I wrote this morning’s reflection for the series Return to Our Senses in Lent as a result of some the struggles I have experienced in the last few weeks.
Christine Sine
This morning I am almost pain free and my head does not feel as though it is full of cotton wool. That may not sound remarkable to most of you but for me it is a wonderful feeling. For the last 5 weeks I have struggled with a bout of facial neuralgia that has slowed me down physically, mentally and even spiritually. I have struggled with constant pain, sleepless nights, and an inability to think straight. And for someone like me who generally memorizes their calendar, rarely writes down appointments and loves to work on half a dozen projects at once, this has been extremely limiting.
Sounds appropriate that this should have hit during Lent, one of my friends commented. At the time I dismissed her comment but now find myself reconsidering. After all, Lent is about craving for wholeness. As we walk with Jesus towards Jerusalem and the cross, we look not just for spiritual healing but for physical healing too. Sometimes, as in the case of my facial pain, there is little we can do to bring about that healing except wait patiently, pray and hope for a better world. At other times we can actively work towards healing, changing our lifestyle and daily activities to nurture the healing process. And always there is that amazing sense of freedom when our pain or whatever other issues we struggle with, disappear and we are released.
So it is with our faith. The healing from the brokenness within does not always come easily and sometimes we feel there is little, if anything, we can do to hasten it. We are acutely aware of the pain, we stay awake at night agonizing over its impact on our lives and those of others, but we feel incapable of changing. All we can do is pray and hope.
Then suddenly something changes, we don’t know why or how, but suddenly the burdens that have so weighed us down are lifted and we feel life has returned. It is as though we have arrived at the foot of the cross and been able to lay them down. Fortunately that is not the end of the story however.
The freedom, the rejoicing, the celebration in our spirits is huge, not because we have reached the cross but because in this moment we have looked beyond the cross to the resurrection and the new life of God’s eternal world. May we always remember that the cross is not an end but a beginning, not a failure but a triumph, not a death but an entrance into new life.
Today’s Lenten post for the series Return to Our Senses in Lent is written by my husband Tom Sine. Tom is a futurist, author, and chief hospitality guy for Mustard Seed Associates. It was first posted on the MSA website where Tom is now blogging each week.
In 1982 I took my first pilgrimage to Iona to experience the new discipline for me of listening for God in one of the holy places. I got more than I bargained for. I not only had a very deep experience of what Celtic Christians call “thin places” where the dimension between this world and the next becomes one. As a result of that first pilgrimage I became acquainted with Patrick and a number of his friends and followers and it has radically changed my view of what it means to be a follower of Jesus.
At age 16 Patrick was kidnapped from his home in England and was taken by Irish traders as slave to Ireland. He was forced to care for sheep. He learned about the people and Irish culture but being enslaved most importantly he learned a life of prayer was essential to his difficult life.. After 6 years he escaped and returned to his family. Then God called him to return to Ireland as a missionary. In three decades Patrick and his compatriots saw Ireland become largely converted to Christianity. The Irish, Scots and English were introduced to much more of a whole life faith than was not common then or now.
What I have learned from Patrick, Columba, Hilda, Bridget and Cuthbert is that prayer is not 15 minute break in the day but prayer was intended to permeate all of life. Celtic Christians had prayers for rising in the morning, prayers planting seeds in the day and prayers for banking fires at night. Celtic Christians not only were devoted to a life of prayer, but a love of God’s creation and a care for the poor. I find younger Christians who are hungry for a more authentic whole life faith are often drawn to Celtic Christian faith.
If you would like to have a small taste of the Celtic faith join us for our annual Celtic Christian Prayer Retreat on Camano Island August 10th &11th.
As we head into the final days of the season of Lent and as we celebrate St. Patirck’s Day on Sunday… I invite you to join Saint Patrick and the many Celtic Saints in taking time to listen to our God by quietly repeating Patrick’s prayer and listen to what God might say to you.
Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ on my right, Christ on my left Christ where I lie, Christ where I sit, Christ where I arise Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me, Christ in the mouth of every man who speaks of me, Christ in every eye that sees me, Christ in every ear that hears me.Write me and let me know what you hear from God as you quietly read Patrick’s prayer and listen for God’s whispers to you.
I wrote this post for the series Return to Our Senses in Lent, as a reflection on a wonderful few days I have just spent celebrating my friend Cheryl’s 60th birthday.
Celebrating with Friends
To be honest when I first arrived at the celebration I felt a little for taking off time like this in the middle of Lent. Then it struck me – Lent is a season to renew, refocus and restore ourselves. This celebration accomplished all three. I hardly opened my Bible, but have rarely spent a more spiritual time together with a community of friends.
Four of our party share memories that date back to the early days on board the first Mercy Ship M/V Anastasis which we all helped pioneer. Some of you may have seen the recent 60 minute program on the Africa Mercy which highlighted this ministry and the amazing fruit that has flown from our challenging efforts and sometimes heartbreaking time together.
One of Cheryl’s friends who had not been through those pioneering commented “I have never seen a group of friends with such a special bond.” And its true, those days of struggle when we sometimes did not even know where the money for our next day’s food would come from formed a depth for friendship we could never have created in any other way.
We reminisced about the trip Ruth and I took in the mid 80s’ on which we recruited Dr Gary Parker who was featured on the program and has now lived on board for 26 years. I shared stories of my adventures in the hospital chipping, scraping and painting wondering why God had called a doctor to do such work. (You can read more about this in my book Tales of a Seasick Doctor). We talked too about the challenging times when some of lived in tents on the Hawaiian island of Oahu while the ship had a sprinkler system fitted – no sacrifice you might think until you realized this lasted for twelve months. The rest of us lived on the ship surrounded by welding smoke and with the not so gentle sounds of unloading cement and cars. Not an easy time to be in charge of the ship’s medical ministry and without these friends I am sure that I would never have had the faith or the sticking power to see it become a fully functional hospital on which I oversaw the first years of Mercy Ships medical ministry. Most important of all we talked about the faithfulness of God in midst, the regular rhythms of prayer, fellowship and fun which molded us together into this very special friendship.
Friendship is so important to our lives and our faith. I would not be the person I am today without these very special friends who cried with me, prayed with me and shared my joys. They helped me confront the demons in my past and brought me healing. What better way to spend a part of Lent than with such friends.
It reminded me of a friend Tom and I share who always contacts us during Lent. His Lenten discipline is to contact friends he has not been together with in the last twelve months. He too recognized the importance of such relationships in molding us into the people God intends us to be.
So think about it. Are there friends you have been out of touch with for a while that you could contact during this Lenten season? Are there ones that were once friends that you are now estranged from? Or are there friends that you fear to contact because they are in challenging circumstances you can’t cope with hearing about? Or sit for a while and think about relationships that have renewed, restored and transformed you. Give your friends a call just to say thank you for their input into your life.
I am moving a little slow this morning so thought that I would get this prayer up first – Lenten reflection for the day still to come. St Patrick’s Day is on Sunday (not today as it said in the original post
Today’s post in the series Return to Our Senses is an excerpt from Jamie Arpin Ricci’s book The Cost of Community: Jesus, St. Francis & Life in the Kingdom. Jamie is an urban missionary, pastor, church planter and writer living in Winnipeg’s inner city West End neighbourhood. He is planter & pastor of Little Flowers Community, in the inner city of Winnipeg. Jamie is also forming Chiara House, a new monastic community. He is a third order Franciscan with The Company of Jesus and is founding co-director of Youth With A Mission (YWAM) Urban Ministries Winnipeg with his wife Kim & son, Micah.
“When you give to the needy, do not let you left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is don in secret, will reward you” (Matthew 6:3).
How should we understand these secret works of righteousness? Interestingly, the Greek word used for “acts of righteousness” is not the same word in every manuscript. Some ancient manuscripts that include this passage use the same word for “righteousness” as the one in the Beatitudes, the righteousness/justice we are to hunger and thirst for. Other manuscripts, though, use an entirely different word meaning “almsgiving” or simply “gifts to the poor.” While the best manuscripts use the former meaning (that is, they refer to works of justice), the reason the other meaning is used at times is because the primary “act of righteousness” in the Judaism of Jesus’ day was almsgiving.
The use of both Greek words suggests that Jesus was referring to the Jewish practice called tzedakah, a Hebrew word that loosely means “charity” but has as its root the Hebrew word for justice (tzedek). Rooted in the gleaning laws of their agrarian past, the complexities of the developing economy led to a more sophisticated set of guidelines and requirements about giving to the poor.
However, consistent throughout that development was the central fact that such giving was always to be done anonymously. What we can glean, then, is that while Jesus is commenting broadly on works of justice, most of his listeners would have thought immediately of tzedakah. And given that Jesus continues by directly addressing the practice of almsgiving in the following section, this connection is obviously intentional.
The connection between righteousness/justice and providing for the poor must not be missed or minimized. Its long history in Judaism and Christianity, and Jesus’ clear affirmation of its continued practice, should be more than enough to make us mindful of its significance for the church. As we have explored earlier, it is not uncommon these days for Christians to believe that God calls us to care for the spiritual needs of others, with material needs being of secondary priority (and often a distant second at that). Some even go so far as to say we are not called meet the material needs of the poor at all. However, most would simply minimize such charity as a secondary, less important aspect to the higher spiritual calling of saving souls.
We cannot miss that Jesus makes no such division or distinction between the spiritual and material needs of humanity (thus making us equally “poor” before God). The righteousness and justice we are called to hunger and thirst after, and the shalom we are called to create in the world—even in its brokenness—is absolutely concerned with the whole person, indeed all of creation. The disintegrative nature of sin is being reversed by the work of Christ’s redemption, moving us toward the intended wholeness of creation, reflected in the nature of the Garden of Eden before sin. It was good! Our commitment to Christ and his mission, then, must be equally devoted to the restoration of the whole person and the whole creation.
When we understand the dynamics at work here, we see that Jesus is not teaching anything new in respect to the requirement of giving to the poor (and acts of justice in general), nor are his warnings about doing so to be seen as righteous by those watching us. This was something all good Jews knew to avoid. However, Jesus is not forbidding us from doing works of righteousness before others (which would indeed be a contradiction of his earlier mandate), but rather he is warning us against doing such works for the purpose of being seen by others. Once again, Jesus is forcing us to examine the intentions of our heart, for the true nature of our righteousness is found there, not in the act itself. We must live in the tension between the interior formation of our hearts and the ethical behavior it gives birth to. We should not be surprised that this was such a common problem in his day. After all, which of us does not like getting praised for our good works? This is a universal temptation that we all face.
Jesus calls such people, with their public displays of so-called righteousness, “hypocrites.” This would have been an even more cutting rebuke then than it is today, for in addition to it meaning those whose expressed beliefs that were not reflective of their heart, the people would have recognized it as the Greek word for actors or performers. In other words, they were fakes and frauds, pretending to be someone or something they were not. After all, it certainly was not about the recipient of the giving or the God who mandated it, but rather it was about the giver receiving praise and honor for his or her devout generosity. Jesus tells them that their acts will mean nothing to their heavenly Father, but that the passing, fickle praise of others will be their only reward. It is here we see for whom we should be doing such good works. Like a child running with their crayon drawing, shouting, “Look what I made for you, Daddy!” so too should our main motivation in such acts of service be about pleasing our heavenly Father, whose love for us is the greatest, truest and only reward we desire. And ex- tending from that love of God, we should be moved by genuine love for others.
(an edited excerpt from “The Cost of Community: Jesus, St. Francis & Life in the Kingdom”, IVPress, 2011)
Street of Santa Rita, oil on canvas, 1961 by Antonio Lopez Garcia.
Accessed from http://www.artelibre.net
This morning’s post for Return to Our Senses in Lent is contributed by C. Christopher Smith. He is the editor of The Englewood Review of Books, and author of several books, including most recently The Virtue of Dialogue: Conversation as a Hopeful Practice of Church Communities (Patheos Press 2012). He is presently in the process of writing a book entitled Slow Church (co-written with John Pattison, forthcoming from IVP Books). Chris and John blog about Slow Church on the Patheos Interfaith portal.
“[Hope] to belong to your place by your own knowledge /
Of what it is that no other place is…” – Wendell Berry
I was deeply moved by the story of the Spanish painter, Antonio López García, as it was told by art critic Daniel Siedell in a recent Books and Culture review:
For most of us, the world is no longer a cause of fascination, of sustained contemplation and reflection. A bird is just a bird, a vase of flowers just that, and the grace of this man or the charm of that woman is buried beneath a multitude of judgments we make about them as they pass us. This is the “real world,” the world in which as Cervantes writes, an inn is just an inn. …
One of the more remarkable and stubbornly beautiful and seductive objects in the world for López García is the quince tree in his backyard. For decades he has tried to paint this simple tree as it absorbs and refracts the sunlight. In 1992 filmmaker, Victor Erice was given unique access to the artist’s world to make the award-winning documentary El Sol del Membrillo (The Quince Tree of the Sun). The film tells the story of López García’s approach to art through his relationship with this little tree, which he feels the urge to paint every autumn. And yet every autumn it thwarts his attempt to capture his experience of it.
In a similar way, I have for several years now been getting to know my own immediate urban neighborhood in Indianapolis, an undertaking that I like to call urban naturalism. Inspired by the poetry of early twentieth century agrarian Liberty Hyde Bailey, I walk the streets and paths of the neighborhood, take pictures, climb trees, look, listen and often write. Our Englewood neighborhood is a postage stamp of a place, about twelve blocks in all, sandwiched between two abandoned industrial complexes that have sat idle for about two decades. Our ZIP code also has one of the highest rates of abandoned housing in the nation. By practically any measure, Englewood is what the new monastics would call “an abandoned place of empire.”
And yet, the life of God abounds in this place (as in all places). Treetops are full of all manner of birds, insects and mosses; fiesty, bright yellow dandelions emerge through cracks in the pavement; even when things made be human hands start to crumble, the life of creation rolls vibrantly on. And the life of creation is a superabundant gift of god for us to see, smell, feel, hear and maybe even taste. Certainly, we need the wisdom of time and others. Not every plant was made to be eaten, or even touched, for instance. Being able to identify birds, plants and trees, can help us to care for them better, or to know when something is awry – say, when we encounter a bird or an animal that is not native to our place.
As we come to know our places, and belong to and love them, we make ourselves available for the healing love of God to flow through us to our neighbors and the other creatures who share this place with us. We strive to live carefully on the land, and cultivate it in ways that sustain us and our neighbors (e.g., growing food), and engaging in the economy and built environment of the place in a way that moves the place forward ever so slightly toward health and flourishing. But to submit ourselves to God’s all-encompassing work of reconciliation in this way takes discipline. We have to slow down, be still and receive the rich gifts that God wants to offer us. Our fast food world does not make this easy for us. Lent is a season in the church year in which we learn to discipline ourselves, not for our own sake but for that of the common good. I’m not a very disciplined person; even in my urban naturalism efforts, I am often too busy with my work to do much at all.
We need discipline. We need seasons like Lent that help us look beyond ourselves and our busyness and by belonging to our places to grow in our love for God and for God’s creatures that share our place with us. God help us. May your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven!
——–
C. Christopher Smith is the editor of The Englewood Review of Books, and author of several books, including most recently The Virtue of Dialogue: Conversation as a Hopeful Practice of Church Communities (Patheos Press 2012). He is presently in the process of writing a book entitled Slow Church (co-written with John Pattison, forthcoming from IVP Books). Chris and John blog about Slow Church on the Patheos Interfaith portal.
Breathe out your sorrows
Today’s Lenten prayer is written by A.B. Simpson, who was founder of the Christian and Missionary Alliance:
“Breathing Out and Breathing In”
Jesus, Breathe Thy Spirit on me,
Teach me how to breathe Thee in,
Help me pour into Thy bosom
All my life of self and sin.
I am breathing out my own life,
That I may be filled with Thine;
Letting go my strength and weakness,
Breathing in Thy life divine.
Breathing out my sinful nature,
Thou hast borne it all for me;
Breathing in Thy cleansing fullness,
Finding all my life in Thee.
I am breathing out my sorrow,
On Thy kind and gentle breast;
Breathing in Thy joy and comfort,
Breathing in Thy peace and rest.
I am breathing out my longings,
In Thy list’ning loving ear,
I am breathing in Thy answers,
Stilling every doubt and fear.
I am breathing every moment,
Drawing all my life from Thee;
Breath by breath I live upon Thee,
Blessed Spirit, breathe in me.
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