I have been teaching an in depth course on the spiritual interpretation of the Song of Solomon for the past few months which has kept me happily immersed in the beautiful language of love, but as this season is winding down I am taking a Spring Sabbatical to flesh out the new inner workings of The Spirit stirring in my heart. This beautiful message of the Indwelling Life of Christ. I have found myself vacillating from anger ( why didn’t anyone teach this to me sooner) to a beautiful sense of the eyes of God upon my frame and his wonderful timing of things in my life.
As I find this message coming out in the strangest of places and conversations, I know it is time to put pen to pad and chronicle this journey…and so we begin with story. Beautiful wonderful story. Thank you to Major Ian Thomas who has passed on to be with the Lord for listening that day in your college dorm room, and receiving this message for the Body of Christ. Thank you to my mentors and friends who have journeyed with me and ahead of me declaring the “truth” and nothing less than the truth.
In a recent article from Clarissa Pinkola Estes she makes the following statement about culture and narcissism that I find relevant and worth pondering:
“Narcissism is not falling in love with oneself; it is falling for ‘the false self”… the one which has no real heart, a cardboard self that can only mimic tenderness and toughness, but has no winged soul.
Thus a culture diagnosed with narcissism is not in love with itself, as suggested by the reductive epithet, ‘me-ism.’ A narcissistic culture is in love with a false self, one that is not real, one that is perceived to have no real issues, no reliable gifts, no real harms and thereby, no real solutions.
But, there is ever hope. Prognosis for an ill culture? It depends… mostly on cultura cura, how smaller healthier cultures within the ill culture will expand outward to heal the larger society.
One of the first ways to destroy a culture and a people, is to destroy their stories. One of the first ways a culture that has become ill can be restored is by adding back the stories that are sustaining to its people.
I have heard this challenge in my spirit. To scribe the story that will heal the soul, and free the spirit and point the heart to the resurrected reality of the Living Christ and Savior who died, rose, ascended and is coming again. Our Christian culture has lost the story in the midst of the madness of crafting our own life, planning our destinies, patenting our image, and demanding adherence to disciplines that are dead outside of the reality of the spirit of God at work in our mortality.
So I ask you, have you ever heard a grain of wheat talking to itself?
To be continued….
