Responding to the News of the Day

Buechner, Ignatius: News of the Day

“When the evening news comes on, hundreds of thousands of people all over the earth are watching it on their TV screens. There is also the news that rarely gets into the media, which is the news of each particular day of each particular one of us. Maybe there’s nothing on earth more important for us to do than sit down every evening and think it over, try to figure it out, or at least try to come to terms with it. The news of our day. It is, if nothing else, a way of saying our prayers.”—Frederick Buechner.

Buechner challenges us to spend even a fraction of the time we listen to the world news of the day dealing with the news in our own lives. 12-step groups and short courses in Christianity, such as Cursillo and Ignatian spirituality, all suggest methods for reviewing the day, giving thanks, making gratitude lists, remembering back to when we encountered God, when we harmed ourselves or others, asking for forgiveness, planning to make amends, and in essence turning our life and our will over to God one more time each evening. Those in recovery call it the 10th step. St. Ignatius calls it the Examen.  

Buechner reminds us that we should consider these exercises as prayer. It is our news of the day for God, nighttime news, and nighttime prayers.

  These nighttime prayers are more needed now than perhaps at any other time in our lives.

In due course, answers will come regarding how we will respond to the world news of the day.

                      Joanna. https://www.joannaseibert.com/

Trees, Roots, and Needing Praise

Nouwen: Trees, Roots, and Needing Praise

“Trees that grow tall have deep roots. Great height without great depth is dangerous. The great leaders of this world—like St. Francis, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr.—were all people who could live with public notoriety, influence, and power in a humble way because of their deep spiritual rootedness. Those who are deeply rooted in the love of God can enjoy human praise without being attached to it.”—Henri Nouwen in Bread for the Journey (HarperSanFrancisco, 1997).

Nouwen gives us a remarkable sign of when our connection to God is thin. When we need the praise and adoration of others, we are not “rooted” in God. Living off the recognition of others is living on the surface. Needing the favorable opinion of others is like a “stop sign.”

Stop! We are going in the wrong direction. Turn around. Go and sit or walk outdoors. Recognize that there dwells in nature something greater than ourselves. Remember that a loving God has our welfare so completely in mind that God created all this for us to care for and enjoy.

Talk to a spiritual friend. Do one of the many spiritual exercises we most often practice to reconnect to God. Reexamine your rule of life.

Reach out in love to someone else, especially someone in need. Make eye contact. Look for the light of Christ in that person. Connect the Christ in us to the Christ in the other person. These are ways our souls will extend and enlarge to nurture deeper roots.

As our roots grow in our spiritual community, we receive an extra bonus. Note in this last image how other roots begin to connect to each other and share nourishment. And so with us. As our roots grow, we connect to others in our community who support and nourish us as we do with them.

Joanna. https://www.joannaseibert.com/

Canoeing Life's Mountains

Canoeing the Mountains

“Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”—John 12:24.

The Alban Weekly from Duke Divinity School interviewed Tod Bolsinger, professor at Fuller Theological Seminary, about the meaning of his recent book, Canoeing the Mountains: Christian Leadership in Uncharted Territory (IVP Books, 2018).

Bolsinger provides a surprising metaphor for so many of our transition experiences in life. He tells the story of the journey of the explorers Lewis and Clark, who anticipated they would find a navigable river leading to the Pacific Ocean when they reached the Continental Divide. Instead, they met the Rocky Mountains. 

They didn’t survive by attempting to canoe the mountain. However, the explorers didn’t let this obstacle destroy their objective. They had to adapt, and their key to survival came from a source of wisdom that was not part of their hierarchy or privilege.

I think what Bolsinger is trying to tell our churches can apply to aspects of our lives. We have much to learn from people who know what it is like to reach the top of a mountain with a now-useless canoe in hand and still accomplish the insurmountable journey.

Survivors of previous calamities have a sense of a GPS calling them back home. Immigrants, people of color, and women especially have had to adapt to overwhelming situations. Their experiences have much to teach us. More and more, we are called to listen to their stories.

Lewis and Clark encountered the needed wisdom from a teenager, a nursing mother, and a Native American kidnapped as a child. “She wasn’t in unfamiliar terrain; she was going home.”  

Bolsinger reminds us that transformation often comes from loss, and those who do not have power may be the true experts in overcoming precarious situations. They may be the best trained in survival and wilderness experiences. Just as Lewis and Clark had to take direction from a young Indian mother, Bolsinger reminds us of the wisdom of giving up power so that something much greater can be birthed. This is also a basic premise in recovery programs and the Christian life in community. 

The canoe metaphor is an apt one for our individual life transitions. What mountains on our journey have we encountered, equipped with only a “canoe”: a valuable energy at one time in our life, but not the expertise we need now? What does it mean to listen more carefully to survivors—survivors in our own world and the survivor parts of our inner world that can guide us along the next pathway?

This is why we continue attending recovery meetings to hear stories from other survivors. This is why we meet with spiritual directors or share our dreams with others who have traveled this path less traveled. This is why we listen to the people we reach out to in need, the survivors who teach us how to serve best. This is why we learn that the skills we know in our work are not the same ones we will need at home with our children or spouses.

I also remember stories I read that were helpful at that time but were much more meaningful in the future.

Oh my, this story was so appropriate for us during and after the pandemic and today.

We had to adapt to new survival techniques that we had never used before, such as wearing a mask, being socially distanced, constantly hand washing, and getting vaccinated. These are simple tasks that saved our lives. We must admit that people who are much more intelligent than ourselves know about survival along this path, and some have even been part of other pandemics and know a thing or two.

 I am thinking of our enormous party when we reach our equivalent of the Pacific Ocean. Lewis and Clark only lost one person in their expedition, probably from a ruptured appendix. But we left behind so many lives as we traveled through that pandemic. Today, we immensely miss them.   

 “Tod Bolsinger: What Does It Mean to Stop Canoeing the Mountains?” Faith and Leadership, Alban at Duke Divinity School, alban@div.duke.edu, 8/13/2018.

Joanna https://www.joannaseibert.com/