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A steady uncovering of grace

When she first sat at her mentor’s table, she couldn’t precisely tell you why she was there.  Her life wasn’t falling apart, her prayers didn’t feel hollow, her faith hadn’t been shaken, but she was looking for something more. “I think I have settled for shallow waters along the shore, and I know deep waters are calling to me, I know that deep calls to deep.”  She didn’t expect answers, but maybe good questions, presence, and trusted words to help in reading the stories she knew.  God was still writing with her.  In the weeks that followed, she experienced a slow, steady uncovering of grace in the deeply personal, ordinary, sacred steps of her journey.

Spiritual mentoring, or simply call it spiritual friendship, is an intentional and deliberate process of sacred conversations for the purpose of soul formation. From my own experience with the mentors of my own life, I know it to engage at least three common experiences… Read More

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Who are your students?

It was thirty-two years ago, and the memory is still strong. I was in my second year as campus pastor at my alma mater in St. Paul. A beloved faculty member was fired just days before the start of the school year. We became a community in pain, crisis, and conflict. Emotions were running high, and feelings were deep, and we needed to be ready for the students to watch us as we taught by our actions, words, and reactions. I wrote a pastoral letter to the community asking for calm and redemptive love as we muddled our way forward. The stakes are even higher for us in our divisions across our nation. I’ll share some of what I wrote then, never thinking it might apply so intensely today. Read More

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We all need an Elizabeth

In the familiar gospel story, Mary, newly pregnant, makes haste to see her cousin Elizabeth, who is surprisingly pregnant in her advanced years.  We all need an Elizabeth. 

 

You know their sons: Jesus and John, cousins, due to miraculous births. Mary knows that she has been given a mission, a future, and a sacred purpose beyond anything her own life drama could write or imagine. Why? Because she had experienced a “Theo drama,” in which God invited her to a task too large for a young Jewish girl to imagine on her own. Her response? “Let it be to me as you have said, I will set aside my own ego drama for something you intend for my life and through my life to the entire world.”  Theos, of course, is the Greek word for God.[1]

 

Mary reaches out to someone else who has found her role in step with God at the opposite season of life to the teenage girl. Elizabeth has also seen her purpose in the larger drama of God’s explosive plan for the universe: “For God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.” Before John the Baptist and Jesus knew their sacred purpose, two women, mothers both, young and old, were overcome by the drama of God’s call and purpose for their lives. Two women, neither highly educated nor socially prominent, set aside their own plans and accepted a larger plan for them and through them.   Read More

CategoriesA Mentoring Guide, Mentoring Matters by

A Letter to a Would-Be Mentor

You have been asked to become a mentor to another. There are few honors in life more precious than to walk alongside a brother or sister on a journey of spiritual formation. If you feel overwhelmed and doubt your worthiness for the task, this is a good sign that you are ready and may be qualified, for the ministry of a mentor begins with humility. You may feel something akin to great unworthiness and are likely to exclaim, “Who am I that anyone should emulate me? I know my own flaws and failures, my contradictions, far too well, and the passions within that rise up in unholiness, as well as moments of holiness. And yet I feel the joyfulness of opportunity—maybe I could help this friend listen to life. I know that I can ask some pertinent questions and can help this friend think through these questions.” 

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Easter Sunday

I’ve been to Jerusalem where I saw what some traditions believe was the place of Jesus’ birth and nearby to where they think he was buried. Lots of gold, jewels, silver, and a certain kind of beauty. But I’ve also seen places “off the beaten path” where others imagined birth and burial: I am moved by those places. No gold, jewels, silver, or “glory,”  just terra firma under our feet. We know the stable pictures of the Nativity and we can imagine a huge round stone in front of a cave-like tomb on Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Read More

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Crucifixion Friday

One Disciple on Crucifixion Friday: A Soliloquy

I wasn’t there—when the sky cracked open and the earth groaned beneath the weight of what it witnessed that violent day. I wasn’t there. I ran. I hid. I let fear throttle the breath from my chest while the one I swore to follow was nailed to splintered wood like an animal, his body a ragged ruin of torn flesh and exposed bone. Say what you will about loyalty—I lost mine somewhere between the first lash of the whip and the moment they rammed that cursed thorn crown onto his head. I should have been there. But I wasn’t there. Fear, not faith, took control of my steps. Read More

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Lent: Maundy Thursday

Maundy Thursday

It’s the Holy Week of Lent. It is Maundy Thursday. The “big” days in many minds are tomorrow, Good Friday, and, of course, Easter: Resurrection Sunday.

However, this Thursday is powerfully important for Christians, even for those who don’t remember the meaning of the word.  “Maundy” comes from Latin, mandatum¸which simply means command.

Jesus knows his physical death is near.  What would you do?  Jesus made supper. Read More

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Lent: Teresa of Avila

Reflections of Lent in the Spirituality of Teresa of Avila

St. Teresa of Avila (d. 1582)  did not write explicitly about the season of Lent, but the Lenten themes that we have been exploring over the past month and a half weave their way through her writing. In this extended Lenten At the Table blog, I will summarize six major themes of her spirituality.

 

A recent book makes the claim: “We live in an age of the celebrity.” [1] It offers an alternative for our culture, which is to return to what I like to call “centuries-deep” teachings and insights from the great cloud of witnesses in the history of churches around the world.

 

One of those is Dr. Teresa, the first of only four women to be named a “doctor of the church.”  Teresa was a 16th-century Spanish nun, mystic and spiritual writer, and reformer of her Carmelite order.   She made it her mission to restore contemplative forms to this order in the Catholic Church. 

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Lent: Prophetic and Poetic Paths Part 2

Lent: The Prophetic and Poetic Paths Part 2

Poetic Path

Kathleen Norris frames Lent as a time of remembering or returning and embracing the rhythms of monastic practice.  It is a time, she would say, for contemplation and spiritual discipline.  As a poet and Benedictine, she sees Lent as a time to return to silence, simplicity, and a deep awareness of God’s presence.  She even speaks of the Lenten experience as something like the desert experience, recognizing that both dryness and struggle are part of the spiritual journey.  One of her primary practices is lectio divina, which is the slow, meditative reading of scripture. 

Following today’s blog, you will find an outline for the practice of lectio divina by which we allow the words of scripture to shape the heart and imagination, something essential in this age of distraction. Like Peterson, she would say that fasting is a practice of detachment, not merely from food, but anything that keeps one from being fully present to God, including our busyness, perfectionism, self-doubt, and abstracted faith.

Prophetic Path

Walter Brueggemann looks to the prophetic traditions of the Hebrew Bible and sees Lent as a season where believers are called to resist the dominant narrative, as he would call them, of empire: materialism, individualism, and injustice.  Therefore, he would say we fast not just from food but from the illusions of security, control, and excess that define our modern culture. 

One of his essential Lenten practices is simply truth-telling.  Lent invites believers to examine the lies that they have accepted about themselves, society, or about God.  This requires engaging deeply with the Bible, particularly the prophetic voices that call for justice, mercy, faithfulness, and care for the widow, the orphan, and the stranger in the land.  Read More

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Lent: Prophetic and Poetic Paths—Part 1

Lent: Prophetic and Poetic Paths—Part 1

Two of our final two portraits for Lent will be presented for the diversity they bring in their understanding and practice of Lent.  Walter Brueggeman is first and foremost a professor of Old Testament studies.  Kathleen Norris is a poet and spiritual writer, both of whom we need to listen to.  I have read nearly all their published works, so, I’ll call them by name:  Walter teaches us that Lent is misunderstood as a season for giving up.  He calls us to a practice of taking on. I first used his stellar book, The Prophetic Imagination, as the text for undergrads at a college in South Dakota.

A professor’s thoughts on Lent 

Walter teaches us that Lent is not just about giving up things (like fasting or self-denial) but also about taking on—practices that align with God’s justice and renewal.  He emphasizes that Lent is a time for transformation—moving beyond personal sacrifice to actively engaging in acts of mercy, justice, and prophetic imagination.  He turns our ears to Jeremiah, the prophet, who spoke fiercely against being neutral about God and God’s ways. 

 

Jeremiah gives witness to the real presence of God who has capacity to bring newness to otherwise broken social realities marked by violence, division, animosity, ethnic hatred, and hostile political partisanship.

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