Stand firm! A reminder for Timothy from the apostle Paul.

"Stand firm! Like a rock in a mountain torrent,"
   John Stott's summary of Paul's charge in 
   2 Timothy 3:14.

Earlier today I spoke with one of my Paul's.  
We exchanged some ideas around different 
ways of blogging.  This is one way.  


What are others?  Do you blog, or read blogs?  
What do you look for while searching or 
browsing online?  I'm interested in hearing 
your ideas!

Living with God in the World

What is Christian spirituality?  How can twenty first century followers of Christ live by faith in the contemporary world?  Is it possible to have a personal relationship with God?  If so, how, and what difference does that make in everyday life?

As James put it: "Dear friends, do you think you'll get anywhere in this if you learn all the right words but never do anything?  Does merely talking about faith indicate that a person really has it?" (James 2:14-15, the Message).

Questions like these challenge contemporary Christians to examine our lives realistically and consider what practices we can actually begin and continue regularly.

"Spirituality has become the contemporary word of choice for expressing how we live with God in    this world," writes Marjorie J. Thompson.  But she prefers to use the phrase, "the spiritual life." This life is "the increasing vitality and sway of God's Spirit in us . . . The spiritual life is thus grounded in relationship.  It has to do with God's way of relating with us and our way of responding to God."

Like James, Paul wrote often about the way God's Spirit can transform any individual (see his explanation in 2 Corinthians 3:17-18, and Colossians 1:15).  The life of a Christ follower becomes an ongoing process of  continual reshaping and becoming "clothed with Christ."

As Thompson writes in Soul Feast: "This reshaping is the basic meaning of spiritual formation in the Christian tradition.  The term formation lies at the heart of words like conformation, reformation, and transformation.  It invites us to consider:

"What or whose form are we seeking?  What in our personal or corporate life, needs to be re-formed?"

Subscribe to read more. A series of brief posts will share more practical insights and motivations from Soul Feast.

Soul Feast: An invitation to the spiritual life, by Marjorie J. Thompson

(Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, Kentucky, © 1995, 2005).

Courageous and Joyful Practices

On a recent Saturday morning, my pastor said he’d like to see more Christians become like marathoners in their spiritual lives. A friend and neighbor began this year by running her first full marathon. 

She prepared well by following a carefully scripted training program.  Her disciplined hours of practice enabled my friend to achieve her goal.  Family, friends, and other runners also encouraged and supported her from start to finish.  If anyone wants to become a spiritual marathoner--a person who faithfully follows Christ for a lifetime—she or he can learn much from the preparations and the disciplines of marathon runners.

As Marjorie J. Thompson writes in her book, Soul Feast:  “There is a childlike simplicity to Christian spirituality.  In a certain sense we never get past practicing the basics.  This makes beginners of us all, a truth that is both humbling and freeing.  My purpose is to help people of faith understand and begin to practice some of the basic disciplines of the Christian spiritual life.  Disciplines are simply practices that train us in faithfulness.” 

Thompson explains her goal for writing Soul Feast:  “I trust that reading and reflecting . . . will draw you into a courageous and joyful exercise of those practices that may yield an experiential knowledge of God.”

How can Christians become more like marathoners in their approach to the spiritual life?  By practicing basic life habits that will sustain a growing personal relationship with God through Christ in dependence on the Holy Spirit.

 

Are you ready for a workout?  Are you a sprinter . . . or are you willing to train to become a marathoner?

Subscribe to learn more. A series of brief posts will share practical insights and motivations from Soul Feast: An invitation to the spiritual life, by Marjorie J. Thompson

(Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, Kentucky, © 1995, 2005).

How to live life . . . an Archbishop's advice

In the Introduction to "Beginning to Pray" by Archbishop Anthony Bloom, the edition I found at a library book sale today, begins with an interview conducted by Timothy Wilson.  He asks Bloom if he has any difficulty communicating since the Christian faith is often not easily understood.  Here is the Archbishop's striking answer:

"What I aim at is to live within a situation and to be totally engrossed in it and yet free from involvement.  The basic thing is that I never ask myself what the result of any action will be--that is God's concern.  the only question I keep asking myself in life is: what should I do at this particular moment?  What should I say?  All you can do is to be at every single moment as true as you can with all the power in your being--and then leave it to God to use you, even despite yourself.

"Whenever I speak I speak with all the conviction and belief which is in me.  I stake my life on what I am saying.  It's not the words themselves that are important but reaching down to the level of people's convictions.  This is the basis of communication, this is where we really meet one another.  If people want to ridicule me, that's fine; but if it produces a spark in them and we can talk, then it means we are really talking about something which concerns us deeply."

This is the kind of communication worth learning and practicing for a lifetime.  Living with conviction, acting with conviction, and connecting deeply with others.

Beginning to Pray by Archbishop Anthony Bloom, Paulist Press, New York/Ramsey, 1970.

"Our Father" A Reading for Christmas Day

“Our  Father” the title is yet all love.  Man whose days

are more brittle than fine-spun glass may pray to Him

whose power moves the stars through ages: “Our Father.”

Man whose deeds are stained with folly may pray to the

Sovereign Will before whom even angels are not blameless:

“Our Father.”   That such a prayer should have been

given by Jesus Christ and understood by blundering men is a

miracle; for it is the assurance that we, despite the devil’s

wiles and our weak acquiescence, are yet in some hidden

center made in the image of God.  God’s authority is stands

eternal, but is yet for our good.  God’s holiness shines

inexorably as light, but is yet intent upon our joy. Nothing

need dismay us, for we have “Our Father.”  His authority

is not broken, His holiness cannot misconceive our well-being;

and authority and holiness are diastole and systole of His

heart of love.

Why are we born?  Because Love must bring forth children—to

live in Love’s devotion.  Why is the earth filled with beauty and

bounty, and with such singular accord as that between eye

and earth and sun?  Because fatherly concern has built the

house and spread the table.  Why is necessity of toil laid upon

us so that we must daily win our livelihood from our friend-enemy,

the cosmos?  Because children grown under responsible endeavor.

Why have the means of travel compressed the world into one

Neighborhood?  Because Hands are round about us constraining

our family nearness.  Why are we stricken by remorse when we

violate our conscience?  Because the holy love of God thus moves

in us, and His grief thus revealed us that we are made, not for

sinning, but for sainthood.

Why pain?  The very question aches and finds no easy answer.

There is enough pain on earth to make any man despair; or,

rather, there would be enough, if man’s awareness of God were

not stronger in all the generations than his awareness of pain.

Pain of itself is the servant of death, as any tortured face or

racked body can show.  But pain made an oblation to God, a

strange and bitter offering, becomes, beyond any easy

moralizing or pious cant, the servant of life  For Beethoven’s

music grew to thunderous praise when it was wrung from his

deafness, and Tennyson’s poetry became apocalypse when he

dipped his pen in tears.  Why must man suffer the inexplicable

yoke of pain?  There is no logical answer.  We should flee the

man who in brash and shallow mind presumes to peddle a

“simple solution” to the “problem of pain.”  Yet earthly

parents thrust their children into cold water to teach them

to swim, and expose them to the politics of grade school to

encourage their growth.  We are but children.  Therefore we

do not know why we should go through this school of life or

ever travel the dark valley; but those who have prayed “our

Father,” and ventured on the prayer, have not lacked secret

tidings that all is well.  They have been persuaded that pain

and death are also his angels.

(So We Believe So We Pray, The essence of our Christian faith,

by George A. Buttrick, Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, New York,

Nashville, 1951, pages 138-141.)

Leading with Outstretched Hands

As he concludes In the Name of Jesus, Henri Nouwen leaves us with a powerful image: the leader with outstretched hands, who chooses a life of downward mobility. This is the image of the praying, vulnerable, trusting leader.

Following his move from Harvard to a communal life among mentally handicapped people and their assistants at L’Arche, Nouwen discovered that every day was full of unplanned events and surprises.  He writes, “The people I came to live with made me aware of the extent to which my leadership was still a desire to control complex situations, confused emotions, and anxious minds.”

Leadership requires a willingness to be led

Nouwen describes his discovery that “leadership, for a large part, means to be led . . . I am learning  . . . not just about the pains and struggles of wounded people, but also about their unique gifts and grace.  They teach me about joy and peace, love and care and prayer—what I could never have learned in any academy.”

After reviewing the abuse of power by Christian leaders in the church over the centuries, he asks:           “What makes the temptation of power so seemingly irresistible? Maybe it is that power offers an easy substitute for the hard task of love.  It seems easier to be God than to love God, easier to control people than to love people, easier to own life than to love life.”

The challenge of Christian leadership in the 21^st century

Jesus’ vision of maturity, Nouwen writes, “is the ability and willingness to be led where you would rather not go . . . 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 . . . but the way of downward mobility ending on the cross . . . 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.”

21^st century Christian leadership “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.”

The call for real theological reflection

Here, Nouwen affirms the discipline of theological reflection as an essential component of such a leader’s life and ministry.  “Just as prayer keeps us connected with the first love and just as confession and forgiveness keep our ministry communal and mutual, so strenuous theological reflection will allow us to discern critically where we are being led.”  He defines real theological thinking as thinking with the mind of Christ.

“To be such a leader, it is essential to be able to discern from moment to moment how God acts in human history and how the personal, communal, national, and international events that occur during our lives can make us more and more sensitive to the ways in which we are led to the cross and through the cross to the resurrection.

“Christian leaders have the arduous task of responding to personal struggles, family conflicts, national calamities, and international tensions with an articulate faith in God’s real presence . . . they have to say no to every form of despair in which human life is seen as a pure matter of good or bad luck. 

“They have to say no to sentimental attempts to make people develop a spirit of resignation or stoic indifference in the face of the unavoidability of pain, suffering, and death.  In short, they have to say no to the secular world and proclaim in unambiguous terms that the incarnation of God’s Word, through whom all things came into being, has made even the smallest event of human history into kairos, that is an opportunity to be led deeper into the heart of Christ.”

Discovering the hidden presence of God

“The Christian leaders of the future have to be theologians, persons who know the heart of God and are trained—through prayer, study, and careful analysis—to manifest the divine event of God’s saving work in the midst of the seemingly random events of their time.

“Theological reflection is reflecting on the painful and joyful realities of every day with the mind of Jesus and thereby raising human consciousness to the knowledge of God’s gentle guidance.  This is a hard discipline, since God’s presence is often a hidden presence, a presence that needs to be discovered.”

Nouwen challenges seminaries to become centers where people are trained to discern the signs of the time.  We would add local churches, home groups, and Bible studies as additional settings where women and men can learn together how to practice spiritual discernment.

“This cannot be just an intellectual training,” Nouwen writes.  “It requires a deep spiritual formation involving the whole person—body, mind, and heart . . . to the degree that such formation is being sought for and realized, there is hope for the church of the twenty-first century.”

By studying the lives and writings of countless women and men through more than two thousand years of history, we can encourage one another in the practices that lead to transformative spiritual formation.

“Jesus sends us out to be shepherds . . . He asks us to move from a concern for relevance to a life of prayer, from worries about popularity to communal and mutual ministry, and from a leadership built on power to a leadership in which we critically discern where God is leading us and our people” (In the Name of Jesus, Reflections on Christian Leadership, Crossroad, 1989, pages 73-93).

Confession and Forgiveness and Loving Support

Christian leaders must be “always willing to confess their own brokenness and ask for forgiveness from from those to whom they minister.” 

In practice, however, the leader may hide his or her vulnerability.  As Henri Nouwen observes: “There is so much fear, so much distance, so much generalization, and so little real listening, speaking, and absolving that not much true sacramentality can be expected.” 

He then asks two questions that every Christian community must consider: First, “How can priests or ministers feel really loved and cared for when they have to hide their own sins and failings from the people to whom they minister . . . ? 

We are called to nurture communities in which all are comfortable practicing both confession and forgiveness.  As Nouwen observes, we must recognize that “ministers and priests are also called to be full members of their communities, are accountable to them and need their affection and support, and are called to minister with their whole being, including their wounded selves.”

Second, “How can people truly care for their shepherds and keep them faithful to their sacred task when they do not know them and so cannot deeply love them?”  In practice, only a few wise and trusted friends can listen attentively and fully to a leader’s personal struggles. But every priest and minister needs a truly safe friend or group of trusted friends.

 

“They need a place where they can share their deep pain and struggles with people who do not need them, but who can guide them ever deeper into the mystery of God’s love.” 

Nouwen found such a place in the community at L’Arche “with a group of friends who pay attention to my often-hidden pains and keep me faithful to my vocation by their gentle criticism and loving support.

“Would that all priests and ministers could have such a safe place for themselves” 

(In the Name of Jesus, Crossroad, 1989, pages 64-70). 

A year is a long time to go without a post . . . for me the past year has been a time of transition . . . the changes go on, and I plan to resume posting . . . and may try some other experiments . . . enjoy.  Read on!