In the Coracle

External and Internal, thought from Merton

December 12th, 2008, No Comments

What was delivered to Moses on tablets of stone, as the fruit of lightning and thunder, is now more thoroughly born in our souls as quietly as the breath of our own being.
“Dialogues with Silence: Prayers & Drawings” (Thomas Merton)

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Rules and Monastic Life (Urban Iona Part 6)

November 22nd, 2008, No Comments

Continuing the series of digging into Kurt Neilson’s book, Urban Iona.
From chapter 22:

The writing of a Rule of life seemed to be the natural step [in Neilson's return to his parish church after his pilgrimage]. Monastic life is an old phenomenon in the Church. It was the effort to establish God’s kingdom on earth, with [...]

Being and doing (Learning from the Monks)

October 10th, 2008, Comments Off

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 [...]

The Reality of Pastoring (and why I want to teach spiritual formation)

October 1st, 2008, 2 Comments

Bob at Pastor Hacks had an entry that is worth considering:

“Danny and I continued to converse throughout the week about his prayer. He asked, ‘How do I learn to love these people?’ As I sought to understand more about the circumstances, Danny told me he felt consumed by the daily demands of ministry. In an [...]

A Little Creative Writing to prepare the dissertation thesis

September 20th, 2008, No Comments

My current class with BGU is Research Bridge, and it helps us to focus our thesis down to something manageable. Winn Griffin is our professor. This assignment helps us to focus on describing the problem that our thesis is meant to address. It was entertaining to do, and I’m looking forward to continuing to refine [...]

Spiritual Formation is…

September 12th, 2008, 3 Comments

There’s a really good converation happening over at Jesus Creed about spiritual formation (and especially Eastern influences in spiritual formation). I linked to it in yesterday’s link fest, but the ongoing conversation turned up some good nuggets.
When people think of ’spiritual formation’ they think of a variety of things, usually from some very specific practices [...]

Spirituality in the Suburbs (riffing on Al Hsu’s book)

August 7th, 2008, No Comments

This entry is cut n pasted from a section of a paper that I’m writing on spiritual formation for my BGU Overture I class.
Spirituality in the Suburbs

Albert Hsu’s book The Suburban Christian contains the best-developed thinking that I have yet seen on suburbia as a mission field.
Contemporary culture tends to look down upon the suburban [...]

Learning from the role of the Benedictine Abbot

August 6th, 2008, No Comments

This entry is cut n pasted from a section of a paper that I’m writing on spiritual formation for my BGU Overture I class. It’ll probably format like crap on the Wordpress blog, but I thought that the section would make a good entry anyway.

The Benedictine Abbot
An interesting feature of monasteries in contrast to churches [...]

Tags for Where We’re Going

July 24th, 2008, No Comments

Today I had a really helpful and powerful chat with one of my heroes, and though I want to digest that a bit before talking about it here, it also spurred me to find a page in my journal and open it up.
Here are some tags that I wrote in my moleskine notebook a while [...]

It’s all about timing

July 9th, 2008, 1 Comment

23 Listen to me;
listen, and pay close attention.
24 Does a farmer always plow and never sow?
Is he forever cultivating the soil and never planting?
25 Does he not finally plant his seeds—
black cumin, cumin, wheat, barley, and emmer wheat—
each in its proper way,
and each in its proper place?
26 The farmer knows just what to do,
for God [...]