We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.
Romans 6:4
jesus christ
I almost gave up rolling in jiu-jitsu for Lent
I’ve been struggling with a shoulder injury, which I sustained in jiu-jitsu, for quite some time. Last month, however, it took a significant turn for the worse. Normally, I simply train around my injuries, which, considering I’m almost forty-seven, may be why my shoulder has never really healed. The nagging and progressive nature of this injury has had me worried, though.
As we entered the season of Lent, it occurred to me that it may be a good idea to give up rolling (sparring in jiu-jitsu) for Lent. Considering the fact that rolling is my favorite part of jiu-jitsu, I knew that this was going to be a big sacrifice for me. In fact, aside from when I was in a car accident nine years ago and when we were in the lockdown phase of covid, this would be the longest I have ever not rolled since I started jiu-jitsu in 2012.
In the beginning, it was relatively easy because my shoulder and neck were in so much pain that the idea of rolling was actually frightening. As I started to get better, however, as a result of rest, foam-rolling, stretching, massage, and multiple visits to a chiropractor, I began testing the waters a little bit on the mats.
At first, I tried only flow-rolling and only with purple belts or higher. After a few classes of that, I tried only playing guard and asking my partners to reset back to neutral if and when they passed my guard. Then, I started rolling with people but not submitting them, telling myself that it’s not rolling if I’m not using submissions.
A dozen loopholes and self-justifications later, I realized that I had broken my Lenten vow. Then came the excuses. “I’m not actually Catholic,” I told myself, “My church doesn’t preach or practice Lent.”
“Does God really care whether or not I roll?” I asked.
“It’s just jiu-jitsu,” I said, “What’s the big deal?”
But I could feel that something was off. My spiritual condition began to suffer and I just didn’t feel right. At first, I thought it was simply the fact that I’m in pain almost all of the time from my shoulder, but I knew there was more going on than that.
Then I recalled the story from Matthew 26:36-46 when Jesus took his disciples to Gethsemane to pray. He tells them that “[his] soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death (38)” and asks them to keep watch with him. He goes off to pray three times and, all three times, he comes back to find them sleeping. Jesus is about to be crucified for the sins of the world and his disciples couldn’t even stay awake to keep watch with him for an hour.
As I recalled this story, my heart sunk. I couldn’t even give up rolling for a month. That’s how weak I am. That’s how easily I give into temptation and how quickly I “fell asleep” while my Lord and Savior prepares to be crucified so that I may be saved. Jesus gave his life for me and I couldn’t even give him a month of my time and faithfulness. Thank the good Lord for his forgiveness and mercy. Heaven knows I do not deserve it.
Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity
To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations on God and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox.
Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other
In an interview with Benedictine monk Father Augustine Wetta, Fr. Wetta talked about a fellow monk recently leaving the monastic brotherhood and explained that whenever this happened, it was almost always because of a secret, something they were too afraid or ashamed to tell someone else. He went on to explain just how tragic and unnecessary the loss of a monastic brother was because whatever was going on could have been worked out if only the monk were willing to discuss it with another person instead of keeping it to himself.
There’s a saying in the recovery community that “We are only as sick as our secrets.” There’s a lot of truth to this. The things about us that we hide and keep secret become the edges onto which demons can cling. By keeping certain aspects of ourselves hidden in the shadows, those shadows begin living in us.
This is not to say that we should share everything with everyone. That is not only unwise, but it can also cause more harm than good. By oversharing and being overly honest, we risk hurting others and putting ourselves in a position where we cannot help anyone.
We shouldn’t, however, be the only person who knows everything about us. This is especially true for those things about us for which we carry shame, guilt, remorse, or embarrassment. These negative emotions are a recipe for isolation, and when we isolate, which is different than solitude, the devil is usually there to keep us company. “Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective (James 5:16, NIV).”
Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity
To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations on God and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox.
It’s hard to drive like a jerk while Jesus is on the radio but it’s not impossible.
It’s hard to drive like a jerk while Jesus is on the radio, but it’s not impossible. In fact, I realized today that I do it quite often. Realized may not be the right word, however. It’s more like I was informed today that I do this quite often and I was unable to deny it.
While driving back from a day-trip to the beach with my family, I found myself getting annoyed at another driver who was driving aggressively. My instinct, an unfortunate result of spending too many years driving in and around Washington D.C., was to match his aggression. When he started to pass me, I began to speed up. As I did, I was struck by the irony of the situation.
On the radio, I was listening to Christian music. “How can you drive like a jerk,” an inner voice asked, “While listening to music about Jesus?” As soon as this thought crossed my mind, I began to slow down. I really don’t want to drive like a jerk. I know it’s not safe or even necessary, and I am sure not being a good representative of Christ in the world when I do.
I remember hearing author Seth Godin say once that it’s not that the other driver cut us off that’s the problem, it’s the story we tell ourselves about the other driver cutting us off that’s the problem. We tell ourselves stories about the driver, we tell ourselves stories about ourselves, and we tell ourselves stories about why the other driver doing this thing to us. But these stories are mostly pride’s way of justifying our un-Christlike behavior so that we don’t have to change.
Pride is a powerful tool of the devil and I’m as susceptible to it as anyone. That’s one of the many reasons I need Jesus. Left to my own devices, I will always choose to retaliate against perceived slights and challenges to my ego no matter the risk to my life, the lives of those in the car with me, or the lives of the other driver. But Jesus challenges this mentality and this behavior.
Jesus asks me to do better, to make better choices, and to treat others better. He asks me to love my enemy, even my imagined enemies, and even my enemies on the road. In a strange way, I should really be thankful for aggressive drivers because they present me with an opportunity to practice this love of my enemies through the example of Christ Jesus who, even while he was dying on the cross, asked God to forgive his persecutors and all of us along with them.
Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity
To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox.
God will never let us down but other people will
God likes to remind me when I am putting my faith in something or someone other than him. As I’ve heard Father Mike Schmitz say, “We are wired for idolatry,” and it often seems as though every time I’m making steady progress in my relationship with God, I find a new false idol to give my attention to. This inevitably leads to unhappiness and disappointment, and I turn back to God for help.
I don’t know how many times I need it to be proven to me that God is God and everything and everyone else is not, but it seems as though I never fully learn this lesson. There’s always one more distraction and one more hope, followed by one more messy let down.
And I know it’s no one else’s fault. I can’t blame them. They are not asking to be God. I put them in that position. I set them up to fail me by having expectations that only God can meet and then I’m somehow surprised when humans prove to be human.
There’s a reason Jesus’s said the first and greatest commandment is to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:37-38, NIV). Even though he then tells us to “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Matt 22:39), this commandment comes second for a reason. God will never let us down, but other people will.
When I make for myself false idols, God allows it. He doesn’t like it and he warns against it, but he allows it because, even though he wants us to choose him, he never stops us from using our free will. If we want to choose to worship something or someone other than God, God won’t stop us. He will remove his grace and protection from us when we turn away from him, however.
Even though I know God never stops loving me, I have experienced times when I could feel his absence in my life. It usually happens when I turn my back on him or put something else before him. The funny thing is that God never went anywhere. It was I who cut myself off from his presence.
All he asks is that I repent. That is, that I turn back to him with a contrite heart. When I do, having been let down by the world once again, he is always there to welcome me home. I don’t do this to test him. It’s more like I have a short memory. I forget what it’s like to be alone in the wilderness, outside of his protection. So I test it out again and am reminded of the pain and misery that led me to him in the first place.
If only I never turned away, but the serpent of temptation comes in many forms. The devil has many faces and many voices, and he is a persistent trickster. He makes great promises that appeal to my pride, vanity, and fear, and he convinces me that I don’t need God this time, again, and it’s a lie.
Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity
To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox.
Choosing God who is choosing you
God wants your time. He doesn’t want your time because he is greedy or selfish, but because he wants you. He wants to connect with you and have a relationship with you, and he can’t do that unless you give him your time.
In truth, it was never your time anyway. You did not bring your life into being and you do not decide when it comes to an end. Every breath, every heartbeat, and every moment of your life is the graced gift from God.
But God will never force himself on you. You have the will and right to choose other than God from moment to moment. He loves you so much, however, and knows that choosing other than him is not what is best for you, that he wants nothing more than for you to choose him because he is always choosing you.
Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity
To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox.
Building a blue collar kind of faith one brick at a time
Some people seem to come by faith naturally. It’s effortless for them. They just have it. My paternal grandmother was like this, at least that’s how it seemed to me as a child.
I don’t remember a time, or even a moment, when my grandmother was not a faithful servant of God. She emanated faithfulness in both word and deed, and she was as close to a saint as I have ever known or may ever know. To this day, even having been gone from this world for many years, when I imagine what it means to be a Christian, I imagine her.
For myself, however, faith has not come easy. It has been a slow, educational process over a long period of time. As prideful as this may sound, God has had to prove himself to me over the course of many years in order for me to trust that he loves me and is actively working in my life to draw me closer to him.
In fact, for many years, even though I claimed to have faith in God and to be a Christian – I always said, “I’m a Christian, just not a very good one,” to excuse myself from what I knew I wasn’t doing – I acted like an agnostic. That is, I said I trusted God, but I behaved in a way that did not prove this to be true.
In spite of my professed faith, I tried to manage every aspect of my life. I worried about every detail, I stressed over every possibility, and I did everything in my power to never slow down because I believed that my efforts were the only thing that kept me from failing.
I tried to control all of the variables and outcomes in my life. I wanted power over all of the people around me and, if they didn’t do what I wanted, I was embittered or enraged. I sought out management positions at all of my jobs, not just because I was a good manager or a passionate and capable leader, but because the fewer people there were above me, the more control I had and the less I had to listen to other people’s input.
To be clear, this attitude made me good at my job. My need for power helped me succeed at work because my constant worry, my obsessive attention to detail, and my need to control my environment helped me to stay ahead of problems, outpace criticism, and predict failures before they happened.
The problem, however, is that this way of living is exhausting. It was like a perpetual game of Whack-A-Mole that I couldn’t win. I worked so hard at playing God that I would literally work myself sick and then medicate myself with caffeine and cold remedies so that I didn’t have to stop.
Like I said, this worked for a while. But then one day, it stopped. I hit an emotional, psychological, and spiritual wall, and I crashed. I just couldn’t keep all of the balls in the air anymore. I started to have anxiety attacks and this life I built for myself started to come crashing down on top of me.
I turned to therapy and it helped to a degree, but something was still missing. Then, one night I was filled with so much overwhelming anxiety and self-centered fear that I couldn’t sleep and I thought I was losing my mind, I begged God for help. I had used up all of my willpower and I simply couldn’t do it anymore. I needed God’s help and he answered my prayers.
Over the course of the past several years, God has been showing me that the more I trust in him, the more I rely on him, and the more I put my faith in his love for me, the more he takes care of me. At first, it was not easy. When you spend as many years as I did trying to control everything, faith in anything or anyone, especially someone or something you can’t even see, is hard to come by. But over time, as I learned to pray not just as a matter of habit, but with the sincerity of a dying man, the Lord started to reveal himself to me.
This happened sometimes in small ways and sometimes in big ways, but it happened and continues to happen consistently. To the degree that I rely on him does he take care of me. In this way, faith is an act of vulnerability because it means I must put my life into God’s hands without knowing what the outcome is going to be. He gives me just enough light to see the next step forward, but the rest of the journey is unlit and unknown to me – except that it isn’t.
God’s promises are very clear and his word is always true. If I trust him, he will never fail me. Things will always work out for the best. They may not work out the way I imagined, but they will work out for the best. This has been proven to me time and time again, even if I’m a slow learner.
Whereas my grandmother’s faith seemed to just come to her, that her faith in and faithfulness toward God defined her character and her existence, or at least that’s how it seemed to me, mine has been a slow work in progress. I suppose you could call my faith “blue collar faith” because it has been built brick-by-brick, one piece at a time, over the course of many years.
Neither type of faith is better or worse, mind you. The Lord loves each of us infinitely and unconditionally, for and as we are. It’s just that everyone’s faith comes to them in different ways and at different times in their lives. Or maybe I’m just stubborn.
Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity
To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox.
Going to the source for joy and peace
During breakfast, my daughter asked, “Daddy, why is the water auntie’s house different than the water at our house?”
“It comes from a different source,” I told her.
Sources matter. This is especially true when it comes to prayer and who we rely on for inspiration, guidance, and salvation. There are many different sources, but they don’t all promise the same end product.
As the saying goes, “Your mileage may vary.”
For many years, partly in rebellion against my Christian upbringing and partly out of a genuine curiosity, I was deeply attracted to the religions of the East, particularly Buddhism. I took classes, attended workshops, read books, listened to talks, and visited monasteries. I even married a woman from a predominantly Buddhist country.
Buddhism was attractive to me because it offered something I didn’t think Christianity did. It offered a method by which to practice. Christianity had prayer, Scripture, and church, but Buddhism had meditation and the promises of meditation were what really drew me into the religion, and it worked for a while.
Then one day, I had a crisis, a spiritual crisis. A series of events and personal choices threw my life completely out of balance and I started to experience anxiety attacks, severe depression, and what felt like the beginning of a nervous breakdown.
Among other things, I tried to recenter myself by returning to my Buddhist books, lectures, and meditation, but something was missing. It felt like I was hitting my head on a spiritual ceiling and I just couldn’t break through. I was almost there, but not quite and I couldn’t figure out why.
In hindsight, I can now see that God was allowing me to struggle so that I would learn a lesson only pain was going to teach me. In my desperation, I cried out to God for help. I prayed for guidance and wisdom, and, as divine providence would have it, I stumbled upon a book called The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind – A New Perspective on Christ and His Message by Cynthia Bourgeault (2008).
Upon reading The Wisdom Jesus, I discovered what was missing from my practice and that was God. Bourgeault’s book not only helped me bridge the gap between Buddhism and the teachings of Jesus, but it also reminded me of who I was and am, and that is a Christian. This book clarified why Buddhism no longer spoke to my heart as it once did. Buddhism had not changed. I had.
This realization restarted my journey in Christ and reignited the fire in my heart for the Lord. Through Bourgeault’s work, I was introduced to Thomas Keating and through Keating I was introduced to centering prayer. In centering prayer, I found a method for meditating which, instead of focusing on me and my attempts at enlightenment, focused on God and inviting him into my heart to do his work.
Both meditation and centering prayer are similar in many ways and they both promise transformative results. The difference between meditation and centering prayer, however, is the source of those results. In meditation, the results come from the practice itself and these results can be amazing and life-changing. The results from centering prayer, however, come from God.
Simply by changing the focus of my practicing an tapping into a different source, by tapping into God, my whole life changed. I stopped having anxiety attacks, my depression subsided, and my relationships started to balance out. I firmly believe that is because God was doing for me what I couldn’t do for myself.
None of this is to criticize Buddhism or to put down meditation as a practice. On the contrary, both Buddhism and meditation helped me out immensely as far as they could go, but for whatever reason, I needed to go deeper and I needed God’s help to get there. I needed to tap into a different source than Buddhism or meditation had to offer. I needed to tap into God and I needed to go through Jesus to do so.
Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity
To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox.
God calls us to stillness in a unique way meant just for us
In spite of my best efforts to remain present and prayerful, I spend a lot of time either working to make things happen faster than they should or waiting in anticipation for them to come to pass. That is to say, I spend a lot of time with my mind and emotions in the future. God does not exist in the future, however. God exists here and now, in this moment.
Faith is not an easy thing. It requires us not only to trust that God loves us and is sustaining us, but also to act like it. That means we must learn to be still and this takes practice.
I posed the question, “What practice(s) do you use to get and/or stay in the moment?” to a couple of friends the other day. Their answers were enlightening, especially in how varied they were.
One friend said that he prays the rosary and also self-administers reiki. We have always had both God and reiki in common and it pleases me to know that, after all these years, he is still practicing reiki. Praying the rosary, on the other hand, is new to me and is something I am just now learning how to do.
The other friend said that he reminds himself to focus on only one task at a time, which is something I have read the late Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh write about a lot. “If while washing dishes,” Thich Nhat Hanh writes, “we think only of the cup of tea that awaits us, thus hurrying to get the dishes out of the way as if they were a nuisance, then we are not ‘washing the dishes to wash the dishes.'” In addition to focusing on only one task at a time, this second friend also utilizes a breath practice and prayer to stay in the moment.
Aside from my morning (and sometimes afternoon) contemplative prayer, one practice I have been using recently is The Jesus Prayer, a prayer that can be traced back to 4th or 5th century Christian desert monks. When distracted, anxious, or agitated, I repeat, “Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner,” over and over again until I’m recentered. I also use The Jesus Prayer as a breath meditation by breathing in “Jesus Christ, son of God,” and breathing out “Have mercy on me, a sinner,” which is a practice I picked up from a talk by Bishop Robert Barron.
What is most fascinating to me about all of this, aside from the fact that I have checked my social media feed several times while writing this in anticipation of likes or comments, is that each of us is essentially seeking the same end goal, but by very different, if overlapping, means. This, to me, is a sign of how loving and personal God truly is. He calls each and every one of us to him, to be perfectly still and present in his presence in this moment, but he calls each of us in a unique way that is meant just for us. That’s how much he loves and is interested in us. What an amazing God we have!
Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity
To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox.
Some days God reminds us how much we need him
Some days, God likes to remind us how much we need him. He lets us get just far enough away from him that we fall and have to return to him for forgiveness and guidance. Today was one of those days for me.
The morning started out normal enough. I woke up a few minutes later than I would like, but it didn’t seem like a big deal. I went downstairs to make my daughter breakfast and, while doing so, I listened to a podcast about Thomas Aquinas.
As I made my daughter’s ham, egg, and cheese sandwich, I remembered my wife telling me the night before that there were chicken quesadillas prepped in the refrigerator for my daughter’s lunch. All I needed to do was to heat one up, put it in a container, and put it in her lunchbox. But this is where things went sideways.
My next thought after I remembered what my wife said was, “She can take care of that. I’m making breakfast. She can get up and make lunch. It’s time for my prayer hour and I have an appointment later.”
I finished making my daughter’s breakfast, set it on the table for her, and then sat down to for prayer. I started by reading a little bit about the history of Saint Patrick. After that, I read the Catholic Mass readings for the day. Then, holding the rosary my friend gave me, I said one Our Father and three Hail Marys and then sat in silent prayer for twenty minutes.
While I was in silent prayer, I heard my daughter’s first alarm go off and then I brought my mind back to God. A few minutes passed and I heard her second alarm go off and then I brought my mind back to God. Then she came downstairs and I brought my mind back to God. I heard her sit down to eat, open a book, and thought, “That book is going to make her eat slowly and she’s going to be late,” and then I turned my mind back to God.
When I was done with silent prayer, I opened my eyes and started to write my Meditations of a Gentle Warrior blog post for the day. While I was doing this, my wife came down and made my daughter’s lunch. She then told my daughter to close her book and finish eating because she was taking too long and was going to be late.
After my daughter finished her breakfast and my wife packed her lunch, we all started scurrying to get my daughter out the door on time. She went upstairs to brush her teeth and, when she came down, it was time to go, but her hair still wasn’t brushed or tied up and her agenda book wasn’t signed. Her mother was starting to get irritated and I could feel the tension building.
As my wife helped my daughter with her hair, I grabbed my daughter’s agenda book to sign it for her. I was getting flustered because it was time to go and all of this should have been done earlier. I also knew in the back of my mind that, if I had only been a little bit less selfish and prepped my daughter’s lunch for her while I was in the kitchen, my wife could have done her hair while she was eating, and we’d all be less frustrated.
After I signed her agenda book, I struggled to get it closed and, in my frustration, I lost my cool and tossed the agenda book on the couch in my daughter’s direction. I then grumbled at both of them that if they woke up earlier we wouldn’t all be in such a hurry.
The truth is, however, that I woke up late this morning, not them. It wasn’t too late, but it was late enough that I had to do my silent prayer while my daughter was getting ready and eating breakfast which, while doable, is not ideal. And then there was the selfish attitude I had about my daughter’s lunch.
I got my daughter out to the bus stop and she made it in time to catch the bus. After the bus drove away, I started on my morning walk. I was about a half a mile down the road when my wife called to talk about what happened earlier. We agreed that we need to do better and came up with some strategies for doing so, and then went on about our respective days.
I should say that I am extremely grateful for the fact that my wife and I talk through these things the way we do. Even when it’s hard or we don’t know how to be, we both want to be better spouses and better parents. These little five minute talks after a less than perfect morning where mistakes were made goes a long way to that end.
After I got home from my walk, a friend of mine who is struggling with some personal issues texted me and we shared back and forth about forgiveness and the process by which God expects us to do so, even when we have been truly hurt by someone. Somewhere in that text thread, I explained how I am constantly reminded of how imperfect I am and that these reminders help me to be more forgiving of others. I went on to say, “I threw my daughter’s school notebook in her direction today RIGHT AFTER I FINISHED MY MORNING MEDITATION. My God do I need God’s help!”
With this awareness of my own sinful nature, that even around my morning prayers I can be selfish toward my wife and impatient toward my daughter, how can I possibly hold a grudge against someone else for hurting my feelings or living in an ungodly way? Without God, I am nothing. Without him, I refuse to make my daughter lunch because, “That’s my wife’s problem and I already made her breakfast.” Without the Lord, I am selfish, I lose my temper over stupid things, and I throw notebooks.
Clearly, there is more work to do and more praying to be done. What a blessing it is to see these things today though. By God allowing our flaws to come to light, we are afforded the opportunity to turn back to him for help, forgiveness, and a better way forward. Just like distractions in meditation are an opportunity to turn our mind back to God, mistakes are an opportunity to turn our hearts back to God.
Later in the day, when my daughter got off the bus, we talked about what happened in the morning. I apologized to her for throwing her agenda book on the couch and told her the strategies her mother and I discussed for doing better in the morning. Unprompted, when my wife got home from work, she had the same conversation with our daughter but apologizing for her side of things and explaining how we can do better tomorrow.
I don’t know if these little talks are necessary or if my daughter “gets it,” but as far as I can recall, I never had them as a kid that and they feel like healing. It’s important for her to know that we make mistakes and when we do, that we own up to them, apologize, and try to make things right. It’s even more important, however, for my daughter to know that her parents are working together on her behalf and that God is helping us to do so because we can’t do it without him.
Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity
To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox.
ROBERT VAN VALKENBURGH 