Merton: Prayer as Distraction

Merton: Prayer as Distraction

“If my prayer is centered in myself, if it seeks only an enrichment of my own self, my prayer will be my greatest potential distraction. Full of my own curiosity, I have eaten of the tree of Knowledge and torn myself away from myself and God. I am left rich and alone and nothing can assuage my hunger: everything I touch turns into a distraction.” —Thomas Merton in Thoughts in Solitude (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999).

What a great gift from Merton to remind us of what may be the problem if our prayer life is no longer meaningful and rich, if we seem to lose the connection. Our first question should be, “Is my prayer life centered around myself?” Unfortunately, it is rare that we can actually see that in ourselves. It often takes talking to someone else about their stale prayers and seeing that loneliness and isolation and self-centeredness in them. Then the “Aha!” moment comes internally. “The same is also true for me!” We constantly learn from each other, consciously or unconsciously.

We also so often realize our egocentricity in community as we see it and abhor it in others—and then by Grace realize it is also in ourselves. The change for ourselves, however, so often comes as we withdraw from community in silence, contemplation, meditation, or centering prayer—so many avenues for change—to again become aware of that connection to God that was always there. Instead of trying to change the other, we see the gold in the difficulty and recognize the call to change ourselves, which paradoxically calls us to place our center on love of God and others instead of only on ourselves.

Joanna. Joannaseibert.com

Phyllis Tickle: Divine Hours

Phyllis Tickle: Divine Hours

“Prayer is a nonlocative, nongeographic space that one enters at one’s own peril, for it houses God during those few moments of one’s presence there, and what is there will most surely change everything that comes into it.”

Phyllis Tickle, Phyllis Tickle: Essential Spiritual Writings. Church Publishing, 2018.

Phyllis Tickle was a prolific writer, amazing lecturer, rarely speaking from notes, and founding religion editor for Publishers Weekly as well as a great mentor and friend. My thank you to her would be to attempt to continue the kindness and encouragement she showed to me. She may be remembered for her analysis of The Emergent Christian Church, but I most treasure her Divine Hours, a series of books of observance of the fixed-hour of prayer for spring, summer, fall, and winter. I know she not only wrote about it, she practiced it. I remember seeing her slipping away at meetings for a few minutes to pray at one of the fixed hours of morning, midday, vespers, or compline.

Phyllis’ books allow us to follow a fixed time of prayer no matter where we are in time or place. She brought back an ancient rule of life to modern times and reminded us how this would change our lives, teaching that we would never be the same after experiencing the practice. I am not as faithful as Phyllis, but instead practice the fixed hours of prayer at certain seasons of the year, sometimes for only a week or a month, sometimes for a whole season. She also wrote an entire book of fixed prayers for night offices for those who have difficulty sleeping or who work at night, prayers at midnight, night watch, and dawn. Phyllis has written prayer books for Christmastide, Eastertide, as well as a convenient pocket edition of The Fixed Hours. There can be no more trusted or beloved friend to keep close by or carry with you during the day or night or during the earth seasons of the year than Phyllis Tickle.

Joanna. joannaseibert.com

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

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.