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The Shadow & The Father

"There is no light without shadow and no wholeness without imperfection. To round itself out, life calls not for perfection but for completeness; and for this the thorn in the flesh is needed, the suffering of defects without which there is no progress and no ascent."           -Carl Jung, Dreams

Awareness of the Shadow- the shadows are the places we have learned to hide or repress because they brought about punishment or disapproval. It is the person I do not want to be, never want to be seen with, and it is often this person I see in others that makes me reject them often ending in some level of abandonment or persecution.

Story.

I am about 9 and I am super competitive by nature, wanting to win all the time. This was not taught by my dad, my coaches, or friends…it just flowed. I loved to win but the impending assault of punishment and disapproval by my peers and trusted adults was strong and mighty. During recess I would play football, dodge ball, or just about any game. If my team won or if I did well my punishment was loss of friendship. They would ignore me or ignore inviting me to play again. My coaches were different in that they had expectations of me to perform. I was stuck. I even remember the rage of this spilling out of me during games where the loss of friendship was not at stake and I would unload my anger on anyone that was not playing well. I would hate playing with “untalented” kids as I saw them. Later on in 7^th grade when I moved to New York I was just one of many good athletes yet I could not shake this rage that turned inward and then I saw myself as average…thus I hated myself for being average. After 3 days of basketball tryouts I looked for my name on the final cut list and it was not there…I stood motionless except for my wet eyes for what seemed like hours staggered in unbelief that I was not picked.

My shadow self began to grow, tearing me into pieces as I would deeply desire to be competitive again but never could I really shine again. I would rarely play out of freedom, rather I would play out of fear of failure of making a mistake because then I would be considered average or lacking and also I would play from a place of fear of success because I might lose friends. I remember one of the guys on my basketball team told me to shoot on the left side of the court because his side was the right side. That does not work in basketball because the game is meant for movement all over the court. I was paralyzed and decided that friendship was more important than me shining so I shot on the left side only. I cannot tell you the hell it was to live out of this divided place because I was damned if I do and damned if I don’t. Sometime I remember sweating profusely if I was called upon to take a leadership position like point guard. That meant someone else was not leading and may not be my friend again. Would I lose a friend? It also meant that I had pressure from the coach to play good or I would not get a second chance. Would I be able to play good enough to not be embarrassed? Winning became a problem either way and so I lived this way…for years! Finally getting out of the state at the end of my junior year in high school and moving to Colorado was the beginning of my healing because I was released to shoot…and I came alive in spurts and giggles…but at least it was something. My team wanted me to do well. But so much had happened in this room of my subconscious that much stayed below the surface, hiding from others, hiding from myself, hiding from God.

What makes these areas of the shadow grow like fungus among us (like mushrooms) is that they never are exposed to the light from a father. I see these shadow places within me as breathing the poison of the spirit of fatherlessness. A good Father sees you, gives you perspective and tells you it is good to be yourself no matter what friends say. A good Father takes notice of the battle waged over your heart and he sweeps down and administers justice! He becomes the defender of the defenseless. He becomes the coach not of specific sports fundamentals of dribbling and shooting but he is the coach of the heart. He teaches you that you have what it takes and with a great smile and laughter continues to put you in the game. He teaches you that if your friends reject you because you have played better than them, they are not really friends. If coaches demand perfection from you without showing they love you and believe in you then they are not worthy to lead. I have found that my real friends today like me because of who I am…that is one thing my Father has taught me. Also I have learned that my Father…he is very fond of me. May the Father of light shine, shine, and shine brighter and truer into these very scared and sacred, tender and terrible, hiding and holy places! I still need his fathering today because the shadow self will always be there in some degree because it is part of my story…but not the whole story! He says to me that all darkness is light to him and that is a good thing for the shadow to hear. Tell the story of your shadow...I would love to hear!

 

 

A Child's Face Is In The Kingdom

June 9th, 2010

Dani, a very thin boy about age 7, held onto me tonight and would not let go. He wanted to be around me so I put my arm around him and pulled him in. He wanted me to help him do pull-ups and so I did. Later all the boys watched "Where The Wild Things Are" a movie that had most of the interns advising against it. The movie was shown and all the time I was seeing the movie through their eyes. It was as if God gave me an emotion of what being alone in the mind of a young boy who was just so angry and unseen that he had to visit another world where he could be king. As movie progressed to the last scene and that boy is leaving the shores, Dani and 5 other boys began to cry. I was in tears as well and my heart was feeling the ache and the need to belong somewhere. The boy howled back at the monster friend and the monster howled back...my spirit howled with them and then all was silent. I asked God if He would father the boys and wrap them into his loving arms where they can be angry and feel all the things a young boys must feel to be a boy. I had tears that evening and wept for their journey...I simply do not know what to do with their tears even though I may understand where they come from. I thanked my Father and slept. The Face of Dani was cradled in the King's arms that night.

June 11th, 2010

Today was more seeing. Took a walk with God and read more of my book "An Undivided Soul" by Parker Palmer. Played kickball with the boys and later that night lifted them boys up so they could do pull-ups. A fever broke out for pull-ups and before I knew it 10 boys were wanting me to lift them up to see what they could do...it was an amazing time of lifting boys up to the heavens. I sat for awhile in a bug infested area listening to Christian and Wikki play with the keyboard as it rang out the tune "My Heart Will Go On" by Celine Dion. Then it hit me...this song is about the heart going on in the midst of a great separation, mythical remembrance and longing...but why this song? I know something about separation. About 12 years ago this song filled the airwaves on the radio almost to an annoying camber. It was the song that marked my honeymoon, the movie we saw in Loveland, CO...and it was the song I heard that made me weep sitting in a parking lot during my separation from my wife that eventually led to divorce. An ending, a separation I never wanted yet here it was starring me in the face...a distance between us forever marked. What did they hear in this song? Do they know the words and what they mean...probably not. Many of these boys were abandoned or dropped off simply because their parent or parents cannot or will not take care of them. Theirs is a separation that stings far into the night and howls at the moon begging an answer! Yet in the distant night I hear this song haunt me as it seems to linger in the humid challis of the dim moon. We together experience the song in different ways, in mythical ways, and in longing ways. We have questions that have no answers...we have faces staring into stars of the kingdom of heaven. Alas...I sit and wonder into the night just why this song wreaks of hope and longing so fierce that it can only be told in a melody...the boys and I do our best to play along to each note. And the notes carry into the damp air and pierce the Fathers heart once again.

Trucks, Tractors, and Transformation

When I was a kid I used to play with Tonka trucks for hours. Tonka trucks were "the toy" for boys my age. In fact the place where they used to make them was only a few miles from my house in Minnesota. One day my parents surprised me and took me on a tour of the plant...I thought I was in heaven! Big yellow dump trucks, cranes, plows, and anything that replicated moving dirt in large quantities...seriously what could be cooler!! You see a Tonka truck mirrored the larger trucks but in a much smaller way in that they were strong enough to take a beating, you could put a variety of action figures in them, and they actually could haul and move dirt...small piles...but dirt none-the-less. They even left tread marks on the ground and could help you build a small town, roads, or make a huge hole in an attempt to dig to China.

At work this week I operated a tractor for the first time in my life...and it was awesome! Beginning my ascent into the drivers seat I found myself feeling very young. But something inside was stirring even deeper and it was this sense of this epic story coming full circle...it was a real Tonka truck! Sitting in the control cab I was amazed at all the gears, levers, and knobs. I was instructed on the use of each one, when to use them and then given the green light to go. This thing even had a radio in it set to a country station playing "Red Dirt Road"...one of my favorite country songs...could this get any cooler? The power that I had felt raw and dangerous. I thought to myself, "Wow I could have fun smashing things with this!" It was a really cool couple hours of moving, pulling, smashing, and trashing things. I felt like I had just gained a stripe of masculinity and I wanted to tell everyone.

Have you ever wondered about your life and the cyclical pattern it seems to weave? What about times when you stop and think, "I have been here before...why am I back?" I wondered the same thing the entire week after driving the tractor. In my new job I am the maintenance guy at Britton Nursery www.BrittonFlowers.com which requires working outside on different projects all day. I fix roofs, dig holes, repair things, trim bushes, and just about anything else that needs to be done...and this also means I get to use some cool machines, drive trucks & tractors, and get my hands into the earth. It has been good for my soul after working desk jobs for 10 years. I love how my mind thinks multiple steps ahead of tasks, how I work hard and finish the jobs ahead of schedule, and how I get to create again like I used to...engaging in work! I love the sun on my face, the wind in my hair (a little less now days than before), and dirt on my clothes. God's soil is good for man's soul. It all takes me back 25 years.

My first job was in 7th grade as I worked part time as the maintenance boy for a convent and retreat center in Highland Mills, New York. This place was where I found my aptitude to work hard and work smart. It was a place filled with weeds, leaves, & poison ivy, silence & solitude, a creepy graveyard, and lots of nuns- some mean ones but mostly sweet ones. Sister Cora was about 4 feet tall, spoke with a strong Ukrainian accent, and drove a mean car...when she could pull herself up to see above the steering wheel to make turns. She worked me hard but she was fair and reasonable except for the day she wanted me to burn poison ivy...a potentially lethal action. I would work under the hot sun pulling weeds for hours in the leech bed (a place where all the sewage ran into), mowed lawns & destroyed weeds, raked acres of leaves, and even using a chain saw to cut up branches. There was honor in the work and a place to become the young man. I am also reminded of this place where I began this integration of the physical and spiritual. I would find myself stopping for a few minutes in their small prayer rooms or chapels just to listen to God and ask him questions. I even remember feeling a very strong presence of peace and transcendence with God that I cannot fully describe to you as I took time to breath the air and drink the waters of transformation...work and worship. Now I feel the pleasure of God as I work with my hands and invite Him in to Father me. Today is the day of transformation both external and internal. With the tractor & truck comes the transformation if I choose to engage and invite God to speak, discipline, and teach me...other than that it will just be work, toil, and labor in vain.

I have often thought about the chasm between the physical world and the spiritual world and how I have tried to reconcile why many tend to live in one or the other. In western Christianity we have gone about with agendas of defining and understanding all things we see as mystery by creating processes of dissection we hold sacred. We pull apart scripture so we can know the meaning of each word so we can make sure we have our theology correct often to the diminishment of our relationship with the God of the Bible. We have lost the integration of walking with God and somehow lost the wisdom and synergy of the physical and spiritual worlds together. We have divided something that in reality cannot be divided. The physical world and the spiritual world were meant to exist and teach together. Dallas Willard says that if God is not God of everything He is God of nothing. In other words if God is not intimately involved in our work we will tend to divide the physical and spiritual with the eventual loss of the deep essence of why they exist must together. I want to embrace living in both with God.

Another Go

"The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and it gives it some of the grace of tragedy..."

                                                -Steven Weinberg

Have you ever wanted "another go" (Australian for "do over")? Maybe it was a moment, a day, maybe a week...how about a year? THe real truth is that I long for do overs. When what I wanted did not happen the way it was meant to, I was careless in word and deed, or things just got weird and flew off in many directions. Sometimes I wish I could pause the day and drink the beauty of a sunset a little longer, take in deeper a great conversation, or see someone in their glory with great clarity who is often overlooked and marginalized.

I am in the middle of a sort of "hockey style" mid life crisis...the ending of the first period. I think I have at least 2 more to go and I am not sure what the score is. I am in the locker room planning, licking my wounds, and drying off the sweat from a well fought battle...so far. Most people say the effect of a mid life crisis is generally the desire for a "Do Over". For men this usually ends badly... even desperate as the to redeem all those lost years result in buying a flashy corvette, the wearing of tighter fitting clothes, more bling, shedding a few pounds, and winning over a younger beautiful woman to parade on theirarm. The construction of a massive fig leaf.

I had a basketball coach in high school tell me over and over in practice,"Life gives you one chance and if you blow it you will never get another one." Whoa! What a crazy thing to say. THe sad thing is that somewhere in my heart I believed him. Basketball to him was life and whenever the team would loose he would smash lockers, clipboards, and anything he could get his hands on. One game he put me at point guard, which I did not like. I had a few turnovers and he pulled me out of the game and benched me the rest of the game. Those words echoed in my cranium. In the locker room he proceeded to take it out on me, saying that there are some people that are born to be basketball players and some that are not...he just could not teach me anything. I was 17 sitting on the bench.

Most of this desire for a "Do Over" comes from a young place, a fatherless place. What I needed was perspective and not perfection. I needed to know something really important- that mistakes are a necessary part of learning, apart of the landscape of a moment, a day, a week, and a year. That we are created out of the pleasure of the Trinity, formed in all our "imperfections" and we all get to play when grace is around. We are not meant to watch life go by from hard wooden benches of dismissal, despair, and shame. We are meant to SHINE!

I want my story to be different in this next period but I often find this young place rise up in me wondering if I really do have what it takes for the next period. The echoes of self-hatred and doubt creep in at just the worst possible time. There is battle, a deep lament for things done and left undone...but I cannot open the door to the lies of my enemy. My Father is pushing me off the bench, calling me into the eternal expanding fields of His good and growing Kingdom and my heart fills with tears of hope...really???....me??? I get a bunch of "Do Over's!!!!" I want to love deeper, hope greater, live free, and battle for the freedom of many hearts. I want to see the Kingdom of God expanded in desolate places, comfort and shelter the un-fathered children, and help me believe in love again. The cry of my heart is "Father me! I am an unfinished man!"

 

A World To Raise A Son

"The world exists for our education...the whole creation works for the development of the children of God into the sons and daughters of God."

                                                                                    - George MacDonald

 

Last night I went to hear Bishop John Rucyahana of from Rwanda speak at the Shove Chapel. He spoke about the genocide in Rwanda 15 years ago where the pain still weighs heavy in his country. He spoke with humility, compassion, and about the love of Christ that is able to draw his people to repentance, healing, and reconciliation. He said that there has been substantial growth in his people and their reconciliation to each other...but also described a long path to go. He spoke of a woman who had 70 out of 76 of her family members slaughtered, skinned alive, and butchered...and how she is forgiving the perpetrators...one at a time. How does forgiveness work? I started to think about how I could relate to her story, I could not. There was no capacity to take it in because it felt so big, so overwhelming. Nothing in my story that could compare with her story...nothing left in me but the mercy of Christ for myself...and my incapacity. Jesus has asked me to forgive those who have sinned against me in my past but wwould Christ ask me to forgive such a magnitude of debt someday? Maybe he will but that does not seem to be the question today. Is Christ asking me to forgive someone else now that I have had the most trouble in forgiving? As I search my heart I find someone I must forgive...strangely it is myself. I am being asked to forgive Nathan for what he has done to his own heart, not guarding it from the corruption of his own flesh. He has committed atrocities against his own heart. Wow, I never saw that coming! Jesus is teaching me what it means to to forgive...even myself. And this is just the beginning!

A 53 year old man recently told me,"I want you to show me what it is to be a man...because I believe you are a man...and you know Jesus." His world has been filled with abuse, addiction, and self-hatred. His mom tried to kill him by shoving him in an oven and his dad did nothing to stop her. This man wants me to teach him about Christ and His love and how to be a man. Stunned. I am stunned at the Christ in me that he sees in me. I am asking all sorts of questions now. What can I teach him? I have levels of brokenness in my life that are astounding to me and sometimes I wonder about that. What is my capacity, what I hold out to others do I not leak out? I have a small bucket with holes and it looks like God uses the leaks. What is this Kingdom of God and the caliber of the man that God sees fit to call into it? I forget that I am more man than boy, more son than child, more fearless than fearful and yet I hate the fact that I forget who I am. I am not self-depreciating here at all.I am simply being simplified. I am re-learning what I have to learn. I am seeing something that I have not seen before...Christ in me the hope of becoming more and more a son.

Sipping my double espresso with friends at Poor Richards last night was great...but I was disturbed. There was a young man reading the Koran next to me and the book was riddled with bookmarks and notes. I was amazed and humbled at his hunger and ambition. He was also noticeably homeless. He said nothing but glanced at our table from time to time. What was his story and did anyone care? Why did I not engage him in conversation? Was there fear? Fear of what? I did not take time to look at the his world...I was satisfied with my own answer and dismissed him as some stereotype in my own mind...I was not ready to learn. Sometimes I am shocked at my shallowness and depravity of my own flesh...it really prevents me from hearing my new heart cry out "Abba!" Then I also an reminded of God and his gentle tone with me...he will bring an opportunity for me to expand His Kingdom in me again. Next time I want to be ready...I will see the opportunity to grow...I hope.

For me, the mystery of God in me is more important than the mystery of man flesh in me. I want to know God's love for me deeper so that His love for the world of man can be known in me and through me. This Kingdom of God is not for me to understand so that I can feel good about what I know. It is for my external engagement and internal expansion. Inside it I am taught the knowledge and wisdom of the heart of the Father. He longs for me to step beyond being a child and run into becoming his son. He shows me this world as He sees it...broken and longing for a Father...the world that is part of his Kingdom...the Kingdom that he is pleased to share with me.

A village to raise a child, a world to raise a son.

 

            "We are the sons of God the moment we lift up our hearts, seeking to be sons-the moment we begin to cry Father...The world must be redeemed in a few men to begin with. It takes a long time to finish the new creation of this redemption...we groan as we wait for the son-ship."

                                                    -George MacDonald