Beginning the Work Again :: Henri Nouwen Is My Teacher

One of my dearest teachers in ministry.

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I’m planning to write a post next week about the things I’m noticing are different about this current formation process compared to the first time I experienced intentional formation. But one thing I’ll mention right now is this:

I’m so aware of how the things I’m learning right now impact my life of ministry — right here, with you.

As you know, I’m relearning my not-God-ness and am embracing my humanity in this place. And as I work through these relearnings right now, I keep being reminded of Henri Nouwen. Specifically, I keep thinking of one of his books that I read last year and which is one of my dearest teachers in ministry. 

It’s called In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership and is classic Henri Nouwen: steeped in vulnerability and authenticity and always pointing toward a real encounter with the real Christ. Through this book, he has taught me so much about the kind of pastoral calling I need to embody: one that is willing to be vulnerable and merely human before you. As I mentioned yesterday, it’s not about pointing you toward me but rather — always — toward Christ. 

Here’s a taste of what he teaches in this book that I’m revisiting right now and seeking to remember these days: 

“The leaders of the future will be those who dare to claim their irrelevance in the contemporary world as a divine vocation that allows them to enter into a deep solidarity with the anguish underlying all the glitter of success, and to bring the light of Jesus there. …
   “Laying down your life means making your own faith and doubt, hope and despair, joy and sadness, courage and fear available to others as ways of getting in touch with the Lord of life. 
   “We are not the healers, we are not the reconcilers, we are not the givers of life. We are sinful, broken, vulnerable people who need as much care as anyone we care for.”

—p. 35, 61-62

May I be this kind of person here.

Beginning the Work Again :: Embracing My Humanity

The light above us.

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Along the lines of relearning my not-God-ness comes the embrace of my humanity, all with the aim of pointing people to God and not me.

This is where something in my head can sometimes get really messed up.

I think about how we are the body of Christ here on earth. How we are meant to be Christ to others. How we are meant to keep growing into the image of God in us. And how, for someone who is a spiritual director or just generally in ministry, this can get even more complex because so often we are the visible image of the invisible God for others. 

Cue the questions of where we end and God begins, and vice versa. 

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When I stop to think about it, it’s funny that I take over-responsibility for things and people, given the metaphor of us as the body of Christ. We are each a part, not the whole. I’m an ear, or an eye. Which necessarily means I can’t be a foot or an arm or a finger. I can’t — and am not meant to — shoulder all of the concerns of the world or be Christ’s body in the world on my own. We need each other. 

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Spiritual directors like to describe what’s happening in spiritual direction by using the image of three chairs: one for the directee, one for the director, and one for the unseen but very real presence of God.

I was talking with my supervisor about this picture last week, and we were talking about how often we assume those chairs to be positioned equidistant from each other, like an equilateral triangle. Sometimes I’m even tempted to believe the chairs held by me and my directee are the ones in “full color” in the picture, with God’s chair kind of greyed out, or perhaps even off in the corner, since he’s an unseen, non-audible presence in the room. 

And yet here’s what’s really true:

Spiritual direction is ultimately about the directee’s connection with God.

If anything, it’s the directee’s and God’s chairs that are meant to be “full color.” If anything, my chair is the one meant for the corner so that I don’t get in the way of what God and the directee are meant to find in one another. I’m a facilitator, but the directee and God are the main players there. They’re the reason we’ve come together in the first place.

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In relationship, if I shoulder the God role, then I keep someone from receiving what God alone is meant to give them. I unwittingly make them dependent on me instead of pointing them toward the one upon whom they’re meant to depend. 

I want my life to be about this: “For I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2). Or, as Eugene Peterson puts it in the Message version: “I deliberately [keep] it plain and simple: first Jesus and who he is; then Jesus and what he did—Jesus crucified.” 

May you always see me pointing you to Jesus. This is the prayer of my heart. 

Beginning the Work Again :: I'm Not God

One of many.

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When I first started blogging in 2006, I chose the name “Lilies Have Dreams” for my personal blog.

It was a reference to Matthew 6:28-34, which compares us to the lilies of the field and says we need not worry — that we are important to God and that God will take care of us, even as he takes care of the lilies that line the earth. It was a reference, too, to dreaming — to living out loud, to taking risks, to standing on the precipice of my own life, which I had been slowly learning how to do (and was about to do in great measure, as I packed up my belongings and moved across the country to marry Kirk the following month).

Ultimately, it was the idea that I could be small yet valuable to God and that even in my smallness, I could dream big dreams and then, because my value was rooted in God, I could take risks. 

Learning to be a small yet beautiful and fully beloved lily of the field … that was a big part of my formation journey my first time around the formation spiral. It’s something that took many years as I identified and then began unlearning key beliefs and behaviors that showed up in my life as perfectionism, over-responsibility, scruples, phantom guilt, and what I came to call the superhuman tendency. 

It was about unlearning my need to be God.

It was one of the best things to ever happen to me.

I don’t say “unlearning my need to be God” from a place of pride but rather fear. I believed with every cell in my body that I needed to hold the world aright. I carried the responsibility for things that went wrong, even if I had nothing to do with what happened. I believed myself to be other people’s saviors, needing to know what they needed and supplying it. I wasn’t allowed to have needs myself.

Again, this wasn’t a prideful thing. It was what happened when a whole lot of mixed-up, messed-up messages tumbled around in my head and my heart at a very young age and then were given a mixed-up, messed-up interpretation through my too-young lens. I didn’t realize at the time that I was ingesting these messages or interpreting them the way I was. And I really didn’t realize the impact those messages and interpretations would have on my life as I continued to grow up and live into the world. 

God is merciful and gracious. He took me through a long unlearning.

As he did this, he took the burden of responsibility off my shoulders. I could live free. I could breathe. Even better: I could make mistakes. I felt, truly, like one of those lilies of the field, small and one of many, yet dazzling in her beauty, twirling and dancing and smiling and laughing in her utter freedom and belovedness.

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I’m relearning this now.

As I continue to grow forward from my healing journey, I’m dealing with the fallout of what happened to me at 15 and 16 years old. I’m looking at the ways it damaged and messed me up. I’m feeling angry. I’m feeling sad. I’m struggling my way toward the place where forgiveness lives. 

And I’m bumping up against that old need-to-be-God proclivity again.

This means I’m struggling to let myself feel what I really feel, as I’m constantly second-guessing whether those feelings are right, correct, and perfect (since everything God does is right, correct, and perfect). It means I’m afraid to tell people they hurt and failed me, as I’m not allowed to be someone who gets hurt or needs people to hold up their end of the relationship. It means I’m afraid to take steps in any direction, for fear they’ll be the wrong steps, since I’m not allowed to do anything wrong or make mistakes.

It’s about learning to be human again. 

Just human.

Human. The thing I previously came to see as one of God’s greatest gifts to us. The not-God-ness. The imperfections in us that are so heart-achingly beautiful. The vulnerability of it all. The permission to stumble, to mess up, to learn. The ability to grow, which means the reality of not-yet-developed-ness. Not having to have all the answers. Not having to be the expert authority. 

Just human. Walking alongside. 

I’m relearning this right now.

Do you ever live inside this struggle?

Beginning the Work Again :: Relearning Things

It reads, “Stir into flame the gift which is you.”

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Ask anyone who’s circling the formation spiral for another go-round, and they’ll tell you the worst part about this whole thing is that feeling of, “But I already learned this!” 

It’s the worst. 

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said this myself and heard other people say it. It’s the most flabbergasting thing. You know that you sincerely learned things in previous seasons of growth — really learned them, really set your heart toward them and incorporated them into your lived reality — and yet here you find yourself, re-learning them again as though from the beginning. 

It can really throw you for a loop. 

One of the things that’s even worse in this place — like rubbing salt in the wound — is not being taken seriously when you express that you’ve already learned the thing you’re re-learning now. I’ve found it’s really important to me that the truth of the jouney I’ve already walked be validated as real. 

And so let me do that for you.

If you are walking a path that feels like déjà vu, learning things you’ve invested real heart and time and energy learning at previous points in your journey, know that it really happened. You did learn those things. You know this thing you’re re-learning right now, at least in certain places inside your soul. What you’ve learned before is real. 

I was talking with a friend on Friday night about this re-learning thing. We were talking about the oft-related image of formation as a spiral — something that circles around and around, hitting up against well-known refrains as it comes back around again. She was saying, “It makes sense that when you hit a new pocket of growth, you revert back to old ways of being. It feels like starting over.” 

My question to her was, “When does the thing you’ve previously spent time learning become so ingrained that it’s the new default position, even when you hit new pockets of growth?”

I don’t know the answer to this yet. Maybe that happens once it’s been learned and re-learned a number of times and builds up enough power to overtake the instinctive response we learned early on in our lives. 

So here I sit, relearning some things right now. This week, I’ll share some of those growing edges I’m re-learning with you. 

Have you ever had to re-learn something you already spent time and care learning before?

Beginning the Work Again :: What's the Difference Between Formation and Healing?

Sun spots. 

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In this series, I’ve used the words healing and formation quite frequently, and it occurs to me that I ought to clarify what I mean by each in case it’s assumed I use them interchangeably.

I don’t.  

In short, I believe the process of healing always includes formation but the process of formation does not always include healing.

Now, let’s unpack that a bit. 

In my exprience, healing work is tied to specific events and circumstances — ways in which we were wounded in precise moments or series of moments or chain of events. Those events formed us in certain ways, and perhaps a better way to say it is that they usually de-formed us away from the intended image of God in us. We were harmed, and in our need for protection, we often grabbed coping mechanisms that helped get us through. We often, too, picked up new beliefs that implanted themselves on our souls as a result of what we experienced.

In a process of healing, we need two things, then. We need healing at the place of our wounding, and we need God to walk with us through an intentional process of re-formation. (This is where I am in my current journey.) 

Formation, on the other hand, is always happening in our lives.

There’s the general formation that’s always at work — ways in which our daily habits and choices and circumstances continually form us for good or ill, even without our conscious involvement. If you are a human being, you are always in the process of being formed in some direction or way.

And then there’s the formation God is about in us.

This is the place of invitation, where God is seeking, continually, to form us more and more into the image marked out for us from the beginning, which is the unique imprint of God in us in the world. All throughout our being, all throughout our lives, there are places God wants to touch, invite, re-teach, re-form. This process, too, never ends. (This can be cause for rejoicing sometimes and cause for frustration at others!)

Now, here’s what I mean when I say the formation process doesn’t always include healing: These places God pricks and invites into our awareness for continued formation aren’t always called out because of wounds. Sometimes it’s because of the Fall. Our mere humanity. Our need for growth. Sometimes it’s time for shedding. For refinement. For maturing. 

When we become aware of the invitation, then we get to say yes or no. And if we say yes, then we get to step into a process of intentional formation in partnership with God.

I hope this clarification is helpful. Is there anything you would add or further clarify? Any questions you’d like me to address?