WEEKLY COMMENTARY: Your Spiritual Landscape Is Evolving

The other day, I had lunch with two church friends who are considerably younger than me.  We had good conversations, and later began talking about our personal involvement in church life.  I was surprised to find how much my story varied from theirs.

Later, I thought about what could be the reasons for this difference.  I realized we are all always searching for answers about the meaning and purpose of our lives, and we seem to express those answers in how we live.  From time to time, and in varying degrees, we question what is truly important.  We build relationships with others and with God, which we might value greatly or just take for granted.  The searching, expressing, questioning and relating are part of our spiritual self.  As we grow older, our spiritual self will change, along with our physical, mental and emotional selves.

The spiritual life that satisfied us when we were younger may no longer satisfy us as we grow older.  Coming face to face with our own mortality often makes spiritual issues a much higher priority than ever before.  We might have been comfortable with just "being", and "having" and "doing", but our "having" and "doing" desires now change, sometimes quite dramatically, as we grow older.  Our spiritual quest must adapt to these changes by focusing more on our own "being" than just on our "having" and "doing".  Relevant spiritual practices are important for navigating the changing spiritual landscape as we grow older.

Participating in regular church worship is an important and helpful practice regardless of age.  We connect with God in worship as we celebrate God's work in our world, offer prayers, hear God's Word read and proclaimed, and offer something back to God in gratitude for our many blessings.  Participating in worship reminds us who we are and whose we are ---- we are God's.  

Older adults are especially vulnerable to doubting their worth when their bodies begin to fail, which may restrict their activities and increase their dependence on others.  Participating in regular church worship helps remind them that their value depends greatly on their being, not just on their "having" and "doing" preoccupations.

Being a member of a worshiping community is vitally important for older adults, who must cope with many personal losses.  Although we face loses throughout our lives, our losses accelerate as we age.  We lose our health, our spouses, our friends, our homes, our possessions and even our identities.  However, participation in a Christian church community continually builds new relationships with people of all ages.

A church community helps us bear each other's burdens.  Depression is not uncommon in older adults, and it can greatly affect a person's spiritual life.  Not being able to feel God's presence can lead people to question their faith when they most need it.  The Christian community helps each other to remember the times when they have felt closest to God.

Maintaining a personal relationship with God is important for meaningful spirituality.  Prayer is how we converse with God, and meditation is how we listen to God.  Relationships cannot grow without conversation and listening.

Worship and prayer offer hope to older adults.  Serving God and serving others plays an important role in the spiritual life of older adults.  After people retire they usually have more time to help others.  Many older adults enjoy going on mission trips.  Others become involved in mission projects closer to home.  Some members enjoy making generous donations to help others.  Giving back to God helps us show our gratefulness for God's grace and our abundance of blessings.  When health begins to fail, service to the church can take the form of more simple things, like writing notes, making phone calls and praying for others.

Studying the Bible and biblical topics is an important source of spiritual growth and comfort for older adults.  Studying the Bible helps us find purpose and meaning for our lives.  It helps us understand the vast love of God for all humankind and gives us the confidence to share that love with others.

The spiritual practices of worship, prayer, meditation, service and study, enable many older adults to enhance their spiritual lives and even provide benefits to their physical, mental and emotional health.

___________________________________________________________________________

These thoughts are brought to you by CPC's Adult Spiritual Development Team, hoping to encourage some spiritual growth for you this fall.

__________________________________________________________________________        

WEEKLY COMMENTARY: Your Spiritual Landscape Is Evolving

The other day, I had lunch with two church friends who are considerably younger than me.  We had good conversations, and later began talking about our personal involvement in church life.  I was surprised to find how much my story varied from theirs.

Later, I thought about what could be the reasons for this difference.  I realized we are all always searching for answers about the meaning and purpose of our lives, and we seem to express those answers in how we live.  From time to time, and in varying degrees, we question what is truly important.  We build relationships with others and with God, which we might value greatly or just take for granted.  The searching, expressing, questioning and relating are part of our spiritual self.  As we grow older, our spiritual self will change, along with our physical, mental and emotional selves.

The spiritual life that satisfied us when we were younger may no longer satisfy us as we grow older.  Coming face to face with our own mortality often makes spiritual issues a much higher priority than ever before.  We might have been comfortable with just "being", and "having" and "doing", but our "having" and "doing" desires now change, sometimes quite dramatically, as we grow older.  Our spiritual quest must adapt to these changes by focusing more on our own "being" than just on our "having" and "doing".  Relevant spiritual practices are important for navigating the changing spiritual landscape as we grow older.

Participating in regular church worship is an important and helpful practice regardless of age.  We connect with God in worship as we celebrate God's work in our world, offer prayers, hear God's Word read and proclaimed, and offer something back to God in gratitude for our many blessings.  Participating in worship reminds us who we are and whose we are ---- we are God's.  

Older adults are especially vulnerable to doubting their worth when their bodies begin to fail, which may restrict their activities and increase their dependence on others.  Participating in regular church worship helps remind them that their value depends greatly on their being, not just on their "having" and "doing" preoccupations.

Being a member of a worshiping community is vitally important for older adults, who must cope with many personal losses.  Although we face loses throughout our lives, our losses accelerate as we age.  We lose our health, our spouses, our friends, our homes, our possessions and even our identities.  However, participation in a Christian church community continually builds new relationships with people of all ages.

A church community helps us bear each other's burdens.  Depression is not uncommon in older adults, and it can greatly affect a person's spiritual life.  Not being able to feel God's presence can lead people to question their faith when they most need it.  The Christian community helps each other to remember the times when they have felt closest to God.

Maintaining a personal relationship with God is important for meaningful spirituality.  Prayer is how we converse with God, and meditation is how we listen to God.  Relationships cannot grow without conversation and listening.

Worship and prayer offer hope to older adults.  Serving God and serving others plays an important role in the spiritual life of older adults.  After people retire they usually have more time to help others.  Many older adults enjoy going on mission trips.  Others become involved in mission projects closer to home.  Some members enjoy making generous donations to help others.  Giving back to God helps us show our gratefulness for God's grace and our abundance of blessings.  When health begins to fail, service to the church can take the form of more simple things, like writing notes, making phone calls and praying for others.

Studying the Bible and biblical topics is an important source of spiritual growth and comfort for older adults.  Studying the Bible helps us find purpose and meaning for our lives.  It helps us understand the vast love of God for all humankind and gives us the confidence to share that love with others.

The spiritual practices of worship, prayer, meditation, service and study, enable many older adults to enhance their spiritual lives and even provide benefits to their physical, mental and emotional health.

___________________________________________________________________________

These thoughts are brought to you by CPC's Adult Spiritual Development Team, hoping to encourage some spiritual growth for you this fall.

__________________________________________________________________________        

WEEKLY COMMENTARY: Is There A Right Way To Reach Out To God?

A wise man once told me, "God offers us no minimum protection, and a maximum of support.  God comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble, with the same comfort we ourselves have received from God."

This sounded great, until it dawned on me that God and I seemed to be strangers ---- at least in my perception.  I needed to get to "know" who God is, and then be sure I could position myself in the stream of God's love and power.  I needed to meditate on how God must already feel about me, perhaps by beginning to pray to God on a regular basis!

The best advice I had received about prayer, was that it is the process of becoming available for what God wants to do on earth through us.  So, let's talk about prayer!

Prayer was not new to me, but people often used such abstract language to discuss it, I sometimes felt lost.  Then, I came upon the following explanation:

              "There are only four basic prayers:

                           Gimme!        Thanks!        Oops!    and    Wow!

             "Wow!"  are prayers of praise and wonder at the Creation.

             "Oops!"   is asking for forgiveness.   

             "Gimme!"    is a request or a petition for something from God which is beyond 

                                    our power.

              "Thanks!"    is expressing gratitude for some good thing we attribute to God.

For adults like me, who wanted to learn to pray, it was recommended that we start with prayers of "thanks".  Everybody has something to be grateful for.

But, we were warned that just practicing the "four basic prayers" would become tiresome and shallow before long.  We were told to use Bible passages for meditation, to spend time in focused meditation, and most importantly to do this on a regular and frequent basis, undisturbed.  The idea was to gradually enter into a dialogue with God, perhaps as facilitated by the Holy Spirit, through my deeper relationship with Scripture.

I gave this a try!  At first I had trouble doing it on a regular basis, until I fixed on a particular time of day when I had the tasks of the day behind me and I could take a little time to think and feel, freely.  With practice, this kind of meditation became easier and eventually a necessary habit.

I still believe there are four basic kinds of prayers, but now I feel I know much more about myself, and what God expects from me.  It is always a source of joy when I feel I am coming closer and closer to understanding what God wants.

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These thoughts are brought to you by the CPC Adult Spiritual Development Team, seeking some spiritual growth for you this fall.

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WEEKLY COMMENTARY: What Makes Self-Control So Hard?

It's ten o'clock in the evening and I am headed for bed.  But, I detour through the kitchen, seeking a bed-time snack.  A jumbo-sized piece of chocolate cake beckons me.  Five minutes later, the cake is gone and I am feeling a little over full.

For some of us, the daily struggle with temptation centers on food ---- the temptation of fats and sweets that are so readily and effortlessly available.  Human nature probably hasn't changed much over the centuries, but the landscape of temptation objects surely has grown.

In the future, for more and more of us, our greatest challenge may be managing our own appetites and addictions in an environment of expanding freedom and affluence.  Technology is a leading culprit.  From refrigeration to credit cards, to automobiles to the internet, technology makes it possible for more and more people to satisfy their self-centered wants from an expanding world of possibilities.

The good news is that the problem of self-control is hardly a new one, and we can learn a lot from those who have wrestled with it before us.  There are some tricks we can use to help us be strong, but we must provide the needed inner strength, and not all of us are equally endowed.

Self-control is the ability to override impulses in favor of longer-term goals.  The heart of the problem is always the same:  The conflict between short-term rewards, which we seem hard-wired to value heavily, and our longer-term goals.  A pan of just-baked chocolate brownies sitting right in front of us, in other words, is simply a lot more compelling than the long-term desire to be slim.  And we understand, perhaps instinctively, that one brownie ---- or one cigarette, or one more drink, or just one hour of procrastination ---- will have no material effect in the long run.  Except, to some extent the first exception leads to another, and we eventually find ourselves some place we never intended to be.

Today's culture promotes independence and non-conformity, and celebrates a world full of options.  Every day, people make innumerable choices ---- from what to order at the corner coffee shop, to which of their 263 cable TV channels to watch on the weekend.  With so many choices, the guiding principle for decision making often becomes "what's in it for me, right now?  In a 24/7 world of endless opportunities, obligations and information, many adults now base their time management decisions on the expectation of immediate, tangible and personal rewards.

Often, however, the need for self-control is not in relationship to simple things like tasty food;  but instead, self-control is needed with opportunities that will just make us feel important.  Choices that benefit only us ---- not other people.  Some folks would describe this as "selfish living".  We can take selfish actions because we were free to make choices that ignore the needs of others and simply serve ourselves.  We may know that this is wrong, but the focus on ourselves is too great to be ignored ---- we lack the self-control to do what we know deep down would be the right action.

If you think about it, you might realize that Jesus often talked about how and why we need to master our self-control.  He had a name for our occasional lapses from self-control into self-centeredness.  He called it "SIN".  Jesus wanted us to always put God at the center of our lives, and not simply put ourselves at the center.  I suggest that if we muster the self-control to do this, it will reward us richly ---- much more than simply avoiding that late-night forbidden snack.

Support from other people will always be essential for making our self-control effective.  The support of our long-term goals by others is something that we can find in church worship.  If we do not find it on Sunday mornings, or at the WAVE Service, perhaps we need to sharpen the long-term goals we have for ourselves ---- sharpen what we are seeking, by becoming more fully involved and integrated into the church community, and less involved in ourselves.

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These thoughts are brought to you by the CPC Adult Spiritual Development Team, hoping to encourage your spiritual growth this Fall.

___________________________________________________________________________

WEEKLY COMMENTARY: Are You Comfortable With Non-Conforming Strangers?

One summer, my family and I rented a house at the Jersey Shore.  Several nights a week we would eat out, so during the day, on our wanderings through town, we would keep our eyes open for interesting restaurants.  One in particular was recommended to us, but it had a window sign saying "NO tank tops for ladies, NO shorts for men." 

This window sign was quite clear ---- you knew where you stood.  Most of society is not that honest.  As Pastor Lillian Daniel has written, "Groups of people have those signs in their heads, but outsiders never see them.  You just perceive that there are rules and an order to things that some people seem to know and others don't."

I remember my first days at a new high school.  I entered the school cafeteria and froze.  Where should I sit?  Will I be welcomed?  Will I be ignored?  I was the outsider, with no welcoming place to sit.

Perhaps the desire to eat at a table with others has been hard-wired into human beings.  But there is an element of social status to this as well.  It is not just that we do not want to eat alone.  We do not want to be seen as eating alone.  From our earliest nursery school memories of snack time to the seating chart at the retirement dinner, we know that these eating arrangements, formal and informal, mean something about whom we are and where we are placed socially.

If Jesus had been a student at my high school, he probably would have been actively discouraged from eating with the tax collectors and sinners.  But Jesus did eat with tax collectors and sinners, breaking rules that were more rigid than those at my high school.

In Jesus' day, whom you eat with mattered.  Where you sat was not a casual affair.  You were associated with the people you ate with.  If they were good, upstanding people and they invited you to eat at their table, you were, by association, good and upstanding, too.

But, if the people were sinners, known to the community as such, you definitely didn't want to eat with them.  The only people who ate with sinners were other sinners, the people who had to share the table because no other table would have them.

At first, when I would sit down at any of those cafeteria social enclaves, I was stared at as if I had made a mistake.  But gradually, I got to know different people, made different friends, and realized that the cliques were not as homogeneous as I had led myself to believe.  There were smart students at the "pretty table", "jocks" at the orchestra table, and interesting stories everywhere.

"NO tank tops for ladies, no shorts for men."  Most of the world just isn't that direct.  But the unspoken and unwritten rules are often the ones that cause the most pain, and block us from trying to develop relationships with strangers.

Jesus turned the tables on that by sitting at the wrong table.  What makes it the wrong table?  The wrong people were sitting at it.  Who are the wrong people?  The ones who are not like us.

At Central Church we house the homeless during four different weeks of the year.  We call it our Family Promise program.  Many Central Church volunteers come together to make this work, even spending overnights with them.  Briefly, we create a "community".

Meanwhile, there were once grumblings about a homeless man who had been encamped outside for many months at the edge of the church parking lot, with all his possessions gathered in large plastic bags.  Sometimes he had homeless visitors.  By camping so permanently where he did, one could say that this long-term camper did not respect the "assigned seating arrangements" in our affluent town of Summit.

It was as if, in affluent Summit there was an unspoken sign that said that if you pay a considerable amount of money for your home, you should not have to walk next to a homeless person ---- you should not even see one.  And this attitude is not unique to Summit, but pervades much of our privileged culture.

To which Jesus would have had a very clear answer, that would not satisfy some people.  Jesus' answer might be this:  "In the world, there may be assigned seating, but in the Kingdom of Heaven there is not."  If we believe this, we ought to act on it, and live it out here on earth.  For Jesus and his disciples there were no assigned seats at his table.  All were welcome, particularly in their brokenness.  Indeed the church was born on the damaged consciences and rotten reputations of tax collectors, sinners and people in need.

We will always be told that social barriers are there for a reason ---- that the rules are there to keep order, and that if we will keep to our own lunch tables, we will be better off.  But the myth of that story is to think we can keep all the sinners at their own table.  Of course, this is wrong and profoundly self-deceiving.  Because, there are sinners at every table.  There is definitely a sinner at every table where I sit, because it is me. 

Perhaps we should try reading this story as if we were the tax collector.  We are looking over the tables, wondering where to sit down, and who will have us.  We want a way out of our past mistakes and sins.  We want to be a better person.

Is this too big a job for us to tackle by ourselves?  IF we sit down at a table with an unfamiliar group, and by trusting that the Holy Spirit will work through all of us, are we going to grow to be more like Jesus?  Isn't this how a true community begins?  Isn't our church a fertile garden for planting and nourishing "community"?  Everyone is welcome because our church is actually a school for sinners ---- not a club for saints.

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These thoughts are brought to you by the CPC Adult Spiritual Development Team, seeking some spiritual growth for you this summer.

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