When I regard my life from a distance, it appears like a puzzle of interlocking roles. I am a retiree, spiritual director, member of a church, owner of a house, parent, partner, grandfather, godfather, amateur gardener, friend . . . and the list goes on.
I try to exercise these different roles with equanimity. Throughout my life, I have struggled to balance work with family or personal roles. A challenge is to accept growth and change in my roles. When my children were little, my task was to keep them safe from harm. My adult children don't need or want protection any longer from me. But they do want support and fatherly encouragement. My role as their father has changed.
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A spiritual theme that bubbled up front and center for me following the worst days of the covid-19 pandemic was disappointment. While locked in place at home for long months, I fantasized images of so-called "normal" life. I fondly recalled my favorite Indian restaurant as having the most delicious food in town. My congregation was visualized as uniformly smiling, encouraging, and friendly. Worship was always vital and nurturing. My friends and some family members were lovely and never jerks. Guess what? It took only several months of "normal" post-pandemic life to discover that the food and service at my Indian restaurant deserved a rating of just five out of ten stars. Many in my church neither smiled nor even acknowledged that I was there. Some persons I was close to did act like jerks. In 2018, I was invited to discuss how I view Scripture at a panel held at the Episcopal Church of All Saints in Indianapolis.
As a Borders bookseller during the aughts, I often heard customers make this confession: "I hate the book (or books) I am currently reading. But because I started this read, I feel I must plod on until I finish."
I have heard friends comment quietly that "My marriage is a mess. But I have put the best years of my life into it, and I'm going to see it through." In professional situations, people say, "I get a great salary and spent years in competitive higher education preparing for it. I hate my job but don't know how to escape it. What else would I do?" One of the gifts of sustained spiritual direction is the breakthrough moment when the client recognizes that an old story is now being expressed in a new way with a different flow, time line, and even vocabulary.
Often these stories are about grievances, regrets or remorse. Last year, for example, I experienced a very great loss of friendship. And I have rehearsed and told that story over and over to others . . . . and to myself at 3 AM when I couldn't sleep. But with time and multiple re-tellings, I now notice that the contours of the story are changing ever so subtly. This story is moving into the rearview mirror of my memory and as it does so it morphs. With gratitude to the late Professor Robert Mulholland of Asbury Theological Seminary, I define spiritual direction as: "Conversation aimed at taking the next step toward wholeness in Christ for the sake of the world." This is my operational understanding as a Christian working with Christians. However, when working with persons who do not identify with Christianity or with any particular faith tradition, I modify the definition to read: "Conversation aimed at taking the next step toward wholeness for the sake of the world."
At the end of January I was cleaning out a storage closet and noticed a bin towards the back next to a stack of framed pictures. I wondered what was in it. When I finally pulled it out of its hidden corner and opened it, I found that it was filled with about 3,000 slides from the early sixties up through the nineties of the last century. They were not identified. They were not organized in orderly boxes. The above picture portrays how I found these slides. On top of the slides was a broken slide viewer, also a vintage product.
Truly, this was a case of out of sight, out of mind. I had long forgotten these slides in my enthusiasm for pictures and digital photography. At present, I don't have a high end camera. But my iPhone 13 does a fabulous job. About eight years ago I was invited to preach at the installation of a dear friend as rector of an Episcopal parish in California's Bay Area. The weekend was packed full of related events: receptions, dinners, workshops, even a welcome visit to the nearby vineyards. Returning home after so many goings-on, I was exhausted and my nerves were frazzled.
San Francisco International Airport did not make things better. Sunday night business travelers were packed into the concourses. Lots of movement. Lots of noise. During my teenage years in Denver, my parents encouraged me to "try out" many kinds of spiritual experiences. True, we were firmly established at South Broadway Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) where my maternal grandparents joined in the 1930's. But my mom and dad thought it important that I know and experience a spectrum of religious or spiritual experiences and activities so that I might find my own approach. Now I am in my late seventies and this process is still alive and well.
From October 16-18, 2021 I attended virtually the 8th Convening of the Parliament of World Religions www.parliamentofreligions.org This mother organization of modern inter-religious dialogue was founded during the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893 by some progressive white Christians (not including luminaries such as the then Archbishop of Canterbury.) Only a handful of representatives of non-Christian faiths attended. These included the abbott of the Engaku-ji Buddhist monastery in Kamakura, Japan, Shama Shaku whose letter of acceptance was written by the "preeminent cultural translator of the Zen Buddhist tradition from Japan to North America," D. T. Suzuki (see Eck, Encountering God, p. 25.) The sole Muslim was a New Englander who was a convert. The Hindu representative was Swami Vivekananda who greeted participants by noting that he was representing a religion "that has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance," Eck, p. 26.) |
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March 2023
AuthorDan Hoffman is an Indianapolis USA based spiritual director, supervisor of spiritual directors, and workshop/retreat leader. This occasional blog discusses things he is thinking about and wants to share. Comments are always welcome. |