Kirkepiscatoid

Well, gang, I have embarked on a 40 day Ecunet cyber faith group experience called "Journey with Joan Chittister." it is an e-mail discussion group using the book "40-Day Journey with Joan Chittister" for daily devotion and reflection. I know, 40 days sounds so....Lenten....but let's just call this a "pre-Advent" activity!

Ok, according to the preface of the book, the goal of the 40 days is to feel yourself "living differently" whatever that means rather than just getting more "head knowledge."

Here is how each day is laid out....

First there is a reflection from Joan, then a snippet (about one line) from a NT reading. Then you are supposed to reflect silently on these two pieces and move to "the questions to ponder", then there is a psalm fragment to read. Then quietly reflect on that. Then, there are topics for "journal reflections" and I am supposed to write a little bit on that. Then there is a closing prayer to read. Anyway, that's the drill!

So here are my journal reflection topics for today. Today's reflections are about how spirituality is a hunger in the heart that seeks a reason to exist beyond biology. aaagh! (P.S. I am looking ahead in the book, and some of these are hard questions.)

Anyway, if you want to tag along on some of these 40 days, the link above takes you to the order page on amazon.com to get your own copy.

Here were the questions I am supposed to journal for today. Well, my blog is my journal, right? So what the heck, you can be part of my "discussion group away from my discussion group!"

1. In what way is your spiritual hunger nourished?

I have been learning to "try new foods" a lot over the past couple of years! I knew about prayer in the traditional sense. I knew about studying the Bible in the academic and historical sense and very minimally in the personal sense. But it is a lot like how I grew up eating bland, traditional NE Missouri "country food" and one day, in my adulthood, I discovered things like hot sauce, ethnic cooking, exotic cheeses, and vegetables other than beans, peas, corn and potatoes. Eating those things are fine--they nourish me--but there's no variety. Likewise, traditional prayer and worship IS satisfying to me...but I have come to realize there are exotic meals in God's word, fine appetizers just from sitting in God's open spaces, and a monastic quality to doing work at church (even setting off bug bombs simply to keep one of the "coffee hour queens" from being upset about the silverfish she found in the coffee pot!) I realize I make her worship better b/c I set off a bug bomb!

(Oh, a quick aside to y'all about the bug bomb thing. Always remember to yank the batteries on the smoke detectors before you set off the bug bombs. I forgot to, and when they all started going off after I had activated the bug bombs, I had to run down in the undercroft with bug spray fumes enveloping the place. I started having flashbacks of Susan Hayward in the gas chamber scene of that old B&W late movie standby, "I Want to Live"!)

Some of this has not been "natural" for me but I have been lucky enough to have some people in my life who have put the strange spiritual foods on the table and even if I wrinkled up my nose at them, have been cajoled into "taking three bites--how do you know you won't like it unless you try it?" Oddly enough, as was the case with many (but not all, of course) of those "new foods" in my childhood and young adulthood, I bit into these spiritual foods rather hesitantly at times, and after a few chews, think, "Hmmm....that is not so bad after all...."

2. Meditate on how spirituality seeks to "transcend the functionaries of religion" to bring you into greater intimacy with God. How does that happen?

I think for me, religion is a set of practices that in some ways, is the "mechanics" of connecting with God. Religion mostly illustrates "the fundamentals" in much the same way that batting practice or shooting free throws works--respect for the divine, common prayers to connect us to our Baptismal covenant, and the sense of wonder about God that comes forth in the Eucharist. We learn to do these things "automatically" so that when we are under stress we can rely on our training. When you've shot thousands of free throws, those thousands of free throws in practice can transcend the moment of stress where the free throw at the end of the game can win it. I think the practices of religion exist to ground us in the fundamentals in times of stress and confusion.

Spirituality, however, is something beyond that. It allows you to have the "aha" moments in the middle of our practices of religion, and experience an even greater level of connectivity with God that is very personalized and quite intimate. It also brings us into greater spiritual intimacy with like minded people, and that has a synergistic effect, bringing us to a higher level of connectivity with that person and with God at the same time. Awareness of the synergistic effects of spirituality is a powerful tool in learning to be spiritually fed, as it opens us up to unseen possibilities for connecting with God.

3. Journal about how in your own life, a spiritual commitment "took religion into its own hands."

Wow, this is a tough question! I think I will use my simultaneous Lenten projects of delving into the "suffering servant" chapters in Isaiah and also lurking on an Ecunet Lenten discussion group as an example. I made a spiritual commitment to take on these extra projects for 40 days. Although in a traditional sense, the suffering servant chapters are considered to have a parallel with the life of Christ, I discovered it also had a connection with my own sufferings and feelings of "exile". In the Ecunet group, an assignment every time was to write a prayer. I started out thinking I was a crappy prayer writer and discovered I was okay at it! In both these exercises, I had to take on for myself, with God's help, aspects of religion that on Sundays are "already taken care of for us" since it's all in the Book of Common Prayer, the readings are from the Revised Common Lectionary, etc. Taking on spontanteous projects created its own "sense of religion."