the blind leap?

We can never understand the life of faith seen in Scripture and in serious Christian living unless
we drop the idea of faith as a 'blind leap' and understand that faith is commitment to action,
often beyond our natural abilities, based upon knowledge of God and God's ways.  The romantic talk of 'leaping', to which we in the Western world have become accustomed, actually amounts to 'leaping' without faith - that is, with no genuine belief at all.  And that is actually what people have in mind today when they speak of a 'leap of faith'.

- Dallas Willard, Personal Religion, Private Reality

Can true faith ever be 'blind'?  However limited our knowledge is, do we not base our belief on something?  Do we trust because we have a button we press that inspires trust?  Or do we trust because we know something about the person in whom we put that trust? 

Yes, we can have mistaken faith, based on error, misunderstanding or lies - but when these are exposed faith understandably shatters and no longer exists - because the base is taken away.  It sees through them.

If faith is described as seeing what is unseen how can it be blind?
Surely faith's hallmark is sight, not the lack of it?

Have we tried to stretch the vocabulary of faith to fit something else entirely?

the secret of writing

I have a quote scrawled in one of my notebooks from a writers' day I went to earlier this year.

The secret of writing is avoiding not writing.

- W. Goldman

Whether it should have the italics I don't know - was I adding my own emphasis?   But it sounds sensible.  I try and implement it as much as possible!


Image: mine

the slow work of God

Words from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin:

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way
to something unknown,
something new. Yet it is the law of all progress that is made
by passing through some stages of instability
and that may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you.
Your ideas mature gradually. Let them grow.
Let them shape themselves without undue haste.
Do not try to force them on
as though you could be today what time
-- that is to say, grace --
and circumstances
acting on your own good will
will make you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new Spirit
gradually forming in you will be.

Give our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.
Above all, trust in the slow work of God,
our loving vine-dresser.

Amen.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955)

knowing them by name

“MY OWN DESIRE to be useful, to do something significant, or to be part of some impressive project is so strong that soon my time is taken up by meetings, conferences, study groups, and workshops that prevent me from walking the streets. It is difficult not to have plans, not to organize people around an urgent cause, and not to feel that you are working directly for social progress. But I wonder more and more if the first thing shouldn’t be to know people by name, to eat and drink with them, to listen to their stories and tell your own, and to let them know with words, handshakes, and hugs that you do not simply like them, but truly love them.”

– Henri Nouwen

Used in welcome service


H/T Missional Church Network  (image included)

love bade me welcome

Used in welcome service

the friend who cares

I've shared this quote before but thought it was well worth another airing:

"When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares. "

Henri Nouwen

Image: mine 

open and expansive and free

“Hospitality means inviting the stranger into our private space, whether that be the space of our own home or the space of our personal awareness and concern. And when we do so, some important transformations occur. Our private space is suddenly enlarged; no longer tight and cramped and restricted, but open and expansive and free.”

— Parker Palmer

Used in welcome service

H/T Missional Church Network

Image: Mine

one person at a time

When do we see the need for welcome?

Is it when someone comes to stay with us?  Eat with us?  Have a drink with us?

Is it when new people come into our families, our communities, our church?

What about the smaller moments – when a child approaches to share a secret, when a friend needs a place to confide, when a family member longs to share the news of their day with us – do we make the effort to make them feel welcome too?  Or do we want to get on with what we’re doing and tell ourselves we’ll make time for them later?

Do we welcome the ordinary, small gestures of the everyday as well as the different and unusual?

How can we make welcome an attitude as well as an activity?

"HOSPITALITY, rather than being something you achieve, is something you enter. It is an adventure that takes you where you never dreamed of going. It is not something you do, as much as it is someone you become. You try and you fail. You try again. You make room for one person at a time, you give one chance at a time, and each of these choices of the heart stretches your ability to receive others. This is how we grow more hospitable — by welcoming one person when the opportunity is given to you.”

- Daniel Homan and Lonni Collins Pratt,  Radical Hospitality: Benedict’s Way of Love

Used in welcome service


H/T Missional Church Network

welcome by listening

“LISTENING is always involved in hospitality. The most gracious attempts we can muster are meaningless if we do not actually hear the stranger. Listening is the core meaning of hospitality. It is something we can give anyone and everyone, including ourselves. It takes only a few minutes to really listen…

Hospitality is a way to counter the thousands of times another human being has felt less than human because others didn’t listen. Listening is the power of hospitality; it is what makes hospitality the life-giving thing it is."

- Daniel Homan and Lonni Collins Pratt, Radical Hospitality: Benedict’s Way of Love

This is one thing that I was particularly struck by when preparing the recent service. By listening to people, we are welcoming them. Welcoming their thoughts, valuing their opinions, providing them with a safe place to speak.  Our attentiveness is a welcome of its own.

For a fuller quote see here.

BOOK REVIEW: In Constant Prayer by Robert Benson

IN THIS BOOK, Robert Benson introduces the discipline of the Daily Office, also known as the liturgy of the hours, among other names.  It is part of the Ancient Practices series.  In a humble and engaging way, Benson presents a truly ancient practice - a way of praying at fixed times and entering into the great river of prayer that runs through the church over the ages.

I love this book.  Ironically it has taken me some time to get round to reviewing it, so I almost want to read it again before doing so.  One thing I love about this book is the voice of the author.  Benson is a wonderful writer and a deeply honest one - an honesty and humility runs throughout the book as he suggests, not prescribes, this ancient form of prayer. He confesses readily to his own sense of shyness, something I could relate to, having a shyness of my own.  And he talks about how he finds this form of prayer helpful while acknowledging that we are all different.

I wish I had read this book with a pencil.  I will next time.

 Just some of things I found helpful were:

• The origins of fixed time prayer- how they go back into ancient Israel.  They are not invented by monasteries!
• The participation of these prayers - how even when we are alone, we know that others all over the world are also praying in this way.
• The purpose of the daily office - it is for God.  So often our prayers are all about ourselves.  The daily office is for God.  This really hit home.
• The practicality of the prayers - Benson is so down to earth, explaining what you will need, how long it takes,  how to incorporate them into our lives.
• The passage of these prayers over time - how the church keeps these prayers going over the ages, and the suggestion that its failure to do so has a truly destructive effect on the church.
• The reality of our own weaknesses - Benson emphasises not feeling guilty for our 'failures' to pray but to start again the next day.

These are just some of the things in this book.  And I believe it does offer a new way of forming ourselves, freeing ourselves, changing ourselves, even as we do it for God alone and not for ourselves.

"WE HAVE WONDERED what might be in this prayer for us if we said this prayer, even as we acknowledged that our worship is not actually for us; it is for the One who made us.  Even so, we wondered, what might happen in our hearts and in our minds and in our work and in our relationships and in the world itself, if we said the prayer that has been given to us?"

- Robert Benson, In Constant Prayer, p148

I have realised while thinking about this review, that I am able to say a very overused and under-meant phrase and actually mean it.  This book has changed my life.  I know that because since I finished reading it I have instilled the discipline of morning and evening prayers in my own life.  I have a chair where I sit and I do my 'office'.  Although it felt a little odd at first, I found the structure and discipline incredibly helpful.  Especially when it comes to praying for others - I now have a journal where I allocate people a day - and will pray specifically for them at the designated point in the office.  Before, I simply felt overwhelmed by all the need and didn't know where to start.  

Anyway, that's another post, really, and perhaps I will write about it separately at one point.

What I mean is this - I have followed through on the reading of this book and now every day is shaped differently.  If that's not change, what is?

Unexpected giveaway: My first book got lost in the post.  So Thomas Nelson very generously sent another.  Then - you guessed it - the lost copy finally turned up.  So, yes, I have a spare copy.  Please leave a comment if you'd like it, explaining why, and I'll choose one.  One thing I would say this is a particularly good book at introducing the Daily Office. So it may be valuable for those who are relatively unfamiliar with it, but have a genuine interest.  

I received this book free from the publisher through the BookSneeze®.com  book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. 

Other reviews from the Ancient Practices series:

The Sacred Journey
The Liturgical Year

hidden lives and unhistoric acts

It fills me with a mixture of hope and of quiet sadness that we so often do not recognise the value of others and the good they do in our world. We do not note the small acts of ordinary kindness, so keen are we to vaunt the exploits of the famous and the infamous, so eager to either praise or mock extravagant gestures. Our lives are steered gently by those who love us, rebuke us, protect us - even when we do not see it.  George Eliot puts it in just the right tone of voice:

...for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs. - George Eliot, from Middlemarch

theology and discipleship

In a recent Baptist Times is an interview with Revd Dr Pat Took, recently inducted as President of the Baptist Union of Great Britain.

At one point she says:

"We need good, thoughtful and seasoned theology in our churches.  We also need loving discipleship.  We need that from ministers, who are the community pastors and theologians, and we need everyone to have access to such good theology and discipleship." 

Sometimes theology gets a bad press.  There's a wedge driven between the 'intellectual' and the 'experiential' as if were not all living, feeling and thinking beings - united, not fragmented. Sometimes you get the feeling that the 'ivory tower' stereotype is still out there.  But I think theology is vibrant, dynamic, and sustaining.  We have been given the capacity for deep thinking and deep feeling.  Both together = deep living.

Perhaps one day I should blog about my preoccupation with 'depth' - but the story behind it feels a mite too personal still.  Occasionally I share it as part of my testimony.  But that quote from Richard Foster at the bottom of this blog is no casually chosen thing.  This quest for depth has characterised my journey and indeed my blog will always be looking deeper.  That was its primary purpose.

But I digress, ever so slightly.

Theology and discipleship are co-partners, companions, each sustaining our lives and enriching them.

We need everyone to have access.  Yes.  We have all been given eyes and ears, minds and hearts that we should love the LORD our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength.  Do we seek him with both mind and heart?  Do we seek understanding?  Wisdom?  To be a disciple and to make disciples?

fourth century thoughts on prayer

"Prayer is the light of the spirit, 

and the spirit, raised up to heaven by prayer, 

clings to God with the utmost tenderness.  

Like a child crying tearfully for its mother,

 it craves the milk that God provides.  

Prayer also stands before God as an honoured ambassador.  

It gives joy to the spirit, peace to the heart. 

I speak of prayer, not words.  

It is the longing for God, love too deep for words, 

a gift not given by humans, but by God's grace." 

- John Chrysostom

I speak of prayer, not words.  I love the differentiation.  Our words are part of our praying, but they are not what makes a prayer.  The prayer itself goes before and beyond the words, Spirit leading, Son interceding, sometimes entirely soundless.  Prayer is an act of offering, of hands opening.  Prayer is a gift.

Other posts:

Prayer as a gift

scallop-shell of quiet...

Sometimes I long to nestle into peace...it takes some discipline. Clearing space not just in my life, but in my head and heart - an attitude that chooses to let slip the things of busy-ness and focus on quiet beauty.  Journeying from hurry into sabbath, into the softness of accepting grace.

Give me my scallop-shell of quiet,

my staff of faith to walk upon,

my scrip of joy, immortal diet,

my bottle of salvation,

my gown of glory, hope's true gage;

and thus I'll take my pilgrimage.

Sir Walter Raleigh (c.1552 -1618)

life...

‘Life is an intoxicant no amount of mundane inebriants – faster, deeper, more alluring, more captivating – can possibly equal. The problem is that for life to become its own exhilarant, we must learn to live it consciously, to live it deeply, to live it to the brim, beyond the visible to the meaningful.’ 

- Joan Chittister

image: mine

all your heart

Trust in Yahweh with all your heart

and lean not on your own understanding;

 in all your ways submit to him,

and he will make your paths straight.

 Do not be wise in your own eyes;

fear Yahweh and shun evil.

 This will bring health to your body

and nourishment to your bones.

Proverbs 3:6-8

to worship...

'To worship is to quicken the conscience by the holiness of God, to feed the mind with the truth of God, to purge the imagination by the beauty of God, to open the heart to the love of God, and to devote the will to the purpose of God.'

 William Temple

new every morning

The steadfast love of Yahweh never ceases;
his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
"Yahweh is my portion," says my soul,
"therefore I will hope in him."
Yahweh is good to those who wait for him,
to the soul who seeks him.

Lamentations 3: 22-25

words that stir

During my recent research of early Christian writings, I was looking at those of Hippolytus (of Rome), with whom I was not very familiar.   (I used the Christian Classics Ethereal Library - a useful resource.) Those who were writing obviously had their own styles, and some felt heavier and harder to read than others.  But I found Hippolytus engaging.  This paragraph, part of his 'Against the Heresy of One Noetus' I find quite spine tingling; I actually murmured it aloud to get a sense of the rhythm and passion of the words.

"This is Jesus of Nazareth, who was invited to the marriage-feast in Cana, and turned the water into wine, and rebuked the sea when agitated by the violence of the winds, and walked on the deep as on dry land, and caused the blind man from birth to see, and raised Lazarus to life after he had been dead four days, and did many mighty works, and forgave sins, and conferred power on the disciples, and had blood and water flowing from His sacred side when pierced with the spear.

For His sake the sun is darkened, the day has no light, the rocks are shattered, the veil is rent, the foundations of the earth are shaken, the graves are opened, and the dead are raised, and the rulers are ashamed when they see the Director of the universe upon the cross closing His eye and giving up the ghost. Creation saw, and was troubled; and, unable to bear the sight of His exceeding glory, shrouded itself in darkness.

This (is He who) breathes upon the disciples, and gives them the Spirit, and comes in among them when the doors are shut, and is taken up by a cloud into the heavens while the disciples gaze at Him, and is set down on the right hand of the Father, and comes again as the Judge of the living and the dead. This is the God who for our sakes became man, to whom also the Father hath put all things in subjection. To Him be the glory and the power, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, in the holy Church both now and ever, and even for evermore. Amen."

longing for the longing

'The soul must long for God in order to be set aflame by God’s love; but if the soul cannot yet feel this longing, then it must long for the longing. To long for the longing is also from God.'
~ Meister Eckhart