A Rhythm of Reading the Psalter

What I've discovered from reading the Psalms regularly is a friendship with this book of the Bible that's our prayerbook.

Knowing

My heart holds things my mind

cannot remember, shielding me, perhaps,

from pain I cannot yet embrace.

My heart, the oldest part of me, knew me

before I was me. How does it beat

all this time, so steady through sorrow and joy,

suffering and liberation?

Every tear and smile it knows. While mind

can only hold so much, heart holds it all.

“Listen, listen” it says, “to my wisdom. I will not

forsake you. Tune your life to my rhythmic beat

as you did, once, in the womb. My knowing

can be trusted.”

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?

Life as Liturgy

Last week was anything but routine in my community. Hurricane Irma, which was Tropical Storm Irma by the time it arrived here, blew through on Monday and disrupted pretty much everything for the rest of the week. Lack of electricity, storm damage to homes, businesses shuttered because of no power, schools out for the entire week—and the story was not unique to our city. Our church housed 100 law enforcement personnel who were sent to assist, so going to work (thankfully the church never lost power) was a reminder that the order of the week was not business as usual.

Almost all our weekday events were cancelled because facilities were used to house and feed our guests. The one thing that stayed on the calendar was our weekly Taize service. I was grateful for that anchor because the activities of the week that help orient me to God through prayer and fellowship with my faith family were on an Irma hiatus.

It reminded me how much I crave order and consistency, and how much life anchored by these occasions of prayer and fellowship is an act of liturgy for me. The various gatherings for prayer, study and meals connect me to God and to my faith community.

Liturgy means “the work of the people” and that work occurred by means other than our usual activities. Our church did much of its “liturgy” last week in the kitchen, preparing three meals a day for the men and women who were making us their home base for most of the week. It was inspiring to see the hospitality offered and the dedication and abundance of volunteers.

I was also reminded that God breaks into routine and offers us the opportunity to wake up from the lethargy that can happen when our lives get so systematic that we go through them on autopilot. In the midst of the dis-order of the week, I had a couple of occasions of God showing up in unlikely ways and places. That I could recognize these for what they were I attribute to the regular rhythm of prayer that forms my own personal liturgical practice.

There are those who discount liturgy, seeing it as old and stiff, but I think a liturgical life gives us a framework that grounds us so that we recognize the Spirit where we might not otherwise. Just as a building needs good framing, a life of faith needs practices that provide order and rhythm, but with space for the Spirit to move through and awareness to recognize the Spirit’s movements. 

What are the practices, the routines that provide the framework for your life, that form your own liturgy? 

The Violence of Busyness

To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.

                                                                ---Thomas Merton

I come back to the quote time and again as a touchstone to remind me not to get caught up in the frenzy of busyness, which occurs as much in the church as it does in life outside the church.

If the Kingdom of God is characterized by peace and love, a church that gets carried away by our culture’s fast pace is a violent church, not a representation of the Kingdom of God.

When the church fails to model a rhythm of work and rest, service and Sabbath, community breaks down. Wayne Muller, in his book Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal and Delight in our Busy Lives, says that our lack of rest and reflection means that when we solve problems, “we do so frantically, desperately, reactively, and badly. . . In the soil of a quick fix is the seed of a new problem, because our quiet wisdom is unavailable. . . When we are moving faster and faster, every encounter, every detail inflates in importance, everything seems more urgent than it really is, and we react with sloppy desperation.”

I have seen the destruction that happens when people try to do too much too fast. People are hurt, and as Muller says, the quick fix mentality breeds new, and often worse, problems. Living with a frantic urgency is not the way Jesus lived. Jesus looked at and listened to people. Even when he was beckoned to save the life of a child, he was so in tune with his inner wisdom that he could feel someone touch his robe for healing (Luke 8:40-56). He did not get in a hurry.

Wisdom does not come from consuming more knowledge and experiences. Wisdom is born and grows in silence, solitude and Sabbath. When we honor our need for rest, we allow God to be God for us. When we act as though we cannot rest, that we must be always involved in frantic activity, we say by our busyness that we do not trust God to act. And when we have, even implicitly, decided that we must act for God, it is only a small step to the violence that leads to decisions and actions that hurt instead of heal others.

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. 

Faster than Grace

Flipping through my copy of The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence, a monk who lived in the 1600s, I saw a  couple of sentences I highlighted several years ago when I read the book: She seems to me full of good will, but she would go faster than grace. One does not become holy all at once.

I wonder what Brother Lawrence would have to say about our instant, disposable, microwave culture that doesn’t have time for even a five-year plan. It seems to me that the Church of western culture has jumped on the runaway train of instantaneousness of everything we do. When I talk to church folk in various locations and denominations, I hear the lament of declining numbers, fear of irrelevance, and I see efforts at one-upping activities “competing” for the attention of church members.

We seem to want to go faster than grace, to find the magic pill that grants instant holiness. We forget the gifts we offer souls: the importance of consistency in an inconstant world, of stability in a transient society, of quiet in a world of noise. Heck, we don’t even build churches with sanctuaries anymore; we have “worship spaces” instead.

Maybe we need a sanctuary, a place to find roots and rest, a place that wraps us in healing embrace and asks, in return, that we go and do likewise with one another. A place to slow down and abide is a place of grace, a place where we are given permission to grow gradually, a place where life is about a long obedience rather than a quick fix.

One of the lessons I’ve learned from the labyrinth is that if I am distracted or try to go too fast, I lose sight of the path. Walking a labyrinth is not about efficiency or speed or results. Rather, the labyrinth invites one to move at a slower pace, to pay attention only to the next step, and to simply be present. The labyrinth reminds me that the journey takes time and is filled with changes in direction, but if I stay on the path, I will never go faster than grace. I’ll never be out of the reach of God’s love and goodness.

Brother Lawrence’s observation reminds me that distractions that pull us away from rootedness in God have existed forever. We haven’t changed that much throughout time. The hunger for God can only be filled by God, and we cannot devour it all at once, and declare ourselves done. We become holy over time, with discipline and stability and sanctuary. May we learn to walk with the pace of grace.

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!

Why I Love the Lectionary

I thrive on order and structure. My husband knows that to spring something on me on short notice is to create stress for me. Years ago, I heard a speaker describe a “time fence.” A time fence is a boundary around your time. For those who are spontaneous, their time fence is small or nonexistent. Time for them is like the open prairie. You cannot trespass on their time because they freely give whatever you need.

For others, like myself, time is bounded by a large fenced enclosure. I sit in the middle, but I want a large space between my fence and myself. I want to see what has come into my fence from a long distance away. I like time to plan and prepare. I am one who looks at restaurant menus online if I know I am going to an unfamiliar establishment. I want to know my options ahead of arrival.

My preference for structure may be why I like the lectionary. The lectionary is a listing of scripture readings appointed for given days. The Revised Common Lectionary used by many Protestant churches includes readings from the Old Testament, Psalms, the Epistles and the Gospel, with some variation depending on the seasons of the Church. Many pastors preach from lectionary texts. The beauty of the lectionary to me is that I can read and pray over the texts prior to attending corporate worship and hearing a message preached on one or more of them. This is a particular advantage if you are traveling and attend an unfamiliar church. If the pastor of the church you are visiting preaches from the lectionary, you can still prepare for worship by praying over the texts ahead of time.

Since my dad died, we’ve been traveling often to his house in Tennessee. We attend worship at his church on Sundays when we are there. It is such a joy to arrive and to hear the texts preached that I have already spent time with in prayer. This preparation makes corporate worship more meaningful for me.

On a larger scale, I know that others all over the world are hearing messages preached on the same set of texts. It connects me to the wider Church in a deeply spiritual way. Across differing denominations and worship styles, the lectionary is a thread that binds us all together. It keeps us from falling into ruts of only hearing “favorite” passages. It challenges us to read scripture more broadly than we might otherwise. It calls us to structure and discipline, to growth and order, by giving us a framework for scripture study. And because the Revised Common Lectionary is on a three-year cycle, it calls us to revisit the same passages time and again, so that the texts meet us in different stages of our lives.

The discipline of praying the lectionary texts has become a transformational spiritual practice for me. The more I do it, the more I appreciate the beauty of the lectionary.

Dislocated Seagulls

For reasons unbeknownst to me, seagulls come every winter to live in the parking lot of the shopping center that is a mile from our house. I always wonder where they have come from, and why, being the shore birds they are, they choose to winter over in an asphalt parking lot, far from any beach or salt water.

Today I saw them for the first time this winter. It was a very windy morning and I had been watching the clouds race across the sky on my morning walk. One gull in particular seemed to be enjoying the high winds as he soared in the gusts overhead. I felt as though I could read his thoughts and that he was reminded of the winds at his seaside home. While his view of earth is much different now than where he normally lives, I could sense his joy in finding a moment of familiarity, an experience that reoriented him toward his usual surroundings.

I thought about my own life, and how at times I find myself in a place that is not familiar or comfortable. Life experiences can be unsettling. The holidays can take me out of the rhythm that most often nourishes and sustains me. Like the seagull, I may be in a season of change, a place that is different than what is home for me. In such situations, I need to be attentive for a strong wind, a wind of the Spirit that blows over me and allows me to soar in a moment of reorientation, of union with God.

My ability to recognize and appreciate such winds happens by the work I do while in my normal rhythms of life. Morning devotions, scripture study, centering prayer, worship, Eucharist and fixed hour prayer ground me and allow me to pay attention even when I am in places where those disciplines are more difficult to maintain. As such spiritual practices become hard-wired into me, I can find moments of “home” even when life’s seasons carry me far from my physical home, just as my friend the seagull found this morning.

Reclamation Project

The past several months have been stressful, busy, and sometimes chaotic. August began with my dad having cancerous tumors removed from his bladder, then discovering that the cancer had spread aggressively. He died on October 3. Between traveling back and forth to his home in Tennessee prior to his death, the decisions that had to be made prior to and after his death and working through all the details that come when you are an only child and have lost your last surviving parent, autumn has been a blur for me. I went into “survival mode,” which for me means filling every waking moment with something to do. I went into this same mode when I went to graduate school, commuting 2 hours each way two or three days a week for eighteen months while teaching full time with a toddler and kindergartener at home. My husband says it took me years to come out of that mode, but I knew I was defaulting back into it as I moved through the past four months.

At least this time I knew what was happening to me, and I’ve been trying to ratchet back the pace to return back to some semblance of balance and rhythm. This week, my reclamation project has been aided by a furry buddy, Annie. We are dog sitting for friends and Annie is a puppy. Since our dog died a year ago, we’ve resisted getting another one because our traveling schedule right now would make dog ownership complicated. But Jim & I were both looking forward to “borrowing” Annie for the week.

Because Annie is not quite housebroken, we have to be attentive about taking her outside. That has gotten me out of the house and into our backyard, where I’ve been able to enjoy the fall colors and the crisp air. Being outside is therapeutic for me, but I’ve been hunkered down inside for most of the fall, observing the changing season only through windows, either the ones in our house, at Dad’s house or in the car as we’ve traveled back and forth to Tennessee. I am grateful that Annie is luring me outside this week (and it helps that the weather has been nice).

If I sit down to read or write, she stays close by, either sleeping or chewing her bone. Yesterday evening, when I got home from work, I sat down on the sofa for a moment and she fell asleep on the floor beside me. Instead of getting up to go do something in the house, I simply sat there and did absolutely nothing. I enjoyed Annie’s nap as much as she did. Adjusting my rhythm to hers is helping me slow down and savor the present moment.

I did not expect my reclamation project to be encouraged by a little black dog, but I am experiencing healing through her being here this week. God is using her to help me reclaim the pace of life at which I thrive. And even when she greets me at the back door soaking wet from dunking herself in our frog pond, necessitating a bath before 7:00 a.m., I can shrug and laugh and adjust. It is all just part of the journey, a reminder that God is present in every moment and in every creature and that each can be savored and appreciated for what it brings to the tapestry of life.