10 The disciples came to him and asked, “Why do you speak to the people in parables?”
11 He replied, “Because the knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them. 12 Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them. 13 This is why I speak to them in parables:
“Though seeing, they do not see;
though hearing, they do not hear or understand.
14 In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah:
“‘You will be ever hearing but never understanding;
you will be ever seeing but never perceiving.
15 For this people’s heart has become calloused;
they hardly hear with their ears,
and they have closed their eyes.
Otherwise they might see with their eyes,
hear with their ears,
understand with their hearts
and turn, and I would heal them.’
16 But blessed are your eyes because they see, and your ears because they hear. 17 For truly I tell you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see but did not see it, and to hear what you hear but did not hear it.[1]
Jesus is a Rabbi. He longs to gather God’s, “children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings.”[2] So what’s the best way to grab the attentions, hearts and minds of hungry souls? As any gifted teacher knows, stories catapult the imagination of listeners into an expansive, elastic space of insight based learning. Jesus works in the vernacular. The directness and simplicity of Jesus’ stories galvanize novel networks of meaning by working with the known to examine the unknown. The sacred becomes parlance entwined with daily objects and events of the lives and times of the historical Jesus.
Jesus united His stories with the stories of people knowingly or unknowingly seeking reconciliation with God. As much as Jesus told stories, he also created stories through unforgettable actions and inactions. Consider the Samaritan women at the well, Zacchaeus the tax collector, or the adulterous women condemned to be stoned. The people of the Gospel accounts were forever changed by the stories Jesus shared and the stories Jesus created. But: Are these just historical moments relegated to the life and times of Christ?
The generative gravity of Jesus’ storied ways sends gyrating ripples through the fabric of our lives. The door of Christ’s cross swings open to let our stories of “the now” pass in and out of His heavenly kingdom. When we invite and receive the gift of Christ’s Living Spirit in our lives with open, inquisitive hearts we imbibe the heavenly elixir of God’s abounding love. The Spirit intones Christ indefatigable love for his Father drawing us closer and closer. Jesus Christ is our story guide (the use of full name of Jesus Christ here is very intentional – it refers to both the historical Jesus with the stories he told and created, and the risen invisible Christ who is working in and with us every moment). Christ’s story making is magnetic. Our ordinary experiences become attached to whole new orbits of meaning.
Jesus is Living Story. Our Rabbi cannot bear to leave any experience we have unattached to His Father. We are at our core relational creatures. We are not designed to be transactional. We cannot be reduced to gears or levers rigged and optimized to produce specific effects. God within Himself is pure relation and through Christ we participate in this mystery of relationship. Our lives are like aquarium tanks full of viscous fluid swishing back forth in waves of generative meaning.
Jesus leads us by grace. Our experiences have the potential to be transformed into crystalline temples that capture the light of Christ and radiate it back into the world. When our experiences precipitate frank conversations with our Savior we step into the kingdom of Jesus as Living Story. Life unfolds. Our experiences cease to be events forgotten and tossed aside to make room for the next. Our experiences co-mingle with each other. We become aware of Christ whispering into our hearts ear and we hearken to His deepening call. A parade of cornucopian possibilities that normally would distract or overwhelm us, narrows into a passage of liberating focus. We are freed to soar in a space of sense making that is inhabited by the mind of Christ.
Jesus Living story works with our God given gift of reflection. Reflection is one of the concrete ways we can enter into prayerful conversation with our Rabbi. Let’s take a moment to breakdown down reflection.
“The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human power to reflect.” Vaclav Havel
Reflection requires focusing our attention in a single direction with circumspection. The image of an hourglass is useful in understanding the state of mind we need to achieve in order to benefit from our efforts. Individual grains of sand pass through a narrow point before they drop into a large collection area. When we concentrate it is akin to the narrow point of an hourglass. When we review an experience and it yields a wealth of insights it is akin to the large open collection area that the grains of sand fall into. From that narrow point of concentration a new vista of perception becomes possible. Our minds open up to new possibilities. We are able to look at our experiences in a totally new way. A reflective mind discovers insights in otherwise meaningless experiences.
The insights we gain from reflection are transformed into knowledge, which become raw chunks of reusable information. Herein lays the greatest challenge. How do we use these chunks? Knowledge provides us with a construct to manage and manipulate abstractions mined from our experiences but we have to find a way of applying them to new situations. When we look for applicability of our knowledge by being attentive to the moment we discover points of intersection. A new experience has some correspondence to a previous one. We leverage the pattern capabilities of our minds and move knowledge into the present. This pattern match guides our behavior. Some benefits include avoiding mistakes we have made in the past, exhibiting a greater capacity for empathy, demonstrating new understanding, or acting with greater confidence. When it comes to interpersonal or intrapersonal dynamics, knowledge applied in the present is wisdom. Arguably, the greatest personal power that we can pursue is wisdom. While information by itself is useless and knowledge brings with it a certain degree of influence, wisdom deepens us. The bottom line is that we cannot be effective without reflection. The feedback gained from flexing our internal powers of observation is invaluable and cannot be procured through any other means.
Now that we have established the importance of reflecting, how do we do it? Reflection can be broken down into four parts:
1. Visualizing
2. Sitting
3. Inviting
4. Sifting
Part I. of Reflecting: Visualizing
Reflection is made possible through the use of visualization. The word visualizing can be misleading. We need to use all of our senses when we visualize. The more senses we can invoke the richer our visualizations will be. Saint Ignatius of Loyola wrote a guide for monks called The Spiritual Exercises. He like others before him had an intuitive grasp of how our minds work without the benefits of psychological research we have today. The spiritual exercises are a collection of guided visualizations on Jesus Christ’s life. Loyola instructs priest to begin imagining a scene from Jesus’ life by walking through the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and feelings of it. The result is a vivid and personal re-experiencing of a story. Athletes offer another perspective on the power of visualization. Mental rehearsals have been shown to result in muscular activity that can be measured. These mental rehearsals enable athletes to practice, learn, and improve motor skills. They can also be used to strengthen cognitive and psycho-emotional skills such as concentration, focus, and stress management. Visualizations are effective because they are not just mental phenomena they engage our whole being.
In order to reflect on our experiences we must relive them. Visualization offers us this ability. We re-enter our past experiences as an observer. Our imaginations fuel our archival inquiry and engage us as active observers. Like the spiritual exercises, we can also reflect on stories outside of our personal experiences. Whatever we visualize is projected into a space where we can begin to manipulate it. In this way reflection has the potential to be more than an analytical rehashing of an experience. Visualization creates a story while analysis by itself creates a collection of linearly associated data points. If we are to win any insights from our experiences or effectively find connections between our experiences we will need to work with them as stories.
Part II. of Reflecting: Sitting
Reflection requires us to be still. After we have visualized an experience we need to sit with it. Here is an analogy to clarify this notion of sitting – think of it as a marble suspended in the middle of jar by a viscous medium. The marble just floats. It is completely buoyant. Sitting with our visualizations surrounds them with a rich medium of quiet space. We are enveloping the visualization to become receptive to how it unfolds. Once we set visualization in motion we must resist the temptation to direct it. Reflection will not occur if we repeat patterns. When we sit with our visualization we are waiting for a new path to appear. The dust settles and it becomes possible to look for un-chartered territory.
Part III. of Reflecting: Inviting
Reflection must be invited. Visualization allows us to relive an experience, sitting with it results in receptivity to discovering new patterns, and inviting is the active process of seeking insights. We must genuinely desire to find insights. Inviting describes an internal process of moving our volition. We go from stillness of mind to movement of heart. In our emotional center we must want to find a new insight even if what we discover hurts our egos. Our self-perceptions can be altered by the things we discover therefore we must be very sincere in our commitment to uncover new insights. The fact that we are willing to uncover potentially painful things acts a supportive lattice to buffer our self-image from becoming damaged. Whatever failures we may encounter during our reflection of the past are counterbalanced by the opportunities to turn them into building blocks of knowledge and hopefully wisdom in future experiences.
Part IV. of Reflecting: Sifting
Reflection engages our analytical mind through the act of sifting. Once we invite insights they will start appearing. This is when we need to review each insight to evaluate its worth and to decide how it is related to our current understanding of things. We turn things over in our mind to examine them. We use our mind as a microscope to probe deeper. In essence we are deconstructing the array of themes that have been upturned during our reflection process to find the details. Sifting results in the objectification of knowledge and completes the process of reflection. Like a prospector sifting for nuggets of gold in his pan we need to rigorously shake all the information in our visualization to find what we want to keep. We begin reflection by invoking our imaginations and we end the process by enlisting our analytical powers.
Reflection is a complex phenomenon. This framework serves as guide. Naturally, there is a degree of artificiality to breaking it down into components but it enables us to observe what things fit together. The interplay of visualization, sitting, inviting, and sifting is supple. They overlap one another and move back forth between one another during the reflection process. So while they are presented in a step-by-step manner discover how they work within you. Every time you reflect there will be a different interaction among the parts.
Jesus as Living Story becomes near real-time reflection. As we have new experiences we find ourselves walking and talking to Christ. Even in the heat of great sorrow or fear we experience His knowing presence…our Rabbi teaching us…our Shepherd leading us…our Lamb washing us in the blood of mercy…and the Love of God offering us an unsurpassable peace.
[1] Mt. 13: 10-17 NIV
[2] Lk. 13: 34 NIV
Would you consider sharing a time when you experienced Jesus as Living Story?
