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.

Sunday Afternoon Prayer: How Long, O Lord?

"How long, O Lord?  Will you forget me forever?"  (Psalm 13:1)

This is one of my favorite musical settings of Psalm 13, which is one of my favorite psalms.  I know the song from the wonderful collection Psalms for All Seasons.

How long, O Lord, will you forget
an answer to my prayer?
No tokens of your love I see,
your face is turned away from me;
I wrestle with despair.

How long, O Lord, will you forsake
and leave me in this way?
When will you come to my relief?
My heart is overwhelmed with grief,
by evil night and day.

How long, O Lord? But you forgive
with mercy from above.
I find that all your ways are just,
I learn to praise you and to trust
in your unfailing love.

Text: Barbara Wollett

Tune: Christopher Norton

More information at Hymnary.org

Sunday Afternoon Prayer: A Prayer of Resurrection

It has been a long winter for me, and a friend knew I needed some beauty in my life.  She gave me Mary Oliver’s newest book of poetry, A Thousand Mornings: Poems.  In this book I found a poem that gave me an image and a prayer for my life.  It points to the hope of resurrection, which makes it a good prayer for today.

Hurricane

It didn’t behave

like anything you had

ever imagined.  The wind

tore at the trees, the rain

fell for days slant and hard.

The back of the hand

to everything.  I watched

the trees bow and their leaves fall

and crawl back into the earth.

As though, that was that.

This was one hurricane

I lived through, the other one

was of a different sort, and

lasted longer.  Then

I felt my own leaves giving up and

falling.  The back of the hand to

everything.  But listen now to what happened

to the actual trees;

toward the end of the summer they

pushed new leaves from their stubbed limbs.

It was the wrong season, yes,

but they couldn’t stop.  They

looked like telephone poles and didn’t

care.  And after the leaves came

blossoms.  For some things

there are no wrong seasons.

Which is what I dream of for me. 

              

The Waiting of Holy Saturday

Entrance to Church of the Sepulchre,
where tradition says Jesus died and was buried

Today is Holy Saturday, the day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.  I keep seeing things on Facebook starting to celebrate Easter, and it seems too soon for me.  I wonder what that it was like for the women and disciples on the day after Jesus died.

I imagine them huddled together, maybe in the same upper room where just a few days before they had celebrated Passover together or maybe they went back to Mary, Martha, and Lazarus’ home in Bethany.  It was the Sabbath, so maybe they went to the local synagogue to pray.  I wonder if they could get the words off their tongue, or if they just got stuck in their throat.  Or maybe they stayed at home so the religious authorities wouldn’t decide to come for them next.

They were grieving.  There was no other choice.  They couldn’t know that when the women went to the tomb the next morning, they would find it empty.  They couldn’t even dream that it would be a possibility.  And so they waited, full of grief and questions.  Unsure of what was happening.  Unable to see beyond the darkness.

There are times in life that feel like that day.  When darkness and questions surround us and we can’t see what the future might hold.  Times of waiting and wondering, when we can’t see beyond the darkness that surrounds us.  

For the women and the disciples, God was working in an amazing way.  Preparing to change the world with the resurrection.  But they couldn’t see that yet. 

This week, I found this quote: "We thought waiting was a parenthesis. It was not. God was working, only we couldn't see it" (The Emotionally Healthy Church by Peter Scazzero, pg. 173).  God was working on Holy Saturday.  I trust that God works in the dark times of our lives, the times that feel like parenthesis, the times we can’t see beyond the darkness. 

I don’t want to skip to celebrating the resurrection yet, because the times of waiting and wondering are important.  They are times that the Holy Spirit can work in us, preparing for new things to come.       

Photo by Michael Plutchok, used under a Creative Commons License.  http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_Talit,_Keffiyeh_and_Palestinian_scraf.jpg

On the Church Calendar

When I lived in China, I went shopping with a teammate and some students for Christmas decorations.  As we went from booth to booth, sorting through the over-glittered window decorations and artificial Christmas trees, I saw an artificial wreath.  I was struck with an idea, “I can make an advent wreath!”  We always had an advent wreath at home when I was growing up, and my mom found various devotionals for us to use during the season.  Once I tracked down some purple candles, the advent wreath helped me to focus on the season.  In the morning darkness, I would like the candles and be reminded that “the people walking in darkness have seen a great light” (Isaiah 9:2).  That was a particularly dark season of the year for a variety of reasons, and the simple candles gave me hope and peace in the midst of it.

Advent is just one season in the church calendar, the way that the church tells time.  Growing up, although we did observe Advent, we really only paid attention to some parts of the church calendar.  But as I have lived with the church calendar longer, it has become an important way for me to order my life.  A Lutheran source says, “People order time in various ways, often based on the rhythms of nature. The church organizes time by the church year. It tells the story of God, who is beyond time, acting in history – above all through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.”  

This way that the church organizes time shapes us.  It doesn’t happen overnight, but through the years we are oriented to get the full view of God’s work in the world.  Instead of organizing our life by when we get to take vacation from our work or have to buy lots of gifts, we organize our life by Jesus life, death, and resurrection.  Instead of being forced to be happy all of the time, we have a variety of seasons with different timbres.  The church calendar is countercultural.  It continually points us towards Christ and helps us to meditate on his work.

And the church calendar is a good teaching tool.  It is simple enough for kids to learn.  The colors associated with each season give us a visual way to engage the story.  It tells God’s story.  This past Sunday was Christ the King (or Reign of Christ) Sunday.  We were reminded that Jesus reigns and that all parts of our life are under God’s authority.  What better message on a weekend of obsessive consumerism? 

This Sunday, the first Sunday of Advent, I will remember the start of the church year.  The way God sent his son to earth.  And I will remember again that the “people walking in darkness have seen a great light.”  I am thankful for the church calendar that helps me to pay attention, to remember, to focus on Christ.   

 

Calendar image copyright © 2011 Michele Quigley, http://www.family-centered.com/living/2011/11/printable-liturgical-calendar/, accessed 27 November 2012.  

Used under a Creative Commons License.