Yr. C, Wk. 16: "Prayer and Worship" Essay

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Discussion of the Readings
This week, we started with discussion of the reading, saving for last the gathering and worship as we close out the calendar year.

Yr. C, Living as Spiritually Mature Christians, Unit 3 Developing a Sustaining Spirituality: 1st yr: Tom, Joyce, Donfred, Scott; 2nd yr: Jessica; 3rd yr, Susan; 4th yr, Pete, Nuno, Marilyn. Mentors: Susan and Scott. Absent: None.

Susan, Pete, and Nuno all had comments about the form of the essay. The essay starts slowly, telling how anxieties of modern life with technology are many, but can also provide opportunities for spiritual growth to take us outside the walls of the church. The author quotes relevant writers (among them our friends Coakley, Ford, Bishops Schori and Griswald). Pete said "it steamrolls." By the end, noted Nuno, the author has drawn on some of the early church authorities, Benedict among them.

Several shared quotations that delighted us. Jessica: Loved the quote from Sarah Coakley – how we are being trained with time… and a way of connecting to others and to the Risen Christ (which is also, others). Joyce – p. 95 “Adoration – one breathes in God as one fills one’s lungs with air…” Stood out to me because I like to pray. Exhaling equals prayer, concerns. Jessica - Drama of the Liturgy a great way to describe it. Scott – a drama that happens in church and in our lives, again and again and again… "Continuous conversion." Marilyn - Maturity may be found in this contemplative approach – leading to loving more deeply; maturity is a matter of expanding your awareness of the world – from self to others to cosmos.

Bishop Schori's definition of violence as "anything that diminishes life" excited many observations from experience. It can be words; it can be hunger, Tom said --

My life has been about the survival of others and myself... I’ve been places where people are looking for food, shelter, security…People who lose their jobs because they don’t speak the correct language, and then they have to move where there’s a civil war, where there are corrupt regimes that our own government supports.

How do we counteract violence by developing a spirituality? We had answers:

• Pete – implied that one who has this contemplative life will also take this inner strength out into public spaces (as the essay says, “outside the walls of the church”). We’ve all been inspired by people who are just living that good proper life, and the way they act among us… (my inlaws) inspire me to be like them…
• Tom – “When someone’s starving, words are meaningless. What they see in you [habitus] is what gives them hope.”
• Nuno: Commitment to place is the physical place but also time.

After we'd shared what stood out to us in the reading, Nuno posed the question from the end of the chapter, what spiritual discipline do you want to work on in the six weeks of this unit? We answered:

• Open the Bible, just a minute here and a minute there
• Finding stillness (turn off my brain)
• Want to be more deliberate about setting time aside instead of just filling in the cracks.
• Reading poetry, writing poetry, writing a prayer - like writing a collect - all involve the same kind of thinking, imagination, openness to examining experience / faith tradition / received beliefs
• Donfred: Prayer and read more over the next six weeks, involve myself more through church
• Joyce: trusting the lord with the hard stuff (in EFM)

Gathering, then Worship
After a break, during which we found candles or lights for the worship at the end, we gathered into breakout rooms, each group tasked to find appropriate gifts for our friends in the other group. Donfred got tickets to the Final Four tournament... Tom got a trip to the Maldives (lots of water, no desert)... Joyce gets a Mercedes... Susan can spend eight days in Greece... Nuno, father of three young children, gets an authentic Santa Suit... Marilyn got a gas gift card for her cross-country treks... Pete got a concrete garden statue of the Cowardly Lion... Jessica got a big green Ford truck. The groups gave Scott bike-riding opportunities at the Tour de France and the island(s) of Bali.

For worship, we recited some verses Scott wrote 30 years ago for a concert musical about Advent (Link to Four Candles), we read the Genesis story of the Fall, and we shared a prayer for the second week of Advent. With our lights, we took a class photo.

For January 2
We do the readings assigned for week 17, listed on pp. 98-99 of the RRG. Follow up with the suggestions there on pp. 99-101. Susan and Scott will provide worship and a TR.

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Yr. C, Wk. 15: A Concrete Metaphor

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Worship and Gathering
Susan led us in Prayers of the People, Form VI. She asked about any creative things we'd done in the past week. Painting... cooking stuffed bell pepper, crockpot stew, and loaded nachos for the Big Game... making decorations out of the dog's reach, helping with the Christmas tree... making arty photos of Advent I for display at church.

For the rest of the session, we were thinking of experience and faith through metaphor. So that was creative, too.

Yr. C, Living as Spiritually Mature Christians, First Interlude Beyond a Binary God: 1st yr: Tom, Joyce, Donfred, Scott; 2nd yr: Jessica; 3rd yr, Susan; 4th yr, Pete, Nuno, Marilyn. Mentors: Susan and Scott. Absent: Nuno. Tom came for TR.

Discussion of Beyond a Binary God, part two
Our discussion seemed to branch in three related categories.

Fatherhood, as experience
Susan: The book is anchored in the personal story and coming back to it at the end. Most heartfelt and persuasive part of all. Pete could identify, as his two daughters came from same parents, and they are so different from each other! He said, “Ultimately, [the author’s] trying to come to grips with what happened with her child [and] using theology to do this in a religious sense.” Jessica, responding to Pete, says we approach God from our own life experience and are partial to our picture of God from that way – How can we deepen our image to grasp the whole picture?

Fatherhood, as metaphor with “Son” for Trinity:
Joyce our heavenly father doesn’t think like we do, but our earthly fathers are like us, and so different. Marilyn: Difficulty in the metaphor in imagining the relationships – hierarchical and patriarchal – Marilyn imagines parental – qualities that we can agree on without pinning to “father” -- the “father” metaphor gives us an ideal. Jessica is challenged by search for a metaphor outside of father/son/holy spirit. Jessica read the different sides to the argument, and wonders, do we need a new metaphor, or just a deeper understanding of the father/son metaphor that we have? Donfred highlighted the joke about “the bird,” which made the point that the Father-Son image leaves out the Spirit; Scott observed that the Spirit had been left out of our discussion entirely aside from Donfred's question. Marilyn suggested that the spirit might be like the music produced by a duet – it’s a third thing that emerges from the first two.

Opening up to an experience alien to us
Pete responded to the fable of five blind men and the elephant: we do all experience something different from our own perspective -- you feed your soul based on your needs, and some may take things differently than I would. Marilyn said that this book "has helped me through my uneasiness about this subject." She has experienced the kindness of a family whose child is transitioning.

Susan appreciated the author’s downplaying of binaries in general: not everything has an opposite! Soughers says to get beyond binary … but that’s not the only way to see Father and Son… tension isn’t always opposition

Theological Reflection
Marilyn brought us a photo she took of a green plant emerging from a crack in a concrete wall. [Not the photo presented here.] For her, the wall was a metaphor for conformity, the plant a bold and creative force. She gracefully surrendered that notion as the currents of our discussion took the image in a different direction.

We had a lot of buy-in to the image. Joyce has felt like the plant… you grow most through a harsh situation that requires you to grow. So has Donfred: no matter how hard a thing is, if you have faith, good will come out of it. Susan told how FLoridians made a beautiful (and amusing) Christmas tree out of an isolated pine that grew out of concrete at a junction of highways.

Insights and applications were varied:

• “Dare to be different: stand out from the wall of sameness… safeness” (Marilyn, relating also to the non-binary book)
• Round up. End of story.
• Surprising – stay open for what comes.
• Weed is just a plant growing where you don’t want one – You can find beauty in a weed, too, beauty in imperfection.
• You can make an allowance for the cracking – allow for growth and shifting – build in give and take – God makes us with our edges, knows we’re brittle… we have strength in certain dimensions… Control joints are like his forgiveness…
• TRINITY? Water, the tree, the soil? Concrete, the control joint, the water – plant is us? (Funny that the control joint [built into concrete structures to allow for expansion and contraction] brings in uncontrol)

We drafted a collect and left it to Scott to finish:

Collect for the Flower in the Crack of the WallAlmighty God, solid rock of our salvation, you opened yourself to give a tiny shoot of Jesse’s stem the experiences of joy and love, hunger and rejection, death and resurrection: help us, where we are hard-edged and defensive, to make space for others' growth, so that we ourselves may grow into your image more and more each day. Amen.

For Next Week
We're shaking up the usual routine for our last meeting before the secular new year. We'll first discuss the essay "Developing a Sustaining Spirituality" in the RRG, ch. 16, pp. 88ff. After a break, Scott and Susan will spring a gathering question, and then we'll conclude with worship.

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Yr. C, Wk. 14: Beyond a Binary God, part one

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Worship and Gathering
Nuno led us in worship from a book that he recommended to us all, St. Augustine's Prayer Book. We began with an examination of conscience, and moved through praise and petitions. (I personally thought the prayers for people who work at night were especially rich -- naming fire fighters, sailors, and "those engaged on the stage.")

Nuno asked us for ways that prayer "feeds" us. Answers included songs in church that are also prayers, emotions reinforced and deepened by the music... the BCP... praying the scriptures, esp. Psalms, "every emotion is there"... morning meditation and closing devotion each day... writing prayers each day... silence.

Yr. C, Living as Spiritually Mature Christians, First Interlude Beyond a Binary God: 1st yr: Tom, Joyce, Donfred, Scott; 2nd yr: Jessica; 3rd yr, Susan; 4th yr, Pete, Nuno, Marilyn. Mentors: Susan and Scott. Absent: Donfred, Marilyn, Tom. (Tom logged on in the same minute that the rest of us logged off early!)

Discussion of the Readings
Jessica generally enjoyed book, especially appreciating HOW the author Tara Soughers wrote it as a response to her own child’s experience: “Everyone is created in God’s Image” and trying to see this from her child’s experience. Susan appreciated the exploration of the phrase "in God's image, male and female" in its context of other opposites that have in-betweens (dark and light, night and day, seas and dry land -- Soughers asks why male and female should be different?) The author admits that she was confused, and is learning. Pete said it was enlightening that there’s "a substantial group out there that needs to be thought of beyond the boxes we put people in." Joyce appreciated this mom and how she had to fill a void left because no one else has written a theology; Joyce was also moved by the plight of homeless children kicked out by parents and communities.

While Nuno also appreciated the author's intention to open minds that are deadset against trans people, he pointed out the author's misleading use of statistics and her reliance on non-canonical scripture. Others expressed how they were disturbed by the author's use of The DaVinci Code, tainted by its derivation from detestable conspiracy theory of the 19th century, and the author's dubious argument concerning plastic surgery for teens.

Jessica expressed gratitude for Nuno’s reading and openness. Jessica offered a quote from Soughers, “I can only speak from the place of being the mother of a trans child.” There seemed to be a consensus on being open to what the author says about that experience.

Because Marilyn was unable to bring her TR to us, and we were missing three, we logged off early -- in the same minute that Tom logged on!

For Next Week
We'll read the second half of Beyond a Binary God by Kara T. Soughers. The RRG suggests that we look for three recent news reports and articles concerning sexuality and gender and ask ourselves what intercessory prayers the Spirit might be calling us to make, and what thanksgivings? (see p. 83) Marilyn will bring the source for the TR; Susan will lead worship. Nuno will be away at a board meeting.

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