Sacred Intimacy Part 1

A question,

Turning back the clocks a little bit this morning.

Do you remember the first time you fell in love?

Do you remember the first time you fell in love?

I don't mean your crush on David Cassidy,

Leif Garrett,

Kirk Cameron,

The Red Power Ranger,

Whatever it was.

I meant real love.

I was 19 years old.

I had just moved in to my first apartment and my friend,

Who I didn't like calling my girlfriend,

Was there with me.

We'd been seeing each other off and on for a few years and I was snooty,

To say the least.

And she's at my place that day and she's probably talking about music and I'm responding with how much better my music is than hers and she's probably talking about a book or a movie and I say,

Well,

Did you read or did you see this?

And at some point,

Very quiet and polite-like,

She says,

I'm leaving.

And I was immediately overcome with immense anxiety,

With a kind of panic.

My palms started to sweat.

I wondered,

Do I have malaria?

And I could hardly get the words out.

I said,

Please don't go.

And she looked at me and she said,

Huh?

And thankfully she stayed,

But I knew in that very moment,

For the first time in my life,

I was in love.

There's this divine contradiction about love.

It's warm and fuzzy,

And yet it can also be painful,

Cruel,

Panic-inducing.

And there seems to be this tension inside each of us that love,

Intimacy,

Closeness is what the majority of us want more than anything in our lives and yet many of us are the first to repel it,

To say no to it,

To fear it.

Henry Nouwen,

The great Catholic teacher,

I think put it quite well.

He said,

We will never experience the joy of loving,

And love is stronger than fear,

Life stronger than death,

Hope stronger than despair.

We have to trust that the risk of loving is always worth taking.

The risk of loving is always worth taking.

Do you agree with that?

Will you say it with me?

The risk of loving is always worth taking.

And we're not going to say that as a platitude.

We're going to take that risk.

I'm starting a two-part series today.

It gives me a great sense of self-importance to say I'm beginning a two-part series today entitled Sacred Intimacy.

And by intimacy,

I want to define what I mean by it right away.

I mean closeness.

I want to talk this week and next week about growing closer with our God,

Growing closer with life,

Growing closer with ourselves,

Growing closer with others.

Oriah Mountain Dreamer said,

This is what I ache for.

Intimacy with myself.

Intimacy with others.

Intimacy with all that is life.

But it takes a lot of risk.

And courage to get there.

I have a little saying about relationships.

I have many,

But here's one.

And it's this.

How you get along with life is how you get along with yourself is how you get along with others.

And in turn,

How you get along with others is a reflection of how you get along with yourself.

And how you get along with yourself is a reflection of how you get along with life.

If life is a mess that's just here to grind me under,

Filled with unknowns,

Temporal,

A crapshoot,

But mostly crap.

If it's to not be trusted,

If it's dangerous,

What does that say about my ability to trust in myself?

To trust in my own mind.

To understand the desires of my own heart and that they may be good.

And what does that say about my ability to trust you?

To invest time in getting to know each other.

To deepen and grow.

But if life is a grand mystery to be embraced,

If life,

For all of its struggles and dangers,

Ultimately leads me to a feeling of immense gratitude and possibility,

If life is indeed a springboard for possibility,

Then I can begin to explore those same aspects of being within my own self and see them and embrace them and risk the love that it takes to grow close with you so that I can know myself and this thing called life and this thing called God in a more grand and emphatic way.

God,

Not in a compartment,

Each and every area of my life,

Each and every relationship,

Closer and closer and closer.

My message today is don't be afraid to be intimate.

How to always stay cozy,

I like that word,

With the heart of life.

How do we grow closer with life?

The key word for me is resonance.

Resonance.

Resonance is the statement about my relationship with life.

It's a statement about my rapport with life.

It's a statement about my trust in life.

It's the recognition that I need my life to show me who I am and life needs me to become who I am so that it can realize itself in grander ways.

Resonance is when that which is at the heart of life resonates with what is at the heart of our own being.

It shows up most effectively as those wonderful little synchronicities.

Discovered this book and there was a line in it just for me,

Just what I needed to hear.

I throw on some tunes,

Oh,

That's the perfect song for my day.

I am so grateful that God gave me these friends.

I don't know where I'd be without them.

How about that?

Just when I needed that new teacher,

That new mentor,

That new person that had that principle of the very thing I'm looking for,

They showed up.

That's growing close with life when we are co-creating with one another every day with epiphany and grandeur.

Growing closer with ourselves takes a hell of a lot of honesty.

It's that ability to tell ourselves the truth,

Not just the hard truths,

But to acknowledge the spiritual truths.

It's pretty easy for me in the morning when I'm in my practice of meditation and prayer and I'm reading a really cool spiritual book to say,

Hey,

I'm whole,

Perfect,

And complete,

Aren't I?

I am a divine child of God.

You know when it's not easy?

At 11.

30 at night when I've spilt some wine on my shirt and I've eaten all the peanut butter M&Ms.

But that's what spirituality in all of our life means.

That guy on the couch who's fallen asleep in the middle of eating his burrito is a child of God,

Too.

And we have to be willing to,

Again,

Tell ourselves the hard truths,

But also tell ourselves and admit those spiritual truths,

That spiritual truth that you are the only sacrament you will ever have for experiencing life.

You'll never have it,

Anybody but yourself.

Your own mind,

Your own heart,

Your own body,

Your own understanding,

It's up to you.

Not only to be responsible to taking care of those mediums within yourself,

But to admit how grand and how great you are.

Walt Whitman,

In his Song of Myself,

Said,

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems.

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand,

Nor look through the eyes of the dead,

Nor feed on the specters in books.

You shall not look through my eyes either,

Nor take things from me.

You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.

You are that important,

You are that sacred,

You are that unique.

Grow closer,

Closer,

Closer with yourself.

How do we grow closer with others?

Risk,

Courage,

The risk to love,

The courage to put yourself out there,

The willingness to be,

Not to try to take advantage of people,

Not to try to get people to meet your articulated needs,

But to have the risk to open yourself up to helping them articulate and meet their own needs,

Trusting that yours will be met in the process.

That willingness and that courage to connect,

To deepen,

To be more intimate.

So all that being said,

In terms of sacred intimacy,

First step,

Let's get intimate.

Let's get intimate,

Let's get closer.

I had a wonderful relationship with that woman who I fell in love with.

It lasted about three years,

Still heart-connected today.

Her feelings changed before mine did,

And it was easy at the time to say,

Well,

We were going in different directions,

Or we just grew further and further apart.

But the honest truth is,

We didn't have the tools to grow close enough together.

I wish I would have had the courage back then to let her know how much I really did love her,

Admired her,

How much better my life was for having her in it.

And I wish I had the courage to admit my flaws,

That I was always keeping my options open because I was afraid that things wouldn't work out,

That I'm afraid to tell her about my fear of rejection and abandonment because she's going to think I've got a bunch of issues and I've got to get away from this guy.

But as we all know,

If we don't tell our secrets with our word,

They still tell themselves in our behavior,

In our disconnection.

We can grow more and more intimate with one another by identifying those opportunities to take that little bit of risk,

To take up that little leap to connect.

Have you ever noticed sometimes in your life that you can be more intimate with someone you bump into at a grocery store than someone who's living in your own home?

It's an interesting phenomenon,

Right?

And I'm going to talk about it in a little bit because our most intimate relationships are often filled not with closeness but with artificial harmony.

Artificial harmony.

And one of the things I think we practice all the time,

And this again is that divine contradiction in ourselves,

That part of us that wants love and closeness and that part of us that wants to run the heck away from it.

We have in every opportunity,

In every relationship,

Opportunities to take our intimacy on-ramps or our intimacy off-ramps.

Our on-ramps and our exits.

Every interaction has the opportunity for those.

What are some examples of those?

We've got a slide.

We'll check it out together.

Intimacy on-ramp,

Sharing affection.

I love you so much.

You mean so much to me.

I'm so grateful for you.

Intimacy off-ramps,

Withdrawing or superficial affection.

You know what I'm talking about when I say superficial affection?

Transactional.

I'm supposed to say this to you right now.

Not here.

Articulating the problem with possible solutions is an intimacy on-ramp,

That risk to trust you enough to share that I'm going to admit a problem to you and trust that you're not going to reject me or run out of the room.

Intimacy off-ramp,

Talking to someone else about the problems in the relationship because that always fixes it.

Intimacy on-ramp,

Creating shared space to connect.

Intimacy off-ramp,

I'm sorry,

This is more Josh than Reverend Josh,

Texting.

If it's serious and emotional,

Please don't text me about it.

Let's create space.

Let's create a container of listening where our feelings can breathe and express ourselves.

Where it's a sense of sanctuary and security that even if we leave upset,

We know that our relationship is always grounded in love.

I don't think AT&T has figured that out with how to do that with text messages yet,

Much less Facebook.

Intimacy on-ramp,

Listening with curiosity and the desire to understand.

Intimacy off-ramp,

Judging,

Creating stories instead of asking questions.

This argument I've been having with you in my head for the last two weeks,

I have solved and here's the solution,

Right?

No,

That usually doesn't fix the relationship either.

Intimacy on-ramp,

Asking for what you want.

Have the courage,

The risk to state your own needs,

To state your own desire.

Intimacy off-ramp,

Testing them to see if they do what you want them to do.

It's a two-week series,

But I'm about to give you a little bit of homework and here's the good news,

Because it's a two-week series,

I'm not asking you to take all these intimacy on-ramps.

I'm just inviting you this week to pay attention to your off-ramps.

They're different and unique for all of us.

Note,

When you're taking an off-ramp,

Don't beat yourself up for it.

Don't judge yourself,

Don't over-jump into an intimacy on-ramp because then it's going to seem weird,

Creepy,

Too much.

Just be aware.

I am exiting from an opportunity for closeness and intimacy right now.

And you can ask yourself why,

But it's going to come down to this tension.

The part of me that wants love and the part of me that is afraid of love.

And why am I alive,

Why am I here?

Is it to live my life in fear of love?

No.

It's to live as close as I can with that heart of life,

That heart in myself,

That heart of the people I love and want to cultivate ongoing love and connection with.

Zamira and Jackie and I have been working on creating a meditation and prayer retreat for Labor Day weekend,

And so we're looking forward to that,

But we got to do an advanced one for our practitioners recently.

And we did an advanced exercise by sharing about this.

Please don't take that as a sign to not sign up for the retreat.

But we had this exercise of just encountering each other and looking one another in the eye.

Just greeting and connecting,

No words at all,

Just connecting with the eyes.

And it was so intimate that it scared some of us.

But what was wonderful was to come before someone I knew and admired and just feel the bond.

The bond was right there.

Nothing needed to be said or shared.

And then in other cases,

And this did bring forward some tears,

It was beholding and seeing someone that I had thought I had known,

But I had never taken the time to really see before.

That could be someone you've been in relationship with for 25 years.

To pause,

To look,

To see the person before you as a beautiful expression in that very moment,

To accept them entirely and to honor wordlessly your bond.

Let's get intimate at the level that works for us by being aware of where we're exiting,

But then becoming aware of those new choices that we can make.

Let's get intimate and let's get honest.

Let's get true.

Let's get real.

Honesty doesn't just mean telling the truth.

It means being who you truly are.

Honesty and living an honest life isn't just about speaking your truth.

It's the courage to be who you really are,

Warts included,

And to allow yourself to be loved and accepted in that way.

Some of us are so caught up in the superficial that we've never had the courage to allow ourselves to be that honest.

Instead,

What we build in so many of our relationships is this artificial harmony.

The biggest enemy of intimacy isn't conflict.

It's artificial harmony.

It's pretending that everything's okay.

We have another slide with some symptoms that may speak if you're practicing too much artificial harmony.

Again,

Josh is going to harp on the texting.

You can call me.

Texting is great for just little bits of information and for talking to people who you'd rather not talk to,

But it's not going to create a lot of intimacy.

Salutation points and artificial check-in rituals.

Hi,

How are you?

I know you're going to say fine.

How are you?

Fine,

Thank you.

Let's move on.

We've said hello.

We've checked in.

Now let's talk about the chores and if you did them or not.

I love you.

Have a great day.

I love you.

Have a great day.

They're not bad,

But they don't create that opportunity for deepening and intimacy.

Escaping together instead of connecting with one another.

What do you and your partner like to do?

We like to not talk and just watch TV from 7 to 12 at night.

Avoiding talking about problems.

If we're willing to take that risk to be intimate,

To be honestly ourselves,

We're going to have to address those elephants in our relationships,

Those elephants that are always in the room.

We have to kill the elephants and have the courage enough to create the space for greater connection.

Sometimes we don't have the trust enough to do that,

And that's okay,

But that's where that opportunity is to build it over time,

Whether it's with our partner or our kids or our parents or our coworkers.

There's always that opportunity to bring forth that new level of honesty,

Of intimacy,

Of closeness.

To say,

Today it's going to feel weird,

Honey,

But we're going to turn off the TV and we're just going to hold hands and be conscious of one another.

I'm going to grow closer with God this week,

So I'm going to take out the headphones and take a walk every night at 7.

30 p.

M.

And experience this beautiful springing Colorado.

I'm going to turn off the secret lives of Mormon wives,

And I'm going to journal.

It's a good show,

You know,

You give yourself some tips,

But if your whole life is this artificial harmony that's built to try to escape,

To try to unplug,

To try to turn off,

That's not the spiritual life.

We want to turn on.

We want to plug in.

We don't want to get away.

We want to find who we are by turning down the chaos and creating those honest experiences for intimacy and connection.

I've been creating a class,

I love it so much,

About Ralph Waldo Emerson called Emerson and the Invention of the Possible,

And he wrote a wonderful essay,

Probably my favorite one,

Called Friendship.

And in it he says something I love.

He says,

We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken.

We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken.

The whole human family is bathed with an element of love like a fine ether.

How many persons we meet in houses whom we scarcely speak to,

Whom yet we honor and who honor us.

How many we see in the street or sit with in church,

Whom though silently we warmly rejoice to be with.

Read the language of these wandering eye beams.

The heart knoweth.

Part of living honestly is recognizing the good in everyone.

They may have lost it.

They may have distorted it.

But that trust,

That affection,

That deep affection within me is in you too.

And with the right trust we can build an experience and grow in it together.

Let's get intimate.

Let's get honest.

And lastly,

Let's get responsible.

There's a sacred text in my life.

It was the first ever Spider-Man comic book.

And in his origin story there's a powerful statement.

With great power comes great responsibility.

It's just as true when it comes to intimacy.

With great intimacy comes great responsibility.

It again is not the act of manipulating or trying to get someone to meet the wants that we think we need to manifest ourselves.

It's releasing those all together.

And being willing to create a harmonious relationship with someone to support them in meeting their own needs.

And then trusting that what we really need will get met in the process.

That's the glorious dance of closeness in our relationship with life,

In our relationship with ourselves,

In our relationship with others.

But it takes being responsible.

It takes being available.

It doesn't mean being someone's end-all and be-all.

But it means being responsible to the intimacy and the sacredness that you have created together.

There's a new best-selling book.

I really like it.

Mel Robbins' The Let Them Theory.

How many people have read that book?

You can see how popular it is just by the raise of hands.

And she's an amazing person.

Karen,

Our events person,

Looked into bringing her to Mountain High Church for like $10 million or something.

So I'm going to talk about her book instead.

And Robbins' Let Them Theory states that,

In short,

Let people do them and you do you.

Don't get caught up in trying to chase or fix or point out or blame for people doing them.

And just focus on your own actions.

And life is going to be a lot better and you're going to be a much happier person.

And I like this for two reasons.

The first is that those of us who are kind of fixy,

A little controlling,

Who think we know the direction other people should be going,

It's good for us to back off and mind our own business.

Two,

It's really good advice for those of us who have people in our lives who are very lovable but they're not love-able.

And they only know how to express through toxicity.

And everything they do,

If we're following up on it,

Winds up us living in the realm of their problems instead of in the heart of our own solutions.

And so the Let Them Theory is perfect because it says they're going to do what they do regardless.

Focus on your happiness,

Your well-being.

Don't go down there.

Keep rising up.

That's where it's great advice.

Here's the problem.

When I wrapped up that book and I turned the last page,

And it's a wonderful book,

Please read it,

My comment to myself was,

Please don't let me.

Please don't let me.

I want to be responsible to you.

I want to be accountable to you.

The intimacy and closeness that we share is really important.

And if you just let me when I've hurt you,

Or haven't heard you,

Or didn't call you back,

Or wasn't present for you in the right way,

It's going to damage our ability to be close and connect with one another.

So when I don't call you back,

Please let me know.

When you don't feel like I heard you,

Please let me know.

Again,

I'm not here to be your be-all and end-all,

And boundaries are really,

Really important.

But I value the intimacy we share so much that being responsible and accountable to you is a top priority.

So yes,

Let the toxic be toxic.

But where you have closeness,

And where you have honesty,

And where you have intimacy,

Step into that responsibility where you let each other up instead of let each other go.

Know that truth for yourself,

And you will continue to build the best relationships possible that will allow you to know and relate with yourself better,

And this thing called life,

Too.

To close with another quote from Mariah Mountain Dreamer.

She shares,

I want to live with deep intimacy every day of my life.

I am guided,

Sometimes driven,

By an ache to take the necessary risks that will let me live close to what is within and around me.

And I am sometimes afraid that it will be too much,

That I will not have or be connected to whatever it takes to be with it all,

To bear the exquisite beauty and bone-wrenching sorrow of being fully alive.

So moving into prayer,

I invite any of our incredible prayer practitioners to stand with me.

These folks are available for prayer in front of the stage after service.

Honoring that spirit that the mystics tell us is closer to us than our very breaths,

I invite us to move prayerfully in the spirit of what Ralph Waldo Emerson defined prayer as,

The contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view.

Honoring our relationship with spirit in this moment.

Let it reveal to us that panoramic view,

That whole perspective that can see a thread of truth and of love and gratitude and meaning and connection moving through all of the relationships,

Experiences,

Ups and downs of our lives.

That golden thread of spirit that is always with us,

Always for us.

And may we ask ourselves,

How can I deepen in this closeness?

How can I get closer to God?

And what can I do in my heart right now to allow God to come closer with me?

Knowing we are fully entwined in the oneness,

No matter what,

But sometimes we forget it.

I invite us as well in this grand point of view,

This panoramic view,

To see ourselves in this thing called life.

How can I better be there for myself?

How can I move closer in the feelings and the desires of my own heart?

How can I best build a greater trust in my mind and myself so that my words,

My acts and my feelings are in perfect harmony together?

And how,

In relationship with this grand spirit,

In better truth and responsibility to myself,

How can I now allow myself to grow closer with those people I care for the most or with anyone that I encounter?

How can I be a more transparent presence for transformational relationships that bring meaning and life and love?

What are the boundaries I'm called to create?

What is the truth about who I am that I have yet to fully embody or embrace?

And what am I called to be right here and right now as a presence not only for life but for others as well?

Knowing that as we take care and we grow in intimacy with life,

With spirit,

With ourselves,

Our psyche,

Our heart,

Our way of being,

And with all of those incredible human beings that fill our life,

May a deep intimacy hold us,

Uplift us,

And make our lives so much more richer.

Thank you,

Life.

And so it is.

Amen.