Christian Year

Advent is almost here: Sunday, November 30th.  As this is the start of the Christian year, it is the perfect time for beginning a devotional book, especially if it is one that is helping you live the Christian year.  And I want to recommend one of the best:  Living the Christian Year: Time to Inhabit the Story of God by Bobby Gross.

Not sure how I selected this book, but since I ordered via Amazon, it was an intentional choice. My usual way of turning to new-to-me authors is from quotes or chapter notes or additional resources suggested in a book that is assisting me in this phase of my walk. I have used this book all of this past Christian year and my understanding of the historical and current inhabiting has become more solidified. Pacing my spiritual journey with the rhythms of the Christian year has not been part of my devotional life until the past seven years, but now the rhythms, which include the liturgy, have enveloped me like a cloud. 

Here is a section in the Foreword by Lauren Winner where she is explaining why observing the Christian year is important to her.

One of my goals in life is to inhabit the Christian story so fully that Advent will e the instinctive beginning of my year. Why is this so important to me, this living into the church's calendar?  Well, for many reason. Fist, I want the Christian story to shape everything I do, even how I reckon time. I want the rhythms of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost to be more basic to my life than the days on which my quarterly estimated taxes are due.  Second, I have found that inhabiting the church calendar is powerfully evangelistic ....you will be doing something so counter cultural that it will not escape the notice of your friends and neighbors -- and they will ask you why you are doing the things you are doing -- and you will have a chance to tell them something about Jesus.  And third, most important: almost more than anything else I've done since becoming a Christian, trying to live inside church time has formed me in the Christian story. Which is to say, almost more than anything else, living inside church time has formed me in Jesus' story. Jesus drew my attention to himself, and the church calendar has kept it fixed there -- on him.  Church time has offered me the chance to reprise and reiterate Jesus' life every year.   

The part I'm selecting to share came from the Thanksgiving chapter which was yesterday's reading in Living the Christian Year by Bobby Gross. Each chapter includes topic based prayers and reading from the A, B, or C year of the lectionary.   

Our texts this week call us to thanksgiving. We give thanks for the bounty of the earth: common grace.  We give thanks for the blessings of Christ: spiritual grace.  We give thanks for the promises of God: eschatological grace. We remind ourselves that all we have comes from God, not our own hands (Deut 8:7). We express our gratitude by giving a portion back to God and sharing generously with others.We also celebrate God's generosity by feasting with gratitude in anticipation of the great feast in the age to come.

Study on Prayer

After moving from Weaverville, NC to Erwin, TN in 2007,  I put together a study on prayer for a few of my scattered friends via internet.  You can find this study at   http://selahretreat.blogspot.com  You will need to go back to the first post for the starting point. The format is my usual style of using the books I am or have read along with the Bible (Amplified Version). The blog is still open for comments; you will need  a google account (already existing or set up one).    

Inviting Silence by Gunilla Norris

I stumbled upon Gunilla Norris in a used book store and brought home a copy of Being Home, A Book of Meditations. Then with the help of Amazon.com I obtained other books like Inviting Silence and A Mystic Garden. Finding just one or two passages to share was challenging but I finally settled on these from Inviting Silence.

Here in each day is a wealth of time
we can take advantage of. They are breath breaks.
If we learn to rest and renew in them
our lives will go from disconnection and haste
to breathtaking presence.

To be on time we need to experience ourselves in time.
Our inner lives are timeless,
and yet our days are numbered.
To work with time we need a sense of leisure,
a sense of the natural unfolding of a day,
of a season, a year, a life.
We need also to be present to our experiences,
moment to moment. This makes for timeliness.
Then we can feel the rhythm of our lives.
Our timing becomes finer and finer.
We do not miss a beat. Leisurely and precise,
we can flow with time. 

W. Phillip Keller

W. Phillip Keller is the son of missionary parents and grew up East Africa.  He has written over thirty-five Christian books; one of the most popular of his books is A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23.  Here is an excerpt from Outdoor Moments with God from the chapter entitled, Mountain Vespers.

I had decided to spend the night there, curled up in a couple of old, well-worn blankets. As the sun settled beyond the sawtooth skyline to the west, the high mountain robins began their evening serenade. It blended into the melody of a small stream that murmured softly through the glade. Then, just then, several vesper sparrows added their pure, plaintive vesper calls to the soft evening song. If ever there was in truth a vesper service of primitive purity, this was it, played out in absolute innocence for all eternity.

For a mountain man, well into the late twilight of his own earth sojourn, this interlude stands out with glowing delight and sheer ecstasy which no pen can possibly portray on paper. I had entered a celestial cathedral of divine design.  In truth this had been for me hallowed ground. And in that place of supreme peace, I had again encountered the person of Christ Himself who as He assured us, "Goes ahead to prepare places of supreme serenity for us." Not just in the next world, but in this one as well.

 I have gained so much from many of his books, especially the ones in which he presents spiritual lessons from whatever the environment may be around him: Mountain Splendor, Still Waters, Sea Edge.

Poem of Friendship

I first saw this poem, Friendship by Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, on a card in a gift store on the campus of WNCU (Gypsi was in junior high school and was participating in a school event). I had to buy the card in order to have a copy of the poem and I am so glad I did. I have passed it onto many friends and it still speaks to me today. Years ago, I was delighted to find that Greg Ogden, author of Discipleship Essentials, used this same poem in the chapter on Prayer. I'm including the before and after paragraphs so you can see how he tied the poem into prayer.

Prayer is transparent dialog.  It is the way we have an intimate conversation with the Creator of the universe and the Redeemer of our lives, who is wild about spending time with us.  Prayer represents the place of greatest safety where we can pour out our hearts in an unedited fashion, much like we would to a dear friend who accepts us as we are, warts and all.  Though the following poem is about friendship, it expresses our experience of prayer as well.

Oh the comfort--the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person,
Having neither to weigh thoughts,
Nor measure words--but pouring them
All right out--just as they are--
Chaff and grain together--
Certain that a faithful hand will
Take and sift them--
Keep what is worth keeping--
And with the breath of kindness
Blow the rest away.

Prayer is a come-as-you-are affair. It is God's welcome into his heart.     

Hesychia, The Practice of Stillness

Weavings,  A Journal of the Christian Spiritual Life,  weavings.org is a wonderful bimonthly publication by Upper Room Ministries.  The January/February 2007 issue was entitled "Be Still."  I want to share some excerpts from the contribution of Douglas Burton-Christie entitled Hesychia, The Practice of Stillness.

The ancient monks of the Egyptian desert had a name for this elusive but crucial aspect of the spirtual life: hesychia. The Greek word can be translated in different ways, depending on the context: stillness, quiet, tranquility, deep peace. In the monastic literature, hesychia is often synonymous with a certain quality of depth of prayer, or awareness of "God's presence.  John Climacus described hesychia as "worshiping God unceasingly...an inviolable activity of the heart." The simplicity of hesychia was, for the early Christian monks, part of its power, its meaning. In this place of stillness, everything other than God faded from consciousness.  God's touch, God's presence became palpable. One became conscious of living in God.

Late in his life, Thomas Merton traveled to California to spend time at Redwoods Monastery and to explore the Lost Coast in the hopes of finding a place where he could descend into greater stillness and authentic prayer.  He had arrived at a moment in his own life in which he felt the need to go deeper, to find a more honest way of living out his monastic vocation.  From his perch along the wild, craggy Northern California, he wrote:

    In our monasticism, we have been content to find our way to a kind of peace, a simple, undisturbed thoughtful life. And this is certainly good.  But is it good enough?

   I, for one realize that now I need more.Not simply to be quiet, somewhat productive, to pray, to read, to cultivate leisure...There is a need of effort, deepening, change and transformation. Not that I must undertake a special project of self-transformation or that I must "work on myself." In that regard, it would be better to forget it. Just go for walks, live in peace, let change come quietly and invisibly on the inside.

   But I have a past to break with, an accumulation of inertia, waste, wrong, foolishness, rot, junk, a great need of clarification of mindfulness, or rather of no min ---a return to genuine peace, right effort, need to push on to the great doubt. Need for the Spirit.

 This is an utterly personal statement, articulated by a man standing at a crossroads in his life, looking for a more authentic way of living. Yet it also speaks, I think, to a larger and more widely shared hunger - for honesty, open-heartedness, integrity, peace. Not any peace - certainly not a peace born of easy acceptance of conventions or evasion of the hard questions. Rather it is something closer to what the early Christian monks meant by hesychia ---a deep, abiding peace, born of struggle and relinquishment, issuing from the costly work of facing up to the truth of one's life. Few of us can deny the need for this kind of clarification and purification in our life, or the sense of relief that comes from finally giving ourselves to this work.Yet arriving at a place where this deep, cleansing work can begin to happen is itself a mysterious thing.  Something in us has to shift. We must become vulnerable. A space needs to open up within us, even a small space. It was here in this space of hesychia, the monks believed, that the need for "deepening, change and transformation" could take root within and begin to blossom.  Here in this stillness, one could begin to dream of entering into "the very center of the mysteries," into a simple awareness of God at the heart of one's life.  One could be reborn.    

Made for Goodness by Desmond Tutu & Mpho Tutu

As mentioned in an earlier post, we are reading and discussing this book in our Contemplative Prayer Group.  It is a book in which every chapter gives the reader a gift and reveals the heart of this exceptional spiritual leader.  When I read in the acknowledgements of the book, that Mpho had spent time in Hot Springs, NC while preparing this book, I felt an invisible connection and was so pleased that my area had provided rest for her as she was writing. I'm going to share two selections of the many gifts this book gave to me.

 At the end of each chapter there is a poem in which the reader is directed to "turn into the stillness and listen to God speak with the voice of the heart" .....

Failure and shame shut your eyes
So you can't see me.
Anguish and pain shriek with your voice
And you can't hear me.
Guilt makes you turn aside
And you think I have walked away.
But through it all I am right here,
Right here where you weep lonely tears for me,
Right here where you thought you didn't want me to be.
I AM.

"Why have you forsaken me?"
I hear the cry through all eternity.
Child, I am here.
I know what you are doing.
I weep for you when you slide away from all that is right,
When you turn your back on all that is good.
I weep for you.
I see the harm that you do.
In my hand I hold your hand.
In my hand I hold the hurting hand of the one you are harming.
Right now,
In this moment,
I stand between the two of you and neither of you see me.
In one hand I hold the hand of my beloved child
My dear one who is blinded by suffering.
In my other hand I hold the hand of my beloved child
My dear one whose savagery and shame hide me from sight.
But I am here
Beside you both,
Between, within, and all around you both.
I AM.  

Here is a section from the chapter of Hearing God's Voice and I have already found it to be very helpful in quieting myself for prayer.

There are many ways to still oneself.  Mpho teaches the use of breath and of the line of the Psalter "Be still and know" as a path into stillness.  "Be still and know" is mouthed on a slow inhalation; "that I am God" is mouthed on the exhalation. The words are not spoken aloud. But mouthing the words helps to hold the attention.  Although the words fall away, the inhalation and exhalation do not become shorter.  Rather, breath fills the wordless space.

Be still and know that I am God
Be still and know that I am
Be still and know that I
Be still and know that
Be still and know
Be still and
Be still
Be

When Mpho uses this form of prayer, she will reconstruct the line word by word and then allow each word to fall away again in turn.  Sometimes that construction and deconstruction will fill the whole period she has set aside for meditation.  Sometimes the words fall away as she sinks into silence.  On occasion the words fall away and then return as some distraction threatens to intrude on the stillness. The words and breath are like a banister in an uneven stairwell: sometimes one must lean on the banister heavily; other times a light touch is all that is necessary to steady one's step; still other times the railing is not needed at all.  It is so with the words of the psalm and the attention to the breath: sometimes they are needed to push the chatter aside; sometimes they are a barely perceptible presence; sometimes they fall away completely. This kind of rhythmic repetition of a words, verse, or mantra is a prayer practice that anyone can use. When the repetition is paired with attention to the breath, it offers a path into deep silence. As we find and inhabit that silence, we will become more attuned to the voice of God.