The Our Father, Word by Word – a roundup of posts!
When I wrote the first post for this series back in March, I thought I’d have it wrapped up by the end of Lent. I would have never guessed that the final post wouldn’t be up until almost December! Keeping up with the project required more work than I expected, but it was so much fun. In particular, I loved hearing everyone else’s thoughts. The guest posters were constantly coming up with fresh insights I would have never thought of, leading me to see this prayer in a whole new light.
And so, nine months, 40 posts and 26 contributors later, here is a roundup on our meditation on the Our Father. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did!
BY WORD
OUR | FATHER | WHO | ART | IN | HEAVEN (1) | HALLOWED BE | THY | NAME | KINGDOM | COME | WILL | BE DONE | ON | EARTH | AS IT IS | HEAVEN (2) | GIVE | US (1) | THIS | DAY| OUR | DAILY | BREAD | FORGIVE | US (2) | TRESPASSES | AS | WE FORGIVE | THOSE | WHO HAVE TRESPASSED | AGAINST | LEAD | NOT | INTO | TEMPTATION | BUT | DELIVER | FROM | EVIL
BY AUTHOR
Jason Anderson – HEAVEN
Erin Arlinghaus – EARTH
Marc Barnes – THIS
Margaret Berns – US
Melanie Bettinelli – HALLOWED BE
Betty Duffy – EVIL
Karen Edmisten – NAME
Steve G. – HEAVEN
Heather King – WE FORGIVE
Martina Kreitzer – NOT
Marcel LeJeune – FATHER
Dan Lord – DELIVER
Darwin – IN
Mrs. Darwin – WHO
Elizabeth Scalia – WHO HAVE TRESPASSED
Anna Macdonald – AS
Jeff Miller – FORGIVE
Anna Mitchell – GIVE
Eric Sammons – US
Dorian Speed – WILL
Matt Swaim – KINGDOM
Sally Thomas – LEAD
Stacy Trasancos – TEMPTATION
Brandon Vogt – ART, AS IT IS
Wellness Mama – BREAD
Kate Wicker – DAILY
Me – OUR, THY, COME, DONE, ON, DAY, OUR, TRESPASSES, THOSE, AGAINST, INTO, BUT, FROM
I hope your Advent is off to a great start!
Turning the other cheek vs. being a pushover: What’s the difference?
I only have a second before I need to dash out to another event as part of my WEEK OF EPIC SOCIALIZING, so I thought I’d let you do all the hard work today and give me the answer to a question that’s perplexed me for a while:
What is the different between being Christ-like and being a pushover?
Here’s why I ask:
I am an extremely nonconfrontational person. To a fault. I mean, if I walked out to my car and witnessed someone run a key down the paint, slash all the tires and break all the windows, I probably would just say, “Hey, what are you doing?” (Phrasing it as a question, since, you never know, he might have a good reason for his actions!) Even if he responded by saying that he was just destroying my car for fun, I would probably just nod, perhaps letting a vague look of mild disapproval cross my face. Heck, if I got on my phone to call a tow truck, I’d probably worry about seeming impolite.
Given this temperament, it’s easy for me to convince myself that I’m just a really saintly, other-cheek-turning kind of person on occasions when I let others’ transgressions go. “Just trying to imitate the Lord!” I assure myself…but in reality I’m just doing what’s easiest for me. For example, the other day I’d been waiting in a line for quite a while, and a woman cut right in front of me. It was pretty clear from her body language that this was intentional. It was one of the most blatantly unfair, infuriating actions I’ve witnessed in a long time. My temper flared, so I said, “Oh — heh-heh — um, hey, I, uhh…” and she promptly turned away from me and made a call on her cell phone. I never did say anything, and, sure enough, she got served after waiting only a couple of moments, whereas my wait was extended even further.
As I walked away from the situation, I assured myself that that was the Christian thing to do. I was a living testament to Matthew 5:39! Maybe this lady was stressed and in a hurry, and I made her day a little easier by letting her cut in front of me in line. But something didn’t feel right about that conclusion. Maybe some small part of my motive in giving her a pass was Christ-centered, but mostly it was Jen’s-fear-of-confrontation-centered. And while I do know that we Christians are supposed to love our enemies and not seek vengeance out of anger, surely there is some line that can be crossed where you’re just a pushover. Right?
I really don’t know. So I turn the question over to you:
Is there such a thing as being a Christian pushover, or should we always let it go when people wrong us? If there is a boundary between being Christ-like and being a wimp, where do you draw that line?
I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
First, you must be willing to lose it all
I’ve received a lot of feedback in response to my post called Finding God in 5 Steps. Of all the interesting and insightful things that people shared, there was one email that hit me right between the eyes, and made me realize something that I’ve hardly gone a day without thinking about. It was from a young man who fell away from faith for many years and had only recently returned to a close relationship with God. He said that he agreed with what I wrote in that post, but thought that I missed one thing:
There was one thing that was essential to my reversion that you do not mention. One must be willing to give up everything for God…I believe that the biggest problem people have with finding God is that they are not willing to give up earthly desires to find Him. People want the best of both worlds. They want a relationship with God and be able to hang on to worldly desires. I think this is all to often overlooked.
Wow. Yes.
Until I received his email, I don’t think it had ever occurred to me what a key aspect of the conversion process this is; I hadn’t even realized that I went through this step myself. But when I look back, I see that before I could accept the truth, I first had to be in a place of willingness to lose it all.
One of the things that’s different about seeking the truth about God as opposed to, say, seeking the truth about a mathematical equation is that the truth about God is personal and transformative. If you’re seeking the truth about mass-energy equivalence and you discover that e=mc², it doesn’t mean anything for you personally. You don’t need to live your life any differently just because you now know that the mass of a body is a measure of its energy content. But not so with God. Because God is the source of all that is good, to know what God is is to know what Good is. Religion has almost always been understood to be about moral codes because a moral code defines what is good and what is not, therefore it defines what God is and what he’s not.
That’s why the search for the truth about God is always personal. It’s always going to bring in all your insecurities, issues and attachments, because your life will be forever shaped by whatever truth you encounter.
Here’s a rough analogy: Let’s say that a woman was seeking God, and she came across a belief system that taught that it’s morally wrong to own a car; something about car ownership, they said, was contrary to God’s nature, and therefore objectively wrong. Naturally, her first reaction was, “That’s absurd!” But then she found a lot of other reasonable stuff in the belief system, so she took another look at that crazy car teaching. To her surprise, it ended up being not as unreasonable as she’d initially thought; in fact, she had to admit that some of the defenses she read really got her thinking.
But in the back of her mind there was always this voice that said, I CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT A CAR! There was no way. She even thought through it a couple of times: She needed it to run errands, her husband needed his car for work. And she couldn’t just take the kids out of all their activities. Nope. The life that she had carefully crafted would completely fall apart if she gave up having a car.
As you can imagine, this line of thinking would bring her investigation into the anti-car belief system to an end. There’s this idea out there we can will ourselves into automaton mode and make evaluations about any kind of subject with perfect objectivity. But it’s not true (except maybe in matters of math or science, and even then I think our biases come into play more than we’d like to admit). To use the example of the woman in the car, there is no way that she is going to accept the belief system that includes the teaching against cars, even if her rational mind believes that it’s true…unless she’s willing to let go of her car, and therefore her entire lifestyle.
Again, the analogy is rough, but I think it conveys the process that many of us experience on the road to conversion. When I was first researching religion, for example, some of the Catholic Church’s teachings sounded just as crazy to me as the idea of not owning a car. At first I dismissed them as absurd. But even when I came to see that the arguments in their defense were incredibly compelling, I was still not that close to admitting that they were true, because, deep down inside, I knew that they would turn my life upside down if they were.
Around that time, everything fell apart: We faced major financial problems, then medical problems which compounded the financial problems. We had to move in with my mom, which meant that I lost touch with many of my friends because I was in a different part of town. With my health, finances, and social life all a big hot mess, I discovered the freedom of having nothing left to lose. Of course I did still have plenty of great stuff like a supportive family and a first-world existence, but I’d lost so much so quickly that I’d received a crash course in detachment. And that’s when I could finally allow myself to see the truth about God.
And so I whole-heartedly agree that that Finding God in 5 Steps post is missing a step, one that is perhaps the most important: First, you must be willing to lose lose it all.
6 Questions My Spiritual Director Would Ask
I’ve mentioned a few times that I had an amazing spiritual director named Christie. Unfortunately, she’s gotten busy with other commitments and I haven’t been able to meet with her lately, so I’ve been without a spiritual director for a while now. I hope to find a new person soon, but in the meantime I’ve been thinking back on my conversations with her, particularly when I’m trying to discern the right path for some big decision where there’s no clear right answer. When recalling our meetings, I realized that Christie almost always asked me the same few questions, and that prayerfully considering my answers to each one always helped get me off the fence and make a good choice. I thought it might be helpful to others to share what they were.
1. Have you prayed about it?
You would think that this question wouldn’t be necessary, but, alas, we’re dealing with me here, and Christie quickly learned that we might want to cover this base before moving on. With embarrassing frequency I’d come to her and pour out my angst about some conundrum, throw up my hands in frustration, and announce that God did not seem to be helping me here. Then she’d gently asked if I had prayed about it; specifically, if I had set aside the time not only to place my petition before God, but to calmly wait and listen for an answer. The answer was often “no,” which gave me an obvious place to start in my discernment process.
2. How does it impact your primary vocation?
I can’t overstate the importance of this question. It’s brought more peace to my life than any other thought exercise. The Catholic idea of vocation is that the meaning of life is to serve others, and your vocation (e.g. married life, religious life, priesthood, etc.) is the main way that God intends for you to serve. It’s his primary path for you to find peace and fulfillment — and, therefore, no legitimate call from God would negatively impact your vocation. For example, God would never call a parish priest to do something that made him feel burdened and resentful of offering the Mass on Sunday, he would never call a father to something that made him feel tied down and frustrated by his wife and kids, etc. It doesn’t mean that the only things you ever do are directly related to the duties of your vocation, simply that those duties are your top priority.
On many occasions I’ve started pursuing opportunities that seemed great in theory, but made my life as a wife and a mother harder. I would walk around the house snapping at everyone, feeling angry that I didn’t have as much time as I wanted to work on these projects, bemoaning the basic duties that come with my vocation, etc. Thanks to the advice from my spiritual director, I would take this to mean that this wasn’t where God wanted me. And, sure enough, every time I made changes that improved my ability to live out my vocation well, I’d find myself on a far better path that made me much happier (and, surprisingly, often led to more success with the project than when I was sitting around fixating on it to the exclusion of my family).
3. What does your spouse think?
Christie always reminded me that God often speaks through our spouses. I’ve experienced this many times myself but, like with #1, I’d often get so caught up analyzing something that I’d forget to sit down with my husband and get his thoughts. (For people who are not married, an alternative might be to ask your parents, siblings, or a trusted friend.)
4. Are you taking care of yourself?
One of the most interesting conversations we ever had was when I told Christie how terrible my prayer life had been lately, and her first questions were about how I was taking care of myself. Was I eating well? Sleeping enough? Getting some exercise? Upon further examination, it came out that I was running myself ragged: I was stuffing myself with junk food all day, spending too much time online, staying up way too late, never exercising, then pounding coffee to help me muddle through each day. She pointed out that while God certainly blesses us when we suffer (e.g. in the case of chronic illness), self-inflicted suffering is different. Basically, it would be like if I’d been sitting around and hitting myself repeatedly with a hammer, then crying, “I feel bad and never feel like praying! So weird!” After I improved my diet, got my relationship to the internet in check, and changed my views about exercise, not only did I feel 100% better physically, but I found that my spiritual life was much better as well.
5. Are you making decisions based on fear or anger?
The Holy Spirit does not bark at us in a voice of anger. He doesn’t instill us with fear. He doesn’t make us feel bad about ourselves. Yet too often, I found myself making decisions out of these kinds of feelings — thankfully, Christie was there to point out that this was not of God. For example, at one point I was discerning whether or not to homeschool, but so much of my thinking was fear-based: I was worried about something I’d heard about the local school, worried about how one of my kids would do in public school, but also sure that I was too lazy and incompetent to teach my children, terrified of messing up their educations, etc. I couldn’t even engage in a rational analysis of the pros and cons of each path because my thoughts were consumed with fear, fear, fear.
Christie encouraged me to let go of those feelings and make a conscious effort to trust that God would lead us down the best path for us, and that he’d bless whichever path that was. Once I did that, I was able to let go of all those fearful thoughts, which freed my mind to objectively look at what I thought would be best for our family, as well as to listen to God’s promptings. In the end we have ended up homeschooling after trying a couple other options, but this time I’ve had complete peace about it, because I was no longer letting angst and fear drive my decisions.
6. Which path would bring you the most peace?
Similar to the above, Christie would sometimes ask me to imagine myself going through each of the various options that were before me in some dilemma, and to consider which one would bring me the most peace. Fairly often, I would find that when I actually took the time to do this, one option made me feel filled with the peace of the Holy Spirit, whereas other options that might seem better on paper left me riddled with anxiety — and the peace-filled option always ended up being the right path.
Additional Resources
I usually get a lot of great questions when I bring up the subject of spiritual direction, so here are some additional resources:
- If you’d like to find a spiritual director or find out more about what spiritual direction is like, here’s a post I wrote about that.
- This spiritual direction blog is a wealth of information on discernment and the spiritual life. Definitely worth bookmarking and reading regularly.
- This post called 9 Things to Do When Needing Direction has some great tips on this topic.