Canticle 5
January 18, 2009
The last part I’ll comment on from the canticle in the morning office of CDP is: This day be within and without me, lowly and meek, yet all-powerful. Lowliness and meekness spell out the virtue of humility that every Christian should ask for from the Lord who dwells within.
This prayer is asking the Lord to manifest himself within us in lowliness and in meekness. Frankly, I am not given to ask for this meekness and lowliness by nature. They ran out of humility when my turn came. I am more inclined to assert myself. Perhaps I can blame society’s influence on me: lowly and meek are out, brash and proud are in. Perhaps it’s not society at all; it’s just my human nature taking its time dying. Blame is not a very productive defense mechanism.
All the same, this prayer of receiving the humility of my Lord is a needed corrective for me. Perhaps it is for you too. Notice also the dailiness of this part of the prayer. I get the manna of humility in daily but sufficient portions. Sufficient unto each day its dose of humility. Tomorrow, I start over again and the day after until lowliness and meekness become inherent character traits in me. Or as Dallas WIllard says until humility become second nature in me.
Biblical lowliness and meekness are not self-deprecating nor are they cowing down to others. In fact the very opposite is true as the words yet all-powerful affirm. Our king Jesus had unlimited power from God while on earth, but willingly laid those aside exercised in order to teach us to negotiate the virtues of lowliness and meekness. How much self-control did he have to learn (he learned obedience through the things he suffered)? Did he pray daily for humility? While I can’t answer those questions for my Lord, I can use all the means of grace available to me to help me on the path of humility. It takes the powerful energy of the Holy Spirit within me to be self-controlled when my tendency is to exert unnecessary power when humility works better. Not everyone will see self-control as power. No matter, we know that “pupils are not above their teacher, but when we are fully formed we will be like our teacher.”
Prayer as Place
January 14, 2009
Often, when speaking or writing about fixed hour prayer, the hours are referred to as place. Phyllis Tickle refers to them as a “small chapels or wayside stations within the day’s courses”. We frequently use language such as “entering in” or even “going to” for these special times of prayer. This language is not a recent human innovation but a tradition that is millenia old. It’s rooted in the Psalms themselves.
One thing I have asked of the Lord,
this is what I seek:
that I may dwell in the house of the Lord
all the days of my life;
to behold the beauty of the Lord
and to seek Him in His temple.
The opening sentences of our morning office remind us of this fact and these sentences from evening prayer follow it up.
In the shadow of Your wings
I will sing Your praises, O Lord.
The Lord is the refuge of my life;
of whom shall I be afraid?
to dwell in the presence of my God,
to gaze on Your holy place.
I believe I shall see the goodness
of the Lord in the land of the living.
Each of these images are here to remind us of both the tangibility of God’s presence in prayer and in the incarnation of Christ experienced through the other. Through an emphasis on place, the Psalms, from which all of these words are drawn, root us in the reality that prayer is connected to real everyday life. These words further remind us that where we live and who we love matters and that this life in the Spirit exists beyond the space between our ears.
While these words may remind us that we have a citizenship in heaven (Phil 3:20), they keep us from borrowing against that hope of heaven without being rooted in and connected to the place we are now. The place where we live, serve and love God through loving our neighbors is that place where we experience God.
Wendell Berry, that champion of the sacredness of place and an enemy of the abstract, reminds us:
Love is never abstract. It does not adhere to the universe or the planet or the nation or the institution or the profession, but to the singular sparrows of the street, the lilies of the field, “the least of these my brethren.”
Canticle 2
December 29, 2008
Missional Order is engaged in three interrelated commitments or vows. First we are committed to live in a sacred way in chronological time and the special moments of worship. The second vow is continuous spiritual formation. We believe our initial conversion into Christ is just that initial. We want to spend the rest of our lives learning and training to be conformed to the image of Christ. The third commitment that unifies our vision for the Christian life is missio dei. It is not enough to worship and train. We must also do the work of God in this world as we participate in the establishment of the Kingdom of God. By making these three commitments we declare our Christian lifestyle not just our beliefs.
We take seriously time set aside for worship, and special moments of encounter with God. As an aid to worship we are using as our guide Celtic Daily Prayer, which is accessible from this site’s menu. Celtic simply means Irish in this case. This prayer book we use was composed by a community of Christ followers in a place in Ireland called Northumbria. Each morning time of worship we sing with them this song or canticle toward the end of the worship time. Last week I wrote a few comments on the first two lines. This week a few comments on the following two lines are in order: Christ, as a shield overshadow me.
Notice again that the form of this line is petitionary, in other words, we are asking Christ to be our shield and as a shield to overshadow us or protect us. I don’t know about you but as for me I need Christ’s protection for he knows how to protect his own as promised “I will never leave or forsake you, and no one will pluck you out of my hand.”
What do you need to be protected from in your life?
For me it is mostly my heart, soul, mind, and body. These are the components of my self and what they are like is the sum total of what my character is like. Proverbs 4:23 says that we must protect our hearts because out of them flows life. Our heart, soul, mind, or inner existence needs protection. It is susceptible to all kinds of attacks from the evil side. These are the areas of susceptibility many of us deal with and need the overshasowing by Christ’s shield: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride. If you guessed or recognized that these are the 7 deadly sins the early church gave us, you would be right.
And so the petition: Christ as a shield overshadow me gains in significance for me as I reflect on the presence of these categories of sin in my life. We are predisposed to all of them; perhaps not always, but periodically. Confession and repentance follow and forgiveness is received. Then we can ask Christ the shield to overshadow us with the 7 virtues, which are also the gift of the early church to us: courage, faith, hope, justice, love, prudence, and restraint.
Do you examen?
December 15, 2008
Here is my question right off the bat: How do you close out your day? Do you have certain practices you engage in to bring an end to your day? What’s your routine?
A day can pack a lot of punches. Think of how many events can happen in a day. Lives can change quickly by an announcement of birth, of death, of the arrival of the kingdom of God into a person’s or a community’s life, or the onset of recession. Sin can lodge free at our expense in our thoughts, words, deeds, and bodies. Distancing ourselves from the loving Father only takes a careless moment of falling into temptation. We make the right or wrong decision, we take the right or wrong turn and by the end of the day life accumulates and many parts of life demand resolution. Stuff happens that needs debriefing with God. An experience cries out to us to be revisited and understood deeply in the presence of God. While this time taken at the end of the day may be a luxury to many (I think here of the mother who is exhausted after a day with a fussy baby, or parents whose children demand more energy than they have). If not daily, then, some form of reflection upon the day, the week, the month needs to take place in our lives.
Compline, saying our prayers just before we retire to bed, allows us a chance to reflect (even if ever so briefly) upon the day’s activities: what we did and did not do, how we felt, how we thought or how we loved, what we said and shouldn’t have said. The kind of prayer par excellence for doing some introspection is called examen. In examen, we address God as “revealer” of our hearts asking him the all-too scary yet necessary questions about our lives. Or perhaps we ask embarrassing questions that would shine the light of God, Scripture, and conscience upon our hearts. Celtic Daily Prayer (also here) offers us a liturgy of examen. By the way examen does not need to be sad and despairing. Far from it. Simply put, be yourself, and expect that hope is alive.
Examen is no easy feat. It can be real scary. What would God think and what do I think about myself, about my experience with God today? Here is that scary prayer: Search me, O God, and know my heart. Test me and know my thoughts. See if there be any wicked way in me, abide with me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”
What’s so scary? …
Who wants to be exposed, knowing that there is no way of escaping from ourselves. Here’s the thing, when exposed, we are exposed by one who is loving and totally committed to will everything good for us. This is what makes examen a good activity at the end of the day for me. I get to face myself and God, my sinfulness and my righteousness, my joys and my sorrows in an attitude of neediness before a loving God.
A Lament to Amen
November 23, 2008
“Do I hear an amen?” “Give me an Amen!” shouts the preacher. And I often wondered if this was an admission of insecurity. Once I heard this: “I am preaching better than you’re amening.”
Poor word, you don’t stand a chance! With friends like that, who needs enemies? A few more layers of bad use and meaning and you will be buried for good. Do you cry dear word?
Amen, in other places, you are just one of those functional words we drag kicking and screaming into its proper slot at the end of a prayer. “There, I finished my prayer properly.” Are you happy being used in this way, my word? Do you object? Do you wonder if you will ever come into your own?
Some composers have played on your inherent lyrical abilities. AAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaAAAAAAAAaaaaAAmen! You’ve been stretched on musical score sheets for pages on end. By the time the second measure drones on singers have already forgotten what you’re about. Stretched to the point of snapping. Toyed with until you’ve become a discarded rag doll.
Somehow, against all odds, you have survived. Victim of abuse, you have remained strong. Today I want to respect and honor you. I offer you an ode. Be honored my word by being a God-chosen word teaching us to agree that God is faithful. Faithful is your name, faithful you remain. Hats off.
Resolution in honor of Amen: I resolve that every time I encounter you in the written pages of Scripture and in other writings, to honor you by lingering with good thoughts. I resolve every time I see you in Celtic Daily Prayer, and I will see you often, to salute you and welcome you as a reminder from God that I too am called to remain faithful to my call as you have remained faithful to your call in the midst of a trying life. Amen! So help me God.
The Community
November 16, 2008
A couple of Sundays ago I spoke the word to a few people in Hamilton, Kansas. I spoke about the healing of the paralytic by Jesus in Mark 2:1-12. I have probably spoken on this passage 25 times or more. It never gets old for me. Every time I speak this word, it seems as if the one whose experience this was in the first place honors my love of it with deeper understanding. It is said that familiarity breeds contempt. False. Not necessarily. Familiarity with an open heart and mind is never contemptible.
This time around (probably my 26th time) I saw three distinct communities in this text. First there is the community of faith (first identified as “They” and then as “four of them”) which is responsible for bringing the paralytic to Jesus (when Jesus saw their faith–verse 5). Pieces of their imaginations collided into one holy action, they dismantle part of a roof, they struggle together, they have compassion together, they are concerned for the welfare of the paralyzed among them together, and each of them was responsible for a corner of the stretcher. Mission accomplished.
This enacted repentance and expression of confidence in the power of God are two motivators of this community. Following their example the community of faith continued to develop in repentance and trust throughout the ages until our very day. It is the kind of community missional order seeks to be. Community is held together by its rhythm of life, by shared experiences, by intimate self-revelation, by formative activities, by being missional.
Our common commitments of praying together, of being transformed together, of being on mission with God together, like the common commitment of the community of faith in Mark 2: 1-12 is one that is built on compassion for others. Praying with others the same text, the same liturgy, the same prayers, sharing the same intentions of being Christ-like in our God-life, will enable us to create a community of faith. Our hope is that this community of faith will find local expressions of the the common commitment we have made, and multiply ad infinitum.
When I pray the closing blessing in CDP’s morning prayer I imagine the many of us who are heading into the world of work or school or vacation, or wherever. Perhaps some are heading into a storm without knowing it. Perhaps there is a wilderness experience custom-made by the Holy Spirit (in imitation of Christ’s custom wilderness journey). What a gift we can give each other when we say those words:
Blessing
May the peace of the Lord Christ go with you,
wherever He may send you.
May He guide you through the wilderness,
protect you through the storm.
May He bring you home rejoicing
at the wonders He has shown you.
May He bring you home rejoicing
once again into our doors.
Lord, hear us and answer our prayers in your mercy.
By the way, the other two communities are the communities of disbelief (2:6), the ones that began to question in their hearts and the community of celbration, the ones that glorify God for what Jesus did (2:12-13.
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