithfully served and greatly loved.

I was baptized by my grandfather in the Sallisaw Creek which ran behind the white mission church and the home – although I have no real memory of that event I have many other memories and pictures that help me remember the wonderful times in Bunch.  It is where I first got my love of trains – as two times each day I would be in front of the house to watch the Kansas City Southern Belle passenger train speed by.  It is where I was first introduced to my spiritual journey – a beginning with a large influence from the Cherokee peoples who were a large part of the community that my grandparents served.

LaVaughn was licensed to preach by the Oklahoma Conference of the Methodist Church – we believe that she was the first woman to be honored with the distinction.  She also provided the first piano that was to assist in my young musical education as a piano student.

Toward the end of her life she lived in our home – both in Oklahoma and in Kansas – where she always provided a loving and warm environment.  She was a very very special woman and I am grateful for all the influence she had on my growing up years and my life.

Grace and peace

The idea for a book with the title Human Beings Anonymous started with one of the times I was working my way through Addiction and Grace*by Gerald G. May, M.D.  An earlier working title was Living as Mustard Seeds in Cracked Clay Pots which is still a valuable working premise for developing meaningful practices, but not, at least in my opinion, a title.

In my experience, sadly, I very much agree with the statements of Gerald May that follow:

I am not being flippant when I say that all of us suffer from addiction.  Nor am I reducing the meaning of addiction.  I mean in all truth that the psychological, neurological, and spiritual dynamics of full-fledged addiction are actively at work within every human being.  The same processes that are responsible for addiction to alcohol and narcotics are also responsible for addiction to ideas, work, relationships, power, moods, fantasies, and an endless variety of other things.  We are all addicts in every sense of the word.  Moreover, our addictions are our own worst enemies.  They enslave us with chains that are of our own making and yet that, paradoxically, are virtually beyond our control.  Addiction also makes idolators of us all, because it forces us to worship these objects of attachment, thereby preventing us from truly, freely loving God and one another.  Addiction breeds willfulness within us, yet, again paradoxically, it erodes our free will and eats away at our dignity.  Addiction, then, is at once an inherent part of our nature and an antagonist of our nature.  It is the absolute enemy of human freedom, the antipathy of love.  Yet, in still another paradox, our addictions can lead us to a deep appreciation of grace.  They can bring us to our knees.

Grace is the most powerful force in the universe.  It can transcend repression, addiction, and every other internal or external power that seeks to oppress the freedom of the human heart.  Grace is where our hope lies. (3-5)

The coming series of posts will focus on The Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and other related fellowships as they inform our understanding of living as Human Beings Anonymous.  These steps, these formative practices, point toward practices that make it possible to open our lives to the possibility of grace, practices that are positive formative influences for helping us to become whole and healthy human beings, and practices that teach us that the only way to keep it is to give it away.  They help us learn and believe that “grace is where our hope lies.”

*Gerald G. May, M.D.  Addiction and Grace.  San Francisco: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1988.

“A form exists within the clay you are holding in your hands, and you are to discover it.  As you work with the clay, let it work with you.  Give yourself time, concentrate, and you will encounter a form taking shape.  You will be able to feel it, to sense it, to know it.  When that happens, you can take off the blindfold and work from there.”

Maria Harris* honors one of her mentors, Mary Tully from Union Seminary in New York, by telling the story of an experience where Tully instructed the students to blindfold themselves and then gave the above instructions for working with the clay.  Harris then offers the following informative words:

Through the years I have often done that same exercise with others and realized that Mary Tully was right.  The form is there, waiting to be found, created, and re-created.  The power of the clay image is that it teaches us the nature of forming, informing, formation, and formgiving in education.  The work is ongoing, in mutuality with material, and open always to further meaning.  The molding of clay is a concrete metaphor illuminating the work of education as the fashioning and refashioning of the forms that human life offers, the forms we shape as artists at the same time we allow those forms to shape us.  For as human beings we are always extending our hands into life and into experience in order to give them form.

The work of education is giving flesh to and embodying, form.  But form is not an arbitrary organizational element – one among many.  Rather, as every artist knows, form is the actual shape of content.  Form is a marshaling of materials in relation to one another.  It is a setting of boundaries and limits.  It is a discipline, an ordering and a fashioning according to need.  As we examine the need in the church for a broader, more complete, and more extensive understanding of education, we realize that one way to understand it is as the fashioning of form.  Education in the church means taking those forms which ecclesial life presents to us, places in our hands, as clay to be molded.  Education is the work of lifting up and lifting out those forms through which we might refashion ourselves into a pastoral people. (41)

*Maria Harris.  Fashion Me a People: Curriculum in the Church.  Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1989.

Those words provide the title for the opening chapter of Fashion Me a People: Curriculum in the Church*by Maria Harris.

The following is from this opening chapter, and provides a valuable springboard for the coming series of posts.

Harris begins her superb volume with these words:

No image has so captured our Christian imaginations in recent years as has the image of ourselves as a people.  Although various models of the church, such as herald, servant, institution, and congregation, continue to influence us, the dominating self-understanding is increasingly the church as a people.  Perhaps this one emerges as most compelling because it takes our humanness seriously.  Being a people, a community of persons, means that all of us are flesh and blood, heirs to both the heights and the depths of everything that goes into being human.  It takes the incarnation seriously and suggests that we have allowed into our spirits the truth that the Word has become flesh (John 1).  And because we have accepted that, we have also allowed into our spirits the truth that the Word continues to become flesh, today, in us.

The Word continually becoming flesh, in us, completes the image.  For not only are we coming to understand ourselves more and more as a people; we now realize that we are a people with a pastoral vocation.  The truth of our baptism and confirmation is confronting us regularly, and we are beginning to see that being incorporated into this people carries responsibilities with it.  No longer is it enough to be passive members, receiving a world told us by someone else, filing that word away to be taken out for a reading now and then.  No longer is it enough to leave the work of the church to pastors and ordained leaders, as if the total responsibility was theirs.  Instead, we are realizing that the word of God is addressing us, saying something to us, making demands on us, and asking us to live that word in our lives.  We are a people called by the gospel, called to make a difference in our world.

We are called to care for ourselves, for one another, for the earth which is our home.  We are called to take seriously our relation to God and to all God’s creatures, both within and beyond the church.  We are called to end our isolation from others by living each day of our lives rooted in love, rooted in the Christ.  And we are called to believe that in doing so, we fulfill our destiny as a people of God.

The mission of the people who are the church is to go into the world and to be in the world as Jesus was, as the revelation of God.  The mission of the people who are the church is to reveal God as present to the world, as a God who cares for the world and is in an ongoing relation to the world.  The mission is to reveal a God who works through active and practical ministry in the world – a world so loved that, in the words of John 3:16, the only-begotten Son of this God was given as a gift to the world. (23-25)

*Maria Harris.  Fashion Me a People: Curriculum in the Church.  Louisville:  Westminster John Knox Press, 1989.

From the wisdom of Calvin Miller*:

One winter I was leading a student conference in Canada when I met the son of a prestigious physician.  He was wearing a heavy and handsome winter coat.  “Nice coat!” I said.

“Thank you,” he replied.

In further discussion, I discovered that it had been purchased at a secondhand store for twenty-five cents.  “Why did you buy a secondhand coat?” I asked the son, out of earshot of his famous father, “Your father is rich!”

“Because my father also buys secondhand coats,” the young man answered.

I listened long enough to discover that the physician had reevaluated his whole economic position and had led his sons in the same new direction.  They honored the lordship of Christ by dressing in other people’s castaways.  They used the money they might have spent on new clothes to travel to Third World countries to practice medicine.  Fettered to this great commitment, the doctor had yet liberated himself and his sons.  Such freedom as they know is only gained as we break our ties to our material ambitions and yield to the Savior. (128-129)

*Calvin Miller.  A Hunger for The Holy: Nurturing Intimacy with Christ.  West Monroe, LA:  Howard Publishing Co., Inc., 2003.

The only real security in life lies in relishing life’s insecurity – M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), p. 136.

A final set of comments from Robert Ball’s Walking on Water: Self-Esteem and a Journey of Faith:

Referring to the above words from M. Scott Peck, Dr. Ball writes:

At first those words may seem to imply there is no security, but that’s not what they say.  They state clearly that there is a real security.  It requires being willing, and more than willing – excited – to live in full recognition that we do not have all the answers and never will.  We don’t know what’s going to happen to us or to the world.  Yet, when we believe we are loved, something within us wants to live, to be a part of that uncertainty, and even relishes it.

But why does Peck call that great uncertainty “security”?  From my faith perspective, I think it’s because living in that uncertainty, loving and choosing and feeling, we discover that that’s where we are meant to be.  It’s security because in that situation we are fulfilling our destiny, being the persons God created us to be, living the life we were created to live.  Living in uncertainty is right for us, being creatures in a world we did not create but which was (and is) created by God, who loves and cares for us personally and wants us to be here.  It’s the security of being who we are.  It’s a life available only to those who esteem themselves enough to choose it, to make the journey.

Achieving healthy self-esteem is a life-long journey.  It is a spiritual journey in which we continually make new choices of faith and then dare to act on those choices.

Dare to make the journey.  Practice your faith. (212-213)

Amen and Amen!!

Some more important observations from the writing of Robert Ball*:

So the mainline churches today are in a state of decline, both in numbers and in public respect.  At the same time we’re witnessing an amazing growth of what are called Twelve-Step programs:  communities modeled on Alcoholics Anonymous.  Twelve-Step programs exist for many groups: the spouses of alcoholics, the children of alcoholics, compulsive gamblers, overeaters, those suffering from suicides in their families, drug abusers, the families of drug abusers, people reared in fundamentalist churches, ex-clergy, ex-prostitutes, and so forth.

Twelve-Step programs succeed by offering what people need most: a nurturing, accepting, supportive community.  These programs are more like what the church is intended to be than are most churches.  People who enter a Twelve-Step program do so acknowledging their needs.  In both philosophy and structure, the programs are designed to discourage any efforts to look better than someone else.  People who become members do so with the humbling acknowledgment that “I have a problem that has become uncontrollable in my life.”  Thus the ideal for the church, the idea that “We’re all in this thing together,” is given actual, personal expression.

In my experience, these programs do strive for absolute acceptance.  In the community they provide, the goal is to allow every participant to feel worthy and welcome.  At the same time, no one is mollycoddled and told “That’s OK.  Just do the best you can.”  What evolves are communities of people who have found understanding and acceptance and who have understanding and acceptance to share with others.  This allows all of them to grow in their sense of worth, their ability to handle their problems, and their ability to live.

Alongside the increasing popularity of the Twelve-Step programs, many people are registering their feelings of having been abandoned by their churches.  Disappointed and hurt with their churches’ failures to provide what they are charged to give, and what we need so desperately, many respond by reciprocating: abandoning the church.  Unfortunately, those who leave sometimes carry with them their unresolved feelings of hurt and outrage.  They may remain needy and needing, still unsure and doubting that there is any hope.  In leaving they abandon, for themselves and for the world, what we all need most: a human community of love and acceptance that is able to put us in contact with a love and acceptance that are truly unconditional and eternal.  In such a community there is hope.  Nothing matters more. (146-148)

*Walking on Water: Self-Esteem and a Journey of Faith by Robert Ball.  Science and Behavior Books, Inc., Palo Alto, CA, 1992.

With deep gratitude, we continue our exploration of Robert Ball’s Walking on Water: Self-Esteem and a Journey of Faith.  (for publication information and a way to secure a copy of this book, please see the post from August 13, 2012 – “Living in the good news”)

In this post we turn to the beginning of this very important volume where Dr. Ball gives valuable advice on our need to understand our deepest longing and the importance that we “recognize ourselves as spiritual beings.”

Convinced that the fear of insignificance occupies a central, tormenting place in the lives of all human beings, and that the only force truly capable of reducing that fear to the point where life becomes manageable, possible, productive, and fulfilling is the faith that we are loved, this book proceeds on the assumption that the deepest longing in all of us is a spiritual longing.

In using the word spiritual, I am acknowledging that the longing is not necessarily religious.  Indeed, many have found their experience of religion to be antithetical to their personal and spiritual needs.

To recognize ourselves as spiritual beings is to affirm that the longings within us cannot be satisfied without some acknowledgment of, some contact with, some relationship to a transcendent power.  Though I am offended by the notion that all spirituality can be enclosed within the parameters of the Christian faith, I am also limited to Christian spirituality by my own personal knowledge and experience.  I write, therefore, conscious of the limitations of my own experience and desiring to be as inclusive as I can.  My understanding of Jesus Christ is that his life and teachings were inherently inclusive, and my experience is that the gospel expressed in his life and death and resurrection, and proclaimed in his words, touches both the depths and the breadth of what it means to be human.  (6-7)

One of the strengths of these statements is that they come from an understanding that we humans are not God – we are not a higher power – we are finite humans who sadly often try to be the Creator rather than being content to be the created – created fully in the image of the Creator.

It would surely be helpful if the more of the religious world would be willing to live as God intended – stewards of creation rather than trying to be owners – people given the freedom of choice – fully conscious that we live, in the words of Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham*, in the spirituality of imperfection – another valuable contribution to the literature that everyone should take the time to read.

We will continue this journey in a couple of days by considering more of the valuable observations and insights from the work of Robert Ball.

*http://www.amazon.com/The-Spirituality-Imperfection-Storytelling-Meaning/dp/0553371320/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1344952713&sr=8-1&keywords=the+spirituality+of+imperfection

One volume that has been a very important part of my recent study journey is a book that, sadly, seems not to be well known or easily available.  It appears that this incredibly helpful book is still available by contacting the publisher at the website listed below*.  It should be required reading for everyone!  The book is Walking on Water: Self-Esteem and a Journey of Faith by Robert Ball, and this book will provide the content for this week’s posts with deepest gratitude to Dr. Ball for his friendship and for being a mentor and colleague!

Once we begin believing that, “I am not that unloved child anymore,” all that comfortable familiarity is lost.  We can no longer go on feeling inadequate.  We can no longer say, “I’d like to be more patient and more loving, but I don’t have it in me.”  Once acknowledged, goodness has to be used.  If we have capacities for love and patience, we must begin living as patient and loving persons, thus producing the new experiences in our memory banks that affirm:  We are lovable and loving persons.

Practicing our faith, we will talk differently: no longer mumbling as if incompetent or being brashly assertive in an effort to cover our sense of incompetence.  We can also talk to ourselves differently, no longer condemning and shaming ourselves for failures and no longer portraying ourselves as victims of circumstance.  We can relate to other people differently: no longer afraid to be known, no longer feeling desperately inadequate and unworthy, no longer yearning to be someone else or despising those others who are (or seem to be) what we yearn to be.

Once we look into ourselves and find capacities for good, we can change our lives.  We need no longer be stuck with unsatisfying jobs or inconsiderate friends or abusive relationships.  We have choices.  We can no longer blame others for holding us back.  Being competent persons, having skills that are of benefit to the world, we know we can take risks to discover just who we are and where we belong.  The voices out of our past say, “To seek to succeed is to risk failure.”  The new reality – the good news – is that, believing ourselves to be loved, we can afford to put ourselves into positions where failure and rejection are possibilities.  We know that only in such positions are love and success real possibilities.  (198-199)

This is wonderful good news!!!

http://www.sbbks.com/walkingonwater.html