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Those who belong to communities of faith have acquired a certain patience with what is sometimes called organized religion. They have learned to forgive its shortcomings as they have learned to forgive themselves. They do not expect their institutions to stand in for God, and they are happy to use inherited maps for some of life’s journeys.
All we lack is the willingness to imagine that we already have everything we need. The only thing missing is our consent to be where we are.
“Come tell us what is saving your life now,
All I had to do was figure out what my life depended on. All I had to do was figure out how I stayed as close to that reality as I could, and then find some way to talk about it that helped my listeners figure out those same things for themselves.
My life depends on engaging the most ordinary physical activities with the most exquisite attention I can give them. My life depends on ignoring all touted distinctions between the secular and the sacred, the physical and the spiritual, the body and the soul. What is saving my life now is becoming more fully human, trusting that there is no way to God apart from real life in the real world.
Each trusts that doing something is at least as valuable as reading books about it, thinking about it, or sitting around talking about
In a world where faith is often construed as a way of thinking, bodily practices remind the willing that faith is a way of life.
To put it another way, my hope is that reading them will help you recognize some of the altars in this world—ordinary-looking places where human beings have met and may continue to meet up with the divine More that they sometimes call God.
The day of my spiritual awakening was the day I saw—and knew I saw—all things in God and God in all things.
Bethel, House of God. At least that is what Jacob called the place where he encountered God—not on a gorgeous island but in a rocky wilderness—where he saw something that changed his life forever.
“Remember, I am with you,” God said to him. “I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.
When had I made the subtle switch myself, becoming convinced that church bodies and buildings were the safest and most reliable places to encounter the living God?
Turning aside from everything else we could have been doing, we did things together in those sacred spaces that we did nowhere else in our lives: we named babies, we buried the dead, we sang psalms, we praised God for our lives. When we did, it was as if we were building a fire together, each of us adding something to the blaze so that the light and heat in our midst grew. Yet the light exceeded our fire, just as the warmth did. We did our parts, and then there was more. There was More.
Although I have spent a lot of my life in jobs that require me to speak for God, I am still reluctant to do it for all kinds of reasons.
the first place,
In the second place,
Anything I say about God will be inadequate. No matter how hard I try to say something true about God, the reality of God will eclipse my best words.
Without one designated place to make their offerings, people were free to see the whole world as an altar.
Francis could not have told you the difference between “the sacred” and “the secular” if you had twisted his arm behind his back.
Like all who write what they remember, I am inventing the truth.
Like anyone else, I do some picking and choosing when I go to my holy book for proof that the world is holy too, but the evidence is there.
When people want to know more about God, the son of God tells them to pay attention to the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, to women kneading bread and workers lining up for their pay.
The House of God stretches from one corner of the universe to the other. Sea monsters and ostriches live in it, along with people who pray in languages I do not speak, whose names I will never know.
not gained by knowing what is right. Wisdom is gained by practicing what is right, and noticing what happens when that practice succeeds and when it fails. Wise people do not have to be certain what they believe before they act. They are free to act, trusting that the practice itself will teach them what they need to know.
As with Jacob, most of my visions of the divine have happened while I was busy doing something else.
From him I learned by example that reverence was the proper attitude of a small and curious human being in a vast and fascinating world of experience. This world included people and places as well as things.
reverence is the virtue that keeps people from trying to act like gods. “To forget that you are only human,” he says, “to think you can act like a god—this is the opposite of reverence.” 1
Reverence stands in awe of something—something that dwarfs the self, that allows human
beings to sense the full extent of our limits—so that we can begin to see one another more reverently as well.
They do not want to debate anyone. The longer they stand before the holy of holies, the less adequate their formulations of faith seem to them. Angels reach down and shut their mouths.
We pay attention to the speedometer, the wristwatch, the cell phone, the list of things to do, all of which feed our illusion that life is manageable.
first criterion for reverence, which is to remind us that we are not gods.
the Sermon on the Mount. So is the laying on of hands, the anointing of the sick, and the bathing of the dead. If you have ever done any of these things, then you know that it is just about impossible to do them without suffering a sudden onset of reverence.
Regarded properly, anything can become a sacrament, by which I mean an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual connection.
The practice of paying attention is as simple as looking twice at people and things you might just as easily ignore.
Since at least one of the reasons I remain Christian is because of the seriousness with which Christian tradition honors flesh and blood, I am always surprised at how easy it is for me to become an oaf—usually by saying something obvious about the human body in the presence of those devoted to the soul.
After he was gone, they would still have God’s Word, but that Word was going to need some new flesh. The disciples were going to need something warm and near that they could bump into on a regular basis, something so real that they would not be able to intellectualize it and so essentially untidy that there was no way they could ever gain control over it.
Stanley Hauerwas
Christianity “is not a set of beliefs or doctrines one believes in order to be a Christian,” he says, “but rather Christianity is to have one’s body shaped, one’s habits determined, in such a way that the worship of God is unavoidable.” 2 In our embodied life together, the words of our doctrines take on flesh.
The issue Hauerwas raises is not whether there is any such thing as purely spiritual holiness, but “whether there is anything beside the body that can be sanctified.” 3
I almost never hear about the intellectualization of faith, which strikes me as a far greater danger than anything else on the list. In an age of information overload, when a vast variety of media delivers news faster than most of us can digest—when many of us have at least two e-mail addresses, two telephone numbers, and one fax number—the last thing any of us needs is more information about God. We need the practice of incarnation, by which God saves the lives of those whose intellectual assent has turned as dry as dust, who have run frighteningly low on the bread of life, who are dying to
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Maybe I have watched Zorba the Greek too many times, but I find myself rebelling against any religious definition of goodness that leaves the body behind.
Then one morning we explored the Beatitudes, only instead of talking about them we decided to embody them.
This idea of embodying the beatitudes would be a good class exercise to use on the day of the memory quiz over them in NTLL class.
The miracle is not to walk on water but on the earth.
walking one of the most easily available spiritual practices of all. All it takes is the decision to walk with some awareness, both of who you are and what you are doing. Where you are going is not as important, however counterintuitive that may seem.
When someone asks us where we want to be in our lives, the last thing that occurs to us is to look down at our feet and say, “Here, I guess, since this is where I am.
I noticed how much more I notice when I am not preoccupied with getting somewhere.
Spiritual practices
The only promise they make is to teach those who engage in them what those practitioners need to know—about being human, about being human with other people, about being human in creation, about being human before God.
“Go to your cell,” advised the Desert Fathers of the fourth century, “and your cell will teach you everything.” If you want more details than that, the only way to get them is to choose a practice and begin.
