Buechner: Spiritual Gifts

 Buechner: Spiritual Gifts

“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”—Frederick Buechner.

Our Sunday lectionary readings often are about a call, the call of the disciples, Jonah, Moses, and Paul’s call.
 In today’s world, Frederick Buechner gives us the best advice about how to find our ministry in perhaps his most quoted phrase about the meeting of “our deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger.”

The Spirit gives us gifts for our ministry for doing God’s work. “The varieties of our gifts” are mentioned in 1 Corinthians 12, but we are unaware of many other spiritual gifts. The Rev. Dr. Kate Alexander reminded us recently that we must not limit our spiritual gifts to those described in biblical times. Many spiritual gifts may initially not seem “spiritual.” She gives the example of proofing the Sunday bulletin to further God’s work as a vital ministry performed by people with a very detailed, unique ministry.

We must remember that the gifts are to further the work of God, not necessarily our work, our agenda, or our goals.

Besides giving us several inventories, material from the Stephen Ministry by Stephen Haugk leads us through other clues to our spiritual gifts. For example, the skills we see in our most admired person may be ours. The gift we use to bring about our most fulfilling life events may be our gift. The action of Jesus we most appreciate may be our gift.

 I also learned from Lloyd Edwards’s book Discerning Your Spiritual Gifts that significant gifts may come from our woundedness. For example, those in recovery stay by helping others recover from addiction. Likewise, those who have experienced the death of a significant person are often the ones who can later best help heal others who are grieving.

Parker Palmer’s Let Your Life Speak is another classic book about where and how God leads us into the servant ministry God has created us to participate in.

My experience is that I am using my gift when the ministry in which I am involved energizes me. I put energy in, and more comes out. The tried and true biblical fruit of the Spirit can also indicate when we are using our spiritual gifts. Galatians 5 reveals that when we are connected to and guided by the Spirit, we will feel and know “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.”

God seeks each of us out and calls us by name. We are each so needed today and tomorrow in our troubled world, healing that only each one of us uniquely can do, where “our deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger.”
Joanna    https://www.joannaseibert.com/

 

Going Upstream

Going upstream

“We are very reasonable creatures, but to feel the grace of God, one must forget about reason and go on a pilgrimage to a place where we no longer ‘see as through a glass darkly,’ to a place where we are able to see with eyes of gratitude, rather than with eyes of conquest.”—George Grinnell in A Death on the Barrens.

Mississippi at Memphis

I remember recently sitting by the Mississippi River in Memphis, watching barges travel slowly upstream on a late December cold, windy morning. The few dog walkers and runners along the shore move faster than the endless barges churning white water as they move against the current. The barges are pushed by either towboats or tugboats, identified by either the flat or V-shape of their hulls. Some covered barges traveling upstream ride high on the water. They must be empty but are still straining to travel upstream to be filled more inland on the banks of this mighty river. They move slightly faster than the full barges.

I wonder where their destination is. St. Louis? What are the filled barges carrying?

I hope to remember these barges slowly being pushed upstream against the current. I enjoy leading my life more easily, moving downstream, going with the flow, and not making waves.

Sometimes, however, I am called to go against the crowd and navigate upstream. It will help if I remember the journey is easier if I travel lightly, not taking myself so seriously, not carrying a lot of my own baggage, and not being on a right or wrong conquest.

The barges teach us that the journey upstream always moves slower than journeying downstream. Moving upstream means speaking our truth against the current culture. I pray that the boat pushing us upstream is the Holy Spirit, not our own ego. Grinnell also reminds us that a heart of gratitude can help discern our path and motives and keep us connected to that greater power, leading us on this more difficult journey.

I will be in Memphis at Saint Mary’s Cathedral Bookstore on Saturday, February 3 at 10 am. I would love to see you there.

Mary Seni sent me a picture of a barge on the Mississippi at Natchez

Merton: Epiphany

Merton: Epiphany

 “In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers.” — Thomas Merton

Merton Marker in Louisville

This is the first line of Thomas Merton’s famous mystical revelation and epiphany in downtown Louisville, Kentucky, described in his 1968 journal about the world of the 1960s. Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. pp. 140-142.

Merton had been a Trappist monk for seventeen years and was on an errand for the monastery in the middle of an ordinary day on March 18th, 1958. The story became so famous that Louisville erected a plaque at the site in 2008 at the 50th anniversary of Merton’s revelation. Ordinary people and popes continue to visit the corner of Fourth and Walnut, which was life-changing for Merton and those who read his works. 

 Merton’s experience seems similar to what James Finley describes in Christian Meditation: Experiencing God’s Presence as “having a finger in the pulse of Christ, realizing oneness with God in life itself.”

 This experience may also be similar to what St. Francis realized in nature when he called the sun his brother and the moon his sister. Richard Rohr calls it finding our True Self, “our basic and unchangeable identity in God.” 1

Methodists might relate it to John Wesley’s experience at 8:45 pm on May 24th, 1738, at a Society meeting in Aldersgate Street when someone read from Luther’s Preface to the Epistle to Romans, and Wesley says, “I felt my heart strangely warmed.” 2

Many readers may be going to Louisville this summer. We hope you have a chance to go to the corner of Fourth and Walnut and let us know what it is like.

1 Richard Rohr in Center for Action and Contemplation,” Richard Rohr Meditation: “Thomas Merton Part II,” October 6th, 2017.

2 John Wesley in Journal of John Wesley (London: Charles H. Kelly, 1903), p. 51.

Joanna       https://www.joannaseibert.com/