pondering love

"Let them ponder the love of the Lord..."
(A phrase from Benedictine Daily Prayer that grabbed at me this morning)

Richard Rohr or someone I read recently (been doing my share of reading, you know) said that the grace-filled life, this way of spiritual formation, must be grounded in an experience and awareness of God's unfathomable love.
To ponder this love...would, I think, catapult us into a fuller experience of it - where we are more aware and attentive to His love throughout the day.

Ponder the love of the Lord. Ponder. I love that word!

The love of the Lord - where do I see evidence of it? I could look at various material and circumstantial provisions... perhaps He does show His love for us in this way. But it's got to go far beyond this, or we'd have to say He doesn't much love the child soldiers of Africa or the starving masses in Haiti. Perhaps His love is more evident in the many gifts we overlook. The momentary treasures (He is, afterall, found in the Present Moment) that we take for granted (this may sound romanticized, but bear with me)... the feel of the wind on our cheeks, the warmth of the sun on our backs...the gifts of sight and hearing, color and sound. Breath. Oh, what about this idea that He created our bodies to be as dependent on breath as our souls are dependent on Him? Or the knowledge that His longing for full relationship with me is deeper and more cutting than our most severe pangs of homesickness or any other tension we are forced to embrace.

Here….Nouwen knocks ‘em dead every time:
“This inexhaustible love between the Father and the Son includes and yet transcends all forms of love known to us. It includes the love of a father and mother, a brother and sister, a husband and wife, a teacher and friend. Bit it also goes far beyond the many limited and limiting human experiences of love we know. It is a caring yet demanding love. It is a supportive yet severe love. It is a gentle yet strong love. It is a love that gives life yet accepts death. In this divine love Jesus was sent into the world, to this divine love Jesus offered himself on the cross. This all-embracing love, which epitomizes the relationship between the Father and the Son, is a divine Person, coequal with the Father and the Son. It has a personal name. It is called the Holy Spirit.” (Making All Things New 48-49)

Questions in my journal that I plan to follow up on:
-Where do I see evidence of His love throughout the day – in every moment and place?
-If I were to find or create a picture that represents His love (as best I can understand it), what would it be like? What would it in/exclude? What objects, colors, shapes, textures?

Jedidiah

Found this via Relevant Magazine yesterday....it's exciting to see businesses buiding stronger foundations in social justice.


Jedidiah Clothing: Who We Are from Jedidiah Clothing on Vimeo.

Innovative spirituality?

Doing a little research on creativity for the quarterly newsletter (at work), I've stumbled across this bit from Wikipedia....

"Creativity is typically used to refer to the act of producing new ideas, approaches or actions, while innovation is the process of both generating and applying such creative ideas in some specific context.
In the context of an organization, therefore, the term innovation is often used to refer to the entire process by which an organization generates creative new ideas and converts them into novel, useful and viable commercial products, services, and business practices, while the term creativity is reserved to apply specifically to the generation of novel ideas by individuals or groups, as a necessary step within the innovation process."

I wonder how this translates to spiritual formation? The ideas aren't historically novel, in that we're talking about practices that have been cultivated for thousands of years. But as we learn about these practices, these means of being conformed to His likeness, they are new for us. They are old ideas, planted freshly in our minds....like prayer of the heart, silent prayer, solitude, service, fasting, secrecy. Innovation moves us from talking about the ideas to experimenting with them. A classmate said it well this week: "It is not enough to stand on the other side of the gate simply admiring the view of what lays beyond."
There's a time to get up "off your arse" and just do it.

Bleed Into One

This was on a friend's blog...I have to wonder when Christians are going to stop protesting things and start being what the world needs.

Just...wow.

Spent two hours at a concert tonight. Ruidoso's Chamber Music Festival. I was given a ticket for tonight's concert: Alexander Kobrin. It was amazing. Truly astounding....breathtaking. I've never really exposed myself to much in the way of classical music....I found myself swept away with the movement, the emotion evident in the composition...and hypnotized by the movement of Kobrin's hands over the instrument. No one can truly claim to be a musician unless they have mastered an intrument like that!
A tremendous amount of discipline....resulting in such....beauty.

http://www.alexkobrin.com/

Soul-Numbing Ruts

Ok...wow. This is really good stuff.

Soul-Numbing Ruts

Intergenerational Worship

The idea of intergenerational worship is new to me. Having grown up in a church with a great kids ministry--having helped with that ministry for years...I have my doubts. Yet it is intriguing to me. There is something very...good about the idea of keeping families together to explore the Way. But how can ideas be communicated in a way so as to be appropriate for such a broad age range? How are behavioral issues addressed?
Emerging Parents offers some great thoughts. One person insightfully commented....

We could point out the fact that Sunday schools (in the UK) were a 19th Century invention, and that they were always separate from the main worship event, normally taking place on a Sunday afternoon. It’s only since perhaps the 1920s that the Sunday School class has taken place at the same time as Sunday morning adult worship. And yet our churches are unquestioningly locked into this pattern of doing church that is less than 100 years old.

We cannot be a whole community unless children play a full part, nor can children develop in their discipleship unless they participate and belong in a meaningful way to a community of people of all ages committed to one another on the pilgrim journey.

So we should stop asking “‘How can we keep the children from disturbing us as we worship in ways that are dear to us?’ but rather, ‘How can we invite children into real involvement with our worship of God?' 'What is the essence of our worship and what is merely adult habit and prejudice?' 'How can we make the whole liturgy accessible to children without losing the adults?’ ‘How can we help our children truly to take part in the whole liturgy, word and sacrament, not separately but with us?’ ‘How can we preach the Word so that all can hear it?’”

These are such great questions. I'd like to take them one at a time....really dig around for answers. Good answers to these questions, effectively implemented, would revolutionize the way we "do" church.

Create in me a clean heart, O God...

I am slowly making my way through Richard Foster's Streams of Living Water. An excellent read. I'm going through the corresponding sections in Renovare's Spiritual Formation Workbook. The six streams, or Traditions, have become somewhat familiar to me as we've used them for the last three or four years as a basic structure for our Kidz Church program. As I read again about the Contemplative Tradition, I chose an "excercise" to help me put into practice what I was learning. fI committed to take the prayer, "Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me," and pray it for ten minutes morning, midday, and evening...and turn it over as much as possible throughout the day. I did it diligently for a week. Evening was the hardest--that's when I'm sleepy. Not much of a night person, I guess.
Anyway...as I started reading about the Holiness Tradition, about it's focus on singleness and purity of heart resulting in holy action...I decided to keep up with the same exercise. I'm glad I did. It's starting to come alive and find its way into so many things! Wrong attitudes towards others, habitual behaviors and obsessions, hurry, anxiety...these things arise and the prayer is a lifeline. Create in me a clean heart, O God.....Create in me a clean heart, O God.....put a new and right spirit in me! It's a great way to throw myself on His mercy and grace whenever I see the filth and brokenness of my self.

create: (kree-ayt) verb. latin ~ creare; akin to crescere, "to grow" ~ to bring into existence; to invest with new form, office or rank; to produce or bring about by a course of action or behavior; cause; occasion; to produce through imaginative skill; to make or bring into existence something new.

Heart: One's innermost character, feelings or inclinations; the central or innermost part; the essential or most vital part of something...


My heart...the central, innermost part of me, the essence of who I am, is being made new. God is creating a new heart in me...growing a new core for my life through His divinely imaginitive skill. Bringing into existence a new essence. This is the transformation happening now, within me!
This is the creativity of God. The creativity to which I am called. Psalm 146 lumps God's creation of the earth in with His executing justice for oppressed people, giving food to the hungry, setting prisoners free, watching over the misplaced, and holding up orphans and widows. This is the creativity of God. The creativity to which I am called.

As my heart is changed, I become His agent for justice in the world. I am called to the creativity of heart transformation....for my own heart to be transformed and to play a part in the transformation of the hearts of those I meet.

O God, create!! Where I may look at this as a request...a plea, for Him is is an invitation to so something He enjoys immensely! Create! Asking God to create is like asking Dad to eat peach sherbet. It's no problem. No imposition. He won't put up a fight!

"God, create!"

No problem.

He joyfully, gleefully leaps to it!