Article
Excerpted from the book, “Rare Peace, Raging World”
Finding Rare Peace in a Raging World
Christian Spiritual Psychology
Integrating Body, Mind, and Spirit.
By J. Rande Howell
Martha is Late For a Very Important Date
Martha was late. Already in a hurry, she was hit with an urgent assignment just as she was preparing to leave work for an important meeting at church. Her mood darkened, but it had to be done. Martha plowed through it at breakneck speed. Rushing through the doors of the office to her car in the darkening evening, she fumbled for her keys in her purse. “Where are they? Where are they? I can’t be late. They’re depending on me. Hurry! Hurry!” she scolded herself.
Finally she found them. Martha shot into the car and rammed the keys into the ignition. She gunned her car. “Gotta get it warm fast. I can’t be late!” she fumed. She squalled out of the parking lot into the gathering darkness and sped towards the church.
Her mind racing and her body in a rush, she could not slow down once she got to the meeting. “This has got to stop – I need to calm down. Why am I so stressed out if I’m trying to do good?” she muttered to herself as she tried to calm down, “My world has gotten crazy. What am I missing?”
A voice in the back of her mind chided, “You can’t slow down. You’ve got to prove you matter. You’ve got to try harder.” A darkness shuttered through Martha momentarily as she pushed that thought out of her mind.
Our Spiritual Psychology:
The Hidden War Going on in Our Minds
A hidden war is going on going on in Martha’s mind (common to us all), and it alluding detection. To her, these were just thoughts whirling around inside her all-too-busy head. Like most of us, Martha pushed these uncomfortable thoughts aside and got on with life. Because Martha was focused on doing good and proving herself to others, she was oblivious to the way she had been deceived by an unseen enemy lurking in the shadows of her mind. She was blind to her spiritual psychology.
There is a disagreement inside her head about which she is clueless. She is doing good, but it is never quite good enough to please her inner critic. And in the frantic activity to prove herself, she finds only fleeting moments of happiness in her life. It is like there is a battle going on in her mind. There is an inner critic that is never satisfied with what she does. And there is part of her that attempts to prove that she does matter.
This was not the Christian life she was expecting. Martha wanted to know the inner peace and unreasonable joy of a close connection to Christ, but it was not working out that way. Instead of peace of mind, she had more and more conflict.
Welcome to our hidden spiritual psychology. Martha, like most of us, fails to recognize that there is an internal dialogue going on in our minds all the time. Most of us dismiss this internal dialogue as “just our thoughts”. While this is true on the surface – it is so much more. If you tune into this internal conversation, you would discover that the internal dialogue is also where the war within the self is fought (Romans 7:21-25). This is the war that keeps us from knowing peace of mind and tapping into the potential we have as human beings.
In the Christian tradition, this war began for humans in the Garden of Eden. When Adam and Eve were tricked by the serpent and ate of the Tree of Life, their eyes were opened to both good and evil (Genesis 3:22). Suddenly, everyone had a little angel and a little devil on their internal shoulder competing for uninterrupted attention. The negative internal voice that seduced Adam and Eve is called in ancient Hebrew – the prosecuting attorney. And the word that they used to describe the prosecuting attorney is Satan. So we all have a prosecuting attorney in our head, constantly judging, criticizing us, and tempting us into a trap.
Christ, as a human, also had to contend with the prosecuting attorney. First, after His baptism, Christ was compelled into the desert (Mark 4:1-11). There He confronted the tempting voice that attempted to convince Him of its deceptions. After rebuking the prosecuting attorney, Satan (the prosecuting attorney) left – not because the interior voice was defeated, but because it sought a better opportunity (Luke 4:13). This opportunity came at Gethsemane. Jesus found Himself in an all out war with the prosecuting attorney as He had to choose between following the will of His Father or His human will (Luke 22:42-44). This is the same war that goes on it our mind.
If Christ had to content with such a powerful destructive voice in His mind, why do we think that it is not normal for us to contend with it? Most of us are embarrassed to acknowledge there is an internal conversation going on in our minds. Yet, within this dialogue is the war between lie and truth. This is the inherent spiritual psychology of the self. Our blindness to our spiritual psychology keeps us from being able to discern the different voices speak in our mind (Romans 7:15-25). And we remain blind to the Christ within us because it is drown out by continual noise in our head.
Fortunately for us, the voice of Christ also dwells within us (John 14:17-20) and is always knocking on the door of our awareness. Our job is to develop the skills so we can tune into the voice of Christ and discover who we are in Him – rather than to remain focused on the message of the prosecuting attorney (like Martha did in the example above).
Spiritual Psychology:
The Intersection of Body, Mind, and Spirit
In modern Christianity we ignore (at our own risk) the power of the flesh to influence the mind and our spiritual development. Our neuro-biology (the flesh) organizes our lives for survival, while our spiritual nature seeks the door that leads to eternal life. This condition makes our flesh, and therefore us, susceptible to the prosecuting attorney living within us (Hebrews 2:14). And, under stress, our brain simply hijacks the capacity to think calmly. This situation makes us highly corruptible for the prosecuting attorney in our head. Given the level of stress in modern life, we have to learn how to calm the body so we can still the mind. How does this work?
Our mind (our awareness of thinking) emerges from the brain – a part of our flesh. Therefore, our mind (our thoughts) is going to be greatly influenced by the emotions of our flesh. Think about the kind of thinking you do when you are angry. Once cooled down, most of us are embarrassed by what we say and do while angry. Not very sane is it? Then think about the kind of thinking and predicting you do while in an emotional state of fear or sadness. All our thinking is emotional state dependent. And our emotions are biological in nature and short term survival oriented.
It is not possible to open yourself to God’s peace when stressed or frustrated. Learning to calm the biological and emotional fear we have in living is essential to finding peace of mind. It is not something that we learn naturally or in our modern Christian churches.
These are skills that can be learned and are found in the book, Rare Peace, Raging World. Stilling the mind though calming the flesh allows us to take fear offline and open ourselves to the presence of the Divine. Working from a calm state, we can direct our attention away from the clanging gongs in our mind to the silence where we can find the Christ within us. And as we begin to dwell or abide in Him, He begins to dwell and abide in us (Ephesians 2:22).
Re-arming Ourselves With the Right Tools
People become so convinced that the inner critic (the prosecuting attorney) is right about the person they are that they no longer question its authority to judge. This is tragic. The focus of our lives is then taken off Christ and our true identity is corrupted. Just as Christ challenged this voice, and, with great effort and authority, staked claim to His true identity – so can we (with His help). We can reclaim our true identity in Christ rather stay stuck in the self beliefs we have been tricked into believing. We learn to turn back to (repeat) Christ and who we are in Him. This is the essence of the work found in Rare Peace, Raging World.
Tool Number One. The first essential tool for this mission is a new understanding of prayer. In the Aramaic notion of prayer (slotha), the purpose of prayer was not to make requests of God – it was to tune your attention to the frequency where you could find God. This is the essence of “Be still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10). By stilling the voices in the mind, you can tune your attention to the quiet, small voice of Christ within you. To do this, the voices in the mind have to be stilled. There are various ways that Christians have used over the centuries to do this. This topic is explored extensively with exercises in the book Rare Peace, Raging World.
Tool Number Two. Breathing and relaxation, as a way to calm the body and mind, have been used since Genesis (Genesis 2:7). God brings Adam into being by the act of breathing the gift of life into Adam’s nostrils. The Hebrew word for breathing and breathe is Ruah. Ruah was so much more than simply breathing air though. To the ancient Hebrews and to Christ, breath and Spirit were integrated together. They were not separate. If you were breathing, you were by definition breathing in the life-giving and life-sustaining Holy Spirit. The risen Christ breathes the Holy Spirit on to His disciples (John 20:22). So the act of breathing in the Judeo-Christian tradition is way to move the Holy Spirit into your body and life.
Breathing calms the body and stills the mind. In the ensuing stillness, we can focus our attention on the presence of Christ within us. Also as we breathe, we move from our stressed-out states of mind to a calm, reverent state of mind. In this way the very act of breathing becomes an important (and overlooked) aspect of prayer that helps us to connect with Christ. This is further explained to greater depth in Rare Peace, Raging World. Included on the book’s training CD is a guided meditation that allows you to experience Christianity’s holy breathing.
Tool Number Three. Opening our heroic nature that God embedded into each of us is the beckoning adventure of new life. Growing in Christ also means claiming the person you were created to be. In each of us there is the courage and desire to face the good and the bad within us. We have to learn to courageously confront our personal demons, or our march to peace of mind is stunted. This part of the self is called the spiritual warrior. The spiritual warrior knows that the war is not “out there”, but rather, it is inside their head.
The spiritual warrior knows that he or she is a precious child of God and is loved by God (John 15:13). Knowing this as the core of his being, the spiritual warrior summons the courage to look into the mirror. What he sees in his reflection (what all of us see) is appalling (Ephesians 6:11-18). But amongst the mess, he also finds something worth fighting for. His life in Christ. It is worth the price.
Shame becomes a tool for transforming the self as Peter experienced after the rooster crowed (Luke 22:54-62)) – not a motivation to hide from the truth as Adam and Eve did (Genesis 3:8-10). Finding rare peace while still living in this raging world takes the courage of the spiritual warrior. A courage born of facing our fears and demons despite our fears because we know Christ will be there for us.
Properly equipped, fear loses its sting as Christ, not our dread, leads us into the new life we are becoming through Him. And we experience the rare peace of knowing that we walk the journey of life hand-in-hand with Christ leading us onward. Our job is to develop the skills discussed here, and our struggle is to reclaim our identity in Christ. It is the war within the self that we must all fight. This is the peace for which we must fight.
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