Breathing into Prayer

I need to pray. And, often times, I need to breathe myself into it.

I have been breathing into prayer for several years now...as I exercise. I need to do it, to realign myself. ...from the things that gather my anger within me. Anger from the violation of my sin against others, from their violation against me, from the evil forces of this world that lie to me about what is true. I get out of alignment easily. I need to pray. But, I have trouble just starting right in.  I have learned that often I need time to breathe myself into it.

This breathe-praying helps me. It helps me see things more accurately. It knocks the edges off that grow so quickly; the ones that distort others, that beckon me to retaliate against them...directly or in less obvious ways. These lies tell me that I am empty, that I need something, that I need to fill something. Breathing and praying re-centers my being. It leads me back towards wholeness.

I need to pray.

Retaliation

When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly. He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness....

-- 1 Peter 2:23-24

I still tend to maintain a spirit of retaliation...towards the things that threaten me.  What kinds of things?  Where do I do it?    ...many of them are referenced here.  So the question becomes, why do I do it?  When I feel threatened in my relationships, what can I learn to turn to?  What keeps retaliation at bay?  The answer seems to have something to do with 'entrusting myself to God' (rather than continuing to rely on my own where-with-all).  ...only He can right the wrongs anyway and my efforts to maintain fairness often seem to be fraught with self-interest, self-preservation, self-promotion.

...and in case I'm wondering (or you are), read the last verse of Collosians 3.  Part of what can keep me from retaliation is more full view of the retaliation I deserve.

Within This Strange and Quickened Dust

O God, within this strange and quickened dust

The beating heart controls the coursing blood
In discipline that holds in check the flood
But cannot stem corrosion and dark rust.
In flesh's solitude I count it blest
That only you, my Lord, can see my heart
With passion's darkness tearing it apart
With storms of self, and tempests of unrest.
But your love breaks through blackness, bursts with light;
We separate ourselves, but you rebind
In Dayspring all our fragments; body, mind,
And spirit join, unite against the night.
Healed by your love, corruption and decay
Are turned, and whole, we greet the light of day.

-- Madeleine L'Engle

Emptiness

Every sin is an attempt to fly from emptiness.

-- Simone Weil

Like Me

As much as we hate to admit it (especially to ourselves):

We really would prefer that people be more like ourselves.

...I'm thankful that God doesn't require...or allow it.

Pain is Never Permanent

Pain is never permanent.

-- St. Teresa of Avila

More on pain here...

Unrivaled Beauty

OK, so there are many things beautiful. Regarding my post yesterday, what stands out to me is that what often makes things feel 'unrivaled' in the moment is the moment itself. For example, the next time I am overwhelmed by beauty...a waterfall, a mountain range, a joy, an act of love...I will likely feel the same sense I felt yesterday about the scene of our snow on pines in the woods -- what can match it? Something about beauty itself is that way, isn't it?

Where have you seen 'unrivaled' beauty?

Snow on Pine

Snow on pine is nearly an unrivaled beauty.

Soul - Eternal Piece of Private Property?

Modern Christianity, then, has become as specialized in its organizations as other modern organizations, wholly concentrated on the industrial shibboleths of ‘growth',’ counting its success in numbers, and on the very strange enterprise of ‘saving’ the individual, isolated, and disembodied soul. Having witnessed and abetted the dismemberment of the households, both human and natural, by which we have our being as creatures of God, as living souls, and having made light of the great feast and festival of Creation to which we were bidden as living souls, the modern church presumes to be able to save the soul as an eternal piece of private property. It presumes moreover to save the souls of people in other countries and religious traditions, who are often saner and more religious than we are. And always the emphasis is on the individual soul. Some Christian spokespeople give the impression that the highest Christian bliss would be to get to Heaven and find that you are the only one there—that you were right and all the others wrong. Whatever its twentieth-century dress, modern Christianity as I know it is still at bottom the religion of Miss Watson, intent on a dull and superstitious rigmarole by which supposedly we can avoid going to ‘the bad place’ and instead go to ‘the good place.’ One can hardly help sympathizing with Huck Finn when he says, ‘I made up my mind I wouldn’t try for it.’.

-- Wendell Berry

Among other things, an interesting adjective is used here, in an effort to make a strong and (I believe) well-intentioned, if not astute, point.  Note the use of the word 'modern' Christianity...as opposed to something else.  Given the voracity of these charges, what is the Christianity that became modern?

There is risk here.  A risk that such things take on a philosophical transcendence from which a return to the utility of daily living never occurs.  What action is needed?  What action is required?  What keeps this from just being another amusement of intellectual controversy?

We Don't Know

We don't know what any given day will bring. Unexpected pleasantry, joy. Devastating news for ourselves or someone we love. A success; a failure. Significant inconvenience or relief. Perhaps today will simply be more of the same than something different.

Without knowing what, but knowing that anything is possible today, how do I want to live it?

Even if I do know of something significant today, how do I want to live it?

The greatest privilege God gives to you is the freedom to approach Him at any time.

-- Wesley L. Duewel

Anxiety About Losing the Next Generation

Another helpful read from Christianity Today addresses the generational concern about the transmission of faith.  Citing what might at first blush appear too simplistic, Stanley Hauerwas says:

The future of the church is not found in things like this; the future is doing the same thing Sunday after Sunday.

...some may have heard enough already.  But a more careful consideration is warranted.  The article's author, Anthony Baker, goes on:

If young church-goers are coming of age thinking they can trade the gospel message for participation in social causes, and demean the creeds and Communion as disposable husks, then something is indeed broken.

We are misguided, if we assume that getting acculturation right depends on constant novelty.  Teaching children and adults to work with the gospel's words about God, to speak the traditional yet constantly new language of the Christian faith, is the only real "fix" for what ails us.

What children today desire, according to research, is "the realness of authenticity of faith".  What we give them instead is a hastily painted undersea mural.  In the memorable words of Kenda Creasy Dean and Ron Foster, young people "look to the church to show them something, someone, capable of turning their lives inside out and the world upside down".  Most of the time we have offered them pizza.

Read more here...

Wonder and Trust

Wonder with the heart and trust with the mind,
until you can do both with both.

Christian Meditation

How unfortunate that we today know so little of the vast literature on Christian mediation by faithful believers throughout the centuries!

While Foster notes meditation is:

...utterly, utterly up to God.

He also laments:

...if certain chambers of our heart have never experienced God's healing touch, perhaps it is because we have never welcomed the divine Scrutiny.

-- Richard Foster

Gospel is Nothing...Until

The gospel is nothing until I hear it addressed to me.

-- Martin Luther

Prayer - Descending

To pray is to descend with the mind into the heart.

-- Theophan the Recluse

What do we really mean when we refer to the 'mind' and the 'heart'?  What distinguishes these two things?  How would you describe it?

...with some of that work in hand, how would you then relate it back to prayer?

Leonard Cohen -- Old Ideas

Click image to take a listen to a couple of his new songs...

Here is a link Andy Whitman's review...a worthy read.

Poetry

We have a splendid heritage of Christian poetry in English that most church members live and die without ever reading or hearing about.

-- Wendell Berry

Faith and Reason

Many people today act like a someone created a peace treaty between reason and faith after reason won the war.  Reason cedes territory to faith, as long as faith relinquishes its rational claims.  Reason is in the realm of public, objective truth, while faith is relegated to the realm of private experience and personal therapy.

We live in a world that assumes that reason is unbiased, when in fact our reason itself is enslaved to naturalism:  a denial of the world's dependence on God for its creation and preservation, much less redemption.

When it comes to faith, you can believe whatever you want, as long as you don't think it's true for everyone else. You can have faith in whatever makes you happy, as long as you don't presume to evaluate my faith.  After all, it's mine: deeply personal and not open to public inspection.  We have all experienced a culture that identifies reason with naturalism and faith with feeling.

Religion and spirituality are all about what we feel and think deep within our precious, delightful, individual souls.  While the true God calls us outdoors into a history that sweeps us into it wake.

-- Michael Horton

More from this good article here...

Secrets and Truth

You are the God from whom no secret can be hid,
and we are a people with many secrets,
    that we want to tell for the sake of our lives,
    that we dare not tell because they are deep and painful.
But they are our secrets...and they count for much;
    they are our truth...rooted deep in our lives.

You are the God of all truth,
    and now we bid you heed our truth,
    about which we will not bear false witness...
        The truth of grief unresolved,
        the truth of pain unacknowledged,
        the truth of fear too child-like,
        the truth of hate, as powerful as it is deep,
        the truth of being taken advantage of,
            and being used,
            and manipulated,
            and slandered.

We trust the great truth of your wonderous love,
    but we will not sit still for it,
    UNTIL you hear us.
Our truth -- heard by you -- will make us free.

So be the God of all truth, even ours,
    we pray in the name of Jesus,
    who is your best kept secret of hurt.  Amen.

-- Walter Brueggeman, January 14, 1999

Let Hope Run You Over, too

I would encourage you to read this post.  It is familiar to the human (and my) experience...not constantly, but at one point or another, very common and seemingly universal (not necessarily the exact circumstance, but the perspectives we all share when we are in deep pain).  I have experienced it...the depths of wondering how to go on in midst of pain and the depths of knowing the joy of a redeemed perspective of that pain (and the tears of both).  I continue to think about the role of pain in our lives...what it does to us, what it does for us.  This adds to value to it.  Read it.  Save it.  Share this hope...and let it run you over, too.  ...you have been or will be in both places described, at one point or another in this life.

“I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”

-- John 16:33 

Penalty of Affluence

The penalty of affluence is that it cuts one off from the common lot, common experience, and common fellowship.

-- Arnold Toynbee

This is really worth thinking about, especially since it is the 'common' that we have become so driven to get away from. Why? What do we believe this distance achieved will afford us?  Something better...than everyone else gets?  

More often than not, affluence seems to foster distance between people.  Having it often makes me feel better than you, not having it often makes me feel that you are better than me.  'Better than', either way, is a problem...it is an illusion.

Parenthood - TV Show

Wow, another pretty excellent episode this week.  Really hard not to recommend this program - profoundly human.  This one will make you wince, laugh, and cry...like many episodes do.

Reputation / Character

Your reputation is who people think you are, your character is who you really are.

-- John Wooden

Dalai Lama on Humanity

In light of this, are there any changes you would like to make this year?