MLK: Next Right Thing

MLK: Next Right Thing

“Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” Martin Luther King, Jr.

This past year my husband and I have been remembering the 50th anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr in Memphis, April 4, 2018, and the events leading up to it and afterwards. We were both senior medical students in Memphis during those troubled times when the world seemed to be falling apart. King left us so many legacies.

Today I am thinking most about how he started out in the civil rights movement becoming a leader in the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott which began in December1955 after Rosa Parks was arrested for sitting in the front of a bus and lasted for 385 days. King was 26, the new pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, the capital of Alabama. He supposedly was selected by the African American community to lead the bus boycott because he was new and had not been intimidated by the white community nor had he aligned himself with the various factions in the black community. During the boycott, King was arrested and his home was bombed. King’s articulate and nonviolent leadership brought him into national prominence.

King also wrote in his book, Stride Toward Freedom, about a spiritual experience as he sat one midnight at his kitchen table after another bomb threat. As he was ready to give up, he felt a divine inner presence that took away his fears and uncertainly, ready to face whatever came that sustained him for the rest of his life. I think this is one of the experiences he is speaking about when he refers to “going to the mountain and hearing the truth.”

King did not decide to go to Montgomery to lead a bus boycott or become the leader of the civil rights movement. He most probably went to be a good minister like his father and have a family, but a situation arose, he was chosen, and he stepped in. Certainly, his family background of three generations of ministers and all his training as a minister allowed him to be that leader, but that had not been his goal.

I see this as a message to all of us that we may be trained to be one thing, but we may be called to do something else that we never realized that we had been trained to do all along. Each of us, like Martin, will be called at some time to speak our truth. We most probably will not think we are prepared. We may be given a job because we are young or old and inexperienced, or no one else wants the job. Every biblical story of leadership speaks to this kind of call.

Tonight, I am also remembering the young high school students who are today leading a fight for gun control after an attack at their school.

My experience is that this is one of the ways God works, and the lives of King, Moses, Abraham, the disciples, David, Mary, Joseph, Paul, Esther, St. Benedict, St. Francis, St. Ignatius, Bill Wilson, Dr. Bob, and these students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida exemplify it.

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.

Slow Down, Waiting

Slow Down…Waiting

“When I am told that waiting seems to belong to the heart of the spiritual life, I’m not pleased, for I want answers, direction, clarity—and I want them pronto..” Robert Barron, "What Are You Waiting For,” U.S. Catholic, Dec 2003.

In this article, Barron starts out with that old joke about the pilot who announces that he has good news and bad news. The bad news is that they are totally lost. The good news is that they are making excellent time!

My experience is that spiritual friends initially come to talk because they are consciously or unconsciously in some kind of pain, and like the rest of us seek relief, answers, hopefully very soon. This is something to talk about early on about being aware that staying connected to God requires much waiting. “Those who wait upon the Lord will renew their strength; they will mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary, and they shall walk, and not faint.” (Isaiah 40:31-1) This is a good verse that most people may know and can help all of us to remember when we find ourselves impatient. We will experience times when we will fly and walk and not be tired, but waiting is still a major part of the relationship. 12-step groups talk about not leaving before the miracle happens.

I have learned a few exercises from my life as a physician about waiting. I would often go to meetings or have patients or other doctors that would keep me waiting. I had those huge ego experiences of “I am very important. You should not keep me waiting. Don’t you know how valuable my time is?” When overcome with these thoughts, I end up mad, arrogant, testy when the person or group finally come. This is never helpful for the interaction. Gradually I learn, that when I find myself waiting, that this is an opportunity to pray for that person or group before we meet, or it is an opportunity to meditate, calm my soul before the meeting. Waiting becomes a gift from that person which makes all the difference in my relationship with those I am meeting with as well as my relationship with God. The same is true about waiting for God. Goodness knows, God spends a great deal of time waiting for us.

Of course, centering prayer, meditation, contemplation, lectio divina are also more exercises about waiting.

Spiritual writer, Michael Vinson, suggests a waiting exercise of remembering times in our lives when by some miracle we do wait and the miracle happens. Perhaps we wait talking to someone about a situation before we hear the whole story. Another spiritual writer, Jane Wolfe, responds to Michael in his blog that God will always give us a nudge when it is time to respond and act after we spend time waiting. Jane reminds us of Mary giving Jesus that nudge at the wedding at Cana when it was now time for him to do something!

“Sit and Wait,” Friday Food, jmichaelvinson.com, February 24, 2017

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.

Barbara Brown Taylor: Spiritual Practices, Movies, Short Stories

Barbara Brown Taylor: Spiritual Practices, Movies, Short Stories

"Anything can become a spiritual practice once you are willing to approach it that way—once you let it bring you to your knees and show you what is real, including who you really are, who other people are, and how near God can be when you have lost your way." Barbara Brown Taylor, in An Altar in the World, (HarperOne 2010.)

I have been in groups that watched for the presence of God in movies, not necessarily religious movies. One of my favorites is Places in the Heart where Sally Fields as a recently widowed farmer’s wife in rural Texas during the depression takes in a blind boarder, John Malkovich, and with the help of an African American drifter, Danny Glover, raises and picks cotton to keep her farm. Stop here if you do not want to know more, but the movie ends with all of the characters living and dead, black and white, murdered victim and murderer, kind and unkind, faithful and unfaithful passing communion and love to each other at their local rural church.

I am in another group that reads contemporary short stories to find the voice of God. We have used a four-volume series, Listening for God, edited by an English professor from Yale University, Paula Carlson, and a professor of Religion, Peter Hawkins. One of my favorite stories is A Small Good Thing by Raymond Carver about a couple whose child dies and the baker who had made him a birthday cake. Spoiler alert! This story also ends with the three of them having a form of communion late at night at the baker’s shop.

We find communion, spiritual practices all around us in our daily life if we have eyes to see, hears to ear, when we can live in the present and reach out and see what is going on with our neighbor right in front of us.

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.