My mom happened upon this tonight…
I’ve been looking for some ways to bring this time of night (daily examen) alive a bit….I really enjoyed the one I went through. You don’t have to sign up for an account – only if you want to keep a journal record online. Looks like a great resource:
http://www.examen.me
You keep us waiting. You, the God of all time, want us to wait for the right time in which to discover who we are, where we must go, who will be with us, and what we must do. So thank you…for the waiting time.
You keep us looking. You, the God of all space, want us to look in the right and wrong places for signs of hope, for people who are hopeless, for visions of a better world that will appear among the disappointments of the world we know. So thank you…for the looking time.
4You keep us loving. You, the God whose name is love, Want us to be like you— to love the lovely and the unlovely and the unlovable; to love without jealousy or design or threat; and, most difficult of all, to love ourselves. So thank you…for the loving time.
And in all this, you keep us. Through hard questions with no easy answers; Through failing where we had hoped to succeed and making impact where we felt we were useless; through the patience and the dreams and the love of others; and through Jesus Christ and his Spirit, you keep us. So thank you…for the keeping time, and for now and forever, Amen.
(Pulled this from an article by Ruth Haley Barton, The Transforming Center)
Further thoughts on liminal space…
It’s a theme that simply will not go away. I get tired of the words for it…but the reality of it? No. That I love. It’s bringing things in my heart alive in ways I’ve never known. There’s not just black and white in the world…and not everything’s gray – it’s bringing a whole spectrum of colors to life. And I’m thankful.
It’s been exactly a year since I was first introduced to the idea of ‘liminal space’…and since then there have been lots of other words and phrases emerge to help define what’s become very real to me.
The landscape of this space has changed over the past year. A lot. But I’m not so sure I have words for it.
A year ago…I was so sure what I was waiting for. There were some very defined things…short term dreams…stuff I was sure would ‘fix’ what I felt was ‘wrong’ with my life. As months passed, there were slow changes…painful in many ways…that led me to a decision to set aside some of those definite things and look at what else God would be working in my heart – what deeper, more eternal things were at stake in the waiting. What deeper, more eternal things I was (am) really waiting for.
Now…I’m not even sure what it is I’m waiting for. I don’t know if that’s good or bad or somewhere in between. It makes me a little less certain of where I am in the journey (is this still liminal space or have I gone somewhere else?). But there still a feeling of being in between…waiting for something, though I’m not sure yet what it is.
Advent is the season of waiting…AND of celebration. In conversation with my spiritual director a couple weeks ago, we explored the idea of “lightening up”. She had told me the previous month that maybe this was something I needed to do :) To live well the challenges of liminal space, but to enter into the joy of it as well. Waiting AND celebration. She said, “Barb, I really think you need to learn to play.”
Something a friend shared recently…about the need to live from the core of who we are…ties in here. And somehow both tie in with yesterday’s post…delighting in God.
So this advent…we’re learning to play.
Happened upon this earlier today.
“Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away with me…” ~ Song of Solomon 2:10
Yesterday morning I woke up late. Too late to spend a significant amount of time on any one thing before church. So I took a shower (when in doubt…take a shower), cleaned up, then had about 20 minutes alone in my room before Mom was ready to walk.
I’ve been meditating on those really beautiful words in Zephaniah…”The Lord your God is with you, he is mighty to save; he will take great delight in you; he will quiet you with his love; he will rejoice over you with singing.” God delighting in me. In…me.
“Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.” I kept turning this over and over in my mind in those first few minutes of the day. Here was an invitation…maybe even a command…to delight in God. In…God.
I’m still pondering the connection between the two meditations.
Anyway…I remembered what Larry Crabb says in SoulTalk about making second things first things. We make “the desires of our heart” the object of our seeking. We seek to obtain the desires of our hearts (soooo often in very “holy” ways)…and loose sight of the First Thing. Delighting in our Father the way He delights in us. Celebrating the God who celebrates us.
Two experiences I’ve had in the last couple days…similar experiences that are affecting me in two completely different ways.
Had a conversation with a friend recently – a friend of my Mom and Dad’s, actually. He’s big on asking questions. That’s great. And he listens attentively. But then the advice follows…and it’s so kindly meant, I know, but one gets the feeling that he’s listening for the purpose of giving advice. It creates a pressure in me to get it right - say the right words and he’ll affirm rather than correct you.
While there’s a part of me that would really like it if someone else could just fix all my issues, when it’s tried…when I’m out on their operating table, so to speak, it’s just not right.
I’m not a broken piece of equipment you can fix!
I came away from the afternoon rather distracted and tired, feeling unheard… misunderstood.
Contrast this to what I experienced the last couple days with a friend in class (I’m in the middle of a class on Spiritual Direction in my masters program…the previous class focused on learning what SD is, this class is all about practicing SD with each other).
I spilled my guts about a lot of stuff and he just listened. He asked questions that pointed my heart and mind to something greater than us. I felt free to speak.
I haven’t really appreciated the freedom and safety of that time until now…with this other experience to provide such a clear contrast.
Both of these guys are Christ followers. Both could be seen as father figures. Both listened. Both asked questions.
But in one place I was trapped, managed, examined, corrected, judged. In the other I was free and safe and listened to and embraced. A WORLD of difference!
Thank GOD for safe people…and may He give me the grace to grow further and further into being that kind of person in the world.
Unless there is this Being…
who is infinitely greater than me,
infinitely good,
infinitely powerful,
infinitely holy,
so completely and utterly NOT ME…
Then my life, as it is, is as good as it’s going to get. Days of fragmented action, nights of distracted sleep, a heart torn in its desire, given to frustrated discipline, nagged by stubborn addictions…obsessions…compulsive behaviors. Despair.
Then the world, as it is, is as good as it’s going to get. Days of starvation and economic crisis, nights of crime committed against the innocent, hearts torn in desire, efforts to make it all better, prisons of addiction of every kind, the silent pain of injustice, war, abuse, consumerism. Despair.
But God IS there. This Being…so much, so infinitely greater than me…greater than any drug lord or national leader or peace activist.
Infititely good.
Infinitely powerful.
Infinitely holy.
So completely and utterly NOT ME. Not you. Not George W. or President Obama or Brittany Spears or Ghandi.
God IS there. God is HERE.
So there is hope. There is hope. There…is…hope.
And despair…turns into brokenness.
And in brokenness we are embraced as Beloved sons and daughters of our infinitely good, powerful, holy Father. In brokenness we become a community of people journeying together, drawing each other deeper into our souls and deeper into our brokenness AND our belovedness.
And so we are changed.
And so the world is changed.
Through relationship that we only find in brokenness.
There is HOPE.
So I was given the opportunity of a lifetime last week to go to my first U2 concert with great friends in Arlington, TX. I’ve so wanted to put words to the experience, but honestly, they just haven’t surfaced yet.
Here’s some amazing video my friend captured from our sweet spot on the floor. Check it out…
I have neglected you, O blog of mine. I’m writing a synthesis paper for the class I’m taking right now…here are some bits of it, kind of a look at what’s been moving around in my heart over the past eight weeks…
How am I letting you be real with me?
The idea of authenticity has become big for me in this class. If regaining a capacity for love is the way toward real and lasting transformation, it is important that I experience God (who is love) as fully God in my life. That means vulnerability.
I have given thought to learning to be real with others so they can be real with me. But what if I am not allowing God to be fully him/herself with me? Translating this to a relationship with God presses me into an intimacy and vulnerability that I have not often experienced in my life. Saying that I can, by my own defensiveness, prevent God from ‘being himself’ with me is a humbling thought. It places God in a rather vulnerable light. It gives me room to accept or reject the omnipotent, omniscient, omni-present Creator of the universe. It also draws attention to areas of resistance deep within my soul.
“He shares himself with us even when we do not know that he is doing so. Life itself communicates him to us” (Barry and Connolly, The Practice of Spiritual Direction). God is continuously present to us, “lowly and meek, yet all powerful” (Celtic Daily Prayer, morning prayer). The idea that life itself is an implicit communication of God (explicit on God’s end…implicit, potentially explicit, on mine) means that every experience of life – whether we perceive it to be good, bad, or anything between or beyond – holds immense value. But “conscious relationship begins when I choose to listen or to look at what the other is doing” (Barry and Conolly). Here it is again – I have the ability to accept God as fully God in my life…or reject him. It is my responsibility to allow the Presence of God, implicit in all of life, to become explicit in my experience. This only happens through intentional exercises in listening and awareness. Spiritual direction. In this practice we learn to let God be fully God to us by engaging with all our experiences (the good the bad and the ugly) so as to let implicit communication become explicit. Not just in choice moments. “How is God leading and loving me in all aspects of my life?…Nothing is outside of God’s breath” (Moon and Benner, Spiritual Direction and the Care of Souls). We learn to live in conscious relationship. Stepping into such mutually vulnerable ground is not easy. There is pain in it because something has to die. But there is also life – abundant, deep, rich, real life.
We need “…a relaxed, humble attitude in which we let go of ourselves and renounce our unconscious efforts to maintain a façade” (Thomas Merton, Spiritual Direction and Meditation). This attitude is what develops as we receive spiritual direction, and it is a process that must be experienced by directors as well as directees. When the director is willing to engage this grace, it more easily seeps into the life of the directee.
Through my devotional reading of Nouwen’s The Return of the Prodigal Son and listening times with my spiritual director, I am coming to realize that there is a deep-seated resistance to this kind of vulnerability. In meditation on the story of the prodigal son in Luke 5, I found myself deeply relating to the plight of the elder son. I could see the love of the father for the younger son, but when he claims love for the elder I could only ask, “Where is it?” The elder son is the dutiful one who stays home, covering up any inclination to leave, any envy of the younger son’s apparent freedom. His brother comes home, warmly welcomed, and when the elder son protests, feeling more than a little overlooked, his father says, “My son, you are with me always and all I have is yours”(Nouwen 2). The elder son is loved, but he is unable to see it. He has, in perhaps a deeper way than his brother, left home. He expects the love of his father to take a particular shape. He is not allowing his father to be real with him and in that resistance, the elder son is unable to fully inhabit his place as son, beloved of the father. And there are walls that hold him inside this place of limitation, inauthentic presence, and skewed perceptions. Walls that need to be torn down. As this takes place, we begin living into the reality that “we are created and in-breathed to life by the Spirit and recognize God’s love as ‘home’” (Jeannette Bakke, Holy Invitations).
If the supposed certainty we cling to is a skewed perception of God (more than likely it is), ambiguity is a key (the only?) way to allowing God to be fully God with us – allowing walls to be torn down. Not only do we not loose Jesus, we finally find him. This clinging to certainty could easily be a form of resistance to allowing God to tear down the walls that hold us inside (away from a more real and authentic existence). We lose our life…to find it.
There is so much beauty in the world. So much that passes by in a day…completely unnoticed. It’s so easy to muddle through the day on auto-pilot, doing the same things we always do and running through the same habits of thought and behavior and…totally miss the sacredness of the moment.
Responding to emails at work.
Answering the phone.
Washing the dishes.
Shoveling popcorn and sloshing out sodas.
Bosses and customers and co-workers…church gatherings and people…even Bible reading, prayer, journaling, silence… when will I finally stop “dealing with” these parts of life and start interacting with them, appreciating them, seeing the sacredness of daily work and of the people who touch my life?
I want to be a wonderer. In ordinary moments.
Recent Comments