On Sacred Rhythms

Life has rhythms.  The rhythm of leaves budding, growing, coloring, and dropping.  The rhythm of people growing up, leaving home, marrying, having children, raising children, retiring, and dying.  The rhythm of the sun coming up and sun going down. 

And the spiritual life has rhythms, too.  The rhythm of advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, Pentecost, and ordinary time.  The rhythm of baptism, profession of faith, serving the church.  The rhythm of prayer and Bible reflection. 

Ruth Haley Barton wrote a book called Sacred Rhythms: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation.  It is a book about what are classically called spiritual disciplines.  We might also call them spiritual practices or spiritual rhythms.  They are the practices that give a rhythm to our spiritual life.  Sometimes that rhythm is imperceptible, or we wish that we had a faster rhythm.  But even when we’d choose a different rhythm, God works through them.

Another one of my favorite books about spiritual practices is called Flunking Sainthood.  The author, Jana Riess spent a year focusing on a variety of spiritual practices.  She starts the year as a “lighthearted effort to read spiritual classics while attempting a year of faith-related disciplines like fasting, Sabbath keeping, chanting, and the Jesus Prayer” (pg. ix).  Each month she picks a discipline, reads some spiritual classics related to that discipline and attempts to practice it.  And she struggles, even fails, with all twelve. 

After a few months and a significant life experience, she found that “Although I didn’t see it while I was doing the practices themselves or even while I was writing the chapters in this book, the power of spiritual practice is that it forges you stealthily, as you entertain angels unawares” (Flunking Sainthood, pg. 168).  God used both her attempts at these different practices, and even the process of failing, to shape her to become more Christ-like and more able to reflect Christ to the world.  She, like thousands of Christians before her, discovered the power of spiritual practices, sacred rhythms, to shape Christian life.

Growing up, I don’t remember hearing about spiritual disciplines or spiritual practices as a group or term.  And yet, we had plenty of them.  We read Bible story books or other devotional material after dinner.  My dad sang to us before we went to sleep.  We went to church twice on Sunday.  My parents taught me to tithe.  We took an extended family spring break trip to do hurricane relief in South Carolina.  There were Christian rhythms in our life.  They shaped my Christian life and how I practice my faith. 

As I grew up, some of my rhythms have developed and changed. They have shaped the rhythms of my life as a single woman.  Like Riess, I have certainly failed some.  Over the summer, I’m going to be reflecting on some spiritual practices that have been important in my life, or that I would like to experiment with.  I have plans to explore writing prayers, meeting with a spiritual director, keeping the Sabbath, and doing justice, among others.  I hope that I, and my readers, will learn new rhythms and that those rhythms would shape us to become more Christ-like.  

Drum picture by Martha Riley, used under a Creative Commons License.

Praying hands picture by C Jill Reed, used under a Creative Commons License.