I happened to read and hear the musings of two aging spiritual giants this past week: The Rev. Billy Graham and The Rev. Gardner Taylor, both men in the 80’s. Graham is featured in this week’s Newsweek and Taylor was interviewed on PBS Relgion and Ethics Newsweekly Each man spoke of a similiar regret in life. This is my interpretation of their regret: that they did not spend more time in simply being in God’s presence. In Taylor’s words:

Taylor keeps busy, but in recent years, he says he’s begun to practice what 19th-century British pastor Alexander McLaren called “sitting silent before God.”

Rev. TAYLOR: This is not praying, it is not reading, it is just opening oneself. It’s a mystic kind of thing. But we do so little of it, and we who preach are likely to engage ourselves in so many things and to neglect that aspect of being open to what God has to say. And I wish to heaven I had practiced this more early on in my ministry.

Graham speaks more of a desire to have studied more but returns each night when he wakes from a restless sleep, to repeat the 23rd Psalm. The writer describes Graham this way:

“A unifying theme of Graham’s new thinking is humility….I believe the love of God is absolute. He said he gave his son for the whole world and I think he loves everybody regardless of what label they have.”

I’m about three decades short of these men’s years and likely eons short of their wisdom and paltry in terms of effectiveness in ministry. But I certainly do know of what they speak. The sweet priviledge of simply sitting in God’s presence is something that doesn’t have to wait until we leave this earthly realm. God longs for us to just be present and life becomes so much less chaotic and confusing when we do.

Simply put: Either embrace the Mystery or be destined to confusion.

I’m about half way through a series of novels by Phil Rickman featuring an Anglican priest by the name of Merrily Watkins. Although these are mystery novels, they are also well researched in areas of mystical Christianity versus New Age religions, paganism, Pentecostalism and much more. The main character being an ordained woman and single parent of a teenage young woman is especially intriguing and more than a little close to my own history. I am enjoying them immensely and learning various historical nuances of New Age and other religious practices. For example, I did not know that Wicca arose in the 1960’s as a conglomeration of celtic pagan practices.
An older set of novels by Susan Howatch have long been be my favorite. The series on the Church of England and various ministries of healing and deliverance are probably the only books I have read two or three times. These novels are set in the 1920’s through the end of that century and therefore do not deal with more recent challenges to the ways of Christ. However, the quotes at the beginning of each chapter and some sections of the novels themselves are so profound and challenging that I re-read them as spiritual food.

Perhaps I first heard this term in a British movie or novel. Or perhaps it was my own mother who said in response to my exuberance “Contain yourself!” This is hard to do! Easier as the years go by, self-containment has become a virtue I admire and one I attempt to espouse. Whether it be joy, sorrow, pain, fear, or anger, “containing myself” seems to enable a moment of extremity to become a teaching moment with the gift of wisdom. It is not, however, my natural state! Such containment is a painful and constant discipline.

Imagine God containing God-self in the body of an infant child. Was that painful? Did it take the energy of the universe to make this possible? The images of God’s creation in space that we have just now begun to see through the Hubble telescope show a God of exuberance and joyous dance, riotous color and un-contained passion. But to become a human child took Self-Containment that is un-imaginable and therefore, unbelievable to many.

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I’m reading The Soul of Christianity by Huston Smith. I found this helpful:

Religions have outsides and insides: they have outer, exoteric forms that house inner, esoteric cores. People differ on which of these stands out more clearly for them. For esoterics God is in the focal view, whereas for exoterics his created world is focal and God must be inferred from it. It follows that for exoterics this world is concrete and the celestial world is abstract, whereas for esoterics it is the other way around….Esoterics can understand exoterics and recognize their need for them, but the reverse does not hold. …Every where in history exoterics far outnumber esoterics and the religious institutions run mostly on the energy they provide.

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One of my favorite people in the world is my daughter. This quote is a part of her e-mail signature:

“One can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.”
Abraham Maslow

Wise words. Somedays I’d much rather cocoon.

The following prayer of St. Basil speaks from a place of such deep presence and awareness of the Holy. I read it each day and find something transformative in it. In these dark times of both earthly disasters and national disgrace, I often find I do not know how to pray. What can I say? I am ashamed not just of my own insensitivites and insecurities, but I am ashamed of the actions of our government done in the name of Christ and the expectation of God’s blessing. My own beloved country, using chemical weapons, on men, women and children….using torture and denying it…I am deeply embarassed for us all. In the midst of this, two lines from this prayer help me: grant us to pass through the night of the whole present life and this reminder that this time too shall pass: For Thou are the true Light that enlightenest and sactifiest all, and all creation doth hymn Thee unto the ages of ages. Doth hymn Thee May we hymn thee, ture Light and may we worship in truth as well as in spirit.
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About six months ago, my husband was out of work. We decided to make a game out of living on the edge of poverty. We collected cans and bottles from the side of roads, recycle bins and garbage containers. Our goal was to collect enough in deposit returns to pay for groceries. We did this for three months and were able to collect about $60 a month and buy enough groceries for the month at Aldi’s. It was fun for about three weeks.

After that, our relative wealth became a little clearer to us. Gas prices went sky high about the time my spouse got a new job. I kept collecting cans out of curiosity and habit. I discovered as the gas prices rose, the availability of discarded cans and bottles disappeared. There were letters to the editor in our local paper about others collecting these discards to afford gas to get to work. I decided they needed it more than us.
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Disturbing times we are in. No doubt about that. Parts of the earth have been washed into our oceans on several continents in the past year. Natural disasters which Pat Robertson calls acts of God have decimated the poorest men, women and children on our planet. Riots in the suburbs of Paris, suicide bombings in the midst of weddings in Jordan, another school shooting. These horrors bring out the worst and the best in our human nature.

I had a doctor’s appointment today for an infection in my eyes. I also have a chronic health problem that I deal with daily, in part through the use of self-hypnosis and in part by listening to what my body is trying to tell me. So, as my eyes have caused me pain, I’ve been asking myself – what is it that I don’t want to see? I think I know the answer – I do not want to see the fear. Nor do I want to see the power of evil.
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Lectio Divina is a form of prayer that involves pondering one section of scripture. This morning, as I said my morning prayers, this phrase from the 51st Psalm in a Russian Orthodox prayer book jumped out at me.

“Restore unto me the joy of Thy salvation, and with Thy governing Spirit establish me.”

For some time, in the silence, the phrase “with Thy governing Spirit establish me” kept ruminating in my mind. After a time, things about my life which sorely need to be put into order came to my mind and I prayed over them “with Thy governing Spirit establish me”. With each one, I let them lift from me like the smoke from the candlelight, and soon I was filled with utter peace.
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I was told this by a friend of mine who is himself a counselor:

A group of psychologists who are both interested in how religion effects persons emotionally and positive about that effect, consider fundamentalism to be the “religion of the virgin,” designed for those who cannot embrace their own humanity. The radical embracing of the doctrine of original sin means they have to prove to themselves over and over again that they are sinners. The anathama in this psychological rubric is the virgin who has been soiled. This group was not surprised by the sexual sins of the televangelists in the 1980’s because the “shadow” self has to be so repressed in fundamentalism that it has to come out and “prove” the person’s sinfulness to themselves.

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