The Wonderment

Lent: Approval

How often do we yearn for approval? Or confuse approval with acceptance? Whose approval matters most to us? Why?

 Some days I’m so hungry for approval I can taste that hunger, bitter and urgent. I know I’m accepted, but I want approbation reinforced. I know where my heart is and how well I live my values. But like much of the rest of American society, I’ve learned to confuse approval with acceptance and thus to hunger for it. It isn’t that the hunger itself for approval would be so troubling, except for what it says about my sense of purpose and place in the world.

 

We aren’t hounded by that hunger when we feel securely connected to our vocations and our communities. We’re running for approval from public, family, work, and friends when we’re uneasy with that belonging and that calling from life.  And that hunger for approval further can unsettle the faithfulness and honesty of our relationships with each other, with our selves, and with the holy.

 

Another of the desert monastics, Amma Sarah, said, ‘If I prayed God that all men should approve of my conduct, I should find myself a penitent at the door of each one, but I shall rather pray that my heart may be pure towards all.’

 

This desert mother – celebrated publicly in her own day as a probable saint – wanted the approval of others. But when she was serving that yearning, she was always on edge, because the approbation of others is the potato chip of the emotional world. One compliment is never enough.

 

Losing the approval of our neighbors or our family or our friends or our coworkers can keep us from acting with integrity when that means separating from the general accepted view or way of doing things. Everyone’s doing it can become our guiding star rather than love, justice, mercy, or generosity. To practice those virtues and guiding aspirations, we actively have to feel connected to them. And if we feel we live in a world where our acceptance is always being tested, it is pretty difficult to feel broadly loving, to locate and head toward justice, to practice mercy, or to live generously.

 

Approval and acceptance are different critters. We’ve just learned to confuse them. If you have a beating heart, you have something to offer the world that can bear towards goodness. If you’re here, you belong here. Feeling that acceptance and purpose deeply is part of our spiritual development. Practicing love, justice, mercy, and generosity is how we demonstrate acceptance.

 

And then when a gasp of joy or wonder does happen, we accept that as the gift it truly is, not as the social snack that leaves us hungry for more, but as an alleluia moment.  

 

Today, may you remember that you are already accepted by life (you’re here!) and that you have much goodness to offer the world. Let’s get moving and share that goodness and draw the world closer to healing and hope today.

Lent: Sin, Spiritual Discipline, and Balance

During Lent, we talk about “sin” a lot. Especially if you’re in the liberal end of the spiritual-religious spectrum, “sin” is probably not a popular topic, because we tend to focus more on goodness, justice, love, peace, and wonder. What is sin? The root of the word “sin” means “to miss the mark”, literally, from archery.  Sin isn’t failure of our souls, although we can give ourselves over to sinfulness, but failing to keep to the greater direction of goodness, justice, mercy, love, generosity, wonder, and peace.

 

Sometimes we’re driven with perfectionism in everything, including our spiritual disciplines. Am I doing this well enough? How can I do better? are common questions along the spiritual paths anyway, but they become anti-spiritual – they miss the mark and become sinful -- when we are gripped by the questions we ask and either unable to practice for fear of the perfectionism or so deeply engaged in the practice that it no longer functions as a path to what is sacred.

 

The desert monastics were familiar with the problem. Amma Syncletica, one of the holy women who fled the city to dwell in the desert in the third century of the common era, knew firsthand that perfectionism seduces even through what we do to turn away from it. She wrestled with the tyranny of perfectionism.

 

Amma Syncletica said: There is an asceticism which is determined by the enemy and his disciples practice it. So how are we to distinguish between the divine and royal asceticism and the demonic tyranny? Clearly through its quality of balance.

 

What are the qualities of balance in spiritual discipline?

 

1.    We embrace the practices with freedom. We’re choosing these practices. When the practices seem to be choosing us or become compulsory in a way that is fear-driven, it is an excellent time to pause and consult a spiritual friend or teacher. Tyranny is ruled by fear, whether internal or external.

2.    Spiritual forms serve particular purposes. Forms are helpful in teaching us discipline and being part of a larger whole, directing our attention away from what is usual and comfortable for us. When we serve the forms instead of the purposes, we’re actually serving different purposes and they’re often unhealthy.  We obsess on the form of the practice to “get it right” instead of knowing we have done our best and return our attention back to the reason for the practice – holy relationship and higher value aspirations. Function over form.

3.    Honesty about why we’re engaged in the spiritual discipline and reflection with a spiritual friend or teacher. Solidarity with the hungry of the world is a worthy goal, but choosing starvation is not practicing solidarity. There are other reasons behind that choice and we need to be honest with ourselves about those reasons. Spiritual friends and teachers are along with us in loving accountability during our journeys so we can avoid some of the pitfalls of delusion.

4.    We are not broken by interruption, mistakes, or failures. If we’re abstaining from sugar and there’s a moment when we end up tasting the cake our friend who didn’t know we were abstaining from sugar, we just return to our abstaining, grateful to our friend for their thoughtful generosity, grateful to be able to taste and receive, and returning back to the discipline. That isn’t license to go on out and just drop the chosen spiritual discipline, but it is to acknowledge that sometimes goods compete in our lives for attention. It would be just as much missing the mark to not appreciate our friend’s thoughtfulness as to be wracked with guilt and anger directed at our self and our friend for breaking the fast from sugar. We break the practice and our attention to it; the practice should not require us to be shattered by it.

5.    Freedom, mercy, generosity, love, justice, wonder, and peace are hallmarks of the spiritual path we wish to travel. We might well wonder why we would choose disciplines that take us away from practicing and experiencing those hallmarks. Some absence is to be expected. But be wary when things feel compulsory, mean, stingy, hateful, fearful, unjust, locked in rigid truths, and violent. When we’re seeking a path of balance, we’ll have all the human feelings; we’ll encounter all the human woes and also the human virtues. Living more deeply into our humanity is, in the end, how we come to meet the holy and practice living into our highest values.

 

May you enjoy and appreciate the path of balance and leave behind the path of tyranny.

 

Lent: Resistance Persistence

Approaching the mid-point of the Lenten exile, it isn’t uncommon for our spirits to flag and for us to shrug and seek to bolt from exile back into what we’re used to and find more comfortable. Adapting to changing habits takes about three weeks and if you’re at all like me, about at the end of that three-week period I’m at my most ready to break the new habit I’m forming. It has become routine enough so that I’m approaching a level of comfort with the habit, but uncomfortable enough still so I’d like to return to how I was before I started it. I can blame it on the waning moon, but the reality is that just as I’m about to enter a stage of successful habituation to the new practice, I rebel. I want a holiday. I have to be vigilant against self-sabotage.

 

Over and over again in the sojourns of return we reach places where we just want to lay down and be done. We far enough from where we started to be hazy and why we’re doing this, and far enough from the goal where we’re struggling to appreciate it. Here might just be good enough. We feel we just don’t have it in us to go along. “Stick a fork in me; I’m done,” we declare.

 

Pausing to consider self-sabotage, it is a truly strange thing that pressures to not change aren’t just outside our selves but inside our selves. Stretching in a different direction, we have all this comfort with going the more usual way, and that way seems to exert more pull just before we become used to going the new way. Pause. Breathe. Pay attention to the distraction of yearning for what’s more comfortable. Talk to co-sojourners. Pray. Sing. And then get back to what you chose only a few short weeks ago: to return to your spiritual discipline. I’m intentionally using the word discipline here, because after the first few days of adjustment, right around now is when the big effort needs to be expended to stick to it. You’ll get your second wind, but if you stop now, you’re likely to take yourself out of the doing and turn away from your choice.

 

You have it in you to pick back up your practice of return. If it were easy, you’d already have this habit firmly established. Despite the lack of evidence, others have actually come this way before. And you can carry on. Part of the exhilaration later will be in moving past this point of resistance and back into the marvel of the place you’ve chosen to go.

 

Pause and remember why you started this practice. Write yourself a note with those reasons. Put that note where you can see it or unfold it as you meet yourself resisting the path of change.

 

Then get back to the path you’ve chosen, a path that isn’t comfortable (that’s why you picked it up for Lent), but one you decided on for making your spirit stronger. You’re worth the discipline. Your deeper relationship with the sacred is worth the discipline. There will be alleluia again. Yep. Really. Ready? Here we go!