One elder said to another: "Why do the Wise have no more words to give?" The elder replied: "Because the disciples no longer listen."
Awaken your heart
When cultivating the spiritual life, don't focus first on "how?" But "how" is generally the first question people ask me. It's not ultimate. How inevitably follows why or what. Get why or what right and you'll get to how. So, focus instead on the disposition of your heart---that is, why you seek God, and what the experience is like.
Here's Theresa of Lisieux:
"Sanctity does not consist in this or that practice; it consists in a disposition of the heart that makes us humble and little in God's arms, teaches us our weakness, and inspires us with an almost presumptuous trust in his fatherly goodness."
It's that that'll carry your where you need to go. What's more, you can rest yourself humbly and little in God's arms whether your arguing a case before a jury, teaching kindergarteners, balancing your checkbook, or walking in a meadow.
Awaken your heart and all of life is prayer; daily life becomes sacred.
The purest prayer isn't complicated
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.
Living resurrection
The Resurrection is likely a belief you affirm (or maybe don't), a doctrine that's part of the religious faith you affirm. But the Resurrection is not a mere idea. It is to be lived. Not just by Jesus or by others, but by you . . . in the ordinariness of your daily life.
A woman with young children tells me that resurrection is something she practices each day--when doing dishes, parenting a child with a challenging emotional make up, talking with her husband about her day. It's no longer an idea, something she confesses in the creeds. It's a reality that feeds her way of life. She says she's learning that she can't live life anywhere other than where she is, what's in front of her, who she is right now. Resurrection frees her to open to Life here and now.
Religiously we say that the Resurrection is God's triumph over sin, death, and evil. It is, in a word, freedom.
So, as St. Paul says: "Awake sleeper, rise from the dead." (Ephesians 5.14)
You'll make the Resurrection more than nice ideas by practicing the resurrection daily. Free now to embrace this moment as sacred, this moment as the meeting place between you and God, this moment as alive with wonder.
Stories of young, urban Christian meditators
Every human heart yearns for God; we are restless vagabonds upon the earth until we stop in our tracks and behold the light shining all around and within us. Here and now. Not somewhere else. To experience God in the midst of daily life—whether changing diapers, arguing a case before a jury, painting a wall, teaching third graders, or walking in the woods. To burn with a holy and playful fire. To live intentional, happy, and compassionate lives in our turbulent world. This is what we’re made for and this is the spiritual life. Through prayer, meditation, and contemplation, the dawn comes; we kindle a fire upon the hearth of our hearts.
But most of us are hurried and harried, fragmented and frustrated. We want to pray, but we don’t really know how to pray; and few of us have someone to show us the way.
Here are the stories of young, urban Christians who are recovering our historic spirituality, coming alive to who they are in Christ, and who are living lives of meaningful involvement in our world: