French author Victor Hugo, best known for Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, was also the author of the novel, 93, (Quatre-vingt treize). The book is centered on the year 1793, Year Two of the French Republic, which saw “the establishment of the National Convention, the execution of Louis XVI, the Terror, and the monarchist revolt in the Vendée, which was brutally suppressed by the Republic.” (See Goodreads for a review.)

In a chapter entitled, “Tormentum Belli,” which Hugo translates in the text as “war machine,” is the story of the corvette “Claymore.” The three-masted, square-rigged warship was in rough seas when suddenly an awful noise arose from below decks. Hugo tells us: “a frightful thing had happened.”

The vessel was equipped with thirty carronades, short smoothbore cast iron cannons able to fire large shot at short range. These had been fastened below deck by triple chains and the hatches above had been shut. Now, one of the cannons had broken loose and had become something akin to what Hugo calls an “indescribable supernatural beast,” rolling, pitching, rushing, and crashing into the ship’s sides.

“Nothing more terrible can happen to a vessel in open sea and under full sail,” Hugo reports, for a loose cannon is “a battering-ram . . . [that] has the bounds of a panther, the weight of an elephant, the agility of a mouse, the obstinacy of an axe, the unexpectedness of the surge, the rapidity of lightning, the deafness of the tomb. It weighs ten thousand pounds and, it rebounds like a child’s ball.”

“How to control this enormous brute of bronze?” Hugo asks. “How to fetter this monstrous mechanism for wrecking a ship? . . . The horrible cannon flings itself about, advances, recoils, strikes to the right, strikes to the left . . . crushes men like flies.”

The whole ship was now in awful tumult as the cannon, which is said to have appeared to the crew as owning “a soul filled with rage and hatred,” tears apart the insides of the ship. Hugo tells us that often, it is true, that more dangerous to a ship is a loose cannon inside than a storm outside. And what is true of ships is also true of human beings. God’s Word invites us to go “below decks” for a look at the turmoil that can result when the cannon that is unforgiveness gets loose. And it is in the Word that we will find the help needed for taming this “beast,” this “battering ram” that – left uncontrolled – can wreak devastating havoc.

Perhaps we might begin by considering what acts can set the cannon of unforgiveness loose.

If author Lewis Smedes is right, these are acts of disloyalty and acts of betrayal. Words like abandon, forsake and let down are attached to such acts and capture the nature of the hurting involved:

When your spouse has an affair with your best friend.

When your mother or father fails to show up at a banquet at which you’re honored with a hard-earned award.

When you fully dedicate yourself for years to doing your very best work at your place of employment and a new manager moves into play and tosses you out on your ear.

When a tornado sweeps through your neighborhood and leaves your house in shambles. When you go into town for supplies and return home only to discover that looters have taken what little was left of your belongings.

When you’re diagnosed with cancer.

When you commit a colossal blunder or fail to follow through on a promise to a dear and trusting friend or when you speak a word you believe needs to be spoken and it’s received as an attack.

When your loved one contracts a debilitating illness that lingers on for years.

When faced with these challenges of life, we may feel betrayed by the spouse, the parent, the friend, the authority figure, the neighbor, our bodies, ourselves, God.

Bitterness. Bitterness is what you get when you leave anger out to rot. It’s what results when injury is added to injury. It begins to root when you go to bed angry, when somebody rubs you the wrong way and the rubbing turns to chafing. It grows in the fertile fields of jealousy, abuse, and vengeance. It hangs in the air. It’s heard in the “us and them,” in the “you did this to me,” in the “he said, she said,” in the “I can’t forgive myself for….” You fill in the blank.

Anger is a natural reaction to injury real or imagined. Bitterness, resentment and unforgiveness are the sins that grow out of unresolved, unhealthy anger. The antidote for these sins is forgiveness.

But why forgive? How do we forgive? If you’re like me, there are moments when I have prayed the Lord’s Prayer and have found myself wincing when I’ve come to that part where we say, “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us,” or “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors,” or “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who have trespassed against us.” If you’re like me, you may well – like me – have found yourself shooting a prayer up from your spirit: “O Lord, please do not forgive me in the shabby, half-hearted, offer it one day, take it back the next day, ways in which I have ‘forgiven’ those who have trespassed against me.”

In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus helps us understand the cost of unforgiveness as he relates the story of a king who decides one day to settle accounts with his servants.

In Matthew 18:21-36, we read:

At that point Peter got up the nerve to ask, “Master, how many times do I forgive a brother or sister who hurts me? Seven?” Jesus replied, “Seven! Hardly. Try seventy times seven. “The kingdom of God is like a king who decided to square accounts with his servants. As he got under way, one servant was brought before him who had run up a debt of a hundred thousand dollars. He couldn’t pay up, so the king ordered the man, along with his wife, children, and goods, to be auctioned off at the slave market. “The poor wretch threw himself at the king’s feet and begged, ‘Give me a chance and I’ll pay it all back.’ Touched by his plea, the king let him off, erasing the debt. “The servant was no sooner out of the room when he came upon one of his fellow servants who owed him ten dollars. He seized him by the throat and demanded, ‘Pay up. Now!’ The poor wretch threw himself down and begged, ‘Give me a chance and I’ll pay it all back.’ But he wouldn’t do it. He had him arrested and put in jail until the debt was paid. When the other servants saw this going on, they were outraged and brought a detailed report to the king.

“The king summoned the man and said, ‘You evil servant! I forgave your entire debt when you begged me for mercy. Shouldn’t you be compelled to be merciful to your fellow servant who asked for mercy?’ The king was furious and put the screws to the man until he paid back his entire debt. And that’s exactly what my Father in heaven is going to do to each one of you who doesn’t forgive unconditionally anyone who asks for mercy.” The Message

So one man is brought before the king. His debt? 10,000 talents. In The Message, Eugene Peterson translates that amount to the contemporary equivalent of a hundred thousand dollars. Whatever the amount, it was clear this man was hopelessly enslaved to debt! Yet another person in the text is mentioned as owing a hundred denarii, which today would be a few dollars.

The text also makes it clear that the terrible consequence of being in debt was debtor’s prison. When a bill went past due and one couldn’t pay, the creditor had the right to seize you and throw you into jail until you either rotted or paid up. But, of course, if you were in prison you couldn’t earn any money to gain your release. Your only hope might the mercy of the one who had the power to release you.

Ever been in debt? In debt now? Can you remember — or do you now know — the fear, the worry? Things can look pretty bleak, can’t they? Our passage is telling us that unforgiven sin is like those unpaid debts. They weigh heavily upon us whether we’re talking about a little sin, a great big sin, or a great many sins. Each of us, like the debtors in the text, must settle accounts with the king, God Almighty Himself.

Well, the king, in our parable, calls his subjects before him and the one who owes the thousands pleads for the king to have patience and promises that he will repay the debt in full.  The king is moved to mercy and erases the debt!

The point of the parable is that God is like that merciful king and He is willing and able to cancel impossible debts. He is willing and able to forgive. As Stephen M. Crotts notes in his exposition of this passage, the Greek word for forgiveness may also be translated “let loose.”

“It’s like a terrible knot that suddenly gives and is completely untied. It’s like a horrible bondage from which there is sudden release.”

And what does this free man now do? He goes out and happens upon a man who owes him a measly few bucks. He grabs him by the throat and demands he ‘pay up!’ When the debtor says he can’t and asks for patience, the man throws him in debtors’ prison. And folks who witness this go and tell the king.

What does the king do? He brings the man back, chastises him for his unforgiveness and says, “Shouldn’t you be compelled to be merciful to your fellow servant who asked for mercy?”  Then he has the man tossed in jail where he will sit until he repays the debt. The point of the parable is clear. If God forgives us, we must forgive others. We must forgive as the Lord forgave us.

But those of us who frequent church services know this — at least on some level — don’t we? So why do so many of us have difficulty forgiving? Why do so many of us have difficulty saying two simple words: “I’m sorry?” Why do we see so little repentance for sins? Why do we see so little forgiveness in Christian circles when repentance and forgiveness are the very foundations of our faith? Amazing grace is what saves wretches such as we all. We, who have turned to Christ for salvation, have been the beneficiaries of amazing grace, amazing love. We’ve been set free. And yet too often we hold one another hostage with our own unforgiveness.

In the December 2012 issue of Leadership Journal is an article on grace and redemption entitled, “Going to Hell with Ted Haggard.”

The writer, Michael Cheshire, recalls sitting in a sports bar in Denver with a close atheist friend. During lunch, the latter pointed at a TV screen on the wall that was set to a channel recapping Haggard’s fall in a sex and drugs scandal. As he did, he said, “That is the reason I will not become a Christian. Many of the things you say make sense, Mike, but that’s what keeps me away.”

Cheshire assumed his friend was referring to Haggard’s hypocrisy but he was wrong. His friend laughed and said, “Michael, you just proved my point. See, that guy said sorry a long time ago. Even his wife and kids stayed and forgave him, but all you Christians still seem to hate him. You guys can’t forgive him and let him back into your good graces. Every time you talk to me about God, you explain that he wants to forgive me. But that guy failed while he was one of you, and most of you are still vicious to him.”

Then Cheshire says his friend uttered words that left him reeling: “You Christians eat your own. Always have. Always will.”

That prompted Cheshire to investigate what was being said about Haggard in Christian circles. Most shut down and demanded he drop the subject while others dismissed as foolish or silly his question, “Why can’t God still use Ted?”

As he lived within close proximity of Haggard, Cheshire contacted him to see if he would be willing to meet with him and a couple of the men from his staff.  Cheshire found Haggard to be brutally honest about his failures, filled with a wealth of wisdom, deeply caring and pastoral. And Haggard had a growing church in the very city that knew him and knew about his failures; God was causing that church to grow.

When other Christians learned that Cheshire had reached out to Ted, they said they would distance themselves from him if he continued to do so. Several people in his church said they would leave. He was told that his “voice as a pastor and author would be tarnished” if he continued to spend time with him.

Cheshire concluded: “It would do some Christians good to stay home one weekend and watch the entire DVD collection of HBO’s Band of Brothers. Marinate in it. Take notes. Write down words like loyalty, friendship and sacrifice. Understand the phrase: never leave a fallen man behind.”

Where is the love? Where is the forgiveness?

In his wrap up, Cheshire wrote: “The Ted Haggard issue reminds me of a scene in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Huck is told that if he doesn’t turn in his friend, a runaway slave, named Jim, he will surely burn in hell. So one day Huck, not wanting to lose his soul to Satan, writes a letter to Jim’s owner telling her of Jim’s whereabouts. After folding the letter, he starts to think about what his friend has meant to him, how Jim took the night watch so he could sleep, how they laughed and survived together . . . Huck realizes that it’s either Jim’s friendship or hell. Then the great Mark Twain writes such wonderful words of resolve. Huck rips the paper and says, ‘Alright then, I guess I’ll go to hell.’”

And Cheshire decides that “if being Ted’s friend causes some to hate and reject me – alright then, I guess I’ll go to hell.”

In our passage from Colossians, we read: “Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.”

In my library is a book entitled, The Sunflower. It’s a story, written by Simon Wiesenthal, with whom you may be familiar. He is well known and well regarded for his activities in bringing Nazi war criminals to justice.

In the book, Wiesenthal tells us that he was a prisoner in the Mauthausen concentration camp in Poland. One day he was assigned to clean out rubbish from a barn that the Nazis had improvised into a hospital for wounded soldiers. Toward evening a nurse took Wiesenthal by the hand and led him to a young SS trooper. The soldier’s face was bandaged with rags yellow-stained with ointment or pus; his eyes tucked behind the gauze. He was perhaps 21 years of age. He groped for Wiesenthal’s hand and held it tight. He said he had to talk to a Jew; he could not die before he had confessed the sins he had committed against helpless Jews, and he had to be forgiven by a Jew before he died. So he told Wiesenthal a horrible story of how his battalion had gunned down Jewish parents and children who were trying to escape from a house set afire by the SS troopers.

Wiesenthal listened to the dying man’s story, first the story of his blameless youth, and then the story of his participation in evil. As the man spoke, Wiesenthal’s thoughts drifted to the graves of the Nazi soldiers that he had seen nearby. Each one was decorated with a sunflower and so each one was visited by butterflies. Wiesenthal believed his place of interment would be different: a mass grave, where corpses would be piled on top of him. No sunflower for him. No butterflies for him.

In the end, Wiesenthal jerked his hand away from the soldier and walked out of the barn: No word was spoken. No forgiveness was given. Wiesenthal would not, could not, forgive. But he was not sure he did the right thing.

And some 30 years later he related the story in the book entitled The Sunflower and he ended his tale with a question: “What would you have done?” Thirty-two eminent persons contributed their answers. Most said Wiesenthal was right; he should not have forgiven the man; it would not have been fair. Why should a man who gave his will to the doing of monumental evil expect a quick word of forgiveness on his death-bed? What right had Wiesenthal to forgive the man for the sins he had committed against others? “Let the SS trooper go to hell,” said one respondent.

Many of us, truth be told, feel the same way when we are sinned against in far less horrible ways. As Lewis Smedes rightly notes: “To the guilty, forgiveness comes as amazing grace. To the offended, forgiving may sound like outrageous injustice. A straight-line moral sense tells most people that the guilty ought to pay their dues: Forgiving is for suckers.”

“What is the answer to the unfairness of forgiving? It can only be that forgiving is, after all, a better way to fairness.

“First, forgiveness creates a new possibility of fairness by releasing us from the unfair past. If we do not forgive, our only recourse is revenge . . . and revenge never evens the score, for alienated people never keep score of wrongs by the same mathematics. Forgiveness takes us off the escalator of revenge so that we can stop the chain of incremented wrongs.”

Forgiveness brings fairness to the forgiver. It is the hurting person who most feels the burden of unfairness but he only condemns himself if he refuses to forgive. Forgiving is the only way to stop the cycle of unfair pain turning in your memory.

Forgiving is not forgetting. Forgiving is not excusing. Forgiving is not smoothing things over. Forgiving is, what Smedes calls, “spiritual surgery.” When you forgive someone, you slice away the wrong from the person who did it. You recreate that person in your thoughts. God does it this way too: He releases us from sin as a mother washes dirt from a child’s face, or as a person takes a burden off your back, lays it on a goat and sends it into the wilderness. (From this, we derive our understanding of the scapegoat.)

Mining the scriptures we discover more than 100 references to the concept of forgiveness and our first lesson in these is that forgiveness is God-initiated.

In Colossians 2:13 and 14, Paul writes: “When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having cancelled the written code…He took it away, nailing it to the cross.”

Forgiveness is offered graciously and readily by God.

In the gospel of Luke, we find the story of the Prodigal Son who, having squandered his inheritance, returns home seeking forgiveness and finds there the open and loving arms of his father who welcomes him with great celebration.” So it is with our heavenly Father.

To receive forgiveness, we must desire forgiveness and repent. This done, there is to be no limit to forgiveness. In the 17^th chapter of Luke, verse 4, Jesus tells His disciples that, “if your brother sins, rebuke him and, if he repents, forgive him. If he sins against you seven times in a day and seven times comes back to you and says, ‘I repent,’ forgive him.” And in Matthew 18:22, Christ carries this further by saying that even seven times is not enough, but seventy times seven.”

For the one extending forgiveness, forgiveness is to be an attitude. Forgiveness, we are told in the 18^th chapter of Matthew, is to come from the heart.

In the passage from Colossians, we find the commandment to forgive: “Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.” Be clothed with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Be willing to forgive. Create the climate for forgiveness. Forgive.

So why do we see so little forgiveness both inside and outside the church community? David Augsburger, in his book, The Freedom of Forgiveness, offers us some clues. He says forgiveness is rare because it is hard. It is the hardest thing in the universe. It is hard because it is costly. The one who forgives, he says, pays a tremendous price – the price of the evil he or she forgives.

Forgiveness is costly because it is substitutional and this substitution was perfectly expressed in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ substituted himself for us, bearing His own wrath, His own indignation at our sin. That’s what forgiveness costs. The sinner either bears his own guilt – that’s cold justice – or the one sinned against may absorb what the second party did – that’s forgiveness. And that’s what God did in Christ on Calvary.

Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.

Forgiveness is hard. Forgiveness is costly because it demands that kind of substitution, not the literal substitution of our physical lives on a cross but the willingness to relieve others of the burden of their sins against us as we reach out to them with loving and forgiving spirits.

As Augsburger notes: “God paid the immeasurable cost of your forgiveness. How can you hesitate to pay the infinitely smaller cost of forgiving your brother or sister – or your enemy?”

You will know you are moving in forgiveness when you no longer need to rerun over and over again the hurt you suffered, when you no longer need to punish those who hurt you by rehashing the details over and over again with whomever will listen.

You will know that you are moving in forgiveness when you no longer have daily conversations, daily battles in your head, with those who hurt you.

You will know that you are moving in forgiveness when you find yourself praying that those who hurt you will be blessed and will no longer have to suffer for the evil that they did to you or to others.

Forgiveness can be a very slow process and, while we may come a long way in forgiveness, we may well find vestiges of bitterness many years post injury. We need to keep forgiving.

C.S. Lewis learned how long a process forgiving can be. He tells the story of a perfectly awful teacher he had as a boy. He hated what he described as that sadistic person most of his life but, a few months before his death, he wrote to a friend: “Do you know, only a few weeks ago, I realized that I had at last forgiven the cruel schoolmaster who so darkened my childhood. I had been trying to do it for years.”

Essentially we cannot forgive but, with attention to prayer and with the help of God, eventually we can. The Lord works the miracle in us as we yield to His transforming power.

And we all want forgiveness for ourselves.

And we all want forgiveness for ourselves. There is a marvelous example of this desire for forgiveness in Ernest Hemingway’s short story, “The Capitol of the World.”

In this, a father traveled to Madrid to find his son Paco who had left the family farm after a misunderstanding. Keep in mind here that the name Paco is a very popular name in Spain. Well, the father, in order to meet his son, placed an ad in the newspaper which read, “Paco, meet me at noon Tuesday in the newspaper office. All is forgiven. Signed, your father.”

Hemingway reports there were 800 young men named Paco who arrived that Tuesday and stood in line, waiting to see if the man might be their father who had granted them forgiveness. 800 Pacos! How many of us, if such an ad had been placed at certain times in our lives, an ad that carried our name, wouldn’t have leapt at the opportunity for reconciliation with our own fathers.

Well, our heavenly Father offers that opportunity today. It is as though He has placed that same ad – the newspaper is the Bible – and when we answer and stand before Him, He is there like the father in the story of the Prodigal Son, ready to offer unmerited forgiveness – the gift of forgiveness. He delights in enfolding each of His repentant children in His loving arms. Have you called on God to forgive you? Have you faced God and told him you’re helplessly a debtor to sin and prayed for mercy? You can be let loose from your sins in Jesus.

And God’s ready forgiveness stands also as an example for us in our relationships with others. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.

If you’re harboring unforgiveness, harboring grudges and hatred, you’re playing with dynamite. You’re playing with fire. Just like the loose cannon in Victor Hugo’s story, unforgiveness can crash around inside you tearing your guts out, messing with your mind, tormenting you!

In Victor Hugo’s story, the loose cannon had to be brought under control and chained so that it couldn’t do any more damage.

Right now, why not ask Jesus to take you below decks? Tell him that you are willing to forgive, willing to go with Him to take care of all the troubling things within. Tell Jesus you’re willing. Ask Him to give you power, power to repent, power to turn from your sins, power to say you’re sorry, power to forgive. Pray…

Featured image: Antoine Morel Fatio.

The subtitle of his book is a mouthful: “A Spirituality of Self-Surrender, Love of God, and Love of Neighbor.” It’s what he calls “tripolar spirituality”–in contrast to monopolar spirituality that focuses only on self-discovery and in contrast to bipolar spirituality which focuses only on the self and seeing God. Tripolar spirituality “links discovering self, seeing God, and valuing people into a seamless unity.” (7)

“Spirituality,” “spiritual practice,” and related words are sometimes vague, so I appreciate David’s careful work in defining what he means by spirituality. In his view, authentic spirituality is not only an inner sense of peace, not only an upward response to God, but it is an outward journey also with others. Drawing on his Anabaptist tradition, he explores seven distinctive practices of this tripolar spirituality:

• Radical attachment (to Jesus)
• Stubborn Loyalty (in community)
• Tenacious Serenity
• Habitual Humility
• Resolute Nonviolence
• Concrete Service
• Authentic Witness

Taken together, these form a “subversive spirituality,” an “upside down spirituality” that David details with many references to other works and with many stories to illustrate his points. Here are just a few gems from his book:

“The natural habitat of any true disciple of Jesus is community. Those who seek to know Christ know that he is most truly known in community.” (65)

“Nonviolence is right not because it works but because it is the way of Jesus.” (138)

“Tripolar spirituality sees love of others as the primary way we go about loving God, so that where we stand socially and politically is also where we stand religiously and spiritually.” (206)

While David clearly makes his case for tripolar spirituality, he also includes “On the Other Hand” sections and plenty of questions throughout his book.  As part of this ongoing dialogue with other authors and even with himself, I have a few “on the other hand” questions of my own:

1. I understand that tripolar spirituality is in part a corrective to spirituality that focuses only on personal piety, only on Jesus and me. But as a corrective, does it swing too far the other way? Is the focus on mutuality so strong that it becomes monopolar the other way, with not enough room given for the inward and the upward dimensions of spirituality?

For example, he said at one point, “I’m not called to be Christ to the neighbor, but to see Christ in the neighbor.” But I wonder, is this a case of either/or?  Isn’t our calling both to be like Christ and to see Christ in my neighbor?

At another point of the afternoon, David recognized, “We are all wounded people, and God meets us there, and leads us toward steps of  healing and growth. So we resist the temptation to say one kind of spirituality is better than another.”  But do we need to go further? Not only recognizing that tripolar spirituality is not better than monopolar or bipolar spirituality, but that we need all of these poles of spirituality. At least for myself, I need a spirituality that is inward and upward and outward.

2. Where is the place of piety, of Scripture and prayer? There is little said in the book about Scripture and prayer as spiritual practices, and from his talk I’m not sure whether Scripture and prayer fit into spirituality from within or above or below. I think of them as all three–where Scripture is the word of God (reflecting the upward dimension), and it’s for my personal reflection (the inward dimension), and grew out of community and is meant to be read and interpreted with others (the outward dimension).

Likewise, prayer connects me with God (upward), and focuses my mind and heart (inward), and is radically other-oriented (as, for example, we pray to “Our” Father for “our” daily bread). In this way, I hold Scripture and prayer–what some might call personal piety–as essential for Christian spirituality, as important as service and mutuality.

While David’s work is solidly grounded in Scripture and prayer, I would have also appreciated hearing more directly about Scripture and prayer as part of spiritual practice.

3. I read this book and heard David speak as part of our Mennonite Church BC leadership sessions this year. So for those of us who took part, I wonder how can we take all of that and engage those who weren’t there and who haven’t read the book?  To do that, we’ll need to continue to wrestle with some of the language and concepts. I hope we can also retell some of the stories–like the one about Rev. Benny Newton who saved a man on the street who was being beaten, or the story of the mother who became a mentor to the girl who bullied her daughter.

I’d love to share how David and his home congregation say the Apostles’ Creed each week–instead of the original “born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate,” they fill in the life, teaching, and ministry of  Jesus. We don’t often say the Apostles’ Creed, but filling in that “Anabaptist comma” is a great way of illustrating the importance of Jesus’ life in addition to his suffering and death mentioned in the Creed. David has graciously agreed to share the wording, and I’ll post that as soon as I can.

4. How will this transform me? I suppose this is a question of “monospirituality,” but I think it’s just as important as the more tripolar questions.  Just as we need to ask  how can we live this out and engage others, I’m also asking myself, how do I live this out? Do I have the courage of Rev. Benny Newton? In what ways do I practice dissident discipleship?

Thank you, David, for your excellent work, for your gracious presence among us, and for your stimulating and inspiring sessions!

David’s Sunday morning sermon at Emmanuel will also be posted on our church website as an mp3 later this week, and I’ll add that link when it’s ready.

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The Sacred Pauses blog carnival conntinues just until the end of February, so if you’re still thinking about it, I’d be glad for you to link up. You can find detailed instructions here.

French author Victor Hugo, best known for Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, was also the author of the novel, 93, (Quatre-vingt treize). The book is centered on the year 1793, Year Two of the French Republic, which saw “the establishment of the National Convention, the execution of Louis XVI, the Terror, and the monarchist revolt in the Vendée, which was brutally suppressed by the Republic.” (See Goodreads for a review.)

In a chapter entitled, “Tormentum Belli,” which Hugo translates in the text as “war machine,” is the story of the corvette “Claymore.” The three-masted, square-rigged warship was in rough seas when suddenly an awful noise arose from below decks. Hugo tells us: “a frightful thing had happened.”

The vessel was equipped with thirty carronades, short smoothbore cast iron cannons able to fire large shot at short range. These had been fastened below deck by triple chains and the hatches above had been shut. Now, one of the cannons had broken loose and had become something akin to what Hugo calls an “indescribable supernatural beast,” rolling, pitching, rushing, and crashing into the ship’s sides.

“Nothing more terrible can happen to a vessel in open sea and under full sail,” Hugo reports, for a loose cannon is “a battering-ram . . . [that] has the bounds of a panther, the weight of an elephant, the agility of a mouse, the obstinacy of an axe, the unexpectedness of the surge, the rapidity of lightning, the deafness of the tomb. It weighs ten thousand pounds and, it rebounds like a child’s ball.”

“How to control this enormous brute of bronze?” Hugo asks. “How to fetter this monstrous mechanism for wrecking a ship? . . . The horrible cannon flings itself about, advances, recoils, strikes to the right, strikes to the left . . . crushes men like flies.”

The whole ship was now in awful tumult as the cannon, which is said to have appeared to the crew as owning “a soul filled with rage and hatred,” tears apart the insides of the ship. Hugo tells us that often, it is true, that more dangerous to a ship is a loose cannon inside than a storm outside. And what is true of ships is also true of human beings. God’s Word invites us to go “below decks” for a look at the turmoil that can result when the cannon that is unforgiveness gets loose. And it is in the Word that we will find the help needed for taming this “beast,” this “battering ram” that – left uncontrolled – can wreak devastating havoc.

Perhaps we might begin by considering what acts can set the cannon of unforgiveness loose.

If author Lewis Smedes is right, these are acts of disloyalty and acts of betrayal. Words like abandon, forsake and let down are attached to such acts and capture the nature of the hurting involved:

When your spouse has an affair with your best friend.

When your mother or father fails to show up at a banquet at which you’re honored with a hard-earned award.

When you fully dedicate yourself for years to doing your very best work at your place of employment and a new manager moves into play and tosses you out on your ear.

When a tornado sweeps through your neighborhood and leaves your house in shambles. When you go into town for supplies and return home only to discover that looters have taken what little was left of your belongings.

When you’re diagnosed with cancer.

When you commit a colossal blunder or fail to follow through on a promise to a dear and trusting friend or when you speak a word you believe needs to be spoken and it’s received as an attack.

When your loved one contracts a debilitating illness that lingers on for years.

When faced with these challenges of life, we may feel betrayed by the spouse, the parent, the friend, the authority figure, the neighbor, our bodies, ourselves, God.

Bitterness. Bitterness is what you get when you leave anger out to rot. It’s what results when injury is added to injury. It begins to root when you go to bed angry, when somebody rubs you the wrong way and the rubbing turns to chafing. It grows in the fertile fields of jealousy, abuse, and vengeance. It hangs in the air. It’s heard in the “us and them,” in the “you did this to me,” in the “he said, she said,” in the “I can’t forgive myself for….” You fill in the blank.

Anger is a natural reaction to injury real or imagined. Bitterness, resentment and unforgiveness are the sins that grow out of unresolved, unhealthy anger. The antidote for these sins is forgiveness.

But why forgive? How do we forgive? If you’re like me, there are moments when I have prayed the Lord’s Prayer and have found myself wincing when I’ve come to that part where we say, “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us,” or “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors,” or “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who have trespassed against us.” If you’re like me, you may well – like me – have found yourself shooting a prayer up from your spirit: “O Lord, please do not forgive me in the shabby, half-hearted, offer it one day, take it back the next day, ways in which I have ‘forgiven’ those who have trespassed against me.”

In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus helps us understand the cost of unforgiveness as he relates the story of a king who decides one day to settle accounts with his servants.

In Matthew 18:21-36, we read:

At that point Peter got up the nerve to ask, “Master, how many times do I forgive a brother or sister who hurts me? Seven?” Jesus replied, “Seven! Hardly. Try seventy times seven. “The kingdom of God is like a king who decided to square accounts with his servants. As he got under way, one servant was brought before him who had run up a debt of a hundred thousand dollars. He couldn’t pay up, so the king ordered the man, along with his wife, children, and goods, to be auctioned off at the slave market. “The poor wretch threw himself at the king’s feet and begged, ‘Give me a chance and I’ll pay it all back.’ Touched by his plea, the king let him off, erasing the debt. “The servant was no sooner out of the room when he came upon one of his fellow servants who owed him ten dollars. He seized him by the throat and demanded, ‘Pay up. Now!’ The poor wretch threw himself down and begged, ‘Give me a chance and I’ll pay it all back.’ But he wouldn’t do it. He had him arrested and put in jail until the debt was paid. When the other servants saw this going on, they were outraged and brought a detailed report to the king.

“The king summoned the man and said, ‘You evil servant! I forgave your entire debt when you begged me for mercy. Shouldn’t you be compelled to be merciful to your fellow servant who asked for mercy?’ The king was furious and put the screws to the man until he paid back his entire debt. And that’s exactly what my Father in heaven is going to do to each one of you who doesn’t forgive unconditionally anyone who asks for mercy.” The Message

So one man is brought before the king. His debt? 10,000 talents. In The Message, Eugene Peterson translates that amount to the contemporary equivalent of a hundred thousand dollars. Whatever the amount, it was clear this man was hopelessly enslaved to debt! Yet another person in the text is mentioned as owing a hundred denarii, which today would be a few dollars.

The text also makes it clear that the terrible consequence of being in debt was debtor’s prison. When a bill went past due and one couldn’t pay, the creditor had the right to seize you and throw you into jail until you either rotted or paid up. But, of course, if you were in prison you couldn’t earn any money to gain your release. Your only hope might the mercy of the one who had the power to release you.

Ever been in debt? In debt now? Can you remember — or do you now know — the fear, the worry? Things can look pretty bleak, can’t they? Our passage is telling us that unforgiven sin is like those unpaid debts. They weigh heavily upon us whether we’re talking about a little sin, a great big sin, or a great many sins. Each of us, like the debtors in the text, must settle accounts with the king, God Almighty Himself.

Well, the king, in our parable, calls his subjects before him and the one who owes the thousands pleads for the king to have patience and promises that he will repay the debt in full.  The king is moved to mercy and erases the debt!

The point of the parable is that God is like that merciful king and He is willing and able to cancel impossible debts. He is willing and able to forgive. As Stephen M. Crotts notes in his exposition of this passage, the Greek word for forgiveness may also be translated “let loose.”

“It’s like a terrible knot that suddenly gives and is completely untied. It’s like a horrible bondage from which there is sudden release.”

And what does this free man now do? He goes out and happens upon a man who owes him a measly few bucks. He grabs him by the throat and demands he ‘pay up!’ When the debtor says he can’t and asks for patience, the man throws him in debtors’ prison. And folks who witness this go and tell the king.

What does the king do? He brings the man back, chastises him for his unforgiveness and says, “Shouldn’t you be compelled to be merciful to your fellow servant who asked for mercy?”  Then he has the man tossed in jail where he will sit until he repays the debt. The point of the parable is clear. If God forgives us, we must forgive others. We must forgive as the Lord forgave us.

But those of us who frequent church services know this — at least on some level — don’t we? So why do so many of us have difficulty forgiving? Why do so many of us have difficulty saying two simple words: “I’m sorry?” Why do we see so little repentance for sins? Why do we see so little forgiveness in Christian circles when repentance and forgiveness are the very foundations of our faith? Amazing grace is what saves wretches such as we all. We, who have turned to Christ for salvation, have been the beneficiaries of amazing grace, amazing love. We’ve been set free. And yet too often we hold one another hostage with our own unforgiveness.

In the December 2012 issue of Leadership Journal is an article on grace and redemption entitled, “Going to Hell with Ted Haggard.”

The writer, Michael Cheshire, recalls sitting in a sports bar in Denver with a close atheist friend. During lunch, the latter pointed at a TV screen on the wall that was set to a channel recapping Haggard’s fall in a sex and drugs scandal. As he did, he said, “That is the reason I will not become a Christian. Many of the things you say make sense, Mike, but that’s what keeps me away.”

Cheshire assumed his friend was referring to Haggard’s hypocrisy but he was wrong. His friend laughed and said, “Michael, you just proved my point. See, that guy said sorry a long time ago. Even his wife and kids stayed and forgave him, but all you Christians still seem to hate him. You guys can’t forgive him and let him back into your good graces. Every time you talk to me about God, you explain that he wants to forgive me. But that guy failed while he was one of you, and most of you are still vicious to him.”

Then Cheshire says his friend uttered words that left him reeling: “You Christians eat your own. Always have. Always will.”

That prompted Cheshire to investigate what was being said about Haggard in Christian circles. Most shut down and demanded he drop the subject while others dismissed as foolish or silly his question, “Why can’t God still use Ted?”

As he lived within close proximity of Haggard, Cheshire contacted him to see if he would be willing to meet with him and a couple of the men from his staff.  Cheshire found Haggard to be brutally honest about his failures, filled with a wealth of wisdom, deeply caring and pastoral. And Haggard had a growing church in the very city that knew him and knew about his failures; God was causing that church to grow.

When other Christians learned that Cheshire had reached out to Ted, they said they would distance themselves from him if he continued to do so. Several people in his church said they would leave. He was told that his “voice as a pastor and author would be tarnished” if he continued to spend time with him.

Cheshire concluded: “It would do some Christians good to stay home one weekend and watch the entire DVD collection of HBO’s Band of Brothers. Marinate in it. Take notes. Write down words like loyalty, friendship and sacrifice. Understand the phrase: never leave a fallen man behind.”

Where is the love? Where is the forgiveness?

In his wrap up, Cheshire wrote: “The Ted Haggard issue reminds me of a scene in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Huck is told that if he doesn’t turn in his friend, a runaway slave, named Jim, he will surely burn in hell. So one day Huck, not wanting to lose his soul to Satan, writes a letter to Jim’s owner telling her of Jim’s whereabouts. After folding the letter, he starts to think about what his friend has meant to him, how Jim took the night watch so he could sleep, how they laughed and survived together . . . Huck realizes that it’s either Jim’s friendship or hell. Then the great Mark Twain writes such wonderful words of resolve. Huck rips the paper and says, ‘Alright then, I guess I’ll go to hell.’”

And Cheshire decides that “if being Ted’s friend causes some to hate and reject me – alright then, I guess I’ll go to hell.”

In our passage from Colossians, we read: “Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.”

In my library is a book entitled, The Sunflower. It’s a story, written by Simon Wiesenthal, with whom you may be familiar. He is well known and well regarded for his activities in bringing Nazi war criminals to justice.

In the book, Wiesenthal tells us that he was a prisoner in the Mauthausen concentration camp in Poland. One day he was assigned to clean out rubbish from a barn that the Nazis had improvised into a hospital for wounded soldiers. Toward evening a nurse took Wiesenthal by the hand and led him to a young SS trooper. The soldier’s face was bandaged with rags yellow-stained with ointment or pus; his eyes tucked behind the gauze. He was perhaps 21 years of age. He groped for Wiesenthal’s hand and held it tight. He said he had to talk to a Jew; he could not die before he had confessed the sins he had committed against helpless Jews, and he had to be forgiven by a Jew before he died. So he told Wiesenthal a horrible story of how his battalion had gunned down Jewish parents and children who were trying to escape from a house set afire by the SS troopers.

Wiesenthal listened to the dying man’s story, first the story of his blameless youth, and then the story of his participation in evil. As the man spoke, Wiesenthal’s thoughts drifted to the graves of the Nazi soldiers that he had seen nearby. Each one was decorated with a sunflower and so each one was visited by butterflies. Wiesenthal believed his place of interment would be different: a mass grave, where corpses would be piled on top of him. No sunflower for him. No butterflies for him.

In the end, Wiesenthal jerked his hand away from the soldier and walked out of the barn: No word was spoken. No forgiveness was given. Wiesenthal would not, could not, forgive. But he was not sure he did the right thing.

And some 30 years later he related the story in the book entitled The Sunflower and he ended his tale with a question: “What would you have done?” Thirty-two eminent persons contributed their answers. Most said Wiesenthal was right; he should not have forgiven the man; it would not have been fair. Why should a man who gave his will to the doing of monumental evil expect a quick word of forgiveness on his death-bed? What right had Wiesenthal to forgive the man for the sins he had committed against others? “Let the SS trooper go to hell,” said one respondent.

Many of us, truth be told, feel the same way when we are sinned against in far less horrible ways. As Lewis Smedes rightly notes: “To the guilty, forgiveness comes as amazing grace. To the offended, forgiving may sound like outrageous injustice. A straight-line moral sense tells most people that the guilty ought to pay their dues: Forgiving is for suckers.”

“What is the answer to the unfairness of forgiving? It can only be that forgiving is, after all, a better way to fairness.

“First, forgiveness creates a new possibility of fairness by releasing us from the unfair past. If we do not forgive, our only recourse is revenge . . . and revenge never evens the score, for alienated people never keep score of wrongs by the same mathematics. Forgiveness takes us off the escalator of revenge so that we can stop the chain of incremented wrongs.”

Forgiveness brings fairness to the forgiver. It is the hurting person who most feels the burden of unfairness but he only condemns himself if he refuses to forgive. Forgiving is the only way to stop the cycle of unfair pain turning in your memory.

Forgiving is not forgetting. Forgiving is not excusing. Forgiving is not smoothing things over. Forgiving is, what Smedes calls, “spiritual surgery.” When you forgive someone, you slice away the wrong from the person who did it. You recreate that person in your thoughts. God does it this way too: He releases us from sin as a mother washes dirt from a child’s face, or as a person takes a burden off your back, lays it on a goat and sends it into the wilderness. (From this, we derive our understanding of the scapegoat.)

Mining the scriptures we discover more than 100 references to the concept of forgiveness and our first lesson in these is that forgiveness is God-initiated.

In Colossians 2:13 and 14, Paul writes: “When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having cancelled the written code…He took it away, nailing it to the cross.”

Forgiveness is offered graciously and readily by God.

In the gospel of Luke, we find the story of the Prodigal Son who, having squandered his inheritance, returns home seeking forgiveness and finds there the open and loving arms of his father who welcomes him with great celebration.” So it is with our heavenly Father.

To receive forgiveness, we must desire forgiveness and repent. This done, there is to be no limit to forgiveness. In the 17^th chapter of Luke, verse 4, Jesus tells His disciples that, “if your brother sins, rebuke him and, if he repents, forgive him. If he sins against you seven times in a day and seven times comes back to you and says, ‘I repent,’ forgive him.” And in Matthew 18:22, Christ carries this further by saying that even seven times is not enough, but seventy times seven.”

For the one extending forgiveness, forgiveness is to be an attitude. Forgiveness, we are told in the 18^th chapter of Matthew, is to come from the heart.

In the passage from Colossians, we find the commandment to forgive: “Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.” Be clothed with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Be willing to forgive. Create the climate for forgiveness. Forgive.

So why do we see so little forgiveness both inside and outside the church community? David Augsburger, in his book, The Freedom of Forgiveness, offers us some clues. He says forgiveness is rare because it is hard. It is the hardest thing in the universe. It is hard because it is costly. The one who forgives, he says, pays a tremendous price – the price of the evil he or she forgives.

Forgiveness is costly because it is substitutional and this substitution was perfectly expressed in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ substituted himself for us, bearing His own wrath, His own indignation at our sin. That’s what forgiveness costs. The sinner either bears his own guilt – that’s cold justice – or the one sinned against may absorb what the second party did – that’s forgiveness. And that’s what God did in Christ on Calvary.

Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.

Forgiveness is hard. Forgiveness is costly because it demands that kind of substitution, not the literal substitution of our physical lives on a cross but the willingness to relieve others of the burden of their sins against us as we reach out to them with loving and forgiving spirits.

As Augsburger notes: “God paid the immeasurable cost of your forgiveness. How can you hesitate to pay the infinitely smaller cost of forgiving your brother or sister – or your enemy?”

You will know you are moving in forgiveness when you no longer need to rerun over and over again the hurt you suffered, when you no longer need to punish those who hurt you by rehashing the details over and over again with whomever will listen.

You will know that you are moving in forgiveness when you no longer have daily conversations, daily battles in your head, with those who hurt you.

You will know that you are moving in forgiveness when you find yourself praying that those who hurt you will be blessed and will no longer have to suffer for the evil that they did to you or to others.

Forgiveness can be a very slow process and, while we may come a long way in forgiveness, we may well find vestiges of bitterness many years post injury. We need to keep forgiving.

C.S. Lewis learned how long a process forgiving can be. He tells the story of a perfectly awful teacher he had as a boy. He hated what he described as that sadistic person most of his life but, a few months before his death, he wrote to a friend: “Do you know, only a few weeks ago, I realized that I had at last forgiven the cruel schoolmaster who so darkened my childhood. I had been trying to do it for years.”

Essentially we cannot forgive but, with attention to prayer and with the help of God, eventually we can. The Lord works the miracle in us as we yield to His transforming power.

And we all want forgiveness for ourselves.

And we all want forgiveness for ourselves. There is a marvelous example of this desire for forgiveness in Ernest Hemingway’s short story, “The Capitol of the World.”

In this, a father traveled to Madrid to find his son Paco who had left the family farm after a misunderstanding. Keep in mind here that the name Paco is a very popular name in Spain. Well, the father, in order to meet his son, placed an ad in the newspaper which read, “Paco, meet me at noon Tuesday in the newspaper office. All is forgiven. Signed, your father.”

Hemingway reports there were 800 young men named Paco who arrived that Tuesday and stood in line, waiting to see if the man might be their father who had granted them forgiveness. 800 Pacos! How many of us, if such an ad had been placed at certain times in our lives, an ad that carried our name, wouldn’t have leapt at the opportunity for reconciliation with our own fathers.

Well, our heavenly Father offers that opportunity today. It is as though He has placed that same ad – the newspaper is the Bible – and when we answer and stand before Him, He is there like the father in the story of the Prodigal Son, ready to offer unmerited forgiveness – the gift of forgiveness. He delights in enfolding each of His repentant children in His loving arms. Have you called on God to forgive you? Have you faced God and told him you’re helplessly a debtor to sin and prayed for mercy? You can be let loose from your sins in Jesus.

And God’s ready forgiveness stands also as an example for us in our relationships with others. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.

If you’re harboring unforgiveness, harboring grudges and hatred, you’re playing with dynamite. You’re playing with fire. Just like the loose cannon in Victor Hugo’s story, unforgiveness can crash around inside you tearing your guts out, messing with your mind, tormenting you!

In Victor Hugo’s story, the loose cannon had to be brought under control and chained so that it couldn’t do any more damage.

Right now, why not ask Jesus to take you below decks? Tell him that you are willing to forgive, willing to go with Him to take care of all the troubling things within. Tell Jesus you’re willing. Ask Him to give you power, power to repent, power to turn from your sins, power to say you’re sorry, power to forgive. Pray…

Featured image: Antoine Morel Fatio.

Here’s the quote:

“Being heard is so close to being loved
that for the average person, they are almost indistinguishable.”

I think of how my heart is healed and how deep is my release from isolation when another person just hears me. In the moment that I sense someone has entered in with me in my pain or my confusion, I feel loved.

It sounds simple, but it isn’t.

When was the last time you had a one-sided or shallow conversation?

How about that one friend or coworker who “engages” with you by finishing your sentence? You’re trying to make a point or answer a question they asked. But you can’t because they’re interrupting you. You feel like you have to talk faster to get the words out before they snatch them away.

Have you ever wanted to interrupt them back and say,

“What if that wasn’t where I was going with my answer?”

This is especially hard with people who know you well. They think they can anticipate the point you’re about to make (maybe they can, but even so . . . ) and they step right on your response.  I don’t think it’s necessarily an intentional or unloving thing to do; it’s just a conversational habit they’ve developed.

Usually I just stop and let them finish MY answer for me, then I continue where I left off. It’s exhausting. And frustrating.

Do you have a friend or loved one who cuts you off in mid-sentence with, “Yeah, I get it. I don’t need all the details”? This is a variation on finishing your sentence for you, though I would argue it IS intentional and unloving. It’s downright mean-spirited and it tells me my point of view, my explanation is not worth hearing.

Of course we’ve all been in group situations where everyone is talking and absolutely no one is really listening. Now THAT will wear you down.

To be honest, I sometimes have these kinds of conversations with God and it must be exhausting and frustrating for Him, too (assuming God gets exhausted and frustrated, which is probably a deep theological question I’m not qualified to answer).

Often I talk at Him, rather than to Him and I don’t quiet myself long enough to hear His response.

Or I hurry through a prayer, suggesting an answer that seems like a really good idea to me rather than putting it out there and waiting to hear from Him.

That’s when I imagine Him saying:

“You didn’t give me a chance to answer. What if that wasn’t where I was going with my response?”

“I want to meet your needs in an incredible way and relate to you intimately, but you won’t let me.  You are so busy and over-scheduled, you’re putting limits on our conversation, our relationship.”

“What if you slowed down enough to really hear me when you pray?”

God is not “the average person” referenced in the quote above by any means and He is far too much of a gentleman to treat me the way I often treat Him when we’re talking. Maybe if I “inclined my ear” (Psalm 86:1) toward Him more consistently in prayer so He could be heard, I would be showing my love for a change.

I think I’ll try to remember to be quiet and let God finish His sentences when we talk.

Quote by David Augsberger.

xoxo – Pikey

“…BE QUICK TO LISTEN…” James 1:19

Dear Overcomers:             

I had an incident years ago when my daughters were very young. My phone rang late one night, and I thought my children were fast asleep. Even though I was preoccupied (writing as always), I answered the phone so it wouldn’t wake them up. A guy named Tony said hello and he started explaining his special offer related to some vacuum cleaner that I just couldn’t live without. But with tile floors throughout the house, I wasn’t interested in the least, so I tried to tell him that. But he just kept talking like I wasn’t saying anything. I was starting to tell him NO, a little more forcefully, when I heard a little giggle on the phone. My eldest daughter was awake and had picked up the extension in the living room. That’s when it finally hit me! THE MAN COULDN’T HEAR ME BECAUSE I WASN’T TALKING TO A LIVE PERSON…IT WAS A RECORDING! Feeling stupid of course, and definitely embarrassed I simply hung up.

As comical as it sounds, there’s no fun talking to machines! LIKEWISE, IT’S FRUSTRATING TRYING TO TALK TO SOMEONE WHO’S LIVE AND YET NOT LISTENING!

That’s a feeling a lot of people understand because they’ve been trying to talk to a human who isn’t listening much more than a recorded salesman on a telemarketing call!

With that said, I must present you with a question: Could it be possible that some people close to you, feel UN-LISTENED to by you? (I’m pretty sure that’s not a word, but I like the way it sounds!) I mean could it be at all possible that you have people, who you love and who love you, dearly, yet they feel completely unheard by you, as if they were talking to a recording? “Being heard is so close to being loved that for the average person, they are almost indistinguishable” (David Augsburger)

Jesus said one of the two great commandments was to love your neighbor as you love yourself. One way you show that kind of unselfish love is to stop talking and listen to people as you want someone to listen to you! See, we want people to listen to us without interrupting, show respect for what we’re saying, and give us their undivided attention—BUT SELDOM DO WE REPAY THEIR KINDNESS WITH THE SAME ATTENTIVENESS! Learn how to love others as you love yourself, which means YOU GIVE THE SAME LEVEL OF ATTENTIVENESS YOU WANT TO RECEIVE! “Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around” (Leo Buscaglia)

Even God Himself tells us to listen! James 1:19 – which is possibly one of the most disobeyed verses in the entire Bible, says: “My dear brothers, take note of this: EVERYONE SHOULD BE QUICK TO LISTEN, SLOW TO SPEAK, AND SLOW TO BECOME ANGRY” The Amplified Bible says it like this: “Understand [this], my beloved brethren. LET EVERY MAN BE QUICK TO HEAR [A READY LISTENER], SLOW TO SPEAK, SLOW TO TAKE OFFENSE AND TO GET ANGRY” But many of us have REARRANGED some of the words in that verse to read- “Be slow to listen, quick to speak, and quick to become angry.” WARNING! DO NOT ADD TO OR TAKE AWAY FROM GOD’S WORD! IF IT SAYS, BE QUICK TO LISTEN, THEN BE QUICK TO LISTEN! “The word “LISTEN” contains the same letters as the word “SILENT” (Alfred Brendel)

So what’s the connection between not listening and getting angry? When we don’t take time to really hear everything a person has to say, we React to the first things they say instead of waiting until we really Understand what they’re trying to communicate In Full! Real Listeners try to Hear the Heart Behind The Words, the Need That’s Behind the Deed! People who would rather talk than listen Jump On Partial Information, Partial Communication, and Slice People to Death Over Surface Stuff! No Listening, No Understanding! No Understanding, Wrong Conclusions – and Wrong Conclusions Always Lead to Angry Reactions. SO DO IT THE BIBLE WAY AND BE QUICK TO LISTEN! “Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply” (Stephen R. Covey)

You can see why God says in Proverbs 18:13, “He who answers BEFORE LISTENING – that is his folly and his shame.” Or better yet, “IT’S STUPID AND EMBARRASSING TO GIVE AN ANSWER BEFORE YOU LISTEN” (CEV).  “We have two ears and only one tongue in order that we may hear more and speak less” (Diogenes Laërtius)

I wonder if the people close to you feel really heard by you? Does your wife or husband feel really listened to and understood? Your parents? Your son or daughter? The people you minister with and minister to? The people you work with? Your employees? Your friends? Can you honestly say they feel listened to by you? OR ARE YOU, LIKE THAT RECORDED PHONE SALESMEN, JUST A TALKING MACHINE THAT GIVES OUTPUT BUT DOESN’T RECEIVE INPUT? If in fact you are like that recording, know that you’re leaving a trail of people who feel lonely, excluded, misunderstood, put down, under-valued, unappreciated and unheard. Keep In Mind: WHEN YOU DON’T HEAR THEM YOU HURT THEM, WHEN YOU DON’T LISTEN TO THEM YOU RISK LOSING THEM! “The most basic of all human needs is the need to understand and be understood. The best way to understand people is to listen to them” (Ralph G. Nichols).

There are few things you can do that say you value a person more than dropping everything to hear what they’re saying – AND NOT JUST THEIR WORDS…BUT THEIR HEART! If you can’t give them your total attention Now, tell them when you can and give it to them Later —IN FULL! Why is that so important? Because sadly, there are many misunderstandings, arguments, harsh judgments and words, many wounded women, messed up men, crushed children, ruined relationships, fractured friendships, bleeding churches, and broken marriages – ALL BECAUSE SOMEONE FAILED TO SIMPLY LISTEN!  “I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I’m not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant” (Robert McCloskey)

Today show and prove your love by being – QUICK TO LISTEN!  You Never Know, You Just May Save Your Family, Your Marriage, Your Friendship, Your Job, Your Life!

“The first duty of LOVE is to LISTEN” (Paul Tillich)

Feel Free to Join Us On Sisterhood School of Inspiration at: www.sisterhoodschoolofinspiration.blogspot.com Today’s Lesson: “Monday’s Meat: A Lifestyle of Listening”

Essentially, every time I’ve lost that lovin’ feeling it became buried under one or more of the Dirty Dozen Defense Mechanisms. Those mechanisms invariably fired up limbic structures in my brain, structures like the amygdala, hippocampus and hypothalamus. Once triggered, the parts that make up the HPA axis (Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal Axis) began secreting stress hormones into my blood stream. Those hormones produce the exact opposite feelings that oxytocin and endorphins produce, leaving me sad and forlorn and singing along with Don and Phil, the Everly Brothers … Bye-Bye Love.

Feeling love means I’m running soft, safe, undefended, expansive energy, as opposed to loss or fear, which most often show up as hard, constrictive, defensive, protective energy attempting to safeguard my body and brain. One of the reasons I can so often unconditionally love babies and pets is that they rarely trigger defensive reactions in me. On the other hand, one big life challenge is to be able to continue running, soft, safe, undefended expansive energy in the face of someone I’ve become disenchanted with, or around someone who has become disenchanted with me. But I can tell you from personal experience, that while it’s not necessarily easy, it’s not impossible.

Given this state of affairs, it’s useful for me to think of emotional reactions as early warning signals surfacing from down below the neck and also from the depths of the right brain primarily (in actuality, thoughts and feelings are probably widely distributed across many neurophysiological nodal points). Emotions are early warning signals because almost all of the (only) 40 conscious pieces of the 11 million data bits we take in at any moment are often apprehended by the Bully Interpreter brain. And the Interpreter is constantly distorting things conservatively, i.e. negatively and apprehensively.

Why I Write Listening Books

David Augsburger, a professor of pastoral care at Fuller Theological Seminary and the author of Caring Enough to Confront, has noticed that “being listened to is so close to being loved, that most people don’t know the difference.” It’s also a great way to combat my Bully Interpreter’s distortions. Turns out I’ve never lost that loving feeling in response to someone earnestly and undistractedly attempting to hear and deeply understand me. So, I think David’s right. One partial reason is that being listened to helps us discharge the increased levels of neurotoxic glucocorticoids that Big Emotion often generates in the wake of a grand HPA axis activation. We begin to feel less fear. Which means we generate fewer stress response neurotoxins. Which means our brains are freed up to process more energy and information as a result of make increasing connections (even with our heart, perhaps).

But also, deep listening, much like love, is radically seditious. It goes toe to toe with our culture of distraction. It promotes the cultivation of radicalness and rebellion, fearlessness and defenselessness, while growing the brain at the same time. Both listening and love live to go beyond themselves. Not only does our safety lie in fearless defenselessness, but therein also lies a pathway back to Rumi’s field out beyond rightdoing and wrongdoing. It’s in that field that we can each begin to breathe out and tell tender truths that permit Defense Mechanisms to dissolve. When we are able to do this successfully, we come back face to face with Rumi’s other great awareness: love is the default condition, the primary, subtle, driving creative energy of the universe. It’s the energy that grows flowers and trees and baby’s brains and children’s hearts.

Learning to listen skillfully is however, a VERY difficult practice. There’s rarely a day that goes by that I don’t find Bully Interpreter trying to convince me and others about the rightness and righteousness of what it believes. And not only is it adamant in its beliefs, it’s often inflexible in its ability to consider alternative possibilities. Not a great way to invoke and sustain loving feelings, unfortunately.  

The Benefits of Reclaiming Love

Using listening skills as a contemplative spiritual practice invariably seems to work to soften mental and physical structures inside me. Tensions I’m holding in body, mind and brain begin to ease, allowing the Bully Interpreter to relax. With such release I often find myself opening to the possibility of increasingly creative responses. As Neil Gaiman offers in this inspiring commencement address given recently to the graduating class at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, listening practice begins to foment not only a deep desire to “make good art,” but a conviction that I really can. And in my experience much of the good art in the world springs from … love. People who love who they are and what they do rarely lose that lovin’ feeling.

P.S. If you want to be seditiously and uncommonly loving on this upcoming Father’s Day, click HERE.

“An open ear is the only believable sign of an open heart.” – David Augsburger

“Have the courage to be sincere, clear and honest. This opens the door to deeper communication all around. It creates the kind of connections with others we all want in life. Speaking from the heart frees us from the secrets that burden us. Speaking truth helps you get clarity on your real heart directives.” – Sara Paddison

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Conrad Grebel

A dream that it is reasonable to follow Jesus Christ daily, radically, totally in life.

A dream that it is practical to obey the Sermon on the Mount, and the whole New Testament, literally, honestly, sacrificially.

A dream that it is thinkable to practice the way of reconciling love in human conflicts and warfare, nondefensively and nonresistantly.

Georg Blaurock

A dream that it is possible to confess Jesus as Lord above all nationalism, racism, or materialism.

A dream that it is feasible to build a communal church of brothers and sisters who are voluntary, disciplined, and mutually committed to each other in Christ.

A dream that life can be lived simply, following the Jesus-way in lifestyle, in possessions, in service.

David Augsburger, “The Mennonite Dream” (Mennonite Board of Missions, 1970).

Note: The Anabaptist movement, out of which Mennonites arose, began in Zürich in 1525 among Swiss Brethren when Conrad Grebel, a former associate of Ulrich Zwingli, baptized Georg Blaurock upon Blaurock’s confession of faith. Anabaptist means “re-baptizer,” a reference to the movement’s practice of believer’s baptism.

A previous post

In the discussion that took place on Facebook, it was suggested that discipleship requires attachment to Jesus – what is described in John 15 as abiding in Christ. In terms of our own spiritual maturity, such attachment to Christ produces Christ-centered, Christ-defined, Christ-empowered faith, hope, and love. It is Christ who generates the faith, hope, and love and any attempt to grow in these areas apart from him results in despair (because we can’t do it) and/or legalism.

Justification by Christ must always precede imitation of Christ. The gospel must be the foundation of all discipleship, pastoral counseling, or missional activity.

But can we still ask what this will look like – assuming the foundation is the gospel, the source is Christ, and the means is abiding in him through faith? It remains a dangerous question because so easily we can play lip service to the gospel, Christ, and faith and simply move on to what we should be doing. Yet we’re slaves to the righteousness of Christ that has been imputed to us (Romans 6:18). His righteousness must define our living. So I’m going to run the risk and offer a suggestion of what Christ-centered, gospel-based discipleship looks like. Actually, this list isn’t original with me, but forms the structure of David Augsburger’s book Dissident Discipleship: A Spirituality of Self-Surrender, Love of God, and Love of Neighbor, though I’m listing his categories in my own words.

Augsburger does not deal at length with the centrality of the gospel to discipleship. He addresses the practical outworking of tripolar discipleship (God, self, and others). His suggestions can easily become dissident legalism, though much more trendy than the ‘don’t drink, don’t smoke’ variety. So heed the warning and consider the following marks of discipleship:

1. Imitation of Jesus
2. Faithfulness to a Christian community
3. Stubborn submission and obedience to the will of God with the peace that passes understanding
4. Humility
5. Nonviolence
6. Service that elevates others
7. Authenticity
8. Subversive, counter-cultural engagement with the world

My copy of Aubsburger’s book is filled with question marks, which I note in the margins when ever I disagree or remain unconvinced with an author’s argument. Yet his suggestions go beyond the ‘here’s what you have to believe and here’s what you have to do’ kind of discipleship. A life of Christ-centered faith, hope, and love will imitate Jesus, respond to evil nonviolently, elevate others, be authentic, and challenge the powers of culture.

Comments?

If I am brutally honest, I must confess that I lack deep humility – by “deep” humility, I mean beyond the facade of appearing to be humble in public. Every time I read the Sermon on the Mount, which is nearly every day, I am struck in my own reflection at how I lack that quality of open-ness to God and his redemptive project – that quality we call poverty of spirit. One of the most powerful chapters to a book I have ever read is the second chapter to Thomas A Kempis’ “The Imitation of Christ” – a chapter titled “Of Humble Conceit of Ourselves” When I catch myself acting, thinking, and behaving in ways that embody selfishness and arrogance, I try to remember to go back and read that brief chapter, or the Sermon on the Mount. My prayer is that, through spiritual disciplines, reflection, and a confessing community, I will be made new in the image of the Humble One who “did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, rather, he emptied himself…”

I have found another gem on this oft-ignored, oft-neglected topic, in David Augsburger’s “Dissident Discipleship: A Spirituality of Self-Surrender, Love of God, & Love of Neighbor” – I find this to be frutiful material for self & communal reflection:

“Humility is a fine balance – it is neither self-deprecating nor self-promoting. The humble person sees the self with equanimity, acts with unpretentious simplicity, assumes an essential equality of persons that makes it possible to flow with others, neither climbing abover nor stopping below. The gyroscope of sane self-worth constantly rights and leves the soul in the ups and downs of relationships, the successes and failures of one’s dreams, the give and take of commerce of community. Humility, when balanced, provides fair and just way of perceiving one’s place in the human family.

Humility consists, roughly, in having oneself and one’s acomplishments in perspective. On this view, to be humble is to understand yourself and your moral entitlements sufficiently clearly that you are disposed not to exaggerate about these.

There are no splendid human beings; none are so perfect, so balanced, so without fault that we must hold them totally in awe. There are those we admire, deeply respect, and seek to follow as guides, but each has a shadow side, all have areas of immaturity or incongruity.

Genuine humility is free of any pretense; it is not persuaded by exaggerated praise; it is not gratified by flattery or overestimation by others even when such positive evaluation is deserved and appropriate. Humility neither undervalues nor overvalues achievement or service rendered. Humility does not take the other more seriously than the self or the self less seriously than the other. It does not overlook evil done to any person, whether self or other.

What is appropriate to true humility is a genuine respect for another’s right to feel that way when similarly wronged. Believing that we are all of equal intrinsic worth, refusing to believe that one’s own rights are greater than those of others, insisting that each person’s dignity and worth deserve full respect is this point of view or perspective of balance that we are calling humility.”

Daar gaan ze:

Ik zou het bij de eerstgenoemde hebben gelaten, als het om nog levende mensen ging – vanuit het standpunt van Augsburger.
Er is iets wat ik wel zie en er is vooral ook wat ik niet zie.
Jammer.

“The Fool and His Scepter” by William Willeford

But first an excerpt from the preface written by Enid Welsford

“Dr. Willeford exhibits both the entertaining and the numinous character of the fool and his mysteriously ambiguous position on the borderline between good and evil, order and chaos, reality and illusion, existence and nothingness.”

From Chapter 14 – The Republic of Folly and the Holy Fool (pp.226-7)

A fool society called the Babinian Republic was founded in Poland in 1568. The name derived from “Baba”, an old woman, was meant to characterize the run-down manor house in which the revels of the group were held. The society adopted a duplicate of the Polish Constitution and had offices of many kinds waiting to be filled by fools. If someone outside the society did something that was judged foolish by the members, he was invited to join it; if at first he did not, he was abused until he did. He was then given a license with a large seal and an office appropriate to his folly. If, for example, he had talked knowingly of things he did not understand, he was made an archbishop. The society grew so large that there was hardly an important person in any branch or church or government who did not hold an office in it. Finally the King of Poland, Sigismund August II, asked whether the Babinian Republic also had a king and was told that as long as he lived the society would not dream of electing another.

Like other saturnalian revels, those of the Babinian Republic violated the social order to dramatize the conceit that everyone, no matter what his social position, is basically foolish. However, though the conceit was applied to the King, and though he was assumed to be the king of the Babinian Republic as well as of Poland, he had a status different from that of other fools. Unlike them he did not have an overtly foolish identity inside the society and a nonfoolish one outside of it: he was the king of fools and of nonfools, his office transcending the distinction between them. One reason for his special status is clear: if he had descended to the level of the other Babinian fools, he would, as simultaneously King and member of the Republic, have affirmed the state of Sovereign Fool with which we have been concerned. He would have become the chief butt without having, on the level of symbolic forms, the power to call the play to a halt and to reassert his ascendancy. He would have lacked this power, because positions within the society were created and assigned by a burlesque but nonetheless potent decree. One of the members expressed this burlesque potency by claiming that the Republic was greater and more ancient than the realms of Alexander the Great or the emperors of Babylon, Persia, or Rome. This joke implies not only that folly is more permanent than any kingdom but also that the reflection of the kingdom in folly might at any moment prove more substantial than the real kingdom. By their allegiance to the make-believe Republic the Polish subjects in the fool society may have served the real state, since their folly was a form of the ritualized rebellion that demonstrates the strength of the established order. But if the King had accepted a fixed office in the society, he would, symbolically, have delivered the kingdom up to the foolish reflection of itself and to the powers that distorted the kingdom in that reflection. Ironically, however, to avoid this danger he resigned himself to occupying the indeterminate, half-and-half position – half inside the fellowship of fools and half outside it – that is characteristic of the royal jester.

This is history, people. This whole book is about the various characteristics and the special roles of the fool in human society.

Mijn Pools is nooit geworden wat het misschien had moeten worden – maar ik verwijs maar even.

Good Samaritan
Lone man mugged,
beat and fleeced,
scorned by saint,
passed by priest.

Good men look
other way.
Much to do!
Seize the day!

Alien stops,
sees his hurt,
gives first aid
in the dirt.

Cares, although
not his class,
lifts him on
his own ass.

Picks up check
at the inn,
on return,
checks again.

Jesus asks
critics dim,
“Which of these
neighbored him?”

Omdat het Nederlands nu eenmaal niet zo monosyllabisch is als het Engels van nu vraag ik mij af of het model voor vertaling of navolging in aanmerking komt. Een uitdaging die ik niet nu aanga.

David Augsburger, Dissident discipleship – a spirituality of self-surrender, love of God, and love of neighbor. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2006