Shared Moments of Trust

A few years ago, my wife gave me a collection of essays from the "This I Believe" project from NPR. If you are not aware of this project, I highly recommend you check it out. In a nutshell, the project invites people of all sorts to write their credo in about 300 words. What a discipline to begin to practice, and not just about what we believe about God or Jesus or the Church.

Here is one of my favorites from Warren Christopher who believes in "A Shared Moment of Trust". You can read or listen to Mr. Christopher's thoughts.

I invite you to poke around and see if you find a submission that speaks to you and share that in a comment to this post.

Grace and Peace.

What is prayer?

I was told to listen to an archived podcast of "Speaking of Faith" with Krista Tippett and could not get it out of my head. In fact on the way to doing the funeral of John Regan Vance I was without anything to say. I had never had the honor of doing a funeral from start to finish by myself and I was terrified. While listening to this podcast on prayer (which I highly recommend) my soul became calm and I began to consider what it prayer. My reflection on this podcast leaves me with two things about prayer that I will continue to hold with me:

1) Sanskrit is like Latin in that how you say the words is just as important as the words themselves. This idea made me consider that sometimes in my searching for just the right words in all situations and prayers, I forget that words are limited and the feeling and emotion is just as important as the words themselves. How I say what I pray makes a difference in me. The "om" of Hindu prayers is meant to focus the person on the vibrations of each of the three sounds. Sitting in the car prior to the funeral, I began to try our the "om" the podcast was talking about. After three of four of these "om" prayers, the vibrations and crescendo of the final "mmmm" made me feel like I had just been to a spa and got a back rub. What a prayer.

2) French poet Simone Weil is credited with this saying, "Absolutely unmixed attention is Prayer." Notice the emphasis is on the action of "attention" not on prayer. The important thing is attention. Thus, this could be used to argue that even non-religious people pray. The girl who hammers out a song on a piano is in prayer. The person who is learning to read and sounding out each syllable is in prayer. Prayer does not just happen in the Church and being in Church does not always mean we are in prayer.

So I continue to wonder at the vastness and yet simplicity of the human need to pray.

MLK connection

"Faith is taking the first step, even when you don't see the whole staircase."

- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Civil rights - Legally, a 'civil right' is a right or privilege that all citizens within a society are supposed to enjoy, as distinct from a natural right, held to be common to all humans. Examples of 'civil rights' are freedom of speech and religion, the right to vote and freedom from involuntary servitude. The term is American, first recorded in Boston in 1721: "That they Indeavor to maintain all our Civel Rights and Properties against any Incrochments upon them."

Source: The Word Origin Calendar January 18th, 2010.

My question in light of civil/natural rights distinction is this: Is marriage a civil or a natural right?

ESPNRadio and Ministry

"Nothing punctures brilliance like stubbornness."

Collin Cowherd on ESPNRadio December 22nd, 2009. Talking the inability to be flexible about former NCAA basketball coach and legend Bobby Knight.

Could it be that some of our churches and ministers are doing brilliant ministries, but are so trapped in the realm of tradition that it stifles the brilliance of the ministry?

Flexibility is the key to doing Church. I am not saying abandon tradition, but I am also saying we are not to be enslaved by it. Tradition is a wonderful thing as it allows us to see how people were flexible in past situations and how they used innovation to move forward.

Part of the brilliance of John Wesley was his ability to recognize that he might be the heart of the Methodist movement, he was not the person for the job in America. He was flexible and stepped aside and innovated by sending different people.

In the beginning of his ministry Jesus thought he came only for the Jews. But after an encounter with a woman who was not Jewish who still had faith in him and God, Jesus innovated and realized God's message was for all people. What if Jesus was stubborn and kept his message only for the Jewish people? Fortunately for me, Jesus was flexible.

Perhaps part of a measure of our brilliance is to measure how flexible we are.

How flexible are you?