Spiritual Direction nyc

April 27, 2019

Imaginative Prayer (Spiritual Practice of the Month)

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Some of the most powerful prayer times I’ve had personally or guided others through have been through the Ignatian practice of Imaginative Prayer. Imaginative Prayer – not surprisingly – refers to the experience of bringing your imagination into the process of reading and praying with Scripture.

While I was in spiritual direction training, my instructor, Jared, led us through an imaginative prayer on the Gospel story of Jesus silencing the wind and waves. In imaginative prayer, you can picture yourself as a person already in the story, add yourself to the scene as a bystander – even imagine yourself as an inanimate object or a natural force, like the boat or like the storm. There are no limits to how you can interact with the scene in your mind and emotions.

As Jared read through the passage to us, he encouraged us to place ourselves in the scene we were hearing. We were to imagine the feeling of the boat heaving beneath us, feel the gusts of wind and the icy rain pelting down on us, smell and taste the salt air, feel the panic clenching in our stomachs, hear the frenzied shouting of the disciples as they tried to keep the boat from capsizing or breaking apart.

In my own prayer, I didn’t take on another persona. I was simply me, witnessing the unfolding interaction between Jesus and his disciples. As Jared read the passage again, I watched and heard the scene unfold the second time, I was struck by the disciples’ question to Jesus: “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?” Suddenly, that question became my own, and I found myself saying to Jesus, without planning it in the least, “Lord, don’t you care if I drown?”

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As I spoke those words, I think I realized in a new way how overwhelmed and tired I had been, how I felt pushed and pulled in different directions. I felt like I was drowning amidst the competing demands of my life. In my prayer, I was, like the disciples, reaching out to Jesus for rescue.

And what was Jesus’ response? In my prayer, he did something different than he did in the original Gospel story. Instead of quieting the storm, he took off his cloak, folded it into a pillow, and gestured to me that I should lie down and rest. He was letting me know that, whatever was going on around me, I could be at peace. He would watch over and take care of me.

That interaction with Jesus affected me profoundly at the time and still continues to shape me. That tangible sense of Jesus’s care and provision for me led me to the leap of faith that was leaving my job and unknowingly prepared me for an intense season of parenting a child in crisis. I remember that prayer often and it reminds me to trust and rest. It reminds me that I am safe with the Lord.

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How can you experience Imaginative Prayer for yourself? First, it’s helpful to know that the Gospels and other narrative sections are often the most fruitful places in Scripture to pray imaginatively because they have stories you can enter into. (If you are poetically inclined and respond well to language and imagery, the Psalms and other poetic or prophetic books like Isaiah would also work.)

Once you have your Scripture passage chosen, follow these steps:

Find a comfortable, quiet place. Invite God to be with you and to guide your prayer time.
Read the passage aloud or quietly to yourself.
Read it again. This time, imagine yourself within the scene – as one of the main people, as a bystander, even as an object or element.
Use all five senses: try to taste, touch, hear, see, smell what is going on. What are you doing? What are others doing?
Bring to your awareness: What emotions or thoughts are coming up? What do you feel happening in your body? How is God speaking to you through the unfolding scene and your inner and bodily responses?
Is there any action God is inviting you to take or commitment he is inviting you to make?

I hope imaginative prayer becomes another invaluable way for you to connect with God and learn more of his heart for you!

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Find me on instagram! @ravishedbylight

Photo credits:

Stormy sea: GEORGE DESIPRIS from Pexels

Woman underwater: Life Of Pix from Pexels

Man praying: Matheus Bertelli from Pexels

April 23, 2018

“Faith in their hands shall snap in two”

I’ve been thinking about a line from the poem “Death Shall Have No Dominion,” by Dylan Thomas. First of all, my sense of the absurd is tickled by its presence on a site called “Funeral Helper,” where it is listed as a “popular non-religious funeral poem.” Do people at funerals actually want to hear this poem? It’s not entirely comforting. Its language is properly Biblical (which seems problematic enough for the “non-religious” set) but becomes so bleak and at times grotesque that it seems unlikely to make anyone feel better. Unless “Twisting on racks when sinews give way” is an image that warms your cockles, in which case you probably liked Fifty Shades of whatever way more than I did.

On the plus side, it’s at least honest about torture being a sucky way to die.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering what “cockles” means, which I did, Google tells me they are either the ventricles of your heart, from the root word “cochlea,” which said ventricles resemble, or a shellfish that tastes delicious boiled and with a dash of white wine vinegar.

Also, they’re alive, alive o.

A bit of family lore: My husband wanted to name our son Dylan Thomas, but I objected to naming him after a hard-drinking, soul-tortured poet, however beautiful the lines he composed. Wouldn’t that be asking for trouble? So we struck that name off our list. Then, we accidentally gave him the name of a famous comedian. Which is totally fine, because most comedians are well-adjusted teetotalers, right?

But getting back to the poem, the line sticking in my head is this: “Faith in their hands shall snap in two.” It’s stuck because it’s set up echoes in my head with a passage in a book called Interior Freedom, which was written by a member of a Carmelite community with the perfectly perfect French name of Jacques Phillipe.

Jacques writes:

Desire can only be strong is what is desired is perceived as accessible, possible . . . We cannot effectively want something if we have the sense that “we’ll never make it” . . . [But] Through hope, we know we can confidently expect everything from God . . . But for hope to be a real force in our lives, it needs a solid foundation, a bedrock of truth. That solid foundation is given by faith: we can “hope against hope” because “we know whom we have believed.” Faith makes us cling firmly to the truth handed on by Scripture, which tells us of the goodness of God, his mercy, and his absolute faithfulness to his promises” (105).”

I can’t set my heart on something I don’t believe is possible – whether that something is a fulfilling relationship, a satisfying job, a dream home, a reconciliation with someone I care about. If I don’t believe those things will happen ever, not in a million years, then why waste time hoping? But the converse is this: Faith provides us with the assurance that we need in order to hold out hope, even in difficult circumstances. It’s not faith in any thing, but faith in a person – in God who is good and always keeps his promises. In Jesus who is the living embodiment of love, truth, and unfailing mercy towards us. Faith, as it says in Hebrews 11:1 “shows the reality of what we hope for; it is the evidence of things we cannot see.”

That’s why, when we are standing before the Risen Christ and death has been defeated once and for all, we will have no need for faith. We will have all the evidence we need, right before our eyes, that God has been making all things new, all along. The reality of everything we have hoped for will have come to pass. Faith, which has sustained us through all our years, will be obsolete, as unnecessary as a childhood blankie long loved but outgrown.

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

(Death Be Not Proud, John Donne)

On that day, death will have no dominion. All of our longings will be met in the person of Christ whose body was broken for us, then made whole so that we, too, can be whole. And faith in his hands shall snap in two.

photo credit: foodfaith.com.au

August 2, 2017

“In Beauty May I Walk”

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A few weeks ago, I posted a poem draft based on the phrase “All is Completed in Beauty.” At the time, I didn’t know the phrase’s source. Today, as I was going through an old notebook of spiritual direction resources, I came across a copy of “Navajo Blessing Way Prayer.” All is completed in Beauty” is the prayer’s last line.

I wanted to know more about the prayer, so I did a quick internet search. The version I was given (as part of a seminary staff retreat) is slightly different from the version I found at Talking Feather: Lesson Plans About Native American Indians, which contains lines in the Navajo language and can be found here. There, the final line is translated as “My words will be beautiful,” which I think is equally lovely. It resonates with me as a declaration and promise of things to come and as a meta-commentary on language, prayer, and the beauty of one’s self as part of the harmony of all things.

According to Talking Feather, the Blessing Way prayer

can be found in many places,”A one of which is the Museum at Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, for the Anasazi. Some say that reading the words bring peace and calm.

The word “Hozho” in Dine’ (roughly translated) Concept of Balance and Beauty. Consideration of the nature of the universe, the world, and man, and the nature of time and space, creation, growth, motion, order, control, and the life cycle includes all these other Navajo concepts expressed in terms quite impossible to translate into English. Some Navajos might prefer the term: “Nizhoni” meaning ‘just beauty.

I’m posting the version I was given below, because it was the one that sparked the sonnet that I wrote, but I recommend reading the Talking Feather version as well. The site itself is full of resources aimed at “correct[ing] some of the misconceptions about American Indians, and instead highlight the educational progress, positive life styles, and giving nature of both Native and non-Native people of all cultures” (“About Talking Feather and Indian Tribes”).

Navajo Blessing Way Prayer

In beauty may I walk.

All day long may I walk.

Through the returning seasons may I walk.

On the trail marked with pollen may I walk.

With grasshoppers about my feet may I walk.

With dew about my feet may I walk.

With Beauty may I walk.

With Beauty before me may I walk.

With Beauty behind me may I walk.

With Beauty above me may I walk.

With Beauty beneath my feet may I walk.

With Beauty all around me may I walk.

In old age wandering on a trail of Beauty,

Living again may I walk.

All is completed in Beauty.

(Image credit: David Mosner and “28 Magical Paths Begging to be Walked“)

July 24, 2017

“The World is Charged with the Grandeur of God”

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A sermon and reflection series following the Revised Common Lectionary. Sunday sermons are based on the Psalm for the week. Written reflections are based on selected Scriptures from the same week.

Read

Genesis 28:10-19a

Reflect

The world is charged with the grandeur of God. / It will flame out, like shining from shook foil – Gerard Manley Hopkins*

At the beginning this passage, Jacob is fleeing for his life. He’s just lied to his blind, dying father. He’s cheated his older brother out of his rightful inheritance as the firstborn son. That brother (quite understandably) now wants to kill him. Jacob has no reason to expect God to show up in a dream, give him a glimpse of angels carrying out God’s work, and leave him a blessing. But God does all of these things.

Most of us have never had a dream even close to Jacob’s. But, as the poet and Jesuit priest Hopkins writes, God’s glory and beauty shine through all creation. And through Jesus and the Holy Spirit, God’s presence is always available to us. We don’t have to wait for God to reach us in a dream or go to a faraway holy place – although those are also options. We can see God, now, through every blade of grass or summer rain. Or, if nature doesn’t speak to us, in science, human interactions, architecture, or the arts. We can hear Him speak to us in our prayers and through the Word. We can feel the Spirit’s presence in our bodies, hearts, and minds.

We can also trust that if God wants to get our attention, He will. Both Jacob’s story and Psalm 139 tell us that God’s love can reach us anywhere, even if we’re running from it or unaware it exists. Whatever our present feelings towards God – shame, sadness, anger, weariness, indifference – God will literally move heaven and earth to reach out to us and assure us of His love.

Respond

What are your feelings towards God right now, positive or negative? Talk to God about them, and ask Him to be with you as you experience those feelings.

How would you like God to show His love today, both to you and to a specific person who doesn’t know Him yet?

*Full text of poem available here.

June 26, 2017

“All is Completed in Beauty”

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Day 10 of my 30-day writing challenge

I’m cheating a bit today, and posting a draft I did a while back during a creative writing workshop I co-taught with a colleague. I don’t plan to post many unpublished poems, because I have (the vaguest of) vague plans in the back of my mind for submitting them for publication someday. But since this one was an exercise, and would need revision before being submission-ready, I think I can safely throw it up. It also fits in well with the Psalms reflections I’ve been posting. The impetus for the poem was the first sentence, “All is completed in beauty” – a quote from a source I unfortunately can’t remember.

It’s untitled for now, because I am the worst at coming up with titles. Suggestions for a title or revisions are welcomed!

(My preview page is not showing stanza breaks, and I’ve noticed this wordpress theme doesn’t show them in published versions either, so I may need to explore alternatives. But the poem is written as three quatrains and a final couplet.)

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All is completed in beauty. Each rock

spinning alleluias from our silence

knows this in its secret heart. Art realized

from imperfection, anything held back

from full flowering of praise, finds its rest

in this endpoint that is not; transcendence

meaning, as it does, bursts of radiance

into infinity, like stars cresting

from their infant nebulae just beyond

the boundaries of visible light. We know

their warmth by the way the universe folds

around their fires, a lover’s response,

joyful gravity by which we are wooed

to God’s dwelling place, faith’s kingdom, our home.

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(image credit: “Finger of God” Nebula, wikipedia.)

June 20, 2017

“Some silence, some zone of grace”

Day five of my 30-day writing challenge.

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All things aspire to weightlessness,

some place beyond the lip of language,

Some silence, some zone of grace,

Sky white as raw silk,

opening mirror cold-sprung in the west,

Sunset like dead grass.

If God hurt the way we hurt,

he, too, would be heart-sore,

Disconsolate, unappeasable

– Charles Wright. “Poem Half in the Manner of Li Ho.” Black Zodiac.

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Yesterday, on Father’s Day, my mother took white petunias to my father’s grave. He has a marble stone that says “Vietnam” on it, even though he spent his time in the army in Alaska.

My father died just over 22 years ago now, and my mother has been re-married for almost twenty, and she still misses and mourns him. I don’t think I have the license, or even the knowledge, to talk about what she felt when he first died, but I know that she still tears up when she speaks about him for more than a few minutes, and that anniversaries and birthdays are still edged with sadness.

Wright’s poem is uncannily similar to some lines I wrote when I was in training to be a college writing teacher. We were practicing personal essays, and I can’t remember what the prompt was, but I wrote about my father’s decline from a brain tumor – how one of the things that it took from him was language. He first lost certain words – anomia, it’s called – then login codes for his computer (he was a programmer), then struggled for sentences. By the time he slipped into a coma, he had lost his grasp on language entirely.

In my essay, I wondered – as I still do, sometimes – what that was like for for my father to gradually have stolen from him symbols and syllables that once seemed as simple and obvious as his own name. To know exactly what was happening and yet be unable to do anything about it.

What did my father know, in that realm beyond language? I posed that question in my essay, and although I don’t remember if I used the word “grace,” I think that was the concept I was striving for. I hoped that even if he didn’t have words – even if whole swaths of his experiences and memories had faded to gray – he had access to something real, some truth to hold onto. I know that he knew that he loved us, and we loved him, because “I love you, too” is that last thing I remember him saying, past the time I expected him to say anything at all.

It’s unclear whether Wright’s speaker is expressing doubt or belief in the idea that God can “hurt the way we hurt.” Perhaps he feels a little of both. But I believe in a God that does hurt as we do. I believe that God yearns over creation like a mother yearns for her children to be well and whole and happy. I think that there is something in God that is unappeasable when any of his children are suffering. I think he grieved, and continues to grieve, with my mother. I think he cried tears of rage over the unfairness of my father’s illness. I think that there is a part of God that will never be fully satisfied until every part of his creation is at peace. And I think this is one of the deep consolations of the Incarnation – that Christ, in his full humanness, knew what it was to lose, to experience physical and spiritual torment, to have people let him down, to have things he just could not fix.

I believe that we are never alone in our anguish, no matter how deep and dark the silence. And that, too, is grace.

April 4, 2017

Awakening the Creative Spirit: Bringing the Arts to Spiritual Direction (Book Review)

Awakening the Creative Spirit: Bringing the Arts to Spiritual Direction

by Christine Valters Paintner and Betsy Beckman

The book’s premise is that “a primary way that we can experience God’s mystery is through the process of our own creative expression,” that the “arts are the language of the soul” and that “God has been inviting us into this sacred dialogue since the earliest awakenings of humanity.” Art is individual, but also collective, rooted in human memory (the authors are fans of Jungian dreamwork) as well as in the primal rhythms and movements of communication between mother and child. The authors link art with right-brain activity, and claim that art making can bring balance between the two hemispheres of the brain, with their different kinds of wisdom. They conclude that we all have divine creativity within us, meaning we are all in essence artists, and write from this same perspective of openness towards many religions and spiritual experiences.

The authors describe the expressive arts as similar to prayer in that the focus is the process, not the outcome. The art-making process is a kind of pilgrimage – a journey that risks the unknown as a way to encounter the sacred. It is also a way to create a tabernacle for the inner self – to create space and welcome for one of the many voices inside you clamoring for attention to emerge, and be heard.

In the context of spiritual direction, the spiritual director becomes an “artist for the soul,” and the artistic process is an invitation to listen to the self without judgment, and to be fully present in the moment. The book includes guidelines for the direction experience – confidentiality, mindfulness, honoring limits, risk-taking, honoring wisdom, and expressing needs to the group – as well as initial guidelines for engaging the arts that are too many to list here, but would be useful for any practitioner.

The book is broken into three sections: Spiritual Direction and the Arts, Explorations of Different Art Modalities, and Working in Different Life Contexts. It’s a nice mix of background and underlying philosophy, examples of exercises, snippets of artistic products (poems, Psalms, photographs of artwork, descriptions of dances), and responses to exercises from a variety of people, both directors and workshop participants. Each exercise is keyed with a symbol so the reader can easily tell what modality is used, whether storytelling, imagination, movement, visual art, music, or poetry.

Paintner and Beckman have created a useful resource / toolkit for those interested in using art in spiritual direction, either with individual directees or with groups. I do think that experiential learning in addition to reading the book would be helpful, and perhaps necessary, for most people who wanted to use these modalities, especially if (like me in several of these areas) you lack expertise or comfort in the arts.