Love never dies

Love never dies

“Love never dies.” 1 Corinthians 13:8

I have heard this passage from 1 Corinthians about love so many times, but when I heard it this Sunday directly from our friend, Paul and our preacher Michael McCain, I was moved to tears. I have told people who are grieving that the love they have for and from their loved one is still there and never dies. I don’t understand it. It is a mystery.

I know I look at pictures of my brother, my grandparents who have died and I can feel their love and in turn feel the love I have for them. Buechner and Nouwen tell us that our bodies die but the love we have for others and the love we feel from another somehow returns to God and is kept for all eternity. If you are a mystic, you have no difficulty understanding this. If you are a person who understands by rational thinking, this may be a difficult concept.

So why did this passage so move me Sunday? As I grow older, I have been obsessing about how I will already so miss friends and family members when they die and when I die. Suddenly I know in my heart that the love we have for each other will never die. We will never be lonely. Their love for us is still present. Our love for them is still present.

I believe that in some mysterious way this love never dies and is carried forward to make a change in them, in ourselves, and in the universe.

Joanna. Joannaseibert.com

Enneagram Retreat and Epiphany

Enneagram Retreat and Epiphany

“The good news is we have a God.. who remembers who we are, the person he knit together in our mother’s womb, and he wants to help restore us to our authentic selves.”

Ian Morgan Cron and Suzanne Stabile, The Road Back to You, p. 23, IVP Books 2016.

This past year our rector at St. Mark’s, Danny Schieffler, invited the staff to the retreat center for our diocese, Camp Mitchell, for a day to study the Enneagram with Presbyterian minister and therapist, Rebecca Spooner. Usually staff retreats are about planning sessions for the year or exercises such as the Myers Briggs personality Inventory study to see how we can relate to each other.

Knowing someone else’s Enneagram number can be helpful but the real heart of the Enneagram is about personal growth, how to learn about the mask you have developed for survival and how can you find your true self, the person that God created you to be. So, our rector was giving us a day away from our usual work during a busy liturgical season for our own personal enrichment. I wish I had done that when I was working in the medical field to let those I worked with know how much I cared about their own personal growth. Let this remain an example for all of us.

This was my third Enneagram study course. The well-known sin of my Enneagram number is pride, and it was front and center when I heard about the retreat. I already knew all this. Today, I am still amazed how things came together at our retreat and how much more I learned. This is my second lesson. Exposure to a spiritual tool such as the Enneagram is more awakening each time we go through this process.

We spent a great deal of time on the Enneagram during my spiritual direction study. More and more I see why. This is a tool to help us know who we really are, the mask we have developed that has become our persona, what the world thinks we are, so that we can make our way in the world. Rebecca reminded us of Richard Rohr’s famous definition of the Enneagram, “the coat and hat we put on to weather the storm.”

This persona has helped us survive, but we are now searching for our true self, the person God created us to be. Learning about our Enneagram number can lead us in the direction of finding our relationship with God that has been blocked by this mask we have developed.

The Enneagram is not for everyone. Rebecca reminded us that it is only one tool in our spiritual tool box. If it is helpful, stick with it. If it is not, there are so many other tools to help us connect to God, but if we do relate to it, there is more gold there than we can ever imagine.

This is an ancient tool that has been proven to be true over many centuries. Epiphany and Lent are great seasons to spend time learning more epiphanies about ourselves through the Enneagram especially if we study it with other spiritual friends.

Joanna joannaseibert.com

Reading again

Reading Again

“In a course on contemplative prayer, I assigned just six books. – and we read them each twice.”

Stephanie Paulsell, “ Faith Matters, Reread it again, The inexhaustible spiritual practice of rereading,” Christian Century, January 17, p. 27, 2018.

View from Bill’s window on Ground Hog Day in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania

There are so many books I want to read. When friends tell me they are rereading a book, I roll my eyes away from them and wonder about all the other books they are missing. Stephanie Paulsell, a professor at Harvard Divinity School, tells me to roll my eyes back toward my friends and listen to what they are learning.

Certainly, we all have experienced studying again the most reread book, the Bible, especially if we try to follow a systematic study of yearly lectionary readings. It never fails that we see things the second or third or tenth time that we never saw or heard previously, probably because our life experiences and concentration are different.

How could we have missed before that word or that meaning or what that person was doing?

During this year I have been blogging about spiritual direction and reconnecting to authors and books I have read in the past that have been meaningful to me. I am rereading material I underlined a year ago or ten years ago and sometimes fifty years ago. As Paulsell suggests, I have become more intimate with the texts and am called to practice more intently some of the teachings presented, “continuing to see things I have not seen before. The authors and their books for some reason now more deeply intersect with my life.” I must admit that yes, rereading and reconnecting to writers is remembering truths I have forgotten and seeing truth which I previously overlooked.

Is there any comparison to Bill Murray’s experience in the all time classic movie, Ground Hog Day?

Joanna. joannaseibert.com