unblocked, unsculpted
learning to live in flow, Part 1
Ok, let’s dive back in. Here I am staring at the obnoxiously blinking cursor, waiting for all the thoughts in my head to tumble themselves miraculously into some kind of order, and that never really happens in my head, so I don’t know what I’m waiting for. How about I just tell you about one of the books I’m reading right now? It’s called Great Themes of Paul, by Father Richard Rohr, and it’s driving me absolutely mad. Why is that? Because:
I kind of hate Paul. He’s just so full of himself, he thinks he has all the answers and all you have to do is follow in his footsteps and you’ll get it right. He makes some very strong statements about women, sexuality, and “correct behavior” (especially concerning women and their interactions with men) which makes me simultaneously rage and squirm. Basically, he sounds like the kind of overblown sexist asshole I have promised myself to not give the time of day.
I began growing the most, spiritually, when I stopped reading the Bible and listening to “teachings.” For me, at present, doing either of those old spiritual practices triggers an almost overwhelming dread of going back to my old fear of God as though I had never grown past it. The dread is literally so strong I feel the pressure of it inside my chest. Not fun.
I have FINALLY let go of the idea that I have to believe certain things in order to be “right with God” and not “suffer eternally,” which allowed me to step away from fundamental Christianity and into a more fluid spirituality within which I can move freely and gracefully, like I’m dancing with God. For a woman who spent her entire life until recently cowering in corners for fear of being noticed by God, while pretending to be God’s bestest friend ever, that is kind of a huge step. Studying a pillar of The Church, like Paul, is undeniably a step back towards Christianity, and that is terrifying.
Most of Paul’s letters, which I have read in their entirety multiple times because that’s what a GCG (Good Christian Girl) does, focuses at some point on how much Paul loves to suffer. He “glories” in it. He is strongest in his weakness. He kills the “flesh” so that God can become everything. He sounds positively masochistic, like the old tradition of penitents flaying themselves until the blood ran down like Jesus being crucified. It’s cringe-worthy, especially for someone like me, who already has a tendency to mentally flay myself for any real or perceived social faux pas, let alone an actual misdeed. Considering Paul started out his religious career murdering people who had disavowed standard church doctrine (Father Richard states that the Pharisaical order to which Paul belonged could most closely be likened to today’s Al Quida in terms of their religious zeal and the lengths to which they were willing to go to achieve their goals1), it’s unsurprising that he might hate himself enough to wish to suffer in life for his sins. That doesn’t mean I want to hear about it, or that it would be healthy for me to listen.
Did I mention that Paul is an arrogant sonofabitch? I did? Well, did I mention that it’s an eleven-part series of almost one hour lectures? Ten hours and thirty-eight minutes, to be exact, of freaking Paul.
Unless you have decided that I’m a glutton for punishment, you might be wondering by now why I’m doing this to myself. I have wondered that a few times myself, to be honest. I am making myself listen to these lectures, all ten and a half hours of them, because I never felt entirely at peace with the idea of abandoning Christianity—evangelical Christianity, yes, but not Christianity in it’s wholeness—and Father Richard’s writings have been giving me a way to keep something of my original faith while letting go of all the aspects of the religion that I can no longer embrace. I guess I figured that, if he could make me appreciate Paul, I would consider keeping some affiliation to Christianity. Maybe. But he had his work cut out for him.
Father Richard is a Franciscan Friar who founded the New Jerusalem Community in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, as well as authoring thirty-one books, editing two books, and contributing to ten more, not to mention acting as head of faculty for the school based in the Center for Action and Contemplation, and various speaking engagements…in 2011, PBS called Father Richard “one of the most popular spiritual authors and speakers in the world2.” He is considered a teacher of Christian mysticism, a term I absolutely love (for the story of how I was introduced to Father Richard’s work and the idea of Christian mysticism, see my earlier post, “I, Shadow” here:
Brene Brown says she has quotes from Father Richard on sticky notes all over her house3, and I’m just about to start doing the same thing. I have decided to read everything that Father Richard wrote, and listen to all of his lectures that I can access, and, of the many titles of his I had on hold, the one that happened to become available next was the Paul lectures. So that’s how it happened. I have mostly fought the ideas presented so far, but in a way that tells me that he’s touching a sore spot related to old trauma, not butting against any core values. Kind of like how I hated the second Frozen movie the first time I watched it, because the theme of coming into your full potential with your mother’s blessing and guidance was just too painful to bear (I have quite literally lost count of the number of times I have watched it now, and it’s one of only a few movies I never tire of seeing. Like The Man From Snowy River, McFarland USA, Moana and Encanto).
Father Richard started off by explaining that most objections about Paul’s teachings can be worked through pretty easily with a little linguistic and historical context. For instance, Paul did not write all of the letters popularly attributed to him. Also, many of the stronger, and seemingly contradictory statements that Paul makes in his letters (such as the assertion that women should not speak in church) appear to actually be Paul quoting from a letter written to him and that he is answering (they didn’t have quotation marks back then, or much punctuation at all, which complicates the interpretation of historical documents). Other problems come from translation, of course. Paul uses the word “flesh” a lot in relation to what Christians might call our “sin nature,” but the original Greek word, sarks, has nothing to do with the physical body. It is the ego, what Father Richard calls our false self, that Paul is actually talking about. To Father Richard, Paul is actually the original Christian mystic because he seems to have a very interconnected view of Christ and our relationship to God. For instance, Paul never once uses the word “forgiveness” in his main letters. Paul’s word is “justification,” which was taken from legal terminology, meaning acquittal. Jesus spoke extensively about forgiveness of sins, but Paul took it one step farther: God does not merely forgive our wrongdoing, God denies the existence of any wrongdoing at all. Just as shocking to me, Paul was utterly and irrevocably convinced that his own personal encounter with the divine outweighed thousands of years of religious doctrine and tradition. Holy shit! I apparently have a patron saint of heresy, and I didn’t even know it!
Even as all of these reasonable reasons to appreciate Paul’s teachings began to dampen and then erode my earthwork barricades, I still found myself resisting the very terms being used, like sin and dying to self and justification by faith. So, when the sixth lecture started and I found out that sin and dying to self was the precise topic being discussed, I nearly shut down entirely. I started it while out in the garden, and continued it the following day while running errands. On my drive home I began listening more closely in spite of myself, so closely, in fact, that when I backed up and listened to that section again I could see in my mind exactly where I was on the drive at given points in the lecture. Oddly enough, even though I only just reread (or re-listened) to that lecture today, I cannot tell you what he said that effected me so profoundly that, half way home, I started sobbing. What I realized in that moment was that I could not accept the notion of an all-loving God because I had never learned to differentiate love from possession. There are special terms for this, I’m sure. All I know is that what I learned of love as a child was that it meant to possess or be possessed by someone else. To be loved by a supremely powerful Being, therefore, is to be supremely possessed, to the point that nothing is left of YOU at all. Unfortunately, a lot of religious jargon supports, or at least seems to support this interpretation.
Hang on, I need to back up and go at this from a different angle now, the point here is just too sharp to handle head-on. (Maybe that’s why Jesus used so many stories to convey his meaning. Hmmmm.) Ok, so there’s this house just down the road from us. We pass it every time we go walking, which is several times a week in the summer. A man with grey hair and a perfectly pointed goatee lives there with a perfectly pointed dog on a perfectly landscaped lawn. His is the kind of landscaping where each bush is sculpted into lovely little matching domes, all evenly spaced and mulched within an inch of their lives. Since our idea of landscaping is more in the realm of chaos management (and “management” might be too strong a word, really), we have a kind of incredulous admiration for the guy. Every now and then we’ll notice that tiny, audacious green shoots are blurring the perfect roundness of his bushes, and we’ll comment on how he better get them trimmed soon, knowing that he will restore order at the earliest possible opportunity. What I’m getting at here, is that this is my idea of love. To be loved is to be constantly sculpted into the most pleasing shape I can attain, according to the person loving me. To love, especially my kids, means to be constantly sculpting them into their most pleasing shape, according to me. Unsurprisingly, I happen to have a very hard time giving and receiving love. Deep down, I know that those perfectly sculpted bushes I pass every week don’t even look alive to me anymore. They only look alive when they are sending out daring new shoots, outgrowing the shape they were cut into. A well sculpted bush, or a well-raised child, might be considered a work of art, but it does not resemble a healthy, growing individual. This belief that love=possession is at the root of why motherhood terrifies me so much, has caused most of the tension between me and my husband over the eight years of our marriage (and in every other relationship I’m part of as well, I’m sure), and is also the fundamental reason why I had to leave the church. Where people must look and behave in certain ways, growth is stymied. This is fitting in, not belonging, as Brene Brown would say4. And it is control, not love.
I hate cheesy analogies, but I keep thinking about something that happened earlier today that illustrates how I feel now about the “Great Themes of Paul” lectures. This morning I was listening to the eighth lecture, discussing freedom and the law, while finishing up some kitchen chores before sitting down to write this post. My husband started to run the vacuum, but then stopped and brought it in the kitchen where I was and turned it upside down. He listened with me while fighting a block in the hose that has been making our vacuum steadily less effective for weeks now, one that we just hadn’t been able to dislodge. While he struggled with the stubborn blockage, I got a pen and the special pad of paper I keep in a magnetic holder on the fridge for jotting down important quotes from the audio books and podcasts I listen, and I backed up the lecture, repeating it again and again so I could get this one right. Father Richard said,
We tend to think “God will love me if I change.” What Paul clearly knows, and any of you who have any bit of common sense should know it, is that God loves you so you can change…the only people who change—I mean real transformation—are people who feel safe, who feel their dignity, and who feel loved. And when you feel loved, and when you feel safe, and when you know your dignity, you just keep growing5.
Safety…dignity, real love…that’s the atmosphere in which a person can grow. No wonder Dr. Brown loves his work so much, he practically just summed up twenty years of her research in four sentences! I let that sink in while holding the flashlight for my husband while he tried to see what was preventing the vacuum from working. We finally resorted to running water through the detached vacuum hose while my husband worked the blockage around the bend of the handle part with a dowel rod. Out came a big wad of junk, layers of hair and other debris hung up on bits of tape and paper leftover from the kids’ many craft projects. I felt like I was the one being unblocked, acknowledging that I needed to redefine love for my adult self in order to—forgive me—suck up the right ideas about love. Interestingly, this is actually one of the ways Father Richard defines sin. In The Universal Christ, he writes:
Grace is just the natural loving flow of things when we allow it, instead of resisting it. Sin is any cutting or limiting of that circuit6.
Perhaps this is a little ambiguous. Perhaps it is meant to be. Grace to me, now, is the state in which I am able to dance with the divine. It is a freedom I only experience when I am in awareness of myself and in connection with my Greater Family (the earth; my fellow living creatures, human and not; and the Divine energy that breathes us into being and sustains our connection to each other and to Them). Sin for me, now, is anything that breaks my concentration and causes me to stop dancing. It is a constant start and stop for me right now, but as Father Richard says,
I do not think you should get rid of your sin until you have learned what it has to teach you7.
What a revolutionary concept! But then, Father Richard, like Paul before him, is intent on revolutionizing the religion he loves and often struggles against. To be a Christian mystic, he says (and I didn’t write this down so I’m paraphrasing), one must hold the tension of what one was taught to believe in one hand, and the belief that one is growing into in the other, at the same time. To resolve the tension by letting go of either side is to forego the Mystery. As a storyteller, I understand that is is tension that drives a story forward, and I want to keep growing. I want to keep dancing. I am nobody’s work of art.
Rohr, Richard. “Great Themes of Paul.” Franciscan Media. 2019.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Rohr (Yes, I used Wikipedia as a source).
Brown, Brene. “Spirituality, Certitude, and Infinite Love: Part 1 of 2.” Unlocking Us, Father Richard Rohr, Spotify Original, April 20, 2022.
Brown, Brene. Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone. Random House. 2017.
Rohr, Richard. “Great Themes of Paul.”
Rohr, Richard. The Universal Christ. New York, NY: Convergent Books, 2019.
Rohr, Richard. Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life. United Kingdom, SPCK, 2013.