Tag / Spiritual Disciplines

by Michael

Creating a Rule of Life, pt 3

Prayer is much broader than saying something to God.  That’s a good partial summary of prayer.  But there are, at least, two things that would enrich that summary.  The first is small, the second a lot larger.

First, as much as prayer is about talking to God, it is also about God talking back.  Some people have trouble with that.  After all, God talking back can be problematic.

It’s hard to know when God’s talking.  It’s hard not to blame things on God after you’ve gotten adjusted to this God-back-talking.  People have said that God has said a lot of suspicious things.  Plus, there’s the problem of that creative utterance.  In the scriptures, when God speaks, things move, people live, people die, worlds that weren’t become.  God’s speech is full and capable and hardly tentative.

Back to the second part about prayer: it is communicating with God whether or not there are words.  There is a passage in the New Testament that encourages what Eugene Peterson calls “prayerfulness.”  The passage says that we should pray without stopping, pray all the time, pray constantly (1 Thessalonians 5:17).  Commentators split about what this means in the pastoral letter, and the way Peterson comes to such language is by talking about prayerfulness.

Prayer is at the center of the Rule of Life.  Communicating with God, you talking to God and God talking to you, is the assumption of the Rule.  Of course, if God communicates with us, then we can hear what God says.  We can keep in the direction of God.  We can continue listening to the various ways God will speak.  Even when there aren’t words, we can train ourselves and our gestures in God’s direction.  We can add things which help us attend to God.  We can remove things that take such full-awareness-of-God away.

The act of preparing a Rule, then, can be prayerful.  Breathing and whispering for God to guide you as you think about what to do and what not to do is as much prayer as anything.  Waiting for that guidance is prayer too.  Waiting all day long, opening yourself up, is prayer too.  Do you get the picture?

So, whisper that in your own way: what should I do, God?  What should I focus on?

You’re already surrounding the creation of your Rule in prayer.  And now, start listening.

by Michael

Creating a Rule of Life, pt 2

The center of your life never needs much explanation because life centers always have all of us communicating for them.  We communicate with our full selves who or what is at the center of us.

In other words, I know the bottom of a person’s spirit by good observation, listening, and patience.  Those three behaviors help me pay attention both to who that person is and to who or what sits at the center of that individual.

You can see my presupposition: everybody has something sitting at the center of his or her being.  There may be exceptions that I’d make to that comment, but most people have something or someone that is primary and of ultimate significance.  Something at the center.

Most people who practice a religion would accept their religious rituals and behaviors and teachings as outflows of that language about Someone at the center.  That would be God.

Religious or not (if a person can not be religious), living well cannot be done without knowing who’s there.  Further, living well cannot be done without conscious choosing who’s at the center and who gets to stay there.

To create a Rule, it’s helpful consider who or what is at the center of one’s life.  In that consideration, we question our behaviors and choices in an effort to inspect the bottom of those behaviors and choices.  We look at our selves through the lens of our experiences in order to wonder around into the deeper floors of our selves.

We ask, what am I doing?  It’s a plain question.  What do I spend myself on?  A calendar starts the answer.  I’ve spent my days, my thoughts, my time doing thus and so.  The surface level answers lead us to a less-seen, less-trafficked place: the center.

We ask more questions.  What does this calendar of thoughts and behaviors say about my values?  What do these things say about who is of importance to me?

Creating a Rule of Life is an activity of putting God continually at that center.  But the survey of who or what is there first may open us to the kinds of activities we need to employ in order to unseat someone else.

by Michael

Creating a Rule of Life, pt 1

I have been pulling together materials for a curriculum, in part, to teach and develop small group leaders in our church.  A piece of that lesson series is about the development of a Rule of Life.  One of the writers who is helping to frame my thoughts on the Rule is Debra K. Farrington.  She’s a writer, educator, and spiritual director.  I’ve also been influenced in understanding the Rule of Life as a practice over the years by writers Adele Calhoun, Richard Foster, Dwight Judy, and Marjorie Thompson.

According to Adele Calhoun, rules help us live toward what we most want.  We live by rules, whether we acknowledge them or not.  In fact, most of the rules we live by are unconscious.  Some might say that our rules are implicit rather than explicit.  When we’re asked a question about an implicit rule–why do you go to church on the weekends, for example–we wake up to the rhythms we’ve kept; we might inspect them, we might change them.

The Rule of Life is simple way of talking about what we most want, who we want to be, and how we will go about pursuing that vision.  It aides us in focusing on all our parts, not just our “spiritual” selves.  Most Rules have some language about work, rest, and play for example.  And the word Rule shouldn’t worry you.  It can be substituted by any of the following: way of life, practice of life, means of life.

I think of a Rule as a container of practices.  It is the statement that contains what practices, over a period of time, we’ll observe in an effort to respond to Love.  A Rule is a statement of things we’ll do, attitudes we’ll cultivate or intentionally be aware of, as we relate to a loving God.

Over the next several weeks, I’ll write a brief post using Farrington’s categorical outline for the components of the Rule of Life.  As part of these posts–or the background of them–I’m revising my own Rule.  I invite you to join me.

by Michael

Something I Read

I was researching a question for someone, and I came across this in my work: The struggles you probably face in living a life centered on God–while they may be new to you–are not new to humankind.

This feels to me like a very good reminder.  It’s an impressive statement because it speaks to my own inferior places, my own fears, and my own hardships.  But it’s equally impressive because it’s right.

What we’ve experienced as we’ve attempted our religious reaches toward God, our responses to the One who has always reached first, these experiences are common.  Humans have always sensed the Divine, and humans have always experienced that sense as inviting and terrifying, as worthy and hard, as beauty and horror.

It’s the origin of creativity and art and prayer and sex and sleep and addiction. At the bottom of us is the mixed experience of struggle and relief which responds to great love.  And our struggles are not new.  They’ve been lived through before.

May we take comfort in the stories of others who have been where we’re headed and who have left good instructions for the paths under our feet.

by Michael

Name the Reality

One casualty of that frantic schedule has been the Christian practice of prayer before meals, a practice often referred to, appropriately, as “giving thanks” or “saying grace.”  Christian parents honor the vows they make at their children’s baptisms to nurture their children in Christian faith in a variety of ways.  Some try to teach their children, with at best mixed results, how they should understand themselves and their world.  But whether they recognize it or not, all parents teach their children by how they themselves live.  Surely one of the most important things Christians do is teach their children to name the reality of God’s grace in their daily lives and to express gratitude for that grace and for their life before God by praying before meals.  It is one thing for a child to grow up in a Christian home and church in which the language of Christian faith may occasionally be heard.  It is something else altogether for a child to hear and learn how to speak not just about Christian faith, but the language of faith, the language of God’s grace in reference to the realities and events of their daily lives.

From George Stroup’s Before God (pgs. 160-161), a solid book that’s hardly about parenting and very much about parenting

by Michael

A Mini Examen

The prayer of examen is an old way of praying through the movements of days.  It involves taking a few deep breaths, thinking about what happened in the day, noticing where God felt especially close and especially far, and remembering the feelings that came along through the day.

It’s a way of praying that can be done for chunks of time, like a week or a month or even a year.  Many people pray this prayer daily, building a life of mini examens.  Over time those little prayers–noticing God here and not there, re-feeling things that we misplaced somewhere else–become a way of determining what really gives us life.  They become a way for us to see the doors we need to push closed and the ones we must hurry through.

by Michael

Personal Retreats, pt. 3

What do you do during a retreat?  How do you attend to matters of the heart or the mind or the spirit?  I have a couple suggestions, again pulling from my own and from much smarter and more spiritually enriched friends from faith.

  1. Sleep.  This is basic, but it takes on new meaning when you’ve spent a year or more having the normal rhythm of your sleep being turned up and down and shaken violently by a sweet cute child who knows nothing about sleeping habits.  You can’t really hear God or grow in depth and character if you’re not taking care of yourself.  That’s the point.  Sleep is indispensable to good health.  My spiritual director, who I quote when I talk about these types of things, once said to me something like, “If you’re not dreaming, you’re not sleeping well.  In order to dream, you need to rest.”  I left that monthly session back then–and not that this was the only point–knowing that some of my inability to dream, to see, to be inspired is only tied to my need for rest and nothing else.
  2. Read poetry.  G.K. Chesterton said, “The greatest of poems is an inventory” (Orthodoxy).  If you’re spending time with your God and trying to deepen that friendship, poetry is a good way to tap into the real humanness represented in poetry.  Poems say things we can’t.  Writers help connect us to us.  The Bible’s poetical books are a great gift (e.g., Job or Psalms).  I’d include in this suggestion other spiritual readings.  This time, over my weekend, I read a few short stories from Gumbo and Eugene Peterson’s memoir, The Pastor.  I also picked up a couple helpful books by Richard Rohr and the latest novel by my friend through the net, Tayari Jones.
  3. Ride a train.  You may think I’m kidding, but a long train route is incredibly centering.  It slows you down.  It allows you to see parts of a town or country that you’d ordinarily pass by.  It’s calming.  Except, of course, when you’re sitting next to a man for 40 hours who knows the intricacies of the Kennedy assassination and has to tell you about it, along with how he is a direct descendant of Moses and other unique parts of his life story.
  4. Sit and do nothing.  Solitude is the practice of doing nothing.  Not thinking or reading or praying or meditating or waiting or studying.  Solitude is contemplation.  It is listening.  It’s hard to do solitude because we all are used to and comfortable with doing.  Henri Nouwen wrote that our lives become absurd, and he said that that word, absurd, was from the Latin and meant deaf.  He said that the discipline, the repetitive act, of solitude is one of the most powerful ways to combat that deafness, which is an absurd life without hearing God.  Try this for a minute and then two and then three.  When you can sit and do nothing other than listen for the voice of God, you’re transforming.
  5. Watch something beautiful.  This could be you watching and listening to a jazz performance.  It might be you listening to a street performer or sitting on a bench across from a tree waving in the wind.  It may be a visit to a garden.  Our days are filled with many things, but I’m sure we all could use more beauty in our schedules.  Use a retreat–again, folks, this could look like a walk around your office building during the lunch hour–to see beauty in the midst of your life.  You’re not avoiding the ugly.  You’re noticing something else.  And that enlarges you inside.
  6. Spend time doing those other things.  Other gestures that you could add into a retreat–or form an entire retreat around for that matter–include reading a single chapter of scripture, praying through a number of ancient prayers from your religious tradition, or fasting from food.
  7. Plan to come back to “someones”.  Retreats are only effective when you plan to return to people.  Even further, they’re effective when you look to return to others in order to live differently, live like you’ve heard something fresh.  And this isn’t just for pastors, folks.  It’s for parents or significant others or students or teachers.  You insert the next one.  Times away are good and useful and enriching not because we focus on ourselves but because we get to incorporate what we get, if we get something, into our relationships, communities, jobs, and lives.
by Michael

Two Out of Too Many

There are two times a year when I think about resolutions: in November, my birth month and April, the month of my wedding anniversary.  November is a way to start earlier with the resolutions most people make in January for the upcoming year.  It takes time for me to get into gear.  April, then, serves as an internal check-in on already-set goals.  When I think about this year’s hopes and expectations, I think about two things I’ll share here.

First patience.  I have more patience than I used to, but that’s not saying much.  Already I can tell that life, God, the devil, and everybody else are playing a part in stretching me into a more patient person.  When I noticed patience as something I needed to attend to, I thought I’d be restricted to getting in the slow lane on the expressway, watching my coworkers—including David Swanson who drives like he’s ninety—speed by, and following cars that drove under the posted limit.  Sometimes I do this since it really does help me rush less and go slower. 

I thought it would have to do with showing up early and managing time.  But I don’t need those disciplines.  I have many ways be patient like being generous with time when I’m sitting with someone, refraining from interrupting somebody talking, praying about my frustrations from unsatisfied ambition, and taking a deep breath before I write an email response to someone I think is misguided or careless or wrong.

Joy is second.  I think joy springs in the midst of situations that make me anxious.  I’m good at anxious.  Anxious is the broad sentiment that keeps me searching.  It gifts me with the ability to be critical, to ask good questions, and to stay with something or someone.  These things are good about anxious.  But there are bad things. 

The first is that rumble in my stomach when the mechanic asks me to follow him back to the bay where my eleven-year old civic is suspended —does he ever have good news in such circumstances?  It’s the natural feeling of worry, or concern even, that doesn’t go away.  Or it’s the response in my heart or my belly that either will make me pray or make me fret. 

My spiritual director would say there is an invitation to the feeling of anxiety.  I think it’s an invite to “joy’s party.”  And I’m looking forward to joy coming this year, even if it has to push against the pit in my stomach when I start my car.

by Michael

Year To Date Letters

Maggie and David Swanson have taught me many things in the ten years we’ve known each other.  On that list is now year-end letter writing. 

Even though we’ve received these year-end missives over the course of our marriage from missionaries and random organizations, the Swansons were our first letter writers, and Dawn wanted to add the gesture this year.  She brought it up after we got a slew of beautiful greeting cards, several with snapshots of children, and, well, letters.  I think she’s more interested in sending people a picture of our boy than anything.

If you’re unfamiliar with the communication, it’s a letter, usually typed, that captures a person or family’s year.  It’s like a one-page summary of life lived. 

We are writing ours.  That’s important.  Because when we do things, it’s not like one of us doing things.  Dawn is taking a part.  I’m taking a part.  I’ll inevitably edit both parts.  And then Dawn will edit my edit.  I love to cut words when she loves to add them.  I choose a word to capture a sentence, usually her sentence, and she’ll tell me I should have included this or that recollection.  It’s going to be fun. 

She’s the type of writer who writes for a long time.  I’m the type who says I’ll work on a thing from this time to that time.  She will probably want to work on this into February, and I’ll have to remind her that we wanted it to go out at the end of December.  She’ll keep writing the same thing and may get a bit upset when I’ve offered my last feedback–because, well, my time is up for it.  We’ll compromise.  Because I’ll print the letter and start stuffing envelopes.

I’ve been thinking about my two paragraphs for a week.  I’ll write them tomorrow, I think.  It feels like querying for a novel, boiling down an entire story to a pitch paragraph or two.  It already feels like next year we’ll decide that quarterly updates are best, but who has time for that?

Do you write these letters?  Why do you do it?