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
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.
Practicing the presence of God through writing
There are many ways to practice God’s presence. Writing is one such practice. This is not true for all writing, but these days, the writing I do here and at Holistic Budo is one way that I practice God’s presence in my life. That doesn’t mean that everything I write is divinely inspired—far from it. Rather, I can feel God’s presence within the practice when I write with my mind on God.
I don’t write for myself. In truth, it was never my goal or desire to write as much as I do. I write because I feel called to do so. It feels like a spiritual requirement for me, something that God is asking of me. Much like when I don’t pray or meditate, when I don’t write, I feel out of sorts. It’s as if God has given me a gift, and when I squander that gift, he lets me know it.
I also don’t publish my writing for attention. I publish what I have written to free myself of it, let it go, and put it into the world without shame, judgment, or expectation. I publish my work as an act of not hiding. This is me not hiding behind my fear, my insecurity, or my concerns over the opinions of others. This is what I wrote. Here it is. Love it or hate it, I sat down today to write, and this is what came out.
Writing has become, for me, a form of prayer. It’s an act of listening. I sometimes sit down with an idea in mind of what I want to write about, but that idea is usually just the thing that gets me started. Once I begin writing, it rarely, if ever, goes the way I expected. I’m merely a conduit for that which wants to be written. I’m not trying to write. I’m trying to get out of the way.
My best writing comes out of the quiet spaces between my thoughts. When I don’t know what to write, I wait. I listen. I feel what wants to come out, and then I do my best not to taint or distort it. Some days, it’s a struggle—it’s like grappling with a ghost. Other days, it’s easy, like the Holy Spirit is writing through me.
The more I write, the more I realize how insignificant I am and how much God truly loves me. I know that my words and blog are a drop in the ocean of creation. I don’t write, however, to make waves or even ripples in the water. I write because God has given me the ability and the inspiration to do so. And it is my way of thanking him for the Spirit he has sent to guide me. It’s an act of gratitude. It’s a practice, a method for practicing the presence of God in my life.
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.
People-pleasing and self-sufficiency are forms of idolatry
In the past, my sensitivity seemed to work in my favor. I thought I had learned to harness it for good, and I even imagined it to be a superpower. Having the ability to sense when things are wrong or are going to go wrong, allowed me to be a great problem solver. It made me an exceptional technician and a pretty good manager.
For many years, I attempted to accomplish the impossible. That is, I tried to solve every problem that came my way. I tried to fix everything and everyone around me, even when they didn’t ask for it. This proved to be an impossible task, however. The problem, as it turns out, is that there are always more problems.
Not only did I burn out and crash hard, but I also started to make things worse. I stepped on the toes of the people around me and, in an attempt to never let anything or anyone fail, I enabled others to be irresponsible. Then, ironically, I would get mad at them for not caring enough when, in fact, it was my caring too much that made them seem to care so little.
All the while, I believed and acted like, if I’m not solving any and all problems, no one is going to. I was playing God and not doing a very good job at it. The more I did, the worse my relationships seemed to get. I got mad at people for not doing what I wanted, they got mad at me for the constant power trip I was on, and with all of the discord I was sowing around me, less and less was getting done.
Fast forward through a series of nervous breakdowns, several near ruined relationships, and a spiritual reawakening, and I have reached a place in my life where, to the best of my ability, I let God be God. This may seem obvious to some, but it was a hard-won lesson for me.
My best ideas and my best efforts had to fail completely before I was willing to submit to the fact that, in spite of what I claimed to believe, I was living as though God needed my help, and not the other way around. I’m still susceptible to people-pleasing and taking on more than I can or should handle, but God is helping me find my proper place in the world.
As it turns out, both people-pleasing and self-sufficiency are forms of idolatry in that they put human desires, whether someone else’s or your own, ahead of God’s desires. While God’s will and man’s will sometimes overlap, they often do not. In fact, man’s will is often in direct opposition to God’s will. We must choose, therefore, whether we are going to please others, please ourselves, or please God, but likely cannot do all three.
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.
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.
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.
Being upset on behalf of others only makes matters worse
Something I have noticed over the past year or so is that a lot of my spiritual and emotional unrest occurs on behalf of others. I have porous emotional boundaries and, when someone around me is upset about something, I find myself getting upset about it as well. It’s not even that they are asking me to be upset. I just take it upon myself.
Ever since I can remember, even if I don’t act like it, I’ve been extremely sensitive to the thoughts and feelings of those around me. I can feel what others are feeling and it affects me deeply. While this sensitivity may be useful at times, it is also a hindrance to my own peace and emotional integrity.
I don’t know how or why I developed this sensitivity to the feelings of others. At some point in my life, I’m sure it served as a defense mechanism of some sort. If I could sense what others were feeling before they acted on it, if I could anticipate their needs, I could then either defuse a potentially volatile situation or protect myself from whatever was coming my way.
The problem is that I can’t shut this sensitivity off. It’s like my emotional feelers are turned up to ten all of the time and it’s exhausting. If I’m around people who are happy, it makes me happier. If I’m around people who are at peace, I’m more peaceful. If I’m around people who are hurt or angry, I’m also hurt or angry.
For this reason, I often crave solitude in order to recharge. If I’m going to be around others, I prefer the intimate company of one or two people at a time. Or, if I have to be around a lot of people, I need to know that there is a way out in case I get overwhelmed or overstimulated.
Where I run into trouble, however, is when someone close to me is angry, hurt, or disturbed by something. Whatever they feel, I feel it too. If they are mad about something or at someone, I find myself feeling the same way, even if I wasn’t mad before. If they are hurt or saddened, I become hurt or saddened as well. It’s not even helpful. In fact, it tends to make things worse.
My being upset on someone else’s behalf, when they didn’t even ask me to be, has caused me way more grief than gain. It has gotten me into arguments and fights I had no business in and it has cost me a lot of joy and peace. This is not something I’m proud of, but I used to be.
I used to think that I was doing other people a favor by getting upset on their behalf. I was their ally and I was fighting for them so they should be grateful. As it turns out, however, amplifying negativity doesn’t improve anyone’s life, least of all my own.
I’m not entirely sure what the solution is, but I know that I’m not solving any problems by getting upset. In fact, I have made many situations and relationships much worse by adding to the conflict instead of being an example of peace and harmony amidst it. In some circumstances, it has cost me or nearly cost me important friendships.
I know that Jesus expects more from me than this. Being sensitive, being empathetic, is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. In fact, it is kind of a superpower. Like all superpowers, however, it can either be used for good or for evil. Jesus loves me exactly as I am, but he also commands that I “be perfect, therefore, as [my] heavenly Father is perfect (Matthew 5:48, NIV)” which means that if this trait is causing me problems, I must be willing to “cut it off (Matt 5:30).”
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.
ROBERT VAN VALKENBURGH 