How My Theology Has Changed, Thank God

 

Part X: Latin American Liberation Theology

My first eight posts in this series articulate the theological ways I searched to find meaning again, and a positive relationship with God, in response to the grief that consumed much of my life after the deaths of my parents when I was in high school, and my first wife, Pauline, after ten years of marriage.

 

In my last post, on Feminist Theology, I described another way in which our theology can change. It is not in response to our own painful experience, but to the painful experiences of others that is shared with us when we have an open mind and heart. The remainder of my posts in this series will be of this type, and most of them fall into the category of what we call “liberation” theologies,” which search to free us from old ways that no longer work, if they ever did. 

 

Traditional theology, which we often call Orthodoxy, begins “above” with traditional interpretations of theology and with the teachings of the church and then applies those understandings to our life in the world.  Liberation theologies always begin “below,” in our lived experiences, or as we learn of the lived experiences of others and then turn to the tradition for insight and guidance.

 

One of the primary ways in which this happened for me was on my first trip to the interior of Mexico in December 1983. The travel seminar began in Mexico City where two Catholic Sisters took us to a massive landfill on the outskirts of the city, the fourth largest city in the world with a population over 23 million people. Our van stopped at the top of the dump ground so we could get out and look down into the landfill. It was massive, with garbage piled high and deep as far as you could see, and an odor so strong it made your eyes water. 

 

Photo taken by me, December 1983

We drove down into the landfill where we found families living in lean-to homes, made from whatever materials they might find, and making their living by sorting through the garbage, for food to eat and for items they might sell. And right in the middle of this massive landfill was a soccer field for the kids to play on. We also saw large garbage bags that were turquoise in color. When we asked the Sisters why they were that color, they told us it was because that was how they got rid of hospital garbage, and the turquoise color was so that people would know not to go through it. 

However, driving a little further, we saw children going through the turquoise bags. We could not believe what we were witnessing! It was impossible to hold back the tears. The Sisters then explained that the poverty is so great that there is a waiting list of people who hope to live in the landfill one day. A child may be born in the landfill, grow up there and have children of their own, and then die there. It may be the only life some people ever know.

 

In the months to follow, that painful and bewildering experience haunted my dreams and my theological reflection. How can someone see, smell and feel such a painful reality and not respond in some way? Two years later, when we had moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico to live and teach, I began to find an answer. 

 

Dr. Mark W. Thomsen was the Director of the Division for World Mission, and he had an idea for a theological conference at our Lutheran seminary in Mexico City, which was scheduled for December of 1985. The American Lutheran Church invited 14 South American theologians and 14 North American theologians to gather to discuss the meaning of Lutheran theology for the contemporary era, especially as it pertained to the massive poverty throughout the southern hemisphere. The plan was to take 14 themes of Lutheran theology, with 7 major presentations made by Southern and 7 by Northern theologians, with another theologian from the opposite hemisphere responding to each lecture. 

 

Invitations were sent to 28 Lutheran theologians, 14 From North America and 14 from Central and South America. Every single one accepted the invitation, anxious to begin what we all knew would be a profound dialogue. 

 

Dr. Milton Schwantes

I remember vividly the beginning of the conference. It felt like being at the United Nations. Everyone had headsets, as all presentations and discussions would be translated into Spanish, Portuguese and English. As the conference was about to begin, a profound theologian from Brazil, Dr. Milton Schwantes, asked to speak. First, he thanked the planners for the invitation to come and he stated how pleased he and the other southern theologians were to be part of such a dialogue. Then he went on to say, “However, we have a problem with how this conference is set up. You are starting with doctrines of Lutheranism, and we are asking what these teachings mean for us today. However, that is not the way we do theology in the South. We begin with the pain and suffering of our people, and then ask what our theology and the church has to say to them.”

 

For a few moments, the conference fell into stunned silence. With those few words Dr. Schwantes had captured the challenge before us. He was advocating for  “theology from below,” the beginning of all liberation theologies. This was the answer to my intuition that the spiritual journey does not begin with doctrine, but with our quest to find meaning and hope in the midst of the suffering we ourselves experience, and the suffering we encounter all around us in the world. 

 

It was time for me to think through again the meaning of “salvation,” which, for me, growing up in the church, was our primary goal and included two elements: living in the forgiveness of sins in this life, and the hoped-for entrance into a life after death in the presence of God. However, that was not the primary understanding in the biblical world. The Greek soteria meant "deliverance from powers of harm, which included rescue from serious peril,  being saved from sin through forgiveness, and experiencing health and well-being. [See Shirley Paulson, The Bible and Beyond Blog]  

 

Focusing on the teachings of Jesus, one can readily see this understanding: he focused on freeing people from illness, racism, poverty, loneliness, and then invites his followers into a Movement built on equality, mercy, compassion, reconciliation, love and hope in the midst of the many calamities of life. For liberation theology, this means calling the church to include in its understanding of salvation the freeing of persons from the many ways in which they are oppressed, abused, marginalized and discounted in the earthly realm. As such, this approach searches for a true and whole freedom not only from spiritual sin, but from the many ways people are imprisoned by the conditions in their lives.

Last October Gustavo Gutiérrez of Peru, called the “father of liberation theology,” died at age 96. In 1971 he had published A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation, which grew out of his concern for people experiencing economic poverty amid the collapse of political projects in the 1960s that tried to modernize the region, exacerbated by the political repression by military juntas in several South and Central American countries. The result was widespread violence and poverty—something that, for Gutiérrez and his colleagues, was not natural, but produced by severe social and economic inequality. 

Leonardo Boff, a Brazilian theologian, explains his understanding of this new theology: “That was the innovation introduced by Gustavo Gutiérrez and others—including myself—when we conceived theology starting from the suffering and oppression faced by the great majority of the Latin American people. The poor are oppressed, and all oppression cries for liberation,” [See Eduardo Campos Lima, The Christian Century, November 1, 2024.]

 

Liberation theology proposes to fight poverty by addressing its alleged source, the sin of greed. In so doing, it explores the relationship between Christian theology (especially Roman Catholic) and political activism, especially in relation to economic justice, poverty, and human rights. The principal methodological innovation is seeing theology from the perspective of the poor and the oppressed. For example, Jon Sobrino, of El Salvador, argues that the poor are a privileged channel of God's grace. According to Gutiérrez, God is revealed as the One with deep concern for those people who are "insignificant", "marginalized", "unimportant", "needy", "despised", and "defenseless". Moreover, he makes clear that the terminology of "the poor" in the Christian Bible has social and economic connotations that etymologically go back to the Greek word ptōchos, explaining: "Preference implies the universality of God's love, which excludes no one. It is only within the framework of this universality that we can understand the preference, that is, 'what comes first'." [Gutierrez,The God of Life, p. 112.] 

I was blessed living in Mexico to see liberation theology at work in the lives of the poor. I attended many Bible studies, called Base Christian Communities, where folks in poor neighborhoods gather to explore the relationship of God and the Bible to their poverty. I marveled at people’s generosity with each other, in spite of their great poverty, and their commitment to support each other and then work together to confront the ways both church and government often ignored them and even at times took advantage of them. 

These powerful experiences became the basis of my Doctor of Ministry thesis on Liberation Theology and the Base Christian Community Movement, and this new theological orientation would eventually change not only how I understood the world but also the ways in which I would do ministry. From preaching to confirmation to adult education I tried to begin with the pain and suffering and joys of the people with whom I worked as together we searched our rich and powerful Biblical and theological traditions for insight, guidance and inspiration. [For further study, see my recent book available from Amazon: Freed to Love and Live Again: My Journey through Grief to Wounded Healing, a Liberating Theology and Social Justice Ministry, especially Chapters 3-4.]

 

St. Paul talks about the power of faith, hope and love, and I saw in these Base Communities all three, including an unrelenting hope stronger than suffering and even death. As Rubem Alves of Brazil wrote in his book, Tomorrow’s Child:

 

What is hope?
It is the pre-sentiment that imagination
is more real and reality is less real than it looks.
It is the hunch that the overwhelming brutality
of facts that oppress and repress us
is not the last word.
It is the suspicion that reality is more complex
than the realists want us to believe.
That the frontiers of the possible are not
determined by the limits of the actual;
and in a miraculous and unexplained way
life is opening up creative events
which will open the way to freedom and resurrection –
but the two – suffering and hope
must live from each other.
Suffering without hope produces resentment and despair.
But, hope without suffering creates illusions, naïveté
and drunkenness.
So let us plant dates
even though we who plant them will never eat them.
We must live by the love of what we will never see.
That is the secret discipline.
It is the refusal to let our creative act
be dissolved away by our need for immediate sense experience
and is a struggled commitment to the future of our grandchildren.
Such disciplined hope is what has given prophets, revolutionaries and saints,
the courage to die for the future they envisage.
They make their own bodies the seed of their highest hopes.

This hope grows out of an unrelenting focus on the love of God for the whole world and a trust not only in God, but in the community of love that surrounds each of us. This deep spiritual understanding is expressed powerfully in the poetry of Julia Esquivel of Guatemala, who was an elementary school teacher who also studied theology:

Mary Erickson, Guatemala, 1986

I am no longer afraid of death

I know well

Its dark and cold corridors

Leading to life.

I am afraid rather of that life

Which does not come out of death,

Which cramps our hands

And slows our march.

I am afraid of my fear

And even more of the fear of others,

Who do not know where they are going,

Who continue clinging

To what they think is life

Which we know to be death!

I live each day to kill death;

I die each day to give birth to life,

And in this death of death,

I die a thousand times

And am reborn another thousand

Through that love

From my People

Which nourishes hope!

—From Threatened with Resurrection

Picture of Christ Figure: Hunger cloth from the Misereor humanitarian aid community in Wernberg Monastery, Villach Land district, Carinthia, Austria, EU. Via Wikimedia Commons

 

How My Theology Has Changed, Thank God

 

Part IX: Feminist Theology

 

 

Rethinking one’s theology is a difficult and dangerous venture. It is also extremely challenging, disrupting and often fear-inducing as we are being forced to rethink and reconsider our values, presuppositions, commitments, priorities and world view. That is why so many people refuse to take on this task: they give up on faith as no longer working in their lives, and they bolt from church and theology, never to return.

 

So why and when would anyone take on such a daunting task? The main reason is that they have had a powerful experience that can no longer be understood and made sense of within the framework of one’s present theological understanding.

 

For me, this first happened as I lived through the experience of loss and grief following the deaths of both of my parents while in high school, and of my first wife, Pauline, after ten years of marriage. My first eight posts in this series essentially articulate the theological ways  I searched to find meaning again, and a positive relationship with God, in response to my grief. 

 

But there is another way in which our theology can change. It is not in response to our own painful experience, but to the painful experiences of others that is shared with us when we have an open mind and heart. Most of the remainder of my posts in this series will be of this type, and most of them fall into the category of what we call “liberation” theologies,” which search to free us from old ways that no longer work, if they ever did. 

 

In general, traditional theology, which we often call Orthodoxy, begins “above” with traditional interpretations of theology and with the teachings of the church and then applies those understandings to our life in the world.  Liberation theologies always begin “below,” in our lived experiences or as we learn of the lived experiences of others and then turn to the tradition for insight and guidance.

 

Liberation theologies  give greater importance to our experiences. They are not automatically trumped by tradition. In fact, there may be times when experience challenges tradition, growing out of the “suspicion” that there are times when tradition not only does not reflect the will of God, but may be opposed to the will of God. Liberation theologies also tend to be more open to revelation, in the sense that God continues to speak to us. Our experience of God can be direct, and not automatically filtered through the lens of the tradition. This is, in fact, the deeper meaning of revelation: seeing something that no one has seen before.

 

This insight grows out of the theology of German theologian, Paul Tillich, and his teaching of what he called the “Protestant Principle.” Tillich begins with the dialectical nature of reality, comparing the unconditional to the conditional, the divine to the human, the infinite to the finite, the immortal to the mortal, faith to reason. Now, in traditional theology there is a strong emphasis on working to make sure that one does not profane the divine. Take the Ten Commandments for example. God’s name is holy, and we should not take it in vain. The sabbath day is holy, and we should not neglect nor misuse it. God’s truth is universal and absolute, and it should not be treated as if it were earthly and temporal and changeable.

 

However, what Tillich states in the Protestant Principle is that just as one should not profane the holy, one should also not elevate that which is finite and cultural to the realm of the sacred. This goes all the way back to the Protestant Reformation and theologians like Martin Luther, who rebelled against certain teachings of the popes of the time that they felt were not God’s eternal will. The one that bothered Luther the most was the pressure put on church members to pay money for indulgences, which were pieces of paper from the church that said your sins are forgiven. Luther also challenged the idea that priests, like himself, could not marry, and, after the Reformation, he did in fact get married and have children.

 

Feminist theology is one of those “liberationist” theologies,” beginning  “below” in our actual experience in the world. It begins with us as humans, and includes our dreams and hopes, but also our pain and suffering. And, sometimes, when those traditional teachings don’t seem to work anymore, we may develop a “suspicion” that we are missing something, or that something is being (purposely?) left out. 

 

When it comes to the role of women, the Bible clearly views women as subordinate to men, and so the question becomes: is this God’s absolute truth, to be accepted regardless of the consequences, or is it a reflection of the human-created culture of the time, and not only not to be accepted, but to be challenged.

 

Throughout history the great majority of cultures have structured society in a patriarchal hierarchy in which women are of less value than men. The biblical world was no different. When it came to inheritance, marriage and divorce, leadership in the temple and synagogue and many other areas of life, women were treated as “second-class” citizens.

 

If you accept this structure of society at face value and as “truth,” and begin “from above” with that tradition, you will likely be less sympathetic to the struggle of women for equal rights and try to keep women “in their place” because that is the “tradition” of the church.

 

On the other hand, if your method begins “from below” with the oppression of women and the ways in which they are not treated equally, one will be quicker to criticize and perhaps even abandon certain traditional teachings of the church that maintain such oppression. During my years in seminary and ministry, a tremendous amount of research was being done trying to understand how Jesus, for example, understood the role of women. The conclusion of many scholars was that Jesus did live within the cultural structure of the day in general, but he pushed hard and challenged many of the negative ways in which women were being treated, inviting them to be a significant part of the movement he founded.

 

Here is an example of how beginning theology from below in experience changed the life of so many women in my generation. A woman grows up in the North American church. She finds much in the teachings of her church that is helpful to her. But perhaps she also experiences a certain amount of oppression of herself as a person. Why is she so often excluded grammatically from the scriptures, as in the passage that states that Jesus, when he is “lifted up from the earth, will draw all men” to himself?  [John 12:32 RSV] She hears a lot about Abraham as the father of a great nation. But what about Sarah? Wasn’t she the mother of a great nation? Or did patriarchal church historians interpret her role as lesser? Why has the church taught that as a woman, she is inferior to men, her role in the church is less important and her ideas are less valuable.

 

This is where “suspicion” may enter. She may realize she does not know this for sure, but she wonders if the subordination and inferiority of women might not be an absolute divine principle, but rather the entrance into theology of patriarchal cultural norms. Now her subordination may no longer be viewed as God’s will, but, in fact, the opposite of God’s will. It is idolatry (treating a human view as God’s will), and, therefore, as something that needs to be combatted. She commits herself to working against female subordination in the church and in theology, and for the liberation of women from patriarchal theological inequality.

 

Slowly, but surely, I learned of the experiences of women in our culture and church, and the ways in which we both viewed and treated women as unequal. Also, slowly but surely, I tried to become a feminist, while continually aware of how ingrained biases can be and how they thereby unconsciously affect our perceptions and actions.

 

When I began seminary, in my Master of Divinity (MDiv) class of nearly 100 students only 7 were women. Today more than half of seminarians are women, and of the 68 bishops in the ELCA, almost half are women. What changed theologically that led to this massive ecclesiastical change?

 

Let me back up for a moment. I was not raised as a feminist. I grew up with very traditional midwestern, white, rural male and female roles. I was pretty much in the dark about women’s issues and roles, and that continued through college. However, I was quickly “liberated” in seminary. The ELCA first ordained women in the predecessor bodies of the ELCA in 1970. When I began seminary two years later, the women in my class were quick to point out sexist language, outdated perceptions of women’s roles in church and society, the patriarchal bias of the Bible and the church and the manifold ways in which women were not treated as equals in church or society. At first, I was defensive. Slowly I began to listen. I began to read. I began to discuss. Over time, I grew in my understanding of the issues women face and their vision of how change could finally occur. Their questions became my questions, including wondering why the church waited thousands of years to ordain women? And why do many present churches continue to refuse to accept women in leadership roles?

 

Eventually I realized how much church and society had lost by treating women of lesser value and importance. And this became even clearer as the amazing scholarship of women theologians began to appear. However, before encountering those works of theology, it was the storytelling of women that gave me my first insights into the evolution of feminist theology.

 

As a young pastor in Grand Forks, ND from 1989-1991, I started a pastor book discussion, and our first volume was by Harvard Divinity School’s  Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza: In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins, “in which she seeks to reclaim early Christian history as women’s history and to reveal biblical traditions as the history of both women and men. These goals help her to answer questions regarding women’s activity in the early Christian movement and to restore the memory of early Christian women’s sufferings, struggles and power to contemporary readers.” [E notes]

 

Another powerful book at this time was Sexism and God-Talk by Rosemary Radford Ruether. Phyllis Trible, Professor of Old Testament at Union Theological Seminary in New York, summarizes Ruether’s approach:

Affirming human experience as the basis of all theology, Ruether claims that historically such experience has been identified with and defined by men. The uniqueness of feminist theology is its use of women's experience to expose the male-centered bias of classical theology and articulate a faith that incorporates full humanity. Whereas the traditional paradigm begets domination and subordination, feminism seeks a mutuality that allows for variety and particularity in women and men. The goal is not to diminish males but to affirm both sexes whole, along with all races and social groups.

 

Feminist theology not only changed my theology in significant ways, it also greatly enriched my life in the church. In my nine callings to parish ministry, only one had had a female pastor before I arrived. However, in my last four calls, I worked on staff with six female pastors. From each of them I learned so much about both theology and ministry, and I experienced countless joys as we all worked together to create a wholistic ministry dedicated to inclusivity, equality and welcome to all people!

How My Theology Has Changed, Thank God

Part VIII: Classical Spirituality

 

Several years ago, I was having dinner with a good friend, and we began to talk about a mutual friend whom I had not heard from in several years. I had become convinced that this former friend was angry at me. My dinner friend thought I might be jumping to conclusions, and since this mutual friend was on Facebook, she suggested I simply send our mutual friend a friend request.

 

And so, I did, and she responded immediately, telling me how good it was to hear from me. She ended up reading both of my books and we had long telephone conversations about our lives and spiritual journeys. 

 

In like manner, it was time to overcome the distance I felt from God after the deaths of my parents. In my early seminary and parish years, you might say I had a cordial relationship with God, but it did not in any way approach the depths of intimacy and love that the great spiritual writers of all ages have described.

 

It was now time to move in that direction. I had taken the course described in the previous post on Process Theology that helped me see that God did not cause the deaths of my parents or Pauline. I had changed my view of how God is related to the world and our suffering, with the result, as I wrote in the last post, “I can now report that my new understanding of God’s relationship to the world really did change my experience of God and grief. This time, unlike after my parents had died, I felt God’s presence and unrelenting love every step of the way. Rather than finding myself driven away from God, my spirituality grew deeper and deeper as I allowed God to be with me step by step, day by day, guiding me into the future, trusting that my life was not over but would find new beginnings.” I now, for the first time, felt God’s presence through what I call Classical Spirituality. 

 

Growing up as a Lutheran Prairie Pietist (see Part II), I never encountered the term “spirituality.” We were proud Second Article Christians. We believed we were sinners, and that Jesus Christ (Second Article) had forgiven and saved us, and that is about all we needed to know. We weren’t much interested in the Third Article: life in the Holy Spirit. We left that to the Catholics, with their theology of Mary, their icons, their crucifixes, their stations of the cross. We were quite sure Catholics used spirituality to try to earn their salvation, and thus we viewed it as a form of “works righteousness” and “life under the law.”

 

A couple of months after Pauline died, I was at a Lutheran retreat at a monastery on the Pacific Ocean, focused on stewardship. When you are in severe grief, it is hard to think of a topic of less interest to one than stewardship. Bored to the core, I wandered into the monastery library. Scattered on a reading table were three books: one by Thomas Merton, one by Henri Nouwen, and one on the theology of celibacy. I started reading the last of these three and was intrigued: maybe that is the way I should think of the rest of my life: maybe I should remain single, like a celibate priest. Then I looked at the Thomas Merton book, Thoughts in Solitude, and came upon this reflection:

 

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore, I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

 

It would be difficult to overstate the way these few words pierced my heart. Merton captured perfectly the struggle in my life, caught up way too much in the past, but uncertain as to how to move meaningfully into the future.

 

One morning soon after, after a restless night’s sleep, I awoke with a sense of new insight, a dawning revelation. I finally began to realize that the weakness I was operating out of was the trying to control what I could not control. I was allowing everyone and everything around me to determine how I felt and thus needed to control outcomes of events in order to ensure my own happiness. I wanted life to give me a break, but there was no way to guarantee that. I knew that pain, could follow pain, could follow pain.

        

This was my weakness. I had no inner strength. Like a sponge, I was at the mercy of having to absorb whatever flowed my way, whether wine or vinegar. I was lacking a deep spirituality and awareness of my call. I was weak in body, weak in spirit, and, therefore, weak psychologically.

 

I bolted out of bed, put on running clothes, and ran in the cool air until I was tired. When I came home, I listened to music and read scripture and excerpts from spiritual books by Thomas Merton and Henri Nouwen, reflecting and praying on what I was reading and hearing. Then, with cracking voice that had not awakened yet to the day, I picked out a song and began to play guitar and sing. Again, I turned on the music, and listened as I finished preparing to go to work.    I heard from John Michael Talbot the words I needed to hear. He was singing a song based on Psalm 62:

 

Only in God is my soul at rest,

  In Him comes my salvation.

He only is my rock,

  my strength and my salvation.

My stronghold, my Savior,

  I shall not be afraid at all.

My stronghold, my Savior,

  I shall not be moved.

 

Only in God is found safety,

  When enemy pursues me.

Only in God is found glory,

  When I am found weak and found lowly.

 

My stronghold, my Savior,

  I shall not be afraid at all.

My stronghold, my Savior,

  I shall not be moved.

 

Only in God is my soul at rest,

               In Him comes my salvation.

                 --John Michael Talbot, “Psalm 62”

 

That day I entered the office with a new sense of life. I felt closer to God. I felt relaxed, and open to those around me, ready to carry on whatever ministry needed to be done.

 

Each day I continued the same routine and each day I became more aware of the beauty of life, more present to others, more able to trust myself to God.  A week earlier I had cried out, “My God, when will the pain ever end?” Now I had received an answer: “Pain will always be there. It will never end. But I will give you the strength to bear it, to use it, to grow through it.”

 

I had wondered if my new theology--that God did not cause Pauline’s suffering and death--would lead me to feel closer to God than I had after the deaths of Mom and Dad. It had indeed. But now I was going a step further. I was not only able to pray to God, to feel close to God, but to rely on God to uplift and carry me regardless of what happened next in my day, or in my life. Having lost the people most important to me, I now turned myself over to God more fully than ever before. Rather than continually lament what I had lost, I was slowly beginning to open myself to the beauty of the world still before me, my place in that world, my new calling in that world. How good it was to want to live and love again, to have hope, and to be able to feel trust. No matter what the future held, I trusted that God had a purpose for my life.

      

God had been so patient with me and now I had to be patient with myself. Like a fawn newly born, I felt ready to run straight away into the meadows of my new life, even if my legs were still wobbly. I knew that I would stagger and fall, but Mother God would pick me up and nurse my wounds.

 

As long as we live and love, we will experience grief over the loss of those we want to be close to and cannot. Once one understands that grief never ends, then it doesn’t matter so much where one is in the grieving process. What does matter is that one begins to find a reason to live again, to love again.

 

I promised myself that, although I would continue to shed many tears for Pauline and for others I had lost and would lose, those tears would not simply carry me back into the past but would become a river that carried me into the future. They would remind me of how much I have been loved, how much I have loved, and that I was called to continue to love and be loved as long as there is breath within me. 

       

John Michael Talbot’s lyrics once again captured my feelings:     

 

My God, and my all,

I should like to love you,

And give you my heart,

And give you my soul.

And so I will yearn for you,

In the depths of your passion,

Show me the way to love,

Show me the way to give my life for you.

 

Show me the way to love,

Then we will surely rise,

To fly like an eagle, through the wind,

To find in your dying, Lord,

We both shall live again. So fly  . . . . .

 

So I will weep with you,

In the depth of your passion,

I will not be ashamed,

To travel the world,

Weeping out loud for love,

Show me the way to love,

Show me the way to love,

Then we will surely rise.

               --“My God and My All”

Note: If you are interested in exploring the twelve classical spiritual disciplines, see Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline:

The inward Disciplines of meditation, prayer, fasting, and study offer avenues of personal examination and change. The outward Disciplines of simplicity, solitude, submission, and service help prepare us to make the world a better place. The corporate Disciplines of confession, worship, guidance, and celebration bring us nearer to one another and to God