Gordon

Gordon Cosby may be the most influential pastor you've never heard of.  He's a model and mentor of the kind of life I write about in these posts.  And today, we need strong models, witnesses to the life of the Spirit.  He's one who attracted thousands upon thousands to the Jesus of the Gospels, many who were either burned out or turned out by the Jesus of suburbia bandied about buy a large segment of American Christianity.  His vision of Jesus and his way of life is particularly important in these days of increased suspicion, hostility, and violence. Gordon died on March 20, 2013 in Washington DC.  The co-founder of the Church of the Savior co-founder and life-long servant leader he passed into the full presence of God at Christ House, a hospice he helped to found for the homeless.

From the Washington Post:

Gordon was absolutely Christian. He was focused on Jesus and sought to live deeply in Christ. I once asked him if his intense focus on Christ did not get in the way of interfaith conversation and respect. He told me that it was his experience that those who went most deeply into their own religion’s truths seemed to understand each other and communicate with each other best. He was profoundly and distinctively Christian without an ounce of parochialism.

Do

How many of us have dreamed of doing something new, adding something to our lives, cutting something out? And how many of us have done what we've dreamed of doing? Why not?

In this TED Talk, Matt Cutts, an engineer at Google, invites you to do something for 30 days . . . and see what happens. In less than six minutes, he'll embolden you to step out and achieve something new in your life.

Write a novel.

Lose weight.

Break the Facebook stranglehold on your time.

Go deeper in prayer.

Stop dreaming and DO.

Heart

Jesus grew up in Nazareth, a peasant of Galilee. Galilee was hill country and life there was difficult. A drought or bad harvest could endanger whole villages. Infant mortality was about thirty percent, and only sixty percent of children lived beyond teenage years. The peasants' diet was poor: bread, olives, wine; lentils, a few greens, figs, an occasionally some cheese or yoghurt. Religious practices were simple. In the rural villages there were no scribes or priests. Families practiced the faith with great devotion, for their vulnerability meant they had little hope except in God.

Twice a day, upon rising and at the time of sleep, peasant families recited a simple prayer, the Shema Israel: "Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might" (This portion from the Torah is what Jesus refers to in Mark 12.29-30).

There was little time for extended prayers, and of course, no possibility of reading sacred texts, since no one could read. The prayers were simple, intense, and frequently recited. It reminded these peasants of the one thing that mattered most to them: to love God with every fiber of their being.

Intention: Today, I will gather my life and energy around the simple act of loving God. My head and hands may be busy with ideas and plans and work, but my heart can rest in God through a simple prayer I can return to over an over again.

Dreams

We all dream, but how many of us take real notice of them? When we take note of them at all, they generally bewilder us, trouble us, and amuse us. But rarely do they instruct us. Most of us who remember a dream here and there dismiss them as irrelevant. Some of us do remember them, but when we do, we tend to misinterpret them. They rarely mean what seems obvious to us.

Dreams are rich material for self understanding, guides for the spiritual journey.  But they are a very different mode of communication than we're used. to.

Every religious tradition honors them, but few of us know what to do with them. In the Bible, dreams are taken very seriously. That's been true throughout history. But today, the modern mind discounts them as phantoms of the imagination--unreliable, and often impenetrable by conventional reason.

Learning from your dreams is an art. They require attention, objectivity, humility, and patience. They are as important as the sense-data that comes to us when we're conscious, but they come from a very different place within the mind. You know, don't you, how a frightening or bizarre dream can lead you into a frump as surely as a critical word for your boss can, or a bad result on a test?

Frankly, dreams often need another to interpret them. And that's a problem for us, for who among us is in a relationship with someone who doesn't have an agenda for us, who will listen without bias, who will remain curious, open, and playful with our dreams, holding the interpretation loosely, as we wait together for something to click?

Because we don't have such persons, we tend to miss out on all God would teach us through our dreams.

You can change that. The first step is to become aware of your dreaming--to welcome them, as bizarre as they might be. Start to write down as much of them as you can, without concern for making sense of them. Observe them over time. Notice how they make you feel. Look for themes and connections--between dreams, and to what's happening in your life. And while you're doing that, wait for someone to come who will sit with you as you together listen for the dream's wisdom.

That someone will come as surely as your dreams will--if you attend to them patiently.

Intention: Today, I'll open myself to my dreams as gifts from the Spirit to my spirit. I'll simply become curious, and take note of them in a more disciplined way than I have in the past.  That's a good enough beginning.

Morning

The way you greet the day matters. Your first lucid moments set the course for what follows. Set that course with intention, through a simple prayer, and you’ll be okay. The prayer needn’t be long, but it ought to be clear. In fact, the simpler, briefer, and more focused it is, the better. For the better part of your life, you’ve let the day start you. Your alarm awakens you, and you stumble out of bed. You turn on the coffee or the shower. A steady stream of thoughts flows through your head. You get the newspaper, put on music or the TV. Maybe you check your email or head off to the gym. The mental stream swells, and as it does, your body and spirit are pulled along with it. Even first thing in the morning, tension and stress tug at your neck and shoulders. The thought-stream nags at you from the start, demanding more from your body than your body’s ready to give. So you pump a little more caffeine into your veins and jot another note on your to-do list. These thoughts—largely unexamined—have yanked you into a river whose direction you control far less than you realize.

Isaiah says, "Morning by morning GOD wakens--wakens my ear to listen as those who are taught" (50.4b).

What might it mean for you to arouse your spirit first thing--to embrace the day and join up with God?

Intention: Tomorrow, I'll embrace the moment of my rising and waken my ear to GOD. Doing so has the power to change everything.