Category: Wildman Journey (Page 85 of 87)

In my last post I mentioned the name of James Houston.  As I continue to write on the blog, his influence will become apparent.  In one of his earlier books which I read in the early 90’s, Dr Houston introduced me to the concept of  “the double knowledge.”  It comes from the thought of Augustine when he gave this spiritual principle.  “Let me know thee, Oh God and let me know myself, that is all.”  The implications of this concept have been very healing in my own life.  I have come to realize that I not only need to know God but that I need to know myself, especially the bad and the ugly.  For most of my adult life I hid from and did not want to bring to life the bad.  I tried being good as a pastor, caught in a performance trap, that would sap much of my spiritual energy.  

Dr Houston has pointed out that the concept of the double knowledge has been lost to  the church in the last century.  It was basic teaching for spiritual growth throughout most of the history of the church.  It was especially with enlightenment thinking that we began to disregard the inner life, giving strong preference to reasonable, pragmatic knowledge.  The focus was on explanation and doing. The mystery of the soul was disregard,being relegated to the superstition of religion.  This  lead to the disappearance of the soul.  We have suffered from this loss ever since.  The church as a whole lost the ministry of the “care of souls.”   We became impoverished in our inner life.  There were few teachers to guide us back into our souls.  In our postmodern age, we are now trying to recover the soul.

Now when I say, we need to take the inner journey, or look inward, I am not talking about getting focused on the self.  Leanne Payne calls that “the disease of introspection.”  Rather I am suggesting that we become aware of what is within our souls in the light and presence of Jesus in our hearts.  We take the journey with him. We look to him to be our guide.  Always as we are being lead on the inner journey, we are to have our “faith look” as that of “looking up and out” to Jesus. 

I will write more about this idea of the double knowledge in some forthcoming posts.  I want at this point to simply testify to the great relief it was for me to know that in the presence of Christ I could accept myself.  David Benner points out, “Self-acceptance and self-knowing are deeply interconnected.  To truly know something about yourself, you must accept it.  Even things about yourself that you most deeply want to change must first be accepted – even embraced.”  Notice – I must first embrace what is there, before it can be changed.  I simply can’t deny reality. 

I am learning to accept the self that is really me.  I am finding that I can accept and welcome those bad parts and not trying to hide them.  Again, from Benner, “Any hope that you can know yourself without accepting the things about you that you wish were not true is illusion.  Reality must be embrace before it can be changed.”  Men, I want you to know that coming to see the reality of who youreally are and not hiding from it, knowing that God sees it all yet loves you deeply in your stink, is revolutionary.  What might you be trying to hid from?  What are you refusing to embrace?  A wild man is someone who is coming out of hiding,  because he knows that God loves him in his totality.  I can picture wild men coming out of hiding, into the light, rising up to be men of faith who have love and praise as the weapons for the battles ahead.

The Psalmist know that he couldn’t hide from God. “Then I said to myself, ‘Oh, he even sees me in the dark!  At night I’m immersed in the light.’  It’s a fact; darkness isn’t dark to you; night and day, darkness and light, they’re all the same to you.”  (Ps. 139:12  – The Message).  A wild man is one who is willing to walk in the light of Jesus, having been given the grace to take the inner journey, as the inner darkness is exposed and then healed by the light of Jesus.  That which remains hidden does not find the relief of the healing light of Jesus’ presence.  Listen to The Message, “But if we walk in the light, God himself being the light, we also experience, a shared life with one another, as he sacrificed blood of Jesus, God’s Son,purges all our sin”  (I John 1:7)

The man that I consider my most significant mentor, is a man who I have only met once and that was only over lunch.  But his books and tapes, however,  have had a great impact on my life.  His name is James Houston, who for years had the chair of spiritual theology at Regent College in Vancover.  His book “The Desire – Satisfying the Heart” greating influenced both my head and heart when I first read it in 1990.  After I read the book and spent months digesting its message, I finally came to a comfortable understanding that it is ok to be both a thinking and feeling person. The great need was for integration.  Dr Houston and Leanne Payne have been formative in my being able to integrate my head and heart.  They both have fed both my mind and heart.

Dr. Houston makes this important observation about human nature.  “The unsatisfied longing for God is what drives human beings above all else.”  He quotes Augustine: “The whole life of the good Christian is a holy longing.  What you desire ardently, as yet you do not see…..by withholding of the vision, God extends the longing; through longing he extends the soul, by extending it he makes room in it….So…..let us long because we are to be filled…..that is our life, to be excercised by longing.” 

God has filled our heart with desire.  The desire is for him.  But remember men, if God is not the focus of our desires, they will run amok in all directions, being expressed in unruly passions and diseased emotions.  We need to acknowledge that we are passionate men with deep emotions.  God has made us that way.  The task, and it is a journey of a life time, is the “right ordering of love.”  In other words, what we are attached to will rule our desires.  Basil Penningtom suggests that our false self is attached to three things: 1) concern about what we have, 2) concern about what we do, and 3) concern about what others think of us.  A focus on any of these three will distort our affections for God.  We do not, however, need to strive for Godly affections.  God has put into our hearts “gracious affections” (Jonathan Edwards).  “For we know how dearly God loves us, because he has given us the Holy Spirit to fill our hearts with his love” ( Rom. 5:5).   

One more quote from Augustine, “My soul is like a house, small for you to enter, but I pray you to enlarge it.  It is in ruins, but I ask you to remake it.  It contains much that you will not be pleased to see: this I know and do not hide.”  As we begin to rightly order our affections, the inner space in our hearts in enlarged because we are making room for God.   God is then able by His Spirit to renew and restore that which has been in chaos.  With more inner space and peace our  desires for God are awakened and we desire more of him.  Remember again, transformation is an inside job.  Jesus promised us, “All who love me will do what I do.  My Father will love them, and we will come and make our home with each of them” (John 14:23).

Richard Rohr makes this very perceptive observation about men and the women in their lives.  “Women for the most part carry our feeling world.”  Oh, how true this was in my home, in my church and often in my marriage.  Just observe the ordinary interaction between men and women in our culture.  When it comes to “the heart” stuff men more or less go silent in the discussion or simply stay in the “control tower” of descriptive and factual language.  That is why in so many churches women meet to talk about spiritual needs and desires, while men prefer to do things for the church.

My mother set the tone emotionally in my family.  My dad was silent.  So as a boy I learned intutively more about emotional expression from my mother.  I had a lot of emotional energy that was expressed either wrongly or never got expressed.  It took me many years before I felt there was any significant  integration of my thought life with my soul life.  This insecurity made me defensive, feeling very inadequate in my self expression of my true self. I had deep gut level feelings that I was not able to give expression to in a healthy way.  My inner world was a kind of confusing fog of emotions and negative images.  I just didn’t have the words to express what I felt, nor did I have any confidence that I could express it clearly. 

I have found that many men are not comfortable talking about their deeper faith issues because their experience in the life of the church has been one of women dominating the discussion.  While we need to be thankful for all the women who have passed on the faith to us men, what is so often painfully missing is the male voice and male role model of faith.  This absence of the male voice spiritual at home, in society and especially the church, has been very damaging.  Men have gone “back in the weeds” spiritually, acknowledging that they are not as spiritual as their wives.  How tragic!! 

So what should men do?  This is where this blog can be of help.  I hope that men read some of my stuff and react to it both positively and negatively if need be.  For now,  here are a few suggestions.  First, men don’t beat yourself up spiritually.  You are as capable as your wife.  We have a God given male perspective that is often diffferent from our wives.  2) Admit that you have neglected your soul.  I believe that men will not become whole in Christ till they move from the control tower of the mind into their hearts.  3) Don’t be afraid of the unknown.  Sure it is new territory.  But Jesus waits for you at the center.  4)  Find another guy or a group of guys where you feel safe to be vulnerable about the stuff stirring in your soul.  5) Most of all continue to look up and out to Jesus, asking him to guide you on the journey of inner transformation.  Change comes from the inside out.  It is his work.  We only make ourselves avaliable to him.   6) It must be repeated continually – the way to a man’s heart is through his pain.  So ask for grace to see what is there, even if it hurts.

In my journey to greater wholeness and continuing inner transformation of my soul, I had to come to the point of realizing that I feared the love of God.  This may sound strange to some who are reading this post. but stay with me as I share more.  The words of I John 4:18 are becoming more of a reality in my following  Jesus. “Such love has no fear, because perfect love expels all fear.  If we are afraid, it is for fear of punishment, and this shows that we have not fully experienced his perfect love.”  I have come to learn that my fear of God’s love is based more on my fear of myself.  Instead of facing my real self, with all its shortcoming, I have spent most of my adult life hiding this real self and all of negative emotions involved.  I was afraid to admit the depth of my guilt and the accompanying feelings of rejection, guilt, and shame.  I kept God’s love from entering my deeper self.  In my shame and vulnerability I was afraid of the one thing I most longed for in my life

In my fear I lived with strict boundaries.   This caused me to try to be in control of my life both outwardly and inwardly.  There was a real fear of getting out of control.  David Benner points out, “The notion of being afraid of one’s self points to the inner conflict that lies at the core of fear.  Although the object of one’s fears may seem to be external, the real source of the fear is internal.  The danger is within.  The enemy is one’s own self.”  For me the guilt I often felt was not real, objective guilt, but rather a fear that came from the unrealistic expectations I put on myself.  This unresolved guilt prevented me from receiving God”s love for me.  I didn’t think I deserved his love, so I would work harder to prove that I was deserving.  I had a fear of messing up and not pleasing God. 

Men, Jesus knows that so many of us have this fear of love.  That is why He says, “Don’t be afraid.”  Why!  Because our Father knows how much we as men struggle with responding to anything that threatens our need for control.  These words to our heart are not a command but an invitation.  God freely initiates a loving relationship with us.  Richard Rohr observes that as men, “we are threatened by such a free God because it takes away all or our ability to control or engineer the process.”  We are talking about surrender, trust and vulnerability. 

God simply loves us because he is good.  Why is it so hard to surrender to such love?  Because it feels like the loss of control and power.  But this is what happens to a “wildmen” in Christ.  We have to trust God and not any of our goodness and righteousness.  It is a risky journey into the outer world with lots of uncertainty and at times failure.  Many men would rather play it safe in the world of idea and programs, rather then risk being loved by a God who asks for total surrender.  But remember  that in surrender we are free to finally begin to know the love of God, thus becoming the man we were create to be from before the foundation of the world.  In the relational knowing of love, our hearts begin to thaw out as we let go of the controls, knowing that God really love us in our stink. A wild man is someone who is experiencing the springtime of a spiritual thaw.

Most men I have known over the years have had difficulty with the idea of  “unmerited favor.”  As men we are wired to initiate and achieve.  We get what we deserve.  So it becomes a real stumbling block to come to the realization that we will never be able to earn God’s favor.  This becomes exaggerated, if we have had a poor relationship with our earthly father.  There are men who spend their entire careers trying to please their absent or distant father.  When a young boy is not affirmed by his father as his masculinitydevelops, the spirit of a young boy goes searching for acceptance.  Grown men will be motivated either unconsciously or consciously to prove their manhood to their  fathers.  But as I have had to tell many men; you probably will never get the affirmation that you are looking for from your earthly father. 

The good news is that we do not have to earn our heavenly Father’s love.  His presence in our lives, brings us the affirmation we need in our masculine soul.  We must always remember that the Father’s love reflect his character.  His character does not reflect our behavior, whether we are responsibile or irresponsible.  Our behavior is secondary.  Behavior does not increase or decrease God’s love for us.  Our sin does not change  the way God loves us. Similar to a parent who is disappointed in a child’s behavior, but in no way loving that child less, God’s love is not dependent on our behavior.

This deepening awareness over the years has allowed me to “relax” in my Father’s love.  Whether I am good or bad, I am daily able to fall into the loving arms of my Heavenly Father and know that all things will be well.  If I image God being disgusted, disappointed and anger with my behavior, I would not be able to relax, that is, come to rest in His love.  This was a struggle for me much of my adult life.  I felt that I have to try harder to be better, getting caught up in “performance trap.”  As a pastor, this was an built in occupation trap.   Pastors are supposed to be good.  The result was that I would be more focused on my efforts.  Any obedience on my part would be based more on fear then love. 

Being able to let go and just relax in God’s love was out of the question.  Surrender would mean coming to rest and relaxing in God’s loving presence.  But if I thought that God was preoccupied with my shortcoming and failure, I would not be at ease in his presence.  Only as I have come to accept myself as I am not as I should be, have I come to relax more in God’s presence.   Real self-knowledge, that is knowing the good, bad and ugly about myself, begins by looking at God and seeing how he sees me.  God sees me first through the eyes of love.  This the basis of my identity.  David Benner observes, “And identity grounded in God would mean that when we think of who we are, the first thing that would come to mind is our status as someone who is deeply loved by God.”  The depths of this statement has allowed me to relax in my  Father’s love and his acceptance of me.  What a relief it is to know that God knows me as a sinner, but that my sin does not suprise him.  Sin does not reduce his love for me.  I am “a beloved sinner.”   Even though I fail, I can still relax in His loving embrace of me as his “beloved.”

Sometime ago I read this passage in Andrew Comiskey’s book, “Strength in Weakness.”  I had never run across this insight regarding the masculine soul.  It spoke to something deep in my own soul.  He observes, “I believe within most men lies an ancient, deep well of grief and regret.  It rumbles with the ache of unexpressed suffering.  And in our silence and isolation, the pain fuels our striving and addiction.  We thus live in the darkness of unexpressed affliction.” 

The reality of a deep well of grief helped me to conceptualize what I had been experiencing for many years.  All the diseased emotions and images stored in my heart, were not all connected to anger. I began to realize that what I often thought was anger, was really grief.  Richard Rohr calls this grief, “unfinished hurt.”  “The grieving mode” is different from the fixing, the controlling mode or even the understanding mode of life.  I have found in my own life as well as the lives of many men, that we were not told or had modeled for us a male mode of feeling that helped us to grieve.  Letting go of hurt will takes time, as we learn to grieve out the pain and hurt.

Usually in the company of others brothers in Christ, who have some maturity in their spiritual walk, men are able to learn to grieve out their pain.  I find it very helpful for men to learn to distinguish the male mode of grieving from that of the feminine.   I learned a male mode of feeling from my mother, as have many men I have shared with over the years.  Father was more like a shadow when it came to expression of heart felt emotions.  This prevented me from accessing what was unique to me as a male.  It took some years for me to be able to go into the well and identify the grief I had stored there

What we must not do is remain silent.  Larry Crabb in his book, “The Silence of Adam” observes that Adam complied with the disobedience of Eve, by remaining silent.  Crabb give this warning about silence: “Since Adam every man has had a natural inclination to remain silent when he should speak…Men are uniquely called to remember what God has said and to speak accordingly, to move into dangerous uncertainty with a confidence and wisdom that comes from listening to God.  Instead, like Adam, we forget God and remain silent.”  Many men feel alone, isolated from meaningful relationships.  We have a hard time to break out of our prison of solitary striving. 

I hope that this post will stir the soul of men as they read about silence.  If you can identify with the well of grief and the presence of unfinished hurt in your soul, I would encourage  you to come to Jesus and ask him for the grace and strength to brake through the barrier.  A very helpful practice would be to seek out another brother in Christ who will hear your story or you might want to join a group of guys who are willing to go into the well together and proccess the pain.

In my last post I talked about the need for men, “to just sit there” learning to receive the love of God.  It seems to me that this is a good metaphor for wildmen.  Instead of thinking more about God or doing more for him, we need to learn the practice of sitting before the Lord.  If this is not your practice, begin by just spending only five minutes in quiet before the Lord.  Another way of saying the same thing is simply learning “to be.”  To be who you are before the Lord is to accept yourself as you are – the good, the bad, and the ugly.  Until you come to the inner awareness that God love you “in your stink” you will have a hard time believing that God loves you.  So don’t hide who you are.  Let God love you for who you are.   He loves you as you are not how you should be. There is absolutely no substitute for your personally hearing the loving, healing Word, giving you the affirmation that you are Abba’s child. 

Allow God to address you as his beloved.  At his baptism Jesus received the assurance that he was the Father beloved.  “And as he was praying, the heavens were opened, and the Holy Spirit descended on him in the form of a dove.  And a voice came from heaven: ‘You are my Son, whom I love, with you I am well pleased'” (Luke 3:21-22).  There is within the heart of each of us an inner voice of love that says, in the words of Henri Houwen, “‘You are the Beloved of God!’ I want you to claim your belovedness.”

The greatest trap in our daily life is that of self-rejection, doubting who we truly are.  Because we don’t know our true identity in Christ we go searching for others to tell us who we are and attempt to find our identity in the things we accomplish and the stuff that we acquire.  Our heart goes on a continual search for identity.  Nouwen says, “Self -rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that declares we are loved.  Being the beloved expresses the core truth of our existence. We are loved as creatures with both limitations and glory.” 

Remember men our true identity is in Christ, that self-in-Christ that we were destined to be from all eternity.  “Long, long ago he decided to adopt us into his family through Jesus Christ. (What pleasure he took in planning this!)  He wanted us to enter into the celebration of his lavish gift-giving by the hand of his beloved Son” (Eph. 1:6 – The Message).  Our true personhood is a gift from God, it is not our creation.  As David Benner has observed, “We are tempted to create a self, rather then receive the gift of our self-in-Christ.”  Your true self in Christ is not a self of your own making  but a discovery, a gift give to us as God’s beloved.  So again, I strongly suggest the practice of spending time alone with God, so that you can hear the Father addressing you a unique person – His beloved Son.

In my last post, I shared the difficulty we have as men in being able to receive love and in particular the love that God has for us. Remember, first and foremost, God loves us. Men are wired in their DNA to be initiators, while women are generally more inclined to be responders. The natural inclination of an initiator is to do something, while a responder is more inclined to be open to receive. So to tell a man to just sit there and receive, without doing a thing is difficult. I can not say it strongly enough, men, “you need to sit there and receive.” God loves us. It is first and foremost sheer gift and grace. It is out of the realization of this sheer grace, that we go forth and do the works of God. But first we have to sit and take in the love of God.

So how does a man do this? It is quite simple. I suppose the simplicity of the practice of receiving God’s love is one of the greatest obstacles for us men. Part of the struggle comes in our learning to comprehend, what Leanne Payne calls “the unseen real.” The unseen real is greater than physical reality. The transcendent God who is totally other, desires for us to know and experience his love. Men, God wants to be known in love. A key phrase from the historic spiritual tradition, that for years, I had a hard time grasping, was that “knowledge comes through love.” I am now beginning to understand that learning to receive love goes far beyond anything that I can comprehend about God. In this knowing He is speaking to my soul, beyond my understanding. I am learning to simply sit there and receive.

A key verse in learning to receive the love of God is found in Psalms 27:8, “My heart says of you, ‘Seek his face!’ Your face, Lord, I will see.” This is a seeing with the “eyes of our heart.” I often recommend that a man simply sit in a chair for five minutes, imagining Jesus looking at him in love. It can be helpful to literally turn your face “up and out” to Jesus. Remember Jesus said, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:7). The spiritual insight of ” not seeing with but through the eyes” is important in this practice. In “seeing with the eyes” we project our misconceptions on reality, where as “seeing through the eyes”, allows reality to enter the soul. “Fantasy comes from seeing with the eye, from reflecting in your eye what is outside.  Reality can only be seen by looking through the eye.  With Christ we look through rather than with”  (Malcolm Muggeridge).  In just sitting there we are learning to allow the reality of God’s love to penetrate our hearts. We are learning to love the great realites outside ourselves. We are learning to “set love in order” in our lives, by allowing God to love us. Then in return we learn to love God with all our hearts.

You might think that the title of this post is rather simplistic. But I want to tell you, men, that the ability “to receive” is very difficult for us. We are wired to accomplish and succeed. Our culture conditions us to believe that we get what we deserve. We have to earn our place. By our effort we gain our reputation and place in culture. So the whole business of “receiving” is not easy. This becomes especially difficult in relationship to our heavenly Father. I don’t know about you, but I can very easily get into “the performance mode,” with a focus more on how I am doing rather than how God really sees me. I now know more than ever, that He simply loves me for who I am, created for intimate relationship with him.

I consider the ability to “receive” God’s love into my heart the biggest discover in these ten years of the journey. I John makes it clear and simply: “God is love” (I John 4:8). First and foremost God loves you. I love this quote from Brennan Manning, “The revolutionary thinking that God loves me as I am and not as I should be requires radical thinking and profound emotional readjustment.” As a blogging community of wildmen, that could keep the conversation going for sometime. Here is another quote. This one is from David Benner. Let this roll around your head and heart for a time. “It is not the fact of being loved unconditionally that is life-changing. It is the risky experience of allowing myself to be loved unconditionally.”

I believe this blog community could have a very helpful dialogue about the love of God. I assume most the men who read this blog as “churched’ guys. They know the words of the faith. They have done a lot of the stuff. But to be honest, they do not feel loved by God. It has not gotten into their “soul” that God really loves them. Remember men, as we dialogue about love, it has nothing to do with deserving and earning. As a matter of fact love has already been poured into your hearts, waiting for you to discover what is already there. “And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us” (Rom. 8:5). So there you have it, men. Love waiting to be discovered by wildmen who are discovering their soulfulness.

The spiritual life is one of continual coming home to the Father.  Years ago I read this quote from Henri Nouwen’s little book, “Making all things new.”  “The whole purpose of Jesus’ ministry is to bring us to the house of his Father….He came to lift us up into loving community with the Father.”  Our coming home to the Father is a spiritual discipline that each of as men need to cultivate.  We are away from home, when we are away from our soul.  So have lost their spiritual address, not having a sense of who they are in Christ.  Practicing the presence of the Lord, is remembering that the Lord dwells within our hearts.  Here we find our unique spiritual address.  This is the hidden life of God within.  Paul reminds us, “For you died to this life, and your real life is hidden with Christ in God” (Col. 3:3)

As men we can live very comfortably in the surface of life.  We can be in the words of Richard Rohr, “circumference people with little access to the center.”  The boundaries of our lives can be confused for the essence.  The result is that we spend our time thinking about God and doing things for God, rather then having a relationship with God.  Many men know there must be more, but they do not know how to access the reality of a loving relationship with God.  For that to happen, men need to sink with their minds into their hearts.  Then our knowing will be more than information about and descriptions of who God is, becoming instead a knowing that is participatory and transformational.  If our knowing is not personal, then God thought of as ”out there,” an object of our thoughts, rather then “being within,” known as personal friend and savior

Albert Haase, a Francisican priest, has written a wonderful book on the spiritual life entitled, “Coming home to Your True Self.”  He quotes Meister Eckhart as preaching that “God is at home.”  Home for Eckhart means within the soul.  Paul wrote to the Galatians, “It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20).  Men, think of it, if you are a believer, who has trusted Christ at the core of your being, whether you are conscious of it or not, there is a intimate communion taking place with God.  Coming home is being awakened to this inner reality.  Haase quotes Catherine of Genova as saying, “My me is God.”  Wow – wrap your mind around that thought!!

Yes, God is at the center.  It is up to us to become aware of this presence within.  Remember the issue is not the absence of the presence of God, but our lack of awareness.  Getting used to the presence within will at first take some discipline.  With your will, you will need to continually come home to the Father, through Jesus, by the work of the Spirit.  For me it is always helpful to remember that the Spirit is doing His work within my soul, as I ask Jesus to bring me into the presence of the Father.  This is a continuing practice throughout the day. In this practice we can be reminded of the words of Jesus, “I will not abandon you as orphans” (John 14:18).  Rather he said, “All who love me will do what I say.  My Father will love them and we will come and make our home with each of them” (John 14:23).  Wow!! There you have it.  The Father and the Son live within each of us.

The image of coming home has been very helpful for me in practicing the presence of the Lord.  As I have learned to be attentive and aware of my soul, I come to a greater assurance that I am not orphaned.  How about you?  Do you feel orphaned at times on your journey.  The spiritual practice of continually coming home can be of significant help.  Visualize yourself coming home throughout the day, as you become aware of your heart and the reality of God living in and with you.  If you need help, the simple practice of placing hour hand over your heart can be benefical.  But always remember in this practice that while you are paying attention to your soul, your “faith look” is always up and out to the one who is continually communicating his loving word to your soul.  

The image of coming home has been very helpful for me, in practicing the presence of the Lord.  As I have become more attentive to my soul I have the assurance that I am not orphaned.  By the way, that means the good, bad and ugly found within. (More about that in another blog).  How about you?  Do you feel orphaned at times on your journey?  The spiritual practice of continually coming home can be real help.  Visualize yourself coming home throughout the day, as you become aware of your heart and the reality of God living within you.  But always remember in this practice, that while you are paying attention to your soul, your “faith look” is always up and out to the one who is continually communicating his loving Word and Presence to your soul.