Leftover Seeds - Writing Sermons

There was an involved discussion at the RevGals' Preacher Party Saturday about sermon writing ~ which each of us does in her or his own way ~  interspersed with discussions about Sunday's texts.

These days, I usually read through all the texts the week-end before.  Then I go through them carefully on Monday with a highlighter, looking for what speaks to me, and I keep them all in mind as I pray and ponder and do some research and mostly go about the rest of my life for the next few days, waiting for the sermon itself to more or less emerge.

I prefer to do the bulk of my writing on Thursday, which gives me plenty of time for changes of heart, reading what others have to say, and revisions.  I don't read other sermons anymore until the bulk of mine is written.

This past week, as I began to read what others had to say, I concluded that I had not had an original thought in my brain.  My bent was toward the sower who tosses his seeds every which way.  I preached for a congregation which just kind of stared at me, leaving me to push forward through an ever-increasing sense of doom:  They hate it. 

But then: some wonderful post-service comments.  If only their expressions during the service had encouraged me along!

Anyway, here's a bit of it (and feel free just to skip to the final paragraph):

**********

Imagine the path, in the parable as Jesus tells it.  Perhaps it runs alongside the field, or perhaps through the middle of the field.  The sower, walking a straight line in the field just adjacent to the path, casts his seed from side to side and, while most of them land in the field, some of them slide through his fingers onto the path.  The path has been hardened by many feet and baked in the sun into something resembling the solid texture of a brick walk; the seeds that land there have no chance.  They lie scattered across the path for less than a matter of minutes before the birds swoop down, eager for a free meal. 

Imagine that path in your life.  That hard, resistant place against which the kernel of God’s word has no chance.  The place you’ve sealed up tight.  That place from which your capacity to respond with gentleness, with openness and hope, is excluded.  The path on which you walked when someone yelled at you, or hit you, when you were a child.  The path you traversed after your father died, or after your wife left.  The road of unemployment, or school failure.  The trail of ruined dreams, of crushed hopes.

             

Yeah – that hardened, impermeable path.  The one onto which Jesus tosses seeds willy-nilly, not at all concerned about the likely futility of his labor.

            

. . .  (Three more sections of the field!)

            

We know that Jesus sows his word, sows the hope of his kingdom, everywhere, in every possible circumstance available to him, everywhere in the wide, various world.  He doesn’t stop to ask for soil certification, for proof of faithfulness, for adherence to all the rules. Oh, sometimes he gets those things – sometimes the people with whom he pauses are demonstrably competent, kind, faithful -- even holy.  But more often than not, they aren’t.  Often they aren’t any such thing.   Often they are prostitutes and tax collectors, people on the margins, people who wouldn’t recognize a good investment in land from a hopelessly poor one.

             

And yet he scatters those little seeds; he plants them everywhere he goes.

             

What does that mean that he is inviting us to do?  How does he ask us to imitate his actions, to get to know his priorities, to participate in his kingdom?

            

. . . 

Now imagine another sower; it’s you.  Imagine the joy, the freedom, the hopefulness, of a heedless generosity.  Your inheritance, that bag of seeds passed on to you by your lord, is one of abundance, not scarcity, one of extravagance, not limitation.

We all possess all kinds of fields.  We possess within us patches of anger and selfishness, areas in which we hold ourselves back from God and from God’s love out of our own quite impressive limitations.  We also possess fields of great goodness, places filled with the riches of God’s love, love which has yielded great blessings within us.

We look out on all kinds of fields, and what do we do? Do we think for a second that God wants us to turn our backs on the barren places, to withhold God's good gifts from those we judge unworthy, those unlikely to benefit, those whose appearance or actions tell us that God’s love will be wasted there?  Or does God want us to scatter seeds regardless of our own assumptions and preconceptions, trusting in God to produce a harvest in the most unlikely of places?

. . . 

But what Jesus does, what he suggests for the sowers of his kingdom, is not limited to the requirements of farming, whether Ohioan or Middle Eastern.  God looks at hard ground and, as a Father, sends a son.  Jesus looks at potential farming disasters and scatters his words and his gifts of healing and hope.  We are called to do the same:  Think abundance!  Open the fields of your own life, no matter their condition, to God’s infinite love.

And scatter generously!  Let bits and pieces of the Kingdom of God fly out of your hands and sparkle across this earth, onto hard soil and rocky soil and pliable soil and every kind of soil there is.  Because that’s what our Creator gazes upon and what Jesus tends and what their Spirit sustains.  Every kind of soil – thanks be to God.

Spiritual Direction - How I Got Here

With my eight days of silence on the immediate horizon, I've been doing some preparatory reflection, and the discovery of a blog written by a pastor who's about to enter the training program in spiritual direction I completed a couple of years ago has prompted me to write a bit about that part of my experience.

Like many people, I "failed" spiritual direction a couple of times.  I wasn't ready, didn't "get it," found at least one really bad match of a director ~ and generally thought it sounded cool, but had no idea how to go about it.  Then I bumped into the Jesuit who became my first real spiritual director (he had been my professor for a couple of graduate classes) and guided me through the Ignatian Exercises over the course of a year.  They say that when the student is ready, the master teacher appears -- and that's exactly what happened in my case.

During that year of the Exercises, I realized that I was heading for seminary, but I didn't particularly envision myself as a spiritual director. A teacher and preacher, sure.  And I fell in love with the sacrament of communion that year.  And after many years as a lawyer, particularly a family lawyer, I knew that I had developed some listening skills.  

But I saw myself as a problem solver.  There was a reason that I had gone for a law degree rather than a Ph.D. in psychology when I was a young woman.  I like action and solutions.

The space of spiritual listening seemed so holy to me.  The skill of listening to someone for an extended period of time and then making a few suggestions, the sense that the Holy Spirit was abroad -- so not what I was about.  At least as far as I knew.  I was deeply and profoundly grateful for what I had received, for the person who had been listening to me so intently every week for a year, as if my spiritual life were a matter of great significance, but I didn't imagine myself as capable of something similar.  And then toward the end he nudged me a bit (no nudging allowed during the Exercises themselves!) and . . .

I found myself launched into a two year program for the training of spiritual directors.

**********

Year One: A long evening class and a five-page reflective paper every other week; a basically academic year in which we studied the theology and practice of spirituality from an Ignatian perspective.  Two Saturday workshops on discernment and one on communication skills.

Year Two:  The classes and papers were reduced to once a month, and the material was more practical in nature: ethics, spiritual development, another communications workshop.  Most of that year was devoted to our practicums: 50 hours of one-on-one spiritual direction, nine five-page verbatim reports, and monthly meetings with our individual supervisors to discuss our verbatims.  (Those who've completed CPE will recognize that ominous word, verbatim:  a detailed replication of a portion of a conversation followed by an in-depth analysis of your own responses and reflections.)

Was it a little intense?  Well, I was in seminary at the same time, and so one day I tabulated the hours of class and meeting times and the pages of writing, and concluded that it was approximately like adding another class to each of six quarters of school.  It meant a lot of extra driving for me, too, since seminary is in another city and my spiritual direction classes were back here, on (sigh) Wednesdays.

And, you know, my son died in the middle of all of it..  At that time, I'd been seeing my current spiritual director for a year, and he and the head of the program (and my first director as well) were very instrumental in getting me back on track.  I thought they were completely delusional in their gentle suggestions that it might be helpful for me to focus on working with others in their spiritual lives, and expressed my strong reservations ~ but they were right.  It was painful (What wasn't?), but it was exactly what I needed to do.

Seminary gave me a place to retreat into the life of the intellect, field education forced me into the life of a church, and accompanying others in spiritual direction made it possible for me to observe the Spirit intimately at work ~ all during a time in which God seemed to have completely withdrawn from me.

**********

I've had some big conversations with people from my program over the last few months about our training.  We all recognize that our program was an immersion into one tradition of spirituality, and lacked an overview of others.  But I think we've all concluded that we're grateful for that depth of immersion, and feel well equipped to venture into explorations of other traditions from the solid foundation we've gained in the Ignatian approach.  One of the men has told me about the time he's spent immersed in Franciscan prayer, and one of the women has described her involvement with Carmelite spirituality (in which I took a short class last winter).  This summer, several of us are reading Julian of Norwich together.

And you know what?  I was a good enough lawyer.  I was kind and thorough and skilled and got my clients through some tough situations.  But I was never as completely and passionately immersed in law as I have been in ministry ~ in so many dimensions of it.  I look back at the woman who so hesitantly and inarticulately first began to spell out some of some of her hopes and questions to a Jesuit who listened as if God might be doing something worth paying attention to ~ and I can hardly believe how much I have grown and changed in these past six years.  I am so very grateful to have been transformed into a spiritual director, and for all the stories and questions and experiences of prayer that are shared with me in that very quiet and contemplative space in my life.

Summer Fun Friday Five

Here's what Dorcas suggests for today:

So, what's up, Rev Gals and Pals?  How are you spending your summer?  (I know, some of you are in a different hemisphere and it may be chilly...sorry!)  Are you experiencing fire or floods or tornadoes?  Vacationing?  Working harder than ever?  Experiencing change?  Longing for change? 

Share five things that are happening in your life, personally or professionally or some of each, in this season of life.

OK . . . .

1. I'm hoping, wishing, longing for a call that will bring some shape and focus to my life.  There's a tiny bit of movement on that front, but that's about all that I can say about it.

2. I'm involved in the planning for a city-wide commemoration of 9/11 as a new board member of an organization that promotes interfaith dialogue.

3.  I'm doing planning and organizing  and teaching for various retreats and workshops and classes that have little to do with my primary objective but everything to do with where the invitations are coming from, so I'm also being forced to give a lot of thought and prayer to What That Might Mean.

4.  We have a family vacation planned for the mountains of western North Carolina, where we are going to meet The Lovely Daughter in mid-August after her camp-counseling summer.  Here's a view of Camp From Above:

5.  And . . .  next Tuesday I'm off for my eight-day silent retreat, which cannot come a second too soon, here:

A Sunlit Absence - I (Book Review)

After months of eager anticipation, I have zipped through Martin Laird's A Sunlit Absence: Silence, Awareness, and Contemplation and begun, as of late last night, a much slower and more careful second read.

A Sunlit Absence is a companion volume to Into the Silent Land: A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation, upon which Michelle and I reflected  over a period of several months last year. (See tab at the top of the page.)  I think that most readers will find A Sunlit Absence to be more challenging and, without a great deal of attentiveness paced over an extended period of time, less easily satisfying,  On the other hand, of course, perhaps such attentiveness will lead ultimately to a more rewarding experience of reading and prayer over that longer timespan.

Into the Silent Land, using the metaphor of the doorway, provides an introduction to contemplative practice in the sequence of a journey.  Moving from an introduction to Christian contemplation into the methodology of utilizing a prayer word, addressing the difficulties with mental distractions that cause many people to run as fast as possible away from anything that smacks of silence, and providing instruction in how to persist in prayer despite or even in aid of life's traumas and crises, Into the Silent Land eases us into an orderly exploration of prayer.

A Sunlit Absence is more akin to the experience of opening a scrapbook, inviting us to sift through a cascade of images, allusions, and parables in pursuit of the elusive God who need not be pursued at all because we live and move and have our being, always, within God's love.  I've just counted, and I have at least 25 of its 175 pages turned down as indications of material that called out to me for further reflection ~ but I don't yet have a sense of the whole.

The title of  the book comes from a Seamus Heaney poem which begins with the words, "There was a sunlit absence."  I'm not sure that Laird ever addresses the poem (as I said, my first read was a speedy one), but what he does describe in the introduction  is our experience of the God who both envelops and fills us as  that of water merging into water and light merging into light.  As Teresa of Avila says, "love melts into love."

As I pondered some days ago, before the book arrived, I have begun to wonder whether the silence of God is not, in fact, the compassion of God.  When I mentioned that possibility to someone else, he suggested that the silence of God is the patience of God ~ and, perhaps not surprisingly, referred me back to a passage in Into the Silent Land.  

I have been wondering, also, whether the silence of God perhaps reverberates through the universe?

Silence as the compassion of God, the patience of God, the echo of God?  We shall see what this book suggests.

Monday Morning Musings

I'm stealing both title and idea from Terri as I ponder the here and now, sitting on the living room couch with our aging dog stretched out and sleeping next to me.

As indicated by the photo above, for another three weeks the Gregarious Son is in Russia, a destination that would have been most unlikely during my own law student days.  He says that some of the Russian students are going to try to help them find an American celebration. 

The Lovely Daughter is at camp in North Carolina, where I expect that they will have a small display of fireworks tonight in their little cove ringed by mountains.  

Last night we spent the evening with friends, a big group of us out on a porch on a beautiful evening.  The Quiet Husband  has been unenthusiastic about going to the fireworks tonight, so perhaps we'll just stay home.  I don't know that I've ever missed the fireworks, but perhaps last night was enough celebrating for us.

The big topic of discussion these days is the recent appearance of a flash mob of kids toward the end of a local street fair last week-end, 1,000-1,500 of them descending out of nowhere upon a small shopping  neighborhood a couple of blocks from most of our homes and generally wreaking havoc.  Most of the young people were from other places, and our city council has responded with a hasty and draconian curfew for certain areas.  Because we live in an older, inner-ring suburb, our residential and commercial districts are all interspersed among each other, with parks, libraries, and schools scattered all over the place, so public gathering places co-exist, generally peacefully, adjacent to quiet, tree-lined streets of older homes.  Our city prides itself on diversity of all kinds, so racial undertones smolder underneath concerns about businesses, pedestrian safety, and a major art festival in a couple of weeks.  How quickly careless adolescent behavior can become a complex social challenge!

Meanwhile, a pair of flickers have raised a couple of their own youngsters nearby.  The other day as I headed out for a walk, one of the young birds, innocent of feline hazards to its health, rested on the sidewalk until the insistent call of a parent atop the church two doors down encouraged a flight into a tree.  The young ones were not yet able to discern which branches would bear their weight, so there were some wobbly landings.  Last night, though, they zipped skillfully across our front yard, all grown up and ready to go.

So . . .  what's going on in your neighborhood these days?

Image here.

A Belated Celebration of Canada Day: Images of Algonquin

Josh - 1999 - Almost 15 and about to start high school.

Brothers - 2002 - Almost 18 and high school seniors.

Josh - 2002 - We convinced my dad that we should stay at one campsite 

for two nights for some R&R.

Loading up for Algonquin - 2004 - My dad and his wife, Jewel, 

and Matt and Josh. That year, the trip was for just the four of them.

Josh - 2004 - Almost 20 and a college sophomore.

Friday Five: The Way We Blogged

Kathryn asks us about blogging today:

A friend and I were lamenting recently about the good ol' days of blogging and memes. Certainly there are still some very active blogs around our web ring, but the days of the Friday Five getting 50-70+ responses are in the past. We lamented that the Friday Five is the equivalent of the women's guild of RevGalBlogPals.

I am one of those who went from blogging just about daily to periodically at best. Unfortunately, the number I routinely read has gone down as well. What about you?

1) Have your blogging (writing/reading) habits shifted since the days of yore?

I still blog about as frequently as I did when I got started seven years ago, but I don't read nearly as many blogs as I once did.  In the old days, a real community of miscellaneous-topic bloggers developed on the AOL Journals site; these days, it seems that most of us stick to groups of common interest.  I got started hoping that by writing about my efforts to eat less and exercise more, I would be publicly accountable for the results.  No results.  But I did make friends and discover that writing is the major way in which I process just about everything.  So my blogs have accompanied me into and out of seminary, through the college years and  young adulthoods of my children, into the darkness of Josh's death, and now into this murky in-between period.

2) Do you have some favorites that you miss?  

There is a guy (who shall remain nameless) whose humor and good will in the face of some big disappointments made his writing zing.  He's all but vanished.

3) Are there some blogs you still put in the 'must read' category?

A couple of women with whom I became friends in the beginnings of AOL journaling are still friends, still wonderful writers, and still must-reads.  I have made some good friends among the RevGals, developed some very close relationships with other moms who have lost older children, and discovered some excellent blogs about Ignatian spirituality, so I read all of them every day.  Or whenever they appear.  Michelle of Quantum Theology is hands down the best blogger on spirituality of whom I know.

4) If we gathered at your knee, what would you tell us about those early days of blogging?

Seven years ago, almost everyone used screen names that provided anonymity.  I remember that even though I wrote under the guises of Ocean and Gannet Girl and for what? ~ maybe 50 people? ~ I was startled to see my thoughts appear in print, and not a little apprehensive about the consequences.  Now I find that that seems a bit quaint. 

5) Do you have a clip or a remembrance of a previous post of yours or someone else's that you remember, you know an oldie but goodie?

Oh, too many for the short time span available to me this morning!  But with the new Marty Laird book on contemplative prayer finally out, I wish that folks would read the dialogue that Michelle and I shared over the first, Into the Silent Land (tab at the top of the page).