Holy Week Readings, Day Four

Thought-provoking insights from Wisdom Distilled from the Daily regarding reflective prayer:

Prayer is the filter through which we view our worlds. Prayer provokes us to see the life around us in fresh, new ways... Prayer is designed to enable people to realize that God is in the world around them... prayer is meant to call us back to a consciousness of God here and now, not to make God some kind of private getaway from life. 

It is so easy to come to believe that what we do is so much more important that what we are. It is so easy to simply get too busy to grow. 

To pray only when we feel like it is more to seek consolation than to risk conversion. To pray only when it suits us is to want God on our terms... The hard fact is that nobody finds time for prayer. The time must be taken. There will always be something more pressing to do, something more important to be about than the apparently fruitless, empty act of prayer. But when that attitude takes over, we have begun the last trip down a very short road because, without prayer, the energy for the rest of life runs down.

Benedictine prayer [rooted in the Psalms and the Scriptures] pries me out of myself and stretches me beyond myself so that I can come someday, perhaps, to be my best self... Benedictine prayer life, besides being scriptural and regular, is reflective. It is designed to make us take our own lives into account in the light of the gospel.

There is little for me to add to these remarkable words. For several years I was in a Tuesday morning prayer group where we learned and practiced the things described here. Rather than revolving our prayers reactively around our immediate circumstances, we learned to invite scripture and the Spirit to set the tone. In fits and starts, I have applied the wisdom gained from my experience in that group, and today's reading is a gut-punch reminder of those lessons.

So today I will reflect and read and pray through Psalm 86, the psalm that is assigned to my daily Bible reading. I will heed these discerning reflections from Wisdom as I pray through it:

Reflection on the Scriptures is basic to growth in prayer to growth as a person. Prayer is a process of coming to be something new. It is not simply a series of exercises.

1 Hear me, Lord, and answer me,
    for I am poor and needy.
2 Guard my life, for I am faithful to you;
    save your servant who trusts in you.
You are my God; 3 have mercy on me, Lord,
    for I call to you all day long.
4 Bring joy to your servant, Lord,
    for I put my trust in you.

5 You, Lord, are forgiving and good,
    abounding in love to all who call to you.
6 Hear my prayer, Lord;
    listen to my cry for mercy.
7 When I am in distress, I call to you,
    because you answer me.

8 Among the gods there is none like you, Lord;
    no deeds can compare with yours.
9 All the nations you have made
    will come and worship before you, Lord;
    they will bring glory to your name.
10 For you are great and do marvelous deeds;
    you alone are God.

11 Teach me your way, Lord,
    that I may rely on your faithfulness;
give me an undivided heart,
    that I may fear your name.
12 I will praise you, Lord my God, with all my heart;
    I will glorify your name forever.
13 For great is your love toward me;
    you have delivered me from the depths,
    from the realm of the dead.

14 Arrogant foes are attacking me, O God;
    ruthless people are trying to kill me—
    they have no regard for you.
15 But you, Lord, are a compassionate and gracious God,
    slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness.
16 Turn to me and have mercy on me;
    show your strength in behalf of your servant;
save me, because I serve you
    just as my mother did.
17 Give me a sign of your goodness,
    that my enemies may see it and be put to shame,
    for you, Lord, have helped me and comforted me.

Holy Week Readings, Day One

This week I am reading Wisdom Distilled from the Daily: Living the Rule of St. Benedict Today by Joan Chittister. In the last five years I have been inordinately drawn to monastic spiritual practices and how they can be pursued without having to hide out in complete seclusion. Here's a great statement from the first chapter:

The spirituality that emerges from the Rule of Benedict is a spirituality charged with living the ordinary life extraordinarily well...  The problem becomes discovering how to make here and now, right and holy for us. (p. 6)

As you and I enter this final week of Lent, in preparation for Easter celebrations, I ask myself where resurrection is needed most in my life. I found this illustration from the book especially resonant, and a profound roadmap to guide me in that question:

Once upon a time, an ancient monastic tale says, the Elder said the businessperson:

     "As the fish perishes on dry land, so you perish when you get entangled in the world. The fish must return to the water and  you must return to the Spirit."

     And the businessperson was aghast. "Are you saying that I must give up my business and go into a monastery?" the person asked.


     And the Elder said, "Definitely not. I am telling you to hold on to your business and go into your heart."

At our weekly times in the park on the Westside, there is a 4 year-old boy named Ernesto who already has a very distinctive personality. He loves to play with carritos (toy cars) and catch balls. You can hear his voice all the way across the park as he plays and laughs. He is an Energizer bunny, endlessly demanding that one of us play with him. Yet as focused as he is on playing hard, his attention will be completely shifted if he sees a butterfly. "¡Mariposa!" he squeals, and starts chasing it, fruitlessly attempting to catch it. He will follow the butterfly throughout the park, up into bushes, across the field, away from everyone.

In the midst of my full and noisy life, I desire that when the Spirit is prompting me, that my attention would be taken away from the urgent and temporal things around me, instead following the Spirit where He leads.

Fear and Faith

I started a new phase of my life yesterday: I am back at seminary, this time at Azusa Pacific University, taking a couple of courses in order to get the extra units needed to start another graduate degree in Fall 2013. It is wonderful to be back in school again. I am a lifelong learner, and simply enjoy the entire process of lecture, reading, discussion, and application. So my Inner (Outer?!) Nerd was blissfully happy.

The course is Pastoral Counseling for Adolescents, and it is remarkable to take this course after so many years already logged in youth ministry. My first seminary courses were taken in 1984, and it is incredible to me what has ensued in those intervening years in terms of learning, experience, mistakes, joys, sorrows. Naturally, I wish I had known then what I know now, but that is what life is all about, right?

I am beginning to reflect on all the things that have changed in youth ministry in this long season of experience. There are simple things like going from using dittos to promote events in 1984 to creating Facebook events! But there are deeper, more profound issues as well, and the one that comes to mind on this anniversary of 9/11 is fear. Many horrifying events occurred well before 9/11 in our history -- two World Wars, AIDS, Vietnam, assassinations, atom bombs, nuclear threat, racism to name a few... but I would say there are two significant game-changers in the way we work emotionally in the United States: Columbine on April 20, 1999 and the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

I am challenged to come up with words adequate to describe the level of fear I now sense with parents in comparison to the ways I related to parents at the beginning of my career. The intriguing part is that in the mid-eighties, it's not as if parents had lived in a world of puppies and rainbows. The decades of drugs and free love in the 60's, along with the cynicism coming out of Vietnam, Watergate and Jonestown in the 70's were not exactly a walk in the park!

But 9/11 and Columbine feel different. The fear and unimagined terror hit so close to home, and feel so tangible and invasive. How can we allay such paralyzing concerns? I look to scripture and there are some fundamentals that keep me anchored:


Isaiah 8
11 The Lord has given me a strong warning not to think like everyone else does. He said,

12 “Don’t call everything a conspiracy, like they do,
    and don’t live in dread of what frightens them.
13 Make the Lord of Heaven’s Armies holy in your life.
    He is the one you should fear.
He is the one who should make you tremble.
14     He will keep you safe.
But to Israel and Judah
    he will be a stone that makes people stumble,
    a rock that makes them fall.
And for the people of Jerusalem
    he will be a trap and a snare.
15 Many will stumble and fall,
    never to rise again.
    They will be snared and captured.”

16 Preserve the teaching of God;
    entrust his instructions to those who follow me.
17 I will wait for the Lord,
    who has turned away from the descendants of Jacob.
    I will put my hope in him.


I have had countless conversations with students over the years of what it means to "fear the Lord." But I think this passage begins to capture it. It is an issue of whom we give power to ~ someone utterly trustworthy, or someone who seeks to destroy us? Fear can be positive, believe it or not, according to whom we fear.

I do not mean to oversimplify or trivialize. Fear can be a dreadful thing, and I know it well. But I am seeking to understand the reality of what it means to walk by faith and not by sight: to not look at immediate circumstances and to what I can see as the final answer. That is to think like everyone else does. Instead, I yearn to wait for the Lord... (and) put my hope in him. My fear becomes one of healthy respect and awe.

May we not be a people of anxious fear, but ones of sober reality who live anchored in the One who keeps us safe in the truest, most reliable and eternal way. If you continue to read in Isaiah (and I encourage you to do so) we find unbelievable promises. Here's the teaser, and with this I conclude; from Isaiah 9:2,


The people who walk in darkness
    will see a great light.