Tag / Spirituality

by Michael

Questions for Preachers, Writers & Everybody Else

Peter Scazzero, a pastor in New York, asks 10 questions of preachers in an article at Preaching Today, and they just may apply to other vocations and professions as well with some slight nuance.  See if any of these speak to you, your life.  I’ve included a sentence from the article along with the question:

  1. Am I grounded in my own contemplation of God?  Quoting Benard of Clairvaux under this question, “You don’t have the walk with God that sustained the weight of responsibility that you’re carrying and I fear for your soul.”
  2. Am I centered in Christ?  When we’re not centered in Christ, we end up preaching out of a reflected self—finding who we are from other people rather than who we are in God.
  3. Am I allowing the text to intersect with my family of origin?  Our family system defines us far more than we think it does.
  4. Am I preaching out of my vulnerability and weakness?  The truth is that we’re as weak and broken and vulnerable as anyone in our congregations.
  5. Am I allowing the text to transform me?  This sounds simple but it isn’t.
  6. Am I surrendering to Christ’s process of birth, death, resurrection, and ascension?  This process can’t be forced or controlled.
  7. Am I making time to craft clear application?  It is not something you do at the last minute.
  8. Am I thinking through the complexities and nuances of my topic and audience?  It takes sensitivity and empathy for how complicated human life is.
  9. Am I doing exegesis in community?  But I always try to have at least one other person that I can talk to…
  10. Am I connecting the message to our long-term formation?  I try to connect people creatively in ways that sheer speaking can’t.

I think all of these are relevant for ministers, even ministers who aren’t preaching regularly.  But these questions can be just as anchoring for people who work in other areas.  Peter’s post is full, and if these questions interest you, do read the entire article here.

by Michael

A Prayer For Writers #3

Periodically I write and post a prayer 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 faith.  Join me, if you will.

Dear God,

Unfold faith in us when our hands clench doubt.  Pull the cord keeping us tied to what we see, and spin us in twirling circles of enfleshed hope.  Open our eyes.  Make our vision or visions clear, unencumbered by the litter of lifeless life.  Where we sit and, then, lay in faithlessness, give us confidence to rise.  Whisper to us the way babies do, in tones that are anything but quiet.  Call to what talent you’ve placed inside us.  Speak to our futures and talk to us until we believe enough to take one more step forward.  Grant the same loud whisper tomorrow and each following day.  When we are overwhelmed, convince us to stay faithful, to keep going, even when going is steep, hard, hardly possible.  Give us little bits of you and make our days decorated by grace.  We will be lonely in our work, and that loneliness will tempt us.  Please be more powerful than the emotion that comes from our long obedience.  Be more convincing than all the feelings within.  Be more.

In the name of the One who wrote lost words in the sand,

Amen.

by Michael

A Prayer For Writers #2

Periodically I’ll write and post a prayer for writers.  Other people can pray them, but they are coming 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.  Perhaps you can pray them, or a line from them, with and for the writers you read, know, and support.  This particular prayer is about ideas.  Pray with me, if you will.

Dear God,

For some of us countless ideas run around in our heads.  For others of us the struggle is to start seeing anything at all.  Grant us the ability to see when our heads are clouded, the ability to hear when the story is being told somewhere just beyond our ear’s grasp, and the ability to put enough form to that thing so it feels.  Help us hold the idea gently.  Help us appreciate and respect the models you’ve given our world, the idea generators whose stories stay and sustain.  Sift through the mess and the garbage inside us so that what we find is truly a treasure.  Search us and shine your light through us so that we can see ourselves as sparkling vessels capable of repeating the amazing in our work.  Enable us to organize, to structure, and to take one step after another.  Give us the gifts of something that can nourish the world.  May we use them for good.  Place in our hearts strength and stamina so we can see those nourishing gifts on display.  And make us mindful to call them yours.

In the name of the One who wrote lost words in the sand,

Amen.

by Michael

A Prayer for Writers #1

Periodically I’ll post a written prayer for writers.  Other people can pray them, but they are coming 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.  Perhaps you can pray them, or a line from them, with and for the writers you read, know, and support.  My first prayer is in response to the blank page.  Pray with me, if you will.

Dear God,

Enable us to see the blank page as a gift and a friend.  Whether white or yellow or some other color, brighten that background until it becomes a wide invitation from the Creator of the best stories and the Maker of the most enduring truths about humanity.  See the page as we see it.  Notice our fears, most of which we keep to ourselves.  Count our hopes and measure the distance between what we want and what we’re able to accomplish.  Track the meanings of all the unwritten words and make sense, especially when we can’t, of why writing matters to us.  Make us unafraid of the page.  Help us to imagine it full and crowded.  Excite us over tomorrow when today’s phrases have felt forced or tired because we tried and we wrote but didn’t quite finish.  Give us the skills associated with gratitude.  Form us into thankful writers, people who are grateful for language and its gifts.  Make us fearless as one page ends.  Grant that we might see you in the blankness of what’s next.  Press into us faith and imagination because writing requires both.  And may we, in some way, offer you all we do.  And may our offerings entertain you, the most perceptive and faithful Reader.

In the name of the One who once wrote lost words in the sand,

Amen.

by Michael

Leadership’s Interview With Gardner C. Taylor

Our interview with Dr. Gardner C. Taylor is in the Fall edition of Leadership Journal.  I reflected a few times on the conversation in July.  I imagine I’d like to revisit the experience again, in a bit, now that the Journal has printed a portion of the time we spent with this preaching hero.

It looks like a little less than half of our questions and his answers were able to be printed.  That means I walked away from that conversation with more gifts than I thought!  I have his melodious tone in my ears talking about things that can feel a little like secret wisdoms given to me and Marshall Shelley, the Journal’s editor.

Leadership hasn’t put the interview online yet.  I won’t attempt to reprint it either.  You should subscribe if you’re interested because, well, you can’t have my copy.

I will offer you two glances here from the interview.

Have you faced different struggles during different phases of your life?  I think they’re mostly the same struggles.  They just get recycled.  At root they are the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life.  Everyone experiences them, though some people seem not to.  I think though, that people who do not have these struggles miss something.  They may be “innocent,” but they miss something.  Like that old hymn says:

Sure I must fight if I world reign;

Increase my courage, Lord.

I’ll bear the toil, endure the pain,

Supported by Thy Word.

I sang those things in my childhood.  I didn’t know what the song was talking about then, but I think I know now.

Sometimes I envy people who are free of that struggle.  But to be perfectly honest, I’m not sure I would want to be one of them.

And another, after Rev. Taylor had said something about being aware that we are strangers and pilgrims, not exactly home.  Re-reading this took me back to the deep stare in his eyes as he looked beyond us.  I wondered what he saw.

Tell us what you mean by “home.”  All in all, life’s a great experience.  But by faith we believe there’s a better one.  It’s hard to imagine what it can be like.  At the point I have reached, one ponders more and more what it’s like.  It does not yet appear.  But this we know, the Bible says, that “we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.”

Those are tremendous things to wrestle with.  Not too much for the human mind to ponder, but too much for it to have.  I cannot picture this.  The best I can do is try and understand the crude symbolism that we’re given.  Our home will be far richer, far finer than anything we can think of.  The maker of that home is God.

by Michael

Writing To Your Bottom

Writing can be a spiritual exercise.  It can be a spiritual practice.  In my mind a spiritual practice is a gesture done or a habit undertaken to make you more honest, to bring you closer to you, and to put you in the conscious presence of God who is greater than you.  Now, that’s what I mean by a spiritual practice or exercise.  And I think writing can be one of those practices.  There are others, many others.

I read an interview with Robert Boyers at Catching Days.  I’m grateful to Jane Friedman for introducing me to Catching Days.  At the end of the repetitive interviews (The blog host, Cynthia Martin, offers interviews at the first of every month), writers are asked the same three questions.

  1. What is the best book you’ve read in the last three months and how did you choose it?
  2. Would you give us one little piece of writing advice?
  3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

In his interview Robert Boyers answers the second question by saying,

“Use your writing–even work written on assignment–to get to the very bottom of what you are thinking and feeling.”

I think this is an illuminating piece of advice for writers, but I also think non-writers can do this.  What do you think?  Have you used writing as a spiritual exercise?  Perhaps you journal or you blog.  What else have you done to get to your bottom, to articulate or to understand your thoughts and feelings?

by Michael

Learning About Spiritual Life By Bicycling, 2 of 2

In my last post I started a list of things I’m learning about life and about growing in life, lessons I’m picking up from the bike paths I use to get to and from work.  Here is the rest of my list.  Tell me what you’d add.

6.  You will get tired.  My commute is 12.5 miles each way.  I remind myself of that when I slow down.  That may not be as long as some of the people on the path, but it’s a long way when I get to my 20th mile late in the afternoon–after a few counseling sessions or a couple meetings or a sour email that just won’t leave my brain–when I want nothing but a shower and a sandwich and an unending hose of cool water lodged directly into my mouth.  Whether it’s that first experience of tiredness, on my way in, when I’m going around that circle-like path at 39th street or when I’m headed home and between Madison and Balbo, I get tired.  Everyone does.  Acknowledge it and move to the side so that faster people, people who aren’t necessarily in better shape, can keep going.

7.  After a while, your lungs strengthen.  I was born in my mother’s sixth month of gestation.  I had very underdeveloped lungs, was born with asthma, had weak eyes, and needed a surgery or two after birth.  I always think about those early lungs when I bike because I feel like my past can be an excuse for all the huffing and puffing I do on that thing.  But I’ve noticed that even a small amount of regular biking has changed my lung capacity.  I can run up those flights of stairs from under the Clark & State street Blue Line stop and have no problem heaving like I used to.  I attribute that to the bicycle, to my getting on it.  I down “run out of breath” as quickly when I’m on it.  I can keep up.  And my old faithful memories, my understandings of the past, don’t come back when my body is growing stronger.

8.  Stopping and dismounting is appropriate and necessary.  I fly by beautiful places on my way to the church office.  Sometimes I imagine that my body works with the landscape to sabotage me so that I can stop and watch birds fly over northerly island or so that I can see a family playing together in the park or so that I can hear the sound of balls bouncing between boys playing at the court near 34th street.  I tell myself that it’s not a crime to stop, that it’s best to listen to my body rather than judge it.  I stop.  I dismount.  I drink water.  I watch people.  They smile and nod, acknowledging that they understand.  I don’t look at the people dressed in real bicyclist clothing.  They don’t understand.  They’re too far into their training to offer me anything when I’m resting.  They’re going too fast to notice people like me leaning over on a rock and stretching every muscle under my waist.

9.  Everything becomes a distraction.  People opening doors.  People running and jogging and going faster than you on their bikes.  People talking on cell phones and wavering over to the right, unable to hear you yelling for your life.  It’s takes concentration to ride in the city.  If you don’t, you could harm somebody or be harmed yourself.  Protecting yourself becomes a goal, taking the place of getting to a destination.  That’s my definition of a distraction: when your first and most important goal gets moved by some other goal.  And things take my attention away from getting to work.  I try hard to bring myself back to the ride.  The noise of my old clunking pedals helps.  The splat of a bug on my glasses helps.  The ring of fellow traveler’s bell helps.  Seeing someone on the side resting helps.  Those things somehow give me something else to look at and attend to when the distractions take away from the ride.

10.  Communicating with fellow travelers is important and, sometimes, fun.  I learned a short way of coming behind another bicyclist.  “On your left,” is the way to say that you’re passing someone.  They anticipate you.  If they’re like me, inexperienced and often confused between one gear and another, they’ll appreciate it.  They won’t get as mad if you ride like Lance Armstrong and make them feel really out-of-shape.  The nods to people riding in the opposite direction become salutations which encourage you to go where you’re going and to return.  They remind me that people will probably always be doing what I’m doing at the time, riding a bike.  People will always be turning those pedals, pushing their thighs, talking to their feet.  I won’t be alone when I turn around and come back.  I won’t be alone when I pass the memorial park that afternoon while feeling my entire body burning and aching and and twitching and singing off key.  There will be others even when I can’t see them in front of me or behind me.  Somebody will come and zip by.  Someone else will walk by slowly.  And I’ll remember to keep going at whatever speed.

by Michael

Learning About Spiritual Life By Bicycling, 1 of 2

I commute to work once a week by bicycle.  I’m into my third or fourth week of this.  I’ve hoped at different points that I could be one of those people who biked to work daily.  But I’m not.

First of all, I hate to sweat.  Even though my body likes to sweat.  Since bicycling makes me sweat, I avoid it.  Second, bicycling doubles and nearly triples my commute time.  It’s not as long as taking the bus, but it’s much longer than driving.  So, I do it when I have some thinking to do; when I’m mid-way into a sermon and need to turn over thoughts in my head.  I do it when I don’t have anyone I’m planning to meet with so that I can change clothes after arriving and look like I should be in the back room of some tall, dark library where customers don’t come.

That said, I’m learning a few things about life and about growing in life–by life I include and always mean the spiritual life–and I want to jot them somewhere.

  1. Five minutes is the same with or without a watch.  My friend and teacher Michael Bailey told me this once, and it came back to me when I started bicycling.  He said whether you look at a watch or not, five minutes is five minutes.  Sometimes I track how long it takes to get to the next mile marker.  Usually it’s the same time whether or not I’m looking at a record of long I’m taking.
  2. The small hills torture my legs.  By legs I’m talking about the long things that fall from my hips and meet with my feet.  There are 2 or 3 big hills on the Lake Shore trail.  I am currently ignoring them, taking the flatter routes.  I’m building my confidence because it’s been two years since I’ve ridden consistently.  But I’m noticing that there are small hills, and that they do me in.  I pedal slower.  I breathe harder.  I suck shallow gasps.  I hope to survive.  I complain under my breath.  I whisper curses to Daniel Burnham and other city planners.  The small mounds are where I slow down because, usually, I don’t anticipate them the way I do big hills, the hills I can go around.  Small hills come upon me, and to get through them I tell myself to, simply, keep pedaling.
  3. It’s best to keep pedaling.  The other day on my way home I removed the need to arrive by a certain time.  I don’t ordinarily pray actively while I ride.  I’m too busy paying attention to my knees, to the creeking of my chain, that annoying call for a tune up.  But I prayed that day before hopping on the thing, that God would be with me on my way home.  When I got tired, I didn’t have to push myself.  Instead, I slowed down.  I told myself to keep going.  That was it.  No time limits.  No expectations except that I keep pedaling.  If I didn’t stop, no matter how slow I got, I would make it home.
  4. It’s always best to look where I’m going.  My tendency is to look down at the ground, at the concrete trail under my wheel and right in front of me.  But this lengthens the trip in my mind.  It takes longer for me to get to work when I’m looking at the 3-4 feet in front of me and missing the skyline, the pier, the island, or the next town beyond me.  I think it’s necessary to look at my legs sometimes, to talk to those things or scream at them even.  But it’s better to look ahead, to see where I want to be, to see that busy corner that reveals the ballroom sign in the old bank building.  It’s better to look down the path when I’m at 47th street and to note the black building we called the Arie Crown growing up or to see the boats lining up inside the harbor when I’m struggling through those straight paths as drivers inch by in front of the Buckingham Fountain.
  5. I should be going faster than the walkers.  I don’t believe in comparing myself.  In fact, I tell myself silly things to prevent making comparisons at the health club or on the bike path.  I don’t always succeed.  I have to tell myself that I should be moving faster than some people.  I should pass by joggers and walkers no matter how tired I am because if I don’t, well, I’m a terrible excuse for a human being.  I’m no scientist, but I’m sure some theory in physics explains why me on a bike should be moving much more rapidly than you on your feet.  Comparing myself is generally a bad idea, but if you’re on your feet, I should coast by you quickly, maybe slowly, but coast by I should.