John Mawurndjul, “Mardayin Ceremony 2000,” Gallery New South Wales. I love Australian Aboriginal art, and I’m sure it’s because I love the patterns.
The human brain loves to find patterns, even when none exist. This explains the popularity of conspiracy theories, some of which must be false. (Only some of them? See, I can’t say, “all of which are false”! I love patterns and categories as much as the next person!)
We can use the human love of patterns to nurture our prayer life and to help us observe the pattern of our spiritual growth. Here are three ideas:
- “Word for the year.” Lots of people advocate picking a word in January that you want to have as the theme for your year. My experience is that words pick me, not the other way around. In 2012 and 2013, the word I kept coming back to was “receptivity.” It was so helpful in understanding that God was calling me to pay attention to where the Holy Spirit was guiding me and to where God was already working in my life, rather than always trying to direct things myself or to see what’s missing in my life. I wrote sections in two of my books, Joy Together and The Power of Listening, about receptivity.
In 2014, the word “joy” was forced on me by the Caring Bridge posts of a wonderful (and joyous) man, Steve Hayner. His posts while he was dealing with terminal cancer were the single biggest source of spiritual growth for me in 2014. Those posts have been turned into a book, Joy in the Journey, which I highly recommend.
Suggestion: Look back at last year, or an earlier year, and ponder whether there’s a word that captures what God was doing in your life. Take that word and pray about it, sing about it, journal about it, draw it and talk about it with friends.
- Daily, weekly, monthly or yearly highlights. What was the best thing that happened yesterday? Last week? Last month? Last year? “Every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights” (James 1:17). We miss so much because we don’t take the time to look and remember. My favorite Jewish Sabbath prayer goes like this: “Days pass, years vanish, and we walk sightless among miracles.”
Suggestion: Use the human propensity to find patterns to help you see the pattern of God’s blessing in your life. Then turn those highlights into prayers of thanks.
- Theme for the decade. I can see very clearly the major life lesson God was teaching me in my 50s: you cannot change another person. You can speak your own truth, you can say how another person’s behavior affects you, and you can encourage others to change. But you cannot change them. I can’t believe I was in my 50s before I learned this. I would have been a much better mother if I had learned it earlier. This big life lesson has helped me pray and speak differently in so many relationships, and I am a happier (more joyous!) person because of it.
Because I can see so clearly my biggest life lesson from my 50s, I’ve been thinking perhaps I can identify a major life lesson from each decade of life.
Suggestion: look at your life in decades or in five-year blocks and see if you can identify a major life lesson in some of them. Take that life lesson and pray about it, sing about it, journal about it, draw it and talk about it with friends.
The human propensity to see patterns can help us see the patterns of gifts and growth in our lives, which can help us pray and act in new ways. Let your brain’s love of patterns serve your growth in faith. “For you, Lord, have made me glad by your work; at the works of your hands I sing for joy” (Psalm 92:4).
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Today’s post is contributed by Lynne Baab the author of numerous books and Bible study guides on prayer and other Christian spiritual practices, including The Power of Listening, Sabbath Keeping, Fasting, and Joy Together: Spiritual Practices for Your Congregation. She teaches pastoral theology at the University of Otago in New Zealand. She has also recently published a new novel, Death in Dunedin, a mystery set in her beautiful adopted home town, Dunedin New Zealand.
Visit her website, www.lynnebaab.com, to read her blog, access numerous articles she has written about spiritual practices, and find information about her books.
Check out Lynne’s other Godspace posts here
A couple of years ago I was given a copy of Ancient Christian Devotional: A Year of Weekly Readings. I picked up the book again this last weekand read through a reflection on Exodus 17: 1-7 by Caesarius of Arles (470 – 543) It profoundly impacted me as I thought about what stirs my heart today. Do I really thirst for justice or am I satisfied with water? and if I do really thirst after justice how is that lived out in my life?
For what did the people Thirst? What then does the scripture mention in what follows? “In their thirst for water the people grumbled against Moses.” Perhaps this word that he said may seem superfluous, that the people thirsted for water. For since he said “In their thirst” what need was there to add “for water”? Thus indeed the ancient translation has it. Why did he add this, except because they thirsted for water when they should have thirsted for justice? “Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for justice.” and again “thirsty is my soul for the living God.” Many people are thirsty, both the just and sinners, the former thirst after justice, the latter after dissipation. The just are thirsty for God; sinners for gold. For this reason the people thirsted after water when they should have thirsted after justice.
What Is Your Response?
What does your heart hunger and thirst for? Is it for God or for gold? Sit quietly for a few minutes and think about how you prioritize your use of time, talent and treasure. Allow the holy spirit of God to speak to you about your priorities. Are there changes God is prompting you to make in your life?
In Micah 6:8 we read
He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.
And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God. Micah 6:8 NIV
It is one thing to talk about justice it is another to live it out in the everyday decisions of our lives. Acting justly means being concerned about the people who make our clothes, grow our food, build our houses. Making decisions about what and where we eat based on how people are treated is not always easy. Ethically produced, fair traded clothes and food are more expensive, and often more difficult to come by. Investing in unethical companies often brings bigger financial returns.
To live justly we must be willing to ask some hard questions about our daily decisions and commitments and it often means going against the values of our culture. Cheap is good could be the motto of our age.
What is your response?
Sit and think about the food and clothing you have bought over the last few months. . How did you make decisions about which products to purchase? How informed are you about the conditions under which these products are produced?Now prayerfully watch the video below. What changes might God be asking of you?
I love to end the week with a recapping of what has happened and expressions of gratitude for all that I have experienced. Looking back over the last couple of weeks, the delight of rain after a very dry summer, the enjoyment of friends, the making of new ones and the richness of ministry, the prayer above bubbled up from my heart.
What are you giving thanks for this week?
A couple of days ago one of my twitter followers tweeted:
The so-called “Refugee crisis’ has been skillfully engineered and manipulated by the Left to open up Europe’s borders to a savage enemy.
It made me see red not just because I did not agree with the sentiments but because it was said by a well known Christian leader. As I sat quietly and contemplated this message the prayer above bubble up from my heart. It also seemed appropriate as we remember the terrorism of 9/11 again today.
Jesus taught us:
You have been taught to love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I tell you this: love your enemies. Pray for those who torment you and persecute you— in so doing, you become children of your Father in heaven. He, after all, loves each of us—good and evil, kind and cruel. He causes the sun to rise and shine on evil and good alike. He causes the rain to water the fields of the righteous and the fields of the sinner. It is easy to love those who love you—even a tax collector can love those who love him. And it is easy to greet your friends—even outsiders do that! But you are called to something higher: “Be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect.” Matthew 5:43-48 The Voice
It is so easy for us to demonize people who are different from us, – to hate homosexuals, African Americans, refugees, Muslims, the list goes on. All of us are prone to hate and love to rationalize our hatred with stories of the bad things these people have done.
Often our hatred is focused on those who are hurting and in pain. It is so easy for us to turn away from the overwhelming needs of refugees, poor African Americans, people of other gender orientations, because they behave badly in front of us or because we do not understand them or their suffering. We rationalize our bad treatment of them because they don’t act as we want them to. But that is not the Jesus way.
Jesus tells us very clearly – love your enemies. That is the story of the Good Samaritan, his inclusion of tax collectors, his reaching out to Gentiles. All of these were seen as Jewish enemies. Even on the cross Jesus looks with compassion on his persecutors and says “Father forgive them, they know not what they do.”
What do you think? Who do you love to hate and how do you rationalize your behaviour?
In response to this summer’s series ‘let’s get creative with our prayers’ I have been wanting to share one simple contemplative tool:
get your photos off your hard drive.
We are told that we are becoming a society inundated by and obsessed with ‘the image’. Apparently we upload onto Facebook over three million of these images a day (one of them will be mine). We have developed technologies that enable us to blur, merge, refine, combine – so much so that we’re no longer sure whether what we are looking at is ‘real’. The availability and spread of mobile phone cameras has brought huge benefits in terms of citizen journalism from places far from our own geography and time. We are banking huge archives and collections of digital media for future generations of historians and archaeologists.
Yet are we in grave danger of our very looking and seeing becoming stale, mundane and disposable?
Earlier in the year Christine wrote about using a camera to heighten her noticing of her surroundings and to channel her attention of these details into her prayers, and whether we use our cameras in this intentionally contemplative way or not, we all have images that catch at us and that we return to. It might be of a person, a place, a colour. It might be a photograph taken a hundred years ago. It might be a photograph taken yesterday. It may not have been taken by you, or have anything to do with you personally. But whatever the image, it bears looking at time and again.
Print it out.
Big or small. It doesn’t matter. Frame it on a wall somewhere you will have to keep going past it. (If you can’t afford a frame or spare the wall space, stick in on the front of the fridge!) Or go small and make it a bookmark for whatever you are currently reading.
In the past year I have done both of these. The above image has been printed onto a large canvas on my living room wall. I face it as I come in my front door and see that it changes with the light of the day. Where my eye is drawn to each day changes too, and it is this that I am beginning to learn to heed. Intellectually I know that I respond to abstract art, the movement of shape, line and colour, and the freedom it brings to create my own associations. I know exactly the time and place that I received this image, but now that it is on the wall both the recollection of time and place and the intellectual analytical fascination recedes. If I am open, prayerful and intentional in my seeing it is what I find in this image today that can lead me to know something of myself, something of my relationship to God, and something of the character of God.
The image below has found its home in my bible, marking each morning’s verse for my Lectio Divina time with the Psalms. On the back of it I have written one of Christine’s prayers for preparation, but before praying that prayer I spend a short – or long – moment with the image on the other side.
In the changing light of each morning, in the shifting pains around my body, in the turmoil of the mind I am attempting to quiet, the image unveils a different gift to me each day. A corner, a colour, a particular line, or the direction of the movement; whatever it might be, it pulls at my attention. And if I still myself, I glimpse that what I am drawn to sets up an echo within me. It might be a joyful rush of gratitude; in which case I am naturally led on to a time of praise. It might be an overcoming upwelling of deep sorrow; in which case I try to allow my tears to be my prayers. It might be that a colour brings a particular person to mind; in which case my intercessions surround them.
Whatever my reaction, I am learning there is a twinned turning of it to God, a gesture of handing over.
And, by Grace, in this handing over I meet God on holy ground.
In this image I see God revealed.
This is a gift of Visio Divina – Holy Seeing – for this day alone.
Thanks be to God.
Kate Kennington Steer is a writer and photographer with a deep abiding passion for contemplative photography and spirituality. She writes about these things on her shot at ten paces blog. Currently she is also posting a daily iphone image on her Facebook page. Join in with gentle ambling conversations about contemplative photography by becoming a friend (https://www.facebook.com/kate.kenningtonsteer).
It’s September and, for North Americans, routines are returning to “normal” as summer ends and kids return to school. In the Southern hemisphere spring has sprung and everyone is looking forward to summer. Now’s a great time to dig in, reconnect, and renew. MSA is here to help with our new line-up of online classes, retreats, workshops, and a new set of prayer cards!
Upcoming Retreats and Workshops
If you’re unable to attend the Rest in the Moment retreat, you may want to look at Reimagining How We Pray in our online school. Many of the same practices are outlined there, with guided video to help you incorporate various spiritual practices.
Our Online School is Growing!
MSA’s online school now has 13 classes to choose from. But why choose when you can take as many classes as you want for just $25/month? For more details on each class please check out our school page. Some of these classes have free introductory videos!
Here’s a quick line-up of what we’re offering:
- Reimagining How We Pray, with Christine Sine
- The Spirituality of Gardening, with Christine Sine
- Animate Practices 1: Eating and Praying, with Brian McLaren and Sara Miles
- Animate Practices 2: Worship, with Mike Slaughter and Phyllis Tickle
- Animate Practices 3: Community, with Shane Claiborne, Enuma Okoro, & Doug Pagit
- Creating the Common Good 1: Economic Inequality, with Bishop Julio Murray
- Creating the Common Good 2: Christian Responsibility, with Rachel Held Evans
- Creating the Common Good 3: Educational Inequality, with Nicole Bake Fulgham
- Creating the Common Good 4: A Christian Response, with Justin Welby
- How to Simplify Your Life, with Mark Scandrette
- Animate Faith 1, with Brian McLaren, Mark Scandrette, and Lillian Daniel
- Animate Faith 2, with Nadia Bolz-Webber and Shane Hipps
- Animate Faith 3, with Lauren Winner and Bruce Reyes-Chow
Coming Soon!
Rhythms for the Day, a new set of prayer cards which will include morning and evening prayers and questions for reflection.
Also coming soon — Brigid and the Hospitality of God, – an MP3 of liturgies and music for worship and reflection drawn from our 23rd Celtic retreat.
Get Ready for Advent!
photo Jennifer Hamlett Herrick
Over the last few days, my heart has warmed to the signs saying, “We welcome refugees”, that seem to be springing up all over Europe and now even in North America. Ever since I worked with refugees in the mid 80s, those who are displaced from their homes by war and violence have held a special place in my heart. Because I feel so deeply about this, it has been hard for me to write, but there are others who have written very eloquently from a Christian perspective that you might be interested in.
The following, I think, are must read articles:
Craig Greenfield’s post: Jesus Was A Refugee
Pope Francis’ call to Catholic congregations to shelter Syrian refugees.
And if you are looking for a way to respond check out the “We Welcome Refugees” website.
The plight of 60 million refugees hangs in the balance and we can make a difference. Why not start by saying this prayer from our good friend, John Birch?
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