Not a bad approach to life; not bad at all:

Artist: Peter Severin Krøyer

Image from Wikimedia Commons

"Praise the God of all, drink the wine, and let the world be the world."

— French Proverb

Jacob wrestling with the angel

Artist: Maurice Denis

Image from Wikimedia Commons

This morning's reading from the Hebrew Scriptures was the story of Jabob wrestling with the angel.

The painting above is rather odd, isn't it? It looks more as if they are dancing.

Isn't it like that? Sometimes we strive with God; sometimes we dance.

To be whole, to be complete, we need to do both - God invites us to both.

Something about religious ideas

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Here's something I just came across:

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some of them woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

-- George Eliot

Perhaps one way of thinking about spirituality is that it can be the approach by which we learn to hear the true melody rather than the out of tune version. That way we learn that it is not detestable at all but ineffably lovely.

Connectedness and prayer

Artist: Arseny Nikoforovich Semionov

Image from Wikimedia Commons

I get a lot of questions about how prayer "works" or whether prayer "works". I think prayer can only not work if we are completely separate. And I believe with Lewis here that our separateness is the real illusion:

Human beings look separate because you see them walking about separately. But then we are so made that we can see only the present moment. If we could see the past, then of course it would look different. For there was a time when every man was part of his mother, and (earlier still) part of his father as well, and when they were part of his grandparents. If you could see humanity spread out in time, as God sees it, it would look like one single growing thing--rather like a very complicated tree. Every individual would appear connected with every other.

-- C.S. Lewis

How we learn

Artist: Nikolay Dubovskoy
Image from Wikimedia Common

The Waking

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close behind me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lonely worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air;
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

--Theodore Roethke

An interior conversation

Artist: Domenico Ghirlandaio

Image from Wikimedia Commons

As for meditation, I would like you to be a disciple of prayer, because without prayer there is no habitual union with God. You need a type of prayer which is suited to your temperament, your situation, your inner inclination, consequently, your heart. Speak simply and candidly to our Lord as with another self, as with your sister. Be a child who is full of love and surrendered to her good maker. Let it be an interior conversation with God more than a work of the mind. Then, a scattered, distracted meditation will come together, because it will express all the thoughts and needs of your heart.

-- Peter Julian Eymard

Life together

Artist: Anatoli Nenartovich

Image from Wikimedia Commons

The political climate of late makes this a particularly important question, I think:

When the Stranger says: "What is the meaning of this city?
Do you huddle close together because you love each other?"
What will you answer? "We all dwell together
To make money from each other"? or "This is a community"?

-- T.S Eliot

The domestication of Jesus?

Image from Wikimedia Commons

The question at the end of this passage is a good question. Truly a question worth pondering:

"At the tattoo parlor, my friend worked with needle and ink applying a design to the skin on his client's back, as the three of us sat discussing our spiritual desires and ambivalence about religion. In the midst of our conversation, the man under the needle turned and said, 'Jesus is cool, it's just that they have f***ed with Jesus. I mean, Christianity was at its best when it was secret and hidden and you could die for it.' This profound, if crass, statement recognizes that the power of the gospel lay in its ability to be a counter-cultural and revolutionary force - not only a story to believe, but a distinctive way of life. The man's comment prompted me to consider the question: Am I in some measure complicit in the domestication of Jesus?"

-- Mark Scandrette

Making peace with silence

Artist: Viktor Vasnetsov

Image from Wikimedia Commons

I'm very interested in the aversion many people have to silence. Last week in one of my Foundations in Mediative Practice classes, a woman complained when we all kept silence for five minutes. "That felt like forever," she insisted. "I thought the bell would never end."

Five minutes.

And so, it will not surprise you that I agree with the following:

Make peace with silence, and remind yourself that it is in this space that you'll come to remember your spirit. When you're able to transcend an aversion to silence, you'll also transcend many other miseries. And it is in this silence that the remembrance of God will be activated.

— Wayne W. Dyer

Help us to see

Artist: Archip Iwanowitsch Kuindshi

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Oh, God of Dust and Rainbows,
Help us to see
That without the dust the rainbow
Would not be.

-- Langston Hughes

Unfathomable love

Artist: Veniamin Ivanovich Borisov

Image from Wikimedia Commons

We all know this, don't we? And yet, we forget it. Or perhaps we can't quite see our way clear to believe it:

God loves human beings. God loves the world. Not an ideal human, but human beings as they are; not an ideal world, but the real world. What we find repulsive in their opposition to God, what we shrink back from with pain and hostility, namely, real human beings, the real world, this is for God the ground of unfathomable love.

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I wonder how our lives might be different if all of us who claim to follow Christ managed to remember what Bonhoeffer said here more consistently.
~~~

Reverence as awe

Artist: Nicholas Roerich

Image from Wikimedia Commons

If we cultivated this kind of awe, I really think we would easily alleviate a lot of the suffering we carry around in our experience:

"Let’s think of reverence as awe, as presence in and openness to the world…Try walking around with a child who’s going, ‘Wow, wow! Look at that dirty dog! Look at that burned-down house! Look at that red sky!’ And the child points, and you look, and you see, and you start going, ‘Wow! Look at that huge crazy hedge! Look at that teeny little baby! Look at the scary dark cloud!’ I think this is how we are supposed to be in the world – present and in awe."

-- Anne Lamott

Faith in adversity

Artist: Thomas Eakins

Image from Wikimedia Commons

For a long time I've been troubled by the sort of Christian formation that essentially tells people to live right and have faith so nothing bad will ever happen. Then, of course, when something bad does happen, people who have been formed in this way lose their faith. I count myself very fortunate that my early formation emphasized faith not as an insurance against difficulty but as a way of being strengthened to withstand difficulty when it happens. Here's a good way of expressing what I mean by that:

The purpose of Christianity is not to avoid difficulty, but to produce a character adequate to meet it when it comes. It does not make life easy; rather it tries to make us great enough for life.

-- James L. Christensen

Prayer as relationship

Artist: Wilhelm Maria Hubertus Leibl

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Yes to this:

Like all good things, prayer requires some discipline. Yet I believe that life with God should seem more like friendship than duty. Prayer includes moments of ecstasy and also dullness, mindless distraction and acute concentration, flashes of joy and bouts of irritation. In other words, prayer has features in common with all relationships that matter.

--Philip Yancey

Lazarus and the Rich Man

Artist: Eduard von Gebhardt

Image from Wikimedia Commons

This morning's gospel was, of course, the parable of Lazarus and the rich man. I heard it at Fellowship Lutheran Church here in Tulsa where I'm teaching a series of classes on prayer for the next six weeks. I think I'll probably worship with them for the duration so I can make an effort to tie in what I say during the prayer classes with what they hear in the sermon. What interested me the most this morning was the dimissal. The assistant minister said, "Go in peace and remember the poor." I experienced that as very powerful. Very powerful, indeed.

Suppose we all trained ourselves to do that after each Sunday celebration of the Eucharist? Suppose we trained ourselves to make remembering the poor a true priority?

It's just something I'm thinking about today.
~~~

The grace of boundaries

Artist: Vincent Van Gogh

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Each morning is a new beginning of our life. Each day is a finished whole. The present day marks the boundary of our cares and concerns. It is long enough to find God or lose Him, to keep faith or fall into disgrace.

God created day and night for us so we need not wander without boundaries, but may be able to see in every morning the goal of the evening ahead.

--Dietrich Bonhoeffer

How hatred affects the soul

Image from Wikimedia Commons

I well remember the event referenced here:

"Hate is a very big and very hungry thing with lots of sharp teeth, and it will eat up your whole heart and leave no room for love."

These words [were] spoken by a grieving father to his young daughter in the movie Amish Grace... This movie, based on the bestselling book, dramatizes the response of an Amish community in Pennsylvania when a local man killed five school girls and wounded five others. Shocked and grieving, their first act was to practice forgiveness.

I found the above on the front page of the website Spirituality and Practice which is, to my mind, one of the best spiritually focused sites going.
~~~

Just listening

Artist: Il Sodoma

Image from Wikimedia Commons

This may well be the best thing Mother Teresa ever said on the subject of prayer:

Reporter: When you pray, what do you say to God?
Mother Teresa: Nothing. I just listen.
Reporter: What does God say to you?
Mother Teresa: Nothing. God just listens, too. And if you don't understand that, I can't explain it to you.

A salutary and consoling discipline

Artist: Vittore Carpaccio (1455-1526)

Image from Wikimedia Commons

If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice, as it were, the remembrance of death. No other practice so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death, life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.

-- Muriel Spark

Praying through overwhelm

Artist: Ivan Semenovich Kulikov

Image from Wikimedia Commons

This is a prayer that I found on the Explorefaith.org website:

Gracious God, when I look at the mound of papers on my desk, see the length of my to-do list, think about the state of the economy, I feel a deep malaise washing over my soul. It is as if I am being tossed about by waves of anxiety, and I can no longer find firm ground on which to stand. Come with your mighty wind and blow the wave back to sea that I may be still in the wake you leave behind. I ask this for the sake of your love. Amen.

I know that quite a number of people who come to talk to me are going through that feeling of being overwhelmed. Cultivating tools for handling this feeling skillfully and learning to trust God for our sense of well being will help. Truly.
~~~