Lent Offering: A distracted mind

My pastor said something a week ago: "One of the greatest resources we have is our attention. What we give our attention to can drag us down and change our life." So for Lent this year, I am once again giving up social media (though I may go online to post these). 

This got me thinking about what it's liked to have a distracted and fragmented mind. 
I was challenged to follow the example of a friend who is doing a "creative lent". Rather than giving up anything for lent, he is attempting to create something each day: often a haiku or text combined with a photo. 

I decided to try to do this as well, but not each day. I've had a bit of writer's block and then was frustrated at images that I could conjure in my head but not produce effectively. 
Then I remembered that I have enjoyed playing with AI images on occasion and so I fired up Adobe Express and Firefly and came up with these to go with a 5-7-5 haiku-like poem.

[pictures created by Adobe Express AI and Adobe Firefly by Tim Tillinghast]

Church Fathers - Day 11: Polycarp

More from my Lent Readings on the Church Fathers. I am behind on this.

Day 11 of the readings is the last of the letters from St. Ignatius. This one was addressed to Polycarp which is not something you might find at Bass Pro. Instead he was the Bishop of Smyrna (in Turkey) who lived from 69 AD to 155 AD. He was martyred, by being bound and burned at the stake but when the fire would not touch him, they ran him through with a sword.

St. Ignatius wrote to him (chapter 3) 

Stand firm, as does an anvil which is beaten. It is the part of a noble athlete to be wounded, and yet to conquer. And especially, we ought to bear all things for the sake of God, that He also may bear with us. Be ever becoming more zealous than what thou art. Weigh carefully the times. Look for Him who is above all time, eternal and invisible, yet who became visible for our sakes; impalpable and impassible, yet who became passible on our account; and who in every kind of way suffered for our sakes. 

Interesting image of the anvil which is beaten but does not move, nor seem to have much choice in the matter.
The image of the athlete persevering is also familiar. In this case, the idea of the WOUNDED athlete is new to the metaphor, wounded and yet continuing on to win.
Impassible - I had to look this up. It is the theological idea that God does not experience pain or pleasure. So the idea here is that Jesus took on and experienced pain and suffering as part of his incarnation.

Later in Chapter 6, Ignatius further exhorts him and the church under his care to live together in community, persevering and living in long-suffering with each other.

Labour together with one another; strive in company together; run together; suffer together; sleep together; and awake together, as the stewards, and associates, and servants of God. Please ye Him under whom ye fight, and from whom ye receive your wages. Let none of you be found a deserter. Let your baptism endure as your arms; your faith as your helmet; your love as your spear; your patience as a complete panoply. Let your works be the charge assigned to you, that ye may receive a worthy recompense. Be long-suffering, therefore, with one another, in meekness, as God is towards you. May I have joy of you for ever! 

 The spiritual armor listed here is different than in Ephesians. Love is a spear - an offensive weapon. And patience is the "panoply" which is defined as a complete suit of armor "the shield, breastplate, helmet and greaves, together with the sword and lance.
The idea is the same but the emphasis different. It is interesting that patience is what provides the complete package, compared with Colossians where it is Love that binds them all together in perfect unity.

Colossians 3:12-14
Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. 13Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. 14And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.

Interpretation of the Martyring of Polycarp.

Cleaning your Lent Filter

Lint in your dryer is at best a distraction and at worst something that will totally destroy your dryer, or even cause your apartment complex to burn down when it catches on fire. That’s what the humble lint filter is for, clearing away the unwanted distraction of lint and preventing apartment fires. 

If you’re from Oklahoma or Texas, “lint” and “lent” are homonyms (due, if you must know, to a neutralization of the contrast between [ɛ] and [ɩ] before nasals. That’s why we have to say “ink pen” and “stick pin” to differentiate pɛn from pɩn. See, I knew you didn’t really want to know.)

Lent – not lint - is one of the rhythms that the church has followed for centuries. It is a time to confess our resistance to the light, and time of preparation for the death and resurrection of Jesus. A time of considering Christ’s suffering and “rethinking how we are called to take up our crosses”. It’s a time to focus on dying to ourselves and the best way to do that is to “practice denying ourselves through the forty days of Lent, fasting from stuff that we usually enjoy so we can learn to hunger and thirst for God’s kingdom.¹

I come from a tradition that does not practice Lent but in recent years I have been around more people who do and will be doing it for this first time this year. Last year around this time, I was at the Boiler Room in Kansas City surrounded by people most of whom had given up something for Lent: meat, cooked food, sugar, chocolate, even jaywalking – which is harder than you might think if you live downtown and walk everywhere. You’d be surprised how long it takes those crosswalks to change. (Thanks, Beau, for the lesson in respecting civil authority).  

I don’t really claim to pretend that I understand HOW fasting or giving up chocolate, meat, twitter or TV for 40 days could bring me closer to God. Brian McLaren says that fasting doesn’t make him feel closer to God; mostly it makes him feel “closer to pizza.” Sometimes, though, you just have to have confidence that a community has certain practices for a reason and you trust the community enough to engage in the practice. Brian says that fasting helps him feel and acknowledge his weakness in the face of impulses and cravings of his body. Fasting helps him trade something he can see (donuts) for something he can’t. ²

Fasting, in general, or limited fasting during Lent, is a way we can show God we love Him more than the thing we can see before us that looks so appetizing or appealing.³

Lent is really about obedience, practicing obedience to something outside ourselves. Dennis Okholm (quoting Brian Taylor) says,

“We like to think of ourselves as independent rugged individuals who make our own rules. But. . . . if we seek God’s will for our life, every choice we make requires a new obedience. Even in our ordinary lives, we ‘have to serve somebody,’ some institution, some tradition, or some rules.

"I have found that through the limits of obedience, I grow beyond the confines of the self with its desires and traps." ⁴

Patrick Morely says that “Fasting releases the participant from the confusion of competing voices. Your personality and temperament will affect the kinds of things that distract from your relationship with God. For me, it’s work. I’ve discovered fasting as a way to slow down my RPM’s protecting my focus on Jesus Christ.”⁵

So I’ve thought quite a bit about what distraction I can give up this Lent season and will be giving up Facebook, as well as probably some sort of food item which I haven’t decided on yet. I’ll let you know how it goes. . . but not on Facebook. 

Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.

Footnotes:

1. Shain Claiborne, et al, CommonPrayer: A liturgy for ordinary Radicals.

2. Brian McClaren, Findingour way again: the return of the ancient practices, p. 84

3. Patrick Morely, Aman’s guide to the spiritual disciplines. p. 121

4. Dennis Okholm, MonkHabits for Everyday people. p. 66-67

5. Patrick Morely, A man’s guide to the spiritual disciplines. p. 121

Counterbalances to our Natural Impulses (Disciplines)

As I have read and reflected over the past 7 months on my sabbatical journey, the spiritual disciplines keep coming up, something God is calling me back to, or in some cases, to do for the first time. As I read more about various ones, I find that they almost always seem to be a counterbalance against some aspect of our nature, which when left to itself leads us far away from God. The disciplines are like course corrections, guiding us back to center.

It might seem that without these, you will keep going straight, but our sinful natures pull us off to the left, further and further off course, without us even noticing. These disciplines pull us back to the right until we are heading straight on course again. Like a rudder they counteract the winds and currents pulling us off our heading.  

In evangelistic Christian circles, we have a tendency to question certain disciplines as being legalistic and binding. The October monthly reading in Common Prayer: A liturgy for Ordinal Radicals ( p. 462) speaks to this:

“Growing up in a legalistic Christianity” many of us have developed a suspicion a discipline and order that can lead to a pretty sloppy spirituality. Reacting against the institution’s sickness, we easily find ourselves with little to help us heal from our own wounds, create new disciplines and carve out a space where goodness triumphs. People who are afraid of spiritual discipline will not produce very good disciples.”

So here are some of the disciplines I have run across. Not an exhaustive list, and perhaps better called Practices.

[1-4 are time oriented, operating on daily, weekly, annual or even longer cycles. The other ones are not really tied to cycles in the same way]

1.      Daily prayer at set times in the day - “the office” as practiced particularly in monastic communities. As protestants, we resist scheduling times to pray, but if we don’t, we often forget. Oddly enough, we don’t have to schedule daily meal times. We just stop and eat as a matter of course. Stopping to pray at set times regardless of what else is happening reminds  me that the work I’m doing in the kingdom is not paramount. I bend the knee to something that takes priority over what contribution I happen to be making at that moment. Prayer reminds us of our dependence on God and that the real fruit comes from him, not our efforts. It’s a way that God chooses to involve us in the outcomes, even though He is sovereign. St. Igantius says, “Work as if everything depends on God and pray as if everything depended on you.”

2.     Weekly Sabbath keeping is a counterbalance to the idolatry of control through work and technology and the quick pace they bring. Sabbath keeping – it provides a detachment from the workplace, from the world’s way of doing things, from our compulsion to take things into our own hands. Or as Eugene Petersen puts it ‘a weekly housecleaning’ that allows us to enter the week “uncluttered with idols”. It “erects a weekly bastion against the commodification of time, against reducing time to money, reducing time to what we can get out of it, against leaving no time for God or beauty or anything that cannot be used or purchased. It is a defense against the hurry that desecrates time.” (Christ plays in 10,000 places, p. 111)

3.      Lent is an annual time to look at our habits and weaknesses. We examine our habits and lifestyle for areas that may seem harmless but may not be and abstain from them. It is also a time to remember Christ’s suffering in the month leading up to Easter.  

4.      Pilgrimage – As mentioned, the first four disciplines take their place in daily, weekly, annual and higher cycles. Pilgrimage is on a very slow cycle, perhaps something you do only a few times in your life. It is also one that few people actually do. The book, Sacred Journey posits that pilgrimage is a counterbalance to Gnosticism, a heresy that says that the spiritual is “good” and the body and all things physical are “bad”.  Going on pilgrimage calls us away from the many aspects of our lives that we control (lodging, meals, who we interact with), to follow God where he leads us, out onto the periphery of society, rubbing shoulders with whomever, depending on the kindness of strangers, etc.  (See Journey's End, Wielding the sword for more from this book).

5.      Fasting is a way to take the focus off of things that distracts us from Jesus. In A man’s guide to the spiritual Disciplines, Partick Morley says “Fasting releases the participant from the confusion of competing voices. Your personality and temperament will affect the kinds of things that distract from your relationship with God. For me, it’s work. I’ve discovered fasting as a way to slow down my RPM’s protecting my focus on Jesus Christ.“ p. 121.

 

6.      Living in Community is a balance to living centered on self. The Benedictine monks placed a high-value on “Stability”: staying put to get somewhere. That is staying with the community of people God has called you to, rather than flitting from church to church and job to job when we come across someone or something we don’t like. If we wander from place to place, we become slaves to our wills and appetites.  God has placed us in communities and has called together “this particular constellation of people to speak and hear from each other what is needed for their mutual growth in Christlikeness.” (Monk Habits for Everyday People, Dennis Okholm, p 91)  Community forces us to practice our gifts, and roots out our selfishness, and develops character in us as we learn to love others, even the difficult ones.

7.      Lifestyle of Poverty – Intentionally living with less, sharing or having things in common. This can be a balance to our protestant work ethic and the materialism around is in the wider culture.

8.      Eucharist – The Lord’s Supper – communion. I keep bumping up against the mystery of the Eucharist, realizing its importance and reality on a level higher than just as a symbol. As someone who grew up Baptist, this is one of the disciplines we regularly do –not often enough, perhaps, but we do hold to it as a practice (ordinance) to be done as a church body.

Communion, as the name implies, is always taken in community, and thus is a counterbalance to our desire for independence, to experience God on our own terms – “just me and Jesus”.  You can’t to communion by yourself. You HAVE to have a group, and it is not even a select group of just folks you like. Everyone gets to come to the table, rich or poor.  Rob Bell calls it a “public display of solidarity wherein we come together and carry each other burdens, elbow to elbow.”

Thomas Merton talks of being “nourished by the sacraments”. What does this mean? The Eucharist seems to have a deep mystical meaning to so many, a mystical meal that nourishes us spiritually, but how? Rob Bell says it is a “time of centering ourselves on where our real strength lies. It is the center of the Christian experience, trust in Jesus crucified.”

It reminds us of Christ’s sufferings, God’s solution to our sin problem: “the fellowship of sharing in your sufferings and so somehow to attain to the resurrection from the dead”.

At one level, the Eucharist very obviously replaces the Passover meal, which was tied to the first covenant. Jesus established the Lord’s Supper as he ushered in the new covenant, sealed with his own sacrifice. The first meal was to be “a memorial day, keep it as a feast to the Lord, an ordinance forever”.  Exodus 12:14.  If Passover is no longer to be observed forever, then it must be only because it is superseded by this new meal.  And so we do what believers have done since that first Lord’s supper: Eat the bread, drink the cup. Receive Christ crucified.

Petersen says participating in the Eucharist “keeps our participation in salvation healthy and not just ‘our thing. It prevents salvation from “being dominated by our feeling and our projects”. (Christ plays in 10,000 places, p. 170, 202). We are tempted to make salvation about what we do, but communion is not about what we do, it is just about reenacting in the meal a picture of what Christ did for us. We proclaim the Lord’s death and receive over and over again what we cannot take or perform as our own.

Finally, the Eucharist keeps Christ before us as central to salvation. Otherwise we might think of Jesus only as our Great Example, Great Teacher, or Great Hero. When we take communion, we are not receiving just ideas ABOUT Jesus, but rather receiving life from Jesus.  (Peterson, p 202).

Okay, there they are -  8 practices or disciplines, among others. Lord, grant me the grace to practice these and stay on course to destination’s end.