email: whitpresby@charterinternet.com
Spiritual readings "Greetings from Whittier Presbyterian Church"
June 2007
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Gun control comment |
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Spiritual life comment by Daniel Wolpert |
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Lord’s Prayer commentary |
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Belden Lane’s sacred geography |
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e e cummings poem on gratitude |
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Praying with the Bible, by Duane Bidwell |
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Learning from distress, by John Pierce |
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Human yearning for God, by Roberta Bondi |
The Shootings at Virginia Tech have moved into the back pages of most news media. Here is a reflection on it that speaks for itself. It is an editorial piece from the Christian Century magazine of May 29, 2007. This is the opening paragraph.
“In 1996, after an assailant massacred 35 people at a resort area in Port Arthur, Tasmania, Australians responded to the horror by banning the possession of automatic rifles and shotguns. Gunowners proceeded to turn in 650,000 guns to the government (which reimbursed them for the cost). Since that year, gun deaths in Australia have been cut in half. The country’s per capita gun crime rate is a tenth that of the United States.”
That hardly needs comment by me. May you grow in wisdom and strength in Christ.
Grace & peace
Geoff
The Christian Century now has a blog of their own, which can be found at this address, http://www.theolog.org/blog/
Here is a brief meditation on the spiritual life from “Creating a Life with God; The Call of Ancient Prayer Practices,” by Daniel Wolpert, Upper Room Books, 2003. I’ve edited it some for the purpose of this email.
“Communicating with God…leads to…deeper intimacy with Jesus. Much of our material striving is not only about meeting our basic creaturely needs but also about filling the void in our soul that is our separation from God. Advertisers know about this sense of emptiness, and they seek to fill it with their products. Even my ten-year-old son was able to say to me once, “This commercial is stupid, Dad. They say that if you buy this car, your life will be perfect.” As we turn our time, resources, and concerns over to God, we find that God begins to fill this void. We slowly come to know that the Holy One is with us in all that we do, all the time. The more we pray with our material lives, the more out thirst for living water is quenched, and we find that we no longer need or want so many material things.”
Prayer changes our relation with all of creation and helps us to clear away the kind of clutter Wolpert refers to here. May your prayer life deepen for you in such a way that you increasingly can tell the difference between the clutter in your life and the things that matter.
Grace & peace
Geoff
I received my Doctor of Ministry degree from the Graduate Theological Foundation, in South Bend, Indiana. Every year they publish a volume of essays by either faculty or students. In the 2006 book of faculty essays, I found this reflection upon the Lord’s Prayer. It comes from an essay by The Rev. Peter E. Roussakis, the Charles Wesley Professor of Sacred Music and Director of the Sacred Music Program (The GTF loves titles!).
“…when we pray the Lords’ Prayer, we do not necessarily think of all the beliefs which are covered; nor do we have time to meditate upon any other values of the prayer, such as the devotional or the ethical. We just do it! We pray it together, and it is a meaningful experience. And yet, there is a value to praying it which may become a part of our conscious appreciation. If the Lord’s Prayer is a digest of the gospel, then reciting it in worship may be viewed as an act of confessing the faith contained within the prayer. The txt of the prayer is a container of the truths of the faith. Praying it is an act of communicating, of proclaiming those truths.”
Many of us prayer this prayer at least once per day. It plays such a large role in my daily faith practices that I rarely even think about it. Roussakis speaks of the use of the Lord’s Prayer in public or corporate worship, but the same thing can be said about our private, personal use of this most famous and powerful Christian prayer.
May your prayer today remind you of the core values that are part of what you believe.
Grace & peace
Geoff
I was listening to an old Mars Hill Audio Journal tape recently and came across this material from Belden Lane. He speaks of the importance of ‘place.’ Lane’s most recent book at the time (2002) was “Landscapes of the Sacred: Geography and Narrative in American Spirituality,” Johns Hopkins University Press. In this taped discussion Lane makes the distinction between the word for place that Aristotle used, “topos” and that used by Plato “chora.” “Topos” is inert, with no significance to the people there. “Chora is a rich sense of place that carries its own energy and power for the people within it. It is the word from which we get our English word "choreography." Here is the quote that struck me.
Dancing in a place is the deepest way of experiencing its powerful connectedness for us.
I was struck because it reminded me so much of a little ditty I came across a few years ago, in relation to prayer. “If singing is praying twice (as St. Augustine said), is dancing praying thrice?” However you do it, using your body in prayer will sink the prayer more deeply into your soul.
Go here for more on Lane. This site includes links to some of his essays, in pdf format.
http://www.beldenlane.com/index.php
Or, do your own search and see what you find.
May your prayer this day, sink more deeply into your soul.
Grace & peace
Geoff
I stumbled upon this poem the other day and thought I would share it with you all. It is called “i thank you God for most this amazing day” by e. e. cummings.
i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
I found this poem at this web site: http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/eecummings/
You can find more of Cumming’s poems there. Art is often a more direct route to the Spirit than we expect. Here is a good way to begin a morning prayer.
May you find God speaking to you through art or whichever means God chooses.
Grace & peace
Geoff
As I snooped around, I stumbled upon this. Check it out for a few minutes of fun.
http://www.impactlab.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=7567
Many of us use the Bible in one form or another in our daily devotional practices. Here is a reference to a different way the Bible can be used devotionally. It comes from Duane Bidwell’s book “Short-Term Spiritual Guidance, ” Fortress Press, 2004.
Attending to God’s Word through the reading and study of Scripture is a mainstay of Christian spirituality. Sometimes, however, people become so mesmerized by the historical and socio-cultural contexts of Scripture, or by efforts to identify the “meaning” of a particular passage, that they forget to read Scripture prayerfully and imaginatively. When this happens, people may experience Scripture as dry and static; the Bible ceases to be God’s living word to them and to their communities.
The prayer practice of “divine reading,” or LECTIO DIVINA, can be one way of offsetting this tendency. Divine reading helps people approach Scripture from a more contemplative stance and, once they have actively reflected on the Word, to enter into dialogue with God about what they have encountered in their reading.”
How many of you “carry on a conversation with God” either in your prayers, your daydreams or in some kind of interior dialogue? Either the practice or the attitude of Lectio Divina can be a helpful way to shape that dialogue. May your life with God be rich, no matter the method or practice you use.
Grace & peace
Geoff
No emails June 29 and July 3. I’ll be at the IASD annual conference.
http://www.asdreams.org/2007/index.htm
Meditation
I just finished a book by one of the regular participants of Companions on the Inner Way, listed below. The book is “Giving Jonah a Sign” by John B. Pierce, Trafford Publishing, 2006. In talking about his own struggles, Pierce says
“Yet I learned something of great value in the darkness. To many outside it, depression seems a weakness, a lapse, a lack of courage, a slump in resolve, a spiritual fall. “Get over it,” I heard a preacher say once. But if you have never had “it” to get over, then that sounds reasonable, even easy. Fighting depression was truly an arduous task set before me. Yet, ironically, depression came as a gift, frightening, but gift none-the-less. Once again, by God’s mysterious alchemy, often one’s wounds find their healing in the very thing that caused them. Depression opened a door in the darkness that I would have never known was there.”
How often do we seek only to get out of depression, instead of perhaps looking around in the middle of it to see what of value might be there? I cannot speak of clinical depression from experience and do not intend to speak glibly of depression of any sort. But sometimes in life we find great gifts of healing from being wounded, gifts that we might not otherwise have developed. May you lift your own darkness to God, to see what God might do with it.
Grace & peace
Geoff
No emails June 29 and July 3. I’ll be at the IASD annual conference.
http://www.asdreams.org/2007/index.htm
Also, I forgot to mention that The Rev. John Pierce, the author quoted last Friday is pastor of Westminster Presbyterian Church, In Eugene, Oregon.
Meditation
Here’s a selection I found inspiring from “In Ordinary Time” by Roberta Bondi, Abingdon Press, 1996. She refers to St. Augustine, the bishop of Hippo in North Africa who has been a strong voice in understanding the Christian outlook on the world.
“…Augustine was convinced that all things that exist are related to God in such a way that they only are able to become what they actually are meant to be by a primeval, mindless yearning toward God, who draws them to God’s self to become what they are meant to be by God’s own yearning toward them. It is this that makes lions able to act like lions, not earthworms, and acorns grow into oak trees, not rhubarb. An odd idea, isn’t it? In a special way, human beings, too, being made in the image of God, only become real human beings, are only able to grow and thrive as human beings as they also yearn for God.”
I found in this reading yet another affirmation of the value of a life with God, in prayer, thought and intention. May you find your yearning for God come into sharper focus through your life.
Grace & peace
Geoff
