#exegy

Do EXEGY Offer Demo Accounts?

...as we approach God, we begin not as knowers, but as the known. We are named before we name, called before we call, spoken to before we speak. What feels like an initiative on our part turns out to be the response to a prior initiative taken by the one who calls us.

I don’t have to be somewhere else—right here is okay. In fact, it’s the only place I can be to begin to awaken spiritually. Here. Now. Just as I am. Being present here where we are can actually be tougher than it seems. I’m always tempted to be partially somewhere else, to pretend I’m not where I am, who I am, how I am.

When we begin by naming God, too often we assume that we know more about the one we’re addressing than we may actually know. The name carries too much unacknowledged conceptual freight for us... In doing so we may falsely assume that our idea of God is identical to God, that the real God ‘out there’ is no bigger than and no different from the idea we have ‘in here’ in our heads.

“Most important, dramatic spiritual experiences simply aren’t the point. Whatever the value of extraordinary dramatic spiritual experiences, to which some people seem more prone than others, I’m convinced that what matters most—and is available to everyone—is daily, ordinary spiritual experience.”

But work for God that is not nourished by a deep interior life with God will eventually be contaminated by other things such as ego, power, needing approval of and from others, and buying into the wrong ideas of success and the mistaken belief that we can't fail. When we work for God because of these things, our experience of the gospel often falls off the center. We become 'human doings' rather than 'human beings'. Our experimental sense of worth and validation gradually shifts from Gods unconditional love for us in Christ to our works and performance. The joy of Christ gradually disappears.

My central task among these people was not to help them solve their problems, but to help them to see how their problems could help solve them, serve as stimulus and goad to embrace the mystery of who they were as human beings, and then offer to be companion to them and teach them the language of this world in which we are God-created, Christ-invaded, Spirit-moved, the language of prayer.

We were created to be open. To be open to God, to open out towards our neighbors. We can only be whole and healthy in so far as we do this. When we are in need, when firsthand experience documents our inability to be whole beings on our own, the first thing that can happen is that we will become more authentically human. Need rips gashes in our self containment and opens us to the neighbor. Need blows holes in our roofed in self sufficiency and opens us to God. But not necessarily. For the self willed self does not give up easily. It makes a persistent and determined stand to use those need generated openings not to move out, but to pull whoever is trying to help it, into its service, put the neighbors to its use. If unwary, the person providing care is co-opted into feeding selfishness, which to say, sin. There is great irony here- that so much of our caring nurtures sin.