Moving Toward Purity of Heart

This week I reflect on purity of heart.

Combatting Restlessness

 

Unfamiliar with Acedia? Even if you are, I expect you've suffered from it. It's not a medical condition! You can learn more about it, and how to counteract it in this week's video blog post.

Restlessness (aka Acedia)

Restlessness is not unique to us in the midst of a pandemic. It's been around a long time, and we can learn how to combat it from early church leaders.

Lizards, Snakes, and Spiritual Formation

 

I'm sharing a video post this week with some reptilian examples!

Seeing with Eyes of Love

A video post, of a devotional I gave this week.

All Flame

Therefore, everyone who acknowledges me before people, I will also acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven. But everyone who denies me before people, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven.     Matthew 10:32-33

Let me not be one who denies you with

my life, while professing you with

my voice. I want my heart to be

open always to you, to be

your dwelling place. I want you

pulsing through my veins, filling every

cell with your presence. And yes, I know

you are already present in these places.

Yet I want to feel you there, in my heart,

in my blood, in my cells. I want,

like Abba Joseph*, to be all flame with you.

May it be so today, gracious Christ.

May it be so. Amen.

*Abba Joseph was one of the Desert Fathers. The reference is to this saying about him:

Abba Lot went to see Abba Joseph and said to him, “Abba, as far as I can, I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace and as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?” Then the old man stood up and stretched his hands toward heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire and he said to him, “If you will, you can become all flame.”

Time Change

Conversation in person and on social media the past few days has often included the time change from the past weekend. The darkness at the end of the day is a struggle for many, including myself, and though I enjoy the light in the morning, it does not offset for me having to move around in the darkness after leaving work at day’s end.

On Tuesday mornings I’m at the church early for our service of Morning Prayer. Depending on the season and amount of light outside, I see a squirrel whose morning ritual has become familiar to me. This squirrel is unfazed by the time change; his days are always marked by the rising and setting of the sun. We are the ones who artificially bend the day to our control, imposing our schedules on the earth’s pattern of seasons and days.

Our bodies know the earth’s rhythm. After the time change on Sunday, many of us have awakened earlier in the morning and been sleepy earlier in the evening because our bodies have yet to adjust to a different rhythm. Yet we adjust eventually to the time change, like adjusting to a pair of new shoes that are uncomfortable at first, then get broken in as we wear them.

Thomas Merton observes that each morning at the point between darkness and dawn, creation asks God for permission to be. However, we humans “have fallen into self-mastery and cannot ask permission of anyone. . . We know the time and dictate the terms.” I wonder how life might be for us if we lived like the squirrel, who rises when it’s light and goes to sleep when it’s dark. I wonder if we’d have less stress and more freedom if we didn’t force ourselves to live by artificial time.

 The squirrel I see on Tuesdays reminds me of the Rule of St. Benedict. Benedict’s monks adjusted their schedules by the seasons. The physical labor, the number of psalms recited daily, the number of meals—these components of the order of each day were different when the days were shorter.

Are there some small changes we can make as these days shorten, changes that help us honor the season and connect us more fully to the rhythms of creation around us? Maybe you allow yourself to go to bed earlier or read rather than watching TV. Maybe you avoid running errands in the evenings and spend time with family or drink a cup of tea. Can you think of how you might welcome the shorter days?

Slow Small Steps

One of my favorite stories of the desert abbas and ammas reminds me of the slowness and smallness of progress in spiritual growth. A hermit told a brother who was discouraged about his lack of progress in keeping the monastic rule about a father who told his son to clear a field. The son, discouraged at the amount of thorns and thistles, lay down and slept instead. His father found him asleep and asked him why he had done nothing. The son said the task was larger than he could do, but the wise father said that if he would clear only the place he slept each day, the work would advance slowly and the son would not lose heart.

We sometimes think we are not progressing because we don’t clear our inner field all at once. The spiritual journey, however, is not a sprint but a marathon. The thorns and thistles have to be cleared away a little at the time. I’ve been reminded of this as I’ve been reading through Paul’s letter to the Galatians. In chapter 6, Paul encourages the Galatian Christians to not grow weary in doing good. As I reflected on that verse this morning, I saw within myself the thorns and thistles of a lingering resentment. My first inclination was to berate myself for the resentment, but then I thought about story about clearing the field, and I realized that this was the “patch” that needed my attention at this moment.

We live in a culture that does not value slowness and smallness. Consequently, we get discouraged when the only way forward is through slow, small progress. I’ve seen it with folks who are recovering from surgeries or health issues and I’ve also seen it in people who have had a significant spiritual awakening. We tend to grow impatient and frustrated when healing is prolonged and when the spiritual high has descended into ordinary time. And when we come upon an inner patch of thorns and thistles, we may choose to shrug our shoulders and go to sleep, preferring to numb ourselves against the acknowledgement that we are not all we imagined ourselves to be.

I’m grateful that God’s expectations of us do not move at our Western culture’s go-go pace. Grace is about slow, small progress. I won’t even say it’s about steady progress, because the journey of spiritual growth is not linear. It happens in its own time, but it only happens if we keep at it.

The Right Focus

Brothers and sisters, become imitators of me and watch those who live this way—you can use us as models. As I have told you many times and now say with deep sadness, many people live as enemies of the cross. Their lives end with destruction. Their god is their stomach, and they take pride in their disgrace because their thoughts focus on earthly things. Our citizenship is in heaven. We look forward to a savior that comes from there—the Lord Jesus Christ. He will transform our humble bodies so that they are like his glorious body, by the power that also makes him able to subject all things to himself.

Therefore, my brothers and sisters whom I love and miss, who are my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord.                                         Philippians 3:17-4:1

Why would anyone take pride in disgrace? That was my first question when I read this passage, the lectionary epistle for the second Sunday of Lent.

Assuming we don’t intentionally want to be proud of disgrace, then I believe that Paul is warning us to not be proud of earthly things. When our focus is on such things, we lose sight of God’s kingdom and the fact that earthly things are impermanent and passing away.

Paul speaks of people whose god is their stomach, which says to me that when something other than God claims our focus—be it food, career, reputation, possessions—it becomes our god.

The early desert monastics had much to say about attachments and their subtle pull on our hearts. One of my favorite stories from the desert tells of a monk who relishes acclaim and is downcast when accused. The abba sends him out into the cemetery two nights in a row. The first night he spends the whole night complimenting the dead; the next night he criticizes the same dead all night long. The abba asks him how the dead reacted each of the two nights. The monk tells him they didn’t respond either way. The wise word to the monk is to be like the dead, immune to praise or blame.

More often than not, it is the subtle things like the “need” for praise, and the pride that underlies it, that become a god. We may resist the obvious temptations and be completely unaware of the subtle ways we are drawn away from God.

The best way I know of to become aware of the subtle forces pulling our attention away from God is to model ourselves after wise guides and to practice silence.

A practice of silence separates us from the constant hammering of the culture that shapes our values and behaviors, taking our focus off the values and behaviors of Jesus. Wise guides reinforce the pattern of Jesus’ life, giving us models for our own lives. Wise guides may be contemporary or ancient. We may know them personally as people of great depth, or we may learn from them by their writings that have endured over centuries.

Patience must likewise undergird our diligent practice of focusing on things of God. Unlike the quick-fix, sound byte advice dispensed in our culture, our transformation is a long, slow process. One of the gifts of Lent is to help us keep our focus in the right place.

Showing Up

As a participant in the Two-Year Academy for SpiritualFormation, I became acquainted with the ancient concept of praying the hours, also known as the Daily Office or fixed hour prayer. Rooted in scripture, and not unique to our Judeo-Christian tradition, the Office is the act of setting aside specific times of day for corporate prayer. Psalm 119:164 says: I praise you seven times a day for your righteous rules.

Many monastic communities set aside seven times a day for the entire community to pray, with a set order of worship for each Office. In my Academy, we gathered for morning, evening and night prayer each day. By the end of my two years, this rhythm of corporate prayer had worked its way into my spirit, so that even when I did not have a community to gather with for these times of prayer, I added my own voice to voices all around the world who pray the prayers that have been part of our history for centuries.

Sometimes I approach this time of prayer with great anticipation. I have experienced God’s presence in wondrous and affirming ways and it is a joy to say thank you by reciting the canticles, prayers, psalms, and scriptures for the day, the Office and the season. Many of the prayers and canticles I know by heart, a treasure trove of praise and prayer to God.

Other times, when life is hard, or I am tired, it seems that the best I can do is simply to show up, to keep the worldwide cycle of prayer going. On those days, when my heart is heavy, I am grateful for the familiar prayers, because I don’t have the words to pray.

In Ezra 3, when the foundations of the temple are laid, there is both weeping and joyful shouting. Those who remembered the former temple wept but others shouted with joy. Weeping and shouting mingled together. I wonder if that’s what God hears when we participate in the great river of prayer that is the Daily Office. There are the joyful, who are grateful for the privilege to offer their sacrifice of praise, and there are those whose offering is simply showing up, reciting the psalms and prayers from a heart of brokenness, but offering them nonetheless.

This is the communion of saints, weeping and praising together, unending, unbroken throughout the centuries, in times of persecution and times of plenty, in seasons of blessing and seasons of brokenness, in places of war and places of peace, in want or in plenty. We come with what we have to offer. We show up. 

Restlessness vs. Persistence

We live in a culture that seeks to keep us in a constant state of excitement. When things stay the same, we lose interest in them. We are not always willing to hang with things for the long haul. Our short attention spans numb us to the sometimes long, slow, seemingly unchanging circumstances of life.

We grow impatient with slow recovery from illness or surgery. We want those who have experienced loss to “get over it” and get on with life. We grow disinterested when asked to pray for people and we see no change in their circumstances.

We bore easily. Familiar prayers are often said without conscious awareness of the words spoken. Do we really want just our daily bread? Most of us are not content with simply enough for today—we want the whole loaf. We want excess, more than what we need. Yet we pray for just enough every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer.

We see catastrophic events in the media and we are riveted by their unfolding—for a short period of time. Then we lose interest and shift our attention to something newer and fresher and more sensational. When’s the last time you gave a thought to those affected by Hurricane Katrina? And yet, how many people are continuing to struggle with the changes wrought by that storm almost ten years later?

Even names on a prayer list lose our attention. It is easy for us to forget that behind every name, there is a person, a family, a life, an oftentimes long journey of uncertainty and woundedness. Compassionate care for others requires a commitment to attentiveness.

The desert fathers and mothers recognized the danger of acedia, which is a restless boredom. Evagrius Ponticus describes acedia as making “the day seem fifty hours long.” One of the ways to combat acedia is to persistently stick with something. Abba Moses said this, “sit in your cell and your cell will teach you everything.” In other words to fight the temptation for constant variety, be still and stay in one place.

Our hunger for variety and stimulation leads us to a rootless existence. We cannot grow deeper in our relationship with God if we have yielded to the temptation of acedia. What penetrates our hearts is not a constantly changing kaleidoscope of stimulation but the slow, steady, persistent, faithful practice of stillness. This penetrates our hearts the way persistent drops of water will create indentions on stone. When one practices stillness over a period of time the familiar becomes cherished, not despised. Patience replaces boredom and there is room for compassion to grow and flourish.

Homecoming

Home is where the heart is. I experienced that last week. I went home to a place I’ve never been before, but I knew for certain I was home a short time after my arrival.

I traveled to Woodworth, Louisiana to a Five-Day Academy for Spiritual Formation. I’ve never been to Woodworth, but at the opening Eucharist on Sunday afternoon, I knew that my heart was at home in this community of pilgrims, even though I did not know but a handful of them.

From 2009 until 2011, I was part of a Two-Year Academy for Spiritual Formation. Every quarter for two years, I spent a week with people from all over the country. While we were together we lived by a schedule, patterned after that of a monastic order. The daily rhythm of worship, study, silence and community time from my two-year experience was so ingrained in me that I immediately fell easily and naturally into the schedule last week.

In addition to the familiar schedule, liturgy connected the community as we gathered daily for Eucharist, and morning, midday and night prayer. As we shared familiar and new words of prayer and praise, I experienced the nearness of God’s kingdom. And I was at home.

Jesus said, in Matthew 6:21, Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. My return to the rhythms of Academy reminds me that my treasure is not found in a place or possessions. My treasure is found in the body of Christ, lived out in koinonia, a community of intimate spiritual communion and devotion to each other and to God. With such a treasure, home can be found in a multitude of settings.

Do you hunger for such a home? Does yearning for Christ propel you into koinonia with others?

I invite your comments in response to these questions. If some of us are searching for a community of accountability and devotion to each other and to God, we might be able to birth such communities either in person or via technology. I look forward to your responses!

Mastered by Time

He has planted eternity in the human heart. . .  

                                                                Ecclesiastes 3:11b

I have begun using A Book of Hours, which uses writings of Thomas Merton for praying the hours. In a recent morning reading, Merton writes that in the morning, creation awakes and asks permission of God to “be” for another day. All creation, that is, except humans, who believe we control time and our use of it. I wonder if it is that notion that keeps us from fully surrendering to God, because we always live with an eye on the clock and the clock is how we have tried to gain mastery over time.

But what if we had no clock, no calendar? What if, like the rest of creation, we lived in cycles of light and dark and each new day we asked permission of God to “be?” Would that be living out the eternity placed in our souls? Would we then take life in stride, with its times and season, joys and sorrows, difficulties and pleasures, much as the ocean ebbs and flows as the tides move it?

St. Benedict, in creating his Rule that guided monastic life, made adjustments for the seasons—the longer summer days had a different schedule than the shorter days of winter. We are not as likely to make adjustments to our lives according to the seasons. We cheat, for we fill our evenings, be they long or short, with work that keeps us up late and causes us to miss the waking of creation in the morning, which Merton says is the closest we come to experiencing paradise in this life.

We do not ask permission of God to “be.” Instead, we stumble out of bed to the sound of an alarm and put ourselves through the paces of a schedule God may never have intended for us to face, all in the name of being masters of time, when actually, what has happened is that time has become the master of us.

Could we be more fully human if we recognized each morning that it is God who gives us permission to “be,” so that we manifest God’s glory in our very “be-ing?” Is this not how the Word is made flesh and lives among us today?  

Enough

Enough for Him, whom cherubim, worship night and day,

Breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay;

Enough for Him whom angels fall before,

The ox and ass and camel which adore.

                     In the Bleak Midwinter, by Christina Rosetti

The carol, In the Bleak Midwinter, is probably my favorite Christmas song. The verse above is not in our hymnal. I found it online at website for The Poetry Foundation. The word “Enough” spoke to me because Rosetti’s description tells me that Jesus did not need much when he was born—a place to sleep, food to eat, and parents to care for him. It was enough. I find it humorous that even though angels fall before him, it was enough that the animals adored him!

How satisfied am I with simple things—simple, nourishing food, an adoring pet, a place to sleep, and the companionship and support of others? Maybe the reason the word “enough” keeps coming back to me is that I recently read about Evagrius Ponticus, the early monastic teacher whose naming of the eight deadly passions laid the groundwork for the seven deadly sins. Evagrius also named eight virtues, one for each of the passions (the monastics always considered passions as negative—they were states of mind that were considered destructive of love). We don’t talk about the virtues as much as we should. Evagrius said that the only way to do away with a passion was to overcome it with a corresponding virtue.

Interestingly, the first passion he named was gluttony. Considering the word “enough” against the backdrop of gluttony makes the contrast between the two especially strong. Gluttony is not only about overeating. It is about overdoing anything that is destructive of love. So how much of what we do in this season becomes gluttonous? And when we identify our overeating, overbuying, overdecorating and overdoing as gluttony, how is that celebrating the birth of the One who was born into simple surroundings and was satisfied with the simple things that nourished his life?

The virtue that overcomes gluttony is temperance. What would it look like to practice temperance in this season? Would simple meals, simple gifts, and a simple celebration allow me to focus more on the birth of Jesus, to adore along with the animals that surrounded him? 

The Middle Part

On Sunday, I was thinking over the previous week, a discipline I do in preparation for worship. I reflect on when I've been aware of God's presence, and when I've missed God and why. Some weeks are full of encounters with God, and some, like last week, seem to be devoid of such experiences. As I considered why that might have been the case, it dawned on me that it was the middle of Lent and maybe that had something to do with my spiritual dryness.


The middle is not always a good place to be. The first week or so of Lent, I was excited to have begun the pilgrimage. For weeks prior to Ash Wednesday, I had been thinking about Lent, and what discipline would I take on for this forty-day journey as preparation for Easter. Like many anticipated journeys, there is excitement as the journey begins. The newness of the endeavor and the immediately apparent changes are reasons for celebration. Every step feels fresh. Every day of successfully practicing a new discipline is a victory.


But in the middle the new has worn off. The wilderness is now THE wilderness, where every day dawns much the same as the one before. The initial excitement is gone, and the pilgrimage now feels more like a forced march. Day after day, step after step. The end is too far out to motivate me forward, so I am in a dry and weary land in the middle of Lent.


The middle is where perseverance is needed, because the initial momentum is gone and it's too early for the final surge to the finish. In this place, the temptations aren't the big things, but the small ones. It's not the sharks, but instead the guppies--that look so harmless and actually kind of tickle as they nibble on my toes--that break my skin and allow my life to leak out of me ever so slowly. These nibbles come in many forms--the short answer given when someone says a hurtful word, the feeling-sorry-for-myself that results from being overlooked, the impatience with a lonely neighbor who talks too much. 


I've been reading Living With Contradiction: An Introduction to Benedictine Spirituality, by Esther de Waal. The author notes that we face a "ceaseless round of daily duties," but that Benedict asks us to pray through all of this. So maybe that is the discipline needed to persevere through the middle part of the pilgrimage. Pray when I encounter others, pray when I am frustrated, pray when the scenery isn't changing, pray when I cannot see the end in sight. Pray for safe travels.

Preparation

Recently I was part of a small group study using the book Saint Benedict on the Freeway by Corinne Ware. Thinking about the way Benedictines pray at certain times of the day has inspired me to infuse more of my day with set times for prayer. Beginning that practice with the season of Advent seems especially relevant, because I really want this Advent season to be one of waiting and watching for God.

I’ve been wondering why it is that I am so  deliberate in my individual preparation for Easter Sunday through the season of Lent, but during Advent my preparation for the birth of Jesus is haphazard. In Lent I add in spiritual disciplines to crowd out some of the worldly activities that otherwise fill my time. I consider regularly the sacrifice that Jesus made on the cross and how my sinfulness caused his suffering. Lent becomes for me a season of contemplation and interior preparation.

Why shouldn’t Advent bring the same attentiveness? My preparation for the birth of Jesus, the Word made flesh, is often all exterior. I clean and cook and shop and socialize. I prepare my home for guests but I fail to prepare my heart for the most important Guest of all.

I am part of a group that is studying the Advent Conspiracy. In the video we watched last night, a person who had participated in Advent Conspiracy for a couple of years spoke of how she had previously found her joy in the shopping and crowds, but she now makes space for Jesus to come and dwell within her heart and it has changed the source of her joy and how she prepares for Christmas.

My desire for this Advent season is to make the time, through regular times for prayer during each day, for Jesus to come and dwell within me. I want my heart to be a stable prepared for him, and I want to wait and watch for him to come and be born anew in me.

Clearing the Field

For years, I have struggled to simplify my life. The desire is always there, but the results never quite measure up to the goal. It can get pretty discouraging, but I’ve become inspired by a bit of wisdom I learned from one of the desert fathers. This Abba told a discouraged brother a story about a man whose land was overgrown with brambles and weeds. The man sent his son to clear the land, but the son was discouraged and instead of working, he lay down and slept. This happened day after day. When the father asked the son how the work was progressing, the son replied that he was so discouraged about the size of the task that he could not make himself begin. The father told him that if he would only clear the place where he slept each day, he would eventually get the entire field cleared.

This story can apply to so many things in our lives. The brother who first heard the story was discouraged because his prayer life was not where he wanted it to be. But for me, it’s the clutter of my life—both physical and mental—that discourages me. So I am beginning to clear a small patch each day, and instead of looking at what remains undone, I am focusing on the small daily improvements I observe.

This process is forcing me to be patient with myself, not something that comes easily to me. But as I work at being patient with myself, I am discovering that I am becoming more patient with others. We all have our own “fields” to clear and field-clearing takes much time. Thankfully, God is patient with us all. The Old Testament is largely one big story of God’s patience with the people of Israel, who often spent more time sleeping in their “field”, or even sowing more weeds in it, than they did in clearing it! Their inability to get it right and God’s great patience with them encourages me.

There is still a lot of clutter in my life, but I am clearing a small amount of it daily. And I am grateful for the encouragement I get from the Abba’s story and from God, who inspires me with these words: Do not despise these small beginnings, for the Lord rejoices to see the work begin. (Zechariah 4:10)