Nouwen on Ministry and the Wilderness
Lent 2012: A Journey through the Wilderness
Nouwen on Ministry and the Wilderness
The question with which I started this exploration of desert spirituality and contemporary ministry was: “How can we minister in an apocalyptic situation?” In a period of history dominated by the growing fear of a world that cannot be won and an increasing sense of impotence, the question of ministry is very urgent.
As a response to this question I have presented the words, “Flee from the world, be silent and pray always,” words spoken to the Roman aristocrat Arsenius who asked God how to be saved. Solitude, silence, and unceasing prayer form the core concepts of the spirituality of the desert. I consider them to be of great value for us who are ministers as we approach the end of the second millennium of Christianity.
Solitude shows us the way to let our behavior be shaped not by the compulsions of the world but by our new mind, the mind of Christ. Silence prevents us from being suffocated by our wordy world and teaches us to speak the Word of God. Finally, unceasing prayer gives solitude and silence their real meaning. Thus we enter through our heart into the heart of God, who embraces all of history with his eternally creative and recreative love.
But does not this spirituality of the desert close our eyes to the cruel realities of our time? No. On the contrary, solitude, silence, and prayer allow us to save ourselves and others from the shipwreck of our self-destructive society. The temptation is to go mad with those who are mad, and to go around yelling and screaming, telling everyone where to go, what to do, and how to behave. The temptation is to become so involved in the agonies and ecstasies of the last days that we will drown together with those we are trying to save.
• Henri Nouwen
The Way of the Heart: Desert Spirituality and Contemporary Ministry
Saturday Ramblings 3.3.2012
Welcome fellow iMonks! It’s time for the weekly venture into the leftovers here at the iMonastery. We fix a lot of food during the week and try to give you hearty main dishes twice a day (if possible). But there are some things we just don’t get around to, so we gather them all up in Baggie and save them for today. And if they’re not all tasty, at least they’re not stale. So gather ’round the table, let’s hold hands and give thanks for today’s provision of Saturday Ramblings.
Oh boy, another archeological discovery that “proves” Jesus never raised from the dead. I think I recall reading somewhere that the only way to please God is by faith, not proof. Now, where did I read that? Oh yeah, the Bible.
The theologian who declared “God is dead” in 1966 died this week. William Hamilton was 87 when he died. I hope that as he is received into the arms of a very real and living God, Hamilton will say, “I am so glad I was wrong.”
I have a request for our brothers and sisters in the United Kingdom. Can you please keep your “theologians” on a shorter leash?
Wilderness Remix
One interesting feature of the Hebrew Bible is its use of doublets — stories that duplicate others. Well known narratives such as the creation, Noah and the flood, and Abraham passing off Sarah as his half-sister are not just told once, but twice. This used to be seen as evidence for multiple sources behind the Bible’s composition, but there is more and more acceptance among Bible scholars that these doublets reflect intentional literary strategies on the part of the authors and editors to make various points.
One example that is pertinent to our Lenten reflections on the wilderness involves the presence of two sets of stories about Israel’s “wilderness wanderings.“
Apparently, there’s wilderness. And wilderness remix.
- The first set of stories about Israel journeying through the wilderness is found in Exodus 13-18. These accounts describe Israel leaving Egypt, crossing the Red Sea, and traveling across the desert to Mt. Sinai.
- The second group of narratives tells the tale of Israel leaving Sinai and heading toward the Promised Land. These are found in Numbers 11-25 and are commonly known as the “Wilderness Wanderings.”
In both passages we read of the people complaining, God giving manna from heaven, Moses bringing water from the Rock, and Israel engaging in battle against her enemies. In both sections, God leads them by a pillar of cloud and fire. In both, Israel sings to the Lord. The two sets of narratives have common characters and events.
But at their heart, they could not be more different.
Wandering the Wilderness of Falsity
Lent 2012: A Journey through the Wilderness
Wandering the Wilderness of Falsity
“Our false selves are the identities we cultivate in order to function in society with pride and self-possession; our real selves are a deep religious mystery, known entirely only to God.”—Thomas Merton
I don’t know why this is such revelation to me. You’d think a half century into this life I might have a clue that my false self has been muddying things up … creating a growing sense of incongruence and a mortifying awareness that I’m a colossal fake. Then again, the essence of falsity is deception and I am my own number one dupe.
In past posts, I’ve shared some of the baggage I dragged from childhood to my young adult years. It all had to do with parental alcoholism and the anxiety it left me, the despairs of parental divorce and the depression it left me, the circumstances of parental chaos and the need for control it left me. Not to belittle my strides to get free or God’s hand to draw me to freedom, but somehow I believed I just chucked all those loaded bags out the car windows of my life and was miraculously and fairly instantly free. By that, I mean the two years it took to function without the need of weekly counseling and daily meds … but I was deluding myself. The truth is that I discovered depression is hard on marriages and friendships. Chronically controlling situations and people to anesthetize anxiety is also a big turn-off for most as well. So what did I do? I got happy and sweet and passive.
From the first moments of nascent awareness, we humans take stock of what the world finds acceptable. Through the molding of parents, siblings, friends, teachers and others we learn proper family or societal behaviors (or at least what these tell us is proper in their various forms and degrees of dysfunction). We learn good playground etiquette, submission to authority, whether sincere or patronizing, and generally how to slog through life. Even teenagers (I’ve had three) going through periods of rebellion against parents to establish their individuality and personhood, are really just complying with expectations of peers in most cases. Consciously or sub-consciously, we strive for the most safety and least risk. Not all of this is bad … unless we enjoy disorder and anarchy, but the downside is that we present ourselves, sometimes quite convincingly, as other than we really are. It’s saddest and scariest that we are so habitual in this that we come to really believe our own lies. We fool ourselves and often we can fool our observers, but when our cover gets blown, the repercussions range from mild to severe – at least until the relief of authenticity begins to manifest.
In The Desert, You Can Remember Your Name
Lent 2012: A Journey through the Wilderness
In the Desert, You Can Remember Your Name
In a tradition dating from at least as far back as the 7th century, Irish religious practice acknowledged a division of three martyrdoms: the red, the white, and the green. Drawing from the established tradition of the Church about the red martyrdom (the martyrdom of blood, where the saints died in the Roman and other persecutions) and the white martyrdom (which came about after Christianity was tolerated and established; so the tradition of the Desert Fathers in withdrawing into deserts or waste places to live a life of isolation and ascetic practice was established; it was later modified to incorporate the peregrinatio pro Christi or “wandering for Christ” when a person would give up all he knew and loved and leave behind home and family to wander abroad, half-pilgrim, half-missionary), the Irish included a third practice: what was known as “green” (or, depending on how the word glas is translated, “blue” or even “gray”) martyrdom.
The Irish had little or no chance of suffering the red martyrdom since there were no persecutions for the sake of the Faith, even in depictions of conflicts between Christian missionaries such as St. Patrick and the native religious tradition as represented by the Druids. This is demonstrated in what the 12th century Norman-Welsh chronicler Giraldus Cambrensis (Gerald of Wales) records in his “The Topography of Ireland” under the heading “A sarcastic reply of the Archbishop of Cashel”, when Gerald (acting as an apologist for the Norman invasion of Ireland under the pretext that they were fulfilling the will of the Pope in reforming the Irish church) reproached the native Irishman that no Irish saint had ever been martyred for the faith in Ireland :
I once made objections of this kind to Maurice, archbishop of Cashel, a discreet and learned man, in the presence of Gerald, a clerk of the Roman church who formerly came as legate into those parts; and throwing the blame of the enormous delinquencies of this country principally on the prelates, I drew a powerful example from the fact that no one in that kingdom had ever obtained the crown of martyrdom for the church of God. Upon this the archbishop replied sarcastically, avoiding the point of my proposition, and answering it by a home-thrust: “It is true,” he said, “that although our nation may seem barbarous, uncivilized and cruel, they have always shewn great honour and reverence to ecclesiastics, and never on any occasion raised their hands against God’s saints. But there is now come into our land a people who know how to make martyrs, and have frequently done it. Henceforth Ireland will have its martyrs, as well as other countries.
Since we also suffer from a lack of deserts, it was also very difficult for any Irish religious to emulate the Egyptian Desert Fathers and Mothers in the white martyrdom; attempts such as Skellig Michael are as close as we came. Instead, the Irish preferred to go into exile, as with St. Columcille who left Ireland for Scotland and Iona, or the monks who spread out throughout Europe between the 8th-13th centuries such as St. Columbanus, St. Gall, St. Aidan, St. Fursey, St. Fergal (Virgil), St. Fiachra (Fiacre) and their disciples, and many others.
But the third and most important for the native Irish church was the establishment of monastic settlements and hermitages in Ireland herself. This was a means of having the “desert in the world”, so to speak; to practice withdrawal from everyday life while still being in the midst of everyday life. This had precedent in how monasticism developed in Egypt during and after the 4th century, where the emphasis changed from solitary individuals living as hermits to small groups living communally, and how it developed in Europe under the influence of the Rule of St. Benedict. The pattern is similar in so many ways; a holy man or woman seeks to live a solitary life but attracts the attention of both laypeople and other religious, who seek to live under the rule of that person, who attempts to flee to a more solitary place but attracts yet more attention and ends up founding or being the inspiration for a community.
Continue reading “In The Desert, You Can Remember Your Name”
Jesus in the Wilderness (Video)
Lent 2012: A Journey through the Wilderness
A Video of Jesus in the Wilderness
I came upon this evocative video through a link by Tod Bolsinger on Facebook. The illustrations are wonderfully simple, the story profound. Take a few moments today and join Jesus in the wilderness.
The Wilderness of Life Under the Law
Lent 2012: A Journey through the Wilderness
The Wilderness of Life Under the Law
• • •
Proposition One: The word “Torah” (often translated “law”) means “a father’s instruction” — it was given to teach God’s people about God’s ways and how to walk in God’s wisdom.
Proposition Two: The Torah (the first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch) is not equivalent to “the Law,” in the sense of a book of legal requirements, but it is a book of narratives that includes passages from Israel’s law codes.
Proposition Three: The Torah is the story of (1) Israel’s life before the Law (the Patriarchs) and (2) Israel’s life under the Law (the Exodus generation), introduced by a “prehistory” (Gen. 1-11).
Proposition Four: The two key events in the story involve covenants God made with his people — through Abraham (Gen. 15) and Moses (Exodus 19ff).
Proposition Five: The Torah presents Abraham as the exemplar of faith, who is counted righteous because he trusts God and receives his promises.
Proposition Six: The Torah presents the generation of Moses as those who failed to trust God under the Law and are therefore kept from enjoying life in the Promised Land and warned about the exile that future generations under the Law will face.
Proposition Seven: The Torah presents these two great eras, two great characters, and two great covenants as two different approaches to life with God, with two drastically different results.
• • •
The Torah, then, sets forth two ways of living with God. One leads to wilderness. One leads to life in a land of blessing. What makes the difference?
Winter Wilderness
Lent 2012: A Journey through the Wilderness
Winter Wilderness (Denise Day Spencer)
Photos by Denise Day Spencer
• • •
When crinkled leaves
drop from the trees,
it’s then you see
what lay hidden.
Or so they say.
The creek rushing beyond rough, bare branches.
A birds’ nest lodged in the forked crook of limbs.
Things not well seen
amid the green
though they have been
there all along.
So they were right.
Unnoticed under cover of summer,
in winter wilderness made visible.
What of my heart?
I stand apart.
When will You start
to show me more?
What do they know?
In the wilderness of my winter soul
will You reveal Yourself and make me whole?
Denise Spencer: Winter Wilderness
Lent 2012: A Journey through the Wilderness
Winter Wilderness (Denise Day Spencer)
Photos by Denise Day Spencer
• • •
When crinkled leaves
drop from the trees,
it’s then you see
what lay hidden.
Or so they say.
The creek rushing beyond rough, bare branches.
A birds’ nest lodged in the forked crook of limbs.
Things not well seen
amid the green
though they have been
there all along.
So they were right.
Unnoticed under cover of summer,
in winter wilderness made visible.
What of my heart?
I stand apart.
When will You start
to show me more?
What do they know?
In the wilderness of my winter soul
will You reveal Yourself and make me whole?
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