Mark Scandrette

Cities like San Francisco seem to attract people who wish to reinvent themselves. I’ve seen professional women dressed in financial district attire abruptly change careers, becoming massage therapists or hippy mamas. I watched my 38-year old neighbor, a slacker covered in tattoos, morph into a successful businessman and real estate tycoon. I saw a shy and awkward young women from small town America transform herself into a hipster scene diva in only six months! We are enthralled and inspired by the possibilities of reinvention. But quitting a job, getting a haircut or buying new clothes is often the easiest part. What is more difficult is learning to become a new person from the inside out—discovering new motivations, breaking old habits or finding a source of energy and love that is greater than your own.

One of the reasons Jesus became such a popular teacher among the poor and discontent of his day is that he awakened their hope that “a new way is possible.” Perhaps our fascination with reinvention stems from the deeper longing we have for “newness” to come to our lives—to experience greater freedom, creativity, purpose, vitality, healing, and restoration. Jesus spoke of a new power for living in the reality of the reign of love that can be accessed immediately. He even had the audacity to say, “the kingdom of God is within you.” How can we learn to tap into the generative energy of the Spirit that already dwells in the nearest place of our being? The path Jesus offered his listeners was, “Repent!” In Hebrew this implies “to return” & “to feel sorrow” and the Greek term “metanoia” suggests “to think differently after…  to have a change of mind and heart.” In contemporary vernacular we might say, “Dream up your whole life again! Reinvent yourself. Rethink your whole way of being! Reimagine!”

Reinvention can sound exciting until you realize that transformation may require painful soul surgery and ongoing therapy of mind and body. We begin to imagine a new way first by considering what the old and tired patterns are that need to change. This practice, sometimes called examin, is illustrated by this ancient prayer:  “Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”

Once you recognize what specifically needs reinvented or reimagined, you can formulate a plan about how you will seek to cooperate with the generative work of the Spirit.

Right now you might be thinking, “Wait, that sounds like hard work? Wouldn’t it be better if I could take a little pink pill or have God magically change me?”  Yes, that would be easier, but you would be missing an essential truth–We were made to cooperate and collaborate with our creator. You have been given great authority and powerful life energy—a mind, body, time, resources, presence in relationships, and natural and cultivated talents. In fact you aren’t far from being a god yourself! But you have probably developed destructive ways of using your essential life energies.  Reinvention and transformation requires that you learn to use your essential life energies in new ways—doing what you are capable of doing to direct and discipline your body, your mind, your resources, your time and talents. If you do what you have the power to do, the creator will do what you cannot. In this way, grace is not opposed to effort and action. This is why one of the earlier followers of Jesus wrote, “Continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, because it is God who works in you to will and to act according to [God’s] good purpose.” The new way to be human is about learning to surrender your life energy to the way of love. This involves taking risks and experimenting with new ways to channel your life energy.

Mahatma Gandhi subtitled his biography “The story of my experiments with truth.” He saw the details of his daily life as a laboratory for learning how to love God and people. Since ancient times earnest spiritual seekers have explored how to discipline their minds and bodies—leveraging their lives towards a greater purpose. An early advocate of the way of Jesus wrote to his apprentice, “train yourself to be godly. For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.”  Jesus serves as a model of a life formed by absolute surrender to love. Dallas Willard memorably suggests:
“The star performer himself didn’t achieve excellence by trying to behave in a certain way only during the game. Instead, he chose an overall life of preparation of mind and body, pouring all his energies into that total preparation…And in this truth lies the secret of the easy yoke: the secret involves living as [Jesus] lived in the entirety of his life– adopting his overall lifestyle. Following “in his steps” cannot be equated with behaving as he did when he was “on the spot.” To live as Christ lived is to live as he did all of his life….the secret of the standard, historically proven spiritual disciplines is precisely that they do respect and count on the bodily nature of human personality.” (From Spirit of the Disciplines)

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”  Matthew 11: 28-30

“The force of love is at work in this world, at work within me– despite my resistance and continuous misunderstanding.”

“We find ourselves, twenty centuries later, using the best of our elitist sensibilities, to understand a simple message delivered to peasants. “

“Beauty and nobility are not scarce.”

In September of his 11th year he boarded the school bus and left the neighborhood and childhood behind. They closed the local school a year before he would have finished sixth grade, and now a busload of children from the sleepy neighborhoods along the West Mississippi were being shipped off to the inner city. The bus quickly passed what was familiar: the library, the diner, and Wong’s Chinese restaurant and used car lot. Crossing the tracks by the new shopping center, they entered the West end of Lake Street where the Native Americans, black families and Vietnamese refugees lived. He looked out the window and noticed the marquee of the adult theater and watched the people milling around talking loudly on the corner.  They passed the old cemetery where some of the graves were so old that the trees had grown into the tombstones.

Over the summer he had entered puberty, somewhat prematurely, his voice changed, he was a head taller and his body was now covered in hair like a monkey.  He was becoming a man like his father, who was strong and wise and left bad smells in the bathroom. On the bus they regarded him as a wonder and freak of nature—someone their same age who had passed from childhood and was now on the opposite side of a great chasm.

He exited the bus and parted from the group. His parents had placed him in a special program they thought fit his personality and interests better than the three ‘R’s of a conventional education. He was going to Open School, a post-hippie era experiment in education that consisted of boundless learning opportunities and the absence of rules. There were no classrooms or walls, only wide-open spaces and choices. Students could choose the courses they wanted, worked on projects independently, and were instructed to address teachers by their first names (like Joan, Susan or John). Joan, his homeroom teacher, showed them R-rated movies on Fridays, called them “little f*#%rs” when she got angry and chain-smoked incessantly. Most of the other students were from progressive wealthy or academic families who lived on the east side of the river by the university, except for a few gifted minority students from the immediate neighborhood. If his parents had listened to public radio or read the New York Times they would have known that many his classmates were the children of prominent city planners, politicians, celebrity authors and musicians. Aram Karapetian, who would become his best friend that year, loved to tell about the time his father, an orchestra conductor, got into a brawl with Pablo Picasso at a bull fight in Madrid.

All of this was a new world to him. Home-life was gentle, strict, oriented around religious piety and duty with a conspicuous lack of humor or irony.  At school he found solace in the art studio, under the direction of a French Catholic bachelor who, recognizing his artistic inclinations, invited him to spend three hours a day working in the studio supplied with any materials he wanted. During that year he created three sculptures. The first was a terracotta bust of his father, the second, a terracotta bust of Jesus Christ and the third, a life sized plaster sculpture of a young man seated on a stool in contemplation.

The first sculpture of his father was admittedly crude, but showed promise and some familiarity with ancient and renaissance forms. In the fall of that year, his father was promoted from Lieutenant to Chief in the U.S. Amy. This change brought more money for the family, more responsibility for his father and meant more time that he was left home alone with his mother and three sisters.  Making this sculpture was his way of identifying with manhood in the relative absence of his father that year. He was becoming a man, and as he carved into the clay day after day he saw something of himself and who he might become. During that time he and his father had the talks about wet dreams, the strength of testosterone, and a man’s natural curiosity about the shape of a woman’s body. Becoming a man was exciting, scary and complicated—and though he closely identified with his father, they were different. He was flamboyant, creative and risk-taking while his father was shy, cautious and duty-bound. He was becoming a man like his father, but also like himself. It was the beginning of his journey to discover how to combine the integrity, sensitivity, and devotion of his father with the courage to dream and act with courage and abandon.

The second sculpture of Jesus Christ was more technically developed, but when fired in the kiln the skull cracked, necessitating an impromptu addition of a crown of thorns. This piece was of special curiosity to his schoolmates from more “enlightened” secular families. “Who is this sculpture of?” They would ask, mockingly. With sincerity he replied, “It is suppose to be God.” He was never the good student in Sunday school or family devotions, but this environment brought out his nascent interest in the spiritual. It was the beginning of his journey to negotiate deep devotion beyond the sentimentality of provincial folk religion. The crown of thorns this path requires would be a continual surprise.

The third sculpture of himself was life-size and inspired by the haunting figures of George Segal, with and obvious awareness of Rodin’s “thinker” in bronze. What is the proper posture of a person, in reference to one’s humanity and the awareness of the divine?  The figure sits leaning forward as in deep thought, with hands clasped to the face and eyes staring forward, equally conscious of the world within and the world without. When he visited the school fifteen years later, the sculpture was still on display in the window case. It was the beginning of his journey to identify as a mystic and a pilgrim—continually on a search for meaning and purpose—living into the questions—and inviting others to stare toward what is beyond and within.