Life As A Blur - The Spiritual Practice of Noticing

I sometimes peruse the books on my shelves and pull down some personal favorites. I then look through them to see what I underlined. I am an underliner when it comes to reading. When I find something that speaks to me...or corrects me...I underline it. It helps me in some way to retain it. And then when I go back to the book I can pick out what spoke to me.

One of these books is Spotting the Sacred by Bruce Main. Bruce directs an inner city ministry so his words carry some weight as he reflects on the pace of his life and how it affects him spiritually:

"I wonder if you can relate to my dilemma: life has become somewhat of a blur. Not that I am complaining. My life is full - family, friends, a job. But events and happenings seem to occur so rapidly that I have little time to ponder their significance and their meaning for my life. Information comes in torrents, not trickles. It is hard to know what to process, what to digest, and what - if anything - can add spiritual value to my life. I think I am becoming a little numb, especially when bombarded by all the bad news in the media. Am I missing something? If I take the time to scratch beneath the surface of the bad news or to reflect more deeply on the events of my life, will I have an opportunity to discover something more life-giving and spirituall enriching? If I really take the time to notice what is going on around me, will I find opportunities to discover a glimpse of God's presence?"

A little later, Bruce Main adds:

"More often than not in rushing blindly through the appointments, meetings, and encounters with other people, we miss opportunities to see and experience the presence of God in the ordinary aspects of our lives. We become content just skimming through life without ever pausing to consider that the events of our daily lives may have deeper dimensions - a truly spiritual quality."

I can be a skimmer. I know that to be true of myself but it's not something I am proud of. In th process of my skimming I fail to truly notice the wonder around me or even the presence of God around me. We often find ourselves empty and lacking fulfillment. Maybe it's because we skim so much of life. Life has a depth and a richness about it that is hidden away in the ordinary but it doesnt just jump out at us and demand we look at it. It takes noticing and paying attention. With all the spiritual practices I could be doing, taking time to notice and pay attention may be what ultimately saves my soul in the end.

Happiness in Any Circumstance - by Alfred Delp. SJ

"It does happen, even under these circumstances, that every now and then my whole being is flooded with pulsating life and my heart can scarcely contain the delirious joy there is in it. Suddenly, without any cause that I can perceive, without knowing why or by what right, my spirits soar again and there is not a doubt in my mind that all the promises hold good.... Outwardly nothing is changed. The hopelessness of the situation remains only too obvious; yet one can face it undismayed. One is content to leave everything in God's hands. And that is the whole point. Happiness in this life is inextricably mixed with God. Fellow creatures can be the means of giving us much pleasure and of creating conditions which are comfortable and delightful, but the success of this depends upon the extent to which the recipient is capable of recognizing the good and accepting it. And even this capacity is dependent on our relationship with God."

Source: Prison Writings: Meditations

Your One Wild and Precious Life

Yesterday in my message I ended with a poem by Mary Oliver. Her last two lines are the most recognizable but here is the whole poem:

Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean -
the one who has flung herself out of the grass
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down -
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, hot to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?

What a penetrating question to ask halfway through one's life...or even near the end..."Tell me, what else should I have done?" In the poem she pays attention to the grasshopper and all that is around her but how much does she pay attention to her life? How much do we pay attention to our lives? To our dreams, aspirations, passions, and creative callings?

How do you answer those two last lines?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?

Called First to Belong to Christ

“We are not called primarily to create new structures for the church in this age; we are not called primarily to a program of service, or to dream dreams or have visions. We are called first of all to belong to Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord, and to keep our lives warmed at the hearth of His life. it is there the fire wil be lit which will create new structures and programs of service that will draw others into the circle to dream dreams and have visions.
“To understand this is to be thrown back upon those disciplines that are the only known gateways to the grace of God; for how do we fulfill the command to love, except that we learn it of God, and how do we learn it of God, except that we pray, and live under His word and percieve His world?”
(E. O’Connor, Call to Commitment (1963) 92.)

Blessing the World by Mending the World

I have often been intrigued by the notion of "blessing the world." It's important for me because I am one that believes our call for mission can be traced back to God's call on Abraham and Sarah. God's call was for Abraham to lead a nation - a people - that would be blessed and would bless in return. Unfortunately, too many TV preachers and religious hucksters have caused us to think that to be "blessed" is simply to make alot of money and have alot of nice things. If you don't have that, you are not blessed. But, I keep suspecting that to "bless" the world goes alot deeper then that. Thank goodness I came across some stuff I read from Walter Brueggemann a while back. In his book, The Word the Redescribes the World, Brueggemann writes:

"Thus blessing is that the world should be generous, abundant, and frutiful, bespeaking effectiveness in generative fertility, material abundance, and this-worldly prosperity. Perhaps out best way to speak of this mandate is to think of 'shalom' in the broadest scope. Israel's life is to make the world work better according to the intention of the creator. That is an immense mission given to this one man (Abraham) and his family!...It is the missional mandate of God to Abraham that Abraham shoudl exist so that the general condition of curse in the world is turned to a general condition of blessing, life, and well-being...Israel's mission is to mend the world in all its parts. That is Israel's raison d'etre in the midst of creation...the mandate in Genesis is not to make the nations over into Israelites, nor even to make them Yahwists. The focus is kept upon the improvement of the quality of life as willed by the creator God."

For my own purposes, I have always felt that a simple call of the church is to mend, tend, and send. In other words, we are to mend broken lives...and mend creation. We are then to tend to the spiritual growth of those in our community...and then we are to send folks out so they can engage in mending the world. I appreciate what Brueggemann has to say by indicating that the goal is not to make "...the nations into Israelites, nor even to make them Yahwists. The focus is kept upon the improvement of the quality of life as willed by the Creator God."

Makes me wonder if ultimately when we are to "bless" the world that the focus is not so much on whether people are converted by moreso on the fact that we seek to improve the quality of life for everyone - as willed by God. This has huge implications for issues such as healthcare, poverty, homelessness, even ministering to those who are laid off, bankrupt, and addicted to consumerism.

We bless the world by mending the world - as willed by God.

God's Call- An Invitation to Adventure

"God's call, vocation, is twofold. God calls us saying, 'Come and follow me.' We arrive and then we must follow. We find but must go on seeking. God's call is a never-ending call, to the unknown, to adventure, to follow him in the night, in solitude. It is a call incessantly to go further, and further. For it is not static but dynamic (as creation is also dynamic) and reaching him means going on and on. God's call is like the call to become an explorer; it is an invitation to adventure."
(Ernesto Cardenal)

To see God's call on our lives is to see the spiritual journey in a completely different way. We don't anticipate anything new happening so we often don't look for the new. We expect things to stay the same...the way they are...with just a little religious veneer over the whole experience. We may be "finders" in the spiritual life but we are also "seekers" - and the seeking never ends. To do church is not to enter into a way of "blessing our static existence" but church...worship...spiritual practices...are a way of nudging us along, encouraging us along the way...guiding us on the journey...as we engage in our spiritual journey.

To see the spiritual life as an "invitation to adventure" is to open ourselves up to a whole new way of seeing...and believing. Sometimes I run into "spiritual people" who seem to be having anything but an adventure. The spiritual life seems a drudgery. It adds nothing to their lives. It keeps them respectable but that's it. We need to move far beyond the notion that Jesus came to our world just so we could figure out how to live respectable lives. Jesus came so that we could live lives of redemptive risk, of holy adventure, to explore depths we would otherwise never explore.

The Great Task of the Spiritual Journey - Claiming Our Belovedness

“The great spiritual call of the Beloved Children of God is to pull their brokenness away from the shadow of the curse and put it under the light of the blessing. This is not as easy as it sounds. The powers of the darkness around us are strong, and our world finds it easier to manipulate self-rejecting people than self-accepting people. But when we keep listening attentively to the voice calling us the Beloved, it becomes possible to live our brokenness, not as a confirmation of our fear that we are worthless, but as an opportunity to purify and deepen the blessing that rests upon us…And so the great task becomes that of allowing the blessing to touch us in our brokenness. Then our brokenness will gradually come to be seen as an opening toward the full acceptance of ourselves as the Beloved.”

(Henri Nouwen, Life of the Beloved)

When I think of being "the Beloved" I always go back to the place of Jesus' baptism. At that moment that Jesus came out of the water he heard these words, "This is my son in whom I am well pleased." I have felt for a very long time that it was those words that gave Jesus the self-identity he needed to fulfill his call. He knew at that point that there was no way he could displease God or cancel out the affection of his Father. Jesus knew at that point that it was not possible to disappoint God. As Jesus lived into that he was able to live a life that fully expressed his truest self because he did not fear rejection.

Our great task is to hear those words, "This is my son / daughter in whom I am well pleased." If we have heard that from our earthly parents - we are blessed beyond measure. If we didnt, we can hear it from the heart of God. Even if we did receive that kind of affirmation from our parents, we need to hear it from God daily in order to live into our truest self. We hold back in life because we feel worthless and we fear rejection. We live with fragile identities. God's love and blessing solidifies our identity and surrounds it with God's great pleasure and delight. To know that is to live an authentic life with courage and to go about loving others freely.

Expanding Our Hearts In Love

I have said on one then more occasion - and I have not been the first - that there are two basic emotions in life. Love and fear. One cannot love what they fear and to fear something - or someone - is to create a barrier to love. We often have trouble loving ourselves because we fear what we will see and we fear God will not accept us if we are honest about ourselves. When we fear people who are different then us we find it hard to love them. When we fear people who think or believe differently then us we find it difficult to love them. The Scriptures remind us that "perfect love casts out fear". Not "perfect" in the sense of neurotic perfection but in this case "perfect" means "on the way to wholeness or completeness." So, a complete love casts out fear and invites others in.

I like how Joyce Rupp describes the nature of love in her book The Open Door:

"One of love's marvelous qualities is its capacity to never cease growing. As our selflessness expands, it continually affects our world. May a day never pass without attempting to keep in our hearts the expansive love that Brad and Jan Lundy visualize:

'Imagine what life would be life if this love continued to expand, it if moved through our families, out into our neighborhoods and towns. Imagine waves of love continuing to roll, building in intensity, surging across boundaries and borders into other countries, dissolving barriers between people and nations. This Sea of Love grows in scope, in power, until everything in its pathy is absorbed by it, enlivened and healed by it. Until everything, everyone, is awash in Love. What will our world be like if Love is all there is?

Today, anoint the world with your love!

"God's Love" by Thomas Merton

"If I were looking for God, every event and every moment would sow, in my will, grains of God's life, that would spring up one day in a tremendous harvest. For it is God's love that warms me in the sun and God's love that sends the cold rain. It is God's love that feeds me in the bread I eat and God that feeds me also by hunger and fasting. It is the love of God that sends the winter days when I am cold and sick, and the hot summer when I labor and my clothes are full of sweat: but it is God who breathes on me with light winds off the river and in the breezes out of the wood. God's love spreads the shade by the sycamore over my head and sends the water-boy along the edge of the wheat field with a bucket from the spring, while the laborers are resting and the mules stand under the tree. It is God's love that speaks to me in the birds and streams but also behind the clamor of the city God speaks to me in God's judgments, and all these things are seeds sent to me from God's will. If they would take root in my liberty, and if God's will would grow from my freedom, I would become the love that God is, and my harvest would be God's glory and my own joy. And I would grow together with thousands and millions of other freedoms into the gold of one huge field praising God, loaded with increase, loaded with corn."

"A Prayer for Gathering Ourselves"

Often in a Quaker meeting we here the term "the gathered meeting". This often conveys a sense of being drawn together as one body as well as feeling drawn together in God. For me, it always feels like those separate pieces of my life...those cluttered areas of my life...are pulled together into one complete whole and this "complete whole" is what it feels like to be centered.

Yesterday in meeting I read the following prayer as a way to call us to worship:

"O God, gather me
to be with you
as you are with me.
Keep me in touch with myself
with my needs,
with my anxieties
my angers
my pains
my corruptions
that I may claim them as my own
rather than blame them on someone else.

O Lord, deepen my wounds
into wisdom
shape my weaknesses
into compassion
gentle my envy
into enjoyment
my fear into trust
my guilt into honest
O God, gather me
to be with you
as you are with me."
(Ted Loder, Guerrilas of Grace)

As I shared that prayer yesterday on more than one occasion, I was continually struck by the line, "Keep my in touch with myself, my need, my anxieties, my angers, my pains, my corruptions, that I may claim them as my own rather then blame them on someone else."
It is so easy for me to blame others or circumstances for how I am feeling, what I am needing, what I am anxious about, and what angers me. Often I refuse to own these parts of myself and look for ways to pass the blame or at least dump the "emotional load" on others. Part of my growing edge is to not only be in touch with myself at the deepest level but to also own myself to the point that I own my condition and accept responsibility for it. Only then will I truly know what it feels like to have a gathered soul.

"Will You Love Me" by Gordon Cosby

One of my "long distance spiritual mentors"is Gordon Cosby. Gordon is 92 years old and is the founder of the Church of the Savior community in Washington D.C. He has always challenged me in his writings about living in the way of Jesus as well as living in authentic spiritual community. Here is the latest from Gordon. In this wonderful article, he describes how ultimately living the spiritual life is a life lived in a love relationship with Jesus.

"All of us need to know that we are loved. And just as we need to know that we are loved, Jesus needs to know that he is loved. Just as we need to listen to Jesus’ declarations of love for us, we also need to tell Jesus that we love him and that we want to be closer and closer to him forever. Jesus’ love for us and our love for Jesus is a mutual love affair.

Everything else is changed by that relationship. Nothing can be separated from it. Every friendship, every love relationship, is transformed by a consuming friendship with Jesus. All our money, all our work is an expression of our love for Jesus and his love for us. We show our love for Jesus by listening to him and taking on his dream for our city, our nation and our world—all of creation. Jesus and Jesus’ dream go together.

We take on Jesus’ dream and commit ourselves to serving his dream for the rest of our lives. And even when we die, we die into our next assignment, whatever Jesus wants us to do for him, until the day that everything and everybody is healed. Until everything and everybody is sitting down together at the feast that God has been preparing for all of us since the beginning of time.

We can’t love Jesus without loving everybody—our neighbors and our enemies. When we let Jesus love us, and when we start to love each other with Jesus’ love, we’ll hardly even remember all the racial stuff that used to separate us. Or all the money stuff that kept us apart. We won’t remember who went to college and who went to prison and all the terrible chasms between us and all the terrible ways we’ve hurt each other—we’ll only remember that Jesus forgives us and loves us and we forgive everyone and love everyone. We’ll feel connected deeply in our hearts to all things and all people—and even to the trees and the sky and the birds and the water and the fish.

ALL things will be made new because of our love, because of Jesus’ love.

So we commit ourselves to helping Jesus carry his dream of love for everything and everybody. We’ll take on his yoke and walk beside him, helping him do whatever he wants us to do. And Jesus says, “I love you, and I’m so glad you love me and are ready to be yoked with me. I know a few other people in Washington, DC, whom I love deeply. They, like you, have heard my voice and responded. I want you to know one another in your depths. Even though it might seem like you’re different from each other, you’re really the same inside. I want you to start loving each other and then take my love to those who don’t know yet how much I love them, too.”

So the question is simply this: Will we love Jesus by loving one another?"

Have a blessed day in the love of Jesus and loving others!

Prayers for Freedom

These are a couple days late but here are some "prayers for freedom" that are worth passing on and taking a look at during our day...

Gracious God, when the struggles of life hem me in on every side, open me to the freedom of your presence that can help me see beyond every restriction, every limit that binds me.

O God, give me the wisdom to see the subtle ways people can be enslaved and the courage to speak for those who have no voice. I ask this for the sake of your love.

Gracious One, may we honor the freedom you have given each of us, by refusing to judge those who are different from us.

O God, when we wake to yet another day of wonder and joy in the beauty of your creation, give us the heart to keep our needs simple, our desires soft, our wills pliable, so that we never participate in the exploitation of the earth, which is the work of your hands.

O God, wash my eyes clean, so I see the ugliness that steals life and hope from others. Do not let the insistence on my own liberty be the ground upon which others are denied freedom

The Potters Wheel

All I could never be,
All, men ignored in me,
This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.

Ay, note that Potter’s wheel,
That metaphor! and feel
Why time spins fast, why passive lies our clay,–
Thou, to whom fools propound,
When the wine makes its round,
“Since life fleets, all is change; the Past gone, seize to-day!”

Fool! All that is, at all,
Lasts ever, past recall;
Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure:
What entered into thee,
That was, is, and shall be:
Time’s wheel runs back or stops: Potter and clay endure.

He fixed thee mid this dance
Of plastic circumstance,
This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest:
Machinery just meant
To give thy soul its bent,
Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed.

RB Browning, “Rabbi Ben Ezra”

A Spiritual Journey - by Wendell Berry

"And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles,no matter how long,but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our feet, and learn to be at home."

Berry's vision of the spiritual journey reminds me that growth in the spiritual life is not about the "huge moments" or the spiritual "big deals" but about the small steps we take each dayand each moment. It is a journey of "spiritual inches" which, over time, adds up to my character and quality of soul.

A Prayer for Growing and Expanding Our Hearts

O Divine Love, you stand everlastingly outside the closed doors of our souls,knocking ever and again. Will you not now give me grace to throw open all my soul’s doors? Today let every closed door that has hitherto robbed mylife of air and light and love be opened.

Give me an open mind, O God, a mind ready to receive and to welcome such new light of knowledge as it is your will to reveal to me. Let not the past ever be so dear to me as to set a limit to the future. Give me courage to change my mind, when that is needed. Let me be tolerant to the thoughts of others and hospitable to such light as may come to me through them.

Give me open eyes, O God, eyes quick to discover your indwelling in the world which you have made. Let all lovely things fill me with gladness and let them uplift my mind to your everlasting loveliness. Forgive my pastblindness to the grandeur and glory of nature, to the charm of little children, to the sublimities of human story, and to all the intimations of your presence which these things contain.

Give me open hands, O God, hands ready to share with all who are in want the blessings with which you have enriched my life. Deliver me from all meanness and miserliness. Let me hold my money in stewardship and all my worldly goods in trust for you.

A Diary of Private Prayer, John Baillie

Beauty as Sacrament

“Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful, for beauty is God's handwriting -- a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing.”
(Ralph Waldo Emerson)