Tomato theology
Over the last few weeks I have planted 30 tomato plants in the garden – another important rite of spring and and an increasingly important part of the rhythm of my life. Here in Seattle, we rarely have tomatoes before the end of July but they are well worth waiting for. You have no idea how much better tomatoes taste straight out of the garden. Ripened in the summer sun, picked at the peak of their flavour, and savoured immediately with other fresh salad vegetables.
I am amazed at how much better all vegetables taste when freshly picked. Kids who never eat their vegetables at home, will stuff themselves with peas, beans, tomatoes and even broccoli florets when they get out in the garden. It’s often the first time they’ve tasted anything the way God intended it to be, not out of the supermarket. And their parents are amazed.
It makes me wonder if part of the reason many of us struggle with what it means to be a Christian is because we get our theology and our Christian discipleship from the supermarket too – picked before it is ripe, stored for months, and past its prime or else as in the case of tomatoes, gassed to make them look ripe and then pumped up with additives to keep it fresh and tasty.
What do I mean – well most of us learn theology by sitting down in chairs and having people yak at us. Or from our twitter feeds and Facebook pages. This might get some useful information into our heads but it definitely does not get God’s principles into our hearts – and to be honest I think it is the most boring and uninteresting way to learn anything.
The only way that God’s principles will get into our hearts is by us putting them into practice. As I have said before I learned my theology in the refugee camps in Thailand. And I continue to learn it through interacting with people from other cultures and perspectives. I read somewhere once that the early Christians felt privileged to live in a nonChristian society because they believed it was through their interactions with people outside the faith that they learned more about God. Now we think we learn best from people who think exactly the same way we do – and I suspect that explains why our theological perspectives are often regarded as old, stale and full of superfluous additives – a little like the produce we buy in the supermarket.
What do you think?
The title of this piece is the job description God gave me in prayer before I became a writer. I didn’t take it too seriously, after all, Christians aren’t supposed to have any truck with magic and I was not a natural storyteller. But when you ask God in earnest what you are meant to be doing on this earth, he is equally earnest when he replies. And now every day, I make magic and I weave stories. And the two are so tightly bound up with my prayer life that I couldn’t separate the threads if I tried.
Magic, as it turns out, is a shimmering, intangible, beautiful way of expressing the mysteries of Christ and his universe tapped into by many Christian writers, including C. S. Lewis and Hans Christian Andersen. The latter described being a poetic soul as “..a gift from God, a blessing big enough for oneself, but much too small to be parcelled out to others. It comes like a sunbeam and fills your soul and mind. It comes like a waft of flowers, like a melody you know but can’t remember from where.” (from The Artist and Society).
Some would call this inspiration a muse, but for me, and for Andersen, stories are a gift from God, truly an in-spiring, a being breathed into. I’ve been writing tales this way for a few years now, enough to hopefully make some sort of anthology possible. Writing them feels sometimes like unwrapping layers from around a present, or putting flesh and sinew onto bone, the building of words around a framework, a design conceived within the silence of listening prayer.
At the moment I am writing a daily blog, something I’ve been doing for over two years now, and all of the entries are birthed in prayer. This year they are all very short stories, like fables or parables. This took me by surprise at first, as normally it takes a week to write a story properly (for me anyway). But I am loving it, and every day the newness of the thoughts that are given amaze and bless me, as I hope they do my readers. But what do I mean, “given,” how does it happen?
Sometimes the seed of a story is phrased like a question in my mind, as today’s piece for instance, which was, suppose the sky were bored of being blue? Sometimes it starts as a picture, as in a story about a bluebird, where I saw in my mind’s eye a tiny blue shell hatching in God’s hand. Often it is even a case of almost taking dictation, where the words come thick and fast and I struggle to get them down. But the thing that all these beginnings have in common is the listening, the being open to receiving gift. Clearly the discipline of silent prayer, contemplation, meditation and listening over the past eleven years or so has been a great training for this work; and the two things, story and prayer, are symbiotic in my heart and my life.
Stories are central to understanding spiritual truths and wisdom. Jesus chose not to preach theological sermons in his earthly ministry, but to tell stories. We take in and digest myth and magic far more easily than we do dry academic pronouncements. We are geared to understand things that lie underneath and in-between the words, which work with our God-given imaginations. We want characters we can relate to, morals and wisdom that make sense to us and teach us, but without spelling it out or patronising us. Because that deflates the mystery and tries to calibrate something unfathomable.
I’ve always loved words and writing, but was never any good at thinking up plots. Now I can sit quietly with God and my deepest self, it comes far more easily, to the point where it feels like spiritual flow. I wonder what treasures might come to each of us, not necessarily tales (maybe art or ideas, poems or music), if we all learned to sit with the stories within?
© Keren Dibbens-Wyatt
I don’t know about you but I am sick and tired of everyone telling me their 5, 7 or 10 tips for success, aka fame and fortune. As Christians I think that our view of success should be totally different from that of the secular world’s, yet often we buy into the same values.
Think about it. How did Jesus model success? Certainly not by becoming rich and famous. Definitely not in the ways that all the business gurus tell us we will find success. He modelled a different form of success that had him rubbing shoulders with outcasts, living without a home and finally dying the death of a criminal. Yet his was the most successful life in the history of humanity.
So what is Jesus’ formula for success – here are my five top tips for a really successful Christ centred life.
1. Get Your Priorities Straight. Jesus had a very different view of success. He was not concerned about personal glory and fame. He was passionate about bringing the Kingdom of God into being and wants us to be too. John 6:38,39 says: I have come down from heaven not to pursue My own agenda but to do what He desires. I am here on behalf of the Father who sent Me. 39 He sent Me to care for all He has given Me so that nothing and no one will perish. In the end, on the last day, He wants everything to be resurrected into new life. (The Voice)
2. Die to self: Fruitfulness come not from seeking our own fulfillment but from being willing to die so that others can flourish. John 12:24 says: I tell you the truth: unless a grain of wheat is planted in the ground and dies, it remains a solitary seed. But when it is planted, it produces in death a great harvest. (The Voice)
3. Share generously: 1 John 3:16, 17 links the theme of dying to self with the need to be generous especially toward those at the margins – not exactly Wall Street’s view of success:We know what true love looks like because of Jesus. He gave His life for us, and He calls us to give our lives for our brothers and sisters. (The Voice)If a person owns the kinds of things we need to make it in the world but refuses to share with those in need, is it even possible that God’s love lives in him? (The Voice).
4. Take Time for Prayer: Jesus never made major decisions without spending at least a night in prayer. He inaugurated his ministry with 40 days in the wilderness. How much more “successful” from God’s perspective would we be if we had a fraction of this commitment?
5. Listen to the Spirit and be willing to let go: Jesus often walked away from the crowds not towards them, usually inspired by hours in prayer. He alienated his followers by doing all kinds of things they disapproved of – walking through Samaria, talking to women, eating with tax collectors and then he crowned it all by walking away from the most successful healing ministry in the history of the world to walk toward Jerusalem and the cross – a very deliberate step away from the power structures of the world.
So what do you think? What does the truly successful Christian life look like?
Honor the Lord with your wealth,
with the firstfruits of all your crops;
then your barns will be filled to overflowing,
and your vats will brim over with new wine. (Proverbs 3:9,10 NIV)
As we enjoy fresh salads and strawberries from the garden, my thoughts have turned often to the giving of firstfruits to the priests that the Israelites were called to. How hard it must have been for some of them, after the leanness of the hunger season when the last of the stored fruit and grain had been eaten and their children were hungry to give up their firstfruits.
How hard too it must have been for Hannah too, to give up her first born son Samuel. She too had endured a hunger season, a winter season of barrenness when she longer to see the firstfruit of her womb and enjoy her God given son. Yet she gave him up. Hannah’s commitment was not a cursory dedication than then a taking home of her baby, nor was the offering of the firstfruits of the harvest. This was a life time letting go, a giving of crops and of a child to nourish and sustain the life of others.
Belief in a future abundant harvest must have taken a lot of faith. Their focus must surely have been on the scarcity of the moment, not the abundance of the future. The desire to hold onto what God asked them to share must have been excruciating at times. This was not a temporary letting go either. Nor was it a one time thing. Firstfruits are seasonal, they ripen after every winter season of barrenness and pruning. They were given to the priests for their consumption and for distribution to widows and the poor, nourishing others with their produce before they nourished themselves.
What is your response.
Sit quietly for a few moments and think about the first fruits in your life. What are they? They probably do not come in the form of grain and fruit. Are they talents, education, finances, or even relationships? What do you do with your firstfruits? Is God prompting you to let go of them so that the hunger of others might be satisfied?
God will generously provide all you need. Then you will always have everything you need and plenty left over to share with others. As the Scriptures say,
“They share freely and give generously to the poor.
Their good deeds will be remembered forever.”For God is the one who provides seed for the farmer and then bread to eat. In the same way, he will provide and increase your resources and then produce a great harvest of generosity in you. Yes, you will be enriched in every way so that you can always be generous. And when we take your gifts to those who need them, they will thank God. (2Cor 9:8-11 NLT)
Today the concept of firstfruits and the promise of abundance to follow is often associated with the prosperity gospel. Partly because we think of the rest of our harvest as belonging to ourselves, but the giving of the firstfruits was to set a pattern of generosity and sharing for the people of God.
Jesus was the ultimate firstfruits offering. He gave up his life to God so that others could be nourished and find life after a barren existence, a winter season without God.
As I ate the bread and drank the wine of communion last Sunday, I realized that Jesus is still being offered as the as the ongoing fruit of a long awaited abundant harvest in the kingdom of God. Wherever the fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control are manifested we see the life of God, the firstfruits of Jesus sacrifice being multiplied and offered in abundance to nourish all of us who are in need.
It is often when we have little that we are the most generous. We give freely of our firstfruits, but as God blesses us with more abundant talents, ministry and wealth, we become less generous. The wealthy give a much smaller proportion of their income away than do the poor. We easily forget that all we have is to be shared generously with those in need.
What is your response?
Watch the video below, then sit quietly and consider the fruit that you produce. Are you as generous with the ongoing fruit of your life as you were at the beginning of your productivity? Are there ways in which God is prompting you to be more generous in the sharing of your gifts, talents and resources? What steps might God ask of you to make this possible?
For my sixtieth birthday someone gave me a finger labyrinth. I put it in my drawer and promptly forgot about it. However, as I started to research various methods of prayer to incorporate in my book Return to Our Senses: Reimagining How We Pray I pulled it out again. To be honest this seemed a very strange way to prayer especially when most of the articles I read suggested that the best way to trace out a finger labyrinth is with a finger from your non-dominant hand. Evidently research suggests that our non-dominant hand has better access to our intuition and creativity.
Much to my surprise, when I experimented with my finger labyrinth, I found that it really did help me focus and often brought intuitive inspiration when I was grappling with challenging issues. It inspired the prayer that I posted yesterday.
Interestingly, some of the earliest labyrinths found in Christian churches are finger labyrinths, their circuits well worn over the centuries by the passage of innumerable fingers “walking” to the center and then out again.
For more information on finger labyrinths and ideas on how to use them check out my post: What on Earth is a Finger Labyrinth? or Meditation Monday – Questions from A Labyrinth. This one has lots of links to creative ways to make your own labyrinth.
Let’s Create our Own Finger Labyrinth.
Creating finger labyrinths is one of the creativity tasks I use frequently at spiritual retreats. The process we use is very simple for adults and kids.
Cut pieces of wood into squares – minimum size 6″x6″ but preferably 9″x9″
If possible use recycled wood.
Download templates for finger labyrinths and choose the one you want to use. A simple pattern like this one is best for this exercise.
finger labyrinth
Print the image onto card stock and cut it out. Then use as a stencil and spray paint onto the pattern to create your labyrinth.
OR
Transfer your image to your block of wood using waxed paper and these simple instructions: or those in this video.
If you are plan to do this with a group you may like to transfer your image to sheets of cardboard. Either cut out the template with an x-acto knife and allow participants to trace around it with a thick permanent marker as part of the exercise or allow them to cut it out themselves and then trace around it or spray paint (much less fun).
Trail glue around the labyrinth pattern.
Making finger labyrinths
Sprinkle with sand. This creates a wonderfully tactile experience when you use the labyrinth that stirs the senses in unexpected ways.
Allow to dry.
Decorate it and use it regularly as a spiritual discipline.
For other ideas on making a finger labyrinth check these out:
Tutorial for making a finger labyrinth
How to Make a Finger Labyrinth that is also a piece of art
Today’s prayer is one that was both inspired by walking a labyrinth and can be used as a labyrinth walking prayer. I know that there are some Christians for whom walking the labyrinth is not a comfortable experience, but for others it is life giving.
In the Middle Ages people who could not afford either the resources or the time to go on pilgrimage, walked the labyrinth instead. I suspect that many of them walked it on numerous occasions. It is I have discovered a wonderful form of mini pilgrimage.
The twists and turns of the labyrinth, at one moment walking straight towards the centre and then suddenly turning towards the perimeter, reminded me that there are times well into our Christian journey when we feel we are back to our starting point. These are the times when we feel far from God in spite of the fact that we have been followers of Christ for many years. All of us experience them. Part of what my labyrinth walk has taught me is that at times like this I don’t need to look back, I need to look forward to the next step, trusting that God has laid out the path I am walking. Hopefully the next turn will lead me back toward the centre.
Of course if I was building the path, I would make a straight line that moved me straight to the centre without any twists and turns, with no times of feel distant from God. That I realize is not God’s way. Standing back from a labyrinth one cannot see the whole path but we trust that it is there and that it will not lead us astray. And so it is with God. We cannot always see the path that God has laid out for us. Sometimes it takes unexpected turns that seem to take us away from the centre just when we thought we were drawing close to God. But it is not really so. Every step we take is a step closer to the centre of the path God sets out for us and closer to a more intimate knowledge of the God we love and serve and in whom we live and move and have our being.
If you are not familiar with labyrinths check out my post Tools for Prayer – Walking a Labyrinth
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It’s nearly summer and that means gardens are in bloom and good things are coming to life all around us. That’s exactly what if feels like here at MSA! All kinds of good things are springing to life as opportunities to connect, grow, and create push through soil tended by prayer, discernment, and patience. Here are just a few highlights: Annual Celtic Prayer Retreat
There’s still time to catch the early bird special! Our annual retreat is Saturday, August 8th, with good conversations, morning and evening prayers from Friday afternoon through Sunday noon and options to camp and enjoy the land. This year’s theme is Shalom and the Reconciliation of God, a timely topic given the turmoil in our world. Worship with be facilitated by Sean and Julie Hall of February Birds. Sean and Julie were recently featured at the Inhabit Conference, bringing their prophetic and thought-provoking lyrics to an already amazing gathering. You can listen to their music on Spotify and get a copy of their latest CD in our store. Would you like to volunteer at the retreat? We’re looking for volunteers of all sorts to help with the children’s program, registration and set-up/tear-down. Registration fees are waived for all volunteers! Drop us an email and let us know you’re interested. E-School Our e-school keeps adding courses! We now have the full “Creating the Common Good” series up and ready for you. In these four classes you’ll explore economic and educational inequality and their far-reaching impact on our daily lives. But our instructors don’t just leave you with a bunch of head knowledge. Each session includes a practical exploration of how we can respond in both simple and radical ways to the injustice around us. Coming soon is another course from Christine, Spirituality and Gardening! As always, all the courses in our school are available for a flat monthly subscription of $25. With that you have access to every course in our catalog – take as many as you want! (Currently offering nine different classes) Summer Internship Opportunities We still have positions available for summer interns. This is an exciting opportunity for anyone interested in spirituality, sustainability and hospitality to become part of the Mustard Seed community. One intern will help develop, market and facilitate the program for our Celtic retreat, assist with organizing and publishing blog posts for the Godspace blog, and participate in hospitality and gardening activities at the Mustard Seed House. Mentoring by Tom and/or Christine Sine is available. The position also involves administrative responsibilities. And there may be housing available for a single person interested in the position. We also have a second internship opportunity for anyone interested in developing their writing and editing skills. This internship provides a unique opportunity to help create and edit new Mustard Seed publications. Here, too, there is mentoring available. Discernment Continues We appreciate your prayers and support as we continue to discern what God is saying to us through the recent vandalism on Camano Island. Thank you for taking time to discern with us. So many have responded with encouragement and prayerful input. There is still time to contribute your insights and feedback.
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