Volume 31, No. 1-Winter, 2007
Table of Contents
The Spirit of Sweetness - Shalem's Society for Contemplative Leadership: Inaugural Gatheringby Carole Crumley
Evening Prayer on the Rio Grande
by Elaine Dent
The Congregation as a Place of Spiritual Formation
by Robert Duggan
Hope for the World in a Sufi Inspired Rock Band
by Tilden Edwards
Working With Clay
by Dwight Fraser
Living With Wisdom
by Elizabeth Randall
Healing Prayer for the World
by Patience Robbins
The Spirit of Sweetness - Shalem's Society for Contemplative Leadership: Inaugural Gathering
by Carole Crumley
"There's a sweet, sweet Spirit in this place ...." Whenever I think about the inaugural gathering of the Shalem Society for Contemplative Leadership last October, these words from a familiar hymn come to mind. There is a sweetness of the Spirit that is tender, loving and palpable, that both fills my sense of the inaugural gathering and this moment of remembering it.
I come from the South, known for its "sweet tea" and Sweet Pea flowers but also for smooth talking that can sometimes sound like fake expressions of sweetness. So for days, I've delayed writing this article, trying to find some other way to describe our gathering.
Then I remembered John of the Cross's beautiful poem, "The Living Flame of Love." Although it was written during the most painful time in his life, John can find no other word than "sweet" to describe the Spirit of the Beloved that fills his soul.
In that "sweet encounter" with the Beloved and the "sweet cautery" of its wound, John writes, there is an exquisite experience that is tender, delightful, gentle and delicate. He concludes that this is nothing less than a taste of eternal life. Finally, as if he is smiling softly to himself, John describes the gentle and loving ways the Spirit awakens in his heart. It is the Spirit's "sweet breathing, filled with good and glory," that tenderly swells his heart with love.
In the inaugural gathering of the Shalem Society, there was a sweetness, a tenderness, a sense of good and glory that, I think, John would have smiled over. It feels delicate trying to describe that goodness. We simply gathered as kindred souls, having the shared foundational background of a Shalem extension program. In coming together, there was reuniting with friends, colleagues and mentors, opportunities for strengthening and encouraging each other through sharing experiences, insights and deepening prayer.
There was the power of spiritual community, the energy of inspiration and the excitement of sensing the Spirit's movement in the world and our part in it. There was the joy of being with others who share a desire to live more fully into radiant Love and true life in God. There was commitment to share the fruits of spiritual deepening with others. There was also hope and expectation for what the Spirit may work in us and through us-both individually and collectively-for our religious institutions, communities and world.
Now, there are over 100 members of the Shalem Society. Many are exploring new ways of being in community through Shalem Society Circles and the Society's dedicated web site. There is great Mystery here and unknowingness about what will unfold and be needed to truly support a growing fellowship of contemplative leaders. We are relying on the Society members to help give shape to this pioneering movement and on the Spirit to guide our steps. Meanwhile, we watch and wait, seeking to stay close to the Living Flame that draws us to our "deepest center" and that infuses all our prayers and actions.
I invite all who are reading this article to hold this new entity, the Shalem Society, with tender love, and I encourage all of our extension program graduates to join. We will meet again as a Society for five days next October. Oh my, I can taste the sweetness of it already!
Evening Prayer on the Rio Grande
by Elaine Dent
We had come to the day of silence on our Epiphany Pilgrimage to New Mexico. After enchiladas in the pueblo, experiments with pottery making, studying ancient Indian carvings on volcanic rock, and learning new songs to sing, we would rest from human words. We would have space to be still, listen and reflect on our week's journey.
A day of silence was new to my daughter who had accompanied me on this pilgrimage, so I invited her, silently of course, to join me for a walk. We put on our thickest socks, our walking shoes (we wished for snow boots), grabbed packs with journals, and we two pilgrims trudged out into the cold, maturing afternoon.
Shadows stretched blue across the white snow. One pilgrim behind the other, our feet crunched in the path of former seekers of the day's sun and sky. If I lost my daughter's shadow hovering around my feet, I knew to slow my pace and honor her city gait, unfamiliar with nature's slippery pavement on the ground.
Finally we branched off the snow-tramped way of other two-legged folk and headed into the Basque, an area of aging cottonwood trees along the Rio Grande. This is where the four-legged ones make their home and playground. Our feet plowed snow past the fallen tree with white bark weathered smooth, through reddish stems standing bare from a former season of flourish. Our footprints mingled with those of swifter, lighter jackrabbits. Beyond stumps that must have served fishermen as campfire seats, the river reached from horizon to horizon, moving, breathing, faintly singing. Its glassy turquoise reflection slipped through the ribbons of snow bank on either side.
Without needing to talk, we dug out comfortable hollows in the snow and placed our cushions on the frozen ground. We strangers had apparently arrived in time for evening prayer. A few others had gotten there before us. A family of Canadian geese moved farther out into the water to give us plenty of room to watch the Sandia mountain. Sandia means watermelon, and this mountain imposingly rose above the land beyond the river, absorbing the remaining yellow warmth of the afternoon sun. One or two at a time, ducks flew in and took their seat on the quiet river. Some had black plumes on their heads, others a white streak and rusty chests. They chatted, fussed and laughed with one another over matters beyond my comprehension.
More geese, both in number and species, flew in, organized in larger groups now, soaring and circling in formation before gliding in for a landing. Occasional stray ducks joined these geese lines, filling in the gaps within their soaring V-patterns. The whir of wings whipping air only a few feet over our heads fanned prayers of awe in my heart. As the sun sank near the distant mesa behind us, the water fowl gathered in earnest; they streamed in from the west. Sand Hill cranes coasted in from a nearby nesting site and added their distinctive squawking harmony to the river's rising prayer of honkings, quackings, chirpings, flutterings, and splashings. The congregation had assembled, and the liturgy was underway.
The temperature dropped quickly in this desert land while the praise of the winged ones swelled and the mountain's yellow folds opened into the rose, watermelon glow for which it is named. Amidst all the noisy praise, the sun slipped silently away from the congregation's worship. For a brief moment the reddened mountain and the translucent, pale light of the river held the sun's parting gift of illumination, blessing the creatures with an afterglow of radiance. I was moved to prayer and tears.
But we mindful pilgrims needed to retrace the unfamiliar path before dark. Psalms from the chorus of river folk continued in full voices as we rather wistfully left this place of prayer early. Even while we were re-crossing the Basque, late cranes continued flying into the gathering. We heard their songs echo off the river waters while we once again slipped our way on the icy path of human ones. The sharp, stirring wind rustled the cottonwoods, and we sank deeper into our coats and hoods and even deeper down into our souls, full of what we had witnessed.
Our now-hurried presence startled a lone goose dallying in the irrigation ditch along the path. He must have had his reason for missing the river's evening prayer, but he rose wearily at our passing and, in the enveloping darkness, veered east toward the river to join his brothers and sisters as the night's great silence began.
Elaine and her daughter, Becca, were part of Shalem's New Mexico Pilgrimage in January 2007. To view a chronicle of this pilgrimage, go to http://web.mac.com/annkulp/iWeb/Epiphany.
The Congregation as a Place of Spiritual Formation
by Robert Duggan
We Americans like to take care of things neatly and efficiently, preferably from a prepackaged solution that can get quick results with a minimum of hassle. Our cultural bias towards action and our get-the-job-done outlook impacts our approach to spiritual formation as much as it does a variety of other areas of life.
Communities or individuals who are interested in the work of spiritual formation are quite likely to begin by looking for a program, a book, or a technique that will target the objective, focus resources on the task, and accomplish the mission with the maximum possible speed and efficiency. The self-help and business sections of the local bookstore are lined with shelves of books that demonstrate how we Americans prefer to get things done, quickly, efficiently, and with neatly targeted initiatives. The "spirituality" section is no exception to this pattern.
Members of the Shalem community recognize these tendencies in themselves, but we also hold an awareness of the counter-cultural nature of what is involved in the work of spiritual formation. The kind of authentic, deep work required for the formation and transformation of our spiritual selves is neither neat, quick, nor the result of single-focus approaches.
Spiritual formation is intentional and deliberate work, to be sure, but it must also be broadly pervasive, gradual and patient, and richly multifaceted. The ideal setting for this kind of effort is a faith-based community with its multiple structures, various kinds of interactions, and ongoing mission of support and concern for its members. Faith-based communities provide the kind of setting and opportunities for transformational learning that are needed for the task of spiritual formation, if only they are intentional about this work as a first priority.
I grew up in pre-Vatican II Catholic parishes where it was an unquestioned assumption that the job of the Church was to help its members "save their souls." Such traditional language and individualistic focus lost favor in the years after the Council, as Catholics became more appreciative of community and more evangelically- and mission-focused. But there seems to be a renewed understanding today--across the ecumenical and interfaith spectrum--of the urgency of helping our nation, our ecclesial communities and even each of our individual members to "save their soul" by a recovery of spiritual values.
Putting those values into practice in every aspect of our common and individual lives is the work of transforming an entire culture. Such transformation is what congregations are--or should be--about, and a renewed, intentional focus on spiritual formation seems very much needed in a nation that in so many ways shows signs of having lost its spiritual moorings.
The familiar adage that it takes a village to raise a child reminds us of the deeply formative impact that communities have on their members. We are social beings, through and through, and the communities with which we interact shape our attitudes, our values, our beliefs and our behaviors in profound and lasting ways.
Congregations need to reclaim their power as agents of transformation by becoming more intentional and deliberate about the work of spiritual formation. Common worship is the most obvious place to start, since sacred ritual begs for spaces where silence allows those who worship to enter a deeper level of contemplative awareness and openness to the Holy.
Believers hold a special reverence for their sacred texts, and we Americans are desperately in need of learning to listen to the word proclaimed in those texts with a contemplative heart--to slow down the rush of mental activity enough to hear how the texts invite us into Mystery, rather than give us quick answers or shallow comfort. Congregations need to teach their members how to listen in this way.
Faith communities generally devote considerable resources to the work of religious education or catechesis. The major focus, understandably, is on conveying from one generation to the next the core beliefs of the tradition and the moral and ethical standards guiding right conduct. But too often neglected is deep spiritual formation, such as practical support and nurture of contemplative spiritual practices and contemplative prayer.
Virtually every aspect of a congregation's life presents an opportunity for the community to do the work of spiritual formation. How that is accomplished will vary, of course, but there is little that a congregation does that cannot provide an opportunity for a more intentional approach to spiritual formation. The possibilities are limited only by the imagination, interest and will of those who are leaders in their respective domains.
The work of spiritual formation, especially contemplative spiritual formation, is subtle and often indirect, but that need not suggest it is insignificant or superficial. The more a culture of thriving interest in spiritual formation can be cultivated across the spectrum of a congregation's life, the more ways that community will be able to reinforce a central vision of what is truly important in the business of "saving souls."
Bob, a Catholic priest, is on the staff of Shalem's Clergy Spiritual Life & Leadership Program.
Hope for the World in a Sufi Inspired Rock Band
by Tilden Edwards
Love raises its beautiful head above the cauldrons of hate in wondrous and timely ways. Take for example the wildly popular Indonesian rock band "Dewa," whose five members include four Moslems and one Christian, including its Moslem leader and composer, Ahmad Dhani.
Dhani's recent turn to Sufism, the contemplative heart of Islam, has led him to change the band's songs from romantic love to the larger path of divine love shared at the heart of the world's great religions. He has become an ambassador for peace, using his music to lead his millions of youthful fans away from the extremist fundamentalist Islam in which he once was schooled. Listen to this excerpt from the lyrics of his hit song, "Laskar Cinta," "Warriors of Love," a play on "Laskar Jihad," or "Holy War Warriors," an Indonesian militant group possibly linked to Al Qaeda:
Hey there, all you lovers of peace
Watch out, watch out and be on guard
For lost souls, anger twisting their hearts,
For lost souls, poisoned by ignorance and hate....
Warriors of love, teach the mystical science of love,
For only love is the eternal truth
And the shining path for all God's children
Everywhere in the world.
Lyrical music inspired by the Beloved holds enormous potential for the world's well being. I'm sure we all have experienced the power of such music to open our minds and hearts to the deep flow of Love's energy. We have seen how it can melt our hard boundaries and divisive categories. It's no accident that sacred music holds such a special place in the world's religions.
In Christian tradition today we see the way Taize and other chants and songs have crossed denominational lines and opened millions of hearts to God and one another. We see this in the Moslem world where Sufi mystical poetry has been set to music. I'm sure such a phenomenon is true in other religious traditions as well. In popular Western tradition I think we see it at least implicitly in some of the lyrics of Bono and his U2 band, among others.
Lyrics are sung poetry, and at their best, poetic metaphors can carry and empower a transcendent sense of mystical reality that helps to shake us free from the build up of separations, narrowness, and numbness in our lives. Then we become more available to be carried into the current of divine Love and its particular path for us at a given time. Of course, the singing needs to be part of a larger way of life that can help sustain and encourage what shows itself in the ecstatic moments. Contemplative practice, compassionate living and spiritual community, in whatever form that may best take for us, are the steady background "drones" that keep us listening for, hearing, remembering, embracing the larger truth of our being and world in God, in the midst of so much in our culture that entices us away from our true nature and calling.
Part of that larger truth is the realization of our inclusive humanity in God. Ahmad Dhani reflects this in his lyrical call to be warriors of love. I think Jesus would put his arm around Ahmad and say something like this: "Yes, we all need to be that kind of warrior, then we won't divide the world into enemies to hate and friends to love. We will melt our enemies within and around us with love and prayer, or at least we won't feed the unforgiving cycles of hate that help keep enemies alive in the world. We will witness to the Love that we know has no boundaries. In the divine guiding light we will walk a holy path that reduces the causes of hatred and raises up the world's reconciliation in God. By grace we will shine that light from a hilltop, letting it brighten all around us without discrimination."
As we pursue this calling, we will be faced with the realities of a broken world and find ourselves supporting restraints on those who insist on maintaining violent hatred and its way. But woe to us if we absorb the same kind of hatred that we would defeat, the kind of hatred that buries the great divine love-treasure of our hearts. Ahmad Dhani's lyrics hold up that treasure for everyone.
Maybe some of us will be inspired to write our own lyrics and melodies and offer them as an alternative to the violence-prone sectors of our own and the world's popular music and culture. If you do, I'll be one praying for them to make it to the top of the music charts, as did "Laskar Cinta" in the largest Moslem country in the world.
Photos of the band and further information about them can be found on www.libforall.org, a global network of moderate and progressive interpretations of Islam.
Working With Clay
by Dwight Fraser
The following is a record of Dwight's experience while participating in a meditation exercise during the fall residency of Shalem's Personal Spiritual Deepening Program.
I took up the lump of clay and held it... felt its weight... its texture. It felt moist, soft, yet solid. Firm!
My first impulse was to just roll my hands so it would shape the clay into a ball. I resisted, wondering, why should I change the clay's shape? It seems that that is what goes on inside me. I resist being shaped.
Thankfully there was another nudge: "twirl your hands to make the clay into a ball." I lamented changing the clay's shape but slowly began to twirl my hands.
Amazingly what was a thick slab of clay began to become round. I had supposed that I would have had to muscle it into a ball. Instead, almost imperceptibly, it became the shape of an ... apple.
Wow! An apple! I realized after the shock that that is what I am... an apple of God's eye. I realized that God had not just been shaping the clay; God had also been shaping me, imperceptibly.
I began to think, "How was I going to get the apple a stem?" Before my thoughts went too far down that road, I got another nudge. "Make a vessel!" "No!" I retorted. "I am the apple of the eye! Why make a vessel? I want to stay the apple of the eye!" "Make a vessel!" I heard again.
Reluctantly and dejectedly I began to press my fingers down into the clay, sorrowful that I was no longer the apple of the eye. I then began to wonder what vessel I was going to be.
It became apparent after not too long that the shape of the apple did not change too much. It was just hollowed out and in the process expanded some more. Shame on me for thinking that being an apple was enough when I could be more. And shame on me for thinking that I knew better than God what I should be.
But what vessel was I? Looking closely I recognized it almost instantly. It was a distinct shape from my childhood. I grew up on a small farm with cocoa and coffee, and we had a mortar hewn out of wood, much bigger but, in this exact shape, used for threshing, grinding and refining both products.
Oh! God wanted me to be his mortar! God wanted me to be his vessel for threshing, grinding and refining. I agree! There is much chaff for the wind to drive away. There needs to be grinding to unlock the flavour. And there has to be refining to produce a smooth texture. Who wants trashy, flavourless, loamy cocoa or coffee?
So I did not need a stem, instead I needed a mortor stick (pestle made of wood). I got up obediently, found an appropriate piece of clay, and made it into a mortar stick. When I placed it in the mortar, it almost looked like a stem....
I chuckled to myself. The words "God's apple of the eye vessel for refinement!" formed on my lips as I continued to chuckle. Then I remembered this passage from the prophecy of Jeremiah:
But the vessel he was shaping from the clay was marred in his hands; so the potter formed it into another vessel, shaping it as seemed best to him. Then the word of the Lord came to me: "Oh house of Israel, can I do with you as this potter does?" declares the Lord. "Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel." -Jeremiah 18:4-6 NIV
I responded with the verse of the Hymn:
Have Thine own way, Lord! Have Thine own way!
Thou art the Potter, I am the clay.
Mold me and make me after Thy will,
While I am waiting, yielded and still. -Adelaide A. Pollard, 1907
Dwight, part of the Personal Spiritual Deepening Program, Class of 2007, is a Baptist pastor from Jamaica.
Living With Wisdom
by Elizabeth Randall
Last spring, at an intensive week-long conference, I was asked to identify three overarching goals for my life and ministry. After days of prayer and conversation, I was able to discern and describe my central goal: "to live with Wisdom." For me this phrase from scripture came as a gift. It is more than a metaphor or symbol; it is a way of gathering all I find most valuable and setting it in the context of life with God. At the heart of that is the ongoing formation of the spirit within me and my continuing growth as I give and receive spiritual direction.
Wisdom is, for me, a way of speaking of the divine that brings freedom and peace. Living with Wisdom means many things: listening for the voice of God in scripture, nature, and the words of diverse people and communities; the discipline of prayerful attention; the struggle to find words for an experience of holiness that seems beyond words; the willingness to be surprised by new questions and led in new directions; the ongoing discernment of God's call to act on behalf of the poor, oppressed and friendless.
Wisdom gathers all the ways of speaking of God that I find most exciting and life-giving, those of being and becoming, of seeing, noticing, discerning and knowing, of human response to the overwhelming offer of love, of acceptance in friendship, of hiding and revealing, of the gathering of time into eternity.
Friendship with God is one of the gifts of Wisdom and so is another way I could describe my understanding of spirituality and spiritual direction. If we are friends with God, we seek God out for conversation, listen to what God has to say, care about how our actions seem to God. We trust our friend, even if sometimes we are mystified. We assume good intent, even when we do not understand. We count on our friend to give us a fair hearing, and we count on forgiveness. These are hallmarks of the life of the spirit.
Mary sitting at the feet of Jesus is for me an image of spiritual direction as friendship with God. More and more I imagine this scene as one of mutuality rather than of authority and discipleship. It shows two true friends in the intimacy of intentional conversation. The other image that shapes my inner life is that of Jesus asleep in the stern of the boat as the disciples struggle through the storm. I think of my life as a boat on the uncharted sea, on a voyage of exploration. Jesus is in that boat with me, not steering, not talking, simply present. Friendship with Jesus, the friendship of trust, of willingness to be vulnerable, willingness to change and be changed in response to another's insight and invitation-this is a model of spiritual direction I can live with and into which I can continue to grow.
Paying attention to the faithfulness and the freedom with which I listen is most important for me. Am I faithful in inviting the Holy Spirit to be present in every moment? Am I free from preconceived notions, free as far as possible from anxiety? Am I free from my own resentments and judgments?
For spiritual directors to do this kind of work, we need humility and compassion. Without humility, we get in God's way and fill up the time with our own clever images and ideas. With compassion, we have the privilege of offering, for a little while, the acceptance, forgiveness, and new vision that God is always wanting to show. Our compassion opens up a place, here and now, where God can be at work. Ultimately, God is not limited by our failings; when we are unable to show compassion, God will simply wait for another chance. But when we do let God work in and through us, when we become friends of God; when we live with Wisdom, we share as God's partners in the building of the realm of God.
In a dark and anxious time, when there could be ample reason to despair, to live selfishly, to give up hope, the work of spiritual guidance is one way we share with God in keeping the world alive. When we are faithful in our practice of spiritual guidance, we and those we sit with make a space, over and over again, where the Holy Spirit can enter and keep changing the world. Spiritual guidance is a place of transformation, for the one who speaks and the one who listens. When we engage in this work, we become more and more the people God is hoping we will be. Our tolerance, our compassion, our radical acceptance of the other, our freedom from anxiety, all are strengthened by the gift of patient listening and attending to the God who is within us and all around us. And as we become the people God is waiting for, we gain the courage, strength, and will to be agents of change.
Elizabeth is a graduate of Shalem's Spiritual Guidance Program, Class of Winter 2005. This article is taken from one of her program papers.
Healing Prayer for the World
by Patience Robbins
The other day I found myself weeping over the state of our world. I felt deep grief and pain; I call it being heartsick. I felt moved to seek out another person so I could share this deep pain. As we sat together and I wept, I felt comforted. I told of the troubles I was carrying and then felt able to turn them over to God--to God's light and love--as well as pray for the courage and willingness to do what I am called to do.
I am reminded of a wonderful story that Richard Rohr tells (which may or may not be true) that, when Francis and Clare of Assisi got together for holy conversation, they wept over the state of the world. This has been so affirming of my experience and reminds me of the stream of contemplative people who have gone before us who also were deeply aware and sensitive to the suffering in the world.
One of the most encouraging ways I have found to remain aware and hopeful is by recalling these people who have traveled this contemplative path. I have some favorite mentors: Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Etty Hillesum, Therese of Lisieux, Jerry May. I continue to look to their lives as examples of great courage and great generosity of spirit. They lived and breathed a deep willingness to be utterly available for God in the world.
I pray to these people. I beg them to join with me in prayer for our world and for me that I , too, might have that deep generosity to be a vehicle or manifestation of God--of Love--in our broken and troubled world.
Again, Francis's words as he was dying come to mind: "I have done what is mine to do, now do what is yours." One of the tasks that has been given me to do is envisioning our world full of light, love and compassion. In my imagination, I can encircle it with deep peace, allowing that gift of peace to flow through me and out to all the world united with this stream of courageous, generous and loving people.
This is a profound mystery--that my loving, my embracing peace and sending it out to the world could make a difference. There is also another aspect of this mystery about which Jerry May has written: "This contemplative vision of God as vulnerable, woundable, brings about a fresh sense of intercessory prayer as well. Though we often think of intercessory prayer as praying to God for the sake of someone else, the contemplatives often sense an invitation to pray with God, to share God's joy and sorrow, which in turn God is sharing with all creation. There is a notion here of 'keeping God company' in whatever God is experiencing." Perhaps I am keeping God company as God weeps over the world. At times, I really feel that I am!
The other person who has voiced my experience is Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish woman in Holland, who lived through the horrors of the Holocaust, and died at Auschwitz in 1943. In her journal, "An Interrupted Life," she writes: "I said that I confronted the 'suffering of mankind' (I still shudder when it comes to big words), but that was not really what it was. Rather I feel like a small battlefield, in which the problems, or some of the problems, of our time are being fought out. All one can hope to do is to keep oneself humbly available, to allow oneself to be a battlefield. After all, the problems must be accommodated, have somewhere to struggle and come to rest, and we, poor little humans, must put our inner space at their service and not run away."
I, too, often experience this struggle--what to do, how to respond, how to make sense of the complexity, the vastness of the problems. How do I make a difference? How do I take it all in? I can only be "humbly available"--offering my inner space for all of these questions.
As a contemplative, this holy envisioning, keeping God company, and providing some opening and availability for God, have emerged as responses of how to act with deep love and compassion for our broken and suffering world.