Barbara Brown Taylor: Spiritual Direction in the World

Barbara Brown Taylor: Spiritual Direction in the World

“People can learn as much about the ways of God from business deals gone bad or sparrows falling to the ground as they can from reciting the books of the Bible in order. They can learn as much from a love affair or a wildflower as they can from knowing the Ten Commandments by heart.”

Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World, HarperOne 2009.

I received this quote from Barbara Brown Taylor today from Synthesis, A Weekly Resource for Preaching and Worship in the Episcopal Tradition http://www.synthesispub.com. I look to my right where my husband just bought a new bookcase today to house closer to me all the books I have read over the years that I want to share with you this year about spiritual direction. Then I look straight ahead out of a floor to ceiling window to the outside and watch a gentle Spring rain bathe the trees just outside between our house and our neighbors. I can also hear the rhythm of the rain on the roof above where there is very little insulation in our “modern” 1960’s home.

We will soon have dinner with our children and grandchildren in their new home across the street. What a blessing just to walk across the road to be with grandchildren, our greatest gifts, our most important visitors we will entertain. I learn from them every time I see them about simple joy and unconditional love and wide-eyed excitement about life. All of these are learning experiences. I hope I can hold on to my gratitude for them that I have learned from Barbara Brown Taylor. She was a speaker recently at the Buechner Writing For Your Life Conference in Nashville at Belmont University that I attended. She is still the amazing writer, speaker, and teacher she was when I first read her books over thirty years ago. If you have a chance to hear her, don’t miss it.

She has taught all of us so much about an awareness of the altars in the world that keep us constantly connected to the God of our understanding if only we have eyes and ears to see and hear and hands to touch and even noses to smell. Yes, the smell of a Spring rain is not unlike the smell of the well-known costly incense from Smoky Mary’s in Manhattan (Church of St. Mary the Virgin). The altars in our churches are also thin places where we especially go to give thanks for our altars in the world.

Joanna. Joannaseibert.com

4 Opportunities to purchase this book for Lent and have it signed.

Holy Spirit Episcopal Church, Gulf Shores Alabama, Saturday February 23, 10-2 and Sunday February 24
Wordsworth Books, Little Rock, Saturday March 2, 1-3 pm

St. Mark's Episcopal Church, Little Rock, Narthex after 8 and 10:30 services on March 3 and March 10

Proceeds from this book go for Hurricane Relief in the Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast

Silence, Waiting for Dolphins, Chant

Silence, Waiting for Dolphins, Chant

“When chant music stops, sometimes quite abruptly, an audible silence reverberates throughout the room, especially in the high arches of the oratories in which it is sung..If we listen carefully, we discover that.. chant inducts us into this silence that is the ground of our being.”

David Steindl-Rast, O.S.B., The Music of Silence, Entering the Sacred Rhythms of Monastic Experience Harpercollins 1995.

We have often sat silently on a balcony overlooking the gulf in the early morning watching, waiting for the sunrise, waiting for the dolphins to make their first run. Then we wait for a line of pelicans to silently sweep by. The rhythm of the waves is like a heart-beat. Today it is a slowly beating heart. Yesterday the heart beat was faster.

At home in Arkansas we sit with our son and his family on his back deck as the sun sets behind the trees of his back woods and wait for the hummingbirds to come and feed before they finally rest for the evening. Nature seems to be calling us to wait, to wait. Our own heart beat slows. Our body seems to say we are connecting to something greater than ourselves. Our mind wants to repeat Julian of Norwich’s famous words, “and all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” We are ready for whatever comes. We think. Maybe. The dryer stops working. We know whom to call for help, and again we wait for the repair workers to come. We pray to take time between tasks, between breakdowns.

What do we do between sunrise, dolphin, pelican times and sunset, and hummingbird times? One more suggestion is waiting for the heartbeat of music, especially the “silence between the notes” of Gregorian chant. One of the most popular versions to listen to has been CHANT by the Benedictine monks of Santo Domingo de Silos. If you get “hocked,” you may want to read their companion book, The Music of Silence, by Brother David Steindl-Rast, O.S.B. which may then lead you to a desire to follow in some form the canonical hours or seasons of the day. Another book is simply called, CHANT, by Katharine Le Mee, who tells you more about the origins, form, practice, and healing power of Gregorian Chant.

God is constantly calling to us, but God seems for many to speak most clearly in the silence between sunrise, pelican, dolphin, chant, and sunset hummingbird times.

Joanna. Joannaseibert.com

4 Opportunities to purchase this book for Lent and have it signed.

Holy Spirit Episcopal Church, Gulf Shores Alabama, Saturday February 23, 10-2 and Sunday February 24
Wordsworth Books, Little Rock, Saturday March 2, 1-3 pm

St. Mark's Episcopal Church, Little Rock, Narthex after 8 and 10:30 services on March 3 and March 10

Proceeds from this book go for Hurricane Relief in the Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast

C S Lewis: Great Divorce

C S Lewis: Great Divorce

“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done..”’ C S Lewis, The Great Divorce, Geoffrey Bles 1945.

The Great Divorce is Lewis’ classic study of the difference between living in heaven and living in hell. In hell, people become more and more isolated and separated from each other until communication is lost. Before the great distances develop there is a bus stop where groups of people in hell are given the opportunity to go to heaven on a tour bus ride to decide if they might like to live there instead. Spoiler alert! Only one person decides to stay in heaven. The rest return to their life in hell. It is a choice.

With each character, Lewis describes what keeps each of us in hell. My favorite is the bishop whose intellect keeps him in hell as he must go back to hell because he is scheduled to give a lecture that he does not want to miss. Other characters remain in hell because they cannot recognize joy, others see all the difficulty in life as someone’s fault, some stay connected to their material goods that mean the most to them, some find people “beneath them” in heaven, one sees heaven as a trick, and an artist must return to hell to preserve his reputation.

The Great Divorce is a great study for a book group especially in Lent, which will soon be upon us. It can be insightful for people to share with each other which of the characters they most identify with. Lewis hands us a mirror to see where in our life that we do not recognize that we are still controlling the show and living in a hell, where we have forsaken the gifts of heaven on this earth.

4 Opportunities to purchase this book for Lent and have it signed.

Holy Spirit Episcopal Church, Gulf Shores Alabama, Saturday February 23, 10-2 and Sunday February 24
Wordsworth Books, Little Rock, Saturday March 2, 1-3 pm

St. Mark's Episcopal Church, Little Rock, Narthex after 8 and 10:30 services on March 3 and March 10

Proceeds from this book go for Hurricane Relief in the Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast

Joanna joannaseibert.com