Our faith in God who sent his Son to become God-with-us and who, with his Son, sent his Spirit to become God-within-us cannot be real without our faith in the Church. The Church is that unlikely body of people through whom God chooses to reveal God's love for us. Just as it seems unlikely to us that God chose to become human in a young girl living in a small, not very respected town in the Middle East nearly two thousand years ago, it seems unlikely that God chose to continue his work of salvation in a community of people constantly torn apart by arguments, prejudices, authority conflicts, and power games.
Still, believing in Jesus and believing in the Church are two sides of one faith. It is unlikely but divine!
from Henri Nouwen daily meditation
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Monday, October 19, 2009
Monday, October 12, 2009
Celebrating Holy Uselessness
In my spiritual leadership class this fall we have had to come up with a self-care project. Mine is play. I just don't play enough! In the midst of the demands of ministry (emotionally, physically, spiritually and mentally) I need to care for myself by having moments of fun sprinkled throughout my day/week.
In my intellectual "research" on play I came across this quote:
"Play exists for its own sake.
Play is for the moment; it is not hurried,
even when the pace is fast and timing seems important.
When we play, we also celebrate holy uselessness.
Like the calf frolicking in the meadow, we need no pretense or excuses.
Work is productive;
play, in its disinterestedness and self-forgetting,
can be fruitful."
play, in its disinterestedness and self-forgetting,
can be fruitful."
Margaret Guenther in Toward Holy Ground
I have a long way to go to integrate more holy uselessness into my days. But I am convinced playfulness is a more important part of my spiritual formation than I ever imagined. To give myself permission to play feels like swimming upstream in the culture of ministry. I must pay attention to all of the compulsions and resistance that keep me from engaging in playfulness.
How are you playing/being holy useless this week?
Sunday, October 11, 2009
The lost art of listening
I picked up Eugene Peterson's The Contemplative Pastor again. It is one of those books I return to frequently to help remind me what I am supposed to focus on as one who follows a compassionate and unhurried Christ. Today I'm struck by Peterson's self-pondering, "The question I put to myself is not 'How many people have you spoken to about Christ this week?' but 'How many people have you listened to in Christ this week?'" (21).
Coming from over two decades of vocational ministry and having had to turn in statistics counting the former (speaking to others), but never the latter (listening to others), it makes me wonder:
- Why did I never have a seminary class on listening? There is homiletics and hermeneutics, but what about hearing God? Self? Others? (I did learn how to listen and pay attention to culture in my Intercultural Studies degree and I am learning to listen to "self" in my Spiritual Formation classes at Fox!)
- Theological debates are always verbose - people trying to prove their reasoning and thus "listening" merely to garner points to disprove, with verbosity, anothers' "faulty" reasoning. What would happen, instead, if we listened more to one anothers' hearts than to their reasoning (and our intent to disprove it) alone?
- Jesus never un-welcomed someone for their different theologies (except perhaps the Pharisees) and He was an equal-opportunity listener to those with different genders, economic status, race, nationalities etc. Who do I "instantly" close my ears to because they are different from me?
- Why are new disciples trained to be so wordy in prayers, in teaching, in evangelism and in sharing testimonies? How might discipleship programs teach listening to God, self, culture and others in our quiet times, witnessing, prayer and Home Fellowships/Bible Studies?
- Why is it that I have been taught that my greatest growth as a disciple depends mostly upon listening to other people's sermons, books, seminars, teachings etc? Who teaches the disciple to listen to God in the daily ordinariness of life in nature, self-reflection, good fiction, strangers,dirty diapers etc?
- How can I, like Jesus, join the Father in what He is doing if I do not take time to pay attention to what He is doing? How can I heed His invitations if I cannot hear them? It is far easier to make (and measure) my own plans and ask God to bless them, than to listen to His plans and join Him.
- Why do so many need to pay a professional to "listen" to them when it is our job as the body of Christ to do that for one another?
- What would change if missions organizations had a column in their weekly statistic gathering for "listening" to others in Christ vs. merely speaking to others about Him?
Listening also requires unhurriedness. To be fully present to one another (or even to myself and God) is a rare and wonderful gift! But if I am busy, thinking about what is next on the schedule, I will not listen (nor, consequently, love the other,) well. I am double minded - unstable in all my ways and in what I offer. If I have not cultivated a habit of paying attention to God and my own soul in the quiet times of solitude and silence, I cannot impart the space and energy required to engage in loving others with my ears and heart. People can mince and manipulate words and fake sincerity. You cannot fake being a good listener. It takes time and not a little amount of energy to "hear" beyond what is being said on the surface.
Perhaps that is why in the Old Testament the most often iterated command is: "Hear/Listen."
In the twice daily repeated Jewish Shema (which is, incidentally, the Hebrew word for "hear/listen"), an invitation to Listening and Love are mingled together:
"Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is One.
Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul mind and strength."
Deut 6:4
How do we become good at listening/loving?
According to Peterson
- Practice lingering and unhurriedness - with a friend, child, spouse, pet, stranger, elderly person etc. Another offer suggests slowing to look at one thing a day through a magnifying glass - pay attention, do not rush.
- Schedule "margin" in your days so you are not rushing from one thing to the next and thus can linger honestly, sincerely and with focus and enjoyment;
- Cultivate a "listening" prayer life: "I can be active and pray; I can work and pray; but I cannot be busy and pray. I cannot be inwardly rushed, distracted and dispersed. In order to pray I have to be paying more attention to God than to what people are saying to me; to God than to my clamoring ego. Usually for that to happen there must be a deliberate withdrawal from the noise of the day, a disciplined detachment from the insatiable self" (20).
Incidentally, the qualities of Love mentioned in 1 Corinthians 13 seem suspiciously similar to someone who is a good listener:
4Love is patient, love is kind.
It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud.
5It is not rude, it is not self-seeking,
it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.
6Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.
7It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Wednesday, October 07, 2009
If I may hold your hand...it is enough
A little prayer for today:
As the rain hides the stars,
as the autumn mist hides the hills,
happenings of my lot
hide the shining of Thy face from me.
Yet, if I may hold Thy hand
in the darkness,
it is enough;
since I know that,
though I may stumble in my going,
Thou dost not fall.
Alistair Maclean
in Celtic Daily Prayer reading for 23rd day of month
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Tuesday, October 06, 2009
Why is busy okay?
Over the weekend I was with a group of ladies and we were pondering together how to be still in the midst of the noisiness and demands of life. Living un-busy is counter-cultural as my friend discovered during her trip to the dentist yesterday. She was greeted with, "Hi, Keeping busy?" to which she automatically replied yes.
But after our weekend of pondering what rest and stillness might actually do to bring life and meaning to our worlds, she realized the awkwardness of this familiar phrase of greeting: She writes her questions spurred on by the encounter: "Is keeping busy the equivalent to doing fine, and if I'm not keeping busy, does that mean I'm not doing well?" Seemingly, according to the cultural norm, yes.
As she talked about her musings with the dentist, the dentist replied (somewhat wistfully), "You know, in all the times I've asked people that, the answer's always the same!"
Brenda continued: "I told her that I'd recently been reminded of the importance of resting, to which she nodded sympathetically and then launched into how she is a workaholic and if she took time off wouldn't know what to do with herself, etc."
Unfortunately, not much is different in the church and in our ministries. Busy is worn as a badge of honor - perhaps because my ego is too frail and has to live off the appearance of doing significant things. Un-busy feels lazy - even when I am doing the good and right and best things of caring for my family and my soul so that I can continue to pour out to others. I know in my head this is not how God measures my significance, but there is an underlying compulsion to produce, to prove and to render acceptable my life by what I do.
Eugene Peterson, in his book the Contemplative pastor, writes about this: "The word busy is the symptom not of commitment but of betrayal. It is not devotion but defection. The adjective busy set as a modifier to pastor should sound to our ears like adulterous to characterze a wife or embezzler to characterize a banker. It is an outrageous scandal, a blasphemous affront" (17).
The un-ing of my life continues - un-busying because if I cannot say no, what does that say about my yeses?
Anyone else encounter this?
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