In a previous post I reflected on “bridge ices before road” signs and requested suggestions for signs you would place along your life’s road to remind you of things you need to remember but often forget. There were several responses. I hope others will contribute and I will collect them and share them periodically.
As you can see there is a wide range of thoughtful responses. Feel free to add your sign.
Still on the Journey.
Spiritual disciplines are habits, practices, and experiences that are designed to develop, grow, and strengthen certain qualities of spirit — to build the “muscles” of one’s character and expand the breadth of one’s inner life. They structure the “workouts” which train the soul.
https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/behavior/introduction-spiritual-disciplines/
After reading the definition of spiritual disciplines and further reflection on our experience traveling to Florida “Off Road”, (“Off road” meaning avoiding Interstate 75 using a route traversing Kentucky, Tennessee and Georgia, with some brief exceptions, on non-interstate highways.) I believe traveling “Off Road” qualifies as a spiritual discipline.
I have, for the most part, thought of spiritual discipline in a classical sense. Influenced by Richard Foster, his list of disciplines comes to mind:
The inward disciplines:
Meditation
Prayer
Fasting
Study
The outward disciplines (inward realities resulting in outward lifestyles):
Simplicity
Solitude
Submission
Service
The corporate disciplines:
Confession
Worship
Guidance
Celebration
For most of my life, I viewed spiritual disciplines as religious requirements, adoption and practice of, necessary to be more acceptable, righteous in God’s eyes. For example, finding myself wandering from the “straight and narrow” spiritual disciplines were a convenient cure. Not surprisingly, disciplines most often chosen were study, service, worship(church attendance), and prayer, generally in that order. Of course, the underlying problem was my assumption that somehow I could earn Gods’ favor and be spiritually transformed through the exercise of religious practices.
For the past few decades, embracing the grace and mercy of God through Christ provided a different lens through which to view religious practices and their relationship to spiritual formation. Theologically and intellectually I understand spiritual disciplines are means to spiritual health, not ends in themselves.
Despite an enlightened understanding of spiritual disciplines, I continue to fall prey to to performing spiritual disciplines to improve outward appearance of spiritual health rather than exercises to train and transform my soul. Improving outward spiritual health is beneficial, but the soul is not nourished.
If you start any kind of physical exercise program, you’ll enhance your health. But people who are most successful in making exercise a habit, who stick with a program and see real results — significant transformations in their physical aptitudes and physique — are those who have a higher purpose beyond simply “better health.” …
Likewise, doing the spiritual disciplines out of a simple desire to improve the general health of the soul will certainly garner something of the intended effect. But this effect will be much smaller, and the disciplines far harder to stick , than if they were approached with a higher purpose in mind. It’s hard enough to find time in one’s day for such habits when you’re clear on their raison d’etre. Without one, activities that require discipline will assuredly fall victim to those that don’t, like smartphone surfing and Netflix watching.https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/behavior/introduction-spiritual-disciplines/
Driving Interstate highways is analogous to performing spiritual disciplines to improve spiritual health. Efficient and beneficial in several ways, interstate travel is consistent with our hurried lives, but provides little opportunity for spiritual nourishment. After all, one can drive 1000 + miles and never encounter a stoplight while fulfilling dreams of competing in a NASCAR event. Interstate travel is an optimal secular experience, feeding deep needs of self- interest, individual autonomy, control and accomplishment.
Reflecting on my engagement with spiritual disciplines, it appears their purpose has been more about fulfilling felt needs than training and nourishing my soul. Traveling “Off Road” was an epiphany, illustrating how an innocuous decision could provide spiritual nourishment. In this context, the decision to go “Off Road” was an exercise in spiritual discipline. I have gained new perspectives on spiritual disciplines. First, is the necessity of embracing a higher purpose when practicing spiritual disciplines, this seems obvious, but reality is, I have adopted them as religious ritual rather than spiritual practices, rituals believed to find favor with God, but do not train nor nourish heart or soul giving only the appearance of righteousness.
Second, is an understanding of the role of “noetic perception” in the adoption of and practice of spiritual disciplines. An unfamiliar idea, Fr Stephen Freeman has been helpful:
“Noetic perception” is a phrase that describes the ability of the human heart to perceive that which is Divine. As such, it is our capacity for communion with God and the whole of creation. … Without such a perception, we do not see the truth of things. By the same token, without such a perception, we cannot know the truth of our own selves.
Noetic living is not a technique, per se. It simply describes the proper grounding for the spiritual life. Thus, whether reading Scripture, praying, attending a service, or simply being still, we actively and quietly offer ourselves to God. We should not expect this to automatically produce some wonderful result (it’s not a technique). But as we engage in these activities with the right mind (noetically, neptically, hesychastically) we do indeed learn to perceive God. We learn to be aware of what our nous perceives.
The nous is not a faculty of consumption. It is a faculty of perception, particularly of spiritual perception. The modern struggle to experience God often fails because it is carried out by consumers. God, the true and living God, cannot be consumed, nor can He be known by the tools of consumption. Consumerist Christianity peddles experience and ideas about God. It has little or nothing to do with God Himself.
If there were anything that a Christian could practice that would help nurture this aspect of their life, it would be refraining as much as possible from the consumerism of our culture. It teaches us habits that are very destructive to our souls. Instead, we should practice generosity and kindness, and give ourselves over to the care of God rather than the spirit of shopping. You cannot serve God and mammon.
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That is a lot to take in. Let me summarize what it means for me so far.
Classic spiritual disciplines are not to be discarded because they can be abused. Spiritual disciplines are not the problem.
“Noetic perception”, must be nurtured by surrendering to God’s work through the Holy Spirit, so my heart will perceive the divine. As the divine is perceived, spiritual disciplines will find higher purpose.
Spiritual discipline will encompass practices, habits and experiences previously undiscovered. (Traveling “off road”?)
I am challenged to see daily life with a right mind, so my practices, habits and experiences will train and nourish my soul. That is a work of God.
Still on the Journey
Not surprising, but disappointing, I received only one response (pictured on the left)to my challenge to suggest signs you would place along your life’s road to remind you of things you know but forget. If you have not read the previous post click HERE. The challenge remains open.
Intolerance
Instead of offering rigorous and compelling arguments in defense of what we understand to be true, some simply take up the other side of the rope in a tug-of-war game of intolerance, making each side no different from the other side.
….some things are clearly and simply wrong. It takes wisdom to discern what should be tolerated and what should not. It also takes wisdom to know when to speak up and when to wait. It takes wisdom to understand when institutions are set up to perpetuate wrong rather than prevent it, to recognize when corruption is a feature, not a bug.
Karen Swallow Prior
Wisdom
The moral logic of creation becomes visible to us in the life of Jesus. Jesus is wisdom incarnate, wisdom in the flesh. To live wisely, to follow the grain of the universe, is to imitate Jesus. This changes how we might think about questions of “right versus wrong.” Is it “wrong” to build a house out of marshmallows? Well, not exactly. But it is foolish. The same goes for how you build your life. As Jesus says at the end of the Sermon on the Mount:
“Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock.” (Matthew 7:24-27)
Life is full of storms. You might be in a storm right now. Look at the choices you are making. Are you building wisely? Because you will get to where you are going.
Richard Beck
The truth will set you free, …
but first it might break your heart. We need broken-hearted people overflowing with empathy if we want to heal this country.
[Jesus talks about] peacemakers [not] peacekeepers. [Peacekeepers avoid conflict while peacemakers enter into the conflict to make peace.]
Kristen Powers
Doing Good
“We need to make the kind of society where it is easier for people to be good,” said Peter Maurin (1877–1949). [1] That is our difficulty today. We are surrounded by good, well-meaning folks who are swept along in a stream of shallow options. Not only is the good made increasingly difficult to do, it is even difficult to recognize. It seems that affluence takes away the clear awareness of what is life and what is death. I don’t think the rich are any more or less sinful than the poor; they just have many more ways to call their sin virtue. There is a definite deadening of the awareness of true good and true evil.
Richard Rohr
Prayer Life
There is a tendency, I think, to conceive of our prayer life as an effort that somehow gains us something. Like so much in our lives, we imagine prayer to belong to the realm of cause and effect. “If I do this…then this will be the result.” There is no causation in the spiritual life, at least not in any manner we can imagine. God alone is the Cause, and He “causelessly” causes – we can never truly observe His causation: it remains out-of-sight. Self-emptying is an embracing and acknowledging of the complete futility of our efforts. We cannot cause anything in our spiritual life. We cannot add a “single cubit” to our span of life; we cannot make our hair white or dark. God is the cause of our existence and is alone the source of eternal life and blessing.
Fr Stephen Freeman
Lying
…the Fathers write about three things that are somewhat interchangeable: Goodness, Beauty, Truth.
This sense of the connection between the words we speak and the goodness, beauty and truth of the world find a connection in the simple injunction: “Do not lie.” We generally think of lying as being sinful because it has the potential to cause harm. And we thus describe certain lies as “harmless.” But there is a deeper problem with lying: it attempts to create what does not exist, or, rather, to uncreate what does. It becomes the enemy of Goodness, Beauty and Truth. We should take to heart the fact that our adversary is named the “father of lies” (Jn. 8:44).
Fr Stephen Freeman
We.. must not try to make our own imprint of God by projecting onto him conclusions about what he is like deduced from our own life experiences, conceptions, and expectations.
Greg Boyd
Resistance and Opposition
We must know the difference between resistance and opposition. Resistance to our proposal or plan of attack is most often a good thing. It helps to test, clarify, sharpen, and strengthen a plan. The sign of a mature leader is their ability to welcome resistance from others and receive influence. Opposition is a different matter. Opponents don’t usually want to test, clarify, sharpen, or strengthen. They want to advance their own course and often for their own ends. Resistance should be welcomed. Opposition must be confronted. Knowing the difference is the secret sauce of wise leadership.
J D Walt
View from the lanai
Same sunrise. Perspective is shaped from point of view.
Still on the Journey
We are on our way to Florida. This trip is different in a couple of ways. We have traveled to Florida in the winter for almost two decades. In previous years our stays ranged from two weeks in the early years to 10 weeks last year. This year we will be there for three full months. We also altered our travel plans. Until last year, we drove 12 hours the first day and had a short second day, last year because of age and health concerns we spent two nights on the road, giving us three days of 5-6 hour driving. We found that to be a pleasant experience and decided to make that our usual plan.
Previously our route was mostly Interstate 75, notorious for heavy traffic, accidents and most notably, dreaded Atlanta. With the pressure off to make the trip in two days and encouragement from friends, we decided to go “off road” on this trip. “Off road” meaning avoiding Interstate 75. Using a route provided by our friend roger, we traversed Kentucky, Tennessee and Georgia, with some brief exceptions, on non-interstate highways.
I found driving to be much less stressful, even enjoyable. Traffic volume was very light, except for cities, which are mostly small. The picture above is from south Georgia and was typical of a lot of rural highways. As we drove along, I began to realize how much of a metaphor traveling interstate highways is for my life. It is my intention to write about that in future posts. There was opportunity to observe and think. One particular observation and thought will conclude in this post.
I noticed a ubiquitous sign along the way. Ahead of every bridge there was a “bridge ices before road” sign. That was not unusual but as they continued to appear it became a bit irritating. What the heck? Do they think we are stupid? OK, so there are people who are new drivers, or, they have never had cold enough wether for icy roads. Then I remembered occasions when I failed to remember that bridges freeze before the roads, so the signs have a legitimate purpose. Someone in DOT understands human nature. We humans have a memory problem. It is not a bug in the system but a feature. For reasons I do not understand it is necessary to be constantly reminded of things we already know but forget, i.e. bridges ice before roads. In thinking about bridges icing, it occurs to me that there are many other, much more important things we need to be reminded of on a consistent basis.
I am creating signs to place on the roadside of my daily travels. I encourage you think about things that you know but have forgotten in the rush of life and create your own sign.
This is my first sign I’m placing on the roadside of my journey. Often forgotten it is one I need to see continually.
What is a sign you need to place on the road of your daily travels ? Feel free to share in the comments.
Still on the journey
Progress ?
On October 22, 2020, the United States was averaging, per The New York Times, about 62,000 new COVID-19 cases, 45,700 hospitalizations, and 800 new COVID-19 deaths per day in what was the early stages of the country’s third wave that would go on to kill hundreds of thousands of people. One year later, all three of those figures are worse: 76,500, 57,700, and 1,500 as of Wednesday, respectively.
What’s wrong with America? bottled water!
Susan McWilliams’ observation that 2006 marked a terrible turn in American civic life. That was the year when Americans started drinking bottled water more than beer. “Why is this important?” she asked. “It’s important because beer is a socially oriented beverage, and bottled water is a privately oriented one.” Beer commercials have happy fun people doing stuff together. Bottled water commercials, meanwhile, “tend to include lone individuals climbing things and running around by themselves, usually on a beach at sunrise—even though they are not being chased.”
Jonah Goldberg
Surrender
In A Return to Love, Marianne Williamson says, “Until your knees finally hit the floor, you’re just playing at life, and on some level you’re scared because you know you’re just playing. The moment of surrender is not when life is over. It’s when it begins.” [1] It is entirely cliché, but this was exactly my experience. The moment I finally let my knees hit the floor was when I finally stopped playing at life, and every bit of good that’s come to me since then stems from this reversal of opinion on surrender.
Surrender is the strongest, most subversive thing you can do in this world. It takes strength to admit you are weak, bravery to show you are vulnerable, courage to ask for help. It’s also not a one-time gig; you don’t just do it once and move on. It’s a way of existing, a balancing act. For me, it looks like this: I pick up the baton and I run as far as I can, and I hand it over when I’m out of breath. Or actually maybe it’s like: I’m running with the baton, but the Universe is holding on to the other half of it, and we have an agreement that I’ll figure out the parts I can and hand over the parts I can’t.
Holly Whitaker via Richard Rohr
How to see
At its best, Western Christianity is dynamic and outflowing. But the downside is that this entrepreneurial instinct may have caused it to be subsumed by culture instead of transforming culture at any deep level. In our arrogance and ignorance, we also totally trampled on the cultures we entered. We became a formal and efficient religion that felt that its job was to tell people what to see instead ofhow to see.
Richard Rohr
I can do nothing
I can recall years ago that in my very first confession as an Orthodox Christian, the priest told me to pray: “Apart from You, I can do nothing.” I did, but I misunderstood it for many years. My twist was quite subtle. When I prayed this I meant, “I can’t do anything without your help.” This is somehow not the same as “I can do nothing.” The first kept directing my attention to the “anything” I could do if God helped me. However, my attention needed to be on the “nothing.” It is our emptiness and failure that bring us face-to-face with our shame, and in that moment, face-to-face with the God who alone can truly cover our shame and comfort us.
Fr Stephen Freeman
Elderly
Earlier today, a friend posted on Facebook about an experience he’d just had on the Upper West Side of Manhattan: “I heard a guy who looked to be in his 20s say that it’s not a big deal cause the elderly are gonna die anyway. Then he and his friend laughed … Maybe I’m lucky that I had awesome grandparents and maybe this guy didn’t but what is wrong with people???”
What does it say about our society that people think of the elderly so dismissively—and moreover, that they feel no shame about expressing such thoughts publicly? I find myself wondering whether this colossal moral failure is exacerbated by the most troubled parts of our cultural and economic life. When people are measured and valued by their economic productivity, it is easy to treat people whose most economically productive days have passed as, well, worthless.
From a religious perspective, if there is one thing we ought to teach our children, it is that our worth as human beings does not depend on or derive from what we do or accomplish or produce; we are, each of us, infinitely valuable just because we are created in the image of God. We mattered before we were old enough to be economically productive, and we will go on mattering even after we cease to be economically productive.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/respect-old/607864/
Friendship precedes fellowship
…friendship precedes fellowship. Yes, they want fellowship but they have big doubts sitting in a nice chair on Sunday in silence (or some singing or saying words from the liturgy) can legitimately be called fellowship. And if it doesn’t start with friendship it can never be fellowship.
Scot McKnight
Kate Durie 1950-2021
Kate’s Christian faith was never based on already found answers. Her mind was too sharp, her mood more interrogative than declarative. She had grown beyond the various iterations of Christian faith too ready to settle for certainty, and too impatient of mystery, too worried about not knowing. In the theological sense Kate loved mystery, and refused steadfastly to reduce God to manageable proportions or propositions. She trusted the humanity of Jesus, his tears and his anger, his compassion and patience, the sheer gratuitous fun of turning water into the best ever wine. She could entrust herself to the Lord of all faith, whose strong hands were skilled at the plane and the lathe – Christ, the master carpenter, using those tools that shape and form us towards Christlikeness.
Jim Gordon
The problem with our lives is that we cannot solve them. We can only live them.
Kate Bowler
View from the front porch
Fall is waning and temperatures are falling. We are preparing to flee to Florida for three months. Next time I write it will be a view from the lanai. For whatever reason, blogging has been a challenge since my stay in the hospital. My recovery is going well but writing is lagging behind. It is not clear why that is. I suspect it is related to the trauma I experienced and will improve with time.
Happy Thanksgiving.