...Of Emotional Breathing

One of my congregation (I won't say who, as he doesn't like any limelight) recently a link to a wonderfully reflective thinker: Ron Rolheiser.

Ron has some great things to say about how we approach faith and relationships - especially where our faith and our expectations of others intersect.

You can check out Ron's thoughts here:

http://www.ronrolheiser.com/

An older article of his on the impact of our emotional needs on how we serve others is particularly insightful. It is Ron notes it is good and healthy to look for the touch of others: God created us that way.  But if this becomes the basis for why we serve - to have our  emotional needs met - we will never mature spiritually. Why? Because we always put a condition on the serving: we will keep saying 'I will love you and stay with you, as long as there's something in it for me.'

But as Ron says, real growth and maturity serves because it is good and right; not because we get something from it. That's hard, and it is certainly not the message we hear in Twenty-first Western media outlets: but it is very true.John the elder wrote "We love because God first loved us." That, and only that is the true basis for loving and serving: out of gratitude to the One Who loved us totally and gave Himself freely for our restoration.

...of Lost Friends

I lost a dear friend this week. We have been close for over 30 years. It has been very had to focus on other things.

My friend - we'll call him John - and I met at University. A brilliant man, but with deep emotional scarring. Petrified that God would punish him for not loving properly. Certain that no-one could love God, and that therefore no-one could assume they had escaped the judgment of God. A man more comfortable with God's wrath than God's love. A man who for those 30 years barely inched his way toward a peace with God. During those 30 years he used his sharp mind and short temper to slash many people's egos and feelings - yet whose own emotional skin was so thin that the smallest of criticism sent him into weeks of distress and deep hurt. Many people came into his life, and many people went.

John - a gifted musician and linguist. A first class mind. Yet a man more comfortable using his hands than his other talents to make a living, as he wrestled with God. John - who believed that anyone making any act of will to serve God as by definition living a gospel of works, even though in his own life he struggled day after day after day to find a way to let God into his life (though he never saw it that way: in his mind, he grew with God only when he was the passive vessel).

And for those 30 years I had journeyed with him, always listening, rarely commenting (not that he would have noticed in the early years: at that time John talked at you, never with you). But John had made progress, and so in recent times I had felt I could critique and beg to differ, all the while remaining friends.

But I was wrong. Sadly, John is gone.

Oh, he is not dead. John is still very much alive. But this last week, after 30 years, I finally felt the lash of his tongue and the venom of his anger, when I responded to a comment he made questioning my commitment to one of my core values. For John, being right trumps relationship. For John, disagreement is a knife wound to a friendship. For John, there can ever only be one viewpoint: his viewpoint. All else is flawed, and must be rejected. So John said goodbye, finally and forever.

So today I pay my last respects to John. He has chosen 'truth' over 'love', having never realized that God is Love, and that we are called ever only to speak the truth in love. Of course truth matters; but so does relationship. How we hold these in balance is our journey with God, and with each other.

Good-bye John. I shall miss you.