Tall Monastic Guy:

November 30, 2009

Urban Retreat 11/14: Hostility to Hospitality

Saturday, November 14th was our second of three retreats processing through Henri Nouwen's “Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life." The setting for this one was St. James Urban Church, which is the upstairs chapel of Network Coffee House in the Capitol Hill neighborhood where I spend my Wednesday nights.

On this occasion we were honored to be joined by St. James Urban/Network Coffee House pastor and my wild and wacky friend, John Hicks.

Nouwen begins this movement with this indicative thought, “If there is any concept worth restoring to its original depth and evocative potential, it is the concept of hospitality. It is one of the richest biblical terms that can deepen and broaden our insight in our relationships to our fellow human beings.” (p 66)

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November 09, 2009

permission to be honest

My friend Jim invited me to speak with his high school students today. He's been giving them permission to ask any and all questions they have about God and church. What a gift that is to not only grant permission but to encourage young people to voice their most honest spiritual questions.

Adults tend to get uncomfortable when kids start asking questions that seem to threaten perceived foundations. So, big props to Jim!

Based on the places my story has taken me this year, I tried to address some of their questions by chatting about image of God stuff. When asked from their unique perception what are some of the most HONEST characteristics you attach to God, here are some of the replies...

moody
scowl
santa
beard
clouds
clever
male
old

So, on the white board we sketched an image that fits these descriptors and talked about how excited we really are to engage in relationship with that God and introduce our friends to that God.

The stats for kids continuing to engage the church after age 22 are abysmal. And this morning I was reminded of one of the primary reasons...

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Words make Worlds...

"It becomes so clear to me as I grow older that people who change, and keep changing, are the only people who grow up." -Richard Rohr
“An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.” -Martin Luther King Jr.
"Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be." -John Wooden
"Receptivity without confrontation leads to a bland neutrality that serves nobody. Confrontation without receptivity leads to an oppressive aggression which hurts everybody." - Henri Nouwen
"Spirituality is not a formula; it is not a test. It is a relationship. Spirituality is not about competency; it is about intimacy. Spirituality is not about perfection; it is about connection. The way of spirituality begins where we are now in the mess of our lives." -Mike Yaconelli
"But that doesn’t mean community is easy. For everything in this world tries to pull us away from community, pushes us to choose ourselves over others, to choose independence over interdependence, to choose great things over small things, to choose going fast alone over going far together." -Shane Claiborne
"Nothing that we despise in the other man is entirely absent from ourselves. We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or don’t do, and more in light of what they suffer." Dietrich Bonhoeffer
"Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create." Albert Einstein
"Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive." Howard Thurman
"A nation that continues to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." -Dr. Martin Luther King
"Our relationship with each other is the criterion the world uses to judge whether our message is truthful--- Christian community is the final apologetic." -Francis Schaefer
"It is not allowable to love the Creation according to the purposes one has for it, any more than it is allowable to love one’s neighbor in order to borrow his tools." Wendell Berry
"All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers. Each one owes infinitely more to the human race than the particular country in which he was born." -Francois Fenelon
"Ministry cannot be about maintenance, but it is about gathering, about embrace, about welcoming home all sorts of and conditions of people; home is a place for mother tongue, of basic soul food, of old stories told and treasured, of being at ease, known by name, belonging without qualifying for membership." -Walter Brueggemann
"Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get round to being the particular poet or particular monk that they are intended to be by God." "In order to become myself I must cease to be what I always thought I wanted to be." -Thomas Merton
"God spoke to Balaam through his ass, and God's been speaking through them ever since. So, if God chooses to speak through you don't think to highly of yourself." -Rich Mullins
"We must become holy not because we want to feel holy but because Christ must be able to live his life fully in us." Mother Teresa
"I am deeply convinced that the Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self." Henri Nouwen