Lead Us Not Into Temptation

I was thinking about the phrase from the Lord's Prayer: "Lead me not into temptation, but deliver me from evil." In this prayer we are asking God to direct us away from future temptations that would cause us to stumble into the sins that "so easily beset us" (as we would hope any good navigation program to route us around trouble on the road ahead).

One of the real dangers of a commitment to a holy life is to try and move into holiness based on human effort. This is the kind that resists temptation as it comes, only to find yourself a little worried that in the next wave of temptation you will not be able to endure it. This is resistance based on personal effort, which always leaves us feeling weaker and more susceptible to sin.

However, in the Lord's Prayer we are being invited into something more than human effort. In essence we are asking:

"Lord, you know my penchant of harboring a wandering heart and my tendency to think/act badly. Would you help me to steer clear of this by helping me to remember to look to you to lead me out of temptation when I feel the gravitational pull of sin? I admit that sinning is par for my wounded soul and that wandering from you for relief instead of running to you is really what I am best at doing without the direct action of your grace within me. Help me look to you for escapes In temptation, instead of in myself (1 Cor. 10:13)."

"Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil." 

A great prayer.

Resisting Performance in Prayer

One of the greatest treasures I embrace from my Evangelical/Charismatic roots is bringing the piety and passion of my heart into the prayer moment. As wonderful as that is, that is not the ONLY purpose of the Office. 

One of the realities of living in the intense spirituality that accompanies those of us who feel called to bind up the brokenhearted and bringing freedom to those who are in captivity, is that that kind of work will burn you out. Spiritual warfare creates a loss of personal energy. If all prayer does is demand MORE personal energy, we will do it less and less. Then we will drift into things that seem like rest because they require nothing from us but yielding, and they carry their own energy -- things like sin.

This is one of the central reasons I am committed to praying the Offices day in and day out. I don't have to perform or bring my best...I just have to show up. The Offices themselves carry a kind of spirituality that transcends emotion and intellect and they hold us in life without demanding tons of internal energy. Reading the naked texts; praying the rich prayers and collects doesn't require spontaneity or tons of passion. Praying the psalms--these are things that don't demand emotive response. The Offices are a naturally supernatural, wholistic approach to life and faith that are like a good workout for the soul. You get a workout--it's a little hard to get through in the moment, but you just feel better and think better throughout the day.

The stories of men and women who are deeply committed to the Kingdom of God and end up getting lost in the morass of personal or family failure are too well known to us. Let's be a people who hear and respond to the deep ache of the world with the Gospel of deliverance and transformation without losing our way or imploding emotionally. What we do day in and day out in the Order will help us here.

Praying for Kings

Remember as we pray the Psalms we often pray things that seem obscure and inapplicable to our personal lives. This is when we should shift into the awareness that we are praying AS the Body of Christ, speaking for the Body the prayers that have filled the lungs of the Church since her inception. 

This morning's psalm prays, 

"Add length of days to the king's life; 
let his years extend over many generations.
Let him sit enthroned before God for ever; 
bid love and faithfulness watch over him."

Since we have no kings in our modern world, my mind went to a cry for those who are leaders influencing the Church in the modern world--like Pope Francis or our Primary Bishop Quinton, or those who serve as Priests in our Order: like Mark Aarstad/JP Robles/Janis Sharpe/Shelby Swanson/etc--the prayer was "Lord, let these 'kings' have length of days to influence in a way that fulfills why God you have anointed them to be leaders to begin with." 

As an Order, we do not pray for ourselves alone but our very Rule of Life and cries in prayer are for the whole Church around the world.

Praying without Guilt

One of the dangers of praying the Office two times a day is praying the Office two times a day in a rote kind of way. The opposite of "rote" is NOT stirring up some internal passion or by grasping a pressured focus that can produce spiritual hemorrhoids, but a pausing and waiting, refusing to do something just to do it. 

I had this experience this a.m. I didn't want to do the Office and felt guilty about it. That's where I stopped. 

The great revealer of a weak soul is the appearance of negatives like guilt or anger. So I just sat and thought about the fact that I am alive and that meant God is holding me in life. I thought about the fact I was connected to everything in the universe because I am held in being by the Great I Am. I waited till gratitude came--the work of any priest is giving thanks (Eucharist). 

Guilt left.

I was not anxious about anything.

Then I chose to present myself to the one I Am by praying the Office.

It turned out to be unusually sweet with no hint of rote.

Praying the Psalms

Remember that one central focus of praying the Psalms is that it is not just PERSONAL, but corporate--these are OUR prayers, which means there are times we resonate with what is being said and times we don't. But even in times when we don't, we can IMAGINE how someone somewhere in the global Church may resonate with it given the contingencies of their lives. So we pray FOR and WITH them when we utter a psalm--they are at least intercessory when they don't seem personal.

In one of today's psalms, the writer pens: "I am as useless as a broken pot." You may not feel that way at all today, but certainly you can imagine how the global Church can feel that way in the light of being discounted from culture/power structures around us. So we enter the prayer...imagining being a broken pot that cannot do what it was designed to do...there is loss and a sense of hopelessness...yet, the psalmist continues with the sense that God will fix this eventually: "Blessed be the LORD! for he has shown me the wonders of his love in a besieged city."

The Psalms prayed take us into another dimension of prayer. One that both touches us personally (at times) and springboards us into the global mind of Christ's Church with effective intercession that only eternity will tell of its true fruit.

This is just another way (to refer back to our conversation yesterday) that we enter community and communion with the saints...it is not earthy enough / incarnational enough in the long run (a nod to the need articulated yesterday) but I think it is the foundation for that kind of community. 

I have a cousin in New York that I have only known casually over the years, but since moving here we have been more intentional about connecting with her. Why? She's family. The familial bond pushes me towards her, not just my ache for community. What should push us towards each other is that we are members of one another metaphysically--one body, one faith, one baptism, we worship one God and Father of us all...we pray together, even when we are in different places...THIS is the foundation for community, not ache. And as we pursue it (which is where the convo for yesterday really begins) we pursuing it and what does that pursuit look like - we obliterate the ache as a byproduct, not as the goal.

Praying with Sacramental Imagination

Remember that a sacramental imagination (over against a Protestant imagination) refocuses the "agent" of activity from us (the participating humans) to God. We pray but we don't trust the patterns of the prayers we pray. We simply present ourselves to God (Rom 12:1 style) in the Offices we pray and trust that God is acting in and through us. Sometimes we "sense" that emotionally, other times we don't. But what is true in either case is that over time, as we look back, we become aware that a transformation is occurring in us and (by faith) in the world surrounding us. This higher view is where we are motivated the most to continue in our Vow.

Beginning to Pray

One of the potential dangers of the Daily Office is the will's role in it. We "will" to pray--which can be too strong and actually dampen the effects of the prayer leading to pride over the fact that we DID pray.

This is why it is a great idea to open the Office with a moment of silence in a sense of contemplation and humility. In contemplation we lift our hearts in humble love to God without any deliberate flow of thoughts or words--it's good to take a couple breaths and pause just a few moments. Here we surrender control; here we blunt the ego; here we enter the dance of prayer without trying to be the "lead" dancer--we come to him who is Almighty and All in All. And he's smiling that we've come... 

Now begin with that opening verse.

Lament

On the issue of lament...I'm convinced this is one of the great absences of modern Evangelical faith that must be recaptured. However, it is not a simple issue. I know we know this, but it’s not what we know but what we keep saying that sticks…

Mat 5:4 claims, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” However, we are not oriented to mourning. Most of our Evangelical/Charismatic ethos is celebration and victory (this is pretty much our American ethos as well). We run immediately to the FIX of redemption, not patiently facing what it is we are ultimately redeemed from. We don’t want to face suffering head on—to taste or experience its loss.

Walter Brueggemann writes:

“Jesus sees that only those who mourn will be comforted.  Only those who embrace the reality of death will receive the new life.  Implicit in his statement is that those who do not mourn will not be comforted and those who do not face the endings will not receive the newness ... I used to think it curious that, when having to quote Scripture on demand, someone would inevitably say, 'Jesus wept.'  It is usually done as a gimmick to avoid having to quote a longer passage.  But now I understand the depth of that verse. Jesus knew what we numb ones must always learn again: (a) that weeping must be real because endings are real; and (b) that weeping permits newness. His weeping permits the kingdom to come. Such weeping is a fearful dismantling because it means the end of all machismo; weeping is something kings rarely do without losing their thrones.  Yet the loss of thrones is precisely what is called for…”

So, my first impulse would be to urge people to not rush past loss to fix. We must be patient and grieve / morn for comfort to come.

Secondly, I would argue that we need to realize lament demands a great sense of intimacy. In the movie, Rendition, an abduction-thriller film about the CIA that came out a few years ago, there is this riveting scene where one of the main characters, “Abbas-i” is a high-ranking official who is the target of a terrorist bomb. He has a daughter (Fatima) who inadvertently ends up close to where the bomb, which is to kill Abbas-i, her father and she ends up being killed herself.

The tension of this moment is that Abbas-i and his wife have been having an ongoing argument about his dangerous position and how it was putting their whole family at risk—but Abbas-i’s resolve to serve his country was unbending. The scene is when Abbas-i, after actively looking for his missing daughter for days, walks into the room to his wife after discovering their daughter was killed with the bomb being targeted for him. Without a word, the wife sees in Abbas-i’s eyes what happened. In sheer grief she begins to scream and run to Abbas-i hitting him on his chest with gut-wrenching tears. He just stood there and took it gently holding on to his wife’s shoulders as she hit him. She quickly exhausts and falls into Abbas-i’s arms and he holds her in silence as she continues to sob.

She was blaming him (though she knew he didn’t directly do this0.

He was letting her blame him, willing to take her punches and was simply present. 

When I saw this I thought: “This is lament.”

It is something of great intimacy. We can dare to blame God precisely because on some level we believe he could have prevented it and yet we know he is good. 

Ps. 10:1 says, ”Why do you stand so far off O, Lord, and hide yourself in time of trouble." 

This is why I love the Psalms...these are gut, honest prayers--not theology. Just like a close friend or spouse telling you, "I hate you right now" over some disappointment or hurt. That person would be uttering FEELINGS, not belief or truth.

I think in times of heartache it's right to vent feelings about “why Lord” or when we are hit with the sense that things are not fair.

Stuffing these feelings thinking we are being faithful is a deception.

God knows our hearts and invites us to complain in prayer (this is why these lament prayers fill many sections of sacred text)—with the caveat that after you throw-up on God (and that is what it is), we remember he has historically been faithful and able towards you. 

Later in Psalm 10, the psalmist continues: "Surely you behold trouble and misery; you see it and take it into your own hand." In the end, God is faithful. But we should avail ourselves to praying the psalms during evil times in order to process the disappointment of pain and trouble.

I blather on to simply ask, Can we really lament without understanding it? Maybe until lament becomes an understood and practiced expression we need to simply "pray for" people...I'm not sure that people actually feel close enough to God to actually lament in its proper sense. 

The first person I ever saw that seemed to have this was a Catholic nun in the 70's. She looked at me and flatly said, "I threw my Bible at God today." 

I said in shock, "What?" 

She told me again and I asked her why. She said, "I told him that I was his bride [then told me parenthetically "I'm a nun, you know. I see Christ as my husband."], and I told him that he needs to start treating me like a woman."

My first thought was, "And you lived to talk about it?!"

But something else rose up in me. I thought, "Man, I wish I was that close to God to be that honest."

I'm not sure many are. And if they are not, I'm not sure we can truly lament as congregations without more training. But prayer is good.

Knowing vs. Doing

I want to remind us that KNOWING what and why we are doing is helpful, but not necessarily the most important aspect of what we doing. DOING is more important than KNOWING. Think of how many things you know (like eating healthy or exercising) that do NOT impact your life. It is when we ACT that things get HABITUATED in us--they capture us.

For the past several weeks I've been exercising every day and this morning was the first time I felt my body longing for it. Something is changing in me and goes beyond my head. This is true for the Office too. I've been doing this for years and I find my soul leaning into doing it without thinking of why or what I am exactly doing. It's more habit that I careen towards almost without thought. Think of the words of James 1:22, "Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says."

James KA Smith claims it is what is HABITUATED that actually transforms us. I think it is as important to trust the process as to want to learn why. I'm not suggesting that LEARNING is not important--it is. And it helps to motivate us to become habituated, but that being said...let's simply do...it will pay off!

Interestingly, philosophically the modern age has reduced our anthropology to us being THINKING BEINGS primarily (Cartesian epistemology)--or as Smith says, "Brains on a stick". This pervades the way we approach our spirituality in the West--we think if we get it down in our heads, we'll have it down. But that is far from the truth. And I think this is WHY people who are going through rough patches in life (where nothing makes sense to their brains on a stick) are so captured by liturgy and Eucharist...it isn't something that has to be understood (mystery) and yet is seems to capture them in a formative, strengthening way. I'm convinced this is the magic in the sauce for a 21st century community to face our helter-skelter world...this informed but HABITUATED spirituality.

A Prayer for Goodness

Here is a beautiful prayer that reminds us that we cannot live as we should without the help of God himself:

"Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners: Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen."

Remember this whenever you are less human than you want to be--we are never very good at life because we have "unruly wills," but God is so good he will not cease until he has made us good with his goodness.

Dead Wood

This morning's reading is from Numbers 17 where the leaders of Israel brought their walking sticks that represented their individual tribes and laid them before God. These were pieces of wood that were once alive but were now dead. God touches one of them and this dead piece of wood brimmed with life: buds, blossoms and ripe almonds (nourishment).

I couldn't help but cry, "Lord, help us as an Order approach you when we feel like dead wood. Help us to simply lay our hearts and affections before you as we do the offices and cause life to bud and blossom in us. Let us bear fruit that nourishes our own lives, the lives of those close to us and anyone you bring across our path. Lord, hear our prayer."  Amen.