Vigil

I’ve always been fascinated by the Cistercian Order. I’m completely intrigued by those that feel called to a disciplined life of prayer and physical labor in quiet community with their brothers in the faith, drawn out from the world in order to seek God more fully in mind, spirit and body. On several occasions, I have had the opportunity to journey north to the oldest Trappist Monastary in the U.S., The Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky and to stay in the retreat house adjacent to the monk’s quarters. The Trappist monk’s life is a beautiful picture of kinship, full of quiet wonder at the work of God in and among men. The Abbey itself is situated in the hills of Kentucky, surrounded by dirt roads, dense woods, and farmland. Some of my fondest memories of communing with God come from my times of retreat there. It probably has a lot to do with my personality, but times of solitude and quiet tend to revive my spirit and work to reposition my focus on the true things of God, His mercy, and His purposes.

Trappists monks are signified by their fervent, disciplined devotion to prayer. I, on the other hand, am not. I’m, at best, undisciplined and listless. I want to be defined by constancy, devotion and self-discipline, but I would more likely be identified by my timidity and insecurities. Letting myself be overtaken by subtle distractions is one of my many, many vices.

As a protestant raised in the contemporary church, I grew up with the obligatory suspicion of anything liturgical. The mantra in my life, as it is with most contemporary churchers, has been “no one should dictate how I communicate with God” (a very Western/American influenced view of prayer, I’m sure). By default, we’re taught that prayer should be conversational and somewhat informal, and trust me when I say, I believe there are numerous aspects of this viewpoint that are positive and that I will always hold to.

The problem with completely shunning all things liturgical is our own inability to articulate prayer at times. Though we feel free to talk to God whenever and however we want, we just don’t do it most of the time for some reason. For the average believer, prayer is needs based, as opposed to relationship based. And because we’ve tossed out the scripts, we’re often times left like actors with no lines to read. True, spontaneous improvisation is immensely desirable, but can sometimes feel insufficient. Quite often, if we don’t have anything we’re supposed to say, then we just don’t say anything at all.

Before you write me off, let me give an example.

My son has had trouble sleeping the last few days. He started waking up more frequently and became less and less able to put himself back to sleep. Jes and I got into the bad habit of pulling him out of His bed and putting him between us in ours so that he would quickly fall back asleep and we could attain blessed silence once again. We realized that we were going to have to start leaving him in his bed in order to train him to fall back asleep on his own. The first few nights didn’t go too well. He would wake up several times and be completely inconsolable. We had to just let him cry for a while. Well, this has become an ebb and flow of a few days with great sleep followed by a few more days where he chooses spend much of the night restless and crying. When he’s chosen not to sleep, I’ll occasionally kneel beside his bed and try to soothe him back to sleep by rubbing his back. In some cases, this results in me rubbing his back for 30 or 40 minutes straight at 4am. In those moments, I’ve wanted so badly to pray, mostly because of the quietness of the moment, the physical discomfort of it all, and the otherwise ungodly hour that I find myself awake at. But for whatever reason, exhaustion, frustration, etc., I can’t seem to find the words. My spirit longs to commune with God in that moment, but my fatigued body won’t let my mind clear up enough to find the words to speak. This is where the recitation of prayers consoles me. It acts as a physical catalyst for communion with God when my mind is hazy and my body is weary… “Lord Jesus Christ, take all my freedom, my memory, my understanding, and my will. All that I have and cherish you have given me. I surrender it all to be guided by your will. Your grace and your love are wealth enough for me. Give me these, Lord Jesus; I ask for nothing more.”

Prayer is a curious thing. Communication with the living God from our current state would seem to require so much more preparation, effort, or will-power than it actually does. But for whatever reason, we’re invited into the conversation that is already taking place between the Spirit of Christ in us and God the Father.

Prayer changes us in ways that no other spiritual discipline can. It gently, never forcefully, aligns us with the work and will of God. It leads us into the stream of God’s flowing current. His purposes invite us in, despite the language we use, whether we are reciting a prayer or bringing the tired, wordless groanings of our spirit. By the time we position ourselves to pray, we realize that He has already begun His work in us.

A Prayer of Martin Luther

iMonk posted this a few days ago, and it has stuck with me ever since I read it.

You can find the original post here.

"Behold, Lord, an empty vessel that needs to be filled.

My Lord, fill it. I am weak in the faith; strengthen me.

I am cold in love; warm me and make me fervent, that my love may go out to my neighbor.

I do not have a strong and firm faith; at times I doubt and am unable to trust you altogether.

O Lord, help me. Strengthen my faith and trust in you. In you I have sealed the treasure of all I have. I am poor; you are rich and came to be merciful to the poor. I am a sinner; you are upright. With me, there is an abundance of sin; in you is the fullness of righteousness. Therefore I will remain with you, of whom I can receive, but to whom I may not give."

-Martin Luther

May we walk with the same humility as our fathers in the faith; quick to recognize our ignorance, even quicker to confess our sinfulness.

Because of Your mercy…

Jes and I have had many conversations about ministry in the last week. More often than not, our dialogue moves easily into a mutual sense of how undeserving we feel to share in the work of the Kingdom. Our lives are nothing extraordinary. We struggle to find God in the everyday routine we often find ourselves in. We have to work to engage in a consistent prayer life. All too often, we are content to leave God in the background, finding ourselves consumed with the effort it takes to get through each day.

The truth is: we absolutely don’t deserve any place in ministry. As I’ve gotten older and have become all too aware of my own perpetually bad habits, stubborn sinful inclinations, and apathetic tendencies, I grow more and more certain of God’s unrelenting mercy. I’ve shed any sense of entitlement to worldly importance that my younger self sinfully held onto. Any good that comes, any task He graciously includes us in, any person that we are commissioned to effect in a positive way, any positive thing that happens in our life is solely because He is merciful.

“Yet I call this to mind, and therefore I have hope: Because of the Lord’s faithful love we do not perish, for His mercies never end. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness!
I say: The Lord is my portion, therefore I will put my Hope in Him. The Lord is good to those who wait for Him, to the person who seeks Him. It is good to wait quietly for deliverance from the Lord. It is good for a man to bear the yoke while he is still young.” Lamentations 3:21-27

Nouwen on Authenticity in Friendship

"When we dare to speak from the depths of our heart to the friends God gives us, we will gradually find new freedom within us and courage to live our own sorrows and joys to the full."

Moving with the Whisper

The very nature of God’s created works suggests that He plans, motivates, and even encourages change in His created beings. The earth is full of the evidence of God’s ever-evolving, systematic plan for his creation to progress. This cyclical motion of development all around us suggests that our lives are meant to follow the same pattern.

From a theological standpoint, many would say that the only reason why anything changes is because of the resulting decay of man’s fall. But I don’t agree. I think change comes with purpose, though its purpose can often be difficult to define. Our best chance of moving with the Spirit of God is to loosen our grip on our own future. Ambition can naturally result in planning, and forecasting our own future is often helpful, and in itself, not sinful. But when the plans we’ve created for ourselves become anchors, causing our sails to resist the winds of God’s intentions, then they become barriers to the intentions of the Spirit. But when the prayer “Your will be done” is a fundamental phrase in our prayer life, our plans are never a hindrance, because they’re never beyond the reach of God’s swiftly progressing story of salvation in our lives.

Lately, it seems, change seems to come relentlessly in my spirit.

Essentials

Ten years ago, I was fighting the “guitars in the worship service” battle with my church. Of course, the battle wasn’t really just about guitars. At its core, the battle was much more about worship styles than instrumentation. Granted, battles of this nature were already raging among transitioning churches around the country for years before, but many churches tend to move into transition behind the curve, and my church was among that group. Fortunately for those of my generation, the most intense part of the conflict had already been waged over a decade earlier by people like my friend, Gerrit Gustafson, who was apart of the original creative team of Integrity Music. It was those individuals in that time period that faced the heaviest resistance to God’s movement, giving people like me a better opportunity to be heard. I continually felt impressed to challenge the mindset of congregants (which, as a teenager, most assuredly came across as youthful insolence and rebellion.) During that time, as many churches were still clinging to their hymnbooks and organs, I hoped that I, along with many others in my generation, could convey the fact that the instrumentation during a service shouldn’t matter, neither should the style of song in which a worship song is packaged. What truly matters is that people come into the presence of God with a worshipful spirit and that “songs, hymns, and spiritual songs” are offered “in Spirit and in Truth.” This is what God desires, and it’s what we should desire as well.

I’ve recently felt an ironic twist in the narrative, however. In the recent months, I’ve felt these same questions being posed to me by God. Am I so caught up in a “contemporary” worship mindset, that I’ve started to unhealthily cling to elements of a contemporary service that don’t hold any sort of vital role in true worship? Have I begun to assume certain instruments are crucial to a “good worship service” when in fact; these instruments are inconsequential to whether true worship is actually taking place? I feel like we’ve, once again, begun to assume some things are formulaic in our offering of worship.

Acoustic guitar + plus electric guitar + plus electric bass guitar + plus drums= good worship.

The bottom line is, if we say that worship styles shouldn’t matter, and if we say that worship instrumentation doesn’t matter, then wouldn’t worship in “spirit and in truth” be just as likely to happen at the tiny Episcopal church down the street as it would at the massive ultra-contemporary church across town?

Maybe we should rethink what is vital in our worship service. Maybe we should once again be willing to strip everything down to the bare essentials in order to burn away the dross. Maybe we should pay a little more attention to the heart behind the action. We should all know by now that formulas just don’t work.

"I want to see the kingdom come..."

My brother and I went to see Fran Healy at the Belcourt Theatre this past Tuesday, one of my favorite places in the city. It was rather nostalgic for me since I’ve been listening to the band Travis for over twelve years. What a great experience it was. Fran really took the time to document his own personal history through his songwriting, as well as some of his experiences living in Scotland. I think I often forget how moving personal experiences can be when conveying an art form. Sometimes I feel jaded to anything autobiographical, especially in an age of Twitter messages, Myspace profiles, and Facebook surveys. Everything just feels so disingenuous. But to really experience, even for a moment, an authentic and personal narrative through a song is something to be treasured. I was fortunate enough to encounter it on Tuesday in that beautiful old theatre.