So your son got an academic scholarship plus some money to play college soccer!

What more can you hope for in the suburbs? You win!

But what happens when your athletically gifted (and very bright) son is not doing so well in college? So poorly, in fact, that he is on the brink of losing the scholarship?

A friend and business partner recently sent this email to his 18-year-old son who was starting the second semester of his first year in college. The kid is smart but enjoyed college a bit too much first semester. My friend had just learned of his son’s final grades for first semester.

The subject line for this email was: “College – the actual school part…”

****
So, college. There are a few models.

Model 1: You go to classes, study really hard, have some fun, graduate early or with honors and land a great job.

Model 2: You go to classes, study, have a lot of fun, graduate in 4 years and find a good job.

Model 3: You go to most classes, study occasionally, have loads of zany and/or whacky fun, maybe blow an academic scholarship “whoops!”, pay way more than you needed to for college, graduate in 5 years and then get a job that you don’t really like, but hey, it pays the bills.

Model 4: You blow off most classes, never study, party, flunk out, live at home, go to community college, work at Starbucks, get your high school girlfriend pregnant and marry her even though you don’t love her – and what’s worse – she has 3 cats, get a dog, develop anger management issues, get arrested for assaulting a 16 year old mini-mart clerk who won’t sell you cigarettes, serve some time, get released early on good behavior, move south to find spotty construction work, get hooked on Hostess pastry products, lose a few teeth over time (no dental insurance), gain excessive weight and then die in a freak accident involving a ladder, binoculars and coaxial cable.

As I reflect on your first semester, I would have to say that you are on track with Model 3. My hope for you was for something more along the lines of Model 2.

What model do you hope to achieve for yourself?

Talk to you tomorrow. Time to suck it up a bit…
*****

On Good Friday late afternoon, my family and I traipsed over to our church for a “prayer walk.” We herded our three kids through a series of rooms dimly lit with images and crosses and candles, as we attemped to remember the darkness of that day. Our kids are 11, 8, and 6.

One of the last stations was our semi-darkened and empty sanctuary, where we sat near the front watching PowerPoint slides of the Passion of the Christ. The slideshow was on a loop and set at several-second intervals.

One slide looked to be a pencil sketch of the crucifixion, with Jesus outstretched on the cross. Right before the slide appeared, my oldest had asked me a historical question related to the Passion, and it led to a wonderful teaching moment. We whispered back and forth for a minute or so. But then the slide appeared, and Christian said, abruptly, “He had a nice six-pack.”

Christian was referring to Jesus, of course. The six-pack was Jesus’ tight abs, as rendered by the artist.

I couldn’t muffle my giggle, his comment so random, outrageous, pre-adolescent.

To the wonderful pre-pubescent and adolescent mind, everything is about me, myself, my self. There is no “other,” there is nothing that is “not me.” Everything is part of me and about me. I see Jesus on the cross and his body and his abs, and then ruminate on my abs and think it would cool to have abs like his.

The same is true of the adolescent spiritual self, which much of modern religion, especially that of many suburban churches, tends to perpetuate. Everything is about me. My heroism to save the world. My attempts to keep promises for God. My personal spiritual journey.

My sense is that we all struggle to break through the adolescent cocoon of Christian spirituality, the wonderful phase when we love God for the gifts of God and the ideas of God and the theology of God. But we haven’t yet learned to love God for God, because that would mean that there is something Other in the world that is “not me.”

Thoughts?

I don’t slow down easily. So I’ve always been baffled by the urgency of the discipline of silence. I’ve never resonated with spirituality books that trumpet spiritual retreats. They always sound a bit feminine. Only women with no or grown kids, and pastors and monks have such luxury.

I once visited an Orthodox “skete” in southwestern Wisconsin. It’s a live monastary for Orthodox monks, tucked away in shadows of rolling hills covered with pine trees. You can tour the monk cells once a year in August. A friend and I were there in early May. We stepped inside one of the buildings, a small trailer house with an Orthodox cross on top—it was the church. As we left, I spied a young, lanky monk in black, wrapping up a yard hose next to the church. He waved to me with a big smile. As part of his vow, he doesn’t speak. His silence reminded me of Thomas Merton’s silent Trappist community in Kentucky.

When I’ve spoken on the topic of one of the toxins from my book Death by Suburb—and thus on the practice of silence—the women often nod their heads. Perhaps that’s because silence seems like such a luxury to some of them with children. My wife says she’d simply like a few moments alone in the bathroom without one of our three calling out for her or trying to barge in.

Silence really doesn’t make sense in life’s adolescent phase (which starts around 11 and these days runs, uh, into one’s 40s). I just finished reading German philosopher Max Picard’s arcane book called “The World of Silence,” a tough read, at least for me. But near the end of the book, he writes,

“God became man for the sake of man. This event is so utterly extraordinary and so much against the experience of reason and against everything the eye has seen, that man is not able to make response to it in words. A layer of silence lies between this event and man, and in this silence man approaches the silence that surrounds God Himself.”

Okay, I’m not sure if that is a really deep thought or just a bunch of whooey. But then Picard writes this: “It is a sign of the love of God that a mystery is always separated from man by a layer of silence.”

Now I’m going to make a huge leap: after the adolescent phase of life when we seek to love God by making all sorts of promises to make a difference with our lives and weep at our besetting sins, promising to try harder next time, we come to the hope of a more adult spirituality. It’s the hope not of loving God but of being loved by God.

This has great potential for life after 40 and into our later years. But it requires us to approach the mystery of God with silence. To enter into the silence. To practice silence. Even if only 5 minutes a day for three days a week. Something. Nothing grand or heroic. Just a regular break from the noise. A break from the doing. A break from the anxiety of trying to control my life.

And the promise of experiencing both the mystery and love of God.

At a party, an acquaintance recently told me he is often amazed at how easily some of his clients seem to be able to manage a compartmentalized life.

A pychiatrist, he has heard it all. In our conversation, he implicated men, specifically: some can carry on an affair for years while managing their work and family life. I suppose women can do the same.

He also mentioned the wives of such men. Some spouses of compartmentalized men see the dots (the odd hours, frequent trips, lack of interest in sex) and that they connect (that there is an affair) but avoid the truth. Call it denial or the refusal to alter the status quo. The marital conspiracy can hold for years. Or it may be an avoidance of the suffering that the truth might create. Denial is not all bad.

I’m currently reading Thomas Merton’s autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, in which Merton interrupts his narrative now and then to comment on human pyschology and Christian spirituality. He writes about the avoidance of suffering:

“Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt.”

Is that really true?

Merton did force me to ask myself, “Am I avoiding reality in a certain part of my life?”

And, “Will God truly be present in my darkest and most lonely moments when I can’t avoid suffering anymore?”

I am annoyed by most Advent sermons, which can be summarized as “Find some time to be quiet amid the hubbub to find Jesus.”

Yeah, right. I can’t seem to discipline my life for solitude the other 11 months, yet somehow during one of the most religiously programmatic and economically crazy times of the year, I’m suppose to find time to be still. To wait on the Lord. To say no to the self and say yes to God.

Not going to happen. No matter my good intentions after leaving the 11 o’clock service. My disciplines go on vacation, perhaps Cancun, in December; I never start new ones. Or, should I say, it hasn’t happened yet. Perhaps another 44 seasons of Advent sermons will change me.

I think the real Advent message is this: Don’t try to swim against the consumeristic current this Advent Season.

Let the riptide carry you out into the deep, where you can drown in personal debt, a fuller loneliness, and a complete immersion into your self. Give until your physically sick. Push yourself to the limits. Give your kids everything they ask for, and then feel guilty that you didn’t do quite enough. Never say no to any invitation to a party. And always, always – give a gift to everyone, especially to your dog groomer and the assistant substitute Sunday School teacher. Do everything with excellence this Christmas season!

January may be the month when I’m most open to the message of silence, when my distended, bloated sense of self is near the end of itself, like a carnival grinding to a halt before it moves to the next city. January’s spirituality question is, actually, the old Dr. Phil question: “So how did that work for you?”

The hope of Advent may actually be the promise of grace in January.

In the New Testament, those on top (in power) are always asked to descend, and those on the bottom (without power) are always given the invitation to ascend.

Thus, you have the two primary trajectories of Christian spirituality—crucifixion and resurrection.

In his two-tape audio series, Men & Women: The Journey of Spiritual Transformation, Franciscan Richard Rohr argues that for men in the second half of life, often the journey into spirituality requires that they learn how to descend, how to give up power. For women, archetypically, they need to learn how to ascend, since the first half of life was spent in the one-down position—typical for most women in patriarchal societies, where women were treated as second class citizens.

My wife, Jana, often reminds me that for years she didn’t know that my grandpa, whom I loved dearly, had two sisters in addition to his four brothers—because the old family stories always revolved around the five Goetz boys. It was as if the two sisters didn’t exist.

The language that Rohr uses is the language of the gospels—death, burial, resurrection. The most troubling part of Rohr’s construct for male and female spirituality is that it is the male who must learn to descend in the second half of life, since he has through career, privilege, and position ascended in the first half.

I squirm at this: The person with privilege must die to self. Must die to power. Must die to the notion of the endless ascent in this life.

The alternative to descending, says Rohr, is the embittered journey—the angry old fool, who at the end of life is miserable and is miserable to be around. We’ve all cringed at the remarks of an angry old fool in a church business meeting.

What Rohr is describing is the Paschal Mystery—the mystery of suffering and how it transforms us into the likeness of Christ. The art of all true spirituality is the art of letting go of self, of power, and my notions of what constitutes the good life.

There’s not much in life—my business, my family, even my church world—that can teach me about the Paschal Mystery. Suffering itself is the great teacher, if we stop fighting it.

In The Ends of the Earth, journalist Robert Kaplan makes a distinction between refugees and nomads: “Refugees flee a place because they have no choice, but nomads are pioneers on the make. Nomads are the makers of history. Refugees are its victims.”

One chooses to move, the other is forced to move.

Pioneers on the make—the concept embraces several key elements, one of which is movement. Spiritual pioneers are headed somewhere. There’s a restlessness that keeps them scouting for the next frontier. It’s the not the anxiety of the Shirker, whose narcissistic spirituality symbolizes the worst of religion in the ‘burbs. The nomad’s restlessness comes, I think, from an occasional taste of the presence of Christ, of what life can be like in the three-dimensional form of the moment.

Never fully sated, the nomad, then, searches for more. It’s a delight to spot this in those in their seventies and eighties. The pursuit is still on.

One additional thought:

Too often the so-called deeper spiritual life is romantacized and thought of as something cut from a different cloth than that of our ordinary life. This, though, is a form of escapism, as if somehow you can flee dirty diapers, a dead-end career, dying, and all forms of suffering that are endemic to this life.

Thoughts?

I’ve been working on a hypothesis about Christian spirituality that I’d like you to react to: that the deeper one goes in his or her relationship with Christ, the less religious he or she becomes.

What say ye?

The problem, of course, is with two words: deeper and religious.

I am deep person. Aren’t you?

The alternative, I guess, is to be a shallow person, and that doesn’t roll off the tongue well. My kids like to play in the deeper areas of Northside Pool, not the shallow areas. You get to dive into the deep parts. The waterslide dumps into the deep part. The lifeguards get animated when you try to dive into the 3-foot areas. There’s less fun in the shallow pool, once or if you know how to swim.

How nice that we’re all so deep!

The other problem is with the word religious. I grew up in a tradition that said something like “Christianity isn’t a religion so much as it is a relationship.” Religious and religion, of course, are not the same. One is an adjective, the other is a noun.

Perhaps by “religious,” I mean that the further one hikes into the kingdom of God, the less he or she feels compelled to talk in spiritual language, the less he or she cares about speaking the language of religion. Too often “deep” is associated with “Bible knowledge,” and the language and subculture it creates.

I run a small business and one chip on my shoulder is when I hear people talk about being a “Christian businessperson.” I hate that. A friend once told me that every time he hears someone say that, he runs as fast as he can in the other direction.

Perhaps that’s one thing that I mean by less religious: you don’t need to talk so much. You know that the gospel is primarily about doing, not yapping. Yappers splash around in the shallow parts.

The basic premise of Death by Suburb is that while the suburban environment may at times be toxic to your faith, the answer isn’t to flee. The answer is to stay. The answer is to figure it out. To build into your life the key spiritual practices that help us stay awake to the work of God in this world.

The alternative, I guess, is to say that to experience the fullness of God, you need either to move to the country where the pressures appear to be less or move to another place that may be more friendly to faith. For those who can afford it, that’s an option: You can either buy a second home in the rural or move there permanently.

But what about those who will be forever rooted in suburbia. Are we doomed to a thin or thinner spirituality?

I didn’t realize when I wrote the book that the premise that Jesus can be found in the ‘burbs would be controversial. Apparently, it is. I’ve received several angry emails from people who read the book and disagreed with the core premise. In fact, if you go to Amazon.com and pull up my book, you can scroll down and read a short but very angry review of my book. The person is from Wheaton, where I live. I don’t know him or her, because the name associated with the review is, apparently, not real.

I’d like your comments: What is wrong with the theology of staying in the ‘burbs? Am I letting people off the hook? Doesn’t Jesus require a more radical form of discipleship? Does Jesus want EVERYONE who desires to live more reflectly to sell their house and move to India or Wisconsin?

Is there a lower and higher path of Christian spirituality? And only those who commit to getting out will receive the “Well done, my good and faithful servant” when they see their Maker?

In 1969, Jack Trout, an advertising executive, coined the word positioning. Later, in the eighties, he wrote the hugely successful marketing book by the same name.

In short, if you’re not the leader in a business category, then you need to be concerned about your position in relationship to the leader and to the smaller competitors like you.

If, for example, the software that you sell is not tops in its category, then you need to figure out how to position your product in comparison to its competitors. That is, if you want to survive.

If you produce an MP3 player, but it’s not the IPOD, then how do you market your product when the leader has such powerful brand recognition?

Here’s the key: positioning is not what YOU think your position is. Positioning is how your prospects view your product or service.

So the art of marketing is the art of controlling the message of your product or service. Your messaging is key to positioning your product in the minds of your prospects.

In the ‘burbs, positioning is the attempt to control how your neighbors or acquaintenances think of you:

• “Our son Shelton got into the university’s business school directly. Lots of other students can only apply to the business school after two years in the general ed program.”

Which means: “We have a really smart son. So we are smart. And that means that we really are significant. We want you to know that.”

• “We give our daughter $5 for every A on her report card. Boy, she has more money to invest than we do. Ha, ha, ha.”

Which means: The same as above.

• The real estate person says, “I don’t see you living in this neighborhood.”

Which means to me: “I can’t live in such a small house. What will others think?”

No matter your economic or “bright-child” status, positioning is subtle but spiritually crippling.

Positioning prevents us from listening to others (we’re concerned only with making sure he or she knows the exalted truth about ourselves). And it feeds the self. In the journey to God, it is the self that must die.

The next time you’re compelled to trumpet your talented-and-gifted family’s accomplishments, why don’t you resist the urge. Stop. And instead, ask a question about someone else’s child.

Listen.

And then act as if you really care.