Contemplatives and ascetics of every age and every religion have always sought God in the silence and solitude of deserts, forests and mountains. Jesus himself lived for forty days in complete solitude, spending long hours in intimate converse with the Father in the silence of the night.
Follow Your Bliss and Your Doubts: An Open Letter to 2012 Graduates …
An excerpt from a post by Rev. Brian Kirk on Patheos on May 16, 2012. Read full post here …
As you walk the unexplored path ahead, hold tight to your bliss, be open to taking some unplanned detours, and make some room for doubt and uncertainty …
1. Make Room for What Matters
Perhaps mythologist Joseph Campbell said it best of all when he urged us to follow our bliss: “If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.”
This advice is a direct refutation of the lie of Facebook, which tells us to “Follow Everyone Else.” Facebook encourages us to curate our complicated lives, carefully highlighting only the choicest bits and pieces: “Look at my wonderful vacation photos! Look at the award I got! Look who published my article! Look at my beautiful children/wife/new car!” It’s no wonder many of us get depressed after spending an hour on Facebook mulling over the amazing lives others seem to be enjoying. “If I could just be like them, have what they have, buy what they buy,” we think, “then I’ll be happy.”
In contrast, following your bliss is a call to look inward to that which intrinsically brings you joy, peace, contentment, and purpose. Bliss is not dependent on what we have, how many honors we receive, getting top grades, or making it into an Ivy League school. As a Christian, I believe that bliss comes from a deep understanding that we are completely and utterly loved by God just as we are, and that all that we truly need we already possess: the gifts of creation, the gift of life, and the gift of love.
2. Make Room for the Holy Spirit
John Lennon knew what he was talking about when he wrote, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” It might be hard to hear these words at a time in your life when you may already have your whole future mapped out. You’ve picked the right college and right major, which will lead you to the dream job and the great salary to help pay for the perfect house for the perfect family. Or maybe you’ve selected the best branch of the military to launch a perfect career. Or perhaps you’re jumping right into the world of work to start you off on a carefully planned trajectory to land you just where you want to be ten years from now.
Don’t get me wrong—it’s great to dream and plan. But it doesn’t hurt to leave a little room for the unpredictable movement of the Holy Spirit, a little room for the unexpected.
I can count on one hand the number of my friends who left college with a degree and actually ended up in the career they first intended. Most found themselves drifting into jobs they never dreamed they would be doing but which called to them. Some have changed careers one, two, even three times in search of that calling. Some found their path in life changed because of love, family, tragedy, or just plain unexpected opportunities they couldn’t foresee but couldn’t ignore. So, it’s good to dream and plan but, like a river that sometimes overflows its carefully engineered banks, life has a habit of taking us places we might never expect. Sometimes it’s good to just go with that flow and see where it takes you.
3. Make Room for Doubt
Writer Madeleine L’Engle once wrote, “It’s a good thing to have all the props out from under us occasionally. It gives us some sense of what is rock under our feet and what is sand.” Life after high school can be a grand adventure in testing all that you have learned until now about life and faith. You can either choose to hold steadfastly to what you already think and believe no matter who or what you encounter, or you can trust what you believe enough to let it loose in the light of day and see how it lines up with the rest of the world.
Talk to people of other faiths. Listen to people who see Christianity from a different perspective than your own. Challenge your long-held assumptions. Read the Bible again like it’s the first time and see what it might be saying to you as a young adult that it wasn’t ready to say to you as a child and then decide if any of it makes sense. To be certain, allowing yourself to question your faith can be frightening, but it can also be like providing water to a seedling that is ready to burst into a vine. I have always told the youth I’ve worked with, “Don’t take my word for any of this faith stuff. Be willing to challenge everything we teach you in youth group, in Sunday school, in church. God can handle our doubts and our questioning. God is small enough to hang close by while we try to figure out what we really believe and God is definitely big enough to resist any efforts on our part to think we might finally have all the answers.”
So, best of luck to you graduates as you head down this new stretch of life’s journey. As you walk that unexplored path, be sure to hold tight to your bliss, be open to taking some unplanned detours, and make some room for doubt and uncertainty. These are the sorts of provisions that can make for a life really worth living.
— Rev. Brian Kirk, pastor in St. Louis, Missouri. He also teaches as adjunct faculty at Eden Theological Seminary, and co-writes the blog rethinkingyouthministry.com.
See also:
- 12 Things I Wish I Knew at 25 …
- Everything I Know About Prayer I Re-Learned In Spin Class …
- Tell Me, What Is It You Plan To Do With Your One Wild And Precious Life …
- Things I Regret …
- The Will of God Will Never Take You, Where the Grace of God Cannot Keep You …
- Flood the Path with Light …
- How Many Other Things Are We Missing …
Morning Poems …
A new moon teaches gradualness
and deliberation, and how one gives birth
to oneself slowly. Patience with small details
makes perfect a large work, like the universe.
What nine months of attention does for an embryo
forty early mornings alone will do
for your gradually growing wholeness.
— Rumi
Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange
sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again
and fasten themselves to the high branches —
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands
of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails
for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it
the thorn
that is heavier than lead —
if it’s all you can do
to keep on trudging —
there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted —
each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,
whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.
— Mary Oliver (Morning Poem)
See also:
The Joy Of Quiet …
An excerpt of an op-ed written by essayist and novelist Pico Iyer from the January 1, 2012 issue of the New York Times:
The urgency of slowing down — to find the time and space to think — is nothing new, of course, and wiser souls have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context. “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
When telegraphs and trains brought in the idea that convenience was more important than content — and speedier means could make up for unimproved ends — Henry David Thoreau reminded us that “the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages.” Even half a century ago, Marshall McLuhan, who came closer than most to seeing what was coming, warned, “When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.” Thomas Merton struck a chord with millions, by not just noting that “Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest,” but by also acting on it, and stepping out of the rat race and into a Cistercian cloister.
Yet few of those voices can be heard these days, precisely because “breaking news” is coming through (perpetually) on CNN and Debbie is just posting images of her summer vacation and the phone is ringing. We barely have enough time to see how little time we have (most Web pages, researchers find, are visited for 10 seconds or less). And the more that floods in on us (the Kardashians, Obamacare, “Dancing with the Stars”), the less of ourselves we have to give to every snippet. All we notice is that the distinctions that used to guide and steady us — between Sunday and Monday, public and private, here and there — are gone.
We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say. Partly because we’re so busy communicating. And — as he might also have said — we’re rushing to meet so many deadlines that we hardly register that what we need most are lifelines …
… In my own case, I turn to eccentric and often extreme measures to try to keep my sanity and ensure that I have time to do nothing at all (which is the only time when I can see what I should be doing the rest of the time) …
… None of this is a matter of principle or asceticism; it’s just pure selfishness. Nothing makes me feel better — calmer, clearer and happier — than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It’s actually something deeper than mere happiness: it’s joy, which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as “that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.” …
… For more than 20 years, therefore, I’ve been going several times a year — often for no longer than three days — to a Benedictine hermitage, 40 minutes down the road, as it happens, from the Post Ranch Inn. I don’t attend services when I’m there, and I’ve never meditated, there or anywhere; I just take walks and read and lose myself in the stillness, recalling that it’s only by stepping briefly away from my wife and bosses and friends that I’ll have anything useful to bring to them …
Read full article here.
— Pico Iyer from an op-ed that appeared in print on January 1, 2012, on page SR1 of the New York edition of the New York Times with the headline: The Joy of Quiet.
Like this:
Guide Our Dreams – An Evening Prayer …
Dear God,
We give thanks for the darkness of the night where lies the world of dreams.
Guide us closer to our dreams so that we may be nourished by them.
Give us good dreams and memory of them so that we may carry
their poetry and mystery into our daily lives.
Grant us deep and restful sleep that we may wake
refreshed with strength enough to renew a world grown tired.
We give thanks for the inspiration of stars,
the dignity of the moon
and the lullabies of crickets and frogs.
Let us restore the night and reclaim it as a sanctuary of peace,
where silence shall be music to our hearts
and darkness shall throw light upon our souls.
Good Night. Sweet Dreams.
Amen.
— Michael Leunig from “A Common Prayer Book”, Collins Dove 1990
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Everything I Know About Prayer I Re-Learned In Spin Class …
Michael Rossmann, SJ, took up spinning to keep in shape during the winter. He lists 11 lessons he relearned while he rode his stationary bike.
1. A class – or community – is invaluable. Sure, I can exercise on my own, just as I can pray by myself. That being said, it’s knowing that I will see my spin “community” that gets me out of bed and over to the gym, and I work much harder to get through the shared pain I feel in a spin class than I would if I were to sit on a stationary bike alone in a room. Not only are the sacraments similarly communal, but being in a worshiping community pushes me to spend more time in prayer and go deeper in my own faith after seeing the example of others. The daily Mass crowd, especially at an urban parish over the noon hour, can be a ragtag group: professionals on their lunch break, street people, retired couples, and religious sisters (who despite not wearing a habit can be spotted as nuns a mile away). A spin class can be equally eclectic. I may not know the name of the person in the neighboring pew or the young woman on the bike next to me, and yet I love the community that forms and the sense that we’re in this physical and/or spiritual exercise together.
2. A lot of shame is a bad thing; a little bit of shame can be a good thing. We know that a deep sense of shame can prevent us from exercising in public just as it can keep us from turning to the God who loves us and wants us close. A little bit of potential shame, however, can be productive. If I don’t show up at spin class, I know that Molly will tell me, “So, we missed you this morning.” And that gets me out the door. If I am not there for Mass in the community, my Jesuit brothers will notice. And, sometimes, that gets me out the door. It’s not that I’m doing these things simply because of others’ expectations, but that potential “so, we missed you” gives me a little extra motivation to show up at the places that I know are good for me.
3. It’s important to push through to the very end. Sometimes there are so many parallels between the Spiritual Exercises and what my spin instructors are yelling out that I wonder if they’ve been reading them before class. Ignatius instructs those going through the Exercises to pray for an hour at a time and to make sure we spend the full hour in prayer. He even goes out of his way to note that “the enemy of our human nature” will tempt us to shorten the time we had set aside for prayer. It’s the same in spin. It is tempting to relax during the bit of silence between the end of one song and the start of another, but instructors push us to keep up the intensity of the workout and in so doing they keep us moving through the lulls to the very end.
4. If it’s not on my schedule – and typically my morning schedule – then it doesn’t happen. My days are often gobbled up by various commitments, and as a quintessential morning person, my mind turns into a pumpkin after 10:00 PM. But I notice that if prayer and exercise are “non-negotiables,” if they’re part of my routine, then they almost always get done. As busy as I am, I know Kelly will kick my butt into shape on Monday morning and Rachel will spin me around on Friday if that cycling class is already in my schedule. One other note, I recently directed a “busy student retreat” at which students were committed to a daily one-on-one meeting with me because it was part of their schedule for the retreat. But making time for prayer, something they were expected to do, wasn’t built into the retreat schedule. I noticed that because prayer wasn’t built into their schedule like the daily conferences that it was extremely difficult for many of them to make the time to do the prayer they obviously wanted to do.
5. Women dominate. Remember my experience Irish dancing? Spin – and all too often, service and prayer experiences – are the same. Girls have dominated every retreat and service project I have been a part of, while guys have been busy… playing Halo? With spin class, it’s not even close; often I’m the only dude in a room of women with freakishly good endurance.
6. The imagination is an underutilized but greatly valuable tool. ”Jena, are you sure you aren’t from Loyola, Spain?” ”No, you’re from Skokie? Well I’m not convinced.” Just like Ignatius has taught many of us how “Ignatian contemplation” (imaginative prayer, in which we place ourselves in a Gospel scene) can greatly deepen one’s prayer life, my spin instructor Jena has taught me how to visualize while spinning. I’ve even started noticing how visualizing that I’m on a hill trying to catch another rider can push me to go faster – or at least help me temporarily forget about the fire burning through my quadriceps.
7. Transitions are the most difficult. The most painful part about being a Jesuit for me is investing in relationships and digging my roots into a place only to have those roots ripped out when I’m sent off on another new mission in a different location. Likewise for transitions in spin class. In spin transition the spin instructor asks us to cycle in and out of different seated and standing positions. Let me tell you, these are a bear, especially “transitions with sprints.” I always find these analogous to moving to a new place with little time to prepare or settle in, and physically they are awfully like a fiery place filled with wailing and gnashing of teeth.
8. Things are done better with coffee. Not only is coffee wonderful in itself, but it helps me connect with God because it makes me far more alert in prayer. While some athletes refuse to drink it before a competition, it is actually a legal performance-enhancing drug and makes me fly up those imaginative hills in spin class.
9. We are supported by a communion of saints. I tend to use the word “saint” pretty loosely. In addition to those recognized by the Church, people like Dorothy Day and Pedro Arrupe are saintly figures who can inspire, guide, and intercede for us. Perhaps the communion of pop singers that blast from the speakers during class could also analogously serve in a saintly role for spinners – even if some of their lyrics or personal lives may not always be so saintly.
10. Going deeper requires that we allow ourselves to be vulnerable. I am a sweaty mess when exercising. (No, I’m serious – my old yoga instructor would joke with other Jesuits that she needed to put a moat of towels around my mat in order to protect the rest of the group from my sweat). Sometimes I find it particularly discouraging to look around the roomful of spinners and not see a drop of perspiration from anyone else. “I look ridiculous,” I think to myself. Still, looking ridiculous is at least a sign that I’m getting a great workout. Being honest with oneself and God and not running away – even from the sweaty messes of our lives – is likewise essential in the spiritual life. This is especially true because I can only pray as I am, not as I want to be or what others expect me to be.
11. The first step is the most difficult. Some mornings, it can take a lot of willpower to get out of my bed and make the trek across campus to the gym, just as it can be difficult to put everything aside and “waste time” with God when I’m tired, my bed is warm, and I have a million other things to do. But both spin and prayer nourish me; they challenge me in ways I need to be challenged. They can also be deeply enjoyable. It may take a lot of effort to get to the bike and give that first push to the pedal, but, like prayer, once I’m there it flows.
Read full post here.
— Michael Rossmann, SJ
Like this:
How Surely Gravity’s Law …
How surely gravity’s law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.
Each thing —
each stone, blossom, child —
is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we each belong to
for some empty freedom.
If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.
Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.
So like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God’s heart;
they have never left him.
This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.
— Rainer Maria Rilke from Rilke’s Book of Hours as translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy.
Like this:
There Is A Homelessness …
There is a homelessness, never to be clearly defined.
It is more than having no place of one’s own,
no bed or chair.
It is more than walking in a waste of wind,
or gleaning the crumbs where someone else has dined,
or taking a coin for food or clothes to wear.
The loan of things and the denial of things are possible to bear.
It is more, even than homelessness of heart,
of being always a stranger at love’s side,
of creeping up to a door only to start
at a shrill voice and to plunge back to the wide
dark of one’s own obscurity and hide.
it is the homelessness of the soul in the body sown;
it is the loneliness of mystery:
of seeing oneself a leaf, inexplicable and unknown,
cast from an unimaginable tree;
of knowing one’s life to be a brief wind blown
down a fissure of time in the rock of eternity.
The artist weeps to wrench this grief from stone;
he pushes his hands through the tangled vines of music,
but he cannot set it free.
It is the pain of the mystic suddenly thrown
back from the noon of God to the night of his own humanity.
It is his grief; it is the grief of all those praying
in finite words to an Infinity
Whom, if they saw, they could not comprehend;
Whom they cannot see.
— Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit, OCD (Jessica Powers) Carmel of the Mother of God, Pewaukee, WI.
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Prayer For Earth Day (April 22) …
God looked at everything He had made, and He found it very good.
— Genesis 1:31
We do not exist outside of nature
or above nature
or independent of nature —
we are simply its most vulnerable part.
— Joan Chittister
Presence of God
We pause and remember that the God Who created us and Who sustains us is never far from us. In God we live and move and have our being.
Prayer
O God, Holy Spirit, Whose breath gives life to the world
and Whose voice is heard in the soft breeze,
we need Your strength and wisdom.
Come to us and among us;
Come as the wind and cleanse us.
We join with Your Creation and with each other.
Psalm 65
It is good to give thanks,
for the boundless mercy
which renews us and makes us whole.
Happy are those who know this
and open themselves to the Light.
and sing—
You make the sunrise and the sunset shout for joy.
You are the earthʼs fertility.
Your law governs her cycles of snow, run-off, flood, and rain.
You crown the year with abundance
The wild lands are watered with dew.
The hills deck themselves with green.
The meadows adorn themselves with flocks,
The valleys gown themselves with grain.
They dance together.
They join in song.
Glory to You, Creator and Sustainer.
Glory to You for the awesome gift of life.
A Prayer
Earth teach me freedom
as the eagle which soars in the sky.
Earth teach me regeneration
as the seed which rises in the spring.
Earth teach me to forget myself
as melted snow forgets its life.
Earth teach me to remember kindness
as dry fields weep with rain.
— Ute Prayer
Like this:
Blessing Prayer (For Children) …
We pray for children who sneak popsicles before supper, who erase holes in math workbooks, who can never find their shoes.
And we pray for those who stare at photographers from behind barbed wire, who can’t bound down the street in a new pair of sneakers, who never “counted potatoes,” who are born in places we wouldn’t be caught dead, who never go to the circus, who live in an X-rated world.
We pray for children who bring us sticky kisses and fistfuls of dandelions, who hug us in a hurry and forget their lunch money.
And we pray for those who never get dessert, who have no safe blanket to drag behind them, who watch their parents watch them die, who can’t find any bread to steal, who don’t have any rooms to clean up, whose pictures aren’t on anybody’s dresser, whose monsters are real.
We pray for children who spend all their allowance before Tuesday, who throw tantrums in the grocery store and pick at their food, who like ghost stories, who shove dirty clothes under the bed, and never rinse out the tub, who get visits from the tooth fairy, who don’t like to be kissed in front of the carpool, who squirm in church or temple and scream in the phone, whose tears we sometimes laugh at and whose smiles can make us cry.
And we pray for those whose nightmares come in the daytime, who will eat anything, who have never seen a dentist, who aren’t spoiled by anybody, who go to bed hungry and cry themselves to sleep who live and move, but have no being.
We pray for children who want to be carried and for those who must, for those we never give up on and for those who don’t get a second chance.
For those we smother . . . and for those who will grab the hand of anybody kind enough to offer it.
— Ina J. Hughs, an excerpt from “A Grateful Heart: Daily Blessings for the Evening Meal from Buddha to the Beatles” by M. J. Ryan – a collection of 365 blessings which help us to see the importance of gratitude in our lives.
