loss – Intelligent Christian Spirituality

Transformative Loss: Finding Strength in Lent

Lent is a time of loss. The 40 days before Easter are meant to commemorate the 40 years the ancient Israelites were lost in the desert before coming to the Promised Land. Lent is also a time when Christians lose things, give them up, as a way of commemorating Christ’s great loss, the sacrifice of his life on a cross.

Lent is a time of repentance, of turning around, of turning away from things that may be addictive habits the rest of the year. Some give up chocolate, dessert, or that lovely glass of wine after work. Many go deeper and see Lent as a time to lose unholy attitudes: jealousy, self-pity, unforgiveness, adulterous thoughts, the internal sins that no one knows about except us.

Some choose loss during Lent, and some have loss thrust upon them. Due to the financial meltdown, people are losing their jobs, homes, businesses, retirement plans, and peace of mind.

Those who work in palliative care, hospice, and hospital emergency departments receive training in how a person’s “assumptive world,” all the assumptions they have about the way life will be, can implode in an instant: their son or daughter is killed in a car accident, their spouse learns they have cancer, has a stroke, or dies. The normal response is to feel like the ground under your feet has suddenly disappeared, you are falling, and your whole life is falling apart.

The scriptures contain one of the most spectacular stories of loss ever recorded, a story that makes most of our losses seem small by comparison. Job was a man of God who had it all: great wealth, a wonderful family, and an outstanding reputation. Then he had a total meltdown: he lost all his money, his family, and even his health. His friends accused him of bringing all this on himself through some hidden sin, although he couldn’t think of anything he had done to deserve this. Even his wife urged him to “curse God and die.” However, despite all the absurdity, he continued to trust God.

A time of loss can be a time of personal transformation. When people lose precious things, they start to realize that, despite their former assumptions, life is very vulnerable, dreams are fleeting at best, and one’s fortunes can suddenly reverse. The natural response is to ask, “What is really important in life?”

In the face of all this loss, people search for a solid foundation for their life, something eternal and unchanging. People start to realize that the only lasting thing is God. Quite simply, it’s God or nothing.

It’s not surprising that church attendance goes up during individual or social meltdowns. Next to God, the church is one of the few constants in our civilization. It has been there through the collapse of the Roman Empire, the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the advent of modern science, communism, two planetary wars, and the Great Depression. The church has witnessed many severe storms come and go.

People who build their lives on the solid foundation of God know that, with God’s help, they can withstand any storm, crisis, or meltdown, just as the church has. They also know that God can bring a greater good out of any loss.

Throughout the scriptures, God brings new life out of evil, no matter how great. Job trusted God and was vindicated in the end: everything and more was restored to him. As our human exemplar, Jesus trusted God and was resurrected so that all of us could reach the Promised Land.

No matter how bad it gets, as long as we trust God, all is well, and as Julian of Norwich said, “All will be well, and all manner of things will be well.”

Bruce Tallman is a spiritual director and educator of adults in religion. http://www.brucetallman.com

From Winning to Losing: Navigating life’s Challenges

The universe is all about loss – things are constantly becoming, that is, changing. Nothing stands still, so we are constantly losing the way things were. Loss is built into the very fabric of reality and is essential to all life. Every creature is born, grows, and then dies.

The first half of life is about winning, getting, and accumulating. Most people gain an education, their first big job, a spouse, a house, and children in the first half of life. The second half of life is about losing: the children grow up and move out, friends start dying, your spouse may leave you or die, you may be downsized, you retire, you may move out of your house, and your health starts to deteriorate.

Eastern societies had a way of coping with these losses. There were four recognized stages of life: student, householder, withdrawal from active life to contemplate your losses and death, and finally, leaving everything to become a holy man or woman. In Western societies, there is no conscious process like this – you are supposed to keep accumulating throughout your life.

Therefore, it’s a shock when we start to lose, but contrary to what we all believe, we are more losers than winners in Western societies. Loss always begets sadness, and the rapid change in our culture means rapid loss. However, we have no structured life stages that can help us cope with this. This may explain why we have suffered an epidemic of depression, as witnessed by the high proportion of the population that is on anti-depressants.

We believe we are a society of winners because the media emphasizes the lifestyles of the rich and famous. What it doesn’t highlight is the thousands of people who tried but failed at becoming an American or Canadian Idol, or the five hundred individuals who applied for one job and didn’t get it, or the team that lost. The media makes everyone who is not a superstar feel inadequate, and so, alongside the epidemic of depression, we also struggle with a plague of diminished self-esteem.

All these losses have four main purposes. First, to gain wisdom. In the first half of life, you grow in knowledge and material things; in the second half, you are meant to grow in wisdom about spiritual things, a spirituality of subtraction. The second purpose is to gain compassion. You can only open your heart to the suffering of others to the extent that you have suffered yourself. Thirdly, all these small losses are meant to prepare you for the biggest loss of all, your own death, in which you literally lose everything. Finally, these losses are meant to motivate you to search for and find the only permanent thing, that is, God.

In the face of financial meltdowns and all the other losses in our lives, the only real losers are the ones who have not gained compassion for the setbacks and struggles of others and the wisdom to know that all of us die and all things pass away except God.

Christians believe in a man who was arguably the biggest loser of all time. He started his earthly life in an adoring family and was adored by wise men and angels. He ended his life on earth publicly humiliated and put to a grisly death by the secular authorities as a criminal and by the religious authorities as a heretic. He failed his divine mission, failed everyone, even God.

However, Jesus clung to the bitter end to his faith that the one thing no one can lose is God’s love, and so God rewarded him for this faithfulness. Two thousand years later, he still has more followers than anyone in history, people who come together to adore the wisest and most compassionate person who ever lived and, therefore, the biggest winner of all.

Bruce Tallman is a London spiritual director and educator of adults in religion.. http://www.brucetallman.com.

The Power of Wisdom in an Internet Age

Wise people value wisdom above all for it is the source of peace in the midst of information chaos. Knowledge now doubles every six months, and this overwhelming barrage of information makes it increasingly difficult to discern what has lasting value. However, by holding to principles of wisdom that have withstood the test of time, our future-shocked culture can survive.

Jesus, Buddha, King Solomon, and Socrates, all revered as exceptionally wise men of the ancient world, have some particularly relevant thoughts for our present age. They all agree that wisdom is more precious than money or anything else you could desire because it is the source of all truly good things. Wisdom, not information, is what is ultimately important.

Studying wisdom cross-culturally reveals seven key principles.

1. God Exists. Many scientists, including Einstein, believe that anyone who pursues science with their whole heart inevitably comes to the conclusion that there must exist an Intelligence behind everything that is vastly superior to the human mind.

God constitutes the source, sustenance, and goal of all things whether in the scientific age, information age, new age, or any age. The wisdom literature of western religion repeats over and over “The fool says in their heart ‘There is no God’”.

2. Accept Your Humanity. The three great monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, agree that the ancient message of the Garden of Eden remains true: all our problems begin with pride, with denying our place in the scheme of things, with wanting to be like God.

Through the Internet we have fifty million computers at our fingertips. This gives us the god-like quality of instant knowledge about anything, which can tempt us to think we have all the answers and are, in fact, God. Bloated with information, we have no room for wisdom.

False pride easily blinds us to our limitations, creatureliness, and humanness, but all major religions agree that the essence of wisdom consists in forgiving yourself for being human. If the first principle of wisdom is “There is a God”, the second one is “You are not God”. If pride causes all our problems, humility, that is, accepting our humanity, is the solution.

3. All Wisdom Comes From God. King Solomon states over and over that wisdom begins and ends with recognition of God’s supreme wisdom. You may not understand things, but God does. Similarly Socrates maintains that intellectual humility marks the first quality of the wise person: the realization that you lack wisdom and do not have all the answers. The wise listen much more than they speak.

4. All Things Pass Away Except God. Like Jesus, Buddha taught that everything passes away, and sorrow derives from putting too much stock in this world.

The epidemic of depression in our culture stems, at least partly, from ever-accelerating change in which we constantly lose people, things, lifestyles, and beliefs we had clung to. Instant access to infinite information has only sped up the change/loss process. Many find they cannot keep up.

Therefore, hold everything lightly: your health, spouse, children, friends, job, wealth, reputation, ambitions, ministry, and theology, for they all inevitably change. Wisdom teaches that true joy and peace comes from clinging only to God, for God alone lasts.

5. Purify Your Desires. God wants lasting love, truth, and peace but the commercialization of the Internet places all the treasures, pleasures, and temptations of the world before us in an unprecedented way. We must use the great gift of this technology wisely, to bring us what is truly good and life-giving rather than the ever-increasing hawking of earthly wares and human bodies.

6. Wisdom Means Compassion. Christ exhorted us to love our enemies. Similarly, Buddha stated that compassion, even for adversaries, arises when we realize the suffering of all beings. Many people have become news addicts and, through an endless parade of woe in the media, anesthetized to other peoples’ pain. However, in spite of “compassion fatigue” we still need to reach out and try to comfort those who are suffering.

7. Wisdom Sees the Oneness of All Things. Wisdom thinks constantly in terms of unity, and realizes that whatever we do to others we do to ourselves. Therefore it always strives to create community and to take care of all people, creatures, and the Earth. Social and environmental justice are natural outflows of wisdom. The information age tends to fragment people into ever smaller interest groups. We need to use the world wide web to bring people with divergent views together in dialogue.

In conclusion, there are three main ways to gain wisdom: pray for it, study it, and imitate it. Every major religion has a body of wisdom literature, a collection of reflections of its founders, greatest saints, and prophets whose lives can be emulated. In particular , we could all grow spiritually by imitating Jesus, who is considered by Christians to be the Wisdom of God in the flesh. Only by following the wisdom of the ancients will we transform the information age into an age of true peace and love.

Bruce Tallman is a spiritual director and educator of adults in religion. http://www.brucetallman.com.

Preferring the Poor

If we believe that science and religion are incompatible

we will live in one world

and pray and believe in another

the Newtonian view of the world

did not include the human person –

everything was mechanical

and even when the new physics gave us a dynamic cosmos

religious consciousness was stuck in a medieval cosmos:

a perfect/immutable/unchanging/hierarchical/

anthropocentric world

evolution may be a painful movement forward

marked by dramatic suffering and losses

the losses cannot be ignored

but neither can the progress

from hunter-gatherer

to mythic religious empires

to pluralistic informational societies

spiritual regress happened with Nietzsche’s

“will-to-power”

which is not “will” in the psychological sense

nor power in the sociological sense –

for Nietzsche will-to-power

is ontological/basic reality/the way things are

spiritual progress happened after the death

of Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection in 1691

when his Abbott published Lawrence’s Practice of the Presence of God

and it exploded around the world

spiritual progress also occurred with Gustavo Gutierrez

and his radical theology of the poor –

theology from the perspective of poor people not victors

the polar opposite of Nietzsche’s will-to-power

and mirrored in the Second Vatican Council’s

“preferential option for the poor.”

BABY BOOMER AGING

There is a huge shift going on: the Boomer Generation is moving into old age, so this is a big issue for them.

Aging can be approached positively or negatively: as harvest not winter, fulfillment not loss, freedom from work not limitation of income, soul-time not more self-time.

If you have aged well you are now an elder and have some wisdom to share with the younger generation. You know that life is about service, not just more winning. In this regard, Jesus said “I came to serve not be served” and the Twelfth Step from Alcoholics Anonymous is “I give my life away.”

If you have aged well you know that the first half of life is your “survival dance” and the second half is your “sacred dance.” You had a lot to prove in the first half. Now that you have done it, as Frank Sinatra sang “It all seems so amusing.” You don’t have to prove anything to anyone, including yourself, anymore.

A good book on the second half of life is Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward.

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