In the Coracle
“It’s almost like you’re writing a book one post at a time” - Kedge
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Archive of "Family" Category
Being and doing (Learning from the Monks)
I found a really nice blog entry today in my ongoing technorati search for all things monastic.
Check out http://loudandclear87.wordpress.com/2008/10/09/learning-from-monks/, a college student who writes:
So, I have Church History at 7:50 in the morning on Tuesdays and Thursdays and sometimes its a real bear to get up and go to a lecture that early to just hear about the early church and its practices.
Yes, going to class is a spiritual disciplinw for me.
This tuesday, my professor, Dr. Bud Bence gave a lecture on the Monastic Movement in early Christianity. Just by the topic of monks and their practices, I will admit I kind of zoned out for awhile. About 15 minutes into the lecture, my prof got quiet and started to tell a story of how when he was in college he visited a monastery and how fascinated he was by the monks and their practices.
One of the monks expressed to my professor that he was concerned with protestants and their practices. After asking for clarification, the monk explained,”You little protestants are always running around doing and doing. You never take time to just be. Just be and pray for the world and for people you know.”
My prof later told us that one of the other monks at the monastery had stayed up all night praying for all of the visitors to the monastery by name. ALL NIGHT…to pray for people he didn’t even know.
All of this got me thinking. I am doing school. Doing work. Doing relationships.
When do I stop and truly unplug. When was the last time I just stopped and prayed for people.
When do I take time just to BE one of God’s children and rest in the pleasure it is to know HIM.
Needless to say, I learned from the seemingly boring lecture. I am changed by it. Even though Monks might have silly practices in some ways, I found TRUTH in some of it.
This story of a Protestant visiting Catholic monks and hearing about being and doing is not unique. My spiritual director, a fellow Vineyard church planter, heard the same thing as well.
The heart of this issue is abolutely worth considering: Where are our practices hampering just, simply, being with God?
Another try at my thesis statement
After a round of feedback from Winn on the problem statement I blogged a copy of yesterday, here’s another draft of my thesis statement:
I am studying Celtic, Benedictine and Orthodox monasticism because I want to discover whether this spirituality can help my reader understand how to be spiritually formed in community today.
Judging People, and Adoptive Mothers
I’m listening to This American Life podcast episode #362, which is about how we judge people on the basis of surface issues. Like every This American Life episode, this is well worth listening to. Especially this act:
Act Three. Yes, No or Baby.
There are some situations where making judgments about people based on limited amounts of information is not only accepted, but required. One of those situations is open adoption, where birth mothers actually choose the adoptive parents for their child. TAL producer Nancy Updike talks to a pregnant woman named Kim going through the first stage of open adoption: reading dozens of letters from prospect parents, all of whom seem utterly capable and appealing. With so many likeable candidates to choose from, Kim ends up focusing on tiny details of people’s lives. (6 minutes)
This reminds me of our experience as adoptive parents. We wrote just such an introductory letter, agonizing over which pictures to select and how to describe ourselves. We included pictures of us with our dogs, in our house, me with my motorcycles - thinking that these things would help to distinguish us from other prospective adopting families. We wrote about our work, our hobbies (mountain biking and hiking surely included).
Our birthmom chose us because we were the first family that came up on the list in Washington. That was it. I’m sure she read our letter, but she made a big decision quickly, and was convinced. It happened so quickly that our attorney told us we should walk away; that she would change her mind and it wasn’t worth the risk. But she didn’t, and it was.
And we have a great ongoing relationship with her. She’s part of our family, and we’re part of hers. She now lives in North Bend where we live, and we see her every week or two. And when we introduce her to others - or when she interacts with our friends, or our extended family, there’s always this weird awkward dynamic where we know that they’re judging her but don’t really know her. For a couple of years, some of the extended family was pretty mean, actually, and we shut that down.
I can only imagine what her extended family says about us. We don’t get any sense of that from her.
However, our relationship, which began 7 months before Kaileigh was born six years ago, has been truly a blessing for each of us.
On Vacation (Autoblogging)
Hey there crew -
I’m leaving on a week’s vacation to our childhood home in Montana. I’ll be out of Internet range and taking it easy.
To keep your interest around here, I’ve pre-programmed a blog series from a paper I wrote in May 2006 for my church history course in which I looked at the Rule of St. Benedict and applied it in our then-church-plant, Mt. Si Vineyard - and really any missional church.
Enjoy.
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