Category Archives: Spiritual Health

Lament & Humor as Balance in Life (2)

Posted on April 12, 2013 | Leave a comment

As we continue to look at the area of lament, (We’ll get to humor soon) I would call your attention to the superscriptions attached to some of the psalms. For example, look at Psalm 34. The superscription reads, “Of David, when he feigned madness before Ahimelech, so that he drove him out, and he went away.” The one who compiled the psalm is suggesting that if you keep that incident in David’s life in mind (1 Sam. 21:13) as you pray the psalm, it will deepen your understanding of the prayer. If you pray the psalm, however, you will see how early Christians set a new context for this psalm as they sought to understand their experience of the crucifixion of Jesus. (Note Ps 34:20)

We continue to see this flexibility of praying the psalms in different contexts when we look at Psalm 22. Psalm 22 wasn’t originally written with Jesus on cross in mind but when you think about that experience, it provides new depth to our praying that psalm for Christians.

You can deepen your own experience of the psalms by picturing other contexts within Jesus life where particular psalms might have been prayed. Think of Jesus in Garden of Gethsemane. What are some of the feelings you can imagine Jesus experiencing. With that image in mind, look at Psalm 77. It may help by   placing Jesus name in place of pronouns.

I share all of that to remind you of the flexibility you are invited to in praying the psalms. Now, move from biblical contexts to your own contexts. Consider, for example,  a time when you have felt frustrated in your ministry. With that context in mind, pray Psalm 55. Place your name in place of the pronouns, and fill in the blanks with your experiences of frustration as you offer this prayer.

All of this is to suggest that you are both given permission and guided in how to lift up your feelings to God in prayer. While there are many psalms that are not psalms of lament, the emphasis on lament in the psalms recognize this important aspect in your spiritual journey.

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Posted in Clergy, Clergy Health, Emotional Health, Spiritual Health

Lament & Humor as Balance in Life

Posted on April 10, 2013 | Leave a comment

In continuing to look at ways to keep our life in balance, I want to look again at the Psalms of Lament and in a later blog, the role of humor.

As Ecclesiastes reminds us, “There is a time to weep and a time to laugh”  (Eccles. 3:4)

 Having a vital spiritual life is a matter of balance. The emotional continuum moves from  Despair to ecstasy

                        Pain to pleasure

                        Lament to praise

            The whole continuum is valuable in the fullness of life.

                        No one can live a healthy life in constant ecstasy, or pleasure, or praise. The psalms, which are our school of prayer, guides us along that continuum. Calvin said that the psalms provide an anatomy of the human soul – There is no feeling in human psyche that is not expressed somewhere in the psalms. And most importantly for our spiritual maturity, all are acceptable to God.

Look at Psalm 13 as a classic example of a lament psalm. Note how psalmist feels comfortable having expectations of God. While we make no pretense to understand the mind of God, still our faith leads us to expect certain things from God as part of our relationship. The psalmist feels free to remind God of those expectations and when s/he believes that God has not lived up to God’s part of the relationship. We see the same thing in Jesus’ use of Psalm 22 as his prayer from the cross.

Having expressed his or her complaint in bold terms, note also in Psalm 13 how the prayer moves from lament to praise. It is when we are honest in expressing our complaints, even our angers, that we cleanse our soul and can then honestly move to an experience of praise and awe.

           To fully experience this, take psalm 13 and substitute your name for the  pronouns and pray the psalm aloud and with feeling. At first you may even feel embarrassed about being so honest, but as you allow yourself that freedom, notice the sense of release in the experience.

As I mentioned,  Psalm 22, made famous because the Gospels report it as Jesus’ prayer from the cross, also moves across the continuum from despair to praise. If you apply the same practice of placing your name in place of the pronouns, you will likely trigger some of your own moments when you have felt abandoned, even if just briefly.

            Also, note how the  moves from loneliness to community. The more we repress and swallow our own negative feelings, the more we isolate ourselves from others, and even from God. When we find one who is able to listen and accept our darkest feelings, we find ourselves accepted as well. We are restored to community. The spiritual life recognizes that despair and pain often isolates and that healing results in the restoration of community.

As Genesis notes from the beginning, “It is not good for the human to be alone.”

 

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Posted in Clergy Health, Emotional Health, Spiritual Health

God works through Clergy with Real Feelings

Posted on April 5, 2013 | Leave a comment

Think of the various experiences in ministry that cause you to be angry. As a beginning, make a list of five of them. You don’t have to show them to anyone, so be very honest. It may be a person whose behavior almost always upsets you. It may be an official board that seems to be more obstructive than supportive in the decisions they make. It may be the denominational pressure that ignores your personal stress but emphasizes the need to raise funds or advance programs they are sponsoring. It may be the myriad of administrative tasks that consume your energy and leave you little time to focus on people or challenging the injustices of the world. Don’t try to cover everything. Just pick the first five that come to mind.

What do you do with the negative feelings generated by such situations. If you blast forth with such feelings, you run rough shod over the very community of faith that you are seeking to build. But if you swallow them, even to the point of denying that they are there, the energy of those emotions will turn against your body and rob you of the vitality of life–physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Both the rise in physical health problems and depression among the clergy is evidence to the cost of not dealing with those feelings in a healthy manner.

I would contend that God knew you and your physical, emotional, and spiritual needs before God called you to ministry. I would further contend that God is not defeated by your limitations as a human but rather can work through them for good purpose. In addition I would suggest that God invites you to employ strategies that can help you not be harmed by repressed feelings.

One of those strategies is to learn to be honest with God even with your most negative feelings through your prayer life. As I have suggested in previous blogs, some of the harsh language of the psalms of lament, psalms which we have every reason to believe Jesus used in his prayer life, provide guidance in how to share our negative feelings with God through prayer.

I will continue to work on this in future blogs.

 

 

 

 

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Posted in Clergy, Emotional Health, Spiritual Health

Thinking Back, Ahead

Posted on January 4, 2013 | Leave a comment

Consider some basic assumptions. One that God is real, personally involved in this world, and has called you to ministry. In good Reformed tradition, everyone has a call to ministry, even though  only some are called to ordained ministry as pastors, so this really applies to any believer.

Second assumption is that God has been involved in your life and shaping your call long before you were aware of it. Third assumption is that your call will likely change over time but the central core of the call will still be there. For example, I first thought of missionary work, then of inner city work, but eventually became a pastor of a middle class church. Now I’m retired but still feel God’s call in my life.

With those assumptions in mind, take some time to think back to your childhood. What were some of the fantasies that you played with about who you would become? Did you want to be a cowboy, a fireman, a beauty queen, an Olympic athlete? Now go behind those initial fantasies and identify some of the qualities that drew you to those dreams. What did the cowboy, beauty queen, etc. do that drew you to those fantasies? Was being the best draw in the West a factor of developing your full skills, saving others from bad guys, standing up for truth and justice?

After you have probed behind several of your early fantasies, move forward and do the same for other paths not taken in your early life. Keep a list of some of the qualities and achievements that you were dreaming about. Now begin to examine how some of those same factors have played a role in your current situation when you have felt best about yourself. If there are aspects of your current situation where you feel such qualities have been neglected, consider how they might be re-emphasized in some new form in your current life. The Spirit has been moving in your life from the beginning of your life. Listen for it’s early echoes and see how it might be moving in your life now.

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Posted in Clergy, Spiritual Health

Hypocritic Oath for Pastors (3)

Posted on December 7, 2012 | Leave a comment

In the last blog, I asked you to name some of your own hypocrisies. I suggested you try to identify ten as a beginning and shared ten of mine. The purpose of ten is that is forces you to go deeper. The purpose of naming them is not for guilt sake but to enable you to break free of their power.

Once I was able to acknowledge that despite the mandate of the Gospel, I was a racist, I could open myself to the power of God to use an imperfect servant to break down some racial barriers. Once I am free to acknowledge that I am very imperfect and that God loves me anyway, I am free to be less self-righteous of others. The more I can identify both my own failings and the failings of the church, the more I stand in awe at God’s ability to work through the church for the sake of God’s world.

Take the list that you created of the situations and attitudes that make you feel like a hypocrite, and try to identify specific possibilities of how God might work through each of them for a greater good either in your personal life or your ministry.

I had a minister friend who had messed up his marriage and was going through a divorce. He told me that Sunday after Sunday he would feel overwhelmed by his unworthiness to say anything about God, Christ, and faith. Yet each Sunday he had to rise and preach. As we talked about it over time, he discovered that his very pain of unworthiness deepened his sermons. It was not from a perspective of purity that he addressed his congregation but as a sinner who was wrestling with the Gospel. That didn’t justify what had happened in his marriage, but it did allow him to experience personally how God’s power is made perfect in our weakness.

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Posted in Clergy, Spiritual Health