Taking it to the streets

In case you haven't already heard about it, I want to plug Sojourners' Pentecost 2007 conference, which will be held June 3-6 in Washington, D.C. Senators Clinton, Edwards, and Obama will be present for a presidential candidates' forum, and some great religious leaders will speak on topics relating to social justice and advocating for the poor. There's an Emerging Leaders track for people age 30 and under, and scholarships are available if you register by May 4.

I can't go, as I'll be traveling that weekend, but I encourage anyone else out there who is interested in the intersection of faith, culture, and politics to attend.

Prayers for the campus community in Blacksburg, Virginia

At times like these it is difficult to know what to say, or how to pray, except "Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy."Blacksburg, Virginia may seem a long way from the Rocky Mountain Conference, but in this week in April many are remembering the Columbine shootings here in Colorado eight years ago. Violence and grief of this kind affects us all in some way.

Let us pray for the family and friends of those who were injured or killed, and for the whole community of Virginia Tech and Blacksburg. I would also ask your prayers for young people across our country and around the world who have lost hope, those who feel alienated from the human community or from God, those who see no solution to their pain and anger except inflicting pain on others and ending their own lives.

Let us pray, and work, for a society where pain and anger are met with compassion and find expression in a nonviolent struggle for justice. Let us be instruments of God's peace in our broken world.

Praying is living

Okay, this is shameless stealing, but I get Sojourners' Daily Verse & Voice email, and today's was too good to keep to myself:

Prayer leads you to see new paths and to hear new melodies in the air. Prayer is the breath of your life which gives you freedom to go and stay where you wish and to find the many signs which point out the way to a new land. Praying is not simply some necessary compartment in the daily schedule of a Christian or a source of support in time of need, nor is it restricted to Sunday morning or a as a frame to surround mealtimes. Praying is living.

- Henri J.M. Nouwen, from With Open Hands

I have struggled to make prayer a regular part of my life beyond mealtime grace and "arrow" prayers (the "help me!" and "thank you!" that come almost spontaneously at times during the day). I know that prayer helps to ground me in the reality of God's love as few other things can, and that I tend to act and speak more thoughtfully, less anxiously when I have regularly cultivated an awareness of God's presence. But like exercise, intentional prayer too often seems like one more thing to schedule into my already busy day, and I let it slide for too long. Then, when I feel overwhelmed or afraid or lonely or irritable, I realize that in addition to the external forces acting on me, I have not been connecting with God in a way that could ameliorate some of those forces. As a minister, I think that puts more than just my own wellbeing in jeopardy, and I am embarrassed to admit my falling-short in faithfulness. Thank God for grace.

Beyond this confession, I also want to share something I read recently that was a kind of "aha!" moment. I'm not sure where I read it, I think one of the 43 library books I have checked out at the moment (yes, 43), but the author says that the spiritual practices or disciplines that work for you now may not be the ones that fed you 5 years ago, or the ones that will nourish you 10 years down the road. It seems obvious once it's said, but somehow I had in my mind this idea that figuring out how to live "a spiritual life" meant finding a way of ordering my days and weeks and years that, once found, would continue to serve me consistently throughout my life. Okay, if you had asked me in those words, I might have thought about it enough to say, "Oh, probably not my whole life, since I expect to do different kinds of work and ministry about every 5-1o years..." but it wasn't something I had focused on enough to see the disconnect in my own thinking.

Now that I have, though, I have the same sense of relief I had when I realized God didn't necessarily have a scripted plan for my life that I had to figure out and follow or risk seriously disappointing God. If there's more than one way to live that's pleasing to God, if there's a way to order your spiritual life that may change in a couple years, it takes off the pressure of perfectionism, one of my great temptations. And this is what prayer can do for me, too: remind me that it's okay if I'm human, if I can't get everything just perfect on the first try - and if other people are human too. That's how we're supposed to be. Let God be perfect, try to love people, and do the best you can.

New look - and why are only men supposed to be "wild"?

I was intrigued by the blogger.com information about updating from templates to layouts, so I'm trying this out... I even figured out how to post feeds from other sites I like!

In other news, I read today a very insightful commentary on John Eldredge's sequel to Wild at Heart, about men's spirituality. The new book is called The Way of the Wild Heart, and describes six developmental stages of masculine identity. Seminarian Clifton Walker Stringer has written a theologically sound critique of Eldredge's central premise, arguing that the adventure-battle-beauty paradigm for masculinity is based more in classical mythology than Christian Scripture or the life of Jesus.