Tall Monastic Guy: 2011 Lenten Journey: The Discipline of Enough

March 14, 2011

2011 Lenten Journey: The Discipline of Enough

Enough. I am enough. You are enough. My family is enough. My friends are enough. My job… My home… My car… My body… My God…

This Lenten season this is the discipline I’ve decided to take on. At least once a day I click on the notes app on my phone and mentally sift as I type in all of the experiences I can recall from that day and simply tell myself that they are all enough.

Why in the world would I even have to engage this in this particular season? I have a new beautiful 7 week-old-son, and that makes two beautiful sons for me and my more-than-enough-wife. We are being more than sufficiently provided for. My job is great. I actually get to do what I want to do. I come from a solid family. I have the best friends in the world. So, why do I struggle with this quiet recognition that what I have and who I am is simply enough?

Rene Girard, French literary critic and philosopher, would say my desires are impacted and shaped by the desires of the culture around me. I’m continuously compelled to observe and then mimic those around me which as you can imagine makes it extremely difficult to stop and be still long enough to notice how cool my new baby boy is let alone how deeply blue and beautiful the sky was today.

The games of comparing and over-analyzing is exhausting and makes it nearly impossible to sustain an awakeness to the holy nature of the present moment in which I find myself. Like the two men on the road to Emmaus, I have such a routine of preoccupation with stuff that I don’t realize the person I’m walking with and talking to is actually God in the flesh.

I agree with Henri Nouwen as he so honestly said, “I am so afraid of being disliked, blamed, put aside, passed over, ignored, persecuted, and killed, that I am constantly developing strategies to defend myself and thereby assure myself of the love I think I need and deserve.” And in this frantic and often unrecognized fear I forget to stop to enjoy and be grateful for the peanut M & M’s I’m munching on let alone the simply profound gift of my breath or the birds chirping outside the window or the... (fill in the blank).

As I jot down all these experiences and gifts of my day I have to admit just how often I find myself hydroplaning over the surface of my life, too busy to be and too busy to really care. Here as I sit and type, sun shoots through the window reflecting off icons, cigarette smoke swirls up from my friend downstairs, and in 30 minutes a good friend comes over to chat about life. These are the simple graces within the reality of my day and I pray that at the conclusion of this one I'll have the eyes to see that it was all just enough.

Posted at 11:28 AM in Access, missional/incarnational, prayer, Ryan's ruminations, Street Psalms | Permalink

Comments

thank you. i love to read this type of information posts. again thank you...

Posted by: kiralık devremülkler | March 22, 2011 at 03:27 PM

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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