Is Spiritual Direction for you?

 

 I once went to a retreat called “Making a Difference”.  What I remember about that retreat was the process the leaders led us through to answer the question: “What is your ministry?”  Maybe a strange question to some of the participants, as there were nuns, pastors and other professionals present, and you would assume they all knew very well what their “ministry” was. 

In the workshop we did a lot of individual work and writing, centering prayer, discussion in the whole group and conversations with and listening to others.  

The facilitator kept peeling away the layers of immediate responses, getting to the core of who are you and how is your ministry playing out in real life, in essence looking at what am I doing in and with my life.   The questions weren’t “what is your job?”; what is your professional training?  what service projects are you involved in?”, “what are your skills?”, although these are all aspects that make up who we are.

 I had already in worked in a number of situations in war zones and natural disasters and with people living in poverty in many countries. I would say things like, I am a social worker; I am pretty good at training people and organizing, I do international development work with poor communities, I am a Christian; all which can be considered ministries or jobs of service to others.

The idea was to come up with an “I am” statement related to ministry, and after a couple of days, the answer I came to was “I am a spiritual director (or a spiritual companion).  It was both what I wanted to be and that which I believed God was calling me to at that time.  It seemed to be the “right fit”.

After that retreat I enrolled in a training program in group Spiritual Direction at the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation in Maryland.   I had a mentor for a couple of years, I facilitated a Spiritual Direction process with a small group of local pastors, and as a requirement of the program met with a Spiritual Director, a Franciscan sister, for about three years.  During that time, I worked as and enjoyed the role of Spiritual Director in several situations, both with individuals and groups, but never as a job - it was a ministry alongside of my regular work that I think contributed to making my "day job" more focused.  Over the last number of years, I have not done anything formal as a spiritual director, but I still feel what I learned through spiritual direction is at the center of my identity and my sense of ministry. 

If you are curious about spiritual direction, especially in the contemplative Christian Tradition, you can find many good resources on the internet.  You could start by looking at the website of the Shelem Institute, Shalem Institute / Shalem Institute

Or if you want, I can also respond to your questions and comments.  You can email me at jaaker2@yahoo.com, or comment below.

A Meditation on Worship

 

 

I have been a regular church goer my whole life.  As I wrote in the chapter on worship in my book, A Spirituality of Service, the churches Judy and I attended have been primarily Lutheran, though I have worshipped with many other congregations including Pentecostal, Evangelical, Episcopal, Methodist, Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox.  The format and liturgies vary widely.  Doing a rough calculation, I figure I have attended worship more than 3,000 times during my lifetime.  That means, among other things, listening to that many sermons and homilies, and experiencing everything from High Church Episcopal liturgy to very loud hand clapping Pentecostal singing and praying.

At times we found ourselves in places where there were few options in English or Spanish, the two languages we are comfortable with and in which we able to enter into the worship experience. 

In the little village in the highlands of Vietnam where we lived, there were Evangelical and Catholic worship services in both Vietnamese and Koho, the local tribal language.  We understood enough Vietnamese to get by in daily interactions but following long sermons and prayers in these languages was not satisfying.  We missed so much of the message, though we could follow the written hymns and songs and join in singing. I must admit that being in an assembly of a hundred or so Christians all praying in Koho at the same time is a fascinating experience.  But most of the time we would make do with devotions with our very small Vietnam Christian Service team.   

Living in the jungle in Peru we were rather isolated and there were few options, so we sometimes joined the nearby Evangelical missionaries who stressed “witnessing” and a literal interpretation of scripture. We never did stand up and tell “what the Lord did for me this week”, during those meetings.

In Nicaragua, we formed a kind of house church with a group of friends and co-workers.  The intimacy of a house church provides a lot of support, something much needed when living and working in a different culture and country.  From this experience we developed deep and lasting relationships through worshiping together for several years.  Small groups and churches offer something large ones don’t, and vice versa. 

I remember very few of those many sermons I heard over the years.  Honestly, do I even remember last Sunday’s sermon?  But there is something that brings us back to worship time and time again and it is not just going through the motions, as a skeptical person once said to me.  Thus, even if a church we attend may have some people who are less then friendly, or there is a tension between factions, stress over finances, or the sermon is not always great, (all issues we have seen in churches we have attended – not at St Luke), when we worship together, we are doing the work of the believers. The word liturgy comes from the Greek meaning the service or work of the people.

Remember the familiar story of Abraham and his son Isaak when Abraham was told by God to sacrifice his son. This is where the word worship is used for the first time in scripture.  Genesis 22: 4-5 says “On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place in the distance. ⁵ He said to his servants, “Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you.”

The point of using this example is that worship involves three acts:  It is an act of Obedience – obvious in this story.  Though I resist using that term as I prefer to think of worship as a spiritual discipline or practice; in the end it is an act of obedience. 

Secondly, it’s an act of sacrifice – though it may be hard to understand, when we worship, we are making a sacrifice to God. We offer ourselves in worship.  The Catholic and Orthodox churches understand the mass as a sacrifice.  Is that true in the Lutheran church too?  I seem to remember phrases like, “we offer here our sacrifice… etc. in the liturgy.

And thirdly, it is an act of faith, trusting that God is present and provides (in the story it was the lamb in the thicket).

Why do we keep going to church on a regular basis?  Certainly, we don’t have mountain top experiences every Sunday, though we probably all have experienced profound and meaningful worship experiences at various times in our lives.  If you scan your memory for very meaningful worship experiences you will remember the setting, where and when it happened and what moved you at that time.  When I posed that question to our Wednesday book discussion group, several said it was the sermon: “the message spoke to me very personally and directly”, another said it was the complete liturgy in a magnificent chapel with a great pipe organ accompanying the processional and hymns; while others pointed to an outdoor worship at a camp, singing songs around a campfire.  Not surprisingly, some like quiet and silence, having time and space to reflect and know the presence of God in nature or in the worship service in church. 

In its many forms worship happens when the faithful gather to praise, honor and glorify God.  As we enter into the presence of the living God, we are renewed in our faith, remembering again that we are loved by God and saved by grace through the sacrifice of Jesus.  That’s why I go to church.   

 

 

 

Independent People

 

I post this review not necessarily as a recommendation but because it may be of interest to some to hear about a little known though a well- regarded book by an Icelandic author who won the Nobel prize for literature.  I had not heard of either the author or the novel before though some famous writers rank it as one of their favorites.  I've not read anything about Iceland previously.

Some of the following is from Wikipedia:  

Independent People is an epic novel, by Halldór Laxness, originally published in two volumes in 1934 and 1935; literally the title means "Self-standing [i.e. self-reliant] folk". It deals with the struggle of poor Icelandic farmers in the early 20th century, only freed from debt bondage in the last generation, and surviving on isolated crofts (farms) in an inhospitable landscape.

Book One and Two are published in English in a single volume.  I have only read Book One thus far, as it is somewhat of a labor to read of the harsh life and grinding poverty page after page, and Book One ends on a down note.  However, the writing is good, especially descriptions of the landscape, the geography, the life of Icelandic farmers, the history and myths of that country.  The dialogue is sometimes quite humorous and reveling of the furiously independent nature of the people in that rural culture.

Independent People is the story of the sheep farmer Guðbjartur Jónsson, generally known in the novel as Bjartur of Summerhouses, and his struggle for independence. There is a little bit of the character in A Man Called Ove in this character, but Bjartur is much less likeable and quite a stubborn and brutish man. 

This book is considered among the foremost examples of social realism in Icelandic fiction in the 1930s.^[1] It is an indictment of materialism, the cost of the self-reliant spirit to relationships, and capitalism itself. The book finally brought Laxness the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1955.^[2]

The novel is set in the early decades of the twentieth century but ... Independent People is a pointedly timeless tale. It reminds us that life on an Icelandic croft had scarcely altered over a millennium".^[3] As the story begins, Bjartur ("bright" or "fair") has recently managed to put down the first payment on his own farm, after eighteen years working as a shepherd at the farm of the well-to-do local bailiff, a man he detests. The land that he buys is said to be cursed by Saint Columba, referred to as "the fiend Kolumkilli",^[4] and haunted by an evil woman named Gunnvör, who made a pact with Kólumkilli.

He marries a woman called Rósa, a fellow worker where Bjartur had worked and he is determined that they should live as independent people.  She is miserable in the spartan “croft” (farm), where they live in a rustic house with the farm animals kept in a pen below them.  He is not an easy person to live with, quite critical and insensitive.

Bjartur discovers that she is pregnant by the son of the bailiff. In the autumn, Bjartur and the other men of the district ride up into the mountains on the annual sheep round-up, leaving Rósa behind with a ewe to keep her company. Terrified by a storm one night, desperate for meat and convinced that the sheep is possessed by the devil, Rósa kills and eats the animal.

When Bjartur returns he is mystified as what has happened to the ewe, so he leaves his wife, by now heavily pregnant, to search for it in the mountains. He is delayed by a blizzard, and nearly dies of exposure. On his return to Summerhouses he finds that Rósa has died in childbirth. His dog Titla is curled around the baby girl, still clinging to life due to the warmth of the dog. With help from Rauðsmýri, the child survives; Bjartur decides to raise her as his daughter, and names her Ásta Sóllilja ("beloved sun lily").

The narrative begins again almost thirteen years later. Bjartur is now remarried to a woman who had been a charity case on the parish, Finna. The other new inhabitants are Hallbera, Finna's mother, and the three surviving sons of Bjartur's second marriage: Helgi, Gvendur and Nonni (Jón).

The rest of the novel charts the drudgery and the battle for survival of life on the farm, the misery, dreams and rebellions of the inhabitants and what appears to be the curse of Summerhouses taking effect.

The most important theme of the novel is independence, what it means and what it is worth giving up in order to achieve it. Bjartur is a stubborn man, often callous to the point of cruelty in his refusal to swerve from his ideals. Though undoubtedly a principled man, his attitude leads to the death and alienation of those around him