Tag: spiritual practice

Divinity in Daily Life: Busy Times as Spiritual Practice

by Rev. Teresa Blythe

To get better at something we consider challenging, we have to practice. You know what’s hard for me in spiritual direction? Exploring with a client ways to deepen in relationship with God when they are truly and unavoidably busy. Spiritual directors are not “fixers,” yet I’m always tempted to suggest ways to squeeze more time out of a packed person’s day. Never, ever have my suggestions on this when I gave them worked. I’m especially cautious about doing this to caregivers of people who are ill, elderly, disabled or who have young children in their lives.

As I was reading Mirabai Starr’s amazing book, Wild Mercy: Living the Fierce and Tender Wisdom of the Women Mystics, I came across her beautiful reflection on this. She tells the story of her friend Asha, mother to four girls, who came to the conclusion that “unless she focused on parenting as a spiritual practice, she would have no spiritual life.” (p 122) Overworked people could substitute any number of responsibilities for the word “parenting” in that statement.

That’s the reality! If we say that all of life is spiritual, then the practice of daily life is a good part of our spiritual practice. For caregivers, the act of giving unconditional love to your loved one has to connect you to God. It just has to! Especially since those of us who are Christians constantly refer to God as Comforter, Restorer, Father and Mother.

What part of your life do you need to begin to see and experience as spiritual practice? Is it cooking a healthy meal? Taking an afternoon walk? Sharing tea with a friend? Or maybe even staring at the wall when you are too tired to do anything but.

I have always loved how spiritual director and storyteller Mark Yaconelli looks at it. He is fond of asking people what daily activities really get them excited? Then when they name it, he says, “go and do that.” Do it with all the exuberance and life you have.

I’m convinced that’s the kind of practice that makes the Divine One happy.

Contemplative Practice in UCC: Becoming Still to Encounter the Still-Speaking God

by Rev. Teresa Blythe

The denomination I am ordained in–United Church of Christ—has a catchphrase “God is still speaking,” which means God continues, throughout all of time, to reveal Godself to us, just as God did to the people of Israel in the ancient near east and in the time of Jesus.

For a long time, the motto was mostly used to counter those brands of Christianity that tried to say the Bible is the inerrant and infallible word of God and it is all we need to know from God and about God. And, because we don’t take everything in scripture as the last word, my denomination is known for its social justice “firsts.” [i]

The UCC’s social action bona fides are not in question. However, our commitment to contemplative spiritual practices has not been as robust. Which is why this week’s news that delegates of the UCC’s General Synod (our big convention that occurs every 2 years) approved a resolution calling on the wider church to base its activism on a life of foundational spiritual practices.

Spiritual directors and spiritual formation teachers in the UCC are ecstatic. We’ve been talking about this for a long time! One part of the resolution reads, “Contemplation without action fuels narcissism, and action without contemplation is a recipe for bitterness and spiritual depletion.” The resolution asks churches to follow the example of Jesus and provide times of silence, meditation and solitude to foster “intimate relationship with God.”

The resolution was brought forward by two young UCC leaders—Rev. Matt Carriker and Denson Staples, a member in discernment, both from the Southern New England Conference. Carriker told delegates about a conversation he had with a woman who had tried to bring an awareness of contemplative practice into the life of her church, but found people resisted for one reason for another. Carriker asked, “How can our churches live out both the contemplative and activist dimensions of our faith?”

The resolution is already creating ripples of interest. This past Sunday, the pastor at First UCC Phoenix, Rev. Susan Valiquette opened her sermon with the news of the resolution and encouraged the congregation to balance its activist work with a look inward, suggesting that members consider prayer, meditation, chanting, fasting, tithing, meditative reading of scripture and…..spiritual direction.

To embrace that “God is still speaking” is to also ask the question “How are we listening and responding?” Before we can adequately respond, we need to carefully listen and discern what what work this Still-Speaking God is inviting each of us to.

Rev. Teresa Blythe is a spiritual director, educator and author based in Phoenix. To learn more about spiritual direction, visit her website at www.teresablythe.net.

[1] First act of civil disobedience in the colonies—a protest against an unjust tax on tea; first ordained African American pastor by a Protestant denomination—Lemuel Haynes in 1785; first integrated anti-slavery society in 1846 when Lewis Tappan of the Amistad movement organized the American Missionary Association; first woman pastor in 1853—Antoinette Brown; ordination of the first openly gay minister, Rev. William R. Johnson, in 1972; and the first Christian denomination to support gay marriage on July 4, 2005.

Laying Out the Napkins

by Karen Richter

There are a couple of questions that have captured my imagination in adulthood. The first one is “Do I want a contemplative life?” This question came to me in the midst of training as a spiritual director at Hesychia. The program (it’s awesome, by the way) assumes that participants are approaching maturity in their spiritual practice. My Hesychia cohort and my own spiritual director have been immense help in wrestling with this question… which remains open for me and serves as a guidepost.

The second question is “What does contemplation during the season of raising children look like?” This too is an open question, but I will share with you one answer that I’ve discovered.

Contemplation is laying out the napkins.

My children are older (22, 17, and 13 yikes) but most nights we still sit down together to a meal that I’ve prepared. Often evenings feel hurried. People have places to be and things they want do be doing. Yet there’s a moment – the microwave has beeped and the pasta has drained. The carrots are cut and the sauce has thickened. Everything is ready. But I pause. I lay out napkins and fill water glasses. I pause and I breathe before I call everyone to dinner.

It’s nothing, really. Just seconds, a mere moment of being present and grateful. Silent retreats and long sessions of prayer might be a larger part of my life in another season. For now, I’ll continue laying out the napkins.

Voting as a Spiritual Discipline

by Karen Richter

One of the core purposes of spiritual practice is to remember who we are.

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
    the moon and the stars that you have established;
 what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
    mortals that you care for them?
 
Yet you have made them only slightly less than divine,
    and crowned them with glory and honor.
~ Psalm 8

We struggle to remember our worth: a little lower than the angels. We struggle to remember our humble embodiment: to dust we shall return. Sometimes we experience both sides of this tension moment by moment in a single day!

Humble and as temporary as the grass… and yet.

Of infinite worth, in the image of Creative Mystery… and yet.

So, vote next week if you haven’t already.

Voting as a Spiritual Discipline by Karen Richter, Southwest Conference United Church of Christ

Vote? What? Maybe this feels like a leap. Maybe I’m reaching (picture in your mind my family and friends nodding vigorously). Electing leaders is a tremendous task. The voting booth is holy ground, an acknowledgement of our respect for democracy, a nod to our common humanity and our shared citizenship responsibilities. And yet… my little vote is one of millions, the proverbial drop in a bucket. Voting is a way to remember who we are. Of course, we vote prayerfully. Of course, we vote our values as people of faith. But the act of voting itself – participating in the ground of our communal life – can call us to balance between our humanness and our divine source.

I’ve heard our General Minister and President Rev. Dr John Dorhauer describe the United Church of Christ as a truly democratic institution. So maybe on November 6, instead of rocking the vote, we can sacred the vote.

Do you think the poll workers will scold me if I kick my shoes off before going into my voting booth?

A Prayer for Today:

God of Hopeful Tomorrows – Renew our faith in voting. Strengthen our fight to honor the rights of all. Set fire in our hearts a vision of our communities, state, and nation united in compassion and action. Walk with us into the voting booth and then out into the world. Amen.

Praying for Our Enemies

by Teresa Blythe

If we are to love our enemies, as Jesus emphatically taught, we ought to keep them in our prayers. It’s the last thing many of us want to do these days.

Who is my enemy?

People who strive to be good don’t like to think we have enemies. Your enemy is someone who is working against you; someone who does not have your best interest at heart; perhaps someone who hurt you and shows no remorse. Part of being human is admitting that, yes, we are holding some grudges against certain people for how they treat us. Even if we don’t like the term “enemy,” we probably do have one or two! It’s easier to ignore those who we might label enemy than to hold them in the presence of God as we pray or meditate.

Do you pray for your enemies?

Have you done any deep spiritual work around loving and praying for enemies? If not, the first step might be to simply ask God to assist you in compassion for them. Jesus loved to pray, so if you are a Jesus follower, why not ask him to pray in you or teach you to pray for those who hurt or rebuke you?

I’m one of those who likes to pretend I have no enemies, therefore, I don’t need to pray for them! And then I look at the news and get so angry at politicians who try to take away affordable health care or I fume about men who sexually harass women. So, yes, I need to pray more for my enemies.

A Prayer Practice to Experiment With

When Donald Trump first became president, I struggled with how to love and pray for political leaders who I feel do not have my best interest at heart. I wrestled with how to create a prayer practice that holds our political leaders — even those I would vote against or work to unseat (maybe especially those) — in the light of God’s presence. At the time I was reading a classic book on Christian healing, “The Healing Light” by Agnes Sanford and she suggested that when we feel overwhelmed by evil or tragedy in the world, pick one person or one situation and pray for that rather than trying to pray for everything that’s going on.

And so I did. I chose one powerful national political leader that I find distasteful (a member of the House of Representatives) and began to pray for him. I chose one who speaks frequently of his Christian faith so I thought maybe, hopefully, he will be open to the transformation that we all need to lower the temperature on this nation’s polarization.

I’ve seen no great transformation in him since I began this prayer, but I do see a change in me. I now see this politician as a person — a troubled person — and one that is in a difficult position. Like my Buddhist friends, I pray “May he be happy, healthy and at peace.”

Another Practice to Try

When you want to believe “a change is gonna come” but are having trouble visualizing it on a national or global level, try asking the Divine — and trusting the Divine — to bring “all good things and all good people to work together” for the good of all. Process theology teaches us that God is constantly weaving our gifts and passions together for God’s purposes, and the more we open ourselves to what God is calling us to do or be, the more we become a part of the process of change.

It can be overwhelming to look around at enemies and consider what they are saying and doing. Finding ways to pray for them may feel futile at first, but it’s transformative work. It’s a way of maintaining hope in the face of chaos.

How do you pray for your enemies?

My Favorite Spiritual Place!

by Jim Cunningham

I know stress up close and personal. I will not bore you with the details.

My spiritual journey has taught me that when stress becomes a problem it is a spiritual “disease or dis-ease.” Stress is normal to life but stress becomes a problem when I forget the resources God has gifted to me and to all of us. My inspiration of my thinking on this is the quote:

“You are not always free to choose the circumstances in which you find yourself in life, but you are always free to choose the attitude with which you will address the situation” – Victor Frankl

Stress also becomes a problem when I hold onto stress.

Consider the photo above…

I use this multiple times a day but at bedtime it become my “spiritual throne!”

What do I do here…

I consciously choose to “let go” of the physical waste my body no longer needs.

If I could not or chose not to “let go” of this waste, it would create pain, disease, and eventually death.

So, this moment on the “throne” invites me to ask what are the stresses… the fears, the anger, guilt, frustration, pain, anxiety, worry, despair, events, people etc. that I have taken in during the day which if I hold onto it will disrupt my sleep, cause me pain, contribute to disease/dis-ease, or contribute to my death.

God help me let go of all of all this and flush it from my body, mind, and spirit. The key to letting go I have learned is a spiritual gift: forgiveness. I can “hold on” or “let go” and the key to letting go is forgiveness.

When my son died the grieving process required a “letting go.” Therefore I had to forgive to find the healing to go on living… this does not mean forgetting. It was a process not a moment in time. I had to forgive death… forgive God for the reality of death… forgive the overwhelming pain… forgive that the future that would be forever different… forgive those who did not understand my journey, etc.

So, not only do I need to forgive myself, or others, but all that contributes to stress… to forgive cancer, forgive my anxiety disorder I live with, forgive chronic pain, forgive accidents, forgive congested traffic, forgive aging, forgive prejudice, forgive ignorance, forgive fear, forgive divorce, forgive being laid-off/unemployed, and on and on…

I can CHOOSE to hold onto the stress in my life life or I can acknowledge it, forgive it and let it go and live fully in the moment! My choice and my choice alone.

I continue to work at letting go everyday. I have found it to be my path to peace. I am grateful to God for all who have helped me learn and live these important life coping skills.

I welcome your thoughts, reactions, your coping insights.

Learn more about me, and how I help others to let go, in my bio.

Sitting in the Simple Gratitude

by Amanda Petersen

Gratitude does not need to be complicated. In fact, practicing gratitude for the simple things actually helps one simplify their life. Acknowledging something simple, like breathing, can heighten one’s awareness of the places where things get complicated. This is especially true for one’s spiritual practices. As beautiful as a practice can be, it can become complicated very easily. Prayer lists can grow very long. The sense of ritual can take over. Certain positions or postures, times, and order can complicate to a point where heart of the practice can be lost. Coming back to the heart of a practice with gratitude is a very powerful spiritual practice. Beginning the prayer list, reading, examen, meditation, or physical practice with gratitude for the heart or why of the practice can shift the whole experience.

One of the main points I like to bring forth in meditation is the most important part of this practice: the fact that everyone there chose to come and sit. It is the act of sitting in my opinion that is the important. Whether the mind clears, or one stays with their breath or mantra, or one leaves feeling peaceful or enlightened, there is a nice benefit, yet the real power in the practice is the choice to sit. I believe that because we choose to sit, and step out of the norm or complications of life, the world is literally a different place when we leave. Beginning with gratitude, appreciation  and acknowledging the Source of one’s life changes the practice from one of doing the practice to one of being with the practice.

Beginning a spiritual practice with gratitude takes the focus off of the doing and moves us into the participation and relationship with God/Love/Divine. That is a wonderful place to dwell. It helps one come back to noticing, savoring and to the gift of Life. I encourage you to begin your spiritual practices grateful for the gift of showing up, sitting down, using time, or just breathing. See if you notice anything different in your practice.

I’d like to end with a poem by Mary Oliver from her book A Thousand Mornings:

Poem of the One World

This morning
the beautiful white heron
was floating along above the water

and then into the sky of
this one world
we all belong to

where everything
sooner or later
is part of everything else

which thought made me feel
for a while
quite beautiful myself.

The simple act of gratitude can change the world. A thank you to Diane Owens for the inspiration of this week’s writing.

Sitting In It

by Amanda Petersen

Ever have one of those weeks?

What does this bring to mind when someone asks you that? Does your mind go to a week filled with upset and trouble? Does your posture and mood change the moment you get a chance to share? How does one sit in the “I wish it were different” and practice “This is the way it is”?

The key word is to sit in it. Again the contemplative journey invites the person to slow down, not solve or ease the pain right away. Instead, the invitation is to get one’s bearings, own where they are, live in the tension. It is so easy to find ways of numbing out. In fact, once one is aware, sometimes all that can be done is to admit they are numbing out right now. Learning to sit in that tension of “I’m not where I want to be right now and I want to immediately get up and fix it” is a deep, deep spiritual practice. So is listening to the questions that come up from that staying still. I think the biggest gift in learning to sit with an imperfect life is, instead of running from it or fighting against it, one can use their energy to be free and learn from it. In a sense, “here you are again dissatisfaction, tell me about yourself today.”

Teresa of Avila spoke of reptiles one must deal with when entering the Interior Castle. Reptiles are the pieces of life, like dissatisfaction, that distract from the Love and Enoughness of God. At first it feels like they are everywhere, yet once on the journey for a while, they only pop up occasionally, not to distract, but to remind the journeyer to listen to their life. Something is calling them to pay attention to the tension of some distraction.

When dissatisfaction or the reality of an imperfect life becomes more of a truth than a problem, or when one gets comfortable in the uncomfortable, then true movement towards Love and Enoughness can happen. There are so many things in the world to create a sense of dissatisfaction that there will be plenty of opportunities to practice. The next time you find yourself in “one of those” weeks or feeling dissatisfied, try just sitting in the uncomfortable and listening to the deeper questions. Let me know what you notice.

As always, you may turn to one of our spiritual directors and coaches to help you hear the deeper invitation.

A Transgender Trinity

by Karen Richter

Have you ever noticed what happens in the gospels when Jesus gets asked a question? The people ask “Jesus, THIS or THAT?” and his reply comes from the side always like a quick and sly slanting pass, pushing the question back on his audience. How many times does Jesus respond to a question with, “well… let me tell you a story about that…”? He has a tendency to leave everyone a bit bewildered, especially the disciples.

  • Who sinned that this man was born blind?
  • Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?
  • Why does this Teacher eat with sinners and tax collectors?
  • Are you the One we have been expecting or shall we wait for another?

In his responses, Jesus begins the training of the disciples in non-dual thinking. Duality thinking that we find so natural and easy is the tendency in the human brain to see things in opposing pairs: good and bad; dark and light; male and female.

Easy, right? If I write the word up, you think “down.” It’s the way our brains are on auto-pilot.

Getting past this is tough work, and I have a lot of empathy for the disciples. In our own time, the Holy Spirit has taken over our training in non-dual thinking.

And the gentle leading of the Spirit over the generations is a gift to us – a gift that includes a strange and wonderful idea: that God’s nature is simultaneously 3 and 1. This seemingly esoteric and even outdated dogma can stretch us into new ways of thinking, if we let it.

There’s an Episcopal mystic whose books I sometimes muddle through – Cynthia Bourgeault. She talks about Trinity as PROCESS rather than PERSON. In other words, the Trinity is about how to think about things rather than about creed and doctrine. Trinitarian thinking is a reconciling approach that interweaves what at first appears to be a dichotomous choice. This kind of thinking is a spiral upward, beyond the either/or. When we get to an impasse – a problem, disagreement, decision – when we feel stuck, it’s an opportunity to look for a reconciling path, a third way.

And it’s this Trinitarian thinking, this PROCESS of sitting with mystery, that is so helpful when talking about gender. We have long misunderstood gender as an either/or scenario, driven by chromosomes and anatomy. The lived experiences of our friends tell us that we are wrong.

Knowing when we are wrong is useful information. What do we do next?

Well, moving away from the gender binary is a SPIRITUAL PRACTICE. If I have friends reading this, they are laughing at this point because I sort of think everything is a spiritual practice.

As with most spiritual practices, getting beyond the gender binary is about building a pause of awareness before our response. When we practice listening to others, when we practice holding open the question of another person’s gender (often this looks like letting go of our curiosity), when we let go of the need to put people into little boxes marked M and F, when we are willing to be vulnerable, willing to admit we’re going to get it wrong sometimes and we hate getting things wrong, when we practice – we train our brains to take a deep breath.

Breathe, and let go.

Over and over.

With much practice and patience, this makes us into a gentle welcoming people. We grow into the welcome that we profess, with trans and gender non-conforming people and with everyone!

A pediatrician friend and I were talking recently about kids who are late bloomers, shorter and smaller than their peers. She said that with her late blooming patients, sometimes there’s an appointment, after a period of growing, that their height and weight finally appear as dots on the standard growth chart curve. And they pause for a little celebration: “Yay! You’re on the chart!”

Just like the disciples, we’re beginners in the Trinity way of thinking – that kind of nondual thinking that led Jesus to respond to questions in that wacky way we love so much, the nondual, Trinity-shaped thinking that can be part of our learning about gender. WE ARE BEGINNERS, but we’re on the chart. Thanks be to God.

Notes and sources:

Cynthia Bourgeault’s book is The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three: Discovering the Radical Truth at the Heart of Christianity.

For fantastic transgender educational resources, see PFLAG’s Straight for Equality project at straightforequality.org/trans.