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When I chose the artwork for the cover of the 2014 edition of The Psychology of Jesus, I picked this painting by Bartolome’ Esteban Murillo.

        To me the subject of the painting and the story it tells is obvious. To my surprise, even the most Biblically literate have not immediately recognized this story brought to art by Murillo. I even asked my son, “Who is in this painting?” Not knowing what to answer, he gave the answer most twelve-year-old pastor’s sons would offer, “God.” The painting’s subject matter is given away in the title, “The Return of The Prodigal.”  Painted later in his life, Murillo was part of the Brotherhood of Charity. The group felt that charity was the only activity that people could do which touched the heart of God and eternity. All accumulating, whether power, wealthy, or even knowledge was temporary and lost in death. They highlighted seven acts of charity and mercy. Besides, retelling the story of the prodigal, Murillo’s painting highlighted the act of clothing the naked visually clear in the large pile of clothes the servant holds for the son. 

   A man encountered Sophia at the market selling used books. As he searched through a pile, Sophia reached below the table, pulled out an old book with a ratty cover, and when certain no one was watching, whispered, “Try this one. It is a treasure.”
   The man bought it for a few pennies, took it home, read it, and to his surprise, on the inside back cover he found scribbled in tiny letters a few sentences, a brief description, about a magic stone that could turn anything it touched into pure gold. According to the book, the stone was lying somewhere on the shore of the Black Sea among a million other pebbles that looked just like it. The one difference was that the magic stone was warm to the touch whereas all others were cold.
   The man set up a tent on the shore and went to work. Each stone he picked up, if it was cold to the touch, he threw it far into the sea so that he wouldn’t keep picking up the same stones.
   Stone after stone, he picked each up, felt it, and hurled it deep into the water. Stone after stone…
   He worked a week, a month, ten months, a whole year, patiently feeling each stone and tossing it into the sea.
   Then, one evening, he picked up a pebble, and it was warm to the touch! Through sheer force of habit, he threw it far out into the water.

In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.  Leo Tolstoy

Travel with those who love a journey,
accompany those who enjoy adventure,
be a companion to those who laugh often.

 If you heart is like a house with no door,
how can you ever feel at home with anyone?
If your heart is open, you can be at home
with anyone, everywhere.

 The people of The Way are never lost
because they are always at home,
no matter where they are.

Be like eagles,
why care where your nest is,
when your home is the sky?

   In the summer of 1996, just before midnight, the youth and adults on our Mission Trip to Lexington, Kentucky were bunking down for sleep while I was out driving the church van around the same three blocks in what seemed to me a never-ending track of exhaustion. Cayla, a little over a year old, on her first mission trip, was in her car seat behind me slowly losing the battle between wake and sleep. She wouldn’t go to sleep in the church where we were staying, so I put her in the van and went hoping the driving wheels and the hum of the road would lull her to sleep. That was her first of many ‘mission trips’ to come. By age 12, she’d been on 13. As she graduated from high school, she planned a trip to Russia. In college, she coordinated projects for our Haiti partnership that will end up providing ongoing health care to thousands of children in Haiti. Now, she through her cap in the air and her gown aside after finishing Berry College and is off in Morocco with The Peace Corps.
   As parents, Carrie and I have worked very hard to make a home for our family. That’s what we do, as parents, we work to make a house a home not knowing that our children are conspiring against us all along. While we tell them, “Settle down!” making that our life’s goal, having found each other and settled down, our children are, year after year, with every birthday, cranking it up. No matter what age, as soon as you think you’ve mastered being a parent, they grow to a new stage in their development and your incompetence. I had always heard, “Give your children, roots and wings.” Well, guess what. The wings are far more powerful than the roots.
   I should have seen it coming with Cayla. She put on her backpack for school, but school wouldn’t be enough. She chose horseback riding as a hobby but going around in circles only satisfied her for so long. 
   Yes, I should have seen it coming. Every Sunday she heard me charge a congregation to go out in the world, that’s what we do as pastors. But congregations are expected to come back a week later (or at least next Christmas or Easter). Even so, every once in a while, you get someone who does more on a mission trip than get a small dose, they catch fire. Every once in a while , you get someone in church who actually listens to the gospels and the words of Jesus who says ‘build’ 11 times but ‘go’ 111 times. Look at church facilities and budgets, I think we reversed the ratio. Not Cayla. Even though we seldom preach about the Great Commission where Jesus tells his followers to descend the mountain and “Go into all the world,” apparently on those Sundays, she’s been listening.
   Looking back as full-time parent and part-time pastor in my daughter’s life, I guess I should warn you. Be careful if you come to worship on Sunday, the warm coals of your heart might catch fire – then, as Dr. Seuss says, “Oh, The Places You’ll Go.”

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Soren Kierkegaard wrote of the blues calling it, “Despair,” and “the sickness unto death.” Despair can kill, but to never feel it, to not have experienced heart-wrenching pain is to not be alive. According to Kierkegaard, in our development from infancy to childhood and beyond, we begin to become aware of our existence, to notice that we are here. This awareness stirs in us a sense of awe, wonder, and amazement. During infancy, we become aware that we can intentionally move our fingers, toes, and cry and someone will come. We are alive and become aware of it. We are here and become aware that we are here.
Subtly, over time, we become aware of the limits of our being here, a toy breaks, a pet dies, perhaps we get sick, a friend or grandparent dies. Kierkegaard points out that this is the second part of our awareness, a second stage, where we become not only aware that we are here, we also start to realize that we will not always be here, aware that all which lives, dies.
Initially, there is denial. The temptation is to be special, to be spectacular, other than human. The devil tempted Jesus to try and be special, turn a stone to bread, throw yourself from the top of The Temple in the center of town for all to see, or take control of the world and fix it, be special, be significant, be something other than human, a superior human, better than others, other than mortal. Our existence, when fully attended, takes us to a place where we recognize the limits of life and the undeniable nature of death and can look beyond ourselves to the immortal. According to Kierkegaard, “(Despair) is the road we all have to take – over the Bridge of Sighs into eternity.”
If we want God to remove our challenges, to help us deny our weakness, our mortality, we will find God greatly disappointing as Robert Farrar Capon wrote that Jesus is like a lifeguard who sees a drowning girl. He swims out to her, drowns with her, then three days later comes out of the sea promising that everything, even the girl who drowned, is wonderful.
We want a lifeguard who always saves us, who prolongs our life, not one who helps us die to find new life. God is not a life preserver but a life giver. Our greatest problem with God is God’s contentment with our mortality, a reality that drives us to despair. According to Kierkegaard, experiencing despair is not a sin, living there is. Kierkegaard wrote,

Whether you are man or woman, rich or poor, dependent or free, happy or unhappy; whether you bore in your elevation the splendour of the crown or in humble obscurity only the toil and heat of the day; whether your name will be remembered for as long as the world lasts, and so will have been remembered as long as it lasted, or you are without a name and run namelessly with the numberless multitude; whether the glory that surrounded you surpassed all human description, or the severest and most ignominious human judgment was passed on you — eternity asks you and every one of these millions of millions, just one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not, whether so in despair that you did not know that you were in despair, or in such a way that you bore this sickness concealed deep inside you as your gnawing secret, under your heart like the fruit of a sinful love, or in such a way that, a terror to others, you raged in despair. If then, if you have lived in despair, then whatever else you won or lost, for you everything is lost, eternity does not acknowledge you, it never knew you, or, still more dreadful, it knows you as you are known, it manacles you to yourself in despair!

To live fully requires facing death, moving through our frailty with God’s strength. We fear death; God mocks it. We live trying to be everlasting in life without death, God offers us life beyond comprehension and understanding. We try to achieve immortality while God gives it freely through our mortality. We want to be free from dying while God wants to liberate us from the fear of dying. We have no power to give ourselves life beyond death any more than we gave ourselves life at birth. Birth was not an achievement but a process, so, too is death into life. Like birth, life in death comes as a gift from God. We do the dying; God does the resurrecting, not just in our final deaths, but our momentary ones, as we let go and look to God for the gift of the next moment, and the next, and the…

What we can learn from Herod…

When Herod met the Magi at the palace in Jerusalem, neither had met the infant Messiah. Both were experiencing their perceptions of who and what he might be. Herod is a vivid illustration of what the philosopher Epictetus observed, People are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of them. The Primary Concept for us is: People and events don’t bother us, but our perceptions of them do.

Martin Guitars has an ad campaign called, “Crossroads.” In the ad, they retell the legend of Robert Johnson’s encounter with the devil. It’s a gloomy night at a crossroads on a rural Mississippi plantation in the early 1930’s. A struggling blues musician named Robert Johnson has a burning desire to play his guitar better than anyone else. At this lonely intersection, the Devil waits for Johnson. With the moon shining down, the Devil plays a few songs on Johnson’s guitar. When Robert Johnson gets his guitar back, he has complete mastery over the instrument. His soul now belongs to the supernatural being, and for the next 5 years or so, he creates music that will live past his tragic, suspicious death in 1938 at the age of 27.

A closer look at the lyrics of “Crossroads” shows not a man struggling with the devil and fame but with loneliness and pain. The crossroad is whether or not his pain will overwhelm him or whether or not he can come through it with a song. Here are Robert Johnson’s lyrics and a video to listen to the original version

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Can you take your struggles and turn them into a song?

The Way is like the sower scattering seed everywhere.
Some falls upon the road eaten by the birds.
Some falls upon rocks and never takes root.
Some falls upon thorns and are choked out.
Some falls upon the good soil and brings forth a healthy crop.
The sower is not concerned for seed that is lost.
He does not worry about seed that is eaten by birds,
that takes no root upon rocks, or is choked out by thorns.
The sower understands life.
Life grows exponentially.
Life always wins over roads, rocks, and thorns.
So it is with The Way.
The Way is like a mustard seed tiny but large in life.

The Way is like kudzu, once it starts growing in your field,
you’ll never get it out.

The Way is like yeast, a small amount does much
transforming a lump of dough into a loaf,
and all who eat of it are filled.

Matthew 19:14 Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs.”

Dick Renard wrote, “God, Help Me Be Like My Boys”
When I look at my boys, I see the life of simple concentration.
They play hard, they work hard, they learn with intensity
They fight going to bed because they haven’t had enough of today.
They look forward to tomorrow only at bedtime prayers.
God, help me be like my boys.
They love unconditionally.
They don’t worry about food or clothes or where they will sleep.
They know they will be taken care of.
They move into the world as friendly agents, without pretense or false motive.
God, help me be like my boys.
They know who you are and have no doubt they will be with you forever.
They see your awesome creative powers.
They don’t compromise their faith with their friends.
They communicate their feelings without the mask of an adult.
God help me be like my boys.
But, O God, look at me. See my insides. I’m just the opposite of my boys.
I hold onto anger instead of putting it behind me.
I don’t genuinely laugh anymore. I want to go to be because I’m tired.
God, help me be like my boys.
My relationships are conditional. I like those who like me.
There is usually a motive to all I do. I’m cautious moving into the world.
I worry about my family, my job, money, and things.
I often wonder if you will take care of me.
God, help me be like my boys.
I’m afraid my faith is not socially acceptable. Some friends feel I’ve committed intellectual suicide. I’ve become a chameleon to hide my embarrassment of you. I wonder why you came to me because I am so selfish.
God, help me be like my boys.
God, I look at my two boys and I see a refreshing view of you.
I see life and gaiety. I see acceptance and conviction.
I see strength and commitment. I see a pair who know what it means to die for you.
God, help me be like my boys.
Please, God, don’t allow their hearts to ever change. Let me be like my boys because I want to be like you.

The last post looks at Carl Jung’s four stages of development (as we journey from humans having spiritual experiences to spirits having human experiences. Leon Oudejans offers a great picture of the four stages with the epiphanies that accompany each transition.

Here are the top quotes by Carl Jung to help you on your journey from humans stuck in life hoping for a spiritual experience to spirits on an awakened human journey:

Here are some of my favorite poems and prayers for a daily reading to help guide you on your journey toward Easter.
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https://davidjonespub.com/wp-content/uploads/40-Days.pdf

According to Carl Jung, we grow up as humans and on the journey, we have spiritual experience. The goal for life is to mature, to become spirits having a human experience.

Here are Jung’s 4 Archetypes or Stages of Development:

Looking at the Baptism of Christ presents some deep theological questions.

Consider this painting by Pheoris West, what images do you notice?

Can you see:
a rigid image of John the Baptist to the right?
the dove?
the face and arms of God?
why does Jesus face turn? What is he looking toward following his baptism?

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Curly the cowboy addresses the secret to life…

Jesus faced a similar question, and gave a similar answer (though I imagine without the cigarette or the hat) in Matthew 22:

³⁶ “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” ³⁷ He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ ³⁸ This is the greatest and first commandment.³⁹ And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ ⁴⁰ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Just one simple thing you’ve got to do…