The purest prayer isn't complicated

A vacation posting: re-posting from early last summer

Jesus said, “When you pray, go into your closet, shut the door, and pray to God in secret.”  Matthew 6.6

“But I can’t find such a place to pray,” a young mother tells me. “My life’s hectic. The only secret place in my house is the bathroom, and my four year old makes sure not even that’s guaranteed.”

You may not find such a place, but that doesn’t mean you can’t enter the closet of your heart.

Let go your idealizations of prayer, and just breathe.

“The breath that does not repeat the name of God is wasted breath,” wrote Kabir.

The purest forms of prayer aren’t complicated. That’s their genius.

A time-tested way to draw closer to God

Can living life in community help us draw closer to God? “Come and see,” says Karen Sloan, Presbyterian pastor and author of “Flirting with Monasticism,” a book in which she takes readers through her personal journey with ancient Christian traditions.

Immerse yourself in Creation and come up in the presence of God

While I'm not sure why anyone would want to walk the John Muir Trail in seven days, this nevertheless is a marvelous witness to what it means to immerse oneself in the Creation through silence and solitude (even if racing alone at over 30 miles per day in rugged terrain).

WINTER IS COMING - Seven Days on the John Muir Trail from Ryan Commons on Vimeo.

Body prayer

When depression seizes you

Here's a link to an audio of the sermon I preached on Sunday, June 20, 2010. Some background . . .

One out of every 10 Americans will experience clinical depression during their lifetime.  Dark emotion will become chronic and debilitating, affecting their ability to function, interact with others, and derive pleasure from life.   One out of every four women will be clinically depressed at some point in her life. Because of our increasingly complex and interrelated world, clinical depression has become a modern epidemic.

Says Parker Palmer: "People walk around saying, 'I don't understand why so-and-so committed suicide.' Well, I understand perfectly why people take their lives. They need the rest. Depression is absolutely exhausting. It's why, day by day for months at a time, I wanted to take my life. What I don't understand is why some people come through on the other side and reclaim life with new vividness and with new intensity. That is the real mystery to me."

Depression is real, common, and treatable. Contrary to the way it makes us fee, it doesn't disqualify us.

In this audio sermon, I explore the nature and experience of depression through the life of one of Israel's greatest prophets, Elijah.  With Elijah, we listen for the negative messages that play in our heads tumbling us into despair, we watch for the presence of those angels who nudge us and tell us to do such things as "get up and eat," and we walk the long journey into the dark cave that can become a womb of rebirth into human community.