Spiritual Practice (Friday Five)

Mary Beth asks the questions today:

"My Sunday school class has hit the "pause" button on our study of First Corinthians and is spending Lent on Richard J. Foster's classic Celebration of Discipline. I have had this wonderful and very readable book on my shelf, along with the study guide for it, for years, but have never discussed it with a group.

Because there are only five Sundays in Lent, we are fairly galloping through the book, getting a quick introduction to the various disciplines. The church is also sponsoring a Lenten Centering Prayer group, allowing some of us to sample this discipline in community.

Following the image above, I like to think of the spiritual disciplines as vessels that prepare us to ride the wave of God's amazing love and presence in a new way.

For today's Friday Five, please share with us five spiritual practices or disciplines from your experience. They can be ones that you have tried and kept up with, tried and NOT kept up with, ones that you flirt with at various times, or even practices that you have tried and found are definitely NOT your cup of tea. Let us know what's worked for you...and not."

1. I listen to Pray as You Go on a fairly regular basis, usually more or less first thing in the morning.  Sometimes I listen closely and pray through it, sometimes I journal my reactions and responses as I listen, sometimes I do yoga while I listen.

2. I do a lot of writing as I explore my spiritual life.  I started journaling about my spiritual adventures (and lack thereof) seriously when I made the Spiritual Exercises five years ago and have kept that practice up, to the point were I have filled something like fifteen journals.  Plus a lot of my blogging reflects my spiritual life.

3. Photography is a spiritual practice for me much of the time. Even as I write more and preach more, I am increasingly interested in the visual reception and expression of faith.

4. Reading and listening are critical spiritual practices for me.  I am endlessly interested in what other people have to say about the spiritual life, whether explicitly or implicitly, in nonfiction books and periodicals, in novels and poetry,and in blogs and conversation.

5. This list so far says little about communal spiritual practice, which has been the most challenging arena for me since Josh died.  Three years ago, words like hospitality and worship in community would have been high in the list, but those are matters I am having to reconsider and reframe in light of my sense of vulnerability and fragility.  I am so changed on the inside that I am still working on how to be both genuinely and lovingly engaged and  appropriately reserved on the outside. 

And the all-encompassing spiritual practice for me, the one that can't possibly be reduced to a number on a list, is prayer.  I was thinking about this last night, about how much over the past fifteen years or so my life has tilted, ever so slowly, toward a constant engagement with prayer: formal prayer, intercessory prayer, communal prayer, solitary prayer, visual prayer but, most of all, an increasingly steady prayer of contemplative listening.  This one, I think, gets a post of its own in the next few days.