Today at church is our Thanksgiving Sunday. We are having only one
worship service followed by a non traditional Hog Roast Thanksgiving
lunch. It will be a big day and I am sure a lot of fun.
I am up
early this morning and find myself reflecting on the weekend in
gratitude. What I have learned is that looking back over a day, a week,
a month, a decade is a spiritual practice that - for me - invariably
leads to deep gratitude.
I am part of a group that I call the
"Readers and Writers Salon." Every month we gather to share what we
have been reading and to share something that we have written. This
month I took the time to reflect on the process of grief that I have
lived through since Chuck passed away. On Christmas Eve, it will be
three years since he died. In some ways, it feels like it was 6 months
ago and in other ways - 6 years ago.
The healing that has occurred
in me has certainly been gradual over these years. I have been blessed
to have found a loving community at Gender Road Christian Church as
well as a new pack of pickleball buddies in Columbus. I am also blessed
to have been guided through grief with some wise books and mentors
over these years. My practices of prayer and writing have been
invaluable. It is in reflection that I can see that the big ball of
sadness that I lugged around for a long has not altogether gone away,
but has certainly diminished.
Today as I look back on just
yesterday I see signs of God's love and healing continue in me and in
others that I encounter. In the past two days I have done two reiki
treatments on two women in my life. It is a mystery what happens in
these experiences - but there is something about allowing ourselves to
receive God's love through relaxation, prayer, music and healing touch
that does something. Somehow in it all I am aware of God's presence,
love and peace. It is an enormous blessing.
I went to a craft
fair yesterday with all three daughters and a couple of grandkids and a
dear friend. This is something I usually would NEVER do, but had so
much fun. I bought myself a ceramic sponge holder - who knew I needed
one? Actually who knew they even existed? But I like it. We went out
to lunch afterward and I delighted in watching my 16 year old grandson
playing "dots" on the children's menus with his 7 year old cousin.
These are the moments that give me deep joy.
And so, I write
this just to encourage others in the spiritual practice of reflection.
It enables us to see and feel God's presence again. And leads to
happiness and healing.
I will include an article on "Rummaging through the Day." Written bys Dennis Hamm, SJ, a Scripture scholar, teaches in the department of theology at Creighton University, Omaha, Nebraska.
A Method: Five Steps
1. Pray for light. Since
we are not simply daydreaming or reminiscing but rather looking for
some sense of how the Spirit of God is leading us, it only makes sense
to pray for some illumination. The goal is not simply memory but graced
understanding. That’s a gift from God devoutly to be begged. “Lord, help
me understand this blooming, buzzing confusion.”
2. Review the day in thanksgiving. Note
how different this is from looking immediately for your sins. Nobody
likes to poke around in the memory bank to uncover smallness, weakness,
lack of generosity. But everybody likes beautiful gifts, and that is
precisely what the past 24 hours contain–gifts of existence, work,
relationships, food, challenges. Gratitude is the foundation of our
whole relationship with God. So use whatever cues help you to walk
through the day from the moment of awakening–even the dreams you recall
upon awakening. Walk through the past 24 hours, from hour to hour, from
place to place, task to task, person to person, thanking the Lord for
every gift you encounter.
3. Review the feelings that surface in the replay of the day.
Our feelings, positive and negative, the painful and the pleasing, are
clear signals of where the action was during the day. Simply pay
attention to any and all of those feelings as they surface, the whole
range: delight, boredom, fear, anticipation, resentment, anger, peace,
contentment, impatience, desire, hope, regret, shame, uncertainty,
compassion, disgust, gratitude, pride, rage, doubt, confidence,
admiration, shyness–whatever was there. Some of us may be hesitant to
focus on feelings in this over-psychologized age, but I believe that
these feelings are the liveliest index to what is happening in our
lives. This leads us to the fourth moment:
4. Choose one of those feelings (positive or negative) and pray from it.
That is, choose the remembered feeling that most caught your attention.
The feeling is a sign that something important was going on. Now simply
express spontaneously the prayer that surfaces as you attend to the
source of the feeling–praise, petition, contrition, cry for help or
healing, whatever.
5. Look toward tomorrow.
Using your appointment calendar if that helps, face your immediate
future. What feelings surface as you look at the tasks, meetings, and
appointments that face you? Fear? Delighted anticipation? Self-doubt?
Temptation to procrastinate? Zestful planning? Regret? Weakness?
Whatever it is, turn it into prayer–for help, for healing, whatever
comes spontaneously. To round off the examen, say the Lord’s Prayer.
A mnemonic for recalling the five points: LT3F (light, thanks, feelings, focus, future).
Do It
Take a few minutes to pray through the past 24 hours, and toward the next 24 hours, with that five-point format.
Consequences
Here are some of the consequences flowing from this kind of prayer:
1. There is always something to pray about. For
a person who does this kind of prayer at least once a day, there is
never the question: What should I talk to God about? Until you die, you
always have a past 24 hours, and you always have some feelings about
what’s next.
2. The gratitude moment is worthwhile in itself. “Dedicate
yourselves to gratitude,” Paul tells the Colossians. Even if we drift
off into slumber after reviewing the gifts of the day, we have praised
the Lord.
3. We learn to face the Lord where we are, as we are.
There is no other way to be present to God, of course, but we often
fool ourselves into thinking that we have to “put on our best face”
before we address our God.
4. We learn to respect our feelings.
Feelings count. They are morally neutral until we make some choice
about acting upon or dealing with them. But if we don’t attend to them,
we miss what they have to tell us about the quality of our lives.
5. Praying from feelings, we are liberated from them.
An unattended emotion can dominate and manipulate us. Attending to and
praying from and about the persons and situations that give rise to the
emotions helps us to cease being unwitting slaves of our emotions.
6. We actually find something to bring to confession. That is, we stumble across our sins without making them the primary focus.
7. We can experience an inner healing.
People have found that praying about (as opposed to fretting about or
denying) feelings leads to a healing of mental life. We probably get a
head start on our dreamwork when we do this.
8. This kind of prayer helps us get over our Deism.
Deism is belief in a sort of “clock-maker” God, a God who does indeed
exist but does not have much, if anything, to do with his people’s
ongoing life. The God we have come to know through our Jewish and
Christian experience is more present than we usually think.
9. Praying this way is an antidote to the spiritual disease of Pelagianism. Pelagianism
was the heresy that approached life with God as a do-it-yourself
project (“If at first you don’t succeed…”), whereas a true theology of
grace and freedom sees life as response to God’s love (“If today you
hear God’s voice…”).
A
final thought. How can anyone dare to say that paying attention to felt
experience is a listening to the voice of God? On the face of it, it
does sound like a dangerous presumption. But, notice, I am not equating
memory with the voice of God. I am saying that, if we are to listen for
the God who creates and sustains us, we need to take seriously and
prayerfully the meeting between the creatures we are and all else that
God holds lovingly in existence. That “interface” is the felt experience
of my day. It deserves prayerful attention. It is a big part of how we
know and respond to God.
