What We Talk About When We Talk About God (13 page)

The first Christians had a way of talking about this massive movement, bigger than any one of us, that's sweeping across human history: they wrote that God is in the process of moving everything forward so that God will be
over all and through all and in all,
and in another passage in the Bible it's written that God does what God does so that God may be
all in all.

over

and

through

and

in

and

all in all.

For God to be recognized as all in all,

then, we will become more and more aware of the uniting of all the depths and dimensions of being—

from the physical to the spiritual,

from the seen to the unseen,

from matter to spirit and everything in between—

as we see more and more of the universe as the single, seamless reality it's always been.

As we say yes to this invitation and call and pull, more and more things that were previously thought to be at odds—

like science and faith,

the brain and the heart,

logic and feeling,

joy and suffering,

having explanations and not having explanations—

will become reconciled to each other and take their proper place

as more and more we flourish and thrive in this life, right here and right now.

Which reminds me of my friend Tim.

He's a comedian, actor, motivational speaker, and author. He used to do a radio show on Friday mornings in which he'd answer callers' questions live on the air as a number of different characters. One Friday he began talking on air as an old Irish priest, calling himself Father Tim and inviting people to ask him anything they'd like to know. Father Tim was an instant hit, so much so that Tim decided to make a public appearance at a radio promotional party. Did I mention that it was a classic rock station? Wearing a robe and a big round priest hat he'd found, he showed up at the party and greeted people and walked around smiling and telling stories, as if it were totally natural to be dressed as a priest at a classic rock station promotional party.

Did I also mention that he's absolutely fearless?

One woman told him that her husband had driven an hour to see him in person, adding that she was sure her husband had “never been this close to God.” Other people came up to him and asked him to bless their babies.

Tim, it might not surprise you, decided to take it farther. He took a large piece of cardboard and cut a square hole in it; then he took some strips of cardboard and glued them together to make a confessional window in his cardboard confessional wall. Then he went downtown late on a weekend night to a comedy club in full Father Tim robe and hat and asked the stage manager if he could go on. The crowd, as they often are by this time, were quite rowdy, just as Tim prefers them. He went up on stage, sat down in one of two chairs, put the cardboard confessional wall between him and the other chair, and asked if anybody wanted to make a confession.

Here's the fascinating part: they did—lots of them! Within moments people were lined up to publicly confess their sins in front of complete strangers. In a comedy club. Late on a Friday night.

I tell you this story because often we carry around secrets, sins, doubts, regrets, and crippling fears that we simply don't know what to do with. And so those things are in there, in us somewhere, lurking in the shadows, sapping us of strength and vitality.

As it's written in the Psalms,

When I kept silent,
my bones wasted away . . .

In spite of all the ways that we live split, detached, and compartmentalized lives, we know that this is not how it's supposed to be, because our bodies and minds and hearts and consciences want to be united. When we're talking about God, then, we're talking about the power pulling us forward, the awareness we have that when something is eating us up inside it's not right to keep it hidden or repressed or stuffed down in there. It's the
ruach
of God, drawing the truth out of us so that those dark and destructive energies are no longer wasting our bones away.

We have phrases for this movement of God in our lives—we speak of getting something off our chest,

we talk about how good it was to vent,

we say after we've voiced some truth or doubt that we feel a thousand times lighter,

all of this language blurring the line between our

thoughts and emotions and bodies.

Why does ranting about how we really feel create such release
in our chest
?

For many, the word
confession
is tied up in what they perceive to be archaic ideas about God and judgment and condemnation and how bad we are and how God just can't wait to crush us.

But confession—

confession is about liberation,

freedom,

naming the darkness and pain that lies within and, in naming it, robbing it of its power.

Jesus told a story about two men who went up to the temple to pray. One went on and on about how glad he was for all of the good things he'd done and how he wasn't like other people, while the other man stood at a distance and prayed, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” Jesus said that the second man went home justified. Or, as we might say, it's the second man who went home
free
.

Confession is like really, really healthy vomit. It may smell and get all over the front of your shirt, but you feel better—you feel cleansed—when you're done. Over the years I've had people confess all sorts of things to me, from trivial and sometimes even funny to strange and dark and violent and illegal. I always first ask them, “Have you told anybody else about this?” and a shockingly high number of people say no, no one knows about this.

This is not only sad, but destructive. We
need
each other. We need friends and community, people we can vomit all over, getting it out, confessing it, and saying yes to the pull of God forward to live whole, integrated lives, where nothing is split or stuffed or repressed or stifled or hidden.

This is why the Psalms, the collection of prayers in the middle of the Bible, are so full of people asking God to do horrible, vengeful, violent things to their enemies.

You've felt that way before, right? Like you wanted someone who hurt you to suffer in a prolonged, excruciating way? The Psalms show us what a healthy, vibrant spirituality looks like—you pray those impulses, you speak them, you drag them up and let them pass through your lips, however mean and nasty and cruel they are.

And what you discover when you do this is that they become
less
than what they used to be.

Less pressing,

less urgent,

less powerful.

Make a list of every last awful thing you want done to the one you hate, and by the end of your list making you will have far less energy for list making.

Simply by being honest about what's really going on inside of you, you live less and less divided. It's written in the Proverbs that “a heart at peace gives life to the body.” Of course. The mind and the heart and the bones and the body are all an interconnected, interrelated whole. When you've wronged someone or violated your true self and it remains a deep, dark secret, it negatively affects
all
of you.

This is what Jesus does: he comes to integrate, to make whole, to take all the bits and pieces and disintegrated parts and bring them together, reconciling us to ourselves and to the God who never stops inviting us forward—the God who, reintegrating and reintegrated, finally truly is all in all.

We all have a shadow side, the part of us in which our fears and insecurities and greed and terror and worst suspicions about ourselves reside. It's a churning, restless, dark place, often containing truths that can cripple us with just a fleeting thought.

When I talk about the God who is with us, for us, and ahead of us, I'm talking about our facing that which most terrifies us about ourselves, embracing it and fearing it no longer, refusing to allow it to exist separate from the rest of our being, resting assured that we are loved and we belong and we are going to be just fine.

People deal with their shadow side in a number of ways, the most common way being to find outside enemies and point to them, demonizing them and blaming them for long lists of perceived evils. This strategy often does a very effective job of helping us avoid that which lurks within us. Politicians and radio talk-show hosts and pastors can become very skilled in this, constantly pointing out the darkness and evil and twisted ways of others to avoid dealing with the doubts and insecurities and questions they bear in their own bones.

Institutions can easily become shadow management systems, finely tuned to compellingly convince people of how evil, wrong, dangerous, and threatening
somebody else—
some
other
person or group
—
is.

People often respond favorably to this shadow management because it's much, much easier than actually entering into the darkness. And so the numbers grow, the budget increases, and the system becomes more convinced of its own importance and power, all the while obscuring the unspoken realities that lurk in the center of it: fear, terror, and insecurity. It's easy to crank up the rhetoric, identifying a new enemy each week, calling each one out, appearing to your followers to be strong and authoritative and willing to take a stand, but all of it in the end a weak, shallow, desperate, pathetic, and broken exercise in shadow management.

But as we're more and more open to the ongoing work of God in the world, we become more and more present to our depths.

Remember, 96 percent of the universe is dark matter—a vibrant, pulsating source of energy for the universe. We don't transform our shadow side by denial but by entering into it, embracing it, facing it, and naming it because we believe God is with us and for us.

When we do this—name our fears and sins and failures and own up to them, describing them as clearly as we are able—we pass through them into the new life on the other side. We have faced the worst about ourselves and we have survived, making us strong in the only sense that actually matters. This is why resurrection is so central to the Jesus story: he faces the worst that can happen to a person, and comes out the other side alive in a new way. It is not a false strength we gain, a posing and posturing and pretending, but a quiet, humble, grounded strength that has done the hard work of facing our most troubling inner torments and then watching them be transformed into sources of vitality and life.

To be healthy and whole, then, will always lead us to become more and more fully present to our own depths, which include our shadow side as well as our deepest desires.

Jesus asked a man, “What do you want?”

A rather simple, straightforward question, and yet how many can answer it? What is it
you
want? What is it that you would pay a high price for and endure hardship for and overcome any obstacle put in your way to have? What is it that would get you up every morning thrilled for another day?

There's a reason why so many personal transformations begin with the question, “Is this all there is?”

God gives us desires,

heart,

passion,

and love—

gives us desires for justice, compassion, organization, order, beauty, knowledge, wisdom—

and when we become separated from these desires, we lose something vital to who we are. For many of us, we learned quickly how to adapt, what authority figures wanted from us, and how to play the game. This can be good, and profitable, and can earn us all sorts of attention and accolades, but this can also violate who we are. We can become enslaved to the expectations of others, losing our true self in the process.

The Greeks had a way of talking about the deep place within us where our desires reside: they called it our
splagchnon
.
Splagchnon
translates literally as
bowels
or
intestines
or
guts
or
innards
. It came to refer to the part of you from which you truly live, the seat of your being that drives you to move and act and touch and feel.

And so when we talk about God, we're talking about the divine
ruach
who is constantly at work in us, connecting us to our
splagchnon,
calling out of us all kinds of resolve and fiber and spine we may not even have known we possessed, giving us what we need to face and know and name and embrace all that is true about us, from our fears and addictions and doubts and guilt to our dreams and desires and hopes and longings.

God, it turns out, is found over, through, and in all of it. Which includes, of course, our bodies.

A friend of mine recently told me about a woman in a small town in the Midwest who started teaching a weeknight yoga class. It was the first yoga class ever taught in her town, yet a surprisingly large number of women began attending. The teacher told my friend that a fascinating thing began happening in the classes: several of the women (different ones each time) would begin weeping partway through the class, and they wouldn't stop.

Now, I assume you're like me when I first heard about that class, and you're thinking, “What's the problem? It's just yoga.” But the teacher quickly developed a compelling theory about why the women were crying. Yoga is a Sanskrit word that means to
join,
unite,
or
integrate
. As the teacher got to know the participants and listened to their perspectives on the class, she learned that for many of these women, it was the first time they had ever been told that their body is good and that it is proper and healthy for them to honor and respect and care for it as the sacred gift that it is. They'd never had someone guide them in the intentional integration of their body with their rest of their being.