Front Page

by Tara Owens

Transformational Theology

by David Benner

by Richard Rohr

Honesty About the Journey

Getting Naked With The Friends Of Jesus

David G. Benner needs no introduction to the readers of Conversations. As a founding editor, David has poured much of himself into creating a space for honest dialogue about transformation. Now living on Vancouver Island and semiretired from all things not fun, David has been sailing in exotic places around the world and working on some new writing projects, such as his just-released book, Opening to God: Lectio Divina and Life as Prayer. His recent thinking about that book and the theme of this issue—contemplation and action—serves as the backdrop for this conversation. So pull up a deck chair and listen in.

Gary W. Moon: David, you begin your book with a provocative reflection: “Just imagine how different your life would be if moment by moment by moment you were constantly open to God.” How is your life different when you are able to live with that kind of openness to God?

David G. Benner: My experience of that openness is far from constant…

GWM: So why are you writing in this area, David? Just kidding; please continue.

DGB: Hmm. As I was saying, the moments when I have known this openness are rarer than I’d like, but they leave a taste I can never forget. It’s a sense of being at one with myself and, in the same moment, with all that is. It’s a feeling of alignment, wholeness, and everything belonging. Like any taste of God, it leaves me hungering for more. And this is the way it most impacts life. Once you taste this oneness and experience even for a moment the sense of being sufficiently open to God to allow God to flow through you, desire, not willpower, becomes all that is necessary to lead you forward. And that desire comes from the lingering taste—the residual memory—that remains within you. How does that make my life different when this is my experience? I am spoiled for any lesser goods, any lesser gods.

“I die by brightness and the Holy Spirit”

—Thomas Merton

I dare to call action birthed from contemplation the greatest art form because I believe it is. It underlies all those other, more visible art forms we see in great sculpture, music, writing, painting, and most especially in the art form called human character. When these two (action and contemplation) are one, the result is always beauty, symmetry, and transformative form—lives and actions that inherently sparkle and heal.

With most people the process of uniting contemplation and action begins on the “action” side. It is surely this way for the first half of life for almost all of us, even introverts. We learn, experiment, try, do, stumble, fall, break, and find. It is largely done in the outer world of activity, starting with crawling, walking, playing, and speaking. The stage gradually gets larger for these “enactments,” but we are still constructing our own good stage on which to perform. (We just don’t know it yet!)

Yes, there are inner thoughts, feelings, and imaginings during this time, maybe even sustained study, prayer, or disciplined thought, but do not call them contemplation. These are necessarily and almost always self-referential, both for good and for ill. Do not be put off by this, but at this point in our lives, it is still largely about “me” and finding my own preferred and proper viewing platform. These first steps toward true contemplation have to be, and they are good. But they are not yet the great, much less the greatest, art form of the union between action and contemplation that we want to talk about here. We must go further.

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Albert Luthuli was the first African recipient of the Nobel peace prize. In his autobiography he wrote, “If the Christian concern is with people and not disembodied principles, its concern must be with the conditions under which its people live. Christianity must be concerned with what is going on… here and now.”[1]

Luthuli wrote these words in the midst of apartheid, an inhumane system that ravaged the lives of millions of people in the country where I live. The “disembodied principles” to which Luthuli refers are an apt description of what my Christian life entailed under the apartheid system. It was a kind of Christianity wherein I believed in Jesus as “my Savior,” yet this belief didn’t engage me—or my friends—with “the conditions under which its people live.” Somehow, I could believe in Jesus without attempting to follow Him. I lived in a cocoon (of whiteness), disengaged from the world around me.

As a beneficiary of oppression I comfortably practiced my spirituality while the majority of South Africa’s people struggled for their lives. It was this disembodied version of Christianity that, among other things, led to the theological justification of apartheid. Believing in Jesus and following Jesus were severed from each other. I followed Jesus with my intellect but not with my body. Faith was in my head and not in my hands or my feet.

In the Gospel of Luke we read about a walking Jesus: “And he said to all, ‘If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.’”[2]

After reading this a decade ago, I wrote in my journal, “What does it mean to deny myself and take up my cross daily?” I had no idea! My Christianity was not made flesh. I believed in Jesus, that He died for my sins so I could go to heaven. My version of Jesus was highly individualistic and very personal. This was true, but not true enough. Since writing those words in my journal, I’ve been on a quest to put flesh to my beliefs, to discover the way of Jesus.

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[2]. Luke 9:23-24, English Standard Version.

It was sometime after 1:00 a.m. I slouched in a plastic chair in a dusty wing of the Nairobi airport. Boarding was in two hours, and after that I had almost two days of travel to get home. Despite having a good trip in which I had accomplished all I had wanted, I was feeling unnaturally discouraged. In the sparse bookstore I had bought a popular book, which cynically recounted all the damage caused in Africa by bad foreign aid and misplaced good intentions. It was hitting me right at my place of vulnerability.

A 10-day visit to Tanzania to help set up a new country program for Plant With Purpose (formerly Floresta) was drawing to a close. In this busy and cosmopolitan crossroads of Africa, my efforts seemed particularly puny. I had no business thinking I could fix the problems of deforestation and poverty in even one of the small villages we had visited, let alone all of Tanzania. It was beyond quixotic. I felt miserable. Lord, I thought, why did you let me get so far ahead of you? Why am I here? I thought I was doing what you wanted. I heard no answer.

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After a day of work I come home to two activities that quiet and center my soul. The first involves visiting the hens. I gather whatever eggs have been laid, feed the hens, check their water, and every other day clean the poop out of their coop. Greta, Chicken Little, Liesel, and Penelope are particularly glad to see me and bow so I can pet them (I’m their substitute rooster). They look and hope for a tidbit from the kitchen, garden, or a grub or worm I’ve picked up along the way. These gentle, eager creatures that supply my husband Mark and me with fertilizer, pest control, and eggs remind me that I am part of creation, just as they are.

The second activity that centers my soul is walking to the mailbox. On the coldest, rainiest days I take a direct path, but I prefer the one that winds through the forest, crosses the creek where it tumbles and falls near the cistern, and then takes me across the road to the mailbox. I return by way of the beehives. If the cedar bench by the creek is dry, I rest there for a few minutes. I can smell, feel, hear, touch, and see God’s love and sustaining presence. In the summer the bench is nearly hidden in an alcove surrounded by shrubs and ferns growing along the creek’s edge. A holy place. On sunny days I may sit by the hives for a few minutes instead, watching the comings and goings of bees bringing home nectar and pollen.

I haven’t always lived this way. It took a long while to give myself permission to explore a life that sounded a bit too much like hippie pantheism. What I’ve come to see is that loving, engaging, and tending God’s creation is fundamentally Christian and honors the One who commissioned us to be God’s representatives on Earth. We are physical beings, and spiritual formation happens as we engage our physical world in just and loving ways.

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The signs of our times are troubling. Poverty and exploitation, wars and terrorism, global warming and overconsumption plague our planet. Though there are marks of beauty, creativity, justice, and peace, we have a long way to go before our world is fully redeemed. Being part of an international community committed to serving Jesus among the most vulnerable of the world’s poor gives me an uncommon, intimate understanding of the ways in which our personal lives can impact another—either for good or for harm.

It is estimated that 27 million people are victims of modern day slavery—trafficked into all forms of bonded labor, including the commercial sex industry.[1] Today in Kolkata, India, some of my friends are fighting for their freedom from such a degrading “trade.”

Numerous wars are being fought throughout the world in places like the Middle East, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Africa. Other countries are trying to recover and rebuild from recent conflicts. As I write, nations proliferate nuclear weapons, and economic sanctions endanger the well-being of innocent people. The threat of terrorism lingers, and nation states make war against one another for all manner of reasons—including for power, control, security, survival, and autonomy. Wars are even made in the name of God. And Christians are not excluded from sometimes making religion a cause for war.

It seems domination and exploitation are commonplace almost everywhere we turn—nation to nation, person to person, and in relationship to our environment.

What does it mean to be a faithful Christian in the context of this kind of real world reality?

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Contemplation and action. Justice and prayer. Centering and caring. Finding and seeking. How do these two aspects of the spiritual life work together? Can they work together? Are they necessarily separate? Or do they reinforce one another and work together for transformation?

Most of our adult lives Felicia, my spouse, and I have been doing our best to live in a way that balances these dualities. Felicia is a natural contemplative; I am more of an activist. Felicia’s inclination is to stay in her cell and sit in silence; my bent is toward being with people and working on projects. We have tried growing in each area in the midst of everyday life. We have come upon no solutions; what we have found, instead, is a sense of direction. But first, I’ll offer a little history for contextualizing what we recommend.

TRANSITIONING: ALONE AND TOGETHER

When Felicia moved to Denver to attend Iliff School of Theology and to pursue our relationship, she needed a place to live. During her search, she found out about a unit available at Shepherd’s Gate, an intentional Christian community in downtown Denver. Felicia had lived in cities before—Orlando, San Francisco, and Portland—but never in quite as diverse a neighborhood nor with other families in “community,” a term she associated with people sleeping on cots in one big room and sharing toothbrushes. While Felicia didn’t know what to expect, she took the leap and enjoyed it, and we continued to live there after we were married.

Even so, Felicia had previously been exposed to lifestyles different from her own. Her father and mother worked for many years in international development, and her father helped found Heart to Honduras, a holistic ministry that works with villages near San Pedro Sula, Honduras. By this time in life (late 20s), Felicia had been to Central America many times for lengthy periods. Also, she would soon take a position at Inner City Health Center, a medical facility for mostly uninsured people in one of Denver’s least affluent neighborhoods. So she felt comfortable with other ways of living and people who looked and spoke differently from her.

Also in my 20s, I, on the other hand, experienced quite a shock transitioning to living among people different from me. Having grown up in a small Kansas town, I had limited exposure to diverse communities. As a junior at Friends University in Wichita, I became familiar with Tony Campolo and Eastern University, as well as John Perkins and the Christian Community Development Association movement. This set me on a trajectory to attend Eastern University and live with other students in West and Southwest Philadelphia. It was a seismic shift to live in the Kingsessing neighborhood—ten square blocks of pavement that is home to 80,000 people, broken up into African Americans (90 percent), Asians (5 percent), Hispanics (3 percent), and those of other ethnicities (2 percent). (I was one of the “others.”) At the time Kingsessing experienced one of the highest infant mortality rates in not only Philadelphia but also the United States. In short, Kingsessing said to me, “Welcome to the real world.”

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Writing about how I have intentionally sought to integrate contemplation, compassion, and the struggle for justice into my life is rather daunting. I feel a little like Gandhi must have felt when a troubled mother brought her daughter to see him about her addiction to sweets. He supposedly asked the mother to come back in three weeks. She did so. This time the spiritual master took the young girl aside and explained to her in a few simple words the harmful effects of eating too many sweets. Thanking Gandhi for giving her daughter such good advice, the mother asked him, “Still I would like to know why you did not say those words to my daughter three weeks ago when I first brought her to you?” He explained, “Three weeks ago I was still addicted to eating sweet foods myself!”[1]

Even though I have been a Christ-follower for over four decades, my struggle to integrate the personal and social dimensions of discipleship continues. There are several reasons for this. To begin with, I live within a social context of immense suffering and injustice in the Republic of South Africa. Even though, as a nation, we have witnessed the birth of democracy, human misery abounds. The tragic gap between the haves and have-nots remains one of the widest in the world. Corruption and violent crime permeate all levels of society. Rape statistics involving women and children reveal a country that is in danger of losing its soul. Within this context I am constantly searching for ways in which my life can contribute towards the common good. Often I feel quite overwhelmed by the challenges that lie all around.

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Kate Campbell is a spiritual writer who draws on deep Southern roots. Born in New Orleans in the 1960s, Campbell is a songwriter whose music illustrates the power of her Baptist upbringing. Her father was a pastor, and she still loves and reflects much of the beauty of her heritage. Yet she also writes in the context of the conflict between Southern generations in a profoundly moving way. Kate Campbell is drawing on spiritual, cultural, and historical memory. She is taking a chance that memory might be the way to speak to every soul.

Campbell’s debut album, Songs From the Levee, was released in 1994, and she has released more than 10 albums of music that ranges from Southern folk to country to Delta blues to gospel and back again. She has collaborated with artists of deep faith, such as songwriter Pierce Pettis, whose iconic lyrics have spoken to thousands of believers for decades. Her distinctive style and willingness to approach issues of race, inequality, spirituality, and tradition blend to produce music that comes out of contemplation but leads into movement for change.

Campbell has been influenced by the South in many ways. For example, take the Southern literary tradition and Campbell’s fondness for authors such as Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty. Then there’s her Southern Baptist heritage with its strong biblical formation and the importance of hymn singing. Another major factor in her music came from growing up in the midst of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Out of her Southern past, Campbell has addressed racial tensions head on throughout her recording career. “These issues with race are things I feel strongly about,” Campbell explains. “I keep writing about them as a way to reflect upon the past and to hopefully dialogue toward a better future.”

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