A Secret Ingredient for Spiritual Success

I read last week a fascinating New York Times article titled "Secret Ingredient for Success."  The authors interviewed highly successful people about what made them successful and discovered one common element.  The discovery was surprising--somewhat even counter-intuitive.  Beyond their natural talent and skill, their personalities, their strengths, their passion and vision, how hard they worked, their success came from this quality:  intentional, regular, rigorous self reflection.  Self assessment.  Self evaluation. It's called double loop learning.

"In this mode we question every aspect of our approach, including our methodology, biases and deeply held assumptions. This more psychologically nuanced self-examination requires that we honestly challenge our beliefs and summon the courage to act on that information, which may lead to fresh ways of thinking about our lives and our goals."  (Camille Sweeney and Josh Gosfield)

It got me thinking about the way so many people go through life.  We just kind of float along, going with the flow, never really reflecting or thinking about life, trying to avoid obstacles as much as possible, taking the easy path as often as we can, the path of least resistance.

And even with our spirituality.  We tend to rarely think about it.  We just do whatever it is we've always done, never really evaluating or reflecting about it, whether or not we're learning anything new, or whether or not it's actually changing us into better people.  We just slide by spiritually.

The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates once said, "The unexamined life is not worth living."

I was especially reminded of the power of this value of self reflection last weekend.  I conducted the first of three weekend retreats called "Ignite the Fire of Your Spiritual Life."  Our small group spend a total of 10 hours doing rigorous self-assessment and evaluation.  The purpose of this process was to give each person an opportunity to take stock of their spiritual life to determine what is working effectively and meaningfully and what isn't.

And we engaged within community--not just doing personal reflection but also sharing some of our reflections with each other.  The process of hearing and listening and being heard and listened to is extremely powerful.  When people are willing to hold the space for us as we do our work in a way that's safe and affirming and accepting, we are empowered to grow and transform in beautiful ways.

One of the participants texted me the next day and said, "Thank you for a breakthrough life-changing retreat--my spiritual life is already better ... Can't wait to see what more there is to come and I know it will be very good."

That's the impact of healthy and effective self reflection.  It comes from being willing to be intentional.  To pay attention to your life, your spirituality.  To do it honestly, authentically, transparently, participatively.

Most wisdom traditions agree on the process for enlightenment and spiritual wholeness.  Confucianism describes it as becoming fully awake, waking up to life, seeing life clearly.  According to the Li Chi, the classic Confucian guide to becoming spiritually developed,

"there must be a turning point in life when the maturing individual recognizes that simply being a human is not sufficient to becoming fully human."

Spiritual maturity is not an automatic occurrence.  We can't slide into spirituality.

Jesus called that conscious turning point in one's life repentance.  "Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand."  It begins with awareness, waking up to our need.  It continues with desire, seeing something better--something more--that we want.  It involves an intentional turning around to chart a new path to receive that Life.  "Wake up so you can experience the depths of God's kingdom that is right in front of you, indeed, right inside of you," said Jesus.

One of the poignant stories Jesus told was of the ten bridesmaids waiting through the midnight hours for the appearance of the groom.  All of them had lamps.  Five of them had enough oil for the lamps to keep burning through the night.  So that when the groom finally showed up, they were awake to be swept up into the wedding party and join the festivities.  The other five missed out.  No light.  Sleepy.

Light.  Wakefulness.  Clarity.  Awareness.

Some of the markers Dr. David Benner, in his book Soulful Spirituality, describes as identifying a mature spirituality include

"being grounded in reality and alive to the present moment, a personal philosophy that makes life meaningful, the capacity for forgiveness and letting go, inner freedom of choice and response, the capacity for reflection on experience."  (p. 35)

These qualities don't just suddenly show up in our lives.  They're developed.  We awaken to them through reflection, intention, attention.  Like the five wise bridesmaids, we stock up on enough oil, we trim our lamps, light them, and use them to become fully awake to what's happening inside us and around us.  We repent.

I'm planning two more spiritual retreat cycles this Winter/Spring; one in San Francisco again (April 5-6), and another in Walla Walla, Washington (March 22-23).  Here's the link for the details:  "Ignite the Fire of Your Spiritual Life."  If you want a powerful opportunity to engage in awakening your spiritual life in new and transformational ways, I invite you to check out these events.  It could be a turning point for you.

The two authors of the above New York Times article interviewed tennis great Martina Navratilova to find out the secret of her ultimate success:

"[She] told us that after a galling loss to Chris Evert in 1981, she questioned her assumption that she could get by on talent and instinct alone. She began a long exploration of every aspect of her game. She adopted a rigorous cross-training practice (common today but essentially unheard of at the time), revamped her diet and her mental and tactical game and ultimately transformed herself into the most successful women’s tennis player of her era.  What we learned from conversation with high achievers is that challenging our assumptions, objectives, at times even our goals, may sometimes push us further than we thought possible."

I wonder why so many of us fail to engage in this kind of rigorous self reflection and self evaluation in such a vital area of life, our spirituality?  Maybe it's because we simply don't know how to go about doing that.  Maybe we're afraid of failing or not achieving anything different than what we already have.  Maybe we just don't think about it--we're simply too busy or distracted by the rest of life.  Or maybe it's just not that important or appealing to us.

But maybe it is time to shine the light.  Time for the secret ingredient.  Time to awaken.  Fully alive instead of sleepwalking.  The best way to success and joy!

Transformational Spirituality Pays Attention to Walls

Gordon MacDonald, author and speaker on spirituality, tells about one Christmas vacation when their son Mark flew home from college and greeted his parents with an unexpected gift – a cute little ferret named Bandit.  Unexpected, for sure.  And not exactly a gift they were hoping for. But in the following weeks, the cute little furry animal worked its way into their hearts – Bandit was cuddly, fun, funny.  They enjoyed him.

But enjoyment stopped after about four months.  Bandit began to grow up, and they started learning the hard way that adult ferrets can become nasty – they bite, they exert independence by neglecting simple hygiene producing a stinky house – it all overwhelmed their delicate senses.

Gordon and his wife Gail soon lost all affection for this Christmas gift critter.  Which led them to begin considering how they could get “rid” of Bandit.  The idea finally emerged:  Why don’t we take Bandit up to our cabin in the woods and give him his freedom.  After all, the acres of forest and woods will be perfect for him to live and roam and enjoy!  Nothing there will be bothered by his smelly habits!

Gail said she’d feel more comfortable if she could first go and talk to the pet store people to see what they thought.  Later that day, she came home and told Gordon:  “The pet store people explained that we shouldn’t release a tamed ferret (or any tamed animal for that matter) in the woods.  It would be dead within twenty-four hours because it wouldn’t know how to find its own food and it wouldn’t know who its enemies are or how to defend itself again them.”

The irony of the situation struck them both.  By taming this ferret, by taking it out of the real world and teaching it to live in the safety and seclusion of their nice home, they had destroyed its ability to live where it had been born to inhabit.  It could never be a free ferret.

Is it possible we do the same thing with our faith and our spirituality?  By trying to forge faith and spirituality within the exclusive confines of a personal, small, safe, isolated, and secluded world, we create a faith that doesn’t work in the real world – a limited faith and spirituality – a potentially timid, narrow, insecure, ineffective, unliberated spirituality.

I love the way Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it.  Bonhoeffer was the Protestant pastor in Germany during WWII who became convicted that he should preach and write against Hitler and the genocidal Nazi regime.  He boldly broke ranks with many Christian leaders of that time who were either silent or supportive of Nazism.  He ended up being arrested and jailed and then finally executed by Hitler just as the Allied Forces struck the final blow of liberation in Europe.  Here’s what he wrote:

“It is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith … By this worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities.”

Effective spirituality, transformational spirituality, has to be forged and lived in the real world.  It has to work and make sense and produce positive effect in the WHOLE world, not just our safe, small worlds.

So in my spiritual community Second Wind, we’ve had a series during September called “APPLYING YOUR SPIRITUALITY TO THIS WEEK’S GLOCAL HOT SPOT."  Our goal is to inform our spirituality by means of seeing the rest of the world beyond our individual lives.  So each week, we focused in on a current issue taking place in the world (*GLOCAL = think global + act local).  What is the “crisis/need/situation” – what are the issues involved – who are the people involved – how is the situation being currently handled – how are we impacted?  And how does this situation inform and shape our spirituality?  What kind of spirituality does it take to work in this situation?

The whole attempt is to inform our spirituality and faith with the real world, opening ourselves up to a bigger picture than we would typically allow for ourselves.

This last Saturday we looked at the current plight of the Roma, Europe's largest minority group that originally migrated from Northwestern India back in the 11th century.  They traditionally held slave-type positions among the aristocracy and monasteries of Central and Western Europe.  And now they find themselves spread out all over the continent and beyond, often living in camps under squalid and marginalized conditions from the rest of society, barely able to eke out subsistence to stay alive and provide for themselves.  Last year, Amnesty International described current realities:  "The Roma community suffers massive discrimination throughout Europe. Denied their rights to housing, employment, health care and education, Roma are often victims of forced evictions, racist attacks and police ill-treatment."

The Roma have especially been in the news the last few months as France's President Nicolas Sarkozy moved to expel over 1,000 Roma from his country back to Romania and Bulgaria, creating quite a firestorm of controversy among the nations of the European Union.  It's forcing leaders to address this significant humanitarian crisis within their borders.

So how does our spirituality and faith inform our response to this contemporary situation?  How does this significant human need shape and inform our spirituality and faith?

Timothy Egan, in The New York Times last week said it well:  “Perhaps the best way to judge the health of a nation’s heart is by how it treats the shunned.”

He's certainly echoing the sentiments of historic sacred scriptures.  Jesus himself put it this way:  "If you've shown compassion to one of the least of these, you've shown it to me."

In other words, a Christlike heart (a healthy heart) manifests Christlike compassion, especially to the shunned and marginalized of our world (in Jesus' statement of what the final judgment is about, he refers to acts of compassion to the hungry, thirsty, stranger, naked, and prisoner).  And the amazing thing about Jesus' statement - that reveals how important this issue is to Jesus and the values of God's Kingdom - is that when we show compassion to those in need, we are in reality showing compassion to Jesus - Jesus incarnates himself within the "shunned" person so that we're actually encountering and relating to Jesus himself.  And in the End, says Jesus, we are judged by our response to these people (and therefore to him).  Quite a different paradigm from the picture of Judgment so many religious groups paint of the End, where we're judged by what we believe, by our subscription to the doctrines of those religions and how closely we align with them.

Transformational spirituality is informed by a global view of the world, not just our narrow individual every day worlds.  Transformational spirituality, the kind that really works and makes a difference, chooses to actively engage with the "least of these," refusing to ignore the shunned, the strangers among us, the aliens and foreigners, the dispossessed, the refugees and immigrants, the sexual "other," all of those people groups who are too often labeled and judged as "less than" or wrong or unworthy for whatever reason.

This is a raw and honest kind of spirituality that refuses the easy way out, that allows itself to be confronted by those most unlike us, that chooses to look beyond the surface and in fact discover that we are one family under God, interconnected, interdependent, and intertwined in the life of this planet.  How we navigate this complex, complicated, and yet very human journey is how we are ultimately judged, says Jesus.  Sobering and yet exciting and brimming with possibility!

I'm reminded of Robert Frost's profound poem Mending Wall.  He pictures himself and his neighbor walking along the stone fence that separates their two properties, talking together about the purpose of the wall, the sections that need mending and how.  His neighbor's view is that "good fences make good neighbors."  He, however, doesn't see it that way.

"There where it is we do not need the wall: / He is all pine and I am apple orchard. / My apple trees will never get across / And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. / He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder / If I could put a notion in his head: / 'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it / Where there are cows? / But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out, / And to whom I was like to give offense.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall, / That wants it down.'"

Transformational spirituality is about taking down walls where there shouldn't be any.  It's about refusing to shut ourselves out from the "shunned."  It's about engaging the world of hurt, human suffering and pain.  It's about not allowing our sight to become mono-focused and narrow to our own little worlds.  It's about compassion for "the least of these."

Rarely easy to do.  I admit.  But, as Timothy Egan reminds us, it reveals the true health of our hearts.  And who among us doesn't want a healthy heart!

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