Awareness, awakeness and day dreaming.

So bone fishing was my entry’ into awareness and waking up. How about you? You might be a follower of Jesus, bible reading maniac, bible quoting, memorizing machine. You might be a sermon, book and seminar junkie. But none of those imply awakeness. My life is an example. And the whole mystic and spirituality tradition of the church proves it.

My life in the last 6 years of this journey has had some of the most incredible spiritual depth and growth I have ever experienced. Much of it due to waking up, some of it due to great pain, some of it due to engaging new patterns and practices that have helped me come to grips with how our lives are storied.

All of us live in a constructed reality; personally and socially constructed. This has been and remains the most profound and powerful insight that waking up has brought. What do I mean?

Everyday as I arise I begin the storytelling process. (this happens to be one of the reasons that doing a centering practice of some kind early in the morning is often recommended by spiritual directors….the storytelling hasn’t kicked in yet.) As I am shaving I am rehearsing. Think about it, so are you. We are rehearsing the people we are going to interact with, meet with, present to, and mentor. We are rehearsing our lines, their possible responses and our more clever rejoinders. And by the time we are done showering, shaving, dressing and jumping in the car we have already been day dreaming — rehearsing the story — for 30-60 minutes. We have part of the day already figured out and therefore already “lived” at one level.

Experts say we day dream, which is usually storytelling we are doing about what is about to play out in our world, 4-6 hours a day. That is right 4-6 hours a day. It would be great if that 4-6 hours was spent brainstorming cures for cancer, or solutions to how we can use alternative forms of energy to power our motor vehicles. But the truth is most of our day dreaming is spent constructing a picture of how we think our life will play out.

That mental rehearsing creates emotions that are manifested in our bodies, anticipations that we “wear” as body language as we enter into those already ‘programmed’ interactions, and a less than neutral playing field as we enter our day. What percentage of illnesses do Doctors claim is mentally generated – is psychosomatic?

Can you see this in your life? We are going to spend the next run of posts exploring our storied existence. It is central to waking up. It is critical to a new way of doing formation. It is the almost the sole reason for the effort in the Trek Tribe. It is the reason for the book I am currently writing.

There are other options for possible metaphors that move us away from the owner’s manual for life (OMFL) approach to the bible. The bible as classic, inspired classic, is one option but what about reading the bible the way we would read a jazz score?

The OMFL approach has us combing the text for whatever we think might apply in our lives right here right now. The problem is over time what applies right here right now, doesn’t apply 50 years later right here right now. We have found that model desperately wanting.

But a jazz score? Ahhhh….here is a metaphor with some traction. In jazz you immerse yourself in the score of the composer. You need to know that score inside and out. Why? Because there is going to come a time during the performance where you as the trombonist get to improvise. And your improvisation must be in continuity with the score. A couple things are very important here. Improvisation builds on the score. It isn’t a repetition of the notes on the page, but it is in continuity with the score. In other words the improvisation ought to smell of the original score but have it’s own contribution in how it echoes it.

There is another important piece when it comes to the continuity. When I play in a jazz group my improvisation not only needs some continuity with the score but it needs to riff and echo the way others in the group are improvising as well. In other words I have a community I am responsible to for how I am doing my riffing. They will give me feedback on how well it reflects the score and the echoing of say the trumpet and sax player in the group. So I am not just free to do anything I want I have a “community” that holds me accountable.

Are you doing the parallel study? Our reading of the biblical text isn’t to duplicate what they did in the New Testament. I am sick and tired of hearing that the goal of the church is to be an Acts 2 church. See our previous postwhere we selectively pick and choose what that means.

I know that sounds like heresy. But I don’t sell all I have and give it to the elders of a local church, I don’t have slaves, women can braid their hair, concubines aren’t legal. I suppose you could say we are trying to duplicate the NT in that we are trying to love God and love neighbor; true and true. What we are really trying to do though is build on the score of the NT. That is right move beyond the score. Immerse in it for sure. But the goal isn’t to “replay” the NT. The goal isn’t to find, memorize and recite quips and quotes. The goal is to improvise in our world and contexts in continuity with the score of Scripture. We are asking questions, facing issues, wrestling with global problems not remotely in the purview of the biblical text. Our only solution is to read it as a jazz score and to improvise!

So my journey into waking up began. I realized then, and affirm more than ever now, that my strengths for information uptake, synthesis and retention were part of the very thing that had lulled me into the dull, sleepy world living most of my life in my head, and rather unaware of my own emotional dynamics, shadow, and even the things going on in my body.

Clint was a good sounding board those several days he helped me see things I couldn’t see, he had compassion I had rarely experienced in all of my adult life and he had uncanny insight into how desperately this “waking up” thing was needed by me. I think it is largely due to the fact he had been through his own deep waking up. This was the birth in me of a commitment to see ministry in and through me move in a different direction.

Over the last several years I have with increasing frequency run into guys and gals in ministry that are waking up. Some ministry shift, crisis, interpersonal challenge, deep disappointment or some other catalyst coupled with a little bit of age under their belt makes for an elixir that jolts you into a reality distantly familiar but strangely new. The developmentalists tell us that there are certain things that only come into our field of awareness with the coupling of age and some catalyst that jars us out of autopilot.

Well I had experienced my jolt and Clint was midwifing the moment. I have mentioned The Way to Love and DeMello but Clint handed me one more DeMello book that provided the “last straw” in breaking me down and helping me reconnect in deep ways to God and to myself. The book? Awareness. A resource broker knows how to place the right resource in the right hands at just the right time. Well this was perfectly brokered. I have never been able to confirm it but Father Frank Stroud, about whom you will hear more, told me that this book of DeMello’s was the most sold book in the area of spirituality for Doubleday the book’s original publisher. Maybe this resource would help you too.

Jesus’ first word to the masses we have recorded was “wake up…”

Awareness is all about practices that help you become more aware, not about amassing more information. Maybe some of these resources will help you, maybe the videos on an awareness based spirituality or weekly practices we engage in the Transformational Trek Tribe will help you. But whatever facilitates heightening your awareness…go for it.

According to Tracy when we pick up a classic the classic raises up to the reader what he calls “the subject matter.” Your initial response might be “well no duh…of course!” But for Tracy “subject matter” is a very specific sort of material.

When you and I pick up a classic the plot, storyline, tensions, character development, etc….all arise into my reader world. At that stage I am not looking for a character with which I might identify so I can now mimic their movements or responses, or write down quips and quotes from that character that I might then place on index cards to memorize as I am shaving in the morning. The “subject matter” of the classic isn’t handled that way. In fact we intuitively handle it very differently than that. We realize that the questions being asked, the plot, storyline etc… may or may not have any analogous connection to my world. But the characters wrestling, questioning, analysis or agonizing all have a way of getting inside of me as the reader and asking me to think about the questions I am asking, the ways I am wrestling, the viewing angles I am taking on my own plot, storyline and character development.

On one hand this process is far more complex, intuitive and even subversive when compared to the mimic model we have been discussing. On the other hand this isn’t as neat, controllable and package-able. Principles don’t just jump out of “subject matter” and say “apply me!”

I remember my first great books experience. In 5th grade we were given age appropriate versions of Adler’s great books and we read the stories and then had a gifted adult facilitator engage a Socratic method for extracting from us themes, thesis, plot, sweep, and scope. The subject matter yields to that sort of observation and conversation. Not as easily to principle extraction.

How would you read Jonah differently as a short story…forgetting for a moment that it is inspired?

Well needless to say my next day of bone fishing after Clint’s comments and that little reading out of The Way to Love was a slightly different experience…different in a sort of delightful way.

I was relaxing because I was waking up. I didn’t know it’s magnitude, scope or even full significance at the time but I was undergoing a major awakening. Clint knew something deep was going on and in typical clint-aware fashion he just stayed present as catalyst.

Day 2: Strangely I saw fish fins everywhere. None day one…though according to Clint everywhere. Day two they are all over the place. Tell me my eyes were recalibrated and I might believe you. Tell me that my own inner awareness actually had something to do with what I could “see” and I would have to tell you I think that is closer to the truth. Not only did I see fish but caught fish and for the first time and found the buzz, the joy, and the fun that people that fish talk about. But more than that something spiritual had happened. (of course people that fish think it is a spiritual experience). I was waking up to a new world. A world off autopilot. A world where I was out of the constructed storytelling of the ego and into a world where I could watch what was arising in me and around me. That “nowness” was not the world I lived in. I lived in a future construction where I told myself, how I and the world would be.

Here is DeMello talking about this very topic…no no fishing, waking up

The classic is one new metaphor we can consider as we are looking for a way forward from the owner’s manual for life (OMFL) approach which seems to be boil the narrative down to stories encasing propositions we have to figure out how to mine.

David Tracy was one theologian who realized the problem we were having in our reading the biblical text. His proposal in 1981 in his winsome though dense volume, The Analogical Imagination, was that we might want to consider reading the text as a classic.

Now for those of you reading this from a more conservative perspective don’t panic. Classic doesn’t imply “not real” or even ‘not inspired’ for that matter. In fact let’s call it an inspired classic (some actually find that a redundant couplet…all classics are inspired some would say). We have to consider new paradigms with an open mind or we never really “hear” their power.

The shift Tracy is inviting is in how we read a classic. We do not read the classic story, looking for a character with whom we identify, noting their response to situations in life and then trying to emulate or avoid duplicating their life responses. The function of the “storying” feature of the classic is that it is much more insidious, subtle and yet complex. And yet what I just described is indeed how we approach the biblical text…well at least selectively.

For instance in the OMFL approach we read or have preached to us that Jonah is being called to be an evangelist. You as a Christian are also called. Jonah wasn’t excited about his calling, often we aren’t excited about sharing our faith… You see where this is going. In our reading, due to what we have heard in the formative time of faith development and in preaching, we start into the reading task with a “make a one to one correspondence” goal and a then “learn and live” accordingly. It is relatively neat, clean and quick. The problem as we have already mentioned though is that works much easier for applying the call of Jonah to go preach to the Ninevites than it does for the call or Noah to build a football field sized boat. You can be called to preach to pagans too but no one has ever thought you were called to build a boat of any size.

When we read a classic we actually don’t start into the reading enterprise looking for a one to one correspondence to emulate. So what happens? When you pick up a classic or what you know to be a great story how do you read it?

So you can see the day of fishing (or more accurately a clinic on how to bone fish in which I demonstrated no sight ability let alone casting ability) + Clint’s observation + the opening reading in A Way to Love by DeMello = A Real Ah-ha moment for me!

Several things dawned on me that night in a guest room in Abaco. First, I thought I was pretty aware, quite emotionally intelligent, and rooted in Christ. What I found out was much of my identity was in accomplishment, accolades, applause, affirmation. This realization that night was the combination of what Clint said and what I read in DeMello. Something was happening inside of me that was deep, powerful, singular and life altering. And while I felt it then it is even more true as I look back on the experience and begin the seventh year since it happened.

The second dawning was that for all the information, scholarly and practical that I had amassed, memorized, passed on, written about and spoke from, even to the place of earning degrees and being honored with some, I really hadn’t been deeply formed. My motives weren’t ill, my heart wasn’t nasty or bad, I was just unaware, blind, on autopilot; informed but not deeply transformed. This was not only a tough pill to swallow but it was the derivative conclusion that was just crushing. How much of my ministry had been spent creating the very same information acquisition in others while not leading or facilitating deep transformation? I had a mentor early in my ministry years who often said “you will teach what you know but you will always reproduce who you are.” What had I reproduced?

Third, I realized the the next run of ministry for me would entail a new kind of spiritual life. This was my enlightenment, this was my waking up, this was my click off autopilot.

You might say this was the perfect storm for all this to occur and I would have to agree with you entirely. But what I have come to realize is that all over the world people are becoming aware they are information heavy and transformation light. They are in church arenas that inform but do little to catalyze, process, facilitate or foster deep change. The last 6 years of my life I have spent trying to engage entirely new patterns and practices so the life I am living is different, vastly different I hope, from the life I had previously lived.

get your copy.

So I couldn’t see the bone fish. I hadn’t seen one. I looked, strained, focused, but bone fish fins glinting in the sun remained invisible.

Clint and I plopped down on the shoreline near his house and he looked over at me and saidwhat do you think? I shook my head as if to say “think of what? All the invisible fish you saw and pointed out that remained totally hidden from my eyes?” He then looked me in the eyes. This is the guy I met 6 months earlier for the first time. This is the guy I have now been around for a full 18 hours and some of that was sleeping. Clint then said what was proved to be a life changing moment for me…

“Ron I think God wants to teach you something about your own internal awareness and who you are. Because if you can see the clear and obvious glint of hundreds of bone fish fins that are physical and material, then how will you ever be able to be aware of more subtle things going on deep down inside you and all around you.”

A ton of bricks would be an understatement. Clint had no idea about the identity crisis I was surfing just 24 hours earlier on the airplane. Clint had no idea how much I had prided myself on supposedly being aware, but just 24 hours earlier in a crisis show how unaware I really way. Clint had no idea how timely his words were.

They probably seem small to you, unimportant and maybe even a throw away thought. But given my vocational shift and the moment I found myself in developmentally his words were potent.

Clint went on to share some of his journey into awareness and how we often think we are tuned in when we are really actually asleep or hypnotized by what is going on around us. He then asked me if I had ever heard of…

I have given out dozens of copies of this, get your copy.

We need some new metaphors. I think it is quite clear the two bucket theory is untenable, and the owners manual for life metaphor reduces the bible to a behavior manual. Both the theory and metaphor generate so many problems that it is time we start searching for an alternative approach to the text.

This is always how paradigm shifts occur. When a paradigm is initially adopted it answers a variety of questions very well. Those adopting the paradigm realize it doesn’t answer all questions and those unanswerables go on a shelf for further reflection and research. No paradigm is perfect, no model can answer all the questions.

Eventually the current paradigm, always historically and contextually rooted, answers fewer and fewer questions well and the shelf with the unanswerables becomes overloaded and near collapse. This is when a new paradigm begins to emerge. We are undoubtedly living in such a new paradigm time.

Furthermore we have seen that the cultural stage of development in which the author is writing has a tremendous influence on how they see the world. An author writing in a magic or mythic culture will always write from a magic or mythic perspective. There is no way someone writing in 1500 bce for instance, could write from a perspective of a sun-at-the-center cosmology or quantum worldview. Furthermore the fundamentalist explanation that an inspired text somehow suspends or mutes these cultural specificities has been proven in countess texts to be incorrect.

So what options are there for replacing the two bucket theory (the academic issue) and the modern metaphor of “an owner’s manual for life” (the practical issue?) My guess is there are dozens of options that would empower us to get at the text in a way more faithful to it’s writing. In my latest book I suggest three different options. See the biblical text as an inspired classic, a musical jazz score, or a drama writer’s script.

In preparation for these next posts ask yourself this question. Where did you inherit your approach to the biblical text? From who or from where did you learn to ask the questions of the text you ask?