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6 / 2 / 13
Amanda
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Sunday Meditation

May the Father of Life pour out His grace on you;
may you feel His hand in everything you do
and be strengthened by the things He brings you through:
this is my prayer for you.

May the Son of God be Lord in all your ways;
may He shepherd you the length of all your days,
and in your heart may He receive the praise:
this is my prayer for you.

And despite how simple it may sound,
I pray that His grace will abound
and motivate everything you do;
and may the fullness of His love be shared through you.

May His Spirit comfort you, and make you strong,
may He discipline you gently when you’re wrong,
and in your heart may He give you a song:
this is my prayer for you.

May Jesus be Lord in all your ways,
may He shepherd you the length of all your days,
and in your heart may He receive the praise:
this is my prayer for you, my prayer for you.

A prayer of blessing taken from Celtic Daily Prayer: Prayers and Readings from the Northhumbria Community, pg. 292.

4 / 11 / 13
Amanda
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Tips for Practicing Lectio Divina as a Student at a Christian College

It is a hazard that is inevitable for biblical studies/theology students: the more you study Scripture as part of your program, the more devotional reading of Scripture plummets. Sometimes it takes years after graduating for the practice of daily Scripture reading as a spiritual discipline to be reincorporated into a student’s life.

A few years ago, a friend recommended Lectio Divina as an exercise for me to try to reclaim devotional reading during my studies.

Lectio Divina is comprised of four components or stages:

Lectio – reading – What does the text say?

Meditatio – meditation – What is Jesus saying to me in and through this text?

Oratio – prayer – What do I want to say to Jesus about this text

Contemplatio – contemplation – How will this text shape/change me?

 

I tried it. Over and over, I tried it. And I failed horribly. I could never get past the “lectio” stage. I would read the text and begin mulling the exegetical issues. I’d think about parallel passages. I’d think about different scholars’ opinions on the interpretation of the text.

 

After a year of trying and failing to practice lectio, I realized that maybe I needed to tweak my approach. I didn’t change stages, but instead I worked on changing the environment of the stages.

 

  1. I chose a different translation than what I used for my studies. For class and papers, I use the NASB. For lectio divina I chose a different translation, usually a more contemporary one. This helped separate this exercise from the daily exercise of studying Scripture as a part of my program. For the most part I would use something like the NLT, but sometimes I would experiment with a paraphrase like The Message.
  2. I chose a different space to read. Instead of doing lectio divina in the same place where I studied and wrote papers, I would find a place where I could assume a less academic posture. Instead of sitting at a table or a desk, I would sit in an oversized chair. Sometimes I would find a closet or a corner away from busyness.
  3. I chose a different text. If my coursework was focused on the Old Testament, I would choose a NT text for my lectio reading. If my theological work was focused on Christology, I would choose a passage of Scripture that was about ecclesiology or pneumatology.
  4. I asked someone to pray for me. They didn’t need to be praying at the same time that I was doing lectio, but knowing I had someone interceding and praying that the Word would speak through the word helped especially if I found myself struggling in the oratio stage.
  5. I limited how often I practiced lectio divina. Sometimes it was only once a semester. Sometimes it was once a month. But in limiting how often I practiced it, it made the act and time of lectio divina sacred, focused and purposeful.
3 / 10 / 13
Amanda
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Sunday Meditation

At first the word ‘hospitality’ might evoke the image of soft sweet kindness, tea parties, bland conversations and a general atmosphere of coziness. Probably this has its good reasons since in our culture the concept of hospitality has lost much of its power and is often used in circles where we are more prone to expect a watered-down piety than a serious search for an authentic Christian spirituality. But still, if there is any concept worth restoring to its original depth and evocative potential, it is the concept of hospitality. It is one of the richest biblical terms that can deepen and broaden our insight in our relationships to our fellow human beings…

Hospitality means primarily the creation of a free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy. Hospitality is not to change people, but to offer them space where change can take place…

Just as we cannot force a plant to grow but can take away the weeds and stones which prevent its development; so we cannot force anyone to such a personal and intimate change of heart, but we can offer the space where such a change can take place.

~Henri Nouwen, Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life, pg. 46-54.

 

12 / 20 / 12
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A Meditation on John 1:14 by Karl Barth

I think I like Karl Barth best not when he’s a theologian, but when he’s a preacher. There is something about his writings aimed at a general rather than academic audience that draws me in and wants me to become a good charismatic shouting “amen” in response to his witness to Jesus Christ.

From 1926 to 1933 Barth wrote a series of Christmas devotions/meditations/homilies for German newspapers. My favourite is the one from 1926, a reflection on John 1:14 entitled, “The Word Made Flesh.” And as Christmas fast approaches, I wanted to share a few excerpts from it:

The Word:

            It is an event which happened and which is still happening; to the evangelist it is as certain as his own existence, and as self-evident as the truth of an axiom. God has spoken and still speaks. All abstract thought and metaphysics, everything one might know and say of God as Thought, Power, and Deed is summed up and completed by the fact that God has spoken and still speaks.  Yes, God! In the verses which precede our text, the evangelist has made it clear what he means by God’s speech: This is a Word which is thought and spoken in the eternal “beginning” of all things, God Himself being present, a Word which unreservedly possesses God’s own attributes, nature and being and which is – really, not parabolically – His Word.

Became:

            This must be immediately interpreted as: “He came to be flesh then and there,” which excludes any wrong conception the word “became” might suggest. John means not a transformation but an incomprehensible coexistence. Without ceasing to be the eternal divine subject the Word is there in time, concretely, contingently and objectively, recognisable as man’s vis-à-vis, for only man can really confront man. The reality of revelation is according to the general meaning of our text just this: The Word of God to which the Gospel witnesses, is a man. To put it the other way round: the man of whom the Gospel speaks, is neither the “symbol” nor the “appearance” of God’s Word to man, nor the highest expression of the Word in a relative sense, but the Word of God Himself, His one and only, His first and His last Word. This “is” the Christmas Gospel.

 

Flesh:

Flesh in the New Testament is not human nature generally and ideally, but concretely this human nature in which I find myself, the nature of “Adam,” the nature man possesses under the sign of the Fall, in the realm of darkness and in his principal opposition to God and to his own self. It does not say: the Word became a super-man or a personage…He does not appear in the form of an angel nor of an ideal man (how can anyone who is not as real as we are, address us?) but as Paul writes, in “the form of a servant” (Phil II.7), so that we who ourselves exist in this form, are able to hear Him. He encounters the riddle of our “darkness” on its own ground.

And Dwelt Among Us:

Inasmuch as the Incarnation fulfils the time, it is also limited by time. Inasmuch as it is epoch-making, it is also an episode which points beyond itself to the Holy Ghost who proclaims the Incarnate Word in other ages as well, and to the Resurrection of the body which includes all ages.

(You can read the whole meditation in Karl Barth, Christmas. translated by Bernhard Citron. London: Oliver and Boyd, 1959).

 

 

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9 / 29 / 12
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Some Thoughts on Spiritual Formation

 Spiritual formation is more than just formation of the soul or spiriti; it is the formation of the whole person. It is not just about shaping what we believe, or how we think. While it most certainly includes these, spiritual formation shapes the actions, posture and whole being of a Christian so that her life and entire being become molded in the image of Jesus Christ. Ultimately, spiritual formation means that Christians are going to look and act differently than the world around them. In the words of St. Benedict, “Your way acting should be different from the world’s way; the love of Christ must come before all else.” After having taken a class on Spiritual Formation, I want to suggest four common themes that are foundational to a spirit-formed life.

Community:

While there is indeed a place and a need for individual reflection, spiritual formation is cultivated in and through the community of believers. It is in living this “life together”(Dietrich Bonhoeffer) that our attitudes and postures are shaped and conformed to the image of Christ. The community is built on the person and work of Christ. This means that true community is found only in and through Christ. In each culture and age, the community may take on specific traits and rules that guide the mission and structure of the community. Thus, Benedict’s monastic order had specific rules and expectations for its members, and while they may seem legalistic and harsh (e.g., at least two references to the use and benefit of corporal punishment) they are not designed to be punitive, but are instead meant to be tools to assist the community to conform and be transformed to Christ’s image. Indeed, whether it be St. Benedict’s monastic order, Bonhoeffer’s enclave of seminarians, or James K.A. Smith’s vision of Christian higher education, the role of community is one that embodies the Great Commandment: to love God and to love each other. This ethos that is shared and encouraged shapes not only the community but also each individual within the community. Community is where spiritual formation takes place.

Confession:

In the introduction to Augustine’s Confessions, translator Maria Boulding notes that confession has three levels: there is the confession of sin, which is most prominent, the confession of God’s glory, and the confession that it is God who enables us to make confession in the first place. Augustine’s entire life is a confession to God, and an act of testifying to the goodness and rightness of God’s justice and mercy, both in his sinful life before his conversion, and in his life after conversion. Augustine’s confession exposes the reality of his sinfulness: “To you, then, Lord, I lie exposed, exactly as I am…My confession to you is not made with words of tongue and voice, but with the words of my soul and the clamor of my thought.”

This practice of confession may have fallen out of favour with Protestants in light of Catholic misuse and abuse, but Bonhoeffer and his seminary students, who were Lutheran, adopted a form of confession as part of their spiritual formation. Bonhoeffer writes that the act of confessions leads to four breakthroughs: a breakthrough to community, a breakthrough to the cross, a breakthrough to new life, and a breakthrough to assurance. Confession of sin includes confession of both personal and corporate sins, and the act of confession is profoundly counter-cultural, particularly in the modern, secular world that encourages the deflection and/or minimization of guilt (see Smith, 177-181). James K.A. Smith highlights the role of confession in the liturgy of the Church, specifically pointing to the prayer of confession in the Anglican tradition, noting that in the act of confession, “we are honest with God about our transgressions and agree with God that they are violations of his law.” The act of confession is not just words, it is also a posture and a way of life.

Contemplation:

The act of meditating, praying through, and reflecting on Scripture is foundational to the life devoted to spiritual formation. As part of his confession, Augustine contemplates the mighty works of God in heaven and earth. Benedict devotes a significant portion of his rule to the structure and space for the study of the Word, as he outlines the practice of the daily office, and morning and evening prayer. Bonhoeffer emphasized the practice of meditation, which appears to have caused discomfort for several of the seminarians. N.T. Wright notes that reading and meditating on Scripture is habit-forming in that “the more you do it the more it will form the habits of mind and heart, of soul and body, which will slowly but surely form your character into the likeness of Jesus Christ.”

Included under the heading of contemplation is also the practice of worship, though in actuality, worship could and should properly be discussed under each element of spiritual formation, as it is done in the context of community (see Wright and Benedict), is at the heart of the act of confession (Augustine), is structured by the story of Scripture (Smith) and assists in the cultivation of virtue (Wright). An entire paper could just be written on the function of worship in spiritual formation, but suffice to say, worship is an embodied act that points to the fact that what we love is what we worship.

Cultivation of the Virtues:

As N.T. Wright notes, the Christian life does not stop once we have prayed the “Sinner’s Prayer”, given our life to Jesus, been baptized or any other rite of initiation into the life of Christianity. The over-emphasis on conversion means that Christianity can (and has) been reduced to act of intellectual consent, with little thought to the embodied reality not only of human existence, but also of the life of Christian discipleship. The cultivation of the virtues is the practical outworking of the doctrine of sanctification. It is a life-long process in which the Christian actively participates in the ongoing work of God in their life, the life of the Church, and in the world. The cultivation of the virtues is the formation of habits, so that the practice of a specific virtue becomes “second nature”, wherein the Christian does not have to consciously think about how and why he has to act, but does it automatically.[Footnote] While the list of Christian virtues may vary by theologian or tradition, the three core virtues that form the Christian life are faith, hope, and love.

 

9 / 16 / 12
Amanda
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Sunday Meditation

“Justice doesn’t work like that. You don’t get to decide when and how your debt is paid.” ~ Doctor Who, A Town Called Mercy.

9 / 9 / 12
Amanda
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Sunday Meditation

The life of worship, then, is itself a corporate form of virtue. It expresses and in turn reinforces the faith, hope, and love which are themselves the key Christian virtues. From this activity there flow all kinds of other things in terms of Christian life and witness. But worship is central, basic, and in the best sense habit-forming. Every serious Christian should work at having worship become second nature. Expressing the love of God in this way will then flow ‘naturally’ across from the first conjoined twin to the second, reinforcing the life of mission. The temple is there because God’s filling of the house with his presence is to be a means, as well as a sign, that God intends to fill the whole world with his glory. Worship must lead to mission.

~ N.T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters, 225.

9 / 2 / 12
Amanda
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Sunday Meditation

“Worship is the ordering and reordering of our material being to the end for which it was meant. Implicit in the materiality of Christian worship is this sense that God meets us in materiality, and that the natural world is always more than just nature — it is charged with the presence and glory of God. Thus the very performance of Christian worship cuts against both dualistic gnosticism, which would construe matter and bodies as inherently evil, and reductionistic naturalism, which would construe the world as “merely” natural.

In short, the practice of Christian worship resists two sorts of reductionism: a dualistic, supernaturalistic gnosticism, on the one hand, and a materialistic, flattened naturalism, on the other other. Both evacuate the world of God’s presence, either by suggesting that a holy God would not traffic with the impurities of materiality, or by a “nothing-but” conception of the material as nothing more than material. The sacramental imagination runs counter to both of these reductionistic understandings of the world. The understanding of the world in Christian worship walks the tightrope of a “theological materialism” that both affirms the goodness of materiality but also that the material is only insofar as it participates in more than the material. Thus the sacramental imagination implicit in Christian worship eschews the dichotomies of both naturalism and supernaturalism.”

~James K.A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview and Cultural Formation, 143.

8 / 12 / 12
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How Vast Beyond All Measure

The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.

In the darkness, while most normal people slept, we woke the family and went on an adventure. With coats thrown over our jammies, and blankets tucked around our knees, we drove out the grid-road until the lights of Caronport were far behind us.

There, at the crossroads of a dirt road and yet another dirt road, we parked the car, pulled out our lawn chairs, and sat out under the heavens.

We watched as the Perseid Shower sent meteors shooting across the sky.

We watched these “shooting stars” fall into the big dipper.

We watched little ones fade so quick we weren’t sure if our eyes were playing tricks on us.

We watched big bright ones, with large tales, streak slowly across the sky.

There is nothing like the prairie sky. It’s one of my favourite things about living out here. The horizon stretches for miles and miles, and you can’t help but feel very, very small. And that’s in the daytime.

And then at night, the stars hang so low you can almost touch them. The sky is not tainted by the lights of the big city. Even from our backyard, with the small lights of Caronport brightening the sky a little bit, the Big Dipper, Orion and other constellations can be seen throughout the year, bright as ever, constant and true against the blackness of the night.

If there is one word for this expansive sky, it is vast. It is vast beyond all measure. And as I sat out on the grid-road, my head leaning on the back of the lawnchair, I was reminded in that moment of the trueness and realness of God’s love.

How deep the Father’s love for us, how vast beyond all measure.

God’s love is vast like the prairie sky.

The stars that are too numerous to count, the blackness, and wideness and clearness of an August night out on a grid-road — how vast beyond all measure.

We are small in the vastness of the prairie sky. We are small in the vastness of God’s love.

The vastness can overwhelm, unsettle and cause us to tremble.

And yet, the vastness isn’t going anywhere. It isn’t going to change.

It will still be vast when we run inside to get away from it.

It will still be vast when we dance and rejoice under it.

It will still be vast when it makes us uncomfortable, and we cry out that it’s too much.

It will still be vast when clouds of pain and trial and confusion mar our vision.

It will still be vast when we stand in awe, drinking in as much of it as we can.

How deep the Father’s love for us, how vast beyond all measure. That He should give His only Son, to make a wretch His treasure…

I will not boast in anything, no gifts, no power, no wisdom. But I will boast in Jesus Christ, His death and resurrection…

7 / 29 / 12
Amanda
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Sunday Meditation


Let every faithful man and woman, when they have risen from sleep in the morning, before they touch any work at all, wash their hands and pray to God, and so go to their work. But if instruction in the word of God is given, each one should choose to go to that place, reckoning in his heart that it is God whom he hears in the instructor.

For he who prays in the church will be able to pass by the wickedness of the day. He who is pious should think it a great evil if he does not go to the place where instruction is given, and especially if he can read, or if a teacher comes. Let none of you be late in the church, the place where teaching is given.

Then it shall be given to the speaker to say that is useful to each one; you will hear things which you do not think of, and profit from things which the Holy Spirit will give you through the instructor. In this way your faith will be strengthened about the things you have heard. You will also be told in that place what you ought to do at home. Therefore let each one be diligent in coming to the church, the place where the holy Spirit flourishes. ~ Hippolytus, ‘Of the Time When One Ought To Pray’

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