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Dear Friends,
Love Wins in the End
Happy Easter! I hope you are enjoying these Great 50 Days of Easter as we celebrate and meditate upon grace. Grace! Grace is God’s wonderful answer to human sin, apathy and violence. We praise and thank God the Father for the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. For in that unique and world-changing action, God proclaimed in final and unquestionable terms that love wins in the end, and that nothing can defeat God’s love, not even death. So in this Easter Season we concentrate on grace and give thanks for our lives together, trusting God for all things, trusting God for the future of our church.
The Future
When the Vestry met with Bishop Wimberly on January 30, he challenged us to trust God and to develop a Vision Statement and action plan that will propel St. Matthew’s into a strong and worthy future. Under the leadership of your Wardens, David Price and Babs Clendenin, the church has contracted with nationally known and highly respected consultant Peter Steinke to lead us in our vision process. David Price will be giving more information on this but I wanted to tell you how important I feel this work will be and to ask you to begin interceding, right now, for the good and meaningful future God is calling St. Matthew’s to enjoy. Mark your calendar for Saturday, June 11. You will be needed at your church that day. More forthcoming!
My Journey in Prayer
Elsewhere in this issue of The Word you will read about our Weekend of Prayer on June 17-19. I so believe in the efficacy and worthiness of the life of prayer. For many years I just went through the motions of prayer, and my spiritual life became very dry. I found that I prayed all the time with others: in the Eucharist, reading Morning Prayer, praying with the sick, dying and grieving, praying over food; and in spite of all my opportunities to pray I was somehow not growing closer to Christ, or sensing in any way that I was maturing in my life with God. It was the concept of contemplative prayer that turned this all around for me. I began to yearn more to be in the presence of God than to droll out a laundry lists of concerns every day. I found that silence was more powerful and authentic than my viewing God as a power supply to plug into like a wall socket.
Need for Silence
Because of my growing need for silence, I began to take regular retreats away to pray. And I soon discovered what was driving all this in me. I was tired of two drastic factors that control our lives these days, namely, inner chaos and political divisions.
Too Much Noise.
I was tired of noise and anxious striving. Our world is so fast and constant and chaotic that it requires tremendous discipline to learn how to pray, or to even want to learn how to pray. I realized that I prayed the same way I did everything else in my life, in a hurry, with a deadline and without enough patience to allow God to be really present to me. I reaped just rewards! My prayer life became stale.
Too Much Arrogance.
I also found myself feeling less and less sympathetic with division and name-calling in the church and in the world. Contemplative prayer demands that one focus on God and self, seeking to reduce conflict with others and to learn how to love and respect others in spite of disagreement. Contemplative prayer insists that one see the log in one’s own eye before yanking the speck out of another’s eye. Contemplative prayer sees beyond labels like liberal and conservative and searches for an ethic of love that expects responsibility, maturity and compassion. So I began to read authors like Richard Rohr, Thomas Keating and Thomas Merton. I also found that I was not alone and that many here at St. Matthew’s were coming to a realization that contemplative prayer is indeed an antidote to conflict and inner chaos. Indeed the presence of Bob Lively and the work of Jim Williams and Susan Barnes attest to this as well.
It is with this personal background that I speak of contemplative prayer so regularly, and from the heart. I believe all of us can benefit from learning and practicing a form of contemplative prayer, if even for only 20 minutes per day. I see this as a gift to our faithful parish, a gift that might open us in new ways to the leading of the Holy Spirit. And I just wanted you to understand me!
Some suggested books for those seeking maturity in the spiritual life:
Simply Sane, The Spirituality of Mental Health by Gerald May, M.D.
New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton
Hope Against Darkness by Richard Rohr
Invitation to Love by Thomas Keating
Open Mind, Open Heart by Thomas Keating
In God’s Presence by Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki
The Edge of Adventure by Keith Miller and Bruce Larson
True Prayer, an Invitation to Christian Spirituality by Kenneth Leech
Ministry and Solitude by James Fenhagen
Faithfully, Merrill
