Tag Archives: prayer

  • songsol867

    When My Beloveds Talk Together

    November 10, 2012

    2 Comments

    I’m going to tell you strange things today. Like about the times early in my marriage when I prayed to God, telling him about the pain of being married to another broken human being. I brought to God things I had never said to my husband because I knew he wouldn’t be able to receive them. And it happened more that once that my husband came home from working so hard to take care of us and said, “today, I really felt like God was telling me . . . ” And nearly word-for-word what I had said to God came out of his mouth. It turns out that the man who God provided for me has an uncanny ability to listen and hear God. It wasn’t the last time he would tell me things he had no way of knowing.

    But one of the strange things about this life is that as much as we might want and seek after God as a way of protecting ourselves from the chaos and pain of life, it just doesn’t work that way. In time when the blows of life finally overtook us, this marriage of ours fell apart. I’d always said that we’d either end up as one of the world’s great love stories or self-destruct in a truly spectacular fashion. For a long time, it has seemed that the latter was our fate. It wasn’t that we stopped trying – far from it. In fact, in the middle of our worst arguments, my husband began to stop to pray and listen to God. I followed his lead and began doing it as well.  We became the only couple in all of creation perhaps that would actually stop to seek God in between throwing accusations and curses and venom at each other. And yet, even with both of us seeking after God, our marriage continued to devolve.

    Only I’ve discovered that hearing God isn’t enough. In communication there is what is said, what is heard and what it understood. And it turns out that one must know God better than we humans actually know him to understand what he is saying. I learned this when one day my husband told me, “be careful – God told me that there are two voices you are hearing.” The way he said it made it clear that he thought I was being deceived. This was his own belief – that I was wrong and refusing to deal with reality. He thought God was confirming this. Only unbeknownst to him, I had been praying regularly to God complaining that I was no longer sure if I was listening to Him or just hearing what I wanted to hear – talking to myself. Over and over again, I had asked, “how do I know that when I think I hear you, I’m not just hearing what I want to hear?” And he answered me – “you’re hearing two voices.” I knew what it meant – you’re not just talking to yourself. But my husband, working with a different set of assumptions and knowledge, took away something totally different. As we can see perfectly well with all the people who know God’s word yet know little of love, simply hearing God is quite different from understanding Him. Continue reading »

  • prayingman

    “Masculine Christianity” and Men

    October 28, 2012

    5 Comments

    My husband has often remarked to me that the heart of the problems we have in understanding God is one of translation. No matter how we try, the words we use to express spiritual truths can’t fully capture the reality they describe. Especially for “people of the book” such as we are, words are the medium through which we explain God to ourselves and each other. But as powerful as words are, it is exceedingly difficult to translate the spiritual into the spoken (or read) without flattening what is being described – sometimes to the point of obliteration. It’s a bit like explaining sex to a 9 year old – you can explain how it works, but they will walk away with no concept of why anyone would want to do such a thing. Descriptions don’t always illuminate reality.

    When it comes to our Christian/Hebrew attempt at translation, scripture relies heavily on that good writing maxim: “show, don’t tell”. So we have a book filled with stories, poetry, a couple of books of rules, genealogies and some letters of exhortation. Its more like giving a 9 year old a Danielle Steel novel in lieu of explaining the mechanisms of sexual intercourse. They may come away a bit fuzzy on the details, but with a better grasp of what it is they have to look forward to.  Better, but still not complete.

    One of the oddities of Hebrew and Christian texts is the extent to which they avoid describing the spiritual at all. There is no attempt to really discuss the nature or substance of God. Very little is said of where we come from or where we are going to outside of this physical realm. Questions such as the relationship between the physical world and spiritual world are vague at best. While our stories and poetry help to flesh out the relationship between God and mankind, the reality of the spiritual is something we must seek to experience for ourselves. Christianity has always hinged on experience rather than belief. Few people come to a life-altering Christian faith because they got to know the bible and theology and decided to follow it. At some point, most people must have a spiritual experience of love or connection to bring the whole thing to life. Even the most lurid erotica is a poor substitute for the real thing, after all.

    So, what does all of this have to do with “Masculine Christianity” and men? Continue reading »

  • 100_0948

    God:Me::Me:The drama troupe I gave birth to

    September 5, 2012

    1 Comment

    I can’t begin to imagine where they got it from – probably their father’s side – but I have some rather dramatic children. We still laugh about the time we told 5 year old Noah to put a book away and he contorted his face into a picture of agony, lifted the book above his head and bellowed, “noooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!” like a super-hero villian whose plans had been thwarted again.

    Just last week, one of my daughters was telling me all about how she wasn’t going to do what I said, she’s going to do what she wants to do and there’s nothing I can do to stop her, humph. Whilst I was escorting her to her room, she tried grabbing the bannister and corners and anything she could grasp to try and stop me. So I gave her a swat on the behind. Now, I’m not much good at spanking. I am completely certain that if I hit a housefly the way I occasionally swat a child’s behind, the fly would be OK. It might be dazed for a second or two, but it would fly away unharmed by the encounter. However, my daughter, not having the tough constitution of a housefly, began shrieking “Help – I need immediate medical attention”. She’s a delicate soul.

    Her slightly less dramatic sister went through a phase where she came to me crying because she was afraid that I might die. I get that sort of sensitive imagination – I am hoping to use all the crying I’ve done while imagining my mom dying as credits towards the actual event. Sort of an emotional pre-payment plan I made up in my own head. Later this daughter came and told me, “remember how I was really scared that you were going to die? I realized that if you died I would be able to do whatever I want. So I’m not worried about you dying anymore.” Continue reading »

  • sin different

    Judging Christians

    August 30, 2012

    4 Comments

    What would happen if we all stopped judging each other tomorrow? Would everyone start sassing the boss, not realizing they could be fired? Would families start roasting each other for dinner, knowing no one would judge them for it? Is judging properly the only thing that’s standing between us and a world of complete chaos (as opposed to the one we currently inhabit!)?

    Or to put the question another way – what effect do we think we are having when we observe for others what is right, wrong, correct, mistaken, etc? I’m going to go way out on a limb here and guess the actual effect doesn’t exactly line up with our desires. Somehow people rarely react to being told what they are doing wrong by saying, “gosh – thank you so much for telling me. I’m going to get right on fixing that now and devote the rest of my life to making up for all the pain I’ve caused you.”

    The reality is that being right is no big thing – anyone can do it. The kids I met in juvi knew the difference between right and wrong. But it’s really hard is to actually do what Jesus tells us to do: “don’t judge.” Now I know I just lost a bunch of y’all there. The last time I said we should take his instructions not to judge more seriously, if not literally, the comments had a good number of “but Jesus said judgmental things” and “we have to judge – it’s judging in a way that condemns another human that we can’t do.” All arguments I have made myself in the past. Only I actually tested the not judging thing. And found out that in order to judge properly, we need first need to learn how not to judge. Continue reading »

  • holy spirit

    Holy Spirit Raining Down and Welling Up

    August 4, 2012

    1 Comment

    Have I ever told you about the time that I stopped listening to Christian music, threw away my Christian t-shirts (“Color Outside the Lines -  Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind – Romans 12:2″ was my fave) and took down anything from my living space with a bible verse on it? Believe it or not, I did it so I encounter God again. For years after my first encounter with God, I would have experiences in prayer or worship or even just through some unexpected event that I experienced as the Holy Spirit raining down on me. Like heaven was washing over me. It’s not an uncommon experience – in fact there’s a well known worship song called just that: Holy Spirit Rain Down. It’s a wonderful experience but one day it started going away. First God’s voice – that still, small voice that will sometimes come to us – just went silent. I would still have that experience of the Spirit through worship and sometimes through prayer, but in time that became more and more muted. Finally, it just seemed to be gone. I remember at one point telling my husband that I felt like I was wandering through a dark forest and God was there – somewhere above me – watching. He knew the way out but I was lost and he wasn’t helping me find my way. This was the first dark night. As John of the Christ explains it is the dark night of the senses. But I didn’t know much of anything about that then.

    As the voice and presence of God became fainter and farther from me, I think that without even realizing it, I started adding things into my world that would remind me of God. Maybe make me feel some sort of connection or even just warm-fuzzies. I never went overboard, but as time passed I listened to more and more Christian music, read more Christian books, bought a few of the aforementioned T-Shirts, put bible verses on the bathroom mirror and on my screen saver. I became more stereotypically and outwardly Christian as if by surrounding myself by reminders would trigger that connection with God again. It may have even looked from the outside like I was growing in my faith – and I was, in a way. But from my vantage point, I was just grasping at straws and trying to will God to show himself to me again. Continue reading »

  • prayer

    Reaching Spiritual Home

    July 26, 2012

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    Sometimes I hit a blog post where I know what I want to say and why, but it turns out to be much harder than I anticipated to actually write. Sometimes this means I need to let it go. Other times the only thing to do is to just start writing and see what happens. This post is an example of the latter.

    I wrote the other day that I had arrived at my spiritual home. My long journey is done. A new chapter has begun. And by the next day I was wondering what on earth I was thinking coming right out and saying something like that. Normally I take days and even weeks to think things through, but I just spouted that one out without even allowing a decent waiting period to see if I would feel the same way in the morning. So, did I feel the same way in the morning? Um, hmmmm . . . can I get back to you on that?

    Here’s what I can tell you: the spirit of judgment that I have lived under as long as I can remember is finally gone. Just gone and for the first time I feel safe. But more about that later. First I suppose I should try to explain what happened. Continue reading »

  • deer

    Dispatches From the Desert

    July 22, 2012

    7 Comments

    I woke up from a nap the other day feeling more normal than I have in years. I was afraid to get up. But children call and if I don’t make dinner, people will starve. And they’ll wait until bedtime to tell me that they were too stupid to feed themselves. So i got up. What was missing, I realized later was the sense of hope and dread that has been my constant companion for quite some time. See, everyday, sometimes all day if I’m not careful, I’m waiting for something good to happen. Like a game changing something good to happen. A turning the corner something. Life has been so miserable for so long that all I or anyone I know can think is, “something’s gotta give soon.” But nothing ever does. I try things that fail. My husband waits for months on end for a promised raise. My kids swear they’re doing school work that never gets done. A spiritual deluge to bring peace back to my poor, starving heart would do the trick. I’m really not that hard to please. Day after day, I wait for something good that never comes. It’s an awful way to live life. The only thing worse, I suppose, would be giving up hope altogether. Continue reading »

  • desert

    Retreating to the Desert

    July 14, 2012

    13 Comments

    I’ve always prayed a lot. Mostly because no one else wants to talk to me much. And I can only talk to myself so much. So I pray. And if you spend a lot of time praying, after a while you decide that maybe you should stop just chattering and try to listen. And if you let the Spirit lead you as you try to listen, it will show you to a place of still and quiet where the Spirit in you hangs out. I’ve described it before like finding a faint channel on the radio dial that if you can be quiet and sit still and get the antenna just so, you can tune into. Sometimes if you sit and listen, you can tune into God. Other times, there’s just a sense of something meant for you – an image, a song, a feeling. For a long time there was this joy waiting for me there. In the middle of everything, if I could just get my mind to quiet and my feelings to settle, it was like opening a spring-loaded door that let in this golden light of joy. It was hard to hold onto and once my mind wandered or my feelings intruded, it was gone. But I could get there if I tried and just bask in it for a moment or two. (Yes, I know I sound crazy. So what? If people knew what went on in your head, they’d probably think you were crazy too!) But then the joy went away. And was replaced by . . . nothing.

    For a while, I would quiet and settle and reach this nothing and be so upset to find that my joy was gone and God wasn’t there and there was just nothing waiting there to comfort or sustain me that I would quickly withdraw in anger and frustration. Sometimes I would try and sit and wait, wait, wait and look, look, look for something – anything to hold onto. But it was just so, so empty. This is what has been fueling most of my crabby, woe-is-me anger the last couple of months. Everything else that’s going on, I’ve mostly let go of. I can’t make everything I own quit breaking and I can’t make money appear and I can’t make people like me or fix everyone’s issues, so whatever. I’d be quite happy to just draw from that inner place where God’s joy and peace and hope are placed and live off of that. But it’s empty. I’m just SOL. Continue reading »

  • psalm150

    Whatcha Praying For?

    June 25, 2012

    2 Comments

    Do you want to know what you really look like to God? Pull out a piece of paper and make a list of the things you have prayed for most fervently. What’s there is the sort of person you are presenting yourself to God as. Who have you told God you are? Someone who wants things? Someone who wants people? Someone who wants comfort and ease? Someone who wants God himself? Who do you want God to know you as?

    Let me be a blessing to you, Lord.

    Be careful what you pray for – asking God for something is a bit like telling the genie in the lamp your wish. He may take you at your word.

    Let my heart love and desire nothing and no one more than it loves and desires you, God.

    Pray a prayer like that at your own risk Continue reading »

  • Ecstacy of St. Theresa

    Allow Me to Screw Up Your Sex Life a Bit

    June 19, 2012

    8 Comments

    “We monks do not try to repress our sexual passions . . . Woe to those monks and nuns, who shovel into their subconscious their sexual passions. . . There is no spirituality in that. What happens, and what we aim at, is the transmutation of erotic energy from earthly attractions to God.” – Father Maximos quoted in The Mountain of Silence: A Search for Orthodox Spirituality by Kyriacos C. Markides

    In the old pagan world, sex and religion were all tied up together. Temple prostitutes and depictions of group sex on ancient Hindu temple walls and all that. Christianity has too often taken the opposite tact – sex as being so unholy that for a while it was considered a sin even in the context of marriage by the Roman church. Which led to possibly the most dysfunctional set-up ever; putatively and sometimes actually celibate priests being told each time a parishioner had sex with their spouse. What could be the problem with that, eh? Although the actual rejection of sex by the Christian church has varied wildly from place to place and time to time, the reality is that a lot of people continue to see sex and God as inevitably belonging in two separate spheres of our lives. To the extent that God and sex intersect, it is in the parsing out of rules for sexual conduct. But when actual sex takes place, well if our guardian angels could please exit the room, that would be great. And surely God has the good manners to turn his head for a few minutes. Wouldn’t want to be caught in flagrante delicto by the creator of the universe. That would be too weird. Continue reading »