Creativity / Theology / Culture / Spirituality
Trish has been sourcing me with Improv Everywhere for several years. I am sure most of you have seen their stuff. But this was posted today. Dead funny. What can the church learn? What can we learn from this about spiritual conversation?
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In this deeply relational world, a world where quantum science is proving that everything is connected down to the smallest parts of an atom, we need to experience these shifts that move us from a mindset of fixed, fate, and futility, to dynamic, possibility and potentiality. This is the hidden invisible reality of the Kingdom of God. (The_new_sciences is a long article but sooooo worth reading I have uploaded the full pdf here for you.)
As I wake up to the kindgom of God me self story changes and my image of you changes. I learn to see you, the real you, not the you I have constructed from the images, feelings, betrayals, dislikes, envy and jealousy you evoke in me. I come, in this new larger envelop of reality. to understand what I see in you might say more about me than anything about you at all. I might be projecting my own hurts, insecurties, fragilities, and pain.
These awakenings are the fruit of bonefishing Clint style. Need an awakening? Need some bonefish time?
But the biggest learning for me to date, is without doubt the most life altering but the most difficult to continue to live into. Jesus invites us into the kingdom for one reason…. to bring the prevalence, reality and concrete demonstration of the kingdom here on earth as it is in heaven (yes that sounds like the Lord’s prayer intentionally)
The hard shift? The universe is unfolding through me. God’s new thing I am to be alert and present to sense? That is unfolding through me. The problem I have is patiently, alertly, presencingly (think I made up that word…wouldn’t be the first time though) doing it. I like control, manipulation, make it happen, force it postures. They come more naturally but the results are forced and ron-manufactured.
The idea that Jesus enlisted me to wake up because this envelop of a larger reality is at hand and to then let this new reality unfold through me, is simply winsome. At that stage I am co-creating, co-working, co-unfolding the universe with God. I know sounds crazy and heretical, but true nonetheless
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One of the most perplexing mysteries of our current state of perception is how we can live in a world so alive with possibilities, so deeply relational and connected, so absolutely NOT fixed but walk around with a perception the world is fixed, solid, stable and unchanging.
Jesus invited people to realize there was a wider envelop of existence available to them, a bigger reality, a hidden wholeness where they could live and move and have their being. When we grasp this fundamental shift, a shift in our identity occurs. In this world of possibilities and potentialities (you will do even greater things than I, said Jesus) another shift occurs as well.
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I have reflected alot on my awakening experience with Clint and bonefishing. I wish everyone could have something like this happen to them. But some key learnings have emerged that have informed my journey since then and continue to fund my outlook. What I have learned is there has to be an openness, a readiness, even a lack of control and certainty if we really want to learn and be transformed. This is what Jesus was doing when he said be a like a little child. It is what they call in Zen the beginners mind.
I realize much of my life I have considered things fixed, as in unchanging and in stone. My bonefishing experience did something to peel back scales from my eyes and help me realize fixedness is an illusion. I can view people as fixed…their attitudes as fixed, if they have hurt me or have established a track record of being what I thought was a jerk, all of these things though often looking fixed actually are not. But we say things like… “but they always..” “She is constantly…” “He has always…” “I know what you are going to say because you always…” Can you hear yourself here? They are not fixed, my “self” is not fixed, my circumstances are not fixed, the universe is not fixed. Everything is relational and that means where I am involved I am at least part of the equation….always. This is part of the insight of living systems. Nothing is fixed and nothing is isolated.
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Parents you are fiction writers! We have just begun exploring the role of the biblical text and it’s influence on our personal “text.” Part of the journey into awareness is that we are constantly telling ourselves stories of how we view the world.
Parents few things are more important to the development of your child than the stories you pass on to them, as you help them learn to view the world. From the time they are little you being reading to them (some of you did this while they were in the womb) and then telling them stories, stories you make up when you go to bed at night, nursery rhymes, family history stories, and on the list goes.
But where things really get interesting is when kids on the playground start messing with their stories. They get picked last for the kickball team. They are in the last group crossing the finish line for field day. Their name doesn’t make it on the board where the “smart kids” are listed. All of a sudden the pristine story you have been telling them is getting jacked around and they begin to privately question and ponder things that shape and reshape their personal storytelling. That is the beginning of where our spirituality, view of God, view of self and scripting we live into are formed.
In the month of September the Transformational Trek Tribe looks at this self storying, it’s orgins, sources and role in vertical development and formation. How does our personal storying intersect God’s storying and the stories we inherit tacitly from culture? We will also be looking at one of the researchers and authors that has done us a major service by doing the homework for us to understand the spirituality of children.
If you have been putting off check this out maybe this is the month to jump in. We had a half a dozen new people sign up yesterday to join us on the journey. Hope you are next to join us.
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My most recent time with Clint was last summer…
Apparently I have not been the only one to have deeply spiritual experiences bone fishing, nor am I the only one to have had those 
catalyzed by the man of the ocean — Clint. Clint these days has his own fishing company. Secret Soul Flyfishing takes his expertise into formal fishing trips with a 5 star experience. I had the opportunity last year to head back to Abaco and spend a week with Clint, he and I and one of our close friends just hung out, caught up and processed our journeys of awareness together.
But something unexpected happened that was deeply moving for me. We reminisced at the deep spiritual work that had been “conducted” in our lives. We thought back to those days of my first bonefishing experience and my frustrations, deep ah-has, and embarrassing realization of my own sleepy hypnosis to the world around me.
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For those of you who haven’t followed the Anne Rice facebook conversation you should at least be aware of it. Someone of her influence (130 million books sold) coming out to say she is a fully devoted Christ follower but refuses to continue to be a Christian is something warranting at least a listen.
She opted to use facebook as the forum and vehicle for her announcement, her reasons are fascinating as are the responses on her fan page of well over 100,000. What do you think?
Anne Rice Interview with Tripp Fuller
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Like my journey into waking up, my journey with Clint continues. Over the last six years we have shared incredible moments. It was Clint who not only introduced me to Anthony DeMello but then to Father Frank Stroud who took up publishing Tony’s work posthumously (as Father Stroud called him). Praying Naked was the last volume of Tony’s work Stroud published before his death three years ago.
Out of my awakening experience I have begun to do something I saw Clint do the day he and I met at Orcas Island on that memorable day in January of 2004. Walking the ocean shore I saw Clint bend over and selectively pick up several shells and stones, stones worn smooth no doubt through millennia of rhythmic ocean tides washing over them.
It wasn’t for a couple years that I discovered what Clint was doing, and had been doing for sometime. When he sensed important moments he always took a physical earth artifact to kinesthetically connect him to that spot, that memory that event. Clint always said he never wanted to lose his connection to the ocean, to the earth, to creation.
Not long after my bonefishing experience with Clint I began going down and working with his church on a periodic basis. One of the things I noticed in his office were various bowls and vessels holding rocks and shells and bits of rope or wood. It was one of those things you notice but sort of out of the periphery of your awareness so it never really registers. You know what I mean?
It would be two years more before it came up in conversation what these artifacts were. They were in fact these collected memory markers from various events, moments and turning points. Interesting I thought, very interesting and neat idea, a 21st century rock altar.
My most recent time with Clint was last summer…
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So the obvious question is where do those stories we are telling ourselves come from? Or maybe an even better question, if our lives are storied creations then where and from whom did we learn how to story tell?
Pondering, reflecting and answer these questions is a million dollar insight. And lots of learnings happen along the way. What we all come to find out is we have been scripted. In fact therapists call our enacted stories scripts and schemas. Early in our lives we start living into the accepted scripts of those closest to us. Parents, caregivers, and soon after that school teachers, music and art teachers and coaches.
We could stop right here and start identifying where stories I am telling myself today about my lack of ability, or insecurities, or feelings of inferiority, or arrogant ego, or narcissism all start with some storied script I inherited or picked up along the way. The sources are various, insidious and cryptic. But they are the narratives that literally bring form to our lives.
This is why the last post posed the question how much of our life is fact or fiction. We would like to think we are the authors of our lives but the truth is self authorship is a very high level of human development and takes significant self awareness leading to self reflection.
What are some of the the fictions you are telling yourself these days? How long has that story been playing? Transformation, real metamorphosis comes when we change the running commentary in our heads. Contrary to popular evangelical nonsense that Paul wanted people to memorize scripture, this is the meaning of Romans 12:1-2. Transformation comes by renewing the story in your mind, by changing the way your mind makes meaning of yourself and your world.
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“Is your life fact or fiction,” seems like something of stupid question doesn’t it? Fiction comes from the Latin fictum meaning “created.” Fiction when it comes to narrative is a story that has at least parts if not all of it that are “created” by the author and do not represent anything in the real factual world.
Hmmmm….
For the last couple months I have alternated blog posts between my personal story of awakening through a bone fishing experience and about reading the text of scripture with new metaphors and eyes. One seemed more academic, the other more personal. One seemed more engaging the other a bit dry. The next series of posts though will bring the two together in a not so obvious connection. And hopefully both posts sets will live in new ways
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