Buechner: Best Teacher

 Buechner: Best teacher, Muilenburg

 “There was no one on the faculty who left so powerful and lasting an impression as James Muilenburg…. With his body stiff, his knees bent, his arms scarecrowed far to either side, he never merely taught the Old Testament but was the Old Testament. He would be Adam, wide-eyed and halting as he named the beasts "You are . . . an elephant . . . a butterfly . . . an ostrich! "or Eve, trembling and afraid in the garden of her lost innocence, would be David sobbing his great lament at the death of Saul and Jonathan, would be Moses coming down from Sinai..” Frederick Buechner, Now and Then, The Frederick Buechner Center, Frederick Buechner  Quote of the Day  

Buechner’s professor seems to have practiced Ignatian spirituality, taking his students and himself into the story of scripture. It is true we can make a fool of ourselves if we do it as an act or performance, for we will soon be found out. On the other hand, if it is a real and honest journey, we can travel in time and find ourselves back in the scripture with a different understanding than when we are just intellectualizing the story in our head.

At the front of the refectory at the College of Preachers at the National Cathedral, in stain glassed was written, “if you do not dramatize the message, they will not listen.”  You can see this from many angles, but what it came to mean to me was that my job as preacher was to help those in the congregation “experience” the scripture, usually the gospel. My experience was I could best do this by taking myself and all who would like to make a journey into the story, be one of the characters, feel his feelings, know his hopes and fears, his frustrations, his loves, his passions, his humanness. The same is true for advice to spiritual friends whose study of scripture has become stale. It is hard to become dry when we actually go into a story in scripture and become a part of it. We will hear voices we have never heard before.

I was first exposed to this Ignatian exercises and this method of studying scripture in a small purple book, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius in the Image Classics.  I know there are now so many more. A friend recommends the Jesuit Guide to Almost Everything by James Martin, SJ.

Joanna joannaseibert.com

Mary Oliver: LIfe, Poetry

Mary Oliver: Life, Poetry

“I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.”
 Mary Oliver

Petit Jean Mountain, where poetry lives

So many seem to find their own spirituality in writing and reading poetry, not the kind we were often taught in school, but more like the poems of Mary Oliver. In our spiritual direction course at Kanuga we meet often with a former poet laureate of North Carolina, Cathy Smith Bowers. She encouraged us to write and to read poetry. Some of the most moving comments from my blog have come when I have put up a poem.

Debra Dean Murphy in an article about Mary Oliver (“An Invitation to Wonder”, Christian Century, April 26, 2017, p 20-29) helps us understand. She reminds us that the best speakers and authors use poetic language, image metaphor, paradox. This is real life, and few speak to it as well as Mary Oliver. She is a mystic of nature, seeing nature’s beauty and seeing nature as our neighbor, calling us to be present to the present moment.  “She listens to moths, trees, and other nonhuman neighbors.”  Murphy describes the worst kind of poetry to be “preachy and argumentative”, while Oliver invites us into the wonder of what is presented to us, to learn to care about our neighbors, human and nonhuman. Christians would say Oliver is inviting us her poetry to see the Christ in each other and to experience God in creation. 

I look forward to hearing about the poems that frame your life.

Joanna  joannaseibert.com

Esther Harding: Change

 Esther Harding:Change

“We cannot change anyone else; we can change only ourselves, and then usually only when the elements that are in need of reform have become conscious through their reflection in someone else.

M. Esther Harding,  The “I” and the “Not-I”, A Study in the Development of Consciousness, from Inwardoutward.org

Esther Harding was a British American Jungian analyst who is considered to be the first significant Jungian Analyst in this country. Her 1975 first book, The Way of All Women, was one of the first books I read as I first tried to connect to a feminine spirituality.

President Jimmy Carter writes recently about getting to the place where we can give thanks for our difficulties. That is almost impossible, but I can see his reasoning a little more clearly in Esther Harding’s writings. We wear  our character defects and self-centeredness like an old bathrobe that is ugly and tattered but comfortable and a known entity, because this manner of life has become our known identity. We can only cone to see these defects so glaringly in someone else as we are repulsed by the behavior pattern in others, and finally may realize this is the way we live as well. Our behavior and reaction to the world is what is keeping us from our connection to God.

I continually am amazed how God uses everything, everything to bring us back to God’s love, to connect to the God within us and within our neighbor. We find out what is blocking us from God’s love by first seeing it in someone else and realizing how unbeautiful it is. At some point, when it is right, I can share this with spiritual friends who also are suffering.

Joanna joannaseibert.com