Retreat weekend

Some friends of ours joined us for a retreat weekend on June 2-4. We stayed at a lovely farmhouse in Deep Creek Conservation Park, about 2 hours south of Adelaide on the coast of the Southern Ocean. It was a fruitful time of reflection and renewal. Some photos of our
weekened are below–they include a view of the farmhouse, some early morning kangaroos, and the view of the pastoral land and ocean as seen from the house.

Meditative prayer and lectio divina

The spiritual formation retreat we held last weekend centred around wilderness and solitude and their role in our lives as followers of Christ. One of the spiritual disciplines we spent some time learning about and practicing was meditative prayer, and meditative reading, or lectio divina.

I thought I would post the notes we used to guide our time of study and teaching on meditative prayer in case you might find them of use. Enjoy!

Content derived from Meditative Prayer, by Richard Foster

What it meditative prayer all about? Learning to hear and obey.

• Biblical basis for meditative prayer? The Bible = history of God’s interaction with His people, and records the examples we have of intimate relationships with God characterized by hearing and obeying (Adam and Eve, Moses, Samuel, Jesus, Paul)
• The purpose of meditative prayer? To create the emotional and spiritual space which allows Christ to construct an inner sanctuary in our hearts. “Behold, I stand at the door and knock.” (Rev. 3:20)
• The general method?

• Center down (a deliberate act)

1. Surrendering to the Lord control of our lives, our cares and worries, our good intentions and high resolves.
2. Experiencing a spirit of confession and repentance
3. Accepting God’s ways in our lives. “My thoughts are not your thoughts.” Is. 55:8
4. This is the hardest bit—if we get no further than learning to centre down, it’s OK.

• Behold the Lord (a deliberate act and also an experience)

1. Basking in the warmth of God’s presence.
2. Worship, adoration, praise and thanksgiving well up.
3. Scripture can help us here: the great vision in Is. 6:1-8, John’s vision of Rev 1:12-18, Jesus in the manger, or dying on the cross

• Listening prayer (enabled by the first two)

• We are able to be truly silent and still.
• As we listen and wait, we are given a teachable spirit. And God teaches as we learn to listen with more than the mind.
• The goal? To learn to bring this listening prayer into the sphere of everyday life: vacuuming, working, walking.

• 7 practical questions

1. Wandering mind (keep a ‘to do’ list at hand and write things down)
2. Falling asleep (do so—you probably need it)
3. Fear of non-God spiritual influences (a healthy fear, but ‘greater is he that is in us…’)
4. Where to meditate? (you are a portable sanctuary)
5. How long to meditate?
6. When to meditate?
7. Do we meditate standing on our heads? (posture IS helpful, don’t underestimate this)

Lectio divina

We read the Bible in 5 ways

1. Literally.
2. In context. Allowing the way in which the author originally depicted life with God so that we can understand life with God today
3. In conversation with itself. We seek to understand how the whole gives meaning and life to the component parts.
4. In conversation with the historic witness of the People of God. Like debate in a synagogue, we have learned as Christians to gain insight into scripture from the communion of saints: Jerome, Augustine of Hippo, John Calvin, Martin Luther, Watchman Nee.
5. From the heart. This is lectio divina, or ‘divine reading’. We slow down, breathe deeply, and read with the heart.

Lectio is:

1. Listening to the text, yielded and still

2. Submitting to the text, allowing scripture to instruct us rather than attempting to master it

3. Reflecting on the text, permitting ourselves to be fully engaged in both mind and heart

4. Praying the text, letting the life with God depicted in scripture energize our heart cry of gratitude, confession, complaint, or petition

5. Applying the text, seeing how God’s Word provides a personal word for our circumstances

6. Obeying the text, always turning from sin to holiness and repentance.

Suggested scriptures for meditative reading:

• Is 55:2, 10-13
• Matt 11:28-29
• Ps 37:4
• Is 58
• Ps 37:7
• Ps 32:8
• Ps 33:11

Suggested devotional excerpt for meditative reading: Prayer and Worship, by Douglas Steere

Adapted from the foreword of the Renovare Spiritual Formation Bible, by Richard Foster et al.

Prayer and Action

“‘Now go! When you speak, I will be with you and give you the words to say.” Moses begged, “LORD, please send someone else to do it.”’
Ex. 4:12-13

I love the historical narratives in the Old Testament of men like Moses and David. These are guys that kids today should be looking to as their heroes. Yeah, we still need Gandalf, Wolverine, and Spiderman—but Moses and David and their contemporaries are cool because they shared the same weaknesses and faults that you and I do. Their power to influence our lives lies a step beyond supra-natural abilities and feats of strength and courage. It is their weaknesses that we learn about ourselves.

For example, the encounter between God and Moses at the burning bush is just crazy. Picture it: you’ve been a Bedouin shepherd for a really long time in an isolated part of the world, and you have a clearly supernatural experience with God involving fire and a shrubbery[1].

In this encounter, God converses directly with you—no intermediary or middle-man. It’s real, God speaks to you in a way and in a location that means something to you personally (for Moses, the desert where he spent most of his life), and there’s no ambiguity about whether or not you ‘heard’ God.

I just love what Moses says in response to God telling him He wants him to go back to Egypt. It gives me such great hope. When we read it, it’s tempting for our first response to be something along the lines of, ‘What?! What a coward! You heard the man, go!’ But if we prayerfully examine ourselves in quiet solitude, something might pierce through the smokescreen that may exist in our own lives between action and prayer.

You may begin to recognize in yourself the same hesitation that Moses had. Like Moses, you want to see the Lord do what He says He’s going to do and back up His act with power. But when you are faced with a decision that might result in action on your part, you secretly (or not-so-secretly, like Moses) want God to ‘use’ someone else to do it.

Permit me to apply this insight to our prayer lives. Somewhere along the journey of our lives, we can begin to divorce action from our prayers. We’re reasonable people; as followers of Jesus, we recognize the importance of prayer, and so we pray—but that’s where we have learned (or been taught by example) that our involvement ends. We simply expect divine results from God when we pray, and so we remove ourselves from the chain of influence that exists in God’s kingdom. Our actions lay bare our underlying belief: we see engagement in God’s ‘kingdom among us’ (Lk 17:21) like a divine slot machine where our participation ends once the quarter is put in and the lever is pulled.

Do you see?

Learning to listen to the Lord while we pray for others is an important part of our development as disciples of Jesus. That’s how we begin to take part in what the Lord is already doing around us. As we learn to listen, we will find that often we’ll get insights into something that should be done. This is where we learn that prayer and action are usually inseparably linked.

“You may pray for the release of some area of life in a friend and find that you are called upon to set right something in your own life that has acted as a stumbling block to him. You may pray that your friend be given courage to endure certain hardships and find that you are drawn to pack your bag and go and join him or that you are to give up your pocket money for the next month, or a fortnight’s pay. In intercessory prayer one seldom ends where one begins.”[2]

Obedience to these insights that the Lord impresses on us forms a vital link in the chain of influence set in motion by intercessory prayer. When we pray, we engage ourselves in what God is doing in the world around us. His prompting for action on our part is a link in that chain. If we fail to act on what he leads us to do, we break the chain of influence and that person must wait for another to come along.

Another consequence of not acting on the promptings of the Holy Spirit when we pray is the impact it has on our prayer life. When we fail to act when the Lord prompts us, it kills our prayer life dead. You will find it hard to pray, and wonder why you don’t feel more ‘enthusiastic’ about prayer and engaging with what God is doing in the lives of those around you. That is a natural consequence of limiting our participation in prayer to our petition. When we take ourselves out of the equation of God’s redemptive plan for the world, prayer feels hollow and forced. 19^th century author Katherine Mansfield wrote, ‘I went upstairs and tried to pray, but I could not, for I had done no work.’

Take the opportunity this week to continue to practice to listen as you pray and sit in meditative silence. Keep a notebook and pen handy as you pray. If you receive an inclination of an action that you might carry out, write it down and prayerfully examine it in the light of God’s love and concern for that person. Resolve to carry it out immediately.

For Further Study/Meditation: Deut 9:12-21

Resource of the Week: www.followtherabbi.com An excellent online resource with many articles and lessons on seeing the world and the Bible through Hebrew eyes. Some great geographical and contextual info on Biblical stories and places.

Listening Prayer

“Here’s what I want you to do: Find a quiet, secluded place so you won’t be tempted to role-play before God. Just be there as simply and honestly as you can manage. The focus will shift from you to God, and you will begin to sense his grace.”

-Matt. 6:6

In the foyer of the Smithsonian American History Museum in Washington, DC used to hang an enormous Foucault pendulum[i]. I loved to sit and watch it swing back and forth, carving giant arcs in the air. Over time the pendulum appears to change direction on its own and it carve out a slightly different arc. It’s wonderful; the marvelous God-created physical laws of the universe in action right in front of you.

While on a retreat this weekend, I realized that my prayer life is a bit like this pendulum.

Sometimes I am passionate, full of fervent and energetic faith-warrior kind of prayers. A few days later, like the Foucault pendulum swinging under no discernible external force, I’ve somehow acquired the laid-back attitude best summarized by ‘it’s all good, God’s got it under control, and he doesn’t really need me to intercede for others.’

Can you relate?

I approach both extremes with the honest desire to see God work in the lives of those I pray for. My intentions are good. But the un-acknowledged external force applied to my prayer life is what my focus is on: me. How I pray. Where I pray. How I feel when I pray. The likelihood of God answering my prayer. My problem is not effort, it is faith—do I really believe that God is alive and active, desiring me to play a role in what He’s doing around me?

I am learning that when I pray for others, I am, in the words of Quaker philosopher Douglas Steere, ‘holding up the life of another before God’. I am praying, ‘in Jesus’ name’ (Jn 14:13), perhaps for a restoration of their relationship with others, a deepening of their relationship with God, or freedom from a destructive lifestyle. I am engaging with God to do the work in their lives that He wishes to accomplish.

To pray ‘in Jesus’ name’; along the lines of who He is and what He desires to do, we must learn to listen as we pray. Petitional prayer for others involves sensitivity to the Lord’s leading as we pray, so that our prayers might be steered in the right direction.

“Such prayer is only cooperation with God’s active love…If you pray for something, other than what is in keeping with that cooperation, you go against the grain, and if you remain in prayer and are sensitive, you will realize this and be drawn to revise it. As in all petitional prayer, the one who really prays must be ready to yield. You may pray for the release of some area of life in a friend and find that you are called upon to set right something in your own life that has acted as a stumbling block to him. You may pray that your friend be given courage to endure certain hardships and find that you are drawn to pack your bag and go and join him or that you are to give up your pocket money for the next month…In intercessory prayer one seldom ends where one begins.”[ii]

At the core of our inner, hidden life with God lies the willingness to listen and change the direction and thrust of our prayers as He leads. This does not come easy; learning to pray with humility and genuine love for others involves a commitment to hold their lives up to the Lord for his changing work—not our own. Left unguided, the pendulum will swing towards a one-way conversation where we are telling God what we want to happen in our friends’ lives. And when we sense (as we always do) that we just don’t feel all that engaged with God, the pendulum will swing back toward not praying much at all.

Lord, help us to be willing to learn to pray in your name, and in line with what you want to do. Give us the faith to believe that you are active and engaged in the lives of our friends, and teach us to discern your leading as we pray. May we be obedient to your guidance, and leave the outcome of our prayers in your hands.

For Further Study/Meditation: Deut 9:12-21

Resource of the Week: Prayer and Worship, by Douglas Steere. From a review by Richard Foster: “A slender volume well worth many readings. It addresses the question of why so many Christians ‘atrophy away on the early plateaus of the religious life’ and offers a prescription for spiritual growth rooted in private prayer and corporate worship.”

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