Re:Lentless

"The life of a monastic ought to be a continuous Lent.  Since few, however, have the strength for this, we urge the entire community during these days of Lent to keep its manner of life most pure and to wash away in this holy season the negligences of other times.” — St. Benedict

Since I began my monkish adventure a couple of years ago I’ve been exposed to many new (to me, although they’re centuries old) ways of worshipping and serving God.  My Protestant upbringing and Christian life severely limited my exposure to liturgical and high church traditions.  In spite of living my entire life in Louisiana and hearing of Mardi Gras since early childhood I had no inkling that it had anything to do with God and certainly not with a season of sacrifice.  You see, although the lines are beginning to blur somewhat, during my childhood there were two very distinct Louisianas.  There was South Louisiana, very much Catholic, the land of seafood, Cajun cooking, lots of French language and Mardi Gras.  And then there was North Louisiana, mostly Protestant, farm country, woodlands and we spoke plain redneck English.   To most of us in northern Louisiana Mardi Gras was just another Cajun party and we had never even heard of Lent. 

But, as I mentioned, I’m being exposed to many new/ancient traditions and the Holy Spirit is drawing me toward them.  Over the past few months I’ve read several things about Lent and each time the Spirit has prompted me to do something but I’ve put off making any decision on it.  Last week while reading a totally unrelated article the word relentless jumped out at me – more specifically, the two words Lent and less in the middle of relentless.  The Spirit seemed to be asking me, “How much longer are you going to be Lentless?” 

“Benedict tells us that Lent is the time to make new efforts to be what we say we want to be.”– Joan Chittister

So, I made the decision right then.  I replied to God that I would be Lentless no longer.  

Re:Lentless

God,

I will not be Lentless this year.  I’ve made a commitment to participate in Lent this year, to make new efforts to be what I say I want to be.

Monicus Peregrinus 

But what should I give up?  Several things have come to mind that would be sacrifices for me to give up for 40 days.  Bread was one recurring thought but I wasn’t sure I wanted to make that strong of a commitment.  You see, I LOVE bread and have it almost every meal.  However, the Spirit would not let me drop the idea of bread so bread it is. 

The Lenten tradition that I’m most attracted to is not just simply giving something up.  It entails fasting (justice towards self) but also prayer (justice towards God) and service (justice towards others).  With God’s help, beginning Ash Wednesday I am abstaining from eating bread until Easter.  I’m asking the Spirit to use my physical hunger for bread during these 40 days to increase my desire to pray for those who don’t have adequate food.  I’m also, with God’s assistance, going to actively use more of my time and money to help others without food.

Photo of the Week-Biking in SE Asia

Taking a break while biking on an XMA trip in Southeast Asia

Humilitas

It seems I’ve been caught up in a perfect storm of humility.  Does my writing on the subject mean I lack the virtue?  Perhaps that’s why God sent the storm? 

I’m a solitary in life.  I enjoy the quietness, the stillness of being alone.  Most of the time I prefer the presence of others to be through books.  And the plural is important to this post.  You see I like to have several books going at once.  It’s part of my thought process to read a chapter or two then lay the book down and pick up another while the ideas I just read ruminate in my mind.  It may be a few days or weeks before I pick up the previous book again as the ideas in it slowly ferment within me. 

And so my perfect storm of humility crept up on my unawares.  I’d heard about John Dickson’s new book Humilitas.  Dickson is a senior research fellow of the Department of Ancient History, Macquarie University.  Although a Christian, in Humilitas, he is showing from an historical perspective that Jesus’ humble life and even more humble death changed western civilization from one where “honor was universally regarded as the ultimate asset for human beings, and shame the ultimate deficit” to one where “the noble choice to forgo your status, deploy your resources or use your influence for the good of others before yourself” is the greatest virtue. 

Sounded interesting so I promptly ordered it up on Amazon.  Yes, as an avid reader I have the requisite Kindle and iPad and I am an emerging environmentalist but I’ve found that I still prefer to sit down with a good old-fashioned tree-based book.   A couple of days later the Box Man (my grandchildren’s name for the friendly UPS guy who is always dropping boxes of books off) brought Humilitas which immediately start reading. 

After reading a few chapters of Humilitas I decide I need some exercise.  While I’m riding my bike I listen to a few chapters of Jim Collins latest book Great by Choice which is a follow up on his ground breaking business management book Good to Great.  In Good to Great Collins asserts that all good companies that made the jump to great companies were led by what he calls Level 5 leaders.  According to Collins “Level 5 leaders are ambitious first and foremost for the cause, the organization, the work—not themselves—and they have the fierce resolve to do whatever it takes to make good on that ambition.   A Level 5 leader displays a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will.”  And in Great by Choice Collins says that these Level 5 leaders made the conscious choice to embody personal humility and professional will. 

As part of my monkish spiritual exercises, each morning I’m reading a portion of Joan Chittister’s TheRule of Benedict.  This morning’s reading is Chapter 7 Humility.  After I finish my daily reading in The Rule I continue my monk training with some time in The Artist’s Rule, Christine Valters Paintner’s 12 week journey into nurturing your creative soul with monastic wisdom.  I’m beginning week six which is titled Humility: Embracing your imperfections and limitations.    

I’ve often been accused of being a little slow on the uptake but even I’m starting to pick up on a pattern.  Everything I’m reading this week is pointing to the importance of humility in my personal life, my work life and my spiritual life.  Perhaps God is telling me that I need to spend some time meditating on and incorporating more humility in my life.  A very humbling thought indeed! 

Reflections

I've been musing about reflections this morning-  

As the water reflects the face,

So the heart reflects the person.

-Proverbs 27:19 

A pilgrim looked at the reflection of a mountain in still water.  It was the reflection that first caught his attention. 

But presently he raised his eyes to the mountain.  Reflect Me, said his Father to him, then others will look at you.  Then they will look up and see Me.  And the stiller the waters the more perfect the reflection.

-Amy Carmichael 

Scrub away the residue of yesterday.

Polish the bell of my soul

to a high shine.  Ready me

to receive and quite clearly

reflect your simple light.

               -Rachel Srubas 

I raise my eyes toward the mountains.

Where does my help come from?

My help comes from the Lord,

The maker of heaven and earth.

               -Psalm 121:1-2

Adventure with "A" purpose

"But we have the mind of Christ” Apostle Paul

“Being steeped in the mind of Christ is all important” Joan Chittister

Adventure with a purpose.  We use that phrase a lot where I work at Extreme Missionary Adventures and I think that it is important to our mission, our vision and our passion that we understand what we mean with this phrase.

Lots of people are into adventure these days.  Heli-skiing, base-jumping, scuba diving, exploring new places and new peoples, the list goes on and on.  For those not quite as active you have adventures in shopping, eating, drinking, etc. (think Anthony Bourdain).  Many chose to live out their adventures vicariously.  Take reality TV for example. A large percentage of Americans prefer to watch others live (a usually twisted version) of life rather than get up off the couch and live themselves.

Each year more and more people are getting into adventures with purpose. In their pursuit of meaning for their existence these individuals pour their time and talents into feeding the hungry, education initiatives, helping refugees, saving the whales, rescuing endangered snow leopards, reforesting lands in developing nations, cleaning up polluted waters and many other purposes.  A few years ago adventurer Richard Bangs wrote a fairly popular book Adventures With Purpose detailing some of his exploits into this type of adventure.  These are all worthy causes which we as co-creators and co-inhabitants of our planet should be concerned about and involved in.  But they should not be THE purpose of our adventures, our lives. 

And that’s why our tagline is not adventure with purpose but adventure with A purpose.  That “a” points to a grand, specific, all-encompassing purpose to our adventures and that purpose is all important to our mission and our very lives.  As our tagline goes on to say the purpose of our adventures is to know Him and make Him known.  Him being the triune God - Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  We take this life purpose from Scripture:

“God… wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.”  1 Tim 2:4

“For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you. We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives,” Colossians 1:9-10

As I was crafting this tagline 12 years ago I felt that the sequence of knowing Him and making Him known was very important.  We cannot effectively teach or demonstrate what we do not personally know.  To make Him known to the world we must first know Him.  Scripture reinforces this concept.  As Paul goes on to say in Colossians 1 this knowledge he is asking God to fill believers with is, “so that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work,”. 

And how do we come to know God?  It’s not hard and God is on our side in this.  As we saw in 1 Timothy 2:4 God wants all people to know Him.  But it does take some effort on our part and some time.

We come to know God and develop a relationship with Him by spending time with Him in prayer and in His Word:

“If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you.” James 1:5

“But we have the mind of Christ” and “We speak a message of wisdom” – see I Corinthians 2:6-16 for context.

We must invest time alone with God if we are to truly know Him.  We must not let the busyness of our lives, even the busyness of our ministries, keep us from devoting significant blocks of time to being alone with God.  To sitting quietly while listening for His still voice.  God longs to speak to us, to reveal His will for us and for our ministries.  But we must take the time to hear what He is saying. 

I think this is one area where the early Christians had an advantage over us.  Their lives were no doubt physically harder than ours but they also lived at a much slower pace with much less distraction.  They had time as they tended to the necessities of life to walk with the Lord and to talk with the Lord.  Many of them invested significant time in contemplative/meditative prayer.  Not Bible study to see what they could get out of the Bible but rather letting God, through His Word, get into them  This closeness to Him, this knowledge of Him is what gave them the courage and strength to make Him known in an often times very hostile world.  Courage and strength such as that displayed by the Celtic Christians who would launch out in a boat with no sails allowing the wind of the Spirit to blow them wherever He desired for them spread His Word. 

Speaking of these Celtic Christians in his book Exploring Celtic Spirituality Ray Simpson says,

“They did not get their adventure from intellectual exploration, but from obedience.  In this, they mirrored those personalities portrayed in the pages of Genesis who set out into the unknown in obedience to God.  These Biblical travelers did not try to ensure a good result, as we are prone to do, before they set out.  They achieved results not by going to people who were likely to react in a way that would bring the desired results, but through prayer.”

Simpson goes on to say,

“The Irish monks…defined the true search for God as starting from apavia (roadlessness), a state of complete trust in the direction of God rather than that of a human decision.”

In Sanctuary of the Soul Richard Foster discusses some biblical references to meditative prayer,

“Two Hebrew words deeply inform and enrich our understanding of meditative prayer: haga and siach.  Our English Bibles most often translate both of these words with the simple word “meditate”.  Actually these two Hebrew words convey a host of nuances: to mutter, to moan, to whisper, to reflect, to rehearse, to muse and even to coo like a dove(Is 59:11).  Often the emphasis of these words is on silent reflection upon God’s works in nature (Ps 143:5; 145:5) or God’s Word (Ps 119:15, 23, 27, 48, 78, 148).

“ ‘This book of the law shall not depart out of your mouth: you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to act in accordance with all that is written in it’ Joshua 1:8.  This passage from Joshua underscores a central element of the biblical view of meditation: obedience.”

We too can know this courage and strength to make Him known.  We too can experience this apavia, this trust in God’s direction.  We too can feel the wind of the Spirit guiding our lives and our ministries if we, like our early Christian brothers and sisters, will invest the time to know God.

I encourage you to make time to be alone with God and His Word today and every day.  I encourage you to rediscover the power of contemplative/meditative prayer.  A great place to begin your pilgrimage into contemplative prayer would be Foster’s book Sanctuary of the Soul.