Time to reflect:
Make yourself comfortable. If you are at home, sit in your favourite armchair. If you are at your office, close the door. Cut out as many distractions as possible. Focus on your breathing. Take a deep slow breath in from the depths of your abdomen and hold it for a moment. Then breathe out slowly. Relax your body and your mind.
It has been a busy week with much noise and activity. Even as I sit in my office the road and air traffic fills my world with noise that easily distracts me. Physical silence is elusive, but in the depths of my soul I know I can find a place of calm and silence at any time.
Let us start this morning by listening to Simon and Garfunkel sing their classic Sounds of Silence
Finding the silence that comes from a soul at rest and at peace is a remarkable thing, a gift from God, but a gift that must be received from the hands of God and then opened in the presence of God in order to be fully appreciated. A pause, a few deep breaths to centre myself on God, a deliberate relaxing of my muscles and suddenly I feel the embrace of God’s enduring love.
Read the prayer above slowly, focusing on the words and their message. Listen to the Simon and Garfunkel song. Sit quietly in the presence of God; breathing in and out slowly again.
What is your response: As you try to sit quietly in the presence of God what distracts you? What pulls you out of that inner silence and fills you with anxiety, fear or despair? As you focus on breathing in and out the essence of God how does it make you feel?
Now say YHWH slowly in synch with your breathing, (YH breath in; WH breathe out) savouring each syllable and the breath it draws into and out of your body. Breath holds the essence of God. Imagine it flowing into your lungs. oxygenating each blood cell and spreading out through your body. Imagine as you breathe it is the love of God; the peace of God and the stillness of God in which you can hear the quiet whispers through which God so delights to speak. Read the prayer again and listen to the music. Relax your body as you breathe out, and imagine the music flowing with your breath down through your body into the ground.
What is your response: Sit in that inner place of silence and rest for a few moments. What is God saying to you in the silence? What are the faithful promises God has reminded you of? What are the new places of trust God is making you aware of? Write these down. Consider leaving a comment below that might enable others to enter into this silent place of God’s embrace.
The art of leading spiritually
Last week I published a post on Leadership as Spiritual Direction. It has made me think a lot about what I feel a good spiritual leader looks like. Our modern idea of leadership, even of Christian leadership is often a very hierarchical model, based on power and prestige. Success is often judged by growth in numbers rather than in spiritual maturity. Sadly this is the model that most of us know and adhere to without even thinking about it.
Most of us aspire to be leaders. We want to be noticed. We want to feel successful. As Christians we want to know that what we do makes a difference in God’s world. I wonder however if in our striving towards these leadership goals we sometimes miss God’s purposes for us as leaders.
To know how to become good spiritual leaders we need first to understand the purpose of leadership not from the perspective of the secular world or even from the perspective of the religious community but from God’s point of view. A good place to start is with Jesus‘ last prayer to his disciples before his betrayal and crucifixion.
I am praying not only for these disciples but also for all who will ever believe in me through their message. I pray that they will all be one, just as you and I are one – as you are in me, Father, and I am in you. And may they be in us so that the world will believe you sent me. I have given them the glory you gave me so that they may be one as we are one. I am in them and you are in me. May they experience such perfect unity that the world will know that you sent me and that you love them as much as you love me.(John 17:20-23)
As far as I am concerned, spiritual leadership is not a job but a journey. It is a journey into intimacy with God. It is a journey into the kingdom of God. It is also a journey into the company of others. Spiritual leadership is not about individual success, in fact I am not sure that it is about individuals at all. Spiritual leadership is about community, about enabling others to become the people God intends them to be so that together we can become the community of shalom that God intends us to become.
Jesus invited his disciples into a journey towards unity with God and with each other. The challenges of listening together, struggling together and praying together moulded them into a richly diverse loving community that resounded with the Spirit of God and as a consequence turned the world upside down.
No wonder Jesus spent more time developing a community of followers than he did preaching. Missiologist Lesslie Newbigin explains: “…the center of Jesus’ concern was the calling and binding to himself of a living community of men and women who would be the witnesses of what he was and did. The new reality that he introduced into history was to be continued through history in the form of a community, not in the form of a book.”
Early Christians believed that to live by the law of love that Jesus called them to required community because we cannot practice love in isolation.
They reasoned that as the essential nature of God is love and because it is impossible to practice love in isolation, God the Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – must be a model of perfect community, a perfect harmony of loving relationship.
Gilbert Bilezikian in his book Community 101, further elaborates this understanding. “Since God is Trinity he is plurality in oneness. Therefore, the creation in his image required the creation of a plurality of persons. God’s supreme achievement was not the creation of a solitary man, but the creation of human community.”
He goes on to explain that this last prayer of Jesus with his disciples is a prayer for community. “The oneness that Jesus prayed for was not mere unity. It was the oneness that reaches deep into the being of God and finds its source in the relationship between Father and Son. Jesus is asking for the restoration among humans of the oneness that had originally been entrusted to them in creation, a oneness made in the image of the oneness within the Trinity.”
This understanding of God and of God’s purposes for us invites us to rethink everything including the function and form of leadership. In fact it turns our leadership models on their heads.
Spiritual leadership is not about our own advancement or success. The central purpose of spiritual leadership is to become co-creators with God in bringing into being a community that is at one with God and with each other. Together we can shine with the presence of Jesus and model the love of God in such a way that others are drawn to believe in God.
This doesn’t require a charismatic out in front personality that hopes everyone will catch their vision, follow and obey. It requires a community that is willing to journey together into the ways of God. It recognizes that leadership is a function of the whole community. As we listen together, discern together, struggle together and pray together we learn to grow together into that restored community of love and mutuality which does indeed reflect the image of the oneness within the Trinity.
What do you think?
On Monday I posted a meditation reflecting on the words Every season has its beauty. The words keep revolving in my mind. I taste them on my tongue and savour them in my thoughts. I look for the beauty of God in a fallen leaf. I see it in the clouds and in the mountain skyline. Our world is alive to the glory and beauty of God.
As I walk around the garden and drive through the city, I find myself looking for the beauty of new gifts God is unveiling too. As I talk to friends and strangers I am wondering – what season are you in? What are you afraid to let go of? What new things are you embracing with joy?
Out of my reflections has come this prayer/poem
Every season has its beauty,
Fresh from the hand of God.
Look for it.
Listen to it.
Savour its goodness.
Every season has its beauty.
Remember what is past,
With joy and not regret.
Anticipate what is to come,
With hope and not with dread.
Every season has its beauty.
Embrace the new gifts of God,
And live into their blessings,
Full measure, pressed down,
Running out all over.
Christine Sine https://godspacelight.com
We have just passed the equinox, that time of the year when night and day are of equal length in both northern and southern hemispheres. Equal yet not the same.
autumn leaves – Seattle
Here in the northern hemisphere we are heading towards winter. Outside my window the leaves are slowly changing from green to gold and red. Heaters have replaced fans and swimwear has given way to winter coats in most stores. We are hunkering down, waiting expectantly for the first icy blasts.
Flowering Australian wattle
I watch in envy however as my Australian friends post photos of wattle and New Zealanders revel in the flowering of the kowhai tree. For them the hot, sun bathed days of summer are just around the corner.
My global connections remind me that even when change occurs it is not the same for all of us. There are often only fleeting moments when we seem to be living in the same world – equal parts night and day, light and dark. Then suddenly we realize – some of us, like those who live at the equator are not changing much at all, others seem to be going in totally different directions and their viewpoints are diametrically opposed to ours. The hard thing to come to terms with is that this might be OK with God. And I am not talking just about the seasons here.
It is natural for us to want to convince others that we hold the corner on truth when it comes to faith. Perhaps our faith journey has moved us from conservative to liberal theological viewpoints. Others have journeyed in the opposite direction. Some have moved right out of the accepted realms of Christian faith. For others faith has grown and blossomed out of adamant atheism. We struggle with guilt and grief because we cannot convince them of our perspective.
penstemon
When I first moved to Seattle, I struggled to garden appropriately. I wanted to plant the wrong seeds and plants at the wrong seasons. I wanted to grow hibiscus and bougainvillea when I should have been experimenting with rudbeckia and penstemon. It took years for me to adjust to the new rhythm of the seasons and fully appreciate the beauty of these plants.
As I contemplate the changing of the seasons today I find myself wondering. Can I trust that God is still at work when someone I love is going in the opposite direction from myself? Is it possible that God has many rhythms of life, many pathways that are acceptable that I need to appreciate?
What do you think?
The last few months of the year are always a busy season for events here at the Mustard Seed House and we have some exciting possibilities coming up that I wanted to make you aware of.
October 18th Andy Wade will facilitate a Justice At the Table seminar. I am very much looking forward to this event which always challenges and inspires me.
November 15th I will facilitate a contemplative retreat day: Stop the Madness – Return to Our Senses for Advent. We once again invite you to prepare for Advent and Christmas by refocusing your life on what really matters. Take time to renew, refresh and restore your priorities. Make this an annual event and re-establish God’s rhythm for your life.
Today’s post in the series Seeking Help Through the Faith Shifting Process. is by Robert Rife.
Robert Alan Rife, is the Minister of Music and Worship for Yakima Covenant Church in Yakima, Washington. He graduated from Spring Arbor University with an MA in Spiritual Formation and Leadership. He is a singer-songwriter, studio musician, choral director, poet, and liturgist. He maintains two personal blogs: Innerwoven and Robslitbits. He also blogs at Conversations Journal and for CenterQuest. Robert describes his vocation as exploring those places where life, liturgy, theology, and the arts intersect with and promote spiritual formation.”
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Historically, I have HATED the process of discernment. Why? Because it has a profound prerequisite: self-love, which requires self-knowledge which, in itself, reveals a second, foundational prerequisite: wisdom. As an often-confused adoptee, such golden gifts weren’t always forthcoming, especially when I was younger.
A common characteristic of adoptees is fear of rejection. One would think this to be self-evident since rejection, at least in broad terms, is what we have experienced even in utero. Although that probably overstates it a bit, people like me have a terrible time in the decision-making process because it includes elements that are not in our wheelhouse. For example, intentionality, which presupposes determination, which presupposes confidence, which presupposes freedom, which presupposes a general sense of acceptance, which presupposes a universe more or less benevolent, which presupposes…well, you get my point.
This process gets ramped up exponentially early in our lives when, perhaps at college, we’re not only trying to figure out where God would have us, what it is we are to be about, who we are as people and with whom we are to spend our lives, if anyone. Too much unthinking advice gets bandied about in times like these. One’s friends, equally confused, tell us, “take care lest you find yourself outside the ‘perfect will of God.’” Great, let’s add a little more fear to the mix! Worse still are the mating rituals to which we must all prescribe. They are often rituals designed to actually keep us from really getting to know ourselves let alone another human being since they, too, are built on suspicion, regret, fear and…more fear. Faith as one big ‘what if?’ or ‘should I?’
Well, I am not about to singlehandedly untie the God’s-will enigma in a simple blog post. However, allow me at least to share three gifts of great worth that have helped remove my fear of discernment.
First, as a guy now 50 years old, I have some history of decision-making. All I can say is, God’s got this. My worst decisions, ever, seem to have been redeemed quite nicely in the hands of a loving and particularly creative God. This pares down decisions not to right and wrong but good and better.
Second, it’s not just up to me. The next time some misguided but well-meaning soul comes up to you and says, “I just really feel God told me…,” let your response be, “Interesting. And to who else has God told this?” God speaks to us in community. We can get impressions and experience joy or caution, but it will be through others that the stick of God’s will gets sharpened to a finer point.
Finally, avoid a theology that dictates God’s will as the head of a pi
n stuck in the center of a bull’s eye viewable from a full moon while facing east on Tuesday afternoons in a leap-year November. Such is not a theology at all but a control mechanism built on fear. If all is grace, then so is our process of discernment.
In the economy of God we do not trip blindly into that dark night. We dance blithely in the arms of a particularly good dancer, unafraid to take the lead and with whom every spin is ultimately in the “right” direction. So dance away, little pilgrim!
_______________________________
What is your greatest fear related to the will of God?
How are you engaging God in community to best discern God’s present and future for you?
Pray this: “Lord of all the universe, my past, present and future are cupped in the palm of your eternal hand. Help me to face them all with courage and confidence, recognizing that you are benevolent and strong and will never leave me to face any of it alone. Lord, since you redeem all my “mistakes” I can relax and simply dance with you in peace and unspeakable joy. Through Jesus, the one leading me on this dance floor…Amen.”
With you on the journey, Rob
Time to reflect:
Find a quiet place, if possible where you can see outside to the beauty of God’s world. If not, focus on the photo above or listen to the Youtube video below. Make yourself comfortable. Sit with your hands in your lap, palms up. Close your eyes. Take a few deep breaths in and out and sit, relaxed in the presence of God allowing the love of God to embrace you. Listen to the music. Relax. Say the prayer printed above and listen to the video.
The seasons are changing. Here in the northern hemisphere the leaves are changing colour, and the cool mornings make us aware that winter is on its way. This weekend the temperature reached 80F, probably for the last time this year. Here in the Pacific NW the days are shortening and though I know winter is coming I am not yet ready to let go of summer. For many, it is a start of a new school year. Others are beginning new jobs, moving house, facing health challenges. It is an unsettling time with doors opening and closing.
How often I wonder do I miss the beauty in front of my eyes because I am living with regrets for what is past? Not just in the changes of the season, but in the changes of my life.
Every season has its beauty, but if my eyes are focused on summer then I miss the beauty of an autumn day with leaves red and gold, and I am not ready for the new and frosty beauty of winter either.
What is your response: What are are you holding onto from a season that is past? Are you hankering after youth or health, or a job you have left? Are you struggling with the changing seasons? Write down what you are afraid to let go of on a piece of paper. Light a match and burn the paper. As it burns release the past to God.
Now imagine that Christ is holding out his hand to you and inviting you into a new season, with its own promise and beauty. Even in seasons of suffering and trauma there is beauty.
A friend told me recently that her mother’s brain tumour is the best thing that has happened this year. Her mother is schizophrenic and has lived most of her life on the streets. Because of her tumour she has been admitted to a nursing home, is on meds and my friend has been able to develop a relationship with her for the first time in her life.
What is your response: What have you missed? Sit quietly listening to the music and ask God to open your eyes to beauty of this season. What is God showing you? Write it down. Sit quietly for a few minutes to allow the peace of God to flow over you. Then say the prayer above to finish your time.
This is a new practice that I started last week. Each Monday I will post a new meditation. Check out last week’s here:
I am posting these in conjunction with a series on Spiritual direction which I also began last week with this resource list.
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