Poetry today is a lost art and one which we need to refind. Back in the beginning of the last century, some of the most famous and popular writers were poets and we need to recapture this art and make it common place again.

E.E. Cummings is probably my favorite poet. Ever since I bought his Complete Poems back in 1987 his words, which are playful and sometimes misaligned, have always captured what lyrical and profound writing could become.

May his words inspire you to enjoy this day.

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and love and wings;and of the gay
great happening ilimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any — lifted from the no
of all nothing — human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

‘The law of Jehovah is perfect, restoring the soul.’ (Psa. 19:7). Most laws condemn the soul and pronounce sentence. The result of the law of my God is perfect. It condemns but forgives. It restores—more than abundantly—what it takes away. Jim Elliot

If you live in Chicago, you know that you naturally spend a lot of time in your car because of traffic and getting from Point A to Point B. On these stop-and-go drives, I usually listened to Chicago sports radio. The Bulls were winning championships left and right and it was fun listening to the banter about the pride and joy of our city.  If you know me, you know that I am not a regular listener to Christian radio or television. However, that night for some reason I turned the dial to some Christian radio station being piped in from one of the suburbs. That night driving down Roosevelt Avenue lonely and sad, I inadvertently came across Bob George’s People to People radio program. If you have ever listened to Bob George or read his books you know that he talks about one thing over and over at great length—God’s grace. For the first time, as I was listening to his words, God began showing me a grace I had not seen before—one that I actually began to experience. In that car ride, listening to his Southern twang talk about acceptance, it opened up my eyes like never before. It was as if Jesus mixed some mud together, rubbed it on my eyes and then commanded me to open them. A couple of days later I grabbed Bob George’s book Growing in Grace off the bookshelf at a store and took it home. I read it in one sitting and in that time came across this passage below:

Now realize that I am talking about ourselves being acceptable to God, not necessarily our actions. In my identity I am eternally acceptable to Him, but that doesn’t mean that everything I do is all right. He may put His arm around me, so to speak, and show me the truth about something in my life that is out of line: an attitude, action, or habit. Why? So He can change my attitude that is out of line, resulting in a change of action. But at no time is His acceptance of me ever in question.

But at no time is His acceptance of me ever in question. This was one of the missing pieces for me. I knew something like this in concept, but had yet to experience it. Now I began to do that or as the psychologists term, I began to internalize this truth.

During that period in my life, Jesus was also saying that some significant changes needed to occur in my life so that I could really begin to understand that freedom he desired for me. At that point, I made a commitment to not date anyone, even casually. Likewise, I decided I needed to pursue friendships with men, which for the most part was a bit of a challenge for me. Hanging out with women even from a young age was easier for me and for the most part, I enjoyed their company more than hanging out with the guys. However, I began to see that this on some level was contributing to my problem with having healthy relationships with women. With this decision, not until years later did I realize that in this time of healing for me, as I was pursing my relationship with God, I was also pursuing healing in terms of what it meant to be a man. I also decided to remove myself from any ministry context and began reading voraciously books on sexual healing. Specifically, the works of Walter Trobisch had a tremendous influence on me; his books speak openly about sexual issues from a Christian perspective and address certain issues that most books written at that time wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole.  Jesus, no different than with Peter, had flipped my world upside down and it was an amazingly lonely, but healing time in my life. In essence, with all that he was doing in my life, he was saying that I had all this focus on ministering to others, but that I had gotten the cart before the horse, and that first, he needed to minister to me. Something, for the most part, I had never allowed him to do.

Ironically, at the end of the day, the main way in which Jesus dealt with me in this healing in terms of all these relational and sexual issues was that he simply forgave me and just as importantly, taught me how to forgive myself. Strangely, these were the two key components that began to change my behavior. Yes, I was reading books, seeking counsel, and doing a myriad of other things to attempt to bring change to my life, but it was these two pieces that began to transform me—His forgiveness and my own forgiveness toward myself. I, for the first time in my life, had truly experienced forgiveness beyond just knowing it in text-book fashion and in word only.

In particular, I can remember one day when I was reading the Bible, God through His words basically said, Buddy, there are a lot of other areas of your life that you pay little attention to that need even more change than just this area of lust. I remember that moment because it struck me that I began to see that in some ways the sin of pride was just as damaging to myself and to others as what my sexual sin could be. This was a freeing moment for me. It made me realize how focused I was on this one area of my life, but was neglecting so many others. Again, God was teaching me in a way only that he could, that I was a sinner through and through to the very core. Through this relinquishment, not only did I begin to heal, but I miraculously began to change. The beauty of this time, now that I look back at it now, was that even though I was in this completely broken state, Jesus was extremely patient with me and slowly, but surely was in the process of changing me for the better.

Bought this on vinyl two weeks ago by Explosions in the Sky.  The song title is Be Comfortable, Creature.

It’s worth your time.

After loss of identity, the most potent modern terror, is loss of sexuality. Jeanette Winterson

 I had my own experience in which I had lived a servant too long. Ironically, just as my move from believer to servant began in a car ride, in a way, so did my transformation to becoming a friend to Jesus. As I have said before, for about ten years I lived in Chicago. It is a city I deeply love with my Chicago Cubs (yes, I am a glutton for punishment), the lakeshore, its unique architecture, and deep-dish pizza. While living there a couple of years after college, I was now a couple years in my first “official” job. I worked for a large catalog company as a print and paper buyer and loved my job with all of its perks. I often ate at some of the best restaurants, got to see Michael Jordan play on many occasions, and because of my position, I was schmoozed on a regular basis by the other companies that I worked with on the different projects I oversaw.

However, a couple of negative things were also happening, especially in my relationship with God and in my personal life. First, I was becoming callous in my faith and jaded. I had been a Christian for some years, had moved into various places of leadership and was beginning to like that spotlight. In my early years as a Christian I threw myself into many endeavors and slowly but surely was getting burned out and basically, becoming tired of being a Christian. I was leading Bible studies; mentoring a couple of rambunctious seventh graders through Big Brothers; trying to get off the ground a college ministry at the school I graduated from; attending not one, but three different churches. You name it, I was doing it. The problem was…I also trying to keep up appearances, because what once seemingly was a thriving faith had deteriorated. And here was the big problem—the problem was that if you knew me then you would have never known that by looking at all that I was doing. You would have thought I was this great guy who had it all together, serving God and serving others. How do I know this? Because at that time so many around me told me this in not so many words. I had become a very gifted actor and was fit to be the next Robert De Niro.

And underneath all of this, issues from my past had surfaced and secret sins began to pile up. On the surface everything looked like it was in working order, but inside I was hollow and there were so many problems in my life that I wasn’t recognizing. First, I was beginning to grow an anger within myself that seemingly just showed up one day. I was hard to please. I was putting high expectations on others, but rarely myself. While up to that point in my life, anger had never really been a struggle or problem, however, now inside I was seething. I often would walk around just a bundle of annoyance and chagrin. I almost never showed this to others, but inside anger had taken a foothold in my life. Second, I had become very arrogant and prideful. I would go to church and not listen to the sermon for self-reflection, but to critique what was being spoken. With others, when someone would have an opinion on some given issue, I often had to disagree. Being a Christian had turned into for me an intellectual exercise and not a spiritual one. That’s not how you interpret that passage! Boy, was that sermon boring! That’s not what Jesus meant when he said “Love your enemies!” Because I had been a Christian for some years, I was slowly becoming a know-it-all and if someone disagreed with me, I could almost in every occasion convince them otherwise. At that time, I learned this—sadly, rarely do people ask tough questions of their leaders.

To top this off, while I had lots of friends, I was distancing myself from them—I carefully hid who I was becoming and where I was struggling. In particular, there was one part of my life which was unraveling and was revealing my brokenness at its deepest levels—its roots, which were nearly twenty years old. Through various experiences in my childhood that had happened to me, some which we would now name as sexual abuse, my sexuality had become an intricate and acute wounded part of me. Like so many that I have met in my practice and in my role as a pastor, my sexuality had been opened up way before it should have been, and with this, the damage that was done was coming to bear. Over the years, in particular starting in my late teenage years, but especially in my early twenties, I was slowly developing a dependency on unhealthy relationships, specifically those that turned sexual.

This brokenness originated at some of my first memories. I became promiscuous at an early age, in part because of these childhood experiences that I mentioned earlier. Likewise, while in middle school, the door had been abruptly slammed open with some incidents with a high school girl who lived down the street and who was a couple of years my senior. We would sneak away to secret places during the summer nights of my eighth grade year and she opened up a world to me that was intoxicating and dangerously mysterious. As I have told many, pornography for the most part has never been a strong urge for me, primarily because of these early experiences. I did not yearn for virtual experiences; I wanted the ones that had flesh and warmth associated with them. These sexual cravings took hold of me at a very early age and would follow for me years to come.

Toward the end of my high school years, this solidified in an even more damaging way—in my freshman year in college, a woman in her twenties who was very “experienced,” entirely opened up that part of my life introducing me to a world which I had not quite imagined. Up to that point, for all intents and purposes, I had been dabbling with sex and in this relationship I gave in full blown to my desires. And of course, by no means was I an innocent bystander in all of this—I was enthralled with this lifestyle and at that same time, could not see its dangers.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, in my early twenties, I was out of control and did not have the capacity, knowledge or courage to stop what I was doing. I had recently become a Christian, but this transformation had yet to invade my relationships with women. While I might have been having lots of sex, in truth, I was beginning to lose my sexuality and in some way, was losing my capacity to love a woman. I wouldn’t of course understand this for years to come, but the ground work had been laid. In these years, I was in many relationships with women, most were just based on having both of our sexual needs met. There were a handful of Saturday mornings that I would awaken next to a woman at my side and I would lay there in a tremendous amount of guilt and shame because of this dual life I was living. The wounds from my sexual past had finally caught up with me, but I did not know what to do.

At about age twenty three, I realized I had to somehow try to get things in respectable order. The problem was—I did all this on my own, trying to piece together something that would bring some semblance of well-being. For the next couple of years, I managed to keep things together, but only barely. It was at this point where I re-committed my life to God which I detailed in a previous post. I seriously dated a couple of women and was trying to take my faith more seriously as well. With the couple of committed relationships that I did have in those years, on the surface they seemed like they were healthy relationships, but in reality, we were two people who had not wrestled with the demons of our past and present. Often in these relationships, I was the overly dependent one and in reality these relationships were becoming a substitute for my relationship with God. I knew I had a serious problem when one Sunday I was standing next to my girlfriend at church and in seeing her in worship; I became jealous of her love toward God. Can you imagine that? I was jealous of God! I remember feeling that emotion and thinking he was going to strike me dead at that very instance. At that point, I knew things were really bad and that what I was trying to do was bringing very little healing to my life.

It all culminated one night at my girlfriend’s apartment, in which, in too many words, we had another great argument about our relationship. That evening, we both decided to mutually break things off and that was the beginning for me in pursuing my own healing and relinquishing my craving for women to make me happy and whole. Relieved and devastated at the same time, that evening as I was driving home in my car, I heard a whisper of a voice, which to paraphrase, basically said, Dude, you need to get some help. Jesus was crying out for me to pursue healing instead of relationships, and soon I was about to finally relent. Remarkably, Jesus was going to begin to heal me in a way that was about as strange as when he used mud and spit to make a blind man see.

Next time, I will tell you how he did that…

Doubting Thomas (2001), Mixed media on paper

(Click to enlarge)

Tree-Lit Dawn (2013), Watercolor on paper

(Click to enlarge)

venetian silence
abreast
a blink
and undressed open
beside over under
furrowed whisper
choir certain
a vestment kiss
piece by piece

uprooted
savor of coral
of autumn reach
and another
gathered or beheld
imperfect
sidestep into twist
arisen touch
woven and
kept

[To have faith in Christ] means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you.

C.S. Lewis

I do not want to be the inheritor of so many misfortunes. I do not want to continue as a root and as a tomb. Pablo Neruda

 As I said earlier in the blog, how we view God is all-important. It is the underpinning of our entire life. Most often, our view of God comes from two places in our lives: 1) from how we were raised, i.e., from our parents and our upbringings; and 2) what we are taught from others either directly or indirectly. Again, as we look at Peter’s life, on a few different occasions, Jesus had to correct him in terms of his view of God (Matthew 16:23, John 13:3–9, Acts 10). Jesus completely understood that if Peter did not change some of these views, everything else would also get bent and distorted in his life. Jesus clearly saw this in the religious leaders of his time and he didn’t want these same attitudes and behaviors to continue in Peter.

There is one common denominator when it comes to those who are stuck in this phase of faith of being the servant—they inevitably see God as the stern father—Someone who has expectations that can never be met. Now, none of this is out in the open; these views are emotionally held in the sub-conscious and in the deep part of the person’s soul. This truly is how they see God—he cares very little for them. If you were to ask them to name some of God’s characteristics they would be able to perfectly and even eloquently share with you these:

• God is good.
• God is gracious.
• God is loving.
• God is forgiving.

But in truth, to internally experience these realities on a daily basis, they don’t even come close. Deep inside, deep within their soul, God is not good or loving or forgiving. And with this, here is a simple test in how you can determine how a person genuinely sees God—don’t ask them how they view God—ask them how they view themselves. Don’t let them think about the question, just ask them for the first words that come to their mind. Inevitably, the person caught in this stage of faith will use the majority of their description with words such as these: a sinner, broken, wicked, evil, a fallen person. In how they view themselves, we begin to see a picture of how they might view God. They will not use true words such as these—righteous, saved, holy, redeemed, a child—such words would not be the ones that would first come to their mind.

Those who are caught in this servant stage of faith need to assess truly how they view God. They need to get beyond the simple mental conceptions that they have learned and look at who God is genuinely to them right now. But here is the tough part with this self-reflection—you often need someone else in your life who knows you extremely well to help you answer these questions of who God is to you. With the person who is stuck in this phase, as mentioned in a previous chapter, too often this is a no-no; you do not get close to others and you definitely don’t need the help of others.

Often these deep-seated ideas of who God is began a long time ago in a land far, far away. Sometimes a person stuck here will need to deal with issues from the past and often these issues might be difficult to acknowledge or deal with because of the pain or confusion associated with them. Some of these difficult issues to address might be:

• How you were raised – especially growing up in home in which perfection was always required or where a parent was emotionally distant
• Being physically, emotionally or sexually abused in the past
• Facing a traumatic event that occurred in your life
• Having a parent who was extremely domineering or passive
• Growing up in a home that was overly religious (overly emphasizing the rules of the faith over grace and forgiveness)

FACING THE WOUND OF REJECTION

There is an important concept from psychology that might help you understand one dynamic of this in terms of one’s up-bringing. Gregory Bateson, a linguist and anthropologist, wrote in the 1950’s about the concept of a double bind; it is a term that is used when children grow up with inconsistent and negative parental messages. Double binds usually are most damaging within the relationship of a parent to a child; however,  they can also occur in different types of relationships such as with siblings, extended family relationships, within dating or marriage relationships and friendships. Here is the basic process of how a double bind occurs within the relationship of a parent and child:

• Stage One: Confusion. First, the child who experiences a double bind receives contradictory verbal and emotional messages when they are spoken to by their parent. For example, love is expressed by words, and yet disgust or detachment is exhibited by behaviors by the parent. Likewise, a child is encouraged to speak freely, but then criticized or silenced whenever they actually do share their view on a given issue.
• Stage Two: Control. Often, when such conversations occur, the child is not allowed to disengage from the conversation which has these conflicting messages.
• Stage Three: Punishment. Finally, if within the conversation, the child fails to fulfill the contradictory requests of the parent, they are punished in some way (e.g., withdrawal of love, physical punishment, verbal attacks, etc.).

The classic example given of a negative double bind is of a mother telling her child that she loves him, while at the same time turning away in disgust for some reason. In this case, the words the mother speaks are normal and good, but then the body language is in conflict with the words the mother just spoke. The child doesn’t know how to respond to the conflict between the words and the body language and the harmful behaviors of the parent (this can be either physical or psychological). Overtime, the child in this case will become either very suspicious of those who attempt to show him love or will become very dependent on the parent or others.

Often those who grow up in religious homes experience double binds on a regular basis. It is the image of the parent who says “I love you,” but in reality never really shows it in a physical manner or often shows their repulsion more times than not. It’s the father who says to his daughter with his mouth “You are important to me,” but never expresses it in a physical and tangible way.

I will share an example I heard recently. A client of mine shared an experience of a double bind which was very damaging and confusing to him. This man had been in an accident in which someone on a motorcycle had died because of their own reckless driving. It was not this young man’s fault in any way, and he stayed at the scene of the accident. Obviously, it was a a very troubling experience for him. In his family, he was never allowed to express emotion and on different occasions was actually told to “stop crying” or to keep his feelings in check. One afternoon, he and his mom were in the same room and she pointedly asked, “I am really surprised how you haven’t expressed any emotion about the accident last week. Hasn’t it bothered you?” At that moment, a wave of emotion rushed over him and he began to cry. He reached for his mom to hug her and she pushed him away. This is a perfect picture of a double bind. Step by step, this is what happened:

1. Throughout his life, verbally and non-verbally, he was told not to show emotion.
2. In this incident, he initially did as he was told and did not show any emotion about the accident.
3. His mom requested that he show emotion about the accident.
4. He was rejected and punished for showing emotion.

If you grew up in a home like that, how do you think you would view God? You’d be very confused and it would make sense that how you grew up would influence who God was to you. This often can be the case with the person who is stuck in this legalistic stage of faith. Even without really knowing it, they have grown up in a highly dysfunctional home, experienced subtle abuse and then transferred this experience to their relationship with God. In the situation, with the young man above, this is how I found him when he came into counseling. He was highly distrustful of others and he was highly distrustful of God. Now granted, he went to church each Sunday and served in a lot of meaningful ways there, but in reality, he was a very broken young man who really needed to get at some root issues that had happened a long time ago. Not until he began to see the harm in his past was he able to begin to look at himself and others differently. This healing initially began in that he confronted the truth that he was beginning to mimic his mother’s emotional distance with his own family. Second, he had to reach out for help—these two things were the beginning of his healing from a very wounding childhood and upbringing. Those caught in this servant stage of faith have a hard time doing what this young man did. Only those who are willing to look deeply at their past and how they are responding presently because of the past are able to grow in their relationship with God. The God who heals desperately wants us to deal with our wounds and often that means we must first acknowledge them.