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brush stroked incense: how painting and monks taught me to pray — today at transpositions

May 1, 2012 in guest post with 2 Comments

Today, I have the rare honor of posting over at Transpositions, the collaborative blog project initiated by the students of St. Andrews affiliated with the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts, whose ranks I shall join in the fall. Read me today over in their space as I discuss painting and prayer?

And when he had taken the book, the four beasts and four and twenty elders fell down before the Lamb, having every one of them harps, and golden vials full of incense, which are the prayers of saints.
Revelation 5:8

Morning light splinters against the blinds and quickens body to wake. Limbs protest, but are forced into motion, the raw fight of discipline. Soon after, as the sun still peeks through in gaps of light across the flooring and the foot of the bed, the small black prayer book is opened, the office of Prime found, and the day is marked anew.

I have been praying this way, in the habit of the monks, for a little over a year now. It began last Lent, when I chose to abstain from receiving the Eucharist until Easter Day. A spiritual mentor recommended that I enter into that time with a mind set upon continuous prayer and, given my disposition, to mark the hours along with the monks, who blended psalms and short passages from the Scripture into a whole, structuring the day by meditation on the received Word. And I have done so since.

Keep reading, here, today at Transpositions?

from The Live31 Team — a response to my open letter

December 14, 2011 in guest post with 12 Comments

Today I bring you a rather unusual sort of guest post on this blog. Yesterday I wrote an open letter to the Live31 Movement and they kindly responded, as well as took me up on my offer to use this space as an additional place for them to share their views. You can see the original response on Facebook, here.

How we’re handling things today is also a bit different. I am producing their response below. Below that, I am including my response to that response as it appeared on Facebook. Please note that, as I stated yesterday, after this post I am essentially done with this issue directly. I shall not post on it again. Rather, I am leaving it to you all, readers on both sides, to have a productive conversation in the comments about this. To that end, I shall not be commenting on this post unless a comment needs clarification or is directly addressed to me. Otherwise, I am leaving it up to Alex and the rest of the Live31 team to comment as they see fit. As always, derogatory comments shall be deleted on either side. (For instance, yesterday someone called someone else something fairly foul and it was directed at someone who disagreed with me. I show no prejudice to people disagreeing or agreeing with me, if the comment is rude and does not seek to discuss the issue, it goes. So, friends on both sides, please keep that in mind. I have a pretty wide filter, but don’t tempt me.)

—From Live31—

To Preston Yancey and anyone who has read his blog and has concerns with our movement, here is a response to his open letter. We want to encourage thought and debate on this page. We have nothing to hide, and wanted it to be known that we do not ignore our critics. If you have not yet read his blog and would like to do so, it is attached. The full text of our response is as follows.

Dear Preston,

Thank you for your concern. Constructive criticism is always welcome and above all you have offered the most well thought out dissent we have read to this point. We want to address by answering each of your points specifically starting with the original post.

First post entitled, This One’s for the Sisters

Indeed, God does call some women to be celibate. There are many women in the Bible who have made unbelievable stands for God without ever being married. Furthermore, we made a firm declaration that we as men are seeking Proverbs 31 women. This said we are not calling all women to live Proverbs 31. We are however saying that the women that we each want to marry must be this type of woman. The Bible admonishes us to do this through the words of King Lemuel to his sons and is clearly supposed to be an instruction for us just as the rest of proverbs offers us simple maxims for living a more full life dedicated to God. God indeed is bigger than Proverbs 31, but we never said otherwise—and we never required or admonished anyone to like this page that wasn’t called to. LIVE31 is for those who believe they are called to a Biblical marriage and are poised to live as Biblical wives or husbands.

Second post entitled, Sparks Fly Up

To begin, I believe that this title unfairly dramatizes our brief exchange on twitter and sensationalizes our response.

We apologize for such a brief and incomplete response to your post. It was unprofessional to brush off your comments in that way and we are sorry for that. The amount of traffic directed to our post on Facebook and twitter are unbelievable which makes it difficult to respond to everyone.

The page does not implore all women to live Proverbs 31, only those who are committed to romantic relationships. However, saying the Proverbs 31 woman is a fiction is a personal interpretation. The Proverbs 31 woman is a model: a model of virtuous married life. She is a fiction insomuch as the Victoria’s Secret model is a fiction—they are both thoroughly unattainable: just as no one could be as beautiful as the women on the fashion show without the aid of photoshop, creative camera angles, and sometimes cosmetic surgery—so is the Proverbs 31 woman, and we encourage dedicated Christian women seeking marriage (not all Christian women) to imitate this model to the best of their ability. We believe it is not unfair to ask women to imitate Biblical models, as Christ is a Biblical model is by every accord to be imitated, as you say in your post—we believe that the Proverbs 31 woman fears God before carrying out the tasks listed in Proverbs 31, and accordingly glorifies the Lord with those tasks.
Continue Reading…

in media res: a blog conversation part III

November 16, 2011 in connections, guest post with 0 Comments

 

We come to the close of this little blog series, wandering and roving through the fields of wonder. “We all — in the end — die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.” I mentioned it through fiction, David wove in strands of narrative nonfiction, and now Stephanie shares in reflection by a poetic all her own. Join our conversation over at her blog today.

—

We all are born into the middle of a story, infants hurled howling into a plotline and expected, like a cat, to land on our feet.

It is in life as in literature: the reader is thrown into the middle of the story to engage our immediate interest and stir our curiosity, in what is called in media res—Latin for “into the midst of things.”  In media res is The Odyssey, the opening scene of which reveals Odysseus captive on Calypso Island, and then backtracks to the beginning of his journey, circling back to this event in chronological order. It’s Paradise Lost, the epic which unfolds out of a fallen angel’s monologue in the lake of fire at the end of the world. It’s William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, which startlingly begins, “Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.” 17 syllables, and we are hooked.

In writing, in media res is refined literary technique. In living, it is often brute survival.

Keep reading at Stephanie’s blog, here.

in media res: a blog conversation part II

November 15, 2011 in connections, guest post with 0 Comments

 

 

 

 

We continue the series begun yesterday, with David, Stephanie, and myself.

Yesterday, I shared fiction, today, David reflects with haunting narrative nonfiction, as Stephanie so well described it, “A true story of dying in media res, and how the living can provide the last chapter of an unfinished story.”

Let David words wrap you up …

—

He went there every fall, with his dog, to a little garage in the mountains. Around it was a plot of land with young pine trees. He would go out every morning to check on all the saplings, make sure they were supported, growing up. It’s where he went to reflect, and while he wandered between the trees, the dog would run and play in the fields.

He was divorced, and he loved that dog. But one year, she got sick, and he had to take her for emergency care in the town. But she couldn’t be helped. The dog died abruptly. And the death pushed him over the edge.

He left the forest and drove home, “worse than a drunk,” he described it. When he got home, he took a bottle of pills from his bathroom, swallowed most of them—then right before it killed him, he called for help. He couldn’t do it. He wasn’t ready for his story to end.

After two weeks of intense treatment, he got put on medication. Something for his depression, something else for anxiety. He had a bad thyroid, and his emotions would fluctuate more than most people.

But he started to stabilize, and after a while, he decided to simplify his life and move on: sell some things, give away money, volunteer for a local politician. He even started going to church, and after two years of that, he decided that he was going to be a missionary.

Keep reading this beautiful work over at David’s blog, here.

the grace of then and now — guest post by antonia terrazas

November 9, 2011 in guest post with 5 Comments

It is my exceptional honor and privilege to share with you the words of one of my closet friends, Antonia Terrazas. Antonia makes up more of my life than she realizes, glimpsing grace and wisdom in ways that unravel, move, and make it hard to breath but to marvel at the absolute mystery of God. Yes, she is my dear and close friend who, from time to time, says things like, “Wandering womb.” But she is also a kind of pooled wisdom, spilled out in front of you, given without reservation. She and Jerry Hodge, who is an incarnate blaze of fierce, rooted wisdom all his own, have not only made my Wednesday mornings encounters with radical and delightful grace, but have made me, through their joy and faithfulness, long and desire to seek after Him all the more. This is none the less true than Antonia’s words here, which started out as just her shooting me an email … (And this, friends, is why you should demand that she blog …)

— the grace of then and now —

This week I’ve been thinking about my story so far, thinking about how much has changed in the past few years and months–my vocabulary for things that matter, my “understanding” of mysteries, my vision, the way I sense Presence, the way I pray.

And so much more.

And I’m apt to label one place, the Now place, as better than the Then place.

Maybe it is. I think it is. At least for me.

But unfortunately, that has made me look at my fellow walkers who look like they are in the Then place, and smirk. Even scoff.

And forget.

I forget how terribly short a span it’s been.

I forget that there was grace even Then, Presence even Then.

I forget that there are very specific parts of my Then that make so much sense of Now, or even made it possible–even the unsettling parts, the off-kilter crazy parts, the coolly aloof parts, the de-spiritualized spiritual parts, the movement-without-breath parts. As I write this, I can trace in my mind places, people, and books from Then that miraculously, mysteriously made room in my heart for the shift I described a moment ago, in ways I never would have imagined.

And I forget that He is at other churches, too.

I forget that I am constantly making a mess of things, oh-so-fundamental things, stumbling all the time. I have a million more steps to take, a million ways to grow.

I even forget my own moments of feeling overwhelmed and lost because of this, present they may be.

But it all has been a big gracious blunder.

And if I believe in grace at all, then it can’t just be for me. My journey. My clumsiness. My inability to see.

Surely, grace filled in the blanks Then, even as it does Now.

Surely, He knows all hearts and hears all prayers.

Surely, He is not far from any one of us.

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