Prayer, as I offering it here, is living with a nearly continuous sense of the Sacred no matter what you’re doing or where you are. Prayer is life. But so much of the time, what passes for prayer is actually an abstraction of life, and it’s not the kind of prayer God wants for you. The kind of prayer that’s religious and therefore somewhat separate from ordinary life. That kind of prayer is what people do before a meal, but not while they’re eating. It’s what they do when they’re doing something particularly pious, but not while they’re doing the dishes or writing an email, shuttling kids to school or sitting in a doctor's office, talking with a friend or making love. Too bad. Such a view of prayer keeps them from so much of God. True prayer is, as I’ve said before, as natural as breathing, as earthy as talking a walk.
The risk of the Incarnation
There's an awful lot of taming of this mystery we call the Incarnation. Here Parker Palmer explores the risk of the Incarnation. An apt way of putting things in a time when we're becoming more aware of the tremendous risk it is to be human.
A feminine window on the Incarnation of God
Here's a needed counter-testimony to the often thin preachments of male preachers who can never put the Incarnation in these terms. This is exceptionally good material for re-encountering Christmas, especially if you're a woman all to familiar with the ways we men have spun this Mystery. . . . And yet my body had taken over and all we could do, all I could do, was surrender to that moment fully. Every muscle in my body was focused, my entire world had narrowed to that very moment. And then there he was, born while I was leaning against our old truck, standing up, into my own hands, nearly 9 pounds of shrieking boy-child humanity, welcomed by my uncontrollable laughter and his father’s uncontrollable relief-tears. A few people applauded.
There wasn’t anything very dignified about giving birth.
And yet it was the moment when I felt the line between the sacred and the secular of my life shatter once and for all. The sacred and holy moments of life are somehow the most raw, the most human moments, aren’t they?
But we keep it quiet, the mess of the Incarnation, because it’s just not church-y enough and men don’t quite understand and it’s personal, private, there aren’t words for this and it’s a bit too much. It’s too much pain, too much waiting, too much humanity, too much God, too much work, too much joy, too much love and far too messy. With far too little control. And sometimes it does not go the way we thought it was supposed to go and then we are also left with questions, with deep sadness, with longing . . .
For more click here.
Living with a higher degree of pleasure
Dear brave soul; What I've been talking about might sound contradictory—“How can I be present to this moment when I’m thinking about the future?” But give it some time and practice. You’ll learn that it’s possible to plan a birthday party for a loved one or bury your head in a history book and do it all with a high degree of awareness or presence.
You’ll also learn that doing so can bring you a higher degree of pleasure than you’ve known before. What’s more, you’ll learn to let go of planning the party when you’re driving your car or sitting in a meeting at work or having dinner with someone you love.
You’ll become skillful, better able to concentrate your energy on the person or task right in front of you. You’ll learn how to intentionally forget other tasks that nag at you, and you’ll be more able to resist the temptation to multitask (which only scatters your energies).
Let’s be honest, multitasking is a spiritual treadmill; you waste a lot of energy trying to get where you want to go.
Be here, now . . . even when making plans for the future.
May you walk in the Way today.
Why you ought to work with your hands
We must learn again to work with our hands. There is a great loss in the modern world in its loss of manual labor. Touching things, sweating, stopping, starting. Manual work gives a person a sense of dignity and worth. How might work, hard work with your hands, provide the necessary antidote to desk work that involves you in the curse of Modernity, the crush of unending responsibility to an electronic universe that, by nature, knows no rest---a cyber world that plays by rules with consequences we don't yet understand?
Not all work can be manual, of course, but how might a rhythm of manual work and prayer teach a way of life that brings intellectual and electronic work into a goodness it might not know apart from it?