Peace Recap

We missed the week before last, but thanks to our rockin' blog and Adam’s impressive electronic post-it skills, we got to see that you all spoke about being “beautifully angry”. The times in our life, like when we are beautifully angry, that we lack inner peace can be instructive and generative. We can use the feeling of “this isn’t right” to create, to find something new (like new expressions of faith), to help others, and to make our world a teensy bit better.

But what to do when “beautifully angry” just becomes…angry? This week we talked about how all of us have arrived to this point in our spiritual journeys because we have experienced internal turmoil at some point, telling us that something was not right, that we needed to push against the barriers holding us in. Pretty much all of us have gotten here because of a temporary, and necessary, lack of inner peace. Listening to that gut instinct has been helpful. The anger and the turmoil that led us here has been and will continue to be beneficial for all of us in different phases of life – but what happens when what is supposed to be a temporary state starts to settle in and become permanent? How do we locate the switch to turn OFF that inner anger and lack of peace, once it has helped us grow and evolve?

Our value as an agent of peace in the wider world starts with ourselves. We are the most genuine reflection of peacefulness when we are living it out within ourselves.

So, what are our strategies? Do we have any? Some of us (not Ron and I, ha!) are major planners. Do we have a plan to follow Jesus? What are the cluttered attics in our mind that we need to clean out in order to make room for peace? Do we have anything in our lives that we consistently work on to grow spiritually and achieve inner peace, or do we spend our time envying the spiritual lives of others or dreaming of a day when we, too, will get there – without actually “showing up for practice”?

We ended the discussion on Sunday by talking about some of the ways in which we've individually tried to create peaceful mindsets in our lives. We talked about fasting from things in your life that make you angry - the kind of things that are totally avoidable. Hide those intensely partisan folks from your Facebook news feed, don’t read the news (if anything stupendous happens like another 9/11 or Michael Jackson dying, trust me, you’ll find out), stop reading spiritual blogs that make you think too much of how others (or even yourself) are doing it wrong.

Whatever works for you – just fast from it for awhile.

Practice being someone who becomes beautifully angry, and not just angry. Peace isn’t something that’s natural in human beings, I think. It’s something that we work toward, not a goal we ever really achieve.

Advent: Joy

Hey all,

I wanted to go ahead and get a digital version of our time together up on the blog for everybody to peruse. I have really enjoyed taking in each others' responses, and I hope you will too.

For those who weren't able to make it, we spent some time discussing various perspectives on what 'joy' might be. For many of us, the word itself feels sort of antiquated; it's not one that we toss around in everyday conversation very often. What does it mean that Jesus' coming to our world brought joy? It seems that in contrast to the fleeting nature of 'happiness', 'joy' inherently has an element of fulfillment... that when we experience joy we're communing with the core of who/what God created us to be and take in. It comes in myriad moments and forms. It seems to be independent of happiness, quite often. It can also be a mindset and/or discipline (see the previous post by Carrie).

We then shifted our discussion to Rob Bell's Jesus is Difficult: Beatifully Angry sermon. We spent some time recounting Rob's point about how identifying the things in the world that make us beautifully angry can often give us insight into how God wired us individually and what he wants us to address in this world. Ultimately it seems that when we identify and address the things that make us angry, we end up finding another way to create and experience joy/fulfillment for ourselves and the people around us.

We wrapped up the evening with an "ideation session." The session progressed through three questions, the results of which are reproduced in the images below. [click to enlarge]

1. How have you/do you experience joy?


2. What makes you [beautifully] angry?


3. What are you going to do with your beautiful anger to find/create joy?

christmas morning

Moonless darkness stands between

Moonless darkness stands between.
Past, the Past, no more be seen!
But the Bethlehem-star may lead me
To the sight of Him Who freed me
From the self that I have been.
Make me pure, Lord: Thou art holy;
Make me meek, Lord: Thou wert lowly;
Now beginning, and alway:
Now begin, on Christmas day.

--Gerard Manley Hopkins

advent

"Those who think they have arrived, have lost their way. Those who think they have reached their goal, have missed it. Those who think they are saints, are demons. An important part of the spiritual life is to keep longing, waiting, hoping, expecting. In the long run, some voluntary penance becomes necessary to help us remember that we are not yet fulfilled. A good criticism, a frustrating day, an empty stomach, or tired eyes might help to reawaken our expectation and deepen our prayer: Come, Lord Jesus, come."

--Henri Nouwen, The Genesee Diary

one of the best ever

Merry Christmas Eve Everyone!

I am a little excited. I have a confession: I love giving presents. And no joke, I dreamed I bought a golden retriever puppy for Stacy. I can still smell his puppy breath. Ew. (Sorry Stacy, I didn't get you one in real life.)

I was checking the internets this morning, and read about an amazing Christmas Eve during WWI. The soldiers stopped shooting each other and exchanged food and song. I thought this was a truly beautiful story. You can read about it on TallSkinnyKiwi's blog.

". . . if we had been left to ourselves, there would never have been another shot fired. We were on the most friendly terms, and it was only the fact that we were being controlled by others that made it necessary to start shooting each other once again."
--Major Murdoch Mackenzie Wood, Gordon Highlander

Annunciation

To the impossible: Yes!

Enter and penetrate

O Spirit. Come and bless

This hour: the star is late.

Only the absurdity of love

Can break the bonds of hate.

--Madeleine L'Engle

first sunday in advent

Hey friends and fellow travelers, I just wanted to thank everyone for their candor tonight. I felt really connected to each and every story. Thank you for sharing your hopes and your struggles.

Here is a link to a post by Julie Clawson who lives in Austin, Texas. She is an insightful blogger, and I really appreciated her advent post. Excerpt:

...those magi following that star had a hard time of it. The journey was difficult. Unsure of exactly where they were going or what they would find when they arrived, they just knew they had to journey on. A distant star, days of toil, endless doubt and questions, ridicule and remorse - these defined their hope. But they didn’t settle for safety or that which confirmed what they already knew. They sought a miracle and that hope sustained their journey.