spiritual tools

Spiritual tools

“ Living in a spiritual way is a lifetime job. There are always areas that need repair and new plans to incorporate into the design. So, having the right tools helps. Tools like curiosity and compassion. Like honesty and open-mindedness. There are basic tools like listening and study. There are specialized tools like discernment and meditation. Learning to use the tools from a mentor makes sense and practice is a given. Take care of your tools and they will take care of you: simple spiritual advice.”

Bishop Steven Charleston daily Facebook post

Bishop Charleston again offers us his tried and true well-used toolbox for a spiritual life. I am reminded of another manual to accompany Charleston’s toolbox for the spiritual life written by the Quaker, Richard Foster called Celebration of Discipline, The Path to Spiritual Growth. Foster’s classic offers a smorgasbord of a variety of rich spiritual disciplines. Foster divides thirteen disciplines into three categories, inward disciples of prayer, fasting, meditation, and study in the Christian life, the outward disciplines of simplicity, solitude, submission, and service, and corporate disciplines of confession, worship, guidance, and celebration. His book is one to read and re-read and become tattered, frayed, and worn with falling apart pages as we return to it over the years to try different spiritual disciplines that may work best in different stages of our life. God speaks to us in so many voices. Foster teaches us about thirteen of God’s well-known languages.

Joanna joannaseibert.com

Remembering World War I

Remembering World War I

“This is a war to end all wars.” Woodrow Wilson

This past Sunday was the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, the Great War, the War to End all Wars. The war officially ended on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. This Sunday at 11 in the morning, bells tolled in churches all over the world. Special programs about the war were held all over the world most notably in England and Paris, France where the world’s diplomats met to remember what had happened before them.

Both of my grandfathers served in the war and came home. I never heard one grandfather talk about his experience. The other, Grandfather Whaley, rarely talked about the war itself but did talk much about being in the army. He was born in what is now the Great Smokey Mountain National Park. Going into the service was his higher education.

When I was in college, my grandfather wrote to me every week on his old typewriter where several keys would often get stuck. The type was uneven. Every letter, however, was full of his army experiences and how he related it to my new life in college. He would remind me that the best lessons were in the people I would meet and the places where I would travel. Almost every sentence ended with etc, etc, etc. I kept every one of his letters. The girls on my floor in my dorm would gather each week to hear about his wisdom from his life experiences a half century earlier in the army in World War I and about his present life in small town Virginia.

Did I forget to tell you that my grandfather also always enclosed a dollar bill with each letter.

Grandfather Whaley is closest man to us digging trenches in WWI

Joanna. Joannaseibert.com

Charleston: Love

Charleston: Love

“Love will not lose. Love is the subversion of power by mercy. It is the uncontrolled spirit of hope that erodes the authority of oppression. Love is the human soul made visible. Once we see it in one another’s eyes, no force on earth can compel us to deny its reality.” Bishop Steven Charleston, Daily Facebook Email

Love is indeed all around. We must appreciate it, love it, take it in, and then share it. Often, I take it for granted, especially from my husband of almost fifty years, but there are moments when I see that look of kindness in his eye that is more precious than gold.

Yesterday at church I received a homemade Valentine from a young boy with cerebral palsy. I remember when he was prematurely born. He knows love and knows how precious every moment is. I hold his sweet words of kindness next to my heart.

Recently we attended a concert of two fiddlers. Not violists but fiddlers. The young man was blind. He had been playing with the young women for several years and they had traveled aboard playing concerts together, especially in Spain. Just before the last piece, he got down on his knees, pulled a ring from his pocket and told her how he did not want to continue his life without her, and asked her to marry him. She cried and kissed him and the congregation gave them a long, standing ovation.

Only recently my husband found his mother’s wedding and engagement rings that had been lost for over fifteen years. He reenacted the fiddler’s show of love outside one of our favorite restaurants with two of our grandchildren present. He says he needed them there to help get him back up off his knees!

Anthony De Mello recommends keeping a book of good memories we can return to whenever the presence of love is more difficult to see. I treasure moments such as these and hold them in my book of memories of times of pure joy and love.

This has been so helpful to me, and I share these memories with you.

Joanna joannaseibert.com