Not so much a sequel to Leaving Church, but a reflection on spiritual practices, grounded in auto-biography. Excellent.
Quotes:
People seem willing to look all over the place for this treasure. They will spend hours launching prayers into the heavens. They will travel halfway around the world to visit a monastery in India or to take part in a mission trip to Belize. The last place most people look is right under their feet, in the everyday activities, accidents, and encounters of their lives. What possible spiritual significance could a trip to the grocery store have? How could something as common as a toothache be a door to greater life?
I learned reverence from my father. For him, it had nothing to do with religion and very little to do with God. I think it may have had something to do with his having been a soldier, since the exercise of reverence generally includes knowing your rank in the overall scheme of things.
Reverence for creation comes fairly easily for most people. Reverence for other people presents more of a challenge, especially if those people’s lives happen to impinge upon your own.
I saw what dies so that I may live, and while I did not stop eating chicken meat, I began cooking it and eating it with unprecedented reverence.
Whether you are sick or well, lovely or irregular, there comes a time when it is vitally important for your spiritual health to drop your clothes, look in the mirror, and say, “Here I am. This is the body-like-no-other that my life has shaped. I live here. This is my soul’s address.”
every spiritual practice begins with the body.
“Do this,” he said—not believe this but do this—“in remembrance of me.”
NOT EVERYONE is able to walk, but most people can, which makes walking one of the most easily available spiritual practices of all.
I mean God loves bodies. I mean that in some way that defies all understanding, God means to welcome risen bodies and not just disembodied souls to heaven’s banquet table. The resurrection of the dead is the radical insistence that matter matters to God.
Popular religion focuses so hard on spiritual success that most of us do not know the first thing about the spiritual fruits of failure.
Anything can become a spiritual practice once you are willing to approach it that way—once you let it bring you to your knees and show you what is real, including who you really are, who other people are, and how near God can be when you have lost your way.
It can be difficult to be an introvert in church, especially if you happen to be the pastor.
“We have just enough religion to make us hate one another,” Jonathan Swift once observed, “but not enough to make us love one another.”
“The supreme religious challenge,” says Rabbi Sacks, “is to see God’s image in one who is not in our image,” 10 for only then can we see past our own reflections in the mirror to the God we did not make up.
The moment I turn that person into a character in my own story, the encounter is over. I have stopped being a human being and have become a fiction writer instead.
Earlier in my life, I thought there was one particular thing I was supposed to do with my life. I thought that God had a purpose for me and my main job was to discover what it was.
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“Do anything that pleases you,” the voice in my head said again, “and belong to me.”
While the world deeply needs people who will punch cash registers, enter data, empty bedpans, and take household garbage to the dump, these purposes are too small for most human beings.
And yet meaningful work is hard to come by. Not everyone can teach school or cure illness. Plenty of us do not get the kind of work we want, and plenty more can find it difficult to stay focused on the meaning of what we are doing.
In Buddhist teaching, right livelihood is one of the flagstones on the Noble Eightfold Path. Along with right speech, right intention, right action, and right effort, right livelihood is a key step in waking up to the true nature of reality, which includes the true nature of you.
The inherited wisdom is that certain kinds of work are bad for you. Being a hired killer is not so good, for instance. Neither is selling drugs, arms, or sex. The basic principle is to do no harm. Beyond that, you are free to do quite a lot of things for a living, but they are not all going to come with their own evident purposes. Supplying that purpose is going to be up to you.
while my chosen vocation gave me a really good job in the divine work of creation, it remained a subset of a larger vocation, which was the job of loving God and neighbor as myself.
work as spiritual practice,
Work connects us to other people.
Any worker with a good imagination should be able to come up with hundreds of people whom his or her work affects.
Yet it is always possible that one’s true work in the world is not what one does for a living.
In a world where the paid work that people do does not always feed their hearts, it seems important to leave open the possibility that our vocations may turn out to be things we do for free.
ONE COMMON PROBLEM for people who believe that God has one particular job in mind for them is that it is almost never the job they are presently doing. This means that those who are busiest trying to figure out God’s purpose for their lives are often the least purposeful about the work they are already doing.
The point is to find something that feeds your sense of purpose, and to be willing to look low for that purpose as well as high.
Some busy people cannot even tell the difference between relaxation and narcolepsy, because the minute they sit down in a quiet place alone, they nod off.
On day three, I decided that a power outage would make a great spiritual practice. Never mind giving up meat or booze for Lent. For a taste of real self-denial, just turn off the power for a while and see if phrases such as “the power of God” and “the light of Christ” sound any different to you.
Pain makes theologians of us all.
I am a failure at prayer.
I do not know anyone who prays very long without running into the wall of God’s apparent nonresponsiveness.
“If you ask anything in my name, I will do it,” Jesus says in the gospel of John, leaving a lot of us wondering what it is about “in my name” that we do not understand.
The problem, I think, is that divine response to prayer is one of those beauties that remain in the eye of the beholder.
The plan is to replace approval with gratitude. The plan is to take what is as God’s ongoing answer to me.
At the same time, I am aware that prayer is more than something I do. The longer I practice prayer, the more I think it is something that is always happening, like a radio wave that carries music through the air whether I tune in to it or not. This is hard to talk about, which is why prayer is a practice and not a discussion topic.
To pronounce a blessing on something, it is important to see it as it is.
Not many people know it, but both Martin Luther and Julian of Norwich did some of their best thinking on the toilet.
God has no hands but ours, no bread but the bread we bake, no prayers but the ones we make, whether we know what we are doing or not.
for reasons beyond anyone’s understanding, God has decided to be made known in flesh. Matter matters to God. The most ordinary things are drenched in divine possibility. Pronouncing blessings upon them is the least we can do.
So I end where I began, at the wedding of spirit and flesh, practicing reverence with the living and the dead. I hope you can think of a dozen chapters I left out of this book. I hope you can think of at least that many more ways to celebrate your own priesthood, practiced at the altar of your own life.
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