Charleston: We are not done yet/ community

March 15, 2019 joanna seibert

“We are not done yet. We may count our progress in inches. We may swim against the deep tides of greed and hate, but we are not done yet. Even if we do not live to see it all, we will be content to be the inspiration, to give all we have to free our world from fear.” Bishop Steven Charleston, Daily Facebook Page

Bishop Charleston gives us encouragement during difficult times when we are discouraged. This is why God constantly calls us to community. When our lights are dim, we feel we have lost our connection to God, we feel we have not accomplished anything, in fact we believe we are failures, there are others in our community whose lights are on, who are more connected to God, who can encourage and support us until we see a different picture. They are like Simon of Cyrene, briefly carrying our cross. They are like the friends of the paralytic lifting him through the rooftop to Jesus. Then in turn as we heal, it will be our turn to be the encourager.

Often people come for spiritual direction or meet with spiritual friends who indeed have been burned out or feel their life or their ministry is not accomplishing what they had hoped. That is our job as spiritual friends, to show each other where indeed God is working in our lives and how important it is for us to continue to be an inspiration to each other, remembering that we may not see the results. The results may be apparent much later, long after we have lived our lives and our names have been forgotten.

As I grow older, I seem more vividly to remember the people, the teachers, my grandparents, my co-workers and friends who encouraged me, who supported me, who never gave up on me. Most of them are indeed dead, so I can now only thank them by trying to encourage others as they did to me. So today, I share with you Jon Sweeney’s new biography of Phyllis Tickle, Phyllis Tickle, A Life, where he shares how Phyllis was a major encourager for him and myself as well as so many others, and whose birthday was March 12th.

Joanna. Joannaeibert.com

Purchase a copy of A Daily Spiritual Rx for Lent and Easter in Little Rock from me joannaseibert@me.com or from Wordsworth Books or from the publisher Earth Songs Press or on Amazon.. Proceeds from the book go for hurricane relief in the Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast.

Nouwen: Community

March 14, 2019 joanna seibert

Nouwen: Community

“Community is not a talent show in which we dazzle the world with our combined gifts. Community is the place where our poverty is acknowledged and accepted, not as something we have to learn to cope with as best as we can but as a true source of new life.” Henri Nouwen, in “March 18,” Bread for the Journey (HarperSanFrancisco, 1997).

The Hebrew Bible and the New Testament constantly reveal stories of how God continually calls us to community. This is what enlarges our view of God, keeps our God from being so small as we hear about the God of their understanding from others. In community is where we learn how our gifts are needed and how we don’t need to have all the gifts or be in control. In community, we also learn about ourselves as we begin to see that the faults we so dislike in others are often also in ourselves, and in time we see how ugly they are in the ourselves as well and finally pray to be changed.

We also learn about forgiveness as we are forgiven. In community as we attempt to live in harmony we learn about reconciliation, pluralism, connection, a different kind of living than our society often teaches us.

We live in a zero-sum world, where we are taught there is only so much food, so much resources, so many jobs, so much money, so much love to go around. If we give any of what we have away, we will lose it all, we will lose all that we have accumulated, and it will not return, so we store our things in pods and warehouses and even store up love inside of ourselves and don’t give it away. We fear if we share, we will lose what we have and not be able to have more.

I learned about the fallacy of zero sum from some of my grandchildren. I once envied their grandparents who lived nearby while we lived far away. I feared there was only so much love my grandchildren could give, and their closer grandparents were going to get most of it. Oh, me. My grandchildren have taught me that they have much more love to give than I can fathom, and how wonderful it can be that they know and share the love of so many living grandparents. This is what we learn in community. We learn about God’s love without numbers, love without conditions, love that we cannot hold onto, but love that can only grow if it continually moves and flows in and out of us.

As I meet with spiritual friends I share what I have learned in community and offer living in community as one more way to keep that connection to God which so beautifully lives in others. In return, our community reflects to us the Christ, the God of our understanding which also dwells within ourselves as well.

Joanna. Joannaseibert.com

Purchase a copy of A Daily Spiritual Rx for Lent and Easter in Little Rock from me joannaseibert@me.com or from Wordsworth Books or from the publisher Earth Songs Press or on Amazon.. Proceeds from the book go for hurricane relief in the Diocese of the Central Gulf Coast.

Kelsey: Spiritual paths

March 13, 2019 joanna seibert

Kelsey: spiritual pathways

“There are two quite different ways of leading people on the spiritual pilgrimage, which have often been seen as opposed to each other.” Morton Kelsey in Companions on the Inner Way, The Art of Spiritual Guidance, (Paulist Press 1976) , pp. 7,8.

Kelsey is describing first the sacramental method of spiritual direction where we use spiritual practices such as concrete matter, music, pictures, beads, rituals, symbols to connect to God. The downside is that these can lead to idolatry, worshipping the means we use to reach God instead of worshipping God. For Episcopalians, it has always been the Book of Common Prayer as illustrated by the difficulty when our tradition tries to revise the book. Droves of people leave the church. The same thing may happen in churches when the altar is moved or the order of service or even the prayers are changed. Kelsey calls this method the kataphatic way from the Greek meaning “with images.”

Kelsey describes the second path based on the belief that we best connect to God by emptying ourselves of all images, remembering that there is no way to describe or represent the holy. In silence and emptiness, we connect to the God within. This is the apophatic way from the Greek meaning without images. This has been the way of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christian contemplative forms such as Centering Prayer. Kelsey believes that the downside is that this inner work can occasionally lead to a lack of reaching out to others even though the true result should be connecting the Christ we find within to the Christ in others.

Kelsey encourages us to practice both methods. The two are a necessary part of a well-developed and informed spirituality.

Joanna. joannaseibert.com