Author: Soulman77

 

 

James 3:4-5 offers this: 

Or look at ships: though they are so large that it takes strong winds to drive them, yet they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. So also, the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great exploits. 

One of the more intimidating spiritual practices I have avoided as a contemplative is the silent retreat. Silence and ADHD are not compatible playmates. This is not to say that I have not done a silent retreat, many of my long runs are done alone and it can be a long 6-8 hours of me and my thoughts. But to go to a weekend retreat with other people and not talk the whole time, that is a whole different animal.  

This week, I want to talk about the notion of silence as a spiritual practice.  

I was recently the Rule of Saint Benedict and the reading schedule had us pause upon Chapter 6, On Restraint of Speech: 

1 Let us follow the Prophet’s counsel: I said, I have resolved to keep watch over my ways that I may never sin with my tongue. I was silent and was humbled, and I refrained even from good words (Ps 38[39]:2-3). 2 Here the Prophet indicates that there are times when good words are to be left unsaid out of esteem for silence. For all the more reason, then, should evil speech be curbed so that punishment for sin may be avoided. 3 Indeed, so important is silence that permission to speak should seldom be granted even to mature disciples, no matter how good or holy or constructive their talk, 4 because it is written: In a flood of words you will not avoid sin (Prov 10:19); 5 and elsewhere, The tongue holds the key to life and death (Prov 18:21). 6 Speaking and teaching are the master’s task; the disciple is to be silent and listen. 

7 Therefore, any requests to a superior should be made with all humility and respectful submission. 8 We absolutely condemn in all places any vulgarity and gossip and talk leading to laughter, and we do not permit a disciple to engage in words of that kind. 

Silence is powerful. I remember a hike I was on with my 17-year-old last summer. We were in a section of woods that was particularly secluded from human made noises, a rarity today. I remember her recalling how silent it was. In my younger days, these natural areas were much more abundant. It has always baffled me how overwhelming these silent areas are. There is some evidence for this. 

In an article in the Smithsonian Magazine in December 2013, entitled Earth’s Quietest Place Will Drive You Crazy in 45 Minutes, the authors describe a room that is supposedly the quietest place on earth, an anechoic chamber at Orfield Laboratories in Minnesota, is so quiet that the longest anybody has been able to bear it is 45 minutes. I am not sure about the 45 minutes, but as a contemplative, I know that the mind tends to wander in about 5 minutes or less in silent meditation and takes a tremendous amount of training to gain “control” of the mind. One thing that the article points out is that as the ears adapt to the sound, we adapt to the sound and become the sound.  

If you have been around me for a while, you will know I tell the story about how I almost ended up in the monastery. From the ages of eighteen to twenty, I contemplated Catholic priesthood and the monastic life. I actively courted the Benedictines and the Redemptorists as potential orders. I was about a year out from making novitiate vows when I met a pretty red head who fed me tacos.  

In those two years, I spent a lot of time praying my rosary, reading the Psalms, doing the work that my vocation directors asked me to do and generally being a devout Catholic. After meeting my wife, I left the Catholic church and became a Methodist and was an itinerant preacher for 20 years in a variety of roles. The one lesson that I have taken with me all these years is the power of prayer and silence.  

In 2017, after being away from any formal contemplative formation, I took up studying to get a certification in Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction. The culminating project at the end of the course was a day long silent retreat where I had to practice all the forms of meditation that I had learned in the course. The day was a long day of silence, walking and thinking. No phones, no kids, no jobs, nothing but me and God.  

In all of this practice, the greatest thing I have learned is that God is not something that is outside of us. God is something that resides in all of us. Through contemplative silence, we begin to see how great God is, how God’s greatness resides in us. In all our ugliness, our self-doubt, our fears and our anxieties, contemplative silence strips us and if we can come to our centering breath, we see that we are none of these illusions. We are the greatness of God’s love. We are God’s beauty. 

Borrowing from the Brussat’s Spiritualty and Practice, they offer these suggestions for increasing your practice of silence: 

• Turning off a television, a radio, or a portable media player is my cue to practice silence. 
• Seeing someone meditating is a reminder that I must incorporate silence into my daily routine. 
• Noting the silences in my conversations with others, I vow to use silence as a bridge rather than as a barrier. 

We talk too much and listen too little. In my practice as a therapist, I offer that listening happens more than with your ears. It happens with what you see and feel from the world around you. Turning off the television, turning down your music or putting down your phone is a physical posture that helps you listen better and creates a space of silence in your life.  

Learning to listen to be a beneficial presence rather than to listen to offer a thought or suggestion is another practice of silence that our society has forgotten how to do. It is one that I am actively engaged in daily as a meditative practice, one hour at a time.  

A well-known prayer used in Centering Prayer is this prayer. The idea is to repeat the prayer like a mantra, dropping a section at a time until you get to the word, “Be”. At which time, you sit and meditate on the notion of being: 

Be still and know that I am God. 
Be still and know that I am. 
Be still and know. 
Be still. 
Be. 

 

 

 

The topic of this discussion was inspired by a podcast I was listening to with Dr. Adam Clark of Xavier University in Cincinatti Ohio (https://adamlclark.com/). In a conversation with Josh Patterson of the (RE)Thinking Faith Podcast, Dr. Clark mentioned the comparison of cosmetic diversity vs. Deep pluralism.  

Cultural Diversity and Peace and Justice 

At the heart of my education in undergraduate and in both of my graduate programs was some sort of emphasis on cultural diversity. In college, I spent time with a group that focused on peace and justice work. We would go on mission trips throughout the year, usually during the breaks to places like rural Michigan, Kentucky, and urban settings like New York City. In seminary, I was exposed for the first time to different liberation theologies. In my counseling masters, I was challenged to write about how to work with clients of diverse cultural backgrounds.  

This training has shaped my mind in such a way that when I see a person of color, a woman, or a member of the LGTBQ+ community, I not only see a person, but I also see a child of God; a potential for the seat of Christ. I also see a story, a history.  

The focus of this post is going to look at the story, the history. As a disclaimer, I am a middle age white man. I tell this to my BIPOC, women and LGBQT+ clients all the time. While I not only have book knowledge around these issues and quite a bit of exposure, none of this also compares to the shared lived experiences these people face generationally and every day. 

Deep pluralism 

According to Dr. Diana Eck of the Pluralism Project at Harvard Univeristy, pluralism is (https://pluralism.org/about) : 

 Pluralism is an ethic for living together in a diverse society: not mere tolerance or relativism, but the real encounter of commitments. 

When our churches claim an open and affirming status or open hearts, doors and minds, what are they really talking about here?  Is this, as Dr. Grant suggests, cosmetic diversity or is there a deep commitment to learning to live together? It has been my experience that when you really push people to understand and listen, people stop listening or in my case, ask me to leave. The Pluralism project focuses mostly on deep ecumenism, but I believe the concepts can spread across to race, sexuality, and gender acceptance.  

Potential Seats of Christ 

At the beginning of many Buddhist texts, one will find this passage: 

‘Oh nobly born, oh you who are the sons and daughters of the awakened ones, the Buddhas and the bodhisattvas. Do not forget who you really are, do not forget your true nature.’ They begin with this beautiful expression of respect to you, that you were born with a basic goodness and a heart of compassion that is born into every child. You are born with a capacity to awaken and live in a wise and caring way in this world. Do not ever forget who you are. 

Thomas Merton in his famous mystical experience on 4th and Walnut revealed this (From Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander); 

“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness… This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud… I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.” 

 

At the end of the creation narratives, God declared all creation good. The Buddhist teacher, Jack Kornfield offers in response to the opening passage noted above, that as a society, we are unwilling to admit our vulnerabilities and see our interconnectedness. On those different than us, we project these differences through hate and ignorance. The fear that we may be wrong causes us to cling to this ignorance. We cling to our ignorance because it keeps us from looking at our own pains and vulnerabilities. In behavioral work, when we talk about bullies, we often point out that their behaviors are driven by their own fears and insecurities.  

Our Call to Compassion 

It is felt that we are at a tipping point in society right now. Churches have significantly lost the ability to be beacons of hope to many, too often digging their heels in and sticking to the ways we have always done things.  

Churches must awaken to the realities of a changing world. I talk to many millennial and Gen Z clients daily and weekly. They tell me a similar message; the church is out of touch. The church defends its perpetrators, it is full of hypocrites.  

It is time for churches to see their places of worship as hospitals for the poor in spirit. To be sanctuaries of peace not plastic marquees touting openness. It is time for pastors devoted to the word to start preaching the radical words from the religious orientation of Jesus rather than the man made religion of Jesus.  

It is time to cultivate a compassionate, deep pluralism and openenss to all the seats of Christ in our presence.  

“Go to Hell” is common parlance when one is disgusted with another’s behaviors. In our house, since I am a former pastor, “I am going to go to hell for saying that” is a joke we pass around quite often. Perhaps one of more trying theological and historical topics to preach and teach about was hell. In this discussion, I want to tackle a couple of notions of hell from several angles: misconceptions; the nature of hell and other religious orientations.  

One of the first myths to dispel with the word hell is that the word is not biblical as it is understood from the English word, “hell.” Consider this article from Patheos: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/messyinspirations/2019/11/hell-absent-bible/ 

As a word, hell was first used sometime before the 12 century. It is generally agreed that etymologically, the word originates from Middle English and Germanic origins. It roughly translates as abode of the dead. In Germanic, the definition leans more towards to conceal or hide. 

The Problem of Hell

A question to consider then is “how did this word become so powerful in Christian lexicon?” It is felt that church power structures have used this word as a weapon to emotionally control believers to maintain order in parishes, communities, states, and governments for millennia. As with other behaviors that Christianity has engaged in, the use of the word hell is a culturally appropriated notion from real ideas in the Jewish tradition. As a multicultural word, there are many understandings of what hell means. While there are overlaps in understanding, it is understood that each meaning is unique from the tradition it comes from.  

The problem of hell is an ethical problem in the Abrahamic traditions because of its conflict with the notion in the three traditions of a just, moral and all the omini’s(benevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient) supreme being. It is also inconsistent with the idea of free will.  

Of the Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, the faith of Jesus, hell is the least restrictive. In Judaism, one’s soul continues to exist after death. During this time, the soul is subject to punishment and reward. This period is temporary and after this period, the soul is free to enjoy the light of God in the afterlife. Because of this temporary notion of hell in Judaism, it does not compare well to the Christian or even the Islamic notions of hell. Consider this article from Chabad.org: https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/1594422/jewish/Do-Jews-Believe-in-Hell.htm 

Rather than spending the rest of the time in this post rehashing all the different ways “hell” shows up in the bible, I instead want to look at how hell has shown up in your life.  

Love Your Enemies

Too often, Christians use hell as place where the bad people go when they are not living up to their biblical ideals. Instead of loving our enemies as Jesus challenges us, we instead presume that a person is sinful, we try to evangelize them or scare the hell out of them as they would have done in my day and then when this fails, resign to the fact they are going to hell. This then historically has justified all kinds of heinous behaviors of untold cruelty.  

What does it mean to love your enemies? As with other approaches to understanding words, I turn to my contemplative roots and read that line from a lectio point of view. There are three words in this statement that we need to consider: love, your and enemies.  

Love is pretty straight forwards, or so it seems. I have preached on this topic, written on this topic many times. Love however in this context for me is considering the Christ nature in all of those around us. In my practice as a therapist, I do not talk about forgiveness much as it is so loaded emotionally. I do however love the concepts around cultivating acceptance, especially when you consider one’s Christ nature. We are all potential seats of Christ. God saw us in God’s final creation and said it was very good, and God seemed to be pretty pleased.  

Your. The word your is a possessive word. It indicates that something may belong to you, say, “your car,” “your house” and so on. When we tie it into the other word in this statement, enemies, we come across a conundrum, a possession of our enemies. In Buddhism, we hear that we suffer because we cling. If we consider one our enemy, then what are we clinging to? If we turn again to the previous word, love and understand a universal sense of this word, that God loves all of us universally and that all are potential seats of Christ, hopefully then this changes our orientation around how we see people we do not like or even disagree with.  

Finally, we come to the word enemies. I work with people for a living. There is a line from the Jimmy Buffett song, Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes” that says, “good times and riches and sons of a bitches, I have seen more than I can recall.” I get it. People are hard to deal with. People do horrible things to each other. 

Are we projecting our fears and failing to deal with our discomfort with people we do not like?

Jesus got it too. Peter was a back stabber; Judas was a betrayer and Thomas was a doubter. His religious authorities were undermining the very values he believed in as a Jewish man at his time.  

Too often, the enemy is inside you. It is your mindset, your latent or even on the surface beliefs, your fears and your ignorance’s that cause you see yourself other than part of the body of Christ.  

Rather than focus on where people are going, focus on yourself, focus on loving yourself, embracing the enemy of you mind. Nobody is going anywhere. We are all in the same boat. We all get afraid sometimes. We all have big feelings sometimes. Address these and you will combat the enemy within, learn to love yourself and you will learn to love others.  

In 2017, I turned 40 years old. At this point, I had been running ultramarathons for 7 years, averaging around three 50k’s a year, with a couple of years where I had 5 ultras under my belt. I have never been competitive, but in 2014, a strange thing happened, I ran my first sub-8-hour 50k, followed by a sub 7 in 2016 and then consistent sub 7:30’s in 2017-2020. Forty was a new age bracket putting me in the “Master’s” athlete category. Training for Master’s athletes ranges from 7-10 hours a week. See https://coach.ca/sites/default/files/2020-02/Coaching_Master_Athletes_FINAL_EN.pdf 

In the peak of my year, usually June – September, I am regularly putting in 10-13 hours a week. The point of all this is that despite all my training, I do not look like Hugh Jackman in Wolverine. In reality, my body type tends towards the endomorph with a touch of mesomorph. I am a slightly chubby father of four. A six pack of abs has never been in the cards for any of the sports going back to high school I have competed in. The reality is that I do not care. Being able to complete 1 50k was cool, saying that I have completed over 50 (if you include training runs, then that number is in the 100’s) endurance/ultra events is way cooler. 

Body Dysmorphia 

Consider this article from Sarah Valley of Mindfulness for Addressing Stress, Anxiety, Trauma and Grief:  https://www.patheos.com/blogs/mindfulnessforaddressingstress/2023/05/the-truth-about-negative-self-talk-shame-and-body-image-and-how-to-move-beyond-it-all/ 

In this article, Miss Valley rightly points out that many women struggle with body dysmorphia. This article was written in 2015, and this article and a conversation I was having with a classmate got me thinking, “what is the state of body dysmorphia today? In this post, I aim to address body dysmorphia and how addressing it is a spiritual practice of caring for ourselves. 

Body dysmorphia is a problem for both men and women. As noted in the article link above, body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) is “when a person has a preoccupation with a perceived flaw in their physical appearance. Although there might be a slight flaw, the distress is excessive. BDD has similarities to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD); however, there are some important distinctions.” A common myth is that this disorder is about vanity, which it is not. Consider more information here: https://adaa.org/understanding-anxiety/body-dysmorphic-disorder 

Another common misconception is that body dysmorphia is related to body dysphoria. Body dysmorphia is a mental health condition and gender or body dysphoria currently is not, though historically it has been diagnosed as so. According to the American Psychiatric Association (APA), gender dysphoria presents as “clinically significant distress or impairment related to a strong desire to be of another gender, which may include a desire to change primary and/or secondary sex characteristics” while noting again that not all transgender or gender diverse people experience dysphoria. See this article: https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/gender-dysphoria/what-is-gender-dysphoria 

How the Influencer Culture and Hollywood Drives Body Dysmorphia 

I am a fan of the influencer videos on YouTube. Some of them are great with quality content, others, not so much. An article from the NY Times in 2022 entitled “What Students Are Saying About How Social Media Affects Their Body Image” https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/31/learning/what-students-are-saying-about-how-social-media-affects-their-body-image.html highlights students’ thoughts on how social media has been detrimental to their mental health and has created the rise of “bigorexia”. This article seems to suggest and confirm what other articles have pointed to around body image and social media. Anecdotally, the number of people at my gym who are walking around toting influencer supplements and lifting poorly, or ego lifting is high.  

In another study conducted by the NY Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/10/well/move/fitness-influencers.html ), they point to an article in BMC Public Health (https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-023-15232-7)  pointed out that influencers sometimes lack proper training and tout unsound advice when it comes to diet, fitness, and wellness. Again, watching many hours of this on YouTube, I can concur that this is often the case. As a trained personal trainer and nutrition coach, as well as a professional counselor, I am ethically mindful of the limit of my scope of practice.  

Managing Body Dysmorphia 

What do you do if you or someone you know is dealing with body dysmorphia?  

Psychotherapy in the form of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is the standard of care when dealing with anxiety type presentations. While there is no pill that will “fix” or “cure” body dysmorphic disorder, medications in the form of select serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI’s) can be utilized to mitigate symptoms of depression and anxiety.  

In my practice as a therapist, CBT is the first line of defense, but there are also the modalities of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) and Mindfulness based approaches.  

 My best advice here is to make an appointment with a therapist who specializes in anxiety and obsessive-compulsive behaviors.  

The Spiritual Practice of You  

The Spiritual Practice of You is a practice of mindfulness. Each of us is a work in progress. You are a beautiful gift from God. This practice challenges us to become all God intended us to be; to see ourselves as God sees us. In love we were created and from beautiful intentions we were set forth. When God got done creating on that last day and took a rest, God declared it good, God declared you good.  

 

Is fear an emotion or a perception? What do we do about the notion of fear? In the next two posts, I am going to look at how fear is driving the problem of social conflict and the ongoing collapse of church institutions in America.  

In this post, I want to address three areas regarding the experience of fear: the psychology of fear, and finally mindful practices to deal with fear. 

Psychology of Fear 

Fear is closely related to anxiety, here is a post on anxiety that I wrote a few weeks back: 

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/loveopensdoors/2023/12/advent-spiritual…actice-of-prayer/

It is important to note that anxiety and fear, while related, are not the same. Fear relates to a known or understood threat, whereas anxiety follows from an unknown, expected, or poorly defined threat. 

Like anxiety, we need fear. If we did not have both, we would not be able to protect ourselves. As an evolutionary device, it has protected our species for millennia. While the stakes are lower today, as a clinician and as a former pastor, I witness and help folks manage a lot of fear in my practice. While speaking in public, driving across town, or even getting groceries are not the scariest experiences, every day, I help people manage their fear and anxiety.  

There are many factors that lead one to be fearful. The behavior trait known as neuroticism can increase one’s likelihood of developing a phobia. One’s tendency toward frequent worries and negative thoughts may also increase the risk. Traumas such as being raised by overprotective parents, losing a parent, or sexual or physical abuse also can raise the potential for an openness to fear.  

There is another fear that I have had to deal with my entirety of my career as a pastor, the fear of change. My working hypothesis here is that these feelings are more of an anxiety than a fear response. I say this because of the definition I used above. I will dig more into this in a future post. When I talk about taking the emotion out of fear, I do believe that while fear is an emotional state, it is also a state of being. In the military, there are many ways that we are trained to deal with the many fears we will encounter in a gun fight. Facing those fears and problem solving through the fears are one of the solutions that I will talk about later in this post.  

Philosophy of Fear 

The Stoics teach us that fear is not the enemy, but a tool to help us determine what we should fear and how to live in a diminished state if our worst fears come true. It is from the Stoics that I take my cues for how to manage my fears. While fear is based on real and tangible threats to our existence, our reactions can be magnified by our perception of hopelessness, meaninglessness, and victimization.  

The most important aspect to our mental health is our emotions. Emotions bring meaning to our experiences in general, make life worth living. However, when one emotion dominates our headspace, say depression, anxiety, grief and in the case of this post, fear, we begin to lose sight of what has the most meaning for us.  

Turning back to the Stoics then, they argued that emotions make no sense because we cannot fear what we cannot control or what we can for that matter. As I mentioned in the section on psychology, fear is normal and okay, anxiety is not. A healthy relationship with fear along with other emotions can bring us into a greater awareness of ourselves.  

Mindful Practices to Manage Fearful Responses 

I would argue that our ego gets our fear really fired up and then anxiety comes along and joins the party and now I have someone who is not engaging in life. To take the emotion out of fear, we need to take the ego out of the emotion. 

 On of the most obvious things we can do when we are fearful is to just breathe. While I hear it all the time, “deep breathing doesn’t do anything for me,” the evidence is quite robust when it comes to breathwork and its healing properties. As a long-distance runner, getting control of my breath helps me maintain control of my mind so I can not only run, but eat and focus on my strategy.  

Two of the most common breathwork approaches I teach in my office are box breathing and diaphragmatic breathing: 

Diaphragmatic, or belly breathing 

• Start by sitting comfortably or lying on your back. 
• Place one hand on the upper part of your chest and the other hand on your belly. 
• Relax your belly muscles. 
• Breathe in slowly through your nose until you feel your belly start to rise. 
• Breathe out slowly through slightly pursed lips and feel your belly fall. 
• Repeat. 

Box breathing 

• Breathe out while counting to four. 
• Hold your breath while counting to four. 
• Breathe in while counting to four. 
• Hold your breath while counting to four. 
• Repeat. 

 

Walking is another way of dealing with fear. In the military, we often were told to move, or the only way out is through. What does not work is staying put or getting stuck.  

Finally, turn off the television, put down the phone and get off the social media. All these mediums are curated to maximize your fears. The world really is not any worse off than it has ever been. When you engage in these mediums, especially in this day, you only get to see what you want to see. I get it all the time; I tend to read the news in the morning to have material to talk about throughout the day. Inevitably in my morning readings, I find myself reading articles sent to me about things I had talked to clients about the day prior. It really makes decent quality research hard to do.  

I want to close with William Ernest Henley’s poem, Invictus (Henley, 1875) as challenge to our fears: 

Out of the night that covers me, 
Black as the pit from pole to pole, 
I thank whatever gods may be 
For my unconquerable soul. 
In the fell clutch of circumstance 
 I have not winced nor cried aloud. 
Under the bludgeonings of chance 
My head is bloody, but unbowed. 
Beyond this place of wrath and tears 
Looms but the Horror of the shade, 
And yet the menace of the years 
Finds and shall find me unafraid. 

It matters not how strait the gate, 
How charged with punishments the scroll, 
I am the master of my fate, 

I am the captain of my soul.