Category / Faith-Related

This category is like Interior except that it covers faith and spirituality.

by Michael

Those Well-Fed Hopes

This is a prayer from my journal, from an undated entry, and it’s up here in case I need to return to it.  I believe I was relinquishing some things around writing at the time, but I can utter these words as I try to become a Christian:

Help me let go of those dreams, those well-fed hopes, stubborn desires even though they came mostly from places of sincerity and love and, perhaps, mystery.  Grant me the freedom to choose some other life, to set some different course.  Make me fearless in that choosing.  Inspire me as I close and choose and change.

by Michael

Being in Love

Thurman said in one of books, probably The Inward Journey, that we don’t love in general.  We love in particular.  We love the particular.

We love people and things.  We love God.  We love hobbies, ourselves.  But we love specifically, adding discrimination to an otherwise grand concept.  Love is not a concept and it can’t be done without a grounding in reality.

When we first meet the loves in our lives, we try to shape them by our dreams.  All those things we thought living in love would be like crash into the unsuspecting object of our devotion.  They meet the way our families meet our first girlfriends, with eyes raised, everyone in the room wondering how long this phase will last.

Soon those two parties–the new love and the context of life–get together and ruffle each other until one begins to change.  They effect each other.  Sometimes we change our lives in submission because the object of love is better.  Sometimes we decide that the object of our affections and desires is unworthy, and we move on.  But when loved ones, their particular selves, stay with us, everyone changes.  Because we cannot be in love, live in love, stay in love (and here I don’t mean anything about the fanciful notions of being “in love” as much as I mean the straight and unstraight line that is a life of disciplined, passionate, contemplative, committed love)–we cannot stay in that love without changing.

I am no specialist on love, though I used to say that I fell in love everyone few months when I was growing up.  I started writing poetry in high school because I was in love.  And I did so many other things I’ll kept between me and special people in my life.  I am no specialist, no expert.  But I am trying to become a specialist.

I am trying to train myself in what loving well is.  I want to love well, love strongly, love hard.  And the implicit commitment it takes to want that, to desire that, and to pursue that desire is often unsettling.  I come to see what the desire means, along with what walking toward that desire requires.  It takes detailed effort to love.  Oh, we’d like to believe we love everybody.  I think the Savior said words that make us think we can do that.  But loving everybody is a perplexing impossibility.

Loving the people we know is hard enough and something we fail at so regularly that the Savior would blush at our insistent foolishness to misquote and misunderstand him when it came to behavior.  Thurman turned it correctly: Loving well is loving in particular.

It is loving the cracked skin and blemishes that won’t go away even though they may be covered.  Loving strongly is knowing the sheer vulnerability of your loved one and using that weakness to give them hope and inspiration and faith in humanity because you don’t do with your power what others untrained in such artistry would do.  Loving hard is the consistent exercise of staying with all those promises by the grace and help of every gift God gives.

I think doing this love, being in this love is one of life’s most consistent challenges.  And mostly because nothing really trains us toward it.  We are instructed and taught to dispense with things.  And that won’t help us become lovers.  Recycling and reusing are better words for love because love uses the raw materials of our particular lives, our real special selves, and does not force us to become something else, all while that love motivates (moves and pushes) us to become better.  Living that way is hard and usually so rewarding.

by Michael

A Prayer For Healing Today

As this surgery starts and throughout the procedure, be the Lord who heals.  You made your servant’s body, know his frame, and remember everything within it.  You know him, love him, and remember him.  So look at and bless him with the sensitivity and care that he needs.

Relieve all manner of sickness.  Remove pain.  Use doctors and nurses and attending angels to do your work.  Grant your servant a strong sense of your company, so that, as he lays and waits and receives both loss and newness, he may always have you.

There are needs beyond your servant’s, and his need today remind me of how long you’ve been healing before now.  You are accustomed to saving and reclaiming and making whole.  Do your work as you often do, even when we don’t notice or watch or praise or acknowledge it.

Be the most competent physician during today’s surgery.  As each nurse and doctor tend to him, be present in each touch, word, and gesture, making healing happen.  Bring recovery when all is done and may strength be in the body of your child and friend and servant.

Grant his family all the courage they need.  May they know your mercy, be enveloped in your lavish grace.  These things are not difficult for you.

In the name of the One who made healing his work.  Amen.

by Michael

Prayer For Winston

It’s probably around the time that Winston is standing near the casket of his aunt, saying things about her and saying things about you.  Will you be with him in the midst of a long day of many feelings?

While you know the joy that comes at the entrance of one of yours into bliss, you know the mixed feelings of grief and sorrow and pain as well.  Will you accompany him in the fragile experience of all these emotions and grant him a strong sense of your nearness.

You know the deep feelings of love, the memories, the jokes, the stories.  Enable him to remember with truth and humor and affection.

You know all the things that make us love animals, all the things that make us good and bad at loving.  Redeem every moment that he’s spent, and that his relatives have spent, combining those times into full experiences that help them support each other now.

You see those memories coming back when we see our loved ones, the remains of them, the last pictures of them.  Give Winston and his family and their friends a host of things to see during this day.

May they see you in the midst of their tears and their prayers and their songs and their presence.  May you be in the midst, drawing them all into your embrace.

Give them joy and praise  and kindness.  Let them eat well and restore each other through loving touches and long laughs.

And when the days pass, after others have stopped mentioning their relative, after they themselves have forgotten or begun to forget their loved one, make every spontaneous memory that arrives unbidden an occasion for gratitude and peace and anticipation for that last family gathering.

In the name of the One who conquered death.  Amen.

by Michael

Ending Another Semester

They trickled into the room and eventually we gathered as a group.  For most of the semester we started at 9am, but the clock ticked across several more minutes before our start.  By then, the tables were filled and dressed with treats.  Two pans of some casserole of sausage and bread and eggs or broccoli and onions for us meatless eaters, a bowl of sugary goodness a pastor’s wife provided, a box of buttered sweet cakes.

Their eyes and heads were heavy with every unfinished paper and all those unwritten words scrambling in their heads like thoughts waiting.  Their anxiety was normal as was their exhaustion.

We talked about things.  We wrote affirmation cards and ate and talked about the unseen days ahead.  Their would be jobs over the summer, breaks from seminary, no one taking classes.  One of them was starting a business, one serving at a camp.  There were hugs and written prayers, and as in previous times, I was so thankful for the chance I have to do this work.

by Michael

Prayer for a Friend as He Presents

You have never had a problem presenting yourself.  You have always communicated well.  So as my friend communicates, will you?

When he walks into the room, present yourself to him as he presents himself and his stuff to others.  Calm his heart and nurture his nerves in your hand.  Make him see and hear what he should.

May every inspection that happens in that time be full of accuracy, wisdom, and practical help.  Season the words of his listeners with grace, empathy, care, and truth.  Bring them closer to each other and to beauty as they talk.

Grant that this presentation brings you glory.  Enable it to connect with the broader bigger vision of his doctoral work in powerful, effective ways.  And perfect every step in the future of this work.  Bring it to pass in a ravishing way.

In Christ’s name.  Amen.

by Michael

Creating Saints

I’ve been thinking about the creation of saints, the way saints are made, and it’s been a head swirl of a time.  I’ve been both captivated and sullen, giving my ears to the interviews between Charlie Rose and leaders in the Roman church, for instance, and struggling with questions in my own ministry of what a saint looks like and how many we have and who is so far away from the word that they themselves would laugh.

It’s a basic question.  After all, I spend my days doing ministry.  I spend a lot of time pushing, coaxing, praying, encouraging, and teaching people–all because our work is about creating saints.  Not in the Roman tradition of course.  There are no robes, no newspaper articles, no banners or flags or printed billboards.  There aren’t interviews of all the people these saints have met, notes about every conversation, explanations of the details of their miracles.

There are miracles but they’re boring, unseen miracles.  They are the daily events that God must be underneath but that Presence is so far that is silly to call them by the same name.  They’re too terrestrial, these miracles.  But we make disciples in churches.  We talk to people and recognize the gifts that only God could implant.  We create saints.

And creating saints in my way of practicing is both encouraging and debilitating.  It’s draining and fun.  It’s hard and people are ungrateful while, at the same time, in some other way, there’s nothing more interesting and full and enlivening.

Creating saints brings no cameras or coverage.  There is hardly any notice of this mundane task; even colleagues may not notice or understand since our services are so specialized and context-bound.  There is less fanfare.

Creating saints means dinners away from family, vacations at weird times when they come, taking days to recover from an experience of self-giving, or never having normal Sundays, even while Sunday is the momentous occasion of remembering what it’s all about.  Creating saints is waking up with someone’s name on my tongue, someone who’s life was given to me in 2 hours and in a way that it’ll make me intercede at odd hours.  Creating saints means insomnia and isolation because of confidentiality and appreciation for a long laugh that my son just can’t control.

No one wants to see that on television.  It would be too boring, too close to real human experience.  It’d be better to read a good novel.  At least you could close the book and move on.

by Michael

A World I Want to Know

I was speaking with a person recently, trying to get across points about love.  We were continuing a conversation from weeks prior, and love was the bottom of it, how we love, who we love, and whether we could love others without first loving ourselves.

I felt sorrow for the man as we ventured into the strange world of real love.  A world where there is life and unconditional regard and, in one word, grace.

I remembered because of him that we are often taught to earn everything.  Evaluation from superiors.  Admiration from lovers.  Income for meals.  Why would love be different?

Love–the gift given, whenever it is given, in lavish laughter and open-handedness of someone else–is always a gift that comes for free and for freedom.  That’s a world we hardly know and if we know it, we don’t know it well.

by Michael

The Strangeness of Being a Pastor

As always, David’s thoughts are clear, sensitive, insightful recollections that are worth keeping up front.

David Swanson's avatarDavid W. Swanson

Being a pastor isn’t the hardest job – not by a long shot. I can think of many, many jobs that seem far more demanding. Even so, it is a strange vocation without much cultural equivalency. It’s only after ten years in the ministry (as we pastors call it) that I don’t dread the What do you do? question. I’ve come to expect the awkward silences and unpredictable follow-up questions. (But what do you actually do? So, that’s a real job?) I kind of like the questions now; telling people what I do seems to give people who don’t often get to talk about such things permission to share their opinions and questions about spiritual things.

IMG_0015_2So being a pastor isn’t the hardest job but there is a strangeness to it that is hard for people outside vocational ministry to relate to. And that’s OK, but it does mean…

View original post 867 more words

by Michael

The Whole City Gathered

I’m blogging for Lent, meditations from the gospel of Mark, primarily for our church. Perhaps, these posts can get me back into the swing of things.

Michael's avatarNew Community

And they went into Capernaum, and immediately on the Sabbath he entered the synagogue and was teaching.  And they were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one who had authority, and not as the scribes.  And immediately there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit.  And he cried out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?  Have you come to destroy us?  I know who you are–the Holy One of God.”  But Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be silent, and come out of him!”  And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying out with a loud voice, came out of him.  And they were all amazed, so that they questioned among themselves, saying, “What is this?  A new teaching with authority!  He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.”  And at once his fame spread everywhere throughout all the surrounding…

View original post 295 more words

by Michael

A Prayer For Writers #5

I haven’t in a while, but I started writing and posting prayers for writers and for others.  These prayers come out of my writing life, out of my hopes for the writers among us, and out of my desire for this blog to sit at the intersections between faith and writing.  Pray them or a line from them, with and for the writers you read, know, and support.  This prayer is about rejection and persistence.  Join me, if you will.

Dear God,

When the anticipations which once gave hope have fallen away; when the dreams which decorated our imaginations have turned; when the efforts and energies which once swelled purpose have drowned in reality; when rejection has convinced us that the full space of received creativity is too crowded and the consistent whispers of friends is forgotten; when passion has been misplaced, misdirected, and misshaped; grant us the ever-increasing melody that will not go unheard, the rumble of an instrument underneath our feet, the blaring of an unseen horn, the striking of unseen strings.  Pull that music from every possible source and play it into us that the embers of persistence might churn and shift and renew us and every word that comes from you.  In the name of the One who wrote lost words in the sand, Amen.

Amen

by Michael

Try Great Things

One day the teacher, Frederick Wilkerson, asked me to read to him.  I was twenty-four, very erudite, very worldly.  He asked that I read from Lessons in Truth, a section which ended with these words: “God loves me.”  I read the piece and closed the book, and the teacher said, “Read it again.”  I pointedly opened the book, and I sarcastically read, “God loves me.”  He said, “Again.”  After about the seventh repetition I began to sense that there might be truth in the statement, that there was a possibility that God really did love me.  Me, Maya Angelou.  I suddenly began to cry at the grandness of it all.  I knew that if God loved me, then I could do wonderful things, I could try great things, learn anything, achieve anything.  For what could stand against me with God, since one person, any person with God, constitutes the majority?

That knowledge humbles me, melts my bones, closes my ears, and makes my teeth rock loosely in their gums.  And it also liberates me.  I am a big bird winging over high mountains, down into serene valleys.  I am ripples of waves on silvery seas.  I’m a spring leaf trembling in anticipation.

From Maya Angelous’s Wouldn’t Take Nothing For My Journey Now