Moderating the Inner Beast

“All men die; few men ever really live.”

If that seems like a quote from Braveheart or Thor Ragnarök or Home Improvement (with a grunt), no, it’s from John Eldredge’s best-selling, slightly controversial book called Wild at Heart (2013).

Perhaps the same can be said of women; I wouldn’t know, not having been one.

But, as a man, the quote settles well among my cushions and my comforts – as a lost but longed for ideal. I’m nothing if not an ideologue and wishful thinker.
Eldredge further declares that God designed men to be “dangerous, passionate, alive, and free”.  So, yeah, I’m all of those.

That’s why I relish parallel parking.  Or the chance to drive in rain, or use a hand saw up a ladder. (Not being permitted to use a chain saw.)
Blood courses hotly through me when I watch Top Gun or The Magnificent Seven.  I swell in stature when I face the wind on Ocean Beach or shout at the ref or get asked by my seven-year-old grandson what I did in the war.  I straighten to my full 160cm and gild my experiences as an Air Force hangar sweeper.

Trouble is, the more you fantasise about such things, the more the realisation of what a wannabe you are crushes you, and you go back to your beer and custard square.

This was the case the other day when driving back from the big city (not the beer part), where I’d attended a stamp collecting convention, and I found myself thinking, “God, what a wannabe I am,” and at that moment I shot past a hidden exit from the wide, straight road I was travelling, and I thought, “Go on … live a little.”  I screeched to a gentle halt, thinking of my tyres and brake pads, and reversed.  The road was dusty metal.  Veering off as it did immediately to the right, I couldn’t see around the corner.  All the better.  Let’s do this, Maverick.

Look, it matters not whether you judge me.  I’m a wuss. I know it, but the heart of wild man resides within and I’ll take adventure where I can find it, as long as it’s safe.  I mean … who wants to be dead?  Or hurt?  Tentatively wild-at-heart, is me, and I was. I went tentatively what they call “off grid”.  Don’t know why.  A grid is something I can select on a Spreadsheet, so …  But, anyway, I went off it.  What could go wrong?

I’ll tell you.
Because you’re expecting a disastrous end to this story, no?  So, when, a kilometre in, I stalled in the ford, I thought, no problem.  Actually, my first thought was that, surely the water will dry up soon.  My second thought was, call the AA.  But they didn’t answer.  Neither was there dial tone, which meant my mobile was off grid as well.  My third thought was, well, being wild at heart, this should be easy enough.  I’ll find a tractor.
There wasn’t one within my immediate visual radius so I did what any dangerous, passionate, alive and free man would do: checked in the car’s manual, located and depressed the ECAB (emergency conversion to amphibian button), and jet-boated out of there, back to the main road and home to catch The Chase on tele.  Enough adventure to quench this wuss for several weeks, until the wannabe-ism exceeds the instinct for comfort and safety once again.

Wild at heart, chicken in other places.  True story.  (Some of it.)

Ken F

The Kingdom Without the King

By Strahan Coleman

(Based on Luke 10:1-23)

As I’ve reflected on this passage from Luke, I’ve been drawn to think about this first evangelical mission, 2000 years on, to the decade.

We find ourselves today in a strange relationship with this story. The entire world has now heard the Gospel. Today, in 2022, we rest on the shoulders of 200 years especially of profound missional energy, with transportation making people groups and villages available that were totally unimaginable only a century ago.

From these seventy disciples (in the reading) the good news of the kingdom even reached the farthest corner of the globe, here in Aotearoa, on Christmas Day 1814.

We’re in a very different position today to the audience who first heard the story of the sending of the Seventy. Liberation has come to us all. Our entire world shaped by their faithfulness. In the West, our entire culture is christianised. Not because of so called “Christian nations” or some golden age people like to imagine existed in the not too distant past. But because Christian ideas such as the dignity and worth of every human being regardless of who they are have won over racism, classism and other forms of political oppression of minorities.

The work isn’t finished, of course. But the very fact that society embraces this struggle as crucial is a sign of Christ’s radical transformation of our world.

Roman society at the time of Christ, for example, saw mercy and compassion as weakness. Historian and author Tom Holland in his seminal book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind tell us that,
“The heroes of the Iliad, favourites of the gods, golden and predatory, had scorned the weak and downtrodden. So too, for all the honour that Julian paid them, had philosophers. The starving deserved no sympathy. Beggars were best rounded up and deported. Pity risked undermining a wise man’s self-control. Only fellow citizens of good character who, through no fault of their own, had fallen on evil days might conceivably merit assistance.”

Christians taught the world mercy, compassion and care for those whom society cast aside. The kingdom of heaven was near.
Now, the sick receive care, children are adopted and fostered, all are educated. These are all the results of Christian theology played out in society. They’re all things that have come from the Christian spirit of care and hospitality. Christians taught that all people were made in God’s image, the kingdom of heaven came near to Western philosophy, and was becoming available to all who would receive God’s offer of peace.

Because the Seventy, then and now, have been faithful.

And yet, despite this profound gift, it seems the world no longer wants the Jesus at the heart of it. “God is dead,” declared Friedrich Nietzsche in the 19th Century. We have apparently outgrown him. Taking all these values and the gifts of mercy, dignity and freedom, secularism claimed it could build its own world.
Having taken what they could from God they cried out with the Psalmist,
“Let us burst [God’s] bonds apart
And cast away His cords from us.”  (Psalm 2:3)

Australian pastor, theologian and social commentator Mark Sayers names this a third culture. Not a pagan or pre-Christian world, not a Christian one either, but a post-Christian society shaped by the history, beliefs and practices of Christianity and yet unhinged from Christ himself. He summarises this third culture powerfully in the line “they want the kingdom without the king”. Christian ethics and morals, a Christian appreciation for dignity and freedom, but devoid of the anchor of the person of Jesus.

With Nietzsche, a post-Christian world seeks liberation from God, not in him.

God, to the world, appears as bondage.

This has led culture in a few directions. On the left, a militant liberalism has created ‘cancel culture’, identity politics and a ‘self-ism’ without concrete moral grounding. On the right, conservatism has found its hope in politics, power and return to nationalism for identity and security.
Even the church battles with the temptation to believe secularism’s promise that if we just keep tweaking things, just keep thinking our way there, we’ll be able to bring the world to rights.

We too can fall into a kingdom without the king spirituality. Doing church well, loving and serving our neighbours and fighting injustice, all without the joy and wonder of intimacy and profound love for God.
A life of action, without a life of prayer and devotion.
The Great Commission before the Great Commandment.

But it was always Jesus, and Jesus’s name, that brought the kingdom near, as we read in the Gospels. We can’t have one without the other. To be in the kingdom is to be found in Christ and that means both freedom and liberty as well as self-denial, prayer, and intimacy with God.

When I look around me at many of my peers and those struggling with the church today, I see a tonne of valid hurt, disappointment and frustration with the church.

But I also see this:
I see a generation who want all the good things Jesus offers, the liberation of the kingdom, but not the costly things. Even though we don’t think of closeness with God as costly, its vulnerability, openness and connection can be.
I see a people who want to make love, and liberty and grace, in its own image. Not in the shape of Christ’s.
I see an embrace of God’s patience, and little welcome of his invitation to discipline, self-sacrifice and prayerful adoration.

Even Christians can subtly want the kingdom without the king. Because it helps us to fit in. It costs us less of our hearts. The kingdom without the king embraces the extremes of compassion without conviction, or conviction without compassion. It goes to church and pays a tithe but doesn’t grieve with the grieving or seek satisfaction in God through prayer. The kingdom without the king takes the teachings that make us feel better and rejects those that cause discomfort. It refuses the pain of transformation.
But, worst of all, it wants the kingdom and all it offers without the Person who brings it to us. It prefers an arms-length approach to God. It keeps from him our hearts.

I’d like to propose that today, in honour of what the Seventy have done for two thousand years, it’s our job to place Christ back in the centre of his kingdom where he belongs.

As people in the small towns of a far away isle, we’re called now not only to proclaim, but to embody this divine friendship that changes the world and to display it before a society disconnected from it. To seek Christ’s face in prayer, to abide in him, to long for what he longs for and to live a God-soaked life. To ache for God like the body does for food and water and to embody the whole Gospel in the small town of Tairua we inhabit rather than just accept things as they are.
And to not buy secularism’s version of the kingdom without the anchor of Christ’s centring truth, way and life.

As someone who has been in ministry my whole adult life, I know how easy it is to slip into a “kingdom without the king” way of being. It’s often far easier to preach on a Sunday, pray for someone else, attend church and give a little money than to acknowledge how little I love God, sit with him in the secret places, and find fulfilment in him alone.

Work is a great distraction, even for the church.
Today’s gospel story is incredible; precisely because it’s been so successful. The work isn’t finished, but it has transformed.
We’ve been a great doing church these last few centuries, but without the being in God that this kingdom is meant to offer, we can only preach a half gospel. And not the best half.

Liberation has come via the Seventy to the world, to us, but do we still want him who brought it? Or has the kingdom – of political gain, of social work, of psychology and religion – become more important to us? I know, at times, I can say it has. I think that’s the human heart; it wanders, and we need reminders from time to time of what is deep at the heart of our faith.

I’d like to leave you with these powerful words by St Theresa of Avila, who I think knew just how important it is to personalise God in ourselves and who knew that simply to tell others of the Gospel isn’t enough:
Christ has no body on earth but yours; no hands but yours; no feet but yours.
Yours are the eyes through which the compassion of Christ looks out to the world.
Yours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good.
Yours are the hands with which he is to bless others now.

Yes, we are to go, but we go in Christ. To be Christ to the world, one must be in Christ in ever deepening layers of love and joy. The kingdom can only come near if Christ does.

A prophetic message for our world today. Maybe that is how we honour these Seventy, and continue their work – by bringing Christ himself back to the centre of his world and to the centre of his kingdom by bringing him back to the centre of our hearts.

Habits and Monastery Cats

** Since this blog was posted in July ’22, it has been accessed (read?) hundreds of times – a far greater access than any other posts on this website – from numerous countries all over the world. Even today, it gets one or two views almost every day. I’d very much like to know why. Are you real human readers? If so, what do you all have in common, and what is your particular interest in this article? Or is this some kind of electronic ‘bot’ phenomenon? What is the story?
If you are reading this, please respond in the ‘Leave a Comment’ box at the bottom of the page. I will be very grateful for your feedback, thank you. (Editor … St Francis Webguy)

What kinds of habits do you own to?  Don’t you find life is muchly governed by habits, predilections, assumptions and preconceived ideas?

It occurred to me that when drinking tea I always leave the last millilitres at the bottom of the cup, and I wondered why, when a coffee cup usually gets drained.  The answer was obvious when I thought about it.  My early tea drinking experiences were from teapots, when the bottom mouthful was always full of off-putting tea leaves.  Now, well into the twenty first century, tea bags protect us from tea leaves so they no longer populate the last mils: one can drain the cup.  But, one doesn’t.  Well … this one doesn’t.  He’s developed a sacred, irrational habit.

It is said that habits are hard to break.  Get rid of the ‘h’ and you’ve still got ‘abit’.  Get rid of the ‘a’ and the ‘bit’ is still there.  Get rid of the ‘b’ and … what?  You’ve still got ‘it’! 

Don’t think there are any easy solutions.  I bring problems, not solutions.


Breaking habits take commitment and discipline, of course, but even before that – awareness.  You have to recognise a habit before you can can it.  Be aware that it even exists.  Then you have to desire change.  Only then the application of commitment and discipline and determination and all those habit-busting things.

No.  No easy solutions. But here’s a story (maybe apocryphal, maybe not) that illustrates the problem, and the ridiculousness of some habits.  And the need for awareness; and may even have something to say about religious practices and traditions.
And the sacred habits of tea drinking.

Once upon a time there was a monastery in Tibet. The monks in the monastery meditated from dawn to dusk. One day it so happened that a cat wandered into the monastery and disturbed the monks. The head monk instructed that the cat be caught and tied to the banyan tree until dusk. He also ruled that every day, to avoid interruption during meditation, the cat be tied to the banyan tree. So it became a daily practice, a tradition in the monastery.  To catch the cat and tie it to the banyan tree before the day’s ceremonies commenced. The cat remained tied to the banyan tree as long as the monks meditated.
The tradition continued.
One day the head monk died. As per tradition the next senior-most monk was chosen to succeed him, and all other traditions, including the banyan tree custom, were continued.
One day the cat died. The whole monastery plunged into panic. A committee was formed to find a solution and it was unanimously decided that a cat be bought immediately from the nearby market and tied to the tree before starting the meditation the next day.

In time, the tree also died, and was replaced.

The tradition is followed in the monastery even today, and, centuries later, learned descendants of the spiritual teachers have written scholarly treatises about the religious significance of tying up cats for meditation ceremonies.

Monks and their habits, eh?

Ken F

Trailblazer

By Joan Fanshawe

(Based on Luke 9:51-62; Gal 5:1,13-26)

A recent post on Franciscan theologian Richard Rohr’s daily blog featured guest writer Diana Butler Bass, an American author and explorer of divine spirituality. She says that over recent years she has had to respond many times to the question, “Why do you stay Christian?” She says she knew many fancy answers but in the end “it’s because of Jesus”.

That might seem the perfectly simple answer to some or even many of you. “Of course it’s Jesus,” you might say, and so might I – but  I then found myself thinking about who Jesus has been for me over my lifetime of Christian experience, and today.

In her recent book Freeing Jesus, Bass suggests that our relationship with Jesus is a “dynamic opportunity to see God and ourselves perpetually anew”.
Jesus has not stayed the same for her through her whole life’s journey. And, while open to understanding that a verse in Hebrews says, “Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today, and forever”, she herself hasn’t stayed the same yesterday, today, and forever. Neither has the church or the world stayed the same yesterday, today, and forever.

The ‘who Jesus is to me?’ question arises especially in this encounter we have in today’s passage from Luke. It’s a familiar passage but this time my very first reaction on reading it had me wondering if Jesus had got out of bed on the wrong side that day!

Another source just starts: “That Jesus: he can be quite enigmatic.” 

When his disciples ask if they should command fire to come down from heaven and consume unbelievers, he sternly tells them, “No.” 
A village does not welcome him, and he simply moves on to another village. 

A convert says she will follow him, “wherever you may go,” and he replies, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests.”
He invites a stranger to follow him, and that one replies, “First let me go and bury my father”— and Jesus says, “Let the dead bury their own dead.” 
And another asks simply to say farewell to his loved ones. To this one, Jesus says, “No one who puts a hand to plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of heaven.”

You have to say it does read rather like a litany of crankiness/grouchiness. Or it could be looked at this way:
Jesus reprimands James and John for wanting to resort to retaliation or violence as a response to inhospitality, and he avoids conflict by simply moving on from an uncomfortable situation. The next three interactions could be picked apart and analysed forever – and no doubt have been – but we can’t deny that Jesus appears to be saying something like: “If you wish to follow me, you must drop everything and everyone in your life. Just give up everything and follow me.”

And just where is he leading?
To Jerusalem, as it says in this passage, “to be taken up.” To his betrayal, crucifixion, and death. 

How do we hear this? Can our Jesus be ordering us to put aside our livelihoods, our relationships, and to abandon our property in order to enter into pain, suffering, and the very jaws of death?

That might depend now on whether you see Jesus as someone to worship or someone to follow. Nothing new here, both have their supporters, both are traditional. But, for today, let’s consider the possibility that Jesus is asking us to follow him. Because, if we were only to worship him, we might be expecting him to save us from trials, to rescue us from danger, to keep us from harm.  That’s what an omnipotent God should do, right? That’s how the Almighty really ought to treat those he loves and who worship him.

And that’s exactly the problem if we make Jesus a mere religious focus, instead of a journey toward union with God. 

Richard Rohr provides an insight here, telling us that the shift over time — from following Jesus to worshipping him — made us become a religion of “belonging and believing” instead of a religion of transformation.
A religion of belonging and believing is concerned about who’s in and who’s out, about what specific doctrine people subscribe to, and about how they support the institution called the church.

A religion of transformation, on the other hand, focuses on change. Changing ourselves into more and more of whom God is calling each of us to be, and changing the world around us into a more hospitable place for all of God’s creatures. 

This way Jesus calls us to is much harder work.
We might be like Elisha and ask for a double share of Elijah’s spirit. We might wait around for the whirlwind to pull us into heaven. And we might hope for divine power to part the waters before us. 
Or, we can settle down and do the work given to us: to share love, to spread joy, to wage peace, to foster patience, to nurture kindness, to exhibit generosity, to seek faithfulness, to cultivate gentleness, and to strive for better self-control. 

As Paul writes to the churches in Galatia , we are “called to freedom” and this freedom comes by leaving things behind. Maybe not every possession, maybe not every relationship, maybe not every thing and everyone — but certainly we are called to leave behind what Paul calls “the works of the flesh”.
To leave behind anger and quarrels. 
To leave behind dissensions and factions. 

Jesus’s promise to all of us — that we will be inheritors of the kingdom of heaven: this does not promise us avoiding all difficulties in this life. The spiritual life is not one without pain, without suffering, without challenge.
This is what it is to follow Jesus, rather than just worship him. To accept our baptismal calling to become dead to sin and raised to new life.
To seek, by word and example, to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly — following our God on the same path. This path that may lead us directly into whirlwinds or even through the valley of the shadow of death.

But never on our own. “I am with you,” Jesus promises.
This path can and will leave a world behind us a little better, a little kinder, and a little safer. 
The path can and will leave us stronger, more spiritually fit, and better able to cope with whatever lies ahead.  

If we truly follow Jesus, we have an amazing trailblazer ahead of us. 
One who set his face towards Jerusalem.
One who never repaid anyone evil for evil.
One who forgives and expects us to do likewise. 
One who requires only love — for others, for God. 

This is my Jesus.