BOOK OF THE MONTH: BEFRIENDING SILENCE

Posted on by Lisa Deam

Week Four: The Community of Prayer

Befriending Silence

Reading Carl McColman’s Befriending Silence, I found the two biggest takeaways to be the importance of living a life in community and a life of prayer. These two ways of life might at first seem like opposites. Contemplative prayer, after all, is often undertaken in solitude. If we happen to be writers, we spend even more time alone!

Yet McColman reminds us that prayer, even silent prayer, makes us part of a larger community. This is a gift and, for non-monastics, sometimes a challenge. Here’s what McColman has to say about community:

The Cistercian way of life rests on the idea that spirituality needs community.

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Monks and nuns enjoy the support of a community that prays together multiple times every day, where everyone is expected to take part in the liturgy in a public way. Those of us who are not monastics . . . do not have an abbot or abbess who will check up on us if we start skipping prayers, so we have to be truly intentional about our decision to make prayer a priority.

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Christian prayer always has a communal or social dimension to it, even when we pray in solitude . . . Prayer makes a difference in our lives, not just in terms of personal spiritual growth but also as a means by which we discover God’s love and compassion expressed for the world.

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When we pray for our family, friends, neighbors, coworkers, our community and nation, as well as our adversaries, enemies, competitors and opponents, the space to slowly, gradually grow in compassion and love opens within us.

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Read more here.

For reflection:

McColman Week 4

FEATURED ARTICLE: RECLAIMING THE RHYTHM OF WORK AND REST

Posted on by Lisa Deam

Have you noticed how many people talk or even boast about being busy? Work and productivity, it seems, are our new status symbols. If you’re not constantly working, you’re lazy or, worse, failing in life. We no longer know how to slow down and rest. I’d go further and say that we’ve lost the meaningful rhythm of work and rest that defines a healthy spiritual life.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, a Silicon Valley strategist, suggests that it’s time to rethink rest. He comes at rest from a productivity angle, but what he says applies to creatives and people of faith, too. As summarized in a recent article, Pang says that rest can, paradoxically, help us get more done. It is not simply the negation of work:

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[O]ur cultural view of rest influences our relationship to rest, creating an aversion—the mistaken belief that rest is for the weak. Because we mistake rest as the opposite of work, we avoid it. This view, however, is flawed.

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The critical thing to recognize is that when we are letting our minds wander, when our minds don’t have any particular thing they have to focus on, our brains are pretty darn active. When you do things like go for a long walk, your subconscious mind keeps working on problems. The experience of having the mind slightly relaxed allows it to explore different combinations of ideas, to test out different solutions. And then once it has arrived at one that looks promising—that is what pops into your head as an aha! moment. The people I looked at are able to construct daily schedules that allow them to draw on that process in little increments.

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Our society’s cult of busyness means that we must fight for rest, Pang says:

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Rest is not something given to you to fill in the cracks between work . . . You have to resist the lure of busyness, make time for rest, take it seriously, and protect it from a world that is intent on stealing it.

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Pang even suggests that a (gasp) shorter work day would help us to be more productive.

I’ve always thought that from a faith perspective, rest is not just a productivity issue but also a trust issue. Adele Calhoun, who defines rest as a spiritual discipline, writes, “Rest can be a spiritual act—a truly human act of submission to and dependence on God who watches over all things as we rest.”

Have you made rest an intentional part of your spiritual and creative life?

Read more.

WEEKLY PRAYER

Posted on by Lisa Deam

A prayer before writing or teaching from Christina Rossetti (1830-1894):

Lord Jesus Merciful and Patient, grant us grace, I beseech Thee, ever to teach in a teachable spirit; learning along with those we teach, and learning from them whenever Thou so pleasest. Word of God, speak to us, speak by us, what Thou wilt. Wisdom of God, instruct us, instruct by us if and whom Thou wilt. Eternal Truth, reveal Thyself to us, reveal Thyself by us, in whatsoever measure Thou wilt.

Source

BOOK OF THE MONTH: BEFRIENDING SILENCE

Posted on by Lisa Deam

Week 3: Letting Go
Befriending Silence

In Befriending Silence, Carl McColman explores three kinds of monastic prayer that can help us today. In previous posts, we looked at the gifts of lectio divina and the Divine Office. We now turn our attention to contemplative (silent) prayer.

Contemplative prayer gives us much-needed peace and inner rest. When we pray in silence before God, McColman says, “The Holy Spirit invites us to gently set aside our attachments to our interior drama so that we might rest in God’s unchanging stability.”

Since it is mostly without words or particular agendas, contemplative prayer offers an additional benefit that can also be a challenge: letting go of our all-pervasive need for control.

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Contemplation challenges us not only as individuals but as a society because ours is a society that rewards assertive, take-charge, type A behavior, and we want to do spirituality in the same way.

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Think of it this way: every conversation requires both speaking and listening, otherwise it is one-sided. The Divine Office and other verbal prayers invite us to speak to God, while contemplation gives us the space to listen.

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Contemplative prayer fosters an inner spirit of acceptance and receptivity. It reminds us that we are not in the driver’s seat when it comes to prayer (or indeed any aspect of spiritual living). When we pray in silence, we actually embody humility in our prayer. We make ourselves available to God but without presuming to tell God what we want to have happen or what we think should happen. Rather, we shut up and let God take the lead.

Read more.

For reflection:

McColman - week 3

FEATURED ARTICLE: THE LOST LIFE OF LISTENING

Posted on by Lisa Deam

A couple weeks ago, we explored a needed Christian virtue: humility. This week’s featured article takes a look at a common vice: pride, or what the Latin fathers called Superbia. Author Paul J. Pastor believes pride to be the defining vice of our age. In an article in ChristianWeek, he defines pride not (only) as a nose-in-the-air type of attitude, but also as self-obsession. Many of us are tempted to think about ourselves so much (whether good thoughts or bad) that we miss what’s going on in the lives of those around us.

We might expect the antidote to pride to be a dose of humility. Perhaps it is. But Pastor believes another important corrective can be found in the practice of listening — of being truly attentive to another person.

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As I look around our world, and indeed within my own often-dark heart, I am convinced that listening is the needed thing. Nothing can replace it, nothing can give a short cut to it.

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Pride makes true attentiveness impossible. And in the reverse, true attentiveness sends pride fleeing like shadows before a floodlight.

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To listen requires us to set aside our view of ourselves as the unrecognized expert or the one of right opinion. To listen requires a measure of personal security that few of us have. To listen, in short, requires love, and love must be learned from the Great Lover.

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In fact, listening to others begins with listening to God:

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Listening was, you remember, the one command given to the disciples on the Mount of Transfiguration:

A voice came from the cloud, saying, “This is my Son, whom I have chosen; listen to him.” (Luke 9:35 (NIV)

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[A]s deeply as I believe anything, I believe this: if we cannot listen to God, we cannot know him. Know about him? Sure! But know him? Never without presence, never without quieting out hearts and turning to him in humility. It is in listening to God that we learn the skill that can be salt and light to our world.

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In short: listening can help us be superb while letting go of Superbia.

Read more.

WEEKLY PRAYER

Posted on by Lisa Deam

A prayer from Clement of Rome (1st century):

We beseech thee, Master, to be our helper and protector.
Save the afflicted among us; have mercy on the lowly;
raise up the fallen; appear to the needy; heal the ungodly;
restore the wanderers of thy people;
feed the hungry; ransom our prisoners;
raise up the sick; comfort the faint-hearted.

Source

BOOK OF THE MONTH: BEFRIENDING SILENCE

Posted on by Lisa Deam

Week 2: Baby Steps Toward a Life of Prayer

Befriending SilenceIn Befriending Silence, author and Lay Cistercian Carl McColman shares with us the gifts of Cistercian spirituality. Not surprisingly, many of these gifts center on prayer. “Artists paint, doctors heal, businessmen sell, and Cistercians pray,” McColman writes.

The monastic commitment to a life of prayer can inspire those of us “in the world” to make this gift an important part of our spiritual life.

[P]art of the gift of Cistercian spirituality becoming available to people outside the cloister is a challenge to pray, to seek intimacy with God every day–not in just a perfunctory way but as a meaningful part of each day.

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With prayer we express love of Christ, and it is also a gift, in a very mutual way; for prayer, like all spiritual blessings, is a gift from God. Yet when we pray, we give ourselves back to God. ‘Here I am, Lord.’

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There are several different kinds of prayer. Last week’s post touched on lectio divina, a way of praying with the Bible. Also important in monastic life is the Divine Office, the prayers and other readings marking the hours of each day. McColman believes that this liturgy offers a poetic and insightful prayer structure for everyone. Because the Divine Office can be complicated, McColman advocates starting small. He suggests the following practice based on the psalms, which form the heart of the Divine Office:

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Here is a simple, yet effective, way to begin a practice of daily prayer. Every day for the next five months, pray one psalm a day. That’s it. Each individual psalm can easily be prayed in a single sitting.

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Keep in mind that Jesus prayed the psalms. Jews and Christians of every generation have found inspiration, solace, hope, comfort, and challenge in this biblical prayer book. When you pray the psalms, you are truly partaking in a prayer tradition that spans the globe and the centuries.

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Don’t worry if you don’t ‘feel’ the particular emotion that is expressed in any one particular psalm. Your prayer is meant to operate on a deeper level than mere feeling.

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Read more.

For reflection:

McColman - week 2 (alt)

WEEKLY PRAYER

Posted on by Lisa Deam

A prayer from Thomas à Kempis (1380-1471):

Grant me most sweet and loving Jesus, to rest in You above every other creature, above all health and beauty, above all glory and honor, above all power and dignity, above all knowledge and precise thought, above all wealth and talent, above all joy and exultation, above all fame and praise, above all sweetness and consolation, above all hope and promise, above all merit and desire, above all gifts and favors You give and shower upon me, above all happiness and joy that the mind can understand and feel, and finally, above all angels and archangels, above all the hosts of heaven, above all things visible and invisible, and above all that is not You, my God.

Source

FEATURED ARTICLE: RECOVERING THE VIRTUE OF HUMILITY

Posted on by Lisa Deam

When we as Christians need to be reminded that humility is a virtue, we might be in a spot of trouble. Such is the point made in a recent New York Times op-ed. The author, Peter Wehner, laments the dearth of humility today and seeks to recall Christians to this quiet virtue. He’d like to see more of it not just in our churches but also in civic life and especially in the political sphere. I certainly second that motion.

I was especially interested in the way Wehner defines two kinds of humility: moral and epistemological:

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I have become convinced that Christians should be characterized by moral humility. This doesn’t mean followers of Jesus should be indifferent to a moral order grounded in eternal truths or unable to judge some things right and others wrong. But they ought to be alert first and foremost to their own shortcomings — to the awareness of how wayward our own hearts are, how even good acts are often tainted by selfish motives, how we all struggle with brokenness in our lives.

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Epistemological humility should also characterize Christians . . . This doesn’t mean one ought to live in a state of perpetual doubt and uncertainty. If we did, we could never speak up for justice and moral truth. It does mean, however, that we’re aware that what we know is at best incomplete. “We see through a glass darkly” is how St. Paul put it in one of his letters to the Corinthians: We know only in part.

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Perhaps we could usefully think of humility as a spiritual practice, one that grounds us and helps us relate to God and our community. Might we also be called to humility as writers? Surely so. As we put words to screens and paper, we come up against all that we do not know and cannot express. We rely on one another and on God to try to come up with a fuller picture.

Read this op-ed in the New York Times.