Aidan was a monk at St. Columba’s monastery on the island of Iona in the seventh century. Upon hearing that a fellow monk had gotten nowhere in preaching the gospel to the northern English, Aidan piped up and opined that perhaps a gentler approach would work. The predictable result was that Aidan soon found himself on the way to Northumbria to evangelize! He was so successful in his mission that Christianity soon spread as far as London….
Riding the C train uptown one afternoon, my spouse Charlie nudged me and subtly pointed to the other side of the car. Sitting across from us was a man wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Winchester Sachems,” accompanied by a graphic depicting the profile of what was meant to be an indigenous person in some sort of headdress. I recognized the image immediately. I attended Winchester High School in Massachusetts, and the “Sachem” was our mascot.
Persistence is the ability to maintain action regardless of your feelings. It is the ability to continue even when you feel like quitting. The difference between winners and losers is their level of persistence.
As believers in Christ we need to be persistent as the Canaanite women does in Sundays Gospel lesson. Throwing in the towel at any little disappointment can make us not to be able to receive answers to our requests.
God’s time is different from our own. He does things at His own time, and He does not make mistakes, His timing is always right and accurate. His words tells us in Isaiah 55:8-9 that His ways are not our ways; neither is His thoughts our thoughts….
The 1970 Broadway show titled The Me Nobody Knows was one of the first rock musicals ever produced. Based on an anthology of writings by urban young people, it included this song, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPJ0b6sNOMk titled “The Tree:”
This man I know
Has an apple tree he’s hoping will grow
day after day he waits
and what does he see?
Not one apple on the tree…..
In these dog days of summer, you might want to try a new spiritual practice ─ napping! To be sure, this is not what we typically think of when we imagine prayer practices. Our ideas may tend more toward kneeling or sitting quietly, reciting memorized or improvised prayers, praying one of the daily offices in our prayer book, or perhaps meditating to clear our minds. Maybe we enjoy a walking meditation, or saying a rosary, or reading scripture, or gazing at an icon. And these are all wonderful practices (though maybe not the kneeling if you have bad knees!). But napping?! Seriously?….
Two weeks ago, I wrote about the spiritual experience of the journey; how being placed in a new environment (internally or externally, whether by choice or not) provides shifts that can both change and sustain us. Sometimes, such shifts happen without the travel, by way of noticing something that’s been with us all along….
Jesus knew all about the problem of weeds and he used them to illustrate an important spiritual truth. This parable is based on the devious practice of sabotaging an enemy’s field by scattering bad seeds among a newly planted crop.
The weed in this case, also known as tares, is a plant that in its early stages of growth is indistinguishable from wheat. Only as it begins to mature is it betrayed by a grayish coloring. By then, however, the roots of the two plants have intertwined, so that it’s too late to pull the weeds without also uprooting the grain. The only recourse is to wait until the harvest, when the wheat can be safely sorted from the weeds….
This spring, my spouse Charlie and I traveled to the Southwest. The main reason for the trip was to see our son Luke, currently living in Arizona, but we stopped first in New Mexico—a state neither of us had ever been to before. We had a wonderful time, and we thoroughly enjoyed the shifts in perspective that emerge from being in a new environment….
With the nicer weather of summer upon us, you might think about shaking up your prayer life a bit. One spiritual practice that often gets forgotten is to use walking as a prayer. In fact, monks and nuns have practiced walking meditation since the beginning of religious communities. Such a movement practice can help us get physically and spiritually fit, and it also helps us remember the value of our bodies. Walking meditation helps reconnect our minds, bodies, and souls….
Today is the last day of June, and what a month it’s been! We bid farewell and Godspeed to members of our Holy Apostles community, and we welcomed new people; both on staff and in the congregation. We baptized a new Christian and heard a fresh voice speak from our pulpit. We have mourned with those who are grieving. We have celebrated service and ministry among us, and rejoiced in the welcome and inclusion that has marked our common life over many years. We completed the first half of a building project that strengthens the foundation from which we offer all the beautiful activity that happens in our beloved church. We have shifted to “summer mode” in our liturgy, simplifying some aspects of our worship until our programming returns in the fall…..