Sunday June 23-We have dual psalms this morning, as they are pretty clearly connected. A line in Ps 43 that speaks for me is the question, “why are you downcast o my soul?” Soul in Hebrew is nephesh, and it means to me me the inmost self, one’s whole being, more than an isolated spiritual element. Sometimes, being downcast is a matter of circumstance, but the sense may rise up unbidden, for no apparent reason at all. To know that I have a conversation partner in prayer helps me to get through those downcast spells.
Monday-We participated in a fundraising trivia contest.I like the idea of them for fundraisers. So often our spiritual lives get clouded with trivia. We have to work hard to learn to bear down and seek the essence.When do your prayers seem trivial? When does emotional life get swamped with trivia? When is it fun to have a mind filled with trivia, and when is it deleterious to thought?>
Tuesday-Micah 4:4 inspired the founders of our nation. they saw one of the outcomes of their struggle as a promise toward human security beyond oppressive designs.Adams quotes it in a letter, for instance. What would be your model of peace and security? How would you put it in 21st century terms? What would be a way of speaking of one’s spiritual life with similar metaphors?
Wednesday-When do we know we spend “good money after bad?’ At some point we make a decision to pull the plug on a money pit: a house, a project, a need.When do we keep pouring energy into a project, even a church, and find it is still dying, or seek signs of renewal? When is it more gracious to pull the plug? On the other hand, we are the church of the resurrection, so even death has no finality for us.
Thursday-In one of the Yale Reflections pieces, I noticed an article by John Collins on biblical interpretation. he writes of the breakdown of reading the Bible in one way alone. “The situation poses an obvious danger of disintegration...the breakdown of consensus can be salutary, as it forces us to look again at assumptions we had taken for granted.” (p.6 Spring 2008). I like how we have moved toward a variety of approaches for the Bible speaking to us today. it has certainly informed my preaching for the better, to read the bible more like a literary reader.
Friday-levels of communication certainly are a feature of our interaction., my sense is that women usually work on multiple levels more easily than males. That is not always to the good, as one can seek complexity where none is intended, or we think we know the motives for a statement better than we are capable. I wonder if we could look at our prayers as having multiple levels of meaning and intent?
Saturday-recipes are being featured on-line, so I think the cookbook is not long for this world.Some folks read the Bible as a recipe book, but I doubt that is its purpose. Some seek foolproof recipes for spiritual development, but I doubt that those are of much avail either.Instead, the ingredients are the raw material of human nature and action, and that is necessarily messy and uncertain. I am always captured by the notion that we discover ourselves in the passages of the bible, more than discovering five steps toward financial health.
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