'Theology' Tagged Posts
Bless the Lord, My Soul
Have you ever had a week in which, by the time the end of the week was approaching, you found yourself feeling…thin? When I am emotionally and spiritually thin, I am without focus or ambition to get much of anything accomplished. It is a feeling of emptiness that tells me that I need to shift my focus, to find some things that are going to provide me with energy and life, and to turn towards the ways that I practice…
Commending the Self
For more than a decade now, I have been using the same prayer practice to begin my days. Perhaps to the disappointment of Anglican purists across the globe, I have opted for something other than The Daily Office as my most regular prayer practice. Instead, I have used a practice that originated with St. Ignatius of Loyola and the Jesuits called The Daily Examen. The practice, in its shape, is rather simple, but Ignatius cemented the practice as the practice…
Befriending Lent: Try, Try Again
Well, here we are approaching the second Sunday in Lent, and already, I have fallen off the bandwagon of the Lenten practice. It is crazy how quickly something can distract your attention away from those things that you really want to do as a Lenten discipline! I mean, we are ONLY now getting to the second Sunday in Lent! How is it possible that I have already fallen off the proverbial wagon and need to recalibrate things so that daily…
Praying Advent…even now
It happens every single year. Without fail, Advent is moving on along and BOOM! Just like that, it is a week before Christmas. Suddenly, there is not enough time for just about anything. From Christmas shopping to writing sermons to preparing Christmas bulletins to finding enough time to spend time with God in prayer, it seems like everything is being crowded out by all the other things on the to-do list whilst also being the source of the crowding out…
Seeking Happiness
It was the end of the day. I had just finished cleaning the kitchen after cooking dinner and was settling into a mindless game on my iPad whilst a Netflix series that I had watched already played in the background. It was more of a source of background noise than it was something that I actually wanted to watch again. The idea of tuning into a screen more attentively than that is somewhat off-putting in the days of coronavirus. I…
The Conversation of Invitation
When we seek to use conversation as a model of leadership in community, it is important to understand the kind of community that we are seek to create. Conversation is flowing and only unfolds because of the presence of multiple voices in the room. It is an act that is, by its very nature, restorative to relationship. To create conversation is to issue an invitation, either formally or informally, for others to participate. It is to create an open space…
What is Liturgy?
What is liturgy? This is the question that we began with during our Advent Wednesday forum last night. It makes sense for us to begin with a question of what liturgy actually is because of the role that it plays in the life of our parish. As Episcopalians, we are the weird ones on the Protestant block because we have held on to the sacramental life of the church in a way that is very different from most of our…