Long time...

Well, it's been a while since I've posted here. My world has been pretty hectic of late. I don't say that pridefully, for I know firsthand the results and impact of the sin of busyness and "overcommittedness."

Though I am missing my girls TERRIBLY!, this has been a good weekend, on the whole. I've gotten a lot of work done, though it seems there's always more to do. I've been on a television fast since Friday morning, which has been incredibly trying (strange for a guy who didn't even watch television several years ago). I've been able to go and "be"with people from LOCC, feeling fully present in a way that I often don't. I spent yesterday morning at a funeral of the father of a dear woman in our church. I was able to grab her seven-year-old son, give him a hug (at least as close to a hug as you can give a 7yo!), and validate all of the strange things that are going on inside of him. I spent about seven hours with friends from LO at a cookout. We ate, laughed, shared stories and life, played volleyball and horseshoes, and fellowshipped in the Spirit of God. It was a gift to be able to receive others fully yesterday, and by doing so to receive the presence of God in them. I got a lot of work done toward my sermon for today. (I don't think I've ever "finished" a sermon; I continue to edit and modify until the moment I am in the pulpit. Then the editing is done on the fly!) It was prep work for sermon that was not to be, at least not or today. The wonderful afternoon of fun gave me a nice flare up of seasonal allergies that attacked me all night long. In order to spare my class and the congregation having to watch my nose leak and listen to me cough all the way through the sermon, I called in the replacements. (Thank goodness for people who will bail you out at the last minute!)

I've also been able to do a good bit of reading this weekend. I read some from O'Day's brilliant commentary on the Gospel of John in the New Interpreter's Bible. Wonderful stuff! I also read Darryl Tippens' new book, Pilgrim Heart: The Way of Jesus in Everyday Life. I highly recommend this read to you. It's a wonderful and very accessible look at the Christian journey as the cultivation of a "worldly spirituality." It is a helpful book that I am hoping to start reading with my elders soon. I think that it does a good job making the spiritual life accessible, especially to our tribe, when other volumes on the spiritual life might seem a little too difficult to use in our everyday lives. Tippens is deeply grounded in the Scriptures and the Christian spiritual tradition.

He wants us to hear Jesus invitation to "Follow me." He writes, Jesus' invitation reflects how the Christian life is rather simply, at one level. It is a matter of rejecting the allure of the sedentary life in order to get out on the road and seek God. The saints through the ages can be recognized by their searching spirits. They live as strangers and foreigners on the earth. "[T]hey desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore, God is not ashamed to be called their God; indeed, he has prepared a city for them" (Hebrews 11:14-16). A faithful heart is always a passionate pilgrim heart, ever on the road, ever moving forward--searching for understanding, seeking the face of God (198).

I also loved this quote, especially in light of my work with college students and young adults and couples who are struggling with the hard questions of life and faith which are too often not welcome questions in "the church": Through the years I have been blessed by faithful friends who have not merely tolerated, but welcomed, my questions. In their hospitable company something quite unexpected happened. The doubts grew less fierce in the warm glow of their welcome. When I saw that my toughest questions did not rattle or unsettle them, I became more settled and less doubtful. Airing the doubts, I have found does not enlarge them--just the reverse....Wondering and wandering may be necessary to spiritual discovery whereas making doubts taboo only ensures that they grow stronger (196). (I like the "wondering and wandering! I should have gotten that trademarked! ;-) )

He goes on to say something that I may pass out to several godly and wonderful parents at LOCC: When we desperately want others, especially those most dear to us, to believe, it is often hard to grant them the space to question and to work things through. We want to see them arrive at the shining destination by the shortest route. Yet one of the finest gifts we can give strugglers is the freedom to take the long way 'round. Jesus promises us that if we ask, we will receive; if we search, we will find; if we knock, the door will be opened (Matthew 7:7-11) A good question to ask ourselves is this: Do we trust Jesus on this point? (191)

Here are three quotes that Tippens mines out of the writers of the spiritual tradition that captured my attention today:

From Soren Kierkegaard (in Tippens' chapter on discernment): What I really need it to be clear about what I must do, not what I must know....What matters is to find a purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I should do; the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die....[O]f what use would it be to me to be able to formulate the meaning of Christianity...if it had no deeper meaning for me and for my life?

From Flannery O'Conner (in Tippens' chapter on suffering): I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe. I know what torment this is, but I can only see it, in myself anyway, as the process by which faith is deepened....What people don't realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe. If you can't believe, you must at least do this: keep an open mind. Keep it open toward faith, keep wanting it, keep asking for it, and leave the rest to God.

From Thomas Merton (in Tippens' chapter on seeking): My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following you will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

Well, after writing this I still miss my girls. I get to seem them around noon tomorrow. Tomorrow come quickly!

Thoughts on the journey from old friends...

Prayer must penetrate and enliven every department o four life, including that which is most temporal and transient. Prayer does not despise even the seemingly lowliest aspects of man’s temporal existence. It spiritualizes all of them and gives them a divine orientation. But prayer is defiled when it is turned away from God and from thee spirit, and manipulated in the interests of group fanaticism.

In such cases, religion is understood to be at least implicitly misdirected, and therefore the “God” whom it invokes becomes, or tends to become, a mere figment of the imagination. Such religion is insincere. It is merely a front for greed, injustice, sensuality, selfishness, violence. The cure for this corruption is to restore the purity of faith and the genuineness of Christian love: and this means a restoration of the contemplative orientation of prayer.

Real contemplatives will always be rare and few. Butt ht is not a matter of importance, as long as the whole Church is predominately contemplative in all her teaching, all her activity and all her prayer. There is no contradiction between action and contemplation when Christian apostolic activity is raised to the level of pure charity. On that level, action and contemplation are fused into one entity by the love of God and of our brother in Christ. But the trouble is that if prayer is not deep, powerful and pure and filled at all times with the spirit of contemplation, Christian action can never really reach this high level.

Without the spirit of contemplation in all our worship—that is to say without the adoration and love of God above all, for his own sake, because he is God—the liturgy will not nourish a really Christian apostolate based on Christ’s love and carried out in the power of the Pneuma.

The most important need in the Christian world today is this inner truth nourished by this Spirit of contemplation: the praise and love of God, the longing for the coming of Christ, the thirst for the manifestation of God’s glory, his truth, his justice, his Kingdom in the world. These are all characteristically “contemplative” and eschatological aspirations of the Christian heart, and they are the very essence of monastic prayer. Without them our apostolate is more for our own glory than for the glory of God.

Without this contemplative orientation we are building churches not to praise him but to establish more firmly the social structures, values and benefits that we presently enjoy. Without this contemplative basis to our preaching, our apostolate is not apostolate at all, but mere proselytizing to insure universal conformity with our own national way of life.

Without contemplation and interior prayer the Church cannot fulfill her mission to transform and save mankind. Without contemplation, she will be reduced to being the servant of cynical and worldly powers, no matter how hard her faithful may protest that they are fighting for the Kingdom of God.

Without true, deep contemplative aspirations, without a total love for God and an uncompromising thirst for his truth, religion tends in the end to become an opiate.

- Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayer, 115-116.

The world says, “When you were young you were dependent and could not go where you wanted, but when you grow old you will be able to make your own decisions, go your own way, and control your own destiny.” But Jesus has a different vision of maturity: It is the ability and willingness to be led where you would rather not go. [See Jn 21:18.] Immediately after Peter has been commissioned to be a leader of the sheep, Jesus confronts him with the hard truth that the servant-leader is the leader who is being led to unknown, undesirable, and painful places. The way of the Christian leader is not the way of upward mobility in which our world has invested so much, but the way of downward mobility ending on the cross. This might sound morbid or masochistic, but for those who have heard the voice of the first love and said yes to it, the downward-moving way of Jesus is the way to the joy and the peace of god, a joy and peace that is not of this world.

Here we touch the most important quality of Christian leadership in the future. It is not a leadership of power and control, but a leadership of powerlessness and humility in which the suffering servant of God, Jesus Christ, is made manifest.

- Henri Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus, 81-82